I’d have to keep my eyes skinned.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
She had a head the size of a beach ball and her eyes were dull and her lips were parted in a way that suggested they didn’t have much feeling to them. She had made a half-hearted swipe at getting the dark hair arranged properly, but it wasn’t good enough. She wore no makeup, but that was only part of the reason she looked so pale. The rest of the reason was that she was still suffering from the effects of too much liquor taken too fast on an empty stomach, to say nothing of the event that had caused her to attack the liquor in the first place.
Which also explained why she was still in her robe, a white terry number with aqua stripes, even though it was well past noon.
I said, “Good afternoon, Donna. How’re you doing today?” An idiotic expression—how are you doing?—but, like the rest of the population, I find that it fairly leaps from the tongue before I can do anything about it.
She mumble-grumbled something and shut the door behind me and shuffled into the kitchen. I ditched my sport coat in a chair and followed. Now that I knew her parentage, I recognized Donna Berens’s décor as being remarkably similar to that of Paul Tarantino’s house back when Sal Gunnelli lived there. Cold and empty. In the kitchen, Donna had a tall white pot on the table in front of her, a big mug from which a thin thread of steam rolled lazily, an unopened newspaper, and an untouched slice of black toast on which a pat of margarine slowly melted.
“Coffee,” she mumbled, with a distracted wave toward the white pot. Then she went back to concentrating on the contents of her mug.
I opened a couple of cupboards until I found where the rest of the mugs were kept, took one down, figured out how the pouring arrangement on the thermal pot worked, made the transfer, and leaned against the counter. Sitting was okay, as far as my aching muscles were concerned, and standing was okay, and lying down was okay, but the activity involved in going from one position to another was NG.
“Have you eaten anything?”
She gave me a look. “Please,” she said sourly.
“It’ll help. So will aspirin, and lots to drink.”
She grunted. I pushed off, went into the bathroom, and rifled the medicine cabinet. She had a plastic bottle of regular-strength—whatever “regular strength” was—Tylenol Caplets on the lower shelf. Weren’t the Caplets one of the families in Romeo and Juliet? According to the bottle, I wasn’t supposed to use the product if the foil inner seal was broken, but it didn’t tell me how I was supposed to get the medication out without breaking the foil seal. I shook out three Caplets and ate them, then shook out two for my patient. Then I went back to the kitchen and poured a tall glass of water and put it and the painkillers in front of Donna.
“Here,” I said. “The pain-reliever hospitals use most. Because they can get it the cheapest.”
She looked at the pills, looked at me, then, fatalistically, took them one at a time, following each with a tentative sip of water. “How come you’re so good to me,” she said sarcastically.
I glanced at my wristwatch. “Any time now you’ll be having company. The police. They told me they’d give you until after noon, but they have questions that must be asked. It won’t be easy, probably, and you’ll have to be in some kind of shape to take it.”
Donna nodded and sipped some more water. “What kind of questions? Didn’t we take care of everything at the … yesterday?”
“Yesterday was to satisfy the bureaucrats. Today the cops will want to know everything about Meredith. What she was like, whom she knew, whether anyone had anything against her—the whole nine yards.” I paused. “They’ll have questions about you, too, Donna. They’ll need to know about you and your relationship with Meredith, and they’ll need to know about the rest of Meredith’s family, too. They won’t be put off as easily as I was, either. In fact, they won’t be put off at all.”
She said nothing, having gone back to inspecting her coffee.
I said, “I met your husband today.”
I had hoped for some kind of reaction, but she would accommodate me only to the extent of glancing at me and saying, “Ex-husband” before returning to her inspection.
“He wants to hire me to look for Meredith’s killer.”
Nothing.
“I said I couldn’t commit until I had spoken with you. Last night you said you wanted my help. But I don’t know what you m—”
“Do what he wants,” Donna said in a weary monotone. She looked at me, her face matching her voice, and I realized that there was more to her current state than shock and a hangover.
“Then you’ve talked with him already.”
She moved her mouth into something that you might have called a smile. “I listened. He talked. I—” The smile vanished. “Listen, just do what he wants, okay?”
I said, “You’re in the hot seat. I can tell Berenelli I’m not interested, I don’t want to get involved. That takes you off the hook.”
She grunted a laugh. “He’ll think I had something to do with your decision. No, it’s better in the long run, for both of us, if you just go along with him.”
I shrugged. “All right.”
“The arrangements have all been made. One of his … people came by a while ago with some money I’m supposed to give to you. An advance or a retainer or whatever you call it.”
“You already paid me a retainer, and the meter’s still running.”
“That was for me; this is for him. I’m supposed to use some of the money to pay you what I already owe you and the rest of it to get you going on what he wants. You’re supposed to give me a receipt. If you need more, for expenses or anything, you’re supposed to call me. Everything, all the transactions, will be between you and me. That keeps him clean. There’s no connection to you.”
“Except you. Donna, I can understand why you didn’t want to come out and tell me that Meredith’s father and grandfather both worked for the Mob. But you understand that you can’t keep that from the police, don’t you? They may already know who your father was.”
She bobbed her head toward one shoulder in a tired, defeated who-cares gesture.
“Try to eat some of that toast.” I looked at my watch again. The cops, probably Kim Banner herself, would be on the doorstep any minute now, or maybe any hour now. You never know with those guys. Sometimes they seem to be everywhere at once, sometimes they seem to have disappeared entirely. Seem to have. “I gather they leaned on Thomas Wayne pretty hard last night,” I said, as if Donna Berens had been keeping right up there with my thoughts.
“Why not,” she said lifelessly. “He killed her, didn’t he?”
“What do you know about Wayne?”
“Nothing.” She drank some coffee, made a face, and drank some more. “I never heard of him until you told me about him last night.”
“Never? Meredith never mentioned him to you? You never met him?”
“Didn’t we already go through all this?”
“And you’ll have to go through it all again with the police. What about Thomas’s father?”
“What about him?”
“Alexander Wayne. Does the name mean anything?”
“Not to me.”
“Your daughter never talked about him either?”
She said nothing, which I took to mean that she didn’t think it was worth saying anything.
“What about someone named Jahna Johansen?”
“What about him?”
“Her. Never mind.” More to myself than to Donna I said, “It’s funny Meredith wouldn’t have mentioned Thomas to you. If she was planning on marrying him.”
“That’s what you say he says. I don’t believe it.”
She meant she didn’t believe the engagement story. She was sticking by her guns, holding fast to her belief that she and her daughter had had a close relationship and that the girl told her everything that was going on in her life. Obviously not so. Obviously there was much in Meredith’s young and short life that she kept h
idden from various parties. But the engagement, or at least Meredith’s belief that there was an engagement, was fact. Dianna Castelli and Steve Lehman and Thomas Wayne all agreed on that one point: Meredith had talked about an engagement.
Which, as always, brought things around to Thomas Wayne.
If Meredith had a secret life, then so too did Wayne. A secret past, more accurately. Alexander Wayne’s attitude and actions the night before pointed in that direction. They pointed at something hidden that he wanted kept hidden. What? That Thomas once had a girlfriend who was killed in some kind of automobile accident? If in fact it was an accident. All of my nice theories about Alexander Wayne having as much motive as his son for wanting Meredith Berens out of the way might work just as well on the other girl’s death, if the other girl’s death wasn’t accidental.
Too many ifs.
I didn’t figure I could stroll into the Wayne house and invite Alexander to tell me a little more about himself. Thomas might be more workable, if I could doctor up a way to make his quick temper work to my advantage. And Alexander wasn’t entirely out of the equation either. I just had to figure out how to play things.
When I left Donna Berens the police hadn’t yet shown themselves, which was all right with me. When I asked her if she wanted me to hang around until they did and hold her hand after they did she said no, which was even more all right with me.
The afternoon was cool and blustery and gray. The sky was a solid gray, no clouds, that hung so close that you kept feeling the impulse to duck. No precipitation, not yet, at any rate, and the puddles that remained on the pavement were vanishing fast in the breeze.
I put some miles on the car, which was about the last thing it needed, but which helped make me as sure as I could get about whether or not I was being tailed. More private-eye talk. I wasn’t, as far as I could tell.
When I felt reasonably safe, I made what was getting to be a habitual pilgrimage to the building that contained Midlands Realty and Development Corporation, in virtual certainty that young Wayne would not be in. I was not disappointed. I made up a story about having an appointment with him for that hour, an appointment made last night “at the house,” to explain why the efficient young thing behind the reception desk had no knowledge of it. She looked through an appointment register the size of a ledger book and, can you believe it, announced that my name appeared not at all for today or any other day this week, nor had Wayne mentioned it to her this morning.
I was not amused.
Frowning, she said she would check Wayne’s personal appointment book if I would wait there a moment. I agreed. She went away and came back and said there was nothing about an appointment with me on his desk calendar either. I made what I felt was an appropriate comment about “this Mickey Mouse outfit” and left. I had what I wanted. I had read it upside-down in the big appointment book when the secretary took off for Wayne’s office. The book was upside-down, I mean, not me, but I could nevertheless decipher the entry for Wayne’s current location as well as his appointments for the rest of the afternoon.
It was one of those big, shiny new office buildings that they don’t seem to be able to get filled. It had been up for a couple of years now, looming over Maple from one of the curvy streets west of Ninetieth, and it still had the big banner across the Maple Street side, near the top of the building, telling you where to call for rental information.
One thing: It was easy to find a parking space in the asphalt lot alongside the building. Which I did after driving around the neighborhood with an eye peeled for a car or cars that seemed to be keeping the same pointless route as me. There were none.
I went in and wandered around. The high-ceilinged lobby was occupied by a Thai restaurant that had a nice open-air look to it and which explained why they weren’t having a lot of luck moving the “choice office and retail space” the lobby card spoke of: Who could get any work done in a building that smelled of cooking food all morning and cooling grease all afternoon?
The lobby card referred potential renters to a suite on the mezzanine that hung over the restaurant on three sides. A renter I wasn’t, but Suite M-100 seemed as good a place as any to start.
I went up and went in.
A middle-aged woman who had shoved too much of herself into too little navy-and-red knit dress sat behind a bleached-oak desk just inside the suite’s double doors. There was enough thick maroon carpet and textured beige walls and artfully neutral artwork to suggest that the failure to fill the building hadn’t yet driven the management to anything so desperate as belt-tightening. “Can I help you,” the woman said in a routine monotone that suggested that helping me was the furthest thing from her mind.
I said, “You can tell me why places like this always install double doors but end up locking one of them, usually the one someone is most likely to try opening first.”
She looked up from the papers on her desk. “I beg your pardon?”
“Skip it. I need to see Thomas Wayne. Is he here?”
“Yes, but he’s in a meeting with Mr. D’Agosto …” She glanced to her left, and so did I, toward a bleached-oak door that bore a skinny vertical window and a plastic-wood sign that read conference room.
“This is important,” I said. “Would you mind getting him?”
“I can’t interrupt them!” She managed to almost appear shocked by the suggestion.
I hurt all over and I was tired and crabby and I had spent the day dancing minuets with mobsters and their ex-wives and I didn’t feel like dancing anymore and, besides, every so often a guy just feels like being an asshole.
“Fine,” I said, and crossed to the door.
Her reflexes were lousy, and I was into the conference room before she could stop me. I’ll give her credit: She didn’t try making excuses to her boss. When she saw she was too late she stopped and stood there in the doorway behind me, awaiting instructions.
There were four men and two women in the room, all of whom looked up in varying degrees of surprise, one of whom got over it fast and replaced it with a look of extreme vexation and came to his feet.
“Goddammit, Nebraska, what’s the big idea?”
“We need to talk, Wayne. Miss Whatserface here said she couldn’t interrupt you, so I had to do it myself. These nice people will excuse you …”
“Like hell,” he said heatedly. “Call my office and make an appointment.”
There was a vacant chair not four feet from me. I went and made it unvacant. It hurt, but it was good theater. “As far as I’m concerned these nice people can hear what I have to say. That is, unless you mind. I need to discuss a rumor I heard about you. Something about an old girlfriend …” I let it trail.
It took him maybe three seconds to catch the allusion. When he did he tried to stare me down. Bad move. He had no way of knowing he was facing off with the stare-down king of Harrison Elementary. He folded after about twenty seconds, mumbled excuses to the befuddled audience, and headed for the door. I stood up.
“Thanks for the use of the hall,” I said, and followed Wayne.
He was waiting for me outside of the suite, at the rail of the mezzanine.
“Jesus Christ, Nebraska, have you lost your mind? Those are important clients in there, important people—”
“Meredith Berens was an important person, too, Wayne. As far as I’m concerned she still is. As far as some other people are concerned, too.”
He sighed with heavy anger. “The police,” he said. “I’ve already been put through the wringer by them, Nebraska. I answered their questions, I told them everything I knew. I sure as hell don’t have to go through it again for your benefit. If you want to—”
“Not just the police,” I said mysteriously. “Tell me about this girlfriend of yours who got killed. Not Meredith; the other one.”
Wayne’s eye widened for an instant, then narrowed to dangerous slits. “You son of a bitch,” he hissed. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit.
You gave yourself away inside, there.” I jerked my head toward the half-useless double doors behind us. “Try again.”
He had a slim leather attaché with him, which he now balanced on the flat steel rail, crossing his arms on the case and looking down on the Asian restaurant workers cleaning up after the noon crowd and readying the place for the evening clientele. “Fuck,” he sighed. Then he looked at me sideways, head down, shoulders hunched. “You really are a son of a bitch, you know that?”
“I have it on the best authority.”
I like to blame what followed on my physical state, which at the moment was far from good, but I’m not sure I’d have seen it coming even if I had been one hundred percent. “It” was Thomas Wayne’s attaché, which one second was resting flat on the rail in front of him and the next second was in my sternum, corner-first. The wind went out of me the way the wind goes out of a balloon when it gets too close to the business end of a hatpin, pain spidered from the center of me all the way out, and I doubled over, slamming into the railing.
The shape I was in, there was no chance of catching Wayne, who was doing his impression of a rabbit in retreat. I didn’t even bother.
If I were Thomas Wayne, my office is the last place I would go. Of course, if I were Thomas Wayne, I would figure that the good-looking but slow-witted private investigator to whom I’d just given the banana peel would figure that the office is the last place he’d go if he were me, so I’d go there.
Fortunately, most of the world doesn’t think like me. I skipped Midlands Realty and Development—I’d seen enough of those offices already anyway—and found the house that Thomas Wayne shared with his father, or vice versa. It was a nice big two-story plantation-ish place on a gentle hill of a lot out west of Boys Town. You know the kind of place I mean—four big columns across the front holding up a balcony to which there’s no access, shading a concrete slab on which sit two or three pieces of white metal furniture designed by someone who never sat down. The place was slate blue with white trim, and it was deserted. At least, no one answered the bell. I went around the side of the house and peered through a flyspecked window into the garage. No cars.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 20
