“So she’s at least an accomplice.”
“I think so.”
“From what you say, Frances sounds like she was playing Goth, but was gonna wind up as an executive somewhere. Not really into the poverty lifestyle. So if you don’t find a fairy, or if she didn’t do it, you’ve really got to think about the possibility that you’ve got two separate things going on here. Austin, and the others.”
“Be easier if it was all one thing,” Lucas said.
“The world isn’t easy,” Del said. He finished his coffee and pitched the cup toward an oversized plastic wastebasket, and missed. Clarence Carter went away and Jefferson Airplane came up, “Plastic Fantastic Lover.”
“It’s not two things,” Lucas said, after a while. “They’re connected. We don’t have Frances’s body, but the lab says there was a lot of blood. Just like Ford and Carter. They could have yelled, their throats weren’t cut, but nobody heard them yell because, probably, by the time they thought of it, they were already going.”
“Unless the knife went up into the diaphragm,” Del said. “Jesus, though, that’d take some expertise—a doctor or something.”
“There’s that.”
“And from what you say, there’s other big differences,” Del said. “When they killed Frances, they went to all the risk of moving the body and getting rid of it. Since it hasn’t popped up yet, they did a pretty good job. But Ford and Carter, they leave out on the street, like calling cards. Right out there in public, like advertisements.”
“Advertisements for what?”
“You’re the detective,” Del said.
Lucas slurped on the coffee, which tasted sort of brown, like a cross between real coffee and the paper sack it came in. “If they’re advertisements, there’ll be more of them. And now that you brought it up, another question about Frances. People were going to miss her pretty quickly, so why bother to move the body at all?”
Del shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe to shift time, to give themselves an alibi. Maybe to shift the place, so you wouldn’t look at people who had keys to the Austin house. But then, if you’re right, and the cases are connected, why does the fairy let herself be seen now? Doesn’t she care? There are probably what, a half-dozen people who’d recognize her now?”
“Maybe she just doesn’t give a shit,” Lucas said.
“You know what it adds up to?” Del said. “Either you’ve got two separate things, or she’s nuts. She lets herself be seen, then she runs and hides. It’s like a game to her.”
Across the street, Heather got up, stretched, loafed into the kitchen, got something out of a cupboard—black corn chips, Lucas thought, and a bottle of salsa. They watched her carefully fixing the snack. “Is salt okay at this point? In the pregnancy?” Del asked. “Those chips have got a lot of sodium.”
“Dunno.”
Lucas said, after another moment, “There’s something else going on, too. Austin—Alyssa—says her husband might have been sleeping with his assistant. Smart, pretty, big boobs; that’s Alyssa’s description. Alyssa said she didn’t care too much.”
“Bullshit,” Del said.
“. . . because on other levels, the marriage was still okay. They had a solid partnership.”
“Wasn’t okay. Another woman gets to her husband in a way she can’t? That’s never okay,” Del said. “If she tells you that, she’s lying.”
Lucas shrugged. “All I can do is tell you what she said.”
“Did you check the plane crash?”
“Not personally. I read some paper on it. Supposedly, he’s at a fly-in fishing place up in Canada. He’d been there before, had gone up by himself, meeting some pals. On the day he’s scheduled to leave, he takes off, had a power problem when he’s a hundred feet up, tries to turn back down the lake, dead stalls, and goes straight into the ground. The Canadian investigators didn’t find anything particularly suspicious. Happens a few times a year up there. This was an old rebuilt plane, a Beaver. And boom. Alyssa was back here; the daughter was back here.”
“What about the guys up there? His pals? Alyssa didn’t have anything going with any of them?”
“You’re a suspicious motherfucker,” Lucas said. And, “I’ll check that.”
“Wup-wup-wup . . .” Del said, pointing across the street.
Toms was running toward the kitchen and Lucas put the glasses on her. “Phone call,” he said. He looked at his watch and noted the time. She spoke for ten seconds then hung up.
“Quick call,” Del said. “Setting up a meet?”
“Dunno.” Toms walked back through the visible rooms, then disappeared down a hall that led only to the door. “Somebody coming up?”
“Didn’t see anybody going in the front.”
“I think somebody called her from the door.”
They sat cocked forward on the folding chairs, tensed up; Toms was gone for another ten seconds, then reappeared, pushing an old woman in a wheelchair. “Ah, shit,” Lucas said. “It’s her mom.”
“You know anything about Goths?” Lucas asked.
Del did. He’d even dated a couple of them, twenty years earlier, during their initial efflorescence. Much of the Gothic trip was a deliberate, ironic, self-conscious pose, along with a genuine interest in the subject of decadence and the transcendent. Most of the Goths he knew, Del said, were smart. If they’d had a scientific bent, instead of a literary bent, they’d have become geeks.
“I’ve always been more on the industrial side myself,” Del said, “but there were crossover clubs that had both things going at the same time. Sort of Gotho-Industrial.”
“I understand all the words you just said, but none of the concepts, ” Lucas said.
Del said, “Yeah. See, there’s this alternative non-jock universe that you wouldn’t know anything about. . . .”
They talked about Goth for another fifteen minutes and came back to the murders only at the end. “How much money did Frances get?” Del asked.
“According to her mother, a little more than two million. Some carefully calculated amount that she could get without anybody paying taxes. I don’t understand all the ins and outs of it.”
“Okay. Two mil,” Del said. “Lots of people have been killed for a hell of a lot less. Maybe Mom’s a money freak.”
“She says she doesn’t care about the money.”
“Oh, bullshit. How many rich people you know who don’t care about money?” Del asked. “How about you? You’re rich. What would you do if somebody said, ‘Uh, shit, we just lost all your money in the market’?”
Lucas grinned. “Well, hell . . . it’d be a shock.”
“Yeah. You like your money.”
“Alyssa may like the money, but she didn’t kill the kid,” Lucas said. “If you’d seen her, Alyssa, you’d know how this whole thing has gotten on top of her. She is seriously fucked up.”
“So she didn’t kill the kid.”
“I don’t believe so,” Lucas said. “She could be a psycho killer, and then it’s all up for grabs. But to me, she just looks like a hippie chick who did good for herself. And then everybody around her went and got killed.”
“A quick nasty argument about Daddy—maybe the kid found out something?—one of them picks up a knife, there’s a struggle, the kid gets stuck . . .”
Lucas shrugged: “Anything’s possible. But if that’s what it is, why is Alyssa campaigning to get more cops on the case? The whole case was dead in the water. And if she killed the kid, and if I’m right about all three being killed the same way, by the same person, then why did she kill the other two?”
“Maybe somebody else figured out the connection?”
“Aw, come on, man. A bartender and a twenty-something Goth?”
Del nodded. “Okay. But I’ll tell you what, I don’t have that much experience with your basic upper-class crime.”
“Being pretty much a proletarian yourself,” Lucas said.
“A working man.”
“A horny-handed son of
the soil.”
“You got me on the horny,” Del said. “Anyway, I don’t have that much experience with the upper classes, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a crime where there was millions of dollars floating around, where the money didn’t have something to do with the murder; especially if there was philately going on.”
“That’d be philandering,” Lucas said. “Philately is stamp-collecting. ”
“That’s what I meant—stamp-collecting.”
Lucas scrubbed an index finger across his philtrum, then said, “You’re right about the money and fucking. And when you’re right, you’re right.”
Lucas said, “Are they arguing?”
Del looked across the street, where the old lady was jabbing her finger at Heather.
“Looks like it.” Heather laughed and said something, and the old lady laughed. “On the other hand, maybe not.”
Lucas said, “You’ve been grousing about your old lady. Everything okay?”
“Ah, everything’s okay, but she’s been sick for a couple of weeks,” Del said. “Not enough to go to the doctor, but, you know. Doesn’t want to walk around much: her stomach is upset.”
“Jeez, man, a couple of weeks? That could be something serious. You gotta get her to a doc.”
“There are two kinds of nurses,” Del said; his wife was a nurse. “There’s the kind who think the sun shines out of a doctor’s asshole, and the kind that think most doctors are running a long-term hustle, and who don’t trust them any further than they could throw them. I got one of the second kind.”
He turned his head to the window: “Old lady’s leaving,” he said. “Looks like it’s bedtime.”
“She’ll be changing into her nightgown,” Lucas said.
“Can I borrow the glasses?”
“Get your own fuckin’ glasses.”
Eric Clapton: “Willie & the Hand Jive.”
After a restless night—disturbed a last time by Weather getting ready for work—Lucas had breakfast with the kids, talked to Letty about hip-hop music, stuffed creamed corn and whipped ham into Sam’s mouth, and argued with the housekeeper about the lawn service, which wanted, too early in the year, in Lucas’s opinion, to schedule a winter cleanup. At eight o’clock, he was on the phone to Alyssa Austin.
“I was wondering—have you begun organizing the financial records for Frances’s estate?”
“Not yet, really—there’s an accountant and a lawyer, but they’re not pushing too hard,” Austin said. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Would it be possible for me to look at her financial records? Checkbook and investment records? All that?”
“Of course, if you think there might be something in there.”
He hesitated for a moment, then said, “There was another Goth killing last night.”
“Oh, no!” Her voice was a groan. “Who was it?”
“A kid named Roy Carter,” Lucas said. “Middle twenties, I guess, worked in a liquor store and hung out at the A1 and November, at least some of the time. Did Frances ever mention the name?”
“Not that I remember. She had friends I didn’t know, but he wasn’t one of the long-term ones. What’d he look like?”
“Tall, pale, red hair, thin—bony, almost,” Lucas said.
“That doesn’t sound familiar. . . . Does he have a family?”
“Yeah, his parents are postal workers, I guess. Out in the countryside, somewhere.”
“That’s awful for them. That’s awful,” Austin said.
“So I can get that stuff?”
“Yes. I’ll put it all out for you. I’ve got a board meeting today, but Helen will be here. I’ll stack it up in the front room. You’re welcome to stay as long you want. Helen can get you Cokes and coffee and sandwiches. ”
“One more thing. Have you heard of a couple . . .” He looked in his notebook again. ‘. . . named Denise Robinson and Mark McGuire? ”
“Sure. They were friends of Francie’s. I should have given you their names, but I didn’t think of them,” she said. “They came by with her a couple of times after Hunter was killed, last fall sometime.”
“What does Robinson look like?”
“Mmm, tall, gawky, blondish hair—sandy, maybe—wears big plastic-rimmed glasses. She’s a marathoner. Bony shoulders, drinking-straw arms. She told me that she ran it under three, which means she’s pretty serious about it. Why?”
“Just a couple names I picked up,” he said. “I’m pushing all of Frances’s friends for names.”
And Robinson didn’t sound like a fairy, he thought after he’d rung off.
He called anson, the Minneapolis detective, from the car, on the way to Austin’s house. Anson was sleepy: he’d gotten six hours the night before. “And I gotta have eight, or I’m just not worth shit.” They both yawned together, into their phones, and Anson added, “We got the ID last night, it’s confirmed. I got our guys to make up a mug shot of the fairy—I’m going to run it around this morning, talk to all those people on your list.”
“Let me know what you get,” Lucas said. “I’m on the way over to Alyssa Austin’s to look at her daughter’s financial records.”
If nothing came up sooner, they agreed to talk at noon, to compare notes.
Lucas found four boxes of records waiting for him at Austin’s. The housekeeper met him at the door, took him into the living room, said, “Mrs. Austin said to try to keep all the folders together, because there’s really a lot of paper and if it gets confused, they might not ever get it straight again.”
Austin had been right about the paper. There were two intersecting sets of records: Hunter Austin’s estate, two million of which went to Frances, while the rest went to Alyssa; and then Frances’s estate, which included not only the two million from Hunter Austin’s estate, but another half-million that she had apparently accumulated earlier, presumably through gifts and investments made on her behalf.
Hunter Austin’s estate was still mostly intact, because the estate return had only recently been accepted by the IRS; and all of his investment, banking, and retirement accounts and trusts were still operating. That produced dozens of checks coming and going each year, on top of money coming in from his investments.
Frances Austin had had two major accounts of her own, one with Wells Fargo investment services, and one with Fidelity Investments. As money came in from one or the other—about a quarter of her accounts were in bonds that produced regular income that she apparently used for living expenses—it was deposited in her checking account, which was also at Wells Fargo.
The totality was confusing. At eleven o’clock, though, his neck and back muscles starting to cramp, he had what could be a breakthrough. In December, Fidelity had issued a check for fifty thousand dollars to Frances. There was no check form where the other check forms were, and there was no record of the fifty thousand going into her checking account.
Where had the money gone? Had she simply endorsed it to somebody? Had she walked it into a bank and gotten cash—not all that easy to do, in these days of drug awareness and terrorism alerts. What had she spent it on?
Del had been right, the night before, when he said that people had been killed for a lot less than two million dollars; and a lot less than fifty thousand dollars, too.
He stood up, stretched, went into the kitchen for another diet Coke, found the housekeeper unstacking the dishwasher. “Do you have a cell phone number for Mrs. Austin?”
“There’s a list,” she said. She went to a cupboard near the wall phone and opened the door: on the back of it was a list of fifteen or twenty phone numbers: plumber, appliance repairmen, lawn and pool services, Mercedes and Jaguar dealerships, and three different numbers for Alyssa Austin: Office, 1Cell, and 2Cell.
“Her personal phone is 2Cell; 1Cell is the business cell,” the housekeeper said.
Lucas called her on the personal phone: she answered on the third ring. “Sorry to bother you,” Lucas said. “I have a question. Frances took fifty thousand do
llars out of Fidelity in December, but there’s no record of it going into her checking account. Do you remember anything like that? Did she sign it over to somebody for a car or something, or put a down payment on a condo?”
There was a long pause, and then Austin said, “Fifty thousand? I don’t know anything about that, at all. I would have known—if she was thinking about spending fifty thousand dollars on something, she would have mentioned it.”
“She didn’t say anything?”
“Nothing at all,” Austin said.
“I’m going to leave some documentation in a folder on your dining table,” Lucas said. “Could you take a look at it, and the other expenses she had at the time? See if anything rings a bell.”
“I’ll look as soon as I get home—I’ll come back as soon as this meeting is done.”
“Good. Let me give you my cell number. Call me anytime.”
When he got off the line, he took out his book and found Anson’s number. “Get anything?” he asked, when Anson came up.
“I took that photo kit of the fairy woman around to the people who saw her,” Anson said. “And to Frances’s friends. One of her friends said the fairy looked like . . . guess who?”
“I don’t know. Lana Turner?”
“Close, but no cigar. They said it looked like Frances Austin.”
8
A slap in the face.
"Frances Austin’s dead,” Lucas said.
“You know that and I know that,” Anson said. “The question is, does Frances Austin know that?”
“Man . . . the blood at Austin’s. You’ve seen the lab reports?”
“I’m just telling you what I was told. We really don’t know how much blood there was at Austin’s place, whether it was a little that got smeared around or a lot that got mopped up. But here’s a question for you. What if the fairy is Alyssa Austin? She looks a little like Frances.”
Lucas had to think it over. Why not? “You’re thinking outside the box,” he said finally.
“She gets a wig, she gets some black clothes . . .”
“She’s forty-five, or something like that. Everybody says the fairy is in her early twenties,” Lucas said.
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