Maybe it was more.
Burke cut in. “We aren’t trying to be obtuse, John. Losing a brother is a hard thing. Believe me, Detective Macaulay and I sympathize. We are trying to establish patterns here, nothing more. You’d be surprised at the seemingly insignificant details that will break a case.”
“Is there a history of drug use in the family?” I said. “A relative, maybe. Uncle, cousin—someone David might feel more comfortable confiding in?”
Pella stood, dropped his mitt, fists clenched, face full crimson.
“You son-of-a-bitch! Is that what this is about? Rooting out the rest of the degenerates in the family? This is the kind of shit I have to be subjected to? That’s the way this is gonna go?”
“How’s that?” I asked calmly.
Pella took a breath and relaxed.
“There was a guy David brought by once when he was dropping off some papers for me to sign. Our mother was adding us both to her banking and investment accounts. He didn’t get out of the car and I didn’t ask for his name. I didn’t think of it until just now. Doubt it helps.”
“That’s great, John,” Burke said. “Just the kind of thing I was talking about. Maybe you could come down tomorrow and look at a few mug shots. Guy like this, if he got your brother involved in something ugly, he’s probably been in a scrape or two with the law before.”
Burke tossed the mitt into the pail.
“Maybe after work on Tuesday,” Pella agreed. “I could see if anyone looks familiar. I’m pretty good with faces.”
“Great. Say, what, four-thirty?” Burke said. Pella nodded, returning to his work. “Thanks for your time, John.”
“So what do you think, Mac?” Burke asked as we circled out of the maze of cookie-cutter homes.
“Pella’s hiding something,” I answered. “It could be he’s grappling with the guilt of spurning a brother who is now in a casket. No law against disapproving of your brother and his activities.”
“True enough,” Burke agreed.
“Could be the wife would be more forthcoming about her husband’s relationship with his brother. Say you make sure Pella comes in alone. Let him know you will be handling the mug shots.”
“Can do,” Burke said.
“There is something he’s not giving up.”
“No question,” Burke agreed.
“When you get him at the station, let him look through the books. Let’s hold off a bit with Dolan—see if we can get him to give up anything more than we’ve already got.”
“I’m way up front of you on this one,” Burke said.
“I figured.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
PELLA AGREED to come to the squad around 4:30, alone. Burke informed him I wouldn’t be present for the screening of mug books. I drove to the Pella residence around four, giving myself a half-hour in traffic to reach Centennial. A roll-over on I-25, just south of the I-225 split had traffic snarled so I exited at Hampden and drove east, past Kennedy Golf Course, where the annual DPD tournament would be held in July. Surface traffic was better and I reached the Pella residence at 4:25.
The Excursion was gone but the garage was open and the silver Audi I had seen the other day was parked in one stall. I rang the doorbell and heard a woman’s voice call out. A minute later the door opened and I met Kate Pella.
“Hi,” she said cautiously, the stock look of a homeowner waiting for the pitch.
“Mrs. Pella, I’m Detective Macaulay with the Denver Police Department. I’m in charge of the investigation into the murder of your brother-in-law.”
Her countenance thawed and she became friendly, almost doting. “Oh, come in, please. I just hate salesmen, don’t you? I thought you were selling something.”
“It’s not an uncommon first reaction, ma’am.”
“Can I offer you something, Detective? I just pulled a jar of sun tea from the deck. It’s no trouble.”
I smiled affectionately. “That would be great.”
She nodded and went to the kitchen, a room partitioned by a stucco wall that reached three-quarters of the way to a vaulted ceiling. The top of the wall was a shelf between the living area and the kitchen and was used to display a small arrangement of potted plants that looked too deep green to be real.
Kate Pella was an attractive woman, handsome in a mild, unobtrusive way. She was dressed in the comfortable attire of the stay-at-home spouse: black fleece sweats with a sleeveless lavender top that revealed her freckled arms, browned nicely by the workday sun. Her nails were unpainted and a trim of dirt under each indicated recent gardening. We exchanged pleasant banter regarding her prize roses, the young English Setter that seemed intent on rooting out something important from my lap, and the general sadness of the tragedy that had befallen the Pella family.
“Estelle is heartbroken,” she said, referring to the mother-in-law. “She loved David very much. I liked him, too. He had a good heart—he certainly didn’t deserve, well, no one ever deserves that.”
I sipped on the bitter iced tea with a slice of fresh lemon. It was cool and refreshing and I told her so and thanked her again. She was relaxed and strangely unaffected by my presence. I assumed her husband had not shared our last visit with her. She had the happy, plastic face of a woman who wasn’t in a position to expect such inclusion in matters. I wondered what lay beneath the facade of that merry existence of prize roses and jars of bitter brown sun-tea with lemon.
“We spoke to John yesterday briefly,” I said.
Her smile waned almost imperceptibly. “He didn’t say.”
“I don’t get the feeling your husband maintained much of a positive relationship with his brother.”
There was a pregnant pause as she formulated her response. “John didn’t approve of David’s life choices. At first, when David starting using, John refused to accept it. Then he tried to help. Nothing really made a difference. The people David got mixed up with…well.”
“I know it’s hard to talk about,” I said.
“John just tried to erase David from his life,” she said. “Whoosh. Like a blackboard. It hurt David very much. He so looked up to his older brother, idolized him really.”
“Did they ever have arguments? Anything recently?”
“They bickered, mostly. John is a big talker, but he would have been there for David if he really needed someone. It really hurt my husband when he got the news about his death. John hasn’t been himself since. I don’t think he’s been sleeping well, I hear him padding around the house at the strangest hours.”
“No fights or arguments then,” I said, drawing her back to the original question.
“Well, David came by, what, maybe a few days before he was killed. I wouldn’t exactly call it an argument.”
“This was, when, Thursday? Maybe Wednesday?”
“It was Wednesday,” she remembered. “Karen had just gotten back from gymnastics.”
“Would you categorize the discussion as unpleasant?”
“Meaning that John was not pleased?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Well, he wasn’t. Pleased, that is.”
“Do you have any idea what they were discussing?”
“Later, John said it was the drugs again. That’s all I know.”
“How did the visit end?”
“As they usually do. I never saw David again.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pella.”
“Please, didn’t I say it before? Call me Kate.”
I nodded. “One last thing. Were you here the weekend David was killed, I mean the whole family?”
“Yes. Well, no. John was here in the morning—Saturday morning—but he had some servers go down at the office that afternoon. He spent the whole day and evening there. Caught some sleep in his office when he could. It’s an occasional demand of the job.”
I checked the notes I had taken from Burke’s original interview.
“Your husband works at I-Port Communications?”
“Yes. He’s a sen
ior computer engineer.”
“And that’s in the Tech Center, right?”
She confirmed the location of the company her husband worked for and I told her that was really all I needed, that she was very helpful, and that we would be in touch. She showed me to the door and asked me to please find the person who had done the terrible things to David. I promised her we were doing our best and thanked her for the hospitality.
I called Burke’s desk from the cell and he picked up on the first ring.
“Burke, homicide.”
“I just left the Pella house. I’m heading to the Tech Center.”
“Pella’s got two books to go. Nothing yet, of course.”
“Enough chain-jerking,” I said. “Show him Dolan.”
I-Port Communications leased the top two floors of a building that looked like it was constructed completely of blue-hued glass—one of the newest skyscrapers to block the view of the mountains from the Tech Center in south Metro.
I wasn’t able to access the eighth floor because there was only a door with a badge-swipe, but on the ninth I found two glass doors with the company name, a logo, and a receptionist inside.
“Yes, sir?” The young girl with a wireless headset said.
I flashed the badge, long enough for her to lean over and get a look.
“Do you have a Mr. John Pella that works here?”
“Yes. Mr. Pella works on the eighth floor. A Unix programmer.”
“Is your security handled by the building?”
“Yes. Ground floor. Room 1100.”
“Thank you,” I said, and took a business card.
“Yes, sir?” said the woman in standard-issue, rent-a-cop blue and gray. She wore a GPS patch on the shoulder and her tag read Officer Smith.
“Hello, I’m Detective Macaulay.” She looked carefully at the badge and then at me, as if I was presenting my driver’s license to write a check at the supermarket.
“Officer Smith,” she said. “What can I do for you, Detective?”
“Do you keep logs of employee’s entrance and exits, in specific on the weekends?”
She was already nodding before I was finished. “Right here,” Smith answered, pointing to the computer monitor on her desktop. I leaned over and looked at the screen. Names scrolled past in white-on-black as people logged in and out of various rooms in the building.
“How far back does this go?” I asked.
“Backed-up once a day. The files are automatically saved to a folder...here,” she said, pointing and clicking until she had the folder she was looking for. There were twelve folders representing the months. I asked her if she could check last Saturday for me.
Smith navigated through two sub-folders and opened a file represented by Saturday’s date in reverse with a text extension. She scrolled the entire list for me, which didn’t take long. It didn’t seem I-Port employees pulled a lot of weekend duty. Neither did it appear John Pella had badged in at all on Saturday. I had her check Sunday just to make sure Kate Pella hadn’t gotten the weekend days mixed up. Pella had not been in since 3 p.m. Friday.
“Can I get a print-out of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday?” I asked. Smith nodded, already clicking the print icon in each opened document. A small laser printer behind her whirred and a few pages of text spewed out.
“You’re a whiz, Officer Smith,” I said and meant it.
She smiled, her cheeks rosy. “No problem, Detective.”
I arrived at the station half an hour later. Burke still had John Pella in Interview Five.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Pella barked.
“He works here,” Burke said, probably a little meaner than he had been the past couple of hours on the mug books.
I sat down without saying anything.
“Why am I still here?” Pella said.
“You’re not being truthful with us,” Burke said.
“The hell I’m not!”
“Tell us about that last picture,” I said.
“What are you talking about? You weren’t even here,” Pella scoffed.
“Tell us,” Burke said.
“I told you already—I’ve never seen that man before.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
“Nope,” said Pella. “Sounds like I should be calling an attorney.”
“You can do that,” I said. “When you do, we all stop talking, and your ability to share the real story flies out the window.”
“Out the window,” Pella snorted.
“Like a fucking bird,” Burke said.
“There’s no story to tell.”
“You didn’t like your brother much, did you John?” I said.
“Fuck you,” said Pella.
“What my partner meant by you sharing the real story is this: when the talking stops, we detectives start piecing together what we know. Part of what we know is that you and your brother didn’t get along,” said Burke.
“Says who?”
“Your wife, for starters,” I said.
He went beet-red.
“Tell us about the argument you had—when he visited you three nights before the murder,” Burke said, leaning in real close.
“You know how it makes us feel when people lie to us, John?” I said. “It makes us feel like chumps. You think we’re chumps, John?”
“I…”
Burke slammed his hand on the table.
“I’ve been real nice with you, pardner. But that’s about to change, real fast.”
“I, I...”
“There’s exactly two ways out of this room,” I said. “One, you tell us what you know and you walk out a free man. Able to go home and kiss your daughter tonight.”
“Okay,” Pella said, the bravado drained from his voice.
“Or there’s way number two,” said Burke, who had suddenly become the big, bad wolf. “Gonna be honest with you, Pella. You aren’t going to like number two, not one little bit.”
“The guy in the picture, that’s Marty Dolan,” Pella said. “He and my brother were selling dope together.”
“Go on,” Burke said, easing off—giving Pella that oh, hey, sorry to be so rude tone.
“David came by. He said he’d gotten himself into a mess of trouble. He didn’t know who to turn to,” Pella said.
“You tell him to take a powder?” Burke said.
“No,” Pella said. “It was different this time. I mean, I told him what a fuck up he was…how I told him this shit was going to mess up his life six ways from Sunday. But I could see he really needed some help.”
“So you helped,” I said.
“He was my brother. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“We know you weren’t at work over the weekend. Where you told your wife you were,” I said.
“The night your brother died,” Burke added, improvising a bit.
“Right,” said Pella.
“Where were you?” I said.
“Do I need an attorney?” Pella said.
“Listen,” said Burke. “You ask about an attorney again, I’m gonna have to go and let you get one. Get out in front of this, John. Now.”
“I got a hotel room. Near Sloan’s Lake. David was too scared to go back to his apartment.”
“Did he say why?” I said.
“He and Marty were stealing dope,” he said. “A lot of dope. From some bad people.”
“They’re all bad people,” Burke said. “Be more specific.”
“David wouldn’t tell me,” he said.
“So what happened?” I said. “How did David end up in the park?”
“He said he needed to get in touch with Marty. He was afraid if they didn’t get their stories straight, things were going to go south in a hurry.”
“So he left the hotel room,” Burke said.
“I thought I had him talked out of it,” Pella said. “He slipped out after I was asleep.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHEN I got back to the house, Greer was not there. She nor
mally parked her car on the street in front of my brownstone—when she was “visiting”, that is. Permanency in my house had been more and more of an issue that summer. It’d been an even bigger uphill battle with Cole home. Even though it’d been a number of years since his mother died, he had not moved on yet—not in a visceral sense, anyway.
And I didn’t like to push him. For that matter, neither did Greer. So it did complicate matters in a relationship that had been treading water a bit as of late. It felt strange for me to be the insecure one. First, I was a man. Men aren’t supposed to worry about the longevity of a relationship. Cliché Man is actually intended, I believe, to avoid such commitment at all costs.
But I’d been married for most of my adult life. It was certainly my comfort zone. Greer and I didn’t exactly argue about it, though it wasn’t her thing. And it was more than a wedge between us. Maybe not a full-on roadblock—not yet—but it was there. Always.
The elephant in the room.
So it was easy to lose track of the days—which ones she planned to spend at the house, when she and Charlie would be staying at the apartment. The two of them had been spending more and more time there. I think it was because the issues of commitment and permanency at my place were palpable, like the smell of burnt toast lingering in the air.
As I walked toward the front of the house a movement caught my eye. I turned and saw a short, squat man—shaped like a fireplug—hiding in the shadows beneath a tree up the block. Well, not hiding maybe, but definitely trying to minimize his presence. I stopped and made eye contact.
“Help you?” I said.
The man stepped into the sunlight and I was surprised to see that he was dressed in the attire of a priest.
“Detective Macaulay?” the man said.
“I hope that’s a costume. I’m not even qualified to rate as a lapsed Catholic.”
He walked down the block, obviously convinced he’d found his mark.
“Father West,” he said, offering a thick hand.
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