by Misty Simon
“Hey, Winthrop.”
“Hello there, Tallie. I just wanted to let you know I was here in case we bumped into each other. I didn’t want to scare you.”
“No worries.” Although I did look down and saw that he had no socks on, which might mean there were yet another pair shoved in the couch.
“I’ll be in the office if you need me.”
“Thanks.”
So much for the thinking time. Now, I’d be aware he was here and just want to get the heck out. I finished up in record time and was out the door with a quick wave. He’d mail me a check once I invoiced him; he always did.
With some extra time on my hands, I decided to take care of one of the things on my list. A call to Darren was in order. I had to tell him I wasn’t cashing his check. I just couldn’t take the money.
“Tell me you don’t need more,” he said when he answered the phone.
I pulled my cell away from my ear and gaped at it for a moment as I turned on the car. Now I was thinking about cashing the damn check just because. But I wouldn’t. “No, I’m no longer part of your inner circle, so that’s not how I operate.”
“You aren’t above it, Tallie. I hear there might be tax trouble coming your way. Now, how much?”
That check was about to burn a hole in my gut. I clenched my teeth. “I was calling to tell you I’m not going to cash it, you jerk, though I should just on principle.”
“I don’t believe that. I told you it’s part of your bonus. Just cash it for future cleanings.”
I might never clean for him again. Then again, the tax issues he alluded to were one of the reasons I would not be able to tell him no. “Fine, but it’s not a bribe. I’ll put it on the books as paying forward.”
“Good.” He cleared his throat. “Will you be out to clean this week? I don’t know what days Darla had you come. Then I think I need you tomorrow for deep cleaning. That closet isn’t as empty as I wanted it to be.” Censure was in his voice and I cringed. “The day after tomorrow, I’d like you to come back for the funeral because the house will need to be spiffed up. You did a good job earlier, but I’d feel better if you went over it again. From next week on, we’ll do Thursdays. Is that possible?”
Did he want to keep me busy or close? I’d never cleaned their house so many times in one week. Then again, I’d never needed so much access either, so who was I to complain?
I felt a little like we were back to business as usual, even though his wife was dead. Then again perhaps that was how he ran his life. Death could do things to your norm. “Is Letty still on staff?”
“Yes.” He sounded baffled that I would ask.
“What about the pool boy?”
That one got a snort out of him. “Yes, for the moment, until I can figure out how to get rid of him. I don’t know why Darla wanted him in the first place. He has no idea what he’s doing, but he’s paid through the month so I can’t fire him until then. I checked in his contract.”
They had a contract with the pool boy? Then again, he did live there, which was different than most people. Why did Darla need a live-in pool boy, anyway? We lived in a state that had pool use for about four months out of the year. It was a question I had wondered before, but had never asked.
“Are you sure no one else knows about Darla’s past? You don’t think Letty might have found out some way, do you?”
“No,” he said flatly. “I only found out myself by accident and confronted her about it. She was furious. I can’t imagine she would have told anyone. And Letty’s no angel. If she thought she knew something to hold over Darla, I’m sure she would have used it ruthlessly.”
How could he employ people he didn’t trust?
“I told Darla I wanted a divorce when I found out her little secret, but then I talked to a lawyer who told me what her cut of my money would be. Needless to say, I didn’t go through with it. It wouldn’t have been as cut-and-dried as your divorce. There was too much at stake.”
So Darla knew he wanted her gone. Had she blackmailed Waldo to make money if Darren really did get rid of her? Or was she trying to set up someone else who would take care of her and let her live in the luxury she was accustomed to? If she’d chosen Waldo, she wasn’t a very good picker, because he was no prize.
“I’ll be there day after tomorrow. Will you?”
“No, I have things to do in the office and want out of this house. It should be all yours since Letty won’t be here, either, and apparently the pool boy has let me know he has a day off coming up.”
Interesting. That meant I would truly be alone in the house again. Maybe there was more to find . . .
Really, I shouldn’t be thinking like that. Now that someone had broken into my house, I might want to worry about myself instead of the death of someone who had hated me when she was alive.
Unless everything was related, and it wasn’t a coincidence everything crappy was happening at the same time.
It was time to cash the check, since Darren had said it was advance pay and I had written it down in my ledger as such. No way would he be able to say it was a bribe if Burton followed my trail and came to the Darla/Marla info all on his own.
But first I needed to stop down in the funeral parlor to see how my brother and father were doing. It hadn’t been easy to have my space violated, but my dad was more shaken than even I was. This place was his lifeblood. To have someone walk in when they shouldn’t have had shaken him up.
After a quick pit stop up at my apartment, I came back downstairs. I heard raised voices before I made it to the second-floor landing and tripped down the next set of stairs to see what the heck was going on.
From the curve halfway down the stairs, I could see a man with light brown hair and a nose as hooked as a parrot standing in the foyer, flanked by two other men with the same nose. If I had to guess I would have to say they were related, probably brothers, but I’d never seen them before.
“Look, I ain’t telling you again, I want to see my sister and I want to see her now. You can’t keep us from her. She has to be identified, you old coot.”
Oh man, I hoped he wasn’t calling my father that. But it appeared he was, as I came trundling around the corner from the final descent and stopped behind the wall that was my brother and father. Another thought hit me as I stood behind them: My God, these were Darla/Marla’s brothers! They had to be. I tried to struggle through the human wall, but my brother and dad blocked me.
“Sir, we don’t need you to identify her. She is here for her final resting. The police would be the ones to take this matter to. I’d be happy to call them if you’d like.” My father held out his hand and Jeremy handed him a cell phone. “Now, would you like to go to the police yourself, or shall I call them for you?”
The three brutes took a collective step back, then turned as one and left. Their ability to synchronize like that was pretty impressive, but nothing compared to the swearing my father was doing in his perfectly pressed suit. He pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket to dab his balding head.
“I want you to hire security until this funeral is over,” my dad said to Jeremy as he continued to stare after the trio. “We’ll add it to the bill at this point, because all I want to do is get this broad into the ground and out of my hair.”
I gave myself away by snickering. It was rare that my dad slipped into a less formal speech pattern. For the perfectly proper Bud Graver, it was vocabulary less than stellar. Calling a woman a “broad” was a big jump.
“What do you need, Tallie?” Dad asked, most likely onto the next topic in his own head after taking a moment to acknowledge me.
“I just wanted to see what the raised voices were. Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked, but I already knew what I was going to do. I’d call Burton in just a moment and tell him to question the goons very closely about how they knew the deceased.
“No, just keep your eye out and the door locked. I don’t trust those ruffians. I’ll call Burton now to let him k
now they should be on their way.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. The readout said Burton. I’d programmed him in when this all started. Shaking the phone in the air, I said, “He’s right here. I’ll let him know.”
“Are you coming to the station to fill out the report, Tallie?” he asked. “I don’t have time to follow you around.”
“Yes, sorry. You were my next stop.” Cashing the check would have to wait now. Maybe I could get some more of the scoop on the three brothers Grimm if I was actually at the station. “Hey, heads up: There are three goons coming your way saying they want to identify their sister. Since we only have Darla here, I’m not sure who they’re talking about, since she had no family that I knew of.” A thought struck me and I almost slapped my own head. How had they known she was dead or where to find her?
Chapter 11
The trip was short since the police station was less than a block away. I made it in record time even without running. Whisking through the front door, I ground to a halt.
“Tallie, Burton isn’t going to have time for you now.” Suzy sat behind her desk, her cotton-ball white hair poofed above her head in a cloud. The woman hadn’t changed in all the years I had known her.
“I need to fill out that paperwork.”
“Yeah, well, the second he hung up with you he had a trio of big, mean-looking guys come in demanding to see him. I can let you talk to Matt if you want.”
Matt’s office was right next to Burton’s. That would work as well as anything else. The walls were not exactly thick and, with how loud the leader was in the funeral hall, I doubted he’d keep it down with Burton.
“Sure. I’ll just show myself back.”
I was back through the half door before Suzy could stop me. Making my way through the hallways, I kept an ear out for any yelling in other conference rooms. I heard nothing, so chances were Burton had taken the three men into his office. I barely kept myself from rubbing my hands together. If these guys were legitimate, then I wouldn’t have to tell Burton that Darla had formerly been Marla at all, and Darren couldn’t blame me for the info getting out. Win-win for me.
Matt sat at his desk with his feet up on the scarred wood. He dropped them quickly when I headed for him. Most likely he was thinking of the times he’d been a victim of me knocking his feet off a table when we were kids. One time he had almost lost a tooth. He used his tongue to probe his right front tooth, and I knew he was thinking about that time too.
“What’s up, Tallie?”
Shouting started up on the other side of the wall and he cocked an ear for it, his gaze sliding to the right.
“We want to see her, you bastard. She was our sister.”
Clear as day, which made me as happy as if I’d gotten a new squeegee.
“If you’re here to fill out the report on the break-in, we should go to the room down the hall for privacy.”
I glared at Matt. “No way. These guys were just at Dad’s. I’m here to make sure they aren’t going to come back.”
“That’s not your job. Burton will handle this.”
At that moment Burton raised his own voice and it shook through the halls. “Sit your ass down and listen to reason, or I’m going to lock you in a damn cell.”
I raised an eyebrow at Matt. “You really want to miss this?”
“No.” He settled back in his chair. We listened to the volley of voices as the leader of the trio demanded to see Marla and Burton continued to shout that there was no Marla here. Well, that answered one question. The other burning one was: How had they known where to find her?
Burton’s door crashed open and the three stepped out in tandem. Burton followed along behind like a sheepherder with errant lambs, though the thunderclouds on the three similar faces did not lead one to truly think of lambs, but maybe velociraptors.
“I’ll fill out the paperwork later,” I whispered to Matt, preparing to follow along behind the men to see where they went next and who they harassed. My plan was thwarted when Burton caught my arm on his way back to his office.
“You have some explaining to do and I don’t want any more runaround. I don’t have time for this, Tallie. You’re going to tell me everything you know, or you’re going to be the one sitting in a cell. I don’t think your clients or your dad would be too thrilled about that.” He didn’t even look back at me as he dragged me through the room. When I made pleading eyes at Matt, he merely shrugged and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. Yeah, that didn’t help at all.
“Sit.” He let me go as he passed his visitor’s chair. I plunked down and he took his own chair across the desk from me. “Now, we’re going to do this again and I don’t want vague, nor do I want pat answers. I want to know what the hell you know. Now.” He placed a piece of paper in front of him, took out a pen and stared me down.
At least I wouldn’t be telling him anything he didn’t already know. “I gave you the receipt and the invoice. I told you to look into Darla’s past.”
“You said it might be a good idea to see where she came from to see what might have been in her past. That’s not exactly telling me Darla had changed her appearance and name.”
“I wasn’t entirely sure about the appearance thing.”
He grunted. “Don’t. Just don’t. Did you, or did you not, know Darla had once been Marla?”
“I heard that might be true.” I had not been able to find a picture of Marla on the Internet no matter what combination of words I used. It was if she had erased herself previous to her transformation.
“And you didn’t think it was significant enough to tell me?”
“I was trying to tell you without telling you,” I said.
Another grunt. This was not going to go well.
“I don’t know whether to just shake my head or take you in for obstruction of justice. At least then you wouldn’t be in the middle of my investigation every freaking time I turn around.”
“I don’t mean to be.” I crossed my arms and jerked back in my chair.
“Yeah, you’re like a bad penny.” He sighed. “Look, be honest with me. Are you looking for stuff? Or do you really just keeping happening upon it?”
Honesty was not going to earn me points right now, but I was going to try anyway. “I’m looking, Burton. You gave me no choice when you made it clear I was your number-one suspect.” At least now maybe I could stop. I would go clean Darren’s house and leave the secret room alone after replacing the birth certificate and the papers changing her identity. The entrance of Darla’s previously unknown family was not something I wanted to delve into.
“Well, I’m looking elsewhere now. Stay out of it from now on, or I’m going to have to take it up with your father.”
Christ, I was almost thirty years old—this had nothing to do with my father. I was a grown woman. But I didn’t say that because I did not want to get into an argument with Burton, or send him immediately to my dad. That would not go well. Because, though I knew I was an adult, my father did not yet get it when it came to matters of scolding, much like my brothers. Max, though, he got me and that frightened me more than I was willing to examine.
Thoughts of Max followed me out of Burton’s office and across the way to the funeral home once again. I needed to change and get to Darren’s to supposedly clean again. I’d told him I wasn’t quite done, but really I wanted to get the documents back where they belonged and not in my apartment. With luck, the trio wouldn’t be there. I could be in and out before anyone came home or saw me.
* * *
The coast was clear when I got to Darren’s. No cars were in the driveway and no one was in the house. I’d get in, do the closet and a few other rooms, and get on with things. There was no need for me to be involved anymore.
I was in the middle of cleaning the dreaded downstairs toilet, sure now that it was Darren instead of Waldo—or maybe both of them—who had the aim of a blind elephant, when the front door opened, then slammed, and someone started banging on it. I couldn
’t tell if the banging was from this side or outside and sat frozen on my haunches in the tiny powder room, not sure what to do, or how to get out without being noticed.
“Tallie, are you here?” Darren yelled from the front foyer.
It wasn’t like I could say no, since he had to have seen my car around back. “Just finishing up.”
“Don’t go yet. There’re madmen out front. I need you to stay in case they break the door down.” The pleading in his eyes wasn’t enough to make me stay, but the very real possibility of being assaulted by the people banging on the front door was not something I wanted to face.
I didn’t want to say it, but I had to. “Maybe you should call Burton.”
“Good idea.” He yanked his cell phone out of his pocket, along with his keys and a handful of receipts. Everything fell to the floor and he ignored it to dial the police station.
I didn’t want to touch another receipt to save my life since they always seemed to get me into trouble. But I couldn’t just leave them on my clean floor. Scooping them up, I made a point not to look at them. Unfortunately, one caught my eye, anyway. It was a receipt for a hotel that was notorious for renting out rooms by the hour, and it was for this morning.
Against my better judgment, I shoved it in my pocket and put the rest on the front hallway table while Darren spoke with Burton. Within minutes I heard sirens and running feet as the guys took off for whatever they were driving. I saw the tail end of a truck fishtailing out of the front drive and knocking over Darla’s prized Aphrodite statue in the process.
Darren ran a rough hand over his head. “Jesus.”
“Yeah, well, I’d better go. I don’t think there’s anything more to do here, and quite honestly I’ve seen enough of Burton over the last few days to last me for a lifetime.”
I ducked out the door before Darren could protest. I didn’t need to wait for a check this time. And I did not want Burton to see my face—again—and blame me for being—yet again—in the wrong place at the wrong time.
