“What’s up?” she asked. “I’m checking on a chocolatier who’s being accused of using less cocoa in his candies than he claims. I think we got him.”
I felt so much safer knowing that someone was tracking down the real evildoers. “I’m calling about Caroline Sturgis,” I said.
The clicking stopped, and for a moment I wondered if I had crossed over to the dark side.
Lucy knew Caroline had been extradited to Michigan; everyone who cared to, knew. It was what I would have considered junk news if I hadn’t been tangentially involved. A judge there had scheduled a hearing to be held in three weeks. Until that time Caroline would be making her home in a Michigan jail. I tried to imagine her in a cell instead of in her pristine kitchen with its whiteboard tracking everyone’s activities. What would her new bulletin board read? Walk around courtyard, make hand-carved shivs, design tattoos, join gang?
“They confiscated her knitting needles,” Lucy told me. I could tell she was reading from a screen. “I guess they didn’t think she was a threat to herself or anyone else in the Bridgeport jail, but things are more formal where she is now. Maybe they’ll let her crochet. How much damage can she inflict with a plastic crochet hook? Although I suppose you could kill someone with a sharpened pencil if you stuck it in that right spot.” An interesting theory. I’d have to bring my pencil case the next time I went out at night.
“I need to use Background. Do you guys still have an account?” I whispered, as if someone other than Lucy could hear me.
“You’re wasting your time.” The keyboard clicking resumed. “I already plugged her name in. Just a few old phone numbers under Monica’s name and five under Caroline’s—her home number and four cells which look like hers, her husband’s, and the two kids’. I did get the criminal records, though, and the original arrest report. You want them?”
Sure I did. Lucy sent them and the phone numbers as an E-mail attachment. The police report had been copied so many times it was probably six generations away from the original and nearly impossible to read, but I printed it out anyway.
“Caroline was arrested with two others, Kate Gustafson and Edward Donnelley. I checked them out but nothing much came up,” Lucy said. “She’s dead and he’s out of prison. Gone.”
“I need to look up someone else. Betsy will never know and it won’t cost the company a dime. Can you give me the new password?”
Silence.
“C’mon, it’s five hundred dollars to open a Background account—you know I can’t afford that. Just this once?”
The clicking stopped.
“You know I’m not supposed to. Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for and let me do it?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you just now. Later, I promise. If I’m right I don’t want to scare anyone off with major media coming in.”
“Flatterer. And do I get to use any of the info at some point in the future?”
“Absolutely.”
After a pause she spoke.
“Do we?”
“Do we what?” I asked. “Have a deal? Yes, we do.”
“Dewey. Dewey1250.”
Twenty-two
Warren. It had to be Warren. It couldn’t be something less common like Wozniacki or Wittgenstein, so he would be easier to find. Background.com had phone records for fifty-three men named Jeff or Jeffrey Warren. Seven of the fifty-three were Michiganders. I didn’t know the Upper Peninsula from Upper Volta, but three of the seven had zip codes that were reasonably close to the one I’d found for Caroline, and luckily there were only two high schools in her town.
I reminded myself that when I searched my own name, I found nothing except entries about Billie Holiday and Judy Holliday, so I wasn’t optimistic, but it was a place to start.
All I had to do was to call three total strangers. Easy, right? Except that electronically invading someone’s privacy was one thing. Given the anonymity of the Internet, it was simply a matter of pressing keys on a keyboard. If the information was available online, people had somehow made the decision to put it out there for all to see, hadn’t they? That’s what I told myself anyway. I was less sure I could pull off this level of snooping on the phone. Hi, I was just wondering if you ratted out my favorite client? Ugh, I was starting to sound like a character from The So pranos.
I tried to channel the telemarketers who routinely and breathlessly interrupted my dinners and at-home movie nights. Two seconds of silence and then a friendly voice suggesting they were someone I knew before they launched into their pitches: “This is Heather?” as if they’re asking you, waiting for you to commit yourself by continuing to listen or, worse still, asking “Heather who?”
What was it that kept people on the phone, as opposed to automatically hanging up the way I did when I answered the phone and heard those first few seconds of dead air? How do the good ones hook people? Bank error in your favor? You may already have won? We’re calling about the warranty on your car? It had been a long time since anyone I knew had been taken in by one of those ploys.
A lost item was a possibility. Babe had used it on her bulletin board, but on the phone I’d have to say what it was. It had to be something most people owned that you could conceivably be without for a day or two without missing or freaking, so anything like a wallet or driver’s license was out. Terry had said the guy was wearing expensive sunglasses, Oakley’s. I’d give them a shot. If it sounded ridiculous when I said it out loud, I’d come up with something more inventive for the next call.
Telemarketers generally sounded as if they were smiling—like they were drugged or lobotomized (less like babies or idiots in this instance). I smiled. I dialed. A woman answered the phone. Expecting a man to pick up, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Astonishingly enough she didn’t buy my story about having found old Jeff’s sunglasses.
Somewhere in between being called a skanky ho and a heartless home wrecker I considered stopping her, but it wasn’t really me she was trashing and she obviously had buckets of venom inside her, so I let her vent. Given some of the details she was throwing out, I’d have been very surprised if this Jeff Warren hadn’t been cheating on his wife, so maybe she had a right. She had dates, locations, and all the particulars of a tryst in Milwaukee that her Jeff and I were supposed to have taken together. Then she got personal. She made disparaging remarks about my hair and my alleged cup size. It went further south from there, to my butt and hips and the problems I undoubtedly had with them. How she knew this was beyond me. Still, I stayed on the line. I was fascinated by her lung capacity. Perhaps she was a swimmer?
My family was scum. She could tell by my voice that I, too, was trash. (I’d liked to have asked, “How exactly?” but didn’t see how I could fit it in.) I was dangerously close to switching allegiance. No wonder her Jeff fooled around—the woman was a harridan. I gave her thirty seconds to come up for air. If the confirmation of Jeff’s infidelity had driven her crazy, it had been a short drive and I’d done enough penance for it.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” I said. How many adulteresses called their lovers’ wife ma’am? “I think I must have dialed the wrong number.” It stopped her cold—but just long enough for her to fill her tank and start again.
“Like hell you did. Don’t give me that ma’am crap—and don’t think you’re the first—”
I put the phone back in the cradle and prayed she didn’t have the star 69 option on her telephone service.
The next call was marginally better. This time I did my best to sound sweet and wholesome. But according to this Jeff’s roommate, Jeff was touring with a production of Jersey Boys and always wore Oliver Peoples’s prescription sunglasses with dark blue lenses. They were his trademark. It was unlikely that he was the man I was looking for.
“You didn’t really find a pair of sunglasses, did you?” the roommate asked. Jeez, was I that transparent? “Listen, you sound like a nice person. If he’s hiding out from you, honey, it’s probably over. It’s time to move on. I know fro
m whence I speak.” I let him tell me the story of his breakup with Ethan and thanked him for being so supportive. Jeff was lucky to have such a sensitive and understanding partner.
So far I’d been excoriated for being a slut and pitied for being a dumpee who was all but stalking a former lover. If I didn’t have such a positive self-image, I might have let those two calls discourage me.
There was one number left. I didn’t know what my next step would be or how I’d search the other forty-nine states if all the Michigan calls were as unsuccessful as the first two.
The phone rang ten times. I was just about to hang up when an older woman answered. Yes, her son was always misplacing things. The old sweetheart gave me a laundry list of the things this Jeff Warren had lost since grade school, including a jersey signed by his coach and the five starters on his high school basketball team, two of whom went on the play for the Spartans. I was impressed that she knew who they were, but obviously she was a hoops fan. He’d lost a collection of commemorative first edition stamps given to him by his uncle Lou, who’d spent forty years working for the post office, three jobs—one that the aforementioned Uncle Lou had had to pull strings to get him—and two wives. So she wasn’t surprised that he’d lost his expensive sunglasses and wasn’t I a dear for trying to return them. But Jeff wasn’t home now. He was on the road, driving a truck up and down the East Coast. He got the job through one of his ex-brothers-in-law, Leroy, who worked for Hutchinson Shipping. Bingo.
Mrs. Helen Warren clearly didn’t get many phone calls. Jeff’s ex-wives never stayed in touch, but that was probably a good thing because they were worthless gold diggers and never really appreciated her boy. Her daughter Abby had moved to Northern California and rarely came to visit, not even for her high school reunion—just came the one time when her dad passed. Helen and Abby’s relationship had been reduced to twice-yearly baskets from Harry & David on Christmas and Mother’s Day, and the twins’ annual class picture slipped into an envelope with just the date on the back, not even a note. It was so sad I almost hung up on her to call my own mother.
Jeff had moved his few possessions back home after the second divorce since he was now driving for a living (better money), and he was on the road so much these days it didn’t make sense for him to pay rent. Especially since he was still supporting those two floozies whom she’d never liked, who had never given her grandchildren, and who’d taken him to the cleaners or, in Jeff’s more modest circumstances, the launderette.
I hated to stop her; it was like stream-of-consciousness reality television. I started to picture them all standing in front of a retired judge, pointing fingers and shouting at one another until they broke for a commercial. Even though it hadn’t worked the last time, I thought it time to resurrect “ma’am.”
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Do you know where I can find Jeff now? Is there a cell number you can give me?”
Somehow that convinced her I was a girlfriend. She’d love to see her boy settle down with a really nice girl and I sounded like a nice girl. She asked if I had a job and I mumbled something about my own small business. My stock was rising. Twenty minutes earlier I’d been treated like a whore and then a pathetic discard. All of a sudden I’d turned into a good catch. Mrs. Warren asked what church I went to, and I struggled to remember the name of the parochial school where I had spent the worst two months of my six-year-old life.
“Sacred Heart, ma’am.”
Dead silence. Obviously, Catholic wasn’t as good as Protestant, but at least Jeff wasn’t dating a heathen. Mrs. Warren regrouped quickly. It was okay—she was sure I was nice anyway. If I stayed on the phone with her much longer, she’d have me converted and us engaged.
She didn’t know if the number she had was his latest. Jeff changed numbers a lot, and Mrs. Warren hated to cross any of them out, as if doing so was erasing a part of his life. My guess was that changing numbers was less about his adventurous lifestyle than it was about staying one step ahead of the bill collectors and his ex-wives.
“I suppose the best way to reach him right now is through Leroy.” I could hear Mrs. Warren flipping through a phone book that I imagined looked like my mother’s, pages falling out, slightly sticky from being in the kitchen for the last thirty years, with numbers and addresses written in blue ballpoint ink in beautiful copperplate script, except for their children’s, which had been crossed out and changed over and over while everyone else’s stayed the same. (Note to self: Call Mom!)
“Here it is, Leroy Donnelley.”
Suddenly, my heart was racing. “Leroy Donnelley? Any relation to Edward Donnelley?”
I scribbled notes as fast as I could while Mrs. Warren gave me the extended family tree of all the Donnelleys and their kin. Off the top of her head she recited a veritable Book of Donnelley—who they’d married, who their kids were, and where they’d gone to school. If she had used the word begat it could not have been more biblical or more complete. It was as if I had stumbled upon the town historian.
Now, the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Jeff Warren had bumped into his old high school friend, Monica, and accidentally or intentionally mentioned it to a relative of one of the people she’d been arrested with. I still wasn’t sure how they found her. Warren knew she was going by the name Caroline and had been seen in Springfield, but as far as I knew, that was all.
Kate Gustafson, the other woman in the case, served only two years. After she was released, she’d been killed in a suspicious fire. The man, Eddie Donnelley, served his entire sentence, all twenty years. Could you carry a grudge for that long because one of your partners in crime had gotten away? It’s been known to happen.
Mrs. Warren was still rambling on, but I felt sure I’d already gotten the lion’s share of the story. Somehow I didn’t think the health issues of the current crop of Donnelleys was going to help me, Grant, or Caroline; but, as is often the case with seniors when they’re on the phone, if they sense you’re ready to hang up, they dig in their heels and tear into another long-winded anecdote, frequently about the azaleas, the garbageman, or something equally mundane just to keep you hanging on.
“Of course, they never did find all that money they said was missing,” she said, wheezing, daring me to hang up.
I had to hand it to her: Mama Warren knew how to tell a story. I switched my phone to the other ear, sharpened my pencil, and got comfortable. This anecdote I did want to hear.
Two hours later Grant Sturgis called me from a hotel room in Michigan. Caroline had told him I hadn’t been the one to give away her secret, and he was calling to apologize.
I had a lot to tell him about Caroline and Jeff’s accidental meeting in the diner and what I thought had happened afterward.
“But why?” he asked.
“Grant, Donnelley served twenty years in prison. Not even time off for good behavior.” (I had thought everyone got time off for good behavior.) “Caroline walked away after eighteen months. And then to learn that she’s been living a pretty cushy life in suburban Connecticut, it might have ticked him off. I mean, he wasn’t one of life’s noblemen before he went to jail. Something tells me he didn’t see the error of his ways while behind bars. The man was angry.”
And then there was the missing money. Mama Warren wasn’t sure how much, but the police had suggested the forty-seven grand found in Caroline’s gym bag was just the tip of the iceberg. Over seven hundred fifty thousand dollars was unaccounted for, the drug money having funded an extensive college sports gambling ring. A tidy sum then and not too shabby now. Maybe Donnelley had reclaimed it when he got out of prison, or maybe he couldn’t find it and was looking for the person he thought still had it. Or had used it to buy a nice big house in Connecticut once she thought no one would be looking for her.
Grant was quiet. Had I gone too far? This was, after all, the woman he loved. What had he called her in a tone that suggested sainthood—“the mother of his children”? He
took a deep breath.
“Except for one thing,” he said. “Even if the judge and the jury didn’t know it, Eddie Donnelley did and I do. Caroline was entirely innocent.”
Twenty-three
If half of what Grant Sturgis told me next was true, Caroline had lived through a succession of nightmarish events equaled only by Jean Valjean; right out of Les Misérables.
Caroline started dating Eddie Donnelley when she was a senior at Newtonville High School and he was a sophomore at Nixon County Community College. She was flattered by his attentions. He was an older man, relatively speaking, and the town was so small that, as pretty as she was, she’d already been through all the interesting boys her own age. Not in a slutty, town pump kind of way—she just had an idea of what she wanted and was quick to realize when she hadn’t found it, so she kept looking.
Kate Gustafson was Eddie’s ex-girlfriend, who was surprisingly cordial to her replacement. At least it was surprising to me. Where I grew up, you didn’t want to be in the same time zone with your boyfriend’s ex, much less hang out with her, but Newtonville, Michigan, was a far cry from Brooklyn, New York.
Attractive and popular, Caroline was a capable student but more interested in creative pursuits than academics—painting and dancing were two of her passions. Beyond the Twinkletoes ballet classes which she’d outgrown by the age of twelve, there was no dance studio in town, so Caroline turned to cheerleading. And she pursued it with a vengeance. They said she was fearless and would cheerfully and accurately fling her body into whatever formation the coach asked, landing with her trademark happy face without even breaking a sweat.
As the school’s head cheerleader she went to all the varsity events on the road and was invited to every postgame party. Eddie and Kate went everywhere with her, Eddie following the school bus that carried the team and the cheerleaders, driving to the games and meets that were out of the city, with Kate tagging along, as a pal and chaperone. At least that was what they told Caroline’s dad, who by that time was consoling himself for the loss of his wife every day with a quart of scotch and a six-pack of beer and every night with a hairdresser named Rita.
Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery Page 13