Stone Rain (13 page)

And then the police would talk to Magnuson. And then they’d want to have another interview with me.

So you tried to warn Benson off a story
, the police would say,
and when he didn’t go along with it, he ratted you out, and you got demoted
.

I couldn’t be sure the cops would use the word “ratted,” but I figured that would be about the gist of it.

Maybe it made more sense to stop fighting with the railing. Maybe it made more sense to stay handcuffed until the police arrived. How likely a suspect was I when I was left handcuffed at a murder scene? I was a victim too, although I had to admit I’d gotten off a little bit better than Martin Benson.

Of course, the only problem was, we hadn’t both been victimized by the same person. Being handcuffed by Trixie would no doubt lead police to suspect that she was also responsible for Martin Benson’s murder.

Trixie did, after all, have some familiarity with the apparatus to which Benson was secured.

What a fucking mess.

I twisted my right hand around to look at my watch. Coming up on 2:30 p.m. Trixie had been gone at least half an hour, maybe more. Just how far away was she planning to get before she called someone to rescue me?

It hadn’t occurred to me then that she might actually have called someone right after leaving the house. That she might have called someone who would need thirty minutes or more to get here.

Finally, around 2:45, there was a hard knock at the door.

“Down here!” I shouted.

Another knock.

“Hey!” I shouted. “In the basement!”

I thought I heard the door open, and then a voice, tentatively, called out, “Hello?”

I think, of all the people Trixie could have called, Sarah would definitely have been my last choice.

I went to say something but the words caught in my throat for a moment. I guess, for a fleeting instant, for nothing more than a millisecond, I must have thought I could keep Sarah from finding me handcuffed in Trixie’s basement only a few feet away from a dead guy strapped to a cross with his throat cut open. But it only took the briefest of moments to realize there was no way out for me that didn’t include immense dollops of shame and mortification.

“Sarah!” I shouted.

“Zack?” Sarah sounded scared. “Zack! Where are you?”

“Just listen to me first, okay? Okay? Just stop and listen!”

“Zack, what’s happened? Are you okay? Where are you?”

“Sarah,
stop
! Are you stopped?”

A pause from upstairs. “Okay, yes. I’m not moving. Zack, Trixie phoned. She told me to come out here, that something had happened and—”

“Sarah! Listen to me!”

“Okay.”

“First of all, I’m okay. I’m going to need your help, but before you come downstairs, I have to prepare you for what you’re going to see.”

“Oh my God. Don’t tell me you’re trapped in some sort of leather thing. You’ve been coming to Trixie, paying her to—”

“No, Sarah. Please just listen and don’t interrupt. I’m not hurt, but I am handcuffed to the stair railing and I need you to get the keys.”

Even from where I stood, I could hear her intake of breath upstairs.

“But Sarah, what I have to tell you is, I’m not exactly alone down here.” I took a breath of my own. “I’m down here in the midst of a…I’m in a crime scene, Sarah.”

“A crime scene.”

“A man has been killed, he’s been murdered, and I’m down here with his body.” I paused. “It’s very, very…bad.”

From Sarah, almost a whisper: “Who is it, Zack?”

“Martin Benson. The reporter from the
Suburban
. Somebody’s…oh man.”

“Tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m okay. Are you ready?”

Sarah paused a second before she said, “I’m ready.”

And then she appeared at the doorway at the top of the stairs, assessing my situation in a glance. She came down the steps slowly, and as she was able to see more of the room, she saw Benson at the far end of it.

“Dear God,” she said. She stayed on the last step, next to me, as if putting a foot on the floor would be an admission that what she was seeing was really true.

“The keys are right there,” I said softly, nodding at the table a few feet away. “If you give them to me, I can get these off and call the police.”

“Zack, his throat’s been slit clear across.”

“I know. The keys. Hand me the keys.”

She was holding it together fairly well, considering. She’d been a police reporter back in her early days and had seen the odd corpse here and there. Usually after the police had arrived.

She looked at the keys on the table. She’d have to put both feet on the floor to get there. As if she were putting her toe into icy cold water, she came down the last step and approached the table hesitantly. She delicately picked up the keys in her fingers, turned, and handed them to me.

“Your wrists are bruised,” she said as I struggled to work the keys into the openings. It took a minute or more for me to get the cuffs off my wrists. I didn’t bother to remove them from the railings. Perhaps, if they stayed there, it would bolster my version of events when the police arrived.

“Come on,” I said, leading Sarah up the stairs. “Let’s get out of here.”

I took her into the kitchen, where sunlight was streaming through the blinds and down through a skylight. Sarah slipped her arms around me and hugged me tight.

“I didn’t know what to think,” she said, starting to cry. “Trixie called, all mysterious, said you were in some trouble at her house, that she’d had to take your car, that she was very sorry, but that I should get out here as fast as possible.”

I put my arms around my wife, held her tight.

“I’m glad she called you. And I’m sorry you had to see what’s happened here.”

She pulled back, looked into my face, put a hand on each of my cheeks. “What’s going on, Zack? What’s happened?”

And then something caught her eye, something on my lip, and then she moved her left thumb over and rubbed at the corner of my mouth, then glanced at her thumb.

She stared at it for a moment, as though transfixed, then looked at me and said, “The police. You better call the police.” Then she turned and walked away.

I realized then what she’d found on her thumb was lipstick.

TWO BLUE AND WHITE CARS
with uniformed officers arrived first. Sarah and I were waiting outside, leaning on her Camry. I had the keys to Trixie’s German sedan in my pocket, as well as the copy of the
Suburban
from the kitchen counter that had her picture in it. Sarah had her arms folded in front of her, and whenever I shifted my butt along the fender toward her, she moved away.

“I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong,” I said.

“Stay away from me,” Sarah said quietly.

The uniforms, as I suspected, kept their interrogations to a minimum and set about making sure the crime scene was secure, well aware that the more senior detectives would be along shortly to conduct the investigation.

An unmarked car parked at the end of the drive and a short, squat man in his late fifties, dressed in a dark suit and black fedora, got out. Who the hell wore fedoras anymore? And then I recalled that I knew at least one detective who did, and that was Detective Flint, from the Oakwood Police Department, whom I knew from my earlier troubles in this neighborhood.

Halfway up the drive he stopped, looked at Trixie’s house, then scanned two doors over to take in the house Sarah and I and the kids once lived in. Even with his eyes narrowing, it was possible to read them.
I’ve been here before
, he was thinking.

And then he looked at me and smiled to himself, as if everything was starting to make sense. “Well, well,” he said. “Mr. Walker. We meet again.”

“Detective Flint,” I said, trying to smile but not quite pulling it off.

“And you would be?” he said, turning to Sarah. I noticed that when I introduced her as my wife she hardly swelled with pride.

“Hello, Mrs. Walker. I’m going to want to talk to both of you, but individually.” He called over one of the uniforms. “Why don’t you show Mr. and Mrs. Walker to separate cars so that they can rest comfortably while I check things out in there.”

He disappeared into the house. Sarah and I were put into the back seat of different cruisers. I could see her from mine, but she wasn’t looking over in my direction. I couldn’t resist trying the door handle, to see whether it would open, and it did not. I sat there, feeling like a criminal, and feeling even greater shame that Sarah was being put through the same ordeal. It was about ten minutes before Flint reappeared. He got into the back of Sarah’s car first, questioned her for at least fifteen minutes before he got out and settled in next to me. Even though he appeared to be done with Sarah, she had not yet been allowed out of her cruiser.

Flint shifted in the seat, got comfortable, and asked to see my wrists.

“Ouch,” he said empathetically, inspecting the bruises from the handcuffs. “That part checks out.”

He got out his notebook, clicked his ballpoint a few times, made some scribbles. “Where’s Trixie Snelling gone?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

“I honestly don’t know. She said something about trying to find her little girl. I’m guessing she means her daughter.”

“Where’s her daughter?”

“I didn’t even know, until she said that, that she might have a daughter. So I have no idea where she might be.”

“Hmm.” He made some notes. “I understand that you know the deceased.”

“Yes.” I cleared my throat. “Martin Benson. A columnist for the
Suburban
.”

“Yeah, I’ve read him now and again. Saw his big exposé on suburban kink, a dominatrix in the neighborhood. Lordy lordy.”

“There was a picture,” I said.

“Yeah, I saw that. She was dressed in her civilian clothes, though,” Flint mused. “I guess, if they’d got a picture of her on the job, they couldn’t even have run it. Family newspaper and all that.”

“I guess,” I said. “Listen, should I have a lawyer?”

“I don’t know,” Flint said, scratching his prominent nose. “You think you should have a lawyer?”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.” I paused. “Stupid, maybe, but not wrong. That’s why I called the police.”

Flint grunted. “When did you get here?”

“I guess, around one-thirty. I got here before Trixie.”

“She wasn’t already home?”

“No, she’d been away somewhere, I don’t know where, and we arranged to meet here at that time.”

“So both of you went into the house at the same time.”

“That’s right.” I remembered something. “As we were going into the house, Trixie thought maybe the door was already unlocked, but she wasn’t sure. You know how, sometimes, you turn the deadbolt, but it’ll still turn even if it’s not in the lock position?”

Flint shrugged. I went through the rest of it with him, how I’d gone into the basement for some coffee and found Benson. That Trixie came downstairs wondering what had happened to me, screamed, found a note, started to panic. That she handcuffed me to the railing and took off in my car. That she called Sarah at work to rescue me.

“Hmm,” Flint said. “So what were you meeting her here for…?” He leaned in a little closer, as if there were someone else in the car he didn’t want to overhear. “You can tell me. Nice-looking lady, I gather. Your wife might not understand, but I would.”

I swallowed. “It wasn’t like that. Trixie and I were friends, from when we used to live on the street. She helped me out when I was in trouble, with that other mess.”

Flint nodded, remembering.

“She’d been having trouble lately with the local paper, and wanted my help with it, and I told her there really wasn’t anything I could do, and then she set up this meeting between me and Benson—I thought she was going to be there but she bailed—thinking I’d try to talk him out of taking her picture, but I explained to her I couldn’t do that. But there was a huge misunderstanding, with Benson, and it got me in a lot of trouble at work. I was pretty pissed with her. But she called, said she was going to come clean, tell me what kind of trouble she was in, and I agreed to come out and see her, one last time, to hear her side of the story.” I shook my head. “Good call.”

“So you weren’t having a sexual relationship with Ms. Snelling?” Flint asked.

“No.”

“You weren’t one of her clients? You didn’t get those marks on your wrist some other way? You weren’t coming out here, paying her to do some things for you your wife’s just not too crazy about?” He smiled, like we were just a couple of guys, talking. “Look, it happens. You’re married awhile, you have the kids, the wife’s just not into it like she used to be, and her idea of kinky is doing it with the lights on.”

“Don’t speak about my wife that way,” I said.

Flint’s eyebrows went up. “My apologies. That was rude. I was just speaking generally. But you didn’t answer my question. Were you paying her? Were you hiring her for one of her little sessions?”

“No.”

Flint kept going over the same ground, again and again. What time I got there, what I’d been doing before my arrival, where Trixie might have gone, did she have any family that I knew of, who might have done this to Benson, whether I’d noticed anyone else around the house. My earlier meeting with Benson, how it had gone wrong, my subsequent demotion at the
Metropolitan
.

I was getting a headache.

“So both you and Ms. Snelling, you had really good reasons to be angry with Martin Benson,” Detective Flint said.

I thought about that. “The thing is, the damage had already been done,” I said. “The paper got the picture they wanted, they ran it. I think that’s when things started to totally unravel for Trixie. Someone saw that picture, tipped off someone who’d been trying to find her, and they tracked her down to this house. It was the thing she’d been worried about from the beginning.”

“And what was Martin Benson doing here in the first place?”

It was a good question. “Maybe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe he was trying to get more dirt on Trixie, and the guys who came to get her found him instead.”