Pay dirt, p.28
Pay Dirt, page 28
I finally took Peppy for a long walk, down to the river, passing the boathouse where I’d hidden the wrench. Why couldn’t Lucia Bednarek talk tonight? I fumed, spinning rocks into the river.
Of course, she could be doing the prudent thing, checking my credentials. I walked back to the trailer, stopping for sushi at one of the little carryout places that dotted Sixth Street. I ate it while I watched Mike Shepherd use amazing intuitive leaps to solve crimes in Brokenwood, New Zealand. He was like so many other modern detectives who solved crimes in an hour or so without a lot of evidence. I wondered if they went to a special detective school where I could take a refresher course: the Zen of detection, something like that.
At ten, as I was getting ready for bed, Lucia called.
“I’m at the Kansas City airport. I thought maybe I should come out in person to see Rickey, or see if it’s Rickey, but I don’t know where you are or how to get to you.”
I was going to suggest a rental car, or perhaps a bus service, but she sounded dejected, maybe scared. I told her I’d pick her up, but to wait in the terminal, since I was fifty miles away.
She called again as I pulled onto the interstate, wanting to know where I was, and yet again fifteen minutes after that. Clarina had annoyed everyone she met; I wondered if that was a genetic trait.
Lucia Bednarek was pacing the sidewalk in front of the terminal when I pulled up. She was a thickset fair woman, very like the snapshot of her sister except for her lighter coloring.
“Finally!” she greeted me. “I’ve been waiting so long I thought you’d gotten lost.”
She was carrying a large suitcase and wearing a puffy coat that doubled her circumference. It took some doing to get her and the coat into the front seat. Peppy, eager to help greet her, didn’t make it easier, but Lucia said she didn’t mind dogs, she had a dachshund at home.
“My neighbor, she’s agreed to come over and feed Jippy and walk him while I’m away. How long do you think I need to stay here?”
“I expect not more than two days. Where did you book a room?”
“I’ve never traveled like this before,” Lucia said. “Not on the spur of the moment, just getting on a plane, like I was in a movie or something. But if Rickey was murdered—I didn’t think they’d have gangs in a place like Lawrence. When I read about the town, it didn’t sound like a violent place.”
“Her death is strange for anyplace,” I said. “She wasn’t shot, though. Someone hit her on the head.”
“She must have made them mad. She was always getting our dad totally pissed off. She made everyone around her mad at her, me included, but especially our dad. She wanted him to change his name, can you believe that? She said ‘Bednarek’ made people tease her more at school than they already did. They’d yell ‘Who wants to take a fat girl like you to bed’ and instead of fighting back she’d come home bawling that it was all Daddy’s fault, and he should change our last name. Of course he wouldn’t, but she changed her first name. Not that I blame her for that. They called her Ulricke, for Pete’s sake, after our grandma. She changed it to Rickey.”
“Did kids at school make fun of her because your town was called Skaneateles?” I asked.
“Yeah, that, too. She was always kind of stocky, not fat, built pretty much like me. No one ever bothered me like they did her, but in seventh grade, God, makes you glad you only have to be a teenager once! This gang of girls started telling her she should move to Fatty-atlas!
“So then she started telling people she was adopted, and her real family was named Bradshaw and came over on the Mayflower. It was embarrassing. She always had a different story about who she was and who her real family was. Sometimes they came over on the Mayflower, sometimes they were British aristocrats who had to go into hiding after the Revolution, and so they hid out in the hills around Skaneateles.
“The worst was the time she claimed she was Black, that we had adopted her and wouldn’t tell her. See, she was kind of dark-complected and the rest of us Bednareks are blondies. She made a fool of herself at one of the Black historical society meetings. I wished she really had been adopted, it was excruciating.
“Not that I wished her dead, but I didn’t miss her when she took off. She’d done it before, been gone once for three years, and then came back because she couldn’t keep a job.”
“What about the rest of your family?” I asked. “Didn’t anyone miss her?”
“It was just the two of us. Daddy’s family are mostly in Michigan, and Mother, she only had her own mom and our auntie Kalina. Mother and Daddy are both dead. And no one was friends with Rickey, she was just so weird. Every now and then someone at church asks about her, but no one really noticed she was gone. Or if they did, it was a relief not to listen to her conspiracies about the way Mother and Daddy lied to her about her true identity.”
I could feel how embarrassing it must have been to see her sister make a spectacle of herself. Even so, I felt sympathy for Rickey, who felt so different from the people around her that she kept trying to create an alternate version of her life.
“Did she ever claim to be a navy SEAL?” I asked, thinking of the job candidate I’d been vetting.
“What? Why would she do that? She wasn’t interested in the navy or physical fitness or any of that stuff.”
“What about social justice?” I asked. “The one person in Lawrence who she connected to is a guy who leads protests over environmental issues. He joined her in picketing a school where a teacher was fired for having too woke a curriculum.”
“That would be Rickey all right.” Lucia sighed heavily. “That summer George Floyd was murdered, it was like Rickey invented Black Lives Matter. She took part in every march, and she filled the living room with posters and literature. Then she started worshipping at this Black church in Auburn.”
“Do—did—the two of you live together?” I asked.
“I still live in my folks’ house. Whenever Rickey was in Skaneateles, she’d stay there.”
We had reached the Lawrence exit of the turnpike. I asked Lucia again where she was staying.
“I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t know how to find a hotel. All I was trying to do was figure out how to get to Kansas. And then I had to pay a fortune for traveling at the last minute. I thought they had compassion fares for bereaved people, but can you believe? The airline wanted to see Rickey’s death certificate. How could I show them a death certificate when I didn’t even know if she was dead? Can’t you put me up?”
“I don’t live here,” I said. “I’m renting a trailer with one bed and no spare sheets. There are a dozen motels in the area; we’ll find one with good rates.”
“Just for tonight? If there’s a couch or something?” Her voice trailed off plaintively. “You’re the person who told me my sister is dead. Probably is dead, I think you could give me a little support.”
You’d think a private eye with a reputation for toughness and recklessness could put her foot down, but I thought of the journey she’d made. Seeing the dead body of a sibling, even an unloved one, was going to be a shock.
“Just one night. Tomorrow we’ll book you into a motel.”
When we got to the trailer I asked Lucia if she needed to eat. I half expected her to demand a meal, but she said she’d found food at the Chicago airport where she changed planes. “They had this huge food court. Chinese and Mexican and everything.”
She dropped her coat on the couch next to her suitcase. She tossed underwear and a sweater onto the floor, found some pajamas decorated with owls and penguins, and a toiletry bag. She didn’t bother to pick up her clothes, just demanded the bathroom.
“I’m on New York time. Beddy-bye for me.”
I had left my papers out on the kitchen table and was pulling them together when Lucia put a hand on my arm. “There. That proves it’s Rickey.”
She was looking at the photo of the woman wearing the floral-hair wreath.
“You know her? Is she one of your ancestors?”
Lucia gave a derisive bark. “In Rickey’s dreams. That’s what started her most recent outburst. When Auntie Kalina died, Rickey, she thought she’d go through all the papers in the attic to see if there was anything valuable. She found a box of letters and diaries and photos going back to eighteen-hundred-something. Rickey said they were letters and newspaper stories and so on about abolition and slavery. This picture was one of them. So, of course, Rickey got it in her head that we must be related to these abolitionists.”
Lucia was gesticulating wildly, slapping her forehead for emphasis. Her pajamas and toothbrush fell to the floor.
“I tried to tell her that our family was still in Kielce, in Poland, during the American Civil War. Auntie Kalina moved into that Skaneateles house when her and Uncle Jarvis came to live in Skaneateles, and all those papers were probably in the attic when she moved in, but once Rickey made up her mind to some fairy-tale story, nothing could change it.”
“I don’t suppose you brought any of those papers with you, did you?” I tried to sound casual, not like Peppy with a rabbit in view.
“Rickey took them all when she left. She showed them to me when she first found them, but when I wouldn’t believe they belonged to our family, she said she was going to take them someplace where she could prove she was descended from the women in the letters.”
Lucia’s lips tightened with remembered anger. “She said since I couldn’t see the papers for what they were, I’d lost any right to read them. She grabbed them away from me and left the house. I thought she was taking them back to Aunt Kalina’s place, but when I didn’t see her for a week or so and went over there, the house was locked up.
“Some real estate company in Syracuse was putting the house on the market for this distant cousin who Auntie Kalina left it to. I got the agent to let me in to see if Rickey had left a message or anything, but she hadn’t. And all the old papers were gone, too.”
“What about the distant cousin—did you ask them if they knew anything about your sister?”
“Please. This is some guy in Arizona who we never heard of. I guess Auntie Kalina looked at how crazy Rickey was and decided to leave the house to someone as far away as possible. She knew I didn’t need another house, since I already own the one that belonged to our parents.”
Something in her voice made me think Lucia was pretending to take the high road. She may have thought Auntie Kalina should have left the house to her.
I prodded Lucia back to the papers Rickey had found in the attic, to see if she remembered anything from her brief chance to study them.
“The writing was so faded you could hardly make it out, but some woman named Carruthers had been murdered at a school along with the man who ran the school. Whoever was writing the letter said the murders upset her mother so much that the mother was going back to Skaneateles.
“Why Rickey thought that proved anything about our family tree beats me. I’m kind of surprised she didn’t call herself ‘Carruthers,’ since that was the dramatic part of the story. Rickey always wanted the most dramatic role. But Coffin was her favorite pretend great-great-grandmother.”
“Why Coffin?” I said.
“There was this woman, Martha Coffin, who lived in our area back during the Civil War, and Rickey was obsessed with her, her and her sister Lucretia. They both had a million children, so Rickey pretended she was descended from them. ‘They knew how sisters were supposed to act,’ Rickey would say, like it was my fault we couldn’t get along.” Lucia’s face turned red, then she remembered her sister was dead.
“I don’t know where this Clarina name came from, unless Rickey stumbled on some other Coffin sister who was called that.”
“I think Clarina was a Kansas suffragist and abolitionist.” I picked up Lucia’s pj’s and toothbrush and steered her toward the bathroom.
While she was noisily brushing her teeth, and then showering, I stuffed her sweater and underwear back into the suitcase. I saw she’d packed a black dress and heels, anticipating a funeral.
I opened the couch into a bed. I’d only bought one set of sheets and I wasn’t in the mood to share, but I did bring a blanket out for her.
When Lucia saw the sofa bed she was dismayed. She wanted a pillow, sheets, a better mattress.
I gave her my Death Eaters smile. “All those things are available at any of the motels in the area. I’ll be glad to drive you to one of them right now, or in the morning as soon as we’ve been to the morgue.”
“Oh, all right,” she grumbled.
When I went into the bathroom, I had to remind myself to be thankful that Lucia had answered my ad. She hadn’t closed the shower door tightly, and there was a quarter inch of water on the floor.
When I emerged, carrying towels heavy with water to the kitchen sink so they could drain overnight, Lucia said, “It’s freezing in here. Can’t you turn up the heat?”
“It’s as high as it will go. Socks will help. And your coat.”
43
The Sergeant’s Softer Side
Despite her complaints about the couch, Lucia slept heavily, and loudly. I shut the door between the bedroom and the living area, but the walls were thin, and Lucia’s snoring kept jerking me awake. The first time, around one in the morning, I sent a text to Deke Everard.
I’ve found someone who thinks she can identify Clarina Coffin. Is Coffin’s body in the Kansas City Medical Exam facility? Do you want to ride over with us in the morning?
I switched my phone off; Deke would call as soon as he read the message and I wanted as much sleep as Lucia’s saw blades allowed.
In fact, Deke, or actually Peppy, woke me at eight. He was pounding on the trailer, which sent her into a frenzy of barking. I pulled on a pair of jeans under my sleep shirt and staggered to the door, Peppy at my heels, keeping up her warning.
Lucia was sitting up on the couch. “Can’t you shut up that dog? I’m trying to sleep.”
“You’ll have a better time tonight when you’re in your motel bed.” I opened the door and let in the sergeant.
He was wearing the frown that had become his permanent greeting to me. “This had better be on the level, Warshawski.”
“Good morning, Sergeant. I’m glad to see you, too. Come in and meet Lucia Bednarek, who thinks Clarina may be her sister.”
I stepped aside to let him enter. Peppy, uncomfortable with the tension in the room, was growling softly, hackles raised. I kept a hand on her head. “Easy, girl. He can’t help himself, but he isn’t going to hurt us.”
“You can’t let a man in here,” Lucia screeched. “I’m not dressed.”
Deke walked over to the couch. He crouched next to Lucia and spoke in a soft warm voice that I’d never heard.
“My apologies, Ms. Bednarek. I’m Deke Everard. I’m a sergeant with the Lawrence police. Warshawski here texted me that she’d found you, but she wasn’t answering her phone. I didn’t know I’d have the pleasure of meeting you first thing this morning. If Clarina Coffin was your sister, I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry, too, that we have to ask you to identify her body.”
Lucia blossomed under his tender manner. “That’s okay, officer. I’ll just be glad to have some closure with my sister. And I’m grateful to this other detective tracking me down. Like I told her, my sister was always making up stories about herself and using fake names, but her real name was Ulricke Bednarek, except she changed it to Rickey.”
“Of course until you see her, we won’t know for sure the dead woman is your sister,” Deke said. “Why don’t you put on some clothes so we can drive over to Kansas City and get this ordeal out of the way. Warshawski, you come outside with me. We’ll chat in the car while Ms. Bednarek is dressing.”
“Sure, Sergeant.” I produced a Little Miss Sunshine smile. I was carefree and openhearted, not frowny and mean like Deke. “I just need shoes and socks.”
And to brush my teeth and wash my face. I did all these things at a leisurely pace. Deke’s frown deepened and Lucia cried out to hurry it up, she needed to get into the bathroom.
When I finally went outside, Peppy came with me, sticking close to my legs. A fine freezing mist was blowing. Deke’s unmarked car had a grille between the front and back seats, which didn’t allow room for the dog to get in with me. I insisted on staying outside with her, which didn’t improve the sergeant’s temper.
“How did you get on to this woman, what is her name? Bednarek?”
“It was an inspired guess.” I told him what Trig had told me, about Clarina’s having been bullied over her weight and her town name. “There was a newspaper article Clarina had studied, dating back to the 1860s, about one of the abolitionists coming from Skaneateles, but until I heard your aunt Gertrude say the name out loud, and say that her own family had come from there, I didn’t know how to pronounce it. I ran an ad on social media; Lucia Bednarek responded. She decided to fly out on the spur of the moment yesterday evening.”
“And you couldn’t tell me you’d made this Skaneateles connection?”
“I figured you knew all these things, since you grew up hearing these stories from your mom and Aunt Gertrude. As for the guess to try Skaneateles, I could see you roll your eyes if I asked you to believe something Trig said.”
He bit his lip and looked away.
“I was pretty sure she was Clarina’s sister,” I added, “but I wasn’t going to notify you until I was convinced. I didn’t want another lecture on hotdogging or wasting police resources.”
“I’ll bite: What made you believe her?”
“When she came into the trailer last night, I had a photo on the table that she recognized.”
“Photo of Clarina?”
“No. It was one that Clarina had found in a great-aunt’s attic, supposedly with a cache of documents that dated to the Civil War. The sisters had argued over their provenance—Clarina thought they were papers from her family, Lucia says they belonged to whoever originally owned the house.
“When Clarina took off for Lawrence, she seems to have brought all those papers and photos with her—she kept making veiled hints to Cady and to your mother and Gertrude about evidence she had of Lawrence’s history. Anyway, I found the photo in the trailer where Clarina had been living.”
