Roger Stelljes - The St. Paul Conspiracy

Mac went down to the kitchen, where Lich was looking at various items posted on the refrigerator. It might have been the only messy place in the house. It looked like a typical refrigerator-photos and miscellaneous notes held up by refrigerator magnets. There was a white erase board with a note “Get Milk.” A small paper calendar hanging on a magnetic hook, still on October, had notes on various dates, such as “Workout at 7:00,” “Coffee with Landy at 10:00” and “Happy Hour at 5:30.” Lich jotted down some notes and squinted at the calendar, scratching his chin.

Riley and Rock came in, caught Mac’s eye and shook their heads. They took seats at the kitchen table.

“It isn’t difficult to know you haven’t found anything with these women. I mean, man, talk about two anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive people. A place for everything and everything in its place. Except, of course, for the fridge,” Riley stated.

“Almost too neat, artificially neat,” Mac replied.

“What do you mean?” Rock asked.

“I’m pretty meticulous about my place, but there’s always something out of place. But these two women are unlike anything I’ve seen. I mean there’s a little film of dust around here, but you almost get the feeling they would have required you to walk around with plastic gloves on and baggies around your feet. They remind me of an old neighbor we had when I was growing up. He’d sweep out his garage three times a day and wash his car twice a week. His yard was perfect, looked like the infield at Wrigley and he’d have a shit fit if someone set foot on his grass. He was just nuts.”

“Well, all I can tell you is that I didn’t find anything that seemed related to what we’re doing or looking for,” Rock replied. “These women make it easy to look for stuff. It’s all organized. I mean if you were looking for something you wouldn’t have to ransack the place, just give yourself time to go through it and find what you’re looking for.”

“And PTA has had five weeks to do precisely that before we got around to it,” Mac replied.

“Assuming they had anything to do with this in the first place,” Riley replied. “We sure aren’t finding anything this way.”

“No, we’re not.” Mac looked at his watch. Noon. “Why don’t we get something to eat and go from there.”

Rock and Riley nodded and pushed themselves up from the table. Lich was still looking at the fridge.

“You coming?” Mac asked Lich.

“Yeah. I’ll be right with you.” Lich replied as he continued to stare at something on the fridge, his hands on his hips.

Mac joined Riley and Rock outside, holding the key to lock the door. The temperature was back up a little, mid-thirties, a bright blue sky. With no wind, it was comfortable, a trenchcoat sufficient for warmth. None of them wore gloves.

Lich came out a few minutes later, and they started to file into the Explorer. Mac turned the key asking, “Where should we go?”

“Franco’s is five minutes away,” Rock replied.

“Yeah,” Riley added, rubbing his hands together.

“Franco’s it is,” Mac replied, dropping the truck into gear. They sat in silence for a few minutes, the sports station playing on the radio.

“Was James Stephens’s wife named Yolanda?” Lich blurted.

“Riles?” Mac asked. Riley opened the Jones file and started leafing through the notes. “Yeah, Yolanda. Second wife it says here.”

“Is Landy short for Yolanda?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Riley replied, “Why?”

“Because,” Lich replied, “There was a note on the fridge that said-”

“-coffee with Landy at 10:00,” Mac finished it for him. “What was the date on that, Dick?”

“October 25th.”

“At lunch I’ll give Ms. Stephens a call and see if we can pay her a little visit.”

“Probably just a coincidence,” Rock added.

“Yeah, but so is this whole case,” Mac replied.

After lunch, they made their way over to the Stephens home, a sprawling two-story stucco mansion in the wealthy Highland Park neighborhood, close to the Mississippi River.

“My, we are jet setting today aren’t we?” Rock mused.

The house was set back a hundred feet from the street, and one could tell that, in the summer, it had numerous flower gardens in the front following a serpentine cobblestone sidewalk from the street. It looked like a home you would find in California, with off-white stucco, red tiles on the roof and tall, perfectly manicured shrubs framing the windows along the front.

A housekeeper answered the door. She welcomed them in and asked that they wait for Ms. Stephens in the foyer. Mac admired the winding staircase up to the second level and a couple of the art pieces on pedestals.

Mac recalled having seen a picture of Stephens. He wasn’t a homely guy by any stretch, just kind of an average Joe in his fifties. He had clearly overachieved in his second marriage. The second Ms. Stephens, who had answered the phone “Landy,” was a stunning beauty in, Mac guessed, her late thirties. She was tall, with strawberry-blond hair that fell stylishly to her shoulders. Two words came immediately to Mac’s mind-Trophy Wife. No reflection on her intelligence, just that he seriously doubted it was Stephens’s magnetism that drew this woman to him.

Landy was ever the polite hostess, seating everyone and offering coffee. She sounded almost excited to speak with them when Mac called. Now she was serving coffee and what not, and he got the feeling that she was happy to have company. He wondered if having the mansion and the money still had left her a little lonely. Stephens probably had her running with an older crowd. Now that he was gone, all she had was the house and the money.

“So, Ms. Stephens…” Mac asked.

“Landy,” she replied, smiling warmly at Mac.

“Okay, umm, Landy. As I mentioned when I called, we’re following up on some things from the Jamie Jones murder, and we noticed that she had met with you shortly before she died.”

“Oh, yes. I remember. Probably a week beforehand.”

“Were you and Ms. Jones friends?”

“Yes. I really liked Jamie, and so did James. She was really nice, and we kind of hit it off because we were the same age.”

“So, why did the two of you get together on the…” Mac looked down at his notes.

Lich finished for him. “… the 25th.”

“Oh. I had her meet me for coffee out at the Yacht Club. I had been up to our lake home, I guess my lake home, up north on Gull Lake. James had an office up there, and I ran across a banker’s box with a bunch of PTA stuff in it. I think it was called Cross or something like that. Anyway, I didn’t just want to throw it out. It might be something important. I figured if James had it, it was something financial, and I should give it to Jamie. We met for coffee, and I gave her the box.”

“Do you recall what was in the box?” Mac asked.

“No, I really don’t,” she replied and then looked thoughtfully towards the ceiling. “There was some sort of book, like for accounting I think.”

“A ledger book?” Rock added helpfully.

“Yes. That’s right. Thanks.” She shot him a warm smile. “A ledger book of some type.”

“Anything else?” Riley asked.

“Not that I can recall. Just papers, some folders, stuff like that. Most were in those brown file folders. I don’t know much about finance and, like I said, it was PTA related, so I gave it to Jamie.”

“After that day, did you talk to her again?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“When you gave the box to her, what did she say?”

“Nothing much. Thanks, maybe. She might have said, ‘I’ll look it over’ — that kind of thing. We were friends. Giving her the file was just an excuse to get together for coffee.”