Below the fold, bottom right, some bold type caught my eye. But it wasn’t an exposé about the Storeys. The headline read,JUDGE’S SPOUSE ARRESTED FOR POSSESSION OF COCAINE.
Huh,I thought,I know about that.
Jim Zebid had told me about it. I hadn’t given his revelations about Jara Heller’s husband’s criminal activities a moment’s thought since I’d heard them during Jim’s regular session the previous Tuesday.
What was Judge Heller’s husband’s name?
I started to read the article. Jara Heller’s husband’s name, it turned out, was Penn Heller. I allowed myself to be distracted for a moment trying to figure out how someone ended up with the name Penn. Pennington? Pennsylvania? Penncroft? Couldn’t. Nor did I recall any legal cocktail party chatter with a male spouse named Penn.
The article didn’t have much information. Police, acting on a tip, arrested Mr. Heller, an investment banker with some firm I’d never heard of, early Saturday evening in a brewpub downtown, and they’d confiscated a “significant quantity” of white powder and an unspecified quantity of cash. The reporter apparently attempted to reach Judge Heller for a comment, but his calls were not returned by press time.
Huh.
I felt a pang of sympathy for Jara Heller. She had a decent reputation on the bench and was known as a hard worker who knew the law and played fair. I’d always thought she was personable and that she couched her ambition better than many of her colleagues did. Whatever her husband was involved in wasn’t going to do much for her reputation. I wasn’t smart enough to know what it would do to her future on the bench. I’d ask Lauren when she got up.
A distant humming sound intruded on my reverie about the Hellers. Within seconds the hum became an insistent rumble. Adrienne wasn’t singing, but she had indeed fired up the Deere and was preparing to plow the lane. Sunday or not, she loved the damn tractor too much to allow a decent snowfall to melt of its own volition.
Solar energy was her sworn enemy.
The roar of the Deere awakened Grace, and within a minute I was called to my daughter’s room by her surprisingly mature lungs.
Diaper change for Grace. Take the dogs out, feed them. Waffles. Sunday almost always meant waffles-from-scratch waffles-and lots of chatter. Debussy ended, and the next disk in the changer fired up. Tony Bennett and k.d. lang doing Louis Armstrong. Perfect.
The weekend morning routine was soothing but surreal. After breakfast Grace played in her high chair. I tried to focus on the paper. But below the surface calm lurked, I knew, the monster that lived in the depths: the closed bedroom door and the precarious state of my wife’s health. I waited for the sound of the toilet flushing, or water pinging against the tile in the shower, anything to indicate that Lauren’s day had started in a fashion that resembled normal. But eight o’clock came and went without a hint of her condition.
The phone rang at 8:05.
I pounced on it.
“It’s me,” Sam said.
“Another field trip?” I asked. “I think I’m busy.”
“I’m calling from the pay phone outside Moe’s. The place is crowded even after a blizzard.”
Moe’s Bagels was in a little shopping center on North Broadway not far from Sam’s house. I made an assumption that he was out for his prescribed morning rehab walk and was seeking moral support from me much the way that an alcoholic might call his sponsor from outside a saloon. I said, “It’s okay, Sam. But get something with whole grain. And nonfat cream cheese. Not the good stuff. But lox is okay. Omega-three oils.”
“I’m not asking for help with the menu. I’m calling from a pay phone outside of Moe’s so that if somebody ever subpoenas your phone records, they won’t show that I talked to you at eight o’clock on this Sunday morning.” His tone was gruff.
I sat down. “Yeah? Why?”
“Because Sterling Storey is dead. And I’d rather people not know that I’m the one who told you. Just in case that becomes important.”
“What?” My exclamation had to do with surprise at the news of Sterling’s death. But I was also wondering how it could become important from whom I’d heard the news. Paranoia wasn’t part of my friend’s character, so I assumed that Sam was a step or two ahead of me. Although all the chess pieces appeared blurred on the board to me, Sam was plotting moves farther down the line.
“Lucy came by to see me last night, kind of late. You know, to check on me. She told me about it.”
“Why is Lucy worried about you?”
“That’s not why I called, either, Alan. Focus.”
I considered pressing it; after all, he’d offered the opening. But I didn’t. “Okay, then what happened to Sterling?”
“I don’t know what happened to Sterling Storey. All I know is what I’m hearing.”
Another one of those critical distinctions that Sam liked to make. I asked, “And the Storey story is what?”
His voice changed. It became a little louder, a little less patient. “Hold on. I’m waiting for a woman to stop staring at me thinking I’ll get off the damn phone any second if she’s rude enough. I hate that. Don’t you hate that? Now she’s like five feet away. She’s staring right at me. I’m staring right back at her.
“Hey, lady, I’m going to be a while, do you mind? Get over it.”
“Did she go away?”
“She’s like sixty or something-she looks exactly like my aunt Esther-and she just flipped me off behind her back as she was walking away. What is that? I don’t think I want to live in a society where old people are pricks.”
“She’s an exception, Sam. Tell me about Sterling.”
“You know he was in Florida, producing coverage for some football game? Yeah, of course you know that. After his damn football game was over yesterday, he was driving from Tallahassee to visit an old college friend in Albany, Georgia. You know where that is? Me, neither. Personally, I think he was avoiding coming back here to face the music, but it’s a free country, right? Until the cuffs are on, hey-he can do what he pleases. Lots of people want to talk to him, but nobody was ready to arrest him.
“Anyway, there was some freak rainstorm all across southern Georgia yesterday. Flash floods, the whole thing. A biblical-type storm. Witnesses say a car went off the highway and was about to slide into the Ochlockonee River. If I said that name right, I deserve a prize. I thought Minnesota had goofy names for places, but the South? It’s like they had a goofy name contest and there were a thousand winners. No, ten thousand winners.
“Anyway, Sterling, being the sweet guy we all know he is, stopped his rental car and went to help this woman whose car was about to go in the river. He slipped on the bank, fell in, and went underwater almost immediately. His body hasn’t been found.”
“Wow.”
“That’s it? ‘Wow’?”
“Sam, the man’s about to be picked up for questioning for a homicide and instead he dies a damn hero trying to rescue a stranger from a car wreck? That’s world-class irony.”
“Warms your heart, doesn’t it? Three witnesses to the whole thing, too. One of them is a damn preacher. The others are twin sisters. A social worker and a pediatrician.”
“I take it you don’t believe what you’re hearing?” Sam often didn’t believe what he was hearing. It wasn’t evidence of a character defect so much as it was the foundation that made him a good detective.
“What do the lawyers say? Render up the body? Do I got that right? Well, when they render up the body, then I’ll believe it. It’s all too convenient as far as I’m concerned.”
“How do you fake a rainstorm and a biblical flood, Sam? Sterling Storey isn’t Moses.”