Another Dead Republican (15 page)

Making guns at home never crossed my mind as something I would be interested in doing.

Scott asked, “Did Edgar carry a gun?”

Achtenberg shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What’s the deal with the dead reporter?”

“I don’t know.”

Veronica entered. She took one look around the room and shuddered. “I’m tired of the goddamn dead animals. Let’s get out of here.”

In the Green Bay Packer trophy room, she collapsed into a chair. “The kids are in bed. I don’t know if they’re asleep. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sleep.”

Achtenberg filled her in on everything she knew and left a half hour later.

TWENTY-SIX

Thursday 12:05 A.M.

My sister and I were alone again in the Green Bay Packer trophy room. It was just after midnight. The last well wisher had left. My parents had gone to bed. We were staying at the house as were my mom and dad. Scott knew I wanted to talk to Veronica. He would be as he always was at home or when we traveled, naked in bed, reading a book.

My sister and I sat next to each other on a couch. Embers smoldered in the fireplace.

She sipped from a glass of Merlot.

My sister whispered, “I loved him. God help me, I loved him. I don’t know why. I know people never understood why I loved him.” She gulped. “From the first I saw the person he wanted to have become if he’d had a loving family and upbringing.”

I tried soft shushing noises, patting her arm. I was not about to demand details and proof of whatever bits of him she saw whether it was hidden kindness or generosity of spirit, or whatever it was that led her to see this. She had seen it. She did love him.

“Edgar was sweet. He was always sweet to me. He brought me little gifts. I got flowers even when there wasn’t a special occasion. He was thoughtful. He loved me.” She began to cry.

She leaned her head onto my shoulder. I put my arms around her. She wept.

After her tears had eased, I took a box of tissues from the coffee table and held them to her. She grabbed a few and wadded them up and wiped at her running nose.

She said, “I hate his family. All of them.”

My sister had never been a hater. More a reconciler like my mom.

“Every single one of them should rot in hell. They are bullying, obnoxious pigs.”

I didn’t tell her that I thought her husband hadn’t fallen far from the family tree. I opted for, “It must have been tough marrying into them.”

People might fight with their in-laws, but Veronica had never hinted at this much anger. Had she been suppressing it all these years? That couldn’t be healthy. Grief could be adding to her anger.

“That woman ruled and commanded, and they obeyed and demurred. Beulah Grum married into that family, but her people, the Felches, have actually been in the county longer. I’ve met a few of them. They add to the cold and distant familial ghastliness. They all look like refugees from that sinus commercial.” Another mucus memory connected to the Grums. She took another sip of Merlot.

“Did you know,” she asked, “half my life revolved around keeping away from the Grums, especially my kids? We’d vacation on holidays to Disney World or resorts like that or go on cruises, anywhere his family wasn’t. Sometimes his family organized these gigantic get-togethers on cruises to various parts of the globe, and we couldn’t get out of them.” She sipped from her wine. “I took every opportunity I could to make sure we were not even in the same time zone as them. I didn’t want my kids to be like them.”

She refilled her glass of wine from the bottle on a green and gold tile-topped coffee table in front of us. She sipped from her wine and took a deep breath, leaned back close to me, and said, “Edgar hated his family. I did too. They were awful. They are awful.”

“You kept quiet all these years,” I said. “That couldn’t have been easy.”

She whispered, “They killed him.”

I caught her eyes. “Who?” I asked.

“That family. All of them. He was happy until this last year. He lost his job at the finance company he worked at. With the downturn they let over half the staff go.”

“Has he been acting normally lately? Anything unusual happening?”

“Not that I noticed. He’s been busy with that stupid campaign, not coming home until late every night.”

As quietly as I could I asked, “Didn’t he lose a lot of jobs over the years?”

She said, “After he left that law clerk job, he just wasn’t a good fit.” She listed three of them.

“Did you ever discuss why he left so many jobs?”

“He said he was always moving up, or they weren’t paying him what he was worth. He was finding himself.”

I thought, what bullshit, but she had bought all his excuses.

She continued, “They coerced him into working on that campaign. He’d come back late every night. He wouldn’t talk.”

I didn’t offer any alternatives about why he might be late. Maybe he was cheating on you. Nor did I mention the folders with porn pictures on the desktop nor the hundreds of bookmarked sites.

“He’d curse the family. As the day of the election got closer, it got worse. He got more and more tense and more and more crazed. You have to find out who killed him.”

“The police are working on it. I don’t know anyone here. I have no contacts.”

She leaned close, gripped my arm, spoke in whispered gasps, “They killed him.” I’d never heard anyone so passionate and so fierce. “The police are in it with that goddamn family.” Either she knew enough about the history of the county or had been alert enough to notice this through the chaos of the day or maybe a bit of both. She may have been blind about Edgar, but I never thought Veronica was stupid.

She put her wine glass down and clutched my arm with both of hers. “His goddamn family killed him. You have to find out who did it, and what they did, and how they did it, and you have to make them pay, and they better pay and it better hurt.”

What else could I do? I promised to help.

I asked, “Did he say what he was more crazed and more tense about?”

“No. That damn Grum family secretiveness took over. It’s a disease with them. Did you know when one of Barry’s kids, you know which one is Barry? Edgar’s oldest brother?”

“He came into the room right after you left first thing this morning. He’s the one with the very red nose.”

“Yeah, him. Well, Barry’s son, the day he turned eighteen, he signed up for the Army. He got sent to the war in Iraq. So Edgar asked at one family get-together about how to contact his son, Oswald is the kid’s name, or how to send him a package, a letter. And Barry said there was no way they could send him things.”

I said, “Maybe he was in a secret organization or undercover.”

“Ha! I found out the truth from one of the other mothers one time when I couldn’t get out of going to one of those Women’s Heritage Society meetings. The mother had a son in the very same unit. Slept two beds away from Oswald. That family called, talked, everything. They sent gifts, packages. It’s just nutty secretiveness. They all hate each other.”

How sad, I thought. I was lucky, I guess. With all of our quirks, mom and dad and my family looked pretty normal especially compared to all this.

“Who in the family could I talk to?”

“Why them? They’re all terrible.”

“I’ve gotta start somewhere.” I told her about the conversations we’d had with Azure Grum and her gynecologist.

She shook her head stubbornly. “They didn’t understand Edgar.”

I said, “There were the regular deposits to the bank that have no explanation.”

“I don’t know where they came from, but Edgar was not doing anything illegal.”

“Did he get family money?”

“Not that I know of. They kept him on a short financial leash. He had little actual money of his own. They wouldn’t let him at the family Trust money. I think he gets bits of money from the family Trust periodically. Maybe that’s what those are.”

“Do you know anything about his investments?”

“I know he was always trying to make a deal. He had millions of deals. I’m not sure they worked out. He’d be all enthused about one, then I’d never hear about it again. I figured he gave up, or lost money, or his family made him stop, or they were part of what the family was doing.”

I said, “And give me the name of the other places he worked.”

“He had so many jobs.”

“The ones you can remember.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Thursday 1:00 A.M.

I trudged up to bed. We were in a second floor corner room farthest from the others.

When I opened the door, Scott was as I expected him to be, sitting up, propped on a cloud of pillows. He had a book open and Bose Quiet Comfort headphones on, which were connected to his iPod. He was probably listening to a Danny Schmidt album, a new favorite singer for him. I stood in the open doorway and watched him for a moment. The covers were pulled to his waist, but drooped on one side revealing the first hints of his lower torso. The golden hair on his chest shimmered in the soft light of the reading lamp next to the bed. His torso expanded and contracted with each soft breath as his eyes scanned the page. Watching him calmed all the jangling of the day. I realized how tired I was and was reminded for the millionth time about how much I loved him.

When I closed the door behind me, he looked up, smiled, took off the headphones, put a marker in the book and closed it. He was reading
The Metaphysical Club
by Menand, a book about the effect of the American Civil War on the development of philosophical thought in the years after that conflict ended.

Scott asked, “How is Veronica?”

I began undressing. “Holding up as best anyone could do at a time like this. Mom and dad being here make a big difference.”

He was watching me undress. I turned full frontal toward him. I didn’t put on a show or make it a production although sometimes he liked that too. It was just a moment I know he liked, as I did watching him. One of those small moments of intimacy long term couples know about each other.

“And you?” he asked.

“Tired.”

I dumped my clothes in a random pile where I stood. His were folded neatly on a chair. He glanced for an instant at his. He looked at me and said not a word. If you’ve been married as long as Scott and I have, I occasionally actually remember not to be as big a slob as I am in my natural state. I picked them up, hung things on hangers or folded them neatly.

Each guest room had its own private bath. I brushed my teeth then crawled into bed next to him. He placed the book on the nightstand.

I said, “She wants me to investigate the murder. She doesn’t trust Edgar’s family.”

“She’s right about that.”

“And she doesn’t trust the police.”

Scott said, “I still don’t get the Grums having that much power. Even in Chicago, you’ve got to be kind of circumspect. Cops don’t just bow and scrape in front of people or get them to bow and scrape to you in front of witnesses.”

I said, “Who gives hints and commands to police in the presence of others?”

“Someone who doesn’t care that other people are hearing it,” Scott said. “Which means someone who is totally confident of their influence and power.”

“Or a moronic twit who is trying to cover up the fact that he or someone in his family killed his kid.”

“There is that. Those people are awful.” He rearranged the bed covers and moved himself so our legs touched then he said, “That election stuff was incredible.”

I repeated the left’s mantra. “If it is close, they will always find a way to steal it.”

Scott said, “I checked on the Internet about what the gynecologist told me. There are some web sites that agree that the math for the Grums doesn’t add up.”