Clawback (15 page)

“Because the killer's footprints are bound to be there, too.”

During that exchange, B. had appeared in the doorway between the living room and the library. Completely focused on one another's faces, neither Bob nor Edie seemed to notice as B. slipped into the high-backed chair across the coffee table from Ali.

“I still don't understand why Eric Drinkwater would think you did this,” Edie continued.

“Because I was there,” Bob said.

“Oh, for goodness' sake,” Edie said. “You would never in a hundred years do anything of the kind.”

Her heartfelt declaration left Bob momentarily speechless. At that juncture Leland reappeared in the doorway. “Dinner is served,” he announced. “Would you care to eat in the dining room, or would you rather I served the meal on trays in here?”

As usual, Leland's instincts were spot on. Ali shot him a grateful look. “In here please,” she said. “If it's not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” Leland murmured, melting quietly out of the room. “It'll be ready in a jiff.”

Both Bob and Edie had fallen silent. When Leland left, Edie turned to her husband.

“You heard about the bankruptcy first thing this morning and then went traipsing off to Dan's house without mentioning a word of it to me?”

“You were still at aerobics with Betsy. And I didn't have the guts to face you right then. I needed to know for sure what had happened before I told you about it. Instead I drove over to their place to ask Dan face-to-face. I found him out in the garage, sitting in his Mustang. Millie was on the kitchen floor. They'd both been stabbed. I called 911 right away, but they were both gone before the EMTs got there. And then . . .”

He broke off, unable to continue.

“And then what?” Edie urged.

“The cops found what they believe to be the murder weapon in my Bronco,” he said. “The windows were wide open. The killers must have tossed a knife inside on their way past.”

“You're saying the killers were there at the same time you were?”

“They must have been. Whoever did it must have walked out the front door while I was in either the garage with Dan or the kitchen with Millie.”

“Oh, Bobby,” Edie said as tears sprang to her eyes. “It's a wonder you weren't killed, too.”

“But you didn't see anyone?” B. asked.

“No,” Bob answered. “I never saw anybody, but as I turned up the driveway I noticed another vehicle was parked in front of the house next door.”

“What kind of vehicle?” Ali prompted.

“A white Ford F-150 loaded with landscaping equipment.”

“But you didn't see any workers.”

“No, they were probably on the far side of one of the nearby houses.”

While they'd been speaking, Leland had made several trips in and out of the room, each time carrying individual trays laden with plates, napkins, and utensils. Each plate held a hunk of meat loaf, a helping of salad, and a thick slice of freshly baked bread, already slathered with butter. Ali's tray held a small ramekin with ketchup, and the others had both mustard and ketchup. When the last tray was delivered, Leland made a discreet departure, closing the French doors behind him.

“So did the person toss the knife into your Bronco just to get rid of it?” B. asked.

Bob shrugged his shoulders. “I have no idea.”

“Or maybe the killer put the knife there in a deliberate effort to frame someone else,” Ali suggested.

“It's possible, I suppose,” Bob agreed.

Edie took a deep breath. “Exactly how much money did we lose?”

Put on the spot by her direct question, Bob's face burned with shame. “About one point two mill, all told,” he answered at last. “You tried to warn me about putting all our eggs in one basket. Now, because I didn't listen, it's gone.”

“All of it?”

“Yes.”

After a brief silence, Edie asked, “What day of the month is this?”

Her seemingly sudden change of subject caught everyone off guard. Glancing at the date on his watch, B. answered before anyone else. “It's Tuesday,” he said, “June sixteenth.”

“All right, then,” Edie said, turning back to Bob. “When we moved into Sedona Shadows, we paid the first and last month's rent, and our move-in date was on the first of the month. That means we have until the end of August to find a new place to live.”

“Mom, please,” Ali interjected.

“No,” Edie said, “no arguments. If we're left living on nothing but social security, there's no way we can afford Sedona Shadows. We'll have to move, no question. And it's likely one or the other of us will have to go back to work. Since I'm five years younger, I'm the one who'll need to find a job. Maybe I can get hired on as a cook in one of the school cafeterias. Or maybe we can find a snowbird who will let us do some kind of caretaking work in exchange for a place to live.”

Now it was Bob's turn for outrage. “Edie Marie Larson, you are not going back to work—not if I have anything to say about it!”

“Sorry,” Edie said. “After fifty years of marriage, you'd think you would have figured out by now that bossing me around was not in the contract. If I want to go to work, I will. End of story.”

“Wait a minute, both of you,” Ali said. “B. and I have already talked about this. We're more than happy to help out, and we'll be glad to make up any shortfall that will make it possible for you to stay on at Sedona Shadows without either of you having to go back to work.”

“Not on your life,” Bob declared. “This is not happening! I didn't work this hard or come this far to end up having to count on charity for my daily bread.” His voice softened a little. “As for Dash Summers? I appreciate your having him show up to bail me out tonight, but don't think you're the ones who'll be paying his bill. One way or the other, Edie and I will manage. If I have to have a public defender, so be it. And if we have to move into a shed somewhere out in the Verde Valley, that's what we'll do, too. Edie and I have always lived within our means, and we're not changing now.”

“All right, then, Bobby,” Edie said, “now that all that's settled, tell us what happened today—all of it.”

W
ith a sigh, Bob Larson launched off into his story, telling it from beginning to end for perhaps the fifth or sixth time that day. In the course of the afternoon he'd lost track of the number of times he'd been asked to repeat it. He talked nonstop for the better part of an hour, telling them everything he could remember, from the time the story had first appeared on the morning news until Dash Summers had collected him from the interview room. Just as he seemed to be finishing up, a phone rang. Ali recognized her mother's distinctive ringtone, although it took Edie a moment to unearth the device from somewhere in the depths of her purse.

“Hello,” Edie said. “Oh, why hello, Bridget.” Her voice had brightened for a moment. “Yes, Bobby seems to have misplaced his phone, but you've reached mine. What can I do for you?”

Ali recognized the name. Bridget Wagoner was the young woman who functioned as the nighttime desk clerk and receptionist at Sedona Shadows.

Edie's brightness was replaced with concern. “No way!” she exclaimed. “That's so not happening!”

“What?” Bob demanded in the background. “What's going on?”

“Bridget said the cops showed up in the lobby a few minutes ago,” Edie replied, holding the phone's mouthpiece away from her face. “They came with a search warrant. Bridget says she's sorry, but since they had a warrant, she had to let them into our unit. She tried calling your cell phone first, since yours is the one they have listed as our emergency contact. Then she called Betsy and got my cell number from her.”

Bob rose to his feet. “We need to go,” he urged. “Now.”

“I can see why you'd want to be there,” Ali interjected, “but don't speak to the officers, and, whatever you do, don't interfere. Getting into a pissing match with cops who are in the process of executing a search warrant is the last thing you should do.”

“Yes,” B. agreed. “If they have enough probable cause to obtain a warrant, that means this is very serious. It's also way beyond the point where you should settle for the services of a public defender. I'm going to call Dash Summers right now and let him know the latest. And before this goes any further, both of you are going to agree to my paying for Dash's services. Understood?”

Defeat registered on her parents' faces as first her father and then her mother reluctantly succumbed, accepting their son-in-law's terms. Much as they wanted to fight their own battles, they knew they were in over their heads, and that knowledge diminished them both.

When Bob rose to his feet and made for the door, the worrisome, uncertain shuffle Ali had seen earlier was back. Even in his own shoes he walked with the same pained gait Ali had observed at the police department and attributed to his ungainly footwear.

It shocked Ali to realize that in the course of a single day her father had somehow changed into a frail and tired old man.

B. must have arrived at the same conclusion. “If you're ready to go now, I'll be glad to take you home, but only if you agree to leave the police officers alone, and only if you'll let me call Dash and have him meet us there.”

“What do you say, Edie?” Bob asked.

Nodding, Edie reached out and took her husband's hand. “Ali and B. have a lot more experience with these kinds of difficulties than we do, Bobby,” she said kindly. “If they think we need the help, then we probably do. I agree that it's important for us to stand on our own feet, but right now isn't the time. As for Eric Drinkwater? If he thinks we'll go down without a fight, he's got another think coming. Now come on. Let's go home and see what kind of a mess those cops have left behind. I'll probably be up half the night cleaning up after them.”

Ali smiled as the old can-do attitude came back into her mother's voice. This version of Edie Larson was the one her daughter knew best—the one who always refused to take no for an answer.

Standing in the doorway, Ali watched her parents walk hand in hand down the flagstone-covered pathway toward the gate. Clinging together with their heads bowed and shoulders slumped, they were a picture of utter despair.

Suddenly Ali was propelled back in time to her seventh-grade classroom. On the first day of school she had discovered that a surprising summertime growth spurt had made her not only the tallest girl in her class but the tallest kid as well. When she fell into the habit of slouching, her mother had taken her to task and given Ali a code Edie used in public to urge her daughter to stand up straight. “Knockers up,” Edie would whisper under her breath.

At first, Ali had believed the word “knockers” was just another way of saying shoulders. Later on she realized that knockers didn't mean shoulders at all, but when you straightened your shoulders, you straightened other things as well.

When Aunt Evie, her mother's twin sister, died, she had left Ali her extensive collection of records. Most of them had been original cast recordings of Broadway musicals, but among them was an LP by Rusty Warren, who had, in the sixties, taken the sexual revolution onstage and on the road in the form of music with unrepentantly bawdy lyrics. Ali's mother and aunt had shared a love for Rusty Warren's work, and “Knockers Up” had been one of the artist's signature songs.

“Hey, Mom,” Ali called after her parents. “Don't forget about Rusty Warren.”

Edie turned around and looked at her daughter for a moment, and then a miraculous transformation occurred. Ali's father's shoulders may still have been stooped and bent, but at once her mother's back shifted to ramrod straight. Still holding her husband's hand, Edie walked on to B.'s car with her shoulders thrown back and most definitely with her “knockers up.”

It looked for all the world as though Edie were leading her beloved Bobby into battle. Whatever was coming, the two of them would face it together.

W
hile Ali waited for B. to return, she bustled around, taking the dinner trays back to the kitchen and loading the dishes into the dishwasher. It wasn't that late, but Leland was an early-to-bed-early-to-rise kind of guy, and he had evidently decamped for the night to the privacy of his fifth-wheel residence on the far side of the garage.

Sedona is located in high desert country, an area with huge temperature differences between daytime highs and nighttime lows. As the house cooled, Ali felt a chill, but she realized it might have far more to do with emotional exhaustion than it did with whatever showed on the thermometer. Given that, she lit the gas log in the library and brought out a bottle of Cabernet along with a pair of glasses. She opened the bottle to let it breathe and then settled down with James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
open on her lap.

She had embarked on a self-imposed effort to tackle the classics, reading them because she could and wanted to, rather than because a teacher or English professor was standing over her with a threat to her GPA if she didn't get the job done. She had been making good progress in that regard, but she had pretty much stalled out with James Joyce. Whatever was going on in
Finnegans Wake
had the unerring ability to put her fast asleep within no more than a couple of pages. And that's what she was doing when B. returned an hour later—sitting with the book open in her lap but with her eyes shut and her chin resting on her breastbone.

She stirred when he came into the room and clinked the neck of the bottle on the rim of one of the glasses. She glanced at her watch. It wasn't that late, just a little past ten. Still she felt as though she'd been asleep for hours.

“After today, the last thing I expected was to find you asleep,” B. observed, handing her a glass of wine.