Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery (17 page)

“Like hell you did. Don’t give me that ma’am crap—and don’t think you’re the first—”

I put the phone back in the cradle and prayed she didn’t have the star 69 option on her telephone service.

The next call was marginally better. This time I did my best to sound sweet and wholesome. But according to this Jeff’s roommate, Jeff was touring with a production of
Jersey Boys
and always wore Oliver Peoples’s prescription sunglasses with dark blue lenses. They were his trademark. It was unlikely that he was the man I was looking for.

“You didn’t really find a pair of sunglasses, did you?” the roommate asked. Jeez, was I that transparent? “Listen, you sound like a nice person.
If he’s hiding out from you, honey, it’s probably over. It’s time to move on. I know from whence I speak.” I let him tell me the story of his breakup with Ethan and thanked him for being so supportive. Jeff was lucky to have such a sensitive and understanding partner.

So far I’d been excoriated for being a slut and pitied for being a dumpee who was all but stalking a former lover. If I didn’t have such a positive self-image, I might have let those two calls discourage me.

There was one number left. I didn’t know what my next step would be or how I’d search the other forty-nine states if all the Michigan calls were as unsuccessful as the first two.

The phone rang ten times. I was just about to hang up when an older woman answered. Yes, her son was always misplacing things. The old sweetheart gave me a laundry list of the things this Jeff Warren had lost since grade school, including a jersey signed by his coach and the five starters on his high school basketball team, two of whom went on the play for the Spartans. I was impressed that she knew who they were, but obviously she was a hoops fan. He’d lost a collection of commemorative first edition stamps given to him by his uncle Lou, who’d spent forty years working for the post office, three jobs—one that the aforementioned Uncle Lou had had to pull strings to get him—and two wives. So she wasn’t surprised that he’d lost his expensive sunglasses and wasn’t I a dear for trying to return them. But Jeff wasn’t home now. He was on the road, driving a truck up and down the East Coast. He got the job through one of his ex-brothers-in-law, Leroy, who worked for Hutchinson Shipping. Bingo.

Mrs. Helen Warren clearly didn’t get many phone calls. Jeff’s ex-wives never stayed in touch, but that was probably a good thing because they were worthless gold diggers and never really appreciated her boy. Her daughter Abby had moved to Northern California and rarely came to visit, not even for her high school reunion—just came the one time when her dad passed. Helen and Abby’s relationship had been
reduced to twice-yearly baskets from Harry & David on Christmas and Mother’s Day, and the twins’ annual class picture slipped into an envelope with just the date on the back, not even a note. It was so sad I almost hung up on her to call my own mother.

Jeff had moved his few possessions back home after the second divorce since he was now driving for a living (better money), and he was on the road so much these days it didn’t make sense for him to pay rent. Especially since he was still supporting those two floozies whom she’d never liked, who had never given her grandchildren, and who’d taken him to the cleaners or, in Jeff’s more modest circumstances, the launderette.

I hated to stop her; it was like stream-of-consciousness reality television. I started to picture them all standing in front of a retired judge, pointing fingers and shouting at one another until they broke for a commercial. Even though it hadn’t worked the last time, I thought it time to resurrect “ma’am.”

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Do you know where I can find Jeff now? Is there a cell number you can give me?”

Somehow that convinced her I was a girlfriend. She’d love to see her boy settle down with a really nice girl and I sounded like a nice girl. She asked if I had a job and I mumbled something about my own small business. My stock was rising. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been treated like a whore and then a pathetic discard. All of a sudden I’d turned into a good catch. Mrs. Warren asked what church I went to, and I struggled to remember the name of the parochial school where I had spent the worst two months of my six-year-old life.

“Sacred Heart, ma’am.”

Dead silence. Obviously, Catholic wasn’t as good as Protestant, but at least Jeff wasn’t dating a heathen. Mrs. Warren regrouped quickly. It
was okay—she was sure I was nice anyway. If I stayed on the phone with her much longer, she’d have me converted and us engaged.

She didn’t know if the number she had was his latest. Jeff changed numbers a lot, and Mrs. Warren hated to cross any of them out, as if doing so was erasing a part of his life. My guess was that changing numbers was less about his adventurous lifestyle than it was about staying one step ahead of the bill collectors and his ex-wives.

“I suppose the best way to reach him right now is through Leroy.” I could hear Mrs. Warren flipping through a phone book that I imagined looked like my mother’s, pages falling out, slightly sticky from being in the kitchen for the last thirty years, with numbers and addresses written in blue ballpoint ink in beautiful copperplate script, except for their children’s, which had been crossed out and changed over and over while everyone else’s stayed the same. (Note to self: Call Mom!)

“Here it is, Leroy Donnelley.”

Suddenly, my heart was racing. “Leroy Donnelley? Any relation to Edward Donnelley?”

I scribbled notes as fast as I could while Mrs. Warren gave me the extended family tree of all the Donnelleys and their kin. Off the top of her head she recited a veritable Book of Donnelley—who they’d married, who their kids were, and where they’d gone to school. If she had used the word
begat
it could not have been more biblical or more complete. It was as if I had stumbled upon the town historian.

Now, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Jeff Warren had bumped into his old high school friend, Monica, and accidentally or intentionally mentioned it to a relative of one of the people she’d been arrested with. I still wasn’t sure how they found her. Warren knew she was going by the name Caroline and had been seen in Springfield, but as far as I knew, that was all.

Kate Gustafson, the other woman in the case, served only two years. After she was released, she’d been killed in a suspicious fire. The man,
Eddie Donnelley, served his entire sentence, all twenty years. Could you carry a grudge for that long because one of your partners in crime had gotten away? It’s been known to happen.

Mrs. Warren was still rambling on, but I felt sure I’d already gotten the lion’s share of the story. Somehow I didn’t think the health issues of the current crop of Donnelleys was going to help me, Grant, or Caroline; but, as is often the case with seniors when they’re on the phone, if they sense you’re ready to hang up, they dig in their heels and tear into another long-winded anecdote, frequently about the azaleas, the garbageman, or something equally mundane just to keep you hanging on.

“Of course, they never did find all that money they said was missing,” she said, wheezing, daring me to hang up.

I had to hand it to her: Mama Warren knew how to tell a story. I switched my phone to the other ear, sharpened my pencil, and got comfortable. This anecdote I
did
want to hear.

Two hours later Grant Sturgis called me from a hotel room in Michigan. Caroline had told him I hadn’t been the one to give away her secret, and he was calling to apologize.

I had a lot to tell him about Caroline and Jeff’s accidental meeting in the diner and what I thought had happened afterward.

“But why?” he asked.

“Grant, Donnelley served twenty years in prison. Not even time off for good behavior.” (I had thought everyone got time off for good behavior.) “Caroline walked away after eighteen months. And then to learn that she’s been living a pretty cushy life in suburban Connecticut, it might have ticked him off. I mean, he wasn’t one of life’s noblemen before he went to jail. Something tells me he didn’t see the error of his ways while behind bars. The man was angry.”

And then there was the missing money. Mama Warren wasn’t sure
how much, but the police had suggested the forty-seven grand found in Caroline’s gym bag was just the tip of the iceberg. Over seven hundred fifty thousand dollars was unaccounted for, the drug money having funded an extensive college sports gambling ring. A tidy sum then and not too shabby now. Maybe Donnelley had reclaimed it when he got out of prison, or maybe he couldn’t find it and was looking for the person he thought still had it. Or had used it to buy a nice big house in Connecticut once she thought no one would be looking for her.

Grant was quiet. Had I gone too far? This was, after all, the woman he loved. What had he called her in a tone that suggested sainthood—“the mother of his children”? He took a deep breath.

“Except for one thing,” he said. “Even if the judge and the jury didn’t know it, Eddie Donnelley did and I do. Caroline was entirely innocent.”

If half of what Grant Sturgis told me next was true, Caroline had lived through a succession of nightmarish events equaled only by Jean Valjean; right out of
Les Misérables.

Caroline started dating Eddie Donnelley when she was a senior at Newtonville High School and he was a sophomore at Nixon County Community College. She was flattered by his attentions. He was an older man, relatively speaking, and the town was so small that, as pretty as she was, she’d already been through all the interesting boys her own age. Not in a slutty, town pump kind of way—she just had an idea of what she wanted and was quick to realize when she hadn’t found it, so she kept looking.

Kate Gustafson was Eddie’s ex-girlfriend, who was surprisingly cordial to her replacement. At least it was surprising to me. Where I grew up, you didn’t want to be in the same time zone with your boyfriend’s ex, much less hang out with her, but Newtonville, Michigan, was a far cry from Brooklyn, New York.

Attractive and popular, Caroline was a capable student but more interested in creative pursuits than academics—painting and dancing were two of her passions. Beyond the Twinkletoes ballet classes which she’d outgrown by the age of twelve, there was no dance studio in town, so Caroline turned to cheerleading. And she pursued it with a vengeance. They said she was fearless and would cheerfully and accurately fling her body into whatever formation the coach asked, landing with her trademark happy face without even breaking a sweat.

As the school’s head cheerleader she went to all the varsity events on the road and was invited to every postgame party. Eddie and Kate went everywhere with her, Eddie following the school bus that carried the team and the cheerleaders, driving to the games and meets that were out of the city, with Kate tagging along, as a pal and chaperone. At least that was what they told Caroline’s dad, who by that time was consoling himself for the loss of his wife every day with a quart of scotch and a six-pack of beer and every night with a hairdresser named Rita.

At first, the invitations were just for Caroline. After all, who wouldn’t want the prettiest girl in school at their party? But later all three were invited because Caroline’s friends could pretty much get you anything you wanted. According to Grant, unbeknownst to Caroline, they’d used her to open a whole new line of distribution for the drugs they were selling—mostly speed, some pot, and eventually heroin, at schools all over the county. Place your orders now for next week’s postgame party. It didn’t take long for interested parties to get involved in betting on the games. That’s when the stakes were really jacked up.

When the three of them were busted, witnesses and former clients testified to the damning truth, that Caroline had been present at virtually every drug sale or buy; if she hadn’t actually taken the cash and handed over the drugs, she had, in fact, introduced Eddie and Kate to most of the buyers, thereby helping them make the transaction. On paper it was hard to dispute.

Caroline’s court-appointed attorney was a recent grad, two years out of law school and clearly out of his league. With all the evidence stacked against her, and Eddie and Kate pleading guilty, the lawyer convinced Caroline’s dad that she should plead guilty, too. At her age and with no previous convictions, he was sure she’d be put on probation or sentenced to community service; she should throw herself on the mercy of the court.

But there was no mercy. With the help of Eddie’s and Kate’s well-paid attorneys, the prosecutors successfully argued that Caroline had masterminded the entire business. After all, she was the charismatic one with all the connections. And who were the others? Eddie was a troubled underachiever in his fourth year at a two-year college, and Kate, five years older than she’d originally claimed, identified herself as an actress and model, which in those days was code for
prostitute
. Caroline was the only one smart enough to have planned it all. Caroline, Eddie, and Kate were each sentenced to ten to twenty years at the Henderson Dade Correctional Facility. At the sentencing Caroline passed out.

Grant was still processing all this new information about his wife of twenty years. It was hard enough for me to believe. I couldn’t imagine what he was going through.

If Caroline really was innocent, Grant needed a good attorney to reopen the case, otherwise it could be a very long time before any of us ever saw her again. At least this time she could afford the best. And an attorney could hire a professional to look for Donnelley, not a gifted amateur like me.

Grant thanked me for sticking with the job even after he’d treated me so shabbily. He insisted on paying me for my time and the yearbooks, and I made a show of protesting but not too hard. The offer was more than enough to cover my expenses and keep me in soup and big breakfasts until gardening season rolled around again in March, and I
was grateful for it. Before he hung up, we talked about meeting at Babe’s when he returned to show the folks in town that I was once again one of the good guys.