Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I was on my way to find my grandmother and demand we leave, when Sue Langtree cornered me.
“You missed rehearsal this week. I was really hoping you’d come.”
“I don’t think singing is my thing.”
“I told you before that doesn’t really matter. I want you to come on Tuesday. Will you promise?”
“Uh. No.”
“Oh, don’t be like that. You’re still new here. You need to get out and meet more people.”
“I don’t think ‘Hi, I’m tone deaf’ is great introduction.”
“Oh, you silly! You’re not tone deaf. Or at least you wouldn’t be if you came to rehearsal.
All you need is practice. Maybe a lot of it, but if you’d only try.
Tuesday. Seven o’clock.” After that she walked away, and I was left to go find Nana Cole.
I mouthed that I wanted to leave, and she reluctantly began her goodbyes.
We left nearly an hour later. As soon as we got into the Escalade, she said, “Call Little Italy and order some fried chicken and a pizza. We’ll pick it up on the way home.”
Surprisingly, I was a bit hungry. I asked, “Why do they have fried chicken at a pizza place?”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“It’s not Italian fried chicken, is it?”
“I don’t think so. I think it’s just fried chicken.”
I dialed 411 and asked for Little Italy. For an extra charge, I was put through. As the phone rang, I asked my grandmother, “What kind of pizza do you want?”
“Oh, I don’t care. I’m just ordering it to be polite. It would be rude to just get the chicken.”
Even though that made no sense, I went ahead and ordered a bucket of the fried chicken and a meat lover’s pizza, medium. For the hell of it, I added a couple of Cokes. I was told it would be about half an hour. After I hung up, we drove the five minutes to Little Italy.
Once inside, I quickly discerned that little was the more important word. Italy seemed an afterthought. There were three tables, a long counter and a giant white board as a menu—much of which was far from Italian. We were the only customers.
On the counter was a bell, which Nana Cole hit.
“She said a half an hour. It’s not ready yet.”
“It’s only polite to tell her we’re here.”
After a moment, a woman in her late fifties came out. She had a wide face and thinning bangs that were meant to disguise a spider’s web of scars running across most of her forehead.
“Hello Dinah, it’s Emma Cole.”
“Yes, Emma, I can see you.”
That brought my grandmother up short. She stumbled for a moment and then meekly said, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I can never… this is my grandson, Henry.”
I had no idea what that was about. Dinah nodded at me.
“Your order will be ready in about twenty minutes. If you let me go back into the kitchen.”
“Oh. Yes, of course,” my grandmother said to Dinah’s back.
“What just happened?”
“Oh, I just… she has this thing. I can never remember it. It happened when she was in that awful car accident. Oh God, thirty years ago. She went through the windshield. Amazing that she—”
“What thing does she have?”
“She can’t hear voices—er, I mean, she’s not deaf. She can hear them, she just can’t recognize them. I always think it’s that she can’t remember faces but it’s not that, obviously. It’s a brain thing.”
“From the accident.”
“Yes. I said that.”
She hadn’t exactly. Had she?
“So, everyone knows she can’t recognize voices.”
“Yes, but it’s not polite to talk about it.”
“Is this the only place you can order pizza?”
“It’s good pizza. And the fried chicken—”
“Is it the only place?”
“Well, the only place in Masons Bay. There’s pizza in Bellflower. And Traverse, though I can’t imagine why you’d drive forty minutes there and forty minutes—”
“Do you think this is where Reverend Hessel ordered pizza the night he died?”
“I imagine it is. I mean, it makes sense.”
I stepped forward and rang the bell. After a moment, Dinah came out. She looked around and then at us.
“It’s not ready yet.”
“Oh, I know. I just have one question. Did you take Reverend Hessel’s order the night he was killed?”
“I certainly did. I ended up stuck with a vegetarian delight.”
“But you can’t be certain it was him, can you?” I asked.
She glared at me. I guess I had two questions.
“He always ordered the vegetarian delight. And it was his credit card. Detective Lehmann said so.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Nana Cole said. “We’ll just take our pizza and go.”
“It’s not ready yet,” she said, clearly getting annoyed.
“So, you can tell the difference between a man and a woman?” I asked.
“Of course, I can.”
She was obviously offended. I mean, I thought it was an important question.
“Why do you get to ask me something like that? I have a disability. Are you making fun of me?”
“No. I’m sorry. It’s important that you actually spoke to Reverend Hessel.”
“Well, I did. I’m sure I did. He coughed a lot and apologized. Apparently, he had a cold when he… died.”
Did he have a cold? No one else had mentioned that.
After giving me a nasty look, she went back into the kitchen. I relaxed a little. She was really pissed off. I worried about what she might do to my pizza.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Nana Cole asked.
“Well… don’t you see? It might not have been Reverend Hessel who ordered the pizza.”
“Why would someone pretend to be Reverend Hessel just to get a pizza? I mean, they didn’t even come pick it up.”
“Detective Lehmann thinks the murder happened in the time between the order being placed and when Reverend Hessel should have left to come get it. But if someone else made the call, he might have been dead already.”
“But, no—”
“All they needed was his credit card information and what kind of pizza he liked. The credit card would be easy—if you killed him just take it out of his pocket.”
“But knowing what kind of pizza he liked—that means it’s someone who knew him,” she said, her voice darkening. I could tell she hadn’t quite given up on it’s being a robbery or a hate crime. “You think it was Carl, don’t you?”
“He’d have known what kind of pizza his stepfather liked and about Dinah’s condition.”
“Wouldn’t that detective have checked his phone records?” she asked.
“Yes, but he could have used Opal’s phone. Maybe she went to the bathroom or something.”
“But why would Carl kill his stepfather?”
That was a little dicey. I didn’t want to tell her that Hessel had been PNPing with a guy Carl was in love with.
“Maybe he did it for his mother,” I suggested.
“Do you think they did it together?”
“I guess. I don’t know. She might have found out her husband was doing drugs.”
“I know women who’ve put up with worse,” she said.
Then Dinah was back with our order: a large, flat cardboard box and a big bag on top of it. To Nana Cole she said, “You know where the napkins and forks are.”
“Thank you, Dinah. And I’m sorry if Henry was rude.”
“I’m just asking the questions you want answers to,” I protested.
To Dinah, Nana Cole said, “Young people. They just don’t get it.”
Monday morning, I went to see Detective Lehmann.
On the drive to the Municipal Center, I went over everything in my head again and again.
I doubted Detective Lehmann would believe me.
Not because what I had to say didn’t make sense, but because his default position where I was concerned was disbelief.
He was there in his office. I was beginning to suspect that he left it as little as possible.
“I broke their alibi. Ivy Greene and her son.”
“You ‘broke’ it? How did you do that?”
“My grandmother and I got a pizza from Little Italy.”
“Ah, well, that makes perfect sense,” he said with obvious sarcasm.
“Look, you’re not from here, so you probably didn’t know this. Dinah at Little Italy, she was in a car accident, went through the windshield. She has this kind of brain damage where she doesn’t recognize voices. She thought it was Reverend Hessel on the phone, but it wasn’t.”
It was starting to make sense to him, I could tell because he looked very unhappy. “You’re not from here, either. So how do you know?”
“My grandmother explained it to me.”
“It was Reverend Hessel’s credit card. And his credit card was still in his wallet when we found him.”
“Dinah can tell men from women, but that’s it. Did you get his phone records?”
“The phone records for the church should get here soon. It can take up to forty-five days. We just got the records for Ivy Greene, and they match up with what she told us.”
They got phone records all the time on Law & Order. They usually arrived before anyone thought to ask for them. Apparently, things worked differently in real life.
“Which was?” I asked. “What did Ivy Greene tell you?”
He stared at me for a moment. “I thought you were finished with this. Didn’t you tell me that?”
“Yeah, then someone tried to poison us, me, whatever.”
I waited for him to decide that earned me more information. “Ivy says that Hessel called her around seven-thirty to ask if she needed him to bring anything home. She asked for the pizza.”
“Or… that call came from Carl. He’d just killed his stepfather and wanted his mother’s help.”
“Why would Carl kill his stepfather?”
I blushed. This was going to be embarrassing. “Carl’s bisexual. He’s got a thing for a guy named Denny. Denny would sometimes PNP with Reverend Hessel.”
“PNP? What is—”
“Seriously?” I mean, a cop would know what that meant, right? He smirked at me, happy to have gotten me riled up.
“Do you have any evidence of that?” he asked.
I decided not to mention my little trip to the local drug dealer, and went with, “I saw Denny and Carl having an argument across the street from the barbershop.”
“Nothing says love like fighting on the street.” He seemed to be enjoying this. “You’re still just guessing.”
“You could talk to Denny.”
“Because drug addicts always tell the truth?”
“So, what are you doing next?”
“Not telling you.”