Drayco’s cellphone chimed out a Prokofiev ringtone, and the screen showed it was Benny Baskin’s number. Drayco almost didn’t answer at first. “Yeah, Benny, what you got?”
“Just giving you a chance to make some party plans tonight. Floozies, booze, whatever. We got a dismissal.”
“Of Maura’s murder charges?”
“Of your case in front of the board, dumbass. Or have you completely forgotten about that? Your record and reputation are back to Def Con 5. You can relax. Well, there’s the teensy bit about being on probation for six months. But as Carlotta Peggs told me in confidence, it was the only way to get Saul Bobeck on board. And Mayor Kozell will likely be ex-Mayor Kozell by then.”
“Oh, well, that’s good news, Benny. Thanks.”
“Your enthusiasm underwhelms. Thought you’d be thrilled. You want me to go back and tell ’em you’re really a serial killer?”
“Just a little distracted. Can you be ready to spring Maura if I find the real killer?”
“Since she hasn’t been charged with anything else like corpse desecration nor fraud, easy peasy.”
“I’ll get back to you, Benny.”
Drayco hung up and turned to Sarg, still seated in the passenger’s seat of Drayco’s car as they parked under a streetlight near Jerold’s old condo. “Looks like I don’t have to worry about working sans license.”
Sarg grunted. “Oh, I don’t know, it was fun thinking of you going rogue.”
“Maybe that would be more fitting. I’ve spent my career fighting crime and turns out I come from a long line of criminals. Think that evens the score on some cosmic balance sheet?”
“At least your family is more interesting than my lineage of car salesmen.”
Drayco glanced at the list of items in Jerold’s condo that Halabi passed along, then said, “I’m still worried about that missing gun.”
“Still not seeing why that’s important.”
“Maura said Jerold sounded very tense over the phone when he called her. I think it’s possible he already had a visitor, someone who knew him, knew Jerold had a gun and where it was. Then the visitor pulled it on Jerold to force him to call Maura to come over.”
“And thus frame her for the murder.”
“Jerold told Maura something cryptic about the two of them being ‘twin guns’ heading off for a trip to Nevada. The Nevada reference could be about gambling. Add in the ‘twin guns’ part, and it might have been him using a coded message to let her know what was going on.”
Drayco flipped the papers over to a different page. “The PD’s interviews with neighbors show one man thought he saw a car that night but didn’t have a description since it was dark and raining. They blew him off because they didn’t think it was related. Might be a long shot.”
“My favorite kind of shot. After Tequila shots. Where do we find him?”
They found the neighbor-witness, Vito Armas, at an apartment in the more rundown building across the street from Jerold’s. When he answered the door, he seemed reluctant to let them in for a chat. The belt Armas wore was fighting a losing battle to keep his pants up, and his shirt looked like a skeleton’s idea of what a human would wear at a costume party.
Drayco pointed to a mobile taco truck a block down the street. “Hungry?”
The man hesitated, then followed Drayco and Sarg, and they ordered burritos with habañero salsa. When Drayco asked the female server if they had any pineapple he could add to his, she wrinkled her nose and mimicked sticking a finger down her throat, making both Armas and Sarg laugh.
Armas wolfed his burrito down in only three bites and licked his fingers. Drayco looked at his foil-wrapped meal and handed it over. Armas didn’t hesitate this time. He grabbed the offering and peeled away the foil slowly as if it contained a rare treasure.
His Spanglish was better than Drayco’s Spanglish, so Drayco asked him in English, “We know the police talked to you about the night Jerold Zamorra was murdered. But we’re not the police. We’re just trying to make sure an innocent woman doesn’t hang instead of the real sinner.”
Armas washed down the last of his burrito with a Mexican coke and nodded.
“You said you thought you saw a strange car that night but don’t remember anything about it.” At least, Armas told the police he didn’t recall anything. More likely, didn’t want to recall anything, better to stay out of trouble.
Armas nodded.
Drayco continued, “But maybe there’s something you didn’t think was important. Or some little detail that may have stood out to you.”
Armas looked at the ground, and Drayco thought he was going to refuse to talk to them. But their witness was apparently deep in thought, concentrating on what he’d seen that night. He raised his head and looked at Drayco, then Sarg. “It was oscuro—dark. From night and rain. It was light.”
Sarg blinked his eyes. “It was dark and light at the same time?”
“No, no, sky dark, rain light.”
Sarg smiled. “I see. The car was dark, too, right?”
“Si. Gris.”
“I can understand a gray car would blend in with rain at night, Mr. Armas. Where were you at the time you saw this car?”
“In my truck.” He nodded at the condo parking lot across the street. “I pulled out. The road was one lane only. This car, it blocked my way. I honked.”
“Did it move then, Mr. Armas?”
Armas shook his head. “No. It waved me on.”
“The car waved you on?” Sarg looked at Drayco out of the corner of his eye.
“The hand did. The window rolls down half the way, a hand waves me around.”
“Was there anything unusual about this hand?”
Armas shook his head again. “I see it was a woman.”
Drayco tried to hide his excitement. “How could you tell it was a woman, in the dark?”
“The headlights. The hand was in my headlights. Wearing a shiny watch. Oro and rosa. No man’s watch.”
Drayco slipped a twenty into Armas’s hand, and Drayco and Sarg headed back to their car. Sarg waited until Drayco slid into the driver’s seat and all windows and doors were closed until he asked, “Why all the excitement over the watch?”
“You remember when we first talked with Rena Quentin? She was wearing a pink-gold watch.” Drayco filled him in on his talk with Lauralee.
“Ah. Well that fills in a few more holes.”
“And in the surveillance photos Brisbane sent me, there was a recent one of Rena. If she and Jerold had parted on such awkward terms, why the meeting in person, alone?”
“Didn’t she say she went to one of Jerold’s concerts recently? Maybe she was just remorseful as she said.”
“She would have been one among a crowd there. Meeting him alone that’s another matter.” Drayco added, “Oddly, the caramels were the kicker.”
Sarg raised an eyebrow. “I’m lost.”
“By her own admission, Rena is addicted to caramels. You may recall that in Jerold’s condo, he had a display of miniature weapons and security gear we thought was a TSA in-joke.”
“If not a joke, then what?”
“That little perfect replica of a Nikon camera? It was so unusual, I looked it up. They were prizes found inside Clibo candy. Rena told me at Jerold’s funeral she used to irritate him by bringing in Clibo candy she’d fallen in love with on a visit to Japan. If they were such hard feelings between them, thanks to the sexual harassment claims, why did he keep that camera in his condo?”
Sarg nodded. “Makes sense.”
“It gets better. In the box of effects Ashley delivered to Jerold the day he was murdered, there was a big box of caramels. Yet, in the list the police made of items in his condo after his death, it was missing. A normal thief would hardly take just candy.”
Sarg reached over into the back seat and hauled his briefcase over. He pulled out a folder with a stack of papers. “Here’s more reading material for you. Those police files. Wasn’t sure why you needed them, but the subjects make a lot more sense now.”
Drayco scanned the documents. “I suspected this after making calls to the coroners I told you about. But since the cases happened in different states and were considered accidents, they weren’t entered in any violent-crime databases. Certainly not the Bureau’s VICAP. And the police never had Rena as a suspect, so they didn’t think to track this down. Plus, the first case, Rena’s grandmother, happened forty years ago.”
Sarg peered over his left shoulder, read what Drayco underlined with his finger, then said, “Sweet Jesus.”
“I doubt it’s a coincidence.”
“Hell no. After Rena’s grandmother fell down the stairs, the coroner found a credit card stuck in her throat.”
“The theory was she had it in her hand since her purse was found near the body. When she tripped down the stairs, the card somehow got wedged there.”
Sarg gave him a skeptical look, and Drayco said, “Yeah, I know. But she was old, she had no enemies, no money, and there were no signs of assault, sexual or otherwise.”
Sarg pointed to another report. “And that one says Rena’s elderly ex-husband fell down some stairs—his wallet also conveniently located beside his body—and a credit card was found stuck in his throat. But it was after she’d divorced him, wasn’t it?”
“That was her pattern, a way to avoid suspicion. It was three years after she left her grandmother’s home that the grandmother was killed. Two years after she divorced her husband that he was killed—”
“And only one year after Ophelia and Jerold divorced. Why kill Ophelia though?”
“My guess is she thought Ophelia knew about her scheme with Jerold and was going to turn them in. Rena learned to adapt her methods to suit the occasion.”
“This doesn’t prove Rena killed Jerold.”
“The wagons are circling. I’d thought her father might be involved as a partner, but our little trip to see him ruled that out.”
“I see most of it. But why the card-in-the-throat thing?”
“Her mother’s body was found like that.”
“But her father told us he killed her in a drunken rage and doesn’t remember doing it. Or exactly why.”
“According to that police report in your hand, it was five-year-old Rena who found her mother dead with her mouth open and the card stuck there. It couldn’t help but make a huge impression. When she turned to her own homicidal ways, she must have copied what her father did. As to why she killed her grandmother, she told me the woman beat her.”
“Hates men too, I take it.”
“Or just likes controlling them. Barney Schleissman at the assisted-living home said Rena always likes to be in control. And Jerold liked domineering women. First Ophelia, then Rena.”
“The whole sexual harassment thing was just a ruse on Rena’s part?”
“Probably had consensual sex, but she turned it around to blackmail Jerold into going along with her plan. Plus, he was in debt, the TSA job didn’t pay well, and she probably told him he could make millions. Which he did.”
Drayco thrust the paperwork back into its folder. “Sad fact is, she didn’t need any of that lottery money after the pot of gold she got in her divorce. Must have been for the thrill of it all.”
Sarg tugged on his ear. “Why frame Maura?”
“When she thought Maura was threatening her little scheme, she wanted to make both Maura and Jerold pay for it. It’s probably why she stabbed Jerold in the groin.”
“She’s one clever, sick bitch, you know that?”
Drayco recalled Halabi’s account, that even though Ophelia’s head was bashed in with a baseball bat, she was still conscious when the ATM card was forced down her throat. Bleeding, in pain, possibly aware enough to be frightened, then the card slowly suffocating her. Poor, innocent Ophelia. Just like her Shakespearean namesake, collateral damage.
He said, “Benny Baskin would say there’s wiggle room for reasonable doubt. Though it might make that reference of Jerold’s, about going on a trip to Nevada, make more sense.”
“You mean he knew Maura wanted to go to Reno, and Reno was his way of saying Rena was there holding a gun on him? Could be.” Sarg grabbed the folder and threw it into the briefcase.
“It’s funny, but Rena was every bit as much a con woman as Maura. Maybe more. Pretending to be normal, respectable, even working for the TSA, all the while she was a cold, calculating psychopath.”
Sarg said, “We should call Halabi.”
Drayco whipped out his phone and dialed Halabi’s number.
The detective answered right away. “You must be psychic. I was going to call Agent Sargosian. That key you found in Jerold Zamorra’s condo. We finally traced it to a storage facility. Thought he might like to join us.”
Drayco told Sarg the address Halabi passed along, and Sarg started whistling the Peter Gunn theme as they drove away, down the same road where Armas had seen Rena the night Jerold was murdered.