“Don’t know. Can check the report.”
I shook my head. “Just curious.”
I quit trying to imagine what she’d seen, what had been in her head. I studied the inside of the car. The dashboard, steering wheel, doors, all the hard surfaces were dusted gray with powder. Even though the car was older and smaller than Fran’s sedan, with fewer gizmos, the fingerprint powder was the only dirt in the car.
“Can you show me exactly where she would’ve—held the gun?”
Rudy raised his right arm, using his finger to point behind his ear but not quite as low as his earlobe.
“Like this?” I tried to mimic him. He bent over and pushed my right elbow back, directing my finger at a sharper angle behind my ear.
“Of course, to hold the gun, her hand would’ve been about here, not with her finger jammed against her head.” He pulled my arm back a few inches. A sharp muscle spasm made my arm jerk out of his grasp.
“Where would her head have been?”
“On her shoulders?”
“Smarty. Was it on the headrest? Was she leaning forward? Was her arm resting here?” I patted the headrest of the passenger seat.
“Don’t know for certain.” He stooped over, his hands on his knees, and studied the seat. “From the looks of things, I’d say she was leaning back on the headrest.”
“Do you have your gun? Could we try it? Is it about the same size?”
He looked dubious.
“Just unload it. It’ll help to think it all through. Was she about my size?” The image of her small, pale hand in the crime scene photo flashed to mind.
“About. She might have weighed less.”
Never crossed Rudy’s mind that was something no female, however clinical, wanted to hear.
He unholstered his pistol, popped out the clip, and pulled back the slide to make sure no round had been chambered. He left it open. “Keep your finger off the trigger.”
Surrounded by the smell of stale blood, I was glad he was maniacally safety conscious.
I hooked my index finger into the trigger guard and tucked it safely behind the trigger, then hefted the pistol. Even without the clip full of bullets, it was an unwieldy weight.
“No, farther back.” Rudy pushed my elbow and tried to guide the muzzle to the sweet spot behind my ear.
“Oww!” My arm jerked forward in a self-protective reflex. “I don’t bend that way.”
Rudy studied me, then wrapped his hand around both the pistol and my hand. “Try this.”
He slid my thumb into the trigger guard, twisting and pulling just short of dislocating my shoulder. I could feel that the muzzle still wasn’t quite in the spot he’d pointed to earlier.
“Could you pull the trigger like that?” He let go of the gun. I tried squeezing the back of the trigger guard, but I couldn’t hold the heavy weapon. It slipped from my grasp. Rudy stood close enough to grab it before it slid out the open door onto the concrete floor.
“Maybe her arms were longer than mine.”
Rudy cradled the pistol in his hand, lost in thought.
“Maybe.” Rudy reached in his pocket for his gun clip, reloaded, and holstered his gun. The holster snap sounded loud in the quiet garage.
I leaned back against the headrest, studying the inside of the car. Except for the gore and its sick-sweet metallic odor, the car was immaculate. Worn, but free of clutter. Unlike mine, which still served as a second home as I shuttled between my parents’ house, my new apartment over the office, and the lake cabin. Would the cops have cleaned out any clutter, gum wrappers or old newspapers? Maybe.
Over the rearview mirror, the cloth lining on the roof was wrinkled. My gaze kept passing over it, noting it because it fell at a demarcation between where the fabric was blood-spattered and where it wasn’t.
I reached out to touch it, a reflex I have for straightening things. When I brushed the fabric with my fingertips, a four-inch section gaped open at the edge, quite the opposite from what I’d intended.
“Oops.” I started to tuck the fabric back under the plastic band around the windshield when I felt something underneath.
“Hey, be careful,” Rudy said. “Don’t mess that up.”
I ignored him, slid my index and middle finger into the opening, and pincerlike slid out a rectangle of stiff paper.
Until I saw it clearly in the light from the open door, I thought it was a torn piece of cardboard interliner.
Rudy leaned in the door. “What’s that?” He wasn’t going to mess up a case over a stupid chain of custody issue.
“The photograph.” I held it by the edges and turned it so Rudy could see.
“This has to be it,” I said. “The photo Neanna found stuck in her grandmother’s scrapbook.”
Rudy took it by the edges and stood, studying it.
“Who keeps a photo like this in the family photo album?” he said.
I now had a visual for the phrase “deathly pale.” Never again would I use that to describe something that gave a meek imitation of reality. Just as Fran had described her, Neanna’s aunt Wenda reclined across a stone bench, her feet on the ground. Twenty-three years ago, the camera flash had reflected at just the proper angle, freezing her lifeless face in stark detail.
The only color on the photo came from tiny droplets of blood that had soaked through the headliner and left rusty dots on the paper.
Rudy said, “I’m more curious about where she got this than why she kept it.”
“Neanna’s grandmother had it.”
“So where did she get it?”
“Beats me.”
He stood outside the passenger door, his head bowed over the photo.
“I need to get Fran French to identify this. Can you get her into the office?”
“She’s back in Atlanta.”
He kept studying the photo. “Somehow this doesn’t look like a crime scene photo. Maybe I’m just used to looking at Lester Watts’s atrocities.”
“Maybe a news photographer snapped it.” I couldn’t imagine why, or why anyone would offer it to the victim’s mother. “Maybe that’s what they used to identify the body, so her grandmother didn’t have to endure viewing the body in person.”
“Maybe. We don’t let them keep the photos as souvenirs, though. Can we fax this to your client? Make sure this is Miss Lyles’s aunt?”
“Sure. Or we can scan and e-mail it.”
“Not on the equipment I have. You can do that?”
“Sure.” I swung my legs out the door and stood, careful not to touch anything. We were both smudged with graphite powder.
“Let’s go by your office and reproduce it,” Rudy said. “Then I’ll log this in with the file. Maybe give the guys who went over this car some lessons on where smart people hide things.”
“Dear Lord.” I remembered the photos he’d shown me at lunch. “Hiding things. Whoever tore up her trunk and her suitcase was looking for something.”
I looked at the photo Rudy held. “Looking for that.” My voice was almost a whisper.
“Probably so,” he said and reached down to lock the car door before he pushed it shut.
Wednesday
“It wasn’t exactly part of the scrapbook,” Fran said when I called after faxing the photo. “It was stuck in the front, just loose.”
“This was the only photo like this?”
“The only loose one. The newspaper articles were pasted in. Of course there were pictures in those, but no other loose photos.”
She was quiet a moment. “It was like Gran wanted to know everything, to capture everything. Then one day she just stopped. I guess the newspaper quit covering it. Things just petered out.”
We were both silent, thinking about a woman who’d tried her best to hold together her daughter’s life and who’d pieced her death together as best she could.
“Avery, why would Neanna hide that picture in her car?”
I hadn’t told Fran about the rifling of the car trunk. The circumstance
s of identifying the photo offered enough difficulty for one phone call. She didn’t need to know any more right now.
“I’d like to have a private investigator check out Neanna’s last boyfriend. Is there anybody else in Atlanta we should talk to?”
“Gran had a cousin she was close to. I don’t know if that would be helpful. Sidalee Evans. But I told you, Neanna and Dirick broke up. Some time ago.”
“That’s been known to provoke some guys. If nothing else, I’d like to mark him off the list. It shouldn’t take long.”
The line stayed quiet for too long.
Finally, she said, “His name is Dirick Timms. I don’t know his phone number, but he lived in an apartment near Georgia Tech, last I heard.”
“You happen to know his birth date?”
“Um—no. Yes. October 31, Halloween. Easy to remember.”
“Okay.”
“I was also thinking,” Fran said. “Can you find Nut Case and that guy she was so interested in meeting? He might know something.”
“The police can locate him. I’ll—”
“It won’t hurt for you to talk to him. I’ll feel better if you do.”
“Sure.”
“Avery, while you’re looking at boyfriends, have you learned anything about Aunt Wenda’s death? I just have this feeling—it’s not right.” She stumbled, searching for words. “Somebody knows what happened to her. I see these cold cases solved on TV all the time. Maybe enough time has passed. Maybe you can find somebody who’ll talk now. It was so important to Neanna. I just want—to do that for her.”
Tears thickened her voice and she paused for a moment. “Since you’re so interested in boyfriends, Aunt Wenda was dating some guy Gran didn’t trust. He hit her at least once. Gran called the police, and from then on she blamed herself because she couldn’t make Wenda see the danger. I can still hear her: ‘If her father had been alive, they’d’a been calling the ambulance, not the cops. I was too much a coward; I let him continue to draw breath.’”
Her voice broke in short breaths. “Gran couldn’t hold Aunt Wenda back. It was like she was on the edge of an abyss. Like I tried to talk Neanna out of leaving Atlanta. Now I know—”
She must have covered the phone or held it away, but I could hear her jagged breathing.
“Fran?” I hoped she could hear me. “Fran, I’ll talk to you later, when I know something more. Okay?”
The phone clicked off.
I couldn’t imagine Neanna’s life and her losses, and I couldn’t imagine Fran’s grief. No point in telling Fran it wasn’t her fault. Words weren’t going to make her believe that.
I waited a few seconds, then picked up the receiver and checked for a dial tone. I flipped through my Rolodex—one of the few organized parts of my previous life I’d managed to maintain.
I dialed Rowly Edwards in Atlanta. I’d lucked into Rowly in February, during a frantic, misguided trip to Atlanta on another case, when he picked me up in his cab at the airport. What I needed now wasn’t his cabbie skills or his country-music singer/songwriter skills. I needed his private eye wannabe skills. Last I’d heard, he’d finished his training course and had taken a job with an investigation firm to work off his apprenticeship. Who better to cover Atlanta for me?
His voice mail message said he was unavailable.
“Rowly, it’s Avery. See what you can find for me on a guy named Dirick Timms.” I spelled it for him. “His birthday is October 31. He was living in an apartment somewhere near Georgia Tech. May have a record. See what he was up to last Friday night, if you can.”
I talked fast to get all the information recorded and left my office number.
As I walked through what I was beginning to think of as Shamanique’s office, she came in carrying the mail. More brochures from experts wanting to improve my office function or win my cases for me and magazines I needed to read to keep up in a field where I no longer played.
“Put the sales brochures in the recycling basket.” I pointed it out under the desk. “Stack any bills to be paid with their envelopes in this top drawer.” I hoped there weren’t any. “Put the bill stubs and everything else in the to-be-filed basket. No, wait. Maybe we’d better have a new mail stack, so I can go through it first.” I was still trying to think through the best work flow.
“Okay if I listen to my music?” She pointed to a tangle of delicate wires and an MP3 player.
“Sure. Oh, and a book should come today or tomorrow, about running a law office. Thought that might be helpful to read. When you run out of things to do, you can get familiar with that legal-research site. I left the Web address on your desk. I may get a callback from Rowly Edwards. You have my cell number if he needs to talk to me.”
I could’ve put Shamanique on Dirick Timms’s trail. If she’d worked for Edna, she was probably handy at skip traces. But Rowly was on the ground in Atlanta and could size this guy up without spooking him. It also gave me a chance to hear what Rowly had been up to lately.
I headed for the stairs to change into my work clothes. If I couldn’t put in some billable hours on a case, might as well work off some of my rent.
The bells on the front door jangled about the time I got to the top of the stairs. Something to help me procrastinate on cleaning the rest of the light fixtures, which would further delay my inevitable appointment with the wax rings on the toilets.
In the entry hall, Colin “Mumler” Gaines and the ghosters stood peering all about, through the doors into our offices, down the back hall, and up at the soaring staircase, watching me descend.
“Hi,” Colin said. He gave a shy wave, his elbow at his side, his hand raised in a sideways salute. “We were wondering, is Mr. Bertram in?”
“I don’t know. Do you have an appointment?”
“No, ma’am. We were passing by, thought we’d—”
Melvin picked that moment to swing open his French doors like a landed gentleman making his study available for brandy and cigars.
He got a wave from Quint and a handshake from Colin. Trini stayed closer to the front door, her hands intertwined in an awkward knot of fingers.
“Do you have a minute?” Colin looked from me to Melvin and back. “We had a quick question and you’re the very people who would know.”
Trini nodded her head in affirmation or encouragement.
Melvin hesitated before he stepped aside. “Come on in.”
In the front room of Melvin’s two-room suite, a leather sofa sat under the window opposite the French doors, flanked by two leather chairs. In the bay window that overlooked the wraparound porch, he had two armchairs and a large pie-crust table that probably cost more than his Jeep. Though it was arranged for comfortable conversation or for reading, Melvin never sat in here. Too much on display, I supposed. He likely had a lavishly furnished den upstairs as well.
It made a nice gathering place for a visit that I expected Melvin would keep short.
The three ghosters sat on the sofa, reminding me of three blackbirds perched side by side on a fence.
“Mr. Bertram, we were wondering . . .” Colin indicated his fellow black-clad birds. “We heard that you arrange investments?”
Oh, this was going to be good.
Melvin settled in the club chair facing me. Colin sat on the end of the sofa closest to me, so I got the full effect of Melvin’s response. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. I knew that expression. Melvin leaned back in his chair, his legs crossed, his tasseled loafers spit-shined, his gray slacks creased.
The kids obviously didn’t hear what he didn’t say, but to me the tension at the corner of his smile and the steel gray-blue gaze spoke volumes.
“Yes, I do arrange investments.” He didn’t lean forward with the intensity he shows when something catches his interest.
“We were wondering what it would take to attract investors for our project.” Colin’s excitement carried him to the edge of his seat. “You see, we have this idea for a TV series. We’ve decided on a
name. On the Ghost Hunt. And Quint here even wrote theme music for it. Didn’t you?”
Colin nodded to Quint as if urging a reluctant child to give a hug to the grandma who always pinched his cheeks. Quint rubbed his knees and started humming, Turn, turn, turn-turn tum-ta-tum, and bobbing his head in time to something that sounded like an off-pitch mix between Mission: Impossible and Scooby-Doo.
“This could be really big. We were talking about it with a couple of cops, and this guy said you might be interested, maybe to invest yourself or for somebody else. One of your clients.”
I slipped my hand over my mouth, assuming what I hoped was an unobtrusive, thoughtful expression. This was too rich. Oh, I was glad the bells on the door had beckoned me back downstairs.
“May I ask who told you I might be interested?”
“One of the cops.”
“Oh?” Melvin let his gaze slide over to me. “Where did you meet up with this cop?”
“At the graveyard last night.”
Uh-oh.
“Did you get some good film?”
“Uh—no.” Colin’s gaze danced from the Persian rug to his partners to the door. “Not really.”
Quint came to the rescue. “We had set up and started rolling. You just tape, you know. ‘Cause you can’t ever tell what you might get.”
Trini sat between her partners, nodding.
“Then we heard this noise. I almost levitated, it scared me so bad. Trini screamed. Man, can she scream.”
His tone indicated he meant this as a compliment.
I knew where this was headed. With the hand covering my mouth, I dug my fingers into my cheeks to keep myself from laughing.
Colin picked up the story again. “This lady, dressed all in black, appeared outta nowhere. She had this air horn and she let ‘er rip. Jeez, I thought it’d busted my eardrums.”
“Then the police came,” said Quint.
“Mrs. Amey,” Melvin said, his voice businesslike. He looked like he was playing with a rough cuticle. He was avoiding looking at me.
“Yeah, man. How’d you know?”
“She lives in the graveyard, in the caretaker’s house. She doesn’t take kindly to people who interfere with the cemetery, especially at night.”
Hush My Mouth Page 11