The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Page 18

  His face collapsed.

  My defenses went at the same time. “Daddy!” I said. I put my arms around his neck.

  Arnie hugged me back. He gulped and went on, talking into my hair. “And I knew, Nell—I knew I’d made the right decision back there in Michigan when I decided to run for it rather than face a trial for killing your mother. I knew that your grandparents could do a better job of raising you than I could ever do. I knew you deserved a better home than anything I could give you! I knew I didn’t want you to have to testify against me—even if you had no idea what your testimony meant.”

  “But you came back! You came to the Gazette.”

  “When I saw that the Gazette had an opening, I couldn’t resist seeing you. And, honey, you’re just as wonderful as I knew you’d be. That’s why—”

  “Arnie!”

  “That’s why I have to go now. I can’t mess your life up any more.”

  He pulled my arms from around his neck, and he gently pushed me away. “Nell, you’ve got a good life. You’re one of the Gazette’s best reporters, and you’re getting better all the time. You’ve got Mike, and he’s a fine man, and he really cares about you. Enough to risk his career by helping your old man. It’s best for both of you if I go on my way.”

  “Where will you go? This is going to destroy your life as Arnie Ashe.”

  “I have another plan.”

  “You won’t be able to get a newspaper job.”

  He shrugged and got into his car. “I know.”

  “Won’t I ever hear from you?”

  “Maybe I’ll figure out a way. But you don’t need me, Nell. You’re doing fine.”

  “No! Not really. At least—” I was desperate. He was leaving. Again. And I couldn’t tell him it would be better if he stayed. Staying might mean prison for my mother’s murder. And it might mean a separate prison sentence for Martina’s death. And I didn’t want to believe he had committed either crime. But who had? He’d never be free if we didn’t find out.

  “You said you ran away from Jessamine looking for the man who killed my mother,” I said.

  Arnie nodded. “But I never caught up with him.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. I had a lead, and I thought I could identify him. But the lead didn’t pan out.”

  “You haven’t even told us what this ‘lead’ was.”

  “It’s too late now.”

  “No! You’ve got to help us figure out who killed Martina.”

  “Martina’s death had nothing to do with me.”

  “I think it did. The night she was killed, two things happened. First, I asked her if she’d ever worked with ‘Alan Matthews.’ ”

  “Why’d you think of that?”

  “Something she’d said the night before, while she was under the influence of blanket wash. Anyway, she denied knowing you. But later she asked me to meet her in that downstairs ladies’ room. She said she needed to tell me something and that was the most private place.”

  Arnie frowned.

  “She was killed before I could meet her! But it’s too much of a coincidence. She was going to tell me something about you—”

  “Maybe.”

  “—and somebody killed her before she got a chance. Arnie, if Martina was killed because she figured out that you are really Alan Matthews, then someone else is around who knows that, who had some reason to kill her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it logically! The only reason you would have to kill Martina would be because she found out you were wanted for murder in Michigan.”

  “Right.”

  “But you say you didn’t kill her.”

  “No. For one thing, I didn’t know she’d figured it out. For another, I’m too chicken to kill anybody. I’m all set up to run again. Anytime.”

  “But somebody killed Martina.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “I accept that. But it may have been somebody who knew about the Michigan case—somebody else who was threatened by her knowledge.”

  “Nell, that’s crazy! Life isn’t that full of coincidences. Who could be in Grantham who was in Jessamine, Michigan, twenty years ago?”

  “The guy in the Cadillac,” I said. “The guy who tried to kill me.”

  Arnie and I stared at each other. The implications of what I was saying hadn’t really soaked in until I verbalized them. Suddenly my bare feet were freezing on the cold garage floor, and the cool air of an April morning was blowing through the open garage door and creeping up under the T-shirt, and I began to shiver violently.

  “Kill you?” Arnie was scowling. “Someone tried to kill you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe it had nothing to do with Martina’s death. Maybe it was somebody who wanted to steal my car.”

  He swung his legs out of the car. “What happened?”

  “It was night before last,” I said. I sketched out the car chase down Mississippi and the whizzing run through College Hills, ending with my hideaway between the drycleaner’s vans and with the shots that missed.

  “So I have no proof it had anything to do with Martina’s death. But Jim Hammond thought . . .” I paused.

  “What? What did Hammond think?”

  “Well, he used the same word you did. He said it was awfully coincidental—my finding Martina dead one day and somebody chasing me the next. But, Arnie—Dad—we already knew there was a killer hanging out at the Gazette.”

  Arnie got out of the car. “But we didn’t know he had his eye on you,” he said. “You’d better get back in the house, young lady.”

  “But—”

  “And I’m coming in with you.”

  Arnie took my arm and pushed me ahead of him into the kitchen.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t want you to go, but I can’t swear Mike and I can help you—help you stay out of prison, I mean.”

  “That’s doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters! You shouldn’t go to prison for something you didn’t do.”

  “And I shouldn’t let some geek kill my only daughter because I’m too careful of my own skin to help the police find the real killer.”

  “But he didn’t—maybe it wasn’t—”

  Arnie was still shoving me ahead of him, up the steps and into the kitchen. Mike was standing in the middle of the room wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt. I stopped, but Arnie kept going. Right around me. Right up to Mike. And he tapped Mike on the chest with his forefinger.

  “Did you know somebody tried to kill Nell?”

  Mike frowned. “I’ve been out of town,” he said defensively.

  I cracked up.

  I laughed all the way into the bedroom and shook all over so hard that I could hardly put my clothes on. Of course, my laughter had an edge that was pretty close to tears.

  By the time I had climbed back into my jeans, sweater, and tennis shoes, Mike had put on the coffeepot, and Arnie had had time to repeat my story to him.

  Mike came into the bedroom. “You’re not making this up, are you? Somebody really chased you?”

  “You can check the police report. Jim Hammond came out to supervise my statement. Having a senior detective there nearly scared the kid patrolman to death.”

  “Weird.” Mike went into the walk-in closet where he keeps his clothes.

  “What do we do now?” I said.

  “I don’t have a clue,” Mike said. “But maybe Arnie can give us one.”

  “Will you take him when you go to see Boone Thompson?”

  Mike came out taking a blue oxford cloth shirt out of a plastic laundry bag. “It might be better,” he said, “if Boone came here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks as if someone at the Gazette is concerned in Martina’s death, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Entirely too much headquarters gossip finds its way to the Gazette. Maybe we’d be smarter to keep quiet about Arnie cooperating.”

 
So Mike called Boone Thompson and asked him to come out to the house and to bring Jim Hammond with him. He didn’t tell them why, but they came, which was a tribute to their opinion of Mike. Lowly patrolmen rarely suggest actions to detectives, even when the patrolman can do it as tactfully as Mike can. Especially when the patrolman is as cagey about explaining as Mike was.

  While we were waiting, Arnie lit cigarette after cigarette and played solitaire. Mike doesn’t really like people to smoke in his house, but he didn’t say anything. He just found an ashtray in a drawer somewhere.

  And after Jim and Boone arrived, he gave Arnie a little pep-talk introduction. “This is the man who’s been working at the Gazette under the name Arnie Ashe.”

  Jim Hammond barked, “Under the name Arnie Ashe? You using an alias?”

  Arnie did look panicky then, and I reached over and took his hand. “His real name is Alan Matthews,” I said. “He’s my dad.”

  Jim and Boone both looked as amazed as if we’d announced Arnie was D. B. Cooper, and Mike used the moment of surprise to speak again.

  “Arnie—or Alan—came to me two days ago and told me a strange story,” he said. “I thought it might be better if you all heard it unofficially first.”

  Jim sat back in his chair. He made his voice its gruffest and most intimidating. “Well, let’s hear this strange story,” he said.

  Arnie squeezed my hand. “It all starts twenty years ago, when Nell’s mother was murdered outside a small town in western Michigan,” he said.

  His prècis of the events that led up to my mother’s death was different from the one Ronald Vanderkolk had given me.

  He and my mother, Sally, had been married nine years, he said. They’d met in Amity, her hometown, when Alan/Arnie came there as a young reporter just out of college. My mother had been a freshman at Amity Junior College. She was tiny, with dark hair and snapping blue eyes. Volatile and moody.

  “Sexy as hell,” Arnie said. “I couldn’t get enough of her.”

  Only four months after they met, they eloped. Then Sally began to find out about reality. She was already having morning sickness, and living on the salary of a young reporter is no picnic. Arnie didn’t say it in so many words, but she had apparently needed a guardian more than she needed a husband. He had to cut up their one credit card after she maxed it out.

  “But Sally’s parents were wonderful,” he said. Though the “have-to” status of their daughter’s marriage had obviously embarrassed them, they had been supportive. They had given me a baby bed and had loaned Alan and Sally money for a car.

  “When Nell was about a year old, Sally finally faced the fact that newsmen’s wives have to help earn a living,” Arnie said. My grandparents paid her tuition and bought her books so she could return to college part-time, first at Amity Junior College and then commuting to a nearby state college. My grandmother had kept me while my mother went to class.

  Alan, meanwhile, had done well professionally. He’d begun to have better job offers, but he’d stayed at the Amity paper until Sally finished her degree and got her teaching certificate, moving up to city editor of the small-town daily, supervising a crew of six newsside reporters when he was only twenty-eight.

  Then he got his big break. The Amity paper had been acquired by a small chain, Gordon Publications. The new bosses offered him a transfer and a promotion to managing editor of a paper of approximately the same size—in Jessamine, Michigan. It included a major raise.

  He eagerly accepted. My grandparents kept me while he and Sally drove to Jessamine to find a house. They rented a U-Haul and drove off, on their way up the ladder.

  But things hadn’t gone well in Jessamine.

  First, the Jessamine newspaper staff had been demoralized by the former editor’s failings, and the general manager was a dunce. Alan had to fight his own boss and his own reporters over every change he wanted to make. The job involved long hours and maximum stress.

  And Sally had been miserable. Her peppery personality had rubbed the Michigan people wrong. She’d been tactless. She’d never before lived any place where she hadn’t had old friends who were willing to overlook her failings. Now, in Jessamine, she was simply known as that rude Mrs. Matthews.

  When she tried to get a Michigan teaching certificate, she was told she’d have to take most of her classes over. “Nobody seemed to have heard that we’re literate down in this part of the country,” Alan said. “They wanted her to duplicate all her work—at colleges that weren’t as good as the one she’d graduated from.”

  Stuck in a strange community, with no way to get a job, with no friends, and with a husband who was forced to work twelve to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week—no wonder my mother had been miserable.

  I’d made a friend—I still remember her, Annette Vandyke. Her mother had liked me, but she’d been coldly polite to my mother. Only one neighbor, another outsider—from Chicago—had been friendly. Arnie’s lips tightened when he mentioned her.

  But the real trouble started on one of the few occasions when my parents had been able to get out for the evening. They were to be guests of a printing-supply salesman, along with the general manager and his wife. Since my parents had only one car, Arnie had arranged to ride with the salesman from the newspaper offices to the Elks Club—the only good place to eat in Jessamine—and to meet my mother there.

  He hadn’t been very pleased to learn she’d come a half hour early and had spent the extra time in the bar, having a drink with some of the Elks. One had been a pressman at the Journal.

  That had led to a quarrel. Angry, Sally and her Chicago friend had gone back to the Elks Club bar the next night. Another quarrel.

  And the gossip began.

  “There wasn’t a lot happening in Jessamine,” Arnie said. “People didn’t have much to talk about but each other. Sally was a stranger, and she’d made it clear she didn’t like the town or the people there. She was perfect gossip bait. And, of course, I had a whole staff of reporters and a town full of news sources who were happy to pass the gossip along.”

  “But, Arnie,” I said. “I’m old enough to remember. My mother let me stay up until the news came on, and she was there every night. She wasn’t out running around.”

  Arnie nodded. “I know, Nell. I really think ninety-five percent of the talk was completely unfounded. I think those two excursions to the Elks Club bar just about ruined her in Jessamine. Anyway, that’s when the phone calls began.”

  Sally began to get crank phone calls—strangers asking her out, heavy breathers, dirty talkers. Always high-strung, now she was frightened and almost crazy.

  “I can remember I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone,” I said. “I never knew why. She must have been frantic.”

  “She was frantic to get out of Jessamine,” Arnie said. “And I could understand that. But I’d been there less than six months. My first job as M.E.! How was it going to look if I couldn’t handle it? I just had to make it on that job, and she couldn’t seem to see that. I offered to send her home on a visit, but she said I was trying to push her out of my life, was building up to a separation. No matter what I did, it was wrong!”

  Just as things got totally cuckoo, Arnie said, “the motel incident” occurred.

  Chapter 17

  The “motel incident,” simply stated, was this. On an evening when my mother had taken the family car to go to a PTA meeting, she said, some Jessamine busybody had spotted the car at a motel in the town of Holland, thirty miles away.

  Since I’d grown up in Amity, a town around the same size as Jessamine, I wasn’t surprised she’d been caught. People from small towns not only see each other around town; they tend to go to the same out-of-town spots to do their shopping, dining out, and moviegoing. I’ve been away from Amity several years now, but so far I’ve never once gone to Grantham’s biggest mall on a Saturday without running into someone from my hometown. People from burgs smaller than Amity run into each other at the Amity Wal-Mart. I’ve even run into peo
ple from Grantham in Dallas restaurants.

  Apparently people from Jessamine had routinely driven into Holland, a city three or four times the size of Jessamine, for special occasions and shopping. It was not a good place for my mother to have a clandestine meeting.

  My parents’ car had been easy to identify because its window still held a parking permit from the small state college my mother had attended in her home state. Everybody in Jessamine knew whose car it was. The news flew, Arnie said.

  “She should have known someone would see her,” I said.

  “I don’t know what she was thinking of,” Arnie said. “But—I was young and stupid. She’d hurt my pride. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard about it.”

  That had brought about the final quarrel, Arnie said. That led to the night burned into my memory, the one when my daddy came in to kiss me good-bye. Distraught, I had yelled at him, “Just go away! Go away and leave me alone!”

  I hadn’t seen him again for twenty years, until the day two months earlier when he’d been introduced around the Gazette newsroom as Arnie Ashe, the new police reporter. We’d shaken hands.

  The twenty-years-ago quarrel had ended without any explanation of why Sally had gone to the motel.

  “Did you find out who she’d met there?” Mike asked. “Or if she’d met anyone?”

  “No. All she said was that she ‘hadn’t done anything wrong.’ Since Sally’s idea of what was right or wrong depended pretty much on what suited Sally”— Arnie shrugged—“that wasn’t a real reassuring report.”

  He contemplated his cigarette briefly, then spoke again. “But something had frightened her. Or someone. She said something like ‘First that terrible evening, and now you act like this!’ But she wouldn’t tell me what had happened.”

  Arnie had left the car for my mother and me, taking a room at a “funny old” hotel near the Jessamine Journal office. But he’d talked to my mother frequently, Arnie said, either by phone or face to face.