“Of course…er, Miss,” the young man at the desk said, looking taken aback. He looked Lomas up on his computer and dialed a number on the phone. “I’m afraid there’s no answer.”
“Try again, please,” Nat said firmly.
“We have a policy—”
“Fine,” said Nat. “Can you go up and see if he’s there?” She paused, her eyebrows arched. “Please.”
The man clenched his jaw as he stood up. “Yes, Miss,” he said insincerely. “And who should I say wants to see him?” He looked her up and down. Nat’s tattoos stood out even more than normal in the staid, chrome and neutral-shaded lobby.
Nat straightened up and held her head high. “The management of Evangeline’s. He’ll know.”
“Please wait over there,” the man said. He gestured toward a couple of luxury couches in the seating area where suited businesspeople tapped away on laptops and swilled coffee.
“Thank you,” said Roxy. Nat was already walking away. When Roxy sat down, she found herself fidgeting. She drummed her fingers against the leather arms of her chair.
“I don’t know where I’m going to go either,” Roxy said quietly. “My boyfriend left me. I have no job to go back to.”
Nat looked out over the room to avoid making eye contact with her. “Hmph. You can go stay with your family.”
“I don’t have any family,” Roxy said. “I don’t know my dad. And…well, my mom and I don’t get on.”
Nat looked at her then, surprised, as if she were considering Roxy from a whole new perspective. “Oh…I thought…well, I don’t know. You just seem like the kind of person who’d have a wonderful family who loves you, who you could go home to on the holidays, eat massive amounts of food, and have a laugh with.”
Roxy chuckled. “I wish!”
Nat frowned and pursed her lips. “Are you sure? You look so…normal.”
“I do my best,” Roxy admitted. “Looks like I’m doing a better job than I thought.”
“My parents would love to have a daughter like you,” Nat said ruefully. “Unfortunately, they can’t stand the sight of me. I’d hate to go back to England with my tail between my legs, deported.”
“I know what you mean,” Roxy said, feeling a rush of recognition. “Every time something goes wrong, my mom loves to tell me how bad I am at being a grown-up. I haven’t told her anything about my job or my boyfriend—ex-boyfriend. It would give her too much ammunition. I find it better to say nothing.”
“Sounds just like my dad.” Nat sighed. “Perhaps we’re not quite as different as we look.”
“Maybe not,” Roxy said. Nat gave her a little smile and leaned over. She held out her fist. Roxy met it with her own—a fist bump! She didn’t think she’d ever done one before. It wasn’t conventional, but it worked. Their shared experience bonded them together.
Shortly afterward, the receptionist came out of the shining silver elevator in the hotel lobby. “There’s no answer from his room,” he told Nat. “I’m afraid you’ll have to try again later.”
At that moment, Nat’s phone rung. It was Elijah. Nat put the call on speakerphone. Roxy could hear a voice, it sounded like Louise’s, wailing and sobbing in the background.
“This was supposed to be…the beginning…of my new…life!” She sounded utterly hysterical.
And no wonder.
For it was Louise, it turned out, who had found the missing property developer. He was in the cemetery at the end of the alleyway, behind one of the graves. He was dead, a bullet through his chest.
Louise had come across Richard Lomas’ body on her morning jog. At first, she thought he was passed out drunk and shook him, but…“Deathly cold!” she’d reported through sobs. “Deathly cold! And with a gunshot wound!”
Now, Roxy sat in the corner of the dining room at Evangeline’s, feeling numb as the drama played out before her. They had raced back to the guesthouse from the hotel, and Nat had gone straight into panic mode. She couldn’t stop making tea and coffee and plying everyone with beignets. “A cup of tea will make everything better,” she kept saying over and over.
“It’s her crazy English way,” Evangeline explained. She sat slumped in a chair, periodically shaking her head, biting her lip, and wringing her hands. Elijah had rushed over when he heard Louise’s screams, and his complexion was now a shade of green that matched his shirt. He hovered in the doorway, looking unsure of himself. In the corner, Sage took Louise in her arms and rocked her gently, stroking her hair to calm her. Slowly, Louise’s wails subsided to sobs, then to a whimper as the shock of her discovery abated.
9-1-1 had been called, and as the small group waited for the police, the friends sat mostly in silence, all quietly contemplating Louise’s discovery, what it could mean, and wondering what on earth would happen next.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
DETECTIVE WILLIAM JOHNSON was a robust man in his early sixties with thick glasses and a bald head. He wasn’t particularly tall or large, but he was sturdy and sure on his feet. He somehow dwarfed the dining room. He wore a sharp black suit and had the look of a bull that was about to charge.
As soon as he stepped into the room, Sage shivered. “Bad vibes,” Roxy heard her whisper. “Very bad vibes.”
Roxy couldn’t have agreed more. Johnson seemed to make the very air turn cold and hostile. He was deeply unsettling, and the cruel glimmer in his eyes made Roxy feel like running upstairs and pulling the comforter over her head. As he looked over at Evangeline, Roxy could have sworn she heard him growl.
“Right, listen up! It seems that this was the last place the victim was seen alive.” His eyes swiveled to Evangeline. They were beady, threatening. “He was talking to you.” Johnson looked back at the others and said, “So you’ll all stay here until you’ve spoken with me one by one.”
Sam came running into the dining room, his eyes wild with anxiety. “Elijah called me. Is everyone okay?”
Detective Johnson sneered. “We’re all fine, thank you, Superman. But now that you’re here, you can sit yourself down, too.”
“Right,” Sam said, a little defensively. Roxy couldn’t help but notice he looked pretty nervous, just as Nat did. Did he have something to hide, too? He avoided Johnson’s eyes and rounded his broad shoulders like he was trying to make himself smaller, inconspicuous. “Well, I’m glad everything’s being taken care of.” Sam sat down on a chair by the door.
“Shall I fix everyone some coffee?” Nat said. When she got no response, “Maybe tea would be better?” She bit her lip and rushed into the kitchen.
“You first,” Johnson said, pointing at Roxy.
“M… me?” said Roxy.
The detective sneered again. “Yes. You.”
“Oh, but I wasn’t even here when the body was found. I just came back.”
Johnson stared at her. “Roxy Reinhardt, right? I’ve heard that you were at the victim’s hotel when the body was found! I want to know why.”
He took her to a side room off the lobby, which Evangeline and Nat used as a place to dump stuff in order to keep everywhere else clean. There was a mess of files, some with papers poking out as they tried to make their escape onto the floor. An old washing machine stood in the corner, and an assortment of random items, including napkins, plates, bed linen, and bizarrely, a bicycle wheel, were crammed into the rest of the space.
There was just about enough room for two chairs. Johnson set his recording device on top of a stack of files and sniffed. “Well, this will have to do.” He then stated the date and time for the benefit of the recording. “Now please give me your full name.”
“Roxanne Melissa Reinhardt,” Roxy said.
“Date of birth?”
“2, 27, 1995.”
“Address?”
“Well…I’m kind of between addresses,” she said. She really didn’t want to elaborate about her breakup to this stern-faced, hard-hearted detective, but he looked at her with one eyebrow cocked. It clearly meant, “Explain.” She tried to put
a positive spin on things. “I’m starting a new life,” she said, holding her head high. “I wanted a change of scenery.”
“Tell me about what you were doing before and where,” Johnson said flatly.
She had to go into detail, it seemed.
“And how did you end up in New Orleans?” he said when she had finished.
“By bus,” she said.
He sighed, exasperated. “No, why New Orleans in particular?”
Roxy gulped. What could she say? Because her cat had alerted her to a commercial, which had stirred a feeling deep inside her that she didn’t understand? And she’d simply abandoned her former life and left? How ridiculous did that sound? In fact, it was ridiculous. What on earth was she doing with her life?
“Ms. Reinhardt?” Johnson said. He was watching her suspiciously.
She realized she had better come up with an answer fast. “Well, what with my ex-boyfriend leaving and me having a stressful time at work, I was attracted here by the, um, cuisine. It intrigued me. I thought it would be good to go somewhere…interesting.” Roxy’s palms were sweating, but she didn’t want to wipe them against her jeans in case it made her look guilty.
“So, you left your job and your home town indefinitely because of…Creole and Cajun food?” Detective Johnson did not sound impressed. Roxy didn’t know if that was because he suspected her of lying, or that he considered her life choices to be ludicrous.
“Something like that, sir.”
“Ooookay, then,” Johnson said. He continued on. “Richard Lomas died from a gunshot wound in the early hours of this morning. Also this morning, you accompanied…someone…to the Fontainebleau Hotel where he was staying, in order to track him down. Why was that?”
Roxy could feel her hands trembling. Authority figures always made her feel afraid. “Well…” she began, and her voice wobbled. “Evangeline had decided she was going to sell the guesthouse to Mr. Lomas and had arranged for him to come over and sign the papers. He didn’t turn up. The atmosphere here was tense, and I decided a walk would do me good. So when Nat said she was going to find him, Mr. Lomas, that is, I decided on the spur of the moment to go with her. Evangeline was angry that he hadn’t shown up.”
“Right,” the detective said. “Evangeline is a well-known figure in these parts. She’s been part of the establishment for decades. What is not clear is why she would decide to sell to this developer. She’s well-known in town as a conservationist, wanting to keep old buildings alive. She’s also known as someone who never gives up, even in the face of a sensible, logical proposition.” The veins in Johnson’s temples stood out, and his jaw muscle twitched as a dark cloud of annoyance swept over his face as he spoke. Roxy got the feeling there was some history between the two that she didn’t know about. His animosity seemed extreme and out of place for so early in an investigation. “I find it hard to believe she would sell her property knowing that he would tear it down and develop the area beyond all recognition.”
“I think she’s at the end of her rope,” Roxy said. “Exhausted by the responsibility and drudgery of running such a place. I’m sure she didn’t do it if that’s what you mean. Kill Mr. Lomas,” Roxy blurted out. “I mean, why would she? She wanted to sell her property to him.”
Johnson smirked. “Is that so? Well, thank you for that important insight. Tell me again, which police department did you transfer from to come here?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I…UH….” ROXY stumbled.
“So who do you think did it?” Johnson said, leaning forward, his eyes bright, his voice full of fake enthusiasm. He was mocking her.
Roxy felt heat flush her cheeks. A sense of shame burned in her chest, but since she’d been asked the question, she decided to answer it. “Probably Mara Lomas. That’s his wife. She came over yesterday, telling us to inform her husband that she knew what he was doing. Something about an affair.”
“Right,” Johnson said, raising his eyebrows and looking a little more interested in what she had to say. “She came over here?”
“Yes, she was in the street outside.”
“That’s mighty convenient for Evangeline,” he muttered under his breath. He coughed and looked down at his notebook. When he looked back up at Roxy, his eyes were shining.
His expression sent a shiver through Roxy. What was his beef with Evangeline? Did he hold a grudge against her? He wasn’t being logical, that was for sure. Or without bias, it would seem.
“Not convenient at all,” Roxy said firmly. “How would killing Lomas help her? His wife has a far stronger motive.” Roxy wasn’t quite sure where she was finding the courage to speak out like this, but her sense of fair play was acute. And justice wasn’t being done here.
“I’m not interested in your speculation,” Johnson snapped, despite the fact he had been asking for just that a minute or so ago.
A silence stretched out between them. Roxy played with her fingers in her lap while Johnson sat back and let out a sigh. Roxy doubted he ever felt uncomfortable. He had far too much confidence and self-assurance. It was very off-putting.
“Is this place going to be shut down?” she asked.
“Not yet,” Johnson said with a snort. “There’s no reason for it. However, if a certain someone happens to be guilty and is carted off to jail, it won’t be able to continue. It will have to be sold, probably to another developer who will tear it down. No one will buy it and retain it in its current state.” He looked around with disgust as if he had found himself in a stinking pigpen.
“Actually, two people said they would buy it, aside from the developer.”
“And you tell me that now?” Detective Johnson said, leaning forward. “Who? We may have to protect them from…” Roxy knew he desperately wanted to say Evangeline, but he couldn’t, because the tape was running. “Harm,” he said eventually. “Give me their names.”
“Louise, the other guest,” Roxy said, “the one who found the body. She’s an interior designer. And Sam, the handyman and laundryman. He plays the saxophone,” she added and regretted it immediately. The instrument Sam played was completely irrelevant to the inquiry.
“Okay,” Johnson said. “We need to make sure they stay safe. They might be in danger. Are either of them putting pressure on Evangeline to sell?”
“I don’t think so,” Roxy said. “They seemed to be offering a way to preserve the building and for Evangeline to stay on in some capacity. They didn’t want to tear it down. They wanted to keep the guesthouse as is, improve it, update it. Their offers seemed to be acts of genuine kindness.”
Detective Johnson opened his eyes wide and shook his head slowly. Roxy stopped herself from speaking. He was still being illogical. There was no sane reason to suspect Evangeline. “Right,” he said. “So you would say they’re on Evangeline’s side?”
Roxy was getting a little sick of his line of questioning. He seemed so closed-minded, so dogged in his dislike of Evangeline. Every time he said her name his lip literally curled. “I don’t know,” she said, a little more sharply than she’d usually have managed toward an authority figure. “I’m new around here. I don’t know anything about sides.”
“Whatever,” he said. His voice thickened into a monotonous drawl and his eyes glazed over as he said, “Can you account for your whereabouts last night?”
Roxy explained about the parade, then the meal, and the boat ride. She told him of her near mugging, and how afraid she had been, and how Sam had come to her rescue.
“Why are you going red?” Detective Johnson said.
That only made her blush deeper, and stammer for the right words to say. “It’s… it’s hot in here.”
Johnson rolled his eyes. “Can you tell me what Evangeline was doing last night? Was she with you at the parade? At the meal? On the boat ride?”
“No,” Roxy said. “She stayed here. She said she’d been to enough carnival parades to last a lifetime, and she didn’t feel like it. I think she was very sad. She seemed to have
resigned herself to selling this guesthouse, but she doesn’t really want to.”
“Conjecture,” Detective Johnson snapped. “You have no idea what she was thinking. And she was here, alone, not far from where the victim was found. Very suspicious.”
“Well, I do know that she was holding Nefertiti when we left. Nefertiti’s a very good companion when you’re not feeling your best. And she’s a very good judge of character.”
“Who on earth is Nefertiti?” Johnson said irritably.
“My cat.”
Johnson smirked. “And we can trust your cat to be a reliable character witness, can we?” He rolled his eyes again. “Anything more to say?”
“I don’t think so,” Roxy said. She couldn’t stand being around this guy. She wanted to get away from him as quickly as possible. Roxy burned to say something to him about how he was assuming all kinds of bad things about Evangeline, but a shadowy fear swirled within her and sucked her voice down her throat. She lost her nerve. She wasn’t brave or bold enough.
“No,” Roxy said eventually, more firmly this time.
“Right. Interview over.” Johnson snapped off the machine. “Now, I want to see the girl you went to the hotel with, whatever her name is; the strange looking one who works here, the one with all the tattoos, wears only black.”
“That’s Nat.” Roxy felt for Nat. She was going to sweat. Roxy hoped Nat was a good actress because before she had even blinked, Johnson would have decided that her close relationship with Evangeline meant Nat was probably an accomplice to some crime that existed only in his mind. And that was before he knew of her illegal status.
“Nat,” Johnson said disapprovingly. “Go and get her. And tell her to bring me some coffee and beignets. And don’t scrimp on the beignets, you hear?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“THAT GUY,” NAT said furiously. “Who the heck does he think he is?”
“Right?” Roxy agreed.
Roxy Reinhardt Mysteries Box Set Page 7
