Dearly Departed Page 7

  “Or when Holland Taylor solved a seven-month-old murder before lunch,” she added.

  I grinned. “God, I’m good.”

  nine

  I was late to my office the next morning. It was such a beautiful day, I stopped at the University of Minnesota driving range on Larpenteur to hit a bucket of golf balls. It took me over an hour. I would have finished sooner except that I took time to admire the female golfer who was hitting seven irons from the tee next to mine. Absolutely gorgeous form. Her swing wasn’t bad, either. Unfortunately, my ogling came with a price that I was forced to pay when I called my answering service.

  “It is un-ac-cept-able,” the operator told me, sounding a bit like Anne Scalasi in a bad mood. “We will not tolerate that kind of behavior from our clients. If there are any further incidents, we will terminate our relationship.”

  Gulp.

  I tried to explain to the woman that it wasn’t I who had called four times between eight and nine A.M., making angry references to various parts of the operator’s anatomy when I wasn’t there to answer the phone. However, she didn’t see it that way, and I was forced to promise that I would “speak” with Mr. Truman. Either that or dig my old answering machine out of the closet.

  But first I fortified myself with a cup of Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee—I grind my own beans—and sorted through my mail. Except for a large brown envelope from Publishers Clearing House, nothing excited me. I turned my attention to my newspapers. I get both the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune. Most people read newspapers starting with the front page and work in. I always start with the agate type listing the transactions in the sports section and work out. No particular reason; it’s just how I do things. I noticed immediately that the Oakland As had brought up a middle-relief pitcher just in time for their series with the Minnesota Twins. They’ll need him. My Twins were hot, having won nine of their last eleven, including a three-game sweep of Cleveland. It was still early, of course. Too early to get excited about a pennant race. And given the team’s payroll … Still, every time my boys start playing well, I remember ’87 and ’91, and a little tingle creeps up my spine. True, ’87 and ’91 are starting to be a long time ago. But what has your team done lately? Not much I bet.

  I was studying the stats of today’s probable pitchers when the phone rang. I let it ring six times before I answered, knowing it was Hunter Truman.

  “What the fuck is going on?” he wanted to know.

  “Pertaining to what?”

  “Goddammit, ain’t you working for me? I gotta get my news from the fucking radio, from some greaseball on TV?”

  “Are you referring to Irene Brown?”

  “What the hell you think I’m referring to? Jesus, Taylor.”

  “If you’d shut up for a few minutes, I’ll explain.”

  “Goddamn, Taylor—”

  “Shut up Truman. Will ya?”

  I told him all about Irene Brown, about how I spooked her into tossing the shoes, about what the Dakota County folks were going to do next. Truman surprised me by not uttering a syllable until I was finished.

  “What do you think?” he asked at last.

  “You asked me for my best guess. Well, my best guess is that Irene Brown is guilty of murder. Only I doubt Dakota County can make the charge stick even if forensics does discover corroborating evidence. Without a body, a good defense attorney should be able to clobber the county attorney. Hell, Truman, even you could win this one.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” he agreed. After a long pause, he asked, “Is that it?”

  “That’s it. I’ll send you a bill.”

  “You’re not looking into it anymore?”

  “You wanted my best guess. Well, you have it. There’s nothing more that I can do.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m having lunch today at W. A. Frost with someone involved in the case. If I hear anything new, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Fine,” he said and hung up.

  “Yeah, pleasure doing business with you, too, Truman,” I told the dead receiver.

  “I should warn you before you order that I’m not buying after all,” Anne told me as she perused her menu.

  “You’re not?” I asked, surprised.

  She shook her head.

  “What happened?”

  “Raymond Fleck confessed to the murder after he learned that the Dakota County deputies arrested Irene.”

  “He did?”

  “Irene Brown then confessed a few minutes after she learned that Raymond was in custody.”

  “She did?”

  “Which means Irene did it and Raymond’s trying to protect her, or Raymond did it and Irene’s trying to protect him. …”

  I stared at my menu, not really seeing it.

  “Or worse,” she added, “they both did it and this is just a nifty way to interject a reasonable doubt into their trials. Both had motive, both had opportunity, both confessed willingly. Who do you believe? Who will a jury believe?” Anne shrugged. “Without the body, neither Raymond nor Irene can prove that they’re telling the truth. Without the body we can’t prove that either or both of them are lying. And neither of them is willing to lead the deputies to the body.”

  “I just had a sickening thought.”

  “What?”

  “What if they can’t lead them to Alison? What if neither of them did it, but both believe the other did, and they’re only confessing to protect each other? Call it the Gift of the Magi defense.”

  “People in love do amazing things,” Anne agreed.

  “Hell, I didn’t catch anybody,” I griped, tossing my menu onto the white tablecloth.

  “Buy your own damn lunch,” Annie told me.

  We parted with a hug in the parking lot of the YWCA just down the street from the restaurant. Annie was parked in the first row, my car was way in the back. When I reached it, I found a folded sheet of plain white typing paper jammed under my windshield wiper. I unfolded it, expecting to learn that I was invited to the grand opening of a car wash or some damn thing. Instead, the note, written in black marker, read: STAY AWAY FROM THE EMERTON CASE IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU!

  “Annie!” I yelled.

  Fortunately her car window was rolled down to hear me, and she stopped just as she was about to exit the parking lot. “What?” she called. “Are Raymond and Irene still in custody?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn,” I muttered, reading the note a third time. I really hadn’t caught anybody.

  Truman listened patiently as I told him of my discovery of the note.

  “What does it mean?” he wanted to know.

  “Just what it says. Someone wants me off the case, and it’s not Raymond or Irene.”

  “Who?”

  “Obviously someone who knows I was working the case. Stephen Emerton. The employees at Kennel-Up. I’m betting on Stephen Emerton, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Yesterday he admitted to me that he believed Alison was having an affair with Raymond because he believed Alison had had an affair with an unidentified employee, possibly a doctor, while she was employed by the health-care organization. That makes him a stronger suspect, and it could be he’s afraid I’ll pass it on to the cops or his insurance company.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Truman insisted. At first I thought he was defending Emerton. A moment later I knew better. “That’s absolute bullshit. There’s no fucking way Alison would do that. He’s lying.”

  “He has no reason to lie,” I reminded Truman. “It hurts him more than it helps him.”

  “That’s real bullshit.”

  “Maybe it’s bullshit that Alison was having an affair”—I thought of the photograph, the black and white number that made her look like a cat on the prowl and the word caught in my throat—“but if Emerton believes it’s true …”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s motive,” I concluded. “He didn’t admit it to the
cops but he did to me, and now I’m thinking that last night he lost a lot of sleep over it.”

  “And put the note on your windshield?”

  “It could have been someone else,” I admitted. “But he’s my only suspect right now.” My inner voice was speaking to me again. It whispered, Alison couldn’t possibly have done it if she’s in Bermuda.

  “You think we should look into it,” Truman told me.

  “Yes. But it’s your nickel.”

  Truman made clicking sounds with his tongue; over the phone it sounded like the ticking of a clock.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said. “If Irene or Raymond or both of them really did kill Alison, digging up another suspect could only help them at trial, am I right?”

  “Possibly,” I agreed.

  “But you think we should look into it, anyway?”

  “Yes.” Although a small part of me wanted Truman to say no.

  “Why?”

  “Because someone doesn’t want us to.”

  “There’s a New York actress named Holland Taylor; pretty good one, too,” Marie Audette reminded me when I met her in the lobby of a downtown Minneapolis recording studio.

  “So I’ve been told,” I said.

  “Any relation?”

  “No,” I answered, without adding that I’ve always wanted to meet the woman.

  After speaking with Hunter Truman, I located the names of Alison’s two best friends in my notes. The first was Marie Audette. Her agent told me she was recording a voice-over for a TV spot, and I arranged to meet her before the session began.

  “I heard on the radio coming over here that a woman was arrested for killing Alison. Do you know anything about that?” she asked.

  I told her that I did, told her I was partly responsible for apprehending the woman. If Cynthia had been there, she would have accused me of grandstanding. I assure you, my motives were pure. I wanted Marie’s gratitude, yes, but only because I figured it would make her more receptive to my questions. The lovely, affectionate smile she bestowed on me was merely a bonus.

  “Alison and I were very close while we were at the university,” Marie confided in a throaty, sensual voice—yeah, I could see why people would pay her serious money to speak eloquently about detergent and fax machines. “She was like my little sister, which is kind of funny when you think about it. She was eighteen and I was twenty-two, but she was a senior and I was only a junior. God, she was smart. She could have been a great actress. She had this ability to totally immerse herself into a role, to actually become the character she was playing. Like Meryl Streep … Well, maybe not quite like Streep.”

  “I have a photograph of the two of you,” I told her. “You’re in costume. European, I think.”

  “The Cherry Orchard?”

  I shrugged my ignorance.

  “We did Chekhov for the university theater company. She was Anya to my Varya. She was wonderful; great reviews. The critic from the Star Tribune said Alison was, quote, ‘an actor to watch.’”

  “Why did she give it up?”

  “I don’t think it was important enough to her. We often spoke about acting, fantasizing about our careers. She told me she was going to change her name to Rosalind Colletti; it was going to be her stage name. But acting is an extremely punishing profession, and I don’t think she was willing to take the rejection, the hammering we often get from agents, from casting directors, from critics. You know what her goal was? It wasn’t the Oscar or the Tony. It was independence. She wanted to take only those parts that genuinely interested her and nothing else. Show me an actor with that attitude who gets work. Jack Nicholson, maybe, but first he had to pay his dues like everyone else. Ever see Hell’s Angels On Wheels?”

  “So she gave it up,” I volunteered.

  “We went to a few auditions together, then fewer and fewer until she stopped going altogether. It’s too bad. I’m doing The Merchant of Venice for The Acting Company; Alison would have made a great Jessica. Would you like a couple of tickets? On the house?”

  “That would be very nice, thank you,” I answered without hesitation. I used to glom onto freebies when I was a cop, too.

  “Thursday night? I already gave away my weekend tickets.”

  “That’d be great,” I said as she made a note to herself on a small pad.

  “I write everything down,” she told me.

  “So do I,” I replied, making a notation on my own pad. “When did Alison begin working for the health-care organization?” I asked.

  “About a year after she earned her master’s. First, though, she took a job with an advertising agency that had a public relations department. She was a junior account executive—or something like that—and the health-care company was her primary client. A year later she left the agency and began working full time for the health-care place. It upset a lot of people, too.”

  “How so?”

  “First thing she did was fire the ad agency and hire someone else.”

  “Burning bridges,” I suggested.

  “She was like that.”

  “How did your relationship hold up?”

  “Fine,” Marie answered, shrugging. “We started to drift apart; she was doing her thing and I was doing mine. We stayed in touch, though; met a couple times a month for lunch.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “About a month before she disappeared.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I can’t even remember, it was so unimportant. She certainly didn’t confide in me about what was happening in her life if that’s what you’re asking,” Marie shook her head sadly. “I was supposed to be her friend—one of her best friends—yet she didn’t confide in me. Now I wonder if we were friends at all. Sometimes it seems to me that we were only two people who knew each other for a long time.”

  I appreciated Marie’s confusion. I am continually impressed by how little we truly know about each other, by how much we conceal. We often remain strangers even to those we’re the most intimate with. I’ve known widows who learn more about their dearly departed husbands in the first week after they’re dead than in forty years of married life. It makes one yearn for that lost age of formal introductions, that time in our society’s evolution when our character was well known and even guaranteed by mutual friends, accepted customs, and shared institutions. Of course, there wasn’t much call for private investigators back then.

  “How did she meet Stephen Emerton?” I asked, nudging Marie slowly toward the question I most wanted to ask.

  “I introduced them,” she replied. “Stephen and I were seeing each other. Nothing serious, though. One day I introduced them over lunch. A week later Alison called and said Stephen had asked her out, did I mind? I said no.”

  “You didn’t mind that your best friend was stealing away your boyfriend?”

  Marie smiled. “Stealing him away? More like I was giving him away. And good riddance. Stephen’s a good-looking guy, I admit. But I’ve seen kiddie pools with more depth. ‘An idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,’” she added, quoting Macbeth.

  “Did you tell that to Alison?”

  “‘Friendship is constant in all other things, save in the office and affairs of love; therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues; let every heart negotiate for itself,’” she replied. I couldn’t place the line.

  “I recognized Macbeth,” I told the actress. “The last quote?”

  “That was Shakespeare, too. Much Ado About Nothing. Sorry. I know I can be annoying, quoting playwrights. Sometimes I can’t help showing off.”

  “Forget it,” I told the actress. “I’ve been known to show off on occasion myself.” Then I asked, “Was Alison working for the health-care organization when she and Stephen met?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Alison see anyone else while she worked there?”

  “Before Stephen? Probably. Alison was pretty enough; she could have had all the male companionship she
wanted.”

  “Any names?”

  “No,” Marie answered. “None that I can remember.”

  “How about after she married Stephen?”

  There it was—the high, hard one. Marie swatted it like it was a beach ball.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I think you can tell if a woman cheats, and Alison just wasn’t the type.”

  Alison wasn’t the type: I was happy to hear Marie say it. Happy and relieved. So much for not getting emotionally involved in a case, so much for keeping an open mind. Alison wasn’t the type. I wrote it down in my notebook.

  “Although if she was cheating on Stephen, I would have been the last person she’d tell,” Marie added. “Alison was very big on appearances. If she thought someone would disapprove of something she did, she’d have kept it to herself. I guess I know that much about her.”

  “Would you have disapproved?”

  “Absolutely. You want to sleep around when you’re single, go ahead, who cares—although these days I figure you’re taking your life in your hands. But not when you’re married. You have to be honest when you’re married. Otherwise, why bother?”

  “If Alison was cheating on Stephen and didn’t confide in you, would she have confided in Gretchen Rovick?”

  “The cop?”

  “The sheriff’s deputy,” I corrected her.

  “Maybe. She and Gretchen grew up together, went to the same high school. I met Gretchen only once, the weekend Alison was married. She was maid of honor, I was a bridesmaid. We were the only two standing up for Alison.”

  ten

  Deer Lake. Wisconsin was A GOOD NATURED TOWN. It said so on the hand-lettered sign that marked the city limits. The sign listed the community’s population at 1,557. It seemed larger than that. The parking lots of two supermarkets located across the blacktop from each other were packed with cars, and a considerable amount of traffic was moving in and out of King Boats, which I later discovered not only sold recreational boats but built them, too. Along the main drag a visitor could find a drugstore, bank, real-estate office, hardware store, several gift shops, two restaurants, a service station, a clothing store, a movie rental shop, an appliance dealer, a store that specialized in personal computers, and six—count ’em, six—taverns.