Big Sick Heart: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (8 page)

“But you think if she figured she could make a go
of the debates, she’d do them with you?”

“Yes, I do. I hope so. It’s important to me that I
get e-mails from college kids telling me they really learned something.
Sometimes I hear from them after a parent gets Parkinson’s or has a spinal-cord
injury, and that breaks my heart, but I think we did some real good with the
debates. I hope we can keep doing them. It’s up to Margaret.”

The shade had crept up my legs, and I was starting
to get cold. “What can you tell us about Connie de Marco?”

His eyes brightened. “Connie is really something.”

“How so?”

“I assume you heard her story. Lots of problems.
She was homeless, using drugs, when she showed up at Arlen’s door. What I love
about her is that there isn’t an ounce of artifice about her. She is exactly
what she seems to be: a beautiful soul who’s been knocked around a lot, but she
holds her head high, does her job.”

“Seems like you talk with her a lot?”

“Oh, yeah, we spend a lot of time just talking on
the road. Her outlook is terrific. She doesn’t have any education—you know
that—but she’s one of the wisest people I’ve ever met. Everything that’s
happened to her, she’s learned from it. She’s not bitter or cynical. She knows
there’s bad out there but there’s good out there, too. And she’s determined to
experience that goodness without looking back.”

“She sounds pretty special.”

“As special as they come,” he said, nodding. His
gaze drifted off over the driving range, where the winds were whipping the
three flags. Dead leaves scratched across the patio.

“Can you help us out with anyone who would want to
kill Arlen Hagerty?”

He shook his head. “I’m sure there’re some people
out there. We get hate mail all the time, both of us. I guess you’re running
down that angle.” His brow was furrowed. “But Margaret? Connie? I just don’t
see it,” he said. “Sorry.”

I nodded to Ryan. He said, “Well, thanks very
much, Mr. Ahern, for talking with us. We’ll get in touch if we need to talk
more. And we’re going to try to wrap up our investigation as soon as possible
so you can get back to your life.”

“Good luck,” Ahern said. “Get whoever did this to
Arlen, will you?”

“Count on it,” I said, as Ryan and I stood and
walked back toward the parking lot. I was shivering when we got inside the big
Ford. We watched Jonathan Ahern walk over to the driving range and pull a club
from his bag.

*  *  *

“Well, this is starting to
get kind of interesting,” Ryan said, blowing on his hands.

“It always does,” I said, shaking out my fingers
to get some blood in them. “Assuming the killer was someone who knew the vic.”

“How’s that?”

“I mean, if the room-service guy cracked him on
the skull and grabbed the cash from his wallet, that’s not very interesting.
But if one of his own people killed him, that’s juicy.”

“Yeah, but if it was random, like the room-service
guy, that’s interesting, too, in its own way. You trace back how he got to
where he was, what decisions he made, the kind of pressures he was living with,
and you start to understand what brought him to that decision.”

“Yeah, if you’re into sociology,” I said. “But if
you’re a detective, that kind of investigation usually goes pretty quick. The
room-service guy blows off work the next day, you find out where he was born,
you alert the cops there, send his picture, and they pick him up when he gets
off the Greyhound. Or he’s bunking with his best friend from high school.”

“That isn’t how Matt Damon would do it if he were
the room-service guy.”

“Yeah, well, Matt Damon’s writers are smarter than
the room-service guy.” I was starting to warm up, the sun coming in the
windshield. I undid the buttons on my coat and pulled it open to let the sun
hit me, then got self-conscious and closed it up again. “Since there’s no
evidence there was a room-service guy, let’s assume we’re dealing with a murder
among friends.”

“Good,” Ryan said. “So what does Jon Ahern add to
the mix?”

“You tell me. Did you buy that story about the
Johnny Trautman and his wife with MS?”

“It’s easy enough to check out. I’ll run it down
as soon as I can,” Ryan said, taking his notebook out of his pocket and jotting
it down. “I got kind of a funny feeling with the way he started crying about
the wife.”

“Why’s that?”

“Trautman and his wife were older, right, around
seventy? It just didn’t ring true that Jon was crying about his boss’ wife.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but it looked real enough. You
never know. Maybe this woman was a mother figure or something. I can see it. Or
maybe Jon lost a parent or someone to a bad disease when he was younger. The
emotion can attach itself to a different story. That’s assuming there was a
Johnny Trautman and his wife.”

“That should take ten minutes, tops, to confirm.”

“All right, let’s talk about motive. He’s opposed
to Hagerty’s side of the debate.”

“Yeah, but he’s traveling with him.”

“At the bar, when you guys were talking football,
what did you get off of Ahern?”

“Unless he’s a heck of an actor, he was sincere. I
was thinking about their relationship the whole time, trying to read it in
their faces, because remember we were both pretty surprised they seemed to be
friends. Arlen Hagerty definitely liked Jon Ahern.”

“How’d you see that?” I said.

“Not so much what he said. His body language. It
seemed that Hagerty was the senior partner, you know what I mean? He didn’t
have to suck up to Jon Ahern, so what you saw on Hagerty’s face and the way he
moved was the truth.”

“And the fact Hagerty was nailing someone in his
room? That doesn’t change that for you?” I said.

“Not really. I’m not saying Hagerty was a saint.
Maybe Margaret won’t sleep with him. Maybe he was into some kinky stuff with
Connie or hookers. But it looked like he really liked hanging with Jon. Like
Jon was his son, but with none of the father/son baggage. A guy he could talk
football with.”

“And you think Jon felt the same way toward
Hagerty?”

“It’s hard to say. Knowing what we know now—that
someone was going to kill Hagerty in an hour or two—I’m sure I might see
something different on Jon’s face. You know, I’d love to crack this case right
here, right now, impress the heck out of you. But, tell you the truth, I didn’t
see one thing suspicious about Jon last night. He seemed completely comfortable
with Hagerty the whole time.”

“All right,” I said. “One thing for certain, it
doesn’t make sense Jon would want to take out Hagerty, who’s paying his
salary.”

“Yeah, unless Jon’s already worked it out with
Margaret that she’s going to take over the road show.”

“You saying she could’ve had Jon take out her
husband?”

“Just that it’s possible,” Ryan said. “That way,
she gets the respect she thinks she deserves from Soul Savers, plus a nice
promotion. She doesn’t have it in her to kill her husband, but she’s got no
good feelings for him. She goes to Jon with a deal: you do it and you get a
serious raise. You don’t do it, it happens anyway—and you’re out of a job.”

“Geez,” I said, smiling. “You’re kinda weird.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot, coming
from you.”

“Don’t be a wiseass,” I said, like a big sister.

“One other thing makes me not like Ahern for the
murder. You notice he didn’t try to throw any suspicion on either Margaret or
Connie?”

“Yeah, I caught that,” I said. “But maybe he’s
just smooth. You know, he realizes we’re watching him carefully. He figures
we’re gonna be looking for anything like that. So he talks up the two women,
which makes him look cool.”

Ryan said, “Okay, but listen to what he said about
them. He did say he didn’t think Margaret could have had anything to do with
killing her husband, but he didn’t say anything positive about her. He didn’t
even say she believes in their stem-cell cause.”

“Yeah, whereas Connie wears a halo.”

“I see it more like he admires the heck out of her
for what’s she’s put up with. She’s been victimized for years, but she’s got
dignity.”

“Which means what? He’s doing her or not?”

“I don’t think so,” Ryan said. “He’s old enough to
be her father.”

“Yeah, but you told me Hagerty’s doing her,
ninety-five percent, and he’s old enough to be her grandfather.”

“True, Jon might be a creep, but the way he called
her a beautiful soul, I think he sees Connie as a daughter, not a young girl
with a hot body.”

“So, call it.”

“On the other hand, maybe that stuff about her
having a beautiful soul is his way of talking himself into not seeing her as a
junkie whore. She’s got a hot body, and the beautiful soul compensates for all
the miles on her odometer. So my guess—right now, since you’re making me call
it—is that both guys were doing her, and Jon flipped out and killed Hagerty
because the old guy just saw her as a reliable hard-on. Is that how you see
it?”

“I don’t see it at all,” I said. “We don’t have
enough facts. Only an inexperienced detective would call it this early.”

“Thanks for the sucker punch,” Ryan said,
laughing.

“Not a problem,” I said. “Any time.”

“I’d sure love to figure out who’s sleeping with
whom. If we knew that, we’d be in a lot better shape to figure out motive. Got
any ideas except for waiting for the DNA?”

“Well, we could come back a little harder on
Margaret Hagerty or Jon Ahern, but they won’t be easy to rattle.”

“Then there’s Connie.”

“That’s right,” I said, “and since we’re pretty
sure Connie is where we ought to be looking, why don’t we push her a little
harder?”

“She’s the one who’s probably most afraid of cops.
She might think she’s the path of least resistance because she already has a
record and doesn’t have the resources to fight back like the others do. That
makes her more likely to slip up. But what do you want to use to push her? We
don’t have any new information, right?”

“Right,” I said, “but she doesn’t have to know
that.”

“So what do we say we have?”

“DNA. She’s not gonna know we don’t have it yet.”

“But if she meets with Hagerty every night,
there’s got to be DNA all over his room.”

“We don’t say it’s all over his room. We say it’s
all over his dick.”

Ryan said, “And if she calls our bluff?”

“You mean if she wasn’t screwing Hagerty?”

“Either way: if she was or if she wasn’t.”

“If she wasn’t screwing him,” I said, “we’ll be
able to tell by the way she says it. If she was screwing him, she’ll tell us,
and then we’ll be closer to figuring out who wanted to kill Hagerty. Either
way, it’ll shake up the three of them, assuming they’re talking with each
other.”

“Is there a down side of bluffing her?”

“You mean, she could lose some respect for the
Rawlings Police Department?”

“Good point.”

Chapter 4

The uniform in the lobby
pointed and said, “The pool.” We followed the signs to the outdoor pool, past
the empty exercise room and the locker rooms. The chlorine smell, which lingers
even through the winter, told me we were almost there.

The pool and the Jacuzzi were covered for the
winter with dark green tarps attached to hardware built into the pebbled
cement. In the center of each tarp was a large puddle, filled with dank brown
water. The chairs, brown-painted steel with tan plastic straps, were stacked in
a corner. The tables and the umbrellas must have been stored somewhere else.

Connie was sitting with her face to the sun, a
pale gauze of smoke obscuring her face. This woman must really be addicted to
cigarettes if she’s willing to grab a chair and sit out on the pool deck in
November just for a smoke. As she watched us approach, her hand shielded her
eyes from the sun.

“Ms. de Marco, can we talk with you again?” I
said.

“Okay,” she said, no intonation in her voice, no
expression on her face. It seemed like she meant exactly what she said: it
wouldn’t be particularly good or bad, just okay.

I glanced around for someplace for me and Ryan to
sit, but there were no chairs. Seeing that Connie had just started on that
cigarette, I turned up my collar and began to talk. “There’s been some new
information from the lab,” I said. Connie didn’t say anything. She just kept
looking right at me. “We know you were with Arlen Hagerty last night.”

Connie took a long pull on her cigarette, then
exhaled slowly. “Yes, I told you that earlier. I met with him almost every
night.”

“That’s not what I mean, Ms. de Marco.” I paused.
Some people get so uncomfortable with silence they start saying things they
hadn’t meant to, but Connie wasn’t one of those people.

“What is it that you mean, Detective?”

I didn’t say anything for a couple of moments.
“Why did you lie to us about your relationship with Arlen Hagerty?”

Connie sighed, looking out over my shoulder at the
sky. The sky was a pale blue, a few wispy clouds hurrying across.

Ryan said, “Ms. de Marco, lying to us is
obstruction of justice.” She looked at him for the first time. “That’s a
felony.”

Connie turned her gaze back to me. “Should I get
an attorney?”

“No,” I said. “We’re not interested in pursuing
that if you help us with the investigation.” Connie nodded slightly, the first
sign she was willing to be more forthcoming. “But we need to understand the
relationships among the four of you who traveled with the debates. We want to
solve this murder. That’s all we care about.”

“What do you want to know?” Connie’s voice was
level and low. She took her folding ashtray out of her coat pocket and stubbed
out her cigarette.

“Okay, you were in Arlen Hagerty’s room last
night.”

“Yes.”

“You had sex with him last night.”

Connie was looking straight ahead, not at me.
“Yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“What happens every night after that.”

“Which is?”

“I go back to my room, take a long shower, and go
to bed.”

“What time was that?”

“About 12:00.”

“When you left him, Arlen Hagerty was alive.”

She looked at me, waited a beat. “Yes.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“No, I didn’t kill him.”

“I could understand if something happened in that
room that got to you, made you want to hurt him.”

“No,” she said, sighing, “there was nothing like
that. I didn’t kill him.”

“Do you have any knowledge of what might have
happened to Mr. Hagerty after you left his room?”

“No, I don’t.”

“And you say you went back to your own room. You
didn’t go to anyone else’s room or see anyone else.”

“That’s right.”

Ryan said, “So you don’t have an alibi for the
period from around midnight to 2:00?”

“That’s right.”

I said, “Do you have an intimate relationship with
Jonathan Ahern?” Connie smiled slightly.

Ryan said, “Why are you smiling?”

She turned to him. “I was just thinking about the
Detective’s words: ‘intimate relationship.’”

“Tell us what you’re thinking about those words,”
I said.

Connie reached into her pocket and pulled out her
pack of cigarettes and lighter. She tapped one out, lit it, and put the pack
and the lighter back in her pocket. “If your question was ‘Am I fucking Jon?’
the answer is no.”

“My question was, ‘Do you have an intimate
relationship with Jon Ahern?’ Do you?”

“If by that you mean, do we talk, are we friends,
do I enjoy spending time with him, then the answer is yes. I value his
friendship more than I can say.”

“But you didn’t go to spend time with him last
night after you left Mr. Hagerty’s room. Correct?”

“That’s correct. My relationships with Mr. Hagerty
and with Jon are separate. As separate as I can make them.”

“So you don’t know where Jon Ahern was around
midnight?” I said.

“That’s right. I never spend time with Jon late at
night.” She took a long pull on her cigarette, then exhaled. Picking a piece of
tobacco off her lip, she said, “That time was reserved for Mr. Hagerty.”

“Tell us a little more about your relationship
with Mr. Hagerty.”

“What exactly do you want to know?” She looked
old. Not old, exactly, but I could see what she was going to look like when she
got old. It was more like she was incredibly weary, as if I was making her go
someplace she didn’t want to go—because she went there all the time on her own.

Ryan said, “Let’s start with what you told us this
morning about how you met him. That was true, right?”

Connie looked at me as if to ask whether she had
to answer Ryan’s questions. I wanted to tell her no, she didn’t have to. But I
stood there, holding her gaze. “Was it true?” I said.

“Yes, it was true.”

Ryan said, “You said this morning you know that
the Hagertys have separate bedrooms at home as well as on the road. Are we
correct in assuming you know that because you’ve been in his bedroom at home?”
She looked straight ahead. “So we can modify your story a little bit, about how
you came to travel with the debates? It wasn’t that he needed an assistant on
the road so much as he wanted you available. Is that right?” She nodded, almost
imperceptibly. “Tell us a little more about your routine—with Mr. Hagerty—on
the road.”

This time she asked the question. “Do I have to?”

“Ms. de Marco,” I said, “you’ve admitted you sleep
with him. You’re how old—twenty-one? Twenty-two? He was sixty-something or
seventy. And not exactly a Clint Eastwood seventy. So we have to think there
was some sort of coercion in that relationship. And since you don’t have an
alibi for last night, and you were the last one to see him alive, it’s looking
like it’s either Margaret killed him because he was having an affair with you,
or you killed him because you just couldn’t stand the humiliation of having to
have sex with him night after night. Which one do you think seems more
plausible?” Connie sat there, motionless.

“And we could hurry this investigation along by
just going to Margaret and telling her what you’ve told us about sleeping with
him. One way or the other, something’s gonna happen that will help us figure
out who killed her husband. And one thing’s for sure: that ends your employment
with the road show, right? So, the way I see it, Ms. de Marco, it would be
smart for you to help us understand your relationship with Mr. Hagerty.”

Connie took a deep breath. “I came to Soul Savers
just as I said. I was using, and I was hooking. I had left home at fourteen or
fifteen. My step dad was abusing me, and my mother was drunk most of the time.
She told me that was the price I had to pay, that I should feel lucky he wasn’t
hitting me or anything. I was on the streets. No skills. Pretty soon I was
using. My dealer was a full-service guy. He pimped me out, too. I show up at
Soul Savers because I see a billboard for it. I think, it couldn’t be much
worse. And it wasn’t.

“Mr. Hagerty used to meet all the new street kids
they took in. He took a liking to me. Within a couple of days, he was taking me
aside, rubbing up against me. Then he was sticking his fingers in me and having
me give him a suck every once in a while. I was out of the dorms, into my own
place. I figured that wasn’t a bad deal. Pretty soon, I’m learning how to run a
computer and traveling with them. I just have to stop by around 10:30 at
night.”

“Margaret Hagerty knows about this?”

Connie gave me a look that said, You’ve got to be
kidding. “I think it was her idea to bring me on the debates. Mr. Hagerty
didn’t think she’d let him be so out in the open about it.”

“Okay, so what’s the routine at 10:30?”

“He’s already taken his pill. I change into
something hot and lie in the bed next to him. He watches the monologue while I
fondle his dick. At the first commercial, he turns off the TV. If he’s got a
hard-on, he fucks me. If he can’t, he has me suck him. If he still can’t get it
up, he lets me go after a few minutes. If he can get it up, I suck him till he
comes, or if he’s feeling real manly, he tries to fuck me. After he’s done, he
lets me go. I go back to my room.” Connie looked at me. “Is that specific
enough?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “And last night?”

“Last night he was able to fuck me the first time.
I didn’t have to suck him. Then I went back to my room.”

“So nothing unusual happened?”

“Detective,” she said, lighting a cigarette, “I
was raped, the first time, I was nine years old. By my uncle. I was sucking my
step dad starting when I was twelve. I worked the streets for about three
years. So did anything unusual happen last night? Know what would’ve been
unusual? If I didn’t have to fuck an old man for money.”

“Thank you, Ms. de Marco. I know this must have
been hard for you to tell us. I hope we don’t have to bother you anymore.”

Connie turned to Ryan. “How about you, Detective?
Did you get what you needed?”

Ryan turned away, his head down, and he and I walked
back toward the hotel. I turned and saw her sitting there, smoke rising and
disappearing into the cool November air.

*  *  *

Ryan sat with his elbows on
the table, his fingers tented, supporting his jaw. I gave him a minute to
process what he just heard from Connie. I looked at his face. He was still a
good-looking guy, with strong cheek bones, a long, straight nose. But his eyes
were clouded. For the first time since I met him, he looked upset.

He looked like he was realizing for the first time
that there really were people like Connie, people with shitty stories to tell.
I didn’t get why he seemed so shook up about this one. He must have seen this
kind of thing often enough when he was a uniform.

“Hey, Ryan,” I said, hoping he would look at me,
maybe start telling me what was on his mind. But he didn’t even seem to hear
me, so we sat for a while in the meeting room in the hotel, three feet from
each other.

Suddenly, he spoke. “Did you hear the last thing
she said to me?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to think of it. “Actually,
no. What’d she say?”

“She said ‘How about you, Detective? Did you get
what you needed?’”

I hadn’t caught that. I could see now why Ryan was
bent out of shape. “Listen, partner, you were doing your job. You were asking
things that had to be asked.”

“So I could get off on her sad story?”

“No, that wasn’t what you were doing. Like you
say, it’s a sad story, not a sexy story. If you asked her to describe the
nightgown she wore to bed with Hagerty, then I’d be thinking you were getting
off on it. But you were doing the right thing. You remembered she’d said
Hagerty and Margaret have separate bedrooms at home, and you got her to say he
used to do her at home, too. Which tells us something about Margaret, because
there’s no way she doesn’t know he’s screwing her in her own house. So, you
were being a good detective.”

“So that’s why I’m feeling so bad?”

“Yeah, pretty much. You’re going to see a lot of
brutal stuff, ugly stuff. And an awful lot of sad stuff. And you keep doing
your job. You figure out who killed Arlen Hagerty.”

“I guess I’ll just have to toughen up.”

“Well, maybe a little. If you fall apart and can’t
think clearly about Connie and the others, you’re not gonna be able to do this
job. But if you get too hardened to the stories you hear, you’ll forget you’re
dealing with real people. Then, you won’t be able to get inside their heads,
see things through their eyes. And you won’t be able to figure out who killed
Hagerty.”

“And after you figure out who killed him, how do
you forget about all the bad stories you heard along the way?”

I paused. “What I do is … In fact, I’ve known two
detectives who knew how to do it. They were both married to strong people, had
families, like you do. Somehow they were able to leave it in the locker. So
maybe you’ll figure out how to do it, too.”

“And you, Karen? What did you say you do?”

“I didn’t actually say. But the truth is … the
truth is I get drunk most nights.” My hand came up to my mouth and I began
biting at a fingernail, like I’ve done since I was, maybe, four. I could see
Ryan noticing a drop of blood on my finger.

“Why did you tell me that, Karen?”

“Shit, I don’t know.” I thought a moment. “Didn’t
want you to think there was something wrong with you because Connie’s story
bummed you out.” That might have been part of it: I told him because it’s
something a new detective needs to hear. I was glad when I saw Ryan nod his
head. But maybe another reason is I hadn’t talked with anyone for a real long
time. My ex and I didn’t talk. We didn’t talk since before he became my ex, which
had a lot to do with him becoming my ex. And I didn’t have any girlfriends.
Pulling night shift had something to do with that, but so did the divorce. You
can lose them in a divorce, too. Those would be the two big reasons.