Dead Velvet Cake

by James, Emily

  She’d been under his control up until she’d found out he died.

  “Do you believe me?” she asked, her voice still small.

  She was in so much trouble. Her meekness and kindness seemed to run so deep that there was no way the police would believe it was genuine.

  But I did. I nodded. “I think the police suspect me too. His body turned up on the beach, right in front of my truck, at the start of the sandcastle competition.”

  Eve flinched like she’d been stung by a hornet. “I was there. The insurance firm where I work had a booth.”

  I’d been right that I spotted her that day.

  “I didn’t find out that the body those competitors dug up was Anthony until my other boss called me.” Eve stuck the end of her sunglasses into her mouth, hesitated like she hadn’t realized what she was doing, and pulled them out again. “I don’t think the police are considering anyone else for the murder.”

  The police had two solid suspects between Eve and me. She was the verbally-abused girlfriend who had what would sound like a shaky reason for why she hadn’t worried when he didn’t call. I was the woman who confronted him publicly and was threatened by him, then conveniently was at the scene of his murder without hearing or seeing anything.

  Given my rescue of Eve, the police probably did think we were in on the murder together. I didn’t know how the legal system worked when the police suspected a conspiracy.

  It seemed like finding evidence to prove one of us guilty would help prove the other one guilty. If we were both arrested and neither of us confessed, we’d also be tried together.

  In other words, Eve and I were suddenly linked in a way that we couldn’t extricate ourselves from.

  We turned around and walked back toward my truck in silence.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Eve finally said. “I didn’t kill him, and I don’t believe you killed him. You didn’t have any reason to. But if we’re the only two they’re investigating…”

  If we were the only two the police were investigating, then our odds weren’t good. One or both of us could be charged with a crime we didn’t commit.

  I’d been here before, accused of something I hadn’t done and feeling like I had to stick up for myself because no one else would.

  Despite my relationships with Dan and Claire, this wasn’t their fight. They might support me morally, but they didn’t have the ability to protect me from suspicion. Not even Dan, who likely worked with or knew of the detective in charge of the investigation. I couldn’t expect him to risk his professional situation for my sake. I was basically a stray he’d taken in out of pity.

  I’d discovered in the past, though, that I could sometimes have more success figuring out who’d committed a crime than the police could. People suspected me less because I wasn’t wearing a badge. I could investigate more deeply because I didn’t have multiple crimes to look into. And I wasn’t held back by protocol and traditional investigative techniques. I could act as a maverick.

  If Eve and I could find some reasonable alternative suspects, I was sure Dan would at least be willing to present those as options to the police.

  I stopped, and Eve copied me, turning back around to face me. Hopefully her adventurousness extended further than trying new cupcake flavors.

  “I have an idea, but it’s unconventional.”

  6

  “I don’t have a key to Anthony’s house,” Eve said after I’d explained my idea that we should come up with a list of viable alternative suspects for the police. “He didn’t want me being able to go in on my own even though I stayed over a few times a week. It always made me suspicious. Maybe we should start there and see if he was hiding anything at the house.”

  If he had been, the police had likely found it and logged it into evidence by now. That said, they could have overlooked something important because it didn’t look relevant. Eve might notice something they hadn’t.

  Besides, I didn’t have a better idea for where to start.

  Anthony wanting Eve at his place when he chose and not any other time smacked of control again if nothing else.

  I hadn’t studied psychology or counseling. I didn’t know about abuse in general or whether all abused partners stayed for the same reasons. This was the first time I’d spoken to someone who’d been in even a remotely similar situation.

  But Eve seemed so different from me. She had a good job. She appeared confident and fashionable. She wasn’t the kind of woman you’d guess would end up in an abusive relationship.

  I’d always thought that there was something wrong with me that I’d ended up trapped the way I did. If it could happen to someone like Eve, maybe what I’d experienced with Jarrod hadn’t been because I’d been too weak or too stupid or too incompetent.

  Maybe what happened was something that could happen to anyone given the right set of circumstances.

  “My husband wasn’t a good man, and it took me a long time to get up the courage to leave,” I said so she’d know that my question wasn’t an accusation. “Why did you stay?”

  “I didn’t feel like I had any other option.” Eve shrugged and pressed the clicker to unlock her car. “He was my boss. He’d fired people for a lot less than breaking up with him, and I didn’t want to lose my job. At Rigman & Associates I’m the head of the marketing department. It’s incredible creative freedom.” She laughed in a way that sounded self-conscious. “That makes me sound like I’m sleeping my way up the ladder, but it wasn’t like that. It was after I was hired. And he was kind at first. Sometimes he was still kind.”

  Her last words were soft and sad. It was the first hint of sadness at Anthony’s death that I’d seen from her. I understood that too. Even when she hated him for how he treated her, she still also loved him on some level—a level that would never make sense to anyone who hadn’t lived it.

  The echoes between her story and mine made me feel like someone had pinched my heart. “I think that’s part of how they get you to stay. You convince yourself that those glimpses of kindness are who he really is.”

  Eve blinked rapidly and nodded her head.

  The longer I talked to her, the more I wanted to make sure neither of us were blamed for something we didn’t do. Anthony had likely been killed for something he’d done. Eve shouldn’t have her freedom taken away from her due to his choices.

  We needed a way into Anthony’s house to look around that didn’t involve breaking-and-entering. “Do you know any of his family members who might have had a key to his house? We could tell them you left some of your stuff there and need to pick it up.”

  Eve straightened, reminding me of a wilted flower that’d been given a drink of water. “I know the name of the woman who cleans his house. She has a key.”

  * * *

  Anthony’s cleaning lady turned out to be a pale woman in her fifties who was so skinny and pointy that I wasn’t sure how she’d manage to carry a vacuum from one floor to the next. She had a handkerchief tied around her head, a few wisps of blonde hair sticking out the front.

  Eve had barely closed the door to her car when the woman threw her arms around her. She pinned Eve’s arms to her sides.

  “Oh, Evie, I’m so sorry. He was such a good man. I don’t know who would do something like this.”

  Eve micro-flinched, the way I used to when someone would tell me what a good man Jarrod was and how lucky I was to be married to him. The movement was small enough to go unnoticed by most people, almost like a muscle twitch.

  The woman let Eve go and looked over at where I stood near the hood of the car. I took a step back. No offense to a woman who seemed nice enough, but I didn’t let strangers hug me.

  She linked her arm with Eve’s. “I’m glad you brought a friend for moral support. That’ll make it go quicker. I still have another house to get to tonight, so I don’t have long.”

  Her final house must be one she cleaned while a family was out of the way for a regular weeknight activity. We’d scheduled our
chance to get into Anthony’s house late in the day when Eve would be done work and I wouldn’t miss out on much for customers.

  Our plan was for Eve to distract Anthony’s cleaning woman in one part of the house while I snooped in another under the guise of checking for anything Eve might have left lying around in a random room. Ideally we’d have been able to get into the house and look around without anyone watching us. According to what Eve told me after she called the cleaning woman, that was off the table. The woman seemed to think she was doing Eve a favor by staying the whole time, and Eve wasn’t able to convince her she didn’t need to.

  The woman’s insistence actually made sense. Eve shouldn’t need a lot of time to gather her belongings from a home she only visited and didn’t live in. I wasn’t sure how these situations normally went, but she couldn’t have more than a dresser drawer of clothes and a few items in the bathroom.

  I’d have ten or fifteen minutes at best.

  “Most of my things should be upstairs,” Eve said once we were inside. She glanced back at me. “Could you look down here for anything that looks like mine just in case?”

  “Of course.” I tried to make myself sound like the obliging friend whose sole purpose was to help Eve through this.

  I turned left and went through the living room. Eve had given me an idea of the layout of the house to save me time I’d otherwise have wasted on opening bathroom doors.

  The living room looked like it’d been decorated to make a statement. The flat screen TV mounted on the wall took up so much space that it wouldn’t have even been comfortable to watch, like having to sit too close to the screen in a movie theater. The sofa and chairs were the kind that looked nice, but felt like you were trying to sit on a rock.

  At the edge of the living room, I found the door that should lead to the basement. I opened the door and flicked on the bare-switch light. Eve had never been down into the basement. Her first night there, she’d opened the door thinking it led to a powder room, and Anthony told her she was an idiot. She remembered thinking he’d over-reacted. At the time, she’d chocked it up to a bad day.

  Basements could hold a lot of things people didn’t want found—a secret marijuana-growing operation, stolen goods, weapons, or kidnap victims. Any of which could have gotten him killed.

  While it didn’t seem likely that an insurance salesman would be involved in anything like that, some of the best criminals hid in plain sight.

  The light that came on when I flicked the switch was dim and yellow. The stairs were bare wood, and the walls were cement.

  I stepped onto the staircase, and it shifted underneath me. The wood groaned.

  A pulse of blood ripped through me, and I leaped backward. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and directed the light at the stairs. Most of the steps were cracked and rotting. A couple were even missing.

  Unless there was another way in, it didn’t look like the basement was used at all. I shone my flashlight into the parts I could see from my spot in the doorway. The windows were high up in the walls, indicating that the basement was mostly underground. Any other entrance would be obvious from the yard, and Eve had said there were only two doors into the house—the front door we’d entered through and the back door that led from the kitchen into the backyard.

  I’d wasted five of my minutes on a dead end. He’d likely yelled at Eve because the basement was dangerous and ugly rather than that he was hiding anything there. He seemed like a man who valued appearances.

  Where was my next best option? Eve said he often threw parties. He wouldn’t likely leave anything incriminating in the main portion of the house.

  Since Eve stayed over, that crossed off the bedroom. He wouldn’t risk her stumbling onto something since he’d put effort into keeping her out of the house when he wasn’t around.

  That left the office.

  I passed by the stairs leading up to the second level.

  “It should have been right here.” Eve’s voice floated down the stairs, high-pitched and too rapid-fire. She’d have never survived as a spy. “Did you move anything last time you were here to clean?”

  That sounded like Eve was already having to stall for time.

  I picked up my pace and found the office at the end of the hall, right where Eve said it would be.

  His desk sat empty, a bare space in the middle showing where his computer must have sat. The police had taken it. The drawers for his file cabinet hung open as well, the files gone.

  We might have been naïve to think the police would have overlooked something.

  I’d use what time I had left searching anyway.

  I pulled open his desk drawers. Only office supplies. Just to be sure, I felt the dimensions. Then I felt silly. False bottom drawers were something that really only existed on TV and in movies. You couldn’t go to an office supply store or a furniture store and request a desk with secret drawers, and this desk definitely looked like it came from a box store.

  Think. I had to think. And pay attention.

  There weren’t any pictures on the wall, so that meant no hidden safe. Even if there had been, Eve wouldn’t have had the code.

  A wireless phone handset rested on the desk, but I hadn’t seen the base anywhere in the rooms I’d passed through. Maybe he was vain enough that he didn’t want anyone seeing a slightly unsightly phone base?

  If that were the case, the police could have overlooked it, thinking he only used a cell phone the way so many people did anymore.

  Anthony would have still needed to be able to access the phone base to charge the handset and check for messages.

  I opened the office closet. The shelves inside held a printer, stacks of paper, and backup boxes of ink.

  A small black antenna peeked just over the top of the ink boxes.

  I shoved them aside. The phone base stared back at me, the answering machine light blinking.

  Footsteps came down the stairs.

  “I just need to check the kitchen,” Eve said, much too loudly for an inside voice. “I know it sounds silly, but I left my favorite cheese grater here.”

  I cringed. That didn’t sound suspicious at all.

  I pressed the button on the answering machine.

  “You have four new messages,” an automated voice said. “First new message.”

  The first two calls were hang-ups. The third was from his doctor’s office, reminding him that he was due for his physical. He wouldn’t need that anymore.

  This had been a pipe dream. What did I think I was actually going to find on his answering machine, a sobbing confession and apology from his murderer?

  “Final message,” the automated voice said, and gave the date as the Thursday before the sandcastle competition.

  According to Detective Strobel, Anthony died sometime in the night between Friday and Saturday, when I’d been parked next to the beach. The fact that he hadn’t checked his message between Thursday and then meant that he must have been either involved in something that distracted him so much that he forgot or the people who killed him had already kidnapped him at that point.

  A woman’s voice came through the machine. The reception was bad, cutting out every few words, but her tone was sharp and angry.

  “…can’t do this to people…you’d better…”

  That sounded like a threat. I yanked my phone out of my pocket, flipped to the video feature, and hit record. It was quicker than going to the feature where I could record dictated notes.

  The message was almost over. I only caught the last few words. “You’ll regret it.”

  7

  Eve waved to the cleaning woman as she drove away and then slumped against the side of her car like all her bones suddenly melted. “Please tell me you found something. That was worse than public speaking back in grade school. I can’t do that again.”

  I motioned that we should climb into her car. Anthony’s street was empty for now, but I didn’t think I should play the snippet of message if there was a chance
of someone overhearing.

  We both slid inside.

  I pulled out my phone. “I found an angry message on his machine. I think it could be someone he fired.”

  I pressed play and the three words came out loud in the confines of the car.

  Eve frowned. “That’s it?”

  “There was more, but this was all I had time to record.” Eve and the cleaning woman had showed up at the office door before I could play it again. I’d had to make up something about finding Eve’s favorite stapler just to keep the cleaning woman from becoming suspicious.

  Though, in hindsight, that might have sounded more fishy than if I’d simply said I hadn’t found anything of Eve’s in the office. Eve already had the “favorite cheese grater” in her arms, and a missing favorite stapler might have been going a touch far,

  I told Eve the rest of what the message said.

  “Play it again,” Eve said.

  I played it again. Then another time.

  Her bottom lip sucked in between her teeth so deeply that it looked like she didn’t have one. “I think I recognize the voice. One more time just to be sure.”

  I did.

  Eve stopped chewing her lip. “It sounds like Harper. She used to work at Rigman and Associates, but she quit a month ago.”

  When Eve thought she recognized the voice, I’d expected it to be someone Anthony fired. The message was angry, and the bits I’d been able to catch sounded like something a person wrongfully let go might say.

  What reason would a woman who quit have to be that angry with Anthony?

  “Do you know why she quit?”

  Eve shook her head. “She was there one day and gone the next. I only know she quit rather than being fired because Mr. Green, my other boss, told me.”

  Most jobs asked employees to give at least two weeks’ notice if they wanted to quit. That she’d left so quickly could point to a bigger issue behind why she’d left. Maybe Anthony asked her to do something unethical, or he tried to pressure her into sleeping with him. Either of those could be a motive for her to quit, though they wouldn’t explain the angry message.