Ghost Sudoku (15 page)

“The cause of death—he was garroted.” Ted pushed away his plate. “That means Redbourne had to turn his back on his killer. I don’t see that happening in the middle of a big confrontation—”

“Like if John Jacob Pauncecombe came to accuse Chad of sleeping with Brandy . . .” Liza paused. “I could see the old man strangling Chad.” In fact, her mind’s eye could easily conjure up an image of the older man’s big hands closing around Chad’s throat.

She went on more slowly. “Maybe I could see Chad not wanting to meet the other guy’s eyes. But you’d think he’d have to notice Pauncecombe picking up the wire or whatever he used to do the job.” She frowned. “We’ve been going on the notion that this was a sort of spur-of-the-moment thing—that the killer was improvising.”

“Unless,” Ted said, “it was a carefully planned killing that went off the rails. The killer sneaks up on Redbourne—no talk, no questions, just choking him with a garrote brought for the purpose. The fake suicide could have been planned in advance. And then the packed suitcase turns up.”

“If it were planned, Pauncecombe wouldn’t start hollering at being questioned,” Liza objected. “He’d have his alibi established and all ready to recite.”

“Unless it’s not Pauncecombe.”

“Then I gave Clements a bum steer that only led him into trouble.” All of a sudden, Liza’s lunch wasn’t sitting all that well. “We must be missing something.”

“Like more facts or some solid evidence like the murder weapon.” Ted pushed his chair back. “Well, I can’t spend all day constructing elaborate theories with you. I have an investigation to pursue at the county elections office.”

“How is that going?” Liza asked.

Ted made a face. “All of the staffers—shall I say the surviving staffers?—seem to be glorified file clerks, paper pushers. Whatever Redbourne was doing with the phantom voters, he didn’t seem to let anyone in on it. We may wind up having to go weeding through every voter in the county.”

“Sounds like a lot of time and expense,” Liza said.

“Tell me about it,” Ted replied gloomily. “Well, off to the salt mines.”

They paid their bill and headed back out to Broad Street. Liza waved good-bye as Ted drove off.

Whistling tunelessly, she started up the street.

Speaking of the salt mines, I guess I’d better get back home and work on some sudokus,
she thought.

Retracing the route to her car took her past the offices of Killamook County Trust, one of the bigger local banks. A large poster in the window featured a dog at a computer, touting the ease of automated banking.

That’s all I’d need, Rusty able to go online and withdraw funds for doggie treats,
Liza thought.

But just as she was about to turn away, she spotted a familiar face—in fact, a pair of them. J.J. Pauncecombe and Oscar Smutz sat in front of the manager’s desk.

Liza remembered that bit of byplay at Chad’s memorial the evening before, where the undertaker had complained that the check for the event hadn’t cleared. She sidestepped behind the dog poster and peered around it.

The bank manager looked concerned as he consulted some papers in front of him. When he was done, J.J. got up without a word and headed for the door.

Liza quickly got out of the way. The last time she’d seen J.J. look that way had been at the championship game when J.J. had his gong rung pretty hard by a big linebacker. The coach had pulled J.J. out of the game, but for half an hour, he’d just sat on the bench, his eyes seeing nothing, his face sagging.

 

 

 

Liza waited until she got to her car before taking out her cell phone and calling Ava Barnes.

“Is this a call to tell me how many more columns you’re about to e-mail in, or do you have something exciting to pass along about this Redbourne mess?” That was Ava, always the editor.

“I went to the memorial for Chad last evening,” Liza said.

“They actually barred Murph at the door,” Ava told her. “He was getting ready to slug somebody until he realized there were TV cameras around.”

“He didn’t want to make a spectacle of himself in front of the enemy?”

“The competition,” Ava corrected. “I understand he missed one bit of excitement. The sheriff tried to ask John Jacob Pondscum some questions and got his head bitten off for his trouble.”

“Ah.” Of course that story would be making the rounds immediately. “I saw some of that exchange,” Liza admitted. “Any other fallout from it?”

“No,” Ava replied. “Not yet.”

That didn’t make Liza feel much better. But she had another subject to discuss with her editor.

“Something else happened,” she said. “At the end of the memorial, Mr. Freney came up to John Jacob. He said the check that the committee had cut to pay him had insufficient funds.”

“They must be yanking Freney’s chain.” Ava sounded very certain. “I’ve never heard of the Party hurting for money.”

“Where do John Jacob and the boys do their banking?” Liza asked.

“Oh, they spread their loot around to most every bank in the county,” Ava replied, “five, maybe six banks. Probably more goes to the local operations like Killamook Trust than the branches of the bigger outfits. Our political friends figure they can exert more leverage on neighbors who might need a favor instead of a manager who answers to a head office somewhere out of their control.”

“Well, I just walked past Killamook Trust,” Liza told her friend. “J.J. Pauncecombe was sitting at a desk with Oscar Smutz. And they looked as if they were getting an earful of bad news.”

“We don’t have a financial reporter at this office.” Ava spoke slowly but quickly made up her mind. “I can send Murph around to ask some questions, though. He knows enough people in the various offices.”

“And if they don’t give him a straight answer, he can probably figure out what they’re hiding,” Liza added.

Now it was her turn to hesitate. “Last night was the first time I saw J.J. in I don’t know how many years. He got married, I see.”

“Yeah, he picked up Donna the Doormat as some sort of consolation prize while he was flunking out of law school in Portland.” Ava definitely did not sound complimentary. “I guess you could call her the Queen of Denial, considering the way she shuts her eyes while he cats around.”

“So what exactly is J.J.’s place in the machine’s pecking order?” Liza asked. “I saw him standing right beside his dad, and when Freney came up with this check problem, John Jacob referred him to J.J.”

“That seems to be the kind of job he gets nowadays—responsibility without much authority,” Ava said. “Our boy J.J. suffers from a bad case of Prince Charles Syndrome—he’s the heir apparent, but when the hell is he supposed to inherit?”

“Huh.” Liza let her breath out in a puff. “Makes me wonder whether J.J. was at the bank on his dad’s say-so, or if he’s looking into it on his own hook. Then, too, why was Oscar Smutz along for the ride?”

“Well, the guy was a cop,” Ava pointed out.

“So what do you think? Does that make him the closest thing the machine has to an in-house investigator? And if so, what are they investigating?”

“I guess that’s what Murph will have to find out.” From the sound of Ava’s voice, she intended to call her investigative ace to get on the story right away.

But first, Liza reverted to managing editor mode. “Good-bye,” she told Liza. “Go home. Work.”

“Yes’m.” Liza cut the connection and started her car.

As she drove back to Maiden’s Bay, Liza tried to organize what she’d seen and heard over the past few days into some sort of coherent framework. Regrettably, she ended up forced to agree with Ted Everard. Despite all the stuff they had, they didn’t know enough.

This case felt like a sudoku puzzle with only a few spaces filled in and no candidates listed in the blanks. To paraphrase the great Donald Rumsfeld, they didn’t even have enough to know what they didn’t know.

The way this thing had twisted and turned, Liza wasn’t all that hot to bring Chad Redbourne’s killer to justice. Such high-flown pursuits were more in the way of intellectual skywriting. What mattered more right now was that a live friend was in trouble. Bert Clements had put himself on the Killamook machine’s S-list because of a clue that Liza had given him.

And Ava was right—John Jacob Pauncecombe’s threats were just the first shoe falling.

Liza stabbed a finger at her car radio. She didn’t want to listen, but she figured she’d most likely hear about the machine’s next move through their official propaganda arm, KMUC.

The afternoon pundit gassed for a while about national politics; then he announced a guest, the local district attorney, Cy Langdon.

“Here it comes,” Liza muttered.

She had no idea as to how successful the DA was at prosecuting and convicting criminals. But even her mom, who barely talked about politics, had Langdon pegged as a stooge for John Jacob Pondscum.

Langdon alternated between folksy language and lawyer-speak, but his meaning was crystal clear. His office was considering legal action against the TV network and the late-night show that had run the clip of Oscar Smutz. Apparently the theory was that they were stifling free speech by holding Oscar up to ridicule.

The subtext was also pretty apparent—that Bert Clements for his own dastardly purposes had pulled a dirty campaign trick.

“It comes down to this.” Langdon’s voice would have sounded a lot more sincere if he didn’t have a slight wheeze. “Do we want outsiders deciding our elections? Or shouldn’t the voters of Killamook be free to make up their own minds?”

That steaming shovelful got Liza so annoyed, she switched to the country-western station for the rest of the drive home.

Things were pretty calm back on Hackleberry Drive. Michael had taken Rusty for a walk, picked up some provisions, and copyedited some of Liza’s rough columns.

He also had a message from Buck and Alvin, asking for a meeting ASAP.

They convened over at Mrs. Halvorsen’s house. She gave everyone thimble-sized glasses of sherry. Then Liza went over everything she’d learned from Ted Everard about the sheriff’s investigation and added what she’d seen at the offices of Killamook Trust.

“I talked to Ava Barnes about that, too,” she finished. “She’s putting a good reporter onto checking with the banks around here.”

“I have some connections in the banking business,” Buck offered. “Let me talk to them and have them ask around.”

“I can do that, too,” Alvin said.

“The next item, from my point of view, is what can we do to help the sheriff? Ava thinks it’s just a matter of time before the machine comes up with something unpleasant. Pauncecombe certainly threatened his job because of something we dug up.”

“I don’t know how much more you can do,” Buck pointed out. “Technically, you’re still a suspect.”

“Not to mention that the people you want to protect the sheriff from are using you as a political football,” Alvin added.

“And even though I know that you, Mr. Foreman, and Mr. Hunzinger mean well, other people don’t,” Mrs. H. put in. “The district attorney was on the radio today, talking about outsiders tampering with the election.”

“I heard that,” Liza said gloomily.

“It’s just that whatever you do could be taken the wrong way.” The older woman looked at her watch. “The evening news is coming on.”

She turned on the big, old television set in front of the couch. They started with pretty much the same local fare—a breaking story about a fire burning up stores in Pacific City, followed by an interview with a food bank activist in Nehalem.

Next came some stories relating to national news, and then the anchor team went into “happy talk” mode.

“A local political candidate got some national coverage last night,” the male anchor said with a smile.

“But it’s not the kind of attention he might want,” his female counterpart went on. “Here’s Pat McNabb with the story.”

The now-infamous film clip of Oscar Smutz looking like a bullfrog ran, segueing into locally shot footage of the candidate on his pickup truck. It wasn’t the same speech-making try that Liza and Ted had seen, but it ended the same way, with chants of “Ribbit” drowning Smutz out.

Liza shrugged. “Well, I guess the cameras had to catch it sooner or later.”

The scene shifted back to the newsroom and the anchors. “In more Killamook political news, Orem Whelan became the acting elections chief, filling the office of the recently deceased Chad Redbourne. Given the murky circumstances of his predecessor’s demise, Whelan is promoting tough new standards.”

A film clip came on, featuring a rabbity-looking man trying to seem stern. “It seems there is only one way to ensure there are no irregularities in this election cycle,” he said, reading from a prepared statement. “I am requiring a new set of nominating petitions from each candidate.”

“There’s the other shoe,” Liza remarked. “The machine has the manpower to go out and get new petitions signed with no problem. But independent candidates like Ray Massini—and now Sheriff Clements—will have problems.”

Michael nodded. “Very neat. Takes care of two birds with one stone.”

“And we can expect this stooge to go over their petitions with a microscope to invalidate any signatures they can.”

“But that—that’s not right,” Mrs. Halvorsen huffed. “They want to keep us from voting for the mayor and the sheriff?”

“If this works, they might not even be able to run,” Alvin explained. “Although I suppose the whole matter could wind up in court.”

“Where the Killamook machine will keep delaying things until the election is over.”

“We can’t allow that,” Mrs. H. said decisively.

“I don’t know that there’s much that you or I can do.” Liza gestured to the others in the room. “And three of us aren’t even registered to vote around here.”

“Well, I’m going to start calling all my friends—and I have a lot of them.” Mrs. Halvorsen got up. “Some of them agreed to help when you were running . . .” She broke off with an embarrassed smile at Liza. “When we thought you were running for mayor. And after they hear about this dirty trick, I’ll bet I can get a lot more.”