Dead Head: A Dirty Business Mystery

by Rosemary Harris

  This time I resolved to stay in my car until I saw Warren and got a reality check. Was he as safe and as aw-shucks innocent as he and Mama Warren wanted me to think or not? I thought so, but I still wasn’t sure.

  There was no time for a hot caffeine jolt, so I grabbed a diet Red Bull from the fridge, hoping the buzz would clear my head. I pulled on my jacket in the entranceway and stepped down to the door that led to the garage. Just as I turned the doorknob—“Burglary! Burglary! Step away from the house!” An earsplitting shriek ripped through my brain. It was me, screaming. I dropped my keys and my bag. The two horrendous sounds—the siren and the taped warning—continued alternating until I scrambled back up the stairs to turn off the alarm. All I could think of were World War II documentaries and ambulances during the London Blitz.

  I finally found the alarm code, entered it, and the hideous noises stopped, although the vibrations seemed to hang in the air for a few seconds like the aftereffects of a fireworks display. Then the phone rang. Cripes, what was it now?

  “Alarm Central. We have a report of the alarm going off at your residence.” It was nice to know someone was paying attention, since I hadn’t noticed one light go on in any neighboring houses.

  “It was me.” I leafed through the instruction manual, looking for some language or jargon to put the caller’s mind at rest. “I’m the homeowner. It was an accident.”

  “We understand. We just need your password.”

  My password? I had so many passwords they were recorded on multicolored notes stuck all over my office. My bulletin board and the side of my computer were feathered with them, but none was the password for an alarm system someone else had installed at least three years ago.

  “Uh, I don’t think I have a password. It was the previous owner’s system. But I can assure you, I’m fine.”

  “We understand, ma’am,” Cheerful Clerk said, “but we still need your password. After all, you could be the burglar. You could be holding the homeowner hostage.” This speech was delivered in a singsong manner and with all the sensitivity and concern of someone reading it off a plastic card hanging in his cubicle while he text-messaged his girlfriend. The homeowner could be hog-tied on the kitchen floor….

  “Okay, okay, I get it. I’ll look for the password.”

  I searched through the manual again. Nothing scribbled on the back, no dog-eared corners in the booklet to give me a hint what the damn password was.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to tell you,” I said. “I didn’t install the system and I’ve never even been sent a bill for the service.” That got his attention.

  I heard keyboard clicking. “Let’s see…the system was installed four years ago and that fee included five years of monitoring at no additional charge. That period ends in seven months.”

  “So what does that mean? Can I change the password?”

  “Yes, ma’am. You can go on our Web site, but you’d have to sign in with your original password. Otherwise we need you to do it in writing and send it to us along with a copy of your deed.”

  My deed? I looked at the clock. I didn’t want Warren to drive off again and I could still be on time if I got off the phone in the next thirty seconds. “Great, you know where I live. Send me the form. I’ll make a copy of my deed. Gotta go, thanks.” I hung up and dashed out the door to my car.

  Not long after I turned onto Lakeview Road, I saw red flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I slowed down, not wanting to attract any more attention, and I was relieved when the patrol car made a left a few blocks behind me.

  I pulled into the strip mall and parked about a hundred or so feet from the deli’s entrance. It was still open, but it was not the teeming hot spot I’d read about in the Bulletin.

  I was still visible from the road—that couldn’t be helped—but at least I was out of the direct light of the streetlamp. I killed my lights but left the engine running to stay warm and to make a quick departure if necessary.

  I’ve tried to re-create what happened next, but it’s something of a blur, a weird permutation of what had happened earlier. Just as Warren pulled in, he must have seen what I’d seen in my rearview mirror not long before—the red flashing lights of a Springfield police car. This time Warren tore ass out of the lot, knocking over a bank of free newspaper stands on his way to the highway. Something told me his truck driving partner would be hitching a ride to Virginia in the morning.

  Seconds later the police car screeched into the lot, stopping at an angle, just shy of the overturned newsstand. Two cops jumped out and started running toward my Jeep. I turned the lights on to show them I was all right.

  O’Malley stopped running first and walked the rest of the way. He did not look amused, but I was.

  “You just can’t stand the thought of me meeting another man, can you?”

  Twenty-eight

  “You mean to tell me after all that, you never even met the guy?”

  Babe Chinnery snatched back the menu as if she were going to withhold food because I’d failed to accomplish my mission. “I’m disappointed in you.”

  “Hey, I have an absolute rule about how many times per night I’m going to arrange to meet a strange man in a deserted parking lot.” I said it a little too loud and got a few puzzled looks from the other diners at Babe’s.

  I was disappointed, too. I’d given up an entire night’s sleep and had gotten only two useful words from Jeff Warren on the phone—Eddie Donnelley. How useful they were remained to be seen. Was Donnelley behind all Caroline’s troubles—old and new? That was the suggestion Warren had made, and it was what had gotten me out of bed a second time when common sense should have dictated that I stay put. Some people were like ticks—they just couldn’t let go of things—and I was turning into one of them.

  Babe didn’t bother listening for my order. She brought me a tall glass of orange juice, coffee, buttered toast, and three scrambled eggs, well done, a meal that would have been anathema to me two years earlier, before I knew that a little bread and butter wouldn’t kill me. Her only acknowledgment of my formerly restricted lifestyle was that she didn’t heap a mountain of Pete’s parsleyed potatoes alongside the toast. A side dish fondly referred to as the 3Pete, Pete’s parsleyed potatoes were so good, they were all some diners had for breakfast, but I needed protein—and that wasn’t one of the Ps in the secret recipe.

  Babe set the plate down in front of me and cast a quick eye around the diner. She decided she had a few minutes before the only other customer in the diner asked for the check, so she settled in on her side of the counter to wheedle the rest of the story out of me as I ate.

  “This Donnelley creep must really hold a grudge. I myself don’t believe in holding grudges,” she said. “Stresses you out. Bad for the digestion, the skin. I knew a girl in the Collins Band whose hair fell out because she was stressed over not being named lead tambourine. Although she may have pulled it out herself. We were never really sure. Either way, it was stress related.”

  I could feel another rock and roll flashback coming on.

  “And if you do get some satisfaction,” she said, stretching her arms over her head, “that period of elation is fleeting. More likely you’ll regret it. I remember being ticked off at a roadie once. The guy promised to get me backstage to see Jerry Garcia after a concert. He got me backstage all right, but everyone was already gone. No Mr. Garcia, only Mr. Johnson.”

  Babe’s revenge had been swift. She let the roadie keep drinking while she spilled her own wine in a bucket of sand meant to be used as an ashtray. When the guy was good and plastered, she led him out onto the empty stage, telling him she wanted their first time to be something special. Instead, he was so falling-down drunk she was able to tie him to a set of drums, where he passed out with his pants down around his ankles.

  “The whole crew knew about it in the morning. It’s amazing what some guys will let you do when they think they’re going to get some. Coupla years later, he got religion and wound up trave
ling all the way to Decatur, Georgia, just to apologize to me.”

  It warmed my heart that Babe was no longer inclined to seek revenge, but not everyone was as highly evolved. Something told me Eddie Donnelley wasn’t one of the enlightened. If he was in town, I didn’t think it was to give Caroline a big old bear hug and to have that cathartic “closure” conversation.

  I hadn’t called Warren back. What for? The way the previous evening had gone we would have only missed each other again. And he’d have had to have the innocence of Charlie Brown to show up a third time for a rendezvous with a woman who claimed to have never called the cops and yet always seemed to have a police escort.

  Instead, after a final round of verbal sparring with O’Malley I’d gone home and crawled into bed thinking how close I’d come to getting answers—if only the police hadn’t shown up again.

  “The police,” I said, thinking out loud and shaking my head.

  “Excuse me?” Babe was horrified. She was still reliving the revenge memory. “Jerry Garcia was a member of the Dead, the Grateful Dead? Sting, Stewart Copeland, and Andy Summers were the Police.”

  “Give me some credit, I know that. I’m not one of your little acolytes. I’ve owned vinyl. I was just thinking how happy I was to see the police the first time last night, then how unhappy.”

  Babe was relieved—she didn’t take kindly to too many disappointments in one day. “Has it occurred to you that O’Malley may have appointed himself your guardian angel?” Babe said.

  It hadn’t. Over the last few years the snappy dialogue between O’Malley and me—even when it bordered on the frisky—had built up a kind of scar tissue. We couldn’t touch nerve endings if we tried. And I think we did try every once in a while, but never, it seemed, at the same time, so we never made that complete circuit required to turn on the lightbulb.

  “Speaking of the angel…” Babe jerked her chin in the direction of the police station across the road, where a now ubiquitous patrol car sat idling and O’Malley stood leaning against it, on the phone. “The angel’s lookin’ good. I think he’s dropped a few pounds,” she said, sizing him up. “You take him out of that blue polyester uniform, put him in a pair of black jeans, black T-shirt, leather blazer. I bet he’d look mighty fine, with that salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes.” Clearly she’d given this some thought. I hadn’t and I had a hard time resisting the urge to raise myself up off the counter stool, peer out the window, and visualize Mike O’Malley’s proposed makeover.

  Babe left to seat a couple of women with two toddlers and I peeked at O’Malley while pretending to be reaching for napkins. Not bad, but was he really date material? What was it Lucy and Babe were seeing that I wasn’t? Maybe all these near misses meant we were just supposed to be friends.

  “You’re busted,” Babe said over her shoulder.

  “I just wanted to see if he was coming this way.”

  “You are such a bad liar. If you’re going to survive in a small town, you’re going to need to hone those skills.”

  O’Malley headed toward the diner. He sprinted across the street easily, and moments later the screen door opened, then jingled shut with a smack. Babe was still with the newcomers, helping one of the women strap an obstreperous kid into a wooden seat that had all the appeal of a vintage electric chair. No wonder the kid was screaming.

  “Hello, ladies. Okay if I serve myself?” O’Malley needn’t have asked for permission. Babe adored him and he knew the diner’s setup better than some of her employees. He poured himself a coffee and slid onto the counter stool beside me, a smug look on his face.

  “Okay. What?”

  “State police didn’t need to chase your friend too far—he drove straight into an overpass on the Merritt. Sheared off the top of his rig.

  “Oh, and there’s something else. Caroline Sturgis is coming home.”

  Twenty-nine

  Home. Was it here in Michigan where this cell was; Oregon where my fictional grandmother lived and died; or Springfield, where everyone knew me as Caroline Sturgis? Bland, boring, stay-at-home, faintly amusing and to-be-pitied Caroline Sturgis, who drank a little too often and rarely finished her crafts projects but was otherwise just like any of the other suburban moms who spent their days chauffeuring kids from one structured activity to the next with only the occasional break for spa treatments or Wednesday matinees in New York City.

  The last weeks had been a far cry from soccer matches and afternoon theater dates. I no longer knew or remembered how I’d managed to keep track of all the lies for so many years. It was as if I’d kept an internal bulletin board just like the slick white one in my kitchen that told me where everyone was. Some days the schedules were as complicated as the landing at Normandy, but the bulletin board gave me the illusion of order—Molly at soccer, Jason at hockey practice, Grant gallivanting all over the world, Caroline in Connecticut, not to be confused with Monica in Michigan. Never to be confused with that girl I used to be.

  They put me in solitary confinement for my own safety. No one seriously thought that I’d hang myself with an Hermès scarf, but they’d never had a resident like me before and frankly didn’t know what to do with me. Oddly enough, I might have welcomed the company of the other women. As it was, I heard them only once a day when I was let out for my forty-five-minute exercise break. Some jeered and some cheered as I was led past their cells. I heard everything from “skinny bitch” to “hockey mom, can you hook me up with some blow?”

  I tried to focus on Grant and the kids. Was Molly keeping up with her piano lessons in Tucson? Was Jason wearing his helmet for the pickup hockey games he’d be playing in? I didn’t imagine anyone else in the building was thinking about hockey pucks, and it was difficult for me to do it. I kept drifting back to the path that had led me here.

  Sherry, the girl I’d met at the soup kitchen, had been around the block at least a couple of times. She was a user, and I knew it, but I learned a lot from her—good and bad. We spent two weeks together, my total-immersion apprenticeship into a life of petty crime. She and I took full advantage of all the social services agencies in the city, offering different names and different sad stories to each and moving on before too many questions were asked. We stayed away from personal details, even with each other.

  On her own, Sherry inspired others, inside the shelter system and out, to grip their handbags and backpacks as if she was about to snatch them and make a run for it. It was an understandable reflex. She had the look of a female Artful Dodger, eager to give them the pitch, slick and practiced and knowledgeable of which buttons to push for maximum, sympathetic effect.

  With my cherubic face, we made a good team. I gave her credibility. People were more trusting of us. As a duo, we got the benefit of the doubt, until one day she did snatch someone’s bag while waiting for her turn at a communal shower. She ran off and left me, her presumed accomplice, to face the music alone. It took all the vestiges of my Midwest charm to convince the others at the shelter I’d had nothing to do with the robbery.

  But it was a sign I should move on before I slipped up and gave something away. I’d lost my cicerone, my guide to the strange city, where every ten-block neighborhood was larger than my entire hometown.

  I was sitting on a bench in Central Park, eating a bologna sandwich on squishy white bread for breakfast, when Sherry reappeared, jumping out from behind the statue of Balto, a hero dog who’d saved a bunch of people during a diphtheria outbreak.

  “Ta-da!”

  She laughed and boogied around the statue as if we were two friends who’d planned to meet for a movie or an afternoon in the city and she’d been a few minutes late. I tightened my hold on my bag and kept eating, eyes down. The sandwich was rubbery and tasteless, but I’d been happy to score four of them last night when the do-gooder truck made its rounds circling the park. I made them last for two meals.

  “C’mon,” she said. “You’re not really sore, are you? I knew they wouldn’t call the cops on you. Look at you. Y
ou’re clean as a bar of soap.”

  That’s what she thought. Where was she when my crap attorney was looking for jurors? I almost blurted that out but bit my lips. If Sherry knew I was wanted and there was any kind of reward for my capture, I’d be in custody before I finished my bologna sandwich.

  “What do you want?” I said, trying to sound tougher than I felt.

  Sherry reached into her stash and pulled out something that looked frighteningly familiar to me. My passport. I dropped the sandwich and fumbled around in my bag to see what else she’d stolen. Squirrels miraculously appeared to make off with the few scraps of bread and bologna at my feet. I kicked them away as if they were rats.

  She held her hands up. “Nothing else, I swear. Take it,” she said, flapping the passport up and down, “before I change my mind. I could have gotten a nice chunk of change for it. It’s a testament to your good influence on me that I brought it back.” She gently placed the passport on the wax paper my breakfast had been wrapped in, trying to avoid the mustard.

  I was in shock. After my experience with Kate and Eddie, I knew enough not to trust anyone completely, but apparently I was still a stupid kid from Michigan who could be suckered into any setup and left holding the bag.

  A discarded newspaper fluttered underneath the park bench. Sherry pulled it out and tore off a corner of the masthead. She scribbled a name and a number on it with a pencil stub she fished out of her pocket.

  “Max will offer you a thousand dollars for it, but tell him I sent you.” She handed me the scrap of paper. “Hold out for two; he’s going to sell it for four anyway. And make him give you a fake driver’s license for free. He’s got tons of them. Pick a name you like. Pick a state.”

  She walked away swishing the bag she’d ripped off from the other girl. “I’d love to stay and chat,” she yelled, “but if I spend any longer with you, you’ll have me going straight. And that would be a terrible waste of talent. One last piece of advice. Wise up, trust no one.”