The Shoulders of Giants (26 page)

“Why would she do that?” asked Scott, without thinking.

“To make everyone assume the killer is male. If you got a search warrant, and got some of her cyanide from her darkroom, could your lab guys match it against the stuff found with Julie Campbell?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “The case is closed. Even if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t get a warrant on what you have.”

“Don’t you think it’s worth looking into?”

“Based on what you have, no, I don’t. At best we have a ten year old motive involving a fire which the fire department called an accident, not arson.”

“What does it take to convince you?” I asked.

“Evidence. That’s all.”

After Scott left to go and sleep, I spent the afternoon formulating two ideas of what I should do next. I called them, provisionally, Plan A and Plan B. Plan A involved me visiting Leitz Futures Inc. first thing the following morning and asking to speak to Lee Connors.

Chapter 40

After a phone conversation far too long to inform the receptionist that Lee Connors was in a meeting, I was told that he was in a meeting. I looked at my watch, and worked out that I had nearly ten hours to kill before I was due to meet Abby. I told the receptionist I would wait.

She went back on the phone, and after a few more minutes, I was informed that Mr Connors would be in meetings all day and would not be able to see me.

I smiled, and said that I would wait anyway, in case Mr Connors found five minutes between meetings, or he broke for lunch. I also mentioned that in the meantime I would occupy myself by asking anyone I saw in the lobby if they had any information about Richard West.

Within two minutes, Lee Connors had managed to find time in his schedule for a short meeting.

“I really must protest, Mr Abraham,” he said, as he lunged into the lobby, “at your hostile manipulation tactics.”

“Listen Mr Connors, I know you’re a very busy man, so let’s not waste time protesting. Shall we do this in your office?”

He looked around at the faces of his employees. “Follow me,” he said.

When we reached his office, he sat down behind his big desk, interlaced his fingers, and raised his huge eyebrows expectantly. He said nothing.

“I’d like you to take a look at something.” I said, and took out a picture of Shelley Ryan. I had captured a still image from the video footage of Shelley leaving her office and then, based on the information from the bartender at Circle, I had colored her hair blonde in Paint Shop Pro.

“Do you recognize this woman?” I asked.

“Of course not, why should I?”

“Mr Connors, I know you lied to me about where Richard went that night, and I think I know why. Marie West doesn’t need to know the details, but the pain she’s feeling at the moment, not knowing why her husband died, is just as bad as any pain you are saving her from by lying to me and to the police. I’ll ask you again. Do you recognize the woman in the photo?”

He took a deep breath.

“She looks a little like a woman Richard got talking to in the bar that night,” he said, his whole body slouching in despair.

“Was it her?” I asked

“I can’t be sure. It could be. She looks similar. It was dark, I’d been drinking. I didn’t stay long.”

“Were they still together when you left?”

He hung his head and nodded.

I left Connors slumped in his office chair, worrying about Marie West. What he told me backed up what I suspected, but wasn’t usable. He just wasn’t sure.

I took the photo round the corner to Circle, and showed the same bartender I had spoken to almost a week before. He said the woman in the photo might be the same one who had bought Richard West’s drinks that night, but he couldn’t swear to it. I asked him to imagine her with long hair, but it didn’t help. I had no more luck with Angel DeMarco, who I showed another version of the photo, one in which I had made Shelley a redhead. Angel said she hadn’t paid the woman much attention, and that she wished she could be more help. I showed her the blonde version and the original, unaltered photo, but it was no use. Nobody could positively identify Shelley as being with either Susan Patterson or Richard West on the nights they died.

Plan B. I swung by the office and picked up the set of lock picks I’d been given when I left Hayes & Co., then I walked to a hardware store and bought some disposable latex gloves.

Shelley Ryan’s green BMW was parked outside her studio in the same place as it had been the previous day. If she kept to the same schedule, I had at least three hours.

Shelley’s house was a three storey Victorian gray stone building in Wicker Park, which must have cost a couple of million bucks. It looked empty from the street. I parked a block away and found a baseball cap in my glove box that I figured was better than nothing as a disguise, though I felt like I should really be wearing black for breaking and entering.

The street wasn’t busy, but the house overlooked the park, so there were people milling about, walking dogs and so on. I felt like they were all watching me as I climbed the stoop and pushed the buzzer. Nothing. While I waited I checked out the lock. It was an electronic keypad - no keyhole, so no chance of being picked. I headed round the back. The rear door had a regular lock. Nothing fancy by the look of it, just a basic $12 lock – the same kind, as far as I could tell, as Shelley had on the door of her studio.

I glanced around, but the back yard was quite private thanks to a canopy of trees at the border. I took a few deep breaths, removed the lock picks from my jacket pocket and set to work. I inserted the tension wrench, my hand shaking slightly, and put just a tiny bit of pressure on it, ready to turn as the tumblers fell into place. With my free hand I took out the half-diamond pick and pushed it into the lock and slowly drew it out, raking the tumblers as I went. I put a bit more pressure on the tension wrench. Then a bit more. But it didn’t budge. Odd. The guy in the YouTube video made it seem much easier.

I knew the theory, I’d looked at cross sections of locks and it all made sense. I’d read how-tos and watched video tutorials, but practice, I guess, is a different animal. I tried again, from the top. I kept trying for about twenty minutes, but each time I ended up on the wrong side of the door. The lowest windows were eight feet off the ground, so I looked for something to stand on. I chose a black, City of Chicago garbage cart, which looked like it would take my weight.

The window was locked, as I suspected, and I wasn’t going to learn much from the room inside. It was just a regular dining room. A bit brightly colored for me, with canary yellow walls and purple drapes – the kind of thing a real estate agent would call ‘vibrant’ – but nothing incriminating. No jars of body parts. No wall of news clippings like at Leon Walker’s place. From my vantage point I could see the other side of the back door as well, and I saw that I’d been wasting my time. Even if I’d managed to deal with the lock I would have been defeated by two large vertical bolts at the top and bottom of the door. Shelley sure was security minded. I didn’t remember seeing such vigilance at her studio. Maybe the house was where she kept all the good stuff.

I climbed down from the garbage cart dejected, ready to leave empty-handed, then I had a thought. I opened the cart and there were two large black garbage bags inside. You can learn a lot by going through someone’s garbage.

I headed back to the car swiftly and purposefully, trying hard to look as though nothing was quite so normal as a man heaving two large garbage bags into the trunk of his car. I told myself I was taking some old clothes to donate to Goodwill and hoped that the charity showed in my eyes.

Chapter 41

I drove back to my apartment via a Home Depot, where I bought a large plastic dust sheet and a $12 lock. I cleared a space in the living room and laid out the dust sheet before bringing the garbage bags in from the car.

It didn’t seem to matter much which bag I picked first, so I just chose one and ripped the top open. The stench was what you might expect from a bag of garbage several days old, so I had to leave the room for a moment. I found some Vaporub in the bathroom cabinet and rubbed some on my upper lip the way I’d seen pathologists do in the movies. It helped a lot.

The bag’s contents emptied onto the dust sheet, I started to dig through it looking for useful stuff. After moving the same chicken bone three times I hit on a new plan. I picked everything up in turn and assigned it to a pile on the edge of the sheet – food items in one pile, paper and card in another, plastic and cellophane in a third, and glass and metal in a fourth. I had planned on a fifth pile for miscellaneous items, but almost everything fitted into the first four. Shelley was not a big recycler.

There were no surprises. A few wine bottles, empty cereal boxes, potato and carrot peelings, yogurt pots, balls of aluminum foil, a couple of magazines, plastic trays that once held meat, six banana skins, a pair of laddered pantyhose, the remains of a roast chicken, a carton of cream that was past its expiration date, a small stack of unopened junk mail, some candy wrappers and a few pieces of bad fruit. The second garbage bag, I would say, was older. The smell was certainly worse, and the banana skins (only five this time) were in a worse state. There were a lot of duplicated items – more wine bottles, more junk mail, foil and so on. A pizza box and a couple of half-full Chinese takeaway containers suggested she’d had less time to cook earlier in the week. The big find in the second bag was a large ball of shredded paper.

I cleared everything else away and folded the dust sheet in half, so as to avoid kneeling in food gunk while I went through the long strips of paper. After some futile attempts at figuring out which bit went next to which, I divided it up by color. About ninety percent of it was white, some pink, some kind of cream and there were some glossy promotional flyers that I guessed had been pushed through the door or left on her windshield.

The clock on the wall told me it was nearly five. In two and a half hours I had to be at Abby’s front door with a bunch of flowers and a bottle of wine, and I should probably take quite a long shower first. There was no way I’d be able to sort through all the paper in time, so I started on the smaller piles. The cream strips of paper slowly became an old bank statement, a quote for home insurance and two envelopes. The pink pile was slightly smaller and was easier to separate out because the two items were very different thicknesses. The thicker of the two, almost card, was an invitation to a photography exhibition that was happening in a week’s time. The thinner was a receipt for a month’s rental on a 10’ x 20’ unit at an establishment called Cal City Self Storage. It was dated September 15th.

It had taken a while to piece together what I had, so I left the large white pile of paper for another time, and thought about what I’d found while I scrubbed away the smell of rotting fruit and old chicken in the shower. September 15th was a Saturday. The day Richard West was killed. The day after Susan Peterson was abducted.

Chapter 42

Abby greeted me at the door looking incredible, as usual. I’d made sure to choose flowers with a strong scent, to mask any residual odor from the garbage. She took them from me and kissed me. My stomach did that thing stomachs do when a lift goes down too fast.

Abby went to check on dinner and I wondered around her living room, checking out the photos of her family on the mantelpiece.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked, still in the living room. I wondered if she was the kind of hostess who wanted to keep the kitchen off limits to guests or if she was more relaxed.

“You could open the wine”, she said, popping her head round the door. I went in and found she had everything completely under control. When I cook, which is quite often, every available surface is covered in pans, chopping boards, flour tubs and so on. Abby’s granite worktop was sparkling clean. She had a couple of pans on the stove and a small tub of green beans ready to add to one of them. It was like a cookery show on TV. She registered my admiration.

“I clean as I go”, she said, modestly, and then whispered “most of it’s in the dishwasher already”. She handed me a bottle opener and I found the wine I had brought in the icebox. I’m not a big wine drinker, but social constraints prevented me from bringing a six pack of beer instead, so I chose a mid-price Pinot Noir and hoped for the best. I poured two glasses and asked her about her day.

“I’m trapped in voir dire on a manslaughter case. You know what voir dire is?”

“Jury selection, right?”

“Right. Picking the twelve good men and true who get to decide the fate of my client. Weeding out prejudice and bias unless it’s in our favor”.

“You sound a little cynical.”

“Hard not to be after a while, I think,” she said. She put the beans in one of the pans and gave it a stir, then came over to me and put her arms around my shoulders. “It was a Chicago lawyer who said ‘A jury is made up of twelve people who are too stupid to get out of jury duty’. Only I don’t believe that. Sure, some of them are dumb, but I do believe there are people who take their civic duty seriously. They believe in our system of justice and are proud to be a part of it. If I could get twelve like that I’d take it every day of the week and not worry about whether they once got beat up by a black man or whether they work for minimum wage and might resent a baseball player for how much he earns.”

“So you’re defending a black ballplayer accused of manslaughter?”

She smiled. “I’m speaking hypothetically. We’ve got one juror – let’s call him Dave, who campaigns on environmental issues in his spare time. My second chair thinks he will convict our client of manslaughter because he drives an SUV. Dave seems like a sensible, law abiding guy. I think he’ll weigh up the evidence and argue strongly in the jury room for whichever side makes the most compelling case”.

“Which will be you, of course.”