Repo Madness (22 page)

Alan woke up on the way to Gaylord, a town of close to four thousand people due east of East Jordan. I told him what Kermit had to say, that Blanchard had bankrolled the whole Hawaii vacation thing.

“I still don't get how it makes money,”
Alan confessed.

“I don't either. Next time I see Blanchard, I'll ask him. Hey, Alan, I've got some good news.”

“You've decided to go to the gym and lose fifty pounds,”
he guessed.

“What? I don't need to lose
fifty pounds
.”

“Even five would help. You've got to start exercising.”

“It's winter. Every animal gains weight in winter.”

“No, animals
starve
in winter. Only humans gain weight in winter, but if they go to the gym, they gain less.”

“Why are we even talking about this?”

“Our pants are tight. They're not only ugly, they're uncomfortable.”

“They are
my
pants and you know what? Forget it. I'm not telling you anything.”

“No, tell me.”

“I'm just some fat guy in bad pants. And Jimmy Growe is an idiot, and you laugh at the Wolfingers—you're the most intolerant person I've ever met, Alan,” I stormed.

He was silent. I stared moodily at the empty road ahead of me.

“Okay,”
he finally said quietly.

“Okay what?”

“You may have a point. I never intended it, but I see how some of my remarks might cause offense.”

A few more miles rolled by.
“What did you really want to tell me?”
he asked hesitantly.

“All right. It's a secret, but I guess I don't have to worry about you telling anyone, do I? Guess who's having a baby.”

“Oh my God, no,”
Alan moaned.

“What? Wait, you think it's Katie? And all you can think of to say is ‘God no'?”

“It's not her?”

“Of course not.”

Alan sighed in relief.

“It's my sister, thanks very much,” I told him. “I'm going to be an uncle.”

He congratulated me sincerely and told me I needed to buy a gift. “Like, now? I thought that's for the baby shower,” I objected.

“No, that's what you do if it is someone close to you; you get a gift right away.”

“Like, a baseball mitt, maybe? Hockey mask?”

Alan laughed, knowing I was joking. Or hoping, anyway.

David Leinberger was easy to find—he ran a tax preparation and accounting service out of a converted Victorian house, just two doors down from the bank that financed the Chevy Malibu I'd repossessed from him. I guess the people in the bank were too embarrassed to walk a few yards down the street and ask for their collateral, so I drove the forty miles from Kalkaska and hooked him up. David came out to ask what was going on when I had the front wheels lifted off the ground, and communicated a certain amount of displeasure with events. He was my height and spent a lot of time poking his finger in my face. Experience has taught me that fingers aren't too dangerous unless they're curled around a trigger, so I let him point and swear and threaten while I finished putting the safety chains on, and he was still yelling as I drove away.

This would be our first reunion.

“What are you going to say? What if he recognizes you?”
Alan fretted.

“I don't know; let's just see what happens.”

“We should have a plan.”

“My plan is to see what happens. Stop talking now, Alan.”

The other half of the house was a defunct hair salon, the windows cloudy with dust, but Leinberger's side was tidy, the snow shoveled. The sign above the door to the small accounting business invited me to come right in, so that's what I did. There was a tiny outer office with a desk and a phone, empty of people, but I could hear someone in the back, moving around, so I waited, wiping the wet off my feet and onto the welcome mat.

“Hi!” David greeted me, coming out smiling. He looked in better shape than last time I'd seen him—he'd lost weight, it appeared. As Alan seemed eager to point out, I'd sort of gone in the opposite direction. His clothes were pressed, and he wore a sports coat—Alan's kind of guy, basically. “What can I help you with today?”

“Mr. Leinberger?”

I held out my hand, but before he could reach for it, his gaze darkened. “I know who you are,” he said after a moment. “McCann.”

“Yeah. Hi.”

“What do you want?”

“Just to talk. Do you have a minute?”

“Talk about what?”

“That's what I want to talk about.”

Okay, even I had to admit that didn't make a lot of sense. His facial features were hardening. “You need an accounting service?”

“No. Well, actually, I probably do, but I can't afford one.”

“Then I can't help you.” He folded his arms.

I sighed. “I was just out on Beaver Island, talking to Audrey Strang. You remember her?”

He regarded me warily. “So?”

“So, something has come up concerning her sister, Nina. I was hoping you could help me shed some light on a few things.”

“You've got to be kidding me.”

“I think it was you who went to the bridge and asked the captain to page Nina, am I right? You were supposed to meet up with her on the
Emerald Isle,
but you couldn't find her anywhere. But did you see her at all that day? On the boat, or before?”

“Are you stupid or something?”

“I do get asked that from time to time. Look, Mr. Leinberger. David.”

“Did you notice my car out there, when you came in?”

I didn't know where this was going, so I just shook my head.

“That's because it's not here. It's in the shop. It's
always
in the shop. It's an utter piece of crap. I'd like a decent vehicle, but I can't get one. Because of the repo on my credit. I was just at the Chevy dealer last week.”

“All I do is what the bank tells me, David.”

“No.
No.
You didn't even talk to me. Tax season was just getting started. I could have gotten caught up in just a few days. You didn't have to repo my car! You know what it did to my reputation in this town when that happened?”

“You just stole his car? Without even talking to him?”
Alan demanded indignantly. I wondered just what he thought a repo man
did.

“I went through hell that year. My marriage fell apart, I lost Nina, business went to shit … but I was getting it back together. I had been sober for twenty-one days when you showed up. I could have told you all of that—I was
trying
to tell you—but you just drove off without a word.”

“Would it make a difference if I told you I was sorry?”

“What do
you
think?”

“I'm here because something happened to Nina on that boat. And I'm trying to find out what. All I'm asking is for your help. I would think you'd care.”

His expression was utterly disgusted. “Time for you to leave, McCann.”

*   *   *

“I thought that went well,” I said to Alan once we were back in the wrecker.

“He didn't tell us everything he knows.”

“Gee, ya think?”

“You can really be unpleasant to talk to sometimes.”

“You're right. You should quit talking to me.”

Alan took my advice for about five minutes.
“I couldn't tell if Leinberger saw something on the
Emerald Isle
or not.”

“If he didn't, then we've wasted a lot of time.”

“I don't agree. He might not have seen anything, but this is still an important lead, the best one we've got at this point.”

“Listen to yourself. Lead. Says detective Harry Bosch. Leinberger was on the boat and couldn't find Nina Otis, so he had her paged. She didn't show up. What more can he tell us?”

“You're forgetting the panel van theory.”

“I'm not forgetting it; I'm ignoring it.”

“It's the only thing that fits all the facts.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe it happened exactly as everyone believes—she fell off the
Emerald Isle
. Just like the woman who got drunk and slipped off the sailboat; or the one who got drunk and took the dive off the public docks in Charlevoix. Maybe what we're really learning is that it's not a good idea to be intoxicated around deep water.”

“Because if you are, and you're a woman, you're going to drown and wind up floating to shore five days later with semen in you,”
Alan finished for me.

I thought about this for a moment. We were literally at the turning point—the place where, taking the back way, I would turn left to get to Kalkaska. Instead I remained on M-32, pushing on.

“Where now?”
Alan asked, sensing a change of plans.

“So, okay. Let's go to Charlevoix and ask around, see if we can find anyone who saw Nina that day, before the boat left for Beaver Island.”

“That would have been in the newspaper,”
Alan objected.

“Not necessarily. If you saw a woman having a couple of drinks before she got on the boat, would you call the cops or a reporter when you found out she'd fallen off?”

“I would, yes.”

“That is right, Alan. And I'm sure they would have given you another merit badge for your Cub Scout uniform. But normal people would just shrug it off.”

He went back to not talking to me.

Deputy Timms swung out after me as soon as I crossed the county line, as if he'd been sitting there, waiting for me. My ticket was for “following too close.” I shoved it into the middle of the pile of citations in the glove box.

The downtown stretch of Charlevoix wraps around a round lake called, well, Round Lake. The Pine River, about which I spouted worthy facts to Katie, runs from Round Lake under the drawbridge to Lake Michigan. Lake Charlevoix is on the opposite side of Round Lake from Lake Michigan and is the same body of water that connects most of the places where I do my work: Charlevoix; Boyne City, where bodies float up; Ironton, where I drove into the channel; East Jordan, where Katie worked. In the summer, the
Emerald Isle
tied up at the docks on Round Lake, right at the place where the drunk woman had fallen into the drink and drowned. I had no idea where they parked the car ferry in the winter.

I parked out in front of the row of shops on the Round Lake side of the main drag, stopping in front of what used to be the Star movie theater and is now a couple of retail stores. I experienced my first kiss in that theater, with a girl named Susie. I'd heard recently that Susie had gone on to become a sister at the Carmelite Monastery of the Sacred Hearts, but I doubted our kiss had anything to do with that.

At the end of the row of shops, positioned so that it would have the best view of the car ferry, was a bar named, appropriately enough, the Ferry Bar. “Where do you think someone would go to get a drink or two before getting on the boat?” I asked Alan.

“Maybe,”
Alan conceded.
“So what are you going to do? You can't just go in there and start asking people if they remember if Nina was there that day.”

“What I'm going to do is go in there and ask people if they remember if Nina was there that day.” I grabbed the folder with the pictures of the missing women. The sky was cloudy, but the air was warm, so warm that the snow in the eaves was starting to turn gray with meltwater and drip in a rainlike patter to the ground.

The Ferry Bar was not as big as the Black Bear, but otherwise wasn't much different—just a small-town saloon, though the wall was decorated with pictures of boats and a bunch of nets and fishing crap. Not nearly as classy as a dead stuffed bear, in my opinion. I walked in and got the sort of assessing glances you see from regulars when someone they don't know shows up, though I imagined that in the summer, the place was jammed with tourists. That's why I like the Black Bear: Our summer crowd isn't really any different than our winter crowd. Nor is it hardly ever a “crowd.”

The guy behind the bar was what Jimmy calls “cue bald”—a shaved skull gleaming in the overhead light. He was almost my height but very thin. I've spent more than a few hours of my life in bars, and slipped onto a stool with practiced ease, asking for a beer. “This your place?” I asked Cue Bald.

“Yeah. Wade Rogan.” He extended a friendly hand.

“Ruddy McCann.” I waited for a reaction and got it. He frowned a little, trying to place the name, so I nodded. “Yeah, from the Black Bear in Kalkaska,” I told him. Not the guy who drove Lisa Marie Walker into the drink—more and more, that guy was fading away.

“Ah, the competition!” He grinned at me. He had narrow dark eyes but a friendly smile, the kind of happy look that keeps people coming back for a drink. Nowhere near as handsome as Jimmy Growe, but the same joyful personality type.

“You do siphon off a lot of our business,” I agreed. “People driving thirty miles so they can watch your TV instead of ours.”

“You and your wife own that place, right? Becky, Betsy?”

“No, Becky's my sister. I'm not married, but I'm engaged to Katie Lottner.”

He gave me no reaction to that one. I couldn't believe he hadn't heard of her—it seemed to me that every man in a seven-county area would know who she was.

There were two other men at the bar who, if this were a movie, would be Guy at Bar #1 and Guy at Bar #2. They looked like they'd been sitting there so long, their pants were adhered to their stools. They didn't react to me or Katie's name at all—it seemed as if their reflexes were pretty well anesthetized.