“My wife says you were a lot of fun to golf with. I apologize if we treated you abruptly the other day.” He gave me a wink.
If?
“Just to show there are no hard feelings,” Richard said, slurring his words, “how’s about I buy you a drink.”
“No, thanks. I don’t drink that much.”
“You can just drink a little, then.”
I reconsidered his offer. A conversation with Richard could prove enlightening, especially with alcohol loosening his lips. “Okay, but only one,” I said.
“What’ll it be?” Richard asked me, snapping his fingers for the bartender.
“I’ll have a Shirley Temple.”
“That’s a kiddie drink. Whatsa matter? You a wimp or something?”
“No, but if it bothers you, I’ll have the bartender put it in a dirty glass.”
That was an old joke, but Richard laughed heartily and ordered my drink, repeating my line about the dirty glass, at which the bartender forced a smile.
“It’s a shame about Preston Saunders,” I told Richard as I watched the bartender spray soda pop into a glass with one hand and pour grenadine with his other hand. “I understand he made a lot of enemies, though.”
Richard nodded. “All he cared about was money. Money and his looks.” He leaned toward me and said, “Now, if it were me doing him in, I’d have gone with fire.”
“Fire?” I repeated. The bartender set my glass in front of me.
“Set his beloved Benz on fire, or his house. Get him with a double whammy, so even if he lives, he’d have lost money and gotten maimed.”
“You wouldn’t have simply shot him in the chest?”
He shook his head emphatically. “The face, maybe, but not the chest.”
“What reason would you have had for killing him?”
He widened his bloodshot eyes and tried to put on, I suppose, a somber appearance, but in his drunken state, he merely appeared to be airing out his lower lip. “None. I didn’t care for the bastard, but, hey, that’s no reason to start shooting people, right? We can’t have just the ten or so people in this world we really like be all there is. Who’d be left to clean the toilets, right?” He laughed and jabbed my upper arm.
If we’d been at my house, the temptation to bop him in the face with my toilet-bowl brush might have been overwhelming, but now I said nothing.
He took a gulp of his amber-colored drink. “I will say this for Preston. Hell of a golfer. Beat the three of us damn near every time we played. Only time I remember him losing was right before he suckered us into that bet over your cartoon. We were playing double or nothing, so that one bad round cost him six hundred. Says he can win this cartoon contest. He bets us three grand and, Christ, the guy draws stick figures, you know? Should have guessed something was up.”
For the first time, I voiced a question that had nagged at me all along. “It wasn’t a very good cartoon. I can’t imagine why he’d be so confident as to bet that kind of money on it.”
Richard snorted. “Once we paid up, he admitted he had an inside edge. Said he was boinking some editor at the magazine.”
Rage seeped into me. At least, up until now, I had believed that I’d won that contest fairly. To find out now I’d cheated to win a contest I never intended to enter in the first place was so infuriating I wanted to spit on Preston’s grave. “Was her name Susan Wolfe?”
“Yeah. That’s it. Says he’d met her on a business trip several months ago. That it was ‘the real thing’ this time.”
Chapter 19
Is That Too Much to Ask?
Damn! The mystery long-haired brunette was Butch Blake, editor-in-chief of Between the Legs. And she’d been so likable, too. “He was in love with her?”
“Claimed to be,” Richard answered, giving me another of his winks. “Course, Preston had a pot in every port.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “A broad in every port. Port in every pot. A—”
“What about Lindsay, the waitress who used to work here? Did he have any feelings for her?”
Richard laughed. “Oh, yeah. He had feelings, all right. Hated her. Know what I heard? She’d had his son when he was just a pip, I mean a pup, himself. Rumor was the kid died, though.”
I rose, took a couple of gulps of my Shirley Temple, and set it back on the bar. “Thanks for the drink, Richard.”
“’S all right” He gave me yet another wink. “Goin’ home myself in a shortly.”
“You’re not driving, are you?”
“No, no. Wife’s meeting me here any minute. Good talking to you, Missy Masters.”
“Richard, could I borrow your cellphone for a minute or two?”
“Sure thing,” he said.
While he struggled to get the phone out of his pocket, I said, “I need to call information and then a number or two. Can I give you a couple of bucks to—”
He was already waving off the need for reimbursement as he handed me his icky-warm phone. I explained I would step into the hallway and return momentarily.
I got the number for Between the Legs from information, and dialed. When Susan Wolfe was on the line, I identified myself, then said, “You and Preston Saunders were having an affair. That cartoon contest was bogus!”
After a brief pause, she replied, “No it wasn’t. Your cartoon would have won anyway.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“Please, Ms. Masters. This could cost me my job. I admit, I made some poor decisions. I should have disqualified your entry when I saw Preston’s name as the contact person. He convinced me not to. He assured me he was your agent. I had no reason not to believe him. I’m telling you the truth. All of our contest entries were atrocious, except yours.”
“Preston was going to leave his pregnant wife for you.”
“She was pregnant?” she cried. There was a pause. “I believed every lie,” she said in a voice choked with emotion. “About his being your agent. About his wife being a self-absorbed shrew who loved only herself. The only time I didn’t believe him was when he said he was leaving his wife for me. The one time he was telling the truth.”
Actually, the part about the self-absorbed shrew was accurate, too, but my loyalties were with Stephanie now. Especially considering that Preston’s lies had led Susan to believe I was said shrew until recently. I believed Susan, though it was odd for her to be telling me, a virtual stranger, all of this. Perhaps she just needed to get it off of her guilty conscience.
“I loved him,” Susan cried. “I’m so sorry.”
In the corner of my vision, I spotted Kimberly Worthington entering and heading toward her husband at the bar. We waved at each other. I realized I could save time by giving her Richard’s phone. I still needed to talk to Lindsay Mintoff, though. “I’ve got to go. Goodbye.” I hung up, and promptly dialed Lindsay’s number as Kimberly headed toward me.
“Molly, how are you?” Kimberly asked.
“I’m good. I borrowed your husband’s phone so that—” I held up a finger as her phone rang.
It went to a message: “Hey, there. This is Lindsay. I can’t come to the phone—”
I shut Richard’s phone. “I have to run to Schenectady. Could you thank Richard for letting me use his cell?”
“Certainly will, honey. Can you join us for another round soon? Next week maybe, when the rain stops?”
Clearly, she hadn’t talked to Emma recently. She would never want to see me, let alone golf with me. “I’ll be in Florida then, but thanks so much for the invitation.” I handed her the phone, thanked her again, and rushed away.
As I sped to Schenectady, my heart was pounding. I needed just a few minutes to think everything through, but I didn’t have a few minutes.
To my annoyance, road construction had caused a traffic jam. I was going to have a hard time getting home in the hour that I’d promised Jim that I would need. This trip was probably a waste of time and gasoline, anyway. She hadn’t answered her phone, and might not be home.
But while pondering the precise language for the card, my previous words, “fifteen minutes,” suddenly rang a bell.
That was it! Stephanie said she’d been in the bathtub for only fifteen minutes when Preston was shot, yet Dayton had claimed to have gone there twice, immediately after leaving my house and again, when no one answered the door. “The Postman Always Rings a Couple of Times,” I said to myself, mentally putting what I hoped was the final missing piece of this puzzle into place.
I was surprised when a glance at my watch showed me it had taken only twenty minutes to reach Lindsay’s home. It was a dilapidated residence in the city. She answered the buzzer. She had a couple of blue, ribbon-shaped plastic clips in her strawberry-blond hair. Though she wore a lot of makeup, her clothes were decidedly casual: gray sweatpants cut off at the knees, a white Just Say No! T-shirt.
She looked me up and down, maintained her stance in the doorway and said, “I saw you at that damned club, right? Whatcha want?”
“My name is Molly, and I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your son.”
“What’d he do now?” she asked.
She must have lied about her son’s death to make Sabrina and Preston feel guilty. I was pretty sure I knew who her son was. I took a calculated gamble and said, “Dayton’s gotten into some serious trouble.”
She promptly whirled around and hollered, “Dayton? There’s someone here to see you.”
Yikes! I had only wanted to verify that Dayton was Lindsay and Preston’s son. I wanted Tommy to take over from here. “That’s okay. I came here to talk to you, mother to mother.”
She snorted and gave me a head-to-toe scornful look. “You want to lecture me on motherhood? You ever try raising a kid by yourself? Scraping together dime tips that customers leave in the bottom of their soda glasses? You want to tell me, mother to mother, how I shoulda done a better job?”
“No. You’re right. I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Let me tell you something, mom to mom. You want to step inside and see how the other half lives?”
I did not. I wanted to go home and call Tommy. “No, thank you. I’ll leave you—”
“I done as good a job as I could. Our luck’s finally turning around. Dayton’s made himself ten thousand dollars. He won it on one of them slot machines in Atlantic City. If he dinged your damned Cadillac or cursed you out, you don’t have to worry. We’re leaving town.”
I studied her face. Her expression was guileless. In that instant, I decided my theory had been slightly off-base. She truly didn’t know where her son had gotten the money. “You told him you overheard Preston Saunders making that bet with his golfing buddies, didn’t you?”
She tossed her hair back haughtily. “The man can’t acknowledge his own flesh-and-blood, but makes thousand-dollar bets over porno cartoons. All of you people think you’re so much better than everyone else. You sit in that stinkin’ country club and drink your hundred-dollar bottles of wine, and make me pick up your scraps to keep alive. If it weren’t for my boy, I don’t know what I’d do. He’s all I’ve got in this world. But he’s worth any six of you and your friends. You can talk to him yourself.” She stepped away from the door and hollered, “Dayton?”
Their front door opened into their messy living room. From my angle, I could see the a copy of magazine on the seat of a raggedy upholstered chair. It was a copy of Between the Legs, the edition that contained my cartoon. Lindsay must have bought the magazine out of curiosity when she overheard Preston talking about it to collect on his bet.
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” I called after her. I trotted down the cracked, dirty cement steps, anxious to get out of there. I could drive straight to the police station. This would all be over with soon.
“Hey, lady!” she shouted back to me.
I turned. She was standing in front of the screen door once again. “Don’t you be spreading rumors ‘bout my boy. I know how you and your rich friends like to gossip. He didn’t do a thing to you.”
“You’re probably right. My mistake.”
I got into Jim’s Jeep quickly and started the engine. Traffic was heavy on their street, but I managed to pull into a gap right away. I hoped Tommy would be in his office. I was eager to tell him to his face that this time I knew for sure who the killer was: Dayton Mintoff.
After driving only a block and a half, I tensed as I heard a noise that sounded for all the world as if it had come from the backseat. Just as I started to look over my shoulder, Dayton popped up from the floor. I screamed.
He held a gun to my head and said, “Quite a scream you got there, Mike. You just about busted my eardrum. Now keep your eyes on the road and keep driving. We’re gonna find us a nice secluded spot.”
My first impulse was to dive out of the car and take my chances with the pavement. But Dayton immediately vetoed that idea by pressing the gun to my temple.
My second impulse, which I had to battle against with all my might, was to give in to my fear and turn into a blubbering idiot. I looked at my watch. Just after four thirty. Jim wouldn’t be suspecting anything was up for another thirty minutes or so. My eyes welled despite my best efforts.
So this was it. I was going to die. This Dayton character had been smart enough to outwit the police and me, and now my children would be motherless.
Where the hell was my life? Wasn’t it supposed to be flashing in front of my eyes right about now? Someone in the left lane honked, as I’d unwittingly started to veer too close. I swerved back into my lane. Maybe my brain had decided I needed to pay attention to the traffic instead of flashbacks.
“Just keep going straight till we’re out of town,” Dayton instructed.
We stopped at a red light. A man in a pickup truck pulled into the left-turn lane beside me. I watched him and tried to make little jerky motions with my chin that might attract his eye but not be so blatant as to inspire Dayton to shoot me on the spot. Dayton had leaned forward between the front seats, now resting the barrel of his gun in the crook of his arm but still pointing it at my head. He was so close to my face now that I could smell his sweat and the lingering cigarette smoke on his clothing.
As the light turned green, Dayton chuckled. “What’s the matter, Mike? Cat got your tongue?”
Oh, fine! I was going to get taken out of this world in the midst of honking cars and cliches! This really sucked!
Then again, as long as I was still behind the wheel and driving, I was unlikely to get shot. I glanced at his face in the rearview mirror. His scalp was still smoothly shaved, but his gray, mocking eyes now portrayed an unmistakable resemblance to his father. “Just tell me one thing,” I said, finally finding my voice. “Why me? I don’t even like the Saunderses. They don’t like me, either, for that matter.”
“Just your dumb luck, huh, Mike? See, when my mom overheard about the cartoon and everything, it was just too perfect to pass up. I made it look like a radical feminist group because all of you libbers annoy the hell out of me. Look at what you’ve done to my mom. Shit. Trouble was, a group of crazy libbers wouldn’t know that Mike Masters wasn’t Daddy Dearest’s real name. So I looked up Masters in the directory. There you were, Jim and Molly Masters. How was I s’posed to know you’d turn out to be such a god-damned pain in the ass?”
Now there was a question for the ages.
We stopped at another red light. This time we were too far back to pull alongside anyone in the turn lanes. I wanted to get him talking. Maybe then he’d lose concentration long enough for me to signal a passing motorist or pedestrian.
We were nearing the outskirts of town. He pointed at the i
ntersection up ahead. “Turn left onto one-forty-six. We’re gonna head to the Northway. Maybe, if you’re nice to me, I’ll let you live clear till we get to the Adirondacks.”
So far, we were retracing the route I’d used to get to his mom’s house. The hospital was around here someplace, but I wasn’t sure where. If only I were more familiar with this part of town, I’d drive like a bat out of hell to the hospital, then try and make a run for it to the emergency room. He’d probably shoot me, but at least I’d get quick medical attention.
I silently cursed at myself as we reached Route 146. I had already blown my chance to get out of the car. The houses were set way back from the roads and there were few traffic lights. The speed limit was forty-five all the way to Carlton, though I doubted he’d be foolish enough to have us go there. He’d probably have me turn off for the Northway in a couple of miles.
“Since I’m going to die soon, can you just answer a couple of questions for me? Why all the stained boxes? And how did the one stained box wind up in the Saunderses’ closet?”
“Just didn’t want to have to deal with that much shit. I stashed the box in the closet to frame his wife.”
“Why did you kill him? Was it for your mom’s sake?”
“Yeah. Hers and mine. Last year, my mom contacted Preston at work and said she needed a job. The least he could do for her, right? But he just got her that damned waitressing job at the club. It was eating her up inside, waiting on you pigs. So finally I went to see him myself. At his office. Told the shit-head we needed a hundred thousand, and we’d move away and be out of his life forever. He said forget it. That’s when I decided to kill him.”
Our lane started up again, and I deliberately lagged back, hoping to build enough of a gap between cars to attract attention to myself.
“Dear Dad loves his money too much to ever let go of a hundred grand,” Dayton continued. “But I knew I could get at least something out of him. Told him I was going to have a friendly little chat with his wife and with all of his socialite buddies if he didn’t come up with at least ten thousand reasons to keep quiet.” He paused and gestured with his gun. “Hey, step on it. If you want to stay alive till we’re out of town, you keep up with the traffic and don’t try nothin’.”
Death Comes to Suburbia (Book 2 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 23
