Assignment Denver: The Case of the Eccentric Heiress: Jae Lovejoy Cozy Mystery One (Jae Lovejoy Cozy Mysteries Book 1)

by Lucey Phillips

  We walked up to the front door, but a police officer was standing there.

  “Can’t let you in,” he said. “Sorry. Chamberlain said she’ll be out to make a statement when she’s done.”

  “Was there a break-in?” I asked.

  “The building isn’t alarmed,” the officer said. “Someone just called dispatch saying they saw people inside with flashlights.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Behind the officer, the shop looked untouched from when Colin and I had been there. But the piles of junk, resting beneath a thick coating of dust, looked even more dreary under the unnatural glow of the florescent lights above, without any supplemental sunlight filtering in through the front windows. The windows and door were all intact. Had the burglar used a key?

  Colin snapped a picture of the storefront before we stepped away.

  I wandered off down the sidewalk, toward the alley. Maybe the burglar entered through the back door. Colin followed me.

  Before we got to the shop’s back loading dock, I could tell something was off. A narrow rectangle of light stretched out from the doorway, onto the cement platform and the brick wall.

  “Look! Is this how they got inside?” I started walking faster.

  “One of the cops probably opened it when they were looking around,” Colin said. “Or I guess, maybe, it’s broken.”

  I walked up to the platform and grabbed the edge of the cement, trying to peer through the tiny, two-inch opening of the door. It looked like the latch was stuck, preventing the metal door from closing completely.

  “Yeah, maybe the police opened it,” I whispered as I pulled myself closer and stood on my tiptoes. “Who knows.”

  I watched for shadows and listened for footsteps on the other side of the door. It didn’t seem like anyone was there.

  “I’m going in,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I think I can parkour myself up there,” I said with a giggle.

  Colin’s eyes twinkled. “I’m sure you can.”

  I tightened my grip on the platform and tried to pull myself up while kicking my feet against the brick wall. I made it a good fourteen inches before collapsing on the ground, covering my mouth to quiet my laughter.

  “Yep,” Colin whispered as he helped me up. “You’re a real ninja.”

  I stood and grabbed the platform again for a second attempt.

  “Here,” he whispered, placing his hands firmly around my hips. “I’ll give you a boost. On three, you jump.”

  He started counting, and I jumped on three. He was able to lift me an extra two feet—enough for me to throw my torso onto the platform. Then wiggled my lower body around, one leg at a time. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

  I looked down at Colin, ready to give him instructions about bailing me out if I got caught. But he was holding an open hand toward me. He wanted me to help him up.

  So I knelt close to the edge and reached down with both arms. Colin arranged his camera strap so it was diagonal across his torso and spun it so the camera rested in the middle of his back. Then he reached up and wrapped his hand around my left arm above the elbow.

  “Hold tight,” he said as he put his hand over mine on his left arm. “Don’t worry, I won’t pull you down.”

  He didn’t. He positioned his right hand on the platform, jumped, kicked off against the wall, and landed softly on the platform beside me. He had barely needed my help.

  Then Colin leaned toward the tiny opening of the door, peered inside, and looked back at me with a mischievous smile. I felt the color drain from my face. I’d done some snooping back in my news reporting days, but I didn’t remember doing anything like this.

  I approached the door and listened for a moment. It was still quiet on the other side of the door, in the shop’s back hallway. I slowly started pulling the door open, ready to stop if it made a noise or if I heard someone coming.

  We stepped inside. To the left was the shop’s office where we had found Bunny on the floor. We could hear police officers’ voices. They seemed to be talking about plans to visit a nearby breakfast buffet after they cleared the scene.

  To the right was a staircase. Cautiously, I walked toward it and up the stairs.

  “What are we looking for?” Colin whispered while we walked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just want something good for my next story. I want to make it stand out.”

  At the top of the stairs, a narrow hallway led to an open door. We stepped inside and turned on the lights. There was a living room and a small eat-in kitchen, with a hallway leading away from the living room, presumably toward the bedrooms. The rooms were dusty and a little bit cluttered, but not nearly as bad as the shop.

  “She lived here?” I whispered as we both gazed around the room. “She had so much money. The stuff Quinn sent me said she had a massive estate outside of Colorado Springs.”

  “But she was eighty. An eighty-year-old can’t make that drive every day,” Colin said.

  “And she’s eccentric,” I said. “Maybe she just stayed here sometimes.”

  “Maybe it was her love shack,” Colin said, pointing to a bouquet of roses sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. A small card was attached to the bouquet. It had a picture of a smiling teddy bear hugging a heart. I walked over and pulled the card out of the bouquet. “XOXO” was written on the back. There was no name. “Trieber Florist” was printed in tiny gold letters on the card.

  Holding up the card, I asked Colin, “Could Bunny have had a boy toy?”

  He smirked. “I guess so.”

  Then we heard two pairs of stomping footsteps coming from the stairway. Colin was instantly pale. He motioned toward the hallway. I grabbed his wrist and we ran toward the back.

  Two men’s voices were getting louder. We found our way into a bedroom. I slid on my stomach under the bed and Colin hopped into a closet.

  “Someone already cleared this area,” one of the voices said. “Why’d they leave the lights on?”

  “Better check again,” the other voice said.

  The sound of the footsteps traveled through the apartment. I held my breath as the footsteps came closer, then the light in the bedroom turned on. I could see the polished shoes and the navy blue trousers belonging to the police officer walking across the room.

  For the first time, I could see the surface I was lying on. It was covered in gray dust. There was a ball of dust the size of an apple right in front of my face and some random fibers and hairs stuck to my hands, which were splayed out on the hardwood floor in front of me. My stomach turned.

  Just as I wondered how Colin was doing, and if the officer would open the closet door, the light turned off and the footsteps faded away down the hallway.

  I waited a moment—what felt like five minutes but was probably just ninety seconds—and then I whispered to Colin.

  “Let’s go.”

  The closet door creaked. I scooted out from under the bed and felt something stringy wrapping around my fingers.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” he whispered.

  “The way we came in, I guess. I gotta get back out front if Chamberlain’s going to be making a statement or something.”

  I walked through the apartment. The lights were all turned off, but there was now enough sunlight coming in through the windows to let us find our way.

  At the top of the stairs, we could hear chatter on a police radio. An officer was probably standing close to the loading dock door. Colin looked grim.

  “Fire escape,” I whispered as I hurried around the apartment, moving curtains and trying to find a window that led to the fire escape.

  Finally, I pulled back yellowed lace curtains in the kitchen and saw the wrought iron railing of the fire escape. I unlocked the window and tried to open it, but it was stuck. We could still hear the noises of the police radio drifting in from downstairs.

  Colin gave the window a little wiggle and then slid it up with ease. There was no tim
e for me to insist I’d loosened it, so I just rolled my eyes at Colin as I climbed out of the window.

  We made our way down the fire escape quickly. I tried to wave the dust from my hands and I brushed off my clothes while we walked. When we got to the bottom of the fire escape, we were still far above street level.

  “Oh yeah, it’s parkour time,” I whispered. The relief from escaping Bunny’s apartment without getting caught was making me giddy.

  Colin grinned and held out his hand, gesturing for me to go ahead of him. The alley seemed far below me. Yesterday, I’d watched Mitch, Amos, and Jennie all drop similar distances with ease. But it looked different from up here.

  Colin was silent as he waited behind me. Finally, I decided the only way I would have the courage to make the drop would be to shorten the distance between me and the ground—I would hang from the fire escape and then drop to the alley.

  I lowered myself through the opening in the landing of the fire escape and held onto the edge, the rough metal digging into the skin on my fingers. I never really made the decision to let go. After a moment, my hands just couldn’t hold me anymore, and they slipped away from the fire escape.

  Somehow, my lower body remembered the landings I’d practiced the day before, and I planted both feet in the alley without any pain. Colin followed me the same way—hanging first, then letting go. I checked my clothes for dust as we walked around quickly to the front of the shop.

  The sun was up now, and more reporters and passersby had gathered at the scene. Detective Chamberlain, wearing a long navy blue trench coat, stood in front of one of the shop’s grimy windows. Journalists were poised with cameras, recorders, and microphones pointing in her direction.

  “Because of the, eh, disorganized merchandising and filing systems in this business, it’s extremely difficult to ascertain what—if anything—was taken or disturbed,” she said.

  One woman, holding a microphone toward the detective, asked, “Are there signs of forced entry?”

  “It doesn’t look that way,” Chamberlain said. “The windows and doors are all intact. The back door was locked when police arrived this morning. However, this is an old building with no security system. There are some vulnerabilities here that could have allowed someone discreet entry without leaving signs of a break-in.”

  “Or the perpetrator could have had a key?” another reporter asked.

  “That is a possibility,” Chamberlain answered.

  I decided to get in the game. “What’s missing?” I asked. “What do you think they were looking for?”

  “There are some secured areas inside that may have been disturbed,” Chamberlain said. “Locked cabinets and drawers were found by arriving officers to be ajar. We’ll be comparing photos taken today with murder scene photos taken two days ago.”

  “Is this related to Bunny Malone’s murder?” a male broadcast reporter asked.

  “There are many possibilities,” Chamberlain said. “Obviously this is an antiques shop. There could be numerous valuable items inside. Unfortunately, the record-keeping related to inventory was poor to non-existent. For now, we simply don’t know.”

  Then the reporter asked Chamberlain, “Are you any closer to making an arrest related to Bunny’s murder?”

  The detective looked like her patience was long gone. “The investigation is ongoing. That’s all I can tell you right now.”

  Despite reporters continuing to volley questions at the detective, she hurried to her vehicle with her partner at her side. Then two uniformed officers climbed into their vehicle and drove away.

  Colin and I walked to the coffee shop across the street. I went into the bathroom and scrubbed the dust off of my hands while Colin ordered our coffee. We set up our laptops. Colin got to work editing his photos and I began writing my story.

  “I wonder if it was the murderer,” I muttered, mostly to myself, while I typed.

  “What?” Colin asked without looking up from his computer.

  “Maybe whoever killed Bunny came back last night to, I don’t know, get rid of evidence?”

  “Sounds like they had a key.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Her lanyard with keys went missing when she was killed.”

  “But lots of people could have had keys. The nephew Pat probably had one, maybe Mitch had one. Maybe some of those buildings share a basement—just like they share a fire escape.”

  I let out a deep sigh and rested my chin on my hand. “So far, the people who benefit from Bunny’s death are Mitch, because she was an awful landlord, and Pat because he’ll inherit her fortune, right?”

  “That’s the short list,” Colin said, nodding. “But the police are interested in the Tin Pan Saloon guy—Gus Grubler. I mean, when someone ends up dead, you have to look at the romantic partner first.”

  “But they quit seeing each other years ago.”

  Colin shrugged. “People lie.”

  “Yeah. They do.” My time away from the news had allowed me to lapse into trusting people, but Colin was right. Good reporters have to be skeptical.

  | Seven

  Iread Pat Malone’s address to Colin while he typed it into our rental car’s navigation system. Quinn had found the address for me. I didn’t call ahead, but at 9 a.m., I figured our chances of finding Pat home were pretty good.

  Colin and I had several coffees while he worked on the photos and I wrote my story about the break-in at Antiquities. Even though I’d only had about six hours of sleep and Colin had even less, there was no way we were going back to the hotel after our assignments were complete. I’d even penciled out a route we could take, after the interview with Pat, to hit a couple interesting spots for my travel story.

  “This Pat Malone is an odd guy,” I said, scrolling through the information Quinn had sent me, while Colin drove.

  There were several news articles announcing Pat’s imaginative business ventures and then their prompt, often catastrophic failures.

  First was an adult circus fantasy camp where, for five thousand dollars, people could spend a week learning trapeze, lion taming, fire eating, sword swallowing, and a variety of clown skills. The camp closed within six months after several participants sustained serious injuries. Plus, the business was accused of mistreating animals.

  Pat Malone’s other entrepreneurial disasters included a mobile dentistry practice and a manufacturing startup called Feline Innovations that offered a variety of creative solutions to litter box problems.

  “FYI: Cats do not like wearing diapers,” I said to Colin as I held up a drawing of Feline Innovations’ “Catainment System” taken from Pat’s patent application.

  “What?” Colin laughed after glancing over at the illustration.

  His face completely transformed with his laughter. I couldn’t look away from his suddenly bright eyes and smile.

  We were winding up a hill when I remembered I’m prone to motion sickness. I dropped my phone in my lap and opened the window a crack.

  “Woah,” Colin said quietly. “You okay? Your face just turned white.”

  “I shouldn’t have tried reading in the car,” I said. “I might hurl.”

  Colin laughed again. “Hurl? You’re such a grownup.”

  I swung my arm sideways and smacked his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t tease you when you’re ill.”

  “Liar,” I said. “You know you’re not sorry!”

  “Well.” He smirked and chuckled.

  Colin slowed, rolled all four windows down, and eased the vehicle onto the narrow shoulder of the road.

  “I was probably going too fast. Sorry,” he said, sounding sincere this time.

  I managed an “Ugh,” as I breathed in the fresh air and prayed the nausea and spinning would subside.

  After a couple minutes, I started to feel better and told Colin he could keep driving.

  “There were broken engagements too,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Pat Malone, I was get
ting to the part about his love life. Quinn found so much good stuff on him … his failed businesses … his love life was a wreck,” I said. “I think he was trying to hook up with a sugar mama.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I’ll have to look at it again when we’re not moving, but he was on the society pages sometimes—arm candy for the rich old ladies.”

  “Wow.” Colin’s eyes widened. “This is gonna be good.”

  We pulled into Pat Malone’s condo complex. It must have been a spectacular site for a bachelor’s pad thirty years ago. But now, the gold script lettering, reading the name of the complex, Spruce Bluff, set against the decorative white brick wall at the entrance, looked tired and dated.

  “Oh yeah,” I said.

  I squinted at a sign. “Let’s see, he’s supposed to be in number forty-seven, that way.” I pointed to the right.

  We parked and made our way up the outdoor stairs to the front door of Pat’s second-story condo. After I pressed the doorbell, we heard an elaborate series of chimes. I took a deep breath and glanced over at Colin—relieved that I didn’t have to do this alone.

  Pat opened the door. He was wearing brown corduroy pants and a matching blazer over an ivory dress shirt. His red frizzy hair was styled in its usual deep part and comb-over. A gold bracelet sparkled on his wrist.

  He seemed to light up with excitement when I introduced myself and Colin.

  “Come in! Come in!” he said. “I love Alt News America! The local news places have contacted me, but you’re the first national news folks to come by.”

  He led us to his living room where we all sat on black puffy vinyl sectional sofas and chairs.

  Pat shook his head dramatically when I told him I was sorry for his loss.

  “Aunt Bunny was a really special lady,” he said. “She helped me so much. And I was her only family. I took her to her appointments and helped at the shop sometimes.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Well, of course people said she was eccentric. When someone has the means to do as they please, they get labeled that way,” Pat said with a sniff. “It’s jealousy, really.