by Robb T White
‘I been tryin’ to quit but these ain’t helpin’ much.’ She blew out a violet plume of minty smoke. ‘That’s all there was,’ she said. ‘The money was in wrappers inside an old paper bag.’
‘Do you still have the bag?’
‘No.’
‘Was there a note inside the bag?’
‘No.’
‘Did your husband gamble, Evie?’ Jade asked her.
‘Maybe once in a while. Him and Donnie and Buddy’d get up a poker game. Mostly, it was just an excuse for him an’ his friends to get shit-faced.’
Outside, adjusting her sunglasses, Jade noticed how paint flaked like alligator skin in the intense heat. The composite siding of the trailer glistened like new; it would outlast Shakespeare.
‘My God, you were good in there,’ she said.
‘Shut up,’ Pete said.
He couldn’t hide the smirk. The male rampant.
Neither said a word for a mile then Jade said, ‘Pete, there’s something there.’
‘I’m with you. She lied. There had to be a note. What are you thinking?’
‘I’m thinking your Daisy Mae back there would love for you to call her when you dump me off.’
‘Funny, Jade, funny.’
Something about the way he said her name thrilled her. Stupid schoolgirl crush.
Pete slapped the wheel—a way to diffuse excitement. ‘Her husband’s a rutting boar, but he never made that kind of money in a poker game in his life. And his hunting and fishing hobbies burned up a lot of family money. She has a lover or—’
‘That paper sack and the missing note could have been our best clue so far. Stacks of bills separated by denomination takes time. Evie said no rubber bands to hold them, no bank wrappers—just the bills, and they weren’t clean, she said. Like the money had been in public use. And who carries around wads of cash for a spur-of-the-moment act of charity?’
‘Could be something involving drugs,’ Pete said.
‘That’s logical,’ she said.
She looked at him but didn’t say a word. She mugged a star-struck teenager gaping at him. A smile lit her face all the way to her eyes and she laughed—maybe the first good, soul-cleansing laugh she’d enjoyed in months, if not years.
‘Please,’ Pete begged. ‘No more. You know I had to play it that way! You practically ordered me to.’
‘And exactly how did I do that?’
‘Telepathically,’ Pete said. ‘I’m sensitive like that. I pick up vibes easily.’
‘It’s funny your lady friend back there didn’t,’ she said. ‘That wedding ring didn’t faze our new widow much, either.’
She thought he winced at the mention of his ring and mentally kicked herself for revealing more about her own feelings than Evie Burchess’s.
Pete recovered his poise, however, and his handsome face creased in a smile.
‘OK, lady killer, I’ll quit teasing,’ Jade said.
‘Back to the office?’
‘Not yet.’ Jade wagged her notebook at him. ‘We’ve got an abused hubbie to check out first. That is, unless you want to hit a tattoo parlor and get Evie’s name done on your manly chest.’
‘It sounds like fun, but truth is I’m terrified of needles. I know you’ll make me pay for asking this, but why would any woman put a big blue catfish on her boob?’
She laughed. ‘That’s not a catfish. It’s a Japanese nishikigoi fish.’
‘A what-all?’
‘A Koi,’ she said and put on her sunglasses so that he couldn’t see her smiling.
The first name on the list was the ‘howling man’ husband, as Pete called him.
They found him in Springdale six miles north of town. He turned out to be a dud. A man whose wife left him not long after the affair with Burchess. He told them standing in his sad, messy house that he was a broken man afterward. He called her a ‘whore’ and a ‘slut’ and said he was well rid of her. They thanked him and left.
‘What a sad sack,’ Pete said outside the house. ‘No killer vibe there, for sure.’
‘People choose their own destiny,’ Jade said. ‘I have no pity for him.’
Pete’s cell buzzed as they were heading for husband number two, a man Burchess’s size, Evie had told them, who lost a bar fight over a girlfriend before she and Burchess got engaged.
‘Yes, sir,’ Pete said. ‘We’re heading back now.’
‘What is it?’ Jade asked. ‘Not enough 302s so far?’
‘Something just came in,’ Pete said. ‘Could be something, could be nothing.’
‘OK, that’s a nice build-up. What is it?’
‘That notify-me alert you faxed out to Midwest offices? Pittsburgh just received an RFA for an unusual homicide.’
Requests for FBI Assistance weren’t unusual, even in big cities like Pittsburgh.
‘What gives, Pete?’
‘This just happened, too soon for it to show up.’ He meant the massive national crime information database known as NCIC. ‘Somebody got himself killed outside Pittsburgh.’
‘That’s unusual?’
‘No. Having one eye removed is,’ he said.
‘Stop by the morgue first,’ she said.
‘What for? We need to get back. Gilker will have a shit fit—’
‘I’d like to get your pathologist on a plane to Pittsburgh. We’ll tell Gilker he’s the only one who can make an accurate assessment.’
It made sense. Jade felt that quickening in the guts every detective and agent knows when things finally get rolling in a direction. If Peaspanen could rule their unsub in for this one, they’d have a trail. Pete notched up the air conditioning and the chilled air blasted her the face; she thought about the next steps: Gilker to contact Pittsburgh’s SAC to get the Bureau’s own forensics tech to photograph the eye cavity, face, head, and neck before more time lapsed and decomp interfered with Peaspanen’s judgment. And while resident agents never spoke it aloud to the police departments they worked with, the quality of forensics teams from one homicide department to another varied from superior to deplorable. Meanwhile, she’d have the images sent for comparison with the Burchess photographs. She blew out a breath of air, an automatic reaction when she was animated.
At last, the days of her dog-and-pony show were ending. In FBI slang, her PowerPoint was nothing but a Pig’s Wings case.
Her heart beat even faster. The doldrums she was slogging through, showing up for work, listening to lawyers talk of pending cases stetted or nolle prossed—all the itchy boredom of the past months was blown away in a sudden gust. She stared ahead through the windshield. Without asking Pete’s consent, she reached for the air conditioning knob to shut it off and rolled down the window to let the wind rush through the car, muss her hair, and fill her nostrils with the scents of the speeding world: aroma of magnolia, whiff of road tar, sweat, switch grass and honeysuckle, pungent rot of ditch. Life, her own sap moving again.
Chapter 12
‘THE PRODIGAL SON RETURNS,’ a voice called out as Wöissell descended the staircase. ‘Welcome home, Charles,’ Fred said.
Fred Wöissell, Charley’s older brother, had gotten heavier since he’d last seen him. It was hard to believe Fred had ever been his youthful tormentor and had held such power over him. He looked at his brother once, assessing and dismissing at a glance.
‘Where’s our mother?’
‘Christ, you sound like Norman Bates. Where’s Mother? Not even a hello back? Besides she’s not your mother or mine. She’s a redheaded, menopausal harpy in a fright wig.’
‘Where is she, Fred?’
‘I’m sure she’s off to the store to buy something sweet for dessert to celebrate her favorite stepson’s unexpected return—or maybe another goddamned shawl. The woman’s fashion sense would make a cat weep.’
Fred enunciated the word unexpected as if it had the same connotations as excremental. Wöissell ignored his brother’s outstretched hand to brush past him on his way to the kitchen. He could have broken
that hand and left it mangled, dangling from the stump of his brother’s arm if he wished.
‘Now, now, little brother,’ Fred cooed, feigning hurt feelings, ‘let’s be kind, shall we? I’m glad to see you home. I really am.’
‘You’re lying because your mouth is open, Fred. I’ll ask you one last time. Where is our mother?’
‘Here I am, Charles!’
Mrs. Susan Alice Whitcomb Wöissell set the bag of groceries on the settee in the marble foyer to rush into her stepson’s arms.
She was given to drama, but Charley indulged her because it suited his purpose. There was no doubt Wöissell’s older brother was right about their mother’s preference for him, but he misjudged the lack of affection mother or son had for the other. Wöissell and everyone in their social set knew she’d tricked the old man into marriage after his mother’s sudden illness and death. And she knew he knew, which made for a kind of Mexican standoff in the household. Fred, however, battened on open hostilities rather than a truce; she deflected his attempts to sabotage the peace very adroitly and ignored his sarcastic jibes. She had the power of the purse and Fred was afraid to take her on directly.
‘How’s he doing?’ Wöissell asked her—he being her third husband, his second wife, his father.
She separated herself from him at arm’s length and gave him the full benefit of her sad-faced moue.
‘Oh, he’s the same. Yes, the same,’ she said. She drew out the sibilants in a way that maddened his brother. She cocked her head to one side, another habit of hers Fred despised whenever a moment of stress appeared to dampen her normally sanguine outlook.
Her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s required the full-time care of a nurse and he was no longer permitted to leave the master bedroom upstairs. Susan slept in the farthest guest bedroom down the hallway so that she would not hear him talking gibberish into the wee hours. His ‘sundowning rants,’ as she called them, manifested first of the symptoms of his disease and disturbed her rest. Charley suspected the real reason was that she was fearful he might try to harm her. Much of what poured out of his mind belonged to a time when she was competing for his attentions with several other women, all of whom had greater advantages in wealth or family connections. But Susie Whitcomb from Wanskuck knew how to win her man.
When Charley learned of his father’s sudden marriage, Fred was apoplectic with rage.
‘That slut must have told the old man if she could suck more of it out of him, she expected an engagement ring.’ He slammed his bedroom door so hard it came off the hinges.
Like everything else Fred encountered as an obstacle to his happiness, he prepared for it with some scheme or other. Charley was bored with his brother’s greed and stupidity.
‘How’s Min?’
‘Frances is wonderful, sweetie,’ his stepmother replied. ‘She spent last weekend with us—’
‘She hasn’t popped out any brats yet,’ Fred interjected from behind her. ‘Her uterus must be tougher than a Formica countertop by now.’
‘My God, is that any way to talk?’
Frances Minerva Wöissell was the eldest by two years of the siblings, married to a well-to-do lawyer from a prestigious law firm in downtown Providence, who specialized in corporate law. They were a prominent country club set—not anywhere near the same bracket as the Newport elite, but then, not many in America could afford an overnight stay in one of the mansions Vanderbilt and his Gilded Age cronies had built there. All three siblings shared in their paternal grandfather’s trust fund, which netted each around $67,000 per annum, depending on the market. It was this money that Wöissell used to shore up his dwindling stash from time to time.
‘I was just telling Charles how pleased I was to see him,’ Fred chirped to her.
‘You should be,’ his stepmother said. ‘He’s the only brother you’ve got.’
‘As if I need to be reminded of that, Susie Q,’ Fred mumbled.
Fred told his brother he used to creep downstairs to watch his father and then-girlfriend fornicate on the couch in his father’s den while their mother lay doped to the gills in a rehab facility; it was not more than a couple of weeks since her breast cancer had metastasized to the lungs and liver.
‘It looked like she had a funnel stuck in her throat. I’m not shitting you, Charles!’
If greed weren’t sufficient enough a taint on Fred’s character, prurience was a bonus. Fred was a corpse on reprieve, and his day was coming. It was a grain of satisfaction to know that, as he declined like his father, Fred’s time was shortening as well.
Fred had tried to drown Charley when he was fifteen. Charley’s Tourette’s announced itself the week after he woke in a hospital, a cold water, near-drowning victim, who had been submerged for almost four minutes, according to the first responder, under the ice of a skating pond. Envy, pure envy was the cause of it. The athletic younger brother had scored goal after goal against his older, uncoordinated brother, and Fred’s team of high school seniors. He struck Charley on the head and dragged him to a hole in the ice after the game while they waited near a 50-gallon drum fire for warmth, their chauffeured limousine en route. Fred told the cop and everyone else his brother had gone off to skate alone where the warning signs were; he must have slipped and struck his head and his momentum carried him into the hole. The police wrote it up as an accident.
Charley had no memory of what happened when he woke up. His last memory was the sound of Fred stamping his feet and kicking the barrel. He remembered sparks flying. His voice was raspy and his head was in excruciating pain.
‘How long are you here for this time, sweetheart?’ Susie crooned in his ear.
‘Not long,’ Wöissell said. ‘A few days. I need to renew my prescription.’
‘Back on the road so soon?’ his brother asked.
The phony disappointment was as false as it was goofy-looking on his overfed face.
‘My Lord, can’t America’s hideous county fairs do without your greasy chili dogs? Stay a couple weeks. I have a proposal for you.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ Wöissell replied. To his stepmother, ‘I’m going out for a while.’
‘I’ll call Franny,’ his mother said. ‘We can all have dinner together. We should all discuss some things as a family.’
‘Hurry back, Ty-rone,’ Fred sang after him.
Fred alone used his middle name, a bequeathal from his mother’s girlish infatuation with the 1940s actor Tyrone Power. ‘Only Negroes name their kids that,’ Fred mocked. His thick-headed brother could never fathom why anyone born to modest wealth should feel compelled to work, let alone choose the bizarre path of his younger brother. ‘Selling crap from a truck in Cornhole, Idaho makes as much sense as a rat copulating with a grapefruit.’
Money enabled him, but it didn’t fuel his hunger to do what he did. For Fred, money was his ruination: too little to live a life of leisure, too much to prod him into a job. Fred filled his days with schemes to make his ‘annual pittance’ grow, and thus, he was often victimized by get-rich-quick schemes posed by con artists. Had Charles Sr. not succumbed to dementia when he did, Fred’s free room-andboard at the family brick Georgian home on Loring overlooking the Seekonk River would have been negated. Charley recalled many a disapproving glance from the old man directed at Fred; he considered his older son ‘a wastrel’ and ‘blood sucker.’
Charley suspected his father would have had a pillow stuffed over his head by now if it weren’t for Fred’s fear his father had secretly disinherited him and thus, the $3,000,000 mansion sold off and split among his children would pop like a soap bubble. The last Mrs. Whitcomb kept the will under lock and key at the Fifth Third downtown. Fred had already secured the services of a less-than-reputable probate lawyer for the anticipated showdown with his stepmother.
Wöissell had no time for Fred’s pestering. He was worse than those people on those reality survivor shows where you formed alliances to squeeze somebody off the island. Backstabbing and greed were the true soul
of America, he thought.
While he was home, he might as well check out some possible venues for his next road trip. Never a shortage of festivals in fly-over country. Not owning a cell phone or a laptop was occasionally an inconvenience but it was easily offset by the absence of electronic footprints. It astounded him that criminals left cell phones and laptops as treasures to be mined by the police, never mind pinging off a cell tower a hundred yards from your victim when you were supposed to be hundreds of miles away. Charles Wöissell was a ghost, off the grid, unknown except to a handful of people who were too clownish to realize who resided in the family bosom. Not a traffic ticket, no name on a utility bill, nothing but the fake names he used in his travels.
Maybe something closer to home this time, Wöissell told himself.
That lapse in Pittsburgh continued to distress him. Why hadn’t he simply disarmed that thug—left him with a broken arm and gone back to his motel? He hoped it wasn’t hubris of wanting credit for his exploits. He had no interest in fame or infamy, another weakness lesser beings succumbed to and wound up on death row. Charley already had his death sentence. He had nothing to gain—or lose.
The Finger Lakes region of New York looked promising. The artsy-fartsy crowd in Chautauqua was always good for a late-summer, early fall festival. Chautauqua had the lingering presence of Secret Service agents. A factor but not a decisive one. He googled ‘best small-town festivals’ and tried to block out a feeling of dread creeping in his guts from being home again.
Obtaining false papers in Providence was a minor worry because it was big enough to accommodate a decent-sized cottage industry of various criminal enterprises like forgers, low priorities in every police department. Fred pointed at carloads of people in traffic as immigrant scum—namely, Irish ‘spudniggers,’ Italian ‘ginzos,’ and ‘Portagee scum.’ The Interstate 95 expressway south from Boston to Providence was how they all got here, he claimed, and ‘ruined the city.’ As soon as Charley secured new papers, he planned to dump the driver’s license, fake receipts, and phony MasterCard he stored in a secret compartment in the Chevy. They were never used except for show, if needed, so that he could be like everyone else: a good consumer, an everyday Walmart shopper.
