The Sleuth Sisters (13 page)

Chapter Twenty-two

Barb

To my great relief, Brown was waiting when we came downstairs the next morning. The motel offered continental breakfast, and from the yeasty smell and the little pile of trash in front of him, I guessed he’d had toast and jelly. Now he was drinking coffee, and the little pile of sugar packets nearby indicated it was not his first cup.

“Can’t remember the last time I had this many choices,” he told us, glancing at the array. He seemed more at ease this morning, as if he’d worked through the revelations of yesterday, good and bad. He’d shaved away the uneven beard, and without it and his fake infirmities, he was an attractive man with a definite likeness to Meredith around the eyes and mouth.

Brown sat patiently while we made our own breakfast choices, oatmeal for me. Faye smeared a bagel with cream cheese, took two spoonfuls of egg casserole, and wedged a doughnut onto the plate as well. When we were seated, he said, “You want to hear my side of the story.”

“We do,” I said, sprinkling a sugar over my cereal. “When we agreed to find you, we gave your sister no guarantee you won’t go to prison.”

“I was pretty sure that’s where I was headed,” he said. “But I swear: if I’d done anything wrong, I’d have stayed and taken my deads.”

The phrase from childhood struck me, and I remembered the shots fired at us the day before. By tracking him down, we’d put Brown in danger. Someone wanted him dead, and I was determined to prevent that. “You promised us a story.”

He looked around the tiny dining area before meeting my gaze directly. “I didn’t kill my wife. Or her worthless punk brother, for that matter.”

“But when you heard they were dead, you ran.”

“I knew it was going to look like I did it.”

I turned my best lawyer look on him. “Your blood was on his clothes. Your skin was under Carina’s fingernails.”

My accusing tone didn’t seem to disturb him. “Carina pulled me off Carson. She probably scratched me in the process.” He turned to Faye, who I guessed he thought was more sympathetic. “Do you blame me for running?”

“With a man like Wozniak pushing things, maybe not,” she answered. “What do you know about what happened after you left?”

“Nothing.” He gulped the last of his coffee and stared into the empty cup. “I, um, made arrangements to be notified if it was safe to come home, but I never heard a word.”

“From Susie Mason?” Faye asked, and he looked up in surprise. “You and Susie were an item before Carina came along, right?”

He made a negative gesture. “We dated in high school, before I met Carina, but Susie married my friend John. There was nothing between us.” His earnest expression was hard to doubt. He was telling the truth as he saw it.

“But she helped you out when you needed her.”

Brown swept some breadcrumbs into his hand and emptied them into his napkin. “In order to say how she got involved, I have to tell the story from the start.”

“That would be good.” I rose and got the coffee pot for another round for all of us, spilled two packets of sugar into mine, and looked at him expectantly.

His sharp exhalation scattered the pile of empty sugar papers, and Faye gathered them up while he talked. “Carina and I had been separated about two weeks. The pregnancy made things hard. She’d fly off the handle about some little thing. Or nothing at all sometimes.”

He paused, and I suspected he hadn’t spoken this many words all at once in years. It must seem odd to talk about it, but telling the story might bring catharsis, too. Faye leaned toward him, eager to hear it, and though I sat back, I was just as interested.

“The morning Carina—that morning, Ralph, my foreman, said he wanted me to run to Gaylord in the afternoon and pick up supplies. Just before lunch, he came over and said Carina wanted me to come by the apartment as soon as possible.” He bowed his head. “She’d been pretty rough on me the last time we met, so I told Ralph she could wait a while, I’d stop and see her before I left town.” His voice softened. “I didn’t know she had a real problem to deal with.”

“What time did you get to her place?”

“I left the job site at eleven twenty. When I got there it was about twenty to twelve. I heard loud voices inside and let myself in with my key. There was Carson, standing over Carina. She was on the floor, crying. I was furious. I charged the little creep and knocked him down.”

There was anger in his voice, all these years later. Whatever the end result, Brown had been protecting his wife in the beginning. “Go on.”

“Carson fought back, which surprised me. We went at it hard for a minute or so, and he got in a punch that split my lip. Finally, though, I got him on the floor. That’s when Carina stepped in, screaming I was going to kill him.” He looked ashamed. “I was just so mad he’d hit his sister like that, and her almost due to deliver our baby.”

“But you stopped?”

“Yeah. We all kind of got it together for a minute. Carina told me they’d been arguing about something she found out that morning. She said it was a family matter.” Brown pulled on one earlobe. “Looking back, I think when she called the job site that morning, she’d meant to tell me about it. By the time I arrived, something had happened that changed her mind. Instead, she told Carson, ‘You gotta make this right, or I will.’ I had no idea what she meant by that.”

I sipped reached for another sugar packet. “Why did she call you? You were separated.”

He flashed a humorless smile. “Whatever you’ve heard, Carina loved me. She was spoiled, but she depended on me in a lot of ways.” He paused, searching for an illustration. “One day she called the job site to ask how many t-shirts I thought we needed for the baby.”

“Were you going to divorce?” Faye obviously wanted him to say the baby would have had two parents if things had not gone horribly wrong.

He stared into space. “I probably would have gone to work for Stan. For her and the kid.”

“Okay,” I said. “You and Carina and Carson quit fighting. How did it start up again?”

He met my gaze steadily. “It didn’t. Carson got all weepy and said he’d do what Carina wanted. It turned out he hadn’t hit Carina like I’d thought. She’d got mad and pushed him and he pushed back.” Brown shifted his feet under the table, causing a wobble that made me grab my coffee cup. “Pregnant women don’t have the greatest sense of balance.”

“He said he’d make it right, whatever he had done to upset her?”

Brown nodded. “I believed him. He was all sorry, said he’d never really wanted to do it.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know. Carina shut him up and ordered me out of there. Her dad was on his way, and she said it was a family matter they had to handle together.”

“You weren’t family?”

“Not to Stan. Carina said if I was there when Carson faced his dad, Stan wouldn’t like it.”

“So you’re telling us you left?”

“Yeah.”

“And they were both alive and well?”

“Carson was a little bloody, but yes. Alive and well.”

Faye was listening carefully. “What time was this?”

“Noon. I heard the clock downtown chime as I was getting into my truck.”

“Wozniak said you left at twelve forty. He called the EMTs at twelve forty-two.”

“I heard.”

“How? How did you hear what he told the police?”

Brown began tearing his empty coffee cup into pieces. “I didn’t have to be in Gaylord until two, so I had lots of time. I went down to the lake shore, ate the lunch I’d packed that morning, and thought about all the stuff that was coming between Carina and me. I sat there for a long time, letting the adrenalin from the fight wear off. When I finally got calmed down, it was time to head for Gaylord and pick up the stuff Ralph needed on the job.”

“What time was that?”

“Around twelve thirty, twelve thirty-five.”

“So you were still in town when they died.”

He sighed. “Yeah. If I had—” He thought better of that and returned to the story. “On the way through town, I remembered I was supposed to have dinner with John and Susie that night. I had to pass the dispatch office, so I stopped to tell her I didn’t feel like coming over.”

“Then it was your truck someone saw there.”

“Yeah. I’d barely said hello when the call came in.” Neil’s facial muscles tightened. “It was awful. Stan was screaming into the phone, and I could hear every word. ‘That bastard killed my children! Neil Brown killed them.’ Susie tried to calm him down, but he kept saying over and over again that I’d killed Carina and Carson. He saw me running away.”

“Susie knew he was mistaken?”

Brown shrugged. “I’m not sure what she thought. I had a cut on my lip from where Carson punched me. First thing, she sent police and EMTs to Windswept. I was a wreck. I wanted to go there, but Susie stopped me. ‘Wozniak will have you arrested,’ she said. I told her I hadn’t killed anybody, but she said it didn’t matter. I’d just had a fight with Carson, so it would look like I’d done it. Susie kept saying Stan would see I went to prison for the rest of my life.”

It could easily have gone exactly as Susie Mason feared. He looked guilty. The evidence proved his presence and his struggle with the victims. Who’d believe he’d left that apartment minutes before someone else came in and killed two people? Only Meredith and his parents.

“So you decided to run.”

“Wozniak was a guy people listened to.” He put a hand to his forehead as if the pain of it had gathered there. “I couldn’t think. I kept saying Carina couldn’t be dead, but Susie pointed at Carson’s blood on my shirt. She said I had to get out of Allport.”

“She offered to help you elude the law.”

Brown came to Susie’s defense. “If I’d stayed, I’d have spent the last six years in prison.”

“What did she tell you to do?”

“She said I should turn my shirt inside out then get all the money I could get my hands on and go hide somewhere. If they found proof I didn’t kill them, she’d put an ad in the Sunday Detroit Free Press saying, ‘Son, come home on your birthday, Love, Mother.’ Corny, but we were both pretty rattled.” His face turned grim. “I’ve combed the personals every Sunday all these years, but there was nothing.”

“How much money did you take north?”

Neil collected the bits of his demolished cup in one hand. “On our wedding day, Stan gave us fifty thousand dollars in cash, all wrapped up in a cardboard box with a bow. It was the kind of thing he liked to do, and when we opened it, everyone saw all that money. To me, it said I’d never be able to give Carina what he could.” He swallowed. “That was the first time we argued. I didn’t want it; she said it was a sweet gesture. In the end we put it in a safety deposit box till we could agree what to do with it.” He dropped the Styrofoam shards into the trash. “That was our first fight, but not our last. The money was still there, so I took it.”

Sparks had noted Neil’s visit to the bank around one that day. Wozniak’s money had given his son-in-law the means to escape. But was Brown guilty or falsely accused?

I found myself wondering what Rory Neuencamp would think. Would he conclude I was an idiot for wanting to believe this pleasant young man had not done the horrible things almost everyone in Allport believed he’d done? I didn’t want him to.

Hardening my heart, I resolved to be objective, to question everything Neil Brown told us and ignore his innocent demeanor.

Chapter Twenty-three

Retta

In order to speak to the employees at WOZ Industries and find out what they thought of the murders, I needed a cover story. Stanley was out of town for two days, his secretary had told me. If my purpose seemed innocent, he’d never know I’d visited. In my desk, I found exactly the thing: a book of tickets to the Fireworks Benefit Picnic. While some might consider it cheating to hit people up for money at work, where they can’t get away, it happens all the time in small towns. Most folks would be good sports and buy my tickets, if only to get rid of me.

I started at the desk of the receptionist, Bambi, according to her nameplate, and I’m not kidding. Bambi looked a little like a deer, all eyes and soft brown fur—I mean hair. I did my bit about the tickets and, while she dug her knock-off purse out, asked if she’d ever met Neil Brown.

“Who?”

“The man they say killed Mr. Wozniak’s children. I hear he might be found soon.”

“Oh.” It took a while for thought to get past all that makeup. “I wasn’t here then.”

“Who was Mr. Wozniak’s secretary at the time?” Since Stanley talked about his “girl,” I guessed she didn’t expect to be called a personal assistant.

Again, her thought was slow. I waited. “I don’t remember her name. She was nice, though. She showed me where stuff was.” In a few seconds a name fought its way through the cosmetic wall. “Patricia?” She didn’t like the sound of it. “Pricilla? Something with a P.”

Thanking her, I moved on, guessing Bambi hadn’t been chosen for her wits. Maybe something that rhymed. Stopping a woman in the hallway, I asked for directions to Eric Dubois’ office in order to make a courtesy announcement of my purpose.

Eric and I had met a couple of times at civic events. He had a reputation as a good second in command, efficient, loyal, and patient with Stanley’s demanding personality. Cheerfully ordering five tickets, he agreed to let me solicit further contributions in the building.

“I hear you met my sister, Barbara Evans,” I said casually.

“I didn’t know she was your sister.” He dropped his fashionable black-rimmed reading glasses on the blotter, rubbing his eyes. “I hope she’s able to find Neil Brown, so Stan can finally get past his children’s deaths. It’s been really hard on him.”

“I know you were working here then.”

“Yes, but I’m afraid I couldn’t tell Ms. Evans much.”

“You never know,” I said. “You might say something that eventually leads to the killer.”

Eric’s brows rose, but his surprise turned to gentle admonishment. “I think the police already know who’s guilty. I liked Neil but, sad as it is, likeable people can do terrible things.”

I couldn’t argue. I went on with my ticket sales, targeting people who’d worked at WOZ Industries for a long time. Scanning name plates displayed on the walls next to office doors, I located the company accountant, Miles Bonworth. Knocking twice, I invited myself in. He turned with a frown and regarded me balefully as I made my pitch for the fireworks benefit.

“I went to that picnic once,” he said when I finished. “Too many bugs.”

“Some people who don’t plan to attend buy a ticket anyway, to support the city’s efforts.”

“I went to the fireworks once,” he said with a sneer. “A lot of expensive noise.”

“It brings a lot of people into town, though. Tourists are good for business.”

“Tourists? I call ’em Cidiots!” He made a nasty snort. “Can’t stand ’em.”

I hovered, trying to find a way to segue to the Brown case. A picture on the shelf behind his desk gave me inspiration. “Is that your daughter’s softball team?”

“Yes.”

Your only child?
sprang to mind, but I asked instead, “Which one is she?”

He pointed to a somber-looking child with arms too skinny to hit more than a single.

“What a doll.” Having created my opening, I asked, “Didn’t Mr. Wozniak’s son-in-law play ball in school? I heard he could have gotten a scholarship.”

“Don’t know.” His tone said he could not have cared less.

I lowered my voice. “They say he killed his wife with a bat.”

“That’s what they say.”

Men fall into categories, and a clever woman can get what she wants by recognizing the category and working with it. Bonworth obviously enjoyed taking an opposite view of whatever was said, so I offered a comment he could disagree with.

“It must be a hardship on the company now that Mr. Wozniak’s son is dead.”

He looked surprised. “On the company? Not at all.”

“Really? I assumed the son would take over when his father retired.”

He snorted again, which was apparently his version of laughter. “That kid never took a minute’s interest in this place except to subtract from the profits.”

I threw another challenge at him, guessing he couldn’t abide a misconception. “The papers said he was looking for ways to expand the business.”

Snaky eyes slid across my face. “That just shows you what reporters don’t know!” I’d hit the right button, and he was on a roll, forgetting I had no right to know what went on at WOS. “Expanding the business--what a joke! About every six months he’d come wanting Stan to ‘invest’ in some scheme.” He made sarcastic quotation marks with his fingers. “Jet-packs for commuters. Biodomes in the desert. Some independent movie that was the next
Good Will Hunting
. I was always in the middle, trying to keep Stan from throwing away good money.”

Bonworth seemed to resent losing control of funds, even if they weren’t his. I shrugged delicately. “Stanley must have thought they were good ideas if he invested in them.”

“For a while he gave the kid the benefit of the doubt, but then he said no more.”

Again I let disbelief show in my voice. “How would you know that?”

One brow rose self-righteously. “You wouldn’t ask if you’d heard them go at it the week the girl got married! Carson had another idea, but Stan said no more. He told the kid to either get a job out in California or come home and go to work here.” Adjusting his tie, Bonworth added in a mumble, “Don’t know what we’d have done with him. Kid couldn’t balance a checkbook.”

No one had mentioned that at the time of the murders. “Did this happen at the wedding?”

He shook his head. “In Stan’s office. Just me and them.” True to form, he added, “I skipped the wedding. Can’t stand to see money wasted on a bunch of drunks.”

Refusing to be diverted by Bonworth’s dislike of everything, I asked, “Do you think the boy was really on his own? Maybe Mr. Wozniak gave him money from his personal funds, even if he didn’t invest any more money from the company.”

He went from terse to rude. “That would be his business, not mine or yours.”

Accepting the rebuke, I said, “I don’t want to seem nosy, but I spoke to Stan a few days ago, and it struck me that he’s still dealing with the deaths of his children.”

Bonworth regarded me, distaste evident in every wrinkle on his Sharpei face. “It had nothing to do with money. The girl’s husband killed her during one of their famous fights, and Carson was unlucky enough to have been present—collateral damage, I believe they call it.”

With that, he turned to his computer, dismissing me from his number-crunching mind.

I went on, selling a ticket here and there, asking my hopefully innocent-sounding questions. Everyone agreed, some sadly, some with gossipy delight, that Brown was the only possible candidate for murderer of the wife he hadn’t been able to get along with. Some knew Carson had exhausted his father’s patience with his money-making schemes, but no one even hinted Stanley would have laid a hand on either of his kids. Much less a softball bat.

My last stop was the computer tech’s room. It was in the basement, as they often seem to be, a windowless square stuffed with devices I don’t understand and don’t really want to. They hummed and blinked, and oddly enough, so did the tech. He was humming as he removed the slightly dented back of an elderly-looking computer with a tiny screwdriver. He blinked when I called out a greeting, a mole unused to visitors in his natural habitat. Probably he was more accustomed to desperate summons by phone from the computer-deprived upstairs.

We did the ticket thing, and the man, whose name was Art Chalmers, dug out a battered wallet and handed me a five-dollar bill. Since computer people are in on many secrets of the businesses they work for, I pretended interest in the equipment in order to get him talking. Eagerly he explained in terms of gigas and metas and whatever. I was lost after the first sentence.

When he paused for breath, I asked, “Were you working here when Mr. Wozniak’s children were murdered?”

He smiled, revealing crooked bottom teeth. “Yup. Came on board at nineteen with an associates from ACC and a ton of experience in World of Warcraft.”

I’d been thinking of what Miles Bonworth said. Carson had gone back to California after Carina’s wedding, apparently charged with getting a job and earning his own way. The news reports had called him an
entrepreneur
, which could mean almost anything, including nothing.

If the boy had come home that last time to try to change Stanley’s mind about turning off the money spigot, they might have come to blows. Maybe Carina had been the collateral damage.

Guessing Art was the male type that responds to flattery, I looked around the room appreciatively. “I’ll bet Stanley’s glad to have someone here who knows all about computers.”

“Yeah. He’s great at business, not so great at technology.” Art’s smile indicated patience with clueless non-techs. “My generation’s the first ever to be smarter than the ones before it.”

That surprised me, but I’m good at hiding my opinions—and the fact that I have any. Turning up the brightness on my smile I asked, “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, we grew up with computers, so they’re second nature to us. For older people, trying to understand them’s like reading a book through muddy glasses.” Raising pale eyebrows, he repeated his point. “First time ever, the younger generation is smarter than the old one.”

Back in high school, I was on the debating team, and I’d always enjoyed destroying the cases of opposing teams who looked at me and thought, “Isn’t she cute!” I saw all sorts of flaws in Art’s logic, starting with his definition of the word
smarter
.

Gulping back the urge to argue, I asked, “Did you know Carson and Carina well?”

Art scrunched one side of his face in a move designed to push his glasses back into place. It was a gesture he’d repeated several times already. “She never looked twice at me, but Carson and me were kinda tight. He’d hang here sometimes when he was in Michigan.”

Some people use words like “kinda” and “sometimes” to imply more than truth allows, and I guessed that “sometimes” meant once, twice at most. What I’d heard of Carson Wozniak didn’t jibe with him “hanging” with a nerdy computer tech. I played along. “The two of you were interested in the same things?”

His brow furrowed. “Yeah, movies and stuff like that. And he liked watching me work on the computers.” He chuckled. “He had a million questions.”

“About how they work?”

“Yeah, like that.” His thin chest puffed. “He said his dad was kind of a dinosaur with technology, and I told him how I’d got him to stop using family birthdays for his passwords.”

“Mr. Wozniak used birthdays as passwords?”

Art’s smile was smug. “For some he used Carina’s, and for the rest he used Carson’s. I told him to make a different password for each one, with numbers and special characters.”

“I don’t use birthdays, but I do use the same passwords a lot.”

He nodded as if he could have guessed it. “They all gotta be different. If you can’t remember them, make a file to keep them in. That’s what I showed Mr. Wozniak how to do.”

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “If the file’s on my computer and someone hacks it, all my information would be right there.”

He pointed a finger at me. “He said the same thing, but you call the file something nobody would look at. ‘Electric Bills’ or ‘My Favorite Poems’--something boring.”

“That’s clever.”

“That’s what Carson said, too.”

“You told Carson about the new passwords?”

Art caught the tone of my question. “Nothing specific. I wouldn’t do that.”

I smiled my “How nice” smile, but if Carson had at some point hung out with Art, it wasn’t because he found the tech’s conversation scintillating. He’d been cut off from Daddy’s money for a year, and he might have been desperate. Had he tried to dip into his father’s accounts and found the passwords had been changed? That would explain Carina’s anger at him, her demand that he make things right with his father.

“When did you tell Carson you’d helped his dad out?”

“That last time, just a few days before he got killed.” Peering through dust-specked glasses, Art said, “Some people didn’t like Carson, but he looked out for his old man, and he died trying to save his sister from that maniac she married. That shows he wasn’t so bad.”

Carson might have convinced a guy like Art Chalmers that his motives were pure, but I was a bit skeptical. While Art was smarter than I’d ever be about computers, I guessed he was clueless about the plotting a greedy son might do in order to get at his father’s money.