Page 24 of A Winter of Discontent for Henry Milch
“Why do I need to go there? I thought the Roberta LaCross thing was finished. You asked for an invoice. Which reminds me how much?—”
“Roberta LaCross is dead. You need to get up there before they finish with the scene.”
“But… what happened?”
“That’s what I need you to find out. Melanie Frasier called me. She’s afraid the sheriff thinks she did it. She’s hired us to make sure he doesn’t arrest her. Oh, crap. I have to go?—”
And he hung up. I called Bev and then Jan to come and take care of Emerald, but neither of them was available—to be fair,they’d been there part of Saturday and most of Sunday. That left me no choice. I ran around the house for a good ten minutes collecting everything I was going to need, put the baby in the car seat, grabbed the recently refilled diaper bag, and said good-bye to my grandmother who called out, “Where are you going?”
“Murder!” I called back as I went out the back door. I took the Escalade because I had the baby and I didn’t want the hole in my convertible top to blow on her. It was frigid out; it had to be in the low teens, if not lower. I got the baby belted in and then went around to the front, got in, and turned the SUV on. Then I flipped the heater and fan onto high. I revved the engine a few times and then drove down the driveway and turned north.
A damp fog had settled across M-22 so I had to drive slowly. It was a fifteen-minute ride to Three Friends, but it took me half an hour. On the upside, the Escalade was warm and toasty five minutes in.
When I finally got there, the parking lot was full with two sheriff’s deputies’ black SUVs, a red F-150 and a weird little Subaru—brand-new, yellow, four-door with a pickup bed instead of a trunk. Totally odd.
In front of the tasting room, an area had been cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape—which strangely matched the Subaru. Inside the tape, standing alone and inadequately dressed for the weather, was Detective Rudy Lehmann. He was a tall man with rapidly disappearing sand-colored hair and a frequent look of discomfort in his eyes—which might just have been his reaction to me. The two deputies, both hulking white guys, hung outside the tape looking like KKK members taking a break from listening to the grand wizard.
I pulled in next to the Subaru and turned the SUV off. Now I had a decision to make: I could leave the baby in the nice warm car or I could bring her with me. Both felt wrong. I didn’t think I should leave her alone; I also didn’t think I should have her outin the cold for long. There are too many situations like this with a baby; two wrong choices and no right one.
Anxiously, I walked around the Escalade, unstrapped the car seat and pulled it out of the vehicle. I bent over and draped a blanket loosely over Emerald’s face. As I walked over to the tape the deputies made a move to stop me, but Lehmann waved them off.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m working as a private investigator. Melanie Frasier is a client.”
“So you show up at a crime scene with a baby?” He was staring at the safety-rated plastic basket hanging from my arm. “That is a baby in there, isn’t it?”
“I couldn’t find a sitter.”
“It’s twelve degrees.”
“We won’t be out here forever. Where’s Sheriff Crocker?”
“Florida. He lives there from late fall to early spring.”
“He’s literally calling it in for half the year?”
“He’s up for re-election next year. You want to run against him?”
“Tempting, but no. That’s Roberta LaCross, isn’t it?” I asked, referring to the body that was rolled up against the glass door. She wore a giant green parka, but even that couldn’t disguise that she was a tiny, frail old woman. Faded red-dyed hair popped out of the hood.
“It is.”
“Listen, she’s suing the winery. Apparently, she fell in the ladies’ room nearly two years ago. I’ve been investigating. The fall was completely her own fault. Really, she has no chance of winning the case. Had.”
“I know all that. I’ve already spoken to Melanie.”
“You spoke to my client without me?”
“Yeah, you know she didn’t happen to ask for her private investigator. And she didn’t ask for alawyer, either.”
Okay, maybe that was not a bright thing to say. “Right. Yeah, that makes sense.” I thought about what I was looking at then asked, “You don’t think Roberta was killed here, do you? It looks like she was dumped.”
It was an important point. Obviously, Melanie had a motive. She was being sued. She could have entirely lost the winery. Though if she did kill Roberta, she wouldn’t dump her in front of her own tasting room, would she?
“I’m not deciding anything until we know more. There’s a forensic guy coming up from Benzie. We’ve got a sharing arrangement going on with them. And then the medical examiner. He’s a consultant, drives in from Traverse.” He seemed to remember who I was and added, “Not that it’s any of your business.”
I looked at the scene and tried to figure out what a forensics guy might find. I mean, there wasn’t much. A concrete slab in front of a couple glass doors, with a roof—awning? Portico? Over the whole thing. And, obviously, a corpse.
