Dying for a Clue

by Judy Fitzwater

  “Fine. Give me an idea what the first verse should be about.”

  He slid forward in his chair, rubbed his craggy face, and then crossed his hands. “Fortunately for us, when Robbins moved north, he transferred his account rather than closing the old one and opening a new one. Makes it easier to do a little checking. He’s self-employed, which means he’s got money coming into and going out of that account in no particular order or amount except for the standard monthly bills—mortgage, utilities, etcetera. Only there’s this one deposit like clockwork. Five grand shows up every August the fourteenth, every year since they made the move to Smith Mountain fourteen years ago.”

  “So what’s the significance of that date?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “Could you trace where the money came from? Do you know who wrote the check?”

  “No checks. Cash deposits, most likely in an overnight depository.”

  “So who were they blackmailing?” Jennifer asked, stunned by the idea of Anne Marie being mixed up in some nefarious activity. And she’d trusted the woman.

  “Wait a minute, little lady. That’s a major leap. Money passing hands don’t always mean blackmail, you know.”

  Maxie Malone would have punched out anyone calling her ‘little lady,’ but at the moment, Jennifer didn’t much care. She was reeling from the idea that Diane’s parents might not be the good guys. She sank into the vinyl and chrome armchair to the left of the desk. Dirt, at this point, was the least she had to worry about.

  “How’d you know to look for it?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. I was expecting money going in the other direction. I figured this Collier might be putting the squeeze for a little cash now and then, but no deal. No big withdrawals other than moving expenses, and all of them are documented.”

  Whenever Jennifer thought she had even the vaguest notion of what was going on, things got curiouser and curiouser.

  “There had to be a large withdrawal around the time Diane was adopted,” Jennifer insisted.

  He shook his head.

  “So where’d the money come from to pay Collier?”

  He started to chuckle, but it broke into a raspy cough. He cleared his throat. “You’re making an assumption not in evidence. I’m telling you, money is going into Diane’s family’s account. Not out. Period.”

  She felt like shaking him. Any P.I. worth his salt should have been able to find a record of the cash.

  “Is that it?” she asked, sitting up and more than ready to be out of that office.

  “You act like I don’t have nothin’ to do but chase after this Robbins case.”

  “Well, do you?”

  He shrugged. “Did check out the father. He’s right where he’s supposed to be, straightening out some computer glitches for an outfit in D.C. I don’t think we have to worry about him.”

  Apparently nobody, including Mrs. Robbins, had bothered to notify Mr. Robbins. He seemed to be the forgotten man.

  “One thing’s still bugging me,” Johnny confided. “That nurse—Beverly Hoffman—she was gonna pass somethin’ over to me that night. I’d kinda like to know who has it.”

  And so would she.

  Chapter 26

  One more day without her books, and Diane was going to be toast. She might as well die right then and there, in Sam’s living room, because Lanier would expel her, her scholarship would be passed along to some more deserving freshman, her parents would disown her, and, heaven forbid, she’d never see Jared again.

  Whoever Jared was.

  So when she left Johnny’s office, Jennifer headed over to Lanier to get the girls their books, some clean underwear, and Valerie’s hair gel and dryer. If anybody followed her back to the apartment, she’d deal with them. Some things were worth the risk. Dodging bad guys couldn’t possibly be any more difficult than two teenage girls without their strawberry body wash.

  A smile, a lot of fast talk, and a note from Diane got her access to room 205 of James Hall on the north side of Lanier’s small campus.

  “Make sure you let me know when you leave, so I can check to see the room’s locked up properly,” the residence director, a first-year grad student, told her as she turned the key in the lock. It took both of them to push the door open all the way with all the clothing on the floor.

  “Are Diane and Valerie all right?”

  “Fine,” Jennifer assured her, distracted by the unbelievable mess. Someone had thoroughly trashed the place. Either that or these girls were bigger slobs than she and her own roommate had ever been, which, unfortunately, was unlikely. It made the search of her apartment look like it had been conducted by a couple of Felix Ungers. Oscar Madison must have been the main man on this one.

  “Pretty scary, huh?” the woman said.

  Jennifer nodded.

  “You come to clean it up?”

  “Oh, no. I just hope to take the girls some of the necessities of life, assuming I can find them in here somewhere. You know, CDs, eyelash curlers, lip balm. And textbooks, of course. Diane’s an Elliot Woodrow scholar.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Full tuition, room and board, plus expense money.”

  “Yeah? Well, that’s a new one on me. I’d like to have had it when I was an undergrad here. The best they offered then was full tuition, and those were so competitive they were impossible to get.”

  She said it as if had been long ago, but it couldn’t have been more than a year, maybe two.

  “Well, I’ll leave you alone.” The woman quickly backed out of the room, apparently afraid that if she stayed too long, Jennifer might ask for some help. And with good reason. She needed help.

  She bent and scooped up the items directly in front of her, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and tossed them toward the single bed to her right. It gave her enough room to step past the door and actually survey the room.

  It was small, but large enough to house two single beds, two dressers, and two desks. Posters of heavy metal rock bands lined one wall, new age groups the other. Cutouts from magazines filled in every other inch of wall space. Books, papers, toiletries, a computer, stereo, and TV mushroomed from every flat surface.

  “Hey! So you finally decided to—” The voice stopped, and Jennifer turned. He was about five-nine, thin, with an unbuttoned shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, over a T-shirt. His dark hair, parted in the middle, was tucked behind his ears. His upper lip sported a mustache and his chin what would have been a goatee if he could have grown one. In one hand was a Tootsie Roll Pop, and in the other, a couple of envelopes.

  He gave Jennifer the once-over and shrugged. “I saw the door open and thought Diane had come back.” He stuck the pop into his mouth and then staggered back dramatically. “What the hell happened here?”

  “Don’t you know?” she asked.

  He dropped the act. “Well, yeah. But I didn’t get to see it before. Diane and Valerie cut out before I got back that night. I heard it was, like, trashed, but man...”

  “Yeah, pretty scary stuff.”

  “So what’d this dude have against Diane?”

  Jennifer looked at him. “Why Diane? Why not Valerie?”

  He took the pop out of his mouth and pointed with it. “The dresser and the desk. And the bed. Those are Diane’s.”

  He was right. Only one dresser had been tossed. And one desk. And one bed had its mattress pulled out. In the disorder, it was easy not to notice.

  “So, you got a name?” Jennifer asked.

  He sucked hard on the candy as though sizing her up. “Jared.”

  She’d suspected as much. He looked like something that would appeal to Diane. “So, Jared, Diane tells me the two of you are friends.”

  “You a relative of hers or somethin’?”

  She ignored the question, just as Johnny had taught her. “Tell me, what is it about Valerie you don’t like?”

  She was fishing, but he didn’t know that. For all he knew, Diane had given her the low down on the
whole floor.

  He looked at her with dark, brooding eyes. “She’s possessive.”

  Ah, yes. If she’d had any doubts before, they had vanished. Jared was the boyfriend.

  He shifted, and she knew she was losing him.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Don’t forget to leave the mail.” She pointed at the envelopes in his hand. When she was in college, at any given time, at least three other people knew the combination to her mailbox. She suspected Diane was no different.

  “That’s why you came by, wasn’t it? You heard someone in the room, and you brought over the mail, right? I was planning to stop by the student union to pick it up, but since you’ve already done that...” She held out her hand.

  He held up the envelopes and shook them in her direction, then let out a sigh and handed it over.

  “Tell her... Tell her...”

  “Yes?” Jennifer said.

  “Tell her I’ll see her later.”

  She nodded and watched as he disappeared back into the hallway.

  She had a lot of work to do before she could get out of there, but she couldn’t help but sort through Diane’s mail. Checking the mail was one of the big events of a writer’s day, one she sorely missed.

  She thumbed through the envelopes. Between what looked like a card from Anne Marie and a notice from the registrar’s office was a business-sized envelope with Diane’s name, Lanier College, Macon, Georgia, and a zip code scrawled across it. No box number. In the upper left-hand corner was printed the address of the East Lake Fertility Clinic. The postmark was dated the Monday after the murder.

  Chapter 27

  “Open it,” Jennifer demanded, hovering over Diane.

  She’d sent Valerie out to walk Muffy, so the two of them could be alone when she gave Diane her mail. Besides, Muffy was bursting to get out. She’d explored every nook and cranny of Sam’s apartment and was up for adventure.

  “Do you mind? You’re taking up more than your share of oxygen,” Diane declared.

  Jennifer calmed herself and drew back. She was, after all, the adult here. But if Diane didn’t open that envelope in the next thirty seconds, she couldn’t be held responsible for her actions.

  Diane sat in Sam’s one good chair, running her hands over the paper’s edge. “What if it’s—”

  Jennifer gave her a dangerous look from her perch on the arm.

  “All right already.” Diane slipped her finger under the seal and loosened the flap. Then she took a deep breath and pulled out what was inside, a thin piece of cardboard with a flat, metal disk Scotch-taped to it. She opened the envelope wide and shook it, but it was empty.

  She looked at it and then asked, “What’s this?”

  Jennifer examined the engraving. It read CAT’s cat. “It looks like one of those pet ID tags you attach to a collar. Muffy has one. In case she gets lost, whoever finds her can call me. Do you remember having a cat?”

  Diane shook her head. “Only a little pink stuffed one that I’ve had forever.”

  “And what do you call it?”

  Diane looked at her sheepishly. “Cat. I don’t think it ever had another name.”

  She loosened the tape and lifted the shiny, silver tag. On the back was a hyphenated, seven digit number. “See?” Jennifer said.

  “Yeah. But what’s it got to do with anything, and how come I got it in the mail? Why would someone at the clinic be sending it to me?”

  Excellent question, and one that sent Jennifer’s mind clicking into overdrive. She felt sure they could assume they currently had no friends at the East Lake Fertility Clinic. Which meant....She stood and paced back and forth as goose bumps skittered up and down her arms.

  “Let’s say you’re Beverly Hoffman. You’re at the office late on a Sunday night. Nobody else is around, and you’re waiting to pass some information to a private eye. Only you’re early, and he hasn’t shown up yet. You’re getting nervous. You’ve put the information in an envelope. And then you hear something outside, only it’s not what you expect to hear. It sounds like a truck, and you specifically told Zeeman to park at the end of the alley and walk up. You get worried. Then you start to panic. The last thing you need is someone coming in that clinic and finding you with whatever it is that you have. How are you going to get rid of it?”

  “Is this how you plot your books? You get all red in the face and start acting it out in your mind?”

  “I should have thought of this before. I mean it’s a classic,” Jennifer went on, totally ignoring Diane.

  “What? The letter was addressed to me. You are working for me, technically at least, even if I’m not paying you. So, would you like to tell—”

  It was so simple. It should have been the first thing she thought of. “Ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’?”

  Diane shook her head.

  “Okay, forget that, but don’t you see? That must have been what Beverly did. She must’ve hidden the envelope by putting it where letters go, in the Out box at the clinic before going to check who was at the back door. Only the people looking for it didn’t know what they were looking for. They didn’t think to go through the mail. And the next morning, it went through the meter with all the rest of the envelopes. The office clerk wouldn’t have questioned it. Lab reports and correspondence must go out all the time.”

  Diane looked at her as if she were nuts. “You mean this is what Hoffman was going to give me? This little piece of metal?”

  She threw herself back into the chair in a major pout.

  “This little piece of metal,” Jennifer declared far more confidently than she felt, “may be the key to who you are. If Hoffman were somehow involved with your adoption—for lack of a better word—she could well have been in charge of removing any identifying information such as clothing labels, jewelry, whatever, that you might have had. And it’s just possible that little stuffed cat of yours had a collar with this tag on it.”

  “Maybe. But why would she have kept it all these years?”

  “Why not? She may have been afraid to throw it away. It won’t burn, and it won’t decay. Do you recognize the phone number?”

  Diane took back the disk, looked at the numbers again, and shook her head.

  The girl couldn’t remember her name. It was unreasonable to think she could remember anything else.

  “Get the phone book,” Jennifer told her. “I think it’s in a drawer in the kitchen. I’ll find the atlas. I’m sure Sam has one somewhere, probably on that bookcase over there.”

  “Okay, fine, but what are we doing?” Diane asked.

  “Finding out where you came from.”

  “This time you’ve lost it,” Diane declared, abandoning all pretense at politeness. “Even if that were my phone number, as you seem to think, no way would it still be in operation unless you think my real parents—” Her eyes grew wide, and Jennifer put a hand over Diane’s.

  “No, I don’t. All I’m trying to do is find out what state and city you might have come from. I don’t expect to find your parents, and neither should you.”

  She couldn’t let herself or Diane think that, to hope that it might be as simple as dialing a phone number. Besides, what she had in mind was a long shot, at best. Those three missing girls on the net. One was from Philadelphia, one from Bethesda, Maryland, and one from Wilmington, North Carolina. A lot had changed in fourteen years. States had added area codes. But the exchanges had generally stayed the same. Even if Diane’s parents no longer had that number—for whatever reason—it should ring through to the right area.

  Diane brought the directory to the table, and Jennifer laid it side by side with the atlas. It looked like Philadelphia had a 215 area code, Bethesda 301, and Wilmington 252.

  “There’re fifty states,” Diane reminded her. “What do you plan to do? Go through them one by one and ask if they’ve heard of...of who? A girl called Cat?”

  “Indulge me for half a minute, will you?”

  Diane glared ba
ck at her and opened her mouth.

  But Jennifer shook her head. “That means shut up while I try something. If it doesn’t work, then you can tell me how stupid I am.”

  She took up the phone, her heart beating in her ears, pressed 215, followed by the number on the tag. It rang. Then she heard a series of loud beeps. “Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please hang up, check the number, and dial again,” a recorded voice told her.

  She hung up. Diane looked at her, and Jennifer shook her head. Then she tried the 301 code. A woman picked up. “Hello?” She sounded older.

  “Excuse me,” Jennifer said. “I was trying to reach the...” Think fast, Jennifer. The woman can hang up on you any second. “...the Barnes and Noble in Bethesda. Is this it?”

  “I’m sorry. You’ve reached a private number.”

  She gave the woman the number she was dialing.

  “That’s my number, but—”

  “So this is Bethesda? Bethesda, Maryland?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I’m sure I copied it right. How long have you had it?” Mentally Jennifer crossed her fingers. Could this be one of Diane’s relatives?

  “Oh my. I’d say it’s been a good six years. Ever since we moved here from—”

  Darn.

  “Thank you. Sorry to bother you.” Jennifer dropped the receiver in its cradle. “That one’s a maybe.”

  She dialed again, and it rang through. A man answered with “Mack’s Grill.”

  “Where are you located?” Jennifer asked.

  He gave her detailed directions, a little too detailed.

  “I’m coming from Wilmington,” she told him.

  “Oh, then you’re about forty-five minutes away. Come in on—”

  “Thanks,” she said, and hung up.

  “That one’s also a maybe, but a not likely.”

  “Three down and what? Forty-seven to go? Why aren’t you calling numbers in Georgia?”

  Because Georgia hadn’t listed any missing three-year-olds that fit all of Diane’s statistics. “As soon as I figure out—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Diane curled up in a ball in the chair and turned away from her.