“An X carved into the bark of a tree? You’re kidding. That would have been fifty years ago, Frank. The mark would be overgrown by now.”
“Not on a beech. They have this smooth grey bark and the marks last as long as the tree. They look like they’ve been painted. No, the problem we will have is whether the tree is still standing. It might have fallen, or the school may have logged out the older hardwoods. They do that from time to time, I hear. There’s a substantial profit in it and it will thin the forest, which some people think is a good thing for the ecology.” They walked slowly along the stream bank looking for beech trees.
“It would help if I knew what we were looking for—besides X marks the spot.”
“It’ll be somewhere along this stream.”
“Frank, I don’t know much about geology. I took a course in college. I had to have one science, and freshman geology was a snap course. We all took it. Anyway, if I remember correctly, this is a meandering stream. It could have changed its banks and course a dozen times in the past five decades. We may be twenty yards away from where whatever we’re looking for used to be.”
“Yes and no,” he said, his eyes still searching. “Can’t see the trees for the forest. How much a stream meanders depends on the fall—the rate of descent to its mouth. This stream flows into Chinquapin Run about a mile and a half from here. The drop is nearly four feet. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to make this branch flow at a nice clip most of the time. The greater the fall, the straighter the course. When Jack and I were here, the stream bent to the right and then back to the left. In fifty years, I’m betting it is running straight past that point, and what we’re looking for can’t be, at the most, more than five or ten yards from this side of the stream.”
They picked their way through the underbrush. Frank shook his head.
“You know the trouble with people,” he said, squinting at a beech he knew had to be too young to carry his mark, “is that we rely too much on our memories. Scientific evidence points to the fact that of the many mental faculties God gifts us, memory is the least reliable. You have four people witness an automobile accident and you get four different stories. The longer you wait to collect the stories the greater the variation. Half the time they can’t even agree on the color of the cars. I don’t know why, at our age, we worry so much about losing our memory. It was never that good in the first place. Old people should rejoice in their memory loss. If you have to lose something, why not dump the least reliable?”
“Thus spake the voice of the ‘experienced’ minority. Say, do you think there might be a benefit in it for us?” she asked.
“A benefit? How so?”
“Well, our gray cells are being logged out, so to speak. Maybe there’s a neurological benefit for our brains like logging out creates an ecological one for the forest.”
Frank laughed. “It’s a happy thought, but I feel like I’ve been clear-cut. Nothing left but stumps.” He caught sight of the small rise.
“There,” he said, “you see that low ridge running parallel to the stream? That’s the old bank. When I last saw it, it was almost eight feet high, but the stream has straightened out its course and natural erosion over the years has smoothed it out. In another twenty years, you won’t be able to see it at all.”
Then he saw the tree. In the forest with its high canopy, the beech had grown straight up, reaching for its share of the sun. Its trunk bore the evidence of hundreds of boys with pocket knives—an allowable possession in years past, contraband nowadays. Initials and semi-obscene phrases covered the surface six feet up the trunk—and in the center, Frank’s X. He looked around and his mind drifted backward fifty years. It was cool in the forest’s shade, but Frank sweated. He walked to the old bank, stepped over the ridge, and stared at the depression.
“This is the place,” he said.
Chapter Forty
Rosemary cleared papers away from one edge and flopped down on the bed. “I need to get to the gym more often,” she said. “That walk couldn’t have been more than four miles and I’m whipped.”
They’d returned to the hotel in relative silence. Frank knew she wanted to hear it all, but he wanted time to think it through. He could be wrong. How good was his “logged out” memory and what were the possibilities that all of his and Jack’s work had survived a quarter of a century? The clearing in the honeysuckle thicket didn’t prove anything. It could have been discovered and rediscovered numerous times over the years and easily repaired.
“Are you up for lunch?” he asked.
“Not looking like this,” she said.
“You look fine.”
“I am sweaty, tousled, and in my grubby clothes. I need a shower, a session with my makeup, and at least a half hour to get myself moderately presentable. And don’t tell me I look fine. Men say that all the time. Here’s a flash—women don’t care whether we look fine to them or not, it’s everybody else we’re concerned about.”
“I hear you. Tell you what. Since there’s no room service, I’ll just wash up, take my cell phone to the lobby, and make some calls. You can meet me there when you are sufficiently repaired to face the world. Then we’ll have lunch.”
She sat up and pulled off her cap, spilling her wonderful, platinum hair around her shoulders. She shook it out and began unbuttoning her blouse. He grabbed the phone, checked his pockets, and left without washing up. In his rush, he missed her grin.
***
He was staring at the phone when she emerged from the elevator. He didn’t notice her and looked up only when she stood in front of him.
“Frank? Hello, anybody home?”
She came into focus. He exhaled, but his eyes were still fixed somewhere in space. “Right, are you ready?” he said, voice flat. She pirouetted in front of him.
“Ready as I’ll ever be. How about you? Did you manage to find a wash basin?”
He raised his arm, wagging his wrist toward the restrooms. “Yeah. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to skip the idea of driving somewhere. Is it okay to go next door to eat? I have some things to do this afternoon…I need some time….”
“Frank, are you all right?”
“Am I? No. I don’t know. I’ll tell you at lunch.”
There were only a half dozen customers in the restaurant. He glanced at his watch and discovered it was after two. They ordered and sipped their drinks.
“What’s up, doc?” she asked. She leaned forward smiling, trying to see behind his eyes.
He looked up. His hands were palms down on the table’s surface, and his thumbs moved back and forth, making squeaking sounds. “I have to go home,” he said. “Right away, tomorrow, as soon as I can get packed. I need to talk to my daughter…she may want to go with me.”
“What’s up?” she asked again, this time seriously.
“They found Sandy’s body. Four years and they finally found it out in the desert. I have to go home.”
“Found? Frank, who found your wife’s body? The police?”
He nodded and brought his thumbs under control.
Their lunch came and they ate in silence. That is, she ate. Frank picked.
“This changes everything,” he said. “I’ll have to call the airlines, change my ticket again…check out of here, leave…this…you….”
“Of course, you do. Can I help? I have a travel agent I can call. She can at least take that job off your to-do list.”
“Yes, thank you, if that’s not too much trouble. I need to call Barbara.” But he didn’t move to make the call. “The truth is, I’m afraid to call her. I don’t know what the cops are going to do to me when I get there.”
“Well, there’s no sense worrying about that now,” she said. “Give me your phone and I’ll call the agent. I’ll tell her to book reservations in both your names. If you need to cancel one you can.” She phoned the agent. “When did you want to fly out?”
He thought a minute. “Late tomorrow afternoon would be best. That way, I
’ll have a little time in the evening to get myself organized before the cops descend on me, I hope. And it will give us a little time to clear up this missing boy business.” She raised her eyebrows at that, murmured into the phone, then snapped it shut.
“You still want to? I mean do you think we can?” she asked. “It’s really important you don’t leave with this thing still hanging. We owe it to those families. We opened up that box of horrors again. We can’t just drop it. They need closure. Everyone does. But under the circumstances—”
“I think we can do it, Rosemary. But I’ll need a favor from your friend the judge.”
“I don’t know about that, Frank. He’ll certainly try to do something, but the last time, the police wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
“I don’t care about the police. I want him to write some official-looking order requiring certain people to meet me at the school’s main gate tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”
“Can he do that? I mean order people to do that?”
“I don’t think so, but they may not know that and even if they do, their curiosity will bring them out. At least one of them will be there.”
“Who?”
“The guilty one.”
“Are you going to tell me who that is?”
“Yes, in a minute.”
“Why not just call them yourself?”
“I have no clout in these parts. I’m just an old man—”
“Experienced.”
“Not this time—old. An old man with an idea. And I need them all there. I am not Hercule Poirot and do not have Inspector Japp to insist they attend.”
“Or Nero Wolf…no Archie Godwin to round up the cast of suspects.”
He smiled. “No, or Nero Wolf either. You’re my Archie. That’s why I need your judge. He will sound sufficiently authoritarian to get them there. He should use language like official reopening of the investigation or important new evidence, things like that. It will get them. Oh, and you should invite your friend the ex-cop, the one working the cold case who gave us all the documents. He deserves to hear this. One more thing, I need couriers, messengers to deliver the judge’s orders to them all ASAP.”
“I’ll call in some favors from George’s old buddies. They have the muscle to pull this off. Okay, we need a fake court order and a messenger service to deliver them today. Consider it done. Now, are you going to tell me what happened, or do I have to wait until tomorrow, too?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to see you cry.”
“Try me.”
He told her the story. She did cry—a lot.
Chapter Forty-one
Phelps let Ledezma and Pastorella stand while he shuffled papers into a pile and swept a handful of paperclips into the middle drawer of his desk. He didn’t have anything against the sergeant or his partner, but he didn’t like time wasters either and Ledezma, at least, had wasted time and resources. He looked up. Ledezma was inspecting the putter on the desk.
“It’s a Ping,” Phelps said. “It needs to be cleaned and re-gripped. Dave Fowler gave it to me.” Ledezma took his eyes from the putter and looked at him. He seemed uncomfortable. He knew where the putter came from. Good, Phelps wanted Ledezma to be second guessing. It was time to finish this business once and for all. He waved Officer Gutierrez in and motioned for her to sit. Ledezma looked at the rookie and started to say something.
“Sit,” Phelps said and gestured toward two gray steel chairs. “Since Officer Gutierrez is our intern, I want her to hear this. She can learn something before she gets shipped off to traffic. Bring me up to date on the Smith case.”
Ledezma cleared his throat. Pastorella looked nervous and dug a notebook out of his jacket pocket. Phelps couldn’t be sure if he would be reading from it or writing in it. Pastorella never struck him as the sharpest tool in the shed.
“We are getting closer,” Ledezma began. Pastorella nodded. “The body they found in the desert is the wife. We have a pretty good circumstantial case on him and once we confront him with it, he’ll crack.”
“You had a crew of divers in a lake behind his house on Monday. What for?”
“Right, we found his gun.”
“His gun. That all?”
“Yes, but it’s the right caliber for the wound in the body’s skull.”
“The dive team leader says you kept them in the water three hours after they found the gun. What was that all about?”
“I thought we’d find her jewelry.”
“Her jewelry? Why did you think you’d find her jewelry in the lake?”
“Well, it wasn’t on her at the crime scene. That means he must have taken it—”
“And then threw it in the lake?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You buying this, Pastorella?”
“Well, it does tie together.”
“Who did you talk to this week?”
“Insurance salesman, the guy who sold Smith the million dollars on his wife, double indemnity, no less.”
“What’d he say?”
“Um…not much. He tried to tell me that buying the insurance was her idea or something. But that don’t seem too likely, under the circumstances.”
“Why?”
“Well, he clipped her and he gets the money. What’s in it for her? He’s lying.”
Phelps leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his stomach. “Tell you what, why don’t you lay out your case for me exactly as you see it. The body, the gun, the jewelry—all of it.”
Ledezma perked up and pulled out his notebook. “Okay,” he said, “I figure it this way—Smith decides to kill his wife. They’re fighting, another woman, something. The woman next door is my guess—hot-looking fifty-something. He’s a smart ass mystery story writer who thinks he’s the guy to commit the perfect murder, only he isn’t.” Ledezma looked around and got an encouraging nod and a weak smile from Pastorella.
“So he says ‘Let’s go out to the desert and take a walk,’ or something. They get out there and he says, ‘Take off your jewelry.’ Then he pulls the gun. She drops on her knees and begs him, something like that. He steps up behind her. She starts to pray. The ME says she had her head down like she was praying. And he pops her.”
“Why does he take the jewelry?”
“Don’t know. Maybe to give to his kids, maybe for the bimbo he’s got on the side, maybe to make it look like a robbery.”
“Why’d he toss it in the lake, assuming he did? You never found any jewelry, did you?”
“No. See, they’d be pretty small and in all that mud, they’d be hard to find. I’m thinking when he feels us closing in, before we got the warrant to search his house, he got spooked and threw the gun and the jewels in the lake. Up to then he could sit on them. Or he could have ditched them somewhere else.”
“Or given it to the girlfriend,” Pastorella chimed in.
“Assuming there is a girlfriend. Did either of you check that angle out?”
The two detectives exchanged glances. Ledezma shrugged.
“One more question for you two,” Phelps said. He sat up in his chair and took them both in with eyes that had gone from friendly sky blue to steely gray. “Did either of you check any incident reports for the area for that day or anytime within, say, three months, just in case?”
“I did,” Pastorella said, and opened his book.
“Did you read one called in by a Ms. Kindernecht?”
“The screwy broad? Yeah, I glanced at them. She’s a nut. Elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor. She calls stuff in all the time. She sees suspicious people in the neighborhood, her cat’s missing, the neighbors are making too much noise, can we reroute the planes from Luke Air Force Base. The woman’s a pain in the butt.”
“But you did read them?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Anything?”
“In her calls? You’re kidding, right?”
Phelps co
nsidered what he should say next. These were good police officers. Ledezma had a future. Pastorella, maybe, maybe not. Sometimes a man gets an idea and won’t let it go. When that happens, when the need to be right overshadows the need to be careful, bad guys walk, innocent guys get hassled or maybe even do time. Ledezma had been on the writer’s case from the get-go and had missed things.
Phelps wished he could smoke his cigar. These sessions always went better for him in the old days when they could smoke in the office. Now, if he wanted to smoke he had to go downstairs and out the back door and stand by the Dumpster. He sighed.
“Okay, this is the way I see it. Ledezma, you got a bug up yours about this guy. You want him way too bad. And because of that you aren’t paying attention and are going to blow this one.” Ledezma squirmed in his chair.
“You two need to learn to play what if. When a case goes this cold, a what if can break it open.”
“A what if?” Pastorella asked.
“Yeah. Look, you say to yourself, what if there isn’t a girlfriend, what if the insurance man is telling the truth, what if the screwy woman said something important, what if Smith is not the guy. What then?”
“But he is the guy,” Ledezma almost shouted.
“You say so, but what does the evidence tell you?”
“Lieutenant, I know it’s circumstantial, but it’s there.”
“That’s the point, Manny. It’s not there, never was. You wanted it to be there, so you only pushed in one direction.”
Ledezma’s face reddened. He started to say something. Something Phelps feared might have career-altering consequences. He lifted his hand off the table, palm out.
“Listen to me. What did the ME say? In his final report he says, after the details about the condition of the body et cetera, he says, ‘The victim was probably shot while kneeling. She most likely was holding her hands together, one over the other because her left ring finger had been cut off. This would indicate a brutal assault on her before the fatal shot was fired. Her head was bent forward, probably in response to the pain in her hand.’” Phelps looked up. Ledezma sat absolutely still. He opened his mouth to say something and then stopped.
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