Rosemary Harris - Dead Head

“You know how Caroline and I met?” he asked. “We were in South Beach. She was one of those sun-kissed girls in a bikini top and shorts having coffee and reading the paper at a hip café on Ocean Drive.”

He told me that she was on her own in Florida, and so was Grant. After three days of furtive smiles and shy waves, he worked up the courage to talk to her and was in heaven when she didn’t shoot him down. She told him she’d recently graduated from Bloedell University in Oregon and that she was an orphan, raised by her maternal grandmother who’d just died. The grandmother had left her a little money and she was in Florida trying to decide what to do next-go to graduate school or travel around.

Pretty clever, in retrospect. Oregon was as far away from Florida as you could get, and she claimed to have gone to a small school where not many people were likely to say, “Oh, you must know so-and-so.”

And she had her own money.

“She even said something about the Oregon Beavers and I believed her. It was all a lie. She’s not an orphan. Her mother is dead but her father and brother still live in Michigan. A town called Okemos.”

Half of him was angry and the other half shattered. What must it be like to learn that everything you thought you knew about your spouse was untrue? That you didn’t really know her at all? If the rest of Springfield was in shock, what was Grant Sturgis feeling?

“Her father’s an alcoholic. God knows what her brother does, but what kind of guy in his forties still lives with his father?”

“Maybe her father is sick and the brother is looking after him.” It was weak, but I wasn’t ready to join the chorus of Caroline bashers just yet. “I don’t know, Grant, this is personal stuff. I probably shouldn’t be hearing it.”

“Personal? I may never have anything personal again. My life’s been splattered all over the newspapers. Total strangers are blogging about me, for God’s sake. Morons on AOL are posting comments about my life. Do you know the names they’re calling the mother of my children?”

I didn’t know, but I could guess. The few times I was dumb enough to read anyone’s comments on AOL, I was convinced there must be Internet cafés in every prison and mental institution in the country-the remarks were that irrational, uninformed, and frequently violent and hateful. I tried to calm him down. I slung my bag around to the back of the seat, leaned over, and took both his hands in mine.

“The Caroline we know is a good woman. She’s raised two beautiful kids and she’s been a good wife to you. Whatever she did in the past, she did when she was young and stupid. Surely a judge will see that.”

“That’s what we’re hoping,” he said. “I’m hoping to get Mickey Cameron’s firm to represent her. Us.”

I knew little about lawyers. I’d started my corporation with a form downloaded from the Internet, but I recognized the firm’s name from Cameron’s guest appearances on Justice TV and his large white building on the corner of Peachtree and Cummings streets. From the quality of his landscaping, he probably charged his clients a bundle.

“So she’s in good hands,” I said. “I know it’s presumptuous of me to say this, but you have to try not to worry. Think about your kids. Where are they, anyway? Are they here in Springfield?”

He shook his head. “At my mother’s in Tucson. I sent them there this afternoon.”

“That’s good,” I said, patting his hands, then pulling mine back to flick away a spider that had dropped down theatrically right in front of my face.

“Okay, I’ll get to the point,” he said. “I want you to find out who did this. Who wrecked our lives.”

“Me? Can’t the police tell you?”

He shook his head. “They don’t know anything and they have no jurisdiction. All they’ll tell me is that it was an anonymous tip. I don’t know if they’d tell me even if they knew.”

My first thought was, Who cares? Shouldn’t you be thinking of your wife now? Then I realized he was thinking of her. And he wanted to crush whoever it was that had done this to her.

“I’d like to help, really, but I don’t think I’m what you need. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“You found that dead girl, didn’t you?”

That girl again. She just wouldn’t stay dead and buried. Maybe it was because her fate was unknown for so long that people keep remembering Yoly Rivera, the girl I’d finally sent home and put to rest, closing the books on a local mystery that had baffled members of the Springfield police department for more than thirty years. Two mysteries, really. A missing girl and a mummified baby. It had been in all the papers, even as far away as Boston and New York, and had gotten me a certain amount of notoriety in Springfield. Might have even helped my business a bit. But it wasn’t what I did for a living. He needed a professional. And I told him so.

Grant choked his way through a laugh and shook his head. “Where do you think we live, L.A.? It’s not as if there are gumshoes on every corner in this town. Besides-you’re smart. I know you’re fond of Caroline, otherwise you wouldn’t have said what you just did. You’re the only new friend she’s made in ages and…and Caroline trusts you.”

So she had told him she’d confided in me about his alleged affair. He wasn’t wrong, I did like Caroline, but this was serious business, not something for a dilettante. If Grant Sturgis was really going to pursue his hunt for the tipster-and I wasn’t sure he should-he needed an experienced, licensed private investigator, not a gardener who knew how to do a Google search. Grant spoke before I could say another word.

“And I’ll pay you. Very well.”

Failing to appeal to my emotional or altruistic side, Grant rushed in with a sneaky move, one that must have served him well in business negotiations: he showed me the money. Dirty lucre-always a powerful motivator. I guess a flicker of interest crossed my face that he read as “How well?” Grant laid it out for me.

“I’ll buy this place, put five hundred thousand into the renovations of your choice-my contractor, of course-and rent it to you for a dollar a month, for as long as you like. But we’d need to get started soon. I understand a couple of other people are interested in the property.”

It was an insanely generous offer, the operative word being insanely.

“You’re obviously upset. I wouldn’t dream of taking advantage of you by agreeing to something you said under these circumstances. Besides, running a nursery is like being a farmer, weather, pests.” I tried to lighten the mood. “Didn’t you ever read The Good Earth? We could get locusts.”

He smiled and then it dawned on me: he didn’t care if we would ever make the business work. He wanted to give Caroline something to look forward to. I was almost embarrassed to be in the presence of that kind of love.

What a sweetheart. And what an optimist. She’d already been moved out of Springfield to the county jail and was awaiting extradition to Michigan. Her fate was in a judge’s hands. For all we knew, Caroline would remain incarcerated until she completed her original sentence. The authorities in Michigan were under close scrutiny for meting out such a harsh sentence, so they were scrambling to make the nineteen-year-old Caroline sound like the new Pablo Escobar. Why obsess about who snitched when your wife is facing decades in jail? I had the good sense not to mention that, but I didn’t have to: it hung in the air like the cobwebs.

“I know I’ve been flip-flopping with Caroline on this business deal-because of my own financial situation. I’m sorry if I misled her and I’m flattered that you both have such faith in me, but I don’t think this is the right time for me. I can’t start another business, especially such a risky one, when the one I have is on such shaky ground.”