Murder in Store (19 page)

It was almost dark now and I hoped that would give me an advantage. I heard another gunshot and the sound of something hitting a tree very near me. I found the car and the road and ran parallel to it through the woods and toward the highway we’d turned off from, using it to find my way out of here. If I made it to an open road, Griffin might hesitate to blow me away in front of witnesses.

I had figured about a mile and could probably manage that if I didn’t break a leg tripping over a branch or a protruding root, but Griffin looked like he was in pretty good shape himself. I tried not to think about what was behind me or that at any moment I might be in his gunsight. I just ran and tried not to trip.

I heard the traffic before I came crashing out of the woods. With only a second’s hesitation, I half ran, half slid down the hill toward the two-lane road. Near the bottom of the hill I heard another gunshot, lost my footing, and tumbled, head first, into a ditch.

Griffin was almost on top of me by the time I picked myself up. I glanced at him and at the big semi bearing down the road. I had no idea whether or not I could make it across the road in front of that truck, but I knew I couldn’t afford to stay here. The truck horn blared as I ran into its path, and it didn’t miss me by much. Griffin, as it turned out, wasn’t so lucky.

The semi covered a lot of ground while braking to an emergency stop, and as I ran up to the cab, I intentionally avoided looking for anything it might have left in its wake. When I got there, the trucker, a young guy, had removed his cowboy hat and was running a hand through dark, curly hair, shaking his head. He stood next to the cab, not sure where to look and probably not sure he wanted to find what had to be there.

“Oh my God,” he said. “I couldn’t stop. You saw, didn’t you?” He had a slight drawl.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.” I climbed into the cab to use his CB while he stepped off the road to throw up.

A row of cars were lining up in both directions as I got on the emergency channel. I raised the police in less than a minute and told them to contact O’Henry. “Tell him that an attempt is going to be made on Elaine Kluszewski’s life. He has to keep her away from her apartment. You got that?” I released the button on the CB. The cop repeated the message. Then I depressed the button again. “And we’ve got a fatality here involving a truck and a jaywalker. Hold on.” I stuck my head out the window of the cab and yelled into the group of gapers. “Can anyone tell me where we are?” I related the majority opinion to the cop and replaced the CB in the unit.

Then I leaned back and watched as a few snowflakes drifted onto the huge windshield. I was reminded of the way Elaine’s hair had looked that night with the snowflakes lighting in it. Outside, the curious were finding out that getting a good look isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Inside, I was just sitting there, trying not to imagine the worst.

21

 

The scene had taken on the dreamlike quality that sometimes accompanies a morbid accident. The truck’s trailer blocked both lanes of the highway with the cab partially in a ditch. Traffic was lining up, but no one was honking his horn or showing any signs of impatience. A few people offered to help or asked if the police had been called, but most sat quietly in their cars, engines stilled, prepared to wait it out. It was a strange, expectant silence. No one knew exactly what had happened, only what it looked like.

At this point, there was nothing for me to do but wait along with everyone else. There was enough of Frank Griffin on the grill of the cab to confirm the fact that he wasn’t going to crawl into the brush and escape when the crowd dispersed.

The truck driver waited beside me, looking pale in the eerie glow of the car headlights. Finally he said, “That was you who ran out in front of him, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “He was chasing me with a gun. If he hadn’t gotten in your way, I’d probably be dead now.”

He shook his head like he didn’t completely understand but it didn’t matter anyway. “God, what a mess,” he said. “Who was he?”

A squad car pulled up before I could think of an appropriate response. The two officers took a quick look around, then walked over to me and the truck driver. One was very young. Could have been right out of the academy. The other was middle-aged and a little heavy. He looked

pretty grim but not as shaken by the scene as the younger one.

“Which one of you did I talk to on the CB?” I asked. The voice had sounded older, but never assume anything.

“Me.” I was right. “We relayed your message to Sergeant O’Henry. Now, are you going to tell me what’s going on here?”

“That”—I gestured in the general direction of the truck—“was a guy named Frank Griffin. He had just killed another man and was in the process of trying to kill me.”

“You mean there’s another body around here?” The younger cop hadn’t spoken yet and was watching his elder partner like he was Plato.

“Uh huh,” I said and gestured toward the wooded area. “About a mile down that road.” The cop looked at the road, then back at me. “He’s just as dead as Griffin, but he looks a whole lot better,” I added.

Another squad car joined the first, and one of the new cops at the scene began setting up flares. The other approached our group. “Which one of you is McCauley?”

“I am.”

“O’Henry said he’s on his way.”

“Is that all?”

“Yeah.”

“Christ,” I muttered.

The middle-aged cop said to me, “You want to show me this other body now?”

Deke was right where I’d left him, along with the car, and he appeared to have two more bullet holes in his back. The cop began probing me for details. I guess I couldn’t blame him, but I wanted to be out on the highway when O’Henry arrived.

He was looking in the trunk of the car. “So this is where they stashed you?”

“Listen,” I said. “Do you think we could get back? I’m anxious to hear about my friend. I want to know if she’s all right.”

He shrugged. “Why didn’t you say so? C’mon.”

When we returned to the highway, O’Henry had arrived. I recognized his stocky, slouched figure before I saw his face.

I rushed up to him. “Is Elaine all right?”

He held his hands up in a familiar gesture of appeasement. “Calm down. I sent some of my best men over there. They’ll call as soon as they know anything.”

I ran an impatient hand through my hair. “O’Henry—”

“Relax, McCauley,” he interrupted me. “She’ll be okay. Trust me.” Didn’t this guy ever sound anything but calm and collected? “How are you?” he asked.

“I’m fine.”

“Coulda fooled me,” he said. “Don’t tell me they coaxed you into the trunk with a Snickers bar.”

“No,” I said, “it was an inflatable Dolly Parton with a come hither look on her rubber face.”

“That I’d believe,” he said. “Why is it, McCauley, whenever I run into you, you’re in the company of a corpse?”

“Two corpses,” I corrected him.

“Even better. Who’s the other one?”

“One of Griffin’s little helpers,” I told him. “In fact, he’s the one who finished off Bonkowsky.”

O’Henry nodded. “Were you right? Was it Griffin who killed Hauser?”

“Sure looks that way.”

“He confessed?”

“It was more like he was reciting his resumé.”

One of the uniformed cops yelled to O’Henry, “Call for you, Sarge.” I followed him to his car and listened to his end of the conversation.

“Uh huh,” he said. Then “Okay.” Then, “That’s good.” That was when he winked at me and gave the thumbs-up sign.

After he hung up, he removed a new pack of gum from

his pocket and unwrapped it as he spoke. “Apparently there was someone waiting for Elaine in the garage. They found a guy lurking around. He was carrying. I doubt we’ll ever get a confession out of him though, unless we can link him to Griffin.” He pondered that for a moment. “O’Henry,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well, before they found the guy, they did a check on Elaine’s car and were able to ID her by her license. She was about four blocks away from the apartment.”

“Oh, thank God,” I said. “So she never got back to the building.”

“I didn’t say that.” O’Henry was milking his audience again. “She did go into the garage, but she wasn’t able to park. There was a Honda in her space.” He raised his eyebrows. “Sound familiar?”

I gazed up at the stars and silently thanked whoever was in charge of doling out parking spaces and tickets to sold-out ball games that, for once, I had gotten a good one.

“So,” he said, “now we know that the good guys are alive and the bad guys are dead. What were you starting to tell me about Griffin?”

“Well, according to Griffin, who, as I see it had no good reason to lie to me—I think he figured his admission would be that last thing these mortal ears would hear—Griffin killed”—I clicked them off with my fingers—“in this order: Melinda Reichart, Ray Keller, the detective, Art Judson, and Deke what’s-his-name. Motives were rejection, blackmail, blackmail, and incompetence plus bad aim.” Finished counting, I shoved my hands into my pockets. “We didn’t get to Hauser. But if Hauser knew about Melinda, he’d definitely have made Griffin’s hit list.”

“You didn’t
get
to Hauser?” I knew he wouldn’t let that line slide.

“No. Griffin wasn’t exactly letting me lead the conversation.”

“Yeah, but couldn’t you have brought his name up or something? It would’ve been so neat.” He crammed the gum into his mouth.

I’d been thinking the same thing, but it irked me to hear O’Henry say it. “I’d love to hand this to you gift wrapped, but Christmas was a month ago. Do some work yourself if you’re not satisfied. As far as I’m concerned, Griffin killed Hauser. But at this point I admit I could be convinced he was responsible for every unsolved murder since 1960. I really get offended when someone tries to kin me.”

O’Henry studied me for a minute. “You finished?”

“Yeah,” I said, noticing that it was cold and I was without a jacket.

“You better get your head looked at. I’ll give you a lift.”

It felt good to get into a car through the door instead of the trunk. The heat felt good too.

“I’m sorry,” O’Henry said, and it was a moment before I realized that he had apologized. I looked at him as he continued. “You did real good. It’s just that, well”—he shrugged—“it woulda been nice if …”

“I know.” I didn’t let him finish the sentence and I didn’t want him to try again so I changed the subject. “I don’t need to go to the hospital. Just drop me at the apartment.”

“The only way you’re getting to the apartment is if you walk from the hospital. Don’t be stupid. You’ve probably got a concussion.”

He was right.

The doctor at the emergency room was at least ten years younger than I and cocky as hell. He said I’d been sapped by a pro and offered his congratulations. Even though it was a simple concussion, he told me I might be experiencing its effects for a while and I should spend the night at the hospital under observation. I told him I didn’t have any insurance. He said that a guy in my line of work without insurance really should have his head examined. I thanked

him for the advice. He gave me two aspirin, and we parted.

I walked into the apartment and straight into Elaine’s arms. I kissed her on the mouth and buried my face in her hair and was starting on her neck when she pulled back slightly and said, “Ah, Quint?”

I looked up and over her shoulder at the stranger sitting on the couch.

“Quint, this is Paula Wainwright,” Elaine said, “Diana Hauser’s stepmother.”

22

 

The woman smiled and extended her hand to me. She was attractive in a tanned and fragile way, with simply styled, shoulder-length brown hair. When we shook hands, mine engulfed hers and I was a little surprised to find her grip as firm as it was. One other thing I noted right off the bat—there was no trace of the smile in her eyes.

“I understand this is a bad time to be here.” She straightened a pleat in her skirt and pulled at the cuff of her tweed jacket. “Should I come back tomorrow?” From the way she delivered that line, I had the feeling she didn’t expect me to tell her I’d call her when I rolled out of bed in the morning.

“No,” I said quickly. In spite of the strong desire I had to fall, fully clothed, into bed, there was no way this woman was going to leave before I knew why she was here in the first place. “Wait here. I’m going to change and I’ll be right with you.”

As I walked into the bedroom, my mind was so flooded with ideas and questions that my brain overloaded and I had to sit on the bed to get my equilibrium back.

“Are you okay?” Elaine was sitting next to me.

“Mostly.” I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her toward me. “Where did that woman come from?”

“She called about an hour and a half ago. Right after you phoned from the hospital. Are you going to be all right?”

“It’s only a flesh wound.”

“I’m serious. Give me a straight answer.”

“I’m okay. Just got my brains scrambled a little. Back to the woman on the couch.”

“Well, she said she wanted to meet you at your office.” Elaine giggled a little. “I told her you’d probably be coming home first.”

“Thanks.” I kissed her hair and her cheek and pushed her back on the bed.

“Quint,” she whispered, “we’ve got company.”

I hauled her back up and shook my head. Thoughts were difficult to hold onto.

“She hasn’t told me anything yet,” Elaine said, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know how she does it, but she makes me feel like an intruder in my own home. I invite her in, offer her a drink, which she refuses, and she sits there flipping through magazines like she’s in the waiting room at the dentist’s office.”

“Small talk failed you?” I whispered.

“Small talk! This woman wouldn’t respond to a cattle prod. She sees I’m drinking out of
a U of I
coffee mug and she asks me if I went there. I said, ‘No, I never went to college.’ She smiles sympathetically and picks up a copy of
Chicago
magazine and I don’t hear from her again.”

She held my gaze for a moment before adding, “I’d appreciate it if you’d hurry up.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

I changed into jeans and a flannel shirt and splashed cold water on my face. Then I took a good look at myself in the mirror and decided that right now I didn’t look a whole lot better than Frank Griffin. I forced a smile, which turned into a wince. The blow to my head must have injured my smile muscles.

Grim-faced, I marched into the living room, where both women looked at me expectantly. I sat down in the overstuffed chair and immediately found myself fighting the

urge to fall asleep. I pushed forward and placed my elbows on my knees.

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Wainwright?”

“You may call me Paula,” she said, and I hoped she didn’t expect me to thank her for that “Tell me. What happened today? Has Preston’s murderer been identified?”

I glanced at Elaine and she shrugged as if to say “We had to talk about something.”

Then I said, “We think we know who he is, er, was.”

“He confessed?” She sounded relieved. Or was it disappointed?

“Well.” I looked at Paula, then Elaine, then at the wall. “Not exactly.” I cleared my throat. “I believe the police are proceeding on the assumption that he killed Preston. After all, he killed everyone else.”

“Everyone else?”

I buried my face in my hands and just wanted to sleep. Maybe this could wait until tomorrow. “Here, Quint.”

I looked up at Elaine. She was holding a glass of ice water. I took it and resisted the impulse to splash it on my face. I drank some, and the fuzziness in my head dissipated a little. Then I explained what had happened that day. Elaine added the eyewitness commentary when I got to the part where Griffin sent his thug after her.

Paula nodded and listened. When I finished she turned to Elaine. “I’d like that drink now. Scotch. Neat.”

Elaine rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen.

“So,” she said, “this Frank Griffin died before confessing to Preston’s murder.”

I was getting real tired of people pointing that out. “Yes, that’s true, but the police are working on it. They’re trying to find a channeler who’s tuned in to Frank Griffin. Confessions from beyond the grave hold up pretty well in court.”

Paula studied me in a detached manner, like she was examining a lab rat. “I apologize if I seemed to accuse you of not doing your job. I suppose you were lucky to get out of that situation alive.” Paula accepted the drink from Elaine and took a couple of sips.

She continued, “It’s been more than five years since I’ve seen or spoken to Diana. I think the distancing has made me more objective. I also believe that my schooling has made me understand her better so I can almost sympathize with her, in spite of everything.

Before I could kick my brain into gear, Elaine jumped in. “What kind of schooling?”

She smiled at Elaine. “I’m a dissertation away from my PhD in psychology.”

Elaine smiled back and murmured, “That’s a long way away.”

If looks could have killed, Elaine would have been reduced to a puddle of protoplasm on the couch cushion.

I finally remembered how to talk. “What is it that you understand about Diana now that you didn’t before?”

“I can understand her animosity toward me better. She was extremely jealous of me. Probably still is. She perceives me as the woman who stole her lover—her father.” Paula looked away for a moment, then said, “Not a lover in the physical sense, of course. But the crush little girls frequently have on their fathers, well, Diana never outgrew hers.” She turned back to me. “And I suppose I can understand that. Diana’s mother died when she was twelve. Robert’s all she’s had since then.”

What she was telling me you didn’t need an almost PhD to figure out. I had the feeling that Paula hadn’t gone out of her way to make friends with her husband’s daughter. “Has she always had it in for you?” I asked.

Paula nodded. “Oh, she was subtle about it. Diana is a very bright young woman. She did little things that made

clear her disapproval, like showing up at our wedding wearing a black strapless dress on the arm of a man older than her father.”

I smiled and nodded. “That sounds like Diana.”

“It goes deeper than the father-figure complex. Diana is a dangerously disturbed young woman.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll buy the fact that Diana has a lot of unresolved feelings about her father. That’s pretty obvious. And maybe she does go to extraordinary lengths to be noticed, but don’t you think you’re pushing the limits of your schooling, not to mention the limits of slander, when you brand her a psycho?”

Paula smiled and I knew that I’d said exactly what she wanted me to say. I was getting real good at playing straight man. I decided to continue the role and retrieved a line she had dropped earlier in the conversation.

“You said you sympathized with her in spite of what she did. What was that?”

“She tried to kill me.” That line was followed by a dramatic pause.

I lopped it off after about five seconds. “And how, pray tell, did she do that?”

Without looking away from me, Paula reached into her purse and withdrew three white envelopes that spoke louder than any completed dissertation could have.

“These started three months after Robert and I were married,” she said.

I felt that familiar chill I was beginning to associate with Diana Hauser, and the fuzziness in my head vanished. I picked the letters up off the table where Paula had placed them. All three were addressed to her at a Pasadena address. No return. The type wasn’t the same as the type on Preston’s letters—more even and better defined. I removed the contents from the first. It was a news clipping announcing the wedding of Paula Dixon and Robert Wainwright.

The bride’s face had been disfigured with a red fountain pen and blotches of the same red erupted from her mouth and chest.

Elaine peered at it over my shoulder. “Oh, God,” she said. “What did you do?”

Paula sighed. “Nothing at first. That was probably a mistake. But, you see, I suspected it was Diana and, well, she
is
Robert’s daughter. I didn’t want him to have to choose between the two of us.”

I opened the second letter. “That came about three weeks after the first,” she explained.

It was a black-and-white candid of Paula with a bulls-eye drawn on her chest.

“Hey,” I said, “I had one taken of me in the same pose.”

Paula nodded like she wasn’t at all surprised.

The third one was an altogether new approach. It was another candid of Paula, only this time she wasn’t alone. She was seated at an outdoor café with a man approximately her age. She was smiling and leaning toward the man to hear what he was saying.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Paula said. “He’s just a friend.”

I looked at her to see if her expression would reveal a clue as to the truth of that line. Her eyes neither gave her away nor invited me to question her statement. I let it pass.

“Let me guess,” I said. “This is when you shared these letters with Robert.”

Paula nodded. “He was very upset that I hadn’t come to him sooner and admitted that it might be Diana, but he also didn’t want it to go any further. He’s very sensitive about keeping family problems within the family.”

“Any more letters?”

“No.”

“You said she tried to kill you.”

Paula nodded. “It happened about a week after the last

letter.” She explained about their infrequent luncheon dates and how Diana had, for the first time, taken the initiative. “I don’t believe it was coincidence that the restaurant she chose was the one where I’d had my picture taken two weeks earlier.”

Paula went on to describe these luncheons as stressful and how they usually produced a monstrous headache. “Not infrequently I would have to take something for those headaches with coffee and dessert.”

“In front of Diana?”

“Usually,” she nodded. “That most recent lunch was no different.” She drank from her glass of scotch. “As I was driving home I began to feel nauseous. By the time I got home, I knew it was more than my lunch disagreeing with me. I was violently ill and having trouble breathing. I was lucky to make it home. Fortunately, Robert was there to take me to the hospital. The doctors examined my medication and found several aspirin mixed in with my prescription pills.” She paused, then said, “I am extremely allergic to aspirin.”

“Did Diana know that?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. She knew.”

“The pills couldn’t have looked the same? Didn’t you notice a difference when you took them?”

She shrugged. “They were very similar in size and shape. I’ve been taking these pills for years. I don’t examine each one before I put it in my mouth.”

“Did Diana have the opportunity to put them in with your prescription pills?”

Paula nodded. “I was called away to the phone at the restaurant and I left my purse at the table.”

“Was it a legitimate phone call?”

She shook her head. “There was no one on the line. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

“I told Robert my suspicions and that was all he needed.

There are some things even Robert can’t forgive his daughter for. He was outraged. But, again, he didn’t want to drag the family name through the mud. He didn’t want the exposure something like this would have caused. So he disowned Diana—wrote her out of his will, washed his hands of her. Everything.”

“But he tells people he disowned her because she posed in the nude,” I said.

Paula shrugged. “It’s a convenient lie. She needed cash. That was a quick way to get it.”

“Then Preston came along,” I said, nodding to myself. “He likes them young and needy.” I considered her story. “Preston died several days ago. Why wait this long to come forward with this information? Even if you didn’t know about the letters, the means of death had to be disturbingly familiar.”

“It was, but I didn’t know about his death until yesterday.”

“Yesterday? Don’t you watch the news?”

“It’s the dissertation. I don’t have time for much besides that.”

“Did Robert know?”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “Again, it’s the family name he’s intent on protecting. Having a murderess for a daughter doesn’t do much for the reputation of a law firm, even a highly reputable one.”

“Whose clients are the rich and sensitive,” I added.

“That can’t be ignored.”

“Robert sounds like a schmuck,” I said before I could check myself. Then I waved my hands in front of me in denial of what I’d just said. “I’m sorry. It’s the concussion.”

“In ways he is a schmuck,” Paula said, doing her best to imitate my pronunciation, “but in ways everyone is.” She looked from me to Elaine, then back again.

I studied Paula and tried to read beneath the polish and

poise. The fact was that among the three of them—Robert, Diana, and Paula—Paula was the only one who had emerged a winner, even if she had almost died in the process. I wondered just how far she’d be willing to go just to make her marriage work. Maybe she figured getting her stomach pumped wasn’t too high a price to pay to get Diana out of her life. Maybe she’d even enjoy the metaphor.

“Were you aware that your reaction to aspirin would be so severe?” I asked Paula.

“Oh, yes,” she responded quickly, as if anticipating the question. “When I was in college, the infirmary accidently gave me aspirin. I was in a coma for two days. The doctors told me if Robert hadn’t come home early that day after Diana and I had lunch, well, I probably would have died.” She smiled and crossed her arms. “That would have been a rather high price for me to pay just to make a statement against my stepdaughter, don’t you think?”