“What kind of things?”
“They started with beer.”
“Tsingtao?” Even I had heard of Tsingtao.
“No, evidently somebody already had that. They started with Sinkiang Black Beer. Mark drank some in a Xinjiang restaurant—I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right—fell in love with it, decided there had to be a market for it in the States.”
“Can’t have done too well with it. I never heard of it,” I said.
He looked surprised. “I didn’t realize you drank beer.”
“Well, I don’t. Not really. I had a bottle of Bud Lime the other day.”
“Ah, well. I’ll defer to your expertise.”
It was the first time he’d ever been at all snide with me, and I liked him rather better for it. “Touché,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“No, no. Don’t apologize. I had it coming.”
He grinned. “Anyway, they’ve continued to branch out. They import several brands of beer, wine, and teas now. A few children’s toys. Ever heard of Baby Bibi, the doll with the demonic face?”
“I can’t say I have. As you may be about to point out, though, I haven’t played with many dolls over the last twenty years.”
“It’s a closely held company, so financials aren’t readily available, but it’s possible their revenues are in the neighborhood of eight or nine million dollars a year. Maybe even twice that.”
I stared at the ceiling as I considered whether this kind of background was useful to me. At the moment I couldn’t see how, so I got the grocery sack out of my briefcase and handed it to Rodney. He dumped out the wallet and keys on the secretarial desk that held the coffee pot.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“A wallet and keys. That’s all I can tell you, except maybe you ought to handle them with gloves. Actually, you can dust them for prints, can’t you?”
“I can try.”
“Then I want to know everything there is to know about Larry Smith.”
“Who is…?”
“Larry Smith is the owner of the wallet, or at least of the cards that are in the wallet.”
“What else do you know about him?”
“Not a thing.”
“A name like Smith, you’re not giving me a lot to work with.”
“Hey, if it was easy, I’d do it myself.”
Later that morning I was in my office making sure I had filed all the paperwork I needed to in the Natalie Stevens case. Carly buzzed me and told me there was a woman waiting to see me. In a low voice—it sounded like she was cupping the phone with her hand—she added, “She wouldn’t tell me her name.”
“Would she tell you what she wanted?”
“Unh unh. Not that either.”
“I’ll be right out.”
The woman was about five years older than I was with a slightly angular face and hair of an almost neutral color that she probably thought of as light brown.
“Are you Ms. Starling?”
“I am. What can I do for you?”
She pulled her chin in.
“Or come on back and tell me about it,” I said.
When she was seated, she said, “You’re not what I expected. I expected some kind of petite little thing.”
“Well, I don’t often get called petite.”
“No. I imagine you get called a lot of things, but not that.”
“What can I do for you, Ms.…”
“Mrs.”
“Mrs.…”
“Mrs. McClane. Does that name mean anything to you?”
I had a sinking feeling. It was beginning to.
“I came to ask you about your intentions concerning my husband.”
“Tom McClane?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, don’t play dumb with me.”
“When I saw him last week, I was hoping he’d show me a case file.”
“I’ll show you mine, if you’ll show me yours. Is that it?”
“Uh, no. Look, we stopped for a cup of coffee on the way back from the impound lot one morning last week.”
“Is that what you call it these days? Stopping for a cup of coffee?”
“Starbucks has that room in the back with all the mattresses, but I try not to go in there.” Her face tightened. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re in pain. I didn’t mean to make light.”
“Tom and I have had our problems, but we’re working through them. It doesn’t help when some long-legged…” Her mouth worked before she could spit out the next word. “…vixen comes along swinging her hips—”
I held up a hand, hoping to cut her off before she really hit her stride. “I won’t have coffee with your husband ever again,” I said. “And when I see him in the course of doing my job, I’ll do my best to keep my hips under control.”
She breathed in and out through flared nostrils. “Okay,” she said finally. “Okay.” She gathered her coat and her purse against her chest and stood up. “Good bye.” She staggered on her heels just a bit as she went through the doorway. Her hips didn’t swing when she walked, I noticed. She was a thin woman, and it was actually hard to tell whether she had any hips to swing.
When she was gone, Brooke came in and sat down.
I exhaled through puffed cheeks. “Do you hear everything that goes on in this office?”
“You really need to close the door.”
“It’s a small office. With two people in here, I feel like we’d suffocate.”
“Did you really have coffee with her husband?”
I shook my head. “Yeah,” I said. “He took me to see Natalie’s car at the impound lot, and at his suggestion we stopped for coffee. I saw the indentation in his ring finger. I should have known better.”
“How do you think his wife found out about it?”
“I don’t know. I guess he told her.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because men are stupid? How would I know?”
Brooke smiled and stood up. “Life would be simpler if we were lesbians,” she said from the doorway, and I raised my eyebrows.
“Except for the sex thing,” she said. “That would be gross.”
That afternoon when I pushed through the door of Rodney Burns, Private Investigations, Rodney was sitting in his outer office with a cup of coffee.
“You look like Yurtle the Turtle,” I said. “King of all you can see.”
“I feel like Yurtle.”
“Aren’t you going overboard with this new coffee pot? How do you manage to sit still? You should be jitterbugging all over your front office.”
“I only drink half-caf after lunch. I get regular and decaf, and I mix them together.”
“Shrewd,” I said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
I sat. “Tell me.”
“You never mentioned just when Mark Stevens is supposed to have left for China.”
“I never knew.”
“Monday,” Rodney said.
“Pardon?”
“Mark Stevens left Richmond for China on Monday.”
“This past Monday? A week ago today?”
Rodney nodded. “Probably about the same time Mrs. Stevens was in your office hiring you to represent her stepdaughter. At 9:20 a.m. Mark Stevens was on a plane taking off from Richmond International Airport. He flew to Dallas, changed planes, flew to LAX, changed planes, flew to Hong Kong. If he went into mainland China from there, he didn't fly. I'm assuming he took a train in, but I can't verify it and may not ever be able to.”
“You're sure about this?”
“He used his frequent flier numbers.”
“When did he purchase his tickets?”
“Roughly a month ago.”
“I’d have liked it better if it were three a.m. that morning.”
“He does the deed, then gets out of town?”
“And leaves his daughter twisting in the wind. Yes.”
“Well, he’d planned the trip at least a month in adv
ance. But you never know: Maybe he also planned what happened in that motel room.”
Chapter 18
I didn’t know if Mark Stevens had committed murder or not, but everybody I had talked to had given the impression he had been out of the country for some time. Natalie, Chloe, Mark’s brother David…I was ready to confront someone and unload. I couldn’t sleep for being ready to confront someone.
The next morning on my way into work, I drove through downtown and took I-95 ten minutes north to Mechanicsville. The septuagenarian secretary looked up as I came in.
“David Stevens?” I said.
“I’m afraid he isn’t…”
I spun as the door opened behind me, and David Stevens came in.
“Ms. Starling!” he said.
“We need to talk.”
“Okay. Come on back.”
We went through the door into his office. Now the polished mahogany and clean desktop had a more sinister feel to me, speaking of pretentiousness and having something to hide.
“How’s the case going?” he asked as he settled back into his chair.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to sit. “As I said on your voicemail, the charges have been changed from manslaughter to murder. Other than that, it’s going swell.”
“You don’t sound like you’re making progress.”
“I’m not. I have to spend my time uncovering information that should have been given me right off. You’re real helpful when it comes to handing me a grocery sack full of things that supposedly came from Natalie’s room. Not so helpful about letting me know your brother was in Richmond last Sunday night. I don’t know if you explicitly told me he wasn’t, but you sure led me to believe it.”
“And now you don’t?”
“Now I don’t. Mark Stevens was in Richmond that night. Moreover, he was in the Best Western on Chippenham Parkway. Did you know that, too? Did you also know that, coincidentally or otherwise, he was in the room next to Natalie’s?”
David had a hand out. “Calm down. No need to get angry.”
“I’m not angry.” I dropped into a client chair. “What I am is pissed off royally.”
He started to speak, then hesitated. “What’s the difference?”
“Beside the point. Did you know Mark was at that motel, or didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know it. Of course I didn’t know it.”
“But you did know he was in town.”
He sighed. “Yes, I did know that.”
“Did Natalie? Chloe?”
“Maybe not. It’s possible they thought he left the previous week. He did, actually, but it was to talk to a distributor in Philadelphia. He came back the Friday before all this unpleasantness, but…” He shrugged. “He may not have gone home.”
I waited.
“Look, I’ve told you about Natalie, what a worry she was to her father.”
“You’ve told me.”
“If she thought he was out of town, she’d be more likely to be herself, and Mark would have a better chance of finding out what was going on with her.”
“What did he think was going on?”
David moved his head in apparent discomfort. “He thought she was having an affair with a married man.”
“He thought Natalie was having an affair? Are you sure he wasn’t suspicious of Chloe?”
He looked shocked. “I don’t know why he’d be suspicious of Chloe. She hunted down her sugar daddy and married him. She wasn’t going to jeopardize that.”
“So you think Natalie was having an affair with this Larry Smith. What’s your theory of the case? Natalie was meeting married Larry. Her father got wind of it and booked the room next to hers in order to confirm his worst suspicions. Then what? He burst into their room and confronted them? A shot was fired, and Larry was killed. Who fired the shot in your view? Natalie or her father?”
“Does it matter?”
“What do you mean, does it matter? It’s pretty much the only thing that matters.”
“Either way, the two of them had to work together to dispose of the body.”
I thought it through. Pictured Natalie and her father in a panic, stripping the body of anything that might identify it. They drag him out to the parking lot, run over his head a few times, spin the tires against his face, do whatever it takes to delay identification as long as possible and forever if they’re lucky. They drive the body a couple of blocks into a residential neighborhood and dump it—or maybe Natalie does that part alone. The only person Beecher saw was a woman…
“It won’t work,” I said.
“What won’t?”
“Your theory of the case. As far as I know, it’s possible that Natalie checked into that motel at six-thirty. It’s possible that she was out disposing of a body sometime after midnight. In between those times, though, she was at a party. She wasn’t shooting someone and mutilating his corpse.”
“You sure about that?”
I wasn’t sure. If she’d gone straight from the party to the motel, if her father had burst in on them at eleven o’clock or so…Maybe there was time. It might seem improbable merely because I didn’t have all the facts.
“Let me give you a theory,” I said.
He shrugged.
“Mark was suspicious of his wife.”
“I told you. That doesn’t seem at all likely to me.”
“It’s all too likely. A professional man-chaser, everybody’s idea of a sex kitten. Why not Chloe? Something arouses Mark’s suspicions—callers that hang up, Chloe disappearing from time to time, a letter, a memento, it could be anything. So he leaves town on an extended trip, takes care of some business in Philadelphia, but comes back before he has to leave for China. Doesn’t tell his wife. The cat’s away, the mouse may play, he thinks. He breaks in on Chloe and this Larry Smith, is outraged, takes his revenge. Maybe lover boy even attacked him, and it was self-defense.”
“Who mutilated the body and then dumped it?”
“Chloe, Mark, the two of them together? What do I care? Either way, it exonerates my client.”
“If you can prove it. Don’t forget this took place in Natalie’s motel room.”
“A room that was registered in Natalie’s name. How difficult would it be for Chloe to have a credit card with Natalie’s name on it? She applies for a card, it comes in, she signs the back of it and puts it in her purse.”
“How does she get a driver’s license? Suppose the motel asked for identification to go along with the card?”
“She leaves that motel and tries another one? I’m not saying I have this all worked out. At this point, I’m just speculating, but I don’t know that my theory is any more farfetched than yours. I’ve met Natalie and Chloe, and based on my impressions of both women I like my theory better.”
David drummed his fingers on the desk. I’d never noticed before, but it looked to me as if he’d had a manicure.
“Natalie’s not going to thank you for trying to smear her father with this,” he said finally.
“I’m not after her thanks. My job is to get her acquitted.”
That evening, when I went to get into my car at the parking garage, I had another flat tire. I made the call, waited for the tow truck, rode in the cab to Discount Tire. “Something’s wrong with my tire,” I told the guy. “I was in here last week. Clearly, I’ve got a leak.”
“We’ll check it out.” When he called me back up to the desk, he said, “You’re right. It’s a leak. Want to come look?”
I followed him out into the service bay. The back of my car was in the air, my tire off and lying horizontally on a spindle tool..
“Here it is.” He took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and poked it through the hole in the side of my tire. “It’s through the sidewall. We can’t fix it.”
“What did it?”
“Off-hand, I’d say a big nail, or maybe a screw.”
“Can I see it?”
He shook his head.
“Wasn’t it inside the tire?”
<
br /> He kept shaking his head. “If I had to guess, I’d say somebody drove a nail into your tire, pulled it out, and took it with them.”
“Why would anybody do that?”
“Could be that they don’t like you very much.”
I was silent.
“Shall we go look at tires?”
“Driving a nail into the tire wouldn’t make it explode or something?” I asked.
“People drive over nails all the time. Their tires don’t explode. You can get some blowback, I understand. Depending on the tire pressure and the cross-section of the nail or screw or whatever, it could shoot the nail back out at you.”
“You mean there could be someone walking around Richmond with a nail sticking out of his forehead?”
“Well…”
“At least I can hope.”
The next morning, I looked around the parking garage for surveillance cameras, thinking maybe I could get the recording and see who was sabotaging my car, but there were no surveillance cameras. Though I hadn’t thought about it, a parking garage with no cameras didn’t seem very safe. Suppose I was attacked?
When I came back to the garage that evening, my windshield was an opaque sheet with a web of cracks running all the way across it. I called roadside assistance again, waited.
“Discount Tire doesn’t do windshields,” I said when the tow truck got there. “Can you recommend a body shop?”
Fortunately, the body shop didn’t close until six, but I had to leave my car.
“We can have it for you by tomorrow at this time,” said the man across the desk. “Can we drive you somewhere?”
“You don’t rent cars, do you?”
“No, but there’s an Enterprise about a mile that way.” He pointed. “Want me to call them for you, set something up?”
“Please.”
I didn’t get home until after seven, and when I did I was driving a Ford Focus. Deeks had already been fed, but he was delighted at the prospect of going for a ride. I set him in the passenger seat, and we went to Best Buy.
Nobody messed with the Ford Focus on Thursday. I didn’t have an assigned space, so probably no one knew it was mine. On Friday I had my Beetle back, but nobody messed with it, which was actually a disappointment since I had two security cameras set up inside, one on the front dash and one in the rear. On Monday, I had four flat tires. I felt anger mixed with a savage triumph as I waited for the tow truck. I had the bastard.
Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 14