A Welcome Grave (16 page)

It took us less than twenty minutes to break all the numbers. Some were easy, using a basic reverse lookup, and two others—pay phones—required our more sophisticated search databases.

“Both of the recent calls were made from pay phones,” Joe said. “Not surprising, if those were the calls that freaked Jefferson out, this guy stepping back into his life. What do you have?”

“Two of the calls he received came from Fairview Park Hospital. They’re four years old, though, and my guy last night made some reference to five years ago. I’m more interested in a number Jefferson called.”

I explained the sequence to Joe: At nearly two in the morning, Matt Jefferson had called his father, who then immediately made another call.

“And you got a match on the number he called?”

“Yeah. It returns to one Paul Brooks, of Geneva-on-the-Lake.”

“Mr. Brooks would seem to be our best option, then. Nobody at the hospital is going to talk to us about a four-year-old phone call, and the last time I interviewed a pay phone it didn’t go well.”

“You really are dispensing wisdom today, aren’t you?”

“Geneva-on-the-Lake is a long drive. Let’s hope the guy’s around. If not, we can wait on him.”

“You want to drive out there? Don’t think we should call first?”

He shook his head. “Harder to blow us off in person.”

“True.”

He got to his feet and picked up his car keys. They belonged to a new Ford Taurus. His old Taurus had suffered a little body damage back in the summer. A little body damage of the sort a car can suffer when an assault rifle is unloaded into it. True to form, Joe simply purchased a newer version of the exact same car, in the exact same color. Word from Ford was that the Taurus would soon be reaching the end of its line. I didn’t want to break that news to Joe, though. He’s a strong man, but news like that . . . no sure thing that he could handle it.

“You driving?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it make sense to let the guy with two good arms drive?”

“Not when the guy is you. Besides, I need to put some miles on the car, break it in. Still haven’t hit a thousand.”

“You’ve had the car for two months, Joe. How have you not hit a thousand miles?”

“Haven’t had to go anywhere. It’s been two months since you got yourself into trouble.”

“A new record,” I said, and then I followed him out the door.

An hour later, Joe pulled onto 534 north as it became the lake road and led into the village of Geneva-on-the-Lake. In the summer, the place would have been buzzing, filled with families and tourists, but here in late October things were quiet. We drove through the village and onto a winding country road, glimpses of Lake Erie showing through the pines occasionally.

“We should be coming up on it,” he said. “I hope the damn place has a mailbox with numbers. Drives me nuts when the mailboxes don’t have numbers.”

Turned out he didn’t have to worry—the numbers were two feet high, painted on a huge wooden sign that proclaimed Paul Brooks’s residence as
BROOKS’S NORTHSHORE WINERY
. Joe turned the Taurus into the drive and pulled into a long parking lot filled with cars. Behind the parking lot was a large log building, and behind that was the lake, looking hard and gray.

“Thought you said the number was residential,” Joe said.

“That’s what the computer told me.”

“Well, let’s go in and ask.”

We got out of the car and walked into the building. Racks of wine lined one
side of the room, with coolers of chilled wine on the opposite side and bins full of fancy cheeses and other gourmet items in the middle. In one corner, about a dozen people were gathered together, glasses in their hands, listening intently as a woman with red hair explained the “full-bodied richness” of what they were about to sample. A young, attractive girl in a black skirt and blouse approached us then, smiling.

“Do you gentlemen need any help?”

“It seems we’re a bit confused,” Joe said. “We thought this place was a private home. We’re looking for Paul Brooks?”

She nodded. “Mr. Brooks owns the winery. And there is a private home—you just needed to go right when you came through the gate instead of left. It’s tough to see with all the pine trees.”

We thanked her, walked back out to the car, and followed her instructions. The house was maybe two hundred yards down the drive, a good distance from the winery, and the girl was right: The pines screened it from the parking lot completely. The construction matched the winery, though; it was a big log home with a green-shingled roof, looking every bit the perfect lakeside retreat. We walked up to the front porch, past a black BMW that was parked in the drive, and knocked on the door. About ten seconds later, a good-looking young guy opened it. He couldn’t have been much past thirty, wearing a white dress shirt untucked over blue jeans and leather moccasins. Between the outfit and the perfect face and the thick brown hair that hung down almost to his collar, he looked like he should be a model for one of those “outfitter” catalogs that pretend they’re marketing clothing for outdoorsmen but really sell only to men who live behind computers.

“Can I help you?”

Joe and I passed him our licenses. He didn’t show either the distrust or the childish excitement that most people give you when they see the PI license, just nodded.

“Are you Paul Brooks?” I asked.

“Yes. What do you need to talk to me about?” He had noted the damage to my face but immediately looked away. Manners.

“A five-year-old phone call,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“We’re looking into the background of a man who was recently murdered. Five years ago, he called this house at two in the morning on—”

“The Fourth of July,” Brooks said. “That’s what you’re talking about, isn’t it? It would be five years now.”

Joe and I exchanged a glance while I nodded.

“That’s it. The call was on the fifth, but it was basically the night of the fourth.”

Paul Brooks sighed and pushed the door open wider. “I think we ought to sit down for this one.”

H
e took us out to a cedar deck that overlooked the woods and a private beach on Lake Erie. The water banged gently against the shore, and out beyond it the clouds were thickening. It made my own beautiful view of the stoplight on Lorain and the small-engine-repair shop across from it seem inferior.

“So, Paul, what can you tell us?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Let’s not get in such a rush. I still don’t know what interested you in the phone call to begin with.”

I gave it to him as concisely as I could, saying simply that we’d been employed by Alex Jefferson’s widow to look into the circumstances surrounding his murder and his son’s death, and that those circumstances had landed us here.

“I’d heard about Alex Jefferson being killed,” he said when I was through. “Didn’t know about the son, though.”

“Haven’t been reading your paper.”

He smiled. “Guess I’m a few days behind. But what makes the phone call significant to you?”

“Matt called his father before two in the morning, and his father then called your house. We’re wondering why.”

“You’re going to love the reason.”

“Yeah?”

“The calls were made because someone was murdered on my father’s property and Jefferson’s son saw it happen.”

It was quiet for a few seconds then, Joe and I waiting on Brooks, who was staring out at the lake. The beach in front of his house seemed to continue all the way up to the winery. Voices and laughter were audible, but we couldn’t see any people because of the pine trees.

“Can you provide a little more detail than that?” Joe said.

“I assume you know of my father?” Brooks asked in response.

Joe and I looked at each other, then shook our heads in unison. Brooks frowned at us, slighted.

“Fenton Brooks? Brooks Biomedical? That mean anything to you?”

“Stents,” Joe said.

Brooks nodded. “Yes, the company makes stents, although we also manufacture many other medical products.”

“But your father made his money on the stents, right?” Joe said.

“A good portion of it, at least.” Brooks looked annoyed, as if he found Joe’s question in poor taste. “The company has gone on to much greater things, though. My father passed away a few years ago. Cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

For a moment it was silent, and then Brooks cleared his throat.

“Okay, so now you understand the situation. My father owned a large company, had lots of employees, attorneys, advisors. He bought this winery as a side venture and liked the location enough that he built this house as a summer retreat. He used to have parties in the summer for friends, colleagues, that sort of thing. Five years ago, he held a Fourth of July party. There were about one hundred people out here, maybe more.”

“Including Matt Jefferson.”

“Yes, he was here. Alex Jefferson was, too, although he went home much earlier in the night. He was one of my father’s attorneys, you know.”

“We did not.”

“Well, he was. His son was in law school then, I believe. A few years younger than me? That sounds right. At any rate, he was here, and I gather he felt a bit out of place. The crowd began to thin out around twelve, but the man Matt Jefferson had come with was drunk and hanging around, and so he had to stay, too.”

“Who was that man?”

“Another one of the company’s attorneys, James Simon. Matt was working for him, some sort of internship.”

“So what happened?”

“Okay. Well, a few people stayed late—you know how that goes when you’ve got an open bar. Simon was drunk, and Matt got bored or annoyed or something and went up the beach, back toward the winery. We’d had a catered dinner up there earlier, so Matt knew where he was going. Found a guy and a girl up on the deck, apparently engaged in a little late-night illicit behavior. Matt figured they were entitled to their privacy and turned around and started back up the beach. But then he got the impression that the girl was resisting. Heard her shout or something. So he decided to go back in case there was a problem. When he got there he couldn’t see the girl, and the guy was booking around the corner of the building. Matt ran up onto the deck and found the girl. Clothes half off, and dead. She’d been strangled.”

The clouds had made the temperature dip, and Paul Brooks wasn’t wearing anything over his thin shirt, but he looked warm enough, sitting there watching our faces with a hint of satisfaction, a storyteller pleased with his ability to capture the audience.

“So what happened?” Joe said again.

“What do you think happened? The cops were called, obviously. Interviewed Matt and everyone else. Matt was pretty upset by it, I guess, and that was understandable. He wanted to talk to his dad. I think maybe he took the police questioning the wrong way. He called his dad, and his dad told him just to answer the questions and try to help. Then Alex called the house and asked for my father, making sure Matt had been honest about the situation.”

“That’s more than we were bargaining for with that phone call,” Joe said.

“Pretty intriguing stuff, but I don’t see what it could possibly have to do with Alex Jefferson’s murder or the son’s suicide,” Brooks said. “I’d have to say you’re grasping for straws on that one.”

“Who was the victim?” I said. “Did she belong with your party?”

“In a way. She worked for the caterer my father had hired for the party. She was only twenty years old, I think. A girl, really. They’d been going back and forth between the house and the winery, and she was left to clean up there alone. Not a good decision.”

“And the guy who killed her?”

Brooks hooked one moccasin-clad foot over his knee. “Someone she’d gone out with a time or two, then tried to dump. He was a real loser, criminal record nine miles long. Lived in a trailer maybe three miles up the road from the winery. Easy for him to come down that night.”

“He was arrested?”

“Arrested, tried, convicted. He’s still in jail.”

“You know his name?”

“Andy Doran. The girl he killed was named Monica Heath.”

“Quite a story,” Joe said.

“Quite a story,” Brooks agreed. “I imagine that answers your question about the phone call. What I can’t imagine, though, is that it will help you with the current problem.”

“You never know.”

Brooks looked skeptical. “I guess not. The whole situation was quite an embarrassment to my father. I mean, Andy Doran was certainly not an invited guest, but still . . . the girl was working at our party, you know?”

“Nobody else saw or heard anything?” Joe said. “No other witnesses except for Matt Jefferson?”

“None.”

“So Matt Jefferson gave a positive ID on this guy, Doran?” I said.

Brooks started to nod, then frowned and shook his head.

“To be honest, I can’t remember. I feel like he recognized a car, but not the actual guy? I’m not sure.”

“Pretty tough to convict someone with nothing but one eyewitness.”

“They had a lot more than that. Turned up hard evidence at the guy’s trailer, and then he got himself into all sorts of trouble lying to the cops. Changed his story six times before the trial, or something like that.”