Read Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_04 Online
Authors: Death in Paradise
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Women Sleuths, #Henrie O (Fictitious Character), #Women Journalists, #Fiction, #Detective and Mystery Stories, #Contemporary Women, #Kauai (Hawaii), #Hawaii, #Mystery Fiction
“But on the Friday that CeeCee disappeared, Johnnie was in and out of the Ericcson place working for Mackey. Is that right? And Johnnie didn't come home for supper?”
“No'm. He come in about seven and said he was sorry but he'd had to work late. He was kind of excited.” She finally looked up, her eyes dark with pain. “But I thought it was just because that Mackey was down here. Johnnie always liked to hang around with him. Johnnie was in a real good humor, kept grinning to himself. 'Course this was before we knew Miss CeeCee'd been taken.”
CeeCee Ericcson had stopped for gas in Pottsboro at a quarter to six.
No one ever admitted seeing her after that.
Lester Mackey later told police he'd found CeeCee's Mercedes a few minutes before seven o'clock on Friday night in the drive in front of the lake house. Mackey said the driver's door was open and the keys were in the ignition. CeeCee's purse lay in the passenger seat.
Mackey moved the car around to the garage. The house
was locked. He opened the front door, went inside, turned on the lights. He put the keys in a wooden tray on a side table. He said nobody was in the house. As far as he knew. He didn't go upstairs, but he said no lights were on.
It was dark by then.
Mackey later told police he'd had a few drinks so he went around to his quarters and fixed himself some dinner and watched TV and didn't think again about the car. He said he figured CeeCee had gone off to dinner with someone else in the family and they'd be coming in later.
It was a large family with members who came and went, of course, as they pleased. No one had any particular schedule that weekend, no set time to appear at the lake.
The alarm wasn't raised until Saturday afternoon.
Maria reached out for her coffee mug, stared down into the dark brew. “I was there when Miz Ericcson got the letter. On Saturday. It come in a mail truck.”
Express Mail. The police traced it to a Gainesville Express Mail receptacle. It was processed shortly after 8
P.M.
Friday. The return address was a downtown business, an insurance company. No one there had ever had any contact with CeeCee or any of the other family members.
On Saturday afternoon, Belle was carrying a pile of brightly wrapped birthday presents into the living room of the lake house when the mail truck arrived.
“I took the envelope from the postman.” Maria hunched over her coffee mug. “One of the boysâI think it was Mr. Jossâsaid something about his mama never getting away from work. Miz Ericcson laughed and said she did too get away from work, and whatever it was, Elise could see to it. That was her secretary. So I carried the envelope over to Miss Elise. She said, âI'll take care of it, Belle. This is your weekend to enjoy.' She opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper. Then her smile kind of slipped sideways and she made a gasping noise and said, âOh, my God. Oh, my God.'”
Maria put down the mug, the coffee untasted. “It got real quiet in the room. Real quiet. We all knew it was something awful. Miss Elise tried to talk, she opened her mouth and finally, her hand shaking, she took the sheet over to Miz Ericcson.”
“Who was there?”
“Miz Ericcson's husband, Mr. Scanlon. He'd just come in the front door. He was carrying a big white cake box. Miss Gretchen was sitting on a bench by one of the windows, reading a book. Miss Megan was out on the terrace in a hammock. Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Anders were playing checkers. Mr. Joss was picking out a tune on the piano. He can play real well, but he was just doing one note at a time.” Her eyes squeezed in remembrance, and now her voice was cold. “That Mackey, he was bringing in suitcases.”
“And Stan Dugan?”
“Miss CeeCee's young man?” Maria shook her head. “No, ma'am. He wasn't there.”
I made a note of that. It surprised me a little.
Maria Rodriguez shivered. “When it got quiet, everybody looked at Miz Ericcson. She'd been so happy. And she still had that armload of presents. She looked at the paper and her face got old right in front of our eyes, old and pinched. She looked at each one in turn and her voice was as cold as a blue norther. She said, âThis isn't funny. This isn't funny at all.' Then she looked around, like it would all be all right. âWhere is CeeCee? Where
is
she?'”
But CeeCee was nowhere to be found.
The note was quite simple:
Â
I
F YOU WANT
C
EE
C
EE BACK ALIVE
,
DO PRECISELY AS INSTRUCTED
.
C
ALL THE POLICE AND SHE DIES
.
F
OLLOW INSTRUCTIONS
.
Â
So Belle refused to call the police. Or to reveal the instructions on a folded sheet of paper.
That came later.
“Miz Ericcson made each one of us promise not to say a word to anyone. But she asked me to go get Johnnie to help Mackey and the kids search around the place. They'd pieced it together by then that Miss CeeCee had come to the lake the night before, on Friday. Mackey told them about finding her car. I run home to get Johnnie. When I told him what had happened, he shook his head back and forth real puzzled. âMama,' he said, âI don't understand. Listen, you wait here a minute. I got to see about something.' He jumped in the pickup and went off. He come back in about ten minutes and his face was like the ashes in the fireplace. âMama, I got to go over to the Ericcson place.' I asked him what was wrong, but he said he couldn't tell me nothing now.
“He didn't come home till late that night and then all he'd say was that they hadn't found no trace of Miss CeeCee and they all was wanting Miz Ericcson to call the police but she wouldn't and she was going to do what the letter said to do and she wouldn't tell anybody what it said. And she got on the phone and called some man to come and help her. And that made Mr. Scanlon mad.”
Yes, Belle had called Richard and he'd gone to National to catch the next flight to Dallas.
“Did you ask Johnnie where he drove in the pickup after you came home to get him? Before he went to the Ericcson place?”
“No'm.” She made no explanation, no defense. But the limp and sagging skin of her face was a study in fear.
Denial takes many forms. One is a refusal to ask questions that need to be asked.
I worried at her pallor. But I couldn't let her rest. Not yet. “When the deputy called, was that when Johnnie asked you
to say he'd been home on Friday night between six and seven?”
She nodded wearily. “But the truth is he didn't come in until right after seven o'clock. I fed him then. But he did work most of the evening on the soldier.”
Funny how you can pick up a little nuance. “Most of the evening?”
“Johnnie liked to walk out after dark. Sometimes late at night. He liked to find a place and stand real quiet and watch the raccoons. Sometimes a cougar'd pass by.”
I waited.
She picked up the last toy soldier her son had made, gently touched the little wooden musket. “Johnnie thought he'd been part of a joke. Her brothers were big to play jokes. And 'specially since Miss CeeCee's birthday was April Fool's Day. Oh, they always had big jokes going on. Johnnie might have wanted to know more about it and maybe he went somewhere late that night to see what was happening. And he would've just stood quiet and watched. But I
know
he didn't see nothing terrible. He would've gone to the police if he had. Then Saturday when I come home and told him about that letter, he went back and Miss CeeCee wasn't there. And he didn't know what to do.”
Somewhere nearby.
“Why didn't he tell the police?”
“He was scared.” She pressed her hand against her lips to keep them from trembling.
“What do you think happened, Mrs. Rodriguez?”
She turned dark, haunted eyes toward me. “Just ten minutes. That's all he was gone Saturday afternoon. I think he went to where he thought Miss CeeCee wasâbut she wasn't there. And Johnnie was scared to death. Kidnapping!” She leaned forward, her face angry and vengeful. “That Lester Mackey, I never liked him. Talked so soft you'd think it
was a rattlesnake slithering by. Not like a man. You talk to him.”
Â
The road was twisty but well-graded and the underbrush was thinned on either side. I pulled into a turnaround drive in front of the white two-story vacation home that had once belonged to Belle Ericcson.
The drive was empty except for my rental car. The blinds were closed. Nobody home. That wasn't surprising on a cool March weekday afternoon. It was nice for my purposes, though I couldn't expect to learn much after all this time.
I pictured a Mercedes curving up the drive, pulling to a stop, the door openingâ
Although the house crowned a bluff, it was well screened from the road by a tall, thick hedge. It was extremely secluded here. The stucco home had clean, spare Mediterranean lines, a red tile roof and windows, windows, windows.
I followed a flagstone path along the east side of the house to the terrace that overlooked a private bay. Canvas covers shrouded the deck furniture. The patio umbrellas were tucked shut. A steep path led down the bluff to a boathouse and pier.
The terrace was in shadow, the late afternoon sun blocked by cedars to the west.
I walked across the flagstones, occasional leaves crackling underfoot. The floor-to-ceiling windows were masked by interior blinds, now closed.
I found a space at the end of one set of blinds and peered into the huge living room. The dusky, untenanted room gave no hint of the life and death drama it had seen.
I continued around the house and saw, on the west side, garages and separate quarters.
Anyone wishing to wait unseen could easily park on the west side of the house. Cedars screened a large parking area from the front drive.
Seven years ago CeeCee had arrived, opened the car doorâand the kidnappers appeared.
There was no evidence of a struggle, no blood, her purse in the passenger seat apparently untouched.
Were the kidnappers armed?
Either armedâor armed with a story plausible enough to persuade her to come with them.
That was possible, of course, could account for the lack of struggle. A report of an emergency, an illness. “
Your mother's been hurt in a car wreck. She's in the hospital in Denison
⦔
CeeCee had notâat that pointâresisted.
The Mercedesâdoor open, keys in the ignitionâwas the closest link to her, made this driveway the last certain place she'd been.
The sun slanted through the blackjack, touched an early-blooming redbud. It was lovely and peacefulâand unutterably sinister.
Â
Deputy Dexter Pierson drew in a lungful of smoke, coughed, and rasped, his voice hoarse and rough, “It stank. The whole damn thing stank. Worse than fish guts in August.”
He glared at me pugnaciously from behind a paper-laden desk, his pockmarked face dangerously red. His office was small, four fake knotty pine walls and an old wooden desk. The grainy computer screen looked out of place.
“What do you mean?” I edged my chair a little closer to the open window and the small stream of fresh air.
His quick green eyes flickered from me to the window. “Yeah, smells like shit in here, don't it? I keep trying to quit.” He stubbed the cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and the acrid smell of burning joined the fuggy odor of smoke. “Yeah. My wife says nobody smokes anymore but butts.” He gave a whoop of laughter that ended in a cough. “Used to
be the big clue, didn't it? A cigarette butt. Or maybe a button. Or a strand of hair. What was it in the Lindbergh kidnapping? A piece of a ladder? Well, nobody left anything around for us when they grabbed CeeCee Burkeâif anybody grabbed her.”
I looked at him in surprise. “Her car was found with the door open, her purse on the passenger seat, a ransom note came the next day. What else could it be?”
He clasped his hands behind his head, tilted back in his swivel chair, and stared moodily at a lopsided bulletin board decorated with a half-dozen yellowed Far Side cartoons. “We got crime around here. Sure. Guy gets drunk, beats his wife. Kids break into a store, steal cash and cigarettes and beer. We keep a close eye on some dudes, the ones who watch and see when the city people are gone, then break in and loot the houses. We smashed a pretty big burglary ring a couple of years ago. Every few years, we get a run of rapes. That don't happen too often. Country people have dogs and guns. But big-time kidnapping for ransom? No, ma'am.”
He jolted forward in the chair, grabbed at his cigarette pack. “That whole deal was as fishy as a bass derby. I kept trying to tell the feds it didn't computeâbut would they listen to a hayseed deputy? So”âhe lifted his round shoulders in a sardonic shrugâ“so screw 'em.”
“I'll listen.”
His red cheeks puffed in a pugnacious frown. “Okay. I got a theory. 'Course, I'll be up front with you. There's a big damn hole in itâbecause somebody picked up the ransom money and if my idea's right, that shouldn't've happened. But here's my take. She did it herself.”
I suppose my face reflected utter surprise.
“I'll tell you, lady, suicide takes a funny tack now and then. A lot of times people'll go to a hell of an effort to make it look like an accident. I think that's what happened here. Because I been a deputy for twenty-two years and my
brother's a homicide cop in Dallas, so I'm not the new boy in town when it comes to murder. Even if we're not talking murder and kidnapping. But I've never known anybody to be snatchedâthen murdered with a painkiller. Never.”
“Painkiller?” I was learning one new fact after another. “But I understood her body was found in the lake, two days after she disappeared.”
“Yeah. She drowned. But she'd had enough narcotic to drop an elephant.”