Undertaking Irene

by Pamela Burford

  “She was here every day,” Bonnie pointed out. “It would have been easy enough for her to do it.”

  “She tasted one of them once,” I said. “She told me it was awful and she didn’t know why anyone would drink them.”

  “Yet her boss did. Willingly.”

  “Well, Irene despised health food,” I said. “To her, the poisoned smoothie probably tasted exactly like she expected a healthy drink to taste, and she choked it down because it was supposed to make her stomach feel better. My point is, why would Maria come right out and say that to me, just volunteer how terrible the stuff tasted, if she was the one who poisoned them?”

  “I see what you mean,” Bonnie said. “It would be in her interest to let everyone keep thinking Irene died of a simple heart attack. No autopsy, no investigation. Saying that to you about the smoothies is like waving a red flag.”

  “Exactly.” I sent Martin a smug look that said, See? I have this under control. He did not appear convinced, especially when I added, “There’s actually a can of wasp spray under the kitchen sink, but everyone has stuff like that lying around, right?”

  “Do you mind if I take it with me for testing?” Bonnie asked.

  I opened my mouth to say, “Knock yourself out,” but Martin spoke first.

  “No.” He sat up straight. “Jane, don’t let her remove anything from this house.”

  I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to ask why on earth I shouldn’t cooperate if it would help the cops apprehend Irene’s killer. But the look on his face told me I had my foot poised over that stinky old pile. He could see it even if I couldn’t.

  “Well, um,” I said, “maybe it’s not such a good idea for you to do that, Bonnie. Not right now, anyway.”

  “Don’t you want to know whether the ingredients in the wasp spray match up with what they found in the tox screen?” she asked, the soul of reason.

  If they did, it would be coincidence. I was certain Patrick had poisoned the smoothies before bringing them into this house and that Irene’s wasp spray had nothing to do with it. “It can, you know, wait. Like I said.”

  Detective Hernandez treated the pesky priest to a long, suspicious stare. “Tell me, Father, do you belong to the diocese? I know you’re not with the local parish.”

  “You know, I’m really very busy today,” I blurted, hoping to deflect her attention from Martin. “I’m in the middle of moving. So if that’s all…”

  “That’s not all,” Bonnie said. “Maria isn’t the only one who had unimpeded access to Irene’s refrigerator.”

  It took a few seconds for her meaning to sink in, and when it did, the blood drained from my head in a sickening rush. I glanced at Martin, who said, “Now would be a good time to stop talking.”

  “I’m sure Father Kade thinks he’s doing you a favor,” Bonnie said, “but refusing to cooperate with the police does not send a favorable message.”

  My mouth felt dry. I licked my lips. “That’s just… crazy. I could never hurt Irene.”

  Martin stood, and SB immediately curled up on the nice warm spot he’d just vacated. “Jane. Listen to me.” He leaned on the arms of my chair, his face inches from mine. “Talking to the cops can never help you. It can only hurt you.”

  I tore my gaze from his. I had to make Bonnie understand. “Ask Dom. He’ll tell you how I felt about Irene. She was like a grandmother to me. I loved her.”

  Martin straightened with a sigh of resignation.

  “What possible reason would I have to hurt her?” I continued. “Okay, she gave me this house in her will, but I didn’t even know about that until after she died. Now, Patrick knew he was in her will. He knew ahead of time that she was leaving him sixteen million bucks. That’s a motive for murder if ever there was one.”

  Martin slumped back onto the sofa, displacing SB, both of them looking thoroughly disgruntled. Well, what could it hurt to point out the obvious? To remind Bonnie that what Patrick had to gain by killing Irene was a heck of a lot more than what I had to gain?

  “I agree,” Bonnie said. “That kind of money would definitely qualify as motive for murder.”

  “Thank you.” I tossed my hand as if to say, There! Some common sense. Martin did not appear to share my relief. The grump.

  Bonnie smoothed a wrinkle out of her pants leg. “Of course, if Patrick O’Rourke were convicted of murdering Irene McAuliffe, he would be disqualified from inheriting her fortune.”

  “Well, I should hope so,” I said.

  “I take it you’ve read Irene’s will?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Then you know that if Patrick is disqualified,” she said, “his inheritance will go to you.”

  I started to nod, then said, “Wait, what? It’ll go to me?” I looked at Martin, who glumly nodded. Unlike me, he’d apparently made it past the first few paragraphs of legalese. I experienced another head rush and slumped back against my chair.

  “It works in reverse,” Bonnie said. “If you were disqualified from inheriting, Patrick would get the house. I mean, it’s a nice house, but it can’t compare with what he’s getting, am I right? Plus the money comes with no strings attached.” She nodded toward Sexy Beast, as if he were some kind of unwanted obligation.

  As I struggled to formulate a response, she added, “But you know all this, because you read the will.”

  “Yes,” I murmured, then, “No! I didn’t read that far. I didn’t know about that part. Plus I didn’t even come across her will until after she was dead.”

  “Where did you come across it?” Bonnie asked.

  I pointed upstairs. “Her file cabinet.”

  “Did she keep the cabinet locked?”

  Absently I nodded. “The key is behind the O’Keefe painting.”

  Martin’s gruff exhalation shook me out of the stupor that threatened to hijack my brain.

  I got to my feet. “Okay, were done here. This conversation is over.”

  “And you’re telling me you never borrowed that key and sneaked a peek at Irene’s will?” Bonnie asked. “Coming here two or three times a week like you did, for how many years?”

  I didn’t bother telling her that Irene had shown me where she hid the key in case of an emergency, because she trusted me. I didn’t tell her that I’d never opened that file cabinet while Irene was alive and that when I finally did, I hadn’t needed the key because Martin had left it unlocked after breaking into it.

  Too late, I remembered what the smart murderers always told the detectives on the ten million episodes of Law & Order I’d sat through. I’m not saying anything until my lawyer gets here.

  Gee, if only someone had given me good advice like that.

  I imagined Bonnie entertaining Dom with a blow-by-blow of this whole wretched conversation. She’d tell him how I kept opening my yap and digging myself in deeper, all the while ignoring Father Kade’s commonsense warnings. They’d laugh and she’d say, You never told me what a ditz she is! And he’d say, Why do you think I never wanted to have kids with her?

  Bonnie didn’t budge from her seat. “You do see how it looks, don’t you, Jane? You, who have the most to gain from Patrick O’Rourke’s conviction for Irene’s murder, have pulled out the stops to incriminate him.” She ticked off points on her fingers. “You claim you found Patrick searching the victim’s fridge, a claim that cannot be corroborated. You ‘discover’ a contaminated cup that links him to the crime. You pressure the victim’s executor to halt her cremation and order an autopsy, which, sure enough, reveals the presence of toxins matching those found in the cup. And for some inexplicable reason, you refuse to allow me to test a can of bug spray that might be connected to the crime.”

  Martin rose and stood next to me. “Jane ended this interview, Detective. It’s time for you to leave.”

  She sighed, stood, and produced a business card from her pocket. “We got off to a bad start, Jane. If you truly had nothing to do with Irene’s death, I know you’ll want to help the investigation
any way you can. I’ll be in touch, but in the meantime, please call me if you decide you’re ready to talk.” She flicked an irritated glance at Martin. “Just the two of us.”

  When I didn’t take the card, she set it on the coffee table, just as the doorbell rang. Sexy Beast flew off the sofa and ran into the foyer, barking. He built up so much steam he skidded the last few feet on the wood floor and nearly beaned himself on the doorframe.

  I left Bonnie and Martin in the living room and went to open the front door. Dom stood on the porch, offering a sheepish smile and a crystal vase crammed with more tulips than I’d ever seen in one place in my life. My favorite flower in my favorite color assortment: peach, cream, and pale pink, with a scattering of butter yellow. He tipped his head to the side in that charmingly apologetic way he had.

  SB stopped barking and went into the submissive, I-am-unworthy posture he adopts when greeting one more alpha than he—a category that includes any human he knows and trusts. Head down, tail tucked in, scraping toward the object of his adoration, basically pleading for a scrap of recognition. But only if it’s not too much trouble. I was grateful Bonnie was in the other room and not witness to this embarrassingly un-Frederick-like display.

  Dom bent to give SB a few pats and said, “I figured if I delivered these myself, there’d be less chance of you sending them back.”

  In a whisper I said, “This is not a good time, Dom.”

  He managed to slip into the house before I could slam the door shut. “One minute, that’s all I ask.” He closed the door behind him. “Hear me out.”

  “This is not a good time,” I growled, sotto voce. “Trust me, you do not want to be here right now.” I tried to reach around him for the doorknob, a move he deflected by wrapping his free arm around me.

  “Janey, I’m sorry. Sincerely sorry. I never meant to disrespect you, especially in public.”

  I tried in vain to push him away. “Dom—”

  “Am I forgiven?”

  “Yes! Yes!” I hissed. “You’re forgiven. Now, go.”

  “That’s my Janey. Next time I grab your ass,” he joked, while grabbing my ass, “I’ll make sure there are no witnesses.”

  “Good idea,” Martin said.

  Dom looked toward the entrance to the living room, where the padre stood next to a grim-faced Bonnie. If I’d morphed into a giant, radioactive scorpion, he couldn’t have shoved me away any faster, while losing his grip on the vase. Water, glass shards, and about a million tulips erupted in all directions on the gleaming ebony. SB shrieked and bolted for the dining room. I ran after him and scooped him up as Dom tried to make his mouth work.

  “B-Bonnie—what are—I didn’t—this isn’t—”

  Her frigid gaze traveled from his stricken face to the tulips carpeting the foyer to his left hand, the one she’d just witnessed giving his ex-wife’s posterior a merry squeeze. Brick red splotches crawled up her throat and into her cheeks, but to her credit, she kept it together.

  “I’m here on business,” was all she said.

  “Business?” His eyebrows pulled together. “What kind of business?”

  “Police business, Dom?” Her expression said, You do recall what I do for a living?

  Martin wore a cream-lapping grin, the first smile he’d offered since before Bonnie showed up. Dom seemed to notice him for the first time.

  “What’s he doing here?” he demanded, as though his fiancée weren’t wondering the same thing about him.

  “Spiritual support,” Martin said.

  Watching Dom squirm was the second most entertaining thing I’d done all day—after hearing Martin talk dirty to a corpse—but my schadenfreude was dampened by the knowledge that if Detective Hernandez didn’t have it in for me before, she sure as shootin’ did now. Based on the preponderance of evidence, she doubtless considered Dom’s presence in my home an open-and-shut case.

  Before Dom could pounce on that “spiritual support” line and out the faux padre, I jumped in with, “I’ll tell you what Bonnie’s doing here. She thinks I killed Irene and framed Patrick O’Rourke for the murder.”

  I don’t think I’d ever seen Dom do a classic double-take before. He looked, as the Brits so eloquently put it, gobsmacked. He wheeled on Bonnie. “Are you insane?”

  “Dom, this is official police business,” she said. “It’s none of your concern.”

  “None of my concern? This is about Janey. Of course it’s my concern.”

  Hoo boy, it was going to be a fun time in the Faso-Hernandez household that night. And okay, I wasn’t exactly broken up at the thought. Does that make me a bad person?

  Shut up, it was a rhetorical question.

  Bonnie said, “We can discuss this later—”

  “You couldn’t be bothered giving me a heads-up?” he asked. “Considering who we’re dealing with here?”

  Bonnie folded her arms and treated Dom to a scary dead-eye stare. She hadn’t looked at me that way, and she thought I was a coldblooded murderer.

  Dom plowed ahead. “Plus Patrick is an employee of mine. Just when were you planning to let me in on all this, Detective?”

  “Best not to let the water sit on that nice floor,” Bonnie told him as she strode toward the front door. “Your Janey will show you where she keeps the mop.”

  She reached for the knob just as we heard a key scrape in the lock. After a few fruitless jabs from the other side, Bonnie pushed open both double doors, knocking Patrick O’Rourke onto his keister.

  “Detective!” Patrick got his feet under him and stumbled over the threshold. His gaze flicked over the tulip carnage, but he paid it no mind. “I can’t let you arrest Jane. She didn’t do it. Cheyenne made up all that stuff about her framing me.”

  Cheyenne concocted that story? Was I the only one who couldn’t be bothered reading the fine print in Irene McAuliffe’s will?

  “I came here as soon as I found out she called you,” he told Bonnie. “Don’t blame my daughter. She’s just trying to protect me, but I can’t let an innocent person take the rap for something I did.”

  “Patrick, shut up.” Dom pushed past the rest of us to place his hands on his employee’s shoulders and look him in the eye. “Don’t say anything else without a lawyer.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud.” Bonnie threw up her hands. “Dom, back the hell off and let me do my job.”

  “Yeah, Dom,” I said, “let her do her job.” He was supposed to be on my side!

  Patrick shook off his boss and faced Bonnie. “It was me. I killed Irene. I did it for the inheritance.”

  She placed a soothing palm on his back. “Let’s go down to the station, away from this crowd, and—”

  Martin calmly interrupted her. “That car’s going to end up in the living room.”

  We followed his gaze through the open doorway and saw a compact red sedan race up the drive and fishtail into the courtyard. We held our collective breath as it headed straight for Patrick’s Hyundai. At the last second it turned and sideswiped all four of our vehicles lined up in front of the house. Groans and curses filled the foyer. Finally the car spun a three-sixty and came to rest smack-dab in the center of the courtyard.

  “Cheyenne, no!” Patrick cried as his daughter lurched out of the car and ran toward the house.

  “He didn’t do it!” she shouted, tottering up the steps on sparkly five-inch platform pumps. “Daddy didn’t kill her. He had nothing to do with it.”

  “Cheyenne, stop it.” Patrick grabbed his daughter’s arms and gave her a little shake. “I took care of it, do you hear me? I told the detective the truth—”

  “Don’t send Daddy to jail!” Her face was red and tear-streaked. “I did it, not him! I murdered my grandma!”

  13

  Add 2 Tbsp. Insecticide and Stir Well

  “YOUR GRANDMA?” I glanced at the others, who appeared just as befuddled. All except Patrick, whose expression, as he gazed at his daughter, was heartbreakingly sad. Colette O’Rourke had officially died of natur
al causes. If she’d been murdered, it was news to me.

  Cheyenne’s gaze zeroed in on Martin’s clerical collar. “Father!” She dropped to her knees in front of him and grasped his hands, sobbing. “You have to hear my confession. Please, Father. I did a terrible thing. I’m gonna go to hell!”

  For the first time since I’d known him, Martin was at a complete loss for words. He lifted his stunned face to mine. What could I tell him? Is it still fun impersonating a priest, smart-ass?

  Bonnie moved to take control of the situation. “Cheyenne, you and your dad are going down to the station with me—”

  “No! I have to make confession.” She clung tighter to Martin. “Bless me, Father, for I have—”

  “Whoa! Whoa!” Martin pulled her to her feet. “Don’t do that, Cheyenne. This, uh, this isn’t the place.”

  “Plus,” Dom said, “this guy isn’t really—”

  He broke off with a grunt as my elbow found his ribs. The look I gave him might not be as scary as Bonnie’s, but it did the trick. His mouth snapped shut.

  Clearly, neither Cheyenne nor her father recognized Martin as the phony priest who’d swiped Colette’s brooch—which wasn’t surprising considering that for the minute or two that he’d stood at her casket, Patrick had been busy chatting with me, and Cheyenne had been preoccupied with her iPad.

  “I won’t say anything without him.” Cheyenne squeezed Martin’s hands so hard, I half-expected to hear bones crack. The knees of her skintight jeans were soaked with tulip water. By some miracle, she’d avoided getting gouged by the broken glass littering the foyer.

  I could see Bonnie debating the wisdom of hauling Cheyenne down to the station. By the time they got there, the girl might decide to clam up. “Everyone into the living room,” she ordered. “Get away from this mess before someone gets hurt.”

  “Mop’s in the laundry room,” I told Dom. He looked ready to object until Bonnie and I gave him a double dose of The Stare. He went to fetch the mop while the rest of us got settled in the living room.

  Sexy Beast snugged himself between my right side and the upholstered arm of my chair, one of his favorite snoozing spots. Cheyenne sat on the sofa, flanked by Patrick and Martin, who looked very much like he wanted to stop playing Father Kade. Doing so, however, might have caused Cheyenne to rescind her confession and once again point the finger at me. He was continuing this charade for my sake, I knew.