“Tell the funeral home. Have them call her,” I suggested.
“This is all so hard to believe. Cal, thank you for everything you’ve done.”
“It hasn’t been much,” I said, getting into my car. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. In the meantime, I’m heading home.”
“Okay, thanks. Good-bye, Cal.”
I keyed the engine and pulled away from the Chalmers house, thinking about Miriam. She’d looked more upset about the discovery of the playroom, and those missing discs, than she had about her husband’s death.
But it wasn’t my headache anymore.
There was a parking space set aside for me in the lot behind my building, but there was no access to my apartment from there. That meant I had to walk down a narrow alley that delivered me to the main street, where I’d find the ground-level door to my second-floor apartment right next to Naman’s Books.
It was after ten, and the light was on in the store.
The jangling bell over the door announced my arrival. Naman Safar was perched on a stool behind the cash register, his nose in an old Bantam paperback edition of The Blue Hammer, by Ross Macdonald, while some opera I’d never heard of played in the background. He glanced up at me.
“Hey, Cal.” He tucked a strip of red ribbon between the pages, closed the book, and set it next to the cash register. “You’re up late.”
“Me? What are you doing open this late?”
Naman looked at his watch. “I guess it is kind of dumb. No one’s out shopping for books at this hour. But what am I going to do at home? Sit around?”
“Naman, turn off the lights. Go home.”
He nodded obediently. “Okay, okay.”
He slid off the stool, planting his feet on the floor. He turned off the CD player and then popped open the cash register. “Big day,” he said. “Twenty-nine dollars.”
“Well,” I said.
“E-books aren’t just killing new-book stores. They’re killing me, too. I hate those things, those little things with the screens. I hate them.”
A book resting atop the pile closest to me caught my eye. Another Roth, in paperback. The Human Stain. I picked it up. “Am I too late? Have you closed the till?”
“Take it.”
“No.” I glanced at the price Naman had lightly penciled on the inside cover. Five bucks. “Here,” I said, digging into my wallet. I had a five. “Take this.”
He looked at the bill. “Okay.”
As he was taking it from my fingers, we both heard tires squealing up the street somewhere. The gunning of an engine.
“I haven’t read that one, so I can’t tell you if it’s one of his good ones,” Naman said.
“Someone recommended it to me this morning,” I said. “The woman who runs the Laundromat up the street.”
The sound of that racing engine was getting closer. Then the sudden screeching of brakes.
We both looked out the store’s front window at the same moment. A black pickup truck had appeared, passenger side facing us. The window was down, and a young white man, probably in his early twenties, was shouting.
He yelled, loud enough for us to hear through the glass, “Fucking terrorist!”
I saw an arm come up. There was something in the man’s hand. A bottle, maybe, and what looked like flame.
“Get down!” I said to Naman.
As he threw himself to the floor, the Molotov cocktail sailed through the air, hit the window of the bookshop. The glass and the bottle shattered simultaneously, and the burning rag soaked in, presumably, gasoline landed on a pile of books.
Flames erupted instantly.
The truck’s back tires squealed. The man who’d tossed the bottle let out a large whoop of victory as the vehicle sped off.
“Naman!” I shouted. “We have to get out!”
“My books!” he cried, stumbling to his feet. “My books!”
“Have you got an extinguisher?”
He looked at me with horror and panic. “No!”
“Get out!” I said again.
I dropped my copy of The Human Stain and pushed Naman toward the door, followed him out onto the sidewalk. I dug into my pocket for my phone to get the fire department.
I hated talk radio.
Forty-two
“I keep hoping somehow I skipped over her,” Clive Duncomb said to Peter Blackmore. Duncomb had the remote in his hand, his thumb on the fast-forward button, bodies gyrating and tangling and untangling at high speed on the TV screen.
“You’re going so fast, it’s starting to make me sick to my stomach,” Peter said. “I can’t look at it anymore.”
“She’s not on that one,” Duncomb said, ejecting the disc. He picked up another one, glanced at what had been scribbled on it in marker. Georgina-Miriam-Liz flying high. “I don’t think it could be this one. This is one where the girls had the stewardess costumes. That was after the Fisher girl died.”
“You better check it just the same,” Peter said. “I can’t think about this. Why did that man answer Georgina’s phone?”
“One crisis at a time,” Duncomb said. But then his own phone rang. He looked at it, said to Peter, “It’s Liz.”
He put the phone to his ear. “Yeah.”
“You find her yet?”
“Not yet.”
“We may have another problem,” Liz said.
“What?”
“Lucy called here.”
“Lucy?”
“Lucy Brighton, Adam’s—”
“I know who she is. What’d she want?”
“She said she knows you have it. That she wants it back.”
“It?”
“She says she doesn’t want any trouble if you return it.”
“That private detective,” Duncomb said. “He must have told her he suspects I’ve got the discs. What did you tell her?”
“I told her you weren’t here. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. I’ll try to sort her out later. Set up a private meeting, show her the discs, destroy them in front of her, maybe. I don’t know. I can’t deal with this now.”
He ended the call.
The doorbell rang.
“Turn that off,” Duncomb said to Blackmore. “Put those discs away.” Once there were no longer naked bodies on the television, the Thackeray security chief opened the door.
“Well, whaddya know, it’s Detective Duckworth. Won’t you come on in?”
As Duckworth stepped into the living room, Blackmore was gathering together the discs and putting them into a cabinet under the television. He approached and extended a hand. “Hello. I–I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Peter Blackmore.”
Blackmore looked nervously at Duncomb, as though seeking permission to say anything more. Duncomb stepped in. “The detective here’s been out to the campus a couple of times.” He grinned. “Thinks we don’t know how to do our job.”
Blackmore said, “I don’t work with Clive. I’m a professor.” A pause, then, “English literature.”
“So it’s Professor Blackmore?” Duckworth asked.
“Yes.” He looked at the security chief. “We should tell him.”
“Peter, please.”
“About Georgina’s phone. About that man who answered. He—”
“Peter,” Clive Duncomb said, struggling to remain patient, “let’s see why the detective has decided to drop by.”
Duckworth said, “Professor, I understand you were talking to someone else from the Promise Falls police today.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Detective Carlson had interviewed Mr. Duncomb here, and you followed him out afterwards. About your wife. That she was missing.”
“I didn’t file an official report,” the professor said, glancing at Duncomb. “I just had some basic questions for him.”