Impulse (20 page)
Rosemary cleared papers away from one edge and flopped down on the bed. “I need to get to the gym more often,” she said. “That walk couldn’t have been more than four miles and I’m whipped.”
They’d returned to the hotel in relative silence. Frank knew she wanted to hear it all, but he wanted time to think it through. He could be wrong. How good was his “logged out” memory and what were the possibilities that all of his and Jack’s work had survived a quarter of a century? The clearing in the honeysuckle thicket didn’t prove anything. It could have been discovered and rediscovered numerous times over the years and easily repaired.
“Are you up for lunch?” he asked.
“Not looking like this,” she said.
“You look fine.”
“I am sweaty, tousled, and in my grubby clothes. I need a shower, a session with my makeup, and at least a half hour to get myself moderately presentable. And don’t tell me I look fine. Men say that all the time. Here’s a flash—women don’t care whether we look fine to them or not, it’s everybody else we’re concerned about.”
“I hear you. Tell you what. Since there’s no room service, I’ll just wash up, take my cell phone to the lobby, and make some calls. You can meet me there when you are sufficiently repaired to face the world. Then we’ll have lunch.”
She sat up and pulled off her cap, spilling her wonderful, platinum hair around her shoulders. She shook it out and began unbuttoning her blouse. He grabbed the phone, checked his pockets, and left without washing up. In his rush, he missed her grin.
***
He was staring at the phone when she emerged from the elevator. He didn’t notice her and looked up only when she stood in front of him.
“Frank? Hello, anybody home?”
She came into focus. He exhaled, but his eyes were still fixed somewhere in space. “Right, are you ready?” he said, voice flat. She pirouetted in front of him.
“Ready as I’ll ever be. How about you? Did you manage to find a wash basin?”
He raised his arm, wagging his wrist toward the restrooms. “Yeah. If it’s all right with you, I’d like to skip the idea of driving somewhere. Is it okay to go next door to eat? I have some things to do this afternoon…I need some time….”
“Frank, are you all right?”
“Am I? No. I don’t know. I’ll tell you at lunch.”
There were only a half dozen customers in the restaurant. He glanced at his watch and discovered it was after two. They ordered and sipped their drinks.
“What’s up, doc?” she asked. She leaned forward smiling, trying to see behind his eyes.
He looked up. His hands were palms down on the table’s surface, and his thumbs moved back and forth, making squeaking sounds. “I have to go home,” he said. “Right away, tomorrow, as soon as I can get packed. I need to talk to my daughter…she may want to go with me.”
“What’s up?” she asked again, this time seriously.
“They found Sandy’s body. Four years and they finally found it out in the desert. I have to go home.”
“Found? Frank, who found your wife’s body? The police?”
He nodded and brought his thumbs under control.
Their lunch came and they ate in silence. That is, she ate. Frank picked.
“This changes everything,” he said. “I’ll have to call the airlines, change my ticket again…check out of here, leave…this…you….”
“Of course, you do. Can I help? I have a travel agent I can call. She can at least take that job off your to-do list.”
“Yes, thank you, if that’s not too much trouble. I need to call Barbara.” But he didn’t move to make the call. “The truth is, I’m afraid to call her. I don’t know what the cops are going to do to me when I get there.”
“Well, there’s no sense worrying about that now,” she said. “Give me your phone and I’ll call the agent. I’ll tell her to book reservations in both your names. If you need to cancel one you can.” She phoned the agent. “When did you want to fly out?”
He thought a minute. “Late tomorrow afternoon would be best. That way, I’ll have a little time in the evening to get myself organized before the cops descend on me, I hope. And it will give us a little time to clear up this missing boy business.” She raised her eyebrows at that, murmured into the phone, then snapped it shut.
“You still want to? I mean do you think we can?” she asked. “It’s really important you don’t leave with this thing still hanging. We owe it to those families. We opened up that box of horrors again. We can’t just drop it. They need closure. Everyone does. But under the circumstances—”
“I think we can do it, Rosemary. But I’ll need a favor from your friend the judge.”
“I don’t know about that, Frank. He’ll certainly try to do something, but the last time, the police wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
“I don’t care about the police. I want him to write some official-looking order requiring certain people to meet me at the school’s main gate tomorrow morning at eight o’clock.”
“Can he do that? I mean order people to do that?”
“I don’t think so, but they may not know that and even if they do, their curiosity will bring them out. At least one of them will be there.”
“Who?”
“The guilty one.”
“Are you going to tell me who that is?”
“Yes, in a minute.”
“Why not just call them yourself?”
“I have no clout in these parts. I’m just an old man—”
“Experienced.”
“Not this time—old. An old man with an idea. And I need them all there. I am not Hercule Poirot and do not have Inspector Japp to insist they attend.”
“Or Nero Wolf…no Archie Godwin to round up the cast of suspects.”
He smiled. “No, or Nero Wolf either. You’re my Archie. That’s why I need your judge. He will sound sufficiently authoritarian to get them there. He should use language like
official reopening of the investigation
or
important new evidence,
things like that. It will get them. Oh, and you should invite your friend the ex-cop, the one working the cold case who gave us all the documents. He deserves to hear this. One more thing, I need couriers, messengers to deliver the judge’s orders to them all ASAP.”
“I’ll call in some favors from George’s old buddies. They have the muscle to pull this off. Okay, we need a fake court order and a messenger service to deliver them today. Consider it done. Now, are you going to tell me what happened, or do I have to wait until tomorrow, too?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to see you cry.”
“Try me.”
He told her the story. She did cry—a lot.
Phelps let Ledezma and Pastorella stand while he shuffled papers into a pile and swept a handful of paperclips into the middle drawer of his desk. He didn’t have anything against the sergeant or his partner, but he didn’t like time wasters either and Ledezma, at least, had wasted time and resources. He looked up. Ledezma was inspecting the putter on the desk.
“It’s a Ping,” Phelps said. “It needs to be cleaned and re-gripped. Dave Fowler gave it to me.” Ledezma took his eyes from the putter and looked at him. He seemed uncomfortable. He knew where the putter came from. Good, Phelps wanted Ledezma to be second guessing. It was time to finish this business once and for all. He waved Officer Gutierrez in and motioned for her to sit. Ledezma looked at the rookie and started to say something.
“Sit,” Phelps said and gestured toward two gray steel chairs. “Since Officer Gutierrez is our intern, I want her to hear this. She can learn something before she gets shipped off to traffic. Bring me up to date on the Smith case.”
Ledezma cleared his throat. Pastorella looked nervous and dug a notebook out of his jacket pocket. Phelps couldn’t be sure if he would be reading from it or writing in it. Pastorella never struck him as the sharpest tool in the shed.
“We are getting closer,” Ledezma began. Pastorella nodded. “The body they found in the desert is the wife. We have a pretty good circumstantial case on him and once we confront him with it, he’ll crack.”
“You had a crew of divers in a lake behind his house on Monday. What for?”
“Right, we found his gun.”
“His gun. That all?”
“Yes, but it’s the right caliber for the wound in the body’s skull.”
“The dive team leader says you kept them in the water three hours after they found the gun. What was that all about?”
“I thought we’d find her jewelry.”
“Her jewelry? Why did you think you’d find her jewelry in the lake?”
“Well, it wasn’t on her at the crime scene. That means he must have taken it—”
“And then threw it in the lake?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You buying this, Pastorella?”
“Well, it does tie together.”
“Who did you talk to this week?”
“Insurance salesman, the guy who sold Smith the million dollars on his wife, double indemnity, no less.”
“What’d he say?”
“Um…not much. He tried to tell me that buying the insurance was her idea or something. But that don’t seem too likely, under the circumstances.”
“Why?”
“Well, he clipped her and he gets the money. What’s in it for her? He’s lying.”
Phelps leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his stomach. “Tell you what, why don’t you lay out your case for me exactly as you see it. The body, the gun, the jewelry—all of it.”
Ledezma perked up and pulled out his notebook. “Okay,” he said, “I figure it this way—Smith decides to kill his wife. They’re fighting, another woman, something. The woman next door is my guess—hot-looking fifty-something. He’s a smart ass mystery story writer who thinks he’s the guy to commit the perfect murder, only he isn’t.” Ledezma looked around and got an encouraging nod and a weak smile from Pastorella.
“So he says ‘Let’s go out to the desert and take a walk,’ or something. They get out there and he says, ‘Take off your jewelry.’ Then he pulls the gun. She drops on her knees and begs him, something like that. He steps up behind her. She starts to pray. The ME says she had her head down like she was praying. And he pops her.”
“Why does he take the jewelry?”
“Don’t know. Maybe to give to his kids, maybe for the bimbo he’s got on the side, maybe to make it look like a robbery.”
“Why’d he toss it in the lake, assuming he did? You never found any jewelry, did you?”
“No. See, they’d be pretty small and in all that mud, they’d be hard to find. I’m thinking when he feels us closing in, before we got the warrant to search his house, he got spooked and threw the gun and the jewels in the lake. Up to then he could sit on them. Or he could have ditched them somewhere else.”
“Or given it to the girlfriend,” Pastorella chimed in.
“Assuming there is a girlfriend. Did either of you check that angle out?”
The two detectives exchanged glances. Ledezma shrugged.
“One more question for you two,” Phelps said. He sat up in his chair and took them both in with eyes that had gone from friendly sky blue to steely gray. “Did either of you check any incident reports for the area for that day or anytime within, say, three months, just in case?”
“I did,” Pastorella said, and opened his book.
“Did you read one called in by a Ms. Kindernecht?”
“The screwy broad? Yeah, I glanced at them. She’s a nut. Elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor. She calls stuff in all the time. She sees suspicious people in the neighborhood, her cat’s missing, the neighbors are making too much noise, can we reroute the planes from Luke Air Force Base. The woman’s a pain in the butt.”
“But you did read them?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Anything?”
“In her calls? You’re kidding, right?”
Phelps considered what he should say next. These were good police officers. Ledezma had a future. Pastorella, maybe, maybe not. Sometimes a man gets an idea and won’t let it go. When that happens, when the need to be right overshadows the need to be careful, bad guys walk, innocent guys get hassled or maybe even do time. Ledezma had been on the writer’s case from the get-go and had missed things.
Phelps wished he could smoke his cigar. These sessions always went better for him in the old days when they could smoke in the office. Now, if he wanted to smoke he had to go downstairs and out the back door and stand by the Dumpster. He sighed.
“Okay, this is the way I see it. Ledezma, you got a bug up yours about this guy. You want him way too bad. And because of that you aren’t paying attention and are going to blow this one.” Ledezma squirmed in his chair.
“You two need to learn to play
what if.
When a case goes this cold, a
what if
can break it open.”
“A what if?” Pastorella asked.
“Yeah. Look, you say to yourself, what if there isn’t a girlfriend, what if the insurance man is telling the truth, what if the screwy woman said something important, what if Smith is not the guy. What then?”
“But he is the guy,” Ledezma almost shouted.
“You say so, but what does the evidence tell you?”
“Lieutenant, I know it’s circumstantial, but it’s there.”
“That’s the point, Manny. It’s not there, never was. You wanted it to be there, so you only pushed in one direction.”
Ledezma’s face reddened. He started to say something. Something Phelps feared might have career-altering consequences. He lifted his hand off the table, palm out.
“Listen to me. What did the ME say? In his final report he says, after the details about the condition of the body et cetera, he says, ‘The victim was probably shot while kneeling. She most likely was holding her hands together, one over the other because her left ring finger had been cut off. This would indicate a brutal assault on her before the fatal shot was fired. Her head was bent forward, probably in response to the pain in her hand.’” Phelps looked up. Ledezma sat absolutely still. He opened his mouth to say something and then stopped.
“‘Parts of her clothing,’” Phelps read, “‘what appear to be shorts or capri pants, while showing the effects of being in the open and subject to insects and rodents, appear to have been removed and then placed with her body before the canvas was put over her. This would indicate a possible sexual assault as well.’ And then he says, ‘The body is too badly decomposed to extract DNA with any certitude, but we do have possible residue on the clothes which we will test and put into the computer.’ You with me so far?”
Ledezma’ face had faded from red to gray. Pastorella looked confused and a little worried. He kept shifting his attention from Phelps to Ledezma.
“Now here’s the next piece. You never went back to the ME for the final?” Ledezma shook his head. “Okay. ‘The body had been covered with a scrap of canvas measuring five and a half feet by six. It had a trim piece of vinyl on one edge indicating it was once part of an awning or perhaps a covering for a table.’ That ringing any bells, Pastorella?”
Pastorella frowned and chewed on the end of his pencil.
“An awning? Anything? No? Well, we move on. The ME adds as his final note, ‘In conclusion, it is my professional opinion the woman, Saundra Smith, was murdered after she was beaten, raped, and robbed. Her finger was removed by a very sharp knife probably because she could not get her wedding band off quickly enough for her attackers. She was pushed to her knees and shot on the spot. A second search of the scene produced the bullet buried in two feet of dirt on the trajectory such an analysis suggests. The finger has not been found. The assumption must be made that some animal found it and took it away.’
“Now, let us go through the incident reports for Mrs. Smith’s neighborhood. This would be your area, Pastorella. Do you remember anything coming down about that time?” The two men looked blank.
“Two months after she disappeared, our people and the INS raided a house on a street ten blocks from where she lived. They removed forty-five illegal immigrants that day. Another half dozen beat it over the fence and got away. You with me?” They looked at each other and back at him.
“Let me give you a quote from our Ms. Kindernecht, ‘I told your men before there was something funny about that house. I told them about the nice woman they ran after and took away in the van.’
“Now we go back to the day Smith’s wife disappeared. Incident report for that day, one of a couple of dozen. Easy to overlook, especially if it’s from Ms. Kindernecht. ‘Three men came out of the house and stopped a nice looking lady, I think I’ve seen her before, and then they put her in a van and drove away.’ The receiving officer asked, ‘Did they force her in any way?’ She replies, ‘No, but they might have had a knife or a gun, mightn’t they?’ Officer: ‘Can you describe the van?’ Ms. Kindernecht: ‘It was brown and had a picture of…’ Are you ready for this?…‘an awning on it.’” The two officers sat on the edge of their chairs. Phelps couldn’t even detect breathing.
“Here’s the way it went down, boys. She goes for a walk, like the husband says. She’s on the street where the illegal immigrant smugglers, the
coyotes
, have set up their drop house. She sees something. Maybe a shade goes up by accident—whappa, bap, bap—something, she turns at the sound and she’s eyeballing a gang of illegals standing around in the living room. She stands there gawking, and while she’s wondering what to do, three
coyotes
slip out the door, put a gun or a knife in her back and drive her away. Maybe they’re headed to Nogales anyway. They drive into the desert, God only knows what they did to her out there, and then they shot her. They cover her up with a scrap of awning from the van and leave her. There’s a report from Mesa about a stolen van, by the way. It turned up in Bisbee later.”
The three men sat in silence. Ledezma and Pastorella studied the shine on their shoes as if they might be inspected by the President of the United States and their entire future depended on him approving it. Gutierrez sat with her mouth open.
“Now what?” Ledezma said.
“Now, Manny, you go apologize to Frank Smith. Pastorella, you too.”
Ledezma looked at Phelps. “Does this go in my—”
“Jacket? Not this time, Manny. We all get one of these sometime in our career. We just know that we know. And then it turns out we’re wrong. Been there myself. And I need all the men I can get. But you find Smith and you make nice, or I could change my mind.”
