Jesse Shuttleworth had been suffocated.
Subsequent stories yielded further details. The landlady was interviewed at length and put together with a police sketch artist. The man known to police as Devlin Smythe had a shaggy head of dirty blond hair, a moustache, strong chin. He was described as stocky and stood an inch or two under six feet.
They reproduced the sketch in the paper. I tried to imagine him without the hair and the moustache. How he might look with a shaved head.
He was a chain-smoker. “You never saw him without a cigarette,” the landlady said.
He did odd jobs. He was, according to one man, a talented electrician. He had rewired a house for someone in the neighborhood. “He was good at it, and quick, too. He liked to get paid under the table.”
He possessed the skills, I thought, to bypass an electric meter.
Another man came forward to tell police Devlin Smythe had done some landscaping work for him. It was from this man that police learned Smythe had a tattoo.
It was on his right shoulder. Small, police said. Of a melted watch, in the style of Salvador Dali.
I put the clipping down, went into the kitchen, and ran myself a glass of water from the tap. In the cupboard I found a bottle of Tylenol, shook out two caplets, and downed them. Standing there in the kitchen, where so much horror had transpired only a few days earlier, it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t over yet.
SLEEP NEVER CAME TO ME that night. I kept running things through my mind, bits and pieces of conversation.
How Earl claimed never to have lived downtown, that he’d come from the East Coast, or the West, I was trying to remember. But there was that night, when I’d blundered into his house and discovered his growing operation, and I’d happened to mention that this sort of thing had never happened when we’d lived in the city, on Crandall.
Earl had said something along the lines of “You lived on Crandall? Nice area. There was that little fruit market down at the end of the street.”
The inconsistency hadn’t meant anything to me then. But it meant a lot now. Especially knowing that Carrie Shuttleworth used to take her daughter to that fruit market.
It didn’t have to mean anything, I told myself. There had to be at least a few guys in the world with tattoos of melted watches on their shoulders. Dali had pretty much made the melted watch an iconic symbol.
And the chain-smoking. Millions of people chain-smoked.
And the business about being skilled at electrical work. And the landscaping. That could all be coincidence, too.
You wouldn’t hang a guy based on evidence this flimsy.
So why couldn’t I sleep? Why did I have this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach?
“WHY DON’T WE DO SOMETHING on the barbecue tonight?” Sarah said. I was walking her out to her car.
“That sounds good,” I said. It was also good to have my wife speaking to me again, even if it was only about menus.
“When did you come to bed last night?” she asked.
“It was late, sometime after midnight.”
“You working on something new?”
“Sort of. I was looking through some old clippings I’d kept, on the Jesse Shuttleworth case.”
Sarah frowned, shook her head sadly. “With all we’ve been through, I can’t even think about something like that right now. Why were you looking at those?”
Across the street, Earl was throwing some gardening tools in the back of his pickup.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m just trying to find some sort of focus.”
Sarah got in the car, did up her seat belt. She powered down the window. “Why don’t you pick up some burgers, stuff like that? For around six? And then, after, we can talk about that other thing you mentioned last night.”
I nodded. I leaned down, kissed her through the open window, a little peck on her cheek, up close to her eye. She backed out and drove off, but didn’t wave.
Earl did, though. And started walking across the street. Earl never came across the street to initiate a conversation. I was usually the one who drifted over there.
“Hey, Zack,” he said.
“Earl,” I said, smiling.
“I see things are getting back to normal, little bit more every day.” He put a cigarette between his lips, lit up.
“For sure. Got to go shopping for another car. Insurance company’s going to give us what the Civic was worth, but that doesn’t amount to much. It was pretty old.”
Earl stood three feet away from me, gazed up and down the street.
“So,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
There was a slight breeze, and his smoke blew into my face.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No problem,” I said.
We watched two cars drive by, then a minivan. “Paul,” Earl said. “You decide to let him get that tattoo?”
I shook my head. “No. He’s too young.”
Earl nodded. “I think you’re right. That’s too young. Got to be at least old enough to get drunk. That’s how most people get their tattoos.”
We shared a laugh over that one.
“Well,” Earl said, “I got work to do.”
“Same here,” I said.
I turned back to the house and Earl walked back across the street to his. I glanced back once and saw that he was watching me over his shoulder.
Shit.
NOW I WAS RETHINKING EVERYTHING. Not just whether Earl was, in fact, Devlin Smythe. I’d pretty much made up my mind on that one. Now I was rethinking motives.
Why had Earl agreed to help me that night?
A man with a marijuana-growing operation in his basement had a lot to lose by getting mixed up in somebody else’s business, especially if that business was likely to involve the police.
Why hadn’t he turned down my request for help? Or at the very least, just given me his gun to use? Why come along?
I’d thought it was because, deep down, Earl had some sense of honor. I hadn’t turned him in, and he owed me one. But now I had a feeling there was more to it than that. That maybe Earl had acted out of self-interest. That helping me out of a jam that night had provided him some sort of an opportunity. And it seemed to me that he had made this decision around the time that Trixie and I told him about the murder of Stefanie Knight, and the roll of film that showed her in bed with Roger Carpington.
Why would Earl care about any of that? Who were these people to him?
Later, in the afternoon, I put in a call to Dominic Marchi. I was transferred a couple of times before we connected.
I introduced myself, said I was looking into the Jesse Shuttleworth case with the idea of doing a freelance article on it for
“I know that name,” Marchi said, referring to mine. “You’re the guy, was in the house with his wife, the crooked development thing, nearly got killed.”
“Yes.”
“Used to cover city hall a few years ago, too, am I right?” I admitted it. “I remember names,” he said. “Faces
