Instead, I brushed off my jeans and my shirt again, which didn’t do much good, seeing as I was coated with icky mud. My knees were trembling, my arm was bleeding, my hair hung in my eyes. I plunked down in the dry, prickly grass.
Doesn’t it figure, that was precisely the moment that Greer showed up. Of course Bianca was with her.
The supermodel took one look at me, shook her head sadly, and left. Greer, though, quivered with anticipation. “Thought I heard a commotion,” she said. “Not as good as that Sammi beating up on her boyfriend. That was priceless!” She gave me a once-over, and I don’t think it was my imagination. She really did smile when she saw that I looked awful.
“Looks like you’ve had an accident of some kind.” Greer called her cameraman over. “Get this,” she ordered him. “Let’s have Ms. Martin here tell us what happened.”
This was not my idea of a good time, but trooper that I am, I pulled myself to my feet.
“We were just checking out the mausoleum,” I said.
“You? Both of you?” Greer turned to Absalom. “I don’t know. I can’t say for sure, but I thought I heard two people yelling back and forth. You know, like one of you was in that mausoleum and the other one was outside. What do you think…?” Like she was teasing, Greer elbowed Absalom in the ribs. “Think there are ghosts hanging around that place?”
He gulped, and that’s all she needed. She was all set to pounce when I stepped between her and Absalom. “We were checking to see what kind of work needed to be done in the mausoleum,” I told her in my best team-captain voice. “Absalom told me to be careful. I should have listened. I went right through an old, boarded up part of the floor. If he wasn’t here to pull me out… well, I don’t know what would have happened.”
“You’re sure?” Greer peered at me before she turned to Absalom. “That’s the way it happened? I thought for sure I heard you sounding like you didn’t want to go into that-”
“For sure,” I interrupted. “That’s the way it happened.”
Her shoulders slumped inside her navy suit jacket, but in her own way, I guess Greer was as much of a trooper as I am. She latched onto her cameraman’s sleeve and led him toward the open door of the mausoleum. “Let’s get in there, Charlie, get some mood shots. You know, dark hole and all.” She looked my way. “We could re-create the scene.”
“Not on your life!” I didn’t wait for her to try and wheedle me into agreeing. I was wheedle-proof, and besides, I knew what was going to happen next. Greer was going to try and talk Absalom into showing her how he’d saved my life. And she was going to read right through his big tough-guy facade. Just like I had.
Rather than risk it, I walked away.
Absalom came along. “You didn’t tell her,” he said.
There didn’t seem to be any use in pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about. “It’s not her business,” was my only reply.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe you’re not so bad after all.”
Reluctant to break the bond we’d forged, I scrambled for something to say and thought of it when we neared Jefferson Lamar’s grave and I saw the voodoo altar nearby. “Do you suppose that voodoo doll of yours had anything to do with you hearing me and coming to save me?” I asked him.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute. Protection. That’s what she’s for.”
“Then I’m guessing I owe her something. You got any rum?”
Absalom smiled.
7
Lenny Fitzpatrick, the current warden of Central State, didn’t know me from Adam, and he wouldn’t have given me the time of day if he wasn’t stuck on a treadmill. I knew this because when I finally found him in the dizzying maze of buildings that make up the massive Cleveland Clinic, he looked me over with as much suspicion as if I was one of the inmates in his prison and he’d just found a hole in my cell floor with an escape-plan map tucked inside.
To my credit, I didn’t let that stop me. But I didn’t appreciate it, either, especially since when I left the cemetery at lunchtime, I’d stopped home to shower and change. I was neat, clean, presentable, and looking as good as ever. I wasn’t about to be intimidated. Not by a silver-haired, sixty-something guy wearing gray fleece shorts and a white T-shirt that said I MIGHT BE OVER THE HILL, BUT I GOT HERE ON MY HARLEY.
I introduced myself and told him the same story I’d told Helen Lamar, the one about doing research for the TV show competition and how if I could find out more about Jefferson Lamar, it would get my team big points.
“That was a long time ago.” Fitzpatrick wasn’t moving very fast and it was no wonder. His left leg was crisscrossed with glossy, bright red scars. He took a dozen more slow, careful steps. “There’s nothing new to learn about Jeff Lamar, anyway. Anything you need to know about him, you can find in the old newspaper articles. There were plenty of them. Jeff’s case, it created quite a media sensation.”
By now, telling fibs didn’t phase me, so I didn’t miss a beat. “I have read the old newspaper articles. They gave me all the basic background I need, but there’s nothing like firsthand information from a person who was really there.”
His jaw went rigid. “I was there at the prison,” he said. “Not there at the murder.”
“Of course not. That wasn’t what I meant at all.” I sidled a bit closer to the treadmill, and maybe a whiff of the Marc Jacobs Pear Splash I’d sprinkled on before I left my apartment was a welcome change from the combined aromas of sweat and hospital disinfectant. Some of the starch went out of Fitzpatrick’s shoulders.
“There never was a chance that Jeff didn’t commit that murder,” he said.
Since I hadn’t mentioned the bogus note in the cemetery file that talked about Lamar being framed, this struck me as interesting.
“That seems like a funny thing to say about a friend,” I pointed out.
“Who said we were friends?” There was an open water bottle on a holder at the front of the treadmill, and keeping one hand firmly on the railing at the side of the machine, Fitzpatrick reached for the bottle and took a swig. He didn’t look at me again until he’d put the water bottle back. “We worked together, me and Jeff. It’s not like we were joined at the hip or anything.”
“And you think it’s possible for someone to commit a murder when he’s a firm believer in the justice system?”
“You’ve learned that much about him, huh?” A smile twisted Fitzpatrick’s expression. “That was Jeff, all right. Always preaching about what we could do to help our inmates. Bah!” I had the feeling if Fitzpatrick could have gotten away with spitting on the floor, he would have. “He never would listen. Not when I told him that no matter what he did, criminals were criminals and they were never going to change. He saw the same figures on recidivism that I did. He knew that as soon as the prisoners were released and walked out our front gates, they were going to pick up right where they left off and end up back behind bars. But Jeff…” Fitzpatrick shook his head in disgust. “Maybe that should have told me something, huh? Maybe I should have seen that he had criminal tendencies.”
“Did he? Have criminal tendencies?”
“He killed that girl, didn’t he?”
“What was she like?”
“Vera Blaine?” He probably hadn’t given Vera so much as a thought in more than twenty years. That would explain why he had to concentrate for a while before he said, “She was young. And she didn’t strike me as being very smart. I wouldn’t have hired her. But then…”
“I’ve heard the stories about Lamar and Vera having an affair,” I told him when it seemed like he was reluctant to continue. “You don’t have to worry that you’re helping to keep Lamar’s secret.”
His laughter sounded like sandpaper on stone. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Keeping secrets in honor of Jeff’s memory? I’m not in the secrets business, honey. Don’t have the time, and even if I did, I couldn’t care less. What Jeff did with that girl, that was his business. It became my business when he killed her.”