Dark Tort gbcm-13

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “On the street,” I said, “because I knew I was going out later, and I didn’t want Tom to block me in when he got home.”

  “After this argument with your son, do you know whether he locked the van when he got out of it?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I don’t. Gee, do you think…maybe one of my neighbors saw someone messing around with my car.”

  Britt took a deep breath. “We’ll canvass your neighborhood. Now, Investigator Schulz gives you a jump, you take off for H&J, and you get there at what time?”

  “The exact time?” I sipped more coffee, which tasted as metallic as the building smelled. “I’m pretty sure it was right around ten-thirty. Yeah, pretty sure. I didn’t check my watch, though.” Britt gave me a narrow-eyed look, and my mind conjured up the image of him informing his pals that Tom Schulz’s wife…you know, the caterer?…was as flaky as one of her renowned piecrusts. “I came into the office, and tripped. I didn’t know what was going on. I certainly didn’t think I’d stumbled over a body.” I sighed. “At first I thought it was a joke. The lawyers in the firm like to pull pranks. But then I saw something wrong with one of the paintings in the lobby…”

  “Something wrong?”

  “You know, it’s one of Charlie Baker’s paintings of food. The firm has several.”

  “I’m familiar with his work. Like it, too. But it’s out of a detective salary’s reach. So what was wrong with it?”

  “The bread dough I was carrying slopped onto the painting when I fell, which is why I noticed anything. The frame on the painting looked broken and there was a darker stain. I think it may have been blood.” My weak voice indicated a brain thicker than cold oatmeal. “Then when I tried to get up, I saw Dusty lying there. I went to her and realized she wasn’t moving or breathing.”

  “So you thought…what?”

  I looked him square in his puzzled dark eyes. “I didn’t think. I used to be married to a doctor, and I learned a lot. Not anything good about him, mind you. But I do know about medical procedure, so I did CPR.” I shook my head. “But nothing happened. She had a gash on her forehead, so that might explain the blood on the painting.”

  “Was she warm when you started CPR?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did you try to revive her?”

  “I’m not sure. It seemed like a long time, maybe half an hour, but it might have been less. I couldn’t think about anything except trying to get a pulse…but the CPR wasn’t working. My cell phone was back in the van, and the office phone lines weren’t operating, so then I just left the lobby to try to find help.”

  “So you did CPR and then you left. Please, please tell me what time you think it was.”

  “I don’t know,” I said through clenched teeth. “I didn’t think to check my watch or a clock. I peeked both ways down the hall, then ran out back to my car, but—”

  “Wait. Think back to that parking lot in front of the H&J office building. Before you went around back. Did you see anything there? I need to know precisely, especially if it was something suspicious.”

  I frowned. “Well, no. That I can recall, anyway. You see, I went out the service entrance. It leads out back.”

  “Did you see Ms. Routt’s car?”

  “Not until I went around to the front. I saw her Honda Civic, parked alone in the lot.”

  “Did you see anything else around the building? Other cars, trucks, anybody coming in or going out?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “What about when you were on your way up the stairs to the law firm, when you were coming in, or in the office itself? Anything unusual?”

  “Not that I haven’t told you. Look, I’m really beginning to feel tired and stressed out. My husband said he’d be waiting for me—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know.” The dark eyebrows knit into a sympathetic expression. “Just a couple more things. Why did you agree to give Ms. Routt cooking lessons at the firm?”

  I explained to him about how Dusty and I were friends and neighbors. “We talked a lot. It was fun for both of us. And in the firm’s kitchen, we could cook and visit without the interruption of phones and whatnot.”

  “But you’re a thirtyish married woman and she was a twentyish single female. What was so much fun to talk about?”

  “Her studies, her work, my work, my clients, the law firm, the people there. Dusty wanted to…get ahead. She was ambitious, and I was flattered that she wanted my advice about this or that.”

  “This or that?”

  “What she should wear to a lunch meeting with big clients. Whether she should take golf lessons. That kind of thing.”

  “Did Ms. Routt have any problems with anyone in the law firm? Was she scared of someone on staff there?”

  Of course, this was what I’d been wondering ever since I’d raced across the street. Who, who, who? And yet I was still unprepared for this question.

  “Mrs. Schulz? I’m asking you again. You said Louise Upton was hard on her?”

  “No, no, not really. Louise Upton just enjoyed savoring her power, that’s all.” I thought for a minute. “Dusty did have to be careful about protocol at the firm. One time, at a staff meeting I was catering? Dusty’s uncle, Richard Chenault, asked a question about how a particular kind of will could avoid probate. Nobody seemed to know. Finally Richard said, ‘Come on, Claggs, for God’s sake! This is your area!’”

  “Claggs?”

  “Alonzo Claggett, one of the associates. He’s really a great guy, and he cared about Dusty. He came tonight, after I found her—”

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back to this meeting.”

  I blew out air. “Well, as all the lawyers were filing out, Dusty motioned her uncle aside. She whispered to him that you could avoid probate with the kind of estate they were discussing by setting up a particular kind of irrevocable trust. I didn’t really understand the details, but I gather she had them correct.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “What happened? Richard wouldn’t let Alonzo Claggett forget it. In other meetings, he’d joke that maybe instead of asking Alonzo a question, he’d just consult with Dusty. It was funny to everybody but Alonzo, and Dusty hated it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because she told me. At a lunch I catered for the lawyers and their wives, Nora Ellis, Donald Ellis’s wife, scolded Dusty. Nora said that Dusty shouldn’t give legal opinions, since she wasn’t a lawyer. In fact, she wasn’t even a paralegal yet. And Ookie Claggett, Alonzo’s wife? She went out of her way to ignore Dusty through that whole lunch. All over one intelligent remark from Dusty, who was just trying to please her uncle.”

  “You’re sure it was only one?”

  “Well, it was the only one I witnessed. Maybe there were others.”

  “Maybe Mr. Chenault began asking for help from Dusty when he should have been consulting his associates.”

  I shook my head. “I think Dusty would have told me, if that had been true.”

  “Who did Dusty hang out with at the law firm?”

  “Only one other person besides me. She was good buddies with Wink Calhoun, the firm’s receptionist.”

  “Wink? Ookie? Claggs? Where do these people get their names?”

  I was so tired, I laughed. “I don’t know.”

  “Spell Wink’s full name for me, would you?” This I did. Then Britt said, “Did they go for lunch together? Hang out on the weekends?”

  “Yes, Dusty and Wink were friends. I saw Wink over at the Routts’ house sometimes, and I know Dusty went to see her.”

  “And at the firm, were they friendly?”

  “Sure.”

  “With each other and the lawyers, or just with each other?”

  It was all I could do not to start laughing again. “When I serve breakfast, from Monday through Thursday? There’s a dining room, with two big dining tables. The staff—Wink, Dusty, and Georgina, their paralegal who’s now in Hawaii with the other attorneys—would always
sit at the second table. They didn’t really mix with the bigwigs.”

  “The bigwigs?”

  “You know. The lawyers. I mean, the lawyers were okay, but—”

  Britt poised his pen over his notebook. “Describe them to me. How’d you get hired by H&J in the first place?”

  “I was referred by Brewster Motley. He’s a friend of Richard Chenault, who’s the head honcho. Brewster is a criminal attorney who—”

  “Yeah, I know him,” Britt interrupted. “Looks like a beach bum, talks like Perry Mason. Did he get along with Ms. Routt?”

  I frowned. “I don’t even think they knew each other.”

  “Can you name the rest of the staff that’s in Hawaii?” Britt tilted his baby face as I recited the names. In the fluorescent light of the interrogation room, his skin looked pale and clammy. “Describe Richard Chenault to me.”

  “Late fifties, combs his silver hair straight back, so he always looks like he just got out of a swimming pool. A strong guy, and proud of it. Does a lot of bodybuilding, I think.”

  “And the kind of work he was doing with Dusty?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Wills, estates, that kind of thing. That’s what they do at H&J.”

  “Chenault easy to get along with?”

  I smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far. He is imperious. And he loves to play jokes on me.” I told him about the gin in the coffee, the moths in the tablecloth, the green food coloring in the eggs.

  “He just sounds like a ton of fun.”

  “He sort of is, really. He fell in love with a friend of mine, a doctor.” I told him about K.D. and the altitude sickness. “They moved to a big house in Aspen Meadow and Richard bought a partnership in Hanrahan & Jule. But he had a little something on the side, and it wasn’t asparagus. K.D. found out, and now they’re getting divorced.”

  “Did Richard Chenault get along with his niece?”

  “I’m telling you, everybody seemed to get along with Dusty. And really, because she was working so hard for Richard, it had gotten to be that I didn’t see her a whole lot outside of the firm, except for our cooking lessons together.”

  Britt asked, “You live across the street from her family, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “They get along? Any problems?”

  “They all get along. No problems. Really, they’re great. Sally, Dusty’s mother, adores her, as do both her grandfather, who lives with them, and Dusty’s little brother, Colin.”

  “Go on.” When I gave him a quizzical look, he said, “Tell me more about her family.”

  “Dusty’s father, Richard’s brother, took a hike while Sally Routt was pregnant with Colin, Dusty’s very little brother. He left her with nothing but debts, and hasn’t been heard from since. Sally was forced out on the street, literally. One of the first things she did was to take back her maiden name, Routt. Sally’s father, John, lives with them, because he was blinded in prison.”

  Britt’s forehead furrowed. “Blinded in prison?”

  “Back before rabbits were the guinea pigs for cosmetics companies, those companies tested their products on prisoners.” Britt closed his eyes and shook his head. “John Routt was a guinea pig for a cosmetics company testing mascara, and the stuff blinded him. Dusty loves…loved her grandfather. He’s one of the reasons she went to work for a cosmetics company after high school…she said she didn’t want that to happen to anybody else. Naive, but sweet, which is the way Dusty was.”

  “So she went from a cosmetics company to a law firm? Just like that? Seems like an odd leap, for a young woman, anyway.”

  “No, she went to community college in between. It was her uncle who hired her to work for H&J.”

  “But why would she want to work in a law firm?”

  I pressed my lips together and tried to remember exactly what Dusty had said about that particular leap. We’d been working on a breakfast pie at the time, a light-tasting but hearty concoction of blue cheese, eggs, and cream cheese, mellowed with sautéed shallot and chopped scallion. We’d just decided to call the dish Blue Cheesecake, when Dusty launched into a story about a family on our street suing a Colorado electric company. When a March blizzard dumped five feet of snow on our little burg, we’d lost power for a couple of days. But west of Aspen Meadow, the outage had lasted for five days, because some dummy at the power company had sent every one of their tractors over to the western slope. This family on our street had been particularly distraught, as their very independent eighty-year-old grandmother lived out in the area that didn’t have power. Cell-phone service in the mountains is iffy at best, and the family hadn’t been able to raise the grandmother or any of her neighbors. By the time the power company managed to bring a tractor over from Grand Junction and replace the fuse that had blown in the neighborhood, the grandmother had run out of firewood. She had frozen to death.

  The family on our street had been unable to get the county attorney to charge the power company with negligent homicide. But they’d been determined to sue the power company in civil court for wrongful death. This had gotten Dusty interested in torts, and the law. She hadn’t had the wherewithal to go to college, but she received a partial scholarship to a community college. After that, she was determined to become a paralegal, and maybe even eventually a lawyer. If the family whose grandmother had died was going to sue the power company, then maybe, Dusty reasoned, she could eventually help people like her grandfather, who had been treated so abominably by that cosmetics company, all those years ago. And then her uncle had shown up, and been willing to foot the bill and hire her, so Dusty had seen it as divine intervention.

  All this I explained to Britt. He whistled.

  “Sounds like a pretty extraordinary young woman.”

  “She was.”

  He asked, “What about Dusty’s love life?”

  I thought back, trying to remember what had been just out of reach when I’d first seen Vic a few hours ago. “A couple of months ago, Dusty told me about some problems she was having with her boyfriend. He’s Vic Zaruski, the fellow who helped me tonight. I just happened to run into him when I was looking for a phone.”

  “Stop and tell me about that.”

  This I did, as Britt wrote. “Vic was very nice and helpful, and he seemed extremely broken up when he heard something had happened to Dusty.” I went on to explain that I knew little of Vic, beyond a short but friendly chat I’d had with him one time when I’d brought a meal over to the Routts, and he’d been waiting for Dusty. He was going to a technical and vocational school somewhere outside of Denver, and he loved to play the piano. I did remember that he was particularly proud of his car, a vintage white Chrysler Sebring convertible that he kept in immaculate condition. This summer, I’d admired the way Vic glided that ultracool car into the Routts’ driveway, when he came to pick up Dusty. I didn’t know the details of the breakup, I only was aware that I hadn’t seen the Sebring for a while. Still, what twenty-year-old woman didn’t have romantic ups and downs?

  “So, did Dusty have a current boyfriend?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  “Dusty told you all this stuff while you cooked together, but you don’t know whether she had a boyfriend?”

  “Wait a minute.” She’d said she had something to tell me. And she’d promised to explain the new bracelet. My brain finally recalled what had been bothering me. “There might have been somebody, though she didn’t exactly tell me about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I bit my lip. I was so tired. And was it warm in this room, or was that my imagination? “I’m not sure,” I said finally.

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “When Dusty came last week for her cooking lesson, she was wearing a bracelet. It wasn’t the kind of jewelry she could possibly afford.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I shook my head. “It was a complex arrangement of opals and diamonds. I asked her about it, almost, you know, playfully. Anyway, she…glanced down at it
and kind of frowned. Then she said she’d go take it off, she really shouldn’t cook while she was wearing it. Then I said, ‘Aren’t you going to tell me about it?’ And she said, ‘How ’bout this? I’ll wear it next week and explain it to you.’”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I don’t know. Did you find a bracelet on her?”

  “Did you, Mrs. Schulz?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Was she wearing it when you discovered her?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Detective Britt closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he opened his eyes and half grinned. “What do you think was going on with this bracelet?”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to speculate.”

  “Exactly. So, in all your cooking lessons, Dusty Routt never mentioned a boyfriend. But once, you caught sight of a bracelet? And she said she had something important to tell you? Something important to tell you last night, to be exact, when she was going to explain the bracelet.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Since I wasn’t supposed to speculate, what I didn’t tell Britt was that I had thought Dusty was kidding around one time when she had told me that her real motivation in learning to sauté vegetables, steam fish, bake bread, and roast lamb was to attract a wealthy husband. This dream fellow would fall in love with her cooking, she reasoned, with a laugh and a shake of her newly highlighted hair. But it had felt so much like a joke that I’d never taken it seriously. And in all our time together, she’d never talked again about this inspiration for learning to cook. Maybe I’d inform Britt of this particular conversation at some point.

  “Look,” I said, “I have a ton of kitchen work to do for a big party tomorrow, if the party actually takes place. And I mean what I keep telling you, I really am exhausted. Do you have any idea when I could get back the kitchen equipment that I dropped in the H&J office?”

  “We’ll have your husband bring it to you.”

  “Thanks. Sorry about the mess I left in the reception area.”

  “Not your fault. A cleaning team will come in when we’re done with the crime-scene analysis.”

  “Good.” I rubbed my eyes. If there had been a bed there in that toasty-warm interrogation room, I think I would have lain down on it.