Barry Friedman - Dead End (4 page)

Nancy Taylor sat at the scarred table across from
Maharos in the interrogation room. She leaned back, chain-smoking, slim legs
crossed, a shoe dangling from a toe. Quite a change in her attitude.
Self-assured, no longer weepy. A portable tape recorder on the table made a
faint hissing sound.

Maharos had read the Miranda rights. She said she
did not need the advice of a lawyer nor did she want one present. She had done
nothing wrong. Yes, she admitted, she and Horner had spent the night together
in the Cleveland hotel. That was the only time they had been intimate, she
didn’t consider that an “affair.”

She lived alone in an apartment.

Maharos said, “Did you ask him to your home any
time after that night you spent together?”

“No.”

“Did you tell him you would tell his wife about
what had happened in Cleveland if he fired you?”

“Never! And he never said anything about firing
me. I did my work. He liked what I did. In fact, we never talked about that
night in Cleveland.”

 
Maharos
asked her about her former marriage. She had been married seven years. Had no
children. Her ex-husband, an alcoholic, had beaten her several times while he
was drunk, so she divorced him four years ago. The last she knew of him, he was
somewhere on the West Coast. She wasn’t going steady with anyone but had dates
once or twice a week. Maharos jotted down the names of her male friends.

“When was the last time you were in Mr. Horner’s
car?”

Her brow furrowed. “In his car? I don’t know,
maybe a week or two ago.”

“Where did you go?”

“Probably to court. Yes, we went to court.”

“Did you often accompany him to court?”

“I wouldn’t say often. But when there were a lot
of files he had to take with him, I’d go along to help. Many times, during a
trial, he’d have me find things in a file while he questioned a witness.”

“And you’d go to court in his car?”

“Certainly. The court’s a mile away. Do you
expect me to walk there?”

Maharos placed his palms on the table, leaned
forward, aware of her musty, sexy perfume. “Mrs. Taylor, when I spoke to you in
your office I asked you to be frank and open. I told you that if you’d try to
hide anything, we’d find out eventually. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“And when I asked you whether anything had gone
on between the two of you, you denied it, right?”

Her eyes blinked rapidly. “I just got through
telling you, I didn’t consider that one night as being a big deal.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m asking you now: Did you have
anything to do with Mr. Horner’s death?” She started to speak but he held up a
hand. “Before you say anything, let me point out if you did have anything,
anything, to do with Mr. Horner’s death we’re gonna find out about it. I mean,
it may have been accidental, maybe even justifiable. Even if you didn’t pull
the trigger on the gun that killed him, if you know anything about it, now is
the time to say it.” Again, Nancy Taylor’s mouth opened and he silenced her
with a gesture. “Look, Nancy, we’re all human. We all make mistakes. It only
gets worse if we—.”

She broke in, “Listen, Detective, I had nothing
to do with George Horner’s death. If you want me to take a lie detector test,
fine. Let’s do it. But I’m not going to sit here and let you make accusations.
Maybe I do need a lawyer.”

Maharos stood up. “That’s up to you. One thing,
we’d like to do is examine your hands. It’s a test that can tell us if you’ve
fired a gun recently.”

Nancy threw her head back and laughed. “Oh,
really now!”

“Do you have any objections?”

“Of course not!”

This was one cool cat. Maharos had used the
gunpowder residue test as an excuse to see her reaction. More than twenty-four
hours had elapsed since Horner had been shot. By now the chances of finding
such evidence were negligible, even with the most sensitive techniques.
Although he did not believe everything she told him, she probably had nothing
to do with Horner’s death.

*
  
*
  
*

LIEUTENANT ED BRAGG squared the corners of the
sheaf of papers he held and placed them in a file folder labeled “Horner.” He
handed the folder to Maharos seated opposite his desk. “Looks like you got shit
so far.”

Bragg, four years from retirement, counted every
day—when he wasn’t eating, which was most of the time. The men and women in the
squad room made bets on which would go first, the spring on his swivel chair or
his thirty years.

Bragg said, “Nothing in his personal letters?”

“No. Fiala went through them and came up empty,”
said Maharos.

“That secretary is clean?”

He wobbled a hand. “A little hanky panky, but we
got nothing on her we can use.”

“Ballistics?”

“Nothing.”

“Prints?”

“Horner’s.”

“I see the lab found nothing.”

“Well, not exactly nothing. They got some Navy
blue fibers from the carpet in front of the back seat. They think it’s from a
sweater. They don’t match anything in Horner’s clothes closet. They’re still
working on that.”

Bragg flipped his hand. “S-u-r-e. Probably turn
out to be a May Company lot of fifty thousand.”

Maharos said, “Did you read the M.E.’s report?”

“Yeah he’s a big help too. He says the guy was
shot in the back. Twice. And his head was bashed in. We coulda got as much from
one of the Boy Scouts who found the body.”

“Frank spent a week on his case files. He picked
up a few leads. None of them worth anything.”

“You mean we got here a lawyer nobody hates
enough to kill him?”

“No. It’s just that the list of haters is too
big.”

“What about our snitches?”

“Frank put the word out on the street. None of
the gangs had anything working with Horner.”

“All right, you been working on this one for
three weeks now. Where do you go from here?”

Maharos shrugged. “Got any ideas, Ed?”

“Nope. Probably some crazy. We’re just runnin’ in
place. I’m afraid we’re gonna end up puttin’ this one on the shelf.”

Maharos sat in the squad room, his feet up on his
desk. He was thinking about the Horner investigation but couldn’t come up with
any fresh ideas to pursue it. Besides, Lieut. Ed Bragg, his superior, had told
him to drop it. The phone rang.

“Maharos.”

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Annie, sweetheart. I was just thinking about
you.”

“I bet!”

“Are you home?”

“Uh-huh. Where were you last Sunday? I was
expecting you.”

Maharos’ feet hit the floor. Jesus, he had
promised Annie he’d take her to lunch and a movie. He had gotten so wrapped up
in the Horner thing, he had forgotten it was Sunday. “Annie, you want the truth?”

“ ‘Course.”

“I was so busy I forgot it was Sunday. Honest.
Look, if it’s okay with Mom, how about I pick you up Saturday morning and we
spend the weekend together. Lunch at McDonald’s, a movie or whatever you want.
Sunday we can drive out somewhere and picnic, just the two of us. How about
it?”

He pictured the long-legged twelve-year-old,
running her fingers through her long silky hair, auburn like her mother’s,
chewing on a strand while she talked. Scratching the tip of her small, upturned
nose by running her palm up and down over it. He thanked God she had inherited
the looks of the O’Learys, Marcie’s side. From Maharos all she got was love.

“Wellll..”

“Want me to ask?”

“Yeah. Maybe you’d better. Only she’s not home
now.”

“Okay, I’ll call back later.”

“Don’t forget. Today is Thursday already.

“Don’t worry, I won’t. Bye, honey.”

Four years since the divorce. Their fifteen-year
marriage had been great for him, lousy for Marcie. The same tired story he’d
heard from every other divorced police officer: Come home to change clothes,
leave the dirty laundry and go. She often said she wished it had been another
woman instead of The Job. Another woman she could compete with.

“Quit the force,” she’d pleaded.

He’d said, “Don’t ask me to do that, it’s the
only thing I know. The only thing I’m good at.”

“You could be good at anything you wanted. You
could be a concert violinist if you devoted as much time to that as you do to
being a cop.”

Maharos smiled thinking about it now. He couldn’t
carry a tune on a kazoo.

 
Annie. It
took seven years, half a dozen fertility tests and three miscarriages before
Marcie had to call a black and white patrol car to take her to the hospital
with labor pains coming every three minutes. Maharos was staked out in a
fleabag hotel, in the room next door to the girl friend of a murder suspect,
waiting for him to show. The girl on the switchboard back at the station was
new, and didn’t know how to reach him until an hour after Annie, covered with
slimy meconium, was welcomed with a slap on the ass by the obstetrician.

Looking back on it, that’s when Marcie changed.
She began carping at him about raising her daughter as a single parent. Not
that she didn’t have a legitimate beef, but the few hours he was home he didn’t
want to hear complaints. At first he just tuned her out. Then came the spats.
They weren’t quite in the plate-throwing, fuck-you-and-your-family category.
Not quite. But when Marcie’s Irish temper flared it could rock the civilization
that had been born in Greece centuries before. He told her that the wives of
Greek men raised the children. The husband worked and drank ouzo with his
buddies. That’s the way it was gonna be. Furthermore, he was taking a week of
vacation time starting the day after next, going off to Georgian Bay fishing
with two of his detective buddies. She reminded him her name had started with
an O-apostrophe before they were married, it didn’t end with -os, and she
suggested what he could do with his Greek customs. When he returned a week
later with two walleye that barely made the legal size, Marcie and Annie were
replaced by a note.

Now Marcie was remarried. He knew she wouldn’t be
on the open market very long. Sam Hudson was a comfortable, unexciting widower
who owned an insurance agency. At fifty-eight, sixteen years older than Marcie,
he had two grown and married children. Most important to Maharos, Annie adored
the guy.

Marcie had gotten the house in the divorce
arrangements, sold it when she married Sam. Maharos still lived in the
two-bedroom apartment he had taken when they separated. Three times a week,
Louella Watson came in to clean up the mess he had made the other four days.

Maharos scratched a note on the appointment page
of a spiral calendar that lay open at the current date, Thursday, June 5. “Call
Marcie—weekend with Annie.”

Interstate 77 starts at Cleveland’s west side and
threads its way south, down the eastern third of the state. The freeway crosses
the Ohio River at Marietta and continues on through West Virginia finally
ending at Columbia, South Carolina.

Once you get past Canton, where you could wave at
the Football Hall of Fame and the Hoover and Timkin plants as you drive by, the
landscape on both sides consists of trees and gently rolling hills. About 25
miles south of Canton, New Philadelphia and Dover sit side-by-side just off the
highway.

If your farm was, say, off State Route 39 or 516,
and you needed feed for your livestock, you’d probably load your pickup at Noah
Hamberger’s Feed and Hay store in New Philly. Hamberger’s a surly son of a
bitch but people buy from him because his DoubleX Hybrid is good quality for
the money. Besides, his is the only feed store for miles around.

Of course, if it were Sunday, Hamberger wouldn’t
be at the store. He’d be home, a white frame three-story house off Rainbow Lane
surrounded by some rye grass and two acres of tall elms, sturdy oaks, buckeyes,
some maples and a few pine trees. He’d probably be tinkering in the barn with
his 1984 Buick Century, his 1973 Ford Pickup, or the International Harvester
Riding Tractor.

In fact, that’s exactly where he was at 10:30,
the morning of June 7. Under the Buick, draining the oil. He was on his back,
lying on a flat wooden platform fitted with roller wheels so he could roll
himself under the car. It was a squeeze, and he had to suck in his big belly to
make it under the car frame. His wife Martha always told him that at his age,
fifty-seven, he ought to take it over to Pete Fisher’s Shell Station and let
Pete do it, rather than strain himself. But he was a hardheaded, tight-fisted
Dutchman and he wasn’t going to part with $14.85, oil and labor, for a simple
job like changing the oil. Besides, Martha wasn’t home to object. On summer
Sundays she stayed on at Lutheran Church after services to help the other
ladies of the auxiliary, arrange tables for the afternoon outdoor social.

Couldn’t ask for a better day for it. Even now,
mid-morning, it was sunny with just enough of a breeze to blow the humidity
away. The thick stand of trees that almost surrounded the house gave enough
shade to keep it cool.

Their shadows were good cover for Ephraim Rankins
who had been standing, hidden behind the thick trunk of an oak, waiting for
Hamberger like he’d done on each of the previous three Sunday mornings. At
eight that morning, he’d parked his Dodge van on a dirt road that ran between a
couple of fields about a quarter-mile past New Philadelphia’s business
district. He strolled the mile and a half to Hamberger’s house and had been
there, behind the oak, when Hamberger, returning from church, parked the Buick
in the barn. He waited while Hamberger walked back to the house, changed out of
his Sunday suit to overalls and came back to the barn to work on the machines
like he did every Sunday.

He watched as Hamberger rolled himself on his
back under the car. Then he crept to the barn door; careful he didn’t step on
gravel or loose stones to crunch underfoot. He grabbed the shovel he’d leaned
against the wall just outside the barn while he was waiting. Now he was in the
barn, three feet from where just the top of Hamberger’s head poked out under
the car frame.

He listened to the musical sound the oil made as
it dripped into the metal basin Hamberger balanced on his chest. After the oil
stream stopped, Hamberger turned the cock closing the oil drainage valve. He
steadied the basin of waste oil and, using his heels to push against the barn
floor, began propelling himself backwards, from under the car. He kept his eyes
on the basin, keeping it level so the oil wouldn’t spill. His head, neck and
upper chest had cleared the car frame when his backward progress was stopped.
Rankins’ feet were blocking the wheels of the roller platform. Hamberger
shifted his gaze from the basin and looked straight up into Rankins’ face.

Hamberger sucked in his breath. He squinted like
he was trying to recognize the face. He said, “Who is it?”

Rankins just smiled.

Again Hamberger said, “Who is it?”

Rankins’ answer was to swing the shovel with both
hands, like a baseball bat, and smash it down into Hamberger’s face.

He watched for a moment, the shovel poised to
strike again. Hamberger’s arms and legs twitched a few times, then he lay
still, blood pouring out of his nose and mouth. Funny how they all twitched
like that for a few seconds.

Rankins dropped the shovel, then pushed
Hamberger, still on the roller platform, to the pickup. A large canvas tarp
covered the truck bed. It was secured by a piece of clothesline that ran
through grommets along the tarp’s free edges. He pulled about six feet of line
free of the grommets, took a knife from his pocket and cut it off from the rest
of the line, then cut that in half. He used one half to tie Hamberger’s hands
behind his back. With the other half he tied his feet together at the ankles.

Hamberger was a stocky son of a bitch,
unconscious he was dead weight. It took most of Rankins’ strength to stand him
up and prop his body against the tailgate. By bending him backwards and
boosting him, he was able to get Hamberger’s upper body far enough into the
truck bed so he wouldn’t slip back down to the barn floor. Then, he climbed
into the truck, pulled Hamberger to the center of the truck bed, and covered
him with the tarp.

Rankins stood, stretched, and pressed his fists
into his aching back for a moment. Rubbing where the scar was, helped ease the
pain. He climbed down from the truck bed, took a pair of rubber gloves from his
pocket and pulled them on. With a handkerchief, he wiped the handle of the
shovel he’d used to club Hamberger. In the cab of the truck, the key was in the
ignition. He started the motor, backed out of the barn and headed out of the
driveway on to Rainbow Lane. It was a quiet, peaceful, sunny morning in early
June. Couldn’t ask for better weather for the church social that afternoon. Too
bad Noah Hamberger couldn’t make it.