Laura Lippman - What The Dead Know

“Did she tell you anything about herself? Penelope Jackson, I mean. Where she was from? Where Tony was from? How they met?”

“She wasn’t one who was inclined to chat. I know she worked over on St. Simons, at a place called Mullet Bay. Tony did work on the island, too, sometimes, when he couldn’t find long-haul work. He picked up jobs with a landscaping service. But of course they couldn’t live there.”

“Why not?”

Aaron Parrish laughed at Infante’s naïveté. “Prices, son. Almost none of the folks who work on the island can afford to live there. This house”-he waved at the charred remains of the three-bedroom rancher with blue siding-“that would be a quarter of a million, as is, if you could just pick it up and airlift it five miles east. St. Simons is for millionaires, Sea Island dearer still.”

Infante thanked Mr. Parrish and let himself into the unlocked house, which still held the smell of the fire. He didn’t see why the structure had to be condemned; the damage had been largely contained to the bedroom. The landlord probably stood to make more money on the insurance claim that way.

The door to the bedroom was swollen and stuck, but he managed to open it by throwing his full weight behind his shoulder. Tolliver had said that Tony Dunham had been dead before he burned, killed by smoke inhalation, but it was hard to forget that his flesh had sizzled and popped like barbecue for a time. That smell remained, too. Infante stood in the doorway, trying to imagine it. You would have to have some big balls to try killing someone this way-tossing the ashtray on the rug, waiting for the fire to engage. As Tolliver said, you couldn’t throw a second cigarette down if it didn’t get going. And if the guy woke up, you’d better be able to persuade him that it was an accident and you just walked in, a nervy chance to take if he was already smacking you regular. You also needed the discipline not to reach for a single cherished possession, to let it all go. You had to stand there until you were almost choking from the smoke, then close the door, wash your face to clear it of the watery tears caused by the fire, then go back and wait until you were sure that no one could save the man on the other side.

The woman up in Baltimore, whatever her name was-she could do that, he was sure of it. But he also was convinced that she wasn’t Penelope Jackson. It was the only real fact he had. I don’t know Penelope Jackson , she had said. But wouldn’t a true stranger have modified the name? I don’t know a Penelope Jackson, I don’t know any Penelope Jackson . Then how the fuck did you come to have her car? She had managed to avoid answering that question by offering them the solution to an infamous crime, then setting up a police officer as the perp. She had thrown a lot of things at them-to what end? What didn’t she want them to see?

He left the house, left Reynolds Street. It was a sad house, even before the fire. A house where two unhappy people had coexisted with frustration and disappointment. A house of quarrels and insults. He could tell because he had lived in such a house, twice. Well-once, his second marriage. His first marriage had been okay, until it wasn’t. Tabby had been a sweet girl. If he met her now…But he could never meet her again, not the Tabby he had first glimpsed in the Wharf Rat twelve years ago. She was lost to him, replaced by a woman who knew Kevin Infante as a cheat and a runaround. He ran into Tabby sometimes- Baltimore was small that way-and she was always polite, civil, as was he. Friendly, even, laughing about their marriage as if it were nothing more than an accident-plagued road trip, a merry misadventure. A decade out, they could be generous to their younger selves.

Yet there was a film in her eyes that would never quite disappear, a sheen of disappointment. He would give anything to see Tabby one more time as she had regarded him that first night in the Wharf Rat, when he was still someone she could admire and respect.

ONE OF THE PAMPHLETS from the Best Western lobby said there was some sort of fort over on St. Simons Island, and he decided to kill time there until Mullet Bay, the restaurant-bar where Penelope Jackson had worked, began prepping for the dinner rush. He was used to historical disappointments-he had seen the Alamo when he was just ten years old-but there was no structure at all where Fort Frederica once stood. He was staring at a sea of weeds known as the Bloody Marsh when his cell rang.

“Hey, Nancy.”

“Hey, Infante.” He knew that tone. He was more attuned to Nancy ’s tones than he had been to either wife’s. She was going to drop some bad news on him.

“Out with it, Nancy.”

“Our gal has decided she wants to talk. Today.”

“I’m back tonight. Can’t it wait?”

“I thought so, but Lenhardt says we gotta humor her. He’s going to send me in there with her. I think he’s worried about media, once her mom gets here. No one expected her to get out of Mexico so fast, with so little notice, and…well, we can’t control the mom as easily. We’ve got no charge hanging over her head. She can talk to whoever she wants to.”

Free, white, and twenty-one , as Tolliver might say.

“Yeah, it could be a clusterfuck.” It was amazing that they had flown beneath the radar as long as they had, their only bit of luck. “Fuck, though. When does the mom get in?”

“ Ten P.M., right behind you. That’s another thing…”

“Aw, c’mon. I’ve got to pick her up? Did I get demoted in the last twenty-four hours?”

“Sarge thought it would be nice if someone met her, and we don’t know how long this thing will go. Nice and…well, prudent. We want to keep her in our sights, you know?”

“Yeah.”

Infante snapped his phone shut in disgust and returned to staring at the marsh. The battle hadn’t apparently been all that bloody. British troops had repelled a Spanish invasion during something called the War of Jenkins’ Ear. What a small-stakes name for a war, but then he was fighting his own meaningless battle, wasn’t he, wandering around Georgia while his former partner vaulted into the lead position, conducted an interview that should have been his. The War of Infante’s Left Testicle . It was worse, in a way, knowing that Nancy hadn’t backstabbed him or maneuvered this. She had never been the scheming type. He wondered if maybe-Heather knew he had gone to Georgia and that’s why she was suddenly keen to tell all.

Fuck, he hated Brunswick.

“The thing is, we could really use your help.”

Willoughby heard the words, made sense of them, yet couldn’t quite process his way to an answer. He was too taken with the speaker, enthralled and delighted by her mere presence. An old-fashioned girl . Willoughby knew he was being sexist, but he couldn’t help thinking of the young detective that way. She was so curvy, a nineteenth-century body type here in the early days of the twenty-first, with such pretty red cheeks and slippery blond hair falling out of a careless topknot. There had been women in the department when he was there. By the late 1980s, some had even made homicide. But they sure hadn’t looked like this one.

“I was up until almost four A.M.,” the detective, Nancy, was saying earnestly, “going over what’s filtered out about the case and what was kept in the file. But it’s so much to take in at once, I thought you could help me focus on the key details.”

She pushed two printouts toward him. Not just typed but color-coded, red and blue. Red for what was known publicly, blue for what had been kept back. It seemed a little girly to him, but maybe all police did such things now that they had computers. Certainly he would never have dared using a system like this in his day, given how his coworkers were always on the alert for any sign of weakness or softness in him. Effeteness was the precise word, but if he had ever uttered it aloud, his colleagues would have seized upon it as evidence that he was, in fact, effete.