The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix) Page 8

  Martina usually wore it the entire time she was in the building. She’d had it on the evening before, when she was gassed in the downstairs ladies’ lounge, that’s for sure. I remembered that she had struggled out of it after Mike hauled her back to fresher air. She had curled up and gone to sleep on top of the paper roll, with the jacket wrapped around her like a baby blanket.

  But this evening, when Martina took her fatal fall, she had not been wearing it.

  Why would she have taken it off? And where?

  Did it matter? I decided to ask Mike, so I picked up the phone and dialed his number.

  He wasn’t home.

  Well, that made sense. He’d probably gone on out to Grantham State for his appointment with his thesis adviser, even if he had to be late.

  I left a message on his answering machine and got back to work. With Martina out, I had to copyedit the obits, and they have to be checked against the originals faxed in by the funeral homes. Every date of birth, every spouse name, every funeral time and place, every name of every son and daughter, every total number of grandchildren. All had to be checked against the original copy.

  Or so Martina had told me. I realized that she’d be haunting me for the rest of my journalistic career.

  It took me forty-five minutes to get caught up. Then Dan Smith called, answering the message I’d left at the Downtown Holiday Inn, and I got to be the one who told him Martina was dead.

  He didn’t say anything right away. Then he grunted like a gorilla. “Huh! Huh!”

  I began to talk nervously. “I wondered if she was still feeling bad, Dan. Weak from the effects of that blanket wash yesterday. It could be she fainted. You probably know how awful those stairs are.”

  Dan sniffed. “Seems like everything you’ve got over there is dangerous,” he said. He asked a couple of questions about her next of kin, but I told him he’d have to ask Jake.

  “I’ll find out from the funeral home,” he said. “Thanks for letting me know.” I heard another sniff as he hung up. Maybe one person was sincerely mourning Martina’s death.

  I was finishing up the last of Arnie’s violence-run copy when my phone rang. It was the front desk’s security guard, calling from fifty feet away. When I looked at him, I saw why. Mike was standing at the front desk. He was dressed for duty, in dark navy pants and shirt, with gear hung all over him—pistol, radio, nightstick. I went to meet him.

  “You called,” he said.

  “Yes, but you didn’t have to rush right over.”

  He grinned. “It’s on my way to work.”

  I checked my watch. He had about thirty minutes before roll call, and the Grantham Central Station was about five minutes away. I went through the swinging gate that serves as a psychological barrier when strangers come to the newsroom, and we sat on the waiting room couch.

  “I’m probably being silly,” I said. Then I sketched my concerns about Martina’s jacket. They sounded pretty dumb when I verbalized them to a guy wearing a police uniform.

  “So you see, there’s very likely nothing to it. I’ve made you go to work early for nothing but a good laugh.”

  “It doesn’t sound laughable to me,” Mike said.

  “But I don’t want to stir up a bunch of trouble over an accident.”

  “You won’t be stirring up anything. I assure you Martina’s death is on the case list for the detectives. They’ve been tied up tonight, or you’d already have had somebody over here asking questions.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when the same woman has a near-fatal accident on one night and a fatal one the next, it’s just a little too coincidental.”

  “You don’t think she was still feeling weak or something? That she got dizzy and fell down the stairs?”

  “Maybe. It’s possible. But like I say, it’s just too coincidental. So this jacket may be important.”

  “Then you think I should tell the detectives about it?”

  Mike nodded. “Unless the jacket turns up between then and now.”

  “I haven’t looked for it.”

  “Where could you put a jacket around here?”

  “She always hung it on the back of her chair, unless she was wearing it.”

  “You don’t have a coat closet?”

  This time I grunted like a gorilla. “Uhhh! Of course we do! Hell’s bells! I didn’t even think of that.”

  Mike stood up. “Let’s go look in it.”

  We threaded our way through the cubicles and pods of desks that dotted the newsroom toward the back stairs.

  “Actually, there are three closets, close to the back stairs, so they’ll be handy as people come and go from the parking garage in bad weather,” I said. “And that’s why I didn’t think of them. I don’t know anybody who uses them for anything but raincoats or heavy coats. It’s a long way back there. If we have sweaters or blazers—indoor-type jackets—most of us just keep them at our desks. Lifestyles even has a hall tree they share.”

  The closets are down a short hall from the door to the stairway, opposite the third-floor rest rooms. They’re strictly utilitarian and usually have muddy floors. In the Southwest at this time of the year—mid-April—rain is common, but hardly anyone still wears a winter jacket.

  The first closet was empty, except for somebody’s lunch bucket on the shelf and a ripped plastic raincoat hanging crooked on a wire hanger.

  The second closet held a windbreaker I recognized as belonging to Jack Hardy, and a trench coat that had RUTH B. in the back of the neck. They’d probably want coats when they left after midnight. I was leaving late, too, but I was wearing a sweater I’d kept on in the office. Martina had been right about needing an “air-conditioning jacket” because of the vent over the copy desk.

  The third closet seemed to hold a few leftovers from a garage sale. An umbrella with a drooping rib was propped in one corner. Two old sweaters on wire hangers were shoved against the left-hand wall.

  “Looks as if nothing’s here,” I said. But I moved the sweaters out, sliding their hangers along the metal pole.

  And there, crammed behind a sky blue cardigan, were the lapels of a white linen jacket.

  “There it is!” I reached for the jacket.

  “Don’t touch it!” Mike’s voice was sharp.

  But he was too late. I’d already grabbed the jacket by the shoulder and pulled it out of the closet, hanger and all.

  I held the jacket at arm’s length, slowly taking in the reddish, brownish stains that spotted its front.

  “What’s that?” I could barely hear my own voice.

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. “But we’d better get the lab to check it out.”

  I pivoted the hanger in my hand, turning the jacket around.

  There was another stain on the back, square in the middle of the back. But this stain wasn’t reddish or brownish.

  This stain was black. It was shaped something like a figure eight. A black figure eight about a foot long.

  “It’s ink,” I said. “Mike, it’s ink. And it’s in the shape of a footprint.”

  “Put the jacket back,” Mike said. “Just put it back where it was.”

  But I was frozen. “My God, Mike,” I said. “Somebody kicked Martina down those awful stairs.”

  I went back to my desk, and Mike used one of the reporters’ phones to call in. I guess he called the detective bureau, and pretty soon a detective showed up. Mike showed him the jacket, and they put it in a paper sack and labeled it. The detective came by and told me I’d have to include this in my statement the next day. I agreed to go by his office before I went to work.

  Ruth and Jack wanted to know what was going on. I would have told them, but Mike brushed the question off, so I followed his lead.

  Mike left—he’d called his sergeant to say he might be late for roll call—and the detective left. I read a final story. Then Ruth told me all the copy was in, so I could go home. I headed for the parking garage, via the back stairs.

  As I cam
e out of the stairwell on the first floor, I had my head down, looking for my car keys, which always hide in the bottom of my purse. So I almost bumped into someone who was coming the other direction.

  “Whoops!” We both jumped back, and I was reminded of the little dance I’d done with J.J. Jones just before I discovered Martina’s body.

  But this time my partner didn’t dance. He simply stood back and held the door for me. It was Ed Brown, our building manager.

  Ed looked more like a dissipated matinee idol than usual. His face was extremely sour. For once he was not holding a clipboard.

  “What are you doing here this time of night?” I said.

  “Always problems,” Ed said. “Now somebody’s been prowling in the pressmen’s locker room.”

  “Oh, my gosh! Didn’t they lock up their billfolds?”

  “Sure, that’s not the problem. It’s shoes.”

  “Shoes?”

  Ed nodded. “When the eleven p.m. shift came on, one of the guys couldn’t find his shoes. Swears they’re gone from his locker.”

  Chapter 8

  First an inky footprint. Then missing shoes. There had to be a connection.

  I tried to call the detective who had just left with Martina’s jacket, but he wasn’t in. I left a message, but I was almost glad I didn’t have to talk about Martina anymore. I was so tired of the whole thing I just went home and went to bed.

  My own home. My own bed. It would have been nice to be with Mike, but my own bed was pretty good, too.

  My two girl roommates were already asleep, apparently, and the guy who lives downstairs, Rocky, was on duty at the gay bar he owns. His hours run even later than newspaper copy editors’ hours. So I saw no one, talked to no one until I tried to call the detective bureau when I woke up at nine-thirty the next morning.

  After the detective bureau clerk, Peaches Atkinson, hollered out my name, I heard the voice of Jim Hammond, a senior detective, in the background. “Let me talk to her,” he said. “I’ve got something to say to that young woman.”

  Jim and I have worked together a lot, naturally, since I covered his office for nearly two years. Grantham P.D. policy is that the public information officer issues statements to the press, but both the former and the current PIO’s were good about linking up reporters with the detectives who really knew the low-down on important cases. If the case was at all touchy, or was merely dramatic, Jim Hammond usually got the job of handling the press.

  In addition, he and Mike had a rather low-key friendship going, a friendship strongly affected by Mike’s strange position in the Grantham P.D. It was a position that could be described as between a rock—his father’s position as an honored former chief—and a hard place—Mike’s awareness that he’d get further faster if he didn’t take advantage of his family connections.

  Mike was careful not to get too chummy with the higher-ups in the department. The chief, Wolfe Jameson, and Jim Hammond had been his father’s protégés. Mike made sure he never socialized with them, never seemed to be seeking their favor or friendship. When they showed up at the Christmas buffet his mother gave, Mike stayed at the other end of the room.

  But Jim Hammond was a problem for Mike. He wasn’t willing to be snubbed. He’d worked with Mike on a couple of cases, with Mike as a uniformed officer temporarily attached. Jim was already pressuring the promotions board to shift Mike to the detective bureau, even though policy said Mike needed another year on the street before he was eligible. Jim’s request left Mike torn. He coveted the job, but he didn’t want special consideration. So far Mike hadn’t endorsed Hammond’s request, and the promotions board hadn’t acted.

  Whenever Mike and I ran into Hammond, an odd little maneuver came into play. I called Hammond “Jim” and punched him in the arm. Mike called him “Captain Hammond” and saluted respectfully.

  Jim looked at our romantic relationship with an avuncular eye, but he looked at my status as a reporter suspiciously. So when he told Peaches he wanted to talk to me, I didn’t know who was coming to the phone—Uncle Jim, who pictured himself as a father figure for my boyfriend and me, or Tough Jim, detective who claims he eats reporters for breakfast.

  “What’s going on over there at the Gazette?” His voice was a growl. Must be Tough Jim.

  “Darned if I know. Y’all are the detectives.”

  “Because of you we had to get a judge out of bed, get a search warrant, call in off-duty officers, and search a four-story building with more hidey-holes than a Baptist Easter egg hunt. All over a missing pair of work shoes.”

  “What!”

  “Haven’t you been searched?”

  “No! I didn’t get off until midnight. If you want to know the truth, I’m still in my pajamas even as we speak. I don’t go to the office until two o’clock.”

  “Well, as soon as you get there, we’re gonna search your desk.”

  “If there’s anything embarrassing in my desk, I don’t want to be there when you find it. Go ahead and search it now.”

  “No, you’ve got to sign a waiver. We’re making sure every little thing is legal.”

  I thought about that one. “The Gazette has a couple of hundred employees, Jim. You mean you’re searching every desk?”

  “Yep. Every desk. Every locker. Every credenza, file drawer, and storage closet.”

  It boggled the mind. The Gazette has rooms full of old newspapers, offices that are packed solid with desks, workshops stuffed with tools and with the bits and pieces that accumulate in workshops. The Gazette employs two full-time electricians and a carpenter, for heaven’s sake, and more than a hundred printers. It has a garage full of trucks, forklifts, and company cars. It has entire rooms of telephone equipment. Satellite dishes and a miniature weather station hold down the roof. There are banks of filing cabinets, rows of computers, acres of drawing boards, copying machines of all sizes, several kinds of darkrooms, giant cupboards that hold advertising art. The number of—well, wastebaskets, for example—was staggering.

  And a pair of work shoes could be hidden anywhere in this accumulation.

  “What a job!” I said. “I guess you started in the alley, checked the dumpsters first.”

  “Oh, yeah. That was a fun job. Do you know how much fast food you Gazette employees eat? Nasty stuff, catsup.”

  “I believe it. But whoever kicked Martina had several hours between the time she went down the stairs and the time Mike and I found that jacket. And another hour before the shoes were missed from the pressmen’s locker room. It would have been pretty easy to just take the shoes out of there and throw them in the trash at—well, at McDonald’s or someplace.”

  “Do tell! Gee, I hadn’t thought of that!” Jim’s voice was its most sarcastic.

  “Okay! Okay! I won’t make any more suggestions.”

  “Peaches says be here at one o’clock to give your statement,” he said. “She’ll have a detective free to take it.”

  I had barely put the phone down when it rang again. This time it was Mike.

  “What are you doing awake?” I asked. “You’re supposed to be asleep at nine-thirty in the morning.”

  “I wanted to talk to you. How about lunch?”

  “Sure. Do you want to come over here?”

  He paused. “How about Goldman’s? Maybe neutral territory would be better.”

  “Neutral territory? What is this?”

  “Just something we need to talk about. See you then.”

  And he hung up.

  I drank some coffee, read the paper, took a shower, got dressed in brown plaid pants with a linen shirt and jacket. But I did it without the usual zing in my step and song in my heart—the zing and the song I usually got when I knew I was going to see Mike soon.

  “Neutral territory,” he’d specified. Somehow I was afraid I wasn’t going to enjoy this interview.

  Despite having little or no sleep, Mike looked great when we met. He was wearing khakis and a cotton sweater that wasn’t quite maroon and wasn’t quite
rust and wasn’t quite brown. I’d bought it for him for Christmas because it nearly matched his eyes, and his eyes nearly matched his hair.

  We picked up our food at the counter—Goldman’s doesn’t offer table service—and took Mike’s Reuben and my bowl of chili to the back room. I crumbled some crackers into the bowl before I spoke.

  “Okay,” I said. “Why did we need neutral territory?”

  Mike stuffed strands of escaping sauerkraut into the side of his sandwich. “I wanted to know if you talked to Martina yesterday before she took her tumble.”

  “Well, there was no point in talking to her afterward.”

  “Come on, Nell. Get serious.”

  “You mean, did I talk to her about my dad?”

  “Right.”

  “Yes. I asked her if she’d ever worked with an Alan Matthews, and she said no.”

  Mike shrugged. “Okay. Then—”

  I cut him off. “Then she seemed to have second thoughts. She asked me to meet her in the basement ladies’ room when I started my dinner break.” I ate a spoonful of chili. “That’s where I was headed when I found her.”

  “I see.” Mike mulled that over while he ate a hunk of his sandwich. “Then you never got to find out about Alan.”

  “No. But she’d denied knowing my dad. I have no idea what else she might have wanted to tell me. The name of a good private eye? The phone number of the Salvation Army missing persons service? I’ll never know.”

  “What are you going to do next?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “About finding your father.”

  “Finding my father! Who said anything about finding my father?”

  Mike ate silently.

  “Look, Mike, I’m not at all sure I want to find my father. If I were to find him, it would probably be in a drunk tank someplace.”

  “Did he have a drinking problem?”

  “No! I just mean—well, he didn’t go away because he just loved me to pieces, obviously. Something was wrong. He didn’t want me.”

  “Do you remember him?”