A Dead Husband (Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery)

by Anna Burke

  She placed all the materials from Roger’s office in neat stacks on her desk, along with his laptop for Laura. She was plotting her route from the house to the police station in Cathedral City and the coroner’s office in Indio, her anxiety mounting as a wave of dread welled up in anticipation of the tasks ahead. A police station was not too bad, but visiting a morgue to request an autopsy report was too creepy. Her cell phone rang and she went from a state of mild dread to DEFCON 5. Her body was on full alert, startled by nothing more than the familiar ringtone of her cell phone. She suddenly remembered a favorite quote, used by her mother and borrowed from Dorothy Parker in response to telephones and doorbells: “What fresh hell is this?”

  CHAPTER 16

  Jessica tried to regain her composure as she answered the phone. “Hello,” she said a little breathlessly.

  “Jessica, are you okay? It’s Jerry.”

  “Yeah, Jerry I’m fine. I’m just freaked out about having visits to a police station and a morgue on my ‘to do’ list for the day. When the phone rang I jumped out of my skin! Sorry, I’ll be able to breathe again in a sec. What’s up?”

  “Please, no need to apologize. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I still feel uneasy about being about caught up in someone else’s nightmare. If you want to wait until tomorrow I can go with you to the morgue and police department.”

  “Really, I’m fine, Jerry. I want to find out as much as I can today, before my lunch meeting with Paul tomorrow. You have plenty on your plate and we’ll make more headway with both of us out there hustling.”

  “I’m with you, Jessica. My call is to give you an update about this guy Eric. It turns out his name is Eric Warren and he was hired about a month ago by the manager at Lulu’s. Home is in the LA area. I have a name and number of a previous employer the manager called to get a reference and an old address for Eric that we can check out.” Jerry paused for a moment. Jessica imagined him looking over the notes in the little pad he carried with him.

  “In addition to a name and address we have a social security number and a cell phone number. I tried the cell phone and left a message for him to call me without saying too much. Right now, I have Tommy running a background check online. What I really wanted to tell you, Jessica, is that he hasn’t been back to work even though he was on the schedule for Sunday. Nobody has heard anything from him. The manager wasn’t worried. He says that’s typical for the young people he hires.”

  “Okay, so that means we don’t have a way to corroborate Laura’s claim that she spent the night with him. So no one to verify her whereabouts after we left her at Costa’s a little before midnight Friday night. Have I got that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s about it, for the moment. Don’t forget that she took a cab home so we might get a fix on her whereabouts from the cab company records. Tommy’s working on that too. Also, I tracked down the property manager at the apartment complex and there is a Joe Abernathy who lives there. According to the property manager the location of his apartment fits the information Laura gave us. It’s a ground floor apartment near the pool. The manager wouldn’t give me a number to call the tenant directly, but did take my name and number, and promised to give Mr. Abernathy a message asking him to call me. Joe Abernathy is the only one on the lease and she wasn’t aware that anyone else was staying in the apartment. Until I get hold of Joe or reach Eric I think I’m at sort of a dead end on this. I stopped by and knocked on the doors of the two apartments closest to the pool but didn’t get any response. The manager suggested I try to find Joe at work; she thinks he’s a realtor with Desert Lifestyles Realty but she wasn’t sure which office. I’ll ask Tommy to call around and see if he can figure out where he works. I’ll let you know tonight if we come up with anything else.”

  “That’s good, Jerry. I’ll rest easier once we verify my best friend was merely cheating on her husband instead of murdering him. This all seems so dicey for her,” Jessica declared. Her mood shifted from anxiety to frustration.

  “Hey, it is a difficult situation. It’s going to be like that for a while, Jessica. The police are working on this and we’re doing all we can so we have to be patient. Right now I’m going back over to Laura’s house in Panorama. I still need to get in and finish my search. I’m going to knock on a few doors before and after I go into the house to see what I can find out from the neighbors. If Tommy locates the office where Joe Abernathy works maybe we’ll get a break. If I can catch up with Joe-the-realtor on the job maybe he can put us in touch with Eric-the-waiter. If that doesn’t happen I’ll swing by the apartment complex in Palm Springs again before we all meet at your place for dinner. With a little luck I might catch this guy Joe as he comes home from work.”

  Jessica filled Jerry in on what she had learned about Roger’s business and financial circumstances, including the AD&D rider.

  “Wow, when you said dicey you meant dicey. You can bet the insurance company is going to drag this out. They’ll wait as long as they can to pay up. Unless there’s a break in the case it could be months before Laura sees a check. Can she stay afloat for a while?”

  “We’re not sure yet. Going over her finances is on her to do list today, the poor woman. She’ll have to use more debt to handle the debt she’s already saddled with. That’s never the best way to go but she’s got that self-reliant streak. I’d be glad to do more if she’d let me. Maybe once we’ve figured out the details about her financial situation she’ll be more open to taking a loan from me. I can afford to wait until she gets this all straightened out. I’m not sure she can. Anyway, thanks for the update, Jerry. I’ll see you and Tommy at the house for dinner around six.”

  “We’ll be there.” With that they hung up. Jessica stood for a moment resting the edge of the smartphone against her chin. The anxiety and frustration had fled, leaving something close to despair in their wake. “Poor Roger, poor Laura, poor me,” she thought. Although she was better off financially than Laura, she was as out to sea as Laura about what the future held in store. If anyone had told her a year ago that she’d be without a job or a husband, living in her childhood home, sporting a black eye and trying to figure out who killed her best friend’s husband she would have said they were crazy.

  “Buck up, chica,” she said to herself, imagining Bernadette was speaking to her.

  What she wanted to do was shop. She decided, instead, to go into the bathroom, splash cold water on her face and see what she could do with makeup. This task gave a whole new meaning to the “fix your face” phrase bandied about so casually. Soon, she was pretty confident she wouldn’t trigger another reaction like the one she got from Brien when he saw her sans makeup this morning, especially as long as she wore a pair of oversized dark glasses. She transferred all the essentials from her Buti bag to the new Marc Jacobs bag she had bought at Saks. She slung it over her shoulders, cross body as the style allowed.

  “Ouch!” Her face wasn’t the only part of her anatomy still hurting. She repositioned the bag, and then picked up the photo of Roger.

  “What were you up to that got you murdered, Roger?” She asked the amiable looking man staring at her in that photo. She hoped someone at the Adobe Grill could get her closer to the answer to that question. Her skin crawled. Did she really want to know? She grabbed her phone and keys and marched to the kitchen before she could delay further.

  Jessica hollered to Bernadette that she was leaving and would be back at six when the pizza and salad were going to be delivered. A muffled acknowledgement came from somewhere at that back of the house as Jessica opened the kitchen door, stepped into the garage, and made her way to her bimmer.

  Then it struck her. Her search for MT was taking her to the La Quinta Resort & Spa. Not just restaurants, but a spa, bungalows, pools, golf courses, and shops awaited! She might just have time for a quick shopping fix if she got it together and finished her other chores quickly. Jessica felt a surge of happiness.

  “Sick, I know I’m sick. I’ll add that to the list of
things that are wrong with my life,” she said as she sped off toward the Cathedral City Police Department.

  CHAPTER 17

  Jessica sat at a corner table in the Adobe Grill at the La Quinta Resort. While the restaurant was only a few years old, the resort had been in the desert since the 1920s. Residents of the Coachella Valley never tired of telling and retelling stories about the rich and famous who visit places like the La Quinta resort. Some celebrities chose the resort to hide from the prying eyes of fans or reporters. Others chose it as a place to get a little work done, or for those hoping to shed a few years, it was a place to recuperate after you had a little work done. A haven for Hollywood icons like Garbo and Gable, it remained a getaway for writers, artists, tycoons, pop stars and even presidents to this day. Bill Clinton had already booked the place to host the Humana Golf Challenge in 2014.

  The legendary Frank Capra worked on many of his most beloved movie projects at the resort. Always vacationing in the same suite, Capra believed it brought him good luck. Supposedly, Irving Berlin wrote White Christmas in the gracious resort with magnificent views of snowcapped mountains in the winter. Just walking onto the now sprawling, but still intimate grounds, Jessica felt tension drain from her. Individual casitas were surrounded by dazzling white stucco walls, offset by blue gates, doors and trim. Terra cotta tile roofs and hand hewn bricks abounded. Everywhere deep red bougainvillea careened over the white-washed walls as palms sang overhead while swaying in the wind. It was transporting, at least momentarily.

  Re-immersed into a more dismal reality sitting in the restaurant, Jessica pored over the copies of reports Detective Hernandez had left for her. She had hoped to speak with Detective Hernandez or his partner. Unfortunately they were both out on a case. That was more than a little irritating since Jessica preferred to give the written version of Laura’s amended statement to Detective Hernandez in person. She also wanted to ask if there was any news about the goon in the pantyhose, but that would have to wait.

  Sipping iced tea she struggled to remain calm as she perused the reports. The police reports, and preliminary results from the evidence collected by CSI’s, revealed relatively little she didn’t already know. There was no evidence of forced entry, prior to the break-in by the goon in pantyhose Jessica encountered on Sunday. The report also confirmed, what she had already been told, that there no evidence that anything of value had been stolen. Nor was there evidence of a struggle. All of that suggested Roger had been shot by someone he knew and let into his home.

  As to time of death, the report noted that pizza and a six pack of sodas had been delivered to the house a little after 8:00 p.m. Friday evening. The pizza delivery guy, Bill Perry, said Roger answered the door and signed for the pizza paid for, online, about half an hour earlier. He gave him a good tip too. According to Bill Perry, Roger didn’t seem distressed. A little distracted, maybe, since at first he had given him a really big tip. Roger handed the delivery guy a wad of bills that included several twenties. When Bill Perry pointed out the mistake, Roger took back all but one of the twenties then told him to keep the rest. He didn’t see anyone else in the house but thought he heard the voice of a woman in the background. She was talking to someone, but no one answered, so he figured she was on the phone.

  A neighbor, Carla Gomez, in the house directly across the street from Roger and Laura reported seeing a woman enter the house earlier that evening. That was right around her dinner time, which would have been 6-ish. At first she thought it was Laura. She started to call out but stopped when she realized it must not be her. The visitor had parked at the curb and gone up to the front door. Laura always went in and out through the garage. The neighbor identified the car parked out front as a light blue Toyota Prius. She remembered that it was a Prius because she had been thinking about buying a hybrid since gas prices had gone through the roof. Mrs. Gomez was very observant and quite chatty with the police. She was the Neighborhood Watch captain and took the responsibility very seriously. Jessica made a note to be sure she or Jerry spoke with Mrs. Gomez.

  When asked if she had seen or heard anything else that night she said “no.” Then she went on to add that when she came out later, after dinner to walk the dog, the Prius was gone. A dark colored BMW sports car was parked almost in the same spot. She had seen the same car a couple times before, but had never seen anyone getting in or out of it.

  Mrs. Gomez volunteered that it was quiet that night but she and her husband Jorge turned in pretty early because he had to get up at 5:00 a.m. the next morning. Mrs. Gomez said there had been trouble across the street before but wouldn’t go into it, unless they really wanted her to. It was pretty clear who had called the police when Laura and Roger were fighting.

  The preliminary autopsy report was also included, for which Jessica was grateful. That meant she could put off that visit to the morgue in Indio. Roger had been shot three times with .38 caliber bullets. The first bullet had entered the upper abdomen, missing his heart but nicking the thoracic aorta, leading to considerable blood loss. The bullet left a nearly round entrance wound, suggesting whoever shot him was standing almost directly in front of him. The bullet exited his body and was found in the wall in the hallway opposite Roger’s office doorway. Powder tattooing on his clothing around the wound suggested the shot had been fired from a relatively short distance.

  He had also sustained a blow to the back of the head that likely came from a fall following the first shot. That blow may have knocked him out, but not for long, because there was evidence that he had tried to pull himself up off the ground, leaving a bloody hand print on the wall across from his office near the Master bedroom. There were blood smears, not only on his hands, but on his knees and pant legs. He had tried to crawl toward his bedroom either to get away or to call for help. His cell phone was found beneath his body, so it was possible that he had crawled to the phone and picked it up. Unfortunately for Roger, whoever had shot him the first time was still nearby. He was shot two more times in the back, with one of those bullets penetrating the heart, killing him and stopping the blood flow. Those two shots were fired at close range, too.

  The forensic team had collected fingerprints from various locations in the house. So far, most of the prints they had collected were from Laura or Roger. They had a couple extraneous prints that were yet in need of identification, one from a soda can and another from a door knob in the bathroom. A preliminary check using automated data bases of prints provided no match.

  The lab was trying to see if they could get anything from the lip of the soda can, like saliva or skin cells, that might contain DNA if a visitor drank from that can. They were still processing other trace evidence collected from examination of Roger’s body and the area around him in the hallway. Call records had been requested. The request included records for the land line as well as those for both Roger and Laura’s cell phones.

  The preliminary cause of death was a gunshot that stopped his heart, probably no more than a couple hours after eating the pizza that had been delivered at around 8:00 that evening. Although Jessica felt light-headed from the more gruesome details in the reports she thought it looked better for Laura as they made progress in putting together the timeline surrounding Roger’s death. Even if they couldn’t locate Eric-the-waiter, if Roger was killed any time before midnight, Laura was pretty much in the clear, at least as far as being the actual shooter.

  If the neighbor was correct, Roger had at least one and maybe two visitors Friday night, not counting the pizza delivery guy. One was a woman who drove a light blue Prius and looked a lot like Laura. Jerry could follow up to see if anyone else in the neighborhood got a better look at the woman who drove the Prius. Or if anyone could put a person with the BMW roadster, for that matter. Jessica presumed Mrs. Gomez would have told police if she had noted the license plate number or other distinguishing features that might help identify either car. She’d have Jerry ask, just in case Mrs. Gomez had overlooked something or remembered something later.


  Jessica called Jerry and filled him in on what she had found out from the police reports. He was already at Laura’s house and agreed to follow up with Mrs. Gomez, after finishing his search of Laura’s house and garage. Mrs. Gomez would, no doubt, be more than happy to talk to the handsome private investigator. The challenge for Jerry would be getting away from her.

  CHAPTER 18

  As Jessica put the phone away after speaking to Jerry, a tall, dark-haired woman walked into the Adobe Grill. When she entered several waiters moved quickly to seat her at a table a short distance from Jessica. A glance at the bartender was rewarded with a discreet nod. This was the person Jessica had come to the restaurant to find—MT.

  When Jessica spoke to him earlier, Jeff according to his name tag, had recognized Roger right away from the photo Jessica had with her. And he knew immediately who he had met on a number of occasions at the Adobe Grill. MT was Margarit Tilik, a regular at the La Quinta resort who frequented the restaurants, spa and shops on site. She visited from Los Angeles and stayed in the bungalows a few days at the end of each month, like clockwork. Her current visit had turned out to be a more extended stay. Jeff seemed to relish the opportunity to gossip and, at first, didn’t even ask Jessica who she was, or why she wanted to know about MT. Although he did stare closely at Jessica’s face, even with the makeup and sunglasses.

  “Roger’s not the only guy she’s had lunch with. She usually has some sort of escort. In fact, she’s gone through a lot of them. There were all sorts of rumors that these guys were drivers, personal trainers, bodyguards or something like that. Originally I thought this Roger guy you’re asking about was just the “babysitter du jour.” A few weeks ago something seemed to change.” Jeff paused.