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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

September 17, 1996

Tuesday evening

A fter we fast-forwarded through a couple of hours before the murder and a couple of hours afterward, we watched Joanne get killed a few more times. I was trying to work out where the shooter might have gone. Obviously, he took the hoodie off and stashed it somewhere—possibly in the ceiling of the second-floor men’s room. Then where did he go? Did he wait until he heard the police sirens? Did he come out of the building at the same time as the people who worked there? At its height, there was a crowd of twenty or twenty-five people. Even though the building was fully occupied, there were enough different businesses that no one would have noticed someone they didn’t recognize. They probably saw people they didn’t recognize all the time. Even if you only counted temps and clients.

I looked through the small crowd several times but didn’t see anyone who stood out. Not that I could see anyone clearly. The cameras were actually a couple hundred feet away so people were very small. And, as Rocky had explained, the quality was low. The people I did recognize, I recognized partly because of other factors: Joanne’s jacket, the Voyager with a bumper sticker, Mr. Cray coming out the back of the building with his briefcase. Any of those could be wrong, except I knew they weren’t.

Before I left, I gave Rocky a couple hundred more out of Joanne’s stash. He asked me, “Where are you from? You’re not from Michigan.”

“I’m from California.” And as soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. I didn’t want people to know that much about me. “San Diego,” I lied.

“That’s where I’d go. If I was gonna leave. I’d go to California, re-invent myself.”

“Not a bad idea.”

I drove back to the corporate flophouse. I’d decided to deal with Aunt Suzie in the morning. I hated the idea that she was involved. But she was there and that meant something. It might even mean I got to go home soon.

I missed home. I missed Ronnie. Terribly. We’d only been together a few months when we bought a little house on Bennett and moved in together. It was a crazy thing to do. I nearly backed out three or four times. That would have been logical, but imagining my life without Ronnie has been difficult almost from the moment I met him.

I debated whether to call him. I wanted to wait until I could tell him exactly when I’d be home. He was going to be furious with me... and rightly so.

When I walked into the motel room the phone was ringing. That was disturbing. No one knew where I was. I picked it up and said, “Hello.”

“Hey, it’s Cass.”

Okay, one person knew where I was.

“Hey. What’s going on?”

“I need to you to come back to the house, okay?”

“Why?”

“Just come back.”

“You can’t tell me over the phone?”

“No. I can’t.”

“Are people still there?”

“Some, yeah.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

I hung up. Honestly, I had no idea what that was about. Driving over I weighed the possibilities. He probably had some theory about who killed his mom or his dad or both. Probably one that was way off base.

I wondered if Aunt Suzie would still be there—and whether I should talk to her about what I’d seen. No, I shouldn’t talk to her. Not in front of Cass. If she’d hired someone to kill Joanne I didn’t want him to know. I didn’t want him getting any ideas about—well, I didn’t really think he'd kill his aunt. Would he? Oh, God, maybe. No, if she was involved then I needed to convince her to turn herself in. For Cass’s sake.

The Voyager was still in front of the house when I got there. The Cadillacs were gone, as was the Corvette. A purple Honda Civic I hadn’t seen before sat in the driveway. The Belvedere was gone. I assumed he’d pulled it into the garage.

Before I could ring the doorbell, Cass opened the door. He’d been waiting for me. His eyes looked worried, but all he said was, “Hey.”

He walked away and I followed, shutting the front door behind me. The living room and dining room had been cleaned up with everything put back in place. In the kitchen, Aunt Suzie was at the sink washing the few remaining dishes, while Heather sat at the breakfast nook with a very good-looking Hispanic guy about her same age.

“Hello again,” Heather said. “This is Hector. He’s a friend. I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

“Nick.”

They each had a bowl of Aunt Suzie’s stew. I noted that the cans of Diet Coke that had once taken up a shelf in the refrigerator now sat on the counter. I imagined it had been cleaned out to make room for all the food that had been served that afternoon.

Cass was anxious for me to follow him into the garage, and I would have if Suzie hadn’t asked, “What brings you back, Nick?”

I didn’t have an answer for that. Fortunately, Cass said,

“I called. There’s something I want to talk to him about.”

To me, Aunt Suzie said, “If you learned anything about what happened to my brother I deserve to know.”

“I haven’t learned anything you don’t already know,” I said, without thinking about whether I was being truthful or not. To be honest, I’d almost forgotten about Dom’s disappearance completely.

I walked out of the kitchen into the garage. As I’d suspected, Cass had moved the Belvedere into the garage. He opened the driver’s door, reached behind the front seat, and pulled out a brown paper bag. He handed it to me and I opened it. Inside was a dark green Spartan’s hoodie with a Colt 38 sitting on top of it. The gun was similar to the duty weapon I carried when I was a cop twenty years before. This gun might have been ten or fifteen years old.

“Where was this?”

“Behind the driver’s seat.”

“And how did you find it?”

“When I pulled the car into the garage, I braked a little fast and the bag hit the back of the seat, making a kind of crinkle noise. I checked it out.”

That was when I realized he smelled of alcohol. That explained the ‘braked a little fast’. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“I get it. Your mom just died. Just don’t make yourself sick. That wasn’t fun, was it?”

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

“No. Not whatever. Whoever put this into your car has probably already left an anonymous tip with the police. They’re probably getting a warrant and will be here in the morning. Someone wants to pin your mom’s murder on you.”

“Why would they do that?”

“To protect themselves,” I said. “I’m going to take this away. I don’t want you caught with it.”

“Okay… Do you think it was someone who was here today?”

“I don’t know. I suppose someone could have put it into your car sometime during the night. It was outside.”

I was well aware that it could have been put there by his aunt. She was there. She watched it happen. She probably paid someone to kill Joanne, and they gave her the hoodie and the gun. And now she’s trying… No, that didn’t make any sense. I was sure she genuinely cared about her nephew. She might have had Joanne killed, but she wouldn’t blame it on Cass. So what was going on?

Even as we stood there, I began planning to visit Aunt Suzie first thing in the morning. Without Cass. “Why don’t you open the garage door, and I’ll take care of these and see you tomorrow.”

“You don’t want to come back inside?”

“You go in. Don’t have anything else to drink and get some sleep. The cops will be here in the morning, you’ll need your wits about you.”

“Aunt Suzie wants me to go home with her.”

“Try to get her to stay here.”

“I’ll try,” he said, doubtfully as he hit the button to open the garage door. As I walked down the driveway, I realized it might be hard to get Aunt Suzie alone in the morning. I might need to ask her what she was doing at Top Dog in front of Cass. That gave me a queasy feeling in my stomach.

Then I lucked out. I was standing at the trunk of the Thunderbird when I heard the front door close. I turned and saw Aunt Suzie stomping toward me. When she got close, she said, “What were the two of you talking about? I know it’s about Dominick. You found something out, didn’t you?”

I opened the bag and held it out so she could look into it. “You know what that is, don’t you? Someone put it into the back of Cass’s Car.”

“Someone’s trying to blame Cass? But… he was with you, wasn’t he? He picked up Chinese food… there will be a credit card receipt, won’t there?”

“Yes. But, Cass and his mom had a habit of buying things with other people’s cards. So he really can’t prove he was there.”

“He wasn’t at Top Dog though. They can’t prove he was.”

“You were there though, weren’t you?”

“What? No. I wasn’t. Of course, I wasn’t.”

“I watched the security video. A Plymouth Voyager pulled into the parking lot at around forty-thirty and left shortly after Joanne was gunned down. It had a Clinton/Gore sticker on the back.”

Okay, so I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure of the make of the van or what the bumper sticker said—but her face told me I was right.

A determined look came over her face. “I play softball. In the spring and summer. I have four bats—well, five actually. I put one in the van and I went there. I was going to… I know she killed my brother, her and her cousin. She didn’t have to do that. She could have divorced him and the dope would have paid her child support.”

“You sat and watched while she got shot?”

“I didn’t know that was going to happen. I was going to go over and beat her to death. I had the courage to do it. I did. But then I thought about Cass and… I couldn’t do it to him.”

“But it happened anyway.” I said.

“Did you see who did it?”

“He kept his head down. I don’t think even Joanne got a good look at him.

“Did you see anything? What kind of jeans he was wearing? Sneakers? His hands? Anything he had around his neck?”

She thought for a moment before she said, “He wasn’t wearing jeans. Just dark slacks. And shoes. Not sneakers.”

Okay, that meant something. It could have been any man in the building. “Did he seem at all interested in the car?”

“No. I don’t know why they’re saying things about a car-jacking. He just grabbed her purse and ran back into the building.”

And then ran to the second floor bathroom and put Joanne’s purse in the ceiling, but kept the hoodie and the gun. Finally, I shut the trunk of the rental.

“Whoever put that bag in the back of Cass’s car has probably already tipped off the police. They’re probably getting a warrant right now. Stay here with Cass so he’s not alone?—”

“I’ll bring him to my house.”

“No. Someone should be here for the search. Otherwise they’ll break the door down. You also want to make sure they only search what’s listed on the warrant.”

Then she went pale. “Are they going to figure out I was in that parking lot?”

“I haven’t seen the footage they have, what I saw came from the building next door. But from what I saw, they couldn’t read your license plate. They’re also not looking for you. They’ve got their hearts set on a Black teenager.”

She visibly relaxed. Then she said, “Thank you. I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but thank you.”