Something Rotten, page 13
“Cleaning up a mess I didn’t make.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. What’s up?”
“Claude and Trudy want to see me in his office.”
“So go.”
He stood and stared at me expectantly. I took a five-dollar bill out of my wallet and handed it to the help. He tried to turn it down, but I stuffed it in his shirt pocket and left with Hamilton.
“You don’t have to tip them,” Hamilton said in the hall. “They do get paid, you know.”
“Not by me,” I told him.
The dead bear on the floor of Claude’s study sneered at us as we entered, and I bent down to scratch his head. Claude and Mrs. Prince were sitting in chairs in front of his desk, looking concerned. Hamilton dropped into a chair in the corner and exuded teen angst.
“Hamilton, this is a family meeting. Your friend can wait outside,” Claude said, not looking at me.
Hamilton practiced not caring.
“Horatio, would you mind giving us some time alone with Hamilton?” Mrs. Prince asked.
I didn’t mind telling Claude to sit and spin, but Mrs. Prince was another matter. I glanced at Hamilton.
“I want him here,” said Hamilton. “I need at least one person in the room I can trust.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say to your mother,” Claude told him.
“But not to you?”
“Hamilton, please take those sunglasses off when we’re speaking to you,” Mrs. Prince said. There must have been some small spark of love still there for his mother, because he did what she asked him.
Claude was startled by Hamilton’s face. “Who gave you the shiner?”
“Was there something you wanted to say, or what?” said Hamilton.
Claude shifted in his chair and got frowny serious. “I just spent the afternoon taking care of your little stunt this morning, Hamilton. Luckily,” he said, glancing my way for the first time, “I have friends in the department.”
“Yeah,” Hamilton said. “Lucky for a lot of reasons.”
Mrs. Prince took a deep breath.
“Hamilton, I have no idea what happened to you this morning, or why you did what you did,” she said. She glanced at Claude, probably remembering the part where Hamilton called her new husband a murderer. “But your behavior has gotten worse and worse. Paul Mendelsohn is in the hospital, and you came very near to—to—”
“You’re out of control,” said Claude. “And it has to stop.”
Hamilton shot up straight in his chair. “I’m out of control?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Prince told him. “And it doesn’t help that you sit around and drink all day long.”
So this was it, I thought. The intervention Claude was talking about. My little brain had been imagining all kinds of sinister meanings for what he said to Paul that night listening in over the intercom, and here they were giving him a real intervention.
“I saw this happen to your father too,” said Claude.
Hamilton was on his feet. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare talk about my father!”
“Hamilton, sit down,” Mrs. Prince said, surprising us all with the strength in her voice. “Sit down.”
Hamilton dropped into his chair, but the sunglasses came back on.
“Your stepfather and I have decided that we are not capable of treating your illness.”
“My illness?”
“There is a clinic near Bristol, just over the border into Virginia—”
“What kind of clinic?”
“An alcohol rehabilitation clinic,” Claude told him. “You’re an alcoholic, Hamilton, and you need to get better.”
“I’m not an alcoholic!” He laughed. “Tell them, Horatio.”
I crossed my arms and kept my mouth shut, and he didn’t like that very much.
“You see, even your friends know you drink too much, Hamilton.”
“If you’d just look at the brochure—” Mrs. Prince began.
Hamilton was up out of his chair. “No way I’m going to any ‘clinic.’ ”
“I’m sorry,” Claude said smoothly. “I don’t remember anyone asking you.”
Every one of us had seen the play before, but Hamilton put on an encore performance of Kick a Chair and Storm Out of the Room. If he wasn’t careful he was going to get typecast.
“Horatio,” Mrs. Prince pleaded. “You know this is right. Can you speak to him?”
She handed me the brochure and I glanced at it. It was full of inspirational gobbledygook like “The longest journey begins with the first step,” and “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” and had pictures of half-smiling teenagers silently wondering how they could hang themselves on the ropes course they were doing. I stuffed the pamphlet in my back pocket and looked at Claude, who was watching me. My accusation sat there between us, but he wasn’t going to say anything with Mrs. Prince in the room. What concerned me was what he might say—or do—if he got me or Hamilton alone.
“We’ll see,” I said about the brochure. “I thought I might run into town and rent a video first.” I gave Claude a sunshiny smile. “Anything you’re dying to see, Claude?”
Mrs. Prince didn’t know what I was talking about, but dark clouds formed on Claude’s forehead and I beat a hasty retreat.
Hamilton wasn’t out by the pool, and he wasn’t in the entertainment room with Roscoe and Gilbert. I found him in his room, digging through his closet.
“Looking for something to drink?”
“Get out.”
I sat down at his computer desk and watched.
“I said get out.”
I put my feet up.
“Thanks a hell of a lot for sticking up for me back there.”
“Hamilton, look. I’m your best friend—” I started.
He came out of the closet with a water bottle in his hand. He gave me a look that was supposed to make me feel bad for thinking the worst of him, but I snatched the bottle away before he could stop me.
“Hey!”
I unscrewed the cap and dipped a finger in to taste it. Vodka.
“Couldn’t just pour out good vodka for your stunt with Roscoe and Gilbert, could you?”
“Wait, wait,” he said. “Is this the part where you tell me I have a problem, and that you just want to see me get better? Screw you. I can take care of myself.”
“Digging this out to throw it away, then?”
He grabbed the bottle back from me and told me to go do something to myself that was physically impossible. I said I’d pass.
“You think you’re so smart, don’t you, Horatio?”
“Smart enough to know you need help—in more ways than one.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hamilton, Claude knows. He knows that we know he murdered your father. If he didn’t get it when you plugged Paul Mendelsohn, he figured it out when he caught me down at the police station telling them about the videotape.”
“You did what? Damn it, Horatio! Those bastards are in his pocket. They wouldn’t help us.”
“Yes, well, I realize that now,” I muttered.
“Besides, you promised! You swore you wouldn’t tell a soul.”
“Oh, give the secret society thing a rest, Hamilton. It’s not kid stuff anymore when you shoot somebody.”
“He’s not dead,” Hamilton said softly. He unscrewed the bottle cap and took a swig. He winced as he worked it down, then took another drink just to prove to his throat who was boss.
“No, he’s not dead,” I told him. “And he’s not going to press charges either. But you and I both know you shot him because he was wearing your uncle’s hunting vest and you thought it was Claude. And your uncle knows that too.”
“So what?” he said. “Let him.”
“Ordinarily I’d agree. But let’s review, shall we? We agree that Claude murdered your father so he could take over Elsinore Paper. If he would kill for something like that, don’t you think he’d kill again not to go to jail?”
Hamilton blinked. “You mean—you mean you think he might try to kill me?”
“Gee,” I told him, “after you tried to do the same thing to him? I wonder.”
“Wait,” he said, panicking a little. “What am I going to do?”
“It seems to me they’ve handed you a way out.”
I pulled the clinic brochure from my pocket and tossed it at him. It fluttered to the ground between us.
“No way, Horatio. I can’t—”
“You can, and you should. First off, you’ll be about a hundred miles away from Claude, in a safe and secure facility.”
“A prison, you mean.”
“You said your house and the plant were a prison, remember? What’s the difference?”
He answered me by taking another drink.
“Second, you need it.” I stood and took the bottle from him. “And yes, you do have a problem, and yes, I do want to see you get better.”
“It’s just this stuff with my dad—”
“That made it worse, yeah. But you don’t drink for fun, Hamilton, and you don’t drink to relax. You drink to drink.”
He stared at the brochure on the floor at my feet.
“What about Claude? How can we bust him for murdering my father when I’m off in some sanatorium?”
“I’m not sure we can now,” I told him. “But you won’t leave for a few days. Give me one last chance to pull something off. It’ll be tricky, but there might be something I can do. In the meantime, you pack your bags and watch your back. Deal?”
Hamilton sat quietly for longer than I was willing to count.
“Deal.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I left Hamilton in his room and got my car without waiting for a valet. For what I was cooking up, I needed to talk to Olivia. I couldn’t have found her favorite mountaintop view again if I had a week to drive every back road in Denmark, and I didn’t know where she lived. That left only one place I knew to try her, and I drove into town.
The banged-up door of the diner labeled only as “EATS” screeched across the linoleum as I stepped inside. It was the place where Olivia and I had gone on our first date, and the smell of grease and disinfectant made me all nostalgic. EATS was empty of customers, being post-lunch and pre-dinner rush, although I wondered if it didn’t always look like this. I slid into the booth I liked to think of as “our booth” and set the coffee can I’d brought in on the seat beside me.
The dinosaur who had served us our meal the last time was standing behind the counter. A long, limp mound of ash dangled from the cigarette in her mouth as she skimmed over what was, no doubt, the newspaper want ads. She glanced up at me and registered my existence through lidded eyes.
“Liv,” she called. “Table two.” The ashes took a plunge from her cigarette, and she wiped them off her paper onto the counter.
The kitchen doors swung open, and Olivia walked out wearing an ugly blue waitress smock that still managed to look good on her somehow. What can I say? I’m a private-school kid. I love a girl in uniform.
She gave me a tired look like she could read my mind.
“Want me to take him, honey?” the crone asked.
“No thanks,” Olivia decided. She walked my way and stood over me with her hands on her hips. “You miss me already?”
“Yeah,” I told her. “You don’t know it, but I saved one of my stained napkins from the time we came here together. I’m making a scrapbook for you.”
“Shut up,” she said. There was almost a grin there, but she had other things on her mind. “You want food or what?”
“Hamburger and fries was good. And a root beer.”
She nodded and went back behind the counter to announce my order to the cook. She brought a root beer and a soda to the table and sat down across from me.
“Look, if you’ve come here to apologize for Hamilton—”
“He can do his own apologizing, for whatever it’s worth,” I said. “I hear your dad’s going to be all right.”
She nodded. “His shoulder’s pretty messed up, and he’ll be in the hospital for a while, but Hamilton didn’t hit anything worse. Dad was lucky. . . .”
I had to agree. It was a strange kind of luck, but he had it.
“He’s been asleep almost all day. They sent me home, but I couldn’t go back to an empty house.” She shrugged. “I was scheduled to work anyway, so I thought I’d come here. Larry will be home from school late tonight, and he can check in on Dad.” She stirred the ice in her drink with her straw. “So how did you know I worked here?”
“Well, for one thing, the last time we were here you said you’d take care of the check, and we left without you paying. Cindy over there seemed to know you pretty well too, so unless you were planning on never showing your face here again, I figured you must work here.”
“How did you know her name?”
I reached across the table and flicked the name badge pinned to Olivia’s uniform.
“Well, aren’t you the detective,” she told me, but I could tell she was impressed.
A bell rang, and somebody in the back shouted, “Order up!” Olivia slid out of the booth and Cindy handed her my plate across the counter. She slid back into the booth and put the food between us and started eating my fries.
“So, why track me down?” she asked. “I’m sure the Prince family already knows my dad isn’t going to have Hamilton arrested.”
“You keep forgetting my last name isn’t Prince. What I want and what they want are not always the same.”
“And what is it you want, Horatio Wilkes?”
There were a hundred good answers to that one that might actually have gotten me somewhere, but it was time to get serious.
“You really want to see Elsinore pay for dumping in the Copenhagen River, don’t you.”
That was a direction she hadn’t expected me to go, and she frowned. “Well, yeah. Of course. Why?”
“Because I agree. I think it’s about time somebody made Elsinore accountable. Some of the Princes too.”
“Some?”
“The ones who actively covered up the pollution.”
She seemed to agree with that. “What, have you got something on them?”
“Maybe. But we’re going to need a little help. What we’ve got to do is forget the Daily Dane and get some regional coverage, maybe even national.”
“I’ve tried,” Olivia told me between french fries.
“The Brown-Water Rafting thing was clever, but we’ve got to have something shocking. Something scandalous. You know how these TV news things go—‘Something in your tap water may be killing you! Tune in at eleven.’ ”
She sipped on her Coke. “The trouble is, there’s no way to prove that people get sick and die around here because of the pollution. They all die long, weary deaths. TV crews want to see a big car accident or a house burning down. Something happening right that minute. Nobody wants to come up here and film water running over rocks.”
“What if we tell them somebody drank water from the river and got really sick?”
“You’re kidding, right? Only a complete dumb-ass would drink that water.”
“Right.” I took her soda from her. “But you’d drink this on camera, wouldn’t you?”
It didn’t take much effort to shake a fizzy foam up to the surface of her Coke. Without the ice it looked just like the Copenhagen River.
“We put you in front of a camera, and you tell them you’re going to drink river water to show how disgusting it is. You take a swig from a jar, make a big scene of spewing it back out, and we get a chance to talk about what they’re doing to the water up here.”
“And you think they’re going to buy that?”
“Well, it looks like river water.” I gave her the drink back. “Maybe we could break up little bits of cake in it or something to give it some texture.”
“Now I can’t wait to do it,” she said.
“Anyway, if they call us on it, they’ll have already come all this way. They’re not going to go back without a story, even a slow one like that nasty brown water churning away.”
Olivia mulled that over while I finished my hamburger.
“Okay. And you want me to be the drinker?”
“I think I can get a station here, but you’re the local interest. It’s your cause. Your story. Besides, you’re moderately better-looking than I am.”
“Thanks for noticing. So what’s in this for you?”
“I’m a sucker for a hopeless cause,” I told her. “And I want to get my hands on Elsinore’s pollution testing results. Claude’s not in much of a mood to let me have a look at them, but if we can get some public pressure on the plant, maybe they’ll have to release them.”
“You think there’s proof they’ve been poisoning the river in the test results?”
“No. I’ll bet you’re right—those tests are crooked, done wrong to make the plant look like it’s in the clear with the EPA. I need them to prove that something else was poisoned instead.”
“Like what?”
“Like Hamilton’s father.”
She was the second person I’d spilled the beans to that day, and I was beginning to think I should just post flyers that said “Somebody Murdered Rex Prince” instead of working my way through Denmark person by person. It was dangerous to bring her into this, for her sake and ours, but I figured Hamilton owed her that much, and a lot more.
“Hamilton’s father?” she whispered. “You mean—”
I picked up the coffee can I had brought inside and slid it across the table to her.
“One more favor,” I said. “Can you hide this somewhere for me? Someplace you can get to it again quickly? I can’t keep it in my car or up at the house.”
“Yeah, sure. I guess.” She shifted it around, feeling now two clunky things shift around inside. “What’s in it?”
“Evidence,” I told her. “Just make sure it stays dry and room temperature, will you? I promise I’ll explain everything when I can. And don’t get curious and open it. Seriously. You do not want your fingerprints on either item.”
“Secret agent man,” she said.
