A large dark car pulled up close to the garage and snapped off its lights. I tried to remember if Mike’s Beretta was still in his desk drawer, loaded. I was just heading off to check when I saw Roger and Ricardo, his father, get out of the car.
“Whose car is that?” I asked as they climbed the front steps.
“The department’s,” Roger said, handing me his raincoat as he came inside. “I rarely drive it, but mine is in the shop.”
“What brings you out on this wet night?” I asked, curious. I could not remember Roger ever just dropping by unannounced.
“We have come to steal your car for your mother’s friend,” Ricardo said, planting a cold kiss on my cheek.
“Dad didn’t want Mom driving down the mountain in the rain tomorrow,” Roger said. “So he asked me to bring him up here tonight. I’m sorry it’s so late. I tried to warn you, but the call went straight to message.”
“You didn’t leave a message.”
“Sorry, no.”
“You called from your mobile?”
He nodded, and I asked him to dial my number, just to check the line, I said. He did, and his familiar number appeared on the I.D. screen; the earlier call wasn’t his.
“Sorry to intrude at this hour, dear,” Ricardo said. “When I saw the weather report, I put the prod to my boy and said, ‘Let’s go now.’”
“Probably the smart thing,” I said, imagining Linda, always a nervous driver, following Ricardo down the mountain in a deluge when they came to get my car for Gracie Nussbaum to use during her visit.
After fetching the extra set of car keys, we went down the back stairs and through the garage. I pushed the button to open the big doors, and the overhead lights came on as the doors rolled up.
“Honey, you going to be driving Mike’s truck?” Ricardo asked, eyeing the pickup skeptically.
“Sure. Be good for the truck to get driven,” I said. “It hasn’t gone farther than the feed store for over a year.”
“But it’s a big truck.” He was not persuaded that it was a good idea for me, little me, to drive it.
“Ricardo,” I said, hitting the button on my key fob to pop the trunk of my car, “I’ll be fine. You want to give me a hand?”
I led him to the wine cupboard and asked him to pick up one of the cases of Côtes du Rhône Jean-Paul brought over Saturday and put it in the trunk. I followed him, carrying tins of the pâté that Mom had enjoyed so much.
“What’s all this for?” he asked, studying the label on the pâté.
“Gifts for Mom’s hosts,” I said, handing him my car keys. “She can’t go to your house empty-handed.”
He smiled. “I like the way you think.”
Roger told him to go ahead, he’d be down the mountain right after him, but first he wanted a word with me.
After we waved good-bye to Ricardo, Roger and I stood in the open garage door, leaning against the truck’s tailgate, looking out at the night. There were patches of black sky behind the clouds, a sliver of moon. Rain was predicted to continue until midafternoon Wednesday, but those patches gave me hope of an earlier clearing.
“Are you checking up on me?” I asked.
“I am. How are you feeling?”
“Tired, Roger. Sore. Quite a day.”
“If you don’t want to drive Mike’s truck, you can have my car.”
“I thought it was in the shop.”
“I lied. Your shoulder might get more sore; I thought the truck might be a bit too much, so I brought the company car home so you could have mine if you want it. Let me know and we’ll switch them out.”
Moved by his concern, I thanked him, hugged him.
“Did you have a doctor look at your wound?”
“Not yet. I have an appointment first thing in the morning.”
“Go get some rest,” he said, giving my back a last pat.
I asked him, “Did you find out who followed me yesterday afternoon in Gilstrap?”
“Yeah. I ran the plates and called the sheriff up there to see if he could tell me anything about the owner, young man named Orel Swensen. The sheriff knows him, said Swensen got into some mischief as a teenager but that now he mostly stayed out of trouble; drinks a little beer on Saturday nights. He works on his father’s dairy farm in Gilstrap, a big commercial operation.”
“Never heard of Orel Swensen,” I said.
“Sheriff asked him why he followed you,” Roger said. “He said he wanted to make sure you got out of town.”
“Why?”
He shrugged, looked at me with a sly smile on his face. “Who’d you offend when you were up there, Mags?”
I told him about taping a conversation with Karen Holloway and about being confronted by her younger son, Harlan.
“Maybe he’s a friend of Harlan Holloway.” He smiled down at me, ever the tease. “And maybe he thought you have good legs.”
“That’s probably it,” I said.
“I should go,” he said, taking out his keys.
“Roger?”
He turned toward me.
“You know Joan Givens.”
“Sure.”
“Has she come to you to talk about Park Holloway’s illicit money-raising?”
“No. I only know what my beloved wife has passed along to me. She says Joan wants to go to the D.A. or something. The way I see it, Holloway’s fund-raising may have been unethical, but I don’t know that it was criminal.”
“Joan told me that he deposited checks in an offshore account.”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Certainly has an odor to it. But it isn’t illegal, per se. IRS might be interested, though.”
“Has anyone mentioned any of that fund-raising activity to Thornbury and Weber?”
He dipped his chin in a little nod. “I told them it looked like Holloway was having some financial issues because he put the squeeze on campus donors, privately. They said looking into the finances of a murder victim is standard procedure.”
“Have they looked into it at all? Spoken with Joan?”
“I know they haven’t spoken with Joan or I would have heard about it. But Frick and Frack don’t share much with me,” he said. “They have this funny idea that I’m hardwired into the information pipeline at the college.”
I had to laugh. “Where did they ever get that idea?”
He grinned. “Beats me.”
“Roger, I’m a little worried about Joan,” I said. “She told me that before Holloway died she gave copies of a file of letters from angry donors to the Board of Trustees because she wanted Holloway’s activity to be exposed. But she also told me she could trust the Board only to do their best to make the problem go away. I thought that Joan could be protecting her donors by not pushing the issue further.”
“Protecting them from what?” he asked, dubious. “Embarrassment, scrutiny?”
“The way Holloway died,” I said, “how about a murder charge?”
He put a gentle hand under my chin and raised it so I was looking at him.
“That guy today really rattled you, didn’t he?”
“Hate to admit it, but yes.”
“What you’re doing, it’s called projection,” he said, smiling, dropping his hand from my face. “Instead of worrying about yourself, you’ve decided to worry about someone going after Joan.”
“It’s called experience, Roger. I read the donor letters. Some of them are pretty irate. If someone on Joan’s list was angry enough to take out Holloway, then Joan could be in some real danger.”
“That’s a stretch, Mags.”
“I gave her Thornbury’s card and told her I thought she should call him. Would you do me a favor and ask Frick and Frack if she did?”
“As soon as I get home I’ll do just that, but only because I have a feeling that if I don’t, you won’t get any sleep tonight.”
Chapter 19
“They’re here to arrest me, aren’t they?”
“They won’t do anything until after th
e funeral,” I said, stealing a glance toward the college gym’s exit doors where Detectives Thornbury and Weber stood, feet shoulder-width apart like soldiers at parade rest, unmoving yet seeing everything and everyone in the room.
Uncle Max reached forward from his seat behind us and clamped a hand on Sly’s shoulder as a reminder to keep his mouth shut.
Sly dropped his head and wiped his hands on his pants legs before he clenched them together. He was as thin as a splinter, but compared to the scrawny urchin I had pulled in off the streets a decade earlier, he was downright robust; I thought he looked handsome in his new blue suit.
A lot of people in that room were keeping an eye on Sly. The course of life is rarely a straightaway; his certainly had not been. But it seemed to me that he was handling the curves thrown at him recently with grace.
I looked around, checking on Guido’s crew, camera placements and lights, caught his eye and got a nod that meant all was well. The cameras were fairly unobtrusive, but they were a presence just the same. As I turned back around, I saw that Thornbury was staring at me.
I leaned in close to Sly and whispered, “Don’t worry, kid, if they put you in the slam, I’ll bake you a cake.”
He slid his eyes toward me and managed a smile. “Promise, Maggie?”
“Promise,” I said.
“What kind?”
“What else? Devil’s food.”
Uncle Max cleared his throat, a signal for me to shut up as well.
Sly mouthed, You okay? I nodded, gave his arm a squeeze, mouthed, You? He smiled gamely.
The big gymnasium doors swung open and six men, all of them wearing dark suits, all members of the college administration except for handsome Trey Holloway, the dead man’s son, wheeled the mahogany coffin in out of the rain.
I saw the basketball coach scowl. I don’t know how Coach felt about Park Holloway, but it was basketball season and Coach had protested mightily against holding the memorial service for Holloway in his gym. But it was still raining heavily, predicted to continue into the afternoon, and with the auditorium closed for earthquake retrofitting there was no other indoor space on campus large enough to contain the five- or six-hundred members of the campus community who had come to pay their last respects to the murdered man.
To appease Coach, the highest paid and to some the most valuable member of the faculty, the gym floor was covered with heavy canvas drop cloths borrowed from some ongoing construction project on campus, and we all traded our shoes for athletic socks. I didn’t mind. The socks were warmer than the wet pumps I placed on the tarp beneath my chair.
As the coffin came down the center aisle the crowd stood as they would for a bride and watched the mortuary trolley progress toward the out-of-bounds line where a priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk, a Methodist preacher and a Chumash Indian shaman waited in front of a bank of potted palms and Easter lilies. That lineup of men dressed in their various forms of clerical garb would certainly be fodder for corny jokes once this collegiate congregation was sprung. A priest, a rabbi, and a shaman walked into a bar....
Lew Kaufman leaned across Sly after the coffin passed us and whispered, “Damn, Maggie, I was hoping for an open coffin. You know, just to make sure the bastard’s dead.”
I shuddered, and not because the gym was cold. “Trust me, he’s dead.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” He gripped my elbow by way of apology. “Just a stab at a bad joke. I forgot for a sec; you found him. It was ugly, huh? You never said.”
“Not pretty.”
Lew saw something on my face that made him defensive. “It’s not just me, Maggie. Look around, see any tears?”
“Be careful what you say, Lew.” Sly canted his head toward the side of the gym where the detectives still stood watch.
“Why?” Lew said. “The fuzz going to arrest me for being honest?”
“Not you,” Sly said, his narrow face pale. “They’re going to arrest me.”
Lew scoffed. “Get over yourself, kid.”
Sly turned to me. “Aren’t they, Maggie?”
“Shh,” I said as Max reached forward and nudged Sly’s shoulder.
“That’s crazy talk, Sly,” Lew said. “Half the people in this room had better reason than you to want him dead. Not that you didn’t. I’m just saying that lots of people had fights with Holloway. Worse fights than you.” Lew, though he whispered, could be heard by people around us. Some tittered, others shushed him.
Lew wasn’t wrong in what he said, though his timing stank. In common with many people in that packed gym, Sly and I were only there for the sake of appearances, and not because of any affection for the murdered man. But this was the wrong place to say so. I put my hand on Lew’s arm and whispered, “Not now.” He fell silent, though all through the service he kept checking to make sure the two detectives were still there. As did Sly.
It seemed to me that if Detectives Thornbury and Weber were watching anyone, they were watching Uncle Max.
Clarice Snow and her son, Frank Weidermeyer, AKA Franz von Wilde, arrived late and slipped into seats in the back row. She was dressed appropriately for a funeral in an old Hollywood movie: black hat, black suit, black gloves. Frank wore a narrow Italian-cut suit and his mop of dark hair was combed, but he still looked as if he had just fallen out of bed, puffy-eyed and sullen. She saw me, raised her brows as if surprised that I was there, and whispered to her son. He glanced my way and shrugged in response to whatever she had said to him. I had a feeling she would not be happy to see me the next time I entered her posh gallery, but it was the son I thought I should be on the lookout for.
Kate was near the front of the gym with Bobbie Cusato, Hiram Chin, and a member of the Board of Trustees I had met somewhere. I hoped to see Joan Givens with them, but she wasn’t. I didn’t see Joan at all, but considering her feelings toward Holloway that was understandable.
The service seemed interminable. College campuses are loaded with people accustomed to speaking before captive audiences. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advice to the public speaker, “Be sincere, be brief, be seated,” held no sway that morning as one speaker after another endowed the audience with generous outpourings of verbiage, even as the gym grew hot and airless and heads began to nod. It was interesting to me that Hiram Chin, who probably had known Holloway better than anyone else in the room, perhaps including his son, did not speak.
I may have dozed and missed an encomium or musical offering or two. Still, I never heard an expression of genuine sadness or affection. In sum, the audience was given generic paeans, scrubbed of the essence of the dead man; it had become unpopular to be the man’s friend once rumors of his financial perfidy circulated.
During the service there was no reference to the violence of Holloway’s leave-taking, the details of which fascinated every person in the room more than the details of his “vision” for the college.
Eventually, the Chumash shaman waved smoking bundles of sage, signaling the end, and the pallbearers wheeled Holloway’s remains back out into the rain. As the crowd rose and began shuffling out behind it, I stayed seated with Sly and Lew, with Max standing sentinel behind us. The detectives didn’t move, either.
“That’s a wrap,” Guido called to his crew. “Let’s tear down and get the equipment back to the truck. Time is money, kids.”
He came over for a quick conference. He reminded me that his crew of five was due for a union-mandated lunch break in half an hour, a break that would add rental time to the equipment. I recommended a couple of the Village restaurants, and he went back to work.
“Lot of yakety-yak,” Max said after a big yawn. “That mob of eggheads could out-talk a gaggle of trial lawyers.”
Sly turned to look at him. “The cops can’t take me as long as I’m in here, right?”
“Why’s that?” Max asked, scowling.
“Sanctuary, you know?” Sly said. “This was, like, a religious thing, right?”
“No, sorry.” Max clapped a hand on the youth’s shoulder.
“This is a college gym in a public school, son, not a church. Just stay put. We’ll let the dicks come to us if they want to talk to us. And remember what I told you.”
“Keep my mouth shut.”
“Exactly.” Max tightened his grip on Sly as the detectives stirred and began to walk our way. “No one can question you unless I’m present so...”
Sly finished the sentence. “Don’t volunteer anything.”
“Not to them, not to bunk mates, if it comes to that. Not a damn word. If they hook you up, I’ll get you out on bail as soon as I can find a judge.” Max took his hand away. “So hang tight. And—”
“And shut up,” Sly whispered; the detectives had reached our row of seats.
Lew hovered over Sly, as if his big body could shield that skinny kid from whatever the detectives might throw at him.
“Miss MacGowen, Mr. Miller,” Thornbury said. He extended his hand toward Max. “Counselor.”
“Detective.” Instead of accepting his hand, Max wrapped his arm around my shoulders. Lew had Sly under his wing. Max turned to Thornbury. “If you’ll excuse us, we are just leaving.”
Detective Thornbury stepped into the end of the row, effectively blocking our way. “I’d like a word—”
“My client has nothing more to say.”
Detective Weber smiled to himself, as if to say, God damn lawyers. Then, with his head cocked to the side, he asked, “Why does she think she needs an attorney?”
“She?” Max spun toward me as if just discovering I was there.
“You.” Weber jabbed a finger toward me.
Max put a hand against Sly’s back and gave him a little nudge.
“No need for you to hang around, son. I’ll catch up with you in the gallery in a little while.”
Without a word and without any hesitation, Sly and Lew slipped out behind the crowd.
“You lied to us, Miss MacGowen,” Thornbury said.
“I never lied to you.”
“There are sins of commission and sins of omission, Miss MacGowen,” Thornbury said. “Let’s talk about the latter.”
Max hooted at that. “What are you, a priest or a cop?”
The Hanging Page 19