Dead Man Talking

by Casey Daniels

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Fresh tears welled, and I didn’t even bother to brush them away. “I’m a little confused.”

  He nodded. “It’s the shock. I loaded your coffee with sugar. That ought to help.” He looked toward the Mustang. “You stay put for a few minutes, and when I can break away, we’ll get you out of here.”

  He’d already walked away before I had a chance to

  I guess my relationship with Quinn was what had earned me the luxury of sitting in that patrol car in the first place. When I found them, Absalom, Jake, Reggie, and Delmar were herded to one side of the building, shuffling their feet and waiting for the official go-ahead to leave. They looked as miserable as I felt.

  “You OK?” The blanket was still hanging from my shoulders, and Absalom straightened it. “You look awful.”

  “I just can’t believe it.” Like I needed to tell them that? “I don’t suppose any of the cops said anything. About anything they’ve found? Or who could have done this?”

  “Seems to me, you’re the best one who could answer that.” Absalom was right, but he didn’t press the point, and I don’t think it was because he was willing to cut me any slack. He looked tired. “All they did was ask us what we were doing here.”

  “And you told them . . . ?”

  Reggie’s shrug said it all. “Told them we was following you. And that you was doing research. For the restoration at the cemetery.”

  As far as it went, it was true, but it wasn’t the whole story, and it was about time they knew it. I sighed. “What I’ve really been doing is wasting time,” I said. “I think I know who buried that coin at Jefferson Lamar’s grave. He’s a man named Dale Morgan, and I should have

  Delmar’s eyes were red, like he’d been crying. Because he didn’t want me to see, he hung his head. “You ain’t scared of nothin’,” he said. “You ran out of that room, just like the rest of us did.”

  “But maybe I wouldn’t have been here in the first place. Not if I talked to Dale Morgan first. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe if I found out what he knows, maybe Sammi wouldn’t be—”

  A noise from behind us stopped me, and I turned just in time to see a couple paramedics lift Sammi’s body onto a stretcher and put it in an ambulance.

  I don’t know what it was about watching the scene that knocked the shock out of me. I do know that when it was gone, the only thing left behind was exhaustion.

  My knees were weak and my shoulders sagged. I barely heard Absalom when he asked, “What you going to do?”

  “I dunno.” It was the truth. My eyes filled with fresh tears. “I know I can’t just stand here, not when Sammi’s dead and . . .” I sobbed. “It’s not the kind of place where women should get killed. It’s a stupid little motel with flamingoes on the bathroom walls.”

  I listened to my own words wash back at me, and a chill like the touch of a dead hand tingled up my legs and into my body. My veins filled with ice water.

  I stood there thinking for so long, Absalom figured something was wrong. He waved a hand in front of my face. “Pepper? You OK?”

  If only he knew. I was as far from OK as it was possible to get.

  I threw off the blanket, and I was in my car and out of the parking lot before any of them could ask where I was going.

  At Garden View, there’s a gate that employees use when they come into work early or leave late. It’s in an out-of-the-way place, and not many people know it’s there. Those of us who do have access to the code that unlocks it.

  There is no such entrance at Monroe Street. The cemetery isn’t as big, for one thing, and since the only people on the payroll are city maintenance workers who come and go in daylight hours, there’s really no need for anything but the main gate.

  Which means that gate gets locked every evening.

  Which is a shame since by the time I drove across town and parked in front of the cemetery, it was long past sunset.

  Which explains why I had to climb over the iron fence.

  I am not by nature an athletic person. Besides a sweat (never a pretty thing), I broke a couple fingernails. And ripped my jeans. I got to the top of the head-high fence and held my breath, panicking at the height and the possibilities that spread out in front of me in a litany of disasters: broken bones, concussions, mussed hair.

  None of that was anything I wanted to think about, and rather than dwell and panic some more, I closed my eyes, let go, and dropped. It would be nice to say I landed gracefully, but truth be told, I ended up on my butt.

  No way I was going to let any of it stop me.

  I was hobbling a bit, but my steps were fueled by the anger that had been building since the Lake View. Limp or no limp, I headed straight for Jefferson Lamar’s grave.

  “You get over here, and you get here right now!” I didn’t care who heard me, so I didn’t even try to keep

  There was a shimmer in the air about ten feet away, and the next thing I knew, Jefferson Lamar was adjusting his big honkin’ glasses on the bridge of his nose. “It’s late,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be—”

  In three steps, I closed the distance between us, and I guess I’d learned something from Sammi after all (besides how not to dress). If I wasn’t sure my hands would swish right through him, I would have shoved him hard enough to knock him down, just like I’d seen her do to Virgil. With no more substantial way to demonstrate my anger, I pointed a finger at his nose. “You lied to me. And now somebody’s trying to kill me. And somebody did kill Sammi. Are you listening?” I don’t know how he couldn’t be, since by this time, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. “Did you hear me? I said Sammi’s dead. Just like Vera. And her death is all your fault. Just like Vera’s.”

  “No.” He slashed a hand through the air and this close, I felt the ripple of an icy breeze. “I didn’t kill Vera. I told you—”

  “You told me you weren’t screwing her.” When I stared into those dead eyes of his, my jaw was so rigid, it felt like it was going to snap. “You told me that. You swore it was true. But you knew. You told me yourself. You said the Lake View was the kind of tacky place with flamingoes on the bathroom wallpaper.”

  “Oh.” Right before my eyes, Lamar folded like an origami stork. It was all the proof I needed, and I guess that should have made me feel better.

  All it did was make me madder than ever.

  “There were no crime scene photographs that showed

  He backed away and refused to meet my eyes. “It doesn’t mean I killed her,” he said.

  “It means you’re lying.”

  His shoulders rose and fell. “You’re right.”

  “Well, hot damn!” I laughed, but believe me, there was no humor in the sound. If they bottled sarcasm, they would come to me as the source. “So all this time, you’ve been proclaiming your innocence, and all this time, I’ve been stupid enough to believe you. And now you’re telling me you’re not innocent. That you’re a murderer!”

  “No, not a murderer. But not innocent, either.”

  The only way I could try to think to steady my rattling heart rate was to take a deep breath. “You admit it? You and Vera—”

  When he turned and walked away, I followed right after him. Good thing. If I wasn’t close by, I wouldn’t have heard him when he mumbled, “She was young and pretty and lively. I was a married middle-aged man, and I loved Helen. Believe me.”

  “Yeah, like I’ve believed you all this time?”

  We were near the beat-up mausoleum, and Lamar stopped. “There was something exciting about being with Vera,” he said. “Something dangerous. She was so prim and efficient in the office, but when we were alone together, she was wild and different, and she made me feel so young! So—”

  “So much like the cheat you really were?”

  His shoulders sagged. “The guilt was overwhelming. Even so, I couldn’t stop myself. There were nights I told Helen I had to work late. Vera and I, we would head

  “To the Lake View?”

  “N
o, that’s the truth. The night Vera was killed . . .” His Adam’s apple bobbed. “That was the one and only time we’d ever been to the Lake View. How that clerk said he recognized us . . . why he would lie like that . . .”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Seems to be a lot of that going around.”

  “I’m sorry.” The way he said it, I almost believed him. “I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want anyone to know. If Helen finds out . . .”

  “Is that a little bit of conscience I hear talking?” Since I thought it was, my anger ratcheted back. A little, anyway. “How could you be so heartless? Not to mention stupid?”

  “I’d never done anything like it before. I never would have again. But there was something about Vera . . .”

  “And when you took the stand in court and denied you were having an affair with her?”

  He scraped a hand through his buzz-cut hair. “All these years, I’ve second-guessed my decision to keep quiet about the affair.” He dared to look into my eyes. “I’ve second-guessed it,” he said, “but I’ve never regretted it. Sure, it might have helped. It might have done me some good to admit my sins. To explain what I was doing at the Lake View. But maybe it would have just made me look more guilty. And it surely would have broken Helen’s heart. I couldn’t do that. I’d done enough to hurt her.”

  I took all this in, processing as I went. “So when you left Vera that night, you’re telling me she was still alive?”

  “It’s the God’s honest truth. It was . . .” He cleared his throat. “It was supposed to be another of our usual dates. But that night, Vera told me it was over between us. She was going back to her old boyfriend.”

  “Steve.”

  “She said she’d done a lot of thinking and come to realize there was no future for us. She said she was tired of the sneaking around. She wanted me to divorce Helen so we could be together, but . . . well, I couldn’t do that. I told Vera. I told her I never could.”

  “So she gave you the old heave-ho and you—”

  “I didn’t kill her.” He looked away. “We fought. I know it’s impossible for you to understand, but Vera . . . she made me crazy from wanting her. I couldn’t think straight. When Vera said she didn’t want to see me again . . .”

  I thought about the crime scene photos. “You’re the one who gave her that fat lip.” When he didn’t deny it, my anger came back, full force. “You slapped her, you creep.”

  He hung his head. “I’ve regretted it. All these years. I wished it had never happened, that her last night on earth wasn’t filled with pain and violence.” Lamar lifted his head to look into my eyes. “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  I met him look for look. “What happened after you hit her?”

  He swallowed hard. “She cried. And I begged her to forgive me. I told her how much she meant to me, how I couldn’t live without her. She wouldn’t listen.”

  “So you . . . ?”

  “I left. That’s all. I just walked out. I swear it’s the truth.”

  Was I buying his story? Not lock, stock, and barrel (whatever that means). But I wasn’t going to dismiss it, either. At least not until I knew more.

  “When you left, what was Vera wearing?” I asked him.

  He cleared his throat. “Nothing. Not when I walked out. When we met that evening, she was dressed in the outfit she wore to work that day.”

  “That’s why she didn’t care about your blood on her blouse. There was no use her changing clothes. You knew about the bloodstain. She knew you wouldn’t care.”

  “The police never picked up on that.” He sounded grateful. “I was so devastated when I left the motel . . . about Vera leaving me . . . about how I’d lost control and hit her . . . I wasn’t thinking straight. I thought . . . I thought about killing myself. I would have done it, too, if I didn’t realize that Helen would wonder what had gone wrong. She’d never have the answers, and I couldn’t stand the thought of that. I drove home in a fog. The next morning when I got to my office, the police were there to tell me that Vera was dead. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t tell them that when I saw her last, she was getting ready to get dressed.

  “So she was getting ready to leave, too. By the time the killer showed up at the door of the room, she was already dressed. And—”

  “Maybe when he knocked on the door, maybe she thought it was me.” There was so much hope in his voice, it turned my stomach. “Maybe she opened it because she’d changed her mind and—”

  “You’re pathetic. Do you know that?” I was in no mood to spare his feelings. “We’ve got two dead women on our hands, a marriage that self-exploded, and someone who wants to kill me because I’m looking into what really happened, and all you’re worried about is if your little love puppy wanted you back? ”

  “It’s been my curse. I’ve spent all these years wondering.

  He looked so miserable, I actually believed him.

  Go figure.

  18

  I’m not exactly a fan of prison movies, but I’ve seen my share. When I visited Dale Morgan at Northern Ohio Correctional, I saw that those movies were pretty accurate. Just like in the movies, I sat on one side of a glass wall, he sat on the other, and we talked to each other on telephones.

  Or more accurately, I talked on the phone, and he sat there pretty much not saying much of anything. Then again, he was too busy looking me over and salivating.

  “You do remember Warden Lamar, don’t you?” When I entered the room, I was told not to touch the glass, but I looked over my shoulder to make sure the guard who stood near the door wasn’t watching and took my chances. I tapped on the glass to get Morgan’s attention. “You were at Central State when he was in charge.”

  “He was a good man.” It was the most I’d gotten out of him since the gruff, “What’ya want?” he’d shot my way when he walked in.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t allowed to bring my purse into the visitors’ room (and the guards who’d taken it from me and put it in a locker better be handling it with kid gloves since it was a Juicy Couture), but I’d tucked the silver dollar from Lamar’s grave in the pocket of my khakis. I pulled it out so Morgan could see it. “You buried this at the warden’s grave.”

  Dale Morgan was an I-don’t-know-how-old chunky, short man with eyes as dull as the gray linoleum at our feet. He had hair that was thin and too long, a tiger tattoo on his left arm, and the kind of desperate, hungry look I imagined most of the men in prison wore like a second skin, as if he were starving for anything even remotely related to the outside world. It was the only reason he’d agreed to see me in the first place, and I knew it. I was shameless enough not to care.

  He squinted to get a better look at the silver dollar. “How would you know that about me burying that coin at Lamar’s grave?” he asked me. “I did that ten years ago or more. Between being at Central State and coming here. And what difference does it make, anyhow?”

  “It makes a difference to you.” I didn’t know this for a fact, but if nothing else, I was getting good at throwing a line. “You could have taken him a bunch of flowers. You didn’t. You buried this coin because you were part of the warden’s coin group at Central State. And it’s a Morgan silver dollar, after all. That was your way of letting him know who left it there for him. The coin was significant to you, and it is to him, too. Or at least”—I added this before he could ask any questions—“it would be significant to him if he were alive to know about it. I think you did it to thank him for trying to help you turn your life around.”

  Morgan’s smile was as lean and as sleek as the rest of him wasn’t. “Doesn’t look like it stuck, does it?”

  I couldn’t argue with him there, and agreeing seemed tacky. Instead, I stuck with the plan I’d made in the hour-and-a-half drive from Cleveland. “You can still show him how much you appreciate all he tried to do for you,” I said. “You might still be able to help Warden Lamar.”

  Morgan darted a look around the room. It was
a Thursday, and there weren’t many visitors around. The closest prisoner to him was three chairs away, and that man was so engrossed with talking to a woman with bad hair, a way-too-tight miniskirt, and a blouse with a plunging neckline, he wasn’t paying any attention to our conversation. Morgan lowered his voice, anyway.

  “How?”

  For the first time since I walked into the prison, I felt some of the tension inside me uncurl.

  I scooted forward in my chair. “I don’t think Warden Lamar killed Vera Blaine,” I said. “And maybe you don’t think so, either. Is that why you buried that coin at his grave? Did you feel you owed him something? If you’d spoken up sooner—”

  His look was as fierce as the tiger on his arm. “You trying to pin something on me?”

  “No. Not at all.” I tried for a smile, but let’s face it, it’s hard to smile in a place that frisks you when you walk in. “I don’t think you did it. In fact, I’m sure you didn’t. If you did, you never would have left that coin for Lamar. But . . .”

  This was the moment I’d gone to the prison for, and now that it had come, I felt butterflies flutter through my stomach. I reminded myself that all Morgan could do was get mad at me for what I was about to say. In comparison with someone trying to kill me and someone murdering Sammi, it was small potatoes.

  “I was hoping that maybe you would know something

  Except for his gaze, which darted left and right, he went as still as a statue. “Who told you?”

  “Then it’s true? You do know about what happened?”

  “Didn’t say it was true. I asked who told you.”

  “Nobody.” It was the truth, and somehow, I think he appreciated me admitting it. Or maybe I was just hoping. “But I know you respected the warden, and you’d want to see justice done. I might be able to prove he was innocent. If I could, it would give his widow peace, and it would put a murderer where he belongs. If you know anything—”

  I saw him signal for the guard who would take him back to his cell, and yeah, I panicked. I was too close to the truth. Maybe. I’d never know if Morgan wasn’t willing to talk.