hands.”
“Speaking of prisoners…” Quinn took another sip of wine and looked at me over the rim of his glass. “Heard from your dad lately?”
In a weak moment, I had mentioned my dad to Quinn. Too bad he didn’t get the unspoken message that went along with the story of my dad’s arrest and conviction: that part of my personal life was a little too personal.
I sloughed off his question with a shrug. “Dad calls once in a while. He wants me to visit.”
“You’ll have to apply ahead of time. You must know that by now. He’s been at Englewood how long?”
I didn’t want to rehash it so I glommed onto his previous statement. “Apply?”
“To visit a federal prison? Sure.” He nodded. “You’ve got to be pre-approved, and that means filling out some paperwork. You can get it online.”
It sounded too much like advice, so I did the only proper thing-I ignored it, filing away the information, even if I never intended to use it. Though my wineglass wasn’t empty and the bottle wasn’t far enough away for me to have to get up, I did. I poured another fraction of an inch of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo into my glass. Like it or not, all this talk of prisoners and prisons made me think about my newest woo-woo client. The last I’d seen of him was back at the cemetery when he made me promise I’d look into his theory that he’d been framed for murder.
Would I?
It seemed a better option than thinking about Dad. Or about Delmar, Crazy Jake, Reggie, Absalom, and Sammi, and how all of them would be waiting for me at the cemetery the next morning.
“You ever hear of a prison warden named Jefferson Lamar?” I asked Quinn.
He sipped and shrugged. “Can’t say I have.”
“He was convicted of murder. Right here in Cleveland.”
Quinn’s a typical cop, stone-faced. But I could tell he was curious by the way he cocked his head. “That’s pretty bizarre. I’m surprised I didn’t notice it in the papers.”
“Well, you might have. If you read the newspaper back in 1985. That’s when he died. I just thought if you knew anything about him…”
“You’re not getting mixed up in something again, are you?” Quinn’s question was as probing as the look he shot my way. That explains why I pretended not to notice. And why he wasn’t about to back off. “Last time you started asking about someone who’d been dead for a while, you ended up getting trussed up like a Thanks-giving turkey and tossed into the lake.”
I didn’t appreciate the turkey reference, but he didn’t give me a chance to point that out.
“And who knows what happened to you in Chicago.” Quinn paused here, giving me a chance-again-to explain everything that had happened the winter before. Just like he’d given me plenty of other chances, plenty of other times. Like I could? Where would I even begin?
Disgusted, he folded his arms over his chipped-from-granite chest. “You’ve told me there was a crazy doctor and a bunch of missing homeless people in Chicago. You said you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That doesn’t begin to explain everything that happened, and in case I need to remind you, you got shot, Pepper. And you nearly died.”
“This Lamar thing is nothing like that.” I turned my back on him when I said this, the better to keep him from seeing the look in my eyes that said I hoped my investigation into Lamar’s life wouldn’t end up being as complicated. Or as bloody. “It’s just that Jefferson Lamar, he’s buried at Monroe Street. In the section we’re going to be restoring. I thought…” Honestly, I hadn’t thought anything. Not about this case, anyway. Not until that very moment. Then, like magic, a plan formed in my head. When I turned back to Quinn, even I was surprised at how smoothly I could tell a fib.
“It’s for the competition,” I said. I scooted back to the couch and sat down again. “Each team has to find out the most about the famous people buried in the section it’s working on. Team One has all these old early settlers buried in their section. It’s going to be a cinch for them, seeing as half of them are probably related to the early settlers and they probably have their portraits hanging in their ballrooms. So far, Lamar is the only person in our section who’s got any sort of interesting background. Like I said, he was a prison warden. And then someone framed him for murder.”
“Framed? What makes you think that?”
Have I mentioned that Quinn doesn’t know I talk to the dead? I mean, honestly, could I tell him? Ever? So far, I’d been pretty good at throwing him off the ghostly scent, mostly because of that whole bit about us never really getting too close to each other. In a purely non-physical way, of course.
I wasn’t about to blow it now.
“I found out a little bit about Lamar from his cemetery files,” I said, lying again for all I was worth. “There was a notation in it. The information must have come from someone who knew him well. This note in his file, it said that even when he was arrested and convicted, he still said he was innocent. He said he’d been framed, but he didn’t know who did it, so he could never prove it.”
“It certainly is interesting.” I could tell he hated to admit it. “But, hey…” Quinn put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer. “You know plenty already. You can put that stuff about how he might have been framed in your report. That will help with the competition, right?”
“I could… It might…” Another thing I might not have mentioned is that I can be just as devious as Quinn. Since I was already sitting next to him, I figured I might as well take advantage of the situation. I tickled my fingers over his thigh. “But I was thinking it might be even better if I could get my hands on some of the original information. You know, like the police files.”
“From back in the eighties?” He was about to drop the whole idea, and I knew it. That’s why I tickled a little more, a little higher. Quinn sucked in a breath.
I moved a little closer. “Those files, they must be somewhere, right? A storage facility? Or maybe they’ve all been put on microfiche or something. You know, like they do with old newspapers at the library. But the information has to exist. It isn’t all that long ago.”
“No, but…” Quinn was done playing games. He wrapped his fingers around my wrist and yanked me closer. His eyes locked with mine and his mouth was only a fraction of an inch away when he asked, “If I get you that file, what do I get in return?”
“What do you want in return?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take, but I knew one thing for sure: Quinn Harrison is a man of his word. I was going to get that file. And a little something extra, in the meantime.
The way I remember it, I didn’t get much sleep that night.
Maybe that’s why the next morning, I wasn’t exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when I got to Monroe Street.
I had decided to make Jefferson Lamar’s gravesite our unofficial headquarters. Pretty smart, huh? Something told me I’d be spending a lot of time there, anyway, and this saved me the trip back and forth. With that in mind, I stopped at the tent/office and collected everything I figured we were going to need for the day and sent my team on ahead. When I found them, Sammi was sitting on a low headstone polishing her nails a garish orange that didn’t match her red shorts or the purple T-shirt emblazoned with the picture of some saint. His halo sparkled in the sunlight. Reggie and Delmar each had a shovel, and though they were supposed to wait for further instruction, they’d already started poking around. There were a couple divots of dry earth and brown grass sitting on top of Lamar’s gravestone.
Crazy Jake ignored me completely. Then again, he was a little busy talking to himself while he snapped shot after shot with one of those cardboard disposable cameras.
Absalom was-
I stopped in my tracks and stared. Absalom was standing in front of a headstone nearly as tall as him. It was a solid piece of granite shaped into a hulking rectangle. There was a foot-high figure on top of it made from wire and white fabric. It had a head of fuzzy hair that looked like cotton candy. The figure was wearing beads that reminded me of Ella’s. Absalom was pouring it a glass of rum.
“Is… that… I mean… Did you…?” Yes, I stammered. It is so unlike me, but remember, I hadn’t gotten my beauty sleep (though I had gotten a whole lot more). I choked back my surprise and pointed a finger at the thing. “Is that a voodoo doll?”
