And Jorge, who claimed not to be blackmailable, but still seemed very worried about Doleson. And who just might own a bloodstained sweatshirt.
Of course, Doleson had other blackmail victims. I knew of two now—surely there were more? And the chief would find them as he continued investigating. Just because he’d found Norris Pruitt didn’t mean he was going to ignore other suspects. I should leave the case to him, and stop worrying.
Of course, I’ve never been very good at leaving anything to other people.
Chapter 27
Back at Dunsany Hall, things were quiet. I passed by the counter that served as the theater’s box office, where two people were buying tickets. That was encouraging. I went upstairs to Michael’s office. To my relief, he’d left the door unlocked for me.
Spike was there, asleep in his carrier. I let him out and gave him an early supper and a bowl of water. He bolted the food, sniffed dismissively at the water, and began exploring all the exciting new smells that permeated the unfamiliar room.
I sat down at Michael’s desk, turned on his computer, and used my illicit knowledge of his user name and password to log into the college’s computer system. I wanted Internet access so I could see what else the media were saying about Doleson’s murder.
And specifically what line Ainsley Werzel was feeding The Star-Tribune. Call me paranoid, but I had the nagging fear that if he didn’t get a sexy angle or inside scoop, Werzel would slant the facts or even make stuff up if he thought it would help his story.
This time there were two articles about us listed on the Trib’s homepage. Both carried Werzel’s byline, so perhaps his persistence had paid off. They were evidently filed this morning after Werzel had found a working phone or computer. The headline read SANTA MURDER SUSPECTS ARRESTED FOR BURGLARY. It made the failed break-in at the Spare Attic sound like a twenty-first-century Watergate. The accompanying pictures didn’t help. No shots from the scene, of course, since Michael had reclaimed my camera from Werzel before the break-in, but they’d found an old shot of Clarence, in his biker’s leathers, looking like a thug. Caroline’s picture wasn’t brand new either—I’d guess it had been taken a good ten to fifteen years earlier, and showed her with what I first thought was a leopard-fur stole around her shoulders. Then I realized that the stole was actually a pair of half-grown leopard cubs, one of which was licking her face while the other appeared to be teething on her hand.
The accompanying text completely left out Clarence’s professional identity as a well-respected holistic veterinarian and animal behavior therapist, and merely referred to him as a suspect in “the brutal slaying of Caerphilly County businessman Ralph Doleson.” It didn’t really explain Caroline at all, but left the impression that she was a rich dilettante who kept exotic animals as pets, rather than a committed animal welfare activist who’d taken in hundreds of abused or abandoned birds and animals, nursed them back to health, and when necessary had given them a comfortable, permanent home at the Willner Wildlife Sanctuary.
Werzel had also written a sidebar on the history of the Caer-philly County Christmas parade. Some indiscreet soul had spilled the beans about Wilmer Pruitt’s shoplifting conviction and Orville Shiffley’s bacchanalian exploits. In fact, those weren’t the only black marks on the parade’s history. In the seventies, a group of students from rival Clay County had kidnapped Caer-philly’s Santa Claus and paraded him in triumph down the main street of Clayville. They’d returned Santa after a few hours, but not the bag of presents. And one unseasonably warm Christmas in the fifties, Miss Caerphilly County had tried to shed her fur coat and experienced a costume malfunction that was still remembered fondly by the old-timers who’d seen it.
But no previous Master or Mistress of the Revels had had to cope with a murder during the course of the festivities. I sighed. I wasn’t sure this was a distinction I wanted.
I jumped as a loud sneeze suddenly resounded through the office. I whirled around to see who had come in, but the door was still closed.
I heard another sneeze, and realized it was coming from near the floor. I peered down and saw Spike standing with all four feet braced against the force of a third enormous sneeze. Then he sniffed slightly and looked up at me as if registering a complaint.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ll tell Michael he needs to dust more often.”
Spike sighed, trotted over to a chair that stood against the wall, and curled up underneath it.
I turned back to the computer, though I kept glancing over my shoulder. Maybe, along with the dust, I should speak to Michael about having Rose Noire feng shui his office. I recalled her saying that it was very bad to put your desk so you had your back to the door of the room. I could see why. I kept nervously looking over my shoulder to see if someone had snuck in. I’d have locked the door, but it was the old-fashioned kind that could only be locked with a key. If I kept feeling so jumpy, perhaps I’d hunt Michael down and get the key.
The last half of Werzel’s sidebar about the parade pretended to give some of the highlights of this year’s parade. As I expected, Werzel had gone out of his way to make us seem ridiculous. He didn’t feature any of the beautiful or ingenious floats—only the few really peculiar ones I hadn’t been able to keep out, like the boom lift and the canine carillon. I was already annoyed by the time I got to the next-to-last paragraph. Werzel had cornered Caerphilly’s mayor and asked if he or the town council had considered canceling the parade out of respect for the murder victim.
“Well, no,” the mayor was quoted as saying. “I guess that would have been up to Ms. Langslow.”
Gee, thanks Your Honor. See how fast you can pass that buck. I could hear him saying it—not that he’d ever said anything that brief, but I could imagine Werzel plucking that one quotable sound bite out of ten or fifteen minutes of blather.
Then I read the last paragraph and exploded.
“Ms. Langslow was not available for comment.”
I snarled a few words I didn’t normally say aloud. Spike lifted his head and watched with interest as I pounded the desk a few times. Not available for comment? The man had slept by our fire, eaten our bacon and eggs for breakfast, and been introduced to our llama. I’d answered countless questions from him throughout the course of the day, and if he’d asked me that one, I’d have answered it, too. I was perfectly capable of spinning out a decent answer to Werzel’s question—something suitably sentimental about knowing that Mr. Doleson wouldn’t want to upset and disappoint the children who had loved him in his Santa role for so many years.
I searched the Trib’s Web site until I found a page about how to make complaints and submit corrections. With a phone number. I picked up the receiver and then made myself put it down.
Bad idea. Not complaining to the Trib—that was a very good idea. But a bad idea to call now, when I was still hopping mad and would come off like a crank or an idiot. I realized I should give myself a few hours to calm down and then decide what to do—write a brilliant and incisive letter of complaint, citing all the facts and all Werzel’s omissions and misstatements? Or call to confront his editor in person, once I’d regained my cool and could adopt the icy precision Mother used to such devastating effect in such situations?
Then I smiled. “What would Mother do?” had never exactly been my mantra. But in this case, I realized, I should do exactly what Mother would do.
I consulted the address section of my notebook, picked up the phone, and called one of my cousins.
Cousin Heather had been knocking around the journalistic scene in Washington for a decade or so, and was currently doing her crusading reporter thing at one of the city’s alternative papers, writing exposés of political and financial scandals. She claimed that she was blissfully content with her current job and wouldn’t even consider a move to the cold, corporate world of the Trib. Of course, as far as I knew, the Trib hadn’t done anything rash, like offering her a job, that would force her to prove her dedication to alternative journalism.
&
nbsp; But however scornful she was of corporate journalism, what she didn’t know about the Trib and every other media organization in Washington, large or small, wasn’t worth knowing.
“Mur Cromuf!” she said, on picking up the phone. Maybe I was imagining the sound of crumbs hitting the mouthpiece.
“And a Mur Cromuf to you, too,” I said. “Eating a late lunch?”
“Sorry,” she said. “Yeah, trying to finish up an article before I go home to eat my solitary supper. I was going to take your mother up on her invitation to see Michael’s show and stay at your house tonight and have Christmas dinner with y’all tomorrow, but it looks as if Mother Nature is going to interfere. The roads are impossible. I meant to call you so you wouldn’t worry.”
“No problem,” I said. I wondered, briefly, how many other people Mother had invited to stay with Michael and me, and whether any of them had four-wheel drive and would turn up on our doorstep in our absence. “Good call, not trying to make the trip. We don’t have power, and however bad the roads are there, trust me, they’re worse here. Look, while I’ve got you on the line—what do you know about a Trib reporter named Ainsley Werzel?”
“He’s a total jerk,” she said.
“I already know that.”
“And with any luck, he won’t be a Trib reporter much longer. No idea why they hired him in the first place, or why he’s stayed there as long as he has.”
“And how long is that?”
“About four months. Of course, you can’t just fire people these days, you know. Not in a litigious town like D.C. You have to prove they’re completely incompetent. Takes time, even when it’s true. Any day now, they’ll decide they’ve got enough ammo and they’ll kick him curbside. Meanwhile, they’re trying to minimize the damage he can do by assigning him to spin his wheels on nothing stories. How’d you run into him?”
“Apparently one of the nothing stories they assigned him to was the Caerphilly Christmas parade.”
“Ouch!” she said. “Sorry. Trib’s perception, not mine. So I guess he lucked out, stumbling on your murder.”
“It’s not my murder,” I said. Snapped, really, and then thought better of it. “Sorry. Touchy subject. And what’s the best way to complain to the Trib about him?”
“You sure you want to complain?” she said. “Some editors like it when their reporters hit close to home. Makes them feel they’re pulling no punches and being a thorn in the side of the establishment and all that. And they’ll never hang their reporters out to dry in public. They may read Werzel the riot act back at the newsroom, but they’ll defend him to you.”
“Even if he’s lying?” I explained about Werzel’s “unavailable for comment” line with a few acerbic comments about the character assassination he was trying to pull on Clarence and Caroline.
Heather thought for a moment.
“Okay, the no comment thing’s not fair,” she said. “But technically, it might be accurate. Maybe he was phoning in the story, and his editor asked him if he’d gotten a reaction from you. And he couldn’t reach you in the five- or ten-minute window left to get your comment. Me, I wouldn’t say someone was unavailable for comment unless I’d tried pretty damned hard over a reasonable period of time and thought they were deliberately unavailable, but Werzel’s a sleaze.”
“So your advice is to just ignore it?”
“No, my advice is to keep your eye on him. Sounds like he’s starting to flail. His editor’s probably pushing him. Asking for better quotes, more damning evidence. Werzel’s going to try to deliver, whether there’s anything to deliver or not.”
“Like making things up?”
“Maybe. Or at least making much more glaring omissions and misquotes. If he’s already starting to slant things and weasel, there’s always the chance that before too long he’ll be out without you doing anything. And if you do complain, be very businesslike and make sure you’ve got at least three real howlers he’s pulled. Clear, provable errors. Until then, if you need to vent, don’t call the Trib—call me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I feel better, knowing that the Trib already knows he’s an idiot. Wish I knew what inspired them to hire him in the first place.”
“I heard he started with them as a stringer. They wanted to expand their coverage of Virginia state politics. And they probably remembered his one big story—the Emerson Drood case.”
“Emerson Drood?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“It was about ten years ago. That politician from somewhere near Charlottesville—was it Fluvanna County? Anyway, you remember—the one who pulled out of the House of Delegates race when they found out he’d spent time in a mental institution.”
“I remember,” I said. “I never could understand what the fuss was. I can think of any number of politicians who belong in the nuthouse.”
“Yeah, but getting committed tends to put off the voters,” Heather said. “Especially if you lie about it and some reporter outs you.”
“Werzel outed him?”
“Yeah, and then he was the one who tracked Drood down and got that big final interview just before the guy hanged himself in a sleazy motel room. You remember that part, right?”
“Vaguely,” I said.
“Anyway, it was good detective work on Werzel’s part, tracking Drood down. I’ll give him that. And he did get that incredible final interview. But to me there was always something not quite right about it.”
“You think he made up the interview?”
Silence for a few moments on the other end of the phone. Then she sighed.
“The guy’s such a louse I could almost believe it,” she said.
“But no, the interview was too solid—had too many new revelations that turned out to be absolutely true. I meant not quite right about the way he got the interview. No way I believe Drood would have talked that much in his right mind. Who knows what kind of tricks or pressure Werzel used? And two hours later, Drood offs himself. Don’t tell me the two weren’t related.”
“Drood committed suicide when he realized how indiscreet he’d been?”
“Maybe. Then again, according to the coroner’s report, Drood had a high blood alcohol content—.02 something. Here it is—I’ve got one of the articles online—.025. Blotto. So maybe Werzel got him drunk and tricked him into giving such a candid interview. Or maybe Drood got drunk after Werzel left, when he realized what he’d done. Either way, don’t tell me that remorse and embarrassment over what he’d said didn’t contribute to his suicide. Though the more I think about it—maybe Werzel didn’t make up the interview, but I wouldn’t put it past him to tinker with what Drood said to make it a better story. I mean, the guy wasn’t around to contradict anyone, was he? I guess the Trib didn’t share my skepticism, though.”
“But if that was his one big article, and that was ten years ago . . .”
“Yeah, go figure. I guess maybe the Trib made allowances for the fact that even the best reporters on a small-town weekly have limited opportunities for big exposés. After his big story, he stayed with the same newspaper—the Fluvanna Gazette—until it folded last year. He did a few stories for the Trib as a stringer, and somehow he wangled a staff job—maybe he had something on someone in the Trib’s HR department. Or maybe someone liked his style—he can be pretty funny, in a mean, snarky way. But the grapevine says he’s on thin ice, and the Trib’s had him doing way beyond the Beltway stuff, human interest stuff—not hard news. Maybe he figures your murder—sorry, this murder—is his last chance to make it big. No wonder he’s trying so hard.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It all makes more sense. I’ll keep my eyes open for those provable errors, and hope the Trib cans him before he commits any more errors at all.”
“Good,” she said. “Hey, if the roads get better tomorrow, I could maybe come down for Boxing Day. Will there be turkey left?”
“Probably,” I said. “Since right now neither Michael and I nor Mother and Dad have power, I doubt if anyone has even s
tarted thawing the turkey. You might get to help us cook it on Boxing Day.”
“I’ll check with you before I head out, then,” she said. “Call me if you need any more scoop on Werzel. Or if you get any scoop I can use.”
“Will do,” I said, and we hung up.
I sat back and thought about what I’d learned from Heather. I decided finding out Werzel was in the doghouse instead of being the Trib’s golden boy didn’t make me like him any better. But maybe it would make it easier to put up with him in the short term. He’d get his comeuppance.
“Meg?”
I nearly jumped out of the chair.
Chapter 28
Jorge Soto had opened the door very quietly and was peering in.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Not your fault,” I said. I glared at Spike, who could at least have barked or something when he heard someone approaching.
What was Jorge doing here?
“Enough to make anyone jumpy,” Jorge said, as he stepped into the room. “Knowing that the murderer’s still running around loose.”
“Is he?” I said. “Chief Burke has arrested Norris Pruitt. So if you think he did it . . .”
“Do you?” he asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“You have someone else you think did it?”
“Not really,” I repeated.
He nodded.
I was suddenly acutely conscious of how tall Jorge was. Not quite as tall as Michael, but definitely well over six feet. Even across the room, leaning against the wall, he seemed to loom over me. Having people loom over me didn’t usually bother me—in fact, at five feet ten, I didn’t often get loomed over at all. But right now, anyone tall enough to loom over me was tall enough to be the killer, and that made me nervous. Even worse, this was someone who might have been trying to hide evidence. I eyed the room for possible weapons. I settled on a wrought iron fireplace set I’d made for Cousin Horace and had yet to wrap. The poker would make a lovely club. I had to fight the temptation to stand up and grab it.
Six Geese A-Slaying Page 18
