As she parked that auspicious day and got out of her car, Charlie looked up from under the hood of a Ford Explorer so dirty it looked as if it had unsuccessfully dodged a mud slide. He was pretty dirty himself, with an oily face and jeans. If someone had told her right then she would soon be head over heels in love with this guy she would have wanted to know the person's IQ. He wiped his nose on the back of his arm as she walked over. He had a wrench in one hand and a hamburger in the other. Yeah, he liked Pennzoil on his meat and bun. She wrinkled her nose before she spoke to him.
“Charlie?” she said as if maybe she had the wrong one.
“Yeah?” He had pretty blue eyes but they weren’t dancing with joy at the sight of her. His black hair was long and stringy and hung over his broad shoulders like strips of leather. He took a bite of his hamburger and chewed slowly, his handsome jaw moving with a casual rhythm unconnected to her haste.
Mary was about to be late for work, and Miss Soulte, her supervisor at the library, was always looking for an excuse to fire her. Mary thought the woman hated her because she thought Miss Mary was no longer a virgin, which was not true. Mary was as virgin as an unopened copy of Cosmopolitan. She had a rich imagination and poor prospects, although she did get asked out regularly enough, but by guys who had thrown spitballs at her in kindergarten. That was the trouble with growing up in a small town. The male population was largely made up of specimens she had seen develop from sperm and ovum. Not that she knew much about Charlie. He took another bite of his hamburger and waited for her to say something.
“I need a time up,” she said.
“Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”
She blushed, although she didn't think he was being funny. She gestured to her car. “It's speeding up and slowing down all the time, even when I don't do anything. I don't know what’s the matter with it.”
He studied her car. “It's old,” he said.
She frowned. “Should I go somewhere else?”
He shrugged. “If you're in a hurry.”
She glanced at her watch. “I am in a hurry. I have to get to the library.”
“I never heard of anyone who was in a hurry to get to the library.”
She sighed and put her hands on her hips. “I work there.”
He set his hamburger down and wiped his hands. He finally smiled—he had a nice smile. “I know where you work, Mary,” he said.
He offered to drive her to work and said her car wouldn't be ready until tomorrow. She said that was OK, a friend at the library could give her a ride home and a ride to school the next day. She didn't talk to him about money. She had heard that he was good at what he did and never overcharged. Riding to the library with him, she noticed he hardly looked over at her.
But that evening when she got home she was surprised to see her car parked out front, and even more surprised to find Charlie inside the house sitting with her mother eating cookies and drinking milk. He had cleaned himself up but still didn’t look like a milk drinker. As her mother excused herself, Mary sat at the kitchen table with him and noticed for the first time that Charlie had a powerful stare. He seemed more interested in her than he had that afternoon. She asked about the car and he shook his head.
“I tuned it up and changed the oil but it’s still ready to fall apart,” he said.
“It can't fall apart,” she said. “I need it until next September.”
“It's a car, not a person. You can't tell it what to do.”
“I don't know about that. It's my car. I can tell it what I want. How much do I owe you?”
He bit into a cookie. “Ten bucks.”
“No. Charge me what's fair.”
“Fifty bucks.”
She frowned. “That's a lot.”
He waved his hand. “You don't owe me anything, Mary. Accept it as a favor.”
She was afraid she'd have to repay his favor by going out with him. Not that that was such a horrible idea, at the moment. Still, she wanted to do what was right. She opened her purse.
“Can I give you thirty?” she asked. “It’s all I have right now.”
He looked at her. “You don’t owe me anything, I promise.”
It was amazing how easily he saw through her, she thought. His unkempt manner didn’t mean he was stupid, she had to remind herself. She put her purse aside.
“Thanks,” she said. “I really mean it. Have you been here long?”
“Ten minutes.”
“You drove my car over?” she asked.
“I didn’t walk it over.”
“Do you need a ride home?”
“I can walk,” he said.
“No. It’s cold outside. I'll give you a ride. Where do you live?”
“By the train track, off Strater.”
That was Maple City's worst section, its own personal ghetto. Mary winced at the thought of anyone living there, but then decided it was better than fighting sandstorms in a thatched house in Saharan Africa. Charlie continued to study her. Once again he seemed to read her mind.
“I don't need much,” he said.
Mary stood and forced a smile. For some reason his remark had embarrassed her. “I should take you home now,” she said. “I have to study for a few hours before I go to bed.”
He also stood. “I haven't studied since third grade.”
“I should have known you then. Third grade was the last time I took it easy.”
She gave him a ride across town, to a makeshift house at the end of a forlorn block. There was no front lawn, only a dirt space big enough to park a pickup truck and collect the trash. She had just pulled in his driveway when her car engine made a terrible grinding sound and then died. She thought she smelled something burning. Looking over at him with fire in her eyes, she yelled, “What did you do to my car?”
He shrugged, unmoved. “I told you.”
She tried to restart it, but failed. “But it was working fine before!”
“It was not fine before. It's an old car.”
“At least it ran! Now I can’t even start it!”
“You just threw a rod.”
“A rod? What does that mean?”
“It means your engine is wrecked.”
She pounded on the steering wheel. “My engine can't be wrecked! I need this car!”
“I doubt the car understands that.”
She pointed a finger at his calm expression. “You are responsible for this! You will pay for this!”
“I changed the spark plugs, points, oil, and reset the carburator. I didn't touch the engine.”
“Right. It’s just a coincidence my engine exploded in your driveway.”
“It is a coincidence.” He opened the door. “My truck's here. I'll give you a ride home.”
Frustrated, she got out, pulling her down jacket tight. Usually in December, Maple was below freezing at night. Yet there had been no snow this year, not yet. The overhead stars were hard points of light. She chased him as he strolled toward his truck.
“I can't leave my car here,” she said.
“It sure ain’t going anywhere tonight.”
“You're impossible, you know that?”
He grinned at her as he opened his truck door.
“And you’re a bitch, Mary, did you know that?”
She refused to open her side door. “I am not a bitch. No one calls me a bitch.”
“Get in and shut up. Remember, you have to study tonight.”
She opened the door of his creaky truck. She spoke with scorn.
“What are you doing tonight, drinking beer?” she asked.
Charlie just smiled and said nothing. God, how annoying he was.
In the morning her car was parked out in front of her house with a huge red ribbon tied around it. When she started it, she was amazed how soft it purred, like a new car. Only later did she learn Charlie had stayed up the whole night to rebuild her entire engine. He had practically given her a new car. When she called him to thank him, to pay him, he just laughed and t
old her to forget it. But she knew she was going to have trouble forgetting him. She asked him out and he said he'd be honored.
That was the beginning; that was the end.
CHAPTER THREE
Lieutenant Sharp and Lieutenant Riles decided to have a mini-conference in the hallway. After telling Mary to relax, they left the interrogation room and huddled next to a water cooler that doled out water as lousy as the coffee they made out of it later. Riles looked worried, but Sharp thought they were making progress.
“She's not being straight with us,” Riles complained.
“She's eighteen years old. We're cops. It's the middle of the night. I'd expect her to have her facts a little messed up.”
“No. A guy she dated is dead. Her boyfriend is missing. She's not stupid, she knows how serious this is.”
“I didn't say she was stupid,” Sharp said. “Just confused.”
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Riles said.
Sharp considered the something he couldn't quite find in Mary's eyes. “Maybe not,” he admitted. “Do you want to take over the questioning?”
“No. You’re doing a good job. But I would like a second opinion. Let's get Dick’s sister in here. But let’s talk to her together. I don't want to split up.”
“We’ll have to keep Mary waiting.”
“Let her wait,” Riles said.
Before going to fetch Hannah from the clutches of her unpleasant father, they stopped in to see Dr. Kohner and dead Dick. Normally the body would have been brought to the morgue for an autopsy but the place had burned down the previous month when Dr. Kohner had accidentally set some chemicals on fire with his lit pipe. Neither of the officers was happy to see that Dr. Kohner was smoking a pipe as he worked on sawing Dick's head open. Riles was older and had seen many autopsies but Sharp had to take a deep breath as Dr. Kohner literally opened up half of Dick’s skull. The boy's gray brain sagged onto the makeshift autopsy table and thick blood trickled down a stainless steel gully that had been set up to capture the overflow. There was a portable X-ray machine in one corner. Before picking up the saw, the coroner had taken plenty of pictures. Dr. Kohner looked up and grinned when he saw Sharp pale.
Dr. Kohner was a mixture of German and Japanese. He often joked he was a product of Germany's alliance with Japan during World War II, and it was true he must have been born sometime before the war. He wore a thin mustache as white as a line of sugar and his hair was closely cropped to reveal amazingly youthful skin. He stood firmly erect, and although he was always friendly, he clearly preferred the company of the dead. There was an unverified rumor that he had been a surgeon before he was forced into pathology for refusing to close a patient from whom he had just removed an appendix. The joke was that the patient had been his own father. It was probably all a lie, but operating on his own father would not have intimidated Dr. Kohner. He had once remarked that his only regret in life was that he wouldn’t be able to perform the autopsy on himself. Seemed he wanted to see what was really in there. He gestured to Sharp with his pipe.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “you are too sensitive a man for this kind of work. You should have been a baker.”
“Then you could have fed me pastries all day,” Riles agreed, patting his gut.
Sharp tried not to stare at Dick's brain. Yet the gruesome sight held his eyes. To think that all the boy's thoughts had originated from that three pounds of jelly. To think that just a few hours earlier blood had pulsed through the organ and an entire universe had been alive. But these thoughts, these observations, were painful for Sharp who preferred to believe that even the dead were somehow immortal. That was the trouble with police work. It was too real.
“What have you discovered?” Sharp asked quietly.
Dr. Kohner puffed on his pipe and gestured to a metal basin not far from the body. A bloody slug, mangled from impact, lay in the center of the container. With a gloved hand Dr. Kohner pointed to a small scale beside the basin.
“I weighed the bullet,” he said. “A .38, no question.”
Riles stepped to the basin but did not pick up the bullet. “We're never going to match that thing with the gun that fired it.”
“But Charlie’s father owns a .357, which can take .38s,” Sharp said. “That’s quite a coincidence.”
“Coincidence is not proof,” Dr. Kohner said.
“Not unless you have the right jury,” Riles agreed. He gestured to Dick. “At what distance was he shot?”
“Judging from the powder burns,” Dr. Kohner said, “not more than four feet. It could have even been less. But I doubt he pointed the gun at himself.” He added, “It doesn't mean he knew the killer.”
“Playing policeman, Doctor?” Sharp asked.
“He probably knew the killer,” Riles muttered thoughtfully. “He might have even trusted him. Or her.”
“Mary doesn’t strike me as a killer,” Sharp said quickly.
“But you don’t trust her,” Riles said.
“True,” Sharp said.
“I would like to meet this young woman,” Dr. Kohner said, his gloved hands dripping blood. Riles scowled at him a moment and then shook his head.
“You stick with your end, Doctor,” Riles said. “When did Dick die?”
“He was found outside I understand?” Dr. Kohner asked, consulting his notes.
“Lying face-up in the snow,” Sharp said.
“Within the last four hours,” Dr. Kohner said.
“You're sure?” Riles asked.
Dr. Kohner snorted softly as he picked up Dick's brain. The whole bloody mess had somehow swum out of the bony cavity. It seemed to shudder in the coroner's hands, as if his touch caused it pain. Dr. Kohner smoked as he stared down at it and both cops thought the smoke was probably upsetting any chance of detecting minute chemical compounds in Richard Spelling’s body. Not that there was any doubt about what had killed the boy.
“I'd have to ask the young man to be a hundred percent sure, lieutenant,” Dr. Kohner said. “But my estimate is, I believe, fairly accurate.”
They left Dr. Kohner and had another mini-conference.
“That guy gives me the creeps,” Sharp complained.
“Have you met a coroner who doesn’t?” Riles asked. “I mean, who would want to grow up and cut dead people open?”
“Who would want to grow up and be a cop? God, did you see how that brain wiggled when he held it?”
“The kid isn’t still alive if that’s what you’re thinking.” Riles paused. “We have to see if Hannah's story matches Mary's.”
“I have a feeling it will.”
“That's what I'm afraid of.”
“There is consistency in truth as well as in lies,” Sharp said.
Riles snorted. “I think you have a crush on her.”
“That's ridiculous. She's too young for me. Besides, she might be a killer.”
“She's protecting her boyfriend,” Riles said flatly.
“We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.” Sharp considered. “After we try to match up their stories, what do you want me to press Hannah about?”
“The relationships between all these characters. I can't believe Dick wasn't jealous of Charlie.”
“That's because you have the crush on Mary.”
Riles nodded. “She is a honey. But then, they all are until they shoot you in the head. Let’s go get Hannah, and try not to piss off Mr. Spelling.”
“That guy was born pissed off. I think the killer shot the wrong Spelling.”
“The night is not over,” Riles said.
They found Hannah alone with her empty Coke can. Mr. Spelling had gone to the bathroom. They tried to whisk her away before Daddy reappeared but were not fast enough. The guy seemed to come out of a wall. He was yelling at them before they could even reach for their guns. Not that they wanted to shoot him, but it was somehow a pleasant thought.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” he thundered.
&nbs
p; Mr. Spelling was a stump hit by lightning. Short and squat, he had the build of a weight-lifter gone soft and the ruddy complexion of too many after-dinner whiskeys. His head was massive; it seemed to grow out of his neck rather than sit on it. He was also intensely ugly, even though his offspring were fair and attractive. Sharp and Riles held their ground as he approached. Spelling was the big man in town but they were the big detectives and that was all that mattered at the moment. Yet they were not out to offend him. They both felt genuinely sorry for the guy—he wept real tears when he had viewed his son’s body. Sharp spoke diplomatically.
“We told you earlier that we had to question your daughter,” he said. “We know this is a difficult time for both of you, but memories fade fast. If we can talk to Hannah now, it would be best.”
“No,” Mr. Spelling said. “I've thought about it some more and she’s not to talk to you without a lawyer present.”
“Why not?” Sharp asked. “Your son has been murdered. Your daughter was one of the last people to see him alive. She may be able to help us find the murderer.”
“Daddy,” Hannah said, touching her father's arm. “I want to talk to them. Please?”
Mr. Spelling chewed on his pain and anger. “How long will you keep her?” he snapped.
“It shouldn’t be long,” Riles said.
Mr. Spelling considered. Then tears destroyed his impatience.
“Are you taking good care of my boy?” he asked, weeping.
Sharp spoke gently, trying not to think of Dick's wiggling brain in Dr. Kohner’s gloved hands. “Yes. He is in good hands.”
They led Hannah into a room across from where Mary sat waiting. But they did send in Deputy Howard to alert Mary that they would be a few minutes. They thought they were being optimistic, but in reality it took them only a few minutes to corroborate the main points in Mary’s story, at least as far as the timetable was concerned. However, the match in stories did not soothe their suspicions. The match was too exact. Sharp and Riles looked at each other and thought the same thing. The girls had gotten their stories straight before they had come into the station. Yet why would Hannah lie to hide her brother's murderer?