by Shane Lusher
“You can’t know that,” I said.
“You’re right,” Rassi admitted. “But the town cop in Metamora indicated that Pinnel and Jones didn’t appear to have any blood on them.”
“Did he check?”
Rassi snorted. “The guy’s a real hard ass. They were actually in her car, and he made them get out, all naked, before he let them get dressed.”
“Still, he might not have noticed any blood,” I said. “Especially if he wasn’t looking for it. He wouldn’t have known a murder had just been committed.”
“Right,” Rassi said. “But it takes nearly forty-five minutes to get up to Metamora from Pekin, if you don’t hit too many lights.”
“Not if you do it in the middle of the night,” I said. I’d been all up and down the roads in Tazewell County when I was a teenager. If you took back roads, you could run as fast as your car would go in the middle of the night in summer. “I bet you could get up to Woodford County in twenty minutes if you pushed it.”
“So Pinnel and Jones, who had no motive to kill Colby Trueblood—if anything, Colby would have had a motive to kill them—left the party, according to three eyewitnesses, around 11:45, went out and killed Trueblood, drove her SUV over into those woods, cleaned up the crime scene-”
“They could have stashed the body somewhere and done all of that later-”
“The body, yeah,” Rassi said. “Not the SUV. We put out a BOLO on that SUV. Somebody would’ve seen it.”
“There are lots of SUVs,” I offered.
“No,” Rassi said. “Take a look at it.”
I shuffled through the file until I found it, and realized immediately that Rassi was right. The SUV was hot pink, the kind of pink that probably glowed in the dark. Along the side, in flames, was the name “Colby”.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Is that color even legal?” I had to suppress a laugh, in spite of the circumstances.
“See what I mean?” Rassi said. “So your theory is that Pinnel and Jones left the party at 11:45, did all of that, stashed the body somewhere-”
“They could have hidden it.”
“And then managed to get all the way up to Metamora and be fully into fucking in the park by 12:15.”
“But what about the eyewitnesses?” I asked. “Do kids at parties really know what time it is?”
“It checked out,” Rassi said.
I made a note to check it out myself.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“You said you put out a BOLO,” I said. “Why did you do that? Who called it in?”
“Remmert,” Rassi said. “She was supposed to call him when she got home, and she didn’t. Jesus, didn’t you bother to read through the thing before you called me?”
I ignored him. “Remmert was home at the time?” I asked.
“Called from a land line,” Rassi said. “His parents’.”
I ran down the list on my spiral and then opened up the file to the photos of Colby prior to her death.
“Second,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“The tattoo.”
“The one on her leg?” he asked.
“Did she have more?”
“No,” Rassi said. “They wanted to have that to use as an identifier in case, you know, she wasn’t identifiable.”
That explained the bikini photograph.
“Nobody checked into the tattoo artist who did it?”
“Because technically it would be illegal for her to have gotten it?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And also because a wholesome girl like that, and yadda-yadda-yadda?”
“Shit,” Rassi said. “Wholesome? Look at her car. Besides, where’ve you been? Everybody’s got a tattoo now. Surprised Erin doesn’t.”
“I’ll have to ask,” I said. “And?”
“Sure, we checked into him. Guy over in East Peoria. He said he didn’t know how old she was and we didn’t push it. Said he’d never seen her again.”
“Alibi?”
“Tattoo convention in Kansas City that weekend. Had credit card receipts and everything.”
“Did he have them all ready for you?”
“No,” Rassi said. “He had to find them, bring them in. Why?”
“Just thinking that if he had them all ready, he’d have gotten his alibi straight ahead of time.”
“He checked out. We looked into it.”
“Next question. What else did you guys take out of the file?”
“Nothing,” Dave said. “I gave you the whole shebang.”
“You sure?” I asked. “I didn’t see any statement from Hannah Trueblood.”
“That’s because nobody ever interviewed her,” Rassi said.
“You didn’t?”
“Hey,” Rassi said. “Wasn’t my case, remember?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Rassi said. He lowered his voice. “Maybe they figured they didn’t want to bother her. Trueblood gave his statement. Maybe they thought what he said went for her.”
“Still seems strange,” I said. “Tad would have done the initial interviews, right?”
“That would be in the file,” Rassi said.
I checked. It was there. May 31st. The body was found on June 1st. Tad was shot on June 4th.
His name wasn’t on any of the statements.
“You think this has anything to do with Tad’s death?”
Rassi was silent at the other end.
“Never mind,” I said as I walked outside. “I’ll call you if I think of anything else.”
“Hey,” he said. “Why don’t we meet up for a beer later tonight?”
“Can’t,” I said. “Trueblood invited me over to a party.”
“Moving up in the world?” Rassi said. “Anyway, people go to bed at ten around here. I’ll be at Crossroads at eight-o’-clock, if you want to stop by.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “Talk to you later.”
I’d just sat back down on the veranda, pondering what the hell I was going to do next, when a car turned off Franklin Street into the lane and kicked up a cloud of dust. As it got closer to the bridge over the creek, I recognized who it was by the car, a black Mercedes.
Ulrich Anderson was an old German—“older than dirt,” my father used to say—who’d come over after the war and set up shop as an attorney. He’d been fifteen when he’d been conscripted in 1945, sent out to fight the approaching Russian Army just outside of Berlin, and had managed to avoid getting captured.
There had been 1,000 boys who’d gone out into the field that day, and only 19 who survived. Those 19 had found themselves in the care of an old WW I veteran, who told them:
“When the command comes to march, we’ll go hide over there behind those trees.”
Somehow Anderson had found his way to Central Illinois, where he’d gotten a law degree paid for by a benevolent cousin. He’d been the state’s attorney in the 1970s, and after that he’d gone into private practice.
As he folded himself out of his car and walked stiff-legged across the yard and over to the steps of the veranda, I did a quick calculation. Eighty-three years old, and still walking. His limp, which he’d carried since the war, had not gotten more pronounced.
If anything, he seemed to be walking better than he had the last time I’d seen him. He was still wearing the horn-rimmed glasses that would have made him look like Henry Kissinger had he not been skinny as a broom.
“Dana,” he said, placing one foot up on the stoop. He was wheezing. A lifetime of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day will do that to you.
“Good to see you, Ullie,” I said as I stood up. “Come on up. Can I get you a beer?”
It was a joke that went all the way back to my grandfather. Ulrich Anderson was probably the only full-blooded German who hated beer. “I don’t drink anything that looks like my own piss,” he’d been known to say.
“Scotch,” he grumbled in his rusty voice. “If you have it.”
I brou
ght his drink and, going against my better judgment, another beer for myself and placed them both down on either side of the file on the table.
I noticed Anderson's hand shaking a bit as he put the glass to his lips and took the smallest of sips. It was the only chink in his armor.
When he placed his drink carefully back down upon the table he glanced at the file and coughed. Then he leaned back in his chair and gazed out across the overgrowth below. He pulled his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and took his time lighting one with a match, which he threw out into the yard as he inhaled and coughed.
There was a long silence before he spoke.
"Aggravated assault? On a doctor, in a hospital?"
I held up my hands and then put them down into my lap. "That was just a technicality," I said. “I only punched him once.”
"What's a guy like you doing punching doctors?"
I looked away, down toward the creek, saw my fist connecting with that face, felt the lip squish between his teeth and my knuckles, the squirt of blood coming out, and thought about what to say.
"Well,” Anderson said, picking up his scotch again. “And now you are here.”
"There were extenuating circumstances," I mumbled. It sounded lame, a fourth-grader's excuse.
"Life is an extenuating circumstance," he said. He wrapped his lips around his teeth as he swallowed. “Everything matters. Or maybe it doesn’t. Are you here to stay, or are you going someplace else?”
I looked over at the smooth skin of his shaven face, and thought about all the generations who had sat on this very veranda. I wondered if he’d been drinking whiskey with my grandfather forty years before.
“I don’t know yet,” I said.
“Well, if you are,” he said, “You’d better watch your back. I understand you’ve been commissioned by the sheriff to investigate the Trueblood murder.”
“How did you know that?” I asked.
He looked at the file, and then back up at me. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “This isn’t Chicago, but don’t think that means anything is simpler. Not everybody knows everything, but the ones who matter, do.”
“Like who?”
He ignored my question. “You want to know who killed your brother, Dana?” He asked. “I’ll tell you who. A crazy junkie killed your brother. Just because she’s now no longer addicted and has come to her senses and has decided she’s not guilty of the crime means nothing.
“Life. Extenuating. She did it. Don’t waste your time.”
Anderson drained his glass and stood up, a fresh cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. As he shook my hand, he said:
“I knew your grandfather.”
I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, I said, “I know.”
He nodded and walked away, off the veranda and down to his car.
As he drove away up the lane in another dust cloud, I wondered just who had sent him to warn me off.
Ten
I arrived at Trueblood’s at one minute before seven. The sealed asphalt driveway, long and curving, made a loop around in front of the house, past the Doric columns facing the road. Someone had worked very hard at creating an antebellum Southern atmosphere, right down to the two tiny statues of black men in livery gracing the approach.
I pulled around the loop and parked behind the line of cars already standing there, and as I got out of my car, I stood in the humid air and looked out across the intersection toward the woods where Colby’s body had been found.
Craning my neck and peering through the pin oaks interspersed throughout the front yard, I gazed across the acre of ground, trying to determine whether the car might have been seen from the house.
“There you are.”
I turned to see Hannah Trueblood standing in the doorway, propping the screen door open with her shoulder. In her hand she held a champagne flute. She was wearing a cotton shirt that barely covered her bikini bottom. It gave her the impression of being naked underneath.
“We’ve been waiting for you. Wayne’s out back.” She moved her head toward the rear of the house as I made my way around the loop and up to the front entrance.
“What can I get you? Beer? Wine?”
“Beer’s fine,” I said as she moved to the side so that I could squeeze past her.
“Just go straight through to the slider,” she said. We walked into a great room with a cathedral ceiling. A leather sofa-suite with an oak coffee table stood in the middle of the room. The walls were decorated with art prints and framed posters bearing the names of European cities: Paris, Florence, Rome. An expensive projector hung down from the bare wooden beam that cut through the middle of the ceiling.
The entire back wall of the house was glass, giving a view out onto a terra cotta walkway that led to the in-ground swimming pool I remembered from the case file.
A little get-together was good. There were eight men and women in and around the pool.
Wayne Trueblood stood next to a barbecue pit, wearing a chef’s hat and an apron. One man was floating in an inner tube, his head lolled back, his eyes closed, a glass of beer clutched in his hand. Two women were sitting on lounge chairs facing each other, a pitcher of something icy and green on the table between them.
The rest were gathered around the barbecue pit with Trueblood.
I opened the slider and walked out onto the tile path. Bruce Springsteen’s Thunder Road was playing over a loudspeaker system.
“Dana,” Trueblood called out. “Come, come.” He put his arm around my shoulders as Hannah magically appeared, pressing a pint glass of beer into my hand.
“Everybody, this is Dana Hartman,” Trueblood said as we walked over to the grill. Steaks and bratwurst sizzled over the open pit.
There were two couples and a man standing near the grill. Trueblood introduced me to the couples, but I found I’d forgotten each of their names as I moved on to the next. I hadn’t been at a social gathering in months, even longer with people I didn’t know. Vaguely I thought that two of them were attorneys, and two of them owned a pharmacy.
“And this gentleman over here, keeping his beer warm, is Vic Daniels.”
I shook the man’s hand, wondering where it was I’d seen him before.
Daniels must have seen something in my expression, because when he let go of my hand, he said, “Mackinaw Valley Insurance. I have the office up in Morton. I insured your first car.”
“The competition,” Trueblood said. He looked at Daniels knowingly. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right Vic?”
Vic looked away at the two women on the lounge chairs. He raised his glass toward one of them.
“That’s my wife,” he said. “Stacy,” he called out.
One of the women squinted in our direction. “Oh hi, Dana, how’s it going?”
Stacy Daniels, née Reidner, had gone to school with me. I couldn’t recall ever having spoken to her.
“Hi Stacy,” I said.
The man in the inner tube raised his hand, his eyes still closed, his face still turned upward into the sun.
“Refill,” he said, holding up his empty glass.
“You know where the keg is,” Trueblood said. “That’s Big Red Alrassian. He works for me. Insurance salesman, that most noble of professions.”
He did a quick sweep of his guests and then returned to the grill.
I found myself standing next to the pharmacy couple. The woman whispered something to her husband. He shrugged and looked up at me and then away across the back yard. I took a drink of my beer. It was something made in small batches. Expensive. I wondered where he got it from.
“Another one?” Trueblood asked, turning away from the meat on the grill.
I looked down, realizing that I had finished my beer.
“Sure,” I said.
“Hey, corpse,” Trueblood called out to Big Red. “You watch this for me?”
Big Red looked up and then climbed slowly out of the pool, hoisting first one gigantic knee
over the edge and then flipping up and out onto his side.
“How come I got to get my own beer?” he said as he walked up and took the grilling fork out of Trueblood’s hand.
“Because you know where everything is,” Trueblood said.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said. His hand at my elbow, he led me over toward the open slider.
As we entered the house, I turned and saw that Vic Daniels was staring at me. When our eyes met, he looked away.
I went back into the house with Trueblood. He smiled before looking up at the two-story ceiling and then led me out of the great room and into a hallway. I noticed that there were no pictures, no family photos, on the walls. The European prints in the great room were the only decorations.
I exhaled loudly.
“You get all of that?” Trueblood smiled. “It’s a lot to take in, I know.” He shrugged. “I like to surround myself with people.”
He opened a door. “Back here.”
The house seemed to be much bigger on the inside than it appeared from without.
“The rumpus room,” Trueblood said. He chuckled. “That’s what they used to call them, back in the seventies.”
The room we had just entered contained two leather sofas and an armchair, clustered around a mahogany coffee table. A floor-to-ceiling fireplace held state on one side of the room, while an oaken bar with vinyl runners along the top edge stood opposite. A standing Remington gun safe with a huge old-fashioned bank-style combination lock stood off to one side.
The carpeting was shag.
“Take off your shoes,” Trueblood said. He pointed to his feet. “We all just run around barefoot here.”
He went behind the bar and got a fresh glass and began filling it at the tap.
I sat down on a stool and looked around at the walls, which were covered in framed photographs of Trueblood at various events: Trueblood as parade marshal at the Marigold Festival (there were four or five of those), Trueblood at a retirement function for a construction equipment manufacturer, Trueblood being given the key to the City of Pekin.
There were diplomas, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, and letters of appreciation and thanks from countless business and philanthropy organizations.