by Ginny Aiken
He had me there. I was thankful for the cover of darkness so he couldn’t see my dismay. That’s when a zillion floodlights beamed on. In the dark I’d missed the evidence of Larry’s paranoia; the roof of the house was wired to the hilt. What is his deal?
I winced at the assault on my eyes. “Oh, okay. You busted me, all right? So. What’re you going to do about it,Merrill?” “I’m going to watch you get in your car; then I’m going to follow you home. And just so you don’t get any more crazy ideas, I’m going to be on you closer than your shadow. You need a keeper.”
Super. “Oh, that won’t be necessary—”
“You don’t have to do that!” Wilmont’s pet detective cut in. “I’m on the job already.”
Dutch and I groaned.
“Bella,” I muttered.
“Bella,” he echoed.
A door with squeaky hinges opened. “What’s coming down out there?”
The three of us spun toward the front of the house. Larry, in another message T-shirt and ratty jeans, glared from the doorway, his nondescript features twisted in anger. “What are you people doing on my property? Can’t you read? I have ‘No Trespassing’ signs everywhere.”
I looked where he pointed and saw his signs, the ones I hadn’t noticed before. “Ah . . . Larry? Do you remember me? I’m the interior designer who had an appointment with your mother the day she died—”
“What? Are you nuts?” Dutch’s question came out as a low growl. “That was dumb. Why identify yourself? Now he can sic the cops on you.”
“Hey, Lila and her Smurfs don’t scare me anymore. They did their worst, and I lived through it.” I turned back to my quarry turned irate home owner. “Um . . . you asked my father to do your mother’s funeral, but he told me you and your brother owed him a hymn and some Scriptures so he can write his sermon. At dinner he said you hadn’t done it yet.”
“I know nothing about hymns and verses. He must’ve talked to my brother. Tommy doesn’t live here. Hey! Is that my moo goo gai pan you’re standing on?”
Yet another of the innumerable awkward moments in the life of Haley Farrell. I gave the mess another shake, but the box lid didn’t budge. “I . . . had a small accident.”
“What kind of accident do you have with Chinese that hasn’t been delivered? And how do you wind up with it on your foot?”
“It’s perfectly logicable,” Bella said. “Haley fell out of your tree.”
Larry’s eyes looked ready to pop from their sockets. “What were you doing in my tree?”
“I . . . ah—”
“Mmmrrrrreoooow!”
“There!” I exclaimed, relieved to finally find a use for Bali H’ai. “See the cat? She belongs to my elderly neighbor here. I . . . was on that branch—with her, you understand—and slipped. That’s how I landed on the food.”
“I’m disappointed,” my albatross whispered. “I’ve heard you do so much better.”
“What’s up with that, Haley girl? You didn’t go get Bali,” Bella said, indignant. “Bali went up to fetch you.”
“What was my dinner doing by the tree?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m outta here. You guys can sort it all out together. This is too weird even for me.”
“Wait!” Bella cried, in a hurry to catch up to me. “You can’t leave. What about the murder?”
Larry gasped. “What?”
Dutch groaned. “Not again.”
“She died of cancer, Bella,” I said in an attempt at normalcy. “You can go home too.”
“Murder?” Larry asked, his eyes narrowed. He trotted over. “Cancer? Is she talking about my mother?”
I gave up. The curb looked like a great place to sit and remove the cardboard shackle. Off my foot, the scraps looked even more pathetic. “Sorry—”
Larry’s look cut off my apology.
“Terrific,” he muttered when he glanced farther down. “That’s my lo mein you smushed too. So much for dinner.” He pointed at Bella. “About her. Does she think my mother was murdered?”
I sighed. “I’m afraid she does.”
Dutch snickered and came over to join the circus. “So does our dinner killer.”
“I do not—”
“Watch it!” he said. “You’re going to blow your no lies streak.”
“Don’t you have somewhere else you have to be?” I blew a disobedient curl off my forehead. “And yes, Larry. Bella does think your mother was murdered, but that’s because she just got her private investigator license and thinks there’s a crime under every toadstool, boulder, and leaf.”
“I do not,” Bella argued, fists on hips. “And you’re the one who started the investigating. I’m just following up— you know, double-checking the clues to make sure you don’t wind up in trouble like the last two times.”
Larry looked ill. “Two times? You do this on a regular basis? How many other Chinese dinners have you trashed?”
I stood. “It’s my first and last. I’m going home.”
This time no one tried to stop me. I walked away with what few shreds of dignity I could call up. But when I reached the Honda, Larry spoke up again.
“Tell you what. If you women think my mother was murdered, you need to check out Cissy. She’s the one who shot Mom up with all that bogus stuff from Mexico, and she stole more than half of it for herself.”
My jaw nearly clipped the sidewalk.
“Cissy?” I asked when I forced my mouth to work again.
“Yeah, lady. Cissy. She’s nuttier than peanut butter. She hooked Mom up with that Mexican quack, and I’m not sure she did it to help Mom either. I think she just wanted a free ride to the stuff for herself. And hey. If she could get the terminal patient to change the will in her favor while she was at it, then that’s just the cherry on the Cissy fruitcake sundae’s top, you know?”
I knew Cissy had injected Darlene with the HGH, but she hadn’t mentioned her use of the stuff. “Does Cissy have cancer too?”
Larry laughed. “Not unless common sense can grow malignancies.”
“Why would she want to take the stuff, then?”
Anger returned to Larry’s face. “Because she’s nuts. Because she’s bought all the wacky science out there about that hormone stuff. Because she thinks if she takes HGH, she’ll live forever, and if there’s one thing Cissy Grover’s scared of, it’s death.”
He really didn’t like Cissy, did he? Did he have a point?
Had he checked her out electronically? What had those two columns told him? What had he seen on that computer screen? Did it reflect on Cissy? Or on him?
If it put him in a bad light, did it incriminate him enough that he’d cast suspicion on a retired nurse with an unconventional passion and an unhealthy fear of death?
The technology in that room cost beaucoup bucks. Who knew how many computers he had in that setup. Or even elsewhere in the house. Where did Larry get the money to pay for all his hardware?
Cissy had said the brothers had gone through their trust funds in record time back when Darlene turned over the accounts to them. Did Larry go way berserk with his techie purchases then? More recently? Did he owe the wrong kind of guy for the toys in the überwired playroom?
I still had a crucial question for him. “Do you think your mother was murdered?”
With a strangled sound deep in his throat, Larry turned and jogged back to his house. Without another word, he slammed the door shut. Seconds later all the lights went out.
That was my cue. I didn’t say good-bye to my tails.
I left, suspicion growing moment by moment into certainty. I didn’t need a coroner’s report. I didn’t need the police’s official cause of death. Now I knew something, something concrete, even though I didn’t know how I knew it.
Darlene Weikert hadn’t died from her disease. Someone had helped her along on her final trip. And no one believed it. No one but Larry, Bella, and me.
It was time to talk to Lila.
Even if it killed me.
6
“You need help,” Lila said the next morning.
“Yours.”
“I don’t think so. The department pays me to investigate homicides, not delusions.”
I slapped her desktop. “I’m not delusional, Lila. Don’t you get it? It’s too easy, too tied up. Nothing in life comes out that squeaky clean. What better cover could a killer ask for than his victim’s terminal cancer?”
Lila rounded her desk and came to my side. “I’ll grant you that would be the perfect way to . . . well, get away with murder. But that’s not what happened here. Dr. Hamilton, the victim’s oncologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute, concurs with the coroner. Darlene Weikert was in the final stages of the disease. She lost her battle with cancer.”
I stood toe-to-toe with the deceptively delicate detective. “I might have bought that if I hadn’t met her sons, if I hadn’t learned about her Mexican contraband hormone, if I didn’t know about the massive loan she made to the south-of-the- border doc, if I didn’t know about Cissy Grover’s fascination with HGH and fear of death. Get the picture?”
The tiny flare of the detective’s nostrils told me I’d surprised her.
“You’ve been busy—again.” Lila crossed her arms. “But are you suggesting my officers and I are so inept we don’t know these details? Because I can assure you, we aren’t, and we do.”
“And you don’t think there’s something fishy about Darlene’s death? Even with all those facts staring you in the face?”
“Haley, the woman had cancer.”
“I didn’t say she didn’t. I know she had cancer. I accept it. It’s all those other things that make me wonder if she really did die from the cancer. She could’ve been killed—by someone, not the disease. Tell me. Did I hear you say the coroner did an autopsy?”
“The executrix of Mrs. Weikert’s estate requested one.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t expected that from Cissy—a suspect. “Okay. And the results . . . ?”
“Nothing unusual, aside from the haemangiosarcoma of the liver.”
“Is there a way to check to see if someone suffocated her?”
Lila tapped the toe of her oh-so-chic left shoe. “The autopsy did look for asphyxiation but found no evidence of petechial bleeding.”
“Pe . . . who?”
“Petechia are tiny red or purple spots on the eyes, face, lungs, and neck that appear when asphyxiation causes small areas of subcutaneous bleeding. Their presence suggests suffocation but not necessarily strangulation.”
The technobabble made my head spin. “Okay. If you say so.”
“I don’t say so. The coroner says so.”
So much for that idea. “How about poisoning?”
“There was no reason to test for poisoning. The corpse showed no evidence of possible poisoning.”
I winced. “Do you have to call her ‘the corpse’?”
Lila sighed. “Haley, in my line of work I come across a number of Mrs. Weikerts. If I didn’t separate myself from them, I’d have been locked up in a psych ward long ago. I have to focus on the crime, not the nice or nasty person who became a victim.”
“I understand. But what I don’t get is why no one ran a tox screen for poison. Could you . . . enlighten me again?”
Lila’s patronizing expression didn’t sit well with me. Not that the smart remark I’d almost made would’ve sat well with her either. But I’m not all that stupid. I didn’t argue; I wanted that answer.
“In most cases of death by poison,” she said, “we find evidence at the time of death. Either the body shows characteristics of the poison’s presence or the crime scene reveals evidence of a questionable substance. We then test to find a match.”
“So you don’t test in a plain-vanilla suspicious death? One where the person dies out of the blue for no apparent reason?”
“I did look around the room, and Mrs. Weikert didn’t die out of the blue or for no apparent reason. The woman died of liver cancer.”
We’d waltzed down this path before, but the band still played the same tune. “Yes, Lila, Darlene had liver cancer. But is there some way to know for sure if the cancer itself killed her? All by itself. With no help from anyone or anything else.”
“Do you mean a lab test that would determine whether the actual malignancy was without any doubt the immediate cause of death as opposed to something else?”
“Something like that.”
Lila shook her head, a faint frown on her brow. “I’d never given that much thought. But I’ve never heard of a test that can prove or disprove whether a particular disease the victim suffered was the actual cause of death to the complete exclusion of other potential causes. The medical community presupposes the terminal disease as the cause of death. In the absence of evidence otherwise, that is.”
“Hmm . . . you mean that the medical and law enforcement communities just assume that a victim dies because the victim suffers from a terminal disease?”
She pressed her lips thin. Then, “That’s what I said.”
“It sounds like the cop shop version of ring-around-the-rosy, and it’s stupid.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sure, I know the terminal disease is the cause of just about every one of those deaths, but I’d bet at least one in every thousand or so is a murder. A murder you guys didn’t bother to check out because the victim had a terminal disease. Tell me that’s not dumb.”
“I’ve never thought of it that way,” Lila said, another frown on her brow. “Theoretically, I suppose you could be right, but practically? I don’t think so.”
“Why? Because I’m an interior designer and not a cop or a doc?”
“No.” The detective glanced at her watch. “Because years—centuries—of experience provide us with a wealth of evidence that points to either natural death or murder when specific sets of indicators are present.”
That brief check of the time and her oh-so-stuffy talk told me I’d overstayed my questionable welcome. “Okay, Lila. I yield to your superior knowledge. And since neither you nor I have a truckload of time to waste, I’ll head on out. But do me a favor, please?”
With a Mount Rainier’s worth of reluctance, Lila nodded. “Please, please, consider the possibility of murder by poison in Darlene’s case. Too many people stand to make out like bandits from her wealth now that she’s gone. Or at any rate, too many people thought they stood to gain from her death.”
“Trust me, Haley. Go ahead, give it a try. The rest of Wilmont does. Keep in mind, we checked out all Mrs. Weikert’s friends and family. There’s nothing there. You can go home and get back to . . .” she gestured in a vague, distracted way “. . . get back to whatever you designer types do.”
I gave her the benefit of my expert eye rolling. “Now there’s a patronizing statement. I thought better of you, Detective Tsu.”
“You’re right.” The detective sat back at her desk. “I apologize for the comment. But you really should focus on your business and let me focus on mine.”
Ouch! “You told me, all right. See ya.”
I left the cop shop no more convinced than when I first arrived. You always hear on TV, especially on the news, that when someone dies under suspicious circumstances, it’s a no-brainer to follow the money. But if you were to try to follow Darlene’s money, you’d have to run around everyone in her immediate circle.
Which meant I had a lot of circling to do.
No matter what Lila or Dutch said.
I knew what my gut said.
It hollered, “Murder.”
I’d let a ton of bookkeeping pile up at the Norwalk & Farrell Auctions warehouse. But before I went there, I wanted to change into hands-on designer garb. I planned to stop by Tedd’s office later on. I had to make sure the stain I’d chosen did what I hoped it would on the actual boards Mr. Watanabe had delivered.
At home, I wrote a note to tell Dad he either had to scavenge in the fridge for dinner or maybe hit a Golden Arches type of empo
rium. I had enough catch-up work to keep my nose to the grindstone for a month of nights or more.
But I was ambushed before I got away.
“Okay, Haley girl. Now you have to listen to me.”
“I do?”
Her smug smile gave me the willies. She was up to something— trouble, since it was Bella.
“You do. I have proof.”
Oh boy. “Proof? What kind of proof? And of what?”
“Proof that Darlene Weikert was murdered.”
I closed my eyes, counted to twenty—I didn’t have time for a million. “Go home, Bella. I just left Lila Tsu. We discussed every last little detail of Darlene’s death. There’s nothing there.”
I didn’t have to let her into my gut’s secret scream, did I?
Bella hmphed. “That shows how much you and the detective know. I took the time to meet Cissy Grover. I really like her, but that’s my problem.”
“Problem? What kind of problem can you possibly have with Cissy?”
“Well, I like her. But she killed Darlene.”
“What?”
Bella’s jet black Brillo Pad hair did a disco dance with each nod. “Cissy killed Darlene. I figured it all out thanks to my mail-order college courses. She killed Darlene ’cause she got Darlene to change her will. She wanted the money. And you know what? She was snitching Darlene’s drugs. You know, that MGM—”
“HGH, Bella. It stands for human growth hormone.”
“Whatever. Anyway, Darlene didn’t know Cissy was using her stuff. She had a nifty little racket going. Darlene considered Cissy her best friend, but Cissy was more like a tick, sucking out Darlene’s dope and dough.”
“Ah . . . there’s a little problem with your theory, Bella. What happens to Cissy’s supply of HGH now that Darlene’s gone? Don’t you think she’d rather have her steady supplier alive? The money’s still tied up in probate, since the sons are going to contest the will.”
“No big deal. You see, Darlene gave Cissy tons of money in the last six months, something like ten grand. That buys plenty of that kind of dope.”
“And how’d you find that out?”
“She told me.”
