Dying Embers (6 page)

“You-have-in-vay-ded-my-home,” said Shelly Frampton, holding a voice synthesizer to her throat. She had almond-shaped nails lacquered a pearlescent white and gave the appearance of being larger than her one hundred and sixty pounds. Could have been the spike heels, or maybe it was her double-D bosom strapped firm and high against the effects of gravity. She wore enough make-up to be the wife of a televangelist. Clad in a white silk blouse with black pearl buttons over a black leather A-line skirt, she had elegantly permed hair some shade of Lady Clairol auburn. Whatever the damage to her throat, the scars lay beneath a black scarf wrapped several turns around her neck.

“And-you-have. In-jured. My-em-ploy-ee.” she said.

Hard to guess her age, most of the clues being dyed, painted, or hidden. Late fifties, maybe—and that based solely on the slackness of the skin on the back of otherwise muscular hands.

“Your employee got injured because he sicked a pack of dogs on us for announcing ourselves at the gate,” said Leonard.

“I'm-cal-ling. The-po-lease.”

“We already did—on the gardener's telephone,” I said. “Mr. Hemmings assaulted Mr. Jones just prior to getting injured.”

“Get-out-of-my-house.”

“Last I heard,” said Leonard, “it was also my sister's house and I'm not leaving until
she
tells us to go.”

“You-are-tres-pass-ing.”

“Your maid, Juanita, let us in and brought us here to wait for you,” I said.

“Our-biz-ness. Is-con-clu-ded. Get-out.”

“I'm afraid our business isn't quite done, Ma'am,” I said. “Mr. Hemmings is handcuffed to the gate and my associate is waiting with him for the police to arrive. The police will take their statements, and then they'll want to talk to us. I expect they will ask Mr. Jones to sign a complaint. I intend to have them speak to your maid. If Mr. Hemmings has any open warrants or unpaid child support you may both be guests of the county.”

Shelly turned to Leonard; the muscles in her cheeks twitched as she prepared to speak. “Anne-does-not-live. In-this-house. She-has-a-suite. And-stu-dee-oh. In-the-boat house.”

“You don't mind if we go down there?” I asked.

“She-gets-angry. If-you-int-er-rupt. Her-work.”

“So have Juanita give her a call,” I said. “Maybe Anne's watching a talk show today.”

“There-is-no-phone.”

“Given Mr. Jones's concerns, I'm sure that the police will ask you to take them down there. If you refuse, they might come back with a warrant.”

Shelly constructed a malevolent smile. “Go-to-the-God-damn-boat house. Go-to-hell. If-you-come-back. My-broth-er. Will-deal-with-you.”

Out of the corner of my eye
The Dutchman
caught my attention again. The edge of the ship, where it emerged from the fog, described the inside line of a three-quarter profile of a bearded man wearing a nautical cap. The bricks seemed to be sculpted into subtle suggestions of planks and waves. The facial features appeared as a shadow cast by the ship—the images opaquely laid one upon the other. I walked up to examine the piece more closely and the image disappeared. The bricks were neither sculpted nor painted. I shook my head and we left.

We went out the veranda doors and across a marble patio to the edge of the bluff, where we found a weathered wooden stairwell. Halfway down, a deck provided a resting place and a view of the lake over the roof of the stone boat house, which had been built on a cement pier out into the lake. The boat house had a dock and was as big as a four-bedroom home. A foot pedal boat, a catamaran day sailer, and a fifty-foot Donzi with a canvas cockpit rested against fenders, tied up at the dock.

I knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked loud and hard until I got an answer.

“Get the fuck out of here!” said a woman's voice from inside the boat house. “Leave me the hell alone.”

“There's someone here to see you,” I said. “This'll just take a minute.”

“What language would you like to do this in, asshole? You don't understand English? Get fucking lost!”

“Please! This is important,” I said.

Inside the house someone touched off a large hand cannon. The bullet ripped through the top of the door above our heads and gave us a shower of splinters and paint chips. Leonard and I stood for a frozen moment and examined a half-dozen similar ragged holes in the top of the door.

“The next one won't be as kind!” The voice seemed closer to the door. “I'm working, asshole. Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Annie?” asked Leonard.

We got silence for a reply. Then someone, inside, snapped off the latch.

Leonard turned the doorknob and gave it a shove. The door creaked slowly open and revealed a woman standing in an unlit hallway. She wore tan coveralls under a black welder's apron. On her head was a welder's helmet with the face shield turned up to reveal an angelic face. She wore a heavy gray gauntlet on her left hand and a large frame revolver on her right. Her eyes were dark watery pools.

“Why have you come here?” she asked.

“To see you, Annie-fannie,” said Leonard. He smiled and spread his arms.

It happened in a flash. She pitched the helmet aside, took maybe three steps, and leapt on Leonard—her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Luckily for Leonard she was only about five feet tall and a shade over a hundred pounds—gear and pistol included. Leonard staggered back a step but kept his feet.

“I missed you,” she said, the only part I could make out. The rest was sobs. She settled her face into Leonard's neck.

“You missed Dad's funeral,” he said, patting her back.

“I was in Europe. I didn't find out until I got back.” She wiped her face on the sleeve of her coveralls. “I called Mom. She said I had broken Dad's heart and hung up.”

“After Dad died,” said Leonard, “I retired to be here for her. She's moved out to the cottage. Sometimes she says mean things when she's hurt or frightened.”

“I know,” said Anne. She snuggled her head back to Leonard's neck and tightened her hug. She made a sob and retched out, “So do I.”

I left them, walked down the hall and turned right. I found myself in the well of a two-story studio. The west wall and roof were made of glass like a greenhouse. The room should have been an inferno, but a cool
breeze off the lake was drawn in through a series of screens on the bottom row of windows and blown out through exhaust fans in the ceiling. The studio comprised fully half of the building and held a jumble of construction materials. In one corner a kiln and casting furnace glowed cherry red.

A gas welding rig with long, coiled hoses on a small cart sat parked at the base of a stone and metal spiral—a double helix—topped with a burst of bright metal balls that swayed on the ends of thin metal rods. Drawings cast about on the floor were titled,
Reach for the Stars.

“I wrote you every couple of months,” said Leonard as he and Anne walked arm-in-arm into the studio, “but I always got them back unopened and marked ‘Return to Sender.'”

“I really don't understand that,” said Anne.

“I called, but I got the houseman. He was always rude. He said you didn't want to talk to anyone.”

“Brian?” she asked. “He is usually such a sweetheart.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said. “He is such a sweetie that he sicked a pack of dogs on us when we came to the gate today.”

“This is Mr. Hardin,” said Leonard. He gave her the card I had written Lambert's telephone number on. “That's his card.”

Anne set her pistol on a wooden crate that had been pressed into service as a table for a newspaper and a half-eaten Danish roll. She examined the front of my card and then the back.

“Scotty Lambert?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“What does he want?”

“He's not fifteen anymore. I think he wants to do lunch.”

“What if he's a nutcase?”

“He owns a large manufacturing firm dealing in cutting-edge technology. His wife passed away a couple of years ago and he said that he just got to thinking about you. On the up side I can tell you that he, for one, hasn't shot at me lately.”

Anne laughed. “No one bothers me while I'm working, and no one sees a work in progress. But since you brought Lenny, I'll let you slide—this time.”

“That's nice.”

“So you're just going to tell him where I am?”

“No, ma'am. I give you his name and number, and if you want to talk to him it's up to you to make the contact. I do need you to give me some
little tidbit of information that only you and he would know so that he will feel assured that I contacted you.”

Anne made a mischievous face.

“It doesn't have to be personal,” I said. “Something about school, maybe.”

“We were in the same physics lab. The professor didn't like either one of us so he put us together. Scotty was like this computer geek and I was a fine arts major, so the professor thought we were wasting a bench.”

“He said that sometimes you met at the library or you had a burger together.”

“And that was it?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Anne laughed. “Tell him, ‘Tacos—no onions.' He'll know you talked to me.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I have one more question—not about Mr. Lambert—if you don't mind.”

“Sure.”

“The Dutchman.”

“You were in the main house?”

“Yeah,” I said, “we met Shelly, not very—”

“—Really? Shelly's been gone for a while.”

“Out of town?”

Anne shrugged. “Wherever Shelly goes, she's the real work of art.”

“What do you mean?”

Anne laughed and waved her hand at her face. “Takes a lot of paint,” she said. “A piece of work, the bard would say.”

“What happened to her voice?”

“Car accident.”

“Sorry to hear that. Tell me about
The Dutchman.”

“That's about Scotty.”

“How so?”

“You want to know how the ship captain appears?”

“Absolutely.”

“It was our physics project. There's a photoelectric cell under the mainsail. When the light enters from the side it puts a positive charge on the paint pigment and causes the ghost to appear. It looks like a shadow but it's not.”

“On brick?”

“It's not brick. The wall behind the artwork is cast out of a ceramic mud that's electrically conductive, even after it dries. Scotty invented it.”

A knock exploded onto the door. “Don't shoot,” I said. “I think that's the police.”

It was—a county sheriff's deputy with a brown uniform and a Smokey Bear hat. He escorted us back to the gate where an ambulance, the county animal control truck, and two patrol cars showing red and blue rollers crowded around Leonard's Humvee.

Hemmings sat in the back of the ambulance with his hand wrapped with an ice pack. His knife and gun had been laid out on the front deck of a patrol car.

Shelly stood in front of one of the deputies and made monotone threats and demands. The deputy stared benignly down at her. Lorna stood next to the cruiser and showed me a mean face over folded arms.

“What's up?” I asked.

“You didn't close the gate,” she said. “When the dogs finished the hors d'oeuvres, I had to climb on top of the truck to get away from them.”

“Why didn't you just get inside the truck?”

“Canvas doors.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry we didn't think to lock the gate.”

“It worked out. They're going to charge Mr. Hemmings with ‘felonious assault by doggie.' But they want to talk to Mr. Jones about Hemmings's broken finger.”

Anne steamed up to Shelly. “Listen,” she said over a pointed finger, “unlike you, I have a family. Where do you get off returning my brother's letters?” Shelly turned from the deputy. Anne added a sarcastic smile and the word, “Bitch.”

Shelly caught Anne with a roundhouse open-handed slap. Leonard wedged himself between Shelly and Anne.

The deputy smiled, and I saw him mouth the words, “Hot damn.” He grappled Shelly to the patrol car and bent her over the front deck. “You're under arrest,” he said, reaching for his handcuffs.

L
ORNA
K
EMP DROPPED ME
in the parking lot behind my office a little after nine. The sun hung low, leaving just a sliver of red-orange to filter through the trees. I shut her car door and she motored off with a wave and a toot.

My car, a nondescript dark sedan—all dash and no flash—had the parking lot to itself. I dug out the keys, opened the door, and found the steering wheel dangling by the ignition wires. A cement block nestled in the driver's seat. The windshield lay sprinkled about on the dash, seats, and floor.

Lorna loitered at the stop sign, waiting for traffic to clear on Forty-fourth Street. I thought about running over to catch her before she pulled out, but on the way up from Whitmore Lake we had discussed her open cases and decided that one of them needed a morning surveillance. Better to let her get some rest. I could have the car towed and write up the Lambert/Jones case while I waited for a ride from home.

My office is in Kentwood, the first suburb south of Grand Rapids, in a row of brick three-story office buildings on Forty-fourth Street. I rent a corner office off the common area on the first floor, which is down a flight of steps from the main door—the office being sort of half-assed in the
basement. “Peter A. Ladin Associates” was painted on the window, facing the common area—black letters shadowed in red.

I unlocked the door and turned on the lights. Marg, my late partner's widow, had left a note taped to my office door. “I
NEED YOUR EXPENSE REPORT!”

After Pete died, Marg sold me her half of the business for a dollar and accounts receivable. She stayed on to work as the secretary, typing my reports and invoices, and operates her own accounting business from the reception desk. The name painted on the window makes Marg feel at home.