“I spent that whole night in the room alone.” Thomas Zink was a very standard-issue-looking man, and he was sitting in a café of some sort, from the look of the place on Maxie’s laptop screen.
We were video conferencing with Tom, as he insisted I call him, because he was back in Iowa and driving out to him was completely out of the question. Sitting in my backyard at a picnic table I leave out during the warm weather, I was enjoying the last school day of the year and the last full day I would have these five guests in my house—if by enjoying you mean sitting around watching a man on a computer screen explain how he hadn’t decided to take a strange woman back to his hotel room while on a sales trip to New Brunswick, New Jersey.
“I went to this microbrewery a couple of blocks from the hotel, and I had a burger and a beer sampler,” he said. “I sat at the bar because a guy by himself at a table is pathetic. I didn’t talk to anyone but the bartender the whole night. I watched a Mets game on TV, and I don’t even like the Mets.”
“How was the burger?” I asked.
“Actually, very good. But I don’t think I can tell you anything else that can help you, Ms. Kerby. I’m sorry.”
“He’s trying too hard to get you off the phone,” Paul warned me. With this much sunlight outdoors, he was even harder than usual to see, but I could hear him just fine. “He’s hiding something, all right.”
After the confrontation the night before with Keith Johnson, which you’d have thought would clarify matters, we were even more in the dark than ever about Johnson’s murder and by extension Richard’s. Everybody seemed to be hiding something. The trick was going to be figuring out what and why. That had led us to our only current lead: Tom Zink. Although Richard was back upstairs analyzing the data to trace Johnson’s pyramid scheme.
“Well, maybe you can, Tom,” I said to the screen. Talking to a screen is weird, but it’s better than hopping on a flight to Des Moines and driving for another hour to get to Ames. I was adjusting to life in the current century, although Melissa would certainly have told me I was at least seven years behind the curve. “Sometimes it’s the things you don’t know you remember that make the most difference.” I like to make general investigator-y pronouncements to make the other person believe I actually know what I’m doing.
“The things I don’t know I remember?” Tom didn’t believe I was as effective as I did.
“Sure.” I glanced over at Paul, who at least didn’t have the same totally perplexed expression on his face that Tom Zink did. He wasn’t going to be much help now that I’d started this silly gambit. “I’m not talking about hypnotism or anything. I just want you to walk me through that evening and tell me as much as you can remember about what you did.”
Tom opened and closed his mouth, apparently censoring himself from what he really wanted to say. “I told you. I went to this microbrewery, had a burger and a sampler of their beers. Then I walked back to the hotel, went up to my room, watched some TV and went to sleep. That’s all there was to it. It wasn’t until the next day when the detective came in to ask me about the iron that I even knew anything had happened. I didn’t even know there was an iron in the closet at all.”
“Okay, the microbrewery. Do you remember the name?” I knew perfectly well there was such a business called Harvest Moon on George Street, a short walk from the hotel in which Richard Harrison had been murdered.
“I honestly don’t. It had a big yellow sign out front.” That meshed with the pictures I’d seen of the George Street place online.
“Was it called Harvest Moon?” I asked. You can jog someone’s memory, whether he’s lying or not, with a few unimportant details sometimes. Paul taught me that.
“Yeah, that sounds right.” Tom wasn’t terribly forceful about the statement, but it wasn’t something he especially cared to dispute.
“And you didn’t talk to anybody there except the bartender?” I asked. I would have put this month’s mortgage payment down that he had, but I needed to get Tom to that revelation.
“No. He gave me the beers and the food. I didn’t even talk to a waitress.”
“Perhaps it’s time to be a little more direct,” Paul said.
I had been planning to do just that. Tom was feeling too comfortable about my questioning. No doubt Richard would say there was no chance I’d get my client off with wimpy questions like the one’s I’d been asking. So I moved a little closer to the screen.
“If I told you that Harvest Moon has security cameras pointed at its bar and its tables, would you still insist you didn’t talk to anyone the whole time you were there?” I had no idea at all whether such cameras existed, but then I wasn’t really telling Tom they did so much as mentioning them as hypothetical devices. I sleep just fine at night, thanks.
The question did seem to make an impact on Tom Zink. He looked from side to side as if trying to determine if anyone could hear what was being said. Since he was wearing headphones, it was a pretty safe bet no one besides Tom could hear what I was saying. His own reply would be a different story. I was hoping it would be the true one.
“Look, I was at the bar alone and had no intention of talking to anybody,” he said. I thought there would be more, but he stopped at that point and looked at me.
“We don’t always do what we intend,” I said at Paul’s prompting. Paul is so much more polite than I am. It’s the Canadian upbringing, I think.
Tom looked around again. The café he was sitting in, from my limited vantage point, did not seem particularly crowded. I think this was just a gesture Tom had seen guilty people do in the movies. It worked brilliantly; he looked quite guilty.
“I’m just saying, it wasn’t my idea,” he insisted. I didn’t care what was his idea; I cared what had happened, but I suppressed the urge to tell him that specifically. I took a sip of the lemonade I’d brought outside with me and tried very hard to determine whether the figure a little to my right was Paul, Richard, or an especially large sea gull. I decided it was Paul. Richard had gone back to work with Maxie, and the sea gull idea just didn’t help me at all so I discarded it. “I wasn’t looking for anything to happen.”
“But something did,” I suggested. Maybe I could speed this process along. A nice lemonade on a lovely June afternoon was fine, but my daughter would be home in six hours and would stay for two months. I had stuff to do.
Tom’s voice dropped to a whisper, and I had to lean in to hear it because I had not been intelligent enough to bring headphones like he had. I asked him to repeat himself.
“Yes,” he now emphasized a little too hard. “I don’t care if you’re recording this. I had to come clean. Keeping a secret even for just a couple of weeks has been killing me.”
Wow. Paul was always talking about the power of the right question, and I seemed to have hit on one without half trying. Maybe I really should try being an investigator for money sometime.
“What happened?” I asked in as respectful a tone as I could muster.
“I was sitting at the bar waiting for my dinner to show up and trying the dark amber beer, the third one from the left in the sampler,” he began. That he remembered, yet the name of the restaurant had escaped him. “I wasn’t even looking around the room. Some guys do that, you know, but I don’t.”
What some guys did or didn’t do was not something I wanted to discuss just now. “Okay, so you’re a good guy. What happened?”
“Well, this woman walks over to where I was sitting and takes the barstool next to me,” he said. “The first thing that sprung to mind was, did I leave my wallet in my jacket pocket? Easiest place to be stolen from.”
I thought it was an interesting way to go through life, thinking like that, and I’m from New Jersey. But I said, “She didn’t steal your wallet, did she?”
Tom shook his head. “She didn’t steal anything, as far as I knew. Except I guess she ended up stealing that iron.” Bingo. Now we could place the mysterious woman in Tom’s hotel room.
Paul advised me not to leap directly on that information but to build toward it. “Did she tell you her name?” I asked. If it was Erika Johnson, this would be easy.
It wasn’t easy. “She said her name was Ashley. I didn’t get a last name.”
I knew better than to ask if Tom had taken any photographs of his one-night “friend” from the microbrewery. “What did she look like?” I said.
He looked down. At first I thought it was out of embarrassment, but then I realized he was just trying to remember. “She had blonde hair, but I’m pretty sure it was a wig,” he answered after a moment. “She had big brown eyes. She was pretty, but she didn’t hit you over the head with it. If she hadn’t come over to me in the bar, I might not have noticed her at all.” Tom seemed to realize what he was saying and looked around the café again. As far as I could tell, nobody was looking at him in shock.
The description he gave us hadn’t really rung any particular bells. “None of the women involved in this case are blonde,” Paul said. “But any one of them could have been wearing a blonde hairpiece of some kind to better disguise herself.”
I thought but did not say that I didn’t remember any blue-eyed women we’d spoken to, so anyone could be a suspect. It was possible Robin Witherspoon’s eyes were blue. Somehow I found it difficult to believe she’d killed Keith Johnson in the bathtub in her own bed-and-breakfast. But stranger things have happened, and I’ve been there for most of them.
We had to move the narrative along. “How did the meeting at the restaurant turn into a . . . meeting in your hotel room?” I asked Tom.
He sat up a little straighter, not enough to move the top of his head off my computer screen, but enough that I could see he was wearing a dress shirt with no tie and an American flag pin on the lapel of his blazer. I wondered if Tom was running for office in Ames. “I want to be clear about this,” he said forcefully. “Nothing happened when we got to my hotel room.”
I had as much interest in Tom’s marriage as my ex-husband had in ours, but it was a source of leverage over him, and I needed that right at the moment. “We’ll get to that in a minute,” I said. “What I’m asking now is how you ended up there.”
The skin around Tom’s lips tightened a little. He didn’t want to talk about this. I couldn’t say as I blamed him. But it’s very difficult not to answer a question when it’s been posed to you. “We stayed at the bar and had a couple more drinks,” he said. “We didn’t stay nearly long enough for the bar to close, but it was getting expensive, and I don’t like drinking that much. So I said I was going back to the hotel. And Ashley said she would come with me. It just seemed natural to continue the conversation. I guess I’d had more to drink than I thought, because it never occurred to me that was unusual, but it had never happened to me before.”
I could believe that. “So once you got back to the hotel, what happened?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, I get that, but what actually happened?”
“Oh. Well, I thought we’d just part at the entrance to the hotel, but Ashley came right in with me. Then I figured she’d take off when we got to the elevators, because I told her I was going up to my room and didn’t want another drink. She just nodded like that was the most natural thing in the world and followed me into the elevator.”
Paul was suddenly behind me, paying more attention to the screen than he had before. He clearly wanted to see if there were any signs that Tom Zink was lying, and he’d know better than I would.
“What did you think when she followed you to your room?” I said.
“I was thinking I’d better figure out a way to get rid of her or I’d get in trouble with my wife,” Tom answered. “I mean, this was exactly the last way I would have expected the evening to end up. We got back to the room, and I said it had been nice meeting her but I was going to go to bed now. And Ashley said great and asked if she come in for a minute. I just didn’t know how to tell her no without being rude.”
“So rather than be seen as impolite, you let this woman you’d just met into your hotel room,” I said.
“Pretty much.” He looked embarrassed. I understood that.
“Once she was inside?” It was like pulling teeth with this guy to find out what happened when an attractive woman insisted on being let into his hotel room. I’ve known men who would tell you this story if you passed them in the street.
“She asked to use the bathroom, and that’s when I was worried, you know? You always see those things in the movies where the woman says she wants to freshen up and comes out looking like she wants something else, if you know what I mean.” For the record, I knew what he meant. “I walked over to the desk and turned on my computer so she’d think I was going to be working before I went to sleep. I checked a couple of e-mails, but I wasn’t paying much attention to them, and then Ashley came out, thanked me, and left. She didn’t even shake my hand. Just like that, a different woman once she opened that bathroom door.”
“And that must have been when she stole the iron,” I said.
Tom shrugged. “I guess. It was in the closet in the hallway outside the bathroom, they said, but maybe I wasn’t looking when she took it. All I know is the next morning at six, the police were banging on my door asking about the iron.” I knew he was going to tell me again that he hadn’t even known there was an iron in the closet, but there was just no way to stop him. “I didn’t even know there was an iron in the closet.”
Paul suggested I send Tom photographs of Cassidy, Erika, Miriam Harrison (you never know, but she didn’t strike me as the bombshell type), Adrian Johnson, and just for good measure, Robin Witherspoon to see if he recognized any of them as “Ashley.” He said he would take a look but asked that I send them quickly because he didn’t want his wife to see him looking at pictures of women, one of whom might have come up to his hotel room and . . . stolen an iron.
We disconnected the call, and I asked Paul to find Maxie because I am a computer idiot and Maxie could put together the pictures we needed quickly. He flew off in his search, and for a glorious moment, I was left alone in my backyard on a wonderful spring day.
It didn’t last. I couldn’t even complain because it was Abby Lesniak who came by, and I actually ask for guests to come to my house. You can’t argue with the customers. I breathed in deeply when I saw Abby walking from the direction of the beach because she had asked me for a favor and I had failed her out of my own sense of social awkwardness. I didn’t want to be Betty asking Jughead if Archie really liked Veronica. Or something like that.
Abby didn’t look especially displeased, but she trudged up the dune a little and stopped at my table, which had a nice umbrella in it to block the sun when you wanted that. At the moment, I was perfectly fine with the sun. But I wasn’t sure how Abby felt about me.
Before she could speak, I held up a hand. “I know, Abby. I know. I haven’t spoken to Mr. Lewis yet, and that’s my fault. I’m sorry if I haven’t done everything I could to make your vacation all it could be. It was just a very difficult thing for me to do, and frankly, I kept putting it off because I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. I can’t apologize enough.”
Abby’s eyebrows knit a little. She pointed at the chair next to me. “May I?” she asked.
I nodded and Abby sat down.
“Alison,” she said, “I was being unfair when I asked you to talk to Mr. Lewis for me. That’s not something you should have to do as a host. I was just as uncomfortable as you—more—to think about it, and I figured I could just get someone else to do it. I thought you wouldn’t have a stake in it so it would be easy for you. But if there was ever going to be anything between Mr. Lewis and me, it was either going to happen or it wasn’t, and as it turned out, it didn’t happen. That’s because I didn’t say anything myself. I’m sorry I put you in that position.”
“No, no.” I was going to prove to Abby that I was the jerk here no matter what. “You asked me as the host of your vacation to do something to make it more enjoyable, and I didn’t do that. I failed you and I’m sorry.”
Abby laughed. “Do you realize we’re just trying to convince each other that it was our own fault?” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you what: I’ll forgive you if you forgive me. How’s that?”
We agreed on that plan and shook hands, and Abby went back into the house to shower off the sand. The beach is lovely in June, but the ocean is still really cold. A warm shower was probably going to feel good.
I didn’t even get the moment of solitude this time because Paul and Maxie were floating down to the table before Abby made it all the way to the French doors. Maxie was carrying her own laptop, which had not left her possession since the night before.
She didn’t even take a breath because, let’s face it, she didn’t need one. “I sent that guy the pictures of everybody we think might have killed Richard,” she said. Maxie isn’t one for niceties. “I even sent him separate pictures of them with blonde wigs put on their heads so he could have a better look.”
“What did Tom say?” I asked.
“He e-mailed you,” Paul said. “Take a look.”
It takes a while for my Stone Age laptop to do pretty much anything, so we waited around while I checked for new e-mails. Sure enough, there was one from Tom Zink.
I can’t be sure. I only saw her for a little while and I was drinking. But none of these women look like the one I saw that night. The closest is the one in the middle, but even she probably isn’t the one I’m thinking of.
“Which picture did you put in the middle?” I asked Maxie.
“I did it in a star pattern, with two on top and two on the bottom, one in the center between the two rows,” she answered. “Did that with the wig pictures too, in the same order.”
“I’m not asking for your process,” I said. “Which picture was in the middle?”
Maxie looked to Paul. She doesn’t remember names when she actually cares who people are.
“Erika Johnson,” Paul said.