Dead Head db-3

by Rosemary Harris

  “Will you two fruitcakes please get out of here?” Roxy sank her head into both of her hands. “Natalie,” she yelled for her assistant, “get my calendar. I need four days at the ranch and a stop at Dr. P’s on the way up.”

  “Save us some time, Roxy. Unless that envelope has something to do with Brookfield or Caroline Sturgis, we don’t really care what’s in it. We just want to know who delivered it.”

  She closed her eyes and made circles with her head in a stress-reducing ritual I imagined she performed many times during the course of a morning like this one.

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with either of them. I do represent a great many properties apart from that decrepit, blood-soaked nursery. It’s from an agency we sometimes work with. Nina Mazzo’s.”

  I called Nina and made an appointment to see her that afternoon. This time I didn’t pretend to be Thelma Turner.

  Thirty-eight

  Lucy stared at the image we’d printed out from my computer. “Kevin Brookfield must be a helluva lot better looking than this picture if every woman in this burg would be so all-fired happy to see him relocate here.”

  “We don’t know that Donnelley is Brookfield. You may be looking at a picture of someone else. But Brookfield has something. No denying. It’s something else,” I said, trying to figure out what it was. Lucy and I had time before our meeting with Nina Mazzo, so we doubled back to the Paradise to pick the brains of the town’s resident expert on men. Maybe Babe could put her finger on it.

  “It’s true. I am generally acknowledged to be an expert on a great many subjects—movies, music, and men included,” Babe said. We’d parked ourselves in a rear booth and made our guru join us.

  “What makes a woman gravitate toward a man?” Lucy asked.

  “She kidding or is this some Sphinxlike riddle?” Babe said.

  “We’re serious.”

  “You mean if he isn’t wealthy, famous, or powerful and doesn’t look like Johnny Depp, act like Mr. Darcy, and make love like Don Juan?” She gave it some thought. “Okay, he’s got a sad story. How’s this? He’s a single parent whose wife died young—and tragically—and he nursed her until the bitter end. Could be his mother dying but not as effective as the wife. The kid’s not necessary; in the absence of a kid, a dog would work. Dogs are chick magnets, but best for generating one-night stands, not lasting relationships.”

  Lucy and I were extremely impressed. “Where do you get this?” she asked.

  “Soap Opera Digest, 1994. Classic story line. I think it was on Another World,” she said. Babe continued spinning her hypothetical situations. “Hoping to reconnect with a childhood sweetheart is another good one, but the dead wife story works really well. Shows he’s a romantic and will stay faithful—even after you’re in the ground.” She stood up to go back to work.

  “Did Brookfield say anything like that to you?” I asked.

  “He suggested it. Single guy, not too handsome, not too neat, so probably straight, looking for real estate in a new town, to start a business. To start over. Charming, no ring, or ring line, as if he’d just taken it off. A little flirty but nothing overt. Screams ‘you can trust me, I have a broken heart.’”

  Even if she was wrong, it was a damn good answer on the fly and something to be filed for future reference. Oddly enough, apart from the wife and the part about being new in town, she had also just described Mike O’Malley—romantic, faithful, looking after an aged parent, and a dog owner, always a plus. And just at that moment entering the diner.

  “Oh, this looks a mite scary. Three beautiful women conspiring? Or is it gossiping?” O’Malley said. He sat at a counter stool a few feet away and waved off the young waitress’s efforts to bring him a menu.

  “Why is it when men talk, they’re discussing, and when women talk, we’re gossiping? That’s very misogynistic of you,” Lucy said. “Very disappointing. I’m going to stop telling Paula and Babe that you are the cutest guy in Springfield.”

  “This conversation is taking an intriguing turn, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time for verbal foreplay. I just came in because I saw your car and thought you might like to know. You can tell Caroline that she doesn’t have to worry about Countertop Man anymore. He’s dead.”

  Thirty-nine

  “Did I miss something?” Lucy said.

  Babe, Mike, and I replied as one, “Yes.”

  “Catch her up,” Mike said, getting up to leave. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t go now. Was he…murdered?”

  McGinley and his car were found in a ditch in Macedonia, Ohio. The local police got in touch with O’Malley because he’d made the most recent inquiry into McGinley’s record, and as a courtesy, the cops in Ohio thought they’d inform him.

  “What do you think happened?” Babe asked.

  “Fell asleep at the wheel, got drunk, and drove—who knows? Pretty bad accident, though. Gas tank caught fire.”

  “Does that usually happen when a car goes into a ditch?”

  “Apparently this ditch led to a twenty-five-foot drop from a two-lane bridge.”

  “Could he have been run off the road?”

  “Yes. He also could have had an Elvis sighting or been abducted by aliens. I didn’t ask.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  Because he was a cop in Springfield, Connecticut, not Macedonia, Ohio. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t ask. And I would, but first we had an appointment with Nina Mazzo.

  “You could be a private investigator,” Lucy said. “Seriously.”

  “I think not.”

  “Look at how good you are at this stuff.”

  “That’s what Babe said. Maybe if the gardening thing doesn’t work out.”

  When I had researched Nina the first time, I learned a little about the profession. Most PIs came from a background of law enforcement. Who knew? It was the image of them standing in the shrubbery snapping pictures that made the job seem faintly cartoonish and not quite legitimate, but it was. Fewer than 40 percent of their cases were related to infidelity and divorce (I would have guessed more), but that’s all most people ever thought of when they heard the words private investigator. That or Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Hopefully, Nina would tell us if tracking down missing persons and delivering unmarked packages like the one Caroline Sturgis had received made up the other 60 percent of the business.

  We drove downtown and saw the property values drop sharply from one block to the next until we passed under the railroad tracks.

  “This isn’t much of an area,” Lucy said.

  “Depends what you’re looking for. If you’re a contractor, this is as good as Decorator’s Row in New York.” We passed antiques alley, the flagstone and paving center, and the kitchen and bathroom remodeling district and I made a right onto the stretch of road where Nina’s building was located. As we pulled into Nina’s parking lot, I told Lucy about Mazzo’s recently reduced circumstances and her fervent wish that the economy would bounce back so there would be more philandering husbands.

  “That’s the most twisted logic I’ve heard in a long time. It would make a very salable feature film.”

  “You two are gonna get along just fine.”

  We had to wait for three men balancing a massive slice of soapstone on a dolly to pass before we settled into a spot around the corner from the Mazzo Agency.

  “What was that?” Lucy said, watching the hunk of rock go by.

  “I hear the apartment dweller in you coming out. That’s a slab of stone which will be cut into a countertop.”

  Lucy had been wrong about Ellis Damon, but she wasn’t wrong about something else—when people lie, they frequently use or say something familiar because they think it will make the lie more plausible. McGinley may not have been in Springfield to help his friend The Countertop King get his business off the ground, but perhaps he got the idea after a visit to Nina Mazzo. I remembered how hot Nina kept her office, so I peeled off
my jacket.

  “Are you expecting to come to blows?” Lucy asked as I locked the car.

  If Nina was surprised to see me, she hid it well.

  “How about that—you know I have another prospective client who looks just like you, I think she said her name was Thelma Turner. And who might you be, Etta James?”

  “I’m Paula Holliday and this is Lucy Cavanaugh.”

  She motioned for us to sit down.

  “We’re helping a friend and would like to ask you a few questions.”

  “That’s very admirable. Tell me why I should care.”

  “We think you or someone from this office delivered an unmarked blue bubble pack mailer to 197 Chelsea Road yesterday morning. Is that true?”

  “I have a very busy practice. I really can’t say.” The famous discretion from her place mat ad was kicking in again. “Unlike you, I’m not in the friend-helping business. I do this for a living.”

  “Do you know a man named Chase McGinley? He may have used an alias—scruffy guy, plaid shirt, down vest, bad teeth? He would have come in about a week ago.”

  Nina’s face was so stony, she had to be holding something back. “Ms. Holliday, you don’t really expect me to answer these questions, do you? Why would I?”

  “Because you used to be a cop and presumably cared about the law. Chase McGinley is dead. And the envelope delivered to that address contained blackmail. I think the two incidents are related.”

  She closed her eyes briefly. “When can I go back to the halcyon days of CEOs cheating on their wives?”

  McGinley had visited Nina Mazzo—he’d probably gotten her name from the same place mat that I had. He said he was looking for an old girlfriend who dumped him when she was carrying his child. She was blond, about forty to forty-five, and would have a son about fourteen.

  “I gave him some basic information on how we’d try to find her. Of course I didn’t tell him everything. I wanted him to come back, but he never did. I may need to redo the free consultation wording on that place mat ad. This is getting ridiculous.”

  “And the package?”

  “Totally different case.”

  Without revealing details, Nina told us was the item to be delivered was a pendant, a gift from a married lover. The client wanted to end the affair and make a clean break of it, but she knew it had sentimental value and didn’t want to just throw it away or trust it to the mails.

  “How thoughtful,” Lucy said.

  “She?” I asked.

  Forty

  Nina Mazzo’s physical description of the woman who’d hired her to deliver the package to Caroline’s home was next to useless. It wasn’t that she was not perceptive, she was—but the woman did her best to appear as bland and nondescript as possible.

  “She was a big girl,” Nina said, “slim but tall, that is.”

  With thick, dyed blond hair blunt-cut in a chin-length bob. She wore a plain navy suit with a striped silk blouse. Dark sunglasses. Not much jewelry, a ring with a tiny jewel-toned stone and a heart-shaped pendant. She didn’t speak much; she just stated the reason that she had come and produced the small white jewelry box in a mesh pouch. She showed Nina what was in the box, but Nina gave it just a cursory look before the woman enclosed a note and sealed the box.

  “Her voice was raspy and she coughed into her hankie a few times,” Nina said. “I’m a little germophobic, so I hurried her out and kept my distance when we parted.” She said her name was Brigid O’Shaughnessy, “but I’m an old movie buff so I knew she was lying. I didn’t believe her about the name, but I believed her three hundred dollars, as the saying goes.”

  Didn’t anyone tell this poor woman their real name? Not-Brigid left the item and paid in cash. Mazzo never saw her again.

  “Did you know the item was going to Caroline Sturgis’s home?” This was the first time I’d mentioned her name, and from the ashen look on Nina’s face I don’t think she did know.

  “I checked the zip code. When I saw the address was in the high-rent district, I took the gig.”

  “Did your man return later for any reason?” I asked.

  “Woman. But, no, she didn’t.”

  Lucy and I arrived back to my place with more new questions than answers.

  “Can I open this wine?” she asked. “I think we deserve a drink.”

  “Go ahead. I have to think.”

  She poured herself a glass of red and flopped onto the sofa opposite me, kicking off her shoes and stretching out her legs on the leather ottoman. She flexed and pointed her toes as if she were in an exercise class. “I’m really sorry I have to leave tomorrow morning. This is getting good.”

  The way Lucy saw it, Kate Gustafson had to be alive. What other woman could it be? Eddie Donnelley’s mother? A girlfriend? A homicidal former cheerleader?

  “All those bitter girls who didn’t make the squad,” I said. “Now that’s an avenue we haven’t explored.”

  Suddenly I wished that Caroline and Grant hadn’t escaped to Wellfleet. Until she called me, I couldn’t get answers to any of the questions that were stacking up like books in my to-be-read pile. She hadn’t given me a straight answer. Did she know if Kate Gustafson was alive? She’d never given me a straight answer. I willed the phone to ring.

  And it did.

  “Holy— I made the phone ring!”

  “Uh, you did not,” Lucy said, circling her ankles and listening to the bones pop. “The person who’s calling you made the phone ring. Are you going to answer it or shall I?”

  I ran to the kitchen. I didn’t recognize the number on caller ID.

  “Hello?

  “Is this Paula Holliday? I’m Kevin Brookfield. I think we may have some business to discuss.” I turned on speakerphone so that Lucy could listen in.

  Brookfield wanted to meet. He suggested Chiaramonte’s nursery. Lucy shook her head furiously, but no problem, I’d already done that once and wasn’t interested in a return engagement. From now on any meetings with strange men, remarkable or otherwise, would occur in crowded, brightly lit locations.

  “How about the Springfield Town Center?” I said. It was an enclosed mall that I’d been to once about three years back. “Seven thirty?” Click.

  “You think it’ll be safe?” Lucy said.

  “The man hasn’t done anything here except drink coffee. Maybe we’ve been too quick to think he’s involved in all this. Besides, we’re meeting in an enclosed mall, after dinner, in the fourth quarter. It’ll probably be packed with type-A shoppers who want to get all their gift-buying done before Thanksgiving. You’ll be there to protect me. What can happen?”

  She brightened. “Can I wear the wig again?”

  The Springfield Town Center was about five minutes from the train station. Brookfield and I planned to meet in front of the Crate & Barrel store on the lower level. Lucy would be on the lookout from the upper level. She’d be outfitted in her Caroline-in-disguise disguise and carrying bags to look like a real shopper. I rummaged under my sink looking for bags.

  “I’m not carrying a Walmart bag. Don’t you have anything else?” I remembered the clothing she’d given me and resurrected the Victoria’s Secret and J. Crew bags filled with her own unworn purchases; she was much happier with her look, which she insisted was more believable.

  “You didn’t even take the tags off.”

  “I’ve only had them for a few weeks. How long did you have them?”

  “Good point.”

  At the shopping center, I grabbed a bench and waited in front of the furniture store. Lucy hovered upstairs pacing back and forth like a nervous talent show contestant.

  I scoured the crowd. Everyone looked normal; then in the distance I saw a man smiling and walking directly toward me. Brookfield was more attractive than I remembered, but then I’d been busy and hadn’t paid much attention. It was his walk more than anything else. He stopped in front of me, the tiniest bit closer than I was comfortable with.

  “I’m Kevin.” I stood u
p and we shook hands. From somewhere I heard a noise and out of the corner of my eye saw Lucy bending over to retrieve the phone she’d dropped. Ten bucks said she was trying to take his picture and couldn’t figure out how to do it. I pretended not to know her.

  I understood his appeal and instantly felt a kinship with Roxy Rhodes and the Main Street Moms. One thing was certain: he wasn’t the man who had jumped me. With those arms he could have inflicted a lot more damage than just a bruised wrist. And he wasn’t limping. As hard as I’d kicked my assailant, I had to think he’d still have a little bit of a limp. Things were looking up.

  “Want to go someplace?” he said, hands on his hips.

  “Let’s just stay here, okay?”

  He seemed amused by my security precautions, but after my first few ill-advised meetings, I thought it best to stay out in the open.

  “Suit yourself.”

  He sat down and we danced around the subject of Caroline and the nursery. If he wanted something, he was taking his sweet time getting around to it, so I decided to strike first.

  “What exactly do you want from Caroline?”

  “Well, that’s straightforward. Straightforward is good. I’d like her to end this.”

  “End what?”

  We stopped smiling at about the same time. Lucy stopped pacing upstairs; she must have sensed the tone of our conversation had changed.

  “Let’s not play games. She’s been stringing us along for long enough. I want what she’s been holding on to. It’s what I need to make a new start. Then I’ll never darken her door again. I promise.”

  Omigod. It was him. “Like you did twenty-five years ago,” I said, I slid farther away from him on the bench, and he pretended not to know what I was talking about.

  From the upper level of the mall a cell phone came crashing down to my feet. Lucy had either dropped it again or thrown it to get my attention. I looked up and saw her struggling with two men.