Furniture Fatality in Las Vegas

by A. R. Winters

  Just before my shift ended, my thoughts turned toward my friend Stone.

  When I’d first become a private investigator and gotten my first case, Stone had been my mentor, and pretty soon he became my friend. He encouraged me, gave me advice, and helped me out. I’d always felt a strange spark between us, until one day we ended up kissing, and I thought we might have a future together.

  Unfortunately, the very next day, two large men in black suits showed up, claiming they were from the CIA and looking for Stone. After that, Stone disappeared without a trace—until I tracked down Stone’s CIA mentor, Johnson.

  Johnson told me that Stone had been set up, and that one of the men responsible for his disappearance, Eli Barsky, would be coming to Vegas soon. The two of us were going to run surveillance on Eli, and hopefully learn something about him; with any luck, if we could help clear Stone’s name, he could stop having to live in the shadows. Just before he told me all the details about Stone’s past, Johnson said he needed to rush off—leaving me in the dark.

  I hadn’t seen Johnson since the last time I’d talked to him a few days ago, and I wondered when I’d see him again. I was dying to know what exactly Stone had gotten himself into, and why he’d had to disappear.

  My shift ended just after nine in the morning, and I walked home slowly, hoping to run into Johnson in one of the alleys that I used as a shortcut back to my place. But nobody stepped out of the shadows to talk to me, and when I got home, I had still learned nothing new about Stone.

  Chapter Five

  It was almost eleven in the morning by the time I got dressed and headed over to Ian’s apartment.

  “I stayed up last night looking through that list of employees that Harry gave us,” said Ian. “But I didn’t really find anything.”

  “We can go through the list while we have breakfast,” I said. “And then we can make a plan of attack.”

  Ian nodded. “Glenn came by while you were sleeping and dropped off some cupcakes. They’re chocolate, with vanilla frosting.”

  “Mmm.” I went over to the box sitting on Ian’s countertop, opened the lid and peered inside. There were six delicious–looking cupcakes, and I found two plates and served Ian and me one each, while Ian made two cups of coffee.

  Snowflake watched us derisively as we got ready to eat the sugary treats. I could almost see the judgment in her eyes—”Why don’t you humans ever eat healthy breakfasts?”—and I found myself wishing she would stop looking at me that way.

  “I’m going to stop by the grocery store on our way home,” I heard myself saying, more to Snowflake than to Ian. “Everyone keeps saying it’s so important to have a healthy breakfast. I’ll get eggs, milk, yogurt, cereal and fruits.”

  “What about sausages and bacon? And jam and bread?”

  I squinched up my face thoughtfully. Snowflake blinked at me lazily, looking unimpressed, and I thought to myself that sausages and bacon would take quite a bit of effort to make in the morning. “Maybe we should start with milk and cereal, and see how we go from there.”

  Ian served Snowflake some of her cat food, and the two of us settled down on the sofa and munched on our cupcakes.

  “So, that list of all the employees Harry gave us,” Ian said. His phone buzzed, and he glanced at it briefly. “It’s only Cecilia—and I don’t want to talk to her. She’s been calling me all night.”

  I shrugged. “She’s one of your more complicated girlfriends.”

  “Anyway,” said Ian. “Back to the employees. There are four salespeople, who work shifts, and I looked up all their social media accounts. Two of them have their accounts set to private, but the other two seem like regular young people. All their photos seem to be about partying, eating out, and having fun. No obvious ‘I want to kill someone’ kind of statements.”

  I nodded. “Harry kept saying that Janice was unpopular at work, but I can’t imagine someone killing their coworker just because they didn’t like her. If you’re going to kill someone, you need a really good motive, and it’s usually a lot more personal than that.”

  Ian nodded. “I looked up the ex–husband too, but David Wilkerson doesn’t have a social media profile, and I couldn’t find anything about him online.”

  “We should start with him,” I said. “And what about Janice’s family?”

  “Both her parents passed away a few years ago. She’s got a sister who lives in New York, and a brother who lives in Michigan. Gina and Jerry.”

  “I’ll run their names through the PI database,” I said, finishing up my cupcake and staring at the empty wrapper in dismay. “And I’ll ask my contact at McCarran airport to check if they flew into Vegas or LA anytime recently.”

  Ian finished his cupcake and got up to help himself to another one.

  “You can’t have any more of those,” I said quickly, stopping him before he could reach in to grab one.

  Ian looked at me skeptically. “Is this part of your ‘eating a healthy breakfast’ thing? Because I think we should start tomorrow. Tomorrow is always the best time to start a healthier diet.”

  “No,” I said. “We need to leave some for Detective Elwood. We’ve gotta pay him a visit at the precinct and find out if the cops looked into Janice’s death at all. At the very least, they must’ve done an autopsy—Elwood might have something interesting to tell us.”

  Ian closed the lid on the box reluctantly, and I called Janice’s ex–husband as I sipped the last of my coffee.

  “I thought Janice’s death was an accident,” said David Wilkerson, once I’d explained to him who I was.

  “I’ve been hired by Janice’s boss to investigate what happened,” I explained. “He thinks that it might have been more than an accident, and since you knew Janice so well, I was wondering if you might tell me a bit more about her coworkers? Any enemies she might have had, what kind of person she was, if she had any close friends here, that kind of thing.”

  On the other end of the line, David let out an exasperated sigh. “Fine, you can come by once I’ve gotten home from work.”

  He reeled off his address, and I told him I’d come by at 5:30, before hanging up.

  Ian and I headed over to my apartment, where I ran the names of Janice’s brother and sister through my PI database, verifying that they did indeed live in New York and Michigan. Next, I called Adrian, my friend at the airport, and asked him to check flight records for the two.

  “I guess it’s time to visit Elwood,” said Ian. “What’re we doing after that?”

  I glanced at my watch. There was a long time before we needed to go talk to David, so I said, “We might as well talk to the employees at Betta Furniture, see what they say about Janice. But first, we need to get the box of cupcakes from your apartment—Elwood’s only happy to talk to me if I’ve brought him a treat or two.”

  Ian and I went back to his apartment, and Ian refilled Snowflake’s water bowl. I had just grabbed the box of cupcakes when there was a knock on the door.

  We both froze and glanced at each other, and from the hallway, a high–pitched, saccharine voice called out, “Iannikins! You haven’t been answering your phone, so I got worried about you. I know you must be home.”

  “I can’t let her in,” said Ian in a hoarse whisper. “If she comes inside, there’s no way I’ll be able to get rid of her.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Maybe it’s time you finally told her you’re not interested.”

  Ian’s face went all pale, and his eyes flooded with panic. “I can’t do that! I need to psych myself up and get prepared to be yelled at. I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good day by starting off like this.”

  In a crazy kind of way, I understood what Ian meant. I hated to start off my days with unpleasantness, so I decided to support Ian in his immature decision this one time. “Okay. But we can’t stay inside all day, and I don’t think she’s going to go away on her own.”

  “I’ll wear a disguise,” said Ian. “If I look completely different, she won’t bother me
. You can tell her that I’m a friend of Ian’s, and I’ll slip out without her bothering me.”

  I looked at Ian skeptically, but I couldn’t think of a better idea, so I watched as he rummaged through his bag of disguises and finally selected a thin brown mustache, thick–rimmed black glasses, and a wig with straight brown hair that came down almost to his ears.

  Ian tried everything on and turned to me. “How do I look?” He glanced at himself in the mirror and nodded, pleased. “I totally look like Brad Pitt.”

  I’d never met Brad Pitt in person, but I was pretty sure he didn’t look like Ian in a bad disguise. “I suppose you don’t look like yourself, and that’s the important thing.”

  The two of us stepped into the hallway, and immediately, Cecilia pounced on Ian, wrapping her arms around him in a tight hug.

  “Iannikins! I was starting to get worried. You weren’t answering your phone, and I miss you.”

  Ian disentangled himself gently from Cecilia and said, “No, you must be mistaken. I’m not Ian.”

  He turned around to lock his apartment door, and I said, “That’s right. That’s not Ian, it’s his brother, Brad Pittson.”

  Cecilia broke out into peals of laughter. “You two are so funny! And Iannikins, you look adorable in that wig. Although, I like you better with your red hair and no glasses.”

  Ian looked at me helplessly, and I felt my jaw dropping in surprise. I’d really believed that we could fool Cecilia with the disguise, but she was clearly smarter than we’d given her credit for.

  “Ah,” I finally managed to say, “the disguise is for work. Ian and I need to go and investigate the case we’re working on right now.”

  Cecilia grabbed Ian’s arm and pouted. “You’re just going to run away? I missed you so much last night. And you never answered your phone.”

  Ian shrugged. “The battery died.”

  As if on cue, his phone started ringing.

  Ian pulled up the phone and glanced at it sheepishly. “That’s my mom. I managed to charge the battery a few minutes ago.”

  For a moment, a flash of annoyance lit up Cecilia’s pretty blue eyes. I braced myself for an outburst, for her to tell Ian that he was a selfish pig and that she was so angry at him. But a split second later, the anger was gone from her eyes, replaced with a sweet hopefulness. “Of course. I understand. But what if I come along with you on your case? I won’t be any bother.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said firmly. “We signed a confidentiality agreement with our client, and we can’t let anyone else know about the case, even if it’s Ian’s future wife. I’m sure you can respect that about Ian’s job?”

  Cecilia seemed a little conflicted, but finally, she let go of Ian’s arm. “Of course. I completely understand about confidentiality. I’d never want my future husband to feel like he had to break the rules at work. So I’ll see you once your job’s over?”

  “Sure,” said Ian as he rushed with me into the elevator. “Can’t wait.”

  Chapter Six

  The Las Vegas Police Department was housed in a boring utilitarian brick building, and the inside was just as boring: gray carpets, blank white walls, and the permanent smell of industrial–strength air freshener.

  I’ve been to the station often enough that most of the cops now know me, so I nodded at the officer who was manning reception, and Ian and I headed straight to the open–plan work area where Elwood’s desk was housed.

  Detective Elwood was a short, chubby man with a perpetually grumpy expression. I’d first met him during one of my investigations, and we’d started off on the wrong foot. But by now, I’ve run into him often enough that I think he regards me with a grudging respect.

  Just a few months ago, the sight of me would make Elwood recoil instantly with a heavy scowl. However, a couple of visits to the precinct with a box of cupcakes meant that when Elwood looked up and saw me approaching, his first expression was one of curiosity, not annoyance. His eyes homed in on the plastic food container I was carrying, and his face split into a grin.

  The first words out of his mouth when Ian and I got to his desk were, “Are those cupcakes?”

  Elwood’s desk was strewn with half–finished paperwork, and there was a mug of coffee sitting to one side. I’ve never once seen him at the precinct without his mug of coffee, and his coffee is always the same—lukewarm, weak, and full of more cream and sugar than actual coffee.

  I placed the container on his desk and opened the lid to reveal the contents. “Right here.”

  Elwood made greedy noises, reached inside to grab one, and immediately closed the lid and hid the box in one of his desk drawers, all the better to prevent his coworkers from wanting to share. He bit into the deliciousness as Ian and I sat down opposite him and looked on enviously.

  For a few long seconds, we watched him eating and making a mess like a toddler who hadn’t yet learned food etiquette, and then Ian finally said to me, “You didn’t have to give him all the cupcakes. We could have left most of them for ourselves and just given him one.”

  “You clearly wanted my help,” said Elwood between bites. “I might not have felt too generous if you’d only brought me one cupcake.”

  “It’s for a case that’s been closed,” I said. “The files are already public record. I didn’t have to bring you any cupcakes at all.”

  Elwood chewed happily and shrugged. “You obviously wanted an expert opinion. Which case is it?”

  “Janice Wilkerson,” I said. “She died last Sunday, crushed under a flat–packed sofa at Betta Furniture.”

  Elwood finished his cupcake, and then he went off into the records room and returned with Janice’s file. He flipped through it before passing it over to us, and I skimmed it quickly.

  “I remember that the owner of Betta Furniture was here, asking us to look at it as a suspicious death,” said Elwood. “But as you can see from the files, the whole thing was just an accident.”

  I nodded and passed the file over to Ian so he could have a look. “The autopsy report said they didn’t find any traces of drugs in her system, or any kind of anesthetic on her hair or clothes.”

  Elwood nodded. “You can’t just kill someone by throwing a heavy sofa on them. They’d run and hide. The only way you could make them stay in place without physically restraining them, which would leave bruises and marks, was if they were drugged.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. “But just because they didn’t find any drugs in her system doesn’t mean she wasn’t given some kind of untraceable date rape drug.”

  “That’s always true, unfortunately,” admitted Elwood. “But really, it seems highly unlikely.”

  “The autopsy said she’d had a donut and a cup of coffee about an hour prior to her death, and it puts time of death as between nine p.m. and ten thirty p.m. Maybe someone drugged her food.”

  Elwood shrugged. “A donut and coffee sounds like a regular snack to me, nothing suspicious about that. Besides, as you’ve read in the report, the investigating officer talked to everyone who was close with Janice. She didn’t have any real friends here, or enemies, or any money or fortune worth stealing. There was no one with the motive, and as far as we can tell, there was no means or opportunity either.”

  “You thought Samantha Wells’s death was an accident,” I reminded him. “And look how that turned out.”

  Elwood shrugged. “So you got lucky with one case. The guy set out to commit the perfect murder, and you managed to be in the right place to figure things out. I know you guys even had your nanna help out.”

  “But we solved the case,” Ian reminded him. “That’s what counts. Even when all the clues pointed to Samantha’s death being an accident, it turned out that it really was a murder. Maybe we’ll find out the same thing about Janice’s death; maybe someone killed her so carefully that everyone’s thinking it’s an accident.”

  Chapter Seven

  Ian and I headed over to Betta Furniture. The shopping area looked completely different in the daytime�
��display windows glinting in the bright sunlight, employees wandering around, the occasional shopper going in or out of a store. It was midday on a Monday, so there were only a handful of cars in the main parking lot, but quite a few cars were clustered around the front of the building, near the fast–food restaurants.

  Betta Furniture was brightly lit and devoid of customers. There were two salespeople inside, and when Ian and I stepped in, one of them headed our way.

  He was a tall, lanky man with pasty skin and a receding hairline. His eyes were watery gray and his face was squinty, as though he was dealing with a permanent but minor stomachache.

  A forced smile was pasted onto his face, and when he spoke, his words were near–monotone. “Welcome to Betta Furniture, how are you today?”

  “You sound like you really hate your job,” said Ian.

  The man, whose name tag said John, looked taken aback. “I, uh, no,” he stammered. “I love working here.” He recovered quickly and forced the smile back onto his face. “And our furniture is really great. It’s affordable, and it’ll last you a lifetime. What exactly are you folks looking for today?”

  Ian shook his head, unconvinced by John’s spiel. “I worked in retail once, and I hated my boss. I’m sure you feel the same way about Harry.”

  John blinked at us, confused and slightly exasperated. “How do you know my boss is Harry?”

  “I’m sorry about Ian,” I said. “I’m Tiffany Black, we’re investigating Janice’s death.”

  Understanding dawned on John’s face. “Of course, Harry said you two would be coming around, and that we should talk to you.”

  “I still think you hate your job,” said Ian. “I’m not wrong, am I?”