by Gin Jones
As soon as she started up the front walk, Helen heard the sound of the lathe being used in the garage behind the law offices, and decided to talk to him first, before warning Adam that Lily was going to call to check on their credentials. The garage door was open, and Tate stood with his back to it, bent over the lathe. She didn't want to startle him, so she walked around to stand in front of him and waited for him to notice her.
After a few minutes, Tate looked up, sighed, and turned off the motor. He pushed his safety goggles up to the top of his head, pulled off the ear protection, and dropped down into his director's chair. He didn't offer her a seat of her own, and she wasn't about to ask for one.
"I was wondering if you'd seen my cane?" she said. "I thought I might have left it here."
"It's not out here. I'd have noticed if I'd suddenly acquired a new piece of wood," he said. "You'd have to ask Adam if it's in the law offices."
"Because you're retired," Helen said. "That reminds me. I was wondering why you didn't quit your job before now if you found it so unfulfilling."
"Being in jail would have been more annoying than practicing law."
"They can't send you to jail for changing careers."
"No, but if I'd quit my job, I'd have ended up in jail for nonpayment of alimony."
"There are other ways to get money."
"Robbing a bank would have landed me in jail for even longer than nonpayment of alimony."
"Not if you had a good lawyer."
"And that's where it gets tricky. I'm the best defense lawyer I could afford, but you know what they say about a person having a fool for a client if he represents himself." He finally seemed to notice the papers in Helen's hand, and gave them a look that suggested he thought they were going to burst into flame and destroy his workshop. "What are those?"
She tossed the copies of Melissa's references on top of the sawdust on the workshop table. "Melissa's reference letters."
"It's a bit late now, to be inquiring into whether she was any good at her job."
"I know more than I ever wanted to know about her work skills and shortcomings," Helen said. "What I'm wondering is whether any of her previous patients had a reason to kill her."
"I doubt they'd mention it in a letter praising her."
"That's why I'm planning to go talk to them in person," Helen said. "Find out what they really thought of her. Make sure they actually wrote these letters. That sort of thing."
"Then what are you doing here interrupting my retirement again?" he said. "I'm sure I never wrote her a reference. I never even met the woman."
"You know how to talk to witnesses."
His eyebrows rose. "You expect me to go with you to the interviews?"
"I wouldn't dream of taking you away from your woodworking." She'd hoped he might have insisted on doing the interviews himself, as a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of an untrained person conducting a cross-examination, but she'd known it was a long shot, so she wasn't terribly disappointed when he didn't take the bait. "I'd like you to teach me how to examine a witness."
"It takes years of practice to get it right."
"I don't have that much time," Helen said. "I just need to know the basics. And then I'll leave you to your work here."
"Is that what it takes to get rid of you?"
"That, or murdering me."
"No more murders." Tate pulled his safety goggles off and brushed sawdust out of his hair. "For the sort of questioning you're doing, it's a little different from what you'd do in court. But you can't just go barging in there without a plan. You need to know as much as possible about the witnesses before you talk to them, so you'll notice if their answers don't sound quite right. They don't usually lie outright, just sort of re-imagine their story in ways that make them feel better about themselves. I interviewed one guy who was clocked at over a hundred miles an hour on the highway but still denied he was close to forty miles over the speed limit, because, really, everyone goes eighty on that road, and the cops allow a ten-mile-an-hour leeway, and that meant he could go ninety, so, really, he was only fifteen miles over the speed limit. His speed was a pretty simple fact, but if I hadn't already known he was clocked at a hundred-plus miles per hour, he might have led me to believe he was only going eighty. He wouldn't have been lying, exactly, just putting his own spin on it."
"I don't have time to do that kind of research. I've read the reference letters, but they don't really say anything." She'd read them carefully last night, looking for a Perry Mason moment, a tidbit that would give her an opportunity to point out inconsistencies and demand an explanation. Or a Sherlock Holmes moment, when some tiny detail would lead her to a huge epiphany. All she'd found was generic praise, too vague to pin down inconsistencies, too broad to contain any details. The same clichés showed up in at least half of the letters, although the rest of the language was varied enough that she doubted they'd all been written by the same person. Maybe that was her one insight, she thought: the letters had been dashed off, using the most obvious phrases. They were perfunctory, not passionate. None of them felt like the writer had truly cared one way or another about Melissa.
"I don't even know where to start to find out more about them," she said, "not without provoking Judge Nolan to reconsider her stance on restraining orders, with me as the one being restrained."
Tate bent forward to take the papers from the table. He flipped past Melissa's resume to the cover sheet listing the references. "This one is the father of the mayor's husband," he said, pointing to the first name. He ran his finger down the page, stopping beside each name. "She's the mother of your favorite cop, Detective Peterson. And I believe this one is somehow related to Geoff Loring. His uncle, I think."
"All pillars of the community," Helen said glumly. "The police aren't likely to be interested in arresting any of them, not when they have a perfectly good suspect who was a petty criminal. And I bet the writers of the references are all saintly role models who would never even think a violent thought, let alone act on one."
"I wouldn't go quite that far," Tate said, "but as far as I know, they're pretty clean. I've never represented any of them in a criminal case, anyway."
"Someone must have had a reason to kill Melissa."
"Besides the burglar," he said. "And you, of course."
Helen nodded.
"What about her other patients? The ones who didn't write reference letters for her? She must have had hundreds of patients over the years, and there are only a dozen names here."
"I haven't heard of any patients who disliked her," Helen said. "The owner of the nursing agency told me everyone was satisfied with her work, and she'd been at her previous job for decades."
"He could have lied."
"Or simply refused to hear any complaints, the way he ignored me." Helen could easily imagine Pierce being intentionally blind to Melissa's faults. "But if there were any serious problems, there would have been at least a few written complaints that he couldn't ignore. There wasn't anything in Melissa's official records. I'm sure of that much. Lily did the hiring, and she always does her homework. She would have checked out both the agency and Melissa herself."
"Melissa worked at the Wharton Nursing Home, didn't she?" Tate flipped back to the resume on top of the pile of references. "In fact, that's probably where she met her references. Lots of retired town officials there."
"More pillars of the community," Helen said. "Kind of ruins my theory that the killer might have been a prior patient."
"Some patients are actually grateful for assistance, you know."
"Not when Melissa's the one offering it," Helen said. "I may be a hermit, but I'm not usually violent, and she made me so angry that all I cared about was making her go away. She managed to get me that furious in just a few visits, working with me only part-time, in my own home. It would have been much worse if I'd been trapped in a nursing home, imprisoned with her forty hours a week, complaining about her without anyone listening. In those circumstances
, murder might seem like a reasonable option."
"If a patient killed her, how'd he get out of the nursing home to do it? He couldn't have been all that stuck in his room if he could follow Melissa all the way out to the edge of town where you live."
"Probably not a patient, then," Helen said. "What about a patient's relative? Someone who realized how harmful Melissa could be, and couldn't find a more appropriate way to fix the situation, so he did what he had to do to protect his beloved, frail, old family member?"
"Except, as far as I can tell, there's no evidence that Melissa ever harmed anyone." Tate threw the papers back on the workshop table and reached for his safety goggles. "You haven't found a single person who disliked her as much as you did, and it doesn't seem likely that you will. At least not before you get yourself arrested for some misdemeanor or another."
Helen slumped back in the chair. "Maybe the police were right about the burglar also being the killer, after all."
"Much as I hate to give up all these billable minutes we've been spending together," Tate said, rising and pulling his safety goggles down over his eyes, "it sounds like you've hit a dead end. You'll just have to resign yourself to being an innocent bystander in this murder investigation, blissfully free of any threat of prison sentence."
"I wonder if the detectives are making any progress in identifying the burglar." They wouldn't be able to ignore her if she solved the case for them. "If I can't prove someone else did it, maybe I can help them find the burglar."
"You should stay out of it," he said. "You didn't even like Melissa."
"Judging from the people who attended her wake, I don't think anyone liked her all that much. They may not have hated her, but no one seems to care that she's dead. No one's putting any pressure on the police to find her killer. The detective won't listen to me, unless I do his job for him."
"Just leave me out of it. I'm retired." Tate started to pull up his ear protection, and then paused. "You know, you might be able to get some information about the past burglaries by talking to the victim witness advocate over at the district court."
"Isn't that Judge Nolan's court?" Helen said. "I didn't do too well the last time I was there."
"I didn't say it would be easy," he said. "I thought you'd appreciate the challenge."
Helen reclaimed the copies of Melissa's references. "Getting information out of a state employee is one thing I definitely know how to do."
* * *
Helen detoured into the main building to check in with Adam. He hadn't seen her cane, and he was still working on canceling the nursing agency's contract, but promised he'd call if he had any news.
A few minutes later, when Jack pulled up in front of the courthouse, Helen remembered the steep exterior stairs. Maybe she should go back to the cottage to get her back-up cane. They hadn't been gone an hour yet, and she wasn't sure if that was long enough for Rebecca to give up and leave the cottage. One confrontation with the woman was enough for today. It wasn't like Helen enjoyed making other people's lives more difficult.
The railing on the courthouse stairs was sturdy enough to take the place of her cane. As long as she climbed the stairs carefully, she could handle them without additional support. She slid out of the car and left Jack to his video games.
Once inside, Helen followed the signs to the victim witness advocate's cramped little office in the architecturally grand but dysfunctional building. The door, which was half-open, read Ms. A. Jensen, Victim Witness Advocate. Inside, behind a cheap metal desk covered with folders, legal pads, and loose papers, sat a tall blonde woman with skin so leathery it must have come from forty years of excessive sun exposure.
The woman continued tapping on her keyboard while she said, "May I help you?"
"I'm Helen Binney. I'm here about the Remote Control Burglar."
"Of course." She put down her pen and watched Helen limp into the room. "You must have had difficulty getting up here. We're still waiting for ADA-compliant improvements to be authorized."
Helen shrugged. "I'm here now."
"Other places in the state, closer to Boston, get all the luxuries, but we can't even get the necessities like wheelchair ramps," Ms. Jensen said. "None of the state politicians care about us out here. We might as well be part of New York or Connecticut for all they notice us. They come here for their vacations, to enjoy the simple life, and then they go back to the city and forget all about us."
The advocate would be even more bitter if she knew the whole truth, Helen thought. The state politicians didn't even think about the local residents when they were here on vacation. Helen had only realized recently how little she herself had mingled with the locals, and she'd been the life of the local social scene, compared to her ex-husband. He hadn't needed to leave the cottage; he'd brought all the people who'd mattered with him, either in the flesh or virtually, through phone and internet connections.
"At least we do get some basic funding for victims' reimbursement, based on the number of cases going through the courthouse. I can start a file for you and look into getting you some compensation." The woman keyed something into her computer, and then looked at Helen expectantly. "What did the burglar take from you?"
"My nurse."
The woman started to type, and then looked back at Helen. "Like a figurine? Or a doll?"
"A human being," Helen said. "The police tell me the burglar killed her."
"I read about that in the newspaper." Ms. Jensen abandoned her keyboard and leaned back in her chair. "I'm sorry for your loss, but her family is going to have to file a claim for her death. I don't think you qualify for compensation."
"I'm not looking for money," Helen said. "I just need a few questions answered."
"Good idea." Ms. Jensen brightened. "I can refer you for some counseling. The experience of losing a skilled caretaker must have traumatized you."
"Not particularly." The only trauma had come from the police, and the way they'd assumed she was incapable of doing anything whatsoever. "At least not in the way you mean. I'm fine."
The woman's sun-etched frown lines deepened in apparent disappointment that Helen wasn't traumatized. "Are you sure? Sometimes the reaction is delayed a few days. Or weeks."
"I'm sure," Helen said. "I'm fine, but Melissa isn't. And there's a killer on the loose, who might come back for me or my family."
"That's not my department. I only deal with property crimes. Most of the compensation for serious personal injuries and deaths gets handled through a civil case, rather than the token assessment that goes to victims here in the criminal court. It's usually all worked out before the paperwork comes to me. The family gets their own lawyer, and I don't get directly involved."
"As far as I know, Melissa didn't have any family," Helen said. "Just her work."
"I can't do anything about that. Are you sure there isn't anything I can do to help you?"
"There is one thing," Helen said. "You can tell me more about the burglar and what's being done to catch him. I'd feel better if I knew he was locked up."
"Everyone feels that way." Ms. Jensen said, seeming more confident, as if this was a conversation she'd had countless times before. "It's important to acknowledge that capturing the burglar is not within your control, so you can move on."
Helen tamped down her irritation. She didn't need a verbal pat on the head or assurances that everything always turned out fine in the end. Some things didn't turn out fine. She herself was living, limping proof of that fact. She didn't need false comfort; she needed answers. "I can't move on. Not until I understand why the burglar targeted my house."
"I don't know much about this particular series of crimes," Ms. Jensen said. "The police and the D.A. only tell me the information I need to steer the victims in the right direction for obtaining services. Not about the investigations themselves."
"You must know something," Helen said. "Haven't any of the burglar's other victims been in to see you?"
"All I know is that it's been happe
ning for about five years, and there seems to be a pattern to the timing. Most of the incidents have been clustered in May, June and December, nothing the rest of the year. But they don't know why. At least, that's what I was told the last time I saw the detective in charge of the case. He didn't seem to understand how upset people were that their homes had been broken into, even if nothing valuable had been taken."
"So it's true, that the burglar only steals remote controls?"
Ms. Jensen nodded. "From what the victims tell me, he hasn't even damaged anything while he was breaking in. No broken windows, no forced locks. Nothing."
"And he's never been violent before?"
"Never," she said. "No one's seen him, so there haven't been any confrontations at all."
"Anything else you can tell me?"
"I'm afraid not. I wish there was something more I could do to make you feel safer."
"The only useful thing you could do is to convince everyone to leave me alone," Helen said. "I'd be perfectly fine if everyone would just stop bugging me."
"Sorry," Ms. Jensen said, reaching for her keyboard to erase the information she'd started to key in. "Security is too expensive. If I had a bigger budget, I might be able to help, but as it is, I can barely cover the cost of the stolen remote controls and new locks."
As Helen stood to leave she said, "I'll mention your budget limitations to the governor the next time I talk to him."
Ms. Jensen laughed. "You do that."
It was natural for a victim advocate to assume that everyone she met was weak and powerless, and Helen might have let it slide if she weren't already so irritated by the constant condescension. "Don't underestimate me. I'm going to talk to the governor, and I'm going to find Melissa's killer."
CHAPTER NINE
"Did you get any useful information?" Jack said as he waited for Helen to climb into the back seat of the Town Car.