Daddy's Little Girl

  “Your call is being forwarded to an answering service . . .”

  “This is your former coworker who has enough interest in your well-being to inquire as to your state of mind, job opportunities, and health,” I said. “A response will be appreciated.”

  He called back half an hour later. “You must be hard up for someone to talk to.”

  “I am. That’s why you came to mind.”

  “Thanks.”

  “May I ask where you are now.”

  “In Atlanta. Packing up.”

  “I gather a decision has been made.”

  “Yes. A dream job. Based in New York, but with a fair amount of traveling. Reporting from hot spots all over the globe.”

  “Which newspaper?”

  “Negative. I’m going to be a television star.”

  “Did you have to lose ten pounds before they hired you?”

  “I don’t remember you as being cruel.”

  I laughed. Talking to Pete had a way of bringing a dash of amusing, everyday reality into my increasingly surreal life. “Are you joking, or do you really have a job in television?”

  “It’s for real. It’s with Packard Cable.”

  “Packard. That’s great.”

  “It’s one of the newer cable networks, but growing fast. I was about to take the L.A. job even though it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but then they came to me.”

  “When do you start?”

  “Wednesday. I’m in the process of subletting the apartment and putting stuff together to load in the car. I start driving up Sunday afternoon. Dinner Tuesday?”

  “Sure. It’s good to hear that melodious voice of yours. . . .”

  “Don’t hang up. Ellie, I’ve been watching your Website.”

  “Pretty good, isn’t it?”

  “If this guy is what you say he is, you’re playing with fire.”

  I already have, I thought. “Promise you won’t tell me to be careful.”

  “I promise. Talk to you Monday afternoon.”

  * * *

  I WENT BACK to the computer. It was nearly eight o’clock, and I’d been working steadily. I ordered room service, and while I was waiting, I did a few stretches and a lot of thinking.

  Talking to Pete had, at least for the moment, removed my tunnel vision. For the last couple of weeks I had existed in a world in which Rob Westerfield was the central figure. Now, for just a moment, I was looking past that time, past his second trial, past my ability to prove to the world the depth of his violent nature.

  I could dig up and publicize every nasty, rotten thing he’d ever done. Perhaps I could track down an unsolved murder he had committed. I could tell his sorry, dirty story in the book. Then it would be time for me to begin the rest of my life.

  Pete was already beginning his—a new base in New York, a new job in a different media.

  I locked my hands behind my head and began to twist from side to side. My neck muscles were tight, and it felt good to try to stretch them. What was not so good was the dismaying realization that I missed Pete Lawlor terribly and would not want to return to Atlanta unless he was there.

  * * *

  I SPOKE TO MRS. STROEBEL on Saturday morning. She told me that Paulie was no longer in intensive care and probably would be discharged after the weekend.

  I promised to drop by later for a visit, at about three o’clock. When I arrived, Mrs. Stroebel was sitting by Paulie’s bed. As soon as she looked up at me, I could see from the concern on her face that there was a problem.

  “He developed a high fever around lunchtime. There is an infection in one of his arms. The doctor tells me it will be all right, but I worry. Ellie, I worry so.”

  I looked down at Paulie. His arms were still heavily bandaged, and he had several IVs dripping from overhead pulleys. He was very pale and kept turning his head from side to side.

  “They are giving him an antibiotic plus something to calm him down,” Mrs. Stroebel said. “The fever makes him restless.”

  I pulled up a chair and sat beside her.

  Paulie began to mumble. His eyes flickered open.

  “I am here, Paulie,” Mrs. Stroebel said soothingly. “Ellie Cavanaugh is here with me. She came to pay a visit.”

  “Hi, Paulie.” I stood up and leaned over the bed so that he could see me.

  His eyes were glazed with fever, but he tried to smile. “Ellie, my friend.”

  “You bet I am.”

  His eyes closed again. A moment later he began to mutter incoherently. I heard him whisper Andrea’s name.

  Mrs. Stroebel clasped and unclasped her hands. “That’s all he talks about. It preys on his mind so much. He is so afraid they will make him go back to court. No one understands how much they frightened him last time.”

  Her voice was rising, and I could see that Paulie was becoming agitated. I squeezed her hand and nodded at the bed. She understood what I meant.

  “Of course, Ellie, thanks to you, everything will be fine,” she said brightly. “Paulie knows that. People come into the store and tell me that they look at your Website where you show what a bad person Rob Westerfield is. Paulie and I looked at the Website last week. It made us very happy.”

  Paulie seemed to calm down a little, then he whispered, “But, Mama . . . suppose I forget and . . .”

  Mrs. Stroebel seemed suddenly flustered. “No more talk, Paulie,” she said abruptly. “Go to sleep. You must get better.”

  “Mama—”

  “Paulie, you must be quiet now.” She laid a gentle but resolute hand on his lips.

  I had the distinct feeling that Mrs. Stroebel was uneasy and wanted me to leave, so I got up to go.

  “Mama . . .”

  Mrs. Stroebel sprang up with me, blocking access to the bed, as though she were afraid that I would get too close to Paulie.

  I couldn’t imagine what was upsetting her. “Tell Paulie good-bye for me, Mrs. Stroebel,” I said hurriedly. “I’ll call you tomorrow to see how he’s doing.”

  Paulie was beginning to talk again, tossing restlessly and mumbling incoherently.

  “Thank you, Ellie. Good-bye.” Mrs. Stroebel began propelling me to the door.

  “Andrea . . .” Paulie shouted, “don’t go out with him!”

  I spun around.

  Paulie’s voice was still clear, but now his tone was frightened and pleading. “Mama, suppose I forget and tell them about the locket she was wearing? I’ll try not to tell, but if I forget, you won’t let them put me in prison, will you?”

  34

  “THERE IS AN EXPLANATION. You must believe me. It is not what you think,” Mrs. Stroebel sobbed to me as we stood in the corridor outside Paulie’s room.

  “We have to talk, and you have to be absolutely honest with me,” I said. We couldn’t do it then, though—Paulie’s doctor was coming down the hall.

  “Ellie, I will call you tomorrow morning,” she promised. “I am too upset now.” Shaking her head as she turned away, Mrs. Stroebel struggled to regain her composure.

  I drove back to the inn on automatic pilot. Was it possible, was it remotely possible, that all this time I had been wrong? Had Rob Westerfield—and, indeed, his whole family—been victimized by a terrible miscarriage of justice?

  He twisted my arm. . . . He came up behind me and punched me in the neck. . . . He said, “I beat Phil to death, and it felt good.”

  Paulie’s response to the verbal attack of Mrs. West-erfield’s housekeeper had been to hurt himself, not someone else.

  I could not believe that Paulie had been Andrea’s murderer, but I was sure that years ago Mrs. Stroebel had kept him from telling something he knew.

  The locket.

  As I drove into the parking lot of the inn, I was overwhelmed with a crushing sense of the irony of what was happening. No one, absolutely no one believed that Rob Westerfield had given Andrea a locket and that she had been wearing it the night she died.

  But now the existence of the locket had been validated by t
he one person who would be terrified to publicly admit any knowledge of it.

  I looked around as I got out of the car. It was a quarter past four, and the shadows were already long and slanting. What was left of the sun was passing in and out of clouds, and a light wind was blowing the remaining leaves from the trees. They made a rustling sound along the driveway, and in my edgy frame of mind they sounded to me like footsteps.

  The parking lot was almost full, and then I remembered that I’d noticed preparations for a wedding reception when I left this afternoon. To find a space I had to drive around the bend to the farthest section of the parking area, putting me out of sight of the inn. It was getting to be a chronic state of mind, the feeling that someone might be hanging around, watching me.

  I didn’t run, but I moved quickly as I made my way through a row of parked cars toward the safety of the inn. As I passed an old van, the door suddenly slid open, and a man jumped out and tried to grab my arm.

  I began to run and got about ten feet but then tripped on one of the extra-large moccasins I’d bought to accommodate my bandaged feet.

  As one of the shoes flew off, I felt myself falling forward and frantically tried to regain my balance, but it was too late. My palms and body caught the worst of the fall, and literally every ounce of breath was knocked out of me.

  The man was immediately down on one knee beside me. “Don’t scream,” he said urgently. “I’m not going to hurt you; please don’t scream!”

  I couldn’t have screamed. Nor could I have gotten away from him and run to the inn. My entire body was shaking in reaction to the severe impact with the hard surface of the ground. My mouth open, I gulped air in great shuddering gasps.

  “What . . . do . . . you . . . want?” At last I was able to get out those few words.

  “To talk to you. I was gonna e-mail you, but I didn’t know who else might see it. I want to sell you some information about Rob Westerfield.”

  I looked up at him. His face was very close to mine. He was a man somewhere in his early forties, with thin, not particularly clean hair. He had a nervous way of sliding his eyes around like someone who expects to have to make a run for it at any moment. He was wearing a visibly worn lumber jacket and jeans.

  As I began to struggle to my feet, he retrieved my moccasin and handed it to me. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he repeated. “It’s risky for me to be seen with you. Hear me out. If you’re not interested in what I have to say, I’m out of here.”

  It wasn’t rational perhaps, but for some reason I believed him. If he had wanted to kill me, he’d already had all the chance he needed.

  “Are you willing to listen?” he asked impatiently.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Would you sit in my van for a couple of minutes? I don’t want no one to see me. The Westerfields’ people are all over this town.”

  I could vouch for that, but I wasn’t about to get in his van. “Say what you have to say out here.”

  “I have something that maybe might stick Westerfield with a crime he committed years ago.”

  “How much do you want?”

  “A thousand bucks.”

  “What have you got?”

  “You know that Westerfield’s grandmother was shot and left for dead about twenty-five years ago? You wrote about it on your Website.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “My brother, Skip, he went to prison for that job. He got twenty years. He died after he’d served half his time. Couldn’t take it. He was always kind of sickly.”

  “Your brother was the one who shot Mrs. Westerfield and burglarized her home?”

  “Yeah, but Westerfield planned it, see, and hired Skip and me to do the job.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “Westerfield was heavy into drugs. That’s why he dropped out of college. He owed people big time. He’d seen his grandmother’s will. She’d left one hundred thousand dollars directly to him. The minute she croaked, it would be in his pocket. He promised us ten thousand dollars to do the job.”

  “Was he with you that night?”

  “Are you kidding? He was in New York at a dinner with his mother and father. He knew how to cover his bases.”

  “Did he pay your brother or you?”

  “Before the job he gave my brother his Rolex as security. Then he reported it stolen.”

  “Why?”

  “To cover his tracks after my brother was arrested. Westerfield claimed he met us in a bowling alley the night before the old lady was hit. He said Skip kept eyeing his watch, so he put it in his bag when he started bowling. He told the cops that, when he went to get his watch out of the bag later, it wasn’t there and we weren’t around. He swore that was the only time he ever saw Skip or me.”

  “How could you have known about his grandmother without him telling you?”

  “There’d been a big write-up about her in the paper. She gave a wing to a hospital or something.”

  “How did your brother and you get caught?”

  “I didn’t. My brother was picked up the next day. He had a record and was nervous about having to shoot the old lady. That was the reason he was there, but Westerfield wanted it to look like a burglary. Rob didn’t give us the combination of the safe because only the family knew it, and that would have given him away. He told Skip to bring a chisel and knife and scratch up the safe like he tried to force it open and couldn’t. But Skip cut his hand and took off his glove to wipe it. He must have touched the safe because they found his fingerprint on it.”

  “Then he went upstairs and shot Mrs. Westerfield.”

  “Yeah. But nobody could prove I was there. I was the lookout and drove the car. Skip told me to keep my mouth shut. He took the rap, and Westerfield got off scot-free.”

  “So did you.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, I know it.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “How old was Westerfield?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Didn’t your brother try to implicate Westerfield?”

  “Sure. Nobody believed him.”

  “I’m not certain about that. His grandmother changed her will. That hundred-thousand-dollar direct grant was taken out of it.”

  “Good. They let Skip plead to attempted murder with a twenty-year sentence. He could have gotten thirty but he was willing to plead to a max of twenty. The D.A. agreed to the deal so that the old lady wouldn’t have to testify at a trial.”

  The last of the sun had gone totally behind the clouds. I still felt shaken from the fall, and now I was cold, too.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Alfie. Alfie Leeds.”

  “Alfie, I believe you,” I said. “But I don’t know why you’re telling me this now. There’s never been a shred of evidence to prove that Rob Westerfield was in on that crime.”

  “I have proof he was involved.”

  Alfie reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “This is a copy of the diagram Rob Westerfield gave us so that my brother could get into the house without setting off the alarm.”

  From another pocket he took out a pencil flashlight.

  Standing out in the windy parking lot was no place to study a diagram. I looked at the guy again. He was an inch shorter than I am, and he didn’t look particularly strong. I decided to take a chance. “I’ll get in the van, but only if I sit in the driver’s seat,” I told him.

  “Have it your way.”

  I opened the driver’s door and looked around. There was no one else there. The backseat had been flattened down and contained what looked like paint cans, a drop cloth, and a ladder. He had gone around to the passenger side. I slid in behind the wheel but did not fully close the door. I knew that if this was a setup, I still could get out pretty fast.

  In my job as an investigative reporter I’ve had to meet a number of unsavory characters in places I wouldn’t have chosen to visit otherwise. As a result, my sense of self-preser
vation has become well developed. I decided that allowing for the fact that I was cloistered with a man who’d been part of a murder plot, I was as safe as I could get.

  When we were both inside the van, he handed me the paper. The thin beam of the flashlight was enough to enable me to recognize the Westerfield house and driveway. The garage-hideout was even depicted. Below the buildings there was a precise layout of the interior of the mansion.

  “See, it shows where the alarm is and gives the code to disarm it. Rob wasn’t worried that disarming the alarm would draw attention to himself because a lot of handymen and other employees knew the code too. There’s the layout of the ground floor, the library with the safe, the stairs to the old lady’s bedroom, and the section off the kitchen that was the maid’s apartment.”

  There was a name printed on the bottom of the page. “Who’s Jim?” I asked.

  “The guy who drew this. Westerfield told Skip and me that he did some work on the house. We never met him.”

  “Did your brother ever show this to the police?”

  “He wanted to use it, but the lawyer they gave him said forget it. He said Skip had no proof Westerfield gave it to him, and the fact that he even had it just made Skip look bad. He said being that the safe was downstairs and the way the old lady’s bedroom is so clearly marked only helped prove that Skip was planning to kill her.”

  “Jim could have corroborated your brother’s story. Did anyone try to find him?”

  “I guess not. I’ve kept the map all these years, and when I saw your Website, I figured this is one more thing you might investigate and hang on Westerfield. Have we got a deal? Will you give me a thousand bucks for it?”

  “How can I be sure that this isn’t something you drew up yourself to get money from me?”

  “You can’t. Give it back.”

  “Alfie, if the lawyer had looked into this guy, Jim, and had told the D.A. about him and had shown the D.A. the sketch, they would have had to investigate the information seriously. Your brother might have gotten a better sentence in exchange for his cooperation, and Westerfield might have paid for his crime too.”

  “Yeah, but there was another problem. Westerfield hired both my brother and me to do the job. The lawyer told my brother that if the cops would end up arresting Westerfield, he could make his own deal and tell the D.A. that I was involved. Skip was five years older than me and felt guilty about getting me into it.”