Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

key and the big engine roared into life, “that it was a very instructive exercise.”

“Is that what they’re calling it these days?”

She was quiet then all the way down Gleason until we turned left onto White Plains. Then she said, “Instructive.” Not as a question, but as a statement.

I looked at her along my eyes without moving my head.

She said, “I don’t know, Stone. How was it instructive?”

I watched a cluster of rain drops gather on the windshield, turning the world outside into a jumble of broken light and pictures. Then the wipers swept it away, so that the nocturnal street was clear again for a moment, until the drops started gathering once more.

“I’m guessing,” I said, “that while we were there, you were feeling sullen and grumpy, and what you were focusing on was your desire to go home and have a bubble bath, surrounded by evil smelling candles.”

She raised a hand and grinned. “Guilty.”

“I don’t blame you, but now ask yourself. If you had not been focusing on that, but on them, what would you have noticed?”

“OK, my bad. Let me think.” She sighed. “The old man in deep denial about his daughter and Lenny.”

“That old man is only ten or fifteen years older than me.”

“That’s what denial will do for you. What else? Samuel.” She shook her head. “Man, that guy has a lot of pent up…” She stopped. She drove in silence for a good two or three minutes. Finally she said, “OK, you made your point. His motive is at least as credible as Lenny’s and Chad’s. He really hated his sister.”

“Anything else?”

“Something else?” She thought for a bit. “Yeah,” she said after a while. “He wasn’t so much mad at the fact that she was having an affair with Lenny, as the fact that she did it under the family roof.”

I nodded. “His dad didn’t seem all that surprised. But he was outraged that they had done it in the house. Anything else?”

“Jeez, Batman! Uh… Well, yeah, the whole thing about how Celeste had been systematically destroying the family. She had the devil in her heart…”

I grunted. “That’s more of the same, Little Grasshopper. Anything else?”

She glanced at me. “Your weird, untimely question about whether Samuel worked alone? No, nothing else, but you obviously did.”

I laughed softly. She slowed and turned right onto Morris Park Avenue.

“Oh, I noticed lots and lots, but there was one thing in particular I had hoped you had spotted.”

“Go on, tell me.”

“What was in the back of the white pickup?”

She went very still. “Uh… A blue tarp…”

“Under the blue tarp.”

“I don’t know, Stone. Jesus. You noticed?”

“Ooooh, Ritoo Glasshopper, Sensei notice everything!” I laughed painfully, then said, “It was full of those toughened plastic sacks that builders use. There must have been fifteen or twenty of them, all full of sand.”

“Yeah? Is that important?”

“How heavy do you figure each of those sacks is?”

“I don’t know, a hundred, hundred and ten pounds?”

“Could you heft fifteen or twenty of them into the back of a pickup truck?”

“Probably not.”

“How about Lenny? You think he could? I know I’d find it hard work.”

She was quiet for a long while. Then she lifted both hands off the wheel in a gesture of exasperation. “Come on, Stone! OK, the guy is strong enough to heft a girl of ninety or a hundred pounds over a fence or a railway line and onto the riverbank. That is circumstantial at best! Lenny was having an affair with her! He concealed evidence! He ran when we went to get him! He shot at cops! He tried to run you down, for crying out loud! Come on, Stone! The guy is as guilty as a bishop in a whorehouse!”

I nodded silently a few times. “Lenny fired high and he swerved to miss me. He was reckless, he didn’t aim to kill me. But maybe you’re right. Maybe it was Lenny—I surely would like to know how he disposed of the body though, and why he did it so incompetently.” I watched her face for a bit, bathed in soft amber, concentrating on the road. After a bit I went on, “Lenny has been on the force twenty years. Fifteen in homicide. How many murders do you think he has dealt with in that time?”

She sighed, slowed and turned left into Haight Avenue. Then she pulled up in front of our house and killed the engine and the lights. The rain drummed softly on the roof.

I said, “He finds, suddenly, that in a fit of rage he has killed this girl, in the middle of the street. What does he do? He picks her up, carries her to his Jeep, and after all the homicides he has worked, instead of taking her to a remote, desolate place close to his home, like Ferry Hill or Castle Point, where the body will be carried out to the East River and probably never found again, he takes it to a highly populated area, where he has to carry it over difficult, wet, slippery objects and dump it in a river that will not carry it immediately out. What would make Lenny do something as stupid as that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come on,” I said. “You owe me a large whiskey and a curry.”

We clambered out into the drizzle, put our arms around each other and staggered up the steps to the front door.

FIFTEEN

Next morning brought with it more steady rain. The sky had changed from big, bellying, menacing watercolor clouds to a uniform ceiling of gunmetal gray. The wind had dropped and with it the squally lash of raindrops had gone, replaced by the slow, steady tap of heavy drizzle and the splash of overflowing guttering. We got up late, around ten, though