Deadly Interest (34 page)

Quite the cutie when she was little, Diana
morphed from a sweet-faced little girl who wore every shade of pink
into a sullen young woman who preferred deep browns and black. I
came across the graduation picture Mrs. Vicks’ had shown me last
summer. Such drastic changes over the past eight years.

Pushing the pictures aside, I searched for
more letters. I knew deep down from the insoles of my Reeboks that
Mrs. Vicks had kept her correspondence from Theresa. Just as she’d
kept all those pictures of Diana.

The biggest question in my mind, was why. To
find out, I kept digging, through Christmas card lists, twenty-odd
years’ worth of pocket-date books, and about a dozen keychains,
each holding a single key. These had been labeled with all the
neighbors’ last names. Everyone on the block apparently stored
their keys with Mrs. Vicks’, and I shook off a shudder when I
thought about how close the murderer had been to getting to the
rest of us.

With that in mind, I came to the realization
that my parents had probably given up a set themselves. No time
like the present to take them back, I thought. I didn’t much like
the idea of my keys in Barton’s possession.

I scraped a handful of them along the inside
of the drawer and toppled them onto the table, using my finger to
poke among the litter, looking for either “Szatjemski” or “St.
James.”

Nothing.

I grasped around the bottom of the drawer
and pulled out what I hoped were the rest of the keys. I found
mine, along with my aunt and uncle’s keys. I moved them all into a
single-level pile and gave a little noise of surprise when I came
across a completely flat key, attached to nothing. It was obviously
a key to a safe deposit vault, but the number stamped on it,
thirty-two, was not the number of Mrs. Vicks’ box at Banner
Bank.

A car door slam broke into my thoughts,
freezing me in place, head up—listening. After what I thought was a
reasonable amount of time, I decided it wasn’t Lulinski returning
with Bart, and I returned to the task at hand, moving faster
now.

I rooted around the drawer, opening
envelopes and small boxes for the letters I knew had to be there. I
came across a tiny red envelope that the safe deposit key had
fallen out of. No bank name. No identification, just bold letters
warning the owner not to lose the key because replacement costs
were hefty. I pocketed that.

But not one more letter from Theresa.

When I heard yet another car door slam, I
picked up the drawer and returned it to its niche, deciding that it
was about time those bank statements from the closet got another
look.

The front door opened, bringing with it a
rush of fresh air that made it all the way to the kitchen, where I
sat at the table, this time poring over the file full of blue bank
statements. “You’re right,” I said to Bart as they came in,
Lulinski’s scent of just-finished cigarette following in his
wake.

“
I am? About
what?”

I held up the bank statements. “Your mom had
a few accounts down the street at Crawford Bank and Trust.”

“
I knew it. I betcha
they’re all in my name, too.”

He caught the withering glances Lulinski and
I sent his way, and tried to back-pedal. “I mean,” he said. “Ma had
me sign a bunch of signature cards a while ago. I’m just guessing
that maybe these are the ones, since they tell me I’m not a signer
on the Banner Bank accounts.”

I started to page through the statements,
realizing that the accounts had been opened even before those at
Banner Bank had. “Hmm,” I said, aloud.

“
What?” Lulinski and Bart
both looked up.

“
Nothing.” I felt as
though all the information in my head needed to be arranged
properly. That I was missing the big picture, somehow.

Barton picked up some of the statements I
hadn’t gotten through yet. I couldn’t very well stop him from
reading his mother’s papers, but I hated the fact that they were
now out of order. “Hang on,” I said. Mrs. Vicks had kept a coffee
mug full of pens near her phone, I pulled out two and handed one to
Barton. “As I go over the statements, I’ll initial them, like
this.” I demonstrated, writing “AS” in tiny letters on the upper
right hand corner of the page. “You do the same, in the same spot,
so I know which ones we’ve each gone over, okay?”

He nodded, and grabbed the pen from me,
looking like a little-boy-lost with no clue as how to sort through
the records before him. Wrinkling his nose, he shifted the pen to
his left hand, and scribbled on the statement in front of him.

“
You’re left-handed?” I
asked.

The surliness was back. “Yeah. So?”

Swirling, facts swam around in my brain,
doing tantalizing dances that made my heart race with possibility.
I started to see what I’d missed, and the pieces of the puzzle
dropped, one at a time, until they lined up with a precision that
told me I had to be right about this. What it had to do with Mrs.
Vicks’ murder, I wasn’t sure, but I needed to push to find out.

I fingered the safe deposit key in my
pocket. I thought I might know where those letters were, and what
information they held after all. “Barton,” I said.

“
Yeah?”

His eyes were clearer than they had been an
hour before. I hoped to heaven he was sober and lucid enough to
access the working parts of his brain. “How did Diana come to live
with your mother?”

“
Hell if I know.” He shook
his head, looking grateful for a reason to stop examining the bank
statements. “One day Ma calls me and says she thinks maybe it’s a
good idea if she gets somebody to live with her, you know, to help
around the house and drive her places. Next thing I know, she has
this Diana here.”

“
You never met Diana
before?”

“
Not before that. One
time, Ma asked me to come down because she said she had something
important to talk about. Diana was living here by then.”

“
And?”

He made a face of annoyance, shrugging
dramatically. “I take a day off of work to make the drive, and when
I get here, she just says that she wanted to see me. What was so
important about that?”

Lulinski watched our conversation with
interest. He leaned back in his chair, nothing moving but his eyes,
flicking back and forth between us as we spoke.

“
What did you think of
Diana?”

He gave me a look that told me he thought I
was nuts for asking. “She was a kid. What is she, twenty?
Twenty-five? If Ma wanted a roommate and the kid was willing to
cough up some rent money and drive her around to her doctors’
appointments and shit, I had nothing to complain about.”

All of a sudden, Dr. Hooker’s voice came
into my brain. He would have told me to stop here. He would have
told me to butt out of something that was none of my business. But
I couldn’t let this drop. Not now.

“
Who’s Theresa?” I
asked

He looked at me with those small, piggish
eyes. “Why?”

“
Because she asked,
asshole,” Lulinski chimed in.

Bart looked at him, then back to me. “She’s
my cousin. What’s that got to do with anything?”

His cousin, I thought. Oh, God. It took me a
moment to figure out what to say next.

“
I take it you and Theresa
were . . . close?”

He squinted and his mouth dropped slightly.
Like I’d opened the door and let out the dirty little secret that
he’d been keeping all these years.

“
When we were kids, yeah.
So why?”

“
Maybe the better question
is, Barton, how close were you?”

I paused to let the full implication of the
question sink in, then said. “Diana’s left-handed. Her mother
always told her that it was a curse.”

The big guy sat back in his chair, looking
like he’d just come off of a spinning carnival ride that had left
his brain jumbled and his stomach turned inside-out.

Behind me, the kitchen clock ticked a
rhythmic beat. I didn’t count, but it must have been at least
thirty seconds before it all came together in the big guy’s
mind.

Leaning his head forward, he stared at me.
“She was supposed to get that taken care of.”

Taken care of, I thought. With a parent like
this, no wonder Diana needed to sort things out with a shrink,
though I doubted she knew that Bart was her father. I couldn’t
imagine what effect it would have on her self-esteem once she found
out.”

“
Nicely put, Bart,” I
said, barely able to conceal the contempt in my voice. “But it
looks like, for whatever reason she didn’t. Happy Father’s
Day.”

“
She said she never wanted
to see me again,” he said. “I thought that was okay. I’d go back to
my life and she’d go back to hers and I thought . . .”

I knew what he thought. He neither wanted to
assume the financial obligations of fatherhood, nor the emotional
burden that came as part of the package. How nice for him to have
it all taken away with the promise by his former lover. But she
hadn’t followed through, and Mrs. Vicks had stepped in to provide
what she could, when her son fell short.

The sadness weighing on my heart at the
moment wasn’t for Barton’s lost years with his daughter, nor for
his sudden comprehension of all that had gone on behind his back;
what hurt was realizing that Diana had missed out on knowing that
Mrs. Vicks as her grandmother.

Pulling the safe deposit key from my pocket,
I held it up.

“
I found this while you
fellows were out,” I said. “I have a feeling all the proof we want
is sitting in a safe deposit box in the bank down the
street.”

Barton shook his head with wide-eyed
disbelief. I knew he didn’t need any proof, but I wanted to see
what was in that box.

“
Come on,” I said,
standing. “I’ll drive.”

Lulinski glanced at his watch, then sidled
over. “I have to get back to the station. Couple of other things I
need to follow up.” His wary eyes raked over Bart, then returned to
me. “You going to be okay with the big lug?”

The piss and vinegar attitude was gone,
along with the scowl of distaste Barton had worn from the first.
He’d paled a bit, looking to me for guidance. I nodded. “I’ll be
fine.”

Lulinski leaned over and whispered, “Neat
bit of detective work there, Nancy Drew.”

I shot him a smile. “Doesn’t do much to
solve the murder, though,” I said.

He made a so-so movement with his head.
“Let’s wait and see what other secrets Mrs. Vicks was keeping,
shall we?”

* * * * *

At the bank, I wasn’t surprised to find
Barton’s name as signatory on the safe deposit access card. “Told
you I signed one of these,” he said, when the young black girl
behind the desk smiled and led him into the vault area.

Barton and the girl came back around the
corner; he carried a very large box. Ten-by-ten inches high and
wide, it looked to be about thirty inches deep. The girl showed us
to a minuscule examining room. Thank God it was cold in there,
because otherwise it would have been unbearable with in such close
quarters. The box’s lid hinged about three-quarters of the way
down, and opened upward.

Inside, just as I’d expected, we found
hundreds of letters, in all sorts of stationery, separated in
rubber-banded bundles by year. I let Barton read through them,
content with the knowledge that if something unexpected popped up,
he’d let me know.

He flopped into the only chair in the room,
and started reading, in stunned silence.

I pulled out piles of nine-by-twelve
envelopes, each carefully lettered with descriptions of their
contents. “Bank,” “Questions,” piqued my interest. I picked those
up along with a few others. One, called “Nursing Home Residents”
seemed out of place, but I grabbed that too.

Barton’s fist came up out of the recesses of
the box with a bundle of official-looking papers, unbound, but
sitting snugly in one of those narrow cardboard legal wallets.
While I continued to search, Barton picked through the documents it
contained.

Since one set of hands in the jumble were
better than two, I didn’t comment on his lack of participation, but
I did keep an eye on him.

A thick manila envelope, brick-like and
adorned with at least a dozen multi-colored rubber bands sat in the
back corner of the box. When I pulled it out, and moved aside
enough of the tight bands to see what was inside, I gave a little
gasp of surprise.

“
What?” Barton asked,
instantly on his feet.

I didn’t have time to respond before he
yanked the package out of my hands. “Holy sweet Jesus,” he said.
“Yes!” He pulled out the fat wad of cash with an expression of pure
delight in his eyes. “Thank you Momma!” he said waving the bundled
bills in the air.

“
Barton,” I warned through
clenched teeth. “Put that away.”

“
Hell no. I’m counting it.
Gotta find out how much I got here.”

Afraid he’d react like a hungry and
ferocious dog whose food was being snatched, I resisted the urge to
grab the money from him. “Put it away,” I said again. “Don’t you
know that you’re not supposed to keep cash in a safe deposit
vault?” Two beats later, I added. “If they find out that was in
here, you’ll have to pay tax. And maybe even a fine.”

That got him. Staring at me like I was some
sort of authority all of a sudden, he rewrapped the money and
looked around for a place to hide it.

“
Just . . . here.” I found
another, bigger manila envelope and, after emptying its contents,
offered it to Barton and told him to stuff it.

He nodded a thanks, still looking
skittish.