“Stop glaring at me, Sam, and put your mind on remembering what Janet told you. Start as far back in the conversation as you can recall. The very beginning if you can, and tell us the whole thing.”
“You don’t want much.”
“Samantha,” Laura chided gently, “we’re only trying to help.”
Well, if that didn’t just cap the whole thing off! Now she was ‘Samantha’ for her, and Laurie and the Colonel were ‘we’! Oh, well, it served her right for being so sour when it came to the new neighbor. She promised herself to try to behave. She didn’t have much hope she would, though.
“We ordered our food, talked about Benny and his sailboat.” She frowned in concentration. “I said I intended to get . . .”
The phone rang.
Laura didn’t make a move to answer it.
“Laurie. The phone.”
“The answering machine will get it.”
Samantha was surprised. “I thought you said you’d never have one.”
“That was before every telemarketer in the United States got my number and decided that it was easiest to catch me at dinner time.” She smirked at her friend. “Now I can screen my calls with the best of ‘em.”
Samantha said, “And give Alison all her messages.”
“Oh, stop. I do remember most of them.”
“Uhhmmm.”
“Ladies. We’re recalling the conversation over the tacos, please.” McLain brought them back to the subject at hand as the caller hung up rather than leave a message.
“Yes. Well, it was shortly after the sailboat discussion that Janet suggested that maybe I had made Benny feel pressured the day I’d met him at Brenda’s, and that maybe that was why he hadn’t gone to see Jasmine. Then we greed that Jasmine was upset that he hadn’t, and I said I’d get him to go or know the reason why. Then Janet sort of froze and got all wide-eyed. When I asked her what she was thinking, she kind of dithered around and finally she said,” Samantha hesitated for drama, then told them, “‘what if Benny isn’t Benny?’”
The Colonel let his breath out in a whoosh. “Damn.”
Laura managed to get her mouth closed, then opened it again to say, “Oh, dear. That’s an awful thought. Why would anyone come and pretend to be Benny?”
The question was purely rhetorical. The answer was obvious to both Laurie and Samantha.
McLain looked at each of them in turn. “I take it the Stoddards left a pile of money.”
“Yes,” they both told him.
“But how would he . . . ?”
“He’d have to have help.”
“Oh, no.” Laurie was firm. “No one we know would ever do such a thing.”
“What ‘such a thing’?” The Colonel’s voice was dry.
“Why, help someone deceive us all into accepting a stranger as Ben Stoddard Jr., of course.” Samantha was looking at him as if he were retarded.
“Yeah. Right. But you just thought of it. You just said it. The only difference is that someone else may have done a great deal more than just think about it.”
Samantha and Laura just stared at him.
“Okay, ladies. Time to take off the pretty little white gloves and get down to business. Forget that all your neighbors are certified saints and that you’ll be condemned to hellfire forever if you express an uncomplimentary thought about a single one of them and tell me who knows enough about the Stoddards, their son and the rest of the neighborhood to be able to pull off a scam like this one.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Samantha and Laura stared at each other as if something dreadful had just entered the sunny breakfast nook. And it had. The idea that one of their friends might have brought an imposter into their midst was dreadful. It outraged every finer feeling.
McLain, however, had no qualms about finer feelings. Samantha doubted that he had any of his own. “Come on, ladies. I’m new around here. I don’t know what makes everybody tick. But you do. You’ve played Bridge with ‘the girls’ for years. By now you’re bound to know what somebody might or might not do.”
Samantha and Laura looked at each other again. It was true. One discovered a great deal about friends over a card table. Concentration on the hand that was being played often led to letting slip tiny bits of personal information that might not have been shared under other circumstances.
“Never mind the guilt, gals. Just put your minds to weighing what you’ve heard and dredge me up a list of reasons people you know might bring in a ringer for Benjamin Stoddard Jr.”
After exchanging rueful glances with Laura, Samantha told him, “Money, of course. Mimi and Ben Stoddard left three or four million.”
“Is there anybody else but Benny to inherit it?” McLain’s eyes had narrowed.
“No. Ben used to say they were a pitifully small family to be a Southern one. Just the three of them and one sister of Mimi’s who died of cancer just before they left for Florida.”
“So if somebody had the guts to go out and find somebody who was a Benny look-alike . . .”
Laura interrupted him. “That wouldn’t be as difficult as you’d think. None of us really knew him very well.”
McLain went on as if she hadn’t cut in, “. . . and bring him here with the story that Benny had been in some foreign prison all these years . . .” McLain deliberately left his sentence hanging.
Laura gasped. “Brenda Talley.”
Samantha stared at her a moment before slowly adding, “Yes. Maybe. Brenda found him. He’s staying at her house.” Her reluctance was clear in her face. It disappeared slowly as she added, “And he was always looking to her as if for approval or guidance when I went over to the Talleys’s to try to get him to come with me to the hospital to visit Jasmine.”
“And, even so, he hasn’t yet been to see Jasmine, either,” Laura put in. “In spite of the fact that they were so close when he was growing up.”
Samantha and Laura were regarding each other with eyes that were as round as saucers. Finally Samantha said, “Maybe because Jasmine and he were so close! So if we want to be suspicious, we could say that it looks like Brenda just might have gone and found a look-alike and brought him home to inherit the Stoddard fortune. And, of course, split it with her.”
“Yes. She could have. She was clearly triumphant about having him come to stay at her house.” Laura was thoroughly upset by the thought that someone she knew could be perpetrating such a ruse.
“But why?” Samantha still didn’t want to believe it of someone she called her friend.
“Do Mrs. Talley or her husband have any money problems?” McLain’s was the voice of reason. “Money problems can make the best of people do some pretty unacceptable things.”
Samantha shot Laura a glance. Both were clearly hesitant to speak.
“Oh, come off it, ladies. This is no time for coy glances. Spit it out.”
While Samantha glared at the Colonel, Laura told him, “Well, as everybody knows, Herb Talley took on a big financial obligation when he built the condominiums that Alison is one of the salespersons for. Alison says that constructing them cost a lot, and that it must have been quite a strain on Herb Talley’s resources.” She twisted a strand of hair next to her face nervously. “And Brenda is always lamenting the fact that she’s had to curtail her shopping trips to the D.C. area because of it.”
“That’s true.” Samantha corroborated a little reluctantly.
“Okay. Then there’s a motive for bringing in a false Benny. The Talleys are in a financial pinch, and they’ve thought of a painless way out of it.”
“Oh, surely not Herb!” Laura was upset at the thought of pleasant Herb Talley being embroiled in such a scheme.
“Not Herb?” McLain’s tone was caustic. “You had no problem suggesting Mrs. Talley for the role of villainess.”
Samantha turned an unattractive shade of red. Ashamed, she admitted, “We don’t like her as well.”
“Oh, for G—Pete’s sake.” The colonel shook his head. They cou
ld both imagine hearing him mutter Women! He didn’t, but out loud he went on, “No doubt there’s an agreement that they’ll get half the loot, maybe more, for their sponsorship of the bogus boy.” He sat looking at them, his expression dead serious. “And if he is possibly a substitute for the real Benjamin Stoddard Jr., then . . .” He stopped himself from finishing the sentence.
“Then what?” Laura wanted to know.
“Yes,” Samantha pushed. “In your own inimitable words, Colonel, ‘Spit it out.’”
“If the boy is a ringer, and if there is a great deal of money at stake, then someone might be willing to go to great lengths to ensure that nobody rocks the boat.”
“What do you mean?” Samantha wanted to know.
“I mean that the people who set all this up might have had to be willing to do bodily harm to anyone who could upset the apple cart.”
Laura looked puzzled.
“I’m saying, Miz Fulton, that they would stop at nothing to guarantee that this imposter inherits.”
Samantha looked horrified. “Do you mean . . . ?” She couldn’t bring herself to say what she had finally understood.
The Colonel nodded. “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”
Samantha gave a strangled sound and lunged to her feet. Her cup sloshed coffee across the table. “No!”
Laura cried out, “What are you two hinting at?”
Samantha sat again and took Laura’s hands, oblivious of the spilled coffee. “John means that whoever is behind bringing an imposter here would have to make sure that no one could say he wasn’t really Benny Stoddard.”
Laura burst out, “But no one knew him very well except Jasmine and . . .” Her eyes grew wide as the full horror of it hit her. Her voice sank to a bare whisper. “. . . and Olivia.”
No one said anything for a full minute. Then Samantha said to McLain, “Remember the day you drove me back from the hospital where they’d taken Jasmine?”
“Of course.”
“You told me about the accident then. You hinted that it hadn’t been an accident at all. That it had been someone’s deliberate attempt on Jasmine’s life.”
“True.”
“In light of this new thought, your suspicion that the person who hit Jasmine was coming back to run over her a second time makes sense.”
“I usually do make sense.”
It was a measure of her agitation that Samantha wasn’t even annoyed. “And what you are not saying is that the same person—” She stopped abruptly, halted by the enormity of what she was about to say. Her voice dropped to a whisper just as her best friend’s had. “You’re saying that it was the same person who stabbed Olivia. Stabbed her to stop her from unmasking their Benny.”
“Oh, no. Brenda couldn’t possibly stab anyone. Neither could Herb.” Laura was positive. “Never.”
There was a long moment of silence.
McLain broke it. “Someone told me that Herb Talley served in the Rangers during our last ‘police action’?” McLain spat the last two words out as if they were a bad taste in his mouth. Sending men to die in anything less than a war went against his grain.
There was silence again as Samantha and Laura understood that their favorite real estate broker had probably stabbed enemies in the performance of his duty. The realization stunned them.
Finally, Colonel McLain broke the ugly spell. “So, ladies, whada we do?”
“Should we go to the police?”
“No.” Samantha had a quick answer. “We have no proof. And besides, I’m sure we’re all hoping that we’re wrong about the Talleys.”
“You’ve got that right. All of us want it to be somebody outside our sphere of friends. People always do.”
Samantha shook her head. “I hate this.”
“Me, too.” Laura turned pain-filled brown eyes to the Colonel. “But we do have to do something, don’t we?”
“Unless you want to let ‘em get away with it.”
Samantha straightened and took a deep breath. “So what do we do? We can’t go to the authorities because it would be a dreadful scandal for the Talleys.”
“Yeah. Especially if we’ve got it wrong.”
“But as Laura said, we have to do something.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I propose that we try to get proof, ourselves.”
Laura was relieved. “Oh, yes. That way we won’t embarrass anyone unnecessarily.”
McLain groaned. “God deliver me from women.” Samantha said automatically, “And us women from men like you.”
Seeing her heart wasn’t really in it, McLain decided to ignore the dig. “Okay. So we’re making this a DIY Project.”
Laura whispered, “Do it Yourself?”
Samantha nodded.
“Very well,” McLain clinched their decision. “I can handle that. Let’s let the murder go for now. If we’re gonna find the answer, we’ve gotta get to work. We need to establish some priorities. And the first thing we gotta do is find some way to decide if this guy is the real McCoy.”
“How can we do that?” Laura was eager to think of anything, anything at all, to turn her mind safely away from the murder that had taken place in her driveway.
“Pictures. Do any of you know where there are any pictures of young Stoddard.
“He’ll have changed.”
“Yeah, but there are some things that never change. Eye color, the set of the ears, the shape of his eyes. We just need to compare this new Stoddard with some pictures of the old one.”
Samantha shook her head. “I imagine all the pictures will have been moved to Florida with the rest of the Stoddards’s personal property.”
“What about Jasmine? Wouldn’t she have had one of the boy?”
“I can ask,” Samantha responded. “I’m going to the hospital tomorrow. I’ll find out.”
“Okay. That’s a start. I’ll trundle my Lear out and fly down to the retirement town the Stoddards were headed for. I’ll see if I can get into the house or storage or whatever. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”
Laura was blinking at him like an owl. “You have a Learjet?” She wanted desperately to think about anything but the burden of proving that one of her friends had murdered another in cold blood.
McLain reached over and squeezed her hand. “It’s okay, Laurie.” He sought to reassure her that they’d get through this awful time. He waited until he saw in her eyes that the comfort he offered had taken hold, then he grinned at her and turned it into a joke about his plane to lighten the atmosphere, “It’s last year’s model.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Samantha pushed rags away from her face and peered at her bedside alarm clock. “All right, boy, I guess I was oversleeping.” She scratched him behind the ears, and he jumped down off the bed, happy to be forgiven for staring his owner awake. Samantha stretched like a cat and yawned mightily.
Then everything came crashing back into her mind, and she bolted upright. Proof. They had to find proof of the scam that they suspected was being perpetrated so that they could go to the police and let them take over.
She agreed with Art Chamberlain, who insisted that murder was a matter best left to the proper authorities, but those authorities had to be given a reason to investigate their suspicions of Olivia’s death. They were unlikely to be impressed by the opinions of a bunch of civilians, as the police called those not on the force.
They—Laurie, John and she—must each get busy trying to locate someone with pictures of Benjamin Stoddard Jr., and it was high time she got cracking on her part. Comparing photographs of the real Benny to the boy at Brenda and Herb Talley’s house would, she had no doubt, prove that Benny Stoddard wasn’t really Benny Stoddard.
She tossed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Things were getting serious. Very serious indeed. Janet Wilson’s hesitant suggestion had taken on a significance the poor girl could never have foreseen.
Purposefully, she headed for the shower, slipp
ed out of her satin pajamas, and stepped into the brisk spray. After she’d gotten the shampoo out of her hair, she twisted the control and the cool rinse with which she always finished her morning ablutions pelted down bracingly. The lower temperature of the water chased the last of the cobwebs from her mind, and as she reached for her towel, an idea presented itself.
“Janet!” she said aloud.
“Grrowff?” Rags looked up from his post on the far edge of the fluffy bath mat, curious.
Toweling briskly, Samantha told him, “I must call Janet.” Pulling on her terry cloth robe as she padded out to the bedside table, she picked up the telephone and punched in the number for Greater Tidewater Realty. It was early yet, not even nine, but just maybe . . .”
“Good morning. Greater Tidewater Realty. How may we help you?”
“Janet, is that you?”
“Yes, it is. Samantha?”
“Yes. And I have a question I must ask you.”
“Of course, what is it?”
“Yesterday after you dropped me off, Laura Fulton, the Colonel and I got together for coffee, and I told them about the suggestion you made at lunch.”
“Oh, Samantha. You didn’t! That was such a silly, irresponsible thing that I said. I’d hoped you’d forget it. You weren’t supposed to tell anyone.”
“I do apologize for not asking if you’d mind me repeating it, but the more I thought about what you’d proposed, the more important it seemed to me. I truly hate to say it, but we think maybe the Talleys might have brought a false Benny here.”
“Oh, Samantha. Now Laura and the Colonel will think I’m awful.” Her voice took on an edge. “Not only paranoid, but also ungrateful. Mr. Talley was very kind to give me this job. I hate it that I’ve caused you to suspect him and his wife of—of anything underhanded.”
Samantha brushed Janet’s worry aside. “I’m sorry, Janet, really I am.” She hesitated.
Murder Makes it Mine Page 17
