Chapter 36
Alex talked me out of breaking and entering at the old apartment. Instead, he convinced me to call Detective Aycock and ask him to meet us there. When Aycock asked me why, I said I had new information about Joey’s death. I thought.
“You think,” he repeated in a dull voice. But he wasn’t fooling me. He’d show.
When Alex and I arrived, Aycock had already fetched Cam from the manager’s apartment.
“When do I get the go-ahead to get this place emptied?” Cam was complaining loudly up at the apartment door as Alex and I climbed the stairs to the second floor. “You’ve already searched it up and down! I need to get it rented ASAP to get back some of the money those last two—”
When he spotted me, his mouth snapped shut and he folded his skinny arms over his gut.
Aycock turned and clocked us. “He’s right,” Aycock said to us. “The crime scene team has been all over the building, and there’s no blood evidence, no sign your friend got into any trouble here. Some … quality-of-life violations,” he added as Cam opened the door.
Inside, Cam planted his ratty slippers in the mossy carpet of our living room as though I might try to knock him over for the turntable. My turntable. I brushed past him, noting that things looked a little off, like a big hand had turned the snow globe of our place over and shook it.
Behind me, I heard Alex say, “There might be a ring missing.”
“What kind of ring?” Cam said. “Worth anything?”
He’d be turning the place over as soon as we left.
“We never found anything of value,” Aycock said. “Uh, monetary value, I mean. No jewelry at either scene. Could the victim have had the ring on him when he was assaulted? What’s this new information Miss Devine claims to have?”
“I remembered that Joey stopped by the pub Wednesday,” Alex said.
I stopped. Oh, Alex.
Everything Alex said sounded like he’d just had a new idea. This was a bad one.
“Oh, did he now?” Aycock said, and I didn’t have to look back to know the detective’s notebook was either actually or metaphorically out. “You remembered that, did you?” Aycock said. “All of a sudden? What time was this?”
I rushed into the bedroom, and couldn’t hear the rest. Standing in that room again, my breath caught. Someone had pulled the sheets from our bed and flipped the mattress up against the wall. The dresser drawers were all hanging open.
It looked even more like a crime scene than it had the last time I was here.
The cold white of winter still glared through the window, though. Bright. So bright.
The discount bin blue curtains that had hung there, that had been pulled down and puddled up on the floor on my last visit, were gone.
I turned and raced back through to the kitchen, where Alex was explaining that he had discouraged Joey from seeing me.
“And how did you discourage him?” Aycock said.
“The curtains!” I yelled, bursting back into the room before Alex could dig himself any deeper.
Cam jumped.
“Joey was wrapped in our bedroom curtains,” I said. “I knew they were our curtains as soon as I—in the alley.” I couldn’t quite make out what it meant and my head spun, trying to sort it out.
Aycock turned to face me.
I took a breath and started over. “I saw those curtains here, on our bedroom floor,” I said. “When I was here last. The last time I was allowed in. But Joey was wrapped up in them, in the alley. Does that mean…?”
Aycock frowned. “You were here when?”
“Wednesday. That afternoon, before my show. Cam let me in to get a few clothes, just a few things I could … Joey must have…”
I looked at my feet for a second, then raised my eyes to Cam. “What have you done?”
Cam held up his hands. “Whoa, now,” he said. But underneath a few days of patchy facial hair growth, he was pale. “I didn’t hurt that kid.”
“Then how did he get to be dead, wrapped up in our bedroom curtains, and halfway across town?”
Cam blinked at Aycock. “I didn’t hurt that kid. I swear to it.”
Aycock’s stance shifted. He was somehow taking up more space than he had before. “I believe you told us you hadn’t seen Mr. Hartnett in two weeks,” he said.
“Yeah,” Cam said. “I mean, no. Yes, I mean … Okay, I saw him. Wednesday. He banged on my door a few hours after this one had already come through. Banging and carrying on about the keys not working. I explained to him how not paying the rent was a surefire way to get the locks changed.”
“And then what?” I demanded.
“Miss Devine, I’ll handle this,” Aycock said. He turned his attention to Cam, and I could see him wrestling with how to phrase what I’d asked differently. Professional pride. Finally, he gave in. “And then what?”
“He left,” Cam said, swallowing hard around it.
His hands didn’t seem to know where to be, and he kept thumbing his nose.
“He said he had my money, but not in his pockets, of course,” Cam said.
“They never have it in their pockets. He said it was inside the apartment, but I wasn’t falling for that. ”
Because everything inside was Cam’s already. I kept my mouth shut this time. Aycock said nothing, so we all watched Cam fidget and sweat.
“I didn’t do it,” Cam said.
Aycock shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The floorboard beneath him gave the tiniest creak. Oh, he was good.
“Okay,” Cam said. “Okay. I found him like that, okay? Wednesday, he was here, but, then later, he turned up dead. I didn’t know what to do. I … I panicked.”
I pulled out the nearest chair from our kitchen table and sank into it.
“Go through it,” Aycock said. “Start from the moment you found Mr. Hartnett dead.”
“He was in the back,” Cam said miserably. “Tucked up, hidden in, well, I’ve got some stuff needs hauling away. The city won’t do it—”
“Keep to the necessary, please,” Aycock said. “Did you check his vital signs? Pulse?”
“He was good and gone, no helping him. I checked, okay? But I could tell. Blood on him, like he’d got knocked around or hit in the street. And the color of his skin…”
I knew it well.
“It was dark out,” Cam continued. “No one around. I … I can’t have that sort of thing. The tenants freak out at the least little thing.”
“Like the landlord murdering someone?” I cried.
Cam’s eyes were wild. “I swear, I swear—”
“Okay,” Aycock broke in. “So you did what, then?”
“The curtains,” Cam said, licking his lips. “I’d yanked ’em down already, see? So I could look around the place. I came up and got ’em, wrapped him up. Gentle, you know? And then I … took him where I knew she’d gone to live. He’d be found fast there, right?”
He searched my face, then Aycock’s, Alex’s. No one gave him any kind of high-five.
“So he’d be seen to,” Cam said. “Properly.” Now when he looked down at me, he was a benevolent figure gazing down from a stained-glass church window. “I have utmost respect for the dead.”
“Took him,” I said. I had a bad taste at the back of my throat. “Took him to the pub how?”
Aycock shot me another look, then turned again to Cam. “Well? How did you transport the body?”
Cam blinked at the bad-green carpet. “I-I didn’t—I-I could only…” he stammered. “I put him in the trunk of my car.”