River of Secrets

by Roger Johns

  “Can you see where I’m going with this?” Wallace asked.

  “Given the hot potato case you’re working on, you must think the informant was Herbert Marioneaux.”

  “And somehow, after all these years, Eddie Pitkin found out and decided to take revenge for having his career ruined, not to mention having to spend all that time in prison.”

  “Well, it has a certain intuitive appeal. I’ll grant you that.” Davis nodded.

  “A white segregationist putting the finger on an activist black criminal defense lawyer.”

  “That would’ve caused quite a rumpus in the community. But, even if you’re right, would that be enough for Pitkin to risk going back to prison forever—or even being executed?”

  “That I don’t know,” Wallace said. “But think about it. If it was enough, and the informant’s identity has never been known, who would suspect that now, after all these years, Eddie Pitkin had found out?”

  “Obviously you would,” Davis said, laughing.

  “But if there was no forensic evidence placing Eddie at the scene, no one would ever tie these two things together. Very clever, don’t you think?”

  Davis went quiet for several seconds.

  “What are you thinking?” Wallace asked.

  He smiled at her. “That you’re a very inventive thinker and I hope I’m never the one you’re looking for.”

  “Even if you were, I’d probably let you slide if you promised to behave in the future.”

  Davis went quiet again.

  “Seriously, though, something about this discussion is bothering me. I’m flattered you’d want to bounce these ideas off me, but…”

  “Why you and not my compadres in the police department?”

  “The question does raise itself.”

  “That vessel may be a bit leaky, at the moment, and I don’t think I have the time to figure out where the problem is.”

  “That’s troubling. Extremely troubling. Do you feel like you’re in personal danger?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “I wish you had just lied and said no. Now, I’m going to worry my old head off. You know, I really wish this was not your case.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Look, I know you didn’t come over here just to discuss your latest theory. You mentioned calling in a marker.”

  “According to the old newspaper stories, the informant was passing the information directly to the District Attorney, not the police?”

  “Colin is in a nursing home now.”

  “I know. A series of minor strokes.” Wallace hesitated. “And this is going to sound heartless, but at this stage in his life it’s unlikely he’d be called to account for any shenanigans he might’ve pulled all those years ago.”

  “You want me to see if I can get him to cough up a name?”

  “Didn’t you go to law school with him?”

  “I did and we’ve been friendly over the years, but I don’t think that’ll cut much ice with Colin.”

  “If the informant was Marioneaux, then there’s no longer a worry it would put him in danger.”

  “My guess is, if Colin knew it was Marioneaux, he would’ve come forward with that, once Eddie Pitkin was arrested for the murder. He would have offered it to our current DA.”

  “Would you mind asking him, anyway? Otherwise, I’ve got some pretty good reasons to believe we’ve got the wrong guy in jail for doing Marioneaux.”

  Davis let out a long breath. “You can be very persuasive, you know?” He got behind his desk and flipped through a calendar book. “Come back Thursday afternoon and I’ll let you know what I find out.” He made a notation on the page in front of him.

  “And I’ll expect you to let me know when Mom’s people call your people.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Wallace stood next to her car, staring at the darkening sky, unsure whether she really wanted to discover what she was about to start looking for.

  Melissa Voorhees had called to let her know that Peter’s SUV had been towed to the police garage in Cavanaugh, so Wallace drove out, hoping to find something that would lead her to the missing photographer. Hoping, at the same time, that she wouldn’t find a dead body at the end of the trail.

  After a few seconds, she forced the indecision from her thoughts and strode toward the dingy metal building. She paused when she realized just how strange her investigation was beginning to feel. She had gone to Davis looking for help to show Eddie had a motive, and now she was looking for an alibi witness to show that Eddie had no opportunity. No one would be able to accuse her of favoring one side over the other.

  The throb in her side where she had been punched reminded her that the longer she put off telling Mason about the attack in her carport, the more damage she was doing.

  Except for the scrape of her boots on the concrete driveway, there was a lifeless quiet to the evening.

  She pulled open the door and stepped inside. Strains of forties jazz oozed from an old boom box sitting on top of a rolling tool bin near the hydraulic lift.

  The only person in the three-bay garage was a woman in her late thirties, sitting at a small metal desk at the other end of the building, typing away on a laptop. She looked up as Wallace stepped inside.

  “Detective Hartman?”

  “Only if you want me to go back to calling you Chief Voorhees?”

  The woman gave Wallace an easy smile and motioned toward a large plastic ice chest sitting on the concrete in front of the desk. “Water and soft drinks in the cooler. Is this the vehicle you remember?” She rose from the desk and inclined her head toward the SUV one bay over.

  Although it was fainter, from being exposed to the rain, Wallace could see the finger-drawn “Test Dirt” inscription in the dust covering the hatchback. The license plate number was the one she remembered. Her eyes fell on the empty roof rack.

  “It’s back there.” Melissa pointed to a red kayak standing on end in the far corner.

  The sight of the little boat made Wallace’s heart sink. “Thanks for meeting me here.”

  “Not a problem. It was either this or homework patrol.” She cocked her head toward the SUV. “Shall we take a look?”

  “Is it open?”

  “No, but I have this lovely little slim-jim.” She picked up the door-opening device from the desk and walked over to the SUV. “What are we looking for?” Melissa asked, working the thin metal strip between the window and the door.

  “Something that points us to where Peter is. Or something that tells us whether his disappearance is connected to my case. What those things might be I might not know until we see them.”

  “Got it.” Melissa popped open the door. “Why don’t we unload the back first, then we can do a forensic exam of the interior. I’m the chief of police, but I’m also my little department’s only formally trained crime-scene investigator.”

  Working quietly, they removed everything from the rear of the SUV and stacked it near the desk where Melissa had been working.

  “Can we start with prints?”

  “This is your show.” Melissa opened the large tackle box that held her fingerprinting tools. Wallace watched, in silence, as Melissa carefully dusted every likely and a great many unlikely surfaces inside and outside the vehicle.

  “It looks like the interior has been wiped clean,” Melissa said after a half hour of steady work.

  “That’s a bad omen,” Wallace said. Who would wipe a vehicle except someone trying to cover something up?

  “Hold on. It looks like we’ve got one partial, on the glove compartment latch button,” Melissa said. “I’ll try to ID it after we’re done.”

  “What about blood?” Wallace asked.

  “Hit the lights, would you. The switch is over there.” Melissa pointed to the wall behind the desk.

  Wallace killed the overhead lights. In the faint glow from the SUV’s dome light, she watched as Melissa sprayed the interior with luminol and then climbed out and closed the
door, plunging the garage into total darkness. Nothing inside the vehicle fluoresced.

  “Well, that’s a relief—sort of.” Although she didn’t feel relieved.

  Melissa pulled off her gloves and used a paper towel to wipe the sweat from her forehead. “If Peter’s disappearance is related to his drug business, I guess it’s possible some of his merchandise might be onboard, although that seems unlikely?”

  “Right,” Wallace said. “If his suppliers were looking for back payment, I’m guessing they would’ve already taken this baby apart looking for money or inventory they could reclaim.”

  “Or sold the vehicle itself. So, do you think it’s worth it, to go through all the crap we unloaded?” Melissa asked.

  “I do. He told me he had a list of places he was going to visit, after he left False River. I don’t know if it was a pencil-and-paper list or just in his head. But maybe he wrote something down that might shed some light on where he is. It’s always possible he left his vehicle at the park and went off with someone,” Wallace said.

  Melissa looked pointedly from the SUV to the kayak standing in a back corner of the garage. “I suppose.”

  “And maybe someone borrowed his kayak while he was gone, and just abandoned it,” Wallace said, feeling like she was grasping at straws.

  They opened each box and poked through the contents. It was sweaty work and it was edging into what Wallace assumed was dinnertime for Melissa and her family.

  “Keep in mind that Peter’s general approach to life had a way of creating circumstances that made his periodic absences more or less a necessity.” Melissa pulled the top off a box and peered inside. “So, he was better than average at knowing how and when to hightail it out of town. He could have seen a bad time coming from some of his own screw-ups or because of whatever you wanted him for and he just decided to disappear in a way that would make anyone looking for him think he was out of the picture for good.”

  Wallace walked away from the box she was rooting through, and sat on the cooler. “You seem to know the man pretty well.” Keeping her eyes on Melissa, Wallace stretched her arms forward, trying to touch her toes. She stopped when the knot over her kidney spasmed with the effort.

  “We both grew up here in Cavanaugh. Everybody knows everybody.”

  Wallace kept her gaze on the woman, wondering if there was more to come.

  “And yes, we were involved, way back in the Dark Ages,” Melissa said. “It was a long, long, long time ago. And it was so brief I can almost make myself believe I imagined it. Almost.” A mischievous light flickered in her eyes. “You ever know guys like him? A whole lot of charm and a whole lot of penis, but nothing really substantial connecting the two?”

  Wallace laughed at the unexpected joke. “I’ve heard such creatures exist.” She stood, trying to ward off a sinking spell. “You seem fairly resigned to his disappearance.”

  Melissa sat on the concrete floor next to the open box and pulled her knees up to her chest. “Well, like I said, his vanishing acts are not anything new. We’ve all gotten exercised about his comings and goings before, so it’s hard to believe this time is really different.” She smiled, but Wallace could see worry lines in her forehead.

  “All those times before, did he ever leave his car behind when he took off?”

  Melissa shook her head.

  Wallace sat back down on the cooler as her mind began to crowd with possibilities.

  If Peter’s disappearance was was connected to his drug business, Wallace could easily imagine how things happened. A familiar but not-so-friendly face appears in the passenger-side window when Peter is about to pull out of the driveway. Before he can hit the lock button, the door opens and the person attached to the face slides in. A weapon becomes visible. Peter activates his aw-shucks module, but the sheepish look and the tentative smile are met with a shake of the head and a look of sad dismay.

  Brother Peter, how come you couldn’t just pay me my money when you had it in your hand, instead of trying to string me along? I don’t run a fucking finance company. Man, you know that. It’s strictly cash-and-carry. But, for you, I made an exception … for old time’s sake … but you took advantage. You fucked half the town, and now you finally got around to fucking yourself. Turn left, at the end of this block.

  But if Peter was gone because he could alibi Eddie Pitkin, other questions came back into consideration. Why was Marioneaux killed while the fall guy was way out on False River instead of in Baton Rouge, where it would have been easier to make the frame-up work? To make the frame fit, the plotters would’ve had to know when Eddie couldn’t account for his time. So someone had to be watching him to know when that was. But where had they been watching from?

  Wallace took a deep breath. For the second time in one day, she realized she was thinking about things wrong. What was in the boxes might be less important than what wasn’t.

  She looked to her left. The police chief’s stare and her off-kilter smile told Wallace that Melissa had been looking at her for a while.

  “Where on earth did you just go?”

  “We’re in the wrong place,” Wallace said.

  “I believe you, but how do you know?”

  “There’s no camera equipment in any of these boxes.”

  “I just assumed he had his equipment with him.”

  “Maybe. But it could still be at the lake house.” Wallace propped an elbow on one knee and rested her chin on the palm of her hand. “He went south from False River to Kilgore Park, so maybe, instead of taking everything, where it might get stolen out of his SUV, he left what he wasn’t going to use at the lake house.”

  “And he was planning to pick it up on his way north, toward home.”

  Wallace nodded.

  “But how would that help you?”

  “He said he had been taking pictures of the goings-on out on the lake, from the window in the rear bedroom. Even if Peter’s not here to tell us what he saw, maybe there’s an image in one of his cameras that will.”

  “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “Although he did tell me that he hadn’t taken any pictures of Eddie Pitkin sitting on the dock—”

  “And you believed him?”

  Wallace laughed at her own naïveté. “I did. But I’m thinking about something else he told me. He said he hadn’t seen any cars parked along the road by the lake houses. So, just for the sake of argument, if we assume Eddie Pitkin is being framed, then the killers had to be watching him so they’d know when he would have no alibi. But there’s no place along the road in front of the house, or the spaces between the houses, for a car or a watcher to go unnoticed.”

  “Somebody was watching him from a boat. That’s brilliant. Wait, you don’t think Peter was doing the watching from the house next door, do you?”

  “I considered that for a second, but it doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “What if someone asked him to watch but never told him the reason for the surveillance? And maybe Peter didn’t ask. Maybe he owed that someone a load of cash and they decided to let him barter away his debt by doing a little stakeout on Pitkin.”

  Wallace shook her head. “But why would he return to the lake house, where he ran the risk of getting roped into an investigation? Why would he admit to me that he had seen Pitkin at all?”

  Melissa nodded. She closed her eyes and took a couple of slow, deep breaths. “This case of yours is getting stranger by the minute.”

  “Would you happen to know the chief of police in New Roads?” Wallace asked.

  “Oh sure. Mike Duncan. All of us Podunk police chiefs around here know each other. When we’re not out fighting bad guys we’re scheming about how to outfight our big-city brethren for taxpayer-funded grants so we can buy bigger guns and scarier military-style assault vehicles.”

  “His wife runs the property management company that leases out a lot of the houses on the lake, including the one your good buddy Peter was squatting in.”

  “And you want m
e to call him so he can roust MaryBeth in the middle of dinner and have her meet you at that lake house with a key?”

  Wallace laughed. Until just now, she hadn’t thought about how long it had been since she’d formed a new friendship with another woman. Tonight was strictly business, but Melissa’s willingness to stay so late and work so hard on a case that wasn’t hers, and her willingness to remain in a good humor, even though she was giving up an evening with her family, had the feel of more than just business. She seemed to be reaching out, so Wallace reached back.

  “The tone of your offer tells me you know the chief’s wife and that you might find it a little bit fun to drag her out of the house in the middle of dishing out the tuna casserole.”

  “For some reason, she’s always had it in her head that I’ve got eyes for her husband.”

  “Have you?” Wallace laughed again.

  “Well … yes. But it’s literally eyes only. No other body parts involved.” She raised her right hand in a scout’s honor gesture. “Trust me, it was just window-shopping.”

  * * *

  “I sure didn’t expect to see you again anytime soon.” MaryBeth gave Wallace a sharp look.

  “It’s a surprise to me too.” Wallace tried to look appreciative.

  “Do you think this is gonna take all night?”

  “Thank you for coming out at such an inconvenient time.” She tried harder to maintain her smile.

  “There you go,” MaryBeth said as she finished entering the alarm code. She stood aside to let Wallace enter.

  Wallace moved into the hallway.

  “Come in, if you wish,” Wallace called back over her shoulder as she entered the living area of the little house. “Just don’t touch anything, or move anything, in case I need to get a fingerprint tech in here.”

  “I’m fine right out here, thank you.”

  Peter might not have had much respect for the nuances of private property rights, but his housekeeping skills were excellent. Wearing latex gloves, Wallace moved quickly through the house, opening every cabinet and drawer and closet. She found no cameras or photography equipment.

  She was about to feel a bit bad for hauling MaryBeth out so late for nothing when she remembered the dumpster where she had first found evidence of his presence. Even if he hadn’t left any equipment with pictures of the lake, maybe he had thrown something away that would point to his whereabouts.