The Man from Primrose Lane: A Novel Page 36

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “But before he left, that man, the first Joe King, explained to me that we had someone we could go to in Bellefonte directly, if the Mafia contact ever became too dangerous.”

  “Who?”

  “Seems he was left with a little guilt and concern about the original owner of his identity. After a while sitting in that house, he started obsessing over the life of the real Joe King. The identity he’d stolen. Who had he been?

  “Sometime around 1972, he went looking for Joe King’s story. Found his grave in Bellefonte. Learned of the car accident that claimed his life at such a young age. And learned, also, that Joe King had had a sister, Carol. Of course, he had to meet this woman. You can imagine what comes next.”

  “He had a relationship with Carol?”

  “You got it.”

  “What name did he give her?”

  “Who knows? He made something up. It’s hot and wild, I guess, but their relationship, he told me, abruptly ended in 1973, wouldn’t tell me why. But he said if we ever had reason to, we could go to Carol and she would help us because Carol knows the man in Bellefonte who actually makes the fake papers. She was his … goomah, I think they call it. His mistress.”

  “Any other options?” I asked.

  “Maybe if I had more time,” said the Man from Primrose Lane. “But, your knee. Your goddamn knee.”

  “It’s just … I have a bad feeling.”

  “Get used to it.”

  * * *

  Hours later, we pulled into the driveway of a duplex adjacent to the Schnitzel Tavern in Bellefonte. The smell of fresh spaetzle floated into the car and my stomach growled for some. But we didn’t eat there and I stayed in the car with Albert while the Man from Primrose Lane walked up to the house.

  I watched him through the tinted glass of the window. A woman, perhaps sixty-five years old, with bobbed blond hair and bifocals answered the door and let him inside. We waited. Somewhere inside that house, our secrets were being discussed. I was so nervous my right hand could not stop twitching. Of course, that could have been an effect of my muscles acclimating to agility again.

  A knock at Albert’s window shook me from my trance. A kid, some college man with a crew cut, was leaning down to get the driver’s attention. Albert hit a button and the privacy shield shut again, but stopped before it closed completely, so that I could listen in on their conversation.

  “Can I help you?” Albert asked. He was a cool dude. Really was. But there was apprehension in his voice.

  “Yeah,” said the young man. “What are you doing sitting in my driveway?”

  “Your driveway?”

  “My mother’s.”

  “My client is a friend of hers. He had an appointment to talk to her.”

  “My mother doesn’t need to be bothered. She’s not well. Who did you say your client was?”

  “I didn’t.”

  The young man’s face was getting red. I admired the son’s protectiveness for Carol, but there was a hard edge to his concern and it seemed like maybe this one felt better when he was in complete control of his mother’s social calls … and perhaps her checkbook, too.

  “Spencer!” his mother called from the front door. “Come inside.”

  The Man from Primrose Lane returned to the car as Spencer shook his head and walked toward the house. I heard the beginning of an argument before the young man disappeared inside.

  “Well?” I asked, when the Man from Primrose Lane was back in the car.

  “Good news and bad news.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good news is, we got you an ID. We have to hole up in Bellefonte for the night, but she’ll have it for us in the morning. Express rate, fifteen thousand dollars.”

  “Ouch. Is that the bad news?”

  “No. Bad news is, we’ll never be able to use Carol again. She’s in the early stages of dementia and it seems like it’s progressing quickly.”

  “Oh.”

  “A blessing, I think. She’s already forgotten who Spencer’s father really was.”

  * * *

  The next morning, there was a knock at the door to my room in the Bush House Hotel and when I opened it, there was a cardboard box from Lucarelli’s Pizzeria lying on the floor. A note was attached: Don’t try to get a license, it said. These are good, but not great. I needed more time.

  I’m thinking about writing that last sentence on my tombstone.

  Inside the pizza box was a manila envelope. Inside the envelope was everything I needed to open a bank account and to buy stock under the name of Jeremy Pagit. Certainly enough ID to fool a clinic. The real Pagit, I later learned by a diligent search of Centre County records, was born in 1937, and had died at the age of twelve when he climbed atop an oil derrick and attempted to ride it like a horse.

  I rented an efficiency at the Statler Arms in Cleveland and, from there, played the market, using a nest egg provided by the Man from Primrose Lane. I invested in Yahoo. Starbucks. Apple. I put $10,000 on the 49ers for the Super Bowl in January.

  I got bored waiting.

  I had transcribed Katy Keenan’s diary and notes from the investigation into several large binders, arranged in chronological order. It was her life, presented in minute detail. I knew where she was, where she would be. I wanted to see her, this girl whose murder had become the focus of my life.

  That summer, when she was six, she and her mother took regular trips to the movie theater over in Rocky River. Katy had meticulously collected her ticket stubs in her diary and so I had the dates and show times at hand. I would buy a ticket and sit nearby, sometimes not even looking at them. It was calming just to know she was alive.

  I paid particular attention to other men in the audience. I thought, perhaps, that I might catch her killer stalking her, long before the abduction. A familiar face in the crowds. But the only one stalking her, as far as I could tell, was me.

  In May of 1997, I went to Kent State for the candlelight vigil dedicated to the slain students of 1970. I went because it was in her diary—Katy’s father had taken her. I was so focused on protecting her that I didn’t remember I, too, had been there the first time around. I came upon myself, that would be you, David, standing in place for William Schroeder in the parking lot of Prentice Hall.

  I stood there, making eye contact with my younger self, for just a moment. And somewhere, deep in my brain, I remembered standing there, looking … not at an older version of myself, but through the empty space, at the sculpture on Bunker Hill that had been shot up by the National Guard.

  Suddenly she was there, too. An eight-year-old with red hair hanging down almost to her knees.

  “What’s he doing, Dad?” Katy asked.

  “He’s paying tribute to Bill,” the man said. “Standing in his place. My friend. The one I told you about.”

  “It’s so sad,” she said.

  “It is. Come on, Katy, I want to find my old dorm.”

  Her father led her off toward Taylor Hall and before you could look at me again, I walked away.

  I didn’t check up on her much after that. That had felt like a close call. I didn’t go looking for her again until a week or so before her abduction, in 1999.

  * * *

  “You think Riley Trimble knows who Erin’s kidnapper is?” Larkey asked, fiddling with his mustache.

  We sat around a large table in the back of a Chinese place in Akron called House Gourmet. The owner was one of Larkey’s contacts and she opened the private room with no questions. We didn’t order, but were served portions of the most exquisite Asian food I’d ever tasted.

  “Just a feeling,” said David. “He got an idea when we were sitting there and then he started to tell me that he could catch him if I let him out. I think he does have an idea of who it could be.”

  “And you think that’s where he’s going?”

  “Yes.”

  Larkey leaned back and slid a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and to
ok a long drag. It was, of course, illegal to smoke inside a restaurant in Ohio. He didn’t offer David or me one, either. “Why isn’t he coming after you?”

  “I don’t think he wants to hurt me,” said David. “I’ve always thought he had a little respect or some mixed-up appreciation for me, for figuring out his secret.”

  “He said he would hate you forever.”

  David shrugged.

  “Any idea who he might think it is?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” said Larkey, exhaling a smoke ring that wobbled up to the ceiling, “let’s put it all on the table. We’re three smart guys with some inside information on these cases, right?” He looked at me across the table with a slight smile. “For instance, I bet you could tell us a thing or two about the Man from Primrose Lane and who might want to kill him and this guy’s wife.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “And maybe there’s some information the police haven’t released about Elaine O’Donnell’s abduction that you could share with us.”

  “I don’t wanna see this in some book unless we catch Trimble and the guy who shot the Man from Primrose Lane, all right?”

  “Okay,” said David.

  “Don’t fuck me over,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  Larkey sucked smoke into his lungs, exhaled, then snubbed out the remainder. “First, let’s say what we mean to say, right? We think there’s one man out there responsible for the abduction of Elaine—her murder, actually, because her body’s out there somewhere even if we haven’t found it yet—the murder of her twin sister Elizabeth almost twenty years later, the attempted murder of the Man from Primrose Lane, and the abduction of Erin McNight.”

  “Right,” said David.

  “And the attempted abduction of Katy Keenan,” I interjected.

  “That right?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  Larkey nodded. “All about ten years old at the time. All with straighter than straight red hair.”

  The lawman’s eyes wandered to the wall, where a large ceramic dragon held roost. Finally, he pursed his lips. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll share it with you. Something about Elaine’s abduction was never released.”

  “What?”

  “Little slip of paper found in that parking lot she was yanked away from. Slip of paper with a perforated edge. Number on it.”

  “Like a ticket from a butcher?” asked David.

  “Sort of. But it wasn’t. We traced it back to a photo lab in Berea.”

  “Did you pull the records for whose pictures they had developed? I mean, you had that number?” I asked.

  “We tried. But they didn’t keep good records. They didn’t write the numbers down anywhere. Just matched it up with the photo packet and handed it to the customer who gave them the corresponding tab. We pulled all their credit card transactions for that date, but…”

  “But how many people used credit cards for small transactions back in 1989?” said David.

  “Right. Mostly businesses was all we got back.”

  I sighed. My blood pressure was beginning to concern me. My heart was beating so hard and fast that my hands undulated with each new pump.

  “What do you guys got?” asked Larkey.

  “A man using an alias—Arbogast—attempted to track down the identity of the Man from Primrose Lane a few months before he was shot,” said David.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I talked to the man who made the fake IDs. He’d already spoken to this Arbogast guy.”

  “Don’t suppose you want to tell me the counterfeiter’s name?”

  “Not unless it’s important.”

  “Arbogast,” said Larkey.

  “It’s from Psycho,” I said.

  “Right. So the target was the Man from Primrose Lane, and your wife may have just been in the wrong place at the right time.”

  “One more thing on that front,” said David. “The guy who made the ID said this Arbogast guy was driving a van with one of those handicap permits hanging from the mirror. Except the man was in no way physically handicapped.”

  “That match up with anyone you know?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. Larkey laid his hands on the table and rubbed them against the wood. “Somebody is connected to all of these girls. There’s some common thread we’re not seeing.”

  “I agree,” said David.

  “What did you tell Riley before he got this ‘idea’? What were you talking about right at that moment?”

  “I don’t know,” said David. “The girls.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Looking at their pictures.”

  “Here,” said Larkey, slapping the table. “Let’s see them.”

  From his satchel, David removed Elaine O’Donnell’s and Erin’s pictures.

  “Katy, too.”

  David brought her photograph out as well.

  “Jesus,” said Larkey. “They could be sisters. This man knew these girls. Had to.”

  “It could almost be the same picture,” said David. “Even the background’s the same.”

  Larkey looked closer. Each girl sat in front of a blue backdrop covered in fluffy white clouds. Except David was wrong. Even from where I sat I could tell it wasn’t the exact background in each one. Erin’s school picture had an extra cloud in the top right corner that was whiter than the others.

  “Holy fuck,” said Larkey.

  “What?” asked David, getting up and jogging around the table to where the man sat. I leaned over the table from where I was seated.

  “Look,” Larkey said, pointing to the upper right corner of Elaine’s picture. There was no cloud. Just a tiny black spot against the blue there. Then, Larkey pointed to the upper right corner of Katy’s school picture. There was a black smudge there. Not a smudge, I saw. A tear. The background’s fabric was ripped a little, worn with age. An imperfection no bigger than a dime. But it was there. And in its place in Erin’s photo was a white cloud that appeared whiter than all the others.

  “Same backdrop,” said David. “The exact same. Someone patched the tear and painted a white cloud overtop of it.”

  “That list of businesses,” I said. “Was there a school-picture company on the list?”

  Larkey swallowed and looked up to me. “Fabulous Pics,” he said.

  David flipped each picture upside down. On the top right corner of each sheet, the name FABULOUS PICS was stamped in ink the color of steel. He turned and ran back around the table to get his bag. “It was the fucking school photographer!” he shouted.

  * * *

  David drove while Larkey relayed directions from the back seat.

  “Exit at 480. Go west,” he said. The man was on his phone, speaking in harsh tones to the Berea chief of police. “Stay back! Just stay back until we get there!” He hung up and immediately started dialing again. “His photography studio is right in Berea. Small operation. Apparently it’s a father/son team. Guy who owns the place, his name is George Galt. He developed Parkinson’s about twenty years ago. His son assists him with the photo shoots. Son’s name is Dean.”

  “But who is Dean Galt?” I asked.

  “No one,” he said. “No record of any kind. Not even a speeding ticket. Never married. No home address. He must live with his father. The mother died years ago. Or maybe he lives at the photo studio. The studio has a darkroom, but according to the landlord they haven’t developed their own pictures since 1975. They subcontract most of their developing to Dodd Camera in Cleveland but have been known to use News and Photo in Berea, the lab we traced the tickets to. If he’s got the girl, he’ll be keeping her at the studio, I guarantee it. He’s not going to take her into some residential neighborhood. Downtown Berea is pretty quiet after six p.m. Could have walked her in the front door and no one would have noticed. Anyway, we have an agent driving out to the home, just in case.” His attention switched back to the phone. “Sackett, it’s Larkey. I’m with the writer. We got a lead on … Would you shut
the fuck up and listen? We got a lead on Erin. You better get up here. Berea. I’m texting you the address.” He hung up again. “Hardheaded motherfucker!” he said. He dialed numbers into his cell.

  David rocketed toward Berea at eighty-five miles per hour.

  * * *

  Three patrol cars were parked a quarter mile down the road from the Fabulous Pics photo studio, a second-story loft situated over a brewery in Berea’s business district, a false-fronted square no bigger than a city block. David pulled beside the cruiser closest to the square. Larkey rolled down his window and leaned out.

  “Nobody fucking move, okay?” he said to the officer. “I’m going to knock on the door. You hear shots, come running. But if you don’t, just sit still. I can’t have a contaminated crime scene.”

  “Isn’t that the guy you charged with murder a couple days ago?” asked a wide-mouthed officer, looking at David.

  “Yeah. Gonna use him as a human shield. Kill two birds with one stone. Dickhead. Come on, let’s go.” Larkey rolled his window up and then slapped David in the head from the back seat. “Fuckin’ move, Professor!”

  David took off down the road and pulled to a stop in front of the brewery.

  “Don’t you need a subpoena?” asked David.

  “I thought you were a true crime writer. It’s called a warrant,” said Larkey, checking the clip in his sock Glock. “And there’s nothing prohibiting me from knocking on his door or busting it down if I hear her screaming inside.” He got out of the Cadillac and headed for the door beside the brewery. A sign on the wall read FABULOUS PICS. I followed David, but remained a few steps behind, as my knee protested against the unexpected exercise.

  The stairs were steep and went on for what seemed like two flights before coming to an end at a tall wooden door.