Sudden Engagement

by Julie Miller

  How many other connections in her life had she limited to such a shallow, safe relationship?

  Damn Brett, anyway, for forcing her to deal with the personal side of her life right now. She already had three homicides to solve, and her best lead had just become victim number four of the Ludlow Arms.

  Fortunately though, Merle seemed to have agreed to an unspoken truce, and let the issue of their friendship take a back seat to the investigation at hand. He pulled out his flashlight and shined it up through the jagged stumps and shards of wood that used to be the interior stairwell support structure. “Zeke crashed through from the fourth floor. Mac says his neck’s broken. He places the time of death late last night or early this morning.”

  “What was he doing up there?” Ginny found it easy to slip into the role of partner once more. “He and Charlie camped out in the subbasement. Brett and I took the two of them to a shelter yesterday. We were going to clean them up and have them make a formal statement.”

  “Charlie Adkins has disappeared, too. There’s no sign of him in the building. We checked the place as best we could. We had to jerry-rig a suspension system to get up to the top floors. Nobody’s going up those stairs anymore.”

  “Nobody should.” She heard herself echoing Brett’s warning. “This place isn’t safe.”

  “No kidding.” When the forensics team lowered a gurney to lift Zeke’s body from the basement, Ginny and Merle climbed up the surviving stairs to the first floor. “I already put out an APB for Charlie Adkins. Anything else you want me to check?”

  “Did you get an ID on the 911 caller for Mark Bishop?”

  Merle flipped through his notepad and found the information. “Nothing specific. Records say it was an anonymous woman. And get this, the call originated from the pay phone that used to hang here in the lobby. That’s less than thirty feet from where Mark’s body was found.”

  “A woman?” She immediately thought of Amy. Maybe her sister had been here that night. But if she left Mark’s side to make the call, what happened to her? Why didn’t she return?

  Merle had a suggestion. “Maybe you were hoping Alvin had second thoughts after hurting his son?”

  “That’s not likely.” She sensed Brett’s presence an instant before his voice rumbled behind her. “Instead of destroying his liver, drinking killed his conscience. He’d do his worst to someone, then forget it ever happened.”

  “Where have you been?” she asked. A mantle of dirt and sawdust clung to his shoulders, standing out in stark relief to the dark material of his jacket. She brushed off what she could, dispersing nervous energy and concern under the pretense of saving the poor suit.

  “Nosing around.” He caught Ginny’s hand and clasped it down at his side. When it came to his building, the man was all business. “Detective Banning, did your people stick to the main stairwell when they conducted their search?”

  Merle frowned in confusion. “Is there another way upstairs?”

  Brett nodded. “What used to be the servant stairs off the kitchen. They were sealed off years ago when they converted the hotel into apartments. With the building’s decay, it’s easy to knock out a wall. I found a loose section of paneling in the back hallway.” His gaze swept up to the arches and high ceilings, as if the Ludlow would share her secrets with him if he only listened closely enough.

  Ginny squeezed Brett’s hand, asking him to look her in the eye. “Do I want to hear why this is important?”

  He dropped his chin to meet her upturned gaze. “Somebody’s been using those stairs. Recently, too. There’s a clean set of footprints in the dust.”

  NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME, Brett wondered at the stamina of the law enforcement officers he knew. Before his arrival with Ginny, Mac and his team had spent hours documenting possible clues. Now, for over an hour, Ginny and her partner had taken notes, asked questions and played out various scenarios that could explain Zeke Jones’s death.

  Brett’s discovery of the back stairwell added another forty-five minutes of tracing paths and measuring distances, stretching their visit well into the long part of the afternoon. He hovered at the fringes of the mini think tank, keeping a watchful eye on the building while Ginny, Mac and Merle focused on the footprints leading to the fourth floor.

  Mac adjusted the glasses on his nose and stood from where the three had been kneeling. “Offhand, I’d guess the prints belong to a small man or to a woman.”

  Ginny stood next. She crossed her arms in front of her and tapped at her lower lip with her index finger. Brett’s gaze zeroed in on the gesture, drawn to the thoughtful pout on her lips. “To be honest with you, I was leaning toward Eric Chamberlain as our tall man. If he’s Sophie’s champion, as he claims, then he might murder Alvin to protect her from any more abuse.”

  Mac shook his head. “If it’s the same Eric Chamberlain I knew in school, there’s no way those footprints could be his.”

  “Maybe Zeke’s?” offered Merle.

  “Without Charlie?” said Ginny. “Those two were bound at the hip. There’d be another set of prints. This is one clear set going up to the fourth floor and coming down.”

  Brett watched as the wheels of speculation danced in her eyes. She might use that intellect as a defensive weapon at times, controlling her emotions and denying herself the opportunity to trust or laugh or love, but he marveled at it now. Watching her work like this, she radiated a power, a confidence. His pulse throbbed inside his veins like an answering beacon.

  He didn’t like the danger she faced as a cop. Didn’t like the things she had to see and discuss as a homicide investigator.

  But he worried a little less, knowing that she was good at this job. Her co-workers believed in her abilities, and she delivered.

  “Let me think on it,” Ginny said. The movement of her lips disrupted his own train of thought. “I have a feeling the clues are all here. But if they won’t add up to Chamberlain, I need to put them together in a different way.” She ducked through the hole in the wall with Merle at her heels. “Let’s walk through it one more time.”

  Brett slung his jacket over his shoulder and started to follow. He’d momentarily forgotten the presence of the second eldest Taylor brother. “Is she always like that?” Mac asked.

  The imprint of Ginny’s bottom, cupped in those sensible slacks she always wore, as she bent over to pass through to the lobby was the last impression that stayed with him. Hardly a noble sentiment. But he’d shared worse with his brother. “Beautiful, you mean?”

  Mac came up beside him and grinned. “Well, I was going for analytical or driven. But yeah. I can see it with the eyes and the hair. The whole package is pretty hot.”

  Brett turned his head and looked him straight in the eye. “If you weren’t wearing glasses, I’d knock you down where you stand.” If they weren’t brothers, the glasses wouldn’t have made a difference. For him to see Ginny as pretty hot was one thing. For another man to notice her the same way fired his blood in an embarrassingly primitive way.

  “If you hit me, I’ll tell Ma,” Mac teased.

  Reverting to their childhood, Brett flattened his hand on Mac’s forehead and pushed him aside. He crouched to climb through the exit himself.

  “When the big ones fall, they fall hard.”

  Wary of the hundred-eighty-degree turnabout in his brother’s tone, Brett straightened and asked, “What are you talking about?”

  Mac’s gray eyes leveled with the cool excitement of a scientist testing a new theory. “Do you have any idea how crazy you are about her?”

  Brett shifted his jacket to the opposite shoulder, uncomfortable with this line of questioning. He bluffed his way past the inquiry by donning his toughest big-brother voice. “We’re getting married, aren’t we? What do you know about relationships anyway, Professor? You claim you never have any time for the stuff.”

  “I’m smart enough to know that a week ago Ginny didn’t want to have a thing to do with you. I know you love a challenge like that. But just
a few days later you’re engaged to be married? C’mon.” Mac covered his heart in mock-melodramatic fashion. “You’re breaking my heart, big brother. I thought you were the perennial bachelor of the family.”

  “That’s Josh’s job.” He was floundering in avoidance of Mac’s original question, and he had a feeling his brother knew it. “Besides, it’s not unheard of to fall in love quickly.”

  “No, it’s not.” When Mac squeezed his shoulder in apologetic reassurance, Brett knew he was in trouble. “But I surprised you when I mentioned your feelings for Ginny just now, judging by how nervous this whole conversation makes you. Whatever game you’re playing, Brett, be careful. Ginny’s a friend and you’re my brother. I’d hate to see either one of you get hurt.”

  Chapter Nine

  “I heard about the Ludlow Arms murder on the news this afternoon.” John McBride leaned on his rake, pulled off his faded red Kansas City Chiefs ball cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “The homeless folks have a tough enough life without getting in the way of someone who doesn’t want them around.”

  “Yeah. I’d love to nail that someone.” Ginny looked up from her seat on the grass where she’d been culling dead leaves and blown trash from the rosebush planted beside the Rafferty monument. “He was a confused old man who his killer ignored for twelve years, either because he didn’t know there’d been a witness, or he didn’t think anyone would believe his story. Then Zeke Jones talks to me, and the next day he’s dead.”

  “You’re making someone nervous.”

  She thought about the pink phone message at work, and the threat on her answering machine at home. She shivered despite the warmth of the evening sun. “I guess I am.”

  Ginny picked up her trash and carried it over to the plastic bag next to John. “You know what I can’t figure out?” She posed the question out loud.

  “What’s that?” John resumed raking the dead grass from the new green shoots.

  “How the killer got Zeke up the stairs in the first place.”

  “The news said Zeke discovered the body buried below the Ludlow Arms, right?”

  At this point Ginny was willing to listen to any new ideas. She’d worried with this puzzle so much that it seemed more confusing and unsolvable than ever. “He thought of the place like a POW camp. He told us that he was rescuing a fallen comrade.”

  “How did he know the body was there? Unless he killed him.”

  Ginny had already ruled out that possibility. She opened the bag and held it for John to stuff a pile of lawn clippings into. “Zeke had no motive. He told us he heard a noise that prompted him to check it out. I believe it was a bell that the victim was wearing around his neck.”

  “That was twelve years ago.” John stopped with an armful of debris. “Why did he tell the police about the body now? Why didn’t he report it sooner?”

  The kernel of an idea took root in her mind, sending out tiny little inklings. The idea searched for sunlight. “He didn’t hear the sound until a few days ago.”

  “A corpse doesn’t ring a bell on its own.”

  “The killer came back and moved the body.” The discovery grew like a wild vine. “The building’s about to be torn down. You want to make sure your secrets and old ghosts are buried with it. So you check to see the body for yourself one more time.”

  She dropped the bag at John’s feet and crossed her arms, tapping her index finger against her lip. “The killer got away with murder twelve years ago. But last week, when he revisited the scene, there was a witness. An incoherent old man who thinks he’s serving his country by reporting what he saw.”

  John picked up on the possibilities unfolding before her. “So doddering or not, the old man’s a liability. Someone just might make sense of his story.”

  “I did.” She tipped her face up to the waning sunlight. For some inexplicable reason, she felt her time to solve Alvin Bishop’s murder and the chain of events surrounding it was slipping through her fingers just as quickly as that setting sun. “Somebody else thought he made sense, too. And that somebody lured him upstairs and pushed him to his death.”

  “So back to your original question. Why’d he go up all those stairs?”

  “He went to save a comrade.”

  The wrinkles in John’s forehead deepened with confusion.

  She explained. “He answered a bell.”

  “You lost me with that one. But I guess that’s why I’m the groundskeeper and you’re the homicide detective.”

  “I have to get back to work.” She took a couple of steps before she recognized the rudeness of her abrupt departure. Breathless with excitement, on the verge of breaking the case wide open, she came back. On impulse, she squeezed John’s forearm. Then, holding on to balance herself, she inched up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

  The ruddy blush in his dark cheeks made her smile. “What was that for?” he asked.

  “Maybe my family isn’t the only reason I come here.”

  He put his rake to the ground and resumed his work, pretending not to be flustered by the unplanned overture of friendship. “I’ve always enjoyed our talks, too.”

  Feeling his soft-spoken admission like a great big hug, Ginny sped down the hill to her car. This tired old case had been given new life. She’d been given new energy.

  She knew what to look for now.

  A set of twelve-year-old wind-chime bells.

  “YOU’RE POSITIVE it was Alvin Bishop who stole those wind chimes off your fire-escape balcony?”

  Ginny refused to back out of the open door of Pearl’s Diner until she got the answers she needed. Pearl pulled a light blue coat on over her white uniform and tucked a zippered leather bag under her arm. “Ms. Rafferty, it’s after nine o’clock. I need to get my deposit to the bank.”

  “I know it’s late. I’ll drive you there myself.” She patted the bulge of her gun beneath her jacket. “Police escort.”

  Pearl’s gaze followed the movement of Ginny’s hand. She shifted back and forth on her feet, as if testing whether she had the energy left to make the walk without taking her up on the invitation. Then she shook her head, unable or unwilling to accept the offer.

  “Look, all I know is that old Alvin is the only one who ever complained about my chimes. I woke up one morning and they were gone. My Freddie made those for me with his own hands.”

  When Pearl raised a fist to her heart, Ginny knew she’d taken a trip down memory lane, and her usefulness in answering questions had ended. Ginny hit the light switch herself before preceding Pearl out onto the sidewalk.

  Ginny tried another option. “Would Ruby remember the incident?”

  Pearl locked the door and pocketed the key before answering. She puffed up her ample chest. “My Ruby is on a date this evening, and I do not want you to disturb her. It’s hard enough finding a man to marry around this neighborhood without you outsiders coming in and snatching up all the good ones.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My Ruby isn’t slim and gorgeous. I know her limitations.” Ginny wasn’t sure where this outpouring of skewed motherly pride was coming from. “But she can cook up a storm, and make a man laugh. She has a good heart. It’s been broken a few times along the way, but she keeps smiling.”

  A distant eclipse of a memory tried to work its way into Ginny’s conscious mind. “Who broke her heart?”

  “Mark Bishop was the first one. They were back in high school then, probably too young to really think about marriage. I couldn’t stand the thought of being related to Alvin, but Mark was good to my girl.” She clicked her tongue behind her teeth, tutting with disgust at her next thought. “Alvin found out Mark was buying trinkets for Ruby. Little things, you know. A necklace. A pair of barrettes. Alvin put a stop to that.”

  “How?”

  “Threatened her.” Her fist moved to her mouth as the memory became more difficult. “Came up to our apartment. Told her no girl was going to take what belonged to him.”<
br />
  So Alvin hadn’t been afraid to bully teenage girls, either. He’d lost his wife already. He couldn’t stand to lose his son, too. Ginny’s stomach flip-flopped. Had he made the same threat to Amy? Steeling herself for the answer, she asked, “Did he hurt her? Ruby, I mean?”

  “Mark broke up with her. Isn’t that hurt enough?”

  Oh Lord, she wished she had Brett around to make these questions easier. “Did he hit Ruby?”

  Pearl drew back, horrified. She didn’t answer. “I have to get to the bank.”

  “Pearl, please.”

  The older woman ignored Ginny’s plea and bustled off down the sidewalk. Damning her foolishness for trying this on her own, Ginny released a weary sigh, punched the unlock button on her remote and headed for her car.

  “Ms. Rafferty?” Ginny turned. Pearl had stopped at the corner. In the light from the overhead street lamp, her face reflected more life experience than her sixty-something years should. “He never hit my girl. That’s why Mark broke up with her. To protect her. To keep Ruby from being the target of his father’s wrath. He didn’t start seeing that Amy girl until sometime later. Ruby likes to say she lost Mark to another girl. But the truth is, she lost him to old Alvin.”

  Chalk up two more suspects with a motive for killing Alvin. And Amy, too, for that matter. They could have lied about him stealing those wind chimes. Living in the same building would have given either mother or daughter the opportunity to kill him.

  But neither Pearl nor Ruby fit Zeke’s description of a “tall” guard.

  Had Alvin made good on the same kind of threat to her sister? Or had Mark tried to save Amy’s life by keeping her away from his father?