The Dirty Book Murder (8 page)

The dead man lay facedown like a slumbering walrus. Water seeped from his soggy overcoat and trousers staining the concrete a darker gray. The back of his head shone with blood mixed with water and something yellow and pink. The left arm had landed under his body when they hauled him out. The other arm lay splayed out in front of his face with the palm down so that it covered his features.

The police weren’t letting anyone past the yellow tape, so I scrambled up the hill and made my way to the bridge where more onlookers had gathered for a better view. I wedged in between a woman carrying a baby in a backpack and a young man holding a briefcase under his arm. Like everyone else, they stood motionless, mouths slightly open, staring silently at the corpse.

I recognized the detective in charge.

Underneath a porkpie hat too small for his head, Detective Lieutenant Buford Higgins was six feet of muscle going to fat in late middle age. His broad Irish face featured a bushy mustache that one rarely sees these days outside Durango and a smashed nose that bespoke an active career in law enforcement.

During the Corretti bribery trial in my salad days as a trial lawyer, I made a fool of him on the witness stand. He wasn’t the only cop who didn’t appreciate my methods of cross-examination, but Lieutenant Higgins had a memory longer than most.

I watched with the others as he carefully shifted the corpse’s head back and forth, poking the wound with a pencil, then turning the body onto its back. That’s when I recognized the horribly bloated face of my colleague.

One doesn’t make the connection easily between the living and the dead under those circumstances, but it was Gareth all right. He wore the same ugly paisley tie from the night before and nobody else in Kansas City would have been wearing a heavy overcoat on a warm summer night. An oily black substance still clung to his lower lip and chin. At least what was left of his lip. There are fish in the creek, after all, and he had been there all night.

It appeared he had been struck by a hard object and was shoved or fell into the water to drown. I was about to go down to report what I knew about Hughes’s final night on earth when the thought occurred to me that I was probably the next-to-last person to see him alive and that, as witnessed by a hundred or so people in Fitzpatrick’s Pub, it wasn’t under the most genial of circumstances.

It didn’t help my nerves knowing that Higgins would be in charge of the investigation. While that big ol’ country boy hadn’t been much on the witness stand, he was a persistent and instinctive homicide detective who could marshal a small army of investigators. Two of them were probably making their way to the bars on the Plaza and in Westport to see if anything untoward had occurred the night before.

I was already practicing my alibi when a flurry of new activity away from the corpse caught my attention. A cop had found something in the bushes next to the stone parapet twenty feet upstream.

The object looked like a baseball bat flattened by a steamroller, but I recognized it instantly as an Irish hurling stick used for Gaelic Athletic Association games, just like the one given me on a rugby tour to Ireland. I kept mine under the counter at the bookstore to wield in the unlikely event a robber was stupid enough to think my daily sales worth stealing.

When the cop handed it to Higgins, I saw the broad ash covered with dried blood and bits of hair and flesh. I noticed something else as well, something that caused a nuclear mushroom to cloud my brain.

For several seconds I stared stupidly ahead, my eyebrows scrunched together as if miming Richard Nixon, while I muttered “Jesus H. Christ” over and over.

The hurley had alternating strips of black and white tape at the grip and the stamped crest of the Cross Keys Gaelic Athletic Club above them.

I had put that tape on in the fall of 1994 when I captained the K.C. Blues on a tour to Ireland. During an off day in Dublin we traded rugby balls for hurling sticks and nearly
beat the locals at their national game. The hurley didn’t say “Property of Michael M. Bevan, Esquire,” but it might as well have.

Before backing away from the low railing, I studied the scene unfolding below.

The body, having been photographed from every angle, was placed on a gurney and covered by a white blanket. A man in a jumpsuit tagged the hurling stick with a yellow identification card, wrapped it in a clear plastic bag, and made his way up the stone steps to a police van parked on Ward Parkway. The ambulance attendants unlocked the wheels of the gurney then pushed it up the ramp.

As the grim procession moved through the throng of bystanders on the bridge I whispered a parting prayer for Gareth’s soul, the only funeral my fellow bookman was going to get.

The door of the ambulance closed and I returned my gaze to the creek bed to find the squirrel-like eyes of Higgins staring up at me.

I nodded, he nodded back, and, with a thready smile, returned to his job, leaving me with the feeling that my brain had just been x-rayed.

He couldn’t have connected me with that hurling stick so soon, but it worried me enough not to take further notice of the tanned and limber girls by the tennis courts as I began the run home.

It took less than ten minutes to cover the final mile and a half to my house, a compact bungalow built in 1923 when the Arts & Crafts style was all the rage.

There were three main rooms on each of the two floors and an open porch on the west side. A wall of French doors in the living room looked onto a garden that featured a small pond. The backyard extended sixty feet to where the detached single-car garage sat unobtrusively, its sides covered by a profusion of honeysuckle that my wife, Carol, had planted our first day living there.

We bought the place shortly after my discharge from the Marine Corps for $70,000 when we didn’t have much money. It was to be our starter home, but we became so attached to it that we never considered moving. Instead, we spent any money that would have gone to a more expensive house by filling it with Stickley furniture, mica-shaded lamps, and Oriental rugs.

If there was one positive thing my daughter and I still shared, it was affection for that old place.

After feeding Feklar, my cat, I took a shower, put on a pair of khaki hiking shorts and a black knit tennis shirt, fixed toast and juice, and went outside to sit and think by the garden.

I’m not one to meet trouble halfway, but events had unsettled me enough that I needed to hold the glass in both hands while I took stock of the recent developments.

The South African at the auction must have realized Hughes had stolen the Colette and killed him for it. Did he do it on orders of his employer, this Martin Quist creep?

Could there have been something even more important about the book than its remarkable provenance?

How did the murderer borrow my hurling stick—and why did he think it a good idea?

Was it pure revenge for my running the auction price to over his employer’s limit and getting him into trouble? Or was there another reason for their setting me up as their patsy?

Finally, there was the surprising last-second bid by Richard Chezik. Who would entrust a guy like that to bid such a large amount on their behalf?

There were a lot of questions I needed answered. And fast. But I needed a lawyer first. I gulped the juice, tossed the toast onto the grass for the birds, and drove my jeep three miles to Kansas.

*  *  *

Crossing State Line Road at Sixty-first Street, I entered a real estate agent’s paradise of Tudor mansions, Spanish haciendas, and columned Colonials, all fronted by yards slightly smaller than the Azores.

Tim Winter lived in a more modest Cotswold variety nestled on a two-acre corner lot. What the house lacked in size was more than made up for in its tasteful design and serene location next to a willow-graced pond.

Even if he hadn’t become one of the best lawyers in Kansas City, I would have been walking up the path to Tim’s door that early Sunday afternoon to see his wife. I needed an understanding friend. Alice Winter, of all my acquaintances, came closest.

Soft-spoken, calm, and unprepossessing, she was a tall, shapely woman with a face just this side of beautiful that radiated a restrained emotional power. In Europe she would have passed for an aristocrat by her bearing alone, but her natural dignity and gentle nature belied a bitter ennui that only I ever seemed to notice.

Alice and I had grown up next door and been the best of pals. As a child she comforted me when life with my parents disintegrated. At fifteen we initiated each other in the intimacies of physical love. After our junior year of high school I moved in with my grandparents across town and we drifted apart.

It was lonely at first trying to get along in a sometimes unpredictable world without her, but I soon got used to it, even finding myself relieved at my newfound independence.

I’m not sure Alice was ever able to say the same thing about me.

I went off to the University of Iowa and she attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. We continued to see each other during summer breaks. Shortly after I graduated law school, but before I left for the Marines, we even discussed getting married.

A year later, I fell in love with Carol, the daughter of a British Royal Marine exchange officer at Camp Lejeune. I didn’t have the courage to telephone Alice that I had found my future wife. Instead, I wrote her a breezy letter that began with a description of the weather in North Carolina and ended with “Oh, by the way …”

It took her several months to respond, but the letter that finally arrived oozed with thoughtful wishes for the “lucky English girl” and just the right touch of wistfulness at our having grown apart. She added in a postscript that she and Tim Winter were to be wed in the spring of that year and regretted she would be unable to attend my wedding. I never received an invitation to hers.

By the standards of middle-American society the Winters enjoyed a comfortable marriage, due mostly to Tim’s successful career and the pride they shared in their son. Happiness was another matter. Beneath the veneer of conjugal harmony, a darkness of spirit lurked within Alice and I couldn’t help but feel I was partially to blame.

I knocked on the door and moments later Alice appeared, inviting me in with a smothering hug.

“Is Tim home?” I asked, pulling away.

“He and Mark are training at the high school. They’re running the stadium stairs with rocks in their backpacks. If you ask me, the rocks are in their heads.”

“Which mountain is it this time?”

“McKinley.” She sighed. “I wish he wasn’t taking our boy. Colorado fourteeners are one thing, but the highest peak in North America is a whole different matter for a high school kid.”

“Tim would burrow to hell if he set his mind to it.”

“So would Mark,” she said, with reluctant pride. “Both of them bore easily, I suppose. Their joint response to my concern is that Tim’s father escorted him up Aconcagua when he was Mark’s age—as if the actions of that abusive shit justified anything.”

We went into her kitchen, a sunny airy space where copper pots hung from iron hooks on thick wooden beams and checkered paper from the Ralph Lauren catalog covered the walls. Swaths of dried basil, recently plucked from the garden, were spread out on a five-by-ten foot island in the center of the room. Thin slices of ham and Swiss cheese rested on a cutting board next to a jar of imported mustard and a loaf of bread.

“Do you want something to eat?” she asked. “I thought the boys would be home by now and lunch is just sitting here.”

“Sure.”

Alice prepared sandwiches for both of us, cutting the crust off the bread before applying mustard, ham, and cheese.

“Why cut the crust?” I asked as we sat at a small table in an alcove of the kitchen.

“Why?”

“Yeah. Carol used to do that. I could never understand it. What’s wrong with the
crust?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know why we do it. Maybe it’s one of those little signs of affection to show we love you.”

“ ‘Loved,’ you mean.”

“I didn’t mean it in the past tense.”

“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked.

She shook her head and reached for a glass of milk. The drink left a white ring above her upper lip. Without a word I wiped it off with a napkin.

“You used to do that when we were kids,” Alice reminded me. “You could be so sweet when you and Kenny Shannon weren’t tormenting the nuns.”

I tried to look puzzled.

“Like when you tied Sister Theresa’s shoelaces together during the christening of my little sister.”

“That was Shannon.”

“Maybe. But you put him up to it.”

“And we both paid the price: sentenced to two years’ duty as altar boys. I haven’t been to an early Mass since.”

“Fifteen years later you were the only lay person asked to speak at Monsignor’s funeral.”

“That’s only because it was the old guy’s last chance to torment me.”

I ate in silence and then Alice put down her glass.

“Are you seeing anyone now?”

“Nobody special.”

“Lucy Danton was nice. I liked her.”

“So did I, but never got past the liking stage. A little too much Junior League.”

“So you prefer barmaids to blue bloods now.”

“Let’s not get personal.”

“What about that gal at The Peanut you always talk about?”

“Pegeen Flynn? She’s not the marrying kind. Or so she tells me every time I propose.”

Alice smiled. She’d heard all the excuses before.

“You’re going to wake up some day and find yourself a very lonely old man.”

“Gee, thanks for the reminder.”

“So,” she said, leaning back in her chair, “what brings you to this little piece of heaven? Got some moldy old books for Tim to peruse?”

“Not this time. I’m in a jam.”

“Somebody pregnant?”

She asked it as if I were a sixteen-year-old girl.

“Not on my account, as far as I know. A colleague was murdered last night. The police are going to think I did it. Earlier I’d been in a fight with him at a bar.”

She stared at me, uncomprehending for a moment, then made a vague motion with her hand for me to keep silent and stood up. She walked over to the refrigerator, opened it, and drank some orange juice straight from the container. She put the box back, but continued to stand with her back to me, fiddling with the magnets that held family snapshots on the door.