Rainy City (12 page)

Downstairs, the two uniformed officers who had been grilling Holder finally let him go, after inspecting his I.D. and writing some numbers onto their note pads. Holder strolled away at a leisurely pace, stopping once to turn back and eye the two cops. I couldn’t believe they had released him.

After Percy had hunkered on Mary’s wooden rocker for ten minutes scrawling notes, he stood up, stretched, cracked his knuckles ritualistically and strode over to me.

“You acquainted with this gal’s relatives, you might do us a favor and stick around. Maybe make a few phone calls, have somebody come up and make the funeral arrangements. The manager’s out and none of the neighbors here want to have anything to do with a murder. You know how that goes.” Captain Henderson had told him I had been a cop, bragged me up good. I could feel it. We were brothers now.

“Sure,” I said. “I’d kind of like to see how the relatives react.”

Percy looked at me as if I were a ghoul.

“For the case,” I added hastily, but I didn’t dislodge the morbid impression I’d given him. “One last thing, Percy.”

“Yeah?” He regarded me without compassion. I had some sick instincts and he was going to keep his eye on me.

“I was going to meet Mary today. She had something she wanted to tell me. She never said what it was. But she did mention that she had an unpleasant errand to run first.”

Percy scratched his mustache with a long polished fingernail. “What sort of unpleasant errand?”

“I have no idea what it was. You might check to see if her car’s been driven today.”

“I’ve already thought of that, thank you. You can use this phone. We’ll have the body downtown. Just get somebody up here to make a positive 1.D. and arrange the services.”

“Sure.”

The people at Taltro wouldn’t put me through to Angus Crowell. “His sister was murdered this morning,” I said, nonchalantly. “Does that make a difference.”

“Oh, my God,” gasped a startled secretary. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have bestowed that sort of news through a third party, but Crowell did not have my total sympathy.

Her official mien punctured, the secretary said, “Mr. Crowell has been out of the office all morning. I don’t know when to expect him back.”

From the long distance operator, I obtained Crowell’s home phone number, surprised that it was listed. A maid answered. I asked for either the lady or the gent of the house.

“Who may I say is calling?” the maid asked, with a strong Mexican accent.

“A representative of Mr. Crowell’s sister in Bellingham.”

It was a while before Muriel Crowell came on the line. She was businesslike and taciturn. “Who is this?”

“The name is Thomas Black, Mrs. Crowell. You met me last night under rather unfortunate circumstances. It’s about your sister-in-law in Bellingham, Mrs. Crowell. Mary Dawn is dead.”

The line was silent for ten counts. “I’m afraid I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true. I found the body. If you want to confirm this, phone the Bellingham police and ask for Detective Herman Percy. He’s in charge of the investigation.”

“What do you mean, you found her? What investigation?”

“Your sister-in-law was slugged in the head with a bottle.”

“You mean Mary really is dead?” Her voice rose in pitch, the truth slamming home at last.

“That’s what I’ve been telling you.”

“How did it happen?”

“I wish we knew. Somebody apparently bashed her on the side of the head with a bottle of ketchup.”

“Ketchup?” Her voice was strained, disbelieving.

“It’s too awful for me to have made up, Mrs. Crowell. I was wondering when you or your husband might be able to come up here and make…a positive identification. And some funeral arrangements. I’m assuming you are her next of kin. She never married, did she?”

“No, she never married.”

“When can you get up here?”

The line was silent for almost thirty seconds.

“Mrs. Crowell? Are you all right?”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve!”

“Mrs. Crowell?”

“First you poke your nose into our personal family affairs and now you expect me to come up and identify that woman? I simply am not going to do it. She was a spiteful woman. Mentally unbalanced. She was under the care of a psychiatrist. Some of the lies she spread…No, Mr. Black. You arrange a burial yourself.” The line went dead.

“Mrs. Crowell?”

Herman Percy strode into the apartment again, looked at me and said, “You get ahold of anyone yet?”

“Almost,” I said, grinning weakly.

“I want you downtown when you get done. You’ll have to make a statement.”

“Sure thing.”

“By the way,” said Percy, smiling like a man who had just won a coveted trophy, “we nailed the nephew. A prowl car nabbed him trying to thumb a ride off the freeway.”

“What’d he say?”

“Don’t know yet. But he tried to take a swing at one of the officers who picked him up. I’m going down to interrogate him now. It doesn’t look good.”

It took me a long while and a lot of imagination before I could conjure a picture of Burton taking a poke at anyone, much less a city cop with a pistol strapped to his hip. ?

SHEETS OF RAIN SPATTERED THE CONDOMINIUM WINDOWS noisily. I pored through Mary. Dawn Crowell’s small personal phone directory twice before discovering the notation on the inside cover, feeling like an absolute fool for not looking there first. It said:

To whom it may concern:

Should anything happen to me, please contact my brothers:

Stephen J. Crowell

Shady Lane Rest Home

Sedalia, Missouri

or

Edward and Clarice Crowell

1-213-777-4358

29 Beach Rd.

Malibu, California

So, she had at least two additional brothers besides Angus. That made sense. Families were larger sixty or seventy years ago. I dialed the number in Malibu. An old man who had a very slow and very deep voice answered on the first ring, as if he were sitting next to the telephone.

“Edward Crowell?”

“This is Ed Crowell speaking.”

“My name is Thomas Black. I’m calling about your sister, Mary Dawn Crowell.”

“Yes, of course. What is it? Is it her heart?” He spoke slowly and lugubriously.

“I’m afraid she passed away this morning.”

He paused, and then said, “Are you the manager of her condominium?”

“No, sir. I’m a private detective. I came up here early this afternoon to speak to your sister and found her dead.”

“Had she been ill? We hadn’t heard anything.”

“I’m afraid someone murdered her.”

“Murder?”

“That’s right.”

“A detective? Why on earth would a detective want to speak to Mary?”

“It’s rather complicated, but I assure you Mary had done nothing wrong.”

“My God. My God. Murder? Who? A cat burglar? A rapist? Some young thug?”

“Good questions, Mr. Crowell. Nobody seems to know anything right now. Can you fly up here today and take care of…”

“On my way. I’m on my way. Let me call the airport and make arrangements. I’ll phone you back in a few minutes so you’ll know when to expect me.”

I told him where I was and we hung up. For ten minutes, I watched a couple of sleepy-eyed bumblers trying to shove Mary Dawn into a large plastic body bag. The bag was too big, the men were in too much of a hurry, and they zippered a lock of the corpse’s thin, graying hair grotesquely outside the bag. A squat oriental officer dusting for fingerprints shuffled over and asked me what I had handled in the apartment besides the phone, which he had already checked. I told him.

The phone rang. ‘Black here.”

“Ed Crowell. Clarice and I will be in Washington in

about three hours. I’ve a lodge brother who flies and he’s bringing us up. I’ll lease a car at the airport.”

“The body will be downtown, Mr. Crowell. It won’t be pretty.”

“Don’t fret about me. I was a funeral director for thirty-five years. Now, who should we speak to when we get to Bellingham?”

“A detective named Herman Percy is in charge. I’d like to speak to you also, if that’s all right.”

“By all means. Where do we get in touch?”

“I’ll wait for you downtown.”

I liked his no-nonsense approach to life. Or to death.

Percy sent me to a vacant office for an hour where I dictated my statement to a bespectacled police officer who was straining to grow a mustache. Percy came in, coatless, perused the statement, had me sign it and then asked, “How well do you know this nephew, Nadisky?”

“Not well. I’ve been around him. We haven’t cut our thumbs or anything.”

“You want to see him for a few moments?”

“Is that kosher?”

“Not usually. Me, I get creative once in a while. He seems to have a grudge against you. I was thinking if he came face to face with you, he might blurt out something stupid.”

“Like a confession?”

“Or a motive.”

“I doubt if he did it.”

“You let me worry about that.”

Burton was ensconced in another office similar to the one I had been in. The only furnishings were file cabinets, a coffee machine, which wasn’t percolating anything, and a desk buried in papers. A small mirror was bracketed in the wall. It was obviously a one-way window connected to the next office. Percy would observe from behind it.

When Percy and I walked into the room, Burton leaped up and tried to take a poke at me, both his hands cuffed in front. A burly uniformed officer. restrained him, shoving him back down into his chair with one thick hand.

“You prick!” Burton bellowed.

“Burton,” I said.

“You prick. You squealed on me the first chance you got.”

“What’s the matter? You get into the catnip?”

“You ask me what’s the matter? You people think you’re all one cut above someone just because you have more money than they do. That’s it. Judge everyone by their income. That makes Al Capone upper class and Carl Sandburg lower class. That makes Herod upper class and Christ lower class. Good way to do things. It never occurs to you that some people may have different values. You think because I write poems and don’t have a master’s degree in business administration that I’m some sort of slime that crawled out from under a sidewalk. I’ll tell you something. You people are wigged out. You don’t know what life is all about. None of you.”

Percy looked at me and spoke calmly, in stark contrast to Burton’s shrillness. He had seen it all too many times and he was tired of waiting for the second-act curtain.

“Claims he didn’t kill her. Claims the old lady was going to meet someone else. That he was only there for a few minutes and she shooed him out the door because she had a visitor coming.” Percy looked away from the huffing, wild-eyed Burton distastefully. Nobody liked a killer. “Well, I’ll leave you two here with Simmons. I’ve got some other business to take on.”

“Are you holding him?” I asked, more so that Burton could hear the answer than anything else. If they were true to form, they had left him up in the air over his fate. Percy stared down at Burton for a moment and surveyed the prisoner almost sympathetically. Almost. “Him? You bet.”

I walked over behind the desk so that Simmons was between myself and Burton, glancing out a dirty window at the rain and the dingy buildings across the street. Simmons didn’t seem to give a hoot what happened. He pawed through a Sports Illustrated, twisted his hips and farted loudly. I hoped they were getting all this on tape.

Glowering like a cat that had just been de-balled with a pair of rusty shears, Burton’s face reddened even more, the veins bubbled out on his neck and he tried hard to think of something vicious to say to me.

“Jesus, you’re a sneaky bastard,” he said.

A mouse under his eye, his lip split, wearing faded jeans—he did not look like much. Except for his baby face, he looked like one of the thugs on the local news being led, shackled, down a dark hallway, a gang of cameramen tagging along. He fit the mold. Sullen. Indigent. Unshaved. Belligerent. Disrespectful.

“Did you kill her?” “Sneakiest sonofabitch I ever ran across.”

“I don’t know why you’re ticked off at me. All I did was tell the cops those were your poems in the living room. They would have found out anyway. Your name was on them. You must have left prints all over the place. They were going to pick you up sooner or later. Why all the pandemonium?”

“But you had to help them along.”

“A guy gets mad this way, Burton, especially a mild-mannered guy like you, and it makes people suspect he’s trying to hide something.”

Burton glared at me and mulled it over for a few minutes. “Eat shit,” he said, finally.

“Flowery words won’t turn my head.”

Suddenly Burton’s face collapsed. He slammed his forehead onto his folded hands on the desk.

“You okay, guy?”

“What do you care?” he asked, bitterly, his lips an inch off the desk top.

“I want to see you and your wife and your little girl back together. That’s all I’m in this for.”

Burton swiveled his head up at me, his pale blue eyes trying to discern whether or not I was conning him.

“Have you seen Melissa?” he asked, a trace of hope lacing his voice.

“Nope. You?”

He shook his head despondently. “Gawd. What’s happening to me?” he said, with a hiccuppy sigh. “What the hell’s happening?”

“It’s just pressure, kid. It downs all of us. Don’t let it depress you.”

“What can I do?” he whined.

“Tell me what happened this morning.”

“I hitched up to talk to Aunt Mary. You said she knew where Melissa was.”

“I said she got a call from Melissa.”

“Yeah. That’s what she told me, too. She got a call. She never did like me much. She couldn’t believe the way Melissa and I were living.” A touch of pride infected his voice, as if the way he and Melissa were living was something they had worked very hard to achieve.

“I guess that was part of the whole trouble. Melissa’s parents didn’t approve of the way we were living either.”

“The evidence doesn’t suggest Melissa was too keen on things herself.”

Burton looked at me for a moment, ice in his eyes. Although he was acting like a three-year-old, he had more strength of character than I’d given him credit for.