Once again I couldn’t sleep. It had nothing to do with the coffee I’d had at lunch. There was no noise coming from downstairs either. Feliz had the store covered and wouldn’t hear of me returning to work until tomorrow. I cleaned my apartment within an inch of its life, and finished Jonathan Kellerman’s Conspiracy Club. An enjoyable book, but it got me thinking more about plots, subplots, and counter-plots, all of which naturally led me to the mystery of Ian MacKay. Again, I looked at what I knew, and came up with nothing fresh.
The phone rang at five-thirty. “Hello?”
“Zofia Smith?” The voice was male and didn’t sound familiar.
“Yes, speaking.”
“For your own good, stop snooping around,” the voice was harsh, hoarse and I strained to catch any nuance, any background noise, any kind of clue as to who it might be. Before I could reply, a dial tone blared in my ear. I checked the caller ID. “Unknown.” I wasn’t surprised.
I wrote down the time of the call, but I knew there wasn’t going to be much anyone could or would do. The cops would have to have a much better reason to pull my phone records. A sick, drugged woman’s word about a dead man not being dead was insufficient.
After another email and another phone call, I finally got in touch with Dodson. He didn’t have anything to say.
“What do you mean your cousin wouldn’t tell you anything? I thought you had a friendly relationship.” Damn him.
“Exactly what I said to him.” I could picture the grumpy look on his face. I had put it there a few times myself. “Art clammed up like you usually do when I ask you a question. What gives?”
“Nate, there’s a dead guy out there who isn’t really dead, and I need to prove it.” I took a deep breath. “My boyfriend’s missing, presumed dead at this point even though it’s only been forty-eight hours. I know the two situations are connected somehow.”
“How? Just because your boyfriend and MacKay knew each other?”
Hold on a minute. If Washington wasn’t talking, Dodson would have no way of knowing the relationship between Ian and Michael. My reply was slow and measured. “And just how the hell did you know that? You just said your cousin wasn’t talking to you.” This is why you listen to every word someone says, boys and girls. One of those lessons I learned as a reporter that continued to be useful.
“Um, er,” Dodson stammered.
Got him. “Okay Nate, out with it. Are the police even looking for Michael?”
He started his sentence but then hesitated several times before he capitulated. “Yeah, Zofia, they are, but it doesn’t look good.”
“There’s a woman named Ruby they need to talk to. I think she was the last person to see Michael alive.” I wondered if Jerry was going to talk to her. I wished I hadn’t given him my key to Michael’s place. I should have insisted on going along with him instead. Now, I couldn’t go over to Michael’s and retrieve the information myself. Maybe I was going crazy after all.
No, damn it, I wasn’t. “Nate, what else aren’t you telling me?”
He sighed with resignation. “Someone named Ruby called the station, all panicky. But Art said she called from a pay phone. If I had to guess, she was trying to keep Narcotics Anonymous truly anonymous. Besides, she had a sheet. She got into trouble with heroin a long time ago. It started when she was prescribed narcotics for a back injury. When her doctor didn’t prescribe them anymore, she started buying drugs on the street. Heroin is cheaper than Oxycontin. Art also mentioned drug users aren’t considered reliable witnesses, even if they’ve been in recovery for over a decade.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have an address or phone number, would you, Nate? Maybe her last name? You can’t find out she has a record without a last name.” I knew without asking he had done some digging. Snooping, correction reporting gets in your blood that way.
He paused for way too long. “All right, but only because she called you in the first place. Her last name is Jemison.” He spelled it and then gave me the number. Good, that saved me from having to bully it out of Jerry, assuming he even bothered going over to Michael’s to find it. Okay, that was going too far. Jerry was as worried about Michael as I was. He’d have gone. He said he would.
“Thanks, Nate. What’s next for you? Are you going to do any more nosing around?”
He didn’t say no. “My cousin asked me not to. He didn’t even want to tell me what little I just told you. I think someone got wise to him being my source.” That made the answer to my question either “Yes,” or “Maybe.”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“I know you didn’t. You never revealed your sources when you were in my business either. It’s how I knew I could trust you.”
And if I’d revealed my source for my last story, perhaps I’d still be in Chicago, I thought, then pushed it away from my mind. Exposing a prominent politician’s ties to a porn ring had been a great story, but power and money trump truth sometimes. It had gotten me blackballed from the journalism business. To this day, nobody but my former editor and myself knew the full truth of that story.
“Thank you for damning me with faint praise, Nate. Keep in better touch, would you? Otherwise, I’ll write the story and submit it to the AP as a stringer.” It was a bluff, but he fell for it. Nothing motivates a hungry reporter like the idea of being scooped. I rang off the phone and got some orange juice from my fridge.
Lunch had been late in the day, so even though it was dinnertime, I wasn’t hungry. I ventured downstairs with soft footsteps to see what was going on in the store. Quiet, like Friday nights usually are. Feliz was sitting on a stool at the coffee bar reading one of Vincent Lardo’s Archy McNally novels. They weren’t as good as Lawrence Sanders’ originals, in my opinion. I was offended that Archie stopped smoking his English Ovals. I walked behind the bar and poured myself a cup of coffee.
“You look a lot better,” she put the book down.
“I’m feeling a lot better,” I said. “But I’d prefer things to be back to normal. Any calls for me?”
“Nope. There were a couple of hang-ups, but we get those once in a while.” That was true, but it encouraged the paranoia that was continuing to take up increasing space in my brain.
I put the coffee down on the table in front of the fireplace and poked at the fire. It was comforting but Michael’s presence would have been more so. I tried to make a joke out of it. “No ransom demands, huh?”
She gave me a blank look, then must have realized what I intended because it turned into an anemic smile. “Sorry Zo, not a thing. You must be going crazy.”
Poor choice of words that. “Depends who you ask,” I said mildly. “Jerry certainly thinks so. How have things been here the last few days?”
“A few more people in the mornings. Sam’s been asking about you, so have a couple of the other regulars. You go away for more than a day and people complain that they aren’t getting your homemade muffins. James has been missing you. So have I.”
“I’ve missed you both.” I said. “Business will start picking up in a couple weeks, it always does.”
She nodded, causing silver earrings to tinkle. “How are you really holding up?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I miss Michael, I’m furious that he didn’t tell me everything about his past.” Feliz nodded. Her marriage was over because her husband had been gambling behind her back and lying about it after she caught him. “I just want him to be all right and I want to know why Ian MacKay is pretending to be dead. I’d also like to know that I’m not losing my mind.”
“You seem perfectly lucid to me,” Feliz said. “Yes, it all sounds crazy at first, but when you look at the whole instead of the parts, it all makes a sort of weird sense.” She held up the paperback. “Of course, that may be because I read too many of these.”
“Thanks, I needed that.” I didn’t realize how much I did until I heard it. “Michael was the only one who didn’t act like I was talking nonsense, but like I told you earlier, it turns out he knew Ian, and was at the funeral, so there’s so much more that I just don’t know.” I sipped more coffee. Having the fireplace down here was like having a second living room. It was one of the things I loved about my life. If I was feeling like company and the store was open, I often came down here for a cup of coffee and to chat with whomever was around. “How are the kids doing?”
“The usual handful,” she laughed. “Alandra is studying for a spelling bee. Mateo is obsessed with Sponge Bob one minute and dinosaurs the next. They’re with their abuela tonight. “
“Do they ever ask about Amata?” Amata was Feliz’s sister. She’d set me up for my false arrest. I hadn’t liked exposing her for both that and for the murder she’d committed. She had adored Feliz and her children, but she also had some emotional issues that would have stumped Jung and both Freuds.
“Mateo does sometimes. Alandra just asked once after she went to jail. I told her that her aunt did some bad things and had to go away for a while. She can find out the rest when she gets older. I go see Amata once a week, but I won’t take the kids there. I don’t want the kids to think of her as someone in prison. She’s a little different now. She’s been talking a lot with the priest there, and I believe she sincerely regrets what she did. “
I nodded, sadly. Regret or not, Amata was in jail for at least twenty-five years. If she hadn’t pled down, she would have gotten life. I knew personally how it felt to have a family member be responsible for murder. I didn’t get to visit my father in jail, though. Hardly something to envy a person for, but my life was far from normal these days.
“Zo, it’ll work out, you know that. Trust Jerry.”
Things started coming back into focus. “How can I, Feliz? He doesn’t trust me right now. Plus, I think he’s got stuff going on with him and Allison. She was at lunch today with Marie and me. She’s never shown much of an interest in his work before. And she mentioned him spending a lot of time with me, and Jerry and I mostly talked on the phone the last week or so. No lunches until today.” As I finished my coffee, I wondered if this lack of trust had another source besides my apparent insanity. That could explain a couple of things.
Could Jerry have been having an affair? If he’d been using me to cover up for time not spent where he said it was going to be that could explain Allison’s jealousy. Jealousy already explained her presence at lunch today. I could almost picture the conversation. Jerry telling Allison, “What, you don’t believe me? Come to lunch and see what we talk about. Marie’s going to be there too. You think we’re having some kind of threesome?” The only problem with that was the idea of Jerry cheating on Ally. Inconceivable, as the short Sicilian guy in The Princess Bride said all time. That and never fight a land war in Asia.
I smiled at Feliz, who looked at me fondly. “You were a million miles away, and now you’re going back upstairs to figure something out.”
She knew me too well. “I think I might have Jerry’s personal drama figured out.” It must have made for unpleasantly tense holidays when they weren’t around other people. “Now, I just need to find my boyfriend.” I went back upstairs to start putting all the clues together in the same place.
“Do me a favor, Zo?” Feliz asked.
“What’s that?”
“Take your cell phone this time.”