Embroidered Truths (16 page)

After supper she picked up the phone and dialed Jill at home.

They talked a bit about Betsy’s day—Jill approved of Marvin Lebowski, having heard stories about him—and then Betsy said, “Jill, I need a special favor.”

“Sure, if I can.”

“I want to borrow one of the copies Mike made of John’s hard drive. How do I go about doing that? Should I have Goddy’s attorney ask for it? Subpoena it?”

“What are you hoping to find?”

“For one thing, the name of the young man John brought home the night he was killed.”

“Why not just ask Mike?”

“Could I do that? You know what he thinks about me, the interfering civilian. On the other hand, he’s not using the hard drive, is he? He’s sure he’s got the guilty party, so what would he care? But he must know I’m wild to find another suspect in John’s murder. Mr. Lebowski said he often hires private investigators to help him in a case, and he’s all right with me filling that role, at least for now. If I tell Mike that, would that make it worse or better?”

Jill snorted softly. “Worse, probably, as far as your personal relationship with Mike goes. There’s cops in the area still trying to heal the scars Lebowski leaves on cross-examination in a courtroom, including Mike. On the other hand, having an official role in the defense gives you some authority. You’re not just a snoopy female this time. You’re working for one of the big guns. Not that Goddy deserves any less than the best, in my opinion.”

“So you agree with me, Goddy couldn’t be guilty!”

“Oh, you bet. But it looks bad. He’s got a heck of a motive.”

“You know about the will?”

“Yes, Mike was talking about it to the county prosecutor and I overheard some of the conversation.”

“Goddy didn’t know about the first will, much less the second.”

“That’s not what Mike understands. He found an e-mail to Goddy, suggesting he write his own will, since John had written his.”

Betsy groaned softly. “Oh, gosh, Goddy even mentioned that to me. He said John told him to make a will, but Goddy said he planned to die broke and so didn’t need one. But wait, did the e-mail Mike found say anything about what was in John’s will?”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet it didn’t—but now I have another reason to want to see that hard drive. Do you know where Mike is? I’ve been trying to call him all day with no luck.”

“I imagine he’s at home.”

“Would he mind if I called him there?”

“He’d mind if you called him at work.”

“True. And this is urgent. All right, thanks, Jill. Bye.”

Betsy looked up Mike Malloy’s home phone number in the Excelsior phone book—virtually no one had an unlisted number in Excelsior—and dialed it. A child answered.

“Hello, this is Betsy Devonshire. I’d like to speak to Sergeant Malloy, please.”

“Are you going to try to sell him something?”

“No.”

“Okay, just a minute.”

Less than a minute later, Mike said, “Ms. Devonshire?” He did not sound pleased.

“I’m so sorry to bother you at home, but I wasn’t able to connect with you at work, and this is urgent.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to look at the hard drive—the copy of the hard drive—from John Nye’s computer.”

“Why?”

“Now, Mike, you must know I’m trying to help Godwin. I want to talk to the person who was John’s guest the day he was killed.”

“That young man didn’t murder John.”

“He was among the last to see him alive, right? Maybe he can tell me something.”

“Did Marvin Lebowski put you up to this?”

“Not this specifically. But he’s allowing me to act as his private investigator. Do you need a letter from him stating that? I could get it to you—would an e-mail be all right? I’m in kind of a hurry.”

“Why don’t you just bail him out?”

“You know what the bail is.”

“You’re a rich woman. Don’t tell me you couldn’t raise a million dollars if you had to.” Was there envy in his voice?

“If it meant Godwin’s life, certainly. If it only means setting him free a couple of weeks early, no. I’ll get him out, Mike. But it will be as a free man, not someone under some Mickey-Mouse indictment, all right?” Betsy stopped and took a breath. She was getting angry and that was stupid and dangerous. “Please, Mike. If he’s guilty, it can’t do any harm—and I may even find something to prove that.”

“Yeah, and you’d be quick to tell me about it, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course I would, why not? Look, I’ll make you a deal. If I find proof that Godwin knew about the old will, I’ll hand it over to you. I promise. In fact, I’ll even tell you something now that you probably don’t know. Godwin’s computer is here. I’ll swap with you: a copy of John’s hard drive, for a copy of Godwin’s.”

Mike’s voice was suddenly eager, even warm. “Deal! Come to the police station tomorrow with your copy, and I’ll let you have the one off John’s.”

“Thanks, Mike.”

Betsy hung up. How on earth did you make a copy of a hard drive?

She went into her guest bedroom, where her own computer was, and booted up. It took some research, but she found that she needed a USB external drive. They cost around a hundred dollars, and they came in different sizes. Once you had that item, it was as easy as downloading a single program.

Funny how intimidating computers seemed. Betsy had resisted learning anything about them other than what she absolutely needed to know—all that talk about gigabytes, for example. What was a gigabyte? She wasn’t sure, except it seemed like some kind of large number.

But when you stopped trying to understand how they worked, suddenly it was easy. She didn’t need to know how the internal combustion system worked to figure out how many gallons of gas it would take to drive to Fargo and back. Same here, all she needed to know was that a gigabyte was a unit of storage, and Godwin’s computer had—how many of them?

She signed off and booted up Godwin’s computer. She went to “My Computer” and selected “Properties” for Godwin’s hard drive. That told her, among other things, that he had a forty gigabyte hard drive—so she needed another hard drive at least that large. Probably a little larger. She remembered an early computer that, when its memory was full, didn’t have the smarts left to operate the printer. So maybe a sixty gigabyte hard drive.

Hard drives were for sale in any store that sold computers. Tomorrow she’d go to CompuWorld in Minnetonka and buy one.

Fifteen

THE next day was Saturday. Betsy made three phone calls right after breakfast. One was to Hower House, the bed and breakfast on Water Street where Charlie Nye was staying. She was told Mr. Nye had eaten early and was already gone. She called John Nye’s house next, thinking he’d probably gone there, but the phone had been disconnected.

Then she called Gary Woodward’s house, and got his father, a retired army officer. “Hi, Frank, this is Betsy Devonshire. I need to borrow Gary, if that’s all right.”

“Got a computer problem or a knitting question?” he asked jovially. Some while back, Betsy had helped Gary prove to his father the marijuana found in his bedroom wasn’t his. Subsequently, the father became closer to his son, and, in gratitude, the teen had volunteered to help Betsy solve any computer problems she had. Betsy knew Gary before the marijuana incident; he had learned to knit in grade school and haunted the sales bin in Betsy’s shop for yarn. Betsy enjoyed knowing Gary, he had the same deep understanding of knitting patterns he had of computers.

Now Betsy said, “A computer problem. I need him to show me how to copy a hard drive onto another hard drive. I’m on my way out to buy the new hard drive. Could you have him call me?”

Just before ten, she went down to open up and found Rennie just coming up to the door. Betsy let her in and told her that Nikki Marquez and Shelly would be in in an hour to help out.

“Where are you going today, Betsy?” asked Rennie, as she watched Betsy put the start-up cash into the register.

“First, to CompuWorld. After that, well, it depends on if I can buy a computer part that I can make work.”

“Ah, spyware,” nodded Rennie wisely.

Betsy smiled. “I wish I could use some spyware, but it’s too early in this business to even know whom to spy on. I’m hoping to hear from Charlie Nye today, because I want to see him. If he calls looking for me, give him my cell phone number and tell him I’ll be back in about an hour. And if Gary Woodward calls, ask him where he’ll be today, so I can get hold of him. Tell him it’s urgent.”

Betsy wrote her cell phone number down on a card and put it beside the phone on the desk. “You can also call me if you run into any problems. I’ll stop back in here when I get back from Minnetonka.”

Minnetonka was a lake, but also a town adjoining Wayzata that ran east along the I-394 corridor. Near its eastern end was a nice mall called Ridgedale. In the manner of such things, Ridgedale had inspired a couple of strip malls and a gathering of big box stores: Best Buy, PetSmart, Office Max—and, next to a Porsche dealer, CompuWorld.

Betsy was deeply intimidated by computer stores. Big signs advertising features she sometimes didn’t know the use of made her feel defensive. She was sure the clerks could tell just looking at her, a blond, middle-aged woman—“Look, Harold, a three-fer!”—that she was ripe to be sold some defective product at an outrageous price.

And it was true, she was woefully ignorant. She wished Gary had been at home when she called, she could have brought him along.

She would have walked out of the place, except a fragment of common sense made itself heard. All she needed was a hard drive somewhat bigger than forty gigabytes; she
knew
that. And knowledge is power. Beside, look, right over there, on that bin, a sign saying
SALE: Hard Drives, Priced as Marked
. The bin was nearly full of silver boxes, about the size of a hardcover novel, except longer. They looked metal but were plastic, and were not in boxes or other wrapping. Betsy quickly found labels on their undersides that announced the number of bytes. The Internet site she’d found said hard drives generally sold for around one hundred dollars; none of these cost more than seventy. She found a sixty-gigabyte one for fifty-eight dollars. The case had no damage she could see, and it didn’t look at all shopworn. It should do nicely for the temporary use to which it would be put.

She carried it proudly to the checkout and was careful to store the receipt in a zippered pocket of her purse. Maybe she could get at least some crumbs of her retainer money back from Attorney Lebowski when she turned in her receipts.

Back at the shop, Rennie had been joined by Shelly, Emily, Martha, and Phil. With the addition of four customers, the place looked jammed. Sophie, reclining regally on her chair, was trying to conceal a fragment of a chocolate chip cookie with one fat paw.

Rennie said Charlie hadn’t called but Gary had, and the teen was at home waiting for her to call him.

“Thanks,” said Betsy, and, after subtly removing the portion of cookie from her cat’s custody, hurried upstairs.

Gary didn’t live far away, and he was ringing her doorbell within minutes of her phoning him.

He was a slender boy of sixteen, a little undersized, with a thick shock of dark hair shading gray eyes. He wore an unbuttoned plaid flannel shirt, too-big jeans, and unlaced sport shoes. Betsy bit back the smart-aleck remark about people who went out before they finished dressing, and showed him the way to the computer.

“Is this the right kind of hard drive?” she asked anxiously, showing him the silver box. “I can’t see how to open it, so I just left it alone.”

“You don’t open it,” he said, turning it over. “How many gigs on the drive that’s in it?” He gestured at Godwin’s laptop, a Toshiba Satellite.

“Forty,” she said.

“You bought a sixty, that’s good,” he noted, and sat down, shifting his backpack onto the floor beside him. “Where’s your USB cord?”

“Um, I don’t think I have one,” she confessed.

He nodded and opened his backpack and pulled out a cord with a metal rectangle near one end and a square sort of plug-in at either end. “Well, let’s see if we can do this.”

He booted up Godwin’s computer, went searching in various places, attached the cord to the computer and then the hard drive, clicked on an icon, and clicked on various choices on the various boxes that came down with each click, and sat back.

“Now what?” asked Betsy.

“We wait. It’ll take maybe an hour.”

“Well, then, how about lunch?”

He brightened. “What’ve you got?”

“Not much in the place, how about we go down to Sol’s?” Sol’s was the deli next door to Crewel World. “You can have any sandwich in the place, soup, too, if you like.”

“All right.”

“We could go to Licks for dessert.” Licks, over on Water Street, had many flavors of ice cream.

“All right!”

When they got back, the download was still going on, so Gary washed his hands and produced a knitting project from his backpack. He liked working with beads, and had once shown Betsy a pattern he had worked out on his own, suitable for any kind of cuff, whether a baby’s sock or the bottom of an extra-large sweater. He was currently working a series of red and blue beads onto the cuff of a white sock, a gift for his little sister.

Seeing the white sock, Betsy was reminded of Godwin’s knitting of an endless series of white cotton socks. Perhaps they would allow Godwin to knit while he was in jail, a happy thought. Then, looking at the needles Gary was using with the eyes of a jailer—sharp, slender, easily-hidden objects—coupled with yards of strong yarn, she thought perhaps not. Still, she could ask.

Meanwhile, she got her own project out. Bershada’s inquiry into an entrelac pattern had inspired Betsy to start that sweater. The pattern was from Spincraft, and knit from side to side. Betsy was using overdyed silk yarn in rich shades of wine, purple, blue, and gray. Like the purse Bershada was making, it was knit on circular needles. Betsy couldn’t wait to see how the pattern worked from the sleeves into the body—she wasn’t like Gary, she couldn’t look at a pattern and see how it would look for real.