Chapter 28

The first thing Tess noticed when Lea Wynkowski opened her front door the next morning was that damn gold bracelet on her wrist-even though Lea was still in her robe and nightgown at 11 A.M., her brown hair sticking up in tufts all over her head. She apparently had gone from the insomnia stage of grief to the sleep-all-the-time stage, a progression of sorts.

"Tooch said I should stop talking to people, people I don't really know," she said nervously, fiddling with the bracelet.

I bet he did. "This is important, Lea. I think your husband was murdered, but I need your help to figure out why, and who did it."

Lea twisted the bracelet around her slender wrist, staring at it as if it were a crystal ball that might reveal the right answers if you turned it often enough, in just the right way.

"I don't know," she sighed. "That newspaper reporter was over here on Saturday and she said the same thing, but I haven't heard back from her."

So she didn't know Rosita-Rosemary; Tess would never get use to Rosita's real, posthumous name-was dead. The television stations, like the newspaper, didn't report a private citizen's private suicide.

"What did she tell you Saturday?"

"Not much. She thought Wink was killed, but she needed proof. So I gave her what she wanted and Tooch was so mad when I told him. You see, I thought it was a good thing if Wink was killed-well, not a good thing, but better, and not just because we'd get the insurance money then. It would have meant he didn't leave us, you know, me and his babies. But Tooch said the reporter was a liar who wanted to make more trouble for us, which is the only reason she wanted it in the first place."

"Wanted what, Lea? What did you give Rosita?"

"The yearbook, the one I showed you." Lea lowered her voice as if there was someone who might overhear her, although there was no evidence of anyone else in the big house. "I cut out that one page first, the one you saw. I was the one who wrote…that word on it. I know I shouldn't have done it, but I hated her so. She didn't deserve all that money. But the reporter might've thought Wink had done it, like you did-so I cut it out and put it down the garbage disposal."

Check enrollment records. Rosita's memo to herself. Schools had closed Friday for spring break, making that difficult, so she had procured the yearbook instead, using it as a shortcut to something, or somebody. But the book hadn't been in Rosita's apartment, Tess was sure of that.

"Do you know if Tooch-Mr. Tucci-went to junior high with Wink?"

"Tooch? No, he went to parochial school before Loyola-calls it his sixteen-year stint in the Catholic penitentiary. The brothers at Mount St. Joe actually beat boys back then." Lea's eyes were wide at this story, which must have seemed as chronologically distant to her as the Industrial Revolution. "Can you imagine, someone hitting little boys?"

Tess could. Worse still, she could imagine what little boys could do back.

Spike was asleep when Tess arrived at the hospital for afternoon visiting hours.

"You can sit with him if you don't pester him," the nurse said. "And if he comes to, don't pester him with questions. The police just about wore him out."

"Fine with me," Tess said. "I don't think he has the answers I'm looking for, anyway."

She stared outside the window, wishing for a brainstorm like the one she had the last time she stood there, staring out over the parking lot and the ambulances. The brainstorm that had gotten Rosita fired. And now Rosita was dead, because of her own brainstorm. Check enrollment records. Tess had gone to the Pratt library, but the usually reliable Maryland Room did not carry junior high year-books. Meanwhile, the school administration offices on North Avenue had closed for spring break along with the schools. Tess was sure if she could only locate someone to ask, she would find that Paul Tucci, despite his proud proclaimations about parochial school education, had attended Rock Glen Junior High through eighth grade with Wink, transferring to Catholic school about the same time Wink had ended up at Montrose-right after the robbery in which the shopkeeper had died. Too bad she didn't feel comfortable confronting Linda Wynkowski so soon after their last meeting. She might know if Tucci were #2-the second boy in that long-ago assault, but one with a well-connected father who could keep him from serving the same sentence meted out to the fatherless Wink.

When Wink's past was revealed, he must have decided that Tucci should be humiliated as well. Or perhaps he thought Tucci was the source of the stories, that Tucci had set him up in order to force him from the ownership group. It would have been easy enough for Tucci to dose Wink's drink with Percodan, or whatever he took for his still ailing knee. Even lame, Tucci was big enough to carry a slight guy like Wink to his car, hoist him into the convertible, and wait for the carbon monoxide to work.

"There's my girl." Spike's brown eyes fluttered as he came to. His speech was slurry and soft, almost as if he had no teeth, but he was awake, he would live.

Remembering the nurse's injunction, she didn't try to ask him anything other than "How do you feel?"

"Been better."

"I found the ears."

He looked troubled. "I didn't want you to."

"Yeah, well, when I'm allowed to interrogate you, I want to know more about that."

"I'll tell you everything I told the police."

"I'm guessing that's not much."

Spike smiled, closed his eyes, and drifted back to sleep.

"Good night, Uncle Spike, I gotta go see a man about a dog. One of the human variety."

"It's not a bad theory," Sterling said cautiously that evening, as Tess paced in his office, running through the scenarios she had concocted in Spike's hospital room. She could hear the skepticism in his voice, and it hurt. She had counted on him to be the one person who wouldn't think she was crazy.

"But not a good one, right?"

Sterling wasn't a great liar. Although he tried to smile encouragingly, his eyes made it clear he thought her idea half-baked at best. Tess turned away from him and looked through the glass windows of his office, toward the newsroom. Dusk had fallen and snow was in the forecast again, so deadlines had been moved up, stealing time from the production of the paper in order to ensure its delivery. Consequently, the reporters and editors on the city desk were frenzied, gripped in their own snowstorm panic attack. It didn't help that they were trying to report on something that hadn't actually happened yet.

"You think I'm spinning my wheels, trying to prove Rosita was killed so I can absolve myself in her death," she said flatly. "You think I should have stayed at the hospital with my Uncle Spike, rather than chasing down a junior high school yearbook."

"There's just not enough solid information to go to the police with your theory yet. You'll have to wait until schools open Monday to check your hunches. And I'm not sure enrollment records are public information."

"Oh, I'd get them somehow. I have an uncle in state government who could always call in a favor. I could have them by tomorrow if I really pushed."

Sterling played with a paper clip, twisting it into a straight line, then into a triangle. "There is a way we could make things move even faster, if you're willing to be a little devious."

"Always," Tess said. "What's your plan?"

"You told me Lea cut a page out of the yearbook before she gave it to Rosita. But if Tucci has the book, he doesn't necessarily know why the page is missing."

"So?"

"Think, Tess. What was Linda's maiden name?"

"What is this, the Socratic method? Linda's maiden name was Stolley."