“Now that’s more like it,” I said. I retrieved the book. “The thing is, Steve, that this has your home number in it, not your number at Castelli and Company.” I displayed his business card. “When I went through this book, something stuck. This. Your home number.”
Lehman plucked a TV remote-control box from the yellow table and fiddled with it. Again, the gesture didn’t necessarily mean anything. He was a nervous kid. “I probably exchanged phone numbers with a girl at some party or reception or something,” he said. “What’d you say her name was?”
“Jahna Johansen.” I spelled it. “She’s a hooker.”
He looked at me. “So?”
I had to laugh. “This is good. I like this. No embellishment, not much invention, just damn the torpedos. You probably could sell escalators to Eskimos, or however the expression goes. The problem, Steverino, is I’m not buying. Meredith Berens is dead—I’m sure you’ve had that news flash by now. It was not a pleasant death, if any of them are. She was beaten to death. By a man. Probably a man who knew her. You’re a big, strong kid …”
“Hold on a minute—”
“Just an aside. It turns out that Meredith was several months pregnant—”
“Wow. Really?”
“Yes, really. Nobody knows who the father is—except, of course, Meredith, and maybe the father—and nobody knows whether her pregnancy had anything to do with her death—except maybe those two people again—but you and I both know you had a little-bitty thing for Meredith, and I can’t help but wonder if you weren’t being modest when you told me about how you struck out with her.”
Lehman said nothing. He lounged there shaking his head sadly, a you-poor-dumb-sap smile on his face.
“There’s more,” I said. “Jahna Johansen’s a hooker. I told you that. What I didn’t mention is her game. She organizes events, ‘parties,’ as she calls them, mainly for visiting businessmen. Food, liquor, and girls. Meredith Berens was one of the girls.”
“You’re joking!”
He wasn’t good enough. The reaction, the wide eyes, the dropped jaw, the heavy inflection—too much.
I smiled. I could afford to. I said, “Let’s consider a scenario. I’ve been doing a fair amount of that lately, and to less than appreciative audiences, but everyone needs a hobby. Let’s imagine a sharp, young salesman. We’ll say he has red hair, maybe getting a little thin on top.”
Lehman stroked his scalp self-consciously.
“Let’s say the salesman, through his contacts, ends up at a soirée hosted by Jahna Johansen. Also at the event is Meredith Berens, but not as a guest. She’s working. Our hero scores with her, not that that’s much of an accomplishment under the circumstances. The situation is ripe for subtle and unsubtle pressures, blackmail, even, and it cuts both ways. Our hero can make life tough for Meredith, she can make life tough for him. Peaceful coexistence, that’s the ticket. Compromise. Accommodation. The question is, how much compromise and what kind of accommodation? And who did how much of which? Was there an imbalance? And did someone end up dead on account of it?”
He ignored me. It was more refreshing than the standard angry denials, but bad strategy. You can protest too little as easily as too much. Surely my creative thinking deserved some kind of response.
I said, “You might as well talk to me, Steve. Thanks to this”—I waggled the book in the air—“I can absolutely guarantee that Jahna Johansen will be astonishingly cooperative with me. Or the cops.”
Lehman dinked with the remote control some more. Then he tossed it down on the table and lay back on the sofa and crossed his arms tightly across his chest and inspected the ceiling.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said tightly. “I never hurt her.”
“That’s the end of the story,” I said. “Maybe. Let’s have the beginning.”
It was about as I had guessed. A potential client from out of town knew about the Johansen woman’s “parties.” He had been to one or two, since his work brought him through town fairly frequently. He took Lehman to one, ten or twelve months ago. After that, Lehman was a frequent, if irregular guest. Sometimes he’d bring clients or prospective clients, sometimes he came solo for recreation only.
Eventually, inevitably, his schedule and Meredith’s overlapped.
Lehman had pursued Meredith for months, with no success. Now he had her in a spot where she literally could not say no, not only because not saying no was what she was there for, but also because Lehman could queer her “real” life. But if Meredith was caught, so was her captor, for she could do him just as much damage as he could do her.
An uneasy truce was reached—uneasy because, outside of the unreal world of Jahna’s “parties,” Meredith paid Steve Lehman no more attention then she had before. Despite the hold he had over her, there wasn’t much he could do about it because of the hold she had over him. He began to attend Jahna’s parties even more frequently. Meredith wasn’t always there, but often enough to make it worth his while. If Lehman was to be believed, his attendance hadn’t coincided with Meredith’s for almost two months. That ruled him out as the baby’s father. Since I had fudged on details when I told him how far along Meredith’s pregnancy had been, I could be reasonably sure that he hadn’t plucked the two-month statement out of the air to get him off the fatherhood hook. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t invented the time span in order to distance himself from Meredith’s murder.
I said, “Sunday. You were where?”
He thought about it. “Here, mostly. What time Sunday?”
I shook my head. “You go first.”
He sighed and continued his examination of the ceiling. “I went out to lunch with some friends of mine around eleven. I suppose that lasted until two, two-thirty. Then I went to Westroads and did some shopping. I probably got home around four, four-thirty. I cleaned up this place a little, did some dishes, did my laundry, cleaned the bathroom, and et cetera. Then I got a carry-out pizza and watched TV until eleven or twelve, then I went to bed.”
“Anybody come over?”
“Nope.”
“Anybody call? You call anybody?”
He chewed a fingernail. “Nope.”
“What you’re telling me is that you were here, at home, alone all Sunday evening and night until you went to work Monday morning and there’s no one who can back you up?”
“I didn’t think I’d need anyone to back me up. I was just hanging around my apartment, you know, minding my own business. I didn’t know I’d need an alibi.”
That was reasonable, cuss it. In the movies, it always looks bad when the suspect can’t account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder. But actually it’s a rare suspect who can and one who can bears watching all the more. Hell, I didn’t have an alibi for Sunday night.
Finding out whether Jahna had held one of her parties Sunday night, and whether Meredith or Steve Lehman or both had attended, would be easier than writing a bum check. But whatever answers I got wouldn’t prove anything in any direction. Except for Jahna Johansen, there wasn’t a strong connection between Lehman and Meredith. He may have wanted a less professional relationship with her, but that didn’t strike me as a strong motive for his bludgeoning the girl to death. Not only that, Lehman himself didn’t strike me as the violent type. You can’t tell by looking, of course, just as you can’t make the mistake of thinking that someone who displays a quick and even violent temper is ipso facto a killer. But Lehman as Meredith’s killer … The casting just wasn’t right. His attitudes and reactions and demeanor weren’t right. His motives weren’t right. When I pushed him to the wall, he confessed. Maybe it was a snow job—we mustn’t forget I was dealing with a salesman, and a PR-slash-advertising salesman at that—a good way of throwing me off the scent. But I didn’t think so.
On my short list of the three most likely contenders, Steve Lehman was a distant third.
I moved toward the door, stopped, and looked back at him. He had sat up on the couch, surprised that the interview
was apparently over. He didn’t know what to make of things, and it showed in his face. I recognized the look. I see it often enough in the bathroom mirror.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I was up before the sun, which was no trick since the sun decided not to put in an appearance that day. It rained most of the morning, a steady though light rain with enough wind behind it to make an umbrella pointless. The dampness penetrated everything, saturating it with a coldness inappropriate to September. It would warm up again, of course. We can always count on some good blisterers into October. But this served as a good warning of the inevitable.
My muscles were still stiff and sore, the area around my slowly healing bullet wound especially so, but a long, hot shower helped.
I called Elmo Lammers and told him to forget about the telephone number I had put him onto the day before yesterday. He insisted that it was only a matter of time before he tracked it down. I assured him I knew that to be so, but that the case had taken a different direction and the Chicago angle was no longer important. It was true, to a large extent. Just as it was true that I was afraid Elmo’s continued investigation might put him in some peril. Elmo didn’t buy my excuse, not one hundred percent, but what could he do? Pursuing it on his own would be a complete waste of time, as opposed to the utter waste of time his efforts had been so far. He was at that swing point where you half want to tough it out and continue till the end and you half want to drop it and move on to something else. Ultimately, he took the only course open to him. I told him I’d send him a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch. He said make it a case. That was our joke: Elmo was a recovering alcoholic, and the only Scotch he’d allow himself near came on a tape dispenser.
I called Donna Berens and told her I would be out of town for a day, maybe two. She didn’t ask where I was going or why, and her tone of voice suggested that these things and many others were far beneath her concern. The only thing she wanted to know was what she should tell her ex-husband if he asked her where I was. I suggested she try the truth: that I’d told her I was going out of town but I didn’t say where or why.
I called Dianna Castelli and told her the same thing. Unlike Meredith’s mother, she was extremely interested in the details. I told her because I felt that someone should know, but I also told her to keep it under her hat.
“It’s about that girl, isn’t it?” she said anxiously. “Thomas’s girlfriend, the one who got killed. You think he killed her. You think he killed Meredith.”
“Let’s just say I’m working a cold trail,” I said.
I was on the highway by noon.
The rain followed me the entire distance. Or perhaps I followed it. In any event the windshield wipers got a good workout, and so for that matter did the rest of my old Impala. I don’t run it on the highway as much as I should, letting it get good and warmed up. I threw a bottle of Gumout into the tank when I gassed up before leaving the Big O, and by the time I hit Missouri Valley, half an hour up I-29, I could feel the engine loosen up as it worked out the coke and crap and found the “groove” at which it could cruise with a minimum of gas-pedal help from me. On that old car the groove is at about sixty-three miles per hour. With the speed limit on rural Interstates raised to sixty-five, I could actually drive at a legal velocity for the first time in more than a decade.
There are more boring drives—I-80 across Iowa and I-94 across North Dakota, to name two that I’ve driven—but that stretch of I-29 is a definite contender. Every so often there’s a curve you have to negotiate, so the steering wheel isn’t exactly in a locked position. Now and then you pass a tree or a particularly fascinating billboard, but mostly the scenery is farmland, a very flat terrain that must have thrilled pioneer farmers to no end the first time they came upon it but hasn’t exactly wowed anyone since. I have to admit, at the height of the growing season, on a cloudless July afternoon, it can be quite a sight. This wasn’t July, however, and the afternoon was anything but cloudless, and there wasn’t much to look at except gray fields awaiting drier weather and the harvest, the road in front of me, and the southbound lane to my left.
Barring the sudden appearance of a deer, a dog, or a wide load on a flatbed, there’s no reason for the speedometer needle to move to the left from the time you leave Omaha until the time you arrive in Sioux City, Iowa, some ninety minutes later. Mine didn’t. North of Sioux City I pulled into a truck stop where I ate lunch and got gas, and filled up the car as long as I was there. The rain had passed through by then, leaving gray skies and wet pavement and a blustery chill in its wake.
For a brief stretch, as the Interstate slices through Sioux City, you run parallel to the Missouri River. It’s quite wide at that point. Today it was the color of a slug and about as ambitious.
The last ninety minutes of the ride are through farmland again. There is a bit of a roll to the land here, as if it couldn’t decide, eons ago when the decisions were being made, whether it wanted to be prairie or plain, and settled for an amalgamation. The Interstate will take you all the way north, if you like, through South Dakota and through North Dakota and right up to the Canada border, where it meets up with Canada’s Highway 75 and shoots straight into Winnipeg. I’ve always told myself I’ll do that someday, climb behind the wheel and roll on north into Canada, which isn’t all that far away but which to date hasn’t been blessed with my presence. But today wasn’t the day. For one thing, the needle on my old gas-hog was drifting down into the quarter-tank zone again. For another, I had reached my destination.
One hundred thousand people live in and around Sioux Falls, which gives it roughly one-seventh of South Dakota’s population. It is the region’s shopping, entertainment, and medical center, sitting as it does where Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota meet, and only sixty miles or so from the northern Nebraska border. You see a lot of different license plates, in other words, and the town’s always full of people who don’t know where they’re going.
I was one of them. It had been a good five or six years since circumstances had brought me that far north, and my hazy recollection of the streets was completely inadequate. The town had sprawled to the southwest, past I-29, which previously formed the western edge of the city but now appeared to merely bisect it. I took the Interstate to Twelfth Street, which I dimly remembered as a fairly straight, if long, shot into downtown. It was three-fourteen in the afternoon and the traffic was nice. Another five years, I figured, and it could be almost as zooey as Omaha’s. Communities, like people, must have goals.
Twelfth Street took me where I wanted to go. The old high school was right where I had left it on my last trip through, at Twelfth and Main. Parking was as much fun as it always is around a downtown high school; the fact that I had come on the scene just as the inmates were being released didn’t help any. I found a meter two blocks away and fed it some coins and got my exercise for the day.
The school was and is an ancient four-story structure that fills virtually all of the city block on which it stands. Washington Senior High School. Most of the building is constructed of the pinkish-gray, or grayish-pink, quartzite indigenous to the region, although some of it, an older portion of the building, I suspect, is of a darker, almost black stone. The tall, wide windows were partly filled in with newer, more energy-efficient panes that spoiled the looks of the place only a little. Other than that, the joint looked much as it must have fifty years ago. In size and atmosphere, if not looks, it reminded me of my alma mater, Central, in downtown Omaha. They don’t build ’em like that anymore. I say that with regret.
A kid directed me to the office, just down the hall from the main doors. The wide corridor was dimly lighted and echoed with the noise of escaping students. I checked in, like a good citizen, and told only a medium-sized lie concerning my reason for being there. I gave my true name—none of this Ned Brazda shit, no matter what Travis McGee has to say—and said I was there to research one of their alumni. But, and here’s where the medium-sized lie comes in, I told them I was a free-lance writer f
rom Omaha preparing a feature for Omaha Now! magazine. It’s a gag I’ve pulled so often that I’m not even ashamed of it anymore. Omaha Now! is a city magazine I’ve written for now and then. It’s no better or any worse than the other Omaha city magazines that have come and gone, or most other city rags, for that matter, and it has the advantage of being run by an editor who will back me up on just about any outlandish story I care to tell. If I told you I was doing a story for Omaha Now! on the sexually therapeutic value of guano-extract enemas and you called the magazine to see if a writer with the unlikely name of Nebraska had been assigned such a story, the editor would say yes to both questions. If he assumes anything, I think, he assumes I’m doing background on a story that I may or may not pitch at him. Or he just doesn’t want to be bothered, and figures going along with the gag is the fastest way to get you off the phone. Whatever his reasons, it makes a good, convincing cover.
The man I tried it out on, one of the vice principals, couldn’t have been more accommodating. He suggested I try the school library, where they had a selection of yearbooks going back to when the first high school students climbed out of the primordial soup, and gave me directions that got me lost only once and not severely.
The library was a big, airy, high-ceilinged room with thin carpeting and heavy furniture and not too many students hanging around to work after school. I would have been disappointed at anything else. I tried the free-lance writer bit again, on one of the librarians, and it worked again. She steered me to back editions of The Warrior yearbook.
I had neglected to pin Thomas Wayne down on the exact dates of his high school career, but it didn’t matter seriously. He was thirty-nine, I knew, so, assuming he was neither astonishingly brilliant nor astonishingly dense—neither of which conditions he had given me any indication of—he would have graduated high school when he was about eighteen, twenty-one years ago. I found and grabbed three books, for twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two years back, and had at the mug shots.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 24
