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“Did he defraud them?”
“Of course not!” she said.
“So why not go to the cops?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “My husband is a great man. He has so much to give. I couldn’t let them hurt him this way. I never even told him about the calls. So I agreed to pay. I had inherited some money a few years back from my aunt. Ten thousand dollars. It seemed worth it to protect Tom. It was just like a movie. I took out the money as one-hundred-dollar bills, and put them in a gym bag. He told me to take the bag to Superstition Springs Mall and leave it behind this certain palm tree in the south parking lot. And I did. Three days later I got the documents in the mail.”
I was sweating despite the air conditioning going full blast. I said, “I still don’t believe you. Want to try another lie?”
“This is the truth,” she said quietly.
“The calls stopped after I paid,” she went on. “For a while. Then, after the first of the year, they started again. This time the man said he knew my husband had killed Harry Bell. It just sounded mad. But I looked in the newspaper to see if there was a death notice, and there was. It didn’t say much. There was no word about how he died. Then one Saturday, a letter comes in the mail. It has a photo of this rocky grave in the desert and instructions on how to get there. Thank God, Tom wasn’t home to see this. There was a note. It said I was to pay $100,000 or he would go to the police with evidence that Tom had killed Harry Bell and put him out there. So I came to you.” She stared at me and her large green eyes looked liquid—with tears, emotion, acting, I couldn’t tell.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Why would you come to me? How did you even know about me?”
“I really was in your class, David,” she said, touching my hand. I drew it back. “You don’t even remember me.”
I couldn’t recall her at all. I wondered if I was lost in the fog of a brain in its forties, or if I were being played as a patsy.
I said, “So why not tell me the truth? Why lie?”
“I had to protect Tom,” she said, her eyes closed tightly. “He has enemies, you see. Any great man does. If I had gone to the real police, and told them I had paid blackmail money—it would have been all over the newspaper.”
“So instead of the real police, you came to the play police—me.”
“Plea
se.” She touched my hand again. “Don’t be offended. I thought if I gave you a trail, you’d follow it and get these people who were doing this to us. I read the papers and watch TV. I know some of the big cases you’ve cracked. So I gave you the story that I did. If a man had been murdered and buried out there, you could get to the bottom of it. And it obviously worked. I haven’t gotten another letter or phone call.”
I angled myself to face her and moved in close. I didn’t want her to have a chance to look away.
“There’s just one problem,” I said. “If you suspected the Bell brothers of blackmailing you, then you had a perfect motive for murdering Louis Bell.”
Her eyes widened and she swallowed with difficulty. “What are you saying?” she rasped.
“Louis Bell was murdered last week. Somebody stuck an ice pick in his brain.”
She shook her head and said nothing.
“Do you know the name Alan Cordesman?” I demanded.
“No! What do you want from me?”
“The truth.”
“I am telling you the truth!” she screamed.
We just stared at each other. The men across the parking lot were sitting down now, letting the sun beat on them. I opened the door and dropped to the pavement.
“You’d better get me that blackmail note with the photo of the grave,” I said. “Or I will go to the sheriff, and I don’t care who your husband is.”
I looked back at Dana. She was red-faced, puffy-eyed and about to say something. But I slammed the door and walked away.
18
I tried to sort it out that afternoon with Lindsey. She had stopped by my office after lunch, looking like a million bucks in a black pantsuit.
“Maybe this woman is just nuts,” she said, sitting on my desk, facing me, while I rubbed her feet.
