Dead Man Falls (35 page)

What? Had he just suggested what I thought he had? I sputtered in outrage, my thoughts vacillating between how I wanted to kill him and what I wanted to tell him while I did. I was still debating which activity needed to come first when Jerry walked up beside me.

"There was an accident out on the Bowman City Highway," he said, staring at Pollock. "Sharon Addleman’s car rolled."

"Sharon?" Pollock said, hopping off the desk. "Is she okay? She was supposed to meet me here. Where is she?"

"We don't know. She wasn't in the car."

Pollock's face turned ashen. "What?"

"It’s possible she walked away from the accident and caught a ride with someone. We’re looking for her." Jerry turned briefly toward Leroy, then back toward us, holding two plastic bags. "These were found in her car."

One bag did not need to be closely inspected as it was obviously a short-barrel revolver. Snub-nose thirty-eight would be my newly enlightened guess. I didn’t immediately remember the caliber of gun used in the executions, and started to ask Jerry if he remembered, but Pollock was reaching for the other bag.

"Well, I’ll be damned," he muttered, fingering a white padded book. "What do you think this means?"

The front of the book had an oval frame that held a picture of a black-headed cherubic baby inside. Below the picture, gold letter embossing spelled out "Baby’s First Years," and below that was an engraved name plate.

"Shanna Kathleen," I read aloud.

"You don’t think..." he said, staring at the baby’s picture, a tinge of awe in his voice. "She’s mine?"

I threw my hands up in disgust. "Is there anybody around here that you
didn’t
impregnate?"

He nodded solemnly, still looking at the baby’s picture. "My wife." Then, he cocked his head to the side and grinned at me. "And you."

Leroy stepped around and snatched the bag from Pollock, looking like wanted to deck the old guy himself. "I’ll take this and log it." He eyed Pollock again--and not in a nice way--then said, "You want me to haul him in?"

"Too much trouble," I said, before Jerry could answer. "We were thinking we’d just shoot him and dump him in the lake."

"Leroy," Jerry said. "Do you have an address off the registration for Sharon Addleman’s car?"

"Oh, yeah, I wrote it down. Remember it too." This apparently was a proud moment for Leroy as he puffed out his chest and rattled off an address: 303 Durango Trail.

Didn’t mean a thing to me. In spite of being raised here, I didn’t know my way around Kickapoo all that well, much less the outlying areas.

"Is that the address you mailed Sharon’s letter to?" Jerry asked Pollock.

Pollock stuffed his hands in the pocket of his sport coat. "I believe that’s correct. I don’t have the list with me. I gave that to Red. He was going to check things out before I got here so I’d know what I was walking into." A flicker of remorse wrinkled his face, but he shook it off and winked at me. "You never know about women."

I knew there was a growing list of them that might have good reason to want to kill him. "Were you going to look for Rhonda, too?"

"Of course," he said, rather curtly. "I’ve looked for my kid for years. Why do you think I moved to Abilene? Red had a place down there, sure, but when I found out that was where Rhonda went to have the baby, I hung around, hoping I might run into him someday. Figured if he was mine, I’d recognize him right off."

"So you know the baby was a boy?"

"Not for sure. They won’t tell you anything. Even when I proved I was the father. Doesn’t seem exactly right."

Jerry said, "You were in Abilene when Rhonda was?"

"No, I was tied up here with Nadine and the divorce. She’s the one that gave me the line on Abilene. But when I got down there, Rhonda was already gone, or so they said. I hung around the home for a long time, thinking I might see her. Never did."

I had a hard time envisioning Mr. Lustful hanging around a home for unwed mothers, staring wistfully in the windows. Okay, maybe it was easy to imagine, but not for the reasons he said. "If you’re trying to make us think you were going to marry Rhonda and keep the baby, I’m not buying it."

Pollock cocked his head and grinned. "Why not? Rhonda was a pretty girl. Screwed up in the head, but nice enough looking." He waggled his eyes at me. "And she was young. That’d keep me young."

"Try again," I said, kind of amazed at myself for being able to shrug off his comments so easily. "The truth this time."

Pollock chuckled and rubbed his chin. "Oh, all right. I wouldn’t have married her. I’m not that crazy, but I would have taken care of her, child support and such. I’m a son of a bitch, but I’d have done the right thing that way." He rubbed his chin some more. "It would have been different with Sharon, though. Wonder why she didn’t want me to know she was pregnant."

"Maybe because there was so much of it going around," I muttered.

"She was married," Jerry added logically. "So were you."

"Nah, that wouldn’t have mattered, not to Sharon. She was in love with me."

I rolled my eyes. "Okay, try shame. Easy to imagine that one. She probably knew, or at least guessed, about Rhonda. Maybe she wasn’t real proud of herself for sleeping with a sleaze bag who’d also impregnated one of his students."

He pulled a hand from his pocket and shook a finger thoughtfully in my direction. "You could have something there."

"Whatever the case," Jerry said. "You’ve got plenty of explaining to do."

Pollock nodded. "Nadine always blamed me for us not having kids. She had all kinds of tests done and nothing showed up wrong, so she said it was my fault she couldn’t get pregnant."

"Well, I guess you showed her," I said.

"Not really. Did believe her though. Really thought I was sterile." Thus the rampant impregnation of every female he could catch. "Nadine got what she wanted in the end. House, savings, my retirement. I left here with nothing but a car, a suitcase and two hundred bucks."

"She used the affairs?" Jerry asked.

Pollock shook his head. "Oh, she would have. Told me she’d ruin my career over it." He shrugged. "Hell, I’d already done that myself so I told her not to bother."

"You just gave her everything?"

"Figured she’d earned whatever we had by putting up with me. I was ready to do something else anyway. Red and I worked together down in Decatur. He taught a couple of years at Kickapoo then got out altogether. Decided I’d do the same."

Kickapoo? Yep. Finally I made the connection. Late, yes, but I’d been a kid, seventh grade maybe, and that was a really long time ago. "Coach White?"

"Yeah. Pretty good at it."

I nodded. "We spent more time on football plays than history, I remember that."

"Does your wife have a brother named Nathan?" Jerry asked, interrupting my recollections.

"No, just a sister in Houston."

"There’s a Nathan Irwin listed in the phone book at the same address as N. K. Irwin," Jerry continued. "Is there any chance at all that she could have been pregnant when you divorced?"

I was appalled and I suspect my face reflected that.

"Now, Jolene, don’t be looking at me like that. Nadine wasn’t pregnant. She had a hysterectomy during Christmas break the year before we divorced. Sudden thing. Really tore her up."

"Then who is Nathan?" Jerry asked, voicing the question for us all.

"She could have adopted a child."

I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this. Several of them actually. "Okay, both Rhonda and Sharon had Pollock’s love children, but Nadine couldn’t get pregnant, yet she has someone named Nathan at the same address? The adopted child thing works or it could be a nephew living with her. Does it matter?"

"Rick should be checking that out right now," Jerry said.

I ran my fingers through my hair, thinking, trying to catch the converging thoughts that were just out of reach. Pollock, the prick, had left a trail of heartache in his wake, and any one of the women could have wanted to kill him--not to mention the ex-husbands or abandoned offspring. Which might have something to do with why Sharon Addleman was headed to meet Pollock with a pistol in hand. "Jerry, we have to go to the Dairy Queen."

He did not make any smart remarks nor did he ask why. I told him anyway. "At Mother’s party there was a girl with long dark hair working behind the counter."

Jerry shrugged. "I guess I don’t remember."

"He was too busy looking at you, honey," Pollock chimed in with another wink.

"Well, I remember her. She had an unusual name. Actually, her name was the title of one the first romance books I ever read, and that would be thanks to Sharon Addleman. She read and reread the thing during English class.

It was called
Shanna
."

Chapter 22

We were at the Dairy Queen in two minutes flat.

Shanna wasn’t working, but it was definitely the right Shanna. Since her address was the same as Sharon’s address, and we knew no one was home, we didn’t head in that direction.

Pollock quizzed the manager about "his daughter," and eventually badgered--he’d say charmed--her into giving him a Polaroid photo from her personnel file.

As we drove toward Redwater Falls--and the ever-popular police department--it occurred to me that Jerry might be trying to shuffle Pollock off to Rick. I was pretty sure the Lucille-napping charge needed to be filed in Bowman County, so I suspected we’d be hauling him in that direction eventually. I did not ask for any explanations, of course, as I have noticed that certain law officials get testy about such things. And in point of fact, Mr. Sheriff was leaning about twenty degrees past testy already so I just kept my little mouth shut.

Pollock, however, prattled on about how beautiful "his daughter" was and how she had his eyes, his hair, his spunk, etc. He also gave us detailed accountings of how he had ascertained these similarities. We were not impressed.

In a rare move, Jerry-always-keeps-his-cool-sheriff threatened to throw the photo out the window if Pollock didn’t shut up about it. "We’ve got a killer out looking for us, Willard," he said. "And it may very well be that girl’s mother."

"Hell no, not Sharon. She was in love with me. I think I was in love with her, too, no offense, Jolene."

"Oh, please."

"Of all the women I’ve known, Sharon’s probably the only one I actually ever had strong honest feelings for."

"Meaning, otherwise, that it wasn't necessary for you like them to like ‘em to screw ‘em."

Pollock coughed a little. "That might be one interpretation."

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. "Your charming ways could have sent just about any of these people on a rampage to keep you out of their lives."

"Even the daughter," Jerry said, glancing over his shoulder to the back seat. "She might not know of all your good intentions and just think you left her mother alone and pregnant. The letter could have set her off."

"This sweet little thing?" Pollock said, waving the photo. "How could you even think that?"

"We’re running out of options here, Pollock," I said. "The only people on the yearbook pages who are still alive are the three of us and Sharon Addleman. You want to tell me who our killer is?"

"It’s not my daughter," he grumbled.

"Did you send all your letters at the same time you sent the box to my mother’s?"

"Letters went out over a month ago. Just shipped your package last week."

"How much did you confess in these letters?" Jerry asked. "And what did you say you were going to do when you got here?"

"Nothing in particular and I didn’t confess anything, All I planned to do was come apologize and make things right if I could."

Little late on that score, but maybe it was better late than never--or would have been if somebody hadn’t gone psycho over it and started killing people. Or maybe the letters had nothing to do with it. I put on the brakes and rewound the tape. "Okay, I’m going to try this again. Sharon was pregnant by Pollock, but she also probably suspected he was fooling around with Rhonda.

"He sends a letter saying he’s coming back to make amends, but she knows he doesn’t know about Shanna. Maybe she wants him to know about Shanna--she brought the baby book--but doesn’t want her daughter to know about him, thus she brought the gun. She agrees to meet Stud Muffin here with the intention of putting a bullet through his brain so she wouldn’t have to admit her bad judgment to her daughter. That would be bad judgment for sleeping with him, not shooting him."

Jerry shook his head. "That would work if we didn’t already have three murders."

I could explain those as well. Maybe.

"Give me a good reason why Sharon Addleman would do those killings--and in such a public way--and I’ll buy it," Jerry said, not buying it at all.

"Okay." It wasn’t likely to happen, but I gave it my best shot anyway as I kind of liked the creative process. "Red’s easy. His was a ‘kill the messenger’ kind of thing. "

"And Rhonda?"

"Sharon knew Pollock was coming back to town to dredge up the past. Logically, that meant he’d go see the other woman he’d gotten pregnant." I glanced around at Pollock. "These are the only ones, yes?"

He shrugged. "Three women to deal with was plenty right then. Didn't know about the fruits of my efforts"

"For godsakes, Pollock." I sighed and shook my head, then said to Jerry, "I can find plenty of motives for killing him. I can imagine how I’d feel either if I’d cared about the slug and he vanished, leaving me alone to have his baby."

"Pretty damn pissed," Pollock mumbled, shifting around uncomfortably in his seat."

"What about Calvin?" Jerry said. "Why would Sharon want to kill him?"

"When I ran into Sharon in the store the other day, she said she kept up with some of her old students. Maybe she meant Calvin and Rhonda. Maybe they knew about Shanna, figured out the Pollock connection and decided to blackmail her." I knew it was lame before Jerry gave me the look. My head was so muddled with "what ifs" and "why nots" that I wasn’t even clear on what was fact and what I’d just made up. "I can’t do it. I’m going too far out on this. Too many guesses. We just don’t have enough facts."