Matters of Doubt (12 page)

He smiled. “But deep down I'm still Snake Boy.”

I showed him the new back door and told him the details of the break-in. When we got upstairs he reached into his pocket and handed me a folded check. “Here. I figured you needed this.” It was a check made out to me for two hundred and fifty dollars. I looked up at him and he said, “We never talked about your fee, but I figured I owed you at least that much.”

I looked back at the check and shook my head. “Things have happened so fast, I'm not sure how much you owe me. Can you afford this?”

He shrugged. “It's only money, man.”

He still wasn't forthcoming about his finances, and I didn't press it. I said I wouldn't charge him for last week and would charge fifty bucks an hour going forward. My going rate was one hundred and twenty-five, but I figured art school wouldn't be easy for him to afford. Call it a scholarship.

With that behind us, I said, “Look, I was cornered by a reporter outside the clinic this afternoon. He told me that the cops have declared you a person of interest in the Conyers murder.”

“I thought I already was.”

I laughed. “This makes it official. They had to tell the press something. It'll be in the paper tomorrow. Don't worry about it. Every day that goes by without them arresting you means the chances are less and less likely.” I went on to fill him in on what I had learned the last couple of days. After describing my conversation with Cynthia Duncan, I said, “Do you remember anything about your mom seeing another man before she disappeared?”

His brow wrinkled above an incredulous smile. “
What?
Mom was running around on Conyers? She never let on to me.” He shrugged. “She wouldn't have told me, anyway. I would have ratted her out to Conyers just to see the expression on his face.” Then he paused for a moment. “You know, there were a few times around then when mom didn't come home. It was no big deal. I was twelve and she always told me she'd be home in the morning. But she swore me to secrecy. Maybe she was with that guy.”

“Any idea where she went?”

He shook his head. “I have no idea. You think this guy could've killed her?”

“Maybe your mom got cold feet, and he became angry.” Then I changed directions. “Like I asked in the email I sent you, did your mom ever mention the name Larry Vincent.”

“Who's he?”

I chuckled. “You don't know him, but he knows you. He's a talk show host on KPOC. He's the one who named you Snake Boy. Cynthia Duncan thought your mom might have been doing some kind of exposé on him. Apparently, he has some dirty laundry.”

“Man, I got teased all afternoon about that name, but two people approached me today about doing art for them. Word spread fast about what's happened, and people want to support me.”

“Good. But you don't remember hearing his name?”

“Nope.”

“I didn't find a trace of any big story or exposé on the thumb drives you gave me, but I know she was working on one. Could your mom have stashed another thumb drive or printout someplace else? You know, some favorite hiding place she used?”

He tugged on the ring in his lip while he thought about it. “If she did stash something away, it's long gone. My aunt sold the place over on Knapp Street about eighteen months after mom disappeared. I don't know what happened to her stuff.”

“What about Conyers? Could he have gotten hold of it? Remember, your mom's computer was never found.”

He looked at me and shook his head. “I just don't know.”

“I went to Conyers' memorial service today. One of Jessica Armandy's hookers told me he'd been shaking someone down and got nervous after they found your mom's body. Maybe he was using the story against someone and tried to up the ante after she went from a missing person to a murder victim.”

“So this guy Vincent killed him, and my mom, too?”

“It's another possibility. If not Vincent, then whomever your mom's story was about to expose.”

“Well, Conyers could have easily found something. It was chaos after mom disappeared, and he was probably in and out of our place.”

Finally I asked him about X-Man. He laughed and said, “This is getting weird. I was a big fan of the movie
X-Men
back then. Mom must've gotten that name from me.”

“There's more than one X-Man?”

He laughed again. “Sure. They're a collection of superheroes who work for a man named Professor Xavier. I suppose he's
the
X-Man.” Picasso went on to tell me more about the movie than I really wanted to know, but I made a mental note of the name Xavier.

When Arch and I walked Picasso down to the street, I handed him the cell phone I'd bought that morning. “Here. Take this. And don't worry about brain cancer. The phone's only temporary. I'm going to be in Dundee for several days. If anything comes up, call me
immediately
. And look, if those idiots with the spray cans come back, use the phone to call the cops, okay? Don't get into it with them, understood?”

Picasso nodded, but the look in his eye was not reassuring.

I turned to leave, and Picasso stopped me. “Uh, there's something I wanted to ask you. It's about Joey. He's getting worse, man. Some mornings I come out and he's sitting right where I left him the night before. He doesn't sleep. Just sits there and smokes all night. He needs help bad, but the army and the VA are fucking him over. I've been trying to help him, but he needs an attorney.” He stopped there and rested his eyes on me.

I should have said no, damn it, but how could I do that when this young man—who was being framed for a murder and slandered in the media—seemed more worried about his neighbor than himself? I smiled and shook my head in resignation. “I'll take a look at it when I get back in town, okay?”

The drive back to Dundee was punctuated with gusts of wind that spun and twirled the fine mist of a light rain. When I turned onto the long driveway leading up to our gate, Archie began to whimper with excitement. Portland was full of new sights and smells, but the Aerie was his five acre slice of paradise, his domain.

As the headlights illuminated the gate, two facts that had been floating around in my head came together—Picasso had mentioned there were times when his mother didn't come home, and her appointment book had a telephone number that I'd traced to a bed and breakfast somewhere out in the wine country. It made sense—what better romantic getaway for Nicole Baxter and her lover than a B&B in the wine country?

There was only one problem. I was drawing a blank on the name and location of the bed and breakfast. It just didn't seem very important at the time. I'd jotted it down in my notes, but they were long gone along with everything else I'd lost in the break-in. And besides, even if I found the place, what were the chances they'd have records or remember anything? Very slim, I figured.

Chapter Eighteen

Archie and I were hungry. I fed him some kibbles, then took a nice bone from the refrigerator and tossed it out on the porch. “Behave out there,” I warned. “Don't chase any skunks.” I searched the fridge again and came up with a frozen steak the size of my fist and two big globe artichokes I'd forgotten I had. With water heating on the stove for the ‘chokes, I nuked the steak to defrost it, pricked a nice yam with a fork and slathered it with olive oil and popped it into a hot oven. When the 'chokes and yam were nearly done, I ground pepper onto the steak and seared it in a hot skillet, leaving it red in the center, then served it all up with a bottle of five year old Rioja. It was good to be home.

I was shaving the next morning when a bank of dormant synapses suddenly began firing in my brain. I said, “
Carlton
, that's where that B&B was, Carlton.” I dropped the razor, toweled off the shaving cream, and took the back stairs down to the study with a patch of stubble still bristling on my chin.

Like Dundee, Carlton was a small farming town given a new lease on life by the pinot noir grape. It was straight west of the Aerie, maybe ten miles. Google said there were three bed and breakfasts there, but none of the names sounded familiar. The first place had only been in business five years, I learned with a quick phone call. The next two, the R J Simpson House and the Logan House B&B and Vineyard, had been around nine and twelve years, respectively. However, the woman running the R J Simpson House explained they only kept their records for three years per the tax code. She laughed when I asked if there was any chance she'd remember a couple from eight years earlier.

That left the Logan House. The gruff-voiced proprietor, a man named Harry Winthrop, said his wife was a compulsive record keeper. Why, she even had Polaroid snapshots of most of their guests in addition to their comments about the stay. But he was leery of sharing information about their customers. I gambled on a direct approach, telling him I was helping a son investigate the unsolved murder of his mother, and that I would hold the information in the strictest confidence. There was a long pause before he said I could stop by, and they'd see what they could do for me.

I wolfed down a cup of coffee and a piece of toast and dashed back upstairs to finish shaving and get dressed. Twenty minutes later I turned off the highway onto a long drive that wove through a well-tended vineyard and ended in front of a Queen Anne Victorian mansion. The place was up there on the charm scale, with an arched, second story balcony and a generous supply of brightly painted gingerbread. Better yet, it was isolated and boasted only a single room, which made it more likely a furtive couple like Nicole Baxter and her lover would choose it for a get-away.

I parked in the circular drive and told Arch to stay put. Harry Winthrop met me on the porch. He was a big man with a crushing handshake and quick, friendly smile. The oak floor creaked musically as he showed me into the formal dining room. His wife was busy, he explained, but he'd managed to find the guestbook corresponding to the year 2005. A leather-bound tome, it sat on the dining room table below an ornate crystal chandelier. Before he opened the book, he asked more questions about the case. I was relieved that he hadn't heard about it. The notoriety might have caused him to think twice about becoming involved. He said, “What month was it, again?”

“Nicole Baxter disappeared on May 18, so I'd say April to mid-May, in that time frame.”

We opened the book, started thumbing through it and found the couple almost immediately. They had come in on May 8, a Tuesday, and stayed one night. A faded but well-focused photo showed a woman in a turtleneck sweater and teardrop earrings beaming a smile from the same dining room table. She looked older and decidedly happier than in the photo Picasso had shown me, and there was no question she was Nicole Baxter. She and her son shared the same dark, liquid eyes, and she had a delicate lift at the corners of her mouth I now realized Picasso had as well. She would be dead a week later. The thought of it brought a stab of anger and a sense of the loss Picasso must have felt as a twelve-year-old boy.

Her companion was less visible. He was turned toward her, his left hand partially obscuring his face. I couldn't tell whether this was deliberate, or he was simply caught in the act of saying something, an aside, to Nicole. I could see the contour of his left cheek, part of a heavily browed eye, and dark, wavy hair that was swept back. He wore an expensive looking watch on his left wrist, a blazer with three brass buttons on the cuff, and a button-down oxford shirt, no tie. The watch looked like a Rolex. The photo gave me a sense of the man, but there was no way I could use it to make a positive identification.

The couple had registered as John and Nicole Baxter and had paid their bill in cash. An entry, in what I took to be Nicole's handwriting read, “To Harry and Florence, Thanks for sharing your lovely home with us. The breakfast was magnificent! Best regards, Nicole and John.”

“You remember anything about this guy?”

Harry put on a pair of reading glasses and leaned in to the picture. “Nah, they only stayed one night. I don't remember either one of them. She was pretty, though. Did he kill her?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. How about your wife? Would she remember anything?”

He looked at me and shook his head. “Florence doesn't remember
me
half the time. Alzheimer's.”

I expressed my sympathy, and we went on to talk about other things, including the pinot noir grapes he was cultivating. I took a picture of the snapshot with my cell phone, but it didn't come out worth a damn. Harry surprised me by saying, “Take the picture, I don't need it, and Flo won't miss it.”

Arch and I headed straight from the B&B to my office in Dundee, because my first meeting that day was scheduled for ten. The sun was out, so instead of skirting the Dundee Hills I meandered through them on Worden Hill Road. I had a back window down for Arch. The air smelled of fir with a tinge of something sweet, plum blossoms maybe, and down in the valley the last flecks of a morning fog traced the path of the Willamette River. To the west, banks of cumulus clouds lined up along the Coastal Range like white-washed fortifications.

Risking a buzz kill, I switched on the radio to hear what Larry Vincent was up to. I caught him in the middle of a tirade about the current mayor of Portland. Vincent was bragging about showing up at a recent city council meeting to hector the mayor for joining a national mayors' group calling for gun control. A caller described Vincent's performance as a courageous act, a characterization Vincent brushed off as nothing more than his patriotic duty.

After a commercial for some new, enriched form of fish oil, Vincent said, “I vowed to keep the heat on the mayor and on the police bureau to bring Mitchell Conyers' murderer to justice. In today's
Oregonian
, I was pleased to see that the police finally named Daniel Baxter a person of interest in the case. You remember Baxter, folks. He's the homeless thug with a snake tattooed on his neck and piercings that make his face look like a pin cushion. We call him Snake Boy around here. Anyway, this cretin was caught with blood on his hands,
literally
, next to Conyers' bludgeoned body in the man's own backyard, but Portland's finest haven't seen fit to arrest him.”

Vincent went on about the particulars of the case, before getting around to me. He said, “Snake Boy's lawyer is some bleeding heart from out in the valley named Calvin Claxton. Honestly, folks, I don't know how a man like that can look at his self in the mirror. Judging from his comments in the paper, he's upset that Snake Boy's under suspicion.
Upset?
Are you kidding me? Conyers was an outstanding citizen, a pillar of this community, and now he's dead.
That
'
s
what Claxton should be upset about.”

I switched the radio off after listening to a couple of angry callers who chimed in after Vincent's comments. My cheeks felt hot and my mouth dry. Just for a fleeting instant, I fanaticized about going back to the radio station and waiting for him in the parking lot. I also found myself wondering how many fans Vincent had out where I lived in the northern valley. I suspected there were quite a few.