She told me about the appearance of the jogger in the video. How he’d run right past the parked car.
“So last night, I camped out there, thinking maybe this was a regular run this guy takes, and I’d get a chance to ask him whether he noticed that car or not.”
I felt my pulse quicken, which took my mind off the fact that I was freezing as soapy water clung to me. Maureen stepped into the bathroom, looked at me standing naked in the shower with a phone in my hand, gave me an up and down, and left without comment.
“And?” I said.
“He came by. I got out of my car and stopped him and got him to think back to the car and whether he remembered anything.”
“Ok-k-ay.”
“Something wrong?”
“Nothing. Just felt a chill, is all.”
“So I tried to jog his memory, no pun intended, and it kind of came back to him.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. He said the car was a four-door sedan. Hard to tell at night, but dark blue or maybe black. He was a little fuzzy on the make, but he thought North American. Like a Ford.”
“Plate number?” I knew, even as I asked it, that it was a long shot.
“No, he didn’t take any notice of the plate. At least, not the numbers. But he thought maybe it was out of state. He thought it might have been green.”
Green. Vermont plates were green, and Vermont was not very far away.
“Okay,” I said. “So we’ve got a bit to go on with the car.”
“He says he saw the guy,” Joyce Pilgrim said.
I gripped the phone a little tighter. “Tell me.”
“White, about six-three, ball cap-for the Yankees, he thinks-running shoes, dark blue Windbreaker, maybe a hundred and eighty to two hundred pounds.”
“He must have got a long look at him to get that kind of detail.”
“He says he only saw him for a second. And he didn’t see him near the car. Saw him farther away, near the building where Lorraine Plummer was killed. But he was figuring it must have been the guy whose car it was, since there wasn’t anyone else around.”
“This is amazing, Joyce. This is really terrific work.” I took one step out of the shower and reached for a towel. I rubbed it over my soapy hair, tried to blot myself where I could with one available hand. “You got a name for this witness?”
“Yeah, hang on, I wrote it down. Here’s the phone number. It’s-”
“I can’t take it down right now. I can call you back in a couple of minutes. What about the name?” I stepped out of the shower all the way, my feet on the furry white bath mat.
“Rooney,” she said.
“What?”
“Rooney. Victor Rooney.”
The towel slipped out of my hand.
I said nothing. I was trying to grasp the significance. The boyfriend of Olivia Fisher just happened to be running past Lorraine Plummer’s building at the time of her murder.
Maybe his description of the mystery man was so good, right down to the Yankees cap, because he wanted us to have someone else to look for.
Maybe someone he’d never seen at all.
“Thanks, Joyce,” I said. “I’ll be getting back to you.”
Maureen appeared again, looked at me standing there, stark naked, towel around my ankles, phone still to my ear.
“Coffee’s ready,” she said.
FORTY-FOUR
THERE had been a lot of screaming and yelling before things had quieted down the previous evening. Celeste had been yelling at Dwayne to explain how Cal had come to be tied up in the garage. Dwayne was shouting back that he had no idea. Cal had cried “Bullshit!” on that. Then Celeste turned her anger on her brother, shouting that he had very likely broken her husband’s leg when Cal went at him with the two-by-four.
And then Crystal had started screaming hysterically at no one in particular.
At that point, Cal moved to calm her. He tried to bring the girl into his arms, but she was reluctant at first, standing rigidly, arms tight to her body. He knelt down next to her, spoke softly to her, but not before telling Celeste and Dwayne to go into the house.
“Don’t think about hightailing it out of here,” Cal had warned his brother-in-law. “Because I’ll find you, and when I do, I’m gonna be mad.”
Dwayne had said nothing as he retreated from the garage. But as he and his wife headed back toward the house, they could be heard arguing again.
“I’m okay,” Cal had told Crystal. “I really am. I’ve got a bump on the head, but otherwise I’m fine.”
“There wouldn’t be anybody to look after me till my dad gets here,” she said, “if you were dead.”
“I’m not dead.” He’d put his hands on her upper arms, squeezed. “I’m sorry you had to see all that. You’ve been through enough.”
“I heard the phone.”
Cal smiled. “You saved me.”
“Celeste phoned you, but I heard it. Dwayne said he didn’t hear anything, but I was sure. He was lying.”
“Yes, he was lying.”
“Are you going to kill him?”
Cal had shaken his head. “I don’t think so.”
“But you might.”
He was reminded that Crystal was not good at detecting irony or sarcasm. “I will definitely not kill him.”
“Because I’m okay with it if you do.”
“Celeste would be very upset with me.” He’d given her shoulders another squeeze. “You were there for me. I don’t know what might have happened if you hadn’t found me.”
Crystal had moved into his arms, put hers around him. “I love you,” she’d said.
Other than Crystal, no one had had any sleep by the time the sun came up.
Dwayne had finally come clean on what was going on. His friend Harry at the printing operation-a guy he had, years ago, gone to high school with-was part of a gang that was ripping off electronics stores. They’d stolen from parked trucks and broken into several stores over the last eighteen months and had acquired a lot of product.
Harry said they were starting to worry the police might be onto them, and they needed a few places to hide the merchandise. Harry knew that Dwayne wasn’t making much money these days, what with the town canceling many of his paving contracts, so he approached him. “Hide this stuff for us,” he said, “and we’ll give you a thousand bucks.”
Dwayne wrestled with it for a while. He convinced himself he wasn’t really doing anything wrong. He hadn’t stolen the goods. He wasn’t in on any of that. He hadn’t planned it, he hadn’t driven the truck, and he hadn’t broken into any places. All he was doing now was hanging on to some stuff for a friend. He told himself he didn’t really know for sure where it had come from. Harry could have been making up a wild story just to sound more important.
Sure.
So he started hiding stuff for Harry. He’d been doing it for the better part of a month. Celeste wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved. At least she knew now that when her husband was gone at odd hours, he wasn’t having an affair.
Although, if you got caught sleeping with another woman, you weren’t likely to end up in jail.
When Cal guessed correctly that something was going on in the garage, Dwayne panicked. Once he’d knocked him out, he didn’t know what else to do but tie him up and hide him in the garage until he figured out his next step.
He was on the phone with Harry, trying to come up with a plan, when Crystal appeared, determined to find Cal.
“What was Harry’s plan?” Cal asked.
Dwayne was hesitant. “We hadn’t really come up with anything.”
“Was Harry’s plan to kill me?”
Dwayne, who was sitting across the kitchen table from Cal, holding an ice pack to his thigh, couldn’t look his brother-in-law in the eye. “There was no way I’d let that happen. No way.”
“But Harry put it out there.”
“And I shut it down.”
“Oh my God,” Celeste said, pacing the kitchen floor. “How can this be happening? How is it possible? What the hell were you thinking?”