by Dorien Grey
“Blocked off?” I asked.
“Yeah. It looked like somebody had knocked down a power pole, and an electric company truck was parked right in the middle of the turnoff.”
And we may have a date after all, I thought.
“Would you be willing to tell that to a friend of mine?” I didn’t want to scare him off by mentioning the police.
He looked suspicious anyway.
“A cop?”
“A friend,” I repeated. “Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble.”
“What’s in it for me if I do?”
“Another twenty.”
He looked at me. “It’s worth more.”
“Forty,” I said. I knew the police couldn’t pay for information, but I could; and it would be worth it if it could either nail or clear Farnsworth.
“Fifty.”
“Don’t push it.”
“Fifty,” he repeated.
“Only if you show up at my office Monday morning at ten o’clock sharp.” I should have said “tomorrow,” but since it was already late Thursday afternoon, I wanted to talk to Marty first and be sure he could be there.
“You still have my card?” I asked.
He patted his pocket and nodded.
I chugged my remaining beer, picked up my umbrella and got off the stool.
“Ten o’clock,” I repeated.
“Yep,” he agreed, and with a wave to Bud, I left. It was still raining.
Hoping to catch Marty before he went home, I returned to the office rather than just getting my car and going home. A message from him was waiting on my machine, and I called him immediately. Luckily, he was still there.
“Had a chance to talk to Earl Carpenter for a second a few minutes ago,” he said. “They’d been interviewing people all day, including Booth’s latest ‘house guest,’ who seemed more upset by losing Booth’s promised sponsorship for his racing career than by Booth’s being dead. He had an alibi for Wednesday night, so I mentioned they might want to check with Charles Stapleton. I’m sure they would have gotten around to him eventually anyway, but I thought they could use a heads-up. Anything new from your end?”
I told him of my meeting with Joey, and he confirmed he could be at my office Monday morning. He said it was probably too late in the day to check with the power company to see if they could give him an exact date and time their truck repaired a broken power pole in Prichert Park, but that he would call tomorrow. If the power company records did not show a truck being there on the twentieth, Farnsworth was still a viable suspect. But if they had been there on anywhere between six and seven at night, he was pretty much off the hook, and I would be right back on familiar ground—square one.
We agreed it would probably be best for Marty to come alone Monday to avoid intimidating Joey by having too many people present.
“Oh, and one thing while I think of it,” I said. “I’d assume Carpenter and Couch are looking into Booth’s gambling problem as a possible key?”
“I’m sure they are,” Marty said. “But thanks.”
*
The weekend was hectic, as they increasingly seemed to be, though being busy kept my mind from spending every minute thinking about the case and how little I had actually accomplished on it.
I picked Joshua up from day care on Friday so Jonathan could load his car up with materials and several flats of plants to take over to start his landscaping job at the Conrads’ on Saturday. He left the apartment right after breakfast Saturday morning.
His absence meant that Joshua and I were left to our own devices as far as dealing with our usual Saturday routine of cleaning, laundry, and grocery shopping. The latter was enough of a chore with two adults riding herd on a five-year-old boy who never met a breakfast cereal, bakery item, or junk-food snack he didn’t like. I considered duct-taping him to the shopping cart but was afraid I’d get nasty looks from the other shoppers.
If I’ve ever given anyone the impression Joshua was a little too good to be true, I can assure you one trip to the grocery store on a bad day would dissuade anyone of that notion. While he was, overall, an exceptionally good kid, there were times when I could have cheerfully throttled him; and being the showman that he was, he always seemed to pick a time when there was a crowd around to throw out a field test of the limits of my patience. Grocery stores therefore tended to become the Coliseum, with Joshua and I as the featured gladiators.
Probably because Jonathan wasn’t there to back me up, Joshua decided it was a good time for an encounter, and put a jar of pickled eggs in the shopping cart. I took it out, told him we didn’t need pickled eggs, and to return it to the shelf.
Let the games begin! Apparently not intimidated by the fact that I had a hundred and some pounds and a couple of feet in height over him, he put the jar back in the cart. I took it out and handed it to him, telling him to put it back. Defiantly: back in the cart. I finally took it back to the shelf myself, which opened the floodgates.
At that serendipitous moment, a woman came by carrying a crying baby and followed by a boy about eight or nine. I knelt in front of Joshua and took him by the shoulders.
“You see that baby and that big boy?” I asked. “Which one do you want to be?”
Slowly, the storm abated and we got on with the shopping.
I know it might seem that I spend far too much time talking about Joshua, but he’s become a major factor in my life. There’s no way to separate him from what goes on.
My life had changed profoundly in the past five years. First came Jonathan to yank me out of what I call my “slut phase,” in which I spent a great deal of time hopping from bed to bed. I thought that was a sea-change, and it was. Then came Joshua.
I’ve always had a strong protective streak, often verging, as Jonathan can readily attest, on the overprotective. But being protective of a partner isn’t the same as being protective of a child. Although Joshua is not genetically related to me, I had come to consider that fact less and less; and for the first time in my life I felt I could fully appreciate how heterosexuals feel about their own children.
So, we made it through the day and had the table set and dinner preparations well under way when Jonathan arrived home around six, looking as though he had lost a mud-wrestling contest. He immediately went into the shower while Joshua helped me with dinner. With Joshua’s enthusiastic approval, I opted for an old family recipe from my single days—knockwurst (I know, we’d had it within a week or so before, but we all liked them) slit lengthwise and stuffed with sharp cheddar cheese, over which a teriyaki marinade was poured. I’d picked up some fresh potato salad at the store to add one more element of class to the meal.
Jonathan was very happy with how the day had gone.
“It’s really going to look great,” he enthused over dinner. “And Mrs. Conrad seems very happy with what I’m doing.”
“How could she not be?” I said. “You’re terrific!”
He grinned. “And you’re only slightly prejudiced.”
“I think you’re terrific, too,” Joshua said, his good-kid personality back in place and not wanting to be left out on the chance for a bit of mutual admiration action.
“Thank you, Joshua,” Jonathan said, soberly. “I appreciate that.”
Joshua grinned.
I could tell Jonathan was exhausted, and he nodded off while we were watching TV prior to Joshua’s bedtime. As a result, we went to bed not long after Joshua did.
*
I had to make a quick stop at the bank to pick up some cash on my way to work Monday morning, assuming Joey would show up—and I was pretty confident he would.
In fact, everything went like clockwork. Marty showed up at 9:52 saying he had put a call in to the electric company on Friday and hoped to hear back later in the day. Dan Carpenter was using the time to question Farnsworth once more about the details of his alibi to see if he might mention the fallen power pole or the electric company truck.
Joey arrived at 10:05 in what
I thought of as his full work uniform, and I wondered if he ever wore—or had—anything else. He was aware Marty was a cop, even though he was in plain clothes. Obviously anxious for his fifty dollars and to get on with his day, he told Marty exactly what he had told me. Though he still couldn’t describe what Farnsworth looked like, remember the kind of car Farnsworth drove, or state with certainty the exact time they got to Prichert Park or Farnsworth dropped him off back on Genessee, he did remember that the guy who’d picked him up was staying at the Montero, and stuck to his recollection of the pole and the truck.
When he’d finished his story, I handed him an envelope with the fifty dollars in it and he opened it to check it before standing up to shove it in his back pocket.
“I gotta get going,” he said. He turned, went to the door without looking back, and left.
Marty sat looking after him and shaking his head. Then he turned to me and said, “One more soldier in the Army of the Lost.”
I don’t know why, but I was struck by the wistfulness and insight of his observation.
“I’ll bet you write poetry when no one’s looking, don’t you?”
He shrugged and grinned. “Gays don’t have a corner on the market on being sensitive, you know.”
He was right, but I was surprised, nonetheless. There are certain jobs I could never do simply because of the constant exposure to pain, sorrow, death, and the worst life has to offer. I ran into enough of that as it was. How health care workers and police manage to do their jobs without having all the sensitivity stomped out of them I couldn’t imagine.
Obviously, most of them are able to handle it, and I have the utmost respect for them. I’d liked Marty before, and now my admiration had been bumped up another notch.
It was clear the police investigation into Grant’s death was also teetering on whether Farnsworth/Johnson/Smith’s alibi held up. Marty told me they still had not completely ruled out either Charles Stapleton or the now-deceased Crandall Booth, but that they had not yet come up with anything concrete.
As he was getting up to leave, the phone rang.
“Hardesty Investigations,” I said in my best Professional Private Investigator voice, evoking a slight smile from Marty.
“Dick, it’s Dan Carpenter. Is Marty still there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hold a sec.” I handed the phone to him as he leaned across the desk to take it.
“Yeah?… I’m just leaving… Yeah… Yeah?… Okay. See you in a while.”
He handed the phone back to me with a shrug. “Well, Farnsworth remembers the truck, so if it was there around the time of Jefferson’s murder, I guess we’ve just lost our prime suspect. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear from the electric company.”
He left me with the firm conviction—however lacking in actual evidence it might be—that Grant Jefferson’s killer and Crandall Booth’s killer were one and the same. Now all I had to do was one: find out who that one person was, and two: prove it.
The police had only begun their investigation into Booth’s death, but it occurred to me having two different sets of detectives working independently of one another on one murder was counterproductive. It would have been far more logical for only one team—preferably Marty and Dan, considering my relationship with Detective Couch—to handle both cases, and I couldn’t imagine I was the only one to immediately see the two murders were related.
But then, I’m not the one who makes the determination of who gets assigned to which case and why. And granted, Booth’s murder appeared at first glance to be a robbery. When the call came in, I’m sure no one had the time to sit down and wonder if it might be related to another murder.
Perhaps they would see the error of their ways and consolidate their investigations, especially if the links between the two became more evident than they now were to everyone but me.
I sat down at my desk with yet another cup of coffee and opened the windows of my mind. In Grant’s murder, the potential-suspect list included practically every member of the chorus, Stapleton, Jerry Granville, Roger Rothenberger, Farnsworth/Johnson/Smith, and Crandall Booth.
But with Booth dead, the list shrank considerably. Several members of the chorus had a strong motive to kill Grant, but I couldn’t see any of them, or Jerry Granville, having that same level of animosity toward Booth, whom most of them barely knew.
So that left me with…
Charles Stapleton had good reason to want both Booth and Grant dead, though, if he were going to kill them both, he could have figured out a way to get them at the same time, or one right after the other. No, as I’d considered earlier, the fact that Booth was killed so soon after his withdrawal of support from the chorus linked his murder more closely to the chorus than to his business and Stapleton.
Roger Rothenberger had motive to see both Grant and Booth dead, though I honestly couldn’t bring myself to think of him as a murderer. Still, very few people walk around wearing a sign saying “Potential Murderer.” I’m sure Death Row is sprinkled with some really nice guys who, for whatever reason, murdered someone.
The pressures on Rothenberger as director of both the chorus and the M.C.C.’s choir had to be tremendous without the added headaches of people like Grant and Booth trying to undermine or destroy everything he’d worked for.
It was also conceivable that, despite what I believed, Booth’s death might, in fact, have been a random act of coincidental, albeit an on-the-brink-of-disbelief-coincidental, violence.
One avenue I had not explored and had no practical or immediate way of exploring was that of Booth’s possible gambling addiction. It was quite possible that his letter to the board about financial reversals and cash-flow problems might have had more validity than Rothenberger realized. For someone like Booth to admit to having financial problems might well indicate their seriousness. Could he have gotten in over his head with the wrong people and suffered the consequences?
I made a note to ask Marty to follow up on what detectives Carpenter and Couch might have found out about it. If, by some chance gambling was behind Booth’s murder, that meant it and Grant’s death were unrelated, which meant…
Why the hell does life have to be so complicated?
*
Not a word from Marty on Tuesday, and I didn’t want to make too big a nuisance of myself by calling him. I knew he’d get in touch when he had something to tell me. I concentrated instead on the eternal and losing battle to control my impatience.
Jonathan was off to rehearsal right after dinner, and I awaited his take on the current gossip, which I was sure would center almost totally around Crandall Booth’s death. Sure enough, it did.
Jonathan returned later than usual with an ample supply. Someone—he didn’t say who—had somehow heard about Booth’s gambling problems, which sparked a couple more, supposedly involving Grant’s having bragged several times about the amount of money he and Booth spent on their trips to Las Vegas. There was widespread, if totally unjustified, bitterness that the chorus had to suffer by losing the Chicago trip because of Booth’s gambling. Everything Booth had done for the chorus over the years immediately took a back seat to what he didn’t do for them.
Human beings are an odd species.
When I caught Jonathan nodding off during the late news, I realized that everything he’d been doing lately was taking its toll. I turned off the TV and got off the couch, leaning forward to take his hand and waking him up in the process.
“Too bad you’re not in the mood for a little game-playing,” I teased.
He grinned. “Wanna bet?”
I was happy to lose.
*
Marty called around ten Wednesday morning.
“I meant to get back to you yesterday,” he said, “but wanted to follow up on a couple other things first.”
“Hey, no problem. I appreciate your telling me what you can when you can. What did you find out?”
“Two things, actually. A patrol car on a late-night drunk sweep picked up a
wino wearing a very expensive watch with the initials C.D.B. engraved on the back. The manager at Central Imports identified it as Booth’s. The wino claims he found it in a dumpster on Hawthorn, about five miles from Central Imports.
“And some kid tried to use one of Booth’s credit cards at a convenience store on School. He ran out when the clerk questioned it. So, it looks like the robbery motive won’t wash, and that the items were taken to make it look like one.
“Second, and more significant, Earl and Ben checked with a couple of the major bookies in town, and it appears Booth was a big-time player who’d been on a serious losing streak in the past few months. Rumor has it he got in pretty deep with Charlie Tours—you know him?”
“A loan shark, right?”
“Not merely a loan shark. Charlie’s the great white of our local loan sharks. He has a rap sheet three feet long and a history of playing rough. They’re going to have a talk with him as soon as they can find him. They’re also looking into the state of Booth’s finances.”
A bell went off in my head. There was something Charles Stapleton had said when I first talked to him. Something that had gone right by me until now. What the hell was it?
My father spent fifteen years trying to keep Booth afloat.
It hadn’t meant a thing at the time, but now that I knew of Booth’s gambling debts…
“You might have them talk to Charles Stapleton about that,” I suggested. “His dad was Booth’s chief accountant, and if there were problems, he surely had an idea of them. Maybe he mentioned them to Charles before he died.”
“Good idea,” Marty replied. “Thanks.”
We hung up shortly thereafter, and I sat pondering Marty’s information. Even though they had confirmed that Booth might well have been in serious debt to Charlie Tours and others, the fact was that for a loan shark, even a great white, to kill a client was somewhat counterproductive to getting money back from them. A broken leg, perhaps, might encourage the client to find a way to repay what is owed, but it’s difficult to get money from a dead man. And Booth had plenty of assets he could have cashed in on—unless his financial situation was a lot worse than anyone suspected.