“Get what we needed?” I said.
“Right here boss,” Donatti said, and handed me a file folder. Pate’s financial history with the bank.
“Alright, I want you guys out at the scene to help with the canvass. Ron should still be there. Widen it out as far as possible. All we’ve got so far is Sandy’s report of a white panel van of some kind. If we can get a plate, or even a partial, we’d have something solid.”
The two men stood up and Donatti picked up their plates, looked around for a trash can, didn’t see one, shrugged, and set them back down on the table.
“You know,” Rosencrantz said, “If you let that Jamaican chef of yours, what’s his name, again?”
“Robert,” I said.
“Right, right, Robert. If you get Robert some of this shrimp, and he put some of that jerk sauce on them and sort of sizzled ‘em up in a pan, you’d have something right there.”
Donatti was nodding. “He’s right. That sauce of his is something. You’d pretty much have the crack cocaine of shrimp.”
I nodded right along with them. “Yeah, I know. I’m already on it.”
Before I left, I found Margery at her desk. “Margery, listen. I’ve got something I want to run by you.”
“Sure,” Margery said. “But wait, before I forget, here’s the number of the seafood place in Elkhart. They’re expecting your call.” She handed me a slip of paper with the info. “They said, and I quote, ‘as a favor to me and because you’re a new customer, they’ll move you to the front of the line.’ They’ve got a truck coming to Indy today. If you could call them soon enough, you’d be all set.”
“Aw, jeez, Margery, that’s great. But, uh, I probably won’t have time to call them.” I pulled one of my cards out of my wallet and handed it to her. “Do me a favor? Call the number on this card and ask for Robert. He’s my chef. Tell him I said to order whatever he needs, okay?”
“Sure. That’s no problem. You said you wanted to run something by me?”
“I do. Look, I usually don’t ask this, but you seem to sort of have your ear to the ground around here, so I was sort of hoping you could let me know if you hear of anything that might be, uh, let’s say, out of the ordinary.”
Margery looked around, like someone might be listening. “Like what?”
“Anything really. Something out of place, someone acting strange, uptight, saying something out of character, something they wouldn’t normally do or say. Don’t do anything about it, but call me and let me know, will you?”
“Sure, sounds a lot like what I do already.” She gave me a little eyebrow wiggle. “And, as long as we’re trading favors, how about you do a little something for me?”
“Uh, maybe,” I said, a little skeptical. “What is it?”
“Oh don’t get all coppish on me.”
“No, no. I’m not. What is it?”
“Well, earlier I told you I was thinking about retiring and spending some time on the beach.”
“Yeah? Boy I could tell you about some great places in Jamaica. I go every February for a month.”
“No, no. I was wondering…your two guys?
“Yeah?”
“Well, you know… the cute one. Is he attached or anything? I was hoping you could put a word in for me.”
I sort of puffed out my cheeks. “Margery, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not very religious, and I mean not at all. But with God as my witness, I don’t know which one qualifies as the cute one.”
Margery huffed a little. “You know… the tall one. What’d you call him? Rosie?”
“He’s the cute one?”
Margery gave me a slow blink. Twice. “Oh, honey, are you kidding me? I’d like to buy him a few of those rum punches and get him into a man thong on the beach. You might not ever see him again.”
“Aw jeez, Margery.”
“What?”
“I’ve got to work with the guy pretty much every day. Now every time I look at him…”
CHAPTER NINE
I could feel the day starting to slip away. I had a court appearance scheduled from a previous case in a little over two hours. I thought about calling Sandy-even picked up my phone to do it-but then tossed it back on the passenger seat of my truck. The doctor had told her to get some rest. No sense in bugging her if she was actually doing what she’d been told her. My thoughts of Sandy made me think about what she’d said about the Governor’s wife being out of town…how she’d been there with the Governor at his home, at night, just the two of them…
But those thoughts were nothing more than basic jealousy.
So, Sandy. People say that there is no such thing as love at first sight, and on the whole I used to be one of them, but when I met Sandy everything changed. I’m not sure I can adequately explain the connection between us, but there is something more to her, to us, than a physical lust or even an emotional bond. I am drawn to her in ways that are foreign to me. In truth, I felt a little like a dopey school boy. A middle-aged dopey school boy. The politics of it could get complicated. We are on the same unit, I’m her boss. There are rules about these sorts of things.
But… maybe fuck the politics.
I had never seen Samuel Pate’s residence, but I had a rough idea where his house was located. One of the television stations in town did a feature story on his home a few months ago and I remembered the story mostly because I was amazed at the grandiosity on display from someone who had made their fortune by instilling the fear of God into people who probably could not afford to buy a second-hand bible.
I had not yet looked at the documents I collected from Franklin Dugan’s office and wondered if maybe I should at least glance at them before trying to talk to Pate about a murder he might know more about than I did. I turned into a gas station just off the highway, picked up the papers from the passenger seat and began to read. I spent the better part of an hour trying to make sense of what I saw in the documents, but after reading through them three times, I had no more detailed information than what Cora had given me earlier. The bottom line was Samuel Pate was under investigation for insurance fraud out of Texas, he was talking publicly about running for the office of Governor of the state of Indiana, and he apparently had a banker who’d been either very generous or foolhardy. Maybe both.
When I turned into Pate’s drive I realized the story I had seen on television a few months back did not do justice to the level of extravagance and excess to which this man lived his life. On T.V. he preached the way to heaven was to give most, if not all of your earthly belongings to God through his ministry, yet it appeared he lived his life as if the very rules he preached somehow did not apply to himself.
The driveway was almost a quarter mile in length and at the far end it split into two lanes, one which led around the side of the house to a five car garage, the other to a circular turn-about in front of the three story red-bricked mansion. I parked my truck just past the front door then walked up and rang the bell. When the front door opened I felt a surge of cool, conditioned air brush past me but when I saw the woman on the other side of the threshold who smiled at me and said my name aloud I was left off balance and suddenly at a loss for words.
“Well, Virgil Jones, as I live and breathe. What on earth are you doing here? Come in, won’t you please?”
Her accent was manufactured, or if that is not fair of me to say, then perhaps it was simply acquired from her time spent in Texas, the way a person’s skin will darken after weeks or months spent outdoors in the summer sun. But she had always spoken with a Midwestern twang the way the rest of us do and I somehow found the sound of the words that came from her mouth as contrived as any meaning or sincerity they might have held.
Her name when I knew her in high school had been Amanda Habern, but her married name now was Pate. I heard a number of years ago she and Sermon Sam had married, but at the time Pate was not yet famous in our part of the country, and Amanda was just a girl I knew a long time ago for a very short while. Under any other circumstance I might have been surprised that she recognized or even remembered me, but Amanda and I have a history of a single shared encounter, one which could have been beautiful, or at least just plain old fashion fun, but in the end was neither of those.