“That’s very nice, Rick.”
“You press this little button here on the hood, and this chain cutter pops out of the front bumper. It used to have an antenna, but I guess that snapped off.”
That son of a bitch. Mint condition since I was seven years old, and now this.
Greenway waited a second to see whether Rick was done, concluded that he was, and said to Carpington, “Roger, why did this Walker guy come to see you?”
“Like I said, he wanted to know about Stefanie. What happened to her?”
“From what I understand,” Greenway said, “someone broke into her house and killed her. She’d been hit in the head.”
“Oh my God.”
“I know. It’s been a terrible blow for all of us. She was a very special lady. I still can’t believe it’s happened.” He said this all very evenly, as though he’d rehearsed it. Calmly, he asked, “It wasn’t you, was it, Roger? Did you have a bit of a tiff with Stefanie?”
He recoiled in horror. “What? Of course not! It’s not my style to go around hitting people in the head. Or leaving them dead in creeks, for that matter.” Carpington was looking at Rick when he said this. “You said that was going to look like an accident.”
Rick shrugged.
“You said it would look like he’d tripped and hit his head and drowned. But the police say he was murdered, that his head was bashed in before he hit the water. You’re an amateur, you know that?”
Rick said, “Maybe you need a bit more time in the trunk.”
Carpington thought about that. “No. That won’t be necessary. All I’m saying is, it was supposed to be an accident.”
“Water under the bridge, as they say,” said Greenway. “We have to deal with things as they are now, not as we wish they were. The police have been to see me about Mr. Spender, but I can assure you that they don’t think we have anything to do with this. We are businessmen. We don’t handle things that way.”
Carpington swung his head back and forth briefly, as though trying to make the madness go away. He stopped, glared at Greenway accusingly. “Is it standard business practice to take pictures of people when they’re making love?”
“I’m sorry, Roger, what’s that?”
The councilman pulled the folded print out of his inside jacket pocket and thrust it before the developer. Greenway opened the Caddy door so the dome light would come on and examined the picture. Rick leaned in for a look.
“I always said Stef had nice tits,” Rick said. “Do you have more of these?”
“Well, Roger, how did you happen to come into possession of this?” Greenway asked.
“Walker. He gave it to me. Said he’s got the negatives. How would he have these? Is he working for you? Did you have these taken? Walker said there was a camera in the ceiling.”
“That is interesting,” Greenway said, thinking. To Rick: “Does any of this make any sense to you?”
“I haven’t really had a chance to update you, Mr. Greenway. But you know how you sent me out earlier, to try to find Stefanie and see if she’d run off with the ledger-”
Ledger?
“-I went by her mom’s house, and she said this guy had been by looking for her, said he had something of hers, which kind of sounded like bullshit, but I also thought it sounded kind of suspicious, so I tracked this guy down through his e-mail address, and it turned out to be this asshole who wanted his shower fixed? Remember you sent me out there to have a look at it?”
Greenway’s head went up and down slowly. “The obnoxious man who came by the office, when Mr. Spender dropped by.”
Obnoxious? I was the one who was obnoxious?
“Yeah, same guy, I guess. So I go see him, and he hands me Stefanie’s purse.”
“What was he doing with Stefanie’s purse?”
Stretched out on the plywood floor, my head tucked low, I thought, Man, this is confusing.
“Said he’d found it, was trying to give it back. So I dumped it out, right, but there’s no ledger there. It’s too big to fit in it, I think. But you know what was in there?”
Greenway shook his head.
“Money. Two envelopes, stuffed with fifties. Tons of them. Looked like the stuff we make up on the photocopier sometimes, to pay off inspectors and stuff. But these bills, they didn’t look like they’d been weathered at all like we usually do them. It’s like she’d just made them.”
Greenway took this in. “She must have been doing a lot of photocopying. It’s like she was planning to make a run for it. Grab the ledger, print up some cash, head for the hills. Something spooked her.”
“She was talking to me yesterday,” Carpington offered, “about going away someplace. She was mentioning lots of different places, like she hadn’t decided where to go, but she was going to go someplace.”
“Did you notice anything else in the purse?” Greenway asked Rick.
He tried to think. “Now that you mention it, I think there was one of those little film things.”
“Stefanie was supposed to have brought that in to me a couple of days ago,” Greenway said. “Makes you wonder whether she was ever planning to do it.”
“So she was in on it,” Carpington said. “She let you take pictures of her with me.”
“Roger, Roger, Roger, what am I going to do with you? Yes, I had those pictures taken. Just a little extra insurance for our relationship. It wouldn’t be a good thing for you to suddenly get a conscience. That could be a very bad thing for all of us, but especially for you.”
Carpington was quiet.
“You see, Roger, you don’t work for the town of Oakwood. You don’t represent all those people in your ward. You work for me. You represent me. You only have one constituent, Roger. I’m your constituent. I pay taxes, and I want to be represented well. You’re my guy, and I want you to be doing your very best. You just might be mayor of Oakwood someday, once that blue-haired bitch decides to step down, and we might even have some ways of persuading her to do just that. We have things on you, Roger. Things that could send you away for a very long time. We go down, you go down, but you go down a lot harder. Our lawyers have bigger dicks than yours, Roger. If things ever came crashing down, and I don’t see any reason to think that they ever would, but if they did, you can be sure that the only person who’s ever going to go away is you.” Greenway paused. “If you were even lucky enough to make it to prison.”
Carpington seemed to understand. Rick smiled at him and patted the trunk of his car loudly.
“It’s very important to Mr. Benedetto that you keep doing the fine job you’ve been doing on the council. You’ve been speaking up for us at every opportunity, and we appreciate it. He and I were talking just the other day, and he said to me, ‘Do you think Roger would like an addition built on his house?’”
“An addition?”
“A deck maybe. Or a family room? Someplace to put in a home theater? You’ve got kids. I’m sure they like to watch a lot of movies.”
“It’s true,” Carpington said quietly. “They do like to watch movies. Especially those ones with that Adam Sandler guy.”
“I like him, too,” said Rick. “You know that one, where he’s the water boy?”
“Yeah?” said Carpington.
“What’s that one called?”
“I know, that’s the one I mean. Where he plays the water boy.”
“That’s what it’s called,” said Carpington. “It’s called
“Oh yeah, I think you’re right.”
Greenway cut in. “I wish we had time to continue this conversation all night, gentlemen. But we have other matters to attend to. Roger, I’ll talk to Mr. Benedetto about that tomorrow, see if we can’t get something going on those home improvements for you.”
“That would be very nice,” Carpington said. “I’m sorry if I came on a bit strong tonight. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately.”
