It Takes Two to Strangle (15 page)

Anbani didn’t chastise the young deputy. Why would Horton have questioned it if the incident looked like a clear cut hit-and-run? Rather, Anbani asked, “Any idea of what a fifty-something-year-old woman was doing on the road in the middle of the night?”

“I don’t,” Horton answered. “Neither did the husband. He said they had gone to bed together that night, so who knows. Maybe she couldn’t fall asleep and wanted to take a drive. Or maybe she was sneaking out behind her husband’s back.”

Damon considered the latter explanation. Lirim was on the road a majority of the year, so it would have been very easy for Tabby to have an affair. But the accident was in December while Lirim was staying in Morgantown. Maybe she couldn’t hold off until spring and had gone to meet a paramour under the cover of night. It was exactly what her daughter had done.

Damon directed his attention to Jasper Horton. “I read in the newspaper that the car had the majority of its damage on the front driver’s corner, as if it was in a head-on collision.”

“That’s right,” Jasper said. “There were black paint marks at the impact location, and the vehicle that hit the Cavalier must have been much larger and going fast because it pushed the Cavalier into the ditch.”

“Any footprints?” asked the sheriff.

“None that we saw,” Jasper said defensively. “But I’m fairly certain we’d been going through a dry spell, so even if the other driver had gotten out of his vehicle, footprints wouldn’t have shown up too well on the gravel. And you know how those roads are, Sheriff. There are tire tracks everywhere and you can’t tell which ones are the freshest if there’s no moisture on the ground.”

“That’s a pity,” the sheriff said.

Jasper turned in his chair to face Damon. “So do you think this was something other than a hit-and-run? Like someone ran her down on purpose?”

“I really don’t know, but that’s exactly what I was wondering. Tabby left a decent-sized estate. The principal was untouchable while she was alive. Her husband, brother and daughter each claimed a share after she died.”

“I questioned the husband,” Jasper said. “He seemed pretty shaken up.”

Damon couldn’t think of any further questions. He rose and shook hands with each of the officers.

“I appreciate you coming by, Mr. Lassard,” Sheriff Anbani said. “I’ll give the Arlington detectives a call and fill them in.” He glanced down at the Post Damon held shielding his shorts. “Feel free to keep the paper.”

Chapter 13

After changing at the hotel, Damon picked up nourishment from a local bagel shop.

He left Gerry a message, first apologizing for making the trip to Pennsylvania and West Virginia without telling him, and then filling him in on the events of his morning and previous evening. Finally, he relayed that Sheriff Anbani from Monongalia County, West Virginia, would be calling either him or Lieutenant Hobbes.

Damon considered Lirim’s photographs. Digital cameras that could be connected to a printer hadn’t been commonplace at the time, so either Lirim knew how to develop pictures or was working with someone who did. Damon longed to search Lirim’s property—there could be a darkroom on site right now if he continued to sell photos on the road after he ceased harassing the locals. He conjured the image of a disused carnival trailer sitting at the rear of the property that doubled as a photography studio and darkroom.

Damon decided against nosing around within the bounds of Lirim’s property. He might unknowingly alter critical evidence. But that didn’t stop him from taking a peek from the road.

Damon drove outside the city limits. Paved streets turned to gravel. Damon was no stranger to this type of road—rural Michigan was littered with them. Gravel roads had been a favorite topic of conversation with his maternal grandfather who had lived fifty miles north of Detroit.

The gravel roads near Morgantown were recently graded and smooth. But as soon as Damon turned left onto Railback Road, where the Jovanovic family had resided for decades, he hit a rutted “washboard” surface. He hadn’t thought to ask Jasper Horton about the condition of the road surface where Tabby was killed. An unlit road as corrugated as Railback was this afternoon could easily throw a driver off course if he or she was drunk or just not paying attention.

Damon found Lirim’s property without difficulty. A mailbox fashioned in the style of a boxy brown birdhouse at the end of a twenty-yard curving driveway revealed the address in white block characters. He parked his Saab alongside a deep roadside ditch across from the Jovanovic family home.

Damon stared at the derelict house. It was a single-story clapboard-sided structure that would have been described as Cape Cod style in Arlington’s upscale real estate guides. But here in the rural outskirts of a mid-sized West Virginia town, the home was a flat-fronted domicile devoid of external care or visible foliage. Damon recalled Jim Riley telling him that Tabby cleaned Lirim’s fairground trailer every summer and wondered how much decay had set into the Cheat Lake home during the eighteen months since her death. The large grass front yard, yellow from the summer’s heat, contrasted with an unattractive stain on the house’s weather-worn siding comparable in color to the shade of the pea green sofa in Lirim’s trailer.

Where had the interest from Tabitha’s trust been spent? Certainly not on her home’s exterior. Damon did some mental calculations. Clara said a one-third share of Tabby’s estate was one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Interest payments at six percent on four hundred and fifty thousand dollars would have given Tabby an annual pre-tax income of twenty seven thousand. It was enough to live on, but that was about all.

He had assumed that Lirim and Tabby shared their earnings, but maybe that wasn’t the case. Clara’s grandfather probably made a wise decision to disallow the trust’s principal to be touched during Tabby’s lifetime out of fear that Lirim would have found a way to get his hands on it. On the other hand, it created a motive for three people to cut her days short. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars wasn’t a Powerball win, but it was more than enough money to solve a lot of problems.

The driveway split at the end of the curve, with the right tine of the two-pronged fork abruptly dead-ending at a doorless side of the house. The left tine, spotted with dense thatches of weeds, led to a large free-standing building with a two-car garage door at its front—the “shed” Lirim referred to in his opinion letter. From his perspective twenty yards away, Damon thought it looked self-constructed. Between the house and garage, a large open space continued for some distance before backing into woodlands. A handful of cast-off carnival structures were barely visible in varying degrees of intactness.

On the far side of the road from the house, deciduous trees edged right up to the ditch. Fifty feet further down, he could make out the opening of a driveway cutting into the woods. And in the several hundred yards he had driven on Railback Road, Damon had only passed a single other home.

Damon walked in the direction of the opening into the woods. He reasoned that talking to a neighbor would be less intrusive than speaking to the sheriff, which he had already done. The driveway that appeared was long and narrow, flanked on either side by towering hardwoods. From the end, Damon couldn’t see a house—the drive veered uphill to the right and disappeared. He trudged up the steep gradient. His calves voiced their disagreement. Gravel turned to asphalt when Damon rounded the curve and saw a classic Tudor house significantly larger and in better condition than the Jovanovic residence.

Set back in the woods, it had a small front yard that was neatly landscaped, presumably by the man on his knees with his backside raised in the air and stabbing at the ground with a gardening implement. An eager male voice emanated from a decades-old boom box, loudly criticizing the Pittsburgh Pirates’ relief pitching. As soon as Damon turned from the driveway onto a walkway, the man wheeled around on his knees and raised the handheld tool. It featured a straight sharp blade for excavating roots. Damon stepped back and held up both hands. The man took in Damon’s neatly groomed features and collared shirt. He relaxed his grip on the tool, but didn’t set it down.

“Is there something I can do for you, son?” he asked in a manner that was neither threatening nor welcoming. Damon judged him to be in his early seventies with a shrewd face and a light complexion reddened by the sun.

Damon introduced himself. “I’m trying to find out more about your neighbor across the road,” Damon said. “Lirim Jovanovic.”

“What about him?” the man responded with caution.

“He was murdered in Virginia a few days ago.”

“Murdered,” he repeated. “That doesn’t sound pleasant. Are you with police?”

“I’m not,” Damon admitted. “A friend of mine is a detective there handling the case and I’ve just come from speaking with Sheriff Anbani.”

His face softened at the mention of the sheriff’s name. “Anbani’s a good man. Hard worker, upstanding guy. Did he ask you to come out here?”

“No,” Damon confessed. “I’m the president of a citizens association out east and he was killed at my fairgrounds. I’m just trying to get some peace.”

The man weighed the pros and cons of divulging his thoughts about Lirim, then opted to keep his mouth closed. “Sorry, son. You seem nice enough, but I just don’t know you. Not too many people come up my driveway, even fewer on foot. And no good has ever come of anyone who did. But if you come back with the sheriff, I won’t shut the door on you.”

Damon thanked him, retreated down the driveway and drove the Saab to the first home he had passed on the Jovanovic side of Railback Road. He parked in front of a white picket fence that hadn’t seen a coat of paint in decades. The house was a dusty, two-story, unadorned wooden structure that a single cigarette butt could burn to the ground in minutes.

If he was unsuccessful at this home, Damon would tuck his tail between his legs and return to Hollydale. He rapped at the front door and waited for thirty seconds. He was about to turn away when he heard light shuffling sounds from inside. After another twenty seconds of patient waiting, a timid female voice shrilled, “Who’s there?”

Rather than commence a one-sided dialogue about murder through a solid oak door, Damon said he was a friend of Clara Jovanovic’s and he had some information about her family to pass along. At the mention of Clara’s name, a bolt turned and the door opened slowly. Facing him was a woman about his mother’s age, but that’s where the similarity ended. The large-boned woman standing in a bleak alcove had a hunched posture and downcast eyes.

Without speaking, she gestured Damon inside and led him through a dark hallway to a modest sitting room. Heavy curtains were drawn tightly and the space was dimly lit by low-wattage lamps. A fish tank caked with algae dominated one wall. The woman quietly introduced herself as Johnnetta Frank and offered Damon hot tea. He politely declined and waited until she had seated herself in a white wicker rocker before choosing a faded black chair bearing the logo of Duquesne University.

“My husband loved that chair,” she said. “He attended university there and talked about it until the day he died.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that he’s passed on,” Damon replied. He felt like he was at a wake at that very moment. “Mrs. Frank. I have some news about your neighbor and also wanted to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind,” Damon said.

“Depends on the questions, I suppose,” she responded, folding her hands in her lap. “But go ahead.”

“I’m not quite sure how to say this, except to come right out with it. Your neighbor Lirim Jovanovic died earlier in the week. He was murdered.”

Johnnetta Frank’s expression was one of relief mixed with fear. “Thank the Lord,” she finally said, casting her eyes to the ceiling.

Damon reflected on how uniformly those who knew Lirim appeared to relish his death. Johnnetta’s reaction bolstered his confidence and he asked for her thoughts on the man.

“Rotten right to the core, he was. I don’t know how Tabby put up with him, much less stayed with him. He didn’t give her a red cent. If she hadn’t had a bit of money of her own, she would have starved to death.”

“So you and Mrs. Jovanovic were close, I gather,” Damon said.

“Close as sisters,” she replied, her voice gaining strength. “My husband died eight years ago and Lirim was on the road half of the time, so we kept each other company.”

“It must be tough now,” Damon said neutrally, trying to find an opening into her thoughts on Tabby’s accident.

“The days do go by more slowly now that Tabby’s not around.”

“Maybe Clara will sell the home now and the new neighbors will be friendly,” Damon said with genuine optimism in his voice.

“Anything would be an improvement over that louse Lirim,” she replied, inching her face forward toward Damon.

Damon took advantage of the intimacy, leaned in himself, and asked conspiratorially, “Have you heard anything about Lirim taking pictures of young girls?”

Johnnetta hesitated, unsure of whether to confide in him. She started to cross her legs, but thought better of it in the company of a man whom she had just met, even though her skirt swept below her ankles. “Of course I heard,” she said timidly. “Everyone heard about it, including Tabby. She was mortified.”

“Did Clara know, too?”

“I certainly hope not. My husband and I certainly never mentioned the subject in her presence.”