No way out

Chapter Fifty-six

I found Kate pacing the sidewalk, phone glued to her ear. When she saw me, she turned and walked the other way, leaving me to wait next to her rental.

“Everything okay?” I asked when we got into the car.

“Sure, fine. Where to?”

“I mean your phone call. It must have been important. You left in the middle of a pretty intense conversation.”

She swept her hair back with one hand, turning the key in the ignition with the other. “Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.”

“You always do that, you know, sweep your hair back whenever you’re uncomfortable. I know it’s not one of those gone-in-a-flash micro facial expressions that prove Oswald shot Kennedy and Ruby shot Oswald and the cop who shot Ruby was really a mob guy working as an undercover double agent for the CIA and Castro. But you always do it and it means you’re uncomfortable, and like you always tell me, lying makes people uncomfortable.”

“Unless they’re very good liars.”

“The good ones don’t sweep their hair back. So, are you going to tell me the truth or tell me that everything is okay?”

She pursed her lips. “I hope everything will be okay. How’s that?”

“Fair enough. Anything I can do to help?”

“No more than you’re doing, especially calling me on the hair-sweeping part. Now, where to?”

“While you were on your call, I tried Roni’s cell phone again, but she’s still not answering. Let’s swing by her office first. If she’s not there, we’ll try Nick at the grocery, then Roni’s house.”

Roni’s office was unlocked, the lights on and nobody home. There was no sign of a struggle, no drops of blood, no desk drawers and client files scattered across the floor. The cup of coffee on her desk was still warm, a bite missing from the bagel sitting on a napkin next to the cup. Her computer was open to her Google homepage, her calendar blank, her e-mails a junk buffet, an icon visible at the bottom of the page showing that she had opened another window.

I clicked on the icon, her homepage trading places with an Excel spreadsheet laying out the dismal figures for Staley’s Market. Roni had either left in such a hurry that she’d left the door unlocked and forgotten to close out of her client’s confidential files or she thought she’d be right back. She wouldn’t be happy if she walked in and caught me thumbing through her files, but, at this point, I cared more about keeping her alive than keeping her happy.

I studied the numbers for Staley’s Market. It was dead in the water, its debt dwarfing its assets, its expenses guzzling a vanishing income stream. Nick hadn’t taken a salary for three months, and he’d cut the fifteen hundred a month he’d been paying Brett to half that. Staley’s file included financial statements for a company called Forgotten Homes LLC, which I guessed owned his soon-to-be-foreclosed-on rental properties. He’d used the rental income to keep the grocery afloat, but it wasn’t enough and now he was losing both, the last rents paid three months ago, expenses continuing to accrue.

Scrolling through her client list, I pulled up Frank Crenshaw’s records, his numbers worse than Nick Staley’s. Kate was watching over my shoulder.

“Check to see if she did any work for Jimmy Martin.”

She did, preparing a joint tax return for Jimmy and Peggy for last year. Their income was half of what it had been the year before, the downturn in construction taking a toll.

Roni was a witness to the economic meltdown in her corner of the world, delivering terminal financial diagnoses to people with whom she’d grown up. The numbers were one-dimensional, incapable of capturing how it must have felt for Frank Crenshaw to tell his wife they were broke, for Nick Staley to shove his son below the poverty line, and for Jimmy Martin to sweat about how he’d keep a roof over his kids’ heads.

“All of them, Crenshaw, Staley, and Martin were going down at the same time,” Kate said.

“I wonder if they were going down together.”

Frank Crenshaw had let Roni break the news to Marie Crenshaw at LC’s Bar-B-Q and then leave them alone to talk it over while she went to the bathroom, Frank saying something to Marie that bought him a slap across the face, a blow he answered with a gunshot. I’d asked Roni if she thought Frank was doing something illegal to earn money he needed to keep his scrap business afloat. She’d said Frank was too honest to try and that Marie was too honest to let him, but I knew that honesty was no match for desperation.

If Frank or the others had made that leap, they would need a legitimate business to launder the money or they’d have to bury it in their backyards. I searched her client list, looking for another business or partnership owned by all or some of them, finding none, realizing that there was another reason to doubt that scenario. If they had had any extra cash, Crenshaw and Staley would have used it to keep their businesses alive, and Martin would have used it to pay his mortgage instead of stealing copper tubing from a construction site.

I quizzed the tenants on either side of Roni’s office. One of them said she’d been there earlier in the morning, but he hadn’t seen her leave and hadn’t seen anyone going into her office. We’d been there long enough that she should have been back if she had planned to be gone a short time. I called her again.

“She hasn’t answered any of your calls. What makes you think she’s going to answer now?” Kate asked as we headed for Staley’s Market.

“Wayne Gretzky.”

“Hockey? You’re a hockey fan? You never told me.”

“Never watched a game from beginning to end, but I’ve liked Gretzky ever since I heard him say that you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

I braced myself, one hand on the dash, as I shimmied and grunted, collapsing against the car seat.

“Left turn onto Lexington,” I said, as if nothing had happened.

“You don’t quit, do you?”

“Try not to.”

“It’s heroic, but only to a point. You can’t keep it up, and sooner or later you really will shake when you should shoot and you won’t be able to shake that off.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“Notice that I left my hair alone. I’m telling you the truth, and you know it. You can’t spend the rest of your life asking for do-overs for Kevin and Wendy. First there was Lucy, fresh out of jail. You got her a job and a boyfriend and ended up with her house. Not a bad deal in the redemption sweepstakes, but you should have quit while you were ahead because Roni Chase is up to her eyeballs in who knows what and Evan and Cara Martin may, God forbid, be past redemption.”

It was as if she had read my mind the moment before she left to make her phone call.

“So what would you have me do? Walk away? Hope Adrienne Nardelli and Quincy Carter and Braylon Jennings handle it?”

“It’s their job.”

“And they don’t have the time or resources to do it. Nardelli and Carter have too many other cases, and Jennings is too busy trying to save his ass.”

“That doesn’t mean it always has to be you. Next time say no. Go fishing. Take up golf, photography, or painting. Or write a book. That’s what everyone does when they can’t think of anything else to do.”

“I’d rather shake.”

“I know. That’s what scares me.”

The things in life you can’t consign to memory’s dustbin fall into three categories: first, last, and best. Stick the modifier in front of most any noun, and you’ll see what I mean-friend, dog, job, child, lover, and sex. Kate scored on three out of six of these forget-me-nots.

“Why are you here?” I asked her.

“You don’t drive much, remember?”

“That’s not what I mean. Why did you take this case?”

“I told you. I owed Ethan Bonner.”

“Why?”

We stopped for a traffic light. She looked at me, deciding what to say, until the light changed and the driver behind us honked at her to get moving. She jumped on the gas, the car jerking into the intersection.

“Six months ago, Alan got into some trouble.”

Alan was Kate’s ex-husband, a skinny, humorless, short, hairless, chinless man who crawled under my skin and never left because Kate found something in him that she fell in love with that I couldn’t see, didn’t have, and wished I did even though she and I weren’t together.

“Alan who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful?”

“No. Alan who is the father of my son, Brian.”

“What did he do?”

She sighed. “Went crazy the way middle-aged men do when they think their belly is growing and their dick is shrinking. A woman he met at a speed-dating event accused him of putting something in her wine so he could have sex with her when she was passed out. I called Ethan, and he dropped everything, flew to San Diego, and got it cleared up before it made the paper.”

“How?”

“He was able to prove that she passed out because of a reaction between the wine and a couple of different medications she was taking and that she’d made up the rest.”

“They didn’t have sex?”

“Before she passed out, not after.”

“Why’d she make the accusation?”

“She got mad when Alan didn’t ask her out again.”

“Boy, Brian didn’t deserve that.”

“Neither did Alan.”

I smiled at her. “You’re good to the ones you love.”

She smiled back. “And now you know why I’m here.”