Cold Winter Rain (5 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

The sky was still gray and overcast, and the temperature was in the mid-40s.  Cold when it’s damp.

Leon Grubbs picked me up at the rear entrance of the hotel in a black Ford LTD without markings.  There was a portable blue light suction-cupped to the dashboard and a stubby antenna on the back window.  We took Twentieth Street headed south.  At least Grubbs let me sit up front.

“I miss the old cop antennas,” I told Grubbs after I got in and fastened the seat belt.

“
You miss what?”

“
You know, the old cop antennas.  You knew for sure that black Ford sedan was a police car when you saw one of those twelve-foot whips tied down to the bumper.”

“
Hmmph.  Progress, Slate.  I’ve heard some cops in the big cities even know how to turn on a computer now.”

At the Fifth Avenue intersection, Grubbs turned left.  At the end of the block, he pulled up to the fire hydrant and handed me a five.

“Safari Coffee,” he said.

I looked down at the money.

“Right there on the corner.”

I didn’t move.

“So I’m addicted,” he said.  “Go in and get two coffees.  For me, tall regular coffee, skim milk, one Equal.”

I got out of the car without taking the bill.

“Your money’s no good here,” I said.

I could smell the coffee from the sidewalk.  In a corner near the front window sat a polished brass coffee roaster.  The place was decorated in a jungle theme and featured Kenya AA dark roast.  There was a line, and I didn’t have a badge to show.  Grubbs would have waited too.  He might park on the hydrant, but he wouldn’t cut in front of a line of citizens.

I paid for the coffee, mixed in the milk and sweetener at a little bar in the corner, and snapped plastic lids on the cups.

Grubbs drove north on Twenty-first Street and then took Abraham Woods Boulevard past Linn Park and the Birmingham Museum of Art and down to the cloverleaf onto Highway 280 East.

I tore the little strip off the plastic top and sipped the coffee.  It wasn’t just good and strong.  It was good and hot.

“
So how did you know?” I said.

“
Know what?”

“
When you called my cell phone just after midnight, you said you were not far from my hotel.”

Grubbs inclined his head an inch.

“So how’d you know I was there?”

Grubbs glanced at me, then back to the street.  “I’m a trained detective,” he said.  “But, Slate, tell me something I don’t know, for once.  Did Kramer tell you whether he’d been contacted by anyone holding his daughter?  Kidnappers?  Could he have been making a ransom drop without telling anyone?”

“He told me there had been no contact.  And if he was making a ransom drop, he didn’t tell me.”

Grubbs nodded and drove in silence.

In spite of the cold and the damp air, shoppers were rolling into the parking lot at Brookwood Mall in their Mercedes and Jaguars and Range Rovers, suburban women in leggings and leather jackets and Hermes scarves ready for a tough day hitting the spa, a boutique clothing store, an Oriental rug dealer.

Mountain Brook was Alabama’s toniest suburb, a spiderweb of hilly residential streets connected loosely at three hubs called “villages” by the locals.  In the “villages,” – English Village, Mountain Brook Village, and Crestline – just Crestline to the locals, no “Village” -- there were hair and nail salons, specialty groceries, trendy bars and bake shops, and investment managers.

Grubbs drove and sipped coffee as though he hardly needed to see the road.  He seemed to know the way, so I saw no point in guiding him over the route I’d driven on Sunday.

Grubbs rang the doorbell, and we waited a minute.  I leaned around and rang the bell a second time.

Paul Kramer answered the door, looking sleepy, his eyes swollen and unfocused.  Grubbs offered him a business card.  The kid took it and studied as though it were covered in hieroglyphics.

“I’m Captain Grubbs, Birmingham police department.  This is Slate,” Grubbs said.  “We know this is not a good time, but we need to speak with Mrs. Kramer.  Is she available?”

The boy looked up from the card at Grubbs, then peered under his hair at me.

“I’ll see,” he said, and shut the door in Grubbs’ face.

I had to give the kid credit.  Not many fifteen-year-olds would have closed the door on a police captain, even in mufti.  But the family had been through a rough time, and he was, after all, Kramer’s kid.

Thirty seconds later, the door was opened again by Susan Kramer.  Today she wore a soft gray pants suit.  She wore her hair up and pinned in back, and she appeared to have applied very little makeup.  Aside from the gold crucifix, still in its place on a heavy gold chain, the only jewelry she wore was a wedding ring.  Her eyes were red-rimmed, but that was the only outward sign of grief.

“
Captain Grubbs.”

Grubbs took the proffered hand for a moment and gave her a tiny nod that managed to convey sympathy and respect.

“I am Susan Kramer.  I apologize for Paul.  We’ve had a difficult night here.  I suppose we should talk.  But the police sergeant and lieutenant were here for several hours.  I really don’t know what else I can say.”

Grubbs nodded.  “This is Slate,” he said.

“Mr. Slate,”  she said, extending her hand.  She looked at Grubbs.  “We have met.”

We shook.  Her hand was warm and dry.

“That’s all right, Mrs. Kramer,” I said.  “I understand.  We wanted to speak with you if you had a minute.  Just a few questions.”

I gestured toward the threshold.  “May I?” I asked.

She stepped aside, and I walked into the foyer and took off my coat.  The boy, Paul, was lurking in the entrance to the living room.

“
Paul, take Mr. Slate’s coat,” said Mrs. Kramer.

The boy took my coat without a word and without meeting my eyes and hung it on a coat rack in the foyer.

Grubbs kept his jacket on, and we both followed Kramer’s widow through the foyer toward a living room on the right.

Grubbs stopped me at the entrance to the living room.

“Slate, I need to speak with Mrs. Kramer first,” he said.  “Alone.”

I had expected Grubbs to insist on a solo interview.  “I’ll wait,” I said.

“Mr. Slate, why don’t you sit in the library while I speak with the captain?  It’s just across the foyer.”  Susan Kramer pointed to the room to the left of the foyer, where Kramer had introduced me to the two FBI agents, with its floor-to-ceiling books, red silk upholstery, and writing table under the window.

I nodded.  Grubbs followed the widow into the living room and closed the door behind him.

Unfilled with people, the library in the Kramer home looked comfortable.  Warm.  Used.  I sat in the big armchair in the corner between the front window and the bookshelves, where Paul Kramer had been sitting while the two FBI agents interviewed him.  One of the shelves across the room was devoted to family photographs:  Don and Susan Kramer and the kids on a beach; a larger framed copy of the picture of Kris that Kramer had given me in my office.

I studied the room for clues to Kris’s disappearance or Kramer’s murder, but as far as I could tell there were none, so I took out my iPhone and pretended to be checking my email.

Susan Kramer sat composed and straight-backed across her living room from me.  Grubbs had spent a little over ten minutes with her before he came out to take my place in the library.  Only the right thumb and index finger fidgeting with the ring on her left hand betrayed any emotion.  She smiled a little, but only with her mouth.

“Tell me again about how Don came to hire you?” she said. 

I told her about Kramer’s visit on Saturday.

She nodded a little, tentative, vague.  “Don didn’t always tell me every detail of his schedule.  But he told me he was going to speak with someone else.  Someone who had been recommended to him by someone he knew.”

I told her I had known her husband years earlier when he worked in Montgomery.

She shook her head.  “I know I sounded foolish the other day, maybe even belligerent.  I should not have treated you in that manner.  After all, ‘What use is it for a man to say he has faith when he does nothing to show it?'  Don told me later you were a person he’d been told had – helped – several people with – missing children.  It’s just that I thought I should have been consulted.”

“
Well.  Helping people with interesting problems – including missing children – is something I’ve done, a little, in the last few years.  And no, you don’t sound foolish, Mrs. Kramer.  You sound like a woman who. . . .”

Tears began to well in Susan Kramer’s eyes before I finished a sentence I wished I hadn’t begun.

“I’m sorry, I. . . .”

She shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue.  “I’m just trying to hold together right now, and I’m not sure I can handle this discussion and talk to the police on the same day.  Maybe if we talked a little later?”

“I understand.  I’ll check in with you tomorrow.  In the meantime I’ll make some inquiries on my own.”

“
Is that really necessary?  I mean, with the FBI already looking, and now the police investigating, and so long as my faith is strong, it seems to me that, I don’t know, is this really necessary?”

“
I don’t blame you for asking.  Don seemed to think so, and sometimes it helps to have someone outside law enforcement in these matters.”

Mrs. Kramer stood.  “Thank you, Mr. Slate.  I’m sure Don had his reasons.  We appreciate your help.”

“Just one more thing before I go.”

“
What is it?”

“
I’d like to see Kris’s room.”

Susan Kramer shrugged, a gesture that seemed to fortify her.  “All right.  I’ll show you.  Right this way.”

She led me to the stairway in the foyer.  “Kris’s room is to the left at the top of the stairs, straight down at the end of the hall.  The door is closed, and the FBI agents already looked through it, but go on in.  I don’t know if it will help.  She was only here on visits, really, since she moved to the campus.”

I waited.  “Oh.  I’m not going up with you.  I don’t like to go in there since she . . . since she went missing.  Was there something else?”

“Yes.  Your husband and I didn’t talk about any facts.  I know only that Kris is missing.  I know it’s difficult, but could you tell me how you learned. . . .?”

“
Kris’s roommate, or suitemate, at school.  She called my husband at his office in the morning.  Said that Kris told her she was going to the library to study the night before.  Her suitemate said she stayed up reading and then went to sleep.  When she woke up the next morning, Kris wasn’t there and her bed hadn’t been slept in.  She tried her cell phone and didn’t get an answer.  That’s not like Kris.  She was an athlete.  She wasn’t into parties or anything.  She treasured her sleep.  Always, since she was little. . . .”

“
Thank you, Mrs. Kramer.  What is Kris’s roommate’s name?”

“
Akilah.  Akilah Ziyenge.  One of her soccer teammates.”

“
Okay.  I’ll just go up and look at the room now.  I can let myself out.”

The door to the room was closed.  I opened it, went in, and closed the door softly behind me.

The air inside was still, the room silent.  It was the room of a typical teenage girl post-Title IX, a girl consumed with active sports, not music or drugs or boys.

A sleigh bed, framed by windows, stood in the center of an outside wall.  A net bag half-filled with scuffed soccer balls occupied one corner.

Cream walls almost completely covered with posters of soccer stars in action.  In one, Mia Hamm raised her arms in triumph, a huge smile splitting her face.  Another poster featured a grimacing Hope Solo crouching to prepare for a penalty kick.

And one small poster almost hidden by posters of recent or active players featured an ageless Pelé, body parallel to the ground in a bicycle kick, the great thigh muscles looking as inhuman as oiled machinery.

I didn’t search any drawers or look under the bed for clues.  The Birmingham police, detective novels to the contrary, would have been as thorough as the KGB.  After absorbing the visual patterns, I stood at the foot of the bed, closed my eyes and entered into the stillness of the closed room, the only movement my breath.  My inhalations and exhalations connected us; I was the room, the room was me.

What do you have to tell me, Kris?  Are you out there somewhere?  What are your secrets?  Why have I heard different versions of when you were last seen?  Do you want to be found?