“No, no. I just picked her up at her house and brought her to the dealership. It’s a service we offer to some customers.”
Kenner put on his Mount Rushmore face. Glass went pink, then red, then bright red. A tiny trickle of sweat slid down his round cheek.
“Talk to your people,” Kenner commanded. “Help them remember something else, understand? Call me today at three o’clock with an update.” Kenner turned to Brownlee and said, “Let’s go find the loving spouse.”
Brownlee drove the unmarked Crown Victoria while Kenner watched the fast-food joints and tire stores of Millerton slip by. He called it Mullet Town, because of the prevalent male hairstyle. Nine months ago, shortly after his fifty-eighth birthday, Kenner retired from the Atlanta Police Department, where he’d spent quality time with his share of dead bodies. He followed Brenda to her hometown of Millerton, where she had a sick mother to look after. Kenner went stir crazy from boredom before the movers left. Then strange old ladies knocked on the front door with baked goods and expected him to make conversation. Desperate to get out of the house, he jumped when Mayor Cecil Wood created a detective’s job for him, making it clear Kenner’s primary duty was turning Brownlee into a reasonable facsimile of a police investigator.
“Why’d she bring an Escalade to a Honda dealership?” Kenner said to Brownlee.
“We don’t have a Cadillac dealership in town. The nearest one is forty miles away, in Atlanta.”
“What else don’t you have here in Millerton? Besides professional sports teams and good restaurants.”
“Traffic jams. Child porn. And murders. Well, not many. The last one happened three years ago when Bert Burnett killed his neighbor because the neighbor’s dog bit his kid. He killed the dog too, a young pit bull. Most people could understand that. This one will freak everybody out.”
“It’s freaking out the mayor. He’s already called me four times, but I haven’t answered.”
Brownlee flinched. “Why not?”
“Because I’m working a case. You are too.”
Brownlee pondered the fact that somebody would dare to ignore his uncle. Kenner found it remarkable the young man never changed his facial expression, no matter what the situation. With practice, he might learn to turn that look of vapidity into a stone face, a necessary tool for a cop.
Brownlee drove straight through the unmanned guard gate at Henry Plantation, made two lefts and a right, and pulled into a driveway circling in front of a stucco home of a vaguely European style. The place cost eight hundred thousand easy, Kenner thought. A light blue Jeep SUV was parked in front.
A chunky bleached blonde in business clothes opened the door and exchanged hellos with Brownlee, obviously acquainted.
“Tony’s waiting,” she said. “He knew you were coming.”
She led them across hardwood floors, quick and agile in black high heels, and turned into a bright kitchen. A man with graying blond hair sat at a country French table typing on a laptop with one hand while talking into a cell phone.
Kenner’s adrenaline kicked in. Tony Collins fit the shooter’s description, but the clothes were different: khaki shorts and a yellow polo shirt. He wore gleaming Nike athletic shoes with socks that only covered half the ankle. Not exactly confidence-inspiring footwear for a grown man. Collins turned off the phone and stood. Kenner tensed, not knowing if the guy was a distraught husband or a wife-killer, and squeezed his left arm over the Glock 9mm tucked into the shoulder holster under his coat.
“What happened to my wife?” Collins said with his arms outstretched. His diction was clear and genteel. “Who killed Kimberly?”
“We’re trying to find out,” Kenner said, and went through the sorry-for-your-loss sentences he’d repeated dozens of times in the past. Collins and the police officers sat at the table while the woman hovered in the background. Kenner took out his pocket-sized notepad and a pen and said, “I’ve got to ask: Where were you around ten o’clock this morning?”
“I was right here,” Collins said, gesturing around the room and not seeming insulted by the question. “I have a home office. I own ToCo Investments. Today I was nailing down some details on the house with Kathy.”
That’s where Kenner knew the woman from, the real-estate billboard on the bypass with her bigger-than-life mug shot. Kenner thought she must have some ego.
“I’m Kathy Minter,” she said, fanning her flushed face with her hand. “I sold them the house. The mayor called me with the news and I had the sad duty of telling Tony.”
Kenner turned back to Collins and said, “Did your wife have any enemies, receive any threats?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Everybody loved her. She was a beautiful woman with a great heart.”
Kathy Minter’s cell phone rang and she grabbed her purse off a chair and walked out, cutting her eyes at Kenner as she passed.
Collins had only been married three months but knew surprisingly little about his new wife. She was a Delta flight attendant and they met on a plane. Her maiden name was Swinton. She was thirty-nine and used to live in Atlanta, but he’d never been to her old place. She had family in Florida, but he’d never met them. Kenner thought Collins looked about fifty—an eleven-year age difference.
“You had no curiosity about her history?” Kenner said. “That’s kind of odd.”
“Neither one of us is a spring chicken,” Collins said. “We both wanted a fresh start.”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell, right?”
Collins held his gaze on Kenner, as if deciding whether to blow up or not.
“We decided the best way was to move ahead. No secrets, but we didn’t want to get bogged down in ancient history either.”
“The guy who shot her said something about having a baby. Was your wife expecting?”
“What?” Collins said, lurching forward. “That’s impossible. We didn’t want children. That’s out of the question.”
The question had hit a nerve. Kenner knew he wouldn’t get any more good information and asked for a photo of Kim Collins. Tony Collins led him into a high-ceilinged living room with sleek furniture and a wall of windows overlooking a swimming pool and landscaped backyard. Kenner inhaled the new-house smell. Three photographs of Kim Collins were scattered around the room and an oil painting of her in younger days hung over the mantle. The husband picked up a framed photo of the couple from the top of a gleaming baby grand piano and handed it to Kenner.
“This is recent,” he said.
Kim Collins was so sexy the picture frame felt moist. She had a long and graceful jaw line, almond-shaped eyes, and a smile that relegated Tony Collins to wallpaper.
“I’ll bring it back,” Kenner said.
“Keep it as long as you need to. Just find the killer.”
Brownlee drove them back to the police station, where they shared a tiny back office crammed with two old desks.
“You should have introduced me to Kathy,” Kenner said.
“Sorry, I thought you knew her,” Brownlee said, leaning against his desk and crossing his ankles. His shiny cordovan loafers would be no good if he had to chase a bad guy.
“I’m the new kid in town. She was very helpful.”
“She’s into everybody’s business.”
“Get her down here. She wants to tell me something.”
The real-estate woman arrived in ten minutes, tapping on the doorframe and asking, “Y’all needed me?”
Kenner stood and motioned her to a straight chair next to his desk. She sat and crossed smooth, unblemished legs that belonged on a much younger, slimmer woman.
“Who’d want to kill Kim?” Kenner said.
“Oh, every woman in town. Men fell at her feet.”
“She ran around on him?”
“I don’t know about that,” she said, reaching into her purse to silence the phone. “But here’s an example. My husband is retired and handles the books in my business. One day his cell phone buzzed and I picked it up. It was a text from Kim,
wondering if he could meet her for coffee. I didn’t realize he even knew how to text. I backed Jerry into a corner and he confessed everything. She started out asking him innocent questions about the real-estate market, but then it got kind of personal. He loved the attention. He actually picked up her dry cleaning one afternoon.”
“So you’re confessing to murder?”
“No,” she said with a smirk. “If I were going to kill somebody, it’d be my
husband. I’m saying Kim liked the game. She liked to go behind people’s backs and she liked to lead people astray. With Jerry, she was just staying in practice.”
Kenner leaned back in his swivel chair and took in the fine down on Kathy Minter’s jaw.
“That’s a very nice house you sold them. Mr. Collins must be doing okay.”
“Well, not as well as he hoped,” she said, lowering her voice. “When he moved, he lost some clients. In fact, they just took out a second mortgage. That didn’t stop him from buying a brand-new Jaguar convertible for Kim. But no matter how much money he spent, she wouldn’t quit working.”
“She was still a flight attendant? Why? He’s loaded.”
“She liked having her own money. And she did what she wanted to do.”
“Always?”
Kathy Minter nodded, more with her eyes than her head, and Kenner saw the beauty queen who still lived inside her. He told her what the shooter had said about babies.
“Wow,” she said. “Kim did not want kids. She mentioned that several times. I think it was a sore point with Tony.”
They exchanged business cards and cell-phone numbers. After she left, Kenner told Brownlee to run background checks on both the Collinses and to get their cell-phone and landline records through the district attorney. His desk phone rang.
“I was at the Honder place,” a voice full of gravel said. “I saw that guy drive away and got part of the tag number.”
“Great, what’s your name, sir?”
“I ain’t telling. I don’t want to go to court as a witness.”
Kenner wrote down three letters and a number for the tag on a late-model black Lexus convertible. Kenner hung up and Brownlee announced the computer system was down.
“I’ll go home and get my laptop,” Brownlee said. “That’ll be better than nothing, but we won’t be hooked up directly to the state system to check out that tag number.”
“On your way, call the IT guy and tell him the problem. I’ll improvise here, like the old days.”
Kenner called Todd Ramsey, a friend at the Atlanta police. It was his first contact with his old department since retiring. “I need a favor,” Kenner said. “Run this partial tag number for me. It’s a black Lexus.”
“This is not a free service, you know,” Ramsey said, but Kenner heard the keyboard clicking. “That information matches up to one car in Georgia, registered at an address on Lenox Road in Atlanta to a Kimberly Swinton.”
“The bad guy drove off in the victim’s car,” Kenner said. “But she didn’t drive that car to the dealership. Somebody gave her a lift. Had the Lexus been reported stolen?”
It hadn’t. The Escalade was registered in Kim Collins’ name at an address off North Paces Ferry Road in Atlanta, the new Jaguar in Millerton. One woman, three cars.
Brownlee walked in with his laptop tucked under his arm and a cup of coffee in each hand. “You take it black, right?” he said.
“You remembered something! Plug in and find out who lives at this address on Lenox Road. I’ll put out a statewide alert for the getaway car. We’re going to Atlanta.”
They got in the car and Kenner called his old boss in Atlanta and gave him the details. He next telephoned the state crime lab in Atlanta, where Kim Collins’ body had been taken for an autopsy. Kenner wasn’t sure whom to talk with, since the Atlanta PD gave their body business to a different place, the Fulton County medical examiner’s office. His call bounced around before he got the right person.
“We’ll do the autopsy tomorrow morning or this afternoon,” Dr. Andrew Dover said. “We’re backed up with bodies from a trailer fire in Gainesville. Four dead.”
“I have no leads. Can you tell me anything?”
“The body hasn’t even come in the door, Detective. I can’t perform miracles.”
“Keep me in mind when you find out something,” Kenner said.
Kenner watched the suburban yards and cow pastures of Millerton disappear and dense and dirty Atlanta come into view. He hadn’t been back since retirement, thinking he needed a clean break, yet he felt euphoric as the car entered the city.
As Kenner’s old boss promised, they found an Atlanta patrol car waiting in a Chick-fil-A parking lot on Peachtree Street in Buckhead. Brownlee pulled parallel and the drivers’ windows slid down simultaneously. Kenner knew the uniform cop’s round, red face, but not his name. The cop said, “Hear you had a murder down there. Somebody trampled by livestock?”
“Wiseass,” Kenner said. “Follow us.”
He gave Brownlee directions to the Lenox Road address the Lexus was registered to. It was a blocky, five-story condo building with jutting balconies about a mile from Lenox Mall. The police officers parked their cars near the front door and one of the residents let them inside. They took the elevator to the third floor and a lean blond man in a pressed Oxford shirt and rep tie opened the door to unit 312. His blue eyes shot open when he saw the uniformed Atlanta cop. He glanced up and down the hallway before motioning the three officers into his foyer and shutting the door.
“What the heck is going on?” he said.
“Alex Zack? I’m Detective Joe Kenner of the Millerton Police Department. Kim Collins is dead.”
The man’s face crumpled in what Kenner recognized as genuine grief. He put his palm on his forehead and walked into a living room lit by floor-to-ceiling windows. He dropped into a stuffed chair and Kenner sat on the end of a white leather sofa. Zack wore brown tassel loafers, worn but well maintained, indicating a traditionalist personality.
“Good God,” Zack said after Kenner described the shooting. “Kim was headstrong and made people mad, but to shoot her? Why did you come here?”
“The killer drove away in a car registered at this address.”
“A black Lexus convertible? I bought that car for Kim right before she, uh, moved away.”
“Can you account for your whereabouts when the shooting happened?”
“I was with customers at my store,” Zack said. “You don’t think I had anything to do with Kim’s death, do you? Call the store and check. Lighting Designs, near the mall.”
Kenner looked at Brownlee, who nodded and walked out of the condo.
Zack dropped his head into his hands and stayed in that position a full minute. Kenner looked around. He recognized the furniture style—contemporary—because he read Brenda’s design magazines while sitting on the toilet. The room was neat but dusty, and he got the feeing nobody else lived there, certainly no woman. Zack lifted his head with tears leaking from his eyes.
“I used to think I’d be happy to hear about Kim’s death,” he said. “I hated her when she dumped me for that lawyer. Now I hate myself for feeling that way.”
“I’m sorry to be the one to break the news.”
“I still miss her,” Zack said. “I’d had girlfriends before and almost got married once, but nothing like Kim. She was something, so stylish and confident.” He wiped his right eye with the heel of his hand. “She was always together, always making sure her toenail polish matched her fingernails, even if she was wearing cowboy boots. She had ten thousand bottles of polish.”
Kenner smiled and said, “How’d you meet?”
“On a flight. I ordered a Coke and she made a joke about Atlanta being the home of Coke. Then a teenager had an anxiety attack after we took off and Kim calmed her down in a very expert way. Her voice was so calming.” His own voice slipped into a lower register and he gazed out the window. “I saw her in the terminal and complimented her and asked her
out, which is the kind of impulsive thing I never do. I couldn’t believe it when she said yes. We got serious pretty fast. She wanted to ‘start fresh’ with me, so I bought this condo and we decorated it together. Actually, she did most of the decorating and I just paid for it.”
“Sounds beautiful. What went wrong?”
“I proposed marriage,” he said. “She said yes, with two conditions. She wanted to redecorate the place all over again with a whole new color scheme. I told her I couldn’t afford that.”
“And?”
Zack blushed and said, “She wanted me to have a vasectomy.”
“A vasectomy?” Kenner said. “That’s not asking for much.”
“Now it seems incredible, but at the time I considered doing it. I’ve always wanted children and I thought she might change her mind. I’m forty-five, that’s not too late to become a father. But she was firm. She wanted to be absolutely sure she didn’t get pregnant. We argued for weeks and she said she wanted to think about it. What I didn’t know is, she started looking around.”
Kenner arched his eyebrows, though he wasn’t surprised.
“His name is Jon Stitcher. He’s a lawyer. He lives on North Paces Ferry Road. His office is on Peachtree, a half-mile from Piedmont Hospital. I’ve driven by that office many times and I always looked, hoping Kim would walk out the door so I could see her one more time. Once she left, she never returned my calls or e-mails. She cut me off, like I didn’t exist.”
A knock broke the interview. The Atlanta cop opened the door and Brownlee walked in.
“His alibi checked out,” he said.
In the car, Brownlee used his cell phone to look up the business address for Jon Stitcher, also discovering his home address matched the registration for Kim Collins’ Escalade. They drove down Peachtree Street again and stopped at a squat brick building with an English script sign out front. It said, “The Law Complex.”
“The law is complex,” Kenner said to Brownlee and got out of the car.
The receptionist was a skinny black woman who didn’t blink when the three cops walked in and asked for Stitcher. Two minutes later a door opened and he strode into the room—yet another slender blond man. This one slicked his hair straight back and wore a dark blue double-breasted suit with a thin chalk stripe and shoulder padding. He spread his legs into a commanding stance and positioned his fists on his hips. Kenner thought he looked like an extra from a 1940s gangster movie.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12 Page 32
