Bad Girl

by T. E. Woods

  “I can’t tonight.”

  “Then how about I swing by? Francie can close up here.”

  “I’d love that, but I’m not in town. I’m in Ann Arbor.”

  “You’re where? Sydney, what the hell?”

  “How long do you want this thing to drag out? You can’t leave Madison. Imagine how that would look to the police. Horst and his team will figure this out. In time. I’m here to see if I can move things along. Miranda’s killer is tied to her life here. I know it.”

  “This is insane. Come home now. Please.”

  “A few more days, that’s all…”

  “I’m coming out there. Cops be damned.”

  “No! You need to be where Steel can find you.”

  “I’ll tell Francie to tie him to a chair when she sees him.”

  “Stay there. Take care of your son. I’ll be fine. I’m not here alone.”

  “Don’t tell me Nancy’s with you!”

  “It’s not my mom. She’s about as thrilled I’m here as you are.”

  “Ronnie’s here, sipping a rum and tonic. Who’s that leave?”

  “Rick Sheffield. He’s a detective now. Horst sent him to work with the Ann Arbor cops on background.”

  Sydney heard the dim bustle of the crowd in the background, but nothing else.

  “You need to trust me, Clay.”

  “Oh, I trust you, Sydney. I can’t say the same about Sheffield.”

  Chapter 31

  “You’re up bright and early,” he said. “What’s on your junior detective agenda this morning?”

  “It’s nearly ten-thirty. I’ve already had breakfast, read the papers, and checked in with Hush Money. And from the looks of things, you’ve been up awhile, too. You should have knocked. We could have eaten together.”

  “After last night, I figured I was the last person you’d want to break bread with.”

  “Do you have your flight time? I can drive you to the airport.”

  Rick grinned. “You’re in a hurry to be rid of me.”

  “Did you arrange for your cop friends to get you to the airport?”

  He shook his head. “I was just about to call. I’ve got a few things to wrap up with them. Then I’ll say goodbye, thank them for their help, and be on my way. If you’d like to drive me downtown, I’m sure they’d appreciate saving the pickup.”

  “Can I join you as you tie up those loose ends?”

  “You may not.” His face lost its playfulness. “This is an official investigation. I’m here for a reason.”

  She could see he wasn’t in a negotiating mood. “Let’s go. You can call me when you need to be picked up. And then I’ll drive you into Detroit to catch your plane.”

  “Giving you time to grill me on everything I might have learned downtown. That your plan?”

  “You’re wrong about Clay.”

  He dropped the last of his stuff into his duffel. “I hear you, Sydney. That’s about all I can say.” He zipped his bag. “Come on, hotshot. Drive me downtown.”

  Sydney spent a half hour driving around town trying to formulate something remotely resembling a plan. Coming up with nothing, she decided one move at a time might be all she could muster. She steered her car back toward the corporate headquarters of MidWest ImEx.

  For what reason, she didn’t have a clue.

  She stopped for the traffic light in front of the entrance to ImEx’s parking lot. A dozen people crossed the street in front of her. She squinted against the sunshine to monitor when the light might turn to green. The thermometer on her dashboard told her it was forty-two degrees. Many of those walking in front of her car had jackets unzipped in celebration of the unseasonable warmth. Sydney glanced at her watch. Eleven forty-five.

  Must be lunchtime. Employees who might have eaten their sack lunch inside are heading out to grab the sun. Can’t blame them.

  She noticed someone familiar crossing the street alone. A tiny woman. Neatly trimmed Afro. Sydney watched her walk up the sidewalk and enter the diner across the street. When the light turned green, Sydney drove past ImEx and made a left into the diner’s parking lot.

  * * *

  —

  “Shiree?”

  Sydney tapped the young woman on the shoulder as a cluster of people waited for the hostess to seat them. Shiree turned, and Sydney saw her instant gleam of recognition.

  “Sydney!” Her lovely face registered her sympathy. “Are you holding up okay? How’d your meeting with Mr. York go?”

  “You know how it is. Both of us having lost Miranda and all.”

  “You poor thing! I’m glad you the two of you got to spend time together. It must have been a big comfort to Mr. York to hear about Miranda’s last days.” Shiree lowered her voice. “Were you able to come up with a reason why she would do such a terrible thing?”

  Sydney shook her head. “Her suicide seems incredible to everyone.”

  “That woman had everything to live for. You alone?”

  “Yes. I figured Miranda must have eaten here often. It sounds nuts, I know, but I thought maybe…”

  “Maybe you’d catch a bit of her spirit here?” Shiree looped her arm firmly through Sydney’s. “Come with me. I usually just sit with my nose to my phone during lunch. I think maybe today God has a bigger plan.”

  The hostess led them to a booth in the back of the diner, not two feet from the kitchen. Sydney thought of the elegance of Hush Money. No table there was placed within ten feet of Chef Roland’s realm. None of her patrons would have accepted it. But somehow, in this diner, the last table in the corner, where the constant hubbub of servers coming and going created a busy cloak of anonymity, seemed perfect for the conversation she hoped to have with Shiree.

  “Soup of the day is beef tips and mushroom.” Their server handed them menus with the grace of a drunken elephant. “Chef special is stuffed peppers.” She tugged a pencil from behind her ear. “I got a long line of plates coming up. If you don’t order now, it’s gonna be a while before I get back to you.”

  “Special sounds good to me,” Shiree said.

  “I’ll have a bowl of the soup, please.” Sydney handed her menu back. “Sounds delicious.”

  Their server walked away without asking if they wanted anything to drink.

  You wouldn’t last ten minutes in my joint, Sydney decided.

  “The food’s real good here,” Shiree told her. “Can’t say the same about the help.”

  “I’m not that hungry.”

  Shiree laid a warm hand on Sydney’s arm. “This is hard, I know. But you’ve got to keep your strength up.” She sat back, pulled several paper napkins from a metal dispenser standing next to salt and pepper shakers, and spread them across her lap. “Tell me how it went with Mr. York. What did you learn about your friend?”

  “He thought the world of her,” Sydney replied. “That means so much. Knowing she was appreciated, I mean.”

  “Everybody knows Mr. York had high regard for her. And let me tell you, Miranda felt the same way about him. She was grateful for the chance he took on her. She showed that gratitude, too. Miranda wasn’t one to keep all the goodies for herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You heard about paying things forward, right?”

  Sydney nodded.

  “Well, Miranda made sure she did that…only not in threes, like the common way of thinking is. No. Miranda was always quick to share whatever she learned with anybody who wanted to know.”

  “Did she share with you?”

  “Damn straight she did! Pardon my French. We have a group at church. Women about my age trying to get ahead in the world. Miranda came in to give us pointers probably twelve, fifteen times a year. Told us to always be on the lookout for ways to improve how things are done. Said it didn’t matter where we wor
ked. Factory or office. Dive bar or hospital. Be watching, she’d say. Not a thing in this world being done as good as could be. Be the one who figures out a better way, then tell your boss. Warned us not to take offense when bosses sell our ideas as their own. Miranda said they’d remember who gave them the goods. But she made us promise, once we had people working for us, to never take credit we didn’t deserve.” She smiled wide and strong. “That round information desk you saw? My idea! Used to be a plain old counter with just me sitting at it. My first few months with ImEx I was always running trying to find this person or that. I kept track. Turns out I was spending most of my time running to get the same three girls. Most people coming in want to talk about how they could get a job there, or they had a question about their bill, or else they were either delivering or picking something up. So I drew up a space, that circle you saw. Came up with the idea to have Jodi from human resources, Tiffany from bookkeeping, and Winnie Mae from shipping come sit up there with me. You know Miranda figured out we saved thousands of dollars in lost footsteps from my idea? Thousands! She said she couldn’t begin to calculate how much we gained from keeping our customers happy. That woman gave me a five-hundred-dollar bonus at our annual banquet! Made me stand up so everybody could clap, too.”

  “You must be very proud.”

  “I’m doing my job the best I can. Hope to climb the same way Miranda did.” The glow of pride slipped from Shiree’s face, replaced with something more like disappointment. “She was pulling me up that ladder, too. That’s over now, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Shiree shook her head. “Miranda always told us to not only be looking for ways to do our jobs better, but never be afraid to take on extra work. Special projects were even better, she said.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “Whenever I could. Word got around I can be trusted to do things outside what I was hired to do. More projects came. I was working on one especially for Miranda, as a matter of fact.”

  “What was that?”

  “Miranda had me and Winnie Mae working on it. Shipping manifests and longshoremen costs. She wanted us to make lists. On the ship, off the ship. Stuff like that. We’d give them to her. She’d take it from there.”

  “Things not adding up?” Sydney frowned.

  “It was the darnedest thing! Miranda gave me a stack of shipments. This ship, that ship. This port, that port. Gave Winnie Mae a stack, too. Told us to make a simple list of what went on and what came off the ships. I figured we’d find out the number of containers loaded onto a ship, say, in Cleveland, was going to come up short when it was unloaded in Portsmouth or Marseilles. You know how it is. Dealing with numbers as big as ImEx does, it doesn’t take some folks long to start thinking nobody’s going to miss a container or two. I figured we were working on something leading up to somebody being caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Maybe that’s why Miranda asked us to keep things confidential. Not let anybody know what we were doing.”

  “She must have trusted you very much.” Sydney pressed for what she hoped was a clue. “I guess you can’t tell me what you found out.”

  Shiree shrugged. “Don’t see why not. What with the project being done and all. A couple of days after Christmas, Miranda was in Madison. Oh, but you know that! She called me and Winnie Mae. Had us send her everything we had electronically. We figured the you-know-what was about to hit the fan. Next day she calls, thanks us for our work, and says that it’s over. Shuts the whole project down. Day after that Anna…you met her. She’s Mr. York’s assistant. She comes down with a big smile on her face. Hands me and Winnie Mae each an envelope. Another five-hundred-dollar bonus! Each! We got new computers, too. State of the art with those big screens.”

  “You never found out what happened to the missing containers? Never learned who was stealing from ImEx?”

  Shiree laughed. “Turns out nobody was stealing anything.” She must have seen the confusion on Sydney’s face. “Those manifests and those longshoremen invoices? They went the wrong way!”

  “Wrong way?”

  “Yeah. There was no theft. Somebody must have miscounted! It wasn’t that containers were missing. Turns out those longshoremen unloaded more containers in those foreign ports than had been loaded onto the ships in the first place. Isn’t that crazy?”

  Chapter 32

  Rick Sheffield lifted the folders Mitch Calblonz had assembled for him.

  “You sure you don’t want me to scan those for you?” Calblonz asked. “That’s gotta be three, four pounds of paper. Hate to think of you lugging that all the way back to Madison.”

  By the size of the detective’s gut, Rick believed carrying a few pounds of paper might seem unmanageable. “Call me old-fashioned. I like the feel of real reports in my hand. I want to see how the words look printed on the paper, not glowing at me from some screen.”

  “Suit yourself. Don’t see what good all that’s gonna do you. If you haven’t gotten the sense by now that the late Ms. Miranda Greer was one of Ann Arbor’s shining examples of sterling citizenry, I haven’t been doing my job.”

  “I sense a bit of sarcasm in your voice, Detective.” Rick shoved the files into his canvas briefcase.

  “It’s the job. Your detective shield might be new, but you’ve been a cop long enough to know what I mean. Day in, day out, seeing the underbelly of humanity doing things to one another that most folks couldn’t imagine. It colors a man’s thoughts.”

  You’re an out-of-shape detective in an upper-middle-class university town, Rick thought. Save it for the girls at happy hour. Twenty bucks says the toughest case you’ve ever caught is a frat party turned rowdy.

  “You don’t buy Miranda Greer was as squeaky clean as this report suggests?”

  “My mom used to say every sinner has a future and every saint has a past. That’s all I’m saying. Seems to me the fact those files are so pristine is more a matter of what we didn’t find out about her than what we did.”

  “You could be right. Somebody killed her. Gotta be a reason.”

  “Love hurts. That’s the reason. You find who loved this woman and you’ll find who killed her. Same old story. Only the names on the reports change.” Calblonz hoisted himself out of his chair and stuck out a hand. “Good workin’ with ya, Sheffield. You’re gonna make a good detective. Maybe next time we’ll team up on something a bit meatier.”

  “Thanks for your help. If there’s anything I can ever do for you, you know where to find me.”

  “Wouldn’t mind if you sent some of that good Wisconsin cheese my way. My brother’s got a girlfriend from up there. Rhinelander, I think it is. Every time she visits her people she brings back an assortment. Gotta tell ya. It’s turned me off every other. Can’t eat a piece of cheddar or Colby without wishing it tasted like that stuff you guys make. They don’t call you cheeseheads for nothing.”

  Rick promised he’d see what he could do and bid him goodbye. He left the headquarters of the Ann Arbor police department and turned toward a cluster of businesses a few blocks up. He knew he’d be sitting too many hours that day. First in the car while Sydney drove him to Detroit, then in the airport, then on the plane. The whole day added up to too much time on his butt. The relatively mild temperature urged him to get outside. He’d grab some lunch, call Horst to let him know he was coming home empty-handed, then call Sydney after he arranged a flight home.

  Here’s hoping they’ve built a strong enough case against Hawthorne that he’s behind bars. If I can convince Syd to see what’s real, maybe she’ll be in the seat next to me.

  He smiled at the absurdity of his wish. If he told Sydney that photographs had been discovered showing Hawthorne, rope in hand, stringing Miranda up over that silo crossbeam, she’d explain to him how the pictures could have been doctored. Then she’d suggest a destination filled with fire and brimstone he might want to visit.
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  She loves hard. Steady and true. Hawthorne’s taking advantage of that.

  He came to the first intersection and waited for the light to change. Traffic was challenged by cars parked on both sides of the road, but that didn’t stop drivers from traveling at speeds better suited for a closed thoroughfare than surface streets.

  Just like Madison.

  He glanced to his left and right and wondered what brought all those parked cars to that street. Surely it wasn’t the strip mall across the way. He wondered if commuters avoided paying for parking by finding a spot on a residential street and busing in to work.

  Just like Madison.

  Then he saw her.

  Parked on the cross street.

  Two cars up.

  Dark hair. Shoulder length. Maybe not quite thirty.

  She pulled her dark gray Chevy out of her parking spot and drove away.

  Chapter 33

  Sydney hadn’t eaten much of her soup. The broth was too salty, the noodles were overcooked, and the beef was chewy enough to be bubble gum. Roland’s cuisine had turned her into a picky eater. She focused on Shiree and ignored her meal. Shiree prattled on about the wonders of the Church of Today and how it had changed her life.

  “You really should stop by the church,” Shiree told her. “Bishop Fulcraft is always available to talk.”

  Sydney smiled and lied that she might do that. She imagined the bishop was busily trying to discern exactly how much Alden York had shared with her. She knew men like him. He viewed her as a threat. He wouldn’t stop until he was confident any risk she posed to his relationship with York and his money was neutralized.

  But there’s something, she thought. Fulcraft could have exposed me to York and his family before cocktail hour was over. But he didn’t. Why?

  She hadn’t figured out his reasons, but she would.

  Shiree winced when she noticed the time. “I’ve got to get back. Miranda says always be three minutes earlier to work than you’re scheduled to be. I’m going to miss that woman more than I realize…” Her voice trembled. She scooted out of the booth, looking for their server. Sydney told her to go on, that lunch was on her.