“Well, if at some point you decide you want that letter,” I added, “just give me a call.”
My first stop was the laundry room, whose floor was now dry. I looked in the recycle bins next to the big upright freezer. Sure enough, I spied, along with a spent bottle of premium vodka and a few empty food jars, a brown Guinness bottle. I picked it up, peered inside, shook it. The heady perfume of Irish stout cut through the cloying scent of fabric softener that always permeated that room. A drop or two of liquid remained. So this bottle had probably been tossed in there in the past couple of days.
Maria must have heard the clinking of glass. “Did you lose your earring in the recycling?” she called.
“I’m checking everywhere.”
I hope you’ve already figured out the lost-earring bit was a big fat lie. My intuition was shrieking like the Bride of Frankenstein. Okay, in all probability the beer drinker was a regular pal of Irene’s—didn’t Sophie Halperin like a brewski or two?—but the whole thing didn’t feel right. Throw a larcenous padre with impeccable timing into the mix and I figured there was a better than even chance said padre had been sitting in Irene’s living room in the past day or two, sipping a cold one and working the conversation around to a certain McAuliffe family heirloom, one with a fishy tail and perky, ruby-tipped tatas.
Had he come here dressed as a priest then? Was that how he’d gained entrance? Irene was raised in the faith but had long ago slipped into your basic A & P routine: Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday. Would the clerical collar make her easier to manipulate, or would she be quicker than I was to see through it? Knowing Irene, my money was on that second thing.
A plausible scenario was beginning to take shape in my overtaxed brain.
Okay, first of all? I know what I said last night about the guy forcing Irene to talk, but Jonah was right. Torquemada with his rack and thumb screws couldn’t have gotten her to spill the beans about that brooch. This was one stubborn, headstrong broad. But let’s say the padre was just as determined to learn the location of the brooch, or even to leave here with the thing in his pocket. After all, if Jonah was correct, no one outside of the Poker Posse knew that it was no longer in Irene’s possession, and they weren’t blabbing. How many people even knew of its existence? For that matter, how did the padre know?
Anyway, let’s say he’s wrangled an audience with her ladyship and has nothing more to show for his efforts than a bellyful of good Irish beer. Maybe she’s booted him out on that nice, tight butt of his and commanded him never to darken her door again. But he refuses to accept defeat. What then?
My guess? He returns Wednesday evening with a more aggressive plan of action. There’s no talking his way through the front door this time, so he picks the back-door lock, locates the lady of the house in her home theater, and leans on her hard. We’re talking threats, coercion. Maybe he waves a weapon at her.
I still couldn’t see Irene giving in. Well, maybe if he threatened Sexy Beast, but let’s assume he didn’t go to that extreme—mainly because I didn’t want to think about it.
What I could see Irene doing in that terrifying situation is suffering a fatal heart attack. Jonah’s Exhibit C: scary home invasion was gaining credibility by the minute. The padre might not be a murderer in the technical sense, but if he scared her to death, if he stood there and watched her expire without attempting CPR or calling for help, then you tell me where you draw the line.
So now Irene has gone and died on him and he’s no closer to the mermaid brooch than he was before. Yet somehow he finds out not only where the darn thing is but that if he intends to beat me to it, he’d better get the aforementioned butt over to Ahearn’s pronto.
I’d gone back into the foyer and started up the curved staircase before I realized I was headed there. I took the steps more slowly than I wanted to because of my knee. Irene’s library, at the end of the hallway, doubled as her home office. She kept meticulous records, all of which were of the dead-tree variety and resided in an expensive lateral wooden file cabinet. A state-of-the-art laptop sat on her desk, but it was reserved for email, shopping, and of course online poker.
The bottom file drawer contained household paperwork, everything from A for art purchases to W for warranty info. The top drawer was for sensitive stuff such as medical records, investment statements, and invoices from Jane Delaney, your friendly neighborhood Death Diva and dog sitter.
Irene kept the file cabinet locked at all times, yet when I tried the handle, it slid open on well-oiled tracks. My nape prickled.
Delaney, Jane, was filed between Credit Cards and Dentist. I pulled out the extra-wide hanging folder bulging with copies of every piece of paper that had been exchanged between Irene and myself during our long association. She was a stickler for formal record keeping and insisted on presenting me with handwritten work orders before each job and receiving a detailed invoice upon its completion. If Irene had qualms about paying someone to lift a valuable piece of jewelry from her former friend’s corpse, you couldn’t tell from the top item in the folder. It was a copy of the most recent work order, the particulars of the assignment spelled out in cringe-inducing detail, including precisely when and where I would nab the brooch.
But that’s not all that was there. My heart pounded so hard, I nearly stumbled. Irene’s visitor had left his calling card, all right.
No, literally, he’d left his calling card, paper-clipped to the work order. It was a stark white card, a little smaller than a business card. Printed smack-dab in the center, in elegant raised black ink, were the words Mr. Martin Kade McAuliffe.
I’d never been formally introduced to the man, but his reputation preceded him. The black sheep of the family had some explaining to do.
5
Bad Bad Black Sheep
“THIS IS YOUR lucky night, Jane. Ladies drink free on Thursdays.” Mr. Martin Kade McAuliffe slapped a small square napkin on the bar in front of me. “What’ll it be?”
So much for ambushing him at his place of work. He hadn’t looked at all surprised when I claimed a barstool. I could have been one of his Thursday-night regulars. The man who’d left the calling card wore a black vee-neck sweater with the sleeves pushed up, displaying his lovely shoulders and pecs to better effect than the priest’s shirt and collar I’d last seen him in.
He’d recognized me instantly, though I, too, looked different than I had at Ahearn’s. My hair was down, for one thing, the reddish blond waves falling unrestrained past my shoulders except for the front pieces, which were loosely pulled back in a charmingly messy bun, though some strands had escaped to curl artlessly around my face and my big hoop earrings. And yeah, it had taken me twenty minutes in front of a mirror to achieve that level of casual perfection, what of it? I wore a dark red top and suede jacket over skinny jeans.
The internet is a wondrous thing. Within two seconds of typing “Martin Kade McAuliffe” into the search bar, I’d discovered that he tended bar at Tierney’s Publick House in Southampton. I knew little else about the black sheep of Clan McAuliffe, aside from the fact he was the illegitimate grandson of Irene’s late husband, Arthur, and had done bad, bad things that had alienated him from his family.
Tierney’s was an upscale Irish pub in Southampton, oceanfront playground of the rich and famous and more than an hour’s drive from my Hobbit hole in Sandy Cove. After Memorial Day this bar would be crammed with the wealthy folks who summered out here, as well as working stiffs with weekend house shares and day-tripping tourists. But it was a Thursday night in early April and there were a handful of locals, most in their twenties, schmoozing at the tables, drinking, and playing darts. At the end of the bar a hipster couple were enjoying a quietly intense conversation over Irish coffees.
The décor featured the usual dark wood with Gaelic posters and tchotchkes, but the place was clean, the lighting refined, and the faint aroma of beer within a range I considered acceptable. The classic rock emanating from the speakers wasn’t too loud, and the TV over the bar,
now showing a soccer match, had been blessedly silenced.
“Nothing for me,” I said. “I’m here to talk, not drink.”
Martin produced a cognac snifter and a bottle of high-end añejo tequila. The brand happened to be my favorite, the one I dispensed like a miser at home, the one that would run you well into the double digits for a single shot at your better watering holes. Not that I ever ordered it outside the house or even found myself in your better watering holes on a regular basis.
“How’s the knee?” he asked. So he had been paying attention in Ahearn’s parking lot.
“Hurts like hell.” Okay, not really, it felt a lot better today, but he didn’t need to know that.
“This should help.” He dispensed a generous pour and made a show of glancing around for his boss. “The free drinks are supposed to be from the well. I won’t tell if you won’t.”
“Shucks, Padre, I’m honored,” I said, and was rewarded with a little scowl, which made the bastard look even sexier, damn him. “How’d you know?” I lifted the glass. “About this.”
“I know a lot about you, Jane.”
“Which isn’t really fair, is it, since the only thing I know about you is that you have a gift for breaking and entering.” I tossed his calling card on the bar. “Oh, I do know one other thing about you. I know your drink is Guinness.”
“Second choice. Irene doesn’t stock Jameson’s.”
What I knew about Martin McAuliffe did not, in fact, end there. I knew he wasn’t a murderer. Well, unless he happened to be the dumbest killer on the planet. People who do very bad things do not, as a rule, advertise the fact by placing darling little calling cards at the scene of the crime. For the same reason, I was fairly certain he hadn’t witnessed Irene’s death by natural causes and failed to call 911.
Finding that card had shot my carefully crafted theory all to hell.
He was, however, indisputably guilty of grand theft mermaid. It was that troublesome mermaid that had brought me here.
Martin gave me a quick once-over. “Take off your jacket. It’s warm in here.”
“Nope. I’m good.”
He was right, it was warm, and getting warmer with each sip of tequila. However, I couldn’t remove the jacket without taking my straw tote bag off my shoulder, and I couldn’t take the tote off my shoulder without revealing the presence of a scruffy seven-pound stowaway, currently snoozing in the bottom of the bag on his sweater-nest. My hope was that Sexy Beast would remain asleep and undetected until I was out of there.
Well, what was I supposed to do? Leave him all alone in my shabby little basement apartment? I could be gone for hours. He’d just suffered the loss of his mommy and needed the reassurance of a warm, familiar body.
All right, so maybe that reassurance went two ways and it felt good to have SB’s slovenly little self curled against my side when I went to confront the big bad wolf in black sheep’s clothing. It didn’t mean I was insecure. Or a wimp. Or…
Oh, shut up.
A burly young man with a goatee sidled up to the bar, checked me out, and pushed an empty pitcher toward Martin. “Again, dude.”
“You got it.” As Martin set the pitcher under the beer tap he told me, “You made a long drive for nothing.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I raised my glass. “I’m sitting here with a tasty free drink and enjoying a scintillating conversation with a mysterious stranger. Beats sitting at home watching Seinfeld reruns.”
Beer and money exchanged hands. Martin watched the young man saunter back to his buddies. He turned to me. He was not smiling. “Tell Irene she can forget about the mermaid. She’s never getting her greedy mitts on that brooch again.”
His words were a punch to the gut. I wasn’t surprised he hadn’t heard. He was, after all, estranged from his entire family.
While I groped for the right words, he braced his impressive forearms on the bar and leaned over to stare at my tote. In a bored tone he asked, “Seriously?”
I looked down to see Sexy Beast peeking over the top of the bag. He yipped and I tried to shush him. My affection for this little animal and my feelings about Irene swirled into a confusing amalgam of love and grief, and at that moment I just wanted out of there. My eyes stung and I kept my head directed down at the dog, horrified that this man might glimpse my weakness.
“SB, hush, now,” I whispered, trying in vain to push the dog down into the tote before anyone else noticed him. “Be a good boy for Jane.”
“Get that thing out of here,” Martin said, and something burst inside my chest.
“I will!” I snapped, getting in his face now, letting him see it all, the grief, the tears. “But not until I finish what I came here for.” I cursed and rummaged in my pocket for a tissue, cursing again when I came up empty. SB chose that moment to leap from the tote onto the bar. He’s quite the little acrobat when he puts his mind to it.
Martin seized the poodle’s harness and handed me a fistful of bar napkins. He stood watching as I mopped my damp eyes and blew my nose. I happen to know I could lead Santa’s sleigh when I’ve been crying. So much for Jane Delaney, drop-dead-sexy Death Diva. Meanwhile SB was in an orgiastic frenzy of sniffing, straining against Martin’s hold to get at the beer taps and their fascinating malty, hoppy smells.
Well, the cat—or rather, the dog—was out of the bag. I shucked off my jacket and tossed it onto the barstool next to me. From his table behind me the burly beer drinker said, “Yo, what is that thing, some kinda hairy rat?” His buddies laughed.
Martin said nothing, just watched me with his unreadable blue gaze as I got myself under control.
I cleared my throat and looked him in the eye. “Irene died last night. Heart attack.”
If I hadn’t been watching him closely, I wouldn’t have noticed the slight widening of his eyes.
“I just saw her,” he said. “Tuesday evening.”
Well, that was one question answered.
“Tequila” started playing in the recesses of my tote bag. What now? I dug in the bag, ignoring Martin’s smirk at my choice of ring tone, and discovered the phone had fallen out of its sleeve and was caught in the folds of Irene’s sweater. I yanked the sweater out of the bag and watched something drop out of one of its pockets and roll onto the wooden floor. I snatched up the phone, glanced at the screen, and groaned. Sten Jakobsen again, doing his lawyerly thing. Not a good time, Sten. I did my SB-loving thing and dumped the call.
I bent to retrieve the object that had fallen out of Irene’s sweater pocket: a half-used roll of antacids. In all the years I’d known Irene, I’d never seen her take an antacid. She’d bragged about her cast-iron stomach, even in her eighth decade of life. So what was she doing with these? I shoved them into my jacket pocket where SB couldn’t get to them.
Martin lifted the bottle of añejo tequila. I held my hand over my glass. “No more for me, I’m driving.” He brushed my hand away and poured, then produced a bowl of peanuts. As if a few goobers would undo the effects of a couple of shots once I was behind the wheel. I let the excellent tequila sit there untouched, and wished I could take it home and pour it into my nearly empty bottle.
SB’s nails scraped the bar top as he changed course and fought to get near the peanuts. With his free hand Martin picked up a nut. “Does he like these?”
“He likes anything that qualifies as people food. It’s dog food he turns his nose up at.”
“Wouldn’t you?” He offered the peanut and watched SB chew, the little mouth gaping wide open with every smack of his lips. Martin looked closer. “What’s wrong with his fang?”
“Nothing’s wrong with his fang. It’s a perfectly functional fang.”
“The left one.” He peeled up SB’s lip on that side. “It sticks out over his bottom lip.”
“So?”
“So it’s a bucktooth. A buckfang,” he said. “I’ve never seen that.”
“Big deal,” I said. “It’s not like it hinders his eating or anything.”
/> “No, it just makes him look even more special.”
I scooped SB off the bar and tried to wedge him back into the tote. The little demon braced his legs on the rim of the bag and refused to cooperate.
I surrendered and held him against my chest. “So,” I said. “You were at Irene’s Tuesday evening.”
Martin arranged glassware in silence. He wouldn’t have revealed even that if I hadn’t surprised him with the news of her death.
“Had the two of you met before? Maybe when your grandfather was alive?” Metaphorical crickets chirped. I was curious about their connection, but more than that, if I could break the ice, if I could get him to warm up to me even a little, he might be in a more receptive frame of mind when I brought up my real reason for being there.
“Beat it, Jane.”
Or not.
“And waste all this quality tequila?” I pulled my drink closer, though we both knew I had no intention of finishing it. I popped a couple of peanuts into my mouth and fed another to Sexy Beast. I had to be careful how many I gave him. It was a long drive back to Sandy Cove.
“There’s only one reason you’d have bothered to track me down here,” he said. “Tough luck. You had your chance and you blew it.”
Thanks for rubbing it in, jerk. “I’m thinking you returned in the middle of the night Tuesday—well, Wednesday morning,” I said. “After Irene was asleep. You picked the back-door lock, disabled her sophisticated alarm system. Quite an impressive skill set, by the way.” When he failed to acknowledge the backhanded compliment, I plowed on. “You came looking for the brooch, but it’s a big house and you figured you’d start with Irene’s home office—her files. Like if you learned the thing was in a bank safe-deposit box, you’d have to give up.”
Undertaking Irene Page 6
