The Violence Beat

by JoAnna Carl

  Four o’clock. Grantham Memorial Rose Gardens.

  Chapter 16

  The Memorial Rose Garden is a Grantham show-place. It was donated to the city by an early day flour mill owner in memory of his wife, whose name was Rose. One story is that Rose hated her namesake flower, and that her husband hated her and gave the rose garden to the city as a sort of perverted joke.

  But, whatever his motivation, he did endow it properly, so the park is well-taken care of, year round. Its flora is not limited to roses; in October the place is ablaze with chrysanthemums in colors carefully selected to avoid clashing with the late-blooming roses. And in our climate, or so the garden page editor tells me, lots of roses bloom late as well as early. So it’s lovely in October.

  The garden lies south of the campus of Grantham State University. This allows the GSU administration building to look out at ten acres of flowers, centered by a fountain. That fountain spouts out of the center of a stone bowl, and at night colored lights play upon it the varying patterns of water. My grad-student friends tell me it’s known as the Technicolor Teacup, or the Beautiful Bidet.

  If the campus is crowded, as it is all morning and in the early afternoon, there are always people around the Teacup, particularly on sunny fall days, so Lee had picked a good spot for an inconspicuous meeting.

  If it hadn’t rained.

  A front moved through Grantham early in the afternoon. The line of clouds I’d noticed that morning came in from the northwest, shadowing the blue skies. The temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the northwest wind picked up. By four o’clock, we had a gusty rain, the kind that blows down the neck of your raincoat. The radio guys were saying how wonderful it was, since we’d had a dry fall. Obviously, they weren’t planning to meet anonymous news sources outdoors.

  But I gamely went by the house, ripped my trench coat out of the cleaner’s bag where it had spent the summer, and picked up my umbrella. I knew I’d never find a parking place on the Campus Corner shopping area, so I walked the half mile across the Grantham State campus to the fountain.

  I went to a bench that put my back to the GSU administration building and sat there, bracing my umbrella against the wind so I wouldn’t float off like Mary Poppins. At least I knew I’d be easy for Lee to find, since I was the only idiot sitting around. I left my head uncovered, since my string-straight, reddish hair is my most distinctive feature, the one Lee would probably remember from my appearance on television. Rain doesn’t hurt my “do.”

  Since most students had gone to the campus early in the day, with no idea of walking home in the rain, the few people who passed were running or walking fast. Lots of them had no coats at all. Some had umbrellas with no raincoats, some had made ponchos out of plastic garbage bags, and some wore denim jackets and pulled their heads in like turtles. One had taken off his jacket and was using it to cover his books and papers, letting his T-shirt get soaked. A “don’t-give-a-damn” type walked slowly, hair soaked and stringy, clothes sopping wet. What, me worry?

  But none of them wore clear plastic raincoats and hoods, the cheap kind you can pick up at Kmart when you get caught in an unexpected rain. So I noticed the brown-haired girl the first time she came by.

  The second time she passed, walking in front of me as she circled the fountain counterclockwise, she definitely stood out, but I played it cool. I didn’t want to scare her off. If she was Lee.

  The third time she appeared at the right-hand end of my peripheral vision I was ready to call out to her. Then she suddenly swiveled and sat down beside me.

  “Nell?” It was the breathy, little-girl voice.

  “Lee?”

  She nodded her head. Striking eyes of a flat, light gray, their pupils rimmed in black, looked out from inside the hood. Her face was little-girl pretty, matching her voice, with a deep widow’s peak and soft, fly-away hair. She ducked her head and looked up at me. “I didn’t think about the weather changing like this.”

  “We can share this umbrella,” I said. I moved it so that it blocked part of the blowing rain from her head. “Or we can go someplace dryer.”

  Lee turned her head inside the hood. The hood never moved. “I’ve got to talk fast and get back.”

  “Okay. What did you want to tell me about Irish Svenson?”

  “He was murdered.” She was turning her head the other way. I realized that she was looking around the rose garden. “He had to be.”

  “You said that on the phone. How do you know?”

  “It was my fault.” She gave me that childlike, appealing, upward look with those amazing gray eyes. Then she scanned the rose beds and chrysanthemum clumps again. We were the only people in the garden at that point.

  “I was so frightened. I had to feel that I was absolutely safe, so I wouldn’t tell him.”

  “Tell him what?”

  “Everything he needed to know. If I had told him—” She was fighting back tears, but her head was still swiveling. “If I hadn’t been so frightened, he wouldn’t have died.”

  “You said it was a case of fraud. Was it against the city?”

  “Not exactly. City employees.” She saw something far behind me and gasped.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not sure.” She ducked down and behind me, peaking under the umbrella. “Oh, God! It’s the Scamovan!”

  “The Scamovan?” I started to lift the umbrella and turn, but she clutched my arm.

  “Don’t look! They mustn’t know I spotted them!” She whirled around again, facing forward, sitting there stiffly. “What can I do?” Her voice was more wispy than ever. “I can’t run. They’ll catch me.”

  “What did you see?” I was losing patience. Was she nuts? Should I call the guys in the white suits? Or did she actually know something? “What is it?”

  “That white van.”

  Now I saw that a white van was turning down the street that bordered the rose garden on the left. It was moving slowly. Between the rain and its heavily tinted side windows, the inside was a blank, the driver completely anonymous. At the corner, the van turned right, passing in front of us.

  Vans are extremely common in Grantham, Southwestern U.S.A., as they have become everywhere. Lots of people drive vans even if they rarely haul anything bigger than a sack of groceries. So a van wouldn’t normally have caught my eye.

  But this van was white, and it had an aluminum ladder on the roof. And the muddy door had a clean square on it, a square that had obviously held a magnetic sign until a few minutes earlier.

  The addition of a magnetic sign that said JOE’S PAINT AND PLASTER would have made this van match the description of the one that Mike’s neighbor had seen stopped in front of his house that morning. The van whose driver might have dumped the Salvation Army uniform in Mike’s trash can.

  I decided it was time to panic.

  “Come on!” I grabbed Lee by the arm and pulled her to her feet. I forced her to wheel around, so that we were walking the opposite direction from the one the van was traveling. And right then a miracle happened. A guy wearing a Grantham State windbreaker and clutching a pile of books ran by us, going the same direction we were—away from the campus, toward the campus shopping district.

  “Run!” I told Lee. “Keep up with this guy!”

  The van’s driver might be after us, but surely he’d hesitate to take out an innocent GSU student who was running for his car.

  The guy looked around at us, and I tried to smile reassuringly. “Sure is wet!” I yelled.

  The three of us pounded across the rose garden. Or rather the guy and I pounded. Lee tap-tapped. For the first time I realized she was wearing high heels. The wind caught the umbrella and flipped it inside out. I let it fly away, and I ran on, still clutching Lee’s arm. I finally had hold of her. I wasn’t letting go until she told me what she knew.

  I didn’t stop to watch the white va
n, but when we came to the street that edged the east side of the rose garden, I looked left before I pulled us out into the traffic. And I saw two things. First, our innocent escort was wheeling toward a compact car parked at the curb. Second, the white van was the second car back in the line of traffic stopped at the light at the next corner. A half block away.

  “Come on!” I yelled again, and I pulled Lee into the street.

  That’s when she lost a shoe. She bent down, scooped it up, and we ran on. To our left the traffic was clear, which should have tipped me off that the light a half-block down was about to change. But there were cars coming from the right. We rushed across the two open lanes, but had to stop for the cars coming toward us. Lee kept looking toward the corner to our left.

  She squealed. “The light changed! He’s turning the corner!” she said.

  I plunged ahead, oncoming traffic or no. A small red car tried to stop before it hit us, sluing sideways in the inside lane. A horn of a sporty green model in the next lane began to make a loud blasting noise. The green car stood on its nose as Lee and I dashed in front of it. We scrunched between the bumpers of two cars parallel-parked at the curb. We stepped onto the sidewalk. I could feel the curses of the northbound drivers, but I didn’t look at them. I scanned the street to find the white van. It was speeding down the block, moving into the left-turn lane. It could be going around the block.

  “Thank God there’s never any parking at the Campus corner,” I said.

  “But where can we go?” Lee said. “He’ll come back.”

  “I know a place where he won’t think to look,” I said.

  I let Lee put her shoe on, but I kept pulling her along for half a block, until we reached an oak door flanked by stained-glass windows featuring strange blue birds. I shoved the door open.

  “We can’t go in here!” Lee sounded scandalized.

  “Sure we can,” I said. “It’s the safest place in Grantham for unescorted women.” I shoved her ahead of me into the Blue Flamingo.

  I was truly happy to see the big, pudgy, balding guy behind the bar. Rocky was on the job, wearing his bartender’s uniform of blue shirt printed with the neon-bright flamingos, getting ready for the rush hour for his gay clientele. He was alone, unless you count a flock of long-legged lawn ornaments—originally pink, but repainted electric blue—which decorate the joint.

  “My stars, Nell,” he said. “You look like a drowned rat.”

  “You look like Santa Claus,” I answered. “Rocky, this is Lee. She’s a confidential news source with some information for me. Somebody just chased us all across the rose garden.”

  Rocky came around the bar with his fists and his jaw clenched. “You just point this guy out to me,” he said.

  “No! I don’t want you to get involved. Just let me use your phone. Then we’ll hide in the ladies’ room until Mike comes. If anybody comes in looking for us, you say we haven’t been here.”

  Rocky relaxed his jaw and grinned. “I’ll tell ’em our customers don’t run to damsels in distress.”

  “You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Let me check out the ladies’ room before you go in. Some of these guys—” Rocky went to the back of the bar, looking puffed up. He loves playing protector for Martha, Brenda, and me. I quickly explained to Lee that he owned the house I lived in. I also gave her a brief account of the night he rescued Brenda from date rape in our own living room. He’s considered himself our guardian angel ever since.

  “Rocky’s one of the good guys,” I said. Lee seemed to accept this.

  Rocky gave us the all clear, and Lee went back to the ladies’ room while I used the phone behind the bar. It wasn’t until I heard Mike’s voice that I realized he and I weren’t friends anymore.

  Funny, but with my adrenaline pumping, he’d been the first person I thought of. Now that my brain was in gear again, I wondered if I had been smart.

  But Mike and I had agreed to keep working together on the puzzle of what Bo Jenkins knew about his father’s death, I reminded myself. So he should want to know what Lee had to say, even if he wasn’t interested in me.

  “Uh, Mike?”

  “Nell?” He sounded cautious, but at least he’d recognized my voice.

  “Yes.” I paused. I wasn’t ready to apologize, but I wasn’t going to let Lee get out of there without making sure she was safe. Mike ought to want to help, if she had information about his father’s death.

  “Nell? You still there?”

  I took a deep breath and plunged. “Mike, I need help.”

  “Sure.” He hadn’t hesitated the slightest bit before he said it. My innards gave a few of those spasms that he’d been causing.

  I sketched the situation as quickly as I could. “So we’re stuck in the ladies’ room at the Blue Flamingo,” I said. “I feel certain the guy in the white van really did intend to do something awful to Lee. I’m afraid to just walk out, and I think if I call 911, Lee will disappear, and I may never find out what she knows.”

  “We don’t want that. I’d like to talk to her, too,” Mike said. “It’ll take me about ten minutes to get there. I’ll pull up in the alley. Tell Rocky to open the back door.”

  “How did you know there’s a back door?”

  “I spent four months on that beat. All the businesses in that block have loading areas on the alley. Ten minutes.” He hung up.

  I gave a sigh of relief. The cavalry was on the way. Rocky handed me several old cup towels from a stack behind the bar. “Here, use these to dry your hair,” he said. “I put the ‘out of order’ sign on the door to the loo.”

  “Thanks.” I went into the ladies’ room. I assume that the city code required Rocky to provide it, whether his customers usually included ladies or not. It had one stall and a minuscule area for primping at the sink.

  Lee had taken off her plastic raincoat and hung it on a hook on the back of the door. She was combing her soft, light brown hair, and her gray eyes met mine in the mirror. Even after the run through the rain, her makeup was beautifully applied. She wore a suit in a medium blue. Her blouse was cream, and she wore a pearl necklace and earrings. Her bone-colored shoes were completely soaked, but they were stylish, and her bag matched them. It was a businesslike outfit, one a well-dressed office worker in our climate can wear year round.

  I handed her the towels Rocky had provided. “Where do you work?” I asked.

  “I have a bookkeeping job. Who did you call?”

  I took off my trench coat and hung it beside hers, then perched my purse and notebook on the shelf over the sink. “Lee, I’d already been working on Irish Svenson’s death. Before you called yesterday.”

  Her eyes widened. “Why?”

  “Something Bo Jenkins said during the hostage situation. Anyway, I’ve been working with a guy from the Grantham PD—”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Lee, it’s okay!”

  “But I told you! People who are high up in the department are involved!”

  “He’s not working with anybody else in the department.”

  “You believe that? How do you think they knew where to look for me? He must have passed the word along.”

  “I didn’t tell him I was meeting you!”

  That stopped her.

  “They must have followed you,” I said. I pulled off my sodden loafers and knee socks. “Isn’t that possible?”

  “No. If they knew where I was living, what city I’m in, what name I’m using, I’d have been dead long ago.”

  I edged around her, toward the stall. “Well, all I can tell you is that we need help to make sure we get out of here safely. So I called Mike.”

  “Mike?”

  “Yes.” I went in the stall and closed the door. “I know he wasn’t involved in Irish Svenson’s death. He wasn’t even living in Grantham when his d—when Irish was killed.”
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  She didn’t say anything. Looking under the edge of the stall, I could see her slipping her pantyhose off and her shoes back on.

  “I assure you, it’s okay,” I said. “Let me ask you a couple of questions. You called Irish Svenson your best friend. Why?”

  “Because he was the first person who ever really cared about me. He gave me the thing I care most about. He changed my life.”

  Oops. Maybe she really was the girlfriend. I settled for a noncommittal question. “How did he change your life?”

  Lee laughed. “He forced me to do it myself. I needed to get away, to get a new identity, or I was going to be dead. I asked him to help me. He said he would—if I’d do what he said.

  “It was easy for me to say yes to that. Everybody had always bossed me around. My dad, my husband. I’d obeyed them, and I wound up in a whole heap of hurt. My husband got me into this mess—and I could yet go to prison! Irish saw that I had to learn to stand up for myself. And he saw I didn’t have the gumption to do it on my own. So he ordered me to learn.”

  I could see her feet. She was leaning over the sink. “How could he order you to learn how to stand up for yourself?”

  “Irish tucked me into a support group, and he forced me to go into counseling. My husband—he’d always scoffed at people who went for therapy. Now I can see he was afraid he’d lose control of me if I got help.”

  “You were abused?”

  “Oh, my husband never beat me! He didn’t need to. He could cut me to shreds without raising his voice. Just the way my dad could. But Irish—well, he was the first person in my life who ever built me up, who ever told me I was smart. Or brave. Who ever told me I could leave behind the mess I’d made of my life and move on—that I could be able to love somebody.”

  I hitched my clothes around. I could hear movement beyond the stall.

  Lee spoke again. “That’s why I’ve got to get this settled. Legally. Personally. Finally. I can’t go on living with this hanging over my head.”