The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (9 page)

Chapter 9

Cletis Williams stood up
from behind the massive cherry desk in his office, a big, burly guy in a brown
Western suit, white shirt with blue piping and silver snaps, and a bolo tie
with a gold longhorn steer beneath his fleshy chin. His serious gut was cinched
in by a thick, tooled leather belt with a gold buckle larger than my fist.

“Cletis Williams.” He wore a big, insincere smile
as he extended a meaty right hand with a heavy gold ring with diamonds in the
shape of a horseshoe. His grey eyes, milky with age but alert, jumped back and
forth between me and Ryan. The wheels were turning as he tried to figure out
who we were and why we needed to see the boss. With me being forty-two but
looking fifty-two and Ryan being twenty-nine but passing for twenty-five, we
obviously weren’t a couple. And the vibe was all wrong for mother and son.
Ryan’s wool suit said he ran the finance department at a large law firm
downtown. My polyester was from the You’re Lucky You Still Got a Job collection
at J. C. Penney.

“Detective Karen Seagate. Rawlings Police
Department.” I shook his hand. “My partner, Detective Ryan Miner.”

Cletis Williams’s smile was locked in tight, but
his eyes showed he knew this was worse than a couple of local yuks asking for a
donation for some charity run. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance. Indeed I
am.” His voice was raspy but strong. I heard decades of cigarettes but couldn’t
smell anything.

I glanced down at the desk. No ashtray. No
computer, no paper, no pens—like he never did any work. Most likely he just sat
there, gazing at the six framed photographs only he could see, or the four
old-time rodeo trophies standing guard at the front of the desk, flanking his
nameplate. Seated in a high-backed leather chair, he could see, to his left,
one wall covered with grip-and-grin photographs of him with the Rawlings mayor,
three or four Montana governors, and Ronald Reagan. To his right, the wall was
covered with certificates and awards for all his citizenship and philanthropic
work.

Someone had obviously put some thought into how to
make the point that this was an influential and generous guy who hung with the
other worthies. To me, the point was that he was an insecure blowhard who
figured out that giving money to good causes not only lowered your taxes but
moved more new cars.

The office didn’t say Cletis Williams was such a
bad guy he must have killed Virginia Rinaldi. But it didn’t say he was such a
good guy he couldn’t have killed her.

Ryan and I took the seats. “Let me tell you why
we’re here,” I said.

He waved me on.

“We’re investigating the death of Virginia
Rinaldi.”

He pulled back, just slightly. “The professor?”

“That’s right.”

“I … I didn’t know about that. Was she ill?”

“We don’t think so. It might have been an
accident. It might have been a homicide.” I let that word hang there a moment.
“We don’t know yet.”

He closed his eyes briefly and shook his head.
“I’ll be damned.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to see if he was
the kind of guy who started talking when there was a pause. Unfortunately, he
wasn’t. We stared at each other for three or four seconds.

“Can you help us with the investigation?”

“Of course, Detective. Of course.” He leaned
forward theatrically. “How can I help?”

“Any thoughts on anyone who’d want to hurt her?”

“Can I be frank with you, Detective?”

“That would be great.”

“I am sorry that she has … passed. One of God’s
children. But I wasn’t her biggest fan.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t think she was right for Central Montana
State. Not for the university, not for the students. Not for the city. I’m a
firm believer in religious freedom. It’s in the Constitution, you know. And she
represented a serious threat to that freedom.”

“How’s that, Mr. Williams?”

“She wanted to give special rights to LGBTs. She
wanted to take away the religious freedom of ordinary Montanans who disapproved
of their lifestyle and didn’t want to do business with them.” He put up his
palms. “As simple as that.”

Ryan cleared his throat. “Mr. Williams, why did
you call Professor Rinaldi a dyke?”

Cletis Williams’ eyes narrowed. Then he caught
himself and put on his smile. “I’m sorry, Detective. I didn’t catch your name.”

“Detective Miner. Why did you call Professor
Rinaldi a dyke?”

“I did no such thing.”

“Many people at that meeting heard you call her
that.”

“Many people misheard.”

I glanced through the half-closed blinds on the
picture window behind Williams and saw a row of sedans with helium balloons on
ribbons tied to their door handles. The balloons were fluttering and bobbing in
the breeze. Some things never change.

I said, “Mr. Williams, how did you know Professor
Rinaldi was a lesbian? Technically, she was bisexual. But how did you know?”

His eyes darted to the side for an instant. “I
didn’t call her a dyke—because I had no knowledge of her sexual preference and
wouldn’t have commented on it, anyway. My disagreement with her was about that
issue—her attack on religious freedom—and nothing else.” He was starting to
breathe deeply. His face was getting flushed.

“What was your relationship with Virginia
Rinaldi?” I said.

He shifted his big frame in his high-backed chair.
“Listen, do I look like the kind of man who’d have a relationship with a woman
like that?”

“You mean a dyke?”

“Your word, not mine. But yes. Do I look like I’d
have anything to do with a … a dyke?”

“You know, Mr. Williams, I’m a lesbian myself, and
I find that statement highly offensive. Why wouldn’t you have a relationship
with Professor Rinaldi?”

“Listen to me. I’m going to explain this once.
Only once. Then, you arrest me or talk to my attorney. Is that clear?”

“Tell us about your relationship with Professor
Rinaldi.”

“I had never been in the same room with her, never
seen her until that state board meeting. But she had been poking at me for
years.”

“What do you mean ‘poking at you’?”

“Emails, text messages, phone messages. She didn’t
agree with my positions. That’s her right. But she was highly abusive. Calling
me names, insulting me.”

I shrugged. “That happens, right? The name
calling?”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it. And it sure as
hell doesn’t mean I have to like
her
.”

“So that was the extent of it? She used to
complain to you and taunt you?”

“No, that was not the extent of it. I would hear
from other faculty at the university, from students, too. They would tell me
things about her activities on campus. Things about her course. Do you know she
taught a course in pornography?”

“It was a sociology course.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I suggest you take a
closer look at that course, Miss.”

I glanced over at Ryan, who was writing in his
skinny notebook. “You should call me Detective, Mr. Williams. I’m not here to
buy a car. This is official police business.”

He bowed his head to concede the point. “You’re
right, Detective. I apologize. I do. I realize you’re just doing your job.”

“All right, sir. Now, you’re saying when you
called Virginia Rinaldi a dyke, you were just showing your disapproval of her
teaching methods, is that correct? Is that your position?”

“I regret that it happened. I regret it.”

All right, we got that out of the way. “I’m going
to ask you one more time about your relationship with Virginia Rinaldi. And I
want you to think a moment before you respond. Because if this turns into a
murder investigation—and there’s a very good chance it will—and we determine
you haven’t been honest with us, we have to look at you different. Here’s the
question: How did you know about her sexual orientation? It wasn’t public
knowledge.”

He looked down at his hands in his lap. After a
few seconds, he looked up at me, his eyes shining with tears. “She had been
taunting me for some time. Like I said, her messages and emails were very
abusive. I was going through … going through a very difficult time. My wife was
dying of breast cancer. We were two months from our fiftieth anniversary. I
would visit her every day. In the hospice. She asked me what was bothering me.
I told her it was nothing. I didn’t want her to be worrying about me. You know
what I’m saying. She’s bedridden at this point, in considerable pain. And she
sees me upset about some professor who’s saying nasty things about me. That’s
what I’ll never forgive that professor for. What it did to Arlene.” He paused
and wiped a finger at a tear.

“So what happened?”

“My wife passed. Even though I knew it was
coming—had known for a while—I didn’t handle it well. Not well at all. I wasn’t
thinking clear.” He took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. “I got the name of a
prostitute. I paid her some money to go over to the professor’s house. I had
some kid take photographs of the prostitute going into the professor’s house.”

“Why?”

He looked at me. “I wanted her to stop harassing
me. I wanted—” He started to weep. “I just wanted her to stop.”

“What were you gonna do with the photographs?”

“I told her—”

“You met with her?”

“No, on the phone. I was very upset. I told her to
stop contacting me. That I had these photographs and I would show them to the
president of the university—”

“President Billingham knew about this?”

Cletis Williams shook his head. “No, he never knew
anything. But I assumed she wouldn’t
know that. I wanted her to stop bothering me.”

“What did she say to you?”

“She told me she knew I had hired the prostitute.”

“How did she know?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the prostitute told her.”

“What else did Professor Rinaldi tell you?”

He took a deep breath. “She told me my life was
going to explode in five days.”

“Those were her words? She said ‘explode’?”

He nodded.

“What did she mean by that?”

“That’s what I asked her. She hung up.”

“Was that the end of it?”

“Next day, I get another call from her. My life
was going to explode in four days.”

“What did you do?”

“She kept calling. Three days. Two days. One day.
That last day, I said to her, ‘What do you want? What do you want me to do?’”

“What did she say?”

“She said she wanted me to resign from the state
board. I was to say it was for personal reasons. And never play any role in
public life in Montana for the rest of my life.”

“So you stepped down.”

“That’s right.” He nodded. “I knew it was wrong,
what I had done. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Did Professor Rinaldi contact you again?”

“I never heard from her again.”

“You have any proof Virginia Rinaldi made those
calls?”

“You can check my phone records, see the calls
coming in. But I have no idea whether she was using a real phone, or
whatever. For all I know, she could’ve been using a
pay phone.”

“You have nothing from her in writing?”

“No.”

“And you said you never met with her.”

“Just that state board meeting.”

“Do you know the name of the prostitute you
hired?”

“No.”

“How did you contact her?”

“All I had was a phone number.”

“Where did you get the phone number?”

He looked at me, his eyes shining. Then he lowered
his gaze and spoke slowly. “My wife was sick for a long time. Someone gave me
her number. I’m not proud of what I did. I never knew her name.”

“Mr. Williams, did you kill Virginia Rinaldi?”

His face was red and shaking, like he had some
kind of tremor. “I did not.”

“Can you tell us where you were last night? Ten to
midnight?”

“I was home. I live alone. I was watching
television.”

Cletis Williams was wrung out—hunched over,
breathing heavily, his face blotchy. Ryan and I thanked him for his time and
told him we’d get back to him if we needed any more information.

Back in the Charger, I put down the visor to block
the late afternoon sun coming in at eye level. “That bit about how Virginia
Rinaldi was attacking religious freedom. That’s bullshit, right?”

“Yeah, that’s bullshit.”

“Let me see if I understand his story. His wife’s
dying, so he starts nailing this hooker. Then he hires her so he can
blackmail the professor to leave him alone. Is that
what you got?”

“That’s what I got.”

“You buy it?”

“I think I do.” Ryan tapped a finger on the
dashboard. “Stress and grief can make you do strange things.”

“There’s no evidence Virginia told him his life
was gonna explode.”

“True, but it doesn’t sound like a phrase he would
make up,” Ryan said. “At any rate, there wouldn’t be any evidence. She was too
smart to put anything in writing.”

“He’s got no alibi,” I said.

“That’s right.”

“So what do we do about him?”

“One thing: He said we need to look a little
closer at the porn course.”

The phone in my big leather bag rang. I pulled it
out and checked the screen. “Let me take this,” I said to Ryan. “Yeah, Helen.”
It was Helen Paddington in Vice.

“I got a possible ID on your prost Krista. Can we
get together?”

“We’ll be there in five.”

Chapter 10

“You
IDed
our prost?”

Ryan and I were at headquarters in a medium-sized
room that said “Vice” on the door. Vice and Anti-Gang got their own little
playhouses. They say it’s about unit cohesiveness. They say things like that.

Last time I’d been in Vice’s room, it was an
all-guy pit, and it looked it and smelled it. There was a tattered, stained
couch, a full-size refrigerator, and all kinds of takeout wrappers. But since
Helen Paddington came on board six or eight months ago, the place had been
cleaned up. The couch went, along with the refrigerator and the garbage. I
don’t know whether she kicked their asses or shamed them into it.

“Hey, Karen. Ryan.” She nodded in our direction
and gestured for us to sit at the Formica-covered table in the middle of the
room.

She was about thirty-five or forty, medium height
but thick in the middle. She had platinum hair, short on top and buzzed along
the sides. In her left earlobe was a rainbow-colored plug; in her right ear, a
half-dozen small stones of different colors ran up the cartilage. No makeup.
She wore cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a man’s old white dress shirt with the
top three buttons open to show a thick black crucifix surfing some significant
cleavage. If I had to guess, the statement she was making was that you’d never
be able to figure out the statement she was making. I’m fine with that. The
word was the guys in Vice thought she pulled her weight.
 

She took the seat at the head of the steel table.
Ryan and I flanked her. As she opened a folder on the table, she looked out at
me and then Ryan over a pair of half-glasses. “This is Krista.”

She passed the booking photo to me. It showed a
pale-skinned young woman with a broad, Russian-looking face. Strands of
shoulder-length hair, an unconvincing shade of red, had escaped the ponytail.
Her brown eyes were wide-set underneath thin, penciled dark eyebrows. The nose
was thin, the lips full. Her expression was blank.

“Krista is Elena Moranu. Twenty-seven. We think
she comes from Romania.”

“She got an AKA as Krista in our system?” I didn’t
think so, since Ryan hadn’t found her when he did a search.

“No, one of our guys said he remembered booking a
prost goes by Krista. He pieced it together and we pulled her out of the
system.”

“She here legally?”

“I doubt it, but we don’t follow up on that unless
it’s a felony.”

“We got a good address?”

Helen tapped the folder. “This is for you to
take.”

“What can you tell us about her?”

“We arrested her three times, going back four
years. She works regularly in town. Fairly high-level.”

“As in?”

“By-the-night. Five-hundred bucks and up. She
doesn’t blow truckers.”

“She do time for anything?”

“No, not in Rawlings. She could have a bunch of
other identities in her past we don’t know about. Since simple prostitution is
a misdemeanor, not a felony, if the girl isn’t robbing the john or selling him
drugs or doing something else nasty, she’s not going inside. Krista’s never
given us any problems.” Helen Paddington shrugged her shoulders. “She does like
to pretend she’s not a hooker.”

“How’s she do that?”

Helen put her hand into a loose fist and waved it
up and down, the gesture every eleven-year-old boy uses to mean jerking off. “Not
sure the extent of her legal training, but she appears to know that if she
didn’t take a dick in her cunt, her ass, or her mouth, it wasn’t sexual
intercourse.”

Ryan shifted in his seat. He’s not fully
comfortable with women using plain language.

I said, “She wants us to believe a guy’s giving
her five-hundred bucks for a
handjob
?”

Helen smiled, showing a gold crown on the side.
“Like I said, unless we’re booking her for something in addition to the
hooking, we don’t really give a shit. And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t give a
shit what we believe. She doesn’t give us any backtalk. She makes her phone
call, the lawyer comes. She cops to the misdemeanor, pays the five-hundred
dollar fine, and walks away. Nobody gets hurt. Everybody’s happy.” She smiled
sadly. “What are you looking at her for?”

“The professor went down the stairs last night? We
think Krista was living there.”

“Living there?” Helen Paddington’s eyebrows shot
up, like she hadn’t seen that coming.

“The professor’s students tell us there was a
local sex worker name of Krista got in an argument with the professor upstairs
during halftime in the class last night at her house. Krista storms out,
carrying a backpack. We get there this morning, the professor’s lying at the
bottom of her stairs, wearing
a couple of
injuries that don’t look like they came from the trip down the stairs. We go
through the house. There’s definitely a young woman living there. She’s got all
kinds of hooker outfits.”

“The professor
a les
, or
she just giving Krista a place to live for some reason?”

“We haven’t gotten that far. We think maybe she
was les or bi. The professor apparently had Krista come to her class about a
month ago to talk about being a hooker or whatever. Whether that means the two
of them were a couple …?” I put my palms up.

“Something’s off here.” Helen Paddington frowned,
trying to put the pieces together. “A prost as good as Krista can afford her
own place. No reason for her to be renting a room. Unless she’s got a thing for
the professor. I’ve known a lot of working girls do guys for a living but
they’re really gay.”

The three of us were silent for a minute.

Then Helen said, “You see Krista killing the
professor upstairs, pushing her down?”

Ryan said, “No. We think there was a struggle
downstairs, in the kitchen.”

Helen was shaking her head. “This woman weighs one
ten, tops. If she killed the woman downstairs, no way she’s getting her up the
stairs. You sure she didn’t just drag the body from the kitchen to the bottom
of the stairs?”

“We’re sure,” I said. “There’s evidence on the
staircase and the walls showing she really went down the stairs.”

“Maybe Krista’s laying low.”

“From who?” I said.

“That’s a good question.” Helen leaned to the side
and pulled her phone from a rear jeans pocket. “Give me a second.” She speed
dialed someone. “Jason, that prost Krista you busted—from Romania, whatever—you
know who runs her?” She listened a few seconds. “When was this?” Jason said
something to her, and she thanked him and ended the call. “Jason thinks she was
run by a guy named Christopher James Barrow.”

“He’s not sure?”

“Krista wouldn’t say. She’s not a prost, so she
doesn’t have a pimp. But the lawyer she called, Jason knows the guy works for
Barrow.

Ryan said, “Why’d you say Krista
was
run by Barrow?”

“We heard Krista might’ve gone freelance. Within
the last couple weeks.”

“What do you know about Christopher James Barrow?”
I said to Helen.

“He’s a fairly rough character.”

“He beat up his girls?”

Helen thought for a second. “Haven’t heard of him
hitting the girls. The kind of girls he runs, the johns don’t want to see
bruises.” She paused. “But I have heard of a couple of girls disappearing
without telling anyone where they went.”

“Sent them home?”

“That’s my impression. They weren’t making quota.”

“So how’s he rough?”

“We think he’s beat up other pimps trying to move
in on one of his girls.”

“He ever get convicted of any of those?”

She shook her head. “No, never on felony assaults
or anything. Nobody would be stupid enough to press charges.”

“But on pimping?”

“Couple times. Ended up doing less than six months
for each one. But I think he paid twenty-five K each time. He’s willing to do
the time. He pleads out, doesn’t name the girls. Goes quietly. I think he
believes it gives him more cred with the girls—that he won’t rat them out.”

“You see him as capable of killing that professor
to get Krista back in his stable?”

“I’m sure he knows some guys who could use five
grand. But no. It would scare the shit out of his girls. Half of them would get
on a bus and leave town. It wouldn’t work as a business decision. He’d know
we’d have to get involved and eventually trace it back to him.”

Ryan said, “What if he and Krista had some kind of
personal relationship?”

“You mean, like he killed the professor because
Krista was doing her? And he was jealous?” She said it slowly so she didn’t
unintentionally insult Ryan.

“It’s possible.” He gave her a small smile.

She returned his smile. “That theory hadn’t
occurred to me.” Which was more polite than saying, “You’re quite a Gump,
aren’t you?”

“Helen.” I stood up. “This is great. Thanks very
much for helping us out.”

“Let me know if you need anything else, all
right?”

“You bet.” Ryan and I left the Vice room and
headed back to the bullpen.

When we got settled, Ryan said, “You want to make
sure this is the right Krista?”

I nodded. “Who was that student—you know, this
morning?—with the brother committed suicide?”

Ryan opened his folder and pulled out the seating
chart from the meeting in the conference room. “Donna Boyles. Want me to call
her?”

“No, I think she’d be more comfortable with me.
Dial her number for me, will
ya
?”

Ryan got her number and punched it in. Line 2 on
my phone lit up. She picked up and I reminded her of who I am. “Donna, we’re
hoping you can help us out. It will take just a minute.”

“Sure, what do you need?”

“Could you take a look at a few photographs and
tell me if you recognize any of the people?”

“Yeah, send them over.”

“I can’t send them, but we’d be happy to come over
to wherever you are. Like I said, it’ll just take a minute.”

She said she was at the Student Union, in the main
dining area, with a couple of other girls, working on a project. I told her
we’d be there in eight or ten minutes.

With the afternoon traffic picking up, it took us
eleven minutes to get to the Student Union. We walked into the two-story brick
building, past the ticket counter, the information desk, and the little
snack-food store.

“There she is,” Ryan said. She was over near the
food court.

The two other girls gave us wide-eyed stares as
Ryan and I came over. As we led Donna off to a booth in the corner, I glanced
back and saw the two girls checking Ryan out, big smiles on their faces. Every
damn female. Every damn time.

The three of us sat down, and Ryan pulled five mug
shots from a folder and arranged them on the table in front of Donna.

I said to her, “Recognize any of these people?”

Donna Boyles immediately put her finger on
Krista’s photo. “That’s her. That’s the sex worker.”

“Any of the others?”

“No.” Donna looked at me, then at Ryan. “Is that
it?”

“One more thing,” Ryan said. “Do you happen to
have the syllabus for the porn class with you?”

It took me a few seconds to figure out where he
was going. Then I remembered how Cletis Williams, the car dealer, told us to
take a look at her syllabus.

“Let me pull it up.” She opened her laptop, logged
into the university system, and opened it. She swiveled the laptop so Ryan
could see it.

“Could you give me thirty seconds to look at it?”

She was checking him out. “As long as you need.”
She smiled at him. When she wasn’t all messed up about her brother, she was a
pretty girl.

“You already started on the final project, right?”

She nodded. “Almost done.”

“What’s your topic? I mean, if you don’t mind the
question.” He shifted in his seat, putting his hand on the table near hers. He
turned on the smile. I watched her take a breath. She had caught his cologne.

“No, not at all.” She was all his. “I’m doing a
study of how first-year females here use online porn.” All of a sudden, she
started to blush. “What I mean is, what their viewing habits are. I’m an RA, so
I invited twenty of the girls on my hall to take an online survey—completely
voluntary and anonymous, of course—on their awareness of online porn, how much
they watch it, you know. I let them contact me if they’re willing for me to
follow up with an interview.”

“That’s really interesting.” Ryan put on his
serious face. “How many of the twenty filled out the survey?”

The color rose up her neck again. “Thirty-six.
Some of the girls forwarded the login information. Apparently, the girls want
to talk about it.”

“Thirty-six out of twenty. That’s pretty good.” Ryan
smiled. “One more question—you got another minute?”

“Sure.” She held her head a little higher,
blossoming under his attention.

“I notice that Professor Rinaldi gave the students
two options for the final project: a research project, like the one you’re
doing, and a creative project. Can you tell us what a creative project is?”

“Professor Rinaldi is …” She caught herself, and
she looked down at the table for a moment, as if she was ashamed to be thinking
more about the handsome detective than the dead professor. “Professor Rinaldi
was very big on giving us options. So she said we could do something creative
if we wanted. We could write an erotic short story, or a little script for a
porn video. The thing was, we had to incorporate one or more of the themes we
studied this semester.”

“Can you give us an example?”

“I haven’t really thought this out, so it’s pretty
lame. But if we wanted to write an erotic short story, we’d bring in … I don’t
know, an economic angle, for instance. Like with Krista. She started out being
trafficked or whatever. She was poor, didn’t speak much English. So if she’s in
the story, it has to include how her poverty and the other stuff determine how
the story turns out. Do you know what I mean?”