Look Closer(115)

A car door closes nearby. I sit still at my desk and listen.

Footsteps coming up my walk. The porch light goes on, activated by the motion sensor.

The doorbell doesn’t ring. No knock on the door.

Who’s out there?

I go downstairs to the front door and open it. Standing there is Sergeant Jane Burke, expressionless, a bag slung over her shoulder.

I open the screen door. “Little late for a search warrant, isn’t it?”

“I’m not here to search your place,” she says, angling past me, walking through the foyer.

“I don’t believe I invited you in, Jane.”

“I’m not a vampire.”

“No, you’re a cop. Who doesn’t have the right to enter my house without consent or a warrant.”

She walks past the living room into my family room and plops down. “Simon, you can take your Fourth Amendment and shove it up your ass.”

I join her in the family room but don’t sit down. “Can I quote you on that?”

She takes a load off and reaches into the bag she’s carrying. “I brought you something,” she says.

Out of her bag she pulls a bottle of champagne and two plastic champagne flutes, tinted red, and places them on the coffee table.

The champagne is Laurent-Perrier, “ultra brut.” I never knew what that meant. Is that different than kinda, sorta brut? Is that one step up from really brut?

“What are we celebrating?” I ask.

She makes a face. “A bottle of that exact brand of champagne, with two cheap red plastic flutes just like those, were found at your father’s crime scene.”

“I don’t have the exact brand committed to memory,” I say, “but yes, I remember that he was hit over the head with—”

“Oh, Simon, Simon, Simon.” She shakes her head. “Tell me. What kind of a person keeps an empty bottle of champagne for years upon years, waiting for the right moment to exact revenge?”

“I don’t know, Jane—”

“A champagne bottle that your father and Lauren shared. Probably pissed you off but good. And the champagne flutes, too. You kept them for years, Simon, waiting for the right moment to go down to St. Louis to hit your father over the head with it before stabbing him.”

“The right time?” I ask. “The week of my final exams was that ‘right time’ I’d been waiting for?”

She wags a finger at me. “Had a nice talk with Lauren’s father, Al Lemoyne,” she says. “Lauren did come back, once, while she was living in Paris. For two weeks, to celebrate her parents’ thirty-fifth anniversary.”

“How nice,” I say.

“Yeah, how nice. Lauren’s parents were married May 18, 1975. So their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary was May 18, 2010.”

I open my hands. “Okay . . . ?”

She fixes a stare on me. “Lauren stayed that week and through Memorial Day in Chicago. Memorial Day was May 31, Simon. May 31, 2010. You know what that means.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re gonna make me say it?”

“I’m afraid so, Jane. I’m not following.”

“Oh, you’re following just fine. Your father was murdered on May 27, 2010. Lauren was in Chicago at the time of his murder.”

“Wow,” I say.

“Yeah, wow. Try to sound a little more surprised.”

“Hey, Jane, y’know what you should do?”

She cocks her head in mock curiosity. “What should I do, Simon?”

“You should check Lauren’s fingerprints—I mean, I assume you took exclusion prints of her when you found her dead.”

“We sure did, Simon. We sure did.”

“You should run those prints and see if they’re a match on that champagne bottle used to incapacitate my father at his murder scene.”

Jane gets off the couch. “Should I do that, Simon? Should I?”

“Yeah, you should,” I say. “I mean, if I’m capable of driving down to St. Louis and killing Ted, I don’t see why Lauren wouldn’t be just as capable. And she didn’t have final exams to worry about. Right?”

“Right, Simon. Exactly right. And, in fact, we did run her prints. And surprise, surprise, that champagne bottle has Lauren’s prints on it.”

“That’s—that’s great. Case closed! The St. Louis murder has been solved!”

She likes that, a bitter smile, shaking her head. “Everyone asked, why wait so long to kill his father? Why wait until his final exam week to drive down to St. Louis and kill his father? Turns out, you didn’t pick it because it was final exams week. You picked it because Lauren Lemoyne had come back to the States.”

I shrug. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, how would I know that Lauren was coming back to town?”

“Facebook, that’s how.” She pulls a piece of paper out of her pocket. A printout from a Facebook page—Lauren’s, I assume—well, actually, I know, because I remember reading it back then—from May 12, 2010:

So excited to return to Chicago next week to celebrate my parents’ 35th! I’ll be in through Memorial Day at the Drake!

I hand the sheet back to her, keep a blank face. Jane Burke is a very good detective. But if she’s here, it means she’s lost the battle.