Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Of course, not everything that starts out well ends well.
Especially when it comes to sex. To be honest, sex with Denny didn’t even middle well.
The problem was probably Tina. The stronger the high got, the less I cared for it.
It made me jittery and nervous. My heart felt like it was running a marathon the rest of my body had not been invited to, and I may have even hyperventilated at one point—which Denny mistook for enthusiasm, offering me more meth. I turned it down. Or tried to.
Afterwards, as we were pulling up our pants, I asked him, “You heard about Reverend Hessel, right? The sheriff thinks he was killed by someone trying to get money for drugs.”
I mean, that had been the whole point of asking him to meet me in the pole barn, right? Unfortunately, even in the pitch black I could tell he’d tensed up.
“I thought we were having fun.”
“We were. We are,” I lied.
“I don’t steal.”
“Okay. Well, I didn’t mean you personally. Do you know—”
“I don’t know people who steal.”
“Okay.”
“But—”
“But what?”
Now we might be getting somewhere. Unfortunately, he continued, “Well, there’s all sorts of vacation homes around here. They’re empty most of the time, even in the summer. If you need money, you just go in and take DVDs and CDs. Shit like that. People barely even notice.”
When he left—finally—I went inside and took three Oxys just to come down.
While I waited for them to take effect, I tried to figure out if I’d learned anything at all.
Not much, really. I mean, some guys like to get high and have sex.
I knew that already. So what had Opal wanted me to figure out?
And did she know something she wasn’t telling me?
I guess Denny could have been lying. He certainly seemed to know a lot about stealing for someone who didn’t steal. But then, what he did know suggested he was too smart to have broken into the church at all, since there were easier pickings elsewhere. And he knew it.
Plus, I got the definite impression that between cutting hair and hooking up with guys who’d give him Tina, Denny wasn’t having any trouble getting what he wanted. Which didn’t mean there weren’t other tweakers who weren’t getting what they wanted and might not be smart enough—
The next morning, I had a wicked headache and the feeling the world was likely to end before lunch.
All I really wanted to do was take a few more Oxy and spend the day locked in my room.
But what I wanted even more than that was to go home to California and that meant I needed the money I’d been promised.
I just had to figure out a way to get it.
I’d finally gotten around to calling and scheduling a new physical therapist who was scheduled at eleven.
If I left around ten and planned to be back by one, I’d have three hours which would not be leaving Nana Cole alone for too long.
At quarter to ten, I slipped out of the house.
As soon as I got into the Escalade, I called Opal.
“Meet me at Cuppa Mud at ten-thirty. I want to show you my haircut.” Two can play the cryptic game.
“No,” she said. “Meet me at Main Street Cafe. At noon.”
“Eleven-thirty.”
“Whatever.”
Since I had time, I went to the Masons Bay Library, which was located on Main Street in a building that had once been a lumbermill or some such.
A two-story brick building, it had basically been gutted and the library built inside.
Most of the books were on the first floor, because the second was largely open.
A staircase behind the circulation desk rose to the second floor, which was basically a narrow balcony ringing the floor.
In addition to the circulation desk, the first floor had activity rooms, computers and rows and rows of books. At the circulation desk sat a slightly overweight guy whose name I remembered was Chad. Hanging Chad, as I’d nicknamed him.
“Hi, Henry. How are you?” he said when he noticed me.
“Oh, you remember me.”
“You’re hard to forget.”
Was he flirting? Ick. He didn’t think I’d do a fat guy, did he? Was I looking that bad? Or desperate?
But then I wondered, could I use it to my advantage?
Hanging Chad added, “You’re on the front page of the Eagle today.”
“Seriously?”
He pointed to the periodical area. I walked over and found the Eagle hanging on this weird piece of furniture with a lot of wooden dowels designed specifically to hang newspapers from—kind of like a clothes rack for periodicals.
There I was on the cover accepting a large fake reward check from Sheriff Crocker.
We both wore phony smiles; his was a little more polished.
I needed to stop off at Benson’s Country Store and buy a few copies.
Actually, there were several issues of the Eagle hanging there, going back three weeks.
One of them had a story about Reverend Hessel’s murder on the front page.
There was a large picture of the minister sitting at his desk.
A telephone sat at his right and an in-box was on his left.
It was full of papers to be dealt with. Something sat on top of them.
It took a moment to see that it was glass, a paperweight, I guess.
I picked out some of the items I’d seen in the box of Hessel’s belongings. The cup that said Treble Maker, the picture of Reagan, the plaque from Downers Grove.
He looked happy. Not at all like someone who would someday be murdered at that very desk. It occurred to me that this might happen to people a lot. We cross the spot where we’ll eventually die, over and over again. Did that make things better or worse?
Morbid thoughts. Possibly connected to my raging headache. I drifted back over to the circulation desk and asked Chad, “Do you have access to the Chicago papers? Like, historically?”
“Not here. I mean, not exactly. I can do a computer search. But the articles… I can’t access them. There’s a monthly fee and we don’t—”
“Can you do a search on Chris Hessel in the Chicago papers?”
“You’re trying to solve the reverend’s murder,” he said, excitedly. “Is there a reward? I haven’t heard about one.”
“No. No reward. My grandmother—” then I rolled my eyes like, you know, everyone’s grandmother wanted them to solve a murder.
He nodded like he understood exactly what I meant. Then he asked, “So, the search terms should be Hessel and Chris and Christopher. Anything else?”
“Choir.”
“Oh yes, that’s a good idea. I have a friend at the Evanston library, just outside of Chicago. It might take a day or two.”
“Okay.”
I gave Hanging Chad my phone number and asked that he call me if found anything out. Then, on a hunch I asked, “Do you have any books on forensics?”
“Three sixty-three,” he said with a smile. “Upstairs to your left.”
After smiling back in the most noncommittal way possible, I climbed the stairs to the second floor and followed the sign to the three hundreds.
There were actually a lot more books on the second floor than I’d originally thought.
Still, I quickly found the forensic books.
Zeroing in on the one that seemed like it would be most useful, I pulled Forensic Pathology off the shelf.
I flipped through until I found what I wanted in the second chapter, ‘Time of Death.’
There was a lot of information about how time of death was calculated, most of it vaguely disgusting. The most interesting was that you needed to take a corpse’s temperature—which you could do rectally, ick, or by slicing the body open and sticking a thermometer directly into the liver, double ick.
The thing is—and this is what had been bothering me—is that Opal said Detective Lehman was asking about the time between eight-fifty and nine-twenty, and that didn’t make much sense.
It was too exact. In all my viewings of CSI they always said between eight and eleven or noon and four.
It was always several hours and always began on the hour.
So why was Detective Lehmann asking about eight-fifty? Why wasn’t he asking about sometime between eight and ten? That would be more in keeping with what it said in the book I was holding. I stared at the book for a moment but didn’t find an answer.
Putting the book back, I went downstairs and was about to leave the library, when Hanging Chad waved me over to the circulation desk. He took a copy of the Eagle out from under the counter and said, “It’s from two weeks ago.”
It was the same one that had the story about Reverend Hessel on the front page. “I already looked at that one.”
“Check out the last page,” he said. “The Wyandot County Dispatch Blotter.”
“What is that?”
“All the 9-1-1 calls.”
“Oh.”
I turned to the inside back page and there it was. It said:
2:50PM 05/29/03 Animal at Large, S. Plum Point, two calves got out overnight. Calves were located near Big Turtle Road eating grass, returned safely.
11:36PM 05/29/03 Disorderly, W. Mill St. Female with bottle of booze yelling at people on bike trail. Currently hiding in bushes. Black jeans/red and white shirt. Advises she will stay at her house for next 24 hours.
12:04AM 05/30/03 Body found, Woman reports finding husband unresponsive in church office. Cheswick Community Church.
That was weird. Ivy Greene said she’d sent her son, Carl, over to talk to his stepfather around midnight.
And here she was calling 911 just after midnight.
That raised a lot of questions. Why was she the one to make the call?
Did she do it from her home or did she go over to the church? And why hadn’t Carl called 911?