Shadow Man (25 page)

Lila Mae McTeague looked up. “What?”

“I
know
I had a brand-new twenty-dollar bill. Now all I see is a scruffy five and a couple of beat-up ones.” He pocketed the billfold. “Well, it’s not an earthshaking problem. After yelling and cussing some, the Big T always takes my IOUs.”

“You don’t have a credit card?”

He tried to look embarrassed. “I’d rather not talk about that.”

She reached for her purse. “Never mind. I’ll take care of the bill.”

He shook his head. “No. I’d never stick a lady with the check. I’ll have a man-to-man talk with Tony and—”

“No,” she said firmly. “I said I’d take care of it and I will. So let’s not have another word about it.”

With a doubtful look, he shrugged.

McTeague shifted gears. “Charlie—there’s something I should tell you about. But you must treat it as strictly confidential.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s about that body part that turned up in Moccasin Lake.”

The tribal investigator nodded. “The infamous dismembered arm.”

“Right. Which Mrs. Blinkoe identified as having once been a functional portion of her husband’s body.”

“So what about it, McTeague?”

“Bureau Forensics has completed a series of tests on the specimen—including a detailed DNA analysis.” She watched his face very closely. “A comparison was made to tissues obtained from a prostate biopsy Dr. Blinkoe underwent eighteen months ago. Bottom line is this: That particular arm was never attached to Manfred Blinkoe’s body.”

Moon returned a blank stare.

“Excuse me, Charlie—but you don’t seem particularly surprised.”

“It’s probably because in my duties as a law-enforcement professional, I’ve seen and heard just about everything. I am a hard man to surprise.”

“I don’t buy that.”

“Then put it down to my legendary gambling skills.”

“Your
what
?”

“I was referring to my exceptional poker face.”

“Then you
are
surprised?”

He picked up a highly polished silver cream dispenser, carefully examined the reflection of his exceptional poker face. “I don’t know, Lila Mae—I’m
so
good at this, it’s really hard to tell.”

“Charlie, don’t fool around—this is serious. Some John Doe’s arm has been found with Dr. Blinkoe’s watch and ring on it. Which forces one to consider some rather disturbing possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“Well, it’s rather obvious—Blinkoe could still be alive. He might have staged the boat explosion to fake his disappearance. And to make it look convincing, he might have left a corpse behind—or at least a portion of a corpse—with his ring and watch attached to it.”

“Yeah. I guess it could’ve happened like that.” Moon turned the creamer in his hands. “But Dr. Blinkoe would be bound to know that a DNA test would ruin his evidence—even suggest he was still among the living. Seems a lot more likely some bad guy took Dr. Blinkoe’s watch and ring by force.”

“Oh, sure.” She flung her hands in the air. “And then blew himself up in the houseboat!”

“That sounds just a tad unlikely, McTeague.” He set the silver creamer aside. “But I won’t say you couldn’t be right. After all the strange things I’ve seen in this world, nothing amazes me.”

“Listen, Charlie—if you know something you aren’t telling me—”

The waiter appeared. “Was everything quite satisfactory?” Assured by both diners that it was, he continued. “I am directed to tell you that if you should wish to order dessert, it will be on the house.”

Big Tony was wedged behind the counter, beaming at Moon and the good-looking tootsie.
There ain’t no way that long-legged cutie pie is goin’ to pay for Chollie’s lunch.

“Thank you,” McTeague said, “but I will not want any dessert.”

This has to look good.
Moon sighed, as if he had lost his appetite for sweet things. “Me neither.” He gave the waiter a sad look. Sad enough to make an IRS auditor weep. Then he added a dash of humiliation. “Uh—tell Tony I need to have a word with him. In private.”

“No!” McTeague snatched the check. “Lunch is on me.”

Big Tony’s double chin fell twenty dollars’ worth.

At shortly after ten that night, special agent McTeague’s telephone rang. She smiled at the readout on the caller ID screen. “Hello, Charlie.”

“Hello yourself, McTeague.”

She put her book aside, leaned back on a flowered sofa. “It’s only been a few hours since we had lunch. You missing me already?”

“You bet.”

“How much do you miss me?”

“Three or four bushels. Matter of fact, aside from an ailing heifer down in the riverside corral, you’re all I can think about.”

“I come in second to a sick cow. You are very sweet.”

“Either that, or I suffer from limited mental capacity.”

“I’ll buy that. What’s up?”

“At Big Tony’s, while you were ruining my appetite with all that talk about rotten human flesh, there was something I wanted to ask you about—it completely slipped my mind.”

“Define ‘it.’”

“Uh—I forget. Just a second. Oh, now I remember. It was about Mrs. Pansy Blinkoe.”

“Before you ask—no, the Bureau has not located her. And her brother, Clayton Crowe, also continues to elude us.”

“Then maybe you’ll be interested in what’s on my mind.”

McTeague closed her eyes. “Don’t tell me—another hunch.”

“All right, I won’t.”

“It was merely a figure of speech, cowboy. It’s okay for you to tell me.”

“I’m glad you explained that.”

“So what’s on your mind?”

“I think you oughta check out Mrs. Blinkoe’s family.”

“That’s routine procedure, Charlie. I already have a preliminary report on my desk from the field office in Nashville. Pansy Crowe grew up in western Tennessee with her parents and her older brother. She was a C student, a cheerleader, had a few minor run-ins with the law. Nothing too serious. Usual teenage stuff.”

“What about her brother?”

“Clayton was a better student. He trained as a diesel mechanic.” She curled up on the couch. “You have a particular interest in Pansy’s brother?”

“I’d like to know what happened to him.”

“So would I. But I’d much rather know where Pansy is hiding. Perhaps she’s with her brother.”

“Could be. But I think you should take a
close
look at her family.”

“What, exactly, am I looking closely for?”

“First time I met Mrs. Blinkoe, I was struck by her pretty blue eyes.”

McTeague smiled. “I’m sure you were.”

“I think she got ’em from her parents.”

“From what I’ve been told, that is nature’s usual course.”

“Well, I’d like to talk to you all night, Lila Mae.”

“Would you?”

“But I got me a sick heifer to doctor.”

“Good-bye, Dr. Moon.”

“Good night, Special Agent McTeague.”

Phillipe’s Streamside Restaurant was immersed in that hushed transition between lunch and dinner, when tables were being draped with clean linen cloths and decorated with cunningly folded napkins and spotless silver flatware. It was also the time when the heavily tattooed dishwasher stepped outside to smoke a skinny little Jamaican cigar, whilst speculating about the ultimate meaning of Life and the Universe and what the Red Sox might accomplish late in the season.

With the entire customer parking lot at his disposal, Scott Parris edged his black-and-white into the shade of a perfectly conical blue spruce. He nodded at the meditating dishwasher, entered through the kitchen, exchanged a few words with the pasty-faced pastry chef, passed down a narrow hallway, knocked on a door marked
MANAGER
.

Phillipe jerked the door open, looked down the hall. “Did anyone see you come in?”

Parris responded in a serious tone. “Nope. I slid down the chimney.”

As he closed the door behind the burly cop, the proprietor showed not the least sign of amusement.

The Granite Creek chief of police removed his hat, grinned at the nervous fellow. “So what’d you want to see me about?”

“It’s my groundskeeper.”

“Old Willie—the senior citizen who works for table scraps and a bed in the shed?”

Phillipe chose to ignore this display of impertinence. “Ever since the unfortunate incident—”

“You refer to the brutal murder of one of your customers?”

The thin man paled. “If you must be so blunt, yes. Ever since that unfortunate incident, my groundskeeper has been—how shall I say it?” He tried to think of just the right expression.

Parris waited.

It finally came to him. “Ill at ease.”

The town’s top cop leaned forward, his palms making spots on Phillipe’s previously spotless glass-topped desk. “Is he worried we’ll ID him as a witness to the killing?”

The businessman winced at the word. “I suppose that’s a possibility.”

“You want me to have a talk with Willie, reassure him the department won’t mention his name to the media—that it?”

Phillipe’s dark eyes did not blink. “That is not it.”

Parris’s patience was running close to the empty mark. “Then what
do
you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.” Phillipe nibbled at a fingernail. “It’s just that he’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I haven’t the least idea. My headwaiter informed me this morning that the old man was nowhere to be found. I took the liberty to inspect his lodgings—”

“You mean the equipment shed.”

Phillipe glared across his desk at the coarse policeman. “All of his belongings appear to be in his quarters. It’s as if…as if he simply walked away.”

“This Old Willie—he have a last name?”

“Everyone has a last name.” The restaurateur shrugged. “But he was not an official employee, so I didn’t keep any records. He merely slept in the—” Phillipe was about to say
shed,
“in his assigned lodgings. If he volunteered to do some work, that was fine with me. But it was not required.”

“You didn’t pay him?”

Another shrug. “Oh, from time to time I gave him a few dollars.” He frowned at a Tiffany lamp. “A man that old, he must have had a pension of some sort—or perhaps he was drawing Social Security.”

“This prosperous old guy have a set of wheels?”

“I do not know. Employees are encouraged to park their vehicles across the highway, in the mall lot.”

Parris looked out the window. “Let’s go have a look at Willie’s assigned lodgings.”

The shed was crammed almost to overflowing with fifty-pound bags of fertilizer, gallon jugs of weed killer, an assortment of paint cans and brushes, and virtually every hand tool known to man. Plus a rusty gasoline-powered lawn mower, a garden tractor that looked almost new, a dirt-encrusted wheelbarrow, about a ton of fresh sod.

In a dark corner, the groundskeeper had cleared out a space for himself. There was a folding card table that—judging from the single plate, knife, and fork, and the stack of paperback books—evidently did double duty for Old Willie’s dining and reading needs. On the wall above a makeshift cot topped with a plastic-covered mattress, there was a rough pine shelf that supported a cheap-looking radio and a Kerr jar with a green toothbrush and tube of toothpaste stuffed inside. A Cattleman’s Bank calendar was suspended from a nail. Parris turned backward through the pages. The aged man, who’d had so few days left, had been marking them off one by one. The marks stopped at the day before yesterday.

“You see,” Phillipe said with an expansive gesture, “all of his meager belongings are still here. Why would he just walk away?”

Parris felt a sour coldness settling into his stomach. He was absolutely certain that the old man had not simply “walked away.” On that night when the woman on the restaurant patio was shot in the head, maybe Old Willie had seen more than he’d admitted to. And even if he hadn’t, maybe the shooter had decided to eliminate a potential witness.

At least three days every week, Special Agent McTeague worked out of her Granite Creek office. The rented space was a small corner room above the Cattleman’s Bank. It had an old-fashioned door with a transom, a ceiling fan that creak-creaked, cracked plaster walls, and a pair of tall windows that looked out over Third and Main. It was late in the afternoon, time to clean off her desk. The FBI employee was spinning the file cabinet’s combination lock when she heard footsteps slowly ascending the uncarpeted stairs. Boots, she decided. Men’s boots. He walked like an old man—a tired old man. The heels clicked slowly down the hallway, stopped outside the door marked
PRIVATE
.

Her presence in Granite Creek was supposed to go unnoticed, but word had gotten around and the locals were curious about the Bureau’s new office in town. From time to time, someone stopped by “just to say hello”—obviously hoping to find out why the “G-men” were setting up shop here. Prevailing opinion was that it must have something to do with Rocky Mountain Polytechnic University. Some of those college students were probably involved in a project that had upset the feds, like making a radiation bomb or hacking into an air-force computer—you could never tell what. Crazy kids.

There was a tentative tapping. McTeague pressed the intercom button. “Who’s there?”

A muffled voice answered. “You the FBI lady?”

She smiled at the door. “Who wants to know?”

“Uh—I’d rather not say.”

The agent switched on a black-and-white video monitor. It was hard-wired to a miniature TV camera mounted in the hallway, just above her office door. The LCD screen slipped a few frames, then stabilized the image of a man in a raincoat. Two-thirds of his face was concealed under the brim of a tattered cowboy hat. Under the cuffs of the faded jeans were the expected cowboy boots. The federal cop automatically made mental notes. Height was hard to determine with the steep camera angle, but this was a Caucasian, medium build, a few days’ growth of beard.
Looks like a derelict
. Just yesterday, a wild-eyed Korean who called himself Emperor Chan-Spong of the Thirteenth Planet had arrived to report a landing of space aliens just north of town.
This could be one of the emperor’s drinking buddies. Probably wants to confess to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.
“Okay. Give me a moment to open the door.” There was a standard dead bolt, another that was electrically operated from a switch under her desk.

“No!” The scruffy-looking man took a step backward. “I’m not comin’ in.” He scratched at the stubble on his chin. “You that new FBI lady that’s come to town, or her secretary?”

“This is a small office, we don’t have a secretary. I’m Special Agent McTeague.”

The visitor leaned closer to the door, as if he were trying to see though the thick oak panel.

“Look up at the camera over the door,” she said. “And show me some ID.”

He shook his head. “Oh, I can’t do that, miss—because I don’t carry none.”

She glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s almost quitting time and I’m looking at a long drive home. So either state your business or hit the bricks.”

“What I have to say won’t take but a minute.” He pushed his hands deep into the raincoat pockets. “I have some information you’ll be interested in.”

Sure you do.
“About what?”

He squared his shoulders. “I know something about that guy whose boat blew sky-high up yonder on the lake. That Mr. Blinky.”

“I assume you mean Dr. Blinkoe.”

He nodded the cowboy hat. “Yeah. That’s the guy.”

“I suppose you saw the story on the TV news.”
He’ll have some half-baked theory about what
really
happened, expect a ten-thousand-dollar reward.

“No, I read about what happened in the newspaper. And I’m ninety-nine percent sure I can help you.” A hesitant pause. “But times is tough, so I don’t beat my gums for nothin’.” He pulled his right hand from the coat pocket, rubbed finger and thumb together in the universal gesture. “If you can spare me a buck or two, I’ll give you a little tip.”

If I give him something, maybe he’ll go away.
McTeague reached into her purse, squatted to slip two dollars under the door.

“Thank you, miss.” He picked up the payment, pocketed it.

She gave the pitiful figure on the monitor a stiff smile. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you gather your thoughts for a few days, come back next Tuesday at ten
A.M
. and we’ll talk for a few minutes.”

“Next Tuesday, I may be dead.”

Great, a paranoid.
“Who would want to kill you?”

“The bad guy, if he finds out I’m ready to spill my guts to a fed.” He glanced toward the dimly lighted stairwell, as if an assassin might be lurking there.

She frowned at the image on the monitor. “So who’s this bad guy?”

The odd person pulled his hat brim down a notch. “I don’t dare say.” He hesitated. “But he’s a sure-enough hardcase, I can tell you that.” He dragged the coat sleeve across his nose. “You know, it’s kinda funny—ever since I was just a pup, I’ve wanted to be an undercover agent for the FBI.” A raspy cough. “I’m ready to go to work startin’ right now—but only if you pay me a reg’lar salary. Let’s say twenty dollars a week. My code name’ll be ‘Scarf.’” He glanced over his shoulder again. “I made it up while I was climbin’ the stairs.”

She gave his video image a smile, this time the genuine article. “Mr. Scarf, do you have—”

“Not
Mr.
Scarf.” His tone suggested a painful exasperation at having to deal with someone who did not understand how these things worked. “Just plain
Scarf.
”

“Very well, uh—Scarf. Do you have the telephone number for this office?”

“Uh, no.” Just Plain Scarf fumbled in the raincoat pockets. “Wait just a minute till I find my pencil.”

“That won’t be necessary.” She slid her card under the door, stood up to watch him snatch it off the floor.

“Okay, I got it.” He put his hand under the raincoat, slipped the card into a shirt pocket. “I’ll be ringin’ you up soon as I have somethin’ to tell you.” He rubbed his hands together. “Now there’s the matter of money to talk about. Startin’ a week from now, you can leave my twenty bucks under that flower pot in front of the bank downstairs. The one with them red-and-yella tulips.”

Special Agent McTeague watched his black-and-white image turn way, heard the boot heels click-click down the hallway. She sighed.
With any luck at all, this will be the last I see of this pathetic old geezer.