“I know,” Sanko said. “We’re looking for it. So about this work you were doing for Ungless. She was having an affair?”
I shook my head. “Not that I saw.”
“What did she do? Who’d she do it with?”
“She shopped. By herself. And she went to hot yoga.”
“Hot yoga?”
“It’s like regular yoga, but the room is like eighty degrees.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
Tom cut in, “Never mind hot yoga, Ed. Roxane, how did Arthur seem to you?”
“Embarrassed.”
“And?”
“And, that’s basically it. He was embarrassed about the check. Surprised, too, I guess. I got the feeling he’s not accustomed to being short on cash.”
“And how did he seem regarding his fiancée? Angry?”
“No. He wanted me to keep her under surveillance.”
Sanko scowled harder. “It was me, I’d be angry. If my pretty, younger lady was stepping out?”
It seemed like my initial instinct to hedge had been correct. “He wasn’t angry,” I said. “He was sad and confused.”
“People react in different ways. Maybe he was pretending to be sad, for your benefit.”
“What, he hired me to follow her around but wrote me a bad check so I’d stop right before he murdered her? You’ve got to be kidding.” I turned to Tom. “Did anyone see or hear anything?”
Tom said, “It’s Ed’s case, and his call. I’m just here to make introductions.”
I tried to look as cooperative as I could. “Please?”
Finally, Sanko shrugged. “Neighbor reports hearing raised voices in the alley before the gunshot. A man and a woman, arguing. Then pop. A bullet to the chest. A thirty-eight. You know who owns a thirty-eight?”
I waited for the punch line.
“Arthur Ungless. And conveniently, he can’t locate it.”
I saw Arthur’s face again, pleading for my help the other day. I was thinking that I needed to find a criminal lawyer for him, because he obviously didn’t have one. A murder victim’s significant other was usually the first stop, and for good reason. But I didn’t buy that my client killed his fiancée, argument or no. “You said Marin left the restaurant first,” I said. “So can anyone put Arthur still there at the time she was killed?”
Now Sanko shook his head. “We came here to get information out of you, not vice versa.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “I don’t know what I can tell you,” I said. “Marin didn’t meet up with anyone while I was following her. Other than a few salesclerks, she didn’t even talk to anyone. She didn’t go anywhere unusual or do anything unusual. And Arthur was not angry.”
Sanko thrust a business card at me. “Right. Sure,” he said. “Call if you remember anything.”
I said, “About Marin, or about Arthur?”
“Yes. And don’t go doing your girl detective routine in my case.”
He turned to head for the door. Tom said, “I’ll be out in a second.” Then he paid a lot of attention to the dying plants on my fireplace while he waited for Sanko to be out of earshot.
I didn’t care if Sanko heard me though. “Girl detective routine?”
Tom gave me half a smile. “Sorry. I would’ve called, but the first I heard about this case was ten minutes ago. He grabbed me on the way back in from court and said he needed my help. He hated Frank’s guts, and apparently you by association.”
I shrugged. “So not a compliment when he said I look and sound like him, then.”
He didn’t respond to that. He didn’t have to.
“I should go. We’ll talk later. And hey, be careful around this Ungless guy.”
“He’s harmless. Tom, there’s no way he had anything to do with this.”
His face told me he had his doubts. “Be careful anyway.”
TWO
The sun was warm on my back as I stood on Arthur’s front porch. He lived in a modern ranch overlooking Rush Run, a woodsy ravine that felt isolated even though North High Street was less than a half a mile to the west. I’d spent some time here last week, sitting in the car down the block as I waited for Marin to emerge. Today, though, I parked right in front. I was expecting to see a long line of cars in his driveway—my mother had received an endless stream of visitors in the days after my father was killed last year—but Arthur’s driveway was empty except for his own vehicle, a dark grey Jeep similar to Marin’s. His and hers. I knocked a second time and the curtains fluttered and then Arthur opened the door and squinted out at me, his face pale and stunned with pain. “It’s you,” he said softly.
“Arthur, I am so sorry about Marin,” I said quickly.
He stared at me, slowly palming the front of his shirt. His eyes were rimmed with red.
“I spoke to the police this afternoon,” I continued. “I apologize for showing up like this, but I wanted to talk to you about—”
“The police.” He cleared his throat. “Oh. I guess I shoulda given you a heads-up. I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, no, don’t worry about that.”
He ran a hand over his face. “I just—look, ah, why don’t you come in for a minute. You’ll have to ignore the mess, though.”
Behind him, I could see that the house was decorated in a nineties sort of outdated opulence—overstuffed furniture, a black and grey geometric area rug, and a glass-topped coffee table. It was a strange aesthetic for an interior decorator’s house, but more notably, the house looked like a windstorm had blown through it. An entertainment stand on the far wall stood empty, its contents flung across what I could see of the living room, doors hanging open. A bookcase had been knocked on its side, paperbacks spilling off the shelves like a waterfall.
As I followed him inside, I said, “What happened in here?”
“My gun,” Arthur said. He shoved a stack of magazines off the sofa and sat down. “I can’t fuckin’ find it anywhere.” He turned around to face me. “The police, they got the wrong idea. I mean yeah, we were fighting. In the restaurant. I’m the first to admit, it was a pretty bad fight. But I would never hurt her, even after—after everything. I just need to find my gun. If I find it, they’ll have to listen, right?”
I perched on the edge of the coffee table. What he said was a bit of an oversimplification. If my last big case had taught me anything, it was that the police could sell any story they wanted. “When did you see it last?”
“I got no idea. Haven’t seen it in years. Years. I bought it when I lived over in Linden, there was a string of break-ins on the street. But that was, what, twenty years and two houses ago.” He looked around a little helplessly. “But it’s got to be here somewhere. Christ, what a thing to have to think about at a time like this.”
I looked around at the mess. I was good at finding things—that was why I became a detective—but probably no one would be able to locate a handgun that hadn’t been seen in two decades, and it was hard to say how much that would help anyway. Finding Arthur’s gun could only prove that this particular gun hadn’t killed Marin. Thanks to Ohio’s complete lack of gun laws, there was no registry or anything to prove that Arthur didn’t own ten other thirty-eight-caliber weapons. I said, “Arthur, can I ask how the gun came up with the police?”
“They asked me if I owned one, so I said yeah.” He ran a hand over his face. “I mean, was I supposed to say no?”
“Have you talked to a lawyer?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I got nothing to hide.”
I bit my tongue for a second. The fact that he was looking for the gun told me that he was worried, even if he didn’t want to admit it. “Do you have one?”
“Well, Norm.”
“Norm is a tort lawyer,” I said, with measured patience. “He’s not going to be able to help in a criminal case—”
“But he’s real good in the courtroom—”
“Criminal court is completely different—”
“You know he
referred me to you in the first place,” he said. “So have a little respect.”
I held up my hands. I had no interest in arguing with him, not about the objective fact that a personal-injury lawyer wasn’t ideal in a criminal case. Nor the part about how Norm’s referral had gotten me exactly no money for my trouble. Arthur was grieving, so I figured I should give him the benefit of the doubt. For another few minutes, at least. The vague guilt that brought me here was giving way to vague irritation.
“Sorry,” he said after a beat.
“It’s fine.”
“But what the hell am I supposed to do. Call that detective and say okay, I got a lawyer now, wanna question me again? No, thanks.”
“No, but if they come back to talk to you a second time, you ask to have your lawyer present.”
He leaned back and covered his eyes with a hand. “But they’ll just think I’m lying, then. Hiding something.”
I got up and went to the kitchen, looking for a scrap of paper to write down the name and phone number of a firm specializing in criminal law. They would do worlds better in a police interrogation than Norm Whitman would, his courtroom record of victories against uneven sidewalks aside. I could write down this number and be on my way. If I wanted to feel frustrated without getting paid for it, I didn’t need Arthur Ungless. I could do that all on my own. But I stopped when I got to the kitchen counter. There was an open can of chicken noodle soup next to the sink, a spoon inside. I peered into it, hoping that Arthur had just been about to pour the soup into a pot when I interrupted him. But the can was two-thirds empty. Again I thought back to the days after my father died, about the casserole dishes brought over by well-meaning neighbors and distant relatives. I glanced back at him—still sitting on the couch with his hand over his eyes—and then I quietly opened the fridge. Not a casserole dish in sight. That didn’t mean much, but between the empty driveway and the sad fact of his cold-soup meal, I got the feeling that something else was going on here.
“Arthur,” I said as I returned to the living room. “Do you have family in town?”
He dropped his hand to his lap. “No,” he said. “My daughter’s in Erie. She’s really all the family I got left, except some cousins.”
“Have you talked to her?”
“No,” he whispered.
“Have you told anybody what happened?”
He took longer to answer this time. “No.”
I couldn’t imagine what was going through his head. “Arthur, why?”
My client looked at me. “Because I’m embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed of what?”
Arthur fell silent again. I thought back to what he said when I first arrived—I would never hurt her, even after everything. Then I said, “I want to help you if I can. Do I have the whole story here?”
He cleared his throat. “No.”
I stepped back into the kitchen and found two rocks glasses and a bottle of Irish whiskey. I poured us each two fingers’ worth and sat next to Arthur on his couch. He took the glass, eyes flicking to his watch for just a second.
“It’s kinda early,” he said. But he took a small sip.
I glanced at his watch too and saw that it was almost five.
Not that early.
I sipped my whiskey and motioned for him to tell me what the hell was going on.
“After you left on Friday, I got with Janet, she does my bills and whatnot. I thought maybe there was some kind of bank issue that caused it, the—you know, the check to bounce. Janet doesn’t touch my personal accounts, so she didn’t know anything about it. But we looked at the statements together and, well,” he said, “there’d been all these checks. Big checks, payable to cash. With my signature.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“And I remembered, shit, the wedding stuff. I’ve been giving Marin blank checks to pay the deposit on the venue, the flowers, all that. I thought it would be a couple hundred here, a couple hundred there. But the money’s gone. All of it. And what kind of venue wants a deposit in cash? She was lying to me.”
“Ouch,” I said. I pictured Marin’s slightly snooty profile, the dress, the shoes. Aloof and rich. And dishonest as fuck. “How much are we talking here?”
“Seventy-five.”
“Hundred?”
Arthur raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “Grand.”
Okay, so ouch didn’t quite cover it. “Christ,” I said. “She stole seventy-five thousand dollars from you. When did this start?”
“January. That’s when we set the date and she started planning the wedding. I tried going with her at first but it was too hard with my schedule, so I figured, it’s easy enough to sign a check and let her take care of the amount, whatever. And I know, it’s partly my own fault—for not paying attention to my account balance, for keeping that much in checking in the first place.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s not even a little bit your fault.”
“I just didn’t think about it. All my personal bills are auto-withdrawals, so I guess I never even look anymore. I hate dealing with that stuff, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “I do too. Mind clutter. What happened then?”
“So this was Friday, three, four o’clock. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know what to think. I mean, I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but what explanation could there possibly be? And the worst part is, whatever she needed that money for? I would’ve given it to her no problem if she’d asked.” He shook his head and tossed back his drink. “So we were supposed to go to dinner at the Guild House. We had reservations. I was getting ready to go home early, talk to her before dinner and all that, but we had an issue with a customer and I got stuck there till after seven. Marin called and left a message that she was going to head down to the restaurant so we didn’t lose our table. And I had no choice but to meet her down there.”
If I’d been in Arthur’s position, I wouldn’t have just calmly gone to dinner. Then again, I couldn’t exactly pretend I had never put up with any nonsense from the men or women I’d dated. I had some more of my whiskey. “Go on.”
“Well, I shoulda called her back and told her to forget it. I don’t know what I was thinking, going there. I lost it. I completely lost it. I told her I knew about the checks, and I even told her how I found out—that I’d hired you because I thought she was having an affair. And then she got just as mad as I was, and we were practically shouting at each other in the restaurant. Worst night of my life. Finally, she got up and stormed out.”
“And you didn’t go after her.”
“No, I stayed, had another drink.” He shook his head. “Then I came home. Middle of the night, I’m passed out right here on the couch, and the police come to the door. It’s just unbelievable.”
“Did you tell the cops?” I said. “About the money she stole.”
Arthur nodded. “And I think it might’ve been a mistake, because the fat one just acted like that was practically proof that I’d been mad enough to kill her.”
Interesting that the police had left this out of what they told me, although, as Sanko had said, they came to my apartment to get information out of me and not the other way around. “What was she doing with that money?” I said. “Do you have any idea?”
“She wouldn’t say. She wouldn’t even admit to it.”
“Does she use drugs?”
“No.”
“Gambling?”
“No.”
“Anyone in her life with a problem? Friends or family?”
“She doesn’t have any family.”
“None?”
“None. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was nine, and she was an only child. Her aunt, her mother’s sister, took her in for a while and was abusive. So Marin had to cut ties with everyone. She hasn’t spoken to them in over thirty years. And friends, I mean, we’ve got our mutual friends. But she’s shy, she’s an introvert.”
I thought his assertion about Marin having no
friends the other day sounded a little shaky, but this story was clearly a load of crap. “Mutual friends,” I said. “You mean your friends.”
He looked at me for a second and nodded.
“Arthur, I have to say. This is very strange. She made seventy-five thousand dollars disappear. She didn’t do that on her own. Introvert or not. Did the police look through her stuff, take anything?”
“No.”
I sighed. It didn’t sound like Sanko was trying all that hard. I thought about the places Marin had gone while I was following her. They were maddeningly ordinary, nothing to explain why she had been blatantly stealing money from the man she lived with. Unless her secret was that she had a pathological addiction to expensive pens. “Her cell phone,” I said. The device itself was likely in her handbag at the time of her death, and therefore tied up in evidence. But her call records could be illuminating. “Do you pay her bill?”
“No,” Arthur said.
So much for that.
“I told her we could get one of those, you know, sharing plans. But she didn’t want to change her number, because of her business.”
A bullshit excuse. She could have easily transferred her number to a new carrier. But speaking of her so-called business, now I wondered if that was any realer than the rest of her. Marin hadn’t acted like someone conducting business of any kind while I was tailing her. Then again, if someone were tailing me, I might not either. Still, the outdated look of Arthur’s home gave me pause. “Did she have a website for her company, a trade name, anything like that?”
“A website?” Arthur said. “You know, I’m not sure.” Then his eyes lit up, relatively speaking. “But I still have one of her cards, the cards we printed for her over at the shop.” He went into the kitchen and opened and closed some drawers. Then he returned and thrust a cream-colored card at me.
Marin K. Strasser. Sophisticated decor for your home.
Then her email address and phone number.
What You Want to See Page 2