In Plain Sight

by Barbara Block

  “I wouldn’t be in that position in the first place.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really.” Then before I could reply George changed the subject. “So what do you think? Did Tony and Richie kill Marsha for the thirty thousand?”

  We stopped at a light.

  “No.” I opened the window and flicked the ash from my cigarette out into the street. “And Fast Eddie doesn’t think so either. Because if he did, those two wouldn’t be walking around right now. They’d be buried somewhere in Utica.”

  “True,” George replied. “One thing about thirty thousand dollars. It certainly provides an incentive for homicide. I’ve known people who would slit your throat for two bucks let alone thirty grand.”

  Zsa Zsa jumped up on my lap. I scratched underneath her chin. “What I want to know is where would someone like Marsha Pennington get that much money in the first place? When I saw her I got the impression she was broke.”

  “Interesting question.” George put his foot on the gas and zoomed through a yellow light just as it was turning red. “Possibly the most interesting question. Maybe she got an inheritance.”

  “You mean from some distant relative? I guess she could have, although it doesn’t seem likely. At least, she didn’t say anything to me when we talked.” I wound my hair around my finger. It felt oily. It definitely needed to be washed. “Maybe I should give her mother a call.”

  “Maybe you should.” George chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Of course, she could have always gone down to Atlantic City.”

  “She was thirty thousand in the hole. Where would she get a stake?”

  George shrugged. “She could have conned someone into lending her a couple of thousand.”

  I took another puff of my Camel. “I’d imagine that if you’re a compulsive gambler, your sources would dry up after a while.”

  “I don’t know. In my experience there’s always a loan shark out there willing to give someone enough rope to hang themselves with.” George loosened his tie. “Or maybe,” he continued, “she’s got someone in her family who’s a soft touch.”

  I pushed a strand of hair off my forehead. “She did go down to see her mother just before she died,” I allowed. I decided I was definitely going to have to speak to the lady—if I could get the nurse to put her on the line.

  George zoomed around a car and shot up Beech Street. “How about this? She embezzled the money.”

  “From where? Office petty cash? She taught ESL in high school for God’s sake.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of her husband’s business.”

  “That makes a little more sense,” I admitted.

  “Or she could have been blackmailing someone.”

  “Who?”

  George shrugged. “How the hell would I know?”

  We both fell silent.

  “Carpe diem, “I said suddenly.

  George shot me a questioning glance.

  “It’s Latin,” I explained. “It means seize the day.”

  “I know what it means,” he growled. “I’m not a total idiot. I just don’t see the relevance.”

  “I was just thinking that that thirty grand gave Marsha an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start over again. She was going to pay off her debts, get a divorce, and start a new life with Brandon Funk. She was going to seize the day.”

  “And everyone would live happily ever after,” George observed as he drove up Beech.

  “Except in this case there was no ‘ever after.’ “ We hung a right on Westcott and went down Euclid. I tightened my grip on the door handle as we sped through the intersection.

  We turned up Meadowbrook. “There probably wouldn’t have been a ‘happy’ either,” George said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because your friend didn’t pick the greatest guy in the world to start over with.”

  “You checked on Funk?”

  “I said I would. Funk does have a record. He was arrested twice for assault and three times for domestic violence. All the complainants were women. One of them, a Shirley Hinkel....”

  “That’s the name of Merlin’s girlfriend!” I cried.

  “If you say so. She’s got an order of protection out on him.”

  “Why?”

  “Assault. He slugged her. Pleaded guilty to a misdee and got a year probation. I talked to the other two women, too.”

  “And what did they say?”

  George turned up Crawford. “They both said he was very nice, very kind, but then something would happen that would set him off and he’d go nuts. He was always sorry afterward. They always are,” George added.

  I thought about Brandon sitting there and repeating, “it’s my fault” over and over. He’d definitely been referring to Marsha. What was he feeling so guilty about? “Do you think he killed Marsha in a fit of rage?” I asked.

  “He could have. He’s got the temperament.” George pulled up in front of my house. “The only problem is there weren’t any marks on your friend’s body. None at all. I pulled the ME’s report,” he explained in answer to my glance. “I just wanted to make sure the paper had gotten the facts straight.”

  “He could have half suffocated her and thrown her in.”

  George shook his head. “There still would have been some bruises around the facial area, and anyway that sounds too complicated for him. I see Funk as the kind of guy that beats someone to death, realizes what he’s done, and runs out the door.”

  “That’s my impression, too.” I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth. Something else occurred to me. “I wonder if Eddison would know anything about the money Marsha came into?”

  “Who’s Eddison?”

  “He was Marsha’s therapist.”

  “Even if he does know, why should he tell you?”

  “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Breach of confidentiality.”

  I put my cigarettes in my pocket. “Maybe I can come up with something that will make him change his mind.”

  “Well, whatever you do be careful.” George lifted up my chin with the tip of his finger. It hurt like hell. “Because I don’t want to have to call an ambulance for you again.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  Chapter 26

  After George drove off I stood outside for a moment and admired the crocuses and grape hyacinths blooming in my neighbor’s front yard and decided that next year I’d plant some of my own. I used to do things like that in my other life; in fact I’d even read garden catalogs, but then my other life hadn’t included people like Fast Eddie and his mother or Brandon Funk. I turned and walked into my house. I still felt weak and I needed to sit down.

  Zsa Zsa ran in front of me. I followed her into the kitchen, got two Snickers bars out of the fridge, poured myself a shot of Scotch, went into the backyard, uncovered one of the lounge chairs, sat down, and tried to forget about the events of the past day. Two seconds later James padded through the grass, jumped up on the deck and into my lap.

  I petted him while Zsa Zsa licked his ears. He must have missed her because outside of an occasional shake he didn’t do anything. For a while I just sat there eating my candy and drinking my Black Label and watching the new leaves on my neighbor’s birch tree fluttering in the breeze. But little by little my mind started drifting back to the problem of Marsha’s death and the thirty thousand and how she got it and who had it and whether or not that person was the one that had killed Marsha. I was willing to bet it was. Find the thirty thousand and I’d find Marsha’s murderer, something that was easier said than done.

  Then I started thinking about Estrella again and wondering how she fit into the equation.

  If she did.

  Her death could have been happenstance.

  But the more I thought about it, the less I believed it.

  Someone, an English playwright I think, had written about “the long arm of coincidence.”

  If you asked me, this a
rm was a little too long.

  Because things weren’t so coincidental after all.

  Marsha and Estrella had several connections.

  They both went to the same school—one as a student, the other as a teacher.

  They both went to the same therapist.

  Which meant what? Maybe nothing, maybe a lot.

  I got up and went inside to pour myself another Scotch.

  I was coming outside when I remembered something George had told me. He’d said that a lot of kids from Wellington hung out at the LeMoyne Reservoir. They went there to party and smoke and cut class. Was it possible that Estrella had been there when Marsha was killed? Could she have seen the murder? Is that why she’d been so anxious to leave Syracuse?

  I sat down and finished off the last half of the second Snickers bar.

  And of course she couldn’t go to the police. She couldn’t take the chance of having them turn her and her family in to the INS.

  I wondered if she’d said anything to her boyfriend Ray. Or to her friend, Pam Tower. I was deciding I should really speak to her when I drifted off to sleep. I awoke a couple of hours later with a crick in my neck. I was massaging it when the phone rang. I went inside to get it. Tim was on the line.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” he said, “but the ball python we just got has really bad mouth rot. Do you want me to take him to the vet for a shot of antibiotics or do the iodine number?”

  “Take him.” Reptiles Inc. was definitely going to hear about this.

  “When?”

  “I’ll be in in an hour. Make the appointment for any time after that.”

  “I thought you were supposed to stay in bed for three days.”

  “I was,” I said and hung up. I would have gotten bored anyway. Then since my car was still at the store I called Ace Taxi for a pickup. They came thirty minutes later.

  Tim left with the snake as soon as I walked through the door. I settled in and fed the fish. I was fixing the filter in one of the tanks when Manuel walked in.

  “What do you want?” I said as I reconnected the tubing. My headache was coming back which put me in an irritable mood.

  “Why do you always think I want something?” Manuel demanded.

  “Because you usually do.” I put the lid on the tank and dried my hands off on the back of my jeans.

  Manuel placed his hands on his hips. “Well, maybe I got something you want. Maybe I came to do you a favor.”

  “Really? What might that be?”

  “Look.” He beckoned me over to the counter. “I got something for you.”

  I walked over reluctantly. Whatever it was that Manuel had, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to see it. When he took a Glock nine millimeter out of his pocket I knew I’d been right.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

  “I figured that the next time someone tried to grab you you could pop ’em with this.”

  I rubbed my temples. My headache was getting worse. “Manuel, just put it away.”

  “I can let you have it for one twenty-five.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Okay.” He put the gun back in his pocket. “I was just trying to help you.”

  The sad part was that in his mind he was. “Manuel,” I told him, “why don’t you go back to school before you get yourself into some real trouble.”

  “I’m planning to,” he said, doing sincere.

  Yeah. Right. I don’t know why I bothered. Manuel would do what Manuel wanted to do.

  He hitched his pants up. “I thought I’d give you first crack, but if you don’t want it, I know someone else who will.”

  “At least get a job,” I continued, even though I knew what I was saying was a study in wasted effort. We’d had this conversation too many times before.

  “Hey, I make more money doing this than working at someplace like Pizza Hut.” Then he snapped his fingers. “I knew there was something I forgot to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You was asking about Estrella’s girlfriend.”

  “Pam Tower?”

  “Yeah. I saw her the other day. She was working at Eats Galore over on Westcott Street.” And with that he left.

  Tim came back a short time later without the ball python. I asked him what happened.

  He bent down to pet Zsa Zsa. “The vet and I decided to put him down. His mouth was so deformed, even if we had cured the rot, he wouldn’t have been able to open his mouth enough to eat. We would have had to force feed him for the rest of his life.”

  “How much did Curey charge?”

  “Thirty.”

  “Thirty? We could have put him in the freezer for nothing.”

  “I know.” Tim straightened up and handed me the bill. “He charged us for an office visit.”

  I threw it on the counter. “I’m sending this straight to Reptiles Inc. with a nasty note.”

  “You think they’re going to refund the money for the snake plus the vet bill?” Tim said dubiously.

  “They’d better.” I went in and wrote my letter. Then while I was at it I sent Garriques a bill for the money he owed me. I spent the rest of the day cleaning cages, phoning in orders, and taking Advil to keep the pain in my head down to a tolerable level. I would have loved to have gone home, but considering the amount of time I’d been away from the store recently, I thought that probably wasn’t a good idea.

  At nine o’clock I locked up the shop, and Zsa Zsa and I drove over to Eats Galore on Westcott. It was on the way home and I figured maybe I’d get lucky and catch up with Pam Tower. But she wasn’t there. According to the manager she worked three days a week and this wasn’t one of them. I gave the manager my card and asked him to pass it on to her, but I didn’t have much faith that he would. If I wanted to speak to her, I’d have to come back later.

  I stopped at Nice N’ Easy on the way home and got the evening paper, a package of cigarettes and a pint of coffee ice cream. The street was quiet when I parked the car in the driveway and stepped out. My neighbors were in for the evening. The only sound was coming from the Fonte house. Their kid, a pimply twelve-year-old who thought he was eighteen, was practicing his sax. It sounded as if someone was strangling a goose. It made my head hurt even more and I went inside and went to bed. I guess the day had taken more out of me than I’d thought.

  I woke up at four. At four-thirty I gave up trying to get back to sleep, went downstairs to the kitchen, got the pint of coffee ice cream out of the freezer, and lay on the sofa and ate it while I watched The Creatures From Planet Nog. After a few minutes I found myself thinking about the LeMoyne Reservoir. What had Marsha been doing there? She must have been meeting someone. But who? Not a social acquaintance, that was for sure. Maybe it was the person she was blackmailing.

  Maybe she’d arranged for the payoff to take place at the reservoir.

  And maybe the person she was blackmailing decided he didn’t want to pay, killed her, and took back the money.

  Or maybe not.

  The more I thought about it, the more I thought that arranging for a payoff to take place in a deserted area was just plain stupid.

  But then Marsha never had been exactly smart.

  I was stifling a yawn when I remembered something I’d forgotten, something I should have remembered earlier—Merlin’s papers, the ones Marsha had never gotten around to giving me. What had Marsha said about them? That she thought he was doing something dirty and she wanted me to look at them and find out what it was. Maybe she’d found out what he’d been doing. And maybe she’d demanded thirty thousand dollars’ worth of hush money and he’d killed her.

  Except why had she come to me if she already knew?

  The answer was obvious: when she’d come to me she hadn’t known. Something had happened after we’d met to change the equation.

  But what?

  It seemed as if it was time to have another chat with Merlin. But before I did that I decided to call Marsha’s mother. Marsha might hav
e told her something that would help me make sense of everything. I ate another spoonful of ice cream and watched the first streaks of light on the horizon and thought about how some daughters actually talked to their mothers and about how I no longer talked to mine.

  Chapter 27

  Because I was still playing catch-up at the store, it was a little after two in the afternoon before I got a chance to call Marsha’s mother. Once I managed to get through Nurse Ratchett, Mrs. Wise, or Nancy as she insisted on being called, was full of interesting surprises, the most interesting one being that her daughter had left late Saturday afternoon, not Sunday as the nurse had told me.

  “Pearline wasn’t here,” Mrs. Wise explained as I wound the telephone cord around my finger. Her voice was crisp, her dictation precise. A picture of a thin, patrician-looking lady, the obverse of pudgy, rumpled Marsha, rose before me. “She just made an assumption because that’s how long Marsha usually stays.”

  “But not this time.”

  “No. Not this time. She wanted to get back early. Evidently she had things to do.”

  “She didn’t happen to say what things?” I asked as I pried a piece of paper out of Zsa Zsa’s jaws.

  Mrs. Wise paused for a second before continuing. “No, she didn’t, and I didn’t ask.” Another pause. I got the feeling she was choosing her words carefully. “Over the past three years I’ve learned not to pry too much. But I can tell you she seemed very excited.”

  “She didn’t ask you for money, did she?”

  “No. She knew better. I’d stopped giving her any.” Mrs. Wise’s voice grew hesitant. “Why? Did she need any? Was she in trouble?”

  “I think she may have put herself in some.”

  “She always made things hard for herself—always.” Mrs. Wise stopped talking again. This time the pause on the other end of the line was longer. “You know,” she finally said, “I thought I was doing the right thing not giving her any money. Everyone I talked to said not to. They said that no matter what she told me she’d just gamble it away. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to them.”

  “No. I think what you did was correct,” I replied, trying to console her.