Repo Madness: A Novel

  I went very still. “Sorry?”

  “The woman in the photo here. The one with the blurry face. It isn’t her. It’s not Nina.”

  In the silence that followed, the only sound was the whisper of noise from the second hand on the large clock on the wall. My mouth was open, and I was staring in shock. “It’s not?” I finally managed to ask.

  Leinberger shook his head.

  “Audrey said it was!” Alan blurted.

  “Her sister says it’s her.”

  “Well, sure, but it’s not. See how long her hair is? Nina got it cut short, like, a few days before. Audrey wouldn’t know that, because Nina said she was going to spring the new look on her sister when they got together. Also, I saw these three girls that day. They were from Arizona State. You know, the women who are always drinking margaritas and yelling ‘woo-hoo’? That’s who they were. They were standing right where Nina and I were supposed to meet. I remember them handing a camera to someone to have their picture taken. Believe me, Nina wasn’t there.”

  “Ask him if he remembers the woman who is in the picture, then,” Alan urged. I didn’t see what that had to do with anything, so I ignored him.

  “What do you think happened that day?” I asked.

  Leinberger shrugged uncomfortably. “She would have been drinking. I think she fell off the boat. Only…”

  “Only?”

  “Well, her credit cards were maxed out. I had to give her the cash for the ferry ticket. If she was drinking before she got on the boat, then someone was buying her drinks.”

  “The Ferry Bar,” Alan declared. “We’ve got to get the mayor of Shantytown to call you back.”

  “How about you? Did you maybe have a couple of drinks before you got on the ferry?”

  “Yeah, a few.”

  “Were you at the Ferry Bar?”

  He shook his head. “No, I never go in there. There used to be a place down the street, really quiet, private.” He smiled ironically. “You’re only as sick as your secrets. I ducked in there for a couple. Nina didn’t. Not there, I mean.” He frowned at me. “What are you saying? That she didn’t fall? That maybe someone pushed her?”

  “Well, the theory seems to be that she got drunk and fell over the railing. But nobody saw her that day. And you’re telling me she maybe couldn’t even afford to buy her own drinks, and that you searched all over for her. Now we find out this picture is of someone else. What I get from all this? We don’t even know for sure that Nina ever got on the boat.”

  * * *

  The next day, I felt hungover, which was unfair, because I had had nothing to drink except orange juice before retiring. I swung my legs out of bed and felt like swinging them back in, and as I stood up, all I could think about was that perhaps my day might arrange itself to afford me some nap time. It was as if my medications had given me Jake’s personality. Alan was snoozing as well.

  I called Barry Strickland and told him I’d like to stop by and talk to him. Then I took my pills like a good little patient, washing them down with strong coffee, and heading in to take a shower. The coffee didn’t so much wake me up as make me irritable. “Nice of you to join me,” I muttered when I felt Alan stir.

  “Did we have breakfast?”

  “No. I had breakfast. You didn’t wake up, so you missed it.”

  “It’s just … I’m hungry.”

  “Well, you haven’t had anything to eat in more than a decade, so yeah, I can see why you’d have a few cravings.”

  The ride to Strickland’s took me through East Jordan, so I picked up the cinnamon roll at Darlene’s that I felt the universe owed me since I’d passed it up the day I’d crashed the old repo truck.

  “Okay, that’s the last thing you should be eating,” Alan lectured me sternly.

  “That’s good, because it is the last thing I’ll eat. Until lunch, anyway.”

  “It’s fat and sugar. Why not eat a vegetable, for once?”

  “I’ll eat a salad tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” he squawked.

  “Look, this was a one-time treat because I was really hungry, for some reason.” That reason being that one of the side effects of my new meds was food cravings—I’d looked it up. “I know I shouldn’t be eating the things. I’m giving them up. That’s the last one.”

  “Well, good. I feel a lot better,” Alan told me.

  “That’s my goal in life: to make you feel better, Alan.”

  * * *

  Strickland opened his door for me. “Nice little storm rolling in tomorrow,” he told me. We settled down into our habitual chairs in his living room.

  “So I’ve got this thing that’s a little … unusual,” I told him. “And also, I need another favor.”

  That reminded him about Amy Jo, the supposed medium, and he asked me how that had panned out. I told Strickland what she told me, and he watched me without expression. “Somebody helped her. The victim. Prior to the accident. And she drove away with that person,” he summarized.

  “Right. So if Lisa Marie wasn’t in the car, but she shows up five days later, floating in the drink, then whoever it was helped her die.” Which meant I still felt that I had failed her.

  “Anyone ever come forward who saw the same thing?”

  “No.” I shrugged. To an extent, my mood mirrored his skeptical expression. Spoken out loud, my words sounded desperate and delusional.

  “Tell him about Nina Otis,” Alan urged.

  “So what’s this other thing?” Strickland asked. A certain wariness came into his steely eyes.

  “Yeah. You know William Blanchard, president of that little bank in Traverse City?”

  “Heard of him, yeah.”

  “Why are we talking about that?” Alan complained.

  “He just hired me to murder his wife.”

  Strickland had a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth, and he halted it there for a long moment before completing the journey and taking a deep gulp. When he set the mug down, the gesture seemed to indicate he wouldn’t be picking it back up for a while. “Explain what you just said.”

  I went through it all. When I was done, Strickland had some questions.

  “Jimmy had no idea about the child?”

  “No, sir. He just found out maybe two years ago.”

  “And now Alice Blanchard and Jimmy are sleeping together, and she asked Blanchard to move out, and that’s why he wants her murdered.”

  “Not exactly,” Alan said, trying my patience, because that’s precisely what I was going to say.

  “Yeah, he’s living in his summer place down the lake from here. But actually, I think Blanchard’s problem is the idea that Alice’s attorney wants to hire an accountant to look through his books. I think he’s been hiding money from her, probably the IRS as well.”

  “Why you?”

  I shrugged. “He’s not real detailed. He’s heard I was in prison for murder, and someone gave him bad information about what happened a few years ago, so he thinks that when I heard my sister was in danger, I went out and killed the two guys threatening her.” Strickland had been intimately involved in that episode and didn’t need it explained to him.

  “Who else knows about this?” Strickland asked.

  “Just me,” Alan advised. I knew he was trying to be funny, but it irritated me anyway.

  “Nobody.”

  “You need to go to the state police with something like this.”

  “Sure, okay, except as far as they are concerned, I’m an ex-con serving out probation. I thought maybe you could help pave the way. Besides, they’re always doing you favors; don’t you want to do one in return? I’m picturing the newspaper stories—it would go a long way toward redeeming your reputation if you prevented a murder, don’t you think?”

  It took him a minute, but eventually he grunted and nodded. “I’ll make a few calls,” he said.

  We finished our coffee and stood up, but Alan was stridently objecting. I sighed. “You got time for one more thing?” I ask
ed Strickland.

  I showed him the folder with the photographs, and to his credit he didn’t roll his eyes or shoot me skeptical looks. I put Rachel Rodriguez and the other two local “just missing” women in one pile, and Nina Otis, Lisa Marie, the woman Rogan saw heading toward the docks, and the one who fell off the boat in Boyne City in the other, the “found in the lake” pile. I walked Strickland through the nagging elements in Nina Otis’s case.

  “You’ve been on the Emerald Isle,” I told him. “It would take you, what, maybe five minutes to search everywhere on the boat? But Leinberger couldn’t find her. If she fell off before he could look everywhere, she’d be in the Pine River and two hundred people would have seen it. And everyone stands at the railing, looking at the water—how do you miss an adult woman going overboard? The whole theory has always hinged on the fact that she was supposed to be on the Emerald Isle, and that her sister identified the girl in the photograph as Nina Otis. But if it wasn’t her, isn’t it more likely that she was never even on the boat? So yeah, her death still could have been an accident—but it didn’t happen the way it says in the reports.”

  Strickland’s gaze was unreadable. “I would agree,” he finally said. “What are you proposing?”

  “I’m wondering if the investigations turned up anything that didn’t make it into the papers, something that maybe didn’t fit the circumstances as precisely as the news stories implied,” I said.

  Strickland pulled out a pad of paper and wrote down each of the victims’ names. I waited respectfully. “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask.” He glanced up at me. “Meanwhile, you let me know the minute Blanchard contacts you, understood?”

  “Got it.”

  I had a couple of repos I needed to follow up on, plus I wasn’t that far away from where Kenny MacDonell’s mother said he and Mark Stevens were remodeling a small home, but in the end I wound up just driving back to Kalkaska. Weighed down by my medication, there was no joy in repossessions that day.

  “Why don’t we go to Charlevoix? Maybe the mayor of Shantytown has shown up. Maybe someone else in the Ferry Bar saw Nina and could tell us who was buying her drinks that day. Or maybe she was in one of the other bars. Ruddy? Why don’t we do that?”

  “I think a better use of my time and body would be to take a nap,” I told him.

  Alan maintained a huffy silence all the way home. With a weary sigh, I opened the front door, glancing automatically at Jake’s blanket. My dog was still at Kermit’s, of course, and it just seemed like too much effort to go retrieve him.

  I went into my small kitchen and poured myself a glass of water, and something hit me very hard on the back of the head.

  20

  The Perfect Job for a Murderer

  The shock of the blow sent me reeling, literally staggering into the wall, where my legs went weak and I slid to the floor. I looked up and had the vague impression of a person standing over me, raising his arms, holding something. He swung like a woodsman splitting a log, and I rolled away and felt the shock wave when he smashed his club on the floor, the blow so ferocious that the weapon bounced out of his hands.

  Stupidly, I watched the man dart after it as it rolled away. It was a chair leg, the kind that has been turned and spindled. He was a stocky guy, not tall, gray haired. He stooped to pick up his club, and I got to my feet, feeling wobbly.

  “Ruddy!” Alan shrieked at me, which wasn’t at all helpful. I forced myself to cross my tiny kitchen and was still driving with my legs when my attacker raised his club, but I got inside the swing and punched him in the gut, the air and the fight leaving him in a gasp. He crumpled, holding his stomach.

  I took a deep breath, fighting the queasy feeling. Now that I had time to process it, the blow to my head seemed to be bouncing around inside my cranium, ricocheting like a bullet. When I thought of it, I kicked the chair leg away, and it rolled into the living room and under the couch.

  “Zoppi,” Alan murmured. “I told you not to mess with them.”

  The guy lying in my kitchen was at least sixty years old. His thin hair was neatly trimmed, and he wore a heavy woolen shirt and new Danner boots. He had a portly gut with what felt like twelve inches of give when I buried my fist in it, and was otherwise soft and out of shape. He looked like a retired accountant who had purchased some expensive outdoor gear for a weekend in the wilds of northern Michigan. “The local mafia must be in pretty sorry shape if they sent you,” I told him. I rubbed the back of my head, finding no blood but a lot of tenderness that would need ice if I wanted to be able to move my neck the next day.

  He got to his hands and knees. “Screw you,” he said, panting twice between the words.

  “You try to stand up, I’m going to make you lie down again,” I advised.

  He stared at the floor between his hands, visibly gritting his teeth. “After everything you have done to us, to find out what you’re trying to pull now, you sonofabitch…”

  I cocked my head at him and was rewarded with a stab of pain between my eyes. I made a mental note not to rotate my neck. “Now I what, exactly?”

  “Leave us alone!” he roared. “For God’s sake, show a shred of humanity and leave us the hell alone!”

  He raised his eyes to look at me, wet, pain-filled eyes, and I recognized him. “Oh,” I said.

  Alan sensed something. “Who is he?”

  Ignoring my threat to put him back down, my would-be assailant used his hands on his knees to straighten himself into a standing position. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Look. Mr. Walker. I don’t know what you’ve heard—”

  “I’ve heard you’ve been telling people you didn’t kill my daughter, you lying bastard!”

  Then he came at me again, swinging his fist, but I’ve had a lot of drunks try the same move on me, and it was easy to step out of the way, catching his arm and twisting it a little. “Easy,” I told him, squeezing him tightly. “I don’t want to have to hurt you, sir.”

  The fury went out of him, and he sagged. “Goddammit,” he muttered.

  “Look, you want something? A Vernors, maybe?” I offered.

  He gave me a fierce look.

  “All right, then,” I said. “I’m having one, though.” I picked out a can of Vernors ginger ale and pressed it to the back of my head. The cold felt good, fleetingly, but an army of pain troopers had assembled at the base of my skull and was attacking the rest of my cortex in a flanking maneuver. I found some aspirin and gulped a couple, warily watching Mr. Walker, who was standing and staring sightlessly at the dusty shelves where my football trophies were all stacked. I’d pulled them out of the closet when I’d started dating Katie.

  “I want you to leave us alone. Leave her alone,” Mr. Walker said woodenly.

  “I understand how you must feel. But a witness has come forward. Someone who saw your daughter that night. Who says Lisa Marie got out of my car at the 7-Eleven and drove off with someone else.”

  He turned to face me. “I wanted to kill you. I wanted to take a hunting rifle and remove you from our lives, but my wife wouldn’t let me. I’ve got two other children. But they’re grown now. So I’m warning you this one time. Stop it. Stop ruining our lives. Because if you don’t, I’m going to shoot you in the goddamn face.”

  I stared at him. He looked like he meant it.

  “Ask him who told him,” Alan blurted.

  I frowned, not getting it.

  “Somebody called him! Find out who. Whoever did it was hoping this would happen, that you’d be warned off. Ask him who called.”

  “Mr. Walker. How did you find out I was looking into the case?”

  He sneered at me. “My daughter is not a case, McCann. My daughter was a living, loving, wonderful person who you let drown in the back of your car while you swam to safety.”

  “The person who called you did it for one reason, which was to get you to come here and get me to stop. He wants me to stop, which means I’m get
ting closer to him than I thought. Who was it? Who called?”

  “For God’s sake. You’re serious,” he said wonderingly.

  “Just give me a name.”

  “I don’t owe you a goddamn thing.”

  “Give me a name,” I repeated patiently, “or I will call the police and tell them you came into my house and tried to kill me with a chair leg. You’ll go to jail. You want that?”

  “Screw you,” he spat. I could tell, though, that my threat had landed on him, could see it in the self-disgust building on his face. I waited. After a moment he looked away. “I don’t know. Someone called my firm and left a message. All it said was that it was a friend, and that you were spreading lies about my daughter, saying you didn’t kill her, that someone else did it. That you’re looking for the real killers.” He said this last part with a sarcastic set of air quotes hanging in the air.

  “Mr. Walker. I stood up in court and said that I was responsible for Lisa Marie’s death—”

  “Don’t say her name!” he interrupted harshly.

  I nodded. “All right. That I did it, that I should go to prison. But now a witness says I didn’t do it, because your daughter was not in the car. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m starting to believe it might be. And if it is, it means the person who put your daughter in that lake has never been punished for it. Don’t you want me to try to find out who it is?”

  “You,” Walker responded after a long moment, “can rot in hell.”

  * * *

  I lay on my couch, a bag of frozen peas pressed to my neck, until Kermit brought Jake home, and then I went to bed with my dog. Katie was at her aunt’s bedside and couldn’t really talk, so I let her go and tried not to pay attention to the throbbing in my skull. Getting up the next morning was the most difficult task I’d ever undertaken in my entire life, a grunting, wheezing repositioning of myself as an upright human. My neck felt as if a shark were trying to eat its way out of it, my stomach was heaving, and a muscle under my eye was fluttering like a butterfly trapped in its cocoon.

  The only thing on my schedule that day was to pee in a cup. I wondered if I was up to it.