Blood Relative (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 4)

by Michael Allegretto

  I said nothing.

  “The cops aren’t even looking for him. I told the D.A. that if he didn’t get who killed her, I’d beat his head…” He heaved a sigh. “Everyone’s so sure I did it. Other than Westfall, the only people who believe me are Kenneth, Karen, and Nicole—my children. Their love and support are keeping me from exploding in here.” Butler licked his lips. “Being locked up, it’s—I can barely stand it. If I don’t get out, I don’t know…I might really kill somebody.”

  I believed him.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll find Mr. Winks and—”

  “Forget about Winks. No, I don’t mean that. Do what Westfall wants. But find out who Clare was seeing.”

  “Seeing?”

  “The fourth person you need to find is Clare’s…lover.” Butler set his jaw and exhaled through his nose. He hated talking about it. “Clare is—I mean, she was—much younger than I am. I’d met her a few years after my first wife died. Clare brought joy back into my life. She was full of cheer, full of energy. After a while, well, it was difficult for me to keep up with her. Sexually. She took a lover. This was about four months ago. I found out and put a stop to it.

  “But she started up again recently. I didn’t have any proof, really, just an attitude change on her part. Preoccupied. Then, the night before she was killed, I overheard her talking on the phone. Intimately. But angry, too, as if she were having a lover’s quarrel. She hung up when she saw me standing in the doorway. She refused to talk about it, and we fought. In the morning we fought some more…”

  He fell silent. I waited.

  “I told the police about Clare’s first lover. I thought she was seeing him again and that he’d killed her. They questioned him, and he proved he’d been out of town at the time of the murder. But I know she was seeing someone. If you can find him, at least the police will have another suspect. Right now all they’ve got is me.”

  He had a mildly desperate look in his eyes, as if he were hanging from a cliff by his fingers—and I was standing over him.

  “Why would your wife’s lover kill her?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Who was the first one, the man the police questioned?”

  “I told you, he was out of town.”

  “Yes, but he might know things about Clare that you don’t.”

  Butler winced at the thought. But he gave me the name: Christopher Pruitt.

  “I’ll need a recent photo of you,” I said. I already had Westfall’s permission and the key to Butler’s house in my pocket, but I asked, anyway, “May I take one from your home?”

  It was a small thing, a modicum of respect. It made Butler sit up a little straighter.

  “Of course,” he said. He told me where to find it. He also told me to speak to his son, who would help me in any way he could.

  The interview was over.

  We left the booth. The deputy led Butler away. Now that I’d met the man, I could see my first impression had been wrong. What I’d interpreted as confidence and self-esteem was merely self-control. Butler was straining to hold himself together.

  And somehow I’d begun to doubt that he’d murdered his wife.

  CHAPTER 3

  I DROVE HOME TO GET A GUN.

  When I’d left this morning, I’d believed the only killer I’d be dealing with was already locked up. But if Samuel Butler was innocent—and it seemed possible—then someone else had brutally murdered his wife. Someone I might bump into while I was nosing around. An altercation could ensue, and I wanted an appropriate response.

  My home was just off Seventh Avenue, near the governor’s residence. We both lived in mansions.

  That is, my building had been constructed as a mansion around the turn of the century. Decades ago it was divided into eight apartments.

  There were two apartments in the basement, one vacant, the other belonging to George. He unclogged drains, patched plaster, repaired leaks, and generally kept the grand old house from falling apart. I’m not sure how old he was. He still limped from a wound received in the Indian wars.

  My wacky old landlady, Mrs. Finch, lived on the main level in what had long ago been her family’s parlor and formal dining room.

  The apartment across the hall from her was occupied by a continuous stream of tenants. Mrs. Finch kept renting and evicting, searching for just the right person to be on “her floor.”

  On the second floor, right below me, were my good friends Vassily and Sophia Botvinnov. They’d emigrated from Russia. Perhaps “escaped” might be a better word, since back then no one had heard of glasnost. Vaz was a grand master, retired now from world-class competition. He played chess the way Muhammad Ali had fought, smooth and powerful and nearly unbeatable. In fact, the only game I’d ever seen him lose was to an inferior player at a multiboard exhibition he’d given at a local chess club. When I questioned Vaz later about the loss, he told me, “Jacob, when a club sponsors me at an exhibition, I always lose to the treasurer, draw with the president, and beat everybody else.”

  Also on the second floor was a young couple I barely knew. They came and went a lot. Sophia called them “yoopies.”

  On the top floor was me and a vacancy. It had been that way since I’d moved in over three years ago. As far as I knew, Mrs. Finch had never tried to rent that apartment. She’d mentioned once that it had been the bedroom for her and her sisters, back when the place was still a mansion and her father was an affluent Denver merchant. Sometimes at night I’d hear her go in there and lock the door. She’d stay for hours.

  I unlocked my door and went into my apartment.

  Because the building had not been originally designed for multiple tenants, no two apartments were the same. You entered mine in the middle of the living room, with the kitchen to the left and the bed and bath through a doorway straight ahead. The apartment was probably the smallest in the building, but it had the best view, from a third-floor balcony off the eating area that overlooked the large backyard and the neighborhood to the east, north, and south. The view improved considerably in the summer when the secretaries in the apartment building across the alley worked on their tans beside the pool.

  I passed through the living room to the bedroom. The bed was still unmade. Maybe the cleaning lady would make it. If I had a cleaning lady.

  Out of respect for burglars, I kept the guns in the closet safe, a hundred-pound, two-foot cube. Presently, I owned two pieces: a nickel-finish .357 Magnum Colt Trooper and an Airweight Smith & Wesson .38 with a two-inch barrel.

  I clipped on a hip holster with the smaller gun, then checked myself in the mirror. My jacket barely bulged. Jacob Lomax, armed and ready. The most dangerous man in the building, if not on the block.

  But I hadn’t worn a gun in months. It felt lumpy and awkward. And menacing, as if it would cause problems, not solve them. I considered taking it off.

  While in Mexico I’d reflected on my six years as a cop, my four and a half years as a private snoop, and all the sociopaths who’d made it prudent for me to carry a gun—brawlers, backstabbers, and stone-cold killers. A never-ending stream of scum, mine for the wading. Why should I keep doing it?

  Of course, there were the others, the ones who’d accidentally fallen into the stream or who’d been dragged in unwillingly. They’d needed someone to help them out. They’d always need someone.

  But what made me think it had to be me?

  I shut the safe and locked it. I kept the gun on.

  The residence of Samuel and the late Clare Butler was on Adams Street, just north of Evans Avenue, a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. The house itself was a big, angular brick ranch, built in the late forties and painted off-white sometime later.

  I parked in the driveway in the spiderweb shade of a giant weeping willow.

  The next-door neighbor gave me the eye. He was short, fat, and balding, kneeling beside a flower bed of newly turned soil. He wore a white shirt, a blue cardigan sweater, baggy brown pants, and a pair of half-glasses. There
was a trowel in his hand and a frown on his face.

  He watched me go up the walk to Butler’s front door. After I pulled open the screen and shoved the key in the lock, he called, “Hey.”

  He crossed the driveway and came up the walk toward me, stopping halfway.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” He pointed his trowel at me as if it were a sword.

  “It’s okay, I’ve got a key.” I held it up for him to see.

  He squinted.

  “Samuel Butler’s lawyer gave it to me,” I said.

  “His lawyer?”

  I told him who I was and what I was doing. He lowered his weapon. He said his name was Pennypacker and that he’d lived in the house next door for thirty-seven years and that ever since he’d been burglarized five years ago, he’d kept a watchful eye for “suspicious-looking persons.”

  “Er, no offense.”

  “None taken,” I said. “How well did you know Samuel and Clare?”

  “Him, very well. I was here when he moved in with his first wife twenty, twenty-five years ago. She was a peach. Her name was May. A real sweet lady. I remember when she died.” He clucked his tongue and shook his head.

  “How did she die?”

  “Brain tumor. It was sudden. Sam and the kids took it very hard. Before that, they’d been one big happy family. Then, a few years later, he took up with the other one.”

  “Clare.”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “I knew that would never last. She was too young and wild for him. To tell you the truth, I’m not too surprised he killed her.”

  “Because she was wild?”

  “Because they fought.”

  “I understand they had an argument the night before the murder.”

  “Argument is putting it mildly,” he said. “I opened the back door to let in the dog, and I could hear them screaming bloody murder over there, calling each other names you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Did you hear them fighting the next day?”

  “The police asked me the same thing. No. The only thing I heard— Well, like I told them, it wasn’t important.”

  “What?”

  “I heard tires screech. It sounded as if it came from my driveway or Sam’s. But when I looked out the window, there was no car, not even in the street.”

  “What time was this?”

  Pennypacker shrugged. “Around noon, I think. Anyway, as I told the police, that night wasn’t the first time I’d heard Sam and Clare fight. They’d had other yelling matches, one just a few months ago. That time, she ended up with a black eye and a mink coat.”

  “So he’d hit her and then buy her things?”

  “Something like that. But don’t start thinking Sam was a monster. I mean, he was a different man when he was married to his first wife, May. A good husband and a loving father, from what I could tell.”

  “So you think Clare changed him?”

  “I do. She changed him into a murderer.”

  Pennypacker went back to his flower bed, and I went into the house.

  The architect had been a freethinker, or else he’d mislaid his T square—the hallways and rooms were not quite at right angles.

  I moved along the hallway to my right, sensing the emptiness of the house as a pressure in my ears, as if I were swimming underwater.

  The living room had a hardwood floor and an enormous area rug with arcane designs in black and white. White leather couches and chairs were arranged for group conversation. A few black-steel, stick-thin lamps reached out from the corners like giant praying mantises.

  I wandered into the kitchen, the scene of the crime.

  It was large and airy. There was a table with four chairs, a big butcher block, and lots of counter space to accommodate the expensive, foreign-made small appliances. The table-top gleamed, with not a trace of Clare Butler’s blood.

  I moved past it to a door and twisted open the dead bolt. An attached three-car garage. I was surprised—although I shouldn’t have been—to find cars there: a two-year-old white Cadillac Seville and a new midnight-blue Porsche 911. I couldn’t picture Butler driving a sports car, so I assumed the Porsche had belonged to Clare.

  I stepped down into the garage.

  There was a workbench along the rear wall, too clean and unblemished to have seen much use. The pegboard gleamed with hand tools, including three crescent wrenches. They were hung in a row according to length. The fourth hook was empty, apparently having once held the largest wrench, the murder weapon.

  I went back into the kitchen and locked the door.

  Westfall had told me Clare was bludgeoned while she sat at the table. I wondered if she’d sat with her back to this door or if the killer had had to walk around her, hiding the wrench at his side. Either way, she hadn’t been alarmed by his presence.

  I moved toward the living room and veered right, through a wide doorway, into the sunroom.

  Wicker furniture with pastel cushions was arranged about the stone floor. The room had once been a patio. Large windows opened onto the sprawling backyard.

  There were plenty of leafless trees out there, some just budding, and a few stately evergreens. The flower beds were beginning to bloom with perennials. Near the rear of the yard, a hundred feet from the house, a gazebo was being swarmed by thick, leafless vines.

  I turned to the wall behind me, which was hung with family photographs. Butler had told me to look here for a suitable picture.

  However, most of the photos showed him as a much younger man, with his first wife and their three children—a son and a daughter about a year apart and a cute, chubby little girl who’d come along six or seven years later. The only recent pictures of Butler were snapshot-sized, with him wedged in among his children.

  I wanted something more close up.

  I found it in the master bedroom. On the bureau was a silver-framed head-and-chest picture of Butler and a young woman, young enough to be another daughter. Clare. She was extremely attractive, almost professionally so, with stylish blond hair, violet eyes, and a generous mouth. Both she and Butler wore sweaters with turtle-necks underneath. She looked like an advertisement for a ski resort. Butler looked brutish beside her. I slipped the photo from its frame.

  Before I left the room, I made a brief search of the closets. Not because I was looking for anything in particular. Just professional nosiness.

  The closets were his-and-hers walk-ins, each a small room. Butler’s was only about half full. There were shelves for sweaters and a rack for shoes. His shirts were mostly solid colors—off-white and pale blue. He had half a dozen sports coats and fewer suits, not much for a guy with money. There was one Armani that stood out like a First Communion suit in a kid’s closet. I wondered if Clare had made him buy it.

  I was certain she had when I stepped into her closet.

  It looked like a boutique. Dozens of sweaters and twin racks jammed with dresses, blouses, pants, and jackets—everything with designer labels, some unworn, still with price tags attached. I pulled open the built-in drawers. Each was filled with silk undergarments.

  Then something shiny caught my eye, tucked between the side of the drawer and a black silk negligee. I turned it over in my fingers.

  It was a short, clear glass tube—a fluted mouthpiece at one end and a hollow ball at the other, with a tiny hole on top of the ball—some kind of pipe. I doubted that you could smoke hash in it. And it wasn’t like any crack pipe I’d ever seen. But it definitely had the look of drug paraphernalia.

  I sniffed it. Odorless.

  Had Clare been into drugs? If so, I wondered if they’d had anything to do with her murder.

  I put the pipe in my pocket and left the house, locking the front door behind me.

  Then I climbed into the Olds and headed toward the mountains.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to get to Golden, which lies in the folds of the foothills west of Denver.

  I hadn’t been there since early last fall—also because of
someone’s death. Then the area had been brown and dry, baking under the last of summer’s heat. Now it was brown and wet, with large patches of white. The shady mountainsides would show snow for at least another month.

  I cruised down the main drag between one- and two-story storefronts, some new, some as old as the century. There were pedestrians moving about on the wide sidewalks. Few business suits. Mostly blue jeans and jackets or sweaters. I could smell hops being brewed into Coors beer a few blocks away.

  Then I spotted the bar Butler had described to me.

  As he’d said, it was on the corner, the bar entrance in front, the one to the restaurant on the side, a theater across the street. Another Rambo movie. Doesn’t that guy know when to quit?

  I nosed the Olds against the curb between a pair of pickup trucks, one of which sat high atop huge muddy tires. Each vehicle had a gun rack in the rear window.

  The inside of the establishment also fit Butler’s description.

  It was as dim as a saloon should be at eleven-thirty in the morning. A bar stretched down the right side, fronted by a dozen four-legged wooden stools. The mirror on the wall doubled an uneven row of liquor bottles. The left side of the room was crowded with empty tables. Farther up on the left was a large open doorway. I could hear the faint clack of pool balls.

  A waitress with yellow hair and a peasant blouse came through the doorway carrying a tray of empty beer bottles. She unloaded them on the bar and said, “Four more.”

  I took a stool and waited while the bartender popped open some cold bottles and the waitress toted them back through the doorway.

  He asked me, “What’ll it be?”

  There was little doubt that this was Butler’s bartender. He was around thirty, average looking in nearly all respects—medium height and weight, medium brown hair and eyes. His mustache, though, was uncommon. It was as thick as a brush and completely covered his mouth. The ends were longer still, waxed and twisted tightly into six-inch spikes that pointed straight out at each side. His wife wore safety goggles.