Murder Bone by Bone (23 page)

I dropped into a chair in the living room, knowing I should go back outside to try and help, but not able to marshal my quivering knees to the task.

“What happened?” Melanie came to sit across from me. “I called the twenty-four hour Public Works line, and when I said where the disturbance was, the man actually hung up on me!”

“They might have heard the nine one one calls come in.” I gave her a brief sketch of the action, finishing
with Doug’s blowing out his brains.

She chewed her lip. “So he’s the one who did it? Put that body under the sidewalk and hit Richard?”

“It looks that way."

“But why?”

“Who knows?” I leaned my head back in the chair, and felt that I never wanted to get up. “Guess I should make some coffee or something. They might need a place to put things together.”

“Right.” Melanie brightened. “I’ll make the coffee. You tell Drake that the kitchen’s at his disposal. After all, if all that other racket couldn’t wake the kids, nothing could.”

It was tough to make myself go back out there. The street was alive with flashing lights and vehicles. Inching past Claudia and Nelson, who sat on the front steps like spectators at a sports event, I averted my eyes from the swarm of activity around the backhoe.

“Are the children okay? Did they wake up?” Claudia pulled on my T-shirt.

“No, they’re fine. What’s been happening here?”

Claudia nodded toward the street. “They’re putting the body in the ambulance.” We watched silently while the shrouded stretcher slid through the opened doors.

Nelson didn’t look good, especially in the flashing lights, which washed his pale face with pulsing reds and blues. “I never saw anyone die before.” His voice cracked.

“What were you doing here, anyway?” Despite my impatience to find Drake, to stand by him and know that he was alive, his usual grumpy self, I was consumed with curiosity over Nelson’s role.

“I wasn’t doing anything.” Nelson shrank away a little. “Just—watching.”

“Nelson thought something fishy was going on with Dr. Blakely,” Claudia explained. She has a soft spot for young academics, even unprepossessing ones. “He heard what Richard said to Melanie—and I must say,” she interrupted herself in a voice thick with grievance— ”that it was very small of you not to tell me about that, Liz.”

Nelson rushed into speech, saving me from having to answer. “I thought Dr. Blakely might have done it—might have hit Dr. Grolen. Because everyone knows she’s climbing the ladder. She’s grubbing for tenure already, and I heard a couple of the faculty complain that she was barging in on committees, trying to get a power base.”

It didn’t sound like that cute young thing I’d seen, but I recalled how she’d played up to Richard, just as she’d flirted with Drake. Nelson, at least, seemed immune to her charms; of course, she never used them on him.

“Anyway, Nelson thought she might be after Old Mackie, and he tracked him down to warn him and see if he could find out what the old man saw.” Claudia wrested the narrative away from Nelson with an ease born of much practice. “He’s been hanging around here, hoping to see her incriminate herself in some way.”

“It’s not that I hate her or anything,” Nelson assured me earnestly. “I just thought it would be cool to find out whatever she was up to and expose her. That’s all.”

“You’ll probably need to make a statement.” I moved away. I’d spotted Drake and Bruno, squatting at the edge of the street, talking to someone who sat on the curb facing them.

“I’ll make a statement, too,” Claudia called after me.

She’d recovered quickly from the carnage. I didn’t feel so bouncy. I could still see that picture on the inside of my eyelids, the one with all the red in it.

Drake and Bruno were talking to Stewart, but Drake came over when he saw me hovering at the sidewalk. He held out his arms, and I walked into them.

“You shouldn’t have been out here,” he scolded, hugging me warmly. “Did you see—”

“Yes.” I felt his chest beneath my cheek, the strength of his stocky body within the circle of my arms. “You were taking far too many risks, Drake.”

“Wait a minute. That’s my line.” His arms tightened around me. “It’s my job, Liz. Not yours.”

“I know.” I gave him one last squeeze for comfort’s sake, and stepped away. “Melanie’s making coffee inside.”

He looked undecided. “The kids are sleeping?”

“Like logs.”

Bruno came up. “Should we take him downtown, Paolo?" He jerked his head back at Stewart.

“What about the other witnesses?” Drake turned to me. “Who all’s here, anyway? Looked like a damned convention on the lawn when we pulled up.”

“Claudia and Nelson were out here with me. Melanie’s inside—she didn’t see much.”

“All the same,” Drake grumbled, “we’ve got a passel of witnesses. Maybe we should take some statements inside and let people go, not haul this many people down to the office.”

“Fine.” Bruno glanced over his shoulder at the huddled form of Stewart, sitting on the curb. “He is in shock, I think. Perhaps the EMTs—”

“I’ll take care of it.” Drake strode off toward the ambulance. Stewart rose slowly to his feet. I found the policewoman, Rhea, at my side.

“Detective Drake says you can show me a room we can use to take statements,” she said with a friendly smile.

I led the way inside, closely followed by Claudia, who didn’t want to miss a single minute of the proceedings. She dragged Nelson along—he would have been glad to melt out of the picture at that point, I surmised. Officer Rhea was satisfied with Emery’s study and started right in with Claudia. I went to tell Melanie that we’d have customers for the coffee after all.

Chapter 27

Drake and Bruno both accompanied Stewart into the kitchen. He sat at the table, cradling a cup between his hands, looking down at the steaming coffee, as if it held the answers to his questions. Without his hard hat, his bent head looked vulnerable, the short graying curls tight around his receding hairline.

Nelson, seated across the table, stared in fascination at the stains on Stewart’s shirt. The worst of it had been brushed off, but the dried rust-colored smears were livid reminders of the night’s events.

Melanie looked at them, too, but then she watched Stewart with growing puzzlement. Finally she burst out, “Aren’t you Fritzy?"

Stewart whipped his head around, staring. “Who the hell are you?”

“Melanie. Melanie Fulton. You are Fritzy!” Melanie sat down next to him. “Remember? I used to live in this house, and so did one of your friends, for a while. You came by all the time to hang out with him. Skipper, right?”

Stewart buried his face in his hands and groaned.

Drake exchanged glances with Bruno. “What basis do you have for this, Mrs. Dixon?”

The leather-bound album was still on the kitchen table. Melanie pulled it forward. “I’ve been refreshing my memory of that time,” she said, with a sidewise glance at me. “And we were just looking at these earlier, that’s how I recognized him.” She flipped through the pages until she found the picture from the Baylands. The lanky, long-chinned man with the lazy smile and the primitive sailboard. The man with curly dark hair nearby. Both of them not far from Nado, whose bones being found beneath the sidewalk had started this chain of events. Except that it had really started fifteen years ago.

Melanie pointed at the man with curly dark hair. “You’re going gray, Fritzy. And you don’t have sideburns anymore.”

Stewart looked at the picture. But he wasn’t looking at himself. Tears came to his eyes.

“That is your friend, is it not?” Bruno looked over Stewart’s shoulder. “The one with the sailboard. That is Doug, isn’t it?”

Stewart nodded, wiping the tears away with one hand. “Poor old Skipper.” He almost smiled, looking at the picture. “He loved to sail. That’s how he got that nickname. We grew up sailing together on the Bay. Built ourselves a catamaran, joined the Sea Scouts. Doug invented sailboarding, you know.” He said this with such conviction that no one cared to debate the probability of it.

“Doug was the one whose slate was wiped clean.” I remembered how Claudia had referred to it earlier.

“That’s right.” Stewart’s shoulders slumped. “We were just partying like guys in their twenties do—beers, drugs once in a while. Skipper got this job with the Public Works so he could fund his sailboard experiments, and I got one too—just meant to work for a few months, through the summer.”

“You were acquainted with John Hessman?”

Stewart stared blankly. “Maybe. I don’t remember anyone like that.”

“You called him Nado.” Bruno touched Nado’s image with one finger, measuring the inch of space that separated him from Stewart’s pictured younger self. “You had dealings with him?”

Stewart hesitated, then nodded when Melanie showed signs of bursting into speech. “It’s no secret. All of us bought a little something once in a while back then.” He looked at Melanie, and she nodded. “Nado sold Skipper that MDM. I wasn’t around that weekend—chasing some woman or other to Santa Cruz, I think. When I came back I found Skipper like he was—just sitting in a corner in his room, almost catatonic.” He stared down at the photo of his friend, the intelligent expression, the lazy smile. “After a year or so he got a little better—he could function and all. But he never really came all the way out. He was such a sharp guy, before that.”

“You have been a good friend to him, it sounds like.”

Stewart glanced quickly at Bruno. “I stuck by him. Stayed on at Public Works at first just to help him out. They gave him his job back, you know, but at first it was hard for him to do.” He shrugged. “Never would have thought I’d still be doing this so many years later, but it’s comfortable.” He glanced down at his uniform shirt, at the ominous stains, and winced. “It was, anyway.”

“Why would Doug take his life? What was bothering him?” Bruno was, as always, courteous, interested. But in his own quiet way, relentless. Drake sat back, occasionally making a scrawled comment in his untidy notebook. The way he sat, his shoulders held rigid, told me that he didn’t yet see his way clear, that something about the sequence of events troubled him.

Stewart answered Bruno. “Lately he’s been depressed. He didn’t like working in this neighborhood, where he lived before his life got fucked up.”

We were all silent for a while. Claudia came to the kitchen door. Officer Rhea, behind her, looked a question at Drake; he shook his head. She stood there, quietly waiting.

Melanie puzzled over one part of the conversation. “You said Doug invented windsurfing—”

“Maybe not invented,” Stewart conceded. “But he had one of the first working prototypes. Don’t you remember? You were at those picnics.”

“What I remember is that Richard did sailboarding, and I know he took out some patent or other. He still gets money from a sailboard design.”

“It was Doug’s design!” Stewart sat up in his chair. “Grolen outright stole it from him after Doug’s OD because he figured the Skipper would never know. That money would have meant a lot to Doug. And it might have given him back sailboarding. He hardly went at all in the last few years because it reminded him that he wasn’t even sharp enough to keep a grip on his own inventions. Just the recognition of having accomplished that would have made him feel better.”

“Did Doug know what Grolen had done?” Bruno asked, exchanging glances with Drake.

“Or at least what you say he did.” Melanie thrust herself forward. “Richard and I were married at the time. I don’t think he would have acted like that.”

“He didn’t take out the patent right then,” Stewart explained. “He borrowed Doug’s board—I said he could. Doug wasn’t up to using it, and I thought nothing of it. Then a couple of years later when the Skipper felt like boarding, I remembered Grolen never gave it back. He wasn’t around anymore, we didn’t know where he was. Next thing we know, this company is selling boards based on that design. They told us who they were licensing it from, and that’s when I realized that Grolen had just stolen the whole thing. I wanted to turn some lawyers loose on him, but Doug wouldn’t do it until just recently.”

“He agreed to sue?” Drake sat up, his gaze intent.

“Yeah. He sort of built up a slow burn.” Stewart looked down at his hands, then averted his gaze. "When he saw Grolen at the sidewalk that morning, he wanted to take him out then and there.”

“So you’re saying Doug is the one who hit Richard and left him under that tarp to die.” Melanie sounded distraught. “Maybe he was going to come back later and bury Richard—bury him alive! Maybe the same thing happened to Nado, fifteen years ago!”

Drake and Bruno looked at each other again. Drake was about to speak, but Nelson interrupted.

“He wasn’t under a tarp.”

We all looked at him, and redness washed over his face.

“So you were there. When did you see him?” Drake’s voice was soft. “And why didn’t you tell us this earlier?”

“I didn’t know it would matter.” Nelson ran a finger around the collar of his grubby polo shirt. “I walked to the excavation that morning, and I was early. I’d just turned the corner when this old dude comes dashing past me with his shopping cart full of bottles, rattling away. At first I thought it was because of the recycling truck around the corner. But when I got to the excavation, I saw Dr. Grolen lying there with that chunk of concrete on his head.” He swallowed at the memory. “I—couldn’t touch him, but he looked dead. And I didn’t want to be the one that found him. That’s always bad in mysteries. So I—I left.”

“You just left? You didn’t report it? He might have died, and you wouldn’t have helped?” Melanie’s voice got shriller and shriller. Nelson shrank a little.

“I thought he was already dead,” he said stubbornly. He turned to Drake, who was scrawling wildly, and then to Bruno, tapping away on the laptop. “But there wasn’t any tarp over him. He was just lying there.”

“Did you see the assailant?” Drake rapped out the question.

Nelson looked miserable. “I didn’t pay any attention. I—I don’t see so well at a distance anyway. Somebody might have walked away in the other direction. That’s all I know.”