Pay dirt, p.29
Pay Dirt, page 29
Deke slammed his right fist into his palm. “Why am I only hearing about this photo and the attic and crap for the first time? What did you do with all the papers you found? Concealing evidence in a murder investigation is a crime!”
Peppy gave a warning bark: Don’t slug V.I. I thought uneasily of the wrench I’d sent to the Cheviot lab in Chicago. My excuse to myself was that I wasn’t sure the wrench was evidence of a crime. Plus Deke had impounded my car, as if he thought I really was a criminal. I stayed confrontational.
“It’s okay, girl. He’s frustrated that I figured out something he couldn’t. Sergeant, I was third in line at Clarina’s trailer. Someone had searched it with a violent hand. Then your crew went in. And then me. This photo, which was an original, not a copy, was there, along with blurry printouts of newspaper photos dating to the 1860s. These were the scraps you and the intruders left behind.”
I paused, still smiling, to give him a chance to acknowledge his crew had been sloppy. He didn’t say anything.
“Either your crew or the first intruders had taken all the other documents. I had only those three pictures, so that’s where I started. At the Origins Museum and Library in Topeka, they dug up the newspaper article for me, the one Clarina had found. They couldn’t identify the photo, but they gave me some provenance for it. I showed it to your mother and to Ms. Perec yesterday—didn’t your mom tell you about it?”
“I do not consult with my mother on active investigations.”
“You just show up when the water is getting a little hot? Your mother and Ms. Perec are sitting on a secret. Do you know what that is?”
“A figment of your imagination,” he said grimly. “You’re harassing them because you can’t justify—” He cut himself short, remembering in the nick of time that I had probably identified Clarina Coffin. “My mother wants to file an order of protection against you.”
“Right. That will help protect her and Ms. Perec from me consulting with them as I uncover more information about Clarina’s death. Rickey, I should remember to call her.”
We were both getting wet. And cold. The dog was, too, but she didn’t seem to mind. Deke wasn’t going to show any weakness, such as admitting that standing in freezing rain is not pleasant, so I suggested he might like to look at the photo.
“Hopefully Lucia is dressed by now, but you can wait on the step if you’re worried.”
He followed me in without saying anything, but once we were inside, his professional manner returned. He smiled at Lucia, said they’d stop for something to eat on their way to Kansas City.
I handed Deke the print that I’d left on the table. “Does she look familiar to you?”
“She’s old, Warshawski, not someone I would have met before.”
“In a family photo album, I’m thinking.”
“Unthink it. I have not seen this picture before. Tell me about it, Ms. Bednarek. This was among your sister’s possessions, right?”
Lucia started the same saga I’d heard last night. Peppy followed me into the bedroom where I changed out of my wet clothes.
Lucia had used the bedroom to dress. Her penguin pajamas were on the floor, along with the socks she’d slept in. I kicked them to the door. I’m not much of a housekeeper, but it annoyed me that Lucia thought her role as chief mourner entitled her to fill up my space.
I hung my own damp clothes over the baseboard where the heat came into the room and put on dry ones before checking my phone: it had been dinging with incoming texts while I’d been outside with Deke.
Leo Knaub, my account manager at the Cheviot forensic lab, had left five messages, demanding that I call ASAP. I have company, I wrote back. Give me ten minutes.
When I went back to the main room, Lucia had gotten as far as Great-aunt Kalina and the papers in her attic, and why Rickey thought she had a right to stuff that belonged to them equally.
Deke was saying, “You said no one in your town liked her much. Would someone have followed her out here to kill her?”
“After she’d been gone two years?” I said. “I suppose it could have taken that long to track her down. She seems to have been quite skillful at avoiding surveillance.”
“She rubbed people the wrong way with all her make-believe,” Lucia said. “People didn’t want her around, but it’s not like she threatened them. At least, I don’t think she did. . . .”
Her voice trailed off uncertainly. “Do you think she was maybe blackmailing someone? And she ran away under a fake name to keep them from killing her?”
“Before we worry about killers from Skaneateles, why don’t we drive to the morgue and make sure that Clarina really is Rickey Bednarek,” I said.
“We aren’t driving to the morgue. I’m taking Ms. Bednarek. And I don’t want to see you in my rearview mirror. If Ms. Bednarek wants to tell you about it when I bring her back, that’s her business.”
“I’m sure Lucia is going to want to give media interviews,” I said. “And she’s going to want to be someplace more comfortable than this trailer, with its one bathroom, and a shower that floods the floor if you don’t close the door just so.”
I stuffed Lucia’s pajamas and socks into her suitcase, found the ziplock bag for her toiletries, and put her toothpaste and makeup into it, and forced the case to close.
Lucia watched me, squawking. “Those are my things! Now my pajamas are going to get all wet. And my funeral outfit!”
“Sergeant Everard will help you check into a motel when you get back from Kansas City. It will be so much easier if you already have your case with you.”
I took her picture and forwarded it to Zoë. Lucia Bednarek from Skaneateles. Probably Clarina’s sis.
Zoë replied instantly. Is she with you? I’m coming straight over.
I wrote back, Deke’s here, about to take her to KC to see the body. I’m disinvited.
Even before they were out the door, Deke’s phone rang. He looked at the screen, then back at me. “You sicced Zoë on me? Do you need to win every confrontation you’re in?”
“Only when my expertise is disrespected.”
44
Wrenching Problems
The trailer felt more depressing than ever. Between my damp clothes and the towels Lucia had soaked, the place smelled like a wet sheep. I took everything to a Laundromat and left them to wash while I went on to the Hippo.
I sat in my favorite spot, on a stool in the window, and drank my first coffee while staring at nothing. My shoulders relaxed; at my feet, Peppy curled up around her empty milk bowl and fell asleep. We’d both been too stressed lately.
When I’d ordered a second cortado, I called Leo back.
He got straight to the point. “There’s a DNA match between blood traces and hair on that wrench, and a DNA request filed two weeks ago by the Lawrence Kansas police. If this wrench is evidence of a crime, our lab can’t hold on to it. It needs to be with the police or the FBI ASAP. In addition to the hair, we found microscopic traces of scalp tissue. If you’re not going to take care of reporting these items, Cheviot will.”
“Did you find fingerprints on the wrench?” I asked.
“Nothing usable. The surface doesn’t hold prints well, and too many hands had been touching it, some in gloves.”
“Leo, I found this wrench underneath a garbage can in the apartment I was renting. It had been put there in the hopes that the cops would find it and arrest me for Clarina Coffin’s murder. I was hoping it was a red herring, but sent it to you to find out one way or another.”
“Now you know. And that means you act now. If not, Cheviot will terminate our relationship with you.”
“Do you want to send it directly to the Lawrence police?” I asked. “I have the address here.”
“Of course—” he started, then stopped, imagining the legal headaches if they sent this out of the blue to the LKPD. Cheviot investigators spend half their lives in court, testifying on forensic evidence. It wouldn’t do their own reputation a lot of good to explain why they’d had the wrench in their possession for the better part of a week without notifying the cops. They could blame it on me, but that would not only add to their days in front of a judge, trying to exculpate themselves, but it would also end my relationship with them. Other, more important clients would hesitate to send them confidential projects when word leaked out through my connections that they’d screwed with me.
“You are a piece of work, Warshawski,” he finally said. “Do I send this to you or your lawyer?”
“I’m in Kansas, Leo. Give me five minutes to get an address for you.”
I called Lou. “You know how you told me you and Ed like to accessorize?” I asked, after a hurried catch-up. “I’m ordering accessories online. Could I have them delivered to you?”
“What are we talking about?”
“Mmm. Something like punk metal jewelry.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Me and Ed, we’ve been eating our hearts out, longing for that heavy-metal look, and we’re the guys who can carry it off. Send it to the yard; we’re there in business hours more than we’re home.”
When I called Leo back with the scrapyard address, he told me I’d have the wrench Monday morning. “If we don’t see a report that it’s in law enforcement hands by Monday night, you and I will be having a very serious conversation.”
“Copy that,” I said. Forty-eight hours, roughly, until I needed the wrench in the LKPD’s hands, with proof I could share with Leo. Piece o’ cake.
I was gritty-eyed from my short night’s sleep, but too restless to go back to the trailer to try for more. Although the sky was still overcast, the drizzle had ended. I walked with Peppy back to the Laundromat to put my linens in a dryer.
Before turning to my Chicago clients, I remembered another distraction: I had to let Murray know I’d discovered Clarina’s identity—he wouldn’t forgive me if he learned it from the wires first.
Murray was impressed by my investigative skill, but asked if knowing Clarina had been born as Ulricke Bednarek gave me a reason for her murder.
“I suppose it’s possible,” I said. “If her sister can be believed, everyone in Skaneateles despised Clarina. I’m focusing more on Lawrence. Do you want to go to New York and track down whoever she’d most annoyed?”
“If you’ll pay first-class airfare,” Murray said.
“I’m not paying any airfare at all. This case has already put me several grand in the hole just for legal fees.”
I told him about my meeting with Pauline Tulloh. “She discussed her family’s dynamics in a cool impersonal way. I wondered if that was a deliberate distraction—you know, show the audience how the billionaires bicker, keep their attention away from the important acts on the other side of the stage.”
“Those being?”
“Whether her brother engineered Clarina’s, or Rickey’s, death. The most genuine thing she said was that her mother asks Pauline to support charities that she knows her husband won’t approve of. It sounded as though charities might mean indigent friends and relations.”
“You know, Warshawski, you should hire yourself out to a pest management company. People want to know if they have rats or roaches or whatever, and you just stand in the middle of their living room. Pretty soon, every vermin within a mile will come charging out to get you. No one in Lawrence cared about that hill or that house or even the drug sales until you came along.”
I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or the most unpleasant criticism I’d ever endured, but when we hung up, I finally buckled down and cleared up the skimming that one of the partners was doing to the accounts at a law firm I work with. Put the report and a bill in an email. I entered my time sheet against the four thousand dollars Valerie Granev had paid me. I was about sixteen hundred down.
Zoë called as I was on my way back to the Camry to collect Peppy. She had made it to the morgue in Kansas City in time to intercept Deke and Lucia in the lobby.
“Clarina is Lucia’s sister, all right. They look amazingly alike, even though Clarina was dark and Lucia is so blond, but it’s not just that, it’s that they have the same whiny-aggressive attitude.”
She hesitated, then said in a rush, “I know you feel too many people are counting on you, but you are amazing. You figured out Clarina must have come from Skaneateles. And, guess what, Ben Pike, my two-fisted tightwad of an editor, agrees that the story will sell, so he’s paying to send me to New York to get background on Clarina. Ulricke. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to calling her that. Anyway, if I were in the room with you, you’d get the biggest hug you ever got in your life.”
I laughed. So much better to hear than being called a pest magnet. “When do you leave?”
“First flight to Syracuse tomorrow morning, by way of Chicago. Want me to stop and say hi to any of your friends during the layover?”
“Call them all and tell them that thanks to me, you’re the next Martha Gellhorn.”
The dog and I walked down a side street to my favorite sandwich shop. I was going to take lunch to a park so I could eat outside with her.
The air was cold but not unbearable; I had my heavier coat over a hoodie, and Peppy was wearing fur. As we crossed Massachusetts Street, a Porsche revved its engine and turned in front of us, rubber squealing, missing us by a hair. I pulled Peppy against my legs and watched the Porsche go down Seventh Street, past the Lion’s Heart, then turn the corner toward the municipal parking lot.
Peppy and I followed. The Porsche was in the lot, close to the Lion’s Heart back door. The engine was running with that deep thrumming good sports cars make when they’re idling. I put the sandwich down so I could use my phone to take his picture. The weedy-looking kid whom Zoë had photographed dealing out the back door emerged. He looked furtively around, didn’t see any cops, and handed over an envelope. Trevor gave him one in return.
I walked over as he was getting into the car. “Trevor!” I cried in a hearty voice. “Good to see you again.”
He looked up, startled. He’d posted my photo on his trolling messages, but he was the kind of jerk who didn’t actually register women’s faces, probably not women his own age, let alone someone old enough to be his mother.
“We keep meeting in parking lots,” I said. “First at your fraternity, and now down here. I have a nice video of you and your buddy at the Lion’s Heart. I’ll be sharing it with Sergeant Everard at the LKPD.”
He took a step toward me, fists balled, expression ugly, but a cluster of shoppers passed us on their way to their cars. He climbed into his ride, slamming the door hard, made a great show of gunning the engine.
I pulled Peppy away as he roared out of the lot and saw she had her nose in my lunch bag. I yanked her head out of it.
“Is this your payback for taking you far from home? Stealing food?” I asked.
She wagged her tail doubtfully.
“Yep. My bad, leaving it on the ground.”
I walked back around the corner, past the bar again, on my way to get another meal. It was the lunch hour, and more people were starting to show up for noon-day drinks. I was crossing the street to keep the dog away from the crowd when someone else I recognized went into the Lion’s Heart. Brett Santich. I was tempted to tell him he’d missed young Trevor, but decided it would be more interesting to see if he was meeting someone. I trotted back to the library so I could leave Peppy in the car while I checked out the bar.
The room was full enough when I got there that no one paid special attention to me. My prey was at a corner table near the kitchen where he could see the room. He seemed to focus on each newcomer for a few seconds, deciding on friend, foe, or neutral, so I didn’t stare but wandered to the bar to order a drink. I don’t much care for beer, but it seemed the easiest way to blend in. I ordered a Free State, since that was the local brew Zoë had drunk, and took it to a corner where I could stand looking at my guy without seeming to.
Don Wilton, the Lion’s Heart owner, came out from the kitchen and sat down with Santich. The two men didn’t seem to be talking as much as waiting—every time the front door opened, they’d look over and then shrug. After ten minutes or so, their party arrived: they both sat up straighter, and Wilton gave a half wave.
They were joined by a tall tanned man in pressed jeans and cowboy boots, wearing a Stetson and a fringed leather jacket over a sweatshirt that advertised Wichita State University basketball. Not Robert Tulloh. The other brother, Jacob.
Jacob Tulloh with Don Wilton. I felt like one of those cartoon characters whose hair stands on end after an electric shock. The Wilton family, those losers who lost their share of the family grain elevators while Matthew Tulloh turned his wife’s into a massive fortune. Grandmother Tulloh cackling over the losers at Emmaline and Matthew’s fiftieth anniversary.
The Wiltons were the charity Pauline Tulloh supported for her mother, her hapless siblings and nephews. An angel bailed out the Lion’s Heart in the depths of the pandemic. Grandma Tulloh would have forbidden any money going to the Wiltons, but Pauline helped her mother help her cousins.
Jacob Tulloh and Lawrence police chief Rowland McDowell were old pals going back to their college days. If Santich was useful to the Tullohs in their Yancy dealings, Jacob would see that he wasn’t harassed by the local law.
The trio headed for a narrow staircase rising behind the kitchen door. I hadn’t noticed it before and went over to look.
The barman appeared at my side. “What are you doing here?”
I smiled. “Admiring the architecture.”
“You’ve admired it long enough. Pay for your beer, which you haven’t drunk, and get out.”
I paid for my beer and left, the bartender close behind me. I closed the door slowly so that I could check the lock mechanism. Unlike the upper floor, Wilton used a standard keypad lock, easy to bypass. The bar had an alarm system. Harder to bypass, but not impossible.
