Rob Cornell - Ridley Brone 03 - Saving Sasha Brown

by Rob Cornell

  Carrie and Holden looked at each other for a second. Holden finally answered. “It’s possible. But I don’t know what the message would be.”

  “How about,” Carrie said slowly, “‘I’m not myself.’ Or, ‘this isn’t the real me.’ Something like that.”

  “Which means,” I said and let loose a long sigh, “we could be looking at homicide, not suicide.”

  * * *

  I thought about calling Palmer to let him know what the kids and I had come up with. Then I realized how full of speculation all that was, and how it didn’t exactly connect with my real case. As much as Sasha had left an impression on me in a single night—a single song, really—I was not the one investigating her death. I didn’t want to call Palmer with so little. He’d think I was an idiot asshole.

  Wait. He already thought that.

  In any case, I had to stay focused. That meant searching for a confidante that might know if Peter had checked himself into Sunnygale or, if not, where he might have headed.

  That night at the High Note, I sat in my back booth, all the things from the box I’d taken spread across the tabletop, a mini museum dedicated to the life and times of Peter Brown. I had finished arranging the yearbooks into chronological order when Paul came over, surveyed all the stuff, and frowned at me.

  “Fuck’s this?”

  “I’m multitasking,” I said. “Searching for clues while listening to drunk and off-key folks from all walks of life. Can you imagine a better spent evening?”

  We’d been open about a hour. Only a few people sat at the tables, and one at the bar. A girl on stage, no bigger than a twig off a Bonsai tree, trembled from her toes to the top of her skull while she tried to sing “Brown-Eyed Girl.” If we had a decent crowd of young girls come in, I’d hear that same song several times tonight. One of those quirks of the biz. Even the girls with blue eyes loved that song.

  “I tune it out,” he said. “Can’t you? After all this time?”

  I thought about trying to explain that my listening to every singer I could was part of my penance for the way I let my relationship with my parents deteriorate. But Paul would probably tell me to get the fuck over it.

  “Don’t you have a bar to tend?” with more edge than I’d intended.

  Paul cocked his mouth to one side. “Whatever, yo.” He trudged back behind the bar and offered the single patron a refill.

  I looked down at my collection of things. My eyes went immediately to the journal. If he kept it at all up-to-date, I might get an easy line on where he planned to go. Best not to get my hopes up.

  The yearbooks were probably worthless, but I had to give them a try.

  I picked up the stack of letters. I sometimes use my curiosity as a sensor. I’ll follow it, knowing something deeper in my subconscious is at work. My curiosity about the history of Peter and Debra Brown’s courtship rang like a bell in my head. And as much of a waste of time it seemed, I let my curiosity get the better of me.

  An old rubber band, half disintegrated by age, held the stack of envelopes together. The envelopes carried a faint hint of something flowery, overpowered by the mustiness of time. I wondered if Mrs. Brown had spritzed some of her letters with perfume.

  I started to gently roll the rubber band off, but it snapped at its weakest point and flopped onto the table in front of me. I pushed the rubber band aside and set the stack of letters in its place. I started with the top letter, addressed to Debra L. Gould. The address belonged somewhere in southeast Michigan. I wasn’t familiar with that part of the state.

  I recognized Peter’s return address right away. His letter came from Ann Arbor, which led me to believe he probably went to school at the University of Michigan. I also guessed he never completed his degree, considering he ended up on a factory line.

  I slipped the letter out of the envelope, unfolded the paper, and started reading.

  It was a pretty basic letter, running down the things he was involved with at the time with a bunch of I miss you so much variations to make sure he wasn’t having too much fun without her. It did give me a better idea of who Peter was, at least at that time. For example, he was studying engineering, wanted to design “cars of the future,” and was, so far, acing all his classes.

  He also went into detail about this new church group he found called CYAN.

  That surprised me. I couldn’t believe that organization had been a part of the Brown family for so long. We were talking at least twenty years or so.

  My brain did some mental calculations and left me with a spark that hit so bright, it felt like someone had stabbed me in the brain with a mirror shard. Peter had been a sophomore when he wrote this particular letter. That meant Sasha was either born while he was still in college, or was the reason he never finished his degree.

  But according to information that I’d gathered on the computer when I first started the case, Peter and Debra married right around the same time.

  Can someone say “shotgun wedding?”

  I started pulling the letters out of the envelopes and spreading them out on the table over all the other stuff as close to chronological order as possible, hoping I could track the progress of their “courtship” as if reading through a history book. While Sasha’s birth outside wedlock was a little scandalous, it wasn’t that unusual or big of a deal in this day and age. But the event could give me a better perspective on Peter’s psyche. The more I knew about him, especially those things hidden in the dark corners, the better I could track him.

  But as I laid out the letters, I had to stop halfway through the pack.

  I had stumbled into another dark corner.

  And may have found exactly what I was looking for.

  Chapter 15

  Four letters in the middle of the stack. Not one of them addressed to Debra Brown. These, instead, were addressed to Peter himself, but through a PO box instead of his house. And the return address on the upper left corner of each of the four claimed the letters came from a Ms. Elizabeth Garaski.

  The envelopes looked newer than the others. No yellowing around the edges. A thicker, sturdier feel to the paper. A small bit of stickiness still on the flaps. I found the postmark on the top letter. The date stamped there was this past summer.

  I opened the first of the four and started reading.

  Ms. Garaski had a passionate way with words. She might have been a poet. Or song lyricist. The letter went on and on about their last encounter on the beach of Cryer Lake, one of the few draws of Hawthorne northerners into the south. A dead philanthropist named Cryer had the lake built and stocked with bass over seventy years ago. The stocking continued to this day, funded by some kind of trust started by yet another dead philanthropist.

  Ms. Garaski didn’t write only of the lake and its beauty, but the feel of Peter’s body close to hers, the touch of his lips on her neck, the firm push of his hand at the small of her back.

  At the very end came the inevitable post script.

  Please tell her, she wrote, the three plainest words in the whole letter.

  The other letters followed a similar format—Ms. Garaski gushing over their latest encounter with a post script that also stuck to a theme:

  Have you spoken with her?

  When can we shed light on our love?

  You must tell her or I can’t continue with this!

  That last, with the exclamation point and all, gave off a sinister feel almost. The ultimatum of every mistress, and usually the death knell of the relationship or the marriage—or both.

  So did Peter finally answer to her ultimatum?

  With a return address clearly written in the same flowered hand as the letters themselves, this had almost become too easy. I had to admit, I was a little impressed with Peter’s trick of hiding his mistresses’ love letters smack in the middle of his wife’s. That took some balls. It also showed some smarts.

  When I finally found Peter, I knew I’d have to be careful.

  * * *

  The following
morning, I woke early, showered, made a breakfast that came out of a box and into the microwave. Some breakfast sandwich with fake meat and eggs. I had to put something on my stomach, though, and I didn’t want to waste time stopping somewhere. Obviously, I needed to make a grocery run.

  Groceries would have to wait, though. I stopped by the office before daylight broke so I could run a background check on Elizabeth Garaski. It didn’t take long.

  That done, instead of contacting or confronting Peter’s mistress, I decided to sit some surveillance time on her house. If he was living with her, he would have to come out eventually. Besides, she could block me at the front door while he sat inside watching Firefly reruns on TV, and I’d be none the wiser. I’d had to take the direct approach with Peter’s brother because of the whole gated community thing. Luckily, I didn’t have a similar issue with Ms. Garaski.

  She lived on the north side, in a upper-middle class neighbored where all the houses looked like they came out of cookie cutters and were stacked so close they had lawns about the size of floor mats. Almost all of them had two stories and bright, fresh siding. Besides the numbers on the mailboxes along the curb, the ornate landscaping out front of each was the only thing that kept them distinguishable one from the other. But winter had killed most of the landscaping, so until they started decorating for the holidays, they remained a mirror images of one another.

  I had the heat blasting. The snow had stopped, but only because it was too cold outside to snow now. At least, that’s what the weatherman said. “Too cold to snow.” Sounding like some corner of hell for people like me who didn’t mind the heat.

  Weather could become an issue depending on how the surveillance went. If I had to sit on the house, I couldn’t do it with the engine running. The cold exhaust pluming from my tail pipe would give me away. With the houses so close around here, I didn’t have anywhere inconspicuous to park. Nearly every corner had one of those Neighborhood Watch signs planted on them. Mostly a scare-tactic to deter crime, it also meant the neighborhood had a few busy-bodies. Never fun for stationary surveillance, worrying about some widow in her eighties calling police about a “strange vehicle” parked in the street.

  But in this neighborhood, some people actually did use the curb out front for parking, so I wouldn’t be the only one.

  I had a scarf and a pair of gloves. Time to man up.

  I chose to pull in behind a Toyota with a few inches of snow collected on it, which told me it hadn’t been driven in a couple days at least. This gave me a car to sort of hide behind, but the odds of the owner coming out for the car might be a little lower. So much of PI work is guesswork. You play your hand as best you can, because in this game you don’t get the draw again.

  I cut the engine, buzzed back my seat, and hunkered down to stay low and, mostly, out of sight.

  I had parked across the street and about six houses down. In the passenger seat beside me I had a digital camera with a telephoto lens, fresh batteries, and a clean memory card. I wanted to take a few preliminary snaps of Ms. Garaski’s house for the sake of my records, but working the camera meant taking off my gloves, and the heat had already begun seeping out of the car.

  Have I mentioned I hate the cold?

  But I wouldn’t let it beat me. I yanked my gloves off, picked up the camera, adjusted the zoom, tweaked the focus, and took a bunch of pictures of the house, closing in here and there as well as taking shots zoomed back a bit. I took the time to shoot the houses to either side of hers, too. You could never document too much. And it was as easy as a mouse click to get rid of what you didn’t need.

  I sat watching the house, gloves back on and arms hugging my body, for another forty minutes before I had to start the engine up again and pump some heat in the car. As the BMW’s engine hummed and the heat spewed from the vents, I glanced around for any suspicious neighbors. I didn’t see anyone except for a someone shoveling their walk, so bundled against the cold I couldn’t tell if it were a man or woman. Just a hooded, puffy creature with a plastic shovel, face obscured by a red ski mask and the scarf wrapped up over his or her mouth. Not someone who would probably notice my car running.

  I wasn’t feeling the vibe from this surveillance. I wasn’t feeling much of anything, actually, since the cold had turned me numb. I started to doubt my strategy. A Tuesday morning most likely meant Ms. Garaski was at work, assuming she worked at all and had a standard nine-to-fiver. The background work I did on her at the office before coming out didn’t have much on her. Based on the available data, and assuming it was up-to-date, the return address on the letters was still correct.

  But her work history showed a secretarial position she held in southern Ohio. Sounded like a bit of a commute from this address. She was not, however, married according to the info I could pull. It raised the question about how she paid her mortgage and fed herself, especially in a nicer neighborhood like this one. Things I might look into more deeply if it turned out I needed to. Really, I was hoping to catch Peter at her house and make the whole thing a lot easier.

  I waited for my heat to thaw me out, then cut the engine again. Fingers of cold almost immediately curled their way into the vehicle. I groaned and tucked my gloved hands into my armpits.

  Twenty minutes passed before I had to start the car again.

  Time for a new tactic.

  I pulled away from the curb and drove toward Ms. Garaski’s house. I pulled right into her driveway, the cement neatly shoveled, but the surface slick enough, I almost fell onto my ass getting out of the car. I had to penguin walk up the approach to her front door. Unlike the day before, there was hardly any wind blowing. If there had been, my spit would have turned to ice. As it was, I felt my skin stinging in the cold despite my heavy parka, gloves, and scarf.

  I hoped my clients would forgive me for what I was about to do.

  I also hoped it was worth going out into the cold.

  I rang the bell while dancing from foot to foot to keep my internal body heat up as best I could. I heard at least two dogs with big voices woofing and scrabbling their nails on the other side of the door.

  I took a step backward.

  A woman’s voice, stern, admonished the dogs, shouted for them to shut up and back off. Meanwhile the barking eased, the scraping sounds against the door stopped. The whole ordeal sounded like a rehearsed routine.

  Finally, the dog sounds fell silent. A minute passed. I shivered, the cold wining against my efforts to keep moving. I started jumping on one foot and clapping my gloved hands together.

  When the woman opened the door, she caught me in mid-hop, my hands pressed together as if in prayer. Her eyes took me in as I landed, hit a slick stop, and almost fell again. But I brought my other foot down onto a dry section of the porch and managed to keep my balance.

  With my hands still together, I asked, “Are you Ms. Garaski?”

  “Who are you?”

  The woman barely touched the bottom side of thirty. She might have even been around twenty-seven. She had her hair cut short in the back and longer in the front, two blonde points hanging to her chin. She wore a blackberry shade of lipstick, layered on thick. Her eye shadow, a sky blue, looked air brushed on, as did the blush, as if she treated her face as a canvas every morning. Lots of make-up, but precise, not sloppy.

  Then I noticed the thick pancake foundation.

  Not a normal makeup job. But I realized now why I hadn’t found any recent employment history on her. No one counted a life in the arts as an actual job.

  She didn’t have the body of a dancer—not that it was a bad body. Her snug jeans and tight red sweater gave me plenty of proof of that. But if not a dancer…

  “You’re an actress.”

  She crossed her arms. “I didn’t ask who I was. I asked who you were.”

  “Sorry.” I made an awkward gesture toward her face. My shivering didn’t help. “I noticed the stage makeup. I used to do a lot of work in the theatre.”

  “That’s cool and all, bu
t I have a life, right? Are you selling something?”

  “No. Not selling. I wanted to talk to you about…er…”

  Brone, you started with this plan, you had to see it through.

  I cleared my throat. “I wanted to talk to you about God.”

  She blew to pieces with laughter. Her hand went to her belly as if she were pregnant and having labor pains. Her eyes teared-up, making her thick eyeliner glisten.

  I stood there in silence, accepting the humiliation.

  She glanced from my BMW in the drive to my face. It took some doing for her to finally swallow her laughter and speak again. “You’re telling me a Jehovah’s Witness drives a Beemer?” She cocked her head. “When you said you did theater, I assume you painted sets, ‘cause you’re a terrible actor.”

  I didn’t think I was that bad.

  “I was a singer,” I said. “It’s very cold out here. May I come in?”

  “To talk about God?” She smiled, but I didn’t feel a single watt of humor from it. “I have a dress rehearsal in about an hour and I have to drive to flipping Portage. I don’t really have time for God.”

  “There’s always time for God.”

  She looked me up and down with some interest in her eyes.

  I reminded myself about ten years sat between us.

  I also reminded myself it had been a looooooooong time since I’d been on a date, let alone taken a woman to bed.

  All of this was irrelevant, seeing as I was supposed to be acting like a professional investigator, not checking out women.

  Then again, she checked me out first.

  “So who are you really?” she asked, tapping a finger at the corner of her mouth as if trying to decide between a piece of cake or a slice of pie.

  I should have picked salesman, damn it. I hadn’t even considered the BMW giving me away. Sometimes you follow instinct, and instinct leads you astray.

  I had to come up with a better story, and fast.