Murder on the Mind (14 page)

“I need a favor tomorrow. A ride. I sort of have a date.”

Brenda’s eyebrows rose. “A date?”

“I met this lady at the bank the other day. We’re going to lunch tomorrow. I thought maybe you two could go out, drop me off, then pick me up later.”

“You mean you don’t want us to join you?” Richard asked. There was a lightness in his tone that had been absent for days.

“No!” This wasn’t my night for conversation. “I mean, sure, if you want. But—”

“No one’s taken me to lunch in ages. Richard?”

He smiled at her. “Sure.”

I figured I’d better make a fast escape before my foot became permanently lodged in my mouth. “Thanks.”

* * *

Richard dropped me at Ted’s Place, a little diner across the street from the main branch of Bison Bank in downtown Buffalo. He and Brenda were headed to a much more upscale restaurant down the street, where linen napkins and salad forks were standard at every place setting.

I stood in the cafe’s crowded entryway, waiting for a table to open. The place smelled of bacon, coffee, and greasy fries, and was an obvious favorite with downtown office workers who’d donned heavy coats and boots to trudge past thigh-high snow banks to get there.

A waitress seated me in the last booth. As I perused the menu, Maggie flopped down across from me.

“Hi! Sorry I’m late. You order yet?”

I shook my head. “Good to see you.”

She struggled out of her bulky down coat and set it beside her on the bench seat. She wore a navy knit sweater over a dark wool skirt. The thin gold chain around her neck made her look dressy yet casual.

She glanced over the menu. “I’m starved. I had to shovel the driveway, so I didn’t have time for breakfast, and nobody brought in doughnuts. God, I hate winter.”

“I guess I shouldn’t mention that some guy in a pickup with a plow did our drive about six this morning.”

She stuck out her tongue at me, then went back to the menu. The waitress showed up with steaming coffee pots—regular and decaf—in each hand. We ordered, Maggie settling for chicken salad, and I asked for beef on weck—rare roast beef, piled high on a salty, caraway seeded kimmelweck roll, served with a Kosher dill, sinus-clearing horseradish, and au jus. For me a New Orleans po boy or a Philly cheese steak sandwich would never beat Buffalo’s beef on weck.

After the waitress had gone, Maggie opened her purse and took out a sheaf of folded papers. She looked around, decided it was safe to speak, and motioned me closer. “I could get fired if anyone found out about this.” She handed me the pages.

“I won’t say a word.”

The first was a typed list of the three names I’d given her. The Ryans had a VISA account with the bank, the Prystowskis had none. Under the third name was a lengthy paragraph, which I skimmed.

Sharon Walker had no current accounts with the bank, but her father’s construction business had many loans with Bison Bank over the previous two decades. The text concluded with a terse statement: Walker Construction had gone bankrupt three years before. At that time, Sharon Walker headed the company. Matt Sumner was the executive in charge of those loans. I wondered if that alone could get Maggie fired, and swallowed a pang of guilt. As I stared at the Walker woman’s name, something in my gut twisted.

I shuffled through the next several sheets, photocopies of Sumner’s appointment calendar the week of his death. Interesting.

“I had to do some digging on that third name. I threw in the calendar as a bonus. Hope it helps.”

I folded the papers and put them into my coat pocket. “Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” she said, but sounded nervous and quickly changed the subject. “Hey, your cast is gone.”

“The brace is better. And I only have to wear it another twenty-seven days.” I took a sip of my coffee. “You never told me exactly what you do at the bank.”

“I’m an administrative assistant—a glorified title for secretary, except that I have a secretary. She does all the piddly work, I deal with the directors and handle the more complicated assignments—like coordinating this conference, which is driving me nuts.” She paused to sip her decaf coffee. “I’ve been there fourteen years. The way things are going, with so many banks consolidating, you never know how long you’ll last.”

“A familiar story. I worked my way up to supervisor, only to be busted back to field investigator, then out the door, after a major re-engineering at Travelers. Thinking about it depresses the hell out of me.”

The sandwiches came, but I was more interested in listening to Maggie than eating. She seemed nervous and began to chatter.

“If you need a dentist, my brother-in-law has a practice in Tonawanda. He’s wonderful. Totally painless.”

“Totally?”

“Well, it depends on how well you take care of your teeth.”

“You live in Tonawanda?”

“Out in Clarence. Me and my dog, Holly, a golden retriever. I got her for Christmas a couple of years ago. She’s a big dog and needs to be walked at least once a day. Then there’s the yard work.” She rolled her eyes, making me laugh.

We talked while we ate: the Buffalo Bills, the weather, how she dabbled in interior decoration as a hobby. Occasionally she’d look down at her plate, bite her lip like something bothered her. Then she’d find another safe topic and start again.

The check arrived and I grabbed it. Brenda, bless her heart, had slipped me a twenty.

Maggie donned her jacket and pulled a white knit beret over her hair. I stood to follow her and pay the check at the register.

“Bye. Thanks for lunch,” she said, took a few steps, and turned back. She gave me a quick hug before hurrying out the door.

People crowded past me on their way in or out, but I hardly noticed. I just stood there and smiled.

* * *

I wasted the rest of the day with mundane tasks—namely laundry. After dinner, I returned to my cramped room. I needed a desk. I needed more space. I needed my
own
space.

I studied the copy of Sumner’s calendar Maggie had given me. The daily register was broken down into half-hour increments. Most of the entries were downright cryptic. Maggie had included a Rosetta-stone-like key for me. Merrill, R1010C translated as a meeting with Bob Merrill in Conference Room 1010. Most of Sumner’s appointments had been right at the bank, the entries made in neat, fat, girlish script—the secretary’s, no doubt. The last entry for Thursday, four thirty, was made in a messy scrawl, which I assumed to be Sumner’s own hand. According to the newspaper, he left the bank about four o’clock and was never seen again.

I stared at the entry: Ron. Ron Myers? He was a colleague on the same floor. Surely the cops had talked to him—and every other Ron in the building. I’d have to ask Maggie.

My mind wandered to thoughts of Sumner’s remains . . . or lack thereof. According to the deer hunting book, the internal organs were usually left in the field. Hunting season in western New York State occurs in the fall, when only a deep frost is expected. It had snowed less than an inch in Amherst the night of the murder; it may have snowed more than that on the outskirts of town, and since then we’d had a major snowstorm. I couldn’t remember the weather patterns in and around Lake Erie to know just where the snow belt lay. Instead, I thought about the steaming pile of organs left in the cold night air. What if the raccoons hadn’t gotten them? What if . . . ?

Richard didn’t have a map of western New York, but he said Brenda had one on the back seat of her car—a Buffalo atlas, which included all of Erie county. My shoes were snow-caked from trudging through the ever-forming drifts to retrieve it. I sat at the kitchen table and flipped through the atlas pages, with no idea where to start looking.

Brenda shuffled into the kitchen on slippered feet. Although it wasn’t late, she was dressed in a blue quilted bathrobe. “Is that from my car?”

“Yeah. Rich said I could—”

“Okay, but I want it put back where it belongs. You want some hot chocolate?”

“Sure.”

She got the milk out of the refrigerator and heated it in a saucepan on the stove. No instant stuff for Brenda. She had a cylinder of Ghirardelli sweet ground chocolate and cocoa, and scooped teaspoons of the stuff into large mugs.

I turned my attention back to the atlas, still with no clear idea of what to look for. The pages flipped past. Whole sections of the book were devoted to the outskirts of Buffalo. I ran my hands over the paper, hoping for some kind of impression.

Brenda plunked a steaming mug, heaped with fluffy clouds of Reddi-Wip, in front of me, taking the adjacent seat. I took a sip. Better than the cheap stuff, for sure.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, took a sip, and ended up with a whipped cream mustache.

I kept fanning through pages, running my hand over the type—waiting for . . . something. “I’m looking for Sumner’s guts.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not.”

She wiped her lip with a paper napkin. “What’ll you do if you find them?”

“I have no idea.”

She took another sip, watching me as I continued to run my hands over the pages. “What’re you hoping to come up with?”

“I’m not sure. But as far as I know, the cops haven’t found his insides. What do you know about DNA testing?”

She looked thoughtful. “I’m sure they took tissue samples during the autopsy. It would be easy to match them.” She glanced down at the page in front of me. “If you find them.”

My index finger rested on the town of Holland. “I think I already have.”

CHAPTER 12

“You want to what?”

To say that Richard wasn’t enthusiastic about my plan was definitely an understatement.

“I’m pretty sure I know where to find the rest of Sumner’s remains, but I need your help.”

His eyebrows drew close in consternation.

“Think of it as archeology, Rich.”

“Do you realize how much it’s snowed in the past week?”

“It’s in the country. Snow blows away in an open field. I’ll bet we can find it easy.”

Skeptical doesn’t begin to describe the expression plastered across his features.

I awoke early the next morning. Too psyched to eat breakfast, I wandered around the house, waiting for Richard and Brenda to get up. I dressed in my oldest jeans and sneakers. The only pair of boots I owned were more suited for line dancing than foraging through deep snow. With no heavy jacket, I dressed in layers—cotton, flannel, and wool—and hoped I wouldn’t freeze to death. That was unacceptable to Richard, who, when he finally got up, loaned me one of his jackets—easily two sizes too big. I talked him out of cashmere and into flannel, but when he reappeared in his grungies, he still looked like a walking advertisement for Neiman Marcus.

By raiding Richard’s bar and the broom closet, I’d collected a plastic grocery bag filled with tools that might come in useful, and plunked them in the back of Brenda’s Ford Taurus. I figured Richard wouldn’t want the back seat of his beautiful Lincoln cluttered with broom, shovel, and the like, and Brenda was accommodating, as usual. She informed us she intended to read up on frostbite remedies while we were gone. She had no desire to spend the better part of the day in sub-freezing temperatures.

It was after eleven when we finally started out. The day was bright and sunny. As Maggie predicted, the snow was melting and the roads were clear and dry as we headed south. For the first time in what seemed like ages, I felt good. Useful. Richard drove the twenty-some miles in silence, making me glad to have the radio for company.

We passed naked trees, closed ice-cream stands, and mile after mile of snow-covered fields. One thing was apparent: the road was not well-traveled.

The perfect place for murder.

The Holland town line sped past. “Slow down, will you? I’m not exactly sure where we’re going.”

“Anything look familiar?” Richard asked.

I shook my head. “I’ve got no mental picture of our destination, just a funny feeling in my gut, which, I’ll admit seems pretty insubstantial.”

Richard slowed the car. Instead of looking at the countryside, I concentrated on the thrumming inside me.

“Stop!”

“Here? It’s the middle of nowhere.”

“We’re getting close.”

Plow-piled mounds of dirty snow flanked the road. The shoulder was virtually nonexistent. Richard parked as close to the snow as possible before activating the hazard flashers.

“If this car gets hit, you’re going to explain it to Brenda. Not me.”

I closed my eyes and concentrated. That shaky feeling inside grew more pronounced.

“What is it you feel, anyway?”

“I don’t know how to describe it.” I frowned, thought about it for a moment. “It’s like being a Geiger counter. But instead of a noise, I have this tense feeling inside me. Like a guitar string tightened too much.” That didn’t come out exactly right, but he seemed to accept the explanation.

I got out of the Taurus, opened the rear door, and took out the grocery bag, shovel, and broom.

Richard surveyed the waist-high snow. “This isn’t going to work.”