Murder in the Dog Days (Maggie Ryan) (15 page)

“It’s possible. But if one of them killed him, I’d think they’d want to get back to Harrisburg and pretend they’d never left. Still, they may have reasoned that if they were seen they should have an excuse for being here.” Maggie frowned at the sheets of rain chopping at the road. “And someone did go into the Colby’s around three-thirty, when Bo was looking out the window.”

“Not Felicia, though. Bo said it was a man, right? Not a blonde woman.”

An impressive boom of thunder delayed Maggie’s reply. “Felicia’s fairly tall and broad-shouldered. And when Sarah and I were in her bathroom, we saw a wig form.”

“A wig?” Olivia banged a fist against the steering wheel. “You mean that pile of blonde hair is a wig?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“Jesus Christ. I thought it was the blue-ribbon winner in the Clairol County Fair.”

Maggie grinned. “Maybe that too.”

“What’s a wig?” demanded Sarah.

Maggie looked over her shoulder at the little girl, her hands shaping a phantom wig around her head. “It’s like a hat that you can put on or take off, but it looks like hair.”

“Like my hair?”

“Your hair isn’t a wig. But a wig might look like your kind of hair. Or it might be blonde, or brown, or red like Aunt Liv’s.”

“A wig,” said Olivia. “So Felicia could take it off, and maybe put on Mark’s clothes—or Mark could have done it himself, of course.”

“Unless they really were in Harrisburg.”

“Yeah.”

“And there’s a second car. Bo saw a blue Ford, not a red Vega.”

Olivia thought about it a minute. “I’ll check the motel desk. Find out what time they checked in, what license number they gave. Because she already had her motel key when she arrived at Dale’s, right?”

“Yes,” Maggie agreed.

“Of course that’ll only help if they did check in much earlier than they said. If they waited to check in until after they’d done it—”

“Still, it’s worth a try. Ouch! Sarah, don’t grab my hair! It’s not a wig!” Maggie untangled small fingers from her curls. “And you’re supposed to keep that seat belt on!” She twisted back again to resettle the lively child.

Olivia glanced sidelong at her sister-in-law. With caffeine coursing through her veins, she had finally located the source of her puzzlement at this foray into the dawn. “I’ve got a question for you,” said Olivia.

“What?” asked Maggie.

Olivia looked back at the sluicing rain. “Last night you said leave it to the police. You said you didn’t want to snoop. You said I shouldn’t snoop. So why did you wake me at dawn to go snoop?”

“Oh, that,” said Maggie guiltily. “It’s just—well, I told you I had to go back to fetch Tina’s dolls last night.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I talked to Detective Schreiner when I was there. Just for a moment. And Liv, she’s shattered. She’s a very competent woman but she’s living right on the edge of a breakdown.”

“Shattered?” Olivia asked.

“Emotionally, yeah. Behind that cold facade. And Josie and Tina need gentleness now. Not coldness.” She gazed out at the Mosby business strip, cafes and hardware stores, florists and frame shops. “Wish I could keep Schreiner from interviewing those kids—Anyway, the quicker this thing is cleared up the better. So I decided maybe this time snooping was the least of the possible evils.”

“I see.”

“For starts, there’s a friend of my mother’s who works in Representative Knox’s office.”

“Hurray!” Olivia grinned at her. “Welcome to Snoopers Inc!”

9

“Well, my freckled friend, what are you doing here so early?” Nate Rosen swung into the Sun-Dispatch city room, hooking his umbrella onto the rack and casting a glance at the clock. Seven-thirty, she saw. He turned back, beaming the smile that never quite brightened his mournful eyes. “And why are you playing in our illustrious colleague’s file cabinet?”

Olivia looked at him bleakly. “He’s dead, Nate. Dale’s dead.”

“Dead?” Nate stopped in midstride to stare at her. Implications chased each other across his face. “Dead?” His smile wavered. “You’re kidding!”

Olivia closed her eyes and shook her head. “No. Didn’t Edgy call you? I told him last night.”

“How the hell can he be dead? The Parkinson’s? But they said it wasn’t fatal!”

“No, no. Worse than that.” Olivia pushed back from the files and collapsed into Dale’s chair. “He was murdered.”

“You’re kidding!” Nate said again. He dropped his rain-beaded briefcase onto his own desk and came around the big central table to stare at her accusingly. “At the beach?”

“No, no. I’ve got to ask you—well, first let me tell you what happened.”

“Please!” He propped himself half-sitting against the shorter of the file cabinets. His yellow shirt was already rumpled.

“Okay. We went over to pick them up. They were all ready except that Dale was on the phone.”

“Yeah.”

“I went back to his den to tell him what you said about going easy with Moffatt. And he seemed glad that Moffatt was upset. He decided instantly to stay and work on the story. Said it was getting interesting. Called for his wife to leave him some lunch and sent us on our way.”

“Wait a minute. You’re saying that after all that planning he didn’t go with you?”

“Right. Just sent his wife and kids with us, said he could work better alone. But when we got back about nine, he was dead.”

Nate shook his head in disbelief.

“And it’s weird, Nate. He’d been hit on the head with his own brass lamp. But the door was bolted from the inside.”

“Liv, you’re putting me on!” He straightened with an impatient flip of his hand.

“No, Nate. I know it’s crazy, but it’s true.”

He studied her suspiciously. “God, Liv, if you’re lying …”

Olivia felt her mouth trembling and willed it still. “About something like this? I only wish I were, Nate.”

“Shit.” He licked his lips. “You say he was working on the plane crash story?”

“Yeah. You were on it too for a while, right?”

“Yeah. I was first on the scene, in fact. Picked up some talk on my CB and zipped over to Blue Hill. Edgy put Dale on it too because there was so much those first days, with Representative Knox’s office making pronouncements and the air investigation so complex.”

“So what’s your feeling? If Dale got too close to the truth about that crash, do you think Moffatt or someone would kill him?”

Nate shook his head again. “Christ, Liv, I can’t quite absorb this.”

“Yeah, I know! Neither can I! But it happened. I saw him lying there. His wife and kids spent the night at our house because there were detectives all over theirs. It really happened. And I want to know about Dale’s work.”

He was beginning to believe her. He shoved his hands in his pockets and went to stare out the window. He’d worked with Dale for ten years, Olivia remembered. Maybe twelve. Much longer than she had. They weren’t buddies, but they weren’t enemies either. Not like Nate and Corey on sports, who seemed to grate on each other and did their best to avoid each other. Ten years, though—that was a long time. Ten years ago she herself had been starting college. God, how much she’d changed! Getting into the peace movement, the women’s movement
.
How many times must the cannonballs fly
?
Woodstock, Kent State
.
And it’s one, two, three what are we fighting for
?
Editing her college paper, landing a mini-job on a suburban weekly and soon, miraculously, this one on the Sun-Dispatch, complete with salary. Well, in a manner of speaking. Meeting smart, loony Jerry, who understood her hunger to uncover truth and tell the world. A busy ten years. And all that time Nate and Dale had been slogging away together, cranking out the stories side by side.

Nate still faced the window. “How do you think it happened?” His voice sounded thick. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t know what to think, Nate. Maybe it’ll all come clear when the police find out what kind of Houdini got out of that locked room. But since I can’t figure out that part at all, it makes more sense to start looking for motives.”

“So that’s how the plane crash story fits in.”

“Well, I know that’s what he planned to work on that afternoon.”

“Moffatt was mad as hell, all right,” Nate said, turning back toward her.

“I know! What’s with him, Nate? Why is he so mad at Dale?”

“Dale was keeping things stirred up. He and a Post reporter were nagging at Knox’s office all the time.”

“But wouldn’t Moffatt be glad of that? Wouldn’t he want to find out how his father died?”

Nate pulled his hands from his pockets, frowned absently at the scrap of paper he’d pulled out, and walked across to his own chair. Olivia pursued him and sat on the center table facing his cubicle. Nate said, “I don’t know the answer to that. Moffatt the younger is a contractor. I talked to him a few times those first weeks. He was stunned, angry—well, that’s not unusual.” Nate still wore his thoughtful frown.

“No. It would be more suspicious if he wasn’t. But I still don’t know why he’d be mad at Dale.”

“Yeah. Mrs. Resler, now, she’s into appearances. Reputation. Almost from the first day she was full of anxiety about how her husband would want things to look. Really yelled at me when I suggested in one story that he was on suspiciously good terms with some of the scum he defended.”

“Was he?”

Nate looked hurt, his mournful face twice as piteous as usual. “Would I lie, Liv?”

She gave him a little smirk. “Not in print. Not if they could catch you.”

“No trust left in this evil world,” he grumbled. “Even the young and fair are cynical. But in fact, I know that one Bob Bates came back to Resler after he was released, and Resler got him a job at the water treatment plant.”

“Hope he wasn’t a poisoner!” Olivia swung her legs from the edge of the table.

“No. He’d conned his way into a bank job, then blew up their armored truck. Resler got him off most of the counts but Bates had to go inside for a couple of years. Most of the money was never recovered.”

“And then Resler got him a job. No wonder you were suspicious! So how did Mrs. Resler dare object to your story?”

“Well, her version is that her husband was humane, all milk of human kindness. He tried to help offenders because it was the moral thing to do. My story, she said, made him sound like a criminal himself.”

“And did it?”

Nate shrugged. “I thought it was neutral.”

Olivia gripped the edge of the table and leaned forward eagerly. “But Edgy listened to her. Right? That’s why he transferred the story to Dale?”

Nate held up his arms as though to ward off blows. “God, girl, you go for the jugular, don’t you? Yeah, La Resler is the reason he switched.” His look was half exasperated, half admiring. “Look, you damn reporter, you want to know about the plane crash or about my brilliant career?”

“Nate, it’s weird, I know.” Olivia looked down at her toes in her damp sandals and decided not to complain yet that he’d called her ‘girl.’ She shared his sense of being off-balance. “I’ve felt schizophrenic ever since it happened. We’re reporters, yes. But we’re also friends of Dale’s, so we’re involved too. Almost like sources for each other.”

“Yeah.”

“And when the cops come, you’ll see that we’re suspects also.”

“Suspects?” His startled eyes jerked up to stare at her, the full impact of the situation registering at last. “God, Liv, this is a mess!”

She smiled sympathetically. “I promise not to write it up to make you sound like a criminal.”

“Back to that, are we?” Nate snorted. “Okay, I’ll take you to meet that ex-con Bates and see what you think. It was a big favor Resler did him. And his widow is keeping up family tradition.”

“And you can’t help but wonder why.”

“Right.”

“What does Bates look like?”

“Fangs, warts, a squint …”

“Nate, come on!”

“Oh, he looks average enough. Even respectable. But shifty, somehow. Never know what’s going on in that brain.”

“And Mrs. Resler approved of helping him?”

“Not only approved, but announced her intention of setting up the Frank E. Resler Memorial Trust to aid poor fallen felons like him.”

“Wow. Okay. Because remember I said Dale was on the phone when we got there to take them to the beach? He was talking to Mrs. Resler. He told her he’d be discreet.”

“Really!” Nate’s eyebrows climbed.

Edgy bustled into the room, tossing everything but his takeout coffee onto the table. Olivia had phoned him late last night with the first details. “What’s new on Dale?” he asked.

Olivia jumped off the table and tried to look more dignified. “Not a lot.”

Edgy glanced at Nate. “I tried to call you last night.”

Nate nodded. “I, you know, met somebody. Got back late.”

“Real late,” said Edgy.

Olivia broke in, “I was about to tell Nate, I interviewed Dale’s ex-wife this morning.”