The Unbidden Truth (15 page)

“Drink, play cards, look at dirty movies. Have girls on call. Depends on who they are. Maybe they beat drums in the forest and chant. Or have prayer meetings.”

“Larry goes to the Rogue every year for steelhead right after the rains start. I want pictures of him during the first three days, several for each day. Sylvia probably knows where the camp is, or she'll find out for you.”

He made a note, then regarded her with a brooding expression. He held up his glass and she nodded. After ambling to the bar and replenishing his drink, he said, “I guess we've come to a hit-man theory. The Wenzels have good alibis. You're keeping that in mind?”

“You bet.”

“And still trying to pin it on their tails,” he said morosely.

“You're damn right I am.”

T
hat weekend the first real rain of the season moved in with blustery winds that stripped the trees of leaves and flattened flower gardens. Barbara stood at the back sliding door at Frank's house on Sunday watching asters sway and bend, then spring upright over and over. End of summer, end of daylight saving time, she was thinking without regret. She loved the rain and the misty days that would come.

“I should have pulled out the petunias before now,” Frank said. “They're done for.”

“You say that every year, and every year you can't bear to do it until they turn into black slimy mush.” She looked at her watch. Frank had invited Darren and Carrie for dinner, and they would arrive any minute. It had been her idea this time. No one wanted Carrie to be at home on Halloween when masked people would likely be coming around, and Morgan
would have to be restrained or else bark and growl at little kids and parents. Todd was at a party with school friends that evening, not due home until ten. And Herbert would be in the dark house on guard.

The doorbell chimed and she went to open the door. Before Carrie and Darren got inside a second car pulled into the driveway. Alan MacCagno had arrived, the other invited guest, and Bailey's most reliable operative. Everyone hung coats and jackets on an old-fashioned coatrack in the foyer with a drip pan under it. Barbara introduced Alan to Carrie, and they started to go into the living room when the bell chimed again. Alan opened the door. There was a man with a large black umbrella and three small children on the stoop.

“Trick or treat!” they yelled.

Barbara ushered Carrie ahead of her into the living room as Alan began to hand out candy. He would be the only one to open that door again until the dinner party was over and they all headed home, Darren's truck in the lead and Alan close behind all the way. As Bailey had said, it was adding up to big bucks.

It was a good dinner party. Alan and Darren compared tricks they had done as kids, and Frank began to talk about case law. “It's been on my mind a long time,” he said, carving a leg of lamb. “I always said I had two books in me, and that's the second one, good old case law.”

“Is that what we call common law?” Darren asked.

“Yep. The best known one is the oldie, that if a man finds his wife in another man's arms, and he shoots one or both of them, he's justified. Case closed. Same if a guy finds a rustler after his cattle. Hang the guy, be done with it. Case closed. It's law set by community standards, not legislated, but accepted by everyone in the area.”

He mentioned another one or two, and was telling about one that involved sitting on the porch on a Sunday drinking lemonade. “Got you a fine every time,” he said. “Case closed. But down the road in the next town they sat out all day Sunday and drank whatever they wanted to. Different standards.”

As he talked, Barbara realized how strained Carrie was, how she reacted every time the doorbell rang. She smiled and laughed at the appropriate times, but she started as if in alarm when the bell rang.

It chimed again, Alan excused himself and went to the door, and Carrie said, “Is he an old friend?”

“We've known him a long time,” Frank said. “I think he just wants to be helpful.”

“He's a philosophy major looking for a job,” Barbara added. Alan certainly looked more like an unemployed recent graduate than a private detective. “Not many calls for philosophy around here.”

“Or anywhere else, I imagine,” Carrie said.

When Alan sat down again he said, “The little ones are done for the night. Now the bigger kids are out getting soaked.”

He looked at Carrie. “You ever go trick-or-treating?”

Barbara could have kicked herself. No one had thought to mention to him that they were not asking Carrie any questions about her childhood.

Carrie nodded. “A couple of times. In Indiana. I didn't like it. I thought it was scary, all those masks, kids jumping out at you and scaring you.”

She picked up her wine and took a sip, remembering. Boys had jumped out from behind bushes, shooting cap guns and yelling, and she had started to scream and had run down the
street screaming, and then she had tripped and fallen and had become hysterical. The mothers chaperoning the girls had taken her to a hospital. And afterward she had thought: screaming, running, falling meant crazy and hospital. She had refused to go out trick-or-treating again. Adrienne had been furious, she remembered.

She looked at Alan and asked, “What does a philosophy major do for a living?”

He grinned. “Not much. I might end up flipping hamburgers and talking about Spinoza to the customers.”

She laughed. “The great watchmaker in the sky.”

“You studied philosophy?” Alan asked a bit cautiously. He looked relieved when she said no.

“I just read Will Durant's
Story of Philosophy.
I skimmed the surface. I found a lot of it tough going. Kant, for example.”

“Most people find him tough,” Alan said.

Before she could say anything else or ask a question, Frank said, “Nine o'clock. Time to turn off the lights and let the little beggars get their candy from their moms.”

“And I get the leftover candy,” Barbara said. “I'll divvy it with you guys.” To her relief they didn't return to the subject of philosophy again.

Frank said no when Darren offered to help with dishes. “You have to get home before ten, and Barbara will help me later. Now, warm gingerbread with applesauce and coffee.”

Barbara smiled. That was one of her favorite desserts, and had always been made on Halloween, just as pumpkin pie came with Thanksgiving, and sinfully rich Sachertorte with Christmas. He never forgot a thing.

When Darren said it was time to leave, Alan jumped up. “Me too,” he said. “In fact, I think I've got you blocked. I'll
go move my car out of the way.” He thanked Frank, waved to Barbara and left before Darren and Carrie had retrieved their coats. Barbara suspected that he had left so hurriedly to check Darren's truck, to make certain no one had tampered with it.

After they were all gone, she helped Frank clear the table. As she was rinsing dishes to load the dishwasher, he said, “Carrie's remembering things. Did you see?”

She nodded.

“God,” he said, “I'll be glad when this trial is over.”

She looked at him then. “No more than I will be.” He was so troubled, she thought, so worried, and there wasn't a thing she could do about it.

“Bobby, stay the night,” he said. “No reason, just uneasy, I guess, with spooks and haunts on the prowl.”

“Sure, Dad. In fact, it's too nasty out there to go anywhere.”

 

In her apartment, Carrie locked the door, remembering when Herbert had looked at the previous lock in disgust. “That piece of crap ain't worth shit,” he had said, and he had installed a dead bolt.

“That will keep out the pack of wild four-year-olds,” she had said gravely.

“You bet your sweet patootie it will.” He had nodded approval at his handiwork. “That'll do the trick.”

She was not laughing as she sat on her sofa and recalled her own private fright show of long ago. Why had she reacted like that? She had known the boys were there teasing the girls. They all had known that, and although Becky and Ruth, her two companions, had shrieked and screamed, it had been mock fright. Girls that age liked to shriek and scream. But she had been terrified, panicked, and she could not think why. Un
less she had been crazy. It was the fire, she thought then. She had been so afraid of the fire. She shook her head. They had been shooting cap guns. There had been no fire, just cap guns.

She was freezing, chilled by the rain, she told herself. Then she said under her breath, “Do you really outgrow childhood insanity? Once crazy, always crazy?”

I
t always happened like this, Barbara thought, eyeing a new folder of material from Bailey. First you got all the material the district attorney's office released, and the preliminary statements you collected personally or through your investigator, and then everything stalled. And it stayed static for what seemed like forever while you searched for a direction. She knew the destination, and had known for weeks now, but too many tangled paths kept showing up in the wilderness of data. Which one to follow became the question. Then a trickle of new information, a stream, and with luck an avalanche. The avalanche had yet to happen. But the trickle was wider and deeper than it had been and might even be called a stream.

She opened a folder and started to read and was still at it when Maria tapped on her door and entered, closing it behind her.

“Mr. and Mrs. Wenzel are here to see you,” she said in a hushed voice.

“Larry and Nora Wenzel? Isn't that interesting? Show them in, by all means.” She glanced around the office, at stacks of papers on the round table, more on her desk, the poppy on the easel, then said, “Hold it. Let's move that easel over here.”

After they moved it behind her desk, she waved Maria out and waited to greet her visitors. They were both impeccably dressed, he in a charcoal-gray fine wool suit and a discreet pale-blue necktie, and she in a powder-blue cashmere suit with a dark-red blouse. His hair was uniformly gray and well trimmed. He looked freshly shaved, and he appeared to be powerful, with big hands and thick wrists, a thick neck, and a bit jowly. And she had on too much makeup. To Barbara's eye any noticeable makeup was too much for day hours, and hers was very noticeable. Eyeliner, eye shadow the color of her suit, blush. Every blemish, if her face had any, was well hidden. No doubt it was very good makeup, expensive and expertly applied, but still it was a Wednesday afternoon, and she looked ready for the opera. Her hair was as blond as it ever had been, although the color now came from the outside.

Barbara motioned toward the two clients' chairs and took her own chair behind her desk. “What can I do for you?” she asked when they were all seated.

“Please excuse this intrusion,” Larry said. “We should have called for an appointment, but our decision to come here arose quite spontaneously at lunch and we said let's do it.” He smiled. It was a very good smile, warm and sincere looking.

Barbara closed the folder before her and said, “Well, as you can see I am quite busy.”

“Of course. I'll be brief. I happened to meet Alexis O' Reilly in Portland a day or two ago, and she mentioned that you had sent your colleague to talk with her. I always cared
for Alexis and never felt she was in any way to blame for the unfortunate marriage she and my brother had. During our chat she mentioned that she had taken some of his possessions when she left him and, further, that she had given them to your colleague. Ms. Holloway, this is an awkward and even delicate situation, but I don't feel that we are necessarily adversaries. I have no doubt that your client did what she had to do. I have no illusions about my brother. However, he was my brother, and we shared many, many happy years. When his house burned to the ground, everything he owned burned with it, and at his death I realized how little I had of his as keepsakes, mementos. My wife and I have come today to ask you humbly for his possessions. Something for me to keep and cherish, for our children to keep to honor his memory. They were both very fond of him. I understand that Alexis took racing forms with his notes and, tawdry as it might appear, I would cherish them, as well as his favorite music. We shared so many evenings listening to music with him, all of us singing along, and those are the memories that I want to hold on to. The good times we had together.”

“I see,” Barbara said, and glanced at the folders on her desk. “As soon as this trial is over and I'm no longer so rushed for time, I'll see what I can do for you.”

“Ms. Holloway,” Nora said then, “those things have no monetary value, of course, but we are prepared to pay for your time. I've found so often that in the crush of work things get misplaced, lost, and it would be a shame to let that happen. Would ten thousand dollars be a just compensation for a few minutes of your time?”

Larry's voice was good, he had come a long way from being a carpenter's helper working minimum, but her voice
was astonishing. She was downright sultry. Barbara shook her head impatiently and stood up.

“Mr. Wenzel, Mrs. Wenzel, I really can't be distracted by matters that are extraneous to my case at the present. I'll be in touch after the trial. I'm sorry, but that's all I can offer now.”

They both stood up, and there was steel in Larry's voice when he spoke. “Ms. Holloway, Alexis stole that material. I am my brother's legal heir, and that material belongs to me. I believe it's a felony to be knowingly in possession of stolen goods. I wanted to handle this in a civilized, amicable manner. It doesn't end here.”

He took Nora's arm, in what Barbara suspected, from the look on Nora's face, was not a tender grip, and they walked out.

She sat down hard as soon as her door closed. “Idiot!” she muttered. “It's the tapes!” She waited for Maria to ring and tell her they were gone. It didn't take long. She hurried from her office, and said in passing Maria, “Get Bailey on the phone. Keep at it until you reach him.” She went to the outside door and locked it, then to Shelley's door, knocked and entered.

“Where's the box Alexis O' Reilly gave you?”

Startled, Shelley stood up and started to move toward her closet.

“Don't touch it,” Barbara said, opening the closet door. “Is that it?” She pointed to a cardboard box closed with tape. Shelley nodded. “Exactly what did you do with it after she gave it to you?”

“I brought it up here and put it in the closet.”

“Did you open it?”

Shelley shook her head. “I haven't touched it since then.”

“Remember that,” Barbara said, picking up the box. “You
brought it up and put it away and haven't touched it since. That's all you have to say about it. Come on.”

In her own office, she set the box on a chair, swept up the papers on the table and dumped them on her desk. So much for all the sorting she had done earlier, she thought angrily, getting out her letter opener. She returned to the box, cut the tape and dumped the contents onto the table. Racing forms, racing newspapers, notebooks and music tapes, forty or fifty cassettes. The phone rang. Maria had tracked down Bailey.

“Don't touch them yet,” she said to Shelley as she picked up the phone. “We have a situation,” she said to Bailey. “I need as many old music tapes as you can round up in the next hour. Old, before 1980. I don't care what music, but rock if you can find it.”

“I have a few at home,” Shelley said. “From my school days.”

Barbara repeated that to Bailey. “Shelley will call Alex and have them waiting, but I need more than that. At least twenty, more would be better. Put them in your duffel bag, no boxes or shopping bags. And pronto.”

Shelley hurried out to call Alex, and Barbara eyed the tapes, went to the washroom and dumped crumpled and crushed paper towels out of a small wastebasket, took the basket back to her office and swept all the tapes into it. She replaced it in the washroom, added the used towels, crumpled up a few more and tossed them in.

She was scanning one of the racing forms when Shelley returned.

“Are we in trouble?” Shelley asked.

“Depends,” Barbara said. “Considering that we've probably been sitting on a powder keg for the past few weeks, and so far no explosion, not too bad. Now it hangs on who gets
here first, Bailey, or the sheriff of Nottingham with his henchmen and a search warrant.” She told Shelley about the Wenzels. “What I want to do is check out all this racing junk, just to make sure there's nothing here, but it's the tapes. It's been staring me in the face from the start, and I kept looking somewhere else.” She glanced at her watch; twenty-five minutes before three. It would take time to get the warrant, get a judge to sign off on it, get back here, she told herself, but not a lot of time.

The racing forms had margin notations, but they were all about horses. The notebooks had the same kind of notes, and one of them seemed to have several methods for beating the roulette wheel. Each one had a black cross through it.

They were both looking at their watches more and more often as the minutes dragged by until at ten minutes before four, Bailey arrived. His apparent amble was as deceptive as everything else about him, Barbara had learned long ago. He could cover the ground faster than most people, and never seemed to hurry. Now he seemed to move almost in slow motion as he opened his duffel and pointed.

“Twenty-six tapes. Now what?”

“In the box,” she said, motioning toward it on the chair. He began emptying the duffel, and she went to the washroom to collect the wastebasket. She didn't bother taking out the paper towels, but simply dumped everything into his bag after he had removed the tapes he had collected. “Okay. Guard them, and I'll want a couple of tape players with headsets.”

“Three,” Shelley said.

Barbara nodded. “Three. I'll leave here around five and head for Dad's house. Meet me there.”

After putting his own gear back in the bag, he said, “You
think your old man's going to sit around watching us listen to music?”

“Make it four,” Barbara said. “Now, git!” He had not reached the door by the time she had tossed all the racing forms, newspapers and notebooks on top of the music tapes. She taped the box the way it had been before and carried it back to Shelley's closet. “Done,” she said with relief. “Take off as usual at five, and if no one shows up by five-thirty, I'll leave. See you later.”

Back in her own office she spread papers on the round table again, then sat at her desk with an open folder, not seeing a word in it. At ten minutes after four Maria buzzed her to say that a Mr. Kenmore and a detective wanted to see her.

“Bring them back,” Barbara said. Kenmore himself, she thought in surprise. He headed the law firm that represented the Wenzel Corporation. He entered with the detective a moment later.

“Ms. Holloway,” Kenmore said. “I regret this intrusion, however my client found it expedient to recover his possessions now rather than wait until later. This is Detective MacClure. He has a search warrant, I'm afraid.”

She held out her hand and the detective handed her the warrant. “A box of tapes and papers,” she muttered. “I told Mr. Wenzel I'd get to it when I had time. Come with me.” She walked past them, down the hallway to Shelley's office. She knocked, opened the door and entered, with the attorney and the detective pressing in behind her. Shelley looked up from her computer, put a notebook down and hit her screen saver key.

“Did Alexis O' Reilly give you a box of stuff a few weeks ago?” Barbara asked.

Shelley nodded. “Yes. I brought it back with me.”

“Where is it now?”

Shelley stood up and went to her closet, opened the door and pointed to the box.

“Did you open it?” Barbara asked.

“No. I haven't touched it since I brought it up here. What's wrong?”

“Not a thing,” Barbara said. She picked up the box and led the way out of Shelley's office. In the reception room when the detective reached for it, she said, “Hold it. Let's make sure it's what you're looking for. Tapes and papers.” She didn't bother cutting the tape this time, but yanked the box open, ripping tape and box alike. She shook things around in it, reached in and stirred the tapes, lifted one to read the label and tossed it back. “Tapes and papers,” she said, shoving the box toward the detective. She turned to Maria. “When these gentlemen leave, lock the door and don't let anyone else in here today. No more interruptions.” She looked at Kenmore. “Is there anything else?”

“I'm sure there isn't,” he said. “Thank you, Ms. Holloway.” He bowed his head slightly and walked out with the detective.

 

“And that's where we stand,” Barbara said in Frank's kitchen later. “We have to listen to those tapes tonight. The Wenzels might know exactly what tape they're looking for and if they don't find it, they might send someone else to find it. If there is such a tape in that pile, I want it put in a safe-deposit box first thing in the morning. Inez told me Joe was always taping everything. Alexis told Shelley the same thing. And there was a tape recorder and player with a headset in his motel room, but no tapes. They're looking for something and haven't found it yet.”

“It could have burned up in the house fire,” Frank said. “But you're right. We have to find out. I suggest the living room. At least we can be comfortable.”

Bailey showed them how to work the tape players. They had variable speed, he said, real time, then faster and faster forward. “You'll find the speed that lets you know if it's just music or something else,” he said gloomily.

Frank put the paper towels on the fire in the fireplace, brought in coffee and cups, and they started. It was an eerie party, Barbara thought, listening to The Doors scream about their mother, adjusting the speed faster until the words were lost and there was only noise. The others were doing the same thing, adjusting the tape players, sitting without a sound, sipping coffee.