Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery (23 page)

Once he knew it was me, O’Malley took his time getting to the phone.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You’d like to have dinner? Sorry, I’m busy.”

“Mike, I think Countertop Man is trespassing again, this time on Caroline Sturgis’s property. I think he’s involved with some of the people Caroline knew in Michigan.” Mike told me to lock the doors and set the alarm. He’d be right over.

“Countertop Man?” Caroline said, pouring another one and wondering how much of the story she’d missed with one glass of vodka.

“It’s a long story.”

But it made sense. Jeff Warren sees Caroline at the diner and casually mentions it to a few people, including Leroy Donnelley, who must have told his cousin Eddie. Eddie sends C-Man to Springfield to find out if it’s really her.

“How could this man mistake Babe for me if he knew me in Michigan?”

“Maybe he’s a friend of Eddie’s or someone Eddie met later who owes him a favor. Eddie might not want to scare you off by coming himself.”

Ten minutes later, O’Malley was in Caroline’s kitchen, the shades were up and I was telling him what I thought I knew. I thought I laid out my evidence beautifully, but O’Malley was not convinced.

“That’s why he was yelling that Babe was a criminal, remember?” I said, my voice rising an octave. “He thought she was
Caroline
.”

“People say a lot of stupid things when they’re being arrested. Or when they’re agitated.” He eyed the bottle on the island. “Or when their senses are impaired.”

“We are not impaired. Can’t you at least confirm that the guy was in prison in Michigan at the same time as Eddie Donnelley?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Well, why not?”

“Because he wasn’t.”

The main real man was Thomas Chase McGinley. According to the mandatory check of his Michigan driver’s license he’d never been convicted of a felony. He didn’t even have any outstanding traffic violations. Okay, he had bad teeth and stringy hair, and there was the faint whiff of
Deliverance
about him, but maybe that was just me being snobbish. Other than those grooming defects, he appeared to be an upstanding citizen who had until recently worked as a shipping clerk in a sporting goods store in Michigan. Perhaps he
would
know the difference between a countertop and a kayak.

“The only remotely criminal activity McGinley’s been engaged in was two years ago”—O’Malley leafed through a tiny spiral notebook—“a tussle at a Big Boy restaurant in Tipp City, Ohio, when management said he tried to walk out with someone else’s larger order and McGinley claimed it was all an accident. That’s why no bond was set. We let him go with a promise to appear.”

“Why would he lie about being in prison? To brag?”

“Men have been known to say stupid things. Perhaps he thought it would impress Babe.”

“He’s from Michigan, though. What about that?”

“Lots of people are from Michigan, Paula. Magic Johnson. Eminem. Madonna.”

Caroline’s fingers were playing on an invisible keyboard. She was aching to reach for another drink but didn’t want to fuel O’Malley’s assumption that she was loaded.

A month earlier she had helped to organize the library fund-raiser and had baked brownies for the Unitarian church rummage sale. Both
were big successes. Now she was out on bail, hiding from the media, and listening, bewildered, as two people in her kitchen argued about Madonna and a guy they called Countertop Man. Wanting a drink was perfectly understandable.

“Where’s Grant?” O’Malley asked.

“He’s in Hartford,” I said. “With Lucy.”

Now O’Malley looked like he wanted a drink.

O’Malley refused to let me go with him. He and his partner searched the woods and came back to the house to report. All they found was a flattened area where someone had knelt down and had a cigarette, a can of Bud, and a pee. No way to tell how long ago any of those activities took place.

“Can you really tell about the pee?” Caroline asked.

“No. I’m making an educated guess based on the number of beer cans. Someone was there, but who knows when? It could have been last summer during the fireworks.”

“Were the cans rusty?” I asked.

“Aluminum cans don’t rust, Sherlock, they oxidize.”

“Was it flattened grass or something else? Grass would have sprung back up after a day or so, especially if it had rained.”

His look said it all. Maybe I was letting my imagination run wild. Caroline lived near the woods. All sorts of animals probably trespassed on her property with nothing more on their minds than eating,
eliminating, and making babies—and some of them sat down flattening the grass.

“I’ll have a car swing by the house regularly for the next few days,” Mike said. “As annoying as they are, when the press gets wind that you’re home, they’ll probably camp out in front and keep away anyone who might have mischief on his mind. Set the alarm and if you see anything, call us right away.”

Caroline was close to tears. “Mike, I didn’t do anything.”

How could he respond? He was a cop. She was a convicted felon and a fugitive out on bail. He said nothing, just squeezed her arm and left.

I didn’t know what else I could do for her. As long as Lucy was out there pretending to be Caroline, the genuine article would have some peace. She could get in touch with her lawyer and try to explain things to her kids who were still in Tucson. The next day would be a totally different story. And she’d had lots of them. So many it was possible she no longer knew which one was the truth. I picked up my backpack and got ready to leave.

“I should go, too,” I said. “Besides, you probably want to be alone.”

“I don’t want to be alone. I’ve just gotten out of a ten-by-ten cell. You can’t leave me here. If the reporters don’t think I’m arriving until later, and Lucy and Grant take the back roads trying to ditch them, I’ll be all by myself. What if he
is
out there? Corian Man?”

“Countertop. He didn’t specify stone or composite. Caroline, much as I hate to admit this, O’Malley was probably right. It was a raccoon or a turkey.”

“Turkeys don’t throw off five-foot-tall shadows, and if there is one that big outside I’d rather not be here.” she said quite sensibly. She grabbed an erasable marker and scribbled a cryptic note on the whiteboard letting Grant know that she was all right and would be in touch. I waited while she rummaged in her hall closet.

————

An hour later, we were on the road. Caroline Sturgis was crouched down in the backseat of my car, under a tarp wearing one of her son’s hockey uniforms. Every once in a while, she’d peek out from under the tarp.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Toward New Haven,” I said. “More places to stash you.” That was our plan, I’d check Caroline into a hotel or motel for the night and head home. Then I’d call Grant and tell him where to pick her up in the morning.

“I should have made sure this was Jason’s clean uniform,” she said, sniffing the armpits of her son’s jersey. “I think I took the dirty one.” She popped up again like one of those carnival games where the mole keeps bobbing up and you’re supposed to whack it on the head. “Stay down,” I said.

“Between the stinky uniform and the dirty tarp it’s hard to breathe under here.”

“That’s not dirt on the tarp, it’s soil. Do you know there are places in the world where people eat dirt?” I said.

“Kids do it, too. They call of pica—eating stuff that isn’t food. I hope that’s not on the menu tonight, I am the tiniest bit hungry.”

We passed an exit whose only claim to fame was cheap gas, something called the Famely Restaurant, and a motel, the Hacienda.

“Famely with an
e
,” I said, thinking ahead to dinner. “If they can’t spell can they read recipes?”

“Oh, Grant and I stayed at a place called the Hacienda on our honeymoon in Zihuatenejo.” She sounded wistful and looked pathetic. Her face
was
dirty, and after all she’d been through, I thought, why not? Something told me it wouldn’t be the romantic Mexican hideaway she and Grant had found, but if the sheets were clean it would do for the
night. And hopefully the cook at the Famely restaurant was better at his job than the sign maker was.

I got off at the next exit and made my way back, snaking along the road that ran beside the highway until it didn’t and then did again and finally we reached the Hacienda.

The place looked about as Mexican as your average generic bag of nachos—cardboardy, some orange, some red, very little spice. I parked around the back so the car couldn’t be seen from the lobby.

“Is there a hockey mask in that bag?” I asked.

Caroline looked through her son’s duffel bag and pulled out a face and throat protector. She put it on. Her face was covered but her hair stuck out.

“Here, use these.” I tossed her a scrunchie and a baseball hat, my “don’t leave home without them” kit that I always kept in the compartment between the seats. “Put the hat on backward. It’ll cover the stubby ponytail.” With Jason’s sweatshirt thrown around her shoulders, Caroline could pass for a boy, if someone didn’t look too closely.

“I’ll go to the front desk, you walk around the lobby like you’re not interested.”

“I have a teenage son,” Caroline said, fidgeting with her disguise. “I know what ‘not interested’ looks like.”

We needn’t have worried. Peyton, the desk clerk, couldn’t have cared less. It was a little strange to see a grown man, wide-eyed and baby-faced, in an orange vest festooned with yellow rickrack and pom-poms, guzzling diet soda and reading a vampire book so close to Halloween, but probably no stranger than seeing a nervous-looking woman and her sullen, hockey fanatic son checking into a dumpy highway hotel this late on a weeknight.

“Reservation?”

He must have been joking. Did anyone ever stop here intentionally?
I’d assumed only the prospect of driving oneself into a ditch would induce anyone to check into this dive.

“No,” I said.

We checked in under my name, as mother and son; we’d be staying for one night and we’d need two beds and two keys. My “son,” wacky kid, insisted on wearing his face protector and waving his stick around when we entered the building.

“Teenage boys—what can you do?” I said, plucking the card keys from the counter and hoping I sounded like a typical suburban mom. I tried not to let it bother me that the desk clerk didn’t bat an eye at the idea that I was the mother of a teenager. (That was the last straw. Microdermabrasion, here I come.)

Caroline was in the breakfast area of the lobby where she’d probably be having bad coffee and chemically preserved muffins in the morning while I was home sleeping in.

“Jason, Jason.” It took a while for Caroline to realize I was calling her. She was transfixed by the local news report on the lobby television. It was her own smiling image. Blond, blunt-cut hair, velvet headband, no dark roots.

“C’mon,” I said, tugging on her sleeve. “No more television tonight. Didn’t you watch enough in the car?”

Caroline said nothing as we walked down the narrow hall all the way to the end. Our room, number 104, was on the left, next to the pool and spa, and smelled faintly of bleach or whatever it was they used to clean the Jacuzzi. At least they cleaned it. Inside the room, Caroline pulled off the mask and sucked air.

“No wonder Jason has zits.” She tiptoed to the bathroom and dampened a scratchy washcloth to wipe her face while I hurriedly pulled the curtains shut.

The bathroom was a toilet and a tub that Toulouse-Lautrec would
have felt cramped in. Outside the closet-sized bathroom was a sink with a square of mirror bolted to the wall, and underneath the sink a rectangle of curling plastic tile on the floor to catch the drips. The rest of the room was just as basic with a microwave; a boxy tweed Herculon loveseat; and the one incongruous item, a giant flat-screen television, which probably cost more than all the other furnishings combined. Priorities, I supposed. I turned it on for background noise.

By this time Caroline and I were starving. I was ready to give the curiously named Famely Restaurant a try, so I told Caroline to make herself as comfortable as possible while I went out to get us some dinner.

“Can’t we order?” she asked.

“I’ll ask at the desk, but I don’t think they have room service here, and I doubt that the Famely Restaurant delivers. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, I’ll be back in thirty minutes with something reasonably healthy to eat. Bolt the door after I leave; don’t open it for anyone but me. Don’t call anyone and don’t answer the telephone. And don’t walk around barefoot on this rug. My shoes are sticking to it. Not a good sign.” Clearly, I was taking my role as “mother” seriously.

True to my word I returned in under thirty minutes. While I was waiting for our order to be ready I learned that Famely was not a typo, the restaurant was actually owned by a couple named Famely, which I’m sure caused their children no end of embarrassment and may have even resulted in early, disastrous marriages as offspring tried to escape the Famely family moniker.

Although good, healthy food was foreign to the Famely family, they made up for it with quantity. Back in our room I laid out our feast on the fake wood coffee table—fried chicken, coleslaw, biscuits, and applesauce. The only things that were green were the straws for our sodas.

“All the basic food groups: grease, mayo, bread, and sugar,” I said.

“Don’t knock it. You’ll be amazed at how easily it all goes down,”
Caroline said, opening the Styrofoam boxes. “It’s better than it sounds. We eat this way all the time when Jason has an away game.” Her face darkened and I wondered if she was thinking of her previous life or all those away games long ago that had gotten her into this mess.

My dining standards having plummeted in the last few years, I inhaled the food but swapped out my biscuits for her applesauce. We said little while we ate, just listened to the buzz of some inane low-budget reality show now turned up loud to drown out the shower noises and toilet flushes we could hear through the hotel’s cardboard walls.

“Want to tell me about Kate?” I said after we finished eating. I thought that’s where she was heading when we fled her house.