‘No,’ I said. ‘It certainly wasn’t.’ I reached out for it. ‘May I?’
‘Sure,’ he said, handing it over.
I ran my hands along it, from one end to the other. It was perfectly smooth, even at the thick end, which usually takes a beating from being tapped on home plate while the player waits for the pitch.
‘If I didn’t know better,’ I said, ‘I’d say this has never been used.’
Malcolm took it back and made a show of studying it carefully. ‘Not very much, that’s true.’ He laughed. ‘I guess that means Chandler isn’t hitting the ball quite as often as he’d like to be.’
‘Franny told the police she stole Chandler’s bat,’ I said.
‘Hmm?’ Malcolm said, pretending not to take in the significance of what I was saying.
‘It was Chandler’s bat she took. From where your son said he’d lost it. She wanted it to have his fingerprints on it.’
Malcolm feigned puzzlement. ‘I’m not following.’
‘Did you come home the morning I met you because you’d just bought a new baseball bat and wanted to tuck it into the garage? So if and when someone asked for it, you’d be able to produce it?’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Patently ridiculous.’
‘I’ll bet you were smart enough to pay for it in cash. But how many places in Promise Falls sell baseball bats? Maybe half a dozen? You think if someone were to go to all those places with your picture, and ask if anyone remembered you buying a baseball bat in the last week, they’d get lucky?’
Malcolm hesitated.
‘Buying a bat is not a crime,’ he said.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But it raises an interesting question. You’d have had to buy that bat before news got out that Mike Vaughn had been killed. You bought it to help Chandler before you could have reasonably known he needed the help.’
‘You’ve totally lost me,’ he said, holding the bat with one hand, tapping it in the palm of his other.
‘That’s probably why you wiped his real bat down too. To help him. To make sure none of his fingerprints were on it. And you accomplished that. None of Chandler’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon. But what’s funny is, that’s the thing that incriminates you.’
‘You should leave,’ he said.
‘Franny wanted his fingerprints on that bat. So after she struck Mike, she would have just left the bat there. That’s where I have a hard time figuring out the rest of it. Let’s say it was you who wiped the bat clean. That means you were at the scene. But if you were at the scene, you’d have witnessed Franny hitting Mike. So why wipe down the bat?’
‘I did no such thing,’ he said.
I took a close look at some of the books, the ones related to teaching. ‘Before you got into offering financial advice, you taught, didn’t you?’
‘What? In a community college, yes. Why the hell are you asking that?’
‘A lot of educational institutions in this state, as part of the background checks on their instructors, insist on having them fingerprinted. Have you ever been fingerprinted, Malcolm?’
His eyes were wide. He muttered something.
‘What was that?’
Quietly he said, ‘Possibly.’
‘Because while they didn’t find Chandler’s prints on the bat, and none for Franny, since she was at least smart enough to wear gloves, they did find one partial print that got missed when it was wiped down. They’re searching databases now to see if it shows up anywhere. What do you think the odds are that it’s yours?’
Malcolm was starting to breathe heavily. There were droplets of sweat forming on his brow.
Greta appeared in the doorway. ‘Did you want a coffee, Mal—’
‘Get out!’ he shouted.
Stunned, she backed away. He strode over to the door and slammed it shut.
I said calmly, ‘The only way I can figure it is you came onto the scene after Franny left. But how? How did you find Mike? How did you find him, and the bat? You want to tell me that?’
‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t I just leave things as they were?’
‘What happened, Malcolm?’
‘I just wanted to protect my son. I just wanted to save him. I did what any father would have done.’
He’d walked over behind his desk. The bat in his hands was shaking. He gripped it more tightly to try to make it stop.
‘How did you know he was there?’ I asked again. ‘How did you find Mike after Franny killed him?’
Malcolm turned and looked out the window. ‘I heard him.’
It took a second for that to sink in. ‘Franny didn’t kill him,’ I said.
Malcolm shook his head slowly.
‘She thought she had, and then she ran,’ I said.
‘When Chandler slipped out of the house, I heard him go. Greta was asleep. I thought, what the hell is he up to now? He and Mike humiliated that boy, then he writes that damn story, and now he was sneaking out. I wanted to stop him from getting himself into anything else. So I... I followed him. But by the time I got outside, he was out of sight, so I wandered up and down the streets, and down near Clampett Park. He was walking back from there, heading toward the house. He was just walking, he wasn’t doing anything wrong that I could see, so I slipped into the woods and let him go past. And that was when I heard moaning, someone crying for help.’
I waited.
‘I went into the woods and I found Mike. I had my phone with me and was using it like a flashlight. I could see his head was bleeding, really bad. He’d been hit more than once. He was making these gurgling sounds, like maybe he was close to dying.’
‘But not dead,’ I said.
Malcolm turned away from the window, back to me.
‘He looked up at me, I think he could make out who I was, and he just said, “Why?” And I panicked. I’d read the story that got Chandler in trouble. I’d just seen him in the area. I figured there was something... something wrong in my son’s head, that maybe he wrote that piece to warn us what he was going to do. I... I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I thought Chandler’s life would be over. That when Mike told the police what he had done to him...’
‘So you picked up the bat and finished him off,’ I said. ‘So he wouldn’t be able to tell the police Chandler did it.’
Malcolm turned and looked at me. ‘I wanted to save my son.’
‘Chandler didn’t need saving. But there was still a chance to save Michael.’
‘How could I... I didn’t know that.’
‘So you finished what Franny had started, wiped down the bat, and got out of there. And the next day you bought another bat to bolster the argument that the murder weapon wasn’t Chandler’s.’
‘What would you have done?’ he asked. ‘What would you do to save your son?’
It was too late for that for me.
Suddenly he swung the bat up over his head, both hands on the grip, and brought it crashing down onto the top of his desk. It was like a thunderclap. He took another swing, this time side to side, clearing the desk of a lamp and a clock and several other items that went crashing to the floor.
Then he dropped the bat, and collapsed into his leather office chair.
The door opened and Greta stood there, dumbstruck.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked. ‘What in God’s name has happened?’
I found my way out, wondering whether Barry Duckworth was going to get tired of hearing from me.