“Do you know why the bank foreclosed?” I said.
“Nonpayment, I assume,” she said. “Phil told me we got a good deal.”
“Phil is your husband?”
“Yes. Phil Karras. I’m Flora.”
“Do you know where Anne Marie went?” I said. “Or her husband?”
“No,” Flora said. “No idea.”
“And the bank?” I said. “Do you remember the bank you bought from?”
“Sure.”
She shifted a little. She was tiring of me. Hard to imagine. Maybe she was becoming aroused by my masculine profile andmy Boston accent. Probably invite me in for coffee in a minute. That would be the giveaway.
“What bank?” I said.
“Workingman’s Trust of Ohio,” she said. “Right here in town.”
I nodded.
“Is there anyone special you do business with there?”
“No. That’s Phil’s department.”
I nodded. The birds herky-jerked around the yard pecking at whatever they were pecking. Of course, if she did invite me in for coffee, it would not be fair to accept. I was considering marriage. I waited. Now would be about the right time to propose the coffee, and prove it was desire, not boredom, that caused her to seem restless.
“Is there anything else?” she said.
Iron self-control.
“Is there anything else you can remember about the Turners?”
She shook her head.
“Not a thing,” she said. “I never even met them.”
“Thanks for your time,” I said.
She smiled and closed the door and I walked down past the preoccupied birds to my car.
Hooray for Phil and Flora.
53.
The senior vice president and chief lending officer for Workingman’s Trust was a man named Norbert Coombs, who looked like he’d been recruited from a bank commercial. He was tall with thinning gray hair. His suit was a dark pinstripe. His shirt was a blue Oxford. His tie was a small blue bow tie with polka dots. His black shoes had wingtips. He wore half-glasses, which he peered over with his head tilted as he talked with me and looked at his computer screen.
“The Turners’ last mortgage payment to us was on August twenty-sixth, 1994,” he said.
“And you foreclosed when?”
“March 1995,” he said.
“You sent them dunning notices?”
“Every month,” he said, “and according to the notations here, we called them, fi rst monthly, then weekly.”
He read off his screen some more.
“My predecessor went up to the home with the branch manager to speak to them personally. There was no one there and no sign that anyone lived there at all. The lawn wasn’t mowed, mail had accumulated in the mailbox and on the front steps.”
“Call the cops?” I said.
“Apparently,” Coombs said, “they did. The Laurel Heights police reported the house was empty. That there was food, badly spoiled by then, in the refrigerator. Unwashed dishes in the sink. The phone had been shut off, but power and heat remained on. They cannot be denied a homeowner during winter months so that at least the pipes don’t freeze.”
“How much was the mortgage?” I said.
“A hundred and fi fty thousand,” he said.
“What was the house worth?”
“Maybe two hundred and fi fty thousand.”
“So they walked away from a hundred thousand,” I said.
“Minus a broker’s commission and a few fees.”
“When you foreclosed on the house,” I said, “what did you do with the contents?”
“It is bank policy to hold the contents in storage for a year, and then dispose of it.”
“Sell it to a jobber?”
“Normally, or in some cases donate to charity, or”—he smiled and shrugged—“in some cases simply discard it.”
“So the contents of the house from Turner’s time are gone,”
I said.
“Yes, long ago.”
“Do you keep an inventory?” I said.
“Normally we keep one for seven years before we purge it from the system.”
“And are you faithful in your purging?”
He smiled.
“Probably not,” he said. “It’s not something I supervise closely.”
“Could you see if you’ve still got an inventory?”
“Yes, excuse me for a moment.”
He went out of his office, leaving the door open, and walked through the railed-off desk area, and talked to a skinny grayhaired woman at a desk near the railing. My guess was that status ran downhill as it got closer to the railing, and Skinny Gray Head was about as far down as you could get and be inside the railing. She diddled with her computer for a moment while Coombs watched over her shoulder and, after a time reached across the desk and took a printout from her printer and patted her thin shoulder and walked back up the status ladder to his offi ce.
“Fortunately for your needs, Mr. Spenser,” he said, “we have been neglectful in our purging.”
He handed me a printout. I glanced at it and folded it in thirds and put it in my inside pocket.
“They have any savings, checking accounts here?”
Coombs consulted his computer.
“Yes. An interest-bearing checking account and a money market account.”
“Do you have transaction records on those?”
More consultation.
“Both were emptied and have remained inactive.”
“When were they emptied?”
“September seventeenth, 1994,” he said. “Both. Same day.”
“Can you tell who did the cleanout?”
“In a moment,” he said.
He tapped some keys and waited.
“Both by check for ten dollars short of the balance,” he said, and tapped again.
“So they wouldn’t overdraw and call attention,” I said.
“I presume so,” Coombs said.
Tap, tap.
“We photograph the checks,” he said.
Tap, tap.
“Both checks are signed Bradley Turner,” he said. I nodded.
“And you’ve heard from neither of them since?” I said.
“Not a word.”
“Did he take the proceeds of his two accounts in cash?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“Seventy-seven hundred from his money market account. Eight thousand and fi fty dollars from checking.”
“Would you just hand him the cash at the counter.”
Coombs smiled.
“No, we’re not that big a bank. I’m sure he gave us a couple days’ notice.”
“You didn’t work here then?”
“No,” he said. “I was living in Omaha at the time.”
I stood and shook hands and slipped into my topcoat. Outside would be cold. Coombs’s office had a fireplace. With a wood fi re burning.
That’s status.
54.
I’m not at all sure what Perry Alderson is up to,” Susan told me on the phone.
“He’s still coming.”
“He’s coming and he’s talking,” she said. “He’s asked me to dinner once, and I made it clear that socializing would not be possible. But still he comes for his appointments.”
“He’s been very successful with women,” I said. “He probably thinks, with you, it’s only a matter of time.”
“Probably,” Susan said. “But there’s more than that. He likes talking to me. He likes being with me.”
“Me too.”
“He may even like it that there is no romantic agenda available,” Susan said. “A chance to relax.”
“And a chance to talk about himself,” I said.
“Yes.”
“His goal is still to use you.”
“I am well protected,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“I feel like Hawk and I have become a couple,” sh
e said. “He sleeps in the spare bedroom. We have breakfast together in the morning. If you turn me down, I may marry him.”
“If he’ll have you,” I said.
“There’s that,” she said.
It was dark out, and when I looked out the window all I could see was my own reflection. I didn’t look old, exactly, maybe a little weathered, sort of. Like a guy who’d seen too many bodies. Heard too many lies. Fired too many shots. Swapped too many punches.
“He talk about stuff that would interest me?” I said.
“He talks mostly about his father,” Susan said.
“What’s he say?”
She was silent for a time. I could almost hear her sorting through what she thought she had a right to tell me.
“He has admitted that he sometimes uses his father’s exploits in the counterculture, as if they were his. He says it increases his credibility and allows him to pursue his father’s goals more fully.”
“Credibility with whom?” I said.
“He brags that he is partnered with an international revolutionary enterprise.”
“His language?” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said. “An international revolutionary enterprise.”
“He say how they are partnered?”
“He implied that they finance his part of the revolutionary enterprise,” Susan said.
“Last Hope?”
“Yes.”
“What do they get back?” I said.
“He says they like the prestige of associating with him, and implied that he was also a source of intelligence for them.”
“As in spying?” I said.
“That was my understanding.”
“Do you know the name of the people who help fi nance him?”
“No.”
“Why would he tell you all this,” I said. “This is very close to a confession.”
“He cannot keep himself from bragging,” Susan said. “From trying to impress me.”
“And since you have a client-therapist relationship,” I said,
“your testimony would probably not be admissible, if it ever got to court.”
“Probably not,” Susan said. “And, if you are correct about him, he may think I’ll not be available to testify against him.”
“Does he ever wonder why I let him slide? Why I just don’t blow the whistle on him and turn the tapes over to Epstein?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “I could speculate that he still assumes your goal is blackmail, and that if you turn over the tapes, you’ll lose all the money you are trying to extort.”
“That would be my surmise, as well,” I said.
“Surmise,” Susan said. “Do you speak more elegantly to me than to others?”
“Yes,” I said. “Except sometimes.”
“When you speak very inelegantly to me.”
“Yes.”
“At those times,” Susan said, “I am a bit inelegant, myself.”
“I’ll say.”
“I wish it were one of those times,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you come home soon?”
“I got some cops to talk with tomorrow, and then, unless they open something up for me, I’ll come home.”
“Yay!” Susan said.
“You think he’s telling you the truth about his father?” I said.
“He seems to be speaking of an actual person,” Susan said.
“Feds looked pretty hard back along the counterculture path,” I said. “You’d think if they came across a guy named Alderson they’d record it. Even if it wasn’t Perry.”
“His father’s name was Brad,” Susan said. “Bradley Alderson.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“What?” Susan said.
“Before he changed it,” I said, “Perry’s name was Bradley Turner.”
We were both quiet. I imagined the silence hovering above the small dark towns of Ohio and Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
“Which means what?” Susan said fi nally.
“Damn,” I said. “I was hoping you’d know.”
55.
The laurel heights police station was across the town square from an upscale shopping mall. It was like it was a detached part of the mall, with the kind of pseudo small-town America décor that you find in theme parks. I parked in a visitor’s slot out front and went inside.
The cop on the front desk directed me to the detective squad room on the second floor. I sat down in a straight chair beside the desk of a detective named Coley Zackis.
“Name’s Spenser,” I said. “I called you yesterday.”
We shook hands.
“After you called,” Zackis said, “I got out the Turners’ fi le.”
He patted a thin manila folder on his desk.
“Not much,” he said.
“You want to show it to me,” I said, “or you want to tell me.”
“You been a cop?” Zackis said.
“I have.”
“Then you know what a file looks like,” he said. “Be easier if I tell you.”
“Illegibility is one of the first things you learn on the job,” I said.
Zackis grinned. He was a heavy guy with a noticeable belly and thick hands.
“And you got to spill coffee on them,” he said.
“What’s in this one?” I said.
“Hardly enough to spill coffee on,” Zackis said. “Turners stopped paying the mortgage. Eventually the bank sent somebody over there. Place looked deserted, so they called us. Patrol guys went up and took a look. Mail was piled up, grass wasn’t cut, unopened newspapers all over the front walk. Phone was disconnected. They went in. No sign of life or anything else. It was like one day they just up and left.”
“Bank inventories the stuff they left behind,” I said. “I went over it last night. It looks like they didn’t take much. No car.”
“Couple of our detectives went up and looked around.”
“You one of them?”
Zackis nodded.
“Yep,” he said. “Just made detective at the time. We found nothing. There were still suitcases in a closet. His and hers. Makeup in the master bath. Couple purses hanging on a knob in the front hall closet. No way to know how many suitcases they had, how many purses. Makeup looked like it was used, but . . . you married?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“How do you be sort of?”
“Takes practice,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “you probably know that your sort-of wife has more makeup than anyone would believe and that when she packs to go away she takes it all, but when you look at her bathroom, or wherever, there’s, like, still a ton of makeup.”
“I know that,” I said.
“And you know she got a half-dozen purses.”
“I do,” I said.
“So we got no way to know what there was to start,” Zackis said. “Did they take suitcases? Did she take a purse? Did she pack makeup?”
“Beds made?” I said.
Zackis glanced at the report for a moment.
“Nope,” he said. “King-sized bed in the master bedroom was not made.”
“People usually make the bed before they take a trip.”
“So they don’t have to fi nd it unmade when they come back.”
“Or have someone else fi nd it so,” I said.
“Like wearing clean underwear,” Zackis said. “In case you’re in an accident.”
“Like that,” I said.
“For most people the house is their biggest investment,”
Zackis said. “They don’t just walk away and leave it.”
“They left about a hundred grand on the table,” I said. Zackis shook his head.
“It smells bad, doesn’t it,” he said.
“It does,” I said.
“No signs of foul play,” Zackis said. “No blood, nothing broken, no sign of forced entry. No hint of a weapon. Neighbors saw nothing.”
> “You put out a Missing Person?”
“Yep. Nothing. Not a peep,” Zackis said.
“Neighbors shed any light?”
“Nope, pleasant couple,” Zackis said. “She was a little older than he was. Both of them were friendly enough. Didn’t bother nobody.”
“How about the car?” I said.
“Missing,” Zackis said. “Turned up a few months later in a parking lot at a mall in Toledo.”
We were quiet for a time. At the next desk another detective, with his feet up, was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife.
“This ain’t Cleveland, you know? Or Chicago. This is a little-city police department. Most of the time we get it done, but we don’t have a ton of resources. Anne Marie Turner has a sister in Lexington, Kentucky. I actually went over there and talked with her.”
He shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Mail?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Bills, flyers, bank statements, no per sonal letters to either one of them.”
“Credit card statements?”
“Usual, nothing caught your eye and after . . .” He looked at the file. “August twenty-sixth, no activity at all. He cleaned out both their bank accounts on September seventeenth.”
“I know,” I said.
“We haven’t cleared the case,” Zackis said. “But we haven’t closed it either. Every once in a while, when it’s a slow day, one of us revisits it, and comes up as empty as the rest of us.”
I nodded.
“Ever hear of a guy named Perry Alderson?” I said.
“Perry Alderson,” Zackis said. “I’ve heard that name some where. Perry Alderson.”
He rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully for a moment. Then he stood up.
“Lemme check something,” he said.
Zackis went out of the squad room. The dick that was cleaning his fi ngernails looked at me.
“You private?” he said.
“Yep.”
“How’s that pay?”
“Not so good in this life,” I said. “But in Paradise you get all the virgins you want.”
He looked at me for a moment and then said, “I guess maybe I’ll stay here, wait out my pension.”
Zackis came back into the squad room with a piece of paper.
“I knew I’d seen the name,” Zackis said.
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