“I don’t know. But I do wonder about this Rinaldi fellow.”
“Oh, I know about Rinaldi.”
“He said you’re friends, you two.”
Noyce chuckled. “Did he, now.”
“He didn’t exactly play by the rules on the GRPD. He was squeezed out on suspicions of holding on to cash in a drug bust.”
“How do you know that?” Noyce was suddenly intrigued.
“I called Grand Rapids, asked around until I found someone who knew him.”
Noyce frowned, shook his head. “I’d rather you didn’t call GR.”
“Why not?”
“People talk. Rumors spread like wildfire. Things could get back to Rinaldi, and I don’t want him knowing that we’ve been asking around about him. That way we’re more likely to catch him in a lie.”
“Okay, makes sense.”
“You saying you like Rinaldi for the Stadler homicide?”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Edward Rinaldi’s an ex-cop, and a guy like that may know people, you know?”
“Who might have done a hit on some loony ex-employee?” Noyce replaced his glasses, raised one brow.
“Far-fetched, right?”
“Just a little.”
“But no more unlikely than a crack-related murder involving a guy who doesn’t fit the profile of a crackhead, had no crack in his bloodstream, and had fake crack in his pocket. A setup, in other words.”
“You make a good point.”
“Also, no fingerprints anywhere on the plastic wrapped over the body. Traces of talc indicating that surgical gloves were used to move the body. It’s all very strange. I’d like to get Rinaldi’s phone records.”
Noyce gave a long sigh. “Man, you’re opening a can of worms with Stratton.”
“What about Rinaldi’s personal phone records-home, cell, whatever?”
“Easier.”
“Could you sign off on that?”
Noyce bit his lip. “Sure. I’ll do it. You got an instinct, I like to go with it. But Audrey, listen. The Stratton Corporation has a lot of enemies in this town.”
“Tell me about it.”
“That’s why I want to be fair. I don’t want it to look like we’re going after them arbitrarily, trying to embarrass them. Bowing to public pressure, pandering. Nothing like that. I want us to play fair, but just as important, I want the appearance of fairness, okay?”
“Of course.”
“Just so long as we’re on the same page here.”
40
Cassie Stadler’s house was on West Sixteenth Street, in the part of Fenwick still known as Steepletown because of all the churches that used to be there. It was an area Nick knew well; he’d grown up here, in a tiny brown split-level with a little scrubby lawn, a chain-link fence keeping out the neighbors. When Nick was a kid, Steepletown was blue-collar, most of the men factory workers employed at Stratton. Mostly Polish Catholic, too, though the Conovers were neither Polish nor members of Sacred Heart. This was a place where people kept their money in mattresses.
He was overcome by a strange, wistful nostalgia driving through these streets. It all looked and smelled so familiar, the American Legion hall, the bowling alley, the pool hall. The triple-deckers, the aluminum siding, Corky’s Bottled Liquors. Even the cars were still big and American. Unlike the rest of Fenwick, which had gone upscale and fancy, vegan and latte, with all the galleries and the SUVs and the BMWs, something uncomfortable and ill fitting about it, like a little girl playing dress-up in her mother’s high heels. Just before he parked the car at the curb in front of the house, a song came on the radio: Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman.” One of Laura’s favorites. She’d taught herself to play it on the piano, not badly at all. She’d sing it in the shower-“Oh, she takes care of herself…”-badly, offkey, in a thin, wobbly voice. Hearing it caused a lump to rise in Nick’s throat. He switched the radio off, couldn’t take it, and had to sit there in the car for a few minutes before he got out.
He rang the doorbelclass="underline" six melodious tones sounding like a carillon. The door opened, a small figure emerging from the gloom behind the dusty screen door.
What the hell am I doing? he thought. Jesus, this is insane. The daughter of the man I killed.
Everyone is beloved by someone, the cop had said.
This is that someone.
“Mr. Conover,” she said. She wore a black T-shirt and worn jeans. She was slim, even tinier than he remembered from the funeral, and her expression was hard, wary.
“May I come in for a second?”
Her eyes were red-rimmed, raccoon smudges beneath. “Why?”
“I have something for you.”
She stared some more, then shrugged. “Okay.” The bare minimum of politeness, nothing more. She pushed open the screen door.
Nick entered a small, dark foyer that smelled of mildew and damp carpeting. Mail lay in heaps on a trestle table. There were a few homey touches-a painting in an ornate gold frame, a bad seascape, looked like a reproduction. A vase of dried flowers. A lamp with a fringed shade. A sampler in a severe black frame, done in needlepoint or whatever, that said LET ME LIVE IN THE HOUSE BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD AND BE A FRIEND TO MAN, over a stitched image of a house that looked a good deal nicer than the one it hung in. It seemed as if nothing had been moved, or dusted, in a decade. He caught a glimpse of a small kitchen, a big old white round-shouldered refrigerator.
She backed up a few steps, standing in a cone of light from a torchere. “What’s this all about?”
Nick produced the envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to her. She took it, gave a puzzled look, examined the envelope as if she’d never seen one before. Then she slid out the pale blue check. When she saw the amount, she betrayed no surprise, no reaction at all. “I don’t get it.”
“The least we can do,” Nick said.
“What’s it for?”
“The severance pay your father should have gotten.”
Realization dawned in her eyes. “My dad quit.”
“He was a troubled man.”
She flashed a smile, bright white teeth, that in another context would have been sexy. Now it seemed just unsettling. “This is so interesting,” she said. Her voice was velvety smooth, pleasingly deep. There was something about her mouth, the way it curled up at the ends even when she wasn’t smiling, giving her a kind of knowing look.
“Hmm?”
“This,” she said.
“The check? I don’t understand.”
“No. You. What you’re doing here.”
“Oh?”
“It’s like you’re making a payoff.”
“A payoff? No. Your father should have been counseled better at his outplacement interview. We shouldn’t have let him walk out without the same severance package everyone else got, whether he quit or not. He was angry, and rightly so. But he was a longtime employee who deserved better than that.”
“It’s a hell of a lot of money.”
“He worked for Stratton for thirty-six years. It’s what he was entitled to. Maybe not legally, but morally.”
“It’s guilt money. Schuldgeld, in German, right?” Those corners of her mouth turned all the way up in a canny smile. Closer to a smirk, maybe. “The word guilt has the same root as the German word for money, Geld.”
“I wouldn’t know.” He felt his insides clutch tight. “I just didn’t think you should be left high and dry.”
“God, I don’t know how you can stand doing what you do.”
She has the right to go after me, Nick thought. Let her. Let her rant, do her whole anti-corporate thing. Trash Stratton, and me. Make her feel better. Maybe that’s why you’re here: masochism.
“Ah, right,” he said. “‘Slasher Nick’ and all that.”
“I mean, it can’t be easy. Being hated by just about everyone in town.”
“Part of my job,” he said.