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“Yes. She came home with a bronze medal! She was so proud of it. It’s on the mantel there, beside her picture.”
The woman pointed to the offensive medal resting above the fireplace. Woody offered a fleeting smile and sipped his tea. “You mentioned that Annabelle thought she’d been followed the next day?”
“Yes. She told my husband and me that the same brown car had been shadowing her around town.”
Nice choice of words, Woody thought. “Did she get a look at the two men driving it?”
Mrs. Plunkett’s cup halted halfway to her mouth. “How did you know it was two men?”
Bob Bateman had been a guest on Evie’s “Pears Soap Hour with the Sweetheart Seer.” He’d brought a comb as his object and told her it had belonged to a war buddy of his. Except that Evie swore it was her brother’s comb. It had been the start of Evie’s fall, Woody remembered. She’d gotten upset and accused him of lying while on the air, then she’d chased him down the street, demanding answers. It had been scandalous, and the advertisers had not been happy about it.
The question remained: Who had given Bob Bateman that comb and arranged for him to go on her show?
Bob Bateman wasn’t answering Woody’s telephone calls, but, Woody discovered, he had a brother who’d done prison time. That fella worked at a scrapyard in New Jersey.
Woody dodged his way through piles of metal odds and ends, careful not to cut himself on anything sharp. He found Albert Bateman smoking a cigarette while taking a busted-up two-seater down to parts.
“Albert Bateman?”
“Who wants to know?” the man said around his cigarette.
“I’m T. S. Woodhouse. Of the Daily News? I had some questions about your brother?”
“Oh. You boys finally paying attention?”
Woody didn’t follow, but a good reporter never let on. “That’s right. I am. Can you tell me what happened?”
“It’s like I told everybody—he was bumped off.”
Bob Bateman was dead? “You know who did it?”
“Prob’ly those same fellas who paid him to go on the radio.”
“What fellas would that be?”
“Bums in gray suits.”
“You know their names?”
“No.” Albert Bateman took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it under his boot. “And I don’t wanna end up like Bob, neither.”
“Just to confirm, how did Bob end up?”
“Buried in an ash heap in Corona with his throat slit.”
Just like Ben Arnold, Sam’s informant, had been.
Woody had one last name on his list.
Mr. Paul Peterson was a resident of the Derryville Home for the Aged. He was also a Diviner. Woody had come across his story in the Daily News archives, filed under people who had predicted tragedy or disaster. Paul Peterson had foretold a fire that decimated a mill in a nearby town, and he had premonitions of the 1900 hurricane that killed six thousand in Galveston, Texas. That had brought him to the attention of the Department of the Paranormal and a young Jake Marlowe and Will Fitzgerald. Now Mr. Peterson was seventy-five years old, with liver-spotted hands and a rocking chair. Woody had told the nurse he was Peterson’s nephew. He bribed the old man with a secreted cigar.
“You worked for the department for a time?”
“That I did. Here and there.”
“Did they take your blood?”
“No. They did not,” Mr. Peterson said on a puff of spicy smoke. “Mr. Marlowe didn’t want me for his little eugenics project.”
