Linwood Barclay: Parting Shot

They both stood. Gaffney turned his back to Duckworth, untucked and unbuttoned his shirt, then yanked it up over his shoulders.

“How’s that?” he asked.

Duckworth stared. “That’ll do.”

Tattooed crudely on Gaffney’s back, in black letters two inches tall, was:

Duckworth said, “Mr. Gaffney, who’s Sean?”

“Sean?” he said.

“Yeah, Sean.”

Gaffney’s shoulders rose and fell as he shrugged. “I don’t know nobody named Sean. How come?”

I knew the name Madeline Plimpton.

She was old-stock Promise Falls. I wasn’t exactly an expert on the town’s history, but I knew the Plimptons were among those who’d established the town back in the 1800s. I knew they’d founded the town’s first newspaper, the Standard , and that Madeline Plimpton had the distinct honor of presiding over its death.

I didn’t know why she wanted to see me. She wouldn’t say in our phone call. Clients don’t usually want to talk about these things over the phone. It’s hard enough doing it in person.

“It’s delicate,” she explained.

It usually was.

I wouldn’t call her place a mansion, but it was pretty upscale for Promise Falls. A Victorian-style home built back in the twenties, probably four or five thousand square feet, set well back from the street, with a circular driveway. It was the kind of place that, at one time, would have had a black jockey lawn ornament out front. If it had ever actually had one, someone’d had the good sense to get rid of it.

I was behind the wheel of my new, aging Honda. I’d traded in my very old Accord for a merely old Accord. This one was equipped with a manual transmission, and shifting through the gears allowed me to imagine myself as someone younger and sportier. My first car, some thirty years ago, had been a Toyota Celica with a four-speed stick shift. Every car I’d had since had been automatic, until now.

I parked out front of the main double doors, my car outclassed by a black Lexus SUV, a white four-door Acura sedan, and a BMW 7 Series. The combined value of those three cars probably exceeded my total income for the last two decades.

I was half expecting a maid or butler to materialize after I pressed the bell, but it was Madeline Plimpton herself who opened the door and invited me in.

I put her at about seventy. She was a thin, nice-looking woman, bordering on regal, dressed in black slacks and a black silk top, a tasteful strand of pearls at her neck. Her well-tended silver hair came down to the base of her neck, and she eyed me through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses.

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Weaver,” she said.

“My pleasure. Please call me Cal.”

She did not invite me to call her Madeline.

She led me from the front hall into the dining room, where things had been set up for tea. China cups, milk and sugar cubes in silver servers.

“Can I pour you a cup of tea?” she asked.

“Thank you,” I said.

She poured, then took a seat at the head of the table. I pulled up a chair near the end, to her right.

“I’ve heard good things about you,” she said.

“I suppose, as a former newspaper publisher, you have good sources,” I said, smiling.

I caught her briefly wincing and thought it was my use of the word former . “I do. I know just about everyone in this town. I know you used to work for the police here. That you made a mistake, moved away for a few years to Griffon, where you set yourself up as a private investigator, and then came back.” She paused. “After a personal tragedy.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ve been back here a couple of years.”

“Yes.” I dropped a sugar cube into my tea. “So I guess I passed the background check. What seems to be the problem?”

Ms. Plimpton drew a long breath, then raised her cup to her lips and blew on it. The tea was hot.

“It’s about my grand-nephew,” she said.

“Okay.”

“My niece’s son. It’s been quite a year for them.”

I waited.

“My niece and her son live in Albany. But life for them there has become untenable.”

I was pretty sure I knew what that word meant.

“And why would that be?” I asked.

Another pause. “Jeremy — that’s my grand-nephew — had some issues with the courts this year that attracted an unfortunate degree of attention. It’s made life very difficult for him there. Some people who don’t seem to have much appreciation of the justice system have been harassing Jeremy and my niece, Gloria. Late-night phone calls, eggs thrown at the house. Someone even left a death threat in the mailbox. It was written in crayon on a piece of paper that had been smeared with excrement, if you can imagine such a thing.”

“What do you mean by ‘some issues,’ Ms. Plimpton?”

“A traffic mishap. It got blown out of proportion. I mean, I’m not suggesting it wasn’t a tragedy, but the fallout has just been over the top.”

“Ms. Plimpton, maybe you should start at the beginning.”

Her head made a tiny side-to-side motion. “I don’t see that that’s necessary. I’m interested in engaging your services, and it’s not important for you to know all the details. Although I can tell you that Gloria is almost more a daughter to me than a niece. She came to live with me when she was a teenager, so our relationship is...”

I was waiting for her to say “closer.”

“Complicated,” Ms. Plimpton said at last.

“I don’t know what service it is you expect me to perform,” I said.

“I want you to protect Jeremy.”

“What do you mean, protect? You mean you want me to be his bodyguard?”

“Yes, I suppose that would be part of it. I’d want you to assess his security situation and, as you say, perform bodyguard duties.”

“I’m not a bodyguard. Maybe what you need is a bouncer.”

Madeline Plimpton sighed. “Well, perhaps you don’t think of yourself that way, technically. But you are a former policeman. You’ve dealt with criminal elements. I would think that being a bodyguard really wouldn’t be straying all that much from what you actually do. And I’m perfectly prepared to pay you round-the-clock for as long as your services might be required. One of the reasons I chose you was because I understand you have — I don’t mean to be insensitive here, Mr. Weaver — but I understand you have no family. It wouldn’t be disruptive in ways that it might be to someone else.”

I wasn’t sure I liked Madeline Plimpton. But then again, in my line of work, if you only worked for people you wanted to be friends with, you wouldn’t eat.

“How old is Jeremy?” I asked.

“Eighteen,” she said.

“And what’s his last name?”

She bit her lip briefly. “Pilford,” she said, almost in a whisper.

I blinked. “Jeremy Pilford? Your grand-nephew is Jeremy Pilford?”

She nodded. “I take it that you are familiar with the name.”

The entire country was familiar with the name.

“The Big Baby,” I said.

Madeline Plimpton winced more noticeably this time. She looked as though I’d poured my hot tea over her veined hand.

“I wish you hadn’t said that. Those words were never used in his defense. That was something the prosecution came up with and the press ran with, and it was insulting. It was demeaning. Not just to Jeremy, but to Gloria, too. It reflected very badly on her.”

“But it came out of the defense strategy, didn’t it, Ms. Plimpton? It’s basically what Jeremy’s lawyer was saying. That was the argument. That Jeremy had been so pampered, so excused from ever having to do things for himself, from ever having to accept responsibility for any of his actions his entire life, that he couldn’t imagine that he was doing anything wrong when he—”