William Lashner - Marked Man

And yes, it was fresher than I remembered, if the scent of death can ever be described as fresh.

I turned on the lights. The lights of the kitchen, the old pewter chandelier in the green-walled dining room. I turned on the lights to protect me from what I now was certain I would find.

I scanned the living room from the dining room archway and saw nothing, and relief frizzled up my spine, and then I saw the leg with its khaki pants sticking out from the edge of the easy chair, the shiny brown loafer resting flat on the floor, as if someone were sitting in that chair calmly waiting for me to come around and say hey.

“Hello,” I said. “Mr. Quick?”

No answer.

Stanford Quick was sittingin the easy chair, the same chair I had sat on when I tried not to throw up on my shoes. Khaki pants, plaid shirt, blue blazer, a drink in his hand, something brown and watery. He was leaning back comfortably, and there was in his expression something of a man telling a humorous story, who had been rudely interrupted. Interrupted with a bullet in his skull. I guess it wasn’t such a humorous story after all.

A flash whited out the entire scene, and then it came back, just as strange. Just as bloody. Flash flash.

“Can we go over this one more time?” said McDeiss, grabbing my lapel and pulling my attention away from the blood-spattered chair and the corpse of Stanford Quick as the photographer worked. Police were swarming once again in the Ciulla household, dusting for fingerprints, searching for blood. Outside, the carnival was in full swing – the boisterous crowd, the reporters, the television trucks with their microwave dishes pointed high. It’s funny how fast a murder brightens a slow news night.

“You were driving around looking for this Stanford Quick,” said McDeiss.

“That’s right,” I said.

“And you came up with the bright idea of looking for him here.”

“I thought there might be a connection.”

“And lo and behold you found the car that Mr. Quick’s wife had described.”

“It’s funny how when you tell a story ten times, the details stick, isn’t it, Detective?”

“And so, quite in character, you stepped right inside what was still a sealed crime scene.”

“The tape was gone, the door was open.”

“And you climbed the stairs and turned on every light in the place.”

“I’m afraid of the dark.”

“Leaving a trail of your fingerprints.”

“My little gift to the crime-scene search unit. At least I didn’t throw up, I know how much they love that.”

“And then you found him sitting on that chair, just like that, and called the police.”

“I poured him a drink first.”

“Excuse me?”

“He looked thirsty.”

“And you didn’t touch a thing when you found him.”

“Not a thing,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true, because before I called the cops, I had searched for something and I had found it and I had checked it out and then wiped off my prints and put it back.

“You want to tell me now about the connection you mentioned between Stanford Quick of Gladwyne and Ralph Ciulla of Tacony?”

“I thought I’d wait for Slocum and Jenna Hathaway. You know how I hate telling the same story over and over and – Oh, look, they’ve arrived.”

Slocum strode into the house like a captain striding onto the quarterdeck, his eyes behind his glasses alert, his beige raincoat swirling dramatically around him. It wasn’t chilly out and it wasn’t rainy, which sort of dampened the effect of the swirling coat, but still, you could tell that a crime scene had become a natural part of his habitat. Not so, however, with Jenna Hathaway, who walked hesitantly inside and stopped cold at the door when she saw the corpse. She stared at it for a long moment and then turned away as she put a hand up to her nose. Her father had been a regular at such scenes, but I suppose you don’t get to see too many dead guys on the tax-avoidance circuit.

“I’ll be back,” said McDeiss. “Wait here and don’t move.” He started walking toward the prosecutors, stopped and swiveled his head toward me to check that I had listened.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t even twitch,” he said before continuing on his way.

When I had placed the call about the dead man in the easy chair, I placed it directly to McDeiss. Whatever we felt one for the other, my feelings were charged with a professional respect. And I had asked McDeiss to call both Slocum and Hathaway to the crime scene, because with two corpses, a killer on the loose, and my client still trying to come home, it was time to stop dicking around.

“Any idea what happened?” said Slocum when the four of us were finally together in the kitchen and I had gone through the whole finding-the-corpse business for the eleventh time.

“I’d guess murder,” I said.

“You think?” said Jenna Hathaway. “What was it that gave it away? The bullet in the forehead?”

“Any ideas on who did it?” said Slocum.

“Same guy who killed Ralph,” I said.

“Why?”

“Well, it’s the same room and the same house and, from what McDeiss has told me, it looks like the same caliber of bullet coming from the left side.”

“No, I mean why would the same guy want to kill two characters so different? Ralph Ciulla was a blue-collar guy from Tacony, and Stanford Quick was a high-powered corporate lawyer from Gladwyne. Where’s the connection?”

“The Randolph Trust.”

“Stanford Quick was the trust’s lawyer. Ralph Ciulla was maybe involved in the robbery twenty-eight years ago. That’s a pretty tenuous connection.”

“It goes deeper than that, and farther back into the past,” I said.

“No more dancing, Carl,” said McDeiss. “You’re going to tell us everything you know.”

I checked my watch. “It’s a little late for a story, don’t you think?”

“You can do it here and now,” said McDeiss calmly, “or later from a jail cell.”

“Now’s good,” I said quickly. And with that, I relayed to them the whole story, as much as I knew, about the Randolph Trust robbery, the five neighborhood losers who planned it, and what happened to four of them after they pulled it off.

“So what you’re saying,” said McDeiss once I had laid it out as best I could, “is that Ralph Ciulla, Joey Pride, your client, and this Stanford Quick were all part of the crew that pulled the heist?”

“That’s right.”

“So why are some of them showing up dead?”

“To keep them quiet. To keep the whole thing quiet. To keep Charlie away, to keep the painting hidden, to break any link that still existed between the Randolph heist and the one guy out of the original five who is still not identified. It was this final guy who arranged for Stanford Quick to show up at Ralph’s old house for some reason and then had him killed right here, in the very same room as Ralph.”

“Teddy Pravitz,” said Jenna Hathaway.

“So you think he’s back, killing all his old friends like Jason with his ski mask?” said McDeiss.

“Something like that, yeah,” I said. “Or he hired someone to do it for him.”

“But the statute of limitations on the robbery has long passed. Why does he care so much to drop a couple of corpses and make it all matter again?”

“Because it’s not just a robbery, is it, Jenna?”

“No,” she said.

I turned to her. “He was with her. Her brother told us what he told your father, that he had seen them together. And after the robbery that bastard took her, I’m sure of it.”

“You think he still has her?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s been twenty-eight years.”

“I know. But we need to find out.”