Denny's Law

by Elizabeth Gunn

  ‘After that big rain it’s growing so fast, I couldn’t wait.’ He patted his clipper and said, ‘I’ll just do this front part and leave the back for you, Curro.’

  ‘OK. You promise? And drink plenty of water.’ Oscar pulled back to the legal side of the street and shook his head as they drove away. ‘Six months ago he had his heart attack. All the men in my family have one the year after they retire.’

  ‘Oh, dear. And cops retire so early. Better be thinking about it, Oscar.’

  ‘I already made a deal with my sister. I help her in the shop now on my days off and we expand into our own retail line the week after Tucson PD punches my ticket.’

  ‘Ah, the Tucson solution: don’t retire, keep working. What’s that he called you? A nickname?’

  ‘Curro. It means …’ Oscar looked embarrassed. ‘He thinks I look handsome. You know how parents are.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Papa Cifuentes was not alone in that opinion, she knew. Oscar had a well-earned reputation as a ladies’ man which he had been trying to soft-pedal since he realized it made Delaney question his suitability for the homicide squad.

  Anyway, Oscar was the best detective on the crew to canvass this neighborhood, Sarah thought, and she was pleased when he got the assignment. But he wasn’t coming up with much information about Calvin Springer. The victim had evidently led an incredibly solitary life.

  ‘He’s been right here in plain sight but he has no buds that I can find,’ Oscar said. ‘Didn’t even have coffee dates or go to ball games with anybody. It isn’t that they didn’t like him, they just didn’t notice him. He didn’t mingle.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘Of course, he was Anglo, and the Mexican community down here is pretty … tight knit. Maybe Ollie will have better luck.’

  Working off property tax rolls and picking their targets according to the names, the two detectives had divided the task. It wasn’t a hundred percent, but since Ollie’s Spanish was pretty sketchy he had been knocking on the doors with non-Hispanic names, working a widening spiral around the crime scene.

  They talked about it in Delaney’s office. ‘Found more black people than I knew we had,’ Ollie said, ‘and a few Muslims, a few Mormons. Interesting part of town, actually.’ His good-humored face reflected amusement. A gregarious man, he enjoyed canvassing and was proud of his reputation for getting the most out of interviews. But he hadn’t done any better than Oscar on this job.

  ‘Two days of canvassing and I kept at it,’ Oscar said. ‘I’m sure I got all there is to get out of his immediate neighborhood, and believe me, there’s no use going beyond it. You get two blocks away from Springer’s house in any direction and all anybody knows about Calvin Springer is what they’ve heard on the news.’

  ‘Yeah, same here,’ Ollie said. ‘The few people around his own block who noticed him at all say he came out of his house every day, got on his bike and rode off.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Delaney said. ‘He rode his bike?’

  Ollie shrugged. ‘Some days, after he came back and chained up the bike, he got in his pickup and drove away without talking to anybody.’

  ‘But they don’t know where he went?’

  ‘Sarah, I didn’t find anybody who gave a fiddler’s fart where he went. Calvin Springer seems to have spent every day minding his own business – I believe he was the most private man in the city of Tucson.’ He flipped through his notes. ‘I did find one woman two doors west across the street who thinks that once or twice a month he drove away and was gone for two or three days. But she’s quite wobbly about that information. It’s just an impression she got and she doesn’t want to swear to it.’

  ‘Swell,’ Sarah said. ‘Just what I like – wobbly witnesses.’

  ‘I did talk to one guy, Mitch Somebody – it’s in my notes – who said he saw Calvin a couple of times at the Indian casino on South Nogales Highway. Mitch said he nodded and waved but Springer didn’t respond – acted like he couldn’t even see him.’

  The three of them had been waiting outside Delaney’s office for some time while he talked non-stop on the phone. He waved them in during a sudden break and they stood by his desk delivering a quick rant about how little they knew about the dead man. With Delaney you always felt you had to talk fast.

  ‘Sarah,’ Delaney said, ‘are you sure you’ve found all his bank records?’

  ‘No. I just found all I could. I only found one Calvin Springer in Tucson. There’s a few other Springers but they don’t claim to know him. He’s been getting three thousand a month, bi-monthly checks from a wealth management firm in Nogales. Direct deposit into his credit union account here and he spent it all, just about, every month. Almost all that’s on his credit cards is groceries and gas. Occasionally tires, tools and some clothes from Wal-Mart.’

  ‘Three thousand. Doesn’t seem like quite enough, does it?’

  ‘Well, he had no house or car payments.’

  ‘How could he pay off a house and truck on three thousand a month?’

  ‘I don’t know about the vehicle yet but I was able to find the realtor who sold him the house. Told me Calvin paid cash for it when he moved in eighteen years ago.’

  ‘Isn’t that odd? Where does an ordinary guy get that kind of money?’

  ‘Yes, it’s odd, like so many things about this man. He’s lived very frugally ever since he bought the house – wrote his occasional checks by hand. Very lo-tech. No computer. Calvin was not a swinger.’

  ‘You still haven’t found anything from social security or Medicare?’

  ‘No. Nor any doctor’s bills, for that matter.’

  ‘What about lab reports,’ Delaney said, ‘are we close to getting anything?’

  ‘No match on his fingerprints. He doesn’t have a criminal history. And it’ll probably be weeks before we get anything back on his DNA.’

  ‘Did you try the military?’

  ‘Well, no – he’s way too old to … well, I suppose maybe Vietnam, is that what you’re thinking? OK, I’ll try the military.’ She turned a page and found a note. ‘Oh, I was going to ask you, have you still got Springer’s house keys?’

  Delaney gave her a pop-eyed look. ‘Come to think of it, I have. I meant to sign them into the evidence room this morning and forgot.’

  ‘Before you put them away can I take them for a couple of hours?’

  ‘Sure, if you want to. But I gave that house a pretty thorough going over while you and Jason were out in the storm.’

  ‘I know. I just want to do one more crawl-through before I give up on the place. Common sense says there has to be more about this man than we’ve found and the most natural place for it to be is that house and yard.’

  ‘Take plenty of water. And somebody has to go with you. It’s an open crime scene – you can’t be there alone.’

  ‘Can I take Ollie? He’s good with houses.’

  ‘Sure, I’ll go,’ Ollie Greenaway said when she asked him. ‘My skills are all fresh – I spent half the spring in my crawl spaces fixing leaks in my A/C.’ He had three children and lived in a sprawling fifties-era house somewhat like the one she had bought with Will Dietz. She loved her big, cool bedrooms and fully-grown trees, but then she didn’t have to do the house maintenance – Will did that more or less continually. She thought, as usual when her lover’s name surfaced, how was I ever lucky enough to find that man?

  He had come along soon after the angry divorce that she’d thought left her unfit to ever risk loving another man. Sometimes, still, when she thought of him she stopped what she was doing for a few seconds and willed herself to believe: I can have this happiness; it’s real and I can keep it.

  ‘Better go now before it gets any hotter,’ Delaney said. ‘The power’s back on out there but the A/C’s been turned off. You’re going to be good and hot till you get it going. You want to take a crime-scene van? You’d have a ladder then, some fans and extra lights.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’ Sarah looked at Ollie. ‘You free now?’

  ‘
Ten minutes to check my emails and I’m ready.’

  The crime-scene tape around the house lot had been mostly destroyed by the storm. Delaney’s crew had cleaned it up but hadn’t replaced it. There was still a crime-scene lock on the front and back doors. The house hadn’t been cleaned yet and smelled terrible. They put big fans in the front and back doors to get fresh air in. But the fresh air was well over ninety degrees, so as soon as the A/C blew cool air they closed up the doors.

  ‘You’ll be cool pretty soon,’ Ollie said, ‘and I’ll take the outside. Anything you need help with in here before I start?’

  ‘Help me take the bed apart. I’ll come and find you if there’s anything else.’

  There were no pictures hanging. The place had shades, not drapes, so she finished the windows fast. The one dresser had held sparse clothing, which Jody had taken out in a box on the day of the storm. There was nothing on the undersides of the drawers which lay upside down on the bedroom floor. Funny, I thought she put those drawers back. And that little bedside table – did Jody leave it upside down like that? Have to ask her when I’m done here.

  The kitchen was the hardest. Delaney had pulled the stove and refrigerator out of their spaces and left them open. Sarah took the few pans and groceries out of the tiny cupboard, inspected the roach hotels and took a box of trash sacks apart.

  An hour later Ollie found her in the bathroom, wedged into a space between the toilet and the wall, shining her light at the underside of the toilet tank. He squatted by her feet and said, ‘I found something in the soffit above the back door. You want to come out and look?’

  ‘Sure.’ She slithered partway out of her space and stopped. ‘Damn, damn.’

  ‘You hurt yourself?’

  ‘Yeah, I bumped my head.’ She slid the rest of the way out, sat up and rubbed her head. ‘What’s a soffit?’

  ‘It’s like a floor under the overhang.’

  ‘Oh.’ She rubbed her head a few seconds longer, blinked her eyes and surprised him with a sudden, brilliant smile. ‘Hey, I’ll see your something in a soffit and raise you a trifle behind a toilet.’

  ‘What? Sarah, did you find something, too?’

  ‘I think so.’ She reached behind her and pulled it out – a flat oblong wrapped in a blue plastic sack trailing ragged strands of duct tape.

  They unrolled the plastic sack on the kitchen counter and found a business-size envelope, unsealed, with the flap tucked inside. Money fell out when Sarah opened the flap.

  ‘Hundreds,’ Ollie said. ‘Aren’t they the prettiest?’

  ‘Nice new ones.’ Sarah counted. ‘A hundred of them.’

  They looked at each other. ‘Getaway money,’ Ollie said.

  ‘Yup. Why didn’t Delaney find this, I wonder?’

  ‘He couldn’t get into that space you were in so I suppose he assumed Springer wouldn’t be able to hide anything there.’

  ‘How did he, do you think?’

  ‘My guess? He took the tank off the wall, taped the money on the back of the tank and replaced it. He could do all that standing up.’ He pondered. ‘Man, it took strength, though. How he managed that at his age … This guy sure ate up all his grits like a good boy.’

  Sarah laughed. ‘Is that your mother’s expression?’

  ‘My grandmother Bratvold. She was from Norway and had some very distinct ideas on the care and feeding of boys. My mother used to roll her eyes up and walk out of the room. Fun to watch.’

  We should all be blessed with Ollie Greenaway’s temperament, Sarah thought – in his eyes, even family conflict was amusing.

  ‘OK, here goes this pretty money into the evidence bag. We’re both going to sign this label, right? Wait, I have to dry myself off or I’ll smear it. Man, I almost melted under that toilet.’

  ‘I noticed that before – the bathroom duct doesn’t work as well as the rest of the house.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Sarah said, seeing his face take on the speculative gleam of the do-it-yourselfer. ‘Somebody else can figure that one out.’ She had found paper towels and was drying her hands. She signed the evidence slip and said, ‘There. Now show me your soffit.’

  They went out into the punishing heat of the backyard and stood in the shade of the overhang where the air was maybe five degrees cooler than out in the sun. The vines climbing the lattices on either end looked about ready to let go and slump to earth.

  ‘That was a good idea the boss had about bringing a crime-scene van,’ Ollie said. ‘Look at this top-of-the-line ladder we’ve got to use.’

  ‘Nice. And you’re going to climb it because? Oh, I see,’ she said as his feet appeared at her eye level. ‘There’s a seam in this end section of the soffit, isn’t there?’ It had overhung the little metal table which he’d now set out in the yard with the chairs.

  ‘Yes, there is. The only section in the whole house to have a seam. So isn’t it logical to think there might be a … yes, there it is. A sweet little latch painted to match the wood. Right there where the wood facing almost covers it. Isn’t that clever?’

  ‘And you think maybe there’s a hinge on the inside of that seam …’

  ‘I do. Because otherwise why does this one section have a seam? Now if I can just get this little hummer to move …’ He hurt himself, swore, sucked on a knuckle briefly and tried again. Sarah heard a small metallic screech, a bolt slid back and the end of the section dropped down. The hinges inside squeaked a little but they stayed put; the section didn’t fall.

  While it hung swaying, Ollie climbed another rung on the ladder, stuck his head in the hole and crammed his lit flashlight in beside his ear.

  ‘Ah.’ His voice became quieter, muffled by the space inside the hole. ‘Well, look at that.’ He pulled his head back out and looked down to make sure Sarah was still beside him. Smiling into her upturned face, he said, ‘Can I hand you down a few things?’

  FIVE

  ‘Sarah, it’s not my fault he kept all his records in a crawl space,’ Ollie said. ‘It’s just a backache. You’ll get over it.’

  ‘Not if I lift those stinking boxes again,’ Sarah said. ‘Don’t we have a maintenance crew in this building?’

  ‘Hang on while I find the janitor,’ Ollie said. ‘He’s got that wheeled pallet thing …’

  They set up a long table alongside their workstations and the janitor brought in the boxes on his wheeled luggage cart. All the detectives dragged chairs around the table and began to remark that these filthy boxes were full of spiders and the overhead lights weren’t even close to being bright enough to see … And one after another said, ‘Are these handwritten records? Really?’

  Delaney said, ‘You’re detectives, for Christ’s sake. Find what you need.’

  So Jason and Ollie ran around the building borrowing, or sometimes simply stealing, extra lights, power cords and file boxes. Oscar, concerned as always about his clothes, raided the janitors’ cupboard for wipes and cleaned dust and cobwebs off the boxes.

  Soon the table was littered with all the loot Sarah kept bringing from desks – pens, paper clips, staple guns and Scotch tape. Little islands of coffee cups, tissues and eyeglasses formed among the boxes. The clattering and complaining died down gradually and a kind of permanent buzzing murmur formed as the team opened the boxes and examined what they came to call ‘the big honking puzzle.’

  Delaney took a couple of pieces of paper out of each box for the lab, saying, ‘We can never test all of this – we’ll just do a sampling. Go ahead now and see what you can make of the rest.’

  The first thing they made of it was that Calvin Springer had been a busy man. He worked for – or perhaps owned? – a company called Argos Inc., which, judging by its cash flow, was quite successful. In fact, Leo told Delaney after an hour, it must be one of the biggest accounts in this little credit union branch.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘A little of everything, it looks like,’ Sarah said. ‘But so far we can’t see how it all fits together.’

&nbs
p; After another paper-rustling hour with a lot of dusty sneezing, she sat back in her chair and said, ‘Well, if this is big-time vice it’s a lot less fun than I always imagined.’

  ‘What,’ Delaney said, stopping by again as he did every time his phone stopped ringing for a minute, ‘no prostitution?’

  ‘Nor anything else the least bit titillating. Just day after day of Calvin sending orders and payments around, delivering mounds of something called “product” and then back home adding stuff up on the stupid little adding machine, then more donkey labor, heaving plastic boxes up into crawl spaces—’

  ‘And then down again before long,’ Ollie said. ‘Because all this paper’s dated after March of this year. So he must have emptied this stash often.’

  ‘And done what with it, I wonder?’ Jason said.

  ‘Loaded up that sturdy six-year-old Ford pickup and driven the whole load out on his good solid tires to … someplace else,’ Ollie said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Sarah said, ‘on one of those three-day trips the wobbly lady thinks she might have noticed.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Delaney said. ‘That doesn’t sound much like Bogie in Casablanca with his nice white coat.’

  ‘And the whole thing’s so damn quaint,’ Leo Tobin said, shaking his head in wonder.

  Tobin had been working a desk in the cold-case section where Delaney had put him in May, saying, ‘I’d like to see him start drawing retirement before his blood pressure spikes again.’ He was a happy Leo Tobin today because Sarah had begged permission to get him back on his regular crew, helping them paw through these dusty records.

  Sitting in a widening circle of spreadsheets, courthouse records and adding machine tapes, he said, ‘I feel like I’m strolling down memory lane. One little Casio adding machine, for Pete’s sake. Not even a cheap computer? Handwritten spreadsheets – do you know how long it takes to set one of these up?’

  ‘Don’t you just love adding machine tapes?’ Ollie said, waving a fistful. ‘How long has it been since you saw anybody operating this way?’