False Premises

by Leslie Caine

  “In other words, trust no one. Live in fear.”

  He didn’t reply, and I was too annoyed with him to strike up a new conversation. For the next half hour, we didn’t exchange an unnecessary word. Afterward, I gave Sullivan a ride home. Our conversation was superficial and chilly, Sullivan thanking me as he got out of my van and telling me to “take care.”

  I headed straight to my office, eager to let my thoughts focus on something noncriminal for a change. Though I was loath to admit this to anyone, Henry Toben’s misdeeds had given me a task that part of me—the immature daredevil part—relished. It’s typically a pleasure when clients present me with some unusual furnishing to blend into a room design, such as when a client has an appreciation for the whimsical that doesn’t necessarily match my own, or when a beloved relative has given them some bizarre item. This was the first time, however, that I’d been trapped into adding so many incongruous pieces at the eleventh hour. I wanted to see how well I could meet the challenge.

  Once at my office, I spread my presentation boards around me in the center of the pine floor and diligently crossed out the dozen nice items now missing and noted their gaudy, tasteless equivalents. This was going to be a major challenge, indeed. It felt tantamount to a client suddenly announcing that I had all of two hours to find him a trained seal to juggle the exquisite Wedgwood china that I’d spent a month hand-selecting for him. As I stared at the fiasco in growing dismay, my cell phone bleated.

  “Erin,” John exclaimed, sounding almost boyish in his excitement, “I’ve been asking around, and I got a name for you.”

  “A name for what?”

  “I found out who supplied the reproductions in Laura’s house. I thought you might be curious.”

  “Definitely.” I was already scrambling to my feet, snatching a notepad from a desk drawer.

  “It was George Wong. Have you heard of him?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “I’ve worked with him a couple of times, getting some custom furniture for our showrooms. George has a national operation, mostly through the Internet. Guess where his home base is.”

  “Crestview?”

  “Bingo. He’s got a good-sized factory out in the boonies, northeast of the city limits.”

  Pen in hand, I dropped into my leather desk chair. “What’s the address?”

  He gave it to me, and I said, “I’ll look into it. Thanks.” There was a pause. “Erin? When you say you’ll ‘look into it,’ you mean through the police, right? Not that you’ll look yourself.”

  “Right,” I immediately replied, not sure if I meant that or not.

  “Good, because I’ve had some dealings with this guy myself, and he’s no pushover. From everything I’ve heard, Mr. Wong is nobody to trifle with.”

  “I won’t trifle. Promise.”

  Silence.

  “John?”

  “Yeah. I was just . . .” He sighed. “Are we okay?” he asked.

  Oh, God. I hate any and all where-is-our-relationship-heading conversations, even under the best of circumstances. These were about as far from good circumstances as one could get. “Fine. Why?” I stalled. “What do you mean?”

  “You discovered the body of someone you knew, and who I knew, as well. Yet you didn’t call me last night or this morning. Not even later in the day. Most women . . . most people, I mean, would have needed to talk to someone close to them, who they could trust.”

  I winced, realizing that if our situations were reversed, I, too, would worry about this same thing. “I was about to call you, when Sullivan told me about your having once dated Laura, and I . . . needed some time to let the news settle.”

  “Laura and I dated more than three years ago, and it only lasted a couple of months.” He sounded defensive, and annoyed with me. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but do the simple math: he’d gone out with Laura for roughly as long as he and I had been dating.

  “Sullivan told me that, too. And I’ve since realized that it would have been odd for you to have blurted it out to me during lunch yesterday: ‘By the way, Erin, I dated her first, before she destroyed Sullivan.’ It’s just that . . . I tried to take today off, but everything immediately blew up in my face. Things keep snowballing on me. I hardly know which end is up right now, John.”

  “Let me help you, Erin. Let’s get out of town for the weekend so you can forget about all this misery for a little while. We’ll run off to some nice resort in Aspen, and I’ll help you figure out which end’s up.”

  I tightened my grip on the phone, unsettled at the unexpected suggestion. We’d certainly been moving toward sexual intimacy, but . . . “Um . . . I think I’d rather wait another week or two. I want to see when the funeral is, and . . . now’s just not the time.”

  “That’s okay. It was just a thought. I’ve got to get back to work.” His tone was rife with disappointment.

  We said our goodbyes, and I stashed my phone back in my purse. My spirits had plummeted once again. John’s phone call had only reminded me how out of control my life had suddenly become. I sighed and returned the display boards to my portfolio case. There was no way I could concentrate on Henry Toben’s design now. But I wasn’t willing to sit around and mope about my waxing and waning feelings for John. What I wanted to do was something proactive that could let me regain some measure of control over my life and my confused feelings; I wanted to meet with George Wong.

  I glanced at my watch. It was nearly six P.M., and the drive would take at least half an hour. If Mr. Wong had a storefront to his furniture workshop, it would surely be closed by the time I arrived. Even so, a nice drive through the countryside could help clear my head. . . .

  I locked up and took off in my van.

  Forty minutes later, as I pulled into the empty hard-packed dirt parking lot at the address John had given me, I was thinking that John had certainly been accurate in describing this building as “in the boonies.” There was nothing nearby but cornfields. So much for the drive clearing my head; my brain still felt as cluttered as the average junk drawer.

  An old-fashioned carved wood sign on the door read “Finest Furnishings,” but there were no business hours listed. With little expectation, I tried the brass knob on the front door. It turned. And as I crossed the threshold, shutting the heavy oak door behind me, I found myself stepping back in time and into an absolutely stunning room. I felt giddy for a moment. This was like leaving a kid alone in an ice cream parlor with a big silver spoon in her hand.

  The lighting, while electric, was housed in reproduction lamps that resembled gas lanterns. I strode into the shadowy center of the room and slowly turned a full 360 degrees. I drank in the vision of the adorable corner desk complete with a quill pen. Two fabulous Hepplewhite chairs upholstered in a crimson damask. A lovely cyan wingback with cabriole legs. Astonishing end tables, coffee table, and a long, gold sofa with astonishing mahogany leaf carvings. On the two narrow walls, matching gilded pier mirrors had been hung to brighten the space. A mahogany desk along the back wall was the only item that hinted at a more modern function; a receptionist was probably stationed there during the daytime. Wanting a closer look, I rounded the deserted receptionist’s desk. A phone and an intercom were built into the desk and tucked beneath a hinged cover. A flat-panel display terminal was hidden from immediate view within a wooden handcrafted box.

  This place tugged at my memory banks. I’d visited a very similar room before—some Founding Father’s mansion that I’d seen during a school field trip; such excursions had been the highlight of my grade-school years. Livingston Manor perhaps? What a phenomenal re-creation this was! It could have been a drawing room straight out of an aristocrat’s late-nineteenth-century home, and yet every stick of furniture appeared to be brand-new. The wallpaper was a rose-colored toile that would have been in high fashion in the late 1800s.

  For all its glory, however, the furniture was out of balance. The matching mirror on one wall hung above a brilliantly crafted cabinet, but the mirror o
n the opposite wall hung above a blank spot. The pattern of the wallpaper there was slightly more intense. A large, rectangular piece of furniture had been removed recently. Perhaps it was being repaired.

  This whole place seemed surreal to me. A master craftsman had built the nicest waiting room I’d ever seen, simply to serve as a storefront of a furniture workshop in the boonies of Colorado. Why? And what was to stop someone from wandering in and stealing this gorgeous furniture or the absent receptionist’s computer? There had to be a hidden camera and a security man watching a closed-circuit TV; the camera was probably masked in a lighting fixture.

  I tried the door behind the desk: locked. I tried the other door. This one was unlocked. The hinge creaked as the door swung open, and the scent of fresh-cut lumber— an aroma I adore—greeted me. I called out, “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  No answer.

  Judging from the L-shape floor plan of this freestanding building, it was possible that the locked door behind the receptionist desk led to a private residence. As I entered this second, enormous room, I was abruptly pulled from nineteenth-century-America gentility and into a massive modern-day workshop. There were at least a dozen lathes, power saws, and other woodworking equipment. The stations were all shut down and deserted, but ahead of me was a half wall of cinder blocks with sliding glass partitions above the cinder blocks, and the fluorescent ceiling lights were all on.

  As I made my way along an alley—so designated with yellow tape on the concrete floor—I could see into the office. A large man of Asian descent seated there saw me, too, and he gestured through the glass for me to come to the door. When I stepped into the office, he rose. I stifled a gasp. The man was enormous. It was difficult for me to guess his age, somewhere between forty and sixty, but in his youth, he definitely could have been a sumo wrestler. He said to me in careful diction, “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for George Wong.”

  “You found him. May I help you?” he repeated.

  “I hope so. I wanted to discuss a mutual former client of ours. A woman named Laura Smith.”

  His expression did not change; no sign of recognition flickered in his dark eyes. “Yes?” he asked mildly.

  “Um . . . my name is Erin Gilbert.”

  He initiated a handshake but said nothing, and my own hand had never felt so small. Afterward, he looked at me expectantly.

  “May I sit down?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  We both took a seat. His was a substantial gray desk chair befitting his large frame, but mine was chrome and molded blue plastic, a style found in many school cafeterias. I suddenly realized this powerful-looking stranger and I might be the only two people in the building, way out in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly I wished I’d paid a little more attention to John’s suggestion that I notify the police that this was a person they may want to interview, and stay out of their way myself. Really, though, what was George Wong going to do? Attack me just for asking him a few questions? That’d be one heck of a bad way to build up a client base. And even though we were off the beaten path, passing motorists would surely see my Interiors by Gilbert van, parked right near his unlocked Finest Furnishings door, where customers could enter at any given moment.

  “I’m an interior designer,” I began. “Five months ago, Laura Smith hired me to help decorate her home in expensive antiques. I visited her house again yesterday. That’s when I discovered that all the wonderful pieces I’d purchased on her behalf had been replaced with reproductions.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve since learned that those reproductions were supplied by your company.”

  “Yes?”

  His laconic queries were making me feel more ridiculous by the moment, but I soldiered on. “I was wondering if you could tell me anything about how that came to pass.”

  He regarded me impassively, and I desperately tried to formulate a reasonable response to give if he asked me why I was asking. Keeping his hands pressed flat on the surface of his desk, he said, “Miss Smith asked me to duplicate her antiques as close as possible to the originals. She sent me digital photographs, and I sent pictures of my products back to her. I visited her house to see the furniture for myself only one time. We arranged to have her purchases delivered. She paid her bill.”

  He stopped, so I could only assume he felt that was all he had to say on the subject. I blundered on, “Did you hear that she was murdered last night?”

  “No.”

  The news of her murder—if it was news—seemed to leave him untouched. He continued to hold my gaze. Now I felt totally idiotic. The man was definitely skilled at giving nothing away. I, on the other hand, was clearly no Miss Marple. I heard myself babbling, “I’m sure it’s unrelated, but the whole business of the duplicated antiques was so puzzling to me that I wanted to find out what was going on.”

  “Yes?”

  I squirmed in my prepubescent plastic chair. “Didn’t you find it . . . puzzling?”

  “It is not my job to ask why customers want the products that they purchase from me.”

  “Of course not, but still . . . didn’t it seem odd? Have you ever had a customer ask you to duplicate their furniture before?”

  “Miss Smith told me that she’d decided to keep the antiques locked away and sell them again in another ten years when they were even more valuable. Many people make a profit by reselling antiques.”

  “True, but not many people duplicate nearly every stick of furniture that they own.”

  He said nothing, merely sat there meeting my gaze, his palms still pressed flat on either side of his leather desk pad.

  I cleared my throat, briefly mulling over the notion of pointing at the dingy, barren wall behind him and shrieking, “Oh, my God! What is that?” and bolting from the room when he turned. Instead, I replied, “One of my thoughts when I saw what she’d done was that she might have intended an insurance fraud . . . to burn down the house and then to sell off the antiques.”

  “Yes?”

  I stared at his face, blank as an unadorned wall. Well, this little interview was not exactly turning into a Barbara Walters–style exposé. Then again, it couldn’t get any worse. “Did you get to know Laura at all?”

  “She was my customer.”

  “Was she a repeat customer?”

  “Repeat?”

  “Was this the second or third time that she bought furniture through your company?”

  “No. Only the one time.” He smiled. His expression reminded me of a dog baring its teeth before it attacks. “Is there anything else, Miss Gilbert?”

  “No.” I got to my feet. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Wong.”

  I headed for the door.

  “It was nice to meet you, Miss Gilbert. Say hello to John Norton for me.”

  I froze, my heart in my throat. Telling myself to stay calm, I turned and asked, “You know John?”

  He nodded. With his chilling grin, he replied, “John Norton’s a repeat customer.”

  “And how did you know that I know him?”

  “He said your name the last time he was here.”

  “When was that?” I tried to sound casual.

  He flipped the pages of his desk calendar. “January. How time flies, as they say. Yes?”

  I forced a smile. “It sure does. Nice meeting you, Mr. Wong.”

  “Yes, Miss Gilbert. And be sure to tell Mr. Norton that I said hello.”

  “I will. Bye.” I let myself out of his office and crossed the cavernous room and forced myself to maintain a casual pace, certain that he was watching me through the glass.

  John and I hadn’t even met each other in January.

  Chapter 11

  Nothing establishes ambience faster than the way a room smells. For pet owners and the occasional less-than-vigilant cook, potpourri can cover a multitude of sins. After all, sometimes the nose only thinks it knows.

  —Audrey Munroe

  My stomach was still churning from anxiety by t
he time I arrived home. As I slipped through the French doors, I grimaced at the sight of the parlor, still in its future-square-dance motif, with the furniture rimming the walls and the center of the room bare. A lovely, sweet scent in the air distracted me from the visual chaos, however, and I followed my nose to the kitchen. There, Audrey was standing at the island and concocting a potpourri blend. She tended to have too much energy to spend much time sitting, which must have suited her well in her ballerina days.

  The potpourri was in various stages of production—from fresh ingredients to final results. Arranged on her glorious black granite countertop were fresh-cut flowers yet to be sorted or dried, dried flowers with unpicked buds, ingredients to size that were yet to be measured, and blends in dozens of half-full jars that must have already been suitably aged.

  “Oh, good,” she said as she glanced up at me standing in the doorway.“A fresh pair of nostrils.”

  “Not the usual greeting after a rough day at the office. But I gather you want me to help you rate the aromas?”

  “Good deduction. It’s the subject of tomorrow’s segment. And we’re having fish tonight, so the potpourri is doing double duty.” She winked at me. “Pull up a chair and prepare to breathe deeply.”

  I grinned in spite of myself. At times like this, when Audrey’s charm and her fascinating domestic projects allowed me a respite from my troubles, my good fortune at living in her home felt like nothing less than a gift from God. For the time being at least, my feeling of abject humiliation over my exchange with George Wong was forgotten. I’d called the Northridge lead detective and told him about Wong, but our conversation had made me feel even more like a dingbat.That, too, I decided, was now behind me.

  “Okay,” I said, eagerly perching on the elegant bar stool beside her at the kitchen island. “What’s on the olfactory menu?”

  “The completed concoctions are categorized according to the room they’re to be placed in.” She paused and grimaced. As if in a personal aside, she muttered,“I’m going to have to make a mental note not to say‘categorized completed concoctions’during my show.I’ll sound like I’m coughing up a hair ball.” She waved her hand over three sealed jars. “This first group, nearest you, is for closets. They’re your basic walk-in-the-forest aromas . . . heavy on the pine boughs and cedar chips . . . using your more powerful crushed leaves and essential oils.”