Dead In Red

by L. L. Bartlett

  “Yeah, you’re like a pit bull. Once you get your teeth into something, you don’t let go.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “But,” he continued, “you’re trying to get her thrown in jail.”

  “Only if she’s guilty. If she’s not . . . I’ve eliminated her from suspicion and I try something else."

  “Couldn’t you try something else first?”

  “I have no other starting point.”

  “Then what happens if you eliminate her?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get some other insight from touching her car that will direct me somewhere else.”

  Richard drained his cup. “I still don’t like it, but I’ll go along with you, because I happen to think you will have to look elsewhere for Kaplan’s murderer.”

  “All well and fine,” Brenda said. “That is, if you can lure her here and she doesn’t lock her car.”

  “Yeah.”

  Richard stared at his empty cup. “Why the change of heart?”

  “What?”

  His gaze shifted to meet mine. “Why did you decide to let me help? Just because you want to get to Cyn?”

  I wasn’t ready for this question, but I guess I knew he’d eventually ask it. “It’s against my better judgment. But . . .” He didn’t know about Sophie. I’d tried to tell him about her, even taken him to her bakery once, but the owner said she didn’t live there. I couldn’t tell Richard that a figment of my imagination had told me I needed him to help me solve Walt’s death. It was all too complicated.

  Then again, maybe it was time for truth.

  “I need you, Rich.”

  For a second he looked puzzled, then the barest hint of a pleased smile appeared beneath his mustache. “Oh. Okay.”

  # # #

  CHAPTER 16

  Richard was blessed with something I’ll never have: charm. I don’t know what he said, but Cyn Lennox agreed to come by after the mill closed later that afternoon. Richard had to promise her that I wouldn’t be around, and we’d jockeyed Brenda’s car out of the garage and put mine in to reinforce the deception.

  The plan was for them to lure Cyn to the other side of the house so she wouldn’t see me when I violated the sanctity of her Mercedes.

  At 5:47, Cyn pulled up Richard’s driveway. The loft apartment’s living room window was the perfect vantage point. I stood to the right side, peeking around the drape as she stepped out of her car. I couldn’t see the driver’s side door, didn’t know if she’d left the window down or the car unlocked. All this could be for nothing. I watched as she stepped out of the car, once again dressed in western garb. A cowgirl, Dana Watkins had called her. Well, not quite; her denim jumper was embroidered with multicolored flowers, and again she wore the silver-and-turquoise squash-blossom necklace, reminding me of what Monticello’s bartender had said about straights playing dress-up.

  Cyn glanced around the drive, craned her neck to see into the backyard—probably looking for me. I moved back a step. No way did I want to scare her off.

  The phone rang.

  I looked back toward it, imploring it to silence, but it rang again and again.

  Another peek out the window and I saw Cyn was at Richard’s back door, knocking.

  Ring! Ring!

  Thank God she couldn’t hear it.

  The back door opened. Cyn stepped inside.

  Ring! Ring!

  I charged across the room, snatched the receiver. “What?”

  “Jeff?” Maggie.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Everything okay?” she asked, sounding uncertain.

  “Sorry about the greeting. It’s just—I’m kind of in the middle of something. Can I call you back?”

  “Well, not really. I’m supposed to be at my parents’ for dinner in ten minutes, and they live all the way out in Lackawanna, and I don’t like to use my cell phone when I’m driving.”

  Good old letter-of-the-law Maggie.

  “When I didn’t hear from you yesterday or today, I wondered . . . I mean, I just thought—”

  The clock ticked overhead. “I had a wonderful time Friday night. When can we see each other again?” Talk about pushing.

  “Oh. Well, when are you free?”

  “Every night this week.” Speed it up, I need to get outside, I wanted to bellow.

  “Well, maybe we could talk about it later tonight. Make some plans.”

  “I may be going out tonight. With Richard.”

  “You’re not getting him involved in this murder thing again are you?” The disapproval in her voice came through loud and clear.

  “Richard’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

  Dead silence. This was not the way I wanted the conversation to go.

  “What time do you think you’ll be home later? I could call you—”

  “That’s okay,” Maggie said. “Maybe we’ll talk some other time.”

  “Maggie, wait—”

  Clunk!

  The receiver felt sweaty in my hand as I jammed it back into its cradle. For a moment, all I could do was stand there, seething. If we were destined to be together, and I honestly felt we were, then why the hell was it so fucking hard?

  The window beckoned. I crossed the room and looked down on the empty car, then at my watch. Cyn had been inside less than five minutes. Surely Richard would have enticed her into the living room by now. Something inside me said Cyn wasn’t going to stay long and I needed to get out there and in her car.

  I trotted down the stairs and opened the door, not letting it bang shut. This felt weird—sneaking around our own driveway. Why couldn’t Cyn have backed up so I wouldn’t be seen from the kitchen window? Yeah, didn’t everybody back into driveways when coming for casual visits?

  The driver’s window was rolled up tight, like the others, but the handle lifted under my fingers. The door opened and I slipped inside, pulled the door closed but not quite shut, and sank into German leather-clad comfort. The air inside was still cool from the air conditioning, but uneasiness threaded through me. I was getting something, but it wasn’t the same connection I had with the red shoe.

  I leaned back in the leather seat, my hands poised at four and eight o’clock, closed my eyes, and clutched Cyn’s steering wheel.

  An absurd thought flashed through my mind: Jacob Marley. Yeah, Marley’s ghost, forever encumbered in death by fathoms of chains and cash boxes. Cyn’s life revolved around her spreadsheets and the numbers on them. Cash flow, income, expenses. Money, money, money. And when she’d last held that steering wheel she’d been worried sick. But that didn’t make sense. Ted Hanson said her café was already in the black.

  I shook those thoughts away. That wasn’t what I’d wanted to get. I wanted to tap into what Dana had called Cyn’s theatrical side. I tried another position on the steering wheel. The image of the red shoes blasted my mind. Plural. I’d never seen more than the one when I homed into what I perceived as Walt’s psyche. And though they were the same style, these shoes weren’t perfect—they’d seen some wear: scuffed, with sparkles missing. These were the shoes made for Andrea Foxworth, the ones Cyn had bought at auction. She’d danced with joy in them—and joy had not been abundant since the death of her beloved Dennis. She’d danced slow, and fast, with multiple partners. In those shoes she’d felt sexy, beautiful. She’d had fun.

  I moved my hands up to ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel. Shards of music—too brief to comprehend . . . disco mostly—wound through my gray matter like a dozen radios playing simultaneously, much too much to assimilate. My fingers tightened and the sensation of joy swooped over me like a sirocco; wind, speed and the thrill of danger.

  I repositioned my fingers to nine and three on the wheel. A horrible weight pressed against my soul. Something so terribly wrong—horribly bloody—could never be righted.

  Walt’s death?

  I clasped harder, hoping for clarity, but I wasn’t sure Cyn had actually seen Walt in death—seen his blood
splashed on tiled walls—in a bathtub?

  True? Real? Nothing was set in concrete. Nothing I could grab onto—truly understand.

  One and seven on the wheel brought something different: Gene. A powerful pull to protect him. She loved him like nothing else in her life. But that, too, had been tainted. Her love for him was black and blue and the startling crimson of fresh-spilled blood.

  Sorting through the plethora of thoughts and feelings that bombarded me, one thing was certain; Cyn had not killed Walt. Just the thought of his death had horrified her. I couldn’t quite grasp what she knew or how she was involved, but instinct still told me that she knew or suspected something terrible about Walt’s death and it had done much more than unsettle her. She was in deep denial about something. I couldn’t comprehend what, but whatever it was had shaken apart this sometime party girl’s world.

  Nausea pulled at my insides as I tried to sort through the building maelstrom, but I couldn’t seem to pick up any one emotion and stay with it. Like slogging through Jell-O, I kept getting bogged down and losing track of what it was I was tuning into. My hands fell limp to my lap, lay there for eons—lead weights too heavy to ever lift.

  The dashboard’s dark displays eventually drew my attention. How long had I been sitting there staring at nothing? A glance at my watch told me at least twenty minutes.

  Had I suffered a seizure? One of the quacks I’d consulted during the past few months had warned I might have one—more—at some time in the future. Head injuries weren’t predictable. There was so much medical science didn’t know about the brain . . . probably never would.

  I managed to pull open the latch, slunk out of the car, shoved the door with my hip to make it catch. I shuffled away from the Mercedes, ducked into the side door to shamble up the apartment stairs. Less than thirty seconds later, I was back behind the drape, panting, and counting. Ten, twenty, thirty—

  At forty-seven seconds, Cyn stepped out of Richard’s back entrance. She paused on the steps, speaking to my brother. Afternoon shadows were already starting to lengthen.

  Ten, twenty, thirty—

  Cyn turned, took the last step and headed for her car. Richard came out on his step.

  Cyn opened the driver’s door, ducked to enter, paused.

  Could she smell the stench of the fear I’d experienced—relived—in the cockpit of her Mercedes?

  She straightened, staring down at her pretty little car, her brow furrowed. Then she tilted her head to look up to the apartment, her face pale, eyes shadowed. I jumped back, pressed myself against the wall, my heart thumping, my breaths coming so fast I was in danger of hyperventilating.

  I closed my eyes and started counting again until I heard the car door slam, and seconds later the sound of an engine. I waited until I couldn’t hear it anymore before peeking out the window. Richard stood in the driveway. He waved me down.

  By then I had my breathing almost under control and trotted down the stairs. Richard’s back was to me as I rounded the corner of the garage, his arms crossed over his chest, looking down the empty driveway.

  “Well?” I asked.

  He turned, his eyes troubled, and I wasn’t sure if I was in for a scolding or a lecture—or both. “That’s one unhappy lady.”

  “Go on,” I urged.

  Richard closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. “I need a scotch.” He turned and headed into the house, with me at his heels.

  The screen door slammed behind me and I followed him through the pantry and into the kitchen.

  “You could’ve moved a little faster,” Brenda scolded me from her seat at the table. We both watched as Richard opened the cabinet where they kept their kitchen liquor. “That woman wouldn’t leave the room. You have no idea how nerve wracking it was to try to keep her attention from straying to the window while you were out in her car.”

  “I thought you were going to entertain her in the living room.”

  “What took you so long?” Richard asked, getting out a glass. “You sat there for the longest time.”

  I swallowed, afraid to tell him what I experienced—what might have happened. “I kinda got mesmerized.”

  “And?” Richard demanded.

  Looking him in the eye wasn’t easy. “She didn’t kill Walt.”

  He let out a ragged breath, his shoulders slumping. “I told you so. But knowing that still doesn’t make me feel any better about luring her over here. You want something, Brenda?”

  “Wine. Pour it into one of the really big glasses.”

  Richard had a right to his feelings. And that he’d believed in me enough to risk what he thought of as betraying a friend said even more.

  “Well, what went on?” I asked. “Cyn looked upset when she left.”

  Richard reached for one of the balloon stem glasses. “I don’t know. Something to do with her business. She had an argument with one of her employees.”

  “Since she only has two, and one of them works mornings, that leaves her nephew, Gene.” I had to swallow, didn’t want to betray what I already knew—suspected—really had no clue about. “Did she say what the problem was?”

  “No.” Richard opened the fridge, retrieved the previously opened bottle of wine, yanked out the cork, and poured it for Brenda, then handed her the glass.

  I tried another tack. “You looked upset when you came out of the house. Why?”

  “You try keeping someone captive for half an hour when they’d rather be elsewhere. I had visions of her yanking out her cell phone and calling the cops on you. And you sat there and sat there and sat there.” He poured his scotch. Didn’t even bother with ice. “She asked about you, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She wanted to know why you were so damned nosy. She inferred that your harassment was behind her rift with Gene.”

  “How?”

  “She didn’t say. I didn’t know what to say.” Richard downed another healthy swig.

  “Sorry.”

  I watched him take another swallow. He hadn’t offered me a drink. But then, I wasn’t sure I wanted one. I needed a clear head to figure out my next move. And then there was Maggie—a sweet diversion from what we’d all just gone through.

  “I got a call from Maggie just as Cyn arrived. She’s pissed at me again.”

  “Why?”

  “If I could figure out how women think, I’d sell the secret and be rich.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I’ll hear all about it,” Brenda said and swirled the wine in her glass.

  Of that I had no doubt.

  “So what’s your next move?” Richard asked.

  “I also got the feeling Cyn was upset about something and she was in denial about it. Someone was talking to Walt in her office. If it wasn’t her—”

  “You think it was her nephew?”

  “It makes more sense, really, especially as she seems paranoid I’m going to find out what went on with her and Walt and Gene. Maybe Gene’s a drag queen, and maybe he befriended Walt. I don’t have a picture of him to flash around, and what good would it do if the people at the clubs only knew him in his female persona?”

  “You think you’d recognize him dressed as a woman?”

  “I don’t know, what with makeup, a wig, and jewelry. If you see some of these before and after pictures, sometimes it’s hard to tell. I’ve been in Gene’s presence twice, and he didn’t give off strong vibes, so it’s not like I could just tune into him like I can with someone like . . .” Maggie. “Like I can others.”

  They’d both noticed my hesitation. Neither of them commented.

  Don’t think about her, I urged myself. My mind raced to grasp onto something—anything else. “I need a picture of Walt to flash around,” I murmured, wondering if Tom had one back at the bar. Then again, I hadn’t noticed one—not even a grab shot tacked behind the bar with a bunch of other photographs. “I think I’ll go back to Walt’s apartment. Wanna come?”

  Richard looked up. “I’ll sit this one out.” He took another swal
low of his drink. “Brenda, how about a steak dinner? You up for going out?”

  “Any time I don’t have to cook is cause for celebration. But I’ll drive,” she said, putting down her untouched wine and getting up from the table. “Think I’ll go drag a comb through my hair first. Be right back.”

  I watched her head down the hall for the stairs, and waited until she was out of earshot before speaking again. “You’ll hear all about it later tonight. Maggie’s pissed because she thinks helping me look into Walt’s murder will get you killed.”

  Richard poured himself a bit more scotch. “She’s got it wrong. It’s only me that’s keeping you alive.”

  It felt like he’d punched me in the gut. Was that what Sophie meant when she said he had cause to worry about me—and that I needed him?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  # # #

  CHAPTER 17

  The last time I’d been to Walt’s apartment, I hadn’t noticed if the air conditioning was on—or even if the place had air conditioning. Entering the dark apartment gave me a chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. I turned on the light, paused in the doorway. Nothing looked different, but it felt like someone had been there. Not Tom. Someone else—and that person had gotten in with a key.

  I did an abrupt about-face and looked around the dimly lit landing. Two sconces, with what could only have been twenty-watt bulbs, faced one another, giving only enough light for the tenants to find a keyhole. I ran my hand across the lintel and found dust, as well as a dull brass key. Okay, so who knew Walt kept an extra? Had he locked himself out one time too many and used it himself, or did his friends know about it?

  I pressed the key into my palm. Bam! The bloodied hands were back. But damn it, whose hands were they?

  Replacing the key, I reentered the apartment, again picking up the feeling that someone had been there in the last day or so. I stood for a long time, studying the apartment. Maybe I’d found it so tidy on my previous visit because there really wasn’t much in it. The walls and flat surfaces were devoid of homey touches. It was a place to eat a nondescript meal, watch a little TV, and hit the rack. The focal point of the apartment was the desk.