The Cantaloupe Thief (24 page)

Jody met her next, his hands held up in surrender. “We didn't know, Branigan. We didn't figure out it was a homeless woman until after 5 o'clock. I started calling you, but it went to voice mail.”

“How could you not know?”

“It wasn't on the police scanner last night. All they had was a traffic injury on Conestee. No fatality. I was tied up in court all day, and didn't get to the police station until five. That's when I saw the report that said the victim was possibly homeless. We started calling the hospital, you, Jericho Road, the gospel mission, anyplace else we could think of.”

For the second time in an hour, she sagged. “It's my fault,” she admitted. “I haven't been working with the police on this story. If I had been, maybe they would've called me.”

“For now, can you pull together some quotes from your sources and I'll feed you the new stuff? We don't have much.”

“She died, you know. At 5:33.”

“Yeah. I got that already.”

“Okay.” Branigan went to work.

By the time she looked up again it was 8:55. The gospel mission's phone privileges extended only from eight to nine. She punched in Davison's cell phone number, and was relieved when he picked up.

“Brani G! I was afraid you'd forgotten me.”

“No way,” she said. “It's just been a busy day. How are you?”

“Truthfully? Shaky. Not so much physically as the other stuff.”

“Are they feeding you well?”

“Sure.”

“What did you do all day?”

“Got assigned a counselor. Met in a group. Mandatory chapel. Bible study.”

“They don't waste any time.”

“Idle hands and all that.”

“I guess so.” She didn't want to tell him about Rita. If the mission subscribed to the newspaper, he'd find out in the morning, but she didn't want to share the news over the phone. So instead she said, “Davison? There are a lot of people pulling for you.”

“I know. Thanks for calling. Love you.” He hung up.

She went back to work. So far, her frantic pace had allowed her to keep a creeping question at bay: was she responsible for Rita's death? Had her poking around unloosed the killer the psychics warned her about?

 

Jody and Branigan merged their two stories into what they hoped was a seamless narrative. Branigan called the director of the gospel mission and the president of the Grambling Homeless Coalition, a collection of public and non-profit agencies that served the homeless. She pulled liberally from Sunday's story on Vesuvius and his dad.

Jody worked the police investigation. Apparently no one on Conestee Avenue had been awake at midnight on Sunday. Asleep in their air-conditioned houses, the neighbors had heard nothing, seen nothing.

But there was plenty of consternation inside the police department, Jody said, because of the previously unsolved hit-and-run. Chief Warren personally responded to Jody's call rather than sending him to the public information officer. And Jody did get one vital piece of information Branigan had missed — Rita's last name: Jones.

After they'd filed the story online and for the next morning's edition, Tan, Jody and Branigan met in Tan's office. She brought her notebook.

“Obviously,” Tan began, “this changes things. We're moving homeless stories to the front burner. Two hit-and-runs in two weeks? What the hell is going on?”

“There's more,” Branigan said. “We couldn't put this in tonight's story because nothing is nailed down yet.” She hesitated.

“Spit it out, Powers,” Tan growled.

“These homeless deaths could be connected to Mrs Resnick's murder.”

Tan sat back in his chair, clearly startled. Jody's eyes widened. He was the first to speak.

“I knew you were looking at transients. It panned out?”

“I... I... don't know yet.” She laid out what she'd learned as coherently as she could, starting with Rita.

She told them Dontegan's story first, because it had taken place more than five years earlier. He reported a drunken Rita saying — she flipped through the notebook to get it exactly — “I could be rich if I wanna be. I tell about Ol' High and Mighty gettin' her nasty self stabbed, I be off these streets and on Easy Street.”

She told them of Malachi's assertion to Liam that Rita said she “might get rich” if she told what she knew “about some old lady getting murdered” and that a “rich-ass family would pay to keep it quiet”. Branigan admitted that she didn't know when the conversation took place, but that Malachi and Vesuvius heard it. And Vesuvius was dead.

Then she told about Jess's account of Max Brody's wad of money and his comment: “‘This evening's drunk is courtesy of an old lady who had the good sense to get stabbed.' Or maybe ‘the good taste to get stabbed'.

“I'm still trying to find Max Brody,” she added.

She told them that the man who'd lived in Mrs Resnick's pool house, Billy Shepherd, alias Demetrius, might be back in town, though she hadn't confirmed it. And that Mrs Resnick's granddaughter, Ashley, overheard her cousin Ben Brissey Jr say on the night of July 4 that a second person had been living in Mrs Resnick's pool house.

“And to top it all off, Ramsey Resnick volunteers at Jericho Road.”

“Good Lord!” Tan-4 exploded.

“I'm not saying I understand it yet,” Branigan said. “Any of it. But there seems to be some strong links between the Resnicks and the homeless.”

“Okay, here's what we're going to do.” Tan rubbed his meaty hands together. “Branigan, I want you to continue on the Resnick murder anniversary. But I want it moved up to run this Sunday.

“Jody, you stay on the Rita Jones death, with updates online and a new story daily. And the hit-and-run of the guy whose name sounds like a volcano. See if they're connected. Who would you like to help pull together an overall piece on homelessness in Grambling?”

“Marjorie,” the reporters answered in unison.

“Okay. Send her home with background reading tonight. Anything else?”

Branigan asked, “Should I share my information with the police?”

Tan thought for a moment. “Not yet. They may leak it to TV. Anyway, they've had their turn at this. For ten damn years. Now go get some sleep.”

Branigan wasn't sure that was going to be possible.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Branigan was back in the newsroom before eight on Tuesday morning. Unable to sleep the night before, wondering if her digging into the Resnick murder had prompted Rita's death, she'd finally gotten out of bed and made a list.

Number 1: Talk to Ben Brissey Jr about why he thought a second person was living in his grandmother's pool house.

Number 2: See if the police had any information on why Rita Jones was on Conestee Avenue Sunday night. Could she have been living in the pool house, either recently or ten years ago?

Number 3: Look through the pool house.

Ben Jr hadn't returned Branigan's call from yesterday, so she phoned him again at his New York office. She got his voice mail. Then she called his mother at the lake house. Amanda gave her his cell phone number.

Branigan called that number and he picked up. “I'm so sorry I didn't get back to you, Miss Powers,” he apologized. “I had you on my list for today. How can I help you?”

His tone was a pleasant surprise.

“As your mother may have told you, we are looking into your grandmother's murder. It's been ten years next month and it's the only unsolved homicide in Grambling.” That last part wasn't technically true any more, but Ben Jr wouldn't put the hit-and-runs of homeless people into the same category — even if he was aware of them.

“Yes, Mom did tell me.”

“On the night of the July 4 party, your cousin Ashley said several of you went swimming.”

“That's right.”

“She also said she overheard you say that someone else was living in the pool house. I assume you meant someone besides Billy Shepherd?”

“You're taxing my memory, Miss Powers. Billy Shepherd — is that the name of the man Uncle Ramsey found living in the pool house? And who tried to play Grandmother's piano?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Okay. I remember now. But first, let me explain something. I was a douche bag in those days.”

Branigan choked back a laugh. “Um, okay.”

“I've been in AA for two years. I don't know how much you know about AA, but we do a lot of looking back, a lot of soul searching. I'm not proud of who I was then.”

“I'm familiar with Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“At any rate, I was drinking that night. Pretty heavily. I went into the pool house to get some swim trunks. Broke in, in fact.” He chuckled. “The police asked me plenty about that. Anyway, when I was looking in the bedroom for my trunks, I found stacks of books that I knew weren't Grandmother's.”

“How did you know that?”

“Well, for one thing, they'd not been there all the other times I'd been in the pool house. And for another, there's no way she'd be reading them. They weren't Dickens or Tolstoy or Hardy, and they weren't her typical book club material. More like first-rate modern fiction.”

“And so you thought...?”

“And so I thought someone besides a mentally deficient fellow must have been there too.”

“Did you tell the police? I didn't see anything about a second person in their files.”

“I honestly don't remember. But I doubt it. They were asking me about my relationship with my parents and my grandmother, and if Drew or I had gambling debts, stuff like that. Since we were from Atlanta, they weren't asking us anything to do with Grambling.”

That made sense.

She asked Ben a few more questions about his time at the pool, and heard a repeat of what Caroline and Ashley had said. She was uttering a few last-minute pleasantries on autopilot when, almost without thinking, she posed her standard final question: “Is there anything else you can think of that I haven't asked?”

“Well, at the time, I sure wasn't mentioning this to the police,” said Ben. “But the statute of limitations has run out.” He laughed. “We found and smoked some crack that night in the pool house.”

That stopped Branigan short. “Crack? Was it Billy's?”

“Probably. Or whoever else was in there. I'm assuming it wasn't Grandmother's.” Ben chuckled again.

“You said ‘we' smoked crack. You and Drew?”

“Oh, no, I had enough decency not to pull Drew into my craziness. It was me and an older woman at the party. Rena. No, that's not right. Resa. No, Rita. That's it. Rita Mae.”

Branigan clinched the phone more tightly.

“There was a Rita Mae at the Fourth of July party?” Even to her own ears, her voice sounded squeaky. “What was her last name?”

“I don't think she ever told me.”

Branigan's mind was racing. How could this be?

“Can you describe her?” she asked. “I mean, was she... homeless?”

“Homeless?” Ben said. “No. I mean, she sure didn't look homeless. She looked like everybody else at the party.”

“And she was at the party?” Branigan knew she was repeating herself.

“Sure.”

“Describe her to me, please.”

“She was short — petite, I guess you'd say. Blond hair. Nice tan. Good-looking. Wearing one of those summer tops that are bare at the shoulder. Halter tops, I think they're called. Maybe thirty to thirty-five, somewhere in that range.”

“Was she a neighbor? Did she live nearby?”

“I have no idea. I'd never met her before. And as I said, I was pretty drunk. We didn't talk much before we fired up a rock. Then she disappeared.”

“Did she bring drugs to the party?”

“No, we found them in the pool house. Actually, I found them before she got there. She asked if Grandmother had something stronger than bourbon. I guess I was trying to impress her, so I showed her. We smoked. I must have fallen asleep, 'cause when I woke up she was gone and so was the rest of the crack.”

“She stole your crack?”

“Well, yeah. She stole somebody's crack.”

This was sounding a little more like Rita. Movement in Branigan's peripheral vision caught her attention, and she looked up. Jody was waving excitedly from his desk. She thanked Ben and told him she'd call back if she needed anything else.

Jody was beside her desk by the time she put the phone down.

“The police tracked down Rita Mae Jones,” he said. “She wasn't a transient at all. Grew up right here in Grambling. Graduated from Montclair High on the Eastside. Worked awhile at the Eastside Mall in one of the department stores. Arrested for stealing from the store. Then went off the grid. She was arrested more recently for drugs and prostitution. Her parents live in Atlanta. They're on their way to ID the body.”

“I'll go one better,” Branigan said. “She was at Mrs Resnick's Fourth of July party.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Tuesday was Liam's sermon writing day, but no writing was getting done.

He was torn. He thought it likely that the cargo van from Jericho Road had run over Rita. Her dying accusation and the fact that the front bumper had been cleaned with bleach were pretty damning.

He thought it unlikely that Chan had been the driver: Chan had the Jeep and no need to borrow the van, even should he want to sneak out and drink and do whatever else eighteen-year-old boys did. So that concern was lifted.

So why not report it to the police? He was leaning that way.

But he was hesitating. Why? He searched his conscience for an answer, and wasn't quite sure.

The church was a sanctuary — he certainly believed that. He didn't worry about the vows of the confessional, as the Catholics did. But there had to be something that set the church apart from the world.

He remembered the transient from last summer who was so belligerent that Liam banned him from the dining hall for a month. The man then ran up on the stage and flung himself across Liam's pulpit. “Religious asylum!” he shrieked. “I'm seeking religious asylum!”