Lucky Stiff Page 8

  "Can you do that?"

  "You're such a cop, you know?" I told him about Trix and her distinctive vocabulary. Meeting up with Duane Sechrist. Duane's missing mother. Bill Sechrist's car's President Johnson rust. The car in the alley when it was supposed to have been 300 miles away. "So, see," I said, "it's very clear that things aren't what they seem." I'd laid it out pretty well.

  Ciesla paid careful attention to everything I said. Then he said, "OK, this Sechrist family lived where?"

  "Two streets over. Same block, two streets over."

  "And this Bill Sechrist hung out at the bar?"

  "Yeah."

  "So he could've left his car at the bar—parked in the alley, and walked home after drinking at the bar."

  "Well, yeah, but see, the car was moved during the fire."

  "So what?"

  "So see, he was at the scene, Tom!"

  "So were all your other near neighbors. For example, the guy you said that lived across the alley, well, he was there too, right? He was within fifteen yards of the scene the whole time, right?"

  "Well, yeah, but—"

  "The fact that any particular individual who habitually was around was around that night is not a significant fact."

  "But Bill and Juanita Sechrist were supposed to be away, up north, that night. Their son said so. They were in Kalkaska that afternoon. They could've driven back by nighttime."

  "Their son said they told him they were going to stay up north?"

  "Yeah."

  "So they changed their mind."

  "OK, OK. But what if—what if we exhume Patricia Lynn Hawley's body and do DNA testing on it, which I guarantee will show that it's…well, not her. I can almost guarantee you that it's Duane Sechrist's mom, which could be determined by comparing the body's DNA to a blood sample from Duane."

  Ciesla suppressed a smirk. I felt a sudden stab of hatred toward him for that.

  He said, "To exhume a body, you need a good reason. Not suspicion. You need the consent of the family. You need a court order. You can't just go over to the cemetery and say 'Let's dig her up.'"

  "I know that!"

  "There's no way any judge is going to give an order based on evidence like this. Which, I mean, is none. You have no evidence of the existence of this Patricia Hawley. You have no evidence incriminating Bill Sechrist. You have hearsay and speculation. You have nothing. You have a car with a funny spot on it. Where are any of these people? Where is this Patricia Hawley, then? Where is this Bill Sechrist? Go find him and talk to him. Go find your friend's mother. That would end your suspicions, wouldn't it?"

  "Oh, Tom."

  "Lillian, one of the best arson investigators in Michigan history concluded that this fire was accidental. Three victims. Smoke inhalation. This incident was simply…" He stopped and looked at me with pity. "Very sad."

  "Yes," I said softly, "it was."

  Chapter 9

  Back in my flat I faced the fact that I needed help. I needed the kind of help cops couldn't give. I sat on the carpet with my notebook and thought. As a journalist and busybody, I'd investigated suspicious things, crimes, gotten involved in police work—interfered in it, truth be told. My success had been spotty. I envied cops their resources. I envied them their authority.

  Ciesla and Porrocks and the rest were busy with today's crimes. On TV and in books, you'll see cops who've gotten bitten by the bug of an old unsolved case—or who've carried that old unsolved case around in their heads and hearts from the beginning. They don't sleep well until they get the bad guys. Usually these cases are horrible brutal crimes against attractive, innocent women or children. The cop is haunted. He keeps going. He finds new ground to cover, he revisits old ground—anything to keep his hands on it. He talks to cops in other towns, other states about it. He looks for suspects and fugitives in prisons, on the streets, in slums.

  Then something happens: a stroke of luck. He finds a piece of evidence that was overlooked or forgotten. He gets a tip that the bad guy is living in a motel on the outskirts of El Paso under the fake name Mike Stone. Somebody gets busted for selling drugs, and they cut a deal in which they tell where Joe Blow, a.k.a. Mike Stone, said he hid the murder weapon. Then the cops go dig it up, and there's the bloody chain saw with Joe Blow's prints still on it, having been preserved, nay, etched into the metal by the strength of Joe Blow's guilty acidic sweat.

  Then the cop gets a plaque, the media goes ape, the relatives weep and bake cakes for the cop, they write the cop's kids into their wills for good measure. It's great, just great: a happy ending, all thanks to a tenacious, tough cop who wouldn't quit.

  I wished I were a supercop. Better still, I wished I were Calico Jones, with her worldwide network of contacts, her trust fund, her degree from MIT, her biceps and her glutes and her .45 pistol.

  I was a spindly, sneaker-wearing dweeb with no money and a crappy car. I was nothing. But I could be tenacious, and I could choose whether to ever quit on this. I needed resources. I needed someone with a good mind, an incisive mind, someone who knew criminals, who knew law enforcement, who overcame tremendous problems every day, who could think up creative ways to attack an investigation, who was calm and cool. Who was rich. And sexy. Why not?

  You can see where I'm going with this. I needed Minerva LeBlanc. Yes. You don't need an introduction to her, of course. You've probably seen the movie Inside Johnny Florida, based on her best-selling true-crime book, her first book. You've probably seen it more than once, it was so good, everybody's favorite crime movie. Or you've read the book. And you're doubtless aware of her dozen other books, all just as smashing and graceful and philosophically stunning as the first, some of them so awesome in their insights into the mysteries of the human mind that presidents, prime ministers, mobsters, and religious leaders quote from them.

  Minerva LeBlanc doesn't just chronicle crimes, she solves the fuckers. Where the police stumble into a dry gulch, she steps around and makes rain. She's not supernatural, it must reluctantly be admitted. But…well…you know. I needn't go on and on.

  Perhaps you're wondering how she managed to recover from the dreadful disabling attack she suffered during the course of her last research trip. Five years ago now. My God, time gets away.

  I knew Minerva LeBlanc. She'd been unlucky enough to be in Detroit investigating the Midnight Five—remember the Midnight Five? Of course you do—when she met up with me for a one-night stand. I too had been drawn into that case. I'd danced and fallen half in love with the last victim—number six—and wanted more than life itself to bring her killers to heel. I wrote about it afterward: the insanity of the perps, the gullibility of their victims. It's common knowledge that the perps attempted to murder Minerva LeBlanc in Detroit. She was found half dead, her head smashed, her brain exposed, the victim of a horrible bludgeoning attack.

  What was not widely known was the fact that she was found in my apartment. In my bed. The Detroit media got a piece of it, but her family—her patrician Eastern parents, that is—used their influence to keep much from being made of it. They were ashamed that their daughter had had sex with me before getting sent into the oblivion of a coma that lasted the better part of a year. I knew in my heart that Minerva and I were destined for more than just a one-nighter. But that's all we'd gotten.

  I'd made contact with her parents after the attack; they'd put her in a special facility back East. I wanted to come and try to wake her up from her coma. But the parents didn't want anything to do with me; they wouldn't tell me which facility it was. I'd resigned myself to never seeing her again, when I saw an item in the paper that said she'd come out of the coma and was beginning to recover.

  I journeyed immediately to the New York medical center mentioned in the paper to find her working with the best doctors and therapists. Her mind and will were so powerful.

  She remembered me and agreed to see me. I wept with happiness. She had no memory of the assault that almost killed her, though of course she'd been told about it. She'd read my
piece in the Motor City Journal.

  On that short visit I held her hand and felt the warmth of her, the aliveness of her. She was tentative. She was having bad trouble with her right arm and leg. The doctors hadn't expected the language center in her brain to be damaged, but somehow it had been. Her speech was slow and halting, but she was working on it. We didn't kiss.

  I kept up with her, writing letters, sending little things, telephoning once in a while. She was so busy getting well, so busy coming back to life, that she wrote only short notes in response to my lengthy ramblings.

  She went back to live in her Manhattan apartment and commenced to read up a storm. Reading would help her language processes, she believed, which she still wasn't satisfied with. Her short-term memory wasn't too good either, she said, although I observed that nobody's short-term memory is very good. She told me she thought she could work again soon, write books again. Over time her language skills improved tremendously. Her intelligence was undamaged. She hadn't the energy for romance. I didn't know whether she had the inclination for it either, and I didn't push it. I sent her books and articles I thought she'd like. I thought about her, fantasized about her, wrote ridiculous poems about her (which I read aloud only to Todd), and tried to fall in love with other people.

  And that's where it was now, four years after she opened her eyes. I reached for the phone.

  "Damn it," I said to Todd as her voicemail picked up.

  I left a message, then tried to take a nap on my couch. After an hour I got up and looked at the notes I'd made with Ciesla that morning. I put them down and played with Todd. We had a new game, Jump on Monty, which involved a rubber toy dog that squeaked like a rat. The way you play Jump on Monty is you hide the rubber dog behind your back, then you squeak it. Todd comes racing from wherever he is and stops short, looking for Monty. You squeak it once more, then flip it over your shoulder so that it lands in front of Todd. He quickly circles the toy then makes a precise vertical pounce, landing on it, causing it to squeak, of course, which sends him rocketing away in delight. He waits, behind the bathroom door or beneath the couch, aching to hear Monty squeak again.

  Most rabbits would be frightened of an object tossed from above, but something about the rubber dog caused only taut ecstasy in Todd. We'd named the toy Monty after Todd's old nemesis, an ill-mannered neighborhood cur whom we hadn't seen around in a while.

  After we tired of playing Jump on Monty, I cleaned the bathroom. The tile had grown a little mildew, what with the summer heat and humidity. I scoured it off and sloshed bleach water around. I took down the frosted globe over the lightbulb and washed it in hot water and soap. I cleaned the basins. I found a chip in the enamel of the sink and got out my liquid-fixer for that, put a dab on, and blew on it to dry it. I hung there on the rim of my sink, blowing into it.

  The phone rang and I jumped for it.

  Minerva's voice sounded thrillingly strong. "Lillian, my friend."

  "How goes it, woman?"

  "It goes fine. Better and better." I could hear a smile in her voice. She said, "Tell me about it." There was just a very slight hesitation in her speech, not really an impediment, just a little catch.

  It seemed that all I'd been doing for days was telling my story to people. I launched into it again. She listened. It took a while, especially with the addition of the fire investigation report. Every now and then I stopped and asked, "You still with me? You OK?"

  She was. Once she answered, "I love to listen to you."

  Her combining the words "I," "love," and "you" in one sentence made me gulp. I hoped she didn't hear it. I don't like to expose my hand quite that heedlessly.

  "So," I concluded, "I need some advice here. That's what I'm asking you for. I need to prioritize. Should I work on the prove-it-was-arson angle, or the find-Trix angle? Acquiring hard evidence on either one would open up the case for the cops. Or rather, bring the cops into it in the first place. And then, whichever one I pick to concentrate on, what the hell do I do next? How do I go about it?"

  I heard her breath coming softly and evenly over the phone line. "Lillian, I'd like you to step back for a minute here."

  I waited.

  "You need to think about something."

  "Yeah?"

  "You know that what happened is over, finished. And there's nobody from the past trying to reach into your life."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "Just listen to me." Her voice slowed a bit. She spoke deliberately. "This one feels pretty deep to me. You need to ask yourself whether you really, in your innermost heart, want to find the answers to your questions."

  "Minerva, of course I do. I—"

  "I wasn't finished."

  "Sorry. I'm sorry."

  "I want you to think about it, deep in your heart. You went through hell that night when you were twelve. The rest of your life has been a recovery from that."

  I didn't agree, but kept my mouth shut.

  She continued, "You might come across some devastating information. I find this case fascinating. I'd like to—well, never mind what I'd like, for now. Lillian, what if you find that your parents were in fact murdered, or killed unintentionally in a murder cover-up, but you never find out who did it? Will you spend the rest of your life going after it? Will you tear yourself up over it? What if you find out who did it, but then you can't find them? What if the perp or perps are inaccessible to you, to the police, everybody? What if you never find out just why those murders were committed, if in fact they're murders? You're not going to get the perps to sit down with you and tell you exactly why. Exactly why is something in criminal cases that gets…it's the last thing you ever find out. Criminals go to their graves rationalizing their acts. You're not going to get an admission. You're not going to get an 'I'm sorry.' No matter what you find out, it's not going to be satisfying, because the rationalization for murder never makes sense to a normal, loving, dear, straight-up person like you."

  Her speech was slowing down perceptibly. She was getting tired. I was hypnotized.

  After a moment she went on, "You're a wonderful person who has worked hard to be healthy, mentally and emotionally. I know this about you, Lillian: You could live out your life putting this horror of the past in a box, back in its box, and never look at it again. Life goes on. Life goes forward. 'Though much is taken, much abides.'"

  I exhaled in amazement. "You read that poem." Two years ago, about, I'd sent her a copy of Tennyson's "Ulysses."

  "And I love it. Thank you again."

  There were those three words again, "I," "love," and "you," from her lips, oh so close.

  She was almost finished. "You could spare yourself what's to come. You must consider that, Lillian. Do you want to risk the pain that could be lying out there waiting for you? The pain that almost surely is lying out there waiting for you? How strong do you feel? You must understand that kind of pain destroys people. It does. It does. I've seen it happen. Trust me."

  "I have been thinking about it," I said.

  "And do you want to go forward?"

  "Hell, yes."

  Chapter 10

  Minerva tried not to betray her excitement to me, but I could feel it. We talked for only a few more minutes that afternoon; she was tired. She wanted to think about the case overnight and talk again in the morning.

  I went to bed early myself, my head and heart fiery with passion. What do I mean by that? Well, I didn't need Calico Jones to help me to sleep, I'll tell you that much.

  I woke up with a song on my lips. "I can't give you anything but love," I crooned in the shower, massaging my belly to the song's easy beat.

  As I brewed my coffee I pictured Minerva on the phone to the airline, "Yes, one first-class ticket to Detroit. When's the next flight? Oh, good."

  I would go and pick her up, carry her bags, chauffeur her to the Ritz, help her out of the car. I'd give her a nice back rub with lavender oil, then get on the phone to room service for a yummy snack of Dom Perignon and pâté on party rye.
We would make zestful love, Minerva's energy startlingly unflagging, mine hyper as always when in the sack. We would have to delicately scrape each other off the ceiling after our volcanic orgasms.

  In the morning she would wake in my arms and murmur, "I've never felt better in my life. I love you, Lillian. Do you hear me? Listen to me carefully. I love you."

  "Ah," I sighed, pouring myself another cup of joe and breathing in the freshness of the morning. Songbirds trilled in the trees. Todd's ears quivered.

  The clock ticked to 9:30 and I could stand it no longer. I dialed Minerva's number.

  A stranger answered.

  "Uh, I'm calling for Minerva," I said, flustered.

  Pause. "Just a minute, please."

  Minerva came on the line sounding rested.

  I asked, "Who was that?"

  "Oh, that's Tillie."

  "Who's Tillie?"

  Minerva's voice was steady. "A friend."

  "What kind of a friend?"

  "Come on, Lillian."

  "Oh. I see."

  "Look. I met Tillie in rehab. She's an RN."

  "And she's living with you?"

  "Can we get on to business?"

  Oh, I thought, now it's all business. All right. All righty-dighty.

  Minerva began telling me her ideas, all the angles and ramifications she'd thought of since we'd hung up yesterday. "Of course Ciesla is going to discourage you," she said. "He's seen the results of your work…uh, of your style of investigation before. Even if his reaction was 'Holy cow, Lillian's on to something,' he's not going to say it. He'd feel he was being irresponsible to encourage you."

  Blood bubbles popped behind my retinas as I took notes and snarled bitter silent recriminations.

  Yeah, well, you don't feel too goddamn irresponsible for encouraging me, now do you?

  "Right," I said.

  Minerva went on, "What you've got here is a love story gone wrong."