Two volunteers sat at the information desk. “Rita...” she said, then stopped short at their blank faces. She didn’t know Rita’s last name.
Branigan looked around wildly, hoping Liam was waiting for her. She turned back to the volunteers. “‘Rita’ is all I know. She’s homeless.”
“Oh, you’re clergy,” one volunteer said. “Your colleague is already here.” Branigan didn’t correct her. “Your lady is in Trauma Bay 4.”
Branigan nodded her thanks and ran to the door they indicated. She followed some rather confusing signage until she saw cubicles marked with numbers, encircling a large nurse’s station. In the fourth cubicle, she saw Liam pressed against a wall, white-faced, trying to leave enough room for the doctor and two nurses bending over the bed. If Rita was in the bed, Branigan couldn’t see her.
A young woman holding a Bible turned. Chaplain, Branigan read on her nametag.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“Time of death, 5:33 p.m.,” said the doctor.
Abruptly, Branigan’s adrenaline was gone, and she sagged into a chair in the hallway. Liam conferred for awhile with the chaplain, then motioned for Branigan to accompany him. “Let’s get some coffee,” he said, leading her on a byzantine pathway to the hospital cafeteria. They poured coffee and paid in silence, then chose a small table well away from the early diners.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Rita had the chaplain call the church,” Liam said. “She told her she was a member at Jericho and wanted to speak to me. She wasn’t, but that doesn’t matter. The chaplain didn’t think she would last long, so I called you and drove right over.”
“But what happened?”
“Hit-and-run.”
“Oh no! Again? When? Where?”
“Around midnight. On Conestee Avenue.”
“Mrs Resnick’s street? How did I not know?” She grabbed her phone from her purse and sure enough saw two missed calls from Jody. But they were received well after 5 o’clock that afternoon.
“I guess because it wasn’t a fatality at first?” Liam hazarded. “Your police reporter isn’t looking at all traffic accidents.”
“Yeah, but to think we were running around all day trying to find her and she was right here. My story on Vesuvius’s hit-and-run ran yesterday! They couldn’t let me know there was another one? I gotta get back to the newsroom.”
Liam wasn’t listening to her hissy fit. He looked pensive, stricken even.
“Sorry,” she said. “Did she say anything to you? Rita, I mean.”
“Not really. She was rambling. They had started morphine.”
“But what did she call you for? To talk about God? Or hell? What?”
“Yeah.”
“What did she want to know?”
“The usual. Did I believe in heaven and hell? Did I think God could forgive her?”
Branigan stared at Liam. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. Why was he being strange about this? Did he think she wouldn’t understand the pastoral part of his job?
She waited him out.
“I read her the twenty-third psalm,” he said finally. “There’s nothing better for someone who’s dying.”
She tried one more time. “But nothing about an old lady getting stabbed or her getting rich or anything like that?”
“No, nothing like that. I promise I’d tell you anything like that, Brani G.”
Maybe so. But there sure is something you’re not telling me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Liam trotted from the hospital, ducking the huge raindrops that a thunderstorm had blown in. Some weeks, especially as it got hotter and more humid, there’d be one of these every afternoon. It was as if the air got so suffocating that it reached a tipping point. Black clouds rolled in, thunder crashed, lightning bolted, and the temperature plunged twenty degrees. Then came fat drops of welcome rain.
There were other kinds of summer, summers of drought, when the endless sunshine went on and on, unbroken, unabated. Lakes shrank. Crops shriveled. Cows languished. So it was an unspoken rule: no one besides Little League coaches complained of afternoon rain.
But today, Liam hardly noticed the cool, heavy drops. He hopped into his SUV and drove to the church. He left it in the Jericho Road parking lot, and splashed through the sliding doors. He turned right for the receptionist’s office, locked for the evening. Shelter curfew was monitored out of the staff lounge down the hall. He fumbled for his office key and unlocked the receptionist’s door, slid open the top drawer of the desk and found a ring with a single key on it. The key to the cargo van.
Liam locked up and headed back into the rain. Then he did something he’d never done before. He jumped into the bulky cargo van and drove it home.
The Delaneys lived in a downtown neighborhood in the process of regentrification. Liam and Liz had bought the two-story red brick house as newlyweds nineteen years before, when they had two steady, if small, salaries. At that time, the neighborhood along the western end of Oakley was wavering, with half rentals and half homeowners. It wasn’t at all certain which way these blocks would go. But Liz’s eye was unerring, and soon the Delaney property was alive with roses and geraniums and lantana in the sun, and in the shade of towering hardwoods, azaleas and blue hostas as big as tires. The rental next door was purchased and refurbished by new owners who moved in; then, like dominos, the next was purchased, and the next. Now, the neighborhood was almost entirely owner-occupied, and the value of the Delaney house had tripled.
Liam pulled the van into his cracked driveway, seeing Liz’s car and the twins’ Jeep parked ahead of him. That didn’t mean both Charlie and Chan were home. They split their car time, and rode bikes on alternate days.
Liam ducked under the car port, entering the house through the unlocked kitchen door. Liz stood at the refrigerator, pulling out salad ingredients. “Hi, hon. Dinner in half an hour?”
“That’s fine. Is Chan home?”
“Upstairs.”
Liam dashed off in search of his son, taking the stairs two at a time.
He rapped on Chan’s bedroom door, scarcely waiting for a reply before pushing it open. He closed it behind him, so he didn’t see Charlie creep up to listen through the crack.
“Hi, Dad. What’s up?”
“I drove the church van home,” Liam said.
Chan kept his face straight, but Liam glimpsed a nervous swallow. “Yeah?”
“I know you’ve sometimes ‘borrowed’ it when it was Charlie’s turn in the Jeep. Did you borrow it last night?”
“No. Yesterday was my turn for the Jeep.”
Liam thought for a moment. He did remember seeing Charlie come in on her bike shortly after he returned home from evening service. For the first time in the last hour, he allowed his shoulders to relax. He blew out a breath, and laughed.
Chan looked at him oddly.
“Okay, so where were you last night?”
“Well,” said Chan, “you saw me at the 6 o’clock service, right?”
Liam nodded.
“Then Winston and Mark and I went for burgers, then swimming at Mark’s club.” Liam knew Mark’s parents were members of Peach Orchard Country Club. “The pool was open ’til eleven ’cause it was opening weekend. Then I came home. Why?”
Liam was so relieved, he saw no harm in answering Chan’s question.
“Kind of a long story. But there was a hit-and-run of one of our homeless women last night. Rita.”
“Oh, no. Dad, I’m sorry.”
“Anyway, she wasn’t killed instantly. She asked to see me at the hospital before she died this afternoon. And when I got there, what she wanted to tell me...” Liam hesitated, not sure whether to burden his son with this.
“You have to tell me now, Dad.”
“What she wanted to tell me was... it was our church van.”
Chan looked as if someone had sucker-punched him. He swallowed again. “The church van ran her over?”
“I think that’s what she was
saying. This morning, Branigan and I noticed a strong smell of bleach on the front bumper. So you can see why I was scared when I thought you had borrowed it.”
“Jeez, Dad.”
“I’m not saying you’d deliberately hit someone and leave the scene. With Rita being so little, the driver might not have realized he hit a person.”
“But the bleach?” Chan said. “That says he knew.”
“Yeah. Now I have to ask the staff. And the volunteers. Even the shelter residents could have sneaked that key.” Liam stood up. “I’m just glad it wasn’t you.” He grabbed his son in a fierce hug, giving the top of his blond head a “noogie”, as Chan had called the headlock when he was five. Then he turned and left the room, unaware of the gentle closing of his daughter’s door across the hallway.
He leaned against the wall. His reporter instincts were not just kicking in: they were kicking and screaming. Chan was telling the truth about not driving the cargo van yesterday.
But he wasn’t telling the truth about everything.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Another friggin’ hit-and-run of a homeless person and the newsroom hadn’t called her? What the heck was going on over there?
Branigan parked her Civic with a screech, and ran into the pouring rain. She dashed past the newspaper’s security desk, and bounded up the stairs, too angry to wait for the elevator. Tan saw her first and barked, “Help Jody with a 1A for tomorrow’s edition. He’s already got something online.”
Jody met her next, his hands held up in surrender. “We didn’t know, Branigan. We didn’t figure out it was a homeless woman until after 5 o’clock. I started calling you, but it went to voice mail.”
“How could you not know?”
“It wasn’t on the police scanner last night. All they had was a traffic injury on Conestee. No fatality. I was tied up in court all day, and didn’t get to the police station until five. That’s when I saw the report that said the victim was possibly homeless. We started calling the hospital, you, Jericho Road, the gospel mission, anyplace else we could think of.”
For the second time in an hour, she sagged. “It’s my fault,” she admitted. “I haven’t been working with the police on this story. If I had been, maybe they would’ve called me.”
“For now, can you pull together some quotes from your sources and I’ll feed you the new stuff? We don’t have much.”
“She died, you know. At 5:33.”
“Yeah. I got that already.”
“Okay.” Branigan went to work.
By the time she looked up again it was 8:55. The gospel mission’s phone privileges extended only from eight to nine. She punched in Davison’s cell phone number, and was relieved when he picked up.
“Brani G! I was afraid you’d forgotten me.”
“No way,” she said. “It’s just been a busy day. How are you?”
“Truthfully? Shaky. Not so much physically as the other stuff.”
“Are they feeding you well?”
“Sure.”
“What did you do all day?”
“Got assigned a counselor. Met in a group. Mandatory chapel. Bible study.”
“They don’t waste any time.”
“Idle hands and all that.”
“I guess so.” She didn’t want to tell him about Rita. If the mission subscribed to the newspaper, he’d find out in the morning, but she didn’t want to share the news over the phone. So instead she said, “Davison? There are a lot of people pulling for you.”
“I know. Thanks for calling. Love you.” He hung up.
She went back to work. So far, her frantic pace had allowed her to keep a creeping question at bay: was she responsible for Rita’s death? Had her poking around unloosed the killer the psychics warned her about?
Jody and Branigan merged their two stories into what they hoped was a seamless narrative. Branigan called the director of the gospel mission and the president of the Grambling Homeless Coalition, a collection of public and non-profit agencies that served the homeless. She pulled liberally from Sunday’s story on Vesuvius and his dad.
Jody worked the police investigation. Apparently no one on Conestee Avenue had been awake at midnight on Sunday. Asleep in their air-conditioned houses, the neighbors had heard nothing, seen nothing.
But there was plenty of consternation inside the police department, Jody said, because of the previously unsolved hit-and-run. Chief Warren personally responded to Jody’s call rather than sending him to the public information officer. And Jody did get one vital piece of information Branigan had missed — Rita’s last name: Jones.
After they’d filed the story online and for the next morning’s edition, Tan, Jody and Branigan met in Tan’s office. She brought her notebook.
“Obviously,” Tan began, “this changes things. We’re moving homeless stories to the front burner. Two hit-and-runs in two weeks? What the hell is going on?”
“There’s more,” Branigan said. “We couldn’t put this in tonight’s story because nothing is nailed down yet.” She hesitated.
“Spit it out, Powers,” Tan growled.
“These homeless deaths could be connected to Mrs Resnick’s murder.”
Tan sat back in his chair, clearly startled. Jody’s eyes widened. He was the first to speak.
“I knew you were looking at transients. It panned out?”
“I... I... don’t know yet.” She laid out what she’d learned as coherently as she could, starting with Rita.
She told them Dontegan’s story first, because it had taken place more than five years earlier. He reported a drunken Rita saying — she flipped through the notebook to get it exactly — “I could be rich if I wanna be. I tell about Ol’ High and Mighty gettin’ her nasty self stabbed, I be off these streets and on Easy Street.”
She told them of Malachi’s assertion to Liam that Rita said she “might get rich” if she told what she knew “about some old lady getting murdered” and that a “rich-ass family would pay to keep it quiet”. Branigan admitted that she didn’t know when the conversation took place, but that Malachi and Vesuvius heard it. And Vesuvius was dead.
Then she told about Jess’s account of Max Brody’s wad of money and his comment: “‘This evening’s drunk is courtesy of an old lady who had the good sense to get stabbed.’ Or maybe ‘the good taste to get stabbed’.
“I’m still trying to find Max Brody,” she added.
She told them that the man who’d lived in Mrs Resnick’s pool house, Billy Shepherd, alias Demetrius, might be back in town, though she hadn’t confirmed it. And that Mrs Resnick’s granddaughter, Ashley, overheard her cousin Ben Brissey Jr say on the night of July 4 that a second person had been living in Mrs Resnick’s pool house.
“And to top it all off, Ramsey Resnick volunteers at Jericho Road.”
“Good Lord!” Tan-4 exploded.
“I’m not saying I understand it yet,” Branigan said. “Any of it. But there seems to be some strong links between the Resnicks and the homeless.”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” Tan rubbed his meaty hands together. “Branigan, I want you to continue on the Resnick murder anniversary. But I want it moved up to run this Sunday.
“Jody, you stay on the Rita Jones death, with updates online and a new story daily. And the hit-and-run of the guy whose name sounds like a volcano. See if they’re connected. Who would you like to help pull together an overall piece on homelessness in Grambling?”
“Marjorie,” the reporters answered in unison.
“Okay. Send her home with background reading tonight. Anything else?”
Branigan asked, “Should I share my information with the police?”
Tan thought for a moment. “Not yet. They may leak it to TV. Anyway, they’ve had their turn at this. For ten damn years. Now go get some sleep.”
Branigan wasn’t sure that was going to be possible.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Branigan was back in the newsroom before eight on
Tuesday morning. Unable to sleep the night before, wondering if her digging into the Resnick murder had prompted Rita’s death, she’d finally gotten out of bed and made a list.
Number 1: Talk to Ben Brissey Jr about why he thought a second person was living in his grandmother’s pool house.
Number 2: See if the police had any information on why Rita Jones was on Conestee Avenue Sunday night. Could she have been living in the pool house, either recently or ten years ago?
Number 3: Look through the pool house.
Ben Jr hadn’t returned Branigan’s call from yesterday, so she phoned him again at his New York office. She got his voice mail. Then she called his mother at the lake house. Amanda gave her his cell phone number.
Branigan called that number and he picked up. “I’m so sorry I didn’t get back to you, Miss Powers,” he apologized. “I had you on my list for today. How can I help you?”
His tone was a pleasant surprise.
“As your mother may have told you, we are looking into your grandmother’s murder. It’s been ten years next month and it’s the only unsolved homicide in Grambling.” That last part wasn’t technically true any more, but Ben Jr wouldn’t put the hit-and-runs of homeless people into the same category — even if he was aware of them.
“Yes, Mom did tell me.”
“On the night of the July 4 party, your cousin Ashley said several of you went swimming.”
“That’s right.”
“She also said she overheard you say that someone else was living in the pool house. I assume you meant someone besides Billy Shepherd?”
“You’re taxing my memory, Miss Powers. Billy Shepherd — is that the name of the man Uncle Ramsey found living in the pool house? And who tried to play Grandmother’s piano?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Okay. I remember now. But first, let me explain something. I was a douche bag in those days.”
Branigan choked back a laugh. “Um, okay.”
“I’ve been in AA for two years. I don’t know how much you know about AA, but we do a lot of looking back, a lot of soul searching. I’m not proud of who I was then.”
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