by Leslie Caine
I glanced at the thermostat. “It’s set at sixty-eight,” I retorted. I wondered if she was feeling the heat from the police investigation. If so, she might be willing to blab about her client. “Tracy was sure upset at Pate for vowing to develop that land behind his house,” I prompted. “Has Pate heard from her lately?”
Rebecca merely smiled at me. Drat! She was taking the high road for once! What lousy timing!
“Pate and Tracy had nothing to do with the murders. If I were you, though, I’d look closer to home. Michael needs money, and now he’s making beaucoup bucks by cashing in on his wife’s dramatic death.”
“You were having an affair with the man!” I cried.
“Once I began to see who he really was, I couldn’t break things off fast enough.” She added under her breath, “Not that he can accept that.”
“Michael’s still pursuing you?” I asked, surprised.
“He’s the one stalking me right now!”
“You actually saw him following you?” Sullivan asked.
“Yes! It’s gotten so bad, I’m afraid to go anyplace on my own.”
“Yet you came here by yourself,” I intoned, not inclined to feel sympathy toward her. “And you never hesitated to snatch him from Audrey so that he would appear on your show.”
“I know, but I shouldn’t have. That was just business. But being afraid to be alone is just dreadful.” She grabbed Sullivan’s hand and looked at him with pleading eyes. “Do you think you could walk me to my car? I was window-shopping downtown for some clients this morning. Now my car’s a full ten blocks away!”
I rose and grumbled, “Maybe I should turn the thermostat down a notch after all.”
As I changed the setting to sixty-seven, a memory hit me: Taylor had a thermostat in his shabby room. It was on the lone exterior wall, right next to the window. Why would any builder have placed a thermostat in the least efficient place imaginable?
Steve was saying: “Erin and I have a lot of work to do, Rebecca. If he’s really following you, let’s get a police escort for you. That’ll discourage him pretty quick…show him you mean business.”
“No, no. I really don’t want to get the police involved. They have enough on their hands, trying to solve two murders.”
“Actually, Steve, maybe you should walk her to her car. I have to run out to Harlem for a few minutes anyway.” (A day or two after collecting my brother’s things, I’d described the apartment to Sullivan, and he’d quickly identified the building as “Harlem”—its nickname among longtime locals.) I glanced at my watch. “I’ll meet you back here in twenty minutes.”
“Why are you going to Taylor’s? Hasn’t his room already been rented out again?”
“Probably. But I want to ask his former landlady something.” I brushed past Rebecca and grabbed my coat. “Be right back.” With the strong feeling that I was about to know once and for all who killed my brother, I rushed out the door.
chapter 27
My thoughts in a whirl, I raced to Taylor’s apartment building and parked in back. I dug through my toolbox and stuck a screwdriver in my jacket pocket in case the faceplate for the thermostat had to be unscrewed. I trotted to the front door and buzzed the manager. No answer. I pressed the button for Taylor’s old apartment. Again, no answer.
“Damn it!” I leaned on the manager’s button, to no avail.
I headed back toward the parking lot, deeply annoyed. If there was any one thing I’d known for certain about my half brother, it was that he had a compulsion for building elaborate hiding spaces. It would have been just like him to install a hollowed-out thermostat as a small hiding place.
After all, this apartment complex was hardly the Ritz. I was intending to ask the building manager if the tenants even had individual heat controls. She’d mentioned that they were always complaining about the temperature. And the placement for the would-be controls—beside a window on an external wall—was utterly bogus. If the manager verified my suspicions, I’d planned to beg and plead with her to let me into his old apartment.
Just as I stormed around the corner of the brick building, I stopped in my tracks. Taylor’s spare keys! I still had the ones he’d hidden behind the loose brick!
I dug up the two keys from the bottom of my purse. Hurriedly, I unlocked the door. I was trespassing, so I wanted to make as quick and quiet an exit as possible. I eased the door shut without letting the noisy latch fully engage.
Nobody was in the hallway at the moment. Good. I didn’t have to explain my presence. In fact, this whole hall was dead silent. Strange that there were so few people up and about on a Saturday morning. Maybe the entire apartment building had been condemned.
I tapped on Taylor’s old apartment door. No answer. Holding my breath all the while, I used his key and opened his door, praying that I wasn’t going to barge into somebody’s home.
The room was still empty, everything precisely as I’d left it. Management must have had a hard time finding anyone so down on his luck as to have been desperate enough to rent this place in the middle of the month.
I made a bead for the thermostat. I pulled off the plastic faceplate, which merely snapped off, and looked inside. A cell phone!
Taylor had called me on a cell phone from the Youngs’ house before he died. Detective O’Reilly had said they’d found a phone in his pocket. What was so special about this one that Taylor had hidden it?
My memory flashed to a conversation with Emily from last month. She’d mentioned that she’d bought a state-of-the-art cell phone to give Taylor whenever he got out of jail, but was thinking about returning it, because she’d found out he already had a fairly new one that he planned to reactivate.
I examined the phone. This one had the ability to record a video segment.
My God! Everything fell mentally into place for me.
Taylor had said he had evidence that could show me “what’s really going on.” This apartment was right on the way to my office from Shannon’s house. With his penchant for hiding spots, Taylor had hidden the phone here, safe and sound, counting on dropping by to collect it on his way downtown to show it to me. Except the killer got to him first, so he never had the chance.
With trembling hands, I turned on the phone. I pressed the buttons to see if Taylor had stored any video clips. There was indeed a saved video. I cued it up.
The frozen opening frame showed Michael, his back to the camera. He was in his kitchen. One edge of the image was blocked by a wall, as though Taylor had positioned the camera at a corner. I could imagine him staying out of sight behind a wall, holding out just the camera.
I pressed the start button. Michael was talking quietly into the cordless phone. I couldn’t quite make out the words.
A moment later, he turned. He was crying. Both cheeks were wet. Now that I could read his lips, I could tell he was saying, “You can’t leave me, Rebecca! I’m telling you, Shannon’s out of my life. She’s as good as dead.” He paused. “Rebecca?” He pressed a button on the handset and then slammed it down on the granite counter in disgust. He grumbled to himself, “She thinks I’m kidding.”
“Taylor?” Shannon’s voice called in the video.
Michael looked up and right into the camera lens, his jaw agape, just as the camera jerked away. An instant later, the picture faded to black.
My heart was pounding. Though I racked my brain for alternative explanations, this could only be the evidence that Taylor had meant to show me. When he’d said that he had “pictures” that were going to clue me in as to what was “really going on,” he’d meant video pictures. As well as those photographs of Michael and Rebecca I’d found in Emily’s garage.
Michael had looked up and caught Taylor in the act of making this recording.
I checked the time stamp. It was Friday evening, a few minutes after six P.M., the eve of Taylor’s murder.
Michael must have killed him to stop him from revealing his insidious plan to kill his wife. Taylor had pushed his luck t
oo far by going there on Saturday. He’d probably hoped to gather yet more evidence. Maybe he’d reasoned that this little recording wasn’t rock-solid proof that Michael was plotting to murder Shannon. And Taylor must have been right, because surely Rebecca would have told the police about this conversation right away, yet they hadn’t made an arrest. Or maybe Taylor had tried to blackmail Michael with this evidence, and that greedy act had cost him his life.
I tried to replay the clip, curious to see if I could make out Michael’s first words on the recording.
A noise behind me made me jump. I whirled around. My heart leapt to my throat. Michael was standing in the doorway, staring at me.
“Michael! How did you get here?”
“I followed you. Again. See, I also followed you earlier to find out where Taylor lived. That time when you cleared out all his stuff. I figured the gig was up way back then. But nothing happened. Then the way you…took off from your office just now. You were practically pulling wheelies. I realized Rebecca must have told you something I’d said about Shannon, so you were coming out here again. I knew then that he’d hidden the cell phone here, after all.”
I tried to act naïve and forced a smile. “Yes, he did. But the phone belonged to Taylor. Why? Were you afraid he’d stolen it from you or something?”
He laughed. “Erin. Don’t mistake me for a fool.”
“I…don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You don’t? Then why are you so scared of me?”
“I was just startled. That’s all. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“You were too mesmerized by that damned video clip that your idiot half brother shot.”
Still clinging to my hopeless act, I replied, “I guess so.” I tried to chuckle. “That was quite a convincing routine you put on for him. You really had me going there for a minute. Must be all that experience on camera. It sounded at first like you were completely serious.”
“Yeah, yeah. Nice try, Erin.” He stepped inside the tiny apartment and closed the door behind him. “This is where we do the song and dance about my phone conversation being taken out of context and me being innocent. I don’t have the stomach for it. And one look at your face makes it very clear you’d know I was lying. You’re as stubborn as Shannon. The fire, the bulldozer—” he scoffed, “she still wouldn’t give up and sell! And you just kept befriending the bitch, making the place nicer, wasting our money. She knew about my dire finances, but she ignored me! I had to sell while the freaking thing was still worth something! But there was no stopping you. Not even when I tried to frame you. Just now you were seconds away from calling the police on me.”
“No, I wasn’t. Why would I bother? The recording doesn’t prove anything.”
“Oh, gee, Erin. That’s too bad,” he taunted. “So, you still don’t know who killed your brother? And my wife?”
“I’m afraid not.”
He held out his hand. “Let me see it.”
“No, it’s…the last thing I have of Taylor’s. I need to hang on to it.” I stuck the cell phone in my pocket.
He took another step toward me. I took a step back. I bumped into the wall behind me. There was no place for me to go.
chapter 28
Michael had an empty look in his eyes, as if they weren’t fully focused. Although he was staring right at me, he didn’t seem to actually see me. I’d first witnessed a shadow of that detached emptiness when he’d gotten so angry at Audrey, in what turned out to be his final show with her.
“I kept trying to scare you off, Erin,” Michael said in a low, eerily calm voice. “But you wouldn’t listen. Now you’ve gone and made it impossible for me to let you live. Just like your brother did. Snooping around in other people’s affairs must run in your family.”
“I’m not snooping on you. I was just trying to find my brother’s things. To collect them. You know. Keepsakes?” I was so frightened I was babbling, but couldn’t stop. “To remember him by. To remember Taylor with. Now that he died. In an accident.”
He waited till I stopped talking. “It’s not like I wanted to do it, Erin. I liked Taylor. And I didn’t want to kill Shannon, either. She was impossible to live with. It got so bad, just being in the same room with her made my skin crawl.” Despite his intense words, his tone was eerily detached. “But I tried my best…kept up the daily routine as best I could. While, all along, she never gave a moment’s thought to anyone but herself. She’d been so miserly with her earnings. We were supposed to be life partners, for God’s sake. But if she’d had her way, I wouldn’t have gotten a dime from her. I’d lost all of my money, through no fault of my own.”
“You mean because the hepatitis outbreak shut down your restaurant?”
“That’s right. It was the prep chef. His fault. Spread his germs around. Like I’m supposed to do blood tests on my employees? Yet I wind up paying through the nose! Besides, I’m in love with Rebecca. She’d never have married me if she found out how broke I was.”
Reaching as deep as I could for camaraderie, I mustered a sympathetic look. “I understand. Shannon was keeping you from being happy. And so was Taylor.”
He blinked. He gave no reply. He was still inhumanly calm.
In this whole apartment complex, somebody had to be nearby! I strained my ears, desperately hoping I would hear some background noise or voice, anything to let me know that someone was within earshot so I could cry out and have a chance at getting help. Nothing. Except for Michael and me, the building seemed to be utterly deserted.
“He ruined everything,” Michael muttered. “Shot my plans all to hell.”
“Who did?”
He pointed at my pocket, where I’d stashed Taylor’s cell phone, I grabbed it. I needed to dial 911 when he wasn’t looking. “I thought I saw him recording me on his cell phone. But Taylor played dumb…showed me his phone. He could only take still pictures with the thing. Next morning, I set him up, pretended to leave and doubled back. Heard him arrange to meet with you. That’s when I knew he had two cell phones. I just…hadn’t figured anyone so down and out would have two cell phones. But he did. Probably stole ’em from someplace.”
Michael shrugged. “The kid left me no choice. If I’d let him live, I’d be in jail. Same way now. You’ve also left me no choice.”
“No, Michael.” My thoughts were racing. Empathizing with him hadn’t worked. Would he listen to logic? “There’s no point in killing me. You’d only make things worse for yourself. It’s too late. The police are closing in on you. I already called them. It was the first thing I did when I found the phone. Your best chance is to run now. Before they get here.”
He stared at me. He looked strong and fit. There was no way I could hope to overpower him. I had to dial the police without looking. That was my only hope. I coughed and tried to pretend that I was struggling for air to divert his attention away from my hand.
“You’re trying to dial them now.”
“No, I’m not.” I brazenly pulled the cell phone out and hit “send.”
Damn it! I’d dialed 811!
He charged at me. I screamed. We went flying backward. The phone skittered across the linoleum floor. My head hit the wall with a thud. “Help!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
He grabbed me around my neck and started choking me. His grip was incredibly strong. I couldn’t breathe. The pain was so intense my vision was going black. I tried to knee him, but I’d been squished against the wall and the floor. I felt as weak as a rag doll.
I was going to die at his hand! Just like Taylor. Just like Shannon. Knowing I had to grab a weapon, I groped blindly for the screwdriver in my jacket pocket with one hand. That only increased the force of his death grip on my neck.
I grasped the handle of my screwdriver and stabbed at his face. He screamed and released me. I’d driven the tool through his cheek and into his mouth.
In the second or two that I’d bought myself, I gasped for precious air, keeping a grip on my only weapon. With my
free hand, I grabbed hold of the stretcher on the wood chair and tried to scramble to my feet. I only made it to my knees. Michael grabbed my hair.
“You bitch!” His breath was hot and ragged against my cheek.
“Help! Somebody! Call nine-one-one!” I yelled. My voice box must have been damaged when he choked me; I had no volume.
“The place is deserted,” Michael said. “You can scream all you want. Nobody will come.”
Still grabbing a fistful of hair, he pulled me over backward. I released the chair. I tried to stab at his arm behind me with the screwdriver.
He grunted, clawed at me, and started to pry the screwdriver out of my grasp. He was stronger than I was. It felt as if my fingers were breaking. I thrashed my free arm along the floor over my head. The brick that Taylor had been using for the missing leg on his dresser was there someplace.
I got hold of the brick just as Michael wrenched the screwdriver away from me.
I turned and swung the brick at his face, connecting with a solid thud. He groaned in pain. His nose started spewing blood. “You little bitch!”
He tried to stab me with the screwdriver. I blocked the blow with the brick. Swinging at him wildly as though I held a baseball bat, I fended him off and got to my feet.
He stood up before I could get away. I kicked his kneecap. He cried out and bent over in pain. I hit him on the back of the head. He went down in a heap.
I was facing the window and caught sight of a splotch of brilliant yellow in the distance. A woman was crossing the parking lot. Without thinking, I hurled the brick through the glass. She stopped and gaped at me.
“Call the police!” I shouted to her. “A man’s trying to kill me. I knocked him out with the brick.”
Michael was moaning, already regaining consciousness. I was torn, uncertain of whether or not I could reach my car before he could get to me. I yanked off my leather belt and cinched his wrists behind his back.
