by Laina Turner
It seemed like more and more people didn’t look favorably upon the Senator, if you listened to gossip and read between some of the lines, which didn’t necessarily make my job of finding the murderer any easier. Not knowing what I was doing didn’t help either. This was almost getting to be like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. My cell phone rang somewhere deep in my purse and both my hands were full. I started to juggle my mother’s packages, trying to get a hand free. I knew I should have used a cart. I didn’t want to miss the call in case it was important. After grabbing on to every other item in my purse first, I located the phone, just as the ringing stopped. Damn it. I looked at the caller ID and saw that the call had been from Trevor. This was a call I didn’t mind missing. He’d already left me a few messages to check on my progress, or lack thereof. When we had talked after the murder occurred, he had been excited about having such an exclusive scoop, and he hadn’t stopped hounding me since. To be honest, I was stuck on how to write this article and on choosing the angle to take. I also wanted to solve this thing because it would be a much better story. Trevor hounding me was stressing me out.
I was about six feet away from my car when I noticed someone standing by it. Again? I was going to have to start parking where people couldn’t see me. Or maybe this was a good excuse to get a new car. This was getting ridiculous. However, this time it wasn’t Cooper waiting to chew me out; I was briefly disappointed. I wouldn’t have minded seeing him again after yesterday. Just thinking about it made me flush. Instead, it was Helen Daniels waiting for me. That was a shocker. How in the world did Helen know I was there? I was surprised Helen even knew where Home Depot was. I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved or worried. Something told me this wasn’t a social call to see how I was enjoying my day, or a visit to invite me to the next Junior League meeting at the bingo hall. Maybe I could distract Helen by engaging me in conversation about our favorite bag designer, Louis Vuitton. What was the proper protocol for addressing a new widow you had spied kissing some other guy?
“Hi, Helen,” I said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” The look on Helen’s face told me she wasn’t buying the sincere routine. Helen looked more angry than grief-stricken, not what one would expect from someone whose husband had been killed two days ago. She was still dressed to the nines and had awesome taste in accessories. Were those Manolos? I would kill to be able to afford those shoes. Okay, bad choice of words, but I would. What was a small prison sentence for awesome shoes?
“Who the hell do you think you are, snooping around my business?” Helen snapped at me, hands on hips, with looks that could kill on their own. With all this anger, maybe she did kill Tom. This sure wasn’t a friendly visit. Good thing that wasn’t what I was expecting. Helen didn’t look nearly as attractive as usual with her face all scrunched up in anger, and she had quite a loud screech. Helen took another step closer to me, wagging her finger in my face and shaking with anger. “You need to stay away from me and stop sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong!”
I took a step back involuntarily. She was a little scary all mad like that. I wasn’t easily intimidated, but if I had been, Helen might scare me. “Helen, I am just trying to find out who killed your husband. Don’t you want to know who did this? Don’t you want justice?” I tried to reason with her, but Helen wasn’t biting. Didn’t she care, or did she have something to hide? There had to be a reason she was acting like this.
“Does it matter? Does any of that matter? It won’t bring him back, nothing will. He’ll still be dead no matter what you do. Your snooping into my personal affairs isn’t going to bring him back. All you are going to do is spread more rumors, like there isn’t enough of that going on already in this Podunk town!” Helen started crying. Even though I knew there was something Helen was hiding, I really didn’t think her deep dark secret was killing her husband. Despite what kind of relationship they may have had, she seemed genuinely distraught, a quality I wouldn’t expect in a cold-blooded killer. She may have been having an affair, and after meeting the Senator, I certainly couldn’t blame her, but her actions told me there were still feelings there. She just didn’t seem the cold-blooded killer type. Plus, murderers didn’t usually dress this well, did they? I had never read an Ann Rule book where the bad guy was highly accessorized.
“It was bad enough I had to worry about what that asshole was doing to my reputation when he was alive. Now that he’s dead, I want to be left alone.”
Okay, so maybe I was wrong about feelings still being there. There were feelings all right, just maybe not the warm and fuzzy type.
“So, help me figure this out, Helen. Let’s stop the gossipmongers. Who could have killed him? Who might have wanted to see him dead? Did he have a lot of enemies?”
“Like I could even count the people he pissed off on a daily basis. He was in politics, he was always pissing people off,” Helen relayed bitterly. “Besides, like I said, he was an asshole. I would have killed him myself long ago if I had thought I could get away with it.”
Sheesh, tell me how you really feel, Helen, I thought to myself. You might want to be a little more careful who you tell that thought to. Helen noticed my expression.
“Please…I wouldn’t have actually killed him. It’s a figure of speech.”
“But does anyone stick out in your mind as having enough of a grudge to commit murder? There’s quite a distance between thinking someone is an asshole and actually committing a murderer.”
I was hoping Helen might be willing to share information to help me figure this out. But it didn’t look that way. “There is a lot about him that you don’t know. No one knows. If it got out, it would be a scandal, and I am not going to allow him to create a scandal now after he is dead. I worked too hard to prevent it while he was alive.”
“Helen, he’s dead. How can a scandal hurt him?” I wasn’t quite sure why Helen would care at this point.
“Who cares about him? I’m the one who would suffer. I will not have my name dragged through the mud. I’ve suffered enough because of him.”
Silly me, thinking she was worried about him, I thought. “Helen, it’s going to come out eventually. You are not going to be able to keep whatever it is you’re worried about a secret forever. Maybe, if you tell me, I can help you keep it quiet.” I didn’t quite know how I would accomplish that, but hey, it sounded good, so I would just worry about that little detail later. I knew it wasn’t the most ethical viewpoint, but who cared about ethics when there was a killer to find? Wasn’t it all about the shades of grey? At least, that’s what I practiced in my old life in human resources. So what if it was a little self-serving? It was all for the greater good and that made those shades-of-grey tactics worthwhile.
I could see Helen was wavering. My best guess was that she wanted to tell someone. She couldn’t be happy keeping it all to herself, and I wanted that someone to be me. “C’mon, Helen,” I cajoled. “It will make you feel better to talk about it.”
“He had us over a million dollars in debt, that bastard,” she choked out. “These last couple of years, he got hooked on gambling. He started going to Vegas several times a year while I thought he was at political summits or whatever. I guess I didn’t really pay that close attention. He lost heavily and owed some people—the kind you don’t want to owe money to. He finally had to tell me because the bank was about to foreclose on our D.C. house. The house here in Alkon would have been next. My family would have killed me. We just had it passed down to us, and he had mortgaged it without my knowledge. He swore to me that he was done after this last time. I believed him; I really thought he wanted to change so I took money out of the family trust to pay his debts. I thought we could put our life back on track. Boy was I stupid. I still can’t believe I fell for his lies!” She put her face in her hands and sobbed.
“What happened?”
“It was all a big joke. He was still making trips to Vegas, just hiding it better. Like most gambling addicts, he kept thinking that each
time it would be different and that he would hit it big if he just kept trying, that his luck was about to change any minute. All that really happened was he got more heavily in debt to the people in Vegas. Not just in money, but to make a bad situation worse, they started to let his loans slide in return for favors of political influence. He did it at first, but it started to get more and more out of control. It got where he couldn’t do what they were asking, and they started putting a lot of pressure on him. He eventually came to me and came clean. He said he couldn’t continue to go through with it. They kept asking for more and more, asking for things that made him feel very uncomfortable. Imagine, him having a conscience.” She scoffed.
I was thinking the same thing. Whatever they wanted him to do must have been pretty bad.
“When he said he wasn’t going to do their dirty work anymore, they said the loans had to be paid back immediately. They swore they would kill him if he didn’t pay up by Friday. We didn’t know what to do, and we had nowhere to turn. I don’t have that kind of money in the trust fund, and I couldn’t tell the family.”
Sunday was the day he was murdered, a few days after this conversation. I started to get excited. It was morbid, I know, but I was finally getting some useful information. This detective stuff was fun. Although, like when fishing with my dad when I was little, it was fun only when I caught something.
“Who are these people, Helen? Do you think they went through on their threats?”
Helen glared at me. “Who do you think they are, Presley? They’re people you don’t mess with.”
When I thought of Vegas, I thought of Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone. John Gotti was in jail and seemed to be the last of the true gangsters. It was hard to believe Senator Daniels had been tangled up with the likes of those men. It seemed surreal, something you only heard about in the movies. Could the Senator have been mixed up with those kinds of people and gotten himself killed? Did that really happen in everyday life? It was hard for me to imagine, and I didn’t view myself as that naïve.
“Why haven’t you gone to the police with this, Helen? They should know. In fact, they should have known at the beginning of all this. People can’t threaten you and get away with it. They would have a better idea of where to look if you gave them this information.”
“I told you, Presley. I’m not going to drag the Daniels name through the mud.”
“You don’t think that these men will still want their money?” I still had a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact the Senator was killed by the Mob.
“Of course they will still want their money. They don’t care that Tom is dead. There is still a debt in their minds. And I’m planning on giving the money to them, if I can find a way to come up with it,” she said, fighting back anger and tears. She was gaining some control over her emotions, I thought, by being angry, which was good, I always preferred angry people to upset people. Crying people made me feel uncomfortable. I just never knew what to say to them.
“I want to pay them off so they will leave me alone and I can get on with my life. It’s only money,” she continued.
“Was this what you and Tobey were arguing about the other night at the Coffee Café?”
Helen was surprised at this comment. She had been so engrossed in her conversation with Tobey that night she hadn’t even noticed who might be around to overhear them. Helen hoped Presley hadn’t actually heard anything. That wouldn’t be good. “You saw that?”
“Yes, it looked like you were very angry with Tobey.”
“Well, that had nothing to do with Tom. Something else altogether.”
I looked at Helen questioningly, waiting to hear what it was they were arguing about. Helen just stared at me. I thought that if I just stared back at Helen long enough, she would give in and tell me about it. This was an old human resources tactic. When interviewing, have many long pauses. The interviewee felt compelled to keep talking to avoid uncomfortable silence, and it was amazing what they would tell you just to not have uncomfortable silence.
“Fine. I’ll tell you,” Helen said, rolling her eyes.
Sure enough, it worked every time. People just didn’t like quiet. I had never failed with this in my corporate days. I was amused that Helen wasn’t too upset to act put out over my line of questioning. I knew Helen wanted to tell someone.
“Tobey’s been having an affair that was starting to affect his future. I like Tobey and don’t want to see that happen.”
“Wait a minute. I thought Tobey was gay.”
Helen rolled her eyes again. “That doesn’t mean he can’t have a fling. He is having an affair with Bobby Johnson. And that boy is nothing but trouble. I was trying to persuade Tobey to stay away from him.” Helen hoped this would satisfy Presley’s curiosity. It was true, just not the main topic of their conversation.
“Oh.” I was speechless. I hadn’t thought about it from that angle. Not that Tobey having an affair with Bobby was a big deal, after all, I already heard Tobey was gay, and the more I thought of it, the less of a surprise it seemed to be. However, the fact Bobby was having an affair with Tobey was a surprise. I wouldn’t have guessed anything like that in a million years. No wonder his marriage didn’t last. I assumed most wives frowned on that behavior. I wondered if Ruth knew about this little piece of information. I laughed to myself. I somehow didn’t think it was a piece of news Bobby shared with dear old mom. Ruth had just tried to fix me up with Bobby, so she probably didn’t know. Or she was in serious denial. I was sure my mother didn’t know either. Wait until I told my mother about this! She would be so excited to have such a good scoop before her friends. This didn’t have anything to do with the murder, at least directly, but it was great gossip. Yet, it was hard to believe. Even with all his issues, I had always thought of Bobby as a ladies’ man.
Just then, I noticed a black Cadillac, one of those big boxy types, slow down as it drove by. Helen noticed it too and became visibly shaken.
“Helen!” I snapped to get her attention. “Who was that?”
“Simon Atkins.”
“The guy who works for Cooper and who was on security detail for the Senator? What does he have to do with anything? Why did his driving by make you so nervous?”
“I’m not positive, but I suspect he has ties to the men Tom owed,” Helen said nervously.
“You’re kidding me! But he worked for the Senator, indirectly at least.”
“So? What does that matter? Maybe he was working for them to spy on Tom.”
“Helen, seriously? He works for Cooper. Don’t you think Cooper would know if Simon wasn’t on the level?”
Helen shrugged. “I’m sure those people are good at hiding that sort of thing. They seem to have their ways.”
“Helen, you should go to Cooper and tell him.”
“I told you I don’t want the police to know. That will make things even worse.”
“Cooper’s not the police. Frankly, the police, and specifically Dirt, don’t like him much.” But Cooper would still probably feel compelled to tell Dirt. “But, because he feels partially responsible for the Senator’s death, Cooper might be able to help you. Cooper was in charge of Tom’s safety and he cares about what happened. Don’t you think he has the right to know?”
“I don’t care, Presley. I don’t want this to get out. I can handle it myself,” she said stiffly.
“Helen,” I implored.
“Just stay away from me, Presley. And don’t breathe a word about this to anybody or you’ll be sorry.” She turned and walked back to her car.
When Helen left, I sat in my car thinking about my next move. Floored about the extent of the Senator’s gambling problems, thoughts were spinning in my head. The someone, or someones, he had indebted himself to had definite motive for murder. I started my car and decided to go home and think about my next step. In fact, it might be smart to wait until tomorrow to pursue this. I needed to talk to Katy about this new development, and I knew Katy was busy and wouldn’t be around tonig
ht. Katy wouldn’t say why either. When I asked, she was vague. I didn’t press the issue at the time, but I planned to get it out of my friend when I saw her next. I assumed Katy was spending time with Chris and didn’t want to tell me after our discussion about him earlier.
I had stuff to do today anyway. I needed to get the stuff I picked up for my mother home, and I wanted to do some shopping at the new outlet mall nearby. Maybe I would blow off the rest of the day and shop. It wasn’t the most responsible thing to do, but I felt stuck about where to go from here. Who should I let in on what I knew? How could I make all this into something for my article, which I had to figure out soon so I could call Trevor back. He had almost reached stalker status. Having decided on a course of action for the day, I felt happy—even if I was putting myself further into the poor house and avoiding the tough questions. But as I drove by the grocery store on my way to the mall, I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye that made me slow down. Was that Ruth walking into the grocery mart? I pulled in to a spot and wondered what I should do. I had myself all talked into shopping, but I hated to pass up this opportunity. One might argue doing something constructive to earn money was much better than spending it, especially since I didn’t have many other income options right now.
Fine, I said to myself. Let’s do the right thing. Ruth was already ticked at me about our conversation at the library yesterday, so how much madder could she get if I had a few more questions? The fact that this would probably get back to my mother, again, was a thought that I pushed to the back of my mind. Once I explained it all to my mother, surely she wouldn’t be too mad, would she? And she wasn’t that close to Ruth. Was she? Right. Who was I kidding? It wasn’t about being close, it was about embarrassment. When her daughter made a spectacle of herself, she couldn’t be proud of me.