The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Read online

  Was the cutline wrong? Had the picture been flopped, so that left was right and right was left? I knew only too well how easily that could happen.

  But no, Arnie was pictured with Mary, Sue, and Carolyn. He was the only guy in the picture.

  What was the deal here? I looked carefully at all the other aspiring young journalists pictured, mentally aging them, adding pounds, graying their hair, updating hairdos, subtracting hair.

  Whoops! Center of the back row of one of the group shots. Take the hair off, and it was Arnie.

  Yeah. That was Arnie. I realized I’d been holding my breath. I liked Arnie. Finding him in another picture relieved me. The smaller picture was merely identified wrong. Arnie was among the Eagle Press staffers of the era. He’d had a gorgeous head of hair, light-colored in the black-and-white photo, and his eyelashes had been light. He’d been grinning broadly for the photographer.

  He was sixth from the left in the back row. I popped the last cheese cracker in my mouth and ran my finger along the list of names to number six.

  “Alan Matthews,” it said. “News editor, spring semester.”

  Chapter 13

  “No,” I said. “That’s not right. Alan Matthews was my father’s name. And that’s Arnie. That’s not my dad.”

  I calmly closed the book. My hand was steady as I put it back on the shelf. I threw out the cracker wrapper, and I opened my candy bar, and I stared out the library’s window as I ate it. I looked into the lighted windows of a building a half block away, watching a custodian go from office to office, dumping wastebaskets. Then I went to the ladies’ room, combed my hair, washed my hands, and went back to my spot at the copy desk. I opened up the proof file, and I read copy.

  I didn’t feel anything.

  I didn’t dare feel anything.

  Ruth didn’t seem to notice that my life had turned upside down, so I guess I didn’t act as if it had.

  If the face in the yearbook crossed my memory, I merely pushed it out again and smugly told myself that the Eastwick Talon yearbook staff had been a bunch of rank amateurs, not aspiring professionals like the students I’d been in J-school with. They’d simply gotten the names mixed up. No Alan Matthews had been pictured on that page.

  I managed to keep telling myself that until about ten, when Ruth’s phone buzzed and Kimmie called her up to the reception desk. That was odd. If someone came by the office—with a complaint or to submit a news story—Ruth would usually send a reporter to talk to him, not go herself. So I looked to see who was getting the special treatment.

  It was Boone Thompson, the detective who’d searched the newsroom. The one who had found the shoes in Arnie’s desk.

  Ruth shook his hand, and the two of them talked, leaning on the dividing railing. I could see Ruth frowning. Then she swung the little gate open and motioned Boone inside. The two of them walked toward the city desk.

  “Nell,” Ruth said, “Arnie Ashe hasn’t called in tonight, has he?”

  I shook my head. “Haven’t heard a word. Last night he said he had to take care of some personal business. I don’t think he called tonight.”

  Ruth turned to Boone. “Guess that’s all we know. If we hear from him, we’ll tell him you need to talk to him.”

  “No.” Boone’s voice was firm. “No, just tell us you’ve heard from him,” he said. “We’ll take it from there.”

  I was longing to ask why the police were looking for Arnie, but my tongue wouldn’t work. I was sure they wanted to arrest him for the murder of Martina Gilroy.

  They wanted to arrest my dad.

  My teeth were clamped so hard they throbbed, and my throat got so tight I could feel it begin to ache. I sat staring at the screen of the VDT until Ruth had escorted Boone back to the reception area and had returned to her desk. Then I swung my chair around.

  “Ruth.” My voice was a croak. “I’m exhausted, and I have a lot of overtime. Nothing more’s coming for tomorrow. Is it okay if I leave early?”

  Ruth frowned. “You all right?”

  I nodded. “Just tired.” That time my voice nearly broke.

  “If you don’t feel well, I’ll get the photog to drive—”

  “No!” I shook my head vigorously, gathered up my purse, and left. I managed to keep myself semi-composed while I collected my raincoat from the closet—the closet next to the one where Mike and I had found Martina’s white linen jacket. I was halfway down the back stairs before I began to cry.

  I kept going, down the stairs, out the back door, across the alley, and into the first floor of the parking garage, and the tears were flooding every step of the way. I unlocked the door of the Dodge and got inside. Then I fell apart completely.

  I gripped the steering wheel and sobbed. It hurt so bad that I thought I would die. Death would have been easier than sitting there knowing that twenty years earlier my father had abandoned me to avoid being tried for murder. And now it had happened again.

  Disguised as Arnie Ashe, he had slipped back into my life for a few weeks, and then he had slipped out again.

  I wept terrible wracking sobs. I screamed hysterically. I beat the dashboard with my fist. I may have even banged my head against the steering wheel. I didn’t fight it. I couldn’t fight it. For ten minutes I sobbed and muttered and moaned and generally made a spectacle of myself.

  “Daddy! Daddy! I hate you! I love you! I’m so angry!”

  Yes, angry. The thought gave me enough pause that I stopped my tirade. Yes, I was angry. Furious.

  All those years I’d thought that if my daddy came back, I’d be a really good girl this time so he wouldn’t want to go away again. And he had come back, and I hadn’t done anything naughty, and he still went away again. Because of something I had no control over. Because of Martina’s murder.

  Had he killed her? Was the man who taught me to play Dirty Eight a killer?

  I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. But I didn’t know.

  Luckily, there was a box of Kleenex in the backseat of the Dodge. I used half of it. And then I drove home, forgetting all about the crazy guy in the old Caddy who’d chased me the night before. I crept in quietly to keep from waking up Brenda or Martha and was in bed long before Rocky came in from the Blue Flamingo. I didn’t want to talk to anybody.

  Except Mike. Maybe. And I couldn’t call every motel in western Michigan looking for him.

  I was too upset for my usual “sleeping pill,” a chapter of Auntie Mame. But I must have been truly as exhausted as I’d told Ruth I was, because I fell asleep quickly and didn’t budge until the phone rang at eight-thirty Sunday morning.

  I picked up the extension by my bed.

  “Hello.” My voice seemed to be working, but my head was splitting.

  “Nell? This is Wilda.” It was Mike’s mother. “Where’s Mike?”

  “He left town,” I said stupidly.

  “Isn’t he back yet?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Long silence. I could hear that information clicking through Wilda’s brain, and I could tell it had surprised her. I wasn’t sure what I should say. Wilda Svenson is one of Grantham’s most successful real estate operators. She and Mike are reasonably close, but they’re not in each other’s pockets. They’re both too busy, for one thing. For another, Mike’s not sure how to react to her romantic relationship with Mickey O’Sullivan, who had been his father’s best friend. Mike likes Mickey, but his relationship with Mike’s mother is a little hard for Mike to accept. So the mother and son have reached an accommodation. Wilda doesn’t comment on Mike and me, and Mike doesn’t comment on his mother and Mickey. Mickey and I try to stay out of it.

  So if Mike doesn’t tell his mother something, I don’t feel that it’s up to me to offer the information. On the other hand, maybe she knew something about what he was up to. I decided to give it a try.

  “In fact, Wilda, I need to reach him,” I said. “And he didn’t tell me where he’d be staying. Do you have a phone number?”


  “No. I thought you’d know.”

  “No.”

  Another silence. I waited until Wilda spoke. “He said he was checking something out for you,” she said.

  I clenched my jaw. The jerk! Mike was nosing into my life, and he had told his mother he was doing it for me.

  I gulped hard and tried to make my voice sound normal. “Well, I guess he left without getting a reservation,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll call one of us sometime today.”

  “I wanted to tell him I’m going to Dallas this morning, and I won’t be back until Wednesday. If he could check my mail here at the house—or I can ask the office—”

  “I’ll tell him. If he calls. If I don’t hear from him, I’ll call your office tomorrow morning.”

  “Thanks, Nell. Just ask for Shirley. She’ll take care of it.”

  I hung up the phone too mad to go back to sleep, so I got up and headed for the shower. That’s when I noticed that the answering machine in the hall was blinking. I’d been too upset to even look at it the night before. I punched the button.

  “Hi, Nell.” It was Mike. “I’m calling at ten o’clock Saturday. I know you’re still at work, but I wanted to ask what’s new.”

  End of call.

  I made an angry guttural noise deep in my throat. “What’s new?” It was the code Mike and I used to mean “I love you.”

  The nerve of the guy! To call me and tell me he loved me when he was off in Michigan poking into my business without being asked to do so. To tell his mother he was checking something out for me. To refuse to tell me where he was going, and to fail to leave a phone number where he could be reached.

  “Creep!” I said.

  I turned the shower’s temperature up to steam, but my temper was hotter than the water.

  Maybe breaking up with Mike would be the best thing that ever happened to me. I was an honest person—or I tried to be. And Mike wasn’t. I called him every name in the thesaurus. Mike was a liar, a manipulator, a trickster, a charlatan, a fast talker. This had been a problem for us since we began to date, and it wasn’t going to improve.

  Boiled red by the shower, but with my headache down to a dull throb, I put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and went downstairs. I felt that I’d been abandoned by the two most important men in my life, but I was still hungry.

  Rocky, as a professional restaurateur, is the most enthusiastic cook among the four of us who share the big house. He often sleeps late on Sundays, since he doesn’t close the Blue Flamingo until way after midnight. But he was coming out of his downstairs suite—he has two rooms—as I came down the stairs.

  “Morning,” he said. He scratched his pudgy stomach and rubbed his balding head. “I’m hungry for bacon. Bacon and toast foldovers. Catsup optional.”

  I heard Martha’s voice behind me, on the landing. “Cook me a couple of pieces!”

  “Sounds good to me, too,” I said. I went out to get the Sunday Gazette.

  Forty-five minutes later, Rocky had fried enough bacon for a small army, and the three of us were sitting at the round table in the kitchen’s bay window. Martha, who works as a buyer for a department store and gets a discount on everything, was wearing a gorgeous house coat and was made up as if she’d just stepped out of Vogue. Rocky was in T-shirt and sweatpants mode.

  He lifted a slice of sourdough bread and held it over the toaster. “More toast?”

  “No, thanks. Three’s plenty for me,” I said. Martha shook her head.

  Rocky dropped his fourth slice in, and the doorbell rang.

  I tossed down the entertainment section. “I’ll get it. You watch your toast.”

  At the door, I looked through the peephole. “Hell’s bells,” I said. Then I opened the door.

  “Hi, Boone,” I said. “Come on in. Are you here to give me the third degree?”

  Boone smiled, but his eyes looked worried. “I doubt I could beat any information out of you, Nell. I’m still trying to track down Arnie Ashe.”

  “Let me get you a cup of coffee.”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  Boone followed me into the kitchen and looked at Rocky warily. His face grew amused when I introduced them. All the cops know who Rocky is, and most of them think his status in the community is funny. Rocky cleared the newspaper off the kitchen table, poured Boone’s coffee, and refreshed the cream pitcher.

  Boone seemed more impressed by Martha. For a few minutes I thought he was going to give her the third degree, even if I didn’t get it. Then she and Rocky both excused themselves.

  All the time Rocky was being hospitable and Martha was wowing Boone, I’d been thinking wildly. What should I tell Boone about Arnie? Should I tell him Arnie was really Alan Matthews? Should I tell Boone that Alan-Arnie had fled a murder charge twenty years earlier and had been on the lam all that time?

  Should I tell him Arnie was my dad?

  It was that last question which decided me. No. I couldn’t tell Boone anything about Arnie and who he really was. It wasn’t a matter of protecting him. It was simply that I couldn’t push the words out from between my lips.

  Then I had to face Boone.

  “You seem to be the last person who talked to Arnie Ashe,” he said. “Did he give you a hint of where he was going?”

  “No. Just said he had to leave town for a few days. Or something like that. I didn’t really pay a lot of attention at the time.”

  “You worked with him for several weeks, Nell. Did he ever tell you anything about his family?”

  “No!” My voice was too sharp, I realized. I tried to soften it. “No, Boone, we just talked about the violence beat, about the Gazette. We didn’t talk about personal matters.”

  “What about his relationship with Martina Gilroy?”

  “They’d worked together someplace in Kentucky.”

  “Old friends?”

  “Not really. Nobody was friends with Martina.” I got up and topped off my own coffee, then sat down again. “Martina was one of nature’s mistakes, or something. The only person I’ve run into who seemed to like her is this Dan Smith. Have you talked to him?”

  Boone wouldn’t let me distract him. “Did Ms. Gilroy and Arnie Ashe fight?”

  “A better word would be ‘argued.’ And if arguing with Martina puts you on the suspect list, I’d go to the top. She and I argued every day.”

  “Maybe so. But you’re still in town.”

  “Then you think Arnie ‘resorted to flight’? Because the shoes were found in his desk?” I leaned forward. “Boone, anybody could have put those shoes there.”

  “Yeah. But Arnie’s the only one we can’t find. And we can’t find out anything about him. He doesn’t seem to have any family. I called the town in Texas where he lived before he moved to Grantham. No wife or ex-wife. No girlfriend. No poker buddies.”

  “What about the Gazette’s personnel records? Didn’t he list a next-of-kin?”

  Boone nodded. “Oh, sure.”

  “Who?” The vehemence in my voice caused Boone to look at me sharply, and I tried to go on more casually. “I mean, maybe he’s been in touch with relatives.”

  “Not likely. Since the address he gave lists the next-of-kin’s address as Cincinnati, on a street that doesn’t seem to exist, with a telephone number for a bar in Chicago. Where they say they never heard of Arnie Ashe.”

  Boone closed his notebook. “I guess all I’m getting out of this is a cup of coffee, Nell. I’ll leave you and your friends to your Sunday morning plans.”

  “Big deal. I may go back to bed with a book.”

  “You and Mike aren’t planning anything? When I heard he was taking a few days off—”

  “No.” I’d let my voice get sharp again. “He’s out of town.”

  “Oh? I hope he’s back in time for our appointment.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Eight a.m. tomorrow morning. When I talked to him, to set up our session, he said he’d be hard to get hold of over the weekend, but he didn’t sa
y anything about leaving town.”

  “Guess he left in a hurry.”

  I escorted Boone to the door, then put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher.

  Should I have told Boone that Arnie Ashe was really Alan Matthews?

  Probably, I decided. But I simply couldn’t do it.

  Yet that bit of knowledge made a big difference in the investigation into Martina’s death.

  The night before, when I’d realized that Arnie and Alan were the same person, I’d thought of that fact strictly from my own viewpoint. I’d lost my father twenty years earlier. He’d resurfaced briefly, then left again. Left without a word to me. The realization had been so devastating that I couldn’t think beyond that.

  Now I was able to be a little more analytical. For one thing, Martina had hidden away the Eastwick College yearbook. That proved she had known who Arnie really was. Or, at least, we could assume she knew.

  Why hadn’t she gone straight to Jake, the Gazette’s executive editor? Why hadn’t she told the Gazette management what she knew?

  There could be several explanations. The office grapevine had already passed the word that Arnie had been hired because he’d known Jake years earlier. So Martina might have figured Jake already knew that Alan Matthews had assumed the identity of Arnie Ashe, a college classmate.

  Or Martina might have kept the news to herself because she wanted to use it in some way. As a club against Arnie? But what advantage would that have given her?

  In any case, the fact that Martina knew Arnie’s real identity gave him an incredibly good motive for killing her.

  How could I justify keeping this information from the investigating officer?

  But how could I turn in my own father? How could I make him face charges for the murders of two people—my mother and Martina?

  But if the man had killed twice, how could I let him run around loose?

  But what could I tell Boone anyway? I didn’t know where Arnie had gone.

  Thank God.