Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery (15 page)

“He was with another driver, someone you knew, wasn’t he?”

“Retro Joe,” she said. “No one knows if that’s his real name—that’s just what everyone calls him. One of the long haulers. I can almost see the truck, red logo, two letters interlocked. I’ll get it but it may take some time. But those guys don’t always drive with the same partners.”

Inside the diner, we escorted Terry to a booth and sat her down to ask her a few questions.

“What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? You guys are worse than my parents. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention. I dropped the tray and he helped me clean up until Babe came over. It was two seconds. No great meeting of the minds.”

I went into schmooze mode. “Come on, Terry. You’re an observant girl. And sensitive. You write songs—you notice things about people.” She looked down, working hard to live up to my flattering assessment of her powers of perception and conjure up his image. All three of us were.

“He had long hair and a baseball hat. He said something that made you laugh,” I prompted. “What did he say?”

“It was nothing. Something stupid, like I had a nice wrist move. He was a champion Frisbee player when he was in college, so he would know. It just seemed like a dumb thing to say at the time, but it was perfect. Better than asking if I was okay. I hate when people ask me that.”

(Note to self: When we’re finished, don’t ask if she’s okay.)

“Did he mention where he went to school?” I asked.

“Man, it was all of two minutes. It wasn’t a date. He said it was cold and they jumped around a lot to keep warm.” She ratcheted down and gave it some more thought. “His friend called him JW—he was with Retro Joe.” Then she made an up-and-down motion with one hand, almost as if she were playing a washboard. “And he had something strange about his lip. You could barely see it because of the facial hair. A scar—like the guy who played Johnny Cash in that movie.”

“He had a cleft lip?”

“I don’t know what you call it. It’s kind of cute, like a little line. And his hat had an ornate D on it.”

“
D
like in Dodgers?” Babe asked.

A voice over my shoulder said, “No,” and three heads turned in its direction at the same time. It was one of the truckers.

He peeled off a few bills and left them on the counter. “
D
like in Tigers.
Detroit
Tigers,” he said.

Detroit was big, but Caroline/Monica’s hometown wasn’t. The papers had said she was from Newtonville, one of the smaller specks on the MapQuest page, and a Google search made me think people probably didn’t go there unless they were visiting relatives or were passing through to get to somewhere else. Blue-collar residents commuted to jobs in the bigger cities or simply packed up and moved when their jobs did. The ones who stayed were rich or old, or just didn’t have any other place to go. It seemed like a lot of other towns—nice enough, maybe even wonderful forty years ago, but now still lovely on the surface but quietly dying.

I’d start my Internet research with Caroline’s high school. The papers had said Caroline had been a senior at Newtonville High in 1981. How many kids could have been in her graduating class in a town that size? Or were enrolled during the four years she attended? And how many of them could have had a cleft lip? Wasn’t that pretty rare?

I found the school online and ordered yearbooks from all four years
that Caroline attended. If I wasn’t successful, I’d have to eat the cost (and the cost of my eighty-dollar lunch with O’Malley), but if I found out who the tipster was, I knew Grant would reimburse me. And I had my fingers crossed that a pretty and popular girl like Caroline would be in lots of pictures and I’d get a handle on who some of her friends were. There was no guarantee our trucker who talked to Caroline even went to high school with her, but it was the only lead I had from Michigan.

Who knew how long the yearbooks would take to arrive? In the meantime, I took the plunge and said yes to one of the biggest time suckers on the Internet,
highschoolmemories.com
. I signed in pretending to be Monica Weithorn.

For free, I got the tantalizing “Old friends are trying to find you” page with the names strategically blurred. Of course they are. All those people who ignored you or made your life miserable when you were sixteen really wanted to find you. Why? To make sure that they were still cooler than you? For more specific information, I’d have to upgrade my membership. Fifty bucks got me the whole enchilada and a bag of chips. Every classmate’s name in alphabetical order for the four years Caroline had been enrolled, even the old varsity team schedules and records. And updated background info on everyone who’d been dumb enough to enter their current coordinates.

No one I knew used
highschoolmemories.com
. Well okay, one person, but she was recently divorced and looking for love, or a reasonable facsimile. Why she thought she’d find it among her former high school classmates was beyond me. Most people would rather eat ground glass than relive their high school years.

I printed out the list of Caroline’s classmates and planned to search the likeliest candidates on Facebook—athletes, cheerleaders, and those with the same zip codes as Caroline had had. I didn’t know the demographics of the average Facebook user, and it was a long shot that there
would be a lot of overlap with Caroline’s classmates, but it would keep me busy until the yearbooks arrived, and I might trip over somebody with the initials JW. In my former career I had unearthed more than a few good stories by just doggedly pursuing trails that others had dropped.

I had my own dormant Facebook page that I’d started, under protest, three years earlier. Most of my “friends” were old television contacts, and once I stopped being interested in who had his hand in what cookie jar and who had signed what deal, I stopped checking my Facebook page for invitations and new friend requests, but I was still out there in cyberspace with a three-year-old picture and outdated contact info. Just as well—I looked younger and wasn’t as easy to find, a winning combination.

Maybe I’d get lucky and locate that one perky gal who considers it her mission to reconnect people whether they want it or not. Every school, business, or organization has one, the person who organizes things no one else wanted to bother with—the uncool activities, the obscure charity events. (Hi, want to volunteer for the National Frankfurter Finger Weenie Roast?)

At my school her name was Rena. She wore an ear-to-ear grin from the first day of high school to graduation. A relative of mine, from the cynical side of the family, claims only babies and idiots are that happy. In Rena’s case, she might have been right. Rena always seemed to be cradling a clipboard in her arms as if the sign-up sheet was her baby. She was probably working for a cruise line now, with a steady stream of new people to annoy every week.

I started with the school and the word
cheerleader
. Two female names popped up but no pictures—presumably they wanted to be remembered as they were, ponytailed, flying through the air, no cellulite, eternally young. Perversely, I was glad. Who wanted to think cheerleaders from
twenty-five years ago were still as beautiful and limber as they were back then? No male names appeared.

Next I tried the football and baseball teams. The hat was a Detroit Tigers hat. Maybe our man was an athlete and not just a fan. That coughed up pages of names to scroll through; either Newtonville’s male students were all on Facebook, or every water boy and equipment manager claimed he played a valuable role on some team. And this was interesting: the men were more likely to post pictures of themselves and the women posted avatars or nothing. No matter how saggy, bald, or tubby they got, the males thought they still looked hot. Self-esteem or self-delusion?

I was up to the
F
s and getting a little punchy. There was nothing in the fridge, so I ordered a pizza and a two-liter bottle of diet soda for dinner. Good food was going to take time and mine would be there in less than twenty-five minutes or it would be free. My finances being what they were, I found myself hoping for a tiny fender bender somewhere between here and Armando’s Pizza Coliseum, nothing serious, just enough to hold up traffic and make the pizza arrive in twenty-seven minutes.

I stared at my computer screen, wondering how else I might find the man who’d bumped into Caroline if I got to the
Z
s and didn’t see a guy with a cleft lip. The customer who knew his sports teams also knew Retro Joe, and said that these days Joe was driving for Hutchinson Shipping. If my other research came up empty, I’d try Hutchinson, but I wasn’t relishing that conversation. “
Hi, do any of your truckers have scarred or cleft lips?
”
I’d
have hung up on me.

For her part, Babe posted a note on the Paradise bulletin board claiming the man had left something at the diner. Not entirely true but not entirely false either, he’d left a lot of questions.

The bell rang, I snapped out of my blue screen stupor, grabbed my wallet, and headed for the door. I glanced at my watch—shoot,
twenty-three minutes. When I opened the door I saw Mike O’Malley standing there holding a pizza box and a paper bag.

“What are you doing here?”

“Delivering your pizza,” he said, inspecting the receipt that was taped to the top of the box. “I thought you ate healthy food. Cake for lunch the other day and now this. Has life in Springfield totally corrupted you?”

“What have you done with the pizza man?” I asked, looking down the driveway.

“Ran him off the road and stole his pie.” He waited for me to at least smile, but I was too tired. “You used to have a sense of humor. I stopped him for speeding, around the corner.”

“And he bribed you with my dinner?”

“Of course not. Technically, I’m off the clock, so he got away with a strongly worded warning. I paid for your pizza and this swill that you’re planning to drink. Can I come in or are we going to let this pie get cold? Truce?”

I should have just tipped him and sent him on his way after his less-than-polite exit at lunch, but there was something about him that always made me open the door and invite him in.

Of course, he was one of the few single men I knew in Springfield between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five. It could have been that. Or maybe it was something else. He was a good man: he looked after his elderly father, he had a dog, he brought me food. He had all the outward signs of normalcy that usually appealed to women, but maybe that was it. I didn’t ordinarily gravitate toward normal. I wanted the tortured artist. The driven genius. The explorer with just one more mountain to climb. And here I was, once again trying to picture this pale, thinning-on-top suburban policeman naked on a fur rug in front of a crackling fire. There was no denying it—we had the worst timing since that couple on the
Titanic
.

“What are you smiling at?” he said.

“Nothing. When did you get so health conscious?” I said, shaking off the image. I shooed him in and led him past the door to my office. He peeked in.

“You’re working late.”

“Actually I’m being interrupted late. Is this supposed to make up for stiffing me at lunch?”

“Yes.”

We went upstairs to the kitchen and I dropped the greasy cardboard box on a round oak table I’d scored at a flea market the previous summer. The last time Mike O’Malley was here, my kitchen had been ransacked, with all the drawers and cabinets open and their contents strewn about. Despite that, he knew where everything was located. He set the table as if he lived there and we sat down to dinner every night.

“I think the garlic powder is downstairs.”

“No worries, I can do without it.”

We were being very careful with other, not wanting to get into another of our volatile and incomprehensible dustups. The tiptoeing generally lasted about three minutes. According to my kitchen clock, we were at two minutes and forty-five seconds.

“What were you doing around the corner?” I asked. “Am I under surveillance?” I meant it as a joke, but it came out sounding too snippy. He let it slide.

“No. The pizza delivery boy was speeding on Longview Road. I just happened to catch up with him here. Fortuitous, since I’m now off duty and strangely in the mood for one of our pizza dates.” He separated a slice and deftly wiggled it away from the others without adding too much extra cheese. Was this a date?

We agreed that drivers on my street were reckless fools and it was only a matter of time before some poor soul, driver or pedestrian,
was sent flying into the wetlands, never to be seen again, body parts scattered by foraging critters. We discussed the renovation of the one and only Chinese restaurant in a twenty-mile radius and the latest exhibit on Polish immigrants at the historical society. What was next? The weather? The merits of the Mets’ newest acquisition? Caroline was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room with us, whether we said her name out loud or not. As usual with O’Malley, I blinked first.

“I’m sorry if you think I asked you to lunch only to pump you for information.”

“Well, didn’t you?”

“Grant Sturgis asked me to find the tipster. That’s the digging I said I’d do, and it kind of backfired.”

O’Malley picked the pepperoni disks off his slice and stacked them like poker chips in one corner of the cardboard box. “I take it that was before he thought it was you who informed on her?”

“Yes, wise guy. Before everyone thought it was me.” Stay calm, I told myself. If you’re going to ask someone for his help, try not to call him names first. “I know it’s not your case, but isn’t there anything you can tell me?”

O’Malley added to what I’d already learned. Caroline was arrested for attempting to sell drugs to an undercover cop. That much anyone with a newspaper or an Internet connection knew. Her attorney claimed it was entrapment—the cop was a young woman and they were at a party. Apparently, Caroline offered the woman a joint and the woman insisted on paying. The next day the police came to the football field and arrested her in the middle of practice.