Dead Man Talking

11

Over the next week, a couple weird things happened. For one thing, the next episode of Cemetery Survivor aired, and when it did, we found out that in spite of the couple Sammi vs. Virgil knockdowns, our team and Team One were tied, points-wise. After the show aired, something even more surprising happened. We had more fans than ever. Go figure. Apparently, a lot of people were watching the show, and the more calls the station got and the more people who showed up outside the gates of Monroe Street, the more the whole superstardom thing went to everyone’s heads. Greer was sure her next stop was network news. Mae and her bunch (doesn’t it figure?) said they were humbled, and just grateful they could promote their good deeds to a wider audience. And my team? My team loved feeling like rock stars.

I was on the fence. From what I’d heard, the last episode opened with a shot of Sammi choking the life out of me. I knew this because both my aunts called my mom to update her, and my mom called my dad to tell him. Dad’s phone access was limited, but that hadn’t stopped him from leaving messages, and Mom was text messaging like every ten minutes, asking if I shouldn’t see a doctor, and did it still hurt, and had the bruises gone away yet, and wouldn’t I be better off in Florida with her and away from cemeteries and dangerous people?

Honestly, I’d be happy when this restoration gig was over. If I didn’t have to worry about TV and landscaping and headstones and the like, I could get back to Garden View, where my biggest worry was how to avoid Ella so I could get some ghostly investigating done.

As if all that wasn’t enough, on the Thursday after the show aired, I got another bouquet of flowers, this time at Monroe Street. Like the last bouquet, this one included a card, but just like with the last bouquet, the card wasn’t signed. In fact, all it said was, “I watched you.” Unlike the last bouquet, I was smart enough not to call Quinn to ask if he had anything to do with the flowers. I hadn’t heard a word from him since that day he walked out of my apartment, and I sure hadn’t called him. I wasn’t going to be the first one to cave. Besides, I knew Quinn well enough to know he knew me well enough to know that he couldn’t buy me off with a mere bunch of daisies and a couple sprigs of greenery. His offense called for roses. Red roses. I knew he knew it, too.

As for these flowers…

I tossed the card and the problem aside. I had bigger fish to fry and more pressing things to think about. Like the appointment I had that evening with the notorious Reno Bob Oates. If he was still as nasty as Darcy Coleman said he was, he sure hadn’t sounded like it when I talked to him on the phone the night before. But then, I hadn’t mentioned I was coming by to find out if he killed Vera Blaine.

“Looks like you’re all set for the day.” I’d seen Bianca’s silver Jag roll into the cemetery, so I wasn’t surprised when she walked over to the tent/office where I was gathering what we’d need for the day. She looked me over and nodded her approval. We were scheduled to do some digging and hauling, so I’d worn jeans and a T-shirt, but they were clean and stylish and I was (it goes without saying) meticulously put together. “Do you like working at a cemetery?” Bianca asked.

Suddenly face-to-face with my idol asking the question I dreamed she’s someday ask me, I found myself at a loss for words. I laughed away my uneasiness. “I can think of a thousand places I’d rather work,” I said.

“Like La Mode?”

My heart shot into my throat. “Are you asking-”

“Oh, just putting out some feelers.” She laughed, too, in a noncommittal sort of way. “I like to keep an eye out for promising young talent. I think you could really make an impact on the local fashion scene. You’ve got a sense of style, and obviously, the good taste to go with it, and I’ll tell you what, you’d look fabulous in our clothing. You’d show it off to perfection and sell a bundle in the process. If there’s ever an opening for what we call a wardrobe consultant at the shop-”

“You’ll call me?” I blurted out, then scrambled to save face. “Nothing like looking too eager,” I said, cringing.

Bianca didn’t hold it against me. “There’s nothing wrong with being eager,” she said. “In fact, I admire enthusiasm. It shows you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get what you want.”

“I am. I do.” My smile was perky enough to suit a La Mode wardrobe consultant. “I will.”

“Good. Then we’ll talk.” And with that, Bianca went back to her car, got out a picnic basket, and headed over to the section where Team One was working.

Digging and hauling aside, I was still walking around with my head in the clouds that afternoon when Greer called us together. She’d been lurking around all week, of course, following us with that damned camera and the cameraman who did as he was told without ever saying a word. This was the first meeting she’d called since the last episode aired, and like my team, I’d heard local PBS ratings were up and donations to the station were, too. All thanks to us. Like them, I was hoping for a little rah-rah and some congratulations to go along with it.

What we got instead was Greer, in a gray and dumpy suit. “Now that we’ve got people watching,” she said without preamble, “it’s time to start educating them. This is our opportunity to add a little culture to their lives.”

“They don’t watch for no culture.” We were in Team One’s section, and Absalom pushed off from a headstone with an angel atop it. “They watch to see Reggie and Delmar.”

“Yeah.” Delmar grinned. “And they watch to see Sammi kick Pepper’s butt.”

If he wasn’t smiling when he said it, I would have held it against him. The way it was, the red abrasions on my neck were just starting to fade, so I was feeling magnanimous.

“This week, they’ll watch because we’re going to invite people to our tea.” Mae beamed a smile all around. It was stiff around the edges. “Of course, you’re all invited, too.”

“Don’t need your stupid tea.” Sammi tossed her head. “We’re gonna knock your socks off with our-”

I shushed her fast. So far, the art show was our secret. I didn’t need her leaking it, especially before Team One hosted its tea. As old and sweet and pink as she was, something told me Mae wouldn’t be above finding some artwork to display at the tea and scooping our idea out from under us.

“That was good.” I should have known Greer was filming, but honestly, by this time, I was so used to her and that camera, I hadn’t even been paying attention. “The way you cut Sammi off like that, Pepper, that provided a great dynamic.” She glanced at Sammi. “You want to take a swing at Pepper?”

Sammi rolled her eyes and walked away.

“Anyway…” Greer got back down to business. “We’re going to get some nice shots this afternoon. I was thinking of something to really set the mood for the announcement about the tea. Maybe a shot of Team One working and their picnic baskets stacked in the foreground?” It was obviously never meant to be a question, so she signaled to her cameraman and he got to work arranging the baskets artfully.

He’d already put a couple in place when he hefted the one he was holding. “This one’s heavy. What can little old ladies have in their picnic baskets?”

It was the first thing I’d ever heard Charlie the cameraman say, but that wasn’t why his comment interested me so.

I thought about the box we’d found at Jefferson Lamar’s gravesite and if the camera wasn’t rolling, I would have slapped myself smack on the forehead.

I’d been so busy suspecting my own teammates of walking off with the coin, I hadn’t bothered to think it might be someone else.

What could little old ladies have in their picnic baskets?

I wasn’t sure, but as soon as I had the chance, I intended to find out.

“ Whatdoyoumean,youthought one of us took ”that coin?” Absalom was the spokesman for the team, so he was the one up in my face making me regret I’d ever mentioned my theory about Team One having the coin, or my suspicions about what had happened to it in the first place. Outraged, he sputtered, “You think one of us would actually steal something?”

I saw the irony of that question, even if he didn’t. The way I rolled my eyes was designed to point that out. “What do you mean you wouldn’t steal anything? Some of you have.” I made sure I looked at everyone, just so Absalom didn’t feel singled out. “You’ve stolen plenty.”

He opened his mouth, all set to keep arguing.

Until the sense of what I said hit.

Absalom snapped his mouth shut, backed up a step, and roared with laughter.

“You got me there!” What was supposed to be a friendly slap on the shoulder was more like a thud coming from him. I staggered and started laughing, too.

Delmar had a wide smile on his face. “We wouldn’t steal from family,” he said, then blushed. “I mean, it’s hokey and all, but we’re sort of like a family, aren’t we? And none of us would ever-”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.” I caught my breath and apologized, grateful I didn’t have a full-scale mutiny on my hands. Theoretically, I suppose I deserved one. “I never should have suspected you. Not any of you. I never would have. But back when we found the coin, I didn’t know you as well. I’m sorry.”

“You think one of them rich ladies did it?” Reggie’s eyes glowed at the prospect.

“I think it’s a possibility. If they caught wind of the fact that we found something unusual at Jefferson Lamar’s grave, they might want to hide it. You know, so we couldn’t reveal it on the show. They’d know that would make our section look too interesting.”

“And they wouldn’t want us to look too smart, neither.” Sammi crossed her arms over her chest and puffed out a breath of annoyance. “They got a lot of damned nerve.”

“Well, we don’t know if they’re the ones who did it,” I cautioned. “We won’t know. Not until we can get a look in those picnic baskets. They bring them every day, and it’s logical that the coin might still be in the basket. It’s not like they would have taken it anywhere or sold it or anything. They just want to keep it away from us.”

Absalom rubbed his beefy hands together. “So what are we going to do?”

“Create a diversion, I suppose.” It was as much of a plan as I had. “If we can get them out of their section, somebody can sneak over there and take a look in those baskets.”

“And I got just the diversion.” Sammi stalked over to where I stood and raised her voice. It was as shrill as a train whistle and in the quiet of the afternoon, it carried plenty far. She propped her fists on her hips. “Say what? Say what? You know what you can do with these frickin’ maps of yours…” There was a stack of cemetery maps on a nearby headstone, and she picked them up and waited for her opportunity. The moment Greer, her cameraman, and all the members of Team One came running to see what the commotion was all about, she side-handed those maps across the section.

It was perfect, and I joined right in. What did we fight about?

I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter, anyway.

Sammi yelled, and I yelled right back. She screamed, and I screamed louder. We pointed fingers in each other’s faces. We snapped and scowled. We kept it up until Delmar slipped away and came back a couple minutes later, and when he did, there was a grin on his face. Just as I hoped, when Sammi and I stopped fighting, our audience disappeared. Delmar explained that he’d found the box exactly where we thought it would be, in one of the picnic baskets that belong to Team One. He handed it over, and I checked to be sure the coin was still inside it, then tucked it in my purse. After high fives all around, my team went home for the evening.

And it wasn’t until they were gone and I was going around picking up those maps Sammi tossed that I realized just how good all that yelling and screaming felt.

I guess I’d been pissed for a long time and I never even knew it.

Why?

Let me count the ways.

I was pissed at Sammi for being a royal pain, and specifically for ruining that new gold cotton tunic of mine and bruising my neck.

I was pissed at Quinn for not calling, and pissed at my parents for calling, especially my dad, who, as long as he was at it, left one message asking if everything was OK and another saying he really would like to see me one of these days.

I was pissed about being stuck restoring a cemetery when I should have been working on proving that an upstanding guy like Jefferson Lamar shouldn’t have had to die in prison while whoever framed him sat back to laugh about it.

While I was at it, I might as well admit that I was plenty pissed at the universe in general, too, for allowing a kid like Vera Blaine to get murdered in a dumpy motel while she was wearing jelly bracelets.

When he was young, Robert Oates was a tough-talking punk who made a name for himself on the Cleveland streets by stealing cars and overseeing a couple small-time heists. He spent the better part of his formative years in and out of a variety of boys’ homes, reform schools, and jails, and by the time he was twenty-four, he graduated to bigger and better things. He went out to Nevada, where he earned the Reno nickname, and worked as an enforcer for a variety of crime bosses. By all accounts, he had a vicious streak, and he added hard drinking, heavy gambling, and high living to his resume. It’s no surprise that he made plenty of enemies, or that he was forced to come back to the city of his birth when things got a little too hot for him out west.

By the time he masterminded the bank job that got him sent to Central State, he was middle-aged and desperate for a big score. The bomb he said he had when he stuck up that bank was his idea of a joke. Nobody was laughing.

All this information I’d found online about Reno Bob went through my head as I drove through the suburbs west of Cleveland, looking for the address he had given me when we talked on the phone. I found it, finally, down a quiet side street in Parma, a blue-collar sort of place filled with mom-and-pop stores, churches, bars, and tiny homes.

Reno’s house was a small, neat bungalow with white aluminum siding, blue shutters, and a shade tree on the front lawn. He told me that if I rang the bell-I did-and he didn’t answer-he didn’t-he’d be over at the park across the street, so I moved my car over there, parked in a newly blacktopped lot, and walked past a wooden swing set and a sandbox where someone had left a flattened spare tire.

I’d like to say I wasn’t nervous, but let’s be frank: I’d heard so many bad things about Reno and his temper, my knees were knocking together. They kept it up, too, right until I saw that the only other person in the park was a tiny old man wearing baggy denim shorts, a green and yellow Hawaiian print shirt, and enormous tortoise-shell glasses. Temper or not, if this was Reno Bob, I knew I could take him.

He didn’t look at me when I walked up to him. He was busy working on the canvas he had set up on an easel in front of him.

He was painting a picture of the maple tree about thirty feet from where we stood. The painting included the small lake beyond and the couple ducks and Canada geese that floated by. Art history degree aside, I’m not an expert, but I knew the painting was better than just good, even though the old guy’s hands shook with every stroke.

I waited until he finished adding the last bits of green to the leaves on the tree. “Reno? I’m Pepper.”

“Nobody’s called me Reno in a long time.” When he finally turned to look at me, I saw that his face was as lined as an old blanket. Reno’s arms were stick-skinny and his knees were knobby. He was wearing a brand-spanking-new pair of Nikes that were so clean and white, they made my eyes hurt. “You said you wanted to see me. You didn’t say what you wanted.”

Of course, I expected him to ask-that was the whole point-but I shrugged like I wasn’t sure. “I’ll bet plenty of people want to meet you and talk to you.”

“About the old days?” Reno wiped his hands on a rag he pulled out of his pocket and got to work cleaning up his painting supplies. “Not so much anymore. I used to have a following, you know.”

I saw my opportunity and jumped on it. “Back when you tried to rob that bank with the bomb.” I nodded. “I hear back then, you were like a god or something.”

Behind his glasses, Reno’s eyes glittered. “They all wanted to interview me, Dan Rather and Mike Wallace and even that other guy, that Geraldo. Oh yeah!” He lifted the canvas off the easel. It was almost as big as him, but he didn’t have any trouble slipping it into a wooden carrier. “I was something, all right. They all came down to Central State to talk to me. Even got a couple fellows visiting from Hollywood. They wanted to make a movie about me, you know.”

“Until Jefferson Lamar made sure your visitors were cut off and you were treated just like any other prisoner.”

His hands stilled over his art supplies, and Reno shot a look over his shoulder at me. “You’re too young to know about all that.”

“But not too young to know you must have been plenty mad.”

“You think?” He got back to work, stowing his brushes and his tubes of paint in a plastic carryall. “That was a long time ago.”

“And you don’t hold any of it against Warden Lamar?”

Reno scratched a finger behind his ear. “Warden’s been dead for a lot of years. What happened to him, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It might. Maybe to his wife. She thinks he was innocent.”

“What else is a wife going to say? She heard the evidence. Same as we all did. She knows he’s guilty, she just won’t admit it to herself.”

“And if the warden was framed?”

He was done packing his supplies, so Reno turned and gave me his full attention. “Is that what the widow thinks? Did she ask you to come here and talk to me about it? Or is this just something you think?”

“Actually, it’s something I know.”

“Really?” He laughed, then coughed. There was a pack of Camels in his pocket, and he thumped one out, lit it, and took a drag. “Back at Central State, that was back in the day when I hated a lot of people.” The words hissed out of him along with a long stream of nasty smoke that I stepped aside to avoid. “I was angry all the time, you know? I’ve learned to channel my energy. Now, I paint. And I stop and smell the flowers.”

“But back in the day…”

“Back in the day…” He coughed again and spat on the ground. “I didn’t hate nobody as much as I hated Lamar. He thought he could turn Central State into some kind of boot camp. You know, reform everybody. Guess he learned his lesson, huh?”

“Because somebody framed him and he got a taste of his own prison medicine?”

“If that’s what you think.” Reno picked up the crate he’d put his canvas in and hauled it to the blue Prism parked three spaces from my Mustang. I could have been a sport and helped him with the rest of his supplies, but I was afraid if I did, it would give him an excuse to leave. So instead, I waited for him to stow the canvas, then come all the way back.

By the time he did, he was breathing hard.

And I was ready for him.

“If Lamar was framed for Vera Blaine’s murder, who do you think did it?” I asked.

He lit another cigarette. He blew out another stream of smoke. “You think I had something to do with it.”

“I’m talking to everyone I can. You’re one of the people who might have done it.”

“You’re right. I might have.” Reno Bob hoisted the carryall into his arms, his expression as serene as that painting of the tree and those ducks on the pond. “But if that’s true, then you got a hell of a lot of nerve coming here and talking to me.” He turned toward the parking lot. “You could be putting yourself in a lot of danger.”

Was that a nice, friendly warning?

Or a threat?

Since it was the last thing Reno Bob said to me before he got in his car and drove away, I thought about it all the way home. Even then, I still wasn’t certain, not when I got out of the car, slung my purse over my shoulder, and headed for my apartment.

I was still thinking about it when a man jumped out of the alley behind my building, grabbed me, and put a knife to my throat.