Free Dearly Departed by David Housewright Page A

caressing the furniture with her hands, reminding herself who it all belonged to.
    “Hi.… No, I’m not busy. How are you? … Sure.… Oh, you’d think we could, wouldn’t you? My office is only three blocks away.… I have an office manager who would shoot me if I did that.… Yeah, I sometimes wonder who’s working for whom, too.… Your schedule has to be worse. At least I don’t get calls in the middle of the night.… True, but it’s never a matter of life or death.… I wonder about it all the time, don’t you? … Yes, I can do that. I’d be happy to…. Yes, he’s here. He’s sitting on the couch, drinking wine and listening to his beloved jazz.…” Cynthia held the phone away from her mouth and told me, “Anne Scalasi says you’re a sonuvabitch.”
    “Now what did I do?”
    “He wants to know what he did,” Cynthia said into the phone. After a brief pause she exclaimed, “Don’t tell him that! He’ll be harder to live with than ever.”
    “What?” I asked.
    Cynthia handed me the telephone.
    “Hi, Annie,” I said.
    “You’re a lucky sonuvabitch, Taylor,” she clarified.
    “How so?”
    “Your tip to Ed Teeters, it paid off.”
    “No way!”
    “He put a team on Irene Brown. She left her house an hour after sunset and drove to a Dumpster behind a fast-food joint. They have a videotape of her throwing a box into the Dumpster. Guess what the box contained?”
    “No way!”
    “A pair of LA Gear Air System running shoes, size ten.”
    I started to laugh at the improbability of it all.
    “We’re working on this sucker for seven months, and you break it in one day,” Anne said.
    “Actually, I did it in half a day,” I told her and laughed some more.
    “You’re a lucky sonuvabitch,” Anne repeated.
    “Hey, I’m a trained professional. Luck had nothing to do with it. As the great pioneering criminologist Edmond Locard once said—”
    “Give me a break. I lend you one lousy book on forensic detection, and all of a sudden you’re quoting dead Frenchmen.”
    “I thought he was Belgian.”
    “Trust me. Anyway, Irene Brown had been waiting seven months for someone to catch her. Winnie the Pooh could have done it.”
    “Tsk, tsk, tsk. Do I detect envy? Jealousy, perhaps, of my unparalleled skills?”
    “Screw you, Taylor.”
    “God, I’m loving this, Annie.”
    “It’s not over yet. Teeters said that Irene Brown confessed that she followed Alison home the evening she disappeared. Brown said she was going to give Alison a piece of her mind.”
    “Does she have any to spare?”
    “She said Alison met her at the front door with a small gun in her hand. She said Alison told her to leave, and that’s what she did. Brown insists Alison was alive when she left.”
    “Well, she would, wouldn’t she?” I told Anne.
    “Brown claims that she didn’t tell the police because she was afraid they would accuse her of killing Alison.”
    “Did she admit to making the harassing telephone calls?”
    “Yes, and the flowers and dead cat, too. She also claims that Raymond Fleck had nothing to do with any of it.”
    “I wonder.”
    “Yeah, I do, too. Is she still protecting Raymond?”
    “The running shoes. They were men’s shoes,” I reminded Anne.
    “Teeters said that Brown insists they were hers, that they fit her better than women’s shoes.”
    “Why did she keep them all this time?”
    “She said she had no reason not to. She said she never imagined that she left a print.”
    “Unbelievable. What does Teeters say?”
    “Teeters is ecstatic. He’s so happy, he’s actually speaking in complete sentences. He figures this will get the media off his back.”
    “Now the big one: What does the Dakota County attorney say?”
    “I’m getting this all secondhand, you have to remember. The way I hear it, Dakota County is impounding Brown’s car and having forensics conduct a search. If they find any blood, any hair samples, any physical evidence at all that puts Alison in the car