Dead Man Talking (20 page)

Why?

Let me count the ways.

I was pissed at Sammi for being a royal pain, and specifically for ruining that new gold cotton tunic of mine and bruising my neck.

I was pissed at Quinn for
not
calling, and pissed at my parents
for
calling, especially my dad, who, as long as he was at it, left one message asking if everything was OK and another saying he really would like to see me one of these days.

I was pissed about being stuck restoring a cemetery when I should have been working on proving that an upstanding guy like Jefferson Lamar shouldn’t have had to die in prison while whoever framed him sat back to laugh about it.

While I was at it, I might as well admit that I was plenty pissed at the universe in general, too, for allowing a kid like Vera Blaine to get murdered in a dumpy motel while she was wearing jelly bracelets.

W
hen he was young, Robert Oates was a tough-talking punk who made a name for himself on the Cleveland streets by stealing cars and overseeing a couple small-time heists. He spent the better part of his formative years in and out of a variety of boys’ homes, reform schools, and jails, and by the time he was twenty-four, he graduated to bigger and better things. He went out to Nevada, where he earned the Reno nickname, and worked as an enforcer for a variety of crime bosses. By all accounts, he had a vicious streak, and he added hard drinking, heavy gambling, and high living to his resume. It’s no surprise that he made plenty of enemies, or that he was forced to come back to the city of his birth when things got a little too hot for him out west.

By the time he masterminded the bank job that got him sent to Central State, he was middle-aged and desperate for a big score. The bomb he said he had when he stuck up that bank was his idea of a joke. Nobody was laughing.

All this information I’d found online about Reno Bob went through my head as I drove through the suburbs west of Cleveland, looking for the address he had given me when we talked on the phone. I found it, finally, down a quiet side street in Parma, a blue-collar sort of place filled with mom-and-pop stores, churches, bars, and tiny homes.

Reno’s house was a small, neat bungalow with white aluminum siding, blue shutters, and a shade tree on the front lawn. He told me that if I rang the bell—I did—and he didn’t answer—he didn’t—he’d be over at the park across the street, so I moved my car over there, parked in a newly blacktopped lot, and walked past a wooden swing set and a sandbox where someone had left a flattened spare tire.

I’d like to say I wasn’t nervous, but let’s be frank: I’d heard so many bad things about Reno and his temper, my knees were knocking together. They kept it up, too, right until I saw that the only other person in the park was a tiny old man wearing baggy denim shorts, a green and yellow Hawaiian print shirt, and enormous tortoise-shell glasses. Temper or not, if this was Reno Bob, I knew I could take him.

He didn’t look at me when I walked up to him. He was busy working on the canvas he had set up on an easel in front of him.

He was painting a picture of the maple tree about thirty feet from where we stood. The painting included the small lake beyond and the couple ducks and Canada geese that floated by. Art history degree aside, I’m not an expert, but I knew the painting was better than just good, even though the old guy’s hands shook with every stroke.

I waited until he finished adding the last bits of green to the leaves on the tree. “Reno? I’m Pepper.”

“Nobody’s called me Reno in a long time.” When he finally turned to look at me, I saw that his face was as lined as an old blanket. Reno’s arms were stick-skinny and his knees were knobby. He was wearing a brand-spanking-new pair of Nikes that were so clean and white, they made my eyes hurt. “You said you wanted to see me. You didn’t say what you wanted.”

Of course, I expected him to ask—that was the whole point—but I shrugged like I wasn’t sure. “I’ll bet plenty of people want to meet you and talk to you.”

“About the old days?” Reno wiped his hands on a rag he pulled out of his pocket and got to work cleaning up his painting supplies. “Not so much anymore. I used to have a following, you know.”

I saw my opportunity and jumped on it. “Back when
you tried to rob that bank with the bomb.” I nodded. “I hear back then, you were like a god or something.”

Behind his glasses, Reno’s eyes glittered. “They all wanted to interview me, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace and even that other guy, that Geraldo. Oh yeah!” He lifted the canvas off the easel. It was almost as big as him, but he didn’t have any trouble slipping it into a wooden carrier. “I was something, all right. They all came down to Central State to talk to me. Even got a couple fellows visiting from Hollywood. They wanted to make a movie about me, you know.”

“Until Jefferson Lamar made sure your visitors were cut off and you were treated just like any other prisoner.”

His hands stilled over his art supplies, and Reno shot a look over his shoulder at me. “You’re too young to know about all that.”

“But not too young to know you must have been plenty mad.”

“You think?” He got back to work, stowing his brushes and his tubes of paint in a plastic carryall. “That was a long time ago.”

“And you don’t hold any of it against Warden Lamar?”

Reno scratched a finger behind his ear. “Warden’s been dead for a lot of years. What happened to him, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It might. Maybe to his wife. She thinks he was innocent.”

“What else is a wife going to say? She heard the evidence. Same as we all did. She knows he’s guilty, she just won’t admit it to herself.”

“And if the warden was framed?”

He was done packing his supplies, so Reno turned and gave me his full attention. “Is that what the widow
thinks? Did she ask you to come here and talk to me about it? Or is this just something you think?”

“Actually, it’s something I know.”

“Really?” He laughed, then coughed. There was a pack of Camels in his pocket, and he thumped one out, lit it, and took a drag. “Back at Central State, that was back in the day when I hated a lot of people.” The words hissed out of him along with a long stream of nasty smoke that I stepped aside to avoid. “I was angry all the time, you know? I’ve learned to channel my energy. Now, I paint. And I stop and smell the flowers.”

“But back in the day . . .”

“Back in the day . . .” He coughed again and spat on the ground. “I didn’t hate nobody as much as I hated Lamar. He thought he could turn Central State into some kind of boot camp. You know, reform everybody. Guess he learned his lesson, huh?”

“Because somebody framed him and he got a taste of his own prison medicine?”

“If that’s what you think.” Reno picked up the crate he’d put his canvas in and hauled it to the blue Prism parked three spaces from my Mustang. I could have been a sport and helped him with the rest of his supplies, but I was afraid if I did, it would give him an excuse to leave. So instead, I waited for him to stow the canvas, then come all the way back.

By the time he did, he was breathing hard.

And I was ready for him.

“If Lamar was framed for Vera Blaine’s murder, who do you think did it?” I asked.

He lit another cigarette. He blew out another stream of smoke. “You think I had something to do with it.”

“I’m talking to everyone I can. You’re one of the people who might have done it.”

“You’re right. I might have.” Reno Bob hoisted the
carryall into his arms, his expression as serene as that painting of the tree and those ducks on the pond. “But if that’s true, then you got a hell of a lot of nerve coming here and talking to me.” He turned toward the parking lot. “You could be putting yourself in a lot of danger.”

Was that a nice, friendly warning?

Or a threat?

Since it was the last thing Reno Bob said to me before he got in his car and drove away, I thought about it all the way home. Even then, I still wasn’t certain, not when I got out of the car, slung my purse over my shoulder, and headed for my apartment.

I was still thinking about it when a man jumped out of the alley behind my building, grabbed me, and put a knife to my throat.

12

“
Y
ou’re sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, Y bitch.”

The man’s words scraped against my ear. The blade of his knife nicked my skin. I felt a wet, warm drop on my neck, and I didn’t have to think twice to know what it was.

Blood.

My blood.

I would have gulped, but I was afraid if I did, my throat would end up even closer to that knife blade.

One of my attacker’s arms was around me, and he yanked me back so fast, my head snapped. “Stay out of it,” he said.

And what did I do? Well, that’s the weird thing, and I guess it means I’ve been in the private investigation business a little too long. Instead of being scared out of my mind like any normal person would be, I was busy trying to think if I’d ever heard his voice before.

I couldn’t place it, and a second after I realized it, I also knew it didn’t matter.

What did matter, see, was me getting out of this little predicament alive.

As far as I could tell, the only way to do that was to take matters into my own hands.

I am not athletic, but remember, I had once taken years of dance lessons. I liked the costumes and, of course, the spotlight, but I could never keep the routines straight, and I hated to practice. Poor Mademoiselle Adrienne, my dance instructor, had despaired of me. Yet somehow, in this the most unlikely of moments, it all came rushing back. In one quick movement (more lurch than
en avant
), I shot forward just enough to give myself a little momentum, then stepped back with that little ballon bounce Mademoiselle always wanted from me and never got, and slammed my foot against my attacker’s instep. He was caught off guard just long enough to loosen his hold, and when he did, I darted forward, spun around with as much pizzazz as if I was executing an allegro, slipped my purse from my shoulder, and swung. Hard.

Thank goodness for that box we’d snarfed out of the Team One picnic basket. It was nice and hard, and the one side that wasn’t rotted away had a pointy corner. The guy was wearing a ski mask so there was no way I could see his face. I could, however, watch his eyes spin when I hit him in the side of the head.

He grunted a curse, and I took off like a ballerina bat out of hell. I wasn’t dumb enough to stop and try to unlock the door into my apartment building. Instead, I raced straight ahead to the corner where my street intersected with Mayfield Road, the heart of Cleveland’s Little Italy neighborhood. It was a beautiful Thursday evening in the middle of the summer, and I knew the
restaurants and bars up and down the street would be busy with tourists and diners. There was safety in numbers, and feeling safer in an area where bistro tables lined the sidewalks and people all around me chatted and sipped wine, I stopped long enough to look over my shoulder.

There was no sign of the man with the knife.

That was the coda of my little performance.

Mademoiselle Adrienne would have been proud.

 

T
he next morning I had a meeting with Ella at Garden View to discuss the art show set up, and I got there early. I sat at my desk, thinking about what I’d been thinking about all night: Who had I offended? I pulled out a yellow legal pad and wrote down my theories while I fingered the tiny round bandage I’d stuck on my neck to hide the nick from the attacker’s knife. Between him and Sammi, my neck looked like I worked the women’s wrestling circuit.

I wrote that at the top of page one.

That was the heading I scribbled on page two.

I wrote that on page three, then crossed out the line about where the box was hidden, just in case somebody who might be after the coin got a look at my legal pad.

Maybe not.

I tore page four from the pad, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it in the wastebasket. At the same time, I stifled a yarn.

In spite of the heroic (not to mention artistic) stand I’d taken against that knife-wielding creep, I’d spent most of the night too wired to sleep and feeling like a victim. Believe me, I didn’t like it one bit. Helpless and frightened does not look good on me. But facts are facts, and the fact is, once I was safely home, I checked three times to make sure my door was locked. I pushed my couch up against it so nobody could kick it down and get to me. I slept with one eye open. And the lights on. And the blinds shut. And the curtains closed.