by Leslie Caine
“Who are you talking about? Henry Toben?”
He started to leave, and I pushed the button for the nurse, calling to Jerry, “Wait. You did put those photographs under my door, didn’t you? Are you working for someone as a private investigator?”
“You’ve been warned, Erin. If I say another word, it’ll probably be my last.”
“Who are you trying to warn me about?”
He gave no answer.
Audrey was insufferable after she picked me up from the hospital and brought me home. By midday, word had spread through the Crestview rumor mill that I’d been hospitalized for poisoning, but Audrey was a regular pit bull of a watchdog, refusing to let anyone visit. She ruthlessly screened my calls—keeping the cordless phone in the pocket of her caftan and answering the instant it rang. She tried to deny both John and Steve phone access to me. Her plan was foiled when I happened to come downstairs for some tea and was standing right next to her as she answered the phone and told the caller that I was “still asleep.” She then tried to draw me into a discussion about table linens, but finally—when I threatened to move out—admitted the caller was John and that she’d done the same thing to Steve half an hour before. Her entire defense for her actions was to point at the sheet of paper on the refrigerator and cry, “But they’re on the list!”
Livid with Audrey, I snatched the phone away from her and returned their calls—John first and then Sullivan— and both times regretted it. John was unable to focus on the fact that I was perfectly fine now, instead pointing out that I shouldn’t have taken the risk of working alone at a house that I’d already known to be booby-trapped. I made some remark about his point being well taken, but that it was too late to get the proverbial spilled milk back into the carton.
By the time Sullivan started harping on the exact same point, I shouted at him, “Enough already! It was stupid of me. I realize that! And as helpful and healing as it is to have you insult me and yell at me, I promised Audrey that I’d spend the day resting in bed. So goodbye!” I hung up on him, but the problem with cordless phones is that they can’t be slammed down. Although I pressed the off button with extra force, it just wasn’t as satisfying.
The next morning, something felt wrong as I unlocked the door to my office building and stepped inside the small area in front of the stairs. An instant later, I realized that the feeling was caused by the very air I was breathing; the place didn’t smell quite right.
“Hello?” I asked cautiously, my heart pounding. “Is anybody here?”
Silence. I could hear only the pounding of my own heart. The door had been locked. I had to be hallucinating about the foul odor, and yet even as I told myself that it must be my imagination, the scent grew stronger as I started to ascend the stairs.
I spotted the back of a man’s head first, and for a moment felt a measure of relief when I recognized Jerry Stone. No doubt he had been breaking into my office and sleeping here at night. “Jerry?”
No answer. He was seated in my beloved Sheraton chair—the one with my mother’s cross-stitching.
“Jerry?”
Frightened, I rounded the chair to look at his face. He was slumped slightly, his legs at an unnatural-looking angle. I sent up a quick prayer that he was merely asleep. Then I saw the blood.
He’d been stabbed in the chest. The black-handled knife looked like the twin of the one that had been jammed into Audrey’s door.
Chapter 18
Anything else you can tell me that can maybe help us find the killer?”
Linda Delgardio’s eyes were full of concern. We were seated on the bottom step of the flight of stairs that led up to my office. We had to rise to get out of the path of one of a myriad of investigators or coroner’s office personnel, but I’d insisted on staying on the staircase because the macabre scene was out of sight, and yet I hadn’t allowed myself to be driven out of my office entirely. My emotions were in a complete jumble: I felt like throwing a furious tantrum and simultaneously curling into the fetal position in a corner.
Linda continued, “You said that you detected some cigarette smoke as you climbed the stairs?”
“The odor was so subtle, I’m not sure anyone actually lit up in my office. It could just have been the odor from Jerry’s clothing. He was such a heavy smoker that he always reeked.” I paused, thinking. “And yet he wasn’t smoking that time he was waiting outside Paprika’s for Hannah Garrison . . . even though he was waiting outside in the cold. He lived in his car, apparently, so it’s not like he had a lot of disposable cash. He must’ve been out of cigarettes at the time.” My mind seemed to be wandering of its own volition.
“He had a lot of money in his wallet.”
“Really?”
“A thousand dollars. All in newly issued fifties.”
“Huh. He told me he was going to skip town. He probably pawned something to get the cash he needed.” Or he’d recently gotten paid for services rendered as a private investigator. “There wasn’t much blood. I was thinking that his body had to have been moved here afterward. Which had to have taken place late last night, when Chestnut Street is relatively deserted.”
“You’d think so,” Linda replied.
I studied her placid features, but there was little point in asking her outright if Jerry had been killed elsewhere or here; she would not divulge key information and possibly had already stretched the rules by telling me about the money in his wallet. She’d already made a huge concession by coming to my office when she was off duty. She’d warned me that she could take only a peripheral role in this investigation, because of our friendship.
The Powers That Be considered me a murder suspect now.
“As far as I know, the only smoker besides Jerry who’s in any way connected with both me and Laura Smith is Henry Toben,” I told Linda. “But Dave Holland might smoke, too. That information came from Laura, who lied to me about everything.”
Linda made no reply.
I sighed. “I wonder if it was just a coincidence that his body was in my favorite chair in the whole world . . . if the person who did this could have known how much sentimental value my chair has. My mother and I refinished it together.”
“Who else knows about the chair’s significance?”
Steve Sullivan. John Norton. With feigned nonchalance, I answered, “No one who would have done this. I’m being paranoid, come to think of it. That was just the closest chair to the entrance.”
Linda raised an eyebrow. “Okay, but who knows about the chair who wouldn’t have done this?”
I frowned, but then buried Steve’s and John’s names within a list of a half dozen friends who’d never as much as met Laura Smith.
Linda shut her notepad, implying that this was the end of the interview. I was about to rise, and barely managed to stifle a groan, when Detective O’Reilly arrived, our eyes locking before he’d even opened my glass door. There have to be dozens of detectives in Crestview, and he has to be the one on call today? When a client’s murder had shaken me to the core last winter, his cruel accusations had nearly been the final straw. Physically, he was a nondescript—beige—man: average height and weight, fortyish, brown hair, mustache, not handsome but not ugly. He always seemed to wear cheap and ill-fitting clothes on the job, and today was no exception. He had on a five-dollar black, red, and white diagonal-striped tie to augment his brown gabardine suit.
“Ms. Gilbert,” he growled. “We meet again.” He shifted his gaze to Linda and raised an eyebrow. “Del? Aren’t you on swing shift?”
“We’re friends,” I interjected. “I was badly shaken and called her at home after dialing nine-one-one.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Oh, really.”
I gritted my teeth. Linda had once confided to me that Detective O’Reilly’s nickname at the department was “Oh, really!?” because he interrogated all witnesses with such hostile incredulity. He was probably good at his job, but his methods were miserable to endure when on the receiving end of one of hi
s interrogations.
Long after Linda had gone, O’Reilly voiced his final snide remark to me and allowed me to leave as well. My workday was in shambles with missed appointments, but my head was reeling. I drove away without calling a single customer and with no clear destination in mind.
There had to be a link—a single connection that could make sense of this madness. My instincts warned that all of the hideous events of the past week were related, but it felt as though I were color-blind and incapable of seeing the pattern in the fabric right in front of my eyes.
One possible link did occur to me—Dave Holland had, at the very least, set the fire at the storage facility. By the sounds of our last conversation, Jerry had apparently been working as a private investigator and could have been hired by a victim of one of Laura’s scams. Dave Holland fit that bill. Dave could have hired Jerry not only to trail Laura but to harass his ex-wife, Hannah, at the same time. Then, in a jealous rage, he could have killed Laura and then murdered Jerry to cover his crime.
Even while I inwardly screamed at myself not to do this—to instead drive straight home and cuddle up with Hildi on my favorite sofa, under my angora afghan—I turned south, toward Dave’s office.
Dave Holland’s business offices occupied the top floor in a building on the southwest city boundary of Crestview. The three-story concrete structure—the double arches of its façade on all four sides forming what looked like enormous lowercase m’s—was painted a dusty rose, which, over time, had deteriorated into dirty rose. I walked past the badly smudged stainless-steel doors of the elevator in favor of the stairs, to give myself an extra minute to sift through my thoughts.
I’d visited Dave’s office only once before, when meeting Laura and him midway through their job. That had only been three months ago, yet it felt as though everything had changed so drastically in that length of time that I’d acquired a decade’s worth of wisdom and cynicism about the human condition. Laura had proven to be nothing like the person I’d believed her to be. Now she was dead, perhaps at the hand of Dave Holland.
There was one big problem with my theory, however; I just couldn’t believe Dave was capable of murder. The man was an enigma, though. His ex-wife insisted he was this lamblike man, and that had been my overall impression. Yet he’d been livid and confrontational toward Steve Sullivan both times the two men had spoken, so much so that it was easy to see why Steve had once believed Laura’s story that Dave had beaten her.
I exited the stairwell on the third floor. Visually, this space overemphasized bold, geometric lines—a bad Frank Lloyd Wright imitation. The furniture had obviously been selected to give visitors the impression that this company was modern and edgy, but to me, all it said was: George Jetson. When Dave left his gorgeous eighteenth-and nineteenth-century furnishings to come to work here each day, it must have felt as though he’d stepped into a time machine.
Dave’s personal secretary, an attractive African American, took my name and asked if I had an appointment. “No,” I replied, so emotionally drained that my sarcasm kicked in and I continued, “but does it count in my favor at all that I wish I did?”
She stared at me blankly.
I sighed. “I have some business of a personal nature to discuss with Mr. Holland. A mutual acquaintance of ours has died recently.”
“You don’t mean Laura Smith, do you? He already knows about her.”
“Right, but I don’t mean Laura. This is someone else.”
“Oh, dear. Another person Dave knows has died?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“That’s terrible! He’s had such a rough go of it lately.”
“Yes, we both have. Laura Smith and I were friends.” Or at least she’d given me an excellent forgery of a friendship.
The woman nodded. “Let me see if he’s available. Why don’t you take a seat?”
I thanked her and tried to get comfortable in an oversized, padded eggcup centered along one wall. A minute or two later, Dave emerged and said in a somber voice, “Erin. Come on in.” We exchanged a few words of meaningless chatter as he closed the door behind us. With his dirty-looking dark hair in need of a trim, his thick glasses, rumpled white shirt, and gray corduroys, he looked the very definition of a computer nerd; his shirt was even buttoned wrong.
His office was enormous, each corner of the room containing large, short-legged tables with pillows on the floor. Unusual that someone more than six feet tall would opt for so much floor seating, but my hunch was that he had a lot of Asian associates. Those low tables, along with virtually every horizontal surface, were blanketed with cyan-blue ink drawings of electronic circuits. Dave’s imposing ebony desk was centered in the room. His view of the Front Range through the plate-glass window on the west wall was marred by a hideous parking structure directly across the street.
He took a seat in the enormous leather office chair behind his desk, and I sat down in the nearest of two smaller, but otherwise identical, chairs across from him. His black eye was mostly back to a healthy color; now it looked as though he might be wearing a bit of mustard-colored eye shadow. “What brings you here, Erin?”
“I had a horrible ordeal this morning. Someone I met recently was murdered in my office.”
He reseated his glasses on his nose. “Jeez. That sucks. Another murder? What the hell’s going on in this town?”
“This death was related to Laura’s.”
“It was? How do you know?”
“They’d had an altercation at Paprika’s. The night before Laura died.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d followed the two of us from Rusty’s to the store for a presentation Audrey Munroe was giving. They argued, and Laura wound up flipping him onto the floor.”
Dave sprang to his feet, glaring at me, his face instantly so red that I half expected his eyeglasses to steam up. “And you didn’t tell me this? Christ! Maybe he killed her!”
“I told the police at the time. Meanwhile, you nearly ran me down, fleeing the scene the night of Laura’s murder.”
He shook his head adamantly. “That was my brother, not me. I told you that already, at Laura’s funeral. I went through this whole story with the police.” He pointed with his chin at the door, as if signaling for me to leave. “I’m not going to go back over it with my interior designer.” He dropped heavily back into his chair.
“Even if your brother was behind the wheel, it was your car.” I leaned forward to capture his gaze. “Dave, my life has become enmeshed in all of this. I need to know if what I told you about the antiques being swapped with reproductions led directly to murder. Maybe then I can figure out if there’s something I can do to protect myself and my friends.”
He balled his fists on top of his desk. “All I know is, I didn’t do it.”
“Meaning you didn’t kill anyone, right? But you set fire to the unit, didn’t you? You were angry because you realized she had ripped you off, probably for the second time, and you found out where she’d been hiding all the stuff she’d stolen from you, so you set fire to it.”
“My brother, not me, was going to monitor the blaze, make sure no one else’s stuff got damaged. . . . I just wanted him to do a small enough fire that the antiques would get ruined. I didn’t want the warehouse to go up in flames.”
“And you hired Jerry Stone to track down Laura?”
“Who?”
“The private investigator. That’s the name of the man who was murdered in my office this morning.”
Dave rotated his seat a quarter of the way around so that he could stare out the window. He said nothing at all for so long that I worried he wasn’t going to say another word to me. Finally, he muttered, “I didn’t use an investigator . . . didn’t need one. I came home from the bogus errand she’d sent me on and caught her packing. She clobbered me. Said if I followed her, she’d put the car in reverse and bump us both off the road. After you told me about the furniture, I found the bill for her cell phone, called the numbers. D
idn’t take an Einstein to put a call to U-Store together with a house full of missing furniture. I got the unit number from the manager . . . told him she was my wife and that it was my stuff and that I’d sue his ass if he didn’t tell me where her unit was.”
“So it was you, not your brother.”
He snorted. “I’ll deny it if I’m forced to repeat it in court or to an officer. I was practically insane with anger and started the fire, even though I was the one who’d bought and paid for those antiques. But I didn’t know she was there until I found . . . until I nearly tripped over her.” His words became more forceful as he grimaced and continued, now looking straight into my eyes, “It was such a shock, finding her there like that. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I knew I’d look guilty as hell. There she was, dead on the floor . . . and there I was, burning the place down. Shit! I figured the killer might still be around and would kill me, too. I panicked. So I left as fast as I could.”
“You nearly ran me down in the process.”
He scoffed, “I could have driven through a stampede, for all I know. I just wanted to get the hell out of there and pretend none of it ever happened.”
“The killer’s made a couple of threats on my life, Dave. A knife was stabbed into my door. And I got poison injected into me from a jerry-rigged picture frame.”
Even though he’d poisoned me himself, Jerry Stone had saved my life by getting me to the hospital. Now he was dead.
“I don’t know anything about that, Erin. You can ask anyone. I’m just your basic Joe Schmoe. I would never hurt anyone.”
The receptionist knocked, then cracked open Dave’s door. Her expression revealing deep concern, she said, “There’s a detective here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”
Damn. If it was O’Reilly, he was going to be furious with me for butting in.
The receptionist shifted her gaze to me. “Sorry to—”
