The Skeleton's Knee (6 page)

“Guess he was a rich guy.”

I feigned surprise. “Really? He didn’t look it.”

“Well, he was.” Coyner’s face suddenly became stern. I could sense a concern that he’d said too much.

I kept pressing. “Did he pay for fixing the house up, too? A lot of that work doesn’t date back twenty years.”

“Yeah.”

“He did pay for it?”

Coyner’s lips were compressed to two thin white lines. He nodded wordlessly.

I shook my head and whistled softly. “I guess he was loaded. You said he never left the place. How did he buy the building materials, the gardening equipment, all the rest of it?”

Coyner was becoming restless; his hands found one another and began unconsciously fidgeting. “I got it. He’d leave a note.”

I moved to throw him further off balance. “And a hundred-dollar bill or two.”

His back stiffened and he chewed his lower lip for a moment. “I got work to do.” He began to walk off.

My voice lost its leisurely tone. “We’ll have to finish this sometime. Me or maybe the State’s Attorney or the state police.”

He stopped and glared back at me. “They’ll be trespassing.”

I shook my head. “No they won’t. But they’ll drag you into this further than you want to go. It’s your choice.”

He suddenly grimaced and clenched his fists. “So what if he paid in hundred-dollar bills? Wasn’t my business.”

“Didn’t say it was. What else did you buy for him?”

Coyner shrugged, his fists loosening somewhat. “Supplies—whole wheat, tofu, nuts and berries, and anything else he needed. I’d get most of it in Bratt.”

“How did you two first meet?”

His expression remained guarded, but he became a bit freer with what he knew. “He found me. Somebody must’ve told him about the house. Said he wanted to be left alone, that the world was a shitty place. He also said he’d make it worth my while, and he did, and that’s all there was to it. I let him alone and he did likewise.”

“There’s a lot more food growing around that house than two men can eat. Did he let you sell the surplus?” The fists closing again was confirmation enough. I moved on quickly. “He ever have visitors?”

“Early on, when he was adding onto the building.”

“You never saw who?”

“They came and left at night. I don’t know who, or how many, but I do know it stopped.”

“When?”

“Same time—’bout twenty years back.”

“And nobody since?”

“Nope.”

“What about the newer construction? Did he bring people in to help him? Or did you do it?”

“He did it himself—alone.”

“And you never saw him leave the place?”

“Only on that ambulance.”

“You ever hear a gunshot?”

“Nope.”

“And you never suspected he’d been hit by a bullet?”

“Nope.” He was shaking his head almost continuously now, as if trying to throw off where my questions were leading. I doubted at this point if the truth meant a whole lot to him. It was more important to pacify me, to get me off his back.

For the moment, I would play along, although we had more ground to cover. “Mr. Coyner, some of my men’ll be coming to join me soon, to look through that house more carefully. We’ll try to be as unobtrusive as possible.” I reached into my pocket and handed him the search warrant.

He glanced at it and handed it back without a word.

He turned to leave again. I let him go a few feet before I called out a final question. “What did Fuller mean when he accused you of a breach of faith for calling that ambulance?”

The old man looked back at me for a long, measured silence, his face as impenetrable as ever. “Don’t know; didn’t know what the hell he was talking about most of the time.”

I doubted that, just as I doubted his relationship with Fuller was as uncomplicated as he made it out to be. But I had time. We would talk again.

I returned to the cottage in the clearing, pausing this time to absorb fully the uniqueness of the garden. Every inch of its several acres had been manicured in some way, even if only to make it look untouched. Here and there, as if to give the emotions a rest, a patch or strip of ground had been left alone—pauses in a symphony of color and shape. But even those were cultured and contoured, free of weeds and distracting blemishes. In their emptiness, they were as complex and satisfying as the horticultural riot around them. I envisioned Fuller spending season after season out here, steeped in the pursuit of perfection, applying a near-fanatical concentration in his efforts.

I re-entered the house, still feeling like I was on the wrong side of a glass wall, retracing my steps of a half hour ago. The place was basically as I’d found it, as attractive and sterile as a monastery cell.

There was one difference, however, a change that hit me like a hammer, smashing the tidy myth of a crime long past.

As I stepped away from the ladder after climbing to the sleeping loft, my eyes went to the one item I felt instinctively had the most to offer.

But the chart over the bed had been removed.

J.P. TYLER, WILLY KUNKLE
, and Ron Klesczewski found me pacing in front of the cottage a half hour later, boiling over with anger and frustration.

“Where the hell have you guys been?”

Each of them reacted true to form at my outburst. Tyler silently raised his eyebrows, Kunkle smirked and ignored me, and Klesczewski looked worried.

“We left as soon as you called,” he answered.

“Did you see an old guy in a red-and-black-checked wool shirt when you drove up?”

Tyler answered crisply, “Nope. Is this the place you want checked out?”

I began walking quickly toward Coyner’s house. “Yeah, but wait ’til I get back. Ron, come with me. You guys just keep an eye out.”

I heard Kunkle’s “So much for bustin’ our butts to get here” as I led Klesczewski back down the trail.

“What’s goin’ on?” he asked in a tentative voice. Ron Klesczewski was my second-in-command, a senior detective sergeant still in his twenties, serious, sober, and hard-working, a little shy of using his authority, and a man in dire need of a good sense of humor.

Not that I would have appreciated one had he chosen to display it now. “While I was using the phone to get you three up here, somebody ripped off a major piece of evidence.”

“The guy in the wool shirt?”

“His name’s Coyner. He owns this whole place. Did Harriet give you any idea of what’s going on here?”

“Pretty much.”

By the time I got to the edge of the woods, within sight of Coyner’s house, I’d cooled down considerably from my earlier humiliation and had come to realize that I was hunting for a lion with an empty gun. I stopped dead in my tracks, staring at the distant house and breathing heavily, both from exertion and the dregs of my anger.

Klesczewski took a couple of steps farther on and then hesitated. He looked back at me quizzically. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m being a horse’s ass—again.”

“You don’t think Coyner took it?”

“I’m sure he took it, but there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about it. I have no proof, so I can get no warrant. He could have that damn thing right behind his front door, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Unless he invites us in.”

I smiled at the thought. “He might invite us to drop dead, but that’s about it.”

We both stood there in silence for a moment, with nothing much to weigh. I finally shrugged. “What the hell; we’re here. We might as well knock.”

I resumed my course, slower and calmer now, thinking more about what the search of Fuller’s house might reveal than about the chances of Fred Coyner undergoing a sudden personality change. If we were lucky during the search, we might even get something to pin Coyner to the theft of the chart.

We walked up to his front door, and I pounded on it with my fist, having fruitlessly looked for a bell. There was a pause; I thought I heard something move within the house.

“There he is,” Ron muttered.

At a side window, the curtains moved slightly, revealing Fred Coyner’s impassive, creased face. He looked at us without expression for several seconds, and then the curtain fell back into place. We could hear footsteps retreating slowly away from the door.

We waited a half-minute more, until I finally shrugged and turned my back. “Okay, he screwed us. Off to plan B.”

“Search the other house?” My pace grew stronger as I set my sights ahead, the sharp sting of my earlier embarrassment fading, if not vanishing completely. “That, and have the photographs I took developed. There may be another way around Mr. Coyner.”

Back at the cottage, Tyler was loitering in the garden, looking around generally, his technically oriented mind no doubt intrigued by the effort in Fuller’s work. Willy Kunkle, by contrast, was lying flat on his back near the front door, staring at the clouds overhead with a cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth.

“Jesus,” Ron sighed under his breath as he caught sight of him. Willy Kunkle, the most unique member of our detective squad, had one working arm, a lousy attitude, and a sniper’s eye for other people’s weak spots. He was also one of the best cops I’d ever worked with. When he was inspired, he went after cases like a pit bull after a mailman, ignoring long hours, hard work, and lousy working conditions, all while staying totally sharp to every new wrinkle around him. He had a feel for the overlooked detail and a nose for his fellow humans’ devious ways. But his contemptuous, cynical, and constantly testing attitude gave truth to the cliché that some great cops, given the right spin at the wrong time, had the makings of crooks.

His instincts were as nasty and combative as Ron’s were compassionate and hesitant, an outlook not helped by the crippled left arm he’d lost to a rifle bullet several years ago and which he dealt with by stuffing his shriveled hand in his pants pocket so the arm wouldn’t flop around. That arm was a symbol to him of adversity overcome and of his own tenacity; it was also a symbol to us of how embittered and unbalanced he could become when his occasional self-pity kicked in and dragged him into the depths. To say he was an emotional roller-coaster was to put it lightly, which explained why Ron tended to treat him like unstable dynamite.

The search took the rest of the day. We used a line method, stringing out four abreast and working our way, on hands and knees, across the floor to the kitchen area’s far wall. It was a painstaking effort, involving the occasional use of tweezers and a magnifying lens; transparent sticky tape for lifting hair and soil samples; and tiny Ziploc bags for storing minute particles whose origin only a lab analysis could reveal. As one of us located some item of interest, the rest had to stop where we were and wait, so the integrity of the line would be maintained. Traveling twenty-five feet of open floor took over an hour.

Tyler was in his element. This, rather than working street snitches and following up leads, was his idea of police work at its best. Due to our small staff and the mundane quality of most of our cases, however, Tyler’s forensic expertise was only rarely called upon.

Four long hours later J.P. had a cornucopia of hair, dirt, and fiber samples to keep him busy for days, and I had a headache and nothing more to show for our efforts than what I’d discovered earlier on my own.

I also had nothing linking the chart’s disappearance to Fred Coyner.

I sent my three colleagues back to the office with the evidence, the film from my camera, and the duffel bag full of money from under the kitchen sink, while I remained behind. All sense that this was a paperwork case destined to pass from our hands to some other agency’s had vanished along with the chart on that wall. Its disappearance had served notice that Fuller’s crimes, if he had committed any, might not be as remote in time or distance as we’d imagined.

I made my way back to Coyner’s house. What warmth there’d been was fading with the day, and an autumnal chill ran down my back and numbed my face. As before, Coyner looked impassively out at me following my knock on his front door. This time, however, the door opened.

“What.” It was less a question than a demand, but gently put, as if the old man was resigned to whatever Fuller’s death would bring down upon him.

“I wanted to tell you that our investigation into Abraham Fuller is going to be stepped up. Removing that chart from his wall while I was on the portable phone was illegal, and we’re going to have to pursue it. That also means we’ll be digging into his past and yours, and looking under every rock we come across.”

His face didn’t change, but I sensed a new tension in the man. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I shrugged. He hadn’t invited me in, and while the cold didn’t seem to affect him, I was beginning to shiver, which rarely adds to a cop’s credibility. “Maybe, but we’ll have to figure that out on our own. I think I ought to warn you, though, that cooperating with us might help you in the long run.”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t even blink.

“Left to our own devices, not knowing exactly what we’re after, we’re going to have to put you under a microscope, and we’ll find out things you wouldn’t believe. Information like that gets hard to control, once it gets out.”

“Look all you want.”

The door shut in my face, quietly but firmly. It was apparent that the connection between Coyner and his tenant would have to be uncovered the hard way—if at all.

· · ·

By the time I got back to my office, the medical examiner’s courier had dropped off what little information on Abraham Fuller Beverly Hillstrom had been able to gather, which boiled down to a set of fingerprints, some photographs, and a detailed analysis of her physical findings.

Morgue pictures are hardly the most scintillating of art forms, but in this case I looked them over with keen interest. They showed a tall, slim, clean-cut man, well muscled, with strong facial features. Even with his eyes half-closed in death—a cadaver’s typically sleepy drunk appearance—Fuller’s angular nose, his hollow cheeks, and powerful chin all told of a driven intensity.

He had taken on a personality for me by now, still vague and elusive, but tinted with enough unusual character traits to capture my imagination. Homicides are generally uncomplicated affairs—brutal, forthright, displaying little planning or subtlety. Most of the time, the investigator doesn’t have to look far beyond the victim’s immediate circle of acquaintances to find the one with the gun or knife.