Deadly Gamble: The First Charlie Parker Mystery (18 page)

"She's still under arrest in the Gary
Detweiller case," he reminded. "And now we want her for questioning
in Jean's death."

"Surely, you don't think. . . I mean, Jean
might have been a victim of random violence. That's not the best
part of town. Violence is everywhere nowadays."

"We have every reason to think," he
interrupted, "that there's a connection."

"They've compared the bullets," Ron said.
"Both Jean and Gary were killed by a nine millimeter weapon."

"Of course we'll do ballistics tests to be
sure if it was the same gun," Taylor added.

I digested this for a minute. "I thought you
got a search warrant and checked the North home for weapons last
week," I asked Taylor.

"We did. Didn't find the weapon, obviously.
But that doesn't mean Stacy North doesn't own it. She could have it
in her possession right now. And if she does. . . you can tell her
this if she contacts you . . . if she's carrying a weapon, it's a
violation of her bail conditions and we'll have her back in the can
so fast she won't know what hit her."

It was the longest speech I'd ever heard Kent
make. And it wasn't especially reassuring.

"Stacy came to see me Saturday morning," I
told him.

"Why didn't you say so?"

"I was just about to." Now that I'd opened my
mouth, I wasn't sure how much to tell. Stacy's marital problems
weren't part of this, at least not directly.

"Well?" Kent and Ron were both watching
me.

"Well, she didn't tell me she was going out
to kill Jean Detweiller," I snapped. I made myself take a deep
breath. "She was upset, but we didn't talk about the case at all. I
gathered her problems were personal. Her husband is a difficult man
to live with." Understatement.

"Was she angry, defiant, or what?"

"Not at all. Depressed was more like it. She
spoke very little and was on the verge of tears the whole time. If
Stacy North left with the idea of killing anyone, it was probably
herself."

Even before the words left my mouth, I
realized their import. "Oh, God, do you think. . . " I turned to
Ron. "Do you think she might do something like that? What if I
could have stopped her?" My mind was spinning.

Ron rose from his chair and came around the
desk. He put a comforting arm around my shoulders.

"Let's all sit down and think this out," he
suggested gently.

He led me across the hall to my own office
and guided me to the sofa. "Sit here. I'm going to get you some
tea."

Kent Taylor was oddly quiet as he took the
side chair next to my desk. Ron came back a minute later with
coffee for Taylor and tea for me. He sat beside me on the
couch.

"Now, tell us about Saturday morning."

I related the gist of the visit, without
going into a lot of detail. Stacy obviously didn't even want to
talk to me about her marriage. It seemed invasive to bring two more
people into it.

"So, you think she was depressed when she
left?" Taylor asked.

"I don't know. I'm no psychologist. She was
unhappy. Maybe she just decided to go somewhere and be alone
awhile."

"Well, you better hope she hasn't left the
city. And you better hope she comes back soon."

"Will she be arrested again?" I asked.

"We'll have to question her." He said this as
though it would be obvious to a child.

I didn't bother with a response. The
conversation was about finished by then and he left a few minutes
later.

My desk was stacked with mail that I had not
attended to last week. Somehow, though, I just couldn't put my mind
to it now, either. I reread the morning's front page story.

Jean had been killed outside Archie's. As far
as I knew, Stacy didn't know anything about Jean Detweiller—her
workplace, her schedule. I suppose she could have found out, but it
didn't ring true. Stacy had been much too enveloped in her own
problems to focus on tracking and killing Jean.

Poor Josh. I thought of the troubled kid
who'd now lost both his parents to violence. I had to talk to him.
I picked up my jacket. Ron was on the phone, but I told Sally to
tell him I'd be out for awhile.

Taking the scenic route up Central Avenue
might not have been the quickest path to the Detweiller house. It
did, however, lead me past Archie's Diner. I decided to stop there
first.

It was past the breakfast hour and the
parking lot was nearly empty. I saw Archie dragging a coil of green
garden hose from a storage room at the back of the restaurant. He
screwed the hose coupling onto a faucet mounted on the back wall of
the building and attached a sprayer to the other end. He tried to
walk toward the middle of the parking lot with it, but the knot of
hose on the ground yanked back at him. A few choice words slipped
out as he tried a whipping motion to get the thing untangled.

"Hi, Archie," I called out.

He squinted toward me, trying to place
me.

"Charlie Parker," I reminded, "I was here the
other day." I was standing one parking space away now.

"Oh, yeah . . .. You the one asking about
Jean, weren't you? Well, I don't know how to tell ya this . .
."

"I already know." We stood silently for a
minute, neither of us knowing quite what we should say.

"Um, I . . ."

He gestured toward the next parking slot, and
it dawned on me what he was doing. A large brownish stain formed an
irregular circle on the pavement. He aimed the sprayer at it before
realizing that he hadn't turned on the water.

"Could you get that faucet for me?"

I trotted to the building, glad that the
little errand postponed our conversation, even for a short while.
The faucet handle was old and caked with dirt. I struggled with it,
taking a little longer than necessary. The spritzing sound of water
blasted behind me.

"Police said they were done here, so I guess
it's up to me to clean this up," he commented when I walked back to
him.

"I was really sorry to hear about Jean," I
told him. It sounded trite. I'm terrible at these things.

"Yeah, me too," he said. He kept spraying,
forming a red puddle that soon turned pink, then ran clear.

"How's Josh doing?" I asked.

He gave me a puzzled look.

"Her son."

"Oh, the boy. Well, gee, I sure don't know.
Hadn't given him much thought." He guided the puddle of water out
toward the street. "Funny, you know, she didn't talk a whole lot
about the family here at work. Kinda like she came here to get away
from them. She'd mention 'em sometimes, but not like some of these
mothers do, where you hear about it every time the kid goes to the
bathroom."

"She didn't say how Josh was handling his
father's death then, I guess."

"Nope. Don't tell nobody I said this," he
said, leaning toward me as if there were dozens of people standing
around, "but I think Jean was so happy with her own freedom that
she didn't take time to think about what her kid was doing."

His eyes met mine with a knowing look. I
tried to look surprised at his words, but truthfully, I wasn't.

"I thought I'd stop by and visit Josh," I
said. "Just to see how he's taking it."

"Good idea," Archie grinned. "Poor little guy
could probably use a friend right now."

I wondered if he knew that Josh was sixteen,
practically a man.

"Were you here when it happened?" I asked,
taking a different tack.

"Nope. It was right when Jean got off work at
midnight. I got me a night manager for that late shift." He
chuckled in a humorless way. "I'm gettin' a mite old for that late
night stuff. I can still get right up with the birds in the mornin'
but when the late shift comes on, I usually go home."

"Didn't anybody hear the shot?"

"They say they didn't. Hell, in this
neighborhood, it ain't that uncommon."

We did a little more chit-chat while Archie
coiled up the hose. He invited me in for another piece of pie but I
told him I'd have to make it another time. I drove away wondering
how well he'd really known Jean.

The Detweiller driveway was full of cars.
Josh's was nearest the garage door, blocked in by three others.
Relatives or friends?

I tapped on the door, but the hum of voices
inside was loud enough that no one heard. Finally I tried the knob
myself and just went in.

Josh sat on the sofa, a pretty blond girl of
about fourteen wrapped around one arm. He didn't seem to be paying
a lot of attention to her. A middle-aged couple had pulled two
kitchen chairs into the living room and sat facing Josh. After
pausing to gape at me for a second, they resumed talking in hushed
tones. The man wore a dark suit and tie and had a Bible in his
hands. Josh shot me a "rescue me" kind of look, but I wasn't about
to get into that. I sidestepped the little group, heading in the
direction I assumed the kitchen would be.

It, too, had been commandeered by the church
ladies. Two of them, in polyester pantsuits, had laid out a spread
on the kitchen table that would feed twenty easily. They had a ham,
two plates of fried chicken, potato salad, green beans, and various
Jellos in several colors. Not to mention two sheet cakes baked in
disposable metal pans. The two women smiled at me but I caught them
looking at my empty hands. I ducked out the way I'd come.

No one was especially paying any attention to
me, so I slunk across the hall into the master bedroom. The thought
had come to me, driving across town this morning, that Jean's death
could be tied to Gary's because of something she knew. Gary's
business dealings were a little on the dim side, to say the least.
What if Jean had found out something about somebody and they knew
that she knew . . . I wondered if Gary kept any files or papers at
home.

The bedroom drapes were pulled, making the
room cool and gloomy. I pushed the door shut, guiding it with both
hands, turning the knob so it wouldn't make any noise. Alone, I was
like a kid in a toy store. What to touch first?

The room was neat by Jean's housekeeping
standards. The bed was made. Maybe she was like me, hating to crawl
back into an unmade bed; the sheets and blankets have to be
smoothed out or it feels icky. The rest of the bedroom was more in
keeping with her neatness criteria for the other rooms.

There was no file cabinet with a drawer
labeled "Illegal Stuff" so I had to go into this blind. There were
two night stands, a dresser, and a chest of drawers. It was
anybody's guess. I picked the nightstands first. The first one held
an assortment of feminine articles, including a romance novel,
three sheets of pink stationery with frayed edges, an emery board,
and a diaphragm. I pawed through the contents clear to the back,
and only came away with a dusting of powder from some long ago
broken compact. Wiping my fingers on my jeans, I went for the
second stand.

This must have been Gary's. Two copies of
Playboy
and a nail clipper. Below the drawer there was an
open space, ostensibly for books or perhaps an object d' art. In
this case it was crammed with papers. Quite a few were old racing
forms and newspapers, shoved into the space with no apparent method
of organization. Others were sheets from yellow pads, spiral
notebooks, or whatever was probably handy at the time. I recognized
Gary's heavy slanted writing on most of them. I began to flatten
them out to see if there was any theme to the whole mess.

Just then, I sensed movement from the other
room.

"Now, son, I want you to know that you can
call on Mrs. Luthy and me just any time you need to. We're here in
the Lord with you, in your time of sorrow." The preacher was making
his closing statement. Their voices were just the other side of the
wall from me. Apparently they were standing at the front door.

"That's right, son," a female voice joined
in. "And we'll look for you in Sunday School this week."

I jammed the handwritten papers into my bag
and zipped it shut. The racing forms and newspapers went back into
the night stand. Judging by the layer of dust on everything, I
doubted that Jean had gone through this stuff but there could be a
clue here somewhere. Right now I had to get that door open before
anyone figured out where I'd gone. I reached for the knob.

Another voice piped up, no more than a foot
from my face. "Yes, Josh, we'll see you Sunday." I held my breath,
knowing they could probably hear the sweat trickling down my sides
right about now.

"We've set lunch out for you, now. You and
your friend be sure to eat something." The voices were receding in
the direction of the front door.

I turned the doorknob slowly with my right
hand, holding my left hand up to the crack as it gradually opened.
Like that would keep them from seeing me. Eye to the opening, I
held my breath. I could see no one, so I slid the door open and
myself out. In a quick switch of directions, I tried to make it
look like I was just coming from the bathroom across the hall. One
of the food ladies gave me a funny look but didn't say
anything.

The three women had their purse straps over
their arms, neat cardigans buttoned up tight. Josh stood at the
front door, seeing them out. The blonde had kept her seat on the
couch. I hung back, letting them finish trying to save Josh's soul.
He closed the front door behind them with a sigh.

"Hey, Charlie," he said.

"Hey, Josh." He came toward me, unsure, and
we gave each other a brief hug. I told him I was sorry about all
this; he murmured something that sounded good. We were both glad to
have that part over with.

"You hungry?" I asked. We went into the
kitchen.

"Sort of." He eyed the spread on the kitchen
table. "I kinda wish they'd brought some Quarter Pounders." We
laughed.

"Well, this is here already. Want me to fix
you a plate?" I offered.

"Naw, I'll get something later."