The Dirt Peddler (20 page)

“Phil just ate one of the babies! I
saw
him! How could he do that? It was a
baby
!” Then he looked at me and a quick look of embarrassment crossed his face. “Well, it was a baby
fish
, but it was still a baby.”

“And Phil is a big fish and big fish eat little fish,” I said gently.

Jonathan shook his head sadly and stared into the tank. “Yeah, you're right, of course. But I should have realized that! Stupid, Jonathan! Stupid!”

I put my arm around his shoulder. “Not stupid. Sweet.”

He gave a very large sigh. “Yeah,” he said disgustedly. “Sweet.”

He quickly reached into the silverware drawer and took out the tea strainer, then opened a cupboard under the sink to take out his original fish bowl—the one Phil and Tim had given him before we got the larger aquarium. He filled the bowl with water, then took the strainer and began attempting to catch whatever of the smaller fish remained in the grass. It wasn't easy, and he kept having to shoo the bigger fish out of the way.

“Phil,” he muttered, staring threateningly at the offender, “if you don't want to spend the rest of your life in solitary confinement in the toilet tank, you'd better get the hell out of the way!”

He managed to rescue four of the tiny fish and transport them to the other bowl. It took another five minutes of futilely searching the grass for survivors before he sighed and gave up. He made another quick check of dinner, turned down the flame under the pans, and said, “You want to set the table while I go call Phil and Tim? Dinner's almost ready.”

Chapter 9

There were no messages waiting when I arrived at the office Tuesday morning. I was tempted to make a pot of coffee and do the crossword puzzle before leaving for the library, but decided against it. Instead, I didn't even sit down, but left the office and headed for the main library.

I'd always had a fascination for libraries. As a kid I was an avid reader, and as a result of my spending so much time at my local library, I got my very first job there, while still in high school, as what they called a “page”—I loved that title, considering. It mainly entailed putting books back on the shelves, going down to the archives for back issues of newspapers and magazines. The very first love of my life, a classmate in school, would meet me at work and I would sneak him down to the archives where we would spend an intense and testosterone-filled five minutes before rushing back upstairs. Looking back, I'm amazed we were never caught.

The first thing I did was look up the issue of
Time
with the Dinsmores on the cover. I remembered it had been some time the preceding February, so that helped cut down the search time. As I said, I'd read it when it came out, but didn't remember much about it.

It was a pretty good article, actually, with more information than I'd expected. Jeffrey was heir to a Texas oil fortune. Barbara Dinsmore's father was a circuit court judge. They'd met at the small religious college they'd both attended, married right after graduation and gone off to do missionary work in Peru. Shortly after they returned to the U.S., Jeffrey Dinsmore's father died. Jeffrey sold his interest in his father's company and started the Eternal Light Foundation, which began by doing outreach programs for disadvantaged teens. From that beginning, the first New Eden was opened outside Atlanta, followed shortly by another near Dallas, and then the one here. Both Dinsmores were very skilled and professional fundraisers. They didn't resort to blubbering, teary-eyed Sunday morning TV show appeals to the lonely and naive, promising eternal salvation in exchange for a “love offering.” The bulk of their outside funding came from large companies and corporations, to whom they appealed on the basis of the social benefits of their projects rather than the religious. Undoubtedly, a lot of their success could be traced in part to their family connections, but they were very persuasive in their own right.

The article, probably not surprisingly, gave no hint that there might be an apple tree or two in New Eden. It did mention in passing that the couple was childless by choice, which made me wonder momentarily, knowing Jeffrey Dinsmore's apparent attraction to male hustlers, if the choice were mutual or one-sided.

I was able to find any number of newspaper and magazine articles on the Dinsmores and their good works and awards, but again with no indication of things being less than idyllic at New Eden. No complaints, which I might have expected, from the residents at the various facilities alleging exploitation by the Dinsmores; no indication whatsoever of misappropriated funds or a lavish lifestyle. I did manage to find a couple of tabloid articles (our library had reference copies of even these birdcage liners, though I suspected they had to keep them submerged in vats of disinfectant to keep the stench away from the other archived materials) claiming satanic rituals were conducted at each New Eden, involving the sacrifice of virgins, small children, or illegal immigrants, depending on the tabloid in which the story appeared (they were all pretty much word-for-word copies of one another). One article hinted darkly of routine mysterious disappearances of residents and the existence of mass graves somewhere on each New Eden property. That last one I paid a little attention to, wondering if it might in any way be related to the “murder” Catherine Tunderew mentioned being referred to in the new book. But I made a note to check on any more-reliably-reported disappearances at any of the New Edens.

Of course the built-in problem with alleged disappearances was that by the very nature of a New Eden, the turnover rate of residents must be relatively high. Compound that by the fact that New Eden served “throwaway kids”—those who either had no families, or none who knew or cared where they were. It would be pretty hard to tell who had just left and who might have gone unwillingly. In short, if there were “disappearances,” who would have reported them? Who would even know?

Having read everything I could find on the Dinsmores and the Eternal Light Foundation and the local New Eden—I'd have to go to Dallas and Atlanta if I wanted to check the papers there for any other information—I decided to just head back to the office. It hadn't been a wild goose chase, but it hadn't exactly pointed the way to where any skeletons were kept, either. In fact, I came away with the impression that for all intents and purposes, the Dinsmores were pretty admirable people.

I had two messages waiting at the office and I hit the Play button as I circled my desk to sit down. The first call was Bil Dunham, identifying the owners of the plate numbers I'd given him—as I'd suspected, the Renault was Catherine Tunderew's; so much for the red-paint-smeared Jag. The second was from Marty Gresham who left his City Annex extension and asked me to call, which I did immediately.

“Administration, Officer Gresham.”

I didn't want to keep him away from his work any longer than I had to, so I got right to the point. “Marty, it's Dick. Did you find out anything?”

“Not much. Tunderew's car was gunmetal grey, by the way. An El Dorado. But as far as any run-ins with the law involving New Eden or the Dinsmores, nothing. They're squeaky clean.”

“Have there been any reports of missing residents?”

There was a long pause, then, “I was going to say ‘no,' but I seem to recall when I was in Missing Persons Records something about a teenage boy…filed by his parents…from someplace out of town, I think, but…” Another long pause. “Are you going to be around for a while? Let me make a quick check to get the facts straight, then I'll call you right back. I remember New Eden came into it somewhere along the line, but it was quite a while ago.”

“Sure. I'll be here. But it's almost time for your shift to end, isn't it? I don't want to incur your wife's wrath by keeping you after work.”

He laughed. “She'll live. I just have to run downstairs, and it will only take me a minute. I'll call you right back.”

“Thanks, Marty; I appreciate it.”

I hung up and reached for the newspaper and a pen.

I was just putting in the “d” in “brigand” (“Freebooter,” seven letters) when the phone rang.

“Hardesty Investigations.”

“Dick, Marty. The kid's name is Denny Rechter, seventeen years old. Reported missing last July sixth by his parents. They'd come into town from Bayonne, New Jersey, looking for him. Someone had tipped them that he was at New Eden, but when they got there, he was gone. Whether he got wind they were coming and just took off, or why else he might have left no one seemed to know. His folks filed the report in hopes he was still in the area and someone might spot him. They made three long-distance phone call inquiries after that over the next couple of months, then nothing. No idea if they ever found him or not. They never got back to us.”

Now it was my turn for a long pause.

“Marty, I know this is a stretch, but would it be possible to check with the Dallas and Atlanta police and sheriff's departments to see if they have anything on any problems at the New Edens in their jurisdictions?”

“I'll have to okay it with Lieutenant Richman, but I'm pretty sure he'll go along. But can I ask what all this has to do with that writer's death? I assume that's what you're following up on, right?”

“Yeah. And I hope it's got nothing to do with it. But something tells me it might have
everything
to do with it.”

“Hmmm. Okay, I'll check it out, if the Lieutenant okays it. I'll get back to you either way.”

“Thanks, Marty.” I looked at my watch.

“Now you'd better get home to your ball and chain.”

“And you to yours,” he said lightly.

*

Okay,
my mind-voice mused as I drove home:
one missing kid report in two years does not exactly a blockbusting, best-selling exposé make. And this was probably a kid who'd run away from home in the first place. Most likely, he just ran again.

But it was also quite possible that as a runaway, if he'd gone to New Eden, it was because he was living on the streets. And he wouldn't have been the first runaway kid living on the streets to turn to hustling to survive. And Jeffrey Dinsmore has an eye for hustlers. And…

And a square peg will fit into a round hole if you hit it hard enough with a hammer,
another mind-voice chimed in.

They both had valid points, but the missing kid and everything else aside, I'd bet my bottom dollar that the Dinsmores and New Eden were, for whatever reason, the subject of Tunderew's next book. I mean,
No Door to Heaven
? Come on! There are a lot of other religious organizations and preachers and ministers and cults out there. But only one close enough for Tunderew to have direct access. No, I'd have to go with the Dinsmores. And I suspected, too, that it had something more lurid than just Jeffrey Dinsmore's sexual ambiguity. As to whether Tunderew had died as a direct result of it remained to be seen.

Four suspects, four motives,
my mind went on.
Larry Fletcher: jealousy and betrayal; Bernadine Press: company survival; Catherine Tunderew: revenge and a fortune; the Dinsmores: to keep their skeletons (whatever they might be) in the closet.
Again, there might very well be several other prime candidates out there, knowing Tunderew even as little as I did, but these four would keep me more than busy for a while.

The only ones on my list that I'd not yet spoken to were the Dinsmores, and it was time I remedied that. How to do it I wasn't quite sure yet, but I'd figure it out.

*

I must say that one of the benefits of being in a relationship was that it kept me from spending as much time as I normally would have dwelling on cases I happened to be working on at the time. And even though Jonathan spent a lot of time studying every night after dinner, there was still enough interaction between us to keep my mind from getting bogged down.

I got home to find Jonathan busy in the kitchen. I noticed he'd taken the fake grass out of the bigger aquarium and put it in the smaller bowl, apparently to give the four surviving smallest fish somewhere to hide—though what they'd need to hide from in there wasn't clear. He was in the process of sprinkling fish food on the surface of the water in the larger tank, talking as always to each one by name as they came up to grab the small flakes—except for Phil, the one who had started all the trouble, but quite probably hadn't been the only offender. Phil was still obviously on Jonathan's shit list. He didn't seem to mind.

Well, just having said that I didn't spend all my time worrying about cases anymore, I spent most of the night worrying about this one—mostly about how to approach the Dinsmores. I finally figured it would be best if I could talk to them separately, if I would be able to talk to them at all. One of the most recent newspaper articles I had read at the library had mentioned something about Mrs. Dinsmore having an upcoming speaking engagement in Philadelphia at a conference on teen runaways. This coming Friday? It didn't say if Mr. Dinsmore would be in attendance, but from what Randy and I think Jake had said, the couple didn't do everything as a team, and that Mrs. Dinsmore was gone frequently. I'd have to take a chance that Mr. Dinsmore would be in town, though there was no guarantee on that. One way to find out.

*

I was mildly pleased with myself that I was actually able to finish reading the paper and do the crossword puzzle Wednesday morning before reaching for the phone.

“New Eden,” a young female voice answered after three rings. “Can you hold, please?”

I love questions like that, since you are inevitably and instantly put on hold whether you can or can't. Luckily, in this instance I could. A moment later a click and “Thank you for waiting. How can I help you?”

“Is Mr. Dinsmore in, please?”

“I'm sorry, sir, he's not available at the moment. Can I take a message?”