by Shane Lusher
“I know about the cocaine Colby took that night,” she said.
I raised my eyebrows, but let her keep talking.
“I know about it because it was mine.”
“I see,” I said. I drank some of my Pabst, discovered it had the same metallic taste as always, and looked at her
“So,” she said and sniffed. “Anyway. I had the cocaine. I-I don’t even really take it, that’s the thing. It was just something a friend of mine and I were talking about. We know so many people who tried it, you know, in college, and we’d never done it. So, I got in touch with someone who knew where to get it, and we got a little, just enough for each of us to try one line.
“We were going to hold off on it until Sunday evening, when Wayne and I got back from Chicago, because we were going out, just the two of us, and I’d stashed it in my glove compartment. Not the best place to hide it, considering, you know, but-”
I looked at the broken clock on the wall and checked the time on my cell phone. Two forty-five.
“How did Colby wind up with it?” I interrupted again.
“She—I don’t know,” Hannah said. “She wasn’t the kind of girl to try anything like that, and I’d forgotten about the cocaine when she went missing, so I didn’t remember to check until Wayne came home and told me about it.”
“And it wasn’t in the car anymore?”
“It wasn’t in the car,” she said. Her eyes began to tear up, and she downed the rest of the whiskey.
I held up an index finger and Mike came over.
“She’ll have another,” I said.
She sniffed again. “It wasn’t in the car,” she said. “Wayne told me, and I looked, and it was gone. Colby took it, and then she died.”
“Hannah,” I said. “She didn’t die from the cocaine.”
“No, but I thought that maybe she—maybe she did something she wouldn’t have, maybe went with somebody she wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t taken it.”
I didn’t try to argue with that. It was possible. I’d never tried coke myself, but I’d certainly done enough things while intoxicated I wouldn’t have otherwise.
“So, Wayne blamed you for her death?”
Hannah looked up, shocked. Mike brought her drink and then went away.
“No,” she said. “Why would you think that?”
“You said that—I just assumed-”
“You think I’d tell Wayne about that? Mr. Clean? Wayne doesn’t even drink. He’d have thrown me out if he’d found out about it.”
“You sure about that?”
She nodded as she mixed sugar into her glass. “You bet your ass I am. Why do you think he got divorced the first time?”
“His ex-wife was a coke addict?”
She shook her head. “Pot.”
“Pot?” I asked, thinking that was a little extreme, but a friend of mine had been tossed out after seven years because he’d not been able to stop smoking.
“Okay,” I said. “I could see that. If you live with a stoner, and you’ve got kids-”
Hannah looked up from her drink. “She wasn’t a stoner. He caught her with it once. Once. And that was it. He told me before we were married, he said he didn’t want me to make the same mistake Diane did.”
“Wow,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” she said. “When Wayne found out that Colby had cocaine in her system, it’s like he wrote her off. He never cried or anything when he found out she was dead. It was just business as usual for Wayne.”
One of the men at the other end of the bar got up to use the bathroom.
“So, he found out Colby had cocaine in her system and then what? He just didn’t care anymore? He cared enough to back me up when Dave Rassi brought me in to the sheriff’s office.”
She shivered, though the air around us was causing me to sweat, even in the light T-shirt I was wearing.
“He doesn’t give a shit whether you find out who killed Colby. He just wants you to find someone so he can look like he does. He was happy when they found Maclaren, and so was I, but not for the same reason.”
She looked up, and her chin was trembling.
“I want my daughter’s killer brought to justice. He just wants the whole thing checked off his To Do list.”
“You’re not just pissed off at him, or something?” I asked, and then regretted it. In the what to say to women department, I was still hovering somewhere around basic knowledge of.
She shook her head and clammed up. We sat there quietly for another five minutes before she spoke.
“For a while I thought maybe he did it,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I said, and waved at Mike, who brought me another beer. “There’s a big difference between being the kind of guy who gets divorced over a joint and being the kind of guy who kills his daughter.”
“You think I don’t know how this sounds?” she said.
Hannah was finished with her drink. She looked at her watch. I could see it was already ten after three, so I drank half the beer and put a pile of ones on the bar.
We stood up, and on the way out, she spoke.
“I thought that, because he’d threatened to kill her over that stupid tattoo she got,” she said. “He actually said he would kill her if she got another one.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Hannah,” I said, “People say things they don’t mean. Especially if they have a temper. The way you’re describing Wayne, it seems he has an overdeveloped hang-up about drugs.”
Why was I defending him? Maybe it was because I couldn’t balance up what I was hearing from Hannah Trueblood and what I had seen of her husband. I’d been around for a while, and my judge of character usually tends to be right on.
We were at the car, staring at each other over the roof.
“Wayne doesn’t have a temper,” she said. “He’s never lost his cool around me, not ever. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He doesn’t do anything out of emotion. He says he’s going to do something, and then he does it. Most people say they’re going to do this or that all the time, and then they don’t do anything.”
“Which still doesn’t mean he killed Colby,” I said, wondering whether I was only playing devil’s advocate, or whether I was actually sticking up for him.
She looked at me. “You don’t know him. I do.”
She was right about that. We got in the car, and as I was pulling onto Route 29, I said:
“You’re right. I don’t know a thing about him.”
She had her sunglasses on again. In spite of the beers I’d had, I could smell the whiskey on her breath when she exhaled.
“When Colby got that tattoo, I wasn’t exactly thrilled, but it was small, and I figured, well, everybody’s getting one and it’s better than a set of antlers on her backside. What I’m saying is that I didn’t voice any approval of it,” she said. “But let me ask you something. If you have a daughter, and you’ve raised her as your own, even though she was adopted, and if that daughter is sixteen years old and has no idea she has been adopted, and she gets a tattoo, do you tell her, in the same tone of voice that I’m using right now, that she was adopted, that her real mother was a whore, that she is a whore just like her mother and that if she ever did anything like that again you would kill her?”
I stopped at a light. “I think that seems a little out of character,” I said.
“You think?” she hissed. She turned to look at me.
“I know,” I said. “I know what you’re saying.”
I also knew that I was eventually going to have to do what I’d been avoiding doing all along: speak to Wayne Trueblood about his daughter’s homicide. I’d been avoiding it because I’d seen him as the boss, and I assumed that if he brought me into the case, then he couldn’t have much to do with it.
As she was getting into her car, I laid a hand on her arm.
“Hannah,” I said. “I can’t prove it, but the cocaine Colby took that night didn’t come from you.”
&nbs
p; She looked at me a moment, the look in her eyes changing to a semblance of relief and then clouding over again.
“Thanks, Dana,” she said as she sat down and put the keys in the ignition. “But it doesn’t really change much, does it?”
Thirty-Six
I was back at the farm, putting the bag I’d packed for the weekend into the trunk of my Taurus, when my phone rang.
I had been thinking what I needed was a decent meal, a decent beer served in a pint glass, maybe some decent music. You can only listen to Sammy Hagar for so long before your world goes monochrome. I took the Van Halen out of the cassette deck and tossed it over my shoulder into the back seat.
I was thinking I should let the phone go to voice mail.
Against my better judgment, I swiped my finger across the screen.
“Dana Hartman.”
“You find Rassi?” It was Percy.
“No,” I said.
“Dubois talked to me,” he said. “He says he thinks you know where he is.”
“I don’t,” I said, looking out the windshield. It was just before four, plenty of time for a long conversation, but I wanted the time to grab a quick shower at Kelly’s and come down from the past 48 hours. “Can we do this some other time?”
Percy chuckled. “Isn’t as easy as you thought, is it? Friday afternoon, you just want to go home, kick back-”
“Yeah,” I interrupted, and waited.
“You know, you got no good reason to protect him. Rassi wouldn’t get your back.”
“That may be true,” I agreed. “But I’m not getting his back. I don’t know where he is.”
“Dubois was saying that if you did, and you don’t come clean, we can get you for contempt of court.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“What about all that talk about being partners? That still mean anything? It’s only been what, five hours since we had that conversation?”
Percy chuckled again, but didn’t answer my question.
“Sweeney and Roe,” he said instead. “The guy at State Forensics got back to me. He says the mark on Sweeney was definitely made by an arrowhead. Roe’s could be anything. Could be a piece of sharp angle iron, for all it’s worth, so he’s been concentrating on Sweeney.”
“And?”
“Doesn’t know yet,” Percy sighed. “He also says they cut back on his overtime.”
“Which means?”
“Which means that we have to wait until Monday at 9 A.M. before he starts looking at it again.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s worse than the private sector.”
“No shit,” Percy said. “Anyway, I probably won’t need it. Somebody found Sweeney’s car.”
“Where?” I asked. I got out of the car and began walking around on the driveway.
“About a half-mile from his house,” he said. “Down by the Tazewell County Health Department, where the tracks used to be.”
I knew what he was talking about. There had been a Bloomington-Peoria rail line, up to the sixties. It had been abandoned, and gradually, nature had come back to reclaim it. Many of the railroad ties had been cannibalized for landscaping, and much of the gravel was overgrown with multiflora rose and small trees.
“Fingerprints?” I asked.
“We have our people working on it,” Percy said. “I also have four sets of prints from women on the list. The fifth refused to give any without a court order.”
“You think she had anything to do with it?”
“Nah,” Percy said. “It was the woman out near Brimfield. Lives back in a hollow in a shack, water source is a pipe stuck in the side of a hill.”
“A survivalist,” he continued, taking a drink of something. “She looked like she hadn’t left the house since Clinton was president. So, where are you at?”
I paused. There was no reason not to tell him about my plans.
“At the farm,” I said. “I’m going up to Chicago tonight. I’ll be back on Sunday. Got to talk to your mom.”
“Why are you talking to her?” Percy asked.
“You told me I should last night.”
Percy paused, remembering. “Yeah,” he said. “I said that. But I didn’t mean you should actually talk to her.”
“Is there a problem with that?”
“No,” Percy said, and he sounded like he genuinely meant it. “It’s just that it’s a surprise she agreed to talk to you. Did you actually set up a meeting?”
“I have to go play golf with her,” I said.
“Nice,” he said.
“Why?”
“If you’re going up there to play golf, you’d better take an extra liver. What time?”
“Nine A.M.”
“That might work,” Percy said. “She won’t be sober. She might still be coherent, though.”
“You think she might know something?”
“I think she knows a lot of something,” Percy said. “Problem is, she never told me any of it. I had to find out for myself.”
“About what?”
“What do you think?”
“Percy, I don’t even know what to think,” I said. “I think there’s a hell of a lot you’re not telling me.”
“That makes two of us,” Percy said.
There was a long pause. I closed the car door, turning the key in the ignition.
“You still there?” Percy said after a time.
“I am.”
“Dubois told me about Stevens,” he said. “He said he came up. He said you wouldn’t tell him who gave him up.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You tell me?” he asked.
“I promised not to,” I said.
“Yeah,” Percy said. I could hear him breathing into the phone. The silence stretched on, and then he said, “Well, I don’t have a lot I can do around here right now. I’m going to take off. Got a standing poker game I want to get to tonight. It’s time for a good cigar.”
That called to mind those posters people used to have when I was a kid where a group of dogs dressed as people sat around the green surface of a poker table smoking and drinking whiskey. I laughed.
“Something funny about that?” Percy asked.
“No,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Good,” he said. “You take the weekend to think about whether you want to work with me on this.”
“The Stevens tip didn’t have anything to do with Sweeney. Or Roe,” I said weakly. “It’s all about Colby.”
“Jasper Stevens' name is coming up all over the place,” Percy said. “He was a known associate of Sweeney, and he was the last person who saw Roe alive. He had an alibi for Roe, but we need to take him any way we can. It would help if we had a witness to some kind of criminal activity.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said.
“What?”
“Are you loyal to Dubois?”
“Haven’t we already been over this?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “One minute you like Rassi better than Dubois, the next minute you’re ready to bring Dave in. Which is it?”
Percy took his time answering, and when he responded he’d lowered his voice. “I’m not either one,” he said. “I believe what the evidence tells me.”
“Okay, but what is your evidence here?”
“Rassi has a summons issued in his name,” Percy said. “He has to be served, he has to come in. There’s also going to be an internal investigation, if Dubois pushes it, and then he’ll go up for gross insubordination.
“Either way you look at it, it’s better for him if he comes in and tells his side of the story.”
“And if he’s hiding out because he’s afraid the same thing will happen to him that happened to Tad?” I asked.
“Then that’s all the more reason for him to do this officially,” Percy said.
I sighed. It was then that I noticed the post-it note stuck to the garage door. At first I wasn’t s
ure what I was looking at, and when I squinted, I could see it.
“Meredith Pinnel,” I said as I got out of the car. “She was with Colby the night she died. She’s the one who got the coke from Stevens.”
I wasn’t sure what that made me, by giving her up so quickly, but I needed all the help I could get, and if I gave Percy a little, I figured he would give back.
I walked over to the garage door and looked at the note. It was from Wayne Trueblood.
“Stop by my house at 4:00. It’s urgent. We need to talk to you.”
“Percy,” I said. “I have to go. You have a nice weekend.”
Thirty-Seven
It was after four already. I’d promised Kelly I’d be at her house, ready to go, by five, and I had wanted to speak to Jimmy Remmert.
That wasn’t going to happen. As I drove over to Trueblood’s house, I thought about what Hannah had said about his handling of Colby’s tattoo and her take on how Trueblood felt about the murder. Points checked off a to-do list, a wife divorced because of her apparent one-time drug use.
I wondered if Hannah had decided to come clean to Wayne about the contents of her glove compartment, and what that would mean.
I pulled into his circle drive in front of the Doric columns at exactly four-fifteen.
Contrary to what I’d thought, Hannah Trueblood’s SUV was nowhere to be seen. The garage door was open, revealing an orderly space that appeared as if it had never been used.
What got my hackles up was the black Mercedes standing in the driveway. Ullie Anderson had come calling. I didn’t bother to lock my car as I got out and made my way around the back of the house; the only thing of value in the car was the Trueblood murder book, and there wasn’t anything in there that was helping me, anyway.
“Well, would you look at that?”
Trueblood sat in a patio chair by a table, on the other side of which Ullie Anderson reclined on a metal chaise longue, his trademark cigarette in one hand, the perpetual Scotch with ice in the other.
I walked up to them and glanced down. I was still dressed in my white T-shirt, and my suit pants had a stain on the side, a casualty in my Lebanese culinary battle from a few hours before.
