A Bitch Called Hope

by Lily Gardner

  Alice shook her head. Her dark curls brushed against her face and she started talking again. She told Lennox how Bill had taken her into his study before the party got rolling. Alice had sat across the desk from him. She remembered hearing Sinatra singing over the sound system from the living room.

  “You know how you stare at the dashboard?” she said. “There’s a poor guy on the side of the road, holding the cardboard sign and the last thing you want to do is make eye contact? I was that poor guy. Bill’s telling me he wants to help, but he won’t look at me. Not even when he hands me the money.”

  “He was ashamed,” Lennox said. He had stolen Alice’s girlhood. He should’ve poisoned his own self.

  Alice was the one who looked shamed. “He gave me that ten thousand just to get rid of me.” Then she shrugged. “Ten thousand, I would’ve figured I’d need a wheelbarrow to carry that much money, but I could hold it in two hands.” Still, she said, it was a whole lot of money; she could pay off her car, help Gabe with his stuff. Ten thousand— she could finish school; she only had a year and a half left. Grad school was the moon, but if she kept working part-time, maybe she’d get a scholarship.

  But then Bill died. And the cops found the money in the bottom of her backpack. They questioned her forever. When they finally let her go, they kept the money. In custody, they said. She didn’t even have enough for bus fare. Gabe wouldn’t pick up on his cell. She had to call a cab, stop at an ATM to pay for it.

  “Gabe used to tell me I was his angel. Now he’s shitty all the time.” Tears pooled in her eyes. One broke and ran down her cheek.

  Lennox sipped her coffee while Alice got a hold of herself. “Why did you leave Saint Mary’s?” she said.

  Alice wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “You mean why was I kicked out? I confessed my sins. And this time I got the nerve to confess about me and Bill. Father Mac, he was pretty nice about it, say your rosary, la-la-la, go and sin no more. Next thing I know, Mom gets a call from the school, they’ve found stolen property in my locker.”

  Alice blew her nose into her crushed napkin. Lennox pulled a handful of tissues from her bag.

  “Maybe I’m an idiot, but I’ve never ripped off anybody in my life,” Alice said. “I’m the injured party here, but Fergusen says the only way they won’t press charges is if I surrender rights to the ten thousand. Otherwise I’ll be charged with theft and slander.”

  Something shifted in Alice and all that hurt turned hard. She slapped the tears from her cheeks and looked steadily at Lennox.

  “You said you can help? Get me my money and get your client off my back.”

  Chapter 11

  Lennox returned Alice to her apartment, turned right and drove to northwest Portland. Back when Lennox was in grade school, the northwest neighborhood was populated with longshoremen, electricians and steel workers: hard-working, hard-drinking folks. It had been that way for as long as there had been that kind of work. Bill Pike started investing in small apartment complexes back in the late sixties. Places with good bones as he liked to put it, but in bad neighborhoods. The banks wouldn’t go for it, Delia recalled, so Bill recruited his cousin, Father Mac. They pooled the money their grandmother had left them. Bill used his own crew to replace the dry rot and plaster. Ten years later, Father Mac needed the money for a deal in the suburbs and Bill bought him out.

  About the same time, artisans began moving into the neighborhood. They opened little shops that sold felt hats and beaded dresses. Twenty-third Avenue turned into Trendy-third as a mob of shoppers trolled the shops looking to buy Italian pottery and eyeglass frames. Doctors and lawyers swooped in and bought the run-down Victorian homes and turned them into gingerbread palaces. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, the Alphabet District from Upshur to Ankeny gentrified and Bill was charging quadruple the rent.

  Lennox had to think the priest was a little cheesed off losing out on the big payday. But according to Ham, a whole lot of deals went down over the years between those two. Who was to say how the balance of resentment tallied? Ham was looking into it.

  Lennox? She was just trying to find a parking spot. With the Christmas crush, she was lucky a space opened twelve blocks from the Mirabella, a twenty-plex Bill Pike owned and his younger son, Scott, lived in for free. Lennox wondered how that had sat between the two men. Had Bill been disappointed that his son wasn’t more successful? Had Scott been defensive?

  There were a whole lot of possibilities for friction.

  She walked past little shops outlined in Christmas lights with cutie-pie names like Salvador Molly’s and Bee and Thistle until she got to the Mirabella, a sweet-looking brick two-story horseshoed around a fountain and ornamental garden.

  It was one in the afternoon when Priscilla answered the door dressed to go out. She had a way of tilting her head and peering through her lashes that looked rehearsed. Lennox verified that Priscilla had been living with Scott for a year and a half. What Priscilla had failed to mention was that Bill had been paying her tuition at Portland Community College the last year.

  “Sorry,” Priscilla said. “Scott’s not here. He left early.”

  Irritation jangled along Lennox’s nerves. “We had an appointment.”

  Priscilla opened her eyes wider. “Something came up. Anyway, you’re not a cop and we don’t have to tell you anything.”

  If Lennox still was a cop, she’d have both of their breakfasts. Lennox didn’t even try to keep the mad out of her voice. “What about Scott trying to help his poor, incarcerated mother?” she said.

  Priscilla screwed her mouth in a “whatever” and shrugged a bony shoulder. “I seriously doubt that anything he could say would help Mrs. P at all.”

  “Do you have a minute?” Lennox asked. “I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about.” Biggest question being who had Priscilla been angling for—Scott or his father? And if it was Scott all along, would she have killed the old man so Scott would inherit?

  Priscilla said, “This isn’t really a good time. I have a lot of errands.”

  “Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I’ll be on my way,” Lennox said.

  “I don’t think Scott would want me to.” Priscilla stepped outside and locked the door behind her. When Lennox refused to move, Priscilla brushed past.

  “Excuse me.” Priscilla clattered down the sidewalk in high-heeled boots. One of her scarves unwound and trailed over her shoulder.

  For a short person Lennox was a fast mover. She caught up with Priscilla and walked alongside her. “It’s up to you,” Lennox said. “I can dog you all morning, or you can have a cup of coffee with me and I’ll go on my way.”

  The Bean was an industrial-style coffee shop two blocks from the Mirabella. Corrugated metal counters, cement floor, chrome tables populated with young hipsters. Lennox and Priscilla ordered their coffees and snagged the last seats.

  Lennox pulled her notebook from her bag and crossed her legs, her pant leg hiked up exposing an ostrich leather boot.

  “Nice.” Priscilla pointed to Lennox’s boots.

  Priscilla didn’t seem like the kind of girl troubled over the fate of an ostrich. Lennox nodded.

  “Louis Vuitton.” Priscilla’s voice was coated with approval. “Last year’s?”

  “Aurora found them in a resale shop. She’s always trolling the resale shops. I could have her look for you.”

  Priscilla smiled, a little smugly Lennox thought, and snapped the clasp on the front of a mustard leather bag, a diamond sparking light from her left hand. Lennox figured it at a full two karats. Where did those two daisies come up with enough cash for two karats?

  “What a gorgeous ring,” Lennox said. “Wow! Congratulations.”

  Priscilla smiled a wide smile that showed the gold crown at the back of her mouth. “Thanks.”

  “Delia must be thrilled,” Lennox said.

  Priscilla went from smug to deer in the headlights in no time at all. “We want to keep it from the family for a little while.”<
br />
  “But why? Delia could use some good news.”

  “We’ll tell them in a few weeks.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lennox said.

  Watch Priscilla try to suss out whether to confide in Lennox or risk having Delia find out about the ring. Then watch her cave.

  “Once the will is read,” Priscilla said. “Scotty’s a millionaire.”

  “Wow. The will has been read already?”

  Priscilla’s face closed so tight, you could almost hear the snick of a deadbolt. Lennox was taking it too fast. Okay, so she sipped her espresso and watched the action around the other tables, let the world take a spin or two. Pressurized steam punctuated the fifteen some conversations in the coffee house. It was like fishing. It was like cards.

  Sure enough, when she looked back, Priscilla was watching her. “Not exactly,” Priscilla said. “Scott ran across it.”

  “They had something like that lying around?”

  Priscilla shifted in her chair.

  “Naughty boy,” Lennox said. Thinking here was a solid motive for both Scott and Priscilla.

  “Please don’t tell Mrs. P. She already wants to pin Bill’s death on Scott.”

  Lennox could feel her antennae rise up out of her head, twitching for signals. God, she loved this job. She kept her voice noncommittal. “Why would she do that?”

  “She needs someone to blame Bill on.”

  A cloud of caffeinated steam wafted over their table. Priscilla’s mouth turned down. “Now that there’s trouble, she’ll go after him like she always does.”

  Lennox said, “I talked to Delia just yesterday. She never implied that Scott was in any way connected with Bill’s death.”

  “Mrs. P thinks she can get away with it, but I was standing there when she yelled at Bill,” Priscilla said.

  It was a little kiss, no big deal, she said. If Mrs. P was so sensitive why did she hang mistletoe all over the place? Scott understood once Priscilla explained how trivial it was. God! But Mrs. P had always acted jealous of Priscilla. Was it Priscilla’s fault she was young?

  “Once she gets that the police aren’t going to release her she’ll start pointing fingers. Scott will get the blame.”

  Lennox jotted notes and smiled encouragingly, the whole time marveling that Priscilla held herself blameless.

  When Priscilla exhausted the topic of Delia’s jealousy, Lennox said, “You said Scott will get the blame. Can you be more specific?”

  Priscilla shrugged. “Anything goes missing, we get a call. Money. Drugs. You name it.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Yeah. How do you think Mrs. P stays so thin at her age?”

  Speed. No wonder Delia wore a size two and her jaw was clenched all the time. Lennox said, “Street?”

  Priscilla smirked. “She doesn’t need the street. She’s got the Candyman, M.D. in her pocket.”

  Lennox leaned forward. “You’re talking like you think the cops have the right person for the murder.”

  Priscilla leaned back in her chair and looked bored. “Duh,” she said.

  Chapter 12

  Lennox worked the rest of the afternoon poring over the one-hundred-nine pictures from the party. All the grinning senior citizens in their party finery. She studied them picture by picture. Bill in a tux, his arm thrown around his cousin Father Mac, Bill with Dan, big smiles on both their faces. Delia stick thin in black trousers and a red sequined top, smiling for the camera. Lennox looked for stress lines and read the disappointment, maybe embarrassment.

  Photograph after photograph, Lennox looked for anything false and came up with nothing. She closed the program and got ready for her meeting with Ham. A half an hour later she was at the Shanty.

  “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” crooned from the Shanty sound system. The bartender had draped even more garland on the back bar.

  Lennox and Ham sat at the corner table, her with her Blitzen, the bartender’s holiday spin on a vodka stinger, and Ham with his perennial pint of Fat Tire ale. It was eight thirty and slow for a Tuesday night. Lennox figured all the uniforms who usually gathered at the bar must be doing extra traffic duty, keeping the streets safe for last-minute shoppers.

  “At first pass, it doesn’t look like anyone outside the family had a financial motive.” Ham licked the beer off his mustache.

  “What about the councilwoman?”

  “Plenty of folks funding her campaign even if Bill backed her opponent.”

  “The carpenter?”

  Ham shrugged. “He pays his bills on time. He’s busy. He got the occasional job from Bill. No motive.”

  “The family.” Ever since Lennox’s interview with Priscilla earlier in the day, a feeling between alarm and panic had vibrated up Lennox’s spine until it lodged in her neck bones. She had to say it out loud, get her fears out on the table.

  “What if the murderer turns out to be Delia?”

  It was only when Ham said, “I don’t think so,” that her spine relaxed.

  He said, “Financially speaking, Delia would’ve been much better off divorcing him. That way, she’d get half his assets instead of a fraction of them.”

  “She wore a hot pink slip to her husband’s funeral,” Lennox said.

  “Is that a bad thing?” Ham said.

  “She’s taken down all of Bill’s pictures, and you should see Doctor E,” she said. “He’s been hanging out in front of the jail like someone’s lost dog. It would be a helluva thing, my first shot back in the game and it turns out the perp is the client’s boyfriend.”

  “Boyfriend?” Ham said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Gus was planning on using the doc as a witness for the defense,” Ham said.

  “Gus?” she said.

  “Mr. Kline to you.”

  “It’s a bad move. Our Doctor E prescribed insulin inhalers to Delia and it’s rumored he prescribed diet pills as well. He’s going to make things worse. Tell Mr. Kline that.”

  Ham licked beer foam off the top of his lip. “I’ll run the doc’s books. How far back?”

  She thought five years was sufficient.

  Ham said, “Who else do you got?”

  “Scott Pike. According to Priscilla, Delia has blamed Scott for missing money and missing prescription speed. I went back and talked to Delia. She said Scott’s never respected their boundaries. Takes whatever he pleases. Add to that, Scott found out about the will prior to Bill’s death.”

  “That’s not unusual,” Ham said. “What’s weird, their estate wouldn’t go in total to the surviving spouse.”

  “I thought that, too. Delia said Bill was paranoid she’d marry again and the new husband would inherit.”

  “Doctor E?”

  “If Delia had anything of a romantic nature going on, she would’ve told Aurora.”

  “Are you sure of that?” Ham said.

  “As sure as I am of anything,” Lennox said and sipped her Blitzen. “Anyway, Delia swears that she and Bill kept the will secret. She said they didn’t want to sap their boys’ ambition. Seems to have worked on the older son.”

  “You mean Dan?” Ham said. “He may have ambition, but his credit score is in the toilet.”

  Lennox felt disappointed, then surprised she felt disappointed. “What do you have?”

  “His condo foreclosed on nine months ago, a couple months later, his car repoed.”

  Mr. Dan Pike in his Dolce & Gabbana funeral duds, Aurora going on and on about how successful and tasteful he was. Don’t even ask how much his clothes must’ve set him back, she had said. More than your friend, Tommy, has in the bank. Lennox had to hand it to him: no one would guess he was broke.

  “I found these in his trash.” Lennox handed over her photos of the credit card receipts.

  Ham paged back in his notebook before examining the pictures. “Yeah. This one,” he said, pointing to the receipt ending in 4637, “is his MasterCard. He’s down to just one. I don’t know about the receipts ending in 23
31. It was charged at a Chicago bank?”

  She nodded. “I found a boarding pass from last weekend, Chicago to Portland.”

  “He probably had business he needed to conduct in person,” Ham said. “I’ll see what I can find out.” He leaned back in his chair and made a circular motion with his finger signaling another round to their waitress. “Anyone else?”

  “Scott’s girlfriend, Priscilla Krahn. I interviewed her this afternoon. Now that Bill is dead she’s wearing the biggest honking diamond I’ve ever seen. ”

  Ham grimaced. “Near as I can tell, Bill pulled the plug on Scott’s rent and allowance last June. But he’s still paying Priscilla’s tuition.”

  “It’s occurred to me that maybe Bill had his eye on Priscilla.”

  “He cuts off funds to Scott to make him look bad?” Ham said.

  Lennox nodded. “It’s possible. Here’s another thing: I talked to Alice Stapely this morning.”

  “The caterer?”

  “The very same,” Lennox said.

  From the television screen over the bar, an adoring Donna Reed looked up at Jimmy Stewart. The bartender, mercifully, had set the movie on mute. What Lennox could hear were the hard clicks of billiard balls colliding in the back room.

  “And?” Ham said.

  Lennox told him about Alice’s affair with Bill, the confession, the frame-up. “Her basketball coach,” Lennox said.

  “You think Father Mac had Alice expelled to protect Bill’s reputation?”

  “Or his own. How would it look? The coach is his cousin,” she said. “Father Mac probably figured if Alice confessed the affair to her priest, maybe she’d confess to her parents or teachers. Discrediting Alice was probably the safest way to block her accusations. Then there’s the parking attendants at the party. I knew Resnick was a felon. Turns out the other one, Emory Zimm, has spent half his adult life behind bars. Father Mac has them on his payroll at least part-time. You got to wonder about the priest’s character.”

  A micro smile hitched the corners of Ham’s mouth, a smile you could miss under that mustache of his. “There’s more about the priest than you know,” he said.