The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Page 17

  “And you talked him into letting you investigate.”

  “Hardest talking job I ever had to do. I’ve talked guys off of ten-story ledges with less effort.”

  “I’m sure it was a tribute to your skill and sneakiness.”

  “I’m a hellava negotiator. So I flew to Grand Rapids, rented a car, and went to Jessamine.”

  “Did you find out anything?”

  “I talked to the former sheriff, a guy named Vanderkolk, and I got a photocopy of his original case notes—such as they are. He wasn’t real good with his paperwork.”

  “I called up there and talked to Vanderkolk myself. Arnie told me he had made his mind up—wouldn’t consider any other suspect.”

  Mike grimaced. “That’s pretty close to true.”

  “Was the evidence that damning?”

  Mike drank from his beer. “Oh, most of it wasn’t real conclusive.”

  “Can I read it?”

  “Let me show it to Arnie first. Get his slant on it.”

  “You’ll have to arrest him.”

  “Michigan will have to tell me that officially.”

  “No, Boone—”

  Mike held up a hand so firmly it would have stopped a semi. “You’re the one who wants the truth here. I, on the other hand, might not want to know everything in the world. Right away.”

  I gulped my sentence down. Mike didn’t want to be told that the Grantham Police Department—his employer—was looking for Arnie. Even if there wasn’t a warrant out for him, Mike would be forced to bring Arnie in.

  “You can’t keep from knowing very long.”

  “Maybe we can all get a little sleep first. Anything else you want to know?”

  I sighed. The mention of sleep had made me feel exhausted. “Just about the evidence you found in Michigan. Why this sheriff was so determined that Arnie had killed my mother.”

  “One witness was the most damning. She told Vanderkolk Arnie had called the house and quarreled with your mother. She said that your mother had planned to meet with your dad the night she was killed.”

  “Who? That neighbor? The one I stayed with until my grandparents came?”

  Mike shook his head. “Like I say, maybe I should go over this with Arnie—”

  “No! Neither of you is going to keep anything from me! I want to know who told Vanderkolk that!”

  “No!” The word from the kitchen door was as vehement as the one I’d yelled. Arnie, now dressed in dark suit pants and a white cotton T-shirt, was standing there.

  “She doesn’t need to know that, Mike,” he said.

  “Yes, I do! Maybe it’s not important,” I said, “but it’s simply one more thing you two are keeping from me.”

  Mike frowned. “We’ll have to ask her about it eventually.”

  Arnie scowled.

  “Tell me!” I said. “Who was this witness who made my father go off and leave me?”

  Mike took a drink from his beer. His voice was quiet. “It was you, Nell.”

  “Me!”

  “Yes. That’s what was so damning about it. It was the evidence of an eight-year-old girl who had no reason to lie, who had no idea she was hurting her father by reporting what she had heard, what her mother had said.”

  Arnie turned his back and walked away from me.

  I didn’t swoon.

  When I was growing up, my grandmother had a collection of books by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and one summer I started at the left end of the shelf and read straight through them all. Mrs. Rinehart’s heroines were usually spunky, but occasionally they swooned. If they received a shock too great, they simply said something such as, “The next two days are a blur in my memory,” or “The world went black then, and when I awoke Dr. Diddly was at my side.” There have been times in my life when I envied those heroines their ability to clear the emotional decks and simply retire from life for a few days.

  At that moment—when Arnie turned away from me—I felt that way. As I took in the implications of what Mike had told me, I wished that the floor could simply open beneath my feet, that I could disappear down the hole, and that the world would go away.

  But I didn’t collapse or become hysterical. I stood there. Mike put his beer bottle down on the cabinet, and he put his arms around me. I stood stiffly, but I didn’t pull away. Neither of us said anything. I had even stopped crying.

  Then, looking past Mike’s arm, I saw Arnie. He was sitting on the couch in the living room, and he was holding his head in his hands.

  God! His whole life had been ruined, and it had been ruined by my testimony. Whatever I had told the sheriff—twenty years earlier, when I was eight years old—it had forced my father to flee. He’d given up his first job as managing editor, a big step up the professional ladder. He’d taken another identity. He’d roamed from city to city as a journeyman reporter, afraid to stay around and build seniority, always afraid that the Martinas of the world would dig out his secret and turn him in. Afraid to marry again. Afraid to contact his daughter, afraid to see old friends.

  And I had caused it. I had only the vaguest memory of ever talking to any law enforcement official about my mother’s death. I hadn’t even known she’d been murdered, and I certainly hadn’t thought my father had been involved. But I had condemned him to a footloose and frightened existence.

  What had I said? What had I told this Sheriff Vanderkolk?

  I really had rejected my father. Perhaps he hadn’t gone because I said, “Just go away!” But he had gone because of something I had said.

  I moved away from Mike’s arms and went into the living room. I sat on the couch beside Arnie. I wasn’t quite ready to put my arms around him, but I touched his shoulder.

  “Arnie,” I said. “I don’t know what I told the sheriff—way back then—but I didn’t mean to cause trouble. I really don’t believe you killed my mother. I’m sorry I made the sheriff believe you did.”

  He took my hand. “Vanderkolk was ready to believe anything bad about me. We’d been investigating his office—he was blinking at some illegal slots, and I’d encouraged the police reporter to go after the story. Heck, I’d hand-led the kid through the investigation! So there was bad blood between Vanderkolk and me already.”

  “But what did I tell him?”

  Arnie didn’t answer, but Mike did. “Your story didn’t match Arnie’s,” he said.

  Beer bottle in hand, Mike sat down in a club chair that stood at a right angle to the couch, stretching his legs out full-length and leaning back.

  “Apparently everybody in Jessamine knew your parents had split up, Nell. Arnie told the sheriff he had moved out two weeks earlier, and that he hadn’t even talked to your mother for three days before she was killed.”

  “Well,” I said. “Only that phone call the night before.”

  Arnie snapped his head around. “No!”

  I stared at him. “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t call Sally the night before she was killed. I talked to her on the phone a couple of times, and she met me for lunch one day while you were at school. But I didn’t talk to her the night before she was killed.”

  Now I really was staring. “But I heard you!”

  Arnie shook his head, then looked at Mike. Something very like despair filled his face. “See,” he said. “See! She still believes it.”

  Mike didn’t change his relaxed position. “Yes, I felt pretty sure that was the situation. Nell, when did your dad call?”

  I thought about it. “It would have been after eleven on the night before the evening my mother went out and didn’t come back.”

  “You heard the phone ring?”

  “No, I was already in bed. In fact, I think I must have been asleep. I think I woke up when I heard my mother’s voice.”

  “What was she saying?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I was upstairs in bed. At the front of the house. She was in the kitchen, downstairs and the back of the house.”

  “How did you know she was talking to
your dad?”

  I stared at my fingernails. “They were quarreling. She was angry. But I wanted to talk to my daddy. So I went to the upstairs extension and picked the phone up. I heard my dad’s voice.”

  Arnie put his head back in his hands. “It wasn’t me,” he said.

  Mike’s face stayed blank. He took a drink of his beer.

  “Look,” I said. “We hadn’t lived there long. My mother was having a hard time making friends. She didn’t know anybody. No one ever came to the house. Except that one woman.”

  Arnie raised his head, but I kept talking.

  “I know! I know! Vanderkolk believes she had a boyfriend. He told me that. But I don’t believe it. She didn’t go out! And I’m sure I would have noticed if anybody came to the house! When I heard a man talking, I thought it was my daddy. Besides, my mother told me it was.”

  Mike frowned. “She told you? When?”

  “That same night. Like I said, when I heard her talking, I picked up the upstairs extension.” I stared at the floor. “I wanted to talk to my daddy. But Mother heard the phone, and she shushed my dad. She told me to go back to bed.

  “I told her, ‘I want to talk to Daddy.’ And she said, ‘Tomorrow. I’m trying to fix things up so you can see him tomorrow. Hang up now.’ ”

  “How many times did Vanderkolk go over this with you?” Mike said.

  “I barely remember the policeman—I guess it was Vanderkolk—coming to the house. But I remember standing there in the hall, talking to my mother on the phone. I was so disappointed.”

  “Disappointed?”

  “Yes, I wanted to tell my dad I was sorry I told him to go away. I always remembered it because I never got another chance. I didn’t get to talk to him, and he was right there on the same line.”

  Arnie shook his head. “Sorry, Nell. I don’t know who was on the phone, but it wasn’t me.”

  “But—”

  Arnie was still shaking his head, and I shut up. I looked at Mike. “What did Vanderkolk say about it?”

  “Same thing both of you say. You thought your dad had been there. Arnie said he hadn’t been.”

  “And Vanderkolk believed me?”

  Mike nodded. “Yes. Frankly, I thought he was putting a little too much trust in the word of an eight-year-old girl. He didn’t take an official statement. He just asked something like, ‘When did your daddy last call your mother, little girl?’ When she said ‘Wednesday night,’ he didn’t go into it any further.”

  “I didn’t call,” Arnie said. “Nell was mistaken.”

  “That’s entirely possible,” Mike said. “After all, Nell, you were an eight-year-old child who had been upset for a couple of weeks because her parents had split up. Who was blaming herself—the way children do—because her father had gone away. You woke up in the night, and you heard your mother’s voice in the kitchen, talking on the phone. You couldn’t hear the words—just her quarreling with someone. You jumped to the conclusion that it was your father and went to the phone to try to talk to him.

  “But your mother made you hang up, saying she was trying to work things out for you to see your dad.”

  “If that had been me—” Arnie stopped.

  Mike looked at him questioningly, and Arnie went on. “I would have talked to Nell,” he said. “I wouldn’t have stayed on the line but not said anything. Sulking or something.”

  Mike was nodding again. “That’s what I thought. I think some other man was on the phone, someone who didn’t want Nell to hear his voice.”

  “The supposed boyfriend,” I said.

  Another long silence. I touched Arnie’s arm. “Did you think my mother was seeing someone else?”

  “She denied it,” he said.

  I gulped. “So you were suspicious enough to ask her.”

  Arnie stared at the rug. “There was a lot of gossip,” he said. “We hadn’t been getting along. I didn’t know what to think.”

  He stood up suddenly. “But right now I know what I think. I think this situation is small tough, and I don’t want to talk about it. Mike, am I still a houseguest?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then I’m going to bed.” He walked out of the room.

  I stood up, ready to tell the final reason I’d been so sure that my daddy had called the house in Jessamine the night before my mother was killed.

  Chapter 16

  “Arnie!”

  I must have sounded anguished, but Arnie didn’t look around.

  “We need to talk about this!”

  He kept walking toward the back of the house, and in a second I heard the bedroom door close. I stared after him. How could I tell him the rest of the story if he wouldn’t listen?

  Mike was standing up, too. “I have a feeling Arnie’s survived twenty years on the run by avoiding confrontation, Nell.”

  “Well, he’s sure avoiding me!”

  “When he’s trapped, his instinct is to run. When a quarrel arises, he dodges the issue. Odd that he’s built a reputation—under whatever name he was using—as a good reporter.”

  Mike’s reaction puzzled me. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “Because I think of reporters as people who come on strong, who aren’t afraid to face facts and ask tough questions.”

  “There are different styles of news gathering,” I said absentmindedly. “Most of the time you accomplish more with cooperation than with confrontation.” I was staring after Arnie. Should I go after him, make him listen to the rest of the story?

  Or should I tell Mike the really damning part? I turned to find Mike was standing up.

  “But maybe Arnie has the right idea this time,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m so tired that I’d just as soon give it a rest. Maybe Arnie has the right idea. Let’s just shut up and sleep on it.”

  That settled my problem. Neither Mike nor Arnie wanted to talk to me.

  “I think you should stay here,” Mike said. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”

  “On the couch?” I considered laughing. Was Mike afraid of shocking Arnie? Didn’t he want my father to know our relationship was intimate?

  “Mike, I’m sure Arnie has figured out that we sleep together.”

  “I thought you were mad at me.”

  “That’s a big bed. You can stay on your side.”

  “It’s better if I’m out here.”

  He took his beer bottle into the kitchen. I followed him.

  “I’ll go home. I don’t want to put you out of your own bed.”

  “No. Stay.” He lowered his voice. “It’ll give me an excuse to sleep in the living room.”

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  Mike leaned closer. “The living room is between Arnie and his car. I want him to be here tomorrow morning.”

  So I stayed in the bedroom, lonely in the big bed yet not quite sure I wanted Mike on the other side of it. Emotional turmoil doesn’t make me feel sexy, and I wasn’t sure just where Mike and I stood at the moment. He and Arnie had conspired to keep things from me, things I ought to know. How could I trust either of them?

  About four a.m. I heard a noise, and I jumped out of bed and tiptoed to the door. Mike’s breathing was regular, but I caught Arnie’s bald head sticking into the room from the hall. He pulled it back like a startled turtle taking refuge in its shell.

  Maybe Mike had been right. Maybe Arnie wouldn’t have stuck around if he hadn’t had to pass Mike to get to his car, if he hadn’t had to open Mike’s noisy motorized garage door to get away. Anyway, Arnie stayed put until the next morning.

  The first hint I had that morning had arrived was the soft swish of water in the bathroom sink. I realized that Mike had crept through the bedroom and into the bathroom without waking me. His activities barely disturbed my sleep, but just after the water started, I heard a noise from another direction. Furtive steps in the hall. I sat up. The door to the garage opened, then closed gently. And the noisy motor started lifting the ga
rage door.

  My dad was leaving me again!

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about him just yet. But I knew I didn’t want him to go before I could find out.

  “Arnie!” I jumped out of bed without worrying about the skimpy T-shirt and underpants I was wearing, and I ran through the kitchen. I threw the door to the garage open, and I yelled. “Arnie! Don’t go!”

  Arnie cringed guiltily, almost ducking down behind the open door of his Toyota. “Nell! I’ve got to go! For you as well as for me.”

  “No! Mike and I will help you! I know you didn’t kill anybody! We’ll prove it! Please, don’t go!”

  Arnie leaned on the top of his car. “It’s no good, Nell. Things look too bad. If they don’t get me for Martina, they’ll get me for Sally. My only hope is to keep running.”

  “Running where? To what? You can’t keep living like that!”

  A grin crossed Arnie’s face. “It’s worked so far,” he said.

  It was exactly what Mike had said the night before. Arnie had stayed free for twenty years because of his well-developed sense of when to run. He had run out of my life when I was eight years old. And he was about to run out again. But I couldn’t just stand there and wave good-bye. We hadn’t had our confrontation.

  I stepped down into the garage and grabbed the edge of the car door, the door he was holding open. I clutched it as if my grip could keep the car from backing out of the garage. “Why did you even come back into my life! Or did you do it on purpose? Did you just come to the Gazette for the job? Did you even know I was there?”

  “I knew.” Arnie looked away, then went on. “When you and Mike talked that nut out of the belfry of the police station, you wrote it up, telling what it was like to be held at gunpoint by a madman. The story moved on the wire. I was working the wire desk in Texas. I nearly fell over at the VDT when a story by my own daughter moved on the natwire.

  “Then you and Mike were interviewed on television. I saw the interview.” He made an impatient gesture. “I taped the interview, and I played it over and over. That was my little girl. All grown up. And smart! And beautiful! And brave! And a great writer! Everything I’d ever wanted her to be! And I knew—”