Authors: Aaron Stander
Mr. Charles came out with a client and entered her bill on the cash register. After he was paid and tipped, he walked her to her car. Before Lisa could be ushered in Marilyn offered, “It’s good to see you. I think I would like to know you as an adult. If you can stand two middle-school boys, I’d love to have you over for lunch. I’ll write our number on the back of a card.” She took one of the business cards—neon blue letters on a hot pink background— from the counter, wrote her number and gave it to Lisa.
“I would like to do that. I’ll call you early next week.”
“Good,” said Marilyn, “I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”
The sound of the car door brought Claire Lapointe out onto the back porch, a slender, sinewywoman in her late seventies, with grayblack hair pulled back into a bun, and thin, wire-rimmed glasses perched below the bridge of a delicate nose. Ray remembered when he was a boy, how his mother used to bring him along when she would visit Claire. He remembered how strikingly beautiful she used to be. She was still a beautiful woman.
“Thanks for coming, Ray,” she said as she came down the porch steps. “Dad’s in the barn working on something. He just won’t let go of this. He’s convinced that someone moved that old truck, and he keeps going on and on about it.”
“And you don’t think it was moved?” asked Ray. “Look, Ray, he doesn’t seem to remember hardly anything from one day to the next. The boys just don’t appreciate what I have to put up with. They just think I’m going on about how forgetful Dad is. He hadn’t used the truck since last fall. I’m surprised it even starts. How would he remember where he left it? Half the time he can’t remember where to get a clean pair of shorts. I’ve been putting them in the same drawer for over fifty years. But humor him, Ray. Humor him.”
Ray walked to the barn. It was empty. He followed the sound of a motor to the next building, a small garage. John stood in front of an electric grinder. A shower of sparks came from the piece of steel he was holding against the grinding wheel. Ray walked to one side and grabbed his elbow. John jumped. He switched off the grinder. “You scared the hell out of me, Ray.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you.”
“Thanks for coming, Ray. Someone’s been messing with my truck, and that old woman,” John, with irritation in his voice, pointing toward the house, “just don’t believe me.”
“Show me the truck,” said Ray.
John led him behind the garage. “Last fall I mounted the snow plow and left it sit right here. Look where the grass grew long. That’s where it sat. I come back here yesterday and the truck is over here. Just ten feet over, but over here. And there is one more thing, Ray, I topped off the tank last fall so it would be ready to go. Now more than a quarter of a tank is gone. Now tell me that someone didn’t take the truck.”
“And you never used the truck to plow snow?”
“No, I wanted to, but the old woman,” he motioned toward the house again, “she won’t let me. She hired young Bob Johnson down the road. She said she didn’t want me dying of a heart attack just to save a few dollars on snow plowing. She don’t let me do anything anymore.”
“Could one of the boys have borrowed the truck?”
“No, I checked. I called Junior just to see if he took it. I sometimes forget things, you know what I mean? He said he hadn’t used it for several years. And Bobby is working down state. He hasn’t been up here for several months.”
“I didn’t know Bobby had moved,” said Ray.
“He got transferred down state sometime in early spring. He didn’t want to move, but the manager of the Detroit branch had a heart attack, and they needed him. He’s hoping the guy will get better so he can move back.”
“When did you notice the truck had been moved?” Ray asked.
“Yesterday morning, I came back here looking for something, and I knew something was wrong. You know how that is. At first I thought I must be confused, but as soon as I walked over here and saw this pattern in the grass, I knew that it had been moved.”
“Other than the missing gas, the truck hasn’t been damaged or vandalized in any way.”
“Not that I can tell. I took it for a little drive and everything seems to work all right.”
Ray walked around the truck looking for new damage. The sheet metal on the old truck was covered with dings and rust holes. Last, Ray inspected the snow blade, held by a hydraulic piston about a foot off the ground. Ray noted that in two places the coating of rust, that uniformly covered the surface of the blade, had been scratched away. The surface of the blade had several deep gashes where the rust had been scraped away, exposing bare metal.
“John, when you took your test drive, you didn’t push anything with the blade, did you?”
John came to his side; Ray pointed to the gashes on the blade.
“To be truthful, Ray, I didn’t notice those. See what I tell you, someone did use this truck. When you go back, stop at the house and tell the old lady about this. Every time I tell her something, she says I’m just getting old and funny. Tell her, will you?”
“I’ll stop and have a word. And I’m going to send my evidence technician to check the truck for prints. She’s a pretty young woman, John. You’ll like talking to her. She’ll have to take your prints, too.”
“Mine?”
“She has to be able to tell the difference between your prints and any others that might be in your truck. Don’t touch the truck again until she is finished, understand?”
“I hear you. I won’t go near the damn thing till you’re done with it.”
“When I get back in the car, I’ll call in. She’ll probably be here tomorrow morning. I’ve got to run.”
“You will stop at the house and tell her, Ray?”
“Yes, I’ll stop and have a word with your wife. I promise,” said Ray.
Dell was standing outside the garage having a cigarette as Ray approached.
“Cigarette, Sheriff?”
“I quit.”
“Another one, hardly any of us left anymore.”
“Time to give it up, Dell. Those things can kill you.”
“Look Sheriff, a whole lot of things have been trying to kill me. Nothing’s done it yet. At this point I’ve outlived most of my friends. A few cigarettes won’t make a hell of a lot of difference.”
“I want to look at that Triumph again.”
Dell walked with him to the fenced storage area.
“What are you looking for?”
“I want to see if there is any sign that the car was hit by something, something like the blade of a snowplow.”
Dell walked around the car with Ray.
“I can tell you one thing, Sheriff. It wasn’t a head-on. The front bumper and grill are the only things that aren’t busted up.”
Ray walked around to the rear of the car. “What happened to the back bumper?”
“It wasn’t there when the car was brought in. When the rear slammed into that tree, it probably got torn off.” Dell looked from one side to the other. “You can see how the damn thing was attached. Fucking limey engineering. Bumpers on their cars were too damn flimsy to do any good. This one probably caught on the tree. You can see where the bolt pulled through the sheet metal. You got two broken studs back here, and the sheet metal is torn on the other side. Those bumpers were never anything more than trim, anyway. They didn’t have any strength. I’m glad these damn cars aren’t around anymore; they were a royal pain in the ass to work on. Five pounds of shit in a three-pound bag, you know what I mean, five pounds of shit in a three- pound bag. You could never get the damn things to run right.”
“Dell, where is the rear bumper?”
“It still may be in the woods somewhere. If Jeff threw it on the truck, it would’ve been stacked with the scrap over there.” He motioned with his hand. “Company from Grand Rapids has a truck come through once a month and pick it up. He was here yesterday. If your bumper was in that pile, it’s gone now.”
“Dell, I told you to hold onto the car until we were through with the investigation.”
“Car’s there, Sheriff. But we can’t be responsible for all the bits and pieces.”
Ray drove back to Ely road. He parked on the shoulder near where Grimstock’s car left the road and carefully climbed down the steep embankment. The car’s path was still clearly marked by the bent and broken underbrush and grass.
As he descended the hill, he carefully checked for the missing bumper. Part of the way down the hill, he stopped at a large maple. The base of the tree was badly gashed, bark peeled away, its white interior cut and torn.
Ray circled the tree in widening circles, going beyond where the bumper might have been thrown. Then he went to the base of the hill and carefully worked his way to the area of the car’s final resting-place. He then followed the path used to remove the car. He followed the tracks of the dozer back to the highway.
He was disappointed in not having the bumper, not that it necessarily would have proven anything, but it might have been one more piece of the puzzle.
Ray was parked in an “Authorized Vehicles Only” space in front of the restaurant near the harbor. He was leaning against the car— back arched, arms folded, mirrored sunglasses hiding his eyes— talking to one of the charter boat captains as Marc drove past looking for a parking place. Ray was still leaning on the car when Marc and Lisa arrived. As they approached, Ray began to playfully berate Marc for inviting him to dinner and then showing up long after the appointed time.
Once inside, the hostess, a pretty young woman with a gluedon smile, told them in a scolding tone that since they were more than half an hour late for their reservation, their table had been given to another party. She added that if they would be willing to wait, she would have another table in about thirty minutes. She directed them toward the bar and said she would find them when their table was ready.
They walked through the bar out onto a deck that was cantilevered over the river and found a table on the outside perimeter. Once seated, Lisa glued the same smile and in a mocking tone, started delivering the hostess’s speech again, word for word.
“Please,” protested Marc cutting her off, “it was bad enough the first time.”
Ray, teasing, remarked, “If the woman knew why you guys were late, she’d really have a reason to lecture you.”
“You better have your woman friend get back here soon. Your fantasy life is getting out of hand,” Marc kidded back.
“That would be good. I talked to her last night; looks like it will be at least a week or two. What are we celebrating tonight? Dinner on the town and all. When I told you I wanted to talk this whole thing through, I just meant coffee on the deck as usual.”
“I got my last pay check today, and I thought while I was flush I’d take my close friends to dinner. Tonight we will live like summer people. Tomorrow I will start adjusting my living standards to my income level,” Marc proclaimed. “And we’re late because Lisa was feeling guilty about not being serious when you tried to talk through your…”
“I just made a chart with as much of the information as I could remember.” Lisa opened a folder and laid out several sheets of paper. They were interrupted briefly by a waiter taking a drink order—two white wines and a black coffee.
Ray looked at the sheets; Lisa guided his eyes with her hand.
“I’ve put the victims in columns and the variables in rows,” she explained. “In the first column we have Randy Holden.”
“Okay,” said Ray reading aloud. “Cause of death—bullet wound. I don’t know if you want to add anything here. I can give you much more information.”
“Why don’t we just go through the chart and verbally add the details so we get the full picture? Then we can decide later what should be added,” said Lisa.
“So this is what we know. We have a murder. It was carefully planned and executed—the manner in which it was carried out suggests that itwas the work of a professional. The murder weapon was a rifle, we have one 30.06 slug. We have no shell casing, no prints, no suspects, no nothing. No one saw or heard anything that might lead us to a suspect. We learned Holden has had several civil suits brought against him by dissatisfied clients, and he is under investigation by the SEC for violations of security laws, but no formal charges have been filed. From what Marc remembers, Holden was involved in questionable dealings for years.”
“That’s exactly what his sister said,” volunteered Lisa.
“His sister?” Ray’s voice showed surprise. “When did you talk to his sister?”
“This afternoon. She and her husband have a condo on the peninsula. I ran into her at The Third Wave. It turns out she was a sorority sister. I didn’t really know her; she was a senior when I was a freshman. She had just come back from her brother’s funeral. When I figured out who her brother was, it didn’t take much prompting on my part to get her to talk about him. She had no fondness for him.”
“Do you think she might be able to add anything that would help solve her brother’s murder?” Ray asked.
“I think she could confirm what you have heard about Holden, but I don’t think she knows anything about his recent activities. She said she hadn’t talked with him since their father died, and that seemed to be a number of years ago.
“Let me skip to the next person without going through the categories you have entered,” said Ray. “I’m trying to get the big picture.”
“Whatever is helpful,” offered Lisa.
“Next we have Arthur Bussey, clearly his death is an act of God. Although he matches with the other three in just about every category you have here. He went to Northwestern, which you have. And he went to law school—Chicago. You need to add that. While I was checking on Holden, I checked to see if Arthur Bussey had ever had any difficulty with the law…”
“Did he?” interrupted Marc.
“None until recently. Apparently he was involved with the failures of several savings and loans. But he has yet to be charged with anything. Other than that his record is clean. Quite different from Holden, who had been involved in various kinds of criminal investigations over the years.”
“Any convictions for Holden?” asked Lisa.
“None. He seems to have always been able to duck the bullet.”