by Shane Lusher
“This is important,” I said.
Her silence was the only answer.
“All right,” I said. “When?”
“Eleven-thirty,” she said. “Nine-year-olds eat early.”
I realized that I’d never actually been in the town of Deer Creek, and, after driving around for fifteen minutes looking for Green Avenue, I doubled back to the Gas Thru on Route 9 to ask the gas station attendant for directions.
By the time I found it, it was 8 A.M., and most of the surrounding driveways were empty. I pulled over to the curb and got out of the car.
Alisha Stamm’s house was a one-and-a-half story stucco bungalow with a detached garage and a large wooden porch that had been added recently, on a street of houses looking very much the same.
The yard was well-kept, with flower borders and beds lined in red brick encircling the trees. There was an in-ground sprinkler system, which appeared to have just finished watering, judging by the puddles on the walk and the wet grass glinting in the muggy sunlight.
I walked up the driveway and took the concrete path to the front porch. The curtains in the windows were drawn, and the door was a solid dark wood with a sign that said “The Stamm’s” in routered writing on white pine.
I was about to ring the doorbell when I heard the garage door open. A late model GMC truck backed its way down toward the street.
I waved to the man inside and went back down the walk and into the driveway. He looked at me warily and then rolled down the passenger window.
“You serving papers?” he asked. He was wearing khaki pants and a long sleeved white shirt.
“No,” I said. “Mr. Stamm?”
“Reporter?”
“No,” I said. “I’m Tad Ely’s brother.”
“Oh,” he said. He put the truck in park and tapped on the steering wheel. His face was closed. He pursed his lips almost imperceptibly.
“Look, Mr. Ely—“
“Hartman,” I said. ”Dana Hartman. Tad was my half-brother.”
“Oh,” he said again. “Look. I’m real sorry about what happened to your brother. I heard he was a good guy.”
“He was,” I said. “Thanks. You’re probably on your way to work.”
He nodded.
“I wanted to get here earlier,” I said. “Is there any chance you can talk for fifteen minutes or so?”
Stamm considered for a moment, then tapped on the steering wheel again and got out of the truck.
“There’s some coffee still in the pot,” he said. “Probably burnt, but cops are used to that.”
“I’m not a cop,” I said after we’d entered the kitchen at the back of the house. “I’m a consultant for the sheriff’s department.”
He led me through the kitchen and into the front room. Three or four decorative quilts took up one entire wall. The others were lined with framed needlepoint.
“I keep wanting to get rid of that stuff,” Stamm said. He gestured around the room. “My wife was the one who remodeled everything. Right before, well, before she got hooked on that stuff.” There was a pained look in his eyes. “Thing is, now that she’s going to get convicted, she’s clean.
“But you probably already know that,” Stamm added.
He disappeared into the kitchen for a moment and then returned with two cups of coffee. I’d taken a seat on the couch. He handed me a cup and then sat opposite me in a reclining chair.
“You going to sue me?” he asked, watching me over the lip of his cup.
“What?” I asked. “Why would I sue you?”
He shrugged. “It’s what people do, isn’t it? Wrongful death.”
“I hadn’t even considered that,” I said.
“Well, don’t let me give you any ideas.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I just want to ask you a few questions about your wife.”
“There really isn’t more I can tell you than you already know.” He set his coffee cup down onto a side table next to a dish of potpourri. “Isn’t it all in your files? Police records, all of that?”
I chose my words carefully. “I know the facts of the case,” I said. “But what I don’t know, and if you don’t mind my asking, is how it all started.”
“The drugs?” Stamm said.
I nodded.
“Shit,” he said. He looked up at the ceiling and then back to me. He paused for a moment, choosing his words.
“I’m gone two weeks every month, on business, okay?” he said finally. “I’m an engineer. Last year I went to Ireland for the summer. Alisha could’ve gone, but she didn’t want to.” He shook his head. “Scared to fly.”
He blew out through his lips. “When I got back in August, she was already into it. I didn’t know it then, but I found out soon enough. See, she got hooked on Oxycodone when she had shoulder surgery last year. I knew she was buying it from someone, but I figured if it was a prescription drug a doctor would give, then it would be different than some kind of street drug.”
He continued, “She started doctor shopping, which is illegal, and at some point someone threatened to call the police. So she just stopped taking it. Anyway, I thought she was clean. Turned out she’d just switched to meth.”
He stopped and took a drink of his coffee. It seemed unusual to me, that someone would go to meth for pain relief, but there were stranger things that had happened.
“Why are you interested in this?” he asked and looked at me.
Given that he’d started out so smoothly, that surprised me a bit.
“She says she didn’t do it,” I said.
Stamm snorted. “It was the drugs that did it,” he said.
“When was the last time you talked to her?”
He swallowed. “When I kicked her out,” he said.
“When was that?”
“December, last year,” he said and shook his head. “My daughter will never forgive me for that. Two weeks before Christmas.
“Jesus,” he said. He stood up and walked into the kitchen, and I followed.
“You think you know somebody,” Stamm said as he rinsed his coffee cup in the sink. He sighed and wiped his hands on a dish towel. “Thank God my daughter isn’t in school anymore,” he said.
“Where is she now?”
“Why?”
“You mind if I talk to her?” I asked.
“Why?” Stamm said again.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Mr. Stamm,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe she knows something she didn’t tell the investigating detectives.”
“What do you need to ask her that you can’t ask me?” Stamm asked.
“Who was she buying from?” I asked.
“How the hell should I know?” He folded his arms across his chest and pointed at me. “And for that matter, how would my daughter know?”
I held up my hands, palms out. “She can’t very well have been buying it from Gas Thru down the street,” I said. “I’m just trying to get a lead here.”
Stamm eyed me, and then turned and leaned on the countertop with both hands. “Shit,” he said. “You’d be surprised.” He was looking out the window over the sink, into the neighbor’s yard. “She’d go over to Pekin, God knows why. This all happened when I was in Ireland. She’d go over to Pekin to a bowling alley and somewhere over there she found someone to get her meth.”
He turned and looked at me. “I think we need to stop talking now. You want to sue me, go ahead.”
“I told you, I’m not going to sue you,” I said. “All I want to do is find out who killed my brother.”
He gave me a good, long look.
“My ex-wife killed your brother,” he said.
“But what if she didn’t? If I find out anything, that might cast some doubt on the case. She could get off with a lighter sentence.”
“Why exactly do you care?” Stamm asked, his hand on the kitchen door. “My wife kills your brother, and you want to help keep her out of prison?”
He shook his head and led me back outside
.
I looked at him, remembering the look on his face when he’d told me at the beginning that she was clean again. It was a look that said he might not mind having her back. I waited for a moment, and the expression on his face softened a bit.
“The thing is?” he said.
“Yes?”
“The gun. The drugs I can maybe figure out. She was in a lot of pain, one thing leads to another, and you’re into some bad stuff before you know it.” He frowned, and I waited. “I used to be a smoker. I know all about addiction.
“But what bothers me a lot is the gun. That’s what I just could not imagine her having.”
“Why is that?”
“Alisha hates guns,” he said. “I mean, she really hates them. Which doesn’t make you too popular around here. I was a hunter when we first met, and I had to stop hunting. I had to get rid of all the guns in the house. I tried to reason with her about safety, protection, all of that, but she wouldn’t have it. Said if I loved her I would give it up.”
“People do lots of things they wouldn’t do when they’re under the influence of—substances,” I said, thinking about my own harried past. “Maybe that hatred of guns turned into a kind of—thrill or something when she was using.”
He looked at me for a while and then turned away and started walking toward his truck.
“You probably think I’m an asshole,” he said as he got in.
I shook my head. “I don’t think that.”
He put his arm on the steering wheel and looked out the front of the cab. “You married?” he asked.
“I was,” I said.
“You know what it does to a marriage, when you have to pick up your wife from the police station because she got caught blowing somebody in the bathroom of a gas station?”
He was still looking out the front window, and I remained silent.
“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head as he looked at me. “I have to get to work.”
“Just one more thing,” I said. “What is your daughter’s name?”
He sighed loudly. “Darcy,” he said. “Her name is Darcy.”
I got to Pekin twenty-five minutes later and parked in front of the courthouse. The irony was not lost on me as I walked across Elizabeth Street to the Pekin Observer office that my brother had been gunned down not fifty feet away.
I’d tried Darcy Stamm on the way over, and gotten only voice mail. I hung up without leaving a message, not wanting to scare her off.
Now I was chasing shadows, hoping that if I spoke to the editor of the newspaper he might point me in the right direction, if not give me a little more insight into the darker cobwebs of Tazewell County’s political and social machinery.
I checked the time on my telephone. It was nine, and although the etched lettering in the glass door said office hours were 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., the door was locked and there were no lights on inside.
I knocked and waited a few minutes before calling the general information number on the glass.
The phone picked up on the first ring.
“Pekin Observer-”
“Hi, can I speak to-”
“We are sorry but we are currently unable to take your call personally. For private deliveries, please press ‘1’. For vending locations, please press ‘2’. For advertising, please press ‘3’ and leave a message. We will get back to you today. All other callers, please try again during our regular business hours.”
I hung up the phone and walked back across Elizabeth Street, paused and then retraced my steps.
Three doors down. I walked slowly, my eyes on the hot, cracked concrete of the sidewalk. I stopped in front of a doorway boarded up with plywood held up by shiny new screws.
It had happened here. I glanced out into the street, but cleaning crews and the sun had eliminated any sign of what had transpired there in June. The heat was beating down onto the whiteness of the concrete beneath me, and when I looked up toward the east, in the direction of the Tazewell County Justice Center, I could see the flickering waves rising up out of the earth.
I went over to the windows of the closed shop. It had once been a laundromat, but that, for some unfathomable reason, had relocated on the other side of the square.
Wiping the grime away from the window, I peered inside. Could someone have been hiding there? The front room was empty except for a metal folding chair and a few scraps of two-by-fours. Water hook-ups and electrical boxes for the coin washers and dryers lined the back wall. The floor had been swept recently, which meant that the dust that I could see from the outside appeared uniform and undisturbed.
I pulled out my phone and dialed Rassi. It rang five, six times and then voice mail picked up. I closed the connection and dialed again.
Rassi picked up on the third ring. I’d thought I would be waking him up, but it sounded like he was driving.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Headed over to Peoria,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, that goddamned field is hot right now. I nearly puked walking back over to the Crossroads.”
“I thought you were going to stay at my place,” I said, watching as a sheriff’s cruiser pulled around the corner and began idling in my direction.
“I’m going to go over to Peoria and get a hotel room. Lie low for a few days. I hear the new Angeline’s is nice. Besides, I’m starving, and their lunch is better than most everybody else’s.”
Angeline’s, a nightclub-slash-strip bar, had recently relocated from its age-old location next to the Peoria County Courthouse to a newer, more gentrified area. I couldn’t remember where that was.
“What are you doing?” Rassi asked.
“I was going to talk to Tuan Nguyen,” I said. “And why in the hell are you going to a strip bar?”
Rassi ignored the question. “The guy from the newspaper?” he asked. “Why?”
“I don’t have much in the way of leads,” I said. “I figured he would know as much as anybody.”
“Probably more,” Rassi said. “He broke that story on Dubois.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“The one that got him booted out. Where he used county gas on his vacations?”
After he’d hung up the phone, I realized there was something else I’d wanted to ask him. I was just about to call him back, but by then the sheriff’s cruiser had pulled up alongside.
Inside sat Percy Trueblood, a crooked grin on his face. He was wearing a deputy’s hat. I noticed that he had a long scar creeping out from beneath the sleeve of his right arm.
He rolled down the window.
“Hey, Hartman,” he said.
“Percy.”
“I heard you were out at my old man’s house last night,” he said. “I understand the lapdogs ate you up.”
“Lapdogs?” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word spoken out loud.”
“That’s all my dad has,” Percy said, shaking his head. “His wife—my stepmom—calls them his court.”
I’d forgotten that Percy was the product of Trueblood’s first marriage. He was significantly older than his half-sister, probably as old as his stepmother. As old as me.
“Can I help you with something?”
Percy looked through the windshield, turned back in my direction, and spat out into the street. He looked away from me, out across the square at the courthouse.
“You think you can find out who killed Colby?” he asked quietly.
I looked down at the dirt on my hands.
“I’m going to try,” I said.
Percy looked over at me, into his rearview window, and then back at me again. “They took Rassi off the case.”
“I know.”
“I never liked him,” Percy said. “But let me tell you what, I’d rather see that bastard on this case than I would Dubois any day.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
He put the car in drive.
“You find out who did this to Colby,” he said. “And then you come to me about it. That a
deal?”
I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I just stared at him as he drove off.
I took out my phone again and called Rassi.
“Ah, man,” he said. “I’m going to be eating spare ribs in the company of naked women in about five minutes. When I get inside, I’m putting my phone on vibrate. Don’t call me any more unless somebody else dies. Which could happen.”
He sounded anything but hung over, and generations away from the humble drunk he’d been not eight hours before.
“Did you ever think about a second shooter?” I asked.
“With Tad?” he asked. There was a pause. “I thought about it. But there’s no way. I told you last night, her fingerprints were on the gun. I know that she did the actual physical shooting. Why?”
“I was just standing outside the store where Tad went down. I looked inside but the place has been cleaned up. Was the glass broken? The wood on the door is new. What was in there before?”
“I checked all of that, man,” Rassi said. He’d stopped driving. I heard a door slam shut and the sound of passing traffic. “What was in there? Alisha Stamm was in there, that’s who. The door was steel, but it didn’t actually sit on the hinges. From the outside it looked like it did, but when you pushed on it, it fell right down inside.
“She’d been living there. There was a running toilet in the back. She cooked whatever food she ate—if she was even still eating by then—on a hot plate.
“But there was no sign of a second shooter. Why do you ask?”
“One thing that bothers me,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“If the guns were switched, then that means that Stamm’s fingerprints were not on the one in the evidence locker,” I said.
“Of course they weren’t,” Rassi said.
“So there is no case,” I finished. “I’m surprised they haven’t thrown it out yet.”
“No,” he said. “The fingerprints were run in our lab. They ran the first gun, the one that Dubois reported stolen. It was after that that they got switched. We just had to send off the gun for the ballistics.”
“Okay,” I said, listening carefully to his tone. His answer didn’t seem fabricated, rolling out as if he were telling the truth. Either that, or he’d practiced it so long in his head that he believed it himself.
