Almost Dead

by Lisa Jackson

  “But I can. Handle everything.”

  “Even your grandmother’s murder?”

  “Don’t be such a bastard.”

  He inclined his head, taking the heat. “I just want to face reality.”

  She slid a glance at their son, and her voice softened. “Let’s not discuss this now, okay? Little ears hear a lot, Jack. Maybe you should just go home.”

  “This is my home.”

  “No more. And I’m tired. It’s been a helluva week.” She slid another piece of pizza onto the tray of Beej’s high chair, then poured some milk into a sippy cup. “Careful with this,” she told her son, and he, so much like his father, grinned mischievously before taking the handle and swinging the cup to and fro, spraying milk on the wall, floor, tray, and Cissy.

  Perfect.

  “I was afraid of that. You just lost your ‘get out of jail free’ card, bud.”

  She retrieved the cup, and he started winding up to wail before she distracted him with his favorite toy. A little rubber car with no moving parts. It did nothing except look remarkably like Jack’s Jeep.

  “Dad-dee car!” he said gleefully, his attention diverted as Cissy dabbed at her sweater with a dishrag before swabbing the counter. She glanced up at Jack and saw him smothering a smile. “Don’t say it,” she warned, pointing at him and dropping the rag by mistake. “Crap.” She bent to pick it up and nearly cracked heads with Jack, who had also dived for the soaked towel. “I’ve got it!” Retrieving the dishrag, she mopped up the sprayed milk, then walked onto what had once been a porch and was now the sunroom. Opening a cupboard door, she dropped the rag into a laundry chute that channeled to the basement.

  By the time she’d returned to the kitchen, Jack had retrieved two bottles of beer from the fridge. “Something I forgot when I moved out,” he said, then popped the tops. He handed her a bottle, tapped the neck of his to hers, and said, “To better days.”

  A part of her wanted to argue and throw him out, though another part told herself to let it go for the night. She didn’t need another fight. She figured there were enough battles on the horizon. Reluctantly she offered him a conciliatory smile.

  “Amen,” she whispered. “To better days.”

  She lifted the bottle to her lips, but paused as a horrid thought hit her.

  What if this was the best day?

  What if from here on in, things just got worse? She took a long swallow as her son pounded his little car on the tray of his high chair.

  Now, there was a happy thought.

  Chapter 4

  Paterno felt a case of heartburn coming on.

  He reached into his pocket and found a near-empty packet of Tums. Popping a couple of the chalky tablets, he took a sweeping glance at the Cahill estate, thinking this was the price he paid for returning to the city. A few years back, he’d taken a leave of absence and spent some time working in Santa Lucia, thinking the quiet life might appeal to him. Instead, though, he’d caught one helluva case involving a firefighting family, and after that he’d slowly become bored with the slower pace of small-town life. He’d done his share of touring wineries, golfing, or fly-fishing, but the quiet life hadn’t taken. Truth to tell, he’d missed the hustle and bustle of the city: the steep hills, rich history, and varied elements and ethnicity of San Francisco. He loved the smell of the wharf, the Irish bars, the noise and color of Chinatown, all of it. He still got a thrill driving over the Golden Gate, and hell if he didn’t ride a damned cable car now and again. He just liked the feel of the city, the smell of it. So despite this new Cahill mess and the long hours he put in with the department, he was glad to be back.

  “Hey! Detective! Over here!” From within the house, Tallulah Jefferson gestured for him to come back inside. She was eyeing the marble tiles of the floor while the ME was examining the body, taking internal temperature, checking for contusions and lividity. A petite black woman, Jefferson was nothing if not an enthusiastic criminalist. She was able to divorce herself from the person within the body in a way that Paterno had never seen. She wore no makeup, and she always sported some kind of headband to scrape her springy curls away from her face. Now her usually smooth forehead was wrinkled in thought as she huddled with Janet Quinn at the base of the stairs while an officer dusted the railing for prints and a photographer snapped off pictures.

  “What have you got?” Paterno asked, approaching her.

  “No accident, that’s what I’ve got.” Jefferson nodded, as if agreeing with herself, then looked up at the landing and squinted. Paterno guessed that in her mind’s eye she was watching a slow-motion movie of what she thought were the last seconds of Eugenia Cahill’s life. “The way I see it, she fell from the landing, not down the stairs.” Jefferson pointed to the sweeping wooden steps covered with an expensive runner. “I can’t find any signs of anything hitting the wall, no blood, no unusual scrapes on the risers or railing where either her body or her cane would have hit and bounced as she tumbled down. Nothing on the runner, no tears to the carpet or smears of blood, at least none that I can see.” Jefferson scratched a spot near her headband. “And see where she landed…over here.” The criminalist walked back to the victim’s body, where the ME was getting it ready for the body bag.

  A thick red stain spread upon the floor, Eugenia’s blood in a pool directly under a huge chandelier suspended from the floor above. Dripping crystal and illuminated by hundreds of small lights, the chandelier seemed garish and overwhelming considering the tiny victim directly beneath it. “She’s a good six feet from the bottom step. No way would any kind of momentum send her over here, even if she skidded over the tile. This rug”—Jefferson pointed to a small circular carpet at the base of the stairs—“would have been disturbed, but see: not even one piece of fringe is out of place. No blood streaking the floor. No scuffs from her shoes. And I don’t think the body was moved. It looks like she landed right where she ended up.”

  “She was pushed?”

  Jefferson glanced up at the landing. “She was not quite five feet tall, and presumably a little stooped. Walked with a cane. The rail would have hit her about here.” She leveled a hand on her own body, to a spot just under her breasts. “Even if she tripped, or fell, or had a heart attack or stroke or whatever, how did she get over the railing? I could see her stumbling on the landing and falling against the rail, and if it was really weak and she hit it with some kind of force, maybe the old railing would have splintered. Maybe then she could’ve fallen through, but I really don’t think so. Doesn’t matter. I checked. That railing’s oak and damned solid. No weak connections, no broken balusters. Besides, I think the body’s in the wrong spot. If she fell or were dangled, she’d land over here.” Jefferson walked to below the landing, closer to the wall. “We won’t know until we take more measurements, but I’m guessing she either did a swan dive from the railing, leaping outward, or, more likely, she was helped over.”

  “Homicide.”

  “It’s preliminary, but yeah, right now, that’s what I’m saying. I didn’t see any sign of a struggle on the landing, but I’ll look again.”

  So who would kill her? Paterno wondered, his gaze moving from the foyer to the sitting room, then toward hallways that he knew from previous visits led to the kitchen, dining area, and elevator. If he remembered correctly, this floor was strictly for entertaining; the second was the real living quarters, and included Eugenia’s room; the third was bedrooms; and the fourth had once belonged to live-in servants. Beneath it all was the garage. The house was worth millions, and he wondered who would end up with it now that Eugenia was dead. He walked to the sitting room off the foyer, glanced around. “Anyone see a dog?”

  “What? A dog?” Jefferson asked.

  “A little white dog. It was the victim’s. According to her granddaughter, Eugenia never went anywhere without the damned thing.” He remembered the little white mutt, a terrier mix of some kind. The dog had been a pain in the ass the last time he’d visited here, and he figured it hadn
’t improved with age. What was amazing was that the scrappy thing was still alive.

  Or had been.

  Jefferson walked up the stairs to the landing. “No dog, white or otherwise.”

  “Let me know if you come across it.”

  Jefferson flashed him a smile, showing off slightly flared teeth against her mocha-colored complexion. “Does it bite?”

  “Probably,” Paterno said. “It’s a Cahill.”

  She snorted, already back at the railing above and studying the balusters positioned directly over the body. Meanwhile, the techs had spread out, dusting for prints, collecting debris, and continually snapping pictures in their painstaking search for evidence.

  Quinn joined Paterno. “I’ll start with the phone records, the computer, and her date book. They’re all up in the library.”

  “She’s got a computer?” Paterno asked.

  Quinn nodded.

  “The granddaughter said she didn’t like them.”

  “I’ll check it out.”

  “See if you can find any legal records,” he added. “Insurance policies and a will.” Frowning, he stared at the interior of this immense house with its original art and expensive, if worn, furnishings. “A place like this might have a wall safe.”

  “Already checking,” Quinn assured him as she headed up the stairs to the library.

  Paterno glanced down at the victim again, a last look before she would be zipped into a body bag and placed on a stretcher. His gut clenched as he stared at the dead woman’s tiny body, dressed in its expensive pants, suit jacket, blouse, and scarf. As if she’d planned to play bridge or have tea with her friends. Her hair was messed and bloody now, but he guessed it had been recently done—smooth apricot curls were still teased and sprayed into position.

  Damn it all.

  He had a bad feeling about this.

  Real bad.

  At least the beer was cold, Cissy thought, though considering the outside temperature, she and Jack should have been sipping hot chocolate laced with whiskey or Bailey’s, the kind of drinks they’d loved on the few trips they’d taken, skiing at Tahoe and Heavenly Valley. Back in the days when everything had felt magical. She recalled coming into the lodge exhilarated from the ski runs, snow melting in Jack’s hair, his face red with cold. Clunking in ski boots, they had ordered drinks, then sat outside to stare at the clear, incredibly blue waters of the lake, and later, after soaking in a hot tub outside, they’d spent hours in their room making love.

  A lifetime ago.

  Cissy took a swallow from her bottle and pushed those particular thoughts back into the locked closet where they belonged. No sense getting maudlin or nostalgic. So she had loved Jack with all of her heart; so it didn’t work out. No big deal. It happened all the time.

  But you never thought it would happen to you, did you?

  Cissy had believed that when she married, it would be for life, to a man who loved her unconditionally. She craved love like an addict—an emotional need any two-bit shrink would say lay in the debris of her broken childhood. And they would be right. Cissy had never experienced that kind of love, not from her grandmother, and certainly not from her egomaniacal mother or narcissistic father. She’d thought with Jack and B.J.—her own little nuclear family—that life would be different.

  Oh, how wrong she’d been.

  Now, sitting at the table they’d bought at a secondhand store and refinished together, their first of countless “projects,” she and Jack shared what they could salvage of the pizza and tried not to let the silence grow too uncomfortable.

  She leaned back in “her” chair—the one positioned next to the French doors leading to the backyard. Cissy wouldn’t allow herself to think about their search for this house and how excited they’d been when they found it. It had been run-down, in need of “TLC,” the real estate ad had said, a “fixer-upper,” a “handyman’s dream.” This hundred-year-old Victorian had been all those things and more, but they’d both fallen in love with it the minute they stepped over its rotting threshold. They’d bought it, hired a contractor, and spent the next year working every night and weekend, ripping up thin, filthy thirty-year-old carpeting then stripping the hardwood floors and refinishing them to a lustrous sheen. They’d replaced or regrouted tile and peeled off layers of the ugliest wallpaper she’d ever seen. They’d worked to exhaustion, loving every minute of it.

  And Cissy was certain she had conceived B.J. the very first night they’d moved in. Probably while testing out the durability of the living room floor. Now her eyes strayed to that room and the shining patina of the oak floorboards. Just around the corner was the fireplace, and there, on a sleeping bag that they’d used for camping, they’d created their first and only child. She’d thought she’d love Jack Holt forever.

  Pushing that uncomfortable thought aside, she took another swallow of beer, then righted Beej’s sippy cup before he sprinkled milk all over himself, the high chair, and the surrounding walls and floor. Her son wrinkled his nose and showed off his new teeth. “Get down?”

  “In a sec, honey.”

  “I know this isn’t a good time,” Jack said, “but I want you to rethink the divorce.”

  “Rethink,” Cissy repeated. Like she hadn’t thought and thought and thought about it already.

  “We need to give it another shot, Ciss. Hell, we’ve hardly been married long enough to have a rough patch, much less survive one.”

  She studied this man she’d married. Was he a raving lunatic? “You had an affair, Jack. With Larissa. End of story.”

  “I did not—”

  “Sure you did,” she cut him off. “We’ve been through this before, so let’s not do it again. You brought me home, and now you can go. You don’t live here anymore.”

  “Not my choice, Ciss.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s best.”

  “I miss you.”

  “Should have thought of that when you were sleeping around.”

  “For the millionth time, I wasn’t. You know it too. You’re just looking for an excuse.”

  “Fortunately for me, you gave me a damned good one.” She stood, unstrapped B.J., and plucked him out of the high chair. Wiping a spot of milk from his cheek, she balanced him on her hip, then set him on the floor. As he loped to his toy box in the living room, Cissy squared off with her husband. “I caught you coming out of Larissa’s house, Jack. Please don’t insult me with the old ‘but nothing happened’ story. Just leave, Jack. This is pointless.” Beej wandered back into the room, a beat-up stuffed frog hanging from one hand, and Cissy said, “Say good-bye to Daddy, honey.”

  “You just won’t listen. You’re as pigheaded as ever.”

  “Pig-headed,” Beej repeated on a giggle as Jack lifted him. He patted his father hard on the shoulder and chortled, “Dad-dee! Dad-dee!” so many times that Cissy thought she might puke. Pigheaded? She would have liked to argue the point, but Jack and Beej were doing their male-bonding thing, laughing and playing with each other, so she decided to keep out of it for the moment. As lousy a husband as Jack had become, she couldn’t take away the fact that he loved his child. By no means was he a great father, and considering his upbringing that could be explained, but he did love Beej. He did try.

  She grudgingly gave Jack points for that, especially when she thought about her own childhood. For Beej’s sake she would try to pull herself out of the anger and pain caused by his betrayal and do the best she could to ensure that father and son had a decent relationship. It wasn’t B.J.’s fault that she and Jack couldn’t get along.

  He hadn’t chosen his father.

  She had.

  “Look who I found.” Janet Quinn, who had been searching the library on the second floor, walked down the stairs carrying a shivering little white dog. Paterno looked up from the floor, where he’d been studying the tiles where the body had hit. There was still blood everywhere, but the shell of what had been Eugenia Cahill had finally been hauled away.

  “Where w
as it?”

  “Cowering in a cupboard beneath a shelf containing first editions of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “In good company,” Paterno observed.

  “And scared to death. Literally shaking. I wonder who put her there. Eugenia? Or the killer? We are thinking homicide, aren’t we?”

  “Looks that way. Jefferson’s pretty certain.”

  “Who would want to kill a little old lady?”

  Paterno flashed on Marla Cahill. “Maybe her daughter-in-law?”

  “Pretty bold to come here right after an escape.”

  “Have you forgotten Marla Cahill? Brazen doesn’t begin to cover it.” He’d seen a lot of conniving, cold-hearted people in his time, but, as far as women went, Eugenia’s daughter-in-law took the prize.

  “She’s not stupid.”

  “Not at all.”

  “And she would have had to have known that we were watching the place.”

  “Well, someone called 9-1-1 before the granddaughter showed up here. I’m willing to bet whoever put in the call that pulled our guys off was involved. If we find out who that is, we might start making some headway.”

  Quinn nodded. “The caller was a male. I checked.”

  “Paid to do it. From a pay phone.” Paterno already had that much figured out from talking to the emergency dispatch operator. Squatting next to the bloodstains, he twisted his neck to view the landing as he had half a dozen times, replaying what he imagined had happened. It wouldn’t have taken Atlas to toss the little woman over the railing, but then again, Eugenia would have fought back. Unless she’d been drugged or had a stroke or heart attack. He’d know more once all the tox screens and blood work came back from the lab and the autopsy was complete. “I’ll start calling the staff,” he said to Janet Quinn. “You order phone records.”

  “Planned on it,” Janet said. She stroked the dog’s head, and it whimpered. “Do you know her name? The dog’s, I mean.”