There are few things Duffy Madison enjoys as much as a dramatic pronouncement. He likes to shake things up, and he is an emotional guy, so when he comes across a fact that he believes leads to a “eureka” moment, he tends to play it up to the hilt.
Of course, I had a few reasons for writing Duffy that way. For one, I didn’t want him to perfectly fit the calculating, almost stoic Sherlock Holmes model; Duffy was going to care desperately about the people he was trying to help. For another, a writer is pretty much always looking for a nice jolting end of a chapter, a way to bring one small piece of the story to a conclusion while enticing the reader to continue turning pages. Losing the reader’s interest is the worst thing an author can do.
So when Duffy dropped his “murder” bomb in my lap, I had time to consider my reaction because I more or less expected him to be didactic and a touch melodramatic. He had shown up unannounced and had not waited, as he normally would have, outside my office door for permission to enter.
Also, he hadn’t asked me about the phone call I was ending, one I would bet cash money he knew was about him.
These were all signs Duffy was going to try for a rise out of me. The real question was whether I should give it to him. I decided against.
“What makes you think so?” I asked.
I’m fairly sure I heard Paula chuckle just a bit from her office across the hall, but Duffy did not react to the sound. He was still trying to get a bigger reaction out of me. I’ve found since this version of Duffy emerged from nowhere that it’s productive not to feed his ego all the time because it forces him to try to impress you even more.
“Ah!” Duffy held a finger up in the air. He seemed positively invigorated by the possibility of a murder investigation. It’s the Holmes thing again; every crime fiction writer in the world is influenced one way or another. “The North Bergen police were kind enough to supply me with the original photographs taken at the scene of Damien Mosley’s death, and I have observed some details they did not take into account originally.”
(“Observed” isn’t blatantly British, but it is very Sherlock. He’ll often admonish his best friend, “You see, Watson, but you do not observe.” You have to wonder why anybody wants to hang around with this guy.)
I knew that Duffy wanted me to ask about the pictures, which I was certain he had on his person somewhere. I didn’t want to torture the poor man, but I did want to make a point that I thought needed reiterating.
“Duffy, you remember I told you I was no longer on this case with you, right?” I said. “I’m not an investigator or a cop, and all I want to do right now is figure out how to write my next book. I don’t understand why you came here with this lead. Why not go to Ben or someone in North Bergen?”
Duffy’s eyes flashed just for a moment with absolute astonishment. How could anyone pass up the opportunity to investigate a juicy murder with him? Why wasn’t I as engaged in Damien Mosley’s supposed murder—although if Duffy said it was a murder, I had little doubt that’s what it was—as he was? Duffy hasn’t had much experience with women that I know about (although it would be worth looking into the idea of him having dated Louise Refsnyder), so sometimes he really does find me baffling.
“Ben is a fine investigator, but he has no jurisdiction in North Bergen,” Duffy stammered for a moment.
“Neither do I.”
Duffy regained his composure. “The North Bergen police have been informed, and Detective Lowenstein is considering his options, including the possibility of exhuming Damien’s body for a more detailed examination.”
Okay, I’d tortured him long enough. “Why don’t you think the ME did a thorough job the first time?” I asked. “What did you see in those photographs?”
Yes, I knew what I was in for: Duffy reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. Lucky me, I was going to have a guided tour of the scene where a man who might have been Damien Mosley died, possibly having been murdered. Then I could go back to my own story about a guy being impaled on a fence after falling off his bicycle.
Crime fiction writers live rich, full lives. They just mostly take place in our heads.
Duffy looked for a flat surface on which to spread out what I was sure would be somewhat gruesome prints of digital photographs. But we were in my office, which meant there was no such open space to be found.
“Perhaps we should move to the dining room table,” he suggested.
I followed him into my dining room, musing as I do periodically on the wisdom of allowing a crazy person into my home often enough that he could lead the way from one room to another. But I walked on behind and waited while Duffy painstakingly arranged the pictures on my dining room table, where I do occasionally eat actual food. I couldn’t wait to see photographs of a guy with his head bashed in on that surface.
Duffy had laid out the photos as they were numbered on the back by whoever had filed them away in North Bergen. I wasn’t sure there was any rhyme or reason to the numbering, but Duffy clearly was, and I figured he worked more often in this sort of area than I did. He pointed at the first—top left, with twelve pictures arranged in four rows of three each—image.
“This one shows the area from which Damien fell,” he said.
I was pleased to note there was no body visible in the picture, although my peripheral vision had noticed more than one shot with a man facedown in the mud to come later in this gruesome collage. So I worked to maintain my focus on the picture Duffy was indicating.
It looked to me like a fairly low-angle shot of a dirt road with grass to the right side and a hill, or the top of a hill, directly ahead. There were footprints on the dirt going in pretty much every direction and yellow police crime scene tape wrapped on a few trees around the site, isolating it from the rest of the park.
“So, land. Right?” I said.
Duffy, now accustomed to my enthusiastic approach to crime busting, did not miss a beat. He pointed at a spot, shiny and white, on the photograph. It looked to me like maybe a tooth in the grass, and I definitely did not want to see that. Not that I have anything against teeth per se, but I didn’t want to think about the implications of finding one in this particular spot under these circumstances.
“This is the significant area,” Duffy said. As if the pointing hadn’t made that clear. But he didn’t go on.
“Why?” I asked. I realized questions were simply enablers for a born lecturer like Duffy, but now he’d actually gotten me thinking about the scene. I hadn’t noticed anything all that significant.
“Do you know what that white object is?” he said. Duffy has an annoying habit (I know, you’re amazed) of answering questions with questions so he can feel he’s actually teaching me how to solve crimes. I don’t want to know how to solve crimes. I want to know how to write my way through a slump.
“It looks like a tooth,” I answered.
“It’s not,” he said. That was probably a relief. “The photograph is not especially clear in that area. What you’re seeing is actually smoothed grass, a spot where a shoe slipped and skidded, just a little bit.”
I was glad it wasn’t a tooth, but I didn’t see how that was going to be significant. “We already knew Damien fell down the hill here,” I reminded Duffy. “So he slipped and then he fell. How does that make it murder? You don’t even know if it’s Damien’s shoe that matted down the grass there. Anybody’s foot could have done that, even one of the crime scene investigators.”
Duffy smiled. I’d given him the exact response he’d wanted, which meant that I was definitely wrong. He loves showing people where they made mistakes so he can correct them. Why had I made up this character? Well, largely because it never occurred to me we’d actually meet. It was becoming clear I’d been very shortsighted in that regard.
“It’s true that other people had walked through this area before the crime scene tape was put up,” Duffy said. “There was the young jogger who made the nine-one-one call and the uniformed police officers who had responded. But that skid wasn’t made by Damien Mosley’s shoe because Damien, as you’ll see in subsequent photographs, wasn’t wearing shoes.”
Huh? “Who goes out for a walk in the park at night barefoot?” I asked. It was really thinking out loud, but Duffy believes every question ever asked is directed specifically at him, so he answered. If I was being honest, I’d expected nothing else.
“That is a good question,” Duffy said, “but the theory is borne out in this picture here.” He indicated the one immediately to the first photo’s right, a close-up of some mud nearer the edge where Damien—or somebody—had dropped to his death. “See this footprint? It’s very deep, as if the man standing there was trying very hard to hold his position. But it is also clearly that of a barefoot man; at least three toes are distinctly indicated.”
That was true. Assuming Damien was the person who died here, he had definitely not been wearing shoes when standing on that precipice. “Were there any shoes found nearby?” I asked.
“Very good, Rachel!” Duffy gushed. “Yes. A pair of New Balance running shoes was found seventy-eight yards south of the edge we’re looking at now, and the size of those shoes is a match for the footprints found here. The owner of those shoes, which had athletic socks stuffed into their toes, was the man who fell to his death here. Damien Mosley.”
I chose not to argue the point with him at that moment, but we still did not have a positive identification of the man who died that night. Duffy wanted it to be Damien for his own reasons, which might have been clouding his judgment. When there were facts, I’d make my case if necessary. (Hey. Duffy’s character didn’t come from nowhere.)
“Why do you think he took off his shoes?” I asked. Duffy had a theory for everything.
“My best guess is that whoever killed him forced him to do so. We don’t have photographs from the area where the shoes were found, but there are small dots of blood here and there on the path, see, like here and here. Very small, but indicative that Damien had cuts on his feet from the rough surface. He did not decide to walk this way without shoes; someone was directing him. But that is just a guess.”
“I’m still not getting murder from this, Duffy,” I said. “A guy takes off his shoes, walks around in a park, falls down, and hits hit head. It’s odd, I’ll grant you, but so far I’m not seeing how it’s criminal.”
Duffy pointed to the third photograph. “This is where it gets interesting,” he said. I didn’t see how; it was a picture of the same scene from a medium distance. All I saw were trees and dirt and grass and the trunk of one police cruiser on the right side. But I knew better than to comment on how truly fascinating the picture was, because Duffy certainly wanted me to so he could show off the crucial detail I had missed. It’s kind of a really sick parlor game.
Not wishing to be embarrassed, I studied the photograph more closely. I remembered that the photographer was not Duffy, so the angle of the shot might not be relevant to what it was I should be noticing. The lens had been aimed mostly at the ground leading up to the fall, but not so closely that you expected to see the photographer’s shoes. He or she had shot the picture almost straight from eye level, so the dirt and grass were there but so was a hint of the sky (fairly dark) and the trees in the wooded area to the left of the drop. I wondered if a magnifying glass would have revealed something especially significant, but I didn’t have one except as an app on my phone. But I didn’t activate it because my phone was back in my office, and I didn’t want to make a show of it.
Besides, I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to see what Duffy had seen anyway.
I was just about to throw my hands up and concede defeat when it occurred to me to examine the police car that took up only a small fraction of the frame. Could Duffy think a cop was involved in Damien’s death? But all that appeared on the picture was a standard white car trunk, license plate not visible. I couldn’t see the back window, and the bumper, not surprisingly, was free of stickers. It was a cop car, no frills.
“I give up,” I sighed. “I don’t see anything that points to a murder. The only interesting thing in the whole picture is that one tree branch.” I pointed to a tree in the background of the photograph. “It’s bent funny.”
Duffy did not respond with the derisive laughter I had expected in my low-esteem-afflicted writer’s mind. Instead, he beamed at me and nodded his head approvingly. “Very good indeed,” he said. “That is the significant feature.”
“It is?” He’d caught me by surprise.
“Of course. Your eye was drawn to the branch. Otherwise this is a pretty standard crime scene photograph without any noticeable abnormalities. Look at the way that branch has broken. What do you think could have caused that?”
Still reeling from being correct, I leaned over to look closely at the photograph again. “A really fat bird?” I asked.
Duffy clicked his tongue. “Think, Rachel. Look at the other trees and even the other branches on that tree. None of them appears in any way abnormal. Some of the branches are thinner and would have been weaker than the one in question, so we can rule out damage from a storm or any phenomenon that would have affected them all equally. So what can we surmise from that?”
My mind was focused on the idea that I’d never use the word surmise for anyone but Duffy in dialogue, so I wasn’t going to have a satisfactory answer for him. “Don’t try to teach me, Duffy. Just tell me what I’m looking at.”
“It’s the angle and the kind of damage done.” Duffy was still leading me to an answer instead of just giving it to me. He would have made a really annoying college professor, but his students might have had a chance to learn something. “What does that kind of damage to a healthy branch?”
Okay, in order to make this scene end in time for the following Thanksgiving, I would have to think harder. This was about Duffy’s claim that Damien Mosley (or whoever was at the bottom of the ditch) had been murdered. It wasn’t about trees or their nature, of which I knew nothing. If I were writing this scene and wanted to prove a murder had been committed, what would I use to break a tree branch in a crime scene photograph?
“A bullet?” I said.
For a moment, I thought Duffy might actually kiss me on the cheek, but he managed to suppress the impulse. He did clap his hands and point at me. “Exactly,” he said. “There would be no point in going to check the scene again now because it has been years, but the photograph indicates that someone shot from a low angle toward a high angle, as if trying to hit someone’s head from a supine position, missed his target, and instead hit a tree branch quite a distance away.”
That sounded like an enormous leap of logic to me, but Duffy is always right about this stuff, and besides, I had clearly guessed correctly, so it was really my victory. “So you think someone tried to shoot Damien, missed, and then instead of taking another shot, he pushed the guy over a cliff?”
“That is one possibility. Another is that a second bullet actually lodged in Damien’s skull, and because of the extensive damage done by the rock on which he landed, the medical examiner did not think to look or did not find a remnant if the bullet passed through. It seemed obvious enough that Damien had fallen and hit his head. There was no reason to search for another cause of death.”
It sounded so logical when he said it. If I had written something that preposterous or suggested a county ME was that incompetent, my editor would be all over me with notes about implausibility, and Sol would be right. As Joseph Mankiewicz, the writer and director of All About Eve, once said, “The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.”
“So what do you think you should do about it?” I said. “Do you think the North Bergen cops will push for an exhumation based on that picture?” He hadn’t mentioned any of the others, and I didn’t want to look at them.
“I’m not sure,” Duffy admitted. “What I see as clear evidence, they might view as speculation. I’d like to gather more information.” That sounded vaguely ominous.
“I’m not going to the scene of the crime so you can try to dig five-year-old bullets out of a tree, Duffy. I have fictional things to make up for you to do.” Might as well embrace the crazy.
He spread his hands to deflect any misunderstanding. “I have no intention of asking you to do that.”
“Good.” But I knew something else was coming. It was in his tone.
“What I would ask is that you join me in a visit to Damien Mosley’s apartment in West New York,” Duffy said.
I shook my head reflexively. “No, not this time. Whatever you think you can find in an apartment that nobody’s lived in for years is your problem, Duffy. I have to write a thousand words today, and that means I have to get my head in the game. I don’t have time to traipse out to West New York with you. I wouldn’t be any help, anyway.”
“I disagree. You have a good eye for abnormality that can be quite useful.”
I didn’t point out that I felt my eye for abnormality was the quality that helped me create Duffy Madison. That would have been cruel, if accurate. I had been looking for a character who was not like everybody else, and Duffy was clearly that.
“You know what you’re looking for,” I encouraged him. “You brought that picture of the bent tree branch. I never would have thought to look at that if you hadn’t led me to it. Trust your talents, Duffy.”
He stood up and started gathering the photographs from my dining room table. “Of course,” he said quietly. “I understand. You are a busy woman, and you have obligations.” He slid the pictures back into the envelope and sealed it. “It’s just that I am used to working with a partner, and Ben is not able to fill that role for me on this case. It feels a little odd, that’s all. Sorry to trouble you.”
If you think fictional characters can’t successfully employ passive aggression, you won’t ever understand why I found myself in Duffy’s car heading to West New York. But I made him promise I would be back by five. I needed to write the thousand words and be ready to go by seven.
I had a date.