Pay dirt, p.34
Pay Dirt, page 34
The dirt walls held shelves that must date back to the house’s origins. Hand-printed labels were still stuck to some cans, with lettering so faded that it couldn’t be read. Some of the cans had exploded, but so long ago that the contents had dried past identification.
The chest had a padlock, but the chest itself was made of a light metal. Using a stick as a lever, I pried the top open. The padlock held, but the metal around it peeled back.
I brought the lantern over to inspect the contents. Most of what lay inside was paper. The top document was a notebook with the University of Kansas logo on it. Inside the front cover, Clarina Coffin’s name was printed, with the address of the Prairie View Trailer Park. “Reward if found and returned,” she’d written.
The notebook seemed to be Clarina’s journal, which included an autobiography called “Following in My Family’s Footsteps,” along with notes she’d made about documents she’d read in various libraries. She’d also felt free to help herself to some original material. Tucked between two pages in her notebook was a yellowed piece of newsprint, so fragile pieces fell from it when I tried to lift it. I could see the header: yancy ledger, kansas oldest negro newspaper, June 28 1867.
A binder held more original documents, including telegrams and letters from members of the Grellier family and people named Entwistle. Zoë had mentioned that name in her first report from Skaneateles. Elias Entwistle had built the house where Clarina found the old letters and papers that prompted her move to Kansas.
Beneath the binder were three books bound in red leather, which had faded with time. I opened one to the elegant script I’d seen last week in Topeka. Abby Langford and Tommy Gellman, librarian and conservator at the Kansas Origins Museum, would be horrified to see Florence Wheelock’s precious journals down in this damp cellar.
An additional journal, in a different hand, bound more simply in mildewing cardboard, lay at the bottom of the chest, next to some packages of dried fruit and yogurt chips.
I barely had feeling in my hands. The latex gloves I’d worn to keep from leaving prints on my evidence bag were no protection from the cold.
I thought about leaving everything in situ, but I was afraid Tulloh’s team would come back to the chimney when they didn’t find me in the woods. If they really started searching, it wouldn’t take long to uncover this hideout.
I needed to save the journals. If my pursuers found them, they’d either destroy them outright or leave the paper here to disintegrate.
Florence’s three volumes fit into my daypack, although I couldn’t zip it completely shut. Clarina’s notebook I tucked into the waistband of the jeans I’d been wearing since yesterday morning. The cardboard-bound journal was too big, its contents too fragile, to risk wearing it. I carried it in my left hand over to the brick ladder.
My shoulders and arms were still throbbing from the battering they’d taken on Saturday. Those same battered muscles needed to hoist me up the chimney stack, one-handed to protect the binder. Inching up, leaning into the brick stack so it took my weight, fumbling for each handhold, pushing up with my quads.
When I reached the top, I stuck my head cautiously around the chimney stack. My sweat froze in the harsh wind.
The snow had stopped, leaving only a thin cover on the ground, but enough to show that my pursuit had gone back to the Dundee house. I would also be leaving prints, but that couldn’t be helped. At least I knew which way not to go.
I moved as quickly as I could, ordering my body to ignore the cold, ignore my swollen legs and trembling arms, repeating my old basketball coach’s mantras. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. Quitters never win; winners never quit. That was before St. Cecelia beat us 98 to 40, but we never quit.
I’d planned on walking in the road when I got there, easier terrain in my running shoes. A few yards from the edge I tripped on a root. I was clutching the cardboard journal and so I fell awkwardly, hitting my right shoulder hard. I lay still, catching my breath. A black Jeep Cherokee cruised by, slowly, Don Wilton in the backseat peering out the open window into the woods.
When it passed, I counted the seconds until it reappeared. About three minutes, and then five more as it made a return trip. I could lie here until the weather warmed up, when flowers and bushes would grow high enough to mark my grave. Or I could get back in motion.
Crawling, latex gloves in tatters, fingers bleeding, shoulder pounding. Lying flat every time I heard tires on gravel.
And then a crashing through the undergrowth, a short sharp bark, a man’s grunt. “Got her.”
53
Beauty Treatment
Peppy was licking my face, whining. Lou scooped me up. Compared to a car door, I apparently didn’t weigh much. Ed had the engine idling. Lou dumped Peppy and me into the backseat; the truck was in motion before Ed shut the door.
“What in the name of anything holy are you trying to prove, Warshawski?” Ed said. “You’re a dog person, not a cat, you don’t have nine lives to squander. When I said there were corpses better-looking than you, I didn’t mean you should go for it as a beauty treatment.”
“Ease up, man,” Lou said. “You got her started with your chain saw juggling. She figured she had to do something better than that to keep your attention.”
Waves of fatigue were carrying me away. I struggled awake. “How come you two were on that road just now?”
“Remember, Warshawski? Back when you told us about your accessories, you said you needed to have them on Dundee land so Five-O would connect them to the Coffin woman’s murder. You went silent for so long we thought we’d better take a look. Princess here, she was all for letting you rot in the woods so she could stay with us, but Ed had a moment of softheartedness, he insisted we come out.
“Not much we could do without jamming ourselves up, but we saw the Yancy project foreman driving up and down in that Cherokee, so we knew he was probably hunting you. I dropped off the princess and Lou. What were you doing there?”
“I found Clarina’s hideout. I have her papers. Here with me.”
I must have fallen asleep midsentence, because the next thing I knew, Lou was slapping my face; we were at the mountaintop house. I was in a point beyond exhaustion, but I had to get a message to Deke about the bag of evidence. My smartphone, with his mobile number, was in the Camry trunk near the library, but Lou said he wasn’t going to risk his license by driving a corpse around downtown Lawrence.
“Give me the keys. Give me your phone passcode so I can look up the number. I’ll text him from this doodah. And then it will go into the compacter.”
It’s hard to text from a burner keypad, so I kept the message short: CC murder weapon in bush 75 yards east Dundee house.
54
Library Privileges
A long bath, a long nap, a vegan dinner Ed created from the produce in his and Lou’s greenhouse, and I was more or less ready to face whatever had built up during the day. They drove me to the trailer so that I could pick up my smartphone. I opened it to a truckload of messages.
Deke had phoned and texted, six messages that escalated in fury, ending with, You are not leaving the jurisdiction until you explain that wrench to me.
Murray wondered why I’d gone dark. Mr. Contreras wanted me to come home. My erstwhile client, Valerie, wanted to talk to me. Zoë had sent an urgent text, Call, I’ve found the original owner of that house.
I wrote down my messages; I’d answer them from a different phone when I was outside both the trailer and the Camry. An exhausting way to spend time but essential until I got back to my Chicago computer experts, who could clean my phone for me.
“You going to sleep here, or you want to hunker down with the rats again?” Lou asked. We’d gone outside to talk.
I made a face. “Tulloh is keeping track of me, I’m sure, either through his contact at the LKPD or through whatever tracers they have on my phone and the Camry, but so far they don’t seem to know I’ve found anything. I should be safe for another night, anyway.”
Ed moved the door back and forth. “Door’s okay. Be hard to remove. But this lock isn’t worth the price of the key.”
Lou nodded. “Got an ABUS padlock at the shop. Length of 100 chain. Even if they have the right bolt cutters, the noise will wake you long before they get in. Back in thirty. Anyone comes looking for you, hide under the couch.”
“That’s a hell of a way to leave the princess’s ma. I’ll stay here and tell her my life story while you collect the hardware.”
Lou grinned. “Thought you’d man up. Be sure to tell her all the different ways chain saws have figured in your life.”
Ed grunted and made a flicking motion. When Lou had left, we inspected the furniture and the bathroom fittings for booby traps. Ed disconnected the cooktop electrics and made sure they hadn’t been wired to electrocute me.
When Lou returned with the chain and padlock, we moved the bed so that if someone threw something through the window, say a Molotov cocktail, I wouldn’t be under it, and would have a clear path to the door. They made sure their numbers were on my speed-dial.
I walked back outside with them.
“You’re carrying a load of dynamite on you. You going to keep it here?” Ed asked.
We’d packed all the journals into the lining of one of Lou’s old jackets. It was oiled leather, and heavy, but it had a lining buttoned into it where I could pack my documents. I moved with the lumbering gait of a woman close to her due date, but on a dark February evening I hoped no watcher would be suspicious.
“They searched this place on Saturday. They searched me, they searched the car. I think the papers and I will be safe here for one night.” I spoke with more confidence than I felt, but these documents had cost me too much trouble to want to separate myself from them.
I dreaded being alone in the trailer, but I kept up a bright face while the men packed Peppy back into the truck and took off. When they’d disappeared, I walked over to the building the trailer park advertised as a common room and gym. This was a double-wide unit with an old treadmill and some arcade games for children. No one was there, so I sat on a stationary bike to call Zoë.
Her eager voice vibrated the phone’s speakers so loudly that my ears were hurting. I slid the volume bar down and still could hear her over the wind banging on the door.
“Vic, you’re not going to believe this, but I found the family that used to own the house, you know, the one where Clarina or Rickey found all those papers? Their name is Carruthers. They were a prominent Black family in Skaneateles, but in the nineties—1990s, I mean—there was only one immediate family member left, and she got a job in the Clinton administration, something in the State Department, then she stayed on in DC, teaching at one of the universities there.”
“She sold the house to Elise and Clarina’s aunt when she moved?”
“That’s right. Well, here’s the creepy part. I mean, I tracked her down, it wasn’t hard—Louisa Carruthers, her name is, but Rickey also tracked her down. Professor Carruthers—she’s eighty-something now, she’s retired from teaching but heads a foundation.
“Anyway, Professor Carruthers said this strange woman wrote her, claiming her name was Martha Carruthers, that she’d been adopted at birth by a Polish family, but that she was a cousin to Professor Carruthers, only she needed the professor to give a DNA sample so she could prove it. Of course, the professor refused. She had her secretary write back to say she did not respond to such letters, from white people who imagined there was glamour in being Black and not to bother the professor again. Only, guess what?”
“Martha Carruthers was a name Clarina-Rickey was using?” I asked.
“Yes!” Zoë cried, triumphant. “I talked to the neighbors who knew Clarina and they said she kept claiming she was Black and descended from this family who were important in the civil rights movement. I guess when Clarina-Rickey heard back from the professor, she retreated and decided to be descended from white abolitionists.”
“That’s great work, Zoë,” I said. “Did the Carruthers family have a Kansas connection?”
“The professor didn’t want to talk much about her own family, but she said her people had originally gone from the Auburn area out to Lawrence, and then come back to Skaneateles after the Civil War. ‘It was not a hospitable climate’ was how she put it.”
“So at least we know now what made Clarina come out here,” I said. “This is great. When do you publish?”
“Someone from the Washington Post showed up in Skaneateles today, so if I’m going to scoop, I have to publish in time for the morning cable feeds. Ben Pike is even giving me more money to stay on.” She hung up, beside herself with excitement.
The Camry was still in the police parking lot. I decided to leave it there one more night and rode the free bus downtown to get some dinner, the journals weighing down the coat, giving me practice in rebuilding my muscles.
My skin prickled all the way through supper and on the bus back, not knowing if anyone was watching me, or where they were watching from. Life in a surveillance state must feel like this, constant exposure, constant vigilance over what you said and who you said it to.
55
Pranking the Sergeant
Back in the trailer, I checked the windows and the perimeter a half dozen times before settling down with my trove. I started with Clarina’s notebook.
Her handwriting was big and sloppy, hard to decipher. I’d gotten as far as following the footsteps of “my Grellier ancestors” from Skaneateles to Kansas Territory in 1855 when a car pulled up outside the trailer’s door.
My heart went cold. I stuck the notebook back behind the lining of Lou’s coat. I switched off the living room light and pressed myself against the wall next to the door.
A pounding on the door, and then Deke Everard said, “I know you’re in there, Warshawski. Open up before I get a bar and pry the door apart.”
I called out that the door would be open in two minutes. Police—especially angry frustrated police—don’t wait long before busting down doors. I got the lights on, picked up the key from the kitchen countertop, and got the padlock undone.
I went outside, pulling the door shut behind me—standard advice every defense lawyer gives their clients. Only let them in if they have a warrant. Invite them in and they can make themselves at home.
“I’ve been trying to reach you since one this afternoon. Where have you been? What’s the meaning of your text about finding evidence of Clarina’s murder in the woods behind the Dundee house?”
Every nerve in my body was on high alert. Lou and Ed told me they’d put the phone through their compacter. If Deke had had a warrant to search the yard, they would have told me. I was grateful for the dark, which hid any nervous twitches I might be making.
“My text, Sergeant?” My voice came out light, steady, annoyed. “Was someone pranking you, sending you on a wild goose chase after evidence? Or were they pranking me, claiming I was texting you?”
“Don’t push me, Warshawski, because you’ll be pushing yourself into a holding cell. We have a photograph of you at the Dundee place yesterday.”
“Do you, now,” I said. “Sent to you by the same helpful people who provided you with photos of Trig and Gertrude there the night Clarina’s body was found?”
“Do you deny you were there?”
“I wasn’t at the house,” I said. “Interesting that you got a picture of me there. Must have been photoshopped. Maybe that’s what happened with Gertrude and Trig?”
“Not at the house, in the woods behind it.”
If he hadn’t been a grown man and a police officer, I would have said he sounded sullen.
“Yes, I was in the woods. I wanted another look at Yancy, at the woods, and the remains of those old houses behind the Dundee place. I was hoping for some hint about what connected Clarina to that property.”
I spoke to him earnestly, innocent, not knowing why he was so agitated.
“You’re in the woods at 9:03 a.m. and at 1:16 p.m. I get an anonymous text telling me there’s evidence of Clarina’s murder in those woods. And then a SOC team finds the wrench—where you stashed it.”
“Wrench?” I said blankly.
“You’re not a good enough actor to go on Broadway,” he snapped. “You know about the damned wrench.”
“Even if I knew what you were talking about, I wasn’t hanging around in the woods for four hours waiting to text you.”
“No, but you were there dropping off a plastic garbage bag that contained evidence of a murder.”
“It’s time for Faye Mitchell to join this conversation. You are making wild accusations and I am not listening to more of them without my lawyer present.”
I hit her speed-dial icon but got her voicemail. “Deke Everard is with me at the Prairie View Trailer Park. He claims he found evidence of a murder in the woods behind the Dundee house and is blaming me for it. If we move to the police station, I’ll let you know.”
Deke walked around in a circle, venting steam, came back to face me. “I’m not booking you, not yet, but one fingerprint on that bag, on that wrench, and you will be in a cell so fast your feet won’t have time to hit the ground.”
He turned to go.
I said, “By the way, Sergeant, someone shot at me, more than once, in those woods, and I ran. Does the photo include that?”
“You’re making that up!”
“Not for one second. You should find evidence of where I landed flat on the underbrush. And a branch fell on the trail when the shooter hit a tree instead of me.”
He stared at me for another long minute, face tight with emotion. Not anger, I thought, but frustration. He turned on his heel and got into his car, leaving with a great spinning of gravel. I went back inside. Collapsed onto a chair, muscles too weak from stress to hold me up. He was almost certainly recording me. If he’d asked me directly about the evidence bag, I could not have lied on the record.
