“I’m headed back to Chicago.”
“Wounded, I just heard.”
“How did you hear?”
“Sources. How are you feeling?”
Her source had to be Plinnit. I didn’t know whether he was using her or she was using him. Most likely it was mutual.
“I’m feeling sharp enough to fence with you about releasing what I know,” I said cleverly.
“Everybody’s got the story: The police are looking for Darlene Taylor, Sweetie Fairbairn’s sister. Apparently, she’s no longer at home in Minnesota. I’m guessing you probably knew that first.”
Definitely her source was Plinnit.
“How’s your investigation into Rivertown citizen boards?” I asked, to change the subject.
“I’ll drop by tonight, after the broadcast.”
She gave me enough time to say no to that. When I didn’t, she said, “Until tonight,” and hung up.
“Where does she fit?” Leo asked the instant I clicked off.
“Who?” I asked, sounding dumber than an iron bar.
“The lovely, ambitious, and potentially man-eating Jennifer Gale? Or, as you now call her, Jenny.”
“Beats me, Leo.”
He looked over at me. “No, I meant how does she fit into this case?”
“She’s already cultivated Plinnit as a source, though she said everyone in Chicago now knows the police are looking for Darlene.”
“You going to tell her about the gas station?”
“I won’t have to. The old story will blow wide open when the press digs into Darlene’s background. Young Rosemary’s presence in that car, at that gas station, will come with it.”
“It would be tough to prove anything about that,” he said.
“I’ll bet that’s not what Darlene and Koros passed on. I’ll bet they got word to her that they could alibi each other, and make Sweetie the shooter.”
“Another reason to run?”
“On top of being blamed for everything else? I’d have run, too.”
We fell silent then, each of us content to watch the white road-dividing stripes slip under the front of the minivan. I imagined he was ready, like me, to let everything we’d learned slip away as well.
After a half hour, though, Leo had a question. “Did you deliberately forget to swing by and return Rosemary’s manuscript to that retired lady?”
“What I heard,” I said, “was those mimeographs were all over town, back in the day. If none survived, other than the one Koros must have had, and the one I forgot to return, well…” He couldn’t see me smiling because, by now, it was dark.
“Isn’t that suppression of evidence?” he asked, in his most sanctimonious voice. “After all, that manuscript could incriminate your client.”
“Damn,” I said, thinking of matches and a small fire.
I slept, on and off, for the next hours as we drove south through Wisconsin. Sometime around Rockford, Illinois, I remember waking up, and Leo asking if I was sure I could negotiate the turret by myself. He said he’d be happy to stay over.
I told him all I needed was Ho Hos, and I had plenty of those.
I didn’t tell him that Jennifer Gale had said she’d stop by.
It was ten thirty when we got to Rivertown. As we turned off Thompson Avenue, Leo said he’d drive to the airport the next day to turn in the minivan and get my Jeep. I told him I felt well enough to drive the Jeep now. He told me no one should ever feel well enough to drive my Jeep. There was logic to that. I gave him my keys.
He stopped the van halfway through the turn to the turret and turned on the high beams. The headlamps lit up the corner of the spit of land, and the turret beyond.
“Jenny’s Prius,” I said, of the car parked in front of the turret. “She said she was going to-”
“No. This side of the turret, back toward the river.”
I saw it, something small and shiny, glinting in the headlamps, lying on the ground. He eased the van forward.
“My blue plastic tarp,” I said. “It’s supposed to be covering the ladders around back.”
Leo stopped the van. “Look at the turret door.”
Even from a distance, I could see the long scratches around the lock, fresh and white against the dark wood. They looked like claw marks made by an animal.
“Someone was anxious to pay me a visit,” I said.
“Let’s call the cops.”
I looked at Jenny’s Prius. “In a moment.”
He pulled forward another twenty feet, angling the van to best shine the high beams on the tarp. I was just reaching for the door handle when his hand shot out and grabbed the back of my shirt collar.
“No,” he said.
The shiny plastic hadn’t been laid out flat on the ground. It was covering something. Something mounded.
I pushed his hand away, opened the door, and slid off the seat to stand on the ground. For a second, I teetered from the pain, and from what I knew, in my gut, was under the tarp.
“I’m calling the cops,” Leo’s voice said, from far away.
I headed for the tarp. There was no doubt what the shape was, covered up.
My right side was throbbing around the stitches. I moved slowly, suddenly in no hurry to see what was under that tarp.
I bent down, pulled back a corner.
I saw a woman’s naked foot.
CHAPTER 55.
A new pair of high bright headlamps angled onto me.
“Stop!” a cigarette-roughened voice yelled.
“I need to see.” I tried to shout, but it hurt my side. I started toward the opposite end of the tarp. The head end.
“Hey, I was the one who called,” Leo yelled.
“Damn it, step away!” Cigarette Voice called out.
Car doors slammed. Two long shadows came running up. A hard hand clamped the back of my neck.
“That’s far enough,” the second voice said, next to me.
Rivertown uniforms, the cops Leo had called.
“Your hands,” the cop with his hand on my neck said. “Show me your hands.”
I turned toward him, hands out, so he could see they were empty.
“We’re the ones who called,” I said, dumbly mimicking Leo. It was all I could think to say.
The second cop’s hand relaxed on my neck as the cigarette-voiced cop moved around the tarp. He knelt at the head end and pulled back the corner.
The body lay facedown, its hair white and colorless in the glare of the headlamps. It could have been blond.
For sure, it wasn’t dark, it wasn’t lustrous. It wasn’t Jenny.
Air came into my lungs then, sweet and cool in the summer night.
“Female. Older. Dead,” the kneeling cop said in his cigarette voice.
“Who is it?” Jenny said, behind us.
The cop’s hand on my neck fell away. I turned with him. She stood ten feet back, a dark shape in the white glare of the headlights.
“You are?” Cigarette Voice asked, looking up.
“The reporter broad that’s been rousting Mr. Derbil,” the cop next to me said. “What are you doing here, lady?”
“I was driving by, and thought I’d take another look at city hall. Marvelous architecture. Spur-of-the-moment thing. Then I saw you come up.”
Both of the uniforms must have recognized a lie, but they were smart enough to not antagonize her. She was the fire under one of their own, Elvis Derbil.
“There’s no story for you here,” the cop next to me said. “Please wait out by the street.”
Another car pulled up. Jenny turned and started walking toward Leo. I took a step to join them.
“Not you. You stay,” the kneeling cop said, standing up.
Two Rivertown detectives got out of the car and came over.
“Quite a party you guys are having,” one of them said, staring at the shape beneath the tarp. He had whiskey on his breath, and a soft slur to his words. He’d been enjoying an evening of free fuel at one of the tonks along Thompson Avenue. “Who’s the stiff?”
The smoker cop bent and pulled back the tarp.
I had to look for a number of seconds, to be sure.