A Secondhand Murder

by Lesley A. Diehl

  “Maybe. I could say more if I knew who your client was, but I can guess.”

  He was holding my hand, turning it around in his and massaging the fingers.

  “That’s still confidential information. You know I can’t reveal a client’s identity.”

  Then the truth hit me. He wasn’t here out of concern for me. He was simply on a fishing expedition, and not the kind where you end up with a crispy trout in a pan.

  “Oh, don’t be so coy. If your client let you go today, it’s because he, not she, saw us together at the funeral. When he, not she, asked you about it, you admitted that we had gone out on a dinner date.”

  Alex pulled back, surprise on his face. “Wow, great powers of deduction.”

  “Mr. Sanders hired you and now he’s expressed some concern about your relationship with me, and you want to know what set him off. Am I right? Oh, and, of course, you’re just worried sick about me.”

  “Evie …”

  I pulled my hand out of his. “Don’t call me Evie. Only one person calls me Evie, and that’s—”

  “Me.” Jerry walked out of my bedroom, a towel wrapped around his middle, his hair mussed as if he’d stepped out of the shower and dried off just moments before.

  “You should have told me you had company.” Alex spoke through clenched teeth.

  “If only I’d known,” I said. “Jerry, what the hell are you doing in my house? I thought I told you to get a hotel room.”

  “Yeah, well, I tried, but there’s a Western Days Festival in town. They’re all full. I should have known. There were no car rentals available at the airport when I flew in. I had no choice.”

  I walked over to him and jerked the towel off. Underneath, he had his shorts on. As I had suspected.

  I was fuming with frustration. And maybe just a little bit of fear. “The last thing I need right now is for your future bride or daddy-in-law to find that you spent the night here.”

  I spun on my heel and looked at Alex, whose expression had changed from irritation to amusement.

  “You need to wipe that grin off your face. Both of you get out of my house.” I raised my voice loud enough that my cowboy babysitter could hear, and, right on cue, he banged through the door.

  “Shouldn’t you be holding a pistol? What is that anyway? I pointed to the very ugly weapon that Cody was holding in his hand.

  “It’s a cattle prod.”

  “That sounds lethal,” I said.

  “And electric. You heard the lady.” Cody waved the prod. “Out.”

  “But my clothes … and a ride. I’ve been taking taxis all over.” Jerry eyed the weapon warily. By now both he and Alex were out the door and standing on my porch.

  “Wait a minute.” I marched into the bedroom and returned with Jerry’s clothes. He reached for them, but I whipped them out of his reach. “Did you call Daddy Napolitani and tell him I signed the papers?”

  “Of course. I’d be in as much trouble with him as you if I hadn’t been successful.”

  “And the loan?”

  “We didn’t talk about that.”

  There was enough commotion on the porch to alert the neighbors. Lights came on in houses on both sides of the street and people poked their heads out the front doors. A black SUV cruised by, slowed, then sped up.

  “This isn’t a block party,” I called out to the curiosity seekers.

  “What papers?” asked Alex.

  I snapped at him. “None of your business.”

  “Let’s go, boys.” Cowboy Cody gave a wave of his hand as if herding two harmless little dogies.

  “What papers?” I heard Alex ask Jerry. Jerry stopped on the sidewalk to pull on his pants and shirt, the latter still wrinkled from its earlier run-in with my fist. He hopped from leg to leg, putting on his shoes. He stuffed his socks into his pants pocket. At the curb, the two of them conferred for a moment. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but moments later Alex drove off with Jerry in the passenger seat. Damn! Now I’d given the two of them an opportunity to bond. That couldn’t work out well for me.

  When I had the opportunity to talk with my insurance agent the next morning, he asked if Madeleine had been with me when the car blew.

  “We were together, but this time, she wasn’t responsible for the destruction.”

  Matt, my agent, and Cody, my bodyguard, sat at my kitchen table, where we were all having coffee. When Matt had arrived earlier, he’d evinced no surprise at seeing Cody outside my place. News traveled fast around here, probably because it was so flat. There was nothing to get in the way of gossip as stories blew from one side of town to the other.

  “I sure do like that little gal.” Matt smiled, then shook his head. “We dated a few times, but she’s real accident prone. I always worried that something would happen while we were on our date and she’ll end up in the emergency room or in jail. I just couldn’t handle the anxiety.”

  Cody nodded in agreement. He was the one who had been with her when she accidentally let the rodeo bulls out of the pen.

  “I’m sorry, that little beauty is a total loss.”

  At first I thought that Matt was still talking about Madeleine. “Maybe therapy will help,” I said. “She went to see a counselor just last week.”

  Matt looked puzzled. “You took your car to a shrink?”

  “No, Madeleine went to a shrink.” Both Matt and Cody perked up. “But I’d wait awhile before asking her out again. Better wait to see if the therapy takes.”

  Matt nodded and slid several papers across the table to me.

  “So, here are the papers for your rental. The check for the car should be in your hands within a few days. It’s not like there’s any question of repairing her.”

  I returned the truck to Rob Cassidy, thanked him profusely and agreed to dinner at some point. Why not? The man was good-looking, rich, and single. I was grateful, poor, and recently divorced—very recently divorced. I tried not to make comparisons between him and PI Alex. My head told me to leave Alex alone, but every other cell in my body shouted “Go for it.” My body won in a landslide. Why fight the popular vote?

  I pushed into the back door of the shop only five minutes before we were to open. Madeleine stood in the middle of the store tapping her tiny, boot-clad foot and looking around.

  “We’re no better off today than we were two days ago. What we have here is boring.”

  The expression on her face told me that the euphoria she’d experienced in the restaurant last night with Paco had failed to spill over into the rest of the evening.

  “So what happened?”

  “I just told you. We got nothing.”

  “No, I mean with Paco.”

  “Who?”

  “Your chips and salsa, perfect Margarita guy.”

  “Married.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “His wife told me. You know, she’s really nice.”

  I said nothing and waited.

  “She heard about the blast at the restaurant, so she grabbed the kids and went to see if he was okay. She and I sat at a booth and talked. The kids’re great, too. A five-year-old boy and a girl, two years. I told her to come into the shop, and we’d give her a ten percent discount.”

  “You’re taking this very well.”

  “Don’t believe it. I’m furious at him, that Mexican Lothario. It’s not her fault. What do you think about asking her to join us for cards night with the gals?”

  “I don’t even want to give her the ten percent off. Are you out of your mind? You’re just trying to get rid of the guilt you feel for flirting with a married man. Let it go, sweetie. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Okay, but I think she’ll expect the ten percent.”

  “Fine. Look, why don’t I take over the store today? You go back to the coast and visit our customers. See what you can bring back. Now that Valerie’s funeral is over, I’m sure you’ll find the women eager to go through their closets and weed out their clothes. It�
�ll be relaxing for you.”

  “I’ll go if I don’t have to visit Cory.”

  “You don’t have to visit Cory.”

  She produced a tiny smile then sighed. Her shoulders drooped. “What about you? You had one hell of a night.”

  “I want things to get back to normal as soon as possible. That means running this store. So shoo. Go find merchandise.”

  After Madeleine left, I looked around our little shop. She was right. We were down on goods by fifty percent. The publicity associated with the murder had worked to our financial advantage, at least for a while. Now I worried we’d be looked at as no different from the other consignment shops in town, even though we did feature high-end clothing. That also meant we charged higher prices than the others. I didn’t know how long we could cash in on the bad luck of wealthy women to realize a little additional spending money. Of course, recent news suggested that there were other Bernie Madoffs out there ripping off their friends, families and wealthy investors, so maybe we still had a long run ahead of us.

  In the meantime, I decided that it was time to clean up the mess in the back room. We had bags and boxes piled in the corner, many of which had been there since before Valerie’s unfortunate demise. If I didn’t cart that stuff to the dumpster out back, we’d have no room for new merchandise—assuming Madeleine was successful in getting some. She would be. The woman had enough charm to talk the West Palm society matrons out of their Rolls Royces if she wanted to, but we didn’t carry them.

  I pulled handfuls of crumpled newspaper out of the cardboard boxes and stuffed them into a trash bag. I worked steadily for several hours. No customers came into the store. It was as I suspected. The novelty of the murder had worn off and the horror of it had set in. Our business was sure to suffer. I broke down the boxes, tying them with twine and piling them at the back door to be loaded into the recycling bin. Wiping sweat from my face, I looked at what I’d accomplished. Only one corner of the room remained a mess of boxes and packing material. As I crumpled up a wad of packing material, something sharp bit into my hand.

  “What the hell?”

  I dropped the paper and looked at my thumb. A thin line of red erupted along its base and ran in a small rivulet onto my wrist. I looked down at the papers I’d thrown on the floor. Among the crumples lay a knife. It looked like the one used to kill Valerie, the one we thought came from the cutlery holder in the front of the shop. Obviously, either Madeleine or I had been careless when we unpacked the merchandise and left one of the knives in the box. This one.

  Blood dripped onto the floor.

  The shop bell rang, announcing a customer.

  “Have a look around and use the dressing rooms if you like. I’ll be with you in a second,” I said.

  As I ran from the back room, I caught sight of a woman looking through the front racks. Her back was turned to me.

  “I had a little accident.” I rounded the corner to the hallway that led to our bathroom, where I grabbed some toilet paper to stem the flow.

  I sat on the closed toilet lid nursing my wound. The knife in the body wasn’t from our cutlery set. Someone else’s then. Whose? We thought Valerie grabbed a knife out of the set and took it into the dressing room to protect herself and that it was that knife the killer used on her. But we had inadvertently failed to unpack one of the knives to the set and didn’t notice it was missing when we put out the display. The murder weapon couldn’t have been our display knife. Supposing she brought a knife from home to accomplish the same purpose? Or the killer had?

  “Can I help?” asked a voice from the open doorway. “Or am I interrupting something private, as usual?” I jumped up from my seat. My intruder’s glance traveled to the floor, where the bloody tissues I’d tossed toward the wastebasket lay. His eyes came to rest on my hand.

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  “That cut looks pretty bad.” Alex pulled the toilet paper off my thumb and examined it. “You could use a stitch or two.”

  I glanced down at my hand. With the toilet paper and pressure off the wound, the cut began to bleed again. I certainly couldn’t drive.

  “Okay, fine,” I said, “but I need to stop by the police station and drop something off with Frida first.”

  He helped me off the throne and followed me into the back room.

  The knife was gone.

  I turned on him.

  “Did you take it?”

  “Take what?” That azure innocence again.

  “Was there anyone else here when you came in?”

  “Someone was just leaving as I entered. A woman.”

  “Yeah, she came in as I was running to the bathroom. I only caught sight of her back. What did she look like?”

  “Maybe you should sit down for a minute and tell me what’s going on.”

  Instead of taking his suggestion, I dropped to my knees and began to shuffle through the newspapers lying on the floor. “Maybe she came in here and accidentally kicked it out of sight.”

  “Kicked what out of sight?”

  “Never mind.”

  I couldn’t find the knife. Suddenly my vision clouded, my stomach did a cartwheel and everything appeared in an ugly shade of blackish yellow. “That’s a really bad color for you,” I said to Alex, who appeared discolored along with the rest of my world.

  Next thing I knew I was lying on my storeroom floor with my legs propped up on a chair and my head cradled in Alex’s arms. He was sitting on the floor with me.

  I stared up into his eyes. “You’ll wrinkle your khakis.”

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  Admit it, girl, this feels good, well, as good as anything can feel after you’ve fainted. I snuggled closer to him. He didn’t back off.

  “Okay. When you’re feeling up to it, we’re off to the emergency room.”

  “But Frida—”

  “Frida can wait.”

  “Okay. I think I want to stay here for a while.” Why waste a good cuddle with a sexy man?

  “You have to go to the hospital. Let’s get you up.” He held out his hand and helped me to my feet.

  The dizziness seemed to have subsided.

  “Hey, wait a minute. If someone came in here and then left as you entered, why did I only hear the shop bell ring once?”

  With Alex’s help, I walked on my Jell-O legs out of the back room and into the shop. The door opened as we made our way past the counter and toward the front racks.

  Madeleine entered, her arms filled with clothes. She took one look at me, then shifted her gaze to Alex and tossed the clothes over a rack.

  “Eve, what did he do to you?”

  I shook my head to indicate Alex wasn’t at fault. Madeleine stopped midstride. She turned toward the door and looked at the push bar.

  “What happened to the bell?” The bell, which had been tied on a ribbon so that it would jangle when the door was opened, lay on the floor. It was crushed flat, as if someone, furious with its tinkling sound, had stomped on it.

  Chapter 11

  The three of us sat in the emergency room. It was mid-afternoon and only two other folks were waiting to be seen. One was a small boy with what looked like the kind of head injury that young boys tend to get when they fall out of trees, attempt a wheelie or try out in-line skates without a helmet. My injury would have to wait—he had the more serious bleed.

  The other prospective patient, the guy hacking up a lung on the far side of the room, looked as if he’d never make it to the examining room. My guess was that he’d be taken first, but I was wrong. As it turned out, he wasn’t even the one waiting to see the doctor. The woman with him, who looked just fine to me, was the prospective patient. I guessed the guy was just a heavy smoker. The boy went first.

  “Uh, Madeleine,” said Alex, “could I have a few moments with Eve alone. There’s something I’ve got to tell her in private.”

  Madeleine did her best not to look surprised. She nodded, claimed a need for the ladies’ room and strolled down the h
allway, only stopping to inquire for directions at the sign-in counter.

  I watched her leave. “I’m not so certain she should go off alone,” I said. “This is a hospital, and there’s no telling what trouble she might get herself into.”

  “She’s a big girl,” said Alex.

  “No, she’s not. She’s tiny, but powerful like a bulldozer.”

  “Eve.” He took my uninjured hand in his. I remembered the two of us having this handholding encounter once before, that morning when I had figured out that he was using me for information. I tried to jerk my fingers away. He held on tighter.

  “I’ll call security if you don’t let go,” I whispered between clenched teeth. “I’ll make a scene.”

  He dropped my hand, and I immediately regretted my words. His touch was so, so sensuous, as his hands caressed my fingertips and moved down onto my palms. I was willing to bet he gave a great foot rub, too.

  “Okay, fine, but I really am worried about you.”

  I made as if to get up out of my chair, but he held up one finger, asking me to wait a minute before I turned away.

  “Let me get to it. I know why you and Valerie fought. Mr. Sanders told me. I think he’s going to tell Frida. If you haven’t leveled with her yet, you might want to tell her the truth.”

  “You believe Sanders’ story? Why would you take his word? Looks to me like he’s simply trying to pin his wife’s murder on somebody.”

  “Jerry confirmed the story.”

  I jumped out of the chair and stood as firmly on my teetering stilettos as a wounded girl could. “You told Jerry about what Sanders said? Jerry?”

  “No, Jerry told me about the feud on his own.”

  I sat abruptly, but at that moment the nurse called my name. I had to pop out of the chair again.

  “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  “I could come in with you.”

  I considered his offer, along with the possibility that they might want me to change into one of those white hospital gowns. If Alex was going to see me naked, I wanted it to be on my terms, preferably in a bedroom of my choosing and in one of my sexy nightgowns.