فصل 15 - بخش 02

15

The Firepit was indeed open for brunch, so Ralph went there first. Two of the staff who had been working on the night of the murder were currently on duty: the hostess and a crewcut waiter who looked about old enough to buy a beer. The hostess was no help (‘We were mobbed that night, Detective’), and while the waiter vaguely remembered serving a large group of teachers, he was equivocal when Ralph showed him Terry’s picture from the previous year’s FCHS yearbook. He said that, yes, he ‘sorta’ remembered a guy who looked like that, but he couldn’t swear it was the guy in the picture. He said he wasn’t even sure the guy had been with that bunch of teachers. ‘Hey, man, I might have just served him a Hot Wing Platter at the bar.’

So that was that.

Ralph’s luck at the Sheraton was at first no better. He was able to confirm that Maitland and William Quade had stayed in room 644 on Tuesday night, and the hotel manager was able to show him the bill, but it was Quade’s signature. He had used his MasterCard. The manager also told him that room 644 had been occupied every night since Maitland and Quade checked out, and had been cleaned every morning.

‘And we offer turn-down service,’ said the manager, adding insult to injury. ‘That means on most days the room was cleaned twice.’

Yes, Detective Anderson was welcome to review the security footage, and Ralph did it without any complaints about how Alec Pelley had already been allowed to do so. (Ralph was not a Cap City police officer, which meant diplomacy was the better part of valor.) The footage was in full color, and sharp – no elderly Zoney’s Go-Mart cameras for the Cap City Sheraton. He saw a man who looked like Terry in the lobby, in the gift shop, doing a quick Wednesday morning workout in the hotel’s fitness room, and outside the hotel ballroom, waiting in the autograph line. The stuff from the lobby and gift shop was iffy, but there could be little doubt – at least in his mind – that the guy signing in to use the exercise equipment and the guy waiting in line for an autograph was his son’s old coach. The one who’d taught Derek to bunt, thus changing his nickname from Swiffer to Push It.

In his mind, Ralph could hear his wife telling him that forensic evidence from Cap City was the missing piece, the Golden Ticket. If Terry was here, she’d said – meaning in Flint City, committing murder – then the double must have been there. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

‘None of it makes sense,’ he muttered, looking at the monitor. On it was a frozen image of a man who certainly looked like Terry Maitland, caught laughing about something as he stood in the autograph line with his department head, Roundhill.

‘Pardon?’ asked the hotel dick who had shown him the footage.

‘Nothing.’

‘Can I show you anything else?’

‘No, but thanks.’ This had been a fool’s errand. The Channel 81 tape of the lecture had pretty much rendered the security footage moot, anyway, because it was Terry during the Q-and-A. No one could doubt it.

Except in one corner of his mind, Ralph still did. The way Terry had stood to ask his question, as if he’d known that a camera would be on him … it was just so goddam perfect. Was it possible that the whole thing was a set-up? An amazing but ultimately explicable act of legerdemain? Ralph didn’t see how it could be, but he didn’t know how David Copperfield had walked through the Great Wall of China, and Ralph had seen that on TV. If it was so, Terry Maitland wasn’t just a murderer, he was a murderer who was laughing at them.

‘Detective, just a heads-up,’ said the hotel dick. ‘I’ve got a note from Harley Bright – he’s the boss – saying all the stuff you just looked at is supposed to be saved for a lawyer named Howard Gold.’

‘I don’t care what you do with it,’ Ralph said. ‘Mail it off to Sarah Palin in Whistledick, Alaska, for all I care. I’m going home.’ Yes. Good idea. Go home, sit in his backyard with Jeannie, split a six with her – four for him, two for her. And try not to go crazy thinking about this goddam paradox.

The dick walked him to the door of the security office. ‘News says you got the guy who killed that kid.’

‘News says a lot of things. Thank you for your time, sir.’

‘Always a pleasure to help the police.’

If only you had, Ralph thought.

He halted on the far side of the lobby, hand out to push the revolving door, struck by a thought. There was one other place he should check, as long as he was here. According to Terry, Debbie Grant had booked for the women’s room as soon as Coben’s lecture ended, and she had been gone a long time. I went down to the newsstand with Ev and Billy, Terry had said. She met us there.

The newsstand, it turned out, was a kind of auxiliary gift shop. An overly made-up woman with graying hair was behind the counter, rearranging bits of inexpensive jewelry. Ralph showed her his ID and asked her if she had been working the previous Tuesday afternoon.

‘Honey,’ she said, ‘I work here every day, unless I’m sick. I don’t get anything extra from the books and magazines, but when it comes to this jewelry and the souvenir coffee cups, I’m on commission.’

‘Would you remember this man? He was here last Tuesday with a bunch of English teachers, for a lecture.’ He showed her Terry’s picture.

‘Sure, I remember him. He asked about the Flint County book. First one to do that in Jesus knows how long. I didn’t stock it, the darn thing was here when I started running this place back in 2010. I should take it down, I guess, but replace it with what? Anything way above or way below eye-level doesn’t move, you find that out quick running a place like this. At least the stuff down low is cheap. That top shelf is your expensive stuff with photographs and glossy pages.’

‘What book are we talking about, Ms—’ He looked at her name-tag. ‘Ms Levelle?’

‘That one,’ she said, pointing. ‘A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township. Jawbreaker title, huh?’

He turned and saw two racks of reading material next to a shelf of souvenir cups and plates. One rack held magazines; the other held a mixture of paperback and current hardcover fiction. On the top shelf of the latter were half a dozen larger volumes, what Jeannie would have called coffee table books. They were shrink-wrapped so that browsers couldn’t smudge the pages or dog-ear the corners. Ralph walked over and looked up at them. Terry, who had a good three inches on him, wouldn’t have had to look up, or stand on tiptoe to take one of them down.

He started to reach for the book she’d mentioned, then changed his mind. He turned back to Ms Levelle. ‘Tell me what you remember.’

‘What, about that guy? Nothing much to tell. The gift shop got way busy after the lecture broke, I remember that, but I only got a trickle of custom. You know why, don’t you?’

Ralph shook his head, trying to be patient. There was something here, all right, and he thought – hoped – he knew what it was.

‘They didn’t want to lose their place in line, of course, and they all had the new book by Mr Coben to read while they waited. But these three gentlemen did come in, and one of them – the fat one – bought that new Lisa Gardner hardback. The other two just browsed. Then a lady poked her head in and said she was all set, so they left. To get their autographs, I suppose.’

‘But one of them – the tall one – expressed an interest in the Flint County book.’

‘Yes, but I think it was the Canning Township part of the title that caught his eye. Did he say his family lived there for a long time?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said. ‘You tell me.’

‘Pretty sure he did. He took it down, but when he saw the pricetag – seventy-nine ninety-nine – he put it back on the shelf.’

And whoomp, there it was. ‘Has anyone looked at that book since? Taken it down and handled it?’

‘That one? You’re kidding.’

Ralph went to the rack, stood on his toes, and took down the shrink-wrapped book. He held it by the sides, using his palms. On the front was a sepia-toned photograph of a long-ago funeral procession. Six cowboys, all wearing battered hats and holstered pistols, were carrying a plank coffin into a dusty cemetery. A preacher (also wearing a holstered gun) was waiting for them at the head of an open grave with a Bible in his hands.

Ms Levelle brightened considerably. ‘You actually want to buy that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, hand it over so I can scan it.’

‘I don’t think so.’ He held the book up with the bar code stickered to the shrink-wrap facing her, and she beeped it.

‘That’s eighty-four fourteen with the tax, but we’ll call it eighty-four even.’

Ralph set the book carefully on end to hand over his credit card. He tucked his receipt into his breast pocket, then once again picked the book up using just his palms, holding it out like a chalice.

‘He handled it,’ he said, less to make sure of her than to confirm his own absurd luck. ‘You’re sure the man in the picture I showed you handled this book.’

‘Took it down and said that cover picture was taken in Canning Township. Then he looked at the price and put it back. Just like I told you. Is it evidence, or something?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said, looking down at the antique mourners gracing the cover. ‘But I’m going to find out.’