Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Page 3

  He nodded. “I could use some help.”

  “What kind of help?” I kept my tone casual. “Did you have anything to do with that?”

  “No. Hell no!” He stiffened in his chair. “Sherry was a great kid. One of the best friends I’ve ever had.”

  “More than a friend, I think.”

  “No,” he said, meeting my eyes dead-on. “That’s my problem. We weren’t.”

  “I’m not following you, Rob.”

  He took a deep breath. “How much do you know about my family, Dylan?”

  “The basics, I guess. Old money. One way or another, a third of the county probably works for you.”

  “Not for me, pal. Not even for my father. My grandfather Asa totally controls the finances. Eighty years old and bedridden, the old bastard won’t let go.”

  He waited for a comment. I didn’t make one.

  “The thing is, the old man’s got this . . . obsession about our family tree, Dylan. He wants to live forever. He thinks a part of him will continue on after he’s gone. Through us.”

  “Maybe he’s right. So what?”

  “He’s been pushing me hard to get married, have a family of my own. Not my two sisters, mind you, just me. I’m the one with the name. He liked Sherry a lot. Used to watch her do the TV news every night. She’s pretty, she’s smart. He thought we were a perfect match.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  Rob took a deep breath, then faced me squarely. “The truth is, if I wanted a mate, you’d be closer to my type than Sherry was.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just stared. “But you always dated girls. Stone foxes . . .” I broke off. Getting it. “My God. Sherry was a front for you, wasn’t she? They all were.”

  “She was the best of them,” he admitted. “When we were together, everybody focused on her. Thought I was the luckiest guy in the world. We had an arrangement. I paid for her apartment, plus some pocket money. My grandfather thought I was keeping her.”

  “I guess you were.”

  “But it was strictly business,” he said, leaning forward intently. “It kept the old man pacified, kept my inheritance intact, saved Sherry the rent. Win, win, all around.”

  “Why all the drama, Rob? Nobody hides in the closet anymore.”

  “You think because the army takes gays now, everything’s so different?”

  “The army always had gays.”

  “Not my grandfather’s army. We can march down main street in Frisco or New York, but in wood-smoke country? You grew up here, Dylan. Ten miles inshore, it might as well be nineteen twelve. Or maybe eighteen twelve. You know it’s true.”

  “In some ways it is,” I conceded. “Did you know Sherry was pregnant?”

  “She told me. And before you ask, the answer is no. There was no chance I was the father.”

  “How did that affect your arrangement?”

  “Actually, I thought it might make things even better. We talked about getting married. I mean, why not? Our arrangement could stay basically the same, my grandfather would come across with my inheritance and die happy. A quiet divorce later on. Sherry and the kid would be set for life.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said there were limits to her hypocrisy, but she didn’t rule it out. Women in my family don’t work, and Sherry loved her job. That was a problem, and it wasn’t the only one. When I told my grandfather about the kid, I thought he’d be over the moon. He was. But since we weren’t married . . .”

  “He wanted her to get tested,” I finished.

  Rob nodded. “He insisted. I thought there might be a way to fake the test. Sherry said she’d look into it and that’s where we left it. Until this morning.”

  I was staring at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You’ve told me a lot more than you had to, Rob. You could have backed off, taken cover behind your lawyers. Why didn’t you? What do you want from me?”

  “I need your help, Dylan,” he said, leaning in. “I know I’m going to be a suspect. The boyfriend always is. I need you to know I had no wish at all to harm Sherry, nor any reason to.”

  “You want me to control the investigation, to make sure your private life stays . . . private.”

  “I understand I’m asking for special treatment,” he said carefully. “I don’t expect anything for free. Give me a number.”

  “Wow. Everybody’s trying to buy me off today,” I said. “It’s a damned shame.”

  “What is?”

  “If you’re clear of this thing, Rob, I’ll keep your arrangement quiet to protect Sherry. No charge. But if you’re involved in any way at all? It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got. It won’t be enough.”

  After Rob Gilchrist left, I sat at my desk, staring at the wall. Not seeing it. Not seeing anything, really.

  I’ve probably worked a hundred homicides. I lost count in Detroit. For the most part, murder is about love, money, or drugs. Domestic abusers blow up, a drug deal goes bad. Violence can cook for years or explode in an instant. But none of the usual elements seemed to apply here.

  Sherry asked me to check out the men in her life, so I assumed one or the other might be involved. But Milano had a solid alibi and Rob had every reason in the world to want her alive and well.

  According to him.

  Could Sherry have been blackmailing him about their setup? Not a chance. If he’d killed her to keep the secret, why would he tell me about it?

  No matter how I worked the facts, I couldn’t make ’em compute. Rob was telling the truth. He hadn’t done this. Maybe I’d been working the wrong track. Maybe Sherry’s death had nothing to do with her love life at all.

  What did that leave? A story she was working on? I had a huge roadblock there. Zee would already be working that angle. She’d have access to any hate mail or threats Sherry had received. Trying to get access to them through channels could get me suspended. If I went after them directly.

  But there might be another way.

  I had an inside connection at the station. Not family exactly, but not far from it.

  A Metis.

  The first Frenchmen, the voyageurs, began arriving in the lake country around 1540. They came for the fur trade. They mapped the land, built outposts, and then homes. They brought no women with them, but human nature being what it is, a new race of beige babies was soon playing along the lakeshore.

  We are the Metis (May-tee). Dark-haired people with natural tans and hybrid genes. Born survivors.

  Max Gillard isn’t a relative, but he’s Metis. He served in Kuwait with my Uncle Armand and they’re still poker buddies. In the north, that’s enough of a bond to earn me a favor.

  After the war, Max hired on to WNTB-TV as a technician. He’s a head cameraman and de facto news director now. A busy man.

  He agreed to meet me for coffee in the station cafeteria, a brightly lit room with metal chairs, stainless-steel fixtures. We took a table in the corner, away from the other staffers.

  Max is my uncle’s age, but the years have been harder on him. He looked hollow-eyed, burned-out.

  But still formidable. He’s built like a blacksmith: blunt fingers, a square face, sideburns going silver. He was dressed in a white shirt and tie, but his sleeves were rolled up, revealing powerful wrists.

  “We need to keep this short,” Max said, glancing around uneasily. “Milano called the station from New York. Says he’ll have the balls of anybody talks to the police without clearing every word with him.”

  “My uncle says you used to run straight into shellfire to get a picture, Max. Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a city-boy suit like Milano?”

  I’d hoped to josh him along, but the glare I got was no joke. He eyed me like a stranger.

  “You don’t know, do you? About my wife?”

  “Margo? What about her?”

  He glanced away, taking a breath. “She’s got MS, Dylan. Multiple sclerosis. She’s bedridden most of the time now. The bills are killing m
e. I’m working double shifts to keep from losing the house.”

  “Damn. I’m sorry, Max, I didn’t know. What about your insurance? Doesn’t it—?”

  “It covers ninety percent,” he said flatly. “Which sounds terrific until you total up what an overnight stay in the hospital costs these days. So, yeah, I do worry about a puffed-up city boy like Milano. I need my damn job, Dylan. What do you need?”

  “Nothing,” I said, rising to go. “I didn’t mean to put you in the middle of—”

  “Sit down, damn it,” he growled. “I’m not so spooked I can’t help a buddy’s favorite nephew. You probably want to know about threats? Stuff like that?”

  “Did she get any?”

  “By the bale. Every station gets a steady stream nowadays. Any twit with a laptop can flame us, fire off an e-mail that would bring down the FBI if they were on paper. The problem is, there’s so much of it, nobody takes it seriously. I’ve already bundled the top twenty from the past few months. I gave ’em to Redfern. Didn’t she tell you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Max cocked his head, eyeing me. “I wondered if Chief Kazmarek knew about you and Sherry.” He nodded. “You’re not assigned to this case, are you?”

  “I’m working it off the books.”

  “I’ve covered stories with Redfern a few times,” he said. “She seemed plenty sharp to me.”

  “Zina’s a good cop, and she’s thorough,” I said. “She’ll track down every name you gave her. But you’re a local, Max. You know which threats were from flakes and which were serious. I want the short list. Who should I be looking at?”

  Max looked away, chewing on the corner of his lip.

  “I can’t do this, Dylan,” he said, glancing around, making sure he wouldn’t be overheard. “If Milano finds out about it, he’ll have my ass.”

  “Got it. No problem,” I said, rising again. “It was good to see you, Max. I’m sorry about your trouble.”

  “It’s a sorry situation all around,” he said. Jotting a quick note on his napkin, he slid it across the table to me. I palmed it without reading it.

  “No comment means no comment,” he called after me, making sure the other staffers in the snack bar heard him. “Next time bring a damn warrant. Officer.”

  I didn’t read the napkin until I was in my car.

  Two names were on it. Pudge Macavoy and Emmaline Gauthier.

  I knew both names. All too well.

  Macavoy was a local bad boy, late twenties now, in trouble since he could walk. I remembered seeing him on TV when Sherry did a piece on domestic abusers. Shirtless, he was standing in the door of his doublewide screaming obscenities at her.

  Was Macavoy crazy enough to go after Sherry? Absolutely.

  But he hadn’t.

  A quick check of the Enforcement Net turned up Pudge’s name. He was already in custody. He’d been busted in Petoskey for his third DUI. Too broke to make bail, he’d been cooling in a cell for the past ten days. He was probably guilty of at least fifty felonies. But not this one.

  The Gauthiers were another matter. There was a small army of them, a dozen families related by blood or marriage. They’re wood-smoke folks, a catchall term for blue-collar types who live in isolated cabins and double-wides in the northern interior. Their homes are heated with free wood gleaned from the state forest, and the scent of smoke lingers on their clothes like musk. I’m a wood-smoke boy myself, and not ashamed of it, but it’s not a term you toss around casually. Some newcomers consider it a synonym for white trash. If you call somebody wood-smoke, you’d best smile.

  The Gauthier clan has a dozen branches, but one has been top dog since I was a boy. Miss Emmaline, mama to seven boys, grandmother to a roughneck militia. She could give the Mafia lessons in organized crime, backwoods style.

  I could have hauled in half of the Gauthier clan on one beef or another, but it would have been a waste of time. Wood-smoke people never talk to the law. Ever. If one of them had a problem with Sherry Sinclair, there was only one person I could ask.

  The drive into the back country is a bit like time travel, back to my childhood. The October hills were already dressed in gold and autumn orange, the forest floor carpeted in leaves in a thousand colors, dusted with white snow doilies here and there.

  The Gauthier clan owns small holdings scattered around the edge of the state forest, some adjoining, some not. Subsistence farms, for the most part, twenty acres here, forty there. None larger. But total them up and they cover a lot of territory.

  A generation ago, they ran truck gardens, poached venison and small game year round, lived off the land as they had for a hundred years.

  But times change. The DNR is tougher on out-of-season hunting now, and you can make a lot more money growing reefer than raising vegetables.

  Emmaline’s farm rests atop a long rise, with a magnificent view of the rolling, forested hills with a silvery sliver of the big lake glinting on the horizon. From her front porch, she can watch the morning sun rise, and then see it set again at the end of the day. She can also see anyone approaching a good half-hour before they pull into her yard.

  She watched me come, sitting on her porch in a white-pine rocker hand carved by one of her sons. Or perhaps her great-grandfather. Time is measured differently in the back country.

  As I pulled up in front of the house, she was knitting, waiting for me. If she was concerned, she gave no sign. She appeared to be alone, but across the clearing I noticed the hayloft door of her barn was slightly ajar. Someone was watching me from the shadows. Probably had me in the crosshairs. Welcome to wood-smoke country.

  I kept my hands in plain sight as I walked up the steps to the broad front porch of her ranch house. The October air was brisk, but the sun was warm on the weathered wood.

  It wasn’t a suburban ranch-style home; the rambling clapboard cabin could have been teleported from the Great Plains, along with its owner.

  Emmaline Gauthier had one of those old-timey faces you see in tintypes: weathered, hawkish, carved from oak. Ice-blue eyes that looked right through you. Her clothes probably came from Goodwill: faded flowered dress, a threadbare sweater over an apron.

  “Good afternoon, Miz Gauthier.” I nodded as I reached the top step, “I’m—”

  “Claudette LaCrosse’s boy,” she finished, glancing up from her knitting. “You’d be Dylan, right? How’s your mother?”

  “She’s fine, ma’am.”

  “Yes, she is. Most folks in town aren’t kind. Store clerks pretend they don’t see me, snotty brats snicker at my clothes. But when I visit your mother’s antiques shop, she offers me coffee. Shows me some of her nice pieces. We chat about the old days. Once in a while I’ll buy some trinket, but not often. We both grew up in the back country, your ma and me. She ain’t wood-smoke no more, but she ain’t forgot her roots. Have you?”

  “I’m not here to talk about my ma, Miss Emmaline.”

  “Then maybe I should call my lawyer. Sergeant.”

  “That’s your right, if you think you need one.”

  “Oh, I expect I can handle any trouble you got, sonny. I’d offer you cider, but I doubt you’ll be here that long. What’s this about?”

  “Sherry Sinclair,” I said, watching her face.

  “That girl from TV?” She frowned. “I heard about what happened to her. As I recall, you two were keeping company awhile back. So are you here on police business? Or on your own hook?”

  “Both,” I said.

  She glanced up at me, her gray eyes as sharp as lasers. “No, I don’t think so. It’s mostly personal, ain’t it.” It wasn’t a question.

  “It doesn’t matter what it is,” I said. “I understand you had some kind of dust-up with Sherry. I need to know about that.”

  “We had us a few problems,” she admitted. “The girl ambushed me. I’m comin’ out of WalMart with a cartload of groceries. Sherry runs over and shoves a microphone in my face with a cameraman filmin’ the whole thing like I was on C
OPS TV. Girl had sand, I’ll give her that.”

  “What did she want?”

  “Same thing you people always want. She’d heard a lot of ugly rumors and gossip—”

  “And checked your clan’s police records,” I put in.

  “That too, maybe,” Emmaline conceded with a wry smile. “She said she was planning a story on the wood-smoke outlaws.”

  “Starring your family?”

  “That was the plan.” She shrugged. “You know my boys, LaCrosse. There’s so many Gauthiers in this county, somebody’s always jammed up over some beef or other. Nephews, cousins, shirttail kin. If you go by the numbers, we can look a little shady. That girl had it in her head that wood-smoke country is the Wild West, and I’m Jesse James.”

  “More like Calamity Jane,” I said. “What happened?”

  “We made a trade, like in the old days.” Emmaline shook her head, smiling at the memory. “I invited her out here to the house for a visit. No cameras, no mikes, just us. She came, too. Girl wasn’t afraid of nothin’. We had us a talk, nose to nose, worked things out.”

  “Worked them out how, exactly?”

  “The way it usually works. I bought her off.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Everybody’s got a price, young LaCrosse, even you, I expect. The key to a good trade is to figure what that price is. Sherry didn’t care much about money. Robbie Gilchrist was keepin’ her and if I had his money, I’d burn mine.”

  “Then what was her price?”

  “I offered to swap her a better story.”

  “What story?”

  She hesitated, reading my eyes. “I wonder how far I can trust you, young LaCrosse?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I didn’t.

  “I knew your daddy,” she said, resuming her rocking. “He was a handsome man, but a little thick, I always thought. You favor your mother, I believe. There may be hope for you.” Reaching into the pocket of her print apron, she came out with a cellophaned brick of white powder and tossed it to me.

  I caught it and hefted it. It felt like a pound. “Sweet Jesus, lady, what—?”

  “That’s half a key of crystal meth,” she said calmly. “Pure glass. Ounce for ounce, it’s worth about the same as gold.”