The Reluctant Coroner (Fenway Stevenson Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Ferris looked down.

  “I can count on one hand the number of times I saw you after we left. Why?”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m not sure I have a good answer for that. I know I was really mad at Joanne.”

  “We were on food stamps, Dad.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said lamely.

  “Well, what did you think was going to happen? Mom couldn’t afford to keep fighting your lawyers even though everyone knew she’d get enough to keep us comfortable, even if she didn’t get half of everything.”

  He was quiet.

  “Did she cheat on you?”

  He started pacing slowly. “Did your mother ever tell you how we met?”

  Fenway shook her head.

  “Your mother was a brilliant painter.”

  “I know.”

  “I hear she had started selling her paintings again, before, you know.”

  “Right.”

  He sighed. “The company had just moved into a new headquarters building,” Ferris said. “It’s the one we’re in now, where Santa Clarita Street hits 326, and it was huge. I’d hired interior designers to arrange the space, but all the artwork they’d picked for the walls just didn’t do it for me. So, one Saturday, I’m having breakfast downtown, and I decide to walk around. There used to be a little boho-type gallery over on Fourth, and I’m passing by, and I see it.”

  Fenway looked at her father. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and a smile even touched his lips.

  “It was a painting of the Three Sisters Rock Arches just north of Point Dominguez,” he continued. “She captured the light perfectly, reflecting off both the rocks and the ocean. She got the color of the water absolutely perfect too. It was surreal, but at the same time, it was… I don’t really know. It spoke to me. It spoke to me the way a good jazz record speaks to me. The electricity I felt was like watching Nomo pitch the ninth of his no-hitter in ’01. It was special.”

  He shuffled his feet. “I had to have that painting on the wall of the front lobby. The first thing everyone would see when they came in. I had to buy it.” He put his hands in his pockets. “And your mother was in the gallery. We talked about that painting, and the winding road to get to Three Sisters, and at the end of the evening I had a new painting and a date for the next night.”

  Ferris smiled wistfully. “And I came home late one night from the office—what was it, ten, twelve years later? And Joanne was gone. And you were gone. And your clothes were all gone; all your toys, your bed, the spare couch in the playroom...”

  He cleared his throat again. “Look, I worked a lot. I probably never paid attention to Joanne as much as I did the night I bought her painting. But she never gave me a reason why she left. She never told me why she took you. She moved a thousand miles away, for God’s sake. I wasn’t going to let her steal away in the middle of the night with my only daughter, and take my money, without at least an explanation.”

  He folded his arms. “So, when I heard what happened to her a few weeks ago—and I’m not proud of this—the first thing I thought was, I’m never going to know.”

  “I thought you’d moved on. You married Charlotte,” Fenway said quietly.

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Fenway. The first thing I thought was, I’m never going to know. And just like that—it was like a blindfold being taken off. I realized that I had a daughter whose childhood I had completely missed because I was so enraged at her mother.”

  “And you want to make up for it.”

  “Well of course I want to make up for it. But I’m not stupid. I know I’ll never make up for it. But you were in a rough spot, and I could help. You were in a rough spot before, and I could have helped then, and I didn’t. But I will now.”

  “It still hurts.”

  “Yeah.” He paused. “Do you still want to go to dinner?”

  She nodded.

  “Good.” Nathaniel Ferris opened the rear door of the Mercedes, and she got in and slid over. Her father slid in next to her, and the driver started up the car.

  Fenway enjoyed the smooth ride of the S500, although it made her feel like a poseur in her twenty-five-dollar dress from Target. The leather was buttery soft. She had her own air vents and seat controls. The sound of a gong followed by the quick yet mournful notes of a tenor saxophone filled the car before the music settled down into a four-note bass riff.

  Fenway turned to her father. “Coltrane.”

  “That’s my girl. Know the tune?”

  “A Love Supreme.”

  He smiled. “One thing that’s always going to stick with me is that Coltrane almost died from drugs, and then he turned his life around and he wrote this album. He had put out some great albums when he was high all the time, but then he cleaned himself up, discovered what was really important, and created this masterpiece. Probably the best thing he ever did.”

  Fenway wondered where her father was going with this, but continued to listen.

  “I had a blind spot for the last twenty years. I was as blinded by my anger toward your mom as Coltrane was blinded by his drugs. And I did some amazing things with my company. I even found love again. But I was blind to what was really important.”

  They were quiet for a couple of blocks.

  “Fenway, you remember when you were little, and you and I used to watch all those recorded Red Sox games from the ’86 season?”

  “The season they went to the World Series,” Fenway said.

  “You were absolutely fascinated that they had a pitcher named Oil Can Boyd. He was probably the ace of that great pitching staff. You kept asking me, who would name their kid ‘Oil Can’?”

  Her father turned the music down a little. “Oil Can pitched some great games, but I read an article a few years ago and he said he was high on weed, or cocaine, or crack for every single game he pitched. It even started in Little League for him. How screwed up does your perspective have to be when you need to get high before every game you pitch?”

  His voice turned wistful. “He was a great pitcher, but I always think how great he would have been if he had cleaned himself up. He could’ve had a masterpiece of a season that would have been his equivalent of A Love Supreme. If he hadn’t been messed up like that, I might not have had to wait another eighteen years for them to win the World Series.”

  “I remember reading that article, too, Dad,” Fenway said. “I remember how I couldn’t believe his parents named their kid ‘Oil Can.’ It never occurred to me how ironic it was that I was questioning a guy’s weird name, when you named me ‘Fenway.’ And then I found out ‘Oil Can’ was just his nickname.”

  They got to the restaurant just after the first section of A Love Supreme concluded—Fenway’s favorite part, where Coltrane plays the main riff in every single key. They walked up to the hostess stand, and the maître d’ nodded to her father and took them to a table in the back that was secluded from the rest of the restaurant.

  “This is your usual table?” She sat down across from him.

  Ferris bobbed his head noncommittally, acknowledging both that this was his usual table, and that he knew Fenway was too self-consciously spartan to be impressed by it. “You have any special dietary restrictions? Vegan? Gluten-free? Anything like that?”

  “No, nothing special. And anything here would have to be better than the fast-food chicken sandwich I ate on the way to the M.E.’s today.”

  “Well, the chilled corn soup here is phenomenal, and I recommend the pheasant. Although the lamb is good, if a bit heavy. And the steaks, of course, are excellent.” He called the server over and ordered an old fashioned with some rye bourbon Fenway hadn’t heard of before. The server complimented him on his choice before disappearing.

  Nathaniel Ferris soon lost his sadness from their earlier talk, and settled into his let-me-show-off-my-daughter mode. He introduced Fenway to Eric The Sommelier—Fenway heard it as if he were a great Viking wine leader. Ferris agreed to a couple of expensive glasses of Germa
n Riesling to go with the pheasant he ordered, and appeared both surprised and delighted with Eric The Sommelier’s non-wine suggestion of a coffee-infused pale ale to go with the chilled corn soup. “Do they let you keep being a sommelier if you recommend beer with the starter?” Ferris hooted. Eric The Sommelier provided a big belly laugh in return. Fenway smiled, trying to keep her eye-rolling internal. Her father ordered his second old fashioned.

  Fenway had to admit that the pale ale with the chilled corn soup was fantastic. She thought of the corn chowder her mother would make on chilly Seattle days.

  After they cleared the plates and flatware from the starter course, and they brought her father his third old fashioned—he had chosen against the beer—Fenway cleared her throat. “Dad, first of all, I want to say thank you. This is a great place. And I’m glad you and I have a chance to reconnect.”

  “Uh, oh. We’ve entered the business discussion portion of our evening.”

  “Look, it’s just you and me now. No police interrogation room. No hulking security guy.”

  Nathaniel Ferris leaned forward. He must have been feeling quite good with the bourbon flowing in his veins. “I know! Rob is huge, right? I bring him to some negotiations with me when the other guys are really trying to put one over on me. One time, I just had him stand behind me and crack his knuckles, and just stare at the guy. Rob is so old-school.” He laughed. “Poor guy didn’t know what to do. He thought he was in a mafia movie. And everyone pays their rent on time in the building, too.”

  Fenway tried to get her father back on track. “Right, so, just you and me. But let’s be serious for a minute. If I had known that Carl Cassidy had gotten killed in that accident six months ago, I might have been able to talk my way out of that situation with his widow earlier today. But I didn’t know anything, and that just made her angrier. Angry enough to shoot at me.”

  That seemed to sober him up a bit. “Fenway, I’m so sorry. I never for a minute thought you’d be in danger. I thought maybe some people would be like, ‘oh, he’s just giving his daughter a job,’ but I never thought anyone would be upset enough by it to try to hurt you in any way.”

  “I believe you.” Fenway folded the corners of her napkin in. “I haven’t always believed everything you’ve said, but I believe you on this.”

  Ferris stared down into his glass.

  “But, that also means that whatever is in those stolen files, you need to tell me about. I don’t care how relevant you think the details are, or whether I have a subpoena. There are people out there who, literally, are ready to kill over what’s in those files. And I don’t know it yet, but that might be why Harrison Walker was murdered.”

  He squinted at her. “I heard you have someone in custody for that.”

  “We do.”

  “And you think he killed Harrison because of what’s in the stolen files?”

  “I don’t know. Like I told you earlier, the stolen files don’t fit with the theory of the crime. I mean, they might fit, but right now, we’re not seeing the connection.”

  Nathaniel Ferris picked up his glass and swirled the big ice cube around in it. Then he sighed. “I’ll tell you something that Rob uncovered during our insurance review of the accident.” He lowered his voice. “I probably shouldn’t say anything about this, but I guess it might affect your case, and, well…”

  “I’m listening.”

  “We were going through the two employees’ files. Trying to match things up. It didn’t make sense—someone had to physically vent the toxic fumes into that room that the two of them were in. We can’t figure out who had access to that room except for the two of them. I don’t know if it was a weird murder-suicide, or what, but that’s what I was told was the only theory that held any water.”

  “So, you’re saying that one of the dead employees vented the toxic fumes into that room on purpose, killing both of them?”

  “I know.” Her father took another drink. “It doesn’t make any sense, except when you look at every other explanation. Carl Cassidy had been using his EAP—for couples’ counseling.” He picked up his fork and turned it around a full turn. “We asked some of the members of his team what was going on. One of his buddies said that Carl and his wife were going through a rough patch; Carl thought his wife was cheating on him. Even hired a private investigator to follow her when he went on trips to Houston and Alaska. The guy took pictures of this black pickup truck in front of their house when he was away on trips, and pictures of her entering a motel room in P.Q. with that same truck parked out front.”

  “P.Q.?”

  “Sorry, Paso Querido. About half an hour down the coast highway. Neat little hippie town.”

  “And that boyfriend was Dylan Richards?” Fenway guessed.

  “No, not Dylan Richards. That’s not what I heard. There was a black pickup that belonged to this young hotshot who worked on a competing project, name of Lewis Fairweather.”

  Fenway remembered reading that name. “The other guy who died in the accident.”

  “Right.” Ferris nodded. “Rob said that he was talking to our PR team about whether it was better to see if we could call it a tragic one-off accident, where the workers made a mistake in the ventilation system, or if it was better to suggest the theory of the murder-suicide publicly. But we had absolutely no evidence that Carl had actually done anything to kill himself and Lewis.”

  He sighed and drained the rest of his drink. “Ultimately, we decided to call it an accident, and the families were going to be getting the insurance payouts. We have quite good accidental death coverage for our employees, so the life insurance was taken care of, but given that it was on our property, we negotiated an additional settlement going to Carl’s widow and Fairweather’s parents. Our insurance company needed the coroner to sign off on the paperwork, though, and Rob kept telling me that there was a problem getting Harrison’s sign off on it. I had actually called Harrison twice, and he kept saying he just needed a couple of bureaucratic items done on his end.”

  A host of servers suddenly appeared, startling Fenway. Eric The Sommelier excused himself for the interruption and regaled them with the story of the German winemakers who made their Reisling in a town near the Black Forest. A woman introduced herself as the sous chef and wove a tale of the wild pheasant that were taking over the Black Rock wildlife reserve in the Santa Ynez valley, and how they made the journey from overpopulation to Maxime’s kitchen. The pastry chef discussed the wild blackberries in the highly recommended fruit tart. They all gave slight bows as they left. Fenway couldn’t imagine what this meal was costing her father.

  Fenway didn’t want their conversation to lose traction, so she continued even before the servers left. “So, why would anyone steal those files?”

  “I don’t know.” Ferris took a big bite of pheasant and kept talking. “I haven’t seen them, but as far as I know, everything in those files closes the case for us. It absolves us of wrongdoing, and it doesn’t mention the murder-suicide theory, or the affair between Lewis and Carl’s wife. And it allows the families to get their money. It’s a win for everyone on all sides.”

  “Except Carl Cassidy and Lewis Fairweather,” Fenway muttered.

  Ferris didn’t notice the aside. “If the murder-suicide thing was in there, I guess Carl’s widow might want to steal the file. And, I guess, if it were in there, neither Carl nor Lewis would want it out there. But they’re both dead.”

  Fenway saw another possibility to pique her father’s interest as she swallowed a bite of sweet potato purée. “What if it wasn’t Lewis who was having the affair with Carl’s wife? What if it had been with another guy who drove a black pickup?”

  “Like who? Like that Dylan Richards guy you mentioned? He’s the one you have in custody, right?”

  “Yes. And he drives a black pickup. What if those files had his truck’s license plate listed, or the private investigator’s photos of him, and not Lewis Fairweather?”

  “Well, then,” Ferris said, “
I guess you’d want to find those files.”

  Fenway’s mind was already working.

  He talked about the files a little more, but she realized that he only knew the information he had heard secondhand—and most of it was from Rob Stotsky.

  They changed subjects a couple of times after that. Her father wanted to talk about Coltrane some more. Fenway talked about how much she liked Blue Train. He talked about how much Coltrane had screwed up his life with heroin when he was on tour with Miles Davis. She talked about her last forensics class that she was taking online.

  Ferris ordered dessert, eschewing the recommended fruit tart for a butterscotch panna cotta. She had a bite of his, but she was full. She had a coffee, and although she was a little concerned about getting to sleep, she figured her body was so exhausted it wouldn’t matter.

  When Nathaniel Ferris dropped her off at her apartment at ten-thirty, she was still feeling full. Her head was swimming with how they would get to the bottom of whether or not Dylan Richards and Lana Cassidy had been having an affair. Her father was relaxed in the back seat, eyes half-closed, humming out of tune to Psalm. He didn’t see the sheriff’s car parked in one of the visitor’s spaces.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Fenway looked at her phone. She had missed a couple of texts from McVie. Call me when you’re done with your dad at about nine o’clock and ETA? at about ten.

  She said goodbye to her father, then walked upstairs. McVie was sitting on the walkway in front of her door.

  “Hey, McVie.”

  “Hey, Fenway. Wow, you look great. Nice dress.”

  “Thanks.” She picked at the hem, considering. “I felt like it wasn’t expensive enough to get in my father’s Mercedes.” She looked closely at him. His smile lines weren’t smiling, and there was a sadness in his eyes she couldn’t quite place. “Is everything okay?”

  He paused. “Well, I came over to give you a whole bunch of news. Mark—uh, Sergeant Trevino—located Walker’s missing laptop. It was under the seat of the car.”