by Rae Davies
Muttering threats at my brother’s beloved pet, I lowered her to her big orange feet and stepped back. She turned to glare at me, then hopped one by one down the steps. Peter waited until we were even with him and then joined us in our slow, jerky descent.
At the landing to the main floor, Pauline picked at her feathers with her beak while Peter and I stood in an awkward silence.
“I can’t tell you—” he began.
I held up a hand. We’d been here before. And as much as I would have loved for him to betray the department and tell me every little secret that Stone wouldn’t, I understood.
He nodded, accepting my acceptance. “I understand Jeremy called you.” He smiled in a kids will do the darndest things kind of way. “I can tell him you can’t make it after all.”
Mid-way to some major warm fuzzy feelings of my own, I stiffened. “Wait. What?”
“The cattle drive? I’ll tell him you have another commitment.”
“But I don’t.”
His brows drew together. “You can’t drive cattle.”
“How do you know?”
“You can’t ride a horse.”
“You don’t know everything about me. I’ve ridden a horse before.”
“You have? When?” His smile was still there, more amused and more annoying.
“It doesn’t matter. I have.” Realizing Pauline’s leash had gone slack, I looked around for her. She’d hopped back up two steps and now stood watching me from her approved height with undisguised interest.
“It isn’t like riding a bike, and it isn’t just riding. If you don’t know what you are doing, you could get hurt, or get someone else hurt.”
“I’m not planning on playing cowboy. I’m just riding a horse somewhere out of the way so Jeremy and Alphie can have their moment.”
“Out of the way?” His expression said he didn’t believe me.
What else was new?
“Yes. Out of the way.” I pulled myself up to my full five foot three inches of height. “I can do that.”
“Maybe.” He stared at me, trying to get me to break. But I was stronger than that. I lifted my eyebrows and tried to look haughty.
“Fine.”
He sounded resigned. I’d won. I smiled.
“I’ll talk to Danes about getting you a calm horse.”
“Jeremy has a horse for me,” I informed him.
“Really? Which one?”
I swallowed. “Pokey.”
“Pokey? The pony?” He laughed out loud.
My pride bristled. “He wants me to ride him.”
Still laughing, he waved his hand in front of his face. “At least you won’t have far to fall.”
Realizing if I wanted to leave with any dignity intact at all, I needed to leave now, I walked to the steps and shoved my hands under Pauline’s wings to scoop her up.
She squawked and honked and flapped her wings. I held her at arms’ length in front of me and walked toward the door. Peter, taking a break from his mirth, shoved the door open and let me walk through.
I kept walking, not stopping for Stone or George or any of the other officers who seemed to have gathered in the lobby just to see me exit.
Head high and goose complaining, I stomped out of the building and back to my car.
Chapter 18
The next day, I got up, undecided what I was going to do. I should return to the shop and see what Betty and Phyllis had been up to, but just the thought made my head ache.
Maybe if I waited long enough, they would clear out the shop, clear up their fight, and make me a wagon train-load of money.
Or maybe they would kill each other and burn down Dusty Deals to destroy the evidence.
It was really a fifty/fifty proposition.
Thinking of the shop and the merchandise that was crowding it reminded me of another possible suspect that I hadn’t followed up on yet. Carl Mack.
I got Carl on the phone and, after assuring him that the best merchandise was definitely stored in Rhonda’s garage, agreed to meet him there in half an hour. Then, after a quick call to Rhonda warning her that Carl and I would be rooting through her garage in a bit, I put Pauline in the laundry room, left Kiska with the run of the rest of the house, and headed into town.
When I pulled into the alley behind Rhonda’s house, Carl was already there, rising up on his tiptoes to look in through the windows.
“Are those seats I see?” he asked, sounding every bit as excited as I’d expected.
I took a moment to let the pride of my find wash over me, then motioned for him to step back as I opened the garage door. He rushed inside with the enthusiasm of a malamute let loose in a meat market.
“How many of these do you have?” he asked, walking around the row of seats.
“What you see here and maybe a few more.” I had no idea if Betty had managed to sell any yet. Actually, now that I thought about it, I was surprised she hadn’t already contacted Carl.
“Did Betty call you?” I asked.
“No, but I’ve been out of town. I had to work some contacts to convince them of the importance of buying the Antlers now that it’s available.”
“So you are going to buy it?”
“Of course. I just hope it won’t cost too much to undo what that woman did to the place.” His voice was laden with disgust. He looked up at me, apologetic. “May she rest in peace.”
I nodded. I wasn’t big on voicing false feelings of love just because someone had passed over to whatever side awaited them. Not that I sat around taking advantage of their absence by bad mouthing them either, but there really wasn’t much good that could be said about what Tiffany had done to the Antlers, aside from maybe that her restaurant had kept the place from being razed.
“Did it surprise you that Danes was willing to sell? He did just buy and renovate the building.”
“Renovate.” Carl snorted. “Desecrate is more accurate.”
I didn’t think an old movie theater quite rated the use of the word desecrate, but I didn’t argue.
“But no, it didn’t surprise me that Danes was willing to sell. Why he wanted to buy it in the first place, is what I wondered. I was this close...” Carl held his thumb and index finger about a quarter inch apart. “...from having the money, and then, out of nowhere, comes some rich rancher. And the Antlers is gone.” Shaking his head, he picked up a stack of playbills and started sorting through them.
I, of course, now suspected that Danes’ interest in the building had a lot less to do with an investment and a lot more to do with tucking his girlfriend away somewhere close enough to visit, but out of his wife’s normal path.
I shuffled through a few of the playbills myself, planning my next question. “The night was crazy, wasn’t it?”
Carl, head deep inside a cabinet that last I’d seen had been in my shop, mumbled something that sounded affirmative in reply.
“What did you do afterward?” I asked, casually as I could.
He stood up. Cobwebs coated his head like a brides’ veil. Unaware of this new accessory, he shoved a toilet out of his way and dove deeper into the garage. “I stayed for a while. After seeing what had been done to the place, I couldn’t just leave. Plus, after the protest soured the occasion, I thought perhaps Tiffany would be rethinking even opening. After that, I went home. I hadn’t eaten anything all day.”
“You talked to Tiffany?” I didn’t know why I was so surprised, except when Peter left, he hadn’t told me Carl was inside talking to or waiting to talk to the chef. But then he never told me anything important. It was like he didn’t even know what was important.
“Yes.” Carl frowned. “She was not very receptive.”
“To...?”
“To my advice that Helena might not be the best place for a restaurant like hers.”
Fancy that, woman harassed by protesters didn’t embrace strange man’s advice that she close up shop.
“I also asked if she knew what had happened to the original furn
ishings of the Antlers.”
“And she didn’t tell you?”
“No.” His outrage was palpable. “She brushed me off completely, like I was bothering her and these things...” He held up his hands, indicating the treasures that surrounded us. “...didn’t matter.”
I shook my head. “Shocking.”
He placed his hands on his hips. “I know.”
After a shared moment of silence for the less informed and appreciative of history, I pushed on. “When you talked to her, did you notice anything funny about her?”
“Funny? You mean besides her taste?”
Carl seemed to have forgotten the whole “may she rest in peace” thing.
“Like how she was acting. Daniel said he saw her later and that she was a bit... out of it.”
Carl tilted his head and pursed his lips. “She seemed fine to me. Bitchy, but fine.”
Yep, not speaking evil of the dead had left the building.
“She was checking her phone the entire time I was talking with her. I hate it when people do that. It is so rude.”
Since I was more at risk of not checking my phone for fear my mother might have called or texted, I felt safe to nod in agreement. “What was she doing?”
“Waiting for a call, I think. She was leaving a message for someone when I walked up. I don’t know who it was, but she wasn’t any friendlier to them than she was to me.”
“What time was this? Do you remember?”
Busy examining an elk head mount, he didn’t question my interest. “It was nine when I got home. So a little before that.”
If I could believe everyone who I’d talked with, Daniel had seen Tiffany with dilated eyes a few hours after the opening, and by midnight or soon following, she was dead.
Had whoever she called brought her the drugs that killed her? Or intentionally given her something that killed her?
And when exactly had Daniel talked to her? Knowing that would pin things down more.
Damn my luck. I was going to have to visit with the reporter again.
o0o
I left Carl in Rhonda’s garage, sorting through what he did and didn’t want, and headed to the hospital. When I got there, I discovered Daniel had been released and was already back at work at the paper.
Maybe he was truly a wonder boy. Or maybe Ted had been Ted and harassed him back to work. Either way, I knew where to find him.
Sure enough, he was at his desk, looking only slightly less green than when I’d seen him a couple of days earlier.
He greeted me with a scowl. “I don’t have time for you.”
“Glad to see you’re back to your old self.” I plopped down on a chair that sat next to his desk.
“My phone and notebook are still missing. You haven’t seen them have you?”
I’d taken the wrath of the EMT receptionist, and this was the thanks I got? I stuttered out something that I hoped showed my outrage.
He shrugged off my response. “Well, someone has them.”
“Or not. They probably threw your notes away by now.”
He gave me a sour look. “Thanks.”
I started to respond with a flippant “No problem” before remembering that I was here to get information out of him and, fun as it was, provoking him would not help my cause. Daniel was difficult like that.
I shifted in my chair, changing my posture from arrogant to diffident. “Maybe I can help.”
He set the stack of papers he’d been holding down onto his keyboard. “You?”
“Well, I can’t find your phone. I’ve already tried that.” I shared my experiences with the EMT receptionist and George.
His eyes narrowed, but only in a slightly suspicious way.
“And so far as the notes, sometimes going over things helps me remember.”
His eyes narrowed more. “Like what?”
He was onto me. I sighed. “I want to know what time it was when you saw Tiffany.”
“You do...?” I could see his mind working, see him plotting. “And why is that?”
I did some mental finger tapping, weighing how much to tell him to get the information that I wanted. Finally, I decided I needed the time too much to play coy. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t play to his ego.
“I think you’re right.”
His eyes rounded. “You do?”
I waved my hand to cut off what I guessed he was thinking. “Not about Ben, but about Tiffany. I think she took an overdose or something.”
His smile went beyond gloating. “And why do you think that?”
I hesitated. He had to know that Ben had been arrested, but he probably didn’t know as much as I did about why. Not that I knew that much.
“They found something in his trailer, didn’t they?” he asked.
My mouth fell open. I closed it as quickly as I could.
“What was it? Drugs or something else?” He dug around on his desk and found a notepad.
“I... how do you know they found something?”
He gave me a you-have-to-be-kidding look. “They towed his trailer. They wouldn’t do that unless they’d found something and were looking for more.”
Oh yeah.
“Plus, I saw the autopsy report.” His superior look would have been annoying if I hadn’t been so interested in what he’d learned.
“You saw it? What did it say?”
His look shifted down a level. “Well, I didn’t see it, but I talked to someone who had.”
Close enough for me. “And?”
“And it wasn’t natural causes. She was poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” That wasn’t overdose, was it?
“But it could still be drugs,” he added, a little too quickly in my opinion, like he wanted my brother to be a drug dealer. Which, to be honest, for some reason I guessed that he did.
Even considering that, I felt better now about sharing what I knew. There was, after all, a code of sorts for the exchange of information.
I told him about my conversation with Carl.
“She wasn’t calling Ben,” I added.
“How do you know?”
“He didn’t know her, and he doesn’t have a phone.”
Daniel looked a bit put out by the second detail. “She could have called someone else’s phone to get a hold of him.”
I gave him a “really?” look.
“Okay, that’s stretching it, but I don’t think her making a phone call acquits your brother.”
“So, what time did you see her?”
He twisted his lips. I could see he was considering the same code I’d considered earlier. Finally, he came to the same conclusion I had and shared. “It was probably around eleven. I was walking home from the paper and she was standing out in front of her restaurant.”
“Eleven? You didn’t talk to her right after the protest?”
He pointed at his chest. “Crime. Remember?”
That’s right. As I had pointed out when he turned up at the Capitol, protests weren’t his beat. Not that protests were anyone’s beat in Helena.
“Actually, I missed the protest part. I was in East Helena. One of the business reporters got that story.”
Of course, because he was there covering the opening.
“But when I saw her standing in front of the restaurant...”
His natural nose for a bigger story led him to talk to her, and his nose had been right, if an hour or so early.
“Why was she standing in front of her apartment at eleven at night?” I asked.
“She didn’t say, but, like I said, she wasn’t all with it either.”
“Do you think she was still waiting for someone?”
Had she overdosed on her own and then wandered up to Ben’s van? Had that all been coincidence?
o0o
Pondering what Daniel had shared, I left the paper and returned to Dusty Deals.
I was greeted by a scene from The Brady Bunch—the one where Bobby and Peter divide their room in two with a piece of tap
e on the floor.
Except instead of tape there was a six inch stripe of white paint breaking Dusty Deals into two distinctly different shops.
To accommodate the new layout, a central check out area had been added, complete with two cash registers, one for each half.
I stopped, one foot in post-modern and one foot in Victorian West. “What have you done?”
Betty and Phyllis, both standing poised by the front door, ready to grab the next innocent person to enter and drag them to their side, turned to face me.
Betty flipped her yellow boa over her shoulder. “You said to settle things, and we did.”
Phyllis, wearing a sheath mini that reminded me a lot of something I’d seen on Mad Men, patted her hair—which had taken on a distinctly bouffant look today—and added, “Yes, this is much nicer. Much easier for my customers to find the quality merchandise on my side.”
“But... there’s a line. Down the middle of my store.”
They blinked at me, then turned back to the door as if I wasn’t even there.
And maybe I wasn’t. Maybe this was all part of a surreal dream. I picked up an antique advertising ice pick and poked myself in the thigh.
Nope. I was awake.
Rubbing my self-inflicted wound, I hobbled to my office and pulled out the notes that I’d made earlier.
I wrote down my new information, mainly the order of events leading up to Tiffany’s death.
7 p.m. - Restaurant opens
8 p.m. - Protest starts
8:45 p.m. or so - Protesters, Peter, and I leave.
9 p.m. - Carl talks to Tiffany and gets impression she is waiting for a call from someone else.
11 p.m. - Daniel sees Tiffany and thinks she is “on” something.
12 p.m. - Tiffany dies.
8 a.m. - I find Tiffany under Ben’s van.
According to Ben, he was with the other HA! members and Rhonda from nine that night until the next morning when I found him at the grocery. That should have been enough to give him an alibi, except according to him, everyone had been asleep.
But what if they weren’t? Hope could have snuck out, and Ben wouldn’t have known.
Then there was the question of what the police had found in the Egg. It wasn’t a weapon. George had told me that. But if Daniel was right, they wouldn’t have been looking for a weapon, they would have been looking for drugs or poison or... I couldn’t think of anything else.
