“You were getting concerned about property values?” Phil said.
“Yes. Not that anyone at our end of the block was anticipating selling. That’s as far as it went.”
Phil pinned him with a hard-cop glare and faked a sigh. “So you never got proactive about your suspicions? Never asked Tom to let you inside Number 5?”
“Why would I do that?”
Henry, flushed from his own hard-cop performance, said, “You might have liked it. Would have been the same tropical temperature as your place, ex-Warrant Officer Proffet.”
CHAPTER 17
It was closing in on one o’clock when they finally freed Jerry Proffet from the precinct. Had they continued, Phil might have openly accused him of plotting violent retribution on the Watsons. As it was, he couldn’t resist a parting shot. “Thank you, Mr. Proffet, but please don’t leave town for a while.”
Proffet, who seldom left Hollis Street, departed in confusion.
Seconds later, Phil jumped up and shouted, “I’m hungry, need a drink. Let’s do the Rose.”
Phil’s dusty sedan piloted itself to the bar, although Henry remained antsy about the choice of the Rose, not only because its boozy atmosphere made him feel like a temperance scold but also because it was Boog DeKlerk’s home turf.
When Phil was stymied he turned profane. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Do we have enough to arrest Proffet?”
“Nowhere near,” Henry replied, hoping to dial back his partner’s zeal.
“You’re right, I agree. So, partner, let’s work on a search warrant.”
“For every house on Hollis Street?”
“Now there’s a great idea!” Phil bellowed, and banged on the steering wheel.
They had almost reached the turn for the Rose when Phil shouted again and swerved back into traffic. “We’re on the wrong track!”
“You don’t want to search Proffet’s house?”
“Oh, yeah, I think there’s a good chance we’ll find blood traces in the Proffet mansion. No, what we need, Henry, is to write a better story to hand Grady so that the chief can be the one to apply for the warrant. I know a perfect place to work.”
Henry looked over from the shotgun seat. Had Phil bought the modified Orient Express theory, in which Jerry (Selma, too?) planned the vendetta and lured selected neighbours into carrying it out?
The perfect place was another Irish-themed pub, nothing special aside from the list of single malts posted behind the bar. Business was quiet. Phil knew the owner, who assigned them an entire back room, featuring a dart game with a slate scoreboard. Phil went over and erased the chalked number 501 on the board and replaced it with “Dog.”
The owner of the pub entered and asked about drinks.
“Henry, you’ll have a shot?” said Phil.
Henry had tried brandy and red wine, and an occasional glass of burgundy, inescapably, during his Mission in France (yes, like Mitt Romney), and once a bourbon at the FBI Academy in what amounted to a hazing ritual. Phil himself didn’t drink all that much, but merely talked about fine scotch to put down the Utah rubes. But now his fervour persuaded Henry, and they welcomed two glasses of single malt from the taciturn owner, telling themselves that it would fuel their decision-making.
Phil said, “So, why didn’t they kill the dog?”
“That one I’ve got,” Henry said. “They didn’t kill the dog, because they had nothing against the dog.”
Phil smiled. “Compassion for the mutt but they behead the owner. Gotta love that.”
“Respectfully, Phil, can we address the bigger scenario? Try this: one of the neighbours observed Tom Watson getting his product ready to move. It put him in a rage. He expected to find Tom when he rang the bell, but Gabriella answered. He overreacted …”
“Overreacted? I’ll say.”
“He killed her, spared the dog, had no time for the bags of grass, and moved on to house two. He had plenty to do loading Tom Watson’s corpse into the truck and getting off the street before Nurse Anderssen arrived home from her overnight shift. What does this tell us?”
Phil rapped on the nearest bar stool. “The killer not only knew the habits of Tom Watson, he knew the patterns of the other residents on the street.”
“Right!” said Henry, grimacing as he sipped his scotch. “He wanted to do his grisly business and get out of there before Mrs. Anderssen came down the street.”
Phil held the chalk like a baton. “Jerry Proffet had the most at stake on the street …”
“You’re obsessed with Proffet.”
“He has the motive. He worried about property values, and he resented the demise of HASA. People were selling out. Tom Watson was a provocation.”
The booze fired up Henry, even as it nauseated him. He craved action. “I’m going to place another call to Stan Chambers. He lives down in Sedona now. He was the last elected president of the street association and lived the closest to the death houses, except for Maude Hampson. I want to know if there was ever a confrontation between Jerry and Tom Watson.”
“Should we go for the search warrant for Proffet’s house?” said Phil.
“Still not sure we can meet the threshold,” said Henry.
“Good chance there’s Tom’s blood in there, maybe in the garage.”
“If we blow it, find nothing, we won’t get permission for any other property on the block. Why don’t we just ask? Appeal to the better angels of his nature.”
“Hey,” Phil said, “we forgot to eat!”
But they didn’t eat in the crypto-Irish pub. Henry insisted that Phil come over to the house on Coppermount. It was early afternoon, but Henry uttered the universal words of invitation in Utah: “I’ll grill us a couple of steaks.”
Phil knew right then that his drinking was done for the day. He and Theresa got along — they called themselves “Easterners” — but he knew how sick she was, and he would avoid anything that might aggravate her disorder. Theresa would offer to open a bottle of wine, but he would refuse. From Henry’s end of the call to Theresa, he understood that there were plenty of steaks in the Pastern freezer and company was welcome. Phil had been divorced for years; he lived alone and was quick to accept Henry’s invitation. He hoped that their buoyant mood would carry through the evening, and he assumed that they would avoid further discussion of the Hollis Street murders. He was wrong on both fronts.
When they reached the desert house, they found Theresa resting on a chaise longue on the patio. Even this far back, Phil could see how pale she was. As the men crossed the broad living room, Theresa turned and looked through the open doors. At the same moment, a dark figure intersected their path and almost dropped the jug of ice water and the pills he carried. “Oops!” the man said.
He was all in black, and Phil’s natural thought was that a Roman Catholic priest had come to take confession.
“Phil Mohlman, uh, Elder Tynan, our neighbour,” Henry said, taking the water and putting it on the floor next to Theresa. He crouched down by his wife. Phil noted that Tynan wore a black suit but wasn’t sweating — echoes of Jerry Proffet. He had the demeanour of a priest, standing with hands held open like a presiding pope and displaying a beneficent smile.
“Thomas Abraham Tynan.”
As a choirboy, Phil had been taught to show respect to all priests, even if they were called Mormon elders. He half bowed and backed away as Theresa explained to her husband through coughing spells that she had summoned Tynan from up the street.
“What meds have you taken?” Henry said. The desert was scorching. Tynan diplomatically held back with Phil.
“I’m fine,” she wheezed.
Henry enveloped her with his long arms and she seemed to recover miraculously, getting out of the chair and rising to full height as if to prove her fitness.
“Hi, Phil,” she said.
Phil Mohlman ha
d always liked Theresa, but he didn’t want to be here. He no longer felt convivial. This was a time for husband and wife to be alone, and he was about to beg off and flee to his car when the strange man in black said, “Theresa, you’re in good hands now. I’ll go.”
Theresa smiled warmly and gave Tynan a tight hug. Phil — and Henry, too — was surprised at the degree of affection. Was Theresa demonstrating her full recovery, or had she called the Mormon before? Henry was like any husband, alert to his wife’s trust in other men.
“I should go, too,” Phil said.
“No, no,” Theresa said, her voice rising an octave. “Stay. I’m really fine.”
To avoid a standoff, Phil said, “I’ll walk you out, Tynan, and allow these folks a moment.”
Phil and Tynan paused by the unmarked police sedan in the driveway. The sun was well past its zenith, and they looked up, as if to assess the impact of the searing heat on Theresa’s well-being.
“She looks not so good, or am I wrong?” Phil said.
Phil appraised Tynan as honest, perhaps sage, a little of the mystic in him. Tynan said, “I’m not a doctor, but I think she’s getting worse.”
“What was that all about? She seems almost hyper now.”
“She called me because she was choking. She could hardly get the words out. Her raw throat is heightened by inflammation of the lungs, and phlegm builds up. That’s the obstructive pulmonary disease part of COPD.”
“What’s she on?” Phil said.
“The full range. Antibiotics, bronchodilators, prednisone at a low level because she doesn’t want to gain weight. I think she should have an oxygen tank beside her at all times. Neither of them will hear of it. It’s as if it would signal her crossing over into the world of infirmity.”
Phil nodded. He liked the man. “Has she been coughing up blood?”
“She denies it, but I looked in the wastebasket in the bathroom and, yes, there was bloody sputum.”
“Elder Tynan, you’d make a good detective.”
In the ensuite bathroom on the far side of the house, Henry and Theresa were having a parallel conversation. Henry checked the array of pill bottles and inhalers on the sink. A new puffer contained albuterol; they had switched from salmeterol, which gave her a skin rash. A stronger antibiotic had been delivered that day by her usual pharmacy. It was backed up by a bottle of Ventolin, a corticosteroid. They had agreed to keep all her medications in one place. Henry worried that he was losing track of her pills-of-the-week. His anxiety reflected an ineluctable thought: my wife is getting worse.
For now, she was much better, almost frenzied as she ordered her husband to bring Phil back out to the patio.
“We’ll talk about D.C. in the old days, when Henry and I met,” she said to Phil as he returned.
But they didn’t talk about Washington. They excavated Hollis Street.
Henry launched into a lengthy debriefing as soon as they sat down to their steaks, baked potatoes, and guacamole salad at the outdoor table. Phil begged off beer and wine.
Theresa wasn’t impressed. “You guys fixate on the dog and the bags of marijuana, but two things jump out at me.”
“What two things?” Phil said, bemused by his hosts’ Nick-and-Nora act.
“The blood and the inside of the truck.”
“The truck stymies us, too,” Henry said encouragingly.
Theresa proceeded, her voice unblemished. “Guys, you need to think about the blood in the houses, outside the houses, in the truck. The murderer was efficient, in his own loopy way. He stabbed Gabriella and hauled her across the lawn, where he cut off her head, but he didn’t waste time painting words on the walls like Charles Manson. No hesitation, am I right?”
“Yes, it was relatively quick and decisive,” Henry agreed. “She wasn’t tortured, but a message was being sent. But a simple beheading — I can’t believe I’m using these words — is typical of the Mexican drug cartels. They’re experienced. It’s about sending a message.”
“The drug gangs can get sadistic,” Phil added.
“But González told you it wasn’t business. There was no one who needed to receive a message. González is saying Tom Watson didn’t deserve this.”
Phil licked his lips, craving a shot of scotch. “Theresa, your problem is this: Why didn’t he leave Tom Watson lying there on the floor of Number 5? Did he panic? And, if it wasn’t business, in what way was it personal?”
Theresa got to her feet and paced once across the patio and back. Phil could see that it was her way of proving her passion and her vigour. She turned to face the men, her face pale and drawn. “It’s like he wanted to exact the same biblical judgement twice. Who does that?”
“So much blood,” Phil said. The conversation was turning morbid.
“Shakespeare again,” said Henry.
“The blood,” Theresa confirmed. “There was so much blood, yeah. It’s the way he killed them that scares me. Henry told me there was a bucket of it inside the truck, even after Tom Watson supposedly bled out. Look for blood on clothing, in the vehicles of your suspects, anywhere. He wallowed in it. It might be the killer’s biggest error.”
Phil nodded at her pitiless summary. She had spoken too long, and now her face darkened alarmingly. Phil, preoccupied as they all were with images of blood, hoped that blood wasn’t rising in her ruined lungs. He leaned in, inches away. “Theresa, do you think the folks on Hollis Street helped eliminate the Watsons?”
“I honestly don’t know. But all you have to do is look for the source of the rage, Phil.”
CHAPTER 18
Phil left and headed straight for the Rose to get a scotch and a beer chaser. He half hoped to run into Boog DeKlerk, even if the South African was a pain in the ass. Boog would bitch and argue, but he would finally support Phil’s radical plan. Hell, Phil would barely be able to keep him from riding along.
Tonight.
Phil Mohlman intended to press Jerry Proffet hard, just one step short of arresting him; two steps, actually, since Phil had neither a search warrant nor an arrest warrant, and little prospect of talking a judge into authorizing either kind at eight o’clock in the evening. He had a scotch at the bar, ordered a second. Persuasion was the key. That would be ideal: talk the Proffets into a look around the house, casual, maybe lie a little bit and say he wanted to familiarize himself with the layout of the two-storey model on the street. Find a reason to examine the garage. Look for the blood Theresa imagined everywhere. Then give the impression he was wrapping up details. Come back to Jerry and Selma’s living room and less gently ask how the conflict between Tom Watson and the ex-executives had come to this pretty pass. “Pretty pass” was a phrase Phil’s mother often used.
He had floated the plan, without specifics, with his partner before leaving Coppermount Drive. Henry had promised to come along in support, but the moment he acquiesced, Theresa’s flaring cough distracted him, and they had no time to work out the details.
Phil stepped out of the Rose to call Henry, but when he reached the empty parking lot, he speed-dialed Jerry Proffet by accident.
“Yes?” Jerry answered with military gruffness. Phil could sense Selma in the background. Maybe it was the scotch, but the fact that he had Jerry on speed-dial seemed portentous. He recovered quickly.
“I’ll be by at nine.”
“But why?” Jerry said, more fear in his voice than Phil expected.
“We’ve pretty much interviewed everyone about everything,” Phil stated. “But the details don’t add up in a few areas. Nothing serious, Mr. Proffet.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nine sharp.”
Now he stabbed the correct number, and for once the connection to the desert was clear. Theresa was feeling fine, and Henry cheerfully echoed Phil’s own words to Proffet: “Nine sharp. I’ll be at the gates.”
Phil drank
alone in the bar. Boog hadn’t been there and wasn’t expected, and nobody else from the West Valley precinct entered. He ordered a third scotch. He had the paradoxical feeling that he had been plodding for weeks but now he might be moving too fast. Frustration will give you that feeling, he observed. He wondered about Theresa Pastern and what had made her so … psychic. Her preoccupation with blood was an amateur’s obsession, and morbid, too, yet she had convinced him that the blood spillage contained the signature of the killer’s rage. Proffet had panicked and let his full fury spray across the rooms of both murder sites and, as Theresa had reasoned, generated a flood of malice along Hollis Street, house to house, up to its dead end.
The killer had driven into the hillside fog with Tom Watson’s last fluids seeping into the spools of wire. In his own gruesome mood, Phil imagined blood raining down on the forest and river world of the Wasatch. He was a city boy, and he worked to envision the exhausted executioner hoisting a blood-sodden body by flashlight to the river cliff. The scotch was getting to Phil. Was Jerry Proffet a woodsman? He was military, but what difference did that make? Never mind, there were bound to be outdoorsmen among the neighbours. That guy next door to Proffet, Ronald Devereau? Jake Wazinski? That loner Henry interviewed, Davis? Which one had volunteered to help?
Phil’s thoughts remained with Theresa. He found her beautiful, special, and a prize for his partner, Henry. She was more than that, for her illness had turned her otherworldly in an enchanting way. Her failing lungs forced her to disburse short sentences and, he had noticed tonight, often these swathed pearls of insight. She was radiant, with shining alabaster skin, but as his mother would say, she was a consumptive beauty. Of course he would obey her insights — he longed to be in her thrall.
The Rose was still, the bartender having retreated to the back. The silence rushed over Phil, and the recollection of Theresa’s smoky voice beguiled him again.
A revelation came raw-edged from her to him: he must go searching for blood, literally.
The Verdict on Each Man Dead Page 13
