A Carnival of Killing (16 page)

This scenario coincided with mine. I put down the phone and went to the photo department to run Brownie’s recitation past Al. He agreed that everything pointed to St. Claire.

“I should have borrowed a picture of him when I was talking to his wife,” I said. “She had a picture on her desk of herself looking lovey-dovey with a guy that must have been him.”

“I wonder if she would’ve given it to you if you’d asked,” Al said.

“Who said anything about asking?”

“You’re thinking of the Navy way of borrowing things, known as cumshaw.”

“Come see, cumshaw,” I said. “Assuming we’re right about St. Claire, we still don’t have a handle on who tried to kill Toni Erickson. The cops think she was attacked because she was blabbing to everybody about knowing who killed Lee-Ann, but why would somebody go to that extreme in order to protect lover boy St. Claire?”

“God only knows.”

“And She ain’t telling.”

“In other words, we haven’t got a prayer,” Al said.

Square Pegs

The St. Claire scenario took a hit the following day when I was visited by a lanky, athletic-looking young man wearing a snow-flecked London Fog raincoat and black-knit hat similarly dotted with white. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t say why.

“Remember me?” he asked as he offered his hand for shaking. “I’m Tony.”

“And your last name would be?” I asked as I took his hand and discovered it was wet with melted snow.

“Costello,” he said. “Tony Costello. The Count of Ashes. When you rode with our Krewe, you asked me about being in O’Halloran’s Bar the night Klondike Kate, Lee-Ann, got killed.”

“Okay,” I said. “As I recall, you blew me off and stayed far, far away for the rest of the ride.”

“Orders from headquarters. The cops ordered us all not to talk to anybody, especially nosy reporters. The chief himself told us he’d toss our asses in the clink if we blabbed. Those exact words.”

“That’s very interesting. While the chief was telling you to stonewall the media, the head of homicide was telling me to find out everything I could while I was with you guys that day. So what brings you to my desk this morning?”

“I read your story about Eddie St. Claire being hauled in for questioning,” Costello said. “And I think the cops have got the wrong guy.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Have you seen Eddie? He’s short. Not much taller than Lee-Ann, who was only about five-four. The guy in the Vulcan suit who walked out with her that night was a lot taller. Probably close to six feet.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw them.”

That got my attention. “You’re the anonymous witness?”

“That’s right,” he said. “The cops—a detective Brown—ordered me to keep my mouth shut about that.”

“Have you told this height thing to the cops?”

“Not yet, but I will,” Costello said. “I stopped here to see you on the way to the station so you won’t slander Eddie anymore.”

“I haven’t slandered Eddie,” I said. “Slander is verbal. It has to do with the spoken word. Newspapers
libel
people, they don’t slander them. But my story can’t be construed as libelous because I was quoting the police verbatim. You can talk to Brown about slander, but he’ll tell you where to stick it.”

“Jeez, you’re a walking dictionary. That’s a shit load more than I wanted to know about slander.”

“Well, you haven’t told me anywhere near what I want to know about Lee-Ann and the badass Vulcan. Tell me exactly what you saw in O’Halloran’s that night.” I had picked up a small tape recorder off my desk and I flipped it on to record his response.

“It’s pretty much what you had in your story about the police chief saying a Vulcan was the last one to see Lee-Ann alive. I was watching Lee-Ann because I was hoping to get next to her myself. But, this Vulcan, and I don’t have a clue who it was, except I’m sure it wasn’t anybody from our Krewe, was cozied up with her at a table in the back, buying her drinks and shooting the shit. She was obviously feeling no pain when she got up to go to the can because she did the old zig-zag on the way.

“Anyhow, Lee-Ann was barely out of sight when the Vulcan got up and headed in the same direction. I figured he was going to the men’s room.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You were watching Lee-Ann because you wanted to be the one getting her drunk?”

“Not drunk, just mellow,” Costello said. I smiled and gave what I considered to be a knowing nod, a gesture from one horny male to another. “Hey, don’t give me that fisheye,” Costello said. “I’m single and I thought Lee-Ann was cute.”

“Okay. Sorry I interrupted. Finish your story.”

“I wasn’t watching for Lee-Ann to come back from her piss call because Marcus, Count Embrious, was telling a joke and I turned around to listen to it. When he finished, I looked back just in time to see the two of them, the Vulcan and Lee-Ann, go out the back door to the parking lot. It looked like he was pretty much supporting her, which didn’t surprise me considering how wobbly she’d been on the way to the ladies’ room.”

“Do you think she might have been dead when they walked out the door?”

“That’s spooky, but yeah, I do now. The bastard must have killed her back there in the ladies room, just like he went after the other girl, Toni What’s-her-name, at the dance Saturday night.”

“But you didn’t see the Vulcan who attacked Toni?”

“No. The action was all over by the time I got through the jam-up in the ballroom door. Obviously, that wasn’t Eddie, ’cause he was somewhere out in New York.”

“Obviously,” I said. “And you’re going to tell Brown or whoever about this height differential?”

“As soon as I leave here, which I guess is now,” Costello said. “Unless you got more questions.”

“Not at the moment.” I offered him a notepad and a ballpoint pen. “Leave me your phone number in case I have some later.”

Costello accepted the pad and pen, scribbled his numbers at work and at home, apologized for accusing me of slander and went on his way to the police station, leaving me to wonder how this square peg fit into the round hole with everything else I knew.

I ran my conversation with Costello past Al in the lunchroom at noon.

“This case gets screwier all the time,” Al said. “It seems like the more we find out the less we know. I was sure there were two Vulcans involved, a killer and a wannabe, but now it looks like we’re back to one Vulcan. Who the devil could it be?”

“Beats hell out of me,” I said.

The St. Claire scenario took an even bigger hit from another square peg two days later. I was shutting down my computer late Friday afternoon when my plan to leave the office was sidetracked by a call from Brownie.

“You want the bad news or the worst news?” he asked.

“Give me the worst news first,” I replied.

“The worst news is that Edward St. Claire’s DNA test came back, and his DNA doesn’t match that of the Nordquist fetus.”

“And the not as bad news?”

“We had to release him for lack of evidence, even though he’s still a person of interest in the case.”

“If he’s not the father, why would he still be a person of interest? What would be his motive for killing Lee-Ann?”

“Jealousy. He was screwing the woman at least three times a month. Then she goes out and gets knocked up by somebody else.”

This was news, although I wasn’t quite sure how I’d write it. “Did he admit to screwing her at least three times a month?” I asked.

“Not at first, but he quit denying he’d been banging her regularly when we told him that we had evidence to prove it,” Brownie said. “Because Mr. St. Claire is a car salesman, he belongs to a number of civic organizations in order to make contacts. These organizations meet once a month, the Kiwanis on a Tuesday, the Elks on a Wednesday and the Lions Club on a Thursday. He would tell his wife he was going to one of those meetings when his real meeting was with Ms. Nordquist in a motel up I-494 in Woodbury.”

“How’d you discover that?”

“By talking to Mrs. St. Claire. It seems that the Kiwanis treasurer called the house a couple of weeks ago to remind Mr. St. Claire that he needed to pay his dues, and Mrs. St. Claire took the call. Said the treasurer told her that they hadn’t seen her husband at a meeting for eight or nine months and asked if he was okay.”

“I’ll bet he wasn’t so okay after that,” I said.

“She was smart,” Brownie said. “She kept her mouth shut, but the next time he left for a Kiwanis meeting she got in her car and followed him. She watched him check into the motel, then went home and dug through his old credit card bills. And guess what? She found a regular pattern of visits to that particular motel.”

“The idiot used his credit card to shack up with Lee-Ann?”

“Apparently he doesn’t carry much cash. Anyway, the wife was just about ready to let the shit hit the fan right when Ms. Nordquist was murdered and the coward took off. Now we have the credit card records for the motel and a list of people from the Kiwanis, Elks and Lions to talk to about Mr. St. Claire’s attendance record.”

“So you still think St. Claire might be the killer?”

“We can’t write him off. He’s still got a motive.”

“What about the physical thing?” I asked. “You know, the fact that he’s short and that other Vulcan, Costello, said he saw a taller man with Lee-Ann?”

“Witnesses are always making mistakes about height, weight, age, color of hair, number of arms and legs, what have you,” Brownie said. “Somebody else who was there that night told us that the Vulcan hanging around Ms. Nordquist was average height, whatever the hell that is.”

“So what’s the official police line on all of this?”

“That Mr. St. Claire was having an affair with the victim, but that his DNA test was negative as far as being the father of her unborn child, and he has been released from custody at this time. You can dress it up anyway you want, but go easy on his poor wife. Have a good day, Mitch.”

North by Northeast

That night Martha and I dined with the Jeffrey family again. Martha had baked a pecan pie, which made her even more popular than usual with the teenagers, Kristin and Kevin. After the pie had been demolished and the adults were sipping the last of their coffee, Martha dropped a bomb not at all popular with me.

“I’m going to be away probably all next week,” Martha said. “We’re trying a civil case in Duluth and the lead attorney wants me to be second chair.”

“Congratulations,” Carol said. “That could be great experience for you.”

“Take your long johns,” Al said. “If you think it’s cold here, wait until you feel the winter wind whipping off Lake Superior.”

“Who’s the lead attorney,” I said. I had visions of Martha spending a week in the same hotel with an up-and-coming law office stud muffin.

“Sara Norris,” Martha said. “You met her at the Christmas party.”

Indeed, I had met Sara. She was slim, brunette, in her early forties, and best of all, the married mother of two teenagers.

“How am I going to keep warm while you’re gone all next week?” I asked about three hours later as we were undressing for bed.

“You’ve always got Sherlock,” Martha said.

“It ain’t the same,” I said, doing my best not to sound whiny.

“Sorry, sweetie, but duty calls. If the paper sent you to Duluth for a week, I’m pretty sure you’d go.”

“Don would never send me that far.”

“He once sent you to Martha’s Vineyard, which is a heck of a lot farther.”

“That was a very unpleasant special assignment,” I said. “And I’ll never have to go there again.”

“What if I want to go there?”

“You can go with Sara Norris.”

“That wouldn’t be much of a honeymoon.”

That froze my tongue for a moment. “Did I hear you say honeymoon?” I asked after the pause.

“That’s a possibility sometime down the road, is it not?” she said. She was naked on the bed, stretched on her right side like a svelte, nubile feline, and was staring up at me with wide hazel eyes. Talk about timing.

“I possibly could be persuaded, sometime down the road,” I said, dropping my under shorts to the floor and stepping out of them as briskly as if I was dancing on a bed of hot coals.

“Then don’t do any more whining while I’m keeping you warm for the next couple of nights.” Apparently my best effort not to sound whiny had been insufficient.

“Should I get the book and look up Number 63?”

“Let’s leave the book alone until I get back from Duluth. That old time lovin’ was pretty good last night.”

When the alarm went off Monday morning, I turned my head toward the bedroom window and discovered that it had become opaque during the night. The outside surface was plastered with a wind-driven layer of white. The TV weather pundits had forecast high winds and several inches of snow, and this time they were right.

I turned back toward Martha, who lay on her back to my right. “Not a nice day to fly to Duluth,” I said.

“Who said anything about flying,” Martha replied. “We’re driving up in Sara’s Subaru.”

“You’re driving northeast for 150 miles in this shit?”

“It’s an all-wheeler. We’ll be fine.”

“Better wear your ski pants and snow boots. You’ll probably be out shoveling.”

Martha sat up and let the covers slide off her bare breasts, an erotic unveiling that always disarmed me. “You think because we’re women we can’t drive in a little old snowstorm?” she said.

“I didn’t say anything about you being handicapped by your gender,” I said. “I don’t think anybody of any sex, color, or creed should be driving to Duluth today. In fact, I’d rather not be driving to downtown St. Paul.” I turned away from Martha, curled into the fetal position and pulled the covers over my head. Her response was a knee applied solidly to my glutei maximi.

“Okay, weather wimp, you can lay there and suck your thumb until I’m out of the shower,” Martha said. I felt the bed shake as she rose, and I sat up just in time to watch her wondrous ass disappear through the bathroom door. I sank back onto the pillow and reminded myself that a few hours ago this gorgeous woman had talked about the possibility of a honeymoon.