A Bitch Called Hope (8 page)

At first look her early life seemed as uneventful as her current life, excepting one little factoid. She was expelled from Saint Mary’s her freshman year and, according to Sarge, that would’ve been the year she claimed having a sexual relationship with Bill Pike. How had she met Bill in the first place? The one connection, and it was a beaut, was Bill’s cousin and business partner, Father McMahon. He happened to be Saint Mary’s pastor. But when she called Saint Mary’s the staff made it clear as clear Lennox wasn’t going to get any details of Alice’s expulsion without a court order.

And setting up an interview with Alice proved nearly as hard. Alice told Lennox no way was she going to cooperate in the investigation if it meant it would help the Pike family. Lennox pressed her case. Alice hung up.

Best chance for finding an unwilling witness at home? Wake them up. Lennox figured Alice for a late riser. She worked nights for one thing, and her classes were all scheduled in the afternoon.

So December 7th at nine in the a.m. Lennox ducked in the lobby door of the Cornerstone Apartments behind a dog-walker, rode the mirrored elevator up five floors to Alice’s apartment, walked down the carpeted hallway. The place smelled like the inside of a new car. Lennox would’ve guessed something older and funkier for Alice and her boyfriend. The carpet muffled the sound of the all-Spanish station behind an apartment door. Farther down the hall, someone practiced scales on the piano. There was no sound coming from Apartment 509, the abode of Alice Stapely and Gabe Makem.

After four minutes of persistent knocking, Lennox heard a woman’s voice say, “Give me a sec, babe.”

Alice cracked the door the width of the security chain, revealing a bleary eye, a flash of bare leg, a black tee shirt.

“Oh,” she said the way you do when you’re faced with a total stranger.

Lennox thrust a to-go cup up to the space allowed by the security chain. “I figured you for a mocha triple espresso,” she said. “Was I close?”

“Who are you?” Alice said.

“A friend. Leastways I could be if you give me half a chance.”

The bleary eye narrowed suspiciously. “You’re that detective working for Bill’s wife.”

“I heard you got a raw deal. Maybe I can help.”

Alice closed the door on Lennox’s face.

“I used to be a cop,” Lennox said through the door.

A brown-haired woman in a raincoat stepped out of the apartment next door.

Lennox changed strategy, raised her voice. “I’m not going away.”

The brown-haired woman locked her door, shot Lennox a puzzled look before she headed towards the elevator.

“I’ve got a good idea why Bill Pike gave you the ten thousand dollars.” Lennox’s voice near echoed down the long hallway. Apparently that did the trick. The chain slipped off and Alice opened the door.

Quiet girl, steady worker, the only extraordinary thing about Alice was her looks. She was tall, the same height as Priscilla. Bill Pike seemed to have a thing for tall, leggy brunettes, difference being while Priscilla was about four inches wide, the only word for Alice was voluptuous.

“You trying to get me evicted?” she said.

Her full breasts perched high in the Tex Mundi tee shirt she was wearing. Her thighs were curvy. Her hair a dark mass of curls falling past her shoulders.

“We need to talk,” Lennox said.

“Just what I need,” Alice muttered. “Another person sticking their nose up my life.” She left the door half opened.

Lennox followed her into a studio apartment. Large uncurtained windows dominated two walls of the room. One direction took in a half-finished glass high-rise, the other direction overlooked a transient hotel. A large drafting table covered with sketches and two ladder-back chairs furnished the room. Lennox glimpsed an unmade bed behind a paisley curtain. A stack of pizza boxes balanced over one of the burners on the stove.

Alice pulled a pair of jeans from the chair back, wiggled into them. “Gabe went to the market. He’ll be home any minute,” she said. “If we’re not out of here before he gets back, say you’re my friend from school.” She yanked a black sweater out of the closet and pulled it over her head. “Tell him statistics class.” She pulled on socks and black work boots.

“Doesn’t Gabe know about Bill Pike?” Lennox said.

“He does now.” She grabbed a wool jacket. “Just the same, I don’t need to remind him. C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

Taking the stairs down five flights, not bothering to brush her hair, this whole business with Bill Pike must not have sat well with her boyfriend.

“Where are we going?” Lennox said.

“You want to be my friend?” Alice said. “Take me to breakfast.”

Lennox’s car was parked around the corner. Alice slumped low until they cleared the neighborhood.

“Where do you want to go?” Lennox said.

“Surprise me,” Alice mumbled.

“Cup and Saucer?”

Alice straightened in her seat. “Yeah, fine,” she said.

A delivery truck sprayed water across Lennox’s windshield. She asked, “How did you know Bill?”

Alice clamped her arms across her chest, stuck out her chin. “I already told the cops, Bill gave me that money straight up.”

The light greened and Lennox turned left off of Alder onto Fourth Avenue. “I understand you had a relationship with Bill when you were young,” Lennox said.

“Relationship!” Alice snorted. “That’s what you people call it when a middle-aged guy seduces a fourteen-year-old girl? Tell Fergusen he can go relationship himself.”

Nice Mr. Pike was relationshipping a fourteen-year-old and what really uncorked Lennox was the mystery person hired to make it go away. What did that say about Lennox? She halted her arm across Alice’s midsection. “Who is Fergusen?”

“He’s the Pikes’ lawyer.” Alice’s eyes narrowed. “How come you don’t know that?”

“I work for Delia Pike’s defense team,” Lennox said. “Bowersox, Kline and Hansen.”

Alice’s mouth stretched into a knowing grin. “Then Bill’s old lady has a different lawyer threatening me.”

“Different?” Lennox said. Then stomped on the brake microseconds before rear-ending the car in front of them. The light turned yellow.

Alice thrust her hand into an enormous messenger bag purse.

“See?” Alice waved Chuck Fergusen’s business card under Lennox’s nose. Fergusen’s firm, Delancy and Firth, was known for being conniving, slimy bastards. It appeared that Lady Pike was swimming with the sharks. Was she simply protecting her financial interests, or was it bigger than that?

You’ll be working for the defense
, Tommy had said. At the time, Lennox had been feeling like the champion of the innocent, but how could Delia possibly think that Alice walked into her house for the first time and somehow between warming up the canapés and pouring champagne she went into Bill’s office, cracked his safe and removed ten thousand dollars? And what about Bill? Nice Mr. Pike? It was one thing to have an affair. Another thing to rape a kid.

Lennox Cooper, champion of the innocent.

Lennox crossed the Fremont Bridge to the east side, past Emanuel Hospital, past barbecue shacks and old houses broken into apartments, bicycles chained to their porch railings. Alice stuck out her chin. “He was my coach. Back then I thought I loved him. He made me feel special.” She blushed. “God, did I just say special? Okay, so I’m an idiot.”

If Lennox had to put money on it, she’d bet Alice was on the level. They reached Killingsworth and Lennox sighted a guy pulling out of a two-hour parking space a half block from the Cup and Saucer, a Christmas miracle in this part of town. Alice twisted in her seat to unhook her seat belt.

“Grab the umbrella,” Lennox said. “You can tell me what happened over breakfast.”

By the time their eggs benedict came, Lennox learned that Alice never considered reconnecting with Bill Pike, not until she saw the Pike Christmas party on Mina’s catering roster for December.

“When I finally saw him he wouldn’t look me in the eye.” She crushed the napkin in her fist. “I mean, he had to have looked at me, recognized me, right? Am I that pathetic?”

Alice shook her head. Her dark curls brushed against her face and she started talking again. She told Lennox how Bill had taken her into his study before the party got rolling. Alice had sat across the desk from him. She remembered hearing Sinatra singing over the sound system from the living room.

“You know how you stare at the dashboard?” she said. “There’s a poor guy on the side of the road, holding the cardboard sign and the last thing you want to do is make eye contact? I was that poor guy. Bill’s telling me he wants to help, but he won’t look at me. Not even when he hands me the money.”

“He was ashamed,” Lennox said. He had stolen Alice’s girlhood. He should’ve poisoned his own self.

Alice was the one who looked shamed. “He gave me that ten thousand just to get rid of me.” Then she shrugged. “Ten thousand, I would’ve figured I’d need a wheelbarrow to carry that much money, but I could hold it in two hands.” Still, she said, it was a whole lot of money; she could pay off her car, help Gabe with his stuff. Ten thousand— she could finish school; she only had a year and a half left. Grad school was the moon, but if she kept working part-time, maybe she’d get a scholarship.

But then Bill died. And the cops found the money in the bottom of her backpack. They questioned her forever. When they finally let her go, they kept the money. In custody, they said. She didn’t even have enough for bus fare. Gabe wouldn’t pick up on his cell. She had to call a cab, stop at an ATM to pay for it.

“Gabe used to tell me I was his angel. Now he’s shitty all the time.” Tears pooled in her eyes. One broke and ran down her cheek.

Lennox sipped her coffee while Alice got a hold of herself. “Why did you leave Saint Mary’s?” she said.

Alice wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “You mean why was I kicked out? I confessed my sins. And this time I got the nerve to confess about me and Bill. Father Mac, he was pretty nice about it, say your rosary, la-la-la, go and sin no more. Next thing I know, Mom gets a call from the school, they’ve found stolen property in my locker.”

Alice blew her nose into her crushed napkin. Lennox pulled a handful of tissues from her bag.

“Maybe I’m an idiot, but I’ve never ripped off anybody in my life,” Alice said. “I’m the injured party here, but Fergusen says the only way they won’t press charges is if I surrender rights to the ten thousand. Otherwise I’ll be charged with theft and slander.”

Something shifted in Alice and all that hurt turned hard. She slapped the tears from her cheeks and looked steadily at Lennox.

“You said you can help? Get me my money and get your client off my back.”

Chapter 11

Lennox returned Alice to her apartment, turned right and drove to northwest Portland. Back when Lennox was in grade school, the northwest neighborhood was populated with longshoremen, electricians and steel workers: hard-working, hard-drinking folks. It had been that way for as long as there had been that kind of work. Bill Pike started investing in small apartment complexes back in the late sixties. Places with
good bones
as he liked to put it, but in bad neighborhoods. The banks wouldn’t go for it, Delia recalled, so Bill recruited his cousin, Father Mac. They pooled the money their grandmother had left them. Bill used his own crew to replace the dry rot and plaster. Ten years later, Father Mac needed the money for a deal in the suburbs and Bill bought him out.

About the same time, artisans began moving into the neighborhood. They opened little shops that sold felt hats and beaded dresses. Twenty-third Avenue turned into Trendy-third as a mob of shoppers trolled the shops looking to buy Italian pottery and eyeglass frames. Doctors and lawyers swooped in and bought the run-down Victorian homes and turned them into gingerbread palaces. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, the Alphabet District from Upshur to Ankeny gentrified and Bill was charging quadruple the rent.

Lennox had to think the priest was a little cheesed off losing out on the big payday. But according to Ham, a whole lot of deals went down over the years between those two. Who was to say how the balance of resentment tallied? Ham was looking into it.

Lennox? She was just trying to find a parking spot. With the Christmas crush, she was lucky a space opened twelve blocks from the Mirabella, a twenty-plex Bill Pike owned and his younger son, Scott, lived in for free. Lennox wondered how that had sat between the two men. Had Bill been disappointed that his son wasn’t more successful? Had Scott been defensive?

There were a whole lot of possibilities for friction.

She walked past little shops outlined in Christmas lights with cutie-pie names like Salvador Molly’s and Bee and Thistle until she got to the Mirabella, a sweet-looking brick two-story horseshoed around a fountain and ornamental garden.

It was one in the afternoon when Priscilla answered the door dressed to go out. She had a way of tilting her head and peering through her lashes that looked rehearsed. Lennox verified that Priscilla had been living with Scott for a year and a half. What Priscilla had failed to mention was that Bill had been paying her tuition at Portland Community College the last year.

“Sorry,” Priscilla said. “Scott’s not here. He left early.”

Irritation jangled along Lennox’s nerves. “We had an appointment.”

Priscilla opened her eyes wider. “Something came up. Anyway, you’re not a cop and we don’t have to tell you anything.”

If Lennox still was a cop, she’d have both of their breakfasts. Lennox didn’t even try to keep the mad out of her voice. “What about Scott trying to help his poor, incarcerated mother?” she said.

Priscilla screwed her mouth in a “whatever” and shrugged a bony shoulder. “I seriously doubt that anything he could say would help Mrs. P at all.”

“Do you have a minute?” Lennox asked. “I had a couple of things I wanted to ask you about.” Biggest question being who had Priscilla been angling for—Scott or his father? And if it was Scott all along, would she have killed the old man so Scott would inherit?

Priscilla said, “This isn’t really a good time. I have a lot of errands.”