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CHAPTER SEVEN

September 14, 1996

Saturday afternoon

T he car had fins. A mint condition, two-door, tomato soup red 1958 Plymouth Belvedere sat on the second floor of the Big Blue Deck. The parking garage was directly across from the terminal we’d come from. As we got close to it, I asked, “This is your car?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s not really what I was expect?—”

“My grandfather left it to me. He made it. I mean, not all of it. Some of it. He worked on the Plymouth line. My mother wanted to sell it, but Aunt Suzie wouldn’t let her have the title. She pays the insurance for me.”

His mother charges him room and board, but his aunt pays his car insurance. The kid was getting some very mixed signals—which could explain why he was desperate to have a father. He unlocked the door on the passenger side, and said, “Get in.”

I climbed in. The seats were red-and-white vinyl that looked like they’d never been sat on. I glanced over at the driver’s side and saw that the car had a push-button transmission. Cass climbed in and unlocked the anti-theft bar that held the steering wheel in position. He dropped the bar in the backseat.

I put on my safety belt. There was no shoulder strap, so if there was an accident I’d likely have significant whiplash. He put the key in the ignition and the engine burst into life. Pushing a gear, he pulled out of the parking spot and we were on our way.

We stopped at the cashier’s booth and Cass paid the fee with a credit card. He’d given me the impression it was his mother’s card, but I was starting to get the feeling that the name on the account wasn’t related to either of them. A few minutes later we were heading west on one freeway, then quickly heading north on another. It was in the low fifties with dark clouds above us, and I had no idea where I was.

Not long afterward, we were in a neighborhood straight out of Leave It to Beaver. We pulled into the driveway of a two-story house with white painted brick on the first floor and matching clapboard on the second. The lawn was neat and the house surrounded with hydrangeas sending out last-gasp blossoms.

I followed Cass up to the front door. He got out a key and we walked in. We were in a small foyer with stairs on the far side and doors going into a living room, and opposite that a dining room. It was a more formal house than I’d been expecting.

“What do you want to do first?” Cass asked.

“Well, I’d like to take a shower.”

The kid looked disappointed, so I said, “We’re going need to talk to some people, I’d like a shower before we do that. You should probably take one, too. How many bathrooms do you have?”

“There’s a half bath down off the kitchen and regular bathroom upstairs.”

“So just one shower?”

“There’s a bathroom with a shower off my mother’s room, but we can’t go in there.”

Which meant it was exactly where I wanted to go.

“Do you want to shower first or do you want me to?”

“You can do it first. It’s upstairs. The door’s right there at the top of the stairs.”

“Okay.”

When I reached the top of the stairs, I noted one door to my right, two doors to my left and a door in front of me. I walked into the bathroom. It was large, with a bathtub and separate shower on the right side of the room, and a toilet and sink on the left. I guessed that the mother’s room was the single door, and that her bathroom was on the other side of the wall from this bathtub and shower. I’d need to know that in a few minutes.

At first glance, the bathroom looked fairly ordinary: pink and gray with fuzzy rugs and seat covers. But then I looked closer. It was filthy. The toilet needed a good scrubbing, as did the sink, which was caked with toothpaste. I’d been thinking about rinsing out my shirt and boxer briefs but decided I’d be better off trying to stop and buy some new ones—plus I needed some kind of coat.

I opened the medicine cabinet—because that’s who I am—and checked it out. There were some shaving supplies that went with the stray whiskers around the sink, a spray for jock itch, an unfinished prescription for antibiotics, allergy pills and a lot of Band-Aids.

The bright spot was the linen closet, which was largely empty but did hold one clean towel. I left the towel on the shelf, because I thought it might be the cleanest place in the bathroom, turned the shower on, and took off my clothes. When the water was warm enough I climbed in.

Did this disgusting bathroom mean anything? If they could afford a house like this, why didn’t they have a cleaner? Or why didn’t his mother clean the room? Sexist, I know, but most mothers would. Did she spend a lot of time screaming at him to clean up after himself and he just ignored her? Or did she not even bother?

Luckily, the water got hot. I turned around and let it run over the spot where I’d had surgery. The heat felt good. I’d taken all the aspirin; I needed to get more.

I should search the house. The comment he made about not going into his mother’s room concerned me. If he wanted me to find his father’s killer, he was going to have to do this my way. He didn’t seem inclined to do that, though.

When I got out of the shower, I took the towel out of the linen closet and used it. Then I put my clothes back on. They didn’t smell so great, but I’d hopefully make it to a store that afternoon. Then I opened the door as quietly as I could.

From downstairs, I heard music. Then a moment later talking. It took a moment, but I realized Cass was watching cable TV. MTV to be specific. Not that I knew much about it. We’d had cable at the house on Second, but I didn’t spend a lot of time watching MTV. Videos weren’t my thing.

Creeping down the hallway, I opened each of the two doors. One was Cass’s bedroom, which was messy and about as clean as the bathroom. There was a twin-sized bed, a dresser with a broken drawer and a desk. The desk was even more cluttered than the rest of the room. There was a pretty recent PC—I couldn’t tell you much more than it looked new. And a laser printer; that I knew because we had one at The Freedom Agenda. On top of the printer was a Sony PlayStation. There was a stack of game cartridges piled next to the entangled electronics. The room smelled strongly of teenaged boy, so I decided not to stay long. I shut the door quietly.

The other room was what he’d described as the junk room. It seemed an accurate description. The room had an unmade twin bed pushed up against one wall, surrounded by stacks of boxes, folding chairs, bags filled with who knows what, an exercise bike, an abandoned Atari gameplayer and stacks of Harlequin romance novels. Since this was the room I was meant to stay in I didn’t dig too deep, there would be time for that later.

I went back out to the top of the stairs and called down, “Your turn.” I waited. A bit later the TV was turned off and Cass appeared at the bottom of the stairs. When he got closer, I said, “I peeked into the junk room. If you tell me where the sheets are, I’ll make the bed.”

“In the closet on the shelf,” he said, as though that should have been obvious.

I went into the room and found them. I began making the bed, though mostly I was listening. I heard him go down to his room, then come back to the bathroom. A minute or so later, the shower came on. I left the junk room and quietly walked back to his mother’s room. I opened the door.

It was a very large room with windows on opposite sides. There was her private bathroom and a walk-in closet. In the center of the far wall sat a very large four poster bed. It had a frilly canopy and looked like the kind of bed Scarlet O’Hara would enjoy. There was a floral love seat and a makeup table. The love seat had too many pillows and a comfy looking chenille blanket. The latest Harlequin romance was tangled in the blanket. The makeup table was covered with perfumes, tubes of lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara brushes, foundation, powder, eyelash curlers, tweezers, eyebrow pencils and thick brushes to spread it all around.

I took a look in her bathroom. It also had a lot of fuzzy pink rugs and things. These looked pretty new, and I had the feeling that as soon as they began to look shabby she’d put them into the other bathroom and buy new. Her towels looked recently purchased and there was a souvenir glass from Las Vegas holding her tooth brush next to the sink. I wouldn’t say her bathroom was spotless, but it was definitely clean.

I opened the medicine cabinet. In addition to a selection of hairsprays, there was a row of prescription medications. I read the labels. The first bottle I picked up was Prozac. I’d heard of that. The bottle was full and the prescription was nearly a year old. She wasn’t taking them. She was taking something called alprazolam. I wasn’t sure what that was, but she was taking a lot of it. She’d only filled the prescription a month ago and it was nearly gone.

Back in the bedroom, I cracked the closet open. It was deep and crammed full. There was a lot of money in her bedroom. There was a lot of money in the house itself. Cass had mentioned that his mother had taken cards in her husband’s name and never paid them. Just looking around the bedroom, I knew she was up to a lot more than that. Exactly what I couldn’t be sure, but it did make me wonder how long she’d been up to it and whether it might have to do with Dom Reilly’s disappearance.

Fortunately, the kid was taking a long shower. Longer than you’d expect from a kid with a high tolerance for filth. I went back into the junk room and finished making the bed. Then I went downstairs.

The living room was neat and expensively furnished. The only thing I could see that was out of place was Cass’s backpack, which he’d left on one of the two facing sofas. There was a large mahogany coffee table with matching end tables. Against the walls were a couple of side chairs, a console television that looked like a liquor cabinet, and a cabinet that didn’t but probably was. At the far end of the room was a double pocket door opening onto a den.

That room held a sturdy looking mahogany desk. There were a couple of short filing cabinets. I went in and sat behind the desk. There was a beige desk phone in one corner sitting on an answering machine, a stack of three yellow legal pads, a bunch of pens in a cup from the MGM Grand, and not much else. I opened the center drawer, and among the paperclips and receipts found an address book. It was old with a cartoon koala bear on the cover. I began flipping through it.

It was obvious she’d been using the book for a long time. It was probably time to replace it. First, I flipped to the R’s. The first listing was for Patrick and Verna Reilly, but it was crossed out. Well, they were dead. Several names down was a listing for Suzie Reilly. Her address was crossed out and replaced by her parents’, which was in Roseville. Wherever that was.

It didn’t seem like something Joanne would forget, but I appreciated her letting me know Suzie had inherited her parents’ home. I wondered if half the house had been left to her brother or whether her parents had given up and left it solely to her. I picked out a pen and wrote down her address and phone number. Not that I’d need it. I didn’t think Cass would be letting me go anywhere on my own.

Then I flipped to D. There was an entire page of Di Stefanos. There was a Carmen and Ophelia Di Stefano. Ophelia was crossed off, so I assumed she’d died. My guess was these were Joanne’s grandparents. I had no idea which of these Di Stefanos I should talk to. Cass would have to tell me.

Though the book was pretty full, I realized the oldest addresses were at the top of the page. I flipped through the alphabet looking for one in particular. I didn’t find it until I got to the letter S. Szymanski. Heather Szymanski. My guess was that this was the Heather who’d been with Joanne when she met Dom Reilly. I quickly scanned through the S’s to see if she had another listing. It made sense that she might have moved. There wasn’t one.

Well, she could have gotten married and changed her name. That meant she could be under any letter. I opened both bottom drawers looking for a telephone book. It was on the right. The drawer on the left was locked. I decided to deal with that in a bit. I grabbed the phonebook.

I got lucky. Heather Szymanski was listed. I wrote her name and address down on the pad. Then I put the phonebook back so I could tackle the locked drawer. First, I pulled out the drawer above it. As I’d expected, there was a thin piece of unfinished veneer between the drawers. At some point, someone had tried to break through it, so I could see into the drawer below. There was an accordion folder in there. The hole wasn’t large enough for me to get my fingers through, so I had no idea what was in there. I felt the bottom of the drawer above, then put it back. Then I felt the bottom of all the other drawers. Taping a key to the bottom of a drawer was an easy way to hide it. Just not this time.

The smart thing would be to keep the key on your key ring or, at the very least, hidden in a different room. Most people didn’t do the smart thing. I found Joanne’s key when I took all the pens out of the MGM Grand cup and flipped the cup over. The key fell out.

After I opened the drawer, I took out the accordion folder and looked it over. In the first pocket were about ten letters sent to different individuals explaining that their debt had been purchased and was now owed to Top Dawg Collections. That matched the name at the top of the stationery. Each letter was signed by Cassidy Reilly, administrative assistant.

It seemed all wrong. Was Top Dawg Collections where Joanne worked? Cass had just said she worked for a lawyer who did collections. Lawyers usually worked under their names.

The file made it seem like Joanne had her own collection business. Each letter had notes that reflected how many phone calls had been made to the debtor. A lot of them. Enough to qualify as harassment.

The next pocket contained bank statements for Top Dawg Collections. The account had well over fifty thousand dollars in it. Fifty two thousand six hundred and eighty-five to be exact. That was a lot of money.

The next pocket held a packet of papers which were the LLC Operating Agreement for Top Dawg Collections. I flipped through it. It was pretty simple with the members being Cassidy Reilly and L and yet it wasn’t.

There was an entire shelf of Diet Coke in cans. The top shelf was packed with leftover take-out in white boxes. The vegetable bin was filled with packets of catsup, mustard, mayonnaise and soy sauce. There were two bottles of champagne. I opened the freezer compartment and found a frozen pizza and a half-eaten container of vanilla ice cream. It seemed pretty scant for a woman who was charging her seventeen-year-old son board.

I opened some of the cupboards, which were mostly empty. She was definitely committed to this no-cooking thing. She didn’t even have anything to do it with. I pulled open the drawers. One held silverware, one held take-out menus from dozens of restaurants and the rest were empty.

The kitchen had a built-in breakfast nook and a sliding door out to the patio. There was a door that I thought might lead to the garage. It did.

Inside the two-car garage sat a recent model, bronze Cadillac Eldorado. There was more in the garage than there was in her kitchen cupboards but not by much. I didn’t see a lawn mower so she must hire a company to do that. Most people would pay their teenage son to mow the lawn. But, given the state of his room, I could see why she might not.

“What are you doing out here?” Cass asked, standing in the door to the kitchen. His hair was wet so he was obviously clean, but it looked like he’d put the same clothes back on. I was already getting tired of the red hoodie.

“Snooping. That’s how we’re going to figure out who killed your father. By snooping.”

“Yeah, well, my mother’s car didn’t kill him.”

“She likes expensive things, doesn’t she?”

“Do people like being poor?”

“How far is she willing to go to have money?”

“What does that mean?”

I decided not to tell him I’d been rifling through her desk and knew about her (or their) cagey little games with credit cards.

“You told me she took out credit cards in your dad’s name after he disappeared. You don’t think that was a little dishonest?”

“She was a single mom. He abandoned her.”

“She seems to have done all right.”

“I know she bends the rules. That doesn’t mean she killed my dad.”

Seemed like a good idea to drop it. “I’d like to go see your aunt.”

“Which one?”

“Your father’s sister. Suzie.”

“Sure, I’ll call her.”

“Let’s just go.”

“How come?”

“Because she might say sure, come by on Tuesday. I want to see her today. I don’t want to be here very long.”

“Yeah, okay. Come on.”