“We’re screwed,” she said at last. “We’ve pissed away the best shot we ever had of getting out of here.” She shot a look at the girl, who lingered in the hallway not five feet from my shoulder. “Damn! I swore I’d get him, and he got away.”
“Who got away?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
“Suzannah’s daddy.”
“Your husband?” Up to then, I’d thought we were talking about Gordon Lively. Now it appeared I’d stumbled into something else.
Suzannah tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and started to cry.
“No, no...” Lucille shook her head in frustration, her breath still coming in labored gasps. “I’m sorry, Suzannah. I know I promised your mom and all, but I did the best I could.”
I looked from one to the other. “What’s going on, Lucille? What do you mean, you promised her mother? I thought you were her mother.”
Lucille grabbed another Kleenex and began blubbering again. Clearly I was going to get nothing else from her. I stood up and walked over to the girl.
Suzannah, at sixteen, was almost half a head taller than Lucille, which put the two of us eye to eye. She was pale and thin, but the way she carried herself was almost regal. When I stepped in front of her, she raised her chin slightly, as if mustering a dignity that came from somewhere outside of that motel room.
I hooked a thumb back in Lucille’s direction. “Does this have anything to do with your little performance today on the radio?”
Her eyes widened, and her lips parted slightly. “How’d you know about that?”
I shook my head. “First, tell me what’s wrong with your mother.”
Suzannah sighed. “She’s not my mother. She’s just a friend of my mom’s.”
I nodded. “Okay, I’ll bite. Where’s your mother?”
“She’s dead.”
Her voice was like thin ice on a frozen pond: slick and hard, with something deadly right under the surface. I thought of my own son, Byron, just a year younger. How much would it take to make him as hard, I wondered. How much to make him so angry? I took a deep breath and glanced back at Lucille.
“I know it’s none of my business, but I’d be willing to listen if you need to talk.”
The girl shrugged. “Nothing much to tell. Mom died last year. Breast cancer. Aunt Lucille was her best friend. Things were okay until she hurt her back in January. Then she went on disability, and we had to move in here.” She looked around quickly. “We don’t like it much.”
I could see why. From the looks of things, the two of them had come about as close to hitting bottom as possible and still have a roof over their heads. I still didn’t see what it had to do with her father, however, so I asked.
“My folks never married; they split when I was really little. Mom and I did just fine on our own. I never missed him.” She took a deep breath and looked at Lucille, who had recovered enough to light up another coffin nail.
“When Mom got sick, she started to worry about money. She decided to sue my dad for support. Not for her, just for me. But my dad told her she’d ruin him if she did that. He said his wife would divorce him and take all his money. So he made her an offer: if she’d sign a piece of paper saying he wasn’t my real father, he’d take care of me after she died.”
Suzannah stopped and pressed a tear out of the corner of her eye.
“Anyway, when she died, I guess he kind of changed his mind. Aunt Lucille adopted me, and now I live with her.”
I looked at Lucille. She seemed mortified.
“I figured it was the only way to get any money out of him,” she said. “So I staged the accident. Wasn’t that hard to do. Keeping this girl quiet, though...” She shook her head angrily. “Bastard didn’t even recognize his own flesh and blood.”
My head was spinning. “You mean Gordon Lively is Suzannah’s father?”
“Yeah.” Lucille frowned. “How’d you know his name?”
I stood in front of my house on Wednesday morning, listening to the trash truck as it made its way down the street. I still didn’t know how I was going to pay my mortgage next month, but Gordon Lively’s check had paid most of my outstanding bills and I still had half a tank of gas.
I had no idea whether anyone connected with the case had heard Suzannah on the radio, but I did know the cassette in my hand was the only physical evidence there was. When I told him what had happened, Carlos “accidentally” destroyed the master tape of the previous day’s show. Now it was up to Lucille and Suzannah. And me.
The garbage truck came to a screeching halt in front of my driveway, and a burly blond man in a red shirt and Levi’s came over to collect my cans. He took them both and emptied them one by one into the back of the truck. I hesitated, thinking of all the things I could do with Gordon Lively’s five thousand dollar bonus.
The guy in the truck gave me a curious smile.
“Is that it, lady?”
I shook my head. “Just one more thing,” I said, and tossed the tape in with the rest of the garbage.
Spare Change
by Chris Rogers
“The Jag don’t belong here,” Murley was saying, big belly grazing the side mirror as he faced the young cop. “Anybody could see that. Sticks out like a damn poodle at a dogfight.”
Jeff Rickey leaned his fifteen-year-old body across the hood of the Chevy he was detailing to swipe at a nonexistent smudge on the polished windshield. He’d never witnessed a real life crime investigation before and didn’t want to miss a word.
Officer Packet stooped, hands on uniformed thighs, to peer in the Jaguar’s driver-side window. Careful, Jeff noticed, not to touch anything and spoil the chance of lifting latent fingerprints. Jeff liked that. It meant the officer had some experience at crime scenes, and maybe something could be learned from him.
“Answer me this,” Murley said, meaty lips pooching in and out as he chewed on the stump of a carrot. He’d stopped smoking cigars, doctor’s orders, but said he couldn’t get through the day without something between his teeth. “Why would any sane human being steal an eight-year-old Dart and leave this spanking new Jag in its place? Don’t make sense.”
The officer straightened to his full six feet plus. Gazing around the car lot, he unbuttoned his shirt pocket to pull out a pencil and a small notepad.
Rookie, Jeff thought miserably, getting a first-time straight-on look at the cop’s youthful face. Just his luck. But Packet appeared intelligent and not completely green, and anyway, every cop had to be a rookie sometime.
“Those chains.” Packet nodded toward the north entrance where fifty-gauge chain links lay piled beside the foot-high steel barrier that kept thieves from driving Murley’s Used Cars off the lot at night. “Were they secured when you left here last night?”
“Tighter’n a new belt after Thanksgiving dinner.” Murley hitched his pants an inch higher over an expansive gut. “Hell, it’s the last thing I do of a night. Drag the chains across the exits, snap on the west side padlock, drive my Caddy out, and lock up the north side. Same routine every night, ten P.M., come hail or kinfolk.”
“Who else has a key to those locks?”
“Nobody.”
“Keep a spare key in the office?”
Murley plucked the mangled carrot stump from his mouth and spit. “Keep a spare set of everything locked up in the desk drawer.”
“Locked.” The officer made a note on his pad. “The drawer’s always locked?”
“Hell no, not during the daytime. We got to get in and out of that desk to get applications and such.”
“So any one of your salesmen could have borrowed the key long enough to make a copy.”
Murley tongued a speck of carrot from his lip to his fingertip. “Ain’t none of my salesmen dumb enough to steal a Dart and leave off a Jag.”