Darkness, Sing Me a Song--A Holland Taylor Mystery

by David Housewright

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I am so sorry for that.”

  The way she lowered herself into her chair and hung her head, I believed her.

  “Murder?” asked a second man. “Who said murder?”

  He was taller than Kaufman and thinner. Together they reminded me a little of Abbott and Costello, although neither was even remotely as endearing.

  “He said murder,” Kaufman said.

  “You’re Allen Palo?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Gentlemen, if you would kindly give me a moment…”

  “No,” Kaufman said. “Hell no. We have nothing to do with any murder. Get out of here right now.”

  “Gentlemen—”

  “Get out or we’ll call the police.”

  “Fine. Go ahead.”

  Neither of them had anything to say to that. Nor did Esther, who was now watching the scene unfold with keen interest.

  “Talk to me and it’s kept quiet,” I said. “Talk to the cops and it becomes a matter of public record. Your call. Or you can contact your employers in Chicago and let them decide. It’s all the same to me.”

  The tall skinny guy grabbed the arm of the short fat man and they huddled up, turning their backs to me because they thought that was enough to keep me from listening. I did listen, though, and kept listening until I heard the phrase “bad publicity.” I turned back to the receptionist.

  “What happened to her?” Esther asked. “The girl in the picture?”

  “She was shot,” I said.

  “That’s awful.”

  Again I was impressed by what seemed to be her genuine concern, and I wondered if it came from some kind of kinship—pretty girls united—that caused her to empathize with a woman she had never met.

  “Why are you here?” Kaufman asked. “Why do you want to talk to us?”

  “It’s common practice, when someone is killed, to speak to those who saw the victim last.”

  “What?” Palo said.

  “You met with Joel Barrington five days ago in his office in downtown Minneapolis.” It was a statement, not a question—I wanted them to think I knew more than I actually did. “You discussed buying property belonging to the Barrington family along the Trempealeau River outside of Arona in western Wisconsin.”

  “What of it?”

  I showed him the pic of Emily Denys.

  “Do you recall seeing this woman?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I handed over my smartphone.

  “Take a good look, both of you.”

  They shared the cell for a long moment and handed it back.

  “I never saw her before,” Kaufman said.

  “Neither have I,” Palo said.

  “Yet you both did,” I told them. “There’s video evidence to prove it.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  Palo might’ve had a point, I decided. I never asked if Mrs. Barrington’s office had security cameras. Probably I should have.

  “I don’t remember seeing her,” Kaufman said. “That’s the honest truth.”

  “Taylor. Mr. Taylor.” Palo’s voice was consolatory. It was as if he suddenly remembered what he did for a living. “We wish to cooperate as best we can in this matter. Let us help you. Tell us who this woman was.”

  “Emily Denys.”

  “That was her name?” the receptionist asked.

  “Yes. She was in Mrs. Barrington’s offices when you were. She became aware of your negotiations and became very upset.”

  “Ill will hangs on us,” Palo said. “We appreciate that we have enemies. What we do, helping to develop new energy sources to answer the growing demands of the American people, making our country less dependent on volatile Middle Eastern oil suppliers, is often and sometimes purposely misunderstood. Special interest groups spread their propaganda, confusing the issues, enraging citizens that more often than not hear only one side of this important story. We hope and pray that this unfortunate incident, this terrible, terrible killing of an innocent girl, is not related to these issues. If it is, you need to know that it does not involve us as individuals or U.S. Sand as a whole. Neither Mr. Kaufman nor I recall meeting Ms. Denys. Certainly we had nothing to do with her tragic demise. What’s more, we deeply resent any suggestion to the contrary. So much so that U.S. Sand is willing to take all necessary legal action to protect our reputation from any sort of slander.”

  “Wow.” The more time I spend with Freddie, the more I pick up his vocabulary. “Wow. That was impressive. It actually gave me chills listening to it. Did you just make it up, or is it part of an all-purpose speech?”

  “Good day, Mr. Taylor,” Kaufman said.

  I actually expected him to repeat the phrase like Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—“I said good day.”

  “Mr. Taylor,” the receptionist said, “I remember the girl.”

  “Ms. Tibbits,” Palo said.

  I turned my back on him and approached the desk.

  “We were in the conference room,” Esther said. “The room was surrounded by glass walls. I guess it had curtains that you could close, but they weren’t closed, so you could see people walking by. I was watching Mr. Barrington. He kind of smiled and gave a little wave, and I turned in my chair to see what he was looking at, and that’s … that’s when I saw her. The girl who was killed. She didn’t do anything. She just turned around and walked away. I don’t know if she even knew that I saw her.”

  “Did you ever see her before that?” I asked.

  “No, sir. Never.”

  “What did Barrington do?”

  “Nothing. The meeting just kept going on and on.”

  “Does that satisfy you, Mr. Taylor?” Kaufman asked.

  “It answers my question.”

  “Then, sir…”

  “Yes, I know. Good day.”

  * * *

  I leaned back in my chair, my legs crossed at the ankles, my feet propped on top of my desk.

  “Looks like a dead end,” I told Freddie. “Mrs. Barrington was aware of the meeting. There’s no grand conspiracy. U.S. Sand does seem a bit discombobulated, but that’s probably just corporate paranoia.”

  “Speaking of dead ends—there are no missing persons reports matching Denys, no bulletins issued by the Chicago PD or Cook County.”

  “We’re gonna have to find out who Emily really was, and we’re gonna have to do it the hard way.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sackett called again while you were out. He wants to move up the meeting, get us going on investigating his acquisition right away.”

  “Define right away.”

  “He’s buyin’ me lunch at Manny’s.”

  “Why you?”

  “What can I say? I was the one what answered the phone. Besides, I’m better at this sort of thing than you are. You lack … What’s the word? Subtlety.”

  “Subtlety? You used to carry a Colt Commander into church, for God’s sake.”

  “What I’m saying, I’m better with computers than you are. You’re a people person.”

  “That’s so untrue.”

  “You used to be, before you got all morose on me. Look at the time. I gotta scoot.”

  “I don’t know, Freddie. Manny’s is a pretty high-class joint. They might not let you in dressed like that.”

  “What’s wrong with the way I’m—?”

  Freddie looked down at himself and then stopped. Ever since his marriage he’d been dressing like a jazz musician playing an after-hours gig.

  “I remember when you used to be funny, too,” he said.

  “I remember when you didn’t care what you looked like.”

  “We all adults now, partner.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The cops had sealed Emily Denys’s front door with bright yellow tape. Apparently they had decided the entire place was a crime scene even though she had been killed outside. That was okay with me becau
se I was interested in the door next to hers, the one leading to the second apartment in the duplex. There was no answer when I knocked. I knocked again and got the same reply. Probably the resident was at work. It was early afternoon on a weekday, after all. I made a note of it in the pad I carry and drifted back toward my car.

  The Camry was parked at the curb. I stood on the passenger side and stared over the roof at the woman who lived across the street. Professor Alexandra Campbell was kneeling on a strip of foam rubber at the edge of her garden and gripping a three-prong hand rake. She was watching me watching her. She brushed hair out off her forehead and waved the rake, which I took as an invitation.

  The professor spoke as I approached.

  “Still asking questions, I see,” she said.

  “Trying to.”

  Campbell stood and offered her hand. I shook it. My gaze started low and moved upward. The rubber strip was in the maroon and gold colors of the University of Minnesota and cut to resemble a hand with a single finger announcing “We’re No. 1.” Campbell was wearing ratty sneakers. Her legs were long and athletic as if she actually used them for running. Her shorts hugged a slim waist. A flannel shirt with the sleeves removed revealed muscled arms and a graceful neck. Auburn hair with just enough gray to suggest that she didn’t worry about it was tied back. Her eyes—when I first met her, I thought they were light brown, yet in the bright sunlight I realized that there was plenty of green in them, too. They were the kind of eyes that looked cheerful even when the rest of her face was trying hard to appear grim, like now.

  “If you’re looking for the roommates, Lisa Carrell left for work a half hour before you arrived. Mickie Umland is a flight attendant. God knows where she is.”

  I pulled out my notebook and wrote down the names.

  “Neither of them were home when Emily was shot,” Campbell added. “Mickie was in Chicago, I think she said when I saw her last. Lisa—she’s a young woman. I suppose she went out with her friends after she closed up shop.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “Grand Gourmet. She owns it along with a partner. Her partner opens the store at ten A.M. Lisa closes it at nine P.M.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about your neighbors.”

  “We form a village, I suppose, don’t we? Especially here in St. Paul. A kind of subculture built around a park or a church or a school. Don’t you know your neighbors?”

  It occurred to me that I knew Amanda and her mother, but just barely—her father had been arrested? Yet I didn’t know the names of anyone else in the building where I lived or in the houses and apartments around me. My neighbors were merely faces to nod at, and it was probably my fault. I had become antisocial just like my mom said.

  “No, I don’t know my neighbors,” I said.

  “I make a point of knowing them.”

  “Good for you.” I didn’t mean for it to sound like a rebuke, yet I knew that it did.

  “Like I said, Lisa wasn’t home when Emily was shot,” Campbell told me. “She didn’t arrive until much later, until after the coroner or medical examiner or whoever it was removed the body.”

  “Medical examiner,” I said. “In Ramsey County the medical examiner decides when a body is removed from a crime scene.”

  “It’s always a good day when you learn something new.”

  “I suppose that depends on what you learn.”

  “Are you really this cynical, or is it just me that you don’t like?”

  The question was like a slap across the face, and I found myself recoiling to the point where I took several steps backward.

  “No,” I said. “I like you fine. I mean I’m not … it’s because … my friends, I actually do have a couple friends, they’d tell you that I’m just going through a bad patch.”

  Her eyes seemed to contain a hidden smile.

  “Really?” she asked. “How long has it lasted, this bad patch?”

  “A couple of years.”

  “Get over it.”

  * * *

  As coincidence would have it, Grand Gourmet was located on Grand Avenue about a half mile from my apartment. Given the parking issues along the street, I might have been better off driving to my place and walking there.

  The tinkling of a bell greeted me as I passed through the front door, followed by the aroma of dozens of exotic spices all fighting for attention. The spices were set out on wire shelves, along with jars, bags, and boxes of cheeses, flavored vinegars, mustards, assorted sugars, salsa, a myriad of snack foods that I had never heard of, and an astounding amount of fine chocolate, all selling at heart-stopping prices. A young woman—at least she was younger than I was—stood behind a glass counter next to a stack of thick pamphlets with the title Fancy Food Creations. She was short and plump, with a smile as bright as the store’s art deco lights.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Ms. Carrell.”

  “I’m Lisa Carrell.”

  I flashed my ID at her and added my name.

  “I’m investigating the murder of Emily Denys,” I said.

  The smile faded as she glanced around the shop.

  “I don’t want to bother my customers with this,” she said. Satisfied that we were alone, she added, “I can’t leave because my partner is on her lunch break.”

  “I’ll try not to be an imposition.”

  “Besides, I don’t know what I can tell you that I haven’t already told the other cops.”

  Other cops. It’s against the law to pretend to be a police officer. ’Course, I never actually said I was, did I?

  “I know you weren’t present when the shooting took place,” I said.

  “I was with friends. You can call them.”

  “What I was hoping is that you could tell me about Emily. Did you spend much time with her?”

  “Not a lot. I usually work the night shift, and she worked days, so … Sometimes, though, on the weekends when neither of us had anything going on, we’d get together and drink wine and binge-watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sometimes Mickie would join us, when she was in town, that is. That’s my roommate, Mickie Umland. Emily tried to get me to go to the gym with her”—Lisa gave me the name, and I wrote it down—“but honestly, I don’t have the time.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “This and that. When is the funeral, do you know? I’ve been looking for a listing…”

  “There’s some question as to her identity. Until he knows who Emily was for sure, the medical examiner probably won’t release the body.”

  “I don’t get it. She was from Albert Lea. She had people there.”

  “Have you met any of them? Do you know their names?”

  “No. I just, I guess I just assumed from what Em told me.”

  “Did she ever tell you any stories about her family, about growing up in Albert Lea?”

  “Not Albert Lea, I guess. She did tell me about going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan once when Lake Superior was like bathwater; that it was so warm that year you could just walk into it, which astounded everybody.”

  “What was she doing there?”

  “I dunno. Vacation, I guess.”

  “With her family?”

  “With her dad. I got the impression that Emily didn’t have a mother growing up. She never said anything specific, just the impression I got. I don’t know if she died or abandoned her or what.”

  “Do you remember the conversation?”

  “I was upset at my mother. She’s such a … My partner and I have been running this business … Our fourth anniversary is in September, okay? Every year has been better than the previous year. We’re doing really well. Yet my mother keeps waiting for it to collapse. She kept telling us what a stupid idea it was to start a business in a down economy, and now she’s praying for it to go bust so she can say she told us so. Four years this has been going on. One day I just lost it and said I’d pay real money to put her in the ground, and Emily said she wa
s surprised by how many women she knew hated their mothers and it made her feel left out. I asked if she actually liked her mother, but she didn’t answer.”

  “Did she mention her father’s name?”

  “Dad. She called him Dad and sometimes the old man, but mostly Dad.”

  “Do you know what he did for a living?”

  “I got the impression that he worked for the government.”

  “Why?”

  “Emily said he really hated the government, and for some reason I thought that was because he worked for it.”

  “City, state, federal?”

  “Sorry.”

  It went on like that for another ten minutes. Lisa had very little specific information to offer, only impressions.

  “What about your roommate?” I asked.

  “Mickie’s a flight attendant, and she’s home only ten or eleven days out of the month and rarely more than two days in a row, which makes her a perfect roommate, if you know what I mean. When she’s home it’s usually all day, so … I don’t know what she and Em talked about or if they talked much at all. You can ask her.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know. I can never keep track of her schedule. I don’t know how she keeps track. Mickie’s on reserve, so she doesn’t always know what her schedule is, where she’s flying to or when. Sometimes they call her two hours before the plane is scheduled to take off. She should be home tomorrow, though, if you want to drop by the duplex.”

  I thanked her, gave her my card, told her to contact me if any other impressions came to mind, and thanked her again. Lisa called out as I went to the door.

  “One thing I know for sure. Emily was a Packer Backer. She loved the Green Bay Packers. I told her that it was sacrilege, a Minnesota girl rooting for any Wisconsin team. She said something about how you could have her Aaron Rodgers jersey when you pulled it from her cold, dead fingers.”

  * * *

  I requested Emily Denys’s complete employment history at the megabookstore, with emphasis on those days when she didn’t report to work. Her supervisor wasn’t sure she should give it up.

  “What do you want it for?” she asked.

  “Because it’s important that we have all the information correct for the trial,” I said. It sounds absurd, I know, yet it worked. It usually does. Most of the time when you begin an explanation with the word “because,” people stop listening. They hear the word, which they translate to mean “there’s a good reason to do this, go ahead,” and tune out the rest. If you don’t believe me, try it sometime.