Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“Do you know who Lionel Grayson is?”

Harvey Coughlin looked blank. “No idea.”

“He’s the manager — or he was the manager — of the Constellation. He says you and he spoke a few weeks ago. When you were unhappy about a film you thought was inappropriate for your kids.”

His face drained of color. “Jesus, you’re here because of that ?”

“I wanted to ask you about that conversation. Mr. Grayson says you were very upset.”

“I–I mean, yeah, I was angry. But it wasn’t a big deal or anything. I mean—”

“Mr. Grayson thought it was a big enough deal to make a note of your license plate.”

“No way.”

“Why don’t you tell me your version of what happened?”

“I — you don’t seriously think I had something to do with what happened up there, do you?”

“Just tell me what happened.”

He thought back. “It was nothing. I just — Jesus, I just thought it was wrong to be showing a movie with a whole lot of the f-word after they’d run a kids’ movie. You know? Tiffany, my daughter? We have a hard time getting her to settle down. You think she’s going to fall asleep after the first movie, but she doesn’t, so she’s wide-awake, and everyone is saying ‘fuck’ this and ‘fuck’ that, so we had to leave and I wanted my money back and I looked for the manager on the way out and, you know, let him know I wasn’t happy.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t remember exactly.”

“Did you tell him you were going to take your complaint elsewhere? To the town?”

Harvey shrugged. “I might have.”

“Were you shouting at him?”

“I might have raised my voice a little. But shouting? I don’t know that I was shouting.”

“Did you follow it up? Did you make a complaint with anyone?”

He shrugged. “No. I was just blowing off steam. By the next morning I’d kinda forgotten all about it.”

“Do you lose your temper like that a lot?”

“I don’t think I lost my temper. No, I don’t do that.”

“You sell explosives here?” Duckworth asked.

“What?”

“Dynamite? Anything like that?”

“No, we don’t sell anything like that at all,” Harvey said. “What are you trying to say?”

“But you’d know how to procure it, I imagine. People always having to bring something down to put up something new.”

“Listen to me. I would never, ever, ever do anything like that,” Coughlin protested. Duckworth could see fear in the man’s eyes. “People were killed up there. You think I would kill people because I was upset about a movie ?”

“Somebody did it,” Duckworth said. “Maybe it was because their popcorn wasn’t buttered enough.”

He shouldn’t have said that. All he could think of now was buttered popcorn.

Next stop: the widow of Dr. Jack Sturgess.

Duckworth wasn’t looking forward to the interview. The woman had been through a lot. Not only had she lost her husband, but she’d had to endure the destruction of her husband’s reputation.

There was no doubt he’d murdered two people. There was the nursing home employee turned blackmailer, and the old lady who lived next door to him.

But had he killed Rosemary Gaynor, too? If it turned out he had, then he was Duckworth’s number one suspect in the Fisher murder, too. He’d already been turning this over in his head, however. Killers tended to repeat their methods. Sturgess had used lethal injection in one murder, a pillow in another.

Gaynor and Fisher had not died so easily.

There was a For Sale sign on the front lawn when he parked out front of the handsome two-story house. Ten seconds after he rang the bell, Tanya Sturgess opened the door. She was dressed in a pair of gray sweats, graying hair pulled back, several damp strands hanging over her eyes.

“Oh,” she said. “You.”

They had met, of course, during the investigation that had followed her husband’s death.

“Mrs. Sturgess,” he said. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”

“I’m sure you are. Well, you better get it out of your system because I’m getting out of here as soon as I can.”

“May I come in?”

“Why the hell not?”

She left the door open as she turned and went back into the house. Duckworth noticed the moving boxes everywhere. Framed pictures leaned up against boxes, square shadows on the walls where they’d once hung. Three rolled-up area rugs were in the living room.

“I’m not waiting for the house to be sold,” she said without his having to ask. “It can sit on the market empty. Let them stage it if they have to.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Texas,” she said. “Outside Houston. I have family there. I’m putting all this on a truck, sending it that way, putting it into storage until I find a place to live. I can’t get out of this goddamn town fast enough.”

Duckworth said nothing.

“They’ve crucified him,” Tanya Sturgess said. “They’ve fucking crucified him. Accused my husband of monstrous things when he’s not here to defend himself. Agnes Pickens was the one behind it all. Why else would she throw herself off the falls? The woman was consumed with guilt.”

Duckworth listened.

“You know what happened last Thursday? Believe me, if I didn’t ever have to leave this house, I wouldn’t, but I had to go to the store the other day. I’m going up and down the aisle and a woman sees me — I don’t even know who she was — and she looks me right in the eye and she says, ‘What was it like to be married to a man who steals a baby?’ What gives her the right to speak to me that way? What gives her the right?”

“People judge,” Duckworth said.

“Don’t they, though?”

He followed the woman into a ground-floor study, where she’d evidently been packing books. She took a handful off the shelf and dropped them into a box.

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To destroy whatever small shred of reputation Jack might have left?”

“I’m here following up on one thing,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s from three years ago.”

“Three years?”

“Three years ago, this month. The third anniversary is actually later this month. I wondered if your husband kept his old appointment books. Something that would tell me what he was doing at that time. That day, if possible.”

“Why on earth would you need to know that?”

“It’s part of the overall investigation,” he said.

She dropped some more books into the box. “Well, you’re two days too late.”

“What do you mean?”

She opened her arms wide to indicate the scope of the task before her. “I’m going through all this stuff and I’m not taking it all with me. I’m pitching as I pack. I didn’t see any reason to keep Jack’s old appointment books. They went out with the trash.”

Even if the doctor’s own calendar was gone, the hospital might have what he was looking for, Duckworth thought. If Sturgess had been the ER doctor on call, for example, on the night Olivia Fisher was murdered, it would have been hard for him to slip out to the park to kill someone.

“The only one who keeps stuff like that is me,” Tanya Sturgess said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I keep my own old date books.”

Duckworth nodded slowly. “Would you have one from three years ago?”

She studied him. “Why should I look? Why should I bother? Why should I help you?”

Duckworth could think of several reasons why helping him was in his interest, but not one that was in hers.

He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. If I were you, I wouldn’t help me at all. But it could be important.”

Tanya Sturgess dumped some books on a desk and said, “Follow me.”