“So what you’re saying is that you’d probably kill my best friend, if you had a chance?”
“Yeah, probably,” Richard said, but he smiled, as though he was joking, which would be the first time she’d seen him making any kind of joke. “I mean, to tell the truth, I don’t give her a lot of thought.”
“Well, she doesn’t give you a lot of thought, either.”
“I’m sure.”
The fluorescent light above them flickered suddenly, the room darkening then springing back into light.
“Uncle Murray,” Joan said.
“Yeah. It does that, the lights.”
“Look, aren’t you scared I’m going to tell Madison what you said about her, that I’m going to go back to school and say how you want to kill people?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, you can do what you want. I can’t stop you.”
“She’d probably try to make your life miserable.”
“Honestly, my life is already miserable, and it’s not like we’ll be in school forever.”
“It’s three more years,” Joan said.
“Exactly. Not forever.”
There was another slight pause, and Joan said, “Well, I should probably go.”
“Okay,” Richard said, and he looked back down at his page. She studied him briefly. He had thick, black hair, and the hairline pointed down in the middle of his forehead. There was a word for that, but she couldn’t remember it. The truth was Richard was far less of a nerd than he was just two years ago, and even though his eyes were a little too close on either side of his nose, they were an intense shade of blue. In the right clothes he’d probably be borderline cute.
“Hey,” she said. “The best way to murder Duane would be to walk out to the end of that jetty on one of the days when the waves are crashing in, then just push him off the edge. He’d never be able to get back up onto the rocks, and you could just say that he slipped.”
Richard gently nodded his head, as though he was thinking about it. “Yeah,” he finally said. “All I’d have to do is say something like, I bet you can’t walk all the way to the end of the jetty in the rain. And then he’d have to do it. And then I could pretend to slip, but I’d actually push him in. Even if he lived he wouldn’t know I was trying to kill him. Thanks, Joan,” he said.
She held her palms out and shrugged. Richard was still thinking, nodding his head. “It’s a perfect plan,” he said.
Chapter 5
Kimball
At ten thirty on the Tuesday morning after I’d met with Joan I was sitting at a chain coffee shop on Colonial Road in downtown Dartford. I had a view, not a great one, of the Blackburn Properties office across the road. It comprised a single brick storefront between a florist and a women’s upscale clothing store. From where I sat I could make out Blackburn’s plate glass window, an array of property cards adhered to it from the inside. The front door, unfortunately, was obscured by both a red maple and, underneath it, a white SUV with a Tufts bumper sticker.
There hadn’t been too much activity at the Blackburn offices since I’d arrived at the coffee shop, and I was now drinking my second latte, and picking at a banana muffin. I had brought a small paperback edition of Selected Poems of W. H. Auden with me, thinking that nothing would make me blend into the background more than being a shabby guy in a coffee shop flipping through a slim volume of verse. But now that I was doing it, I realized how much I stood out among the other patrons around me, all of whom stared at open laptops, or conducted conversations through invisible headsets.
I opened my own laptop, logged onto the free Wi-Fi, and looked up W. H. Auden on Wikipedia. What I really wanted to do was go onto the Blackburn website again, and reread the employee profiles, but my computer screen was angled toward the inside of the shop, and I didn’t want any random employee picking up their breakfast seeing me scroll through their site. Instead I learned that Auden had been twenty-three years old when he’d published his first book of poems, a fact that would have depressed me at one point in my poetry-writing career, but these days I’d lowered my ambitions so that all I hoped to do was to actually finish a poem that wasn’t either complete doggerel or a limerick.
Keeping half an eye on the comings and goings across the street I opened up a Word document on my laptop, and wrote the line, “A putty sky was scuffed and grazed by every livid tree,” but couldn’t come up with anything to add to it. I hit the return key a number of times, then quickly wrote a limerick:
There once was a woman named Joan,
Convinced that her husband did roam.
So she hired a dick
To find out what his dick
Got up to when he wasn’t home.
It was not one of my better limericks—Joan didn’t rhyme with home or roam for one thing—but I thought it was probably better than my pretentious line about the putty sky.
The door to the coffee shop swung inward and a blond woman entered who looked a little like the profile picture of Pam O’Neil, the woman Joan had identified as having an affair with her husband. She went up to the counter and ordered a chai tea, her voice flat and nasal. She was wearing a pair of black trousers and a velvet blazer, an outfit that seemed to be the kind of ensemble an office manager of a real estate company might wear. While she waited for her tea she studied her phone, at one point smiling at something she’d just read, and I got a look at her teeth, not remotely white. In fact, for someone so young her teeth were abnormally stained, and that was what made me think she was absolutely the same woman from the Blackburn website with the photoshopped picture.
I must have been right because when she left the coffee shop she crossed the street and disappeared behind the maple and the white SUV. I saw the top of the real estate office’s door swing open. Thirty seconds later she came back out onto the sidewalk, held up what must have been her key fob, and pressed the lock button. A blue Toyota on my side of the street beeped, its lights flashing once. Underneath the limerick I wrote down her license number. Detective work. I even knew that at least some of the employees of Blackburn parked on the street, even though Joan had told me yesterday that there was a small parking lot behind the offices, and that her husband drove a silver BMW.
I wondered what to do next. There was no reason why I couldn’t sit in this coffee shop all day, except for the fact that it might be a huge waste of time, and a waste of Joan’s money. At least I had an eye on Pam O’Neil’s car so that if she went anywhere I could follow her. But what if Pam wasn’t the woman Richard Whalen was fooling around with? Or what if they were having an affair but only hooked up once every two weeks? Then it was going to be a long, caffeinated week for me. I ate some more of my muffin and considered my options. I could find a way to install spyware onto either Richard’s cell phone or Pam’s, or I could find a way to get to know Pam. Maybe she’d confide in me. Both of those options were risky. Maybe I’d get lucky and Pam and Richard would come meet for coffee at the next table over from me and loudly confess their love.
The coffee shop was starting to fill up again after a period of quiet, and I realized it was the lunch crowd, buying wrapped sandwiches to go. I stood and walked to the bathroom, my body stiff from spending all morning on a hard chair. When I returned to my table I glanced out the window and saw that the blond woman I believed to be Pam O’Neil was getting into her car. I quickly stowed my laptop back into my backpack, cleared my table, and was back outside as she was pulling away. My own car, a ten-year-old Taurus, was just half a block away but I had to wait for about four slow-moving vehicles to go by before I was able to pull out onto Colonial Road. I’d lost sight of the Toyota, but kept heading east toward Dartford, hoping I’d spot her if and when the road straightened out. Two of the cars in front of me turned left at a major intersection, and I was able to speed up a little, but after a mile I realized I’d lost her.