Death Benefits Read online

  But times had changed at Steak ‘N Shake. There was no curb service, and the drive-through lane at the McDonald’s across the street had more cars in it than the entire parking lot at Steak ‘N Shake. Fortunately, not everything had changed, as I discovered when the waitress placed my favorite Steak ‘N Shake meal on the table in front of me: a double cheeseburger with thousand island dressing, extra pickles, regular fries, and a chocolate malt. I must have eaten that combination more than a hundred times during high school, and it tasted just as delicious as it had back then.

  “Rachel?”

  During the time it took to chew and swallow a bite of cheeseburger I was able to put a name with the face.

  “Timmy O’Donohue,” I said.

  “Been a long time, Rachel.”

  “It sure has. I didn’t know you were a cop.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “I been on the U. City force going on ten years now.”

  The waitress came over with a white carry-out bag. “Here’s your fries and Coke, Tim.”

  He thanked her and paid the bill. He turned back to me, a hesitant look on his face.

  “You on break?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Don’t be such a snob,” I said. “Sit down.”

  “Sure,” he said with a sheepish grin. “Don’t mind if I do.”

  We spent a fun ten minutes reminiscing about high school days and sharing the latest intelligence on our classmates. He had married Sherry McGuire, whom I remembered from my Spanish class. They had four kids, two still in diapers.

  I tilted my malt and sipped the last part through the straw until it made that gurgling noise.

  “So you’re not married?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” I said, glancing at my watch.

  He checked his own watch. “Well, my break’s almost over.”

  We both stood up. Timmy walked with me out of the restaurant.

  “Maybe you can help me, Timmy,” I said as we walked toward our cars. “I have to talk to some people over the next day or so. Maybe you’ve heard of them.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Salvatore Donalli. He’s the head of his own construction company.”

  “Sure. He’s got a crew doing some work on the River Des Peres over by Hemen Park. Donalli’s a hothead. He got into a shoving match with some sewer district inspector about a month ago.”

  “Over what?”

  “Some sort of dispute over cement. Something about the specs. No one filed charges.”

  “How about Albert Weidemeir? He works for the sewer district.”

  “Don’t know him. Of course, that River Des Peres project, the one Donalli Construction is working on, that’s a sewer district project. I don’t know any Albert Weidemeir.”

  We had reached my car. “How about a guy named Remy Panzer?” I asked.

  Timmy raised his eyebrows. “He the guy with the art gallery in the Central West End?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve heard some of the guys in vice talk about him. It’s all hearsay. He’s supposed to be one of the chickenhawks who sometimes cruise the Loop. I don’t think we’ve ever busted him.”

  “He likes young boys?”

  “So I hear. He likes them around thirteen. A real sicko, if that’s the guy I’m thinking of. Watch out for him.”

  “Do you know anyone on the Bridgeton police force?”

  “I know a few of those guys.”

  “How about a detective named Mario Aloni. I’m meeting him first thing tomorrow.”

  “Mouse? Sure, I know him.”

  “They call him Mouse?”

  “Yeah. Mouse Aloni. He’s a good man. Tell Mouse I said hi.”

  “I will. Thanks, Timmy. Give my best to Sherry.”

  “Sure. It’s real good to see you, Rachel. See you around.”

  As I got in my car Timmy called out my name.

  “What?”

  He had his car door open, his hand on the hood. “You have any problems, things get a little dicey, you give me a call, you hear?”

  “Thanks, Timmy.”

  ***

  By the time I pulled into my sister’s driveway it was almost eleven o’clock. The house was dark except for the den on the first floor, where I could hear the sounds of a television show.

  I stopped at the doorway to the den. Ann’s husband-the-orthodontist Richie was seated on the couch, staring slackjawed at a Cubs-Dodgers game on the big-screen television. An empty bag of Doritos and two cans of Diet Coke were on the coffee table.

  “Hi, Richie,” I said.

  Richie snapped out of his TV daze. He was startled at first, but then flashed me one of those 50,000-watt orthodontist smiles—all those even white-capped teeth.

  “Hey, Rachel. Good to see you, babe. Looking super.”

  Richie started toward me. I stuck out my hand. He looked down at it.

  Five years ago, just after Richie and Ann had moved into their brand-new English Tudor in Ladue, they threw a big New Year’s Eve party. I was in St. Louis for the holidays and went to their party. Around one in the morning I had walked into the kitchen for a refill. Richie sneaked up as I reached into their Sub-Zero for a beer. He grabbed me by the hips as I straightened, pressing his crotch against my rear. I was so startled I thought he was joking. But then he turned me around and backed me up against the built-in Amana microwave oven. “God, you have magnificent incisors,” he groaned as he tried to stab his thick tongue into my mouth. I had to conk him on the head three times with the beer can, splattering foam on the hardwood floor, before he loosened his grip enough for me to shove him away.

  That was five years ago. We had reached an awkward truce since then, although I tried to avoid situations where we were alone together.

  “Good to see you, Richie,” I said, shaking hands. “Ann asleep?”

  “Sure is. You know her. Early to bed, early to rise.” He smiled and shrugged.

  Studying him, I suddenly realized that Richie was sliding into middle age. He’d put on enough weight to have a double chin and paunch. His black hair was thinning, and he had started combing it over the top to cover the balding area. Camouflage hair. Before long he would have to eliminate rides in convertibles. (Why do bald men go the camouflage route? And what happens when they turn in their sleep so that their heads rest on the same side as their parts? Do those eight-inch hanks of camouflage hair gradually slide off the bald spots and unfurl on the pillows?)

  Although I had never been crazy about him, Richie was on his best behavior tonight, playing his own version of Robert Young on Father Knows Best. He took me up to the guest bedroom, showed me the fresh towels Ann had left on the bed, brought in his travel alarm clock, and gave me a note from Ann.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, pausing at the door. “You got a phone call from a guy named St. Something-or-other.”

  “St. Germain?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. He said to be sure to call him when you got in.”

  Richie ran downstairs and came back up with the message slip and the portable phone. I dialed the number after he left. Reed St. Germain answered on the second ring.

  “Rachel, I just wanted to make sure you’ve been getting the cooperation and help you need from our people.”

  “Everyone’s been great, Reed.”

  “Terrific. I’m pleased. Tell me, Rachel, how is the investigation going?”

  “I’m making progress, but it’s still kind of early.”

  “Sure. I can understand that. Any questions I can help answer?”

  “Not really. I just have to work my way down the list of people. Oh, there is one thing. Do you know whether Mr. Anderson had a new client named ParaLex?”

  There was a pause. “A client named ParaLex? No. Why, Rachel?”

  “Just
curious.”

  “How did that come up?”

  “Just a name jotted down in his calendar. A dinner meeting, I think. I thought maybe it was a new client. If so, it might be someone I could talk to about Mr. Anderson’s mental condition.”

  “I don’t think it’s a client, Rachel, but you might want to check our list of new clients tomorrow to be sure. Sorry I can’t help you there. Anything else?”

  “No.”

  “You be sure to call me if there is, Rachel. And you be sure to tell me if you need any help whatsoever. Understand?”

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  As I hung up I thought to myself that if St. Germain had used my name one more time in that conversation I would have screamed. Maybe clients responded to his programmed sincerity, but I sure didn’t. He reminded me of the boys from my sixth-grade dance class: the ones who looked like little Fred Astaires from across the room. When you were up close, holding their sweaty hands, staring over their heads, you could hear them counting to four over and over again.

  Before turning off the light, I read Ann’s note, written in her familiar, childish scrawl:

  Hi Rachie!

  I know you’re probably real, real busy tomorrow, but like Mom always says, a girl has to eat! My girlfriends are just dying to meet you. I told them to meet us for lunch at Briarcliff. We’ll all be there at noon. Hope you can join us.

  Love ya,

  Ann

  I groaned at the thought of lunch at Briarcliff, but Ann wanted me to be there and I would be. Firstborns are saps for those requests.

  Chapter Nine

  I could have understood Stretch, since he was as tall as a professional basketball player. He was skinny, too, so they could have called him Slim. And he was bald, which could have earned him one of those antonym nicknames, like Curly, or Fuzzy.

  But Mouse? You certainly couldn’t tell from looking at him. There just wasn’t anything mousey about Bridgeton Police Detective Mario Aloni. He was perched behind his metal desk, his shoulders hunched forward, as he peered at the notes from the Stoddard Anderson file. He had a long, solemn face with a hooked beak of a nose. His large eyes were dark brown—deep set beneath large projecting eyebrows. If anything, Mario Aloni looked like a predator—the kind that swooped down and carried off mice in its claws.

  It was 8:40 a.m. I had been in Mouse Aloni’s cubicle at the Bridgeton Police Department on Natural Bridge Road for about twenty minutes. Although he had been reluctant to talk to me at first, he became less guarded after I showed him the letter from Ishmael, countersigned by Dottie Anderson, confirming that I was her lawyer on this matter.

  I had asked him a question and he was slowly leafing through the Stoddard Anderson file for the answer. He stopped to study a document. “Anderson checked into the hotel under an assumed name,” he said.

  “What was the name?” I asked, taking a sip of coffee from the Styrofoam cup.

  “Unusual one. Giovanni Careri, Esquire,” he read from his notes.

  “Who’s that?”

  Aloni looked up and shook his head. “No idea, ma’am.”

  “Did Anderson use a credit card when he checked in?”

  “No, ma’am. Paid cash in advance. For a week.”

  “Did he ever leave the hotel room?”

  Aloni tugged at the skin covering his prominent Adam’s apple. “He left the hotel, or at least his room, for some part of the next two days. The hotel maid cleaned his room both days around noon. According to her, he wasn’t in the room either day.”

  “How about the third day?”

  “Door chained shut from inside. One of those Do Not Disturb signs hanging from the doorknob. Maid didn’t go in. We don’t know whether he was inside the room the whole day.”

  “Room service?” I asked.

  Aloni shook his head. “Didn’t use room service. No telephone calls from his room, either. Outgoing or incoming.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever.”

  “And the fourth day?”

  “Mr. Anderson was dead by the morning of the fourth day. He died somewhere between midnight and about three a.m., according to the ME.”

  “ME—Medical Examiner?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He glanced down at the notes. “On the fourth day the room was no longer chained from the inside, and the Do Not Disturb sign was gone. Maid started to go in his room around noon. Heard the shower, so she left. Came back an hour later. Went in, heard the shower, left. Same thing an hour later. Finally, at three o’clock, when she heard the shower still going, she got worried and called for the manager. They went in together. They found the body in the bathtub.”

  “With the shower on?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He died in the rain.”

  “He cut his wrists with a razor?”

  Aloni nodded solemnly. “Slashed his neck on both sides, then slit his wrists. From the stain lines in the tub, it appears he filled it with water, got in, turned on the shower, pulled the plug, and then started cutting.”

  The image made me shiver. “Was he—just sitting there when they found him?”

  “Sort of slumped down. Body probably slid lower as the blood drained.” Aloni leafed through the file. “Had a crime scene technician in there before we moved the body. That’s S.O.P. on suicides. He took photographs of the body.” He looked at me. “I have one here, ma’am.”

  I shook my head. “No, thanks.” I once prosecuted a wrongful death claim on behalf of the widow of a man killed in a motel fire. Although the case settled quickly, the charred corpse continued to appear in my nightmares for almost a year.

  “Were you able to find any evidence of what he’d been doing in the room for those three days?”

  “Not much, Miss Gold. His last supper was a Big Mac, large fries, and a medium Coke. We found the McDonald’s bags and containers in the bedroom. Coroner found the contents in his stomach.”

  “Any indication of where he went when he left the room?”

  “Just general observations, ma’am. From his clothing and his car. We never sent any of it through the lab, seeing as how it wasn’t much of an issue, him having committed suicide and all.”

  “What kind of observations?”

  “His clothes and shoes were kind of muddy. There were traces of what looked like concrete on his shoes and on the floor of his car.”

  “Which tells you what?”

  Aloni shrugged. “Tells me some, not much. Tells me that sometime between the time he disappeared and the time he killed himself, he was probably walking around near a construction site. That’d explain the concrete, and probably the mud as well. Since it hadn’t rained for a couple weeks before he disappeared, the mud part’s a little curious. Which is why I say a construction site. Then again, he could have been walking down near a river or some other body of water, but then where’d the concrete come from? Like I say, the mud and concrete tell me some, but not much.”

  “Why didn’t you have the lab run some tests?”

  Aloni sighed. “This is a busy department, Miss Gold. We got limited resources, limited manpower. Look at it from our point of view. A suicide is the easiest homicide to solve. You always catch the killer right there at the scene of the crime. And that means it’s a file you can close. We’ve got hundreds of files we still can’t close. Mud in an open file gets sent to the lab. Mud in a closed file—well, it’d be nice if we had the time. We don’t.”

  “I understand,” I said with a sympathetic smile. “I’ve got a few open files with mud in them. Where did you find the suicide note?”

  “On the bed.”

  “Not in the bathroom?”

  “No, ma’am. It was right in the center of the bed.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “You seem surprised.”

  “More confused than surprised, I guess. Did you find any rough draf
ts?”

  “We did, ma’am. Several, in fact. Found three in the waste can. Some were torn into several pieces. Took me a while to piece ’em together.” He reached into the folder and pulled out three sealed plastic bags. “These are them.” He handed the bags to me.

  I skimmed each draft. Anderson had tightened the language from draft to draft, a good lawyer to the end. In one draft he spoke of the Executor “having crossed the River Styx.” In another draft he wrote that he was “the only Executor above ground.”

  “It looks like his handwriting,” I said as I compared the photocopy of the final version—the one Dottie gave me—with the earlier drafts. The handwriting seemed to match the handwriting in his appointment book and time sheets.

  “Our expert agrees,” Aloni said.

  “What’s his suicide note mean?”

  Aloni shrugged. “Doesn’t make any sense to us. So far.”

  “How ‘bout these drafts? River Styx?”

  Aloni shrugged and gave me a palms-up gesture.

  I reminded myself of the original purpose of my trip to St. Louis. “The suicide note sounds a little crazy,” I said, hopefully.

  “That’s because we don’t have all the facts, Miss Gold. These things tend to make sense once you learn all the facts.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Are you still working on the case?”

  Aloni shook his head. “No, ma’am. Like I say…”

  I finished the thought: “Closed file.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I stared at my photocopy of the suicide note. “You say you didn’t find this in the bathroom?”

  “Found it in the bedroom.”

  “Was there any evidence that he’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills or some other medicine before he slit his wrists?”