Cremains of the Day

by Misty Simon

  He groaned. “I wasn’t that bad, was I?” He shook his head, but continued. “I guess I was, but I watched an unidentified man drop those flowers off at the back door of this place today and took them before you could get them. I was trying to bring them to you because I had steamed open the envelope of the card and knew whose signature that was. I wanted to talk to you, but obviously I went about it the wrong way. I’ve never been undercover before, and that’s not an excuse, just a roundabout apology. Here’s a more direct one: I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to approach you. Especially because I know Monty had not gotten a call for those flowers.”

  “How do you know that?” I whispered. My mind was trying to grasp so many things at once that I grabbed the only thing I could hold on to.

  “I went through his receipts and I’ve been watching you.”

  “You what?” I was frantically trying to think if I had done anything financially inappropriate. I couldn’t come up with anything, but that didn’t mean I hadn’t done it. “Wait, before you answer that, why are you involved in all this? You say you got the assignment, but why? And why isn’t it a bigger team? For the kind of money you’re talking about, it seems like it would be a whole slew of people looking into this and seizing records, not trying to ferret them out under the radar.”

  “Jeremy was my best friend. And I remembered liking you more than you like me right now. I didn’t want you to get caught up in the mess if I could help it. Beyond that, unless the total is in the billions, I’m good enough for the first round of data collection. It’s only when we get permission to open a true investigation that the teams get bigger.”

  “Huh.” Not too intelligent, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. I was half afraid I was having some kind of nightmare I wasn’t able to wake up from. Either that, or I was going to hurl my tea at him and take off at a dead run. That business of Waldo’s was in my name, if I remembered correctly, and had been for years. Even though we were divorced, would that mean I was still going to be responsible for all those taxes? The embezzling, even though I had nothing to show for it? Maybe instead of hurling my tea at Tax Max, I’d just hurl.

  “I don’t have a card to give you, as I’m supposed to be here only to gather evidence undercover, but you were getting way too inquisitive, and I can’t have you blowing my cover. Plus, I could use your help. We can get this solved together.”

  I tried breathing through my nose to calm the urge to vomit. “Do you think the IRS will give me a tax break if I can come up with the money from Waldo?”

  This time he laughed and I didn’t find it derisive or threatening: A step in the right direction. “Yeah, I don’t know about that. I guess it doesn’t hurt to ask.”

  I relaxed a little. It didn’t sound like they were after me specifically, so that was good. “Let me just state this for the record. I have no idea where that money is and no idea where it might be. I didn’t even know Waldo had it. I certainly didn’t know Darla and he were involved, though it doesn’t surprise me at all.” I believed in not speaking ill of the dead, but that woman was a hussy.

  “They don’t think you do. I looked into it before I took it upon myself to come up here. I talked to the guy in the office who started the inquiry and begged a chance to come straighten things out before we officially come in.” He stopped and clamped his jaw closed. Took a breath and continued. “You’ve lived pretty frugally since moving out of Walden’s home. They haven’t had any luck finding that money, though, and so I came down here to sniff it out before someone else does. I haven’t been here long. Normally I’d have more time, but Darla’s murder might have stepped up my timetable a little more than I’m comfortable with.”

  “Do you really think someone murdered her for Waldo’s money?” That sounded strange even to me. “Why wouldn’t that just go after Waldo?” And why had Max clamped his jaw shut? Was it the begging part? I knew he was a tax consultant and with everything going on I had assumed he was here as a tax consultant, like a freelance investigator or something. But maybe there was more to this story than I knew. I didn’t think he was going to hurt me at this point, but I wasn’t totally convinced he was being aboveboard with me, either.

  “You’d be surprised at what people will do when money is involved, even small amounts. And believe me, this is no small amount.”

  “That dirty, rat-fink bastard!” I wanted to ask Max more about his role here, but it had just occurred to me that Waldo had a bunch of money lying around somewhere while I was busting my hump to clean ex-friends’ houses and dividing myself between what I wanted to do and what I had to do to make ends meet and gather a nest egg. I should keep his damned pain pills and not give them to him. In fact, I should go over there and threaten to shove them all down his throat if he didn’t tell me where this treasure trove was hiding.

  “You’ll want to let go of that thought, whatever it is,” Max said, breaking my mad.

  “I do not need you reading my mind.”

  He smiled, all his pearly whites showing. “It’s not the mind I’m reading, but your body language. Depending on how much we can find, there might be some left over after paying everything back and the fines. It should most likely at least get rid of your portion that’s owed, but we have to get it first.”

  So I might owe something. I’d have to start searching out more cleaning jobs. That did nothing to brighten my mood. “Oh, I have an idea how I can get it for you.” Waldo hadn’t called me a ballbuster for nothing.

  “I’m sure you do, but it needs to be throttled back.”

  “Are you sure?” I wouldn’t say my wariness of him had dissipated altogether, but I was getting a much better vibe off him after hearing why he was here. Caution could stay, but the hostility I had been feeling was drifting away.

  He laughed. “Yeah, you kind of scared me there with your ferociousness, so I think we need to throttle it back.”

  “Oh, fine.” I still could dream about it, though.

  He stared into my eyes, making me squiggle in my chair. “Look, the problem here is I had no easy entrance to anyone, certainly not any of the wealthy people. I have no reason to contact Mr. Phillips, and he’s not going to open his home to me. He’s definitely not going to trust me with anything more than that phony smile.”

  So I wasn’t the only one who could see past the Waldo he showed to everyone else. He wasn’t going to get off easily when his clients found out about his tax evasion and definitely not if he’d been embezzling. I had thought he was doing just that before I left, but couldn’t find any proof. If Max could get the proof, all those rich people were going to hang him, and then they’d see what he was really like.

  “What do you want me to do?” Squiggling in the chair became bouncing with urgency to get started. Now.

  “Stop being so eager, for one thing.”

  Okay, now he was going from funny to chastising. I really did not like chastising. “Do you not understand what this could mean for me?” I asked, knocking my knuckles on the table. “If I can get Waldo to hand over this money, or even take it from him, then I won’t have horrendous taxes to pay. I’m struggling as it is, and I can’t imagine what the total amount is. No matter what it is, I won’t be able to afford it.” I was dangerously close to tears with this new, mammoth wrinkle. “If Waldo gives it up then I can continue with my life as it should have been years ago before I even married the stupid man.” I had a feeling I was pretty much yelling by the end of the monologue, but didn’t much care. Max, for his part, didn’t act like he’d even heard any change in my voice.

  “I get what you’re saying. I know it’s tempting, but let’s inject a little logic into this.”

  No conversation starting with let’s be logical ever went my way. “Fine, logic me to death.” Flopping back in my chair, I crossed my arms.

  “I’m trying to keep you from death. For one thing, if Darla had pressed Mr. Phillips for the location of the money, or more money, and now she’s dead—it’s very
possible he’s the reason she’s dead.”

  “But he was in the hospital this morning when I found Darla dead.” I could spout my own logic when I had to.

  “True, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t found someone else to do the dirty work for him. I can’t imagine Mr. Phillips getting his hands dirty.”

  “You’ve got that right. And you can drop the mister. I call him Waldo because it irritates him, just follow suit,” I said.

  He ignored my comment. “So until we can be assured where the money is, you might be putting yourself in harm’s way by confronting him. What if he’s not so against taking you out?”

  I hadn’t thought of that and Max knew it. “I can’t imagine Waldo would kill me,” I said with a bit of hesitation in my voice. I heard it and hated it.

  “You barely took any of the money he admitted he had and that led the IRS to investigate him, leading to him being on a train to getting slammed for tax evasion for starters and hopefully embezzlement for the win. When he finds out, do you really think he’d hesitate if he saw a chance? He could blame it on whoever killed Darla and get away with it along with possibly leaving the country. You want that because you’re impatient?”

  Well, when he put it like that I felt like an idiot. “Sorry.”

  “Yeah, so am I. I’d love to be able to nail him and would if I really was a ninja bean counter, but that’s not the way we’re going to have to approach this. We have to go in methodical and get all our ducks in a row. According to my supervisor, there’s information he had shared the whereabouts of the money with Darla. That might be what got her killed.”

  I was good with methodical when it involved cleaning, but this was obviously not the same. In fact, it might never be the same again if what he said was true.

  “What do you want me to do?” If he said go about my normal business and leave Waldo alone, I was going to scream.

  He raised an eyebrow, and I figured he got the message from the frown lines on my forehead far more than anything I could have said.

  He blew out a breath that sounded just like exasperation. “Okay. You have a prescription to deliver to him, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So do that and see if you can get anything out of him when you’re over there. Subtle is your new middle name. Don’t press and don’t say anything directly about the money or the tax thing. Maybe you can ask if he’d heard about Darla, since he was in the hospital. Make sure to say something about how horrible it was. Watch for his reaction. You get checks from Darla, right?”

  “I did, yes.” And that was one more thing I would have to worry about now. Was Darren going to keep me on, or just make Letty do more work? “Why?”

  “Does the writing on the card from the flowers look like hers?”

  I thought hard about it, but honestly couldn’t swear by it. I had a contract I’d signed with Darla in my apartment and that was it. While I didn’t mind making Waldo wait longer, I didn’t want Max up in my apartment. Shaking my head made him frown.

  “Can I ask Waldo what happened out in the alley? I’m sure I can antagonize him into telling me.” I warmed to that idea. Tallulah Graver, Amateur Sleuth. “Should I wear a wiretap in case he decides to confess all to me?”

  This time his laugh was much bigger and far more appealing, crinkling up his eyes and showing off his pearly-white teeth as well as the dimple in his left cheek. There was the boy who would always buy me a Tootsie Roll even if my brother wouldn’t.

  “No, no wiretap. I think we’ll go in low-key. I’ll follow you in my car and park down the street. I doubt he’s going to try anything as long as you don’t do something overt, but I’d feel safer being near you.”

  “It’s obvious you don’t know me.”

  “I know you well enough to know you can do this. Just go in and give him the meds, engage in some conversation with him, and feel him out for what he knows about Darla. He hasn’t answered any questions for the police about what happened in the alley. He swears he never saw anyone and must have been dragged into the alley, because there was no way he would have been back there.”

  “I can do that.” And I had just the way to accomplish it, though it was going to cost swallowing some of my pride.

  * * *

  I fully expected to be harangued as soon as I knocked on Waldo’s door, and I wasn’t disappointed.

  “What did you do? Stop to get a manicure and pedicure?”

  I couldn’t recall the last time I had either, but the goal here was to not piss him off further. I was trying really, really hard to remember that.

  “They had to look for the medication. I nearly had to go to another pharmacy because they couldn’t find it.” I almost said I was sorry, but as much as I didn’t want to pounce on him for information, I also didn’t think it would be a good idea to start acting all acquiescent and out of character from the way we normally interacted with each other. He’d be as skeptical of me being nice as I would be if he suddenly handed me a check for a year’s worth of bills.

  “Fine, I suppose that’s okay, then.”

  “Well, thank you, Your Highness.” Typical us. We hadn’t had a decent conversation without sniping in several years.

  “Well, you can leave now, unless you want to clean my house or make me dinner,” he said snidely.

  No thank you, no I appreciate it. Nothing. The jerk.

  Though, his offering to let me clean his house was just the opening I had been waiting for. “I am not going to clean your house, you big jerk. I can’t imagine you don’t have some bimbo to help you out around here. In fact, where’s the bimbo who could have brought you home?”

  His eyes narrowed as he glared at me. Good. Perhaps that would keep him from thinking too much about why I was holding the bag of clothes from the hospital and heading toward the laundry room.

  “I’m just going to throw these on the floor in the laundry room, then I’ll get out of your hair.”

  I stomped off to hide the sound of the brown paper bag crinkling. Someone from the hospital had put the clothes into the bag and handed them to me when I’d picked him up. I’d placed them inside the front door when I’d dropped him off, but after talking to Max I could have kicked myself. I had access to the clothes he had supposedly been dragged in. It had been dark in the alley when I’d seen him last night, but I didn’t remember any kind of drag marks. Then again, they could have been on his butt. And that was exactly what I was checking for.

  Nothing. I found nothing and that just raised my already high level of suspicion. Why wouldn’t he answer the cops about the alleyway unless it was either illegal or embarrassing? Either way, Waldo was not going to tell me, so I decided to get my other question answered instead.

  “Hey!” I yelled from the laundry room off the kitchen. “Did you hear about Darla?”

  He didn’t answer. I knew it was because he hated yelling in the house. He’d installed intercoms for that very reason. In return, I’d avoided the things like the plague.

  I fished in his pockets like the old days, and nearly crowed when I encountered crinkly paper. As quietly as I could, I pulled the paper from his pants. Not surprisingly, there was a phone number on the back of a restaurant receipt. Despite the fact I detested him, he was attractive in a pretty-boy, polished way. His dark hair didn’t have a single strand of gray in it and his deep blue eyes contrasted with his hair, making them mesmerizing. He had impeccable manners when he wanted to and charm that could make a tree want to peel off its own bark. He was a trim man, well-kept, and actually pretty delicious if you didn’t look below the surface. Most people didn’t. They saw the packaging but not the rotten sandwich inside the box.

  There were more times than I wanted to think about when we’d been at dinner and he’d been given completely inappropriate invitations. But then we’d laugh about it later. I’d had no idea he’d actually been taking quite a few of the proposers up on their offerings until right before I left.

  I shook my head. That was in the
past and had nothing to do with today. Today, I turned the receipt over and read he’d had dinner with someone on Wednesday night that he’d paid for. Steaks and salads with the dressing on the side. But what caught my eye was that the second steak eater had ordered theirs well-done enough to probably make the chef want to substitute a piece of shoe leather instead. And a baked potato with blue-cheese dressing. There was only one person I knew who ate their baked potato with blue cheese.

  And she was dead.

  Chapter 6

  I hightailed it out of my former house as fast as I could without arousing suspicion. Of course, that wasn’t too hard since Waldo was already engrossed in calling everyone he knew. His voice trailed me out the door as he lamented about how much pain he was in and how he’d appreciate it if they’d bring him food and take care of things—out of the goodness of their hearts, of course. He wasn’t going to pay anyone to clean his house or mow his lawn. Not if he could help it.

  There could be any number of reasons Darla and Waldo had been at dinner two days before her death. Any number of reasons, but none I could come up with. As much as Darla had wanted my husband, as far as I could tell they had never actually slept together. I wasn’t sure why, since he’d pretty much slept with anything that didn’t run away, but he’d disdained Darla, starting about two years ago. I had no idea why it had happened, or how, but suddenly Waldo had been looking down his nose at Darla and refusing her dinner invitations. He only allowed us to accept if it came directly from Darren. Even then, Waldo had been careful to stay away from Darla at a party. It was a flip I had noticed but not commented on. Before it had been Darren he snubbed, but whatever happened two years ago had made Waldo change his mind and snub Darla while cozying up to Darren. Well, as much as the snobby Waldo cozied up to anyone who didn’t leave their number on the back of a receipt.

  So why on earth would he and Darla have had dinner? And when exactly was Waldo stun-gunned? I knew from listening to the homeowners’ gossip, as if the help didn’t have ears, that he’d been seen at Darla’s party. In fact, he’d been thought to still be there when the attack happened. After a quick call to my cousin, Matt confirmed Waldo had been seen at the party twenty minutes before the attack. So exactly when had he left and why?