Crime & Punctuation

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  “I heard.” I didn’t tell him who had mentioned it. He had to know that his ex wasn’t a member of his fan club.

  “My theory is that he found a copy of Tiffany’s will after her death and used it as a template for the bogus version. It has the same date and is signed by the same witnesses, but there’s one big difference. It leaves everything to him.”

  “The same witnesses? Then wouldn’t they know which will is the real one?”

  “All they witnessed was Tiffany’s signature. That’s standard practice. There was no reason for them to see the contents of the will.”

  We were silent for a few minutes. “Won’t a handwriting expert be able to tell the original from the forgery?”

  “Sure, but meanwhile the legal challenge is preventing Ronnie from doing anything with the shares until the case is settled. Even when it is, there will be a long wait while the authentic will is probated. In the meantime, who knows what Onslow will do?”

  I was about to ask Mike for his take on Wonderful World being a total scam when he suddenly stood up, crossed to the loveseat, shoved Calpurnia off, and sat down beside me. He took both my hands in his.

  “Listen to me, Mikki. It’s not a good idea for you to get on Onslow’s bad side.”

  “Does that mean you think he killed his wife?”

  “It means you need to use common sense and stay out of the crossfire. Whether he’s a murderer or just a garden-variety con man, he’s trouble. Tell you what—why don’t I take charge of that thumb drive?”

  “No way.” I pulled free of his grasp. “It isn’t as if he knows I have it. I’m not taking any risks by hanging on to it. Besides, so far it doesn’t look as if it contains anything more exciting than Tiffany’s manuscript and research files.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  He looked so concerned about my well-being that I softened my stance. It felt good to have someone worry about me, even though I had no inclination to take on the role of little-lady-in-need-of-protection. “The only file that’s been the least bit mysterious is one Tiffany named ‘blackmail.doc,’ and I’m pretty sure it relates to one of the characters in her novel.”

  Mike looked startled but forced a smile when I chuckled.

  “Most of the rest of the research consists of newspaper stories about very old crimes,” I continued, “although there is one set of notes. She talked with someone who had firsthand knowledge of a Murder Incorporated killing back in the 1930s. Or maybe secondhand, considering how long ago that was.” I should go back and read that file, I thought. I’d only glanced at the content the one time I’d opened it.

  A thundercloud gathered in Mike’s expression. “Those old killings were brutal. Why do you want to read about them?”

  “I’ve read worse, and seen the like in living color at the movies.”

  He was sweet to worry about my delicate sensibilities, but his overabundance of concern was starting to annoy me. I didn’t need someone else deciding what I should or shouldn’t do.

  “Don’t worry.” I squeezed his forearm in what was meant to be a reassuring gesture. “I don’t plan on confronting Onslow or making wild accusations in public, but I am going to read the rest of the material Tiffany left behind. If I find anything that constitutes proof of wrongdoing, I promise that I’ll take it straight to Detective Hazlett.”

  Mike heaved an exasperated sigh. “At which point you’ll probably find yourself in big trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “Ever hear of withholding evidence?”

  I sent him a considering look. “You wanted me to give you the thumb drive. What would you have done with it?”

  “The same thing you’re going to,” he admitted. “Read the files. Look for anything that isn’t fiction.” He released me to run one hand through his hair, calling my attention to the preponderance of gray strands among the black. It was thinner than it had been, too.

  “And if you found something?” I prompted him.

  “I’d be tempted to send it to Hazlett anonymously.”

  “I could do that, but I’d be afraid that he’d discount it.”

  Mike forced a smile but his eyes remained deadly serious. “Promise me that if you do come across something incriminating, you won’t go to the police on your own. I’ll go with you to make certain you stay out of jail.”

  “You’ll be the first to know if I find a clue,” I assured him. “Believe me when I say that the last thing I want is to be locked up.”

  Chapter 22

  It was Saturday morning before I had a block of time available to spend with Tiffany’s files. I had not yet finished reading her novel. Since her plot had grown more convoluted with each succeeding chapter, a little went a long way. The same was true of her research. If I were fascinated by true crime, I might have found the documents she’d collected more interesting, but my tolerance for reading about long-dead mobsters killing each other was limited, and there was a certain gory sameness about the newspaper clippings, not to mention some of the interviews. At first I thought the file I’d just opened was more of the same.

  It was the story of someone Tiffany referred to only as “a local man” and detailed how he had gotten away with murder by making the authorities think it was just another mob hit. The real killer had apparently enjoyed a loose connection with a hotel where the gang ran the slots. A note at the end of the account indicated that Tiffany’s facts had come from a descendant of this murderous Sullivan County resident.

  I should confess that I don’t know much about gambling. There are a couple of casinos in Maine, but I’d never visited either of them. The closest I ever came to a one-armed bandit or a roulette wheel was on a ferry ride from Portland to Nova Scotia years ago. Once in international waters, most of the passengers spent their time, and their money, hoping to win big at one of the table games or hit the jackpot by repeatedly inserting money and pulling a lever. I’d found a comfortable chair where I could look out over the water and alternated between watching that peaceful scene and reading a book I’d brought with me. The building of a casino in nearby Monticello might have prompted Greg Onslow to come up with his plan to revitalize Lenape Hollow, but I had zero interest in spending any time in that establishment.

  “I’ll watch Ocean’s Eleven if I want to see how gamblers live,” I informed Calpurnia as she walked across the table in front of me, momentarily distracting me from my laptop screen.

  Just as I started to close the file and move on to another, a stray thought niggled at the back of my mind. Where was the confirmation Tiffany mentioned? Could it be in the file I’d told Mike about, the one I’d started to read and never gotten back to?

  After a few minutes of searching, I found it again. This time I read every word. Tiffany’s notes consisted of a collection of quotes that when cobbled together corroborated the details in the file I’d just read. She had taken pains not to identify her source. She hadn’t even specified when or where she’d talked to this relative of the man who’d gotten away with what she called “the copycat killing.”

  Pretty clever, I thought. Murder someone and let the mob take the blame. I wondered if a fictionalized version of the story would appear in the final chapters of Tiffany’s novel. That would certainly spice things up.

  That thought gave me pause. If the killer’s descendant was still around, as it seemed likely he or she must be, he or she might not have wanted this skeleton in the closet exposed. It was one thing to tell a story to a young woman who was interested in the “good old days” and quite another to have your family’s deepest, darkest secret appear in print.

  How far would a son or daughter go, I wondered, to ensure Tiffany’s silence? Would a grandson or granddaughter care what Grandpa had done? They might. Assuming that Tiffany had been murdered, here was yet another motive and a whole array of new suspects. The person she’d talked to might have been willing to admit the truth in private, but what about other relatives? One of them might not have been happy about sharing
the story, let alone the prospect of seeing it reimagined in a published book. A change of name to protect the copycat killer’s identity would not have guaranteed that the crime couldn’t be traced back to the real murderer.

  Instead of opening the next research file, I returned to Tiffany’s novel. It contained no front matter, but sometimes writers put acknowledgments and other information about their sources at the end.

  And there it was—“A Note from the Author.”

  Tiffany’s files included several interviews. She had talked to a number of local people, members of families who had lived in Sullivan County for generations and had stories to tell about the atrocities committed by Murder Incorporated. Their parents or grandparents had been eyewitnesses to history. The acknowledgments named them all.

  I recognized most of the surnames, if not the individuals in question. Only one or two didn’t ring a bell, making me wonder if one of them was Tiffany’s anonymous source for the tale of the copycat killer.

  When I read the author’s note the first time, nothing jumped out at me, but on the second pass my editor’s eye caught what I assumed was a typo. I frowned. This particular error struck me as peculiar. While Tiffany had occasionally made mistakes in other areas of punctuation, her use of the Oxford comma had been one hundred percent consistent throughout her manuscript. The anomaly I noticed came at the end of a sentence acknowledging several lawyers she’d talked to. If she’d meant to thank them as a group of three, then she should have written “my lawyer friends, Philip Sussman, Lawrence Kruger, and Michael Doran.” Instead, she’d thanked “my lawyer friends, Philip Sussman and Lawrence Kruger, and Michael Doran.”

  There was a tiny but telling difference in meaning, one that could be interpreted a couple of ways. The missing comma could indicate that Mike wasn’t really a lawyer, that perhaps he was a fraud. I didn’t think that was likely, which left me with the second explanation, that Mike was the source of some specific information, separate from what he might have contributed in his capacity as a lawyer.

  Could Mike have been the source of the copycat killer story? That was a leap, I know, but once I considered the possibility, I began to remember details from his past that seemed to corroborate the theory.

  Mike’s father died when Mike was just a baby. He’d been a lot older than most of our classmates’ parents—old enough to have murdered someone back in the 1930s. Had he left behind papers telling his story? Or had Mike’s mother known what he did and passed that knowledge on to her son?

  Frowning, I stared into space. If I was correct, why hadn’t Mike mentioned that Tiffany had talked to him? The answer to that question was easy enough to come by. It probably embarrassed him to have a killer for a father, even if the murder did take place a long time ago. Perhaps it was his desire to keep his father’s secret under wraps that prompted his offer to take charge of the thumb drive.

  My frown deepened. If that was the case, why had he shared his father’s story with Tiffany at all? He was an old family friend. That meant that Tiffany had known him all her life. Perhaps she’d picked up bits and pieces of the story over the years. That would explain the way her notes were written—as if they’d been compiled in a number of separate sessions. Had Mike even realized he was being pumped for information?

  So, I thought, assuming that Mike’s father was the copycat killer, did that give Mike sufficient motive to murder Tiffany? Nonsense, I told myself. Mike wouldn’t have killed Tiffany to stop her from revealing his family secret. He’d have threatened to sue her to stop publication of her novel, and that was only if she’d actually intended to use the story. I couldn’t confirm that she’d included it until I finished reading her book.

  I dedicated the rest of the day, when the absence of workmen bathed the house in peace and quiet, to completing that task. Nowhere in the text did she mention a copycat crime. I closed the file with a sense of relief.

  So much for that theory! I shook my head, amused by the way my overactive imagination had gone off on a tangent. To fall back on clichés, I’d been grasping at straws. Even my identification of the copycat killer as Mike’s father had probably been way out in left field. The simplest explanation was that Tiffany had simply misplaced a comma and Mike had been no more than one of the lawyers she’d talked to.

  As for her novel, it had failed to live up to the promise of the first few chapters. In the last third of her book, she had thrown in just about every tried and true plot twist ever to grace a gangster story. Even with input from a good editor, I thought it unlikely she’d have been able to interest a traditional publisher in buying it. Would I have suggested she self-publish? Maybe, but only after a total rewrite. Even then I had my doubts about its potential for success.

  It saddened me that Tiffany’s dream had not been realized, but I was more disappointed not to have found a clue to her killer’s identity in the manuscript. Those thinly disguised caricatures of her husband and Alan Van Heusen? She’d killed them off a couple of chapters before the end.

  Chapter 23

  On Sunday, since Darlene hadn’t been in touch and I was concerned about her, I went to the one place I was certain to find her: worship services at the First Presbyterian Church of Lenape Hollow. I inserted myself into the pew next to her and gave her my widest smile. I received a decidedly guilty look in return.

  As soon as the recessional began, I addressed the elephant in the room. “You’ve been avoiding me, kiddo. Don’t you think it’s about time you told me why?”

  She closed her eyes for a brief moment, gave a theatrical sigh, and conceded my point.

  I followed Darlene’s van back to her place. Since Frank was at the golf course, we had the house to ourselves, but she insisted on making sandwiches before we settled down to talk. By the time we were seated at her kitchen table with plates and glasses in front of us and the smell of recent baking—apples and cinnamon—in the air, I’d lost patience with her delaying tactics.

  “So?”

  “I guess you’re wondering why I’ve been so uncommunicative all week.” She inscribed random patterns on the tabletop with the tip of one finger and avoided meeting my eyes.

  “I guess I do. I’ve been worried about you. I know darned well something is wrong. You haven’t been yourself since the day I took you to see the eye doctor.”

  The hint of a smile curved her lips at that statement. “Gee, you should have been a detective.”

  “We’ll talk about that later.”

  She cocked her head, inviting me to fill her in then and there. Instead, I motioned for her to continue.

  “What can I say? I’ve been down in the dumps and feeling sorry for myself.”

  “Why?”

  Darlene took a bite of her chicken salad sandwich, delaying the next part of her confession. I followed suit, trying to pretend I wasn’t about to explode with curiosity. Darlene makes a mean chicken salad with homemade mayo and tiny bits of Vidalia onions and green peppers, but for once I didn’t take the time to savor the taste.

  When she spoke, her words came out in a rush. “I thought I was losing my eyesight. That day you took me to Dr. Shapiro it wasn’t just for a checkup, and the tests didn’t go well. He told me I needed to see a specialist. He said there was a possibility that I might go blind.”

  The food I’d just put in my mouth instantly turned to sawdust. With an effort, I finished chewing and swallowed. “Oh, Darlene, I—”

  She spoke right over my attempt to comfort her. “Dr. Shapiro set up an appointment for me with a guy in Middletown. I drove myself to the appointment and had more tests.”

  “You didn’t have to go through this alone. I could have—”

  “Yes, I did. I didn’t want anyone to know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t even tell Frank. I can’t stand the thought of being pitied.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. She wouldn’t believe me if I claimed that no one would feel sorry for her.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “when the speciali
st looked over the list of medicines I take, he picked up on something that Dr. Shapiro missed. The scare was a false alarm. Or to be more specific, the problem was caused by one of my arthritis medications. Lucky me. I get to choose between living with pain and losing my sight.”

  Although she was trying to make light of the scare she’d had, I could imagine how frightened she must have been. “I just wish you’d told me sooner. At the least I could have offered moral support.”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even want to think about it. I still don’t, really, but you deserved an explanation for my behavior.”

  “I get why you clammed up. I do.” I reached across the table to place my hand over hers. It was vibrating with tension. “The thought of not being able to see would scare the bejesus out of me, too.”

  There was no need to say more. After a moment, we went back to eating lunch.

  “So,” Darlene asked when only crumbs remained on her plate, “how was your week?”

  “Interesting,” I said, and filled her in on what I’d been up to.

  When she laughed at the saga of Lake Kitchen, I knew our friendship was back on an even keel.

  “One of these days, I’ve got to meet this cat of yours,” she said.

  “Any time. Just don’t bring the dog.” I reached down to ruffle Edmund’s ears as he gazed up at me with adoring but bloodshot eyes. “Calpurnia would beat the crap out of him.”

  Chapter 24

  By ten o’clock on Monday morning, the noise level at my house was more than I could endure. Even removing my hearing aids didn’t help. Once again, men were working directly over my head in what would eventually become my office.

  Leaving Calpurnia to cope—she appeared to be able to sleep through an earthquake—I packed up my laptop and headed for Harriet’s. If J. K. Rowling could create Harry Potter in a coffee shop, surely I could edit a manuscript in one.

  I should have known better.