On the Hook

by Betty Hechtman

  I was back inside in no time and went down the stairs to where I’d left the ring. It was gone. I listened for a moment and heard movement on the lower floor. I followed the sound to the scene of the crime and got there just as the sliding-glass door opened. I rushed forward and grabbed at the figure.

  I thought I’d grabbed a shirt, but I heard a yelp as the person pulled free and I was left with a handful of hair. I didn’t have to see the color; I knew it was Lara-Ann’s wavy, glorious gray mane. She was on the patio before I could stop her, and I saw her raise her arm as she threw something off the side.

  “You’re wasting your time. The ring’s gone. There’s nothing to connect me with Tim’s death,” she said as she rushed to the gate on the patio that led to the stairway.

  But I was on her like butter on toast and made a grab for her. It backfired as she whirled around, grabbed me, and pushed me face first against the metal gate. As my arms were pressed against the metal crossbars, my cell phone fell out of my hand and clattered down the stairway.

  “That really worked,” she said, half to herself. “It’s from the Miss Miniver Mysteries.”

  As if I cared. I tried to move, but she had leverage on her side as she pressed all of her body weight against me.

  There had to be a way out, I just needed some time to figure it out, and in the meantime I wanted to distract her.

  “Your daughter is Paisley Wilson.” I’d finally recognized the name on my watch. “Paisley is Cauli Flower. That explains why she looked familiar when I saw her standing outside the bookstore. I don’t get it. She was one of Timothy’s successes.”

  “Not if you ask her,” Lara-Ann said. “She thinks he ruined her career and her life.”

  I felt Lara-Ann move her head around, and it occurred to me that she was trying to figure out her next move, no doubt thinking through all the books she’d read. It seemed to be to my benefit to keep her talking.

  “But she’s in a successful commercial,” I said.

  “You would think that would make her happy. Not my daughter. All I ever wanted to do was help her. That’s why I went to hear Tim give that talk at the community college. She desperately wanted to be an actor, and I thought I could pick up some useful information. I talked to Tim afterwards and told him about her. I was thrilled when he agreed to meet her. He saw her star quality right away and offered to be her acting coach for almost no charge. The deal was that if she became successful, he could use her as a testament to his abilities. All she really needed was a little polish and some help getting through the entertainment business maze. In no time, he had her going to auditions.”

  I couldn’t see Lara-Ann’s face, but she grunted as if she was angry about something.

  “If The Girls’ Club hadn’t come on the air and been an instant hit, none of this would have happened.” Lara-Ann must have realized that what she said made no sense to me. I did know about the show, though. Deana had talked longingly about wishing she could have played the lead.

  Lara-Ann explained that the very first audition Paisley had gone on was for the pilot for the show. “As soon as she saw that the storyline was about a woman her age trying to run a startup in Silicon Valley, she wanted the job in the worst way, even though there was no guarantee that the pilot would even get picked up. While she waited for a callback, Tim took her to audition for Cauli Flower. Paisley wasn’t interested. She didn’t think commercials were really acting. They made her an offer right away. She was exactly what the company’s owner had pictured. She stalled about taking it, hoping she’d get a callback from the show. Tim kept pushing her to take the commercial, and he told me there was no reason she couldn’t do both if the show offered her a part. When she still wouldn’t agree, he got me to help talk her into taking it. A bird in the hand and all. It seemed great to me. She’d make money and get exposure.”

  I felt Lara-Ann’s shoulders drop. Was this the chance for me to make my move? Before I could do anything, she’d shifted her weight again and I couldn’t move. I needed to have a plan ready so when the moment arrived I could take advantage of it. It was hard to think with the metal bar pressing across my chest. The only positive was that she seemed anxious to tell her story, which kept her occupied.

  “I thought I was doing a good thing. They filmed the commercial and it started to air. I’m sure you’ve seen it. And then we heard from The Girls’ Club; they wanted Paisley to come back in. She read for them again, and they were all set to make her an offer until they realized she was Cauli Flower. They couldn’t have her star in their drama if all anybody was going to think about was that she was the raspy-voiced girl in green dancing around broccoli, and that was the end of it.” Her voice grew more forceful. “Tim had to know that could happen. If he’d told me, I never would have…” Her voice trailed off, and she blew out her breath.

  “Paisley kept up her end of the bargain. He used her to advertise his coaching business and workshops. She even went and talked to some of his students. But she snapped when The Girls’ Club started to air this month. It was an instant hit and became the show that everyone was talking about. All I heard from Paisley was that it could have been her and that it was Tim’s fault. She started using drugs again. She fired the agent Tim got her together with. Then she told me she wasn’t going to help him anymore and that I had to tell him she wouldn’t be a special guest at the class he was giving at the community college. She blamed me for getting her involved with him in the first place.”

  “And Timothy didn’t take it well?” I asked.

  “I called him and told him what she said. He laughed and said no way was he letting her out of the agreement.”

  “Did you have some kind of contract?”

  She laughed mirthlessly. “A contract could be gotten out of. He had something more. He said we should talk in person. When he said he had an offer I couldn’t refuse, I knew exactly what he meant.”

  She went into the logistics, sounding proud of how clever she thought she’d been. She knew all about his drink habit and had come prepared for their meeting. She’d gotten the idea of the ring from a mystery she’d read, which came as no surprise. “I didn’t wait for him to finish the drink. I turned the AC on high when I left. I didn’t realize the ring was gone until I got home.”

  She spoke with particular pride when she got to how she’d brought up the idea of the ring to the crochet group. She’d overheard enough to know I was looking into Timothy’s death and thought it would eliminate her as a suspect. Yes, she had left the drink for me and the note on my car in hopes that I’d stop nosing around. It turned out she didn’t even know Deana and had just worn the hat to throw a shadow on her face, like Countess Mara in Death’s Day Off. The ring being too big hadn’t seemed like a problem; she had put yarn around it to make it smaller, though it had turned out to still not be small enough. “I overheard you talking to Adele and that other woman, and I saw my chance to get the ring back.”

  “You’re the one who told the cops I took the scarf with me,” I said.

  “I wasn’t sure how it fit in, but I’d seen you put it in your bag, and I heard that detective asking Adele about it. I figured it might be a way to get you in trouble so you would lay off the amateur investigating. I pulled her aside on her way out and told her what I’d seen,” she said, sounding pleased with herself.

  I felt her shift her position, as if she’d made some kind of decision.

  “I suppose you want to know what the offer was. I might as well tell you now that I know you’ll be keeping it to yourself,” she said, making me uneasy. I was going to tell her that it was her business and I really didn’t need to know, but she had already started talking.

  “It wasn’t exactly an offer; that was just his weird way of putting it. I told you that Tim wanted Paisley to take the commercial and wanted me to talk her into it. That’s when the truth came out. He had somehow gotten himself in the middle of the deal and stood to make some nice money if she did the commercial. He offered to sp
lit it with me if I got her to do it. The deal was that Paisley would never find out.” She stopped to take a deep breath. “And Tim’s so-called offer was that unless I got her to show up at the class and do whatever he wanted, he’d tell Paisley I’d sold her out. She would never forgive me and cut me out of her life. I couldn’t let him hold that over me. Who knows what he would have tried to get me to talk her into next. Porn?” she said in an angry tone.

  She was silent after that, and I felt her body tense as if she was about to make a move. When she said I’d be keeping what she told me to myself, her meaning had been pretty clear. I felt her arm searching for the gate release, and she mumbled something about The Case of the Killer Garden, and that’s when I figured out her plan. She was going to let the gate swing open and I’d go hurtling down the steep concrete stairs right into the bougainvillea vines growing all over the bottom gate. From here the vines looked like a dark mass, but beneath the leaves and flowers lurked thorns that were like swords I’d become impaled on. It was not how I intended to end my days.

  I heard the gate start to creak. It was now or never. My plan came together in a split second as I realized I had a weapon after all. Lara-Ann was momentarily distracted, and I was able to move my arm between the vertical bars on the gate. Now that my arm was free, I slipped my hand in my pocket and got ready to act. I swung my arm back and shoved the metal barrel, hoping to make contact with her body.

  I knew I’d succeeded when I heard her make an oof sound of surprise, and I ordered her to get her hand off the gate and move back.

  “I never thought of you as gun person,” she said, swallowing a few times.

  “Well, we’re even, because I didn’t think of you as a murderer. Now move.”

  I ordered her to go inside as I pushed the metal barrel against her back. I stayed on top of her as we went back through the lower floor. I was right behind her as I nudged her up the stairs. We were just at the top when the double front doors flew open and a bunch of cops charged in with their guns pointed at us. Then someone flipped on the lights. Detective Heather stepped around the uniforms.

  “She’s got a gun,” Lara-Ann yelled.

  Barry came in and saw me with my hand pressed against Lara-Ann’s back. He shook his head in disbelief as he told me to drop it. “You’re into guns now?”

  The metal hit the floor with a clatter, and as he bent to retrieve it, he started to laugh as he held up the large hook holder.

  Lara-Ann saw it and her face erupted in anger. “But you said it was a gun.”

  “No, you did,” I said with a shrug.

  Lara-Ann didn’t miss a beat before she started to make up a story straight out of one of the mystery books she was always reading. How I was an overzealous amateur sleuth who had convinced her to come with me while I looked for evidence to get myself off the hook and then had turned on her.

  “Part of that is right,” I said. “I did come here about some evidence that ties Timothy Clark’s death to the killer, which, it turns out, is her.”

  Lara-Ann rolled her eyes. “That’s ridiculous. There’s nothing to prove it.”

  “Really?” I said, and then I took out a plastic bag with a silver ring inside from my pocket.

  “What?” she yelled. “But I threw it down the hill.”

  “Yes, you threw a ring. The Average Joe’s Guide to Criminal Investigation says you shouldn’t leave things to chance. I wasn’t sure my sting plan would work, so I hedged my bet by using a decoy.”

  I held the plastic bag out to Barry. “You ought to find traces of cyanide in the compartment along with her fingerprints. There might be a few of Elise Belmont’s as well, but that’s another story.”

  “Are you going to tell me how you’re involved with all of this now?” Barry asked.

  “I plead the fifth,” I said.

  “I’ve heard enough of this ‘she said, she said’ business,” Detective Heather said. She directed Barry to take Lara-Ann in one corner of the living room while Detective Heather took me to another. She pulled out a notebook and had just asked me to explain why I was there when the front door opened again and Logan Belmont charged in. He looked around at everyone and put his hands over his face in dismay.

  Apparently, he’d gotten a call from the same neighbor who’d called him before to report that someone suspicious was fumbling with the front door and then had gone inside. He’d notified the police and then come over himself to see what was going on.

  I was glad for the distraction, because I was still trying to figure out how to explain my presence without giving away everyone’s secrets. But the distraction didn’t last, and Detective Heather repeated her question and made it clear that she wasn’t going to take any nonsense from me. Then the front door opened again and this time Elise came in.

  “What are you doing here?” her husband said.

  “You might as well know that I got my license,” she said. “I showed the house to Molly and an undisclosed client—who still might make an offer on the house. I had hoped to prove my value by selling a couple of houses before I told you, and then I hoped you would see that we’d make a good team. Molly is completely blameless. It’s not her fault. We didn’t know that Timothy was dead when we were here the first time. And I moved the ring on the steps to keep clients from tripping over it. I didn’t know it was the murder weapon.”

  Logan seemed uneasy as he looked at his wife. “There’s something I need to tell you, too.”

  Detective Heather shook her head in annoyance and sent the two of them to another corner of the living room, along with one of the uniforms carrying a clipboard.

  Detective Heather turned back to me and started to repeat her question, but then she threw up her hands and called across the room to Barry. “She’s too much trouble. Let’s switch.”

  Lara-Ann took my place and I rejoined Barry, who was stationed at the granite counter which served as the separation between the main room and the kitchen.

  “You heard what Elise said. Are we in trouble?”

  “It will be up to the district attorney if they want to charge you and your friends with anything, but since you were here with Elise, who is a licensed real estate agent who claims she was showing you the house, you didn’t break and enter.” He stopped. “I get it now why you wouldn’t talk. You were covering for your friends. I can only guess who the undisclosed one was. Right now the issue is how you happened to be here tonight and ended up with a ring that might be the murder weapon.” He looked at me with a pointed stare. “And if we can do this in statements instead of your usual answering with a question, it will go a lot better.”

  “Okay, but I thought you were off this case,” I said.

  Barry made a face. “Even your statements come out like questions. I wasn’t off the case, just off the part that involved you,” he said.

  “But even so, here we are.” I smiled at him, and he gave me his serious cop face in return.

  “Yes, here we are, and let’s deal with this so we can all go home. If you could just answer the question.”

  “I don’t think you really want to know,” I said.

  The serious cop face finally cracked and he looked frustrated. “It appears to me that you were here tonight to look at this house with your real estate agent and you just happened to have a big hollow crochet hook that you pretended was a gun because you found an intruder in the house.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said.

  “And the ring in the plastic bag?” he asked.

  “It was on the stairs and I didn’t want anybody to trip on it, so I put it in the bag.”

  I looked at him to see if he was going to accept the answer. He was sort of shaking his head when he wrote it down, but then, after taking the ring, he let me leave. I noticed that Lara-Ann was still there.

  I didn’t find out until the next day that Lara-Ann had fallen for the “Why don’t you tell me what happened so we can straighten it all out” nonsense and ended up confessing to putting the pois
on in Timothy’s pink squirrel. She must have been surprised when she’d been sent straight to jail. The ring did have her fingerprints on it and there was also residue of cyanide. She was eventually charged with first-degree murder because it was premeditated. The jury didn’t buy her story—straight out of one of her mysteries—that Timothy had been acting like a Svengali with Paisley and she was trying to save her daughter. She was sent to prison, where she acted like a mother hen to several younger inmates and had plenty of time to read mysteries.

  Paisley was devastated when she realized her own mother had used her. At the same time, she found out that the vegetable company was replacing her with an animated fairy. She hit bottom and found a reserve in herself and pulled herself together. She got off drugs and used whatever connections she had to make a new start. Eventually she got her shot at a drama and realized her dream of being a serious actor.

  Alexandra’s idea for the human voodoo doll never went anywhere, and her beach movie bombed, but her Babes Behind Bars: The Musical became a campy hit, leading to numerous sequels.

  Mikey got the Wonder Man gig at Universal and became a real superhero when he jumped on a runaway tram and saved everyone. A studio exec happened to be on the tram with his family. He was so impressed with Mikey that he arranged for him to star in the next Steel Man movie. Mikey was thrilled.

  Sonia started taking acting classes at the community college. She was all about the journey, not the destination.

  After posting Leo’s before and after pictures on social media, Brett was besieged by customers wanting his services. The story made the news and he was offered a reality show.

  Deana didn’t get the drug commercial, but she was a standout in the equity waiver production. She got more chances to do small theater plays and collected lots of good reviews. She kept hoping it would lead to something bigger.