Beer Money (A Burr Ashland Mystery) (15 page)

“Now, I only agreed to let you in here," she said, "because I wanted you to see with your own eyes that I am dying. Maybe then, I presumed, and only then, would you leave me in peace."

Her voice was floating high above us. A faint tremolo had crept in. Katherine Hepburn style.

"I really need to ask..." I continued.

Her hands flopped on the bed, a gesture of exasperation.

"The world has done nothing but take things from me," she said. "Take. Take. Take. Why should my last hours be any different? The world is full of cold, heartless bastards like you Mr. Ashland."

I felt my anger boil over. "Why was my friend Tim Bantien killed? He had films of you having sex with a man. Your goddamned nurse tried to kill me. Everything has to do with you. What is it? Why was Tim killed? Why are people trying to kill me?"

She giggled, a sound that would be my vote for the official soundtrack to insanity.

"Why, why, why, why?" Her voice mocked me. "Aren't you just the little interrogator?"

I waited as she sank onto her back.

"Mr. Ashland what are you doing here?"

"I already answered that question."

She lifted, with effort, a small hand mirror from the side table. It looked like it was made of ivory.

"I was such a pretty girl," she said. "So
desired
. I remember in the early days how the boys would chase after me. I even let a few of them catch me.”

She looked into the mirror again.

"No," she said, "time is most definitely not our friend, Mr. Ashland. Of all the evil acts the world has perpetrated on my being, none has been so devastating as those wrought by time." A deep sigh.

"I wish I could say the same for my friend," I said, my voice rising. "An innocent man-"

"There is no such thing."

"-a history professor. With a child on the way."

She dropped the mirror onto her lap.

"Oh, another orphan, how sad," she said and stuck out her lower lip. "If you're trying to play the sympathy card with me, Mr. Ashland, I would suggest you re-shuffle the deck." A long tendril of saliva hung from the corner of her mouth.

Her words were ringing in my ears.
Another orphan
?

The old woman turned to me and the white milkiness of her eyes was criss crossed with bulging red veins.

She seemed to focus on me.

And then her eyes cleared. Her upper lip snarled back.

"You want to know why you're being pursued? What these bad, bad men are after?"

I nodded before I realized it was a rhetorical question.

"Here's what I'll tell you, Mr. Ashland," she said, and pressed a button next to her bed. A man immediately appeared in the door behind me. "And then I want you out of here. I want you out of here and I don't ever want you to come back. If I never see your ugly face I'll die not so much a happy woman, as a
relieved
woman."

She sat up, the effort taking several seconds.

I stood and watched her, looked into her fiery eyes.

Her mouth parted. Her yellow teeth gleamed, dark brown in the crevices. Her nostrils flared, long hairs stuck out from the twin holes.

She whispered.

"They're looking for the little black bitch."

Thirty-Four

The Speedway was deserted, eight bays of gasoline pumps, all of them empty. Most people had had the good sense to fill up their cars before the cold front moved in. With the Audi down to a quarter of a tank, I stopped to fill up. Inside, I bought a twelve-pack.

With a fresh beer between my legs, I pulled out onto Capitol Drive headed back toward Milwaukee's western suburbs. My entire body ached, and with the Audi's upholstery slashed, the driver's seat's springs were poking into my ass.

As I slammed the first beer, I thought about Tim's ex-wife. Emily. The last time I'd talked with her she said she'd had coffee with Tim a week before he was killed. He'd seemed nervous. Uptight.

I emptied the beer and cracked another.

A few minutes later I pulled into Emily Lyon's driveway.

I checked my watch. Only four-thirty.

I took a chance, left the car running and went to ring the doorbell. The path to the front door had been cleared with a snowblower. I could see tracks from the chains around the tires.

The doorbell rang. I waited. No answer. I rang again, but still no answer. I walked around to the garage, found the side door, and peered through the window inside. Except for an oil stain on the concrete floor, it was empty.

I drove back down the block and parked.

What a fucking mess, I thought. I was overloaded with questions. I knew Mary Schletterhorn had something to do with Tim's murder. But what? The more questions I asked, the more questions I created. What orphan? What did Vanderkin have to do with it, if anything? And why had Tim been so secretive?

It was like quicksand, the more I thrashed about, the closer I came to being buried alive.

Forty minutes and four more beers later, no closer to having any idea what was going on, I saw a flash of headlights that signaled Emily's return home. I watched as she pulled her car into the garage.

I waited a few more minutes then pulled into the driveway. I shut the Audi off and went to the front door. I rang the doorbell and waited, looked at the thick sheet of ice covering the mailbox, the spiderweb of frost on the inside of the storm door.

Her face appeared in the window and then the doorknob turned. She pulled the door but it was stuck, frozen in place. I put my hand against it and pushed. It moved backward with a pop and I stepped quickly inside.

"Burr, you really should have called first." We skipped the hug this time. She looked me over. "What happened to you?" My face was still discolored from the beating I'd taken.

"I think the question should be what hasn't happened to me," I said. In the dining room, I saw two place settings. An unlit candle. A bottle of wine on the counter. A wonderful smell from the kitchen.

She checked her watch.

"Look, Emily. I have to ask you something, it won't take long." She looked at me and I thought I saw the old Emily flit before me like the last gasp of a dying candle.

"Okay," she said, and gestured to the dining room table. "But I'm expecting company."

"Like I said, this won't take long."

"You want something to drink?"

"No, thanks." She sat across from me. Crossed her legs. Folded her hands in her lap.

"You said the last time you saw Tim, you had coffee together."

She answered without hesitation. "Right."

"You said he seemed nervous."

"Yeah," she said. "He wasn't himself."

I forced myself to slow down. "Okay, can you remember anything else?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know," I said. "Anything he talked about. What he was doing. Where he was going. Was he meeting anyone else?"

She shook her head and I felt something sink inside me. I'd wasted my time. I should have known.

"No. Nothing like that.”

Shit.

"Do you know where he went afterward?” I asked.

"Yes. Here."

I pointed at the floor of the dining room. "Here? Like, your house you mean?"

"Yeah."

"But you said the last time you saw him was at the coffeeshop..."

"I had to go back to work and he said he needed something. He knows where the spare key is so I didn't come back. He was here alone. But it's not like I wouldn't trust him."

"Did he get it? What he needed?"

She squinted. As if the memory were so long ago she could barely make it out on the horizon.

"Well, that brings up a good point," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't think of it before, but when he told me he needed something, it, well, it struck me as kind of odd."

"Why?"

"Because I'd cleaned the basement the week before and as far as I could tell, all his stuff was gone. He'd moved it all out a long time ago. I just assumed I must have missed something."

From the kitchen, a hissing sound erupted and she jumped up to turn the heat down on whatever was cooking in the pan. Smelled like garlic.

She poured herself a glass of wine as I sat back in my chair. She walked over to me and stood next to me.

"It was odd," she said. Sip.

"Unless..." I said, "Unless he wasn't picking something up."

She looked at me over the rim of her glass.

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe he was dropping something off."

Thirty-Five

"Boy," I said, swiping away a big cobweb, "how long ago did you clean this place?" The spiderweb clung to my hand. I wiped it on my pants. It just seemed to smear.

We went down the wooden steps to her basement. I had accepted a beer from Emily and was glad I did. Drinking in the basement is a unique Wisconsin tradition.

The stairs were old, steep, and creaked with each step. One step was completely cracked.

It was a typical basement. The cement floor had been painted gray many years ago. The cement block walls were white. Several bare light bulbs hung from the ceiling, their string covered with dust. I turned them all on.

In one corner was the furnace, in the other corner, an ancient concrete double sink was pushed up against the wall. Next to it were the washer and dryer.

Emily spoke from behind me. "What are we looking for?" she asked.

"I don't know, did you see anything out of the ordinary when you cleaned down here?"

"No." A long centipede type insect scurried away from the light. "Just spiders and mouse poop."

Water rushed from the washer to the big sink. The furnace kicked in.

"Did you find anything of Tim's?" I asked. "Empty boxes? Anything you thought was garbage?'

"I don't think so. If I did, I threw it out."

Great. Where to start looking?

"Has anyone been down here since?"

She shook her head. "No, just the guy from the city."

I turned around and looked at her.

"The guy from the city?"

"He needed to check the furnace for gas leaks, said that the area had reported abnormal readings. Something like that. "

She saw the expression on my face. Rolled her eyes and held her hands out.

"Look," she said. "He had papers from the Elm Grove police, authorizing him to...be doing that. I checked. I'm not an idiot."

"Did he check your neighbors, too? Did you get any kind of notification from the city ahead of time? Did anyone else mention it? Or did he just show up?"

She looked off, annoyed. "He just showed up," she finally said. "Come on, he was a harmless gas man. Stop being so fucking paranoid."

Something scurried across the floor and Emily said, "I think I need another glass of wine." She went up the stairs and I stood there, alone in the basement. I knew that someone else had already been here. Probably thoroughly searched the space. And judging by what had happened, I figured they hadn't found anything.

I tried to put myself in Tim's place. He must have found something and needed to hide it someplace safe. He figured, accurately I'm sure, that his place wasn't safe. What better place than his estranged ex-wife's house?

I went back up the steps to a small ledge that held a collection of car wax, ant spray and gardening gloves. On the near side was a flashlight. I tested it, and a thin ray of light shone out. Good enough to look into the nooks and crannies.

In the area beneath the stairs, I saw a pair of matching steel shelves, littered with old rolls of duct tape, a few crescent wrenches, pliers, an old hammer, jars of nails and screws, a tape measure and some oily rags.

A box was beneath the bottom shelf. I pulled it out. Nails.

I straightened up. There was only one way to do this. I started with the easy stuff. The washer and dryer area. The workbench. The shelves. Nothing. I went through every box, every nook, every cranny of Emily Lyons' basement.

And I had nothing.

Nothing but a sore back and a headache. And lungs full of musty basement air.

I looked around me. I didn't know what I’d hoped to find. A secret compartment. A loose rafter. A section of drywall with smudged fingerprints around it that seemed out of place.

But there was nothing.

I stood there, hoping for some sort of inspiration, but none came. It was just a basement. No secrets. At least none that it was willing to divulge at the moment.

I turned the lights off and went back upstairs.

Emily had eaten alone. Canceled her dinner plans. I was sure William Vanderkin wasn’t a happy camper right about now. She sat on the couch in sweatpants and a sweatshirt, her feet tucked under her legs, watching television. A bottle wine sat on the table next to her.