Dying Embers

by Robert E. Bailey

  “What do you want?” asked Fairchild.

  “Ross told me to bring Hardin,” said Max.

  “Stay here,” said Fairchild. He walked over and spoke with Ross.

  Ross shook his head and then beckoned to us with a wave. “Just Hardin,” he yelled.

  I walked over and offered my hand. The contents of the glove box of the Lincoln lay scattered on the passenger seat. Ross peeled the latex glove off his right hand and took mine. “You still here?” he asked.

  “You told me not to leave town.”

  “Yeah, well, now you can go. The sooner the better.”

  “What about your snitch?”

  “Tragic accident. One of the four people hurt in the panic.”

  “You really think so?”

  “The sheriff thinks so,” said Ross.

  “How come the lights went out?”

  “Somebody sprayed graphite silly strings into the main breaker box.”

  “Happen often?”

  “Never heard of it before.”

  “Max said that he needed me to vouch for his whereabouts last night,” I said.

  Ross made a dismissive wave. “I never doubted him. This is a suicide. Dixon left a note on his PC.”

  “How many bullets were left in the gun?”

  “Five. He stuck it in his mouth. It’s not like he was going to miss.”

  “Dixon was a cop. You think he’d leave a loaded gun behind?”

  “Dixon was a fed. It ain’t the same. Lawyers and accountants shouldn’t be allowed to carry guns.”

  “PI’s?”

  “Two strikes. Listen, I got shit to do here. Why don’t you have Max take you to the airport?”

  “I’m not quite done here,” I said.

  “I got an address on that Jacob Anderson,” said Ross, “but I’m afraid if I give it to you he’ll turn up on my dance card.”

  “Too late. That’s him over there with Max. We had breakfast this morning.”

  “How did you pull that off?”

  “Hardy Boy stuff—when the power went out, the ATM ate my bank card, so I had to spend the night at the bus terminal. Turned out that Dixon had the security account there.”

  “I’m surprised Max gave up an undercover operative.”

  “He didn’t, really.” I said. “He went to Jack and told him someone was asking about him.” I waited for Ross to give me a nod. “How old is Jack’s address? Jack doesn’t seem like he’s from around here.”

  Ross started pulling his glove back on. “Two weeks,” he said. “He bought a fishing license—got nothing from the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

  I said, “Jack came out and introduced himself. My luck runneth over, even Mama Rosa bought me a steak.”

  Ross laughed and looked at his watch. “You’ve got about two and a half hours to find an oyster bar.”

  “Not really?”

  “Really! Mama Rosa is a fixture here. She does a lot of good for people. You have to look at it like jury duty or a draft notice. She gets pissed, the breakfast portions get small.”

  “You’re a young stud,” I said. “You can fill in for me.”

  “That’s the thing—as sweet as she is I think she still harbors some ugly prejudices,” he said with a smile. “I find it deeply troubling.”

  “Deputy Fairchild?”

  “Makes it a point not to eat breakfast.”

  “Never a cop when you need one,” I said. Ross turned back to the Lincoln. I cleared my throat and asked, “What if—”

  “You still here?” said Ross without looking up.

  “What if your snitch wasn’t an accident and Dixon wasn’t a suicide? I can tell you for sure that the graphite in the switchbox wasn’t a high school prank.”

  Ross turned and straightened, his face dour. “I wouldn’t push that idea if I were you.”

  I took out the key for the bus station locker. “You remember the guy I said followed me here on the plane?”

  “Yeah, he talked on a cell phone and lit a cigarette. A regular desperado.”

  I held the key up. “In this locker at the bus station there’s a soft drink cup. Take the lid off and you’ll find a digital camera. His fingerprints are on the camera and his picture is in the camera.”

  Ross took the key with his gloved fingers. “How on earth did you do that?” was written on his face, but he said, “More Hardy Boy stuff?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You went through Dixon’s property?”

  “Doing it right now.” Ross stared at the key.

  “My client is looking for a ring of keys and some mail addressed to Light and Energy Applications.”

  “They looking for the computer discs too?”

  “Yes, sir.”.

  “They were lying on the desk in front of Dixon. The mail and the discs were bound together with a big red rubber band.”

  “How many discs?”

  “Seven. If your client wants their stuff, they can have it after the inquest.”

  “What was on the discs?”

  “Dixon’s brains,” said Ross.

  12

  WENDY SAID, “LET ME SEE IF I HAVE THIS RIGHT. You want me to send flowers to a woman for you.”

  “Not from me, from us.”

  “Just get on the airplane and come home,” said Wendy.

  “Exactly what I plan to do. But we may need contacts out here and the woman’s like a local Mother Teresa—except for this one little quirk about being horny and luring men with large cuts of beef.”

  “Just what did you do to attract this woman’s attention?”

  “I had a full set of teeth and calf skin boots.”

  “Why didn’t you say, ‘I’m married?’”

  “It’s not like she came on to me. She gave me steak and eggs for breakfast. Turns out to be a public announcement of her intentions.”

  “Well, what were you doing at her house?”

  “I wasn’t at her house. It’s a restaurant. Breakfast Nook, something like that. She runs some kind of subsidized government food program. It’s the only place open in the morning and they said she’d cash the Western Union check.”

  “How was the steak?” said Wendy, with crouched feline menace.

  “Terrible, tough, ack-poohy—wouldn’t have eaten it if I hadn’t been starving.”

  “That good?”

  “Wasn’t bad.”

  “Look, this has to be a joke,” said Wendy. “Some guys pulling your leg.”

  “That’s what I thought until her son met me at the door and told me to bring flowers and come early because his mother needed her sleep.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him you were married?”

  “My basic plan was to get the hell out of the restaurant.”

  “How about a wine and cheese basket?”

  “Sounds about right,” I said.

  “Good. You got your check cashed,” said Wendy, deadpan. “Go buy her one.”

  “No way I’m going around there. I don’t have a ride. And in the afternoon, for entertainment, she and her son go out and maim elephants with a stick.”

  “Fine,” said Wendy. “I really would like to have this woman’s address.”

  “I have little doubt that Mama Rosa, Brandonport, Iowa, is all the address you need.”

  “Sure. What would you like on the card? Thanks for the memories?”

  “How about, ‘Thank you for being so kind—Art, Wendy, and the boys. I think she’ll respect that.”

  “This is stupid.”

  “No, this is being nice. I think we just talked about being nice.”

  “Maybe there’s something else we need to talk about.” Wendy banged the telephone in my ear.

  • • •

  I got the hell out of Dodge—or tried. Mechanical difficulties delayed my flight out of Quad Cities Airport. I had four hours to kill and used the time to write up the Jack Anders report. The sun was already teed up on the eastern horizon when my flight rumbled onto the runway at Kent County
International Airport. Wendy read while I drove. It’s an hour drive to get to the house. She had little to say—after years of carping about my moustache—not a word.

  My ominous dark sedan lurked in the drive, in front of the garage. “Hey,” I said. “You got my car fixed.”

  “Ben picked it up for you,” she said. She marched into the house while I got the bags.

  Rusty’s nails clicked on the foyer tile as he pranced and waggled through his “welcome home” dance. Dogs are always glad to see you. A night spent on a chair in the airport wouldn’t make them cranky.

  I dropped my suit in a pile at the foot of the bed, but Wendy hustled to claim the shower. Rusty trotted into the bedroom with his battered Frisbee and dropped it at my feet. He backed into his “let’s play” crouch and fixed me in the glare of joyous eyes.

  “Well, I suppose,” I said. Rusty closed his mouth around the pink sliver of tongue and perked his ears up. “But if I went out dressed like this, it would be a scandal, dog.”

  Rusty let his fanny collapse onto the floor and watched me eagerly. I pulled on a pair of gray sweat pants—cut off to make shorts—and a matching sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder and the neck cut into an air-conditioned vee.

  “Check this out,” I said as I threw my suitcase onto the bed. Rusty turned his head to follow me with his eyes. He gave me a couple of furtive tail wags but dropped his chin onto his paws. I opened the suitcase, pulled out my new hat—not too misshapen from the trip, I punched it up a little—and plopped it on my head. “What do you think?”

  Rusty bounded to his feet and pushed the Frisbee over to me with his nose. He backed up and stared at me with his chin high and his tail fanning.

  “All right,” I said and picked up the Frisbee. Rusty bounded down the hall, and I could hear him nosing the screen door as I stepped into a pair of blue deck shoes. I knocked on the bathroom door and told Wendy I was taking the dog out. No answer. She probably didn’t hear me over the sound of the shower.

  A twist of the screen door handle launched Rusty into the yard like a rocket. The sun promised a warm day despite a lingering morning chill. Rusty did his ground-to-air doggy number, leaving loopy trails cut in the glistening dew that frosted the lawn. He caught a long floater near the end of the drive and trotted across the road to a fence post where he checked his mail.

  We made our way the half mile to the corner at Ashley in short jogs, with Rusty occasionally stopping to study a message and pen a short reply. On the way back, Rusty—out of ink but unperturbed—left several blank missives.

  As we returned to the end of the drive I saw the porch light flash a summons. We hustled up the drive. I opened the door, and Rusty nosed into his water bucket to fill his fountain pen.

  Wendy met me at the top of the stairs, wearing her fluffy white bathrobe and a turban made of a red bath towel. She smelled of talcum powder and herbal shampoo.

  “There was a break-in at your office,” she said, handing me my pistol, keys, and wallet. “Marg’s in a terrible state. She said she was afraid to go back into the office and afraid to wait for the police. Go!”

  • • •

  I found Van Huis’s fake woody van and a Kentwood patrol car guarding the lot behind my building. The yellow curtains Wendy had hung on the window next to my desk spanked in the breeze from my office window. A pane of glass leaned against the side of the building, near the window frame.

  I left my silly hat on the seat, locked my gun in the glove box, and walked over to inspect the window. Fingerprint powder coated the glass, but no prints had been revealed. I shoved the curtain aside to look in and found Van Huis wearing his game face and a tan suit looking out. “They came in your window,” he said.

  “Ya think?”

  “Are you Arthur Hardin?”

  “I’m the evil twin, Jerry.”

  “Do you rent this space?” he asked.

  “Why, yes I do.”

  “This is a crime scene, Mr. Hardin. We’d like to take your statement. I can have a patrol officer drive you to headquarters if you like.”

  “Headquarters, Jerry? You have one building and you share it with the District Court and the Fire Department. What I’d like is to know what’s going on.”

  “It’s Detective Van Huis, and you may come down as far as the door.”

  The News 9 van lurched up the apron into the lot. Generally speaking, a penny-ante burglary doesn’t rate that kind of attention. I ran for the front door and down the stairs. Van Huis met me at the entrance to my office.

  “Where’s Marg?” I asked, surprised to hear the edge of panic in my voice.

  “She’s in the top floor lounge giving her statement to the patrol sergeant.”

  The contents of Marg’s desk drawers and file cabinets littered the floor. The chip-camera had been ferreted out of the smoke detector and smashed into a lump on her desk. Video cable jerked out of the suspended ceiling had left the floor cluttered with acoustical tiles.

  Through the door of my office I could see the broad beam of someone in blue police trousers bent over at the waist. “When did this happen?” I asked.

  “Marg called it in at seven forty-four this morning. She said that everything was fine when she locked up at around three yesterday afternoon. Can you tell me what her duties are?”

  “Mostly, she tries to keep me in line.” Van Huis gave me his business face so I said, “She spends the rest of her time doing taxes and accounting. Strictly her business. We split the rent but she gets a break for acting as my secretary.”

  Van Huis asked, “Was there a recorder on that video line?” He took out his pad and clicked his pen.

  “No, I’m sad to say—just used that to sort the cusses from the customers.”

  The bent-over trousers straightened, and I recognized Patty Oates, the Kentwood evidence tech. She wore her light auburn hair short and brushed back from her face. A furious case of teenage acne had left her with a stippled complexion. I waved but she looked away.

  “We need to find Lorna,” I said. “Sometimes she comes in to write up her stuff when she’s done on the street.”

  “Lorna has a key to the office?”

  No, she usually comes in the window. “Sure,” I said.

  Van Huis wrote in his pad and then asked, “She have a key to your private office?”

  “No lock on the door.”

  “How about your desk and the storage closet in your office?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Lorna didn’t do this.”

  Van Huis gave me the blank and expectant face cops are so good at.

  “Yes, she had a key for the closet,” I said. “The radios and battery chargers are in there. I bought the desk used—never had a key. I keep her job assignments in a file folder in my lower desk drawer. If I’m not here she picks up her work from the file.”

  Van Huis scribbled away. “When do you expect her in?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been out of town. I can page her if you like.”

  “I don’t want you to touch anything in here,” said Van Huis. “Just give me the number.”

  I gave him the number. “This is my office,” I said. “My fingerprints are all over this place.”

  Van Huis looked up from his pad, paused, and studied my face. Finally he said, “Maybe not.”

  “Okay, Jerry,” I said, “Cut the crap!” I could feel my jaws tighten. “What the hell is up here?”

  Van Huis looked at my office door and called out, “Patty, you done in there?”

  “Not even close,” she said. “I’m still working on the surfaces. I have to bag and tag the rest of this vomit. I’ll do the prints in the lab.”

  “We’ll wait,” said Van Huis, then looked back at me. “What have you been working on?”

  “You know better than that,” I said.

  Van Huis made that expectant face again. I didn’t add anything. He asked, “Some widow have you looking into the contents of her late husband’s estate?”


  “Vomit, Jerry. I do vomit! Just like the lady said.”

  “Mr. Hardin, I’m sure that wasn’t a comment directed at you, personally or professionally.”

  “’Mr. Hardin?’” I said.

  “The hell it wasn’t,” said the lab tech.

  “God sakes, Patty!” Van Huis snapped, then looked back at me. “Are you storing or investigating anyone else’s property, Mr Hardin?”

  “Nothing like that. What’s in my office?

  Van Huis wrote in his pad. When he looked up he asked, “What then?”

  “I don’t discuss my clients and you know damn good and well the kind of work I do.”

  “I need to hear it from you,” he said, without looking up from his pad.

  “Screw you, Jerry.” I found myself watching—praying for—a squint, a flinch, the pause just before the move. Nothing. “Read the license on the goddam wall.”

  “It’s Detective Van Huis,” he said, in a monotone.

  “Asshole!”

  Van Huis squared his shoulders and raised his head. The move was in his eyes—then gone. “Mr. Hardin,” he said, all public servant, “I know this is upsetting. I have to ask some questions. You may feel they are personal, but I assure you they are important.”

  “Okay, Detective Van Huis. I’m not surprised this is all a mystery to you.” He looked back at his pad. I watched him close his eyes and stifle a head shake. “I do insurance defense, product liability, liability loss, and a lot of surveillance. I try to avoid domestic work. My favorite is criminal defense. I get appointed by the court, lose money doing the work, but I get to catch a lot of cops with their procedures on hold and their heads stuck up their asses.”

  “Maybe you have a side business,” he said, looking up now, his face malevolent. “Maybe something like mail order.”

  “I’m a detective—a good one,” I said. “My customers pay me because I’m good. I don’t have a city to pay me to stumble around and shrug my shoulders while I wait for an informant to save me breaking a sweat.”

  “Hey, Patty,” Van Huis called out, looking toward my office door.

  “Yeah.”