“That I can believe. Also your preferring work to playing games. I had no idea I was talking to a corporation. Was this story a coming-out, or did the Etlingers know?”
“Of course they knew—they’re a corporation themselves, and it’s the corporate me they signed on as an independent contractor. It’s no big deal.”
“I didn’t quite get what this other thing you do—rehabbing land?—is all about.”
“Well, you start with a property that doesn’t look like anybody would want to own it. Which usually means you can pick it up cheap from whoever does own it. Then you do some reshaping to bring out its good features and sell it for lots more than you paid.”
He looked skeptical. “It’s amazing every square inch of America hasn’t been prettied up, if it’s that simple.”
“Did I say simple? First you need to know the area. Really know it: zoning and all the other externals, the general economy, what’s on the boards in the way of development. Then the key is to find a property that has good bone structure. Twenty-nine out of thirty are every bit as hopeless as they look. Go to contract, make yourself a plan, and tear in. I have a talent for exposing those bones, and I enjoy physical work. I also enjoy making money. Garden designing rewards the soul more richly than the pocketbook. So I’ve been affiliating with places like the Garden Center for that type of work and doing the land improvements on my own. Now I’ll be doing both on my own.”
“Do you have any rehab properties around here?”
“One over near Bolton Lake that I picked up last year. I used to think of this property we’re standing on that way.” It was the first time I’d past-tensed it out loud, though I’d more or less known for a while.
“It’s definitely a keeper. By the way, I still don’t know who number seven was up north.”
I burst out laughing. “Calvin was right yesterday—he said you just have to keep nosing around until you find out how everything goes together.”
He didn’t even look embarrassed. “So?”
“So your missing character’s name is Jason. Vicky has four children: Gina, who’s twenty-three, Jason, who’s fifteen, and the two you’ve seen. She loves them all dearly. Alex and Galen live down here because Vicky’s not well and Jason’s … difficult. Anything else I can tell you?”
“How about which button to push to get you started? Calvin extracted a couple of candid assessments out of you, plus some hints on how to do our jobs.”
“I don’t recall you asking if I thought Johnny or Skip were hot suspects. I’d have told you no. Now that you mention it, I wouldn’t put anybody else who works for the Etlingers on my top ten list either.”
“You could be right. But, Val, not every murderer kills for well-thought-out reasons, and sometimes stupid people get lucky. Besides, if you decide one person’s not worth talking to, you may be overlooking a critical piece of information. I gather you think we don’t have the entire picture on his finances?”
“The man was making close to fifty thou, and he wasn’t visibly spending anywhere near that much. Unless he had some heavy obligations back in Watertown, I’ll bet you a month of fishing rights on the creek he was squirreling something away somewhere.”
“I sent a man up to Watertown. Ryan was raised in the area, went to business college, worked for one firm a few years, went on to another at a pretty good jump in salary. They hardly remember him at the first place and didn’t have much to say about him at the second. Father’s dead, mother’s in a nursing home on Medicaid and pretty much out of it. There’s one brother, eleven years older, lives in Colorado; they weren’t close. Ryan never married or fathered any kids, at least officially. He rented an apartment, bought a car every few years, nothing fancy; his license was clean. He belonged to the same two service groups he joined here. Oh, and somebody remembered he liked to hunt. By himself.”
“Sounds like he never did have any people skills. I’ve been wondering if the Garden Center books would shed any light on what got him into trouble.”
“The Etlingers reluctantly turned them over this morning. Our department auditor is taking a look.”
“Is there any chance I could, too? Since I know quite a bit about the operation—”
“Val, I can’t authorize that. Which doesn’t mean I don’t need all the help I can extract from you. The physical evidence has given us about all it’s going to, which is pathetically little.”
“And where does that leave you?”
“Pretty much where I was: convinced that it was a thoughtfully planned and well-executed operation, involving at least two people. They should have rubbed some of your driveway dirt into Ryan’s sneaker treads. But frankly, if you hadn’t been able to substantiate your alibi, they wouldn’t have much to worry about at this point.”
“I should write Schwarzenegger and the Tonight Show thank-you notes.”
“You should also try harder to aid and abet your friendly local sheriff.”
I frowned. “Not by analyzing Ryan’s books, obviously.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of analyzing people.”
“You mean gossip about them? Jack Garrett was trying to pull me into that, too. It’s really not my thing. If we compared lists of people who might have killed Ryan, wouldn’t they have pretty much the same names on them? I honestly don’t suspect anyone in particular more than the others.”
“But you may know something I can put together with something else and build on.”
“Well, I could make some assessments people wouldn’t like much, or want to have circulating. I couldn’t begin to guess which, if any, of them might be connected to the murder. Sorry, but I’m not comfortable dissing somebody for no good reason.”
“Even people who aren’t exactly reluctant to diss you? You should give it some thought, Val. If we don’t find out who killed Ryan Jessup I doubt you’ll ever get to uncork any celebratory champagne. At least not around here.”
CHAPTER 10
At what point did I decide to raid the Garden Center that night? Obviously such an excursion had been a theoretical prospect when I hit Skip about bringing him figures—I wasn’t expecting to saunter in during business hours and ask for them. But the follow-through hadn’t yet been on my conscious horizon.
It started moving into view when Baxter reminded me of the limitations of official clearance when there wasn’t a declared suspect on the boards to replace me. I’d already encountered a few people who’d seemed less than certain of my innocence. Face it: My alibi did not sound impressively solid. I could easily imagine Clete’s dismissal: “They’re taking the word of a couple of little spics?” There’d be at least a few loud echoes, and lord knows how many silent nods of agreement.
Still, it required a couple of hours of not getting into my Platteville garden design to acknowledge a timetable. I must be slowing down.
Points for: I hadn’t turned in my keys; the side door is not visible from Route 5; if anybody was working extra late, I’d see the lights in plenty of time to abort; some of those figures I knew exactly how to get. Then there was my still-unfocused Ryan memory. I’d kept trying to sneak up on it and was pretty sure, at least, that it hadn’t been a conversation. Something I saw. The only aspect of the scene I’d been able to clarify was that it was lit by fluorescent lights, and the Garden Center was the most likely place I’d have seen Ryan in that kind of setting. Granted it was a reach, but maybe if I walked around, pausing at different spots, I’d manage to land on the right one and more of the image would come back?
Points against: This would not be what Baxter had in mind by all the help I could give him. I could get into trouble. I could make the killers nervous.
But only if I got caught. The figures, should they turn out to be significant, I could fudge sources for. And if I found my memory, it wouldn’t be necessary to tell Baxter where.
And after three days, an investigation without any named or even seriously hinted-at suspects except the officially discounted one is
not zooming along.
I have never been a passive person.
The village of Pinehaven is rarely a hub of activity on a Sunday night, but one of the two restaurants you could figure on staying open until at least ten was across the side street from the Garden Center. It wouldn’t be a good idea to either drive or walk there before, say, eleven. Not a good idea to take the Bronco into the parking lot, either—it’s fairly exposed. That wouldn’t erect a major hurdle; I could park in front of the apartment complex a ways back on the side street, among a bunch of other cars.
So that’s where I was a little after eleven-thirty, dressed dark right down to my Reeboks and the clingy, lightweight but tough gloves I use when I chop wood. It’s a tree-lined street with shrubby front yards, no sizable open spaces to isolate an innocent pedestrian in the streetlights’ soft orange glow. Not a soul was out, and hardly anyone’s front windows were lit. I pretended I was strolling just in case anyone noticed.
The Garden Center had trip alarms for its front doors and windows and a padlocked grill across the wide door in back. Securing the unalarmed side door, chiefly an employee entrance, were two sturdy locks, for which I held two keys, unless those locks had been changed. Nope—I was inside in no more than thirty seconds.
Knowing the layout, I tried to direct my flashlight not to show from outside. Grant Oldham’s desk was my first stop. It was easy to access what I wanted—I’d showed him how to set up his plant data on the computer and I knew his password. In five minutes, tops, I folded the printout and stuck it in a jeans pocket.
Everything else would be in hardcopy to start with. Kate sent around decorated quarterly reports on the store, a lot of fluff but even more figures—she was seriously into spreadsheets. The last several of those I separated out from the miscellany in my bottom desk drawer. Etlingers’ was a paper-generating outfit. My policy had been that when the drawer no longer opened without a struggle I threw everything out and started over.
Rodney’s office was next. Though forbidden to play with the books anymore, he was acknowledged to be good at designing financial statements. They’d needed one for the Hudson Heights bid, and I knew he’d done a revamped version last spring for their largest plant-materials supplier, part of a pitch to upgrade their credit line. The first file drawer I tried was locked; several unlocked drawers later I found copies of both statements. That locked drawer intrigued me, but I had no idea how to get in, short of prying it open, and I didn’t intend to make an announcement of my presence.
By then I’d been inside maybe fifteen minutes, had not picked up any vibes on my Ryan memory, and was starting to feel edgy. So moving right along, what about their overhead? Rodney’s statements contained numbers in some of the categories, but honest ones? Not what he was known for. I moved out into the communal clutter where the two women who did clerk-type things sat and I opened a couple of file cabinets. Utility bills, folders and folders of them, going back years; I came up with two that had year-end summaries, because of the interest charges. Mortgage statements. It took too long for comfort to find any pertaining to a loan, and then it was only the newest one, taken out in 1993. Another cabinet yielded a bonanza: payroll lists with yearly running totals. My pants pockets were overstuffed and tight. Had I gotten enough for Skip? There must be more on the debt; they had at least one other large loan out somewhere. I assumed corporate tax filings were under lock and key. As would be an accurate analysis of their debt picture, if one existed. Realistically, what I already had was about as much as I could expect to find. There was only one more area to check—then I was out of there.
Ryan’s office was semiprivate—it had a back wall, side walls, and an open front. He’d stacked up file cabinets on both sides to narrow the entrance. I stood in it. Did any of his files need checking? I decided not. Given Ryan’s mania for secrecy, anything worth looking at would be well secured. His rectangle was not much deeper than it was wide, with a tall window in the outside wall, which was on the front of the building. He’d had room to move around—the desk and those stacked file cabinets were his only furniture except for a utilitarian visitor’s chair and a waist-high, yard-wide three-shelf wooden bookcase. Accounting textbooks occupied most of it; there were also the American Horticultural Society’s Encyclopedia of Gardening (for show, I could only imagine) and a couple of technical nursery-business titles. The walls were undecorated—not a picture, cartoon, map, or memo. Except for the exposed computer monitor, his desktop, normally tidy, had become small bulges covered with spread newspapers. His telephone was on the floor, his Rolodex transferred to the windowsill, next to—
That was it! My out-of-character vision. I’d idly glanced in one day on my way to somewhere else, and there was Ryan, on his knees, doing something to his tall, leggy rubber plant. Tell me what’s wrong with this picture? Ryan had zilch interest in plants—it was remarkable that he suffered one in his office. This was not a good-looking specimen, and its pot was two or three sizes too large. It would be hard to think of a good reason for a plant lover to be playing around in its soil. Why had a non–plant lover been doing that?
Moving into the room, I pulled the drapes across the window—not a perfect closure, but my light would be shining down, away from it. I knelt where Ryan had, illuminated that area of the pot. The surface looked uniform. When I started probing beneath it near the pot rim, the soil was bone-dry, its texture much lighter than you’d expect. Sure enough, six inches farther in toward the center things felt normally dense and slightly moist. My probing fingers found the upright barrier—plastic, I deduced—topping off a couple of inches below the soil surface and traced its curve. No wonder the pot was so large—he’d made himself a sizable side pocket.
Digging deeper, trying not to spill dirt, I touched the top of and soon extracted a flexible zippered pouch, maybe nine by twelve and expandable. It was made of some high-tech material—light, shiny, and presumably waterproof. Eagerly, I opened it. Inside was a bundle of triple-folded papers and a journal, of the financial rather than literary sort. Slipping off the rubber band I leafed through the papers. All of them were quarterly statements, from two different brokers, the last pair dated July 1. Over a nine-year period he’d accumulated close to $60,000.
The journal consisted of page after similar page of entries in Ryan’s precise, small hand, dating back to his late-teenage years. The story of his life, in a way, at quick glance a pretty dull one. Coming to the last page, I let out an involuntary “Shit!” loud enough to startle myself. It was for the previous February. In the light from the flash it looked like a genuine last page, but to be sure I peeled off my right glove and ran a finger along the spine—that kind of binding, you can never get the pages out entirely clean. The line was smooth as could be.
Conceivably Ryan had kept Book 2—it would have been, after all, a work in progress—in a more easily accessible place. Conceivably he’d decided to go with some other form of record keeping—there’s lots of computer software around to make that type of data much more fluent, and they’ll do your math for you, besides. Or else Book 2 had, until recently, resided with its predecessor in that shiny packet, and I hadn’t been the first to check out a curious observation of Ryan and his rubber tree.
My vote went to possibility number three, but in terms of practical considerations it didn’t immediately matter. My vision of handing Baxter a neat package of answers had turned into a bitch of a pass-along problem.
Frustrated, I set the journal and papers down and rummaged deeper into the soil. I was still trying for neatness, though extracting the packet had already sprayed small globules of soil onto the carpet. I soon established that there wasn’t any other sizable object down there. Doing a fine sift, I sprinkled handful after rejected handful of soil back on the surface, away from Ryan’s pocket. I’d almost run out of anything to sift when I felt it. Small, metallic—I couldn’t really tell it was a key until I pulled it out and looked. The first thing that came to mind was it would fit a suitcase lock. May
be a safe-deposit box? The one to my box was a lot heavier. A locker, a padlock, a post office box? Any of those, possibly. I could rule out our local post office, the key was the wrong shape, but I knew from experience there were different vintages of boxes, with different specs.
My speculations were aborted by a banging from farther along the front of the building—the store entrance, it sounded like. I must have gotten incautious with my light. Dousing it, I grabbed up the journal, statements, and packet and bumped my way along the walls to the side door. Taking a deep breath, I opened it. There was no one in sight. Before that could change, I sprinted across the wide driveway and crouched behind a grown-together row of mugho pines. It couldn’t have been more than half a minute before a cop in a sheriff’s department uniform came around from the front, tried the side door, and, finding it unlocked, cautiously stepped into the building.
It might be a long time before I’d have a better chance. A little spurt and I was around the corner of the Garden Center lot and back on the side street. From there I forced myself to walk. It felt much, much longer than it had coming the other way, but I made it uneventfully to the Bronco, started it, and got the hell out of there. Unnoticed, as far as I could tell.
Not that this was likely to matter. Back home, taking inventory, I found the flaw in my escape, what I ought to have had two of but didn’t. I could visualize exactly where I’d left the other one. If Baxter was as observant as I’d pegged him to be, I’d probably be seeing him soon.
Opening a beer, I assembled the Garden Center financial papers and scanned them, drawing only one mildly surprising conclusion: for all Kate’s positive claims, the store was still losing money. I went on to study the contents of the journal and brokers’ statements more carefully; I got out my files to do a couple of comparisons. That finished, I put everything away and just sat there for a few minutes, aimlessly waiting. Maybe he’d missed what I’d left behind, or failed to recognize it? Maybe I could try for a good night’s sleep? I didn’t believe that strongly enough to undress, but it wouldn’t hurt to lie down.
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