Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 02 - Rekindling Motives (16 page)

I turned my attention back to Annie as she finished talking about why
she wanted to run for prosecuting attorney. “I think the current prosecuting attorney’s priorities are skewed. He takes cases to court that could easily be settled, and he lets drug dealers plea bargain to probation.” She paused. “I’m not going to prosecute based on public opinion, but I do think citizens are letting us know they want fewer burglaries and car thefts, and the only way to get that in check is to prosecute the people the police arrest instead of putting them back on the street so they can steal laptop computers to support their drug habit. People have a right to feel safe.”

She looked at each of us in turn, and I sensed she had expected applause.

Hardin Grooms cleared his throat. “I know several of us on City Council would love to cut the police budget, and if crime goes down we could do that.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “As one who has run for office several times, I can tell you it’s not cheap. And you’d have to run a campaign throughout the county, not just in Ocean Alley.”

Annie studied the old mirror for a moment before meeting his eye.
“I was dreading doing that kind of fundraising. However, my dear aunt looks after me even after death.” She seemed to be weighing her words carefully. “I’ll have much of what I estimate I’ll need. I’ll still do fundraising, of course. People expect it. It’s just that I won’t have to spend half my time doing it, and I won’t have to take money from people who might expect favors later.”

I’m no political expert, but t
hat last part sounded pretty naive to me. Jennifer chimed in that she would be happy to host a “meet and greet” at her townhouse, and I turned my attention back to the room itself. There appeared to have been a hodge podge of renovations, but the tin ceiling tiles were still in place, which was more than you could say for a lot of buildings this old. The door at the back of this large room probably led to the kitchen where Peter and Richard had produced the goods for what I thought of as their cover business. No sign of a closet in which Richard Tillotson might have locked Peter Fisher. The wall that had the kitchen door still had wallpaper, which looked bumpy. I figured the paper covered some architectural sins.

“…do you think the same time would work next week?” Annie was asking.
Jennifer and the three men pulled out pocket calendars or smart phones and I watched them agree on a time for the following weekend. I watched without committing to the second meeting and picked up the bio info she had provided and stuffed it into my purse.

As I made my way back to the B&B I thought about the meeting.
It seemed odd that the only time Annie mentioned Mary Doris’ death was when she was talking about money, but perhaps they had talked about her before I arrived.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE
OCEAN ALLEY PRESS
RAN an article on Annie and the other two primary candidates. A man named John Abernathy had joined Annie and current Prosecuting Attorney Martin Small in the race. The primary was not until June, but because all three had declared their intention to run the paper was covering their announcements. Given the salary –$120,000 – I thought it odd several attorneys wanted the position. I would clean the meat out of crabs for six months to make that right now, but I thought lawyers could make more money in private practice.

There were two photos of each, a mug shot and one with family members.
Looking at the photo of Annie and her parents I was surprised to see how much older they were than my parents. They looked as if they could be her grandparents. I vaguely remembered that Aunt Madge had said Annie and her mother did not get along well, which was why she had moved to Ocean Alley to live with Mary Doris during high school.

Because Annie was running I read the short pieces on each candidate.
The two men had much more experience as lawyers, but Annie appeared to be the only one who had come up with a slogan – “Upholding our laws with a fresh perspective.”

AFTER LUNCH I PICKED UP SCOOBIE and listened as he outlined his plan to look through the last couple
of notebooks in the attic to see if there were any strings of numbers that struck him as worth playing in the lottery. I was tempted to ask him if he thought that he was focusing a bit much on the lottery, but I didn’t. I wasn’t in charge of his life.

I unlocked the door of the Fisher house and knew there was something wrong as soon as we walked insi
de. There wasn’t usually a breeze coming from the kitchen.

Without talking about it we walked to the back of the house and stopped at the edge of the kitchen to stare at the broken glass in the exterior door.
The door had six small panes of glass in the top half, and someone had apparently broken one and reached in to unlock the door. There was no burglar alarm and in winter months there would likely have been no one out at night to see anyone breaking in.

“Come on,” Scoobie said, “outside.”

I followed him. “You think someone would still be in the house?”

“No idea,” he said.
“And don’t intend to find out the hard way.” He nodded toward my purse. “Call your buddy Morehouse and ask him to look. He gets paid to check out stuff like this.”

I made sure the police knew we didn’t have a reason to think that anyone was in the house and then we sat on the front porch to wait.
It was warm for December, almost 50 degrees. “I guess the articles about me falling out of the attic and you playing those lottery numbers let people know the house was vacant.”

Scoobie shrugged.
“Yeah, but it’s been vacant for awhile. Could just be somebody wanting in out of the cold.”

I regarded him.
“When you were drinking or whatever did you live on the streets a lot?”

“Not much.
Mostly I was here and I knew people, so there’d at least be a porch I could crash on.” He stood up as a patrol car pulled to the curb. “Remind me to tell you about my carny days sometime.”

“What’s that?” I asked, assuming I’d misunderstood him.

“Carny, carnival. I got a wild hair five or six years ago and hooked up with the carnival that comes to Saint Anthony’s every year for the Italian festival and signed on to do site clean-up for a few months.”

I stared at him for a few seconds and then extended a hand to the police officer who had been at Ruth Riordan’s house the day I found her body.
I glanced at her name badge – Corporal Dana Johnson. I would not have been able to come up with it on my own. She let us describe the broken glass and then said she would walk through the house.

She was back out in five minutes.
“No one there now. I looked in the closets and behind doors. Didn’t pull the rope down for the attic. If that’s the only place that has stuff you can look at it with me to see if it looks like anything is missing.”

We walked up the staircase in silence and Scoobie pulled down the ladder.
“Police coming up,” she shouted as she stood on the bottom rung. We watched as her torso leaned into the attic and she shone a long flashlight beam around the space. “Clear,” she said, and placed her hands flat on the attic floor and nimbly leaned left, raised her torso by leaning on her hands, and then raised her legs in a quick bend-and-straighten motion until they were on the floor. By that time she had flipped her hands forward. She gave a push and came to a standing position and looked down at us.

I know my mouth was open, and Scoobie’s must have been because she grinned at us.
“Gymnastics when I was a kid.” She gestured, “Come on up.”

“Jolie’s into tumbling,” Scoobie said, steadying the ladder for me.

“You just can’t let go of anything,” I said.

“Listen,” he said as he scrambled up behind me, “the time I caught you coming down the stairs was one thing, but if you keep falling without me at the bottom you’re going to crack your skull.”

Officer Johnson chuckled as I got to the top of the ladder. “Grab on,” she said, extending her hand.

I did and was surprised at her strength as she basically pulled me up onto the floor.
I winced at the pull in my back and saw the concern on her face. “No problem,” I said wishing there weren’t, “it’s just this is my first time in the attic…”

“Since she fell out of it,” Scoobie said, hauling himself up.

We did what all women do when they don’t like a comment and ignored him.
“Can you tell if anything is missing?” she asked.

Since Ramona and Scoobie had worked up here several times as I sat below on my donut it looked very different.
“It seemed a lot more crowded last time I was up here,”

“Ramona took the dress form, and I’ve got the train set,” Scoobie said, but I could hear the distraction in his voice.
“Hey, though, look at the trunks in the back. We didn’t leave them open.”

I watched as he peered into them, then turned shaking his head.
“Looks as if the books are still in that trunk, but those last few ledgers or diaries in the other trunk are gone.”

Dana Johnson’s expression went from half amusement to all business.
“OK, down we go.”

“But…” I began, half irritated by her words.

“No buts. Just go down, please.” Her tone was firm, and she held out a hand. “Steady yourself on me as you go down the first couple of steps.

Scoobie was next to us in a flash.
“Me first, for the obvious reason.” He began to back down the ladder and called to me to start down.

When all three of us were on the second floor Officer Johnson took the radio off her belt and called for a fingerprint technician because of a break-in and gave the address.
She ended her transmission and met our gazes. “If you’d said some antiques were gone I’d be concerned but not so much. I heard Ramona tell someone in the Purple Cow that those ledgers had business records and such. Richard Tillotson’s body may have been there for decades, but someone who knows something about his death may still be around and wanting to know what you guys are finding.”

NATURALLY, TWO POLICE cars in front of the house attracted more attention than one, and Scoobie and I were soon joined on the porch steps by
George Winters. He was in worn blue jeans and a New Jersey Knicks sweatshirt and he looked as disgruntled as I felt. “You two could give it a rest on my weekend off,” he said.

“Or you could keep doing what you were doing on your time off,” I said.

The porch steps were wide and he sat next to me. “I told my editor to call me on anything to do with this house. And you,” he said, looking at me with a quick grin as he pulled his thin reporter’s notebook from his back pocket. A stub of a pencil was in the spiral rings and he pushed on it with his pinkie until he could pull it out.

Scoobie seemed less irritated than
I. “We found a pane out of the back door when we went in, so we called the cops,” he said. “There was an article in the paper that let everybody know the house is vacant.”

“You gotta love sarcasm,” Winters said as he jotted notes.
“So, anything missing?”

“Nothing we want in the paper,” Johnson said as she sat on the other side of Scoobie.
“Damn fine day, isn’t it?”

Winters leaned around me and looked at her.
“Come on Dana, off the record.”

“Since you always keep your word on that, I’ll tell you a couple of those notebooks you wrote about are gone.
That seems to be all.” She leaned around Scoobie to look at Winters. “You know anything more than you printed?”

“No.” He jabbed his pencil back in the spiral ring and stood up.
“I’ll just print there was some broken glass and it was hard to tell if anything is missing since the attic’s a mess.”

“How do you know it’s a mess?” Dana asked, a sharp edge to her voice.

“Gracie told me that you guys moved stuff when you went up there after Jolie fell on her ass.” He walked down the steps and gave a small wave over his shoulder as he headed back to his car.

When he shut his car door and started the engine Dana looked at Scoobie and me.
“He’s a pain in the ass, but sometimes we learn as much from him as he does from us, and if he says it’s off the record he means it.” She stood and stretched. “I gotta get ol’ Chuck out of the attic. He collects antique tools and stuff and he’ll be up there all day.”

When she was back in the house, Scoobie said, “I don’t think they watch
CSI enough.”

I giggled in spite of myself.

We went by the hardware store to buy a piece of glass, some putty and – thanks to the clerk’s suggestion – some tiny metal fasteners to keep the glass in place until the putty dried.

I
didn’t want to be the one to call Gracie so I made Scoobie use my cell phone to call her. “Just tell her I have a sore throat.” Seeing his expression I added, “She’ll either talk or cry for ten minutes if I call her. I’m not up for it.”

With an eye roll worthy of my mother Scoobie placed the call and pushed the speaker phone button as the phone rang.
It was answered by a surprisingly mellow-sounding Gracie. “Jolie?” she asked.

Scoobie started to hand the phone to me, but I backed up a step and mouthed, “Caller ID.”

“Hey, Gracie, it’s Scoobie. I just borrowed Jolie’s phone for a minute.”

“That was nishe of her,” she slurred.

Scoobie tilted his head back and with his free hand mimed holding a bottle of beer that he was chugging into his mouth.
“You sound like you’re having a good day,” he said.

She giggled.
“Can you tell? The doctor gave me these, umm, prescription something.” She paused. “My husband calls them my happy pills.”

Scoobie’s expression softened and I felt guilty as hell.
“Sorry you needed them,” he said. “Listen, Gracie, I just wanted to let you know that everything’s fine, but…”

“Jolie didn’t fall out of the attic again, did she?”

I would characterize her laugh as maniacal.

“No, nothing like that.
Jolie’s fine, well as fine as you can be sitting on a donut all day.” He grinned at me. “I just wanted you to know some jerk strolled into your grandma’s house. Broke a pane on the back door, but we already got that fixed.”

“Oh dear,” she said, and it sounded as if she was clouding over.

“Think happy pills,” Scoobie said.

She gave a calmer laugh.
“Yes. Thasht a good idea.”

“Doesn’t look as if they did any damage,” he said.
I just wanted you to know.”

“And Jolie’s OK?
Why do you have her phone?”

“She, uh, went into the bathroom at Newhart’s.
We stopped by for lunch.” He grinned at me. “She’s treating.”

“Oh, well, your lucky day.
Say,” I could almost see her sit up straighter. “I heard you won some money playing numbers from those little, watchyacallits, books.”

“Yep.
You want a cut?”

“No silly.
Well, I need to go lie down for a few minutes before the kids get home from school.”

Scoobie told her he thought that was a great idea and hung up.

“You left out the part about them taking some of those little watchyacallits,” I said, dryly.

“Why upset her?” he asked.