Dead Man Talking (12 page)

Or would they?

“Help!” My panic got the best of me, and I screamed as loud as I could. “I’m here. In the mausoleum. Help!”

There was no answer to my plea, and I waited for what felt like a lifetime but was probably closer to a couple seconds before I tried again.

“Help! Somebody, help me!”

Was that a voice I heard in response?

“Help! Is somebody out there?”

“Pepper?” I recognized Absalom’s booming voice. It was close, but muffled, like he was outside the mausoleum. “Where you at, girl?”

“I’m in the mausoleum. There’s a hole in the floor. I fell in and I can’t get out.”

“In there? In that mausoleum?”

Honestly, if I wasn’t so incredibly relieved that someone knew where I was, I would have taken the time to get pissed. I controlled the impatience in my voice, but only with effort, and only because I had a sneaky suspicion that if I gave him any excuse at all, Absalom would pretend the whole thing never happened.

“Get in here,” I told him. “I can’t get out.” As if to prove it, I made another jump for the rim and missed. “I can’t get out by myself. If you could just give me a hand up . . .”

“In there?” Absalom’s voice sounded closer now, like he was right outside the door. “You want me to come inside?”

“Of course I want you to come inside. What the—”

And then it hit me. Absalom’s reluctance. Absalom’s voodoo doll. Absalom’s chilly personality.

I’d assumed it was all because he was a hardened criminal.

I never even bothered to think that he might be scared to death to be in a cemetery.

“Absalom?” I called out, reminding him I was still in trouble so he wouldn’t hightail it out of there. “It’s just a mausoleum. Just a room. Like a small chapel.”

“Dead people buried in there.”

“Yeah, there are.” There was no use denying it. He was bound to see the names carved into the walls. “But they’ve been here a long, long time, and there’s never been a problem. I mean, no ghosts or anything.” I crossed my fingers as I said this, just in case one of those pesky spirits who’d greeted me my first day at Monroe Street actually was buried there. “There’s definitely no ghosts down here where I am.” I could say this with some authority. “There are worms, though. And spiders!” I felt one skitter up my arm and squealed. “If you could help me out, I’d really appreciate it.”

For what seemed like forever, there was no reply. Then I saw him peek over the edge of the hole. “You scared of spiders?” Absalom asked.

“Terrified.” I didn’t have to pretend. I stretched my arms. “If you could just—”

I never had time to finish. Before I could, Absalom latched onto my hands and pulled. One second I was sailing through the air, seemingly as light as a feather thanks to Absalom’s muscles. The next, I was standing on solid ground.

“Thank you.” I held a hand to my heart, fighting to keep it from bursting through my ribs, and I was all set to give him a hug to show him how grateful I was.

Only by that time, Absalom was already out the door.

I followed him outside, grateful for a lungful of non-moldy air. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am.”

Rather than answer, he looked around slowly and carefully, as if he expected something dead to pop out from behind the nearest headstone.

Of course, I knew dead things
could
pop out from behind headstones. But this did not seem like the right time to mention that.

Instead, I brushed off my jeans and my shirt again, which didn’t do much good, seeing as I was coated with icky mud. My knees were trembling, my arm was bleeding, my hair hung in my eyes. I plunked down in the dry, prickly grass.

Doesn’t it figure, that was precisely the moment that Greer showed up. Of course Bianca was with her.

The supermodel took one look at me, shook her head sadly, and left. Greer, though, quivered with anticipation. “Thought I heard a commotion,” she said. “Not as good as that Sammi beating up on her boyfriend. That was priceless!” She gave me a once-over, and I don’t think it was my imagination. She really did smile when she saw that I looked awful.

“Looks like you’ve had an accident of some kind.” Greer called her cameraman over. “Get this,” she ordered him. “Let’s have Ms. Martin here tell us what happened.”

This was not my idea of a good time, but trooper that I am, I pulled myself to my feet.

“We were just checking out the mausoleum,” I said.

“You? Both of you?” Greer turned to Absalom. “I don’t know. I can’t say for sure, but I thought I heard two people yelling back and forth. You know, like one of you was in that mausoleum and the other one was outside. What do you think . . . ?” Like she was teasing, Greer elbowed Absalom in the ribs. “Think there are ghosts hanging around that place?”

He gulped, and that’s all she needed. She was all set to pounce when I stepped between her and Absalom. “We were checking to see what kind of work needed to be done in the mausoleum,” I told her in my best team-captain voice. “Absalom told me to be careful. I should
have listened. I went right through an old, boarded up part of the floor. If he wasn’t here to pull me out . . . well, I don’t know what would have happened.”

“You’re sure?” Greer peered at me before she turned to Absalom. “That’s the way it happened? I thought for sure I heard you sounding like you didn’t want to go into that—”

“For sure,” I interrupted. “That’s the way it happened.”

Her shoulders slumped inside her navy suit jacket, but in her own way, I guess Greer was as much of a trooper as I am. She latched onto her cameraman’s sleeve and led him toward the open door of the mausoleum. “Let’s get in there, Charlie, get some mood shots. You know, dark hole and all.” She looked my way. “We could re-create the scene.”

“Not on your life!” I didn’t wait for her to try and wheedle me into agreeing. I was wheedle-proof, and besides, I knew what was going to happen next. Greer was going to try and talk Absalom into showing her how he’d saved my life. And she was going to read right through his big tough-guy facade. Just like I had.

Rather than risk it, I walked away.

Absalom came along. “You didn’t tell her,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be any use in pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about. “It’s not her business,” was my only reply.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe you’re not so bad after all.”

Reluctant to break the bond we’d forged, I scrambled for something to say and thought of it when we neared Jefferson Lamar’s grave and I saw the voodoo altar nearby. “Do you suppose that voodoo doll of yours had anything to do with you hearing me and coming to save me?” I asked him.

“I don’t doubt it for a minute. Protection. That’s what she’s for.”

“Then I’m guessing I owe her something. You got any rum?”

Absalom smiled.

7

L
enny Fitzpatrick, the current warden of Central State, didn’t know me from Adam, and he wouldn’t have given me the time of day if he wasn’t stuck on a treadmill. I knew this because when I finally found him in the dizzying maze of buildings that make up the massive Cleveland Clinic, he looked me over with as much suspicion as if I was one of the inmates in his prison and he’d just found a hole in my cell floor with an escape-plan map tucked inside.

To my credit, I didn’t let that stop me. But I didn’t appreciate it, either, especially since when I left the cemetery at lunchtime, I’d stopped home to shower and change. I was neat, clean, presentable, and looking as good as ever. I wasn’t about to be intimidated. Not by a silver-haired, sixty-something guy wearing gray fleece shorts and a white T-shirt that said I MIGHT BE OVER THE HILL, BUT I GOT HERE ON MY HARLEY.

I introduced myself and told him the same story I’d
told Helen Lamar, the one about doing research for the TV show competition and how if I could find out more about Jefferson Lamar, it would get my team big points.

“That was a long time ago.” Fitzpatrick wasn’t moving very fast and it was no wonder. His left leg was crisscrossed with glossy, bright red scars. He took a dozen more slow, careful steps. “There’s nothing new to learn about Jeff Lamar, anyway. Anything you need to know about him, you can find in the old newspaper articles. There were plenty of them. Jeff’s case, it created quite a media sensation.”

By now, telling fibs didn’t phase me, so I didn’t miss a beat. “I have read the old newspaper articles. They gave me all the basic background I need, but there’s nothing like firsthand information from a person who was really there.”

His jaw went rigid. “I was there at the prison,” he said. “Not there at the murder.”

“Of course not. That wasn’t what I meant at all.” I sidled a bit closer to the treadmill, and maybe a whiff of the Marc Jacobs Pear Splash I’d sprinkled on before I left my apartment was a welcome change from the combined aromas of sweat and hospital disinfectant. Some of the starch went out of Fitzpatrick’s shoulders.

“There never was a chance that Jeff didn’t commit that murder,” he said.

Since I hadn’t mentioned the bogus note in the cemetery file that talked about Lamar being framed, this struck me as interesting.

“That seems like a funny thing to say about a friend,” I pointed out.

“Who said we were friends?” There was an open water bottle on a holder at the front of the treadmill, and keeping one hand firmly on the railing at the side of the
machine, Fitzpatrick reached for the bottle and took a swig. He didn’t look at me again until he’d put the water bottle back. “We worked together, me and Jeff. It’s not like we were joined at the hip or anything.”

“And you think it’s possible for someone to commit a murder when he’s a firm believer in the justice system?”

“You’ve learned that much about him, huh?” A smile twisted Fitzpatrick’s expression. “That was Jeff, all right. Always preaching about what we could do to help our inmates. Bah!” I had the feeling if Fitzpatrick could have gotten away with spitting on the floor, he would have. “He never would listen. Not when I told him that no matter what he did, criminals were criminals and they were never going to change. He saw the same figures on recidivism that I did. He knew that as soon as the prisoners were released and walked out our front gates, they were going to pick up right where they left off and end up back behind bars. But Jeff . . .” Fitzpatrick shook his head in disgust. “Maybe that should have told me something, huh? Maybe I should have seen that he had criminal tendencies.”

“Did he? Have criminal tendencies?”

“He killed that girl, didn’t he?”

“What was she like?”

“Vera Blaine?” He probably hadn’t given Vera so much as a thought in more than twenty years. That would explain why he had to concentrate for a while before he said, “She was young. And she didn’t strike me as being very smart. I wouldn’t have hired her. But then . . .”

“I’ve heard the stories about Lamar and Vera having an affair,” I told him when it seemed like he was reluctant to continue. “You don’t have to worry that you’re helping to keep Lamar’s secret.”

His laughter sounded like sandpaper on stone. “Is
that what you think I’m doing? Keeping secrets in honor of Jeff’s memory? I’m not in the secrets business, honey. Don’t have the time, and even if I did, I couldn’t care less. What Jeff did with that girl, that was his business. It became my business when he killed her.”

“So you thought he was guilty? You testified against him?”

He slanted me a look. “That’s a leap of logic if I ever heard one. And no, I didn’t testify
against
Jeff. I testified. I told the truth. That’s all. Sat there in court and told the truth.”

“And the truth was . . .”

He took another drink of water and used the time it took to do it to arrange his thoughts. “Jeff Lamar was a tough man,” he said. “Not as tough as he should have been with the prisoners. He believed in educating them. Like that ever did one of those scumbags one bit of good! Jeff was tough with us, with the people he worked with.”

“Then do you think one of them might have—” I’d said too much too soon, but once the words were past my lips, I couldn’t take them back. With no other option, I fell back on the truth. “I talked to Helen Lamar. She believes her husband was innocent, that he was framed by someone who had a grudge against him.”

“Helen always was naive. That’s the only thing that would explain her still believing that crock. With the evidence they had against him, nobody else could have possibly believed Jeff didn’t do it. Well . . .” He paused for a moment, his head cocked. “Maybe Darcy Coleman. But honestly—”

“Darcy Coleman?” I made a mental note of the name. “She was—”

“Jeff’s secretary. Before Vera Blaine. Darcy’s husband
was in one of the armed services, can’t remember which one. He was stationed overseas. That’s when Darcy worked at the prison. When he came back and got transferred to some base in California, she quit and went with him. Jeff needed a secretary. He hired Vera.”

“And this Darcy, do you know what happened to her?”

He looked at me as if I’d just asked him to recite the alphabet backward, but fortunately, there was still twenty minutes to go on the countdown timer on the treadmill, and Fitzpatrick was bored. Talking to me apparently beat sweating all by his lonesome. “I get a Christmas card from Darcy every year. Her husband died a few years ago. Some sort of accident. She moved back to Ohio to be with family. She got her degree out in California. Last I heard from her, she was teaching down at Kent State University.”

I told myself not to forget this. Darcy Coleman sounded like someone I needed to talk to, but before I asked her the all-important question, I wanted to run it by Fitzpatrick and get his take. “Darcy believed Lamar was innocent. Why?”

“Why? Because she was devoted to him. It’s that simple. Not that I thought there was ever anything between them—”

“But you did think there was something between Vera Blaine and Lamar?”