Linwood Barclay - Final Assignment

‘Calm your ponies,’ she told him. ‘You think I don’t know how to look after you?’

‘You had me worried for a second.’

He took a sip, smiled. ‘Just a few more weeks till the long weekend in May,’ he said. ‘I think I might try to get away. You?’

I shook my head. ‘Nope.’

Duckworth went quiet for a moment. Finally he said, ‘This is going to make me sound like Columbo or something.’

‘What?’

‘There’s one thing that bothers me about all this.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Franny’s whole plan was to kill Michael and frame Chandler for it. It was pretty clumsily executed, but she did her best for a kid without a criminology degree. Her plan included stealing Chandler’s baseball bat when he left it by the school bleachers. She figured it would have his fingerprints all over it. So she wears some gloves, whacks Mike in the head with the bat, and supposedly the only prints we’re going to find are Chandler’s. Except we don’t find them.’

‘Franny stole Chandler’s bat,’ I said.

“Yeah. So I thought, maybe between the time she stole the bat and when she used it on Mike, she accidentally rubbed the prints off. Even then, you’d still expect to get a few partials, something. But with one small exception, there are no prints on the bat at all. The whole thing got wiped down. Even though you can still see blood on the bat, it’s all smeared. So if our little friend Franny wants to see Chandler nailed for this, why does she wipe his prints off?’

‘What’s the small exception?’ I asked.

Duckworth said, ‘There’s a partial print right on the very end of the bat. When it was wiped down, that got missed.’

‘Chandler’s.’

‘No. We took his fingerprints and there’s no match.’

‘Franny’s?’

He shook his head.

‘What about the deceased?’ I asked. I raised my arm in a mock-defensive gesture. ‘Maybe he was doing something like this and his hand touched the bat.’

‘Nope,’ Barry said. ‘Checked.’

‘And there’s no way it was the crime-scene techies?’

Duckworth closed his mouth on a forkful of blueberry pie. He took a moment to savor it before saying, ‘Not a chance.’

‘Where’s that leave you?’ I asked.

‘Puzzled,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a full confession from Franny, so I should be satisfied, but I’m not. Got any ideas?’

I did.

It might have been the first time I’d seen Greta Carson smile. When she opened the door and saw me, her face nearly shattered from happiness.

‘Mr Weaver, oh, what a pleasure to see you,’ she said. ‘Please come in.’

Once I was inside, she said, ‘It occurred to me the other day that all the other times you were here I didn’t so much as offer you a cup of coffee. Can I get you something? If not coffee, some tea? I think I might even have a muffin or two.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’

‘Were you looking for Chandler? Because he’s not here. He’s in school!’ She said it as though it were some sort of miracle. ‘All the business about the story just went away, like it vanished into thin air. Given that he didn’t write it, they stopped thinking there was anything mentally wrong with him. Of course, they weren’t happy that he handed in work that was not his own, but they came to understand that he was manipulated by that awful girl.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Things turned out okay for Chandler.’

‘Are you sure you won’t have coffee? I was just going to pour myself some.’

‘You go ahead.’

She asked me to follow her into the kitchen, which was a sprawling room with lots of light and shiny aluminum appliances. She filled a cup, added some skim milk from the fridge, and said, ‘So what can I do for you? I know the way things unfolded we never made any formal arrangement to hire you, but Malcolm and I talked about it, and we think you should submit a bill. God knows what might have happened if you hadn’t been asking questions.’

‘Lucy Brighton helped a lot,’ I said.

‘Well if she wants to submit a bill too, she’s welcome.’

‘I don’t think, as a school board employee, they’d let her do that. But don’t worry about my bill. That’s not why I’m here.’

‘Oh, okay. So what’s up?’

‘I was really hoping to talk to your husband.’

‘Well, you’re in luck. He’s not home right now, but I’m expecting to see him any moment now. He’s working out of the house today, but he just went to the bank. If you want to—’

We heard the front door open.

Greta smiled. ‘Speak of the devil. Malcolm, we’re in the kitchen!’

Ten seconds later, he was there. He had a welcoming smile for me too, and a hand for me to shake.

I obliged.

‘Good to see you,’ he said. ‘I guess you’ve heard that they charged that girl.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘What a twisted little bitch she turned out to be,’ he said. Greta nodded her agreement.

‘Would you have a moment?’ I asked him. ‘Maybe we could talk in your study.’

‘Sure, of course.’ He looked awkwardly at his wife. ‘Just be a minute, love.’

Between the kitchen and his study I asked him, ‘Could you grab Chandler’s bat for a second?’

‘His bat?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The one you showed me the other morning.’

‘Why do you want to see it?’

‘It’ll be easier to explain once you get it. I’ll wait in the study for you.’

I didn’t bother to take a seat, and instead scanned the spines of the hundreds of books tucked into the shelves. There were plenty related to finance and economic theory, but also books about teaching the subject. And plenty of novels, too. The kind men read when they take their annual trip to the beach. Tom Clancy, Lee Child, David Baldacci.

He came back into the room holding the bat crosswise, one hand gripped down by the knob, the other supporting the barrel, the thickest part.

‘For the life of me I don’t know why you want to see this. It’s not like it was used in the commission of a crime.’ He laughed nervously.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It certainly wasn’t.’ I reached out for it. ‘May I?’

‘Sure,’ he said, handing it over.

I ran my hands along it, from one end to the other. It was perfectly smooth, even at the thick end, which usually takes a beating from being tapped on home plate while the player waits for the pitch.

‘If I didn’t know better,’ I said, ‘I’d say this has never been used.’

Malcolm took it back and made a show of studying it carefully. ‘Not very much, that’s true.’ He laughed. ‘I guess that means Chandler isn’t hitting the ball quite as often as he’d like to be.’

‘Franny told the police she stole Chandler’s bat,’ I said.

‘Hmm?’ Malcolm said, pretending not to take in the significance of what I was saying.

‘It was Chandler’s bat she took. From where your son said he’d lost it. She wanted it to have his fingerprints on it.’

Malcolm feigned puzzlement. ‘I’m not following.’

‘Did you come home the morning I met you because you’d just bought a new baseball bat and wanted to tuck it into the garage? So if and when someone asked for it, you’d be able to produce it?’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Patently ridiculous.’

‘I’ll bet you were smart enough to pay for it in cash. But how many places in Promise Falls sell baseball bats? Maybe half a dozen? You think if someone were to go to all those places with your picture, and ask if anyone remembered you buying a baseball bat in the last week, they’d get lucky?’

Malcolm hesitated.

‘Buying a bat is not a crime,’ he said.