Across the street from the hotel in the other direction was a public library. I hiked over there after dinner and, with the help of some ancient city directories and a not at all ancient librarian, found Alexander Wayne’s address from the time when the Beatles dominated the pop charts. The first time, I mean.
There are two four-year private colleges in the burg. Given the population, that’s pretty amazing, almost as amazing as the fact that they are practically next door to each other. Nestled more or less between the two campuses, on a wide and tree-lined street, I found a small white bungalow with red decorative shutters that, according to the literature, had been Alexander Wayne’s home up until about twenty-one years ago.
I started with the house across the street. Across-the-street neighbors usually have a better view of what’s going on than next-door neighbors. You ask next-door neighbors what they heard, across-the-street neighbors what they saw.
The across-the-street neighbors hadn’t seen anything, because they had lived there only three years. They didn’t know the whereabouts of the previous residents, and they didn’t know how long those people had lived there either.
I tried the houses on either side of the across-the-street neighbors and had just as much luck.
The neighbor to the north of Alexander Wayne’s old house wasn’t home. The neighbor to the south was. He was a small, bald-headed man in his late sixties. He had lived there since forever and he remembered Alexander Wayne, but he didn’t remember anything special about him. The man, whose name was Hohm, and his wife hadn’t been close to Alexander beyond their shared lot-line. Wayne lived alone and minded his own business and kept his yard mowed in the summer and his walk shoveled in the winter, and that was all Mr. Hohm cared about. He didn’t know why Wayne had moved away; he didn’t much care. One day a for-sale sign went up in the yard and another day a moving van showed up out front and yet another day the for-sale sign went down and another moving van came and the Hohms had new neighbors.
I don’t know exactly what it was I wanted. Something to clear the haze surrounding the relationship between Alexander Wayne and Tommy Cott—or between Wayne and Tommy’s mother. One or the other being a frequent guest of Wayne would have helped. Or something that would in some fashion pertain to Stacy Eitrem’s death, since I couldn’t help but believe that that killing was somehow connected to the more recent murder. I had my guesses about it all, but it’s always nice to have something substantial to upholster your guesses with.
Giving up on the old neighborhood, I found my way back to the hotel and tried Dianna Castelli’s number. No answer. It was about eight-thirty p.m., but I tried the agency anyway. You know these entrepreneurs. Same story there, however.
I had bought a newspaper and a couple of paperback novels earlier in the hotel gift shop. The local paper filled all of twelve minutes of my time, including the used-car ads. I tried Dianna again.
She was in, and out of breath. “I just got in and ran to answer the phone. The whole day’s been like that—running to catch up. Are you back in town?”
I told her no and gave her my current location. She asked how things were coming and I gave her a TV Guide-style account of my afternoon.
“So Thomas Wayne isn’t Thomas Wayne, and Alexander Wayne isn’t his father,” she said in wonderment when I had finished. “But Thomas’s mother—that woman. Why did she tell you her son was dead?”
“I suppose he is dead, as far as she’s concerned, and has been for twenty years. As for saying Alexander Wayne killed him, well, I guess he did kill Tommy Cott when he took him away and turned him into his own son, Thomas Wayne.”
“Well, no wonder Alexander tried to keep you from looking into his past. I mean, it doesn’t sound like he legally adopted Thomas or anything; he just took him away and they lived together as father and son.”
“You watch too much Dallas,” I chided her. “Alexander, for all we know, could be Thomas’s biological father. And whether he is or not, he didn’t swipe Thomas out of his crib, and no one’s going to come and take his almost-forty-year-old son away from him. Thomas was eighteen, presumably, or at least legally old enough to make most of his own decisions. Having met his mother, I doubt it was a very hard choice at all. After all these years, that secret’s hardly worth keeping, especially looking into the teeth of a murder investigation, as they are. No, there’s something else here, something that Alexander Wayne tried actively to keep me clear of, by threat, and Thomas Wayne passively, by fudging on the details of his parentage.”
“You still think Thomas killed that girl.” She had stopped saying it accusingly, at least, and now had begun to render it as a mere statement.
“I don’t know. I think it’s funny that Thomas’s—Tommy’s—girlfriend is killed and they never find the killer and then Thomas disappears and turns up twenty years later with a different name and, P.S., a girlfriend who’s been killed. ‘Funny’ isn’t the word. Try ‘frightening.’ ”
“You’re scaring me, Nebraska.”
“That’s why I switched to ‘frightening.’ As near as I can see, though, you don’t have anything to worry about, unless you plan to start dating Thomas.”
“I don’t think so. What’s next?”
I told her I planned to try to poke into Alexander’s background more tomorrow—new day, fresh start—and that I expected to be back in the big city late afternoon or early evening. “I’ll call you when I get in,” I said. “If it’s not too late, maybe we’ll grab something to eat.”
“I’d like that,” she said. Then we hemmed and hawed a bit, trying to figure out how to end a conversation that had taken on a new and personal tone. We finally came to the conclusion that “good night” suited the purpose, so we both used it and got off the line.
Dianna Castelli was a little, shall we say, larger than life for my tastes. She was perhaps a little too loud, a little too outlandish in her style of dress, a little too everything. But I liked her. I liked the way she cared about her employees, the way she tried to protect Steve Lehman from mean old me, the way she cried for Meredith Berens. I still hoped that I could patch things up with Koosje, and I realized that, given the event that had driven the wedge between me and Koosje, starting a new relationship, however innocent, with another woman wasn’t perhaps the swellest idea I had ever had. But I’m one of these wacky guys who likes female companionship, whether platonic, as with Kim Banner, or romantic, as with Koosje Van der Beek. Koosje would sort things out based on whatever criteria she used to sort out such things. In the meantime, I didn’t intend to pursue the monastic life.
I spent some time with the TV, reinforcing my opinion that VCRs aren’t worth owning. Nothing wrong with the technology, but it presumes that there’s something on the airwaves worth capturing, and there sure as heck wasn’t tonight. They pumped ten channels into the hotel, and all it meant was that there were ten channels’ worth of dreck instead of the usual three or four. I take that back: There was a good movie on HBO. I had already seen it, and recently.
Likewise, the first of the two paperbacks I had bought downstairs was no good. Maybe that’s not fair to say, since I didn’t last beyond page thirty-eight. It seems the guy who wrote it was afraid of the word says and any of its common synonyms. So no one in the book—up to page thirty-eight, at least—said anything. They quipped and retorted and enthused like crazy, but they never said. Maybe I’m too close to it, what with pretending to be a writer and all, but that kind of stuff drives me loopy.
So, as I said, I called it quits after a couple of chapters. Luckily, I had hedged my bet on the unknown quantity with a Nero Wolfe novel. I’m neither an authority on nor a particularly avid enthusiast of the Wolfe books, but I’ve probably read a dozen of them or more over the ages and I’ve never been disappointed by one.
Wolfe and Goodwin took me up to the point where it began to be an effort to keep my eyes on the page. I turned off the set and the lights and put my head on the pillow and thought lazily about the case. M
y case, not Nero Wolfe’s. Investigations have a peculiar way of changing not just shape but also direction on you. Sort of like those calculus problems, where you’re trying to figure something out while the values are changing. Alexander Wayne, the former math teacher, would be good at that. In this instance, a missing-person hunt turned into a homicide turned into another homicide turned into another, different kind of missing-person hunt turned into … what? I wasn’t there yet. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, but I couldn’t yet tell what it illuminated.
The facts were these: Tommy Cott was Martha Cott’s kid. Alexander Wayne had been Tommy Cott’s high school math teacher. Stacy Eitrem, Tommy’s girlfriend, had been killed and the killer was never found. Tommy Cott disappeared shortly afterward. So did Alexander Wayne. Two decades later Wayne turns up in the Big O with an adult son, Thomas, who coincidentally used to be Tommy Cott. Thomas’s girlfriend, or fiancée, if you like that version better, gets killed. And neither Thomas nor his father, or “father,” if you like that version better, is setting any records as far as cooperating in the investigation is concerned.
It floated across my mind in that lazy half-second between waking and sleep that I could simply present the facts to Michael Berenelli and let him worry about what to do with them. He sure wouldn’t lose any sleep trying to figure out exactly what the hell was going on. But then I didn’t lose much sleep over it either.
CHAPTER TWENTY
In the dream, my high school math teacher was trying to kill me because I wouldn’t take his Advanced Calculus course. In real life, any math teacher would be more inclined to kill me because I had taken his class, but in the dream, as in the way of dreams, it made perfect sense, as if math teachers routinely use the threat of death to fill empty seats in their classrooms. The math teacher definitely was my high school instructor, but in the dream he had the face of Michael Berenelli. He was shooting at me from rooftops with an elephant gun. I wouldn’t know an elephant gun if I surprised one in my pajamas, but in the dream it was an elephant gun. When shooting me didn’t work, he tried to run me down in a big Buick. I ran down some steps at the side of a pink block building and ducked through a steel door and hid in some kind of boiler room. It was hot and dark. Although the door had been unlocked when I entered and I had done nothing to change that status, it now was locked somehow, and Berenelli, on the other side of it, was pounding, pounding, and yelling my name.
The soft rapping at my hotel-room door didn’t qualify as pounding, and the hushed voice from the other side was hardly a yell, although it was pronouncing my name. “Mr. Nebraska?” It was a woman’s voice, soft and low, almost a whisper with no more extra volume than was necessary to push it through the door. “It’s the assistant manager.”
Numbly, stupid with sleep, I staggered out of bed and into my new pants and over to the door, wondering why she hadn’t just used the phone.
The answer was immediately clear when I opened the door. It was no assistant manager. Unless, that is, Dianna Castelli had taken a moonlighting job nearly 200 miles away from home base. I started to say something brilliantly witty, or as brilliantly witty as I can be at two a.m., but something in Dianna’s face stopped me. There was a tightness around the throat. Her eyes were wide and her nostrils were flared and she seemed to be breathing a little hard. Excitement. Or fear. Or both.
The door swung inward a little more and she kind of half-stumbled into the room and then the man she had been with in the hallway, who had cautiously stayed out of peephole range, entered, preceded by a Colt .45 automatic.
I instinctively backed away from it. And came fully awake.
“I’m surprised,” I said. “And then again I’m not surprised. If you catch my drift.”
“Shut up,” said Alexander Wayne.
He closed the door and I turned my attention to Dianna. She appeared to be on the verge of going into shock, and I didn’t wonder. The past three hours, in the middle of the night in a car with an armed man who has killed before, must have been a nightmare with no end in sight.
There still was no end in sight.
I said, “Brave heart, Dianna.”
She looked at me as if for the first time. “Nebraska,” she said throatily. “He made me tell. I didn’t want to. He had a gun …”
“So I see,” I said. “Don’t worry, Dianna. It’s all right.”
“Do you really think so?” Alexander Wayne said. He asked as if he was curious—there was nothing gloating or superior or melodramatic about it. In fact, there was none of the Jolly Charlie bonhomie that he had tried to affect even when he came to scare me off of the investigation the other evening. He was simply asking a question.
“Sure,” I said with both a casualness and a conviction that I didn’t feel. “You’re painted into a corner, Wayne. I think you must know that. Why else did you bring Dianna all this way? You know the game is up, you knew it when you forced her to tell you where I was, but you couldn’t admit it to yourself. You brought her here, at gunpoint, because doing so allowed you to postpone having to make a decision about her.”
He shook his big, white head. “Use your head, Nebraska. I would have killed her when she told me where you were, except I couldn’t trust her. She had already lied to me. When I called her late this evening and said I needed to get in touch with you but couldn’t seem to locate you, she lied. She said she didn’t know where you were or what you were doing. I knew she was lying. The way you talked about her the other night, I knew you would have told her. So I went to her house and I convinced her to talk.” He waved the heavy weapon slightly. “But I didn’t trust her. I couldn’t very well leave her there to call the police, to warn you. And I couldn’t kill her, not then, since I didn’t know whether she was just a good liar. Most women are.”
“And people call me a sexist,” I said low. “Be that as it may, this is the end of the line, Wayne. You can’t go on protecting your son—we’ll continue that fiction, since, after twenty years, it’s probably as good as true. I won’t say he’s pathological, that’s not for me to determine, but two murders in two decades isn’t evidence of normal, well-adjusted behavior, plus it’s frowned on by Miss Manners and other authorities. When he killed Stacy Eitrem you took him away, away from a bad life and a bad situation. You thought you were doing the right thing. Maybe the law will look at it that way. But now … there’s nothing right about this, not any of it. You have to see that. Put down the gun and let’s get some help for him, for Christ’s sake, before another girl makes the fatal mistake of falling for him.”
The older man said nothing, which bothered me a lot. The silent seconds dragged into a full minute. Then he spoke. “Finish dressing,” he told me.
We took Wayne’s car. I drove. Dianna sat in front with me. Wayne sat in the back, in the far right corner where I couldn’t see him in the rear-view mirror but from where I could feel his eyes, and the gun, on me constantly. He gave directions and I followed them. The streets were virtually deserted, the houses and businesses we passed were black and silent. The wind was up and there was a pale silver moon but no stars and the sky had the heavy, sweetish smell of impending rain.
It looked like we were going to Martha Cott’s house. Apparently Wayne was going to burn all the bridges—Dianna, me, and the Cott woman. It wouldn’t end the investigation, but it might give him and Thomas enough time to disappear, as they had done before, and reemerge elsewhere.
Wayne couldn’t know about Martha Cott’s boyfriend, the Native American man who had lifted me like a sack of dog chow and thrown me down the front stairs. The big man would throw a wrench into Wayne’s plans, I figured. Prayed, if you prefer. I would have to be doubly watchful, wait for the exact moment and act.
Dianna, whether from desperation or just nerves, had picked up on the line I had fed Wayne back at the hotel and was prattling on in a way that would have been pretty annoying if I hadn’t been thinking too hard to pay much attention. I got the gist of it, however. She was echoing the opini
on that covering up for Thomas, to the point of killing us, wasn’t helping him any, that things had gone too far to be stopped by our deaths, that Wayne was only making things worse for himself and Thomas, that Thomas may not have been responsible for his actions but Wayne surely was.
“Save your breath,” I told Dianna gently. “Although in a few more minutes you won’t be needing it anyhow. It isn’t Thomas who needs help. It’s Alexander. He’s the one with the sickness.” And that was the only way it made sense, now. The problem all along had been that whatever theory I concocted to indicate Thomas Wayne’s guilt could also be hung on Alexander Wayne with few if any alterations. Thomas had struck me as the more logical candidate for the available slot, with his father acting as accessory. But when I portrayed Thomas as being a brick or two shy a load, and when Dianna had picked up the refrain, Alexander had failed to rise to the bait. He didn’t defend his son, nor did he tell us to shut up. I’d read a lot of detective novels, and this just wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. If Alexander knew that Thomas was sick, you would expect him to want to help his son, and I don’t mean help him in his career as a killer. If he wouldn’t admit to himself that his boy was off the beam, you wouldn’t expect him to stand around like a park statue while comparative strangers said he was.
The conclusion was that my conclusion was wrong. And that left only Alexander Wayne to carry the banner.
To Dianna I said, “Alexander’s the one who killed Stacy Eitrem. That’s the name of Thomas’s old girlfriend. And then he took Thomas away from his mother, which was in the way of doing him a favor, and the two of them, masquerading as father and son, kicked around the Midwest for twenty years or so, eventually ending up in our little hamlet. I’m assuming,” I said, raising my voice for the benefit of the invisible man in the back seat, “that you didn’t leave a trail of corpses everywhere you went. I’m guessing that, after Stacy Eitrem, Thomas was smart enough to keep women at arm’s length, for their own good. No telling when his ‘father’ would decide that one of them was getting too close, and bump her off. By the way, you aren’t Thomas’s natural father, are you?”
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 27
