Wayne said nothing.
I sighed. “To someone who doesn’t share my passion for trying to see all sides of a story, it might look like you’re in the habit of running around bumping off your girlfriends.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said tonelessly.
“There’s no statute of limitations on murder. That’s something else you would know if you’d watched The Untouchables.”
“It was just a dumb accident,” he said. “A hundred years ago. I was in high school—we both were. Her name was Stacy, Stacy Eitrem. We were—She was my girlfriend. And one night our senior year she was walking home from school. She had stayed late for something and it was autumn, so it was pretty dark already by the time she went home. Maybe that had something to do with it. Anyhow, this car jumped a stop sign—this is what they figured out later—and hit her and killed her instantly. They never found the car or the driver.”
“Were you close?”
He shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Where were you when she was killed?”
His mouth went tight and his hands, which had been wrapped loosely around the bottle in front of him, tightened. “School,” he said through his teeth. “I had wrestling practice.”
“Where did you go to high school?”
Seconds passed before he answered. Too many seconds. “Lincoln.”
“Guess again,” I said. “Your old man told me you two moved to Lincoln twelve years ago. So unless you were, what, about twenty-seven when you finished high school …”
He said nothing.
“Don’t burst a blood vessel thinking about it,” I advised. “People leave a trail. I go over to Lincoln and snoop around, credit applications, bank references, and so on, and that tells me your previous address—addresses, even, depending on how frequently you moved, since banks don’t trust you if you’ve been at your current locale less than six months or a year. That takes me back to Indiana, where your dad says you were before Lincoln. I repeat the process there, and that takes me somewhere else. Your dad says you’ve been all over the Midwest. Eventually, Thomas, I find out where your family’s tent was pitched when the obstetrician slapped you on the butt. All it takes is time and money. Money’s no problem for me, since it’s no problem for my client. Time’s no problem, either. For me, that is. For you … well, Berenelli’s going to get itchy, and when he gets itchy, friend, he may just scratch you.” God, I love that kind of talk!
Wayne’s arms were still on the table, his hands still encircling the bottle. Now he fanned his hands, exposing his palms in a gesture of defeat. “All right, all right, all right. We lived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, until I was eighteen. Then we were in Mankato, Minnesota, for not quite two years. Then Dubuque, Iowa, for a year. Then Evansville, Indiana, for about three years. Then Lincoln. Then here. Happy?”
“Ecstatic. What ever happened to your mother?”
That earned me an if-looks-could-kill look, but all he said was, “You like to jump around a lot.”
“It’s the only exercise I get. Your mother?”
He got up, suddenly though not so suddenly as the last time, and came over toward me. I was braced, but he gave me a look that said Get out of my way, so I got out of his way and he opened a top cupboard that I had been blocking, took down a dimpled blue tumbler, and filled it with water from the tap.
“She died,” he said.
“I know. When?”
He emptied the glass and refilled it and took it to the table. “When I was about two.”
“What from?”
He looked at me. There was nothing in the red eyes. No emotion, I mean. None of the anger, the hatred, that had been there mere minutes ago. Nothing. And the voice matched. “Cerebral hemorrhage,” he said. “I guess she’d had a headache the night before. Next morning she just didn’t get up.” He studied me frankly. Something had come back into his eyes, not anger exactly, just a kind of peeved look. “What’s it got to do with anything?”
Time for the plunge.
“Sunday night, the night Meredith was killed, what was your father doing while you were out entertaining your clients?”
The corners of his mouth went down. “I don’t know.” His voice was tight, constrained. “He told me the police asked him that. I supposed they would have to. I suppose you would, too. But I don’t know. He says he was home all afternoon and evening, reading, watching television. I suppose he was. I’m sure he was. It’s what he usually does on Sunday. Why would he lie?”
Both of us knew that that one didn’t deserve an answer.
“What about—what, twenty or twenty-one years ago? The night your friend Stacy Eitrem was killed? Where was your father that night?”
Wayne frowned in apparent confusion. “I don’t understand …”
“All right, let’s do a paint-by-numbers. Let’s talk about your motive for wanting Meredith out of the way.”
“I have told you, I didn—”
“You have told me you didn’t kill her. I heard you. Did you hear me tell you that you nevertheless have a motive? Right. Either you were engaged or you weren’t. If you were, you might have decided it was a bad move and wanted out, but Meredith may not have been graceful about it. You’re a visible young man, Mr. Wayne, and you may have hopes of becoming still more visible. You wouldn’t want a stink. Same goes if there wasn’t an engagement, but Meredith acted as if there was. That situation may even be worse, because it puts you in the position of having to choose between calling a young woman a liar, and possibly a mentally unbalanced one, or being branded a liar yourself. Those are good motives for a man with great expectations.”
I gave it a minute to absorb.
“Or the father of a man with great expectations.”
The look he gave me, while murderous, also suggested that he had seen where I was going and got there a little ahead of me. “You’re reaching,” he said with venom.
“Not very far. Last night your father paid me a visit. I don’t know whether you know that or not.” His face said not. “He tried to bully me off the investigation, he tried to enlist me as bag man for paying off my client to drop the investigation. The first didn’t work and I didn’t even suggest the second to my client. She’s got access to more money than your father could ever hope to touch. Anyhow, my point is that your father made a heartfelt speech about you. ‘Everything I’ve ever done has been for him,’ that’s what he told me. He didn’t specify the ‘everything’ part. Perhaps it included taking care of one or two young women who for one reason or another were bad choices for his boy?”
“That’s pathetic.”
“I agree. Stacy Eitrem. Did you plan to marry her?”
It came at him out of left field, which is as I intended.
“I—I don’t know. I don’t know. We were just kids …”
“Plenty of ‘kids’ get married right out of high school. Was that your plan?”
“I don’t know …”
“But you had discussed it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Just to talk about it …”
“The night she was killed. Where was your father?”
He looked at me. The confusion in his eyes, I thought, was real. “I don’t know,” he said softly.
“Does anybody?”
“He was at home when I got home from practice,” he said lamely.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “When did you find out about your friend?”
“Later. Later that night. Nine or ten, I suppose.”
“How? The police?”
“No. One of the kids from school … her dad was an ambulance driver …”
“Was there an investigation?”
He shrugged. “I suppose so. I suppose they must have looked for the car. No one ever told me. They never caught anyone, though.”
“Did your father know you and Stacy had contemplated marriage?”
He shook his head. “We were just kids,” he repeated, as if that meant something. “We weren’t
serious.”
That didn’t mean someone else hadn’t been.
“According to the coroner, death occurred no earlier than one a.m. Monday morning.”
“ ‘One a.m. Monday morning’ is redundant,” I said. “ ‘a.m.’ means ‘morning.’ ”
“Damn,” Kim Banner said. “And I always try so hard to talk good when I’m around you.” We were at a booth in the side dining room at Caniglia’s, the original one, on Seventh Street in the old Italian neighborhood. We had each made a drink disappear and were working more slowly on second rounds while we waited for our dinners.
“That leaves Thomas Wayne on the hook, then,” I observed.
“I thought your current theory was that his father killed Meredith.”
“The beauty of my theories is that they cover all contingencies. Every time I adjust it to suit the father it fits the son, too, and vice versa.” I had told her about my late-afternoon meeting with Wayne fils. The high points, at any rate. “Thomas appeared alternately outraged and confused when I was troweling suspicion onto his father, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate Thomas’s innocence. I mean, he could be grade-A U.S.D.A.-certified guilty and still be stunned that I was heaping the blame on his old man.”
“Well, let’s see how this fits into your picture: According to the coroner, Meredith was three months pregnant.”
I rated it worth a low whistle, and gave it same. “I wonder if Thomas Wayne knew.”
“Yeah,” Banner drawled over the lip of her glass. “I wonder, too. Tomorrow I’ll find out.”
“She didn’t tell Dianna Castelli,” I mused, “or Dianna certainly would have told me. I wonder what that means.”
“The Castelli woman didn’t mention it to me, either, when I talked to her this morning. Neither did the mother.”
“What a shock that is,” I deadpanned. “But Dianna Castelli … Meredith told her things that she didn’t tell her mother. That she was seeing Wayne, that she was engaged to him …”
“Maybe-engaged,” Banner corrected.
“Maybe-engaged. Maybe engaged,” I said. “Maybe this was her ace in the hole. If Meredith got pregnant on purpose—”
“Do I have to listen to this kind of sexist crap just because you’re buying?”
“Who said anything about me buying? Meredith could have seen her pregnancy as a way of turning her fantasy nuptials into real ones. Thomas could have really panicked. Dumping Meredith, that could be bumpy. Dumping Meredith and an infant … Naturally, it works just as well with Alexander Wayne stepping into the role of murderer.”
Salads came.
“Not quite,” Banner said around a Club cracker. “With Thomas in the lead, you have to assume two things, the first being that Meredith told him about the pregnancy. Which we don’t know. With Alexander in the lead, you have to really stretch. Why would she tell Alexander and not Thomas? Or, having told Thomas, why would she tell Alexander?”
“Why wouldn’t Thomas tell Alexander? He was in trouble and knew it. Maybe he turned to his father to bail him out. Maybe his father had bailed him out of trouble once before, about twenty years ago. And maybe his father bailed him out again this time. What’s the other assumption I have to make?”
“Hmm? Oh—” She chewed a mouthful of rabbit food and swallowed. “That Thomas was the father. I checked into that Johansen woman. She’s well known to the vice detail. A real pa-harty gal, like the old song used to go.”
“Does she work for anybody?” I already knew the answer, I was pretty sure, but it sounded like the kind of question I should ask.
“Sort of. A penny-ante lowlife named Aurelio Ramos. Sort of a pimp, sort of a partner. Between them, Ramos and Johansen line up a fair amount of ‘entertainment,’ mostly but not exclusively for the visiting-businessmen trade. If your Meredith was a pa-harty gal too, and it looks like she was, at least pa-hart time, then that widens the field considerably.”
I speared a black olive and ate it. “The field of candidates,” I agreed after a space. “It still leaves Thomas Wayne as Meredith’s … what would you say? Father of Choice?”
“For God’s sake,” Banner said. She raked a hand through her short blond hair, which is always a sign of some internal churning. “What year does your calendar say this is? Meredith ‘gets pregnant,’ ‘on purpose,’ to force her beloved to make her ‘an honest woman’ so she can have a nice house and an automatic dishwasher and two-point-five kids, is that how you have it figured? I think you’ve perfected the reverse gear on your time machine, professor; now why don’t you return to the twentieth century?”
I didn’t blame her for being hot. The scenario was pretty well imbued with those sexist, man-stalking overtones—enough so to make me a little uncomfortable about it, too. But while we can adopt the fashionable and socially accepted liberal, enlightened attitude, it’s a big mistake to think that everyone else on the planet has too.
Putting down my fork I said slowly, “There are still people in the latter half of the twentieth century who think that black men only want white women and that Jews control all the money and that adolescent boys can ‘turn into’ homosexuals by looking at certain books and that you come out of a Vietnamese restaurant with the impulse to chase cars. I do not hold those beliefs, but I know people who do, and dearly. I also know people who believe that a woman’s place is in the home with the automatic dishwasher and the two-point-five kids. Some of those people are women. I do not know Meredith Berens’s personality well enough to determine what she may or may not have believed, thought, or done. I doubt whether anybody knew her that well. She was a complicated and probably unstable personality. She showed only minute facets of that personality to the various people in her life, different facets based on … based on I don’t know what. What she wanted a given individual to see her for, I suppose. If she told anybody she was pregnant, it was probably the person who would be most inclined to deny having been told—Thomas Wayne. Given that, all I can do is make guesses. Believe me, Banner, I wish to Christ that Meredith was here so that she could tell us herself what went through her head.”
“Yeah. Well, that makes two of us,” Banner said tightly. Her salad plate was empty and she set it to one side, picking up her water glass. “All right, as long as we’re guessing, try this: Meredith is sleeping around on a quasi-professional basis. For all we know, she was moonlighting on her moonlighting—putting together her own action unbeknownst to Jahna Johansen. That’s where she was Sunday night, with a client. But it goes wrong. The john gets pissed. He wants something she’s not prepared to deliver, or he’s a freak who gets off on beating up women. Anyhow, they tangle. He kills her and hides the body. If he’s an out-of-towner, and even if he isn’t, the odds of finding him are a bazillion-to-one against.”
Dinner came. Mostaccioli for me, petite filet for Banner.
“It explains why she wasn’t robbed,” Banner continued when the waitress had departed.
“Where’s her purse?”
“She dropped it during the beating, or left it in the car. The john took it and got rid of it.”
“The car?”
“He used that to drive her to Fontenelle Forest and dump the body. By the way, they were able to get a tire impression, but it’s pretty poor and not much use until we have a tire to compare it with. Anyhow, when he was through he ditched the car, probably making sure to leave behind nothing that could lead anyone to him.”
“Did a good job, too. That car’s been missing since Sunday.”
She scowled. “You’ve got an imagination,” she said. “I’ve seen you use it. Use it now. There are probably only about nine hundred and ninety-nine places in town where you can park a car for days on end and have it attract no attention whatsoever. The airport. A hotel ramp. An apartment building parking lot. A hospital. A private garage—”
“I get the idea.”
“And if you want to be really clever, you drive it to another town and ditch it and take a plane or a bus back. If you’re fro
m out of town, you don’t even have to do that. You just disappear.”
“You’re just a ray of sunshine.”
“It’s the least I can do, considering this fine dinner you’ve bought me.”
I started to protest, but thought better of it. The meal would go down as expenses. And my expenses were being picked up, ultimately, by Baron Mike Berenelli. Banner would choke on her baked potato if she knew. Maybe someday I would tell her. For now, my knowing was enough.
I raised my glass. “Enjoy,” I said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
While I waited for Aurelio Ramos to show his weaselly little face, I flipped idly through Jahna Johansen’s address book, aided by the glove compartment light. The night was moonless and the wind was up and the car rocked a little, now and then, when the breeze got particularly insistent. I was parked along the curb across the street and two or three doors up from the address the Johansen woman had given me as Aurelio’s. It was a sagging little clapboard house whose uneven roof hung low over the yard. The yard had no lawn, but it had an older Buick Electra that could easily have been the car that nearly flattened me across Decatur Street. Aurelio Ramos’s block was full of other houses like his, houses with missing windows replaced with plywood or cardboard, houses with junk cars sitting out front, houses with garbage stacked on the porches and spilling out into the yard. It was a sad and decrepit neighborhood full of sad and decrepit houses. The residents were the poor and the elderly, and the elderly poor. There was much desperation; it was palpable. Desperation was not all bad; where there was no desperation, there was apathy.
I looked at Ramos’s house. It was a minuscule firetrap composed of two boxes, a larger one whose pitched roof ran north and south and a smaller one, butted up against the front of the first box. A slab of concrete along the front of the larger box constituted the porch or stoop; the front door sat at the join of the two boxes. I figured the larger box was big enough for a living room and a kitchen; the smaller would hold a bedroom and a bathroom. Certainly no room for much more than that. There were three windows visible in front: a picture window, which didn’t suit the house and which was covered by a heavy drape or blanket that allowed only a sliver of light to escape on one side; a semicircular window in the front door; and a darkened bedroom window on the other side of the door from the picture window. Tattered curtains hung in this window.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 22
