Closure: An Eli Quinn Mystery Page 3

  “I need something to do,” I said. “I think I can be good at this.”

  “What do you charge?”

  I hadn’t considered that. But I suddenly realized I’d already known the answer. I wasn’t rich, but I’d made good money on Wall Street in my twenties. I tired of finance, but I’d invested wisely in a few hot tech stocks, and sold most of my shares before the market decline. It wasn’t brilliance, just luck and prudence. I put the money into treasuries and dividend-paying blue chips. I went back to school and got a journalism degree, landed a job at the Pleasant Weekly Herald — the only offer I got as a 30-year-old graduate from an obscure journalism program—and a year later was picked off by The Arizona Republic, where after just a couple years I was promoted to senior writer and put on investigative projects. The pay was lousy, but I didn’t need much, and the work was far more rewarding. I still had most of my investments intact. The dividends covered a modest living, and that’s all I really wanted.

  “There’s no charge, Mrs. Bernstein. This isn’t about money. I know how you feel, and I want to help.” If she was the killer, I was already the worst detective in Arizona, feeling her pain, empathizing, volunteering to help.

  “I’d feel better if I paid you something. I’m not a charity case. I need to know you’re serious.”

  My gut told me she was indeed grieving, but I was just as sure she was a rock, always had been. I decided to keep an open mind on whether or not she might’ve killed her husband.

  “Unfortunately, I’m always serious,” I said.

  “Is that some sort of joke, Mr. Quinn?”

  “Not at all. I just mean that my life hasn’t been a barrel of laughs the past year, and I may have lost some of the humor and lightness I once had. But my whole life, when there’s something needs doing, I’ve been serious about getting it done.” I paused, looked at the floor, realized I was leaning forward, shoulders tensed, my whole body tight. I shouldn’t be trying to sell myself so hard. It sounded like insecurity. I relaxed my shoulders consciously, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forced my emotions back down to where they’d come from.

  “When I put my mind to something, I’m very serious about it,” I said. “I want to do this, and I’ll give it my best. Paying me would just be awkward. I don’t need the money right now. And since I’m not officially a detective, it wouldn’t seem appropriate.” Maybe not even legal. I looked at my first potential client, realized I’d given a lousy sales pitch. She stared at me, her head cocked back slightly. Chin jutted out. Eyes narrowed a bit. I wasn’t sure which way the decision would go.

  “If the killer can be found, Mrs. Bernstein, I’ll find him. There’s nothing else I need to do right now. I would focus exclusively on this.”

  Delores held my gaze. Her mouth was shut tight. I thought I saw her chin quiver slightly. If acting, she was good. I knew the emotion behind that quiver, had felt it many times in the past year. It could come at any moment, unannounced, unexpected, unrelated to the moment. She tilted her head forward slightly, smoothed her slacks on her thighs.

  “Thank you, Sam. I like this man Eli Quinn.”

  “As do I,” Sam said.

  I looked at the floor again.

  “Let me get us some coffee,” Delores said.

  ***

  As Sam and I waited for Delores to return with coffee neither of us wanted, we looked around the living room.

  I asked in a low voice, “How much you think all these paintings are worth?”

  “A lot, I suppose,” Sam whispered.

  There were three sculptures in the room. One appeared to be two women having sex, but no matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t tell which limb belonged to which woman. Another was a bust of someone probably famous, but I didn’t know who. The other was a bust of Ben Franklin. Ben, his head and part of his shoulders perched atop a narrow pedestal, looked wise but wistful, lazy lids covering eyes that gazed off to one side and down, thin lips pulled back as if tired from all the work that went into founding a country.

  On the coffee table in front of the sofa were copies of National Geographic, Martha Stewart Living, Scientific American, House Beautiful, Popular Mechanics and Make magazine. I thumbed through a copy of Make, the modern do-it-yourselfer’s bible. How to build an underwater robot. How to make your own Geiger counter. Devise a rear-view power socket. Make a gin pole, whatever that was.

  Delores returned from the kitchen with three white ceramic cups of coffee on a tray. “Please, help yourself,” she said.

  Sam declined. I didn’t want any either, but I took one of the cups, sipped the coffee black. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Now what do you need to know about my husband?”

  “Tell me a little about what he did, how he came to be retired,” I said.

  “Tinker was an engineer at heart, built computer systems that controlled airplane systems. He ended up being a vice president at GE, overseeing a bunch of other engineers. GE paid him well, good pension, and he inherited quite a bit of money when his parents died.”

  Her voice was flat. Sounded rehearsed. But she’d probably had to tell the story more than once in the past few days, and she’d be bored with it. Or maybe the only way to recite the story without tears was to do it in monotone and try consciously to avoid emotion. “Over the years he started collecting art, just as a hobby at first. He was good at it, and he made money on the few pieces he sold. He retired two years ago and other than buying and selling art, he spends … spent … most of his time making things. She looked down. Her eyes watered. I waited. She sniffed a bit, and looked up again.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “Please, call me Delores.”

  “Yes ma’am.” I wasn’t sure what level of formality to strike with my first client, who was also a murder suspect, at least technically. I’d have to look that one up in the private investigator manual. “Was your husband, Mr. Bernstein, was he handy around the house?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Tinker could fix anything. If something wasn’t broken, he’d tear it apart anyway, just to figure out how it worked. Or he’d make it better. He built his own computer. I never understood most of it.”

  “You told me the other day,” Sam said, “That’s where the nickname came from.”

  “Of course,” Delores said, repeating the story for me. “He got the nickname as a kid, and it fit perfectly. He is, was, more than anything else, a tinkerer. When we met, I tried to call him Caleb, but he insisted I call him Tinker. He said he never liked the way his first name ended with the same sound as his last name began. Caleb Bernstein was hard to pronounce, he said, and when he had to use it for official things, he always had to spell it. Nobody had trouble spelling Tinker.”

  “So Mr. Bernstein was out in his office when he …” I let the sentence tail off. My approach to asking detective questions wasn’t well developed yet.

  “When he was killed,” Delores finished for me. “It’s OK, Mr. Quinn. You can say it. I still can’t believe it, but I don’t want to pretend it didn’t happen. Yes, he—Tinker—was out in the garage. We have two. When we bought the place, he converted one to a workshop. Much more than an office, but he has his office desk out there, too.”

  “Doesn’t it get a little hot in the summer?”

  “He put in a separate air conditioner, insulated the walls. Did most of the work himself. He loved it out there.”

  “So Mr. Bernstein was out there, in the garage.”

  “Tinker, please. Call him Tinker.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said. “Just before seven p.m., correct?”

  “That’s what the sheriff says, yes.”

  “How did the killer, or killers, get in?”

  “The deputies figure they simply walked in,” she said. “I left to go to the Desert Ridge mall at around 5:30. The main garage door was open when I left. It was a warm evening. We don’t get much traffic up here—only neighbors. We’re at the end of the street.”

  “And you
said you returned a little after seven.”

  “Yes. I would’ve been home sooner.” She paused to emphasize the importance of the timing. “But when I came through the gate, I saw the sun was about to set. There were a few clouds to the west, and they were turning red, so I took the long way around, on Pinnacle Drive. When you get up to the highest point, there’s a clear view of Pinnacle Peak in one direction, and the sunset in the other. Tinker and I went there often to watch the sunset. I knew there wasn’t time to stop and pick him up, so I went there, stopped for a few minutes, and watched the sun go down. It was beautiful.”

  “And when you returned, was the garage door open?”

  “No, it was closed. I parked in the driveway—we don’t have a lot of garage space—went in the front door, hollered for him and didn’t hear anything but some piano concerto. But that was normal. Tinker usually played classical when he was working. I took a shower, started dinner, and then wondered why he hadn’t come in. I found him around eight o’clock.” Her voice cracked and faltered, but she remained sitting erect, her hands in her lap.

  “And when you were broken into three days earlier, how did they get in?”

  “Also through the garage,” she said. “But they broke in through the garage side door.”

  “And you were both away, right?”

  “Yes, we’d gone to a fundraiser at the MIM down in Scottsdale.”

  The Musical Instrument Museum, a short drive from Pleasant, brought in some amazing performers in classical, jazz, rock, folk, blues and sundry other genres for intimate performances. Jess and I had attended several in our the first years together, before the relationship started to strain and we were more apt to spend evenings at home watching TV, working—or pretending to work.

  I asked, “They didn’t set off your home alarm?”

  “He had never set the alarm up in the garage,” she said.

  “You passed through the guard gate on the way out to the fundraiser that evening,” I said.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “I guess that’s my new job, Mrs. Bernstein. I’m supposed to ask a lot of questions, then see if the answers add up to anything. Can you show me the garage?”

  We went through the kitchen and into the garage. It still had a bare concrete floor and a big garage door. The door was covered in aftermarket insulation. Along the back wall were cabinets over a long workbench with a drill press, a small band saw, and various power tools scattered around.

  In the middle of the garage was a large office desk. I recognized the high-end 3D printer, a commercial-grade model that probably cost north of $200,000, and the separate 3D scanner, also not cheap. There was a keyboard, a mouse and two inexpensive flat-screen monitors, but where there would have been a computer under the desk, there wasn’t.

  “Did your husband still do any work for GE or any other companies, or was he fully retired?

  “He quit cold turkey. Fully embraced retirement.”

  “You said he built his own computer. Was it something particularly valuable?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think it was a bit of a dinosaur. It looked like something out of the eighties. A big, unattractive box with lots of things connected to it.

  “Mac or PC?”

  “PC, I guess.”

  “They stole the PC,” I said, “but none of the peripherals.”

  “Yes, whoever broke in the first time took the computer, and the TV.” She pointed to a bare spot on the wall where a TV mount had been ripped off.

  Next to the desk chair there was a large bloodstain on the concrete. Otherwise the garage looked like any tinkerer’s space, or rather any really rich tinkerer’s space. Maker, I corrected myself. That’s what the tinkerers called themselves these days.

  “They didn’t take anything else?”

  “No,” she said.

  “No cash, no other valuables, none of the art on the walls?”

  “Nothing we noticed,” she said. “They didn’t even come into the house, though we always left the door between the garage and the house unlocked. That door is alarmed though, so the alarm company would’ve known if they’d gone into the house, and we would have gotten a call on Tinker’s cell phone.”

  “And when they—or whoever—came three nights later and, ah, well, did they take anything?”

  “I’m pretty sure they took some tools from the garage. He had a cordless drill that I’d given him for his birthday, and I can’t find it now. There’s a toolbox missing. It was red and always sat in the same place, and it’s gone. Maybe some other things, but as you can see,” she waved her arm in a semicircle to indicate the workbench in the back of the garage, “there’s still a lot of stuff here.”

  “His wallet, maybe?”

  “No.”

  “And somebody shot the clock.” I pointed at the clock, but looked at her. She nodded. “At 6:59,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say about that, so I didn’t. But it felt like a clue the way a heavy thunderstorm feels like rain. Then again, as a reporter I hadn’t spent a lot of time piecing together murder scenes. I didn’t feel like a real detective yet. But I was asking a lot of questions and trying to be observant. I was good at observing and had a good memory for details, so I let my mind absorb what I saw and heard, and figured it would get around to putting things together later.

  We went back into the house.

  “After the break-in, did your husband say anything about what was on the PC? Maybe a valuable file of some sort?”

  “No.”

  “Did he seem nervous about anything?”

  “No. I mean, we were shaken up—it’s the first time we’ve ever been broken into. But I don’t think he was any more nervous than I was, no.”

  “And did they enter the house the night they killed him?”

  “I don’t know. Since Tinker was home, the alarm wasn’t on. But I can’t find anything missing in the house.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to know something is missing until you go looking for it,” I said.

  “So maybe they came in,” Delores said, “but if so, they didn’t take anything that I have missed yet.”

  I looked around at all the art. It was all still hanging on the walls or sitting on pedestals, same as a few minutes ago.

  I asked, “Did your husband have any enemies? Any debts? Anyone you might be suspicious of?”

  “Heavens no. Tinker was well-liked by the few people who knew him well. Ever since we’d moved to Arizona, he spent most of his time here, at the house. His art dealings were done mostly on the phone or by email. He’s always been kind of a recluse, and since we didn’t know anyone when we moved here, he just dove into his projects, out in the garage. He could work for hours. The only other thing he threw himself into was golf, mostly with our neighbor Charlie Entwill.”

  “I may want to talk to Charlie,” I said.

  “Of course. You can go knock on his door, or I can give you his phone number.” She gave me the number. I asked about other close friends, and she told me about them, said they’d all be willing to talk to me.

  “Any casual acquaintances who might’ve known about the art collection?”

  She thought a moment. “I doubt it. I mean, he was friendly with people he met—the checkout clerks at Frye’s, Jeanine, the nice single mother who cuts his hair over at the barber shop, the guards at the gate. He tended to make small talk with people around here more than he used to. He’d never admit it, but I think he got a little lonely with just me and his projects up here in this gated community. But small talk with people he barely knew seemed to be all the social interaction he needed beyond golf and the occasional function I dragged him to.” She looked around the room. “Oh, I suppose, some of the causes we donated too—some of the people who ran them would’ve known we had some art.”

  “That’s a pretty wide net,” I said. Delores nodded. I pondered.

  “I hate to ask this,” I said, “but I’ve read ab
out more than a few murders over the years, and most were about drugs, money, love or revenge—often revenge mixed with one of the others. I assume Tinker wasn’t into drugs. Money could be involved, but you haven’t told me anything that takes me very far down that path yet. But I have to ask: He had a big insurance policy…”

  “I don’t need the money. We didn’t need the money. I explained all that to the sheriff. This isn’t about the insurance policy.”

  “Is there any chance Tinker was involved with someone else?”

  Rather than flinching, she seemed to relax. Her shoulders dropped, and she gave a feeble smile. “If so, I’d be very surprised,” she said. “I suppose no wife would want to believe her husband is cheating on her. But, I mean, I don’t think Tinker would be considered handsome by most people. His beauty came mostly from the inside, and I don’t think very many people saw it. Tinker and I have been together since college. I loved him, and he loved me.” She said it with conviction. “I just don’t see him out gallivanting. I mean, we were rarely apart except when he played golf. And anyway, there was no, ah, nothing missing from our, well, let’s just say things between us were quite good, despite what you kids might think about people our age.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Sorry to have asked. So, frankly, I’m not sure there’s much here to work with, but I think I’d like to go and digest it all. Do you have any theories?”

  “No. I can’t explain it,” Delores said. “Neither can the sheriff. But I can’t accept that this was a random act of violence. It might not feel any better to know there was a reason, but I desperately want to know the reason.”

  “I guess that’s why I’m here.”

  “That’s why you’re here,” Sam said.

  At the front door, Delores reached for her purse, on a decorative table that didn’t seem to serve any purpose other than being a purse-holder. She pulled out a checkbook. “I’d like to pay you something now. Make this official. What would be an appropriate advance?”