Home Repair Is Homicide - Crawlspace Part 8

Bob got up. "All right, I think that's it for now," he said. "Roger, you'll say all this again for the record, right?"

Which made Jake wonder again, as the unhappy barkeeper nodded in reply: Roger was upset. But he wasn't stupid. So- "Why, Roger? Why tell us all this now, and ..."

He understood. "Incriminate myself? Not that it will." He turned sneeringly to Chip, then faced her again. "Please, that's the least of my problems."

A bitter chuckle escaped him. "I know Randy's alive, and what he's done. I'm the only one who has known, until now. So if anyone chases after him, he'll know who talked, won't he?"

His shoulders sagged. "So put me in jail, please. Maybe in there I'll be safe. Knowing Randy, though, knowing what I know about him now," he added bleakly, "I'm betting not." He put his face in his hands.

Chip gazed impa.s.sively at him. "Okay, Roger," he said. "Okay, thanks."

Chip walked out.

JAKE CAUGHT UP WITH HIM OUTSIDE. "YOU'D BETTER COME on up to the house with me. There's no sense your sitting around alone in a motel."

No sense telling him the real reason behind her invitation, either. Because maybe he was a nice guy, as he had been when he'd befriended Sam, years ago. But maybe not, and his performance just now had convinced her she'd better keep an eye on him.

Chip looked balky, but he followed her to the car and got in. "What next?" he asked.

"Call my husband." She gripped the wheel; no question about it, she needed Wade's calm confidence.

"It might take me a while to reach him where he is, though. Meanwhile, I'll have to"-What? She had no idea-"figure out what else to do, and do it," she finished.

She backed the car out. "What difference does it make how big the money package was?"

Chip glanced sideways at her. "Because Roger Dodd's a liar. That sob story he's giving us is an act. On top of which, if you'd ever handled a million bucks-"

She had, actually. Back in the city her duties had included some interesting tasks for people who believed cash should travel incognito. But she'd never measured it with a ruler.

"Not that I've ever seen that much in one place," Chip went on, "but Carolyn was writing about a ransom demand once, so I actually had to find out how high a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills is. Roger's measurements were right."

She did the math in her head, another holdover from her old money-manager days. Chip must have a bit of a head for numbers, too, she realized, to recall such a thing. "Yup," she confirmed. "And that's not the kind of trivia he'd be likely to have just hanging around in his memory, is it? So he could be telling the truth about the money part."

"Maybe. How did he get his hands on so much cash, though?" Chip wondered aloud. "Because I don't care how rich you are, you can't just walk into your local bank branch and ..."

This part she knew for sure. "He didn't. An estate like the Langs' has someone handling it, a personal banker. So a wealthy client doesn't have to stand in line with the riffraff."

It was cold in the car. She turned the heat on even though they weren't going far.

"All Roger had to do was make a call, say what he wanted and how he wanted it, and go pick it up or have it messengered. The banker might've had thoughts about how wise it was, and counseled Roger about it."

And good luck getting anywhere with that, she thought, rich and brilliant not being exactly synonymous, in her experience. "Also, there are reporting rules about withdrawing so much cash."

"To thwart drug dealers and terrorists, right?" Chip asked interestedly.

In the old days, he'd been interested in everything, too: surgical tools Sam's father had brought home, medical-text cross-sections of the human brain, baseball statistics.

Especially New York baseball statistics. She felt a burst of reminiscent affection for Chip.

"Uh-huh," she replied. "Bottom line, though, it's Roger's money. If the Lang trust's provision was that it be dissolved when the last family member died, and the proceeds delivered to a beneficiary, that's what happened."

It wasn't rare for a large family trust to provide for its own end. There were a few paperwork hoops, not particularly onerous if no one involved was fighting about anything, and once they'd been jumped through, it would all be fairly routine.

Roger would have had no real problem getting the cash, if he was insistent enough.

"What made Carolyn Rathbone believe Randy Dodd might not be dead in the first place?" she asked.

She turned onto Key Street, past the old red-brick Peavey Library with the arched leaded-gla.s.s windows and the antique cannon mounted out front, then continued uphill between rows of small white clapboard houses built close to the sidewalk, their hydrangeas and trellised clematis vines brown and dormant for the winter. Identical gray wisps curled from their chimneys, scenting the cold air with wood smoke.

"Before he ever started sending you any e-mails, I mean," she said. "And even afterwards ..."

"Why believe it was really him?" Chip nodded agreement with this question. "You're right, it could've been a crank. Online, anyone can say they're anyone, can't they? I mean, it's the whole principle of the chat room."

They pa.s.sed the old Smith mansion, a three-story, mansard-roofed monstrosity with rotting trim, a sagging roofline, and more holes than stones in its foundation.

No smoke there-the chimney had collapsed into the yard long ago. Last year's shriveled Christmas wreath hung from a doornail.

"But the idea was originally Carolyn's," Chip explained. "She said until proven otherwise, a lot of money and a missing body meant murder, no matter how much it might look like something else on the surface."

"I see." Someone had slapped sheets of cheap white vinyl siding onto the rot-raddled expanse of the Smith mansion's facade, apparently in an effort to make the whole place look less like a tearerdowner.

The attempt hadn't worked. "But how'd she even know-"

"-that much?" Chip turned from the window. "She subscribed to an electronic clipping service. She got news stories about all kinds of crimes from all over the world, and I screened them for her."

Which explained how a writer of true-crime bestsellers had cottoned on to events in a place so remote that it might as well have been on the moon, especially now in early winter. Overhead the clouds thickened again; a spatter of rain hit the winds.h.i.+eld and froze there in s.h.i.+ning globs.

"Once her last book was finally done, she started reading the clippings I'd picked out for her," he went on. "She chose the Dodd story, and I started doing research about it."

"But-" she began. Surely the pair of them hadn't come all the way to Eastport just on a hunch?

"And what I found," he continued, "was one tiny detail that didn't make sense: a motor vehicle department record of a moving violation in South Carolina, issued to a driver by the name of Randy Dodd."

She glanced at him. "A speeding ticket? You can do that? I didn't know that you could just look up somebody's ..."

Driving record. "You can't. But I can." He sighed heavily. "See, I've been a computer research geek for a long time."

Back in the city, pretty much the only other thing the then teenaged Chip Hahn had done besides hang out with Sam was spend time on the early online bulletin boards. Still ...

"Trust me, if you know who to ask and they think you might be able to help them in return sometime, you can get just about anything from the people who run databases," said Chip.

She thought about this. "It could have been some other-"

"Somebody else with the same name?" He seized the objection happily. Then-"But not with the same driver's license number"-he demolished it.

"But that means-" She was still trying to wrap her mind around the idea that Chip could get this stuff at all.

"Yup. I think Randy had his act together," Chip said. "He must have done a lot of planning. But then he made a mistake."

She looked questioningly at him.

"The ticket was dated just a day after he vanished," he explained. "I think maybe he had new papers stashed somewhere for a new ident.i.ty. And he was going to pick them up, but on the way ..."

"He was nabbed for speeding." She put it together. "While he still had only his real driver's license in his possession."

Chip nodded once more. "Which wouldn't have mattered. No one was looking for him then. But I was, later. I was trying to be really thorough before Carolyn and I put a whole lot of work into anything more. Otherwise, she would be unhappy about it. Very," he emphasized, "unhappy."

Jake slowed for a black cat das.h.i.+ng across the street.

"My heart nearly stopped when I actually found that ticket, though," Chip admitted as they crossed the intersection at the top of the hill.

Her own big old white house loomed ahead: white clapboards, green shutters, red chimneys, all wanting maintenance. And a pressing need for more insulation before the real winter arrived, she remembered again sinkingly.

"And then later hearing from someone who kept hinting at actually being him," Chip added, "that just topped it off. I was intrigued, and Carolyn was even more so."

"And that's why you came to Eastport. To meet this person, see if it really was him."

He nodded tiredly. It hit her that he must have been up all night. "I didn't want to. Finding the speeding ticket with his name, it didn't mean the guy writing to us was him, did it?"

No, of course it didn't.

"And anyway, why would he?" Chip said. "If he'd gone to all that trouble to be ... well, dead to the world, I guess you'd call it. That was going to be our working t.i.tle. But Carolyn said we had to come," he finished resignedly.

He stopped, seeming to hear how foolish the whole thing must sound. She turned into the driveway, pulled to a stop.

"You'd have to know Carolyn," he said finally. "If there was even a chance that it was true, it would make her next book another big success. And she wanted to check out the area, the background, too."

At this, the energy returned to his voice. "The place, the people. Mostly people-survivors, what they feel about it all."

He turned earnestly to her. "Carolyn always says it's not the crime that makes a book a big hit. It's the emotions."

Which both of you planned to exploit. Grief, guilt, revenge-the old saying "If it bleeds, it leads" was as true for books as it was for news coverage, Jake supposed.

Although maybe that wasn't fair. She'd never read a Carolyn Rathbone book. She decided to change the subject.

"Sam's dad pa.s.sed away a few years ago," she said, turning off the car. "I don't know if you'd heard."

He stared out the car's side window at the big old houses lining this part of Key Street, where s.h.i.+p captains and lumber barons had built their homes in the early 1800s. The architecture ranged from vast, elderly Queen Annes to narrow Carpenter Gothics with pointy roofs and elaborate gingerbread.

The plain four-square Federals, like Jake's house, were the oldest, built right after the War of 1812 when the British had decamped from their loyalty-oath-demanding occupation and people decided it might be safe to come back.

"No. Dr. Tiptree died? I'm sorry, I didn't know," Chip said. "And ... how's Sam?"

"He's okay. He's had a few bad times, in and out of alcohol rehab, mostly."

Ordinarily, she'd have hesitated about saying this. But Chip already knew Sam's life was no rose bed in the substance-abuse department.

Back when Chip started coming around, Sam's pals had been introducing Sam to the fun of aerosol-propellant huffing. Things had only gone downhill from there.

"The troubles didn't end when we moved here. For a while it was pretty grim. But it's better now," she added.

Fluffs of insulation lay on the lawn where they'd landed a few hours and a lifetime ago. She laid both hands in her lap.

"Why did you do it, Chip? Why were you such a good friend to Sam? I've always wanted to ask you."

His lips pursed. "I don't know. I just liked him, I guess. I'd always wanted a kid brother, and ..." His voice trailed off, perhaps at some painful memory. "And you know, at the time I wasn't exactly Mr. Popularity myself," he added wistfully.

"Right. Well, I guess a lot of us weren't at that age." They sat in silence a moment. Then it hit her again why he was here.

"How'd you get yourself into this?" she asked.

He gazed at the huge white house with its wide lawn and big garden areas, the pointed firs widely s.p.a.ced along the rear lot-line. It wasn't a mansion, but from the outside it could be mistaken for one.

"If I had it to do over again, believe me, I wouldn't. I told Carolyn it could be dangerous, but ..."

They got out and walked toward the house. He kept looking up at it puzzledly. "But like I said before, she talked me into it, as usual. And I let her."

Also as usual, his tone said. For all their crime-writing experience-but none as victims, apparently-the two of them had been as innocent as Hansel and Gretel, Jake realized.

Which was how they'd walked into a trap, and yet another reason why she meant to keep close tabs on Chip. Who knew what further foolish things he might do otherwise, and how they might make Sam's situation worse?

Seeming to be thinking the same, he made a face. "This is all my fault," he said ruefully.

"Don't be too hard on yourself." Then, alerted by something in his voice: "Chip, do you have feelings for this girl? I mean, more than-"

But to that he shook his head emphatically. "No, of course not. That is, we've worked together awhile, I think we know each other pretty well. But like I told you, Carolyn's ... difficult." He craned his neck back, gazing up at the high front gable again. "A stone b.i.t.c.h, actually. Wow, this place is big."

Straightening, he peered around at the quiet street with its other huge old houses set far apart, all the stately gray-trunked maples lined up in front of them.

A few white flakes drifted down. The peace and quiet here was as loud and unnerving as any Manhattan taxi horn, until you got used to it.

Maybe more so. "So, you just came up here and started living like this?" he asked wonderingly.

An iPod stuck out of his s.h.i.+rt pocket. Everything in Eastport was very different from the city he was used to, she realized. The s.p.a.ce, the pace ... She hadn't heard a car horn in months.

And when she had heard one, it had been getting leaned on by a tourist. An iPod wasn't a common sight around here, either-too expensive ... . Remembering all this, she made a mental note to take it easy on Chip Hahn, as much as she could.

"Why?" he asked. "Why'd you do it?"

He waved at the ma.s.sive antique structure with its peeling paint and sagging shutters, its acres of clapboard and trim. She couldn't see the crumbling red brickwork of the three chimneys from this angle, but the porch steps needed painting again, too.

"Believe it or not, I thought it would bring order to my life," she replied. And in many ways, it had. But at the moment she couldn't remember any of them. Sam, she thought.

"Come on," she told Chip, starting up the steps. "We'd best get you situated. You should have something to eat and drink and maybe get cleaned up a little if you want to, and then we'll go get your car."

He'd given up the idea of a rental cabin when he couldn't find Carolyn anywhere, he'd said, and parked at the Motel East instead, without checking in. His things were in the car, too.

It struck her as odd that a fellow like Chip, who'd seemed so capable and confident just now at the police station, had apparently been getting pushed around pretty thoroughly by his writing partner.