The Popsicle Tree

by Dorien Grey

  “Thanks, Phil.” I meant it sincerely. “That would be great! We’d really appreciate it.”

  “Just give a call. I start shooting for Spartan’s new line of underwear next Tuesday, but until then I don’t think we have anything scheduled. Maybe this weekend, if you feel like it.”

  I thanked him again, profusely, and then told him I had to run up to Carrington, and we ended the call.

  *

  Scarletti Park was a pleasant one-block square of the kind usually seen in front of old courthouses on movie back lots. I parked near two grey painted cannons, vintage WWI, flanking a granite column with a list of the town’s military dead. Lots of trees, very pleasant. No fountain, but a large sunken sundial in the exact center of the park. I got there just a few minutes before noon and found an empty bench near the sundial. I wasn’t quite sure which direction Jan Houston would be approaching from, but I was pretty sure she’d spot me if I didn’t see her first.

  I didn’t have long to wait. About seven minutes after the hour, I saw her cross the street and enter the park. I was a little surprised to see her wearing a very attractive grey dress.

  You were expecting maybe Levi’s and a motorcycle jacket? a mind-voice asked, and I felt immediately embarrassed for falling into the Lesbian Stereotype trap.

  She came directly over and sat down beside me, not really looking at me.

  “So what about Kelly?” she asked in lieu of any form of greeting.

  “Have you spoken at all to Beth Erickson?”

  She opened her brown paper bag and looked into it.

  “No. She hates my guts. There’s no way she’d let me see Kelly.”

  I picked up my cooler and set it on the bench beside me. “So you haven’t even asked?”

  She shook her head, taking a large plum out of the bag and biting into it, reaching up quickly with one index finger to catch a trickle of juice.

  “Well, I suggest you do. I’ve spoken with Beth and she appreciates the position you’re in. I’m sure she would be amenable to working out some sort of visit schedule.”

  She looked at me for the first time. “I don’t want a visit schedule. I want Kelly.”

  “And there’s no way in hell you’re going to get him, and you know it.” I hope I said it in a non-accusatory way. “The law sucks when it comes to situations like this, but it’s the way it is. Your best chance to be a part of Kelly’s life is to play it cool. Take it one step at a time.”

  She sighed and stared into her paper bag again, as if it held a crystal ball only she could see.

  “God, I miss him!”

  “I know you do. So call her.”

  She gave an almost imperceptible nod of her head. “I will.” She looked directly at me. “So, what else?”

  “There’s a possibility someone may have killed Carlene.”

  She just looked at me. “Of course someone killed her. She was hit by a car.”

  “I mean there’s a possibility her death was not an accident, that someone wanted her dead.”

  Her expression never changed.

  “Are you serious?”

  I nodded.

  “And you think I did it? You’re out of your mind. I was at a friend’s cabin at Lake Verde.”

  “Mowing the lawn?”

  I saw a flicker of…something…anger?…in her eyes.

  “Yes,” she snapped. “Mowing the damned lawn! Are you spying on me?”

  I shrugged. “Well, I am a private investigator. And I like your new car, by the way.”

  Her expression had gradually transformed from calm to fury, her eyes narrowing almost to slits.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  It doesn’t take a slide rule and a caliper to figure that one out, lady, I thought.

  “Probably nothing,” I said.

  “You’re damned right, ‘nothing!’ I told you before I could never do that to Kelly!”

  “But you did take out a policy on Carlene’s life, didn’t you?”

  We’d both given up any attempt at trying to eat lunch.

  “So what if I did?” It wasn’t really a question. “I got it for Kelly. I didn’t know Carlene was going to leave me, and I sure as hell didn’t know she was going to get herself killed.”

  “Then why didn’t you put Kelly as beneficiary?”

  She was silent a moment, then shrugged, and some of the anger seemed to leave her.

  “I suppose I was afraid that what did happen might happen. I wanted to be able to take care of Kelly if anything happened to Carlene, but Kelly’s just a kid, and if I put the policy in his name there might be some sort of problem with my using it for him. And when Carlene’s sister took Kelly and I realized I’d lost him, I figured the money was mine.”

  There were a few logical threads in there, I had to admit. Still….

  I was suddenly aware Jan was staring at me.

  “So just what makes you think it wasn’t an accident that killed Carlene?”

  My turn to shrug. “Too many loose ends. If they’d caught the driver of the van, the whole question might have been moot, but they didn’t. And since they didn’t….”

  “What about that what’s-her-name woman? Bronson?”

  Bronson? How in hell would she know Estelle Bronson had been seeing Carlene? I wondered. So I asked.

  “How do you know Estelle Bronson?”

  She looked puzzled. “I don’t. I just talked to her on the phone. But her name wasn’t Estelle.”

  Bonnie?

  “How did that come about?”

  “She called me one night out of the blue. Told me Carlene was sneaking around with her sister and she didn’t like it one bit. She wanted to know my side of the story, and I told her it was none of her business, but she said she wanted to protect her sister. That’s how I found out where Carlene lived.”

  Well, that was something of a non-sequitur, going from “wanting to protect her sister” to telling Jan where Carlene lived, but I let it pass. I suspected Jan might be leaving out a few of the details, but I didn’t want to call her on it at the moment.

  I did ask, though, when she’d gotten the call.

  “I don’t know. Probably the Thursday or Friday before…well, before. My phone hadn’t been disconnected yet. Damn phone company!”

  She looked at her watch—which looked pretty new to me—and said, “I’ve got to be getting back to work. Did you get what you wanted?”

  I nodded. “I think so.” I resisted adding, “for the moment.” But then I had another thought. “Oh, one more thing. I understand you knew Roy D’Angelo.”

  I could almost feel the hostility that suddenly radiated from her like the heat from opening a furnace door.

  “What if I did?”

  “I was just curious as to how you knew him.”

  She glared at me and got up from the bench, turning toward me. “That’s none of your damned business! I never want to hear that son of a bitch’s name again!”

  I was really taken aback by the ferocity of her reaction.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to hit a raw nerve.”

  She took a deep breath, and I could see her forcing herself to relax.

  “Well, you did.” She paused. “So you’ll get off my back, right?”

  “Sorry again,” I said, getting up. “I didn’t think I was on it. But you’ll call Beth Erickson?”

  She was already walking away, but turned her head slightly back toward me and said, “I’ll call.”

  *

  I got back into town in plenty of time to take a detour to The Central and stop at Reef Dwellers, the fish store Jonathan liked so much, and bought him one he had had his eye on for some time, but had resisted buying because of the cost. I figured it might be a good—and distracting—welcome home present. I also bought two very small, brilliant-blue what I call “darters”—I could never remember their technical names—for Joshua. He’d been very good about helping me feed Jonathan’s fish while he was away, and since we sti
ll had Jonathan’s original fish bowl, I thought Joshua would enjoy having some fish of his very own. Besides, I knew I couldn’t walk in with a present for Jonathan without getting one for Joshua, too.

  I got home in time to put Jonathan’s fish in with the others—I knew Jonathan would spot it immediately—and dug out and filled the smaller bowl with water. I didn’t put the darters in right away until the tap water temperature had a chance to equalize to the room.

  I heard Joshua’s footsteps running up the steps, then the rattling of the knob.

  “Hold your horses, Joshua,” Jonathan’s voice said, and I heard the sound of the key in the lock.

  Joshua, carrying Bunny by one ear, ran into the room as though the devil were after him, and raced into his bedroom. Jonathan, looking very tired, managed a small smile and came over to give me a hug, resting his head on my shoulder.

  “Bad day?” I asked, somewhat foolishly.

  He nodded his head against my neck, then backed away and gave me a quick kiss.

  “I’ll survive.”

  Joshua came back into the living room, his arms loaded with more toys than I would have thought he could carry.

  “Let’s play!” he announced, dropping everything at once and sitting down next to the pile.

  “In a second, Joshua. Why don’t you come see what I got you today?”

  He scrambled to his feet and ran over, looking up at me.

  “What?” he asked eagerly.

  “I got both you and Uncle Jonathan something to celebrate his coming home,” I said, taking Jonathan’s hand. “It’s in the kitchen.”

  By the time I’d reached the second syllable of “kitchen,” Joshua was halfway there.

  “Definitely track team material,” Jonathan observed, following me.

  *

  They both liked their gifts, though Jonathan protested—weakly—that I’d spent too much on just one fish. Joshua immediately named his two darters “Blue” and “Fishie” and insisted on feeding them immediately. I was very glad we’d established the ritual of either Jonathan or I sprinkling the food into Joshua’s hand first, or he would surely have dumped the entire canister into the bowl. “That’s not enough!” he complained, and even after having it explained to him that they were very little fish and didn’t eat much, he was unconvinced. We made certain to put the canister in a cupboard well out of his reach.

  It was Jonathan’s class night, and he insisted that he go. “I don’t want to start falling behind,” he said. I knew, too, that keeping busy was a way he had of letting reality filter in rather than letting himself be swept away by it.

  A new Italian place had opened up about three blocks away from the apartment, so I suggested we try it rather than attempting to cook anything at home.

  Oh, and a suggestion: when a four-year-old boy wants spaghetti in an Italian restaurant and you offer to cut it up for him and he says “no”…cut it up for him anyway. It was partly Jonathan’s fault, of course, for demonstrating how to suck up a long strand. By the time Joshua was done, his face was covered in spaghetti sauce from his hairline to his chin. Normally, Jonathan would have stepped in long before it got that far, but I realized he was still dealing with a lot of things inside, and messy as Joshua managed to get himself, it wasn’t anything a washcloth couldn’t cure.

  We’d taken Jonathan’s car to the restaurant, and since dinner took slightly longer than we’d planned, I told him just to go on to school and Joshua and I would walk back home. Joshua was all for the idea, since he’d seen a small park with swings along the way. Kids may not remember where they left their shoes, but they can remember every park with swings and a slide within a two-mile radius.

  *

  Okay, back to business.

  I was debating, Thursday morning at the office, what direction to take next in the case. My meeting with Jan Houston hadn’t taken her completely off the hook, but my gut told me she probably was not directly involved in Carlene’s death. But talking with her definitely made me want to speak to Bonnie Bronson, and I was trying to figure out exactly how to approach her when the phone rang.

  “Hardesty Investigations.”

  “Dick. Marty. I have some news on the van that killed Carlene DeNuncio. We were able to get fourteen separate sets of readable prints. Only one came up with anything in our database files, but it’s got potential, a thumb print belonging to one Eddie Styles.”

  “Great! Who’s Eddie Styles?”

  “I’d never heard of him, either. Apparently he’s not from around here.”

  Interesting, I thought. “So where is he from?”

  Marty sighed. “Kentucky, apparently, but it seems from his rap sheet he moves around a lot. His sheet starts in Kentucky, when he was seventeen, and he later served time there for racketeering; he was an enforcer for a couple of big-time bookies, then he apparently branched out from there. He’s served time in Pennsylvania and New Mexico as well as Kentucky, but trying to track his between-jail time isn’t very successful. No known permanent address.”

  “What’s his ‘specialty,’ if he has one?”

  There was a slight pause and the sound of shuffling paper.

  “Appears he’s mostly a freelance enforcer. Mostly aggravated assault, battery, racketeering.”

  “No murder charges?”

  “Umm,” Marty said, obviously scanning his records, “two arrests, one for multiple homicide. No convictions. He’s got several outstanding warrants, but he’s pretty elusive. No idea what he was doing in our neck of the woods.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I hope the answer to that one’s not as obvious as I’m afraid it might be.”

  “A connection between Carlene DeNuncio’s death and Eddie Styles’ fingerprint, which might have been there for a long time before the accident, is kind of a stretch, isn’t it?”

  “A very long one. But a possibility.”

  “We’ll find out. If Eddie Styles is anywhere in the area, we’ll get him, and when we do we’ll be able to find out just how much of a stretch it was.”

  “Thanks, Marty.”

  What neither Marty nor I said, but I’m sure were both thinking, was that Eddie Styles was undoubtedly long gone from local law enforcement’s immediate jurisdiction.

  CHAPTER 10

  So if Eddie Styles had deliberately run Carlene down, who would/could have hired him? How could they even have either known of him or known how to contact him? Jan Houston? Very unlikely. She didn’t come into the insurance money until after Carlene died, and it’s unlikely hit men—an ironic term in this case—would do a job on a promise of being paid at some future time.

  Interesting thought, “way out in left field” variety: might there have been some link between Eddie Styles and the murder of that detective who was following Carlene, Frank Santorini? From what I’d gathered, it wasn’t inconceivable that Eddie Styles was the kind of character Santorini may have known…and maybe even called upon from time to time. Yeah, but then why would Styles kill Santorini, if he did?

  Stretch much further and you’ll fall over, one of my mind-voices cautioned.

  Well, anything’s possible.

  So back to the fact that hit men cost money, and it’s unlikely that Jan could have afforded it even if she wanted to. That brings us to Bonnie Benson. She could undoubtedly afford it, but why? Just to “protect” her sister? Again unlikely.

  Which leaves Roy D’Angelo. But again, why? If he had enough money to hire a hit man, which seems highly unlikely, why wouldn’t he just have spent it trying to get legal custody of Kelly? If that didn’t work, then he could order a hit—if he would ever have considered it to begin with. So that, in turn, leaves us with whom? Roy’s mother, Angelina? Talk about stretching! From what I knew of her relationship with Roy, I doubted that she would give her son carfare, let alone bankroll a hit man for him.

  So that pretty much left Bonnie Bronson in the crosshairs. Though there had been apparently no indication that the death of Estelle Bronson’s previou
s erstwhile lover was anything other than an accident, Carlene’s addition to the list still struck me as possibly something other than just bad luck.

  The thing to do was talk to both Bonnie and Estelle again—I really needed a deeper understanding of their relationship, and how each one of them saw it. I wanted to tune in a little more closely to what was going on between them.

  I decided to call Happy Day and try to set up a private meeting with whichever sister answered the phone. I realized it would be something of a juggling act either way, trying not to let each sister know I also wanted to talk to the other. I didn’t think either of them would voluntarily tell the other, though if Bonnie suspected I wanted to talk to them both, she could probably wheedle it out of Estelle fairly easily.

  “Happy Day Care Center.” I recognized the voice but hadn’t talked all that much with either of the sisters to remember whose voice was whose.

  “Estelle?” I asked tentatively.

  “No, this is Bonnie Bronson speaking. How can I help you?”

  “Ah, Bonnie…yes. This is Dick Hardesty calling, and I wonder if we might arrange to meet privately within the next day or two. I realize you’re very busy, but I thought we might talk for a few minutes about the Carlene DeNuncio matter.”

  “And you have come up with concrete evidence that there is a ‘Carlene DeNuncio matter,’ then, I assume?”

  For some reason I got a quick mental picture of Queen Victoria saying, “We are not amused.”

  “I’m still not a hundred percent certain, but it’s looking more and more as if there is.”

  “I see.” Her tone strongly implied that she did not. There was a pause before she continued. “Yes, I would like to hear what, if anything, you’ve found out, and how soon you are planning to draw this thing to a close.”

  I really couldn’t blame her for being impatient. She was trying to look out for her sister, and the fact is that hiring a private investigator is something of a crapshoot. There’s almost never a timetable, and no time cards to look over at the end of the week, and I’m sure any private investigator so inclined could pad his bill quite easily.

  Since I didn’t want to commit myself to an end date just yet, I avoided her last statement by saying, “So when could we meet, then?”