Shake Down Dead

by Diane Morlan

  “I need to know more about Whitney. I know you don’t like to talk about people, living or dead. So, be prepared to answer some questions you won’t like. I need to know more about her if I’m going to help Harold get out of this. Who would want to see Whitney dead and why?”

  “Oh, Jennifer. You know that this goes against everything I believe in. I try to look at the good in people, not their dark side. We all have a dark side, you know.” She pursed her lips to let me know she knew all about my dark side.

  “I know that, Bernie. I’d love to see your dark side,” I joked. She just gave me one of those looks that make me cringe. “I wouldn’t ask you to speak ill of anyone if it wasn’t important,” I quickly added.

  I gave her some time to get herself prepared to talk about Whitney. Sometimes it pays to just shut up and wait, which isn’t easy for me to do. Bernie poured the boiling water into a small teapot. She then spooned loose tea into an infuser, replaced the lid and continued our conversation while the tea steeped.

  Bernie took a deep breath and began. “Whitney grew up a very privileged young lady, Jennifer. She was lavished with everything she ever wished for and more. It gave her a sense of entitlement that spilled over into every part of her life.”

  Bernie went on to tell me, “Whitney felt she was above others and looked down on people who she assumed were beneath her, and that was just about everybody. She attended St. Theresa’s grade school. At her father’s insistence, went to Hermann High School, rather than a private prep school. It appears that he realized she was too spoiled and tried to ground her to reality.”

  “It doesn’t appear that it worked,” I said.

  Handing me a piping hot cup of tea she said, “I’m afraid it didn’t. She convinced her father to send her to a fussy girl’s college in the east for her first two years. Apparently, she wasn’t the queen bee there and came back home. She completed her college education at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She came home every weekend to hang out with her high school friends who still put her on that pedestal. Whitney liked being a big fish in the small pond of Hermann, Minnesota.”

  I had a few more questions for her, now that I better understood Whitney’s lifestyle. What I didn’t understand is why her friends put up with her.

  “Why do you think her friends didn’t move on after she left for college?”

  “I’m not sure, Jennifer. I know they were always there for her. Maybe they knew she needed their friendship.”

  “Who are these loyal friends?” I asked, trying not to sound sarcastic. Either they were just like her or she had something on them. People like Whitney don’t bring out the loyalty in others, usually just envy and disdain.

  “She was still best friends with her high school buddies. Let’s see. Kimberly Reese, her maiden name was Adler. Then there is Olivia Zimmerman-Brooks, why don’t these woman decide on a name and use just one?”

  I didn’t answer. I knew she was just rambling. I kept quiet, hoping she’d add something I didn’t know.

  “Gina Lange. I don’t know if she kept her husband’s name; it was Cooper when she divorced him. He was a nasty man. He beat her, poor thing.”

  It was time to get her back on track before she went off on a tangent about spousal abuse. “Who is Pamela Frey? I’ve seen her in pictures with Whitney and she doesn’t seem to fit in with the group.” I kept to myself what Bonnie Sue at the Sheriff’s office told me.

  “She didn’t. Fit in, that is. Whitney’s friends, like Whitney, I’m sorry to say, were snobs. They had their own little clique in school. They felt they were privileged and often didn’t bother to follow rules they didn’t think applied to them.”

  “What about Pamela?” I asked trying to keep her focused.

  “Yes, Pamela,” Bernie said and sighed. “A lovely young woman. She’s actually Whitney’s cousin, a year younger and much nicer. Henrietta’s maiden name was Frey. Pamela’s father was Henrietta’s brother. The Freys were working class people. They never had a lot of money. Pamela’s father was drunk when he was killed in a car crash. By God’s grace, he hit a tree instead of another car.” Bernie shook her head and continued.

  “The family was left without a breadwinner and with only a small life insurance policy, barely enough to bury him. Pamela’s mother never got along with Henrietta. At the funeral, Henrietta offered to help with the funeral expenses. At first, Mrs. Frey refused any help. She took a job waitressing to support the family.

  “A few months after the funeral, Graham asked her to let him help Pamela with some money for her school expenses and other things. Graham always tried to include Pam and her mother in family events, especially those involving Whitney. Graham insisted that Whitney give her hand-me-down clothes to Pamela. Luckily, Pamela’s mother knew how to alter the clothes since Pamela was graced with a nice figure, while Whitney was always plump.” There was that “plump” word again.

  “How did Whitney feel about having her poor cousin tag along in her social life?”

  “Oh, she minded, no doubt about that,” Bernie said and took a sip of her tea. “She complained about it to anyone who would listen. However, it was the one place where her father wouldn’t give an inch. Pamela was part of the family and Whitney knew better than to cross her father. I’m not sure how she treated Pamela when Graham wasn’t around, but she was the loving cousin whenever I saw them together.”

  “What about the people Whitney worked with at the group home? Did she have problems with any of them?”

  “Jennifer, you must understand, Whitney thought she was the princess of Hermann and didn’t bother with people other than her chosen circle. I think that most people who knew her had a problem with her. She was not a very pleasant person.”

  Bernie started fiddling with her pen. “I hate to say this but she was a nasty little girl and didn’t get any better as she grew up. Oh, I give her credit for taking the responsibility of caring for her mother since her father’s death. She needed to work to support herself and her mother and she resented that, but she did it. She became bitter and mean and a little snoop. Poking her nose into everything and everyone’s business. I just don’t know what got into her.”

  “What kind of snooping?” I asked.

  Her hands were now twisting the pen—loose, tight, loose tight. “Once I caught her looking at group home personnel records. She actually was poking around in my files! In my own office! There’s no excuse for that and I told her so.”

  I felt my face turning red, since I had done the same thing to Bernie last summer when I was trying to help her out. The look on her face now told me she hadn’t forgotten the incident, even though she hadn’t caught me red-handed.

  I put my hand over Bernie’s and she stopped twisting the poor pen she was strangling. “Did you see her doing anything else? Maybe her snooping led her to something she shouldn’t have known. Maybe that’s what got her killed.”

  “No, I didn’t actually catch her doing anything else like that. However, she was always asking questions about people. I refused to gossip with her, even though I’m sure others fell into her trap and told her whatever she wanted to know. She did have a way of getting people to talk. It was one of the things that made her a good social worker.”

  “Was she good at her job?” I hadn’t even given that a thought.

  “She was surprisingly good with the residents. I think after her father died she somehow related to them. She said once that she understood how her clients felt when people were cruel them. And she fought for them when necessary.”

  “Why would she have to fight for them?” I had no clue as to what a social worker did in the first place.

  “The residents are in our program to enable them to live their lives much like other citizens. They can vote, buy alcohol and get a driver’s license when they are of age and pass any tests required. They are quite independent. Several have jobs in the community, the rest work at our workshop. Sometimes people don’t understand that they are full
members of our society and are entitled to all the benefits as well as the responsibilities.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you an example. Once they all went to the German Haus Restaurant for dinner and one of the residents ordered wine. The waitress wasn’t going to give it to her until she was told by Whitney that the resident was of legal drinking age and had just as much right to a glass of wine as she did.”

  “Any other examples?”

  “Things like that occur every day. Whitney was always educating people that our residents need to be treated just like anyone else. Most of the time people got the message and behaved accordingly. Once in a while a person was just too stuck in their ways to see our residents as anything more than large infants or worse.”

  “What do you mean by worse?” Admitting to myself that if I had ever bothered to think about developmentally disabled people at all, it was usually in terms like “retarded.” I, too, was guilty of seeing these people as less than full-fledged citizens.

  “People often confuse mental retardation with mental illness. They are usually ignorant of both conditions. They are afraid the person will do something ‘crazy.’ Then they try to ban our residents from public places. A group of parents even tried to keep them out of the public swimming pool last summer. They were afraid their children would be molested. It’s so absurd!”

  “And Whitney stood up for them?”

  “Absolutely! She was first on the agenda at the city council meeting. Threatened to sue the city if they tried to keep her clients from their legal right to use city facilities. There was a lot of good in Whitney that she could have used in all areas of her life had she chosen to do so.”

  “She chose not to?” I asked.

  “She just couldn’t seem to get past the death of her father and the loss of money and prestige in the community. She was very angry with her father for leaving them in such a mess. I think that the reason she fought so hard for her clients is that she related to them. She often felt left out. Although she couldn’t do much about her own situation, she could help them. Unless, of course, she found a way to be rich and powerful like her father had once been. Social work never made anyone rich. It’s all so sad.”

  I thanked Bernie for sharing her insight with me and told her I needed to get going. Sitting in my car, waiting for it to warm up and melt the snow that had fallen on the windshield, I thought about all Bernie had told me. Whitney’s snooping stood out in my mind. If she had the nerve to snoop in Sister Bernie’s files, she had the audacity to snoop anywhere. She could draw people out. What information had she gotten and what had she done with it? The word “blackmail” jumped into my head and stayed there.

  16

  It had quit snowing by the time I got home. Cloud cover kept it from getting any colder. Decker was sitting on the red cedar swing hanging from the ceiling of my front porch when I pulled into the driveway.

  “Hi,” I greeted him when I stepped out of my car. “What are you doing here in the middle of the day? Did you solve Whitney’s case already, Mr. Detective?”

  “No, I need to talk to you.”

  Looking at his face, I realized that he was dead serious. “You sound grim, what’s wrong?”

  He patted the seat next to him and I sat down, twisting a little so I could see his face. The last time I’d seen him this upset was when my car had been sideswiped on my way home one night.

  “You know how I’m always telling you to stop snooping into my cases?” he asked.

  I nodded, thinking that he didn’t really want an answer.

  “What would you think if I asked you to help me figure out who killed Whitney?”

  “Really? What happened to ‘Keep your nose out of police business?’ And what about Jacobs, will he be okay with it?”

  “Jennifer, Jacobs can’t know we’re doing this. I’ve been taken off the case and put on leave.”

  “Whatever for?” Decker was a great detective; they wouldn’t take him off the case unless it was personal. I felt a rock in the pit of my stomach. Had he had a relationship with Whitney?

  Decker heaved a big sigh and said, “We found Whitney’s cell phone in her pocket. I was paging through it looking at her contact list to see who her friends were. Then I checked out her Memo. People put the darndest things on those lists.”

  I knew what he meant. Mine had the dimensions of my dining room table, since I was contemplating crocheting a tablecloth for it. It also included passwords for websites I frequented.

  “We came across one memo that appears to be a list of names. They’re dollar signs behind some of them. My name was on the list.”

  “Why?’ I asked, blowing on my hands to keep them warm.

  Decker took a pair of gloves from his pocket and handed them to me. “I think she was going to blackmail me and the others on the list. I think the names with numbers next to the dollar signs might be people she’s already contacted.”

  “Did she contact you?”

  “Hell, no! I didn’t even know her.”

  “Then why would she have your name on her list?

  “I think it’s about Chicago, and why I moved here.”

  I waited for him to continue while he sat there leaning over, looking at the floor and wringing his hands. Finally, I said softly, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “No, I don’t want to, but I guess you have a right to know.”

  He ran his hands through his hair and began telling me what had happened in Chicago that eventually brought him to Hermann, Minnesota.

  “When I was a detective with the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, my partner and I worked under cover for almost a year putting together a case against the leader of one of the major gangs in the county.

  “I couldn’t go near my home so I found cafes and other places around the city to meet my wife and infant son whenever I could. I just wanted to keep my family safe. You know, I didn’t want some gang-banger finding out that I had a wife and kid.

  I nodded when he looked at me, but decided not to say anything. He grabbed my gloved hand, looked down at his feet and continued.

  “Victoria wanted me to leave the police department. Like many other cops’ wives, she didn’t understand that being a cop is more than a job. Sister Bernie is the only person not on the force that understands. It’s like a calling. This one case took over my life and, I’m afraid, it was ruining my marriage.”

  Decker dropped my hand, stood up and began to pace the small porch. “One day she insisted we meet. I didn’t have time to set up the usual secure location, but she insisted that we meet that afternoon. I found a coffee shop in a south suburb. She hadn’t brought the baby. She was there to give me an ultimatum. Choose her and the baby or the job. I tried to reason with her, but she said she figured that I had made my choice. She walked out and the next thing I knew I was being served with divorce papers. Then I did the stupidest thing I ever did in my life. I went to our house to beg her not to leave me. I told her I’d quit the job when this case was closed and I’d find a nine-to-five job and be home every night.

  “It took almost losing my family to open my eyes to what was most important in my life. She forgave me and I spent the night with her, playing with my son for the first time in weeks.”

  “I went back to the apartment I shared with my partner the next day. I told my partner about my decision to leave the department when we closed the case we had worked so hard on for the past eight months. We were going over our notes trying to figure out how soon we could bust the gang bangers when my cell phone rang. It was my supervisor, the Deputy Chief of Detectives.

  “He ordered me to come in on the double. I figured that someone had made us and the case might be in jeopardy. We hightailed it down to our precinct. When I got there, I knew something was terribly wrong. The chief wasn’t alone. The police chaplain and a woman I didn’t know were there alongside him.” His voice broke and he sat down again swallowing and trying to get control. He
put his arms around me and his head on my shoulder.

  He was crying when he sat up again and continued. He took a deep breath and again ran his hands through his hair. “My wife and son were dead. At first, I thought they had gotten into a car accident. Then the chief told me that they were killed by the gang I was investigating.” His eyes glistened with tears when he looked at me.

  “It was all my fault. They followed me to my house. I still can’t believe I was so stupid. I knew better.”

  “That must have been horrible for you. Is that why you quit and came up here?”

  “No, I went on leave and buried my family. Three months later, I went after the goons who killed Victoria and Junior. I found the creeps who usually did this kind of dirty work for their boss. I put them both in the hospital. Three days later the gang leader was found dead under the “El” on Roosevelt Road and Wabash Ave. That case is still open.

  “My superiors decided that maybe I should resign and start over somewhere else. The deputy chief knew Jacobs from a conference they attended in St. Louis so he gave Jacobs a call. And here I am.”

  “Oh, Jerry, I’m so sorry for you.” I reached over and hugged him. Again, I could feel his tears on my shoulder. We stayed that way for a while, and then Decker pulled away and wiped his eyes. I didn’t ask who had killed the gang leader. I didn’t want to know.

  “I’ve wanted to tell you about it for some time now, since we’ve gotten so close. The time just never seemed right. I think Whitney might have found out about it. That’s probably why my name was on the list. I think she was getting ready to blackmail me. And I think she has already hit up several people for money.”

  “Do you know who those people are?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sort of. When I found the list, I copied it before I gave it to Jacobs. Once he saw my name, I knew I’d be off the case. He put me in for personal leave, just to keep me out of it without anyone knowing why. He’s a damn decent guy.”