Grounds for Remorse

by Misty Simon

  Thoughts whirled and swirled in my head as I continued to wipe down counters and make sure the stove was clean. I couldn’t wait to talk with Max about the whole thing. And Gina. I couldn’t dismiss it altogether but I had my doubts. I’d been witness to Miss Smythe being turned down before and then suddenly the guy who’d turned her down had hair plugs, or a fetish for women’s underwear. You weren’t safe if you rebuffed her.

  Still, I was tempted to call Michelle and ask about her sex life with Craig, but we weren’t exactly friends. Even I knew where to draw the line sometimes.

  * * *

  Max and I went to Farrah Chance’s house for its once-a-month cleaning next, and I swear the woman had not lifted a single finger in the thirty days I wasn’t there. I’d tried to talk her into letting me come more than once a month. I’d even offered her a discount to let me come in once a week. But she didn’t like intruders and was only happy with the once a month.

  I’d had to keep Max close at hand for that one since his jaw kept dropping every time we went into a new room and he saw the many, many dead animals Mr. Chance liked to display on every wall.

  Once we were done there, I gathered Gina and Max in the back of the Bean.

  “Did he really hunt all those things?” he asked, now from one of the comfy chairs in the break room. We all sat in chairs with mugs of plain coffee. After working through the big houses today, I didn’t think I would be able to stay awake with a latte. I needed the strong stuff, and Gina had pulled out the big guns with her double-brewed high-octane coffee.

  “No, he didn’t shoot them all. He actually buys them off the Internet already stuffed.” I took a sip and hummed. I needed this caffeine. It was only two in the afternoon and I already wanted to go to sleep and stay there until morning.

  “What is the point of that? Does he like all those blank stares? I would be scared out of my mind to get up and go down the hall to the bathroom.”

  Gina and I laughed and it felt good to let the tension go for just a few minutes. I was going to have to bring the subject up soon, but I let the steam rise from my cup for just a few more seconds before I got into the info I’d heard on my cleaning journey today.

  “Spill,” she finally said, looking at me over the rim of her cup. “I can almost hear your brain firing on all pistons. If you want to ask a question, or need info I have, just spit it out. I want off the hook, Tallie. My mom wants me off the hook, too, and I barely kept her from grilling you about how long this is taking.”

  “Why does she want to grill me? I’m not the police. If she wants to grill someone, have her talk to Burton.”

  “She’s not speaking to him right now, and she’s afraid if she goes after him that he’ll just pin it on me to shut everyone up.”

  “I don’t really think he’d do that. He might not have a clue sometimes, and I know he’s going to want to shut down the case, but I really don’t think he’d pin it on you if he knew you hadn’t done it.”

  “That’s the problem. With the bottle from the cabinet and the fact that Craig died in my stair well with no one else in sight, he might have to take me in for more questioning. I don’t like that little room with the two-way mirrors. I like even less that I don’t have answers.”

  “I don’t like that we don’t have answers, either, but I also am doing my best. This is not a science for me. I’m not even good at solving puzzles in the newspaper. Last time with Darla and Waldo I’m beginning to think I just got lucky. This time nothing is making sense.”

  Max patted my hand. “If you think you’re in over your head, then no one is going to blame you for just letting the police take care of it.”

  How little he knew. If Mama Shirley wanted her daughter cleared, I would never hear the end of it if I let her go to jail and just cleaned my houses and got ready for my funerals. I just kept feeling like I was missing something. Something important.

  But first I wanted to get Gina’s take on the Craig being gay thing.

  “So today I heard something interesting.” I hoped that I’d be able to introduce the topic without sounding like an idiot.

  “What was that?” As always Gina didn’t fall for my nonchalance. It was the problem with being friends for so long.

  “Miss Smythe seems to think that maybe Craig was gay.”

  Gina rocked back in her chair and took a big gulp of her coffee. Because she was nervous? Because she knew something I didn’t know? Because she was offended?

  I hoped not on that last one. Last time Gina and I had talked about anything like this, she hadn’t judged.

  “It would almost make a strange kind of sense, wouldn’t it?” Gina closed her eyes and wrapped her hands around her mug. “He was so attentive and always seemed to know the right thing to say. He never got handsy and I had to kiss him on our third date because he never made a move toward me.”

  “Then again, he could have just been a gentleman,” Max said. He sat in the chair opposite me and had been sipping on his own coffee. “I know plenty of men who aren’t Neanderthals. It doesn’t have to be anything but that. From my perspective, I think Craig was just always looking for something he didn’t have.”

  I so wanted to ask Max if he’d found that something in me, but I didn’t have the guts just yet. Instead, I focused on Gina because I still wanted her impressions.

  “Miss Smythe said that he was very into remodeling her space and had all kinds of feminine ideas that she would have never thought of.”

  “Meh, he was just good at what he did.” She waved a hand in the air. “I don’t think he was trying to hide anything. I think he really was just a womanizer. Nothing more, nothing less. Why add to your available suspects when we have plenty of people with motive if not the means? I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

  “Should I ask Michelle?”

  “Ask her what?” Gina sat forward in her chair with her elbows on her knees. “You cannot seriously be thinking about asking that poor woman, who just lost her husband, if they had a good sex life, or if they ever did it at all.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to say it quite like that.” I was affronted that she would think I would have so little tact.

  “I’d ask Drake,” Max said. “He’d know, and he’s mad enough about all this with the first wife that I bet he’d spill if he knew something.”

  “No, I know who I’m going to ask. He’ll know better than anyone.”

  * * *

  A trip to the flower shop had been on my list of things to do, anyway. I would just move the time table up a little and make sure I waited around long enough to get Monty alone.

  Walking into the fragrant store, I took in the displays Monty had put together for summer bouquets. Flowers bloomed, grew, and looked fantastic in the small area Monty called his own.

  He’d been in business for almost forty years, and for all those forty years he’d been here in our small town delivering bouquets, making clutches, corsages, and funeral sprays. Baby showers remained one of his favorite things to do, and he had a whole box full of baby carriages and booties and little teddy bears dressed up as boys and girls.

  He took pride in what he did. I’d never been disappointed in anything he’d made, and I’d never heard of anyone else being disappointed, either. If you needed flowers you came here, even if you lived out of town, apparently.

  I wandered the shelves, touching a bloom here and a leaf there. I had never been able to grow anything, not even Christmas cacti, which were supposed to be almost indestructible. I’d killed one a year for three years in a row until Monty told me I wasn’t allowed to buy them anymore because he couldn’t face handing them over to me knowing they were just going to perish.

  But he had always been happy to make me arrangements when I was Mrs. Phillips the Third. He’d even made me a couple since I was just Tallie Graver. Not the big expensive ones that I’d displayed around the house for parties and daily brightness in the gloom that was my life then. Recently I’d only asked for simple lit
tle clutches of posies that made me happy and brightened my room on the third floor of the funeral parlor.

  I traded nods with the three people walking around the shop, too, wishing that I could tell them to leave. I had already cleaned two houses today and had another to clean this afternoon. Which meant I did not have a whole lot of time to be here. But this was important. I needed to get him alone before I had to go to my next job.

  Finally, they all left, happy to either have flowers in their arms or deliveries on the way. I pounced before he could get caught up in anything else.

  “Fair warning, I have several questions, and I’m not sure you’re going to like any of them,” I said by way of hello. I had business and fifteen minutes in which to conduct it.

  “I’m glad to see you’re well, and yes, I’m doing fine, too. Thanks for not asking.” His words were accompanied by a sly smile, so I gave him what he wanted.

  “Okay, okay. Hi, how are you? Doing great? That’s great. Now, on to my questions.”

  “By all means, chat away, but do so softly. I’m trying to coax these orchids back to life. Loud noise is not what the plant doctor ordered.”

  “Okay.” I drew the word out, and he just raised an eyebrow at me. “Question one: can you give me a list of all the women Craig sent flowers to or bought flowers for over the last year?”

  The other eyebrow went up. “He may be dead and God rest his soul, and I may be out of a ton of weekly money, God help me, but I really can’t share that information with you. Besides,” he went on when I opened my mouth, “unless he asked me to deliver them I was never privy to whom he made his cards out to. It could have been the same woman over and over again, or it could have been a different one every time. I have no way of knowing.”

  “You’re lying to me.” I could tell from the way he avoided my gaze. “You had to have some kind of list so that he could come in and tell you to make a specific kind of bouquet. You work like that. I know it.”

  “You’ve got me there, but I’m still not telling you. Some of the women may want to remain anonymous.”

  “Married women?”

  “You know, Tallie, not everyone cheats. And I’m sure most of them had no idea he was married. For heaven’s sake, I didn’t know he was married until he died. He’d just come in whistling a tune about a new woman, and how maybe this one was the one, and then he’d tell me to pick out flowers and be on his way.”

  “Wait. What do you mean when you say he asked you to pick out flowers? Didn’t he do that himself?”

  “The two times I set him loose on the store he came back with horrible ideas that did not go together. The colors clashed and the design was all wrong. Finally he left it up to me.”

  “But he was a home remodeler and supposedly had the most amazing ideas for color and design and could make all the women deliriously happy with his ideas. But he couldn’t pick out flowers?”

  “I don’t ask, sweetheart. I just sell. But I certainly wouldn’t have had him decorate anything in my home.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do with that information since it went against everything I’d been told by many people. And yet it would make sense. His home was not well decorated and Michelle had lamented the way Craig put things together. But how had he soared as a designer if he couldn’t even put colors together? Even I could do that.

  I asked Monty that very question and he shrugged. “I have no idea. It takes all kinds, I guess.”

  I let that sit in my head, thinking I really should find a house he’d decorated and see the end result. But first I still had questions on these bouquets. “You really don’t know whom he was sending them to? Or how many women were the recipients?”

  “There were repeat bouquets, but I am being totally honest when I tell you I did not keep those preferences anywhere but in my head. Besides, he had code names for them.”

  “Code names?” What was this? Mission Impossible?

  “Yes, he’d say ‘Make me the sunshine bouquet’ or order a dozen pansies for the ‘Lady in White.’ He never got specific, and since it is most definitely not my place to judge he who gives flowers, or she who gets flowers, I didn’t ask.”

  “Dammit. I was really hoping you could help me get a list together so I could see if anyone else had the motive or the means to kill Craig. Someone did, and I know it isn’t Gina, but Burton needs more convincing.”

  Monty broke the stem of one of the orchids and cursed. “I’m so sorry, baby,” he cooed to it, stroking the petals and laying it aside. “You have got to be kidding me.” He said that to me this time in a much angrier voice.

  How come I always got the anger and inanimate objects got the petting? Probably because I always seemed to be the one asking the tough question, not just sitting there and looking pretty like I used to.

  “I’m not kidding. He had her in jail last night because one of the bottles of medicine from the apothecary cabinet in her shop had traces of hemlock. They think it might be the hemlock that Craig was given. Burton released her to me, but if he doesn’t start making progress on this soon, or if I don’t hand him the killer with a bow, then he might go after her again.”

  “I was wondering why Burton came in and bought a bouquet for Shirley.”

  “He didn’t.” “Aghast” was the closest word I could think of for how I felt.

  “Oh yes, he did, and since he wouldn’t normally do that for his cousin except when he’s in trouble, I bet she wants to bite his head right off. He should have spent more money.”

  I let that roll around in my brain for a moment. Mama Shirley did love her flowers, and Burton probably did not want to be on her bad side. If buying her some posies would keep her from hitting him with her infamous rolling pin for going after her daughter then he’d buy them. I would have to explore that more later. Right now, I was running out of time, and I hadn’t asked my second question yet.

  “Okay, so you can’t help me with names.”

  “Well, this might be a little different. Let me have the afternoon to see what I can remember or dig up. I don’t want that girl in jail. She worked here to learn business smarts, and she’s one heck of an owner. I won’t see her go down for something like this because of a scum bag like Craig.”

  “Language.” I laughed as I said it.

  “This situation calls for language.” He huffed and patted some dirt around the remaining orchid. “Now, what’s the next question? I’ll see what I can do.”

  There was no easy way to ease into this, so I just went straight for the gut. “Was Craig gay?”

  Out of all the responses I had imagined, I certainly didn’t expect Monty to guffaw so loud and long, smacking the countertop until the orchid almost fell off the glass surface. But he did, and I waited him out, at least as long as I could. I had five minutes before I had to be on the road for my next job. I did not have time for hilarity, especially when I didn’t know what was so darn funny.

  He wiped his eyes with a fingertip. “Before I answer, you have to tell me if you heard that from Miss Francesca Smythe.”

  I drew myself up to my full height of just over five feet. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did. She lied because Craig turned her down, didn’t she?” Now I felt kind of stupid for even asking when I’d known better. But no stone could go unturned.

  “Oh, don’t get ruffled. She lies with the best of them. I’ve even believed a few myself. She can be very convincing when she wants to be.” He chuckled again. “Anyway, she frequently tells everyone that any man who doesn’t jump at the chance to be with her is gay. It’s her thing.”

  “It used to be hair plugs.”

  “Yes, well, she’s moved on to sexuality now instead of cosmetics.” He stroked the petals of the orchid. “She came in wanting to know if Craig had a girlfriend. She waited out on the sidewalk around the corner until he left. I have these CCTV cameras so I can see three hundred and sixty degrees around the building.”

  I would have to remember that if Max and I ever decided to stop fo
r a quick kiss near this place. What else had Monty seen over the years? I would have to ask him about that later.

  “So Smythe hid around the corner until Craig left. Then what?”

  “She comes strolling in, trailing her hands all over everything in the store, and all nonchalant asks if the man has a girlfriend. I told her I didn’t know, and if I did it wouldn’t be right for me to talk about it. She tells me she appreciates my discretion but wants to meet the man who comes in every day like clockwork.”

  Every day? No wonder he lived frugally in a small house. The man must have been spending a fortune on flowers alone. Not to mention the money involved if he ever bought other gifts. Then you had to figure in the cost of taking these women out on dates. I really wanted to get my hands on the books for his business. Had he been expensing the flowers? It wouldn’t have surprised me.

  “And did you introduce them?” I asked.

  He narrowed his eyes as if the memory was not a good one. “Yes, I did. How could I not since she showed up the very next day, back in here trailing her fingers over things in a low-cut dress? She gushed all over him, and he barely looked at her. She waited about two seconds before asking him if he’d like to go get a cup of coffee. He was just as quick to turn her down flat, telling her he was already seeing someone who made the best coffee ever.”

  Gina. He’d been seeing Gina. And married and pursued by other ladies. How on earth did he keep them all straight?

  “I will tell you that once he started getting those multicolored roses, he only bought small arrangements for other women. Like he knew he had to keep up appearances but he really thought the coffee girl was the one.”

  “And was that coffee girl Gina? Because that was who he was seeing.”

  “Gina? I was making all those flowers for Gina?” The shock and anger in his voice set me back a step.

  “I thought you didn’t judge.”

  “Don’t throw my words back at me, young lady. I’m not offended as I make Gina flowers as often as possible. She’s my protégé. However, if I had known they were for her, I would have warned her off him in a hurry.”