“I’m thinking now that calling her wasn’t a very good idea,” I admitted. “Or at least calling her without a better game plan than I had.”
Fitz’s silver-white eyebrows drew together in a concerned frown, but he didn’t chastise me. “Sometimes investigations backfire in unexpected ways.”
“No matter what she said, I’m still not convinced she wasn’t involved with Jerry.”
“And if she was, it’s a pretty good motive for murder.”
Fitz turned the fish carefully in the frying pan. I checked my asparagus and started making hollandaise sauce from a packet I’d gotten at Safeway. The only time I’d ever tried it from scratch, I’d wound up with curdled glop.
“Do you think she really hadn’t known about Jerry being dead before you told her?”
“I thought she sounded shocked. Maybe even scared. But I suppose I’d be shocked, too, hearing someone I’d known, even if I hadn’t known him very well, had been murdered. Most people we know don’t get murdered.”
“So, what are our possibilities here? Her husband found out about the affair and murdered Jerry. Or she tried to dump Jerry and he wouldn’t let go, and she murdered him herself to get rid of him. Of course, one basic question remains.”
“Which is, why was Jerry here that night?” We kept coming back to that. “What was he doing in my limousine?”
“Along with, why was his computer and everything connected with it stolen? What reason would this Elena or her jealous hus-band have for doing that?”
I stirred the sauce mixture in the pan. Fitz put a couple of potatoes in the microwave to nuke.
The doorbell rang, and I stiffened like the handle on my infamous shovel. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I’d had what might well be a veiled threat from the willowy Elena. Could she, or the husband—
Then I reminded myself of what I’d told Joella: murderers don’t come politely ringing doorbells.
Hopefully this wasn’t an exception to that rule.
23
Ryan!”
He smiled, apparently pleased that I was glad to see him. I was glad to see him again, but the enthusiasm was also relief that he wasn’t a visiting murderer. His arms were filled with two big paper sacks.
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this when you were at the condo, but you might as well have the stuff from Jerry’s cup-boards and freezer. I’m heading home tomorrow, and I don’t like to see good food go to waste. I don’t think Cara would object if you have it.”
“Cara?”
“She called. She located a will that Jerry had made out back when they were first married. Since he apparently never got around to changing it, it’s still in effect. It leaves everything to her, which simplifies the situation considerably.”
“Is that . . . okay?”
“Do you mean, am I upset that I won’t get anything from Jerry’s estate?” He shook his head vigorously. “No way. The will also names her as executor, so she’ll have to cope with everything. But she does have her father to help, and he’s a very capable person.”
“That’s good.”
“And that stuff I said earlier about his being involved in the murder? Just forget it, okay? Ben’s kind of a ruthless old codger, and I think he’d stomp anyone who threatened those grandkids, but Cara says her father and Jerry had reached a deal on a divorce settlement. Odd, isn’t it, how the divorce seemed to be more between Jerry and the father-in-law than between Jerry and Cara? Anyway, ‘an amicable agreement’ between them was how she phrased it. I shouldn’t have sounded off about Ben the way I did.”
I had the feeling telling me this was the real reason he’d come here, and the groceries were mostly just an excuse.
“Cara’s father agreed to give Jerry money?”
“I think that’s the only kind of ‘agreement’ Jerry would go for. I’m thinking now that the cash in the toilet tank may have been the payoff they agreed on. It’d be just like Ben to send it as a big wad of cash.”
Fitz had followed me to the door, and I realized his hands were resting lightly on my waist. I also realized Ryan was still standing there holding the heavy bags.
Embarrassed, I moved back from the door. “Where are my manners? Come on in.”
Ryan hesitated. “Perhaps I should have called first. Maybe Jerry’s leftovers are the last thing you’d ever want.”
“Groceries are groceries.” And welcome, in my unemployed state. “I appreciate your thinking of me.”
“There’s an odd assortment of stuff here. Jerry wasn’t exactly a Hamburger Helper kind of guy, was he?”
We smiled at each other in rueful conspiracy about his brother’s expensive tastes.
I led Ryan into the kitchen, and he deposited the sacks on the counter. I introduced him to Fitz. I could see Ryan was curious about who Fitz was, beyond a name, but I didn’t offer details. Especially not the detail that Fitz and I had formed a sleuth-and-sidekick investigative team. Though I was still a little miffed by that sidekick status.
“There’s a couple more sacks out in the car. I’ll go get them.”
The minute Ryan was out the door, Fitz said, “Let’s invite him to dinner. There’s plenty of food. I’ll just throw another potato in the microwave.”
“All because you’re so good-hearted?”
“Don’t you think I’m good-hearted?” Fitz drew himself up in righteous indignation. “The guy’s been eating out or cooking for himself all week. He needs a solid, home-cooked meal. Isn’t that being good-hearted?”
Okay, I did think Fitz was a good-hearted guy, but—“I think, at the moment, what you want to do is pick his brain while you feed him.”
“Being good-hearted and practical are not mutually exclusive,” he pointed out. “Ryan may be backpedaling on the possibility of the not-ex-wife’s father’s involvement, but I’m not convinced. Are you?”
No. I figured Ryan was sincere in what he said, but quite possibly mistaken. “Just be nice, okay? Ryan’s a good guy.”
“Not a killer, you mean?”
I was startled. Ryan as murderer had never occurred to me. “He was way off in Denver. And he had no motive.”
“No motive that we know about.”
“I don’t like being suspicious of everybody,” I muttered.
“Goes with the territory.”
Ryan returned with two more bags, and I suggested his staying for dinner.
“Fitz is cooking a lingcod he caught up around the San
Juan Islands. He’s the cook on his son’s charter sailboat, and they just came back from there.”
“A charter sailboat? Hey, that’s neat.” Ryan smiled, some-thing I hadn’t seen him do often. “Kind of like what I’d like to do when I grow up.”
He also accepted the dinner invitation without hesitation. While the men talked sailing and fishing, I put the contents of the sacks away. I felt guilty, but I was really looking forward to those lobsters from Jerry’s freezer. Plus steaks and chicken cordon bleu. And there was that can of foie gras, plus a veritable treasure chest of marinated mushrooms, smoked oysters, fancy olives, and crackers, plus a lot of other stuff not on my usual menu.
Fitz’s lingcod was boneless and tender, light and delicious. Afterward I dished up raspberry chocolate chunk ice cream for dessert. Well fed and relaxed, and with a little adroit encouragement from Fitz, Ryan started talking about his boyhood days with Jerry back in Colorado. Family camping and fishing trips in the mountains, shooting hoops in the backyard, and cheering for Jerry at high-school football games and track events. He’d definitely heroworshipped his big brother.
I had the feeling Ryan hadn’t thought about those happy times in a long while, and it felt good to him to talk about them. I’d have preferred leaving his relationship with his brother on that upbeat note, but shadowy pictures of Jerry’s dead body in the trunk of the limousine kept slithering around in my head. Along with that disturbing possibility Fitz had planted there.
Not Ryan, I assured myself. Su
rely not Ryan. There were any number of reasons Ryan couldn’t possibly be the murderer. And yet . . .
I phrased my leading comment carefully. “It’s too bad you and Jerry weren’t closer in recent years.”
“Yeah, it is.” Ryan’s voice went flat and distant, his gaze unfocused on an empty spot beyond my shoulder. I thought he was going to stop there, but he surprised me by going on. “But Jerry changed. I don’t know if it was getting involved with gambling that did it, or if he changed first and the gambling followed. But he turned harder. More ambitious and greedy.” He paused. “Less ethical.”
He stopped talking, and I refilled his coffee cup. I started to say something smalltalkish, but Fitz bumped me with his elbow. I realized what he was getting at. Sometimes silence is like a vacuum that needs filling, more effective than questioning.
“I guess the breaking point between us came when he told me he had a serious medical problem and needed money. I was glad I had it to lend to him. I’d have happily given him the money for a medical emergency.”
“But there wasn’t a medical problem?”
“No. There was a gambling emergency. I never knew the details, but he never paid me back.”
He was silent for a moment, and I wondered if he was thinking, as I was, that if Jerry could afford a Rolex, he could surely have repaid this debt. And there was that money in the toilet tank.
“Well, I guess none of that matters now, does it?” Ryan briskly moved on to tell us that he’d been to see the guy who owned the private dock where Jerry kept his boat. “He said it was fine if the boat stayed there until Cara can sell it; then he’d like to buy it. He seemed like a really nice guy, as puzzled as the rest of us about Jerry’s death.”
“It won’t be easy for Cara to take care of all these details from back in Georgia,” Fitz said.
“She’ll probably make a trip out here. She said her father might be interested in keeping the condo as a vacation place.
He’s never seen it, but he liked the Puget Sound area when he visited here before Cara and Jerry broke up.”
“Will he come along?” Fitz asked. “Maybe he’d be inter-ested in a charter sailboat trip while he’s here.”
My first thought was that Fitz was just trying to drum up business, but then I realized he had something else in mind.
“Didn’t I hear something about his being in the timber business in Georgia? Southern pine, I imagine it would be. Most people don’t think of the South as a timber area, but a good percentage of the country’s timber is produced there now.”
Leave it to Fitz to know an irrelevant fact like that and toss it out to muddle what he was really doing, which was digging for information. He apparently thought, as I did, that Ryan would be reluctant to tell us anything about Cara’s father if he thought we were still suspicious of him.
“What’s his company’s name?” Fitz added, as if it were an afterthought.
“Something about timber. Well, that figures, doesn’t it? Southern Gold Timber, I think.”
“He didn’t give the company a family name, then, like the big timber barons often did around here. Vigland Timber Products and the town of Vigland itself, in fact, are named after one of the early timber men here.”
More camouflaging facts.
“No, Cara’s father is Benton Sutherland, although every-one calls him Ben. Jerry always grumbled that what he really wanted to be called was Big Daddy, like that character from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Remember him? But Ben’s really a pretty good guy. He’s sent several nieces and nephews through college.”
“Maybe he’d be interested in a tour through the mill while he’s here,” Fitz said. “I took one a while back, and it was interesting.”
“If I talk to Cara again, I’ll mention it.”
So there we were, smoothly in and out of the subject of Ben Sutherland. Yet what could we do with the information? Calling him up and asking if he could recommend a good hit man probably wouldn’t be a productive start.
At the door we shared good-bye handshakes with Ryan. “Thanks again for all the groceries,” I said. “I’ll make good use of them.”
“It’s been great meeting both of you. And thanks, Andi, for helping me there at the condo.”
We watched from the door as he gave us a final wave from the rental Honda.
“What do you think now?” Fitz asked.
“I don’t think Ryan had anything to do with Jerry’s murder.”
Fitz nodded agreement.
“I also think Big Daddy Sutherland could have decided hiring a hit man was cheaper and more satisfactory than paying Jerry off. I have no idea where that ten thousand dollars in the toilet tank came from, but I doubt Jerry’d have settled for that amount. I think he’d have played for bigger stakes.”
“Maybe he did,” Fitz said somberly.
Right. Maybe he’d gambled and lost.
Fitz’s serious demeanor changed, and he grabbed my hand. “C’mon, we’re going up to the CyberClam Café.”
“But we just ate—”
“You don’t eat at the CyberClam. Not if you value the inner workings of your anatomy.”
24
A few minutes later I found out what you do do at the CyberClam. Several rows of computers stood off to the left side of the room. About half were occupied, the others show-ing screen savers of hurtling stars or toothy-fished predators. Hey, maybe I could come here to do some job hunting on the Internet.
Only one guy sat at the counter, eating.
We picked up soft drinks, and Fitz got us set up at a computer back in the corner. A few clicks, and a search engine was eagerly awaiting input. He typed Southern Gold Timber into the blank space.
“You’ve done this before?”
“I spent a lot of time in here looking up information about identity theft. That’s what I had to see the lawyer about.”
Identity theft! At last, an answer for my curiosity. I was also relieved. I know identity theft can be a big problem, but I was thankful it wasn’t something such as marriage entanglements Fitz hadn’t told me about, or lawsuits filed by jealous husbands. Maybe revelations about Jerry’s secrets had given me a jaundiced outlook on males in general.
I kept my unwarranted suspicions to myself. “I’ve never known anyone personally who had an identity stolen, but I keep hearing about what a mess it can be.”
“A huge mess. Somebody got hold of everything. My Social Security number, date of birth, credit card account number, checking account number, address. Maybe my shoe size, for all I know. They drained bank accounts, opened credit accounts, borrowed money, and bought enough stuff to stock an electronics store. I don’t tend to use credit much, but I don’t like having a credit rating number that looks like the IQ of a ham sandwich.”
“It’s scary to think someone could really do that. You don’t know how they acquired the information?”
“No idea at all. I never had my wallet lost or stolen. Never used a credit card on the Internet. Never gave out personal information over the phone. Never, so far as I know, anyway, had mail stolen.”
“How long has it been going on?”
“It started a couple months before I left California. I’ve straightened out most of it, but I needed legal help with a couple of things. One of the strangest problems was my house down in LA. Somebody actually tried to sell it using my identity. I was telling a woman who writes for the local newspaper about all the problems I’ve had, and she’s using me in an article she’s doing on identity theft.”
He made a couple of clicks with the mouse. “Look, here’s a bunch of Web sites about Southern Gold Timber.”
Southern Gold had a Web site of its own, but it was mostly hype about what an outstanding company it was. There was no personal information about Ben Sutherland, although there was a photo of him as CEO. It showed him standing beside an acre or so of desks in a dark-paneled office: a beefy-shouldered, big-bellied guy with bushy eyebrows and jutting shocks of white hair that looked like a hays
tack hit by a tornado. Family photos stood prominently on the desk, but a stuffed boar’s head and a bearskin, complete with head and claws, dominated the wall behind him. Horns of some other unidentifiable creature poked into a corner of the photo.
“He might consider spending less money on preserving dead animals and invest in a decent haircut,” I suggested.
“The man definitely doesn’t need Rogaine,” Fitz agreed. “I’d say he probably has a collection of guns big enough to arm a small country. And knows how to use them.”
A do-it-yourselfer rather than a hire-a-hit-man guy?
“Hey, here’s something interesting,” Fitz said as he opened a new window. “Southern Gold has a recently acquired subsidiary called Shoreline Timber Products right here in Washington, headquarters up in Bremerton. I wonder if the big boss ever comes out here to visit his subsidiary.”
I also wondered if Ryan knew about this company. Ben Sutherland in Georgia had seemed a safe distance away. Ben Sutherland with a company right here in the state felt dangerously close. Had he, in fact, been right out in my driveway, sneaking up on Jerry . . . and hitting me over the head?
Fitz frowned. “But we’re back to the same old problem. What was Jerry doing in your limousine that night? I keep thinking if we knew the answer to that, we’d have a better handle on why he was killed and who might have done it.”
“And what could possibly have been on Jerry’s computer that would worry Sutherland?”
We spent the better part of an hour on the Internet, but most of the remainder of what we found had to do with law-suits filed against Southern Gold Timber by various environ-mental groups concerned with the company’s overlogging and destruction of wetlands. Paying Jerry off to get rid of him would surely have been small change compared to what Sutherland was spending on lawyers. But maybe it was the principle of the thing more than the size of the payoff that mattered.
We were back at the house by nine thirty, had a cup of green tea, and then Fitz was off, saying he’d call me from somewhere on the Miss Nora in a day or two.
I yawned and flicked the remote to see what was on TV, but the phone rang. I answered eagerly, thinking it might be a late call from Sarah, but after my hello, a nondaughterly voice said, “Is this Andi McConnell?”
Your Chariot Awaits Page 17