Dearly Departed

Dearly Departed

A Holland Taylor Mystery

David Housewright

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media ebook

acknowledgments

Special thanks

to Dale Gelfand, Phyllis Jaeger, Lou Ka

Alison Picard, Michael Sullivan, Bob and Sharon

Valois, and Renée Valois

one

What I remember most was her voice. It was strong and clear and totally unafraid, even though the words she spoke gripped my heart with two icy hands:

If you are listening to this now, it is because I am dead.

At first I didn’t want to listen. I did not know the voice, had never heard the name that went with it. But I knew the man who had invaded my office, who now stood in front of my desk, a stumpy index finger pressed hard against the play button of a cassette recorder, and it was all I could do to keep from knocking him to the floor and beating him about the head and shoulders. Hell, if there had been a wooden stake handy, I would have gladly driven it through his heart.

But that voice, that voice …

Hunter Truman was a man who preferred what Winston Churchill called “short, Anglo-Saxon words,” words usually reserved for those moments when you hit your thumb with a hammer or stub your toe in the dark. He used them frequently. Probably the only words he used more often were these: “I’ll sue.”

Truman was an attorney, a fact that might have pleased his mother but few others. He took bragging pleasure in the sixty-some civil lawsuits he had filed on his own behalf over the past ten years—more if you added all the spin-off countersuits. Most were frivolous. The rest were vindictive and vengeful. He didn’t care if he won, only that he crushed his victims with legal fees— a problem he didn’t have since he always represented himself. I hadn’t known this several years ago when I met Truman, and although I was still struggling to make a go of my detective agency back then, I like to think it would have made a difference.

At the time, Truman had insisted that enemies of a client he declined to identify had attempted to run him down just that morning. He gave me a description of the car and the first three digits of the license plate, then hired me to learn who had driven it. By late afternoon, I discovered that the car was owned by a middle-aged couple living in the Kenwood neighborhood of Mi

Armed with the information I had gathered for him, Truman dragged the parents through the court system, vowing that if they wouldn’t control their daughter, then—bigod!—he would. Eventually he lost the suit and was ordered to pay the parents a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar judgment. Meanwhile, the parents had burned several thousand dollars defending themselves.

I hadn’t liked being used so badly. Nor had I appreciated his lying to me. But I probably would have forgotten all about the incident if Truman hadn’t tried to pull the same crap a couple of years later—this time with me as his designated victim.

I had just worked a case involving credit card fraud. A man had been contacting grieving widows. He’d get their names from the obituaries and call them and offer to switch their credit cards from their husbands’ names to their names. All they had to do was provide him with the credit card numbers and expiration dates. And soon they would start receiving bills for televisions, stereos, microwave ovens, and airline tickets that they hadn’t purchased. I had been drawn into the case by an older woman who didn’t think the authorities were giving it enough attention.

It turned out the caller was an inmate at Oak Park Heights state prison. He had been using a pay phone to gather the credit card information and then sell it to accomplices on the outside. When confronted with the crime, the inmate gri

Only that wasn’t good enough for Truman, who had defended the lowlife. A

When chance and the Mi

Now he was in my office, and I found myself regretting that I’d stopped carrying a gun.

He set a battered briefcase on the floor, straightened slowly, and said, “I need your help.” He looked it, too. I had never seen anyone who appeared as sorrowful or as dejected as Truman did outside a cancer ward. His hair was tangled from ru

“Let me guess, the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility pulled your ticket,” I said.

“Fuck, no. Why would they do that?” Truman answered without much enthusiasm.

“Jealousy.”

Truman didn’t reply. His eyes locked on an empty corner of my desk blotter, and for a moment he reminded me of a lawn ornament, one of those sad-eyed ceramic deer that people stick in their front yards.

“You have thirty seconds to tell me what you want,” I said.

Truman’s woeful demeanor didn’t last long. “Thirty seconds, what’s that shit?” he wanted to know in a voice that started low and increased in volume.

“Twenty-five seconds.”

Truman must have figured out I was serious because at fifteen seconds he said, “I want you to find a woman for me.”

“Try Lyndale and Lake Street; the girls who wave at passing cars are usually the most reasonably priced.”

“Jesus H. Christ. This is serious.”

“Five seconds.”

In five seconds, Truman whipped a photograph out of his pocket and set it—ever so tenderly—in front of me. It was of a woman who looked like she should be advertising perfumes with dangerous-sounding names. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly. Her hair was dark and so were her eyes, but her chin was too sharp, and her nose had a slight hook to it. Yet she had a presence, a confidence, that a camera could not diminish. Or perhaps the camera lent it to her—what did I know? I guessed her age at twenty-five.