by Donn Taylor
“Jerry Vaughan and Mitra Fortier?” I asked.
Lee nodded.
“And the information you gave them?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“I have to know,” I said. “I’m in this thing too far to start playing safe.”
Mara answered with a nod.
“A week before Jerry Vaughan crashed, we were talking CPA stuff. I told him I was changing jobs from Steven Drisko’s Overton Technologies to one of Gordon Samstag’s companies. He said his firm was auditing both companies in the next few weeks. I told him to look at their accounts with an El Paso subcontractor named Dustin Industries, Incorporated. He asked why, and I said that was all I could tell him. A week later he was dead.”
Mara fixed her blue gaze on him. “Are you saying there’s a connection between your telling him that and his dying in the crash?”
Lee showed no expression. “I’m saying that a week later he was dead. I do know that he sent word to both companies that he was interested in Dustin Industries. I only began to wonder about it last week when Professor Fortier came around asking questions.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Accounting questions about Drisko’s and Samstag’s corporations, and anything I’d told Jerry about them before his crash. I told her what I’d said about Dustin Industries, and she said she’d have to look into that. Three days later, she was dead.”
Mara was the first with a follow-up question. “What was it about Dustin Industries that got you interested?”
Lee showed a sad smile. “As I said, I have family responsibilities. And there is a lady I hope to marry next year after my sister graduates. These things I can do only if I remain alive. You will have to find out about Dustin Industries for yourselves.”
He turned abruptly and disappeared behind the serving counter.
Noon had passed, so Mara and I left quickly, too quick even for Mrs. Lee to wish us Goo’ lock.
“What do you make of Lee’s story?” Mara asked as she turned her car’s ignition. “Could the word on that card Sally Finhatter showed you be ‘Dustin’ instead of ‘Ruskin’?”
“It’s worth looking into,” I said, “and I know how to start if you’ll run me by my house and let me check a phone number.”
“I’d rather run you by the emergency room and get you checked over. If you’ll pardon my saying so, you don’t look so good.”
I grunted, whether from pain or disgust, I don’t know. “I don’t need the emergency room. And I will not pardon your saying I don’t look good.”
Her blue eyes sparkled. “With or without pardon, you still don’t look good. So we’ll use a field expedient.”
I was wondering about her military jargon when she pulled into a strip center and parked in front of a health food market. She made a show of removing the ignition keys as she went inside, presumably so I couldn’t steal her car and proceed on my own. It’s nice to be trusted. A few minutes later, she emerged carrying a sack that obviously contained a bottle. She drove on without comment until we pulled into the driveway at my house.
“This is liniment,” she said, handing me the sack and the bottle. “While you’re in there, rub yourself down with it from head to foot. It will keep your muscles from knotting up.”
I took it silently but with gratitude. I already felt like The Wreck of the Hesperus.
Inside, I searched through my desk and finally found the number I wanted. Then I stripped down and rubbed Mara’s liniment into my protesting muscles. I couldn’t decide whether it smelled more like a rendering plant or a feed lot on a rainy day. It burned like acid, but it brought immediate relief from the worst of my aches. My blue suit hadn’t fared well in the wreck, so I changed to the brown one and rejoined Mara in her car.
She beamed at me. “I can smell ... uh ... tell that you used the liniment, Cupcake. You’ll feel a lot better by sundown.”
“If I don’t incinerate first,” I said.
“Actual combustion is rare,” she said.
I didn’t answer. I was afraid to open my mouth for fear of a flameout.
The threatened conflagration did not happen, though, and when we were established on the two-lane highway to Cloverdale, Mara broached another thought. “Have you noticed that no one is following us today?”
“I have noticed,” I said. “I’m thankful for small favors.”
She threw me an apprehensive glance. “But what does it mean? I can’t believe those yahoos have given up.”
“Change of tactics, maybe,” I said. “But I can’t imagine what.”
With that dead end, she changed subjects. “What’s that phone number you had to find?”
“An Army friend,” I said. “May I use your phone again?”
She handed me the phone, and I dialed.
Unlike Richmond Seagrave and me, Leonard Morley had made the Army a career. After twenty-odd years’ service, including work in procurement, he’d retired as a Colonel and established himself in Dallas as a business consultant.
His receptionist treated my request to speak with Len as if he were the pope. “Whom shall I say is calling?” she asked.
I resurrected my Special Forces voice. “Tell him it’s Preston Barclay with a Code Red.”
Len’s hearty voice came on a moment later. “Press, you old hump on a mangy camel, how come you’re scaring my receptionist with that Code Red nonsense?”
“I wanted to talk to you and not her,” I said. “She isn’t that cute.”
He laughed. “Don’t judge by the voice, son. Come down here and have a look.”
“I have faith in your good taste,” I said, “but I need some business info in a hurry.”
He humphed into the phone. “If you’d leave that academic fairyland of yours and come into business with me, you wouldn’t have to ask.”
“I’d rather ask,” I said. “I find business as boring as a lingerie ad without models.”
Mara scorched me with a coloring-outside-the-lines glance, and Len said, “Same old Press,” so I described the problem without further byplay.
At the mention of murder, Len grew serious. He knew of Overton Technologies and Gordon Samstag’s companies, but he’d never heard of Dustin Industries, Incorporated. He said he’d look it up and call me back.
“One other thing,” I said. “Could you have someone look at Dustin’s physical facilities?”
“Look at it?” His voice exploded into the phone. “Press, do you have any idea how far El Paso is from Dallas?”
“It’s just a thought,” I said.
“Then you’d better think again about Texas distances,” he said, and rang off.
Mara gave me a sly glance. “Winning more popularity contests, I see.”
“He has a flair for the dramatic,” I said.
“Speaking of popularity,” she said, “Emory Estes called to break our dinner date for tonight. I gather my TV appearance wasn’t good for his business.”
“The Blatant Beast bites again,” I said, “but Estes wasn’t good enough for you anyway.”
She sighed. “We broke about even. He used me as window dressing, and I used him to fight the rumors about you and me.”
Relief flooded through me. I had no claim on Mara, yet I felt relief that no one else had.
“It would never have worked out,” I said.
“You don’t seem to have any trouble with companionship,” Mara said, her voice hard and metallic. “You have one brunette and one corkscrew-haired blonde chasing after you.”
“Brill doesn’t count,” I said. “She had an axe to grind, and she might use it to chop my head off.”
“And the baby brunette?”
“A former student,” I said. “She majored in history.” That was the best I could think of. My conscience stabbed me for fantasizing about returning Cynthia’s love. But then I remembered the two critical lies she’d told me …
“Do all your former students rub circles on your back in public and leave
lipstick on your teeth?”
“Not all,” I said, my temper rising. “Some of my students are men.”
Now Mara’s temper was up. “Did she tell you she’d been married?”
“Cynthia? Married?” A thunderbolt crashed into my mind.
“Married and divorced. I found it in her personnel records the night you and I raided the Executive Center. Everyone on campus knew she’d thrown a fit at Mitra Fortier, but I guess it never occurred to you to look at her records.”
I didn’t answer. It hadn’t occurred to me to check her records, and now other words from Cynthia echoed through my mind— I’m glad I waited for you, Press and my all-too-accurate thought, She’d been practicing while she waited. I spent several minutes kicking myself for imagining a love affair with her. My Renaissance lecture on the Imagination returned with a vengeance, and I heard my voice reciting Shakespeare’s description of lovers, as frantic as lunatics, seeing ultimate beauty in ugly women.
Cynthia had true beauty, externally, but the waiting-for-you bit made the third important lie she’d told me. No amount of physical beauty could compensate for that.
“I didn’t know,” I said after a while.
We drove on in cold silence that matched the winter chill outside.
Cynthia also hadn’t told me she’d visited the Science Center the night Mitra was murdered, but I didn’t see how she alone could have killed Mitra. There were no signs of a struggle, and Mitra wouldn’t have let Cynthia get close enough to use the chloroform.
My morale hit absolute bottom. The only pleasant thing I could think of was that the stench of Mara’s liniment had dissipated. Either that or I’d gotten used to smelling it.
I forced my mind onto immediate problems. I needed to disprove the alleged affair with Mitra, and Mara needed to disprove the love triangle story and the pornography on her computer. Somehow those problems kept getting tangled up with Mitra’s murder and Jerry Vaughan’s death. All we could do about any of these was to keep asking questions. And some unknown person thought our asking questions constituted a danger to him. Or her. Otherwise, why the warnings and harassment by thugs? Who had ordered that harassment, and why? And was its cessation a cease-fire or only a change of tactics?
None of these things made sense. All we knew for sure was that we were driving to Cloverdale to interview Mitra’s aunt—and Ralph Dornberg, if we could find him.
Mara’s cell phone rang. I was still holding it, so I answered. Manny Clampett’s voice came through. “Press, your brake lines was cut clean through and bound up with duct tape. They’d hold just long enough to get you into traffic, and they’d give way first time you braked in earnest.”
That seemed to answer our question about a change of tactics.
CHAPTER 30
Storm clouds gathered overhead as we parked in front of Pleasant Meadow Residences in Cloverdale. The town had changed since my last visit several years ago. It then was a moderately prosperous agricultural town with a population of about ten thousand. Its architectural distinctions were a downtown area of red-brick two-story buildings and a periphery of grain elevators.
Since then, its population had increased by half as workers moved in to man high-tech industries that now served as the town’s commercial mainstay. The buildings housing those industries radiated newness and vigor. The older parts of town were sliding into a gentle seediness appropriate for a way of life once de rigueur, now becoming de rigueur mortis. The Pleasant Meadow facility lay in the fading section of town.
The front desk attendant cast a suspicious eye on me but passed us through on Mara’s statement that we were friends of Reva Cranewood’s recently deceased niece. We found Reva in a private room with her hospital bed raised to a sitting position. She had a well-lined face with silvery-gray hair, and she wore an old-fashioned cotton gown with a bed jacket that looked like it came off the rack in Wal-Mart. She hit the mute button on her TV as we entered. The room seemed overly hot, even after Mara and I shed our overcoats. She handed me hers, and I stood back as she became our official spokesman.
“Mrs. Cranewood,” she began, “we’re friends of Mitra Fortier from Overton University. Could we visit about her for a few minutes?”
“Call me Reva,” the older lady said, “and shut that door to the hall. Arrrgh! That smell! The wind must be blowing from that place outside the city limits where they burn old tires.”
Apparently, the liniment still reeked, and I’d only gotten used to it.
I shut the door and said, “The law ought to make the wind blow in the other direction.”
Mara scorched me with her ocular blow torch, and I shut up. Reva didn’t even glance in my direction, and I noticed that she didn’t look around when she spoke, but kept her gaze pointed at the TV.
“Reva ... ” Mara kept her voice soft. “Reva, we were wondering if you could tell us something about Mitra’s growing up. We only knew her as an adult.”
I reached in my pocket to switch on my voice recorder. It wasn’t there. Here was a conversation I desperately needed to record, and I’d lost my recorder. Where? Maybe in the wreck with my phone. To make matters worse, my internal musicians swung into a Louis Armstrong instrumental of ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You.’”
Mara’s hand moved slightly in her pocket, doubtless setting her cell phone to record. I breathed a sigh of relief.
“The very idea of burning tires right here in town!” Reva said. “But that’s not what you came for. Mitra was seven years old when her mother died, and Mitra came to live with me. Her mother— my sister—married a real ring-tailed no-good. Sissy knew he drank when she married him, but he got worse. They had angry shouting matches, and then he’d go get drunk, and Sissy would dread his coming home. She used to hide Mitra in a closet so Rafe couldn’t beat up on her.”
“I’m sure she was better off with you,” Mara said.
Reva snorted. “You’d better believe it. That was no home for a child, and Mitra lived with it for seven years. Then Sissy died. Rafe was happy enough for me to take the child, and then he went downhill fast. Finally went to prison for burglary. We never heard from him again.” She kept gazing at the silent television, or maybe through it.
“How long did it take Mitra to get past all that?” Mara asked.
“She never did. Oh, she finally came around to trusting me— even shared confidences with me at times. Like last week, she came down to visit. Worried, she was, and needed to talk. You know she lost her fiancé in that airplane crash? Well, last week she told me Jerry’s death wasn’t no accident, but she didn’t know how to prove it.”
We waited, afraid to prompt and afraid not to.
“She said Jerry was about to uncover some kind of scandal. She knew the college’s trustees were mixed up in it, but she wasn’t sure which ones. Or maybe only one. But she’d bust her gullet if she didn’t find out and make him pay. Or them.”
Reva gave a bitter laugh. “Looks like she was the one who paid.” For the first time, she looked straight at Mara. “Other folks are paying, too. I don’t see much, you know—they call it ‘immaculate degeneration’ or some such—but I hear pretty well, and I listen to TV. So I know who you are and why you’re here.”
We waited again, uncertain where Reva’s tale would go next.
She sighed and changed course, her half-seeing eyes back on the muted TV. “Mitra always did well in her studies, all the way through school. She dated some boys in high school, but every boy would disappear after two or three dates. Then late in college, she met that Cochran fellow, a really bright one. So they got married, and I guess they were happy for a year or two before the divorce. The poor fellow couldn’t take it and started drinking—like Mitra’s father did, except he was a crying drunk instead of a cursing drunk.”
“So she divorced him?” Mara’s voice grew husky with emotion. Memories of her own bad marriage, I guess.
“No, he divorced her.” Reva shook her head. “Like I said, he couldn
’t take it.”
“Couldn’t take what?” My own voice surprised me. Mara rewarded me with another scorch.
Reva went on as if she hadn’t heard. “By the time she came to me, it’d become a habit she never broke. Her home life was too awful to think about, so you can’t blame her if she played ‘let’s pretend.’ But her pretend world got to be more real to her than the one she wanted to forget.”
Reva sighed again. “At first, it was just playing dress-up with her as Sleeping Beauty and a handsome prince to come kiss her and take her away. Then in junior high she started writing stories, instead. She’d breeze through her homework. Then she’d shut herself in her room and write in those books—stories about herself and one-or-another man that loved her. Sometimes it was a movie star and sometimes just an upperclassman that caught her eye, but she always built him up into an ideal no man could live up to. That’s why her dates went somewhere else. She never told them, of course, but they all somehow realized they couldn’t match what she expected.”
Mara spoke in a whisper. “You read her journals, of course.”
“Her stories? Of course I did.” Reva spoke in full voice. “I read those romance books of hers, too—some of ’em scandalous. I had to know what she was doing, so while she was in school, I read what she wrote. They was just love and romance, perfect like it could never be in real life. Better she did that than hang around the pool hall, and a fantasy never got anyone pregnant. Before she went off to college, I talked to her about her stories. She was mad at first, but then she seemed glad to share with someone.
“Mitra said it couldn’t hurt as long as she knew the difference between the real world and the make-believe world. And she did keep them separate. No one could complain about her schoolwork. Brilliant she was. But every now and then she’d get to feeling low and let everything slide. It’d only last a few days, and then she’d be herself again—catch up her schoolwork and everything else.”
That rang a bell with me. A couple of times a year, Mitra had gone through periods of depression. Faith would spend evenings with her until things got better.