A Hard Day’s Fright (12 page)

“Because you were trying to prove how grown-up you were.” The pieces chunked into place, and sure, it had happened long before I was born, but my heart squeezed in sympathy. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said.

Ella swiped her hands across her cheeks. “Of course it wasn’t. I know that now. I think I knew it then, but—”

“But you felt guilty, anyway.”

“If I had let her walk me home—”

“Then whatever happened to her that night would have just happened another time.” I wasn’t sure I believed this, but I said it to make Ella feel better. “You can’t change the past.”

Ella sniffled. “You can wonder how things might have been different.”

“But you can’t feel guilty. You were a kid.”

“And she was my best friend.”

“And you couldn’t have known that she’d step off the rapid and get kidnapped.”

Ella’s head came up. “Did she? How would you—”

I was saved from answering when my office door banged open and Ariel sauntered in—in a sweet little denim miniskirt, a black cami, and three-inch heels.

While my mouth was still hanging open, she sashayed over to the desk, set down a leather portfolio, and slipped off her backpack. “I’ve been investigating,” she said. “Pepper, darling, you never mentioned how tough it is for us detectives. Talking to people, retracing our steps, library research!” She could only maintain the blasé attitude so long before her face split with a grin. “This is the coolest job ever!”

“It’s supposed to be my job.”

As protests went, it wasn’t much, but it didn’t matter since neither of them was listening to me. Ella was just about to burst, that’s how happy she looked when she shot forward, wiped the last of the tears from her eyes, and beamed, “Did you hear that, Pepper? Ariel’s been investigating. Isn’t that interesting? She’s been using her free time to do research.”

“And boy, did I find plenty!” Ariel unzipped her backpack and pulled out a book. “Exhibit number one,” she said, sounding like one of the characters in a courtroom TV show. “An autobiography of Patrick Monroe.” She slapped it down on the desk. “I read it, cover to cover.”

Something I never would have done, so I was actually impressed.

“Unfortunately…” Ariel lifted the book and dropped it on the desk with a splat. “He doesn’t say anything about the night of the Beatles concert, and nothing about Lucy, either. Dead end there!” She tossed her head. “But not to worry, you know how we redheads are. We’re not about to give up easily. I also talked to”—she flipped open the portfolio she’d left on my desk—“the six other teachers he worked with in the English department at Shaker.”

Ella looked over Ariel’s shoulder at the list, her head bobbing. “She made a list!” Ella was so impressed, her voice warbled. “That’s a wonderful skill,” she added. For Ariel’s benefit, I hope, not mine. “It’s the kind of time management technique that really pays off once you get to college. Don’t you think so, Pepper?”

I had been known to make lists myself a time or two. Mostly of murder suspects. Or wardrobe essentials on my must-have list. Since they were so involved in this Ariel-as-detective lovefest, I didn’t bother to point this out.

“Nobody liked Patrick Monroe,” Ariel said. “Not one of them had anything good to say about the creep.”

“Did they have anything to say about Lucy?”

When she looked at me, Ariel wrinkled her nose. “They say they always suspected Patrick Monroe had something to do with her disappearance. But…” She slapped the portfolio closed. “Close but no cigar. Nobody’s talking, and if they are, they’re not saying anything that will help us nail our perp.”

There was that word again.
Our
. I had to tread carefully for fear of trampling on Ella’s excitement or Ariel’s ego, but tread I did. It was that or risk having my investigation whisked out from under me. I pulled back my shoulders. Even in her three-inch heels, I was taller than Ariel, and I intended to make the most of the advantage. “I really appreciate your help,” I told her. “I really do. But it’s probably time for me to just take over and—”

“Have you made lists about anything else?” Do I need to point out that the question came from Ella? Or that she wasn’t talking to me? She looped her arm through her daughter’s and they headed for the door. “You could try the same technique for homework assignments. You know, day of the week, what homework you have, when it’s due. Then you could take that list and transfer it all to a master list and…”

They were still talking about it when they walked out into the hall.

And I was left—finally—to my own thoughts. It didn’t take me long to put them in order because, let’s face it, I hadn’t learned much that was new.

Ella felt guilty for not allowing Lucy to walk her home.

OK, I got that. But it had nothing to do with Lucy’s murder.

And was it true that Bobby Gideon felt guilty, too? So guilty he allowed himself to be slaughtered in combat in Vietnam? And if this was true, what was it that Bobby felt guilty about?

I
didn’t have the answers. But I intended to find out.

It took me longer to find Dr. Sharon Gideon than it did for her to throw me out of her office.

But then, I suppose a dentist with patients waiting can’t be expected to be all that excited about answering questions from a woman who wasn’t even alive when her brother died in a jungle on the other side of the world. Especially when those questions involve suicide and a girl who disappeared so long ago Sharon barely remembered Lucy’s name, much less the circumstances surrounding the mystery.

She was accommodating enough to ask where I’d even heard such bullshit (her word) about Bobby’s death, and I was shameless enough to lie and tell her I was writing a book about local soldiers who had served in Nam and that I’d interviewed one of the guys in Bobby’s platoon. He’d told me that Bobby walked into the middle of a firefight and never once tried to defend himself.

Sure, I was elaborating on the slim facts Patrick Monroe had provided me, but I could tell from the way Sharon flinched when I told my story that there was some kernel of truth in it. I took a chance and asked if Bobby might have had any reason to feel guilty about what happened to Lucy. That’s when Dr. Gideon unceremoniously showed me to the door. With the caveat that I’d better not ever come back or she’d call the cops.

I may be persistent, but I am not stupid. I understand the meaning of the words
restraining order
and the concept of jail. I left and sat in my car out in the parking lot, thinking.

It was obvious that Sharon might know the truth about Bobby’s death, but she was never going to talk.

It was just as obvious that when it came to Bobby, Ella couldn’t help, either.

And that left me only one place to turn.

Well…let me correct that statement.

It left me with three places to turn.

It was time for me to track down Janice, Darren, and Will.

O
K, I admit it, as places to live go, Cleveland often gets a bum rap. And some of that is well deserved. Our region’s economy is in the dumps. Some of our public school systems are way less than stellar. Our river once caught on fire, but that was a long time ago, and it’s been cleaned up since then so that doesn’t actually count.

But there are good things about living in northeast Ohio, too. Sometimes the weather is spectacular. When it’s not snowing, that is, or so humid it’s like walking through a wet wall. We have great parks, fabulous museums—as a former art history major, I can say this with some authority even though I never go to them—and a sense of pride and history that is as appealing to some people as our relatively low cost of living.

People who are born here tend to stick around, and that’s a real plus for me. It means that investigating in my home-town is a tad easier than I imagine it would be in places like New York or L.A. Yes, the shopping opportunities in those cities would more than make up for the inconvenience, but shopping aside, never let it be said that I don’t look on the bright side.

It took some digging, but remember, I had an assistant. I put Ariel to work, and just like I found Bobby Gideon’s sister, she found Will Margolis’s mother. When I went to visit, I discovered a teeny, silver-haired woman with dark eyes, and thank goodness, none of the attitude that made Dr. Gideon so impossible.

Oh yeah, Will’s mom wanted to talk. And talk. And talk. She was just about ancient and a little fuzzy when it came to reality. She thought I’d gone to school with Will. In spite of the fact that I am about thirty years younger than him, I didn’t take this personally. In fact, I played it up for all it was worth.

That old school connection I had with Will, that’s what got me his current address.

So there I was, just a couple days later in a part of Cleveland known as the Flats, the area immediately on either side of the Cuyahoga River. Back in the day and thanks to easy access to both the river and Lake Erie, this was where the first pioneers settled. In later years, all that water meant cheap and easy transportation, so the Flats became an industrial hub. That river fire I mentioned? It happened in the Flats.

That incident was something of a wake-up call, and since then, the Flats has undergone an ebb and flow of transformation, from nightclub central to gentrification, from down-on-its-luck to hopping party town and back again. These days, it’s stuck somewhere right in between. There are still some restaurants and bars down in the Flats, but there are empty buildings, too, as well as newly built condos and a whole lake’s worth of promises that never seem to get fulfilled. Developers are always itching to get their fingers into the pie that is the Flats, and from my research (OK, Ariel’s research, but since I was in charge, it was like it was mine), Darren Andrews was one of them.

He was a problem for another day. That sunny Saturday at the end of April, I parked the Mustang and picked my way down a heaving sidewalk littered with beer cans and broken bottles, heading toward a relatively new and beautifully cared for complex called Stella Maris. It means Star of the Sea, which doesn’t make any sense to me since the lake is right nearby and the sea isn’t, but I’m not one to quibble. I stopped long enough to look over the two tidy redbrick buildings. One of them had an ultramodern rounded roofline and plenty of windows, and that’s the one I went for. That’s where I was told the Recovery Coffee House was located, and that’s where I was going to meet Will Margolis.

The
Recovery
part of the name? Well, that was no big surprise. Stella Maris is a drug and alcohol treatment center, and according to his mom, it wasn’t the first time Will had been a patient there. She’d talked about good intentions gone bad, and rehab that never quite stuck, and a treadmill that pretty much went round and round this way: promises, recovery, back to the bottle, and life on the streets. According to her, Will had been at Stella Maris for the last couple months and she was sure—this time—that rehab was going to work. As for Will, he’d seemed more than a little confused when I called to schedule this meeting, and more than a little unsure about why I wanted to talk to him in the first place. In answer to his questions, I had been less than forthcoming. But then, I’ve found that it’s easier to get people to talk in person than it is over the phone. I didn’t want to have him tell me to take a hike before I ever had the chance to meet him in person.

Hoping for the best, I pushed open the door to the coffeehouse and saw that, except for a woman in sweatpants and a hospital-type scrub top, it was empty.

My expectations had been running high, and they crashed and burned in an instant.

That is, until I looked around and saw that there was a man at a table on the outside patio. I pulled out that photo of Ella and her friends taken the night of the Beatles concert and took another look at the teenaged Will. He wasn’t nearly as tall as Darren and had none of that surfer swagger, but in his own geeky not-quite-a-man way, Will was kind of cute. He had dark hair, and it was combed down over his forehead. In the photo, he was grinning at Ella. He was red-faced and very young, and call me a sucker, but the thought of finding him forty-five years later at a drug rehab center…

I pulled in a breath and told myself not to get caught in an undertow of emotion. I was a detective with a job to do, and I marched toward the patio, pushed open the door, and—

Stopped.

In spite of the pool of sunshine where he sat, the man at the table was muffled in a black cardigan and wearing a green stocking cap. He had a newspaper spread out in front of him, and as he read, he tapped the table with the fingers of his left hand, over and over, again and again. It didn’t take long for the frantic rhythm to get to me. I doubted the young Will had a cough that made it sound like his lungs were filled with liquid. And the mustard yellow stains on his fingers? I’d bet anything that back when Ella knew him, he didn’t have those, either. Even as I watched, the man lit a cigarette, sucked in a long breath, and closed his eyes, apparently enjoying the sensation of the smoke in his lungs and the nicotine clawing through his bloodstream. His hands were mottled with age spots. His fingers were as thin as claws.

I checked the photo again.

I looked back at the man.

The hair poking out of the back of his stocking cap was  streaked with silver, but still mostly dark. His eyes were sunken, and the skin around them looked as if it had been smudged with gray eye shadow. But the cheekbones…Just to make sure, I checked the picture again. They were as high as the boy’s in the photo, and since he was so thin, they were as well defined as a fashion model’s. Though his chin sagged and was tweedy with a couple days’ growth of stubble, it was just as round as that of the kid from long ago.

When I took a step closer, I made sure to clear my throat so I didn’t catch Will Margolis off guard.

His dark eyes popped open. They were rimmed with red. Every movement stiff and painful, he dragged himself to his feet. “You gotta be Pepper Martin, the young lady who called me yesterday.” He swept an arm toward the chair next to his. “You want to sit down?”

“Before I do…” I looked back toward the inside café. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“If you’re getting one for yourself…” He poked a hand into the pocket of his worn jeans, but I was way ahead of him.

“My treat,” I said, and I hurried inside. The last thing I needed was some uncomfortable
I’ll get it, no I will
scene when I was trying to break the ice.

I was back outside in a couple minutes and I set a cup of coffee down next to the newspaper he’d folded up. While I was inside and since I didn’t know how he took his coffee, I’d grabbed a bunch of little bags of sugar, a couple bags of sweetener for myself, and some of those tiny coffee creamers. I set those down, too, and when I did, the headline on the day’s paper caught my eye.

“Oh!” I set down my own coffee cup and the leather portfolio I’d brought along so that I’d look official, and dropped into the chair Will had invited me to use earlier. I slid the newspaper closer so that I could skim the article. “It’s about that serial killer who was captured a couple weeks ago,” I said, tapping the paper with one finger. “He escaped.”

“Read it.” He tore open four packs of sugar with his teeth and sprinkled the contents into his coffee, then added three of those little creamers and stirred like there was no tomorrow. “Got away when they were supposed to be taking him to court. Hurt a deputy, too. Pushed the guy down and broke his leg.” Will’s gaze was glued to the newspaper, but the look in his eyes was unfocused. “His name is Winston Churchill. Weird, huh?”

“I know the cop who arrested him.” I’m not sure why it seemed to matter that I mention this. Maybe it was part and parcel of that whole icebreaking thing. “I bet he’s not happy.”

Will’s chuckle sounded like sandpaper on stone. “Bet he’s plenty pissed.”

It was unfortunate that the deputy had been hurt, and scary as hell to think this sicko killer was back out on the street, but I knew Will was right. I chuckled, too.

He darted a look in my direction. “You don’t like him.”

I knew we weren’t talking about Winston Churchill. “I used to.”

“I get it.” He nodded, but luckily, Will didn’t have much of an attention span. He didn’t press me for details. “Who are you?” he asked.

I knew he wasn’t talking about my name. He’d already proved he remembered that so I just said, “I’m a friend of Ella’s.”

He pulled the newspaper closer. Fiddled with its pages. Pushed it away. By this time, his cigarette was nothing but a stub, and he slid another one from the pack on the table, lit it from the one still burning, and tugged in a stream of smoke.

“I don’t know anybody named Ella.”

“You used to.”

The way his lips twitched wasn’t exactly a smile. “I used to do and be a lot of things. I was an alcoholic. I was a drug addict. I’ve slept under bridges and in doorways and behind trash cans. Thanks to this place, I’m changing now. I’m cleaning up my act. I’ve been sober…” He glanced at his watch. Since it didn’t have one of those calendar features, I didn’t know why until he said, “I’ve been sober for forty-three days and six hours,” he said. “This time, my recovery’s for real.”

“I know you can do it.” Of course I didn’t, but hey, what’s a person supposed to say at a time like this? “I talked to your mother. She thinks you can do it, too. She’s the one who told me where to find you.”

“My mom’s a saint.” This time there was no mistaking the expression. That really was a smile that crossed Will’s face. It looked as if it hurt. “She’s put up with a lot from me over the years. But Mom’s always there for me.” He swigged down a sip of coffee, and when he was done, his left hand went back to tapping on the table. “How did you say you know my mom?”

“Well, I don’t. Not really. But I wanted to find you and I didn’t know how, and she’s the one who helped me. I’m a friend of Ella’s. Ella Bender.”

He stopped tapping long enough to drag his stocking cap off his head. His hair was thinning on top and long past needing a good cut and style. He scraped a hand through it. “Told you I don’t know anyone named Ella.”

“She remembers you.”

“Maybe. But that was a long time ago.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know her.”

The tapping stopped for real this time, and honestly, I thought he was either going to tell me to get lost or he was going to get up and walk away. I’m pretty sure he considered both options. That would explain why it took so long before he said, “You’re her daughter?”

“Ella’s?” I guess it wasn’t all that funny, but it was plenty strange, so I laughed. “I work with Ella at Garden View Cemetery.” I was going to leave it at that, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to try out a little experiment so I kept my eyes on Will when I added, “She does have three daughters, though.”

His reaction told me nothing. But then, that’s because there was no reaction. He took another drink of coffee. A long one. When he was done, he looked at me over the rim of the cup. “They look like her?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“She was cute.”

“She said the same thing about you.”

His laugh dissolved into a cough. “I don’t think anybody’s called me cute in a long time. I hope she’s happy with that guy who’s the father of her children.”

“He’s a loser.” I wasn’t exactly betraying a confidence. Anyone who’d ever met him knew Jeffrey Silverman was the world’s finest example of everything a man should not be. “They’ve been divorced for years. Ella, she’s raised those girls herself. She’s done a really great job, too.” This wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. Ella had done a great job. It wasn’t her fault Ariel was a troublemaker. Besides, the kid seemed to be turning herself around. When I’d seen her at the cemetery the day before, her nails were manicured and polished, and not with black lacquer, either, but with a peachy color that just so happened to match the one I was wearing. Maybe there was hope for the kid after all. If nothing else, something told me Will knew all about hope.

“Glad the girls are nice,” he said. “Sorry about the divorce. Ella deserves better than that.”

“Don’t we all.” It was one of those general statements, but I guess even though I hadn’t meant it, it was encouraging.

He flicked ashes into the aluminum ashtray on the table. “She’s got a family. Not me. I lived on the streets for a lot of years. I lost myself in a bottle.” He slid me a look. “Does that make me a loser, too?”

“It makes you a man with a problem and you realize it and you’re dealing with it. That makes you kind of a hero.”

Another laugh, and when it stuck in his throat, he pounded his chest. “Nobody’s ever called me that. So tell me, Pepper Martin, why did you go looking for my mother so you could find me? Meaning no disrespect, but a pretty young woman has better things to do on a spring afternoon than sit here with me. You’re not trying to save my soul, are you?” I would have thought he was teasing, but his expression was deadly serious. “If you are, you’re wasting your time. It’s too late for that.”