Father’s Day Murder

by Leslie Meier

  “In that case, could I speak to your husband?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Is he there? Or is he in Boston? I really need to talk to him.”

  Lucy knew she sounded desperate and she sensed her pleas were falling on deaf ears.

  “I’ll tell him you called,” said Angela, ending the conversation.

  Ah, thought Lucy bitterly, the Read way. Invariably polite, presenting that smooth, impenetrable surface. Would she really give Junior the message? Lucy had no idea. She didn’t even know if Junior was home. Maybe Ted would know. She dialed the Pennysaver, and Phyllis answered.

  “Howdy, stranger. How’s tricks?”

  Lucy had no time for small talk. “Is Ted there?”

  “He went out a bit ago.”

  “Is he with Junior Read? He was supposed to interview him.”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Is Junior in town? Have you seen him?”

  “Can’t say that I have, but I did hear that he’s out of jail.”

  Lucy was disgusted. “I can’t believe it. Everybody is supposed to know everybody’s business in a small town. What’s wrong with Tinker’s Cove?”

  “Well, since you asked, I think it’s that shopping channel. Instead of keeping an eye on their neighbors, people are buying nonstick pans and genuine fake diamonds and—”

  “I’ve gotta go,” said Lucy.

  She perched on the edge of the bed, clutching the phone, telling herself to be rational. For goodness’ sake, she didn’t even know that it was Morgan in the trunk. For all she knew the girl was sleeping in late, or eating pancakes for breakfast under her mother’s doting gaze. As for Junior, she didn’t know if Morgan had met him last night or not. And Junior wouldn’t have killed her. Or would he?

  She dialed home, hoping to talk to Elizabeth, but nobody answered the phone even though she let it ring and ring. She considered calling Morgan, even dialed Information, but there were twenty Dodds listed in Framingham, none of them named Morgan. Not even an M. Dodd.

  She put the phone down and picked up the remote, flipping through the channels. She stopped when she saw Morgan’s face filling the screen.

  “A Framingham Trib reporter was found dead this morning….”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Lucy sank to the floor, her head in her hands. Each piece of information was like a blow. Cause and time of death had not been determined. She lived with her parents. A shot of a modest clapboard house. An interview with her editor. “A hard worker and enterprising reporter.” His voice cracked but he got the words out. “She’ll be missed.”

  Her fingers thick and clumsy, Lucy dialed Information and got the Trib’s phone number. She was connected to the newsroom, where the phone rang but nobody answered.

  She had to talk to somebody. She had so many questions. But who? There was only one person she knew for a certainty couldn’t be the murderer because he had an ironclad alibi. He’d been in Boston when Morgan was killed, and she could testify in court if she had to. She’d seen him with her own eyes.

  She decided to pay him a visit. Maybe this news would shock him into talking, into telling what he knew. She got up slowly and tucked her key card in her pocket, then left her room and took the elevator down to Syrjala’s floor. The door to his room was open, so she stuck her head inside.

  “Anybody here?”

  “Housekeeping,” said the maid, popping out of the bathroom. She spoke with a heavy Spanish accent.

  “He’s gone?” Lucy hadn’t expected this. She thought he’d sleep until they kicked him out of the room.

  The maid shrugged.

  “The man who was staying here? Has he left?”

  The maid shook her head, but Lucy didn’t need to talk to her. Syrjala’s belongings were gone; there was no sign of him in the room.

  Lucy walked slowly down the hall and waited for the elevator. When it finally came she went back up to her floor and into her room. She called the Pennysaver, and this time Ted answered.

  “One of the reporters working on the Luther Read story is dead.” Lucy blurted out the words, running them together. “They found her body in a commuter parking lot, in the trunk of her car.”

  “Who?”

  “Morgan Dodd.”

  “The girl with the short black hair?”

  “Yeah.” Lucy’s voice quavered. “Do you want me to work on it?”

  “Absolutely not. I want you to get out of there as fast as you can. I don’t want you dead, too.”

  “I’m not in any danger.”

  “Don’t argue. Pack your suitcase. Get the bus. Come home. Period.”

  Lucy didn’t answer, just slammed the phone down, furious that Ted was pulling her off the story. She wasn’t a rookie; she knew what she was doing. This was the biggest story of her life, and Ted wanted her back in Tinker’s Cove, working on obits and meeting announcements.

  She tossed the last few things into her suitcase and zipped it up. She slid it off the bed, onto the floor, and pulled the handle up so she could wheel it along. She picked up her purse and left the room.

  She felt like a robot, pulling the suitcase behind her. A robot with low batteries. Who was she kidding? she asked herself as she stepped into the elevator. She’d never really been on the story; she hadn’t produced any new information, written any stories. She didn’t deserve the award that was zipped into her suitcase. It should have gone to Morgan, she decided, feeling hugely guilty.

  The elevator bounced to a stop at the lobby level and she stepped out. There was a long line of people waiting to check out, and she dutifully followed it to the end, where she parked her suitcase beside her. She checked her watch and sighed. She was going to be here for a while.

  It was the eternal conundrum. Time passed too slowly, and then it was over too quickly. Hurry up and die. She blinked back a tear.

  “Have you recovered your appetite?” It was Fred Easton, one of the men she’d eaten with at Durgin Park.

  “I couldn’t eat for days,” added his buddy, Bob Hunsaker. The two were just ahead of her in line, but she hadn’t noticed them.

  Lucy tried to smile, but ended up crying instead.

  “Hey, what’s the matter?”

  Lucy dabbed at her eyes with Bob’s big, snowy handkerchief.

  “I’m sorry. I just heard about Morgan Dodd a few minutes ago….”

  “That girl reporter? What happened?”

  “They found her body in the trunk of a car.”

  “Murdered?” Bob’s face was white. “I was just talking to her the other day.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Fred.

  “It was on the TV news.”

  “It’s hard to believe,” said Bob. “She was so interested in everything, always asking questions, always dashing around.”

  “The best reporters always are,” said Fred.

  The line inched forward.

  “She told me she was going to break Luther’s murder wide open,” said Lucy, sniffling. “Was that what she was asking you about?”

  “Not directly. She wanted to know all about the Pioneer papers in New Hampshire. She said she just wanted background, back story.” Bob scratched his chin. “It was kinda funny. She was mostly interested in Luther and Monica. How they met, how long they’d been a couple, stuff like that.”

  “She couldn’t have suspected Monica,” said Fred. “She’s the one person who’s above suspicion.”

  “Because of her integrity?” Lucy had her doubts on that score.

  “Not exactly,” said Fred. “I admit she’s got a pretty good reputation for a politician—but she’s still a politician. No. I think the reason she’s not a suspect is because she’s so new on the scene. She and Luther had just hooked up a month or two ago.”

  “Really? Who was he with before Monica?”

  “Who wasn’t he with; that’s the question you should be asking,” offered Bob with a dirty chuckle.

  “He dated a lot of different wo
men?”

  “Sure did. Usually employees. They’d be hanging on his arm and smiling one day; then next thing you’d hear the poor girl was looking for work.”

  “He fired them when he got tired of them?”

  “Usually. He lost a lot of good staff that way. It was awkward, you know, breaking up. Embarrassing to keep running into old girlfriends. So he’d usually end up getting rid of them.”

  “That’s why you should never date the staff,” said Fred.

  “That’s awful,” said Lucy, struck by the unfairness of the situation. “And you told all this to Morgan?”

  “Sure did,” said Bob. “It wasn’t a secret or anything. Everybody knew what he was like.” He scratched his chin. “You had to admire the guy, really. Considering his age and all.”

  “Viagra,” opined Fred. “I’ll bet he took Viagra.”

  What was with these guys? Lucy was beginning to get annoyed. She was trying to get to the bottom of a murder and all they could talk about was Luther Read’s sexual exploits.

  “So when did you have this little chat with Morgan?” she asked, taking another baby step closer to the counter.

  “Lunch, day before yesterday, her treat,” said Bob, sliding his suitcase an inch or two forward. “Did you say they found her body in the trunk of a car?”

  Lucy nodded.

  “Damned shame,” said Bob.

  It certainly was, thought Lucy, resisting the urge to knock Fred’s and Bob’s heads together. What a pair! So smug and complacent and so sure of their place in the world. They’d never had to battle the glass ceiling; they’d never had to prove themselves the way women did in the news industry. They were the ones who checked out the girls and made passes; they stared and ogled and commented and joked. All in good fun, of course. Safe in their thick-soled shoes and confident in their strength, they had no idea what it was like to be five-foot-two and one hundred and ten pounds, late at night, alone in a dark parking lot.

  Lucy watched as Bob stepped up to the desk, pulling his stomach in and standing a bit taller as the pretty clerk with the blond curls smiled at him. He handed over his credit card and signed the bill, not even bothering to glance at the total. Well, why should he? It was tax deductible, wasn’t it?

  Fred at least looked at the bill, but Lucy suspected it was simply a ploy to engage the blond’s attention. He held the paper in such a way that the clerk had to lean forward to see the items he was questioning, giving him an opportunity to look down her blouse.

  How long was this going to take? wondered Lucy, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other. Five minutes? Ten minutes? How long could he keep the checkout clerk dancing to his tune, a smile pasted on her face as he questioned the state room tax? Like he didn’t know all about it.

  Finally it was Lucy’s turn. She crossed her fingers and handed over her card, hoping her bill wouldn’t take her over her credit limit. Ted would reimburse her, of course, but she had to pay the bill first. It seemed to take a long time for the card to clear, and Lucy was beginning to fear her room-service supper had been a big mistake when the machine finally began printing out her receipt. Approved this time.

  She stuffed the papers in her purse and grabbed her suitcase, eager to get on the move. Some of the faces of the people waiting in line were familiar—she waved a quick farewell to Carole and a few others—but she didn’t linger to chat. She’d had enough of newspapers, of hotels, of Boston. She wanted to go home.

  “Where to?” asked the cabby when she climbed in.

  “Tinker’s Cove, Maine,” she said.

  He turned and looked at her. “Come again?”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “You said Maine. I don’t go to Maine.”

  Talk about Freudian slips, thought Lucy, realizing her mistake.

  “I meant South Station,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Traffic was heavy, and Lucy had plenty of time to think as the cabby maneuvered his way past double- and triple-parked cars and through gridlocked intersections, keeping up a lively dialogue with himself that was peppered with curses and punctuated with blasts on his horn.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he growled at a SUV that was trying to make a right turn in front of him. Neatly cutting the behemoth off, he blasted the horn at a couple of young girls who were jaywalking, making them jump back to the safety of the curb.

  “Whadda they think?” he demanded. “I’m steering more than a ton of steel here; they weigh maybe a hundred and ten pounds apiece. Who’s gonna win? Me! They’re gonna be squashed like bugs on the windshield. And what have we here? Want to turn left, do you? Not on my watch, buddy.”

  The cab lurched forward, blocking a Volvo station wagon, leaving the confused driver stranded in the middle of the intersection with nowhere to go.

  “Out-of-towner!” snarled the cabby.

  Lucy didn’t think his scorn was directed at the driver’s effort to make a left turn; those daredevils seemed to earn his grudging approval. It was the hopeful blinking of the directional signal that he despised.

  “Christ! An ambulance!”

  Lucy turned around and saw the flashing lights approaching, slowly, as drivers tried to squeeze to the side to let the ambulance through. The ambulance driver encouraged them with blasts on the horn, occasionally adding the siren for emphasis.

  Marooned in traffic and unsure whether South Station was just around the corner or miles across town, Lucy let her thoughts return to Fred and Bob. They weren’t all that bad, just typical middle-aged businessmen who had managed, with society’s connivance, to convince themselves that they deserved their success. They’d worked for it, they told themselves; it was their due. They blundered their way through life—guzzling gasoline and plastic and steak and alcohol—blissfully unaware of their privileged status.

  Unaware was the word that best described them, thought Lucy. They spoke, but they didn’t think. Without realizing it, they’d given her a likely theory that explained both Luther’s and Morgan’s murders.

  Anger and hurt were powerful emotions, and so was the desire for revenge. And who would feel those emotions more strongly than a former lover? It hadn’t been about business and money at all, or who was going to control Pioneer Press, she decided; it was about rejection and humiliation. Bruised feelings. A bleeding heart. Luther had died because he’d spurned someone who loved him. Someone who loved him too much to let him go.

  Furthermore, thought Lucy, bracing herself as the cabby braked to avoid mowing down a bicycle courier, Morgan Dodd wouldn’t have been wary of meeting a woman at night in a parking lot. She would have thought twice about meeting a man, but not a woman. Her defenses would have been down and she would have been easy prey for a murderer who feared she was getting too close.

  Morgan must have figured it out, thought Lucy, chagrined to realize the spunky girl reporter had been way ahead of her. Close enough to spook the murderer, anyway. If only she’d opened up to Lucy last night in the McDonald’s, maybe she could have warned her. Or gone with her. Maybe it would have turned out differently. Maybe.

  “Thirteen seventy-five,” said the cabby, and Lucy was startled to see they were parked right in front of South Station.

  “Keep the change,” she said, handing him a ten and a five.

  “Thanks,” he said, but he didn’t stir himself to help her when she struggled with the suitcase. He merely waited, drumming his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel, until she yanked it free with a jerk. Then he pulled away so fast that the tires squealed.

  Men! Men and women, somehow it was all screwed up. In a similar situation she would have rushed to offer assistance, without regard to age or sex. A child, a pregnant woman, an elderly man—if she could help, she would.

  Men used to help others. She remembered her father shoveling snow for elderly neighbors and warming up the car for her mother on cold winter days. Her parents had always been a unit, a team. She couldn’t imagine her father decidin
g he’d had enough of her mother. What had changed? When had men and women started having relationships instead of marriages? When had partners become disposable when somebody more attractive, or richer, or smarter, or more connected came along?

  No wonder they’d put wheels on suitcases, thought Lucy, battling her way through the doors and into the station. They’d had to because nowadays everyone had to tote their own. Even little children, she noticed, were pulling brightly colored backpacks on wheels.

  The enormous, echoing station was filled with people, and everyone seemed to know exactly where they were going. Lucy didn’t. She found a spot against the wall, out of the flow of traffic, and looked for something familiar. This part of the station bore no resemblance to the bus terminal where she’d arrived. It must be here somewhere; the timetable specified South Station, but she didn’t know where. And she had to find it fast because her bus was scheduled to leave in twenty-five minutes.

  She needed to ask someone for directions, but who? Numerous kiosks dotted the station, but the salesclerks were all busy selling pretzels and books and newspapers and cookies to long lines of impatient customers who wouldn’t take kindly to an interruption. Everyone was on the move and no one seemed approachable.

  “Lady, you got change?”

  Startled, Lucy turned to discover a homeless man sitting on the floor beside her, holding out a paper cup with a few coins in the bottom. She was ashamed to realize she hadn’t seen him there; she’d become so used to seeing homeless people on the sidewalks, in doorways, and on benches that they’d begun to blend into the cityscape. They’d become invisible.

  “Of course,” she said, reaching for her purse and pulling out a dollar. “Can you tell me where to find the bus station?”

  “Thank you, thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said, snatching the bill with filthy stained fingers. “The bus station is over that way, on the other side of the tracks.”

  “Thank you,” said Lucy, hurrying off in the direction he’d indicated. Indeed, when she got closer she could see the sign, high above a passage.