Page 61 of A Winter of Discontent for Henry Milch
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Twiss asked.
“Can I see the search warrant?” I said, holding out my hand.
“Are you related to Patty Gauthier?”
“I’m on her legal team.”
Begrudgingly, Twiss handed me the warrant which was covered in a blue sheet of paper. “Now get out of our way before I arrest you.”
I stepped aside and let them into the house. Honestly, being arrested was not one of my favorite things. After they entered the house, I closed the front door and stood in the mudroom reading the warrant. The date, Patty’s name, the address, legalese, legalese, legalese, then the areas they could search: the house, garages, outbuildings, the grounds and any vehicles. That was pretty comprehensive. More legalese. Then, the items they could take: gloves and other winter outerwear, items originally belonging to Roberta LaCross, diaries, day planners, calendars, home videos, photograph albums, bank records, phone records, computers, answering machines and cell phones. That was also a pretty extensive list. I wondered if they should have brought a U-Haul.
I hadn’t had any time to really look around. This part of the house was a great room, a large open space that included a kitchen with a gigantic island, the living room area which was defined by a gray sectional that would have taken up three rooms in my grandmother’s house, a dining area and a fireplace with a couple of comfortable looking chairs in front of it.
Beyond all that was a wall of three French doors opening onto an expansive wooden deck, now dormant and covered in nearly a foot of snow. Lake Michigan was beyond all that, calm for the moment, gray like sky.
The décor was beach house despite Patty’s being a local: whitewashed, distressed furniture struggling to look cast off from a grand city home, a general overwrought casualness defined by a plaque in the kitchen that read IT’S WINE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE.
The deputies were all within sight. One only a few feet from me going through the coats hanging from hooks on the wall. I was still near the front door, in what some would call a foyer but in Michigan was definitely a mudroom.
The deputy had found a pair of winter gloves and was putting them into a plastic bag.
“I’d like to take a photo of those, if you don’t mind.”
He studied me suspiciously and then brought the evidence bag over to the sectional. “I’ll set things here and you can photo them. Don’t touch anything.”
I got out my nifty Samsung flip phone and took a not-very-good photo of the gloves. They were winter gloves, so I doubted very much Patty wore them to strangle Bobbie. They were fleece-lined suede. The kind of winter gloves that made most tasks, including the strangling of seventy-year-old women, almost impossible.
The other deputies picked up on the procedure and as their bagged “evidence” appeared on the sofa, I took a photo of it. There were more gloves, a couple of scarfs, a Day Runner for 2003, a small wall calendar (2004) from the kitchen. I took photos of all of it until I got a message on my Samsung’s tiny screen that I’d run out of memory.
I had taken a bunch of photos of Riley and Emerald that I should have moved to my iBook, but I needed a special adapter.I just hadn’t gotten around to picking one up. If I was going to keep working for Ham, I’d probably need to do that. In the meantime, I had to delete photos I didn’t want to, but I had Reilly, and I had Emerald. I could take more photos as soon as I got my cell phone cleared out. I spent a good ten minutes navigating the phone’s menu and repeatedly pressing delete.
The most fruitful item they found, in my estimation, was a cardboard box filled with things Bobbie had left behind when she moved out. There was a sling she must have used when she broke her arm, a wrist brace presumably from when she snapped her wrist, three Sudoku books mostly complete, a pair of reading glasses from a drug store, a huge, empty prescription bottle made out to Roberta LaCross for lorazepam, a smaller prescription bottle made out to Russell Belcher, also empty, for hydrocodone—which was basically Oxy.
This proved my idea that Bobbie’s story about getting Oxy from a man with cancer was true, and that man was Brian Belcher’s father. So was this what Patty meant when she said Bobbie killed a man once? That she’d killed Russell Belcher? No, that didn’t make sense. Taking his Oxy wouldn’t have killed him. He might have been left in unbearable pain, but people didn’t die of unbearable pain—did they?
“How much longer do you think you’ll be?” I asked Twiss as he lay a plastic bag containing a daily calendar from 1999 onto the sofa. Pointless if you ask me.
“Don’t know. You got to be some place?”
As a matter of fact, I did. I went back to the mudroom and called Jan to see if she could stay late. She couldn’t, she had a ceramics class she didn’t want to miss. Then I called Dorothy to see if she could babysit. She could not. That left one possibility, one my Nana Cole would hate.
“Hi, Bev. It’s Henry. How are you?”
“Well, upset, of course.”
“Yes. Of course you are. You really can’t take the things she says seriously, though…”
“Henry, I’ve known Emma since before you were born.”
She had me there; I had to turn that to my advantage.
“Then you know that what she’s best at is denial.”
Okay, fine, it’s a family trait. Get over yourself.
“What are you saying?”
“I need help. With Emerald. I’m stuck on a job-related thing…” I was trying to be discreet, but then I realized a bit of gossip would help Bev smooth things over with Nana Cole. “Patty Gauthier confessed to murdering Bobbie LaCross. I have to stay at Patty’s house while they search it. Nana Cole doesn’t know yet, if you could just go over, act like nothing happened, and tell her what’s going on… you’ll probably be fine.”
