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AFTER RETTA BREEZED out of the office to look into the matter of the unknown witness, I couldn’t help comparing her with Frances Habedank. They used the same techniques to get what they wanted: charm, sex appeal, and the assumption that everyone should submit to their inevitable rightness. Frannie seemed more calculating, however, while Retta was just...Retta.
I was surprised a few minutes later when Gabe came through the front door. He usually went to the back, where he was likely to find Dale and gain the moral support he needed to interact with me or Faye. Though we employed him from time to time to help out at the agency, Gabe was painfully deferential. I guess the memory of being locked in the trunk of your own car stays with a person.
Meeting my eyes for a millisecond he said, “Hey, Ms. Evans.”
“Hello, Gabe. What’s up?” I gestured at a chair, and he sprawled into it like a three-year-old, legs splayed and spine curled so that only his shoulders made contact with the back.
“Did you hear about the guy that got killed yesterday?”
“I did.”
“Word around town is the Grammar Nazi did it.”
Even if there was no evidence to connect the two events, rumor was bound to. Frannie probably wasn’t helping with her insistence she could “prove” the scenario she’d chosen to believe.
Gabe got right to his request. “The Nazi didn’t kill anybody, Ms. Evans. Can you help me prove it?”
Folding my hands on the desk, I asked, “How do you know the person is innocent?”
“She wouldn’t do something like that.”
She?
I felt stunned, but Gabe went on. “I—I know the person, and she just wants to make things better. She might have been there that night, but she’d never hit anybody on the head like that.”
“That’s how the man died?”
“Yeah. I talked to Morrie Ansel, and his sister’s married to one of Chief Neuencamp’s guys. He said there was rust and grease in the wound, so the weapon was probably a metal tool of some kind.”
My thoughts went briefly to the image of a bludgeon connecting with someone’s head. It was sickening, but then, murder always is.
Gabe said “she’d never hit anybody.” Was he hinting he knew my secret? “Why are you so certain it wasn’t the, um, grammar person?”
He looked at me aslant, and I knew he suspected me. How had the most clueless person I knew discovered my secret?
My trepidation dissipated when he said, “Because the Grammar Nazi is Mindy.”
I had to swallow twice before I could speak again. “Your wife?”
“They said the blow that killed that guy came from above, so the killer was probably over six feet tall. It can’t be Mindy. She barely breaks five feet with her shoes on.”
“But you think she’s the Grammar Nazi.”
He nodded. “I’m pretty sure.”
I leaned my elbows on the desk. “Why?”
“Well, she always says how great it is that somebody does something about the mistakes.” Gabe rubbed a knuckle under his nose. “When I said once it wasn’t his business, Mindy said, ‘It’s a bad example for the kids in town who are supposed to be learning how to use English correctly.’” Unconsciously Gabe used his wife’s piping tone and gestured in the prim way she’d have used to make her point. “She really believes that.” His brow furrowed. “Mindy’s smart too. She reads Shakespeare and Dickman and all those classic guys.”
“Dickens.”
A casual gesture granted my correction. “Yeah, him. She’s always correcting the TV people when they say something wrong.”
Been there, done that. “So she’s fastidious about proper English. How does that prove she’s the one correcting signs?”
The word fastidious puzzled him for a moment, but in the end Gabe skipped past it. “Twice in the last month I woke up in the night and she wasn’t home. The first time, I asked the next morning where she went, and she said she couldn’t sleep so she drove around for a while.”
The stuff of weak alibis everywhere.
“Monday night I woke up and she was gone again and so was the car. She came back an hour later, and I pretended I was asleep.” His expression turned glum. “I was worried, you know? Then yesterday we heard about the murder and how the Grammar Nazi was there. Mindy said it didn’t mean anything, but the way she said it, I knew. It’s her, and she’s afraid to tell anybody, even me.”
“I see.” Though Gabe’s conclusion was wrong, I had no idea why his wife would sneak out at night. Infidelity came to mind, but Mindy didn’t seem the type, and it wouldn’t do to say it out loud.
I offered what reassurance I could: maybe he’d been dreaming, maybe he was mistaken about how long she’d been gone, maybe she had a good reason, et cetera. In the end I agreed to look into it, and Gabe left, looking slightly less glum. Even if I’d confessed my guilt—to Gabe of all people—the question of where Mindy was sneaking off to would remain. The only way I could think of to relieve his mind was to ask Mindy herself.
Before I acted on Gabe’s problem, I put in an hour on the hunt for the embezzler, Mattias Bowker. Faye had traced him to Nebraska, but he’d moved on, so we were circling the state looking for credit card charges. There were none, which wasn’t surprising since he had plenty of stolen cash. We tried license plate sightings, but that was a difficult prospect. Our best results came from looking at Bowker’s cell phone use. Though it was a big mistake, the guy continued to use his phone. He had to know it could be traced, so he must have believed his crime hadn’t yet been discovered. Whatever his reasoning, he turned the phone on each night for a half hour or so.
We didn’t have the capability to triangulate and locate a phone the way police do. Neither did we have a way of hearing what was said in the conversations. What we could find out was who our suspect called each evening. The number traced to Tommy’s Bar, Allport, Michigan.
My own phone burbled, and Retta appeared on the screen. In typical fashion, she picked up the conversation pretty much where we’d left off earlier. “I think we should take the case.”
“Because?”
“If we don’t, they’ll get someone else. Who knows what a new detective will find out?”
“I thought of that, but—”
“It also gives us a reason to look into Steven Deline’s murder.”
“No, it doesn’t, Retta. That’s an ongoing—”
“I know, I know. We won’t step on Rory’s toes. If we don’t find the killer, the Grammar Nazi will continue to be a focus, which means you’re going to get caught.” She knew how much I hated the idea of my crimes being exposed. “Rory’s got other duties,” she went on, “and the state police don’t know the people involved as well as we do.”
Though it was tempting to go along, I made the virtuous argument. “We have a policy against nibbling at the edges of an active case.”
“Rory’s your boyfriend. He won’t mind.”
“I refuse to presume on our relationship.”
“Oh, pooh, Barbara Ann! That’s what relationships are for.”
“Maybe your relationships. Not mine.”
I pictured her eyes rolling a full one hundred eighty degrees. “Listen, Barbara Ann. Frannie Habedank is one determined woman, so a private investigator is going to be called in on this. I’ll bet Rory would rather work with us than some unknown P.I. from Detroit or Grand Rapids who’ll sneak about behind his back and try to make the police look bad.” She coughed lightly before adding, “You should probably talk to him about it tonight though, because I already told Frannie we’re on the case.”
