Retirement Can Be Murder

by Susan Santangelo

  Jenny held up her hand and stopped me in mid-sentence. “Wait. I think I’ve missed something here. Mary Alice is leaving the hospital?

  When did she decide that?”

  “With everything else going on around here, I forgot to tell you. Mary Alice is retiring at the end of the summer. But she’s going to do private duty nursing and some consulting, so she’ll still be connected to the hospital. She made her big announcement the same day that the police came to interview me about Rhodes’s death.

  “Anyway, I’m planning a party for Mary Alice at the Trattoria, and while I was meeting with Maria Lesco today, I got some real dirt on Davis Rhodes. Maria told me Rhodes was a regular customer at the restaurant, and the staff couldn’t stand him. He was unbelievably rude to everyone who worked there.

  “Maria also told me that one night he’d brought a woman named Grace to dinner. Their waitress overheard some of their conversation, and figured out that Grace was Rhodes’s wife. The waitress told Maria it wasn’t a friendly dinner at all. And Grace called Rhodes ‘Dick,’ not

  ‘Dave’ or ‘Davis’. How about that?”

  “Wow, Mom. I’m impressed that you got Miss Lesco to give you all this info. Way to go. But what does it mean?”

  “I know I could be jumping to conclusions,” I replied, “but it dawned on me after I talked to Maria that ‘Davis Rhodes’ may have been an assumed name. I called Nancy to see if Rhodes or his wife had been involved in any local property transactions.”

  I gave Jenny a moment to be proud of my deductive skills, then filled her in on my trip to Nancy’s office, and her e-mails to other local real estate agents. “Nancy says the network is very efficient, and she should have some information soon about both Rhodes and his mysterious wife.

  “Oh, I just remembered something else. Maria also told me that Rhodes and his assistant, Sheila Carney, came into the restaurant a few times together, too. She said they had a really bad argument there a few days before he died. Maybe Sheila wanted to take over the Center. She’s already changed the web page to feature her picture. She certainly could be involved in Rhodes’s death.”

  I shook my head to clear my muddled brain. It didn’t help. Too many possibilities.

  “Your father is going to be working very closely with Sheila from now on. He’s been officially assigned to the account by the office, and I guess he’ll be helping plan Rhodes’s memorial service.” That is, if he’s not in jail by then, I added silently.

  Jenny slumped back in her chair. “This is too much for me to take in.

  When I’m teaching a class, I have an outline of what I want to cover. But there’s no outline for anything this crazy. What do we do now? Dad is going to freak.”

  I had no doubt that Jenny was absolutely right. I also knew from years of experience that there was only one aspect that Jim would zero in on—one thing he would harp on again and again. My Beloved would gloss over the fact that Rhodes had probably been poisoned and that he could be considered a suspect in the murder, ignore the importance of Rhodes’s wife, and dismiss the possibility that “Davis Rhodes” could be an assumed name. Only a logical person would be concerned about any of that stuff.

  What Jim was bound to zero in on, and harp on over and over, would be the fact that I’d meddled. Interfered. Nosed around. I asked a few innocent questions about a party for Mary Alice and presto. Look what I’d found out. And then, as if that weren’t bad enough, I got Nancy and her entire real estate network involved.

  As upset as I was about Jim’s increasingly vulnerable situation, I was not about to make myself the sacrificial lamb to his all-too-predictable outburst. I’d been down that particular road too many times in the past.

  So, I made a snap decision. I wasn’t going to tell My Beloved what I’d found out today. At least, not until Nancy had provided some hard facts, like whether “Davis Rhodes” was his real name.

  “Jenny,” I said, “I have a suggestion. You and I both love your father very much. And we know him very well. I think hitting him with all this as soon as he gets home is a bad idea. You should definitely tell him what happened with Mark and the phone call. He needs to prepare himself in case the police do want to question him again.

  “But all I’ve got to tell him so far is just gossip and speculation. I know he won’t react well to that. I think it’s best for me to keep quiet and wait to see if Nancy and her real estate buddies can come up with any solid information. I’ll tell your father everything once we have something concrete, and I’ll pass on what I find out to Mark, too. I certainly don’t want to be accused of hiding information from the police. How does that sound?”

  My daughter gave me a look that proved she had my number, all right. “I get it, Mom. I used the same technique when I was living with Jeff. Men can only focus on a one issue at a time, and they go a little nuts when they get too much information to process, right? So, only give them a little. After it’s been processed, give them a little more. Kind of like spoon-feeding a baby.”

  I had to laugh. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  She gave my hand a little squeeze.

  “Try not to worry. I have a feeling that everything’s going to work out ok. Of course, I have no clue how that’s going to happen.”

  “It’s going to happen because the women in this family are going to make sure that it happens,” I responded with more confidence than I felt.

  “Now, tell me more about your coffee date with Mark. You said you two were having a good time before that phone call from his partner interrupted it. Did you fill each other in on what you’d been doing over the past ten years?” I’d promised myself I wouldn’t ask Jenny any questions about her “date,” but, what the heck, it beat worrying about Jim.

  Sure, Carol. Like you’re not dying of curiosity.

  “You’re very subtle,” said Jenny, laughing. “What you mean is, did we talk about any long-term relationships we’d been in, that kind of personal stuff, right?”

  My daughter was getting to be way too smart for me. “Yes, I have to admit that’s exactly what I meant. But you know I won’t pry.” Ha! “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine with me. But isn’t he good-looking now?” Subtle, Carol. When in doubt, stress the superficial.

  “Yes, Mark’s very good-looking. I never would have expected he’d be so handsome after the skin problem he had when we were in high school.

  I remember he wore geeky glasses, too. But I suppose I was no beauty back then, either.”

  “You and Mike were always perfect in every way to Dad and me,” I replied loyally. “But let’s get back to Mark. I completely lost track of him after high school. Did he stay here in town, go away to college, join the service, what?”

  “That’s three questions, Mom,” said Jenny. “You get seventeen more, according to the rules of the game. But Twenty Questions and then that’s it. Yes, Mark went to college in Maine, and graduated with a degree in history. He said he bummed around Europe for a while after graduation trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, and finally came back here when his money started to run out. He never intended to stay, but he met a girl and thought she was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

  “I gather from what he didn’t say, though, that his parents were less than thrilled with her and tried hard to discourage the relationship. Anyway, he moved in with her and needed to get a job and earn some money.

  I think he joined the police force because he thought it would please his parents, especially his father, and take the heat off their objections to his personal life. He’s the youngest in the family, which I had forgotten, and I guess his parents have always been more controlling in his life than in his brothers’.

  “The relationship ended badly,” Jenny continued. “Mark didn’t say what happened, and I didn’t press him for details. But apparently that was three years ago, and he’s been kind of turned off the dating scene since then. I know how he feels.”

&n
bsp; There was nothing I could say to that, so wisely, for once in my life, I kept my big mouth shut.

  “You know, it was so good to be with an old friend today. I think he felt the same way. When you have a shared history, like we do, you can just relax and be friends and not have to get into the role-playing lots of people do these days. I knew I could tell him pretty much anything and it’d be all right. But then his partner called and, well…” Jenny sighed. “I don’t know how we can see each other again with Davis Rhodes’s death hanging over our heads. Especially if Mark’s forced to ask you and Dad more questions. Talk about a weird situation.”

  “What’s a weird situation?” Jim asked. I turned around in surprise.

  Jenny and I had been so engrossed in our conversation that neither one of us had heard him come home. How much had he heard?

  “Hi dear,” I said. “How’s everything with Sheila and the Center?”

  “Don’t try and divert me, Carol. I want to know who you and Jenny were talking about. Who could be forced to come back here and ask us more questions? About what? Did something else happen? What’s going on?”

  “Don’t get excited,” I said as soothingly as I could.

  Jenny interrupted me. “I’ll tell him, Mom. It’s my story.’ ‘

  She turned to her father and said, “Now, Dad, don’t get excited.”

  “God, you sound just like your mother. I am not excited. At least, I wasn’t until I got home just now. Who and what are we talking about?”

  “I had coffee with Mark Anderson today,” explained Jenny.

  “A very nice young man,” said Jim. “He treated me with the greatest respect the other night at the Center.”

  “He is a great guy,” agreed Jenny. “But while we were together, he got a phone call from his partner with some bad news. It was about the cause of Davis Rhodes’s death. I had to worm it out of him, but the bottom line is that according to the preliminary report it looks like Rhodes died from a drug interaction. The police think he may have been poisoned.

  “Dad,” she said gently, “I’m pretty sure from what Mark said that they’re going to want to ask you some more questions.”

  Jim didn’t respond for at least a full minute. The room was so quiet I could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the front hall. Or maybe it was the sound of my heart thudding against my chest.

  Then he placed his briefcase, very carefully, on the kitchen counter, and sat down at the table. For a brief moment, I saw his cheeks flush, a sure sign he was under stress. He reached down to give each of the dogs a gentle pat. They responded by licking his hands. Positive reinforcement from our two nonjudgmental canines.

  “I want you both to know that I have nothing to hide, and nothing to be ashamed of,” Jim told us. “If Mark and his partner want to question me again, fine. Let them. With or without Larry present. This whole thing is absolutely ludicrous.”

  He sat up very straight in his chair. Jenny and I didn’t speak. What was there to say?

  Jim cleared his throat. “Now, let me tell you both about my day. That Sheila Carney sure is something.”

  For the next half hour Jenny and I were regaled with the wonders of Sheila. What was it about long-legged blondes that made men act so stupidly? You would have thought, listening to Jim sing her praises, that she was a combination of Mother Theresa and Princess Diana.

  Brother.

  According to Jim, Sheila had met Rhodes while she was in graduate school studying for a Master’s degree in Psychology. Rhodes was one of the school’s guest lecturers. Sheila told Jim that Rhodes was impressed with her intelligence—the actual words Jim quoted were, “He was dazzled by a brilliance far beyond my years”—and convinced her to leave school and come and work with him. That was several years ago, and she had been worshipping at the Rhodes altar ever since.

  The concept of the Retirement Survival Center had supposedly been a joint one between Rhodes and Sheila. Jim was slightly hazy on who thought of it first. Perhaps Sheila hadn’t made that very clear to him.

  But she insisted that Rhodes always intended to acknowledge her contribution to the Center, and together they had planned to tweak the web site and feature a picture of both of them. The fact that the web site had been changed today, immediately after Rhodes’s death, was purely a coincidence, or so Sheila said.

  The whole thing sounded fishy to me, but the only two people who had been involved in the birth of the Center were Sheila and Davis Rhodes, and he was certainly in no position to contradict anything she said.

  “I’ve really got to admire the way Sheila is dealing with this trauma,”

  Jim said. “Very controlled. Very professional. But I can tell that, underneath, she’s really grieving. She and I went over some details for the memorial service next week. But plans won’t be finalized until she sees which clients respond to the invitation to pay tribute to Rhodes. Oh, speaking of invitations, Sheila wants me to invite the mayor of Westfield, and the president of the chamber of commerce, and any other local big wigs I can come up with.”

  Jim stopped to make a few notes to himself. “I guess it’s too late to get it on the governor’s schedule. Too bad.”

  I couldn’t resist. “Did the governor go to Rhodes for retirement counseling?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Carol.”

  I was being ridiculous? I wasn’t the one who was still in complete de-nial about being in big trouble. Who did he think he was kidding anyway?

  Pardon the pun, but I guess “de Nile” isn’t just a river in Egypt.

  * * *

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  Q: Why don’t retirees mind being called Seniors?

  A: Because it comes with a 10 percent discount.

  I was counting on Nancy and her network of real estate agents to come through with information that could get Jim off the hook and put somebody else, preferably Sheila, on it instead. Or even the mystery woman, Grace. Hell, I wasn’t picky. Anyone but My Beloved would do just fine.

  When I hadn’t heard anything from Nancy, by either phone or e-mail, by 10:00 the following morning, I called her cell phone and left a desperate message. She responded within minutes.

  “Carol,” she whispered into the phone, “don’t bug me. I know how upset you are. I’m doing the best I can. I’m at a Realtors’ open house right now for a new listing, and one of the agents here thinks she remembers Grace. I’m trying to get her to stay a little longer so I can pump her for more information, but there are ten more houses on the tour today and I can’t push her. I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Oh, you might want to check today’s paper. There’s another story about you-know-who on page five.”

  Another newspaper story? Not good. I poured myself a cup of indus-trial strength coffee for courage and opened the paper.

  Yup, there was the story, on page five, but this time in a more prominent position, “above the fold,” as Jim would say.

  Foul Play Suspected in Retirement Guru’s Death

  A spokesman for the Westfield Police Department has confirmed that a preliminary toxicology report on the body of Dr. Davis Rhodes, prominent local retirement coach, has revealed that Rhodes died as a result of a fatal drug interaction. The spokesman refused to speculate as to whether the drug interaction was accidental or the result of foul play.

  “We are looking at all possibilities, and are ruling nothing out at this stage of the investigation,” the spokesman said.

  Rhodes was found dead in the kitchen of the Retirement Survival Center three days ago by an unidentified client of the Center.

  The police spokesman refused further comment at this time.

  Oh, boy. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, there it was in black and white. The possibility of foul play—read “murder”—in Rhodes’s death was now public knowledge. And how much time would it take, I wondered, for “an unidentified client of the Center” to become named as Jim Andrews of Fairport? I didn’t see how Jim could trivialize this
, but knowing him, he’d accuse me of overreacting again.

  I was at a stalemate until I heard from Nancy. After running the dogs in the back yard, I decided to tackle one of the household jobs I hate the most—cleaning the silverware. Not that I was expecting to host a large formal dinner party in the immediate future. Although perhaps when Jim was released from prison, I would.

  Stop that, Carol.

  The only good thing about cleaning silver is that you can see what you’ve accomplished. It’s extremely satisfying, in a basic kind of way. I was admiring the gleam I’d put on a sterling silver tray we’d received for a wedding present—and never used—when the phone finally rang. It was Nancy.

  “Want to take a ride with me?” she asked. “We’re going to meet the mystery woman. She’s expecting us at one o’clock.”

  “What? You found out who she is?”

  “Of course I did. How could you ever doubt me? That agent I told you about earlier turned out to be a gold mine of information. She rented a house in Westfield to a woman who answered your description of Rhodes’s wife. I called the phone number the agent gave me, and the woman couldn’t have been nicer. Her name is Grace Retuccio. I’ll tell you more when I pick you up. Now, get moving. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. We can pick up lunch on the way.”

  “I admit it. I am very impressed,” I said, talking louder than usual to be heard above the wind blowing me to bits.

  Nancy and I were in her red Mercedes convertible with the top down, speeding along Route 15 toward Westfield. She’s forever reminding me that one of the perks of being a real estate agent is having a great car, which, conveniently, can also be taken as a tax deduction.

  “Who is she, where is she from, and how did you get her to agree to see us?”

  “When you’re a real estate agent, you can do almost anything,” bragged Nancy.

  “I gave her a cock and bull story about how real estate agents always want to be sure their clients are happy in their new home. That part is true. When a client buys a house, we always give them a gift. But we never bother to do that with people who rent.”