Death Takes Priority

by Jean Flowers

  My knees went limp and I had to grab the counter to keep my balance. The little girl who constantly lost her stuffed animals was back. How could I help her this time?

  * * *

  I took advantage of the break in the line to make two calls, one to Sunni and one to Quinn, cancelling lunch with both, through their voicemail. I fumbled around with phrases about something that had come up unexpectedly and I’d call later to reschedule and sorry, sorry, sorry.

  I’d agreed to meet Wanda shortly after noon at Betty’s Diner, even though there was a good chance that Sunni would end up there with an alternate lunch partner. I wasn’t worried that Quinn would appear in that public a place any time soon. He’d taken home the leftover pizza from last night and I imagined it would be gone by noon if he hadn’t eaten it already. A smile crossed my face as I thought of our impromptu dinner, quickly followed by a frown as I recalled giving up the UAA letter without the satisfaction of learning its contents.

  At noon, I closed up and struck out for Betty’s, in the opposite direction from the police department, but not much longer a walk for me.

  * * *

  As the only eatery in town that wasn’t fast food, Betty’s was line-out-the-door busy. Wisely, they’d recently added a small takeout annex next door, and provided seating outside in a covered area. Tall heat lamps stationed around the perimeter made the patio bearable most of the year, including today. The only things outdoor diners lacked were the signature red Naugahyde booths and throwback jukebox that the indoor folk enjoyed.

  I sat across from Wanda and searched her face for the little girl I knew, the one with skinny legs who showed up whenever her mom needed a break. It was clear that she loved to be with her big brother and his posse whenever she could. She’d wander into the Grahams’ basement rec room and happily serve us sodas and snacks. Wendell feigned annoyance, but it was clear that the two shared a special bond. And the rest of us just thought she was cute, sometimes taking advantage of her good humor to send her on an errand or ask her to sweep the field before a pickup game at the park. Water girl. Bat girl. Errand girl. Groupie. That was Wanda.

  “You’re remembering when I was a kid and pestered you and the gang,” Wanda said, catching me in the act of putting braids on her again.

  “I suppose so,” I admitted.

  “People always said Wendell and I looked the most alike of all us,” she said. “There were four of us, but Wendell and I . . .” She stopped to catch her breath.

  “I remember.” It was a strange feeling, eighteen years later, to be meeting the sister of a high school boyfriend, let alone one who had been murdered. While we waited for our salads, I apologized for brushing her off.

  “It’s just that the reporters wouldn’t leave me alone, and I really had nothing to tell them,” I explained. “I thought you were one of them.”

  “I guess I was testing you,” Wanda said, playing with her paper napkin. “I had to know if I could trust you, if you were the same Cassie that I looked up to. If you were just another gossiping pseudo-friend, I wasn’t going to bother. I need the old friend of Wendell’s who was willing to play my silly games.”

  “I lost my teddy bear,” I said, mimicking a kid’s voice, getting a big smile from her.

  “I didn’t want to just come out and yell, ‘Hey, I’m different. I’m not one of those reporters. I’m Wendell’s little sister.’”

  “Still, I didn’t have to be snarky. I’m so sorry for your loss, Wanda. I’m sure it’s a terrible sadness for all of you.”

  She shrugged. “The family fell apart when Mom died. Except for Wendell and me, everyone split and we hardly keep in touch. Dad moved to Florida to be with my brother Walker, and my sister, Whitney, never came back from school in Maine.”

  “It must be so hard for you now.” Were there any other trite phrases I could call up? I could say, “I’m here for you” or “You have my sympathy,” but I balked at those. At times like this I forgave all those well-meaning people who uttered the same platitudes when I lost my parents.

  Wanda overlooked my clumsy words and returned to who in her family left town, when, and why. “I always thought you and Wendell would stay together,” she said.

  I gasped. Silently, I hoped. Then, salads to the rescue. “And, here we are,” our waitress said. “Sorry for the wait.”

  I was grateful for the intrusion, and for the loud clatter of dishes and conversation that gave me time to recover from the thought of Wendell and me together as adults. More welcome distraction came, as patrons walked within inches of us. Betty’s was set back from the sidewalk, so close to foot traffic that every passerby could reach into our bread basket and help himself to a free sesame roll if he were so inclined.

  “It was a teenage thing,” I said, finally. “Wendell and I actually dated only part of our senior year.” I didn’t mention that it ended around the time of the ugly green prom dress.

  Wanda looked surprised. “It seemed like forever to me. I guess that’s how things look when you’re little.”

  “Everything’s bigger, longer, more intense,” I agreed. I had an image of her tugging on Wendell’s shirt, asking him never to change.

  For a few minutes we were silent as we dug into our salads. I snuck a glance at my watch, conscious of being on my lunch hour. I made the mistake of looking around the room at one point and caught Derek Hathaway smiling my way. He formed a phone with his thumb and little finger, and mouthed, “Call me.”

  I decided that mouthing, “I don’t think so,” back would be rude, and simply ignored the request.

  Wanda still hadn’t told me what she meant by needing my help, as she’d put it this morning. Maybe she’d meant simply that she needed to talk about her brother with someone who knew him at a happy time in their lives. I could do that.

  “He never married, you know,” Wanda said.

  Uh-oh. Did Wanda think Wendell had hung around North Ashcot waiting for me to return? She seemed smarter than that, but the trauma of her brother’s death could have sent her back to a time when her little-girl self envisioned the best part of her life lasting forever. Wendell and all his friends would never grow old and she and all her toys would always be loved and protected by all of us.

  “What do you do, Wanda?” I asked, universal code for “Do you have a legitimate profession?” as if we were on a blind date, getting to know each other. Anything to move forward.

  “I’m a graphics designer. Freelance. A lot of my work is designing covers for e-books.”

  “I guess I’d have known that if I’d read your business card.”

  We’d finished our salads, chatted about how important a cover was, even for a book that was distributed only online, and received our check. Still no clue what if anything Wanda wanted from me.

  I made a move to gather my jacket and purse. “I’m due back at work,” I said, though I had a half hour left. It wouldn’t be the first time someone left the most important nugget until the last few minutes of a meeting or a phone call. I wanted to give Wanda an opening while I still had time to listen. “Is there something specific I can do for you, Wanda?”

  Her face turned sober and she looked straight at me. The noise from the kitchen stopped, as did all the chatter around us and all the motion past our table. I heard only Wanda’s pleading voice.

  “Cassie, I need your help finding my brother’s killer.”

  I blew out a deep breath. I was sorry I asked.

  * * *

  Wanda walked me back to the post office. It was more of a stroll, with Wanda explaining to me how busy the North Ashcot Police Department was, with a series of vandalism incidents at the high school and a rash of vehicle pranks and break-ins along the back roads.

  “They’re really not equipped to handle a murder case,” she said. “The last one was not even in this century.”

  I bristled at the implication that S
unni and her force were unqualified, that they might be more concerned about graffiti and slashed tires than the murder of one of our citizens.

  “Chief Smargon has the training and she has her priorities straight,” I said, stretching what I actually knew for sure. “And if she needs to, she can get help from other towns, or even the state.”

  Wanda used her trendy short boots to kick some leaves, a favorite pastime in North Ashcot at this time of year. “I tried to tell her I suspected my brother had fallen in with some questionable characters, and she said she’d look into it, but I got the impression she was blowing me off.”

  Maybe Wanda wasn’t so far off about Wendell’s current buddies. I thought of Ben’s reluctance to consider lowering our flag in Wendell’s honor and his hint of a shady involvement that should be investigated. On the other hand, “questionable characters” without names and documentation wasn’t much of a lead for the police to follow.

  “Is there something, or someone, in particular you think the chief should be looking at?”

  “I’m not sure, but I know that Wendell had a lot more money in the last few months than he ever did. He bought a new car and he’s been fixing up our old house. He still lives there and hasn’t been able to afford an upgrade until, all of a sudden, he’s hiring carpenters, redoing the bathrooms. I have my own place, but I go to the old homestead pretty often and I see the difference.”

  “Maybe he got a raise or a promotion, or . . .”

  She shook her head. “I’m talking very high-end stuff. He couldn’t make that kind of money working for the phone company. And it’s certainly not an inheritance.”

  “You really think your brother was breaking the law in some way?”

  She kicked another leaf. “Wendell always felt he was the loser in the family. It was such a letdown for him after being so popular in high school. Whitney and Walker went off to college and now they have really good careers and families. Even I make more than he did, though my little foray into marriage”—she spread her palms—“thus the Cox on my business card, didn’t work out so well.” Wanda took a long breath, perhaps revisiting her marriage. “Believe me, I don’t want to think Wendell was into something illegal. It’s taken me a long time to look at things realistically, but now that he’s been”—she stopped, as if unable to say the word—“murdered, I have to consider that might be why.”

  It was a lot for a little sister to bear. It was even a lot for a former-if-brief girlfriend to think about. “Is there anyone new in his life, someone who might have enticed him into a scheme of some kind?”

  It took all the limited word power I had to dance around crime-related words like “bribes,” “kickbacks,” “payoffs,” “fraud.”

  “He didn’t have much of a social life at all. The only person I can think of is an old classmate. They weren’t especially friendly in high school, but he’s been seeing a lot of this guy in the past few months, maybe a year. His name is Derek Hathaway. I’m not saying he’s a criminal or anything, but he is super rich. Did you know him?”

  I managed a combination nod and frown, not too obviously skewed, I hoped. “He’s in construction, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a developer, actually, according to Wendell. He has buildings all over Albany.”

  Why did I not have any trouble picturing Derek Hathaway at the top of an illegal enterprise? Just because he was rich? Not fair. I found myself defending him.

  “You haven’t told me anything about Derek that makes me think he or your brother was engaged in anything sketchy.”

  “Well, that’s what the cops are supposed to do, aren’t they? Investigate and find out if there was anything going on?” she asked, her tone heavy with frustration.

  We’d come full circle. “I’ll tell you what: I’m on good terms with Chief Smargon,” I said. At least before I cancelled a lunch date with her. “Do you want me to try to find out how the investigation is going?”

  “Of course that would be great, but I also think you could be a big help to her. Detective work is your thing, right?”

  I stopped walking and so did Wanda. “What? Where did you hear that?”

  “I’ve kept up with you, Cassie. Every now and then, you’ve made the local news for some postal reason or other, and then there was that big fraud case, where you busted it wide open.”

  I shook my head more than was necessary for a simple no.

  Wanda had latched on to my fifteen minutes of fame. A few years ago, my diligence with regard to metered mail from my office in Boston paid off. My discovery had led to the arrest of a businessman who’d been using a stolen postage meter to the tune of thousands of dollars a month. Heads rolled, people went to jail, and I was a hero. For fifteen minutes.

  I had a vague memory of talking briefly to a North Ashcot reporter who called me at the time. He’d gotten the story from our public affairs office, noticed that I was from his hometown, and wanted embellishments from me. I gave him the correct spelling of my name but little else. He filled in the rest from his creative imagination.

  “You’ve got it all wrong. I was just doing my job then,” I explained to Wanda. “Checking my collection box to be sure the permit number was legitimate. Something every postmaster is supposed to do. I found a discrepancy, followed it through, and reported it. Not exactly leaping tall buildings.”

  “Isn’t that what detective work is? I read that you had to track down where the unauthorized mail was coming from and stuff like that, too.”

  “Wanda, that was still a long way from a murder investigation. And your brother deserves the best investigators we have.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to make sure happens,” she said.

  We’d resumed walking and had reached the post office, with a few minutes to spare before I had to open up. I turned to face Wendell’s grown-up sister.

  “I’m not sure what I can do about this, Wanda. I’ll see what I can learn from the chief, and I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

  She reached over and hugged me. I felt tears coming on—for both of us. I was sorry for Wanda, for Wendell, for all the losses in our lives since we were both naïve kids.

  “Thanks, Cassie. I knew you’d come through.”

  I gave her a comforting pat, suppressing my question. “Come through how?”

  10

  I couldn’t remember a more distracted afternoon of retail work. Loose threads of nagging questions floated in my mind no matter what else I was doing. I came close to giving one customer twice as many commemoratives as he’d paid for, and almost charged another person forty dollars for a sheet of twenty one-dollar stamps. It was a good thing my patrons were on the ball and corrected my errors.

  I felt as though someone had forced me to make a quilt, then gave me patches of fabric with threads hanging from every edge, each patch with a different, unfinished pattern. And my sewing machine was broken. If I had a sewing machine. I knew I had to stop thinking of quilting and find myself a viable hobby before Sunni swooped in and gave me one of her old machines. I’d never known a quilter who had only one sewing machine.

  As I hefted another pile of phone books onto the counter, I realized the burning issue of directory theft that began the week was the only incident now resolved. Nearly fifty customers had picked up their directories this morning, none of them seriously inconvenienced or wise to the fact that their books had taken a weekend vacation trip first to Quinn’s house and then to the police station.

  All the loose ends in my mind began to take shape into a long list. Whether Quinn’s mother had murdered her husband in San Francisco. Why Quinn ran away rather than testify. Why Wendell had Quinn’s names and address in his pocket. What the UAA letter I’d passed on to Quinn contained. Whether Wendell was involved in a criminal enterprise. What Ben knew about Wendell. Who Wendell’s killer was. And finally, what Derek Hathaway had to do with anything.
<
br />   I stopped counting before I ran out of fingers. Since simply telling myself to mind my own business hadn’t worked, I needed to attack the list. I knew Wanda expected more of me than I could give, but I owed her my best shot. It was the least I could do.

  The last thread seemed the easiest to take on. After all, Derek Hathaway had already invited me to lunch. When the lobby was empty at three o’clock, I steeled myself for a call to him. I put on my headset to free my hands, and lined up chores I could do while carrying on a conversation. I found Derek’s card in a pile of unsorted papers on my desk, along with the betting club literature that Selectwoman Gert and her friend Coach had handed me—all material that accumulated each time I emptied my pockets. I punched in Derek’s number in Albany, the only information on the card. No title or company name. I wondered if he had separate cards for different purposes and had judged that I needed to know only his phone number. Either that, or he assumed everyone knew who he was and what he did; all anyone needed was a line to his office.

  As expected, “Hathaway Enterprises” answered and I left a message with a professional-sounding woman. I could tell she didn’t recognize my name, so who knew when, if ever, the great man would receive the message and return my call? I reminded myself that the reason for contacting Derek was simply to satisfy Wanda. His was the only name she’d been able to come up with as someone tied to Wendell in his recent dealings. If lunch with Derek didn’t work out, too bad. I could at least tell Wanda I’d tried.

  My first customer after that break was another lunch date left hanging, Tim Cousins, who’d tried to work his way into the office on Monday night. I greeted him as he hoisted a heavy, dented tub onto my counter. He wore a paint-splattered formerly white hat and the same dark parka I’d seen him in the other night.

  “Doing a favor for my friend,” he said. “I think this is all legally metered and all.” He paused for a long breath. “Hey, I’m sorry I hassled you Monday night. I was just, you know, freaked out by the murder.”