The Same Mistake Twice Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Same Mistake Twice

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Same Mistake Twice: A Diana Andrews Mystery

  By Albert Tucher

  Copyright 2013 by Albert Tucher

  Cover Copyright 2013 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Albert Tucher and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Calories

  The Retro Look

  Value for the Money

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  To the crew at Untreed Reads: Jay Hartman, K.D. Sullivan, Claire Huysentruyt, Christine LePorte, Brendan Seibel, and Ginny Glass, for all their help and support.

  To Elaine Ash and Andie Tucher for countless insightful comments.

  And to H. for sharing so much about her life with me.

  My most heartfelt thanks. I have come this far because of you all.

  The Same Mistake Twice

  Albert Tucher

  Chapter One

  “We go back a long way, you and me.”

  Detective Tillotson drank the last of his coffee. He kept his eyes on Diana over the rim of his cup.

  “Ten years,” she said. “Since I’ve been in business.”

  “Which leads me to what I came about.”

  He nodded toward a sheet of paper, folded in quarters, that sat in front of him on the table. Diana had been wondering when he would get to it.

  Tillotson slid his chair back and got up. He took his cup and hers to the kitchen counter, where he set them down next to the gas range. He tested the temperature of the kettle with a quick pat of his hand and seemed satisfied. She watched him reach for the correct canister, open it, and start spooning coffee into a new filter in the drip pot.

  Making himself at home in her kitchen looked like a habit, mostly because it was. She didn’t mind, but sometimes he made her think of the H word.

  Husband. It was a little weird, because he was one of the few men in her life these days who had never seen her naked. But there was no denying how well she knew him. She knew that his long experience as a cop had taught him how to function through his exhaustion. The signs were subtle, and few people besides Diana would have seen them. It was obvious to her that he had been working all night and come straight to her instead of going home to his own bed.

  And she realized once again that she didn’t know where that bed was, or who shared it with him. Hookers didn’t ask about things like that, and he had never said.

  “I guess I should look at that,” she said.

  He said nothing, which was as good as an answer. She unfolded the sheet of paper and smoothed it onto the tabletop in front of her. The first thing she noticed was the faint outline of a smaller rectangle in the center of the page, which told her that she was looking at a photocopy of something smaller. Inside the rectangle was a handwritten seven-digit number.

  “Recognize it?” he said. “I did. I’m sentimental that way.”

  “A phone number. On what, an index card?”

  He nodded.

  The ink of the original note had smeared a little and faded a lot, but she had no problem making the numerals out. They did look familiar.

  Tillotson carried two cups of coffee to the table and set them down. He resumed his seat.

  “Try saying it out loud,” he said.

  Diana did, and ten years fell away. She was sitting in the same wooden chair at the same table, but the kitchen was different. It belonged to her grandmother’s old house, just blocks away from the Cape Cod that Diana now rented by herself. She almost expected to hear Grandmom’s voice, querulous in the early stages of dementia, drifting down from the upstairs bedroom.

  “It’s my first pager.”

  She could still remember hefting the device in her hand and then puzzling over the instructions, which seemed to have been translated from Korean by way of Romanian.

  “Tell me about it,” said Tillotson.

  “I only kept it for a few weeks. I gave the number to a new client, and he turned out to be a stalker weirdo. So I had to get a new one.”

  “Did you write it down for him?”

  “No, I must have called him and told him. I never write down anything about business.”

  “How about the handwriting?”

  “All I know is, it’s not mine.”

  “You started hooking a few months out of high school, right?”

  “It was the best money I could make. Still is.”

  “Ancient history. I’m not criticizing. So, make it June of ’eighty-seven that you got the pager?”

  “A little later. I didn’t know much in the beginning. I spent a lot of time hanging around pay phones in the Laundromat or wherever, waiting for a guy to call. Then one of my clients told me a lot of girls used pagers, so I went with that. These days it’s mostly cell phones and email. Anyway, it was more like July or even August.”

  “Who was the client? The stalker, I mean.”

  She said nothing. Detective Tillotson had always looked the other way when it came to her business. He had earned some trust, but asking for names went too far.

  “I can’t let it slide this time,” he said.

  “Why not? Where did this note come from, anyway? I guess that should have been my first question.”

  “We dug up a John Doe last night. Just bones and half-rotted fabric now, plus a hole in his skull that nature didn’t put there. He had your number deep in a pocket, where somebody could have missed it.”

  “No wallet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’d think the note would have disintegrated.”

  “We caught a break there. He was wearing a vest, like you get from L.L. Bean. You’ve seen them—lots of pockets, some of them waterproof. Whoever took his wallet quit searching him too soon.”

  “Or got interrupted.”

  “You know any fishermen?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be an outdoorsman. I know guys who wear stuff like that and never step off the pavement.”

  “Which brings me back to my question. I need names of men it could be.”

  “And right
away you mess in my business.”

  “Give me a break. We’re trying everything we can think of. Which includes you.”

  “Can’t you do dental records or stuff like that?”

  “Not until we have something to match them to. We need a name, or a manageable list of names.”

  It came close to a worst-case scenario. She might have to furnish a complete roster of clients from early in her career. She still saw some of them, while others had probably done their best to forget needing her services. Either way, a reputation for sharing with the cops could kill her business.

  “You know,” she said, “it could be somebody I never met. Guys sometimes recommend me to a friend. Maybe the friend chickened out, and I never heard of him. Or he threw the note out the window, and somebody else picked it up.”

  “Would you have returned a call from just anybody?”

  “Back then I would have.”

  “Doesn’t strike me as the smartest thing to do.”

  “It’s not. Partly I was young and stupid, and partly I was young and desperate for business.”

  “Point taken. But I’m still going to need a list of clients from your first three years, to start with. If we can find one of them who went missing, fine. If not, we’ll have to expand the search.”

  “You know how I work. I remember a guy’s info until I don’t need it anymore. Then I make room in my brain for the next guy.”

  “Try to remember.”

  In other words, she wasn’t fooling him.

  “Where did you find this body?”

  “On the grounds of the Salmon house in Lakeview. Know it?”

  “Did I really grow up around here? Of course I know it.”

  “I wish it was just kids getting drunk and laid in the woods. We also get squatters, drug deals, illegal dumping.”

  “Do the newspapers know what you found?”

  “They were there fifteen minutes after we were. But we’re holding that pager back.”

  “Nobody will hear about it from me.”

  “Good.” He gave her the most serious cop look he had ever aimed at her. “Don’t screw around with this. If you remember something, I want it. No editing.”

  His expression softened.

  “I’m not interested in your business. You ought to know that by now. I’ll do my best to keep you out of it, but this is a murder case.”

  “I guess I’ll have to put my thinking cap on.”

  Tillotson got up from the table, pocketed his photocopy, and left without drinking the coffee he had just made.

  Chapter Two

  Tillotson had a call to make.

  He drove away from Diana’s house, but as soon as he rounded the first corner, he pulled over to the curb and stopped his Lumina. He took out his cell phone and punched in numbers. He realized that he should have done this first, before knocking on Diana’s door. He had let himself get too comfortable with her over the years, even as he warned himself against it at regular intervals. She was too easy to spend hours with. It only stood to reason, because that was ninety percent of how she made her living. Spreading her legs accounted for the other ten, and he suspected that a lot of men would keep coming to her even if she cut that part out.

  He was lucky that Chief Bert Jadlowsky of the Driscoll police was the kind of man to understand the human side of every cop. Unlike some chiefs Tillotson could name.

  “Chief? Dale Tillotson.”

  “Detective. What can I do for you?”

  “Just a heads-up. I’m on your patch.”

  “Something to do with the Salmon house deal?”

  Of course Jadlowsky would know.

  “I just talked with Diana Andrews.”

  “Is she involved? That would be bad news.”

  Tillotson knew what Jadlowsky meant. Any small-town cop would. Someone was going to do the work that Diana did, and not every woman would be as low-maintenance as she had been up to now.

  “Could be.”

  Tillotson explained. As he talked, the scene came back to him with an immediacy that punched him in the gut. That alone would have told him how exhausted he was.

  He saw the near-wilderness that the grounds of the Salmon house had become, the middle-aged dog walker, more bemused than horrified over what his Boston terrier had brought him, the stark blacks and whites of the gravesite under battery-powered crime scene lights, and the crime scene techs looking like aliens in their Tyvek suits.

  And he remembered the layers of grimness as each of the usual clues to a John Doe’s identity turned up missing. Finally a tech’s gloved hand pulled that index card from the waterproof vest pocket.

  “Shit.”

  The word had escaped Tillotson before he could stop it, and it came at the worst moment.

  “Something wrong, Detective?”

  Chief Haldorsen had a talent for approaching unnoticed that made his officers feel like high school kids.

  Tillotson should have expected his boss. One of the good things about small-town policing was the involvement of the top brass in major investigations. It was also one of the disadvantages.

  “Not much to go on, Chief. We always say we’d rather be lucky than good.”

  “Then we’ll have to be good, won’t we.” A knack for annoying rhetorical flourishes was his other talent, but it did a cop no good until he reached a rank that nobody could challenge. “That number mean something to you?”

  “Yeah. It belongs to Diana Andrews. Used to, anyway.”

  “The prostitute,” said Haldorsen. “The one that our esteemed colleague in Driscoll won’t tangle with.”

  “She’s a good source,” said Tillotson.

  “We need to bring her in,” Haldorsen said.

  “I’ll talk to her,” said Tillotson. “If that’s okay, Chief.”

  The Chief gave him a long look.

  “You know where she lives.”

  A little too well, his tone had implied.

  “What does she say?” Jadlowsky asked now.

  “She says she doesn’t remember everybody from ten years ago.”

  “I have my doubts about that,” said Jadlowsky. “I hope this isn’t going to show a side of her that we haven’t seen before.”

  “You want to talk to her, Chief? You know, emphasize our point?”

  “No, I keep my distance from her. Never even met her.”

  Again Tillotson understood. Someday Jadlowsky might have to explain why he let her live in his town and conduct her business under his apparent protection. That would get more difficult if he knew her personally.

  “You take it,” said Jadlowsky. “Anything you need, let me know. Including a call to Chief Haldorsen.”

  “Let’s hold that back,” said Tillotson. “We might really need it later.”

  Chapter Three

  Diana waited for the sound of the front door closing and then picked the coffee cups up. For a moment she stood at the sink and looked through the window at her backyard and the rear of the Gustavson house in the next street. It was time for most people to get out to work or school, but as usual the Gustavsons were getting a late start.

  After a while Diana’s hands started moving automatically. Washing up gave her something to do while she thought.

  She wasn’t proud of herself. She had let Tillotson believe that she didn’t remember the name of the client who had turned into a stalker. It was John Grogan, and he had seen her ad in the classifieds of a skin magazine. He sent a letter to her rented mailbox and included his phone number, with a request to call only between eight and nine in the morning. It usually reassured her when a man was so obviously married, because he would want what she wanted—a simple business transaction.

  Their single phone conversation had supported her theory, but things hadn’t gone well after that. She remembered standing under a blistering summer sun and knocking on a motel room door that never opened. It struck her that Grogan had been her first no-show. There had been many since, but at the time she hadn’
t known how many men chickened out, or got what they needed from talking to her on the phone and then making an appointment that they didn’t intend to keep.

  Then the pages started. Each time, she read Grogan’s number. The first two times she called back, but someone lifted the receiver and said nothing. Diana matched the caller’s silence. Even then she had known to avoid anger or panic. That would only feed the stalker’s tenacity.

  Without a representative of the law sitting across from her, she found it easier to think. Other than her basic reluctance to talk about clients, she couldn’t think of a reason to protect John Grogan. Giving him up now might limit the damage to her business.

  Tillotson should be back in his office. She dialed his direct number, which he had given her years earlier.

  “I’ve been doing some remembering.”

  She told him about Grogan and the calls.

  “Here’s the thing. He told me to call only between eight and nine. But those pages came from his number at all hours. What does that say to you?”

  “He stopped caring if his wife found out.”

  “Or it was somebody else making the calls. Like maybe his wife.”

  “I guess.”

  “At least find out if he’s still breathing.”

  “Okay. It’s something to check out.”

  He sounded less than enthusiastic, but she might have bought more time.

  How should she use it? The one thing she did not want to do was compile Tillotson’s list. Instead, she took the phone book from its place in a kitchen drawer and flipped pages to the G’s. One Grogan, J., was listed at a Driscoll address. Among other things, he had taught her to pass up clients who lived too close to her. She could already see that she wasn’t going to enjoy revisiting her early mistakes.

  The next morning Diana dressed in a gray T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers and tied her dark blond hair in a ponytail. For her an outfit like that counted as a disguise. If she encountered a client, he would need a few moments to connect her with the woman he always saw in heels and full makeup. By then she would have made her escape.

  She took her bag from the counter and walked to her car. Parking a few blocks from home was another security measure, in case a client recognized her Taurus. She drove to the north side of town, where large Victorian houses predominated. On the way she considered plan after plan, but nothing seemed promising. She almost gave up and went home.