A Perilous Conception

by Larry Karp

  “Did she seem different in any way before she vanished? Worried? Unhappy?”

  Mansell shook her head. “Not that I remember.”

  “Okay. Now, you’ve got me curious about something. You made it sound like Ms. Wanego didn’t have a very good attitude for a supervisor. Why did Dr. Hearn appoint her?”

  Mansell’s lips moved, but for a few seconds, nothing came out. I waited. Finally, she said, “Technically it was Dr. Hearn’s decision, and I was in line to get the job. But Dr. Hearn told me Dr. Camnitz ordered her to give it to Alma. Dr. Hearn did get me a raise, though, and she said we should both hang in and give Alma all the rope she wanted, that she’d hang herself for sure…I guess that’s not the best way to put it, but that’s what she said.”

  “But why would Dr. Camnitz think Ms. Wanego was better qualified for the job than you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Dr. Camnitz could tell you.”

  “Sometimes you get a better answer from the sergeant than you would from the general. Look, Ms. Mansell. My station house is no different from your lab. When strange things happen, people talk about them. Now, here’s a department chairman ordering a lab director to appoint someone to supervise a lab full of people who dislike her. I can’t believe no one in the lab wondered why, and no one talked about it to anyone else.”

  “I don’t know if I want to spread gossip.”

  I extended both arms. “Spread it all over me.”

  She couldn’t hold back a little laugh. “All right. The word was, Dr. Camnitz and Alma were having an affair. Satisfied?”

  “I’m getting there. Was it ‘They must be having an affair, why else would he have insisted she get the job?’ Or was there anything specific?”

  Mansell picked at her teeth with the point of a pencil. “Well, for one thing, Lois Rockford—she was the supervisor before Alma—Lois told me she once brought Alma up for insubordination, but Alma got off with a warning, which really bugged Lois. So she went to Personnel, and they told her ‘somebody with influence’ had gotten involved, and made it pretty clear who that somebody was.”

  She frowned. “Also, Alma took a lot of short vacations, a few days here, a few days there, and they always seemed to be when Dr. Camnitz was away too, usually at a medical meeting. In fact, the time she took off right before she disappeared was one of those. I remember because the techs complained to Alma that two of them had scheduled time off for the Labor Day weekend far in advance, and for Alma to also be away would mean the two techs who weren’t scheduled off would have to work around the clock to keep experiments going on schedule. The techs filed a complaint with Personnel, but by the time it got attended to, Alma had already disappeared.”

  “To no one’s great sorrow.”

  “No one that I knew, anyway.”

  She started to get up. “I’m sorry, but I really do have to get to work now.”

  “That’s fine. You’ve been very helpful. One more quick question. Do you have Ms. Wanego’s address, where she used to live?”

  “Yes, that’d still be in the files. I’ll get it for you.”

  “Thanks. Then I’ll leave you alone.” I fished a card out of my wallet, put it into her hand. “If you think of anything else you’d like to tell me, please give me a call. And in the meantime, I’d like you to keep what we’ve talked about strictly to yourself.”

  She nodded. “I will, Mr. Baumgartner.”

  “And don’t worry about Dr. Camnitz hearing anything of what you’ve told me.”

  Finally, a genuine smile. “I’d really appreciate that.”

  ***

  Twenty minutes driving uptown took me to the Sheepskin District, with its narrow streets and small frame houses, most of them rented to students, junior faculty, and staff. The address I had for Alma Wanego was on Northwest Forty-Sixth Street, between Nineteenth and Twentieth, a yellow frame two-story with a waist-high wraparound porch. I rang the bell three times before I heard someone call, “Just a minute, be right there.”

  Finally, a young woman opened the door and peered through the screen, shading her eyes like the light bothered her. She wore a light blue blouse, nothing underneath, and a pair of red shorts. No shoes.

  “If you’re selling something, forget it,” she said.

  I pulled out the badge, held it up to the screen. “Detective Baumgartner, Emerald Police,” I said. “Can I come in and ask you a few questions?”

  “What about?”

  “Alma Wanego.”

  “She doesn’t live here any more.”

  “I know that. Look, Ms…”

  “Corrigan. Katie Corrigan.”

  “Ms. Corrigan. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m investigating a serious crime, and I need to talk to you.”

  She mugged impatience as she unhooked the latch on the screen door. “Did something happen to Alma? I haven’t seen her since last September. Did you guys re-open the case, or something?”

  “Or something. Okay if I come inside?”

  “Sure, if you don’t mind it’s a little messy.”

  “If I had a problem with messes, I wouldn’t be in police work.”

  I followed her into the living room. ‘A little messy’ didn’t quite say it. The room was a hodgepodge of dirty dishes and glasses, scattered books and papers. T-shirts, shorts, and a bunch of female underwear were all over a sofa with a torn green corduroy cover. Katie tossed a brassiere and a pair of almost-nonexistent panties onto the floor, grinned, and motioned me over. “Have a seat.”

  I sat at the end of the sofa. Katie tilted a wooden chair forward, dumping probably a hundred sheets of paper, then sat. Her breasts bulged above the top of her low-cut blouse. She was a full-bodied woman, olive skinned, with huge deep brown eyes over a nose with a prominent bridge and wide lips. I pointed at her copper hair. “Except for that, you look more like a Caterina Columbini than a Katie Corrigan.”

  Katie shrugged. “My mother was Italian. She always did call the shots.”

  I wondered if she’d put it that way on purpose. While I was thinking about it, she used both hands to rake her hair back behind her ears. “What can I do for you, Mr. Bumgarter?”

  That struck me funny; I laughed. Which set Katie laughing, too. The air in the room seemed to clear. “I’m hoping you can give me some information.” I said. “We’re taking a look at Alma Wanego’s disappearance.”

  “Now? It’s been more than half a year.”

  I nodded. “Sometimes things come up. Did you move in here after Alma left?”

  “No. There’s two bedrooms upstairs, and Mrs. Harrison, that’s the landlady, she rents this place out to two women at a time. Alma was here before I came, and it’ll be two years in September since I moved in.”

  “So you were here with Alma for just about a year before she disappeared.”

  “Simple arithmetic, yeah. Hey, did you find her body, or something?”

  I shook my head. “Have you heard anything from Alma since last September? Anything at all?”

  “Not a word. After she was gone a month, Mrs. Harrison asked me to help pack up her stuff, and she rented out the other half of the apartment to somebody else.”

  “Where does Mrs. Harrison live?”

  Katie jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Right next door. She likes to keep a watch on what goes on around here.”

  I did a slow sweep of the room with my eyes.

  “No sweat, it’s cool for another week. The old battle-ax is off visiting her sister in Michigan. Besides, the plaster walls’re real thick in these old houses. There’s a lot you can get away with if you just keep the windows shut.”

  “I’m sure. Who’s the new renter? Is she around?”

  Katie snorted. “You kidding? Patty’s a pre-med. She was off to the library the minute it opened, and she
won’t be back till they throw her out at midnight. I wouldn’t want to be a pre-med for anything. Not with the hours they gotta work.”

  “What’s your major?”

  She made a face. “I majored in Psych for two years, but my grades weren’t good enough and I lost my scholarship. So now I’m a secretary in the Psych Department. I’m trying to save up and go back and finish school.”

  “What happened to Alma’s things after you and Mrs. Harrison packed them up?”

  “We stored them in the basement. Mrs. Harrison didn’t want any legal crap if Alma showed up and wanted her stuff. It’s a full basement, and the boxes hardly even took up a whole corner.”

  “What did you and Alma talk about? Guys? Family? Hobbies? I’m looking for anything that might give me some idea why she disappeared.”

  Katie shook her head. “Alma and I weren’t real close. Frankly, she was a pretty weird person. She had this look that got you to thinking maybe she could read what was in your mind, creepy, you know? And she could be pretty sarcastic.”

  “Did you ever meet any of her friends or her family?”

  “She never did say much about herself, but I do know her parents died in a car crash a long time ago. And I never heard anything about brothers or sisters.”

  “Any boyfriends?”

  “Not that I knew about. But there was this one thing…”

  I shifted my ass away from a spring that was threatening to pop through the sofa cushion and give me the goose of my life. “What’s that?”

  “See, Alma had this habit of going off for maybe three days here, five days there, without saying anything to anybody. And then, like out of nowhere, she’d be back. Once, when I asked her where she’d been, she gave me that so-what look and said she’d gone fishing. Please. Alma didn’t like the out-of-doors, never went camping or anything like that. She said if God wanted us to sleep on the ground in tents, He wouldn’t have given us mattresses and box springs.”

  “But when she was gone a week, two weeks, a month, still nobody called Missing Persons?”

  A dark red smudge spread over Katie’s cheekbones. “Mrs. Harrison said she figured Alma must’ve decided to beat her out of the next month’s rent, so she didn’t see any reason to go to all the bother of reporting her missing. I guess maybe I should’ve put in a report, but I didn’t want Mrs. Harrison to get pissed off and kick me out. Now, I’m feeling a little bad about it.”

  “Don’t. We’ve all got things we wish we could do over. Do you remember anything about those times she was away? You said they weren’t for very long. Was there anything that linked them together? Time of the month or year? Did she ever say anything about them, besides the bit about fishing?”

  Slow shake of the head. “No…nothing really. I never thought a lot about it, or kept track. Why would I? I’m pretty sure the last one was right before she disappeared, but that’s the best I can do. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. You can’t tell me what you don’t know.”

  “What do you think happened to her, Mr. Baumgartner? Do you have any idea?”

  “I wish. Tell you what, Katie. Can you show me where Alma’s things are stored? That might be a big help.”

  Katie grinned. We were friends, now. “Sure, but let me get some shoes on first. I don’t want to walk barefoot in that basement. There’s mice.”

  ***

  The concrete basement was damp and cold, and the only light came from an unshaded ceiling fixture to the side of the furnace, switched on from the foot of a treacherous steep wooden stairway. Without the flashlight Katie carried, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to go down those stairs ass over teakettle. She led me to the far end of the room, and pointed at a small pile of cartons. “That’s it.”

  I peered into the corner. “That’s all of it? Only six cartons?”

  “Yeah, there wasn’t much. Alma’s room looked like a nun’s cell. Just the bed, chair, desk, and a little dresser that came with the room. Nothing hanging on the walls. Like I said, she was different.”

  “Okay. Let’s take a look. You mind holding the flashlight for me?”

  “No, it’s fun, actually. I mean, being part of a police investigation. Where do you want to start?”

  I thought about whether I ought to get a warrant, but Mel wanted the work done quietly, didn’t he? “Let’s start at the bottom,” I said. “I’ll unpile the boxes, then go through them one at a time, and stack them back up.”

  The first two cartons were full of underwear, socks, blouses, jeans, slacks, and dresses. I looked over each article, checked the pockets, shook them over the floor. “Wow, you guys’re pretty compulsive,” Katie said.

  “We damn well better be,” I grunted, then packed the clothes back into the cartons and set them against the wall. As I pulled the lid open on the third carton, Katie leaned forward to look, and started breathing into my ear. Her breast pressed against my shoulder. Thirty years earlier, I’d have been distracted. I rummaged through five empty pocketbooks and four pairs of shoes, then closed the lid and tossed the box onto the pile.

  The fourth box looked more interesting, stuff that probably had been in the desk. Pencils, pens, erasers, pads of paper, envelopes. Who did she write to? A screwdriver and a small hammer. Couple of bus passes. A passport. “Whoa,” I said. “Let’s have a look here.”

  Katie aimed the flashlight at my hands. I turned the blue plastic cover, and looked at the picture inside. You don’t expect a passport photo to be flattering, but no mistake, Alma Wanego was or had been a good-looking woman. Very Nordic, light hair, fair skin, thin lips tightly closed, so her mouth looked like a surgical incision. But it was her eyes that really got me, staring so hard into the camera that I had trouble pulling my own eyes free. This was someone who could be a cross to bear and a bear to cross.

  I ran a finger down the pages with entries, then looked at Katie. “This was issued eight years ago, and through 1974, she made only one foreign trip, to Bermuda. But in ‘seventy-five, there was a trip to Mexico and one to England, and last year there were three, France, then England, then Norway. All of them short, none more than a week.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I was telling you,” Katie said. “And those aren’t near-all the times she was away. I don’t get it. I mean, this house is okay, but if I could afford to do all this traveling to Europe and places, I sure wouldn’t be living here.”

  I smiled. “Maybe she wasn’t paying for the trips.”

  Katie giggled. “At least not with money.”

  “No. But look here. The last trip, the one to Norway, was August thirty-first, with a return on September sixth. That was just five days before she disappeared. Do you remember anything from then?”

  Katie knitted her brows. “Not really…wait, yes I do. When she came back, it was on a holiday, Labor Day. Was that the sixth?”

  I shrugged.

  “Yeah, I remember that because my sweetie and I went to the coast for the holiday weekend. When I got back, Alma was there, and when I told her where I’d been, she laughed, sort of snotty. Then I said something about how my weekend wasn’t cheap, and I was gonna have to eat Spaghetti-O’s for while. That made her laugh again, and she said, ‘I’m not going to have to worry about that.’”

  “‘I’m not going to?’ Or ‘I’m not going to have to?’”

  “Pretty sure it was ‘not going to have to.’ And then she flipped me the smug mug.”

  “Real tease, that Alma.”

  “Not the nice kind of tease, either. It was always like she was laughing at you. I figured, well, maybe she found herself a boyfriend or a sugar daddy, good for her.”

  I slipped the passport into my pocket. “Let’s look at the last box. Jeez, heavy.”

  The reason for that was obvious as soon as I opened the carton. I pulled out a Remington
manual typewriter, set it on the floor. Then I reached back into the carton, and came out with a wooden box about a foot long, four inches high. Katie shrugged when I held it up to her. “Yeah, I remember that. It was up on top of her closet shelf, behind the typewriter. Mrs. Harrison and I almost left it there, we didn’t see it at first.”

  I pulled at the lid, but it stayed shut. I squinted at the small slot surrounded by a metal ring, a bit below the edge of the lid. “It’s locked.”

  If a woman who seemed not to give a hoot in hell about material possessions had thought enough to lock something inside this box, I definitely wanted to see it. But not in front of this particular audience. I set the box on the floor, off to the side. “Aren’t you going to open it?” Katie said. “I thought you guys could open up whatever lock you wanted.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I can get into it without doing some damage, and I don’t like to damage peoples’ property. I’ll take it with me, and get it opened cleanly.”

  Katie pouted. “Meanie.”

  “How’d you feel if the cops broke open a box of yours, instead of taking a little time to get the right key? Let’s see what else is here.”

  As it turned out, there was only a small lamp, an alarm clock, and a radio. I put them and the typewriter back into the carton, then hefted it up to the top of the pile. “Thanks, Katie,” I said. “I appreciate your help.”

  She jutted a hip, turned a crooked smile on me. “Maybe I’ll see you again?”

  “You never know.”

  ***

  My usual procedure would’ve been to take that box to the station and get one of the lock-and-key boys to pop it open, but Mel said he didn’t want people talking up this case around the station. Okay, Mel. I got into the car, turned the key in the ignition, and drove off.

  Fifteen minutes later, I pulled up in front of Iggy the Key’s Lock Shop, on Sixty-fifth Street, just off Ravine Boulevard. Another minute, I was inside, mysterious box in my right hand. I smiled at the hello I knew I was about to get.