A Cutthroat Business

by Jenna Bennett

  I promised I would, and she jogged back toward the office. I pulled the heavy door open, and stepped inside.

  Other people’s research is pretty boring, so I won’t subject you to a detailed account of how I spent the next two hours. Suffice it to say that I sifted through a lot of file boxes, a lot of files, and a lot of pieces of paper, all while my thoughts churned and jumped from place to place. Too much was happening too fast, and I was getting too many pieces of information to be able to keep them all straight.

  First things first. The police had been here on Monday, looking through Brenda’s storage unit. If they had missed anything, or it had been among the stuff they brought back on Wednesday, Rafe would have found it when he searched the place on Thursday.

  And what was up with Rafe, anyway? Surely he wasn’t really a cop; that must have been something he said to be allowed access to the place. After all, with two years in jail behind him, it wasn’t likely that the Metro Nashville PD would take him on, was it? Nor that he’d want them to, from everything I knew about him. I could see him making the claim, though, knowing that if he sounded confident enough, and if he batted those enviable eyelashes, the impressionable old lady in the front office would let him in without question.

  More interesting, to me anyway, was how he had opened the storage unit. If he had declined the receptionist’s help, he must have had the means of getting in himself. But where had he gotten a key? No one had broken into our office and stolen one, or I would have heard about it. We’ve got deadbolts and an alarm system and a lot of expensive tech-stuff that Walker wants to protect, not to mention confidential client files, and I doubted that anyone could get in and out without setting off the system.

  Rafe could have broken into Brenda’s house, I supposed, but surely it was as well protected as the office, if not more so. Or he could — novel concept — have taken the key off her corpse last Saturday morning, after he killed her. Maybe that was why her purse had been ransacked and her belongings strewn everywhere. He might have wanted information about the owner of 101 Potsdam — maybe Tondalia Jenkins was obscenely wealthy, in spite of looking like a bag-lady — and when Brenda refused to tell him anything, he’d lost his temper and killed her. But in that case, why had he waited almost a week to visit the Stor-All? Why not stop by on Saturday afternoon, when the police were busy with the crime scene?

  I had no answers, just more questions, so I went on to pondering the next thing, which was Clarice’s death. I was somewhat dismayed to discover that I wasn’t really sorry she was dead. I hoped it had been quick and that she hadn’t suffered, but we’re all going to die sometime, and it must have been Clarice’s time, was all. And at least she’d died happy. Maybe she’d eaten something on her date last night that had caused her to have an allergic reaction, or something. Or had a little too much wine with dinner, and had fallen and hit her head when she got home. Or just plain had a heart attack from all the excitement. Brenda’s death, Heidi’s apparent snooping, my snooping, and a hot date, all in one week... it’d be enough to make anyone’s heart a little dickey. Detective Grimaldi’s being assigned to the case was surely, as Walker had suggested, just because of the connection to Brenda’s murder, and not because there was anything fishy about Clarice’s demise at all.

  I did my best with the paperwork, opening every cardboard box and file cabinet I came across, but eventually I had to concede defeat. The Potsdam file wasn’t here. However, I did find something. At the bottom of the oldest cabinet in the way-back corner of the small room, I discovered files with information about all the properties Brenda had ever owned. Personally owned, I mean. And there I found the file for the Kress-building, and opened it.

  The eight story office building had been Brenda’s first big purchase. Up until then, she had bought a few small houses and duplexes that she had either fixed up and resold for a modest profit, or that she was holding and renting out. She had taken out second mortgages on all of them in order to buy the Kress-building. It left her stretched, and with no money left over to do the work necessary to convert the run-down offices to upscale apartments, she had taken on a partner. As it happened, he was the banker who had agreed to re-mortgage everything, and that was probably unethical and illegal, too. Their contract specified that she owned the building and he was going to come up with the necessary money for renovations, and they’d split the profits fifty-fifty when the condos sold.

  It wasn’t difficult to deduce what had happened. The partner had dumped in everything he owned, and when that wasn’t enough — because it always takes more time and money than expected to renovate something — he’d started using other people’s money. Eventually, when the whole thing had threatened to come crashing down around their collective ears, Brenda had managed to off-load the building. She hadn’t made a dime, but had gotten out with her shirt, while her partner had been left holding the bag. Once he realized what he was in for, he’d taken the coward’s way out rather than face the music.

  All of this was information I knew already, from the Voice article. The one thing I didn’t know was the man’s name. It was with bated breath that I turned over the last sheet of paper and peered at the signature page.

  The signature itself was illegible, and faded with time, but someone had kindly typed the names of the signatories underneath the signature lines. As I had suspected, the banker’s name had been Graham Webster.

  Digging out this tiny bit of information had taken an inordinate amount of time. When I checked my watch, I realized I needed to head back to the office for the meeting with Detective Grimaldi.

  On my way to the car, I stopped in the office to tell the ancient receptionist I was finished. She was eating a tuna sandwich and watching a soap opera. “Did’ya find what you were lookin’ for, hon?” she asked between bites.

  “Some of it,” I said. “I just wanted to tell you I was leaving. I’ve got to go talk to the police about what happened to Clarice Webb.”

  She swallowed a chunk of sandwich. “Think they’ll be by to look at her unit?”

  “I guess that depends on what happened to her. If she fell in the bathtub and hit her head, I don’t see why they’d investigate further. Then again, who knows.”

  She nodded. “If you’ve got some pull with that cop, hon, the one who was here yesterday...”

  I nodded.

  “Tell him it wouldn’t hurt none if he was to come back here to check out this other unit, too. Them other cops was nothin’ to look at, but he was a handsome devil.” She winked. I smiled politely and promised I would pass the remark on the next time I saw Lucifer. Although, between you and me, I had something else I wanted to ask him first, and that was whether he was now in possession of a file folder with the paperwork for 101 Potsdam Street.

  Chapter 11.

  By the time I got back to the office, Tamara Grimaldi was already there, and closeted with Walker. A couple of the other agents were hanging out in the reception area, whispering, but rather than sit there and commiserate about how awful everything was, I figured I’d use the time constructively instead. So I excused myself and went into my own small office, and got to work on a list of everything I had thought of earlier.

  I had hoped that putting what I knew down on paper and seeing it in black and white would spur some kind of epiphany, but it didn’t. It still seemed like a whole lot of unrelated circumstances, and the most obvious constant I noticed weaving through it all, was Tondalia Jenkins. It was her house that Brenda was murdered in. She visited it frequently, and might have done so on Saturday morning. She lived at the nursing home where the Lincoln Navigator had been found. She was confused, and might have killed in what she would consider self defense, if she had believed Brenda to be an intruder in her home. And Brenda had taken advantage of her somehow; I just didn’t know how yet. But Mrs. Jenkins was also a tiny, frail woman, twice as old and less than half of Brenda’s considerable size, and Brenda wasn’t the gal to stand still and let someone come at her with a knife.
Especially someone she could knock flat with a swat of her hand.

  Rafael Collier was another constant. He’d arranged for Brenda to be there, at the house where she was murdered, on Saturday morning. He’d been there himself. He wouldn’t have had any problem overpowering her and slitting her throat. He probably owned several knives. He was familiar with the nursing home. And he was inordinately interested in 101 Potsdam and Tondalia Jenkins, for no apparent reason.

  A stray thought buzzed through my head, and disappeared, too quickly for me to get a good look at it. I banged my fist against my forehead and swore. In a ladylike manner, of course.

  “Headache?” a dry voice inquired from the doorway. I jumped. Tamara Grimaldi smirked. “I’m ready for you, Ms. Martin.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come in.”

  “Mr. Lamont has kindly allowed us the use of his personal office. If you don’t mind...?”

  She gestured. I snagged the piece of paper I had been writing on from the desk and stuffed it in my handbag on my way through the door. Every eye in the front room was on me as I followed Detective Grimaldi past the sofa and down the hall toward Walker’s office.

  “Have a seat.” She sat down behind the desk and gestured me toward one of the chairs in front. I sat and folded one leg over the other, tugging my skirt-hem. The bright, turquoise color had seemed happy and cheerful this morning, when I hadn’t known that I’d be dealing with another death in the firm, but now it seemed horribly inappropriate. Neither of us said anything for a moment. When Detective Grimaldi didn’t break the silence, I felt like I had to. (It’s a well-known interrogation technique. Sales technique, too. Remain silent and force your opponent — suspect, potential customer, ex-husband — to speak first.)

  “I didn’t expect you to get to me this quickly.”

  “Oh, you’re a very important witness.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes, and didn’t make me feel at all at ease. “Why don’t you tell me what happened last night.”

  “Oh,” I said, “so you’ve heard about that?”

  She nodded. “Mr. Lamont mentioned that you had seen Clarissa.”

  “Clarice. Yes, I did. It was right here — or rather, in Brenda’s office across the hall — at about nine o’clock.”

  She scribbled something on a legal pad in front of her. “What were you doing here that late?”

  “You mean Walker didn’t say?” She didn’t answer, just looked at me, and I continued, “All right, all right. I came to snoop. I wanted to find out what I could about that house on Potsdam Street, where Brenda died. See, when I was there yesterday...”

  “What were you doing there?” Detective Grimaldi interrupted. I squinted at her.

  “Conducting business. Showing the house to a potential buyer. You did say you were finished with it.”

  She didn’t answer the implied criticism. “What’s the name of this potential buyer?” she asked instead.

  “The same as last time. Rafael Collier.”

  “He wanted to go back there?” She made a note on the legal pad.

  “He approached me after the memorial service on Wednesday and asked if I would show it to him again. You had said the forensic team was done, so I didn’t think there would be any harm in it.”

  “And what happened when you got there? Something to make you take an interest in the provenance of the house?”

  I nodded. “This old woman showed up, and then a police car with Officers Spicer and Truman, and Spicer told me she used to live at the house and had gotten confused and still thought she did. Apparently she escapes from the nursing home regularly, and Spicer and Truman are called in to find her. It made me wonder, because she shouldn’t have been able to sign legal papers in her condition.”

  I decided not to mention anything about going to the FinBar with Alexandra Puckett. There were a couple of different reasons why Detective Grimaldi might find fault with that, and it was just as easy to keep Alexandra out of it by implying that it was Tondalia Jenkins’s behavior that had caused my snooping. It had contributed, anyway, so it wasn’t even really a lie.

  Detective Grimaldi made another scribble on her pad. “So you thought Brenda Puckett might have taken advantage of Mrs. Jenkins’s illness?”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” I said.

  “Is that something Mrs. Puckett would do?”

  Hell, yes!

  “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead...” I began. Detective Grimaldi looked surprised, probably because I had been doing very little else since the murder, especially in my conversations with the detective. “I wouldn’t put it past her. Did you happen to catch the article in the Nashville Voice yesterday?”

  Something like a shutter came down over Tamara Grimaldi’s face, leaving it smooth and expressionless. “I did, yes.”

  “Then you know that she didn’t always do things entirely by the book. She kept houses on the market when they already had contracts, and accepted higher prices than the list price so she could kick the difference back to the buyer in cash. It’s mortgage fraud, at the very least.”

  Grimaldi made another note. “So you came here last night to snoop. Then what happened?”

  I grimaced. “Clarice showed up.”

  “What was she doing here?”

  I explained about the envelope. “She took it out of a locked drawer in her desk. I don’t know what was in it.”

  I hesitated for a second before I added, “Although it might have been the same envelope that Heidi told me she’d seen earlier in the day. If so, it just contained Clarice’s contract with Brenda, and maybe another piece of paper.”

  “I haven’t gotten around to speaking with Ms. Hoppenfeldt yet,” Grimaldi said, in a tone that indicated that she wasn’t looking forward to it. “She seems to be having a difficult time, and is lying down in her office. I’ll ask her about it when I see her. Let’s get back to what happened to you. Clarissa came in?”

  I nodded, running through the conversation I had had with the dead woman while Detective Grimaldi made notes on her legal pad.

  “Can I ask you a question now?” I added when it looked like she had penned her last period. She nodded, although the look in her eyes was wary. “What happened to her?”

  Grimaldi hesitated. “Didn’t Mr. Lamont tell you?”

  “He said he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. But maybe he couldn’t tell.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t hard to tell,” Detective Grimaldi said. I looked politely inquiring, and she added, “Her wrists were slashed. She bled out.”

  “Oh, my God!” The room spun for a second, and I could feel my own blood leaving my head and pooling in my stomach. At least that was what it felt like. “Did she do it herself?”

  “That’s the most likely explanation,” Grimaldi said cordially. She waited for me to start breathing again, and then asked, “She didn’t tell you whom she was meeting last night?”

  I shook my head. “I probably wouldn’t have known who it was even if she had mentioned his name. We didn’t associate outside work.”

  “But you know it was a man?”

  I thought for a second. “Not really. She was married once — her husband died just before she came to work for Brenda, I think — and her demeanor... I guess I just assumed she was meeting a man.”

  “But she didn’t specifically say so? Did she mention where the meeting was to take place?”

  I shook my head again. “All I know is, I saw her drive east from here. Towards downtown and the university area.” And the restaurant and nightclub district, as well as 101 Potsdam Street, the Milton House Nursing Home, and Brenda’s house on Winding Way.

  “And you didn’t see her again?”

  “No, of course I didn’t. I’d tell you if I had.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I was about to ask if the interview was over when she posed another question. “What did you do?”

  I blinked. “After I left here, you mean? I waited for Clarice to leave, then I dr
ove home, called my brother, spoke to him for a few minutes, and went to bed. Why?”

  “Alone?”

  “Did I go to bed alone, you mean? Yes, I did.” I’d been going to bed alone for almost two years, not that that was any of the detective’s business.

  “So no one can verify your whereabouts after you got there?”

  My stomach did a weird back-flip. “Not after I hung up the phone with Dix. Why? I thought she committed suicide. Why do I have to have an alibi?”

  She didn’t answer. “What would have happened if Clarissa had told Mr. Lamont that she had caught you going through Mrs. Puckett’s office?”

  I drew a (shaky) breath. “Not a lot. I told him myself, this morning. Before I realized that Clarice wouldn’t ever get a chance to. He took it better than I expected. But then I guess he had other things on his mind.”

  Poor, sensitive Walker, going to check up on an employee and finding her dead in a pool of blood. He must have been absolutely sickened. No wonder he had locked himself in his office after telling the rest of us the news.

  “But if he hadn’t had other things on his mind, how would he have reacted? What did you expect would happen, when Clarissa told you that she’d have to tell him?”

  “I wish you’d stop calling her Clarissa,” I said irritably. “Her name was Clarice. And I guess I expected a reprimand if I was lucky, and if I wasn’t, that he’d tell the real estate commission and they’d give me an official warning and flag my record.”

  “But that didn’t worry you?”

  “Not enough that I’d kill Clarice to shut her up, if that’s what you’re implying. My God, what is wrong with everyone?! I’m a nice person! I don’t do things like that!”

  Detective Grimaldi looked at me, unemotionally, for a moment, before she said calmly, “I think that’s it for now. But stick around, will you? I may have something else I want to ask you.”

  I promised — grudgingly — that I would stay in the office until she gave me leave to go, and headed for the door.