by Ginny Aiken
What should I do? It didn’t help that Cissy had charmed Dad or that his opinion of the AWOL brothers rivaled mine. I, of course, hadn’t repeated my conversation with Cissy.
On the one hand, it seemed everyone but the ailing widower had a reason to want Darlene dead. The brothers were prime candidates for Slime Bucket of the New Millennium, neither one solvent from the look or sound of it. The Mexican doc had fifty grand hanging in the balance. And the poor relation—so to speak—had become an heiress through Darlene’s death.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Been there, done that.
Everyone thought the same when Marge Norwalk, my mentor and friend, died and left me my first savings account 58 with a balance, her auction house, her snazzy home in a gated community that I promptly sold since it was so fancy it made my teeth itchy, and her fat investment portfolio. But I hadn’t known a thing about the inheritance until the day after Marge’s death. From what Cissy had said that afternoon, my suspicion-o-meter said she knew about Darlene’s will from the start.
She just had to wait until Jacob joined his wife. Then she wouldn’t have to share the wealth. From where I stood, Jacob Weikert wouldn’t be among us much longer.
Would anyone believe me?
Did I believe me?
Could Cissy have killed Darlene? She was pretty broken up when she realized she’d never wake her friend again. Could the retired nurse be that good an actress?
I still remembered the icy chill of her fingers when she’d shaken my hand that sad afternoon. Could someone turn down their internal thermometer at will?
Then again, what about the two snarky sons? Either one could have done in their mother. I’m sure that even though they didn’t strike me as the shiniest bobeches on the candelabra, they had enough gray matter to realize her illness offered a perfect cover for the crime. Larry had said something about bankruptcy and jail as they’d walked past me on their way in.
Plus the doctor. What kind of guy built a career around the sale of voodoo medicine to desperate, terminally ill senior citizens? And then borrowed buckets of dough from one of them? What part had he played in this tragedy? Was it a tragedy? I mean, beyond the death of a really neat lady.
Or was this a case of my imagination run wild on its own?
Every so often, I’d fall into a light nap. By the time my alarm clock belched out its daily squawk, I’d become an overtired zombie. I couldn’t get my head around the idea of motion, had no desire to do more than roll over and try to catch some more of those evasive z’s.
But reality was . . . well, real. Dutch and I had an appointment with the guy from the flooring supply place. I had to fake enough brain function to choose the perfect species of wood and then the right shade of stain for Tedd’s office floors. And, as always, I had to be ready to do battle with my nemesis, since agreement between us was a rare thing.
Who knows how, but I made it to Tedd’s office before Dutch. I’d made myself a bucket of Starbucks House Blend at home, but partway to the meeting, I’d had to make a pit stop for a second, massive infusion of the stuff.
With a sloshy waxed-paper vat in one hand and my trusty portfolio in the other, I collapsed into one of Tedd’s comfy if boring office sofas. The flooring guy walked in about three seconds later. The man responsible for the installation of the boards I was about to choose kept us chilling for about another fifteen minutes.
When Dutch finally decided to join us, I gulped down my last swig of caffeine. “What kept you?”
His look doused me with full-strength disgust. “Forget that. I have a question for you, and I think I know the answer already, but I’ll ask anyway. Have you read this week’s Wilmont Voice?”
“Are you kidding? Read the paper? Have you looked at your watch? It’s almost the middle of the night! My eyes don’t focus until nine o’clock at the earliest.”
“I’ve noticed.” He held out a folded issue of our fair hamlet’s press offering. “Here. Glug down more java, make your eyes work, and read the front page.”
I stuck my index finger in my right ear and gave it a bunch of healthy wiggles. “You know, Dutch. I remember we had this conversation about a year and a half ago. That time I was still in bed and you were on the phone. I could’ve—and should’ve—hung up on you and gone back to my blanket and pillow. Unfortunately, I don’t have that choice today.”
“Go ahead,” he urged. “At least look at the headline.”
I rolled my eyes. “I guess I’d better humor you—”
The full color photo of Cissy Grover stole my breath away. A gander at the headline nearly did me in. It blared “Nurse/Companion Takes It All.”
“Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh—”
“Take the needle off the broken record, Haley. Read on down, will you?”
“What more do I have to know?” I tapped the eyepopper of a headline. “This says it all, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, I’m not so sure.”
The taunt in his voice fired off all my alarms. But I couldn’t stop the freight train known as Dutch Merrill.
“I recognized another name somewhere farther down,” he said, “somewhere around the middle of the column. Check it out before you say another word.”
The sharp edge on his stare set my gut on lurch mode. I’d seen that look before. I didn’t like it then, and I liked it no more now. So I did as he asked.
Great. Sure enough, there it was. My name. In black and white. The article placed me at the Weikert home at the time Cissy discovered Darlene’s corpse.
He was going to have fun with this one.
I wasn’t.
I dragged myself up out of the chair and chose to defend myself with a hearty offense. “What are you up to, Merrill? Are you going to try and pin this murder on me too?”
The unsuspecting floor salesman gasped. Dutch and I turned, glared, then went back to our . . . um . . . discussion. “Are you guilty?” he asked, even though I knew he knew I wasn’t, couldn’t be, no way, no how.
“Go pound salt.”
“Okay. Sure. But I’m dying to know how you managed to do it—again. Let’s see. We have a big, old house. In Wilmont— that’s part of the Haley Farrell equation, you know. Of course, there’s the interior designer in the picture—that would be you. And just after the ding-dong at the door, the housekeeper finds a dead woman upstairs. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”
“No! No, no, no, no, no, no, no!”
“Ahem.”
“Tedd!” Had I ever been happier to see someone? Well, maybe Dad when he bailed me out of jail after Dutch and Lila worked so hard to put me there—unjustly, I might add. But still. “Would you tell this bozo I had nothing to do with Darlene’s death?”
“She had nothing to do with Darlene Weikert’s death— the woman had liver cancer.” She pointed an index finger at each of us. “And you two kiddies need to call a truce. My office! There’s a lot to do, and it won’t get done while you two squabble. I have missing chairs, unmade curtains, floors that need fixing.”
“Cancer?” Dutch asked, ignoring most of what Tedd said, while zooming in on the one word.
My smile reeked of smug. “You didn’t read to the end, did you?”
“But there’s all that money, the nurse, the sons—you!
” “Sorry, Dutch. You can’t get rid of me that easy. Get over it. If anyone did something to Darlene, I don’t know about it. And I wasn’t part of it.”
He crossed his arms. “Then I don’t have to worry that the interior designer on the job will skip out and take off on another snooping gig.”
“Ah . . . no! No, no. Of course not.” Did the guy read minds and nightmares by long distance? “Why would you think I’d do such a thing?”
“Because I know you. Your pal Bella and her PI license have nothing on you.”
“Haley! Dutch!” Tedd’s cheekbones matched the earthy rose timeworn adobe glaze I’d put on her walls. “Time out. My office needs you. You can get back to the merits of Haley’s investigative skills later on.�
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“Or not.” With utmost dignity I opened my portfolio and turned to the floor guy. “Mr. Watanabe, here’s a sample of the wood from the chairs I ordered for the waiting room. As you can see, they’re nearly black, and while I don’t want to wind up with matchy-matchy woods, I do want to coordinate tones . . .”
Once I got the meeting back on track, it took us no more than fifteen minutes to come to an agreement. For the distressed wide-plank floors, we chose a medium stain that would let the unique chairs shine on their own. Dutch’s only objection rose when I insisted on distressed floors—his crew would have to stomp on, hammer, and beat with old chains the fresh boards when they arrived.
“I oppose defacing fine wood on principle,” he muttered after Mr. Watanabe left.
I zipped my portfolio. “So oppose it on another job. You’ll get it once everything’s done. Remember, I’m trying to create a look here.”
He tossed the keys to his decrepit old truck in the air. “So long as you stick to creating a look here rather than looking to create something out there”—he pointed at the paper—“then I guess I’ll find a way to be okay with it.”
“Suck it up, Dutch.” I slung the strap of the leather portfolio over my shoulder. “Darlene had cancer. She asked me to restore her parlor and dining room. That’s why I was there. She died of cancer before I had the chance to do the work.”
I held my breath. I hadn’t lied. Would he buy my reassurance?
“All I know,” he said, “is that I have this job to finish and another I’ve just signed on. You’re a flake—a talented flake—”
“I am not a flake!”
“A talented flake, but still a flake. And I have to keep my mind on business. I have a lot of ground to recover after the setbacks I suffered these last few years. I don’t need the designer on this job, her nutty PI neighbor, and the nutty neighbor’s cats to wind up in jail for harassing an innocent family in mourning.”
“How about you audition for the Looney Tunes show?” I opened the door and stepped outside. He followed, so I added, “I haven’t even seen Bella in days.”
“But you will. Probably the minute she reads the paper.”
“Nah. I bet she’s too hot on the trail of lost dogs to even scope out the news.”
“Don’t forget. She’s addicted to the news and gory cable cop shows. I bet she knows as much as you about Darlene and her family, if not more.”
The lurching in my stomach? Well, it had taken a break, but now that he mentioned Bella, her hunger for news, and her unusual absence, it started to buck and roll with a vengeance.
“Gotta go,” I said. “See ya.”
I slid into my Honda, cranked it up, and pulled away from Tedd’s office. I had a nutty neighbor to track down.
Among other things.
Like Cissy’s financial situation. Anything and everything about the Weikert brothers. The skeletons in Dr. Díaz’s closet. And the perfect handwoven rug for Tedd’s waiting room.
All that while I dodged Dutch’s suspicion radar.
It wouldn’t be easy. But then again, nothing good comes all that easy. At least not to me. But still . . .
A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.
The only reaction I got when I rang Bella’s doorbell was the maniacal meows of her two beasts. How a woman can wind up with two identical feral felines, each a potential clone of the other, is beyond me. I was a witness to Faux Bali’s original appearance, but I still find it hard to believe the universe can encompass more than one Bali H’ai.
It’s not as if Bella picked them out at the same cabbage patch on the same day, spawned from the same parental gene pool. No. She adopted the two at different times, several years apart, and, from what she says, in two different states of the nation.
What’s worse, both monsters have it in for me. And while I’m fine with cats as a rule, I don’t love these particular two. So I didn’t hang around Bella’s door for long.
She had to be off on a wild pet chase—I hoped. I was free to snoop . . . er . . . investigate.
And that’s how I wound up at Weikert’s Euro-Import Auto Sales. My Honda’s only a couple of years old, and I don’t want to replace it, no matter how many bucks Marge left me. But I am interested in foreign cars.
Mildly.
Minusculely.
Okay, okay. Hardly at all. But since I don’t know a thing about them, I can honestly say there’s much for me to learn. Which is what I told Tommy Weikert when he slithered out of his office.
His outfit looked just like the one of the other day, different only in color and fit—these pants bore pleats over his melon-shaped paunch.
“Hey! I know you,” he bellowed with all the charm of a hungry cobra over the million-decibel Muzak. “You’re the decorator. Too bad about my mom, huh? You didn’t get the job after all.”
Oh, Tommy charmed me, all right. He elicits the same fascination you experience during a horror movie, when you know something awful is about to happen, when you know you don’t want to see it happen but you can’t take your eyes away until it does.
Poor Darlene.
“I see you drive a Honda,” he said with disdain. “I guess you’ve realized it’s time to move up.”
“Ah . . . I’m not sure.”
“You will be after today.”
Tommy shouldn’t count chickens so soon. “We’ll see.”
He swept his shiny, maroon-satin-covered arm in a broad arc. “Anything in particular you like?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about this kind of car . . .”
And he was off. I followed him, free to let my attention roam, to scope out the place, to take note of anything and everything my heart desired. The guy loves the sound of his voice.
But there wasn’t much to notice. The showroom, while spiffy and spit-and-polish, was a Sahara but for the two of us. Tommy’s inventory encompassed all of six vehicles: two Mercedes-Benzes, one a convertible, the other a traditional boxy sedan; one lime green Jaguar with a cigar-smoke-scented interior; a beige Beemer; a black Rolls; and some red Italian creation with a name without enough loop to catch on the hook part of my Velcro brain.
A tinny rendition of “Disco Duck” pinged out in a momentary lull of the relentless onslaught of Muzak. Tommy pulled out a cell phone and flashed me more teeth than I care to see.
“It’s London.” Big, fat, cheesy wink. “Gotta take this one, doll. Look around. Try the cars. See how they fit you.”
London? Maybe London, Kentucky, or London, Texas. And the caller? Probably someone looking for his missing Jag. But I took the chance to check the odometer of each of the six cars. All had minimal mileage, but not a single vehicle was newer than four years. They couldn’t all have been driven by a grandma to church on Sunday and nothing more.
Maybe my next stop would be at Larry’s. I had no idea what the guy did or even where he lived. Time to let my fingers do the walking through the white pages.
“Tommy?”
He was too busy begging on the phone to answer me.
“Another month, man. Please. That’s all I need. How was I gonna know she was going to change everything at the last minute?”
Hmm . . . interesting tidbit.
Tommy’s championship whining continued. “Hey, listen. I got a big buyer in the showroom right now. Some ritzy decorator. I bet she’ll take the Bentley. You know, to drive rich clients around.”
Yikes! Two big strikes against Tommy: one, there was no Bentley in the showroom, and two, if that was how he saw me, as the “big buyer,” he was in worse shape than I’d thought. In more ways than one.
“Oh, all right,” he grumped. “Two weeks, then. I’ll sell the Bentley by then, and I can pay you back in two weeks.”
That was my cue. “Tommy? Thanks for the info. You sure know your foreign cars. But I have to hurry home now. I’ll give the car some more thought.”
“No!” He ran to my side in panic. “See?” He slapped the clamshell phone sh
ut. “I’m done. Now, which one’s it gonna be? I’ll bet I can guess. It’s the Rolls. It’s just so you.”
Not in this lifetime. “I’ll get back to you. But now I really have to hurry. So many walls, so much to faux. See ya!”
I ran. Yeah, I did the cowardly lion bit and split. I was afraid if I stayed there a minute longer, he’d tie me to the steering wheel of the Rolls and help himself to my debit card. This guy looked like hungry desperation and was a prime suspect in the mur
— Oh. Yeah. Darlene died of cancer.
That sorta deflated my sails, but it didn’t slow my pace. My Honda was a welcome sight.
The gray fedora and tan trench up ahead? Not so much.
I reached my car and thumped my head against the roof. “Bella! What are you doing here?”
“How’d’ya know it was me?” she asked, indignant. “I’m undercover.”
“You showed me the cover, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Her brief disappointment vanished behind a smile. “Toodle-ooh, then, Haley girl. I have a kill—ah . . . er . . . killer headache, and I’d better head on home.”
I nabbed the stubby tail of her trench’s belt. “Not so fast, Sherlock Cahill. You haven’t answered my question. Why are you here? Show me a cat or a dog in the middle of the business district. A little old iguana or even a tarantula will do.”
She waved. “Oh, you’d be surprised. You have to scratch the surface to find your culp—er . . . what you’re looking for, you know.”
I tossed my backpack purse into my car and crossed my arms. “What are you looking for?”
She matched my stance. “How about you?”
“I asked you first.”
“I’ll tell you after you tell me, Haley girl.”
Mental scramble time. “I . . . ah . . . met Tommy Weikert when I went to meet with his mother the day she died. I was going to redesign her parlor.”
“Yeah, I know. I read the paper. But what ya want with him? Last time I checked, you said you loved your Honda and didn’t want some fancy doodadded hood for people to know you’re loaded.”
“I’m not buying one of those cars!”
