A Toast to Murder

by Allyson K. Abbott

  I smiled at her. “You are. But if you can give me an alibi for the time of Lewis’s death, your name could be crossed off the list.”

  “What time frame are we talking about? Are you looking at the time around when his body was found?”

  “Actually, no. The evidence suggests he was killed before that and dumped in the river sometime during the night before he was found.”

  I watched as she did the mental calculations in her head. “I’m pretty sure I was working, and I can give you the name of someone who can verify that. But why don’t you just ask me if I’m involved? You can tell when people are lying, right?”

  “Most of the time,” I admitted. “It helps if I have a baseline lie to use.”

  Dr. T’s voice was one of those that came with a visual rather than a taste. I typically saw a billowing whiteness, like a sheet hanging on a clothesline in the wind. The visual manifestations were some of the most distracting ones, so I worked hard to suppress them. As a result, I hadn’t paid much attention to my reactions to her voice in the past.

  “I killed a patient last night while I was working,” she said.

  This non sequitur was startling, to say the least. And as soon as she uttered it, the white sheet turned black and crumpled to the ground.

  “Good one,” I said with a smile. “I’m happy to know all your patients from last night survived. Now tell me, are you involved in this letter writer thing?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  The sheet sprung up as if it had a life of its own and resumed its white color.

  “And did you kill Lewis Carmichael?”

  “Nope.”

  The sheet was still white, still hanging, still gently flapping in the breeze. “Thank you,” I said. “Now I can cross one more name off the list.”

  Dr. T’s smile was warm and huge. “Thank you,” she said. “Now, what can I do to help you catch these morons?”

  I gave her a warning look. “They are not morons,” I said. “In fact, so far they have proven to be quite smart. I think I have things under control for now, but if there’s something you can help with, I’ll let you know.”

  “Please do. And don’t beat yourself up over this, Mack. It’s not your fault, and most of the folks I’ve talked to understand why you didn’t tell us about it sooner. For what it’s worth, I think you made the right decision.”

  “Thanks, Karen.”

  She gave me a reassuring squeeze on my arm and started to head back to the Capone Club room, but I stopped her. “There might be one thing you can help me with,” I said. “Do you have to work on New Year’s Eve?”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “Got any plans?”

  “My TV and my cat for now. Why?”

  “I’m going to close the bar down on New Year’s Eve at ten in the evening and hold a private party for some invited guests. That includes the Capone Club. Will you come?”

  “Sure,” she said with a smile. “I’d be happy to.”

  We parted ways, and I went back downstairs to attend to some paperwork. After a few hours, Mal came up and tracked me down in my office, where I was busy working on my year-end inventory.

  “Hey, Mack,” he said. “We have a small problem.”

  “Typical construction worker,” I teased. “Why don’t you just dispense with the excuses and skip straight to the money part. What’s it going to cost me?”

  Mal grinned. “Nothing. One of the guys misunderstood my instructions about what we were taking down tonight, and he started on the wall bordering the stairs. The stairs are going to go eventually, but that wall has to stay because it’s load-bearing. It’s easy to fix the hole he created, but his hammering caused some shifting of the door frame at the top of the stairs. It’s all catawampus, and the door won’t close. So I’m going to string some caution tape over it for now. I just want to let you know so you won’t try to shut it. And you probably shouldn’t let anyone use the basement stairs there, either.”

  “Okay. The stairs shouldn’t be an issue since we never use them. There’s nothing in that part of the basement. Everyone uses the stairs by the entrance to my apartment.”

  “Good. The guys are going to quit around eleven, and I told them they could eat and drink what they want once they’re done. We accomplished a lot.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ve got some other help arriving tomorrow, and with the way things are moving along, I expect I’ll be ready to put the elevator in place in a couple of weeks. Are you still thinking of going with the one we looked at earlier?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, good. I’ve already ordered some other stuff, building supplies and such, that I’ll be needing. But in order to have them delivered, I have to pay for them. I hate to ask, but I need you to front me some money for the job. If I was home in Washington, I could use the family business account and charge all this material, but here I don’t have any status or accounts with the suppliers. They want money up front.”

  “Of course,” I told him, opening my desk drawer and removing my business checkbook. “How much do you need?”

  He quoted me a number, and I wrote him out a check for that amount.

  “Thanks,” he said, taking the check, folding it, and stuffing it in his jeans pocket. “The only other thing I wanted to talk to you about was the sleeping arrangements for the next few nights. I’d be perfectly happy sleeping in here on your couch, or down in the basement on a cot, if you have one.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “You’ll sleep upstairs in my apartment just like you did last night. End of discussion.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable or create any more awkwardness between you and Duncan.”

  “Things between me and Duncan are fine. I feel bad that I’m hijacking your life, but I can’t deny that having you here makes me feel safer, calmer, and more secure.”

  “I’ve already told you I don’t have much of a life to speak of outside of work these days,” he said. “So don’t worry about that.”

  Reassured of his financial and sleeping arrangements, Mal headed back downstairs to his volunteer workers. And as planned, they all quit around eleven and came upstairs to have some beer and food. They were a fun group, and after an hour or so of winding down, they all left for the night. Tyrese and Nick came in while the guys were still unwinding, and Tyrese eyed them all closely before heading upstairs. It wouldn’t surprise me to know he had tagged all of them as cops, too, despite the way they looked.

  I made sure to invite the Capone Club members who had shown up to the private New Year’s Eve party. Without exception, every one of them accepted.

  Mal hung with me until closing time, and we headed upstairs to my apartment together. It wasn’t awkward at all. In fact, Mal and I had taken to cohabitation with frightening ease, and after spending a brief time unwinding with a nightcap, we both headed for our respective bedrooms, and I, at least, slept well until morning.

  Chapter 21

  The following morning, I beat Mal out of bed. My body had grown used to having only five or six hours of sleep a night, and when I have the time to sleep longer than that, I almost never do. On this occasion, I awoke at eight-thirty, a little earlier than my usual, and given that we hadn’t gone to bed until well after three, I figured Mal would still be sleeping. It turned out I was wrong.

  My first clue was the open door to my father’s bedroom, and my second clue was the hot pot of coffee waiting for me in the kitchen. I thought Mal might be in the shower, but that door was open, too, revealing an empty room. Though I was pretty certain he wasn’t anywhere in the apartment, I called out to him anyway. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get an answer. I poured a cup of coffee using a travel mug so I could carry it more easily with my crutches and then headed downstairs, still dressed in my pajamas.

  I knew where Mal was, and what he was doing, when I was halfway down the stairs. I heard the distinctive whining sound of a drill and knew he was working on the elev
ator project. When I reached the door at the top of the stairs, the door that would no longer close, the drill whine had been replaced by the staccato tapping of a hammer. I made my way over to the door and peered down the stairs. Mal was down there using a hammer and chisel to clear away some clinging concrete. He didn’t see or hear me; he was facing the wrong way, wearing protective eyewear, and had earplugs in place. After eyeing the stairway closely and noticing the slight tilt to it that hadn’t been there before, I decided not to go down. Instead, I turned around and headed back upstairs to the apartment to shower and dress for the day.

  The early part of the day was like most others. My day staff showed up between ten and ten-thirty, and precisely at eleven I unlocked the front door. Several of the Capone Club members came in: the brothers, Cora, Carter, and Dr. T, who was enjoying a three-day stretch of time off from working in the ER. Tad showed up for lunch, and I pulled him aside and told him that I had reason to believe the letter writer might be targeting him.

  “Targeting me? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I quit trying to understand this crazy person a long time ago.”

  “What makes you think I’m a target?”

  “Certain things that were said in the letters,” I told him. “Whoever is writing them seems to have a real grudge against people who are well-to-do. That and a few other things make me worried for you. And for Suzanne,” I lied. “In fact, if my suspicions are correct, Suzanne might be more at risk than you are.”

  “Suspicions?” Tad looked intrigued.

  “I don’t want to say anything just yet, in case I’m wrong,” I said. “But thanks to a slipup and some trace evidence we found in one of the letters, I’m fairly certain who’s behind this letter writing thing. In fact, I plan to announce it at the private party with all of you and go over the strategy I have planned for exposing them and having them arrested. I’ll present the evidence and see if you guys come to the same conclusion I did.”

  “And if we do?”

  “Then we’ll get the police involved.”

  Tad considered this and then nodded his approval. “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Have you told Suzanne about any of this?” I asked.

  He gave me a sheepish look. “I haven’t,” he admitted. “She’s down enough on my coming here. If she knew what was going on and the risks involved, she’d be even more adamant.”

  “I think you need to let her know. I realize it probably won’t help your cause much, but I feel she should know about the letter writer. Now that we are closing in on the culprit, it might result in things getting ramped up. It could be dangerous for both you and her. Do you think she’d come to the private New Year’s Eve party?”

  “Lord knows, I get dragged along to plenty of functions with her,” Tad said, “so I think it’s about time she returned the favor. And who knows? Maybe when she gets to meet and know the people here a little better, and see what they do, she won’t be so adamant about me not spending time here.”

  “That’s great, Tad,” I said. “I hope both of you can make it. Given all that’s happened, I suspect being locked in here in the bar with the rest of the group might be the safest place any of us can be.”

  He thought about this and said, “Good point. I’ll do my best to get her here.”

  “I hope she won’t be scared off by the letter writer thing.”

  Tad scoffed. “That woman isn’t afraid of anything. She thinks she’s invulnerable.” He paused, narrowed his eyes in thought for a moment, and then added, “Although she does have one vulnerability—her fear of losing me.”

  Yeah, because you’re her biggest status symbol.

  “I know people think I’m just a trophy husband,” Tad said, and for a moment, I was afraid I had voiced my thoughts aloud. “And I confess, there are times when that’s how I feel. But I think that deep down inside, Suzanne really cares for me on some level.”

  I had my doubts, but I kept them to myself.

  Tad glanced at his watch—an expensive Rolex, I noted—and said, “I need to get going. I have some client appointments this afternoon, but I’ll try to come back later.”

  As I watched him leave, I felt both a sense of relief and one of dread.

  Sam showed up mid-afternoon, as did Greg Nash, Stephen McGregor, and Kevin Baldwin. They hung around for an hour or two, chatting about the letter writer, speculating about motive, comparing whoever was behind it to Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. By inference, it meant they were comparing me to Sherlock Holmes, and I had to admit that I found the analogy a little flattering.

  Mal spent the entire day down in the basement, working on the elevator project. But he was no longer working on it alone. Somewhere around one o’clock in the afternoon, a group of four people—three men and one woman—came up to the bar and asked for him. I guessed who they were right away because there was a strong family resemblance.

  “You’re his family, aren’t you?” I said, looking at the foursome. Their abashed grins answered the question for me before they nodded and murmured their assents. “He didn’t tell me you were coming,” I said. “Does he know?”

  “Oh, he knows,” said the older of the three men, who was presumably Mal’s dad. “He said he had some fun elevator project he was working on here and he could use a hand or two. And since he couldn’t be bothered to come back and visit for Christmas, we came here.”

  Despite the chastising tone of this last sentence, there was a lightheartedness to it that told me no one was really upset.

  “He does, indeed, have an elevator project he’s working on. Come on, I’ll take you to him.”

  “You mean the project is here, in this bar?” one of the younger men said.

  I nodded, and with that, the two younger men did a high five.

  I led the group over to the area where Mal was working. The door to the stairway had caution tape across it, and I pulled it loose and opened the door. Mal was off to the side of the stairs down below, hammering away at some sort of wooden structure.

  “Mal, there are some people here to see you,” I hollered down.

  He looked up in surprise, his face lighting up. “You’re here already?” he said. “With the holiday traffic, I didn’t think you’d get a flight out for days.”

  “We didn’t book commercial,” Mal’s father said. “Turned out Christian Leech was flying back to Chicago to visit his daughter, and he offered to let us hitch a ride on his plane.” Mal’s father turned to me and added, “Christian Leech is a friend of ours who happens to own and fly his own planes. He owns a crop-dusting business, among other things.”

  “Yeah, like half of Yakima,” Mal said with a roll of his eyes.

  He bounded up the stairs, and his two brothers grabbed him in a giant three-way bear hug, all of them whooping and hollering. When all the back-patting and ear-cuffing was done, Mal turned to the woman in the group, presumably his sister, who had thus far stood by smiling and shaking her head in amused disdain. Mal picked her up in a big bear hug, making her squeal. Once he had put her back down and released her, he turned to me.

  “Sorry I didn’t tell you they were coming,” he said. “I really didn’t expect them this soon.”

  “It’s not a problem,” I said with a smile. “Although I would appreciate some introductions,” I added with a wink.

  “Of course,” Mal said, slapping himself up side his head. “Mackenzie Dalton, meet the O’Reilly clan, or at least most of them. This is my dad, Connor, my brothers Ryan and Patrick, and my sister, Colleen.”

  Propping myself on my crutches, I shook hands with each of them. “And Mrs. O’Reilly?” I asked.

  “Josephine stayed behind to hold down the fort along with Mal’s other sister, Deirdre,” Connor said. “Colleen is the master carpenter in the family, and Deirdre is our master plumber. Since this job doesn’t involve any plumbing, Deirdre opted to stay home so my wife wouldn’t be alone.”

  I looked at Patrick and Ryan, my e
yebrows raised in question.

  “Electrician,” Patrick said, raising his hand.

  “A more masterful carpenter than my sister here,” Ryan said.

  Colleen slugged him in his arm and muttered, “You wish.”

  “Anyway,” Connor went on, “I should warn you that Jo and Deirdre have threatened to come out here on their own at a later time,” he added, arching his eyebrows at Mal.

  “That would be great,” Mal said.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Ryan said. He looked over at me and explained. “My mother is Jewish, and while she isn’t particularly religious, she’s got that whole Jewish mother guilt thing down pretty good. And Mal not coming home for the holidays is definite fodder for a guilt trip.”

  All of the O’Reillys chuckled at this, nodding.

  “Well, I’m happy to have this much of the O’Reilly clan here,” I said. “Mal has talked about you a lot, and it’s nice to be able to put some faces to the names.”

  “He’s talked about you quite a bit, too,” Colleen said. She shot Mal a sidelong look, and he gave her back a warning one while he blushed up to his roots.

  Eager to get off that subject, I said, “Well, while you’re here, you’re my guests. Food and drinks are on the house. If any of you want anything at any time, just let one of my staff people know, and they’ll get it for you.”

  “Best job site ever!” Ryan said, and then he and his brother once again did a high five.

  Mal reached into a pocket of his jeans and took out his keys, handing them to his dad. “I’m sure you’re all tired after the flight here. You can take my car over to my place and get settled in.”

  “We don’t need your car,” his dad said. “We rented one of our own. And we’re fine with getting right to work on this project.”

  “Besides,” Patrick said, “we’ll be in a bar for New Year’s Eve. It’s the perfect setup.”

  Mal winced and shot me a look. “Mack is closing her bar at ten that night for a private party,” he explained. “And I, for various reasons, need to attend. In fact, I’m going to be living here in the bar for the foreseeable future. So you guys will have full use of my house.”