Mayhem, Mystery and Murder

by John A. Broussard

  I got her to draw me a map to show where she had seen him and what direction he was walking at the time.

  A question about his girlfriend produced something more positive. She had called once when Shane wasn’t there and had left a message. It had apparently been early in their relationship. Sehena had copied down the phone number, which she managed to retrieve from a notepad, and I was pleased to see she’d also copied down the name. Callie Freitas. Some of my relatives were named Freitas, but Callie didn’t sound familiar.

  Before we left, we made arrangements to come back the following afternoon to pack up Shane’s belongings, most of which were destined for the local thrift shop. In the meantime, I’d made contact with Callie and got her OK to come over the next morning. It was now looking as though the Walker case was going to occupy more of my time than I had first thought.

  Back at the office it was getting late, and I scrambled to get stuff together for the temp who was due in the next day for the twice-weekly cleanup of all the odds and ends I usually neglected—mostly letters to current clients, bringing them up to date, and past clients, asking them to bring their payments up to date. In the meantime, Squirt was busy plugging in cables, punching keys, and feeding disks into Shane’s computer. When it looked as though I was finally catching up with my work, I asked him if he’d found a suicide letter yet.

  I doubt that he heard me and, if he had, he would have ignored my sarcasm anyway. What he did say didn’t mean much to me at the time. It did later. “You know, Uncle Tony, he erased everything on the hard disk. Now why would he have done that?”

  Since I’m not really too sure what a hard disk is or what it’s supposed to do in a computer, I just grunted. Squirt’s good at ignoring my grunts, too.

  “Something else,” he continued, “Everybody who owns a computer has CD’s or floppies. I didn’t think to look for any when I was at his apartment, but he should have had some, and they should have been sitting right out there beside the computer.”

  “Easy enough to find out,” I said, punching in the Cumisky/Kalakama number.

  By the time I hung up, I was becoming intrigued with what Squirt had stumbled across. “Wallace says he remembers seeing some in Shane’s room a week or so ago. They were in a container that looked something like a lunch pail. They aren’t there now.”

  Squirt turned around to look at me. “Cleaning out his hard disk might make some sense, but getting rid of his backup disks makes no sense at all.”

  I smirked. “Maybe he took them along swimming on that last day.”

  Squirt didn’t appreciate my humor, so I added, “Sharks ate ‘em, I’ll bet.”

  He liked that comment even less.

  ***

  I’d prepared Callie for a trio, but from the look she gave us when she answered the door, I think we were still a bit overwhelming. I must admit I was surprised by her appearance. Later, Lin told me that Callie didn’t look like the kind of woman Shane would have been interested in. Squirt added his comment, naturally.

  Callie Freitas was an abnormally thin woman who seemed to be somewhere in her early thirties. There was a tired expression on her rather pretty face that indicated it had seen a lot in its day. What she told us later fit in with that first impression. The apartment wasn’t much more than a large single room with a divider separating a tiny kitchen from a living/dining/sleeping room where a daybed filled in as a sofa in the daytime and a bed at night. There was a smell of cigarette smoke in the air. She waved us over to the daybed while she sat back on a futon after offering and serving us coffee (me) and soft drinks (Lin and Squirt).

  With the preliminaries out of the way—we found out that we were related… very remotely—Callie didn’t wait for any questions about Shane. “I can’t believe he’s dead,” she said.

  “Can you tell us anything about him? Where he worked, for instance?”

  She shook her head. “He never said very much about himself.” I was getting tired of hearing that refrain. She turned toward Lin. “But he was a very nice person.” Saying that, she lit a cigarette from a packet that had been lying on the table. With a half smile, she added, “He was trying to make me quit this habit. I kept telling him I’d had a lot worse than this one.” She blew a streamer of smoke up toward the ceiling and followed it with her eyes.

  “Had you known him for long?”

  “A couple of months. We kind of drifted together. He sat at my table at Chen Su’s when it was crowded one day. We got to talking. One thing led to another. You know how it is.”

  “Did you see him that last day?”

  “I did that morning. He’d stayed overnight, which he didn’t often do.”

  “Did he seem any different than usual?” From the corner of my eye, I could see Squirt surveying the surroundings, undoubtedly looking for a computer, but the only electronic gadgets in the room were a TV and VCR. It kept him busy, however, and he didn’t try to butt in with questions.

  In the meantime, Callie seemed to be mulling over what I’d asked her. Hesitantly, she finally said, “There was something. I’m not sure what it was. He seemed to be worried about something. Well, maybe not worried, but concerned. Yeah. And he did say something about having to make an important decision later that day. I didn’t ask him about it, since—as I said—he never talked much about himself.”

  As we were leaving, Callie rounded up a brown paper sack and handed it to Lin. “This is about all he left here.” They looked at each other and I could see the tears at the edge of Callie’s eyes. They hugged for a moment before we left.

  After we settled into the car, Lin—her own eyes kind of moist—checked out the sack. “Mostly clothes,” she said, and we went on to compare impressions about Callie.

  Squirt, in the back seat, leaned over and said “ice.” Lin looked baffled. I clarified. “Crystal meth. I think they call it ‘speed’ on the mainland. Morty’s probably right. But she doesn’t look like she’s still on it. Maybe suffering from the after effects. That must have been what she was referring to as worse than cigarettes.” The next question was an obvious one, but I hesitated for a moment before asking it.

  “Definitely no,” Lin said, reading my mind. “Shane didn’t smoke, drink or do any kind of drugs. I did the usual in college. Smoked some pot. But he wouldn’t touch it, and he was upset that I’d even tried it.”

  “So what attracted him to Callie?” In the back of my mind I’d been thinking that junkies hang out together.

  “Exactly that. My guess is that he wanted to reform her. You heard what she said about his attitude toward her smoking. Shane was that kind of a guy. Given a different family, he might have become a missionary. He really had strong principles.” During all this, Squirt was surprisingly quiet. I knew he’d be making up for all that silence by the time we got back to the office.

  “What’s next?” Lin asked, as I was driving her back to the hotel.

  I tried not to be discouraging, but I had to tell her that my call to the lifeguard had come up with a strong negative on cramps. “The kind of swimmer he was, he would never have panicked. The guard told me he’d have just floated until the pain eased. Besides, if he’d been in that kind of trouble, he knew that all he had to do was to splash around and the guard would have seen him and been out there in no time.”

  After passing along that information, I got her talking about her plans. I knew she was making final arrangements regarding Shane’s remains. They had agreed long ago. No ceremony. Cremation. Return of the ashes to the family plot. Even that minimal amount of ritual was going to keep Lin busy for the next day or so.

  For us—me and Squirt—this was the beginning of the tedious work. With Lin’s signature and a copy of Shane’s death certificate, we would be off on his work trail, if any—via his social security number—and then we’d be checking his credit rating, his ATM withdrawals and deposits, police records, draft registration and on and on. Squirt was the expert in that field, since that was straight computer work.
/>   For me, it was going to be a lot of legwork. Someone, somewhere along the way between Shane’s apartment and the warehouse district, should have seen him if he made that trip regularly. Just possibly, I could trace his steps to something vaguely resembling a chem lab. That and a preliminary search through the yellow pages might turn up a worthwhile lead.

  Early the next morning, the two of us settled down to our respective tasks, only to be interrupted by two independent but related phone calls. The first was from Sehena.

  “Mr. Souza, I got to thinking about that box of computer disks, and after talking it over with Wallace, we both agreed that we saw it in Shane’s room the day he drowned. That afternoon.”

  I waited.

  “We didn’t tell you when you were here. Mostly because we didn’t think it had anything to do with Shane.”

  I kept waiting. What she as saying didn’t make any sense.

  Sehena seemed upset, and sounded confused. She was certainly confusing. “We didn’t even report it to the police because we didn’t notice anything missing at the time. And we didn’t want the police searching the apartment.”

  For good reason, I thought. There were few young people their age on Elima who didn’t have at least a small stash squirreled away. I waited some more.

  “As I said, when you were here, we didn’t think the break-in had anything to do with Shane. But then, maybe it did. You see, someone did break into the apartment the day after he drowned.”

  I saw, and so did Squirt when I told him the news.

  His eyes lit up. “Shane didn’t erase his hard disk. Someone else did. And that someone took his disks. And that someone killed Shane because he knew what was on the disks.”

  I guffawed. “Now all we have to do is to figure out what the information was, who destroyed it, and how they killed Shane. All of that is assuming you’re right, of course.”

  As usual, Squirt was only half listening to me. “If only we had that information.”

  I was still laughing when the phone rang. It was Lin, with the second incident of the day.

  “You know that sack Callie gave me, yesterday, Tony?”

  I nodded at the phone and remembered to say yes.

  “There was more than a toothbrush and clothes in it. There was a CD at the bottom.”

  It was my turn to have my eyes light up. I covered the mouthpiece and shouted over to Squirt, who was already back at his computer. “You’ve got your wish. Lin found a CD in that bag from Callie’s apartment.” Into the phone, I said, “We’ll be right there.” Squirt was already on his way out to the car.

  Lin and I stood over his shoulder, after the three of us had raced back to the office, but all we got was a headshake. “He used a password to store it.”

  “Can you figure it out?” Lin asked.

  “Yes. But it’s going to take time. I’ll try the easy stuff first, then I’ll start in running combinations. Write out anything you can think of that he might have used, or any that you know he used in the past. The names of pets, your mother’s maiden name, nicknames—anything like that. Find out his ATM pin number. And give me his social security number. Fortunately, he didn’t have a fingerprint recognition system. That would have been really tough to break.”

  I gave up watching pretty quickly. Computer screens give me a headache. Lin followed suit shortly afterwards. Squirt, on the other hand, was lost in his wonderland. I knew I’d have to make him break for lunch, since my sister would give me hell if I fed him any more pizza to stuff himself with while sitting in front of the monitor.

  For lack of anything better to do, and since the yellow pages had been no help at all, I decided to start out on the trek looking for the supposed lab. Lin asked if she could join in the search, and I wasn’t about to turn down the company of a lovely woman. Armed with Shane’s photo, we set off. I’m sure Squirt never even noticed our departure, which should clue you in on how much of a computer nut he is.

  Most of the route was through the commercial district, so we kept hitting stores where I identified myself, showed the photo and got a lot of headshakes. A half hour or so into our search, we hit pay dirt. Lin was the first to recognize it. She pointed ahead to a restaurant sign reading “Chen Su.” It took a moment for me to remember.

  “I should have thought to start there,” I said, not exactly pleased with my performance as an investigator that morning.

  Added to our luck was the fact that I knew the proprietor, Sally Wing. Living in a small community has its advantages. A few years back she had used my services to track down the assets of someone she had a court judgment against and, since that time, had evidently prospered sufficiently to buy out Chen Su. Yes, she recognized the photo. Yes, he had frequently dropped by for breakfast, but hadn’t been by for several days. He was nice. Always left a generous tip. No, she had never seen him with anyone else that she could remember. And, of course, the final and familiar refrain. “He never said much about himself. I’ve no idea where he worked.”

  We trekked on. Sheer good luck was with us this time and produced a truck driver backed up to a warehouse platform who immediately recognized the photo. “Yep. I was stalled over at that corner.” He indicated the direction with his head. “Right in the middle of the intersection. I was under the hood, trying to get the old rig started. He asked if he could help. As it turned out, he could. I needed someone in the cab to hold down the gas pedal. He did, and I thanked him.”

  No, he didn’t know anything else about him except that he seemed to be a “nice guy.” “He didn’t say much. Walked away as soon as he was sure the truck would keep running.”

  I was getting desperate as I asked, “You didn’t by any chance see which direction he went?”

  “Sure did.” The trucker pointed to an alley running behind one of the buildings. “He went in there. Waved at me when I drove by.”

  My cell phone rang just at that moment. Squirt’s voice had an even higher pitch than usual. “Got it! I’m running it off on the printer right now.”

  Two breaks all at once. Since we were already there, Lin and I decided to explore the alley, Hulia Place, first. That lead became a dead end, fast, but did still seemed to be only a temporary setback. There were only three doors off what turned out to be a cul de sac. One was the back entrance to a tavern, another—a big gray door with the faded street number of 38-012 on it—was locked, with no indication of what was behind it and no answer to my knocks. The third one was a mail order photo lab. The owner neither knew nor cared what establishment was behind the locked door. He shook his head over the photo we produced, and he made it very clear that he had a business of his own to tend to and didn’t spend time out in the alley minding other people’s businesses.

  The tavern owner was friendlier, mainly because we loomed as potential customers on what was obviously a very slow morning. Friendliness didn’t help much, though. He didn’t recognize Shane, and couldn’t tell us anything about his neighbor except that he’d moved in about two months before, accompanied by a couple of truckloads of crated material.

  So it was back to the office. At least I now had a street address and the mysterious contents of that CD. Thirty seconds of looking at the twenty-page fanfold printout convinced me that I couldn’t do worse with the street address. I looked at Squirt. He shrugged and said, “Chemical symbols.” Lin agreed with him, saying she’d seen enough of Shane’s textbooks to recognize them for that, but didn’t have any inkling of what they stood for.

  While I was looking discouraged, she was looking thoughtful and said, “I know someone who could tell us what they mean. Her name’s Irene Lattimore—Shane’s chem prof back at the U. I’ve heard she’s tops in her field. She was terribly disappointed when Shane decided to drop out of college. She’d told him he really had an aptitude for chemistry. We could send this to her, care of the college, and I’m sure she’d get it. I know her, because we’d talked about Shane’s future, so I could ask her to look at it.”

  Lin hesitated
before continuing. “I’ll just tell her this is something Shane developed. I’m not going to tell her about what happened to him. I don’t much feel like explaining what happened or what we’re trying to do.”

  I didn’t really understand, but I shrugged and turned to Squirt. “Is there any way you can send this and Lin’s cover letter to the prof?”

  “Piece of cake.” The way he said it made it sound like I didn’t know beans about the capabilities of computers. He was right about that, of course.

  Since the e-mail would be reaching the East Coast sometime after business hours, and because my stomach was telling me it was past lunchtime, I ordered a takeout while Squirt hit a half dozen buttons and had the message along with the letter on their way. It was while we were digging into the chow mein that Squirt dropped a bomblet. Speaking with his mouthful, he said, “There was some text on that CD, too.”

  I stopped with my chopsticks halfway up to my mouth, but Lin beat me to the question. “C’mon Morty. Quit holding out. What did it say?”

  Morty swallowed, choked and finally managed to croak out. “I don’t know. It’s encrypted.”

  “And what does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means Shane didn’t want anyone else to be able to read it, Uncle Tony.” He grinned and added, “Not even me.”

  “Can you figure it out?”

  “It’s not like a password. That’s pretty easy. But encryptions can be real grizzlies. I belong to a group on the internet that likes to play around with that stuff. Some of those guys are top flight gurus when it comes to secret codes.”

  “Send it to them!”

  He grinned, and almost choked on another mouthful of noodles. “I already did,” he said, after the worst of the coughing was over.

  After we’d cleared away the dishes, which meant dumping the containers into the wastebasket, Squirt went to work on the routine business, checking the tax map key to locate the owner of the mystery shop, then running down the address of the result—Martinson Properties, Inc. And that meant I had to work my way through various layers of the company to find someone who would be willing to give me the name and address of the renter, something which could be like pulling eye teeth, but which was comparatively easy this time.