“No, our car window was shot out by the people trying to kill us.”
She was all ears and wide eyes, so we gave her the complete lowdown, starting with Wisconsin and ending with the wild ride to the airport in the police cruiser.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, that pretty well describes it.”
“Holy shit. You know, Del, when you were working at that dead-end job and I told you to do something with your life, you really took my advice to heart, didn’t you.”
“Oh, this wasn’t what you meant?”
“Not the getting killed part. Now, the meeting Sabrina part, that’s more what I was talking about.”
Sabrina chuckled. “Meeting me and getting shot at seem to have gone hand in hand.”
“Well then it’s worth it,” said Mo. “So what are you going to do?”
“Good question. We seem to have one clue, and one clue only.”
“Not a hard decision then. Follow the clue.”
“Wow, I never would have thought of that,” I said.
Mo gave me a pretend serious glare. “You know I could break you in two.”
“After the day we’ve had, I’m feeling daring.”
We talked for a while longer, then Mo excused herself.
“I have school tomorrow,” she looked at her watch, suddenly realizing how late it was, “I mean today, and I’m sure you guys need to shower and pick through your hair.”
It was almost three o’clock by the time we crawled into bed, but we found ourselves awake by seven, anxious to find out more about retired senator John Wheeler.
I made a run to one of the myriad Italian bakeries in the area to stock up on breakfast goodies, followed by a Dunkin Donuts trip for a extra-large coffee for Sabrina and a large iced coffee for me. Surrounded by food and coffee, we were now ready to tackle the task at hand. We each fired up our laptops and went to different sites to complete the picture of Wheeler. After an hour, we compared notes.
*****
John Wheeler was elected to the U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania in 1972. Before that, he had been a lawyer for a mid-size Pittsburgh personal injury law firm, never reaching anything even resembling a partnership. Frustrated with the direction his career was heading, he ran for state senate in 1969, after the hard-smoking and even harder-drinking career state senator from his district dropped dead from a heart attack midway through his umpteenth term. Wheeler was a complete unknown running against some career candidates, people who always seemed to be running for something, but never winning. Unfortunately for them, the voters were tired of seeing the same names on yet another ballot, and the majority of the voters decided to take a chance on a new name. In the little they saw of him on the campaign trail (such as it was), he seemed an intelligent and pleasant member of the bar from a respected law office. They were right about him, but wrong about the respected law office. In fact, the horror show of a legal firm that he worked for had successfully bamboozled the public into thinking they were a firm for the “everyman.”
Wheeler enjoyed his time as a state senator, did a decent job, and quickly aspired to bigger and better things. So he took the plunge and ran for U.S. Senate, easily beating his challenger, the incumbent, who was under investigation by the Department of Justice for fraud and embezzlement.
Thus began a forty-year career as a hard-working, but not particularly unique member of Congress. He never had an ambition to run for president. His name was bandied about a few times as a potential vice presidential candidate—mainly for the votes he might have been able to suck out of Pennsylvania—but never seriously. He had said once in an interview that while he was flattered to even be considered, he would have turned down the opportunity each time. He liked it just fine where he was.
The Clover Mine disaster, as we had already read in the magazines, was his claim to fame. He fought hard to assure that the families of the dead miners were treated fairly and claims were handled quickly, and while most of the people who followed the story in the media applauded the senator for his diligence and compassion, the very people one might assume would approve—the mining community—didn’t at all. The outcry among the other miners for a more thorough investigation of the disaster fell on deaf ears.
Over the years, the positive aspect of his involvement in the disaster settlement was mostly forgotten, but to the day he left office, he received nasty letters, pleading letters, and even death threats for him to come clean on his reasons for pushing for the settlement. In the last interview he did with the media before leaving office, the subject was brought up and he once again dismissed it and said that anyone who had questions should ask the families of the miners who died if what he had done was the right thing.
*****
“So where does that get us?” I asked.
“Nowhere in particular,” said Sabrina, still staring at her screen. “Here’s the list of the miners who died. No Leduc on it, so I guess we can assume that Daisy probably wasn’t a family member.”
“So do we visit Wheeler and try to make some sense of it from him?”
“We could, but wouldn’t you like to approach him with a little more than this to go on? If we talk to him now and find out something important later, we might have lost our chance to surprise him. I’m talking as if he’s done something wrong. There is nothing in the magazines that Daisy collected to point us in that direction.”
Sabrina closed her laptop and looked at me with a little fear in her eyes.
“I know we talked about it, but I was kind of hoping we wouldn’t have to actually do it,” she began haltingly, “but I think it might be time to go back to prison.”
Chapter 10
“Are you sure?”
“No.”
“I don’t think you should go. Too many bad memories.”
“We all have bad memories about some aspects of our lives.”
“A bad memory about an embarrassing date in high school is a little different than the horror of spending six years in prison.”
She went silent. I could tell there was a battle going on inside of her. Finally, she said, “You’re right, but I have to do it.”
“I could go for you and tell Terri that you sent me.”
Sabrina laughed. “There is no way she would talk to you. She has a low opinion of men to begin with, and wouldn’t trust that you are really representing me. Besides, it would be a sign of weakness on my part not to show up. Terri wouldn’t respect that.” She sighed. “I’ll be fine. In some ways it might even be nice to see her again.”
“If she doesn’t like men, should I even come?”
“If she knows I trust you, you’ll be fine. Unless you don’t want to come.”
“Going to prison wasn’t exactly on my bucket list, but what the hell, I’m game.”
She gave me a smile that made my legs weak. There was something about the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled that melted me. How could I ever say no to anything she asked?
“A question,” I said. “Other than the nonfiction book you are going to write, the research for which you’ve buried me under, don’t you have some novels to write? Isn’t your fan base expecting more?”
“I’m two books ahead of the game. I could go the whole next year without writing and it wouldn’t affect my book schedule.”
“Just checking.”
“Fortunately, I write fast.”
“So what’s the process we have to go through to visit Terri?”
“Technically, we are supposed to be on her ‘approved’ list of visitors. I don’t think Terri has a list. I don’t remember her having any visitors the whole time I was there. Then again, neither did I, except for the occasional visit from my lawyer, especially as it was getting close to my release date.”
“You had no visitors?”
“Who would visit? I had no family, except for my estranged half-sister…”
“Izzy.”
“Right. Who managed to get murdered hours after meeting you. You do ha
ve a way with women.”
“You’re not dead … yet.”
“Not yet. Anyway, I killed my husband, so he couldn’t visit. That left precious few people. But getting back to the subject at hand, my agent is also a lawyer and has quite a network of lawyer friends, so I bet he could find someone to grease the wheels and get us in there pretty quickly.”
I went shopping to restock the refrigerator with enough items to last a few days while Sabrina called her agent. When I returned an hour later, the visit had already been set up for Saturday, only three days away.
“That was fast.”
“He’s good. And it turns out that Terri did have an approved list. I was the only one on it. Getting you added was easy.”
“Is there a dress code?”
“Most definitely, but more of a dress code of things you can’t wear, not things you can wear. You dress pretty conservatively, so you’ll be fine.”
We spent the next couple of days catching up on projects. We went back out to western Mass to visit my mother for dinner one of the nights, and I spent some time working, writing down our experiences from our previous adventure. Sabrina called Ronnie to bring her up to date on the empty safe-deposit box, and spent a lot of time on the phone with her editor and her publicist. In between, we both tried to find out more about Senator Wheeler, but there just wasn’t much to find. In general, he was a pretty boring politician.
Friday night, we boarded a plane for Pennsylvania.
*****
State Correctional Institution-Cambridge Springs was a little more pleasant—if you could call it that—than what I had imagined. I had grown up on Alcatraz movies: The Birdman of Alcatraz and Escape from Alcatraz being two of my favorites. So I wasn’t quite ready for a prison that was once a college campus. But, a prison is a prison, and we had to go through the whole process of being identified, searched, checked off the list, and put in a waiting room until our names were called. They didn’t make it too uncomfortable, but I found it somewhat degrading. Maybe I just found the whole idea of being in a prison degrading. And yet, for most of the inmates, they were probably where they belonged. It was so hard for me to imagine that Sabrina had spent six years of her life there. I wasn’t sure I would have made it in prison. No, I knew I wouldn’t have made it.
Sabrina was sitting on the hard chair next to me tapping her foot rapidly on the linoleum floor. It was a nervous tic I’d never seen before coming from her. She must have been super-stressed. I took her hand and she gave me a wan smile. I was thinking that if she could have been anywhere else, she would have been. When this was all over, I needed to take her away for a week. Maybe to the Caribbean?
“Sabrina Spencer and Delmore Honeycutt.” Our names were called by a woman who looked the part of a prison guard: stocky, hard-looking, and thoroughly intimidating. “Follow me.”
We were led into a large sunny room filled with tables and chairs, almost every one of which was taken up by prisoners, their families, and various other visitors. She led us over to one of the only free tables and had us sit while Terri was brought in.
Terri was almost a carbon copy of the guard, just stockier, harder-looking, and even more intimidating. She could have been the guard’s mother. She was around sixty, with short gray hair, no make-up, a ton of tattoos—I’d have to ask Sabrina sometime how she left prison tattoo-free—and a bulldog face. In a word, ugly. But when she saw Sabrina, she broke into a smile. It somehow transformed her face into something almost pleasant. For a brief moment, I could imagine her standing at an oven—sort of a 1950s scene—baking cookies for the neighborhood children. Then she looked at me, gave a scowl, and the image vanished.
Sabrina stood up and they embraced. It was truly a heartfelt embrace on both their parts. Two old friends who hadn’t seen each other in a few years. Sabrina introduced us.
“Terri, this is Del Honeycutt, the love of my life.” How many years had I waited for someone to describe me in that way?
Terri looked at me appraisingly. “What’s Del short for?”
The question I always hated. “Delmore.”
“What the hell kind of name is Delmore Honeycutt?”
“Most likely a drunken joke, if I had to guess.”
She smiled. She liked me. Whew.
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to visit,” said Sabrina. “It wasn’t easy walking in those doors.”
“Hey, you’ve made something of your life, Patty … Sabrina. I’m happy.” Sabrina had changed her name from Patty Worth to Sabrina Spencer when she left prison. “When you came in here, you were a scared little wimp. I didn’t think you’d last a week. I figured they’d either find you dead in the shower because you pissed off somebody, or you’d off yourself and they’d find you hanging in your cell. You did good.”
I noticed that she almost said it as if she were responsible for Sabrina’s success. And maybe in some ways she was. She helped to toughen Sabrina up.
I sat quietly while Terri and Sabrina swapped stories about inmates past and present, and then Sabrina told Terri about the adventure that took us to Brazil. I caught the fact that other than a “fine” when Sabrina asked her how she was doing, Terri didn’t talk at all about herself. Sabrina seemed to accept that.
There was a momentary lull in the conversation and Terri said, “You’re here about Daisy.”
Sabrina nodded.
“She knew it was going to end that way,” said Terri. “There was no doubt in her mind.”
“But why?”
“Demons. Past demons. They haunted her most of her life.”
“Do you know what they were?”
“Nope, but I can make a few guesses.” She was quiet for a moment, then out of the blue said, “Do you know she went to Harvard?”
“What?” Sabrina and I said it almost simultaneously.
“She let it slip a long time ago. Just the one time. I think she was hoping I didn’t catch it. I catch everything.”
“I knew she was intelligent,” said Sabrina, “But I didn’t expect that.”
I could tell that Terri, herself, was also intelligent and had probably gone to college, but I knew better than to bring up anything about her.
Instead, I asked, “She was in here because she killed her husband, right?”
“So they say,” answered Terri. We looked at her expectantly. “I don’t think she did. I think she was set up.”
“Why?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Again, it was something she said a long time ago. Vague references to her husband that made me think she was in love with him. Yeah, I know, an abused spouse can still love her husband, despite the abuse, but this was different. I think his death came as a shock to her. But the evidence said she did it. Besides, I looked it up. She never used the abused wife defense in court. She just said she didn’t do it. She never once said she was abused. People just usually assume that’s why a woman kills her husband.”
I gave Sabrina a glance. That was exactly why she'd killed her husband.
“Do you have any thoughts on why she ended up near Lubbock, Texas?” asked Sabrina.
“To get as far away from Pennsylvania as possible?”
“So she lived in Pennsylvania before prison?” I asked.
Terri looked at me as if I was a total idiot. Uh oh. I had just said something.
“Dearie, you are sitting in a Pennsylvania state prison. Chances are she committed a crime in Pennsylvania.”
I could have argued with her that it didn’t mean Daisy necessarily lived there, but I valued my health and kept my mouth shut. Sabrina squeezed my hand under the table Yup, good decision.
“If I had to guess,” resumed Terri, “she tried to find the most remote place she could.”
“As in, Spur, Texas,” said Sabrina.
“Like I said.”
We were running out of things to talk about. Learning the few things about Daisy that Terri shared was something, though. I had no idea where it would take us, bu
t it was more than we had before.
“Did she ever make a reference to a man named John Wheeler?” asked Sabrina.
“Nope. Never said names of any kind, including her own.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“What I mean is, Daisy Leduc wasn’t her real name.”
Chapter 11
I knew Sabrina was thinking the same thing I was, that the possibility of Daisy changing her name had never occurred to either of us.
“It was her legal name, but it wasn’t the name she was born with.”
“Was Leduc her married name?” I asked.
“Nah. She was one of those hippies who didn’t take her husband’s name. No, I mean that at some point in her life, she changed her name.”
Sabrina and I looked at each other. Was this why we couldn’t find her last name on the list of dead miners?
Terri stared at us as if we were idiots.
“Why are you so surprised?” she asked. “Sabrina, you changed your name as soon as you got out of here.” She turned to me. “And you should’ve changed yours a long time ago.”
Ouch!
“It’s just that we never thought of that,” said Sabrina, trying hard to suppress a giggle. “It means we have to change our focus.”
“So who’s this John Wheeler?” asked Terri.
“A long-time senator from Pennsylvania, now retired. Daisy had a collection of magazines that all had stories about him. There’s some connection there, we just don’t know what.”
“Have you asked him about her?”
“Not yet. We felt we needed a little more background.”
“Now you sound like a politician. Just ask him. If he doesn’t answer, then threaten him.”
Was she being serious?
“Are you serious?” asked Sabrina.
Reading my mind.
“Sure. Daisy’s dead. She was gathering info on him. He’s a politician, so he’s gotta be dirty. He has to have some skeletons in his closet. Make him think you know more than you do. Politicians hate to have their legacy tarnished. If he thinks that might happen, you’ll have him eating out of your hand.”
Fatal Lies ( Lies Mystery Thriller Series Book 2) Page 6
