Rough Trade (29 page)

Coach Bennato had also given a statement. He reported that he’d come up to see Beau at ten-thirty for their usual postmortem on the Vikings game, but when he arrived, he found the owner’s door closed. Even though the police had pressed him, he’d refused to offer an opinion about who might have been arguing with Beau. However, another statement, this time given by an accounting clerk, indicated that when she was heading down to Beau’s office, she ran into Bennato, who told her it would probably be best if she came back later, seeing as Jeff and his father were behind closed doors and did not wish to be disturbed.

I found Bennato’s loyalty both touching and infuriating. No doubt he thought he was acting in Jeff’s best interest by refusing to cooperate fully with the police, not realizing how his stubbornness had ended up having the opposite effect of casting suspicion upon him.

The next reports I came to were from hair and fiber. Apparently fibers matching the carpet in the dead man’s office were found on his clothing, not just on his shoes and the bottom of his pants, but also on the back of his jacket and in his hair. The report concluded that this was consistent with his body having lain for some time on the floor of his office. Moreover, the direction of the fibers seemed to indicate that the body had, at some point, most likely been dragged along the carpeting, as well.

The medical examiner had found no evidence of defensive wounds on the dead man’s body—no bruising on his arms and no evidence of skin having been trapped under his fingernails, which one would expect if he’d made an effort to fight off his attacker.

There was a lot of techno jargon—notice taken of the compromised state of the dead man’s cardiovascular system, not to mention the sorry state of his liver after a lifetime love affair with the whiskey bottle. Much was also made of the fracture of the hyoid bone, which was offered as conclusive evidence of strangulation. Other fractures and contusions noted on the body were all apparently made postmortem, either to disguise the strangulation or in consequence of the fall down the stairs.

There was a lot of other stuff about lividity, morbidity, and internal body temperature, and the weights and condition of all of his internal organs were also noted. His last meal, apparently, had been an Egg McMuffin with cheese.

I took a deep breath and steeled myself to look at the photographs. I flipped through the autopsy shots as quickly as possible and set them aside. It wasn’t just squeamishness. I honestly had no idea what I could possibly learn by examining a close-up of Beau Rendell’s liver. Instead, I turned to the crime scene photos and carefully laid them out. As Elliott had indicated, there were two separate crime scenes and therefore two separate sets of photos— one of Beau’s body at the bottom of the stairs, which I turned to first, and the second set, showing his office, the place from which he had presumably fallen.

Beau’s body lay in shadow in a crumpled heap on the concrete floor of the stadium. His body was folded up on itself, making him look much smaller than I remembered. In death, he looked more like a pile of old clothes dumped in a dark corner than the difficult and mercurial owner of an NFL team.

There were also at least a half a dozen shots taken of Beau’s office, including one that showed the safe-deposit key on the far side of the desk as if Beau had slid it across toward whoever sat opposite him. I cursed myself silently for having forgotten my promise to myself to go to the bank and look at the contents of the box. Without Cheryl to hold my hand I really was completely hopeless.

Then something else caught my eye. Glancing through the photos, I was struck by something incongruous, not on the desk, but on the floor. I flipped through the glossies until I found the shot that presented the best view, including the stretch of carpeting on the opposite side of the desk where a visitor might have stood.

It was a newspaper. Nothing particularly sinister. Just a copy of the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
lying on the carpet as if it had just been dropped by someone who’d then forgotten to pick it up. I flopped back onto the pillows of the bed, thinking.

No matter who had dropped it, its presence was significant. Not because of what it said necessarily, but merely because it was there. Beau Rendell was a man with white carpeting in his house and who balanced his checkbook even though he had no money. In short, a neat freak. I was absolutely certain there was no way that he would have tolerated a dropped newspaper on the floor of his office for even one second while he was still alive.

CHAPTER 25

The last thing I expected to be doing was rooting through old newspapers in the middle of the night—certainly not in Chrissy Rendell’s freezing cold garage. But there was no way I was going to be able to sleep without knowing what, if anything, was in that newspaper. Somehow I was certain that it was important. It didn’t help that I was plagued by a vague sense of uneasiness, a feeling of not exactly deja vu, but of having covered the same ground before and having missed the significance the first time.

From the time I was a little girl my mother used to tell me that I had a one-track mind. She did not intend it as a compliment, but she was right. As a lawyer, my greatest strength is my willingness to give myself over to a case wholeheartedly and without reservation. Perhaps, I thought ruefully to myself, dragging the recycling bin over to the spot left vacant by the absence of Chrissy’s Suburban, that’s why Avco blew up in my face.

I had no doubt that was also why understanding Beau’s murder had always seemed out of focus and just beyond my grasp. A firefighter will tell you the hardest kind of blaze to battle is the kind that rages on two fronts. From the very first, from that day I drove up to Milwaukee to listen to Jack McWhorter deliver L.A.’s proposal, I had been dividing my attention and my energies—with disastrous results.

I emptied the bin onto the floor of Chrissy’s preternaturally clean garage and began going through the papers, carefully pulling out the
Wall Street Journals
and putting them in a separate pile. From the crime scene photos it had been clear from the configuration of the masthead that the newspaper in question had been the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Thanking my lucky stars for Chrissy’s tidy-mindedness, I assembled the papers for the week preceding Beau’s murder, even though I was pretty sure that what I wanted was the edition from the day of his death. Then I carefully cleaned up, turned off the lights, and went back upstairs to examine my find.

Comparing the papers to the one in the photographs, it was easy to see that I’d been right. The newspaper in question was indeed the edition that had been published the last day of the team owner’s life. More than that, I knew that I’d seen it before. I remembered quite clearly having read the article about the two-year-old who’d passed the night forgotten and locked in a Porta-John at the flea market. There had been a copy at Beau’s house that I had read while waiting for Jeff to wake up from his pharmacologically induced slumber.

While I pondered the significance of this, I read the entire paper from cover to cover, beginning with the headline about the threatened teachers’ strike and ending with the final classified for a cottage for rent at White Bear Lake. I went back to the articles about the Monarchs, beginning with the front-page article about the proposal for renovating the downtown stadium.

And then I felt it click, that feeling somewhere between
eureka!
and
oh my
that tells you from deep in your gut that you finally understand. I sat up in bed and set the newspapers aside, feeling my face drawn wide in what was no doubt a ridiculous expression of amazement.

The police had been right from the very beginning. Not about who, of course, but about how. Beau may have been strangled, but he had not been deliberately murdered. He had been killed in the heat of an argument by a killer who’d almost instantly come to regret what he’d done.

I’d wasted all my time mentally running in the wrong direction because I’d started from the assumption that whoever killed Beau had done so in order to profit from his death. Beau’s murderer had never intended to kill him; indeed, he’d had the most to lose from his best friend’s death.

From the beginning Harald Feiss had insisted that Beau had intended to move the Monarchs to the suburbs. But Beau had been playing every end against the middle, not even willing to confide in his son what his plans really were. I could only imagine how furious and betrayed Harald must have felt when he’d woken up and read in the newspaper that Beau and the city had reached “an agreement in principle” to renovate the downtown stadium. Especially after Harald, despite being nearly as strapped for cash as his friend, had been making the payment on an enormous tract of empty land in Wauwatosa month after month, waiting for his big payoff.

Of course, he’d been playing the police from day one, from the day he’d stayed down at the stadium feeding them lies while he sent Jeff home with Bennato with instructions to dope him up to keep him quiet. Who better to convince the cops that Chrissy had been having an affair with McWhorter, and what better way to try to sour the deal with L. A. than to try to convince Jeff that his wife had an ulterior motive for wanting to be in L.A.? But Jeff had been reluctant to believe that Chrissy had been unfaithful, and then what? He’d demanded proof. That’s where Darius Fredericks came in, Darius and the fax luring Jeff back into his father’s house.

Perhaps Fredericks really had been a burglar—either that or Feiss had set him up to take the fall. I didn’t really care which one of them had been the shooter. As far as I was concerned I knew who had been behind the crime irrespective of who had actually pulled the trigger. I looked at the clock and decided that it was too late to call Elliott. I’d let him sleep and dazzle him with my powers of deduction in the morning.

I got up early the next morning, showered, and dressed almost as carefully as Chrissy. The house was quiet and I decided to let Chrissy sleep. We’d turned the ringer off the phone the day before, plagued by unwanted phone calls from the press, and I figured it was best to maintain the status quo for now. Before I left I checked all the windows and the doors, making sure that they were still locked. At the end of the driveway I stopped and spoke to the uniformed security officer, who was busy keeping warm in the front seat of his car. I described Harald Feiss to him and explained that under no circumstances was he to set foot on the property.

From the car I dialed my secretary, joining the pitiful trickle of cars that masquerades as rush hour in Milwaukee.

“You must be very important,” announced my loyal secretary who was already at her desk. “The mayor of Milwaukee has agreed to meet with you, but he wants to keep things hush-hush.”

“Oh, yippee. What does he want to do? Meet in the churchyard at midnight? Smuggle me into his office disguised as a policeman?”

“Close. He’s faxing me directions for where you’re going to rendezvous with his security people. I guess you’re going in through the backdoor. He actually managed to use the word
covert
about six times. The man sounds like an asshole.”

“That’s probably because he is one. Anybody else call that I should know about?”

“Jake Palmer called. He seems anxious to speak to you. He says he has some information you might want about Darius Fredericks.”

“Did he leave you a number?”

“No. He said to tell you that he can’t be reached this morning, but if you wanted, you could meet him at a restaurant called Mader’s at one o’clock. I have the address.”

“I think I know where it is,” I said, “but let me take it down anyway.” I reached over toward the passenger seat and was rewarded only by the feeling of rich leather. “Do me a favor—make a note that I want a dozen legal pads put in the car and a bunch of pencils.”

“So, do you still like your new car?”

“It needs some breaking in. Anybody else call?”

“Just Stephen. He says he thinks you two need to sit down and talk.”

“Call him back and tell him that I have a funeral to go to,” I replied, “and all things considered, he’s lucky that it’s not his.”

“Everything go okay last night?” inquired Elliott when I got him on his cell phone. He was on his way out to Naperville to interview one of a dozen families who’d been bilked by a fraudulent builder. “Nothing go bump in the night?”

“All serene. I did find out some interesting things.”

“You, too?So spill. What deep dark secrets did you unearth?”

“I know who killed Beau Rendell and why.”

“So, are you going to share this with me, Sherlock, or do I have to beg?”

“Normally I’d say begging is good, but I’m in a hurry to get to the bank. I want to take a peek in Beau Rendell’s safe-deposit box before my meeting with the bankers.”

“If you find millions in hard cold cash, I’ll split it with you.”

“No chance,” I replied, and told him everything I’d figured out about Harald Feiss the night before.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he replied when I had finished.

“Don’t you mean ‘bravo’?”

“Well, I didn’t tell you, but I called a friend of mine who runs a P.I. outfit in L.A. and had him buzz over to the Regent Beverly Wilshire to see what he could find out about Jeffrey Rendell’s last days.”

“And what did he find out?” I asked, feeling rather deflated.

“Well, for one thing I learned that a luxury hotel is not a particularly good place if you want to keep a secret. They keep records of everything, and the staff doesn’t miss a thing.”

“So what secret was he trying to keep?”

“Let’s just put it this way. Jeff checked in on Friday and met a guy named Ken Gunther, who I guess works out of your firm’s L.A. office. Ken had already booked a room. The whole thing was comped, by the way. The hotel picked up the whole tab. According to the manager it was some kind of quid pro quo deal for the L.A. Stadium Commission.

“Okay, so on Friday they went out to dinner. According to housekeeping, everything looked pretty much like you’d expect. Records indicate Jeff made three calls, two to his wife and one to his office at the stadium. Jeff and Ken and Jack had dinner in the restaurant, a real power deal according to the waiter, who knows everybody and strings for the scandal sheets on the side. That’s when things started getting interesting.”