The Ruinous Sweep Read online

  “So what does your ‘vision’ tell you, Oscar?”

  “That you guys think we had something to do with it, whatever it is.”

  Cameron tipped his head sideways. “Let’s run with that, okay?”

  “Come on, Constable,” said Merv, picking up his cards and then throwing them back down, as if yet again he’d drawn baby numbers. “That ain’t why the police are knocking at our door late on a Friday night.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, you aren’t exactly strangers,” said Merv. “Always looking for an excuse to drop by anytime, day or night.” He sniffed. Picked up his cigarette pack and tapped one out.

  “He’s right,” said Oscar. “Weren’t no ‘accident’ brought you here.”

  Cameron accepted the challenge, chin up. Then he turned his attention to Murphy.

  “You know anything about it?” he asked. Murphy didn’t acknowledge the question. “Hey,” said Cameron. He poked the man’s shoulder. Murphy flinched but didn’t look up.

  “Your friend here stoned?” said Cameron, turning to Oscar.

  “He’s just a quiet one, officer. Leave him be.” He reached across the table and patted Murphy’s hand, which lay there, holding a red chip between his thumb and finger. There was red on his thumb, too, as if it were the chip that was leaking blood, not the man.

  “Which one of these good ole boys gave you the bloodied chin?” Cameron asked.

  “Hey!” said Merv, pushing himself away from the table. “You don’t come in my house accusing us of violence, you hear? Does it look like there’s been any kind of fight here?”

  “Calm down,” said Oscar. Then he looked at Cameron. “Murphy’s been with Merv and me the whole time. He got himself a bloodied chin before he arrived, cleaned it up, and it opened again. Nobody’s been taking shots at nobody. I can vouch for that.”

  Cameron smiled and turned to his partner. “Take note of that. Oscar Shouldice just ‘vouched’ for the validity of a statement he made.”

  Now Merv really growled, deep down in his chest, and shook his lion’s mane.

  “You got something you want to add?” said Cameron, looking at the lion. The constable had his thumbs tucked in the front of his belt and his fingers were beating out a little rhythm on his shiny pressed pants: busy fingers wanting something to do, something to wrap themselves around. The top of his gun holster was unbuckled.

  “We didn’t see nothing. We didn’t do nothing,” said Merv. “You got no call to be here.”

  He was about to say more, but Constable Cameron held up his hand, stopped him. “Hold your water, Merv. We’re just asking around. No cause to get perturbed.”

  “Huh,” said Oscar. “I think my good buddy Mr. Mervin Green here thinks this is looking a whole lot like harassment.”

  Cameron stared at Shouldice, who stared right back at him, unblinking.

  Oscar Shouldice and Mervin Green: the cops knew these guys by name. A den of thieves, thought Donovan. But there was someone missing, wasn’t there? He shook his head. He’d been here and there was . . . there was someone else. No. He couldn’t get to it. Just thieves and a hitchhiker with a bloodied chin. A hitchhiker who suddenly raised his head and stared again toward the window. Donovan backed away. He didn’t think he made any sound, but the last voice he heard from the window was Constable Cameron’s.

  “Anyone else around?” he said.

  Oh shit!

  That was Donovan’s cue, but for a moment he couldn’t move. It was if he were standing in mud. The will was there but no strength. Finally, he made his legs work and hustled back to the storm cellar entrance. He threw himself down behind the bunker just as the door opened, first the real door, then the screen. A gust of wind stirred up last fall’s dead leaves nobody had gotten around to raking. A loose section of gutter rattled overhead. Donovan clenched his fists and held his breath. The door closed. Donovan breathed again. After a moment, he checked, keeping his head low, to make sure it wasn’t a ruse — the officer only pretending to reenter the house. The porch was empty, but Donovan had heard enough to know that hanging around was far from a good idea. And getting himself arrested wasn’t really anything he was prepared to do just yet. It would require giving up, and he couldn’t do that. Something deep inside his injured body told him to hold firm, get a grip. There was something pressing that he had to do. He just couldn’t recall what it was.

  He slunk back the way he’d come, staying tight to the house. Then he sprinted, as fast as he could on his gimpy ankle, back to the trash heap. He’d have been tagged out easy, running like that. Sent back to the dugout with his tail between his legs. He crawled behind the rusted pile of clutter. If they came looking, they’d find him. There was nowhere else to go other than back to the woods, and no energy to get there anyway. There was a broken-down fence to clamber over and the swamp beyond that and a stretch of lonely highway. He couldn’t go back. It was not an option. And going forward didn’t seem like much of one, either. A trash heap, in fact, seemed about the most fitting place to be.

  Bee seldom cried. She loved theater but she didn’t have much time for drama. She was happier solving other people’s emotional meltdowns than having them herself. Her mother was a shrink; maybe she got it from her, but she didn’t want to be a therapist or a counselor. She was a stage manager. Which meant, as far as she was concerned, making sure no one ever had to have a meltdown in the first place — not on her set. She anticipated disaster. She adapted quickly. When an actor’s brain went off-line, she was there with the missed cue. On her stool backstage in the corner with her headset on, she called the show, her voice calm and secure, her manner deliberate, her directions precise. Other people could have the spotlight. She was happy to be the one to make sure it was focused in exactly the right place.

  But she cried now. No histrionics, little more than a hiccup to start it off, but that seemed to open the floodgates. She sat there, back straight, and let her tears wash her tired face.

  Again, Bell was there with the box of tissues, and Bee hungrily pressed tissue after tissue against her leaking eyes, her leaking nose.

  She muttered a thank-you and covered her face with her hands to hide from Bell and Stills, who took up a station across from her. She wanted to count to a hundred, look up, and find them gone.

  Hide-and-seek. That’s what this was going to be now.

  “Drink some water, kid,” said Bell. She took a bottle from him — who knew where it came from — and did as she was told. “I’m sorry to be the one who had to break it to you.”

  Bee sniffed. Stared at the two of them. Sensed that with Stills, there might be a veneer of concern, but piling up behind it was an avalanche of questions.

  “What happened?” said Bee.

  “That’s what we’re trying to sort out.”

  “Must have come as a shock,” said Bell. “But you didn’t know him well?”

  Bee shook her head. Sniffed. “No. Like I said, I’ve only met him a couple of times. It’s not that.” She blew her nose. What was it? He was a drunk, a waste of time, but Donovan stuck religiously to the custody arrangements made for him when he was just a kid, when Al was still a working newspaperman and capable of something like responsible conduct. Now he was dead. And Donovan was hanging by a thread to life. It was a rainy spring night, April the fifteenth, and people were dropping all over the place.

  And there were those words in her journal.

  Not just Donovan’s but her own, from before: her worries for Turn, her fears. It was, after all, her journal, a place where a girl could pour out her most troubling concerns.

  That brought her around. She became aware of Callista Stills’s hand, filled with more fresh tissues, hovering near her face. New tissues for old. The detective gently uncurled Bee’s fingers, took the soggy paper mass from her, and replaced it.

  “Thanks,” said Bee. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s a lot to take in,” said Stills. She managed a tight little smile, then walked off t
o locate a garbage can and some hand sanitizer. She returned, took her seat across from Bee, close enough that Bee could smell the medicinal odor of the sanitizer. “Can we go on?” she asked.

  Bee nodded. Didn’t have the energy to obstruct them right now. But she would be on her guard.

  Bell picked up where he had left off. “From what we can tell, Donovan arrived at his father’s apartment around eight o’clock. You say he was at a baseball practice?”

  “Yeah. Britannia Park. It’s about a mile from his dad’s apartment.”

  Bell nodded and added a note. “He left the apartment about a half hour, forty-five minutes later, and then came back around nine thirty, somewhere in there. Were you in contact with him at any point? Did he phone?”

  Wait. What was that? Bee stared at him, her forehead drawn. This sounded odd. Why would he leave and come back? Her gaze drifted to Stills. Then she slowly shook her head. They waited. She sniffed, cleared her throat. “He’d never phone me at work.”

  “Even if there was an emergency of some kind?”

  “My cell phone is off-limits at work. I mean I can phone him on my break. I just can’t take calls. It’s the rule. If there was a real emergency, I guess he could phone Bridgehead — the coffee shop where I work. He’s never done it.” She looked from one to the other of them, suspicion blooming. “You guys have his phone. You could see if there had been any calls.”

  “The battery was low, near dead. He got your text message somehow, but he didn’t make any calls out,” said Bell.

  “But Donovan could have contacted you some other way,” said Stills. “Or come and talked to you, work or no work.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “You talking about the Bridgehead in the Glebe?” Bee nodded. “It’s what? Six or seven blocks to Wilton Crescent from there?”

  Bee nodded. “You can ask at work. Ask anyone. He didn’t come there tonight — I mean, last night.” Again Stills held her gaze as if waiting for her to crack, but Bee was thinking about something else — something Bell had said. Another clue.

  “How do you know any of this?” she said, deliberately turning her attention to the sergeant.

  “Excuse me?”

  “His comings and goings. When he got there, when he left?”

  “There are witnesses,” said Bell.

  “Witnesses,” said Bee. “As in plural?”

  “Uh-huh. But we’re looking for corroboration.”

  Bee’s hands dropped to her lap, like two birds falling from the sky from one shotgun blast. She looked up at the detectives, shaking her head. “Silly me. And here I thought you were looking for some maniac who ran Donovan over and left him for dead. Now he’s suddenly the chief suspect in a murder investigation?”

  “Nobody said that.”

  “He was murdered. His dad, I mean.”

  “Nobody said that, either.”

  Bee gave up. They weren’t going to budge.

  “Bee, Donovan was there in the apartment. Anyone who was there is a suspect until we can clear them.”

  “And who else was there?” said Bee.

  Stills ignored her. “Ms. Northway, we don’t know very much.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  The outburst earned Bee another full-on glare. She threw up her hands to either side of her head but wasn’t about to apologize.

  “We are still looking into the hit-and-run,” said Bell. “It’s a major crime. But we can’t ignore the connection.”

  “Fine,” Bee said, and threw herself back against the hard surface of the seat. You want petulance as a side order to obstreperous hostility? Got it. She glanced at Stills and then looked away toward the picture window, the lights of the city, the wet blackness of the early morning long before light.

  Stills got up from her chair and squatted in front of Bee, nose to nose, or at least it felt that way. “It’s our job — Jim’s and mine, plus a whole crew of crime scene investigators — to figure out the connections, if there are any. It’s what we do, okay?” Her voice was low, even. “Sometimes we have to get up in a person’s face about it. I don’t want to do it that way. But you’ve been resistant, defensive. And that only makes us wonder why.”

  Bee looked down at a tear in the tangerine-colored plastic of the chair. She wanted to say she wasn’t being defensive but stopped herself. It was one of those things you can’t say. Way too lame. So she rejoined the staring match with Stills. No blinking. No bursting into hysterical laughter. No screaming. Stare her down, if you can. Don’t let her know about the journal with Donovan’s words copied out in it. Don’t let her know what else lurks in that journal. Don’t think about the damn journal.

  Bell piped up, his gravelly baritone cooling things down a bit. “We have reason to believe Donovan was very mad at his father.”

  “Who told you that?” Bee said, then immediately rolled her eyes. “Sorry, I forgot. I’m the one answering the questions.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “His father’s a scuzzbag.”

  “Was a scuzzbag,” said Stills.

  Then Bell said, “Anything change lately? Any escalation in the hostilities that you know of?”

  Bee crossed her arms. Wanted to shake her head. Couldn’t.

  “You mentioned Donovan was going to talk to him about not visiting anymore,” said Stills. “How was that likely to go down?”

  Bee shrugged. “It wasn’t likely to go down well, but if you mean would it end in violence, I honestly don’t think so.”

  “Donovan not prone to temperamental outbursts?” Bee waited one second too long before she looked away. “What is it?” said Stills.

  “Nothing.”

  Stills sighed. “I think we can both agree that that’s not true.”

  “Beatrice,” said Bell gently, fulfilling his good-cop role. “We’ve got a chaotic crime scene. We’ve got witnesses to say there was more than one violent interchange.”

  Bee turned her attention back to Bell. “Well, what do you want from me, then? I wasn’t there. Like I said, check at work if you don’t believe me.”

  “We’re not suggesting you were,” said Bell.

  “But you seem pretty sure he was in touch with me.”

  “We have to look at every angle,” the sergeant continued. “There are discrepancies in the information we’ve been able to gather so far. Time problems. There’s room for doubt. And what we want from you is any help — any information at all — that might clear Donovan.”

  “Or point the finger at him.”

  “Enough!” said Stills. She stood up to her full height but didn’t step back so she loomed over Bee. “Do you know anyone else who might have had reason to harm McGeary?”

  This was something else. Something new. Bee wanted to say anyone who met him might want to do him harm, but she figured this was not a time for flippancy. The man was dead. She looked up at Stills, her eyes sharp and waiting. “I think his girlfriend was leaving him.” Stills nodded, but not as if she knew this already. It was a nod that said go on. “Donovan’s father goes — went — through a lot of girlfriends, but this one had been around awhile.”

  Bell was writing. Whoever they’d talked to hadn’t said anything about this.

  “You know her name?” he asked, his pen poised over his notebook.

  She thought. It was something dumb. “Kali,” she said. That was it.

  “Last name?”

  Bee thought. “Something Irish. O’Connell, maybe? No, O’Connor.”

  Bell wrote the name down. Stills continued, “Good. Thank you. Anyone else?”

  Bee tried to think. There were a number of characters Turn had described in his father’s merry band of losers. But they were friends, weren’t they? She pounded her forehead lightly with the heel of her closed palm. No one came to mind.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t think of anyone else, but he could be really nasty.” She swallowed. “He was good with words. No, that isn’t it. He wasn’t good with words; more like a
suicide bomber with words strapped to his body. When he went off, people could die. Oh . . . I’m sorry. I guess that wasn’t appropriate.”

  “Go on,” said Stills.

  Bee sighed and then remembered something Turn had said to her. “Apparently, Al was good about ditching people, but he didn’t like people ditching him. Maybe things really went bad with Kali.”

  Stills tipped her head to the side, questioning.

  “What?” said Bee.

  “Or Donovan?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, wasn’t Donovan ditching him, in a sense?”

  Bee pressed her lips tight together. She felt swindled.

  “If, as you say, McGeary didn’t like people leaving him, then how’s he going to take to his son pulling the plug?”

  Suddenly, Bee was spent. Couldn’t go on. It must be close to four by now, she thought. Her head fell forward on her chest and her hair formed a curtain covering her face. She closed her eyes.

  “Bee?”

  “I’m done,” she said. Then she realized she wasn’t done. She wasn’t going to field any more questions, but there was something she needed to say. She cleared the curtain of hair from her face, tucking it behind her ears. “Donovan really puts a lot into being a gentleman. His dad was smart, educated — whatever — but he’d become this sarcastic, mocking, totally foul human being. Donovan was all about taking the high road. His father would play on that. See if he could rile him. But Donovan was onto him. He knew what his dad was doing. He would just ride it out. You know?”

  The nod from Bell was way too hesitant. There was no nod at all from Stills. She had been walking around, but now she resumed her chair across from Bee, beside her partner. Her face was stony.

  “What?” said Bee. Then she wished she hadn’t.

  Bell closed his spiral notebook and put it in his sports-jacket pocket. He clicked his ballpoint closed and stuffed it in the breast pocket of his shirt. The two detectives rose.

  “Thanks for your help,” said Sergeant Bell, trying to sound upbeat and missing it by a mile. “I hope Donovan’s condition improves.”

  Stills nodded. And then they walked away. But she stopped and turned around. “If he says anything, I trust you’ll let us know.” Then she walked back to Bee and handed her a card she seemed to produce from thin air. INSPECTOR CALLISTA STILLS it read. She gazed at Bee, waiting for a reply. Instead, Bee shifted her gaze to Bell.