It Takes Two to Strangle (12 page)

Based on his year of high school graduation, Damon calculated Anthony Weams to be thirty-five or thirty-six. Probably seven or eight years older than Clara. Damon couldn’t find any information about Clara online.

He typed in “Tony” Weams rather than Anthony Weams and coupled it with Battle Park High School. Several local newspaper stories appeared from archived sources. Every one centered around Tony Weams’ accomplishments on the baseball diamond. He was a starting second baseman in his junior and senior seasons, managing an all-conference nod in the latter. It gave Damon an idea.

He could take a road trip to the Uniontown-Morgantown area after making sure the fair closed down smoothly the following day. It was only a three-and-a-half-hour trip. If he had to stay overnight, Mrs. Stein would be perfectly happy to fill in for him at the library on Monday morning.

Maybe Tony Weams’ baseball coach would remember something about Anthony and Clara. Given the seven or eight year age difference, the chance of a history between two back then was remote. Unless Anthony had a younger sister who was the same age as Clara. Maybe they knew each other in their youth, even if they didn’t start having a physical relationship until years later and two hundred miles away.

Damon shook his head. He wasn’t a police officer or even a private investigator. He could ask Gerry to go, but the detective was busy and Damon didn’t want Gerry to forbid Damon from making the journey. Instead, Damon sent Gerry an e-mail providing him with the information he found about the proximity of Anthony Weams’ high school to Clara’s hometown. Gerry and Margaret could use it the following morning when they interviewed Weams. Damon wouldn’t make a decision about a trip until after he asked Gerry whether Weams divulged a former relationship with Clara.

The next morning Damon woke refreshed. After a run along one of the many paved trails that wound through the county, Damon put on a pot of hazelnut coffee, which he knew was Rebecca’s favorite. He prepared apple cinnamon pancakes and sliced a fresh mango and strawberries into a clear glass bowl.

When she arrived, Rebecca appeared not only to have recovered from two nights earlier but was more assertive than usual. She may have been overcompensating, but everyone had to manage their emotions. Rebecca strode into the kitchen as if she hadn’t let tears betray her feelings for Damon. She had replicated her pixie look from the Fourth of July party, with an array of barrettes and a short gauzy skirt. Damon thought the look suited her well and told her so.

“Thanks, I needed to liven up my look,” she said.

He filled a mug with coffee, found a pair of natural sugar packets in an overhead cabinet, and handed the offering to Rebecca. She sat at the table with both feet tucked in under her backside.

“The pancakes look great,” she said.

“Thanks. Listen, Rebecca, I’m glad you came over.”

She interrupted him. “Damon, Friday night was ridiculous. It was immature of me not to be completely happy for you. I want you to be content and if dating Bethany Krims accomplishes that, I’m all for it.”

“Rebecca, you don’t have to say that.”

“But I do, because it’s how I feel. So can we just put it past us and move on? You can even tell me about next Friday night after the fact. But only if you want to, of course.”

“Thanks, Rebecca. You really are my best friend, you know.”

“I know, friends without benefits.” She sighed dramatically. “Except these ridiculously good pancakes.”

While they ate, she asked whether he had spoken any further with Gerry about the murder. Damon gave her as much background as he could without supplying details privy only to the police and himself. He did tell her about Clara’s admission to him the previous night and his evening at police headquarters. Rebecca gave him a questioning look when he divulged that Clara had come to his house but she didn’t press it.

The fair was more packed than Damon had anticipated for a Sunday morning. Between the two-day closure and the fact that it was a weekend, people had foregone their standard Sunday routine to ensure a few final hours of wholesome outdoor entertainment. Damon caught up with several Hollydale residents and bought himself a funnel cake loaded with powdered sugar. He saw Skipper holding hands with Shawna Crane near the “Strongman Striker” game and gave them a wave from a distance. Upon reaching the back of the grounds, he spotted Jim Riley. Jim waved him over.

Damon asked whether the police were planning to allow his crew to leave after the Arlington fair ended that afternoon.

“They are. We’ll all be in Manassas, which is pretty close by. And they interviewed a number of people again yesterday, so they’re letting us go, as long as everyone stays with the carnival.”

“What about Victor?” Damon asked.

“I asked Lieutenant Hobbes the same thing. She said that after today he was free to go home but that he couldn’t leave the general area for a while without getting their permission.”

“He lives nearby?”

“I think his place is near Front Royal, a good bit west of here and up by the Virginia-Maryland border.”

Damon agreed with the police’s decision. They couldn’t keep a traveling operation grounded indefinitely without concrete evidence. And their travel was local, so it’s not as if the police wouldn’t know where to find the workers.

“Do you have any big changes planned for the carnival now that you’re running things solo?” Damon asked.

“Technically it’s not all mine yet, but Clara told me I could run things as I see fit until we figure out a final price for her share and get all of the paperwork done. I’ll make some internal structural changes, but nothing that will impact the public’s enjoyment. The toughest part will be figuring out new storage space for this winter. Lirim had a place near Morgantown where he kept all of the equipment.”

“I thought Skipper did the repair work,” Damon said, even though he recalled Lirim’s newspaper editorial.

“Small patchwork fixes, yes. But not the major repairs. He could do them sure enough, but it takes too long and we don’t want anything out of commission during the spring and summer months while the fairs are running.”

Damon’s phone vibrated just as he returned home. It was Gerry.

“What’s the good word?” Damon asked, getting out of the car.

“I wanted to thank you for the information you sent last night on Anthony Weams, even though it didn’t lead anywhere. When we interviewed him this morning, Dr. Weams said he didn’t know Clara when he lived in western Pennsylvania. He said he hadn’t even known she came from that part of the country.”

“Did his story match up with Clara’s?”

“To a tee, unfortunately. And the hotel’s reservations desk confirmed that he booked a room in his name on the night in question.”

“So Jordan Hall’s off the hook.”

“For now. When Margaret told Jordan what Clara had done, he immediately retracted his confession. We’re still going to keep our eye on him and Margaret made him sweat a little by talking up a possible obstruction of justice charge. But we won’t press it unless we find new evidence linking him to the murder.”

“I almost feel bad for the guy,” Damon said. “Too much love for someone who doesn’t love you back.” He thought of Rebecca.

“Margaret said he was almost in tears when she told him about Clara and her late-night tryst.”

“Better to find out sooner than later. Where does that leave your investigation?”

“Pretty close to square one. Margaret wants me to focus my efforts for now on Tobin and Angela Corb. She’s the one Lirim slept with and they both have criminal pasts. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s the right place to look, but I’m letting Margaret take the lead. She has the murder investigation experience and it’s not like I have anything better to push.”

Damon stood in the entryway to his home, debating whether to put together an overnight bag for a drive to Uniontown or to just leave well enough alone and entrust the matter to Gerry and the other professionals. He closed his eyes, breathed in deeply, and decided to take the trip.

There was something inside him that wouldn’t allow his mind to be at peace until he had done all he could to find out who killed Lirim. More than anything, he found it exciting. Life had its thrilling individual moments, but only rarely did a person participate in an endeavor that was suspenseful for days on end.

Chapter 11

Traffic was light on a Sunday in the summer going west toward the Appalachian Mountains. Damon put down all four windows and opened the sunroof—the breeze felt good against his face. He thought about who he should approach. To start, he decided on Anthony Weams’ baseball coach and Lirim and Tabby’s neighbors.

The difficulty was figuring out how to present himself. He didn’t dare pretend to be a police investigator. He could pose as the son of one of Lirim’s childhood friends who was passing through the area. Then again, given Lirim’s surly disposition, even the child of one of Lirim’s friends might not be welcome. Designating himself as a friend of Clara’s would probably better serve his needs.

It wasn’t until he reached Uniontown in the late afternoon that Damon realized he had failed to look up the baseball coach’s name or address. School was out on summer break, so going there wouldn’t help. Not to mention that the coach now probably wasn’t the same person who was managing the team when Anthony Weams was chasing fastballs eighteen to twenty years earlier. He castigated himself for the lack of forethought.

The information he could glean about Battle Park High School from his phone didn’t include anything on the current baseball coach. Damon didn’t have a model that displayed full web sites, just those with dedicated mobile pages. He thought about calling Rebecca and asking her for help, but decided to keep his trip secret for now. If his search turned up empty, no one needed to know how obsessed he had become with the murder of Lirim Jovanovic.

Damon steered his car through the downtown streets in search of a friendly place where he could gather information. He stopped at a diner on a busy street half a mile from the Uniontown mall. A short line of people smoking dotted the sidewalk to the left of the entrance. The interior of the restaurant was so brightly lit Damon had to narrow his eyes upon entering. Sitting at the breakfast bar, he ordered a lemonade and asked the waitress if she knew the baseball coach at Battle Park High School. She responded politely that the school was “a ways out of town” and she didn’t know any of the coaches. But when she returned with his drink, she brought one of the hostesses and introduced her as a rising high school senior.

“You’re looking for the baseball coach at Battle Park?” the girl asked, knotting shoulder-length kinked black hair with her index finger. Acne and light freckles were blanketed by heavy pancake make-up, usually reserved for women three times her age.

“I am,” Damon replied. “Do you go there?”

“No, but I have friends who do. I can find out in about ten seconds.” Which she did. The hostess reached into the front pocket of her apron and removed a smart phone. She pressed a speed dial code, spoke quickly and gave him a thumbs-up in ten seconds flat. But she kept talking for another five minutes, and, without failing to remove the phone from her ear, seated a young family who had just approached the hostess stand. Damon sipped his lemonade patiently. It was terrible—made from straight powder and without enough sugar. But by the time he choked down half of it, the teen returned and gave him the name of David Johnson, who taught biology when he wasn’t coaching the team.

Great, Damon thought sarcastically, could there be a more common name? The phone book could be littered with David Johnsons and D. Johnsons. And he didn’t even know whether this particular one lived in Uniontown.

But the hostess had even more information for him—a diamond in the diner. She didn’t know whether the coach would be there, but there was a baseball complex five miles northwest of town that hosted high school summer league games almost every Sunday night during June and July.

Damon wrote down directions to the park and slipped the hostess a twenty dollar bill but left the remainder of the lemonade on the counter.

At six-thirty in the evening, the mid-summer sun had not even started to set. The Fred Williams Memorial Baseball Complex was impressive. It boasted four diamonds, each stretching out from a central area that was occupied by a modern locker room facility in the shape of an octagon. The result was visually stunning. Four fields combined to form a giant square, or diamond, depending on the vantage point. The triangular-shaped gaps that formed between the edges of each pair of fields were filled by flat seated bleachers that could be used by spectators to watch either side—the first base line of one game or the third base line of another.

And true to the hostess’s word, the complex was brimming with high schoolers. Damon climbed to the apex of the closest set of bleachers and peered down around him. Games were in progress on three of the diamonds and on the fourth, players were stretching out and preparing to commence play. The scene warmed him. Here, in the heart of the country, the nation’s pastime was being played with gritty determination in the faces of the young players.

He stepped down the bleaches toward a game that was in the middle of the third inning. The scoreboard didn’t denote team names, just “Home” and “Away” so Damon couldn’t immediately establish whether the teams were local. He located a couple who looked to be in their mid-forties sharing a large cardboard tub of popcorn. They were probably the parents of one of the players and good candidates to know the local coaches if their son’s team was from the area.