Cold Case

by Linda Barnes

  “Call Rhode Island. Make sure she got there.”

  “No! Her mother will be terrified!”

  “Let me call. I’ll pretend to be a reporter.”

  “She’ll hang up!”

  “I’ll pretend to be a girlfriend! For chrissakes, what’s the number?”

  He spoke the digits quickly, but I didn’t need to write them down.

  “Rosemary,” he muttered. “Tell whoever answers you’re Rosemary and you need to talk to Missy.”

  A woman with a twangy Texas drawl answered. I wasn’t sure if she was the mother, the secretary, the maid. She said Missy wasn’t there in a cheerful voice. Wasn’t expected. Did I want her Dover number? I hung up, ruining Rosemary’s reputation for politeness.

  “Didn’t she tell her mother she was coming?” I asked Garnet.

  “No. We weren’t sure. I hoped she’d hang on till after the campaign. My life isn’t always this crazy, this public. Marissa’s ‘visit,’ if it came to that, was going to be a surprise.”

  Some surprise.

  He stood up and started fumbling around the hall, trying to remember where he’d hung his jacket.

  “Sit down,” I ordered. “Or go in the kitchen and make yourself some toast. We need to call the FBI.”

  He turned on me, slammed both hands on my shoulders with more power than I expected. “No! He said they’d kill her!”

  I pushed him away.

  “Of course,” I said. “That’s what kidnappers do. They terrify you and then they extort money. Unless you believe their threats, they don’t get paid. But money is what they really want, not blood. That’s your trump card, and the FBI knows how to play it. They don’t send guys who come blazing out of cop cars with screaming sirens. Kidnapping is the one thing the FBI handles really well.”

  Garnet shook his head. “It could be a hoax.”

  “That’s what you said before you found out she wasn’t at her mother’s.”

  “She could be somewhere else. Maybe she decided to spend the night with a friend. She’s unpredictable.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Pretty soon you’ll convince yourself you didn’t hear her voice on the phone.”

  “It could have been a recording—”

  “Do you want her dead? Would a dead wife be better, campaign-wise, than a wife who wants a divorce?”

  He’d have hit me if I hadn’t backed out of range. I’d gotten his attention.

  “Look,” he said, “I need time to think this over.”

  “You need to call the FBI. Now. Or else I will.”

  He came close enough to threaten. “If you tell a soul, I’ll see you lose your license within the week. Within the week, do you understand?”

  “I’m an officer of the court—” I began.

  “Don’t pull that bullshit on me. You’re nothing of the kind.”

  I should have known better than to try it on a lawyer, but he was distressed. I thought he might fall for it.

  “So how long do you have to wait for the first finger?” I asked nastily. If I could provoke him into swinging at me, I decided I’d take the hit. Any reason to call the cops.

  “Shut up!” he said. “Just shut up! It’s a hoax and that’s it. Final!”

  He stormed out of the house, ripping his jacket off the coatrack. Henry, the chauffeur, followed like a shadow down the steps and across the lawn. The car doors slammed loudly. Someone gunned the engine. The big Cadillac peeled rubber as it left the curb.

  21

  I enjoy earning my livelihood as a private investigator. The only other thing I’ve got going for me is an updated cabbie license. It’s not like Karolyn Kirby’s itching to call and beg me to try out for the women’s Olympic volleyball team.

  Practical matters—food and taxes—kept my hand off the phone.

  A new thought plunked me down in my desk chair: If I hadn’t answered the door, if I hadn’t been home, what would Garnet Cameron have done next?

  Richard Nixon made it lousy for all politicians. Garnet hadn’t even muttered, “I am not a crook,” and already I suspected him.

  I unlocked my desk, removed both copies and the original of Thea’s maybe, maybe-not first chapter plus poem, and separated them. I left one copy in my desk drawer, anchored by my S&W 40, which I was glad to remove from the waistband of my jeans.

  The original notebook and poem, I moved to my favorite hiding place. It’s a good one. Take a plastic litter tray, place your valuables—smothered in Saran Wrap, the flatter the better—inside. Cover with a plastic liner, the same color and cut to the exact dimensions of the litter tray, then pour on the Kleen Kitty, and let the cat, in this case, T.C., my black beauty with the prestigious zip code, go about his business. Few are the burglars who sift the kitty litter.

  The second copy I placed in a mailing envelope, which I addressed to myself.

  I hit the phone, searching for Mooney. He wasn’t in his office, wasn’t on call. Which left his home, a place I try not to invade, because his dragon-lady mother, who cordially hates my guts, might be on the prowl.

  I had to try.

  Mooney answered after five rings and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  I didn’t identify myself, not wanting to risk my license.

  I said, “Have I got a treat for you.”

  “Really.” His voice was dry with disbelief.

  “I ought to keep it for myself,” I said.

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I mean, I could use the total adoration of an FBI agent. It would be a distinct business advantage.”

  Mooney kept silent. He’s good at that.

  “If I give you this, I think it should cancel all outstanding debts,” I said. “Plus you’ll owe me one tiny favor.”

  “It would have to be absolutely amazing,” Mooney said.

  I said, “Don’t you want the FBI eating out of your hand?”

  “No, I want to be an astronaut when I grow up.”

  “I’m serious, Moon. If there’s any agent whose benevolence would put you in good shape, call him now, and get him over to the Cameron residence. As in Garnet Cameron.”

  “Why would I drag my weary body to Dover?”

  “Kidnapping.”

  His manner altered completely. It was as if his voice stood at attention, saluted. “Who?” he demanded.

  “Marissa Cameron. Help the FBI find her and keep our guy in the governor’s race. You can vote for him. I can vote for him.”

  “That’ll make two.”

  “Moon, I’m serious.”

  “So am I. If I call my buddy at the Fibbies, what do I tell him? I read it in my tea leaves?”

  “Do not, repeat, do not use my name. If you do; I’m dead. Tell him a civic-minded citizen picked up a reference to a political kidnapping on her cellular phone. She heard the name ‘Marissa.’ Got scared and called you. You pieced it together.”

  “Why’d she call me? I’m not the FBI.”

  “Mooney, make up your own story, for chrissakes. This is the goods.”

  “It’d better be. Special Agents in Charge have lost their sense of humor now that everybody knows J. Edgar wore a dress.”

  “Special Agents never had a sense of humor, Mooney.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I want something.”

  “Besides a cancellation of all debts?”

  “I need to meet Albert Ellis Albion. Thea’s killer. He’s at Walpole, and I’m betting you can get me in to see him.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Carlotta—”

  “Mooney, people are asking about her. Old manuscripts are popping up. Old manuscripts, and possibly new ones, too.”

  “Words from the dead?”

  “I want to meet the killer.”

  “And the Camerons? How do they feel about this?”

  “Tessa Cameron wrote me a humongous check.” This was not a lie. She’d voided it, but I saw no reason to share that information with Mooney.

  “
And I do the work,” Mooney said. “Thanks a heap.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get the glory.”

  “Just what I need.”

  I decided he was not in the mood for questions about Beryl Cameron. “‘Been on the job too long,’ Moon,” I said, quoting an old blues refrain.

  He hung up.

  I replaced the receiver in the cradle, idly staring at Paolina’s postcard. One year younger than Thea’d been when she wrote Nightmare’s Dawn. Two years younger than Dorothy Jade Cameron when she died.

  Paolina has talent if not genius. No one would call her “my brilliant child,” unless they were talking about the sparkle in her eyes or the deep shine of her hair. She has the gift of rhythm. She’s the percussionist in her junior high band, swaying to the beat, bringing stick or brush to drumhead, triangle, or bells at the precise moment.

  To lose a child, as Tessa had. To lose more than one. To lose “my brilliant child …”

  The phone rang. I tensed, imagining Garnet at the other end, accusing me of breaking faith, imagining the kidnappers. I’d given them this number!

  “Bitch, you’d better stop those calls—”

  I recognized Vandenburg from the greeting, halted him with, “Where’s Carlos?”

  “I don’t—”

  He was going to say “know.” I hung up before he got the chance. I didn’t want the DEA tracing him to my phone.

  I tried to sleep, but spent most of the night studying Andrew Manley’s curious bibliography. If I’d known my computer protocols better, I might have been able to download articles about recovered memory syndrome. But I struck out.

  The screen-gazing exhausted my eyes. I could still see the commas and semicolons and prompts after I shut down the machine and turned off the lights. They kept on blipping, humming me to dreamless sleep.

  22

  I woke secure in the knowledge that I’d forgotten something terribly important. I find the shower an excellent locale for short-term memory retrieval, and it was there, with cold water thundering on my head, that I realized I needed to phone Gloria in order to nail down a piece of this increasingly complex jigsaw puzzle.

  Dressed in shorts and T-shirt, I shook excess water from my hair while searching the stoop for the morning Globe. No mention of a Cameron kidnapping. Good. I might keep my license.

  I dialed ITOA, figuring Gloria’d be dispatching for the Independent Taxi Owners during the morning commute. She zapped me on hold while I burned toast.

  She tuned in as soon as my mouth was full. She has food radar.

  “Glory,” I managed, swallowing quickly, “I need you to locate a cabbie who picked up a fare off Farm Road in Dover, 1:45 P.M. yesterday, possibly heading to the airport. Every detail.”

  “Do I offer a reward?”

  “Twenty bucks.”

  “That’s a reward?”

  “It’s better than getting hit with a lawsuit.”

  “Dover,” she muttered. “I’ll see what I can do. What’re you eating?”

  “Toast. Burned and plain.”

  “Why bother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  By the time I’d finished my lavish breakfast and headed out toward the car, the heat was shimmering off the pavement. My khaki shorts were the right choice, but the dark upholstery of my Toyota—chosen for durability—was set on “fry.” I grabbed a pale towel from my gym bag, smoothed it over the seat. The steering wheel was barely touchable. I cranked the window.

  Ought to call the city greenhouses, make sure Barrett was working today. But I wanted to drive, wanted the action, the motion, the illusion of progress. I also didn’t want to be home if Mooney gave me away to Cameron and the FBI.

  Past Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, there’s a road labeled Franklin Park Maintenance Yard. It’s a bumpy, narrow track, but if you stay with it to the end, you come out at the city greenhouses.

  Six long glassed-in sheds. I don’t know what I expected—rose-covered trellises, maybe—but it looked like a strictly utilitarian setup. Screen door on the end of the largest building, an array of sacks and terra cotta pots and tools on display.

  When I opened the screen door, a bell sounded. Not as friendly and undefended as I thought.

  The man who entered was fat and red-faced. Doughy, not wiry. White. I asked for Ed Barrett, got a quick insulting once-over, a nod toward the far end of the shed.

  “He’s busy,” the guy said, by which I was meant to understand that I was speaking to Edgar’s supervisor, who was eager to let me know it.

  “I won’t take much of his time,” I said. “I’m from OSHA, checking employment conditions.”

  “He make some kinda complaint?”

  “No,” I said innocently. “Should he?”

  The man gave way as I pressed forward. I managed to edge by without getting touched. If I hadn’t been from some initialed government agency I doubt I’d have been so lucky.

  I passed through a room of cheerful marigolds. The place was hot and humid. The back of my shirt was already sticking to my skin. The man I took to be Edgar Barrett was busily potting chrysanthemums, separating the small stalks, giving them room for their late summer stretch. The greenhouse was a riot of color—apricot, white, pink, flame orange.

  “Do you have a few minutes?” I asked, turning to see if the supervisor had followed.

  “I doubt it.” Barrett was a slim man in his thirties with long agile fingers. He wore an oversized checked shirt, baggy chinos, running shoes. “What you want to talk about? Flowers?”

  “Was your father a gardener?”

  “Damn good gardener,” he said.

  “Did he work at the Avon Hill School?”

  His fingers kept moving but the rest of him went still.

  “You the ‘investigator’ called my aunt?” he asked scornfully. “Don’t waste your time on me. I know that lost money scam is pure con. Mavis can’t guard her mouth. Never could.”

  “I am a private investigator,” I said.

  “You’re a little late. I don’t think my daddy needs one now he’s dead.” Edgar’s voice stayed scornful. He kept doing what he was doing with the flowers, untangling clumped roots, setting them in fresh pots, staking the weaker stalks.

  “Aren’t you curious?” I asked.

  “Curious?” he said. “No.”

  “How about angry?” I said.

  He took his time before replying. “Doesn’t put bread on the table, that anger shit.”

  “Your father lost his job.”

  “My father lost everything. Not just that one job, but all the jobs he ever had. He was the estate man for that fancy Brattle street crowd. He went from house to house, and the neighbors all tried to get him to out-do what he’d done for Mr. Polaroid-Company or Mrs. Executive Wife. If he put in a bed of pink tulips at the Armenian church, everybody wanted a bed of pink tulips. Then some white girl goes missing and he can’t get work, not even a vegetable patch.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eight years old, just eight, and I remember it like it happened yesterday. I remember him coming home all beat up and sayin’, oh no, nothin’ happened to him, nothin’, he fell down on the street. I remember the way my momma and my aunt Mavis looked at him like he wasn’t there anymore. You know, women look at a man long enough like that, he actually disappears, and that’s what my daddy did. Disappeared down the neck of a bourbon bottle and that’s what he died from. Today, I see a cop on the street—black or white, it don’t matter—and I cross over to the other side. Sometimes I spit.”

  “The police had no evidence against your father.”

  “Really? You comin’ all the way down here to tell me that after twenty-four years … Well, I do appreciate it, you understand. I’m sure my daddy would appreciate it.”

  I didn’t apologize. It was too late for that. I don’t know—maybe it’s never too late. Sometimes I think about traveling to Germany or Poland, countries of my childhood nightmares, places where my mother’s relatives d
isappeared into the camps. I wonder if people will stare at my profile, my unmistakably Jewish nose, and mutter, “I’m sorry.”

  Would I accept the apology? I don’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What for? Sorry my daddy was uppity? He spoke to a white girl. A rich white girl. Do you understand the gravity, the enormity of his crime?”

  I nodded. As much as I can understand, I thought.

  “They wanted him to give them names,” he muttered.

  “What names?”

  “They wanted my daddy to say he’d brought his buddies along, to ogle little white girls. They wanted to convict a black man. They had a regular hard-on about it, the perp being a black man—my dad, my uncle, some friend of my dad’s. Questioned all our neighbors. ‘Jimmy Lee, you ever go to Cambridge with Eddie?’ Nobody ever called my dad Eddie. He didn’t have a lot of friends before, and he sure didn’t have any after.”

  “The chrysanthemums are beautiful,” I said after a while, to break the long silence.

  “They’re hardy,” he said. “They don’t break easily. They last a good spell.”

  I waited a little longer.

  “Did your dad ever take you to work with him?”

  “Couple times. You figure I hurt that white girl?”

  “Just twice?”

  “I was eight years old. He must have taken me with him more than twice. Enough so I remember those fancy gardens. He taught me to yank aphids off the leaves, let the ladybugs be. Pull weeds. I learned what good soil smells like when it’s wet—”

  “Did you meet a man who worked with your dad?”

  “Just the Cuban guy.”

  “Cuban guy have a name?”

  “El Producto,” he said flatly.

  “Like the cigar.”

  “I’m sorry, lady, I don’t remember the guy’s name. He was fly-by-night help, somebody didn’t know shit about gardening. That’s what my dad said. My dad told me stay away from that dude. He’s bad business. So I did.”

  “Why’d your dad think he was ‘bad business’?”

  “Cause he’s always mouthing off about how important he is, and there he’s workin’ as a gardener, same as my dad. Cause he’s some big deal with the CIA, so he says.”