The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix)

by JoAnna Carl

  Where was Arnie?

  I assured myself that he would show up soon, and I began to read the planning-commission story. I forced myself to read it slowly and carefully, to push my personal problems out of my mind. I didn’t want Ruth to throw it back at me. I read it three times and ran spell check on it before I sent it on to her file.

  As if I didn’t have enough problems, the phone rang.

  “Hi,” Mike’s voice said. “I have a question for you.”

  I didn’t answer, because I was debating with myself. Should I tell Mike about Vanderkolk? About Arnie, who might have to hit the road? Who might have already done that? It took me ten or fifteen seconds to decide not to say anything.

  It simply wouldn’t be fair to Mike to tell him about Vanderkolk. As a law officer, he couldn’t advise Arnie to run. But as Arnie’s daughter’s boyfriend, he might not want to tell him he should give himself up, either. Better leave him out of it.

  By then Mike was speaking again. “Nell? Are you there?”

  “Yes, I’m here.” My voice quavered. “Things are a little crazy right at the moment.”

  “One quick question. That chain of newspapers your dad worked for—was it Gordon Enterprises?”

  “That sounds right. Why?”

  “Just checking something out,” Mike said. “Listen, kid, what’s new?”

  I gulped. He was telling me he loved me. “What’s new with you?” I said.

  “Nothing much. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Mike hung up. At least he still was telling me he loved me. Would he still love me if Arnie ran away again? Could a cop love the daughter of a wanted man? But if Arnie stayed, Mike might develop another problem. Could a cop love the daughter of a convict?

  Ruth came back, and I had to make some effort to clear out the Proof file before she clobbered me with her pica pole. She couldn’t move her local pages until I did it.

  So I read copy. I made myself read even the simplest stories twice, because I was having a terrible time concentrating. It took me more than a half hour, but I finally opened the last story.

  Arnie still hadn’t showed up when I finished editing that one and sent it on to Ruth. Then I called up the menu for the Proof file. I expected to find it empty, but here was a file named “note.”

  Was it the one I’d written Arnie? But surely he’d killed that one. Then I saw that instead of being marked “FYI, Arnie,” it was marked “FYI, Nell.”

  Arnie had sent me a note.

  I stood up and looked around the newsroom. He could have used any newsroom terminal to send a note to the city desk. So he must have been in the newsroom within the past few minutes. But I didn’t see him.

  I quickly opened the note. “Meet me in the basement ASAP,” it read. “West end. I may have to hit the road. This has turned into a small disastrous situation.”

  “Small.” There was that word again. I was surprised that Arnie would use it.

  But the word it modified, disastrous, sure fit the situation. I fought the impulse to bang my head against the VDT screen. What could Arnie do? What could I do? Should I call Mike and tell him about the latest development? Or, as my grandmother used to say, should I cut my suspenders and go straight up?

  Anyway, I had to see Arnie, if only to say good-bye. I got up without a word and walked across the newsroom and down the back stairs.

  Chapter 27

  I was heartsick. I was going to say good-bye to my dad. I’d known him only a few days, and he was leaving again.

  I was blinking hard by the time I got to the second-floor landing. So I kept my head ducked as a figure in a blue uniform came up the stairs toward me. But the person called my name.

  “Ms. Matthews?”

  I looked up and saw a brush of crew-cut gray hair over a square jaw and bulky shoulders. It was Wes McLaird, the pressroom foreman.

  “Yes?”

  “Listen, I’m awful sorry about all the trouble Bob Johnson caused.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I feel real bad about it. If I hadn’t fired him—”

  “If he’d been drinking, you really didn’t have any choice.”

  Wes sighed. “I could have handled it better. Told one of the guys to take him home, waited to talk to him the next day when I was calmer.”

  He shuffled his feet, and I ducked my head again and tried to walk forward. But Wes was still speaking. “I’m just relieved that you weren’t hurt. Or your roommate—”

  Wes went on talking, but I had quit listening. I was staring at the floor and at the marks on it.

  Wes’s shoes—steel-toed work shoes straight from the pressroom—were covered with ink. As he shuffled from foot to foot, he was leaving footprints. Their pattern looked as if someone had been dancing. It looked like the ads I’d seen back when I read teen magazines, ads offering to send diagrams of maneuvers that could be used to learn the latest dances.

  The pattern looked familiar. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen patterns of inky footprints like those.

  On the night when Martina was killed, I’d run into J.J. Jones on the first-floor landing, one flight down from the landing where Mac and I stood now. On that night I’d come running down the stairs, and J.J. had come up, up from the basement. We’d bumped into each other; then we’d both jumped back, then jumped sideways, doing a little dance as we tried to get around each other. The inky footprints had been all over the floor.

  I realized that J.J. had had ink on his shoes, just as Wes did now.

  But J.J. shouldn’t have had ink on his shoes.

  In the first place, in a modern newspaper the pressroom is the only place ink is used, and J.J. would have had no reason to go clear to the basement to the pressroom. No reason, at least, connected with his job. He edited special sections, true. But they were built on computers on the second and third floors, and there they were turned into film—into photo negatives the size of a newspaper page. These were used to make the aluminum plates that fit on the press and actually impress a pattern on the newsprint. He would go to the pressroom only on the occasions when one of his special sections was being printed, to check it as the press run began. A special section had run the night Martina was gassed in the ladies’ room—the night before she was kicked down the stairs. Not on the night we had done our little dance on the landing.

  And in the second place, if J.J. had had some reason to go the pressroom, he couldn’t have gotten so much ink on his feet that he tracked it clear up the stairs. It would have worn off in ten or twenty feet. Only old shoes like the ones Mac was wearing now would be so soaked with ink that they left inky footprints for that many steps away from its source. If J.J. had merely stepped in a spot of ink, it would have been gone from his foot after a few steps.

  No ad man would hang out in the pressroom so much that his shoes were soaked with ink. For one thing, the pressmen wouldn’t like him hanging around, getting in their way.

  No, if the fastidious and stylish J.J. Jones had been wearing shoes that were thick with ink, they hadn’t been his own shoes.

  They could have been shoes he’d taken from the pressmen’s locker room. They could have been shoes he’d worn to kick Martina downstairs. They could have been shoes he then hid in a newsroom desk, hoping to draw attention to Arnie and to his real identity as Alan Matthews—wanted man.

  For a moment I was sure. J.J. Jones! J.J. must be the killer. But then I doubted. Why? What possible motive did J.J. Jones have for killing Martina? The only time Martina had ever mentioned him to me, she’d told me he got a rough deal from his ex-wife. She’d seemed sympathetic to him.

  And why would he frame Arnie? He hadn’t been in Michigan twenty years earlier, or at least his record didn’t show that. He couldn’t have had anything to do with my mother’s death. Could he?

  It was crazy. He couldn’t be guilty.

  But maybe—maybe the possibility of J.J.’s guilt would convince Arnie that he should stay in Grantham, that he shouldn’t run aga
in. Maybe I could ask Arnie to stick around until J.J. had been checked out.

  I cut Wes off rudely, and I went on down the stairs toward the door to the basement. West end, Arnie had said. The break room was at the east end. Instead of entering the basement by the crazy metal grate and the circular iron staircase, I’d go down the stairs at the other end of the building. The ones that connected the circulation and classified departments with the basement and that came out near the ladies’ room where Martina was almost asphyxiated.

  I clattered down them, my loafers rattling, and came out in the hall that gives access to the ladies’ room. I went past it and entered the paper-storage area. Then I stopped and looked around.

  Stretching off into the dim reaches of the basement were giant rolls of paper, some standing end on end and piled two and three high, and others lying on their sides like giant rolling pins. The bright industrial lighting blasted some areas, but left other areas in deep shadow. It was coffee-break time for the pressroom crew, and the basement was absolutely quiet.

  It also seemed absolutely deserted. Anybody watching should have seen or heard me come out of the hall, but Arnie didn’t call to me. He didn’t step out of the shadows and beckon. He didn’t seem to be there.

  “Arnie!” I used a tone that was between a whisper and a shout. “Where are you?”

  There was no answer.

  I moved forward, down the yellow-outlined path demanded by safety regulations. Dead silence. And no sign of Arnie.

  I walked halfway across the building, looking between the rolls of paper. Same deal. No noise, no Arnie, no indication he’d ever been there. I reached the area where the paper to be used that night and the next day was stored. These rolls lay on their sides, ready to be moved onto the elevator that took them down a level, to the sub-basement, where they’d be loaded onto the press.

  I leaned against a half roll. It surprised me by rocking back and forth, and I jumped aside. Stupid, I told myself. That half roll weighed around a third of a ton. It wasn’t going to roll over my foot unless I pushed it real hard.

  I turned away from that area. The diameter of any roll of paper was between three and four feet, and these were lying on their sides, so they were easy to see over. They were in neat rows, lined up and touching each other. There was no way Arnie could be hiding among them.

  Where could he be? I was far from the west end of the basement, the end Arnie had specified. But maybe Arnie had been confused. He was new in Grantham. Maybe he didn’t know the west end from the east end. So I walked on, still looking down the lanes between the giant rolls of paper, until I was under the circular stairway. I could see a clean spot on the concrete. The place where Martina had fallen had been scrubbed until it was lighter than the rest of the floor.

  This was getting too spooky for me. I looked longingly at the metal grate that served as a landing outside the break room, and the heavy soundproof door that separated the break room from the basement. There were always people in the break room.

  If I’d heard a noise, I would have been up those stairs and into that room in under three seconds.

  But I didn’t hear a noise. There was no sound, no movement, no one around.

  West end, I repeated to myself. Arnie said the west end. That’s probably what he meant. I’ll go back that way. I’ll even look in the ladies’ room. And if he isn’t waiting for me this time, I’ll go back upstairs.

  I belatedly remembered that I’d promised Mike I wouldn’t wander around the building alone. The reminder seemed to make the atmosphere grow even spookier.

  But I steeled my resolution, and I turned and walked back the way I’d come. This time I looked carefully down every one of the gaps between the paper rolls. If there seemed to be more space hidden back there, I edged between the rolls and looked into it. I explored every corner, every crevice. All were empty.

  I was nearly back to the door leading to the hall and the ladies’ lounge when I heard a noise.

  A groan.

  It terrified me. I stopped and listened, but I didn’t hear anything else. I looked down an aisle between rolls of paper, and this time I saw something.

  Feet.

  They wore brown Hush Puppies, and they were lying on their sides. They didn’t move. The legs they were attached to disappeared behind one of the rolls of paper.

  I tiptoed toward them. Don’t ask me why I tiptoed. I’d been calling out and clicking my heels—my own way of whistling in the dark. If there was anybody there, he knew I was walking around, winding among the rolls of paper. But now I tiptoed, barely breathing, as if the feet might disappear if I made a sound.

  When I reached the feet and looked around the roll of paper that hid their owner, I got down on my knees.

  “Arnie!” I said. “Dad!”

  He lay on his stomach, with his arms hidden under his body. His face was turned sideways, and blood was pooling under his bald head.

  But he was breathing.

  I had never been so grateful in my life as at that moment when I saw Arnie’s rib cage move, when I heard him take a rasping breath.

  He needed help.

  I jumped to my feet, and a terrible noise came from behind me. A blast echoed off the girders and the concrete floor, and a ragged hole appeared in the side of a roll of paper, just even with where my head had been a second earlier.

  I had to stare at the hole before I realized the noise had been a shot.

  This time there was no heavy wooden door to hide behind, no storm door to shatter. I was standing on a bare floor, with rows of massive rolls of paper in front of me and on both sides. And the shot had come behind me.

  I whirled. Behind me, crammed into a niche I had passed without seeing, was J.J. Jones. He was holding a shiny silver revolver.

  My God! I thought. He really is guilty.

  “What are you doing?” I yelled. Which was the ultimate stupid question. He was obviously trying to kill me and my father.

  J.J. didn’t answer. His face had lost any trace of his fabled good humor. He looked steely grim and deadly calm as he raised the pistol and aimed again.

  I don’t know why I didn’t scream. True, there was no one to hear me, but that wasn’t the reason I kept quiet. The thought that came flashing through from my subconscious was that J.J. Jones couldn’t hit a moving target.

  If he’d been the man in the van, he’d taken three shots at the flower-delivery boy and me, and he didn’t hit anything but the storm door. And now, at a range of no more than fifteen feet, he’d missed me because I jumped to my feet.

  I began to leap back and forth, waving my hands wildly. I jumped around like a playful chimp, zigzagging back and forth, moving toward him, trying to get out of the box canyon of paper rolls where I was trapped.

  “Damn you!” He muttered the words. His pistol swung back and forth. Another shot went off, but it missed again. And this time I ran straight toward him, trying to get past, out into the main part of the warehouse.

  And then a door opened.

  It was the door to the break room, far at the other end of the basement. Voices reverberated, and I opened my mouth to scream.

  But J.J. got me. He couldn’t aim well enough to shoot me with his pistol, but he whacked me upside the head with it. The blow hurt. It also knocked me sideways. By the time I had caught my balance, he had grabbed me.

  He had a hand around my jaw, keeping my mouth shut, and he had me shoved up against a roll of paper. His face was inches from mine, and he had the pistol jammed into my side.

  He didn’t say anything. But if he pulled the trigger, the bullet was definitely not going to miss.

  “Don’t think I won’t shoot,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Just because the pressmen are back. What have I got to lose? If you tell about those footprints, I’ve had it anyway.”

  I couldn’t believe how strong he was. Or perhaps it was his considerable heft keeping me immobile. He was leaning his whole body against me. I was squashed against the hard, slick paper.<
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  Then I heard a groan.

  J.J. moved sideways, keeping his hand over my mouth. But now he aimed the pistol at Arnie.

  Arnie was stirring, but he was still unconscious. He couldn’t jump up and dodge around to avoid being shot. He was a sitting duck.

  J.J. spoke grimly. “Are you ready to keep your mouth shut?”

  I tried to nod.

  J.J.’s grip on my jaw yanked me forward. He threw me across the little open area. I landed heavily, lying across Arnie’s feet.

  J.J. moved in close. “Just keep your mouth shut until the presses roll,” he said. “Maybe I’ll let you go then.”

  I got up on my knees, and I moved around until I could sit down and lean back against a roll of paper. I tried to turn Arnie over, but he was a dead weight and I couldn’t budge him. I lifted his head enough to slide under him, to put his head in my lap. The wound was still oozing blood, but it didn’t look like a bullet hole. It looked as if J.J. had hit him, with the pistol or with some other heavy object. The skin was broken, but the wound wasn’t deep.

  Arnie rolled over onto his side, and I realized his hands were bound. J.J. had taped his hands together with pieces of masking tape. I’d seen similar tape in the back shop. He’d probably stolen a roll somewhere.

  Arnie stirred again. He’d be conscious soon. But that might make the situation worse. If he moved around or groaned loudly as he regained his senses, J.J. might panic and shoot us both.

  With the pressmen working in the other end of the basement, J.J. wouldn’t want to fire his pistol. The sound would reverberate off the hard rolls of paper, off the concrete ceiling and walls, off the metal girders and plumbing pipes and air-conditioning ductwork that snaked around the ceiling.

  But once the press started, once its roaring and clicking began and the pressmen had put on their ear protectors, J.J. could shoot us both dead without worrying about anybody hearing. And he could get out of the building without being seen.

  And it was getting close to press time.