The Big Thaw (22 page)

I called Sally, and had her work on a list of members of the snowmobile club her sister, brother-in-law, and Cletus had belonged to. I wanted to talk to them about him ever running his sled with NVGs. Just a chance.

I love the feeling you get when you’re working a lead. Much better than sitting on your butt waiting for the FBI to show up and tell you that everything they have is “need to know.”

Just then, Art stuck his head in the door. “Just telling you, I gotta get back to Cedar Falls. Something’s come up. I’ll try to get back tomorrow.”

I believe both George and I understood that Art was ducking out. I thought it likely that he had just told his office about our arresting two FBI agents, and that they had, wisely, told him to come in for a conference.

“I understand,” said George. After all, Art and the DCI hadn’t been involved with the two agents last night.

“I understand they found a cartridge case … the lab people?” I had to ask.

“Oh, yeah … Jake call? He has all the information. I don’t know that it means much.” Attaboy, Art. Screw up, so minimize it.

“We’ll see what we can to with it,” I said. “Have a good trip.”

That’s one thing about Art. You’ll let him go, even if you have a bone you can pick with him. Just so long as he goes.

George and I continued in pursuit of Cletus Borglan, killer. Well, for about another five minutes, until Lamar got to my office.

“Boss, have we got something for you!”

“Fine, fine.” He sat painfully in a chair. The gunshot trauma to his lower leg was bothering him again. He held up his hand, seeing that I was about to launch into something. “Just let me tell you this before I forget, and then you can talk to me all day…”

“Sure. Sure, no problem.” I was feeling generous, having just solved the case.

“You remember my wife’s sister, Arlene?” He waited for my nod. “Well, she lives in this little town in Florida, that is the same town where Cletus and Inez Borglan go in the winter.” He pulled a small piece of paper from his breast pocket, and held it at nearly arm’s length. “Same place where the Bensons, the Hazletts, the Rhombergs, and the Hefels have retired to…”

I knew all four couples. Two teaching families, one insurance man, and a retired farmer. Come on, Lamar, I thought. I’m gonna bust if I don’t tell my news.

“Wife says they want to change the name of the little town to ‘New Iowa’ because of all the Iowans there.” He smiled at the thought. “Anyway,” he said, folding the paper and placing it back in his breast pocket, buttoning the pocket, and patting it down, “Arlene says that she was talking to Cletus and Inez down there, the night before Cletus left to come back up here, and they was pretty excited about something.”

Uh-oh. “Down there the day before the killings?”

“Yeah. They were playing bridge, or something, over at Cletus and Inez’s cabin. He got a phone call about eleven that night, that really shook him.”

“In Florida?”

“Yeah, in Florida. You got somethin’ in your ears?”

“Oh, no, I guess not. We were thinking that he might have come back before we thought he did. That’s all.” Damn. Damn, damn, damn.

“Oh,” he said, absently. “Doesn’t look like it.”

“Sure doesn’t,” said George.

“Anyway,” continued Lamar, “what Arlene says is that he got this phone call, and he just sort of went white. Real worried. Took the phone to the porch, but she heard him say, ‘How could they find out?’ maybe two-three times. She thinks,” he said, confidentially, “that Cletus is up to some illegal financial stuff.” He grinned. “Anyway, old Cletus kept lookin’ at Inez, like there was something she should know. Finally, they went into the kitchen together to get the coffee and some crumbly stuff … what do they call that stuff?”

“I don’t know…” I said. “Crackers?”

“No, that ain’t it…”

“Oh, yeah, that crumbly cake stuff … yeah, I know…”

“Will you two,” interjected George, “stop it!”

Lamar chuckled. “Anyway, Arlene heard him trying to whisper to Inez in the kitchen, and then heard her say, ‘Oh, my God!’ and then when they came out, it looked like she’s seen a ghost.”

I could just imagine Cletus whispering.

“Must have been pretty bad business news,” I said. “The market crash, and we didn’t hear?”

“Well, you know, that’s the funny part,” said Lamar. “I mean, you know Cletus. He ain’t quiet about nothin’ that bothers him. Hell, he ain’t quiet about nothin’ at all. But Arlene says that they never mentioned it the rest of the evening, and he left the next day. Arlene says that she talks to Inez the next day, and Inez ain’t saying nothing about it.”

“Hmm.” I tried to be noncommittal.

“‘Hmm’ is right,” said Lamar. “I was thinking that it’s too bad that there ain’t some way to find out who called him.”

“You got that right,” I said. I was disappointed that Cletus was in Florida at the crucial time. Well, disappointed was a bit mild, frankly. The excitement was only a memory. Shit.

“’cause,” said Lamar, “I got kinda curious, and I called Jack Reed.”

Jack Reed was president of one of the local banks. Curious, indeed.

“I said, ‘Jack, I got this attorney bugging me ’bout having to repossess some stuff from Cletus Borglan, due to some business failure …’” He smiled. “Jack says, ‘No way.’ Tells me that Cletus is in no way in any financial trouble. So I says, ‘Anything happen that might have hit him on the stock market, or the futures market?’ And Jack said ‘No,’ that everything was fine.” He turned to George. “Jack’s Cletus’s banker.”

“Oh.”

That was one of the main differences between the new model FBI agent and the old model sheriff. The agent would spend eighteen hours getting information necessary to get an application together to ask the court for permission to dig into somebody’s financial records. The sheriff would just go to the banker and ask.

“So, I figure that, since there ain’t no financial information of a bad nature, there ain’t no business problems up here that anybody’d get too excited about. So, I think, if it ain’t financial, what is it?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s almost got to be a death in the family, like. But nobody in the family died.”

“Yeah.” I knew where he was going. I loved it.

“But, I got to thinkin’ that maybe somebody ‘in the family’ was
involved
in a death. Or two…” Lamar grinned. “I think our man Cletus was told about the dead brothers a long time before we tried to fill him in.”

“I think you’re right,” I said. Yea, boss.

“So I went one step further, and I got a tape here of the telephone conversation Sally had with Inez Borglan on the day the bodies was discovered. When she called to see if Cletus could come up, and he was already on his way?”

All calls made from dispatch are taped. Without exception.

He opened his other shirt pocket with a Velcro rip, and pulled out his minirecorder. He carefully turned the volume up, and placed it on my desk. George moved in a bit closer.

“I got it right at the part we want,” he said. “You can hear the rest later.” With that, he pressed “play”

There was some hiss in the tape, and voices coming over Sally’s radio console were an irritation, but the conversation itself was clear enough.

SALLY
: I
NEZ, THIS IS THE
N
ATION
C
OUNTY
S
HERIFF
’S D
EPARTMENT
. C
OULD
I
SPEAK WITH
C
LETUS, PLEASE
?

INEZ
: O
H … OH
… G
OD
…

SALLY
: I
T’S
ALL RIGHT
, I
NEZ
. R
EALLY
. C
OULD
I
JUST SPEAK TO
C
LETUS
?

INEZ
: H
E’S ON HIS WAY
. H
E LEFT THIS MORNING, AND HE’S ON HIS WAY
.

SALLY
: H
E’S COMING HERE
? B
ACK TO
N
ATION
C
OUNTY
?

INEZ
: I
JUST KNEW IT
.

SALLY
: I
NEZ, HOW CAN
I
CONTACT
C
LETUS
? W
HERE’S HE FLYING IN TO
? C
EDAR
R
APIDS
?

INEZ
: H
E’LL GO RIGHT TO THE FARM
. Y
OU KNOW

SALLY
: H
E’S GOING TO THE FARM
?

INEZ
: H
ARVEY WILL GET HIM TO THE FARM
.

SALLY
: H
ARVEY
?

INEZ
: O
UR HIRED MAN
. H
ARVEY WILL GET
C
LETE IN
C
EDAR
R
APIDS
. H
E’S GOING RIGHT TO THE FARM
. I’
M SORRY
. S
O SORRY
.

SALLY
: T
HAT’S ALL RIGHT
, I
NEZ
. W
E CAN CONTACT HIM
. W
HAT TIME DOES
C
LETUS GET TO
C
EDAR
R
APIDS
?

INEZ
: H
E LEFT ABOUT TWO HOURS AGO
. I’
M SO SORRY
.

SALLY
: D
O YOU HAVE A FLIGHT NUMBER
?

Lamar stopped the tape. “That don’t sound like much,” he said. “But if you think about it, why the hell is she so sorry? What is it that she knew was going to happen?” He looked at us. “She sound really stressed to you?”

“Sure does,” I said. And she had.

“Very,” said George.

“Now nothin’ against females, or anything,” prefaced Lamar, “but they do worry a lot, and it ain’t that unlikely for a female to say she knew something was gonna happen beforehand, no matter what it is. Right?”

Lamar’s idea of “politically correct” was to use old high school biology terms, like male and female.

“I thought that was just my mother,” said George.

“When a male subject says he’s ‘so sorry,’ he means he’s sorry for himself, like when he gets caught. But,” said Lamar, “when a female subject says she’s ‘so sorry,’ she ain’t sorry for herself, she’s sorry for you. Or about something that happened to you.”

“Okay” I said.

“I think,” said Lamar, conclusively, “that somebody called Cletus and said, ‘I just killed two guys at your house,’ and it was somebody that Inez knew was there, too.” He hurried on. “And I think that whoever it was said that he’d shot a couple of cops. Like you say, Carl. But that’s why Inez is so sorry. She’s apologizing to the whole department for the cops being killed. Only she don’t know she’s doin’ it.”

He was right. Absolutely. No doubt in my mind. Again.

“Totality of the circumstance,” said George. “Now, all we need is evidence…”

“I been thinking about that, too,” said Lamar. “I think there’s a chance that whoever called Cletus in Florida was calling from the murder scene. Cletus’s house.” He shifted in his chair, and winced. He’d put weight on that ankle. “So I was thinking that if somebody was to go to a judge, and just lay the whole thing out, and make a couple of really good points, maybe we could get a court order for Cletus’s telephone records. Like, maybe a longdistance call made to him, from his place in Iowa to his place in Florida.” He shifted back, more carefully. “So what do you two think?”

“Explain to the judge that this is a critical case…” murmured George, to himself as much as us.

What it boiled down to was this: A judge would take into consideration the bare evidence, but would listen to more persuasive arguments. First, we would get a bit of leeway, because it was such a serious crime. Then, it would be apparent that this evidence would go a long way to either get us on the track, or to eliminate Cletus completely. Most persuasively, though, I thought, was the fact that the order to permit examination of the phone bill was not particularly intrusive. We wouldn’t have to go on the Borglan property to get it, and we wouldn’t disrupt the Borglan household in any way. As a plus, we could be pretty restrictive with dates, as well. We weren’t going fishing, here. We could stipulate a three-day span, from Friday through Sunday. No more.

I thought we had a good chance. So did George. Lamar just sat there looking very pleased with himself.

As we were typing out the application, I thought about Cletus. He’d really had a busy day. He’d gone from innocent irritant, to suspected murderer, back to innocent, to accessory after the fact. By rights, he should have been breathing hard.

“So, what did you have to tell me?” asked Lamar

“Uh … nothing,” I said.

The Febbies were still a no-show, so after we broke for lunch—a couple of fat-free hotdogs for me—we moved on with the Cletus lead. Judge Oberfeld was polite, and you could tell he was obviously pleased about George of the Bureau being with us, but suggested we simply approach the county attorney and have a subpoena issued. We explained about the conflict of interest, and that there had yet to be a special prosecutor appointed, and that Davies was in court in Pottawattamie County and not available.

Mike, who was just coming on duty, took the resulting order, and headed to the phone company records office in Manchester.

George and I went back to my office. I got busy filling out my account of John’s and my flying trip into the snowbank, in hot pursuit of a snowmobile. It ran to four pages, in which I took responsibility for authorizing the chase sans headlights. Not nearly as noble as it sounds, really, because department policy requires that the driver, regardless of authorization, operate the vehicle in a safe manner. Best I could do was share responsibility.

I had just finished the report, and signed it, when George said, “They’re here.”