Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After we finished our interview with Patty, Bernie went and talked privately with Detective Lehmann. Alone. That was annoying. Honestly, I didn’t understand why I didn’t get to join them. The general area outside the offices was now empty, the deputies and Gloria Lehmann were gone.
I took a moment to call Hamlet with an update. When he picked up, I asked, “Are you okay? When I talked to you earlier, I heard shots.
“Oh, don’t worry about that. No one was shooting at me. Of course, I’m a lot less interested in marriage now.” Moving on quickly, he asked, “Weren’t you supposed to send me a report and an invoice?”
That was completely true. I tried to sidestep it. “Not since the last time we talked.” I mean, I never sent one, but if I had it wouldn’t need updating from the last few hours. Although, actually it would…
“Bernie is really upset that his aunt confessed, though she’s adamant.”
“She was at Three Friends when Bobbie took her fall. Right?”
“And then Bobbie mooched off her for, like, nine months.”
“Is she saying why she decided to kill Bobbie now?”
“Not really. And…”
“And what?”
“Patty says she strangled Bobbie while she was asleep. But… I saw Bobbie’s face after she died. She looked terrified, like she knew exactly what was happening.”
After a moment, he said, “Did you tell that to Bernie?”
“Not yet.”
“Keep it to yourself for now. We’ll see how things develop. Good job, though.”
“Speaking of which, we need to talk about how much—”
Lehmann’s door opened and Bernie came out. I said to Ham, “Gotta go.” And clicked off the call.
When he reached me, Bernie said, “They’ve got a search warrant coming in half an hour.
I want you to go out to Aunt Patty’s house and be there while it’s searched.
I would do it but, a) it’s going to be super boring, and b) I have to get Aunt Patty bail.
Not going to be easy. You’ve been to the house, you remember where it is? ”
“I do.”
“Make sure they give you a receipt for everything they take. Also, read the warrant and make sure they don’t take anything that isn’t specifically listed.”
“Is it going to take long? I can only be there until four-thirty.”
He frowned at me. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take. It depends on whether they drag their feet or not.”
Then he stared at me until I said, “If they run late, I’ll try to get a babysitter.”
He looked a bit confused by that statement. I decided not to explain since he’d managed to find out I was a drug addict and arguably a slut. If he couldn’t figure out I was taking care of my baby sister that was his problem.
“You’d better get going. I don’t want them there without you.”
I did manage to make it there before the deputies arrived. Which meant I was standing in the open doorway—yes, the front door was unlocked—when deputy Twiss and his two buddies got out of a black SUV and walked up to the door.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Twiss asked.
“Can I see the search warrant?” I said, holding out my hand.
“Are you related to Patty Gauthier?”
“I’m on her legal team.”
Begrudgingly, Twiss handed me the warrant which was covered in a blue sheet of paper. “Now get out of our way before I arrest you.”
I stepped aside and let them into the house.
Honestly, being arrested was not one of my favorite things.
After they entered the house, I closed the front door and stood in the mudroom reading the warrant.
The date, Patty’s name, the address, legalese, legalese, legalese, then the areas they could search: the house, garages, outbuildings, the grounds and any vehicles.
That was pretty comprehensive. More legalese.
Then, the items they could take: gloves and other winter outerwear, items originally belonging to Roberta LaCross, diaries, day planners, calendars, home videos, photograph albums, bank records, phone records, computers, answering machines and cell phones.
That was also a pretty extensive list. I wondered if they should have brought a U-Haul.
I hadn’t had any time to really look around.
This part of the house was a great room, a large open space that included a kitchen with a gigantic island, the living room area which was defined by a gray sectional that would have taken up three rooms in my grandmother’s house, a dining area and a fireplace with a couple of comfortable looking chairs in front of it.
Beyond all that was a wall of three French doors opening onto an expansive wooden deck, now dormant and covered in nearly a foot of snow. Lake Michigan was beyond all that, calm for the moment, gray like sky.
The décor was beach house despite Patty’s being a local: whitewashed, distressed furniture struggling to look cast off from a grand city home, a general overwrought casualness defined by a plaque in the kitchen that read IT’S WINE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE.
The deputies were all within sight. One only a few feet from me going through the coats hanging from hooks on the wall. I was still near the front door, in what some would call a foyer but in Michigan was definitely a mudroom.
The deputy had found a pair of winter gloves and was putting them into a plastic bag.
“I’d like to take a photo of those, if you don’t mind.”
He studied me suspiciously and then brought the evidence bag over to the sectional. “I’ll set things here and you can photo them. Don’t touch anything.”
I got out my nifty Samsung flip phone and took a not-very-good photo of the gloves.
They were winter gloves, so I doubted very much Patty wore them to strangle Bobbie.
They were fleece-lined suede. The kind of winter gloves that made most tasks, including the strangling of seventy-year-old women, almost impossible.
The other deputies picked up on the procedure and as their bagged “evidence” appeared on the sofa, I took a photo of it.
There were more gloves, a couple of scarfs, a Day Runner for 2003, a small wall calendar (2004) from the kitchen.
I took photos of all of it until I got a message on my Samsung’s tiny screen that I’d run out of memory.
I had taken a bunch of photos of Riley and Emerald that I should have moved to my iBook, but I needed a special adapter.
I just hadn’t gotten around to picking one up.
If I was going to keep working for Ham, I’d probably need to do that.
In the meantime, I had to delete photos I didn’t want to, but I had Reilly, and I had Emerald.
I could take more photos as soon as I got my cell phone cleared out.
I spent a good ten minutes navigating the phone’s menu and repeatedly pressing delete.
The most fruitful item they found, in my estimation, was a cardboard box filled with things Bobbie had left behind when she moved out.
There was a sling she must have used when she broke her arm, a wrist brace presumably from when she snapped her wrist, three Sudoku books mostly complete, a pair of reading glasses from a drug store, a huge, empty prescription bottle made out to Roberta LaCross for lorazepam, a smaller prescription bottle made out to Russell Belcher, also empty, for hydrocodone—which was basically Oxy.
This proved my idea that Bobbie’s story about getting Oxy from a man with cancer was true, and that man was Brian Belcher’s father.
So was this what Patty meant when she said Bobbie killed a man once?
That she’d killed Russell Belcher? No, that didn’t make sense.
Taking his Oxy wouldn’t have killed him.
He might have been left in unbearable pain, but people didn’t die of unbearable pain—did they?
“How much longer do you think you’ll be?” I asked Twiss as he lay a plastic bag containing a daily calendar from 1999 onto the sofa. Pointless if you ask me.
“Don’t know. You got to be some place?”
As a matter of fact, I did. I went back to the mudroom and called Jan to see if she could stay late. She couldn’t, she had a ceramics class she didn’t want to miss. Then I called Dorothy to see if she could babysit. She could not. That left one possibility, one my Nana Cole would hate.
“Hi, Bev. It’s Henry. How are you?”
“Well, upset, of course.”
“Yes. Of course you are. You really can’t take the things she says seriously, though…”
“Henry, I’ve known Emma since before you were born.”
She had me there; I had to turn that to my advantage.
“Then you know that what she’s best at is denial.”
Okay, fine, it’s a family trait. Get over yourself.
“What are you saying?”
“I need help. With Emerald. I’m stuck on a job-related thing…
” I was trying to be discreet, but then I realized a bit of gossip would help Bev smooth things over with Nana Cole.
“Patty Gauthier confessed to murdering Bobbie LaCross. I have to stay at Patty’s house while they search it.
Nana Cole doesn’t know yet, if you could just go over, act like nothing happened, and tell her what’s going on… you’ll probably be fine.”
“Or she’ll throw us out.”
“If she does, take the baby to your place.”
“And she’ll have us arrested us for kidnapping.”
Really, getting a babysitter should not be this hard.
“I’m asking you to, so it’s not kidnapping.”
“Are you Emerald’s guardian?”
“No. But neither is Nana Cole. My mother is Emerald’s guardian.”
We were in a very gray area. I could almost hear Bev thinking that if my grandmother called the police, the baby might get taken away by child protective services. A judge might grant one of us custody, but I certainly didn’t want to go up against a well-informed social worker.
“All right,” Bev said. “We’ll call you if it doesn’t go well.”
I wanted to suggest she not bring Barbara, but they seemed to only travel as a pair.
I wasn’t sure if that was because of their lesbianism, their age, or if it was simply unique to them.
Whatever it was, I found it very strange.
I’d met few men I could tolerate all the way through the sex act (without Oxy, I mean) so the idea of being with anyone in that way twenty-four-seven was deeply disturbing.
After I hung up, I noticed that my phone was nearly out of a charge.
The charger was at home in my bedroom. I really hoped Bev and Barbara didn’t need to talk to me since they might not get through.
I might need a better phone if I was going to keep working for Ham.
I wonder if he’d let me expense that? Could I expense things? I really needed to ask—
Someone was knocking at the door, so I went over and answered it. It was Brian Belcher from next door. He had a worried look on his face.
“What’s going on? Why is the sheriff here? Is Patty all right?”
“They’re searching the house. Patty confessed to murder this morning.”
“Wait—what? Patty confessed to killing Bobbie?”
“I just said that.”
“Is she okay? Does she need a lawyer?
“Her nephew is taking her case.”
“Bernie, junior. Okay.”
He still looked very concerned. His forehead was creased and his jaw tight.
“I’d invite you in, but I don’t think they’d like it.”
“It’s all right. I should—”
As he began to walk away, I stepped out onto the stoop and asked, “Were Patty and your dad close?”
Turning around, he said, “Oh, um, yeah. They were friendly.”
“Bobbie used to get painkillers from your dad, didn’t she?”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s just something I heard.”
“He liked her, that’s all. He thought she was fun. Some people did.”
“Do you think it contributed to his death? Could it have hastened the cancer in some way?”
He went still for a moment, then said, “He died of a heart attack. He had medicine, but he couldn’t get to it in time.”
That was odd, I hadn’t expected it. Did it mean something? I was about to ask more questions, but Brian said, “Look, I have to go. I’ve got things I need to do.”
He walked part way down the short driveway, around the far side of the sheriff’s SUV. I expected to see him walking the way out to the road and then back up his driveway, which was obscured by trees, but he didn’t reappear. That was strange. Had he fallen down? Was he hiding? What was happening?
I walked over to the SUV, then around… I found a neatly shoveled path through the trees which connected the Belcher property to Patty’s.
I hadn’t noticed it before. I mean, come on, everything was white.
But now that I did see it, I wondered, why?
Why take the time to shovel a path between the houses?
The end of the driveway was only another twenty feet.
They couldn’t have been going from house to house that often. Could they? And why…
Oh crap. There was something going on between Patty and Brian.
I’d seen them together at Trivia. She was all dolled up.
I guess I hadn’t picked up on it, since she was older than he was by…
fifteen years? Possibly less. To cut myself some slack, I was taking care of a baby that night.
And playing trivia. And asking a lot of other questions.
Plus… who really understands the things straight people do?
Anyway, now that I figured it out, what did it mean? Did it mean anything? I kind of remembered that Russell Belcher died about a year ago. So it was an anniversary. Patty killed Bobbie on the anniversary of her lover’s father’s death. No, that didn’t make much sense. So what did make sense?
I realized I was freezing my ass off, so I went back inside.