Wicked Is the Whiskey: A Sean McClanahan Mystery (Sean McClanahan Mysteries Book 1) (11 page)

After I parted with Morton, Wilson and Hartley, I found a spot above the old industrial campus that houses Preston’s company. Though it was dark, the spot afforded me a nice view of the smaller building on the riverfront, which was well lighted. 

And I waited.

I wondered how Erin was doing and fought the temptation to call Mick and check in.

I flipped on political talk radio, but nothing held my interest. Democrats called in to complain about Republicans and Republicans called in to complain about Democrats.

I flipped to what must have been a soft-rock channel and quickly flipped past it.

Finally, I found a sports talk channel. I turned the volume as low as I could and still hear it.

But I didn’t have to wait for long.

A car drove down the road toward the gatehouse. It was a late model Lexus GS 350 sports sedan. The driver revved the motor as he coasted down the drive. He was a young-looking fellow with dark red hair, a cocky smile on his lips. As he approached the gate, his window rolled down and he inserted a security card into a machine. The gate opened. 

The driver drove the garage door of the smaller building. I was able to see his plate but — a vanity plate from California. It said “Lex.”

When he got to it, the door opened. He drove inside.

About 10 minutes later he came out the other side of the building and exited through the automated gate on the other side. He drove onto Main Street, then onto the highway — but he was moving too fast for my truck to catch up.

I turned around and drove back to Maryville. I situated myself back at the same spot. Some 20 minutes later, I saw another car, a BMW M3. It was a beautiful dark blue and it followed the precise same process. The driver had thick black hair that was slicked back. He looked to be in his 30s. His had a Michigan plate — a vanity plate that read “JoeyM3.”

No point in following him, either.

Several similar expensive vehicles came and went the next two hours before an SUV entered the building, a black Honda Pilot with black-tinted windows and tricked out chrome wheels. It may have looked pretty on the outside, but I doubted the owner did anything to upgrade the motor or suspension. It was one vehicle I’d hopefully be able to keep up with.

I waited patiently waiting for it to come out the other side.

About 10 minutes later, the black Honda Pilot came out — say what you will about Victoria Hall, but she was running an efficient operation.

I followed him onto the highway heading south. He pulled into a service station 15 minutes later. He parked at a bay and got out. He looked to be about 30 with black hair and a slight build.

As he put his card in the gas dispenser and put the handle in his trunk, I pretended to do likewise. As his gas began pumping, he headed inside to the convenience store. I saw him walk to the back of the store to the bathroom.

I moved quickly.

He left his front door open and the keys in the ignition — not very smart considering the line of work he was in.

I searched the dash for the back door release and found it. It rose automatically as I pushed the button.

I ran around to the back of the vehicle and found two travel bags in a small side-wall privacy area many SUVs have.

I unzipped one. Inside were several heavy duty freezer bags that contained small bricks wrapped in aluminum foil. I pulled out a brick and peeled back the aluminum foil to see a hard white substance. I used my pocket knife to cut off a piece, then wrapped it some foil I tore off of the brick and put it in my pocket.

I put everything back and closed the SUV’s back door. It was still closing when he exited the convenience store and walked toward his vehicle — he didn’t notice a thing.

I pretended to complete my transaction at the pump, then got into my truck and headed on back to the pub.

The next morning I got a call on my cell from Dr. Joe. He told me Erin wanted to talk with me.

“How do you feel?” I said, as I entered her room.

She lay on her side shivering.

“I’m fine,” said Erin, coughing. “I’m tougher than I look.”

She attempted a smile.

“I’m just glad I got you out of there,” I said.

“How did you find me?” she said.

I told her how I found her.

“You’re really amazing,” she said. “You saved my life.”

I blushed.

“I know you’re not feeling well,” I said, “but do you have the energy to talk?”

She nodded.

“I want justice for John,” she said. “I will always have the energy for that.”

“We’ll take this slow,” I said. “The day you came to the pub, you visited the Washington County Coroner first?” I said.

“Yes. As I told you the first time we met, he said he could not talk to me about John’s death because he did not know I was John’s real wife. He said his ruling on the manner and cause of death would take the police report into consideration.”

“So you visited Chief Sarafino next?”

“Yes, I told her John had been murdered. I pleaded with her to come with me to our house. She told me I needed to remain quiet for the moment. She told me to go right home and lie low.”

“Did you give her your contact information?” I said.

“Well, I gave her false information,” she said. “At that point, based on the way she responded, I was not certain who I could trust. I didn’t want anyone to know where I lived.”

“And throughout this time, did John let anyone know about you?”

“Only his mother,” said Erin. “We were very careful. We put everything in my name before I married him — our cell phones, email accounts, everything. We went off the grid, so to speak. Only John's mother knew we had got married or where we lived.”

“So as you left Chief Serafino’s office, you saw the big man, Tony, and the little man, Terry?” I said.

“Yes, they saw me and walked toward me quickly. I jumped in my car and got out of there.”

“Then you visited Elizabeth?”

“Yes. I had never met her before, but John spoke well of her. I thought I could trust her, but she knew nothing of me. John was going to tell her on the day they were to have lunch. I visited her because I had nowhere else to turn.”

“How did the conversation go?” I said.

“Awkward. I didn’t tell her about my full involvement with John, if that is what you mean. I told her I knew him and that I was certain he was murdered. She began crying. She told me about you and told me to go to you for help. She said she’d follow me down to your pub after she showered and changed, so that both of us could share our concerns about what happened to John. She seemed to be uneasy in my presence and I sensed she wanted me to go. Of course, I don’t blame her.”

“So you came to see me?” I said. 

“Yes,” said Erin. “But as I drove down the parkway into town, I saw a black car behind me. I thought I saw the same two men in that car. So I sped up and jumped off the first exit I could find and zig zagged through town to make sure they weren’t able to follow me.”

“But they did follow you.”

She nodded.

“I parked my car in a garage downtown. I took cash out of my wallet, then left my purse and cellphone in the car. That way, if they mugged me on the street, they would not know anything about me. I paid cash to a cab driver, who dropped me off at the pub. I have no idea how they were able to follow me. I’m so sorry I dragged you into this.”

“They are professional bad guys,” I said. “It’s not your fault. Tell me about you and John?”

“When I first met John and learned who he was, I had zero desire to befriend him let alone date him. We met in a strip club, for goodness sakes, a place I didn’t want to be. I was embarrassed that I was even doing what I did, just to raise money.”

I knew she took the job to raise money for the care of her now-deceased daughter and felt her pain.

“How did you come to grow closer to John?”

“He was very persistent, but he was also very genuine in his way. We became good friends and gradually he told me the truth about his life — he said I was the only one in the world who he’d told the whole truth to and that meant a lot to me.”

I nodded.

“It was an odd situation,” continued Erin. “Our friendship blossomed into more. Neither of us saw it coming, but I fell in love with John and he with me. He presented me with a plan for how he would tell the truth about his past, so that we could have a future together. It was really an amazing thing, you must understand, for a man to give up so much worldly affluence and the only thing he’d get in in return was me.”

“I'll bet lots of men would be willing to make that exchange.”

She smiled.

“It wasn't about my ego, though,” she said. “It was about John's heart and about honesty and truth. It was about redemption. None of us is perfect — I certainly am not — but how many people would have the courage to walk away from fame and fortune the way John was about to do?”

“A small number, to be sure,” I said. “But how does this relate to Victoria Hall?”

“Well, he told me he was going to meet with her and tell her he was resigning. That was the last time I saw him. He never came home. He was found in the river a few days later.”

“How did he get into business with Hall? Did he ever tell you?”

Erin laughed.

“John was a lot of things, but attentive businessman was not among them. He cared about helping people and never cared about the money. He told me that in the process of helping others, he spent more than he brought in and had to file bankruptcy. Hall was a turnaround specialist with a proven record. She invested in the business. Business boomed soon after she became his partner, but in time he became suspicious of her.”

“Suspicious of what?”

“He was traveling a lot, but Rosie told him about the cars coming and going from the building by the river Hall had leased to one of her businesses,” said Erin. “Then Rosie gave him a Xerox of the coded ledger Hall was keeping. He suspected she was keeping double books, but he couldn’t make sense of the code. John planned to turn them over to the authorities once he resigned.”

“Did he tell Hall he had the ledger?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Erin.

“Do you know where he put the ledger?” I said.

“That is the million dollar question. All John told me was that he hid it in a safe place and that he’d get it in the right hands. But I have no idea where he might have put it.”

“Well, it wasn’t in your house. They tore the place apart and didn’t find what they were looking for. What about John’s mother? Might he have stored it there?

“It’s possible,” said Erin. “He was confident that nobody knew about her.”

“Maybe I’ll pay his mother a visit while you get back on your feet. Elizabeth said John planned a press conference?”

“Yes, he did,” she continued. “The plan was for John to meet Hall and formally resign, lunch with Elizabeth and tell her everything, then conduct his press conference and tell the world the truth. I helped him draft the press release he was going to pass out to the press.”

“You have the press release?”

“Yes, it is on the leather key chain that was at my house — the one I had you to take from our home.”

The key chain contained a USB drive hidden inside a leather strap. I pulled out the drive and plugged it into the USB port in Maureen’s laptop. The screen displayed the only file on the drive: “AboutJohnMiller.doc”

I opened the file.

Here is what it said: 

The Truth

By John Miller

(A hand-out for the media.)

Dear ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for attending this press conference today. In a world full of woes, what I have to say is of small importance. But I need to tell you the truth about who I really am.

My name is not John Preston, nor has it ever been. My name is John Miller. 

I was born into near poverty in a small mining town near Wheeling, West Virginia. My father frequently spent his coal miner’s wages at the bar, then came home and smacked around my mother. Unlike me, he was a big man, strong and broad, and he was cruel when he drank.

When I was 10, he came home one night in a drunken rage and fought with my mother. The fight turned violent. He began to hit her, as he had so many times before. I told him to stop and he did not. He hit me and I flew into the corner. And while I lay there, he beat my mother — he was beating her bloody. I ran to the shed, got out a 12 gauge shotgun and, while he stood over her kicking her and screaming at her, I shouted at him to stop. He turned and saw me holding the gun and laughed. He resumed beating my mother. I shouted again for him to stop. He turned to me. Enraged, now, he charged me and I shot him in the chest — shot him dead.

I was not let out of detention until I was 18 years old. I was in because, while defending my mother from a brutal beating by my abusive father, I’d shot him dead.

At first, I bounced around the country working odd jobs. I bounced around for years, not making any headway. But then I decided to reinvent myself.

I assumed the name of my Uncle John Preston, rest his soul, who died when I was 18. He was a good man who taught me many lessons in life and I sought to emulate him. It was my intent to honor my uncle's name by making something of myself. By doing some good for the world.

It was for this reason I was drawn at first to the field of human psychology and later to helping so many people who had mastered the principles of solid, happy relationships, something I studied with great intensity just as a scientist might examine the world to find out what makes it work.

I found my way into the University of Pittsburgh. I truly wanted to understand men and women, truly wanted to master my subject so I could help couples know greater happiness and satisfaction on this planet than my mother was ever able to imagine.

It was during my studies that I met Elizabeth. She was an associate professor at the school. Though she was nearly a decade older than I she became my mentor, my partner and my best friend. I could never have known any of the success I enjoyed without her support and encouragement.

It took a good long while, but as my star rose — as my speeches gained notice — and my audiences grew in size, I thought I could do no wrong. I thought I was a god, in a manner, and I thought my ideas were the right ideas.

Among my ideas was a hatred for my father, a hatred that shaped my views of men, and made me feel that men, as a rule, were the problem, and that men indeed were in need of repair.

And then I met Adam Clive. This fellow had been a Pulitzer Winner, a poet who marched and supported the feminist movement, but over time came to see that while women had made tremendous strides, it was men who fell behind. He made me see this and know this firsthand, and we had many mighty debates on what it is to be a man.

Throughout this period, I will admit, I was not the happily married man I portrayed myself to be. Though Elizabeth and I never said that we were a married couple, we portrayed ourselves as one. The truth is, we never were married. And though ours was partly a romantic relationship early on, in later years it become strictly friendship and business.

And, for a time, I went off the rails. For a time, I led a double life in which I had gone wildly out of control — booze, drugs, women, all of it. It was during this period, too, that I lost control of my company. I was a bad businessman and did not know it — as we grew, I lost money. The company fell into a spiral of debt and I had no choice but to turn, unfortunately, to a third-party, a specialist who turns failing companies around.

Her name is Victoria Hall and I had thought she was my business partner. She was not. I will address Ms. Hall and what I think she has done to my company with the authorities immediately after today's press conference. My knowledge of her wrongdoing is partial at this time. But I want it to be clear that I had no knowledge, until very recently, of illegal activities that may have been taking place within my company, and neither did I profit from them.

The important message for today is one of apology. I want to come clean with the people who have come to rely on me and believe in my message — the people who have applied my principles to good effect and now enjoy better relationships and marriages and greater happiness. Please do not let my failure as a human being in any way affect what you have accomplished on your own. Please do not let my failure affect your own wellbeing.

The truth is I have only recently learned what love really is. I learned this through a wonderful human being, a woman whose name is Erin, a woman who is now my legal wife, married to me under my real name, John Miller.

Erin helped me to see the light. She helped me to see what is beautiful and what is grotesque and the way I'd been living — the long lie that my life had been — she helped me to escape.

I am willing to lose all the worldly possessions I have gained, because these things mean nothing to me, while Erin means everything to me. I am willing to give up my expensive suits — this one I wear today is the last time you will see me in it — and retire to a modest life, a mild life, a life in which you will never hear from me again.

Lastly, I am at this time, following this press conference, turning myself over to the police and will cooperate fully to help them get to the bottom of the mess of what my company has become. More details will be forthcoming soon as they unfold. I want to be clear that if any illegalities have taken place within my company, they are not of my doing.  

Again, I apologize to all the wonderful people who have supported me over the years, who have believed that I can help them and who have benefited from my words and thoughts, as imperfect and human as they have been.

I am truly sorry.

Thank you.

John Miller

“He didn’t know Hall was running a heroin operation right under his nose,” I said to Erin. “But he did have a copy of her ledger and he probably told her he was going to the authorities.”

“I know where you can look for the ledger,” said Erin.

And so she told me.