“Of course you do. You have access to his computer, calendar, address book, and probably his financial records, unless I miss my guess.”
She shook her head again. “Most of the senior partners at BGB want their assistants to handle everything,” she began.
Margo snorted into her glass, and Strutter slapped her on the shoulder.
Ingrid frowned at them and continued. “But Alain kept his private life private, even from me. Other than knowing his wife’s name and birthday, the address of their house and Alain’s cell phone number, I didn’t know much about him at all.”
“I guess if you’re in the habit of romancin’ the hired help, that would be the only way to go,” Margo observed bluntly. “Otherwise, you’d have ex-lady friends tryin’ to blackmail you six ways from Sunday, pesterin’ your wife, all kinds of untidy goin’s on.”
I returned to my point. “Whatever Ingrid knows is bound to be more than anyone else does, and what she doesn’t know about this firm, Strutter and Margo do. If they don’t, they have a pretty good idea of how to find out. Then there’s me. Everybody knows that I’m too new at BGB to have heard much of the gossip, so when we need someone to play dumb, I’m your girl. You know, that’s becoming an unattractive habit,” I said to Margo as she once again snorted with laughter.
“I’m sorry, Sugar, but you said it.”
“Let’s not forget your little stunt with the sign-in log,” Strutter chuckled.
Ignoring their hilarity, Ingrid gazed at me thoughtfully, her head tilted to one side. “You mean you’re going to try to help me? You would do that for me?”
“Well, of course we’re going to help you,” I said testily. “Who else? Do you think Bellanfonte or Belasovich or any of the other partners is going to spring to your defense? It’s not that they seriously think you’re guilty of knocking off Girouard. As far as they’re concerned maybe you did, and maybe you didn’t. They probably don’t even much care, but their clients will care. They’ve got to clean up this mess, look like they’re in charge, and at the moment, you’re the easiest person to pin this on. Silly little secretary, probably threw herself at the boss like a dozen others and then took it all too seriously, blah blah blah. Believe me, Ingrid, they’re sitting in one of their offices right now trying to decide how fast they can put some serious distance between you and their firm without risking an unlawful discharge suit.”
Ingrid paled visibly. “But how can they prove I did something that I didn’t do? I can’t afford to lose my job,” she stammered.
I felt like a snake and softened my tone. “It may not come to that. They aren’t interested in proving it, just in regaining their clients’ confidence. They need to save some face here. They’ll probably suggest that you take an extended leave of absence—paid, of course, just until this thing is cleared up—and you will look guilty as sin by implication.”
Strutter started to protest, then closed her mouth. She knew what I said was true.
I leaned across the table and met Ingrid’s eyes. “So we’ve got to figure out who did this, and we’ve got to do it quickly to minimize the damage. The police will be investigating, too, but they already have too many open investigations and limited manpower. We, on the other hand, can make this our top priority, and we will.” I looked around the table, daring anyone to demur.
A glimmer of hope dawned in Ingrid’s eyes as she glanced from me to Margo to Strutter. Margo reached across the table and patted my cheek.
Strutter signaled a passing waiter. “Next round’s on me,” she announced, “but then we head home and try to get organized for Sunday’s memorial service. We’ve got to be prepared to dodge the press and still work the crowd for information. It will be a good chance to see who turns up looking nervous.” Our fresh drinks arrived, and we clinked glasses. “One for all, and all for one,” she pronounced.
I smiled wryly at her. “Dean’s list at Trinity, huh? Just my luck.”
She grinned back at me.
“I just knew you were a good one, Lawrence,” Margo said happily. “This is going to be some fun, y’all.”
We finished our drinks and exchanged cell phone numbers all around. Strutter and I left a little earlier than the others, she to tend to her son and I to tend to my three feline charges who would be impatient for their dinner.
After feeding Jasmine and Oliver in the kitchen and Moses in the guest room, I allowed the kitten to follow me out of the room. The two geriatrics had mellowed some in the past couple of days, and with full stomachs, they were likely to be less aggressive. I sat down on the top stair and awaited developments. Moses sat beside me, considering the twelve cliffs before him, each higher than his head. How to tackle these obstacles? Not being a mother cat, I had no idea how to teach him. I needn’t have worried.
First Jasmine, then Oliver, appeared at the foot of the stairs. Jas assumed her usual affronted pose, tail wrapped tightly around her front feet, but Ollie, always a gentler creature, allowed his curiosity to overcome his hostility. Cautiously, he padded up the stairs until he was nose to nose with Moses. I was ready to intervene at the first hiss, but Ollie merely sniffed the alarmed kitten from head to tail, then looked at me in disgust. He began licking Moses none too gently. Instead of being frightened, the kitten started to purr loudly. This, he understood.
After grooming Moses to his satisfaction, Ollie turned around and started back down the stairs. On the third step, he looked back and made a chirping noise I had never heard before. Moses dithered and waggled his little backside for a few seconds, then dropped his front paws over the edge and tumbled down two full steps.
“Okay, guys,” I said, scooping him up and carrying him past Jasmine to the first floor. “I think that’s enough progress for one day.” I deposited him in the living room, where Ollie sprawled comfortably on the floor, and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Jas picked out a spot in the middle of the front hall and hunkered down to watch thoughtfully. No hissing, fat tail or raised ruff, though.
I poured boiling water over my teabag and stepped around Jas to get into the living room. Moses capered happily around Ollie, occasionally batting at the older cat bravely with a tiny foot, then scampering away.
“So how’s it going, Dad?” I said, raising my mug to Ollie. His eyes were half-closed. Jas remained motionless and watchful in the hall.
I sipped my tea and considered the events of the past week, which had been numerous and momentous. Despite all of the drama at work, uppermost in my mind was the fact that six days ago, Armando had taken off for South America, and he had sounded dismayingly happy about it. Our telephone conversations had been spotty and unsatisfactory, consisting primarily of yelling, “What did you say?” to each other over a bad connection, when he could get through at all. Colombian phone service wasn’t the most reliable, and I still had no clear idea of how he was spending his time and with whom. It was unsettling to think of him so far away from me with people I had never met, speaking a language I didn’t understand, at home in a culture about which I knew nothing.
Will our attachment be strong enough to pull him back to me when this was all over? I wondered.
As my mind wandered through the five years of our relationship, I tried to remember when it was that I really knew we were a couple, but I couldn’t remember any specific date or event. It had been more of a realization backed by small, but important, assurances of how important we had become to one another. I remembered a vacation trip, our first together, that we had taken to Disney World in Florida. Both of us had taken our children there many years previously, but we loved the idea of being able to explore at our leisure all of the EPCOT attractions that our kids had dismissed as “Boorrrring!” So off we went, and despite killer heat and aching legs, we had a ball.
At that time Armando had not yet become an American citizen, and he was particularly intrigued by the U.S. pavilion. We explored it on a morning when musical entertainment was offered. A crowd had formed in the building’s rotunda to listen to a spl
endid octet sing several patriotic numbers. Armando’s attention was glued to the singers, and I wandered quietly around the perimeter of the room examining the artifacts displayed on the walls. The music ended, and I stood back a bit from the dispersing tourists and looked for Armando. I spotted him right away, standing across the rotunda from me. He was searching the crowd wildly, a lost look in his eyes that gripped my heart. He was looking for me, I realized, and I instinctively moved through the crowd to reach him. When I got close enough, I raised my hand and waved. “Armando! I’m here!” His head turned toward my voice, eyes still searching, and then he saw me. His worried expression disappeared immediately, and we beamed at each other. As long as we were together, I realized at that moment, we would be okay, and I knew that Armando felt that, too. I sighed deeply, missing him.
Then there was Girouard’s murder and my surprising willingness, along with that of my new colleagues, to involve ourselves in trying to save Ingrid’s job and reputation. While I still smarted in what I felt was a demeaning role, I was buoyed by the strength and good humor of the other women in the firm who shared that role. Oh, there were a few dingbats and silly bimbos, but by and large, far from being the downtrodden little drones they might have been under the circumstances, the secretaries were a bright, capable bunch who seemed able to present an assured face to the world and let their bosses’ arrogance roll off their backs.
“We work for the money, Honey,” was how Strutter put it, and I had to admit that the pay and the benefits were excellent. When you have kids to educate and a family that needs health insurance, you do what you have to do, and these women did it with more grace than I could manage.
I had swallowed my pride and put in a call to Detective Diaz this afternoon to see if the police had any hot new leads on either the cause of death or suspects, but she had simply said that the results of the toxicology tests were not yet available and invited me to keep in touch. The obvious cause of death was the amaretto coffee, laced with some unspecified poison, and the obvious suspects were Girouard’s most recent lover/secretary and his long-suffering wife. Liking Ingrid as much as I was beginning to, and not knowing Vera Girouard at all, I hoped the murderer turned out to be the latter.
Lastly, there were my growing concerns about living in this condominium community. I was fairly certain I could continue to pay the bills on the place now, but did I want to stay? The rules and regulations had purportedly been drawn up to protect the value of everyone’s property, but if that was their sole purpose, they seemed unnecessarily restrictive. Was I prepared to accept my neighbors informing on me for hanging bath mats on my back railing? Was I willing to hide a two-pound kitten behind drawn curtains for fear of eviction? Not having to mow my lawn was nice, but I was sacrificing other aspects of my quality of life.
I realized that I had been dozing and snapped back to attention, fearful that Jasmine had made a snack of Moses while I napped. My concerns were unfounded. Oliver had changed position slightly and lay on his side, curled protectively around the kitten, who snored happily. Jasmine had abandoned guard duty in the hall and dozed next to me on the couch. Well, at least something was going right.
~
Joey arrived at The Birches on Saturday, a day earlier than usual. His schedule had been changed temporarily, and he planned to give the tractor portion of his rig, which served as a very comfortable little apartment on wheels during the week, a thorough cleaning and to spend some time with Moses. He arrived mid-afternoon, driving his red tractor circumspectly down the street.
With the fearlessness of youth, he backed the truck neatly into the visitor’s half of my double driveway. He was so close to the garage door that the vehicle practically touched the paint, but every last inch of it fit within my driveway, where, according to my careful review of The Birches’ rules and regulations, commercial vehicles could be parked “for extended periods of time.”
Once parked, the truck was silent. It blocked nothing and inconvenienced no one. Nevertheless, within five minutes of Joey’s arrival, traffic slowed to a crawl past the driveway as my fellow residents stared, aghast, at this affront to The Birches’ aesthetics. I was confident in my interpretation of the regulations, so I ignored them, and Joey amused himself by waving and smiling at the rubber-neckers as he energetically washed and vacuumed his pride and joy.
Behind the driver’s seat were bunk beds, narrow closets, and a small refrigerator. A heater separate from the truck’s engine kept the interior comfortable when he was stopped for the night. He even had a color television and a CD player. Mary, out for an afternoon constitutional, accepted Joey’s invitation to take a tour and gamely scrambled up the steep steps to the driver’s seat with Joey pulling from inside the cab and me pushing from below. She was enchanted with everything from the comfortable bunks to the miniature amenities and announced her intention to accompany Joey on a future trip. Patient soul that he is, Joey said merely, “You bet, Mary,” and winked cheerfully at me behind her back.
In the early evening Joey finished up, and I took a photo of him and Mary standing next to the gleaming behemoth. We sat down to sandwiches and Cokes, and Moses provided the entertainment. He might not have mastered the stairs just yet, but overnight he had learned how to scramble onto the kitchen window seat and spring from there into the laps of his victims, who were seated at the table. We were invariably startled by his appearing like a black bat out of nowhere, overshooting his target by a few inches, then belly-flopping onto our legs, tiny claws digging in sharply.
“Yeow!” Joey protested for perhaps the fourth time as he unhooked Moses from his cut-off jeans and set him back on the floor. “You’d better quit that if you ever expect to find a permanent home, buster.” He looked at me questioningly.
I shrugged. As many problems as I had at the moment, the one of finding a new home for Moses didn’t even make the cut. I had shelved it for the time being.
Mary went home to her television shows, and Joey showered and went out with friends, an infrequent treat due to his Monday-to-Sunday driving schedule. I poured a glass of Shiraz and settled in with Garrison Keillor’s radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” to give myself a manicure and toss wads of crumpled paper for Moses. Fortunately, his earlier activities had pretty much worn him out, and he soon sought out Oliver, curled on his blanket under an end table, and plumped down on top of him. Ollie opened one eye and gazed at his uninvited companion resignedly, then closed it. Jasmine was nowhere to be seen.
I tried not to think about how Armando was spending his Saturday night and with whom, but it was impossible. Impatiently, I went into my solitary bedroom to pick out suitable clothes for Girouard’s memorial service the following morning. The phone rang, and I picked it up eagerly. “Hello?”
“Ms. Lawrence? This is Craig Saunders from Prestige Property Management.”
My heart sank. “Yes, Mr. Saunders.”
“I just reviewed my telephone messages, Ms. Lawrence, and I must say many of your neighbors are very upset about the commercial vehicle parked in front of your unit.
That’s because they don’t have anything more substantial to occupy their minds, I thought and sighed. “The Association’s regulations seem very clear on that point, Mr. Saunders,” I hastened to point out. “Regulation number eight specifies that a truck can be parked for extended periods in designated parking areas, and my driveway is certainly a designated …”
“This has nothing to do with Association rules, Ms. Lawrence,” Saunders interrupted firmly. “There is a town ordinance that specifically prohibits overnight parking of commercial vehicles in plain sight in a residential zone. Naturally, that includes The Birches.”
Ooops. It had never occurred to me that the Town of Wethersfield could be even more restrictive than the condo association. In the few months that Joey had been driving a truck, we had never had occasion to have to check out town ordinances. Knowing by my silence that he had me, Saunders pressed his advantage. “The vehicle will have to b
e removed immediately, of course.”
I could manage a standard transmission, but a twenty-foot tractor with a dozen forward gears was a bit beyond my reach. “My son is out for the evening, Mr. Saunders, but I will attempt to locate him,” I said, struggling to keep my temper. Buffoon though he was, this wasn’t Saunders’ fault. He had merely drawn the short straw on weekend duty.
“I’d advise you to do your best, Ms. Lawrence. I understand that several calls have already been made to the Wethersfield Police Department about this matter, and this is a ticketable offense.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I said shortly and disconnected. Damn. Now I’d have to track Joey down and ruin his Saturday night. I thought fast, then dialed the non-emergency number for the Wethersfield PD. For once, luck was with me. Young Rick Fletcher, who had been in Joey’s high school class, was on the desk. I identified myself and filled him in.
“Is it true that there’s a town ordinance prohibiting overnight parking of commercial vehicles at a residence?” I asked plaintively.
“Yeah, it’s on the books,” Rick confirmed. “It’s a seventy-five dollar ticket, too. It’s just one of those old ordinances we don’t bother to enforce unless somebody complains, and you’ve got to figure those fussbudgets at The Birches are going to complain. We get more calls from that place than from any other neighborhood in town.”
I could believe it. “Well, we certainly had no idea about the ordinance, and Joey’s out. I can call him on his cell phone and get him back here, but it will take a while, and he’s probably had a few beers. Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to move this thing tonight. Anyway, where is he going to put it? Practically the whole town is a residential community, and it’s too late to call any business owners for permission to leave it in their lot overnight.”
Rick thought for a minute. “When was Joey planning to leave your place?”
“He’ll be on the road by eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” I said. “How soon do you have to issue the ticket?”
Waiting for Armando (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) Page 7
