by Lynn Bulock
I suspected it was the staff, and could more than likely guess the person who cleaned up, although I didn’t know her name. Most afternoons and evenings that I’d been at the care center the same Latino woman, slight, neat and mostly silent, came through the entire wing. She mopped every floor and emptied the untold tons of trash that accumulated in the place. It made me feel bad at this point that I’d seen her for this many months and still didn’t know her name.
With her on duty, staff cleanup was more likely, unless some patient on the hall had been “sinking fast” as Granny Lou would have said. During those times, a lot of the family members dealt with their antsy spells by tidying up the lounge. Right after Christmas, when one dear old soul had a series of small strokes over the course of a week, her daughter and daughter-in-law had done everything in here but crochet doilies for the vinyl couches.
Still, it would be hard to show any proof to this detective that Edna and Becca had been with us all morning. I hoped that Kara and the rest of the nursing staff had seen them coming in and out.
It still bothered me that Edna’s purse was gone. There hadn’t been any reports of stuff going missing the entire time Dennis had been here, so I had to discount theft. That meant that Edna, and maybe even Becca, had been here when Linnette and I had come up. Where had they been, and how had anyone gotten back in the room to get that purse?
I was still working that over in my mind when Linnette and Detective Fernandez came out of the kitchenette, looking chummy as old friends. “I’ll let you get on back to work now, Ms. Parks. I’ve got all your phone numbers and until we know differently, you’re a material witness, so don’t leave town.” He seemed to be perfectly serious and Linnette nodded and shook hands with him.
She stood in the room halfway between Heather and my corner. “You heard the man. I’m heading out of here. But either of you, call me if you need anything. Okay?” We both nodded, and she left.
“So what happens next?” Okay, being blunt might not endear me to this police officer. At this point I figured nothing I did was going to endear me to him. Heather certainly wasn’t in any shape to ask questions and somebody had to.
“Next we stay right here until the evidence techs finish up across the hall, and the ME—that would be the medical examiner—has come and gone. I watch all of that going on in between talking to you two, and we decide who’s going to go back to the station with me.”
I hadn’t considered that part. Did this mean that this was really a homicide, and Heather and I were suspects? It was a scary prospect and getting more likely every minute.
“Are you going to try and find Becca and Edna?” I certainly wasn’t going through all this alone when they’d spent the morning with us, not if I had to.
“I’ll do what I can without leaving here. But none of the three of us are leaving this building until after Mr. Peete has been transported to the morgue. After that we’ll be leaving together.”
Heather was heading toward the exit again. She had a look on her face that was getting familiar by now. “She’s not trying to flee,” I told the surprised detective. “She’s had stomach problems every hour or two since I met her last night. Some pregnant women do. If you want me to follow her, I will. Or we both can.”
He headed toward the door himself. “Let’s do that. I don’t really want to let her out of sight long at this point.”
He was going to have to let her out of sight for a few minutes, given where she was headed. I got the feeling that Detective Ray Fernandez had a challenging day in front of him dealing with Heather. He didn’t look like the type used to sick pregnant ladies. Given his general demeanor so far, I couldn’t feel very sorry for him.
The door to the ladies’ room was still in motion when we got to it. There were signs from the other side that Heather was obviously in there doing exactly what I’d predicted. The detective stopped me at the doorway. “This is as far as either of us is going.”
“But what if she needs help?”
He looked grim. “We’ll call a nurse. They’re probably used to things like that.”
Not for that cause, but I suspected he was right. I started to open my mouth and protest that I was plenty able to help Heather take care of herself, but then it dawned on me. This guy wasn’t going to let us alone together in case we were in cahoots on whatever had led to Dennis’s death. I still thought it was likely that they’d discover that this was all a terrible mistake. I knew I didn’t kill Dennis, and it was hard to imagine that any of the others had, either.
Apparently it was easier for the detective to imagine, because we stood guard over Heather’s doorway for a solid ten minutes and then all went silently back to the family lounge once she appeared. There were several people carrying equipment and cameras going into Dennis’s room across the hall when we got back. This was going to be a very long afternoon and I was already tired of it.
4
The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department shares a facility with the Rancho Conejo municipal police. It is every bit as glamorous as you’d expect a suburban sheriff’s station to be: a big, squat tan-brick-and-concrete structure with a lot of steel and limited glass. I’d driven past the building quite a few times, but never noticed much about it before.
Now, with the prospect of seeing a lot of it from the inside, it looked even less appealing than it ever had while I was driving by. I reasoned that things couldn’t be too bad because at least Detective Fernandez had let me drive over here myself. When he discovered that Heather and I only had one car between us, he’d balked at us driving over to the station together, though. At least she sat in the front seat of his unmarked car with him on the trip. And I’d noticed following them over that he didn’t have to make any stops for her to throw up, so perhaps she was less upset than she had been before.
I was still pretty upset. This day had gone from bad to worse already and didn’t show any signs of turning around. When I pulled into the visitors’ lot at the sheriff’s station, I wondered how long my poor car would sit there before I could go home again.
The detective and Heather were waiting for me on the pavement outside the building. Pulling into the parking lot reminded me of something I’d wanted to point out to Detective Fernandez, and I hurried over to the two of them to do just that. “Her car wasn’t in the lot when we left. Edna’s car, I mean.”
“Right. An older blue sedan. I could tell you the license plate number if I looked at my notes. And you’re right—it wasn’t there, although one of the nurses who came into the building at the same time as Mrs. Peete and her granddaughter this morning did say she thought she saw them getting out of that car.”
Okay, so maybe he wasn’t as set on me or Heather as the only possible suspects as I thought. If we really were suspects. I kept hoping that somebody would turn around and say, “Oh, our mistake. Dennis wasn’t murdered after all. Everybody can go home now.” Maybe everybody was just being ultracautious so that we didn’t sue the care center for neglect, or even the hospital that had transferred him there months ago. If that were the case, though, where were Edna and Becca? There were probably a dozen good reasons why they weren’t here, but I couldn’t come up with any of them at the moment.
The detective ushered us through the front doors of the station and we went down a broad flight of stairs. It was a busy place, with folks that looked like sheriff’s deputies, other employees and regular old civilians coming and going. We went through another set of double doors downstairs, then into a waiting room. “Detective Division,” Fernandez said, motioning to the spare environment. “This is where you’ll come back to once we take your prints. I’ll take you over to processing now so that we can do that.”
It was an inky, messy process, but the woman doing the work was efficient, and she had a canister of some kind of wipes that took most of the ink off pretty quickly. Then she made one phone call and then Fernandez was back to usher us across the building again.
Detective Division still look
ed just as stark. “I have to take your statements and make a few calls. Then we’ll decide what to do next. If I can get you something to drink while you wait…”
“Nothing with caffeine in it,” Heather said. She did look frazzled enough already. “If you have any kind of lemon-lime soda, I’d take that.”
“Same here.” Maybe if I acted more agreeable for a while the detective would stop scowling at me. He got us settled in uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting room. They reminded me of the ones at Pacific Oaks, strewn through the hallways next to professors’ doorways where students waited for appointments. There was no way to settle into them comfortably.
In a moment the detective was back bearing two green cans. “I want to make two or three calls, then I’ll talk to you both. Get as comfortable as you can. It won’t take long.”
I wondered if Ray Fernandez had ever sat in these chairs. If he had, he’d know that any time in them felt like too long. Next to the doorway into what I assumed were the detectives’ offices there was a desk with a phone and computer where a young woman sat entering something on the screen. “This is Jeannie. If you need anything, tell her. That includes if you need to leave the room for any reason.” I felt like I was in junior high detention but I kept that information to myself. Still trying to be agreeable, or at least seem that way.
Ray Fernandez’s idea of a short time turned out to be twenty minutes or more. It was long enough for Heather to finish her soda, need to go to the bathroom and manage to still be gone (with the lovely Jeannie in tow) when the detective came back. His consternation was obvious when he came into the room to find me there alone. Had he expected Jeannie to take me to the bathroom along with Heather, or to call someone else to watch me?
“Detective, Ms. Taylor is over eight months pregnant. She’s tired and nervous and you gave her a full can of soda to drink. Figure it out.”
He looked confused for a split second, and then I would have sworn he almost blushed. “Ah. She and Jeannie are down the hall? Then why don’t you come back with me and make a statement?”
I followed him into another room with as much charm as the rest of the sheriff’s station. This one might have been even less attractive than anywhere but the room where we got our fingerprints taken. It was a large room split into a warren of cubicles, eight or nine at least.
A couple of the cubes were occupied with men or women, mostly on the phone or computer. More were empty. In Fernandez’s cubicle, the furniture consisted of a desk, a computer and phone much like Jeannie’s, one comfortable office chair and two more of those horrors from the front room. Of course the comfy chair was behind the desk.
The plastic ones here weren’t any more comfortable than the ones outside. I hoped I didn’t squirm too much and look uncooperative or even guilty somehow. “So, what’s the word on finding Edna?”
Fernandez sighed. “I’ll ask the questions, Ms. Harris. You provide the answers. But just once I’ll answer one of yours. We haven’t found Mrs. Peete yet. Would you know if she has an answering machine at home?”
“She doesn’t. I’ve suggested more than once that we get one, but she won’t get caller ID or an answering machine. Which means we talk to every telemarketer in three counties.”
He gave me a questioning look. “We? As in you live with your motherin-law?”
“I do. Dennis moved out here to start a business, and to save money he moved in with her. Once our home in Missouri was sold, I moved out, as well. Before we could do anything about looking for a place, Dennis had the accident that put him in Conejo Board and Care.”
His forehead creased. “I’m familiar with that. I was the detective who did the reports on that case, as well. He was driving your car, wasn’t he?”
This was more than I wanted to remember. “He was. We’d switched that morning because he said his was making a funny noise and he wanted his favorite mechanic to look at it. He took mine and by evening it was totaled and he was in the hospital.”
“During the time after the accident until today, was he ever able to speak to you about what happened?”
I wasn’t sure what this had to do with today. And if he had done the initial reports, surely he knew. “Detective, if you took the earlier notes, you know what happened. Dennis hasn’t been fully conscious since the accident.”
He tapped a pen on the desktop in a brisk rhythm. “I’m sorry, Ms. Harris, but I do have to ask questions. And if you had been more cooperative in the past few months I’d have answers to some of them already.”
“More cooperative? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Nobody ever answered the phone at your home, there was no e-mail address anywhere for you and the postcards I sent requesting that you call never got any answer, either.”
This felt like a battle brewing. “As I told you before, there’s no answering machine in the home I share with Edna, so that’s why you were out of luck on that score. I don’t remember talking to anyone afterward to have left an e-mail address with and I have never seen any postcards.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.” I was surprised at how effectively somebody with such soft brown eyes could glare.
“I will. But trust me, there hasn’t been a lot of communication between Edna and me in the past four months. She’s not much of a talker. For that matter, I hadn’t even met Dennis’s daughter, Becca, until today.”
“Not what you’d call a close family, is it?” He almost sounded sympathetic.
“To say the least. The only thing we all have in common is Dennis.” I started to get teary once I’d said that. It was dawning on me that I should have said Dennis was what we had in common. None of this seemed real yet, even when I looked down at the traces of fingerprint ink still left on my fingertips.
He seemed to sense my discomfort. “Well, we need to get going here. No sense in leaving Ms. Taylor out there any longer than necessary.”
He looked at his notes. “I think you’ve told me your legal name is Gracie Lee Harris. Is that right?”
“It is. I am—was—legally married to Dennis Peete, but I didn’t take his name.”
“Just for the record, has it ever been anything else, or do you go by any other names?”
How detailed did he want to be? I didn’t want to be accused of not cooperating again. “Well, the name on my birth certificate was Robin Anne Mitchell. That’s what my mother stuck me with, and my father let her.
“He called me Gracie, as in Grace Allen, and I added the Lee part. It always fit me better than Robin Anne. When I was seventeen I worked the entire summer and into the fall at Edward R. Spence Plastics trimming the rough edges off toy telephones. I made enough money to go down to the St. Louis County courthouse the day I turned eighteen and change my name legally to Gracie Lee Mitchell.
“The Harris part came two years later when I married Hal. I kept it after we divorced fifteen years ago, and this is all probably more information than you wanted.”
Detective Fernandez looked a little dazed. Then he cracked the edge of the first grin I’d seen. It made him look years younger. “Yeah, maybe. But it beats too little information, and I should have figured that since I’d just told you that you weren’t cooperating, you’d fill me in. Now maybe in a few less words you could explain how you and Ms. Taylor happened to arrive at the Board and Care together this morning, and what happened after that.”
Surprisingly, it did take less time to tell him all of that. There was a little bit of detail to go into on Christian Friends and what they were and how I’d found out about the group at Community Chapel. After that he’d already gotten most of the information one way or another and I was just verifying my parts in everything.
“So, when you left to cool off, as you put it, Ms. Taylor, your motherin-law and Ms. Miller were all still in the family waiting room?”
“That’s right. After lunch Dennis had physical therapy and a cleanup, both of which they preferred to do with all of us out of the room.”
“Was it usual for there to be that many people together in the family lounge?”
“Not for us. Normally it was only me or Edna. Sometimes we’d overlap. And once in a while on days I haven’t been there, she’s mentioned that Becca came to visit, too. But this was a rarity.”
“And Ms. Parks, your friend from the group you mentioned. Did she come into the building at any time?”
I started to shake my head, and then corrected myself. “Not before I met her outside. But she did come in with me when I got the phone call during our walk. After that she stayed until you got there and talked with her.”
“Do you know anyone else that would have cause to wish your husband harm?”
“Not really. I don’t think from what he said that his first wife, Carol, was all that fond of him, but I can’t see her doing anything violent. But then I’ve never met her, either. I could be wrong.”
“What about business associates?”
“If I could track them down, I’d be able to tell you more. So far that’s been one of the biggest frustrations after Dennis’s accident. He left precious few business records where anybody could find them, and his PDA never turned up after the accident.”
Fernandez gave me a strange look. “That’s because we kept it as evidence. Didn’t anybody tell you that? Somebody had to have signed for it after the crash, verifying that we kept it.”
I shook my head. “Never. I’d like to see that record if you could dig it up.”
“Definitely.”
“Why did you keep it, anyway? In a routine accident like that, I can’t imagine what good it would have done you.”
That comment earned me another strange look. “Routine accident? That’s hardly what I’d call it. Your husband was forced off the road. You can’t tell me that in all this time, this is the first you’ve heard about it.”
