Honestly Dearest, You're Dead

Four

Without caffeine, my brain is mush. Since my thirty-dollar room didn’t come with a coffeemaker, nor even brownish powder that could be added to tap water, I hurried through my shower and shave and had my hand on the doorknob in a fast twelve minutes, telling what was left of the Oreos they had until that evening to survive.

I sped across the road to the Wal-Mart and got a large coffee and a Wal-Doughnut with yellow sprinkles on it. As I drove northeast to Rambling, I wondered if I was obsessing too much about Wal-Marts, but it was impossible not to marvel at their efficiency. I’d heard that eighty percent of Wal-Mart’s goods came from eight thousand factories in China. Yet even getting their goods from that far away, they still managed to deliver their coffee hot and their doughnuts moist. It was no wonder that the merchants on Main Street U.S.A. were getting creamed.

I was savoring the last of the yellow sprinkles stuck between my teeth when Aggert called.

“When are you stopping by?” he asked.

“It’s only seven thirty; I didn’t figure you to be at work yet. I’m on my way to Rambling to bag up Louise’s stuff.”

“If you’re sure there’s nothing there, let the landlady clean it up. Better you should start on the banks and post offices.”

“Maybe the cops will want to examine her stuff again for clues.”

“The cops are done. Come by my office, pick up that list of banks and post offices.”

“I’m going to bag her stuff; she’s owed that.” I told him I’d stop by later.

A huge dark blue SUV, the kind of monster that squeezes a mile, maybe two, out of a gallon of gasoline, was parked at the end of Louise’s drive. The garage doors were open, and inside, a man was leaning into the open driver’s door of the Dodge. I’d meant to lock the car the previous day but must have forgotten.

When he heard me bounce up the ruts, he straightened up and came out. He wore jeans and a quilted black parka and moved easily, with his shoulders square, arms loose and ready at his sides. Gray-haired, he was older than me, maybe fifty, but he was physically fit, probably a weight lifter, not the type to be crunching nachos at Wal-Mart. He looked like a cop.

“How you doing?” he asked. He spoke softly, but there was an underlying tone of insistence in his voice, as if he were used to people doing what he said. Right away.

“That depends,” I said. “I’m here because I have legal authority. You look like you’re trespassing, maybe even breaking into a vehicle over which I have control.” It was a lot of strong words, but I’d been energized by the yellow sugar sprinkles on the doughnut.

“Fair enough.” Grinning, he reached into his pocket and handed me a business card with a logo and a cluster of blueberries on it. “I’m John Reynolds. I do security for some of the growers.” He smiled wider, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “And you are?”

“Watching empty fields and picking machines extends to this cottage?”

The smile went away. “I could tell you that’s part of it, watching the neighborhood. And I could tell you that watching those empty fields and frozen picking machines occasionally gets boring.” He shook his head. “The real reason is that I think someone should try to find out what exactly happened here.”

“Dek Elstrom,” I said. “Louise Thomas’s executor.”

“Got anything to back that up?”

I handed him my driver’s license and Louise Thomas’s will.

“You knew her?” he asked, studying my driver’s license photo. I had to crouch when they took the picture, and it made my face look like it had more chins than federal buildings have steps.

“I don’t know. I may have met her through my records research business, perhaps years ago.”

He nodded. “How may I help?” he asked, handing back my license and the will.

I got out of the Jeep. “Tell me what happened.”

“I’ll give you the guesswork tour.”

We started up the drive, but he surprised me by stopping almost right away, at the back door. He pointed at the ground beneath the square of plastic that had been taped over the broken glass. “See anything?”

I looked at the ground, then up at him. “No.”

He nodded and motioned for me to follow him. Halfway up the drive, he again stopped, this time right under the two large windows at the side of the house. The ripped plastic sheets billowed softly in the morning air.

He pointed to the ground. “See anything?”

The thousand bits of glass I’d seen the day before glinted in the snow. “The window on the back door was broken inward; no glass left outside on the ground. But these,” I said, pointing up at the two large plastic-sheeted windows, “were shattered from the inside out. And with great impact.”

He grinned. “My guess, too. Now the tour continues inside.” He started to reach to pull himself through a rip in the plastic.

I jangled the ring of keys. “We can use the door, like invited guests,” I said.

He followed me to the front, waited as I unlocked the two doors, then stepped ahead to go in first. Pulling a small flashlight from his jacket pocket, he switched it on and pointed the beam at the floor beneath the two shattered windows. Glass crystals winked back from the carpet.

“Some glass was dragged back in,” I said.

“Hell of a struggle.” He raised the beam toward the back of the room. “You’ve seen the kitchen?”

“Yesterday.”

“It’s been cold enough inside here for the food on the floor not to have spoiled, so I don’t imagine they can pinpoint a time of death.” He started walking through the living room to the back.

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“State police, or the county.”

“What are they telling you?”

“Nothing. They left a message, telling me of the death and saying I should keep an eye on the place for vandals when I’m passing by.”

“Nothing else?”

“Mr. Elstrom, they don’t have the resources to work full-time on a home invasion gone bad. The way it works is that sometime in the future, some small-time greaseball will offer up something he heard in exchange for leniency on his own case.”

“Nobody’s doing anything to catch the killer?”

He started walking to the kitchen. “You mean, did anybody comb the area, ask all the neighbors when was the last time they’d seen Ms. Thomas?” He stopped at the window over the sink and gestured at the skinny trees and the empty fields beyond them.

I looked out at nothing. “Nobody is close enough to have seen anything.”

“You got it.” He pointed at the green linoleum floor beneath the back door window. “The intruder was very careful at first. He tapped out the glass, pulled the pieces outside and tossed them in the bushes, then reached in to unlock the door.”

“To be silent?”

He nodded.

I looked down at the floor. Something had changed. The black banana and the yellow box of Cheerios still lay on top of the spilled flour and sugar, but the only cans that remained were the ones that had been opened. The full tins of vegetables and fruit were gone. At least one pot, a big two-quart aluminum thing, had disappeared as well.

We walked through the living room to the door to the bedroom.

“She was struck high on the back of the head, which I think means that she was seated at that table, maybe typing,” he said, pointing at the old Underwood on the table across the room.

“The blood spatter shows that,” I said.

“He knocked her out,” he went on, “then started rummaging through everything.” He gestured at the pulled-out drawers, the clothes mingled with the newspapers that littered every inch of the tiny room.

“A robbery.”

“I want to think that, but something bothers me.”

I went for the obvious: “Why break into a shack like this looking for valuables?”

“Not that,” he said. “Some of the people around here will steal for chump change.” He walked over to the worktable, and tapped the old Underwood. “She fell forward, over this. We can assume that because there’s blood spatter on the side of the typewriter, and on the wall behind the table.” He turned around. “But there was no paper in the typewriter, no ribbon, either. In fact, I couldn’t find one sheet of anything typed in the whole place.”

“The cops took whatever she was typing as evidence?”

“Could be.” He said it vaguely and then looked down at the typewriter on the table, as though hoping it would speak.

I waited.

“Or the killer took whatever she was working on out of the typewriter and still searched the rest of the house,” he said.

“Looking for something more that she’d written?”

“Or to make sure he grabbed everything that would point to his identity.”

“What about all these newspapers?”

“That I can’t figure.” He looked at me with unblinking eyes. “You must have known her, if she named you executor.”

“I don’t remember her. She might have worked for one of my past clients.”

We walked into the living room and stopped to look again at the two shattered windows.

“I figure she came to while he was searching the house,” he said. “She tried to escape by throwing herself through those windows.”

“Multiple impacts. He kept grabbing her, dragging her back.”

“Jesus,” he said.

We walked out onto the porch.

I pointed to the dime-sized spots of blood. “You saw the blood in here as well?”

He nodded, looking where I was pointing. “She fought here, too, poor thing.”

“This was no ordinary home invasion gone bad,” I said. “Not with the paper missing from the typewriter.”

“And no other paper, blank or otherwise, anywhere else.”

“Damned shame, nobody investigating.”

He paused at the porch door. “I’ve got no pull with the sheriff. I do what I can, but it’s just a couple hours a week. That’s what I was doing when you pulled up, checking her car. I’ve stopped at all the occupied houses in Rambling, which is about ten. Nobody knew Louise Thomas.”

“Her lawyer told me she’d just started renting this place.”

“She showed up last spring, paid a year’s rent up front. The landlady can’t remember if she paid by check or not.”

“That means Louise paid with cash.”

“You bet,” he said, grinning as he stepped down onto the ground.

“Any idea where she banked, or where she worked?”

“I don’t know anything about her.”

We walked back to his SUV. The sun was high enough now to be bright on the snow.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Sort out what can be given away and what’s trash. Should take me a day,” I said. “Then I’ll call the sheriff, see what he knows.”

He paused by his driver’s side door. “I’ve been doing what I can. Any more, I could lose my job.”

“I’ll take a look at my records. Maybe they’ll jog my memory.”

He turned to look back at the shabby little cottage. “Nobody should die so…” His voice trailed off as he hunted for the right word. “Anonymously?” I offered.

He nodded as he opened his car door. “Crappy way to die.”

There was nothing to say to that.