A Bitch Called Hope (7 page)

Lennox felt sick to her stomach, luck slipping out from under her. She watched Delia across the plastic table, positively aglow with motive. Texas divorce, hell! This was a cop’s wet dream. In Lennox’s business, ignorance is not bliss; ignorance is miserable failure. She got the when, where and how from Delia. Delia’s final blow was telling Lennox how her Catholicism prevented her from marrying her beloved doctor while Bill was alive.

By the time Lennox left the jail it was five in the evening, an hour past sunset. Water had collected in the low spots in the sidewalk. She walked past an older man standing in the gloom, his hands shoved in the pockets of his raincoat. He was ferociously thin, you could cut yourself on his cheekbones. His build, his ramrod posture sparked recognition. She stopped and looked at him closer.

“Doctor Engstrom,” she said.

He startled and took a step back. “Yes?” he said.

Chapter 9

That evening Lennox went over the witness list with Aurora over the phone. By her third cup of tea, Lennox had constructed an “A” list, witnesses who had some closer connection and motive. It was a short list: the Pike boys, Father McMahon, Priscilla, a city councilwoman, two rival contractors. Lennox added Doctor E to that list. Everyone else fell to the “B” list. Aurora identified thirty of the guests as casual to good friends, nineteen guests she was unsure of, assumed they were business associates.

Investigation is all about numbers. It took Lennox ten very long days to interview all the witnesses on the list. Ninety percent of them ranged from their late fifties to their mid-seventies. The women looked like they divided their days between the spa and the Pilates studio, their men tan from golf links in some distant and sunny land. Many of them had taken pictures of the party on their smart phones which they willingly gave to Lennox. One-hundred-nine pictures altogether.

Eight of the witnesses asked Lennox for a date. Every last one of them was married.

According to the pharmacy, Bill picked up his newest prescription inhaler on November 26. Other than the family, Geri Davis, the councilwoman, and Lee Fanning, a finish carpenter, had visited the Pikes at their home since Bill renewed his prescription.

Boil it down, the family, Priscilla, Bill’s cousin Father Mac, and the two sons, Dan and Scott, had access to the Pike home. Add to that Doctor E, the councilwoman, and the carpenter, and what you had was the sum total of people who could’ve rigged the inhaler and murdered Bill.

When Lennox finished her interviews she drove to the attorney’s office and got the keys to the Pike homestead. It was ten at night and Kline had looked in need of a shave. “Why do you want to go out there?” Kline said.

“I know the guys who investigated the murder. I’m more experienced, more thorough.”

She got the keys, the security code and a warning not to bother the older son, Dan, who was staying at the house.

The following morning Lennox let herself in and disarmed the security system. In her pocket was a small tube of glue and a prescription label she cooked up on her computer before coming over.

The house was so quiet she could hear the plants breathe. She had every right to be in the house, she did, so why did she feel so furtive? Going through someone else’s things was what she did for a living. What was different this time was she knew these people. She clattered across the foyer, turned into the living room and climbed the stairs. Lennox was twelve the last time she had been upstairs.

The stairs opened onto a wide hallway with white woodwork and pale yellow striped wallpaper. Lennox’s footsteps were muffled in the thick Persian runner that ran down the center of the hall. She pulled on gloves. The first door at the top of the stairs was Scott’s old room. She remembered it was jammed with action figures, Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joes. Now it was stripped of furniture and made into a yoga room. Next door to the yoga room was the guest bath. The Pikes had kept the original mint green and black tile work. This bathroom had been occupied the night Aurora wandered into the master bedroom and discovered Bill’s body.

She peeked inside the next room. A faint smell of limes and soap. Dan’s room. Dan was sixteen to her twelve the last time she got a look at his room. Sixteen, it seemed to her back then, was sexy and mysterious and she couldn’t wait to get there. Back then she had snuck upstairs and looked in Dan’s room. She remembered everything was black. Black walls, black sheets on his unmade bed, posters of Sid Vicious and Bob Marley on the walls. When they had gone home that night she asked Aurora if she could paint her room black. Absolutely not. Aurora never did budge on that one.

Now Dan’s room had the same pale yellow wallpaper as the hallway. The queen-sized bed stood unmade, a blue flower print comforter nearly off the bed, a spy novel twisted in the sheets. Two more novels sat atop a small desk in the corner of the room. Other than his scent this was a completely anonymous room. Even his books were something you’d pick up in an airport kiosk.

What would she do if he caught her snooping through his stuff?

Lennox swallowed that thought and opened the drawers of a mission style dresser. A neat stack of boxers, undershirts, black socks balled up. Underneath the socks lay a composition book with a black and white speckled cover. She opened the book. The first page contained numbers jotted in pencil and arrows pointing to other numbers. The next page had more numbers. She photographed both pages. The rest of the book was blank.

In the closet Dan’s designer suit peeked beneath a dry cleaner’s bag. More suits, trousers, and shirts in dry cleaning bags from a Fashion Cleaners in Chicago. Several shirts hung on the clothes rod with their high-end price tags dangling from the sleeves. What looked like an expensive pair of loafers, nice, soft slip-ons she’d swear were handmade, a couple pairs of athletic shoes and a pair of hiking boots stood on the closet floor. All together a fortune’s worth of clothes.

Lennox checked under the mattress. Nothing. Among the spent tissues in the wastepaper basket Lennox found four receipts from a Portland department store and an outdoor store on a Visa card ending in the numbers 4637. Lennox smoothed them flat and took pictures of them. A boarding pass from Chicago on Alaska Airlines dated last weekend and a receipt from Chase Bank for forty-five hundred seventy dollars charged on a MasterCard, numbers ending in 2331. Evidently Dan had flown back to Chicago two days after his mother was indicted and paid down a whopper of a bill. Lennox made a note to ask Ham about it, then took pictures. Fluffed the trash back to its original state.

Lennox opened the remaining doors off the hallway. On the other side of the hall, Delia’s office. Tommy and his gang had had their way with it. The desk drawers had been emptied, her computer impounded. They left the monitor, a dainty black flat screen, on her desk. Lennox made a note to ask Delia whether she kept a journal or a calendar. And what she kept on her computer.

Finally Lennox opened the door to the master bedroom. You could fit Lennox’s entire house inside the room and still have space left over. Everything in the room was off-white: the walls, the upholstery, the furniture, the carpet. The only color came from enormous paintings, five of them all together, that looked to Lennox like giant blocks of color. Red, orange, yellow, blue, and green. In a gallery they might have seemed like so what, but here in this giant white room they worked.

The carpet was vacuumed in neat lines. Lennox went to the dresser and opened the top drawer. Bill’s black socks rolled in balls in the top drawer next to a plastic change tray. Four dollars’ worth of quarters, an empty money clip, a Blazers ticket from late November. According to discovery this was the drawer where he had kept his inhaler. The other drawers were filled with clothes and nothing else.

Lennox moved to the walk-in closet. Delia’s perfume floated out into the room. On the hangers and tossed on the shelves were a jumble of clothes as if every night she wadded up her clothing and threw it at her closet. Dresses and jackets clung for their lives to their hangers. The only things that were properly buttoned and hung were under dry cleaning bags.

Just as Delia had said, a long narrow door ran alongside a bank of shelves. There was no knob or pull on the door; you simply pushed in and it released. It wasn’t exactly a secret cupboard, but it would do. How could anyone outside the family have ever known of its existence? Lennox stood inside Delia’s closet, breathing her scent, playing with the door catch. The longer she thought about it the more it seemed that only the family could have pulled off Bill’s murder.

The king-sized bed stood neatly made up.

Bill had fallen by the foot of the bed and died.

He’d had quite a night of it. Early on he had run into Alice Stapely. According to Sarge, just at the sight of Alice he had opened his safe and
helped
her to the tune of ten thousand bucks. Was that when he started drinking hard? The autopsy pegged his alcohol level at .115. Drinking hard would explain why he played kiss-face with his son’s girlfriend. He drank and drank until his blood alcohol was right up there on tilt. Did all the drinking cause him to be short of breath? It could’ve happened that when he used his inhaler, the insulin made him dizzy. Then he took another pull of the inhaler, and this one stopped his heart. He fell to the foot of the bed.

The imprint of his body had been erased by the vacuum tracks, long straight rows like a freshly cut lawn. Bill. A jolly, generous man, a man who appeared to have been guilty of bad things, a man whose weaknesses contributed to his death. His family was already anticipating the wealth he had created. Did anyone miss him?

Bill and Delia’s bathroom was predictable, huge and luxurious. His and hers vessel sinks made from burnished metal, a glass shower, quartz counters, a quartz Jacuzzi, yada yada.

Lennox opened the top drawer beneath Delia’s sink. A dozen lipsticks rolled about amongst the eyeliner pencils, mascara tubes and emery boards. The lipstick smudge on Bill’s inhaler the police lab identified as Dior’s
Brown Sugar.
There were two other tubes of the same color. One of them was nearly gone. Lennox noted the other colors. She closed the drawer and went downstairs.

A plate, fork and a glass residing in the sink, gas and insurance bills lying on the kitchen counter. The oil painting of the family that hung over the breakfront had been taken down. Lennox walked down the hall to Bill’s office. The photograph of Bill and Dan she’d noticed at the funeral was gone. It seemed odd for a grieving widow to remove all trace of her mate.

Bill’s office was stripped of computer and calendar. All the plaques, the team photographs, the memorabilia were gone. She went through every drawer in his desk, then pulled the drawers out and looked underneath them, looked into the cavities they made. What was left of Bill’s office was an assortment of supplies you could find in any office supply store. She made another note to ask Sarge what if any of Bill’s papers were in the evidence locker. Beneath a floor mat by the desk was Bill’s floor safe. The door looked about one foot square. She lifted the panel and tried the door. It was locked, of course. She needed to find out from Delia what Bill kept in the safe.

Lennox peeled off her gloves and stuffed them in the back pocket of her jeans and looked at her watch. Eleven forty-five. She’d been in the house three hours.

Lennox was locking the front door when a dark blue Cadillac Escalade SUV drove up followed by white Chevy pickup. Dan Pike parked the Escalade and got out, his look both puzzled and happy. It was probably what she looked like, too, only substitute embarrassed for puzzled.

“Hey there,” he said.

“Your mother gave me permission to take a look at the house,” she said. Would he realize she’d been in his room? That she’d been through his trash?

Dan’s attention strayed to the Chevy. He motioned to the driver. The driver’s door opened and out stepped John Resnick. Another man stepped down from the passenger side. Emory Zimm, dark with a long torso and short legs. The felonious parking attendants from the party. At no time were they in the house the night of the party or any other night— Lennox had checked.

“Give me a sec,” Dan said. He opened the door of the Escalade and leaned in. The garage door on the far right levered upwards. Dan motioned to the two guys and they started loading lumber from the garage into their truck.

“Brazilian Cherry,” Dan said. “It’s too valuable to keep on the site. I heard Mom hired you. That’s cool.”

“Do these guys work for you?”

“The Altar Boys?” Dan said. “They’re Mac’s guys.” Dan shrugged. “They’re hard workers.”

She watched the two men load the pickup. Resnick seemed determined to avoid eye contact.

“Look, off the subject, but you want to go out for dinner tonight?” Dan said.

Her twelve-year-old self was shouting yes, yes, yes! Her thirty-eight-year-old self was clucking big time. What the hell, hadn’t she learned anything?

She wanted to ask for a rain check. Would that sound too eager? Face it: she was no good with “no.” But she made herself answer in the negative. “I can’t,” she said. “Not while I’m working for your mother.”

Chapter 10

Start with the hapless caterer, Alice Stapely. It must have been the very devil trying to explain to the cops why she was carrying ten thousand cash in her backpack the night of Bill’s murder. How would Tommy have played it back at the police station? He would have been flirty, used plenty of eye contact, nodded in that sympathetic way of his.

Tommy had probably gained every secret Alice possessed in short of an hour. Four hours of interview? He had her entire genome sequence. But if Tommy could persuade Alice to confess to an affair with Bill Pike, then surely Lennox could do the same.

Her background check showed Alice Stapely led a remarkably unremarkable life. She lived with her boyfriend, Gabe Makem, the redheaded waiter from the party. She worked two jobs: bartending four nights a week at the Blue Note and catering for Mina’s Parties two nights. She was a steady worker, rare for people who clock in at suppertime and don’t get home until three or four in the morning. Both bosses claimed she was a quiet girl and the customers liked her. During the day, Alice took business courses at the community college. Clean driving record, an okay credit score.