The Second Mouse Read online

  Outside, Nancy had run out of cigarettes, which meant she would soon run out of courage. She twisted around in the driver’s seat, looking for Mel and Ellis, looking for the cops, looking for a way out that wouldn’t get her in trouble with Mel later.

  She hated this part—the waiting. She was always stuck here. The wheel man, Mel called her, as if he were Machine Gun Kelly. Except that most of the time, all he did was eventually saunter up to the car with Ellis in tow, after Nancy had gone almost nuts, with a bag of stolen goods or his pockets full of till money, and tell her to head home, as if he’d just gotten out of the movies.

  He didn’t need a wheel man. He needed a cab. And she needed to stop doing this. She was seriously beginning to lose her taste for it.

  Mel and Ellis reached the second floor landing, still to tomblike silence. Ellis noticed that even the sounds of the surrounding town were muted. It was too quiet, as if all the world had taken cover, knowing that something catastrophic was looming.

  Still in the lead, Mel held up his hand and lowered the box in slow motion, with Ellis following suit. It touched the floor with a tiny bump. Ellis straightened, holding his breath, confused, watching his companion’s back as Mel quietly positioned himself at the corner where the wall met the staircase leading down. Only then did Ellis hear the tired footfall he’d come to dread. As the watchman entered the stairwell below, the echo of his approach reverberated off the walls and ceiling. Ellis expected Mel to order a retreat again and began looking around for a place to hide.

  Instead, Mel stayed put, waiting.

  That wasn’t good. Mel was no pacifist. He never shied from a brawl. But it had always been his rule to bring no violence to an operation. There was less resentment all around, he said, if all you did was steal the money.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t stealing money this time, and Ellis suddenly realized that all bets were off. The thought chilled him—was Mel about to expand how they appeared on the law enforcement radar scope? By association alone, was Ellis soon to become a serious felon? For a wild moment, quickly if regretfully overruled, Ellis was seized by the impulse to push the broad back before him, counting his losses before they became overwhelming, by sending Mel straight into the arms of their oblivious stalker.

  Instead, he waited, rooted in place, and witnessed just the reverse. As the guard reached the top step, Mel swung his leg out, low and hard, and caught the man’s left shin with his instep, causing him to pivot off balance and tumble headlong back down the stairs in a thunderous, rolling clatter.

  Abandoning Ellis, Mel ran after his victim, jumping two steps at a time to keep up, and arrived at the bottom almost simultaneously. There, as Ellis watched, he crouched by the inert body, his fist raised to finish the job.

  He needn’t have worried. The body lay limp as a corpse. Slowly, Mel lowered his hand and rested his fingers against the watchman’s carotid pulse. A few seconds later, clearly satisfied, he rose, rejoined Ellis at double time, and said in a normal voice, “Move it. We’re wasting time.”

  Ellis didn’t move. “You kill him?”

  Mel had taken hold of the box’s other end. “No, I didn’t kill him. He’s just out. C’mon. Grab on. We gotta go.”

  Reluctantly, Ellis obeyed, following Mel down the stairs and past the motionless guard, noticing the slight but regular movement of the latter’s chest.

  “Jesus, Mel,” he murmured, so softly not even his intended listener overheard.

  To the left of the ground-floor landing was a short hallway leading to an enormous two-story basketball court / meeting hall combination, complete with National Guard flags and banners, ghostly in its gloomy silence. If ever there was a moment for all the lights to come on and a phalanx of armed and angry soldiers to materialize from nowhere, this was it for Ellis.

  But nothing happened. To cover their tracks, Mel paused to lock the window he’d jimmied earlier to get them in, and then gently pushed the panic bar on the metal door beside it to bring them out onto a small steel-mesh loading dock. There, a short flight of steps led to the parking lot that circled the armory like an asphalt doughnut.

  Mel did this fluidly, without pause, leading Ellis in ten seconds to where they ended up crouching in the shadows beside a parked car.

  “You okay?” Mel asked, surprising Ellis, who couldn’t recall when or if he’d ever displayed such concern.

  “Yeah,” he stammered. “Good.”

  “Then move your butt. You’re draggin’.”

  Mel rose, fast for a big man, and jogged across the lot, with Ellis doing his best to keep up. At the far end, parked under the trees and facing the street, were Nancy and the pickup.

  They tossed the box into the truck and piled into the cab as Nancy keyed the ignition and began pulling out, waiting to turn on the lights until she had reached the road.

  “Cool and easy, babe,” Mel warned her. “Cool and easy.”

  Chapter 3

  It wasn’t until a few days later that Joe Gunther visited Linda Rubinstein. After he left Doug Matthews at the Michelle Fisher house outside Wilmington—or the house where Fisher had chosen to die, as her disgruntled landlord and pseudo father-in-law would probably have put it—it was late, and he hadn’t seen any lights on at the address Matthews had given him.

  He remained officially uninvolved—there was still no reason to think Fisher’s death wasn’t natural, especially since the ME’s report remained pending. But he felt compelled by curiosity to pursue what angles he had available. Doug had left the metaphorical door open, after all. It could even be argued that by reinterviewing Rubinstein, Joe was merely acting on his colleague’s veiled request.

  Matthews had summed up Rubinstein as a transplanted urbanite and ex-RN who had given up the rat race to concentrate on her art, whatever that was. As a result, Joe had initially expected her address to be either a new house or a yuppified remodeling job, complete with slate roof and shingle siding. Thanks to his initial drive-by, however, he already knew to expect something far less predictable. The place where he now stopped was a true dump—sagging porch, iffy metal roof, peeling clapboards. There was even the “Vermont planter” of lore—a discarded car, half enveloped by the weedy front lawn.

  It seemed that Rubinstein was either inattentive to her surroundings, flat broke, or both, unless this was the latest in negative chic.

  He got out of his car, cautiously approached the porch steps and the front door beyond, and knocked, to an instant response of deep barks from within.

  These were quelled by a short one-word command, just before the door swung back to reveal a tall, slim woman dressed in jeans and a soiled T-shirt, accompanied by a very large dog of confusing lineage.

  “Hey,” the woman said, with a wide smile.

  The greeting alone set her up as an outsider.

  “Hey, yourself,” he answered, going along. The dog sat placidly by her side, waiting for direction. “I was wondering if I could talk to you about Michelle Fisher.” He stuck his hand out. “My name’s Joe Gunther. I’m with the police.”

  She shook his hand, her face more serious, if only slightly. Joe imagined that she had either gotten over the worst of her shock at Michelle’s death or had only been a friendly acquaintance to begin with.

  “You didn’t talk with the other cop?”

  Joe nodded. “He’s the one who told me about you. Don’t worry. I’m not here to make you go through the whole thing again. I just wanted to know if anything else had occurred to you.”

  She pointed to a dangerous-looking wicker armchair on the porch. “Sit?”

  He chose the marginally more solid porch railing as she turned and addressed the dog. “You want in or out?”

  The animal considered his options before turning around and vanishing into the darkness.

  Rubinstein took the chair she’d offered Joe, looking at him carefully as she settled down.

  “Does this mean you think something happened to Michelle?” she asked.

  He
shrugged. “Not necessarily, but it makes sense to ask.”

  “You get the ME report back yet?”

  He laughed. “That’s right. Doug said you used to be a nurse. Where was that?”

  “New York,” she told him. “Feels like a million years ago. We used to see a lot of you guys in the ER, poking around.”

  Her tone remained light, so he took her words at face value. “Yeah—always best to strike while the iron’s hot. Is that the kind of work you did? ER?”

  “Mostly,” she admitted. “It finally got to me. Plus, it was time for a change.”

  Joe sensed volumes more hovering just beyond sight. Without thinking, but feeling the pain of a kindred spirit, he risked admitting, “Yeah—I know what that’s like.”

  “You haven’t always been a cop?” she asked reasonably.

  His face colored slightly. In fact, he’d been a cop all his professional life, which was starting to mean something. But that wasn’t what he’d meant. He thought back to how he’d laughed when Matthews mentioned his breakup with Gail, and how the woman before him might be worth visiting as a result.

  The thought deepened his embarrassment. Was he here because of that? He’d rationalized that he’d merely wanted to ask her about Michelle, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I guess I have at that.”

  Rubinstein looked at him quizzically. She was very attractive, wearing her years well. He guessed she might be close to fifty but had clearly stayed trim and fit. The New York connection was an interesting coincidence, since that was where Gail had come from originally, although the two women looked nothing alike. Their manner was similar, though—self-confident and assured. They both presented themselves as people who’d cut their own paths in life.

  “Nothing new has occurred to me, by the way,” she said, interrupting his daydreaming.

  “What?”

  “About Michelle.”

  He rubbed his face with his hand, pulling himself back on track. “Right. Sorry. You’d known her for how long?”

  “A couple of years. We just kind of hit it off, and I really liked Archie. A truly sweet man. So after he died, it was pretty natural she and I got closer. She was a wreck.”

  “Took the loss hard?” he asked.

  Her face hardened, throwing him off. He thought it might be because his question had sounded stupid. But her answer told otherwise.

  “I guess everyone does that, don’t they? Dance around certain questions without spitting them out. What do you want to know?”

  Joe thought fast, wondering what nerve he’d struck. Falling back on the possible similarities between this woman and Gail, he decided to address her the same way. Directly.

  “Michelle was an alcoholic,” he said. “I was wondering if that’s where she went for solace.”

  “You think she drank herself to death?” The tone bordered on accusatory.

  “There weren’t any signs of it. That’s why I’m asking.”

  She was clearly surprised by his comeback. “I thought . . . How did you know, then?”

  “We dug around,” he said vaguely, just now sensing what might have set her off. “All part of the job.” He paused and then took a stab at it. “I found an AA brochure on her desk. That come from you?”

  There was no answer at first. On the face of it, his question could have been innocence itself. But by now they both were reading between the lines. And as it turned out, correctly.

  “Yeah.”

  “That must’ve been hard on you, seeing her react that way.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Hard? Most natural thing in the world for some of us.”

  He didn’t say anything, leaving an opening.

  She sighed heavily and then metaphorically walked through, altering all his initial impressions. “It killed me. I’ve been sober five years. Fought my way back tooth and nail. Quit my job, left the city, got in shape. I don’t have a dime left, which explains this place, but I’ve started to live again. The first day I met Michelle, I knew she was a drinker—she and Archie both. You just know. At first I was really scared. They weren’t on the program. Hanging out with them might’ve been the end of me. But they’d figured something out. Somehow, they’d turned their love for each other into an antidote or a shield. I mean, they were clueless. They didn’t know what they were doing, but it was working. I sometimes wished I could wrap up what they had and bring it back to AA.”

  She paused to shake her head mournfully. “And then he died. I couldn’t believe it. It was the cruelest thing I’d ever seen, which is saying something.”

  She looked up at him suddenly. “They say drunks are the most narcissistic people you’ll meet. You ever hear that?”

  He couldn’t say he had. “No.”

  “Well, there’s something to it,” she persisted. “In the middle of Michelle’s crisis, as she was falling apart in front of my eyes, I thought maybe the whole thing was a test of me—that God was taunting me for my arrogance.”

  “How did you react?” Joe asked.

  “Not well,” she admitted. “Not initially. I let her hang. I saw what was happening and I ran. Like she was on fire and I was made of gasoline. It was one of the most shameful moments of my life.”

  “Were you all she had?” he asked, remembering not just the photographs on Michelle’s bedroom wall, but how Rubinstein had been brought to his attention in the first place, through mention of Adele Redding.

  The first touch of her old smile returned, albeit wistfully. “No, lucky for her. Her mother, Adele, helped us both get back on track. She called her every day after Archie’s death, or called me if she didn’t get an answer or didn’t like what she heard.” She laughed. “I hated that woman at first, forcing me to get involved, but she saved us both . . . Or at least I thought she had, until I found Michelle.”

  Joe returned to the impression he’d first had of Linda Rubinstein, of self-confidence personified.

  “How are you doing now?”

  “Better,” she answered, nodding as if to double-check. “Maybe Michelle’s death is kind of a relief for both of us. And then maybe it’s because I’ve got Adele to think about now. Life just has a way of steaming on, reducing all our problems to size.”

  “Adele?” Joe asked, taken off guard.

  Rubinstein laughed again, seemingly totally recovered. “Yeah. Now I’m the one who calls her every day. Isn’t that screwy?”

  Joe wasn’t about to argue with her, not based on that evidence. Instead, he shifted the conversation slightly. “I hear relations between Michelle and Archie’s father weren’t as friendly.”

  That erased the smile quickly. “That son of a bitch. There’s the guy who deserved what both of them got.”

  “The bad die last?” he queried.

  “I don’t know about that, but he’s alive and they’re not, and he did his level best to belittle his son when he was alive and make Michelle’s life a living hell afterward.”

  “He must be a happy man now,” Joe suggested.

  “If there is a God,” she answered bitterly, “he’ll burn that house down just to teach the bastard a lesson.”

  “You ever meet him?”

  “Newell?” She pursed her lips. “No, which is probably a good thing. As far as I know, he did all his torturing long-distance.”

  “We found eviction notices,” Joe mentioned leadingly.

  “Yeah.” She dragged out the word. “Michelle said she’d force him to throw her out bodily. Sad part is, that’s exactly what would have happened. She didn’t have a leg to stand on.”

  “Did she have any plans? She sure hadn’t packed her bags.”

  Linda Rubinstein tilted her head back and stared at the porch’s ceiling. “God help me, I’d offered to move her in here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yup. Adele was ready to help me by paying a little rent, from what resource, I don’t know. She’s on welfare as it is. We were going to give it a shot, anyhow.”
r />   Joe mulled that over, fully aware of how dynamics like what she’d just outlined could go horribly wrong.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “A really bad idea. The way I looked at it, though, that’s all the poor woman had done her whole life—make the wrong choices. And yet they’d worked out in the end, kind of. So maybe we’d get lucky. It was worth a try.”

  Joe looked at the floor for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “It’s always worth that,” he agreed. “Do you have any idea what Archie’s father wants to do with the place?”

  “Sell it, as far as I know,” she answered. “It was only an asset to him, nothing sentimental.”

  “And yet he let his son use it.”

  Rubinstein made a face. “And charged him rent, and used him as a free Mister Fix-It, and whined about what a loss he was taking. Archie and Michelle always said there was no way they could’ve had such a nice place without the old man. Maybe, but I never thought it was worth it. Not with the baggage he threw in.”

  “How anxious was Newell to get Michelle out?”

  She hesitated before answering, eyeing him carefully. “That’s a loaded question, isn’t it?”

  He hitched a shoulder. “Not intentionally.”

  She laughed shortly, reminding him of the New Yorker in her again. “Don’t bullshit me. You’re asking if he might’ve killed her.”

  He decided to deal with that straight on. “I’m asking if he was angry enough—and, from what you know of him, capable of it.”

  “You know something you’re not telling me.”

  She was a good poker player, egging him on to show his cards. Sadly, he had nothing to hold back. “Don’t I wish. I didn’t bore you with the details, Ms. Rubinstein, but technically, I belong to a major-crimes unit, and this case is so low-profile I’m not even supposed to be connected to it. I happened to be in the neighborhood when the first cop you talked to caught the assignment, and I dropped by out of curiosity.”