“Gotta run,” he told me, pocketing his phone. “An actual murder-they just found the body.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Can’t say. Oh”-the special prosecutor looked over his shoulder as he walked toward his car-“can we postpone our trip until this afternoon? I could be back by one, maybe two.”
I shook my head. I had a charter scheduled for the afternoon, a woman who wanted to learn fly-casting, and her son who was home from college.
“Wednesday morning, then,” Ransler pressed. “I’ve got meetings tomorrow.”
I don’t like being rushed, and was also troubled by the man’s subtle flirting, so I shook my head and lied, “The biologist I’m dating? He’s already booked me for Wednesday. All day.”
Ransler thought that was humorous. It caused him to smile as he opened the door of his Audi. “Your boyfriend has to book a date? Or do you mean you charge him to fish?”
“We’re collecting specimens,” I responded as if that explained everything.
“Then make it tomorrow, I’ll change my calendar. Afternoon or morning?” Ransler, who should have been on his way to a murder scene, stood, loose-jointed and amused, awaiting my answer.
“Tomorrow same time,” I told him, which was safer than risking another ridiculous lie.
10
Loretta was napping when I got to the house, Alice Candor and the nosy little man with the camera were nowhere to be seen, so I opened my laptop, still fuming, and searched for details on a murder that had gone unsolved for twenty years. I had a dozen more important things to do but couldn’t stop myself. Joel Ransler had been evasive about how Dwight Helms had died. Why? My secret fear was that Helms, instead of being shot, had been killed with an axe, which was a wild suspicion but so unsettling I was determined to prove myself wrong.
The old newspaper stories I found, though, weren’t helpful, because accessing the archives required a paid subscription. Should I find my wallet and use a credit card? Or wait until I was at my Uncle Jake’s office where our computer was authorized to search restricted state and federal files? I decided to wait because the crime databases would offer more information than newspaper stories that were twenty years old.
No… twenty-one years old, according to the abstracts I read. Dwight Helms’s body had been found in May after a tip to police from “an unnamed informant.” Helms had also been arrested the previous month for leaving the scene of an accident and charged with DUI. A year earlier, he had been arrested but not charged after police found a bale of marijuana in his abandoned pickup truck.
Ransler had said Crystal Helms was living in a trailer park not far from Sulfur Wells, so I did a quick search on her, then on her brother, Mica. Like their father, the lives of both were summarized by a series of police reports that recorded the saddest of family traditions, but nothing so new as a phone number or address.
The Internet wastes a lot more of my time than it saves, which I remind myself about daily, yet it’s hard to tear myself away from the keyboard once I get started. I had a ton of things to do-background searches on Alice Candor and Joel, among them, which required the office computer-but I found myself checking my e-mail in hopes of a note from Ford. No luck, which wasn’t surprising because he had warned me that communication was difficult from Venezuela.
Steered by Ransler’s claim there were thousands of charitable organizations in Florida-a few of them fraudulent-I moved on to the subject of scam artists.
He had been right about elderly Americans being a favorite target. Most of them owned property, they had retirement funds and money socked away. Scammers working from the safety of foreign countries-Jamaica, most commonly-preyed on their fragility and loneliness like carrion birds.
There was a long list of gambits: Make contact by phone, Internet, or, better yet, by registered mail-pose as an IRS agent and demand back taxes. Or claim to be a mortgage company that is foreclosing unless a forgotten lien is paid. Threaten to disclose an unnamed crime-by age eighty, we’re all guilty of something, right? Deliver the good news that a million-dollar lottery prize will be shared once the “fees” are paid. If U.S. authorities expose or confront the scammers, so what? They change their cell numbers, invent a new scenario, and return to picking the bones of the innocent living. The scammers’ greatest assets, I read, were America’s inattentive adult children who confused the term professional care with family care.
These stories were so upsetting that when I heard my mother’s bedroom door open and the sound of her shuffling feet, I found myself rushing to help her into the recliner and then fetched her tea after spending several minutes searching for the TV remote, which she had stored with the dish towels, God knows why.
“Are you drunk or did you bump your head?” Loretta demanded when I offered her a pillow. Then called to Mrs. Terwilliger, who was outside picking tomatoes, “Donna, get in here! Something’s wrong with Hannah and she’s scaring me!”
It was then my mother noticed the Fisherfolk of South Florida pamphlet I’d left on the desk. Instantly, her demeanor changed. “My dear lord,” she moaned, “Pinky’s dead, that’s why you’re being so nice. I told you when it was happening. Was she murdered?”
I hadn’t received confirmation from Joel Ransler, but I also couldn’t lie-not after the stories I’d just read about ignoring the elderly. “It’s not official, Mamma, but, yes, Mrs. Helms was found last night. She wasn’t murdered, though, she died naturally-out for a nice walk. She didn’t suffer at all.”
For several minutes, my mother cried, halting her tears long enough to tell me what a good woman Rosanna Helms had been, then mixing in stories about the fun they’d had as girls. “We were always there for each other,” she sniffled. “Except for the years we weren’t speaking, I’ve never had a closer friend!”
I said the things people always do under those circumstances while I knelt by the recliner and waited for Loretta to get hold of herself. She finally did, and was still in control after I’d returned with a fresh box of tissues, her eyes rheumy as grapes when she looked up at me. “You searched Pinky’s house yesterday. Didn’t you tell me that?” She had the date wrong, but I was struck by how unusually lucid my mother sounded.
“Yes, late Friday afternoon, but Mrs. Helms wasn’t there,” I said, once again omitting details about my attacker.
Her attention shifted to the pamphlet and she sighed. “So now you know the truth, I suppose.”
“Truth about what?” I asked.
“You know what I’m talking about. Why torture me by not saying it?”
“You’re upset,” I replied. “You’ve got nothing to feel guilty about.”
“I don’t?” she asked as if surprised. Then she began her nervous habit of tapping thumbs against middle fingers, a sure sign her mind was working hard at something. It made me suspicious.
“Know the truth about what?” I asked again, voice firmer.
Loretta’s thumb tapping stopped. It meant she had come to a realization or had settled on a strategy-seldom did it mean she was about to speak the truth. This time was different, apparently, because she replied, “Teddy Roosevelt’s fishing reel. And the book you mentioned… And a bunch of other junk nobody cared about until you went snooping. I had Levi drive it all to Pinky’s place.”
I had been comforting the woman by patting her shoulder but decided she had received enough comforting for one day. I pulled my hand away and stood straight. “Snooping?” I said. “Granddaddy left those things to the family in his will. That Vom Hofe reel alone was worth a thousand dollars-I looked it up on the Internet. Why in the world did you give it to Pinky?”