Sinister Sudoku (10 page)

“That may be,” Liza said uncomfortably. “My interest is to find out about the postmortem for Mrs. H.”

Sheriff Clements sat up straight in his chair to shrug. “I wish I could be more specific. We’re bringing in a medical examiner with a bit more experience on criminal cases. Doc Conyers groused about it, but I think he’s really relieved.”

The sheriff brought up his hands. “Thing is, the weather is delaying our guy from getting down here. He’s not going to arrive till tomorrow now, and it will be at least a few days until the whole thing is finished. Please pass my apologies along to Mrs. Halvorsen. As I know more, I promise I’ll call her.”

Liza nodded. “Okay.”

Looking at her serious expression, Clements tried to lighten the mood. “So, any theories about what happened at the inn—or where this expensive painting might be lurking?”

That didn’t amuse Everard. “No matter what you say, Bert, I don’t think any investigation should depend on the girl detective and her chums.”

“Well, besides what Liza brought to the table last time, her chums turned up information that helped us make a case—stuff we’d have had a tough time getting hold of.”

“Even so,” Everard growled.

Liza leaned over to pick up a digest-sized magazine that had fallen to the floor.
“Brain-Teasing Sudoku!”
she said brightly, trying to change the subject. “So, sheriff, are you trying out the nation’s new puzzle craze?”

Clements grinned at her. “No, ma’am, that belongs to Ted.”

“All right,” the state police investigator mumbled. “I didn’t make the connection between Liza Kelly and Liza K. Are you happy?”

“Me?” Liza said lightly. “Think of how my publicist will feel when I tell her about this.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” the sheriff told Everard. “I’ve met that woman. She might just decide it’s necessary to kill you.”

Everard’s answer was interrupted by the duty officer’s appearance by the door. “Uh, the food delivery came from Ma’s Café. I paid for it from petty cash like you said.”

“I’d call this official business,” Clements said, taking the open cardboard box. He set it down on his desk and dug out a burger with the works and a double order of french fries.

Everard, Liza was surprised to note, had a salad with chicken and an iced tea.

“You’re not going for one of Ma’s trademark Artery Buster Burgers?” she asked.

“I had to give up a lot of that stuff when I found myself driving a desk,” Everard said. “It’s kind of nice to be out in the field.”

“Yeah, but you CID guys get to hear a lot of interesting stuff that never gets down to us hick sheriffs,” Clements said. “Like about Frankie Basso.”

“I don’t know if you keep up with the crime news,” Everard said to Liza. “But if you do, you might know that most of the organized crime up in Portland is controlled by the Russian mob and various Asian criminal cartels. Frankie had the job of diverting some of the business to homegrown organizations.”

“Like dose guys from New Jersey?” Liza tried to do a gangster accent.

“Actually Vinnie Tanino worked for the Jersey mob, in his incompetent way. They bounced him off to La-la Land, where they figured he could do less damage grifting around the big hotel pools.”

“Hence the nickname Vinnie Tanlines,” Liza said.

“When Frankie Basso started recruiting for some muscle to Americanize Portland’s crime scene, he gets Vinnie Tanlines dumped on him.”

“What did Tanino have to say about last night?” Liza asked.

“He admits he was supposed to trail Chris Dalen. But he claims he got to Seacoast Correctional too late—Dalen had already gone. So he was just having a drink in the Killamook Inn, trying to figure out his next move, when he spotted Dalen at the bar. With the snow, he figured they’d both be stuck there, so he took a room. He didn’t see Dalen after the early evening.”

“So that’s his story?” Liza asked.

“So far we can’t prove otherwise,” Everard replied. “Just as we can’t prove otherwise regarding your statement.”

Liza opened her mouth to protest, but something else came out instead. “But it does show that Frankie Basso was interested in the Mondrian.”

“You mentioned it wasn’t the first stolen art piece he was interested in, Ted,” Clements said.

Everard shrugged. “If we believe Fat Frankie. Supposedly he bankrolled a museum heist just to be able to say he’d done it. The feds actually have him on tape talking about it.” His lips twisted in a sour smile. “Problem is, there’s no hard evidence. The art never turned up, and all the suspects met violent ends.”

“Just like Chris Dalen.” Liza rose from her seat, not sure what she’d learned here—except that Ted Everard was a lot more pleasant to be around when he managed to relax. “Thanks for the visit. I really should get back to Mrs. H.”

As soon as Liza’s car pulled into her driveway, the door to Mrs. Halvorsen’s house popped open. Once again Liza trekked along the cleared path. The neighbors had been shoveling, too, and now a ribbon of cleared pavement ran down the block.

Stepping into her neighbor’s house, Liza presented the sheriff’s explanations and apologies. “I made some phone calls,” Mrs. H. said. “Now I’ll just explain that we have to wait.”

She led the way to the living room. “I’ve also been thinking of how to move forward.”

“Uh,” Liza said brilliantly as the older woman picked up her bulky family Bible. It had been a long day and a longer night. She wasn’t sure how much biblical scholarship she could take right now.

Instead, Mrs. H. retrieved a few sheets of paper hidden among the leaves. “This is where I hid any letters from Chris—my husband would never look here.”

Unfolding the letters, Mrs. Halvorsen spread them on the table. “You can see that he traveled a lot. He makes a lot of comments about the towns he passes through, but there’s very little about the people he meets or any friends.”

She held up one sheet. “Except for this one. Here’s the part. ‘Look Ellie—’ that’s what he used to call me, Ellie— ‘if you need to get in touch with me, leave a message with Phil Patrick at Patrician Books in Portland. I check in with him every so often.’” Reading her dead brother’s words left Mrs. H.’s face looking sadder and older.

Her real age,
the thought popped into Liza’s brain.

“Well, there’s a place to start,” Liza said aloud. She copied down the address, then headed home. Of course, the phone started ringing the moment Liza opened her door.

“You know, you could make yourself useful by dragging the receiver down and barking at that,” Liza told Rusty as he went into his usual
woof
-and-circle dance. “Yeah?” she finally said when she got the damned thing to her ear.

“Not even snow can cool the temper of my lady love,” the voice on the other end teased.

“What do you want, Michael?”

Michael Langley, who would soon be Liza’s ex-husband if they ever got the last of the paperwork cleared away, sounded hurt. “I was calling to see how you were. After a not-very-informative conversation with your answering machine last night, I heard you’d gotten involved in another murder.” His voice got a little flat. “At the Killamook Inn.”

“Michael—”

She didn’t get any further as Michael pressed on. “Anyway, I booked a flight to get up there, but the only airport I could get was Portland.”

Liza sighed. When Michael got this tone, it was no good trying to persuade him otherwise. “I’ll pick you up. When are you arriving?”

She wrote down Michael’s flight information on the same piece of paper she’d just gotten from Mrs. H., said good-bye, and then started dialing Kevin’s office at the Killamook Inn.

“Michael’s flying up tomorrow morning,” she said when Kevin picked up. Taking a cue from Michael, she plowed over Kevin’s next words. “Now I can go in my own car, but I expect the roads will still be crappy, so it would be better to go in your SUV.”

Then, before Kevin could raise a head of steam in his protests, she added, “And since we’ll be in town, I’d like to check out a message drop Chris Dalen was known to use.”

They weren’t even out of the airport parking lot, and Kevin and Michael were already sniping at one another. Liza tried to keep her mouth shut, determined not to pour gasoline on the fire.

Morning had brought weather that was warmer, but pretty gray and cheerless—much like Kevin’s mood as he picked her up. He was not happy about going to collect Michael. He was even less happy when Liza had mentioned the bookshop. But what really made him unhappy was reading about Mrs. Halvorsen’s connection to Chris Dalen in the morning newspaper.

Murph the reporter must have worked his usual little-old-lady magic, because there were liberal quotes from her neighbor in the story, which featured a childhood sister-and-brother picture, a mug shot of Chris Dalen, and a recent shot of Mrs. H. at this year’s garden festival.

The tone was pretty gentle—high-spirited farm boy became famous art thief when his biggest coup went wrong. Of course, the story also pointed out that Dalen had spent so much time behind bars because he wouldn’t give up the Mondrian he’d stolen. Mrs. H. was pretty forthright about that: “When I saw Chris’s picture in the papers, he’d been out of my life for years. I had no idea what he’d been up to, and I never asked him about it.”

Kevin, on the other hand, had a lot of questions about what Liza thought
she
was doing.

“I’m just trying to get Mrs. H. some answers about her brother,” Liza said.

That didn’t satisfy Kevin. “Strikes me the biggest question is, ‘Where did that big-bucks painting end up?’ That’s probably the question that got Chris Dalen killed.” He glanced from the empty road ahead to her for a moment. “And if you start asking questions about Dalen, whoever killed him is going to think that’s the answer you’re really after.”

So neither of them was in a great frame of mind even before they got to PDX. And when Michael got in the backseat, he was carrying a lot more luggage than the duffel hanging from his shoulder.

“Funny, you didn’t mention you were going off to the inn for dinner,” Michael said after he got settled.

Yeah—real funny,
Liza thought. But she thought better of actually saying it.

“Especially with that weather. You’d have to think there was a good chance of getting stranded out there.”

Liza couldn’t let that pass. “We moved up dinner, so I would have gotten home earlier if everything had worked out. Unfortunately, Kevin had business—”

“Yeah, I wonder what kind of business that was— considering what Curt Walters had to say about the way they found you.” Kevin braked with more than necessary vehemence when some idiot cut them off. Michael went on as if nothing had happened. “Yeah, I got to be pretty friendly with Curt during my last stay up in Maiden’s Bay. His comments made a sort of interesting sidelight to the media reports.”

“Curt made a lot of—” Liza was going to say “stupid,” but she changed that to “unhelpful comments during a pretty embarrassing situation.”

“A situation you could have avoided if you’d kept your pants on,” Michael’s former mild tone started disintegrating. “Or if you’d decided not to stay the night.”

“Funny,” Kevin said, “how some people get so controlling when their divorce is just about to be finalized.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s an amicable divorce,” Michael replied. “We’ve been really amicable lately. And things could just as easily go amicably the other way—if we were just left alone.”

“‘Left alone?’” Kevin echoed. “Isn’t that why Liza came back to Maiden’s Bay? Because she was left alone after you walked out on her? And then you come worming your way back in—”

“And you haven’t been worming away yourself ever since I left for that script job?” Michael retorted. “As soon as my back is turned, you’re trying to get her to play house in that overgrown pile of Lincoln Logs you manage—”

As the conversation grew hotter, Liza frantically fished around in the glove compartment for Kevin’s map of Portland. “Let’s see if we can track down the address for this bookstore where Chris Dalen used to get messages,” she said, trying to sound like an adult. God knew, the other people in the car sounded like teenage boys.

Sensing Kevin’s resistance, Michael enthusiastically embraced the idea. But then, he’d just as enthusiastically have opened the door to play in traffic if Kevin had said that was dangerous.

“What do you think you’re going to find?” Kevin demanded. “An envelope with big handwriting—‘For my dear sister in the event of my death’? If there was anything that might point the way to the painting, we’ll probably find the store closed and the owner off trying to dig up the Mondrian. There’s no honor among thieves.”

“Maybe—maybe not,” Michael replied. “We can’t know what we might find out until we check the place—and the owner—out.” Liza rolled her eyes. At least she’d gotten them fighting over a different topic.

Patrician Books didn’t look particularly patrician. The shop was a dingy storefront in a neighborhood that had managed to avoid Portland’s rising tide of prosperity. The grand name was emblazoned on a wooden sign whose hand painting was flaking away.

Phil Patrick didn’t live up to his name, either. Liza had envisioned a small tough guy, like the sort of characters Jimmy Cagney played in those old black-and-white gangster films on the classic movie channels. An exbantamweight boxer, maybe.

The real-life Phil Patrick wasn’t so much a bantam as a big chicken. Liza knew chickens. One of her grammar school classmates, Suzy Dorling, had lived on the outskirts of town—where all the Californians were erecting their McMansions these days. Back then the area was considerably more rural, and Suzy’s parents had raised chickens. Liza had gotten to see the dynamics of a flock, including the pecking order. There was always one scruffy-looking chicken that all the rest could pick on—or peck on.

Phil Patrick was the human equivalent.