by Frank Zafiro
Wordlessly, she led me down a short corridor that opened into a large living room. The television was on but muted. A white fluff ball eyed me from the couch, distrust plain in its feline eyes.
The lady of the house flopped beside the cat and let out a long whoosh of air. “Ashk aways, officer.” She lifted a glass from the table beside the couch and sipped her drink, motioning toward the chair opposite her.
I sat down. Impersonating a police officer was a crime. I knew that. But I also knew that she didn’t know any better right now. She wouldn’t be sober enough to give the cops enough information to make a case against me. Hell, if she was a chronic drinker, they might not even believe her.
“Mrs. Tate—”
“You may call me Paula, officer,” she said, and took another sip.
I smiled, and hoped she didn’t ask for my name. “Okay, Paula it is. I just had a couple of clarifying questions about your husband’s death.”
Her expression didn’t change. She continued to look at me, waiting.
“Uh, I don’t quite know how to ask this, so I guess I’ll just be straightforward. I’m having a hard time figuring out why he did this.”
Her face broke into a smile. She took another drink, laughing into her glass. “I guess you’ll have to discover that one on your own, detective. Shouldn’t be too hard.”
“I know he may have been struggling with some things about himself,” I said carefully, “but what I don’t understand is what changed. Why now?”
She shrugged and swirled her ice cubes. “You know about that, huh?”
I nodded.
“Everyone else know, too, then?”
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
“But they will.”
“Probably.”
“What great gossip that will make,” she said. “And then everyone will look at me and wonder what was so wrong with me that I turned a man that way.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” I told her.
“What? Gossip? Sure it does.”
I didn’t answer right away. She took another drink and stared at her feet.
“Was there anything else going on, Mrs. Tate?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t confide in me like he once did.”
“Was he under any particular strain at work?”
“Always. But nothing special, as far as I knew.”
“Were there money problems?”
She snorted lightly. “Depends on what you mean.”
“What does that mean?”
“Whether you mean his money or mine.”
I didn’t react. So that was where the money came from.
Paula Tate finished her drink. The ice cubes clinked against her teeth. She stood and sauntered over to a small bar to make another one.
“Not that there’s much of mine left,” she said while facing away from me. “Most of it was used paying for his campaigns. Foolish me, I thought perhaps he was going somewhere.”
I remembered what Monique had told me about Tate’s aspirations. They’d seemed noble to me at the time, but it was clear his wife had other ideas about what defined success.
“I got a call from the insurance company this morning,” she said, pouring from a bottle. “Know what those vipers said?”
“No.” I didn’t think she was ever going to stop pouring, but eventually she did.
“That Larry’s life insurance policy might not pay off for suicide.” She turned around and looked at me, swirling her glass again. “Nice, huh?”
“I’m sorry.”
She looked at me more closely, then sipped her drink. “You weren’t here before.”
I shook my head.
“And you’re not carrying a gun. Where’s your gun?”
“I don’t carry one.”
“Funny kind of cop.”
I didn’t reply.
She considered for another moment, then clenched her jaw. “You’re not a cop, are you?”
I shook my head.
“You son of a bitch. I know who you work for.”
A jolt of electricity shot through me. For one crazy second, I wondered how in the hell she knew Rolo.
“You work for those vultures, don’t you?” she snarled at me. “You're an insurance agent.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t lie. You can’t lie. It’s the law and I know the law.”
“I’m not –” I stopped, then said instead, “I don’t work for—”
Her eyes widened. “Liar! Get out of my house!”
She cocked her glass as if to throw it at me but reconsidered. I thought about trying to talk her down, but there was too much going against that. She was drunk. She was distraught. And she might call the cops. All bad.
I rose without a word and walked to the door. Behind me, I heard Paula Tate sobbing.
15
I decided I needed to work the official angles pretty fast. If Paula Tate got sideways over our discussion, she might call the police to report it. Or if she wasn’t the kind of person to call the police, she’d be on the phone with her attorney. Whoever she called would start checking around and if they got to people before I did, the chances of any of them opening up to me were slim.
I figured that after an important man’s mistress and his wife, the person who might know most in his world would be his secretary. Hell, she might even be the most objective of the three. Maybe I should have started with her.
The front desk at City Hall was almost as secure as an airport. I had to show identification, walk through a security station complete with metal detector and clip on a ‘visitor’ badge. Despite all that security, no one asked me the purpose of my visit.
I consulted a directory and saw the council offices were on the third floor. I rode up alone in the elevator, wondering if I was getting in over my head. Poking around official offices, talking to the wife, all of that might catch the attention of the police. Given my history with RCPD, that wasn’t likely to turn out well.
Still, the only other option was to do nothing. I couldn’t check any of Monique’s other clients until she told me who they were, if she even could. And there was something goofy going on with Tate, anyway. Something not right. Maybe it wasn’t my duty to figure out what it was, but I couldn’t see where anyone else was going to do it. Browning was a thorough detective, but he didn’t know what Adam and I saw at the Rocket, or what Monique had to say about the situation. In the end, wouldn’t he see what everyone else saw? A local politician, unable to deal with his conflicted sexuality any longer?
I wished it were that simple. But even though I wasn’t that deep into this situation, I knew it wasn’t. Someone beat up Monique, for starters.
The elevator bounced to a stop and the door slid open. I wandered around briefly until I located Tate’s office. Surprisingly, the door was open.
A red haired woman about the same age as Paula Tate sat at a desk inside the office. A single, closed door was to her right. She stared at the computer, not moving. The nameplate in front of her desk said her name was Lara Monroe.
I cleared my throat.
Lara glanced up. Her eyes were glassy, though not for the same reason Paula Tate’s had been. She’d been crying, and recently.
“Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Councilman Tate.”
She eyed me coolly. “Who are you?”
“I’m not a reporter,” I said, “so don’t worry. But I am looking into his death.”
“The police are doing that,” Lara said. “So why are you?”
“I work for a private party.”
“The insurance company?”
I shook my head. This conversation was giving me déjà vu. I wondered for a second if Paula had called her. The idea wasn’t crazy. As long as she didn’t suspect Tate of having an affair with his secretary, I imagined the two would be friendly. Unless Paula had already been a drunk before Tate’s death, which I su
spected was true. But as long as she wasn’t a mean drunk, the two of them could still have been friendly.
“Then who?” Lara asked again.
“I can’t say,” I said. “Client confidentiality.”
She gave me a cold smile. “Well, I can say who I work for, sir. His name is Councilman Lawrence Tate. And confidentiality applies for me as well. So I don’t think we have much of anything to talk about, do we?”
“I want to help.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
She didn’t reply. Her cold stare was impenetrable. There was no way I was breaking through these walls, at least not right here, right now. The best thing to do was to walk away and try another approach later.
“Thank you,” I said politely, and left.
Clell liked his Maxwell House coffee. Ever since I bought him a tin of it to say thanks for taking me in one cold night, it’s the only brand he’ll drink. So when I stopped by his small apartment in Cannon Hill, he brewed a pot without even asking.
“I just don’t get it,” I said. “Part of my brain says maybe the simplest answer is the easiest.”
“It usually is,” he said, pouring us both a cup. He still wore his security guard uniform. I’d caught him just a couple of minutes after he’d gotten home from work.
“But then some things don’t jibe.”
Clell walked over to the kitchen table and set the cups of steaming coffee down. He lowered himself into the seat, a pained expression on his face.
“You okay, Clell?”
He nodded. “Just the hip acting up. I took some aspirin.”
“I know how that is,” I joked. In another life, a gangster put a bullet through the back of my left knee. A thin patch of skin is still all that covers the hole that’s there.
Clell smiled back. “I don’t mean to complain. The bank job I’m at now lets me sit more. It’s a daytime job, and it’s warm, too, so I’m living high on the hog these days. Much better than those nighttime jobs.”
“You deserve it.”
He waved my comment away. “We all deserve it, and none of us really do.”
“That’s what I like about you, Clell. You’re a blue collar philosopher.”
He snorted. “You live over half a century on this planet, you best figure some things out. It don’t make me special.”
I didn’t bother arguing with him, even though I thought he was wrong about the last part. I rolled my left shoulder and gave it a rub with my fingertips.
“Shoulder bugging you?” he asked.
I nodded. “Every so often, yeah. Not as bad as the knee, though.”
“Hell of a thing, being shot.”
I smiled ruefully. “Yeah. Hell of a thing.”
We were quiet for a minute as I worked out the kinks in my shoulder.
“So what don’t jibe?” he asked me after a while. “Why isn’t the simplest answer the right one?”
I sighed and dropped my hand to my knee, where I continued rubbing. “It’s a jumbled mess,” I said. Then I laid it all out for him. I didn’t hold back anything. When I’d finished, we both sat in silence for a couple of minutes.
Clell stared into his coffee while he thought. Finally, he said, “You just don’t really know enough yet.”
“That’s the fact, Jack.”
He drank his coffee and was quiet a while longer. Then he said, “Way I see it, you have to decide if you believe this lady Monique or not. If she’s telling the truth, and if she’s right, then you probably are investigating a murder. And that does get dangerous, ‘specially when you factor in who it is.”
“You’re right.”
“And who you’re working for,” he said.
I detected a tone of disapproval in his voice. “Something more you want to say on that, Clell?”
He shook his head. “Not much to say. You figured you had no choice but say yes to the man, right?”
“Right.”
He shrugged. “Then done is done. It just don’t sit right with me, you working for a man like that.”
I wondered if he meant a black man, which surprised me a little. Clell had never spoken a racist word in the time I’d known him, which was over a year now. Still, people can shock you sometimes.
“A man like what?” I asked, probing a little.
“A criminal,” Clell answered. “And the guy who had you beaten up like that.” He shook his head some more. “It just don’t sit right.”
“The world is a strange place,” I said dryly.
“That it is. So you believe this woman, or not?”
I thought for a while before answering. In my head, I had questions. I knew she had to be good at manipulating men. That was her job. Plus her version of events was less plausible than the simpler explanation.
In my heart, though, I knew she was telling the truth. At least as she knew it.
That was the bigger problem for me. Whether she was right or not.
I told Clell all of this over our coffee. He listened, offered a comment or two, but otherwise let me talk it out.
“Another thing that bothers me is the pills.”
“Why?”
“Men don’t usually kill themselves that way. Usually, they do something more violent. A gun, or a rope. Pills are more often a woman’s choice.”
Clell shrugged. “Maybe it was insurance. So he couldn’t change his mind at the last minute.”
“Yeah, that’s what Adam said,” I agreed. “And it could be. It’s just odd, that’s all. You don’t hear about murders happening this way.”
“You don’t hear about a lot of murders in this town, period,” Clell said. “Not like the big cities.”
I smiled grimly. There was plenty of dark goings on in this city, including murders. They just didn’t make the paper, or at least not the front page, because of who it was. Drugs were the usual culprit.
“Know what I think?” Clell asked me.
“What?”
“I think you need to follow the money.”
“What?”
“I saw it in a movie once. Or maybe it was a TV show. But the guy, he said that you should always follow the money.”
I thought about that for a minute. The difference between money and everything else that was swirling around this case so far was that money wasn’t based on emotion. Money is business. And Adam and I already saw firsthand that money was part of this equation somehow. “Clell, you might just be a genius.”
“Don’t be over-stating things, now.”
He rose to refill our cup, but I held out my hand to stop him. “I’ll get it.” He smiled his thanks around his bushy mustache and sank back down into his seat.
I went to the counter and poured us both a new cup. When I brought them back, Clell smelled the coffee’s aroma and grinned. “I owe you big time for this discovery, pard. I would have never tried this brand on my own. I’d still be drinking store brand.”
“It’s probably the same stuff,” I teased him. “Just packaged differently.”
“Oh, no,” he told me. “There’s a definite difference. This coffee is…richer. It reminds me that some things in life were meant to be fine.”
“More philosophy.”
Clell sipped and swallowed. “You should enjoy something like this in your life, my friend.”
“I drink coffee just about every day at the Rocket.”
“Yeah, but you don’t really enjoy anything, as far as I can tell. It’s like you just tolerate everything. Like you’re still angry about something from a long time ago.”
I didn’t say anything. He was probably right, but the thought burned in my stomach all the same.
Clell was watching me. “You ask me, I think you’ve done some things to even the scales, Stef. I don’t think you need to be so angry any more. You don’t have to prove anything, or be a hero for anyone.”
He was hitting a little too close to home. I stood up to go.
“Hey there, now,” Clell said. “Don’t be leaving
angry. I didn’t mean any offense.”
“I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m just going to go follow some money.”
Clell watched me go, and I made sure not to slam his apartment door.
16
The River City Library’s main branch was a four-story building right on the edge of downtown. The dour, gray federal building stood across the street, but the library was all open architecture. Big windows, wide stairs, and rooms and rooms with light pouring onto all the bookshelves.
I was more interested in the computers, which were in the basement. A library card affords every patron three hours of Internet use a day. Both the card and the computer use were free, which was something that I appreciated, given my usual condition. That is, broke. I’d put most of Rolo’s money in my bank account, which hadn’t seen that kind of cash since I left the police department.
Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have been searching microfilm, but almost everything was archived on the net these days. All I needed was a connection and a search engine, and thanks to the taxpayers of River City, I had both for three free hours a day.
I found out more about Lawrence Tate than I expected. He was in his second term as councilman. His district was the same South Hill area where he lived, which included some posh neighborhoods. He was the sponsor of the ordinance that set up warming centers for the homeless in the cold months, which was a decidedly liberal sentiment. Yet he tended to vote against tax hikes, which was more conservative. He seemed to avoid becoming embroiled in the more controversial events that divided the city’s population. He either wasn’t mentioned in those articles, or his comments were vanilla.
The picture of Tate that emerged over the next couple of hours was a little bit of a people pleaser, but not necessarily a weak person. Some compassion was apparent, such as when he voted to prop up the local food bank after the director embezzled just about every dime and skipped town. Other times, he seemed quite practical, and willing to make tough decisions, including voting against a raise for the fire department.
That impressed me. Everyone loves the fire department, so voting against them took some guts. He took a few hits for it, too, according to an article I read in the online Herald and in a Fire Association newsletter. But Tate simply said that our police and fire employees were fairly paid and the citizens couldn’t afford to give them a raise while they were struggling themselves, and the city faced a deficit.