A Cold Case of Killing

by Glenn Ickler

  “She brought along your lawyer buddy, Linda L. Lansing, and didn’t even tell us as much as was in your story,” Brownie said. “Guess Mrs. Anderson didn’t think her husband’s lawyer was good enough to handle her defense.”

  “I confess to referring her to Triple-L,” I said. “I didn’t think her husband’s lawyer was good enough.” I’d watched Linda in action while covering several trials, and we’d been friends for years before she took Martha Todd into the firm.

  “Many thanks for making our job tougher.”

  “I just feel sorry for Jill in this mess. Are you charging her with anything?”

  “That will be up to the D.A. So far most of what we’ve got to go on is from your story in the paper. You can count on being a star witness if she is charged with anything and it goes to trial.”

  “Just what I need—fifteen minutes of stardom.”

  “You’ll be on the stand a lot longer than that. Teach you to stick your neck out so far for a story. Damn good one, by the way.”

  Wow, a compliment from the head of homicide. “Thanks. Anything new on Skeleton X’s identity? I assume Jill didn’t give you his name.”

  “She said she has no idea who he was and I believe her. I doubt that even her husband, who made the rotten deal, knew the guy’s real name. Unless somebody comes forward saying they had a pimping relative who disappeared twenty-five years ago in July, he’s going to remain Skeleton X in our records.”

  “Skeleton X doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy that anybody would miss.”

  “You got that right. Have a good day, Mitch.”

  * * *

  I HAD GIVEN UP on having a good day when Al appeared at my desk a little after 3:30 p.m. Not a word had been heard about the capture of Robert Obachuma, and nothing new had developed in the Marilee Anderson cold case investigation.

  “I just had the strangest phone call ever,” Al said. “I still can’t believe it.”

  “Somebody likes one of your pix?” I said.

  “Even stranger. Somebody claims to have recognized the person shown in one of my pix.”

  “You mean you had one in focus for a change?”

  “I bet you’ll stop making negative comments when I tell you who was in the picture that he recognized.”

  “Only if it’s Marilee Anderson,” I said.

  “Bingo! How’d you guess?” Al said.

  I did stop making negative comments. In fact, I stopped making any kind of comments. I just stared at Al.

  “It was a man with a voice that sounded like he was a hundred years old,” Al said. “Wouldn’t give me his name, said to just call him John Doe. He told me that he had seen the picture we ran showing what that missing girl would look like now. He said he has seen that face and can tell us where to find the woman.” Al paused for dramatic effect and I rediscovered my missing voice.

  “Where did he tell you she is?”

  “He didn’t. He wants to meet with you and me in person. And he wants money for his information.”

  “That’s a nasty complication. Did you offer him the fifty bucks we give people who call in tips that turn into stories?”

  “I did, and he said fifty bucks wasn’t even in the ballpark for an important story like this. He wants to negotiate what he calls ‘a suitable fee’ in a face-to-face meeting, and then he will tell us where to look.”

  “How about a fist-to-face meeting,” I said. “We could go beat it out of him.”

  “I’m hoping Don will have a less brutal solution,” Al said. “Anyway, he said he leaves for work at eight, so I set up a meeting for seven thirty tomorrow morning at his apartment in Falcon Heights. Now we need to talk to Don to see how much we can offer him, if anything.”

  Don O’Rourke was not much help when we asked about money. “You know we don’t go out buying news stories from the public,” he said. “Offer him a double tip fee—a hundred dollars—and tell him that’s tops for a tip that I’m ninety-nine percent sure will turn out to be nothing we can use in the paper.”

  I still had mock mayhem in mind. “Would it be okay if we beat it out of him?” I asked.

  “You’re not a beat reporter,” Don said. While Al and I rolled our eyes at the pun, Don added, “Just use your professional powers of persuasion. Play on his sympathy—just think how happy Marilee’s mommy would be if we found Marilee alive and well and living in St. Paul.”

  Thus Al and I agreed to use guile rather than gelt to extract the information from the mysterious Mr. Doe. We both left the office hoping that Don would be proven ninety-nine percent wrong the next morning.

  * * *

  THE FORD HAD replaced the Chevy in the police watch site when I arrived home. I was glad to see they were still on the job, and was hoping they wouldn’t have anything to do during the night. My thought was that the next day—after I’d safely made my early morning exit from our apartment to meet with John Doe—would be a great time for them to apprehend Robert Obachuma.

  I was bending down petting Sherlock Holmes when the doorbell rang. I straightened up so suddenly that Sherlock crouched and laid back his ears. I went to the front door, approaching from the side so I couldn’t be seen peeking out the window at the top of the door.

  I could see the top of a woman’s head down to her eyebrows. The eyebrows were dark brown, as was the hair above the forehead. I could not place either the eyebrows or the hair on any woman I knew.

  What the hell, it wasn’t Robert Obachuma ringing the bell. I opened the inner door and looked out through the screen door. There stood Marilee Anderson’s cousin, Lauralee Baker. I stared at her in silent amazement.

  “Hi, Mitch,” she said in that dusky voice. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” I said. “Come on in.” She sauntered in and I closed and locked the inner door behind her. Ever the gracious host, I said, “How the hell did you find out where I live?”

  “I have my ways,” she said. “Google is a wonderful thing.”

  “You found my address on Google?”

  “Eventually. You know you have a ton of bylines on Google.”

  I did know that, but I didn’t think my home address was in any of them. I decided not to pursue the how and get to the why. “What brings you here?” I said.

  “I need to talk to you. Is your wife home?”

  “No, she’s away for a week, trying a case in Moorhead.” Her reaction told me that I should have stopped with a simple no, omitting the distance and duration of Martha’s absence.

  Smiling a smile as broad as the grin on Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire cat, Lauralee said, “Well, what a shame. Could we go sit somewhere?”

  I pointed her toward the sofa and sat myself down in a chair facing her. She was wearing a filmy white blouse that was open well into her succulent cleavage and a pair of jeans that must have been applied with a paint brush. I wanted to ask how anybody could squeeze into such tight jeans but I was afraid she might peel them off and demonstrate.

  “What do you need to talk to me about?” I asked after finishing my visual inventory of her below-the-neck assets and shifting my gaze upward to her face. I realized that I should have recognized her long, luxurious dark hair from our previous meeting. Apparently that day I’d been concentrating so intently on anatomical revelations at a lower level that her hair had not registered in my memory.

  Lauralee crossed her jeans-encased legs, right over left, flashing a pair of bright red shoes with spike heels as she moved.

  “Originally I came to tell you that I’ve had a death threat,” she said, leaning forward to open the window for a more expansive view of her breasts. “But since you’re here all alone for a whole week, I might talk about something more pleasant.”

  I latched onto the original intent and ignored the possible pleasantry. “You’ve had a death threat?” I said in too loud a voice.

  She sat back in surprise at the strength of my response. “Yes, I have.”

  “Excuse my reaction
, but death threats seem to be going around. Any more and we’ll have an epidemic.”

  “Who else has had death threats?”

  “My next-door neighbor had one yesterday. Hers came all the way from Chicago. Where did yours come from?”

  Lauralee uncrossed her legs and the red shoes flashed again as she crossed them again, this time left over right. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was left on my voicemail while I was at work. It was a high raspy voice—I think it was female—and it said she knew from what she’d read in the Daily Dispatch that I’d been talking to the press about Marilee Anderson, and that if I did it again it would be the last talking I ever did.”

  “How would anyone know that you’d talked to me?” I said. “I’ve never used your name or referred to you as an anonymous relative in a story.”

  “I don’t know. You must have put in something that only I could have told you, but who would know that? Anyway, I thought you should know about it.”

  “I’ll have to go back and look at my stories. But as you said, who would know?”

  “All I know is that I’m scared. What if that creep reads another one of your stories and decides to come after me even if I don’t tell you any more about Marilee?”

  “Have you reported the threat to the police?”

  “No. Do you think I should?”

  “Absolutely. They might put a watch on your apartment, like the St. Paul police have done for my neighbor next door. She’s moved out while the cops are watching for the guy who made the threat.”

  Lauralee tilted her head and smiled. “Maybe I should move,” she said. “Maybe I could sleep here for a few nights. Keep me safe and keep you company while the little wifey is away.”

  “Like hell you’d be safe. The little wifey would break every bone in your body if she came home and found you in our bed. Better that you go home to your mama or some close friend.”

  She leaned forward again. “I’ve seen you staring at my boobs. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to wrap those big strong hands around them.”

  My sweat glands were beginning to function along my hairline and in my armpits again. “I won’t deny that it’s tempting, but it’s not going to happen. I think you should toddle along and find a nice unmarried man to spend a few nights with.”

  “I wish I knew one as hunky as you. How about just one night here? Your wife would never have to know.”

  “I’d know,” I said. “It took us a long time to learn to trust each other—several years in fact—and I’m not about to do anything that would leave me feeling guilty.”

  I stood up and held out both hands to assist her off the sofa. Instead she grabbed them and yanked me forward so that I landed on top of her as she fell backward on the cushions. Her breasts were pressed against my chest, her lips were jammed against mine, and her legs were wrapped around me. I could feel something come to life where our lower bodies met and I was sure she could feel it through the skin-tight jeans.

  One of Lauralee’s hands was clamped around the back of my neck and the other was inside my pants gripping my ass. I realized that I should have been struggling to break free, but I wasn’t. I told myself I had to get loose, and I was trying to peel her fingers off my neck when the doorbell rang. Saved!

  Lauralee released my neck and jerked her lips away from mine. “Who’s that? Is it your wife?”

  “Could be,” I said, knowing damn well that Martha would have unlocked the door and walked in without ringing the bell.

  Lauralee unwound her legs from around my waist and withdrew her hand from my pants, allowing me to roll off her body and onto the floor. “I better hide,” she said. “Where can I go?”

  “Out the back door,” I said, pointing the way. “There’s a little deck back there. If you hug the wall, nobody will see you.”

  We scrambled up and went our separate ways—she out the back door and me to the front door. I looked through the window and in the fading twilight I saw the familiar figure of a tall black man wearing a navy blue blazer and a dark baseball cap. I opened the door and through the screen I said, “Hi, Clarence. Come on in.”

  He pulled open the screen door and walked in. He stopped in front of me, studied my face for a moment, and said, “Who the hell is Clarence?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Not So Safe

  OBVIOUSLY I HAD made an egregious tactical error. In my fervor to free myself from Lauralee, I had tossed caution into the jetstream and opened the front door without due diligence. I was now standing in the entryway face-to-face with a man who was, as they say, the spittin’ image of Special Agent Clarence Jordan, but whose baseball cap bore the logo of the Chicago White Sox, not the Minnesota Twins.

  “Clarence is a friend who looks a lot like you,” I said. “Who are you?” I tried to make it sound like I really didn’t know.

  “Does it matter to you who I am? Don’t all black people look the same to you white folks?” he said. I heard a slight British accent in his speech.

  “Not to me. Clarence really does look a lot like you, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Just call me John.”

  I resisted the urge to say, “Another John Doe?” Instead I asked him what brought him to my door.

  “I’m looking for someone,” John said. “Someone who lives at this number.”

  I decided to play as dumb as possible, which was appropriate since I’d been dumb enough to let this man in. “Does this someone have a name?”

  “Jones. Mrs. Jones. Is she here?”

  “No, she’s not. This is a duplex. Her door is the one on the other end of the porch. You could go over there and try ringing her bell.” If I could just get him out of my apartment I could lock the door and call 911. Which reminded me, where the hell were the cops in the Ford? Had John done something to them?

  “Who else is in this apartment?” John said.

  “Just me,” I said. “I’m here all alone.”

  “You wear those?” He pointed past me toward the living room. I turned and saw a red spike-heeled shoe on the sofa and another on the floor.

  “Oh, those are my wife’s. She’s out of town for a few days. Didn’t pick up after herself before she left.” I tried to give him a disarming smile but it came off so weak it wouldn’t have disarmed a chipmunk carrying a peanut.

  “You sure nobody else is here?” he said.

  “Absolutely. Wife is away and I don’t have kids.”

  “And Mrs. Jones?”

  “Like I said, she lives next door. Why don’t you go ring her bell?”

  “I think I’ll do that. Why don’t you come along with me?”

  “Why would I do that? I’ve got nothing to talk to Ms. Jones about.”

  “I’ll show you why you’ll do that.” His right hand slid into his coat pocket and slid out holding a switchblade knife. He clicked the button with his thumb and a silver blade long enough to go halfway through my gut flicked out. The tip of the blade was pointing toward that very gut.

  “No need for that kind of persuasion,” I said. “I’ll be most happy to go with you.” Where were those goddamn cops?

  John jerked his head toward the door. “Let’s go. Before the cops watching for me get back.”

  “Cops?” I tried to sound completely ignorant of their presence.

  “Quit acting like a dummy. You know damn well they’ve been sitting out there watching the house. But right this minute, they’re tending to a little fire show I lit off just for their benefit down the block a ways.”

  Instantly my pulse shot up to over a hundred beats per minute. The help I’d been counting on wouldn’t be coming. I felt my face grow hot and my armpits become wet. All I could do was cooperate and hope John would decide to leave when we found Zhoumaya’s apartment empty.

  I had taken a step toward the door when the cell phone in my pants pocket rang. I turned toward John, shrugged, and pulled the phone out of my pocket. The caller ID said it was Alan Jeffrey calling.

  To John I said, “It�
��s my wife in Moor . . . uh, in Duluth.” Hoping he hadn’t noticed the mid-word geographical switch, I said, “I’d better answer it or she’ll be worried about me.”

  “Let her worry,” John said.

  “She’ll call a friend to come over here and check on me.”

  “Oh, shit, answer it,” he grumbled. “But make it quick. And be very careful what you say.” He emphasized “careful” by twisting the knife blade in a semi-circle an inch from my belly.

  I backed off a couple of steps, turned my back to John and spoke into the phone. “Hi, sweetheart,” I said. “Are you all settled down safely in Duluth?”

  “This ain’t your sweetheart,” Al said. “It’s just me checking on our meeting time in the morning.”

  “What? You say you have a problem?” I said. “What’s the trouble?”

  “What the hell are you babbling about?” Al said.

  “Somebody broke into your car? You’d better call 911.”

  “What’s going on with you?” He took a quick breath. “Oh, God, do you have a visitor? The guy you were talking about?”

  “Exactly. That’s the first thing to do.”

  “You want me to call 911?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you. It’s the only way to deal with that kind of thing.”

  “Gotcha. Hang in there.” The phone went dead.

  “Bye, sweetie,” I said. “Let me know how it comes out. Love you.”

  I made kissy sounds, closed the phone, put it back in my pocket, and turned to face John. “Somebody broke into her car in the motel parking lot and stole her GPS. Nice welcome to Duluth.”

  “Seems like there’s crime everywhere you go,” John said. “Ain’t that a shame? Now let’s us go call on Mrs. Jones.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Mind if I get a drink of water first?”

  “Yes, I mind. If you think you’re going to throw water in my face and grab the knife you’re even dumber than you’ve been acting.”

  I had no such thoughts; I was merely stalling for time. I shrugged again, opened the door, and went out onto the porch. Off in the distance to my right I could see the flicker of flames in the street. That had to be the diversionary fire that had lured away my uniformed watchdogs.