Acid Bath

by Nancy Herndon

  After a pleasant Memorial Day weekend spent working on her house, sharing a potluck barbeque with her elderly neighbors, and even ferrying some of those who didn’t drive to local cemeteries, where they put plastic flowers on well-kept graves, Elena felt refreshed. She was ready to get back to work on the McGlenlevie murder, and determined to see that Sarah Tolland wasn’t railroaded for something she was not likely to have done.

  “All right,” said Lieutenant Beltran, “what have we got on this acid bath case?” Because of the continuing newspaper coverage, he had asked for a report.

  “Lime,” said Elena.

  “Huh?”

  “I got a chemist to analyze the stuff in the tub. He says the liquid was unslaked lime and water. Like the stuff you use in whitewash.”

  “You would know about whitewash,” said Beltran jovially. “I’ll bet every adobe shack in your hometown got whitewashed once a year.” He grinned and patted her on the shoulder. “How many people live in that town you come from, Elena? Sixty? Seventy?” His idea of a joke was to treat her like a country bumpkin.

  “Oh, probably fifty, fifty-five,” she replied amiably and untruthfully. Elena had long since learned to overcome her irritation with Beltran’s attitude. The man looked remarkably like her father — stocky, middle-aged, thickening waistline, cropped black hair sprinkled with gray, chin developing jowls. He also seemed to have appointed himself father in absentia. Which was O.K.; he was mostly on her side. When she dumped Frank, and the majority of her colleagues acted like she was a traitor to the uniform, Beltran had approved. And he was fair professionally, even though she knew he thought most of the women on the force were more decorative than useful.

  “Most of what we’ve got,” said Leo, “points to the corpse’s ex-wife.”

  “If the corpse is McGlenlevie,” Elena reminded him. Beltran wasn’t going to be in her corner on this one, not if Sarah was the perp.

  “Well, he was found in his own bathtub. Without dental records that’s probably as close to an I.D. as we’re going to get.” Leo grinned and added, “Unless maybe Dr. Tolland tells us who she killed.”

  “That’s it? You’re identifying the bones as McGlenlevie’s because they were in his bathtub?” Beltran looked less than pleased.

  “Nah. We got a few more bits of evidence. Like the hair on the edge of the tub looks like the hair from the hairbrush in the bedroom, which is presumably McGlenlevie’s. D.P.S. has the samples.”

  “’Bits’ is the word for that piece of guesswork,” muttered Elena.

  “And there’s a girls’ volleyball championship ring on the finger bone,” Leo persisted. “McGlenlevie was the coach of the championship team. The height and estimated weight match his in the one medical record we’ve got, which came from an employment physical at the university when he was hired. That, unfortunately, is it,” he admitted.

  “Elena?” Sergeant Escobedo had been sitting silently during the report. He must have assumed she had something to contribute, since she’d expressed reservations about Leo’s evidence.

  Elena wished now that she’d kept quiet. She didn’t know who the corpse was if it wasn’t Gus. The only useful information they’d turned up implicated Sarah, so Elena didn’t want to mention it. Not that she believed Sarah had murdered anyone. And more important, to her personally at least, pointing a finger at Sarah Tolland was as good as saying, “I screwed up, Lieutenant.” Elena decided morosely that she’d never make sergeant at this rate.

  Beltran was grumbling about what a defense lawyer could do with that half-assed I.D. of the remains.

  Leo repeated his own solution to the crime. “Everything we’ve got implicates the ex-wife.”

  “It’s too pat,” Elena protested. “Sarah Tolland is an intelligent woman. She wouldn’t leave all kinds of evidence that implicates her.”

  “She’s got a point,” agreed the sergeant. “Seems kind of dumb for a college professor.”

  “If not her, then who?” Leo demanded.

  “There’s the Mafia girlfriend,” said Elena, reduced to supporting less easily made cases. “She was in town. She could have returned to the apartment as many times as necessary to throw more lime into the tub. Then once she got him down to the bones, she put on the screaming act, and the neighbors called us.”

  “Lots of people can account for the girl’s time between the last sighting of McGlenlevie and her discovery of the body. Classmates saw her in class or at finals. Roommates saw her at the dorm. The two other guys she was shacking up with account for the only nights she didn’t sleep in her own bed.” Leo looked smug.

  Elena frowned, studied her fingernails. “There’s the possibility that her father — that’s Fat Joe Bonaventura from Miami,” she added for Beltran’s information — ”that Fat Joe had McGlenlevie killed.”

  Beltran whistled silently.

  “Organized Crime come up with anything?” asked Escobedo.

  “Not yet,” Elena admitted. “Fernie Duran’s looking into it.”

  “If Fat Joe knew that much about her love life, why didn’t he have the two college boys done? Sounds like they were getting more from her than McGlenlevie. She only visited the deceased every other week,” said Leo. “Anyway, there’s nothing on the flight records to show a hit man coming from Miami.”

  “Well, hell, Leo, they could come from anywhere and by any means,” said Elena impatiently.

  “The Bonaventuras are a long shot, and you know it.”

  “All right.” said Elena. “There’s the fiancée, Bimmie.”

  “Too dumb to have thought up the acid bath idea.”

  “Lime,” snapped Elena. “You’re worse than the newspapers.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Leo. “What’s your problem, babe? Is it that time of the month?” Then laughing, he put his hands over his head as if to ward off the forthcoming blow.

  Beltran glared at him. Escobedo grinned, used to their verbal sparring.

  Sighing dramatically, Elena held out a hand. “That’s another quarter, Leo. Actually, that one’s worth fifty cents.” Leo was a hopeless tease. Ever since the department had sponsored sensitivity training for male officers, he had been saying outrageous things to her, claiming innocence, paying out quarters if she really got hard-nosed about it. He was the best partner she’d ever had — and the funniest. “Bimmie Kowolski,” she reminded him.

  “Right. She had a pretty heavy aerobics schedule during our time frame. Spent a lot of evenings partying by the pool with her neighbors. And most important, no one saw her at the faculty apartment house during our time frame.”

  “So tell me more about the ex-wife,” said Beltran, having listened closely to their argument.

  Elena knew she’d lost that round.

  “Sarah Tolland,” said Leo. “She tried to do him once before.”

  “Oh, come on, Leo,” Elena protested.

  “You remember Elena’s exploding snail case, Lieutenant?”

  Beltran frowned. “You’re telling me that we’re dealing with the exploding snail woman again?”

  “Right. She’s the chairman of Electrical Engineering at the university. Lives in the same building as McGlenlevie. Looks like she left town right around the time he might have died. Went to a meeting in Chicago, but she never came back. Nobody knows where she is now. Her whereabouts are supposed to be in the computer, but they’re gone. The secretary says she doesn’t lose computer data.”

  Elena slouched down in her chair as Leo enumerated the damning evidence against Sarah.

  “Then there’s the unslaked lime. Because of it we can’t pinpoint the time of death. So we want to know where it came from, right? Well, the head of Buildings and Grounds called us and said he’d ordered some but it never arrived. Turns out someone messed with the computer and rerouted it. The unslaked lime got sent to Electrical Engineering. Now why would they need unslaked lime in Electrical Engineering? What are they gonna do — whitewash their generators? Aberdeen, their storeroom man, remembers three b
ig boxes coming in — about the right size. The shipment was marked for E.E., Sarah Tolland. But she never signed for it. It just disappeared overnight, like maybe she thought if she took it, he’d forget it ever came into his storeroom.”

  “Or maybe she never knew anything about it,” suggested Elena. “I’m telling you, she’s too smart to leave all that evidence behind.”

  “Smart just means she’s smart enough to mess around with the computer and get the lime sent to her.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not going to leave a trail.”

  “Maybe she thought we’d be too dumb to follow it,” Leo retorted. “Anyway, the lime disappeared from the storeroom. Guess who had the keys?”

  “Tolland,” said Beltran.

  Elena could see that he liked the case Leo was building. “Other people in the department had storeroom keys,” Elena pointed out.

  “Where’d you get that idea?” asked Leo. “The storeroom keeper said only Tolland and Bonnard — “

  “I asked around,” said Elena impatiently, “and most of them had duplicates, so it didn’t necessarily have to be Sarah who — “

  “Sarah?” Beltran’s heavy black eyebrows shot up. “You’re on a first name basis?”

  Realizing that she’d made a mistake, Elena tried to look casual about her connection with Sarah as she explained reluctantly, “After the exploding snail, I got her into my divorced woman’s support group.”

  The look on Beltran’s face said it all. How many times had she heard him tell someone that cops weren’t social workers? She’d violated his first commandment. Also his second, by getting personally involved with a suspect.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Elena,” he said.

  To her he looked more than disappointed. He looked pissed.

  “Anyway, the lime came in and disappeared,” said Leo quickly, as if to distract the lieutenant from Elena’s admission.

  “When was that?” asked Beltran.

  “Wednesday, May sixth. The storeroom keeper meant to get a signature from Dr. Tolland. Instead he got sick and went home. The lime disappeared between then and Monday.”

  “Was Tolland still in town?”

  “She’d left town by the time he checked his records and discovered he was missing a delivery. So he doesn’t know for sure who took it. My guess would be — “

  “Tolland,” Beltran finished for him. He said the name like a sentence read in court. “Zero in on her. Question her colleagues. Find out if she actually attended this meeting in Chicago, where she went afterward, that sort of thing. And you, Elena, you screwed up. If you’d arrested her the first — “

  “There was no case,” Elena interrupted.

  Her sergeant agreed.

  “And I don’t believe that she’s the murderer this time either.” Just think what this is going to get you, Jarvis, said the interior voice of the detective who wanted to be the youngest woman ever to make sergeant on the LSPD. From now to retirement — no promotions, no raises, rotten assignments, all that good stuff. Still, she defended herself — and Sarah. “It looks to me as if the evidence that points to her has been planted.”

  “Well, you would think that,” said Beltran, “since the woman’s a friend of yours. Maybe I ought to put someone else on the case — take you off.”

  Elena scowled at him. “If she’s guilty, I can arrest her as fast as anyone.” She said it, but she hated the idea.

  “See that you do,” said Beltran. “Track her down. It doesn’t look good, a case like this going unsolved after — what? — eleven days. Especially such a high-profile case. Headlines about bones in bathtubs. Acid baths.”

  “Lime,” muttered Elena.

  “The papers won’t drop it until we make an arrest. I want to be able to tell Captain Stollinger that we’re close.”

  Back at her desk, Elena started making phone calls, calls she should, admittedly, have made at least a week ago. Maybe Beltran was right; maybe she should be taken off the case. First she called the departmental secretary. Had she made Sarah’s airline reservations? No, she hadn’t. Was it unusual for Sarah to make her own? It depended on whether the trip was all business; this one wasn’t, so Dr. Tolland had arranged for her own tickets, presumably paid the bill, and would submit a reimbursement request for the business portion of the trip when she got back. Did the secretary have any idea when she’d be getting back? The secretary got huffy and said she couldn’t remember every little thing, and someone had tampered with her computer. She’d like to get her hands on the guilty party. Did the secretary know what travel agency Dr. Tolland used? No, she didn’t.

  Elena started calling travel agencies. Leo came in and took half. Forty-five minutes later she found one that had Dr. Sarah Tolland on its customer list. Sarah had flown to Chicago on one airline, from there to Boston on another. She was scheduled to return to Los Santos via DFW on May 31. Would they know whether she’d actually used the tickets? No, they wouldn’t.

  Elena sighed and called the first airline. Yes, Dr. Tolland, or someone, had used the ticket to Chicago. Then Elena called the American Association of Electrical Engineers, who had been running the meeting. Yes, Dr. Tolland had given a talk on Wednesday, May 13. They didn’t know whether she’d attended any other sessions. She had tickets for the banquet, but they couldn’t say whether she’d been there. Registration for the meeting had started May 10.

  Elena frowned, reminded again that Sarah had arrived in Chicago two days early. Was that because she’d killed Gus and wanted to get out of town? If so, it had definitely been a premeditated murder because she’d made the airplane reservations a month in advance. But hell, if you wheeled in a barrel of unslaked lime, that took premeditation. It wasn’t something people just carried around with them. Of course, Sarah might have killed him first and brought in the lime later. Directly from the storeroom? And where had she kept the extra barrels? In his apartment? No. An apartment tenant on Gus’s floor had seen a uniformed delivery person wheeling in two large boxes on Sunday. Which was after Sarah left town — or when she returned.

  But three large containers had been diverted to the Electrical Engineering Department and then disappeared. To where? Sarah’s apartment? Had Sarah hoped one box would do it, then discovered there was some of Gus left, forcing her to fly back and use up one or two more boxes?

  The whole scenario made Elena feel sick. And she couldn’t imagine quiet, dignified Sarah doing any of the things that had been done. Sarah hauling around big boxes. Bashing Gus on the head. Dragging his body into the bathroom. Tumbling it into the bathtub. Running the water and then dumping in lime — whoosh, the lime hits the water and starts boiling, bubbling, while Sarah, tricked out in an ill-fitting messenger’s uniform, judges the mixture, watches the flesh — ugh. That was not Sarah!

  The second airline confirmed that Sarah had flown off to Boston. Why Boston? Elena wondered. Maybe they could get a search warrant, search her apartment, find out who she knew in Boston, whether she had another barrel of lime stashed in her closet. Waiting until May 31, almost a whole week away, to see if Sarah came home didn’t seem like a good idea. Leo agreed and went after the search warrant when he got back from investigating a convenience store assault with Jaime Garcia, but the judge said they didn’t have enough evidence. Elena shook her head and started checking the Boston phone book for Tollands. There were dozens. And then there were all the surrounding cities and towns, and they had Tollands too. Elena checked with Sergeant Escobedo to clear that many calls. Frowning, pouring himself a tablespoon of Maalox, he referred her to Lieutenant Beltran.

  “My God,” said Beltran when she reported to him on the number of Tollands she’d have to call. “We’ve got three months to go on this year’s budget, and we’re almost out of money. I’m going to have to start cutting down on overtime unless the city council gives us an emergency appropriation. And we sure as hell can’t afford that many long-distance calls.” He glared at her — as if the number of Tollands in Boston was her fault.

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