by Shane Lusher
“You know,” Vic began, “I thought-”
“Wait,” I said. “So, your take on this is that Trueblood runs the adoption agency, insures kids when they come through at whatever age, then kills them years later to collect on the insurance.”
“I already told you what I think,” Vic said. “You figure it out. You’re the investigator.”
“What about Dubois?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“What do you think of him?”
Daniels shrugged. “He’s been around nearly as long as Trueblood.” He began wiping the condensation from the outside of his glass.
“Which means?”
“It means don’t expect him to ask you for any favors,” Daniels looked up. “Because he’s already got everything he needs.”
I furrowed my brow, and looked at him expectantly, but he was done talking.
I stood up.
“Thanks for your time,” I said.
“Remember what I said about confidentiality,” he said.
When I left the bar and went down the walk to my car, I wondered what, exactly, I was supposed to keep secret about our conversation. More importantly, I wondered how much of it I could believe.
If Daniels had been telling the truth, Trueblood insured the children who went through his adoption agency. I supposed that if I thought long enough about it I could come up with a theory on that, something to do with investment, lawsuit insurance, or a combination of both.
The fact that he’d increased his daughter’s insurance right before she was killed did concern me, but even that could be explained away. Maybe he’d known about her cocaine use, even if he’d claimed he didn’t. Besides, it would have made no sense for him to murder his daughter and then go out of his way to hire an external consultant to investigate her death.
It made even less sense for him to invite that investigator to a party at which the one man who knew about the increase in life insurance would be present. That was the main thing that bothered me. That was the part that really didn’t add up.
I looked through the trees over to Pershing, which cut Jefferson diagonally, to the library. Though I’d grown up in Tremont, I’d gone to high school just down the street from where I stood, and I’d spent nearly as many hours at the Morton Public Library as I had in school, waiting for my father to pick me up.
Miles and years away, I’d sometimes enter a building, something built around the turn of the century, and the smell of the wood and the polished mosaic tiling would bring me back.
I’d been the captain of the wrestling team when we went to the state tournament, broken school records in the long jump and hurdles, but that part of me had been left behind the minute I left Tazewell County.
The only thing I’d ever always done—the only hobby I’d ever had—had been reading, and the smells associated with it.
Most men dream of teaching their kids baseball, or soccer, maybe chess, how to build model airplanes, but what I’d wanted to give my son was the familiarity I associated with printer’s ink and floor wax. It seemed like a silly thing, especially now that I had a daughter, if only part-time.
I took off my suit coat and got into my car.
Was familiarity what kept people together? It certainly hadn’t done it for my marriage. If anything, it had driven us apart. She’d left not so much because of the drinking as the fact that I reminded her of our dead son.
I took one last look around, and turned the key in the ignition.
Morton hadn’t been a kind place when I was a teenager, and I suspected it was the same now. But was it any different anywhere else?
Twenty-One
I got off 155 at Broadway. I was late for my meeting with Tuan Nguyen, but I wanted to speak with Ullie Anderson first. I needed to know why he’d warned me off looking into Tad’s murder. Specifically, I wanted to find out whether it had actually been a warning, or just an old man trying to get me to put my efforts into something worthwhile.
I crossed Springfield road, and, cruising past Trueblood’s house, I saw that Hannah Trueblood’s SUV was parked in the driveway. I remembered then that no one had actually interviewed her personally after Colby’s murder.
I thought about stopping, thought better of it, and sped up to seventy, slowing only when I hit the Pekin city limits.
I was surprised that Anderson’s office was located in a strip mall. I’d expected something statelier; if not a suite in an elegant building on the square, then at least something freestanding.
Instead, his place of business was wedged in between a Tex-Mex restaurant called Tequila Palace and a Radio Shack.
I knocked on the frosted glass door and then went in. There was no receptionist, just a large single room with two leather couches, a coffee table and a gargantuan oak desk bearing only a telephone, an ancient manual typewriter and, completely out of place, a smart phone standing up in its charger. The ashtray at the center of the desk was glass, polished, and empty, though the entire room smelled of fresh tobacco smoke.
I heard a toilet flush, and then a door at the back opened up and Anderson emerged.
He was halfway across the room, his back erect, wheezing, before he noticed me. He gave a little jump and then recovered before sitting down carefully in his desk chair and fastening an oxygen tube to his nose.
Only then did he speak.
“Dana,” he said. He didn’t seem surprised that I was there to see him. He looked at his watch. “Can I interest you in a glass of scotch?”
With the tubing attached to his face, the question seemed a dire one. I shook my head.
“I really can’t,” I said. “I wanted to ask you a few things, though.”
He screwed up his face and looked out the window.
“Trueblood or Dubois?” he asked.
“Pardon me?”
“Trueblood or Dubois?” he asked again and ran a hand over his face. “Which one have you decided killed your brother?”
He tapped the desk with an index finger and then removed the oxygen tube. He set it carefully aside and adjusted a tank at his knees before opening a drawer and removing a cigarette.
“How-”
“Randall Dubois called me yesterday,” he said as he placed the cigarette in his mouth. “He told me that David Rassi came to him about some new information.”
“I see,” I said.
“I told you not to go looking into that,” Anderson said. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, and then struck a match and lit it.
“I know you did,” I said. “I was wondering why, exactly.”
Anderson blew smoke up at the ceiling and coughed. “I told you why yesterday,” he said. “There’s nothing to look at.”
“It just seemed strange, to have you warning me off like that,” I said.
He shrugged, but didn’t comment.
“And now I come in here and you ask me whether I think Trueblood or Dubois killed my brother? Why would you ask me that?”
Anderson sighed. “I was being facetious. I was trying to make a joke about Dubois being as unlikely a suspect as Trueblood would be. Trueblood would be the last person you should look at. Dubois would be second last. You understand?”
I nodded. “Why are you so concerned about what I do?”
“I knew your grandfather,” Anderson said after a pause.
“You said that yesterday,” I said.
“So.” He exhaled sharply, the smell of cigarette breath oozing across the desk and making me want one. “What do you think of Wayne Trueblood? I understand you were out at his house last night.”
I hadn’t been expecting him to ask that.
“He’s an interesting man,” I said slowly. Anderson nodded. “He seems to like to have a lot of people around him, and he seems to know what he’s doing in the county. I-”
Anderson waved his hand. “There are Wayne Truebloods everywhere. They only shine out in a place like this because there aren’t as many of them here as there
are in a place like Chicago,” he said.
“The difference between here and a big city is that you don’t have to bribe people,” he continued. “You just have to be nice to them, pay for food and drinks every once in a while, and sometimes put in a good word for them when they need a job.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about. I just thought it strange that he felt the need to keep explaining, when I hadn’t even asked him any questions.
“I don’t want to appear to be criticizing anyone in the sheriff’s department,” he said, changing the subject. “But David Rassi isn’t, let’s just say, prime material for what really needs to be filling the position. I know Tad thought highly of him, and I’m not going to say that he made a bad decision. I will say that he may have made an imprudent decision based on insufficient information.” He stabbed out his cigarette.
I stood there and looked at him.
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.
Anderson fastened his oxygen tube to his nose hastily, his hands shaking as he did so, the color in his face rising.
“What the hell am I talking about?” he said, his voice growing louder, but muffled behind the mask. “I’m trying to do you a favor because I have known your family for three generations. Listen to me. David Rassi is trying to make a name for himself.”
He paused, breathing slowly and deeply, and then he went on.
“He’s making bad decisions. He’s come up with a theory that nobody in law enforcement—and certainly no prosecutor—would ever believe, let alone a person possessed of a modicum of common sense. There is something wrong with him, and I think that you need to avoid any contact from now until his suspension can be fully investigated.”
His chest was rising and falling rapidly, and he’d shrunk down into his chair. The effort had cost him a great deal, and so I waited a moment for him to catch his breath before responding.
“Why did Dubois call you about this?” I asked.
“What?” he said. He took a handkerchief out of a pocket in his trousers and mopped at his forehead.
“Dubois,” I said. “Why did he call you?”
Anderson stared at me, his face steel.
“I’m his lawyer,” he said finally. “He wanted to know where he stood. And he didn’t call me. He stopped by. Just like you.”
I thought about what that meant. Had Dubois actually told Anderson about Rassi’s discovery regarding the murder weapon? Anderson was too cryptic, and very hard to read. I could just ask him, but I knew that he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “So, if you’re his lawyer, you’re not supposed to be telling me any of this,” I said slowly.
He placed a finger next to his nose. “Exactly,” he said.
I thought I would change direction. “What is your personal—non lawyerly—opinion of Dubois?”
Anderson laughed.
“Dubois is as crooked as they get,” he said, raising a finger in my direction. “But he’s not insane. Which I can’t say with any confidence about your friend David Rassi.”
I stared back at him for a moment, considering what else I might say. When I turned to leave, he spoke again.
“Dana,” he said wearily. “Find out who killed Colby Trueblood, and then go back to your computer. That’s where the money is, anyway, isn’t it?”
“I still feel like you’re warning me off,” I said, my hand on the door.
“I am,” Anderson said. “Warning you off of a lot of foolishness that can only get you into trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” I asked.
“Crazy trouble. Not real trouble,” he said with a smile.
I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. When I got back into my car, I rolled down the window and sat there for a moment.
Trueblood or Dubois? Or Rassi? Or just the ramblings of an eighty-three year old man?
I was starting to wonder whether I knew what I was doing. And I hadn’t even begun to look into the Colby Trueblood case. More importantly, I was beginning to wonder whether everything Rassi had told me had been made up. In that case, I’d just spent the entire day chasing the wind.
I took out the photo Rassi had given me when we’d gone down into the creek bed the day before. I looked at her eyes again, the one swollen shut, the other one opaque, glazed over, dead. The bruises up and down her thighs and on her face, her lips parted, split and bloody.
I needed to spend some time with Erin. Just one more stop, and then I was done for the day.
Twenty-Two
When I walked in to the offices of the Pekin Observer, a plastic box played a sixties sitcom version of a ding-dong and then twiddled out in a hissing over-the-hill technology feedback. Two college kids, a man and a woman, looked up from the table at which they were both sitting opposite one another.
The room smelled of newsprint, though the printing presses were most certainly located somewhere else. An espresso maker sat on a high bookcase next to a diner-style contraption with a pot of coffee sitting on it. At the back of the room was a large window looking into a back office where I could see an empty desk facing outward and two monitors sitting diagonally across the top.
The walls were devoid of anything other than a whiteboard with names—‘Tuan, Kara, Jared, Angelica’—and what appeared to be story assignments. ‘Book Signing,’ ‘Marigold Festival,’ ‘Police and Court,’ was what I took in before the woman intern paused in what she was doing to look up at me.
She was olive-skinned, Hispanic possibly, with high cheekbones and a nose ring.
“Can I help you?” she asked. I put her at nineteen or twenty. She was wearing a tank top with a silver crucifix around her neck.
“I’m looking for Tuan Nguyen,” I said. “I have an appointment.”
“Tuan has appointments?” she said. She exchanged a glance with the man across from her. He hadn’t looked up, immersed in cropping a photo he then inserted into an article on a vast window that showed an entire front page broadsheet.
She cleared her throat.
“I’ll get him,” she said. She walked over to a door next to the window along the back wall, knocked and then opened it.
“Tuan!” she called out.
Nguyen emerged from a door in the back of his office, wiping his hands on a paper towel.
“Got it, Angelica,” he said.
“Your appointment?” She raised an eyebrow before returning to her desk. I noticed that she was wearing camouflage shorts that were nearly falling down her thighs.
Tuan wadded up the paper towel and tossed it into a wastebasket.
“Come on back,” he called, motioning to me.
I walked past the man across from Angelica, who still hadn’t looked up, and through the open door into the office.
Nguyen closed the door behind me and then took his place behind the desk.
“Have a seat,” he said. “You want some coffee?”
“Yes,” I said. “Please. About a gallon.”
He went out into the front room and then returned with a large mug bearing the faded name of the newspaper.
“So, what’s up?” Tuan asked. “You’re the ‘special investigator’ investigating Colby Trueblood’s murder.” He picked at his teeth, and, finding something, chewed it up and swallowed.
“I really don’t have a title,” I said as I sat down with a sigh.
Tuan raised an eyebrow. “Hard day?” he asked.
“You could say that,” I said.
“Any leads?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was thinking you could help me out.”
“You like hamburgers?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Hamburgers? Do you like them?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” I said.
He shrugged. “Seems like a simple question to me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sure, I like hamburgers.”
“See?” he said. “That was easy, wasn’t it?” He looked back to his scr
een, clicked on a few things, and then examined me over the top of it.
“Look man,” he said. “I’m not trying to bust your balls. I’m just hungry. Thought maybe you might want to get a late lunch.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. I don’t really have time. I just thought I’d pop in here and-”
“And what?” Tuan asked. He slid his swivel chair over to the edge of the desk and leaned back, crossing his legs. “Pump me for information about the Colby Trueblood case?”
I leaned closer to him, my elbows on my knees, and looked up. “That’s about it, yeah.”
“You guys are the cops,” Tuan said. He was picking at his teeth again.
You guys? “I work with the cops,” I said. “I’m not a cop.”
“But you are here on police business,” Tuan said. “And I’m wondering what it is I could know that the police don’t.”
He seemed testier than he usually was, as if something had come up. He was flipping a paperclip back and forth across the knuckles of his right hand.
“Tell me about the Quiverfull adoption agency,” I said, trying another angle.
“What about it?” Tuan asked. He uncrossed his legs and sat up in his chair.
“What do you know about it?”
Tuan looked away for a moment. “I went through there about thirty years ago,” he said. He spoke slowly, deliberately. “My adoptive father had just died. He was a priest. He died, and then I went to the Quiverfull.” He shrugged. “I was the youth group leader there for years.”
“What was it like?” I asked.
He looked at me. “It was a home for kids without parents,” he said. “What do you think it was like?”
“Was it bad?” I asked.
He blinked. “It could have been worse.” He looked away again. “Anyway, that was a long time ago. What has that got to do with Colby Trueblood?”
He gave me a strange look, his head cocked to one side.
“Probably nothing,” I said. “To be honest, I don’t have a clue.” I sighed. “About that or anything else. What’s your take on her killing?”
