by Gail Lukasik
The memory of Alex kissing Harper’s hand at the Isle View Bar flashed through my brain. This girl knew how to wield her assets to cast her spell on men. But what did she want from Finch? He knew a lot of people in the business. And now that Nate was dead, Finch was next in line to be enticed by her. Had she cast off Alex, or was she still working him?
As I stopped at the park’s exit waiting for a car to pass, I debated whether I should go back to the office or go home. It was almost 2:30 p.m. Working at the office would allow me to check out the website Sam had found, but I was spent. The lure of Salinger’s company and a cool glass of the Premium Reserve Chardonnay was too hard to resist. I turned right and headed north to Highway 57.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
As I neared the cabin’s driveway, I noticed a dark car parked on the other side of the road. Anxious to get home, I sped past the car and turned into the driveway. When I pulled up in front of the cabin, I heard Salinger’s frantic cries. She never cried like that unless something was wrong. Before exiting the truck, I located my pepper spray. I’d let my guard down once before, and it almost cost me my life. So I wasn’t taking any chances. With the pepper spray in my right hand, I bounded up the porch steps, my heart beating wildly to the sounds of Salinger’s mad scratching.
I’d barely opened the door when she squeezed through the opening, leapt off the stairs and dashed down the gravel driveway as if she were being chased.
“Salinger,” I called out. “Get back here.” For a moment I stood on the porch, wondering if I should just let her go. But her frenetic barking had me worried. Angry and a little panicked, I went after her, still gripping the pepper spray.
Just as I rounded the last curve, I saw the black car. It was now parked at the driveway’s entrance, just sitting there. Salinger circled the car as if she was herding it. All the car windows were tinted, so I couldn’t make out the driver.
“Salinger,” I yelled, hurrying my pace. “Come here now.”
Salinger stopped circling the car, looked back and started trotting toward me.
Then the car revved its engine and took off, squealing its tires.
I watched in dismay as Salinger tore after the car.
When I reached the edge of the driveway, I looked up and down the deserted road. No car, no Salinger. All that remained was the smell of exhaust filling the heavy afternoon air like a noxious vapor.
In a panic, I started running up the road north in the direction the car had gone, my sore leg muscles protesting. Though Salinger had a habit of running off into the woods chasing whatever took her fancy, she’d never chased a car before.
She’ll come back, I told myself as I jogged. She always comes back.
When I saw the intersection of Timberline and Isle View in the distance, I stopped. Salinger was sitting under the intersecting road signs. I sped up, both relieved and worried. I had to reach her before a car whizzed by and she took off again. Hurry, hurry, I goaded myself.
But when I got closer, I let out a deep sigh. My fears were unfounded. She must have seen me because she started jumping up and down, lurching toward me, the rope taut. Someone had tied her with a rope to the road sign.
I knelt down in the weedy grass and ran my hands over her body, making sure she wasn’t hurt while she licked my face. After finding no signs of injury, I untied the rope from the sign but left the other end tied to Salinger’s collar.
“This is what you get for chasing after strange cars,” I reprimanded her as we walked back toward Timberline. She had the good sense to hang her head in shame as she walked beside me contritely.
While we meandered home, I racked my brain for a logical explanation why someone had been sitting, idling their car at the end of my driveway. And even stranger, why they’d tied Salinger to that street sign.
When we came to the cabin’s driveway, the only explanation I could come up with was someone was interested in buying the house and was checking out the area.
Before going inside, I tied Salinger to one of the porch posts and walked around the periphery of the property, peering into the dense woods, seeing nothing. Finally, I circled around to the front porch to find Salinger dozing.
Leaving Salinger on the porch, I went inside and searched the cabin, going room to room, opening closets and looking under beds. There was no one inside and nothing looked disturbed.
After settling Salinger down with several dog treats, I called the realtor, Diane Avers, on her cell phone. She answered on the first ring. “So how’s the cabin working out for you?”
“Other than no A/C and no Internet, it’s great.”
“Easily fixed.”
“Has anyone shown any interest in the cabin?”
“Got a few calls, but no bites. Why, have you decided to put in an offer?”
“Still thinking about it.”
“Don’t think too long.”
“I won’t. Thanks.” I hung up. An interested buyer might explain why a car was idling at the end of the driveway. But it didn’t explain why someone had tied Salinger to a street sign.
Rather than sit around worrying, I refilled Salinger’s water bowl, gave her another treat, locked the doors and jumped into the truck, driving away slowly as I scanned the woods. That scare had revitalized me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The ambush had happened at night, in the tangled jungle. Tim Washington described the torrential rain, the oozing, impossible mud and the heat over 120 degrees. Lawrence Browning was the only soldier who’d disappeared that night in the confusion of battle. Washington never named him. Toward the end of his two-minute recitation, he said that sometimes he thinks it was all a dream. But when he sees photos of himself in Vietnam, it all comes back. “I came home not quite the same person,” were his concluding words.
Had Brownie come home the same way? Not quite the same person?
I studied Washington’s photo, a nineteen-year-old kid with a baby face wearing army fatigues, the sleeves cut out of his shirt, a makeshift piece of cloth over his head, looking straight at the camera with a sad, knowing expression.
I powered down the computer and picked up the office phone, punching in the police station number hoping Chet was there. He was.
“Can I see Ken this afternoon?” I fingered the wine shard, its red glittery surface like a clotted blood drop.
“Be here before five.” It was 4:35 p.m.
“Will you be there?”
“I don’t need your interfering, Leigh. You got that?”
“But I have something to show you,” I pleaded. I picked up the shard and watched the light flicker off it. “Something you’re going to want to see.”
“If you want to talk to Albright, you’d better stop yakking and get your behind here.”
It wasn’t like on TV crime dramas. There was no glass partition separating us, no in-house black phone, just Ken and me in a closed cinderblock room with an overhead light and two metal chairs. I’d been in this room more than once, and the memory made me queasy and lightheaded. I swallowed hard and tried not to shake, as the memory of a young woman’s body rose up—how still and blue death had been.
“How are you doing, Ken?” I managed to keep my voice steady.
He looked wan and depressed, his massive shoulders slumped and his eyes red and puffy. “They’re going to pin it on me.” All the fight had left him, as if his rage had been siphoned off.
“Just be honest with me, Ken. There’s only you and me in here. Did you hit Brownie with a baseball bat?” I needed to ask him that question. I needed to see what he looked like when he answered me.
He kept his head down as he shook it from side to side. “No,” he whispered. I’d expected him to pound the table in anger or at least shout at me. This was worse.
“Tell me again what you saw when you got back from Green Bay. Everything. No detail is too small.”
He cleared his throat before talking. “Brownie was under that tree I showed you, lying on his back. Next to him,
like I said, were two empty wine bottles. The ones I smashed up then threw into the bay.”
“Anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Was the baseball bat there?”
“No.”
“What about the guy you saw sneaking around in the woods, the one with the beard that you told Rob Martin about. Describe him.”
He glanced up at me in surprise, and then looked down again. “I didn’t see him that well. It was night, so I only saw an outline and the beard.”
“Tall, short? Fat, thin? Anything.”
“Medium height, maybe a little taller. It was hard to tell for sure. He had on baggy clothes and had a dark beard. He was wearing a hat too.”
“What kind of a hat?”
“Like in them old black and white movies. Wide brim, turned down so I couldn’t see his face. You think this guy killed Brownie?” He raised his head, making eye contact.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.” Now was the question I’d been leading up to. “If I’m going to help you, Ken, you have to tell me everything.”
“You calling me a liar?” The anger was back, and I was almost glad to see him show an emotion, even if it was anger.
“You haven’t told me everything you know about Brownie, have you?” My instinct told me that from the moment Ken called me asking me to see where Brownie died, he’d made a decision to hold back the intimacies of Brownie’s life out of some misguided sense of loyalty to his friend.
He slammed his fist down hard on the metal table, making me jump. “Don’t push me and don’t call me a liar.”
Suddenly, the door opened and Chet jutted his head inside. “What’s going on in here?”
“It was me. I slammed the table too hard to make a point.”
“Uh-huh.” Chet didn’t buy it. “I’m right outside this door, Albright. So watch yourself.”
After Chet closed the door, I continued. “Brownie’s dead. He can’t be hurt anymore. So if you’re holding something back because of him, don’t.”
Ken’s eyes shifted right. When they came back to me, sadness had replaced his anger. “He told me he’d been a medic in ’Nam. It was almost like being a priest, is what he said. The guys he treated confided in him. Too much sometimes. Things he didn’t want to know. It was too much responsibility.” He paused. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this. It’s got nothing to do with Brownie being killed.”
“You don’t know that, Ken. What if that person you saw sneaking around in the woods was from Brownie’s past?”
“And hunts him down now after all these years?”
“Just trust me. What did Brownie tell you?”
The room went quiet as he struggled with his decision. I placed my hands flat on the cool metal table, waiting, praying I’d gotten through to him.
“Sorry, Brownie,” Ken began, looking up. “But I gotta tell it. There was this young kid who was shot up pretty bad. Brownie was trying to save his life. But it didn’t look good. He confessed to Brownie that he’d shot and killed one of his own guys during this ambush by mistake. He panicked, took the guy’s tags and dragged his body into the jungle. Then he got shot. When he was being medivaced out, he confessed what he’d done to Brownie. The guy was pretty far gone, and Brownie said he didn’t think he was going to make it. So Brownie took the tags and promised not to tell anyone. But afterward, he said he couldn’t live with it. When he thought about this Lawrence Browning’s family, it tore him up. He went to Browning’s parents’ house and almost told them, then chickened out. That’s when he took on Browning’s identity and started drinking.”
“Did this guy who shot Lawrence Browning make it?” I asked.
“Yeah. Do you think he killed Brownie?”
“You mean Anthony Rossi, don’t you?” I wanted to test my hunch that Ken had always known Brownie’s true identity.
He didn’t even try to deny it. “He wouldn’t let me call him that never. He said that person was dead.”
“I don’t know if that guy killed Brownie. Maybe.”
It was a long shot. Brownie had kept his end of the bargain all these years. Why would this person seek him out now and kill him?
“Did Brownie tell you the name of the guy who shot Lawrence Browning?”
He jutted out his jaw as if in refusal. “Tim Washington.”
I was so shocked, my mouth dropped.
“You know this guy or something?” Ken asked.
“You might say that.” I’d just watched Tim Washington’s account of that ambush online. I can’t imagine what had possessed him to retell the horrors of that night to strangers and then let them put it online for everyone to see. Not once did he mention Lawrence Browning.
To his credit, Chet listened to the whole Lawrence Browning story without interruption, shaking his massive Viking head a few times, adjusting and readjusting the tiny American flag on his desk, and sipping from his coffee cup. When I was through, he asked for the website, logged on and watched Tim Washington tell the terror of that night ambush. Then he rocked back and forth in his swivel chair, hashing over what I’d told him.
“You know it’s the story of a dead man told by the man accused of his murder.”
“But worth looking into?” I encouraged.
“Maybe.”
I was prepared for his skepticism. Opening my purse, I dug out the wine shard from an inner pocket and placed it on his desk.
“What’s this?” He picked it up in his large hand and examined it.
“A shard from one of the wine bottles Ken smashed and threw in the bay. The bottle is from the Sweet Cherry Winery. They stopped making this wine seven years ago. And no other winery on the peninsula uses this color bottle.”
“So?”
“So why would Brownie drink a seven-year-old bottle of wine that most likely tasted like vinegar? And even more baffling, where did he get it from?”
Chet smiled broadly, putting the shard down and pushing it toward me. “Look, Leigh, there are things there about this case you don’t know, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. I listened to what you had to say, and now you take that piece of glass and skedaddle. It’s Sunday and there’s a steak and a six-pack of beer waiting for me at home.”
“Just tell me one thing and I’m gone. What was Brownie’s blood alcohol level in the initial tox screen? You can at least tell me that.” I needed to know if Brownie had been drunk when he died. If he hadn’t been, then I wasn’t sure why the wine bottles were there. Unless Ken had lied, and he’d procured the wine somehow and tried to drink it in alcoholic desperation, which I didn’t buy.
Chet let out an exasperated sigh. “Let’s put it this way, he could have driven home if he had a car and a home.”
“Are you saying he was sober when he died?”
“That’s not what I saying. So don’t be putting words in my mouth there.”
“So alcohol was in his system but he wasn’t drunk. Then why is the ME running additional tox tests?”
“I hear you moved up by Gills Rock. How’s that working out for ya?”
Okay, I’d squeezed what I could out of Chet. I stood up and swung my bag strap over my shoulder. “And Brownie did have a home. They both had a home together.”
Before leaving Sturgeon Bay, I stopped by the Gazette office to use the computer again. If Brownie’s story was true, and why would he lie, Tim Washington had killed Lawrence Browning in the confusion of battle and hid the killing. Washington had been nineteen years old when he was drafted. As he stated in his own words, “They called me Billy, like in Billy the Kid.” A kid sent into a hellhole, where he mistakenly killed a fellow soldier. He’d been awarded a bronze star, was deemed a hero. After all this time, would he murder to keep his secret?
The place was eerily quiet and unreasonably hot. I went to Jake’s office, pushed up all the windows to let in the breeze off the bay. Jake’s desk, as always, was a mass of paper piles, magazines and books. Sticky notes ran across his co
mputer top like a colorful border. I plopped down in his chair with trepidation, not sure I wanted to find Tim Washington, because that would mean confronting him with what he did years ago in the heat of battle as a scared kid. But what was the alternative? I booted up Jake’s computer and leaned back in his chair. I was sweating, whether from the heat or my fears, I wasn’t sure.
Though Timothy Washington was an annoyingly common name, I had enough information about him, such as age and military service, that it didn’t take me very long to find him.
Timothy Washington, Green Bay, Wisconsin, deceased. He’d died two years ago.
I powered down the computer and sat listening to the sounds from the harbor, the low moan of a tugboat, the drone of a jet ski, the lapping of water. Though I didn’t believe Ken murdered Brownie, there was nothing else I could do for him. Whatever Chet wasn’t telling me about the murder would seal his fate one way or another. Sadness, like the coming twilight, filled the room.
Before I left the office, I phoned Elsie Browning and told her what I’d learned concerning her son’s death in Vietnam, stressing that the information was secondhand and reminding her that the man who’d had Lawrence’s dog tags was dead as well as the man who’d mistakenly killed him.
She didn’t ask any questions, and when I was done, a terrible silence hung between us.
“Mrs. Browning, I’m so sorry,” I offered.
She cleared her throat before she spoke. “Now at least I can stop hoping.” She sounded so small and sad.
“Would you like me to mail you my research notes along with Lawrence’s photo?” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Yes, that would be nice. Thank you.” Her voice was thick with emotion. “And Miss Girard, I’ll light a candle for you tomorrow in church.”