The Angel Singers (11 page)

“Look, Tony, I realize we’ve only met once and that this is probably a touchy subject for you, but since I’m checking into all the circumstances surrounding Grant’s death, I was wondering if you might give me a little further insight into what kind of guy he was.”

“Other than a first-class prick, you mean?”

“Well, I understand he was pretty much of a troublemaker,” I said, “and I was wondering which other of the guys he might have pulled his little number on? Especially anyone you know of who might have been unhappy or angry enough to want to see him dead. I understand Jerry has a pretty bad temper, and I’d like to be able to look elsewhere, if I could.”

His tone softened slightly. “You can’t seriously think Jerry had something to do with it. He’s got a short fuse, sure, but he always gets over it quickly and he could never do anything like that. Never.”

“I understand,” I said, trying to worm my way into his good graces. “But I’m sure the police investigation will get around to him, if it hasn’t already, and it would probably help to know that he wasn’t the only one with a motive.

“So, who else did Grant jerk around?”

“Just about everybody at one time or another. He was a real prick-teaser. I know he really hurt Barry, and he pissed off a few of the other members’ partners, but…”

“None of them might have gotten angry enough to want to kill him?”

There was a long pause before, “No. Honestly. Wanting to kill someone is one thing, doing it is another. I can’t believe that hating a guy’s guts could really be a motive for murder.”

Frankly, neither could I. But the fact remained that somebody
had
killed Grant for reasons that probably went deeper than the guy’s being an asshole.

I figured I’d gotten about as much from Tony as I was likely to get for the moment, so I thanked him for his time, we exchanged good-byes, and hung up.

I immediately tried calling the number he had given me, but there was no answer and no machine. I folded the paper with the number and put it in my billfold for the next day.

*

The first thing I did Tuesday morning, before even starting the coffee, was to put in a call to Marty Gresham. Since I knew he spent most of his time out of the office, I wanted to try to catch him before he left. Luck was with me when his extension was picked up and I heard the familiar voice.

“Detective Gresham.”

“Marty, it’s Dick. Glad I caught you.”

“Sorry I didn’t get a chance to return your call yesterday,” he said. “So, you’re working on the Jefferson case.”

I hadn’t mentioned that in my message to him, but it wasn’t surprising that he’d figured it out.

“Can I assume you and Dan…” Dan Carpenter was Marty’s work partner. “…have the case?”

“Yeah. Dan says we get all the gay cases because I know you. Dan’s brother is always ribbing him about it.”

Dan’s brother Earl was also a homicide detective, a nice guy whose partner was an old-school homophobe with whom I’d had some nasty run-ins on past cases. Earl, however, seemed to have inherited the
Homo sapiens
genes his Neanderthal partner so clearly lacked, and we got along fine.

“When can we get together to talk about it?” Marty asked.

“You name it.”

“How about your office. One o’clock, one fifteen?”

“It’s a date,” I said.

“Don’t you wish,” he teased.

Though Marty was hopelessly straight, with a wife and daughter and a second child on the way, he and Dan Carpenter were, unlike Carpenter’s brother’s partner and many others on the police force, totally comfortable with my being gay. Not that it would have mattered if he wasn’t, but it did make it a lot easier this way.

“Oh, and one more thing while we’re on the phone,” I said. “Is there any way you can look into someone’s juvenile records? They might have been sealed.”

“Well, that could be a problem, but not impossible,” he said. “What’s the name?”

“Barry Legget,” I said, spelling the last name for him. “He’s in his mid-twenties now, and I don’t have any exact dates.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The number Booth had given me for Bernie Niles got me no further than his answering machine, and I left both my numbers in hopes he’d get back to me, though, especially if he were still pissed at Booth, there was no particular reason to think he would once he recognized the area code.

*

I decided to hold off trying to reach Jerry Granville until that night, when there’d be a better chance of finding him in.

At exactly one fifteen, shortly after I’d finished the downstairs diner’s Meatloaf Special and taken the trash to the disposal room on my floor, the shadows of Detectives Gresham and Carpenter appeared on the opaque-glass half of my door, followed by a crisp knock.

“Open,” I called. “Coffee?” I asked as they took seats on the two chairs facing my desk.

“No, thanks,” Carpenter said. “We just finished lunch.”

“So,” I said, knowing they were busy and probably wanted to get right to the point, “what can you tell me about the Jefferson case?”

Marty grinned. “Odd, we were going to ask you the same thing.”

“You first.”

They exchanged glances before Marty said, “Well, whoever did it wanted to make damned sure they got their message across. They used not one but
two
pipe bombs under the driver’s seat and jointly wired them to the ignition. The bombs themselves were almost high-school stuff, literally. Anyone with a basic knowledge of chemistry and wiring could have done it. Trying to trace the individual components back to their source is next to impossible. And what hardware store doesn’t carry duct tape and wire? It’s all pretty generic stuff.”

“And what about the explosive itself?” I asked.

“You can find it in just about any school chemistry lab. Again, pretty generic stuff. The actual putting it all together probably takes a little research, but that wouldn’t be difficult for someone with any real desire to figure out how it’s done. And all the other components could be picked up in almost any hardware store.”

“Any prints on anything you recovered?”

Dan shook his head. “Nope. Whoever did it wasn’t a dummy.”

“How long would it take to install a bomb?” I asked.

Carpenter shrugged. “Once it was all put together? Maybe five, ten minutes. Bomb under the seat, wire from bomb to ignition—that’s the part that takes the most time.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t Grant have immediately noticed a wire running from under the seat up to the ignition?” I asked. “I can’t see how he could have missed it.”

“Well, whoever did it slit the carpet just enough to run the wire under it, all the way up the firewall. We found small pieces of duct tape, which was probably used to hide the wire where it came out from under the carpet and ran along the passenger’s side of the steering column.”

“Seems to me the bomber took quite a risk of being caught,” I said. “Somebody could easily have seen him screwing around under the dashboard,” I said. “And he had to be pretty confident that Grant wouldn’t show up.”

“Well,” Carpenter said, “we think the plant probably was done in two stages. Most likely most of it was done while Jefferson was at work—employees park in the same lot as cars brought in for service, so it wouldn’t be unusual to see someone monkeying around inside one of them. We think he might have gotten most of it done except for the actual connection to the ignition switch when something scared him off.

“Most likely he followed Jefferson after work, waiting for the chance to make the final connection. He obviously couldn’t risk it in the supermarket parking lot, but when he saw Jefferson come out and drive off with another guy, he probably figured out what was going on and that he’d have more than enough time while the car was parked at the trick’s house. Jefferson was leaving the guy’s place when he triggered the bomb.”

“Was this guy someone Grant knew, or a pickup?” I asked.

“He’s just some kid who works at the supermarket. He said he’d met Jefferson as he was getting off work and that he invited him over. He claimed he’d never seen Jefferson before, and his story checked out. One of his buddies from the supermarket had seen the pick-up.”

“Sounds like something Grant would do,” I said. “You’ve talked to Crandall Booth, I understand.”

“Within an hour of the explosion,” Marty said. “And while he appeared to be duly shocked by the news, he wasn’t too helpful. According to him, Jefferson was simply a friend from Atlanta staying with him, and he claimed he knew very little about Jefferson’s private life. We took that one with about three pounds of salt.

“He claimed he hadn’t left work until around eight and that checked out. So, he wouldn’t have had time to make it from work to the fifteen-hundred block of East Monroe to hook up the bomb. But anyone with his money could easily have hired someone else to do the job for him. We’re looking very closely at his recent financial transactions. It’s beginning to look like he has a rather serious gambling problem.”

“Partly based on that, we also briefly considered whether Booth might have been the target rather than Jefferson,” Dan added. “It was his car, after all, and a man that rich, especially one with a gambling addiction, has to have enemies.”

“Yeah,” Marty added, “but since the bomb had to have been connected to the ignition at the scene, that meant whoever did it was following Jefferson and knew who was driving.”

“And you told Booth the circumstances of the explosion—where Grant was and why?”

“Well, we told him where and that we’d interviewed the guy he was visiting. I’m sure Booth could fill in the blanks,” Dan said.

“And his reaction?”

“He repeated that he didn’t know anything about Jefferson’s personal life.”

When I’d talked with Booth, I’d found his protestations that Grant was pure as the driven snow somewhat hard to swallow. Now, realizing that he knew perfectly well when he talked to me where Grant had died and what he’d been doing there, I found his remarks flat-out suspect.

“So, I gather that at the moment, Booth’s top on your list,” I said.

“At the moment,” Marty replied. “We’re looking as closely as we can into his past, and we understand Jefferson was something less than an applicant for sainthood. Which is why we’re here talking to you. What’s your take on all this? What do you know that we don’t?”

I told them everything I knew, including the details of Jim Bowers’ accident, Booth’s having visited Bowers at the hospital, the “coincidence” of Booth’s mechanic being called in at night for repairs to a baby-blue Porsche and the mechanic’s subsequent suspicious move to Tulsa.

I also gave them a recap of my conversations with the various chorus members and Rothenberger, including Booth’s story about the mysterious Robert Smith.

“Now, it strikes me that, if Booth really did think Smith might be involved, he would have made a point of telling you about him,” I said. “Even if he were completely innocent and not thinking clearly when you first interviewed him, I’d surely think he’d have called you later to mention the guy.”

Marty and Dan looked at one another, then at me and shook their heads in unison.

“Not yet, anyway,” Dan said.

“Well,” I told them, “my first reaction was that he might be making it up on the spot to get me off his back. If he does contact you about it, I might take it a bit more seriously. I did get the name and phone number for the guy in Atlanta who handed Grant off to him—his name’s Bernie Niles, and I get the idea that the hand-off wasn’t exactly voluntarily.

“Booth claims Smith was trying to run a scam on Niles, and that Grant ratted him out and Smith went to jail because of it. If that’s true, it could have made the guy mad enough to want to kill him, especially if Booth was right in calling Smith a psychopath. And if by chance Smith did track Grant here, the only way he could have done so would be through Niles. I’ve got a call in to Niles, but he hasn’t returned it yet.”

“Tell you what,” Carpenter said, “why don’t you give us the number? I’ve got a buddy on the Atlanta force who owes me a favor. I’ll ask him to check with Niles and find out anything he can about this Smith character.”

“I appreciate that, Dan,” I said. “But I’ve found that gays are more willing to talk to another gay than to the police. Let me see what I can find out about Smith from him. But if you could check Smith’s criminal history, we can combine our notes.”

They didn’t look as though they were quite convinced.

“Look,” I said, “if this is all a wild goose chase, I’ll have saved you the time and trouble to do it yourselves. If I turn up anything of interest, you can take it from there.”

The two detectives exchanged glances, then Carpenter said, “Okay. It’s not like we’re exactly looking for extra work.”

“You know, we really should put you on the payroll,” Marty said with a grin.

“I appreciate the thought,” I said, “and no disrespect, but I think I prefer things the way they are. We’ve got a nice thing going here, and in my line of work I don’t think it would be a big plus to be associated too closely with the police. But I’ve got it on my list of things I want to be when I grow up—right after ‘fireman.’”