by Mark Zubro
Achtenberg said, “And a few other things. There must be an antique china set somewhere. If a moving truck drives up looking for the grizzly, it goes.”
We went over a few more papers and confirmed the opinion that I’d already given Veronica. She was going to be okay.
I said, “Some of it doesn’t make sense.” I showed her the bank deposit stuff.
She said, “It could be innocent.”
I said, “Or he could be a crook. He got murdered for some reason.”
Achtenberg said, “And sometimes people die for no reason at all.”
“Did you find anything out about what the police have?”
She took a deep breath. “Some. The guy who found the body is Mike King. He’s a private investigator from Chicago. Mrs. Grum wanted the investigator arrested for killing Edgar.”
“Did they?”
“Even the police here need proof. I think.”
“Why was he around?”
“He was hired by someone, I don’t know who yet, to find out how the Governor’s side was going to steal the election.”
“They had proof?”
“He was supposed to get proof.”
“One of the family members told me that one of the campaign workers died, a reporter. I checked the Internet. Several bloggers insisted the Grums must have been involved. None of the bloggers offered any proof.”
“I know those rumors are believed by the recall campaign. I have no facts or data either way.”
We filled her in about what we had found out from Azure Grum and Veronica’s gynecologist.
Scott asked, “Could it possibly be true that they’ve covered up murders before?”
“I know Azure Grum a little. She’s drunk a lot. A friend of Veronica’s for sure, doesn’t like her in-laws. Her husband is a decent, quiet man. But murder? I just can’t imagine. Although imagining the Grums doing awful things isn’t hard to do.”
I asked, “Do the police think the investigator did it?”
“The cops were on the scene fairly quickly. The investigator had a gun which he was licensed to carry. They already know his gun hasn’t been fired recently. Also, the investigator had no gunpowder residue on his hands.”
Scott said, “But Mrs. Grum claims that he did it?”
“Maybe she’s just making it up? Who knows? What I did find out was that Edgar was shot execution style. That’s all I’ve been able to find out so far. The police are keeping very quiet.”
“Isn’t that kind of usual in this kind of case?” I asked.
Enid said, “They’re hunting for suspects.”
“They’ll need to look at everybody who ever knew him.”
She sighed. “We already knew Edgar was a menace and most, if not all, members of the Grum family are evil incarnate. Nobody has any actual facts that point to a murderer.”
“Assumedly the cops are going over the surveillance tapes from the headquarters, and the news station’s video footage from Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.”
“There seems to be about a three-hour time frame in which the murder could have been committed. People were in and out of the hotel, the ballroom, and the headquarters next door all the time. It’s all one huge convention complex. They’ve got over three thousand people from the ballroom itself, plus the guests from the hotel not connected to the election, and the people from the floors that housed business offices, and the people who worked at the hotel. It will be impossible to pinpoint where everyone was. If they get one suspect, they could narrow it down with the footage. Maybe.”
Scott said, “All the areas have video coverage?”
“That’s another problem. Just some areas.”
I had a notion from the modern spy/thriller movie, where one guy sitting at a computer goes through thousands of hours of video footage from a zillion cameras in a major city, and it takes him five minutes to find the person he’s looking for. Bull phooey. And here, how would they ever get all the names of all the people they saw?
“What happened to the private investigator?”
“They questioned him for hours. His prints weren’t on the gun. The video footage with him on it shows the murder had to have happened before he got there.”
“Anything about the gun?”
“Unregistered, possibly homemade, they’re waiting for forensics on it.”
“Homemade? We found gun making manuals.” I got them out of the desk drawer and showed them to her.
Making guns at home never crossed my mind as something I would be interested in doing.
Scott asked, “Did Edgar carry a gun?”
Achtenberg shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“What’s the deal with the dead reporter?”
“I don’t know.”
Veronica entered. She took one look around the room and shuddered. “I’m tired of the goddamn dead animals. Let’s get out of here.”
In the Green Bay Packer trophy room, she collapsed into a chair. “The kids are in bed. I don’t know if they’re asleep. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sleep.”
Achtenberg filled her in on everything she knew and left a half hour later.
TWENTY-SIX
Thursday 12:05 A.M.
My sister and I were alone again in the Green Bay Packer trophy room. It was just after midnight. The last well wisher had left. My parents had gone to bed. We were staying at the house as were my mom and dad. Scott knew I wanted to talk to Veronica. He would be as he always was at home or when we traveled, naked in bed, reading a book.
My sister and I sat next to each other on a couch. Embers smoldered in the fireplace.
She sipped from a glass of Merlot.
My sister whispered, “I loved him. God help me, I loved him. I don’t know why. I know people never understood why I loved him.” She gulped. “From the first I saw the person he wanted to have become if he’d had a loving family and upbringing.”
I tried soft shushing noises, patting her arm. I was not about to demand details and proof of whatever bits of him she saw whether it was hidden kindness or generosity of spirit, or whatever it was that led her to see this. She had seen it. She did love him.
“Edgar was sweet. He was always sweet to me. He brought me little gifts. I got flowers even when there wasn’t a special occasion. He was thoughtful. He loved me.” She began to cry.
She leaned her head onto my shoulder. I put my arms around her. She wept.
After her tears had eased, I took a box of tissues from the coffee table and held them to her. She grabbed a few and wadded them up and wiped at her running nose.
She said, “I hate his family. All of them.”
My sister had never been a hater. More a reconciler like my mom.
“Every single one of them should rot in hell. They are bullying, obnoxious pigs.”
I didn’t tell her that I thought her husband hadn’t fallen far from the family tree. I opted for, “It must have been tough marrying into them.”
People might fight with their in-laws, but Veronica had never hinted at this much anger. Had she been suppressing it all these years? That couldn’t be healthy. Grief could be adding to her anger.
“That woman ruled and commanded, and they obeyed and demurred. Beulah Grum married into that family, but her people, the Felches, have actually been in the county longer. I’ve met a few of them. They add to the cold and distant familial ghastliness. They all look like refugees from that sinus commercial.” Another mucus memory connected to the Grums. She took another sip of Merlot.
“Did you know,” she asked, “half my life revolved around keeping away from the Grums, especially my kids? We’d vacation on holidays to Disney World or resorts like that or go on cruises, anywhere his family wasn’t. Sometimes his family organized these gigantic get-togethers on cruises to various parts of the globe, and we couldn’t get out of them.” She sipped from her wine. “I took every opportunity I could to make sure we were not even in the same time zone as them. I didn’t want
my kids to be like them.”
She refilled her glass of wine from the bottle on a green and gold tile-topped coffee table in front of us. She sipped from her wine and took a deep breath, leaned back close to me, and said, “Edgar hated his family. I did too. They were awful. They are awful.”
“You kept quiet all these years,” I said. “That couldn’t have been easy.”
She whispered, “They killed him.”
I caught her eyes. “Who?” I asked.
“That family. All of them. He was happy until this last year. He lost his job at the finance company he worked at. With the downturn they let over half the staff go.”
“Has he been acting normally lately? Anything unusual happening?”
“Not that I noticed. He’s been busy with that stupid campaign, not coming home until late every night.”
As quietly as I could I asked, “Didn’t he lose a lot of jobs over the years?”
She said, “After he left that law clerk job, he just wasn’t a good fit.” She listed three of them.
“Did you ever discuss why he left so many jobs?”
“He said he was always moving up, or they weren’t paying him what he was worth. He was finding himself.”
I thought, what bullshit, but she had bought all his excuses.
She continued, “They coerced him into working on that campaign. He’d come back late every night. He wouldn’t talk.”
I didn’t offer any alternatives about why he might be late. Maybe he was cheating on you. Nor did I mention the folders with porn pictures on the desktop nor the hundreds of bookmarked sites.
“He’d curse the family. As the day of the election got closer, it got worse. He got more and more tense and more and more crazed. You have to find out who killed him.”
“The police are working on it. I don’t know anyone here. I have no contacts.”
She leaned close, gripped my arm, spoke in whispered gasps, “They killed him.” I’d never heard anyone so passionate and so fierce. “The police are in it with that goddamn family.” Either she knew enough about the history of the county or had been alert enough to notice this through the chaos of the day or maybe a bit of both. She may have been blind about Edgar, but I never thought Veronica was stupid.
She put her wine glass down and clutched my arm with both of hers. “His goddamn family killed him. You have to find out who did it, and what they did, and how they did it, and you have to make them pay, and they better pay and it better hurt.”
What else could I do? I promised to help.
I asked, “Did he say what he was more crazed and more tense about?”
“No. That damn Grum family secretiveness took over. It’s a disease with them. Did you know when one of Barry’s kids, you know which one is Barry? Edgar’s oldest brother?”
“He came into the room right after you left first thing this morning. He’s the one with the very red nose.”
“Yeah, him. Well, Barry’s son, the day he turned eighteen, he signed up for the Army. He got sent to the war in Iraq. So Edgar asked at one family get-together about how to contact his son, Oswald is the kid’s name, or how to send him a package, a letter. And Barry said there was no way they could send him things.”
I said, “Maybe he was in a secret organization or undercover.”
“Ha! I found out the truth from one of the other mothers one time when I couldn’t get out of going to one of those Women’s Heritage Society meetings. The mother had a son in the very same unit. Slept two beds away from Oswald. That family called, talked, everything. They sent gifts, packages. It’s just nutty secretiveness. They all hate each other.”
How sad, I thought. I was lucky, I guess. With all of our quirks, mom and dad and my family looked pretty normal especially compared to all this.
“Who in the family could I talk to?”
“Why them? They’re all terrible.”
“I’ve gotta start somewhere.” I told her about the conversations we’d had with Azure Grum and her gynecologist.
She shook her head stubbornly. “They didn’t understand Edgar.”
I said, “There were the regular deposits to the bank that have no explanation.”
“I don’t know where they came from, but Edgar was not doing anything illegal.”
“Did he get family money?”
“Not that I know of. They kept him on a short financial leash. He had little actual money of his own. They wouldn’t let him at the family Trust money. I think he gets bits of money from the family Trust periodically. Maybe that’s what those are.”
“Do you know anything about his investments?”
“I know he was always trying to make a deal. He had millions of deals. I’m not sure they worked out. He’d be all enthused about one, then I’d never hear about it again. I figured he gave up, or lost money, or his family made him stop, or they were part of what the family was doing.”
I said, “And give me the name of the other places he worked.”
“He had so many jobs.”
“The ones you can remember.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Thursday 1:00 A.M.
I trudged up to bed. We were in a second floor corner room farthest from the others.
When I opened the door, Scott was as I expected him to be, sitting up, propped on a cloud of pillows. He had a book open and Bose Quiet Comfort headphones on, which were connected to his iPod. He was probably listening to a Danny Schmidt album, a new favorite singer for him. I stood in the open doorway and watched him for a moment. The covers were pulled to his waist, but drooped on one side revealing the first hints of his lower torso. The golden hair on his chest shimmered in the soft light of the reading lamp next to the bed. His torso expanded and contracted with each soft breath as his eyes scanned the page. Watching him calmed all the jangling of the day. I realized how tired I was and was reminded for the millionth time about how much I loved him.
When I closed the door behind me, he looked up, smiled, took off the headphones, put a marker in the book and closed it. He was reading The Metaphysical Club by Menand, a book about the effect of the American Civil War on the development of philosophical thought in the years after that conflict ended.
Scott asked, “How is Veronica?”
I began undressing. “Holding up as best anyone could do at a time like this. Mom and dad being here make a big difference.”
He was watching me undress. I turned full frontal toward him. I didn’t put on a show or make it a production although sometimes he liked that too. It was just a moment I know he liked, as I did watching him. One of those small moments of intimacy long term couples know about each other.
“And you?” he asked.
“Tired.”
I dumped my clothes in a random pile where I stood. His were folded neatly on a chair. He glanced for an instant at his. He looked at me and said not a word. If you’ve been married as long as Scott and I have, I occasionally actually remember not to be as big a slob as I am in my natural state. I picked them up, hung things on hangers or folded them neatly.
Each guest room had its own private bath. I brushed my teeth then crawled into bed next to him. He placed the book on the nightstand.
I said, “She wants me to investigate the murder. She doesn’t trust Edgar’s family.”
“She’s right about that.”
“And she doesn’t trust the police.”
Scott said, “I still don’t get the Grums having that much power. Even in Chicago, you’ve got to be kind of circumspect. Cops don’t just bow and scrape in front of people or get them to bow and scrape to you in front of witnesses.”
I said, “Who gives hints and commands to police in the presence of others?”
“Someone who doesn’t care that other people are hearing it,” Scott said. “Which means someone who is totally confident of their influence and power.”
“Or a moronic twit who is trying to cover up the fact that he or someone in his family killed his kid.”
“There is that. Those people are awful.” He rearranged the bed covers and moved himself so our legs touched then he said, “That election stuff was incredible.”
I repeated the left’s mantra. “If it is close, they will always find a way to steal it.”
Scott said, “I checked on the Internet about what the gynecologist told me. There are some web sites that agree that the math for the Grums doesn’t add up.”
“How so?”
“The percentage of turn-out and the total votes around the state averaged forty-nine percent. That’s what it was until the announcement at the press conference. In Harrison County the turnout was announced now to be at eighty-one percent.”
“So?”
“The eighty-one percent happened in only three heavily anti-recall precincts. The anti-recall precincts in the rest of the state averaged forty-nine percent, as did the pro-recall precincts.”
“Oh.”
“The upshot is the Republicans in this county have come up with eleven thousand missing votes. More than enough to win the election for their side.”
“Rigged?” I asked.
“Of course. Will they get away with it?”
I shrugged. “What do you think?”
Scott said, “I almost felt bad for Mrs. Grum at that press conference. Having to be there dealing with politics instead of her own grief. Who would be such a brute to require her attendance?”
“I sort of did too, but she’s been in public life long enough in the electronic age.”
“No, I meant having to do that kind of thing with her son murdered a few hours before.”
I asked, “Why didn’t they have some flunky on stage? Why did she even wind up being in front of the media? There’s got to be more than one repub in this county who can talk to the press.”
“Maybe because she’s in charge of voting?”
“I don’t care. At a time like this with her son murdered? Who gives a crap about an election?”
He asked, “Are you going to investigate the murder?”
“I will do what I can for Veronica. There’s going to be enough people in and out of the house that I can talk to.” I related what Veronica had told me a few minutes before about what she’d seen in Edgar. “Despite what she told me, I still don’t understand why Veronica loved him.”
