The Undertaker's Widow Read online

  "Let's get a D. A. to write up an application for a search warrant, then visit the little woman," Anthony said.

  Dennis grinned. "Where do you think I've been this last hour? I'm two steps ahead of you. Sondra Barrett is working on the affidavit as we speak. She'll have it ready to take to a judge after lunch. Now, where shall we go?"

  Anthony parked his car in front of an old brick apartment house a few blocks from the Burnside Bridge. The Jablonskis lived on the third floor. It was a walk-up. As they climbed the stairs, Dennis complained about the lack of an elevator and the god-awful smell in the stairwell.

  The third floor was poorly lit. The outside light had to fight its way through a grime-covered window on one end of the corridor and was so weak from the effort that it ended up dull yellow. The lightbulbs that hung from the ceiling were either broken or of such low wattage that Anthony wondered why the super bothered to turn them on.

  The Jablonskis' apartment did not have a bell, so Anthony bashed a meaty hand against the door and bellowed "Mrs. Jablonski" while he strained to hear if there was any movement inside. After his third try, Anthony heard a nervous "Who is it?" from the other side of the door.

  "I'm Detective Anthony with the Portland Police, Mrs. Jablonski."

  "I don't wanna talk with you," Conchita Jablonski answered. Her speech was thickened by a heavy Spanish accent. "Go away."

  "What?"

  "I said, I don't wanna talk to no cops. Leave me alone."

  "I'm sorry, Mrs. Jablonski, but you have no choice. I have a search warrant. If you don't open the door, I'll have the super bring the key. It's about your husband."

  There was no sound inside the apartment. When the silence stretched to thirty seconds, Anthony turned to Dennis.

  "Wait here while I round up the key."

  Dennis nodded. Anthony was about to walk to the stairs when he heard locks snap. The door opened a crack and Conchita Jablonski stared at Anthony through a gap in the door. The safety chain was still on. Anthony held up his badge so Mrs. Jablonski could see it through the narrow opening.

  "This is Detective Dennis," Anthony told her as he pointed over his shoulder. Dennis flashed her a friendly smile, but Mrs. Jablonski continued to regard the men with suspicion. "We need to talk to you about Martin."

  "For why?"

  "Can we come in, please? I really don't want to discuss your business out here in the hall where all of your neighbors can hear."

  Mrs. Jablonski hesitated. Then she closed the door for a moment and took off the safety chain. A second later, the door swung into the apartment and Dennis followed Anthony inside.

  The apartment was small, with two narrow bedrooms, a small living room and a tiny kitchen area that was separated from the living room by a low counter.

  Both detectives were impressed by how clean Conchita Jablonski kept the apartment. Her two children huddled in the doorway of one of the bedrooms watching the detectives. They looked well cared for. A boy and a girl, both about six or seven, big-eyed and brown-skinned with soft black hair.

  Conchita Jablonski was a heavyset, dark-complexioned woman with a pockmarked face. She led the detectives into the living room and seated herself in a frayed and shabby armchair. Dennis and Anthony sat across from her on a sagging couch.

  "I have some bad news for you," Anthony said. Conchita Jablonski's facial features stayed frozen, but her shoulders hunched as if she were preparing for a blow. She clasped her hands in her lap. "Martin broke into a home last night." Conchita's features wavered. Her hands tightened on each other. "While he was in the house, he shot and killed someone."

  Conchita began to shake. The children saw the change in their mother and they looked frightened.

  "Martin was also shot. He's dead."

  Conchita bent at the waist as if she had been punched in the stomach. She started to sob. Her shoulders shook. The children's eyes widened. They huddled together. Dennis stood up and walked over to the shaking woman. He knelt beside her chair.

  "Mrs. Jablonski," he began in a soft and sympathetic voice. Before he could say another word, Conchita Jablonski spun in her chair and slapped him across the face. Dennis was off balance. He fell onto the floor awkwardly, almost in slow motion, into a sitting position, more stunned than hurt.

  "You bastards!" Conchita shrieked. "You killed my Marty!"

  Anthony raced to her chair and restrained Mrs. Jablonski.

  "He was robbing a house, Mrs. Jablonski. He murdered a woman's husband. He would have killed her, too, if she hadn't shot him."

  Conchita heard only parts of what Anthony said as she strained against him. Dennis struggled to his feet and helped subdue the distraught woman. She collapsed, sobbing, her head in her hands.

  "Please, Mrs. Jablonski," Dennis implored. "Your kids are scared. They need you."

  She fought for control, gulping air. The two children raced over to her and buried themselves in her skirt. She talked quietly to them, submerging her own grief. The detectives waited while she calmed them. Dennis brought her a glass of water, but she would not take it.

  "Are you gonna be okay?" Dennis asked.

  "What do you care?" the woman shot back angrily. "You cops never cared about me or Marty before. All you wanna do is lock him up."

  Anthony saw no reason to argue with Mrs. Jablonski. He held out the search warrant. "This is a court order that gives us the right to search your apartment. Detective Dennis will sit with you while I conduct the search."

  Mrs. Jablonski suddenly looked frightened. Anthony wondered why, but he did not ask. If there was something hidden in the tiny apartment, it would be easy to find. He decided to start in the bedroom that the adults used. He could hear Detective Dennis talking soothingly to Mrs. Jablonski as he tossed the covers off the small bed where the Jablonskis slept. He knelt down and looked under it but saw nothing.

  There was men's and women's clothing in the cheap wooden chest of drawers but nothing else. When he was through with it, Anthony opened the door of the closet. Dirty men's clothes lay crumpled on the floor, but there was nothing under them. Anthony peered up at a shelf that was just above his head. He pulled over a wooden chair that swayed slightly when he climbed up on it. Toward the back of the shelf was a shoe box. Inside were stacks of currency bound by rubber bands. Many stacks. The top bills were hundreds, fifties and twenties. Anthony stepped down from the chair and carried the shoe box into the living room.

  "I've read Marty's file/' Anthony told her. "It says that you're on welfare and Marty was having trouble getting steady work. There's a lot of money in here. Where did it come from? Drugs? Was Marty selling drugs?"

  "I ain't saying anything to you. You cops are all the same. I knew I shouldina let you in my house."

  "Listen, Conchita, I'm not gonna mess around with you," Anthony said harshly. "Your husband killed a very important man. Now, all of a sudden, you're rolling in dough. You tell me where Marty got that money or I'll arrest you as an accessory to murder. What do you think happens to your kids if you're in jail?"

  Conchita Jablonski wrapped her arms around her children and looked at Anthony with a combination of fear and loathing. He felt like a first-class heel, but Anthony did not let her know it.

  "It's up to you, Conchita. You want your kids in foster care, keep playing games."

  The fight went out of Mrs. Jablonski. "I don't know where Marty got the money," she answered in a small voice. "He just got it."

  "He never said from who?"

  "Just that it was from some guy."

  "Did he tell you what this guy looked like?"

  "No."

  "Marty didn't say what this guy wanted him to do for this money?" Dennis asked.

  "When he was doin' something bad he wouldn't tell me what it was because he didn't want me or the kids involved, but I knew it was no good." She shook her head and started to cry. "I tol' him to give back the money, but he said it was for me and the kids. He felt real bad how we lived and how he couldn't get no job be
cause of his record. He wanted to do something for us. And now he's dead."

  "I'm going to have to take this with me," Anthony said. "I'll give you a receipt."

  "You can't take that money," she sobbed. "I got the kids. How I gonna feed them?"

  "That's blood money, Mrs. Jablonski," Dennis told her. "Your husband may have been paid to kill someone for that money. You seem like a good woman. You take real good care of your kids and your home. You don't want that money. You know that money will only bring you grief."

  Anthony and Dennis spent twenty more minutes with Conchita Jablonski, but it soon became clear that she did not know anything more about the money, the man who had given it to her dead husband or the reason he had been given it. While Dennis finished searching the apartment, Anthony counted the cash in the shoe box and gave Mrs. Jablonski a receipt for $9,800. The detective figured that the actual amount Jablonski had been given was $10,000. The bills were secured by rubber bands in five-hundred-dollar bundles. Anthony had discovered a solitary rubber band under three hundred dollars in loose bills.

  "I don't like this," Dennis said when they were driving back to the Justice Center.

  "I don't either. I didn't see anything in Jablonski's file about drugs. From what his wife says, he didn't score the money in a burglary. Some guy gave it to him because he wanted Jablonski to do something. Why would Jablonski run out in the middle of one of the worst storms in Oregon history to burglarize an estate with the security system Hoyt had if that wasn't the job he was paid to do?"

  "Yeah, Lou, that's what I was thinking. Only, robbery might not have been the motive. What if Jablonski was paid to hit Lamar Hoyt?"

  "That's one possibility, but there's another."

  Leroy Dennis carried the shoe box full of money to the evidence room while Anthony made the call. James Allen answered the phone and Anthony asked to speak to Senator Crease.

  "I'm afraid she's resting, Detective. She does not wish to be disturbed."

  "I can appreciate that, Mr. Allen, but this is an urgent police matter and I have to talk to her."

  Two minutes later, Ellen Crease picked up the phone.

  "I'm glad I got you," Anthony said. "I wasn't sure you'd be staying at your house."

  "I'm using the guest room tonight," Crease said. She sounded exhausted. "Tomorrow is the funeral. Then I'm going out to eastern Oregon to campaign."

  "Oh," Anthony said, surprised that she was going back on the campaign trail so soon after her husband's murder.

  Crease could hear the note of censure in Anthony's tone.

  "Look, Lou, everything I see in this house reminds me of Lamar. If I don't get out of here and keep busy, I'll go crazy."

  "I understand."

  "Did you call just to see how I'm doing?"

  "That and one other thing. A few hours ago, we identified Martin Jablonski as the man who broke into your house. Does that name mean anything to you?"

  "No. Should it?"

  "Probably not. He was a real bad guy. Multiple arrests and convictions. Home burglaries accompanied by assaults. We thought we had ourselves a simple solution to what happened at your house. Then we discovered almost ten thousand dollars in cash in a shoe box in Jablonski's closet. His wife says someone gave it to him, but he wouldn't tell her why. We think Jablonski may have been paid to break into your estate."

  "But why . . . ?" Crease started, stopping when the obvious answer occurred to her. "Lamar? You think this Jablonski was paid to kill Lamar?"

  "We have no concrete evidence that is what happened. I just found the money an hour ago. It could be completely unconnected to the break-in."

  "But you don't think so."

  "The timing bothers me. The fact that he broke in when the weather was so bad."

  "Thank you for letting me know about this, Lou. I appreciate it."

  "This wasn't just a courtesy call. If Jablonski was paid to make a hit, Lamar may not have been the intended victim."

  There was dead air for a moment. "You're suggesting that I might have . . . that Jablonski was sent to kill me?"

  "I don't know. But I'm not taking chances. There's going to be a patrol car parked outside the estate while you're in Portland. You're going to have an around-the-clock guard until we sort this out. I suggest that you arrange your own security when you're out of the city."

  "I don't believe this."

  "I could be wrong. I just don't want to take any chances."

  "Thanks, Lou. I'm not going to forget this."

  "Yeah, well, let's hope I'm way off base. In the meantime, I'd appreciate it if you could work up a list of people who might want you or Lamar out of the way bad enough to pay someone to kill you. It could be a business thing, something personal. If there's even a possibility, write it down and let me look into it. I'll be discreet."

  "I'll work on it right away." Crease sounded nervous, distant. "And thanks again."

  Anthony hung up the phone and leaned back in his chair. He hoped he was wrong about the money. He hoped it was for drugs or a payoff for something Jablonski had already done, but he didn't think so.

  Chapter 4.

  [1]

  It was still raining when Richard Quinn left for work on the morning after Lamar Hoyt's murder. Not the monster rain of the night before, but a steady, wearying drizzle that was profoundly depressing. The main roads had been opened during the night, but there were places where two lanes narrowed to one because of half-cleared mud slides or still active road crews. Quinn parked in the county garage shortly after seven-thirty and walked through the drizzle to the Multnomah County Courthouse, an eight-story, gray concrete building that takes up an entire block between Fourth and Fifth and Main and Salmon in the heart of downtown Portland. Quinn waved to the guard at the front desk and took the elevator to the fifth floor.

  The door to Quinn's chambers was halfway down the marble corridor on the south side of the courthouse. Copies of the Oregonian and the New York Times were lying in front of it. The judge usually started his day by doing the crossword puzzle in both papers while drinking a cup of coffee, but he was too distracted by the Gideon case to try them this morning.

  Quinn picked up the papers and opened the door to his chambers. After flipping on the lights in the reception area, Quinn started coffee in the pot that sat on the low, gray metal filing cabinet behind his secretary's desk. Then he switched on the lights in his chambers.

  A large rain-streaked window looked out at the ornamental ribbons decorating the north side of Michael Graves's postmodern Portland Building. Behind Quinn's massive oak desk was a bookshelf filled with a complete set of the Oregon Supreme Court and Court of Appeals case reporters and the Oregon Revised Statutes. In front of the desk were two high-backed armchairs. A couch stood against the wall behind the chairs. Above it hung a modern oil painting that made no sense whatsoever. Given the choice, Quinn would have set the oil on fire, but Laura had bought it for him as a swearing-in present. Quinn was not about to destroy the only indication of support for his decision to ascend the bench that his wife had made since the governor's call, three years ago.

  Quinn dropped the newspapers on the bookshelf and surveyed his desk. It was as he had left it the preceding evening. Every square inch was covered with paperwork pertaining to Gideon's sentencing. Quinn eyed the reports, letters and lawbooks as he hung up his jacket on the coatrack that held his judicial robes. He sat behind the desk and stared some more. He had read every piece of paper several times. He knew some of the documents by heart. What he did not know was the proper sentence to impose on Frederick Gideon.

  On Quinn's wall was a framed quotation from Abraham Lincoln, which read: "I'll do the very best I know how--the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference."

  The judge's father, Oregon Supreme Court Justice Patrick Quinn, had framed the
quotation and it had hung in the elder Quinn's chambers in the Supreme Court Building during his years on the bench. Justice Quinn had died when Richard was fifteen. If his father had faults, Richard never learned of them. His wife, who died in the same car accident that killed her husband, adored him. No one Richard had ever met had an unkind word for Patrick Quinn. Certainly not Frank Price, senior partner in Richard's old firm, former partner and best friend of Patrick, and the man who raised Quinn after his parents died. True or not, Patrick Quinn's perfection lived in his son's memory as a model and a challenge, and the framed quote that Quinn had inherited was the creed the judge tried to live by. But doing the right thing was not always easy.

  Quinn reread the quotation. He thought about Lincoln's words. At this level, all decisions were hard and the certainty of mathematics was usually unattainable. He could only do his very best, then hope that, in the end, he had chosen correctly. That knowledge did not make the knot in his gut less painful, only a bit easier to bear.

  "Your Honor," Stephen Browder said as he launched into the conclusion of his argument in favor of probation, "Frederick Gideon is a local boy who pulled himself out of poverty and worked his way through college and law school. Much of his early legal career was devoted to helping the poor. As his fortunes improved, he expanded his involvement in civic affairs. I am not going to repeat the testimony of the friends, business associates and community leaders who have testified in Judge Gideon's behalf at this sentencing hearing, but the gist of the testimony of these highly respected citizens is that Fred Gideon is a good man, a man worthy of your compassion. He is a man who made one tragic mistake in an otherwise blameless life."

  Browder paused and Quinn studied the defendant. He knew that everything Browder said was true. Gideon was basically a good person and he was repentant. Quinn's mental image, formed during his brief contacts with Gideon at judicial conferences, was of a rotund and jovial man who was always quick with a smile and a joke. The months following his arrest had taken the heart out of the jurist. His skin was pasty and there were circles under his eyes. He had lost a lot of weight. He had also lost his pride. The eyes that Quinn remembered for their twinkle were lifeless and had not raised high enough to meet the eyes of Quinn or any witness during the sessions in court.