Dark Waters, page 12
“Bring me crack,” he said wryly. Then he opened his office door. “Mr. Anspach. Good to see you again.”
Vincent Anspach turned and offered his hand. He was a big, rugged man, potbellied and sun-blasted. His shirt was open enough to show his salt-and-pepper chest hair. “Terrible thing about Garrett Bloom,” he said in a voice better suited to calling football plays. “Just awful. First those poor girls got kidnapped, and now this. I tell you, Madison’s just not safe anymore.”
“I thought you and Bloom didn’t get along.”
“Oh, I couldn’t stand the self-righteous little bastard, but I enjoyed having him around. He made things interesting.”
Ethan looked to see what might’ve been moved. All the paper on his desk had been shifted slightly. Luckily he’d thought to lock his computer, or all his files might be on a zip drive in Anspach’s pocket. The man had that sort of reputation. “What can I do for you?”
Anspach stepped close. “Ethan, I think we have a golden opportunity here. I know you’re charging ahead on that community center project, and that’s all well and good. But I think that property would better serve its neighborhood if it was developed commercially, don’t you?”
“I don’t have an opinion either way. I’ll keep building what I’ve contracted for until I’m told differently. But it’s not zoned for commercial use, I do know that much.”
“Zoning issues are a problem, yes, but not an insurmountable one. But tell me—how far along would you have to be before changing it from a community center into, say, a shopping center would be more trouble than it’s worth?”
“Garrett Bloom’s not even cold yet, Vincent,” Ethan said. “Maybe you should wait awhile to pounce.”
“Come on, Ethan, you know how the world works. If somebody doesn’t step in, then those Indians’ll raise such a stink that the land will just go to waste. I heard they found arrowheads or wampum beads or something there. If it falls apart now, you get nothing. Is that what you want in this economy?” When Ethan didn’t answer he continued, “So how much time to repurpose what you’re doing?”
“There’s a lot of variables to consider,” Ethan said evasively. Anspach had a valid point, but Ethan wouldn’t be hemmed in so easily.
“Oh, I know, I know. There always are. But just roughly.”
“It would have to be pretty soon. And I’d need new plans and permits, and that zoning issue would have to be addressed.”
Anspach smiled and patted Ethan’s shoulder. “That’s fine. And would you have any problem with that on, say … moral grounds?”
“I have no problem with honest work of any sort.”
“It would be honest, I assure you. And profitable. I’ll be in touch about this, okay?”
After Anspach left, Ethan sat down and considered what was underfoot. If the project changed direction, it wouldn’t really affect him; he could build a strip mall as easily as a community center. But it would certainly change the public’s perception of his company, since being associated with Anspach would attract a shadier kind of attention than he liked. The question was, did it matter? Work was work, and with things as they were, if he could get it, he should. Shouldn’t he?
He stared out the window at the capitol and pondered this. Then he picked up the phone. The lone sandwich had not subdued his hunger, and he felt the need for company that didn’t make him feel like he needed to wash his hands afterward.
———
“REBECCA WAS PRETTY upset,” Helena said as she wiped down the tables after closing. She and Rachel were alone in the diner, the late-afternoon sun making them both sweat profusely. The air conditioner ran only when there were customers, and then only when it was absolutely necessary. The old building was about as well insulated as a colander.
“Yeah,” Rachel agreed. She assumed Becky was asleep; she certainly hoped she was. “She was in love with the guy who got killed.”
“I gathered that. He was married, wasn’t he?”
Rachel shrugged. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Do you think Becky had anything to do with—”
“No!” Rachel snapped. “For God’s sake, Becky used to campaign to keep rabid dogs from being euthanized. She couldn’t kill anything.”
After a long moment of silent work, Helena said, “So do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?”
Rachel propped the mop against the counter. Helena was her best friend, and her sole female confidant. If she couldn’t share something as basic as an ill-advised tryst, how deep could their friendship truly be? “Man troubles, too, I’m afraid.”
Helena blew a strand of hair from her face. “Still debating whether to call Ethan Walker?”
“No, that’s not it.” Rachel looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. “I got caught up in the moment last night, and did something I shouldn’t have.”
“Was this with someone we both know?”
“No. And it doesn’t matter who, anyway.”
“Maybe not in the grand scheme of things, but I’m going to obsess over it until I find out. Do you really want me to wonder if every man who comes in the diner might be the one?”
Rachel smiled. “Fair enough. It was … Kyle Stillwater.”
Helena’s eyes opened wide. “The loincloth guy? The one Michelle can’t stop talking about?”
“Yeah.”
“When did that happen?”
“Last night.”
“Was he here?”
“No, I ran into him while I was out … jogging.”
“And you went back to his place?”
Rachel looked down now, at the scuffed toe of her sneaker. Her head throbbed with the effort of remembering the details, as though her brain was trying to eliminate them before she could express them. “That’s what’s trashy about it. We just did it in a park. On the ground. And we didn’t go all the way. We got interrupted. But I sure would have.” Even if it meant dying, like the old woman said, she thought. I wanted it that badly.
Helena’s eyes stayed wide open. “Wow. Wow. That doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“I know.”
“And he hasn’t called you today?”
Rachel blinked at the question. She hadn’t even thought to check her cellphone. She pulled it from her pocket and, like a spear through her heart, saw the name of the person who had called last night, while she was writhing under Kyle Stillwater.
Ethan.
Helena saw her face. “So he did call?”
“What? No, he didn’t.”
Before she could close the phone, Helena snatched it away. “Then let’s see who did make your jaw hit the floor.”
Rachel grabbed for it. “Give me that!”
Helena fended her off and looked up in mock surprise. “Why, Ethan Walker called you. Twice.”
Rachel grabbed the phone, snapped it shut, and stuffed it into her pocket.
The two women stood in silence for a long moment. At last Helena said quietly, “Rache, I saw how worried Ethan was when you disappeared. He’s a good man.”
Rachel said nothing.
Helena leaned close so their shoulders touched. “Well, you’ve been pretty levelheaded your whole life. I suppose you’re entitled to one episode of sluttiness.”
“So you think it was slutty?”
“I can’t say. You can have sex with whoever you want. Only you know if the reasons were slutty.”
Rachel pushed her slightly with her shoulder, and Helena responded in kind.
Rachel thought about Helena’s observation. It wasn’t slutty, she decided. It was … compulsory. She could no more have stopped herself than an addict like Jimmy could’ve walked away from a full needle of heroin.
Still, that knowledge did nothing to ease her mind. Or other areas that were growing more insistent as the day wore on.
MARTY WALKER LOOKED around Garrett Bloom’s office in the dim illumination filtering through closed blinds. It looked standard: desk, filing cabinet, bookshelf, photos on the wall. The only sign of anything unusual was the yellow police tape across the door.
“Didn’t you guys do this already?” a wiry young man said from the outer office. His name was Knox; he had curly hair and a scraggly beard, and crossed his arms nervously.
“We did,” Marty said, “but I want to dig a little deeper.”
“I wish Rebecca was here,” Knox said. “She knows where everything is. I hardly ever got to come in Mr. Bloom’s office.”
Marty stood in the middle of the office, making a methodical circuit with his eyes. He hoped anything out of place would catch his attention. “Rebecca’s his secretary?”
“Assistant. If you call her a secretary she’ll either hit you or cry.”
“What’s her last name?”
“Matre. M-A-T-R-E.”
Marty did not visibly react. He ate breakfast at the diner often and had heard Rachel mention her sister, Becky. And it had also come up earlier that day, during the routine questioning that went with any investigation.
Marty turned on the light. The added illumination showed the remains of fingerprint powder on every smooth surface, but no fresh clues jumped out. “Did he have a day planner or an appointment book?”
“I don’t know,” Knox said. “Do you want me to see if I can find Rebecca’s phone number?”
“No,” Marty said. “Just stay there for a minute while I look around.”
“Shouldn’t you have a warrant?”
Marty patted his jacket pocket. “You’ve been so helpful I haven’t had to wave it around.”
He pulled on rubber gloves and went behind the desk. He picked up the photograph of Bloom with a woman in a sundress: Mrs. Bloom, with essentially the same expression she’d had after learning of her husband’s demise. Was she sour enough to cut out her husband’s heart and nail his hand to a tree?
A calendar book was open to a date two days ago. Marty made note of all the appointments, knowing he’d have to call each person and find out what the meeting involved. Then he flipped ahead to the next day and wrote down all those appointments too.
“Was he working on anything pressing that you know of?” he asked Knox.
“That community center. Everything seemed to revolve around that lately.”
Marty looked at what Bloom had written. “This says ‘tribal council meeting’ for tonight.”
“Really?” Knox said, with what seemed to be genuine surprise. “That’s actually kind of odd. He never said anything about that.”
“So you don’t know which tribe?”
“I’d assume the local Karlamiks. You know, the ones who run the bingo hall just outside town.”
Marty made another note. The Karlamiks were a thoroughly modern band of Native Americans who employed top-notch PR in their quest to enter the lucrative gaming market. So far the state had refused permission to build casinos in Dane County, saying it was too near the capital, but that hadn’t stopped the Karlamiks from opening an elaborate bingo parlor that had all the bells and whistles of a casino.
He put his notebook away. “There’ll be some men here shortly to box up all these papers. Can you give them a hand?”
“Everything?” Knox said dubiously.
“We’re looking for a murderer.”
“I know, it’s just …” He looked away and scratched his unshaven neck.
Marty’s eyes narrowed. “There’s something Bloom keeps secret, isn’t there?”
Knox said nothing, but he pointed to the picture of Bloom and his wife. Marty picked it up, looked more closely, and found the CD stuffed into the frame between the picture and the backing board.
MARTY CLOSED THE folder on his desk, leaned back in his chair, and stared up at the ceiling.
Garrett Bloom, the great social activist, was a fraud.
The notes and correspondence he’d printed from the hidden CD proved beyond a doubt that Bloom’s whole drive to build a community center was built on a deliberate deception. First the community center would be finished, with the surprise blessing of someone hired to represent the long-departed Lo-Stahzi. A ready-made story describing how they were actually the ancestors of the modern-day Karlamiks was already prepared, conveniently ignoring the utter lack of evidence for it. Then just before the center was to open, ancient artifacts would be discovered. This would cause the building to be classified as on tribal land, and the resurrected Lo-Stahzi would use the existing Karlamik PR organization to gain public sympathy for this once-forgotten tribe. Once that happened, a lawsuit would be filed, and the settlement proposed. Then the building would be retrofitted into a tribal casino located smack-dab in the middle of Madison.
And Garrett Bloom, in the center of this web, would reap profits at every turn—first as the savior of the local neighborhood, then as the “evil” developer trying to hang on to land that rightfully belonged to the Lo-Stahzi, before finally coming around and supporting the casino settlement. It was a reversal worthy of professional wrestling.
So what had gone wrong?
Kyle Stillwater, the Native American actor hired to pose as a Lo-Stahzi, was supposed to bless the project, not dispute it. Yet the man who showed up did not match the description of the actor, even taking makeup or special effects into account. Had Bloom been double-crossed by his coconspirators, represented in the notes by numerical codes?
Marty had no answers. And at the moment it didn’t matter, because the trail to Bloom’s apparent murderer led in a completely different direction. Yes, Kyle Stillwater threatened him, but so did someone else. Someone with a much more mundane motive and plenty of opportunity.
He locked up the files, then prepared to meet Ethan for dinner.
———
IT WAS ALMOST time for Martyn Park to close, so Patty tried to stay out of sight behind a tree. She often wondered how the city thought it could close a wide-open park with no fences or other ways to separate it from the rest of the world. Would an alarm go off if you stepped on the grass after eleven o’clock?
She felt like a spy, or a ninja. She wore a black T-shirt and black sweatpants, and wore her dark hair down around her face. There was probably no need for such an elaborate getup, but it added to the fun.
Not that her day had been much fun so far. After the scene with Rachel and her sister, Patty had gone home and cried herself to sleep. Then she woke up, wrote a few lines of a new song, and sat in the bathtub as the sun went down.
Rachel doesn’t need that kind of psychodrama, she thought as she soaked. No one does, but especially not someone like Rachel. She deserves a sister who cares about her, and supports her, and is there for Rachel—and not just when she needs something.
She needs a sister, Patty thought with sudden realization, like me.
Then she remembered the lake spirits.
So now she stood in the darkness, looking down at the water lapping and smacking against the erosion-blocking rocks. The wind was strong, and the waves more violent than they’d been earlier. Patty knew the water was barely knee-deep here, but in the dark it looked bottomless and empty, a void waiting to swallow the unwary.
She peeked around the tree. The park was deserted, and a police car drove slowly down Yahara Street. Where were they when I was being kidnapped? Patty thought. They’ve fixed the barn door after the horse has been rescued.
When the car was safely out of sight, she kicked off her shoes, pushed up her pants legs, and sat down on one of the rocks, her feet dangling in the water. Once again, the smell reminded her of Dewey, and she smiled as she recalled their night together.
Then she closed her eyes and cleared her mind as much as possible. “I want to meet Rachel’s spirits,” she said aloud, since spoken intent carried more power.
Then she waited.
Until a shadow cast by one of the streetlamps fell over her.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
POSTED BY THE Lady to the Lady of the Lakes blog:
The Lady needs your help. I want to find the rather, ahem, attractive gentleman who disrupted the ceremony at Olbrich Park over the weekend. I promise confidentiality, but I’d like to interview him for this blog. I know my readers, at least the female ones who appreciate a fine specimen of manhood, would love to know more about him. So if you’re out there reading this, Kyle Stillwater, drop me a line. You have my word it’ll go no further.
“THERE IS NO record anywhere of a Kyle Stillwater who matches the description of the man we saw,” Marty said. “There’s an actor with the same name, but he doesn’t look like our man. We interviewed him, and it wasn’t him.”
Ethan and his brother sat in the Irish restaurant on the south side of the square. It was early evening on a weeknight, so they had the place mostly to themselves. Their server—a college boy with dyed-black hair—watched them from the bar in case they needed anything. They were his only customers.
“If he’s an actor, maybe he was using makeup or wigs or something.”
“You were there. Did he look like he had on makeup?”
“No,” Ethan had to admit.
“It was probably an alias he got out of the phone book, or somewhere online. He needed a Native American–sounding name.”
“And nobody has any photographs of him?”
“Not one that clearly shows his face. A lot of the people we talked to said their cameras or cellphones fritzed out on them. Even the newspeople didn’t get anything substantial.”
Ethan frowned. “That’s weird.”
“Yeah.”
“And he’s your prime suspect?”
“He’s one of them. Everyone is until they’re weeded out. Stillwater claimed to be a Lo-Stahzi, and Bloom was killed in imitation of a Lo-Stahzi sacrifice, so that puts him high on the list, if you’re looking for something blatant.”
“And are you?”
Marty shrugged. “Experience has taught me to look a little closer to home.”
Ethan took a sip of beer. “How about Vincent Anspach? Is he on your list?”
“Sure.”
“How high?”
Marty put down his utensils and narrowed his eyes. “Not very. He and Bloom didn’t get along, but they’re in politics, so nobody gets along. Why?”
