And Death Goes to . . .

by Laura Bradford

  I shivered against the chill that skittered down my spine and willed Andy’s answering embrace to make it all go away. But I knew it would take time. I hadn’t known Deidre all that well, but I’d always found her to be quiet and unassuming—rarities in a business that had a reputation (well earned, I might add) for being extremely cutthroat.

  He held me for what was surely three minutes all on its own before he finally stepped back. “I’m pretty sure we’ve used our allotted time and then some. What’s say we rejoin the party and celebrate the good things that came from tonight?”

  “Sam really knocked it out of the ballpark, didn’t he?” I asked as I fell into step beside Andy on the way to the door.

  “He did, indeed.”

  “And Carter managed to make me look like an actual princess with his box of magic.”

  At the door, Andy stopped and looked down at me. “Trust me, Tobi, you made his job easy in that regard.”

  I raised up on my tiptoes, cupping his face between my hands. “Awww, that’s an awfully sweet thing to say.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  I kissed him hard on the mouth. “Thanks for being there for me tonight, Andy. Having you there meant the world to me, even if I didn’t win.”

  “And you not winning means the world to me. Seriously.”

  ~Chapter Four~

  I tossed my sparkly little handbag onto the catch-all table just inside my front door and tried my best to block out the image of my grandfather accompanying Ms. Rapple onto her front porch and possibly leaning in for a goodnight—

  “Martha is inside, safe and sound.”

  I turned and took in my lifelong mentor as he came through my open doorway with an impressive spryness considering his advancing age and the late night (or should I say, early morning) hour. “That was a quick good-bye,” I said, my tone rather euphoric.

  Grandpa Stu closed and locked my door and then kicked off his freshly polished “party shoes” (his term, not mine) en route to the couch where I, myself, had just landed. “I was afraid if I lingered over Martha’s lips, you’d be asleep by the time I got back.”

  I tried to rein in my answering shudder, but I’m pretty sure I was unsuccessful. Especially since said shudder resulted in a throw pillow (or two) slipping off the couch and onto the floor. If my grandfather noticed, he didn’t let on, his focus now trained on and around the sofa cushion to my left.

  “Did you lose something, Grandpa?”

  He slipped his hand into the gap between the two cushions, felt around, and pulled out the remote control with a triumphant ah-ha!

  “You do realize it’s nearly two o’clock in the morning, right?” I pulled my feet off the coffee table and dropped them to the ground with the intention of standing if my eyes could stay open long enough to do so. “In fact, I probably shouldn’t be sitting here, since this is your bed for however long you’re staying with me.”

  “Sit. Sit.” Heeding his own advice, my grandfather dropped onto the cushion next to me and pointed the newly recovered remote at my TV. “They repeat the eleven o’clock news at two.”

  I watched the screen come to life and then eyed the wiry bald man I called Grandpa. “I don’t understand when you sleep. You’re up when I leave for work, you’re up when I go to bed, and other than an occasional powernap while I’m pulling together dinner, you’re awake. That can’t be good for you.”

  “I’m still here, ain’t I?”

  He had a point.

  Before I could mount a counterattack, he started pressing the channel changing button at such a dizzying speed I had to look away. “Still, I can’t remember the last time I was this exhausted and yet here you are, still revved and ready to go. Maybe you should’ve laid off the Napoleons a little, you know? Sugar before bed really isn’t a good idea.”

  My grandfather laughed and I knew why.

  I, Tobi Tobias, was a sugarholic—morning, noon, and, yes, night. So my lecturing anyone about the dangers of ingesting sugar under any circumstance was, indeed, laughable.

  Rather than cop to my hypocrisy, I changed the topic. “JoAnna really did a nice job with that party tonight, didn’t she?”

  “You scored big with that one, Sugar Lump.”

  And I had. JoAnna Kincaid was truly the best business decision I’d made thus far. In fact, I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t attribute a big chunk of my agency’s success over the past few months to my secretary. Because truly, if not for her, I might have caved under the weight (and unpaid bills!) of small business ownership long before Andy and his brother, Gary, had strode through my front door with my first big break.

  This time when I shuddered, it had nothing whatsoever to do with Ms. Rapple and everything to do with the what ifs that could have been if I had given up.

  No Zander Closet Company ad…

  No shiny new car parked alongside the curb with my name on the title…

  No Andy…

  No St. Louis Advertising Award nom—

  The jingle of Channel Four’s eleven o’clock news yanked me off memory lane in time to see my grandfather point at the TV. “It’s starting!”

  Sure enough, Bryce Waters, the eleven o’clock news anchor, appeared in the center of my fifteen inch screen with a dour expression. “Good evening, everyone, I’m Bryce Waters and this is the eleven o’clock news.”

  “At two a.m.,” I muttered.

  “Shhh!”

  “The St. Louis advertising community is reeling tonight in the aftermath of what can only be described as a horrific tragedy—one that played out in a very heartbreakingly public way. Let’s go to Matt McKeon who is live outside the Regency Hotel, the scene of what is now being described as an apparent murder.”

  I felt the intake of air through my lungs, but the true source of the gasp was anyone’s guess as my grandfather and I stared at each other, wide-eyed.

  “Did you hear that, Sugar Lump? He said murder!”

  I think I nodded, I’m not really sure. But it didn’t matter as we both turned back to the TV and the forty-something reporter standing outside the same ballroom where we’d been less than four hours earlier.

  “It was supposed to be a night of fun and food, a chance to celebrate the best of the best at the annual St. Louis advertising community’s award show. And it was exactly that until the final category of the night—a category tasked with honoring the truly creative elite.”

  I allowed myself a split second of preening at the creative elite tag but it was short-lived thanks to the full screen photograph of Deidre Ryan now gracing my television set.

  “Deidre Ryan was a real up and comer in the local advertising community. Just thirty-seven years old, the mother of two was the brains behind the Books Can Take You Places campaign for the St. Louis Public Library System. The TV and print ads transported us to some of our favorite and most memorable fictional locales in a way that made you want to drop everything you were doing and go racing to the library. That ad earned Ryan a nomination—and subsequent win—for Best Overall Ad Campaign at this year’s St. Louis Advertising Awards Show. But it was while accepting that award this evening that Ryan’s life was cut short in what some are calling an intentional act.”

  The onsite reporter returned to the screen, only this time he was standing beside an older man in jeans and a flannel shirt. “This is Doug Winton, a member of the crew brought in to set up the stage for tonight’s award show, including the elevated platform that gave way beneath the victim. Doug, what can you tell us about what happened tonight?”

  The man, identified as a stagehand supervisor beneath his name, cleared his throat. “My crew has been assembling this exact set year after year for decades now. The same spiral staircase, the same suspended platform, the same video screen, the same red curtains.”

  “Any chance the equipment used to elevate the platform was faulty?�
�� the reporter asked.

  “No. It was checked multiple times, as it always is. And the picture I was shown by one of my guys on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the accident proves that.”

  The reporter leaned closer. “Why do you say that, Doug?”

  “Because the suspension cables were loosened between when I did my final sign-off on the platform’s safety at five o’clock and the accident at ten o’clock.”

  “Sources are telling us an unfamiliar screwdriver was found backstage—a screwdriver that appears to have been wiped clean of any fingerprints.”

  I’m pretty sure the stagehand kept speaking, but I couldn’t be sure thanks to the not-so-dull roar in my head. Before I could process the horror show unfolding, Matt McKeon handed the story back to Bryce Waters who gave a little background on the award show and its founding father, Shamus Callahan, before breaking back to the scene and a segment obviously taped in the immediate aftermath of the accident. One by one, Matt McKeon asked onlookers about the moments leading up to and following Deidre’s fatal fall, and one by one they gave the only answers they really could….

  “It was awful.”

  “One minute she was so happy, and the next she was dead!”

  “I-I just can’t believe it.”

  “I’m so thankful her children weren’t present.”

  And on and on it went.

  When the reporter tried to get a statement from the late Shamus Callahan’s widow, Mavis, the seventy-year-old woman simply burst into tears before being escorted to a waiting car by her daughter-in-law.

  I tried to swallow over the lump I felt forming midway down my throat, but it took more effort than I could give at that moment. Instead, I glanced at my grandfather and noted the same general shock on his face that I felt on my own.

  “Wow.” I know it was a lame thing to say under the circumstances, but in addition to giving me more time to process everything we’d heard thus far, my one word summation fit.

  Grandpa Stu cupped his hands together, brought them to his lips, and exhaled. “I can’t imagine someone wanting to kill anyone, let alone someone with such a genuine smile.”

  And it was true. Deidre may have been quiet by nature, but when she smiled, her face, her eyes, her entire being lit up like a Christmas tree—or a bazillion Christmas trees as was the case when she’d stepped onto the stage to receive the coveted Golden Storyboard from Cassie Turner just a little over four hours ago.

  My grandfather was right. If what had just been reported on the television was true, why would someone have done that to Deidre Ryan of all people? And, even more importantly than why, who?

  “What do you know about them other folks you were up against tonight?”

  “For the award? It was Deidre, Ben Gibbens, Lexa Smyth, and me. Why?”

  “It’s one of the biggest motives.”

  This time, there was no pause followed by understanding. Instead, I started clueless and remained clueless. “You lost me, Grandpa.”

  My grandfather closed the fingers of his left hand around his chin and rubbed it slowly, pensively. “Sure, there are the usual suspects in a situation like this—revenge, greed, money, hatred, et cetera. But jealousy is on that list, too.”

  “List? List of what?” I asked.

  “Motives for murder.” Grandpa Stu let his hand fall back to his lap as he scooted forward and off the couch. “Every episode of Detective Time comes down to one of them on that list, and last week’s murder was on account of jealousy. Like this one.”

  “You mean Deidre’s?”

  “Of course.”

  “But that’s assuming what they just said on the news is even true.”

  “Someone killed her,” my grandfather said as he moved around my living room in a sort of aimless fashion. When he reached my drafting table, he stopped and made his way back in my general direction. “And seeing as how she was receiving her award when she was killed, jealousy makes the most sense, don’t you think?”

  His words hit their mark. “Wait. You think someone killed her because they were angry she won?”

  “People have killed for far less than that.”

  On its own, it was a point I couldn’t argue, but in terms of what happened to Deidre, I could. “First of all, I know Ben and Lexa. I know Ben probably a little better, since my time at Beckler and Stanley overlapped with his, but I’ve seen Lexa at plenty of industry workshops and events. Granted, I’m far from a fan, but branding her a killer is a bit much. Especially when none of us—myself, included—knew who the winner was until the moment Cassie opened the envelope and announced Deidre’s name.”

  “So maybe the motive wasn’t jealousy at all. Maybe it was something else,” my grandfather huffed, clearly not happy with the possible error in his initial theory. “Either way, someone had to know this young woman was going to win, right? A committee? A group of judges? Family members of the winner tasked with making sure their loved one attended? The M.C. or the one who handed the award to that woman in the first place?”

  I pondered my grandfather’s list, moving through it point by point. “I imagine the foundation committee knew, sure. The judges—usually retired ad execs and other notables in and around St. Louis—go without saying. But I’ve never known a nominee not to come to the award show.”

  “And the M.C.?”

  “Carl Brinkman. He’s one of the local news anchors. Channel Five, I think. I’m not sure what motive he’d have to tamper with an award show platform.”

  My grandfather stared at me as if I’d grown a second head (which I checked via my hand, just in case). “Maybe his job at the station is in jeopardy—I mean, I found him kind of stiff at times this evening.”

  “So you think he killed someone because he’s stiff?” I asked.

  “No, to save his job by being on scene when a major story broke.” My grandfather tapped his chin and then made a beeline back to my drafting table where he secured a piece of paper and a pen and began to write with gusto.

  “What are you doing, Grandpa?”

  “Writing down theories the way they do on Detective Time.”

  “You can’t seriously think Brinkman did it? I mean, first of all, it’s a stretch. Second of all, you have no reason to think his job was in jeopardy. He’s had the anchor chair the entire time I’ve been here and I’m pretty sure they tout his longevity with the station in their promos.”

  He silenced me with a wave of his hand, jotted down a few more things, and then pointed the pen at me. “Tell me about the other one—the one who handed our victim her award.”

  Our victim?

  Uh oh…

  “Cassie Turner. And Grandpa, the cops will figure this out. It’s their job.”

  “A job we just happened to do better than they did when that body dropped onto your feet in that house last fall, and when that woman died on the set of that commercial back in January.”

  I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. Still, the meaning behind his words landed like a grenade at my feet.

  “No, no, no.” I held up my hands, surrender like. “We are not getting involved in this, Grandpa.”

  “You’re already involved, Sugar Lump.”

  It was my turn to stare at him as if he’d grown two heads. “How on earth do you figure that?”

  “Maybe this young woman was the target. Maybe she wasn’t.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Maybe the category was targeted rather than a specific winner.”

  “The category?” I echoed as I sat up tall. “You think someone targeted the category?”

  My grandfather’s seemingly nonchalant shrug was busted by the smile creeping across his face. “It’s the most coveted award of the night, isn’t it?”

  The most coveted award…

  This time, when I looked at my grandfather, I didn’t re
ally see him. Instead, I saw the wisdom in what he was saying. Yes, there was a chance Deidre was targeted, but the notion that it was the category that was targeted, rather than a specific person, made a whole boatload of sense, too. Maybe even more so.

  “Now tell me about this Cassie Turner person. Besides, of course, the fact that she’s quite a looker and that she won this same award last year.”

  Part of me wanted to tease him about his description of a woman nearly half his age, but a bigger part couldn’t ignore his line of thinking. What if he was right? What if the winner—no matter who it was—had been the target?

  “Sugar Lump?”

  I snapped my thoughts in line with my field of vision and gave my grandfather what he wanted. “Cassie Turner is one of the darlings of the St. Louis Advertising Community. At least she has been the entire time I’ve been part of it. She’s quite good at what she does and, as you already pointed out, she’s attractive in an almost model-esque way.”

  “Think she could have been irked her reign as winner was over?”

  “Well, there was that snide little remark she made before she announced our names, remember? But if she was irked, as you say, she didn’t appear outwardly so.”

  “Should she have been nominated?”

  “I think she should have. Her St. Louis Coffee Shop ads carried through on the emotional aspect in a way Lexa’s Metro Link ad didn’t, in my opinion. But I’m one person. The judges apparently felt differently.”

  “Think maybe she could’ve tampered with that platform because she was angry she wasn’t nominated? Because that’d give her motive and means considering she was backstage and all.”

  I wanted my grandfather to be wrong, but there was no denying the unease working its way up my spine. Yet just as I was entertaining the possibility he could be right about Cassie and the category as a whole, I found myself back in the Regency ballroom, watching as Deidre’s smile slipped from her face a half second before the platform gave way.