7 - Rogue: Ike Schwartz Mystery 7 (23 page)

Chapter Forty-five

Frank leaned over Ike’s shoulder. He sorted the clippings by date and then pointed at each in return.

“The older ones are articles about Smith or Duffy, mostly Duffy, their arrests, a softball game in which one or the other played, and so on. And there’s this old coupon for a discount on an oil change.”

“An oil change coupon? Why would he keep that? It’s lapsed.”

“Probably forgot about it. My mother has a drawer in the kitchen overflowing with lapsed coupons. Ask any coupon clipper and they will tell you the great drawback with coupons is the lapse at different times, and unless you are super organized and cross-reference them by type and date, you will, on any given day, have many more useless coupons than good ones.”

“Am I hearing the voice of experience?” Ike picked it up and frowned. He tossed it back on the desk and it fluttered and turned over, revealing its reverse side. “Wait. It’s not the coupon. This is an article about Ruth and what they were calling her accident. That’s odd. Why would Duffy have saved that?”

“You’re sure it’s not the coupon? It makes more sense, given Duffy is doing the clipping.”

“No. I’m not sure. But, let me think a minute.” Ike picked up the clipping again and read it. It wasn’t easy, but he did. At the bottom, he saw an awkwardly written series of numbers. “What’s this?”

“Numbers. A date?”

“No, can’t be. Too many digits. There are ten in a row. Dates have a minimum of four and a maximum of eight. What has ten?”

“A phone number?”

“Exactly. So, whose phone number did he write on the clipping and why?”

“You could call it and see who answers.”

“Wouldn’t do that,” said Charlie. He lowered the front legs of his chair to the floor with a crash. “Look it up. If it’s connected to the rest of this, and you call from here, it could spook the party at the other end.”

“Essie,” Ike yelled through the door, “Look up this number.” He read off the digits.

“Don’t have to,” She yelled back. “I already know whose it is.”

“Who?”

“It’s the Overton woman’s direct line at the university. I just called her back. She left her raincoat. Why do you want to know?”

“Overton? What the hell?”

***

Ike instructed Essie to have Sheila Overton wait in the interview room while he shuffled through the papers on his desk once again. He read, paused, and closed his eyes. His fingers drummed rhythmically. He repeated the process. Papers moved from left to right and back again. His face brightened. He walked to Grace White’s bailiwick and handed her the file with the findings about the shell casing from the woods. While she manipulated her computer to log onto AFIS, he reviewed the surveillance tapes from the drugstore. Grace typed in a query to the DoD and Ike made a call to the president’s house at Callend. All this took twenty minutes. Finally, Grace handed him a sheaf of print-outs, her eyebrows forming a ragged question mark. Ike smiled his thanks and then, face set, he entered the interview room.

Sheila Overton sat exactly as she had earlier, her raincoat in her lap, and a worried look on her face. Ike laid a stack of papers on the table between them.

“I’m sorry to have to inconvenience you again, Ms. Overton, but since you were here earlier, some new information has come to light and I need to ask you a few more questions.”

“Sure, what do you want to know?”

“How do you know Martin Duffy?”

“Who?”

“Duffy, Marty Duffy. He worked in the maintenance department at Callend. You must have seen him around campus.”

“Gosh, I guess I might have, but I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I ask because your direct-line phone number appears on a slip of paper we believe he carried before he was murdered.”

“He was murdered. I thought it was a suicide.”

“You know about his suicide? You said you didn’t know him.”

“I just remembered. I mean, I work…worked for the acting president. We knew, of course.”

“Of course you would. So you did know him.”

“Like I said, I worked in the…He had my phone number? I don’t see how. I mean, no, I didn’t know him like that.”

“I see. Tell me something else, then. You mentioned in your earlier statement to us that you were aware that Doctor Fiske padded his CV. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“You also mentioned that you thought he was being blackmailed. Is that also correct?” Sheila nodded. “Is it possible that the person blackmailing Doctor Fiske was Duffy?”

“I don’t know. Why would he—”

“Or Bob Smith. Might he have been the person blackmailing Doctor Fiske?”

“Who is Bob…who did you say?”

“Smith, Bob Smith.”

“I have no idea. You think these men were blackmailing him over the CV business?”

“Not quite. You mentioned that Fiske said he’d done something. When I asked you what is was, you said you didn’t know. But you do know, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come, come, Ms. Overton. What is it you believe Fiske did?” Sheila’s lower lip began to quiver. “It’s no good, we know you know. You all but told us and then you pulled back.”

“I didn’t want to say. He was my partner, I loved him, you know, and since he was dead I didn’t think it mattered anymore.”

“What did he do?”

“He said he tried to kill Ms. Harris. The reason he missed our evening together was because he was in Washington trying to make her car crash.”

“We thought so, too. We were at his house to arrest him for it, did you know that?”

“Arrest him? No, how could I?”

Ike shuffled through the various reports on the table again. “He had a second cell phone. It was that phone we queried him about, and he panicked after that and came to you, is that right?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I should have told you what I knew but I thought, well, like I said, we were more than close. We were supposed to get married, but I guess he wanted to wait until he got a president’s job.”

“He said that?”

“Not in so many words but, anyway, it wasn’t working. God knows he tried, but no matter what we did, he never connected. I don’t know why, but it never happened.”

“It never happened, Ms. Overton, because he was a phony. Academics tend to be fuzzy about most things in the real world, but they know their turf. Your boy tried but never quite got it, and eventually they would have suspected something was not right. So, he was never given a shot. Probably never would be. Doctor Harris all but told him so.”

“That snotty bi…. Yeah? Well, he said he was tired of all that and he decided if he knocked off President Harris, he would naturally fall into her place—worst case he’d have a couple of years as Acting to make a record and land what he wanted. I don’t know, but I didn’t approve, of course, naturally, but it made some sense, you know?”

“Your boyfriend had reached his position in accord with the Peter Principle—he’d attained the highest level of incompetence. It’s unlikely he would ever advance from there. And it was only a matter of time before he was exposed. Indeed that process was already under way, as you know. If you hadn’t been besotted, you’d have seen it. But that’s neither here nor there. Someone shot him and my job is to find out who pulled the trigger.”

“Who did it?”

“Indeed—who?”

Chapter Forty-six

Ike shuffled his reports again and kept Sheila Overton in the corner of his eye. Her nervousness seemed to escalate with every page he turned. She crossed and uncrossed her legs almost synchronously as each piece of paper moved from left to right. She searched her purse and then popped a stick of chewing gum in her mouth.

“You know, I am easily distracted sometimes, Ms. Overton. For reasons about which I am not proud, I generally think of a man when I’m looking for a person who has committed a crime of violence. Doctor Harris is always taking me to task about that. She says I am a male chauvinist. She’s probably right about that, actually. Anyway, it makes it difficult for me in those few instances when the criminal is female, you see?”

“See what? Who do you think killed Scott?”

“In a minute, in a minute. You used the words, ‘someone higher up.’ What did you mean by that?”

“Umm…”

“Did you think someone like me might have killed Doctor Fiske? Perhaps you thought I found out about the phone call and put the picture together and killed him, right?”

“Well…I mean…”

“In some police departments, the chief, or in my case, the sheriff, sits in an office and directs traffic, so to speak. He could slip out, knock off someone like your friend, return, and who would suspect him, right?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything, but I guessed you’d be pretty angry and all, and it seemed like it could have been you or one of her friends.”

“No, no, Sheila, this won’t do. You’ve drifted away from your story. You told us that he intimated there were ‘higher ups,’ not you.”

“I…did I? I meant the other.”

“Did you? I have problems with how this plays out. Maybe you can help me. You’ve had some experience in these matters, correct?”

“Me? Experience? I don’t know what that would be.”

“No? You said you helped Fiske rework his CV. At some point he decided he needed a mention of military service. But he had none, and I’m guessing he didn’t even know where to begin, so you supplied it for him, right?”

“Well, I might have said something.”

Ike slid some sheets of paper from the stack in front of him. “I have here a list of all the people in the Military Police battalion your ex-boss claimed to have served in and guess what? His name is not here, not as Scott Fiske, not as Frank Scott, the name he was born with, but I did find a Sheila Phillips. That would be you, wouldn’t it? Or it was before you were married to Staff Sergeant Nelson Overton.”

“Yeah, okay, yeah, that’s me. My husband died, you know. So, okay, I was just trying to help him out.”

“You were stationed briefly in Iraq, I gather, both you and your husband.”

“How’d you know about that?”

“Come on, Sheila, I’m a cop. We’re both cops, or you were. It’s what we do, right?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t see where this is going, though.”

“Going? Maybe nowhere. You worked a desk back then, or did you do duty outside?”

“Both. I drove patrol when my name came up.”

“Car?”

“You kidding? It’s Iraq. Hummers and trucks. IEDs were bad enough in something big. Drive around Bagdad in a car? It’d be suicide. Still, one got my husband anyway.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, yeah, everybody’s sorry. We go over there to clean up somebody else’s mess, get blown to pieces, and back here, you’re sorry. Thanks for nothing.”

Ike stared at Sheila for nearly a full minute. He started to say something but Sheila cut him short.

“Do you have any idea what that was like, Sheriff? To see your friends blown up, body parts all over the road. Kids—kids shot by some rag-head fanatic. My platoon leader? He went frickin’ nuts right in the mess hall. Started crying and calling for his mommy. He was sent home with a Section Eight. We thought he was the lucky one.”

Ike sat back and listened. He remembered the rant he’d made to Charlie. When? Three weeks ago, about battle-traumatized veterans. Was this woman one of the war damaged? He shook his head and turned over more pages in the reports in front of him. When Sheila seemed to have calmed down he turned to her.

“I must inform you that we have a warrant to search your house. What are the chances we will find an automatic there? The ME says it should be a .25 caliber. Is that about right? Nasty little thing, wouldn’t you agree? Every cop knows that small-caliber bullets have no stopping power whatsoever, but if you use something like a .22 or .25, and your aim is good, or you can shoot at close range, the bullet, because of its lack of velocity, will penetrate but not exit. Instead it will tumble and ricochet around and do all sorts of damage. Especially in a head shot, right?”

“I don’t know. If you say so. Wait, you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you? So what if I have a gun? Lots of people have guns. There’s no law that says I can’t own a gun. That doesn’t mean I used it.”

“No there isn’t, and no it doesn’t. But you did, I think, and recently. Is your little gun registered, Sheila?”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re getting at, Sheriff, but you got no right to search through my stuff and I resent even the implication that I done…I did anything. Jesus, I lose everything, I mean everything, in Iraq, and this is what I get back?”

“Everyone suffers losses, Sheila. I have, you have. Life’s tough but we learn to take it as it comes. So, our problem is maybe gun registration, a lack of an alibi, some fingerprints on shell casings, and on and on. Ballistics will determine if your little .25 is important, unless you dumped it. We did find the shell ejected from the .45 in the leaves out in the park, by the way. Too bad about that. Who’d a thought? It all just piles up and finally spills over, you know?”

“Spills over? What spills? I don’t know what you are talking about, Sheriff, and I don’t like where I think you’re going with this. I shouldn’t talk to you anymore.”

“No, of course not. You wouldn’t like the direction this is taking, so let me explain. As I was saying earlier, have you ever noticed that when you fixate on an idea, it is nearly impossible to stop thinking about it? It’s the same with murder investigations. How many bad guys have gotten away because a cop, for instance a cop like me, couldn’t see the evidence right under his nose? I made that mistake and it cost me valuable time, and maybe resulted in an unnecessary murder or two. I’m sorry about that part. You were a cop once. You would know all about that, of course.”

“I got nothing to say to you anymore. This is ridiculous.”

“Really? What I’d love to know is how you managed to get the phone into Fiske’s hands.”

“What phone?”

“The one I told you about. The one used to make the call to Doctor Harris the night she was forced off the road. That phone.”

“I don’t know anything about a phone.”

Ike sighed and held up the stack of reports. “Sheila, how many more of these reports do I have to read from before you tell me why you did it?”

Sheila’s lips appeared as if drawn by a very sharp red pencil. Ike heaved a sigh.

“Sheila Overton, I am arresting you for the murders of Robert Smith, Martin Duffy, Scott Fiske, and the attempted murder of Ruth Harris in Washington, DC. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as they have been read to you?”

“I didn’t do it, he did.”

“No, Sheila, it won’t wash. Now tell me why.”

Sheila stared unfocused at the wall for a minute. After her outburst earlier, Ike figured she would either break, or slip into catatonia.

“It was the phone that screwed up the deal, wasn’t it? You thought it was his. That’s why you went to arrest him.” She plucked absently at the buttons on her blouse. “I tossed it, you know. How’d I know he was a dumpster diver? If anything, I thought one of the maintenance guys would find it.” She straightened up and some life came back into her eyes. “He wrote me a note when I refused to open the door for him. I don’t know why I did that, you know. I should have let him in. Maybe I could have explained and he would understand it was for him. In the note he said you’d connected him to the phone. I didn’t even know he had it, for God’s sake. He wasn’t stupid. I guessed it would only be a matter of time before he figured out the rest and then he’d drop me like a hot potato.”

“Maybe. That would depend on his part in this.”

“He didn’t know anything. He talked all the time about getting ahead, about how he came from a bad background, and that’s why him and his kind never got the breaks. I could, like, you know, identify with that. We are the people who’re asked to do the scummy jobs, to put our lives on the line, while the stay-at-home Ivy League hotshots get all the goodies. That afternoon when he came over after you guys hit him up about the phone, I wanted to tell him I loved him. I would do anything for him, even if the Board found out about his CV. You do know what I mean about doing anything? We were in it together—us against them others. We were the little guys, the ones who get shoved around, and sent to fight wars for fat cats and Halliburton, and have their loved ones splattered all over some god-awful road in some desert a zillion miles away.”

Ike tensed in his chair, watching her eyes and trying to guess which way she would jump. She sat with the palms of her hands flat on the table, leaning toward him, her eyes flashing in anger. Real anger, Ike realized. After a moment, she slumped back in her chair, defeated.

“You know what he said to me later when I went to his house and told him how I felt and what I was willing to do?” Shelia’s eyes began to tear up. “Honest to God, Sheriff, he said ‘That’s nice.’ Do you believe that? That’s nice? I kill for him to make his damn dreams come true, and it’s nice? So, it turns out he was just like all the rest. All show and no go. He didn’t care.”

She sobbed, blew her nose, collected herself, and straightened up, suddenly calm. “So, I say to myself, ‘Okay, Mr. That’s Nice, you take me or you take nobody.’ I mean, after all that, what else was I supposed to do?”