Bad Memory: A Jake Abraham Mystery Novella (Jake Abraham Mysteries Book 2)

by Jim Cliff

  “Well, that’s not really my field.”

  “Fraud? No, of course not, but I’m sure you know a lot about mortgages from your work. You were dealing with mortgages around that time, weren’t you?”

  Before he answered, Grady drained his whole cup of coffee and then stood up and walked over to the window.

  “I was briefly in the loans department of the bank. I don’t recall if it was around that time.”

  “Really? Because your LinkedIn profile has you working as a loans officer for nearly four years, from ‘91 to ‘94.”

  He took a deep breath and, in the time it took to exhale, came up with an answer.

  “OK, you caught me. The reason I’m uncomfortable talking about this, Jake, is that a couple of years ago I was applying for a position at another bank. That position required more experience with mortgages and loans than I actually had, so I... embellished my résumé a little. The truth is, I worked in foreign exchange during that period. I don’t know what a straw buyer is, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, that clears that up. Sorry to have troubled you.”

  “Not a problem, Jake, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you. Was there anything else?”

  “Now you mention it, I was wondering how you explained all the mud to your wife.”

  “The mud?”

  “That night. It had been raining for a couple of days, and it would have been very muddy around the body. You must have got it all over your pants when you knelt down to check her pulse. In fact, last time we met you said...” I flipped to an earlier page in my pad and quoted him directly. “...’I got right down in the mud’. Wasn’t your wife curious when you got home?”

  “I think I also mentioned last time that Jane and I often went to a motel for the night. I kept a spare set of clothes in the trunk of my car for when that happened. I simply changed into my other suit before I went home.”

  “Did you have a spare pair of shoes too?”

  “If I remember correctly, I cleaned the mud off my shoes with a rag at a gas station.”

  “Well, that makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up. And how far did you say the body was from the car?”

  “I don’t think I did say. I don’t remember. Is it important?”

  “I’m just trying to get a picture of what happened that night. Think back. You heard the shout and the scream. Did they sound close or far off? Then you went and found her in the dark, without a flashlight. Did you have to look for long?”

  “I don’t know, she was maybe fifty feet from the car, if I had to guess.”

  “Right. Close enough for Jane to make out the words the man shouted.”

  I made a note in my pad, then flipped to another page and made an exaggerated look of puzzlement. I held it until Grady noticed.

  “What is it?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s probably nothing. I’m sure there’s a rational explanation.”

  “For what?”

  “The thing is, you were out of the car for no more than four minutes, so you can’t have gone very far in the woods in the dark and, sure enough, you remember it being about fifty feet. Jane stayed in the car, but she heard the words the man shouted.”

  “I’m not seeing a problem. That all seems to fit.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? The problem, Grady, is that the police found the body over a hundred yards from the parking lot.”

  “They must be mistaken.”

  “That’s a big mistake. A hundred yards is six times further than your estimate. No, the police seem pretty sure.”

  “Well, maybe it was further than I thought. It was dark after all. And it was a long time ago.”

  “No, that doesn’t work either. If the murder happened a hundred yards or more away, I just don’t see how Jane could have heard what the man shouted. You see my problem?”

  “I do, Jake, but there must be other explanations. Maybe the man shouted particularly loudly. Maybe Jane has very sensitive hearing. I didn’t hear the words myself. Maybe she was wrong, and just thought she could determine the words he used. People see and hear things that aren’t there all the time. Maybe her mind was playing tricks on her. Jane knows all about that kind of thing – you should ask her about it.”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  Chapter 16

  I made it to the UIC campus just after half past one. Jane Parker called out “Come in,” when I knocked on her office door, so I did. Running away would have been childish.

  She was sitting at her desk eating a large hero sandwich, looking almost relaxed. Her expression said she thought I had an answer for her, but all I had were more questions.

  “Mr. Abraham, sit down,” she said. “I’m sorry, but do you mind if I eat while we talk? I have a tutoring session in fifteen minutes and if I don’t eat now, I don’t eat.”

  “Go ahead. I just had a few follow-up questions.”

  “Do you have a lead?” she asked, taking a very unladylike bite of the sandwich. A piece of salami fell onto the napkin she had laid out on her desk.

  “Maybe. There’s a couple of loose ends I want to tie up first. How close would you say the shooting was to the car?”

  She finished her mouthful with a slight frown on her face.

  “I don’t know how I would know that, I didn’t get out of the car. You should ask Grady.”

  “I have, but I wanted to get your take on it. You heard the shout and the scream. How far away did they seem?”

  “I... I don’t know. I didn’t write that down.”

  “Think back. What do you remember?”

  “Well, I can do that, but as I keep trying to tell you, I can’t be sure how accurate my recollection is. It’s probably quite inaccurate, actually.”

  This was starting to get annoying. I took a breath, smiled, and tried again.

  “OK, I understand that. The stuff you wrote down? That’s the gold standard. But once that runs out, memories are pretty much all I have to go on, so with the caveat that you’re probably wrong and a promise that I won’t hold you to it, give me your best guess. Doesn’t have to be accurate. A ballpark will do. Was it close up, or the other end of a ballpark?”

  The smile may have slipped a little during my speech, it might have come out slightly harsher than planned, and it didn’t even have the desired effect.

  “I’m sorry this is frustrating for you, but I’m literally the worst person to ask that question to.” She sighed at my lack of understanding. “I’ve replayed this night in my mind a thousand times. More. Each time it gets less and less likely it’s a true version of what happened. It’s like a photocopy of a photograph. The first one’s pretty close, but then you make a copy of the copy, and each time – each generation – it gets worse. The difference is with memories, what you end up with after twenty-five years still seems clear, but it’s nothing like what you started with. There’s no realistic chance I can recall new information about that night. The ideal witness would be someone who was there, but hasn’t thought about it since then. That’s as close to reliable as you’re going to get.”

  “OK, I get it. Here’s the thing: Grady and the police have wildly different recollections of how far Elizabeth Weber’s body was from the parking lot. Who should I believe?”

  She had just taken another bite of her sandwich. It was a smaller one this time, and I waited it out.

  “Hard to say. Grady likely experienced some trauma in seeing the dead body, which would have made the initial memory more vivid, but not necessarily more detailed. And if he’s revisited the scene over the years as I have, I wouldn’t rely on the accuracy of his memory. As for the police, they may have recalled the incident less frequently, but if they attended many similar crime scenes, they’re likely to conflate details of multiple scenes without being aware they’re doing it.”

  “What if two cops say the same thing?”

  “That would be helpful. Did both policemen volunteer the same information unprompted
?”

  I thought back. “No. I told one of them what the other one said, and he confirmed it.”

  “That’s a shame. When reconstructing memories, people are very open to suggestion.”

  “But they seemed pretty sure.”

  “It doesn’t matter how confident someone seems, how much detail they include, or how much emotion they express. It doesn’t make it true. You need independent corroboration.”

  “Let me ask you one more thing. How confident are you in the words you heard that night – ‘shut up, shut up’?”

  “As confident as I can be about anything. I wrote them down less than an hour later.”

  “With the sound of the rain on the car, and the shock of the moment, is it possible you just thought you heard those words? Like an auditory illusion?”

  “I don’t think so. I mean, of course, it’s possible. Our brains constantly find patterns where none exist, whether it’s seeing Jesus in a slice of toast, or hearing messages in music played backward. It’s called pareidolia. But I don’t think that’s what happened here.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was careful only to write down the things I was sure of, so I know that, at the time at least, I was confident in what I heard. Also, when we read that the police were calling it a suicide, I recall Grady trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake. But I knew I hadn’t.”

  So, back to square one then. A collection of conflicting stories from people with no reason to lie, and a witness who heard something I was pretty sure she couldn’t possibly have heard.

  When I left she was trying to fit the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. It was like one of those hot dog eating competitions at Coney Island.

  I was hungry after speaking to Dr. Parker, so after I made a quick call, I got a gyro to go from Mr. Greek’s on Halsted and took it back to my office.

  There aren’t many perks to being a licensed private investigator. We can’t arrest people, we can’t tap people’s phones, we can’t even go through people’s mail. We’re basically private citizens with tenacious personalities.

  However, my license meant I could contact the Arkansas DMV and find out who owned a blue Honda Civic with an Arkansas plate, number 207 TFH.

  When the result came back as a forty-four-year-old electrical engineer from Eudora, AK, named Samuel Lynem, it didn’t take me long to figure out that he definitely wasn’t Watch Cap or his Kojak-like friend. For starters, he was black. But maybe he knew who they were.

  I started typing his details into IRB Search to start a background check, but then my cell rang. Felicity Caldwell was returning my call.

  Chapter 17

  The asymmetrical curved balconies of The Aqua on Columbus create a kind of wave effect that make it look like the whole building is part of the lake it looks out over. Of all the new skyscrapers that had grown up in the city in the past few years, it was my favorite, but I’d never been inside before.

  The first fifty floors are hotel rooms, but there’s a separate lobby for the condos and apartments that make up the rest of the building. The security guard at the huge marble desk called up to Mrs. Caldwell’s condo on the seventy-eighth floor to check she was expecting me, then pointed me towards the elevator.

  Dr. Parker’s suggestion to find someone else who was there that night hadn’t fallen on deaf ears, but for now, this was the best I could come up with. My expectations weren’t high, but who knows? Maybe somewhere down the years, Grady had told his wife about that dead body he found once. Maybe he talked in his sleep.

  It took almost a minute to reach seventy-eight and when I came out of the elevator Mrs. Caldwell’s door was right in front of me. She opened it before I had a chance to knock. Her hair was a slightly unrealistic shade of red, and it was all piled on top of her head. With her green eye shadow, she reminded me a little of Samantha’s mother in Bewitched.

  “Mrs. Caldwell?” I said.

  “It’s Ms. McGinley actually. Caldwell was my married name. You said on the phone you had some questions about Grady?”

  I nodded and she walked into the condo, leaving the door open for me. I closed it behind me and followed her into the living room.

  The décor was a curious mix of minimalist design and chintz. There was a distinct lack of pictures or ornaments, no books on view, barely anything personal at all, but the furniture was flowery and busy enough to give her interior designer a heart attack. None of that really mattered though. The only thing worth paying attention to was the huge floor to ceiling windows that lined two walls. Through one I could see most of the way across Lake Michigan, and the other showed Lincoln Park and the city beyond. In a few years they would probably build more skyscrapers to get in the way, but for now, the view was breathtaking.

  “Wow,” I said. “If I lived here I don’t think I’d ever get anything done. I would be too busy looking out at that view.”

  “You get used to it,” she said. Money is wasted on the rich. “How can I help?”

  “I’m investigating a possible homicide from quite a few years ago. Your husband...”

  “Ex-husband,” she interrupted.

  “Sorry, your ex-husband may have been a witness. Did he ever mention anything to you about it?”

  “When was this?”

  “A long time ago. Early nineties.”

  “He never said anything.”

  “Do you remember Grady ever talking about a real estate agent named Elizabeth Weber?”

  “No. Grady never talked about his work. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t really interested.”

  “Why do you assume he would have known her through work?”

  “She was a real estate agent, you said. Grady worked in mortgages some years ago. I just assumed that’s where they would have met. Am I wrong?”

  “No, that makes sense to me.”

  Chapter 18

  Valerie Stone was with a client when I arrived in her office, so I waited by the door, looking at pictures of houses I would never be able to afford. I managed to convince myself I was better off not having a swimming pool (too much work to maintain) and my kitchen was perfectly big enough, thank you. Provided nobody needed to use the stove and get something out of the fridge at the same time.

  “Mr. Abraham?” Valerie interrupted, as I was daydreaming about having my own fish pond in the yard. And having a yard.

  I smiled at her and she turned and walked to the coffee room at the back of the office without another word. I figured she probably wanted me to follow her. It was pretty weird behavior otherwise. When we were both in the small room she motioned to me to sit down in one of the molded plastic chairs and she closed the door behind her. She looked at me expectantly, so I went first.

  “Mrs. Stone, hello again,” I said.

  “How can I help you today, Mr. Abraham?”

  “First of all I wanted to thank you. That information about the FBI? It’s certainly given me a good direction to explore.”

  “Do you think it has anything to do with why she died?”

  “Well, I don’t know that yet, but it’s a possibility. I have one more thing I needed to ask you.”

  “Of course. What is it?”

  “Did Elizabeth carry a purse?”

  I sensed Valerie was expecting a more in depth question about the extent of her former boss’s criminal activity or something. She composed herself quickly and paused before she answered. Maybe she was trying to work out if it was a trick question.

  “Of course she did,” she said.

  “Every day?”

  “I never saw her without one.”

  “Do you remember what it looked like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged. It didn’t seem like a difficult question.

  “You know, size, color, material, did it have handles or a shoulder strap? That kind of thing.”

  “Oh, she didn’t only have one. She had lots of purses. One for every outfit, practically.”

  “She co-ord
inated them?”

  She smiled. The silly man had finally understood.

  “That’s right. Elizabeth was always co-ordinated. Every suit she had, there was the perfect pair of shoes and a purse to match.”

  “When she was found, she had on a blue jacket and skirt. She would have had a blue purse to go with that?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Isn’t that a lot of trouble, changing purses every day?”

  “I suppose it depends on how much you keep in it. I don’t think Elizabeth carried much around with her.”

  “What did she carry, do you know?”

  “Oh, the usual,” she said. “Credit cards, a little cash, make-up, hairbrush, her little blue book...”

  “Her what?”

  “Her contact book. Elizabeth ran a networking group. At first, she started collecting business cards, but it wasn’t very practical. She had so many it was hard to find anyone when you needed them, so she started up her little blue book. Wrote down contact details for everyone she met at the meetings.”

  “And she carried it around with her?”

  “Everywhere she went.”

  “What were the meetings like?”

  “I heard they were good. They certainly brought us business - any time one of Elizabeth’s members was looking to move, we were their first call.”

  “You didn’t go to the meetings yourself?”

  “No, there was a rule. Only one member from each profession. It avoided any competition problems. Elizabeth was the real estate agent.”

  “The mortgage broker you told me about last time, Mr. Sorensen? He said he met Elizabeth at her networking group. So if he was a member, there wouldn’t have been any other mortgage brokers allowed. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Damn. Theory busted.

  “Did the group stop after Elizabeth died?”

  “No, one of the members took over running it. A man who ran a printers. He used to do all our office stationery and house specs. What was his name? Vaughn, I think.”

  Chapter 19

  According to Google, Ernie Vaughn’s print shop was on North Dearborn, about a half mile away. I’d walked to Stone Realty from my office, so I headed up Wabash on foot. Across the street, under the L tracks, I saw a couple familiar faces. They were back in the Chevy Impala today. After I crossed Madison, Kojak got out of the Chevy and followed along behind, staying on the other side of the street.