by Lee Hollis
“I know that’s what I told the parole board, but that’s really just a dream,” Heather said quietly.
“It’s not a dream, it’s a goal. All you have to do is work hard to make it happen,” Poppy said. “I know how determined you are. You got that from me.”
“Your mother went from penniless widow to licensed private investigator in no time,” Matt said, beaming proudly.
“And I pooh-poohed her all the way. I wasn’t supportive at all,” Heather groaned.
“Stop kicking yourself,” Poppy said. “You came around.”
“I can be so negative,” Heather whispered.
“You get that from your father. But that’s easy to change. Be positive. You got a job. That’s something to be proud of. This is a good day,” Poppy said, walking over and hugging her daughter. “Matt, would you like to stay for dinner and help us celebrate?”
“Sorry, I can’t. I have an appointment at a recording studio,” Matt said, unable to tamp down the excitement in his voice.
“Recording studio? Does this have something to do with Lara Harper, because the case is closed,” Poppy said.
“I know, but Carl Menkin wants me to record a couple of songs that he can distribute to a few companies to see if he can drum up any interest,” Matt said, winking at Heather.
“Matt, that’s . . . that’s so great,” Poppy managed to get out. She was sincerely happy for him, but she couldn’t help but feel slightly sad that she might be losing him at the agency sooner than she had expected.
“The next Tony Molina,” Heather said, smiling.
“Let’s hope not,” Poppy sighed.
“I’ve got to get going,” Matt said, then kissed Heather lightly on the lips and hugged Poppy before he dashed out the door.
Poppy turned back to Heather. “How about we go out for dinner?”
Heather put her hands in the front pockets of her jeans and shook her head. “I’d rather stay in, if you don’t mind. It’s been an exhausting day.” She crossed to the kitchen. “I made a casserole for us before my job interview today. I just have to heat it up.”
“That sounds lovely,” Poppy said, studying her morose daughter. She didn’t want to pry, but now that she was a professional detective, she couldn’t stop herself. “How are you and Matt doing?”
“Fine. He keeps telling me he wants to be with me for the long run,” Heather said, turning on the oven and then crossing to the refrigerator to retrieve the foil-wrapped casserole dish.
“He’s very sweet,” Poppy said. “It took me a while to realize it, but he is.”
“I know. . . .” Heather’s voice trailed off.
“But . . .”
“No buts. I believe he’s very sincere. It’s just that I can see his career taking off, acting and singing, and who knows what else? He’s very talented. I’m just not sure, given what I’ve been through, given the road ahead of me, that I am equipped to handle . . .”
“The harsh glare of the spotlight?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“You just need to take it day by day.”
“Cross that bridge when I get to it, and all those tired clichés.”
“In my experience, clichés for the most part have turned out to be universal truths.”
“Then I’ll take your advice,” Heather said, sliding the casserole onto the rack and closing the oven door.
Poppy helped her set the table. She tried telling her daughter again how proud she was of her, but Heather refused to accept the compliment, preferring to focus on her mother’s personal life, which Poppy wanted to completely shut down. She had no intention of boring her daughter with the details of a burgeoning love triangle. Talk about a cliché! They had a pleasant dinner together, and Heather retired to her bedroom early, leaving Poppy to turn on the local news and gasp at the latest reports about the death of Tony Molina’s wife, Tofu. The police were now confirming that Dominick Molina, after a brief interrogation, had confessed to the murder of his stepmother.
Chapter 36
When Rod opened the front door of his expansive midcentury Palm Springs home to find Poppy standing there with Matt, his face registered surprise, but he quickly covered it with a welcoming smile.
“Poppy, I’m glad you came. And, Matt, good to see you,” he said, waving them both inside.
When Rod had called Poppy earlier that morning on her cell and asked her to drop by for coffee, she initially resisted, but he was so insistent, so persuasive, promising her it was important, she finally reluctantly agreed. Luckily at the time she had been at the office with Matt and had enlisted him to accompany her so she would feel more comfortable. Matt was happy to oblige playing chaperone, but he told Poppy that his official opinion was that she and Rod made an “adorable” couple.
Poppy and Matt had barely stepped into Rod’s foyer when Poppy spotted a tiny, wispy young woman, blond with angular features, hovering in the living room. She instantly recognized her from all the photographs she had been recently poring over.
“Lara . . .”
“Hello, Ms. Harmon,” she said, shuffling over to give Poppy a strained hug. “You look as pretty as you did in all those old reruns of my dad’s TV show.”
“And you’re all grown up,” Poppy said, studying the young woman she had been so eagerly searching for the past couple of weeks. Poppy put her hands together and bowed. “I suppose I should greet you with Namaste. . . .”
Lara stared at her, puzzled.
“That’s the official greeting in Nepal,” Poppy said evenly.
“Oh . . . right . . . yes . . . ,” Lara said with a forced giggle before following suit and putting her hands together and bowing. “Namaste.”
“How long were you there?” Poppy asked.
Lara ignored the question as she focused on Matt. “Who’s this?”
“Oh, forgive my manners. This is Matt Flowers. We work together,” Poppy said.
Lara blew past Poppy and held out her hand to Matt. “It’s lovely to meet you. I’m Lara.”
“Yes,” Matt said, flashing his sexy smile. “I feel as if I already know you. I’ve been searching for you high and low for a while now.”
“Well, lucky for us both you’ve finally found me,” Lara said flirtatiously.
Rod stepped forward, attempting to put a stop to his daughter’s efforts to hit on Matt. “I thought you would like to see for yourselves that Lara is safe and sound.”
“Yes, you had your father very worried,” Poppy said in an admonishing tone.
Lara sighed. “I know, I feel so bad about that. I’ve been acting awful lately, like a spoiled child, but while I was in Nepal, the lessons I learned at a spiritual retreat run by Buddhists really centered me, and allowed me to see what was really important through long days of meditation and reflection. . . .”
“And what was that?” Poppy had to ask.
Lara batted her eyes and stared lovingly at her father. “Family, of course.”
Poppy couldn’t help but think the girl was here because she needed money, but she held her tongue.
Matt decided to pose Poppy’s question again. “How long did you say you were in Nepal?”
Lara appeared flustered by Matt. She giggled like a coquettish fifteen-year-old being asked out by the high school quarterback. “I don’t know, a month or so.” She turned to her father. “How long have I been gone, Daddy?”
“A few weeks,” Rod answered. “I’m just happy you came home.”
“I’m not sure I could stay too long in Nepal,” Poppy said. “I love eating beef too much.”
Lara stared at her, utterly confused. “What?”
“Cows,” Poppy said, eyes narrowing.
Lara gave her a brief, dry laugh. “What about them?”
“They are holy and sacred to the Hindus in Nepal. You could go to prison for up to twelve years if you kill one,” Poppy explained. “I’m sure you heard that while you were there.”
“Well, like I said, I spent a lot
of time at the retreat and didn’t get out much,” Lara offered, although she was starting to get nervous that she was being tested.
Poppy didn’t feel the need to ask any more questions because she was certain that the girl had never been to Nepal in her life and was making it all up on the spot. A quick look at her passport would prove it, but this was no longer an investigation. They were no longer working for Rod, so at this point none of this was any of her business. She just hoped Rod wasn’t buying his daughter’s blatant lies.
Poppy decided to drop the line of inquiry, but Matt was not about to.
“When we were looking for you, Lara, we found a lot of instances of people who saw you out here in the desert recently. Your manager, Carl Menkin, said you were at an undisclosed location recording an album. . . .”
Lara’s eyes flicked back and forth as her mind raced. Finally, she nodded and smiled, then replied, “Yes, I was out here briefly with some friends. We were partying too much and getting out of control and my credit card got stolen. I didn’t even know. At the time, I was in a place where I just needed to refocus, and that’s when a friend who was going to backpack in Nepal invited me to join her and—”
Rod interrupted her. “Honey, I thought you lost the credit card in LA.”
Lara did not appreciate being contradicted, but she resisted the urge to lose her temper. “No, Daddy, I’m sure I said Palm Springs. I was here when that loser snatched my card in the club.”
Rod went over the details in his mind again but then decided to let it go. “Maybe I got it wrong.”
“Yes, you did,” Lara said with a tight smile. She turned to Matt. “And now that I’m home I’m going to get to work recording some new songs.”
“Good for you,” Matt said, obviously not buying any of her lies, either.
“Can you stay for lunch?” Rod asked. “Rosa is making her world-famous enchiladas.”
“Oh, yes, please,” Lara cooed, flouncing over to Matt and taking his hands in hers. “I would love the chance to get to know each other better.”
“I’m afraid we can’t,” Poppy said quickly. “We’re meeting my daughter, Heather, for lunch.”
They were not having lunch with Heather because she was starting her new hostess job today, but Matt picked up the cue and went right along with Poppy’s story. “That’s right. We’d better get going. It’s never smart to keep your girlfriend waiting.”
Lara’s face fell. “Girlfriend?”
“Yes,” Poppy was happy to confirm. “They’ve been together a while now.”
Lara dropped Matt’s hands and pouted. “How nice.”
“Thank you for the invitation, Rod, perhaps another time,” Poppy said.
“Of course,” Rod said, disappointed. “Maybe we can do dinner later this week. I’d love for you to spend more time with me and Lara.”
That would never happen.
Although Poppy admittedly found Rod still attractive and nice to be around, his daughter was downright toxic. She would be happy if she never laid eyes on that impulsive, selfish young woman ever again. And it hardly took a supersleuth to deduce that she was a serial liar to start with, and who knew what else.
Poppy rightfully feared that poor Rod, who was desperate to repair the damage done to his relationship with his daughter, would stay blind to the truth until it was too late. He was opening himself up to a whole world of hurt, and Poppy hated the idea of having to watch him go through that.
Chapter 37
Stoney Peterman’s smile froze quicker than a curious kid’s tongue on a metal pole in the dead of winter. Poppy and Matt stood in the doorway to his low-rent office located in a run-down mini mall where most of the retail and office space had weathered “lease available” signs taped to the smudged glass windows. Peterman, a sleazy lawyer you might see on a billboard on the rough side of town, operated out of a tiny space on the end next to a closed barbershop. When Poppy and Matt first appeared at his door, his face lit up like a Christmas tree, his expectations raised that they were potential clients, recent car accident victims with nagging neck trouble, for instance. But Stoney’s hopes were quickly dashed when Matt flashed his fake tin FBI badge he had bought on Amazon for ten bucks and announced, “I’m Agent Cameron and this is Agent Harmon. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
Poppy bit the side of her lip to keep from laughing at Matt’s testosterone-laden performance, adopting an intimidating posture and lowering the register of his voice. He had been so excited when Poppy had first suggested they pose as FBI agents in order to question Stoney Peterman.
Stoney managed to keep the frozen smile from melting into a panicked frown as he stood up from his desk to greet them. “FBI? To what do I owe this pleasure?” His voice cracked slightly, but he fought to remain calm and breezy.
“We have a few questions about Alden Kenny,” Matt said, narrowing his eyes, barreling inside the office as Stoney instinctively took a step back.
Poppy followed close on Matt’s heels. She allowed him to take the lead because so far he was nailing it all on his own. She knew if they had just sauntered into Stoney’s hovel of a headquarters introducing themselves as a pair of local private detectives with no real client, just a natural curiosity to find out who drowned Alden Kenny, he would have laughed them right out of his office. But a scuzzy attorney, keeping a low profile in the slums of Cathedral City, with his fingers in all kinds of pies, most of which were undoubtedly dirty and illegal, Stoney Peterman could not readily dismiss two professional FBI agents who had supposedly been dispatched to see him with some very serious inquiries.
The road to Stoney Peterman had been surprisingly easy to travel. Earlier that day, Wyatt had swung by to visit with his grandmother after school and was promptly put to work investigating Alden Kenny’s finances. It took the whiz kid about an hour to hack into Kenny’s bank accounts, or “access” as Poppy preferred to say, so it didn’t sound illegal. After perusing the recent activity history, Wyatt quickly zeroed in on a mysterious cash transfer of fifty thousand dollars that had been deposited into one of the dead juror’s accounts. According to the date of the transfer, it had been made on the same day that Alden Kenny was killed. Even more suspicious, the exact amount was withdrawn two days later, after Poppy had discovered Kenny floating facedown in his swimming pool. That could only mean that someone else took the cash out of the account. Poppy had her suspicions as to who would be most likely to have had access to Alden Kenny’s money, the most obvious choice being his pal and business partner in the carpet-cleaning business, Jay Takamura. But her more pressing question at the moment was, Where did the money come from?
According to the deposit information that Wyatt had in front of him on the computer screen with just a few keystrokes, the transfer was made by a corporation known as Decision Consultants. After Wyatt did a little more digging, he discovered Decision Consultants was merely a shell company for a seedy lawyer named Stoney Peterman, who boasted on his low-trafficked Web site that one of his star clients was Tony Molina. That struck Poppy as more than just an odd coincidence. When Violet called the high-priced law firm that officially represented Tony Molina in Beverly Hills to confirm that Peterman was also looking after Tony’s varied interests, the receptionist haughtily and steadfastly denied Mr. Molina had anything to do with such a shyster lawyer as Peterman. This left Poppy to assume that Peterman was the attorney Tony used to handle some of his shadier pursuits, most likely on the down low, like soliciting bribes or buying the silence of women he may have had dalliances with outside of his marriage, and, of course, paying a jury plant to vote not guilty at his assault trial.
And so a plan to visit Mr. Peterman was hatched, and now here they were, in the guise of a couple of feds, hoping to find the hard evidence that would finally connect Molina to Alden Kenny’s murder. Poppy was convinced that when Kenny called and insisted she come see him, he was about to come clean. And she believed that Tony somehow had gotten to him first.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know an Alden Kenny,” Stoney sputtered, lying through his teeth.
“So you deny paying him a sum total of fifty thousand dollars from your company Decision Consultants?” Matt pressed, taking another step forward.
“Remember,” Poppy said, folding her arms, “lying to the FBI is a felony offense.”
“I . . . I . . . didn’t know that,” Stoney stammered, flustered. He was so nervous that sweat beads were already forming on his ample brow.
“Well, now you do, so let me try again,” Matt said in a low growl. “Did you or did you not pay Alden Kenny fifty thousand dollars?”
Stoney’s eyes shifted back and forth as his mind raced. He looked as if he was trying to formulate a story in his mind, one that sounded somewhat plausible and honest.
Poppy could almost see the wheels turning inside his head as he tried to come up with an answer. Finally, he nodded and answered, “Yes . . . yes I did.”
“What was it for? And think before you answer because we’re not stupid. It wouldn’t cost fifty K to hire him to clean your carpets,” Matt said before glancing down at the dirty, scuffed floor. “Especially since you don’t have any.”
Stoney shook his head. “I did it for Tofu. . . .”
Matt raised an eyebrow. “Tofu? Why?”
“She was having an affair with him and he got to be kind of a stalker and wouldn’t leave her alone and she was terrified that Tony was going to find out about it so she came to me and asked me to fix the situation, to just get him off her back and keep quiet about their affair. I told the kid I would wire fifty grand into his bank account if he agreed to just go away and forget all about Tofu and he did. . . .”
Poppy wasn’t buying it. Her instinct was telling her the money had nothing to do with Kenny’s affair with Tofu, who was conveniently dead and unable to corroborate whether Stoney Peterman was telling the truth or not. Especially since Poppy had heard Tony had already been well aware of the affair. “So Tony knew nothing about the payment?”
“Hell no! He would’ve killed us both.... I mean . . . I’m not implying he had anything to do with Tofu’s murder—the stepson did it, it’s all over the news. Tony had nothing to do with any of that horrific business.”
