He gave her a long look. “Yes.”
“What kind of crime?” Jewel said. Sergeant Claymore stuck out his jaw again. “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” she added. “Constitutionally.”
He smiled, and was still smiling when he answered, “The crime of murder. Double murder.”
“And Gil Renard did it?”
“I’m a long way from knowing that.”
“But you suspect him?”
“Suspect is too strong a word. It’s just that…” He paused. Whatever thought he was pursuing went unspoken.
“That what?” Jewel said.
He sighed. “The victims were stabbed, for one thing.”
“And Gil Renard sells knives.”
“Did, until he was fired. But it’s much more than selling knives. His father was a well-known blade maker back home, a real artist. Gil’s been around knives his whole life.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And what else have you got?”
Sergeant Claymore’s face colored slightly. “You seem to be asking all the questions.”
“Let’s not stop,” she said. “We’re getting along so well.” His face colored some more; then he shook off his annoyance, almost visibly, and pressed on, like a tourist coping with a foreign culture. “What else I’ve got is something a little weird. One of the victims was buried in Gil’s father’s grave. Right on top of the coffin.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I. He was a local guy, a thief and brawler named Len Boucicaut.”
“Like the Crusader.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Who was the other victim?”
“His girlfriend. A prostitute, just out of jail.”
“Did Gil Renard know them?”
“I couldn’t say about the woman, but he knew Boucicaut. Long ago, that was. Gil left town and never came back.” He hesitated. “As far as I know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Probably nothing. I stopped Boucicaut for speeding a while back. Not unusual. He had a passenger. Didn’t make much of an impression at the time, but when Boucicaut’s body turned up where it did, I got to thinking.”
“That the passenger was Gil Renard.”
“That it might have been,” Claymore corrected. “Until I can establish that Gil did come back, that they’d been together, it’s just a stack of guesses.”
Jewel nodded. A fly buzzed around Claymore’s head and darted off. “Did you recover the knife?” she said.
“That’s another problem,” Claymore replied. “Not just that we don’t have the knife, but it looks like two different weapons were used, and one might not have been a knife at all-the wound’s too deep.”
Claymore sat on the bed, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. A scrapper, but tired. So what? So was she. So was everyone she knew, except the ballplayers: they got all the sleep they wanted, like babies.
“What about motive?” Jewel said. “Were they enemies?”
“As kids? Far from it. In fact-”
“Boucicaut was on the team too.”
“How did you know that?”
I know boys and their games, Jewel thought, but she didn’t say it. “Were you the star, Sergeant?”
“They were the stars, the two of them. Gil was the pitcher, Boucicaut was the catcher. They took us all the way to the regionals.”
“That means you won the state.”
“We won the state.” Claymore looked inward for a moment, and seemed about to say something more, but did not.
The fly returned, buzzed Jewel. She swatted at it, missed. It was hot in Gil Renard’s old room, and airless. No motive, no connection; she was getting nowhere. “This man you saw in Boucicaut’s car-”
“Truck,” he said.
Connection. “A red pickup?”
“That’s right. How-”
“Was he a big man?”
“Yes.”
“Round face? Long black hair? Black beard?”
Sergeant Claymore got off the bed.
“Is that Gil?” she asked.
“Not Gil,” he told her. “Boucicaut. Where did you see him?”
Jewel went to the window, pointed down into the alley. “Right there.” She told him what had happened. Even as she spoke, he was inching toward the door. “Where are you going?” she said.
“No more guessing. I’ll put him on the computer right away.” Almost across the threshold, he turned, came back, shook her hand. “Thanks,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed, just the slightest bit this time. “The story you’re working on,” he said, “any murder in it?”
“Oh, no,” Jewel said. “Nothing like that.”
Sergeant Claymore left. Jewel stayed for a few minutes, opened every drawer, peered under the bed, saw nothing. She left Gil Renard’s room, went back down the corridor. At the base of the stairs leading to the top floor, she heard something from above. It sounded like a woman crying.
Jewel felt the personality of the house around her. She got out as fast as she could.
24
On the flight west, Jewel Stern, in business class, telephoned the Times Magazine editor in New York and got a one-week extension on the Rayburn piece. After that, she took out her laptop and her notes and tried to find a beginning.
Why wouldn’t Bobby Rayburn, one of the brightest stars in the major leagues over the past decade, she wrote, want his only son to be a ballplayer too? She read the sentence over and hit DELETE.
In a world where 35 is geriatric, middle-aged doubt comes early. Jewel deleted that too.
The hands are what you notice first. DELETE.
Sometimes even All-American boys get the blues. Jewel read that over a few times and went on to the next sentence. If the phrase “All-American boy” still has any meaning at this late date, it surely applies to Bobby Rayburn, probably the best center fielder in baseball for the past decade.
The hands are what you…
Jewel worked straight through, eating nothing, drinking nothing, not letting her eye be caught by the man in silver-filigree cowboy boots across the aisle, who didn’t stop trying to catch it until the movie began. She had fifteen-hundred words by shutoff time for all electronic devices.
At the back of economy, Gil Renard slept the whole way.
Gil took a taxi to the stadium, bought a bleacher ticket, was in his seat in the first row behind the center-field fence with two beers and a box of popcorn in time for the first pitch; knapsack at his feet, thrower strapped to his leg. He couldn’t tell what the first pitch was from that distance; all he could see was Primo slapping at it, and the ball looping over the second baseman and hopping over the grass. Under the lights, the ball looked too white, white as rabbit fur, and the grass too green; as though someone had messed with the tint control. Maybe it was jet lag. Gil rubbed his eyes, took a big swallow of beer, gazed again at the field. Nothing had changed.
