by J. A. Jance
That was a scary thought and one I had never considered. Since I was downstairs all day, every day, I never locked the place up except on those very rare occasions when I was out of town.
“You’re saying one of my people may have been coming up here and messing with my computer behind my back?”
Charles didn’t deign to respond. “Tell me about this mystery convention you went to. What’s it called again?”
“Bouchercon.”
“How did you register for it?”
“On line,” I answered, nodding toward the computer. “On that.”
Charles sat down in front of the computer and made himself at home. He typed in a few keystrokes. “Yup,” he said. “Here it is in your browser history, the Bouchercon Web site. What about your hotel? What was that again, the Talisman didn’t you say?”
I nodded. The man may not have been taking notes during my long recitation of woes, but he had clearly been paying attention.
“Is there anything in here about your dealings with your ex?”
I nodded again. “There’s a file called Faithless Faith,” I said sheepishly. “I thought that writing it down would help me put it in the past.”
“Did it?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No such luck.”
“Unfortunately,” Charles said, “Faithless Faith seems to have found a way back into your present. What about your dealings with that developer? Are there any records of your dealings with Mr. Jones in here?”
“Yes,” I replied. “There have been a number of e-mail exchanges about that.”
“In other words, this computer makes your whole life an open book for anyone who cares to take a look-see. Do you happen to have one of those floppy disk drives around here?”
“It’s in the top drawer on the right along with a box of extra floppies. I use those to make backup copies of the business records on the computer’s hard drive. Why?”
“I want you to come over here right now and make copies of all your essential business files and anything else you want to keep, including those unfinished novels. After that, we’re going to reformat your computer. When the cops come back with a search warrant—and I’m saying, when not if—they’ll grab your computer and use everything on it to put you away. Not having your files won’t stop them, but it’ll sure as hell slow them down. Reformatting is the best way to get rid of everything you don’t want anyone else to see. If they ask, tell them your computer crashed and reformatting was the only way you could reboot it. You get busy copying your files. In the meantime, give me the keys to your car.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re caught up in a complicated plot here, Mr. Dixon,” he said, holding out his hand, “and you’re about to go down for it.”
Reluctantly, I fished my car keys out of my pocket and handed them over. It seemed to take ages to go through the computer, copying the necessary files. The whole time I was doing so, I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. If Charles Rickover was right, one of the people who worked for me—someone I trusted—was trying to frame me for killing Faith. So who was it?
Charles came back upstairs a long time later. He was empty-handed and his face was grim. “Just as I thought,” he said. “There’s a bloody bat hidden under the mat in the trunk of your car. I believe I have a pretty good idea about where that blood might have come from.”
“Did you get rid of it?” I asked shakily.
“Hell no,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s the murder weapon. I’m not touching it, and neither are you.”
“You mean we’re just going to let the cops find it?”
“Absolutely. In the meantime, you and I are going to do our damnedest to figure out who’s behind this.”
After returning my car keys, he picked up our empty coffee mugs and went over to the counter where he refilled them. By then I was too stunned to play host. Besides, I was still copying files. Working with floppy disks isn’t exactly an instantaneous process.
“Okay,” he said, handing me the cup I assumed was mine. “What’s in the file cabinets? Are your personal papers there by any chance?”
I nodded. “That’s where I keep paper copies of job applications, tax returns, court decrees—bankruptcy and divorce included. That’s also where you’ll find my birth certificate, Grandma Hudson’s death certificate, and a copy of my last will and testament.”
“How often do you open those files?”
“Not often, why?”
“With any kind of luck, I think there’s a slight chance that those file folders may hold some fingerprints that will work in our favor, unless of course whoever is behind this was smart enough to use gloves. And if the prints are there, the only way they’ll work for us is if we can point the cops in the right direction.”
“Fat chance of that,” I said. “If they come in with a search warrant, I’m toast.”
“Not necessarily,” Charles said. “While I was downstairs, I called Pop. You’ve got a guest room here, right?”
“Yes, but . . .”
“Good. Now your guest room is about to have a guest. He’s another one of Pop’s Sun City chums. His name’s Harold Meeks. Thirty years ago he was the top defense attorney in Phoenix, and now he’s yours—pro bono, by the way. Pop says Harold’s too old to drive or even play golf anymore, but he’s still got all his marbles. When it comes to legal maneuvers, he can’t be beat. He’ll be here as soon as the cab Pop called for him can drop him off. Pop says Harold may need some help getting up and down the stairs, but he’ll be here to set the cops straight when they show up with their search warrant.
“Oh,” Charles added, “when he gets here, I want you to give him a list of all your employees, both current and former. He’ll need to know everything you know about them—approximate hiring dates, where they live, what you know about their personal lives, where they worked before, etcetera.”
“Whatever information I have on my employees is on their job applications in the personnel drawer in the filing cabinet.”
“Are you listening to me?” Charles demanded. “You are not to go near those filing cabinets under any circumstances! Now, are you done copying your files?”
Properly chastised, I held up a fistful of floppies.
“I’ll take those for right now,” he said, removing the disks from my fingers and slipping them into his jacket pocket. “Do you know how to reformat that computer?”
“Yes.”
“Do it then,” he ordered.
I was still reformatting the hard drive—another not-so-instantaneous process—when Charles’s cell phone rang. “Okey-dokey,” he said. “We’ll be right down.”
I glanced at my watch as we headed downstairs. It was after two o’clock in the morning. The Roundhouse was closed up tight. The lights were off, the cleaning crew gone. After disarming the alarm, I unlocked the door and opened it. Standing outside, leaning on a walker, was a tiny, hunched over old man with a shock of white hair that stood on end, as though he’d been awakened from a sound sleep and hadn’t bothered combing his wild hairdo. If the guy was a day under ninety, I’m a monkey’s uncle. Behind him, carrying two old-fashioned suitcases, stood a turban-wearing cab driver.
“I’m Harold Meeks,” the old guy announced in a squeaky little voice that reminded me of someone hopped up on laughing gas. “You Butch Dixon?”
I nodded. Harold turned back to the driver. “Okay,” he directed. “This is the guy. Give him the bags.”
The driver handed them over to me in complete silence, then he retreated to his cab and drove off into the night.
“It’s cold as crap out here,” Harold griped impatiently. “Are we going inside sometime soon or are we just going to stand here until our tushes freeze off?”
We went inside. As I carried the two suitcases
upstairs it occurred to me that my unexpected company obviously intended to settle in for the duration. Behind me, Harold abandoned his walker in favor of letting Charles help him up the stairs. Once Harold was safely deposited on the nearest dining room chair, Charles went back down and retrieved the walker. In the darkened bar downstairs, Harold hadn’t looked that bad. Now that I saw him in full light, however, I was shocked. How could this tiny, frail old guy, sitting there in a threadbare sweater and a pair of worn moccasins, possibly be my best hope for beating a murder rap? He looked like he was far more ready to show up for a summons to the pearly gates than for duking it out in an earthly court of law.
“Okay,” Charles said, dusting off his hands in satisfaction. “I’m done here and need to head out. I’ll leave you two to it.”
When it came to my having a capable someone to lean on, Charles Rickover looked a lot more promising than Harold Meeks.
“Wait a minute,” I said anxiously. “Where are you going?”
“Vegas,” Charles said. “One of Pop’s pals is retired Air Force. He keeps a little Cessna over at the Goodyear airport. He doesn’t fly at night anymore, but he says we can be wheels up by seven A.M. That means I’d better go home and grab an hour or two of shut-eye.”
Charles Rickover bailed at that point, leaving me holding the bag as well as two surprisingly heavy suitcases. “Where’s my bedroom?” Harold demanded irritably.
“Down the hall and to the right,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Put my stuff in there, then come back and we’ll go to work. You got any coffee that’s fresher than that crap on the counter? Smells like it’s about three hours past its pull-by date.”
Which is how I spent the next three hours in the presence of a cantankerous old man who acted as though he’d as soon chew nails as listen to my sad story. Obligingly, I went downstairs to the restaurant, fired up the coffeemaker behind the counter and made a new pot. While I waited for it to brew, I stood leaning against the counter wondering how it was that my fate was now in the hands of this gang of old men—the lame and the halt—who, out of the goodness of their hearts, had joined forces to bail me out of my jam.
I knew Tim O’Malley, the guy Charles called Pop, was responsible. That meant that, by extension, so was Grandma Hudson.
I took the coffee upstairs, only to be ordered back down to retrieve cream and sugar. Since I drink my coffee black, I don’t keep cream and sugar upstairs. At Harold’s direction, I retrieved a yellow legal pad from the outside pocket of one of his bags. Then sitting at the dining room table, I began telling my story one more time, version 3.0, while Harold took notes, using a Mont Blanc fountain pen to cover one page after another with a totally indecipherable kind of shorthand.
The only time he asked questions was when I was going over what I had said to Jamison and Shandrow. Harold explained that the questions they had asked would probably reveal a blueprint of the kinds of evidence they had against me. As a consequence, I told him everything in the closest thing to word-for-word as I could manage.
Next, I gave him the lowdown on my employees. Again I did it to the best of my ability, but without being able to fall back on the paperwork hidden in those forbidden file cabinets, I couldn’t tell him the exact order of hiring, ages, dates of birth, physical addresses, or anything else that seemed to be of much use. Some of my employees, like Matty and Danielle, for instance, are holdovers from my grandmother’s day. The most recent hire was Jason, the nighttime bartender, but he always struck me as a straight shooter. Thinking about them one by one, I couldn’t focus on a single one that I would finger as the guilty party.
By the time Harold and I finished, it was six o’clock in the morning and I could hear the sounds of people downstairs coming on duty and getting ready to open for breakfast. I was bushed. Harold, on the other hand, was raring to go. It turned out his usual bedtime was five o’clock in the afternoon. So being up and going to work at two o’clock in the morning wasn’t exactly a hardship for him. But six A.M. was several hours past his usual breakfast time. I went downstairs and had Maxine cook up a plate of bacon and eggs. “Make that a double order of bacon,” Harold told me. “Hells bells, I’m ninety four years old. If bacon’s gonna kill me, bring it on, the crisper the better.”
I did exactly that—brought him his double order of crisp bacon. In the process, I told my crew downstairs that I was taking the day off. Then, after delivering Harold’s breakfast and a fresh pot of coffee, I hit the hay. And slept. A bare three hours later, when Harold Meeks shook me awake, he was totally transformed. Yes, he was still pounding the floor with his walker, but he was dressed to the nines—suit, starched white shirt, and properly tied bow tie. The moccasins had been replaced by a pair of highly polished Johnston & Murphy loafers. His mane of flyaway white hair had been tamed with a layer of gel. He seemed to have shed twenty years overnight and have had a voice transplant.
“Showtime,” he announced. “Up and at ’em. I just had a call from a friend of mine who volunteers at the local cop shop. He tells me the search warrant crew is on their way. That’s what held everything up—obtaining the warrant. First the cops from Las Vegas had to negotiate a peace treaty with Peoria PD and let them find a warrant-friendly judge, which must not have been very easy bright and early on a Saturday morning. So get a move on. They’re probably going to take you into custody, so don’t take along anything you don’t want stuck in a property locker at the lockup. And remember, I talk, you listen. Do not say a word. Not one. Not to anyone. Not here, not in the patrol car, and not in that jail. Got it?”
I nodded. “What if they try to take your notes?”
He grinned a yellow-toothed grin. “Can’t touch ’em,” he said. “Attorney/client privilege and all that. Besides, they couldn’t read my notes if they tried. It’s my own brand of shorthand. I’ve only had one secretary who could translate it. When Gloria Gray died of a heart attack thirty years ago, that’s when I threw in the towel and stopped practicing law. I was too damned lazy to go to the trouble of training someone else.”
By then I could hear people storming up the wooden stairway. I sleep in my underwear. Taking my attorney’s good advice to heart, I slipped into a set of sweats and a pair of tennies. Then after a quick pit stop, I went to face my doom.
When I came into the hallway, Harold was stationed at the top of the steps, effectively barring any entry. “I’m Mr. Dixon’s attorney of record,” he told the people waiting outside. He spoke in the stentorian voice that had replaced his earlier squeak, and it was enough to make believers of the new arrivals as he bellowed his instructions. “There is no need for drawn weapons. My client is fully prepared to surrender peacefully as long as you have both a properly drawn arrest warrant as well as a search warrant. Mr. Dixon, by the way, has invoked his right to an attorney. That means you will not be allowed to speak to him outside my presence.”
There was a brief pause while documents were exchanged. Harold took his own sweet time examining them.
“Very well,” he said at last. “You’re welcome to search Mr. Dixon’s residence, but everyone involved in the search is required to wear gloves while doing so, lest evidence that might serve to exonerate him be disturbed in any fashion. In addition, anything you take away from here must be treated as evidence. I expect all items to be placed in properly bagged and tagged evidence containers. I’m particularly concerned that any files taken from Mr. Dixon’s office be examined for prints. If there is even the slightest indication that the chain of evidence hasn’t been properly maintained, there will be hell to pay. Is that understood?”
The response must have been in the affirmative. Having said his piece, Harold pulled his diminutive figure out of the way, and a crowd of cops rushed inside. At the head of the pack were two uniformed Peoria officers, guys who had been in and out of the Roundhouse often enough that I knew them by name without having to peer at
their badges. Behind them were two plainclothes Peoria PD guys—one I knew and one I didn’t. Bringing up the rear were my old pals, Detectives Jamison and Shandrow.
“Frederick Dixon,” the first cop said. “We’re placing you under arrest for the homicide of Katherine Melcher. You have the right to remain silent . . .”
While my rights were being read, the second officer went around behind me to fasten the cuffs. “Sorry about this, Butch,” he murmured in my ear as he pulled my arms together. “Those guys from Vegas are a pair of pricks.”
We certainly agreed on that score, but I took Harold’s advice and said nothing. This was serious. Someone was trying to send me up, and my part of the bargain was to keep my mouth shut.
“They’ll be taking you to booking, Butch,” Harold counseled as we went past. “Again, mum’s the word. Trust me. It’s gonna be fine.”
I nodded, and the two uniformed officers led me down the stairs. The alcove below was crowded with people I knew, workers and customers both. Matty stood in the foreground. With her hands on both hips, she looked like she was ready to take on the cops single-handed.
“It’s okay, Matty,” I assured her. “This won’t take long. You’re second in command. It’s your job to keep things running until I get back.”
“But—” she began.
“Not buts,” I said. “Just do it.”
“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “Will do.”
I’d never been booked into anything before. It was a humiliating process. Before long I was printed and changed into my orange jumpsuit. Then they wrapped me in a sort of gray blanket for my mug shot. The whole time, I tried to keep Harold’s reassuring words in mind, but that didn’t work too well, especially when they put me in a holding cell and locked the doors. The rattle of those jailhouse doors clanging shut and closing me inside sent chills down my spine. And that’s when it hit me. Faith had taken everything from me once, and now, even stone cold dead, she was doing it again.
