Dearly Departed Read online

  This resentment permeated the statements made by the witnesses: “You’d think she would have known better.” “I guess she wasn’t so smart after all.” “She was always too smart for her own good.” Crap like that. According to the file, Alison had forged only two long-lasting friendships in her lifetime, both with women she hadn’t seen or spoken with for at least one month prior to her disappearance. Which is why I found no irony in her choice of profession. Perhaps by working in public relations she’d hoped to gain what she seemed to lack in her private life: personal attachments. But that’s just a guess, the amateur psychologist talking. And maybe I was projecting too much of my own life into the theory. I, too, was basically friendless—except for Anne and Cynthia and, truth be told, I wasn’t all that sure of Cynthia. After my wife and daughter were killed, I shed my friends the way you would change from a summer wardrobe to winter: quitting the cops to work in a one-man office, retiring from playing softball and hockey, spending my days solving the problems of strangers. But unlike Alison, who seemed desperate to connect with other people, lately I was disconnecting, keeping them at long distance. Again, the amateur psychologist talking.

  What I did find ironic was Alison’s choice of homes. If you wanted to avoid people—and I don’t think she did—this was a good place to live. The house was located well outside of Hastings, about a forty-minute drive from St. Paul, on a dead-end road that I missed twice, in a forest that resembled Itasca State Park more than a simple grove of trees. Only six homes shared the cul-de-sac, built at least an acre apart. I parked in front of a large colonial with cedar shakes. The one with the patrol car in the driveway.

  Sheriff Ed Teeters approached me with an irritated expression and a clenched fist. He was bigger than I am, but who isn’t? Size does not impress me, though. After nearly fifteen years of studying the martial arts, I learned that the maxim my father taught me while I was growing up small was God’s own truth: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

  “Late!” Teeters yelled at me. “Nothing better to do but hang around here all morning?”

  “I got lost.” I informed him, and Teeters instantly calmed himself.

  “Happens,” he said, and I wondered if he had once taken the same wrong turn himself.

  “Lieutenant Scalasi says you have her file,” he said.

  I waited for him to continue until I realized that he had asked a question. “Yes,” I answered.

  “Heard the tape?”

  “Yes.”

  “Opinion?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Good man,” the sheriff said. “Lieutenant Scalasi said you were a good man. Said you worked homicide in St. Paul for four years.”

  “Closer to five,” I corrected him.

  “How many murders you catch?”

  “Ninety-six.”

  “How many you clear?”

  “Ninety-one.”

  “Which ones you remember most?”

  “The five that got away.”

  Teeters nodded, sighing like a stage actor, and leaned against my car, his eyes fixed on the colonial. “Some people, they get killed, you say good riddance—know what I mean? It’s a terrible thing, but that’s what you say ‘cuz … Hell, you’ve been a cop.”

  I nodded, understanding completely.

  “This time around … this is the one that haunts you. You don’t solve it, you don’t bring the killer down, it haunts you to your grave. That’s why you’re here. Normally I’d kick your PI ass back up Highway 61 for interfering in an ongoing investigation. But Lieutenant Scalasi vouches for you, and what the hell, there’s no investigation to mess up. We ain’t got squat.”

  “If I learn anything, you’re the first to know, even before my client,” I volunteered.

  “Be quiet about it. Don’t come by the shop. Keep the phone calls down. Had it up to here with media types. Way some of them bastards act, you’d think I did it.”

  And that was all the sheriff had to say.

  I accompanied Teeters to his car. He stared at the house as he walked, then lingered in the driveway. He seemed reluctant to leave.

  “I became a cop after I got my honorable from the army because I couldn’t think of what else to do,” he said bitterly. “Still can’t.” Then he climbed into his car and drove away.

  I peeked through a window. The house was empty of furniture. Only the bare walls and carpet were on display behind the glass. That’s when I noticed the FOR SALE sign protruding from the center of the front lawn. I had been there fifteen minutes, and that was the first I noticed the sign.

  You’ve got a real eye for detail, I told myself and circled the house twice, forcing myself to concentrate on every little thing.

  Behind the house was a large kennel, maybe thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide, surrounded by a high cyclone fence. The kennel was empty, too. I went past it and followed a path deep into the grove. The grove was denser than I expected, and several times I was forced to wrestle with trees and bushes that snagged my sports jacket. The undergrowth was brutal, and I began to think, Yeah, the county cops searched the grove but how thoroughly? I finally stopped at the small pond Alison had described on the cassette and sat under the oak tree on the knoll overlooking it. “How deep is the water?” I mused aloud and then dismissed the question. The cops had dragged the pond as soon as the ice went out.

  I sat under the tree a long time, thinking it over. Teeters’s investigation was solid, and whatever cracks there were Anne Scalasi had already filled in. What was left for me to do, besides waste Hunter Truman’s money? I was ready to quit the case, and I hadn’t even started.

  C’mon, make an effort, I told myself.

  I began thinking about Truman. And the tape.

  The tape.

  The footprint.

  The problems at Kennel-Up.

  The report from the officers who questioned Raymond Fleck outside Alison’s house.

  Fleck’s record.

  It all pointed to Fleck, and in less enlightened times he probably would have been strung up by now. Still, ignore the tape and what do you have? You have Stephen Emerton. Yes, the Dakota County cops would have learned about Fleck eventually, but would he have been the number one suspect? No. It would have been the husband. At least he would have been first on my dance card. We always kill the ones we love. At least we do eighty percent of the time. And based on the cassette recording, Alison and Emerton didn’t seem all that close. Think about it.

  The house.

  Stephen Emerton was selling it. Alison had said he didn’t like living there. Could that be a motive for murder? Hell, I knew a guy who murdered his wife for pouring melted cheddar cheese over his broccoli. “She knows I like colby,” he’d confessed.

  The timing.

  Emerton had left his office at five PM. Say it usually takes him forty-five minutes to drive home; assume the snow slows him down, add another fifteen, twenty. During that long drive he gets an idea, or maybe he already had the idea and the snow merely gives him an opportunity. At six he meets Alison at the door, clubs her with the proverbial blunt object, tosses her body into the grove, knowing the snow would hide it soon enough, knowing he could dispose of it at his leisure, knowing the cops would suspect Fleck. Then he reports Alison missing. Could he do all that in a quarter hour? Sure, he could. And the Minnesota Twins might win another World Series in my lifetime.

  Still …

  He could have hired it done. Teeters had examined Emerton’s financial records, but he didn’t find any suspicious movements of money.

  Still …

  If you were going to clutch at a straw, Stephen Emerton was as good as any.

  I had brought Alison Donnerbauer Emerton’s photograph with me. Not the black-and-white job Truman had given me but rather the colored glossy from Anne’s file. I don’t know why I’d brought it, but I had. It was in an envelope. I slipped it out and stole a look at it, starting at the bottom, moving up over the bodice to the lace collar around Alison’s th
roat to her pointed chin to her thin lips to her slightly crooked nose to her brilliant blue-green eyes filled with pain and—now I saw—a kind of hopelessness. No matter how I handled the photograph, no matter what angle I held it at, those eyes seemed always to stare right at me. After a few minutes I shoved the photograph back into the envelope and turned toward the house. Teeters was right. Some cases do haunt you.

  Eventually I made my way back to the house, stopping at the empty kennel. “What happened to the dogs?” I wondered aloud.

  Gonna call me every time you have a brainstorm?” Teeters wanted to know.

  “No, I just wanted—”

  “Taylor, I read Sherlock Holmes, too. The neighbors did not report hearing the dogs bark the day Alison disappeared, but that’s not necessarily significant. The dogs were well trained, they rarely barked at anyone. A couple of the neighbors didn’t even know Alison kept dogs, they were that quiet.”

  “Where are the Labs now?”

  “Doggie heaven. Emerton put ’em down six months ago.”

  five

  “This sorta thing never happened when I was a boy,” Arlen Selmi informed me in his office at Kennel-Up, Inc. “People didn’t have to be afraid of strangers, didn’t have to lock their doors.”

  That was nonsense, of course. When Selmi was a boy, Al Capone, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Ma Barker gang had turned the Midwest into a free-fire zone, slaughtering citizens with the same ferocity as street gangs and drug cartels do now. Kidnapping had been a cottage industry. And sensational murders—Sigmund Freud explaining to a jury why a man would slice his wife into tiny pieces with a razor blade and feed her to the fish—occurred with the same numbing regularity that we see today. But I didn’t question Selmi’s recollections. Nor did I doubt that he actually believed the decade of his childhood was somehow safer, simpler, and less foreboding than our present era; lots of people who spend more time looking backward than looking forward—especially the elderly—have come to the same conclusion. Still, I wondered if it was the circumstances of his youth that he recalled or just his own optimism.

  Arlen Selmi had adored Alison, loved her like she was his own daughter. I know because he told me so. Several times. His eyes glossed over and his throat tightened around the words as he spoke, and I thought about Hunter Truman and began to wonder what was it about Alison that made grown men all misty-eyed and introspective. Yet it soon became apparent that if I had asked, Selmi would not have been able to identify the color of Alison’s hair. Oh, he could’ve described in wistful detail the virtues of a WAC lieutenant he was sweet on when he was stationed in North Africa. Or the curves and lines of a female welder he’d shacked up with for three weeks following VE Day. But Alison, “that sweet child,” was only a blur in his mind’s eye. Time had zipped by Arlen Selmi like a comet, taking the present with it and leaving only the past.

  “His senility—I’d guess you’d call it that—it became pronounced soon after Alison disappeared,” Sarah Selmi advised me. “I don’t know if there’s a connection; maybe so. He partly blames himself for hiring Raymond in the first place.”

  Arlen still carried the titles of president and CEO at Kennel-Up, but it was Sarah, Arlen’s granddaughter, who actually ran the company, gladly taking on the responsibility when the rest of her family showed no interest. More than that, she lived with her grandfather, took care of him, brought him to work each day, and ferociously fought her family’s efforts to have the old man committed—despite the fact that she was not mentioned in his will, only her father.

  “My father does not love his father,” she confided in me. “I understand that because I do not love my father, either. But I love that old man. Why is that? How can love skip a whole generation?”

  I told her I didn’t know and quickly urged her back to the subject. It’s not that I didn’t care. It’s just that her problems had nothing to do with my problems. Okay, I admit I don’t always rate high on the sensitivity meter, but I make it a practice never to visit other people’s lives unless I’m paid for it. I don’t like to get involved.

  I asked Sarah about Raymond Fleck. I still preferred the husband, but since I was already in Hastings, I decided to ask a few questions at Kennel-Up first and interview Stephen Emerton that evening.

  “Talk about love and hate, I hate Raymond Fleck’s guts, yet I’ve never met him,” Sarah replied. “I hate what he did to Alison, and I wish they would put him away forever.”

  “Do you think he killed her?”

  “I don’t know. The papers say he did and so does Grandfather. But most of the people around here say no,” Sarah replied. “Yet, even if he didn’t kill her, he did stalk her. Men think they can treat women however they wish, and that’s crap. And they do it to all of us. All of us. I don’t know of a single woman who wasn’t frightened or harassed at least once in her life by a man. Not one. When I was going for my MBA, I had this professor; he called me into his office, said I should be nice to him, put his hands on me, tore my blouse when I pushed him away. I took it to the administration, but nothing happened, nothing changed. He’s still there, and I had to transfer to the U. Bastard.”

  “Did Alison tell you about Fleck?”

  “No, Grandfather did. Alison, she didn’t speak very much. After my grandfather fired Raymond, I tried to be Alison’s friend. Went out of my way to be her friend, mostly because she didn’t seem to have any other friends around here. One woman, a secretary, actually drew up a petition to have her dismissed. I intercepted it before it reached Grandfather. But Alison, she kept her distance. She didn’t even mention the phone calls or the dead roses; I didn’t learn about those until the police came to investigate. Poor Alison. Lord, I hate Raymond Fleck.”

  “What about the woman, the secretary?”

  “I hate her, too. Give me an excuse to gas her, any excuse that won’t piss off my other employees.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Irene Brown.”

  I recognized the name instantly. Raymond Fleck’s lover. His alibi.

  Irene Brown reluctantly agreed to speak with me in the employee’s cafeteria, which was little more than a cramped one-window room filled with two round tables, a dozen chairs, and a bank of vending machines. She didn’t want to be there and probably would not have been if Sarah Selmi hadn’t hovered over her like a grade-school principal. As it was, she remained defiant, answering questions with questions, giving me the same story she’d given the Dakota County deputies, daring me to contradict her. And when Sarah left the cafeteria to attend to business, Irene announced, “I’m not talking to you anymore.”

  I pumped a couple of quarters into a vending machine and pressed the button marked Dr Pepper. “Want anything?” I asked as the can rolled into the tray.

  “Didn’t you hear me? I said I’m not answering any more questions.”

  I opened the can and drank a generous portion of the sweet liquid. When I finished drinking I asked her, “How big are your feet?”

  “What?”

  “How big are your feet?”

  Irene looked at me like I was a few raisins short of a cookie.

  “You love Raymond, don’t you?”

  Irene Brown was a large woman, six feet and overweight, with about as much sparkle as a cubic zirconia that’s gone through the washing machine a few times. She took a chair and pushed it violently across the room, and for a moment the chair became Alison. “Yes, I love him,” Irene answered, the clattering chair punctuating her remark.

  “And you would do anything for him?”

  “Anything.”

  I took another slow sip of the Dr Pepper.

  “So tell me, how big are your feet?”

  “Why is that important?” she asked, and when she did, I suddenly realized just how important the question was. I couldn’t even tell you where it came from except my wife used to wear my discarded Nikes when she worked her garden, and they fit her fine.

  “
After Raymond was fired, Alison began receiving harassing phone calls. She also received some rather unsavory gifts, like a dead cat—”

  “Raymond had nothing to do with that.”

  “One day she found dead flowers on her desk.”

  “I told you, Raymond had nothing—”

  “How did the flowers get there, Irene? Who put them there?”

  “What are you saying?”

  I drained the remaining Dr Pepper and tossed the empty can into a recycle bin. Wait for it, wait for it, I told myself as I surveyed the candy bars behind the glass face of a second vending machine.

  “Are you saying I put the dead roses on Alison’s desk?”

  “I never said they were roses,” I answered, feigning disinterest.

  Irene didn’t miss a beat. “Everyone knows they were roses,” she told me.

  “I guess,” I said taking the change from my pocket and counting it. “Do you have a dime I can borrow?”

  “No I don’t have a fucking dime,” was Irene’s curt reply.

  I sighed heavily and slid the change back into my pants pocket. “So, Irene,” I asked casually. “How big are your feet?”

  “Goddammit, there you go again.”

  “It’s like this, Irene,” I told her. “I think you’re lying about being with Raymond between five and seven the day Alison disappeared.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “The cops don’t believe you, either.”

  “I don’t care!”

  “But you see, unlike the cops, I don’t think you’re lying to protect Raymond, no ma’am. I think you’re lying to protect yourself.”

  Irene didn’t have an answer for that.

  “You hated Alison, didn’t you?”

  Irene nodded.

  “You hated her because she was so much more attractive and so much smarter than you are.”