“Looks just like Jimmy,” Alan informed me unnecessarily.
Alice Blanchard reacted as if she’d heard him, her face losing its defiance, deflating into resignation. She eased the door shut behind her, protecting her child from our conversation, and motioned for me to sit on a wooden chair. She settled into the porch swing.
I tried to piece it together. “You took those checks from the bank so—”
“No!” She cut me off with a fierce stare. “I made some mistakes issuing the accounts and I was embarrassed to tell anyone, so I brought them home. Later I found out there was a log for me to sign, so people found out anyway.”
“But then…”
“Then his name came into the bank on the last day I was there. Jimmy Growe. He applied for a credit card. When I saw it I just stared, I couldn’t believe it. I brought his application home and put it in the same drawer. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, and then I decided I wasn’t going to do anything. I went upstairs to throw away the application, and I saw the starter packets. That’s when I decided to send him a check for a thousand dollars.”
“I don’t get it,” Alan confessed.
“So you sent him the checks to…” I spread my hands. I didn’t get it, either.
“Look, Mr. uh…”
“McCann,” I informed her after an awkward pause. I found myself ridiculously disappointed that such a pretty woman didn’t remember who I was.
“Jimmy never paid a dime to help with Vicki. When my family found out I was pregnant, I was completely cut off. Do you understand how hard it is to raise a baby by yourself? The church found me a place to live and gave me a job in the nursery, or I would have had to go on welfare.”
“Did Jimmy know about your daughter?”
“No! He dumped me before I knew I was pregnant.”
I could feel Alan straining as hard as I was to comprehend how it all fit together.
“So those checks you sent…” I tried again.
Her stare was cold. “They’re as worthless as he is. And every time he got one, it was a reminder of what he did to me, and the obligations he was avoiding.”
“That makes no sense whatsoever,” Alan stated, sounding almost awed.
“Mrs. Blanchard, if you’ll excuse me for saying it, but don’t you think that’s a little subtle for Jimmy? I’m not sure he’s capable of grasping the whole picture, there.”
She stared at nothing. “It’s not for Jimmy that I sent them.”
“She loved him,” Alan blurted suddenly. “It’s not about the girl, it’s about him leaving her.”
I stirred. “I guess I understand,” I said, though actually I guessed I really didn’t. Alan’s epiphany wasn’t helping, either. I cleared my throat. “But when he cashed them, he got into a real bind.”
Her eyebrows arched. “Mister, I really couldn’t care less about that.”
I chewed on my lip a little, thinking it over. I decided she probably did care, that knowing Jimmy had gotten himself in trouble was a bonus for her in this weird payback scheme.
“Mrs. Blanchard…”
She watched me in what I could swear was anticipation.
“Don’t you think that Jimmy has a right to know his daughter? He’s matured over the past few years.”
“No, I do not,” she replied smoothly. “We have a family here, now. I married William three years ago. He’s talking about adopting Vicki someday. Our lives are on track.” She gestured to the house, clearly a big step up from her circumstances of a few years ago. “William wants us to have a child of his own.” She absently gazed over my shoulder, pulling on an earlobe.
“Still, for Jimmy, it has all turned out to be very expensive.”
I let the statement lie there until she understood where I was heading. When she did her eyes widened slightly, then became milky with contempt. “How much?”
“I’d say thirty-five hundred. We’ll get some money out of the motorcycle he bought.”
“And for you?”
“Pardon?”
“How much is your personal fee?”
“Oh. No, that’s not what this is about. I just need to recover my employer’s money, that’s all.” I didn’t see the need to mention that Milt had already paid me $500 for this recovery.
She reached for her purse and wrote a check in quick, angry strokes. “This means I’ll never see you again, and you won’t tell Jimmy about Vicki.”
“Not unless you send Jimmy more checks.”
“You have a despicable profession, Mr. McCann.” She flung the check at me and left me there on the porch.
“I’m going to guess that was not your typical repo assignment,” Alan observed as we drove away from the Blanchard house.
I was quiet. “What is it?” Alan demanded.
“Well, you’re a father, Alan, did you hear what she said? William is ‘thinking’ of adopting Vicki. He wants a baby of ‘his own.’”
“Yeah,” Alan grunted. “You’re right.”
“Sounds like the bank president is a jerk.”
“That still doesn’t connect the dots for me with her sending the checks,” Alan complained. “What was the point of that?”
“I thought you said you understood her!”
“No, I said that I get that she bears a grudge against Jimmy because he broke her heart.”
I sighed.
“What is it? Why are you acting so moody?”
“Alan, Jimmy is my best friend in the world.”
“Ruddy, you cannot tell him about Vicki. That’s none of his business.”
“None of his business? He’s got a daughter! You of all people should understand that!”
“What I understand is that we cannot start messing in other people’s lives,” he lectured.
“Oh, that’s just great, Alan. You come into my head, you start calling me “we,” when I sleep at night you’re driving around in my truck, and you think it’s a bad idea to mess with other people’s lives? Can you not experience irony in there, Alan?”
He adopted a hurt silence.
“Why do I have to be the one to handle all this crap?” I asked the world.
By the time I reached Kalkaska, he was back to psychoanalysis. Apparently being inside my head made him feel he could get inside others’. “Wexler is the evil one. He hit me with the shovel, and he’s the one who shot me.”
That didn’t sound right to me. “But where’s his motive? Burby had motive.”
“I just can’t see Burby doing something like that.”
“You sound as if you like the guy.”
“Ruddy. Come on. He’s an accessory to murder. To my murder. Of course I don’t like the guy.”
“Plus, he’s sleeping with your wife,” I reminded him.
“Thank you for that. Truly. Thanks ever so much.”
I pushed open the door to the Black Bear and halted, looking around. The atmosphere inside the place reminded me of Nathan Burby’s funeral home, subdued, even mournful. Kermit and Becky stood next to each other behind the bar, watching me with fearful eyes as I walked up to them. “What is it?” I asked.
Becky held out a handful of bank inquiries. “We got more of these today than we got new business to replace them.”
I looked back and forth between Kermit and Becky. “They had to refund more than they got in new business today. The operation ran at a loss,” Alan explained to me.
“We lost money running numbers,” I translated. They both nodded. I took a step toward Kermit. “How could this happen?”
He retreated, inching behind Becky. “We only got in two thousand, and we had to give back forty-eight hundred,” he stammered.
“I don’t mean the math, Kermit,” I snapped. “What’s going on here? Did the psychic have a flock of deadbeats or something?”
Kermit shrugged. “We don’t really have any way of knowing what happened.”
“Did you ask the people who send the numbers?”
“We don’t get to ta
lk to them, Ruddy,” Becky explained. “They just fax us the computer printouts.”
I glared at Kermit. “You call them. Now. We need to figure out what’s happening here.”
“Stop it!” Becky said shrilly. “Stop pushing everyone around.”
“What are you talking about? This is his deal, he should get control of it.”
“You’re not the boss of this, Ruddy. You’re not the boss of me!” her eyes flared angrily.
“I’m not … Becky, I’m your older brother.”
“So what?”
“She’s really angry,” Alan murmured, as if I couldn’t tell.
I took a breath. “I just think Mom and Dad would have wanted me to look after you,” I said reasonably.
“Look after me?” Becky’s face flushed. “Why do you think they left the business to me? Because they knew you couldn’t run it. You were in prison.”
I shook my head sadly.
“The truth is, Ruddy, the shame of what you did, that’s what killed them.”
There. The ugliest thought I’d ever had, the worst notion ever to occur to me, coming from her lips. I stared at her and saw no pity, nothing but anger, cold and cruel. I whirled on Kermit, my finger like a gun barrel. “This is all because of you!”
“Get out, Ruddy. Just get out!” Becky shrieked at me.
I spun and angrily kicked a chair out of the way. In the truck, I vented on Alan. “Didn’t I tell her Kermit’s scheme was crazy? Didn’t I tell her there was something wrong with running numbers?” I raged.
“Maybe it is just a bad day. All businesses have bad days.”
“Come on, Alan. It has turned my own sister against me!”
He was quiet for a minute. “So your parents died when you were in prison?”
“Yeah.” I felt the heat leaking out of me. I realized I was driving toward East Jordan, but didn’t turn around. Maybe I’d move there. “First Dad, then my mom.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well—there you have it.”
“Sounds like you and Becky have some things to work out about it.”
I didn’t reply.
“I’m just suggesting that the two of you need to talk,” Alan elaborated after a pause. “Okay? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
“I really can’t talk right now, Alan,” I whispered hoarsely. I gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead.
For want of anything better to do, I drove to the East Jordan Library and camped out in front of the microfiche machine. We found another story about Alan in the “Still Missing” category, though vague reference was made to police seeking to question him in relation to the fatal firebombing at the nursing home. Alan was incensed. I combed backward, seeking stories about the PlasMerc factory, but most of the ink from that time was devoted to the aftermath of the nursing home fire, the worst disaster in the county’s history. I glanced through the profiles of the victims, most of them elderly people, and stopped dead at one name: Liddy Wexler.
“My oh my,” I breathed.
Liddy Wexler had been survived by her only son, Franklin. Her family was best remembered for a huge ranch they owned in the 1940s, much of which had been parceled off, but of which 240 acres still remained in the family.
Another piece of the puzzle.
“I don’t see what this has to do with me,” Alan complained from his position in the center of the universe.
“It’s interesting, don’t you think? If Liddy Wexler hadn’t been in the fire, her son wouldn’t have owned the ranch, and wouldn’t have made the money from the sale to the factory.”
“And that ties him to Nathan Burby how?”
“I don’t know.”
“And motivates him to murder me why?”
“Look,” I said agitatedly, “it’s a clue. You’re killed. A month later, a nursing home is firebombed, and one of the people who dies there just happens to be the mother of your murderer. There’s a chunk of land involved in her estate, and it winds up six months later being sold to a company that sticks a big factory on the site.”
“Are you saying Wexler blew up the nursing home?”
I rubbed my head with my hands. “I don’t know.”
“I wish you’d warn me before you’d bring your hands up in front of your face like that. It startled me,” he noted.
I slapped my hand against my forehead.
“Hey!” he protested.
“I’ll touch my face any damn way I want,” I informed him. I realized that several people in the library, startled by the sound of the slap, were staring at me as I ranted to myself. I smiled and pointed at the microfiche machine as if its presence explained why I’d just hit myself in the face. When they looked away, I stood up.
“What now?” Alan wanted to know. He sounded disappointed we weren’t going to waste any more time trying to find stories about him in the newspaper. I delayed responding until I had closed the library doors on all the quiet eyes that had been tracking me as I left.
“The only person who has given us any information we can use is Katie,” I reasoned. “So probably the best thing to do is to just go ask her if she can think of any connection between Wexler and Burby.” I felt pleased with myself—a perfectly acceptable excuse to call on Miss Lottner.
Alan was silent while I started my truck and backed it out of the library parking lot. “Ruddy, I don’t know how to say this…”
“But based on past experience I’m going to guess you’ll say it anyway,” I observed.
“It’s just that Katie didn’t exactly seem, well, receptive to you last time you saw her.”
“Alan, if I went through life only talking to people who were glad to see me, I wouldn’t be much of a repo man, now would I?”
I pulled out my cell phone from the glove compartment and dialed Katie’s number. A woman answered on the second ring. “Hello, may I speak to Katie, please?” I requested formally.
“May I tell her who’s calling?” came the cautious reply.
“Yes, it’s Ruddy McCann. From…” I trailed off. Nothing I could use to complete the sentence seemed very promising. The repo agency? A bar in Kalkaska? Prison?
“Oh hi, Ruddy. It’s me. I thought that was you.”
“Katie! Hi!” I chuckled, feeling my brain cells dribble out my ears until I was completely drained of anything else to say. I sat there, snorting witlessly.
“Use your words, Ruddy,” Alan encouraged.
“I thought you were your mother. I mean, answering the phone.” There, two complete sentences.
“No, she and Nathan went out of town. They said it has all been a little much.”
“I’ll bet it has,” Alan muttered.
“Ah. Well, look. I’m sorry, about, you know, the last time I saw you.”
“Why are you sorry?” I thought I could hear the hostility returning to her voice, and cursed myself for reminding her.
“Well, you just seemed … I just thought it sort of ended badly.”
“And you are apologizing to me?” she said in disbelief. “Dwight threw you up against the car and practically broke your arm, and you say you’re the one who is sorry?”
I frowned. “Well, he didn’t throw me, I leaned there myself. I wasn’t fighting back, or anything.”
There was a long pause, and then, to my surprise, she burst out laughing. “That is such a guy thing to say.”
“I guess it is.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry. And I wasn’t mad at you. Dwight and I…” She sighed. “I told him … well, let me just say that the two of us don’t belong together. Never did, really.”
“Yes!” Alan cheered. “See? What did I tell you?”
“I’m so sorry about your engagement breaking up; that must be hard,” I said properly, giving myself points for sensitivity.
“Oh, I bet you are,” she replied sarcastically.
My heart decided it was time to turn up the volume on its pounding a little bit, and for another long
silence, that’s all the noise we made between the three of us. What did that mean? That she knew of my interest? And approved?
“So are you calling from the bar? It seems awfully quiet,” she finally asked.
“No, actually, I was just in East Jordan, and I thought I should call you.”
“You’re here?”
I looked around. “Yeah. Down the street from the library, actually.”
“Oh.” She thought about it for a bit. “Come on over, then.”
23
Katie, Me … and Her Dad
I imagined her in her travel trailer but she was standing in the house doorway, framed in yellow backlight, so graceful and feminine my mouth went dry as I pulled up in my truck. Her eyes seemed lit with a mischievous humor, and they never left mine as I stepped inside. “So you split your time between a bar in Kalkaska and the East Jordan Library?” she asked lightly.
I felt myself blushing. “Oh, well … I was looking up things from when your dad disappeared.”
As soon as I said it the light went out of her eyes and I wanted to shout Wait, come back! at her.
“I sold this house once. They’ve remodeled the kitchen since then,” Alan noted, sounding like a Realtor.
“What sort of things were you looking for?” Katie asked, her voice a bit flat.
I shrugged, oh so not wanting to talk about this. “Did you remodel your kitchen?”
“What?” She looked around, bewildered.
“It looks modern, like maybe you had it worked on,” I explained lamely.
“The countertops and cupboards,” Alan supplied helpfully, as if I cared about any of this. I wanted to slap my forehead again.
Katie offered me a beer and I eagerly accepted, but she seemed stiff as she got one for each of us. I sat on her couch and she settled into a chair, curling her legs underneath her body as she regarded me warily.
“Why would you be doing that, looking into my dad?”
“Ask her about other stories; there must have been some more coverage that we didn’t find,” Alan instructed. I could feel myself hating him.
I took a breath. “I just want to understand him, that’s all. Ever since the dream, I can’t get him out of my head.”
Alan had already heard that particular joke and didn’t laugh. Katie was watching me steadily.