A Bitch Called Hope

by Lily Gardner

  “Whoa there. Who’s handling this?”

  “Fish,” she said.

  “Why aren’t you talking to him? Isn’t he your poker buddy?”

  He wasn’t going to make this easy for her. “No,” she said. “He’s not my buddy. Listen, you interviewed both Gabe and his girlfriend the night of the party. He probably told you he didn’t see anything unusual or suspicious. But right after the murder he quits his job and he’s got a whole bunch of cash. His story about where it came from is too lame to even repeat.”

  “Try me.” There was an edge to Tommy’s voice.

  Lennox felt her palms sweating. “He says he has a patron.”

  “Is that like a boyfriend?”

  “A patron of the arts. Some rich guy who pays him to write comic books.”

  There was a pause on the line long enough that Lennox wondered if the call had been dropped, then she heard him clear his throat.

  “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. I’m finishing some reports. I’ll be done in a half an hour. How about I come over to your place, you can tell me all about it.”

  You wouldn’t have had to know Tommy well to hear the ”better to see you with, my dear” running beneath his just-business voice.

  “How about the all-night burger joint on Forty-seventh and Sandy?” she said.

  “They sell beer?”

  “Tommy, this is serious.”

  “You’re the one that called me,” Tommy said.

  “They sell beer.”

  “See you in a half an hour,” he said and hung up.

  Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rang. Tommy with a wine bottle poking out from the pocket of his jacket. Nothing was straight up with that guy. She grabbed her jacket and bag.

  He walked past her into the house. “It took me less time to wrap up than I thought,” he said in that breezy way he had. “Is Lover Boy here? Is that why you didn’t want me coming around?”

  “Don’t try to make this personal. Gabe Makem is in the ICU. He needs police protection.”

  “Which is why I came over here after working ten hours. Because you needed my help.”

  Fatigue creased the skin around his eyes and mouth. It made him look sincere.

  “Sit down,” she pointed to her sofa. She waited until he settled himself, then she sat in a chair close enough to talk to him, far enough away he couldn’t get too chummy. She said, “Gabe saw something the night he was catering the Pike party. Something he used to blackmail the murderer.”

  “We have the murderer, Dish. You mind getting me a drink?” He held up a bottle of cabernet. She went into the kitchen and poured some wine for him. When she got back he was slouched on the sofa like he’d taken root. She handed him the glass. Put the bottle on the side table by his elbow. He lifted the wine to his lips and swallowed a third of it.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  Lennox sat in the chair facing him and gave him the whole deal. How both Alice and Gabe had been witnesses. How, shortly after the murder, Gabe quit his job.

  Tommy listened and drank wine. Poured himself more. Lennox finished. She had lined out a logical path from witness to blackmail to attempted murder.

  “That’s it?” he said.

  “You’re the one that always used to say there are no coincidences,” she said.

  “Did the kid ever admit he was blackmailing the murderer?”

  “The money is the proof. Makem has spent seventeen thousand dollars in the last month and he’s not working.”

  “If he doesn’t have a boyfriend, he’s selling drugs.”

  “Gabe has no history of drug use, and then two weeks after the murder he’s come up with all that cash. Come on, you know it doesn’t work that way.”

  “You’ve got nothing.” He shook his head. “And you’ve run out of time.”

  He sat there drinking his wine looking as smug as a person can look.

  “You’re not going to help those two get police protection,” she said.

  “Maybe I could be persuaded.” A grin snaked around his lying face.

  “Tell me you weren’t always like this.” Because she couldn’t have possibly loved this man sitting on her sofa not giving two shits about anybody but himself.

  “What about you?” he said. “You used to have a sense of humor.”

  She stood up. “I was an idiot. Get out.” She grabbed the wine glass off the table.

  The second she reached for the glass, he took her by both arms. The last bit of wine spilled on her sleeve and the glass fell. He pulled her off balance and threw her on the cushion next to him. His hands were on her breasts. He groaned and called her baby and told her he knew she wanted it.

  Her elbow came out and up and caught him on the nose. She put everything she had into that jab. A year’s worth of heartache, the disappeared evidence, the rumors he spread about her. Everything. She jumped out of reach before he had time to react.

  Blood gushed from his nostrils. He sounded like he was gargling. His eyes were squeezed shut, both hands clutching his nose.

  She trotted to the bathroom, came back to see him dripping blood on her sofa. She threw him a guest towel. Opened the front door wide. “Out,” she said.

  Tommy lowered the towel. His nose had begun to swell, his laughing eyes dark with hatred. She took a good long look. How she used to love that face.

  “Keep the towel,” she said. The last of Tommy was the screech of tires as he sped down her street.

  She called Alice. The call went immediately to voice mail. Lennox got a scrub bucket of cold water and went to work on the blood Tommy had spilled on her sofa and rug. Is this what she’d become, a person who committed assault? Busting his nose was self-defense. She scrubbed the sofa cushion with a cold rag, rinsed it in the bucket, and scrubbed again. She could tell herself that if she hadn’t applied force he would have. She knew him well, she knew his intentions, but there was so much bad business behind that jab to the nose, it was hard to separate out what was necessary from what was lashing out. And maybe it did give her nice little glow of satisfaction, but unfortunately, making Tommy an enemy did nothing to make Gabe or Alice any safer.

  Chapter 32

  Four thirty in the morning found Lennox in her pajamas making a pot of coffee. It was too dark to see the rain outside but she heard it beating on the windows. The rain had woken her at two a.m. Thoughts of Tommy, Dan and Gabe kept her up after that. She waited until the coffee was finished brewing before she called the nurses’ station in ICU to check on Gabe Makem.

  Gabe had died in the night. Lennox asked how he died, but of course, the nurse wouldn’t give that information over the phone. She told Lennox she was very sorry. Lennox hung up and called Alice. It went to voicemail along with Lennox’s other calls.

  Lennox threw on some clothes and drove the fifteen minutes through the rain to Emmanuel Hospital. Hit-and-run had just turned to murder. A twenty-seven-year-old kid living in his comic book world. Who the hell ran him down? She slammed her hand on the steering wheel. Nothing, nothing had gone right with this case. Why couldn’t she have gotten Gabe to trust her? He’d be alive and she would have her murderer.

  Where the hell was Alice and why wouldn’t she return Lennox’s calls? Lennox pulled into the visitor parking lot. There were only eight cars. The rain had turned to sleet. Lennox splashed her way to the hospital entrance and rode the elevator up to ICU. Gabe’s mother sat by herself on a sofa facing a window of the night sky. She might as well have been gazing down a well. Her faded hair was flattened on one side, mussed on the other. She looked like a woman who’d lost everything.

  Lennox told Gabe’s mother that she was a friend of Alice’s. That Lennox was so sorry. The mother’s name was Debbie. She said she was with Gabe when he passed. Lennox asked what happened. He was peaceful, Debbie said. He never did wake up. A gust of wind shook the window. Debbie shivered.

  “Did you see Alice recently?” Lennox said.

  “She left a
little while ago.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  Her parents.

  Lennox let out the breath she didn’t know she was holding. Asked Debbie if she could get her anything. Debbie didn’t answer. Lennox pressed a business card in Debbie’s folded hands. Told her to call Lennox if she needed anything at all. It was hard to know if she heard.

  It was snowing hard when Lennox left the hospital, the wet kind of snow where a dozen flakes clump together and melt as soon as they hit the pavement. Lennox got home by six thirty a.m., the beginning of what promised to be a colossally shitty day. She left her wet shoes by the door and poured herself a stale cup of coffee before returning to her desk.

  Lennox put in another call to Alice. The call ended in Alice’s voice mail again. Enough already, Alice was fine. As fine as a person could be after her lover died. She was with her parents. She was safe.

  An e-mail from Jillian Oster grabbed Lennox’s attention. She opened the attachments and printed them. It was just as Jillian had said. Sixty-two thousand charged in September spread out between the three cards. Lennox checked through Jillian’s other charges. Purchases from Macy’s and Saks. A charge from Richard’s Smoke for four hundred eighty dollars.

  It was eight forty-five in Chicago. Lennox called her.

  “What now?” Jillian said.

  “I’m looking at your October Visa. There’s a five hundred dollar purchase made from Richard’s Smoke.”

  “That was Dan’s. He paid me back.”

  “Do you know what it was for?”

  Her voice turned brittle. “At the time? I was more concerned about the 64K.”

  Lennox thanked her and hung up. Then ran a credit report on her. Jillian Oster was a woman who paid her bills promptly. She typically ran up two thousand dollars a month worth of charges on her three credit cards and paid them off each month. In October of last year her cards maxed out. She must have had a cow. Mid-January she paid the cards off in full. Just like she said.

  So Dan’s business fails. Two of his investors threaten to sue and Dan goes for his girlfriend’s credit cards. Why? Why not go to his parents right off the bat? He’d run out of options, so he went back to visit his folks. And then Dan seemed so decent to both his mom and his brother. All those fond memories of his dad he had shared with Lennox. Made him some kind of a saint, once you got to know the sort of family he came from. Have you ever known a salesman to be honest?

  Dan couldn’t have murdered his father. If you didn’t count the sixty-two thousand he stole from his girlfriend, or the forty-six hundred from his dad’s estate, he was the only person in the whole family that was decent. There was the box of cigars.

  Lennox looked over at the clock. God, she was depressed. She’d wait until eight to put a call in to Ham. Get him to request copies of the checks Dan allegedly wrote against Jillian’s account. With luck they’d e-mail an answer before Ham and Lennox’s ten o’clock meeting with Kline.

  Kline called and postponed their meeting until two that afternoon. Could they meet at Higgins? Lunch? If you want, Kline said. Had Delia driven him to drink? Maybe, but Lennox never met an attorney who didn’t tipple.

  There are two lawyer bars in Portland: the Lotus, a fun, no-frills joint for cops and the lawyers who work on the prosecution side of the bench. The décor is working class and proud of it. Framed photographs of generations of men in their work duds enjoying a glass of beer or whiskey after a long, hard day line the walls. The drinks are strong and modestly priced, and the wait staff takes no shit. Her buddy Jerry did his drinking there when he wasn’t patronizing the Shanty.

  Higgins serves the defense side of the bench. These attorneys charge the moon for their services and have expense accounts. Higgins is brass and leather, old and impressive. Dan took her to dinner at Higgins. Dan.

  The snow had turned back to rain by the time Lennox parked her car a half block from the bar. As she walked through the slush, she couldn’t help but think about him. He had to have been desperate, his salvation riding on the old man’s death. Lennox could think it, but she didn’t really believe Dan could kill his father no matter how cornered he felt.

  She entered the bar and spotted Kline in a large corner booth along with Ham. Reports were spread across the white tablecloth. What looked like a double scotch sat in front of Kline. Both Kline and Ham were jotting notes in their respective notebooks.

  She sat next to Ham. A waiter appeared from the shadows and took her order.

  Kline turned to her and said, “What do you have for me?”

  “Our only witness died this morning from injuries he sustained in a hit-and-run.”

  “That’s terrible,” Kline said.

  “Did he tell you who the murderer was?” Ham said.

  “No. He kept to his patron story and then he got run over.” It killed her to admit that.

  Kline picked up his scotch and drank deeply. Put it back on the table and stared at it. “We haven’t been very lucky, have we?”

  He didn’t know the half of it. More dead-ends than an Escher painting. She was just this close to fucking committing seppuku.

  Instead she took three calming breaths and began. “The facts still point to the family. I feel certain that whoever killed our witness murdered Bill Pike as well. And I think we can rule out Priscilla; she doesn’t drive.”

  “That leaves us with four suspects, right?” Kline signaled the waiter and lifted his glass. He turned to Ham. “Can you shed any light on this thing?”

  Ham opened the first of two file folders and passed copies of his report to both Lennox and Kline. Lennox scanned the report.

  “At the time of Bill Pike’s death, his net worth stood at thirty-two million,” Ham said.

  Even though it was not the first time she’d heard the figure, it still made her breathless. If you stood to inherit a piece of that fortune, how could you not run little death scenarios from time to time?

  Ham said, “Bill’s investment ratios were eccentric. He kept six point seven million liquid, or semi-liquid.”

  Kline’s eyebrows spiked almost to his hairline.

  “I’ve seen this before,” Ham said. “With certain entrepreneurs, they’re leveraged to the hilt starting out, then over time they become more and more conservative. Given the size of Bill’s holdings, you’d think he’d have a large position in the market. He only had a half million in his son’s company. But that’s not that unusual for your real estate guys. All they believe in is property.”

  Ham took a sip of beer and wiped the foam off his mustache with a cocktail napkin. He turned the page of his report. “Bill’s stock portfolio followed Dan from firm to firm. When Dan went out on his own, Bill stayed with him. But then a year ago he suddenly pulled out. The question is why.”

  Ham kept his eyes trained on his report and filled Kline in on the death spiral Dan’s finances had taken after his father pulled his investment from Dan’s company. The only things new for Lennox were the two lawsuits that resolved once Bill died.

  “What do you have on Dan?” Kline asked Lennox.

  It was her turn to pass out reports. “No criminal record,” she said. “But I talked to his ex-fiancée yesterday. She claims he raided her credit card accounts to the tune of sixty-two thousand last October.”

  “Raided?” Kline said. “He stole sixty-two thousand?”

  “Correct,” she said. She kept her voice crisp though her stomach was twisted in knots. “Dan promised the ex he’d pay her back, but kept slipping the deadline until she threatened action. That’s when he showed up at his parents’ for the Christmas party. According to his ex, Dan was all but estranged from his family. Then Bill dies; Dan pays the ex back.”

  “How solid is this?” Kline said.

  “Rock solid,” Lennox said.

  Kline exhaled.

  “Two more things,” Lennox said. “He paid off a debt to Chase Bank with his father’s credit card to the tune of forty-six hundred bucks. And,” she haul
ed up another breath. “It appears that Dan was the one who bought his father the expensive cigars that brought on his asthma attack.”

  Kline leaned forward. “Do we have our murderer?”

  The air seemed to buzz around her.

  “There are other suspects,” Ham said. “Look at the real estate. Each of Bill’s commercial properties is its own financial entity. Many of his apartment buildings are set up as LLCs, solely owned. But the Hunter’s Ridge subdivision, which Bill owned jointly with Father McMahon, was set up with a cross-purchase plan.”

  “I’m surprised, given Bill Pike’s financial personality, that he’d go for a subdivision,” Ham was saying. “It seems so expansive for a man who seemed to be more in the mode of managing his existing holdings. I’d bet that he got talked into this deal.”

  Ham turned to the last page of the report. “Prior to Bill’s death, Father McMahon was leveraged up to the roots of his hair. Debt to asset a whopping seventy-two percent. Everything he owned or hoped to own was sunk in Hunter’s Ridge. Of course, thanks to the cross-purchase agreement, now he’s in clover.”

  “Remind me what a cross-purchase plan is,” Kline said.

  Ham explained how in the case of death, the surviving partner buys out the other partner’s shares financed with a life insurance policy set up by the company.

  “How much are we talking about?” Kline said.

  “Thirteen million.”

  Even Kline looked impressed.

  Ham reached for the second file folder and handed Lennox and Kline the report for the last three days.

  “Finally there’s Scott Pike.” Ham sipped his beer and talked about Scott’s lousy credit. How Bill paid his rent up until six months ago at which time Father Mac took over funding Scott.

  Lennox said, “Scott has a history of drug abuse and violent behavior going back to his junior year in high school. Lots of complaints filed then dropped, including one act of assault and one act of criminal mischief when he took a baseball bat to a rival’s car. He’s never spent any jail time.”

  “The complaints are dropped when Bill buys them off,” Kline said, stating the obvious. The waiter appeared with her wine and Kline’s scotch.