Dead Man Talking (9 page)

Good thing we were done filming for the week. Even
public television viewers shouldn’t have to see me like that. It was even better that Quinn had been assigned to a new high-profile case. (A city councilman, a dead stripper . . . need I say more?) He was going to be plenty busy for a while, and that meant we wouldn’t be seeing each other any time soon. I was too exhausted for seduction.

Which didn’t mean I was going to sit back and do nothing. I promised myself a deep conditioning when I got home, and on Saturday afternoon, I headed out to talk to Helen Lamar.

Within twenty minutes of leaving my apartment, I was in the city’s Tremont neighborhood. It was the area I’d mentioned to Sammi earlier that week, and as I cruised around looking for the address listed in the phone book, I saw some of the boutiques I’d talked about and she’d ignored. Not that I was taking that personally or anything. If the girl wanted to turn her back on a career in fashion and be a batterer on house arrest for the rest of her life, that was her business.

Mine was getting to the bottom of Jefferson Lamar’s mystery, and with that in mind, I concentrated on my driving. Tremont is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, and every once in a while, somebody gets it into their head to revitalize it. This was one of those times. Great boutiques stood side by side with trendy restaurants and bars, abandoned buildings, brand-spanking-new condos, and hundred-year-old homes that ranged from Victorian mansions to workers’ cottages.

Helen Lamar lived not far from Lincoln Park, the couple blocks’ worth of greenery that is the center of the neighborhood. Her house was one of those blue-collar cottages, small and neat, with steps that led up to a porch that ran along the side of the house. The yard was tiny and immaculate. It was surrounded by a cyclone fence
that had been recently painted. The shiny silver made my eyes hurt. Squinting, I pushed open the gate and stepped onto a slate walk bordered by red roses and white petunias.

I’d already decided what I was going to say to Helen, so when a tiny woman with cropped gray hair and wearing white shorts, an orange T-shirt, and yellow flip flops opened the door, I was ready for her. I’d brought along one of the five hundred business cards Ella had made for me when I started my job at Garden View. Since I didn’t usually want anyone to know where I worked, I had plenty, so I didn’t mind giving one away. Besides, I was hoping the card made me look official.
I handed one to Helen. Her eyes were a soft blue, and she looked from the card to me a little uncertainly. “I’m not interested in a burial plot, if that’s what you’re selling. I’ve already got my plot. At—”

“Monroe Street. Yes, I know.”

The uncertainty in her eyes shifted to wariness. As if she thought I’d brought along an army of thugs and was planning a home invasion, she looked beyond me.

“I work at Garden View. As a tour guide.” I brought her attention back to the matter at hand by tapping one broken fingernail to the words printed on my card. “This summer, we’re participating in a restoration project at Monroe Street. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m doing research, see, and the section I’m working in—”

“Is where Jeff is buried.” She might be elderly, but Helen was obviously as sharp as a tack. She followed my long-winded explanation to its logical conclusion, weighing the card in one hand while she gave me another once-over. “If you’re looking for information so you can sensationalize the whole thing—”
“It’s nothing like that.”

She thought about it for a moment before she gestured
toward the white wicker couch and rocker on the porch. “Then have a seat. I’ll get iced tea.”

While she was gone, I settled myself and got out the legal pad I’d brought along for notes. By the time she was back, I was ready for her. She, it seemed, was ready for me, too.

“If you want someone to tell you the police knew what they were doing and that they did the right thing, you’ve come to the wrong place,” she said. She poured iced tea, her voice as old-lady pleasant as ever. But hey, I’m no dummy. I didn’t fail to catch the iron undertone in her words. “Jeff was innocent.”

“That’s what he—” I drowned my impulsive comment with a gulp of iced tea. It was made from powered mix and too sweet, and I choked, gagged, and swallowed. “I thought if I talked to you, I’d get the other side of the story,” I said. “I thought—”

“Why?”

There was the whole thing about the competition, of course, so I could have started my explanation there. I would have, if Helen hadn’t put down the iced tea pitcher and leaned forward in the rocker, her elbows on her thighs, her fingers steepled beneath her chin. Those blue eyes of hers just about flashed a challenge at me.

In real life, I am not a dishonest person. But more often than not when it comes to ghosts, I find myself not just stretching the truth, but ignoring it altogether. I mean, can anyone blame me? That doesn’t explain why, this time, I opted for honesty. Mostly.

“There’s a note in the cemetery records. I don’t know who left it. It says there was some doubt about Mr. Lamar’s guilt.”
“Really?” Her laugh was cynical in a way that made me realize that if I wasn’t careful, she’d see right through me. “No one ever asked me to make a note in Jeff’s
cemetery file. And I can’t imagine anyone else took the time. As far as I remember—and just so you know, young lady, my memory is very good—I was the only one in Cleveland who believed Jeff was innocent.”

“You still do.”

She hadn’t touched her iced tea. Now, she picked up her glass and held it between the palms of her hands. The glass was sweaty but she didn’t seem to mind, not even when a drop of condensation trickled through her fingers.

She stared at her hands. “It won’t bring him back.”

“But if we could clear his name—”

She stopped me cold with a look. “Why do you care?”

I set my glass down on top of a copy of the morning’s newspaper that was on a table next to the couch. “There’s a competition involved with the restoration. We’re going to be on TV. The show premiers tomorrow night.”

She was not as impressed as I hoped. In fact, she wasn’t impressed at all.

Like I could blame her?
My smile felt as feeble as my explanation. “I’m the captain of one of the teams. The more we find out about the people buried in our section of the cemetery, the better we’ll look. If we could clear Mr. Lamar’s name—”

“So you don’t care. Not really.”

“I care because I want to win. Because it’s going to be on TV, and a few people might actually see it. The other team is made up of garden club ladies, see, and I’ve got these prisoners on parole. Or probation. Or whatever. And—”

“But you don’t really care. Not about Jeff.”

Did I? I didn’t want to. Believe me when I say this: I did so not want to care. But I did. I do. Partly because like all the ghosts I’d met, Lamar had sucked me into
what was left of his life, and I knew he wouldn’t leave me alone until I did what I had to do. But mostly . . .

Well, mostly because it just wasn’t fair the way the ghosts I’d met had been murdered. I mean, let’s face it, that’s just lousy luck, and an awful way to die. In Lamar’s case, things weren’t any better. In fact, I suspected they were worse. Jefferson Lamar struck me as the kind of guy who didn’t like the world to think of him as a killer, and these days (except for Helen, of course), that was pretty much the only thing anyone remembered about him.

None of this was anything I could reveal to Helen, so instead, I asked her, “How can I care about your late husband? He died when I was just a little kid. I never knew him. I’ve never met you before. I don’t know the person who was killed and—”

“Vera. Vera Blaine.” Thinking back, Helen’s gaze traveled somewhere above my head, her eyes misty. “She was a pretty girl. Not very bright.” She shifted her gaze back to me. “Jeff never slept with her.”

Honestly, I’d never considered the sex angle, I guess because Lamar was middle-aged, Vera was younger than me, and the thought of them gettin’ it on was too icky for words. But if they had a relationship, it was a not-so-important fact that Lamar had never bothered to mention. I caught a whiff of scandal and glommed onto it. It was more than I had to go on before. “Is that what they said?” I asked Helen. “Was that what they claimed as motive? That he and Vera—”

“Were lovers? Well, not in so many words, not in the newspapers, anyway. Even in the eighties, the media wasn’t as aboveboard about things like that. The newspapers mentioned that Jeff and Vera were friends. That’s all people needed to hear to make their own assumptions. There were plenty of hints, but the ‘A’ word—
affair—wasn’t trotted out until we got to court. A couple people testified that they thought it was possible. They never had any proof, mind you. There were also people who said Jeff was the jealous type. Where they got that from, I don’t know. They said they’d heard that Vera broke off the affair with Jeff to go back to her boyfriend. Nobody had a speck of proof. There was no proof to have. In truth, Jeff and Vera weren’t even friends. She worked for him, as his secretary at Central State. She’d only taken the job three or four months earlier. He barely knew her.”

“Then why—”

She answered with a shrug. It wasn’t that she didn’t know. It was that she didn’t understand. “Ugly rumors can take on a life of their own. Maybe you’re too young to have learned that yet. Once someone mentioned that there was something . . . romantic . . .”—she gave the word a funny twist—“between Jeff and that girl, everyone just assumed it was true. They claimed that’s how she ended up in that motel here in town, that she and Jeff used to meet there from time to time, and that one of those times, things got out of hand. They said he shot her.”

“They found his gun at the scene.”

Her head came up. “You know that, do you? You’ve been reading the old newspaper articles.”
“Something like that. They said his gun was there and—”

“He always kept it in his desk at our home near the prison. The drawer was locked. He hadn’t checked it for a while. I mean, why would he? Then when the police came around and asked to see it, well, of course, he went right for it. That was the first he realized it had been stolen.”

“And the cops weren’t buying that.”

It wasn’t a question so she shouldn’t have felt obligated
to answer. She did, anyway. “That was the chief evidence they had against him. Jeff’s fingerprints were on the gun. Of course they were; it was his.”

“And his blood was on Vera’s blouse.”

“Jeff had cut his hand at work earlier that day. Vera helped him bandage the wound.”
“And left for a date two hours away in Cleveland without bothering to change her clothes?” This was curious, because changing into something that didn’t have my boss’s blood on it was the first thing I would have done before meeting a guy in a motel. Before Helen could think I was accusing anybody of anything, I added, “That’s just weird. I wonder why she was in such a hot hurry to get to Cleveland.”

“I asked the police the same thing when I heard about the blood. I told them Jeff had told me about the way he’d cut his hand. Of course, the police weren’t very forthcoming. They didn’t have an adequate theory about why, if Jeff and Vera were having an affair, they needed to come to Cleveland to do it, either. You’d think if you were sleeping with your boss, you wouldn’t want to drive so far to do it.”

“Or you would because then it would be less likely that you’d get caught.” I was thinking out loud. I should have known better, so I offered Helen a smile of apology. “Just trying to think the way they were thinking,” I said. “If Mr. Lamar supposedly killed Vera because he was jealous—”

“Those rumors were all part of the frame-up.”

Honestly, had I been talking to anybody else, I would have told her to get real, come to grips with the fact that her husband was a cheating creep and a murderer, and get on with her life.

If I hadn’t heard the frame-up theory from the dead guy in question.

“But who—”

Her laugh was anything but funny. “Some people have overactive imaginations. That’s why they believed that nonsense about Jeff and Vera. Others might have been paid to say what they said on the stand. It’s possible, don’t you think? I told the police that, but honestly, I don’t think they believed me. Still others . . . There’s a lot of pettiness and jealousy in the world. You’ll learn that, too.” She heaved a sigh at the same time she hauled herself out of the chair, and without another word, she disappeared into the house.

I wondered if our interview was over, and I was about to chalk the whole thing up to bad timing when she came back to the porch carrying a framed eight-by-ten photograph of the man I’d been talking to at the cemetery.
In the picture, Jefferson Lamar was wearing the same pin-striped suit I’d seen him in. His tie was plain and dark. His glasses were high up on the bridge of his nose. The thick black frames weighed heavy on his face and made it look as if he didn’t have any eyebrows.

Helen put the photo in my hands. “Does that look like the kind of a man who would kill somebody?”

I didn’t need to look at the picture, but I did, just so she wouldn’t get suspicious. “People kill people every day,” I said. “I can’t say for sure, but I bet they don’t all look like killers.”

“Not Jeff.” She took the photo, and before she sat back down, she set it on the table next to me so that Lamar was staring right at me. “He was a good man. He was honest and ethical. He—” Helen’s voice caught on a lump of emotion and she took a drink of her tea. “He believed in justice. He believed in the system. He thought criminals could be reformed, that he could help change their lives. He wasn’t the kind of man who would take another life.”

“You had him buried in Cleveland, not near Central State.” It was something I’d planned to mention later in our conversation, but this seemed as good a time as any. “I would have thought—”

“We were both born in Cleveland, and there was nothing keeping us near Central State. Nothing but Jeff’s job. Once he was arrested . . .” Helen didn’t fill in the blanks. She didn’t need to. “My parents lived right here in this house, and they were elderly. It made sense for me to stay with them. I helped out around here, and I was close enough to downtown so I could visit Jeff during the trial. Once he was convicted . . .” A wave of pain crossed her face, and suddenly, not even her cheery T-shirt or her flip-flops could keep her from looking old and frail. “He didn’t think it was possible,” she said. “All the time the police questioned him, he understood they were just doing their jobs. He was cooperative and tolerant. He said they were only eliminating him so they could concentrate on finding a truly viable suspect. Then when he was arrested . . . And all through the trial . . .” Her shoulders rose and fell.