“I haven’t done anything wrong.” I paused. “Stupid, maybe, but not wrong. That’s why I called the police.”
Flint grunted. “When did you get here?”
“I guess, around one-thirty. I got here before Trixie.”
“She wasn’t already home?”
“No, she’d been away somewhere, I don’t know where, and we arranged to meet here at that time.”
“So both of you went into the house at the same time.”
“That’s right.” I remembered something. “As we were going into the house, Trixie thought maybe the door was already unlocked, but she wasn’t sure. You know how, sometimes, you turn the deadbolt, but it’ll still turn even if it’s not in the lock position?”
Flint shrugged. I went through the rest of it with him, how I’d gone into the basement for some coffee and found Benson. That Trixie came downstairs wondering what had happened to me, screamed, found a note, started to panic. That she handcuffed me to the railing and took off in my car. That she called Sarah at work to rescue me.
“Hmm,” Flint said. “So what were you meeting her here for…?” He leaned in a little closer, as if there were someone else in the car he didn’t want to overhear. “You can tell me. Nice-looking lady, I gather. Your wife might not understand, but I would.”
I swallowed. “It wasn’t like that. Trixie and I were friends, from when we used to live on the street. She helped me out when I was in trouble, with that other mess.”
Flint nodded, remembering.
“She’d been having trouble lately with the local paper, and wanted my help with it, and I told her there really wasn’t anything I could do, and then she set up this meeting between me and Benson—I thought she was going to be there but she bailed—thinking I’d try to talk him out of taking her picture, but I explained to her I couldn’t do that. But there was a huge misunderstanding, with Benson, and it got me in a lot of trouble at work. I was pretty pissed with her. But she called, said she was going to come clean, tell me what kind of trouble she was in, and I agreed to come out and see her, one last time, to hear her side of the story.” I shook my head. “Good call.”
“So you weren’t having a sexual relationship with Ms. Snelling?” Flint asked.
“No.”
“You weren’t one of her clients? You didn’t get those marks on your wrist some other way? You weren’t coming out here, paying her to do some things for you your wife’s just not too crazy about?” He smiled, like we were just a couple of guys, talking. “Look, it happens. You’re married awhile, you have the kids, the wife’s just not into it like she used to be, and her idea of kinky is doing it with the lights on.”
“Don’t speak about my wife that way,” I said.
Flint’s eyebrows went up. “My apologies. That was rude. I was just speaking generally. But you didn’t answer my question. Were you paying her? Were you hiring her for one of her little sessions?”
“No.”
Flint kept going over the same ground, again and again. What time I got there, what I’d been doing before my arrival, where Trixie might have gone, did she have any family that I knew of, who might have done this to Benson, whether I’d noticed anyone else around the house. My earlier meeting with Benson, how it had gone wrong, my subsequent demotion at the Metropolitan.
I was getting a headache.
“So both you and Ms. Snelling, you had really good reasons to be angry with Martin Benson,” Detective Flint said.
I thought about that. “The thing is, the damage had already been done,” I said. “The paper got the picture they wanted, they ran it. I think that’s when things started to totally unravel for Trixie. Someone saw that picture, tipped off someone who’d been trying to find her, and they tracked her down to this house. It was the thing she’d been worried about from the beginning.”
“And what was Martin Benson doing here in the first place?”
It was a good question. “Maybe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe he was trying to get more dirt on Trixie, and the guys who came to get her found him instead.”
Flint’s lips pursed out, considering it.
“Or,” he said, tipping his fedora back an inch and exposing the top of his white forehead, “it could be a whole lot simpler than that.”