by Shane Lusher
“Dana. We’ve been wondering what you’ve found out. You haven’t even called us to let us know.”
That was quite a change from two nights before, when she’d seemed to think my assignment to the case was useless at best.
“Yeah,” I said, picking up my coffee and walking back across the street toward my car. “Sorry about that, but I’ve been busy checking into a few things.”
“Have you found anything out? Do you know who did it?”
“I don’t, Hannah,” I said, and then added, “Not yet. What I need to do is talk to you.”
“Talk to me? About what?”
“Well, I saw in the case file that you didn’t really give a statement when the investigation started, and I wanted to see what your take was on the whole thing.”
“My take?” she said, and I could hear her shudder over the phone. “My daughter is dead. I want her killer found. End of story.”
I paused, looking over at the balustrades of the courthouse and the blue sky beyond. “I understand that, Hannah. I’m doing my best.”
She laughed at that, high and short. It might have been a hiccup. “And you think-”
“I was wondering if I could stop by,” I said, cutting her off. “You seemed upset the other night.” I needed to get her out of the house, though, that was the point. “Can I meet you somewhere this afternoon?”
“Dana, I had a little bit too much to drink the other night-”
“I appreciate that, Hannah, and I really do understand, but it would be good if we could meet up. Somewhere we could talk. Just you and I.”
There was a silence. I heard the tinkle of ice cubes in a glass and then music in the background. It sounded like Miles Davis, but if it was, she would be the first thirty-something in Tazewell County I’d met who listened to that.
“Hannah? Are you still there?”
“We can’t meet here,” she said in a low tone. She hiccupped a laugh again. “We can’t meet in Pekin.”
“East Peoria, then?” I asked. I still had to stop by the tattoo parlor that afternoon. “There’s an Applebee’s there?”
“Somebody might see me,” she mumbled. “Somewhere I wouldn’t go.”
“Dane Burgers?”
There was a long pause again. More glass tinkling. I hoped that if I got her to meet me she’d still be capable of driving.
“Alright,” she said. “I’ll meet you there at two o’clock.”
Thirty-Two
Lucky for me the Lebanese restaurant on Main Street in Peoria was obviously marked on a brick storefront with a red neon sign that read “Baba Ghannouj,” with a big plastic chicken in the window. There was a parking spot right in front.
The place was empty when I walked in. It was family-run, with decor that looked like it hadn’t been remodeled since the nineteen-seventies, which probably meant the food was great.
The air was filled with the sharp smell of onions and garlic, with subtle undertones of cinnamon. One entire wall stretched floor-to-ceiling in a painted stucco mural, with a collection of what appeared to be famous Lebanese personalities, none of whom I recognized.
I sat near the window in a vinyl booth whose stuffing was coming out around the duct tape that had been used in an attempt to repair the numerous rips and cracks.
I studied the menu and watched the people walk by outside. Mostly students, some people in business suits, and a homeless man who stood just outside the window with his back to me, holding out a plastic cup. He was wearing a Chicago Bears sweatshirt and a sun visor.
A dark man in his fifties with two days’ stubble came out of the back wearing an apron and a stained T-shirt.
“Can I get you something?” he asked.
It was then that I realized I was starving. I hadn’t eaten more than two mouthfuls of instant oatmeal that day, and that had been at six in the morning.
I looked up. “You have shawarma?”
“Of course,” he said. He looked surprised. Maybe he thought I wasn’t aware of where I was.
“I’ll take a shawarma,” I said. “And a cup of coffee.”
“Lebanese or fake?” he asked and smiled.
“Fake?”
“We have either Lebanese, which is coffee ground into a fine powder and then boiled, or we have instant.”
I knew what Lebanese coffee was, if it was anything like Turkish coffee.
“Lebanese,” I said. I handed the menu back to him and he nodded and went into the back.
Just as he had disappeared behind a jingling line of beads that separated the dining area from the kitchen, the bell hanging over the door rang and she stepped in.
Other than the fact that age had not yet given her that pinched look around her mouth, and that she was still in full possession of her dental work, Darcy Stamm was a direct copy of her mother, only taller. So vastly tall and blonde that she looked like a Valkyrie on her way to Valhalla.
And, truth be told, she may well have been. Her face didn’t look like it was used to holding the sad grimace it was carrying, and although her shoulders drooped like most women of her height, I got the feeling that she was unused to that, too.
“Mr. Hartman?” she asked, walking slowly over toward the table. I noticed that she kept a distance that seemed wider than it should have been.
“Dana,” I said. I stood up and held out my hand. We were very nearly the same height. It would have almost been intimidating had she not jumped a bit when I stood.
She recovered quickly, however. She shook my hand and then giggled. “Darcy,” she said.
“Good to meet you, Darcy,” I said. “Why don’t you sit down? Are you hungry? I just ordered the shawarma.”
“It’s great,” she said. “I eat here all the time. The guy in the back is my boyfriend’s father.”
She sat and then looked me hard in the face, her tentative smile replaced by the sad look she’d had when she’d first arrived.
“So, you think you can get my mother out of prison?” she asked.
I held up my hand. “Hey,” I said. “I never said that. I said I was willing to listen to her.”
“Oh,” she said. Her eyes moved in a way that signaled confusion, and then the man from the back returned with my coffee.
“Darcy,” he said, pronouncing it with the emphasis on the second syllable. “You want a coffee, too? Anything to eat?”
“Just coffee, Walid,” she smiled up at him. “Thanks.”
He gave the both of us a curious look and then returned to the kitchen.
When he’d gone, she turned to me and said, “I’m not sure I should be talking to you if you think she actually, um, committed the crime.”
“I never said that, either,” I said, picking up the shot glass of coffee and blowing on it. “Look. I’m investigating, among other things, my brother’s murder. Nobody else is interested in it. They’re convinced she did it. She’s on trial, and they’re going to convict her. The case is over and done with.”
She looked confused again, and so I went on.
“I’m starting to believe there’s more to it. Mitigating circumstances, if you want to call it that. I think that she pulled the trigger. I don’t think it was her idea.”
Darcy sniffed. She turned her head and watched the homeless man in front of the window for a moment. “That’s kind of what I got from her,” she said.
“Do you speak to her often?” I asked.
“As often as I can get over to Pekin,” she shrugged. “Three, four times a week. It’ll be harder once they—once she—once they move her, you know?”
“What has she told you?” I asked.
“How much of this is confidential?” she asked. “What are your—regulations, rules, whatever—if I tell you what she told me?”
I sighed. “You want me to be honest?”
She nodded.
“I have no idea. I’m only officially attached to the sheriff’s department to solve the murder of Colby Trueblood. Do you know about that?”
She shook her head. “Not much. I just know it happened right before your brother, um, died, because people around the courthouse were talking about it when my mom was first arrested.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, the only way I can officially investigate my brother’s death is because I’m also looking into Colby Trueblood’s murder.”
“And you think my mom had something to do with that?” she asked, pulling back away from the table.
Walid arrived with my shawarma and Darcy’s coffee. He left the food without comment and went back to stand behind the counter, where he began going through a pile of correspondence.
“No,” I said, lowering my voice, aware that Walid was there to listen to us. “I don’t. But I do think that the two are in some way connected. If you feel that someone put your mom up to this, then let’s just say that I feel that way, too. Do you mind?” I asked, indicating my food.
“No,” she said. “Go ahead. Eat.”
There was a touch of cinnamon in the meat, a lot of garlic in the sauce. Granted, I was starving, but I didn’t think I’d eaten anything this good since I left Chicago.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
She looked at me, a grateful look in her eyes, and wrapped her hands, amazingly small in such a tall body, around the tiny cup of coffee as if it were the middle of winter and not ninety-five degrees outside.
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s such a relief. Nobody believes her. Except for my boyfriend. And Walid.” She moved her head slightly in the direction of the counter.
“Don’t go to any newspapers about my part in this,” I cautioned. “I won’t say any of this officially. And, it probably wouldn’t be very smart. Not yet.”
I took another bite.
“Why are you worried about confidentiality?” I asked once I had swallowed. “Anything that might be considered extenuating circumstances would have to be good for your mother.”
Darcy was chewing on her lip. “My mother’s afraid,” she said. “She doesn’t even speak to me out loud.”
“Come again?” I asked. When she didn’t immediately answer, I said:
“Is she writing to you?”
“Are you crazy?” Darcy asked. She had her arms crossed, and leaned onto the table with her elbows. “They go through all of that.”
“Well, then how-”
“Sign language,” she said. “My mother works—used to work with—the hearing impaired. She speaks to me through sign language.”
“Oh,” I said. Sign language. Stranger things, I thought. “You have something important to tell me?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Well,” I said. “All I can do is promise you that if you tell me anything—names, things that happened, I don’t know—then I won’t tell anyone who I got the information from. Not unless it leads me directly to someone, and I have to go to the police so they can get a search warrant.”
She was leaning back now, her arms still crossed, teeth still working on her lip. “Sounds fair,” she said, furrowing her brow.
“It doesn’t sound fair to me,” Walid said.
We both turned, startled, and at first I was unsure whether he’d actually spoken at all, since he was still looking down at the envelopes he was busy opening.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
This time he looked up. “I’m sorry too, sir, but I can’t in good trust allow you to speak to this woman any longer.”
“Pardon?”
Walid came around the register and stood in the middle of the room. “Her mother is going to prison. You’re obviously a cop. I know how it works. I’ve been in this country for twenty-five years.”
“I’m not a police officer,” I said. I pushed my plate away, realizing that I probably wasn’t going to wind up eating much of it. I popped a chunk of meat into my mouth and chewed quickly. “I just want to find out who killed my brother.”
“I believe you already know that,” he said, and opened both palms toward Darcy in an apologetic gesture. “Her mother is on trial for murder. Don’t you think Darcy has gone through enough?”
“She has,” I agreed, “But her mother is saying she didn’t do it.”
He looked at me, long and hard, but didn’t speak, and so I went on.
“I happen to be the only person who’s willing to listen.”
“But you were just lying to her, just then,” he insisted. He pulled up a vinyl chair with a piped chrome back and sat down at the end of the table. “She asked you whether what she might tell you would be confidential, and you told her it would be. Which is a lie. It’s never that way.
“You can tell anybody anything you want, and nobody could touch you. It’s not like you just read her her Miranda rights.”
“Walid,” she said. “I agreed to speak to him.”
“Yes, but he called you,” he said, leaning over the chair to rest his large calloused hands on the tabletop.
“Wait,” I said. “What in the world would I have to gain from railroading her into this? The case is closed. Nobody else is looking at it.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he shook his head. “I’ll tell you what her mother thinks. She thinks that somebody gave her the gun, that somebody told her to wait there, that the sheriff will be walking by in just a few minutes, and that if she pulled the trigger she would be taken somewhere else and given more drugs.”
“Oh, God, Walid,” Darcy said. It was a half-sob, and when she wiped at the corners of her eyes I knew things had gotten a bit out of hand.
“Look, Walid,” I said. “My name is Dana Hartman, by the way.”
“Dana,” he said.
“Since you seem to be the one speaking for Darcy here, then maybe you can tell me who this person, or persons, was. Did she say that much?”
Walid shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “She doesn’t remember. She was high. That’s some bad stuff, that meth. Now all she knows is that it was somebody in a suit.”
“A suit?” I said.
“That’s what she said,” Walid said, and Darcy nodded. “But you never know, do you?”
“Walid,” Darcy said. “Enough. Thank you. But enough. You’re not my father-”
Walid pointed a finger at her, but kept his mouth shut.
“And I will thank you again, but this is my problem. It’s my mother.”
Walid stood up slowly and walked away, shaking his head. Some mother, he was most likely thinking.
“Did she say anything else about the man?” I asked.
Darcy shook her head.
“Was he young or old?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“So, that’s it?” I asked. “A man in a suit?” It could be anybody. I’d be willing to bet seventy percent of the people hanging around the courthouse lawn wore a suit.
“Maybe it would be best if I just tried speaking with her again,” I said.
“That won’t work,” Darcy said, and stood up. “Sorry, but I don’t feel so well.”
“But wait,” I said. From my vantage point, she towered over me. “Maybe you could tell her to talk to me.”
“You don’t understand,” Darcy said, shaking her head. “She won’t talk to anybody. She knows that they listen in on everything. That’s why she sent you away when you went to see her. She’s afraid of what they’ll do.”
“Who?” I asked. “The guards?”
“Them, or whoever put her up to killing your brother.”
I touched her arm, and then put my hand back down on the table.
“Look, a man in a suit is something,” I began. “It’s not someone in law enforcement, it’s not someone doing any kind of construction work, or working at the Java’s or any of the businesses around the Courthouse,” I mused. “If it’s someone who’s there regularly, then it would have to be an attorney. An attorney or a judge.”
“Or maybe a banker,” Walid said from the corner.
I looked
at him and nodded. “Most likely not a junkie.”
Darcy winced at that.
“Sorry,” I said. I put my hand on her arm again. “Can you go see her today?” I asked. “And call me back?”
Darcy sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Visiting hours are in the morning,” she said. “I can’t get in to see her until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”
“Can you do that?” I asked. “Do you have a car?”
She shook her head and opened her mouth to answer.
“I’ll take her,” Walid said. “I’ll make Milo open up tomorrow.” He looked at Darcy, who smiled gratefully.
“You think Milo will be up that early on a Saturday?” she asked.
Walid drew himself up, his head coming only to her shoulder. “He’d better be,” he said. “Or I’ll drag his ass in here.”
Thirty-Three
After that, Darcy seemed uncomfortable sitting across from me at the table, and she excused herself, mentioning something about a summer term class she needed to audit. I’d expected Walid to grill me further about my intentions, but after she left, he asked me if I needed anything else, and when I told him I didn’t, he went in the back and let me eat in peace.
I really wasn’t sure that what Darcy Stamm had told me was much help, but it was better than I’d gotten in the previous twenty-four hours, which seemed to be nothing.
A man in a suit. Never trust a man in a suit. That had been my uncle’s advice to me, before I’d graduated college and gone off to Chicago to become one.
Nonetheless, the gut feeling I’d had about Alisha Stamm, coupled with what Rassi had said, now seemed more believable than before. Someone had actually placed the gun in her hand. If her memory served her correctly, I thought, it couldn’t very well be Dubois, since I’d never seen him in anything other than his Tazewell County Sheriff’s uniform.
But who else could it be? I’d seen Trueblood only twice, but he’d been wearing polo shirts and pleated khakis each time. Ullie Anderson. That was a possibility. I wondered if his apparent senility was a play.
Unlikely, I thought. Anderson, Dubois, and Trueblood were linked together, but the only physical evidence of this I’d yet found were a few newspaper clippings and the fact that Anderson had done most of the adoption papers for the Quiverfull.