The Sleuth Sisters (7 page)

Chapter Eight

Faye

I was thrilled when Barb asked me to do an interview. Technically, I’m a partner, but I’m afraid she thinks of me as the office person, not one who goes out and tracks down leads. As things go on, I hope she’ll let me do my share of the legwork. I have a sense for those who’ve been kicked in the teeth by life, the type of person who doesn’t often trust easily.

Putting together what the cousin said with the trailer park address, I figured Nancy Bailey wouldn’t answer the door to just anyone. To people like her, strangers mean trouble, and the best way to avoid them is to be out, or appear to be. To combat her distrust I took a bouquet of flowers along. How can trouble arrive at your door holding a handful of lilacs?

The trailer park was—well, who doesn’t know about trailer parks? Steering around four small children whose game seemed to require screeching, I found Nancy Bailey’s rental by means of a wooden pylon out front that had been knocked crooked, apparently by someone backing into it. The number painted on it had faded from sun and weather. As I pulled into the drive there was no other car, but a shadow moved at the window.

The trailer was battered and ugly, but attempts had been made. Weeds around the concrete slab had been pulled, and fresh digging indicated recent plantings, maybe flowers, maybe vegetables. The trailer’s exterior was scrubbed clean, unlike the one next to it, which had enough mold to manufacture penicillin.

I knocked briskly on the door, and after a few moments, a woman opened the door a crack and peered around it as if she might need it to stop a bullet. Or an alien death ray.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Bailey? I’m Faye Burner. I hope you like lilacs.” I held the bouquet just far enough away that she had to open the door to accept it. “I picked them from my yard.” Actually I’d taken them from a vacant lot near our house. They say stolen flowers smell the best.

“For me?”

“A get-acquainted gift.”

Mrs. Bailey didn’t seem anxious to get acquainted, but she liked the idea of flowers. She opened the door an inch wider but didn’t invite me in. I held onto the flowers.

In her mid-forties, with dark hair and pale skin, she would have been attractive except for two things: her grooming habits and her eyes.
Grooming
might not be the right word, for no attempt had been made to groom anything, not today, not yesterday either. She wore a grimy housecoat bought before the century changed. Her hair was a parody of the “uncombed” look that was so popular. Her hands were grimy. Yesterday’s yard work hadn’t been washed away.

The woman’s gaze telegraphed madness: not raving lunacy or hysteria, but madness she’d lived with for a long time. Her eyes moved constantly with no apparent purpose, not registering anything specific. When she briefly made eye contact with me she seemed confused, not quite sure what was going on. Drugs? Long-term mental illness? Stress? I had no idea.

“May I come in while you put these in water, Mrs. Bailey?” After some thought, she moved back.

“Nancy. Just Nancy.”

Once inside, I felt like Shrek in an elevator. The place was claustrophobia-inducing, over-heated, closed-up, and stuffed with furniture and knick-knacks a second-hand dealer wouldn’t have given twenty dollars for. Everything was covered with a thick coat of dust, indicating that once an item arrived, Nancy paid little attention to it. The Room That Time Forgot.

She seemed unsure what to do with a visitor, but when I handed over the flowers she went to the kitchen and began rummaging through the cupboards.

“Mrs. Bailey, I work for a company that tries to find out what happened.” Instinctively I avoided the words
crime
and
investigation
. “I need to speak with your daughter.”

She paused, and her eyes sought whatever it was they were unable to find. “Annamarie?”

“I need to know about a woman she helped.”

Pride raised her chin half an inch. “Annamarie helped lots of people.” She opened a door, took a plastic cup that said
Arby’s Roast Beef
from the cabinet, and filled it with tap water.

“I heard that.”

Nancy stopped fiddling with the flowers. “She don’t want me giving her number. There’s nobody here she wants to talk to.” Her tone changed as she parroted her daughter’s words.

If I’d endured this depressing environment as a child, I’d have moved away, too.

Nancy touched her chest, fearing I’d misunderstood. “She calls Fridays to see I’m okay.”

“Will you ask her to call me?” I handed her one of the business cards Barb insisted I carry. “It’s about an emergency she was called to.”

“Annamarie didn’t do nothing wrong. She scored real high on the test.” Nancy’s face had grown suspicious again.

“That’s right,” I said. “Annamarie found a mother who was dying. She saved her baby.”

Again Nancy’s roving eyes found mine for a second. “I know who you mean. The husband hurt her bad and killed her brother.” She paused. “Brown. Neil Brown.”

I’d said too much. If this woman could figure out what our case was, anyone could. Reiterating that it was important Annamarie call as soon as possible, I moved to the door. “Annamarie saved that baby,” Nancy repeated, holding onto a bright moment in her past.

“I hope she’ll tell me about it. Will you call her, please? Today?”

I left, keeping my smile bright as I closed the trailer door behind me. The deep purple flowers on the counter contrasted starkly with the rest of the place. I hoped she liked them, but for me they only made Nancy Bailey’s home more depressing.

Chapter Nine

Barbara

Jasper Conklin, Neil and Carina Brown’s neighbor, had a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon but agreed to see me that evening. With several hours to wait, I went to the library and read old news stories. The local paper fairly dripped with excitement over having something to report besides city commission proceedings. There was a little purple prose, but mostly the reporter kept to the facts. What I’d been told so far was more or less confirmed. Though the bereaved father had declined to be interviewed, Eric DuBois, spokesman for Wozniak Industries, said the company would do everything possible to see that the killer was brought to justice.

Digging my phone from the bottom of my bag, where it always seems to end up, I called Wozniak Industries. Despite protests from the secretary that Mr. DuBois was a very busy man, I managed to talk my way into a ten-minute interview at two-thirty in his office.

There was plenty of press on Wozniak, but it revealed little about his personality. Ubiquitous in business circles, he guarded his private life jealously and seldom spoke directly to the press. In articles about him dedicating a building or contributing to a cause, there was only standard biographical information, couched in identical terms, meaning it was handed out on a press sheet. Reporters could use what they were given or say nothing.

In the years after the murders, a reporter occasionally took an interest in Neil’s daughter Brooke and wrote a story on her progress. She was always referred to in terms of tragedy, but the candid photos snapped from far away, obviously without permission, showed a little girl playing happily in the park or splashing in the community pool. Whatever traumas she had experienced coming into the world had been eased by the obvious love and care she received from her aunt and grandparents. She didn’t look like the child of a crazed killer.

One reporter had written a series of human-interest stories to serve as Sunday fare for a month: What would life have been like if the tragedy hadn’t occurred? He covered the possibilities for Meredith one week, Stan Wozniak the next, then Brooke, and ended with Neil himself. He considered two scenarios, what might have occurred if Neil had been able to control his rage in the first place, and how it might have gone if he’d “accepted as a man” responsibility for what he’d done. Nowhere was there any suggestion Brown wasn’t guilty of the crimes.

When I got back to the office, Faye told me about her visit with the trailer-park lady. After congratulating her on getting into the house, I told her I was meeting Mr. Conklin at seven.

“Go slowly,” Faye said with that look she gets when she feels compelled to instruct me. “Old people want you to talk to them, or even better, they want you to listen to them.”

“I’ll listen as long as Mr. Conklin wants me to,” I promised.

“I’m hoping Annamarie calls us, but here’s one for you.” She handed me a note that said JUAN GUILLEN and a phone number. “He wouldn’t talk to me. I told him you’d call back.”

In the office, I located my phone and made the call. A man answered with a terse, “Yes?”

“Juan Guillen? It’s Barbara Evans from the Smart Detective Agency.”

“You say you want to help Neil Brown.” His English was softly accented but precise.

“I’m working for his family. Once I find him, I’ll do what I can to help.”

“What do you want from me?”

I wished I could see Guillen’s facial expressions and let him see mine. Lacking that, I tried to inject honesty into my voice. “Neil’s truck. How did it get to Port Huron?”

There was a pause, a very long one. I’d begun to wonder if he’d hung up the phone when he finally answered. “I was not a citizen then. They could have deported me.”

“If you’d told the truth?”

“Yes.” A pause. “I don’t want to go to jail.”

“Mr. Guillen, I won’t make trouble for you. I just want to know what happened.”

“I don’t know where he went.”

“Tell me about the truck.”

Guillen sighed. “I got fired that morning. I was late, but it was not my fault.”

I didn’t want to get into employer-employee relations. “So where did you go?”

“I had to walk back to town, which took an hour. I went to the motel room we were renting and packed up my stuff. I hung out for a while, trying to decide what to do. Then I started for the highway, to hitch a ride to Saginaw.”

“What time was that?”

“Early afternoon, maybe one o’clock.”

“But you told the police you left town that morning.”

“Like I said, I was scared it would mess up my citizenship to be involved in a crime.”

“What really happened?”

He sighed as if preparing to jump off a cliff. “I was hitching, like I said. Neil came along and picked me up. I could tell he was in trouble. He said he could get me close to Saginaw. He drove for a while, kinda quiet, then all of a sudden he pulled off the road. He said he was getting out, and I should take the truck and keep going south.”

“So after he picked you up, he got the idea of planting a fake trail.”

“I guess so. He said I should leave the truck somewhere public. When I got to Saginaw, I called a friend with a car who followed me to Port Huron, and I left Neil’s truck near the train station. I figured they’d think he went to Canada, and that would make it tough for them to find him. My friend took me back to Saginaw.” He paused. “Neil was good to me, you know?”

Guillen’s tone spoke volumes about how guys like Ralph Torey treated him as opposed to people like Neil Brown, to whom he was a person, not just another unwelcome foreigner.

Allport is a lake-side city, which means it’s T-shaped. Lake Huron forms its eastern boundary, and two highways cross at city center. US 23 runs north and south, skirting the lakeshore. M-9 serves as Main Street until it ends at 23, just a few hundred yards from the lake. Along M-9 are most of the businesses of Allport: restaurants, gas stations, and a just-barely-thriving mall.

A few stores occupy the west side of US 23 as well, but the east side is residential with a capital R. Timber barons, shipping magnates, and other men of wealth built houses along the lakeshore, flaunting wealth that had now pretty much deserted the area. The houses were unique, barn-sized, and romantic. Some had turrets, others Victorian gingerbread, and still others cutting edge architecture of former times. These days they were often second homes, maintained by people who visited northern Michigan a few times a year to escape the city heat or to enjoy the snow for a weekend. I loved driving along the stretch and imagining the original owners’ lives. I hoped they’d appreciated living in houses that didn’t look exactly like the one down the block.

About a half mile from town, US 23 was forced inward as the land rose steeply. There, between the lake and the highway, a huge deposit of limestone had been quarried for decades, accessible raw material easily loaded onto freighters and taken anywhere on the Great Lakes.

The mining operation was simply called the Pit. A huge, ugly hole in the earth, it was impressive for its sheer size and its evidence of how Man shifts Nature around to suit his desires.

Because the Pit interested tourists, a viewing point had been constructed, complete with cyclone fencing to keep the overly curious from falling a hundred or so feet to the quarry floor. One day Faye had taken me to see how the Pit had grown in my absence. It had expanded along the shoreline like a monstrous horse nibbling its way across a grassy field, and I’d gone onto the platform to stand in the lake breezes and enjoy the panoramic view. Of course Faye remained in the car the whole time. No way she’d go near that edge.

WOZ Industries headquarters was a half mile or so past the turnout for the Pit, about four miles out of town. Due to its presence, the secondary road was wider and better-maintained than most in the area. I followed the signs to the main building and hurried through the front doors.

Because of Guillen’s call, I’d almost forgotten the meeting I’d talked so glibly to arrange. I had to hurry to get to WOZ on time, but my haste was for nothing, since DuBois was later than I was. Perhaps by way of an apology, he came out himself to the reception area where I sat pretending to be interested in
Software Horizons
. (It was that or
Industrial Business
.) I looked up at the sound of a pleasing baritone voice. “Ms. Evans? I’m Eric DuBois.” He pronounced it
doo-boys
, and I guessed it was impossible to teach most Americans to say
doo BWA
, as in Blanche.

I rose and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you, Mr. DuBois.”

“Eric, please. This town’s not big enough for formalities.” He frowned at me briefly. “Aren’t you the one I see running every morning when I am on my way to work?”

I grinned. “That’s me, but I don’t run. I walk fast.”

“Still, it’s a good habit, and you seem pretty faithful about it. Wish I were more active.” He looked fine to me, but then, couch-potato, computer-squash behavior often doesn’t catch up with a person until later in life.

DuBois led me to an elevator and from there to a well-appointed office on the second floor. Inviting me to sit he asked, “Would you like something to drink?”

I chose coffee, using the time it took him to arrange it to get an impression of the man. He was good-looking in a Tom Cruise kind of way: direct gaze and confident manner. I guessed his age at forty, but he could have been five years older.

The door opened and coffee entered, not just coffee, but choices. A woman pushed a cart toward us that held three thermal bottles, the kind with pumps on top. There were also little cups of extras to add in: whipped cream, raspberry cordial, even chips of chocolate. Despite my years near the crazy-coffee capital of the world, I stuck with a basic brew, two sugars. I sipped cautiously. It was just the right temperature, and delicious.

“I understand you’re trying to find Neil Brown.”

It was a little surprising that word had gotten around so quickly, but Allport isn’t that big a town. “Yes. We’ve been hired to try, anyway.”

His expression indicated concern, but I thought I detected a smirk behind it. Was it female detectives he found laughable or the idea of us finding a man who’d remained hidden for years? His next words belied my impression. “I always liked Neil. I’ll certainly do what I can to help.” I decided I was probably a little defensive, imagining criticism where there was none.

“How well did you know Brown?”

DuBois sat back in his chair and ran both hands through perfectly barbered hair. “Not well, actually. Of course I knew Carina, since I’ve worked for the family my whole adult life.”

“How did that come about?”

He grinned. “Luck, but hopefully skill as well. I started as an intern while I was still at Eastern Michigan. When I graduated, Stan offered me a job, and we’ve worked together ever since.” Something buzzed discreetly on the desk. DuBois didn’t even look at it, which scored points with me. A face-to-face visitor should come before cyber-sounds.

“What is it that you do?”

He put up a hand in comic pantomime of a stop sign. “We’ve just met, and I don’t want to bore you this early on.” Gesturing at a stack of files on his desk, he went on. “If Mr. Wozniak wants to buy a company, I do the initial research. If he wants to go fishing somewhere in South America, I arrange it. And if he needs someone to act as proxy or agent or scout, I do that too.”

“Jack of all trades?”

“In this day and age, you’d better be if you want to keep a job.” He shrugged. “I’m not complaining, not even a little bit. I’m very well paid for what I do.”

Looking at the suit, I guessed he wasn’t fibbing. “So you knew Carina?”

DuBois’ face revealed a brief conflict. “She stopped in a couple of times a week.”

“What was she like?” The conflict deepened, and I leaned toward him. “Look, Mr. DuBois, I’m not here to smear anyone’s memory of her. I’m trying to understand the players so I can get a fair idea of Neil Brown’s situation at the time of the murder.”

DuBois fingered a Petoskey stone paperweight before letting out a huff of decision. “Carina was all about Carina. I think she cared for Neil, but she wanted to control him, too.”

“How did he react to that?”

“Neil didn’t come around here much, so I hardly knew him. Carina came by fairly often, mostly when he was at work. I guessed it was easier if he didn’t know how often she visited.”

“She came to see her father?”

He shrugged. “She liked the business, liked seeing how it worked. She’d ask me questions, and she’d pick out of Stan what he had planned for his next project.” Eric chuckled dryly. “Looking at her, you’d never have guessed she had anything going on in that pretty little head, but she understood a lot more about finance than she let on.”

“Why do you think she was like that?”

“Well, Stan likes his women beautiful and not too liberated, and I guess she went along.” DuBois glanced away. “She was an attractive woman, and she liked men to notice.”

“And did you notice?”

He grinned. “Sure. I was single. But once she met Neil, she didn’t want anybody else.”

I left the subject of Carina. “What can you tell me about the day of the murders?”

His expression turned serious. “Stan and I were out most of the morning, working on a proposal. When we got back, the secretary said Carina had stopped in. She wanted her father to come to her place as soon as he could because she had something important to discuss with him.”

“What time was that?”

“Around eleven.”

“He didn’t go right over? The paper said he arrived just after one.”

DuBois looked slightly embarrassed. “Carina was into drama.” He stared at the corner of his desk. “I guess Stan thought what she had to say could wait.”

I wondered how many times in the last six years Stan Wozniak had regretted that decision. “He told you he wasn’t going there until later?”

Raised brows and a shrug excused the decision to put family after business. “He had a lunch date with the mayor and some council members. He said he’d stop at Carina’s after that.”

“And what did he find when he got there?”

DuBois clasped his hands and set them on the desk before him. “All I know is what he told me, and what I read in the papers.” His chair let out a discreet whoosh of air as he settled back, letting himself remember. “Stan said he pulled up outside Carina’s apartment around twelve forty. As he got out of his car, he saw Neil hurrying away from the building. Neil didn’t see him, but he seemed agitated. He wore a hooded jacket, one of those sweatshirt type things. It had stains the boss swears were blood.”