Deception (51 page)

Three hours later, at 6:30, I pulled up across the street from Linda Glissan’s. Since we needed dinner anyway, I decided to keep an eye on Linda’s place while we ate. Mulch and I shared three Burgerville Tillamook cheeseburgers, a blackberry shake, and a large fry. I told him I was headed for the house and he should stay out of the glove box, which still smelled like Izzy’s pizza. He gave me that look dogs give you, then put his snout up to the glove box.

Linda let me in. She asked why I wasn’t wearing my trench coat. I told her I had my reasons. But I was relieved to see her alive and hoped she’d talk quickly. She did.

“I don’t know what Jack would want me to tell you. But he left me alone, so he can’t blame me for doing what I think’s right. Late one night last July or August, I came to the kitchen to make tea. Jack and Noel were just around the corner, here in the living room. I heard them talking. Jack said, ‘I could do it and I wouldn’t get caught.’

“Naturally, I listened. Noel said something like, ‘Jack, you can’t. You’ve been a model cop.’ Jack said, ‘He killed our daughter, just as if he put that noose around her neck. He deserves to die.’ Noel insisted Jack couldn’t do it. Then Jack asked Noel if he’d turn him in if he did.”

“What did Noel say?”

“He said he wouldn’t turn him in, but Noel begged him not to put him in that situation. Noel refused to give him an alibi. He said he couldn’t live with himself if he did that. Then Jack said he had to figure out a way to do it that didn’t put himself at risk. He said he loved me too much to put me through that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before? Why that other story?”

“Because I didn’t want to admit I knew about him killing the professor. I was afraid you’d consider me an accomplice. But now … I feel like I have to tell you or you’ll think Noel was involved.”

“So … what happened when you heard all this?”

“I scared them both to death. I stood right there, just out of sight, and said, ‘I couldn’t sleep that night; Jack and I stayed up after midnight watching
Air Force One.’
Then I stepped out from the kitchen and said, ‘Will that alibi work?’ ”

“What’d they do?”

“Jack jumped up. He said, ‘This is a private conversation.’ I laughed at him, asking if he was actually bawling me out for eavesdropping while he was planning a murder! Then I told him I’d reread Melissa’s journal. I knew how smitten she was with … that professor. Her journal documented the slide, page by page, until she was so depressed and drugged she stopped writing. I told Jack I’d thought for years the man deserved to die.”

“You said that?”

“That’s why I took that class with Sheila Phillips. I wanted to watch him up close, see what attracted Melissa to him. After three weeks I couldn’t stomach it. The last night of class I saw him talking to one of the students. I watched the professor and the girl in the parking lot. She followed his car, and Sheila and I followed hers. He went into his house. She parked around the corner, then went through a fence to his back door. I got out and watched, in the shadows. He let her in. I saw him kiss her. That was it for me. I wanted him dead.”

“You hadn’t told Jack that?”

“Not till then. I didn’t want him to think I was a terrible person. Truth is, when I heard him talking to Noel, I was relieved. Isn’t that weird? I was relieved Jack wanted to kill him too.”

“What happened next?”

“Jack asked Noel to leave, which Noel was happy to do. He kept telling Jack not to do it. He warned me not to be part of it. I suppose he thought we’d come to our senses. Jack said later he told Noel not to worry, that we’d given up on the idea.”

“You’re positive Noel wasn’t involved?”

“Absolutely. You know that, right? Noel was in a bar with a bunch of people when the murder happened. Jack was mad at him for drinking when they were the up team. But he was relieved that Noel was off the hook. Jack said it was an airtight alibi. Isn’t that true?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I just need to know what Noel knew about Jack. And the murder.”

“Well, Noel must have put it together once Palatine was killed, since he knew Jack had talked about it. Even I didn’t know when Jack was going to do it. He kept me in the dark, to protect me I guess. He said I was never to tell anybody about anything. I’m violating that now.”

“Apparently he decided he wanted Phillips for an alibi too,” I said, testing her.

“No. Phillips came to Jack. He needed an alibi.”

“Why?”

“Jack wouldn’t tell me. But since we both knew Phillips didn’t do it and it established Jack’s alibi, why not?”

“You’re certain Noel wasn’t in on the murder?”

“Noel wanted nothing to do with it.”

We talked another twenty minutes. I thanked her for her honesty. I went to the door, and this time she hugged me.

It felt good.

55

“I have been beaten four times—three times by men, and once by a woman.”

S
HERLOCK
H
OLMES
,
T
HE
F
IVE
O
RANGE
P
IPS

S
ATURDAY
, J
ANUARY
18, 8:30
A.M
.

I
SAT
AT
LOU’S
, in our bug-free booth. Clarence would be joining me later but said to eat without him since he’d have breakfast with Geneva.

I enjoyed my country omelet, hash browns, and the big buttermilk pancake Rory offers as a toast alternative. Admiring the yellow calla lilies, I flipped through Chris Doyle’s report on Brandon Phillips. At a poignant musical moment on the Rock-Ola—“My folks were always putting him down (down, down)”—my eyes landed on two lines.

“Phillips had one outstanding financial judgement against him, but it was only for $1200 … It’s my judgement that Phillips could have taken his life, or could have been murdered.”

It wasn’t his conclusion that interested me. It was his spelling.

Clarence walked in to “… sorry I hurt you, leader of the pack.” I didn’t notice any tears.

“How do you spell the word
judgment?”
I asked him.

“How do Americans spell it?”

“No, how do Kuwaitis spell it?”

“The American spelling is j-u-d-g-m-e-n-t.”

“Wouldn’t you expect a highly educated cop to spell it right?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Chris Doyle, son of college professors.”

“I’d expect Doyle to spell it with an
e
after the
g.”

“Why?”

“His mom taught him the Queen’s English, remember? Judgement, with an
e
after the
g
, is the British spelling.”

“How did you know that?”

“I’m a journalist. We read. We spell. We’re educated.”

“You’ve never read Nero Wolfe,” I said, taking the wind out of his “I’m an intellectual” sails.

I asked Ray who could do a chemical analysis on short notice. He said he knew just the man: Darrell MacKay, who formerly worked crime lab but now is a private investigator with his own lab. Ray drove us forty minutes to his place, near Battleground, northeast of Vancouver, Washington.

We parked next to an RV and entered a large split entry home, me wearing a Seahawks jacket and carrying a black garbage bag. A dark-haired guy with a winter tan, early forties, came out to meet us.

“Darrell, this is Ollie Chandler,” Ray said. “And Clarence Abernathy.” MacKay wore a Vikings cap, but otherwise seemed normal.

We went down a hallway past the master bedroom. He opened the door to the last room on the left. A Bunsen burner’s flame licked the underside of a glass beaker. Vapor rose out of it into a tube. No kidding. I felt like I’d walked into 221b Baker Street, residence of Sherlock Holmes.

The most impressive piece, for a home lab, was the centrifuge.

“What does it do?” Clarence asked MacKay, which was akin to asking Rupert Bolin what a fountain pen does.

“The motor puts any substance in rotation around a fixed axis, so centrifugal force separates lighter and heavier components.”

“I flunked chemistry,” I said. “Apparently you didn’t.”

“Forensic toxicology is my passion. Solving crimes with science and technology. I love it. Don’t spread it around, but the DA’s office comes to me when they can’t afford to wait for test results. They came last month because they didn’t trust the chain of custody. There’ve been cases where detectives try to test evidence without officially turning it in.”

“That’s reprehensible,” I said, avoiding eye contact with Ray as I swallowed my Black Jack.

“Define forensics—and toxicology,” Clarence said, pen poised. “I want to get it straight so nobody whines about journalistic inaccuracies.” He gave me the eye.

“Forensics is the use of science and technology to investigate and establish facts in criminal court. Toxicology is the science of adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms.”

“In this case I was the living organism,” I said.

“So you think someone put something in your beer?” MacKay asked.

I took my trench coat out of the garbage bag and showed him the arm that had gotten drenched in the beer that night at Rosie O’Grady’s when Brandon Phillips called me. The same night he turned up dead.

MacKay put his nose to it. “Smells like beer. You sure you didn’t just have a few too many?”

“I know what a few too many is. There’s a firecracker; then there’s a bomb. This was a bomb. That’s why I didn’t wash the coat. And haven’t been wearing it.”

MacKay took the sleeve and looked at it with a magnifying glass. “Most of it’s still water repellant, but it’s worn enough that the beer soaked into spots and left a residue.

He clamped something viselike on it. He collected a few flakes into a miniature test tube. Next he put in a drop of some long-named chemical. No reaction. He cleaned the test tube and started over with a few more residue flakes in the tube. This time the chemical turned the flakes green.

“I’ve narrowed it down,” MacKay said.

“That quick? I’m used to waiting days.”

“It’s not just beer. There’s a toxin. Specifically, an aldehyde or a ketone. Which narrows it down to six or seven substances.”

“What substances?” Clarence asked, pen ready.

He named three of them, each at least a dozen letters, before Clarence raised his hand. “I’ll pass.”

MacKay said to me, “Considering the greenish stain and its effects on you and that there isn’t a smell, I’ve got a hunch.” He picked out two more bottles and put a sterile eyedropper in each. “I’m using benzidine dihydrochloride to see if there’s a reaction.”

Apparently there was, because he said, “Bingo.”

We waited for him to redo and confirm the results.

“Yeah. Chloralhydrate. It’s used as a sedative and sleep aid or as a dental anesthetic for children. And in bigger doses, as an anesthetic for large animals.” He grabbed a thick brown book off the wall.

“Why’d somebody use it on me?”

“Because you’re a large animal?” Ray asked.

“It mixes easily into alcohol. Can’t taste it. Induces sleep. Deep sleep.”

“You got that right,” I said.

He started reading aloud portions of a study of chloralhydrate done on two-year-old male mice. He read, “Russo and Levis, 1992, found chloralhydrate to be capable of inducing aneuploidy in mouse spermatocytes.”

“That’s more than I want to know,” I said.

“If you hadn’t been awakened,” MacKay said, “you might have been out six hours. Even if you’d gotten a blood test, chloralhydrate decomposes internally so quickly that it’s undetectable beyond four hours. Never shows up in an autopsy.”

“Autopsy?”

“Yeah. It can be fatal. Finish your beer?”

“Mostly.”

“We’d never have been able to prove what it was without the beer soaked into your trench coat. It paid off being a sloppy drinker.”

M
ONDAY
, J
ANUARY
20, 7:00
P.M
.

It was two months to the day since the professor’s murder. But the string included Frederick, Hedstrom, and Phillips, not to mention four unrelated deaths. Because of the high profile of the Palatine case and its apparent connection with three others, Manny and I had been given a bye when our number next came up. But Sergeant Seymour told me that next time, especially with Phillips gone, we’d have to take it. No problem now since the Palatine murder had been solved, right?

Then why did it feel wrong? Why couldn’t I let it go?

It was Monday Night Football again, at Jake’s. I called to say I’d be there by halftime. I thought I wanted to be alone and went to dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory.

Sometimes I get a craving for the pasta smothered in Mizithra Cheese, which I discovered in 1969, the first year the original Old Spaghetti Factory opened on Second Street downtown. I took Sharon, and we watched the silent movies while we waited an hour to be seated, which you always did back then. When we could, we’d eat in the streetcar. It was cheap, and we went twice a month. We loved it.

The problem with the Old Spaghetti Factory in Clackamas, fifteen minutes from my house, isn’t that it looks so different than the original. There’s still brass headboards and wrought iron chandeliers and a streetcar. No more silent movies, not so long a wait, but the food hasn’t changed much. The Mizithra’s still fabulous. The menu still says of Mizithra what it’s always said: “A toothsome treat for cheese lovers; legend has it that Homer lived on this while composing the
Iliad.”
Still the best Thousand Island dressing in Portland. Couples still sit across from each other, lost in conversation.

What’s changed is that Sharon isn’t with me anymore.

Despite the toothsome treat, I walked out realizing that I craved more than Mizithra. Some places you should never eat at by yourself. I’d just been at one of them.

Twenty minutes later I was at Jake’s. Early in the fourth quarter, he opened Carly’s old dorm room fridge, stocked with drinks.

“Get you a pop?”

Jake asked. “Coke,” I said.

Jake handed it to me. My eyes were aimed at the television, but my little gray cells were working, triggered by the word
pop
.

The sounds of cheering, announcers and Jake’s voice woke me to the outside world.

“Sherlock Holmes,” I said, “solved a case based on the depth parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot day.”

“Did he now?” Jake said. “I’ve got some trivia for you—there’s 3:32 left in the fourth quarter, it’s tied, and the Seahawks are deep in Eagles territory.”

“Why would somebody born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, never having lived elsewhere, ask, ‘You want a soda?’ ”

Jake shrugged, looking at me like I was losing it. “I don’t know.”

“The answer is, he wouldn’t.”