“I need help,” I said haltingly to the short police-woman behind the forbidding counter. The deputy’s dark green uniform stretched across her plump frame, and she wore her streaked blond hair in a French braid woven so tightly it would have given me a headache. “I’m here to see a friend, Marla … Marla Korman. She has … just been taken into the jail.” I cleared my throat and willed control. “You see, there’s been some terrible, terrible mistake,” I said firmly, “because she would never—”
“Hold on,” said the policewoman. She asked me to spell Marla’s name as she typed on a computer keyboard. She puzzled over the screen for a minute, then turned to me, shaking her head. “I don’t know what the charge is, and probably won’t for a while—”
“Please,” I begged, shameless now, “please. I’m Mrs. Schulz. Mrs. Tom Schulz. Couldn’t you please call the officer on duty at the jail and find out what’s going on with my friend? She’s in poor health, and she’s been badly beaten, and the cops who arrested her were hurting her….”
The policewoman leaned forward. “There’s no one to call, Mrs. Schulz. There won’t be anyone until she’s processed. I’m sorry to say this, but unless you’re her attorney you’re not going to be able to see your friend until visiting day Friday—”
“Friday! She could have a heart attack before Friday! She doesn’t even have her medication!” I yanked Marla’s purse up. “It’s called Inderal. It’s in here and they wouldn’t let—” The policewoman relieved me of the purse in a smooth motion and stowed it under the desk.
“What you need to do,” she scolded in a calm, even tone that indicated she had dealt with far more hysterics than she cared to, “is go home. Wait for your friend to call.”
I was getting nowhere. I had to think of another way to help Marla. I ran back out to the parking lot and considered my options. I knew one thing: I was not going home to wait for Marla to call. Her plaintive cry to me as she was hauled away still echoed in my head. I trotted down the steps to the sheriff’s department’s main entrance.
“Tom Schulz, please,” I told the duty deputy at the counter. His desk was a smaller version of the one in the jail lobby. The young deputy himself was so thin his uniform hung on him; he looked like a scarecrow. He couldn’t have been a day over twenty. “Deputy …?” I glanced at his nameplate. “Carlson? Would you please tell Tom Schulz his wife’s here?”
Deputy Carlson picked up a phone and punched buttons, then spoke in low tones. I couldn’t make out what he was saying and couldn’t tell if he was calling Tom, the upstairs duty officer, or, heaven forbid. Captain Shockley. I vigorously shook off this last thought. My paranoia did not extend that far. After a moment the deputy hung up and said Tom would be right down.
Five minutes later, Tom strolled toward me with all his usual self-confidence. It felt like ages since I’d seen him last, although it had only been the previous night. His green eyes sought mine and he seemed to assess my mood instantly.
“Let’s go up and get some coffee,” he said pleasantly, as if I’d arrived to go over the grocery list.
He smiled and waved at the cop at the desk. I’m in control here. Nothing to worry about.
Sure.
“Come on,” he said aloud in the tone that warned. We’re in public; act like nothing’s happened. “Let’s go get some caffeine. There’s an old friend of yours who wants to talk.” When I gasped and brightened, he lowered his voice, but kept the same smile. “It’s Armstrong. He’s been up to the Grizzly Creek scene. He was in the vicinity checking a mountain lion report, and heard about the trucker’s call on the radio.”
I slipped my arm in his and walked by his side, as if I came down to the sheriff’s department all the time to drink bitter vending machine coffee with my husband.
Three uniformed officers were leaving the break room just as we entered it. They nodded and said, “Schulz,” but sent furtive glances in my direction. No doubt my wild eyes and splotched cheeks didn’t play very well. Poor guy, I could imagine them thinking, she’s got some problem and expects him to solve it.
“Does everyone know what’s going on?” I murmured once Tom had brought me a steaming coffee with powdered creamer still dissolving on top. I stared into the brew with dismay.
“Tough to tell.” Hardly had he spoken when Deputy Armstrong pushed into the room. I had known Armstrong—a pasty-faced man with thin brown hair—for a couple of years. He gave me a sympathetic look and joined us.
“They’re putting her into jail pending formal announcement of charges,” he began without cushioning the blow.
“When can I see her?” I asked. I sounded absurdly calm. “Is there anything I can do?”
Armstrong frowned. “They have visiting days. And no, there’s nothing you can do to help. She’ll call the lawyer she wants. They arrested her today because they found out she was planning on leaving the country.”
Marla’s calendar. I nodded, heavy-hearted. “But listen. She needs the medication I gave to the jail receptionist. That won’t get lost in red tape, will it? Plus, she needs to see a doctor.”
Tom touched my shoulder. “The jail nurse will see her. She’ll get her pills. The last thing they want is a wrongful death lawsuit, believe me. Is she hurt? Or are you just worried about her heart?”
“Someone beat her up at the campsite and left her to die. And whoever it was did the same to Macguire, I’m sure. Tom, Tony Royce is missing, and those two cops are saying she killed him. It’s utterly absurd. Marla couldn’t hurt anyone.” Except the Jerk, and he’d asked for it.
“Do they think they fought, and she killed him in self-defense?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know! Those cops tricked her,” I told him ferociously. “That horrid DeGroot Mirandized her when she hadn’t the faintest idea what was going on. Had her sign a document saying they could search her home. She thought they were looking for Tony. I tried to stop them, but no one would listen to me. De Groot kept telling me to shut up. They shoved me, Tom. But they hurt her….” I fell silent.
“She told them she was in a fight, right?” Tom asked gently. When I nodded, he added, “That’s when she became a suspect in their eyes.”
“But is Tony Royce dead? Do they have his body? How did he die? And what about his missing partner, Lipscomb? Marla said a bald guy was beating her up! Do you have any idea where he is? Why isn’t he under suspicion?”
“Miss G., for what? Do you think Lipscomb was camping at the site and they surprised him?” Tom’s eyes questioned me. I shrugged, and he went on: “Maybe a bald guy attacked her. But my bet is that the missing partner is long gone. He took that money and skipped. The one Shockley theory I’ve heard is that Albert Lipscomb, Tony Royce, and Marla were in on a scam together. When it went bad, she murdered Royce.”
“Oh yes,” I said impatiently. “They tried that one out on us. Then what bald guy attacked Marla?”
Tom tapped the table with his coffee cup and shook his head. “Who knows? If Lipscomb running off with all that money means the end of Prospect Financial, we might want to look at those investors. Seems to me they’d be pretty angry at the remaining partner, don’t you think?”
Deputy Armstrong shrugged. “Seems like a long shot to me,” he said softly.
I sipped the bitter coffee and pondered an even more bitter scenario: Marla in prison for murdering Tony Royce and for stealing three and a half million dollars.
Deputy Armstrong gave me a doleful look. “We don’t have Royce’s body, and we’re not going to be able to search the creek for a long time to recover it.”
I put my cup down. Suddenly I longed to be back in my own kitchen, where homicide, arrests, and missing partners who had embezzled enormous sums of other people’s money couldn’t touch me. “Let’s start over. What is the status of the Royce investigation?”
“Okay,” Armstrong said grimly. He knew he was giving me terrible news. “De Groot and Hersey were up at the site first. Shockley sent them because the report we’d gott
en said the two people who might be hurt were involved somehow with Prospect Financial. It’s getting to be a joke around here, how hysterical the captain is about his retirement account. Anyway, the trucker had driven some beat-up kid to the hospital, name of Perkins. Apparently you know him, too?”
I nodded. “Macguire’s my assistant. He wants to be a cop, so that’s why he started following Marla and Tony around after Tony’s partner disappeared.”
Armstrong raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment on Macguire’s detecting ambitions. Beside me, I heard Tom sigh softly. “Anyway,” Armstrong continued, “there was a report of a mountain lion mauling a dog by Bride’s Creek, not too far from the Grizzly Creek campsites. Wildlife Service was already there, so when I heard the radio report on this possibly injured couple, I drove up to the campsite. De Groot and Hersey were already there.” He pursed his lips. “I’ve never seen Grizzly Creek so high. I sure wouldn’t want to camp there. If you fell in, lost your balance fishing, you’d never survive. And something was really wrong at the site. Firewood everywhere. Pots and pans. Clothing. Sleeping bags. In all that mud, it could have been two, three sets of footprints. Hard to tell. One set was from a man’s boots.” He looked at me. “The boots belonged to Royce, we know that. Expensive leather, hand-tooled. We found one boot by the creekbank. The other’s missing.”
I groaned. The trail led to the creek. So far, the evidence seemed to point to Tony Royce—alive or dead—having been dumped in the water. Not for the first time, I wondered if Marla was telling the whole truth. Maybe she had fought with Tony. Maybe she had pushed him into the water in self-defense. But what could they have been fighting about? I closed my eyes, then opened them and said resolutely, dreading the worst, “How can you charge somebody with murder when you don’t have a corpse?”
“You can,” Armstrong answered matter-of-factly.
Tom nodded. “People kill people and dispose of the body. If we’ve got enough circumstantial evidence, we can get a conviction, Miss G., even without a corpse. And as far as that high water goes—well, we get fishermen missing all the time in the springtime, don’t pick up their bodies downstream for six weeks to three months, whenever the water recedes….”
Assume Marla is telling the truth, I ordered myself. Go from there. “Marla said she was beaten up at night,” I insisted. “I don’t believe anyone was fishing. Also, Marla was and is physically wrecked. I doubt she’d have had the strength to push anyone into the water. Or to drag a body from the campsite to the creek.”
Armstrong gave me that I’ve-seen-it-all cop look that always drives me crazy. “Maybe it was dusk. Point is, the water is high, and some people had a fight about something, and it looks as if Korman pushed Royce in. Where else could he be? We probably won’t find him until his body catches on a rock in front of somebody’s creekside house.” He got up and bought a cup of hot chocolate from the vending machine.
“But that’s just not possible,” I maintained. “Think about it. Marla had her car. If they’d had a disagreement, why wouldn’t she just drive away?”
Armstrong began a patient explanation. “Tom heard about the three-way scam theory. I’ll tell you what I heard. Captain told the guy who sits by me that Tony Royce lost a lot of Korman’s money over some investment. Captain even saw her arguing about it with Royce’s partner Lipscomb only last week. And so another of our captain’s theories is that maybe Royce didn’t show enough interest in recouping Ms. Korman’s big investment. She was furious. Fought with Royce at the campsite. But not before she took something of his. Maybe that’s what they fought about. She wanted some payback and he wouldn’t give it to her. Apparently, Royce had this gold watch he wore all the time. Not worth as much as what he owed her, but worth something. And then they found the watch at her house, right?”
“You mean, when they did their little search? Yes, they found a watch in the bathroom. But she says he left it there all the time.”
Armstrong shrugged. He drained his cup and tossed it into the garbage pail.
I said, “A watch, a boot, and several sets of unidentified footprints don’t equal a murder arrest. I’m sorry. Shockley’s theories are lame.”
Armstrong crossed his arms. “Okay, then there’s the bloody shirt. Did you ever see Tony Royce in a white shirt, initials monogrammed on the pocket? It was in the locked trunk of Korman’s car.” He glanced at Tom. “You know how Hersey is with those lock picks—”
“Wait, wait,” I said. “They searched her trunk without a warrant? I just can’t believe—”
“Exigent circumstances, Goldy,” Tom told me. “The investigators have a messed-up campsite, a report of a teenager who’s been beaten, two people missing, they’re going to think. There might be somebody in this trunk dying, we need to get him out. When it’s a matter of life or death, we can break into somebody’s trunk. And before you ask, they can tell it’s blood on the shirt with a chemical test. It’ll take them at least a week with typing and matching to see if the blood belonged to Tony Royce.”
“That’s not all they found in the trunk,” Armstrong added. “They found her keys, which would explain why she had to walk out and get a ride. So anyway, they’re up there with all this stuff and they decide to call in and find out what’s going on with this Marla Korman. And when they do, it turns out she’s had a complaint lodged against her from a few years ago, from the guy she used to be married to. That was about money, too. Neighbor called it in as a domestic, and by the time the cops got there, this Doctor Korman had a dislocated shoulder. Get this—Shockley called up Korman this morning in Honolulu. The doc said, ‘Yeah, my ex is as strong as an ox, has a bad temper, is always threatening violence when she doesn’t get what she wants, and unlike a lot of women, has no fear about turning her violence on men.’”
I drank more of the coffee, shuddered, and tried to think. “I’m sorry, but I really cannot believe all this. I mean, I’m not saying you’re lying, but this is such an incredible amount of baloney that it’s ridiculous. Our ex-husband was physically abusive, and you have the photographs of me covered with bruises in your files to prove it.”
“Do they have photos like that of Marla?” asked Armstrong.
“No,” I replied, “she filed for divorce after the incident with the shoulder dislocation. She stood up to him a lot better than I managed to. And ended the marriage a lot quicker.”
Armstrong sighed, and we were all quiet for a minute. Finally Tom asked, “Do you have a theory as to what happened. Miss G.?”
“Yes, I do.” I tried to soften my indignation to earnestness. “I think the person you want is Albert Lipscomb. He disappeared after Marla accused him of using assays from a disreputable lab. The assays are crucial for a mine to be successful, because they are analyses of ore in the mine. They tell you how much gold is in your ore. If you don’t have reliable assays, you’re not going to have a gold-producing mine, it’s that simple. When Marla found out what he was up to, Lipscomb panicked. He stole over three million dollars from the partnership account, and now he’s killed Tony and set Marla up somehow. For heaven’s sake, she saw him, or someone who looked just like him, up at the campsite.”
Tom rubbed his forehead as he considered this. “Why would a fugitive, with a fortune in stolen money, risk taking on two people—make that three, including Macguire—at night, out in the middle of nowhere?”
“Revenge over a bad investment,” I replied. “I don’t know: Revenge for ruining a perfectly good venture capital firm?” I paused. “Maybe Tony had or has something else Albert wants. Maybe Albert had to get rid of Tony because he knows something, or Tony could figure out where his partner would go with the money….”
Tom said gently, “I’m just telling you, it sounds more farfetched than the stealing-the-Rolex theory.”
“And I’m just telling you, there is no way on earth Marla would hurt anyone and throw him into the creek.”
“There are big inconsistencies in her story, Goldy,” Armstrong interject
ed. He counted off points on his fingers. “First, the times. The family that picked her up says she got into their car around nine, not seven, as she claims. And if Tony was missing and she’d been beaten up, why didn’t she ask those people to call the police? Okay, her phone was out. But if she came home Sunday morning after a big fight with an unknown assailant, couldn’t she have walked over to a neighbor’s for help? Wouldn’t you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said miserably. He made it all sound so plausible. Was Marla lying?
“I’m not done,” Armstrong went on. “What she says was in the trunk of the Mercedes and what was actually in there. Looks like whoever put the shirt in the trunk—and Shockley’s thinking is that she did—dropped the keys in there by accident. That’s why she had to walk out to the road. She locked herself out of her own car. And … there was a fishing knife in the trunk, too. Covered with blood.”
I said, “Was there a gun in the car?”
Armstrong shook his head. “No gun.”
I turned to my husband. “Tom, you know Marla. You know this can’t be true. Please tell me you’ll be able to help her. You can’t imagine how rough those cops were with her.”
He said earnestly, “Shockley won’t let me touch this case. Goldy, look. Tell me this. Do you really believe Marla’s story?” His eyes challenged me. “Why wouldn’t she ask that family to bring her to our place, where we could have taken care of her? She always wants you to get involved in her crises. What could possibly be her explanation for not coming to us that morning, if what she says is true?”
I stared at the grimy linoleum floor. Tom was right. Marla involved me in every aspect of her life. This had been true since her divorce from the Jerk, when we became best pals. But on Sunday, maybe she’d wanted privacy. She took great care with her appearance, and perhaps she’d been too humiliated by the way she looked. On the other hand, I’d visited her numerous times after the heart attack. She’d never looked great in the hospital, but she hadn’t once shunned my company. I shook my head. There didn’t seem to be an answer to Tom’s questions.
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