09 Dead Man Running, page 15
“Oh,” I said. “Let me ask you, then. There have been a couple of shiny-shoed individuals in town lately. One we found dead on a float. One fell out of a tree but managed to escape. Two more shot at my best friend here, and one of them was killed by the sheriff. Well, those two were wearing motorcycle boots at the time, but I’ll bet their street shoes were shiny. Are these your people?”
“Just let me know about Tiny, Mrs. O’Shea,” he said, and stood and stretched.
“Hey,” I said. “I have a job. I can’t just snoop on Tiny Tim all week. Besides, you’re better at surveillance than I am, certainly. I mean, isn’t that part of your job description?”
He just looked back over his shoulder and smiled as he walked out of my office. The nerve of him! Collette and I exchanged exasperated glances. I got up and followed him to the door. “Who do you think you are?”
He spun on me then, and I knew that he had been playing nice up to this point and that I didn’t have a clue what I was up against. There was no mistaking the venom in his eyes. He all but pinned me to the wall, nearly knocking over a porcelain vase. A cold wind seemed to wrap him up. It would not surprise me to learn that the man actually had no heart. He moved so quickly and so precisely, and yet I couldn’t even so much as see a pulse beneath his skin. He never blinked when he spoke. “I can make those that you love disappear. Hell, Torie, I can make this whole town disappear. So do as I say and quit being cute.” His chin jutted out at the end of his speech.
I swallowed a sob, and tears stung the back of my eyes. I completely believed his threat.
“Don’t go telling that stepfather of yours about our little collaboration, either. Okay? And I’ll see to it his bowling league stays intact,” he said. “Even though they need to be put out of their misery. Capiche?”
“Right,” I said.
With that he left the Gaheimer House, and the tears flowed down my face.
So much for staying one step ahead of the crook.
Sixteen
It was not lost on me that Tito de Rosa had used the word “collaboration.” In the movies, any time a person does a favor for the mob, they own you for life. Or you end up at the bottom of the river, wearing cement shoes. Collette came running out of my office to find me in a shaking heap on the foyer floor.
“Oh, my God,” she said and ran to me. “Are you all right?” “Yeah,” I said. My chin trembled. “I’m just really scared.” “I can get some of my friends at the paper to see what they can find out on this guy, if you want me to,” she said. “I don’t want you involved,” I said.
“I’m already involved. I was there when the pact went down.” “His name is Tito de Rosa. We think he might be Chicago mob.”
Her face blanched. She helped me up off the floor. “The de Rosa family. As in Victor ‘Papa’ de Rosa? He belongs to that family? Is he Victor de Rosa’s son?”
“I don’t know,” I said, irritated. “I don’t make it a habit to trace the family trees of the Mafia. I mean, I don’t even know the names of any, except the obvious ones. Like Bugsy Malone and Al Capone.”
“This century, sweetheart,” she said.
My mind drew a blank.
“See, this is why you need to get out in the world. Get to the big city once in a while,” she said.
“Why? So I can meet the thugs face-to-face? No, thank you. One of the reasons I live in New Kassel is so they remain just names on the television,” I said.
“Yeah, but you have to turn the blasted thing on once in a while,” she said.
I’d concede that point to her.
The phone rang in my office. I just stared down the hall at the doorway. Collette looked at me, and then she looked at my office, too.
“It’s probably Rudy,” I said.
“Right. Probably not the Godfather calling in a favor,” she said.
“Collette!”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll get it.”
She ran for my office to get the phone, and I trailed along behind her as if I’d just been caught in a tornado. I don’t know what I had thought Tito was made of, but obviously I hadn’t taken him seriously enough. I cringed when I thought of the way I’d made fun of him in the office. Can I call you Tito? My God, it was a miracle that he hadn’t shot me right then and there.
A wave of anxiety washed over me as I realized he was probably not alone in town—unless he was cocky and thought that some little podunk town like New Kassel wouldn’t require much manpower. He could handle us hicks. Nah, guys like that didn’t live to be thirty by being stupid. He had backup in town. I’d bet on it.
“It’s Colin,” Collette called out.
I made it to the door just as Collette was about to tell him that Tito de Rosa had paid us a visit. I stifled a screech and grabbed the phone from her, shaking my head at her as I did. Tito had been specific. Colin was not to know about our meeting.
“Hey, Colin,” I said.
“You okay?” he asked. “You sound … shook up.”
“Fine,” I said, and started fake-panting for breath. “I just ran all the way from the backyard.”
Man, those lies just kept tripping off my tongue. Collette looked at me and rolled her eyes. Somehow when Collette rolls her eyes, it’s much more insulting than when anybody else does it.
“You need to get more exercise,” he said. “I can put you on a regimen.”
Coming from the man who could no longer see his toes … I wanted to punch him, but I let it go. “What’s up?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were still at the office. I want to come by and talk to you,” he said.
“Are you bringing your watchdog? The she-wolf?”
“No,” he said. “It’s her day off, anyway.”
“You mean she takes a day off? I bet she’s out target practicing. Or doing like five thousand sit-ups or something,” I said.
“Just sit tight.”
Colin was at the Gaheimer House in about fifteen minutes. In that time I had filled Collette in on what had gone on between Tito and me in the foyer. She promised not to tell anybody. Then she filled me in on the de Rosa family of Chicago. Papa de Rosa indeed sounded like a gem. Back in the seventies, his right-hand man had accidentally allowed one of his dogs to be poisoned. Papa de Rosa loved his dogs so much that he made the guy eat dog food for a week. On the last day he gave him a big steak dinner—and poisoned him. I shivered. She had just opened a can of Pepsi and I had just opened a Dr Pepper when Colin came in.
“It doesn’t mean anything conclusive,” he said. He held up a photograph of a fingerprint. “In fact, I’m not sure what the hell it means.”
“What is it?”
“The fingerprints came back on those binoculars,” he said.
“And?”
“They belong to Tiny Tim Julep,” he said. “The guy who owns the new tobacco shop.”
My heart sank, and Collette almost choked. She waved her hands in front of her face and then found her Pepsi can on my desk and took a drink. “Drainage,” she said to Colin. “Been trying to get rid of it for a week.”
Colin only gave her a peculiar look. “Why would the new tobacconist be hiding in a tree snooping on the mayor?” he asked. “It makes no sense.”
“Well, it explains why the branch broke. Tiny Tim is huge,” I said.
“I’m going over there to talk to him now. See what his explanation is for this,” he said.
“Did he have a rap sheet?” Collette asked.
“Racketeering. Tax evasion. A few things. Assault and battery. Managed not to spend too much time in prison for any of it, though. Funny how those guys rack up a list of crimes a mile long but do under five years’ time total. What I want to know is why a man like that would come to New Kassel to open up shop. There’s a connection to the mayor. That’s for sure. If only I knew what Bill was hiding,” he said.
Collette and I exchanged worried glances. I was not about to offer my opinion on what, who, or why Tiny Tim Julep was in our town.
“Hang on a second,” I said to Colin. I logged on to the Internet and brought up Bill’s Web site. While I was at it, I explained quickly to Collette what was going on—or what we thought was going on—with Bill. “Nobody’s seen him since the hayride,” I finished up.
“Maybe he just needed a shopping binge, too,” she said.
“Very possible,” I said, “but I’m thinking not.”
We all crowded around the computer screen and studied the Web page. “What do you think he’s hiding?” Colin said.
“Maybe one of his kids is a homosexual. You know, that could ruin his political career,” Collette said.
Colin shot her a quizzical glance.
“This is the Midwest,” she justified.
“Well, as far as I can tell,” I said, “your children’s sexual preferences don’t seem to hurt your career. It does hurt your career if it’s your sexual preference. Which is odd, since I’m sure there are plenty of heterosexual deviants in places of power and nobody’s the wiser, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“I’m just trying to help,” Collette said. “As I said before, this is the Midwest.”
“I think there’s more to it than that,” I said.
“Wait,” she said. “This bio says that he was born in 1949 and graduated from college in 1970. “Unlikely, he would have graduated from college a year early. Not impossible, but not likely.”
She was right. There on the computer screen, Bill had written that he had graduated in 1970. “Good job, Collette,” I said.
“See? I’m good for something,” she said.
“I’ll bet he never even attended that college. Did I tell you that I checked every high school in the county? He did not graduate from any of them. So he either went to school in Granite County and dropped out without graduating, or he went to school somewhere else. I mean, the jig is definitely up.”
“No kidding,” Colin said.
“He’s got a lot to answer for, and there’s no way he’s going to be reelected. He’s finished. Washed up,” I said.
Colin was unusually quiet, and I eyed him curiously. “What is it? I thought you’d be thrilled.”
Colin shrugged. “Well, I just kinda wanted to beat him fair and square, you know? Because I was the better person.”
“The guy has lied about everything. I think that makes you the better person, you dork,” Collette said.
She was right. Regardless of what his reasons were, Bill was a liar and had misled our entire community. I checked my e-mail quickly. Force of habit. Another message blinked at me from my cousin in West Virginia. I’d read it when I got home.
“Well, I’m going,” Colin said. “You want me to drive you home?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be right with you. I just have to close up here.” As soon as he was out the door, I turned off the computer and then raised a finger to my lips. “Collette,” I whispered. “Find out what you can on the de Rosa family. Get back to me tonight or tomorrow. The mayor has lied about everything, and somebody from the de Rosa family is in our town. Too much of a coincidence, if you ask me.”
“I will. I’ll see what I can find on this Tiny Tim Julep fellow, too,” she said. “Maybe Bill was part of the witness relocation program.”
“Well, if he is, remind me never to turn state’s evidence.”
“Why?”
“Because our government didn’t do a very good job of relocating him. Besides, he doesn’t have a whole new identity. He just fudged the one he’s got. No, there’s more to this than that. Something is so not right here that it actually hurts my head to think about it,” I said. I stuck my head out of my office and glanced through the ballroom. Colin had shut the front door behind him. “I’ve got to go. Call me tonight.”
“I will,” she said. She grabbed her purse, turned off my office light, and walked out through the ballroom and the foyer with me. Once outside, she went right, in the direction of the Murdoch. Colin and I went left, in the direction of my house. He dropped me off at my driveway and waited there until I had shut the door.
At dinner the kids acted a little more like themselves, but things still weren’t the way they should be. Rudy was kind of quiet, but perturbed at the same time, like every little thing irritated him. Of course, maybe it was because he got very little sleep last night, what with me up at three in the morning. I chose not to push anybody about how he or she was feeling.
I decided to give Matthew a bath. He was safe territory. He wasn’t old enough to be hiding things from me. Whatever Matthew was feeling was what I got. No guessing games. I washed his hair, which was a chore since he wiggled more than a baby pig. Then he began to play like he was a pirate. “Man overboard!” he called out, and fell face first in the water, narrowly missing the spout by an inch. The second time he did it, he drenched me, and I jerked his arm and told him to stop.
“It’s fun,” he said. I’m sure adults come across as the biggest party poopers in the universe to a three-year-old child.
“I gotta potty!” Mary called out, and came running into the bathroom.
“Use ours upstairs,” I said. She reluctantly left the bathroom, running with her legs squeezed together. Matthew thought that was funny and chuckled. I turned around long enough to grab his towel from the cabinet, and he did the man-overboard thing again and this time smacked his head on the spout. He landed in the water and sucked in a big gulp and came up coughing and spewing. A big knot formed on his head almost instantly.
“Aww,” I said, and dragged him out of the water onto my lap, soaking wet. “This is why mommies tell you not to do stuff that’s stupid.” I raised his arms over his head to try to clear the water out of his lungs. I’m not sure if that really works, but my mother always did it to me, and anytime anybody is choking my grandmother always yells out, “Raise their arms over their head!” So I did it, regardless. For all I knew, I could actually be making it worse. He coughed and sputtered some more. It was kind of funny, because he desperately wanted to wail and cry, but he couldn’t stop coughing long enough.
I dried him off, put his jammies on him, and led him by the hand out to the kitchen, where I put some ice cubes in a Ziploc bag and told him to hold it on his forehead.
Rudy came in and took one look at me and laughed. “You jump in with him?” Then he saw Matthew’s head. “What happened?”
“He walked the plank and hit his head,” I said.
“Here, you come watch Spider-Man with Daddy,” he said. “All right?”
I let Rudy take Matthew to the sanctuary of the living room recliner, and I went upstairs and changed my clothes, passing Mary on the way down. She took the stairs two at a time, and when she skipped one, she ran all the way back up and did it over.
After I’d changed into my own jammies I, of course, booted up the computer and began looking at the files on Bill’s family tree. I glanced down at the handwritten ones and then looked at the ones on the computer. There were no transcription mistakes. Whoever had transcribed Bill’s tree (most likely me) had done so exactly as it had originally been written. I knew that when all of this finally fell into place I was going to feel like an idiot.
The phone rang. I answered it. It was Elmer. “Torie,” he said, “I just wanted to know about this weekend.”
“As far as I know, everything is still set to go on the bonfire-cookout-bluegrass-Octoberfest,” I said.
“I thought maybe because of what happened …”
“Well, we may not have anybody show up, but it’s still a go,” I said.
“How are your girls?” he asked.
“Better,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
“That’s good,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later, then.”
I hung up the phone and rubbed my eyes. The last of the day’s sunlight filtered through the window that faced Bill’s house. In another three weeks it would be dark right after dinner. I couldn’t help but wonder what Sylvia would think of all of this mess with the mayor, if she were alive. Of course, if Sylvia were alive, she might actually know something that would help me. I’d found out firsthand that her shoes were too big to fill. I might have the money and the property and the title, but I would never have the memories and the knowledge that she had held in her mind.
I glanced down at Bill’s handwritten charts and realized something with startling clarity. The handwriting on Bill’s charts … It was too old-fashioned looking to be his. I opened a drawer and pulled out some photographs that had been Sylvia’s. She’d written on the back of them before she died. The handwriting matched that on Bill’s charts. Sylvia had filled out the mayor’s family group sheets and his five-generation charts.
Was that possible? Well, of course it was possible—but why would she?
I began cross-referencing Bill’s charts on the computer. By the time I was finished, I’d figured out one very important detail. From four generations back, Bill’s family tree was … too perfect, for lack of a better term. It was as if somebody had added his great-grandparents’ names to the lists of the most prestigious families in American history. I mean, there wasn’t one single woman living in a poorhouse, no average ordinary coal miner or dirt-poor farmer.
I logged on to Google and typed in a few of the different families that he was descended from. A few Web sites came up, and I checked the group sheets for each of them.
A “group sheet” is a family data sheet of a particular ancestor and his family. For example, my group sheet would list Rudy, me, Rachel, Mary, and Matthew with our birth dates, places of birth, etc. It would also list Rudy’s parents and mine, and has a place for death dates, cemetery record, and info like occupation.
People from all over the world have compiled family group sheets on specific families on the Internet.
So, basically, I was checking Bill’s family tree to see how they matched up to the genealogies online.
Bill’s great-grandmother on his mother’s mother’s side, for example, was supposedly one of the children of a Samuel Baldwin in Massachusetts. I found the right Samuel Baldwin—who, by the way, was descended from Charlemagne through the Bruen family—but Bill’s great-grandmother was not one of his children. I typed in more names and found more of the same. Somebody had connected the names on Bill’s charts to all of these families with illustrious pedigrees. His family tree, for certain, was a completely fraudulent piece of work from the fourth generation on back!
