Trophy Widow (28 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

The sun was setting the following evening as I pulled into my garage after the drive back from the Crawford County courthouse, where the Bensinger family had fought Round 8 of their version of Dysfunctional Family Feud. We'd spent several hours proving beyond a reasonable doubt that a courtroom is no place to look for moral closure, especially in a trust-and-estate battle among adult siblings who hated one another. On the upside, my client and her husband walked out of the courthouse with $175,000 more than they had when she walked in—and $100,000 more than the other side's final settlement offer. On the downside, she walked out of the courthouse with just half of what she'd sought in the case. Even more galling for her was that the court had awarded her detested older brother the same amount it awarded her. All of which meant that we were headed for Round 9 in the Missouri Court of Appeals.

But that was behind me, at least for now. I'd driven back with the top down and my Rolling Stones greatest hits tape on full blast—a good combo to get the ya-yas out. Though I don't normally turn to Mick Jagger for spiritual guidance, he could have reminded my Crawford County client that you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.

It was a beautiful late summer evening—warm breeze, the scent of honeysuckle in the air, a clear sky, a quarter moon already visible low on the horizon. I got out of my car and stretched. I was feeling antsy after the drive.

Ozzie was waiting at the door inside, his tail wagging.

“How 'bout some exercise, Oz?” I patted him on the head. “We can eat afterward.”

He barked twice. I took that as a yes.

He followed me upstairs to my bedroom and sat at attention on the rug as I changed into my jogging outfit: a red Cardinals T-shirt, gray running shorts, white socks, and my Nike running shoes. I checked myself in the bathroom mirror. My hair was on the verge of unruly—way overdue for a cut. I shook my head side to side and the curls brushed against my eyes. Forty minutes of that would drive me crazy. I found my St. Louis Browns baseball cap in the closet downstairs and put it on to help control my hair. I opened the door and looked back at Ozzie, who had the leash in his mouth.

“Ready?”

He dashed through the door and turned at the edge of the porch to wait. I locked the front door, put the key in my pocket, and bent down to fasten the leash to his collar. “Let's go.”

We took the long route, which included the pathway through the Ruth Park golf course. The fairways were empty as dusk edged into darkness. During the early part of the run, I replayed my conversation with Percy Trotter from the night before, but gradually my thoughts turned to tomorrow. After morning services at my synagogue, I had an early afternoon meeting with Sebastian Curry's minister followed by a late afternoon meeting with Ron Blitz. I'd called him from the courthouse today during a break, hoping that he'd turn out to be one of those gallant knights errant from one of my favorite mystery novels—a Spenser or a Lew Harper. Our five-minute phone conversation was sufficient to remind me that this was no mystery novel. Blitz grudgingly relented only after I agreed to pay him for his time.

“Seventy-five bucks an hour, lady. We're talking cash, and we're talking cash in advance.”

Oh, Travis McGee, we hardly knew ye.

I finished the jog with a sprint down my street, arms pumping, as Ozzie scampered alongside. Both of us were panting as we came into the kitchen. I filled his water bowl with fresh water and filled his dinner bowl with dry dog food. I poured myself a tall glass of water and drank it leaning back against the counter as I watched Ozzie lap up his water.

“I'm going to shower,” I said, placing my empty glass in the sink.

Ozzie turned to follow me up the stairs. “That's okay,” I said, kneeling beside him and scratching behind his ear. “Stay here and eat. I'll be back in a few minutes.”

I stripped down to my bra and undies and had just turned on the shower when the phone rang. I briefly debated letting the answering machine pick up, but I turned off the shower and dashed back into the bedroom to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?”

There was static on the other end.

“Hello?” I repeated.

“Did you have a good run?” The voice was scratchy and hollow, as if it were being electronically scrambled and reassembled.

“Who is this?”

“You are prying into matters that don't concern you.”

“What are you talking about?” I was gripping the phone. “Who is this?”

“Your meddling has already caused one man to die.”

“What?”

“Now you've endangered your loved ones.”

“Who are you?”

“When this calls ends, go to your dresser and open the top drawer. Under your white panties, you'll find your black satin ones. Take a peek inside them, Miss Gold. And when you do, remember that this is your final warning.”

Click
.

I was seated on the edge of my bed. I stared at the receiver in my hand and slowly replaced it.

I turned toward my dresser.

Catching my breath, I spun around and scanned the room, looking for signs of an intruder.

Nothing.

I stared at the dresser. At the top drawer—at the drawer where I kept my bras and my underwear.

“Ozzie,” I called in a hoarse voice. “Ozzie, come.”

I waited, my eyes fixed on that top drawer.

Ozzie came padding into the bedroom, his tail wagging. He stopped when he saw me seated on the edge of the bed. He gave me a quizzical look, head tilted.

I stood, my legs wobbly.

I forced myself to step toward the dresser.

I stared down at the top drawer, at the brass handle. The handle was shiny. I leaned closer, looking for fingerprints, for smudges.

There was a folded bandanna on top of the dresser. I lifted it and used it to cover my hand. As I reached for the handle, my hand was trembling.

I took a deep breath and pulled the drawer open. The bras were on the left, the underwear on the right—just the way they always were. I stared at the pair of white undies on the far right. I tried to remember whether they were on top of the others this morning. I couldn't remember. I couldn't focus.

I reached out my hand. Wincing, I lifted up the underwear.

Beneath it were my black satin bikinis. I could tell from the ridges in the fabric that there was a thin rectangular object inside.

I touched the fabric with the tips of my fingers, feeling the outlines of what was beneath. Playing cards? Cardboard?

I reached inside and removed them.

Photographs.

Three Polaroid photographs.

I stared at the first one as I stepped backward toward the bed. My calves bumped into the edge of the mattress and I sat down on the bed.

I was looking at a picture of my sister Ann. She was in the driver's seat of her Lincoln Navigator, gazing out her side window, waiting in what appeared to be a carpool line. Stamped in red in the center of the photo was a round crosshair pattern that resembled the view through a rifle scope. Ann's face was in the center of the crosshairs.

The second photo was of my mother pushing a shopping cart down the cereal aisle at the supermarket. Her cart was half-f. She had paused to stare at the cereal boxes on the shelf. Her face was in profile, right in the center of the red crosshairs.

The third photo was of Ozzie. He was staring up at the camera, wearing a leather muzzle over his jaws and some sort of leather harness contraption around his neck. Like the others, his face was in the center of the crosshairs. Visible behind him was the edge of a piece of furniture. I held the photo closer. The furniture looked familiar. I glanced up at my dresser and back down at the photograph and back at the dresser.

“No,” I gasped.

I sat there for I don't know how long—shuffling through the photos and staring at the open dresser drawer and looking around the room. I glanced over at the phone and then down at the photos again, trying to grasp what had happened. An intruder had been in my bedroom today. A stranger had handled my underwear. A stranger had broken into my house, forced poor Ozzie into that muzzle contraption, taken his picture, snooped around my bedroom, and shoved those awful photos inside my underwear.

I looked at Ozzie, who was watching me with concern.

“What happened today, you poor thing?”

I studied his eyes, trying to find a trace of what must have been a frightening few hours for him. I leaned over and kissed his forehead.

“What are we going do, Oz?” I whispered.

I rested my forehead on his and scratched him behind his ears, my eyes closed. “What are we going to do?”

I slid off the edge of the bed and sat on the floor next to him. I hugged him against me and thought of my mother and my sister.

“I won't let anyone hurt you,” I said, rocking him gently. “Any of you.”

Chapter Thirty-two

I had trouble keeping my eyes open during Shabbat services Saturday morning. Afterward, I stopped at a coffeehouse in the Central West End for a latte with three shots of espresso, hoping that a jolt of caffeine would rev my engine. I was functioning on less than two hours of sleep.

My first thought last night had been to call Jonathan. He'd been a prosecutor for years and would know what to do and who to contact. He'd know what to make of that creepy call and those photos. Even more important, he could talk to me. I'd needed that badly. He'd know what to say.

Then I'd realized it was Friday night, which meant that I'd have no way to reach him. He'd be at his parents' home in New York with his daughters. His family was Orthodox. Not only wouldn't they answer the phone on a Friday night, they wouldn't even hear it, since they turned it off from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. And he was on the East Coast anyway. What could he possibly do from there other than get distracted in the middle of his trial and worry himself sick?

I'd thought of calling Benny, but remembered his big plans for the night. Despite my fear, I'd almost smiled at the thought of Mister Built-for-Comfort-Not-for-Speed getting lucky.

Although I knew he'd be at my house in a flash, how could I do that to him on that night of all nights? Moreover, what could he do besides storm around the house and threaten to go postal on whoever was behind the break-in?

Seated on my bedroom floor and hugging Ozzie and rocking slowly, I'd gone through other possibilities, and as I did I gradually realized that the danger was not immediate—at least not immediate as in something bad happening that night. Not to my mother, not to my sister, and not to Ozzie. I'd been threatened. Placed on notice. What had the caller labeled it?
A final warning
. An attempt to scare me off. At the very least, the caller would wait to see how I responded. That meant that the next move was mine, not his.

I'd thought of calling the police but that presented other problems. First was the unknown risk of a squad car response. Whoever had made the threatening call had known that I'd been out jogging, had waited until I'd returned from the jog before calling, and had thus been watching me (or having me watched by one of his cohorts). Probably still watching me. The arrival of a squad car in response to my 911 call would let them know that I'd gone to the police. Would that make them think the warning had failed? If so, what would they do? I didn't want to trigger a hasty response from whoever made the threat.

The second problem was the jurisdictional gap. The University City police would answer my 911 call, since I lived in University City and was calling about a break-in and threatening call to my home. But I believed that the reasons for the threatening call were my efforts to uncover the connection between a real estate scam in the city of St. Louis and the death of Michael Green. Moreover, the caller had mentioned a dead man. That had to be Sebastian Curry, and he'd been killed inside the city limits. Would my hodgepodge of circumstantial evidence be enough to get the St. Louis police involved in an anonymous phone call in the suburbs? And if it did, how effectively would they coordinate with the University City police? And what if the mysterious City Hall connection had influence with the St. Louis police—or just someone within the department who could tip him off? All of which made me realize that what I needed was an organization impervious to local politics. Fortunately, the caller's use of the phone wires gave them jurisdiction.

The FBI immediately grasped the situation, right down to the squad car problem. They even had a contingency plan for that. I put Ozzie on the front seat beside me and followed their directions to a nondescript house in Maplewood, where two special agents—a man and a woman—were waiting. They interviewed me until one in the morning, at which point the woman—a sturdy brunette named Holly Sarvis—called the assistant U.S. attorney on duty that night, Ben Harper—a stocky guy in his late twenties with a florid complexion and curly blond hair. Harper swung by the safe house about quarter after two with a pair of FBI tech guys. The five of us—Harper, the tech guys, Ozzie, and me—drove back to my house, where an FBI agent was already parked out front in a black government sedan. Harper assured me that there were agents parked in front of my mother's house and my sister's house.

As the tech guys moved from room to room, I sat in my kitchen with Ben Harper and answered his questions. He took careful notes as he walked me though every aspect of my investigation into the events surrounding Michael Green's death. The tech guys quickly found the point of entry—the dining room window. Someone had used a cutting tool to remove a small circle of glass above the window latch. Although the tech guys also found plenty of fingerprints in the house, the absence of any at the point of entry suggested that the other prints would likely prove to belong to my guests or me. They found nothing else incriminating in the house.

Harper made several official calls during those wee hours. When he finished, he told me that Marsha McKenzie would want to meet with me when she returned from Washington, D.C., on Sunday. Marsha was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, and she'd be the one to decide the next step in the investigation. Meanwhile, Harper assured me, FBI agents or U.S. Marshals would be on round-the-clock security details for my mother, my sister, and me. They would also coordinate with the U. City police to insure that a patrol car cruised by my house often enough to make someone think twice about harming Ozzie when I was out.

But I wasn't taking chances with Ozzie. I'd brought him with me to the synagogue. The rabbi welcomed him to services, and he actually behaved well. Better, in fact, than some of the kids.

I took a sip of my latte and started the engine. I looked over at Ozzie. He was on the passenger seat, watching me attentively.

“You hungry?”

His tail wagged.

I smiled. “I thought so.”

I took another sip of the latte and placed it in the cup-holder in the console between the two front seats. “I bought you a treat.”

I reached into the take-out bag at my feet and pulled out a poppy-seed bagel. Tearing it in half, I handed him one of the pieces. “Bon appétit.”

Ozzie scooted down on the seat, the bagel between his front paws, and started munching away. What a nice Jewish dog—went to the synagogue on Saturday, participated fully in the silent meditation portion of the service, and loved poppy-seed bagels.

I checked the traffic and pulled out of the parking space. I was still rattled—and still worried for my mother and sister—but my anxiety level had dropped several notches since those awful first moments after last night's call. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I watched the dark blue sedan pull into traffic behind me. At the wheel was U.S. Marshal Tommy Jenkins, all six feet four inches of him. There was certainly a measure of comfort in that sight.

***

At a few minutes before one-thirty that afternoon, I turned into the parking lot behind the Goodfellow Baptist Church. It was an older brick structure located on a street corner in a neighborhood of two-flats along Goodfellow Avenue on the north side of St. Louis. The U.S. Marshal pulled into the space alongside me. I patted Ozzie on the head, closed the car door, waved at Marshal Jenkins, and walked to the church entrance. I glanced up at the marble slab over the entrance. If you looked close, you could still make out the faint Hebrew lettering. Many years ago, the Goodfellow Baptist Church had been Temple Shalom.

Reverend Wells had given me directions to his study, and I found it easily enough.

“Come in,” a deep voice called when I knocked.

The reverend was seated behind his desk and writing in a black notebook. He looked up as I entered, capped his pen and stood to greet me. He was a tall, slightly stooped black man in his fifties with a long, angular face and handsome features. Bald on top, he had a fringe of salt-and-pepper hair on the sides and a neatly trimmed mustache of the same mix of gray and black. His dark skin, black suit, and clerical collar only heightened his aura of solemnity.

“Thank you for meeting with me, Reverend.”

“You are most welcome.” We shook hands. His grip was firm, the skin dry and rough. He gestured toward one of the chairs facing his desk. “Please make yourself comfortable, Miss Gold.”

He took a seat behind his desk and steepled his hands under his chin. He peered at me over tortoiseshell reading glasses. “You have come here today regarding Sebastian Curry?”

He had the voice of a preacher, or even of a god—a rich, orotund bass shaded with honey tones.

“I understand that you knew him, Reverend. That you were close to him.”

He nodded pensively. “Sebastian was a troubled young man. He came to me seeking spiritual solace. I offered him what guidance I could.” The perfectly enunciated words seemed to rumble down from the heavens.

“How did you meet him?”

A faint smile as he remembered. “My avocation is pottery, Miss Gold. I am decidedly an amateur, but a most fervent one. Occasionally over the past decade, I have exhibited some of my pieces at local art fairs. Through those events, I have met many gifted artists within the St. Louis community. Two years ago a group of African-American artists asked me to speak to their members one evening. My topic was the relationship between spirituality and art. Sebastian attended that event. He approached me after the meeting, and we went out for coffee. We spoke for what seemed hours—about his life and his dreams and his yearnings. Before long, the young man was attending our Sunday services here at the church. We continued our relationship.”

His use of the term
relationship
made me glance at his left hand. There was a gold wedding band on the third finger. On the credenza behind his desk was a framed photograph of what I assumed to be his wife and three grown children posed in front of a fireplace.

“You said that he was troubled, Reverend.”

“Sebastian was raised—or, rather, raised himself—in a broken home in East St. Louis. He never knew his father. His mother was an alcoholic and drug addict. He was tall for his age—decidedly a mixed blessing in his neighborhood, since he was only eleven when he was recruited by the Vice Lords, one of the dominant gangs on the east side. Eleven years old.” He shook his head with sympathy. “Just a child. Those were dark, vicious, wicked years, but eventually he summoned the inner strength necessary to quit that life. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Sebastian moved across the river to St. Louis to pursue his dream of becoming an artist.” Reverend Wells paused. “Alas, the plight of a young artist is a challenging one. Life remained a struggle.”

“Are you aware that he worked for a few years in adult films?”

“That I am. He did it—or so he told me—to help finance his artistic career. Frankly, Miss Gold, that was another chapter of his life that caused much anguish for him in retrospect.”

“Was he distressed by anything more recent?”

Reverend Wells studied me for a moment. “What is the nature of your interest in Sebastian, Miss Gold?”

“I think he was involved in some criminal activity several years ago—criminal activity that had a direct impact on my client. He may only have been a pawn, but I think he had guilty knowledge. That's why I'm here today, Reverend. I'm hoping that he shared some of that guilty knowledge with you.”

Wells gazed at me pensively. “You are an attorney, Miss Gold. You understand that information disclosed to a minister in confidence is a privileged communication protected from disclosure.”

“Perhaps, but he's dead now.”

“That may be so, but the privilege was his to waive, not mine.”

“Not if there is a strong justification to waive it, Reverend. I believe there is here. My client is alive. Sebastian Curry is dead—murdered in his own bedroom. I believe that whoever killed him had something to do with the murder of my client's ex-husband. My client was convicted of that murder. She's been in prison for years, and she still has years to serve. I am convinced she's innocent, but I can't prove it. At least not yet. I'm getting closer, though. I think that someone that Sebastian knew killed her ex-husband. Specifically, someone he knew from his days in the adult film industry. If that's so, then whatever Sebastian confided in you might help me develop the evidence I need to free my client and bring to justice whoever is responsible for Sebastian's death.”

Something I said seemed to give Reverend Wells pause. He was tugging absently at the side of his mustache. Finally, he said, “What causes you to suspect that the killer was someone Sebastian knew from his days in the film business?”

“My client's ex-husband was killed just before he remarried. Sebastian knew the woman he was going to marry. He also knew one of her former boyfriends. He knew him from their days together in porno films. From what I've been able to piece together, that ex-boyfriend was a disturbed and violent man. He was also still obsessed with his old girlfriend.”

“What happened to him?”

“He's dead. Suicide.”

“Did this man kill himself in front of her town house?”

I tried to mask my excitement. “So you knew about it?”

“Who is your client, Miss Gold?”

“Don't you know?”

He shook his head. “Sebastian never told me any of the names.”

“My client is Angela Green.”

I watched him absorb that information. After a moment, he leaned back in his chair and stared down at the carpet. “Good Lord.”

He turned toward the window. I said nothing as he stared out at the small garden behind the church.

Finally, he turned to me. “Miss Gold, I am stunned by what you have told me. Sebastian never gave me names or dates. His tale corresponded with none of the public facts of your client's trial, which—as you know—occurred years before I met Sebastian. The version Sebastian told me did not include a trial.” He shook his head, frowning. “I never put the two together.” He paused and then sighed. “You are correct, Miss Gold.”