Eight Perfect Murders(39)
“No, no, no,” Marty quickly said. “Fuck them. I know you’d have nothing to do with that, but I had to ask.”
“Honestly, I wouldn’t have worried about it, but when I started to think it had something to do with Claire, I just couldn’t stop turning it over in my mind again and again.”
“I’ll keep looking into this guy, but nothing about Claire has come up. It won’t, either, Mal. I’m sure of it.”
“Thanks, Marty,” I said. “What you got is great. I owe you a drink.”
“Let’s do it sometime soon. I’ll do a little more snooping for you and deliver my report. How about Wednesday?”
“That works,” I said, and we made it official. Six o’clock at Jack Crow’s.
After I’d stopped talking on the phone, the bartender floated over to check on my beer. I asked for a pen, instead, then wrote down the name Nicholas Pruitt on a bar napkin. My body was buzzing with excitement. Nicholas Pruitt seemed so right, somehow. If Norman Chaney had killed Pruitt’s sister, then he’d have a definite motive. And he was an English professor, which meant he’d most likely be familiar with Strangers on a Train. I felt like I had found him. I had found Charlie.
I decided that when I got together for a drink with Marty I’d need to tell him to stop looking into Chaney. He was a retired police detective. Asking him to look into an unsolved crime was a little like dangling a piece of meat in front of a starving dog. I needed to make sure he stopped looking.
It wasn’t yet two o’clock, but I didn’t feel like sitting at the bar any longer. I went back outside and wandered up and down Rockland’s main street, brick buildings filled with shuttered gift shops, and a few open restaurants. I tightened the scarf around my neck and went and looked out toward the harbor, protected by a mile-long jetty that jutted out into the ocean. It had been so cold that chunks of milky ice floated in the seawater. Farther out the water sparkled in the sunlight. I was standing there, the breeze off the ocean cutting right through the layers of my clothing, when my phone buzzed again. This time it was a text from Gwen, saying that she was back at the hotel, ready to leave. I told her I’d be there in half an hour and began the walk back.
On the drive back to Boston, Gwen told me about her day spent wrangling with the local police department, who didn’t seem to consider the death of Elaine Johnson a priority. Still, she’d managed to get a team of forensic investigators to go over the house, in particular focusing on the handcuffs and the eight books in the bookcase downstairs.
I asked her if I’d get a chance to look at the books, maybe see where they’d come from.
“They bagged them as evidence, but I’ll have the photographs sent to you. Would you know if they came from Old Devils?”
“Maybe, if I looked at them. All the books that wind up on the shelf are given a price by me, or by one of my employees, in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. But some books never make the shelves; they get sold online directly, and unless I remember a specific copy of a specific book, then I’m not going to recognize them.”
“But if Charlie came into your store, and bought the books, or some of them, then . . .”
“It would mean he’s a customer.”
“Right,” Gwen said.
We had just crossed over from Maine into New Hampshire, and it had gotten dark. Gwen’s face was periodically illuminated by passing cars.
“I forgot to ask, were there any witnesses?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I mean, did you find a witness who saw someone, or someone’s car, outside of Elaine Johnson’s house around the time of the murder?”
“Oh, that. No. I questioned the neighbor across the street who reported that Elaine’s mail hadn’t been picked up, but she hadn’t seen anything. She’s old, and I doubt she could even see anyone on the street.”
“So, no luck there,” I said.
“I’m not surprised. If there’s one other connection between all these murders—besides your list—it’s that there have been no witnesses. No clues at all, really. No mistakes.”
“There must have been something.”
“There was a murder weapon left behind at the site of Jay Bradshaw’s homicide.”
“He was one of the A.B.C. murders?”
“Yes, he was beaten to death in his garage. In some ways his murder is a bit of an outlier. It was messy, for one; he fought back, and there was a lot of blood. His garage was full of tools, all of which could have been the murder weapon, but it turned out that the weapon that was used, at least initially, was a baseball bat.”
“How do they know it didn’t come from the garage, that it was brought there?”
“They don’t know, not for a fact, but there was no other sports equipment at Bradshaw’s house. And all the tools in his garage were carpentry tools. That’s what he was—a carpenter—although he’d been charged ten years earlier with attempted rape while putting up bookshelves for a divorced woman. Since then he’d done very little work. He kept a sign up in front of his house at all times, advertising ‘used tools for sale,’ and according to his only friend, he spent most of the day in his garage. He would have been easy to target. The baseball bat was the only piece of evidence found that seemed as though it didn’t belong in his garage.”