A Cutthroat Business

by Jenna Bennett

  “Oh, Savannah! It’s so awful!” She subsided into blubbery hiccups.

  “What’s awful?” I looked from Tim to Walker. Tim gave a tiny, almost imperceptible, one-shouldered shrug, as if to say he was sure he didn’t know. Walker gave Heidi’s hand a final pat before he gave it back to her, and turned to me.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news, Savannah.”

  Oh, God. “Before you say anything else,” I said, “let me explain. I wasn’t really doing anything wrong. I just wanted to look at the file for 101 Potsdam Street, and I wasn’t sure Clarice would let me. That’s the only reason I was here last night.”

  I had to raise my voice to get the last sentence out, because Heidi had started howling again. Walker raised his own voice. “You were here last night?”

  I nodded. “Clarice said she was going to tell you. Isn’t that what this is about?”

  Tim giggled, and Walker sent him a quelling look. “I’m afraid not. I have bigger concerns right now than you looking at Brenda’s files without permission. Although I wish you hadn’t. Why didn’t you come to me first?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” I said. “With everything else that’s going on, I figured you had enough to worry about. And I didn’t think anyone would ever know, but then Clarice came in and caught me, and...”

  An ear-splitting howl from Heidi cut me off in mid-sentence. I turned to her. “Do you mind? Whatever it is, it can’t possibly justify this much noise.”

  “Clarice is dead,” Tim said. I turned to stare at him, and then at Walker, speechlessly. Walker nodded.

  “But I saw her last night,” I protested. “She was fine.” More than fine, in fact. Excited and eager, like a kid on Christmas Eve; certain in the knowledge that good things were coming her way. “What happened?” A car accident on her way home, maybe?

  “We don’t really know,” Walker said, with a glance at Heidi. “I don’t know if you know this, Savannah, but in all the years she’s worked for Brenda, Clarice has never once been absent without prior notice. When she wasn’t here by nine this morning, and didn’t call to say she’d be late, I had Brittany call her. I was...” He hesitated briefly, then seemed to reach a decision. “I have been concerned about her mental state. You two weren’t close, so you may not have noticed, but Brenda’s death has been hard on Clarice.”

  To be quite honest, I hadn’t noticed. Clarice had been upset, naturally, but I didn’t think her behavior had been anything out of the ordinary. A murder in the office is enough to make anybody jittery, and Clarice had been closer to Brenda than anyone else. Still, I hadn’t seen any behavior that had led me to worry about her mental state. Then again, as Walker said, we hadn’t been close.

  “When she didn’t answer,” he continued, “I drove over to her house to make sure she was all right.”

  “So you’re the one who found her?”

  Walker nodded. “I called the police, and they sent a detective out. The same one who is handling Brenda’s case.”

  “So was Clarice murdered, too?” Tamara Grimaldi was a homicide detective, so it seemed like a reasonable question. Heidi squealed like I had stuck a knife in her. Tim sent her a dirty look.

  “I don’t think we can assume that,” Walker said. “It seems to me that the police would do it this way simply because there’s a connection between Clarice and Brenda. It doesn’t necessarily follow that they think both women were murdered.”

  “I suppose not,” I conceded. “So what happens now? Do we all have to prove where we were last night?”

  Heidi stopped wailing for a second. Tim said, “That shouldn’t be a problem for you, Savannah. You were here, going through Brenda’s drawers. No pun intended; I know you don’t swing that way. No, wait... you can’t prove you were here, because Clarice can’t vouch for you.” He smirked.

  “Obviously,” I answered coldly, “she couldn’t have vouched for me anyway, since she was very much alive when she left here, and must have died later. I went home alone. What about you? Can you provide an alibi for last night?”

  “Most of it.” Tim smirked. “Although there were those twenty minutes once in a while, when we slept...”

  I grimaced. “Oh, gack! Don’t take me there. Please.”

  “You asked,” Tim said unrepentantly.

  “I think,” Walker added, with a stern glance at him, “that it may be too early to talk about alibis. We don’t know what happened to Clarice. The detective is stopping by this afternoon, to talk to all of us. Will you be available, Savannah?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I think she may be especially interested in what you have to say, if indeed you saw Clarice last night. You may be the last person to have seen her alive, and maybe you can shed some light on her state of mind or where she was going, things like that.” He looked at me.

  “I don’t know how much help I’m going to be,” I answered. “She didn’t tell me where she was going, or with whom, just that she was having a late meeting with someone. How did she...?”

  “The police asked me not to discuss any of the details with anyone,” Walker said, and included Tim and Heidi in his next statement. “The detective will be here at noon, so if you have anything you need to do today, please rearrange your schedules to allow you to be back here by then. I’m sure we all want to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible.”

  “Of course,” I said. Walker nodded and walked out, and into his own office across the hall. I heard the key turn in the lock. Tim drifted away, too, and Heidi and I were left together.

  Chapter 10.

  I admit it, I felt awkward. Heidi and I have never gotten along well, and the truth was that I didn’t like her. She was common and catty, and would do anything to get ahead, just like Brenda. I’m well brought-up, however, and she seemed sincerely, if disproportionately, distraught. I took a couple of steps closer to her.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  She sniffed and shook her head.

  “Are you sure? Would you like me to go across the street and get you a Jamocha or a scone or something?” There was a coffee shop down on the corner, and from what I had seen of Heidi, she enjoyed her food. She wasn’t as big as Brenda — yet — but it looked as if she was trying to emulate her mentor in that, as well as in everything else. “I’ll be happy to do it,” I added, secretly thankful for my own self control. Although after the ice cream last night, maybe I didn’t have as much room to talk as I thought I did.

  Heidi looked up, eyes swimming with tears. “You don’t even like me. Why are you being so nice?”

  “I’m always nice,” I said. “And I feel bad for you. You’ve lost both of your mentors in a week. It must be difficult.”

  That set her off again, howling and wailing. Tim came out of his office, sent her a disgusted look, and closed the door, none too gently. Heidi bawled louder. I sighed. “What’s the matter, Heidi? You weren’t this upset when Brenda died.” She didn’t answer. “Is it just because you shared an office with Clarice and you’re going to miss her, or is something else wrong? Did something happen?”

  She sniffled. And snorted. And blew her nose loudly in the tissue before she looked up. “She screamed at me.”

  I stepped a little closer. “Clarice?” She nodded. “When?“

  It had been yesterday afternoon, just after five o’clock. Everyone else had gone home, even Brittany, and only Clarice and Heidi had been left.

  “What did she scream at you for?” I wanted to know.

  “I don’t know!” Heidi wailed.

  “What started it?”

  Heidi sniffed deeply and said that it had been a misunderstanding.

  “What kind of misunderstanding? Come on, Heidi; think. Maybe it has something to do with what happened to her!”

  Heidi looked stricken. “D’you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “because I don’t know what happened. But if you tell me, maybe I can figure it out.”

  S
o she told me. With lots of pauses for sniffles and snorts into the tissue.

  The story actually boiled down to very little. Clarice had left her desk at one point, to use the powder room. While she was gone, Heidi had had need of a manila envelope. There had been none in the supply closet — with all the hoopla surrounding Brenda’s death, someone had probably forgotten to buy more; I should have used that as an excuse last night! — and Heidi had thought that maybe Clarice had one in her desk. Rather than wait for Clarice to come back, she decided that she would just take a look herself. Nothing wrong with looking for a manila envelope, after all. It was a shared office, and she had looked in Clarice’s desk for things before. Always with Clarice’s permission, but still. And that was how she had come across this envelope.

  “Clarice said she came back here last night to pick up a manila envelope,” I said pensively. “I wonder if it was the same.”

  Heidi said she was sure she didn’t know.

  “So what was in it?” I added.

  At first Heidi hadn’t realized that there was anything at all in the envelope. It had looked and felt empty, and hadn’t been sealed or addressed to anyone. She had congratulated herself on having found what she needed without having to go the office supply store, and had taken the booty over to her own desk. And it was then, when she opened it, that she realized there was indeed something inside.

  “It was just one piece of paper, or maybe two. I only saw the top sheet, but I think there might have been another underneath.” She wiped her eyes on the tissue. I grimaced — she had just blown her nose in it — and fetched another from the box on Clarice’s desk. Heidi added, “But I never got a chance to see for sure, because Clarice came in, and when she saw what I was doing, she screamed at me!” She sniffed, huffily this time.

  “And then what?”

  “Then she snatched the papers out of my hand and stuffed them back down in the envelope, and locked it in her desk. And then she asked me what I thought I was doing and who had put me up to it. I told her I’d just been looking for a manila envelope to send a pre-listing packet to a customer, and that there weren’t any in the supply closet. She said, ‘Well, then you’d better go buy some, hadn’t you?’ and made me leave!”

  “So you went to the office supply store?” Heidi nodded, and pointed to an unopened package of manila envelopes on her desk. “And you didn’t see her after that?” She shook her head. “Huh!” I said. “So what was in the envelope?”

  The paperwork for 101 Potsdam Street, by any chance...?

  “That’s what was so strange,” Heidi said. “It wasn’t anything special at all. Just a contract or something, having to do with Clarice’s pay.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “What do you mean?”

  “It was like the one I signed when I started working with Brenda. Terms and duties and things like that. Like, I don’t have to pay for any advertising or anything, and Brenda gets me leads that I work, and when they close, I get 60% of the commission, after Walker’s share.”

  I didn’t comment. My split is 75/25, with Walker Lamont Realty taking 25% and me keeping the rest of my — as yet — nonexistent compensation, but I don’t have to share my 75% with anyone. Then again, I have to do all my own advertising, and no one gives me any leads, so maybe I was the one holding the fuzzy end of the lollipop. “So what did Clarice’s contract say? And why was it such a big deal that you saw it?”

  “I don’t know!” Heidi moaned, wringing her hands. “It looked the same. 60/40 split after the agency take, except that Clarice’s duties were different than mine.”

  I nodded. “Maybe she just didn’t want you to know how much she makes. Payroll records are supposed to be confidential. It may be as simple as that.”

  “But she screamed at me!” Heidi said. “And now she’s gone and she can’t ever say she’s sorry!”

  She subsided into wracking sobs. I stared at her for a second before I found my voice. “That’s true. But you can look toward the future, knowing that you were right all along. I hope it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”

  Heidi looked unsure, as if she suspected she was being insulted, but wasn’t really positive. Eschewing subtleties, since they didn’t seem to be necessary, I added briskly, “By the way, would you happen to know of a good storage place? Brenda used one, didn’t she?”

  Heidi nodded wetly. “Stor-All on Dickerson Road. She’s kept her stuff there for years, so they must be good. Brenda wouldn’t pay money for something that wasn’t.”

  “You’ve been there, right? Can you tell me where it is? I don’t know if their offices are open tomorrow, and with the police interviews this afternoon, I should probably take care of this now.”

  “Sure.” Heidi nodded.

  It was as simple as that, and I didn’t even need the excuse I’d rehearsed in the car. Three minutes later I was on my way, and twenty minutes after that, I was standing outside the Stor-All, wondering what to do now. The units weren’t labeled, and there were approximately ten thousand of them. I couldn’t walk from one to the other until I found one the key would fit in.

  My father’s adage ran through my head again, and I figured I’d give it another try. It had worked very well the first time, after all. And if it didn’t this time, all I had to do was wait, and try something else later. So I walked confidently into the small office and bestowed a smile on the old lady hanging out behind the counter. “Good morning. My name is Savannah Martin, and I’m looking for Brenda Puckett’s storage unit. Can you point me in the right direction?”

  She squinted at me through bifocals. “You with the police, hon?”

  “Gosh, no,” I said. “Have they been here?” I ought to have realized that they would come; Detective Grimaldi wasn’t the type to ignore something as obvious as the murdered woman’s storage unit.

  The receptionist nodded. “Twice. First, a couple of uniforms stopped by on Monday and took away a few boxes. They brought’em back on Wednesday. And then late yesterday, a single guy showed up. Didn’t look much like a cop, but he said he was, and when I asked him if he needed me to let him into the unit, he said no; he had access. He spent an hour or so inside, but he didn’t take nothing with him when he left.”

  Suspicion filled me. “What did he look like?”

  “Tall guy. Dark hair, dark eyes, tattoo on his arm. Drove up on a bike. I guess he was undercover.” She shrugged.

  “That figures,” I said.

  “You know him?”

  “We’ve met.”

  She wheezed. I guessed it was supposed to be a laugh. I pried my teeth apart and added, as I put a business card on the counter, “I’m not with the police. I’m from Brenda’s office, and I need to get in to look for a file. I have a key.” I held it up. She squinted at it, but didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Which indeed there wasn’t, since the only thing amiss was me.

  “No problem, hon.” She slid off the stool and ducked under the counter. “I’ll take you over there.”

  “You don’t have to do that...” I began, but it was too late; she was already standing next to me.

  “This way.” She trotted out of the office and down the path between the storage units. It was all I could do to keep up. She was in amazingly good shape for being close to the century mark, but of course her Nikes were a lot easier to move in than my three inch heels. “Don’t think I’ve seen you here before, hon,” she said while we were our way. “Usually it’s Brenda’s assistant... what’s her name again? Clara? Clarissa?“

  “Clarice.”

  “You sure it ain’t Clarissa?” I said I was. “Oh, well...” She continued, without missing a beat, “...and sometimes it’s that new girl; the one with the brown hair. Crumbs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She’s always got crumbs on her dress. Like she’s always eatin’ something.”

  I hid a smile. “Her name is Heidi Hoppenfeldt. And she does like to eat.”

  “I even saw that good-looking gay guy earl
ier this week. Monday morning, I think it was. Just before the cops were here.”

  “Tim? Yes, he works with Brenda, too.” Although as far as I knew he wouldn’t have had any business here on Monday morning.

  “How ‘bout you? You new?”

  I explained that I had worked with Brenda for about six weeks when she died. “I didn’t have time to get to know her well, or Clarice either. Or Heidi, for that matter. They work together, I just work in the same office.”

  “So what’re you doin’ here, then, hon?”

  She was sharper than I had given her credit for. “I guess you haven’t heard yet. Clarice passed away last night. Heidi is understandably very upset, and I’m filling in.” I crossed my fingers behind my back.

  “No kiddin’? So Clarice is dead, huh? It’s just a couple days since I seen her, and she looked just fine then.” She turned a corner and trotted down a side-street. I followed.

  “I saw her last night, and she was fine then, too. I’m not really sure what happened to her. The police are coming this afternoon to talk to us all, so I guess I’ll find out. Some kind of domestic accident, I think.”

  She nodded. “Can be nasty, them domestic accidents. More people die at home than in car crashes, did’ya know that?”

  I didn’t. “Are you sure those numbers don’t include people who just pass away quietly in their own beds? A lot of people die in traffic accidents.”

  She shrugged. I added, “You didn’t mention anything about Clarice coming to Brenda’s storage unit recently.”

  “That’s cause she didn’t, hon. Got her own unit, just on the next aisle there.” She pointed over the roofs of the storage units.

  “Really?” I followed the direction of her finger. I don’t know why; it wasn’t as if I could see anything. She nodded and came to a halt outside one of the units.

  “Here we are, hon. Got your key?”

  She held out a hand, liberally freckled with liver spots. I dropped the key into it. She fitted it into the lock and twisted. The lock opened, and she took a step back. “Go on, hon. Knock yourself out. Just make sure you lock up again when you’re done.”