Дэвид Балдаччи - One Good Deed

Archer held up two fingers in the form of a salute. “Scout’s honor.”

“Hmm.”

He left her there and walked out of the building.

He sat on a bench and opened the book to a page whose corner had been turned down.

A sentence was underlined. He read it off: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Archer kept staring at those words as though they would cause everything in his life to instantly make sense. It didn’t work.

He imagined there were two ways to leave Poca City. A car or a bus. If she had left by bus, he might be able to check that, or Shaw certainly could. If by car, that would be more problematic.

Car?

He hoofed it over to Fulsome Street, hoping to beat the rain, which he did. Mostly. The heavens burst open just about the time he made it to the garage. He shook off the rain and slapped his hat against his thigh and watched as rainwater turned reddish brown by the dirt ran in meandering rivulets down the asphalt.

Well, this whole place could use a good cleaning.

The Nash sat in its space. And according to Shaw this vehicle was a veritable bastion of evidence. Mostly against him.

Now, he was no trained detective, it was true. But Archer had spent years of his life in another part of the world noticing little details that might save his life and that of his men. A machine gun muzzle barely visible under a mess of straw. A Panzer barrel edging out from the tree line. The too-intense stare of a villager who was trying to hide something. A wire leading to a bomb that looked like only a bit of plant vine. And then in prison it was sort of the same. A shiv sticking out from the cuff of a shirt, a guard clenching his baton a little too tightly before bringing it down on someone’s skull, a group of cons edging a bit too close for comfort.

His realizing all these things before they could impact him, giving him a bare moment to react, and to live — those experiences had rewired Archer’s brain, bestowing on him a level of skillful observation to perhaps successfully accomplish what he was about to attempt.

Shaw had said that in the Nash’s trunk were the imprints of what had appeared to be the gold bars, their weight pressing down on the soft carpet in the trunk. And along with that were grains of the gold dust. Clearly that had been the haul from Tuttle’s safe. Shaw had told him on the way to the police station that pictures of all this had been taken and would be used as evidence in a trial.

In my trial.

He checked the car, which was unlocked, but the keys were not inside, and the trunk was locked. He managed to work the back seat free and was able to access the trunk that way. He used his Ray-O-Vac light to look at the trunk carpet. He could make out the bar impressions and a bit of sparkly particles in one corner; he concluded the latter represented fragments of the gold dust.

He climbed free of the car and shut the door.

He looked at the Nash’s tires and lower half of the car and saw they were mud splattered. He felt the engine. It was cold. And the car couldn’t have been driven during this latest rain because it had just started not five minutes ago. He peered under the car and saw the hardened and now dried mud caked there, too. That meant the Nash had been driven during the big storm, on the very night that Lucas Tuttle had been killed. He wondered where it had been driven to, and who had been driving it.

As far as I know, only one person has the keys. Jackie Tuttle.

But she hadn’t mentioned going anywhere that night. She was at her house waiting for her father. Ernestine had gone home at eleven, and Jackie had gone to bed. Or so she had said.

She had asked him to leave the keys in the glove box when he returned the car that day, and he had done so. Now, there was no law against driving your own car whenever you wanted, but still. Yet with the keys in the glove box, anyone could have driven the car.

Including Ernestine Crabtree.

He could fathom no connection between the parole officer and Lucas Tuttle. But there had seemed to be no connection between Ernestine and Jackie, either. And now that he knew there was, that meant the connection between Ernestine and Lucas Tuttle would probably run through Jackie.

He walked around the car and stopped at the passenger side. He opened the door and sat in the seat. He rummaged in the glove box but found nothing useful. When he closed it back up, he looked directly down and saw it near his shoe.

It was a bit of a yellow flower bud on the floorboard. He picked it up and looked at it more closely. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but it looked an awful lot like it could be from the flower beds at Marjorie Pittleman’s place. That would make sense because Jackie knew her and had visited the place.

But why is the flower fragment in the passenger seat? Was it from my shoe when I was over there with her?

But if that were the case, the bud wouldn’t have looked as fresh, he figured.

He drew a long breath and then stopped before he let it out. Then he drew two more breaths. He wasn’t doing his combat ritual exercise. He was taking in a scent.

Ever since his time as a scout in the war, Archer’s senses, particularly hearing and smelling, had been heightened. The bolt of a rifle sliding back or the collective breaths of a hundred men about to attack. Or the smell of cordite flung into the air from a brigade in arms marching. Or simply the scent of fear that oozed from anxious men at every deadly encounter.

He recognized the scent he was now inhaling. And it was not Jackie Tuttle’s.

It was the same one Ernestine had been wearing when he had gone to his first parole meeting.

He climbed out of the Nash and shut the door.

He couldn’t be certain that Ernestine had been in the car. She couldn’t be the only woman in town to wear that perfume. But if it had been her, what was she doing in the Nash? Then again, he had just found out that the two were great friends. So maybe they had made a trip in this car to the home of Lucas Tuttle on the night he was murdered.

Archer left the garage and set off for Eldorado Street. He viewed Jackie’s house from a distance, looking for any sign of her being there before heading up to the front door. He knocked and knocked and then called out. He went over to the window that she had been at before and rapped on the glass there. He peered inside a crack in the drapes.

He couldn’t see or hear anything.

Archer looked around to see if anyone was watching him. He went around back and used his knife to unlock the woman’s rear door. He called out when he got inside but heard nothing. He looked quickly through the house and found nothing. A search of Jackie’s closet showed that her clothes, or at least a great many of them, were still there. But he didn’t see a suitcase. Only he had never been in her closet before, and thus didn’t know if she even had one.

He glanced at the bed where they had lain together.

Shaw’s words — or warning, rather — came to his mind.

Women can have their way with you.

He did find the Nash’s car keys hanging on a peg next to the back door.

That was convenient, because he couldn’t exactly walk every place he needed to go.

As he was leaving by the back door, he pulled out his pack of cigarettes but saw that it was empty. He spotted the garbage can and lifted the lid. It was half full of rubbish. He tossed the empty pack in there and was about to put the lid back on when he saw the wadded-up paper next to an apple core.

He pulled the paper out and straightened it. On it were written a series of letters and numbers. He studied the paper a moment longer and put it in his pocket.