Honestly, I wasn’t sure what we were talking about. My best bet was to keep the conversation on track.
I thumbed through the articles until I found the one I was looking for. “I’m curious,” I told him, “about the desk clerk from the Lake View Motel, this Aaron Burton guy.”
Kowalski darted a look at me that I could read as clearly as I could his lame pick-up line. He was wondering if there was more to me than just a great body and a pretty face.
Was that good or bad?
Rather than worry about it, I stayed focused. I pointed to one of the articles, and because it was upside down to him, I read out loud. “You quoted the desk clerk here… ‘“They was here plenty,” said Aaron Burton, a Lake View employee. “I seen them before, lots of times.” ’ ”
I set down the article, planted my elbows on the table, and gave Kowalski a level look. “Why would a desk clerk at a seedy motel lie about a thing like that?”
Kowalski finished his coffee and waved the waitress over for more. It wasn’t until after she poured and he added three packs of sugar and four of those little creamers that he bothered to answer me. “What makes you think he lied?”
“It’s hard to explain.” True enough, since the only thing I had to go on was the word of a dead guy who swore up and down that his and Vera’s relationship was nothing more than what was appropriate for a boss and his secretary. “I don’t think Lamar and Vera were having an affair.”
Kowalski tipped his chin in the direction of the article I’d just read to him. “That’s not what that guy said, is it? And he was there. You…” He gave me a quick once-over. “At the time, my guess is that you were maybe in kindergarten.”
I smiled because Kowalski’s voice was tight and that beady gaze of his was focused on me in a way that told me he was getting pissed. I didn’t know why, but I knew that if I didn’t keep things on an even keel, he was going to ask me to leave, and I was going to lose out on anything he could tell me. “But here’s the thing… Aaron Burton never testified at Lamar’s trial,” I said, and I knew this because I’d been through the file so many times and double-checked my hunch just in case I’d missed something. “In fact, the cops never even interviewed him after the murder. If his testimony was so crucial to the case-”
“Apparently it wasn’t. They convicted Jefferson Lamar without it.”
“But why? How?” I was amazed that an investigative reporter with Kowalski’s reputation didn’t see what I was seeing. “They couldn’t have used the quotes in your articles to prove anything.”
He had a fry in his hand and he tossed it on his plate, where it landed in a pool of ketchup and added another spot to his tie and one on his shirt. “You think I wasn’t telling the truth?”
“Not at all!” I was losing Kowalski and I was losing him fast. I scrambled to keep my questions coming at the same time I sidestepped around his ego. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m not a professional. I mean, not like you. I’m just a cemetery worker looking for a way to look good on a silly TV show.” I leaned forward. “You want to help me, don’t you?”
He sat back. His gaze flickered from my face to the front of my shirt.
I avoided the temptation to get up and leave.
It was a good thing, because the next second, Kowalski gave in.
“Aaron Burton was a druggie,” he told me. “The reason he never testified was that by the time of the trial, nobody could find him.”
“And you think-”
He pushed away his plate. “He didn’t testify because the cops could never find him. The kid probably OD’d or something. Chances are, he was lying dead somewhere and maybe nobody ever found the body.”
“Seems awfully convenient, don’t you think?”
“Not for Burton. Not if he was dead.” Kowalski hauled himself out of the booth and tossed a twenty on the table. “I’ll get your coffee,” he said. “That way I can go back to the office and tell people I bought lunch for a beautiful woman. They won’t believe me, but what the hell.”
And just like that, he walked out.
I spent a lot of time wondering about my conversation with Mike Kowalski. For one thing, I wondered what I’d gained from our meeting. But mostly, I wondered why Aaron Burton had dropped so conveniently out of sight. If what Jefferson Lamar claimed about his relationship with Vera was true, the desk clerk was lying when he said they’d been to the Lake View together plenty of times. To me, that meant Aaron Burton had been paid to say what he said. Maybe paid so much, he went out and celebrated until he OD’d?
I would never know, of course, but it was an intriguing possibility, and though I don’t know any other private investigators, so I can’t really speak for them, my guess was that there wasn’t a PI anywhere who wouldn’t have been at least a little curious.
If only I had the time to worry about it!
The next week was a whirr of cemetery work, and we tried to keep our chins up and get ready for our team’s fundraiser in spite of the sobering news that Team One had been awarded twenty points for its tea and we were lagging thirty points behind. We worked like dogs, and if it wasn’t for Ella, we would have probably ended up looking like idiots.
I would have been grateful if she just kept to her cheerleader role and didn’t decide to deliver bad news just an hour before our fundraiser was scheduled to start.
“Five thousand dollars? Team One raised more than five thousand dollars?” I paced the wide flagstone veranda outside the Garfield Memorial, stunned by the news Ella had just delivered. “That means they had…” Math is not one of my strong points. I tried to do some quick calculations, but fortunately, I didn’t need to overtax my brain. Ella had the numbers at her fingertips.
She peeked at the papers in the file folder she was carrying. “Two hundred and fifty-six,” she said. “They sold two hundred and fifty-six tickets to the tea.”
“And we’ve sold, like, what?” I tried to remember, and again, the numbers failed me.
But not Ella. “You’ve got one hundred and thirty-five sold as of right now,” she said. “But don’t worry. It doesn’t mean a thing. You know Team One sold tickets to people who never even showed. Like the mayor and a bunch of state senators and-”
I groaned. “It doesn’t matter if they showed or not. They still got the money. And that means if we don’t have a whole bunch of last-minute ticket buyers, they’re going to get that bonus twenty-five points.”
To me, this was something akin to a tragedy. Which didn’t explain why Ella had a wide smile on her face.
“What?” It was the only logical question.
She kept right on smiling. “You care,” she said.
This stopped me. “I care? About-”
“About the restoration. About your team. About Monroe Street. About cemeteries. Oh, Pepper!” Where this idea came from, I wasn’t sure, but she was so jazzed about it, she couldn’t keep from bobbing around like a buoy on a choppy lake. Come to think of it, that night, she looked a little like a buoy, too, in a clingy red pantsuit that showed off her substantial curves and crystal jewelry that glittered in the evening sun.
“I knew this was going to happen,” Ella said, in that motherly voice I’d heard her use on her three daughters. “I knew you were going to be a real mover and shaker in the cemetery business. This proves it. That’s why you want to win. You’re striving for excellence.”
“I want to win,” I told her, “because except for Bianca, who sort of keeps to herself…” And who I wouldn’t dream of insulting, even though she was nowhere near. “The ladies of Team One…” There was no other way to put it without explaining about the stolen coin or about the snarly looks I’d been getting from Team One since they realized I stole it back. I sighed. “The ladies of Team One are royal pains in the butt.”