“Have a seat, Mr. McGill,” Harry said, waving at two redwood chairs that were set in permanently reclined positions.
I lowered into one and he took the other.
We were both a little wary, like boxers in the first round of an out-of-town fight.
Tangelo would have been called cute if he’d been a woman. He had black hair, heavy lips, and eyes that seemed in turn sympathetic, then sad.
“Look at me, Daddy!”
“What does Zella want?” the adoptive blood father asked.
“To see her daughter and apologize for what she did.”
“The heist or the shooting?”
“She’s been exonerated for the Rutgers thing,” I said. “The DA admitted that he would have let her off on the shooting for diminished capacity.”
“I thought they found part of the money in her storage unit?”
There was a huge elm standing at the corner of the pine fence that separated the Quicks from their neighbors. The shadow that tree threw was like a stain across the green lawn. This darkness seemed appropriate.
“Hello,” a woman called.
“Mrs. Braxton!” the child screamed.
She jumped from the pool and tore out toward the back of the house. There, emerging from the sliding glass door, was a middle-aged woman wearing a violet dress and a white sweater in spite of the heat.
Harry stood up, following the girl toward the house. He spoke to the gray-haired white woman, gesturing toward me.
“Nooooo!” the child complained.
Then little Zella lowered her head and followed the babysitter into the house.
When Harry returned I was ready to engage him in our awkward contest.
“I don’t understand what Zella wants, exactly,” he said.
“I was hired by an attorney named Lewis to investigate the evidence in her conviction,” I said. “What I found proved that she had nothing to do with the robbery. We got her out of prison and the only thing she wanted was to find her daughter and make amends to you. But honestly, I came here today expecting to meet Sydney and Rhianon — not you.”
My words had the ring of truth to them. Harry grimaced and bit his lower lip.
“I changed my name after getting out of the hospital,” he said. “You know, I was adopted and so it wasn’t my real name, my birth name anyway. And because I was adopted I paid a lot of money to get little Zella. She’s my blood and I won’t have her be a ward of the state like I was.”
“Her mother would love to see her.”
“Her mother shot me three times.”
“That’s over with, Harry,” I said.
It felt good to be involved with a clear-cut element of the case. Zella wanted to see her child. The father had said child and was raising her in comfort and safety.
“Hi, honey,” a woman called from the glass door.
“Hey, babe,” the man known as Sydney Quick said.
I looked up and there, walking across the lawn toward us, was Claudia Burns, aka Minnie Lesser, now aka Rhianon Quick.
I stood up.
She stopped in her tracks, glowering at me.
“What?” Harry/Sydney asked.
The woman wanted to turn around and run — I could see that clearly.
“I’m already in your house, Minnie,” I said. “I’m already here.”
If epilepsy was in her DNA, she would have succumbed at that moment. She took in a deep breath and approached us.
“You two know each other?” Harry asked.
“Mr. McGill was at the office today,” she said. “He was talking to Mr. Brighton.”
“What for?”
“Even though the courts exonerated your ex-girlfriend it seems that Rutgers is not so easily convinced,” I said. “They’re hounding my client and I was there to try to get them to lay off.”
“I don’t understand,” Harry muttered. “Are you here looking for Zella’s daughter or because of the robbery?”
“I want you out of this house,” Minnie said to me.
“And I will leave just as soon as I’m satisfied that you and Harry here don’t have anything to do with Brighton, the heist, and the people who tried to kill me a few nights ago.”
“Kill you?” Harry said.
“Give me fifteen minutes and I will be happy to leave.”
48
Harry and Minnie shared the redwood chair next to mine. He had a confused expression on his cute mug while she exuded cold anger.
“Why would you think that these people trying to kill you would have anything to do with Zella?” Harry asked.
“It’s my only active case,” I said, “and the police think that at least three men have already died behind it.”
“What could we have to do with that?” Minnie asked.
“You’re working for Rutgers,” I said. “That’s enough right there.”
“But...” She was about to rebut my claim but then a thought occurred before the words could come out. She turned to Harry and he looked down at the lawn.
“Harry?” she said.
He looked up at me.
Harry/Sydney was not a stupid man but neither did he have a strong character. The look on his face told of how he was smart enough to get into trouble but too weak to fight his way back out again.
“A man came to me,” he said.
“Your friend Stumpy Brown,” Minnie put in.
“I didn’t really know him before then, honey,” Harry said. Then to me, “He offered me money and a way to get out from under all the publicity. He also helped me when I wanted to adopt Zella.”
“Stumpy?” I said. “What kind of name is that?”
“I never knew another name. He said that he worked freelance for Rutgers and that they needed to know about the heist. He offered me some money and a job for Minnie.”
“Didn’t he think that someone at Rutgers might know who she was?”
“What money?” Minnie asked.
“She wasn’t in the papers when the shooting happened,” he said. “That was the week of those big tornadoes in the Midwest. After that she stayed at her mother’s and never came out. All they had were high school pictures without her in glasses and with dark hair.”
I wondered then where Gert had gotten the more current pictures of the girl.
“What money?” Minnie asked again.
“He gave me thirty-three thousand and told me to stay low,” Harry said.
“You said that you were doing telephone sales.”
“Yeah.”
“Why would Stumpy do all that for you?” I asked.
“He wanted me to stay in touch with Zella, to get her to tell me where the money was.”
But, I thought, Stumpy knew that Zella was framed. He was the one that set her up.
“And why get Minnie here a job at Rutgers?”
“He was working for them,” Harry said. “That’s the place where he could get her a job. After that he helped me adopt little Zella.”
“Big Zella says that you never got in touch with her again after she shot you. That’s why she had me looking for you — so she could apologize.”
“That bitch has got no rights in this house,” Minnie said.
“I told Stumpy that I’d try to get the information out of Zell but I just couldn’t,” Harry told me. “She’d already shot me and there was a guy murdered in the robbery. I only went up to the prison one time—”
“You did?” Minnie said.
“—but I didn’t even go in. After Zella shot me my nerve was gone.”
Not one thing he said made even the least sense. Zella didn’t commit the robbery, she knew nothing about it. Stumpy knew better than I who did do the job. It was Bingo and his crew. Wasn’t it?
“What do you have on Brighton?” I asked the incognito couple.
“What do you mean?” Minnie asked.
“He did have something to do with the heist, right?”
“Not that we know of,” Harry answered. “He was just the job that Stumpy’s contact got her hooked up with.”