Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Fifteen

I was anticipating music to accompany me west, along I-80, to Iowa. I’d recently bought a new car radio at the Discount Den-the place where Leo got his clothes, and Kutz, the wienie man, his purple paint-and was looking forward to having something to listen to, at last, besides the rattling of my ancient Jeep. It had been over a year since the thumpers had yanked my previous radio at the health center. I hadn’t minded the loss so much as the slashes they’d cut in the plastic side curtains. Those had taken a third of a roll of silver duct tape to mend, and that had seriously compromised my peripheral vision. No longer able to be certain of the whereabouts of close-by traffic, I’d had to learn to rely on divine providence each time I changed lanes. I vowed “nevermore” to car radios.

On the other hand, a radio for only $9.95 was too good a deal to pass up. To avoid future slashes, I hung the radio loose on quick release terminals beneath the dash. Though it swung like a pendulum when I drove, at least I could take it inside the health center when I went to work out.

The new radio worked well enough near the bigger towns west of Chicago, and for a time I drove along chirping like a bird, singing rock and roll with oldies stations. In the middle of Illinois, though, the music died, and all I could extract from the static was farm stations, probably being broadcast from the very barns I was passing. It’s hard to sing along with crop price reports, so I gave up warbling and concentrated on the snappy agricultural dialogue.

Apparently, the middle of March was none too soon to begin worrying about corn blight and fertilizer and increased yields. At first, I listened casually. The turret didn’t have much of a yard, just a circle of dirt, artfully spotted with dandelions that I fertilize because they irritate the groundskeepers at city hall. However, as the miles slipped by, I got caught up in the possibilities of corn, and by the time I hit the Mississippi River, digging up my circle of dirt and growing a dozen stalks was starting to make a lot of sense. I could make corn chowder, corn soufflés, and my all-time favorite, corn bread. I’d need a stove, of course, to process all that corn, but I am at heart an optimist. Someday, I would have central heat, and after that, an oven was bound to follow.

My ten-dollar radio quit grabbing anything thirty miles west of the Mississippi River. Cedar Ridge was ten miles past that, a few fistfuls of frame houses set down on hard snow and surrounded by miles and miles of nothing. There was no Wal-Mart, nor signs that one was soon to be constructed, but I would have bet there was a rutted road leading to a fishing hole, though in March it might still be frozen over.

I drove slowly through the two outskirt blocks of white-sided houses, eyeing the windowsills. I spotted no cooling pies. It was probably too cold for that as well.

The business district was in the third block and consisted of a feed store, a grocery called the NW, and three taverns with neon beer signs already lit to welcome late-morning drinkers. No one had shoveled the sidewalks in front of the taverns, but there appeared to have been no need. The snow had been pounded smooth by the prints of a thousand boots, and perhaps more than a smattering of foreheads.

The police station was at the end of the block. It was a gray cinder-block building that appeared to have been the only thing built in town in the past fifty years. I parked on the street, killing the engine and the static from my radio. I didn’t lock the door. No one in Cedar Ridge would have need of such a radio.

Sergeant Patterson sat at a beige metal desk behind the counter. About forty years old, he had a flat belly and hair that matched his starched khaki uniform. He’d probably done a thousand push-ups before his oatmeal that morning. He led me to a yellow cinder-block meeting room to sit at a brown folding table. Earth tones were alive and rampant in Cedar Ridge. I started pulling photocopies out of the envelope I’d brought.

“You didn’t bring the originals?” he asked.

I didn’t tell him that the originals were wrapped in plastic underneath the rubber rug in the Jeep, just in case. Nor that I’d mailed another set of photocopies to Leo. That was also just in case.

“Photocopies for now,” I said. “Instead of being the executor for a dead woman, I’m hoping I represent a live client, on the run, afraid for her life. She might regard these letters as confidential, because they could tie her to money taken during a bank robbery. Normally, you couldn’t look at these letters without a warrant. I’m taking the chance on showing them to you because you might be able to save her life.”

“Whew,” he said when my wind ran out.

I passed over the first two letters written by the child.

The skin around his eyes tightened as he read. “This is a frightened kid,” he said, setting them down. “We can see if Lucia’s school has samples of her handwriting to compare. Next?”

I handed him the copy of the letter that had been folded into a cube.

He scanned the few short sentences. “You’re thinking the child mailed this with the money?”

“That was folded up more times than necessary for an envelope, and it does refer to something she said she mailed.”

Patterson set the photocopy of the folded letter on top of the other two. “You have no idea where your client is now?”

“If I was certain she was alive, I wouldn’t want to know.”

“Because she took off with a lot of money?”

I tossed it back at him. “How much money?”

Patterson shook his head, parrying as well, and motioned for the rest of the sheets in front of me.

I handed him the copies of the three typed threat letters. There wasn’t much to read, but Patterson stared at them for a long time, as though he were looking through the paper at something else.

“No way of telling who wrote these, being that they were typed or computer-printed,” he said when he finally looked up.

I nodded, agreeing.

“Of course, the originals might contain fingerprints,” he said.

“I’m all ears,” I said.

He leaned back in his chair. “A little over two years ago, the Commerce Bank of Ida was held up by two masked men. They made off with one million two hundred and seventy-six thousand dollars. The Commerce Bank normally never kept that much, but that was annual bonus day for a big processor over there.”

“Inside information?”

“Common knowledge,” he said. “Everybody in town knew it was bonus day. The robbers didn’t talk during the robbery; they communicated to the bank president with a written note, which they took back.”

“Making investigators wonder whether someone in the bank would recognize their voices?”

“Sure.” He nodded. “They were careful, like they were careful to write that they knew about the bait money at the bottom of the cash drawers, the bills that, once pulled, trigger the alarms.”

“Inside information?”

Patterson shrugged. “Again, lots of people know banks have bait money.”

“How does the girl who died, Lucia Helm, fit in with the heist?”

“Her stepfather, Randall Severs, was a cop.”

Reflexively, I looked at the closed door, as though Severs might be lurking on the other side, listening. “You think he was one of the two robbers?”

“No. He was in uniform the day of the robbery, working twenty miles from Ida. But afterward, he was part of the task force working with the Feds to investigate the robbery.”

“And then came the fire in his trailer?”

Patterson glanced at the envelopes on the table. “About three weeks after the girl’s second letter was mailed.”

“You told me he was interrogated?”

Patterson shot me a sharp glance. “Not interrogated, questioned. There was no reason to suspect him of anything.”

“It’s time to question him again.”

“He’s dead.”

The room went quiet. Then big chunks of facts started moving around in my head. I didn’t know what they meant yet, but I could hear them aligning, loud as boxcars being banged together in a train yard.

“We don’t really know what happened the night Officer Severs died,” Patterson went on. “He was working the evening shift, and we think he pulled somebody over on one of the rural roads a few miles from here. We don’t know for what, because he didn’t radio it in. About eight o’clock, somebody from out there called the fire department to report a car explosion. It was Severs’s unit. By the time the fire department got there, there wasn’t much left of Severs.”

“When was this?”

Again he glanced at the envelopes spread out before him. “A month after the ‘Honestly Dearest, You’re Dead’ letter was mailed to your columnist.”

“No leads?”

“Three bullets, thirty-eights, were presumed to have been the primary cause of Officer Severs’s death. We can’t match them to anything we have on record. There were two brothers, Lance and Eddie Kovacs, who disappeared at the same time. They were a couple of junior-grade bad guys, with a long list of petty crimes, mostly burglaries they’d pulled off together. There was nothing linking them to the Ida robbery. Our interest in them came only because they disappeared at the same time Severs was killed.”

“You think Severs learned something that linked those brothers to the bank job? And that they killed him?”

He tapped the little stack of photocopies on the table. “For now, I’m saying his stepdaughter is the only little girl killed in the time period you’re talking about.”

“Or are you thinking that Severs could have been involved in planning the robbery, or just stumbled across something that led him to the money afterward?”

“I know, Elstrom; it’s tantalizing. Who’d suspect a cop? But as I said, there’s no hard evidence suggesting Severs was involved.”

“Except the death of a little girl in a double-wide trailer who had proof that her stepfather, a cop, was also a crook? And the disappearance, right after Severs got shot, of two potential suspects?”

“We need more than that.” His face tightened. “Like the originals of these letters.”

“Why burn the unit if Severs was shot? Why attract that attention?”

He shook his head. “I don’t expect we’ll ever know.”

He caught the smile that was beginning on my face. “You’ve heard something humorous here, Elstrom?”

“What are you going to do?” I asked, by way of not answering.

He glanced down at the letters in front of him. “I want the originals of these, to see if there are any fingerprints still on them.”

“And if there are no known comparison fingerprints of Lucia, and the typed letters are clean?”

“We’ll get Carolina Dare’s photograph from her Florida driver’s license, perhaps put out a bulletin.” He frowned at the grin I thought I had under control. “What’s so damned funny, Elstrom?”

“You know all of this is futile?”

“That’s funny?”

“That’s perfect.” This time I let the laugh out, at the relief of it. “Carolina Dare is so far gone no one will ever find her.”

“We’ll-”

“Sure you will,” I cut in, before he could make something up. “How hot is the money?”

“Meaning, was it marked with secret ink, or the serial numbers recorded, so when it starts getting passed at the Seven-Eleven, we’ll be able to race to the scene and apprehend the villain?” For the first time, part of a smile was beginning to play on his starched pale face as well.

“You funnin’ with me, Sergeant?”

“Just trying to wipe that shit-eating grin off your face. I don’t like being handled.”

“Me either, but you’ve got to admit, this wasn’t handling, this was finesse, born of necessity. Because of that bank job, and then the murder of that little girl and her stepfather, Carolina Dare had lived in fear that someone was coming for her next. Until she figured out how to make that bank money work for her.”

He scowled, but it faded away. “The money was not marked. We’ll never know if it is being spent.”

For a minute, we concentrated on not looking at each other. Then I asked, “If I gave you a dried blood sample, would you have it analyzed, store the results?”

He looked at my eyes, trying to figure if I’d said it for show. “To see if it belongs to your client?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d convinced yourself she was gone, with the money.”

“That’s what I want to believe, because she deserves it. And because it ends things for me. I don’t have to keep going around screaming that something bad has happened to her.”

“So why the blood sample?”

“Just in case.”

“I’d need a known comparison sample, one that definitely belongs to your client or a close relation.”

“It might take time to hunt down a relative.”

“Years, maybe decades?”

I stood up, felt in my pocket for my keys. Carolina’s flat key rested thin next to the one for the Jeep. I was beginning to think of it as a key to nothing, a false clue. That made it all the more comfortable in my pocket.

I went out to the Jeep to get the originals of the letters.