Heads You Lose - Lisa Lutz [76]
“What can I do for you, Harry?”
“It’s what I can do for you. I’ve been looking through some of my cousin’s papers and there’s something here that you need to see. What are you doing right now?”
“Give me thirty minutes,” Paul replied, and hung up the phone.
Paul knocked on Terry’s, now Harry’s, front door. There was no answer, so he knocked again. He waited another minute and then tried the door. It was unlocked, so he let himself in.
“Harry,” Paul said. “I’m here. Where are you?”
Paul traveled through the house until he reached Terry’s old office. He pushed the door open and found Harry Lakes, slumped back in a chair with a single bullet through his head. Paul shook him, just to be sure. Harry’s entire body crumpled over to the side and fell to the floor.
While there have been cases of people surviving bullet wounds to the head, this was not one of them. Harry Lakes, Esq., was undeniably, irreversibly, irreparably dead.
NOTES:
Dave,
Harry Lakes, R.I.P. This is like the pumpernickel from The Fop all over again. Should a Jerry Gates, third cousin twice removed from Terry Jakes, turn up in the next chapter, I swear to you, another of your beloved characters will be fish chum.
Let’s recap: We are nowhere near solving the Hart and Terry Jakes murders. If we follow the assumption that all the murders were committed by the same individual, then we only need to solve one. Harry Lakes gives us a clear window of time when the murder occurred and therefore the simplest way to check an alibi.
Let’s say Harry was murdered between 1:15 and 1:45 p.m. on
Wednesday. All we have to do now is interview the town folk and find out where they were during that half-hour. You can handle that, right?
I mean, you want this to end eventually, don’t you? I know I do.
Lisa
Lisa,
Can I get you anything else while I’m up? Compelling plot developments for you to commandeer? Essential backstory to ridicule? Another painstakingly crafted character to assassinate?
I guess I was hoping success might have helped you get your need for control under control. Your insistence on having the last chapter suggests otherwise. I wonder if you’d be so bold with any of the alternative coauthors you’re so reticent about.
How about we flip for it, just like Paul and Lacey?
Dave
CHAPTER 24
Paul’s gut told him to run, but he didn’t make it to the front door. Harry Lakes had called him only a half-hour earlier, so he was already a person of interest. The longer he waited to call, the more suspicious it’d look. And the way his career was going, he had less to hide every day. He called 911. He figured he’d still have twenty minutes or so to look for whatever it was that Harry had wanted to show him.
The place was a mess, but it didn’t look ransacked. The giant oak desk was piled with article printouts, Terry’s cheap journals, hideous vintage porn magazines, handwritten letters from friends, and plenty of documents that were unclassifiable at first glance. It was hard to see where Terry’s stuff left off and Harry’s began, except for a few pieces of mail addressed to Harry in Jirsa, CA. Paul grabbed a couple of paper towels from the kitchen and wrapped his hands in them to go through the papers without leaving prints.
The journals were standard Terry stuff: diatribes, poems, sketches for inventions. Paul checked the last few pages of each and came up empty. He turned to Harry’s mail. The first piece was a brochure from a Belarusian mail-order bride outfit. The next was from an ex-wife looking for palimony. The third and last was a month-old letter from the State Department of Parole, citing Harry Lakes for failure to appear and notifying him that another violation would make him, officially, a fugitive.
Paul figured Harry might not have left the document (or whatever it was) out in the open. He opened a desk drawer. Sticking out of a book of haiku was an obituary page from the San Francisco Chronicle, dated three months back. Before he could study it, Paul heard a car coming up the driveway. He bolted for the kitchen, pocketing