Dearly Departed (9 page)

The phone rang, and Cynthia got up to answer it. My eyes followed her as she removed the cellular phone from its cradle, extending the antenna with one quick motion. I listened to her side of the conversation, watching her as she paced the dining and living rooms, absentmindedly caressing the furniture with her hands, reminding herself who it all belonged to.

“Hi.… No, I’m not busy. How are you? … Sure.… Oh, you’d think we could, wouldn’t you? My office is only three blocks away.… I have an office manager who would shoot me if I did that.… Yeah, I sometimes wonder who’s working for whom, too.… Your schedule has to be worse. At least I don’t get calls in the middle of the night.… True, but it’s never a matter of life or death.… I wonder about it all the time, don’t you? … Yes, I can do that. I’d be happy to…. Yes, he’s here. He’s sitting on the couch, drinking wine and listening to his beloved jazz.…” Cynthia held the phone away from her mouth and told me, “Anne Scalasi says you’re a sonuvabitch.”

“Now what did I do?”

“He wants to know what he did,” Cynthia said into the phone. After a brief pause she exclaimed, “Don’t tell him that! He’ll be harder to live with than ever.”

“What?” I asked.

Cynthia handed me the telephone.

“Hi, Annie,” I said.

“You’re a
lucky
sonuvabitch, Taylor,” she clarified.

“How so?”

“Your tip to Ed Teeters, it paid off.”

“No way!”

“He put a team on Irene Brown. She left her house an hour after sunset and drove to a Dumpster behind a fast-food joint. They have a videotape of her throwing a box into the Dumpster. Guess what the box contained?”

“No way!”

“A pair of LA Gear Air System running shoes, size ten.”

I started to laugh at the improbability of it all.

“We’re working on this sucker for seven months, and you break it in one day,” Anne said.

“Actually, I did it in half a day,” I told her and laughed some more.

“You’re a lucky sonuvabitch,” Anne repeated.

“Hey, I’m a trained professional. Luck had nothing to do with it. As the great pioneering criminologist Edmond Locard once said—”

“Give me a break. I lend you one lousy book on forensic detection, and all of a sudden you’re quoting dead Frenchmen.”

“I thought he was Belgian.”

“Trust me. Anyway, Irene Brown had been waiting seven months for someone to catch her. Winnie the Pooh could have done it.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Do I detect envy? Jealousy, perhaps, of my unparalleled skills?”

“Screw you, Taylor.”

“God, I’m loving this, Annie.”

“It’s not over yet. Teeters said that Irene Brown confessed that she followed Alison home the evening she disappeared. Brown said she was going to give Alison a piece of her mind.”

“Does she have any to spare?”

“She said Alison met her at the front door with a small gun in her hand. She said Alison told her to leave, and that’s what she did. Brown insists Alison was alive when she left.”

“Well, she would, wouldn’t she?” I told Anne.

“Brown claims that she didn’t tell the police because she was afraid they would accuse her of killing Alison.”

“Did she admit to making the harassing telephone calls?”

“Yes, and the flowers and dead cat, too. She also claims that Raymond Fleck had nothing to do with any of it.”

“I wonder.”

“Yeah, I do, too. Is she still protecting Raymond?”

“The running shoes. They were men’s shoes,” I reminded Anne.

“Teeters said that Brown insists they were hers, that they fit her better than women’s shoes.”

“Why did she keep them all this time?”

“She said she had no reason not to. She said she never imagined that she left a print.”

“Unbelievable. What does Teeters say?”

“Teeters is ecstatic. He’s so happy, he’s actually speaking in complete sentences. He figures this will get the media off his back.”

“Now the big one: What does the Dakota County attorney say?”

“I’m getting this all secondhand, you have to remember. The way I hear it, Dakota County is impounding Brown’s car and having forensics conduct a search. If they find any blood, any hair samples, any physical evidence at all that puts Alison in the car or in any area where the suspect had access, the CA will go for a murder indictment even if he can’t establish corpus delicti. If not, I don’t know. Without Alison’s body, without corroborative physical evidence, he’ll have a helluva time proving that a homicide was even committed. The defense could argue that Alison decided to become a blackjack dealer in Vegas—”

Or take a trip to Bermuda
, my inner voice whispered so softly that I barely heard it.

“—and you know juries; they like to see a dead body in a murder case.”

“Still, if he pushes it, Brown might cop a plea, go for manslaughter,” I suggested.

“Depends on her attorney.”

“Or Fleck might open up.”

“Yeah.”

“Let me know?”

Anne sighed deeply. “How ’bout I buy you lunch tomorrow. W. A. Frost.”

“Annie, my gosh.”

“Yeah, well, you did a nice job.”

“Thanks, Annie. But like you said, she spent the past seven months teetering on the edge, waiting for someone to shove her over.”

“Probably, but you’re the one who nudged her, not us. Make it eleven-thirty?”

“See you then.”

I turned off the phone, collapsed the antenna, and set it on the coffee table. Cynthia was watching me from a wing chair, smiling.

“All right, I’m waiting,” she said.

“Waiting?”

“For the self-congratulations.”

“Cynthia, you wound me.”

“Uh-huh.”

I locked my fingers behind my head and leaned back. She continued to watch me, continued to smile.

“The other day you asked why men enjoy sports,” I reminded her. “It’s for the same reason I enjoyed being a cop, the same reason I like being a private investigator now. Yeah, there’s plenty of greed and fraud and ignorance and stupidity and corruption, and sometimes you wonder why you’re wasting your time. But if you stay with it, occasionally you’ll be rewarded with moments of pure joy, like when Kirby Puckett hit a home run to win the sixth game of the 1991 World Series or when Black Jack Morris pitched a ten-inning shutout to win game seven—”

“Or when Holland Taylor solved a seven-month-old murder before lunch,” she added.

I grinned. “God, I’m good.”

nine

I
was late to my office the next morning. It was such a beautiful day, I stopped at the University of Minnesota driving range on Larpenteur to hit a bucket of golf balls. It took me over an hour. I would have finished sooner except that I took time to admire the female golfer who was hitting seven irons from the tee next to mine. Absolutely gorgeous form. Her swing wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, my ogling came with a price that I was forced to pay when I called my answering service.

“It is
un-ac-cept-able
,” the operator told me, sounding a bit like Anne Scalasi in a bad mood. “We will not tolerate that kind of behavior from our clients. If there are any further incidents, we will terminate our relationship.”

Gulp.

I tried to explain to the woman that it wasn’t I who had called four times between eight and nine
A.M.,
making angry references to various parts of the operator’s anatomy when I wasn’t there to answer the phone. However, she didn’t see it that way, and I was forced to promise that I would “speak” with Mr. Truman. Either that or dig my old answering machine out of the closet.

But first I fortified myself with a cup of Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee—I grind my own beans—and sorted through my mail. Except for a large brown envelope from Publishers Clearing House, nothing excited me. I turned my attention to my newspapers. I get both the St. Paul
Pioneer Press
and the Minneapolis-based
Star Tribune
. Most people read newspapers starting with the front page and work in. I always start with the agate type listing the transactions in the sports section and work out. No particular reason; it’s just how I do things. I noticed immediately that the Oakland As had brought up a middle-relief pitcher just in time for their series with the Minnesota Twins. They’ll need him. My Twins were hot, having won nine of their last eleven, including a three-game sweep of Cleveland. It was still early, of course. Too early to get excited about a pennant race. And given the team’s payroll … Still, every time my boys start playing well, I remember ’87 and ’91, and a little tingle creeps up my spine. True, ’87 and ’91 are starting to be a long time ago. But what has
your
team done lately? Not much I bet.

I was studying the stats of today’s probable pitchers when the phone rang. I let it ring six times before I answered, knowing it was Hunter Truman.

“What the fuck is going on?” he wanted to know.

“Pertaining to what?”

“Goddammit, ain’t you working for me? I gotta get my news from the fucking radio, from some greaseball on TV?”

“Are you referring to Irene Brown?”

“What the hell you
think
I’m referring to? Jesus, Taylor.”

“If you’d shut up for a few minutes, I’ll explain.”

“Goddamn, Taylor—”

“Shut up Truman. Will ya?”

I told him all about Irene Brown, about how I spooked her into tossing the shoes, about what the Dakota County folks were going to do next. Truman surprised me by not uttering a syllable until I was finished.

“What do you think?” he asked at last.

“You asked me for my best guess. Well, my best guess is that Irene Brown is guilty of murder. Only I doubt Dakota County can make the charge stick even if forensics does discover corroborating evidence. Without a body, a good defense attorney should be able to clobber the county attorney. Hell, Truman, even you could win this one.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” he agreed. After a long pause, he asked, “Is that it?”

“That’s it. I’ll send you a bill.”

“You’re not looking into it anymore?”

“You wanted my best guess. Well, you have it. There’s nothing more that I can do.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m having lunch today at W. A. Frost with someone involved in the case. If I hear anything new, I’ll give you a call.”

“Fine,” he said and hung up.

“Yeah, pleasure doing business with you, too, Truman,” I told the dead receiver.

“I
should warn you before you order that I’m not buying after all,” Anne told me as she perused her menu.

“You’re not?” I asked, surprised.

She shook her head.

“What happened?”

“Raymond Fleck confessed to the murder after he learned that the Dakota County deputies arrested Irene.”

“He did?”

“Irene Brown then confessed a few minutes after she learned that Raymond was in custody.”

“She did?”

“Which means Irene did it and Raymond’s trying to protect her, or Raymond did it and Irene’s trying to protect him. …”

I stared at my menu, not really seeing it.

“Or worse,” she added, “they both did it and this is just a nifty way to interject a reasonable doubt into their trials. Both had motive, both had opportunity, both confessed willingly. Who do you believe? Who will a jury believe?” Anne shrugged. “Without the body, neither Raymond nor Irene can prove that they’re telling the truth. Without the body we can’t prove that either or both of them are lying. And neither of them is willing to lead the deputies to the body.”

“I just had a sickening thought.”

“What?”

“What if they
can’t
lead them to Alison? What if neither of them did it, but both believe the other did, and they’re only confessing to protect each other? Call it the
Gift of the Magi
defense.”

“People in love do amazing things,” Anne agreed.

“Hell, I didn’t catch anybody,” I griped, tossing my menu onto the white tablecloth.

“Buy your own damn lunch,” Annie told me.

We parted with a hug in the parking lot of the YWCA just down the street from the restaurant. Annie was parked in the first row, my car was way in the back. When I reached it, I found a folded sheet of plain white typing paper jammed under my windshield wiper. I unfolded it, expecting to learn that I was invited to the grand opening of a car wash or some damn thing. Instead, the note, written in black marker, read:
STAY AWAY FROM THE EMERTON CASE IF YOU KNOW WHAT
’
S GOOD FOR YOU!

“Annie!” I yelled.

Fortunately her car window was rolled down to hear me, and she stopped just as she was about to exit the parking lot. “What?” she called. “Are Raymond and Irene still in custody?”

“Yes.”

“Damn,” I muttered, reading the note a third time. I
really
hadn’t caught anybody.