The Not-dead, Dead Husband

"Theresa, what did Martin do for a living? Were they having money problems?"

"I don't think they were. Martin is a property appraiser for one of the real estate companies in Nashville. I don't know which one it was, but they must have been pretty well off. Their house was really nice, and she never complained to me about not having anything."

"That doesn't sound right. If they were doing well, why can't Darlene afford a really good lawyer?"

Therese frowned then.

"Martin was pretty controlling where their money was concerned. He had the only checkbook and the only credit cards. He gave Darlene enough money to buy what she needed, but she doesn't have any way to get to the money they have in the bank. She told me it isn't even a joint account. It's Martin's account."

"What did Martin do when he wasn't working -- a hobby like fishing, or something like that?"

Theresa thought for a few seconds, then shook her head.

"I never heard Darlene say anything about a hobby. Martin worked odd hours because of his clients, so I think he was probably too busy for a hobby. Some days it was early in the morning, some days during normal business hours, and some days pretty late at night. He said people who are selling commercial property sometimes don't want that to get out until the sale is done. They want the appraisal to be done when nobody is around."

Martin's working hours gave me an idea about what might have caused friction between him and Darlene. I'd had a couple other cases where the husband had to work late a lot. What he was really doing was having a ball balling his girlfriend. Maybe Theresa would know if that was the case.

"Any idea why they had a fight that night?"

"I think so, because Darlene told me about fights they'd had in the past. Darlene wanted to have a baby and Martin didn't. I'd guess that's what this one was about too."

That didn't seem like enough to make Darlene kill her husband. It was enough to make her divorce him, but she had nothing to gain by killing him at least in my way of thinking. There was the insurance thing, but if Darlene didn't know about it like she claimed, she'd have been better off divorcing him and getting as much out of him as she could that way. Other than the insurance, I could think of only one thing that might make one spouse kill the other.

"She never said anything about another woman? Usually that results in a fight."

Theresa shook her head.

"No, and Darlene would have told me."

"How much do you know about the life insurance Martin had?"

"Just what Darlene told me. She said the detective told her Martin had taken out the policy three months earlier and it was for two million dollars. The detective told her they were sure that's why she killed him, but Darlene wouldn't ever kill anybody. She wouldn't even kill a spider if she found one in her house. She'd catch it in a glass and then take it outside and let it go."

I'd been taking notes as we talked. When I finished writing that last part down, Theresa asked me if I was going to help them.

"Can you see why we need you to help us? I don't believe Darlene could kill Martin, but everybody else seems to think she did. You're our last hope of getting the truth."

I closed my folder.

"Theresa, I don't think anybody has the whole story of this thing, and maybe I can help. I can't do it for nothing though. My fee is three hundred a day with two days in advance, and it might take a while for me to figure things out."

Theresa frowned.

"That's a lot of money, but Darlene's the only sister I have. I can pay for the first two days and I'll talk to Mom and Dad. They don't think she did it either, so maybe they can help us out."

I said I'd tell her what I'd found out after two days and she could tell me to stop or keep going then. Theresa wrote me a check and then left.

Now, normally, I'd have waited until the check cleared, but this whole thing smelled worse than the men's shitter in a run-down bar. I had a lot of questions, questions Roger's guys should have asked but apparently didn't.

I needed to talk directly to Darlene, but that was going to take some time. You can't just walk into the jail and ask to talk with a person remanded pending trial. There's a bunch of bullshit you have to do first. As soon as Theresa left, I filled out the request form on line and submitted it. I figured that was going to take at least a week. I thought about calling Roger again to see if he could speed it up, but he was probably stretching as far as he could by just telling me what he already had.

While I was waiting, I'd check out Martin to see who he really was.

It was easy enough to find out where he worked. I just looked on the Nashville Realtor's Association web site. He worked for Harelson Realty and did most of the appraisals for the commercial properties in their listing. Harelson had about a hundred commercial properties listed and the going rate for a commercial appraisal was around five grand. If he did a fifty a year, that would put Martin's income in the range of about a quarter of a million.

That would be a logical reason for the life insurance policy. He would have wanted to make sure his wife had some money in case he died. What wasn't logical is not telling Darlene about the policy if that was really the case. If she didn't know about it, she wouldn't know to collect the money when he died.

Since I had no obvious place to start, I started at Harelson Realty. It was tough dressing up in a suit and tie again, but I wanted to look like a businessman looking to sell my factory in Nashville.

}{

The woman at the lobby desk surprised me. She was maybe forty instead of young twenties, and while she was no fashion model, she was pretty hot. She had a lot of cleavage peeking out of her top and her long, blonde hair framed a face she'd probably spent a least half an hour on before coming to work. My ex used to take half an hour and she didn't look nearly as hot.

She gave me the standard receptionist's smile and question -- "Good morning. How can I help you today?"

I said I was looking to sell a business property and a mutual friend had told me Mr. Matthews was a man who could give me an honest appraisal. She looked at me and said, "You haven't heard? His wife killed him last week."

Her face didn't change when she said that. I'd have expected at least a little frown or some other expression that meant she was sad, but there was nothing. I shook my head like I couldn't believe what I'd just heard.

"No, I hadn't heard, but then, I live in Atlanta so I probably wouldn't have. My friend will want to know this. I gather they were pretty close. Has the funeral been held? I'm sure my friend will want to attend if it hasn't."

"No, because they haven't found his body."

"Then how do the police know his wife killed him?"

She smiled a little then.

"He left a note on his computer here at work that said if anything happened to him, she was the one who killed him. I know because I found the note when I was looking on his computer for an appraisal he'd just done. I gave it to the police as soon as I heard he was missing. I don't know the real reason, but the newspaper said he had a lot of life insurance. That's probably why she did it."

As I drove back to my office, I was thinking everything made perfect sense -- Martin's disappearance, Darlene leaving the house after the fight, the note -- but only if there was proof Martin was dead. So far, the only real facts were that nobody knew where Martin was, two blood stains that might or might not really be blood, and the hairs in Darlene's trunk.

I trusted the Crime Lab people, but I didn't trust their report. Really smart, really technical people like techs and coroners will never really commit to stating something as a fact. They only use words like "probably caused by" or "within a probability of so many percent" even if they're absolutely certain, but they also leave themselves a way out in case they might be wrong. The only person who might be able to tell me what the techs had really found was Cindy Russell, the first shift supervisor at the Crime Lab.

I knew Cindy from helping her find her mother a few years back. Cindy knew she'd been adopted when she was only a few days old, but the records had been sealed. She wanted to find her birth mother.

As it turned out, her birth mother wanted to find her too. I was able to match them up. Cindy appreciated my efforts. No, not that kind of appreciating. Cindy likes girls. Her mother, on the other hand...well, that's too much to go into here.

That afternoon, I called Cindy at work and explained what I was doing. I said I'd read the report and asked her how confident she was with the conclusion the police had made. Cindy told me to hang up and she'd go outside and call me back on her cell phone. When she did, she sounded nervous.

"Harry, if this gets out, I'll get fired, so don't tell anybody we've talked, OK?"

I promised I wouldn't, and Cindy continued.

"We're not confident at all that the guy's dead. That's why there's a disclaimer in the report. What my techs found looked a little like blood and the standard field test was positive for blood, but there are a lot of other things that give positive results to that test. There also wasn't really a big enough stain to tell us the guy had bled out, and the house wasn't all torn up like there'd been any kind of a struggle. All we found was two broken plates and they didn't have any blood on them. We didn't find anything that could have been a murder weapon or might have told us what type of weapon was used either.

"We couldn't get any verification from any of the tests we did because the samples we took were so degraded. That usually doesn't happen because most people think just cleaning up what you can see with soap and water is enough. Both spots had been soaked in bleach, and that pretty much removes anything we can test for. The only thing we know for sure is the hairs in the trunk belong to the guy."

I thanked Cindy and then hung up. Nothing she'd found indicated Martin was dead, much less that Darlene had killed him. If Cindy wasn't convinced, neither was I.

If Martin was alive and faking his own death, some of those things made sense. Yeah, I'm a suspicious bastard, but that's how I make my living.

An affair was a possible reason for him to do that, and I wondered why the receptionist at Harelson Realty hadn't seemed upset when she told me Martin was dead. Some people don't show emotion at anything, but in my experience, they're few and far between. It was possible those late hours Martin had been working were really when he was fucking her.

There was also the note he'd left on his computer blaming Darlene if anything happened to him. Even small companies today are really obsessive about computer security because of hackers. The receptionist couldn't have gotten into Martin's computer unless she knew his password and in most companies, sharing your computer password could get you fired. It was also odd that she'd have found the note when there were probably hundreds if not thousands of files on his computer. She was either unbelievably lucky or she knew where to look.

Another possibility was a business deal gone bad. Martin wouldn't be the first appraiser who valued a property too low. Maybe the property owner got a second opinion and threatened to sue Martin's ass off if he didn't pay back the appraisal fee and Martin decided to fake his death in order to avoid losing everything he had.

Another possibility I'd seen before was maybe Martin just got tired of Darlene and decided to dump the whole fucking thing and start over. I once tracked down a guy who'd done just that. He left town without telling anybody. When I found him, he'd married another woman and was running a used book store.

There were other possibilities, but they were all going to be hard to track down because they all depended a lot on seeing Martin's finances. If he was alive, he was spending money and that money had to come from his bank account or credit cards. The police can get access to both. I can't. I'd have to find another way.

Since this was my second day, the first thing I did was call Theresa, tell her I thought something was going on, and ask her if she wanted me to continue my investigation. She said her mother and father were willing to help her out for at least a week, so I could go ahead.

}{

Over my before bedtime scotch and cigarette that night, I looked at what I had so far. It wasn't much and I had more questions than answers. One of those questions was how Martin had gotten out of the house that night. His car was still in the garage when the police got there, so he didn't drive off and the only way Darlene would have gotten his body in her own car was if she put it there the night before.

The neighbor hadn't told the police she'd seen Darlene put Martin in her trunk. All the neighbor told the officer who interviewed her was she watched Darlene back her car out of the garage and drive off. Darlene couldn't have put him in her trunk the next morning because that's when she reported him missing and the police would have found him when they searched her car. That made me think Martin must have slipped out of the house sometime during the night.

He couldn't have gotten very far on foot, so he probably had someone waiting to pick him up. That thought took me back to the receptionist.

The next morning, I drove over to the Matthew's house to see what routes Martin might have taken. Like Theresa had said, it was a nice house. It sat on about five acres in a wealthy-looking suburb. That would put the selling price at close to a million, maybe a million and a half. That seemed pretty high for a man with an income of a fourth that. Most finance companies don't like lending more than three times a borrower's annual income for a property that expensive.

About half of that five acres was a very well manicured front lawn and I saw security cameras at the door and at each end of the house. Martin would have risked being caught on video if he tried to get across that much open space to a waiting car.

In the back, part of the trees that had been there before the subdivision was developed were still standing and they were only maybe twenty feet from the house. That's the direction I'd have chosen. There were probably security cameras there too, but once Martin was in the trees, the cameras couldn't see him especially if it was night. He would have known what those cameras could see and just avoided them.

I couldn't see what was on the other side of the trees, but the map app in my phone could. There was an old dirt road that ran behind the houses on that side of the street. It didn't look like it was in good shape, but that was a possible place for a car to wait on Martin.

I drove around the suburb and found the dirt road. It was pretty rough, and I wasn't sure my SUV would make it so I didn't try. I got out and walked the half mile to behind the Matthews' house. In the dirt of the road, I saw tire tracks, and the tires were those with big lugs than make that annoying fucking whine on pavement. They were probably left by either a pickup or a four-wheel drive vehicle like a Jeep. I wondered what kind of vehicle the receptionist drove.

To find out, I drove to the realty office, parked across the street, and waited until the receptionist left. I let her get half a block ahead of me and then started following her. I did this for a couple of reasons. She was driving a late model Toyota sedan, but she might have another vehicle at home and I wanted to see if she did. The other reason was she might not go straight home and I wanted to see where she went if she didn't. If she was hiding Martin somewhere besides her house, she'd probably go there first.

That turned out to be a fucking bust. The receptionist drove to a house in White House, and her garage door was just starting to close when I drove past. It was a one car garage and her Toyota was the only car in it. That didn't mean she didn't have another vehicle someplace, but I might have to follow her for days before I found it.

I was pissed when I got back to my office. I'd spent three days and had only come up with dead ends. I wasn't quite as pissed off when I found the permission to visit Darlene in my mail. Maybe she could tell me something I didn't already know.

}{

My appointment to see Darlene was from nine until ten, so I got to the jail at eight thirty. Like the permission letter stated, I left everything in my pockets in my car except my car keys, a pad of paper, a pen, and my driver's license. After being searched by an officer, I sat down at the window he pointed to and waited for Darlene.

When Darlene walked into the room on the other side of the window, I found myself wondering if Theresa was really her sister. Like I said before, Theresa didn't do much to make herself look good. Even in her prison uniform, Darlene looked pretty hot. It was the way she had her shoulders back that made her big tits stick out instead of having her shoulders rolled forward like Theresa did. Darlene wasn't wearing any makeup, of course, but there was a sparkle in her eyes that Theresa didn't have, a sparkle that told me Darlene would probably be a lot of fun.

Darlene also convinced me she didn't kill Martin and she didn't have to say anything. Darlene wasn't very tall, maybe five-two, and she couldn't have weighed much more than one-ten. There was no way she could have picked up a man and stuffed him in the trunk of her car unless he was a midget and even if he was, she'd have had trouble.

She sat down and picked up the phone on the other side. I picked up mine. Darlene smiled and said, "You must be Harry. Hi Harry. You figure out how to get me out of here yet? Theresa said you could."

I couldn't smile back even though I felt like it.

"No, but I don't think your husband's dead. There are too many things that don't prove he is and make me think he isn't. That's what I'm working on -- that he's still alive somewhere - but I need any information you can give me. Can you think of any reasons he might have decided to disappear and leave you holding the bag?"

Darlene didn't hesitate even for a second.

"Sure. I was going to divorce him and he didn't want that. He didn't want to spend the money and he thought it would affect his appraisal business."

I hadn't thought of that angle because usually it's the other way around. It's the wife who leaves. Once she does, the husband gets a court notice in the mail telling him to appear or forfeit his rights. I know because I've served several.

"You were going to divorce him? Why?"

"I wanted a couple of kids and before we were married, he said he did too. I waited a year, like all the magazines say a woman should, and then asked if he was ready to be a dad. He said no and that he wouldn't ever be ready.

"I thought if I just kept asking he'd finally agree. That was until last week. I was taking out the trash and found a receipt Martin had thrown away from a doctor for a sperm count he had done three years before we met. Martin was sterile."

"So, that's what the fight was about?"

Darlene nodded.

"I told him he'd lied to me and I wanted a divorce. He said he'd never agree to a divorce and he wouldn't give me any money for a lawyer so I could never divorce him. I got so mad I threw some plates at him and missed. That made me madder. When he laughed at me and said the only way I'd be rid of him was to just leave, I was so mad I couldn't talk. I went in the bedroom and threw some clothes and my makeup stuff in a bag. When I came back out, Martin had gone into his study, so I got in my car and went to a Red Roof. He was right about having money to divorce him, though. The only reason I had enough money to rent a motel room was he'd given me the shopping money but I hadn't been shopping yet."