A Hard Day's Fright

by Casey Daniels

  “Let’s put it all on the line here, Darren…” A middle-aged woman with big hips and a pointy chin stepped forward. It was clear—at least to me—that the two of them had sparred over this subject before. But then, maybe I was the only one who saw that flash erupt again in Darren’s eyes.

  Or maybe that reporter saw it, too. Maybe she just didn’t care. “What we need to know,” she said, “is if you’re really looking after the good of the people, or if you’re just mad that the city didn’t give you as much for that building as you could have gotten from one of the developers.”

  Darren swiveled to face her. “Come on, Mary Linda, you know me better than that. You know that’s not a fair assessment. If the city had legitimate reasons to seize property—any property, even mine—I’d be the first to support their efforts. But legitimate… that’s the key here. Revitalization or no revitalization, I’m going to use every legal means to make sure the city isn’t overstepping its legal bounds. That’s the democratic way. It’s the American way. And now…” When he backstopped toward the doors, it was clear the interview was over.

  I couldn’t wait until the reporters shuffled away. When Darren pushed through the doors and stepped into the lobby, I was right behind him.

  Good thing I’d pulled out all the stops and my best black suit. One look at the smile on Darren’s face when he spotted me, and I knew he appreciated nothing but the best. But then, my skirt was short, my heels were high, and the V-neck cami I wore under my nip-waisted jacket was a golden color that was sure to put a spark in any guy’s eyes.

  “You’re not one of the reporters I’ve met before. You must be new in town.” Darren stuck out his hand.

  I moved my leather portfolio from my right hand to my left, shook his, and offered a smile that was polite enough for business and personal enough to make him sit up and take notice. Not that I was coming on to him or anything. Yikes, the guy was like sixty years old! No matter, old or young, guys were guys, and as I’d learned in a lifetime of getting my way, guys who were busy looking into a woman’s eyes (or at her boobs) were far more likely to cooperate. No matter what she wanted.

  I kept my smile in place. “I’m not a reporter. My name is Pepper Martin, and I’d like a couple minutes to talk to you.”

  He glanced over my shoulder toward the sidewalk, where the reporters were still taking their good ol’ time to pack up and get out of there. “If you’re not a reporter…” His gaze swung back in my direction. “What do you want?”

  “Did you hear about Janice Sherwin?”

  Oh yeah, I was bold enough to pull that out of thin air. No small talk. No niceties. Then again, I was hoping to study his reaction.

  Too bad he didn’t give me much of one.

  “A shame,” he said. Since his brows dipped and he shook his head, I guess it meant any hopes I’d had that he’d confess that he’d strung Janice up (honestly, I didn’t, but a girl can dream) were dashed. “Janice was an old and dear friend and a successful and capable woman. She forged her way in a man’s profession long before that was common.” He looked to my closed portfolio. “If you were taking notes, I’d tell you to quote me on that.”

  I smiled as if this was terribly clever. (See above and my theory about how to get a guy talking. You’d think they’d be clever enough to see the difference between honest admiration and blatant flattery. Then again, the longer they didn’t, the longer I would be able to bluff my way through my investigations.)

  “Like I said, I’m not a reporter. I am, however, looking for information.”

  He pursed his lips, waiting to hear more, and in the interest of getting back to the element of surprise, I didn’t waste any time. “Have you seen Will Margolis?”

  “I can’t say I have. At least not for forty-five years or so.”

  So much for surprise. Andrews was as coolheaded as…well, as if he was expecting someone to come around and ask about Will.

  I thought this over at the same time I wondered how a man as busy and important as Andrews didn’t even have to scramble to remember a kid from so long ago. Since there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to figure it out, I clutched my portfolio to my chest and said, “You’re not surprised that I asked about Will.”

  “Should I be? First you mention Janice, then Will. The next thing I know, you’re going to ask me about—”

  “Lucy Pasternak?”

  He stood as still as a statue. I swear, he didn’t even breathe. I knew this for a fact because his red-and-gray-striped tie never budged. In fact, it took like what seemed forever before he twitched his shoulders, shaking away his surprise. “I thought for sure you were going to say Bobby. Bobby Gideon, he was another of my old high school friends.”

  “Yeah, I know. Do you think he committed suicide?”

  Now that he’d had a chance to get used to the fact that there was more to me than eye candy, he was as poised as he’d been outside in front of the cameras. He pursed his lips, thinking. “Is there someone who says he did?” he asked.

  “Did Janice commit suicide?”

  When Darren laughed, the skin around his eyes crinkled. I recognized the signs; he spent lots of time on sunny golf courses. “You’re full of questions, but you should know the answer to that one. The coroner’s ruling isn’t in yet. That was mentioned in this morning’s paper. You’d think a person as curious as you would be thorough, too.” Another glance outside, and I saw a look very much like relief sweep his expression. I looked, too.

  The reporters were gone, and a young guy in a navy suit was just getting out of the aquamarine convertible he’d left idling in front of the building in a spot clearly marked no parking.

  “ ’Sixty-five Mustang. In Tropical Turquoise!” This was the stuff dreams were made of, and I practically swooned.

  It was apparently the first thing I’d done that actually impressed Darren. He gave me another once-over, this time with admiration in his eyes. “You know your cars.”

  I wasn’t actually trying to come across as cute, but I guess when I shrugged and my suit jacket rode up and my cami tugged tight over my breasts, I couldn’t help it. “I’ve got a newer Mustang,” I said, leaving out the model year since it wasn’t old enough to be a classic but not new enough to be hot. “Mine’s not a convertible.”

  “Maybe someday you’ll join me for a ride.”

  I guess this wasn’t the day. He started outside but seemed to sense that I was right behind him, because his shoulders went rigid.

  “So there’s nothing you can tell me.” I figured it wouldn’t hurt to remind him what we were talking about in the first place. “Nothing about Janice? Or Will? Or Bobby? Or Lucy?”

  He paused, the fingers of his right hand tented and perched against the hood of the Mustang. “You weren’t even born when I knew those people. Why do you want to know about them?”

  I stepped closer. “I could tell you I was writing my thesis about Patrick Monroe,” I said.

  “The poet.” He’d apparently missed that subtle could, and I didn’t point it out.

  “Yeah, the one who used to teach at Shaker.”

  “Of course, you came across Lucy’s name in relation to that hippie nutcase.” He nodded, confirming the information to himself. “There are people who think Monroe had something to do with Lucy’s disappearance, you know.”

  “Do you?”

  “I always wondered. And that…” He shook a finger at me. “That is not for the record, and if I see it in print anywhere, you’re going to be sued for libel so fast, your head will spin.”

  “No print,” I told him. “No quotes. I’m just looking for opinions. Impressions.”

  “And you want to know more about Lucy. I understand. How much do you know already?”

  “I know you two were dating.”

  He moved around to the other side of the car. “True or not,” he said, “I’m not sure why that’s relevant forty-five years after the fact.”

  “Neither am I,” I admitted. “But I fig
ured you were the kind of person who would appreciate knowing what I know.”

  “And you know…”

  “Not a whole lot more than that.” I hated having to admit it. “Is there anything you can tell me about Lucy’s murder?”

  “Murdered? Was she? If you’re trying to get your facts in order…and really, you should…you’re going to have to go back to square one. Lucy Pasternak disappeared. She was never seen or heard from again. No one ever determined that she was murdered.”

  “Yeah, see…that’s where I’m kind of stuck. That’s why I thought maybe you could help.”

  “Really, I don’t see how I can.” He opened the driver’s door. “In fact, I’m a little confused about why you thought I could.”

  And I knew a brush-off when I saw it. I scrambled to say anything that might keep him there. “You were with Lucy. At the Beatles concert that night.”

  “And with my friends for hours and hours after.”

  “And now three of them are dead. And one of them is missing.”

  “You mean Lucy.”

  “I mean Will.”

  The top was down on the car so I could hear him perfectly even after he got in. His voice purred. Just like the Mustang’s engine. “Then I guess I’ll need to be careful nothing happens to me.”

  13

  By the time I got home from work the next day then went out to grab a bite to eat at the closest greasy spoon, it was all over the news.

  No, not the stuff about me striking out in the information department with Darren Andrews on Monday afternoon.

  The stuff about how Winston Churchill had been spotted in one of the neighborhoods near downtown and how the police were closing in on him.

  I lived in one of those neighborhoods near downtown, so this was not necessarily good news for me. Then again, when I got home that evening, there weren’t any cop cars around. No SWAT teams, either.

  That should have been encouraging. It was. At least when it came to Winston Churchill.

  Then again, the absence of police meant that nobody saw anything, and nobody came to take a report (not for hours and hours, anyway) when I arrived home and found that my door had been bashed in and my apartment had been ransacked.

  Leave it to Ella to be the one and only person I knew who could bustle around a cemetery trash can sorting recyclables from throwaway-ables and still take the time to be concerned about me. “You must have been terrified!”

  “I was surprised.” Understatement. When I realized that someone had broken into my apartment, I was more like flabbergasted. At least in the nanosecond before I was royally pissed. “Everything was pawed through. It was creepy.”

  Ella had a plastic iced tea bottle in one hand and a wadded-up piece of aluminum foil in the other. When she stopped what she was doing long enough to see that I was doing absolutely nothing, I knew what she wanted. She might be concerned—about me, my safety, and my possessions—but that didn’t excuse me from not doing my part.

  There was a different trash can in front of me, and just to make it look like I was a team player, I bent over it and, with two fingers, plucked out a paper coffee cup. “Jim’s kidding about this recycling stuff, isn’t he?”

  She sorted her found objects into neat piles. “We need to do all we can to help. If we’re diligent about going through what people throw away, we can get money for some of it.”

  “And get cooties from the rest.” I peered into the trash can and made a face when I saw a half-eaten sandwich and an empty bag of potato chips staring back at me. Knee-jerk reaction. I backed away, scraping my hands against the legs of my pants, just in case any of those cooties decided to hitch a ride. “Can’t do it,” I said.

  “You’ve got to. We all have to pitch in and—”

  “Get E. coli?”

  I should have known Ella wouldn’t let something like a deadly disease stand in her way. Not when she was on a mission. We were in a back room of the administration building, and when she continued to stare at me, and tap her foot, too, I folded like a flip phone. I grabbed a pen from a nearby desk and poked it through the garbage, careful not to get too close. Or too much of a whiff of what smelled like rotten fruit. There was a discarded Coke can in there somewhere—I saw the flash of red—and hoping that a show of good sportsmanship and this one piece of garbage Jim could turn into cash would change Ella’s mind about this ridiculous quest, I snared the can with the tip of the pen.

  “I’ll bring gloves for you tomorrow,” Ella said.

  When I dropped the soda can, it landed right back where it came from. “We’re going to do this again tomorrow?”

  “Now, Pepper…” I hate when Ella starts a sentence like that. Any sentence. “It doesn’t hurt to help,” she said. “And we won’t have to worry about these sorts of cost-cutting measures forever. Besides, keeping busy will take your mind off that burglary at your apartment.”

  “I don’t think it’s a burglary if nothing is taken,” I said, repeating back what the uniformed cop who finally showed up at my place told me. In my mind, I watched a replay of the scene: the cop walking me through my place, room by room, asking me what was touched, what might be missing.

  My bedroom was almost exactly the way I had left it, but believe me, when it comes to my wardrobe, I know what’s what. The skirts hanging from the lowest rod in the closet had been shoved to one side, and the shoes on my closet floor were jumbled.

  As if someone had been looking for something in there.

  I thought about this, realized I was tapping my hand against the side of the trash can as I did, and jumped back. Where was a bottle of hand sanitizer when I needed it?

  “It was all there,” I said, thinking out loud because it beat doing what I was supposed to be doing. “My jewelry. And my TV. And my MP3 player. And—”

  I froze.

  “What?” Ella darted forward. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  If she only knew!

  I shook off the thought. “My leather portfolio was on the kitchen table when I left the apartment to go to dinner,” I told her. “And it wasn’t there when I got back.”

  “Somebody broke into your apartment to take your leather portfolio?”

  Yeah, it did sound weird, so I didn’t blame her for using that tone of voice.

  “I know it was there,” I said, but of course, I didn’t. I mean, I have a busy life, and it’s pretty hard to keep track of stuff that isn’t very important in the first place. Like the leather portfolio no self-respecting burglar would want. “I had it when I went to Patrick Monroe’s poetry reading. And I had it when I went to see Will, and Janice, and Darren. But it’s not there anymore.”

  Ella’s eyes shone. “What does it mean? Do you think it has anything to do with Lucy?”

  This, I couldn’t say. But, oh, I intended to find out!

  Working in the cemetery biz like I do, I’m pretty used to funerals. They are not often—thankfully—the funerals of women whose bodies I find hanging in their offices. When I cut out of my own office the next afternoon so that Ella didn’t have to go to Janice’s funeral alone, I told myself I was not allowed to think about the whole body-swinging-from-the-fan thing. I was there to support Ella. Pure and simple.

  And if I could do a little investigating while I was at it, that would be a real plus.

  As luck would have it, the Sherwin family had a plot right at Garden View. Ella and I didn’t have to drive far in her car, and that, too, was a lucky thing. That day, Ella was quiet, and when she wasn’t quiet, she was weepy, and when she wasn’t weepy, she sat staring off into space. I guess I couldn’t blame her. The morning’s paper had reported that the county coroner had announced that Janice’s death was a homicide. Don’t ask me how they figure out these things, but they know, and personally, I wasn’t all that surprised by the ruling. Ella, predictably, was more shaken than ever. I knew she wouldn’t begin to put any of it behind her and get back to her ol’ Ella self until the funeral was over.

&n
bsp; Then again, with all those memories about Lucy at the surface and no closure in regards to her disappearance or her body, I wondered if anything would ever be the same for Ella.

  When we neared the line of cars parked along a shady, curved lane, I automatically looked for the turquoise Mustang. Ella hadn’t spoken a word all the way from the administration building and the silence was starting to get to me. I said out loud, “Darren Andrews isn’t here.” The sigh that escaped her brought her back from wherever her thoughts had wandered.

  “He’s a busy man. And for all we know, he and Janice haven’t seen each other in years. There’s no reason he should be here.”

  No reason, except that if he was, I would have had the chance to corner him and ask a few more questions.

  We parked and picked our way across the lumpy ground to a place where a couple dozen somber-faced people were gathered around a fancy-schmancy copper coffin. Good for Janice for being successful. Too bad she didn’t have more of a chance to enjoy it.

  “We’re gathered here today…” The minister started into the service. He looked too young to be out of college.

  I tuned out.

  At least to the prayers and the thoughts and reflections of the people who stepped forward to say a few words about Janice.

  But then, I was too busy glancing around, wondering how much any of these people knew about the woman they were there to honor, and if anything they knew might shed some light on Janice and Bobby’s deaths, Will’s disappearance, and Lucy’s missing body.

  When I realized I wasn’t the only one eyeballing the crowd, I guess I must have flinched, because Ella mouthed the words, “What is it? What’s wrong?”