Chapter Thirty-Eight
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Mamie called back then and Clara asked her to meet us at Kentucky Manor as soon as she could, with Robbie.
I took the opportunity to call Teague.
I couldn’t be as vague with him as I had been with Clara.
“You should have called earlier,” he said. “And—”
“I know what you’re going to say. I shouldn’t have touched it. But until I did touch it, I couldn’t know if it was anything. And then I couldn’t leave it there. The wrong breeze and it could have been gone forever.”
His temporary silence acknowledged my logic.
“There’s something else you should know.” I quickly told him about the Payloma-Derrick affair while Jaylynn was pregnant.
“She acknowledged it?”
“Yup.”
“We need to talk to her, get corroboration—”
“Maybe you do, but we already have what we need.”
That’s when I said we’d have all the players at Kentucky Manor’s hospice center in an hour and we’d go ahead with or without him.
Not that I said it that baldly, but he got the drift. He is, after all, a good detective.
He agreed. With caveats.
As our call ended, a word echoed in my head.
Pieces...
Pieces of history caught up in the fabric of the present. Revealing themselves only by an occasional crackle, like the leaves in Gracie’s coat.
A swirl of thoughts and memories, snatches of conversation and impressions.
“Hattie.”
“What?” Clara asked.
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken aloud. I repeated it anyway. “Hattie.”
“Donna’s Hattie?” Clara asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh-kay.” She drew out the first syllable. “Does that mean something?”
“I... I think so.”
Clara, bless her, didn’t ask what it meant.
I didn’t leave her much time to, because I said, “You have more calls to make. If you trust me.”
“Of course I trust you. Why do you have that look on your face?”
“That phrase — trust me .”
“Oh, right. A favorite of abusers.”
“And liars. Though it can take different forms. And I just realized another phrase that’s a close relative.” I shook my head.
“You’re not going to tell me the other phrase. No, don’t make an excuse. I’ll make the calls. And hope I can get them there the way you told Teague they’d be.”
“You will.”
****
Clara ended her last call as I parked at Kentucky Manor.
Inside, we headed for the little conversation spot where we’d met Mamie and Robbie before.
There were other people in the first hallway, so it wasn’t until we’d turned the corner and passed Room One-Twenty-Seven that Clara made a demand.
“Explain to me why finding that label where it sure as heck looks like Robbie went to some trouble to throw it out means he didn’t kill his father?”
“He tried to get rid of the prescription label,” I said to her as we reached the pair of loveseats.
“I know he tried to get rid of the label,” she said impatiently. “Which he’d do if he gave his father a lethal dose of his mom’s pills—Oh. Of course . Where’s my brain?”
Still oxygen-deprived, like mine. Maybe we needed to take the dogs hiking, instead of watching them run while we sat on a picnic table.
“If Robbie killed his father,” she went on, “he would have known a pillow over his face killed him, not the hydromorphone. So, throwing the prescription away meant he thought someone used the drugs to kill Derrick. Who would he do that for? The only one he cares about is Dova and she had the pills.”
“Not the only one. He cares about Mamie.” We’d reached the loveseats.
“ Mamie? I know she keeps cropping up, but why on earth would she kill Derrick?”
“Protecting Robbie. She talked about how upset he was ever since his father was released. Maybe to relieve him of that tension. Or what if Derrick confessed to Robbie that he killed Jaylynn? Mamie could have seen it as simply accelerating nature, worth the risk to spare Robbie more pain and—”
I broke off. We both turned toward the hallway at the sound of approaching footsteps.
****
Robbie and Mamie.
Mamie’s grandfather, too.
That could be a problem. Or not.
Alan took one of the straight-backed chairs and moved it slightly behind the loveseat Mamie and Robbie sat on, which I took as a sign he intended to observe. At least to start.
Robbie’s head was down. So was Mamie’s, except she darted glances toward Robbie.
After letting the silence stretch, I spoke coolly. “Robbie, is Idlewild Cliffs somewhere you go often?”
“Yeah.” He’d had his lie ready. Mamie must have filled him in on what she’d told us. “Spent a lot of time there as a kid. Hiking. Still go when I need to think.”
“You had a lot to think about the day your father died?”
“What do you think?” he snarled. “He’d died and some woman was saying he was murdered.”
“But that wasn’t when you took off from the hospice — not when you learned your father had died and not when Rose Gleiner said he had not died a natural death and not even when the deputy coroner called the sheriff’s department.”
He shrugged one shoulder, not looking at us. “I don’t remember. Like I said, I had things to think about. That’s why I left.”
“Only after you saw a nurse bring bottles of pills out of your father’s room and you recognized the name on one as the pain pills Dova had.”
“That doesn’t—”
“That’s why you rushed to your house, found Dova’s pills, drove to the Cliffs, went to the top, pulled the label off, and threw the bottle and label.”
His face went gray.
“The label got stuck on a weed, Robbie.”
Gray turned white.
Mamie looked at him again, but didn’t touch him.
“That’s—That’s not—”
“Don’t bother, Robbie.” My sharp words raised his head to me, then it dropped immediately.
But he did bother. “I knew where Mom kept those pills. It was easy to get them and bring them here.”
“But you were here the night before he died—” Mamie broke off her inadvertent confession that Robbie had told her about that visit.
“Ah,” I said softly. “You were here and you heard an argument, didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t—”
“Robbie.” This time his head came up and stayed up. “Lying just complicates things. And it doesn’t help. Your father didn’t die from pills.”
“He... He didn’t?”
“He didn’t.” Before he regained his balance completely, I added, “So tell the truth. Did you talk to him?”
“N-no.”
“Either night?”
“No.”
He didn’t seem to realize he’d confirmed he’d been here the night his father died. And I didn’t want to give him time to take that in.
“But you heard arguing.”
“Not really.”
Mamie’s face said otherwise, but she didn’t speak up. Still, what Robbie told her could be another entry point if we needed it.
For now, I specified, “Between your mom and Beverly—”
“Oh, that.”
Boom. Another admission he’d backed into. For that argument to be an oh-that , there had to have been another argument.
“Then the next night—” I took a leap. “—you heard your mom and Derrick—”
“Not arguing. Couldn’t really hear him anyway.”
“So you did talk to him.”
“Not much.”
Mamie blurted out to him, “But you said your mom said not to see him so he wouldn’t take his bitterness at dying out on you.”
He scowled at her, but didn’t deny it.
“What did he say?” I asked Robbie.
“Nothing.” He paused. “My name. Then he drifted off and I thought I heard—I left.”
I dearly wanted to pin down what he thought he heard. But if I scared him off now...
He took us another direction. “What Mamie said... Mom was trying to protect me. It’s natural. With him in prison, they’d been apart all that time. He wasn’t the man she’d married.”
That sounded like a quote.
My phone buzzed with an incoming message from Teague.
Ready .
****
After the challenges of my call to Teague while driving here, the arrangements came together better than we could have hoped.
Clara had used the same lure as she’d dangled to get us in their doors to bring the elder Dorrios, accompanied by their nephew Emil, and the Carnells, mother and daughter. Obtaining the certainty of justice, in their eyes.
She sidestepped the fact that their views of justice conflicted.
She also didn’t mention to either group that the other would be there.
She persuaded Evan Ferguson, based on the ploy that he’d be doing it for the sake of Jaylynn’s family.
The aide Sally was happy to join. Rose wasn’t. But Teague’s authority accomplished that trick.
They were inside Room One-Twenty-Seven when we responded to Teague’s message by coming down the hall with Robbie, Mamie, and Alan — with one exception.
Dova stood outside, watching us approach.
A hospice staffer I hadn’t seen before held a position that made me think she’d kept Dova from joining us.
“Why were you talking to my son?” she demanded.
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“Let’s go in and we’ll sort this out,” Clara said.
Boy, I hoped she was right. Which meant hoping I was right. Because if I was wrong...
“Go ahead,” Clara added, gesturing for them to proceed us.
They did, though three of the four showed momentary hesitation about entering Room One-Twenty-Seven.
Only Alan didn’t.