Don't Cry Over Killed Milk (9 page)

Damon’s heart was pounding. Maybe he wasn’t as good at detective work as he thought. He finished lunch and asked the man behind the deli counter if Hanover had a barber shop. There were two, but according to the counterman only one was operated by Koreans.

It was located a half mile from the deli, across a railroad track in a poor part of town. A sign marked “BARBER” hung from a post at the corner of the glass-fronted shop. Next door, a pub advertised itself as “The Pour Judgment.” Damon cracked his knuckles nervously and stepped into the barber shop. Near the entrance, a young Korean woman was shaving the back of an elderly black man’s neck. At the shop’s rear, a man in his thirties and an aged woman were playing cards at a folding table.

Damon was in luck. The man at the back of the shop stood rather than the woman.

“Need a trim?” he asked. His Korean accent was faint.

Damon’s thinning hair didn’t need a cut. “I have an interview tomorrow,” Damon said by way of explanation, “so I just need it cleaned up.”

Damon was seated in an open chair. As the barber sculpted his meager locks, Damon internally debated whether to broach the subject of Jeremiah Milk. The man, who could be a murderer, was wielding sharp scissors inches from his jugular vein. There were others in the shop, but witnesses weren’t much help for a dead man.

“Are you Shin Ho-Pyong?” Damon asked cautiously.

“I am,” he said without hesitation. “You’ve heard of me?”

“A friend told me you give the best haircut in Hanover,” Damon said. He didn’t enjoy lying.

“Word of mouth is big in the haircutting business,” the man said casually. “Who’s your friend?”

Damon was stuck. Not only did he not relish lying, he wasn’t very good at it. He made up a name. “Toby Flynn. He was just here one time on business at the pretzel factory.”

The barber didn’t respond. By the time he finished Damon’s trim, the elderly customer had departed, and the two women were seated at the back of the shop, conversing in Korean.

Damon paid Shin Ho-Pyong, then summoned his courage. “Mr. Ho-Pyong, I’d like to ask you something.”

The barber smiled. “Actually, Shin is my family name. Some Koreans westernize their names and reverse the order, but I haven’t.”

“Sorry, Mr. Shin,” Damon said. “Can you tell me how you know Jeremiah Milk?”

A puzzled look crossed the barber’s youthful face. He washed his hands and dried them on a towel. “Sorry, I don’t know anyone by that name.”

Damon tried again. “He lives in the Hollydale community of Arlington, Virginia. It’s just west of Washington, D.C.”

“Sorry,” Shin said coolly. “I’ve never been to Virginia. You must have me mixed up with someone else.”

Frustrated, Damon left the barber shop. He considered his options as he walked toward his car. An idea struck and Damon changed course and stepped into the pub next door to the barber shop. The Pour Judgment was dark and reeked of stale cigarettes. Smoking hadn’t been banned in Pennsylvania establishments that served more alcohol than food. Damon ordered a Bass Ale from the bar and picked up a discarded crossword puzzle from a booth. He chose a stool at a tall table in front of the only window in the pub. From his position, Damon could see the street in front of the barber shop. He hoped Shin’s shop didn’t have a rear exit.

Damon spent the next three hours nursing his beer and eyeing the street. Just minutes after six o’clock, Shin and his two co-workers emerged from the barber shop. Damon waited until they passed the pub’s window and then he stepped outside. The barber shop trio loaded into a tan Corolla. Damon jogged to his Saab and followed the Corolla at a reasonable distance. Shin and his colleagues stopped at an Asian grocery, then proceeded to an apartment complex on the periphery of town. Damon parked in the complex’s lot and watched Shin and the two women enter a garden style apartment building.

Damon sat in his car with the windows down. The crisp evening air felt like aftershave against his cheeks. Shin would likely be home for the evening, he thought. Damon closed his eyes. He could sit in the parking lot all night, hoping the barber would emerge. But what did he expect to see––Shin Ho-Pyong loading a pressure washer into the trunk of his car? Even if he was the killer, the pressure washer was back in Emmanuel’s garage. The more he thought about it, the more Damon felt he needed to know where Emmanuel Alvarez had been on the night of the murder. If he lived in the cabin and the instruments used in Jeremiah Milk’s death had been temporarily pilfered from his garage, there were only three possibilities: Emmanuel was the killer, he was an incredibly deep sleeper, or he hadn’t been in the cabin on the night of the murder.

Damon’s eyes flew open as he heard the slam of his passenger’s side door. He turned to see Shin Ho-Pyong brandishing a kitchen knife six inches from his face. The man had unlocked the door through the open window. Damon reflexively shrank back.

“Why are you following me?” Shin demanded.

Damon didn’t know whether to scream for help or to try to jump out of the car. His seat belt was still latched. “I’m trying to find out who murdered Jeremiah Milk,” Damon gasped. “Don’t kill me. I’ll do whatever you want.”

A look of angered confusion came onto the Korean’s face. “What the hell are you talking about? I told you this afternoon, I have no idea who Jeremiah Milk is.” He pulled the knife back from Damon’s face but kept it at the ready. “This knife is for
my
protection. I’ve never had anyone follow me home before.”

Damon quickly considered the man’s position. Damon, a stranger, had come into his shop asking bizarre questions and hours later followed Shin to his apartment. Damon had clearly not followed the Corolla surreptitiously enough. In the face of limited alternatives, he opted for honesty.

“Jeremiah Milk was murdered at Tripping Falls State Park in Virginia a few days ago,” Damon spat out. When Shin didn’t respond, he continued. “About nine months ago, a private investigator was looking for him.”

“Is that what you are?” Shin asked, “A private eye?

“No,” Damon clarified. “I live in Jeremiah’s neighborhood, and I’m helping the police.”
Without their knowledge
, Damon thought. “The private investigator’s name is Marcus Pontfried. And I was told that you hired him.”

Shin Ho-Pyong burst out laughing. The eruption startled and stupefied Damon. Was the man insane?

“Let me guess,” Shin said after gathering his laughter under control. He laid the knife down in his lap. “Sheila Ranch?”

Damon blanched. “Yes. How did you know?”

Shin cackled. “She was my girlfriend. We broke up a month ago.”

Damon’s face still registered confusion.

Shin explained. “While we were dating, Sheila told me that she suckered people for money. Every few weeks, someone would show up in Pontfried’s office looking for information. Pontfried’s mouth is a vault, but his walls are thin. Sheila listens in on his conversations. When she hears Pontfried tell someone to go pound sand, sometimes she’ll follow the person out of the office.”

“This sounds familiar,” Damon said.

Shin grinned. “She tells the person that she has vital information,” he said. “Then she asks for cash and, in exchange, feeds the sap a phony name. After the person finds out that Sheila made up the name, most of the time, he or she just leaves well enough alone. A few times, Sheila said, the person demanded their money back. She would just say she had no idea what they were talking about. And the person she conned was stuck. It was her word against theirs.”

“Someone could have told her boss,” Damon said.

“I suppose, but Pontfried is intimidating. Once he tells a person to get lost, not too many people want to encounter him again.” Shin shook his head. “Our break up last month was pretty bad. I guess rather than making up a name, she decided to mess with me.”

Damon sat, speechless.

“Sorry for pulling a knife on you,” Shin said. “And sorry Sheila screwed you.”

Shin Ho-Pyong returned to his apartment building. Damon admonished himself for giving Sheila Ranch three hundred dollars. He felt relieved that he hadn’t told Gerry Sloman about Shin. It would have wasted police resources to track down the false lead. He drove away from the apartment complex and parked in a motel lot. Damon punched Rebecca’s number into his phone.

“I’m glad you’re alive, Damon,” she said after he recounted his afternoon’s goose chase.

“Me too,” he said. “I was scared to death when Shin was holding that knife in front of my face—I thought he was a murderer.”

Rebecca was silent for a moment. “Any chance he is?” she asked.

“He just invented the story about the private investigator’s receptionist as a jilted girlfriend?”

“You never know,” Rebecca said.

“I suppose it’s theoretically possible,” Damon admitted. “But you should have seen him laugh when I mentioned Marcus Pontfried’s name. It looked genuine to me. ”

Chapter 9

Before driving home to Hollydale, Damon took a detour back to York. It was eight-fifteen in the evening when Damon passed into the town’s city limits. Except for lights in the parking lot, the 7-Eleven, and a twenty-four hour Laundromat toward the far end, the strip mall housing Marcus Pontfried’s office was dark. Damon parked, walked up to the office, and peered through the glass door. He couldn’t see anything and didn’t sense any movement inside.

He crept to the back side of the strip mall and was greeted by a desolate alley wide enough for a single vehicle. An overhead light illuminated a dumpster behind Pontfried’s office. A pick-up schedule posted by the garbage company indicated that trash was collected every other day, including seven o’clock the following morning. Marcus Pontfried told Damon all of the Milk files had been destroyed months earlier. But had the private investigator taken a final sweep ahead of his upcoming meeting with Lieutenant Hobbes?

Damon looked around—seeing no one, he pushed the dumpster’s sliding metal door backward and appraised the inside. Three neatly-tied black plastic garbage bags and two white ones were heaped on a scattering of loose trash. Damon crawled inside and tossed out all five bags. He retrieved his car and parked it in front of the dumpster to serve as a makeshift shield. If someone approached, they might see the car, but they wouldn’t immediately know that Damon was digging through refuse.

Damon readied his nose and tore into the bags. The two white trash bags contained waste from the nearby nail salon. The black bags were from the private investigator’s office. One was filled with food scraps, soda cans, and soiled tissues. The other two were stuffed with paper.

Damon spent an hour sifting. Most of the paper was shredded with crumpled balls and torn scraps mixed in.

Eureka
! Halfway through the second bag, Damon found a handwritten reference to Jeremiah Milk on a ripped corner of a page of lined notebook paper. A curved arrow directed the name “Alistair Atwater” to “J. Milk.” The symbols “$ ?” were positioned over the arrow. The note appeared to question whether money had flowed from Atwater to Milk. Was it the $2 million Jeremiah received two-and-a-half years earlier?

Damon racked his brain. The name Alistair Atwater sounded familiar but he couldn’t place it. Damon could text with his phone, but the device lacked Internet access, so he wouldn’t be able to look up Atwater until he returned home. Damon vowed to purchase a smart phone.

He spent another thirty minutes combing through the remaining debris but didn’t find anything further of interest.

* * *

Bleary eyes clouded Damon’s vision after an exhausting day. It was close to midnight when he turned the corner onto his street and noticed a miniscule flickering light on his porch. Damon parked the Saab at the curb, four houses from his own. He killed the car’s lights and stared out into a darkness abated by a handful of streetlamps. Damon could distinguish a figure crouching in front of his door with a pen-sized flashlight. Was someone trying to break into his house?

Within seconds, the prowler straightened up and hastened down Damon’s front steps to a sedan directly across the street from his duplex. In the glow from the streetlamps, Damon recognized the figure. It was Aylin Erul, the female ranger from Tripping Falls.

Aylin’s car jerked away from the curb and disappeared into the night. Leaving his car in the street, Damon slowly approached his porch, eyes peeled. At the top step, he dropped to his knees and inched toward the base of the door. Nothing seemed amiss. Still kneeling, Damon unlocked his front door and pushed it open.

He missed it at first. Only after standing and flicking on the lights in the foyer did Damon spy the plain white envelope on the floor, just inside the door. Aylin must have slid it under. He opened the envelope’s flap carefully, then removed and unfolded a sheet of white paper. It bore a single typewritten sentence: “Lawrence Drake is obsessed with Veronica Maldive.”

Damon crawled into bed. His head was pounding. Drake was the ranger who doubled as the park’s naturalist. Damon didn’t know much about him—just that he appeared to be a strong man who spoke little. As a ranger, Drake would have known Jeremiah’s schedule and—provided Emmanuel Alvarez was correct on the cause of death—where to locate the equipment that was used to kill him.
Obsession
is a strong word. If Lawrence Drake was infatuated with Jeremiah’s girlfriend, he had to be considered a significant suspect. But if Drake was the murderer, how did Marcus Pontfried fit into the equation?

Damon’s attention turned to Aylin. She had been present at the park the previous day when Margaret rebuffed him. So why would Aylin provide Damon, rather than the police, with information about Drake? And if she didn’t feel comfortable notifying the police, why surreptitiously deliver the news to him by way of an anonymous letter?

* * *

Damon woke at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning. He resolved to call Gerry Sloman at nine o’clock sharp and tell him about Aylin’s secret message. He had a training session with Arthur Jenkins from the Arlington County Crime Solvers later in the morning. A volunteer shift at the library rounded out Damon’s plans for the day.

He brewed a pot of strong coffee and sat down at the kitchen table in front of his computer. Damon typed “Alistair Atwater” into Google and was deluged with hits.

Atwater was the chief executive officer of the largest commercial construction company in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Photos showed a man in his seventies with a shock of white hair and an unassuming smile. He was cited scores of times in
The Washington Post
and had several quotes in
The Wall Street Journal
. That’s why I recognized his name, Damon thought. Society pages coupled him with governors, senators, and a bevy of youthful fashion models. Forbes listed Atwater as the 375th richest person in America, with a net worth just topping $1 billion. He lived in Bethesda, Maryland, less than ten miles north of Hollydale. Atwater also kept residences in Manhattan, Palm Beach, and Cape Town, South Africa.

Damon tapped his fingers nervously against the table. Did this mogul pay Jeremiah Milk $2 million? Unless Jeremiah doubled as a closet hit man, Damon couldn’t conceive of a reason for such a payout.

* * *

Damon popped into The Cookery as Rebecca was preparing for her morning classes. He filled her in on the latest details of his investigation into Jeremiah Milk’s death. And this time, he decided to clue her in to the vast sum of money Jeremiah had obtained and spent.

Rebecca knew Damon too well to ask why he felt so driven to pursue the matter on his own. It was a combination of his rampant curiosity and the absence of the typical pressures of a thirty-one-year-old man—like regular work or a family life.

Wearing thin plastic gloves, Rebecca partitioned allotments of lamb meat for a cassoulet her students would be making later in the day. “So, as I see it, you have six or seven suspects,” she said. “There are six regular park employees. The manager Alex Rancor; three rangers—Milt Verblanc, Lawrence Drake, and Aylin Erul; Jeremiah’s girlfriend Veronica; and the maintenance man. The seventh suspect is Jeremiah’s mother. She’s the dark horse, but you can’t completely count her out. Even though you have some significant external factors, like the money and the private investigator, only those people would know Jeremiah’s park schedule and where the pressure washer was kept—assuming that was the murder weapon.”

“The two Park Police officers might know, too.”

“True,” Rebecca allowed as she pressed ground lamb into a glass measuring cup. “But for now, let’s focus on the park workers. Go over the high points one more time for me.”

“Sure,” Damon said. “Veronica Maldive was dating Jeremiah and thought there was a chance he had a substantial amount of money. The police found a severed power cord in Emmanuel Alvarez’s trash. Emmanuel suggested that Milt Verblanc might know how to blow the circuitry in the shed. And Lawrence Drake was obsessed with Veronica.”

“I’d add that Alex Rancor said that the Park Police don’t like her,” Rebecca injected. “And Aylin slipping that letter under your door—that’s pretty bizarre.” She paused the conversation to scrub her hands in the sink.

When she turned off the water, Rebecca added, “I think you need to find out where Emmanuel Alvarez was on the night of the murder.”

Damon nodded his head. “I had the same idea. All signs suggest that he lives in the cabin. It’s hard to believe he’s such a sound sleeper that someone could sneak into his garage, remove heavy equipment, and return it all without waking him.”

“Are you planning to speak with Emmanuel again?” Rebecca asked.

“I’m not sure. I want to pursue it, but I don’t want Margaret Hobbes to find out I’m discussing the murder with suspects. I
am
going to call Gerry and tell him about the note Aylin left for me last night. Margaret warned me not to speak with Gerry, but this could be a huge break for the police. Maybe while we’re talking, I can ask Gerry if he knows where Emmanuel was on the night of the murder. And the police should have ample resources to track down a connection between Jeremiah Milk and Alistair Atwater, if there is one.”

Damon punched Gerry’s office number into his phone. It rang six times before it was picked up.

“Gerry?” Damon blurted out. “It’s Damon. I know you’re not supposed to talk to me about Jeremiah Milk….”

“Stop right there!” Margaret Hobbes’ voice boomed through the receiver. “Mr. Lassard, this is Lieutenant Hobbes. Unless you are calling to confess to killing Jeremiah Milk, I don’t want to hear from you again. Leave the detecting to real detectives.” She hung up.

Damon was speechless.

Rebecca, who couldn’t have missed hearing Margaret through the phone, held up her hands. “You tried, Damon. You know what they say: What goes around comes around. I’m sure Margaret Hobbes will be on the other end of a tongue-lashing herself someday soon.”

Damon sighed. “You’re right. My mother would say the ‘Rule of Three’ applies—whatever negative energy you dish out is returned to you threefold later in life.”

“Is that a corollary to Cole’s Law?” Rebecca asked with a straight face.

“What’s Cole’s Law?”

Rebecca smiled. “It’s thinly sliced cabbage, silly.”

Damon groaned. Thirty seconds later, he received a text message from Gerry. “Hobbes was in my office and saw your name on my phone. Sorry.”

“Are you going to give up?” Rebecca asked skeptically.

“I’ll stop trying to work with the police, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop looking. I want to talk to Aylin. Any interest coming with me?”

“Damon,” Rebecca cautioned, “What about Margaret Hobbes?”

“She’ll be in York this afternoon. Pontfried said he was meeting with a lieutenant from Arlington at noon today. I have a training session with Arthur Jenkins at the Crime Solvers office in an hour.” He briefed her on his latest volunteer activity. “After lunch, let’s go to Tripping Falls and see what Aylin has to say for herself.”

“I do have a break in classes between one and five. I suppose I could go with you.”

“Great. I’ll pick you up here at one o’clock.”

* * *

Damon called Mrs. Stein at the Hollydale library and asked her to cover his afternoon shift. She readily agreed. The retired widow was happiest when tending to the routine duties of the local branch library.

At ten-thirty in the morning, Damon was back in the office of the Arlington County Crime Solvers. Arthur Jenkins was a neatly groomed man with a tight face. Growing up in Michigan, Damon had a neighbor who suffered from mild scleroderma, which caused natural stiffening of facial skin. Arthur’s condition looked similar.

Damon listened intently as the Crime Solvers’ coordinator explained the ins and outs of the tip line. Arthur had been the force behind the group for the past ten years and had helped the police catch a number of criminals.

Halfway through the training session, the Crime Solvers’ telephone rang. Arthur adroitly handled a tip from a caller who had witnessed a recent home invasion in the western part of the county. Jenkins jotted down notes on the burglar’s physical characteristics: approximate height, weight, skin color, hair color, and clothing description. He provided the caller with an identification code and asked the man to call back in two to three weeks. If the tip led the police to an arrest, the man could claim a five hundred dollar reward.

After Arthur contacted a county police employee designated to receive calls from Crime Solvers and passed along the tip information, he scheduled Damon for his first shift—that night from eight o’clock until midnight.