by Sue Grafton
“Better for you maybe . . .”
Joey put a consoling hand on her arm and his tone was mild. “Babe, she apologized. Let’s not get sidetracked when that has nothing to do with why we’re here.”
She shot him a look, but seemed to accept his point. Clearly, he knew how to handle her and I gave him credit for a maturity that wasn’t visible on sight.
Both of them now seemed ill at ease. It was Joey who broke the ice. “Reason we’re here is something came up and my stepmom thought we should tell you.”
“I’m all ears,” I said before remembering that his protruded like the sideview mirrors on a car.
He turned to Iris. “You want to talk or you want me to?”
“I’ll do it,” she said. She still seemed sulky and out of sorts, but at least she’d finished berating me. “What happened is I thought I saw Austin Brown a couple times last week.”
“Really. When was this?”
“First time was Tuesday of last week when me and Joey were playing pool at the Clockworks over on lower State Street. I was lining up a shot and I happened to glance to my left and I saw Austin in the other room. Just a flash, but I knew it was him.”
“How did you know?”
“Have you seen pictures of him? You don’t forget a face like his. He’s a good-looking guy. He has those honed cheeks and the slight smirk, like he’s better than the rest of us. He’d grown his hair long and he had on these mirrored sunglasses, but when he saw me, he took them off and we locked eyes. I was so flustered I missed my shot and when I looked up again, he was gone.”
“You think he wanted you to see him?”
“He didn’t make any effort to conceal himself. On the other hand, if I hadn’t looked up when I did, he might have walked right on by.”
“What do you think he was doing at the Clockworks?”
“We used to hang out there in high school. Not me so much after I dropped out of Climp, but a lot of kids. He might have gone for old times’ sake.”
I watched her, trying to make sense of what she’d said. “Seems odd to me.”
“Why?”
“It’s just not very smart of him. He succeeded in vanishing for ten years. Now suddenly he’s back and he walks into a place where he could be recognized?”
“It’s the other way around. Austin always acts like he’s in charge, like he knows what he’s doing. Maybe he didn’t expect to see me, but when he realized I had seen him, he had to make it seem like his idea. Something he’d done on purpose instead of being caught out.”
“I can understand that,” I said. “You mentioned seeing him more than once.”
“The other time was Friday. He was in a car that passed me on State.”
“This past Friday? You’re sure of that?”
“Friday’s the day I go to the bank. I was on my way when he went by.”
“He didn’t see you?”
“He was looking the other way.”
“He was driving?”
She nodded.
“Anyone else in the car with him?”
“He had a passenger, but I couldn’t get a good look at him from where I was. I thought it was Fritz but I could be wrong about that.”
“What time of day was this?”
“Must have been just after lunch because I had to close the shop for twenty minutes so I could make a deposit at that Wells Fargo at the corner of State and Fig.”
“You’re sure it was Austin?”
“Not a hundred percent, but pretty sure,” she said. “If I hadn’t just seen him on Tuesday, I might not have noticed him at all.”
“Curious,” I said.
Joey said, “You going to tell her the rest of it?”
“I guess,” she said, reluctantly. “That day you came to the store, you didn’t ask if I’d seen Fritz, but I had. When he got out of CYA, he called Stringer—Steve Ringer—and said how great it would be if Steve would get some of the old gang together. Stringer’s roommate is this other friend of ours named Roland Berg so they invited a few of us over. Joey didn’t go because he didn’t know anyone from Climp.”
“Who else besides you?”
“Patti Gibson. She’s married now and her husband came with her. And let’s see. Betsy Coe and Michelle and me. Bayard, of course. Blake Edelston was invited, but I ended up leaving before he got there.”
“Troy?”
“Not him. He doesn’t have much to do with the kids from Climp these days.”
“So how’d it go?”
“The party? It was boring. I don’t have anything to say to those guys. I went to be polite and because I was curious, but that didn’t last long.”
“How did Fritz seem to you? You think prison changed him?”
“He was as obnoxious as ever. He has this laugh that gets on my nerves. Around Climp kids, he was always self-conscious and sort of out of it. He still is.”
Joey, Iris’s prompter in the great play of life, said, “You want to tell her what he said?”
She looked at him blankly.
“About the blackmail demand,” he said.
“Oh, right.”
“You know about that?” I asked.
“Everyone knows. You mentioned it when you came to the store, acting like a fake reporter,” she said, unable to resist the dig. “The minute Fritz heard about the scheme, he was on the phone bitching about the twenty-five thousand; pissed because his parents wouldn’t pay. He complained to everyone.”
I said, “Ah. So that’s why you were all so well-informed. And here I thought the matter was private.”
“Nothing’s private with him. He never mastered the art of keeping his mouth shut.”
“Did he voice an opinion about who he thought was behind the scheme?”
“He didn’t, but if you ask me, it sounds like something Austin would do. He liked to have something to hold over your head so he could make you do what he wanted.”
“You think that’s why he came back?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. He was always hostile toward Fritz, so why not put the squeeze on him?”
“Speaking of Fritz, when did you talk to him last?” I asked.
“I forget exactly. Sometime last week.”
Joey said, “Bayard invited us over for a swim and Fritz was there.”
Iris said, “Then he called back all in a lather because the extortionist left a message on his parents’ answering machine. He mentioned Austin’s name himself, so he was under the same impression I was.”
I shook my head. “I’m not sure I understand what’s going on.”
“Then we’re all in the same boat,” she said.
Joey stirred restlessly. “Anyway, that’s about all there is. I don’t mean to rush this, but we both gotta get to work.”
“Well, I appreciate your coming in,” I said. “If you spot Austin again, would you give me a call?”
“We can do that,” Joey said. As he stood up, he reached over and shook my hand. “Sorry to have to run. Appreciate your time. Nice seeing you again.”
“Same here,” I said.
The minute they were out the door, I put in a call to Lauren McCabe.
When I identified myself, I could hear her voice deflate. “I was hoping this was Fritz,” she said.
“Still no sign of him?”
“None. You mentioned filing a missing person’s report, which Hollis thought was a good idea. He went down to the police station this morning.”
“Good. I’m glad. It’s a wise move.”
“You said if Fritz hadn’t put in an appearance by now, you’d help.”
“Of course, but I’ll do this my way. If I make a mistake, that’s on me. If you interfere, then I’m out.”
“Agreed, as long as you explain your terms to Hollis,” she s
aid. “He thinks he should be running the show. I understand your point, and while I’m willing to give you full rein, he might not be as agreeable. You don’t want me to step out of your way only to have him step in. Right now, he’s furious with me.”
“Why?”
“He says he should have been allowed to handle this from the start.”
“Last I heard, the two of you were in agreement. What would he have done differently?”
“He’d have pretended to accept the terms and then confronted the extortionist before he paid.”
“What if the extortionist settled on a money drop at some remote location? Most blackmailers aren’t going to agree to meet face-to-face. They want the cash. They don’t want you knowing who they are.”
“Hollis would have insisted or no deal.”
“Come on, Lauren. That’s ridiculous. For all we know, the extortionist would have turned him down cold and put the tape straight in the mail to the DA.”
“Then he’d have gotten nothing. No money at all.”
“You’re assuming money’s the motive.”
“What else could it be?”
“Making you suffer. Ruining your lives. Something along those lines.”
“Oh dear.”
“I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I hung up, grabbed the mail, and shoved it in the outside pocket of my shoulder bag. I was up and crossing the room when the phone rang. As usual, I was tempted to let the call go to the answering machine, but just in case it was Lauren again, I picked up.
“Kinsey, it’s Erroll.”
I walked back around the desk and sat down. I could feel my heart give a hard thump. “How’s Phyllis? Is she okay?”
“We’re hoping so. Sternberg put her in a medically induced coma.”
“This is your friend the neurosurgeon?”
“Sorry, yes. Tom Sternberg. He says when the brain swells in the wake of an injury like this, the pressure can starve some areas of oxygen. Swollen tissue can also be injured when it pushes against the inside of the skull. The point is to reduce the electrical activity and slow down the brain’s metabolism to minimize the inflammation. He’ll know more as they bring her out of it. For now, she’s stable and that’s about as much as we can expect.”
“Will she recover?”
“No guarantees, but he’s optimistic,” he said. “Something else has come up and this news isn’t so good. Ned came back.”
“To the condominium? When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“How do you know it was him? Dumb question. Skip that. How’d he get in?”
“He still had her keys. He waited until I went off to work and let himself in. I might not have known about it except that I hired a company to come in and clean blood off the carpeting late in the day. When I unlocked the door to let the crew in, I could see he’d torn the place apart.”
“The locks hadn’t been changed?”
“I notified the property management company and asked them to send a locksmith, but the guy didn’t arrive until this morning and by then, the damage was done.”
“Why would Ned come back? That’s a big risk.”
“He went through the moving cartons he hadn’t hit before.”
“All of them?”
“Looks that way. He was systematic and took his sweet time this round.”
“Shit,” I said.
“You haven’t told me what he was looking for.”
“He believes his ex-wife has the box of souvenirs he collected from each of his murder victims. What he needs is his ex-wife’s alias and her current location. Phyllis mentioned jotting the information on a slip of paper she’d tossed in a moving carton.”
“How did Ned get wind of that?”
I went back through events, explaining how I discovered not only where the fugitive had been holing up, but how he’d managed to tap my phone. “He actually installed an extension so all he had to do was lounge in the dirt down there, listening to every word I said.” I filled him in on Ned’s threat to burn me out and how I’d blasted him through the vent opening.
“Well, that explains the mess he left. He stayed long enough to change the dressing on what must be a nasty wound. He went through a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, gauze pads, and adhesive tape, and then he stole her Valium and prescription pain pills and left the empty bottles in the trash. Apparently, he can’t resist showing how clever he is . . .”
“Could you bring Detective Altman up to speed on this?”
“That’s the next call on my list.”
30
When I reached the McCabes’ condominium, Hollis was home. He’d gone over to the police station, where he filed the missing person’s report on his son, and then called his secretary to tell her he wouldn’t be in. The three of us sat down in the living room. Just in case the forthcoming conversation wasn’t going to be difficult enough, Lauren hadn’t told Hollis she’d fired me. When I repeated the terms I’d laid out for my continued employment, he had no idea what I was talking about. We spent ten minutes sorting out the details, which seemed to make Hollis cranky. What a surprise.
Lauren was busy smoothing things over. “You’ll want to see his room,” she said. “Maybe you can figure out where he went.”
Given that I’d never stepped a foot in Fritz’s room, I couldn’t see the point, but we were all now on our best behavior and I was pretending to be agreeable.
Lauren showed me in, saying, “I’ll leave you to look around.”
She left, closing the door behind her. My guess was that she and Hollis would engage in a low-level argument, probably a continuation of the one sparked by the discovery that Fritz had forged his mother’s signature and walked away with twenty-five thousand in cash. Their murmured conversation in the living room had a rising and falling tone to it that reminded me why I’m so happy to be single.
Fritz’s room was not what I expected. I’d tagged him as spoiled and overindulged, so I’d assumed he’d have the best of everything and lots of it: his own phone and answering machine, a television set, stereo components, cameras, tennis rackets, skis, a surfboard, skateboards, guitars, and whatever else a young lad like him might consider essential. I was right about the phone and answering machine and wrong about everything else. His room was as plain as a jail cell, which made a certain amount of sense. Lauren was right about his closet being crammed, but only because she and Hollis had moved every article he owned before he went off to prison. The hangers were packed together so tightly, it was hard to determine what was there, let alone what he might have removed. Most of the garments had all the sophistication of a fifteen-year-old’s taste, roughly his age when the legal bombshells started going off in his face. His life had come to an abrupt halt for eight years and now that he was home, all the items of clothing he owned were outdated, out of style, and probably too small.
No books, no school texts, no magazines, no photographs, no artwork, no records, no cassettes, no Sony Walkman, no personal correspondence. No trash in the trash can. There was nothing out of place because he had so little in the way of possessions. In the bathroom, I saw his safety razor, his deodorant, his toothbrush and toothpaste arranged on the glass shelf above his sink. In the shower, his Mickey Mouse soap-on-a-rope dangled from the shower fixture. In the medicine cabinet, a bottle of aspirin and an unopened box of assorted Band-Aids. To me, it didn’t look like he’d left with any of the usual toiletries. As for changes of clothing, I had no way to guess.
I circled his room again and studied the phone and his answering machine. No indication he had messages, but I pressed Play nonetheless. A mechanical fellow wholly without enthusiasm assured me Fritz had no messages. I opened and closed his desk drawers but found nothing of interest. To demonstrate how thoroughly an investigator of my caliber proceeds in such matt
ers, I got down on my hands and knees and peeked under the bed. I also inspected the underside of drawers in his chest of drawers, the interior and the back of the toilet tank, and the space between his mattress and his box spring. For the first time, I felt sorry for him. Not that he needed my pity or my dismay, but I knew now how small his life had become.
• • •
When I emerged from Fritz’s room, Hollis was standing at the wet bar, fixing himself a drink. It was two in the afternoon, which for all I knew was the usual cocktail hour for him. “So, Sherlock, did you find any clues?” Hollis asked. “Any secret messages written in invisible ink?” The jocular tone barely disguised his belligerence.
“I don’t need secret messages. Either he was delivering the twenty-five thousand to the extortionist or he was taking it for himself,” I said.
“Of course he was taking it for himself,” Hollis snapped. “Are you just now figuring that out? Lauren can’t accept the fact, but it seems obvious to me.”
“All he had to do was ask,” she said. “We’d have given him the money if we knew it meant so much to him.”
“We wouldn’t have given him a cent! Kid gets out of prison and thinks he’s entitled to a lump sum? For doing what?”
I closed my eyes briefly, wishing I could click my heels and be somewhere else. This was exactly the reason I didn’t want to work for these people.
Hollis turned to me. “It would have been nice if you’d come up with the insight before the kid ripped us off.”
“She did,” Lauren said, blinking back tears. “I didn’t want to hear it.”
“Why are you getting all emotional? Big boo-hoo. Do we have to go through this again?” he said.
I raised a hand. “All I did was suggest the possibility. In the meantime, it doesn’t look like he left with any of his personal belongings. Certainly not with his toiletries, which suggests he didn’t expect to be gone long.”
“Well, at least now you’re earning your keep. That’s a refreshing turnabout,” he said.
“I can do without the sarcasm, Hollis, if you don’t mind,” I said. I’d already been fired once, so being fired a second time was of no consequence. Turned out there was no danger there because both of them ignored my comment.
