Too Close to Home

We both got up from the table, went from the kitchen and through the living room to the front door. Through the sheer curtain at the window I could make out Barry, and it looked as though he was holding something in his hand.

I opened the door. Standing behind Barry were three other police officers, all wearing those surgical-type gloves. “What is it, Barry? What the hell is going on?”

He held up the paper. “It’s a warrant, Jim. To search the house.”

“What?” said Ellen. “What are you talking about?”

“Get Derek,” Barry said, his voice no-nonsense.

“What do you want Derek for?” I asked.

“Jim, please, don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” Barry said. “Just call him down here.”

I hesitated a moment, then shouted, so that I could be heard upstairs: “Derek!”

“What?” Muffled, from behind his bedroom door a flight up.

“Down here! Now!”

A moment later, his footsteps thundering down the stairs. When he got to the bottom, he met the cops, heading up. “Oh shit,” he said, with less surprise than I might have expected.

I thought of the phone call he’d received from Penny. Maybe now it was happening.

“Kitchen,” Barry said, leading the rest of us out of the living room. Once we were in the kitchen, no one sat down.

“Derek,” Barry said, “I wonder if you’d like to change your story any about what happened on Friday night.”

He looked baffled, but there was something in his eyes, the way they danced.

“No,” he said. “Nothing.”

“So you want to stick with what you told us. That you left the Langleys about eight, wandered about, went to see Penny, came back here around nine-thirty.”

“Yeah,” Derek said hesitantly. “Although I didn’t really see her, just talked on the phone, walked around some on my own.”

Then Barry turned to me. “How about you? You want to stick with what you told me? About hearing Derek come in around that time, before ten?”

“Barry,” I said, “why don’t you just tell us what the hell’s going on here.”

Upstairs, we could hear things getting tossed about. It sounded like it was all happening in Derek’s room.

“I want to know if anyone wants to rethink what happened that night,” Barry said.

“I’m pretty sure that’s what happened,” Derek said, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Then maybe you can explain something to me,” Barry said to Derek.

“What?”

“You talked to your girlfriend, Penelope Tucker, a couple of times that night on the phone.”

“Penny, yeah,” he said. “Sure, I talk to her all the time. Well, until, like, lately. Her parents are being all weird.”

“You can blame me for that,” Barry said. “I was speaking to them early Sunday. I advised them not to allow any communication between you and their daughter.”

“That’s fucking great. So you’re the reason-”

“Derek,” I cautioned, trying to stay calm, “just take it easy.”

“Take it easy?” To Barry, he said, “You had no right to do that. Why did you have to-”

“Derek,” Barry said, getting close to him, almost in his face, “tell me about the calls you made to Penny that night.”

“I don’t know. I called her a couple of times, I guess.”

“From your cell?”

“Sure.”

“Always from your cell?”

It was like something clicked in Derek’s brain at that point. Some sort of realization dawned on him. “I think,” he said.

“Penny says you called her from the Langley house.”

“Uh, sure, maybe. I mean, I was there, earlier.”

“No,” Barry said. “Later.”

“She must be wrong,” Derek said.

“Derek,” Ellen said, “what’s going on here?”

Upstairs, more rummaging.

“If you don’t mind,” Barry said to my wife, as politely as the circumstances allowed, “I’d like to ask the questions for the moment. Derek, I don’t think she’s wrong. The phone, in the basement of the Langley house, it’s one of those phones that keeps a record of numbers dialed out. Saves the police a lot of time asking the phone company to give us a list of calls.”

This didn’t sound good.

“And what’s interesting is, just before ten, that phone was used to call Penny Tucker. How do you explain that? A couple of hours after you supposedly left, nearly an hour and a half after the Langleys had left, someone makes a call from inside that house to your girlfriend. And you know what she told me? She told me she was talking to you.”

Derek said nothing.

“And Albert Langley, he phoned his secretary on his cell just around that time, said they were nearly home. So guess what? It looks like you were in that house, after the Langleys left, and very likely still in that house when they got home.”

Derek shook his head.

I said, “Barry, what you’re suggesting here, this is crazy. You know me, you know Derek. I mean, you know him well enough to know that he wouldn’t, that he couldn’t. .”

“Maybe,” Derek said, his voice weak, “maybe the phone was wrong or something.”

“You think Penny’s phone was wrong, too? Because it shows a call coming in at the exact same time as the Langley phone shows a call going out. She said your cell was breaking up, so you had to use a land line.”

“You don’t understand,” Derek said. “Okay, maybe I was there but-”

“Derek,” I said, “don’t say anything.”