She just looked at me. I noticed that her hair was damp, an earlobe smudged with black dye.
“The man you worked for was murdered,” I said. “Someone who worked for me was murdered. And there are others. I’m sure you’ve been keeping up with some of what is going on. There is reason to suspect that the person who is doing this was an inmate at Spring Street – someone who was released, perhaps around the time that Ronnie Joe Waddell was executed.”
“I don’t know anything about anybody being released.”
Her eyes drifted to the empty street behind me.
“Would you know anything about an inmate who disappeared? Someone, perhaps, who wasn’t legitimately released? It seems that with the job you had you would have known who entered the penitentiary and who left.”
“Nobody disappeared that I heard of.”
“Why don’t you work there anymore?”
I asked.
“Health reasons.”
I heard what sounded like a cupboard door shut from somewhere inside the space she guarded.
I kept trying. “Do you remember when Ronnie Waddell’s mother came to the penitentiary to visit him on the afternoon of his execution?”
“I was there when she came in.”
“You would have searched her and anything she had with her. Am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“What I’m trying to determine is if Mrs. Waddell might have brought anything to give her son. I realize that visiting rules prohibit people from bringing in items for the inmates “
“You can get permission. She got it.”
“Mrs. Waddell got permission to give something to her son?”
“Helen, you’re letting all the heat out,” a voice sounded sweetly from behind her.
Intense blue eyes suddenly fixed on me like gun sights in the space between Helen Grimes’s meaty left shoulder and the door frame. I caught a flash of a pale cheek and aquiline nose before the space was empty again. The lock rattled and the door was quietly shut behind the erstwhile prison guard. She leaned up against it, staring at me. I repeated my question.
“She did bring something for-Ronnie, and it wasn’t much. I called the warden for permission.”
“You called Frank Donahue?”
She nodded.
“And he granted permission?”
“Like I said; it wasn’t much, what she brought for him.
“Helen, what was it?”
“A picture of Jesus about the size of a postcard, and something was wrote on the back. I don’t remember exactly. Something like ‘I will be with you in paradise; only the spelling was wrong. Paradise was spelled like ‘pair of dice; all run together,’ Helen Grimes said without a trace of a smile.
“And that was it?”
I asked. “This was what she wanted to give her son before he died?”
“I told you that was it. Now, I need to go in, arid I don’t want you coming here again.”
She put her hand on the doorknob as the first few drops of rain slowly slipped from the sky and left wet spots the size of nickels on the cement, stoop.
When Wesley arrived at my house later in the day, he wore a black leather pilot’s jacket, a dark blue cap, and a trace of a smile.
“What’s happening?” I asked as we retreated to the kitchen, which by now had become such a common meeting place for us that he always took the same chair.
“We didn’t break Stevens, but I think we put a pretty big crack in him. Your having the lab request left where be would find it did the trick. He’s got good reason to fear the results of DNA testing done on fetal tissue from Susan Story’s case.”
“He and Susan were having an affair,” I said, and it was odd that I did not object to Susan’s morals. I was disappointed in her taste.
“Stevens admitted to the affair and denied everything else.”
“Such as having any idea where Susan got thirty-five hundred dollars?” I said.
“He denies knowing anything about that but we’re not finished with him. A snitch of Marino’s says he saw a black Jeep with a vanity plate in the area where Susan was shot and about the time we think it happened. Ben Stephens drives a black Jeep with the vanity plate”