Deception

by Randy Alcorn

  “That’s a cliché too. You’re embarrassing yourself. All you’re doing in this investigation is making the department look bad.”

  “All I’m doing is trying to keep the department from being bad. How it looks isn’t my concern.”

  “You admit it!”

  Like I’d confessed a murder.

  “Your job’s on the line, Chandler. Embarrass Jack, and I’ll make sure you pay for it.”

  “You’re still threatening me? Don’t you get it? You laid the trap at the seminary parking lot based on what Ray Eagle and I said in a booth at Lou’s Diner. What other conversations between my buddies and me did you listen in on? And how many other citizens sat in that booth? Can you imagine the scandal? Private citizens illegally recorded at a public establishment. And two of those recorded work for the Tribune! I grant you, they were probably evangelizing me—they usually are—but the point is, they’re journalists, first amendment junkies, civil liberties freaks, covered under the Bill of Rights, along with car thieves and hit men. They tell the world that cops were eavesdropping … talk about a PR problem. There’d be a media feeding frenzy. After the lawsuit against this department, Lou’s could be a 10-million-dollar restaurant.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “One of them saw the bugs. He’s eager to know who did it.” It seemed better leverage not to mention that Clarence and Jake already knew. “They’ll fill pages with this story. Can you imagine someone at Police Headquarters doing this? Zero political savvy. He’d be ruined. The man would have to be an idiot. King of the Idiots.”

  I went out the door, ticked not just because of his dirty tricks, but because he’d accused me of using clichés.

  As I walked out I saw his daughter Jenn’s sullen face in that family photo, and I found myself wishing she was more like her friend Tasha, who kept … all her stupid phone photos.

  Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

  “Ever find those pictures with the professor?” I asked Jenn Lennox on the phone. “Told you I didn’t keep them.”

  “Did you ask your friend Tasha?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you said Tasha keeps everything. And aren’t you always sending photos to her?”

  “Oh.” Long pause. “So if Tasha has it, do I get the Starbucks card or does she?”

  “Both of you get one.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Ten minutes later she called. “Tasha has some pictures at Palatine’s. She’ll send them to you, once we get the Starbucks cards. Forty dollars each.”

  “We agreed on thirty, just for you.” Finally we settled on twenty-five each. I said, “No cards until I see the pictures.”

  “No pictures until I see the cards.”

  I swore an oath as a police officer to surrender the Starbucks cards once I got the pictures. Were it possible to strangle someone over phone lines, I’d be on death row.

  Ten minutes later my phone buzzed. I went online to access pictures sent to my account. Surprisingly, the images weren’t bad. In two, Palatine’s mantel was visible. I sent them on to Carp. She called me back and said I should pay her a visit at the Trib.

  I was there in twenty minutes.

  “These are low resolution pictures, but the photo you’re interested in is visible. I’ve made as many sharpness and contrast corrections as I could. The lighting’s not bad. The faces aren’t sharp, but not nearly as blurry as they were in those other photos I enlarged.”

  I looked at the first picture. It was much better. I had the sense that I recognized one of the faces. Then I looked at the silver chain around her neck … a high school graduation present from her mother.

  I looked at the last picture. No doubt now who the girl was.

  Kendra Chandler. My daughter.

  I drove directly to Kendra’s real estate office, near Parkrose High. She seemed surprised. I’d pulled into the parking lot before, to watch her through the window and make sure she was all right. One day I took out my compressor and put air in one of her tires. But this was the first time I’d shown my face inside.

  “Got a few minutes?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a break coming. We can sit in the staff room.”

  She introduced me, awkwardly, to a few of her coworkers. I took a good look at the three men, comparing their faces to wanted posters. I asked Kendra a few questions about her Christmas with the other family, pretending I wasn’t jealous, then jumped in.

  “This picture was on Dr. Palatine’s mantel.” I handed it to her.

  “No way,” she said, studying it. “Dad, I’m thirty. This would’ve been, what, ten years ago?”

  “I was surprised to see him with you.”

  “Well, I happened to be in the picture, but it wasn’t me he was interested in.”

  “The other girl?”

  “You do know who that is, don’t you?”

  “Should I?”

  “It’s Melissa. Melissa Glissan. You used to work with her dad, remember?”

  “I still work with him. I guess I forgot what Melissa looked like.”

  “Well, she’d bleached her hair blond. Maybe that threw you.”

  “You didn’t tell me you and Melissa were in the professor’s class together.”

  “Why should I? I didn’t even remember until I saw this picture. Brings back memories.”

  “So Melissa knew Palatine.”

  “She knew him all right.”

  “Why’d you say it that way?”

  “Well … they were just.” Her face turned red. “You know what I said. He liked the pretty girls.”

  I had two main memories of Melissa. One, a sunny day when she was eight years old, laughing hysterically with Kendra on our Slip ’N Slide. Two, the night I got the phone call, around 3:00 a.m. as I recall, that she’d taken her life.

  It made me wonder about my Andrea, and whether she was still alive. It’s hard when a man to feels powerless to take care of those he loves.

  I asked myself … Who would remove a photograph of Palatine, Kendra, and Melissa?

  I went back to the precinct and reopened Melissa Glissan’s case file. I zeroed in on her roommate at Linfield College, Cherianne Takalo. I put Ray on it, and thirty minutes later he’d traced her down under her married name, in Grosse Point, Michigan. He had her home phone, work, and cell numbers.

  “Ray, you scare me,” I said.

  I put Manny on some background research on Melissa. Anything that might be relevant. He said I was wasting his time. I told him he was paid to waste his time.

  I called Cherianne. She hadn’t heard the professor was dead.

  “Just that name, Dr. Palatine, brings back memories,” she said.

  “Good ones?”

  “No.”

  “Did you know Melissa was involved with him?”

  “She talked about him all the time. He complimented her writing. She really fell for him.”

  “A crush?”

  “She loved him. She’d read his little love notes and his sappy poetry. She showed me some. He never signed them. I wondered if he was covering his tracks so he could deny he sent them. I never met the guy, but I thought it was a big mistake getting involved with a professor.”

  “You knew about the drugs?”

  “She only had two classes at PSU, the rest were at Linfield. She was back in our room every night. She was devastated when the professor told her not to call him anymore. She started smoking pot. I asked her not to do it in our room. I warned her it was messing her up. But that didn’t help her, so she started snorting coke. She got more depressed and was sleeping more and more. Stopped doing her homework. Stopped caring.”

  “This was all a backlash to the professor rejecting her?”

  “Melissa thought he was going to marry her. He turned out to be a jerk. I told her to just walk away. I mean, she had a decent boyfriend her own age.”

  “Melissa had a boyfriend?”

  “She broke up with him for the professor. But
he still loved her.”

  “What was his name?”

  “It’s been a long time. Ten years. Um … David? No, wait. Donald. I don’t remember his last name. I only saw him twice. I think he stayed at her parents’ house when he was in town.”

  “In town? Where did he live?”

  “In the South, maybe? I remember he’d had a long flight. Wait … I remember now. It was weird. He wouldn’t say where he was from. And when I asked Melissa, she wouldn’t tell me. Said something about him having family problems and maybe he was going to make a break from them and start a new life.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Nice. Maybe insecure.”

  “You said you saw him twice. When was the second time?”

  “A few days before Melissa died.”

  “He was in Portland?”

  “Yeah. Melissa had broken it off with him over the phone, I think. He flew in to talk her out of it. He didn’t want to lose her.”

  “He knew there was another guy?”

  “She tried not to tell him. I’m afraid I was the one who let it out.”

  “He knew it was the professor?”

  “Melissa had told him. I felt terrible.”

  “How long were Donald and Melissa together?”

  “They were on and off a couple of years. They got serious the summer before our junior year. When we came back to the dorm in September, she talked a lot about him. He came for a few weeks that summer and stayed at Melissa’s parents’ house.”

  “What’s Donald doing now?”

  “No clue. I knew Melissa’s parents, and I really liked them. We kept in touch the first year after Melissa died, but I transferred to Michigan State. Just couldn’t come back after my roommate died, you know? Could you do me a favor, Mr. Chandler? Do you have a photo of Melissa’s parents?”

  “Probably.”

  “Would you mind sending me one? I do scrapbooks, and I’ve got pictures of Melissa. But I’d like a picture of her parents. They were always nice to me.”

  “I could probably find something.”

  Cherianne gave me her address. I gave her my number. If Sharon were around, she’d know right where to look in our albums for a photo of Jack and Linda. I’d probably send her a copy of the detectives and spouses group photo, but at least she’d have Melissa’s parents. Not to mention the best photo of Sharon and me. Carp would make me a copy.

  Meanwhile, I shifted gears to Donald.

  Where was he? And why hadn’t the police reports or anyone else—especially Jack and Linda—mentioned him?

  Manny chose that moment to call. “Doing the background check you wanted on Melissa Glissan.”

  “You got something?”

  “Most of it’s irrelevant, like I told you it’d be.”

  “But you got something, didn’t you, or you wouldn’t have called.”

  “Turns out she was an insulin-dependent diabetic.”

  I looked over Melissa’s death report again. Toxicology reported drug use—methamphetamine and some indications she’d also snorted coke. The hanging had been the cause of death. But without the drugs would she have hung herself? Naturally her parents didn’t think so. They’d said she’d never been on drugs until she’d recently become depressed.

  I checked statistics. There’s a much higher rate of suicide by hanging among men than women. Still, it happens.

  I was just about to close Melissa’s file when my eyes fell on a red scribble. It was probably just the slip of a pen, but it was enough to draw my attention to something else: the date. The report had been filed on November 21. Melissa’s date of death was November 20.

  I looked again at the estimated time of death. A neighbor had heard a noise, which in retrospect was probably when she hung herself. She’d died just after 11:35 p.m.

  Melissa Glissan died exactly ten years before the professor.

  Not just ten years to the day, but to the hour.

  Likely, to the minute.

  52

  “There are limits, you see, to our friend’s intelligence. It would have been a coup-mattre had he deduced what I would deduce and acted accordingly.”

  SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE FINAL PROBLEM

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 3:00 P.M.

  I DROPPED BY JACK’S DESK, and we small talked. He mentioned Linda would be out all night at a get-together with old college roommates in Corvallis, ninety minutes away. He and Noel were going to a Winterhawks game after dinner.

  Jack left at 4:30. I called Carp and asked if I could borrow her car. When I came by, I also asked if she could doctor up a couple photos for me. When I showed her what I wanted, she smiled. But didn’t ask questions. I like that.

  At 6:25 p.m. I sat in Carp’s silver Subaru Impreza, across the street from the Nine Daggers Tavern near 39th and Belmont. My Taurus slicktop wouldn’t stick out to most people, but cops notice cars. Carp’s car was cleaner than most operating rooms, and since she’d seen the archaeological dig in my car, she asked me not to eat in it. Where are you supposed to eat dinner if not in a car? But I promised.

  With the help of my ProStaff binoculars, I watched Jack and Noel eat dinner, looking like father and son. It took me back to when Jack was my partner, and we’d come weekly to the Nine Daggers. We had a ritual. After arresting a killer, one month later we’d down a bottle of wine, our toast to taking out the bad guy. In a few cases we celebrated annually. I still remembered Harvey Blanda, April 11, and Theda Pranke, July 27.

  Jack always made it interesting. He made it seem like we were doing something that mattered. If Sharon were still alive, we’d be with Jack and Linda every week, like the old days.

  I felt like a louse tailing Jack. I didn’t know what I was looking for.

  After dinner they got in Jack’s car and drove away, I assumed to the hockey game. I headed the other direction.

  When I broke into Jack Glissan’s house that night, it felt creepy. I’d remembered that Jack and Linda had left Melissa’s room as it was. Some visit a gravesite. Some bring the ashes into their home. They kept the room as it was. A shrine. Every day it reminded them of Melissa’s life … and death.

  Sharon kept Chad’s favorite little gray sweatpants and white muscle shirt. Every time I saw it, it cut my heart. It also made me think about the guy who rear-ended us. If Jack and Linda blamed anyone for Melissa’s death, her room might have kept that anger alive.

  I shone my flashlight, close range, around Melissa’s room. I recalled Jack and I coming in there with her and Kendra when they were grade-schoolers. The only time I remembered being in Melissa’s room after her death was with Sharon. Linda showed us around, like a curator, making speeches about various items in the room. I thought there had been a journal or a diary and maybe a photo album.

  In Melissa’s top dresser drawer, I found her scrapbook. What interested me most were the last three months of her junior year of college, preceding her suicide. Three photos had been removed. Why?

  I snuck into Jack’s office. I went through his desk drawers, checking files with the flashlight. In the lower right drawer I found one called “Melissa’s Case.”

  I opened it, disappointed to see only two photos, glossies that reflected too much of the flashlight. I went into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the light. One picture was of a man holding a hardbound book, appearing to read from it. The book was red. On the cover I saw several words, one of them “Poems.”

  The man was Professor William Palatine.

  The other picture was of the professor with two young women. I knew instantly I’d seen it, or rather a low-quality replica of it, in Carp’s office. This photo had been visible on the fireplace mantel, in the photo that cost me fifty Starbucks.

  It was a clear photograph of Melissa Glissan and Kendra Chandler, but the left third of the photo had been cut off. The professor was gone.

  I heard a noise. In a microsecond I switched off the light.

  I stood still in the darkness, hoping no one had seen th
e light in the door crack. I thought of crawling into the bathtub and hiding behind the shower curtain, but I didn’t want to risk the noise. Suddenly the door flew open and the light streamed on.

  I was looking down the barrel of a gun.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Detective Ollie Chandler,” I said. “Jack’s friend. Who are you?”

  “Jack’s brother.”

  “Warren?”

  We’d met two or three times, but it had been years.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, voice edgy.

  “Want to see my ID?” I said. Never reach for your pocket without permission when a nervous man is pointing a gun at your face.

  “I remember,” he said. “You’re the dopey one.”

  It’s good to be remembered.

  “That’s me.”

  If I was Dopey, he was Grumpy. I was hoping the other dwarves weren’t with him.

  “Could you lower the gun, please?”

  “I asked what you’re doing here.”

  “I have a good reason,” I said. “I’ll explain. What are you doing here?”

  “Visiting from Redding. Linda’s gone, and Jack’s at a hockey game. I hate hockey. Had dinner with an old friend; now I’m back. What’s your story?”

  “We’re planning a party to honor Jack for forty years on the detective force,” I said, holding up three pictures.

  “You stealing from Jack?”

  “Not stealing. Planting.” I handed him the pictures. “It’s a prank. Fake photos of him arresting celebrities. Look here—he’s with Lucille Ball. This one’s with Frank Sinatra. See we’re rubbing it in that he’s been around long enough to have dealt with those people. Funny, huh? We’re all going to come back to his office, and I’ll pull out this stack that I was just going to hide up there in his closet. I’m a prankster. You know, the dopey one. I was just planting them when I heard a noise. Afraid it was Jack, so I hid in the bathroom. You can’t let Jack know, okay? It’s a surprise.”

  “When’s the party?”

  “Soon. Real soon. I’d love to invite you, but it’s just the detectives. After the party’s over, he’ll tell you all about it. I’m not sure even Linda knows. One of the wives is pulling it off, maybe.”