I told him about Grant Carson’s hit-and-run and Benno Barberi’s fatal heart attack. ‘You’ve heard of these guys?’ I asked.
‘I recognize the names. Movers and shakers, for sure, though I’m not solid on what they moved and shook.’
‘Then there’s Jim Whitman.’ I eyed the coffee cake, thinking it wouldn’t take running but a few laps to justify an incredibly tiny small fourth piece.
‘I knew Jim.’
‘Actually, he’s why I’m here.’ I removed a three-inch width, fully intending to get back to the health center soon.
‘No doubt,’ he said, watching me heft the wide new slice.
‘How well did you know Whitman?’ I asked through the pastry.
‘I helped value some of the paintings he was going to leave to museums.’ Leo’s eyebrows began to move, restless with a new thought. ‘His death wasn’t understandable?’
‘He went out for the evening, came back, sat at his desk at home and up-ended a bottle of painkillers. It was understandable to the medical examiner, given Whitman’s terminal condition.’
‘But?’ Leo at his most terse is Leo at his most probing.
‘His daughter doesn’t buy it. His suicide nullified an insurance payout to her, money intended to provide for his beloved grandchildren.’
‘I remember Jim mentioning his grandchildren. He was very proud of them. And, for a man facing death, he seemed very businesslike, very much in control.’
‘Suicide that nulls provision for his adored grandchildren doesn’t sound businesslike.’
‘How much?’
‘Two million to her.’
‘No. I meant how much did Whitman’s daughter offer you to prove her father’s death was no suicide?’ His lips started to tremble with the beginnings of a smile.
‘I told her I already have a client.’
The grin widened into a smile that split his lips.
‘Damn it, Leo.’
He smiled broadly, exposing eight hundred big white teeth. ‘How much?’
‘A hundred thousand.’
‘All wrapped up around a case involving Amanda.’ He raised his scratched Walgreen’s mug, satisfied.
‘I love quandaries and ethical dilemmas,’ he said.
THIRTEEN
Debbie Goring was leaning against the back fender of her Taurus, smoking, when I got there at eleven. She looked to be wearing the same blue jeans, but her T-shirt that day was orange and had a Harley Davidson logo on the front. She took a slow look at the silver tape curling off the Jeep’s top and side curtains like a spinster’s hairdo gone wild in an electric storm, flicked the cigarette butt into the street and said she’d drive. I took no offense.
Ten minutes later, we pulled into old streets lined with big trees and what used to be considered substantial houses. Used to be – because the teardown phenomenon was now changing the definition of substantial in Deer Run, her father’s town. On every block, at least one huge new house hulked across an entire lot, dwarfing its neighbors.
‘Teardowns are big here,’ she said, braking as a flatbed truck ahead stopped to unload a bulldozer. ‘Any property worth less than five hundred thousand gets pushed over to build something for a couple million or more.’
‘That would buy an entire block of houses where I live,’ I said.
She backed into a drive and turned the Taurus around. ‘People want to live here, for the charm of an old town, but they don’t want the modesty of an old house. Better to knock it down, they think, and put up something flashier and bigger in the middle of all that old charm.’ She shook her head. ‘You should see these new places at night. They’ve got lights everywhere – under the eaves, on the railings, beneath the shrubs. After dark, some of these streets look to have a whole bunch of starships landing.’ She shot me a sly grin. ‘All that need for showiness makes me wonder if there’s something wrong with their personal parts.’
She stopped in front of a Spanish-style stucco two-story home with a red tile roof, across the street from the Deer Run Country Club. It was a nice enough house, but not the kind of place I’d been expecting for a multi-millionaire. My respect for Jim Whitman went up a level.
I looked at her.
‘Sure to fetch a half-million as a teardown, if Mrs Johnson sells,’ she said, getting out.
‘The housekeeper inherited his house?’
‘While his grandchildren got nothing.’
We walked up to the front door and she rang the bell. A minute later the door was opened by a trim older woman in gray pants and a black sweater. The woman smiled.
‘Hello, Mrs Johnson.’ Debbie’s voice had turned soft and I wondered if the butch rasp she’d been using, talking to me, was an act for when she felt threatened. She introduced me to the housekeeper and we walked into a cool central hall.
The living room had a brown glazed tile floor and mission-style, black metal windows. Lighter rectangles on the beige stucco walls showed where pictures had recently been removed. Several cartons were stacked in the corner. We sat on wide, well-worn, nubby fabric chairs.
‘Forgive the mess,’ Mrs Johnson said to Debbie. ‘I’m boxing up the last of the bequests he left to the museums.’ She said it almost apologetically.
‘Thank you for seeing us,’ Debbie said.
Mrs Johnson reached to squeeze Debbie’s wrist, and turned to me. ‘I understand you’re going to help with the insurance.’
I nodded. It saved me from explaining I had another client who was seeing murder. ‘The day Mr Whitman died, he came home in the middle of the afternoon, took a nap, then watched the evening news as he dressed to go out?’
‘Yes,’ Mrs Johnson said.
‘How were his spirits?’
‘The usual, no worse. Mr Whitman tried not to let his troubles show.’
‘Did he appear to be in pain?’
She pursed her lips, thinking back. ‘No. His pills seemed to be working as always.’
‘What time did he go out?’
‘At seven. Mr McClain, his driver, came by early and we had coffee in the kitchen while Mr Whitman finished getting ready.’
‘Do you remember where Mr Whitman went that night?’
‘I’m sure it’s written in his appointment book. Is it important?’
‘I like to get all the details.’
‘Let’s find out, then.’ She stood up and Debbie and I followed her down the narrow stucco hall to a small study lined with bookshelves. The Spanish motif of the rest of the house had been continued in the carved mahogany desk and the tooled red leather reading chair.
‘I’ve thrown nothing of your father’s away,’ Mrs Johnson said to Debbie as she picked up a blue leather planner from the desk. She opened the book, flipped the pages to the back. She stopped at December thirteenth. It had been a Tuesday.
I looked over her shoulder. ‘What is “C”?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Mr Whitman abbreviated everything,’ she said, slowly fanning a few more pages so I could see.
The pages were filled in with one- and two-letter abbreviations. For someone dying, James Whitman was a busy man.
‘Most of them I can decipher,’ she said, looking down at the book, ‘but “C” has me puzzled.’
‘His driver would know where he took him.’
‘Of course, especially since that was the night Mr Whitman died,’ Mrs Johnson said.
We went back to sit in the living room.
‘How did Mr Whitman seem when he came home later that evening?’
‘Very fatigued, but he tired easily, the last few weeks. I was putting away some things in the hall closet when I heard the car pull up. I’d been listening for him because he was out later than usual. I looked out, saw him get out of a different car—’
‘A different car?’
‘Mr McClain usually drove a black Cadillac, but that night he brought Mr Whitman home in a tan-colored car,’ she said. ‘When Mr Whitman came in, I asked him if he needed anyth
ing. He said he was tired and was going to get something in his study and then go to bed. I said goodnight and went upstairs.’ She pulled a tissue from the pocket in her pants.
‘Do you have a card for Mr McClain?’
‘I have his telephone number memorized,’ she said, reciting it.
I wrote it down and asked, ‘You were the one who found him?’
‘The next morning. He was always an early riser, even at the end. I made coffee, and brought a cup for him to the study. It was then …’ Her voice trailed off as she touched the tissue to her eye.
It was all so eerily similar. Anne Barberi had also found her husband dead in his study the morning following a night out.
‘What medication, exactly, was Mr Whitman taking?’ I asked.
She glanced at Debbie, then back at me. ‘You mean, what did he use to end his life?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gendarin. I’ll get it for you.’ She got up and left the room.
Debbie turned to me. ‘Why is the kind of pills important?’
‘It’s only a detail for now, nothing more.’
The sound of a cabinet door opening and closing came from upstairs, and then Mrs Johnson came back into the room and handed me an orange vial. ‘Gendarin, as I said.’
The vial was full. The label said it contained twenty-eight pills, to be taken one every twelve hours. It was a fourteen-day supply.
‘These haven’t been touched.’ According to the label, the prescription bottle had been filled a little less than two weeks before Whitman died.
‘This wasn’t the vial they found in his pocket,’ Mrs Johnson said. ‘This was to be the new supply. He always reordered when he opened a new vial. That way, he always had a full two weeks in reserve, which I kept upstairs.’
‘This was the only Gendarin he kept in reserve?’
‘It’s a controlled narcotic. They won’t let you buy too much. I was to pick up a new refill when he began taking pills from this one.’
Something about what she’d just said flickered in the dark attic of my mind and disappeared.
‘He carried the current vial he was using?’ I asked instead.
‘Always. The police made much of the vial they found in his pocket, but I told them he didn’t want to risk being someplace without his pills.’
‘He occasionally took extras, when the pain got severe?’
‘Not that I know of. Carrying the pills was mostly a precaution.’
‘Do you know where that vial is now?’
‘I imagine the ambulance people took it.’
Debbie leaned forward in her chair. ‘My father would not have left me without insurance.’
‘Of course not,’ Mrs Johnson said, shifting to look right at me. ‘Mr Whitman was a meticulous person. He had his insurance man over here several times in the last year, going over this and that. He wanted to make sure everything was in order.’
The room went quiet. Both women leaned forward, attentive, anticipating, as though I might pop out a theory that would correct everything. I had no theories. I stood up. Debbie Goring and Mrs Johnson exchanged glances, then got up too.
At the front door, Mrs Johnson said, ‘I feel so bad, Debbie. Your father left me a wonderful bequest. I don’t have to work again if I don’t want to. But you …’ She reached for her tissue.
‘It’s all right, Mrs Johnson,’ Debbie said. ‘Elstrom here is going to set things straight.’
I didn’t look at either of them as I walked to Debbie’s station wagon and got in.
Debbie got in a second later, started the car and we pulled away. Lighting a cigarette, she spoke in the same small voice she’d used in front of Mrs Johnson. ‘That didn’t help, did it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I seemed to be saying that a lot lately.
‘You won’t help me?’ she asked, her voice rasping now.
‘I don’t know how, yet.’
We drove the rest of the way in silence. She pulled into her driveway and we got out.
‘I’ll call his driver,’ I said over the roof of her car, but it was to her back. She was already walking away.
FOURTEEN
The main drag through Deer Run was noisy with traffic. I pulled into a cemetery, parked next to a granite Civil War sentry who looked like he might welcome company, and called the chauffeur’s number. Robert McClain answered on the first ring. He sounded eager for company, too, but said he played bridge until three o’clock. I told him I’d see him then.
I hadn’t eaten since the modest half of a long coffee cake at Leo’s. I drove into Deer Run’s business district, hunting for a fast-food restaurant with the right kind of windows. I got lucky right away. A storefront across from the train station was papered with window banners advertising chili dogs, half-pound hamburgers and cheese fries. The promise showed in the sharpness of the red letters on the white signs. They were not sharp. They were blurred. I cut the engine and got out to make sure. Right off I spotted a fly stuck to the inside of the window, proof enough that the faintly fuzzy signs weren’t the result of sloppy brush work. The blur came from the glass. I went in.
Kings, Kentuckys and Macs are never my first choice because their windows are invariably spotless. The joints I seek have glass made opaque by the inside air. If the windows are filmy with grease, the chef is using properly fatty meat and real lard – sure signs he’s not cooking to some bland, committee-crafted, offend-no-one formula. I see it as my obligation to support such efforts by visiting those grease blots as frequently as I can, for they are highly flammable and regularly explode into black smoke.
I ordered a hot dog, onion rings and a Diet Coke and took them to a Formica counter to look at the blur of the world outside. My first bites validated my greasy window theory once again. The hot dog was properly slippery, topped with pickle, tomatoes, peppers, mustard, chopped onions, dill salt and absolutely no trace of catsup. The rings were strong, sure to delight for the rest of the afternoon. And the Diet Coke … well, the Diet Coke, like every diet soft drink, was there simply to dissolve calories.
I puzzled again over my earlier sense that I’d missed something when Mrs Johnson talked about Whitman’s pills. And in a moment, I had it: Whitman had been about to crack open the reserve vial of pills she’d showed us. That meant his current supply, the one they found in his pocket, should have been almost depleted if he’d been taking his pills in the dosage prescribed.
I swallowed the last bit of hot dog and turned around to ask where the police station was. The man behind the counter shrugged and said something in Spanish to the woman who’d taken my order. ‘Three blocks up the street,’ she said. ‘It’s in the basement of City Hall, opposite the park.’
I stepped almost lightly outside, sure of my wisdom in selecting a hot dog and onion rings for lunch. Like an automobile, my brain functions best when it’s freshly greased.
I decided to hoof the three blocks. Crossing the first street, I spotted a junior-grade black BMW parked down the side street, just like the one that had tailed me for a time earlier that morning. I continued on to the middle of the next block, and stopped as if to look in a store window. No black BMW or well-barbered head on feet had followed.
Deer Run’s city hall was red brick and white pillars. Walking down to the police department in the basement set the onion rings to barking. I slid three breath tapes into my mouth. The tapes were generic; I get them at the Discount Den in Rivertown, at the same place I get the duct tape to mend the rips in the Jeep’s top and Leo gets his shiny Hawaiian shirts and fluorescent pants. I aimed a test breath at the painted yellow block wall before opening the metal door at the bottom. Nothing peeled. Encouraged, I went in.
‘I’d like to talk to someone about Jim Whitman’s death,’ I said to the desk sergeant.
He scooted his chair back a yard, making me wonder if the Discount Den’s breath tapes were as unreliable as the duct tape that curled from the Jeep every time it rained. I slipped my hand surreptitiously into my
pocket and thumbed loose another tape.
‘Your business?’ he asked, looking off to my right where, perhaps, there was better air.
I held out a card. It says I do insurance investigations. He scooted forward, grabbed it, and again retreated fast. I slipped the new tape into my mouth.
He frowned as he studied the card. ‘I thought you insurance guys closed your file.’
‘I’m just filling in a couple of blanks.’
The sergeant swiveled around. ‘Finch, get the Whitman file,’ he yelled to the empty hallway behind him. Turning back, he motioned for me to sit by the door, on the plastic chair farthest from his desk.
Officer Finch came out in five minutes. He was young, maybe twenty-five, and carried a brown accordion file. ‘How may I help you, sir?’ he asked.
‘I’d like to know how much Gendarin Jim Whitman swallowed the night he died.’
Finch looked to the desk sergeant, who nodded. Finch took a sheet of paper from the file and said, ‘Approximately twelve hundred milligrams. It was enough to send him to the moon twice.’
‘You’re sure it was Gendarin?’
Finch took out a clear plastic bag. Inside was an orange pill bottle identical to the one Mrs Johnson had showed me. It rattled as he held it up to read the label. ‘Gendarin,’ he said.
‘May I?’ I asked.
‘So long as you leave it inside the plastic bag,’ he said, and handed it to me.
The pill bottle rattled again as I held the bag up to the light. ‘There are still pills in there,’ I said, like I was surprised.
‘Two,’ Finch said.
‘This vial was found in Whitman’s suit jacket?’
‘Yes.’
I read the label through the bag. Just like the reserve supply Mrs Johnson had showed me, this vial had contained twenty-eight pills, eighty milligrams each, prescribed at two a day. It had been filled almost a month before Whitman died. That made sense, calendar-wise. It had been kept in reserve for two weeks before Whitman had begun taking pills from it, at the prescribed rate of two a day, not quite two weeks before he died.
The Confessors' Club Page 6
