“My lawyer?”
“Me, until you find somebody else.” I turned the receipt to face her and laid it on the small table she was using as a desk. “Tell me about the jacket they took.”
“It’s an old jacket that hangs on that hook by the back door. It’s not one I wear very often. Sometimes I throw it on when I take out the trash.”
“Why did the police take it?”
“I don’t know. They seemed interested in something on the sleeve. A stain of some sort.”
“And the utensils?”
She wet her lips. “A corkscrew, a food thermometer, and…a rusty looking ice pick they found on the floor between the counter and the wall.”
“Which counter?”
“The one out there.”
“Where any patron could have dropped it. When you say rusty looking…”
“The blade had dark splotches on it.” Her expression was earnest. “Robin, I’m scared for Brian.”
“Me, too,” I acknowledged.
“I’m going to go down to the jail this afternoon. I need to see him.”
I sighed. “You can’t. He gets one visitor every seven days. His sister saw him Saturday.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“He seems to think he’s covering for you.”
“Covering for me how? Why would he think that?”
“He found your glasses case with a dead woman, and he took it,” I said. “He tried to leave town, and now he’s doing a good job of remaining silent.”
“I thought he was running because things looked so bad for him.”
“Taking off had the effect of directing suspicion to him—and, possibly, away from you. That may be why he left the glasses case in his apartment. He knew the police would catch up to him, and he didn’t want it found on him.”
Whitney got her glasses case from under the table, opened it, and extracted her sunglasses. She handed it to me. “Here. Do what you need to to save Brian.”
I shook my head. “There’s nothing I can do with it now. Once I took it out of Brian’s apartment, it was too late for that. I could have gotten that case anywhere.”
“You should have left it then.”
Changing tack, I said, “You knew your cousin was trying to have your uncle declared incompetent, didn’t you?”
“I do now. Mr. Propst said something about it in one of his phone calls.”
“When we opened the safe? You didn’t have anything to do with the petition?”
“No.”
“Did your uncle seem in need of a guardian or someone to take charge of his property?”
“I wouldn’t have said so.” She hesitated. “Actually, there was one time I went by and he seemed a little loopy. I made it a point to go back the very next day, but he seemed fine then.”
“Did you ever mention his being loopy to either of your cousins?”
She shook her head solemnly. “Brian and I talked about it.”
“You talk to Jack Packard since the funeral?”
“I haven’t seen him.”
“I’m going to try to this afternoon.”
“Why? What could he have to do with anything?”
“Nothing that I know of. I’m trying to get some insight as to what was going on in Robert’s life before he died. Just in case there’s any sort of connection.”
“Between Uncle Robert’s death and Macy Buck?”
There was a knocking from the counter out in the restaurant. “Hey, is anybody back there who would like to take my money?” Whitney had a customer. The lunch rush had begun.
She stood, and I stood with her. “You gonna be all right?” I asked her.
“I guess I’d better be, hadn’t I?”
A half-block up from Carytown Joe I found a sandwich shop where I got a couple of vegetarian clubs—avocado slices, alfalfa sprouts, and so forth—on millet bread, which, the menu assured me, was gluten-free. I took them to my car. The sun felt good in the crisp, cold air, and I swung my arms as I walked. On a back-swing, a jogger appeared suddenly on the sidewalk behind me and got smacked in the groin with my sack of sandwiches before I realized he was there.
“Sorry,” I called after him, but he was by me, hunched a bit but maintaining his pace. “I applaud your dedication,” I called out to his departing back. He waved a hand, but didn’t turn his head.
By the time I got back to my office, it was after twelve. I was afraid I’d missed Brooke, but she was still in her office.
“You haven’t gone to lunch,” I said as I came through the archway.
She swiveled her chair to face the door. “I was waiting for you. How’s Paul?”
“It may have just been dehydration. He’s been on some crazy kind of diet.”
“I know.”
“How do you know? I just found out about it.”
“You hadn’t noticed he’s been losing weight?”
“Well, sure, I could see he was looking better.”
“He’s convinced he’s going to lose you if he doesn’t lose fifty pounds.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to tell me.”
“Somebody could have told me.” I dropped the sack of sandwiches on her computer desk. “I brought lunch. If you knew so much, why is this the first I’ve heard about it?”
“I didn’t want to interfere.”
“Well next time, interfere. I can’t have people pining away over me.”
“What would you have done?” She opened the sack and took out the sandwiches. “They look good.”
“Told him to stop.”
“Oh, yes. That would have worked. ‘Stop pining, Paul.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ What are they?”
“The sandwiches? Veggie clubs on gluten-free bread.”
“Sounds healthy.”
“It’s low-cal, except for the avocado. We’re having a big meal at Enrique’s tonight—you, me, Paul, and Mike.”
“Mike McMillan? Paul’s friend?”
“Yes. We’re going to have a victory meal to celebrate however much weight Paul’s lost, and we’re going to rehydrate him in the process.”
“Does that mean margaritas?”
“Well, not for Paul. Alcohol is dehydrating. The rest of us could have margaritas.”
“Paul’s not going to like that.” She took a bite of her sandwich. “It’s good,” she said around the mouthful.
“Good.” I took a bite of my own sandwich. “I think the avocado is the stand-in for meat.”
“It works.”
Rodney wasn’t in his office, but he’d left a legal pad with Jack Packard’s address and two phone numbers on my desk. I sat and called the one that looked like a landline, but it was no longer a working number. I could have gotten an address and a nonworking number from the phone book, I thought as I dialed the other number. No reason to hire a detective.
There was no answer at the second number either, but an old man’s voice invited me to leave a message. I did, giving him my name and number and asking him to call me.
Packard lived on Arrowhead Road, not a street I knew. According to Google Maps, though, it was on the Southside. I tapped the desk with a finger. What else did I have to do, I thought.
Jack Packard’s neighborhood looked like it had been established around 1960: Big brick homes with lots of trees, and winding streets with no curbs or sidewalks. Jack’s house was a one-story affair with a patchy lawn that sloped down from the street. A ten-year-old Toyota SUV was parked at the bottom of his cracked and pitted asphalt driveway. He was home.
About halfway down the driveway, I parked, set my parking brake, and got out. There was a fence at the end of the driveway, just beyond Packard’s car, but because of the slope I could see over it into a wooded backyard.
The sidewalk that curved from the driveway to the front door was flanked with the overgrown skeletons of some kind of bush. After one of the leafless arms snagged at my dress, I stayed strictly to the center of the walk,
turning sideways at one point where they grew almost together.
The front door was a step above the level of the sidewalk, and the doorbell chimed like a grandfather clock. There was no answer. I opened the storm door and knocked, with the same results.
“Well, crap.” I fished out my phone, found the working number I had for Jack Packard, and tried it again. Voice mail. It was a nice day for February, maybe sixty degrees and sunshine, but Jack’s front stoop was in the shade, and I found myself shivering. I pulled open the storm door again and tried the knob, but it was locked, and the door itself was as solid and unmoving as if it were part of the wall it was set in.
I stepped back, letting the storm door fall shut with a bang. As I was winding my way back down the sidewalk, it occurred to me that Jack must not use his front door much. The thorns of the leafless bushes would tear at his clothes every time he went in or out. I bypassed my car and walked down the driveway to try a door that went into the house a level below the main floor: Jack had at least a partial basement. It was locked. There was a small, screened window next to the door, but I couldn’t see anything through it.
The privacy fence at the end of the driveway had a gate—padlocked, natch—and I gave it a shake. The fence did have a little wiggle to it, but not enough to encourage me. I plodded back to my car.
As I was backing out of the driveway, I noticed a newspaper protruding from a paper box set on the post below the mailbox. Leaving my car running, I got out and walked around to pull out the paper. There were two other newspapers in there with it, Saturday’s and Sunday’s. Jack hadn’t gotten his paper since Friday, which made it look like he had left home and had not come back—except that his SUV was right there at the bottom of his driveway.
Macy Buck had died on Friday.
I pushed the newspapers back into the box and stood looking down at Jack’s house, the cool breeze catching at my skirt and hair. A shiver lifted the hairs at the nape of my neck.
I shook it off. After a quick glance up and down the street, I pulled open Jack’s mailbox. He had mail, quite a bit of it. I stood there sorting through it. There was a bill from Dominion Resources, a statement from Bank of America, something from Gold’s Gym that looked like a bill. The earliest postmarks were “10 Feb”—Thursday. The most recent were dated 12 Feb. Jack might or might not have picked up his mail on Friday, but he surely hadn’t gotten it since.
A cloud passed over the sun, and I looked up as the day darkened perceptibly. I shoved Jack’s mail back into the box, got into my car and sat with the car idling, the heater warming my bare legs. Jack might have two vehicles, I told myself, or he might have gotten a ride to the airport or someplace. He might have called a taxi.
Or he could be lying incapacitated inside his home, unable to reach the door or even his cell phone. He could be dead.
I put my car in drive and drifted back down the driveway, braking at the sidewalk. This time I skirted the sidewalk with its grasping rose bushes and walked around the front of the house, my heels, low as they were, sinking into the lawn enough to make walking difficult. There was a six-foot privacy fence on this side of the house, too, but no gate. There might be a gate at the back of the property, but trees and brambles and waist-high weeds grew all along the outside of the fence. In these clothes and these shoes, I wasn’t going to make it back there.
Discouraged, I slogged back over the front yard to the driveway. Not only was the damn house impregnable, but I couldn’t even get into the backyard.
I stepped up onto the rear bumper of my VW Beetle, bracing myself with one hand, trying to see something other than trees beyond the privacy fence at the end of the driveway. I won’t tell you the possible courses of action that I considered and discarded, almost all of them highly inappropriate for a member of the bar. What I should do, I knew, was call the police and tell them Jack Packard had gone missing, then return to my office to await developments. Whether and how the police chose to pursue the matter was not my business. This was one occasion when I needed to behave prudently, and that’s just what I was going to do, right after I tried one more thing.
I got the screwdriver out of my glove box and went to the little window by the side door, pushed the end of the screwdriver between the screen and the window frame, and levered out the screen. This was as far as I was prepared to go, I told myself as I propped the screen against the brick wall of the house. If the window was locked, I wasn’t going to break the glass. I was going to return to my office and call the police.
Tucking the screwdriver into the waist of my skirt, I pushed up on the window sash—much harder than necessary, as it turned out. The bottom sash slammed upward in the frame.
I stepped back and looked up the driveway. It looked like I was going in after all, and suddenly I didn’t want to. I got my cell phone out of my pocket and called Paul.
“Hey, Paul,” I said when he answered. “Did you ever get out of the hospital?”
“Yes, Mike brought me home. Where are you? You never came back.”
“Do you remember me mentioning Jack Packard?”
He didn’t.
“Everyone says he was Robert Walsh’s best friend, and I actually saw him at the funeral. He’s a sturdy-looking guy with white hair he wears in a flattop. He read some scripture.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
“I’m at his house. No one answers the door, and it doesn’t look like he’s been here for several days.”
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking about breaking in.”
“Well. I did just manage to get a window open.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Paul?”
“I don’t guess it would do any good to tell you to leave it alone.”
“You could try it and see.”
“Robin. You need to leave this alone. Leave the window how it is. Just get back in your car and drive away.”
I thought about it. “Not good enough,” I concluded.
“Robin…”
“I’ll just take a quick peek, then I’m out of here.”
He exhaled audibly.
“You might call me back in five or ten minutes, just to check on me.”
“If you don’t answer, I’m calling the police.”
“Don’t be too quick to do that. I may still be trespassing.”
It’s not as easy as you might think for a woman who’s five-foot eleven and wearing a dress to wedge herself through a tiny window with a sill about four or four-and-a-half feet off the ground. Let’s just say I managed it and that I’m glad no one was watching.
The first thing I did was grope for a light switch. An overhead light came on to reveal an old couch, an easy chair, and a flat-panel television. There was a burgundy area rug over a linoleum floor, and, incongruously, rich wood paneling that consisted of individual boards rather than the usual sheets of paneling.
I moved quietly across the room to a door and a straight staircase, going up. The door opened on darkness. When I found the light switch, I found myself looking at an unfinished basement with a wall of tools hanging on a pegboard, a row of shelves, and a several stacks of boxes. “Jack?” I called softly.
The furnace cycled off and plunged the house into sudden silence.
I closed the door as quietly as I could and remained standing at the bottom of the steps for several seconds, my eyes tracking a series of dark splotches that trailed up to a closed door. I leaned forward and touched one of the splotches. It was dry. I sniffed my finger, but it just smelled like a finger.
I climbed the steps into the silent house.
The hinges of the door at the top creaked alarmingly, and I stopped on the top step to listen. “Jack Packard,” I called through the partially open door. “Are you home?”
If he was home, he wasn’t saying. I stepped up into a recessed corner of the kitchen, feeling suddenly foolish. The man was out of town for a long weekend, and here I was prowling around his empty house to no purpose except to
add wear and tear to my adrenal gland.
There were a few more splotches on the kitchen floor, more clearly visible in the sunlight streaming through the windows. The splotches here were black and uneven, perhaps with a reddish tint near the edges. I walked around the counter that separated the table and chairs of the breakfast nook from the kitchen proper and found a smeared splotch several inches across. When I crouched over it, trying to detect a pattern in the smear, I caught a whiff of a sharp odor and gagged. I put a hand on the countertop to pull myself up. I had no doubt that what I’d been looking at were dried drops of blood.
A siren whooped once from the front of the house and then was silent. Through the dining room windows I could see the flashing lights of a police car parked in the driveway behind my car. I turned and looked wildly around the kitchen. There was a phone on the wall by the refrigerator. I snatched it up, but there was no dial tone, and I remembered that it was no longer a working number. I fumbled for my own phone, dialing 9-1-1 as I ran for the front door and unlocked it.
“What is the nature of your emergency?”
“My name is Robin Starling. I’m at the house of Jack Packard at 4121 Arrowhead Road.” The ring of the doorbell and the screech of the storm door sounded almost simultaneously. “He hasn’t answered his phone or his door for several days.” There was a pounding on the door. “Today I tried the door, and it was unlocked. The house is empty, but there’s something that looks like blood on the floor in the kitchen.”
“Open up. Police.”
“Are you in the house now?” the emergency dispatcher asked.
“Yes, and someone’s pounding at the door. I’m scared.”
“Don’t answer the door. Lock yourself in a bathroom and stay on the line. We’ll get a patrol car there as quick as we can.”
The knob turned and the door started to open as I hotfooted it down a hall that ran parallel to the front of the house. When I came to a bathroom, I went inside and closed the door and locked it. Already there were footsteps in the hall.
Laughing Heirs (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 13