New River Blues (23 page)

‘What, you got something juicy from the bank?'

‘Oozing, stinking wonderful.'

‘Wow. I've got an appointment at nine.'

‘This'll be short and sweet.'

‘Lovely. Let me check my voicemail and I'll come find you.'

She scrolled through a number of messages that could wait. But the last one asked her to call Dr Moses Greenberg, at the medical examiner's office, ASAP. Concerned, she dialed the number. The Alpha-dog forensic scientist they all called ‘Animal' came on and growled, ‘Sarah? Hell you think you're doing, sending your trainee over here to my autopsy? I don't have time to dick around like this!'

‘If you're talking about Jason Peete, Doctor, he's got eight years on the force and he's been a detective for three.'

‘Three whole years, huh? In Vice, I bet, hassling the working girls up on Oracle.'

‘Home Invasions, actually.' Sarah had been on the advisory committee that helped Delaney pick him for the Homicide squad in September, and had never heard anybody voice regret over the decision. Jason Peete was a quick study with an awesome memory. ‘What's your problem, Doctor?'

‘A detective who pukes on the floor of my lab and has to be helped into the rest room, that's my problem, dammit! I made him clean it up himself! Did you know this was his first autopsy, Sarah?'

‘No,' she said, chagrined. Jason Peete had bluffed his way past the question with sheer bravado. She should have asked.

Delaney would have known. And she should have checked with him before she OK'd the change.

Damn. She walked toward Greenaway's workspace thinking,
That's one you owe me, buster. I'm going to make you pay for this.

In Ollie's messy office, she stood by his extra chair while he cleared the seat, tossing a fleece jacket on to the floor in the corner and moving a stack of folders on to an already-teetering stack on the credenza. The mess in his workspace was easily equal to the one Delaney was giving her grief about in hers. Serves you right for usually being a neat-freak, Ollie would probably have said. He sat down cheerily in the middle of the random heaps, utterly pleased with himself.

‘Early this year,' he looked at his notes, ‘about a week after New Year's, Eloise Henderson's account at the bank was changed. Now her checks have to have her husband's signature as well as her own, and there's a monthly limit on the debit cards.'

‘
What?
'

Greenaway grinned brightly, almost bouncing in his chair. ‘No boolcheet, baby!' In antic moments he imitated Cheech and Chong.

‘Well, but . . . it was all her own money, wasn't it?'

‘Not all of it. It was a joint household account. They both made deposits and wrote checks on it. The account is balanced once a month at Hen-Trax. Eloise never bothered with trifles like totals, she just wrote checks and signed charge slips.'

‘I don't suppose she was paying the routine stuff, was she? Power company, phone bills?'

‘No, Hen-Trax does that. Eloise just paid for the whims – clothing store, beauty shop, gifts for her family and everybody else she knows – this woman had a real thing for gift-wrap. And lunch . . . lots of lunches. Her brokerage house put the most money in the account and she took the most out. Till last year, in the week before Christmas, when she overdrew the account by almost twenty-five thousand dollars.'

‘That's a lot to me, but not so much for a rich lady, is it?'

‘Henderson seems to have thought so. He transferred funds to cover the overdraft, and a couple of days later one of the vice-presidents of the bank witnessed a new signatory card for Eloise that requires both signatures.'

‘My, my. Quite a slap on the wrist.'

‘Well, see, twenty-five thousand was only the amount of the overdraft. Before she went on the spending spree, there was over fifty thousand in the account. And in the first week in January, another twenty . . . um . . . almost twenty-seven thousand in credit-card bills came in.'

‘Ooh. Must have been some Christmas.'

‘That's what I said to Akito.'

‘Who's Akito?'

‘My special buddy at the bank. Japanese exchange student who came to the U of A to get a degree in economics. He fell in love with the culture and never left town.'

‘Is he fun?'

‘A Japanese banker, are you kidding? He's so perfect, every time I look at him I tuck in my shirt. Anyway, when he told me about the big overdraft I said, “That must have bought some ho-ho-ho,” and he kind of shushed me before he showed me it wasn't that simple. Eloise bought about her usual quota of Christmas presents, threw the usual big lavish party for the neighbors, but last year, in addition, she sent a check to her brother for fifty thousand dollars.'

‘Theodore? Doesn't he have plenty of his own money?'

‘Akito says, “So we are given to understand.” He talks like that. But Theodore told Eloise he had some bad days at the track or something, now he was invited on a cruise over Christmas, he'd need nice presents for everybody. He was “temporarily embarrassed,” Akito says.'

‘Akito picks up jargon fast, huh?'

‘It's kind of a pride thing around that bank. They talk about their rich clients in these hush-hush voices, like undertakers. Especially when they mention large amounts. Around Hendersons' money they almost genuflect.'

‘Lately I'm feeling pretty reverent about money myself,' Sarah said, ‘especially in the grocery store.'

Greenaway rolled his eyes up and said, ‘Try it with three kids.'

‘But it was Eloise giving the money away to brother Teddy that got Roger to tighten up, huh?'

‘Especially after he found out it wasn't the first time. In the course of this little tiff over Christmas, Eloise confessed that brother Teddy's been coming to the well every so often for the last couple of years. Akito says, the family legend is that he's always been careless, but lately it's getting worse.'

‘Akito really opened up to you, huh?' She beamed at him. ‘Nice going, Ollie.'

Greenaway flashed his open smile and said, ‘We just kind of hit it off.'

‘I don't quite understand the big alarm, though. I mean, Eloise never got anywhere near the end of the money supply, did she? How much is in the brokerage account, do you know?

‘I haven't got exact figures yet, but I did some quick math based on the payments she's been getting, and it has to be close to ten million. That's not a huge fortune these days, Akito assures me, but it'll keep you in first-class seats if you exercise a little care. There's another account, too, though. I don't know how big that is yet. They call it the growth account, it's invested in long-term, high-yield instruments. That's what they call them, instruments. Like finely tuned violins or something.'

‘You're kind of enjoying the bank, aren't you?'

‘Whole different world. Makes you realize we're just spinning our wheels out here, paycheck to paycheck.'

‘I kind of suspected that,' Sarah said.

‘Me too, but I'm going to think about it some more. Anyway . . . I'll get the skinny on the growth account tomorrow, Sarah. I have to see a different vice-president for that.'

‘But you're getting everything you ask for?'

‘You bet. Eloise is deceased and this is her homicide we're investigating, so they're not trying to keep any secrets about her money. Hen-Trax, now, that's a different, as we say, revenue stream.' Ollie raised his left hand, blew on his fingernails, and buffed them on his shirt.

‘We don't get to go near the revenue stream?'

He nodded solemnly. ‘Don't even think about dipping a toe.'

‘OK.' She thought about the amazing news. ‘So this very rich lady, since last January, has only been able to spend as much of her own money as her husband would let her have?'

‘Right. You think maybe that got kind of . . . annoying?'

‘Would have been to me.'

‘And yet,' Greenaway said softly, ‘the husband's not the one who ended up dead.'

‘No. But the last thing she did on this earth was throw one hell of a party and go to bed with one of the help.'

‘I suppose that could be understood as an expression of hostility.'

Nino's second day in the field was harder than the first because his muscles were sore to begin with. And with one day behind him, he knew how long days were.

They were picking tomatoes off staked-up vines. By the end of the first hour, when he stretched up to reach the fruit on top, his arms felt as if they weighed forty pounds apiece. And when he bent to pick the low stuff his back hurt so much he was sure he must have torn a muscle.

A couple of times during the morning he made up his mind to quit. But a sinewy little Chicano guy working the other side of the row with him, Juan he said his name was, noticed he was in trouble and took pity on him. Using nudges and nods since they had hardly any language in common, Juan showed him how to hang the basket so it didn't hurt his back so much. ‘Así, OK?' Juan said, adjusting the straps. Nino hefted the redistributed weight and said, ‘Cool!' and they high-fived.

A few minutes later Juan taught him another trick, to speed up or slow down so they arrived at the end of the row when the foreman was at the other end. That way they could take turns sitting down for a minute when they grabbed a hose for a drink of water, while the other stood in front for cover. Carlos didn't begrudge all the water they could drink – he knew they had to have it to work in the sun. But sitting down, he considered loafing, and he would roust them for that. It made all the difference, though – Nino's muscles didn't cramp so much if he could get off his feet now and then. Thinking about how good those few seconds of sitting were going to feel, timing his rows became almost like a game, and he made it through the morning.

He ate his noon meal as fast as he could so he could lie flat in the shade and snooze a few minutes before he went back to work. Juan said, ‘Is bell. I call you,' and let him sleep till the last minute before they had to jump on the truck. Nino said, ‘Gracias, amigo,' when they took their seats, and Juan grinned out of his little brown half-starved face and said, ‘Cool, no?' He nudged Nino gently and said, ‘Estados Unidos, no?' And when Nino looked puzzled he said, pointing, ‘You. Me. Estados Unidos.'

‘Oh, sí. Couple Estados Unidos guys, that's us,' and they high-fived again.

Having a new friend willing to help him got Nino thinking about Pauly again. He snickered, thinking about all the nudging and hand-signals they had used on that last day, at the party, so they could duck into the helps' bathroom with food and wine. Once that silly Pauly had come out of the lavatory looking pleased with himself, with chili sauce all over his cheek. Nino grabbed him, saying, ‘Asshole,' softly but laughing too, and wiped it off before anybody else saw.

Thinking back over that day while he worked his rows, he forgot his sore back and the dirt and flies out there in the hot field. He had finally sweat all the drugs and alcohol out of his system, and was beginning to recover from the hysteria that had gripped him ever since he woke up in the terrible bedroom. Freed by the routine movements of his body, his mind drifted, and he had his first flashback. He saw himself smiling, watching Pauly dance the green-dress lady around the utility room, the two of them moving as if they were joined at the hip. He had been dancing too, he was reaching out with one arm around Felicity, interrupting their dance to take the drink Madge was handing him, Madge saying, ‘Drink up, dear boy, the party's finally starting to fly.' And they all laughed, everybody laughed.

He forgot all about grammar in the joy of that realization.

He wasn't drunk, either. He'd had some wine, sure, but he'd been working his ass off all afternoon and evening and then there was all this craziness with the dancing. He knew he could have passed a sobriety test at that moment, walked a line, touched his nose, whatever.

That last drink, though, must have had one helluva kick. The next thing he remembered was waking up on the floor upstairs with his head like a lead balloon. And there was this big heavy gun in his arms – hands? someplace there – Zack was lifting it off him, helping him up. Saying, ‘Come on, for God's sake, we gotta get out of here.' And poor Pauly was on the bed with only blood where his face should have been.

I didn't do it, though
, he told himself with sudden absolute certainty.
I wasn't mad, we didn't fight.

Delirious with the joy of his discovery, he grabbed Juan and danced him down the row between the staked tomato vines. Workers all around them turned in alarm toward the noise, thinking they were watching a fight beginning. But Nino was laughing as he yelled happily into Juan's skinny little startled face, ‘I didn't do it, amigo! I didn't kill that silly little turd!'

Sarah's phone chirped and she read a text message, ‘Need 2 tlk, RD.' She called him and asked, ‘The lawyer here already?'

‘Be a few minutes. Couple things to tell you first.' Delaney had asked street patrolmen, as they'd agreed yesterday, to check Party Down. Zack was not there, and the shop was locked up. He had put out an APB for Nino, in Arizona and the surrounding four states. And Menendez was getting a warrant to search his room above the theater.

She told him about the money fight Ollie had uncovered at the bank, and the motivation it provided for Eloise to punish her husband with more philandering. ‘Which in turn, of course,' she added, ‘provided a good reason for Roger to kill her.'