Ration of Lies, page 18
The only reply I could think of was to nod agreement and take my leave and hope she would stick to the story I’d asked her to.
***
A short detour on my way back to the office took me past the pleasant white bungalow where Phyllis Chapman lived with her mother and aunt. A handful of gussied-up women were just going in. The way they were chattering and laughing indicated they knew each other, and one carried a covered dish. It had the looks of some sort of club or a bridge group whose festivities were going to incorporate lunch. It didn’t seem likely Phyllis could hide a man with such activity occurring, even with cooperation from her aunt and mother.
I’d take a look at the other two addresses that afternoon, after I’d picked up a sandwich and made a phone call. Mary Minerva sounded reasonably friendly when I gave my name and asked to speak to Boike.
“What’s up?” he asked a minute later.
“I need the help of someone with a truck and a strong back tomorrow. I know it’s asking a lot for you to use up gas on a trip into town—”
“Mary Minerva delivers plucked chickens and milk from a neighbor to a couple of little restaurants on Saturday morning. I’ll make the run for her. What do you need with a truck?”
“I have an easy chair from where I’m staying and a bedstead and some other things from Billy Leary’s place that I need moved to a house. They won’t fit in my car.”
“You elope or something?”
“No, I bought a house.”
“Funny. What are you really up to?”
His reaction brought me up short.
“I’m serious, Boike. I bought a house. Granted it’s small, and I came by it partly in settlement of a client’s bill, but is that so hard to believe?”
“Let’s say I’m having a little trouble picturing you pulling weeds. Sure, I’ll help you get things from one place to another. Is nine-thirty, quarter till ten okay?”
“It’s fine. Thanks, Boike.”
I called Rachel Minsky to ask if she’d have one of the men from her building firm take a quick look at the house in case there were any immediate problems that needed addressing.
“Have you any idea what you’re getting into?” she inquired.
“Probably not.”
We’d been friends a long time, so her bluntness didn’t rankle the way Boike’s amusement had.
“Ah. I thought as much. How fortunate you have a construction genius like me to bail you out, then. Give me the address and we’ll meet you there after work if you like.”
I thanked her and shifted my attention to the sandwich on my desk. By the time I finished that, and a couple of background checks, there was just enough time to take a look at the lodgings of Mitzi Fitzgerald and Laura Gray, the proofreader who had acknowledged having coffee with Tosh a few times. They would have to be fast looks. I didn’t want to incur Daisy’s wrath for arriving late at the appointment she’d reluctantly made.
***
Laura’s address was in a quiet neighborhood near Miami Valley Hospital. The eight-unit, brick apartment house had a linden tree in the front yard and a hedge in need of trimming between it and the neighbor on one side. From what I could see from the street, it had a back yard, probably not very deep but more generous than the strictly utilitarian strip found at many apartment places.
All in all, not a bad place for hiding someone, I thought as I made a second loop past it. People would be coming and going in the building itself — tenants, dry-cleaning deliveries, a handyman and someone cleaning the halls. The street outside had foot traffic at all hours too, since the neighborhood was prime living space for people who worked at the hospital. Still, it made a more likely spot than Phyllis Chapman’s had with its arriving covey of chattering women. I ducked inside, where mailboxes were labeled with apartment numbers and last names of tenants.
Mitzi Fitzgerald, unlike the other two women, lived close to downtown. She, too, enjoyed the luxury of an apartment, but in a building larger and older than the one I’d just seen. A quick trip into the lobby with its wall of mailboxes told me units were smaller here, and nearly twice as numerous. Most were shared by two or three people. Two of the boxes had the name Fitzgerald under them, and both were shared.
Given all that I’d heard about her anger at Tosh for rebuffing her overtures, Mitzi had been an unlikely candidate for helping him evade capture. Still, I was dogged by the idea she was connected to his disappearance in ways I hadn’t yet discovered.
The brief encounter between her and Spooner’s son that I’d witnessed puzzled me most. She claimed he’d made a pass. Spooner had dismissed the idea Roger and Mitzi even knew each other. If the girl had managed to charm Spooner, as Phyllis Chapman suggested, would Mitzi keep quiet about his son’s unwanted attentions? Possibly, if it furthered her own interests.
Or had the disagreement I’d witnessed been about something else entirely?
I was still weighing those and other possibilities when Daisy strolled into my office at four o’clock.
“Good afternoon, Miss Sullivan. How have you been?”
Her sarcastic politeness made it hard not to laugh.
“Quite well, thank you, apart from someone attacking me outside that bar where I talked to your brother’s friends.”
The grin she’d been hiding faded.
“Yeah, I heard about that. It wasn’t me.”
I chuckled. “It hadn’t occurred to me that it was.” I straightened up from my comfortable lounging position. “Any chance you’ve heard who it might have been?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry, though. Honest. I never imagined that looking for Tosh would get...you know...” She made a vague gesture that included my defaced file cabinet. “Ugly.”
“That’s the nature of my work, Daisy. And talking to those men who knew Tosh actually helped me quite a bit. So, thanks.”
“You learned things then?”
“A few.”
“Like what?”
I gave a breath of resignation. “Let’s just say I now know the names of two women he might have gone out with and one who didn’t like him much.”
“Who? I might recognize names, somebody he mentioned.”
“You’ve told me repeatedly that you couldn’t remember him mentioning any women by name.”
“I don’t!” She shifted her nose to the side and looked over my shoulder. “Hearing you say them might jog my memory.”
“Nice try.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“You’re too much like me.”
“That’s...” She sputtered.
“That’s what? An insult?” I grinned. Patting the edge of my desk with my fingertips, I stood. “I’ve got to go, Daisy. I know you’re sore at me, but I think I’m finally starting to make progress.”
In imperial silence she rose, slung her book satchel over her shoulder, and went to the door. Just before she opened it, she spun around.
“Anything you found out, I can find out, too.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Rachel Minsky gave me some good-natured razzing.
“You may have carried the spare modern look a hair too far,” she said as she took her first look at my front room with only the faded oriental rug to relieve its emptiness.
I told her grandly that furniture would arrive the following day, we had martinis with the fixings she had thoughtfully provided, right down to a small jar of olives, and the foreman from one of her construction projects inspected the roof and everything else on the place and pronounced it sound as a dollar. As a housewarming present, they left behind the ladder he’d used.
The phone rang as I was waving goodbye from the porch. It was Seamus, saying he was working late, filling in for somebody sick on the next shift. I sat on the back steps a few minutes thinking how odd and yet natural it felt to be answering the phone at my own place. Then, since I had packing to do at Mrs. Z’s, I headed for Finn’s to think about Spooner’s son Roger while, with luck, enjoying a bowl of the Irish stew Rose made only on Fridays.
“Good thing you weren’t later,” she said as she set a steaming bowl of it before me at the table I favored in a back corner. “Two or three more servings and it’s gone for this week.”
Rose never advertised the stew, but longtime pub regulars knew to ask for it. Even without meat, it was rich and thick. I dipped a chunk of soda bread in it and tried to get my taste buds under control as I thought.
Roger’s connection to his father was obvious, and possibly closer than the average father-son link. Spooner had raised him, mostly single-handed. He was the only one who could understand the boy. He’d even tried to get his son a job where he worked. Roger, in turn, went to his father’s concerts. They appeared to be pals.
The link between Roger and Mitzi, on the other hand, was a puzzle. His father seemed surprised that he even knew her, yet he also acknowledged that Roger sometimes came to the printing plant. Had Roger met Mitzi in passing and misinterpreted her politeness for interest in him?
The problem with that theory was, I couldn’t see Mitzi being polite.
I ate another bite of soda bread, savoring the texture of the whole grain on my tongue.
Maybe I was looking at this from the wrong angle. Maybe I should be exploring how Mitzi connected the two men. Was she manipulating one of them, or both, to win some sort of advantage with the other? Or maybe just to further her own purposes?
At work, she could be cozying up to Spooner in hopes of becoming his girlfriend, or even his wife. She’d have to be a glutton for punishment to endure his jokes at the breakfast table, but maybe she hadn’t thought that far, or expected to just turn over and snooze more while he got off to work.
Let’s say that was her agenda and she’d already been seeing Spooner after hours. Roger might resent it. He was a grown man, but because of his dependency on his father, he could resent sharing him as much as a kid would. Maybe more. The episode I’d witnessed on the street might have been him trying to warn her he didn’t want her around his old man. It would explain why they appeared to know each other more than casually even though Spooner had been startled to hear I’d seen them together.
If Mitzi had made some attempt prior to that to win Roger over, she’d bungled it. It was the only reason I could think of that she’d want to butter him up, though. Granted, he was a good-looking fellow, but he wasn’t one who could help her get ahead in the world except through his father. Unless...
I’d been slouching. I sat up.
Mitzi had, by various accounts, seethed with indignation when Tosh rebuffed her. I’d put money that she’d be happy to see him blamed for trying to burn down the place where he worked. She couldn’t have started the blaze herself without being noticed, but Spooner might manage to. So, possibly, might his son.
I took quick, shallow sips of Guinness to keep pace with my thoughts.
I liked to believe Mitzi wasn’t so cold-blooded as to let two innocent men die horrible deaths to achieve her ends. No one but Walt Kirby had known they would be there that night. What she could be self-centered enough to do, though, was persuade either Spooner or Roger to start the fire and make sure Tosh showed up to be blamed. But Tosh had escaped, and Seth Rowe stuck stubbornly to his account that cast doubt on the frame, so Rowe had to be silenced. And while Mitzi might not be heartless enough to sanction murder in her initial scheme, she wouldn’t blink at one that became necessary to save her attractive backside.
***
When I parked at Mrs. Z’s, I sat for a minute absorbing the fact that this was the last time I’d be coming home to the white house that had welcomed me for the last seven years. For some of the girls who lived there, Friday meant the work week was over. They were heading out giggling in twos or threes for picture shows or a beer or two or a USO dance.
The pleasant memories swirling around me evaporated when I opened the front door and nearly collided with the mouthy girl I’d tangled with over her loud music.
“Word is, you got kicked out as of tomorrow,” she smirked.
I smiled.
“Maybe you ought to have your hearing checked. I’m moving out because I bought a house.”
I sailed past her while she stood gaping. My foot was on the first step of the gleaming staircase when I heard her yell.
“Hey.” She came trotting over, leaving her two companions to wait at the door. Her voice dropped. “You want a roommate? Give you a buck a week more than what we pay here.”
When I was capable of uttering sound, I burst out laughing.
“I don’t think the man I’ll be living with would like it much.” My belly was still quivering with laughter when I reached the top of the stairs.
My ruminations about the triangle presented by Spooner, his son and Mitzi had exhausted themselves for the evening. I’d recognized as much back at Finn’s. There came a point, after a time of feverish ideas and connections and possibilities when my brain began to dull and refuse to go any farther along the path it was following. The packing and cleaning-up task ahead of me was just what I needed. It required organizing, but not much thinking. Things that needed doing were obvious.
Lingerie and personal items went in my suitcase, along with my blouses. For lifting furniture and carrying boxes tomorrow, I’d wear my gum soles. My other three pair of shoes went into an old pillowcase. I took the pillowcase out to the trunk of my car, and made another trip to add the clothes on hangers from my wardrobe. The suitcase and a couple of boxes could go in tomorrow before Boike came. Apart from my father’s chair that would go in the truck, and two hat boxes that I could put on the passenger seat, all my worldly belongings would fit in the cavernous trunk of my smallest-of-the-line DeSoto.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“I guess you weren’t pulling my leg about getting a house.” Boike slammed the tailgate of Mary Minerva’s pickup closed and secured it. Using the back of his sleeve he wiped sweat from his forehead and upper lip.
“Have any concrete proof?”
He chuckled at my Freeze imitation.
“That bedstead that weighs as much as a sack of concrete.”
I passed him a quart jar of water and he drank down half. We leaned against the truck, taking a breather. We’d spent much of the morning at Kate’s house, part of the time over coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls she’d had waiting. Now we had to do it all in reverse at my place, minus the cinnamon rolls.
“Boike, I never imagined there’d be this much work involved,” I apologized.
“Change of pace. Don’t worry about it. Besides, it’s the first time I’ve been upstairs at a girls’ rooming house.”
“You’re kidding. With all the suspects you must have talked to over the years?”
He started to scratch at the healing scar on his face and caught himself.
“At regular boarding houses that have men and women both, a cat house or three, but never like your place. Those doodads on the doors, and the smell of furniture polish instead of Lysol.”
“Mrs. Z was a terrific landlady.”
Other than Jolene, only two other women from my early years still lived there, so last night’s goodbyes hadn’t taken much time. After a morning of loading a hodgepodge of furniture and other items into the pickup and thinking about where they’d go, my time at Mrs. Z’s was already starting to feel like a dream.
I’d driven to Kate’s in my own car, so I wouldn’t have to go back for it. Waving away Boike’s offer of the water jar, I slid into the DeSoto and led the way to my place. The perspiration gumming my shirt to my back had just about dissipated by the time we got there.
“Are you still looking into that fire and the Hashimoto boy disappearing?” Boike panted as we eased the iron bedstead from Kate’s through my front door.
“Yeah. Is Freeze?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t talked in a couple of days.”
“If you’re still willing to toss ideas around, I’d like your opinion on a couple of things when we take a break.”
He gave an indecipherable grunt. “I’m expecting a beer or two after this.”
“They’re on ice.”
More precisely, they were on half of what remained of last night’s chunk of ice and half in the very cold water left by the melted part.
Even though the bedstead was the main part of the furniture, it took most of an hour to carry in the rest. My front room still looked woefully empty with a single floor lamp and assorted boxes clustered around my dad’s easy chair. In the kitchen, with two chairs and the small table borrowed from Finn’s taking up floor space, we had to step over boxes.
“Nice of Mrs. Leary to send sandwiches with us, too,” said Boike as we finally sat on the back steps devouring them and drinking cold beer.
“Kate’s as good as they come.” I squinted in sun that was still too high overhead to allow for much shade. “I didn’t go see her as much as I should have, and now that she’s leaving I wish I had.”
Boike lounged back on his elbows.
“So, what about this business at the printing plant? What did you want my opinions on?”
“Since people seem to think he had a girlfriend, or at least was involved with a woman, I decided to follow up some on the idea we kicked around of a woman hiding him.”
“I take it you’ve found a likely candidate for the girlfriend?”
“Not exactly. What I’ve managed to do is narrow it down to three possibilities, two of whom might have been cozy with him and one who, by various accounts...well, she may not have hated his guts, but she’d have been plenty happy to see him in trouble.”
“Huh.” Boike started on a second sandwich. “You think that one would what? Tie him up for some reason? Stash him somewhere?”
“I don’t know. She’s up to something, but it might not have to do with him at all.” I gave a loud breath of frustration. “The thing is, I’ve only got a couple of things besides that left to follow. I have the addresses of all three women. I’ve been by them to look. One seems like it might be okay for hiding someone; one seems unlikely but maybe possible; number three, I can’t see any way at all to manage at that one.”
