The day after the news about the gun, the police showed up at my door. At least thanks to Sarah I’d known they would be coming and had time to prepare. I waited for two peals of the bell before I opened the door, standing there dressed for work, trying to project busy professional. Both of the detectives were on my doorstep this time, the skinny and the fat one, Jack Sprat and his husband. I’ve never been much of an actor, but I tried to look surprised.
Detective Kasper said, “Julie Phelps? We’d like to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Is something wrong? What happened?” I said, faking concern.
“Ma’am, we’d rather not discuss this on your doorstep.”
“Come inside.” I stepped back, but the fat little detective, Lou Tedesco, shook his head.
“We’d like you to come down to the station to talk,” he said.
That I hadn’t been expecting. It wasn’t even eleven in the morning, so the kids were at school, but I tried that excuse anyway. “I need to be home for my children.”
“It shouldn’t take that long.” Tedesco had an odd smile and the taller, skinnier one tried to mimic it—all teeth, no eye crinkling, a phony friendliness. “You should be back well before school lets out.”
What choice did I have? I tried to hide the panic I was feeling, my hands shaking as I grabbed a coat and my purse and followed them out the door. What if Brian called, looking for me? Worse, what if they arrested me? I experienced a horrible déjà vu feeling as I got in the back of their car, although at least it wasn’t a squad car and I wasn’t under arrest.
The skinny detective drove toward the center of town, while the fat detective fiddled with the radio station. I tried to slink down in the backseat so no one would see me. We passed the Sewickley Spa and I saw the mother of one of Owen’s close friends turning in the door. Another woman I knew was just coming out of the Penguin Bookshop as we drove by. There were more familiar faces along the street. We parked at the old brick Sewickley Municipal Building on Thorn Street, and as I walked between the two detectives up the path and into the building I saw a client of mine heading into the library. She stopped, shading her eyes, clearly trying to see if it was really me. I looked away.
The conversation, this is what they called it, took place in an innocuous-looking room that might have been any meeting room for a small business. I sat at one side of an oval table with the two detectives across from me, although Kasper kept getting up, first to fetch coffee, then to lower the window shades because sunlight was in his eyes, and then to adjust his chair. He seemed unable to sit still; perhaps that’s why he was so thin.
“So I’m sure you heard on the news that we found the gun used in the killing of Dr. Lysenko,” Tedesco began, his voice friendly, like a neighbor exchanging gossip. He sat back in his chair, resting his small hands on his round stomach as if he’d just finished a large and delicious meal.
“No, I hadn’t heard. That’s great.” I tried to match my expression and tone to his, staring him straight in the eye and smiling.
“We traced the owner of the gun, Mrs. Phelps. It belonged to a George Duncan. Do you know who that is?”
“Duncan?” I said, pretending to think about it. “It sounds familiar, but I don’t think so.”
“That’s interesting, because you were his real estate agent some years back.”
“Really?” I said, faking surprise. “I sell so many homes I just can’t remember everybody. George Duncan?”
Kasper gave a sharp nod, while Tedesco just stared at me.
“Duncan, Duncan … wait, I do remember him! George and Lois Duncan—they moved to Florida.”
Tedesco’s expression didn’t change. “That’s right,” he said affably, although his eyes were watchful. “He certainly remembers you. He told us something very interesting—he said that his gun had been stolen.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said with a slight chuckle. “I was afraid you were going to tell me that George Duncan had shot Viktor Lysenko.”
Tedesco’s face soured and he sat up, the affability dropping away. “The gun disappeared from his home in Sewickley while a Realtor was showing his house.”
I tried to make my stare as blank as possible. Tedesco looked annoyed. “That doesn’t ring any bells? You were the real-estate agent, Mrs. Phelps.”
“It sounds sort of familiar—I think I remember him calling to say something had gone missing and, now that I’m thinking about it, I do remember giving him the list of names of people who’d been through his house.” I sighed. “I’m sorry, but it’s too many years ago—I don’t keep a record of those names if that’s what you’re hoping I can help you with.”
He looked frustrated. “What I want you to help us with, Mrs. Phelps—”
“Please, call me Julie.”
“What I want, Julie, is for you to help us understand your connection to the gun that killed Viktor Lysenko. It’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“Not really.” I shrugged. “Sewickley has a small population—I’m sure everybody’s connected in some six-degrees-of-separation way.”
“Not everybody is connected to this crime, Mrs. Phelps.”
“Connected?” I let my eyes widen. “Let me get this straight—I knew Viktor Lysenko and I knew the man who owned the gun that shot him, so I must be the one who shot him?” I made a scoffing noise, but inside I was trembling. I crossed my arms, trying to hide it.
“Did you?” Tedesco asked.
“Of course not,” I said, pretending to be outraged. “Viktor was a friend of mine.”
“Was he more than that?”
That question floored me. I didn’t have to act confused—I truly was. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Kasper smirked. “You were having an affair with Dr. Lysenko, right?”
The thought was so ridiculous that I burst out laughing, but neither detective reacted. They were clearly waiting for my reply. “That’s crazy,” I said. “He was my friend’s husband—I wouldn’t do that to her.”
They didn’t look convinced. Detective Kasper sat forward, resting his pointy elbows on the table. “Let’s look at the facts, Julie—we got a stolen gun, we got a guy shot to death, and we got a woman connected to both.” He ticked them off on his bony fingers while Tedesco opened a manila folder that had been sitting on the table when we entered the room.
I’d glanced at it, but had forgotten about it until now, as his stubby fingers struggled to undo the butterfly latch. When he pulled out photos, I froze.
For one horrible moment I thought that this was it—the blackmailer had turned us in and the police had the shots. Tedesco was watching me. I saw him register my shock, and then he turned the photos faceup and spread them out on the table.
They were bright and glossy, not the grainy nighttime shots at all. Photos of me and Brian with Heather and Viktor at one of the fund-raisers for the hospital. There was also a single shot of me and Viktor, his arm loosely around my waist, our glasses raised. We’d been pretty tipsy.
My smile was genuine. “These are from last year’s hospital fund-raiser.”
“You’re clearly good friends with Viktor.”
“We gave a lot of money to that event. My husband was the one who took this photo.”
The look on Tedesco’s face was like someone delivering what they thought was a winning hand only to realize that they’d been outplayed. He scooped the photos up and shoved them back in the manila envelope like a child taking away his game because he lost.
“I don’t understand why you’re even asking this,” I said during the long pause that followed. “I thought Viktor was killed during a carjacking.”
The two men exchanged a look before Kasper said, “So you didn’t know about Dr. Lysenko’s marriage?”
“What about it?”
“He consulted a divorce lawyer.”
chapter thirty-three
ALISON
Julie was a thief? This news made no sense at all to me,
coming as it did in drunk and hysterical messages from Sarah. At first I thought her voice mail might have been some alcoholic hallucination, but then I’d Googled the news about the gun, and by the time I actually spoke to Sarah she sounded less hysterical, if not sober. Yes, yes, Julie was a thief, she insisted, detailing her drive to the subdivision and how Julie had admitted that she’d stolen the gun.
“She stole from me, you know,” she said. “I thought about it—remember that time I couldn’t find my pen? I bet she has it.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” I protested.
“Wouldn’t she? Are you kidding me? She stole from clients, for God’s sake.” This came out as “gosh shakes.” “Of course she’d steal from me!”
Then I found myself remembering a little wooden bird that had gone missing a few years ago and how I’d blamed the children, assuming one of them had taken and broken it, although they’d vehemently denied any knowledge of it. And then I recalled Heather’s missing sugar bowl. Maybe these things weren’t missing; maybe Julie had stolen them.
As much as I was thrown by this revelation, I was more concerned about what she’d say when the police questioned her. She expected that to happen—she’d told Sarah as much. I was sure the police knew more than was being reported. What if they had more than the gun? What if at that moment they were looking at photos sent by the blackmailer?
A day passed, then another. I wondered if Julie had already been arrested and pictured her sitting alone in a cell. No one wanted to call her, just in case the police were somehow tapping her phone. I’d gotten one slightly cryptic text: Everything’s good here. Hope you’re well, too, which could mean any number of things. Everything’s good, as in “I’ve been arrested but won’t talk”? Or, everything’s good, meaning her old client hadn’t remembered that she’d taken his gun?
I wasn’t doing well. I was still grappling with what I’d learned at the hospital, struggling to understand why Heather would lie to us about how Viktor’s first wife had died. She had to have known it was from cancer, unless Viktor had concealed that fact from her as part of some manipulation. Maybe he’d told her the story about the fall? Maybe he’d wanted her to believe that he’d gotten away with killing one wife and he could do the same to another?
And what about the other details his assistant had revealed? Was it true that he’d been having an affair? Not that it made any difference—I already knew he’d been a shit. I kept seeing that young woman’s eager, beady eyes and the calendar on the wall behind her desk. Something about all those color-coded lines marking when the doctors were out of the office. All those blue lines for Viktor. Why was it nagging at me? I couldn’t stop hearing the assistant’s whispered “a-ffair,” or seeing Tedesco’s feigned surprise as he said, “You didn’t know about the prenuptial agreement?”
Suspicion is insidious; it grows like a weed, climbing and twisting and wrapping everything in its path. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, but I couldn’t talk to Julie, not with the police around her, and I couldn’t risk confiding in Sarah given how much she’d been drinking. I was already worried about what she might accidentally let slip.
Heather wasn’t home. I called her landline and heard Viktor’s slightly accented English cheerily telling callers to leave a number. I called her cell phone multiple times, but always got her voice mail. I pictured the Nordstrom bag and Heather’s smiling face. Was she out shopping again? When she called back, I asked if I could come over. Part of me wanted to talk over the phone because I was embarrassed to ask her these questions, but I knew that I needed to see her face in order to believe her.
“I’ve got to drive to my mother-in-law’s to fetch Daniel,” she said. “She sets the schedule, of course. I don’t know why he can’t just stay the night if she’s that desperate to have his company.”
“I guess she’s concerned about him missing school.”
“Would it hurt him to miss a day? This is elementary school, not Harvard.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I’ve got so many things to do—meetings with the lawyers, trying to clear the house out.”
“Can’t the cleaners help with that?”
“I fired them—I never liked them. They were Viktor’s choice, not mine.” She sighed. “That’s just one more thing on my to-do list—I have to find somebody, the house is a mess.”
Couldn’t she clean it herself? I heard a funny sound and realized she’d started to cry and I felt bad for even thinking that. “I just want to be done with this,” she said. “He kept all the money so tightly locked up, I can’t get to it without help from the lawyers, and his mother is sniffing around for her share, believe me. Of course she doesn’t trust me and I don’t think his lawyers do either.”
I saw Tedesco’s grin, heard him say “prenup.” A sob slipped from Heather and I tried to push away my suspicion. “I’ll come over and help you,” I said on impulse.
“What about the police? What if they’re watching my house?” Heather said, but was that a little bit of hope in her voice?
“It’s not against the law to help a grieving friend,” I said, as if that were my sole motivation. Of course I would help. But I would also ask her the questions that wouldn’t stop hammering away inside me.
Heather’s sigh held relief. “Okay, what about coming over tonight? About seven P.M.? I should be back by then.”
* * *
Even as I drove to Heather’s house, I told myself there was no reason to go so early. It wasn’t even five P.M. She wouldn’t be home. As I turned in to her drive, I worried about running into the police again, but there were no cars parked out front. What was I doing here? Even as I parked, I couldn’t admit it to myself. Heather had said that Viktor disabled the security cameras so the police had no record of the comings and goings, but what if she’d hooked them back up? I rang the doorbell first, just to make sure no one was home, standing on the front steps through four rings before walking over to the keypad next to the first bay of the garage.
I’d kept the text with the four-digit code, but thought she might have changed it and was both startled and pleased when it whirred into action, lifting into the ceiling. Ducking under the door, I hastily pushed the button to lower it again. The door into the house was unlocked. I stepped quietly inside, feeling horribly nervous, afraid I might set off an alarm, but the only sound was that of my footsteps echoing on the marble tile.
It was obvious why Heather wanted to hire cleaners. The disarray had grown since the last time I was there, the pile of dishes higher in the kitchen sink and a faint but unappetizing smell of days-old fried food. A layer of dust was visible on the mahogany furniture in the living room, and the carpets were in need of vacuuming. I passed Viktor’s study and peered inside. In all my visits to this house, I’d never been in that room before. It looked like a display in a furniture store, everything pristine and untouched. A large leather swivel chair sat behind an ornately carved dark wooden desk with a glossy sheen. There were floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, complete with a library ladder. Each rung held a faint sprinkling of dust and there were deep grooves beneath the bottom legs as if the ladder had never been moved. Perhaps it hadn’t. Most of the books were fakes, I realized as I studied them more closely, whole sets of cardboard covered in cheap leather and gilt. There were a few real books, mostly medical textbooks, but otherwise the room looked straight out of a Hollywood film. I could picture the script scene description: “The library of a wealthy man.”
I scoured Viktor’s desk in vain, searching for confirmation of what I’d noticed at the hospital, on the calendar. It had finally become clear to me the night before as I lay in bed, long after Michael had fallen asleep, pondering those blue lines that had marked Viktor’s work schedule. I just needed to confirm what I’d realized, but for that I needed his own record keeping. He’d probably kept his schedule on his computer and that had been taken by the police, which made all of us extremely nervous. There was nothing in the desk drawers, just a stack of neatly arranged blank pa
per, pens and paper clips, a box of staples and a roll of breath mints. I found a single folder that had info relevant to utility bills—all of them in Viktor’s name. The bottom drawer of the desk was locked. I tried to pick it with a paper clip without success.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor, passing the photos of the dead, Viktor and Janice Lysenko, both of them smiling. Some of Viktor’s belongings had to be here; surely Heather hadn’t cleared everything out, not when the police were actively investigating.
The master bedroom closet still held his clothes. I brushed my hand over a long row of expensive suits before pulling open a stack of drawers on his side. Sweaters that seemed to be arranged by color. Underwear and socks. There was a collection of cuff links in the top drawer, little black-and-gold footballs, burnished gold disks, miniature Ukrainian flags, and a set to honor his career—gold buttons embossed with a pair of snakes curving around a winged staff. Sitting next to them was a small, neat stack of receipts.
Time was passing; I heard a clock chiming the hour as I flipped through the receipts, one after the other, but they were all recent, the top one dated one night before his death. I searched the rest of the drawer. Some loose coins and—mixed in with them, so I almost missed it—a small brass key.
I ran back downstairs to Viktor’s office, dropping to the floor next to his desk and trying the key in the locked drawer. It opened, the drawer sliding back soundlessly to reveal hanging files with financial and medical information. Of course they were well organized—I wondered if Viktor had ever been sloppy. I pulled out the file marked TAXES and found multiple manila envelopes inside, one marked DEDUCTIONS and another BUSINESS TRAVEL. I opened the latter over the desktop and several neatly clipped bundles of receipts plopped onto the leather blotter.
Just Between Us Page 26
