“You’re playing with fire, Mack,” Nick said. He looked troubled. “I don’t think you should dismiss this person so easily. It’s dangerous to underestimate people.”
I gave him a pointed look. “Yes, it is. Me included. And that’s where this letter-writing maniac has erred.” He frowned and sighed. “As have you,” I added.
“Me?”
“Yes. I heard what you said to Missy a moment ago, about how you think I need someone to take care of me. But you’re wrong. I’m quite capable of taking care of myself.”
“I didn’t mean—”
I held up a hand to stop him. “I know what you meant, Nick. And I appreciate your concern. But it’s not necessary. I’m fine.” And then I made my final parry, driving my sword straight into his heart. “Duncan and I are fine, too,” I lied. “In fact, we are better than ever.”
Nick said nothing for a moment, his forehead creased. He pulled at his chin. “What about Mal?”
“It was a nice run with him, but my heart belongs to Duncan. We were never really apart anyway. We just pretended we were for the benefit of the letter writer. Can I get you another drink? I have a great one I call Sweet Revenge.”
* * *
After fixing a drink for what appeared to be a flabbergasted Nick, I moved on to a table where Kevin Baldwin was sitting—and flirting—with my bartender Curtis. Linda was with them, as was Dr. T and her cousin, Roger. Sam had abandoned his earlier table and had joined this group instead, and they were listening with rapt attention to something he was telling them. Once again, I came up from behind, giving myself a chance to eavesdrop.
“And then the guy stripped off all his clothes and danced across the lawn. And not just any dance, mind you, but a collection of old style dances from the sixties that included the Twist, and one you might remember called the Pony.”
“I know it,” Curtis said.
“Me, too,” Kevin chimed in, giving Curtis a warm smile.
“Well,” Sam said with exaggerated anticipation, “you can just imagine what it looked like. Imagine what it was like to try to catch him. All the attendants just stood there, watching the guy and shaking their heads. No one wanted to try to tackle the naked dancing machine.”
Everyone guffawed appropriately, and Dr. T looked past Sam at me. “Hey, Mack,” she said, once she had her laughter under control. “Sam here was just regaling us with stories of his days working at a mental health facility. Never a dull moment, it seems.”
Linda smiled at me. “Mack, thanks for hosting this private party. I normally don’t even bother with celebrating New Year’s Eve, but this is the perfect way to do it.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” I said, and as others added their thanks, I settled into an empty chair at their table. “I think it’s a great way to kick off the coming year. That, and finally nailing this stupid letter writer.”
“Not that again,” Sam said irritably.
“Sorry, Sam,” I said, winking at him. “I’ve been informed that some trace evidence we found at Gary Gunderson’s murder site, which was his car—has proven to be probative—that’s the word the DA used anyway—and the cops have said that an arrest is imminent.”
“Really?” Dr. T said, looking doubtful. “That was fast.”
“Not really. It’s taken more than a week to analyze what we found.”
“What exactly did you find?” Linda asked.
I shook my head and winked at them. “It’s a secret for now. I’ve sworn not to tell. But you will all know soon enough—later tonight, I hope. In the meantime, drink up and have a good time.”
The next table I hit had Jon, Pete, Debra, and a relieved-looking Missy. I gave them the same spiel about how I hoped to expose the letter writer tonight, and that evidence had been found, but since none of them were on the suspect list, I didn’t make any derogatory comments about the letter writer.
The final group to get my spiel was the cop table. Tyrese was there, along with Jimmy and Nick, who had abandoned his spot at the bar to sit with the other two men. It was interesting that Jimmy hadn’t so much as acknowledged Suzanne’s presence. You’d think he would have at least said hello to her, given that he was working for her and her family. Was his failure to do so because he was trying to hide the fact that he was moonlighting? Or was he trying to hide a more sinister connection?
I fed the cops the same story I had given all the others, and then quickly made an excuse to leave, knowing that this group was likely to be more inquisitive, and knowledgeable, about the evidence issue than the others. And I didn’t want to have to dodge their questions.
After leaving the cop table, I went over to a table where Cora—her laptop on the table in front of her as always—the Signoriello brothers, Mal, and Clay were all seated with the O’Reillys. “The stage has been set,” I said. “Now we get to sit back and see what happens.”
I saw the O’Reilly clan exchange curious looks, but none of them asked for clarification. Apparently, they were willing to sit back and watch whatever happened.
It was about ten minutes before midnight, so I got up to turn the music down and turn the TV volume up. People got up from their tables and started grabbing the hats, confetti, and noisemakers I had set out in anticipation of the midnight celebration. Duncan popped the corks on several bottles of champagne and started pouring glasses. Everyone was up and moving, and I overheard bits and pieces of conversations about the letter writer. The room was abuzz with anticipation.
I made a quick trip to the bathroom to relieve myself and to do a quick primp before heading back out to the bar for the midnight countdown. I had just exited the bathroom when I heard the scream.
Chapter 25
I hurried back out to the main area as fast as my crutches would take me. Everyone was moving toward the newer section of the bar, and I followed, catching Duncan’s concerned look as he scurried out from behind the bar. I heard the gasps and exclamations and knew it was going to be bad.
A crowd had gathered around the top of the stairs going down to the basement. The door was wide open behind the loosened caution tape Mal had strung up. Everyone was staring down the stairs, and as I moved closer, people stepped aside to let me through.
Lying on the floor at the base of the stairs, her legs sprawled partway up the steps, her neck angled into an impossible position, was Suzanne Collier. Her lifeless eyes stared up at us. There was a small pool of blood on the floor on one side of her head, dark and menacing-looking. A spilled drink, the glass shattered into pieces, ice scattered and melting, was on the floor a few feet from her body.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
Dr. T made her way down the stairs, carefully sidestepping Suzanne’s splayed legs, and knelt down beside the prostrate form. She carefully palpated along the front side of Suzanne’s neck, feeling for a pulse. It was a knee-jerk reaction, I think, because one look at Suzanne’s face and neck left no doubt she was dead.
Dr. T confirmed this a moment later. “I suspect she fell down the stairs. Her neck is broken.”
“Is she dead?” Courtney said, her eyes wide.
Dr. T nodded solemnly.
There was a loud gasp that came from the top of the stairs leading to the second level, and everyone turned and looked up. Standing on the landing was Tad, his eyes huge, his face a mix of horror and disbelief.
Whitney, who was standing beside the open basement door, a hand clasped over her mouth, took her hand away and pointed at Tad. “Oh my God!” she said. “You pushed her down the stairs, didn’t you?”
Tad shook his head, his mouth hanging open. Everyone was staring at him, and he looked pale and shaken. “No, I didn’t push her. I was in the bathroom,” he said. “We were . . . she was . . . Oh, God.” He collapsed to his knees and buried his face in his hands.
From out in the main bar area, I heard the explosions and cheers from the TV as midnight struck.
Hell of a way to start the new year.
Tyrese step
ped forward and spread his arms out. “I need everyone to back up,” he said. “Until we can prove otherwise, this is a crime scene.”
There was a collective gasp, and everyone took a step or two back away from the basement door. Tyrese then went down the stairs. Nick followed, and once he reached Suzanne’s body, I carefully crutched my way down to join them. At the top of the stairs, the others crowded in again. This time it was a different voice, one that was no longer disguised, that made the crowd retreat.
“Everyone get back,” Duncan said. He pushed his way to the top of the stairs and then turned to look back at the group. “Arty, take everyone out to the main part of the bar and see to it that no one leaves.”
“You heard the man,” Arty said, corralling the group back away from the door. “Move.”
“What the hell is going on?” Holly said.
A cacophony of murmured comments emanated from the top of the stairs, and from what I could hear, I knew that Duncan’s real identity had been exposed. One of the voices was less subtle.
“Duncan, is that you?” It was Courtney Metcalfe who spoke, and she sounded surprised, confused, and pleased all at once.
“It’s Duncan all right,” Carter said.
“Hell of a disguise,” I heard Sam say.
The voices gradually faded as the group was herded away. A moment later, Duncan came down the stairs with Mal on his heels.
Nick and Tyrese were staring at Duncan. “Dude, that’s one rocking disguise you’re wearing,” Tyrese said.
“I know someone who does theatrical makeup,” he said. Then he refocused everyone. “How the hell did this happen?” He looked over at Dr. Tannenbaum. “Karen, can you tell me anything more?”
She stared down at Suzanne’s body. “It looks like one of her arms is broken,” she said, “but that’s easy enough to explain with the fall. Given the lay of her body, I’d wager she went down the stairs headfirst and with some force, which implies she was either standing at the top of them or going down them when it happened. And I think she was pushed. If she’d simply lost her footing and fallen, her feet would have gone down first, and she likely would have landed with her head on the stairs and her feet on the floor, the opposite of the way she is. But that’s just an educated guess.”
I looked at Suzanne’s extended and broken right arm, the hand open and palm up. “Look at that hand,” I said, pointing. “Is that a sliver?”
Dr. T went to reach for the hand, but Duncan stopped her. “Don’t touch her anymore until we can get some gloves.” He looked over at Mal, who simply nodded and headed back up the stairs.
While he was gone fetching the gloves, we examined what we could see of the hand in question.
“It’s a wood sliver all right,” Dr. T said, peering at it. “And a big one. It went into her hand in a distal direction.”
“Distal?” Duncan said. He was scratching at his beard again.
“Sorry,” Dr. T said with a wan smile. “Distal means in a direction away from the center of the body; proximal is the term for closer to the center of the body. So the direction of this sliver is toward Suzanne’s fingertips.”
Duncan got up and started inching his way up the stairs, examining the old wooden railings on each side of it. He was almost at the top, facing the upper landing, when he pointed to the rail on his right and said, “Here’s where it happened. I can see where the sliver ripped off from the wood.” He hovered his hand over the spot without touching it. “For the sliver to have come from this railing, and for it to have gone into her hand in the direction it did, she must have been facing the landing at the top of the stairs,” he said. “So either she was on her way up the stairs or she had her back to the stairs when she went down.”
Mal returned then, carrying two boxes of gloves. He handed a pair of gloves to Duncan and then brought the boxes down to the rest of us.
“How’s it going up there?” I asked him.
“It’s pretty intense. Arty is doing a decent job of keeping everyone corralled, with some help from Teddy. But there’s a lot of finger-pointing and questioning going on. I told Cora and the brothers to work with Arty at jotting down or remembering what everyone says the best they can.”
Duncan came back down the stairs, stepped off to the side, and proceeded to peel off his fake facial hair, stuffing it all in his pants pocket. Nick was watching him, a scowl on his face.
“What’s up with the disguise?” Nick finally said. “That’s kind of a dirty trick to play on us.”
“We felt it was necessary,” Duncan said. Nick didn’t look the least bit placated by this explanation. “Do me a favor, Nick,” Duncan said after a bit. “Go upstairs and help Arty with the crowd up there. Take notes on anything anyone says.”
Nick continued to scowl, but he did as Duncan asked. I suspected the reason Duncan had sent Nick away was because Nick was the only member of our group who was still on the suspect list. My suspicion strengthened a moment later.
As soon as Nick was gone, Duncan said, “If we assume Suzanne was pushed, and we’re right about her being the letter writer, then whoever did this might be the person who was working with her all this time. Or it might have been Tad.”
“I don’t think it was Tad,” I said. “His shock looked genuine, and I know his voice well enough to know when he’s lying. When Whitney accused him of pushing Suzanne, he denied it. And I’m convinced he was telling the truth.”
“So that leaves us with our secondary killer,” Duncan said.
Dr. T, who had donned gloves by now, was listening to this conversation with a look of intrigue and shock. “Suzanne Collier is the letter writer?” she said.
“We’re pretty sure she is,” Duncan said. “But all the evidence we had against her was circumstantial, and we don’t know who the second person is.”
“Wow,” Dr. T said. “Who’d a thought it?” She shook her head and then focused in on the pool of blood by Suzanne’s head. “For what it’s worth, this blood is mostly congealed already,” she said. “That means this didn’t just happen. Assuming the Collier woman isn’t on any sort of blood thinners, normal blood starts to clot after about five or ten minutes.”
Duncan, who had also donned gloves, knelt down beside Dr. T and gingerly turned Suzanne’s head to one side, away from the pool of blood. “Here’s the source,” he said, pointing to a gash in Suzanne’s scalp that was about an inch long.
“She probably hit her head on the edge of one of the stairs,” Dr. T said, and we all turned to look at the steps.
Tyrese saw it first. “There,” he said, pointing to a step about halfway up.
On the edge of the step was a tiny smear of red. Duncan got up and climbed the steps to get a closer look. “Yep, there’s a hair here caught in the wood,” he said. Once again, he looked at Mal. “We need something to collect evidence in. Can you go up to the kitchen and get some plastic and paper bags?”
Mal nodded and climbed the stairs, careful to avoid the bloodstained one.
Duncan came back down to the basement level and looked around the room as we waited for Mal to return. The sawhorses Colleen and Ryan had been using were set up a few feet away, planks of wood lying across them. Off to the side of the stairs was some wood framing, the start of the elevator shaft. There was sawdust from the wood cutting and concrete dust from the demolition everywhere.
“This construction debris is going to contaminate all our evidence,” Duncan grumbled.
He was right. Suzanne had all sorts of debris in her hair and on her clothes already.
“Where does that go to?” he asked, pointing to a door at the back of the large room.
“To another, smaller room. From there you can access the tunnel that connects this part of the basement with mine.”
He nodded. Duncan knew about the tunnel because it had played a key role in the murder of Ginny Rifkin, the first murder he had investigated here.
Mal returned with the bags, and Duncan went about retrieving the hair and bag
ging it. Then he took out his cell phone and started taking pictures of everything.
Tyrese, who looked flustered and frustrated, said, “I’m not much use to you down here, Duncan. Why don’t I go upstairs and start questioning everyone, see if we can get a better handle on what happened?”
Duncan shook his head. “I’m almost done here, and I want to be involved in any official questioning.” He snapped a few more pictures and then looked around the room again. “Can we get back upstairs by going through that door?” he asked me, nodding toward the exit at the back of the room.
“Sure.”
“Then let’s go that way rather than contaminate our scene any more than we already have.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll turn the lights on.” I crutched over to the door and pulled it open. The light in the adjoining room was on, which was odd, but I thought the O’Reillys might have looked in here and left it on. The walls were lined with empty, wooden shelves, most of them supported by bolts drilled into the cinderblock walls. The one exception was a freestanding bookcase on the other side of the room. That bookcase could be moved aside to reveal a tunnel that led into the part of the basement beneath the main bar area. I was about to cross the room to the bookcase when I noticed the floor. Marking a trail from where I stood were a series of spots—small accumulations of cement dust. These spots were evenly spaced about a foot and half apart and led right up to the bookcase.
“Hey, Mal, can you come over here?” I hollered.
He was at my side in a heartbeat. “What’s up?”
“Have you or any of your family members been in here?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “But I haven’t been with them every second of the day. I suppose it’s possible they might have poked their heads in here.”
“Did you tell any of them about the bookcase and the tunnel?”
A Toast to Murder Page 26
