The Quick Adios (Times Six) (13 page)

I thought I had escaped the mess, washed my hands of everything, left it to Beth and Marnie and the Aristocrats. Now, for sure, I was sucked back in.

With the sad news aired, everyone but Beth left the porch. Dubbie Tanner went first, Carmen and Marnie offered hugs, Chicken Neck shook hands but couldn’t look me in the eye.

I sat in the chair that he had vacated. “First, let me explain Sarasota.”

“I know,” said Beth. “I got your message. I wasn’t sure how to answer it.”

“Why this group, this mini-summit meeting?”

“We expected you back, your message said tomorrow. We were deciding how to let you know by phone. We knew it would be in tomorrow’s
Citizen
.”

“Did you draw straws to pick the bearer of bad tidings?”

“Don’t be that way, Alex. I wasn’t sure how or when, but knew I would tell you. I wanted to include the others in my decision.”

“I’ll have to call Tim.”

“Has he made new friends up in Florida?” she said. “Did you meet anyone while you were there, someone who might stand by him if he needs reassurance?”

“I met two of his pals and a women he’d been dating. I didn’t feel them out for emergency hand-holding. I don’t think he was going to meetings or anything like that.”

In October my brother Tim had found a job in Orlando, which we both needed. I had paid his motel bills for several months until he got situated. Finally a searchlight company hired him to tow a beacon and generator rig all over central Florida. His assignments were sparse. There weren’t many grand openings in a tough economy, so his money was tight. Of all people, the perennial rambling boy had sounded lonely the few times we spoke on the phone. Just before Christmas I borrowed Beth’s new Audi A5, drove up from the Keys and stayed well north of the Disney-Universal mess. I survived a cheap motel and six restaurant meals. After Tim and I shared a farewell lunch at a Bonefish Grill, I drove back to Key West in crazed and urgent holiday traffic. I felt like sleeping for four days. To my surprise, he had mentioned Teresa Barga a half dozen times. Now I would have to ante up brotherly duty a second time.

“Liska was here yesterday, full of one-liners and praise,” I said. “Did he come to tell me about Teresa?”

“He assured me that he was an old pro at breaking bad news,” said Beth. “When he was face-to-face with you, right here on the porch, he couldn’t do it. He meant well. Both he and Marnie felt bad about not saying anything right away.”

“It wouldn’t have changed what happened,” I said.

“It would have changed one major factor,” she said. “I owe you an apology for taking away your fun yesterday.”

“Excluding me from forensics?” I said. “You know me better than that. I would never view a crime scene as entertainment.”

“I wasn’t saying that. I know that murder starts ugly and goes downhill.”

“Where does fun fit?”

“When a detective asks you to help out,” said Beth. “You get the power to say, ‘No.’ It’s flattering to be asked, and it’s strong to turn it down.”

“Wrong and wrong, my lovely friend,” I said. “It’s a pain to be called and a relief to decline.”

“What needs relieving?”

“I hate being the outsider,” I said. “Every time I get dragged into a case, I’m surrounded by trained scene workers. Aside from you and Liska and one or two other detectives, I can see the looks in their eyes. I’m worse than a pain in the ass. I’m a civilian intruder who could molest evidence and undermine their reputations. I’m no better than a TV cop show fan living out his dreams.”

Beth nodded, took a sip, then shook her head. “That’s not what law enforcement people say about you.”

“Not to mention,” I said, “my presence confuses a situation that needs clarity, not turmoil. It makes mockery of their training. Even you have to sense that, right?”

She looked at me and said nothing.

“Who would take time to talk about me?” I said.

“Believe me, out of the public eye, they talk about everyone and everything. A few resent that you don’t think like a cop. The majority say they like your approach. You have a way of clinging to a case.”

I wasn’t sure how to react so I shut up.

“They all respect your results,” said Beth. “A lot of veteran detectives would like to have your case closure rate.”

“You weren’t around the first couple times Liska talked me into it,” I said. “I had reasons to cling, as you call it. There was someone close to me that drew me in and kept me on it. With this case, I’m a true bystander. I have no stake in the outcome.”

“Amazing bullshit.”

“Okay,” I admitted. “I’d like to bring down the bastard that killed Teresa.”

Beth walked around my chair, lifted my shirt, began to massage my upper back. One of her habits that I most enjoyed.

“If Teresa lived down the hall,” I said, “how did she…”

“She was strangled and her neck was snapped. The strangling killed her.”

I fought to keep the picture from my mind. “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “Why was she in Caldwell’s condo? Was she having a fling with the late Greg Pulver?”

My shoulders were tight as bridge cables. Beth’s thumbs were up to the task.

“According to her boyfriend, Marsh, that wasn’t the case at all. He and Teresa had taken the day off. They were lounging around, having their coffee, deciding where to go for lunch. She went to drop garbage down the chute and to get something from her car. She may have found Caldwell’s door open, or heard a cry for help and looked in. She may have walked into a crime-in-progress.”

“Shall I bet that she was found by Officer Marsh?”

Beth eased up her massage. “Yes, but it’s not your job to speculate.”

“Will you do me a favor and talk me through Darrin’s story?”

“Okay,” she said, “but let me say first that her T-shirt, sweatpants and flip-flops fit the idea that she was having an easy morning. Enjoying coffee and the newspaper on her balcony.”

“Let me guess. She didn’t return and Marsh went looking for her?”

“After about twenty minutes he wondered, but he figured she was caught in a conversation with a neighbor. After forty minutes he called her cell phone, but it rang in their bedroom. So Darrin went looking, found Emerson Caldwell’s door wide open, saw the man on the floor, then found Teresa in the kitchen. He called 911 from Caldwell’s land line and backed out of the crime scene. He didn’t venture far enough into the apartment to find Greg Pulver in the master bath.”

“Did Teresa or Marsh know Caldwell or his wife?”

“He said they didn’t. They had seen the cleaning crew come and go, but never an occupant. They even discussed hiring the cleaners.”

“Well,” I admitted, “it’s all logical. Except he put his fingerprints on the phone before he backed out to preserve the crime scene. He probably left his prints on the kitchen floor, too.”

“He did,” said Beth. “And about six other places, too.”

“There’s bound to be a civil rights question. Will the Feds see Marsh as a person of interest?”

“They questioned him for three hours yesterday afternoon. They’ve got two agents watching him, not that they informed us of that fact. We know that he’s acting mopey but he’s going through his day-to-day motions. One of them said he was a person of boredom. Naturally, they’re curious about that, too.”

“Nothing like normalcy to set off a bureaucrat.”

She quit rubbing my neck, walked around and sat opposite me, grim-faced. “One other thing,” she said. “His service pistol is missing, and he can’t account for it. He thinks it was stolen from his pickup in The Tideline parking lot.”

“So… he’s a sloppy cop. How could that matter in this case? No one was shot.”

“Greg Pulver was not carved up with sharp knives,” she said. “We decided to put out that story to thwart false confessions. The hollow-point bullet that took out Pulver entered his lower jaw and went upward. One of my sicker colleagues called it a brain smoothie.”

“I hope someone had the presence of mind to search for Marsh’s weapon.”

“Oh, yes,” said Beth. “One of the sheriff’s guys ordered a search of the condo grounds and adjacent properties. When he expanded it to halfway up Smathers Beach and back down to White Street Pier, I shut down the search.”

“You countermanded him?”

“He bought my logic. Darrin Marsh is a cop. He knows about evidence. He could have shot Pulver, driven less than two miles in any direction but south and dropped the bastard off a dock. No one would ever see it again. Looking around The Tideline is fine. It accounts for the panic of a murderer. But anything else assumes lack of cunning, becomes bogus by the infinite possibilities.”

“But he didn’t have time to drive anywhere… Oh, okay,” I said. “He ditched the gun, came home and found Caldwell’s door open with the man dead on the floor.”

“Except maybe Teresa found Caldwell first, then found Greg Pulver. When Marsh returned she may have been calling 911. So he hung it up, killed his girlfriend, then called 911 himself.”

“Two calls?”

“A hang-up, which is guaranteed to generate a police visit. Then Marsh’s call.”

“He could have wiped her prints off the phone then put his own all over it.”

“That would be nice to prove,” said Beth. “Impossible, but…”

“Is there any kind of security video?”

She nodded, sighed deeply. “Inoperative since 4:00 am that morning.”

“Was her garbage located at ground level?”

“Hauled off by Waste Management about the exact time Marsh called 911.”

“Coffee in her stomach?”

“Yep. All bases covered.”

“I’m afraid to react,” I said. “This is going to take some adjustment. Will the Feds come in because of this Marsh, the cop she lived with?”

“Yes,” she said, “there’s a civil rights question. Which is one reason you couldn’t come near this case, but that was not why I sent you away. Your relationship to the victim, no matter how long ago it happened, could blow our chance for prosecution.”

“Not if I was a work-for-hire employee.”

“Especially for that reason. They’d take one look into your work history and my job would go blooey.” She sat back, stared at the far wall and exhaled. “Which might not be so bad. This whole thing sucks out loud. I questioned two condo dwellers who were angered by the inconvenience. I guess they thought their daily routines were more important than violent deaths in the building.”

“They pay big bucks for those apartments,” I said. “A few think it insulates them from the street, from the rogue crap that the human horde creates.”

Beth looked back to me. “Now you sound like our people when they’re out of the public eye. One woman, I asked her if she heard anything that morning. She said, ‘Screams.’ I asked if the screaming included words that she understood. She shook her head and said, ‘No, just normal screams.’”

“Like normal gunshots?” I said.

“So I asked her if the screams could have come from children at play.”

“Don’t tell me.”

Beth nodded. “She remembered it was kids running in the hallway. But it might have been the night before, the dingbat bitch. One witness was a true eagle-eye. She described a man with his hair done up in ‘spring rolls,’ wearing sleeveless jammies with calf-length bottoms and shoes with zebra stripes. We determined it was a black man who had delivered pizza two nights before the deaths.”

“Speaking of normal gunshots,” I said. “Did no one report hearing gunfire during the time frame when Pulver could have been killed?”

She shook her head.

I had exhausted my limited investigative brilliance. My mind went purposefully blank, fogged with grief. We listened to several sirens on Eaton Street and White Street. They sounded like they converged about four blocks south and east of us.

“Jesus,” she said. “It’s the usual time of night for domestic violence. I do not want my phone to ring.”

Beth stood and came around behind me again to raise my shirt and resume my massage. Half the time she administered relief, her massages led to other activities. My favorite clue to the next step was when she rubbed her breasts against my back. The absolute giveaway was when she removed her top and lifted her bra and tickled my shoulder blades with her nipples. Which is exactly what she did.

“Did you think about this in Sarasota?” she said.

“You bet I did. The client’s girlfriend tried to get me to fuck her. She engaged in flagrant solo skinny-dipping after he had gone to bed. I’d have been a fool to turn her down if I wasn’t coming home to you.”

“Please follow me to your bedroom, Alex Rutledge. Your perfect answer deserves a reward.”

It was a reward we both redeemed, using bedpost leverage, multiple fingertip exploration, laughter and deep breathing.

Before we zonked out, just before I blew out the candle, I brushed a strand of damp hair from Beth’s eyelashes and whispered, “I like your approach.”

I eased awake to faint daylight, Beth Watkins’s smooth leg against mine, one of life’s great natural luxuries. Except it was a queen-sized pillow, and I had been fooled by a high thread count.

She had slipped out early, a relief to my conscience. In spite of our lovemaking hours earlier, I had been virtually unfaithful just after dawn, ninety-eight percent asleep, dreaming of Teresa Barga.

Nothing exotic or erotic, at least by my interpretation, but who knows the true meaning of dreams? She sat across from me at an art deco-patterned Formica table in a loud restaurant full of neon signs, a sly expression on her face. Her low-cut top and high-end bra put lovely tan skin on display. With all the shouting, rock music and clattering, I couldn’t hear what Teresa was saying to our server. He looked charmed. She pointed at me then at something in the bar area, and they laughed. I watched her squeeze his forearm. Were they sharing a little secret?

I shouted above the din, asking if the joke was on me. Teresa waved her hand as if to say it was inconsequential, that I shouldn’t worry about it.

Beth had left a note in the kitchen:
PRESS THE BUTTON. THE ONE TO MAKE COFFEE, MY LOVE
. She had prepped the filter and grounds, poured the water.

I pressed, went to brush my teeth, and my cell phone rang.