A Cup of Jo (23 page)

It was even less satisfying and more galling to know that the aforementioned McDonald had maneuvered me into doing exactly what he wanted me to do all along. Go away.

'I feel like I'm trapped in a Kafka novel,' I said out loud. Then I looked around. No Frank. Small loss, though, as I was pretty sure my sheepdog had never read any Kafka.

I picked up the remains of lunch and went to my door. The big goof was waiting on the porch. 'PB & O, Frank?'

His back end started to dance a jig his front end couldn't keep up with. I tossed him the sandwich.

Leaving the door open so the dog could return at his leisure, I went back into my kitchen and picked up the phone again. Bernie the Attorney was my last resort.

Caron's voice answered. 'Egan residence.'

'Caron, this is Maggy. I really need to—'

'. . . We're not home right now, but if you leave your name and number at the beep . . .'

Fighting the urge to throw my cellular across the room, I waited for the outgoing message to end. 'Caron, this is Maggy. I need to get hold of Bernie right away and I don't know his cellphone number. Can you have him call me? It's really important.'

I closed my phone, wondering what I should do next. I could go to the Milwaukee County Jail, but even if Pavlik was there, I didn't know which cell block or section he might be in and when visiting would be allowed. A big city slammer seemed likely to be stricter than our suburban Brookhills one, meaning a lot of time invested with perhaps no results.

I looked around in frustration. My eye was caught by a boxed message on my computer screen. In large white-on-black letters, it asked if I wanted to install an update 'NOW'.

Seeing no 'NOT NOW, NOT EVER' option for this chance of a lifetime, I just tapped 'LATER' and sat down.

Opening Google, I typed in 'Shake 'n Bake' and came up with 1,370,000 references to the seasoned coating mix. Chicken recipes, pork recipes, chicken
and
pork recipes, even something called 'Armadillo eggs'. Perhaps not as delectable as my late, lamented peanut butter and onion sandwich, but nothing seemed an extraditable offense that could move Chef from suburban Wisconsin to urban Illinois.

Maybe I shouldn't use the brand name spelling. I tried typing just 'shake and bake' instead.

Two seconds later, there it was, between a misspelled chicken recipe and a scientific procedure:

Shake-and-bake: slang term for a short cut method of making methamphetamine . . .

Meth? One of the subjects of Pavlik's DEA conference in Chicago.

I followed the link to a news article:

A scourge that is spreading across the Midwest. This amounts to a short cut around typically more elaborate meth production. Shake-and-bake (also called the 'one-pot' method) requires only small amounts of ingredients that are 'shaken' in a plastic, two-liter soda bottle. Like the dangers inherent in traditional meth labs, the process can be highly volatile. However, should there be an explosion, the shake-and-baker cannot dive for cover, much less run away. He's left, figuratively, holding the bomb, since, literally, both his hands have been blown off at the wrists.

Lovely. But the writer had me hooked.

'Them shake-shits can blow theyselves to kingdom come and back,' an inmate serving time for running a traditional meth lab and dealing its product told me. 'They ain't even making no real ice. My clientele, now, they wouldn't touch that crap.'

Pride in product, even amongst drug dealers. Good to know.

I guess.

Next, I clicked on a link to what the interviewee had called 'real'. A photo, center-page, showed what looked like a pile of rock candy or small, irregular ice cubes, flecked with black. Another showed pink, so-called 'strawberry', meth. Fittingly, 'pink' was one of a hundred additional slang labels listed, along with 'rocks' and 'sugar', 'cookies' and 'glass'. And, lo and behold, 'cristy'. I didn't think I'd be mentioning that one to our piano-teaching neighbor anytime soon.

I was sitting back to think when Frank traipsed in.

'Did you close it behind you?' I asked.

No answer. My sheepdog was too busy trying to get the peanut butter off the roof of his mouth.

I filled his water bowl and went to secure the door.

When I returned to my desk, I opened a drawer and pulled out a yellow legal pad. Some pieces of the puzzle that was JoLynne Penn-William's murder were starting to fall into place, but it's a lot easier to solve the jigsaw when you've already seen the picture on the box.

Which is an elaborate way of saying I didn't know what the hell to do next. From my bouquet of gel pens in a tall mug, I selected a red one, let it hover for thirty seconds over the pad and then wrote: 1.

Writer's block is nothing. I was suffering from thinker's block, and a bad case of same.

I put my red pen back in the mug and took out a black one. Time to get serious.

Next to the numeral, I put Kevin Williams' name. Christy said he had been visiting Ronny's 'room-mate' this morning. And that Ronny's roomie, Chef, was a convicted drug dealer who was being shipped to Chicago on charges dealing with 'shake-and-bake'.

Since shake-and-bake was a short cut method of making meth, and Chef was a druggie, it made some sense. We knew Kevin Williams had been in rehab because, according to Rebecca, that's where he first met JoLynne. More sense.

And, when Rebecca accused Michael of sleeping with her sister, the accusation that JoLynne was addicted to drugs and alcohol, as well as sex, reared its ugly head. No indication, though, of any addiction on Kevin's side. Or, for that matter, whether one or both spouses were still using.

I swiveled back to the computer and typed in 'meth symptoms'.

A ton of hits came back and I chose one that looked reputable. Symptoms seemed to differ based on a.) severity, b.) length, and c.) depth of addiction. The early-use signs were characteristics like 'energetic', 'excessively happy', and 'needing less sleep'. Symptoms that would be tough to pinpoint, much less prove they were caused by meth and not bipolar disorder, other drugs or even an unbearably cheery disposition.

In contrast, the final stage included teeth and hair falling out, plus a bunch more awful things, any of which I certainly would have noticed in the people around me. 'Excuse me, but is that your bicuspid on the floor?'

I ran my finger down the list for a mid-stage addiction. Meaning, I surmised, when you were no longer 'energetic', but before you were reduced to scalp and gums. The middle-ground symptoms: weight loss; dry, itchy skin; mood swings; acne . . .

Geez, change weight 'loss' to weight 'gain' and you had menopause.

The list continued: '. . . or sores caused by picking at imagined acne or bugs or lice.'

Bugs or lice? What a horrible, horrible drug. Why would anyone ever
do
this to themselves? But neither JoLynne or Kevin appeared to match even the mid-stage picture painted.

However, someone else I knew sure did.

Anita Hampton, skinny as a rail, picking at the supposed 'pimple' on her face. The skin, dry and blotchy, probably from scratching. Mood swings, such as storming into the house like a rabid wraith and then coming back out with lemonade on a tray like Mrs Cleaver in
Leave it to Beaver
. Even the early-use symptoms fit Anita. All that energy she'd had when I worked for her at the bank. The tirelessness. The nothing-is-ever-good-enough perfectionist attitude.

Anita hadn't been just a pain in the butt as a boss. She was then – and continued to be now – a certifiable meth-head.

I abandoned my numbering system and wrote down thoughts as they came to me.

OK, so if Anita was hooked on meth, shake-and-bake or traditional, did her husband Brewster know?

Was Kevin Williams involved? That would explain his jail visit with Chef, as well as the twenty minutes between the Hamptons arriving together to take the train to the Milwaukee dedication and Anita's tardy boarding. Maybe Kevin was her drug connection and they were . . . connecting.

But how did all this tie into JoLynne's murder? Pure coincidence seemed unlikely.

What if JoLynne, unlike Kevin,
had
given up the drugs? When she found out her husband was dealing again, she might have threatened to blow the whistle on him. JoLynne worked for Brookhills County, so it would have been easy enough for her to make an appointment with someone in the sheriff's department, even Pavlik himself. Maybe that's why she was killed: JoLynne told someone she was . . .

I stopped, my black gel pen trembling over the pad.

'. . . JoLynne Penn-Williams was,' I wrote unsteadily, '
seeing
Pavlik.'

Chapter Nineteen

'Seeing' Pavlik.

Rebecca had said JoLynne was banging Pavlik 'like a drum'. I knew I wasn't wrong about that. The phrase was immediately and permanently burned into my brain. But had JoLynne also used those exact words in talking to her younger sister?

Or had Rebecca, blinded by jealousy, misinterpreted JoLynne's admittedly ambiguous – and far more innocent – expression: 'seeing Pavlik.'

Perhaps JoLynne was killed, not because she was having an affair with Pavlik, but because she had threatened to report husband Kevin for dealing.

Assuming he had, indeed, been dealing. Right now, all this was based on his visit to a jailed drug dealer and the fact that Chef was from Chicago, like JoLynne, Kevin ….

And, of course, a couple million other people.

I didn't know why Kevin had visited Chef. Not to
buy
drugs, certainly. Even though I hadn't gotten very far into the jail's labyrinth, I was fairly certain drug exchanges would be vigorously discouraged.

It was possible, I supposed, that Kevin was getting instructions from Chef. I had no way of finding out, though, without asking the recent widower. And I sure wasn't going to do that.

While I tried to think of something I
could
do, Frank padded across the kitchen, put one hairy paw on his water bowl and flipped it.

'That trick's getting mighty old,' I told him. 'Besides, have you noticed we do nothing but eat and drink around here? Go catch a movie or take up a sport. It'll make you a more well-rounded companion for me. Give us something new to talk about.'

Frank padded back out of the kitchen.

I slipped my cellphone into my handbag. I hoped that I'd hear from Pavlik or Bernie soon, but, in the meantime, I could be productive.

Levering myself out of the desk chair, I picked up my car keys. I couldn't interrogate Kevin, but it should be harmless enough to ask Rebecca if she remembered her sister's exact words about Pavlik. I also wanted to find out in what context she and JoLynne had spoken and, importantly – maybe even most importantly – who else had been there.

As I rumbled across the railroad tracks to Uncommon Grounds, I saw Christy, wearing a gardening apron and centering mums and their roots in ceramic pots on the front deck of her piano studio. She waved a yellow-gloved hand and I gave her a thumbs-up for the large clay planter she'd already apparently finished.

Continuing down Junction Drive, I passed Art Jenada's catering operation and parked in front of Penn and Ink. Unlike Christy, Rebecca and Michael didn't live behind their storefront – or above it, as in Art's case – so I wasn't sure I'd catch either of them there.

Since I had no idea where they
did
live or even if they cohabited, I was relieved when Michael answered my knock.

'Hi,' I said. 'Is Rebecca here?'

A shadow crossed his face. 'Why?'

'I just wanted to talk to her.'

'Why?'

Ahh. Stonewalling, because Michael was worried I'd tell Rebecca that he'd admitted to a fling with her sister.

'Nothing to do with you,' I said, thinking the reply would merely sound like I was being abrupt if Rebecca was nearby.

Michael, though, read between the lines. 'Sure, Maggy. OK.'

He stood aside, the relief in his voice evident on his face as well. The walls of the front foyer of their converted house were lined with framed ads the duo had produced, as well as watercolors I knew to be Rebecca's own. If I was any judge, the woman displayed genuine talent.

And, speak of the devil, Rebecca careened around a corner. 'Michael, have you seen our —'

She stopped. 'What are you doing here?'

Talented, maybe, but rude. Genuinely rude.

'I need to talk with you.' I looked at Michael apologetically. 'Alone, though.'

I didn't, necessarily, but I wanted to convey the appropriate gravitas.

But gravitas, shmavitas, Rebecca was having none of it. 'Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of Michael.' She linked her arm with his, flashing a large, pear-shaped diamond on her left ring-finger in the process.

Explained the change from 'you bastard, Michael, you're shtupping my sister.'

I decided not to comment on either the ring or the Hyde-to-Jekyll personality switch. 'Rebecca, you told me that JoLynne and Pavlik had a relationship, correct?'

'Yes.' But wary.

'And that your sister told you . . . how did she put it?'

That earned a roll of the eyes. 'Are you asking if she said he was "banging her like a drum"? No. Even my sister had more class than that.'

More than her surviving sibling, certainly. 'So, not quite the slut you thought?'

'JoLynne did the best she could.' Rebecca's eyes filled with tears. Maybe I'd misjudged the artist. Or maybe she was willing to let bygones-be-bygones now that JoLynne was no longer a threat to her own romantic relationship.

'My sister conquered a lot of demons,' Rebecca continued. 'The drugs, the alcohol.'

'So, she was clean?' I asked. 'I mean, as far as you know?'

'Absolutely.'

Such a positive assertion was a little much for me, considering the way Rebecca had bad-mouthed JoLynne both before and after her death.