Laura Lippman - The Last Place

Wallace Gunts Sr. spoke at last. He had a voice like a rusty gate. “He’s mean enough to kill. He’s just not smart enough to get away with it.”

“Is Troy Plunkett still around?”

But Wallace Sr. was done. He reminded Tess of that famous flower in England, the one that bloomed for only a day and gave off a noxious stink when it did.

“Yeah,” Wally Jr. said. “He goes away for periods of time, but he always comes back. People like the Plunketts don’t go very far. His family’s strewn up and down the old Thurmont Highway like so much garbage. You’ll find Troy there, or drinking at the No-Name Tavern.”

“The No-Name?”

“That’s what we call it. Because it’s got no name. It’s just a place on the highway, with no name and no sign. You go up a little ways, past the John Deere store, and then it’s there on your left.”

Tess waited to see if more precise directions would be offered, but the Guntses appeared to feel this should be clear enough. She said good-bye to each in turn. Everyone’s handshake was limp and damp, except for Gunts Sr., who squeezed her hand almost too hard and looked as if he blamed her for his daughter’s death. They were nice people. Tess wanted to like them more than she did. If their daughter had died differently-from a preventable illness, in an act of terror-ism-they might have been filled with a sense of purpose. But the murder betrayed a certain lower-middle-class tackiness. Nice people just didn’t die this way.

But the Guntses were so passive, so bewildered and overmatched by life in general. Had they always been this way? Tess didn’t know, and she didn’t care. She just wanted to get away from them, and away from the wispy, unknowing smile on Tiffani’s face.

The Old Thurmont Highway was not easy to find, but Troy Plunkett was. Tess overshot the unmarked road at least twice and drove so far out of her way that she almost hit Camp David. It turned out there was a Thurmont Highway, an Old Thurmont Highway, and this narrow stretch of falling-apart farmhouses, which might have been called the Older-Still Thurmont Highway. Tess didn’t see any signs of life in the littered yards, most of which were posted with NO TRESPASSING signs. She did see the name Plunkett lettered on several of the old mailboxes, however, and at the end of the road she discovered the No-Name. A concrete rectangle on the edge of a cornfield, it looked like a good place to sit out a nuclear war.

Tess ordered a beer, a Rolling Rock, which was served with a smeary glass and a skeptical look.

“Most women order light beer,” the bartender said.

“When it comes to light beer, I’ve always wondered: What’s the point?”

The line had charmed many a bartender back in Baltimore. But this was not Baltimore. The bartender made a point of turning his back to Tess and pretending great interest in the television on a shelf behind the bar. A baseball game was on. It looked odd, perhaps because it was in black and white. No, the players had big sideburns and builds that were at once stockier but less sinewy than today’s pumped-up professional athletes. It was a rebroadcast of some game from the seventies, on that ESPN classics station. Now that was the definition of pathetic to Tess’s mind: sitting in a bar on a spring afternoon, watching a baseball game that was decided three decades ago.

Besides, it was the World Series with Pittsburgh, the 1979 one the Orioles lost. Traitors.

She glanced around the compact room. Little space was wasted here. It was a serious place, a place for drinking, watching television, shooting pool. It was not a place where a stranger, male or female, could announce, “So, anyone here know Troy Plunkett?”

Eavesdropping, another much underrated tool, also yielded little. The men here barely used nouns at all, it seemed, just grunted monosyllabic adjectives at one another.

“That’s good,” said a man at a nearby table.

“Yeah,” his buddy said.

“I mean real good.”

“Real good.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

They could be talking about their beer, the Orioles, the weather, or Fermat’s Last Theorem, Tess thought.

She was getting ready to try and engage the hostile bartender when the door swung open and everyone in the bar recoiled a little, vampires catching a dose of sunlight. A man’s backlit silhouette, slightly bow-legged, crossed the threshold. Real Good Man number one lifted his hand perhaps an inch from the table. Even the gestures were laconic here.

“Troy,” he said.

And Tess was reminded, as she so often was, that it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.

“Yeah,” Troy said.

He took a seat at the bar two stools down from Tess and gave her a curious look. Not a predatory one, just a glance of mild surprise, the way an alcoholic might regard the pink elephant on its second or third appearance in his living room.

“Troy Plunkett?” she asked, adopting the local custom of verblessness.

He looked at her as if the pink elephant had tentatively brandished a small knife-and he was trying to remember where he had stowed something larger and meaner.

“Humph,” was all he said.

“I’m a private investigator out of Baltimore.”

He hunched his shoulders and bent forward over his beer, as if he hoped she would be gone the next time he looked up. She wasn’t.

“So?” He fit a lot of menace into that one small word.

Troy Plunkett was a small man, with the bristling belligerence peculiar to runts. He wore cowboy boots beneath tight grimy jeans, and the heels were hooked on the lowest rung of the chrome stool. If there had been no rung, his legs would have swung free, several inches above the floor. His exposed skin was dark, a farmer’s tan that appeared to be almost a stain at this point in his life, which Tess judged to be about thirty to thirty-five years under way. She had assumed he was Tiffani’s high school classmate, but Tiffani would be twenty-eight if she were alive now. Cleaned up, trying to charm, he probably had a modest way with some women. Unworldly women. Young women.

But he was not clean now, and he was not trying to charm.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“No,” he said.

“Just a few.”

“Ask all you want. I’m not answering.”

“I’ll pay you twenty dollars for your time.”

He sized her up.

“Forty.”

His appraisal had fallen short of the mark. Tess would have been willing to go to sixty. She pulled two twenty-dollar bills out of her wallet, crisp, sticky ones fresh from a Frederick ATM, and put them on the bar. Not quite between them, a little closer to her than they were to him, and pinned down by her right elbow.

“Six years ago, a woman was killed.”

Troy’s face was blank.

“A woman named Tiffani Gunts. The local authorities think she was killed by an intruder, but they never made an arrest.”

He couldn’t even be bothered to shrug both shoulders, just popped the left one up.

“Understand this: I don’t care who did it. But I care about how the police went about their job. Get me? I’m not a cop or an officer of the court. I’m a private investigator who’s trying to figure out if local law enforcement agencies know what they’re doing.”

He either didn’t believe her or didn’t want to believe her. He stared ahead, so she was looking at his profile. It wasn’t a bad profile. Tess could see how a woman could be lonely enough, or desperate enough, to ignore the dozens of warning signs that Troy Plunkett gave off.

“You get me? I’m just examining the police work in the case.”

“Like internal affairs, or something.”

“Right.”

“I had an alibi,” he said, as if it were a piece of information he had to dig for. “Yeah, that’s it.”