After we hung up, Benny said to me, “Chasers?”
I nodded.
“What did Amy tell you?”
“Not much,” I said. “She knew about them, though. One is a real hothead named Dice. Junior Dice. Apparently, Dice had a big fight with Sally over one of his fees. Thousands of dollars. He claimed he brought her some lucrative client, but she said the client came to her because of one of her radio ads. That’s about the extent of Amy’s knowledge. She says she doesn’t know much about the Disciplinary Commission investigation.”
“Where’s the murder connection?” Benny asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Benny finished off the bottle of ale and set it on the ground next to his chair. He leaned back and pursed his lips in thought. “Rachel,” he said, “do you really have doubts about whether Neville killed her?”
I frowned. “The loose ends bother me.”
“What else have you learned about Sally?”
I told him about her trips to Hong Kong—nine over the past two years, none for longer than two days. Sally told Amy she went there to shop, and the inventory of her home seemed to support the statement. Her house had plenty of the sorts of things people buy in Hong Kong: watches, jewelry, clothes, camera equipment, stereo systems.
“Still,” Benny said, “how much money could she save after adding in the travel costs? What’s her ex-husband say about the trips?”
“Neville didn’t know about any of them, although I got the sense that communication was never strong in that marriage. According to her passport, she only made four trips to Hong Kong while they were actually living together. Most of her trips came after they separated.”
The phone rang again. This time it was Jonathan Wolf.
As usual, he dispensed with the usual pleasantries. “What else do you need?” he asked.
“A confession would be nice.”
“I’m serious, Rachel. What more do you need?”
“How about Neville’s missing girlfriend?”
“We’re working on that.”
“I have to tell you, Jonathan, that one’s pretty lame.”
“As I stated,” he said brusquely, “we’re trying to locate her.”
I told him about the Walgreens receipt, which had another sample of Sally’s handwriting.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll pick it up in the morning on my way to the office. We need to talk.”
“I won’t be here in the morning.”
“Why not?”
I looked over at Benny, who was sorting through the materials in Sally’s briefcase. Benny looked up. I gestured to the phone and shook my head in exasperation. “Because, Jonathan, I will be somewhere else.”
“Then when can we meet?”
I glanced down at my calendar. “After lunch. I’ll come by your office at one-thirty.”
“Make it two.”
I sighed. “Certainly, Jonathan. Two it is.”
After I hung up I turned to Benny. “That guy is unbelievable. Talk about chutzpah.”
Benny was smiling. “He’s perfect for you.”
“Yeah, right,” I said derisively.
“Mark my words.”
I snorted. “Not in this lifetime, buster.”
“I’m serious, Rachel.”
“Jonathan Wolf?” I shook my head. “No way.”
“Were you bullshitting him about being busy tomorrow morning?”
“No, I’m really going to be out. I have to take Ozzie to the vet at eight-thirty, and there’s a memorial service for Sally tomorrow at ten.”
“You’re going?”
I nodded. “I want to see who her friends are. Maybe one of them spent time with her after she retained me. I still need a witness for her case. You want to come along?”
“Maybe.” He was studying the monthly schedule of events put out by the bar association. The three-page yellow document had been in Sally’s briefcase. “Interesting,” he said. “Check it out.” He handed it to me. “Look at what she marked.”
At the bottom of the second page was a reminder for a meeting of the committee overseeing the renovation plans for the St. Louis Civil Courts Building. The meeting was scheduled for 5:00 p.m. on October 16. Sally had circled it in red.
“So?” I said.
“You’re looking for a witness, right? Look at the date of the meeting.”
I did. “You’re right. It was the day after she retained me.” I shook my head. “She didn’t go.”
“How do you know?”
“Amy told me she called in sick that day.”
“Still,” Benny said, “she might have called someone on the committee to say she wouldn’t be there. There are two state court judges on that committee. She wouldn’t have wanted an unexplained absence.”
I mulled it over. “You might be right.”
“What if she called one of the judges on the committee? Better yet, what if she told him the truth? There’d be a helluva good witness for you.”
I looked at the meeting notice again. The only person listed was the committee chair, Lloyd MacLachlan. Lloyd was an older partner at one of the insurance defense firms downtown. Fortunately, I knew him. He’d represented one of the parties in a coverage dispute I’d worked on about a year ago. I called his office.
Unlike Jonathan Wolf, he did not dispense with the usual pleasantries, which, in Lloyd MacLachlan’s case, were quite pleasant. Lloyd was one of the senior statesmen of the local bar, a gentleman lawyer with courtly manners, Southern charm, and a marvelous white handlebar mustache with twirled ends kept stiff with mustache wax. After inquiring about my health, my practice, my mother, and my dog, Lloyd said, “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
“I’m helping wrap up Sally Wade’s estate.”
“Oh, what a tragedy. I had the privilege of becoming acquainted with that young lady during the past year. She served on a bar committee I chair.”
“Actually, that’s what I’m calling you about.”
“Well, I can assure you that Sally Wade was a splendid member of our committee. She was bubbling with ideas and enthusiasm, and was always willing to take on extra responsibility. Why, at the last meeting she agreed to serve as our liaison to the architects, which is no small undertaking. My goodness, that still haunts me.”
“Why, Lloyd?”
“That poor woman was dead less than a week later.”
I looked over at Benny with surprise. “You mean Sally was at your meeting on October sixteenth?”
Benny raised his eyebrows and leaned forward.
“She most certainly was,” Lloyd said. “It made the news of her death even more shocking.”
“How did she look?”
“How did she look?” he repeated, perplexed.
“Physically.”
“Oh,” he said with an awkward chuckle, “she looked lovely.”
“Really? Did you notice a black eye?”
“A black eye? Good heavens, are you serious?”
“Dead serious, Lloyd. I take it you didn’t notice any bruising around her eye?”
“Not at all.”
“Or a puffy lip? Did she look like she’d been in an accident?”
“Gracious, no. Sally sat directly across the table from me during the meeting, and nothing about her appearance seemed to be amiss.”
“You’re sure?”
“Quite sure.” He chuckled softly. “Although it may be a mortal sin in these politically correct times, I plead guilty to having an eye for the lovelier ladies of the bar, very much including yourself, Rachel. I can assure you that on the day in question Sally looked as pretty as a peach, poor thing.”
Chapter Ten
It wasn’t that I disliked Marvin Vogelsang, because I didn’t really. I barely kne
w him. My negative feelings were triggered more by his obvious discomfort. Marvin Vogelsang was one of those people who are so ill at ease around people that they make the people around them ill at ease as well. To begin with, he only made sporadic eye contact when I spoke to him, and when he spoke his focal point shifted starboard. Worse yet, he had a slight stammer, and when he tripped on a bad consonant his eyes rotated up and his eyelids fluttered.
The fact that he was a principal in the Vogelsang Funeral Home didn’t help matters. Embalming is, to be sure, an ancient and venerable profession, but the thought of what morticians do for a living just plain gives me the willies. Although my initial contact with Marvin Vogelsang was at Sally’s funeral, he had come not to bury Sally but to praise her. Literally. Marvin had delivered one of four eulogies. Although his had been short and not particularly stirring, I had driven to his funeral home directly from the memorial service and was now seated in his strange office because of one sentence in his eulogy: “I was privileged to be with Sally throughout the last weekend of her life.”
Marvin Vogelsang seemed a thoroughly unlikely candidate for the role of Sally’s boyfriend. He was tall and skinny and pale, with a long oval face, thick purplish lips, and dark eyes sunk deep beneath heavy eyebrows. His thinning black hair was carefully combed and swirled over the top of his head in an obvious and obviously unsuccessful effort to camouflage his bald spot. Even worse, the hair that had fallen from the top of his head seemed to have resprouted on other parts of his body, including his knuckles, his nostrils, and his ears. He was, in short, a thoroughly unattractive man. As Benny commented during the memorial service, “I’ve seen better heads on a cabbage.”
His office decor added another strange touch. Along the back wall behind his desk were four porcelain Buddhas of various sizes, each on a marble Greek column pedestal. In a lighted display case against one side wall were a half-dozen Chinese vases. The other wall was hung with four Japanese scroll paintings.
“It was a beautiful eulogy,” I lied.
His eyes shifted starboard. “You are kind to say so.” His eyes shifted back to me.
“How long have you known Sally?”
Eyes away. “Three m-m-months.” Eyes back.
“From what you said about her in your eulogy, I got the sense that you spent lots of time with Sally her last weekend.”
Pause. “Almost the entire weekend.”
“Here?”
“No. I attended an out-of-town sem-m-m-inar. Sally accom-m-m-”—eyes up, eyelids fluttering—“m-m panied me.”
“Were did you go?”
It took a while to get out the word “Milwaukee.” The letter “M” seemed to be a problem for him.
I asked about his relationship with Sally. Their intimacy did not seem to extend beyond the physical part. Although she had told him about her pending divorce, she hadn’t shared any of her feelings about her soon-to-be ex-husband. They talked only once during the week before their trip to M-M-M-M-Milwaukee—a single brief telephone conversation, during which Sally made no mention of Neville’s assault and attempted rape.
Although that was disturbing to hear, it wasn’t why I had driven all the way over to Belleville, Illinois, to visit him. For my purposes, the best possible boyfriend for Sally would have been a physician, but a mortician was a close second. Both were familiar with signs of trauma on the human body.
I tried to gently steer the conversation toward the questions I had come here to ask, but with his personality quirks and speech mannerisms it was anything but a smooth approach. Finally, however, I caught sight of the runway.
“So the first time you saw Sally after the assault was Friday evening?”
He nodded slowly, staring off to the side.
“Did you notice any bruises and injuries on her face?”
He shook his head.
“No black eye?”
He shook his head again, still staring off to the side. His watch started beeping. He held it up to eye level and squinted at the dial. He turned to me, apparently hesitant about what to do.
“Uh, excuse me,” he finally said, pulling open a desk drawer. Giving me a furtive glance, he took out what looked like an eight-ounce white plastic bottle of pills. He unscrewed the cap and shook out a gold tablet into his palm. Turning sideways, he popped the tablet into his mouth and crunched it up. His face puckered from the taste. Holding the bottle out of my line of sight, he started screwing on the top. The telephone rang. The noise made him start, and the cap fell onto the floor. I heard it hit the plastic mat under his chair and roll beneath the desk. Flustered, he glanced at the phone, peered under his desk, and then looked at the pill bottle in his hand. He put the bottle on the desk and reached for the phone. “Uh, yes?” he said.
As he listened, he bent down to retrieve the cap. While he was hunched beneath the desk, I leaned toward the plastic bottle. It was half filled with gold-colored tablets. The label was in English and Chinese. The English part read Shim Lai Porpoise Virility Pills. I leaned closer to read the writing beneath the brand name:
Ingredients: Top-quality testicle and penis of porpoise ground into powder and pilled in form convenient for the intake.
I sat back as his head came up from beneath the desk.
“Fine,” he said into the phone and hung up. He grabbed the pill bottle, screwed on the top, opened the desk drawer, put it inside, and shut the drawer. He raised his eyes to mine, his face reddening slightly. “You were s-s-s-saying?”
“We were talking about the weekend in Milwaukee,” I said in a matter-of-fact tone, as if I hadn’t just watched him scarf down a powdered puree of Flipper’s family jewels. “I assume that the two of you stayed in the same hotel room.”
He nodded.
“I don’t mean to offend you by this next question, Mr. Vogelsang, and I hope you understand why I have to ask it. Did you have the opportunity over that last weekend to see Sally without her clothes on?”
He shifted his stare toward me, his brows knitted, his thick lips pressed together. He stayed in that position, virtually immobile, for what seemed a long time. I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or insulted by the question or just pondering it. Eventually, he looked down at his desktop. “Yes, I did.”
“Did she have any bruises or visible injuries?”
With his eyes still down, he lifted a brass letter opener off the desk blotter and rotated it between his fingers. “There was a m-m-m-mild abrasion on her right knee. She said she skinned her knee working in the basem-m-m-ment.”
“Was that all?”
He slowly slid the blade of the letter opener in and out of the brass sheath. “I saw n-n-n-nothing else.” He looked up, his eyes narrowing. “I have work to do. I’d p-p-p-prefer that you leave now.”
***
The offices of Wolf & Diamond were on one of the upper floors of One Metropolitan Square in the heart of downtown St. Louis. Compared to the usual glitzy decor of a successful criminal attorney, Jonathan’s office seemed modest and downright traditional. No chrome, no leather, no bearskin rugs. Instead, there were several comfortable upholstered chairs, a large rolltop desk, two tall healthy ficus, and an old-fashioned oak worktable in the corner piled with stacks of pleadings and legal pads and photocopies of cases. It took me a moment to realize that there was no computer in his office—a rarity these days.
And finally, and most surprising, there were walls, not shrines. There were none of the usual awards and bronzed newspaper articles and plaques and autographed celebrity shots that crowd the walls of so many attorneys, although Jonathan Wolf possessed plenty of displayable laurels, including one priceless memento from Operation Paddlewheel, his most famous criminal case. Operation Paddlewheel, inevitably rechristened PaddleGate by the press, ended in prison terms for several state court judges, court clerks, and local attorneys, including, ironically enough, Sally Wade’s old boss, Abe Gro
zny. When the last of the cases ended, Jonathan’s colleagues presented him with the framed, signed original of the Thomas Englehardt political cartoon that had appeared in the Post-Dispatch during the height of the prosecutions—the one with Jonathan Wolf standing tall and splendid at the helm of his combat ship, the S.S. PaddleGate, ordering his men to fire on the crew of rapscallions frantically poling their raft toward shore. When he left the government for private practice, he left that souvenir behind as well. I knew because I had seen it there just two weeks ago, still hanging on the so-called Hall of Fame in the offices of the U.S. attorney.
Instead of plaques and awards, Jonathan’s walls were decorated with art. On one wall, centered and alone, was a large, striking abstract painting—bold brushstrokes in reds and oranges and yellows. The signature in the lower right corner of the canvas read SHEILA WOLF 1991. It took a few seconds for it to click: Sheila was the name of his deceased wife. A lawyer when she married Jonathan, Sheila Wolf had returned to her avocation—painting—after the birth of her first child.
The back wall was crowded with children’s artwork: watercolors and crayon pictures and homemade Valentines and school art projects and plenty of I Love Daddys. From the signatures on the artwork, one of the artists was named Sarah and the other Leah. On the roll-top desk were several framed photographs of the artists, including one of both on their father’s lap. They weren’t trophy photos—those professional jobs with everyone impeccably attired and so carefully posed that the scene reminds you of a tableau at Madame Tussaud’s. No, these were warm, casual shots of a dad with his two little girls.
The decorating statement was clear: here works a papa. It was a statement so utterly unexpected that I was momentarily flustered. In the courtroom and the boardroom, there was an intimidating take-no-prisoners aura about Jonathan Wolf that seemed to leave no room for a gentler side. And thus, when he told my mother that he made kamishbroit with his daughters, it had sounded so incongruous that I dismissed it as a ploy to enlist her assistance in softening my attitude toward his client. But now, looking at these genuinely affecting pictures of him with his daughters, I found myself wondering again about what was beneath the surface of this intense, aggressive, but very private man.
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