Holly and Homicide

by Leslie Caine

  “Erin and I were about to go back to the inn,” Audrey said. “Are you sure things are okay with you?”

  Wendell made sad puppy-dog eyes at her, which instantaneously repulsed me. “If I said no and that I’d like your company, would you spend the rest of the day with me?”

  “Actually, Audrey,” I said, intent at preventing her from saying yes, “I need your help. Steve and I should really get your approval on our Christmas décor in the twelve rooms. We’re nearly finished.” No way was I leaving Audrey alone with Wendell if I had any say in the matter. At least not when he struck me as having an unhealthy dose of anger simmering.

  Audrey arched her brow as she looked at me—not a good thing—but said, “Well, there goes that idea, Wendell. I’ll call you soon, though.”

  “That’s fine, dear.” Audrey and Wendell gave each other an affectionate hug, which made me cringe. It hit me that Steve, when he’d watched me with Cam, must have felt even worse than I did now, seeing Audrey and Wendell together—seemingly charmed by a man we suspected of murder.

  Wendell continued downtown alone. As we neared Audrey’s car, she said, “I know you think he might be a murderer, Erin, but you’re wrong. I’m a better judge of character than you are. For one thing, I’ve been around longer than you have. And for another, I’ve been around him much longer than you have.”

  “But he has a lot riding on the inn, Audrey. You heard him yourself just now—he’s got ‘business troubles,’ and he’s probably referring to the inn.”

  “All the more reason he wouldn’t want his right-hand man to die. Cameron took care of things for him.”

  I shook my head. “But they’d been arguing. You saw that for yourself during our fancy lunch. They could have had a complete rift, for all we know.”

  Audrey unlocked her car and, as if her glass vase were made of plastic, tossed her bag onto the backseat. I carefully set my bags by my feet as I slipped into the passenger side. She got behind the wheel and donned her sunglasses. Her lips remained in a firm line the entire time.

  “I’ve obviously upset you, Audrey, and I’m sorry. We’ll let it drop … until I uncover some evidence that indicates he’s guilty.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. “I guess.”

  I should have said unless instead of until.

  Her face was still set in a scowl by the time we’d pulled into traffic. The tension between us was palpable.

  Using the only tension breaker that came to mind, I sang out cheerfully, “‘On the first day of Christmas—’”

  To my relief, Audrey laughed.

  Henry and Mikara were in the kitchen, making lasagna for dinner when we arrived. We were showing them our purchases when Steve joined us. After a minute or two of chitchat, I asked how the leaping-lords wall hangings looked.

  He made a wavering gesture with his hand. “They’re in our room, but we didn’t actually get them installed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ben had some other jobs to handle that took precedence.” Sullivan wasn’t quite meeting my eyes. Something was up. “So I told him I’d hang the panels myself. Then I couldn’t find the recharger for the battery in my drill.”

  “There’s a drill in the garage,” Mikara said.

  Ignoring her, I said to Sullivan, “But Ben and I spent a lot of time making those panels this morning. They were ready to be hung when I left.” He furrowed his brow. He’s making excuses, probably because he doesn’t like my leaping-lords design. I had a vague recollection of feeling guilty about making Sullivan do my work for me, but now I bristled at the possibility that he didn’t think my work was up to snuff. “It would have only taken Ben another fifteen minutes to finish the job completely.”

  Sullivan shrugged. “And it’ll just take me fifteen minutes to hang the panels tomorrow morning. Once I get a drill with a good battery.”

  “I’m pretty sure the battery’s charged up and ready to go,” Henry said. “And I’ve got some small drill bits out there, too, that you can borrow. They’re in a plastic container, hanging from the Peg-Board.”

  “I’ll go get them now, and we can finish the wall hangings tonight. I want to start crossing things off my list.” I started to head for the door.

  “I’ll go with you,” Steve said, “and we can talk some more about this list of yours.”

  We donned our coats in the mudroom. He held the outer door for me. As I brushed past him, I said, “You’re joining me so that you can tell me privately you hate my leaping lords, right?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the lords themselves. But we’re going to have to hang them somewhere else. They don’t work in our bedroom.”

  “What do you mean, they ‘don’t work’? Are they not leaping high enough?” I sniped. “Are they suddenly not pointing their toes?”

  “I like the fabric you picked out, but the room is out of harmony, no matter where we hang the panels.”

  “But …they were going to really pop against the blue-gray color I painted the wall.”

  “Yeah, that’s another thing I wanted to discuss. When I saw the panels weren’t right for that wall, the paint wasn’t right, either. I repainted it aubergine, like we’d originally discussed.”

  I whirled around to face him, although it had grown so dark that I couldn’t see his features. “Please tell me you’re kidding! That you didn’t just arbitrarily overrule me on my room design and paint my wall eggplant!”

  He shook his head. “There was nothing arbitrary about it, Gilbert! The fabric panels are wrong for that room. I asked Ben his opinion, and he agreed with me.”

  I marched over to the garage door keypad, distracted and annoyed, unable to remember the combination. “Oh, well, then, the panels must be all wrong then, if the builder doesn’t care for the fabric.”

  “Speaking of fabric, the aubergine makes the comforter look like it was woven from pure, twenty-four karat gold strands.”

  “So the bedspread now looks as hard as a chunk of metal?” I cursed in silence, wondering if the combination could have been a four-letter word.

  “You forgot to ask Henry for the combination to open the garage door, didn’t you?” Steve asked.

  “I didn’t think I needed to ask, because they told it to us when we first started, and you programmed it into your cell phone.” That memory brought back another one. “And I remember the code was a mnemonic for Henry’s name.” I keyed in the number equivalent for H-A-N-K, just as Steve looked it up on his phone and read out the digits to me. “Never mind,” I said as the door opened. The bright overhead light automatically came on as well.

  “You don’t need to get crabby,” Steve snapped while we waited for the rumbling door to open fully. “It’s not my fault the panels don’t look good.”

  “They were my panels, and you might have been wrong about them! But now that you’ve painted the wall a completely different color, they’re guaranteed not to look good!”

  “I’ve got more than ten years of experience working in this field, Gilbert, and I’m telling you right—”

  “Just because you’re four years older than me, Sullivan, and have been at this for four years longer, doesn’t mean you’ve always got better judgment than I do!”

  “Did you lean the panels against the wall before you left? Or pin the fabric up to see how it looked in the room before you made the panels?”

  “Well …no,” I admitted. In retrospect, my not temporarily fastening the fabric to the wall had been a horrendous oversight. The fabric had arrived the morning we’d discovered Cam’s body, though; I hadn’t been in my right mind. “I’m not saying that I’m necessarily right. Just that you’re wrong.”

  I spotted the battery-powered drill resting on two pegs and started to head toward it.

  “Wait here. I’ll get the drill.” He brushed past me.

  “What? Now you don’t trust me with a carpentry tool?”

  “With Mackey dogging you, I’d rather not have your fingerprints on it. Even if I’m w
rong about your damned panels.”

  “You’re bound to be a bigger suspect in Cam’s murder than I am.”

  A heel print in the center of the two-port garage, between Mikara’s banged-up silver sedan and Henry’s red pickup, had captured my attention, distracting me from Sullivan. I walked over to it and crouched down for a closer look. A muddy imprint had been made by a man’s very expensive shoe.

  “Erin?” Sullivan sounded worried. He must have assumed I’d stormed back to the house, or fainted the instant his back was turned.

  “Over here,” I replied. “Do you own a pair of Gucci loafers?”

  “No, but if you’re thinking about Christmas presents, I wear a size eleven.” He rounded the front of the pickup to join me.

  “This is a shoeprint from a Gucci heel. I’ve noticed that both Cameron and Wendell wear Guccis frequently. But why would either of them have been in Henry’s garage?”

  “Beats me.” He, too, studied the mark on the concrete floor. “Maybe Henry owns a pair of really nice shoes. But, even if he doesn’t, he sometimes leaves the garage door open. All this means is that Cam or Wendell might have been looking around in the garage.”

  “And that Cameron might have been in here shortly before he was killed. His car was parked right next to the garage that night.”

  “Enough said. Let’s take a look around to see if we can spot anything that might have drawn Cameron’s or Wendell’s attention. Or that proves Cameron was in here.” He strode over to the controls next to the side door and pressed the button, lowering the garage door. “I’m closing this so nobody can look out the window and see us rummaging around.”

  Our hunt for generic evidence was probably a wild-goose chase, but then Mackey and his men were so inept they probably hadn’t thought to search this space. I watched the door descend, blocking our view of the illuminated windows in the house. “We were supposedly just retrieving the drill. They’ll think it’s strange of us to close ourselves up in here.”

  “I’m sure they’ll assume we had a sudden urge for privacy,” he said. “After they see how bad those fabric panels look in our bedroom, I mean. That’s when they’ll realize we must be out here arguing about where to hang your leaping lords.”

  “Such a comedian,” I snapped. “You’d better switch on the overhead, or the light will time out in a couple of minutes.”

  “Good point.” He returned to the side door to operate the push button for the interior light. He hesitated and muttered, “That’s odd.” He turned the doorknob and opened the door. “Apparently Henry not only leaves the garage door up a lot of the time, but he also leaves the side door unlocked.”

  “He must assume nobody could find anything worth stealing within this mess.”

  The back and sides of the garage were jam-packed with useless odds and ends—lawn chairs with rotted webbing, rusted pipe fittings, old warped boards, mildewed sports equipment, and so on. It would have been optimistic to term our search “a needle in a haystack;” we didn’t even know if there was a needle to be found. Rationalizing that the heel print was pointing toward the middle of the back wall, that’s where we started. We then each worked our way toward the front along opposite walls.

  A few minutes later, after we’d both made it about a third of the way along the side walls, Steve said, “Jeez.” I immediately stopped rifling through a musty box of old paperbacks and joined him. He shoved aside a piece of plywood and lifted out a brown leather satchel. “Does this look familiar?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure I saw that in Cameron’s car when we went out for dinner. In any case, it certainly doesn’t belong out here. For one thing, it isn’t covered in grime.”

  Steve carefully set the case on the hood of Henry’s pickup truck and removed a stack of loose papers from the main compartment—twenty or so sheets.

  “Give me half of them to look at,” I said.

  “No. You aren’t wearing gloves. I am.”

  “Well, then spread them out on the hood, so I can read without actually touching them.”

  Steve followed my instructions and laid out half a dozen pages for me to examine. After just a minute of rapid reading, I cried, “Oh, my god! These are copies of letters Cameron sent to some company in Denver. Cameron was planning to purchase the inn himself after it failed! And here’s a printout of a series of e-mails.” I skimmed it in silence, then said, “Cameron describes how he would ensure the inn’s failure by bribing the building inspector. He wanted to prevent the Snowcap Inn from opening till after ski season, when lodging rates drop exponentially. Then he planned to bribe the restaurant inspectors so that the kitchen couldn’t operate.”

  “Jeez,” Sullivan said. “That’s even worse than what I’d suspected he was up to.”

  “I don’t believe it. Cameron wouldn’t do this. And it’s just too convenient. The briefcase …his plans all spelled out like this. Someone must have forged his signature and made him the fall guy.”

  Steve was reading a paper in his hands. “Sounds like the ultimate goal would be to raze the entire Goodwin estate and erect hundreds of condos in its place. Cameron planned—” Steve paused. “If this is authentic, within the next five years Cameron intended to build a second resort in direct competition with Wendell’s. He was sinking millions into buying up all that property on the southern face of the mountain.”

  Mikara had predicted that would happen all along—that this irreplaceable historical building, the Goodwin estate, was going to get flattened in favor of condos. “Wendell was probably backing the venture,” I said. “Cameron could have been acting on Wendell’s behalf, just like always.”

  “Maybe.” Steve’s skepticism was evident in his voice. And for good reason; I was grasping at straws. The letter had plainly stated that Cameron, not Wendell, would be the new owner of the inn and its surrounding acreage.

  He reached into a second compartment and removed four or five sheets of graph paper. They were crudely drawn maps of the town and the existing resort, with the new resort and new condo development sketched in. In spite of myself, I recognized Cameron’s handwriting. I glanced back at Sullivan, who was glaring at a sheet of paper in his hand.

  “What’s that you’re reading?”

  “Nothing. Just something that caught my eye.” He hastily stuck it behind the other sheets of paper as he started to put everything back into the satchel.

  “Why did it catch your eye?”

  “The name ‘Audrey Munroe’ in the text leapt out at me.”

  “Let me read it.”

  He turned his shoulder to prevent me from taking the briefcase. “Just let it go, Erin.”

  “Steve, for heaven’s sake! Now you’ve got me imagining things like pornographic pictures of myself!”

  He sighed, pulled out the sheet of paper, and set it down on the hood of the truck so I could read it for myself. “I tried to warn you about him. Guys like Cameron don’t bother to keep up the same façade they use on women when they’re talking to other men.”

  My initial reaction was shock. In response to an e-mail from Wendell asking what he could do “to get this damned Goodwin guy to cave,” Cameron had written:

  No prob, W. If HG wants two “unbiased” copartners, get him some brainless bimbo. Snowcap’s full of them. Tell HG you want to get a third partner from Crestview. I’ve got the perfect candidate. One of my ex-g’s is living with Audrey Munroe. She’s wealthy and busy with artsy-fartsy stuff and charity crap, and does a local Martha Stewart Show knockoff. Watch it a couple of times to get the drop on her. My ex-g has always been putty in my hands. And Audrey’s a divorcée in her sixties. Putty in your hands!

  Wendell had written in reply: “Perfect! We can double-date! When it comes to fixing a deal, you’re pure genius!” Then Wendell had asked for contact information for Audrey.

  My head was reeling. “Why would Cameron have printed out these e-mails in the first place? This has to be fake. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “M
aybe you’re right,” Steve said, putting the e-mail printout into the satchel and clicking the clasp shut.

  Despite my protests, the reality was sinking in. “Damn it! Cam often printed his e-mails when he was in college; he liked to always keep a paper trail. He didn’t care a rat’s ass about me or our memories. He just wanted to get his hands on this property. So he could raze the entire place. He could have been killed over a blackmail scheme that went bad. The killer could have stolen the briefcase from Cameron and threatened to reveal its contents unless Cam paid up. Or maybe Cam was late getting back from his date with Chiffon, and Wendell got his hands on Cam’s briefcase in the meantime. He saw that Cam was double-crossing him. So Wendell lost his head and killed Cameron.”

  “Let’s let Mackey deal with this,” Steve said.

  “You might as well have suggested we hand this over to Bozo the Clown.” I felt overwhelmed. “I wish we’d never found the damned briefcase. Mackey’s just going to twist things around to make it look like we planted it here.”

  “Maybe the killer did plant it here, assuming the sheriff and his men would search the garage. Does the wording sound like Cameron’s?”

  The question brought back a memory of meeting Cameron for the very first time. Three girlfriends and I had decided to try our hands at darts in a Manhattan pub one afternoon. We spotted Cameron across the room and agreed that he was the most spectacular-looking man we’d ever seen. Our conversation immediately turned to whether or not he was gay, but before I could cast my vote, he smiled at me and crossed the room. He asked if I was a student at Columbia, and I’d said no, Parsons. He rejoined: “Ah. The artsy-fartsy school.”

  Irked, I blew him off with a sharp reply. As I started to turn away, Cameron made a strange noise and clutched at his throat, alarming me; I remembered thinking at the time that something must have gotten lodged in his windpipe. He managed what appeared to be a painful breath, grabbed my hand, and said in a raspy voice, “I’m eating my words, and they were so bad, I’m choking on them. Forgive me, or I swear to you, I’ll drop dead on this very spot.”