Charlotte tapped the toilet brush against the rim, and after quickly rinsing it under the faucet, she placed it in the sink to drip-dry. Barely breathing, she tiptoed closer to the door so she could hear better.
“How many times have I told you not to call me here?” Lowell snapped at the caller. There was a slight pause; then, his voice rising in anger with each word, he began ranting. “I don’t want to hear it. That woman is out to ruin me—has been for years. Why the hell didn’t you get rid of her, too, along with that two-bit hustler she hired?” Another pause. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before,” Lowell snapped at the caller. There was another silence, then, “Tell you what, buddy,” he said, his voice dropping to a soft, menacing drawl, “if I go down, I’m dragging you with me.” Again his voice rose to a shout: “And the next time I hear from you, it had better be good news or else!”
The crack of the receiver being slammed down jolted Charlotte into action. After what she’d just heard, the last thing she needed was for Lowell to suspect that she’d been listening in on his conversation. In hopes of allaying any suspicions that she’d been listening, she quickly flushed the toilet.
With her insides churning and her mind swirling with bits and pieces of the conversation she’d overheard, Charlotte decided she should wait a few minutes before she left the bathroom.
She eased over to the toilet, closed the lid, and sat down.
That woman is out to ruin me—has been for years. “That woman” had to be Patsy ... didn’t it? Of course there was always the possibility that he’d been talking about someone else, maybe even his wife, but Charlotte didn’t think so. Everything that she’d read about his wife indicated that she was his biggest supporter.
Why the hell didn’t you get rid of her, too, along with that two-bit hustler she hired? Charlotte shivered. If “get rid of her” meant what she thought it meant and “that woman” was indeed Patsy, then Patsy was in big trouble.
Another thought brought a frown to Charlotte’s face. Again assuming “she” was Patsy, then it stood to reason that the “two-bit hustler” could be Ricco.
Charlotte reached up and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Trying to figure out this mess was giving her a headache. After a moment, she realized that it had been a while since she’d heard any noise coming from the outer office. Maybe Lowell had left, and maybe it was time for her to be thinking about doing the same.
Relief washed through her when she saw that the office was indeed empty. Since she hadn’t heard Lowell leave, she figured he must have left when she flushed the toilet.
Charlotte stared longingly at the door that led out into the hallway. If her suppositions were right, then she’d heard what she came to hear, or at least enough to confirm in her own mind that Lowell was capable of almost anything, including murder. And if she had any sense, she’d leave now, just as fast as her legs could carry her.
Charlotte closed her eyes and willed her heart to slow down. No. Too suspicious. It would look too suspicious to leave now.
Taking a deep breath, she quickly set about dusting and straightening the office. Just as soon as she finished up Lowell’s office, she’d make up some kind of excuse, then hightail it out of there.
She had just begun dusting the file cabinets when she heard a commotion in the outside hallway.
“She’s in there,” Charlotte heard Kimberly say as the door abruptly swung open.
Charlotte was speechless when the uniformed security guard stepped into the room. Her eyes widened in recognition, and her heart began pounding in her chest.
What on earth was Louis Thibodeaux doing there?
Chapter Sixteen
The shocked expression on Louis’s face was almost comical, but laughing was the last thing Charlotte felt like doing at the moment.
Louis pointed at Charlotte. “Is this the woman?”
Kimberly gave Charlotte a Cheshire-cat grin; then she turned to Louis and nodded. “That’s the one. I took the liberty of phoning the janitorial service we use. They assured me that the regular cleaning lady was on her way, and they also confirmed that they hadn’t sent out any substitutes today. I don’t know what this woman thinks she’s doing here, but I want her removed from these premises immediately.”
Louis took a step closer to Charlotte, his eyes narrowing with suspicion, and Charlotte’s mind raced with possible excuses she could use.
The best defense is an offense. In for penny, in for a pound. Placing her hands on her hips, she glared at Louis. “What’s going on here? Isn’t this Mr. Lawrence Webster’s offices?”
The look Louis gave her said she wasn’t fooling him in the least. “No, this is Mr. Lowell Webster’s offices.”
Charlotte feigned surprise and embarrassment. “Oh, my goodness.” She turned to Kimberly. “I’m so sorry. I thought this was—I mean—this is such a huge building and all, I guess I got confused.” She bent down and picked up her supply carrier.
To Louis, she said, “If it isn’t too much trouble, maybe you could direct me to Mr. Lawrence Webster’s offices? I’m sure they’re wondering why I haven’t shown up yet.”
Louis rolled his eyes, but he held out his arm anyway. “Be glad to, ma’am,” he drawled.
With one last faked apologetic look at Kimberly, Charlotte gladly took his arm and let him escort her out of the office.
Louis didn’t utter a sound all the way to the elevator. Nor did he say anything while they both watched the panel above the elevator doors as they waited for it to arrive.
Finally the bell dinged, and when the elevator doors slid open, a lone woman stepped out wearing a uniform with a Zachary Carter’s Janitorial Services logo on the front. For a second, Charlotte was tempted to tell the woman that Lowell’s bathroom had already been cleaned, but Louis was nudging her toward the inside of the elevator.
Oh well, too bad. With a sigh, Charlotte gave the woman a quick smile, and with Louis right on her heels, she stepped inside.
Louis punched the GROUND FLOOR button, and once the elevator doors slid closed, he turned to face her. “There is no Lawrence Webster office in this building,” he said. “As you well know,” he added pointedly. “And you didn’t fool anyone back there with that trumped-up excuse about the names. For Pete’s sake, woman, Lowell Webster’s name was right on his offices door in plain sight.”
Charlotte’s cheeks grew warm and she groaned. “Oops! Forgot all about that,” she muttered.
Louis glared at her. “Want to tell me what’s going on here?”
For a split second Charlotte considered trying to bluff her way through the situation. But only for a second, Trying to bluff Louis would be like lying to the pope during confession. Not an advisable thing to do.
“If you’ll walk me to my van, once we’re out of the building I can explain,” she finally told him.
“Yeah, I’ll just bet you can,” he said, sarcasm oozing with each word. “I can’t wait to hear this one.”
Spring had always been one of Charlotte’s favorite times of the year. Outside the sun was shining, promising to be another beautiful morning, but all that Charlotte could think about was the phone conversation she’d overheard in Lowell’s office.
While Charlotte and Louis walked, she did her best to explain, beginning with the call she’d received from Nadia. By the time they reached the van, she had finished her explanation with recounting her visit to Jane Calhoun.
Charlotte unlocked the back door of the van. “After talking to Jane, I wasn’t sure who or what to believe,” she said as she loaded her supply carrier into the van. She stepped aside to close the door. “I just thought that—”
Louis suddenly grabbed the door and slammed it so hard that a passing couple stopped to gawk.
Oblivious to the couple, Louis took a menacing step toward Charlotte. “Thought what, Charlotte?” The harshness of his voice shocked her to her toes, especially since, up until that very second, he hadn’t given the slightest indication that he was anything but mildly
interested in what she’d been telling him.
“Let me guess,” he drawled sarcastically. “You thought you could just waltz in there, and Lowell Webster would outright confess to being a prick, or—no, wait: you thought he’d just outright confess to being a murderer!”
“No, of course not,” she sputtered. “I—”
“You never learn, do you, Charlotte?” He shook his head. “The Dubuisson mess was bad enough, and now this! Do you have any idea who you’re messing with? Lowell Webster could eat you up, spit you out, and never blink an eye, not to mention that he’s got a whole army of lawyers who could keep you tied up in court for the rest of your natural life on defamation of character charges alone.”
He poked her shoulder with his forefinger, then leaned down until he was right in her face. “Stay out of it, Charlotte. Let the police do their job. Let Judith handle it. If Daniel is innocent, then—”
“Just what do you mean ‘if’?” Charlotte snapped. But she didn’t give him time to answer. She’d tried hard to control her temper during his tirade, tried hard to ignore the fact that he was almost shouting at her and treating her as if she didn’t have the sense God gave a goose. But enough was enough. There was no way she could ignore his sneering remark about Daniel.
“There is no if!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “Daniel is innocent!” She poked him hard in the chest. “Do you hear me, you—you—you chauvinist pig? My nephew is innocent!”
With the heels of both hands, Charlotte hit him square in the chest to shove him out of her way. Caught off guard, he stumbled back long enough for her to get around him, and she hotfooted it to the driver’s side of the van.
She wrenched the door open, scrambled inside, and slammed it shut. In the side-view mirror, she saw him heading toward the driver’s side of the van. For good measure, just in case he decided to try to keep her from leaving, she hit the automatic door lock.
By the time she jabbed the key into the ignition switch, he was right beside her window.
“Charlotte!” he yelled. “Open this door!” He pounded on the glass.
Ignoring him, Charlotte switched on the engine, and the van roared to life. With one last contemptuous glare at him, she stomped on the accelerator, forcing Louis to either move or get bumped. He jumped back, and with the tires burning rubber, Charlotte pealed out into the street.
Brakes squealed and car horns blared in protest at being cut off, but Charlotte was oblivious to everything but the anger burning a hole in the pit of her stomach.
The short drive to Patsy Dufour’s house passed in a haze of fury, laced with humiliation. To even think that she’d ever, for the slightest moment, considered Louis Thibodeaux as someone she could possibly spend the rest of her life with only fueled her anger even more. And she had thought about it, thought about it more than once.
“Well, no more!” she muttered. One thing she didn’t need in her life was some overbearing know-it-all who had no conception of what family loyalty was all about.
The fact that he’d disowned his own son, his only child, should have given her a clue. Oh, he’d had his so-called reasons, reasons he thought justified what he had done.
Stephen had been a problem child. Louis’s wife, unable to cope with their son’s problems and no longer able to tolerate the long hours required by her husband’s job as a homicide detective, had deserted them both, leaving Louis to deal with Stephen by himself.
Then, when Stephen was a teenager, he’d gotten mixed up with a group of homeless runaways. One night Stephen and a couple of boys from the group mugged a tourist The tourist died from injuries they’d inflicted on him, but before he’d died the man had been able to give a description of Stephen and one of the other boys. As a result, they had all been caught, convicted, and imprisoned.
For Louis, his son’s conviction and imprisonment had been the last humiliating straw in a hayfield of problems. He’d disowned Stephen and had had no contact with him for over twenty years.
Only recently, due mostly to Charlotte’s influence and encouragement, had Louis finally made the move to reconcile with his son. As a result, he now had a relationship with his little granddaughter as well.
Charlotte sighed as she parked the van on the side street that flanked Patsy Dufour’s property. Reasons or not, she still couldn’t conceive of abandoning your own flesh and blood.
She switched off the engine but sat staring straight ahead. If she were honest, though, Louis’s lack of family loyalty was just one of the many symptoms of a larger problem between them. She’d called him a chauvinist pig, and she’d meant it. The crack he’d made about the Dubuissons had been totally uncalled for and had only confirmed what she already knew about him but had chosen to ignore.
“Lord save us from the male ego,” she muttered as she finally climbed out of the van and stomped around to the back to collect the cleaning supplies she would need.
The fact that she, a rank amateur and a woman to boot, had been the one to ultimately solve the Dubuisson murder for him was something he was never going to forget, or forgive. He simply couldn’t let it go. Never mind that the whole thing was over and done with.
Charlotte slammed the back door, locked the van, then headed for the gate. At least she could be thankful that she’d been spared from having to testify at the trial. Even now, just the thought of all the publicity that the trial would have attracted made her cringe. But at the last moment, thanks to some plea bargaining between the district attorney and the Dubuissons’ defense lawyer, her testimony hadn’t been necessary after all.
Charlotte paused at the gate. As a witness, she had been expendable, and the sad fact of the matter was that everyone, no matter who they were, was expendable. No one wanted to admit it, but, then, no one liked to face reality, either, especially if that reality included the death of an illusion about themselves.
A heaviness settled in Charlotte’s chest. Had she been fooling herself all along? Had a relationship with Louis just been an illusion? Had she been so desperate for male companionship that she’d ignored the reality of who he really was?
Charlotte squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. Maybe, just maybe, like Scarlett in Gone With the Wind, she could “think about that tomorrow.”
Taking a firm grip on the gate, she shoved it open. And in spite of the urge to simply turn around, go home, and bury herself beneath the covers of her bed, she forced herself to march up the sidewalk toward the porch. For today, she still had a job to do, and in light of what she’d overheard in Lowell Webster’s office, there were more important, more urgent matters to consider than her relationship with Louis Thibodeaux.
At the front door Charlotte raised her hand to ring the doorbell, then froze, her forefinger just inches from the bell.
Out of nowhere, it occurred to her to wonder why Patsy had canceled the Tuesday cleaning on the spur of the moment, without prior notice or a reason. Could it have been because Charlotte’s nephew had been arrested for Ricco’s murder?
Not likely, but possible, Charlotte decided. After all, Patsy was, as Jane had pointed out, a spoiled socialite. She might not want to be associated with anyone who had a jailbird in the family. And though Charlotte couldn’t recall offhand if she’d ever mentioned Daniel as being her nephew, she was pretty sure that Nadia had probably done so.
But there was another possibility, too. What if Patsy had conspired to taint Lowell’s reputation and used Ricco to do it, maybe even paid someone to murder him and put him in that urn. Knowing that Daniel, who was innocent, was Charlotte’s nephew, Patsy might not want Charlotte around as a reminder.
Suddenly the front door swung open, giving Charlotte a start. As if her thoughts had conjured Patsy up, there she stood in the doorway.
“I thought I saw you drive up,” Patsy said. “Come on in.” She stepped back to allow Charlotte to pass.
Because Patsy seemed the same as always, Charlotte began to have second thoughts about the reason Patsy had canceled on T
uesday. As usual, she figured she’d let her imagination get out of hand.
But if nothing was different, then why did she feel so uneasy, so self-conscious all of a sudden? Whether the reason was because of the gossip she’d uncovered about Patsy and Lowell or because of what she’d overheard in Lowell’s office, she couldn’t be sure.
Probably just guilt, she concluded as she followed Patsy down the hallway. Guilt because she’d broken one of her cardinal rules and had given in to the temptation to gossip and be an all-around nosy busybody.
“I have to leave in a few minutes,” Patsy said once they were in the kitchen. “I’ll probably be gone most of the day, but I should be back by the time you finish up.”
Charlotte had always found the physical labor involved in cleaning to be soothing, and by the time Patsy returned from her errands after lunch, Charlotte was packing up her supplies, and her melancholy mood, along with her paranoia about Patsy, had abated somewhat.
At the van, she had just finished loading her supplies when her cell phone rang. Charlotte slammed the back door of the van closed, retrieved her phone from her purse, and pressed the TALK button.
“Maid-for-a-Day. Charlotte speaking,” she said as she walked around to the driver’s side.
“Aunt Charley, it’s me.”
Judith. Now wouldn’t it be just like Louis to call and blab about her early-morning escapade in Lowell Webster’s office to Judith.
“I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time, Auntie.”
“No, hon. I’m just finishing up at Patsy Dufour’s house.” Though tempted to outright ask Judith if Louis had called her, Charlotte held her tongue. If by chance, he hadn’t, then Judith would want an explanation as to why she’d asked in the first place.
Polished Off (Charlotte LaRue Mystery Series, Book 3) Page 16
