Madeline Mann (13 page)

I wondered if that was a reference to the tape. Was Logan really so naïve as to think of that tape as an insurance policy? Especially in light of the fact that I might never have listened to it?

“But he asked me if I'd seen any of the mayor's people around town,” Wick continued. “He was feeling a little paranoid, like he needed to look over his shoulder. Which is why I don't know why he'd let someone in—”

“Are you sure he did?” I asked.

“The door wasn't forced, and Logan was shot in the living room, which is two rooms away from the door. The police are thinkin’ that he let someone in, that they went in that room together, and that Logan was killed there, where I found him.” His voice cracked on the last two words, and I felt I'd put him through enough questioning.

“Wick, I'm sorry. For everything you've had to go through. I'll leave you alone, but I'd like you to keep in touch about the funeral,” I requested gently.

“You keep in touch too, Madeline. I want to know everything you find out. Will you do that for me? Logan wasn't always on his best behavior—no one knows that better than me. But he was my son, and he didn't deserve this,” Wick said sadly.

“I'll notify you of anything I find out,” I promised.

Wick thanked me and we broke the connection. Now I had more information than I'd bargained for. Logan “had something” on the mayor, but he felt he was “covered” against harm. What did that mean, if not the tape itself? Had he been blackmailing Don Paul? And why was my mother under the impression that Logan had been fired for an interoffice affair? Could the mayor have been spreading a cover story? And what was Logan's “treasure chest”? More money?

I leaned my elbows on my desk, put my chin in my hands, and closed my eyes. Logan had created a complex little web for me to sort out.

As it happens, I like puzzles. My next step in solving this one, I realized, would have to be taken at city hall.

The
drizzle of the morning had finally ended, and the day had turned cold and bright. As I drove away from the
Wire
office down a quiet residential street, I saw a mother and child on their front porch, carving pumpkins. The little girl seemed tiny in a giant sweatshirt—not much larger than Noah Lanford. She held a bowl importantly while her mother did the dirty work of digging out seeds and dumping them into her daughter's waiting container. I smiled and waved when they looked up at my car. The smell of campfires was back in the air, along with a palpable sense of nostalgia. At holiday time, I often felt I was watching movies of my own past. I wondered if it was too early to carve pumpkins. My mother had always insisted they'd be a rotten mess if we didn't wait until the week before Halloween.
Rotten
, I thought. That was the word for the day. Something was rotten in the state of Webley.

I tried to concentrate on the various ways I could approach Lyle with my new information. I was sure that I'd be better off pretending to know more than I did. Jack loved to tell me the story of his friend Ralph Washington, one of the deans of Webley High School, who often seemed to use methods straight out of a police procedures manual in dealing with student malefactors. Once he had pulled a reported nark out of the lunchroom to grill him about the artwork of an unknown graffiti tagger. The nervous boy had said, “I guess you should talk to Joey Miles.” Without batting an eye, the dean had replied, “Ah, so it
was
Joey,” as though he'd suspected that particular honors student all along.

It went undisputed that my intimidation of Lyle and the mayor would be more successful if I implied that I knew all, and then merely awaited their confession. However, if they denied everything, I would be left with nothing.

I mulled this over as I parked my car outside city hall. I decided to go with the inspiration of the moment and to do all I could to get my information from Don Paul rather than his lackey.

I marched into the building, past the secretarial pool, past the listless girl who took the water bills, past the effeminate man who headed customer complaints, and on to the stairway that led to Don Paul's paradise.

Ascending for the third time that day, I wondered if I would actually lose a pound from the extra effort or if I would just be sore and equally puffy tomorrow.

At the top of the stairs, I found Blanche missing from her desk, Pamela busy on the phone, my mother typing away (her speed was almost a hundred words per minute), and Lyle, blessedly, nowhere to be seen. In the two seconds it took for me to assess the situation, Don Paul burst out of his office with a stack of papers and set it in front of my mom. “Here are the others, Delia. I don't know if you can finish them today, but I sure would appreciate it by the end of tomorrow.” My mother nodded with a professional blankness in her expression. Apparently character is lessened with each generation, because I know I would have sent him a dark look and implied that I was overworked.

Paul spotted me and displayed all the enthusiasm of a wolf in a trap. “Oh, Madeline. I see you did come back. Great. Well”—he looked desperately around for Lyle—“I guess you'll have to wait until Lyle—”

“Gee, while we're waiting for him, why don't I ask you a couple of questions?” I asked sweetly. “It might seem kind of funny in the article if I say, ‘The mayor was unavailable for comment’ after all the allegations are listed. It might sound like you have a guilty conscience.”

He blinked at me. “What allegations?”

I peered into my empty notebook. “The list of allegations Logan Lanford made about your administration before he was murdered. You want me to read them to—”

“Why don't you step into my office?” he asked quickly, with a phony smile for everyone around us. “I'm sure we can sort through Logan's creative ravings. It's understandable that a disgruntled employee would make comments of an unsavory nature about the people who fired him. But you'll have to be careful about what you print, Madeline. You don't want Thorpe to end up with a lawsuit for libel on his desk.” He said it in the friendliest of tones, as though he were asking me to attend the company picnic. I'm not sure anyone else even noticed the threat.

I had gained entry into the king's chamber, however, so I temporarily overlooked his aspersions against my professionalism and proceeded to cast doubt upon his.

“Would you like to tell me anything about Logan that you feel the public should know?” I asked in my best objective-reporter tone, sitting down across from his desk in a red leather chair. The entire office, I now noticed, was decorated in tones of red, white, and black. It was elegant and top of the line, including his desk, a mahogany masterpiece that dominated the room.

“Of course, I'd like to say that Logan, up until his firing, had been a valued employee of five years and that he still has many friends among his former colleagues, who are devastated by the news of his death—including myself.” He looked appropriately grave, and I knew that the line had been rehearsed in the eventuality that Lyle somehow failed in the defensive.

“So why was Logan fired? Couldn't he have been formally chastised for whatever infraction—”

“I'm afraid that's Logan's private business, and mine. It wouldn't be appropriate to discuss his employee—”

“Unless, of course, it all comes out in the police investigation,” I interrupted cheerfully.

“What police investigation? I mean, as I understand it, the man was killed in Michigan. I don't see why you think that Logan's employment here will be a matter for inquiry.” He knit his brows in a theatrical expression, and I had that same old feeling that everything Don Paul did was orchestrated for effect.

“Well.” I knit my own brows, as though unsure how much I could tell him without breaching my journalistic ethics. “Obviously there are some things I can't go into either. The newspaper has its own ongoing investigation, separate from that being run by the Saugatuck police.”

He smiled and shook his head when I said “newspaper,” as though the
Wire
were a negligible threat. It was true we were a little local paper, but we had won prestigious awards. Don Paul would pay for that particular slight, I vowed silently.

“In any case,” I said, “I should warn you that I have statements from two different witnesses who link the mayor's office with Logan Lanford in the time just before his death and on the day of his death.”

Don Paul's smile disappeared. “What do you mean, ‘link the mayor's office’?”

“You know your official city car, Mayor Paul? Someone driving that car was dogging Logan Lanford on the night he disappeared from Webley.” I pretended to consult my notes. “That would be Wednesday night. The witness describes Logan as disturbed by what the driver had to say, as though that person was threatening him in some way. That night Logan left town. Three days later, Logan was dead. Another witness spotted the same car leaving the residence of Logan Lanford not long before his body was discovered.”

Never mind the fact that the witness was me and that I hadn't technically seen the car at Logan's cabin—only at the rest stop and later back in the lot, covered with mulberries. In any case, my white lie had the desired effect, and Don Paul's face lost its smirk and its color.

“I doubt there's any way to prove that it was a car from—”

“Oh, sure there is. It has a license plate. And a distinctive bumper sticker in the back of the rear window,” I countered, looking him in the eye.

I think Don Paul developed a new respect for me then, or maybe hatred. He sat and looked at me for a moment, at a total loss for words, although he tried to make it look as though he were merely meditating on life's little coincidences.

“I checked the sign-out book,” I added thoughtfully. “The funny thing is, no one signed the car out this weekend—or on Wednesday, for that matter—and yet the car has been hither and yon, causing lots of trouble. The driver might even be implicated in a murder.” I widened my eyes in the manner of the doe-eyed blonde he thought he'd dismissed earlier.

He began to speak and emitted only a croaking sound. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I'll need to look into this matter further. Obviously someone stole the car, or someone in my office took it without my permission, for whatever reason. I can certainly attest that the driver was not myself or Lyle Sylvane.”

Now that, I thought, showed the character of the man. When times are tough, never mind the others, get yourself and your slimy dogsbody out of the foxhole. “Gee, I hope it wasn't my mom who killed Logan Lanford,” I said.

My sarcasm was lost on him. “I certainly hope that we can rule out everyone in this office,” he said in an official tone. Now that the shock had passed, he was creeping back into his mayor outfit, the one immune to barbs, nuanced conversation, and implications of wrongdoing. “But I myself will be contacting the police in—what town did you say, Saugatuck?—to assure them that my office was not involved. The local police can then look into the theft of my car.” That would be interesting for Detective Perez, who didn't know Don Paul from a hole in the ground.

“Wouldn't someone have to break into city hall to steal the keys? Wouldn't they have to know where they were?” I asked dubiously.

“Again, I'm sure the local police will look into that,” he said smoothly. Suddenly he broke his official countenance with an eager idea. “Unless it was hot-wired. It could have been hot-wired. These things happen all the time. Living as close to Chicago as we do, we're bound to attract certain, uh…miscreants.” He looked downright triumphant.

Since Webley was a full hour from Chicago and not as affluent as many closer suburbs, this seemed hard to buy. “Miscreants polite enough to return the car when they're finished with it?” I asked, hoping that I didn't sound as smug as I felt.

Paul didn't reply; however, his face seemed to register unpleasant surprise, as though the smell of onions had suddenly permeated the room.

“In any case,” I told him, “you'll probably want to assure your public that there's nothing amiss, so if you'd like to give me a statement, I'll—”

“I'll have Pamela release a statement after I look into this myself. Until then, I don't think there's anything more I can tell you.” It was a dismissal, although the condescension had at least temporarily disappeared from his manner. I had briefly shaken him, and I counted it as a small victory.

Back in the lobby, the door closed firmly behind me, I was about to approach my mother and Pamela about our lunch date when Lyle came sliding in. One of my naughty impulses sent me quickly over to his desk.

“Lyle, do you have a minute?” I asked with what I hoped was a winsome smile.

“Sure,” he said, surprised.

“Is there somewhere we can talk where no one will hear?” I asked.

Because Lyle was Lyle, he automatically jumped to the conclusion that my request was sexual in nature; never mind the fact that we were in his place of business and my mother was three desks away. His eyes darted around momentarily, and then they lit up.

“Yeah, sure, if that's what you want. Come on over here.” He led me toward a room at the end of the loft, just beside the stairway. He chatted as he went, slathering on the phony compliments. “I can't get over how great you look with that blonde hair! It's like overnight you turned into Marilyn Monroe or Britney Spears or someone.” I thanked him, confident that I looked not remotely like either one.

Lyle opened the door of the room at the back. Upon entering, I saw that it was a modest break room, containing a table, a sink, a microwave, and a refrigerator. It was spotless. I knew that my mother had cleaned it, in that near-psychic way I sometimes have.

I moved toward the table, but Lyle winked at me. “No, come here.” He had gone to the corner of the room, which held a little coat rack, and moved the rack aside. “Not too many people know about this little door, but just because they ain't very observant,” he commented. Behind the coats was a small door, like the kind that led into attics. This one, I noted as Lyle climbed through, didn't lead to stairs but to another room beyond: a room that was ten degrees colder and smelled of stale smoke.