Maybe, I thought as I drove through the streets of Valley Forest Estates, I’d made a terrible mistake. I’d dragged us out here out of fear and delivered us into mediocrity. And then I shook my head and decided that my initial instincts had been right-the recent corner store robbery downtown reinforced my decision. Just because the suburban architecture was bland didn’t mean our lives had to be. We still had our interests and our passions no matter where we lived. We didn’t have to give those up just because we no longer lived downtown.
The evidence that we were safer here than downtown was still overwhelming, and I had that thought in mind when our house came into view and I spotted the unmarked police car parked at the curb out front.
“DID YOU SEE ANYONE ELSE near the creek before you found Mr. Spender’s body?”
His name was Flint. Detective Flint. Short, squat, in an ill-fitting suit, wearing a hat like you’d expect to see on Lee Marvin back in the 1960s. He was sitting across from me at the kitchen table, and he’d turned down my offer of coffee. His hands were busy making notes in a small reporter’s pad.
“Uh, no, I didn’t see anyone,” I said.
“Not coming out of the woods as you were going in, headed for the creek?”
“No, I didn’t see anyone at all. You think he was down there with someone?”
“Well, there was someone else down there with him at some point,” Detective Flint said, pushing his hat back further on his head. “Mr. Spender didn’t bash his own head in.”
I stared at him for a moment. “So you’re thinking now that it wasn’t an accident?”
“Mr. Walker, we’ve never thought it was an accident. Mr. Spender was a victim of homicide.”
“I’d been thinking it was an accident,” I said. Okay, maybe I’d been
Detective Flint poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue. His cheek bubbled out like he was Kojak eating a Tootsie Pop. “We have some experience with this kind of thing,” he said.
“No, I wasn’t suggesting you didn’t, it’s just, this isn’t exactly downtown, you know? You don’t expect this sort of thing around here.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes we’re a bit behind, but we do our best to catch up,” Detective Flint said with sarcasm. “Mr. Spender was struck on the back of his skull with a blunt object with considerable force. There wasn’t even any water in his lungs. He was dead before he fell into the water.”
“I see.”
“So you didn’t see anyone at all.”
“No.”
“I understand from Officer Greslow that you knew the deceased.”
“Not personally. But I knew who he was. That he was a naturalist, environmentalist-type person.”
“You know anyone who might want to do Mr. Spender any harm?”
I half-laughed. “Of course not. Like I say, I hardly knew him, and…” And I thought back to that day when our paths had crossed at the Valley Forest Estates offices, and I’d had to hold Don Greenway back from lunging at him.
“What?”
“It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
“Well, I don’t want to go around accusing people of murder, I mean, that’s pretty serious.”
“Yes. It is.”
“Well, you must know that he didn’t have a very good relationship with the people at Valley Forest Estates. It was in the paper, letters and articles.”
“Yes, we were aware of that. Do you know anything about that beyond what’s been in the papers?”
I hesitated. Sure, Don Greenway was angry that day. But it’s one thing to get a little hot under the collar, and another thing altogether to whack a guy in the head so hard his brains leak out. And not only that, if I sent homicide cops after Greenway, would I ever get my leaky shower fixed?
“One day,” I said slowly, waving my hand in the air like it wasn’t that big a deal, “when I was over at the Valley Forest Estates offices, I saw Spender and Don Greenway get into quite an argument.”
“Greenway.”
“He’s the head of the company, I think. We bought this house from him. Our street’s even named after him.”
“What was this argument about?”
I told him. Flint made some notes in his book, flipped the cover over, and slipped it into his jacket.
“Do you think,” I said, hesitantly, “that you could not mention that I told you this, if you’re talking to Mr. Greenway? He’s, uh, supposed to fix some things around the house here, and he might not be so inclined to do it if he knew I was, you know, ratting him out.”
Flint’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. “Ratting him out,” he repeated.
“Yeah. Isn’t that what you call it? Or squealed? Is it squealed?”
“Ratting him out is good,” said Flint, who showed himself out.
I MIGHT NOT HAVE MY police terminology down pat, but I knew the words to describe how I felt: freaked out.
My friend Jeff might have found a dead guy, but I’d found a dead guy who’d been murdered. Surely this beat a guy who just got his head stuck in a storm drain and drowned. And yet I didn’t feel even the slightest bit full of myself. What I felt was scared.
By how long had I missed encountering Samuel Spender’s killer? Just because I’d seen him have an argument with Greenway didn’t mean that had anything to do with his death. What if Spender had been the victim of some nutbar who would have been just as happy to kill me if I’d come along a little earlier? And what if that nutbar was still roaming around the neighborhood, which, up to now, had always been a crime-free paradise?
I needed someone to talk to about this. I tried Sarah at work.
“Dan. City.”
I hung up. I was not talking to that asshole again. I walked to the front window, where Detective Flint was still sitting in the front seat of his cruiser, making some more notes before pulling away from the curb. Across the street, Earl’s truck caught my eye. He was home.
He’d want to know about this.
The pickup was backed up to the garage, which was open, and the door from the garage to the laundry room was propped open. Earl was either loading up the truck or taking things into the house. It made no sense to ring the front doorbell, so I entered the garage, mounted the two steps to the laundry room door, and called in, “Earl?”
No answer. Maybe he was lugging plants or something through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the backyard. Most of the houses in this neighborhood had the same basic floor plan; you could go blindfolded into one you’d never been in before and find your way around.
I took half a step into the laundry room, called his name again, and noticed that in the space where I would have expected to find a washer and dryer, there was nothing. How long had Earl lived here? I guessed he was the kind of guy who liked to hang out in laundromats.
A gust of warm air went past me into the garage. The house was hot. Humid, really. “Earl?”
I heard some banging about in the basement. He was making enough noise that he couldn’t hear me. I took a few more tentative steps into the house and could see moisture dripping down the insides of the windows. The basement door was only a couple of steps away, and I stood in its frame, feeling the warm humidity drifting up from there.
“Earl?” I shouted over the banging.
And then it stopped, abruptly. There was a moment’s silence, then Earl’s voice: “Who is it?” There was an edge to his voice.
I walked halfway down, to the landing where the stairs turned. “Earl, it’s okay, it’s Zack. I just had this detective over to my place, asking about that guy-”
“Don’t come down here!”
