The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Page 16

  I yelled out a quick thank-you, since my grandmother raised me to acknowledge the everyday forms of chivalry. Then I ran down those stairs, out the back door, and across the alley to my car. I was inside with the door locked in a few seconds.

  And then I began to feel silly. After all, what had Ed Brown done to scare me? He’d been upset about the way file drawers were assigned in the newsroom. I had to admit our system wasn’t very businesslike. But it worked for us. So what was his beef? And why had he taken it out on me?

  It was a strange experience, but I had probably overreacted.

  At least I had gotten out of there with the printouts from Martina’s files. And what should I do with them? Now that I’d found them, I knew I’d feel like a narc if I gave them to the police.

  I was going to have to talk to somebody about this. And it would have to be Mike.

  I was keeping two categories of information from the police—Arnie’s real identity and Martina’s electronic files. Could I get in trouble? Mike could tell me what my legal situation was.

  But where was Mike?

  Judging from what he’d told Boone, he was planning to be home tonight. I’d ring his phone off the wall, I decided. The minute he came in the door, I’d be talking to him.

  I went home and called Mike’s answering machine.

  “Mike, it’s absolutely imperative that I speak to you the moment you walk in the door,” I told the gadget. “No matter how late it is. Call me immediately! And I mean right this minute! Pronto! Quick as a bunny!” I took a deep breath, then spoke again. “What’s new?”

  That ought to get results.

  But it didn’t. I wore circles in the kitchen floor and the upstairs hall that day, pacing back and forth, willing the phone to ring. But it didn’t. I even tried baking cookies and mixing meatballs by hand, on the theory that the phone is certain to ring if it’s not convenient to answer it. That didn’t work either.

  At ten o’clock that night I gave up and drove by Mike’s house. There was a light in the living room, but that didn’t mean anything. Mike routinely uses an automatic timer to turn a few lights off and on during the evening, particularly if he’s working nights.

  I parked at the curb. What if Mike was there and simply hadn’t wanted to call me? Did I dare to ring the doorbell?

  You’re being stupid, I told myself. If it was anybody else in the world, you’d go to the door.

  I got out of the car, slammed the door vigorously, and walked up on the porch. I punched the doorbell viciously. The bell gonged hollowly inside. The door did not open, but I can’t say there was no response.

  “Nell?”

  The voice came out of the darkness behind me. I’d been concentrating on the house, and the sound of my name nearly gave me a heart attack. I whirled around.

  “Nell, honey? Is that you?”

  It was Mike’s neighbor. Marceline Fuqua.

  “Oh, Marceline! You startled me.”

  “I saw you park your car and go up the walk. I don’t think Mike’s home. I wondered if there was any problem. I mean, you usually just go in through the garage.”

  So much for our discreet practice of keeping my car in the garage. Of course, we’d known there was no fooling Marceline. Mike grew up in the house where he now lives, so Marceline has known Mike since the day Wilda and Irish Svenson brought him home from the hospital. He’s used to Marceline keeping an eye on everything. And in her defense, Mike sometimes finds Marceline’s deep interest in neighborhood happenings useful.

  She was still looking at me quizzically.

  “Mike needed my garage door opener to leave with a repairman,” I said.

  “He said something about that to me,” Marceline said. “I don’t know who he was expecting, but they sure haven’t shown up. Where’d Mike go?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” I said. “He said he had some business to take care of.”

  “Humph. Well, I guess you know about that girl he was mixed up with in Chicago. He’s had a time getting her out of his hair.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it was anything to do with Annie,” I said. “Mike called and left a message, but he didn’t tell me when he’d be back in town.”

  Marceline still had Annie on her mind. “If he’s gone to Chicago, he always takes that late plane home.”

  I moved toward the porch steps. “I’m sure he’ll call as soon as he gets in. I do need to talk to him, but—”

  “I’ll give you the key.”

  “Oh, no! I wouldn’t—”

  “Don’t be silly!” Marceline headed purposefully across the street. “Mike’ll get me if he finds out I didn’t let you in.”

  I didn’t argue anymore. I’d already concluded that Mike was planning to be home that night—because of his eight a.m. appointment with Boone Thompson. If he was mad at me for going in his house without permission, we’d just have to fight it out. I took Marceline’s key and let myself in the front door.

  Inside, I called out, “Mike?” But there was no answer.

  I turned on the kitchen light and saw a perfectly clean kitchen. Mike had even put his dishes in the dishwasher before he left town.

  I roamed around the living room and Mike’s big bedroom before I finally turned on the television and watched a talk show. It stunk, and when it ended at midnight, Mike still hadn’t come in. I switched the television set off and tried reading a book, but I found I was nodding. I considered getting into Mike’s bed, but decided that would be too intimate. Instead, I took a quilt from the bedroom closet and a pillow from the bed and made myself a cocoon on the couch.

  Once I was comfortably tucked in, of course, I felt wide awake. When would Mike get there? What would he have found out? Would he share that information with me? What would he think I should tell the cops bout Arnie?

  Who could sleep with questions like these dripping like a faucet that needed a new washer?

  I’d left the light on, so I picked up my book again. No use. The questions kept splatting into my mental sink. I had no interest in reading.

  Then the house began to haunt me. Floorboards creaked, windows rattled, doors seemed to move, plumbing groaned, beams shifted uneasily.

  I wasn’t alone.

  I told myself not to be silly. Of course I was alone. I was simply having an attack of empty-house syndrome. It’s similar to empty Gazette Building syndrome. The last time I’d been alone in Mike’s house, I’d had the same feeling—that vague sense that someone was moving around in the house, creeping up on me with a club, drawing nearer with a garrote, slipping knives out of the kitchen drawers, threatening—

  “Enough,” I said. I got up and put on my shoes. The only cure for empty-house syndrome is an inspection tour.

  I began in the kitchen, turning on all the lights and looking in the broom closet and even the oven. I went into the big bedroom, which opened off the living room. There was nothing in the walk-in closet and no one under the bed. Mike’s luxurious bathroom was empty—I even checked the little room he calls the “throne room” and I call the “water closet.”

  I came out and turned the light on in the little hall that led to the back of the house. I checked the second bathroom, the one with the tub. No place to hide there.

  That left the back bedroom, which Mike keeps shut off and unheated, with the bed piled high with junk.

  Might as well make a thorough check, I told myself, even though I was sure it was empty. I swung open the door and reached inside for the light switch.

  But my hand stopped in mid-reach. The light from the hall had already fallen inside.

  It hit the frozen face and bald head of Arnie Ashe.

  Chapter 15

  I nearly wet my pants.

  Arnie was probably having problems along that line, too. He was in bed, with the covers pulled up to his chin. His eyes looked big and scared.

  I gibbered. “Uh. Oh. Arn—You’re here.” Intelligent remarks like those.

  “Nell?”

  Arnie’
s voice sounded timid, but it made me turn and run.

  “Nell! Wait!”

  I could hear Arnie coming after me, but I didn’t stop until I got to the garage door—the door I nearly always used. When I got there I realized my car was parked at the front curb, and I was at the wrong door. I whirled around. I guess I would have run out through the front door, but Arnie headed me off.

  He came into the living room, wearing wrinkled pajamas, and he was between me and my exit. “Nell?” he said timidly.

  When he saw me trapped at the sink, he came to the kitchen door and stopped. His eyes were still saucer big. I think that if I’d clapped my hands, he’d have flown up in the air and come down in a hundred pieces.

  “The cops are looking for you,” I said.

  “I was afraid they would be.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Mike was looking into something for me. He told me I could stay here until he got it done.” He grinned. “You might say he ordered me to stay here.”

  “I can believe that.”

  “What are you doing here? Mike said—”

  “Yeah. He took my key away. But the neighbor let me in.”

  “I nearly had a heart attack when you came in and hollered a while ago.”

  “I nearly had a heart attack when I opened the door to that back bedroom.”

  I realized that my nose was running, and I wondered why. I realized that I was crying. I reached for a paper towel and turned my back on Arnie to blow my nose.

  “I guess I’d better get some clothes on,” Arnie said awkwardly. He turned.

  “Why did you leave me?”

  The words were out before I knew they were coming.

  Arnie swung back. His face was frozen again. “What do you mean?”

  “You left me with Gran and Grandpa. Why didn’t you come back?”

  Hell, I knew the answer to that. He’d been on the lam for twenty years. I wasn’t being coherent. Or fair. Or sensible. But I wasn’t feeling coherent, fair, or sensible. I was feeling miserable and angry, and I stood there wallowing in self-pity.

  Not only had my father deserted me twice, but he’d actually hidden out with my boyfriend. And neither of them had thought I should know about the situation.

  “Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  I watched Arnie struggle with my question for at least thirty seconds before I realized that until that moment he had had no idea that I knew he was my father.

  He finally spoke. “When did you figure this out?”

  “Last night,” I said. “Thanks to Martina.”

  “Martina! The damn woman haunted me alive. Is she going to haunt me dead? How’d she find out?”

  “She had a yearbook. Eastwick College. You and Arnie Ashe were both in the picture of the newspaper staff. What happened to the real Arnie?”

  “He was killed in a car wreck a couple of years after college. I wrote off for a birth certificate. Arnie and I graduated in the same class at Eastwick, and I used his credentials to get a newspaper job. The college closed down a couple of years after we graduated. I figured it would be hard to track down anybody who’d known him.”

  Then he glared and stepped into the kitchen. “But I see Martina managed. She was a digger. You’ve got to give her credit for that.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  Arnie’s eyes glittered with anger. “No, Nell. I didn’t kill her. I’ve never killed anyone.”

  “Not my mother?”

  “No!”

  “Then why did you leave the Gazette?”

  “Because after those shoes were found in my desk—and I didn’t put them there!—the cops were bound to look at me. And if they looked too closely at my background, they’d find out I was wanted in Michigan.”

  “Why did you run away in Michigan after my mother was killed?”

  “Because that Jessamine sheriff had his mind made up! He was fitting me for a life sentence. Wouldn’t look at any other suspect!” Arnie made a dramatic gesture. “I had only one hope of getting my daughter back! Only one hope of getting my own life back!”

  “And just what was that?”

  “I had to find the guy who really did it!”

  I was still crying, but I laughed, too. “The guy who really did it! Wow! Have I heard that line before? Was it at the first murder trial I ever covered? Yeah, I remember. The defendant admitted he and his wife had been drinking with the victim for two days. But just before he passed out, or so he testified, he—sort of—well, maybe—remembered the victim looking at the door behind him and saying, ‘Hi, Bill.’ So, obviously, the evidence that the defendant’s knife was used and his clothes were covered with blood and his fingerprints were on the murder weapon—all that meant nothing. This ‘Bill’ that nobody else ever saw was guilty. He wanted the cops to ‘find the guy who really did it.’ ”

  I leaned forward. “The jury didn’t buy it.” Arnie leaned forward, too, and we stood jaw to jaw, glaring.

  And at that moment I knew he wasn’t a killer. He hadn’t killed my mother. And he hadn’t killed Martina. And he wasn’t going to kill me.

  I knew he wasn’t a killer, because I could see how angry my sarcastic remarks had made him. Fury was bubbling behind his eyes, seething like boiling oil, ready to be poured onto those Huns who were besieging his castle. But he didn’t hit me. He didn’t strangle me. He didn’t pull the bread knife out of the drawer two feet from his hand and slit my throat.

  Violence wasn’t part of his personality.

  This was the man who had once refused to spank a little girl who had told a lie, a little girl who richly deserved a spanking.

  “Arnie,” I whispered. “Why didn’t you take me with you?”

  The anger in his eyes faded. “I thought I’d be right back,” he said. “I thought I’d track the guy down in a couple of days.”

  That’s when we heard the garage door going up.

  Arnie—I couldn’t call him anything else yet—fled, and I was still leaning against the sink, patting my eyes, when Mike came in the back door. He looked grim.

  “I broke and entered,” I said.

  “You were probably abetted by Marceline,” Mike said. “She has her nose pressed to her front window.”

  “Yeah. She let me in.”

  “Well, did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I found something I didn’t expect.”

  At that moment we heard running water in the hall bathroom, and Mike nodded. “Arnie called me and said he was leaving town one step ahead of the cops. I offered to look into an old case—”

  “My mother’s murder.”

  Mike didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed. “When and what did you find out about that?”

  “I talked to Aunt Billie—as you had instructed me to before you instructed me not to. She told me my mother was murdered. And then I found an old yearbook Martina had hidden away. It had a picture of the real Arnie Ashe, and it turned out he was a short, dark guy. A tall blonde was in another picture on the page. And the cutline under that picture read ‘Alan Matthews.’ ”

  “And you’re upset.”

  “No, not ‘upset.’ I can put a more exact word on it. It’s ‘enraged.’ ”

  “At me?”

  “Yes. I’m enraged at you, and I’m enraged at Arnie.”

  “Of course, you’ve been mad at him for twenty years.”

  “Right. And I may be mad at him for twenty more. So let’s talk about my being mad at you.”

  Mike dropped a small duffel bag, the carry-on type, on the floor. He crossed to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of beer. “Your father came to me, and he needed some help. I tried to help him. Was that so rotten?”

  “It was rotten not to tell me what was going on.”

  Mike was twisting the top off his beer. He tossed the cap into the trash can under the sink. “Arnie didn’t want me to tell you.”

  “You’ve only known Arnie a few days. How come what he wanted
counted so much more than what I wanted?”

  “Did you want it? Did you really want to know your father was a fugitive from justice?”

  “I want to know the truth! My aunt had been lying to me. My own grandmother lied to me! Now you’re lying to me! No matter how bad the truth had been, it wasn’t as bad as that.”

  “Nell—”

  “All my life I thought, somewhere deep inside, that my father went away because I spoke angrily to him, because I said, ‘Just go away and leave me alone!’ It didn’t help to become a grown-up and tell myself that things are more complicated than that. It didn’t help to tell myself that he left my mother, not me. Because he did leave me! I was such a bad girl that my daddy went away and wouldn’t even take care of me anymore. Now—after I’ve battled this for twenty years—I find that none of it mattered! He didn’t go away because of anything I did. He went away because my mother was murdered.”

  Mike reached out, tried to put his arm around me, but I shoved him away.

  “Mike, my grandmother lied to me because she wanted to protect me. I was a child then! I’m not a child now. What’s your excuse for lying?”

  “Maybe I’m trying to protect you, too.”

  “I’m not a child,” I repeated.

  “Sometimes you seem as fragile as one.”

  I whammed my fist on the cabinet. “I won’t break. Nothing can make me break but lies! I can face anything but having the people I love lie to me.”

  “Okay, okay! I’ll tell you the truth. No matter how hard it is to take. What do you want to know?”

  That stopped me. I’d been so angry over Arnie being ready to skip town without telling me he was my father, so mad at Mike for helping him and for nosing into my mother’s death without asking my permission—I didn’t really have any questions. But on the spot I determined that I’d find some to ask.

  “Why did you go to Michigan?”

  “To try to help Arnie. After Boone Thompson found the shoes in Arnie’s desk, Arnie got afraid that his background wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. He decided to leave town.”

  “Take a third identity?”

  Mike shrugged. “Maybe. He didn’t tell me all the details. But he didn’t want to leave without telling you he was your father. I guess he called you, at the Gazette, but he chickened out. Anyway, he finally decided to leave a message with me.”