Dead Lift Page 16

  “Your generalizations aren’t working for me,” Richard said. “We can’t dismiss Diana that easily. What exactly did you do yesterday? Let’s hear it.”

  Young stood. “Let’s not.”

  He came around to our side of the desk and motioned toward the door. “At least not yet.” The wheels were turning, spinning out. Young wanted the full story—they both did—but not at the expense of jeopardizing Claire’s defense. “I’d like to regroup later…by phone is fine. Let’s see what details shake loose about last night. I’ll get in touch with Ms. Gaston’s mother. You—” he watched me gather my purse and stand to leave “—keep it on the level. Please.”

  Richard, already out of his chair, waited for me to be first out the door. I sensed silent admonitions and what-the-hell-were-you-thinkings as I passed through his aftershave aura on my way to the reception area. Behind me, he and Young muttered low enough not to be overheard. But thinking I heard my name, I turned. Neither was looking. Richard was probably working on damage control.

  Later, at a pastry shop midway between Young’s office and Richard’s, I tried to make amends by buying brunch. Richard eschewed the bistro’s assortment of gourmet coffees in favor of a large cup of regular black, and instead of a signature crepe or quiche, he took an unadorned bagel with plain cream cheese.

  “No cinnamon swirl or blueberry?” I said. “No flavored schmear?”

  He cut a glance at me, clearly unwilling to make up.

  I felt a little overindulgent with my Hawaiian Kona and baked egg soufflé but not enough to deny myself. The rich aromas were simply too compelling.

  We inched through the tray line.

  “Nobody likes their job every single day,” he finally said.

  “I know.”

  “Plenty of people work for folks they don’t like.”

  “Yep.”

  “You think I like sitting behind the wheel of my car for six hours watching a house? Rummaging through trash? Combing through old records?”

  I hoped this would be a short lecture.

  “Fact is, on some level, anybody who works in investigations is capitalizing on another person’s misfortune. In this job, sometimes you’re going to have to do stuff you don’t like.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I get it.”

  “Even when it’s personal,” he said. “I’m sorry that where Young’s concerned, the misfortune was yours, but you have to learn to compartmentalize. Otherwise, this job—and I don’t just mean this case—will eat you.”

  I slid my tray to the right and rooted in my purse. “It’s not like I don’t think about this, Richard. I do.”

  His career guidance heart-to-hearts, though infrequent, were infallibly uncomfortable. I pulled my billfold from my bag, kept my gaze on the check-out girl, and nodded.

  He let the subject drop.

  I kept thinking about it though, and remembered Tuesday’s talk with Betsy. Self-doubt, in the way it so often does, encapsulated me before I knew what was happening. When it was my turn at the register, I was glad for a reason to push the thoughts aside.

  At the register, the tab came to $11.47 and having only a ten, I handed over my Visa. It was swiftly denied.

  The checkout girl frowned. “Is there another you’d like to try?”

  “What’d it say?” I asked. “Could you try again?” I turned to Richard. “Sometimes those magnetic strips get scratched.”

  She swiped it a second time. “It says ‘Contact card services for billing information,’ same as before. Sorry.”

  Richard reached for his wallet.

  “No,” I said. “I got it.” I took back the defunct Visa, switched to MasterCard.

  She ran it and shook her head. “Same thing.”

  “What the hell?”

  Panic set in. I took the second card back and left Richard to pay and deal with the trays. My cell phone was out of my pocket before I reached the nearest empty table.

  The Visa representative explained that unusual account activity had resulted in the temporary suspension of my card privileges. Messages had been left on my home and cell phones.

  Thinking back, I realized I hadn’t checked my answering machine after returning home from dinner with Jeannie and Annette the night before. But my cell phone? The voicemail icon hadn’t been on my display.

  I listened as she read backwards through over eight hundred dollars in recent charges, mostly at automotive and electronics stores. None were mine. She explained that the most I’d be responsible for was a fifty dollar cap, likely to be waived considering the circumstances. Paperwork would follow in the mail.

  We hung up. I dialed into my empty voicemail box and was astonished to find messages waiting. I glared at Richard. “This is all your fault!”

  He was chewing. “Mine?”

  I pushed the button to get the first of four new messages.

  “The voicemails were here but the phone is screwed up and didn’t tell me they were waiting.”

  “I thought you were getting a new phone yesterday.”

  “We went out to dinner. The store closed.”

  I left out that Jeannie had convinced me to bake my phone in the oven all night at 125º, another apparent failure at cellular resuscitation.

  It was the same story each time. Three more credit cards with suspicious activity and one message from Betsy, who wanted to know if it was safe for Annette to swim with newly pierced ears.

  I called MasterCard. Six hundred dollars.

  Discover. Twelve hundred.

  Dick’s Sporting Goods. Less than a hundred, so no suspicious activity had been flagged, but even so, the charge wasn’t mine.

  “Your sporting goods card?” I thought Richard was making fun of me so I ignored him.

  “Damn,” I muttered. Replacement cards with new numbers would come soon. “Do you have any idea how many automatic bill pay accounts I’ll have to re-map now? You’re so lucky I’m not on the hook for those charges.”

  He wasn’t listening. He was scanning the various cards I’d laid all over the table so I could find the customer service numbers. “You have all your cards here, but they’ve all been hit.”

  Unsure if I was expected to draw a conclusion from this, I just nodded, annoyed.

  “I could see a single card being hit, like if a waiter copied your number when he took the card away to run it,” he said. “But all of them on the same day? And a sporting goods card?” He set down his bagel. “Who could have gotten into your purse?”

  “It’s with me all the time,” I said.

  “You mentioned automatic bill pay. Who can use your laptop?”

  I shook my head. “I never take it out of the apartment and these accounts are password protected anyway.”

  “What about your wireless network?”

  “It’s secure,” I said. “Secure network, password protection, locked apartment. My purse is always with me.”

  He grew more agitated with every assurance. “I’m afraid of what we might be dealing with. A slick, sophisticated thief bothers me way more than a third-rate purse snatcher or a sleazy waiter. Maybe Jeannie left the apartment and forgot to lock the door.”

  “No way,” I said. “She’s a city girl.”

  “Your apartment was empty yesterday while you were out doing your secret errand. Jeannie took Annette to the movies while you were gone. Was anything out of place when you came back?”

  “They leave stuff out everywhere, all the time.” I remembered the nail polish and cotton balls strewn across the table and the leftover party mess in the kitchen. “It was nothing worse than usual.”

  He finished his coffee. The paper cup made a sharp hollow sound when it hit the table. “Sorry about your phone.” He pulled out his wallet and passed me his small business credit card. “Use this to get a new one.”

  I stood up, pocketed it, and amassed all our trash on my tray. “If I get stuck with those fifty dollar maximums, you’re covering those too.”

  He pushed back fr
om the table, checked his watch. “What’s on your plate today?”

  “Besides this?” I walked to the nearest trash can and dumped the tray.

  Richard’s visit to the apartment the night before had interrupted my work on Platt’s Caller ID list. Jeannie, Annette, and I had gone out for dinner afterward, and the evening ended at Betsy and Nick’s where we’d dropped Annette off to finish her promised week with them.

  “I have some calls to make.” I wondered what percentage might land in voicemail boxes. “And tomorrow’s Jeannie’s last day here. I should take her somewhere fun before she leaves. What about you?”

  “Also calls. See if anybody will talk about Daniel.” Something in his voice told me he expected bad luck. I was beginning to feel like I’d hit a dead end myself.

  When we got back to my apartment, he parked the car. “I’m going to talk to your neighbors.” He turned off the ignition.

  “About what?”

  Four seconds had passed and already the car was heating up. I opened my door and let one leg dangle out.

  “To ask whether anybody strange has been by your place.” He opened his own door. I’d had enough company for the day and didn’t like where this was headed.

  “No.” I scooped up my purse. “I’ll ask them myself.” I stepped out, shut the door, and climbed the steps to my apartment without looking back.

  Behind me, a door slammed shut and his motor started.

  Maybe Jeannie was right. Assertiveness could be learned.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I continued through the list. One after another, each call ended in voicemail. Granted, it was late Thursday morning and folks were probably at work, but part of me suspected that the very tool that had delivered these phone numbers—caller ID—was preventing me from reaching anyone. After all, no one on my list would recognize my name. I was another junk call to them.

  On the seventh number, my luck changed.

  “You’re talking to him.” The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Joel McGowan. His accent confirmed that the 732 area code I’d dialed was in New Jersey, and a clip in his tone said he was a no-nonsense kind of guy.

  I came straight to the point.

  “Mr. McGowan, my name’s Emily Locke. I’m calling from Houston, Texas, regarding the death of Wendell Platt. Did you know him?”

  The line fell momentarily silent. “Who’d you say you are?”

  I repeated my name. “Is this the first you’ve heard?”

  “I just talked to him last week.”

  “Yeah.” Finding a vocal balance between sympathy and professionalism was difficult. “I found a record of that in his Caller ID log. It’s how I knew to call you.”

  I let another moment pass, figuring McGowan was processing the news. “How’d you know each other?”

  “School cronies,” he said. “Back in the day, we were like brothers. Harder to stay in touch as time went on, but we did what we could. What happened?”

  “He was killed.” So there’d be no confusion with, say, a five car pile-up, I added, “Murdered.” I regretted the word choice but couldn’t think of an alternative.

  McGowan’s breath caught in a tremulous way I wished I hadn’t heard. By way of avoidance I pushed forward. “Before he died, he asked a patrolman in his neighborhood about some kind of underhanded money scheme. I’m not sure if it was blackmail, embezzlement, bribery—”

  “Elder abuse.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He thought it might be identity theft, which is why he called me. I specialized in financial crimes. But from what he described, it was elder abuse…a tough crime to prove.”

  “Are you a detective?”

  “Was,” he said. “Retired.”

  “So Dr. Platt called to get your take on a crime involving an elderly person?”

  “His neighbor. He was looking for some advice about what to do.”

  My thoughts flitted between crazy Ms. Herald and eccentric William Henry Saunders the third. “Do you know which neighbor?”

  “He said it was an old guy, not quite right in the head. Some lowlife was taking him for everything he had.”

  “What’d you tell Dr. Platt?”

  “I asked him about the situation. Sounded to me like theft would be a real hard thing to prove. It’s always this way with the old folks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s easy for crooks to talk them into things. If they write checks or hand cash over to somebody with a smooth story, it’s a gift, not a crime.”

  I thought about Florence, probably sitting in her apartment across my landing right now watching Days of Our Lives. She had a fourteen hundred dollar vacuum cleaner in there, purchased a couple years ago from a good-looking twenty-something who told her he was a back-up lineman for the Texans.

  “Anyway,” he continued. “Not much I could do from up here except explain all the work that lies ahead. I told him to tell the story to the local police and see if there wasn’t something they could do.”

  I checked my notes. “You had this talk two weeks ago?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Dr. Platt say anything about approaching the neighbor?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Thanks, Mr. McGowan.”

  “Call back if there’s more I can do.”

  We ended it there and I sat on my couch with my phone clutched tightly in-hand and stared straight ahead at the wall. It had something to do with Saunders, and we were dealing with a con man. The morning’s credit card fiasco dovetailed nicely into this new information. But when Platt got close to exposing whatever scheme was underway, he’d ended up dead. So far I’d only come into scary e-mails and fraudulent charges. Why?

  Too weary and lazy to deal with the blazing heat, even for the five steps it would take me to cross my landing, I speed-dialed Florence. It reminded me of years past when I worked across the hall from Jeannie but would e-mail her instead of walking to her desk.

  “Hey lady,” she said. TV noise squawked in the background. “What’s going on?”

  “Quick question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Anybody new been around my place lately?”

  “Don’t think so, no.” She hesitated. “I saw the exterminator yesterday. Don’t even tell me something’s missing.”

  “Everything’s fine,” I told her. “Don’t worry.”

  I hadn’t checked around yet and I’d never called for an exterminator. Until my talk with McGowan I’d assumed Richard was being paranoid, but if the apartment manager had sent someone to work in my unit, I’d have been notified. It was important not to rattle Florence.

  “Richard’s being careful about our new case,” I said. “He asked me to check that nobody strange has been around.”

  “Don’t think so. Anyway, what kind of bugs? Whatever you got is gonna head over here next.”

  “Ants.”

  She made a throaty, disgusted sound. “Long as it ain’t roaches.”

  “The guy they sent over…was he the short cute one with the blond hair? I like that guy. Hard worker.”

  This was what Richard called a fishing expedition. I’d never met any of the complex’s exterminators and wouldn’t have remembered them if I had.

  “No, honey. This guy was tall—even taller than your friend.” Vince. “And he had brown hair and one of those weird beard things on his chin with no mustache.”

  “A soul patch?”

  She laughed. “Whatever you kids call it. Looks stupid.” She sighed. “But I guess as long as he kills those ants, don’t matter.”

  “Thanks. And in case Richard’s right, if anybody happens to ask about me, say I keep to myself and that you don’t know me.”

  “Got it.”

  “Stay cool in there.”

  “You too.”

  We hung up and I pushed myself off the sofa and started to have a look through my things, beginning with my jewelry box, which most definitely had be
en pilfered. Jeannie and Annette had played with my necklaces the day before and the box’s contents were in disarray. At first I held out hope that nothing would be missing, only misplaced. But as I reorganized and sorted, I discovered, one by one, which of my favorites had been taken. Topping the list were my wedding and engagement rings that I’d only recently stopped wearing. That had been a reluctant decision made mainly out of courtesy for Vince. I thought now that if I’d given myself more time to think about it, maybe listened to my heart a little more closely, they’d still be mine.

  I curled up on my bed and pulled a pillow to my chest, not caring what I saw outside when I stared passed the mini-blinds. Tears came, the quiet kind. This time there would be no sniffles, no tight throat or jagged breath. Only the gentle, lingering memory of my husband, skipping down my cheek again, landing silently on his pillow.

  ***

  Later it puzzled me, the things the burglar left. There was my entire CD collection, plainly labeled and still unpacked—perfectly packaged for convenient theft, yet left untouched in the far corner of my bedroom. A whiskey jug that once belonged to Jack’s grandfather was still waiting on the corner of my dresser. Inside was two or three hundred dollars’ worth of spare change I’d accumulated, never feeling sufficiently motivated to schlep it to the bank’s coin roller machine. My TV had been left behind, but I figured that was because it was archaic. Before moving from Cleveland last spring, I’d finally upgraded to a better road bike. My clean, new Cannondale still leaned against the wall in the laundry room and I stared at its gorgeous frame, thankful but befuddled at the same time. Even Vince’s guitar, a 1966 Martin I was disinclined to return, had been spared.

  I thought it over. The only explanation I could conjure was space constraints. An impostor exterminator could leave the apartment in plain sight with his pockets stuffed with my jewelry, but he’d be hard pressed to explain a bike or guitar. I doubted he was after my stuff anyway. In light of everything else going on, the jewelry theft seemed more like an opportunistic afterthought. My laptop had even been left behind.

  I booted up. No doubt about it, there would be mail.

  I was not disappointed.