I would have been in a considerably better mood the next morning if Quinn had showed up at my place the night before like he said he would. He’d texted somewhere around midnight and said he was still at the office and would be there all night and probably wouldn’t be going anywhere the next day, either, except to follow up on any leads he might uncover in Dean McClure’s murder. Instead of enjoying some quality time (and a whole lot more) with my main squeeze, I’d slept alone that Monday night. That is, when I wasn’t lying wide awake thinking.
About the way Dean McClure’s skull looked, all bashed in and bloodied.
About the car in McClure’s garage.
About that old bottle that had been brought to the cemetery by a man I didn’t know.
A man whose house I’d visited with the intent of breaking and entering.
A man who’d been murdered.
That much thinking wasn’t good for anybody. Was it any wonder that I was crabby and out of sorts that Tuesday morning?
As it turned out, not even throwing on my leopard-print raincoat before I left the apartment helped cheer me. When I dragged into my office (almost on time for a change, but then, I hadn’t slept, so I couldn’t oversleep), rain pounded my window, and the scene outside it was appropriately gloomy. Clouds the color of gunmetal perched on top of the trees, and fog snaked around tombstones and drifted past mausoleums in wisps that looked the way most people who aren’t in the know about these things – lucky them – think ghosts do.
‘It’s a perfect day to file. You won’t be out in the cemetery today. Not in this terrible weather.’ In spite of her own personal perkiness, in her gray suit, Jean Tanneman fit right in with the whole gloomy mojo. She met me just inside my office door. ‘If we get started right now, we’ll be done before you know it.’
‘Forget it.’ I slipped out of my raincoat and draped it across the back of my guest chair, then tossed my purse in the bottom drawer of my desk and plunked down in my chair. In honor of the weather, my mood, and the grim thoughts that pounded through my head, I’d worn black pants, a creamy colored shirt and a black blazer to the office that day. It was chilly in there; I hugged my arms around myself.
‘No filing,’ I told Jean. ‘Not today. I’ve got other things to think about.’
‘Never put off until tomorrow what you can get done today.’ Hands clutched at her waist, she gave me the kind of smile mothers reserve for very naughty children. She was at the end of her rope, her expression told me, but she could easily be jollied along. If only I’d do what she said. ‘Yes, it’s an old saying, but a wise one. In fact—’
‘Put a sock in it, Jean!’ I leaned forward and tried for a growl that came out sounding more like a whimper. Blame it on my lack of sleep. Just so Jean knew I meant business, I gave her a narrow-eyed glare. ‘I’m not filing today. You got that? I’m not working on the speakers’ bureau today.’ To prove this, I scooped up all the files pertaining to the bureau that Jean had insisted I keep on my desk so that I could snap to and get working on requests, and I shoved those files in my top desk drawer. ‘And I’m not returning any phone calls, either,’ I told her and as long as that desk drawer was open, I dropped all those pink message slips inside, too, then slammed the drawer shut.
‘I’ve got other things to worry about, so you can take a hike.’
‘Well, really, Miss Martin!’ She sniffed like her ghostly little nose smelled something nobody on this side of the Other Side could possible detect. ‘If that’s the way you feel—’
‘It is. And I’m the boss, right?’
Jean’s pointy chin rose an inch or two. ‘I have never been comfortable with all this newfangled equal rights for women nonsense. Men have always been in charge. Yes, women often do the important administrative work that supports them. But a woman as boss—’
‘But I am the boss, right?’ My hands flat against my desktop, I rose to my feet. I was way taller than Jean, and I looked down at the top of her hair-sprayed-within-an-inch-of-its-life beehive. ‘That means I get to tell you what to do. And I’m telling you …’ Oh, what I wanted to tell her! I somehow controlled myself. ‘Jean Tanneman,’ I said instead, ‘I’m the boss, and I hereby order you to take the rest of the day off.’
‘Off? On a Tuesday?’ If she wasn’t already dead, she would have gone as white as a snowcap. ‘I don’t know … I mean … what would I possibly do?’
‘I don’t care what you do.’ I made a shooing motion toward my door. ‘Just go do it somewhere that isn’t here. Go on. It’s your day off. What do you do … what did you used to do on Saturdays?’
‘I always spent a few hours at the office early in the morning, then went to the grocery store.’
‘And Sundays?’
‘Church,’ she answered instantly. ‘Then the paperwork I brought home from the office.’
I groaned. Back when I’d first met Jean, she’d agreed to help me out around the office if I made sure there were pink flowers on her grave once in a while. Turns out the woman craved the romance of roses because, when she was alive, she’d had zero when it came to a love life.
Now I saw why.
‘There are plenty of ghosts around here,’ I told her. ‘Can’t you go …’ I wasn’t exactly sure what I was advising her to do when I wiggled my fingers and waved my hands. ‘Can’t you incorporeal types get together and talk? Or have a few ghostly drinks or something?’ I thought about the day before when Eliot Ness and Chet Houston had walked off chatting like old friends. ‘Hey, Eliot Ness is around. I bet he was an organized kind of guy. Maybe you two could discuss filing systems or alphabetizing stuff or—’
‘Eliot Ness? You mean like Robert Stack? In the Untouchables TV show?’
I had no idea who this Robert Stack guy was, but the way Jean suddenly twinkled like a schoolgirl told me I was onto something. ‘Yeah, that Ness. Check over by his monument. He could be over there. Go on.’ I waved again, this time toward my door. ‘Get lost.’
She did. In a poof like a raincloud that dissipated and disappeared in the gust of air that resulted when Ella opened my office door.
She glanced around. ‘I thought you had someone in here with you. I heard you talking.’
I patted the phone on my desk. ‘Telemarketer. Imagine them having the nerve to call me here at work when I have more important things to do.’
That day, Ella had obviously decided to defy the weather gods. She was wearing a pink pantsuit and white beads and, had she stepped a little more lively, she would have reminded me of the Easter Bunny.
Instead, she took a couple hesitant paces into my office, looking all around as she did. ‘Well?’ she said.
‘Well?’ I looked where she was looking, at my desk and the bookcases and the file cabinets. There was nothing different about them, nothing that hadn’t been piled and stacked and tossed on them just like it had all been piled and stacked and tossed the day before. ‘Are you looking for something?’ I asked her.
‘No, no.’ She shook herself and hurried the rest of the way into the office, still glancing around as she did. ‘I just thought … well, he did say it was a surprise. Have you looked in all your desk drawers?’
‘Looked for what?’
‘Well, I don’t know. Like I said, it was supposed to be a surprise. I thought of flowers, of course, or candy, though you young girls, you aren’t all that impressed with candy, not the way we were when we were young and a boy would come around with a box of chocolates. That was always the height of romance!’
‘And calories,’ I reminded her.
Ella laughed. ‘Well, yes, I suppose that’s why no one does it anymore. Everyone is so weight conscious. So …’ She bent at the waist, the better to look around at the other side of my desk. ‘If there are no flowers and there is no candy, maybe there’s something else? Like a little box? You know, the kind from a jewelry store? The kind that might have a diamond ring in it?’
I flopped back down in my chair. ‘What are you talking about?’
Ella sat down in my guest chair. The one that didn’t have my raincoat chucked over it.
‘I just thought …’ When she sighed, those white beads winked in the light of the overhead fluorescents. ‘Maybe he changed his mind.’
‘He being …?’
She laughed. ‘Quinn, of course! Who else would leave a small box from a jewelry store for you?’
A little background here: when my mother was hiding out in Florida from the humiliation of my dad’s arrest, Barb and Ella had somehow hooked up and become fast friends. Their favorite topic of discussion was me.
It looked like nothing had changed since Mom had come back to town.
‘Quinn and I are not getting married,’ I told Ella.
As if I’d started talking another language, her nose wrinkled and her top lip curled. ‘Not ever?’
‘No, not not ever. But not soon. And besides, I wouldn’t want to marry anyone who left an engagement ring in my desk drawer. That’s a totally lame way to propose!’
She smiled that soft, understanding smile of hers. ‘I suppose you’re right. It’s not exactly romantic. But he did say he wanted to surprise you and … well, I don’t see any surprise.’
‘Quinn said he wanted to surprise me? When?’
‘This morning!’ Ella settled back in the chair. ‘He came into the office just as I arrived. In fact, he got here so quickly, I wondered if he’d been sitting outside somewhere waiting for me to show up. And he said—’
‘This morning?’ I thought back to that text message from Quinn, the one in which he said he was stuck at the office and would be for who knew how long. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, of course I’m sure, Pepper. I got here around seven. I needed to look over some budget projections, and I thought if I had some quiet time to myself before anyone else arrived, I could get more done. And like I said, no sooner was my key in the door of the building than Quinn showed up.’
‘And he came inside with you?’
‘I couldn’t leave the love of your life out in the rain!’ Ella laughed. ‘Of course he came in with me, and I told him I had to get busy and get working and he said not to worry, that he was just going to pop into your office and leave a surprise for you. Of course I imagined it would be something terribly romantic, but …’ Her shoulders rose and fell. ‘Maybe I heard him wrong. I had a headache last night and I didn’t get much sleep and it was pretty early, and I hadn’t had a cup of Yerba Mate yet.’
Ella’s choice of herbal tea aside, what she said didn’t make much sense. ‘Well, he sure didn’t leave anything for me,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re sure he came in here?’
She thought about it for a second. ‘That’s what he said he was going to do, but of course, I can’t say for certain. I went into my office …’ This time, that rise and fall of her shoulders turned into a full-blown shrug. ‘I just assumed he’d do what he said he was going to do.’
‘But he didn’t. And then he left.’ I mumbled these words to myself and grabbed my phone.
‘I’m going to find out what’s going on,’ I told Ella.
‘Well, don’t tell him I told you. I mean about the surprise. Maybe part of the surprise is that he wants you to be surprised about not getting a surprise. You know, so he can surprise you when you’re not expecting the surprise. That would be just like him, wouldn’t it?’ I guess this all made sense to her because she was smiling when she left my office.
I was not smiling when I called Quinn.
Or when he didn’t answer the phone.
Or when I left the message that asked what was going on because he said he couldn’t leave his office and I’d heard that he had.
Done with that, and not feeling one bit better about my love life or about the murder of Dean McClure and the theft (again) of Eliot Ness’s ashes, I pulled out a legal pad and hoped that if I made a list of some sort, the pieces of the puzzle that was the last twenty-four hours would start to fall into place.
It actually might have.
If I could have thought of anything to write on the list.
I drummed my pen against the yellow paper. I checked for text messages on my phone and found one from my mother that said, ‘Got the tickets!’ and did not cheer me one bit. I spun around in my chair, hoping that spinning might jar loose a thought in my brain that actually might help.
It didn’t, but when I turned back around, there was a flurry of ashes in the air in front of my desk.
‘You disappeared last night,’ I grumbled. ‘What was the deal? If you hung around, you would have seen the—’
‘Thirty-eight Buick in the garage. Yes.’ The fuzzy cloud of ashes moved over, as if Ness had taken a seat in my guest chair. ‘I wondered how long it would take you to find it.’
‘You knew about it? And didn’t mention it?’
‘I saw it right before you did. There wasn’t time to mention it. What do you make of it?’ he asked.
‘You’re the detective.’ I tossed my pen down on the desk and sat back. ‘You tell me. The guy shows up here at the cemetery in that big-ass car of his, he leaves me a package—’
‘Did he?’
I realized that though Ness had come into the administration building with me the day before, he hadn’t been around when Jennine had told me about my visitor and the package. And he was long gone with Chet Houston by the time I opened the package and found the old bottle.
‘He brought …’ I looked into the garbage can near my desk, thinking that I’d show Ness the wrappings the package had come in, but the can had been emptied. ‘He brought me a package,’ I explained instead. ‘And there was nothing inside it except an old bottle.’
Like he was thinking this through, Ness was quiet for a few moments. ‘If we could examine the wrappings, we might be able to determine where the package came from.’
‘Apparently it came from Dean McClure.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Ness chewed this over. ‘Can I see it?’ he finally asked.
‘The bottle? Well …’ I remembered that mortifying call from my mother and Quinn’s reaction to it, and I cringed. ‘The bottle got dropped. It broke into about a million little pieces.’
‘What kind of bottle was it?’
I shrugged. ‘A bottle. Just an old bottle.’
‘Color?’
‘Brown,’ I said.
‘Label?’
‘Yeah, it had one, but really …’ I thought back to the whole incident. ‘It all happened really fast, and I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention. There was no letter, though, nothing from Dean McClure that said why he wanted me to have the bottle.’
‘If he was the one who sent it.’
‘You mean he might have been—’
‘Just the messenger, yes. Now you’re thinking like a detective!’
‘It doesn’t help much.’ I had a feeling he knew this, but I figured it didn’t hurt to point it out. ‘No matter who sent that package, it doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone want me to have an old bottle?’
‘Maybe it depends on what kind of old bottle it was,’ Ness suggested.
Maybe I was finally thinking like the detective he thought I was, because I thought I knew what he was getting at. Our maintenance staff carries walkie-talkies, and I had one, too, so that I could communicate with them when necessary. I dug mine out of the desk drawer and turned it on.
‘Wally. Wally Birch, it’s Pepper Martin. Are you around?’
I didn’t get an answer.
‘Wally, I saw your car out in the parking lot. I know you’re here somewhere. Could you answer me?’
‘You’re supposed to say “Come in.”’ Wally’s voice snapped and crackled at me from the other end of the walkie-talkie. ‘That’s how you talk when you’re on a walkie. You’re supposed to say, “Come in, Wally.”’
I swallowed my annoyance and hit the talk button. ‘Wally Birch, come in, Wally Birch.’
‘Now you say “Over,”’ Wally grumbled.
I grumbled right back. ‘Wally Birch, come in, Wally Birch. Over. And it’s going to be over for you, Wally, if you don’t stop messing around.’
‘What’ya want?’ Wally drawled.
‘I wondered about that stuff you swept up here in my office yesterday afternoon. You know, that bottle that got broken. I wondered if the pieces of that bottle are still around. And the box it came in. It was in my trash. I wondered if you wouldn’t mind bringing it all to my office as soon as you can.’
Wally grumbled what might have been a yes.
Or it might have been a far ruder response.
No matter, within fifteen minutes, he was at my office door.
‘You look lousy,’ I told him. Believe me, I do not usually critique Wally’s appearance, but that morning, the shadows under his eyes were the same color as the gray pants and shirt he was wearing. ‘Are you feeling all right?’
Wally pressed a hand to his forehead. ‘Headache,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t sleep last night. Which means people really shouldn’t be bothering me.’
‘What, I’m not your sweet anymore?’
‘What’s wrong with everybody around here? Acting all crazy.’ He shivered and rubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘Asking for crazy things, too. Like that package. And that broken bottle.’
His hands were empty so I raised my eyebrows, then looked from Wally out into the hallway where he’d left the metal cart with wheels where he kept his broom and his dustpan and such. ‘So where is the bottle?’
He grumbled something I was probably glad I didn’t hear clearly and shuffled out into the hallway and, when he came back, he shoved a piece of cardboard into my hands. It was maybe four inches square, and there was nothing on it except a few scraps of torn paper and some shards of glass so tiny, they looked like needles.
‘What’s this?’ I asked Wally.
‘Your bottle.’ He poked his chin in the direction of the cardboard in my hands. ‘That’s it. That’s all that’s left.’
‘But there was …’ I turned away from Wally so I could tell Ness this news, and honestly, I don’t think Wally even noticed that I was talking to thin air. His eyes squeezed shut, he massaged his temples with his fingers. ‘There was a lot of glass. And an entire label.’ I turned back Wally’s way. ‘What happened to the rest of it?’
Like he’d forgotten I was there, Wally jumped and his eyes popped open. ‘After I swept it all up yesterday, I dumped it down in the boiler room trash can where I always put broken stuff. Figured I’d get rid of it all on Friday when the city garbage truck picks up. But that …’ Another poke for emphasis. ‘When you asked me to get the bottle, I looked in that trash can. That’s all that was there.’
‘But …’ I looked down at all that remained of the mysterious bottle. I looked up at Wally. ‘But what happened to it?’
‘Got me.’ Wally shuffled out of the office. ‘Alls I know is that it was there yesterday and it ain’t there today.’
When he walked out of my office, he didn’t bother to call me my sweet.
I sat down in my chair and examined the bits and pieces on the cardboard. ‘Well, that’s weird,’ I said.
‘Someone else emptied the trash.’ Ever the logical lawman, Ness sounded sure of himself. ‘Someone wanted to do Wally a favor.’
‘Wally? Favors? I think not. That would mean he has friends, and he doesn’t. Or that he sometimes does nice things for other people and they wanted to show their appreciation. That’s never going to happen.’ Careful to stay as far away as I could from those tiny slivers of glass, I turned over one of the pieces of torn paper. ‘This is all that’s left of the label,’ I told Ness and I pointed. ‘Look, this little piece is a dark, golden color, and there’s green around the edges. And this piece …’ The second bit of paper I turned over was a little larger than the first and I scrambled to remember what the label said. ‘Black, with white lettering. S-I—’
‘Sieben’s?’ The little flurry that was Ness was around on my side of the desk in an instant, hovering over my right shoulder. ‘Sieben’s beer? Could it possibly be?’
‘That might have been what the label said,’ I told him and, to prove it, I got on the Internet and searched and found a picture of the beer Ness was talking about. It came in a brown bottle, just like the bottle that had been delivered to me by Dean McClure the day before. It had a dark gold label with green around the edges with a black band across the middle and white lettering SIEBEN’S.
‘I didn’t just get an old bottle, I got an old beer bottle.’ I sat back and studied the bits and pieces of what was left of the bottle. ‘And even though it was broken into a million pieces, somebody took the rest of the bottle. It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘It doesn’t,’ Ness conceded. ‘Or it does and …’
There was something about the way he said it that made me sit up and take notice. ‘What? What is it? What do you know about Sieben’s beer?’
‘Not much about the beer itself,’ Ness admitted. ‘I was always a Cutty Sark man myself.’
‘Then about the bottle. What do you know—’
‘Not about the bottle, either, I’m afraid. Or about why Dean McClure might have brought it to you. But I do know something about the brewery. It was in Chicago and, you see, back in the days when Prohibition was in force, Al Capone himself owned that brewery.’