next thing she did was almost choke to death on a piece of a hundred-dollar bill. Then he ran away before I could question him. An hour later Caren Angland was dead.”
His words levered her back, erect in her chair.
Broker smiled thinly. “Stuff they left out of the news stories.” Now that he had her full attention, he said, “You were his editor, so I wondered if anything about the writing was familiar?”
She shook her head, a trifle too quickly. “Tom was more like Joe Friday in the old
“I believe you. Just one of those grounders you have to run out.” But he left the sheet on the table between them.
She crossed her arms, caught herself, unfolded them. Her eyes perused the sheet. “Why would he write that? He doesn’t even know you.” More than curious. She was trying to solve a puzzle in her mind. Good.
“Maybe he’s angry at me because I accused him of hiding something. You know about the scene at my place up north?”
“I read all the stories.”
“Tom came alone, he left Caren down the road. By herself.
If he’d brought her along, she’d be alive today. And, like I said, when I confronted him, he ran.”
Ida twisted her lips in a half smile. “He saw his big chance to run out on everything. And he took it.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Left his job, his debts and…”
“You,” said Broker.
“Correct.”
“Ida, who is he?”
“He uses people.” She took a measured breath. “He can’t help it. It’s not…malicious. He does it naturally. It’s the kind of gift that made him a good reporter. In his time.”
“Why ‘in his time’?” Broker asked.
Her shoulders shifted in a subtle shrug. “Things changed.
New management arrived, went on a retreat and played spin the newsroom. Currently we are in the grips of team theory.
Are you a team player, Mr. Broker?”
“My stomach gets upset every time I go in an office,” he admitted.
Ida continued. “The new atmosphere favors the young.
Tom was no longer young. He also tended to get ahead of his facts, sometimes.” She sniffed. “Nothing a good editor couldn’t correct.”
“I hear he gambled,” said Broker.
“Blowing off steam. I may be wrong on that.”
Broker wondered aloud, “What did he want most?”
She cut him with a precise look. “That’s easy. He wanted to be someone else.”
A custom-fitted aura of loneliness surrounded her, as carefully chosen as her attire.
Broker came forward in his chair. “How, someone else?”
She pulled back. “I’ll have to think about that. Do you have a card?”
Broker reached into his wallet and gave her one of Jeff’s Cook County cards. He crossed out Jeff’s name and wrote in his own. On the back, he left his name again, his home phone and the number of his motel. “I’ll be at the last number for the next two days,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. “I researched every angle of the Caren Angland story. I even saw her, briefly, when she picked Tom up, in front of the paper. You were married to her.”
“Didn’t work out,” said Broker.
“So this is personal?” she asked.
“You could say that.” He was thinking more of Keith than Caren.
Ida inclined her head. “You were a detective for the BCA.
Before that, St. Paul. Two years ago, you took medical leave and went on your ‘adventure’ with Nina Pryce…”
“Really,” said Broker.
Ida hid her chin behind her knuckles. The effect was dev-astating. “Really. My job is checking facts. You traveled to Vietnam to find Nina’s dad’s remains. Which you did. The Vietnamese government awarded you something like half a million dollars in gold because you and Nina also unearthed a national treasure. There’s a rumor that you smuggled a lot more of that gold to Thailand and sold it on the black market. That you have these interesting foreign bank accounts.
You quit the BCA and moved up north. You tell people you look after a bunch of lake cabins, but your folks really do that.”
“Hmmm,” said Broker. “How’d you put all that together?”
“I’m real good,” she stated boldly. “That part about the hundred-dollar bill, your daughter? Mr. Broker, Tom was broke as a church mouse, unless he won it gambling.”
Broker smiled. If there was a key to James, she was it.
“Maybe we can talk about it some more,” he suggested.
“I’ll think about that,” said Ida. “And I’ll take this”-she picked up the letter-“and read it again.”
He tapped his finger on the business card lying on the table. “Do that. Then call me.”
Ida picked up the card, put it and the letter in her purse, and thanked him for the cup of coffee. He watched her walk from the coffee shop, hearing the two-inch heels on her boots strike the tile floor. A snappy rhythm to her walk. Like castanets. Like…
Ida faded into the headlong snow streaming between the buildings, but Broker had tripped into a rabbit hole of memory and was thrown back more than twenty years, to a torpid summer day, sitting in a classroom at the army signal school in Ft. Knox, Kentucky, listening to dots and dashes beep from a sweaty pair of earphones. A crash code course, for Special Operations.
Ida’s heels. The rings on Keith’s horrible licorice fingers.
Slowly, stunned, he tapped his finger on the table. Dot-dot-dot. Dash. Dash. Dash. Dot-dot-dot. Only the most well-known Morse code signal in the world.
Keith had been sending S-O-S, with their wedding rings.
46
The plummeting snow drilled straight down, each flake individually aimed. Broker stood in the street next to his Jeep, car keys in hand. Unmoving. A white crown of flakes slowly built on his hair.
Lips moving. Crazy man playing statue in the snow, talking to himself. He shook it off. Locked it in its own compartment, checked his wristwatch, dusted the snow off his head and got in the truck. He had to see Dr. Ruth Nelson, Caren’s shrink.
Heavy snow churned the streets of St. Paul to white canals.
Cars floated through turns, slid sideways. Broker dropped the Sport into four-wheel, left the downtown loop, climbed the hill, and passed the cathedral.
Dr. Nelson maintained an office in her home, a shambling white elephant in a herd of Summit Avenue mansions overlooking St. Paul.
She opened the door and asked to see his identification.
Somewhere in the echoing gymnasium of the house, Broker heard preschool-aged children being nannied.
