Up in Smoke

by Charlene Weir

  “Been to Disney World yet?” Bernie grinned.

  “I’m saving it for my afternoon off. Speaking of days off, you ever gonna return my jacket?”

  “I keep forgetting. As soon as we get back to Hampstead.”

  “Right. Don’t forget.” Todd yelled at the waiter across the patio to bring more coffee. “What else have Halderbreck’s people got? What’s their strategy? I can’t figure out what they’re doing.”

  “That’s probably the idea. Let’s hope they can’t figure out what we’re doing either.”

  “Neither can I,” Todd said. “Listen, we gotta go. The governor is about to go on.”

  The all piled into the car and drove to a senior center somewhere in Florida. Cass thought even Bernie probably couldn’t come up with the name of the town right offhand.

  The room was large, walls a depressing prison-shade green, light struggled through narrow crank-opened windows that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the Eisenhower administration. Long rows of metal tables filled the center of the room and stacks of folding chairs leaned in one corner. Apparently, everyone had to get his own chair. The only decorations were the American flag and a bulletin board with photos of a bus trip to the race track and announcements for coming events. Bingo, relaxation methods, singles night, weight-lifting for everyone, dance instruction.

  The place was depressed and so was Bernie. “This is not going to be our finest hour,” he whispered to Cass. She and Bernie had declined the boxed lunches and stood just outside the wide doorway with the press.

  Jack was sitting at a folding table, box lunch in front of him. People at his table and the tables surrounding him were poking into boxes of their own. Cass wondered how long those boxes had been sitting out and hoped they had nothing potentially lethal inside like tuna salad. Jack was nodding and listening respectfully.

  The whole scene seemed absurd in some surreal way and she wondered why she wasn’t home getting rid of unneeded belongings instead of here watching Jack Garrett eat a sandwich with a roomful of people who all had white or gray hair or a color so improbable genetics had never heard of it. She wondered how Monty the cat and Carmen the dog were getting along without her. Why was Jack here? This was his response to Senator Halderbreck and a forgotten former governor? The more she saw of politics, the more she didn’t understand and she was beginning to wonder if Bernie, or even Todd, the wizard of campaign managers, understood anything.

  A scrawny man with a buzz cut so short his pink scalp showed through thin white hair got up to introduce Jack. “Anybody remember Jack Kennedy?” Claps and cheers. “Well, we got us somebody a lot like him right here in this room. Charm. Charisma.” He smiled with a lot of very white teeth. “You all didn’t think I knew that word, did you?”

  Bigger burst of claps and cheers, more for the introducer than for Jack, Cass thought. Jack got up. He mumbled, he rambled and seemed like he’d forgotten what he’d meant to say. Since Wakely died some of the fire and enthusiasm had gone. Jack had a dark look in his eyes and his zeal for speaking had lost its edge. Grieving for his lifelong friend, she thought. She knew about grieving. It never got finished. You think it’s over and you pretend like you’re living and then—maybe a scent, a sound, or a bit of music—and grief has its fangs in your throat again.

  Then Jack started talking, just talking, not making a speech. “I want to say a few words about my opponent, Senator Halderbreck.” Jack waited a beat. “He’s a good man. A man of his word.” Jack shook his head. “But there are some things we disagree on. I want to tell you about them, because they’re important to you.”

  Back in stride, Cass thought, amazed as always at how he reached people and pulled them in. He mentioned cuts in cost of living adjustments for Social Security. A general grumble went through the room like a low hum. Can’t manage now. Prices keep going up.

  “… and we disagree about Medicare. Senator Halderbreck wants you to pay more…”

  Another hum, this one louder. “We always pay more and those bastards always pay less.”

  “… area where we disagree and that’s the Middle East. We have got to give more attention to the consequences of our actions and by that I mean…”

  When Jack finished speaking, the crows started in on Bernie while Jack shook hands, hugged a frail woman, and talked informally with the crowd gathered around him. He was his old self, listening, touching, caring. A woman in a wheelchair smiled up at him and when he bent slightly toward her, she put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled him close enough to kiss his cheek. He kissed her cheek in return and she blushed like a girl.

  Cass couldn’t match up this man with Jackson Garrett, the man she had thought she’d marry. When she tried to superimpose this figure over the man she used to know, the man who was going to be her law partner and they were going to represent the poor and downtrodden, the edges blurred and she could only see the shadow of a stranger, an eerie reshaping of the man she thought she knew into a wraith who only resembled him slightly. The agony she’d felt when he didn’t return to her after that forest fire in Montana seemed, looking back on it, pale compared to the pain she’d endured when Ted and Laura died. How things change, she mused.

  Jack patted the elderly woman’s shoulder and straightened. For an instant, she caught a look of—? Remorse? Did the wheelchair remind him of his old friend? Why remorse? Did he feel he hadn’t done enough when Wakely was alive? Maybe she imagined it. Or maybe he had a pain in his back and regretted bending over.

  32

  The Coffee Cup, packed with media people, was doing a brisk lunch business when Parkhurst came in. Phyllis sent him a smile and nodded at the doorway to her left. He went into the empty banquet room and sat at one of the round tables.

  It took her a minute or two to get to him. “I thought you’d like it better in here. It’s quieter. I’ll guard the door so they can’t get in. I swear they’re like a pack of hyenas. In your face, in your face, in your face. I don’t know how you stand it. If I toted a gun, I’d probably shoot the bunch of them.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.” Without looking at the menu, he ordered a turkey sandwich, fries and coffee. She scribbled on her pad in that awkward-looking way of the left-handed. A minute or two later she came back with a thick white mug and filled it with coffee. He took a sip, it wasn’t any better than what he’d been drinking all morning, and did nothing to get rid of the taste and smell of rot. When the food came, his appetite fluttered and dissipated.

  Susan, ignoring questions and fighting off microphones stuck in her face, slipped through the door and sat across from him. “God, they never give up. I had to sneak out the back and then I run into them here.” She rubbed her temples. “How was the autopsy?”

  “Went well. You should have been there. Nothing like ripping open a body and lifting out parcels of insides to make you think of lunch. You want something?”

  She snagged a fry from his plate before he could splatter catsup all over them and popped it in her mouth.

  “That makes an even thirty thousand you owe me. Why don’t you ever buy your own?”

  She looked horrified. “All that fat and salt? It’ll kill you.” She lifted another.

  When Phyllis came back, Susan asked for two eggs over easy, sausage links, and coffee.

  “Fat and salt?” Parkhurst said.

  “What can I say? An undeniable craving. I’m weak.”

  Phyllis set a mug in front of her, filled it with coffee and refilled Parkhurst’s. Susan put both hands around the mug to warm them. “Has Demarco found the dog?”

  “No sign of it.” Parkhurst upended the catsup bottle and gave it a good smack, dumping red stuff all over the fries. “Some of the blood in her garage belongs to a dog, so it was injured.”

  “Maybe he killed it, too.”

  “If he did, where’s the body?”

  “He took it away?”

  “Why?’ Parkhurst bit into his sandwich and chewed.

&nbs
p; “It tried to protect her. It was in the way, it could identify him?”

  He laughed. “A talking dog maybe?”

  “Hey, there are some bloodhounds that can now give evidence in court.”

  He gave her a sour look and bit off another hunk of his sandwich. “And the girl? Why was she hiding? Think she can identify him, too?”

  “I don’t know why you’re in such a shitty mood, but it’s beginning to annoy me.”

  “As opposed to my usual sunny self?”

  She took a manila envelope from her shoulder bag and opened it. “Crime scene photos,” she said. “Wakely Fromm. These are copies.”

  She snapped down a photo and another and another and another until they formed a half-circle around his plate. Stark, harsh, ugly photos. What was left of Wakely Fromm, listing to one side in his wheelchair, mouth open, right arm hanging down. Gun on the floor. “You see anything there to suggest homicide not suicide?”

  He pushed the remains of his sandwich and fries to one side. An autopsy just before lunch might be a good way to diet. He focused on the photos and wondered why she was so bitchy.

  The nagging grain of sand scratching just out of reach wouldn’t let him drop it and go along with suicide. He couldn’t just do the paperwork and hand what was left of Fromm over to whoever was going to spring for burial. Probably his good buddy Governor Jackson Garrett. And it bothered him that Sean Donovan had found the body. Good way to account for fingerprints or fibers, any incriminating evidence at the scene.

  He studied each picture. Been there, done that. What was it that bothered him about this? Was he missing something? Maybe the poor son of a bitch did check out. Tired of being a burden, when his buddy was trying a bid for candidacy as the first step toward the biggest job in town, Fromm moved himself out of the equation to make life easier for said buddy.

  He studied the photos. Staged, the whole thing looked staged. By not looking at the pictures, but staring through them, they no longer had the same impact. Not pictures of a man, just so much garbage.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Sean Donovan.”

  “Yes?” she said with a little edge of warning.

  Parkhurst took in a long breath and let it out. He might not be much, but he was a good cop and he’d always gone after the answers, no matter what.

  “I don’t know, Susan.” He took a sip of coffee. “Donovan’s business card was found in the trunk of the car with the body of a homicide victim.” Risky business, suggesting this clown she loved so much might be mixed up in a homicide. Good way to get his ass in a sling. “And when Donovan’s confronted with prints, he confesses he met her.”

  “He explained that. He drove Fromm to Gayle Egelhoff’s house because whoever was supposed to do it didn’t show.”

  “And then,” Parkhurst went on as though she hadn’t spoken, “he finds a second homicide victim. He didn’t fall over or upchuck like any normal citizen. He looks at all that carnage, bone and brains smeared all over the walls, blood on the floor, and maybe makes some changes in the way it looks, whatever, he messes up the crime scene and then calmly calls the cops.”

  “He’s been in lots of tight places and seen lots of carnage. He’s been in countries you’ve never heard of, seeing wars so stupid you wouldn’t believe it, with people slaughtering each other in creatively horrible ways.”

  He thought of Phyllis taking an order, writing it down with her left hand. “Left-handed,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Wakely Fromm was left-handed.”

  Phyllis set a platter of eggs, sausage, and toast in front of Susan.

  “If he was planning to off himself, he’d use his left hand.” Parkhurst demonstrated, much to the interest of other diners. “Gun in his left hand, right hand under it for support, sticks the barrel in his mouth, pulls the trigger. Bang. The back of his head’s gone. He’s dead.”

  Parkhurst tapped one finger against a photo. “His left arm should have fallen over the arm of the chair and the gun should have dropped on this side.” He tapped again. “Not the right side, the left. Using his left hand, there’s no way that gun could get way over here. Even with a weird circumstance where the recoil might jerk his arm and the gun gets tossed, hits the floor and slides across the tile, it couldn’t end up here.”

  “How do you know he was left-handed?”

  “Haven’t you been watching the news? That whole circus has been all over the tube every night.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So watch some of those clips and he uses his left hand. To hold a fork, to pick up a glass—”

  “That’s barely suggestive,” she said.

  “He writes with his left hand. That do it?”

  “You’ve seen him write something?”

  “Saw him sign his name to a credit card receipt at The Blind Pig barbeque.”

  “You saw him.” Susan took in a breath. “I was hoping for something a little more definite, like a suspect’s fingerprints on the gun maybe, or signs of struggle.”

  “It’s hard to find signs of struggle when half the victim’s head is blown all over the wall.” Parkhurst leaned back, picked up his mug and drank lukewarm coffee. He looked around for Phyllis and when he spotted her, held the mug in the air.

  “Wakely’s prints are on the gun,” he said. “Smudged, like they would be if the gun was put in his hand by somebody else’s.”

  “Or if he handled it a bit before putting it in his mouth.”

  Phyllis came over and topped off both coffee mugs. When she left, Susan said. “Why would anybody kill Wakely Fromm?”

  “He was a drunk, and drunks can’t keep their mouths shut.”

  “What could he say that was so important or damaging that someone would kill to keep him quiet?”

  “He was probably also a pain in the ass. Where the governor goes, he goes. With the campaign just heating up that’s a lot of places to take him.”

  Susan raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “It’s not like he’s just another person they have to make room for in the limo,” Parkhurst said. “He has special needs. And somebody has to run around and take care of them.”

  “Isn’t that why Garrett has Murray working for him? So everything Fromm had in the way of needs got taken care of? Throw in some wants and he gets those taken care of too.”

  “Come on, Susan, you know you have doubts about this.”

  “Yeah, I just don’t want to have them.” She sipped at her coffee and made a sour face. “How do you go about investigating a homicide with the governor right there in the middle of it. This is not a good thing to have, Parkhurst. This is a big problem. You are not going to have clear sailing.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “I seldom do these days. If Wakely Fromm was killed—if—and if he is left-handed, then that lets out the governor. Garrett would know Wakely was left-handed and wouldn’t have made that mistake.”

  “They’ve more or less lived together for the last twenty years or so. Plenty enough time to build up anger and resentment. Maybe Mrs. Garrett got fed up. Can you imagine marrying the man of your dreams and he comes equipped with a crippled and belligerent friend who drinks too much? Think of the resentment that could build. The time and expense in taking care of Fromm for twenty years must have added up to a lot of dollars.”

  “Now you want me to beetle in on Mrs. Garrett,” Susan said. “You are just a bundle of sunshine, aren’t you?”

  “She could be fed up with the situation, but wouldn’t necessarily have paid attention enough to know Fromm was left-handed.”

  “After twenty years? With Wakely at her dinner table? What, is she blind and deaf?”

  He shook his head. “Just angry and refusing to have him around for every meal and every party and not really looking at him when he was around.”

  “You have anything to back this up?”

  “No.”

  She leaned over the table and gave him
an intent look. “I’d be a whole lot happier if we had some concrete evidence. Like footprints in the blood. If somebody did kill him, there has to be something somewhere.” She sent a watch-yourself look at Parkhurst. “And we can’t just go trampling all over the Governor and his wife on some half-ass theory about left-handedness.”

  “That means we’ll have to trample trying to find some.”

  “Yeah.” She leaned back. “This isn’t good, Parkhurst. You know what it’ll turn into, don’t you? It’s just going to turn into a cluster fuck for the media, aim their cameras on Garrett, and speculate whether he was the shadowy figure stomping on the burning bag of shit.”

  He nodded. It was going to be a mess, anyway you looked at it. Shame, too. Near as he could tell, Garrett looked okay. Might even make a pretty good president if he ever got that far, but this would be nearly impossible to handle under the usual damage control.

  “There’s a connection with the Egelhoff murder,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Gayle Egelhoff talked with Fromm.”

  Susan nodded. “Yeah, so?”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “Old friend of dead husband. They talked about old times.”

  “She wanted to see Garrett.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The kid who took care of Fromm. He gathered that from a conversation he overheard.”

  “Oh, great. He gathered. He could have made it up?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  Susan nibbled at a piece of toast. “What are you suggesting? The governor offed Gayle Egelhoff and then his old buddy—his old buddy who had nothing but praise for him and called him a hero. Loudly. That old buddy?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “Why kill them? What about resentments on the part of Murray? It must get tiresome dealing with a man who drank too much and got loud and abusive. Maybe there was some pent-up stuff building there over the years.”

  “He only worked with him for three years. And I never heard that Fromm was abusive, just belligerent.”

  “So what? At least Murray’s not the governor, or the governor’s wife.”