by Sharon Pape
The door was opened by a man in his forties, whose cheeks had begun the downward slide into jowls, even as his creeping paunch threatened to overlap his belt.
“Mr. Oberlin,” she said holding out her hand, “I’m Rory McCain.”
Oberlin gave her hand a perfunctory shake and stepped back so that she could enter. “We’ll talk in the living room, if that’s all right.”
Although his words formed a question, there was no room for debate in his tone. She followed him through an oversized doorway to the left of the entry hall. The living room was large and softly lit by the lowering sun and a wash of pink light from a Tiffany lamp. A highly polished white baby grand piano occupied the far corner of the room. The walls, rugs and fabrics were all in shades of white and cream, the neutral tones providing the perfect backdrop for the stunning collection of artwork and antiques that Gail and her almost ex had amassed.
“Have a seat,” David Oberlin said, gesturing to the two white silk sofas that faced each other in the center of the room. Rory chose the one that faced away from the windows so that the sun wouldn’t be in her eyes. She wanted to be able to read his expressions. She set her purse on the floor beside her and dug into the leather folio for her notes and a pen. In keeping with the story she’d told him, she’d rewritten Mac’s somewhat legible notes into a form that no one else could possibly read. Since it was doubtful that Oberlin had paid attention to Mac’s handwriting during their only meeting, she didn’t anticipate any problems.
“Okay, Ms. McCain, I’m listening,” Oberlin said. He’d taken a seat across from her and seemed completely at ease, not at all like a man with something to hide. Of course, the odds were that he actually had nothing to hide. The only reason Rory was even bothering to interview him herself was that Mac had taught her if you wanted to find a needle in a haystack, you had to sift through every last straw of hay. At the time of Mac’s death, most of this particular haystack was still very much intact.
“Hmm,” Rory murmured, frowning at her phony notes for a minute. “Oh yes.” She looked up with an apologetic smile. “My uncle’s notes seem to indicate that you and your wife were estranged.”
“Yes, for several months.”
“And she’d started divorce proceedings?”
“Not yet, but we’d both agreed that was the next logical step.”
“Right,” Rory said, taking pains to make her new notes larger and easier to read, so that even from his seat Oberlin would see the difference. “Okay,” she said, biting her lower lip to underscore the difficulty of deciphering Mac’s writing.
“Please bear with me; I can’t make out much of this next paragraph.” She let another few moments pass as she pretended to study the words before her. “I think this says something about changing your wills or beneficiaries?”
“Actually there wasn’t time to do any of that before Gail died,” he acknowledged.
According to the police report he had been the number one “person of interest” until the coroner deemed Gail’s death an accident. At that point the investigation into David Oberlin had been shut down, along with the rest of the case. When Rory first read the report, she’d been struck by the size of the fortune he’d stood to lose once the divorce was final. Over a hundred million dollars made for a dandy motive.
“That was lucky,” she said, hoping the artless comment would catch him off guard.
Oberlin’s eyes narrowed; his jaw tightened.
For a moment Rory thought she’d pushed him too far. If he had killed his wife, he would certainly have no compunction about killing her. And if he made a move against her, she wouldn’t even have time to retrieve the .380 Walther that she’d tucked into the folio. What’s more, no one knew where she was, because she hadn’t wanted anyone to know, and the closest neighbors were acres away through dense, sound-baffling stands of oaks. She’d have to play out this scene that she’d set in motion and hope that he was guilty of nothing more than good luck.
“Oh my goodness,” she said sheepishly, hand to her mouth in feigned embarrassment. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Sure you did,” Oberlin said. But then his face relaxed into an unexpected smile. “Truth is you’re right. I didn’t think I’d see any of that money. I guess sometimes there’s justice in this crazy world.”
Rory smiled and bobbed her head in agreement. One thing was clear, if he was guilty, being acquitted by the coroner’s report had made him feel untouchable.
“I promise I won’t waste much more of your time,” she said, squinting at Mac’s notes again. “There seems to be something here about a Cathy?”
“Casey. Casey Landis,” he said soberly. He leaned forward and looked straight into Rory’s eyes. “Listen, Ms. McCain, my wife was married to her career. It was all she cared about. I was pretty much superfluous.” He shook his head with a sigh of disgust. “I think she was actually relieved when I met Casey and gave up trying to make our marriage work.”
Rory was struck by the honesty in his face and in his voice. Either he was telling the truth, or he was doing a better job of acting than she was.
“Okay. I guess what this says is that you were with Casey Landis the night your wife died.”
Before Oberlin could answer, an attractive blonde in her forties strode into the room. She moved with the poise of a woman who knew herself well and was confident in her abilities.
“Yes, he was with me,” she said defiantly, taking a seat beside Oberlin. “I’m Casey Landis.” She planted a hand possessively on Oberlin’s thigh. Rory noted the long tapered fingernails and the emerald-cut diamond on her left hand that had to weigh in at four carats minimum.
From where Rory was seated, she had a view of the entry hall and she hadn’t seen anyone come through the front door, so Casey had either come down the stairs or from a room at the rear of the house, possibly the kitchen.
“Nice to meet you.” She nodded in Casey’s direction, since she was no longer in hand-shaking range. At least Oberlin hadn’t gone for a girl half his age. That raised him a notch or two in Rory’s esteem. But she’d been planning to call on Casey at another time and preferably when she was alone. Interviewing a suspect with another suspect present was almost always a bad idea.
David Oberlin seemed as disgruntled as she was, although no doubt for a very different reason. It didn’t take a supersleuth to deduce that he had stationed his paramour close enough to hear their conversation without letting on that she was there. That way if Rory wanted to speak to her at a later date, their stories would be sure to mesh. Even if they weren’t guilty, conflicting stories might well raise some red flags and possibly tempt the police into reopening the case. And that was a situation even the most innocent of people wanted to avoid, trial by media pundits being a proven method of ruining one’s life.
Casey seemed oblivious to the effect her entrance had wrought in Oberlin. She was clearly not a woman who responded well to taking orders or to staying in the background.
“Ms. McCain,” she said, her blue eyes flashing with indignation, “the only reason David even agreed to this meeting is because he’s too nice a guy to turn anyone down.”
“I do realize that,” Rory said, “and I appreciate his help. I’m really just trying to put my uncle’s affairs in order.” Which was at least partially true.
Casey refused to be placated. “It’s no secret that Gail had plenty of enemies. Hell, I hardly knew her and I was glad to hear that she was dead. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was an accident. If you need someone to blame, then you’re going to have to round up Fate and put her on trial.”
“Take it easy, Case,” Oberlin said with an uncomfortable laugh. “I don’t think Ms. McCain is looking to put anyone on trial here.”
“Of course not,” Rory said lightly. She gathered her notes together and slid them into the folio. There was no point in staying there with Casey in guard-dog mode. She thanked Oberlin again and said her good-byes.
“Wow!�
�� she exhaled as she slid into her car. She’d pulled it off! She’d really pulled it off. Of course, it was unfortunate that Casey had interrupted the interview, but some things were simply not under her control. Besides, it had given her a chance to see how the two of them interacted. From the moment she’d laid eyes on Casey, she’d known that the woman was not only trying to protect her man, but she was also trying to protect the great wealth he’d just inherited. Wealth that would soon become hers as well. Rory was willing to take bets that the engagement ring on Casey’s perfectly manicured finger would soon be joined by an equally impressive wedding band. In her opinion David Oberlin was about to jump from the frying pan directly into the fire.
She pulled out of the driveway and started the winding descent down the hillside, her mind still racing as if she’d just downed a double espresso. She was beginning to understand Jeremy’s certainty that his sister had been murdered. She’d just begun to scratch the surface of the case and she already had two people with motive and opportunity and, according to the police report, only each other as alibis.
Rory had taken on the investigation as a goodwill gesture to Jeremy, but she had to admit that she’d found tonight’s little caper exhilarating. She hadn’t felt this challenged by her work in a long time. No, that wasn’t fair. She’d actually never felt this challenged by her work.
By the time she pulled into her own driveway, the last of the sun’s rays had been all but gobbled up by the horizon. The house loomed in front of her, dressed in murky shadows, compliments of a broken street lamp. Damn—she’d forgotten to leave a light on when she’d rushed off to work that morning. She certainly didn’t relish the thought of walking into that darkness, knowing that a sullen, moody ghost was waiting inside for her.
Chapter 11
Zeke was sitting on the staircase, third step from the bottom, like a parent awaiting the return of an overdue child, or a spouse the return of a loved one after a quarrel. But his expression was neither worried nor apologetic.
“You keep even worse hours than your uncle did,” he observed. Either he’d forgotten about his tantrum the previous evening, or he was pretending that it hadn’t happened. Not that it mattered to Rory. She’d had a long day on very little sleep, and now that the adrenalin rush from her meeting with Oberlin was ebbing away, all she wanted was some peace and quiet. She certainly had no desire to engage in verbal fisticuffs with the marshal.
“I didn’t know I was expected to punch a time clock,” she said as she walked past him.
She dropped her jacket, purse and folio onto the small upholstered bench that Mac had placed in the entry to facilitate the changing of footwear in bad weather. Then she kicked off her heels and padded barefoot down the hall to the kitchen.
She grabbed a peach from the refrigerator, eating it as she headed back to the staircase. On the way, she stopped to pull her notes out of the folio. Zeke was nowhere in sight. Just as well. Upstairs she turned into the study and booted up the computer. She wanted to write out her impressions from the interview for Jeremy while they were still fresh in her mind. When the monitor flashed to life, Mac’s icons covered half the screen. She found a strange comfort in seeing them there exactly as they’d been when she last visited Mac. Before she could start to wallow in melancholy, she opened the word processing program, pulled up a new page and started typing. Twenty minutes later she was about to read through her notes to see if she’d omitted anything important when a sharp whistle made her jump in her seat.
She swung her chair around in a one-eighty, trying to locate the source of the noise. Puzzled, she turned back to face the computer and found Zeke perched on the edge of the desk.
“How’s that for a warning signal?” he asked her. His expression was perfectly sober, but she could swear there was a touch of amusement in his voice.
“I appreciate the effort,” she said, trying to keep her own voice businesslike, “but a signal that’s supposed to avoid startling me shouldn’t actually make me levitate out of my chair.”
“You sure do startle easy.” Zeke laughed. It was a deep raspy sound, as if he was a little rusty in the laughter department. He was looking at Rory as if he expected her to start laughing along with him.
Rory tried to keep a straight face, determined to keep him from reducing her rules to a joke, but his laugh was infectious, and the circumstances were certainly absurd enough to be funny. Her lips twitched with the tug of a smile, and she was quickly overpowered by the laughter bubbling up inside her. She’d forgotten how remarkably good it felt.
“There you go,” Zeke said. “I was pretty darned sure you had at least one good laugh in you. You’re Mac’s niece after all and he had a mighty fine sense of humor.”
“He did.” Rory sighed, trying to regain her composure. “Look, I’m not trying to be difficult, but that whistle really won’t do.”
“I could see about tonin’ it down some or maybe find a different way to announce myself.”
“I’d appreciate that.” She turned back to the computer screen. It was all well and good to have a little fun, but the only way this strange living arrangement was going to work was if she remained the alpha dog.
She did her best to focus on the notes she’d written, which wasn’t all that easy with Zeke still sitting there, watching her.
“I don’t understand what’s so all fired fascinatin’ about that contraption,” he grumbled after several minutes.
Rory looked up at him. “I’m sure there were things in your time that I wouldn’t have understood.”
“I suppose as how that might be,” he said, vanishing from the front of the desk to stand beside her. “Mac tried to explain how it all works, but I can’t rightly say that I get it.”
“I use the damned thing and I hardly get it,” she said.
Zeke hunkered down to read the screen better. “Well now, I see you’re writin’ there about that Oberlin lady who fell down the stairs and cracked her skull open. So you’ve gone and taken on Mac’s old cases.”
“Just this one. Her brother’s convinced that she was murdered.”
“Interestin’ case,” Zeke said, straightening to his full height again. “Mac used to talk to me about the interestin’ ones. And I believe I was of some genuine help to him.”
“You were. He said so in his letter.”
Zeke smiled, clearly pleased by this revelation. He returned to his seat on the front edge of the desk. “I’d be glad to help you out same as I did for him.”
Rory wasn’t sure how he could help her, or for that matter how he’d been able to help Mac, given that modern investigative techniques were so far superior to what they were in Zeke’s day. But she had to admit that the idea of bouncing her thoughts off someone else had a certain appeal. In spite of how tired she was, she wound up giving him a detailed account of her meeting with David Oberlin and his fiancée, Casey Landis.
“I expect you’re gonna have to wait a good while before tryin’ to talk to Miss Casey again.”
“My thoughts exactly. If I wait long enough, she might think they’re off the hook, maybe slip and say something incriminating.”
“Of course, that’s assumin’ one or both of them is guilty. What’s your gut tellin’ you?”
“That’s the funny part.” Rory sighed, leaning back in the chair. “All that money is a great motive, and David probably knew she was working alone at that house, so they had opportunity, but somehow my gut isn’t convinced they did it.”
“If there’s one thing I learned in our kind of work, gut instinct counts for a lot more than folks these days are willin’ to allow. Back in my day we didn’t have all the bells and whistles. Hell, I don’t think I ever heard the word ‘forensic’ till I started workin’ with Mac. What with all the new-fangled testin’: DNA, toxicology, fingerprintin’ . . .”
“Wait a minute,” Rory said. “You must have had fingerprinting.”
“I do recall some talk about a fella over in Europe who claimed that no two p
eople had the same fingerprints. But I don’t see how you can be sure of that till you’ve gone and checked every single person’s prints.”
Rory smiled. “You have a point there.”
“Everybody’s so focused on the little picture these days that they go missin’ some of the important stuff. You gotta learn to trust your gut. We had instincts long before we had tests.”
“One of the things bothering me,” Rory said, warming to their dialogue, “is that David and Casey don’t have decent alibis. These are two bright, savvy people. If they were guilty they would have made sure they had foolproof ones.”
“Or they were countin’ on investigators thinkin’ just that.”
“Which would bring me back to square one.” Rory sighed again.
“For the time bein’. But as I recall, Mac was considerin’ some other suspects. You talk to any of them?”
“Not yet. What I really want to do is get back into the house where Gail died. But breaking in at night is out of the question, and I can’t accomplish anything with a real estate agent toddling around after me.”
“Well,” Zeke said, ‘if you can’t be there alone, the next best thing is to be there in a crowd. If the agent’s busy showin’ other folks around the house, that oughta get you some time on your own.”
Rory thought about that for a moment. “I guess I could check the newspapers for the next open house and hang out there in my car until I see other people go in.”
“Or you could put together a crowd of your own.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to get anyone else involved in this.” Her friends at work would probably be glad to help, but the more people who knew what she was up to, the riskier it was that someone would slip and say something that might compromise her job. As for her other friends, they were busy juggling jobs, husbands and babies. They hardly even had time to meet for coffee these days.
“It’s your call.” Zeke shrugged. “I’d help you out if I could.”
Rory wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, but she almost dissolved into laughter again as she pictured him in his homespun cowboy duds winking in and out as he made his way through the million-dollar house alongside a horrified real estate agent.
