Can’t Never Tell

by Unknown

  This vacation thing was an unnatural act for me. Before I’d returned to Dacus, I’d had plenty of cases crying for billable hours. Relaxing was just too much work. What do you do when you relax? That had always been a troubling question for me.

  At the Clemson Student Center, I ordered a chocolate walnut sundae in the bright, sparkling shop. I missed the institutional gloom of the old Agricultural Sales Center where I’d first eaten Clemson’s home-grown ice cream as a little girl on outings with my granddad in his Mustang convertible. I drove the convertible now, and every time I came to this part of campus, I missed him. He’d taught me to roller skate on the broad sidewalks surrounded by the agricultural and forestry classroom buildings. Things changed and moved on, but those ice cream memories still tasted good, even if the ice cream shop had changed location—and the scoops were smaller.

  I crammed the change into the pocket of my shorts and carried my sundae outside to one of the metal tables lining the center’s massive portico. These tables felt less risky than those at the Seneca coffee shop. Scattered among the other tables sat students with laptops and backpacks bulging with knowledge bound in books larger than those I remembered carrying. Most looked like graduate students taking summer classes, older and a bit scruffier than the undergraduates scooping ice cream inside.

  Even in the shade, the heat wrapped around me like a steamy, damp sweater.

  Follow the money, Rudy had said. A lot of money to follow lately. Melvin—and likely Spence—were haring off after money that had been entrusted to Manna. I didn’t envy them the political delicacy required in a situation like that. To panic or not to panic, that was the question.

  Then there was Eden Rand. Maybe not in a panic, but certainly in a fret. Not so much following the money as herding it.

  I agreed with Rudy, following the money often leads to the source of a problem. I’d seen it in high-stakes civil cases. Having large amounts of money at risk drives people to extremes. Money does make the world go around, faster for some than for others.

  The one person who didn’t seem motivated by money was Rog Reimann. Of course, he might be the consummate actor. As I often reminded myself, I’d been fooled before. But I just couldn’t see him taking such a risk, shoving his wife off a cliff in broad daylight with a score of his friends and colleagues within shouting distance.

  But Rog was the only one who would benefit from the insurance—unless Eden managed to run him to ground. Money didn’t seem to be her motivation, either. Even though she’d helped create official suspicion about Rog’s insurance greed, I sensed she was prompted more from a need to make herself useful by guarding and protecting him than from any interest in the money for herself.

  She had a good job. Was she just desperate for companionship and Rog was a malleable prospect? Security, companionship, validation, even sex—I could see all those as driving forces for her. But what did I know?

  If I followed the money, where would it go? To pay a lawyer, if Rog was arrested. Gosh, I thought wryly, could that make me a suspect if I represented him?

  If things had a happier ending, Eden would see that the money was invested. Her lecture on the time value of money sounded like something Melvin would deliver. Something he and Spence had in common, the put-your-money-to-work mentality. Couldn’t disagree with that, what with compound interest being one of the wonders of the world.

  I smiled to myself. If you really followed the money, it would end up in an investment portfolio somewhere. It would cease to be liquid, like the rest of Rog’s money. Would Eden mind?

  By the time I’d scraped the bottom of my plastic ice cream bowl as clean as I could, I’d decided I needed a long walk. Probably guilt over ordering a chocolate walnut sundae with two scoops of butter pecan. I usually enjoy walking on the sprawling campus, but not today. The pavement, even when shaded by the heavy oaks, looked too hot in the shimmery heat.

  I pointed the Mustang back to Dacus and up the mountain road. A few hundred feet in altitude would lower the temperature a degree or two, and the idea of a tree-shadowed path felt cool. I’d make sure I stayed away from the path to Bow Falls. No need to revisit that.

  Late Wednesday Afternoon

  I didn’t want to drive far, didn’t want a lot of people around, and didn’t want a strenuous hike or anything near falling water. That narrowed my options. I decided to take the trail from the Oconee State Park toward Tamassee Knob. I didn’t plan to hike to the top of the Knob; that would be too demanding in the heat. But the path along the old logging road would be quiet, shaded, and hot but not blistering.

  As soon as the noisy shouts of swimmers at the park’s lake dimmed in the distance, I wished I’d stopped by the house for my S&W .38. I’d never encountered trouble on any of my solitary hikes, other than the occasional snake that was less thrilled with our meeting than I was, but both my mom and my granddad had drilled it into to me to carry a gun in the woods. “You never know,” Mom would say.

  A sunny holiday afternoon on a popular trail was a safe bet, though, so I trudged along the path, tamping down the frisson of worry born of my family’s constant caution.

  The undergrowth closed in along the path, encouraged by recent rains and the warm summer to stretch for new territory on the sundappled path.

  My mind flashed back to the weedy, overgrown creek banks above Bow Falls, where the woody stalks and vines had clambered over each other, stretching for the opening in the tree canopy that offered more sunlight and water and elbow room beside the creek.

  I broke out in a light sweat. Not dripping wet, but perspiring enough that I could feel the air brush my face like an invisible, faint flannel.

  “Ow!” I stumbled as I jerked my leg back. A blackberry briar had imbedded itself in my calf. I eased it out so it wouldn’t dig in deeper or break off the tip under the skin. A dot of blood pooled up.

  The berries were scant and not dull enough to be ripe. I wondered if Lydia had any of the really sweet blackberries left in her back pasture. Blackberries wanted more sun than they got here or at Bow Falls. I needed to go by Lydia’s. I didn’t want to miss blackberry season—the jelly was worth the briars, the heat, and the snakes.

  I stepped around the spot where the brambles stretched onto the path and glanced down at my scratch. I’d live, but it reminded me that I’d need to check myself for ticks when I got home. The scratches on my arms from last Friday were fading. Had it only been five days?

  Had Spence been able to fix the bramble tear in his pants? Probably not. That had been a much bigger tear than the little prick on my leg.

  I stopped suddenly, frozen on the path. That tiny tear, no more than an inch, in the delicate silk fabric. Where had he gotten that?

  I was headed back to the car for my camera. The blackberries weren’t growing on the path to the parking lot. That path was wide, with granite slabs almost as smooth as paving stones, in deep shade. Blackberries grew in the sun, along the creek at the top of the falls.

  A wave of adrenaline shot through me. I’d have been less frightened if a copperhead crawled over my foot.

  I stood frozen, my brain jumping from one snapshot memory to another, checking to see whether things made sense in a new, less dappled light.

  I turned, dodged the grasping bramble branches, and ran back the way I’d come, anxious suddenly to hear the shrieks and laughter from the swimmers in the lake.

  Early Wednesday Evening

  I drove farther up the mountain and took the shortcut over toward Bow Falls, my tires squealing on every curve. As much as I wanted to avoid it, I needed to go back to Bow Falls, to reassure myself that the heat had gotten to me, that I was imagining things.

  The path to the photo-op overlook was crowded, but, once I passed the overlook, I had the path to the top of the falls all to myself.

  I jogged as quickly as I could over the broken ground, scanning the sides of the path for the telltale red and purple berries and the tiny jagged leaves on spindly runners.

 
Retracing the path along which we’d carried our picnic supplies, I spotted not a single blackberry or any other kind of bramble or thornbush. Not until I turned along the creek did I find tangles of blackberry briars choking the weedy, narrow edge. At least ten feet downstream from where the path crossed the creek.

  The roar of the water over the rocks grew in my head as I studied the clumps of blackberries, some of the leaves yellow-tinged in the sun.

  I would let the sheriff’s crime scene folks come and crawl around looking for any beige silk fibers caught on a bramble. The experts might find something, but more likely, a bird had carried any threads away to its nest by now.

  I walked slowly back to my car, studying every plant alongside the rock-strewn path, hoping to find just one that would convince me I’d been overcome by the heat. Maybe he’d caught his pants on a sharp twig. Maybe—something else. But no blackberries, no brambles, no sharp thorns close enough to the broad path, the only path to the parking lot.

  I was headed back to the car for my camera.

  In the car, I dialed Rudy’s direct office number and got his answering machine. I desperately wanted to talk to someone in authority. I wanted Rudy to tell me I was irrational and incorrect. I wanted him to discredit my amateur sleuthing and tell me about a dozen other explanations for the tear in Spence’s dress slacks.

  He could’ve caught it on a twig, right?

  I took a deep breath and tried to dissect the reason for my panicked certainty that something was amiss.

  That tiny tear could have other rational explanations. Why was I so certain? I realized the torn pants had not been the only prompt for my panic.

  Follow the money. If Rog followed his past pattern, the money would be invested—with Spence. Eden lectured on the time value of money and fretted over the insurance company’s delays because of what she’d learned from Spence.

  Spence knew Rog couldn’t get his hands on any cash because his investments weren’t liquid. Rog and Spence were friends, so it was likely Rog had invested the insurance proceeds and his other assets with Spence.

  I dialed Rudy’s cell phone. It rang so long that I’d begun planning what message I could leave in the allotted time when he surprised me by answering.

  “Rudy. This may be crazy, but have you talked to Spencer Munn about Rinda Reimann’s death?”

  Rudy took so long to reply that I feared the connection had been broken. “Now it’s a death rather than an accident?” His tone had an undercurrent of derision.

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “He was interviewed just like everybody else who was there that day.”

  “You need to talk to him again.”

  By the time I finished outlining everything—how his investment advice pushed Eden to hound the insurance company, the bramble tear on his pants leg, the absence of brambles along the path, Spence’s likely role as Rog’s investment adviser, Spence’s relationship with Eliot Easton, and the investigation of Easton’s investment company, I was down the mountain and on north Main, blocks away from both the Law Enforcement Center and my office.

  After a long silence, Rudy spoke, the derision gone from his voice. “Might be worth another chat,” he said. “Where you going to be, in case I need to get hold of you?”

  “Back at the office,” I said. I needed to be inside my cocoon for a time.

  Later that evening, after I’d made myself a peanut butter and blackberry jelly sandwich and curled up to watch part of the BBC miniseries of Dickens’s Bleak House on my laptop, Rudy called.

  “Can you come over here? I’d like you to see part of this, if you have time.”

  I clicked the pause button on my movie. Lady Dedlock had just shot the lawyer Tulkinghorn. “Sure.”

  When I got to the Law Enforcement Center, the deputy at the desk directed me to a back hall lined with small interview rooms. He took me to a room with a table, two chairs, and a mounted television monitor linked to a nearby room.

  The deputy left me alone in the room and knocked once on a doorway in the hall. Over the television monitor, I heard the sound and saw the back of Rudy’s head turn to acknowledge the single knock, but he didn’t make a move to open the door. A signal I’d arrived?

  “Mr. Munn,” Rudy said, “I want to make sure I’ve got all this straight.”

  I wondered how long they’d been talking. Spence Munn sat at one end of a small table, his back to the wall, his face to the camera. His legs were crossed and he leaned back in the chair, his body language as relaxed as if he was having drinks on Lydia’s deck. Even on the washed-out video, though, his eyes looked wary, his fingers tightly laced together in his lap.

  Rudy faced Spence with his back to the camera, giving the camera a view of his dishwater blond hair sticking out in short spikes from the back of his head. His deliberate tone gave the impression he was a slow-witted cop, not quite able to understand everything the sharply dressed professor was telling him, so he had to ask for clarification.

  “You said you were walking along the path to the parking lot, then you turned back.”

  Spence paused, as if searching for a trap, before he said, “Yes.”

  “You didn’t walk toward the top of the falls.”

  “No.”

  Spence spoke as if short replies created a smaller target.

  “You walked a ways along the creek at the top, though, didn’t you?”

  Spence sat without responding. Was I imagining the tension?

  “You must have. You had a tear in your pants.”

  Did Spence realize I was the one who had reported that? Were the pants in his closet at home, or had he destroyed them?

  “That ought to be easy to explain.” Rudy offered him an escape hatch.

  Spence said nothing.

  “Did you see her when she fell?”

  Rudy let the question sit there in a long silence.

  Spence shifted in his seat. “I told you, I heard her.”

  “Did you call to her, tell her to get back from the edge?”

  Spence’s gaze lifted slightly upward, to the left, away from Rudy.

  “Did you warn her it was slippery?”

  Where had Spence grown up? Norfolk, on the coast, but he’d gone to college in the mountains. Surely he’d been hiking before. He couldn’t claim he didn’t know about slippery rocks.

  Spence blinked and looked down.

  Of course he’d known the rocks were slippery. He’d been standing near them, hadn’t he?

  “What did she say that made you angry?”

  Still no response. In a cold wave, I realized what was happening. He was using the Kennedy Smith defense, he was keeping his mouth shut, refusing to talk. If he’d been as smart as he thought he was, he’d never have agreed to sit down with Rudy, never let himself and his tight control, his involuntary reactions, be captured on videotape.

  Rudy leaned forward, crowding him but not blocking the camera’s view.

  “You pushed her, didn’t you?” His voice was loud, insistent.

  “No!” Spence’s words came through clenched teeth. “I told you—” He cut himself off like an angry dog who’d run full tilt to the end of its leash.

  “So you just let nature take its course, didn’t you? You didn’t tell her to stay away from the edge.”

  Rudy was offering him a safety rope, a face-saving alternative: I didn’t do it. I just didn’t stop it. If Spence reached for the rope, he’d put himself closer to where Rudy knew he’d been.

  Every step Rudy could draw Spence along the weed-choked path near the top of the falls, the closer he admitted to being with Rinda when she fell, the stronger the case against him. With every question, Rudy tried to put him closer and closer.

  Most interrogations didn’t play out like television cop shows. Spence wasn’t going to collapse and confess. He’d been living with whatever guilt he felt. He wouldn’t feel compelled to confess, to cleanse his soul. He’d had the time—and the intelligence—to make some peace for hims
elf, to reach some equilibrium that he could maintain, no matter how ill-founded.

  Like any good con man, Spence had managed to convince himself of the rightness of his views, at least in part. Fooling yourself always made it easier to fool others.

  Maybe I was fooling myself, reading something into an upward left shift of his gaze, his tight knot of fingers, his careful posture, frozen and tense. Even though he thought he was playing it smart, he’d let Rudy place him on the path close enough to hear Rinda’s one scream—which was very near the only place he could’ve torn his pants, close enough to the edge to either save her or push her.

  Rudy let the silence lay, and Spence made no move to fill it.

  “Tell me a little something about your business,” Rudy said.

  Spence shook his head. “I’ve said all I’m going to say.”

  Why wasn’t he asking for a lawyer? Why wasn’t he leaving? He wasn’t under arrest, he didn’t have to stay. For someone who thought he knew how to play the system, he’d missed a couple of key game pieces. He wasn’t under arrest, he didn’t have to stay.

  “Can I get you some water?” Rudy said, pushing his chair back with a loud scrape on the tile floor.

  “No, thanks.”

  Rudy left the room. Almost as soon as I watched the door on the television screen close, Rudy’s bulk filled the doorway in my dim room. On the television, Spence sat frozen in the chair, staring at the floor.

  “Any suggestions?”

  “He hasn’t asked for a lawyer.” I didn’t ask, simply stated the obvious. I knew Rudy would play by the rules. If he hadn’t been, he’d never have called me.

  “And he’s not talking.”

  “You believe he was there?” I asked.

  “I’d expect somebody who wasn’t to be protesting his innocence a lot louder. Not sitting there like some drunk trying to keep from swaying on camera so the jury might believe the video instead of the breathalyzer.”