Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery

by Rosemary Harris

  That was the last time I saw her.

  Max did offer me $1,000, but, as instructed, I negotiated and got him up to $2,500. He fanned out driver’s licenses like a deck of cards. When I saw Oregon, I knew I had the beginnings of my new life story. It was perfect—I’d lied about it so many times I already felt as if I was from Oregon. I tapped it with one finger and Max plucked it from the stack as if he were doing a card trick.

  “You have to come back tomorrow with a passport-size picture, chica. Then I give you the money.”

  “No. Money today and picture this afternoon.”

  “Okay, okay, I tried. How do you know Sherry?” Max asked, his nose running from who knew what substance he’d just inhaled. Sherry had said he was a dealer, but she didn’t say in what. Whatever it was, he managed to stay under the radar of most law enforcement types. According to Max, they hassled him only when things were really slow.

  “The cops don’t bother me. I don’t kill nobody. I don’t sell drugs near schools. I don’t pimp out no little girls.”

  Yes, I bet they loved him. I bet even now some civic group was naming a park after him near the Port Authority.

  I sat in the back of a coffee shop on West 54th Street as he cut and pasted my picture into the fake driver’s license and then sealed it with a portable laminating machine.

  “This gizmo, best investment I ever made. You gotta think about a revenue stream, chica, an IRA. I can help you get work.” He looked at me and then shook his head.

  “Nah, I don’t think so. You too sweet. You look so sweet you could be like that girl in the Neil Diamond song, ‘Sweet Caroline.’” He pumped his fist in the air in time to the music in his head.

  So a grubby guy who dealt in black market IDs and fake food stamp book lets gave me twenty-five hundred dollars, a new driver’s license, and a new name. On the bus ride to Florida I fleshed out my new past and hurtled toward what I hoped was a new future.

  Three years later when I met Grant Sturgis he gave me another new life. Over time, I allowed myself to think that I might really have buried that other person. The one from Michigan who did a stupid thing so long ago she really did seem like another person.

  Thirty

  Babe’s Paradise Diner looked the same as it did most mornings, with one exception. In the past if there had been a cluster of people hunched around one other person, it would have been around Babe. That morning people were huddled around a ten-inch computer screen in the corner booth.

  “I’m standing outside the Connecticut police station where just weeks ago the suburban woman known as the Fugitive Mom was held when it was discovered that she was escaped convict Monica Jane Weithorn. Weithorn escaped from a minimum security facility in Michigan more than twenty years ago and today she returns to sleepy Springfield, Connecticut, to the shocked neighbors and friends who for decades knew her as Caroline Sturgis.

  “After surrendering her passport, the convicted drug dealer was released on one million dollars bail. What she does next and what she’ll call herself is anyone’s guess, but one thing is certain. Authorities in two states will be keeping a watchful eye on her until December 6, when she returns to Michigan to hear the judge’s decision on whether she’ll be forced to serve out her original sentence or be returned to the privileged upper-middle-class lifestyle she’s been enjoying for these last two decades. Back to you, Dave.”

  “Stop screwing around on the Internet, Harry. Aren’t you supposed to be working on that thing?”

  The man in the corner booth grumbled but complied. That news report was as much as most people had seen or heard that morning anyway. Caroline was coming home. The crowd dispersed as he turned off the sound on his netbook.

  “Something in the tone of that reporter’s voice made me hate her,” Babe said.

  I knew what she meant. As vague as it was, the report made it seem as if Caroline had been selling crack in school yards and buying bling and driving big cars over the backs of small children and hopeless drug addicts. The true story was more complicated. Of course she did have a pretty sizable bling collection and a couple of big cars. It was a confusing situation. Even Caroline’s friends didn’t know exactly where they stood.

  I’d caught the early news at home, and it was a little more complete than the web video clip. According to the TV news, she and Grant would be landing at the Westchester Airport at 7 P.M.Journalists and cameramen were already camped out, ready to pounce.

  But I knew better. Caroline was already home, having arrived at Bradley Airport, outside Hartford late the previous evening. I knew because we’d talked this morning. I was on my way to see her.

  I’d take a private unpaved road to the back of the Sturgis house. Caroline and Grant would leave the inside garage door open for me and I’d be able to enter that way.

  They waited for me in the mud room, looking pasty and drained. I guess that was to be expected. He had cavernous circles under his eyes, and she had dark roots, edgy if you lived in the East Village but a major no-no for suburban Connecticut. She tried unsuccessfully to cover them with a scarf folded over many times to serve as a wide headband. Her usually buffed and ovalled nails were rough, and she’d torn at her cuticles, bloodying a few of the fingers.

  “Welcome home,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “Everything’s going according to plan. I heard from Lucy last night.”

  The three of us hugged. Then, as previously arranged, Grant left for Hartford to lead any reporters on the merry chase we’d orchestrated with help from Lucy Cavanaugh. Eager to be a part of the story, Lucy had come up with a cloak-and-dagger scenario that would buy Caroline some time with Grant and the rest of her family and the Sturgises had agreed. Lucy had flown to Detroit the previous night and would return on the flight that Caroline would reportedly be taking. Lucy would be in an obvious disguise and when Grant met her at the airport they would lead any intrusive reporters on as long as chase as they could. If it gave Caroline a day of peace to reconnect with her children and meet with her lawyer, that would be enough.

  Caroline led me into their immaculate kitchen. The only thing that was incongruous was a mountain of unopened mail on the credenza opposite the central island. There were no mimosas this time, only a pot of herbal tea. She brought out a blue tin of Danish butter cookies that I’d seen stacked up at the local Costco.

  “Grant’s been amazing. But look at this,” she said, fingering the top of the tin. “He’s been living on the pantry. If I hadn’t gotten out, when I did he would have been down to the cocktail onions and foil packets of coffee and cheese from last year’s holiday gift baskets.” She pointed to the spotless kitchen. “He’s trying so hard to be normal, he even wrote ‘Mommy home!’ on the whiteboard.”

  There was a catch in her voice as she said it, but she was remarkably composed for a woman who’d been through the ordeal that she’d had.

  “We’ll survive this,” she said. “Our marriage may even be stronger after the dust settles. If it wasn’t for the kids, I’d be glad this came out. You don’t know what it’s been like, keeping it in all these years. Thank you for finding out how it happened. I wouldn’t have cared, but Grant had to know who was responsible. It would have driven him crazy.”

  She shook her head and smiled. “Jeff Warren. I recognized him immediately, even with the beard and mustache. He was always a nice boy.”

  “That’s what his mother says. Did you recognize anyone else who was new in town? Someone at Mossdale’s, perhaps?”

  “No,” she said. “I usually just go out with Becka and we rarely see anyone. You mean the priest, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Never saw him before in my life. He just scared the heck out of me. He used exactly the same words another priest had used years ago when I went to the St. Ann’s shelter. I send them a check every year for their Holiday Fund Drive.”

  “What are you gonna do now?” I asked.

  “Wait until the judge decides. Until then, whatever they let me do.
The people who used to be in my life. You, the moms, my book group.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? Give the rest of them time,” I said. “They don’t know how to process this.” Privately I thought all it would take was one well-connected person to step up and welcome her back, to remind the rest of the pack that she was still Caroline, the woman they all loved a month earlier. For goodness sake, we forgave Nixon, didn’t we?

  I was betting that person would be Becka Reynolds. She had a good heart and had helped before, but I made a mental note to give her a little nudge if she needed it.

  “Is there anything else I can do?”

  “Yes.” Caroline looked quite serious now. “That’s really why I called.”

  She pulled a light blue bubble pack mailer out of the stack of mail on her credenza, hidden in plain sight. It had been stapled closed but was now just folded over. There was no postage and no address; it had been hand-delivered that morning.

  “Grant doesn’t know about this.”

  Caroline had turned into a light sleeper; perhaps a week in prison did that to a person. She’d heard a sound in her driveway around 6:30 A.M.when Grant was in the shower. She didn’t dare open the door but peered out through her bedroom window and noticed the envelope on her doorstep leaning against a cedar planter. In her peripheral vision she saw a car that had been parked across the road take off, but she couldn’t be sure the two actions were connected. And it was still too dark to identify the car or the driver.

  “You shouldn’t have opened it,” I said, staring at the envelope but not touching it. “It could have been dangerous.”

  “Like what, a dead rat from one of my neighbors? Anthrax?”

  “Who knows?” I started to say you never really knew people, but thought better of it.

  Caroline slid something out of the envelope and onto the table. It was a glossy blue jewelry box. Inside was an item wrapped in tissue paper. And a note typed on ivory card stock.

  It’s not over till it’s over.

  “Well, looks like someone has a problem with your release.”

  “There’s more to it than that. It’s not over till it’s over? That was a cheer we did when our team was down toward the end of a game. Whoever sent this knew me when I was Monica.”

  And despite what a judge in Michigan might decide, that person didn’t think anything was over. Caroline unwrapped the tissue paper. It was a silver megaphone charm with the letters NHS on it. Newtonville High School. On the other side were the initials MJW, Monica Jane Weithorn.

  Caroline’s cell phone rang, announcing she had a text message: Want it to be over? If you can pay one million dollars in bail you can damn well pay back the money you stole from me.

  Thirty-one

  I put the water on for tea and made Caroline go over the story she’d kept to herself for years and had undoubtedly repeated out loud and to herself a dozen times in the last month.

  “I guess I was pretty, but who thinks she’s pretty at that age—only the most confident girls, and I wasn’t one of them. I was the poor girl, pretty enough to make out with but not presentable enough to bring home to your parents. Until I met Eddie and Kate. They made me feel special. Kate even gave me some of her clothes and convinced me to try out for cheerleading. She knew the coach. Cheerleading made me popular, at least I thought that’s what it was. Once I started dating Eddie, I had lots of friends. Coach Hopper even encouraged Eddie and Kate to come along to games. He gave them credit for bringing me out of my shell.

  “I never knew what they were doing, and I didn’t steal anything,” Caroline said. “Honestly.”

  “Caroline, I’m not going to judge you and I’m not sure that’s the hot issue right now. Someone I would characterize as one of the bad guys thinks you did. And knows your phone number and knows where you live. He may even know that you’re holding this thing right now.” As I said it, the two of us looked out the sliding glass doors into Caroline’s backyard and the reservoir behind it. A beautiful spot. Peaceful. Wooded. Remote. She pushed a button under the island and sun shades rolled down, allowing us to see out but obscuring the view from outside. Then she went into her living room to retrieve a bottle of vodka.

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Let’s have some more tea, okay?”

  “Tea is not going to do the trick. I’m screwed. My life has been unalterably changed, my kids must think I’m a hypocrite, my mother-in-law wants custody of my children. Lord knows how Grant’s clients will react. What else can they do to me?”

  What they could do, and she’d realize it once she calmed down, was to make her look as bad as possible so that a judge in Michigan would have to send her back to prison to complete her sentence, otherwise risk being thought of as too liberal.

  “You have to call the police,” I said.

  She shook her head vigorously and I couldn’t blame her. The last time she trusted them, she was sentenced to twenty years in jail for a crime I still wanted to believe she hadn’t committed.

  “No,” she said. “We just have to find this man and see what he wants.”

  “Caroline, we know what he wants—money. Some measure of revenge. And from the tone of that note, scaring the pants off you would be a nice little bonus for him.”

  “You have to help me. You found Jeff Warren, you can find this guy.”

  I had to admit I was getting good at locating things and people. I found myself wondering what Nina Mazzo charged for this line of work. It had to be more than gardeners earned, and the work was a lot less strenuous, if occasionally risky.

  “Okay, let’s narrow down the possibilities. We keep saying ‘he.’ Are we even sure it’s a man?” I asked.

  There was only one other woman who’d been involved with the case, and she wasn’t talking. Unless it was from the grave.

  “I can’t tell you anything about Kate,” Caroline said. “The subject is off-limits.”

  Thirty-two

  Apparently, only a few people had shown up for Kate Gustafson’s funeral. Even her mother hadn’t gone, although maybe she was too heartbroken to watch her only child being put in the ground. Kate and Caroline were seven years apart in age, but had had a lot in common. They were pretty, smart, and from single-parent homes where there was never enough supervision.

  Kate had always wanted to be on the stage, ever since her first beauty pageant at age six. She hadn’t won, but she’d stayed on the local pageant circuit until her late teens, when being named Miss Atwell Air Filter was about as much fun as being named Miss Jiffy Lube. Some people just didn’t respect the beauty pageant community. To hell with them. The Atwell prize paid for six months of tuition and they couldn’t laugh at that. In contrast to what her lawyer tried to claim at the trial, she did well in school and finished college in three and a half years because she had calculated exactly when her financial aid would run out.

  Originally, she had hoped to be a teacher, but there were no jobs available since residents were leaving Newtonville and insisted on taking their kids with them. One of the public schools had even shut down and the overflow of teachers were subbing and waiting for their colleagues to either retire or die.

  Kate had had a succession of part-time jobs including tending bar. She was reading the obituaries, looking for job openings one night when Eddie Donnelly came in.

  She went back to bartending after her release and was found dead in the bar’s basement after a fire caused by faulty, nonlicensed wiring on a neon sign. Arson investigators were suspicious but found nothing.

  “Kate was a good person,” Caroline said. “People thought it was odd that we became friends, but she was like an older sister to me. There was no jealousy over Eddie. We were all friends.”

  Friends who were all criminals, or two friends who set up the third one? Caroline knew what I was thinking.

  “You don’t understand. Kate tried to protect me.” Caroline fiddled with her tissues and looked longingly at the bottle on the table. Clearly she was deciding how m
uch to tell me and I wondered how much more there was to tell.

  “Three months into my freshman year, I sensed something was going on. I didn’t know what it was. I thought Kate had started seeing Eddie again. There had been a lot of big parties after the games. Sometimes they’d get lost in the crowd and leave me to fend for myself. We weren’t the Three Musketeers anymore, the way it had been the previous year. I confronted her and she denied it, but I knew they were hiding something.”

  One night, Caroline overheard the two of them arguing. Kate said she was tired of sneaking around and hiding things from Caroline and the coach. That confirmed Caroline’s worst suspicions. Her mother was gone, she had no other female friends to confide in; by then Kate and Eddie had become her surrogate family. She was devastated.

  “I went to Kate again. This time she swore to me that she and Eddie had no romantic connections anymore. She even laughed at the suggestion. She told me they were working for someone, and the less I knew the better.”

  Kate had told her once football season ended, she was getting out and would make sure that Caroline was no longer involved either, but for the time being she should just keep going to classes and to the games and try not to think about it. That’s what she did until the day Kate and Eddie were arrested. Hours later, Caroline was arrested, too.

  “I thought it might have to do with betting on the games. I wasn’t much of a football fan, but there were a few games we lost that everyone thought we should have won. Kate would never do anything to hurt me.”

  “She would never do anything to hurt you? And you know that how?”

  Caroline reached for the vodka and this time I let her. She poured us each a stiff one. I took a tiny sip and stared out at the woods through the shade, wondering what to do next.

  “Let me ask you something else,” I said. “Do you get a lot of deer around here?”

  “No. The reservoir and the dirt road are privately owned by a water company. They use some sort of organic deer repellent. I don’t know what kind. I had to sign an approval form, but it was so long ago I don’t remember what it was. Why?”