“Is it?” Jeff countered.
“Yes,” Richard said reasonably. Up ahead was a chain grocery parking lot. Richard braked and pulled into the lot, steering into a slot far from the store. He put the van in park but kept the engine running if only to power the air conditioning. “What’s wrong?”
Jeff said nothing, his hands clenched in fists on his lap—the skin taut and pale. For a terrible few moments Richard feared his usually stoic brother might explode in rage. But then Jeff shook his head—not unlike a wet dog—and seemed to sink in on himself.
“This damned leg cast has me feeling vulnerable—a lot more vulnerable than when I had my head caved in and my arm broken. This time I can’t run away in a dangerous situation. I really can’t defend myself at all.”
“What are you saying?”
Jeff finally faced him, his expression grim. “I want to buy a gun.”
“No.”
“Yes! It’s not like I don’t know how to use one.”
“I know that, but it would take forever to get a permit and—”
“Hey, I’ve had a permit for more than a decade. I reported my last gun as stolen, and I’ve kept up with the paperwork. I can legally buy another gun today.”
“No!” Richard said again. “We’re not going to bow to the lowest common denominator.”
“So says Mister-I-can-hack anything.”
Richard made an effort to hold his temper. “There’s a big difference between garnering information and potentially shooting a projectile that can kill or maim.”
“When push comes to shove, do you want to be defenseless?”
Richard didn’t answer. He’d been shot a little over two years before. He never wanted to experience that again, nor be responsible—in one way or another—of inflicting that kind of misery on someone else. “So you’re prepared to kill—?”
“To save you, me, Brenda, Betsy, or Maggie? You bet your ass I am.”
Richard let out an exasperated breath. “I don’t think it’s going to come down to that.”
“Yeah? Tell that to Dave. Oh, wait—you can’t. He’s dead.”
There was no way to refute that statement. Still, Richard needed to deflect the conversation—to get them both back on common ground.
“We’ve got options, not the least of which is hiring bodyguards.”
“Who’d hole us up in some godforsaken place while we go stir crazy.”
“You’re already stir crazy,” Richard pointed out.
“You’ve got that right. And never in my life have I felt so paranoid.”
The air conditioning continued to blast. Jeff had again turned away and Richard felt at a loss as to how to rectify the tense situation. “What do you want do to?” he asked finally.
“I don’t know.” Jeff was quiet for a minute or more before speaking again. “Maybe I need to do what I already proposed. I need to see if I can connect with dead Dave.”
“And if you can’t?”
“Then we’re back to square one.”
It felt as though Richard had gone back in time to his former job in California, having to deal with obstinate foundation board members who put up barriers against avenues of research he and other staff members wanted to aggressively pursue. He had never considered putting Jeff in that same category.
The air conditioner continued to roar.
“Okay,” Richard said in his most placating tone. “Then it seems to me that your first priority needs to be trying to connect with Dave.”
Jeff turned to look at him. “What do you propose?”
“That we call Detective Wilder and see if she can get us in to see Dave at the morgue.”
“By now his body has probably been released to an undertaker.”
“Then maybe we can go to whatever funeral parlor his body’s been sent to.”
“Okay.”
Richard reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll call Bonnie Wilder right now and see if she can arrange it.”
“And what do we do in the interim?”
Richard shrugged. “It may be a couple of hours before she gets back to me. “Depending on how long it takes to read Alice’s case files, we could play tourist.”
“Why?”
“Why not? I’ve been back in Buffalo for more than two years, but there are a lot of places I haven’t checked out.”
“Give me a for instance.”
“Hot dogs at Ted’s. I haven’t had a beef on weck at Charlie the Butchers. I haven’t visited the Carousel Museum.”
“Are you sure you want to do that kind of stuff with me and not Brenda?”
“If I like the places, then I know Brenda won’t be disappointed. I’ll enjoy sharing them with her.”
Jeff shrugged. “I guess.”
“Then it’s settled. But first I’ll call Detective Wilder.” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “Then again, if we don’t leave now we’re going to be late getting to the police station to see Alice’s records.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said and let out what sounded like a defeated breath, turning his gaze out the passenger-side window.
“For what it’s worth,” Richard began, “I’m scared, too.”
Jeff turned to look at him “Good. If you’re scared, theoretically you’ll be more careful.”
“Only theoretically?”
“Yeah.”
Richard made no reply. Instead, he moved the van’s gearshift back into drive and pressed the accelerator, steering for the lot’s exit.
* * *
Detective John Destross slapped a thin file folder down on the drab steel-and-Formica table. I looked up at him and frowned. “Is that all?”
He shrugged. “That’s all we found in the archives.”
“Has anyone looked at this file in decades?”
Again he shrugged. “Not to my knowledge. Do you need anything else, Mr. Resnick?”
It was obvious the detective thought the whole exercise was a waste of time—ours, his, and the world at large, and yet I couldn’t blame the guy. If I hadn’t met Alice—talked with her—I would have been just as skeptical.
Destross left the conference room and I saw Richard pass by the open door, cell phone pressed to his ear, presumably talking to Detective Wilder. He didn’t look happy, but I needed to ignore him for the time being and concentrate on the file before me.
I folded back the aged and stained manila folder to expose yellowing onion-skin sheets that had been typed a generation or more before I’d been born.
Thanks to talking to Alice, Richard’s notes, and what I’d gleaned from Forest Lawn’s website, I pretty much knew the basic facts surrounding Alice’s death. The seven or eight sheets of paper in the file didn’t give me much more, and in fact seemed to concentrate more on the assault against her boyfriend, Joe Campbell.
According to Alice’s beau, the couple emerged from the Blue Moon speakeasy, just a little before midnight, and a little tipsy, and headed for his car when they were accosted by several men dressed in black with dishtowels tied over their faces and brandishing handguns. Alice and Joe were herded into the alley behind the bar and when Joe jumped forward to defend his lady, he’d been knocked unconscious.
Okay. But if that was true, and he was no longer a threat, why did the attackers need to strangle petite Alice? Yessiree—Alice’s death was looking more and more like a mobster’s hit. Had somebody been angry with her presumed rumrunner father enough to murder Alice? If so, had the old man retaliated in kind? Considering the thugs had wielded handguns, why had they strangled and not just shot her? Not only was there no mention of a sexual assault, but Campbell had not been fleeced of his wallet. Alice’s purse was found near her body, containing a comb, lipstick, and twenty-one dollars. There was no mention of the possibility that Alice’s death could be tied to illegal activities.
Something was very fishy about Mr. Campbell’s sworn testimony. He claimed he couldn’t remember anything after being whacked on the head. Okay, I could i
dentify with that, having also been the victim of a mugger with a baseball bat. But it didn’t entirely ring true, either. Within weeks, I’d started remembering more and more of the incident. Had Campbell done the same and just didn’t bother to report it, or was he scared enough to keep his mouth shut?
The lack of follow-up by the police department was equally as troubling. Had someone been paid off to make sure no one ever investigated Alice Newcomb’s death?
I’d read most of the pages by the time Richard finally finished his call and joined me in the conference room.
“So?”
Richard sat in the chair across from me. “As we suspected, Dave’s body has already been released to the funeral home.”
“And?”
“I don’t know. Detective Wilder said she’d call to see if we could get in to see him. She brought up an interesting question: what if Dave’s family decides to have him cremated?”
I hadn’t thought about that possibility “I suppose if he was a restless spirit I’d still be able to connect with him.”
“Have you ever connected with a dead person who was cremated?”
“Yeah. Madam Zahara.” Otherwise known as Bridget Madison. “But it seems to me the dead are usually stuck in one place. Sophie’s only at the bakery. Alice is only at the cemetery. Madam Zahara’s spirit clung to the house she’d last lived in, but I’m pretty sure that would have been the case even if her ashes hadn’t been scattered in the yard. If Dave isn’t at the funeral home, I have no idea where he’d be. And so far no restless spirits have come to me—and I don’t want them to, either.”
Richard indicated the pages before me. “Are you done with them?”
“No, but you can read what I’ve already gone through.” I slid the pages across the table.
Ten minutes later I’d finished going over all the sheets. I thought about all I’d read, waiting for Richard to catch up. Finally he looked up.
“Talk about a shoddy investigation.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“It’s almost as though someone didn’t want Alice’s murder to be solved.”
“The cops here in Buffalo turned a blind eye to a lot during Prohibition,” I pointed out. “Did you notice there were virtually no interviews with Alice’s family and friends? Not even the other couples who’d spent the evening with Alice and her boyfriend.”
“Do you suspect a cover up?”
“Yeah. Remember Alice’s niece said her father portrayed her as ‘not a good girl.’ Rumrunners and their suppliers had plenty of turf wars. Alice’s father could have been one or the other? She couldn’t tell me exactly what kind of business her father was in, but that they had plenty of money during the great depression.”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “You’d think if someone killed his only child, the guy would be out for blood. I sure as hell would be.” And Richard had only been a dad for eight months—not twenty-three years like Alice’s father.
“Yeah, but you’re forgetting something; the guy wanted a son. Back in the day, cigars were handed out at the birth of a boy. Half-hearted smiles and talk about the next time around often followed the birth of a daughter.”
“Then the guy was an ignoramus.”
“Probably,” I agreed, thinking about poor sweet Alice.
Richard looked down at the papers in front of us. “Do you think we need to make copies?”
I shook my head.
Richard nodded and collected the papers, settling them back into the folder. “I’ve been thinking paranoid thoughts,” he admitted.
“How so?”
“Our phones. I propose we make like terrorists.”
“In what way?”
“We head to Walmart and buy a couple of those cheap smart phones and load them with a thousand minutes each. That way we can still communicate with Brenda, Maggie, and whoever else we please, but Maria—or whoever—won’t be able to track us. That is, as long as we don’t log onto any social media with them.
“Sounds like a plan. Maggie was pretty upset this morning when I told her I might be incommunicado for a few days.”
“Pay phones would still be better—if we could find them. We just have to hope Brenda’s and Maggie’s phones haven’t been compromised.”
“You can always call Evelyn’s landline to talk to Brenda, and I can call Maggie at work. There’s no way Maria could tap into numbers she doesn’t know about.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Richard warned.
As he was pretty much a computer expert, he was probably right.
“So what’s up next?” I asked.
“We get the phones, contact Detective Wilder and our loved ones—and then eat lunch.”
“And then?”
“Punt.”
And apparently punting wasn’t going to include me buying a gun. But I had a pretty good idea of how I might obtain one. I would call upon my reporter friend, Sam Nielsen. He’d once loaned me an unregistered gun. When I didn’t return it, he’d never said a word. I don’t know why he side-stepped the law, and I never asked. But I was willing to bet he’d have no problem taking me to a place that legally sold guns, especially after what had not only happened to me, but Dave, too. It was something I intended to pursue.
I had no plans to end up like my former co-worker: dead by an unknown attacker.
20
Walmart was not a place Richard was familiar with, but he disappeared inside for almost forty-five minutes and bought a couple of cheapie phones to tide us over during the crisis. Another purchase Richard made was a nanny cam so that he could set it up in whatever hotel we inhabited for the foreseeable future. He figured he’d download the app to our phones later that day when he installed the camera. Just a couple more pieces of the security puzzle we needed. After that, we were ready for lunch, which was damn fine. We nixed Charlie the Butcher because we couldn’t get a beer there, let alone anything stronger, and we ended up at a Buffalo institution: Schwabl’s, for their classic beef on weck. Yes! Mi-T-Fine.
Neither of us were in a hurry to get back to the hotel, where I’d left a do-not-disturb sign on the door of my side of the suite so that Herschel wouldn’t be spooked by strangers wielding vacuum cleaners and dusters.
Instead of visiting a more commercial tourist attraction, we drove to Buffalo’s waterfront and called our ladies. Richard took a walk while I laid low in the minivan, wishing all the windows were tinted. After conversing with Maggie, who sounded pleased to hear from me, I knew someone else I needed to speak to—and yet, I knew Sophie wasn’t likely to be available until at least midnight.
It was nearly four when Richard hit a grocery store and bought a ton of food for supper and the next day’s breakfast before we headed back to our hotel. By then my leg ached like it was about to fall off and I was so friggin’ tired I could barely keep my eyes open, desperately needing to crash. As soon as I hit the bed, a lonely Herschel was only too glad to plaster his furry body against me after Richard relieved me of my phone so he could download the nanny cam software and set up the camera.
I didn’t emerge from my room until almost eight thirty. Richard’s iPod was plugged into a hotel clock radio pumping out some somber piece of classical music while he sat in front of the living room’s desk in front of his computer. He hadn’t waited for me to start Happy Hour and had already broken out the Scotch bottle.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” he said.
“Thanks.” I planted my ass on the couch, hauled my broken leg onto the coffee table, and realized I hadn’t completely shut the door to my bedroom. Herschel wandered into the room and jumped onto the window sill to look at the outside world. Richard gave him a wary look and then grabbed his drink, taking a healthy swig.
I looked at my brother with what I hoped was a hopeful expression. “I’m kind of thirsty and too bloody tired to get up and make myself a drink.”
Richard showed good grace by not rolling his eyes and got up, tossed ice in a glass, then
poured bourbon and a splash of club soda into it before refreshing his own drink. He handed me the glass and gave me back my new phone, which I pocketed.
“Thanks.” I took a hit of that liquid gold and let myself relax … but only so much. I needed to bring up what could be a potentially sore subject. “I’d like to connect with my friend Sophie tonight.”
“I got that feeling,” Richard said, glancing at my cat with peripheral vision.
“We’ve got to establish some parameters around that.”
He turned back to face me. “Which means?”
“I’m not sure you’d be welcome at the bakery.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because Sophie’s told me on a number of occasions that she’s only here on this earth for me.”
“But I’ve met and spoken to her in the past. Why wouldn’t she talk to me now?” He sounded offended.
“I’m just telling you my perception of how things might go down. If we go in together and she doesn’t show up—you have to go.”
“And leave you vulnerable?”
“Yeah. Believe me, I’m not thrilled at the prospect, but I don’t get to make the rules—and Sophie said she doesn’t, either.”
“So there is a supreme being calling the shots?” Richard asked, and I wasn’t sure if he was hopeful or skeptical.
“Not that I’ve been told.” I sipped my drink and looked around the room seeing no evidence of the tiny camera Richard had bought earlier that day. “Am I on Candid Camera right now?”
He shook his head. “I won’t turn it on until we either leave to go out or go to bed.”
“Where is it?”
“On the top of my monitor.” He pointed.
I don’t think I would have seen the thing if he hadn’t indicated where I should look. I could only hope someone entering the room would be as oblivious.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“I will be pretty soon. I’d like to enjoy my drink first.”
He frowned. “Okay.”
Was he hungry?
“I’d like to call Brenda and say goodnight to Betsy. Do you mind?”
“Not a bit.” I was already plotting my next move—which didn’t include him.
Shattered Spirits Page 21