False Premises

by Leslie Caine

  “Let me guess,” Sullivan persisted nastily. “She sent you out on some dumb errand shortly after Erin and I left your place this afternoon, and she was gone by the time you got back.”

  In an obvious grudging consent that Sullivan’s scenario was precisely what had occurred, Dave clenched his jaw and remained stubbornly silent. Linda asked, “Is there a reason you’re wearing your sunglasses indoors at night, Mr. Holland?”

  “Yeah. They’re prescription. And I lost my glasses.”

  “Would you mind taking them off for me?” Her officious tone of voice made her words sound more like a direct order than a request.

  He hesitated. “I’d rather not.”

  “Why?”

  He frowned and didn’t answer. When she continued to look at him without moving a muscle, he sighed and removed his glasses. I fought back a gasp of surprise. He was sporting a black eye.

  “Were you in a fistfight recently, Mr. Holland?” Linda asked.

  “No. Nothing like that.” He touched his cheek gingerly, winced, then put on his sunglasses again. “I tripped on that stupid antique iron Ms. Gilbert got for us that Laura’s been using as a doorstop.” He touched his face a second time. “Clobbered myself right in the eye with the doorknob.”

  I said, “That ‘antique iron’ is now probably a fake, just like the rest of your furnishings, Dave.”

  Dave’s jaw dropped. “Come again?”

  “The antiques in your front room have been replaced with imitations. I noticed that this morning when I came here to speak with Laura.”

  “That’s . . . not possible. That’s the mirror you picked out for us, right there.”

  “It’s a fake. Laura claimed that you were going to sell the antiques for a profit in a couple of years, and that you were keeping them safe in storage in the meantime.”

  “Mind if we come in?” Linda asked.

  Dave ignored her. He went over to his faked twenty-thousand-dollar original Louis XV mirror, stammering, “But this is . . .” He lowered his sunglasses, then put them back in place, all the while studying in horror the bogus frame of the mirror. “There’s no way. . . . This has to be some sort of mistake.”

  “That frame’s only recently manufactured,” Steve said as we stepped inside, taking advantage of Dave’s confusion. “The carvings were made with power tools—you can see the marks where the bits were moved—and it’s obviously been spray-painted gold.”

  In a total state of shock, Dave staggered through the doorway and into the front room. We followed. “Look at the drawer of the writing desk,” I suggested. “The bottom piece was attached with staples. And the back piece was nailed.”

  He yanked the drawer all the way out, letting the papers inside flutter to the floor. “Jesus! Is everything in the whole house a fake?”

  “I’ve only been in the foyer and front room,” I replied, though I didn’t have any doubts that the answer was yes.

  Dave raised the drawer as if to hurl it to the floor, but then stopped himself as he looked in Linda’s direction. He jammed the drawer back into place.

  “Have you been out of town recently, Mr. Holland?” Linda asked.

  “Yeah. For four weeks. Business trip. My technology company makes . . .” He shook his head. “Not important. Anyway, I just got back from Atlanta. Last night. I was supposed to be gone another week yet, but things went really well, and we finished up early.” He grabbed his head with both hands, pressing on his temples with the heels of his hands as he added in a stunned voice, “Got in late last night. And my glasses suddenly disappeared this morning.”

  “Do you have any idea at all where Miss Smith could have gone?” Linda asked.

  “All I know is that Laura’s been really tense and upset about something lately. She said it was because she’d found out an old friend of hers has cancer. But . . . that was the same story she gave me the last time . . . said she was visiting an old friend with cancer when she was really seeing Sullivan here, on the sly.”

  Sullivan took a sharp breath, but to my relief, he said nothing.

  “Were the antiques insured?” Linda asked. “And was your policy registered under your name or Laura’s?”

  “Both our names.” He was growing steadily more pale, and I started to worry that he was going to faint at any moment. Poor Dave.

  “Why don’t we sit down for a couple of minutes and discuss this?” Linda asked gently, obviously worried about the same thing.

  Dave shook his head. “No.”

  “Do you want me to take your statement?”

  “Statement?” he repeated dully.

  “A grand-larceny report.”

  “No. Not yet . . . anyway. I need to think.”

  “Do you want me to examine the rest of your furniture?” I asked, feeling deeply sorry for the man. Unless he was an even better actor than Laura was, he was utterly devastated to learn that his pricey furniture was gone. “I can help you make out a full report of every item that’s missing or has been duplicated.”

  Again he shook his head, and sank into the nearest seat—the erstwhile black horsehair camelback sofa with hand-carved leaf filigrees on the front and back. The tell-tale squeak of springs, which hadn’t even been invented at the time of the original’s manufacture, made me wince. “Just go. Please. All of you.” He sank his head into his hands. “This is the worst day of my life.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Linda told him. “If you see Miss Smith, tell her I’d like to ask her a couple questions. I’m leaving my business card on the table.”

  We let ourselves out and walked toward Linda’s squad car. “It’d be nice to get the name of whoever supplied her with these reproductions,” I said. “She probably ordered them well in advance. She was always really specific about what pieces she wanted. Even if she saw fit to destroy the paperwork before she took off, it should be easy enough for us to call her bank and get a name, right?”

  “Us?” Linda repeated in a near growl.

  “You, I mean. The Crestview police.”

  “Erin, we can’t investigate a theft until the owner reports it. Not unless he or Miss Smith puts in a claim against her insurance company.” She opened the door of her squad car. “So you can’t call her bank to get any names of furniture manufacturers, either.”

  “Understood.” I gave her a warm smile. “Thanks so much for talking to Dave, Linda.”

  “Hey, no thanks are necessary. I smell a rat here, big time. I’d like nothing better than to get this Laura Smith put out of business permanently.”

  After she drove past us and out of sight, Sullivan and I walked down the driveway to his car. The night air felt frosty, but not nearly as ice-cold as my companion. “Damn it all!” he said. “I knew she’d run!”

  “I’m sorry I discouraged you from going straight to the police.”

  He opened the passenger door for me. “Ah, hell. That didn’t make much difference. She’d have been gone by the time the police arrived, too. It was my fault for not heading straight back up here with my van, instead of wasting all that time borrowing a car.” We got into the car and he started the engine. He made a U-turn and drove the short distance to my van. He pulled up beside it, obviously waiting for me to leave.

  “What are you going to do now?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Make a night of it, if I have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m staying put . . . waiting to see if Dave Holland makes any sudden midnight trips someplace.”

  “In other words, you think Dave’s lying when he says he doesn’t know where she is?”

  “Nah. I think right about now he’s digging through every receipt he can find till he finds a clue about her whereabouts. She’s probably stored those antiques somewhere in the general area, where she can keep an eye on them.”

  “Oh, you’re right. Of course she did.” I shook my head, disappointed for not thinking of that myself.

  Picking up on my body English, Sullivan gave me a s
econd shrug. “Yeah. Well, don’t forget: I’ve been in his shoes.”

  I put my hand on the door handle, but couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Sullivan to sit alone in this miserable car, waiting for Dave to make a move. Stalling, I said, “You and Dave have obviously had some confrontations in the past.”

  “You could say that. He followed Laura one time to my place . . . one of those occasions when she claimed she was visiting the friend with cancer . . . and he burst in on us.”

  “Did you know then that she was living with another man?”

  “Yeah. But she’d told me he was this violent monster that she was scared to death of . . . that he’d cut her throat the last time she tried to leave him. She—”

  “Wait. She claimed it was Dave who cut her throat?” Had she deliberately played on my vulnerability over my mother’s death? “She told me that she got that wound when her father killed her mother and her younger brother. Before he took his own life.”

  “No way. Her parents live in Indiana someplace. Or they used to, last time I spoke to them. When Laura took off with Evan for Europe, I called them, hoping they’d heard from her, but she never contacted them. They sound like nice, quiet people, unable to explain or control their wild daughter.”

  Lying to me about her scar felt like a much worse betrayal—more personal—than the fact that she’d used me as a pawn in a swindle. That was just business, whereas she’d used my mother’s death to bond with me on a false pretense. I shook my head. “I don’t believe Dave gave her that scar. He seems to be a decent, mellow person.”

  “Yeah. In retrospect, it’s more likely she got it from some botched scam . . . that she chose the wrong mark one time and nearly paid the price with her life. But at the time, I hadn’t even met Holland, and I believed her every word. She was all distraught when she showed up at my house that night, and she had a shiner . . . worse than the one Holland’s got now. And he just barged into my house, screaming at Laura. Far as I was concerned, that was proof positive that the guy was an abusive maniac. So I threw him out, and Laura wound up moving in with me.”

  “Back then, why do you suppose she targeted you over him? It’s so illogical. After all, he’s the millionaire, not you.” Still, the three hundred thousand dollars she’d stolen from Sullivan was a lot of money. . . .

  “Not then, he wasn’t. His company didn’t hit the big time till a year or so ago, shortly after Laura moved in with me.” He snorted. “For a while there, that was the only thing that cheered me up . . . the thought of how badly the timing of Dave’s skyrocketing wealth must have rankled Laura.” He frowned. “Figures she’d find a way to come back to Crestview and scarf up what she missed the first time.”

  My mind raced back through the troubling events of the last twenty-four hours. “I wonder what her relationship was with that gun-toting man in the dreadlocks wig last night. She might be running from him now, as much as from us. For all we know, he could be the guy who slit her throat.”

  Sullivan ignored this tangent and asked, “Need me to walk you to your car?”

  “Actually, I’m going to wait with you, if that’s all right.”

  “Why?”

  Good question. Maybe I just needed to assuage my guilt for not believing him when he’d said that Laura would immediately run away. In any case, my instincts were telling me to stay. I shrugged. “To keep you out of trouble, I guess.”

  Chapter 6

  We debated for quite a while about what Laura’s connection might have been to last night’s gun-toting, wig-wearing phony cop. We agreed that he was most likely tracking down Laura to bring her to justice for some previous scam. Because he’d proven to be singularly inept at keeping a low profile, my theory was that he was a scam victim himself, taking matters into his own hands. Steve thought it likeliest that he was “a P.I. who happens to be shitty at his job.”

  I argued, “But neither of those possibilities explains why he was harassing the store manager. Hannah Garrison says he’s been targeting Paprika’s for selling merchandise that he supposedly found offensive.”

  “Maybe the guy’s Laura’s new partner. Their tussle last night could have been staged.”

  “Yeah . . . but why? How on earth could their charade have helped them?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question,” Steve muttered.

  We sat in glum silence for several minutes, till I said, “I’ve got a personal stake in this. I spent days upon days selecting those pieces, dickering about their cost, assembling that magnificent collection of furnishings. Despite what Linda Delgardio told me about not poking around in police business myself, I’d really like to find whoever it was that duplicated Laura’s antiques. That person could be in on this thing with Laura. Evan isn’t an expert on antiques, is he?”

  “No. Though he could’ve studied up on ’em.”

  “He wouldn’t have the resources to manufacture a household of knockoffs himself, would he?”

  “No way. And even if he could, that guy’s not about to do anything resembling manual labor, such as building furniture. Evan’s the sort to call a paramedic if he so much as gets a splinter in his pinky.” Steve fought back a yawn.

  Still determined that we could eventually hit on the answers if we kept theorizing, I suggested, “So maybe Evan and Laura parted company, and she teamed up with somebody who’s making the fakes for her. Maybe this is just the start of a new operation of hers, and she’s planning on repeating it at the next fall guy’s house.” Steve made no reply, so I added, “It’s worth checking out, in any case.”

  He shrugged, and muttered, “I guess,” obviously humoring me. He was probably too focused on his own predicament to care how extensive Laura’s latest path of thievery might prove to be. Even in the dim lighting, Sullivan looked haggard, his features drawn. His quest to track down a professional con artist was a long shot. Maybe I’d only made matters worse by volunteering to keep him company.

  “Steve, there’s been no sign of Evan here in Crestview. He’s probably still in Europe. Even if we find Laura and manage to bring her to trial, I doubt if you’ll be able to get your money back.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I’m not letting her get off scot-free again. Not a second time. Not without a fight.”

  To put a positive spin on matters, I said, “We can always hope that, once she gets arrested, she’ll reveal Evan’s location. And maybe you’ll get your money back, after all.”

  “That’d be great.” But his tone told me he held out no hope whatsoever for that possibility.

  We fell into another silence, till Steve finally muttered, “I wish you’d brought some coffee with you, Laura. I could—”

  I stiffened. Steve broke off abruptly as he realized what he’d just said. He flashed a sheepish smile at me. “Got a little tongue-tied, is all. I meant to say ‘while we watch for Laura.’ ”

  “So. I remind you of Laura?”

  “No!” He raked his fingers through his hair, a frequent nervous gesture of his that I was beginning to think was what poker players call a “tell.” “I was just . . . She’s on my mind right now. You two are nothing alike. Other than a few . . . superficial similarities . . . maybe.”

  “Such as?”

  He remained silent for a long time. Then he replied quietly, “You look a little similar, now that you mention it.”

  Laura was remarkably beautiful, so that was a compliment, but I’d designed too many bedrooms for recent divorcés to miss the underlying ramifications of Sullivan’s equating the two of us. However lovely those bedrooms already were when I first arrived, the clients invariably wanted a radical change that would eradicate all reminders of their former spouses. “That’s why you pushed me away, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” Sullivan focused his perpetually angry eyes on me. “I never pushed you away.”

  “Oh, no? And what do you call fixing me up with your buddy John? A bonding experience? Just what do you think I am? Shag carpeting?”

  �
�No, I . . .” He gripped the steering wheel so tightly that I half expected it to crack into pieces. Through a clenched jaw and without looking at me, he said, “That’s not how it was, Erin. I never said you should go out with him. You’re the one who leapt at the chance to get all hooked up with a good friend of mine!”

  “Your precise words to me when you introduced the two of us were: ‘Erin, this is John Norton, who I think you should meet.’ ”

  “I meant that you should meet him because he does demo homes for the residential developer he works for, and I thought you might want to work with him in the future.”

  “Uh-huh. And you’re a designer, too, one who’s fallen on hard times and needs all the work he can get.”

  “So what, Gilbert? Maybe I just . . . didn’t want to have to ask a friend of mine for favors by hiring me! Did you ever think of that?”

  Even while I silently wondered how this conversation had gone so wrong so fast, I heard myself snipe, “Or maybe you’re being less than honest with me right now! Did you ever think of that?”

  “You want honesty, do you? Fine! Go home! I honestly think I’d be better off waiting for Holland on my own!” He returned his gaze to the road ahead, as if too disgusted to continue to look at me.

  I stared at him in profile and stayed put. If I did as he demanded, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that we would revert to the barely civil relationship that we’d had for my first two years in Crestview. He was going to have to say something else to me eventually, and his words would either repair or worsen this ever-deepening chasm between us.

  “Anyway, he’d seen you before as you were leaving my office a couple days earlier and started bugging me for an introduction. I was hoping you wouldn’t go for it, okay? But you practically threw yourself at him.”

  “So, in other words, you were testing me? Dangling your friend in front of me to see if I’d take the bait?”

  “No! Jeez! Let’s just drop it, Gilbert! Everything worked out for the best for all three of us. You and John are obviously all hot and heavy, so it’s too late now. Besides, it’s not as if—” He broke off as headlights emerged from the otherwise black void of the small cul-de-sac on the slope above us. “Holland’s leaving! At nearly midnight! He’s meeting her!”