Blackberry Pie Murder (28 page)

“No, Mother. He exercised.” Hannah turned to Michelle.

“You explain.”

“I was using Hannah’s new exercise machine right before you got here. I had it turned to the treadmill setting, and Moishe hopped on right in front of me and trotted along.”

Mike’s eyes narrowed in disbelief. “You’re joking . . .

right?”

“No. He really did it. I called Hannah and she came in to watch. Moishe likes walking on that treadmill. He likes it so much that he got a little perturbed at me when I shut it off.”

Mike turned to look at Hannah. “True?”

“True. I’ll use it tomorrow morning and we’ll see if he’ll get on it with me again.”

“You’re going to exercise?” Delores asked in the very same BLACKBERRY PIE MURDER

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tone she would have used if she’d inquired whether her eldest daughter was truly going to the moon.

“I thought I’d give it a try for a couple of mornings to see if I like the machine,” Hannah said, being deliberately casual about it. “If Moishe walks along with me, I’ll let you know when we have our meeting tomorrow morning.” Delores nodded and Hannah turned to Mike. “Okay Mike,” she said. “Tell us what you learned in Minneapolis today.”

“Not enough to suit me,” Mike said, looking disgruntled.

“When Lonnie and I got to their headquarters about noon, Stella was just going on a break. We walked down the street to a little coffee shop that Stella and I like, and I showed her the flyer.”

“Did Stella recognize the picture on the flyer?” Hannah found that she was crossing her fingers for luck, just as she’d done when she was a child.

“No, at least not by name. But she promised to pass the flyer around. She did think she’d seen him before and he was a—” Mike stopped and glanced at Delores. “Stella thought he looked like a man she’d seen with a woman who was walking the streets in a notoriously crime-ridden area of Munsington Street.”

Delores laughed. “You don’t have to mince words around me. I know what a streetwalker is. It’s the oldest profession in the world and I just wrote about a streetwalker in my lat-est Regency romance novel. They called them
opera girls
or
round heels
back then.”

“That’s funny, Mother,” Michelle said, “Especially the round heels name.”

“It wasn’t funny if you
were
one. Prostitutes in Regency England didn’t have the benefit of modern medicine or an-tibiotics. Disease was prevalent and most opera girls lived a very short life.”

“Did Stella say the man was soliciting the woman?” Hannah asked Mike.

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“Stella was pretty sure he wasn’t. She’d seen him before with a couple of other girls she’d identified as known prostitutes. She didn’t think he was a customer. She was almost positive that he was a . . .” Mike stopped and glanced at Delores again.

“A pimp?” Hannah provided the word.

“Yeah. That’s what Stella thought.”

“So Grandma Knudson might have been right!” Michelle said, laughing as she remembered what Grandma Knudson had said when Lisa told her story at the coffee shop.

“Grandma Knudson?” Delores questioned Hannah.

“That’s right. Grandma Knudson saw the picture of the dead man when Lisa was telling the story at The Cookie Jar and she said he looked like a pimp.”

Delores burst out laughing. “Leave it to Grandma Knudson to tell it like it is. That dear lady is a breath of fresh air, even if Reverend Bob doesn’t appreciate it sometimes.”

Hannah turned to Mike again. “But Stella didn’t know for sure that he was a pimp . . . right?”

“That’s right. She suspected he was, but she wasn’t sure.

She told us she’d pass the flyer to the vice squad when they came back to the station.”

“We know more than we did this morning,” Hannah said, noticing that Mike still looked disappointed.

“Yes, but we don’t know anything for sure. I really thought we could wrap this up today.”

Hannah felt a bit like chiding him for being unrealistic, but perhaps that was a trait all detectives had. The desire to wrap up a case quickly might be the reason Mike was so successful and worked so tirelessly.

“How about Doctor Jones, the dentist?” Norman asked him. “Did you get a chance to talk to him?”

“No. His office was closed. I called and got a recorded message that said he only takes patients by appointment.”

“Did you make an appointment?” Delores asked.

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“I left my name and cell phone number. If he calls back, I’ll make an appointment.”

“So you don’t really know much about him?” Hannah asked.

“Not really. I’m waiting for his call to find out more.”

“I know something about him from that phone message,”

Norman said. “If Doctor Jones only takes patients by appointment, he’s either independently wealthy, or he’s receiv-ing money from a secondary source. A dentist can’t support a practice if he’s only open by appointment. If your office is a storefront, you have to take walk-ins.”

“Did you meet Doctor Jones at the dental conference last year?” Delores asked Norman.

“Not that I can remember. All I know about him is that he took a seminar in tooth embellishment.”

Mike turned to Norman. “And you didn’t take that seminar?”

“No. I did embed some tooth jewelry when I worked at the clinic in Seattle, but there’s not much call for it here in Lake Eden.”

“Unless some college student asks you to play a joke on her older sister,” Michelle said, and Hannah knew she was reminding him of the removable caps with rhinestones he’d made for her.

“True,” Norman said, smiling at Hannah and then turning back to Mike. “I might have run into him at the conference.

There were over eighteen hundred dentists there. But if I did, he must not have made a lasting impression on me.”

“We drove past his office,” Lonnie said. “It was really small, just a storefront.”

“That’s right,” Mike took up the story. “The plate glass window in front has heavy curtains and we couldn’t see inside. It’s in a high crime area, very close to the area where Stella thinks she saw the man on the flyer. It all fits together, especially if Jones is the dentist who put that diamond in the 236

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tooth.” Mike turned to Norman again. “You said you took the diamond to a jeweler to have it appraised?”

“Yes, and it’s worth over twenty thousand dollars according to the jewelers at the mall. I took it to three places to make sure, and the lowest appraisal they gave me was twenty thousand.”

“Could a pimp afford something like that?” Delores asked Mike.

“Depending on how many girls he has in his stable, sure he could afford it. But he probably didn’t buy it from a jeweler and he probably paid a lot less than twenty thousand for it. Chances are it’s stolen property and he bought it from a fence.”

“Is there any way you can tell if it’s stolen?” Michelle asked.

Norman shook his head. “Not according to the jewelers at the mall. I asked about that. Sometimes you can identify stones by the type of setting they’re in and this one is simply embedded in the tooth. And that means there’s no way to identify it from the setting. The only other way anyone can trace the background of a gem is if it has some distinguishing characteristic like an unusual color or cut. All three jewelers agreed that this diamond doesn’t have any distinguishing characteristics.”

“I think he probably stole it,” Delores said. “Either that or one of the girls in his . . . What did you call it, Mike?”

“Stable.”

“Yes, stable. That’s really a denigrating term, isn’t it?”

Hannah nodded. “Yes, it is, Mother. I don’t think pimps really care if their girls have low self-esteem.”

“It probably works in their favor,” Michelle said. “Otherwise, the girls might decide they could do something better with their lives and leave.”

Hannah happened to be watching Mike when Michelle made her comment. The corners of his mouth twitched in laughter, but he didn’t comment.

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“They can’t leave, dear,” Delores said, addressing Michelle.

“These girls depend on their pimps for their very survival.”

Michelle frowned. “Then what happens when their pimp dies? If we’re right and the dead man was a pimp, what happens to the girls in his stable?”

“They’re up for grabs,” Mike answered. “There’s always another pimp in the wings who’ll take them on.”

“But can’t they run away before that happens?”

“They could if they had somewhere to run and the money or the means to get there. But most of them don’t have that desire. They stay where they are and do what they’ve been doing all along. Most of them are so beaten down by their circumstances that they don’t even think of trying to get out.”

“That’s just sad!” Michelle said.

Mike nodded. “You’re right. It
is
sad. Life on the street is never easy.”

They were all silent for a moment and then Delores posed another question. “Is it possible that one of the girls in the dead man’s stable stole that diamond from a client?”

“Happens all the time,” Mike said. “The pimps encourage it as long as the girls turn over the money, or the jewelry, or whatever to them. Unfortunately, when a girl rolls a John, the John’s usually too embarrassed to report it. That means we don’t hear about the crime and there’s nothing the authorities can do about it.”

“So the diamond could have been stolen, one way or the other,” Delores clarified.

“That’s right,” Mike agreed.

“All right then,” Delores squared her shoulders. “We have to talk to one of the girls in the dead pimp’s stable.”

“First things first,” Mike told her. “First, we have to find out if Stella was right and he
was
a . . .” Mike reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone to look at the display. “It’s Stella,” he said. “I’ve got to take this.”

They all watched as Mike got up and stepped into the kitchen for privacy before he answered his cell phone. The 238

Joanne Fluke

room went quiet as they listened to his end of the conversation, but Hannah quickly realized that she could learn nothing from his one-word replies.

“Will you feel better if he was a pimp, dear?” Delores asked her.

Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t, but maybe I will.” She looked at their puzzled faces and hurried to explain. “I know I shouldn’t feel better . . . morally, that is. A man is dead because of me and his character or lack of it shouldn’t change that fact.”

“But you
might
feel better?” Delores followed up on her earlier question.

“Maybe I would. And if I did, then that would be a fault in
my
character.”

Just then Mike came back into the living room, effectively taking Hannah off the hook. She didn’t want to answer any more questions from her mother about the dead man.

“He’s a pimp.” Mike confirmed it. “Stella showed the photo to Vice and a couple of them knew the dead man. They hadn’t seen him in the last couple of days and they were wondering what happened to him.”

“Do they know his name?” Hannah asked.

“Keith Branson. At least that’s what it said on his driver’s license when they pulled him over for running a red light.”

“But you have to show your birth certificate to get a driver’s license, don’t you?” Delores asked.

Mike smiled at her and Hannah knew he was thinking something like,
What a babe in the woods you are!
“They make fake birth certificates and they’re good forgeries,” he told her.

“I know they do,” Michelle said. “I have one. That’s how I got my fake driver’s license.”

“I didn’t hear that,” Mike said, and then he turned to Lonnie. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Lonnie asked. “I didn’t hear anything.”

Delores turned on her youngest daughter so fast that Han-BLACKBERRY PIE MURDER

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nah almost burst out laughing. “Why do you have a fake birth certificate and a fake driver’s license?”

Michelle didn’t quite meet her mother’s eyes. “Oh, just to see if I could get them. I had to do some research for a psychology class I took last year.”

“They told you to get a fake birth certificate and a fake driver’s license?” Delores looked shocked.

“Not exactly. But I had to get into a club to do the research and they carded at the door. It was twenty-one or older.”

Delores looked up at the ceiling and Hannah suspected she was thinking,
Where did I go wrong?

“I wrote a really good paper and I got an A in the class.”

Hannah watched her mother alternate between worry and pride. “Well . . . I guess it’s all right as long as you didn’t use it for anything illegal. You didn’t
drink
, did you?”

“Only iced tea, Mother. And I don’t mean Long Island Iced Tea.”

Everyone laughed, even Delores, at Michelle’s little joke, and Hannah knew it was time to change the subject before her mother started asking Michelle about more illegal activities.

“So did Keith Branson have a rap sheet?” Hannah asked Mike.

“No. All they had on him were a couple of traffic tickets he paid right away, and one charge of misdemeanor indecent public exposure.”

“What was
that
?” Delores asked him, and Hannah knew her mother was imagining the worst.

“Nothing serious. A highway patrol officer happened to come along when he was urinating by the side of a gravel road in a wooded area of Anoka.”

Delores didn’t say anything to that and Hannah wondered if her mother wished she hadn’t asked the question.

“Stella did find one charge that was disturbing,” Mike said. “The vice squad worked with Stella’s detectives to get 240

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Branson on aggravated assault or attempted murder, but they couldn’t gather enough evidence to turn it over to the district attorney.”

Hannah noticed that Lonnie didn’t look surprised. “Was it that prostitute Stella told us about? The one who died in the condemned building?”

“Yes. All they had was the phone call from her friend, claiming that Branson was the one who beat her. And the friend didn’t show up at the station to give a statement.”