Cool Demise

by Stanley Sauerwein

  I shrugged again. Bill was right and he’d said “we” again which sent a little spark of happiness through me. The $700 I still needed for the other pages would drain my savings completely. If I spent that, I’d have to rely on income from The Grind to buy new book stock. I sat back, crossed my arms, and closed my eyes to think. “Allan gave me these pages because he knew they were worthless. They really don’t tell us anything. He knew I’d have to come back with the other seven hundred dollars to find out anything more. Those other pages have to contain secrets about why Dr. Santos was blackmailed.” I opened my eyes and then raised my cup in a toast. “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”

  Nancy was still tapping her teeth. “Could all this have something to do with the money he was sending to Manila?”

  What she said hit me like a shovel swung in the dark. “Of course!”

  “His little brother maybe?” Bill asked.

  “Margaret said he didn’t have family back there,” Nancy reminded.

  “A friend then?” I asked.

  “The way he writes about the cricket and the grades sounds more like a proud papa to me. You think he has a son over there?” Bill squinted as he said it, waiting for a slap from one of us.

  “Whatever it is, there has to be something on the other pages Allan still has. Something Dr. Santos didn’t want anyone to know about. Something he could be blackmailed for, right? Was he divorced and didn’t tell Margaret? Could the money he was sending be support payments?” Nancy fiddled with her numerous silver rings, all set with stones which probably had deep esoteric meanings. “Whatever, it’s some secret he wanted to keep,” I agreed.

  “If he has a son, it means,” Nancy’s mouth gaped, “an ex-wife. Aren’t Filipinos mostly Roman Catholic? Can they even get divorced?”

  “Of course, they can.” I snapped my answer unintentionally. Jim was Catholic and I’d been studying because he’d wanted me to convert. “Sorry. But it’s not the Middle Ages, Nancy. Catholics get divorced just like anyone else.”

  “Well, I didn’t know.” Nancy looked hurt and I rubbed her shoulder in further apology.

  “But they aren’t supposed to remarry without an annulment of the marriage by a Catholic diocesan tribunal.”

  “Like priest court?”

  I laughed. “More like a marriage office. They have rules for annulling a marriage by saying it wasn’t sacred in the first place. The first marriage should be annulled before either of them marries again.”

  “I’m a Presbyterian,” Bill said, I think for my benefit.

  “Being divorced is no reason to blackmail him anyway.” I dismissed the subject with a wave of my hand.

  “What if he didn’t get it annulled by the church? That’s a secret good enough for blackmail, isn’t it?” Nancy asked.

  “Blackmail maybe, but why would someone kill him for that reason? And what in heck does any of this have to do with Utta Podeski?” One more thing for me to find out.

  The door was locked. The police had it closed off in a big yellow ‘x’ of plastic tape that said crime scene over and over down its length. Su and I stood there in silence with me trying to figure out what to do next. I tried the doorknob again. Of course, it didn’t turn. I moved to the window on the left of the living room and found it locked as well. “Well, Su,” I said, “this was a dumb idea.” I let him off the leash and, eager as always, he tore off the porch and around the house, barking.

  After spending more time with Bill and Nancy, revisiting everything we did and did not know about the notebook pages, Allan had parted with, I’d decided that what I needed was a tour of Utta Podeski’s house before I paid Allan another visit. Maybe there was still something important hidden somewhere. In his rush to get Mrs. Podeski’s blackmail goodies, I wondered if Allan had left any other clues in the house. Because the professional investigators on the CSI team had searched the place, I was fairly certain anything like that would’ve been discovered, but there was still a chance something had been missed. I wanted to see for myself.

  I draped Su’s leash over the banister on the front porch and wandered around the house, testing every window as I went. I found Su, bless his heart, digging in the soft, black earth at a basement window. I didn’t know what he was after, a bone maybe, but he had the right idea. Moving him aside, I got down on my knees and jiggled the window. To my surprise it opened inwards. I took a deep breath and looked around. The yard was still empty and silent. I knew that what I was about to do was totally illegal but by this point I was convinced it didn’t matter. I had to see if there was any other hidden blackmail material before I saw Allan again. My next trip to see him would be my last.

  I got down on my tummy and slid backwards into the basement window. The drop from the window to the cellar floor was a good foot below my dangling sneakers and I strained my ankle a little as I landed. Su, his tail wagging, waited for me to open the window all the way and lift him in. I pulled the window shut again, leaving it as I had found it.

  I found myself at the edge of the room where Utta had been killed. The freezer lid was up. Don’t look at it. Don’t think about it! The silence in the house spooked me, and hairs rose on my arms. Su didn’t seem to mind though. He ran off, his sniffing in high gear.

  I made a tour of the basement room in the half dark using my cell phone’s trouble light, noting cardboard boxes and two clothing trunks. Utta, or I guess Pavel, had built shelves along one wall. There were still cakes, cookies, bread, and other baking stored on the shelves. I saw that the back stairs led to a landing and a rear door. I made a mental note of it for when it was time to leave. Su followed me up the basement stairway to the main floor. I sucked in a breath every time a stair creaked. I tried not to imagine that someone was sitting upstairs, listening to me and getting ready to jump me.

  The kitchen was to the left of the basement stairs. To the right I found a cozy living room and more stairs leading to the bedrooms. I nosed through the kitchen cabinets more or less aimlessly, not really knowing what I was after. Su, in the meantime, had trotted upstairs. Finding nothing out of the ordinary in the cabinets, I went to the living room. Again, I didn’t know what I was looking for. It held an untidy collection of newspapers, laundry waiting to be folded on the couch, while plates and cups that needed washing were scattered on the side tables. Searching the bookcase, I found a hand-made wooden box tucked at the end of the couch but it was empty. Standing alone in the silence I thought of my uncle Barney coming over here to visit. Did she cook for him? There was an easy chair facing the television. Pavel’s? In front of the couch was a worn footstool with several, equally tired cushions piled on it. This is getting me nowhere.

  I moved to the stairs and climbed. Would she have hidden her secrets in her bedroom? No, Pavel might have found them. Did she have a sewing room where she could hide things? What man would snoop in a woman’s sewing room? But upstairs I found only two bedrooms and a bathroom. One bedroom was obviously Allan’s. The bed was a pile of blankets. An old poster of Farrah Fawcett in a skimpy bikini was taped on one wall. He used Scotch tape! Mom would kill me. I took a quick look in his closet, under his bed, and in his dresser. Nothing unusual.

  In Utta’s bedroom I found what I expected too. Another messy bed, men’s clothes draped over a chair, and a closet crammed with flannel checked shirts, cotton dresses, and coats. If Utta had been hiding anything it wouldn’t be here. Obviously, Allan knew exactly where to go to pick up the blackmail materials anyway. He was only in the house for a few seconds. Probably went right to that box.

  I gave up on my search as fruitless and looked for Su. I found him in the bathroom burrowed in an overturned laundry basket. He’d found dirty socks and was in scent heaven. “Come on, buddy, who knows what you’ll catch chewing on those?” I pulled him out of the basket and tugged a woolen sock from his mouth. But Su was enjoying himself too much. He squirmed out of my hands and dived back into the basket with his mouth clamped on a flannel shirt.

  “Bad boy! Le
t go!” We had a tug-of-war but I managed to pull the shirt from his mouth without tearing it. I held it up to check if it was ripped and what I noticed gave me an almost electric shock. The sleeves had been torn away. Allan! The dangling thread, the ace of spades tattoo. Every shirt I’ve seen in him in has had the sleeves torn away! Halfway down the shirt a button was missing. Su, standing on his hind legs, was pawing the air and trying to pull the shirt from my hands. I yanked the rest of the clothes out of the basket and checked all the clothing. None of the other dirty shirts were missing buttons. Maybe this visit is not a total loss after all. I crumpled the shirt into a ball and stuffed it into my purse. Urging Su to follow, I quickly made my way to the back door, half expecting to be accosted by Allan at any moment. I opened the door a crack and peered out to check the coast was clear. We left the house without having touched anything inside except the doorknob, with its lock, which I wiped with my sleeve after relocking it.

  When I got back to The Grind I flopped into one of the chairs facing the display counter and heaved a sigh. My heart was still hammering with nerves.

  “Well?” Nancy perched herself beside the table with a mug and coffee pot in her hands.

  “Nothing but this.” I pulled the shirt from my purse and laid it on the table, unfolding it. “It was in the laundry basket. It looks like one of the shirts Allan wears and there’s a button missing, but it’s probably nothing. Doesn’t prove anything.”

  “You have to take this to the chief.” Nancy carefully put the mug and pot down on the table and slowly sat with me. “You have to.”

  “And what am I supposed to say? I broke into Utta’s house and guess what I found?”

  Nancy frowned. “Well, you can’t keep it to yourself. It might be evidence.”

  I stared at the shirt and thought hard. “I could tell him someone gave it to me. He said I wouldn’t have to reveal a confidence as long as I told him what I know.”

  Nancy bit her lower lip. “Will he believe you?”

  “Why not?” I bundled the shirt into a ball again and stuffed it back into my purse. “I was careful. There’s no way he can prove I was in there.”

  21

  I plopped the shirt on the chief’s desk. “Someone gave me this and said you’d want it.”

  The chief scowled. He poked at the shirt with his pencil and waited for me to explain.

  “I was told it was Allan’s,” I said with certainty. “That’s his shirt and it has a button missing.”

  “Who gave you this?”

  “I accepted it in confidence,” I said, trying to keep my fear from showing on my face. “I can’t tell you. That was our deal. I don’t have to reveal my sources.”

  The chief squinted. “Did it come from Utta’s house or somewhere else?”

  “The laundry basket in her bathroom,” I said confidently. “I was told it was in the laundry basket.”

  “In the laundry basket?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “You were told.” The chief smiled and pulled open a drawer on his desk. “I was over at Utta’s myself, checking it like I do twice a day. I have to do that in case vandals try to break in.”

  I watched him reach into the drawer and tried to keep my stare cold and unflinching. His hand slowly emerged and he dropped Su’s leash on the desk beside the shirt.

  “Look familiar? I found this on the porch by the front door. Made me kind of curious so I brought it back to the station. I recognized it. Do you?”

  I looked from the leash to his smile and realized I had nowhere to turn. “I went over there to look for clues,” I finally said.

  “You broke in? Crossed the police tape and broke in?”

  “I went there to look for clues.”

  “I told you. The CSI team was all over that place already. This is serious, Ms. Willoughby. It’s break and enter.”

  I held my breath and nodded. “I needed to look for myself. Su found the shirt.”

  “Your dog?”

  “He was playing in the laundry. He loves dirty socks.” My grin felt weak. “I didn’t find anything so I went to get him. He was in the bathroom rooting around in the laundry. Like I said, he likes to chew dirty socks.”

  I pushed the shirt across the desk. “He was also playing with this. It’s obviously one of Allan’s. The sleeves are missing, same as with all the shirts he wears, and I noticed that there’s a button missing. In the middle of the shirt. Like maybe he was grabbed. Does it match the one in Mrs. Podeski’s hand?”

  The chief lifted the shirt and examined it closely. Then he gave me a stunned expression. “Looks like it might. But even if it is Allan’s, it’s inadmissible as evidence. In the first place, there’s the way it was obtained and, in the second, there are lots of shirts like that in Glacier, including a shirt owned by your uncle.” He shook his head in disbelief. “You broke into the house and stole this. I can’t believe you did that.”

  “He put her in the freezer, Chief. He killed his mother. She was probably grabbing at him for all her life and tore off the button!”

  “You’re basing that assumption on what exactly?”

  “Maybe she was knocked out,” I said, trying to lead him to arrive at the same conclusion without sharing how I suspected it to be true.

  “Who knocked her out?”

  “Allan? She could have come to while he was lifting her into the freezer and maybe she tried to stop him. Only a strong man like Allan could have lifted her up, especially if she was fighting him. Did you get Allan’s DNA? Did she scratch him too?”

  “We did and she didn’t.” The chief shook his head. “What motive would he have anyway? Why would he do that?”

  “He didn’t have the guts to hit his mother again. Maybe he wanted to take over her little blackmail business? Maybe he knocked her out and put her in the freezer to confuse the time of death. It was a perfect opportunity to seal his alibi about being with his friends when she died.”

  “How’d you know about his alibi?”

  I huffed a sigh. “His lawyer told me.”

  The chief’s look was more like grief than acknowledgement.

  “It’s possible though, right?” I pulled my tiny notebook from my purse. “Okay. I’m going to share everything I know.” I plopped the book on his desk and stared at him but his eyes were still on the shirt. Doesn’t he care anymore? “Chief, the leash doesn’t prove I was in the house but I’m going to tell you everything anyway. It’s time I told you everything.” I recited all the facts and my assumptions on the case starting with Mrs. Podeski’s fight with Dr. Santos in the post office, but I stopped short of telling him anything about my chat with Pavel in The Grind or my conversation with Allan at the hotel. “I don’t know how the deaths tie together. But Su was poisoned with strychnine and Jean uses that old gopher bait to kill skunks. She had strychnine. That’s convenient, isn’t it? Is that what killed Dr. Santos?”

  “Oh. I see.” The chief folded his hands across his chest and leaned all the way back on his chair. “Now it’s not just Allan who’s on your suspect list. You think Jean killed the doc?”

  “I’m not sure why, but somehow yes,” I said, nodding. “I think it was her. Except for a couple of wrinkles because it wasn’t Jean who went to Dr. Santos’s office. It was Pavel Podeski.”

  The chief shook his head like his ears were plugged. “Pavel Podeski?”

  “He drove to the dentist’s office in Jean’s Jeep while she was at Dr. Phillips office.”

  “Are you saying he fed the doc some cake that Jean poisoned?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Not then. He didn’t kill him. He was only there to threaten Dr. Santos. Maybe Jean went over after.”

  The chief scowled. “Threaten him? About what?”

  I held my breath before continuing. “Jean and Pavel have had an affair for years. Pavel asked Mrs. Podeski for a divorce and she wouldn’t give it to him so that night Jean went to see Utta to try and convince her. While she was there, Dr. Santos arri
ved. Dr. Santos fought with Utta. She fell and hit her head. Jean saw it all.”

  “How do you know all this? And why was he fighting with Utta?”

  I pursed my lips. “I asked a few questions,” I said snidely. The chief reacted like I’d slapped him. I tried to soften my approach. “She was blackmailing Dr. Santos. She’d been in to see you and claimed he had assaulted her in The Grind, hadn’t she? Dr. Santos would have been mad at her.”

  “Who were you talking to? How do you know all this?”

  I clamped my lips tight.

  “You have to tell me how you know all this.” He started to rise but I held out my hand. “There’s more.”

  He slumped back down.

  “I think Allan has whatever it was that Utta Podeski could blackmail Dr. Santos over. Whatever it is, he retrieved it from the house the day I found him breaking in.”

  The chief stared at me, trying to digest what I was saying.

  “He has that blackmail evidence, Chief. I’m sure of it.”

  The chief lifted the shirt again. “You think Allan stuffed his own mother in the freezer so he could blackmail Santos himself?” He stared at the spot where a button was missing. “It’s all pretty wild, Ms. Willoughby.”

  “Motive and opportunity,” I answered.

  The chief nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “The first time I asked him what he was doing in there, he said it was to get money. I didn’t charge him with anything because I couldn’t really prove he was inside.” He bit his lip. “I’ll go along with you and pay Allan another little visit. I’ll ask him again.”

  What was that?

  I wasn’t sure, but something had awoken me. A creak in the floor? I was immediately certain I wasn’t alone in the bedroom and my body stiffened in fear. We’ve all had moments when we suddenly wake in a darkened bedroom because we think we hear something. The fear we feel quickly passes as we listen to nothing more than silence, but this time I could hear that whoever was with me was moving things on my dresser and opening the drawers. I pulled the covers to my chin and clamped my eyes shut, listening with every ounce of my awareness. Will he come over here? What should I do? Scream? Jump out of bed and run for it? Su was curled fast asleep on the bed beside me. The tension was unbearable. I was practically screaming in my head.