Murder, Mayhem and Bliss

by Loulou Harrington

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Cindilee laughed, a genuine, deep-throated laugh that sounded hearty while it lasted. “Do you honestly think I could do that?” she asked when the laughter faded. She waved her hands over herself stretched out on the chaise, looking weak enough to faint if she stood up.

  “Well, no, not really, but I had to ask,” Jesse conceded. “You did seem a lot stronger when I saw you on Saturday. And I’m betting you have some pretty serious drugs at your disposal. In which case you could have drugged Harry first, then shoved him into the pool and let him drown.”

  “Well, I admire your imagination.” A sleepy-eyed smile stole over Cindilee’s face, making it look as if the laughter had worn her out. “But why in the world would I have wanted to do that, even if I could have? It’s true I wasn’t terribly fond of him, but I just didn’t care enough one way or the other to kill him.”

  Jesse pondered briefly, very briefly, whether she should mention the embezzlement yet. She decided not to, then opened her mouth and out it came. “Except for all that money the three of you were hiding between you.”

  “My goodness, you have been a busy girl. But that was between Bill and Harry. I had nothing to do with that.” She shrugged dismissively even as she looked Jesse dead in the eye.

  “Then why were you visiting Ginny with the two of them?” Jesse asked. The conversation was beginning to feel a little like a poker game complete with bluffs, counterbluffs, and ‘I’ll see your bet and raise you’.

  “Damage control.” Two bright red spots appeared on Cindilee’s otherwise white cheeks. “It was bad enough for Harry to have taken her to the Caymans with him, but to take her into the bank was idiocy. I was along to help figure out if she understood what she had seen.”

  Judging from the scrap of paper with the account information on it, Jesse was fairly certain Ginny understood exactly what she had seen, but she might have been clever enough to hide it. “And had she?”

  “They didn’t think she had, but I looked into her eyes, and she was a lot smarter than Harry wanted to believe. She was trouble.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing.” The softness was gone from Cindilee’s voice. “Harry broke up with her and seemed to think that was going to take care of everything. And Bill went back to living in his own private fairytale. The one where Harry takes the money and runs, leaving Bliss free for Bill to swoop in and marry.”

  “Excuse me?” Even Jesse felt offended for Cindilee, and for Bliss, as far as that was concerned. “And what’s supposed to happen to you?”

  “Me?” Cindilee plucked at the quilt, looking genuinely uncomfortable for the first time. “I was supposed to take Bill’s part of the money, divorce him and leave town. But I had no intention of doing that. There’s no way Bill could divorce me without looking like a complete heel, and Bliss would never marry him if he divorced a poor, helpless thing like me. And if he tried to force me, I could expose him as an embezzler and destroy what was left of his life.” She tossed her head, her gaze defiant. “Either way, he was still married to me, and Bliss was free to start her life over again while he stood by helplessly watching, gutless bastard that he is.”

  “You’ve got a lot of pent-up anger there, lady,” Jesse said, not at all sure that she didn’t like and possibly admire Cindilee on some level in spite of everything. The woman had a fire in her belly if nothing else.

  Cindilee met her gaze. “What can I say? Life has not been easy. Bill seemed like such a nice guy when I met him. Then he turned out to be someone who didn’t have the balls to fight for what he wanted and ended up blaming me because he wasn’t happy with what his life had become.”

  “So, how unhappy was he? Could he have finally worked up the courage to go after Harry himself? You got any theories on exactly how Ginny and Harry ended up dead?”

  “Why would you be asking me that?”

  The red dots on Cindilee’s cheeks had subsided, and a small smile danced at the corners of her mouth. Even when the conversation was not particularly flattering, she seemed almost to be enjoying herself.

  “Because I’ve been noticing that while Bill seems to be the one with the head for business, you would appear to be the real alpha dog. I can’t see Bill doing much that you’re not at least aware of.”

  Cindilee tilted her head, her eyes crossing ever so slightly as she studied Jesse. “So, does that mean you think Bill killed Harry? And Ginny? Or you really don’t know, and you’re just fishing.”

  “Well, as long as we’re playing couch detectives,” Jesse said, “he could have done both of them. Ginny had become a threat to everything Bill had spent years working toward, and by the time Harry died, Bill would have been aware of how sick you are. Maybe he needed more money than Harry was willing to share.”

  “That’s not a bad theory, but there are a few flaws. I don’t think Bill ever took Ginny very seriously, and as for my illness, he’s still under the impression that my surgery last summer was successful.”

  “You have got to be kidding.” The words were out before Jesse could stop them. “I mean, I just met you,” she added, hoping to soften her bluntness, “and I can tell you’re not well. How could someone who lives with you be so blind?”

  “He’s a man,” Cindilee said as if that explained it all. “He sees what he wants to see. Like you said, he’s good with math and computers, but not so much with people.”

  He sounded more like someone who just didn’t care, but that was an opinion Jesse was keeping to herself. Instead, she said, “Well, still playing at detective, I think nearly a million dollars is a lot of money, and a lot of motive.”

  “But Bill didn’t care about the money,” the other woman said again, then lifted a divided plastic pill container from the table behind the chaise. “Excuse me a minute. Time for more medicine. Could you hand me that water again?”

  Flipping open a section, she emptied the pills into her cupped palm, tipped back her head and downed the handful followed by a long drink of the water Jesse handed her. Then Cindilee replaced the nearly empty glass on the table along with the medicine container.

  Jesse had no idea what kind of pills were just taken, but it was enough to make her apprehensive, considering the other handful that had been swallowed earlier. “That was a lot of pills.”

  Cindilee laughed. “Silly as it seems, I’m still taking all of my vitamins, too. There’s one more round in a little while, then I’m done for a few hours. So, like I was saying, money is not a big motivator for Bill.”

  “All right, I’ll concede that. Maybe he just got impatient and wanted Harry out of the way now.”

  “Or maybe somebody else entirely is the culprit,” Cindilee countered.

  With a shrug, Jesse confessed, “I’m running out of people with motives.”

  “Well, there’s always the chance that Bliss actually did it.”

  “Bliss didn’t even know most of what Harry was doing,” Jesse said with a slow shake of her head. “Which gives us a lot of people with more motive than she has. And you, by the way, are one of them.”

  “So, maybe I did it.”

  “Are you confessing?” Jesse’s breath caught in her throat, and she willed herself to stay calm, even as her cynical voice now argued that such a thing would be all but impossible for the woman in front of her.

  “Would you believe me?” Cindilee’s smile was coy, with a touch of simper.

  “In a heartbeat, if I could figure out how you could have done it.”

  “Oh, that part wasn’t hard. With Ginny, she was self-medicating and drinking too much. Stupid kid with everything to live for, and she didn’t have enough sense to appreciate it. There’s some cognac in that cabinet behind you,” Cindilee said with a tip of her chin. “Think you could pour me a drop?”

  Her head spinning from the lightning turn of the conversation, but not wanting to break the flow, Jesse went to the small cabinet without argument and hurriedly poured a couple of fingers into a sni
fter. She noticed her hands were shaking and took several deep breaths to steady herself before she carried the drink to the chaise.

  “Ah, thank you.” Cindilee cradled the cognac in her palm and tossed half of it back in one long gulp. “I’m not supposed to be mixing this with my medication, but what’s it gonna do? Kill me?” With a wobbly smile, she drained the rest of it and leaned forward to set the snifter on the corner of the coffee table.

  “Now, where was I? Oh, yes, Ginny. I’d gone back a couple of times to check on her. She was such a sad mess without Harry. I felt sorry for her, but it was easy to see that she was unraveling. That night, she told me all about her scheme to get him back. She even showed me the folder of blackmail pictures, complete with the thumb drive they were stored on.”

  Cindilee paused again and pointed to the snifter, then looked pleadingly to Jesse. “Do you think you could pour me one more small drink? I promise not to get sloppy drunk. Maybe just a little tipsy.”

  Jesse’s instinct was to refuse, but really, when a dying woman appeared to be confessing to murder, what was the harm? And who cared anyway? Certainly not the strange, dangerous woman sitting a few yards from her.

  Again, Cindilee downed the drink like someone trekking across a desert. Her satisfied smile slipped off to one side of her face. “So, anyway,” she began again, “it was all Harry’s fault. What did he think was going to happen after he let her in on everything that was going on? She was in love with him, and love makes you do crazy things. I couldn’t let her ruin everything. She was already mixing pills with Tequila Sunrises, so I just added more pills and mixed her another drink. She started having trouble breathing almost as soon as she passed out. It wasn’t much longer before she was gone.”

  “Did you take the pictures?” Jesse asked. She didn’t see any reason to act shocked or horrified or any of the other emotions she was really feeling. Coldblooded murder was an ugly thing, but this is what she had come here looking for. If only it didn’t feel quite so much like having a dead rat dropped in her lap.

  “Of course.” Cindilee’s frown seemed almost offended. “And the thumb drive. I looked around for anything else incriminating, but that seemed to be all there was.”

  “So what about Harry? Was that Bill, or you, or someone else?”

  “You still don’t think that was me, do you?” Looking pleased with herself, Cindilee relaxed against the pillows tucked around her and finished the cognac in a series of sips interspersed with sighs. When she was done, she dangled the empty glass in front of her and gifted Jesse with a sloppy, flirtatious smile over the top of it. “Bill’s too spineless to make a move on a woman he’s been in love with since high school. He might have wished Harry was dead, but that was all he had the guts to do.”

  “So, I guess now he’s got an open field with Bliss. Or soon will.”

  The other woman’s laugh was loud and harsh. “Not hardly. What he’s got now is Harry’s money moved over into his own account, and a plane ticket to a country with no extradition treaty.”

  Jesse tried to say something simple like “what,” but the air wheezed out of her chest as if she were an accordion. She had been trying to get a rise out of the younger woman, but the response she got was way more than she had been expecting.

  Again, Cindilee laughed. “That one caught you by surprise, didn’t it? Yeah, as soon as Bill heard about Harry’s death, he came rushing to Bliss’s side. But that was the second thing he did. The first thing Bill did was to transfer all the money that was in Harry’s Cayman account into his own.”

  “He’s gone?” Jesse asked. Her voice still didn’t sound too strong, but at least she could form words again. “Where? When?”

  “As soon as he found out about that auditor Vivian was bringing in, he bought a ticket out of the country. Argentina? Morocco? I don’t know where. Maybe it’s wherever Harry was planning to go. I just know that the plane should be long gone by now.”

  “And you made sure he got away. You planned to confess all along, but not until you knew he was safe.” It sounded like the worst kind of “B” movie plot, but somehow Jesse knew it was true.

  Cindilee was almost limp against her pillows. Her shrug was nothing more than a jerk of her shoulders and her smile was a sad twist of her lips. “What can I say? I guess there’s a little bit of Ginny in all of us. You do crazy things for love.”

  “How can I believe anything you tell me about Harry? You would confess to anything to keep Bill safe.”

  “Bill’s gone. I don’t know where he is, and if the police find him, they won’t be able to bring him back. But I do know that he sent a letter to Bliss. She should be getting it tomorrow or the next day. He told her about the money. And he told her that I killed Harry. And he told her to give the note to the sheriff.” Cindilee’s eyelids were at half-mast, and her words were beginning to slur. “He’s gone, but he moved half the money back into the dealership’s corporate account, and he made sure Bliss was cleared of Harry’s murder. How’s that for love?”

  “It’s pretty disgusting, if you want to know the truth. But to hell with Bill. If you killed Harry, tell me how, because I’m still having trouble believing it.”

  “God, I never knew it would be so hard to confess to murder,” Cindilee complained, so limp now that she was talking to the ceiling.

  “Well, pardon me, but you can’t even sit up, much less stand, and I’m just not quite able to picture it.”

  “So, you won’t have any trouble believing that Harry didn’t see me as any kind of a threat,” Cindilee said, struggling to lift her head.

  “I can believe that.”

  “Which means he didn’t worry about sitting down with his back to me at a table poolside. And he was more surprised than scared when I injected a syringe full of morphine into the side of his neck. And by the time he started getting pissed about that, I tossed one of Ginny’s blackmail pictures at him.” She snorted in what sounded like it might be a laugh. “That kept him distracted for a few more minutes. And he was already starting to get groggy by the time I pulled my little pistol out of my pocket and told him to jump in the pool and swim to the middle. He refused, but by then he was wobbly enough I could shove him in with one hand. It wasn’t long before he passed out face down, and after that, it was all over.”

  “That sounds very convincing.” In spite of her misgivings, Jesse was impressed. It seemed efficient, well thought out, and possibly even doable.

  “Well, I brought the gun as a backup, just in case,” Cindilee conceded. “But it went a lot smoother than I had expected. Harry could be such an ass, and he and I never did get along well. I figured he’d put up more of a fight.”

  “In your own way, Cindilee Marshall, you are an amazing woman.” A little amazing and a lot creepy, but Jesse needed to keep the confession flowing. This was going to be hard for anyone to believe. As the reality sank in, a ripple of cold chills chased down Jesse’s back.

  “I won’t say ‘thank you’ because I realize that’s probably not a compliment. I am rather sorry that you and I didn’t meet in another lifetime. Maybe the one before I met Bill and became the horrible, murderous woman I have become.”

  “That sounds harsh, but unfortunately true.” Jesse felt almost relaxed now that the hard part seemed to be over, maybe because she still had a little trouble believing it all. “So, what do we do now?”

  “I think you should go find the sheriff and save me the trouble of repeating all of this. And I think I’m just going to lay here and go to sleep.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have a passport and a plane ticket tucked under that quilt?”

  Cindilee pursed her lips in a sloppy moue of displeasure. “You are so suspicious.”

  “I have been told that. So,” Jesse persisted, “are you going to pop up from there and go running off to some land far away?”

  “Why don’t you stand up and take a look at this array of pill bottles behind me.”

  Curious, Jesse did as suggested, a
nd as she moved closer, noticed that Cindilee was chalky white and glistening with a sheen of sweat. “You don’t look so good,” she said, suddenly nervous and not sure why.

  “That’s because there aren’t nearly as many pills in those bottles as there should be. I took a fistful just before you rang the doorbell, and then another fistful, and then…” Her eyelids fluttered and her hand flapped vaguely. “Well, you were here for those.”

  “I thought those were for cancer. And vitamins.”

  “Those are over there.” She pointed to the opposite side of the room, toward the front door. “These…” A finger twitched toward the back side of the chaise. “Are for sleeping and pain and anx… anxiety.”

  “Oh, my God! You’re OD’ing!” Jesse whirled and started to run toward the door, then stopped, turned back and ran to her purse on the coffee table. “Mom!” she was shouting before she had even gotten her phone out of the pocket. “Mom! Are you there?”

  She put the phone to her ear and was relieved to the point of dizziness when her mother answered. “Mom, I’m going to hang up now. Call 911 for an ambulance. Call the sheriff and get him out here, and then get in here and help me. She’s dying!”

  “That’s the point, you know,” Cindilee said faintly.

  “What?” Jesse demanded irritably as she hung up so her mother could call for help.

  “Dying. That’s the point,” Cindilee repeated. “Confess. Then die. Don’t ruin it.”

  “What do you mean, don’t ruin it?” Jesse pulled back the quilt and grabbed Cindilee’s lifeless arms, tugging her up. Instead of sitting up, she slid farther down the chaise, going flatter than she was before.

  “Quit wallowing me,” Cindilee complained.

  “Quit whining. I’m getting you up, and you’re going to walk.”

  The boneless woman clung to the chaise, making a weak but stubborn attempt to dig in her heels. “Too late.”