You Know Who Killed Me (20 page)

“I'm sorry you came all this way, Mr. Walker. I have a ride home.”

“I need to talk to you about Don.”

“Not tonight, please. It's been a trying day. One of the people we're trying to help threw a fit and dumped over the warming table. Island security Tased him, but not in time. Our best cook was taken to Detroit General with third-degree burns.”

“You know what they say about good deeds. I wouldn't bother you, except I think the case is breaking wide open.”

She frowned, showing middle-age for the first time in the wan sunlight. After a beat she nodded and went back to her friend. The woman glanced my way—suspiciously, I thought, but after a few years you don't expect to get any other kind—then shook loose a set of keys and veered toward a red Escalade with frozen slush on the rocker panels. I got out in time to hold the door for my passenger.

I left the car in park and twisted in the seat to face her. The picture Barry had printed out was in a manila envelope on the backseat; I could see it from the corner of my eye.

“What have you found out?” she asked.

“Couple of questions first.”

“You can't talk to Michel.” She raised her chin.

“We're past that—maybe. Was your husband faithful?”

Her head snapped back as if she'd been slapped. “What?”

“I'm not accusing you, although it's a possibility. A love triangle adds more than three sides to a murder case.”

“Where are you getting this?”

I said nothing. I could still see the manila envelope.

“Mr. Walker, my husband wasn't perfect, but he'd never have done anything to hurt our family.”

I looked from one of her pupils to the other. “Okay. I had to know if you suspected anything.”

“There was nothing to suspect.”

“Did you and Don have money trouble?”

A tight little smile drove the angry flush from her features.

“He always said the only people who don't worry about money are those who have tons of it and those who don't have a dime.”

“I mean serious debt. Is your house mortgaged?”

“Yes, but the payments are reasonable.”

“Did you see the papers?”

“I signed them.”

“Did you read them?”

“Well, not in detail. Don had. He explained the conditions.”

“Did he mention the balloon payment?”

Her eyes flickered. “I don't—”

“No one does except bankers. It had to be dumbed down for me the first time I heard of it. In order to get the lowest possible rate, you agree to pay off a substantial part of the loan in one future payment. It's usually a whopper. Sometimes the entire remaining principal.”

“Sounds like a fool's paradise.”

“Was Don a fool?”

She shifted positions to face me full-on. “Just what are you suggesting?”

“I'm speculating, not suggesting. A sudden hit to the pocketbook can play hell with someone's sense of right and wrong.”

“You're saying he was involved in something illegal, and that's why he was killed.”

“He was killed because of something. Why not money?” I forced myself not to look at the envelope on the backseat. I needed it for shock value.

“Who told you there was a balloon payment?”

“I can't tell you that.”

“Well, there wasn't.”

“How do you know, if you didn't read the documents?”

“I don't know much about such things, but doesn't it make sense the bank would offer that option near the
end
of the loan, instead of at the beginning? I mean, anyone would have to be worse than a fool to agree to such an expense just to save money for two years.”

“Who said anything about two years?”

Her eyes remained on mine. “We refinanced year before last, when the rates were at rock bottom. That's when we signed the papers.”

I said nothing.

“Whoever told you that story was lying,” she said. “I can prove it just by producing those documents. They're in a safety deposit box at the bank; not the same bank that's holding the mortgage. Don made a point of that.” She shook her head. “No, Mr. Walker. My husband had his faults, but being a fool wasn't one of them. And he never committed a crime.”

After a moment I faced the wheel. “Okay.” I put the car in gear.

She didn't stir. “That's all you have to say, ‘okay'? After calling a good man who can't defend himself a cheat and a crook?”

“I got a bum steer. I get more of those than the other kind.”

I drove her home without further conversation. In her driveway she got out and slammed the door. She never looked back. I backed into the street with the photo still in the envelope.

The woman who answered the phone in the federal building told me Deputy Marshal Thaler had gone home for the day. She wouldn't give me her home number and her cell wasn't answering.

Someone was lying. It wasn't Amelie Gates. Only a stone psychopath could lie without her pupils changing size. Or a government spook trained by experts.

Florence Melville would have some answers. But I'd retraced enough of my own footsteps for one day. I made a meal out of my survivalist rations and rented a movie, a lobotomy job about a bunch of grown-up frat boys trying to get laid. I laughed my head off and turned in.

*   *   *

I slept late enough to eat lunch for breakfast. I called downtown. A different woman said Deputy Marshal Thaler wasn't in that day. I didn't think I was so important she was ducking me; she'd just have another plausible story to substitute for the one she'd sold me, and an equally plausible story to explain why she'd lied. Trying to brace a cop, any kind of cop, is like playing a shell game when you know there's no pea.

Today's tail was a burgundy Trailblazer. There would be room in the back for a parabolic microphone and whatever other toys they'd drawn from the company chest. By now she knew I'd spoken with the widow, but unless the tech team had found a way around Barry Stackpole's state-of-next-year's-art scramblers, she didn't know what I had on the Reverend Melville.

For once I was ahead of her. I planned to keep it that way.

The guy was good, blending in and out of traffic and giving me as much as a block when the lights were right. I tried shaking him twice, the first time using a city bus for a blind, the second cutting across the site of a demolished crack house bumper-deep in weeds. He stayed on me without visible panic. There were two heads in the car, so parking and ducking into a building and out the back way wasn't an option; the passenger would get out and follow me on foot while the driver staked out the Cutlass in case I circled back.

When I finally lost him it was almost by accident. A DPW crew was digging a tunnel to China on Mound Road, leaving only one lane open. I caught the signalman just as he was turning his sign from
SLOW
to
STOP
. I started to slow down, then gunned it.

“… Cocksucker!”

The signalman at the other end had already turned his sign around and a panel truck had started to ease forward heading toward me; I tickled its front left fender swerving around it. The man holding the sign had to step back to keep from getting clipped by my right side mirror. He, too, had an opinion on my sexual preference; but by then I was free from surveillance.

Not counting satellites, radar guns, and cameras on street corners. Privacy's as dead as Wild Bill.

 

THIRTY

“You're getting to be more faithful than most of the congregation,” Florence Melville said.

I didn't jump nearly as high as the belfry. I'd been striding down the center aisle between the rows of pews, intent on the rectory, when she spoke. The acoustics at Christ Episcopal were perfect; she might have been whispering in my ear. I turned and slid my hands nonchalantly into my pockets while my heart dribbled down to a steady beat. She was seated sideways in one of the pews with her ankles crossed, a breviary or whatever spread open on her lap. It was a casual day: blue pullover, black pleated slacks, flat heels. She'd taken off her gold-framed glasses and twirled them in one hand by a bow.

“Hiding from the devout?” I asked.

“This time of day I like to do my reading here. The stained-glass is cheerful in the east light. For some reason it's more mellow than the afternoon sun coming from the west.”

She was right. Pink and green triangles and octagons fell across her, making the pale streak in her hair stand out.

“Mysterious ways,” I said. “Got a minute?”

“Sure.” She closed the book and folded her hands on the cover.

“Someplace less public than Comerica Park.”

She lifted her brows, got up, and led me to the rectory. Dust motes did arabesques in the beam slanting in through the east window. “Is this an occasion for brandy?”

I said, “Help yourself. I've been hitting it a little hard lately.”

She tilted a palm and sat behind the desk. I didn't sit. I drew the manila envelope, folded lengthwise, from the deep inside pocket of my overcoat and laid it on her calendar pad.

She looked at it, pushing out her lower lip. She stirred, lifted the flap, drew out the picture Barry had printed out. Her face paled a little.

“Where—?” She looked up at me.

“Big Brother's got cousins all over.” I sat down then. “I'm listening.”

She laid the photo facedown on the envelope.

“I told you we dated. I may not have been entirely forthcoming about the level of our intimacy. My position—”

I reached inside my shirt pocket, unfolded an inch-wide strip of photo paper, and stretched it between my hands. “Time-stamp. I own a paper cutter. This was dated last July. It's your hard luck the Hilton Garden Inn doesn't recycle its videos as often as some hotels.”

She nodded, took air deep into her lungs. It came shuddering out. Then she looked me square in the eyes. “I said before you don't shock easily. Everyone falls from grace sometime. It started after the Independence Day charity auction. Amelie couldn't make it. I was born on the Fourth, just like George M. Cohan. It was my fortieth birthday. Do you know the odds of a forty-year-old woman—and a priest—finding her soulmate?”

“I don't gamble. Where were you New Year's Eve?”

She fell back against the back of her throne. “You can't mean that.”

I said nothing.

She flushed, glanced toward the bright window, nodded again, looked at me. “I always deliver a New Year's Day sermon. For me, it's the fourth most important religious event, after Easter, Christmas, and Epiphany: a new beginning, a fresh start, a global baptism, dating to the birth of Jesus. I was here in the rectory, working on it. Midnight came and went without my notice.”

“Can anyone verify that?”

“No.” Her eyes turned hard as shale. “Why would I kill Donald? He was gentle with me; it had been so long—” Something glittered against gray stone.

“Your position, remember?”

“It was just that one time. The auction was a great success; it means a trip to the Holy Land for our Sunday schoolers. I invited him here for a brandy. Brandy turned into a trip to the Hilton. Other people's private business is your business, I don't have to tell you the rest, except we regretted it right away and agreed never to do it again. I even suggested he and Amelie go to another church, but he said he couldn't think of any excuse that would pass muster with her. I never saw him again except at services.

“I'm a bad priest,” she said. “I'm a bad priest, and a weak woman, but I'm no murderer.”

“Did you put up that reward yourself, to muddy up the investigation? Maybe not to cover up the murder, but to keep it from working its way around to you and Gates?”

A Bible stood on her desk among some religious tracts, propped up by a pair of brass fish. She slid it out, laid it down faceup, and spread her right hand on it. “No. I couldn't afford it even if I'd wanted to.”

“Who did?”

She held the position so long I thought for a second her heart had stopped. Finally she withdrew the hand. Nodded a third time.

*   *   *

I'd scratched that itch I'd felt in the stairwell in the McNamara Building. I had it now, all the pieces; it was just a matter of fitting them together without forcing them. I went to the office to start.

Every once in a while, a fly gets confused and lands in the dish of honey I call my reception room. Richard Perlberg was standing in front of the framed
Casablanca
poster. He wore a checked flannel shirt, corduroys, and snowmobile boots with Velcro closures. An old polar coat and earflapped cap, checked also, hung on the clothes tree.

“This an original?”

“So they tell me. I bought it in a junk shop for ten bucks.”

“It's got the year and production number in the lower left-hand corner; that's a giveaway. I used to be a collector. You know what it's worth?”

“More than ten bucks.”

“It should be under lock and key.”

“Then I'd worry about it all the time. The local talent never steals anything out in the open, unless they can turn it into scrap money. How was the fishing?”

“Shitty. Too much sun up north. The bastards can see you through the ice.”

I unlocked the door to the confessional and held it for him. He went in and looked around. “I started out in an office just like this. Hope I never have to go back.”

I sat behind the desk and lit a cigarette. He circled the room, glancing at the faux Navajo rug, the filing cases that fell off the back of the
Santa Maria,
the books in the case, some of them accidental collectors' items, Custer fighting Indians on the wall. When the tour finished he sat down a little too hard on the customer chair. “Ouch!”

“Sorry about that. Mouse ate the cushion. You look like a man who could be talked into a drink.”