Meredith Potts Fourteen Book Cozy Mystery Set

by Meredith Potts

  Finally, she got her nerves back and continued. “I just can’t believe this happened. It’s so terrible.”

  I played along. “It really is. Do you have any idea who might have done this?”

  One name immediately came to her mind.

  “Sophie Paulson,” Kaitlin said.

  My stomach sunk.

  I was taken aback. “What?”

  “Sophie Paulson,” she repeated.

  “Why her?”

  “She’s a bad woman.”

  Kaitlin didn’t know that Sophie and I were friends. I had to keep that a secret in order to find out why Kaitlin disliked her so much.

  “Maybe you’re just saying that because Sophie was dating Paul when you wished that he was still in love with you,” I said.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “First of all, because they weren’t dating anymore.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Paul told me. He couldn’t believe how ungrateful she was. Neither can I. After all he did for her, for her to turn around and break his heart like that, it’s unfathomable,” Kaitlin said.

  Kaitlin had it all wrong. She was giving me a completely different story than Sophie had. According to Sophie, Paul was the scumbag. It seemed like, with Kaitlin at least, he had tried to paint himself as a victim. Kaitlin clearly hadn’t heard that Paul had been sleeping around like crazy.

  I wasn’t about to tell her. Right then, there was a more pressing question on my mind. One that seemed especially relevant.

  “When was the last time you talked to Paul?” I asked.

  “Last night,” Kaitlin replied.

  That set off all kinds of red flags in my mind.

  I peppered her with a follow-up. “You talked to him last night?”

  For the first time in our conversation, she tensed up. “Yes. At about seven.”

  How curious? I hadn’t even asked her what time. In addition, she had been very quick to emphasize the word seven. That aroused my suspicion.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a little later? Perhaps at around nine?”

  She corrected me. “No. It was seven.”

  “Where were you last night between and nine and nine-thirty?”

  “I was at home,” Kaitlin said.

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Her answers were getting shorter and shorter.

  “So, you have no one to verify your alibi then?” I asked.

  Kaitlin scoffed. “Alibi? What are you talking about?”

  I made myself perfectly clear. “You and Paul used to date.”

  She continued to act like that had no bearing on anything. “So?”

  “So, you two broke up. Do you know how often crimes like this are committed by bitter exes?”

  Kaitlin thought she had an answer to shut me up. “Only, I broke up with him.”

  That wasn’t enough to stop me. “Yes, after you found out he was interested in Sophie Paulson.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t like where you’re going with this.”

  “I don’t care if you like it.”

  “All that stuff you’re talking about is in the past. I’m completely over Paul.”

  It took all the energy I had not to laugh at the ridiculousness of that statement. “You don’t look like it. As a matter of fact, you seem pretty broken up.”

  I zeroed in on the flowers she was holding.

  Kaitlin had an excuse for that as well. “I’m broken up because he was a friend who was murdered.”

  I pressed on. “You have to admit, it’s pretty curious that you’re lingering at a crime scene.”

  “I told you, I’m here to pay my respects.”

  “That’s your story. Maybe you’re worried that you left something here…incriminating.”

  Kaitlin was outraged at my accusation. “You’re crazy.”

  “Am I?” I asked.

  “I live down the street. When I woke up to take my jog this morning, the police were everywhere. I wanted to see what had happened, and when I did, it broke my heart.”

  Wait a minute. She just lived down the street? That opened up all kinds of possibilities.

  “It’s funny that you mentioned that you live down the street. Since you said you were at home between nine and nine-thirty, that means you were in close proximity to the scene last night. Maybe you came over here, killed Paul, went back to your house, and peered through your front window only to see Sophie show up at Paul’s house shortly after. To cover your tracks, perhaps you put in an anonymous call to the police to frame Sophie for the crime.”

  “You’re just making things up now,” Kaitlin said.

  “Am I? It’s no secret that you hated Sophie. Maybe you killed Paul and set Sophie up to take the fall for you.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No. That doesn’t make any sense. If I truly hated Sophie so much, why wouldn’t I have just killed her?”

  A theory came to my mind. “I know why you hated Sophie, but perhaps you wanted Paul out of the picture as well. Maybe you couldn’t stand the fact that he didn’t love you like you loved him and you decided that if you couldn’t have him, no one could. So, by killing Paul and framing Sophie, you’d get double the revenge.”

  “You’re nuts,” Kaitlin snapped.

  “Prove me wrong,” I said.

  Instead, Kaitlin backtracked. “I’m out of here.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I have nothing else to say to you.”

  As Kaitlin began walking away, it really put me in a real bind. If I truly was a detective, I could have detained her. Since I was just pretending to be one, there was nothing I could do to force her to stay.

  I tried to egg her on. “What’s the matter? Did I just hit too close to the bone?”

  She didn’t take my bait. “We’re done here.”

  Kaitlin kept walking, leaving me to lick my wounds alone.

  Chapter Eight

  After Kaitlin had walked away, I whirled around to look back at the crime scene. That’s when I saw something out the corner of my eye that caught my interest. It turned out Kaitlin and I hadn’t just been talking alone. There had been an unexpected audience watching us. One house over from Paul’s, I saw a nosy elderly female neighbor peeking through the blinds in her living room.

  I stared directly at her to make it perfectly clear that her presence hadn’t gone unnoticed. The moment she saw me looking her way, she snapped the blinds shut. I don’t know who she thought she was fooling, but it wasn’t me. She also had the wrong idea about the situation.

  Granted, normally I hated prying eyes. In this instance, they could actually work to my advantage. The neighbor had been spying on my conversation, so who was to tell how many other conversations she’d watched through those exact set of blinds? What had her eyes seen? Anything that could be of use to me? I was curious to find out.

  As I walked across the street to pay that nosy neighbor a visit, an interesting theory occurred to me. I had assumed that the anonymous call notifying the police to come to Paul’s house had been placed by one of the other murder suspects. Maybe I had been wrong. Had it been placed by this nosy woman instead? If so, what had she seen? And, almost just as importantly, who had she seen coming and going last night?

  I reached the elderly woman’s door and gave it a few knocks, hoping I didn’t have a struggle on my hands in getting her to answer. It took a few sets of knocks, but she finally did.

  Unfortunately, when she opened up, she squawked at me immediately.

  “What do you want?” Beatrice Turner asked.

  What a rude way to start things off. Beatrice was short, bespectacled, and didn’t look the least bit intimidating. What she lacked in size, she made up for in feistiness. Judging by her response, she was a real live wire.

  “Hi, my name is Hope Hadley,” I said.

  Beatrice remained dismissive of me. “So?”
/>   “So, I saw you looking over at my conversation with Kaitlin Doherty.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  Really? We were going to play that game? Because she wasn’t going to win that one.

  “Miss, I saw you.”

  She kept up her ruse. “No. I was looking at my rose bushes. I just wanted to see if I have to call my gardener to trim them.”

  This was going nowhere fast. It was time to pull out the heavy artillery. I grabbed the honorary deputy badge from my purse and flashed it quickly.

  “I’m investigating Paul’s murder,” I said.

  Beatrice opened her mouth to reply. I decided to stop her in case she was about to give me any more malarkey.

  “I need you to be truthful with me,” I added.

  Beatrice became resigned to not being able to brush me off. “What do you want to know?”

  “An anonymous call was placed to 9-1-1 last night telling the police that they’d seen some suspicious activity at Paul’s house. Did you place that call?”

  Beatrice was quick to answer. “No.”

  I tried to get her to put her guard down. “If you did, I assure you, you’re not in any trouble. I’m just looking for some information about the case.”

  “I told you, I didn’t place the call.”

  “Well, if you happen to know who might have, please tell them it’s vital for them to come forward. It could be crucial to solving this case.”

  Beatrice was still very leery of me. “Uh-huh.”

  I had tried things the hard way, with no results. It was time to take a new approach. I tried to butter her up.

  “You look like a very smart woman. Did you happen to see anything last night? Perhaps Kaitlin Doherty coming and going from Paul’s house?”

  That didn’t warm her up to me in the least.

  “No, I didn’t,” Beatrice replied.

  “Did you hear anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Sorry. I’m afraid I turned in early.”

  “And you slept through the night? No noises woke you up or anything?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  Yikes. This was like talking to a brick wall. I tried to salvage this questioning so it wasn’t a complete waste of my time.

  “When was the last time you spoke with Paul?” I asked.

  “A few days ago,” Beatrice replied.

  “Did he seemed troubled or mention anyone giving him grief?”

  “No. We just talked about cheesecake.”

  What an odd answer. “Cheesecake?”

  “Yeah. He’d just picked up some cheesecake from the new bakery in town on Maple Street. He said it was to die for.”

  Great, food talk. That’s just what I didn’t need. Now I was getting hungry.

  As for the case, she was giving me nothing. Talking with Beatrice was as bad as questioning a suspect. For a woman who was nosy about getting information, she sure seemed desperate to keep it to herself. Sheesh.

  I reached into my purse, grabbed a small piece paper, and scribbled down my phone number on it.

  “Well, if you do think of anything, don’t hesitate to give me a call,” I said.

  After finishing up with Beatrice, I headed back to Paul’s place. Unfortunately, the police had cordoned off most of the property. I would have been breaking the law if I crossed the yellow police tape. And, with the detective already not on friendly terms with me, I didn’t want to provoke him any further. Besides, Detective Wright had told me that everything they’d found at the scene of the crime pointed to Sophie being the killer.

  Considering that, I reluctantly decided to leave the scene to question the next suspect on my list.

  Chapter Nine

  Jack Sprague was the next suspect that was in my sights. Like so many aspiring actors, the thirty-eight-year-old was tall, muscular and handsome. The problem was, he knew how handsome he was and had let it get to his head.

  I caught up with him at his workplace, Bistro 310, a hip café on Beverly Boulevard. I requested to have the hostess seat me in his section, then waited for him to take my order. For a man who waited tables for a living, he sure walked around like he owned the place. He approached my table, drenched in arrogance.

  “Welcome to Bistro 310. My name is Jack, I’ll be your server today. Can I start you off with a drink?” Jack asked.

  I pulled the honorary deputy badge out of my purse and flashed it at him quickly. “Actually, I’d like to start by asking you a few questions.”

  Jack scrunched his nose at me. “About what?”

  “The murder of Paul Franklin.”

  “I didn’t know he was murdered,” Jack said.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I find that hard to believe.”

  He was dismissive of me. “Believe what you want, I didn’t know he was dead.”

  “I will believe what I want. And I believe you shouldn’t be so dismissive of me. You had a motive to want Paul dead.”

  Jack tried to shrug me off. “That’s what you say.”

  I laid out the facts for him. “Paul was dating your ex-girlfriend—a woman you haven’t exactly gotten over. Revenge is a very strong motive—”

  He interrupted me. “You’re really reaching here.”

  “Am I? I know you hated the fact that she left you for him. Sophie told me as much.”

  He didn’t deny that. “Yeah. But that doesn’t mean I killed him.”

  I pressed on. “Sophie told me you wanted her back. With Paul in the picture, that wasn’t going to happen. But, if Paul was gone, maybe you could win your way back into Sophie’s heart.”

  “Those are your words, not mine.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I don’t want to blindly take the word of a murder suspect.”

  He wasn’t so dismissive of me now. Instead, he became very defensive. “For the last time, I’m not a suspect.”

  “Who are you trying to kid? You had all these reasons to want Paul out of the picture, yet you’re still insisting that you’re not a suspect.”

  “Of course I’m not a suspect. I have an alibi for the time of the murder.”

  Wait a minute. Stop the presses. Where did that come from?

  “An alibi? But you just told me you didn’t even know Paul had been murdered. Why would you be so quick to tell me you have an alibi for a crime you supposedly didn’t know had been committed?”

  Jack changed his tune. “All right. I did know Paul had been murdered, but I didn’t do it.”

  “What you mean to say is that you’ve been lying to me?”

  “Only about knowing that Paul had been killed. I really do have an alibi.”

  “After finding out that you’ve already lied to me once, it’s hard to believe that you’re telling the truth now.”

  “Call my friend Brent. He’ll tell you I was at his place all night rehearsing for this audition I have.”

  “All night?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I went over there after I got off work at five. I was there until midnight. Go ahead, call him.”

  I had never questioned someone who was so eager to throw an alibi at me. I took Jack up on his offer and called his friend Brent. Not surprisingly, Brent corroborated Jack’s story. Normally, that would have put an end to my questioning. In this case, I couldn’t help but think that Jack knew a detective would be coming to question him at some point and that he had pre-arranged an ironclad alibi to put himself in the clear.

  The problem was, I had no evidence that Brent was just lying to cover for his friend. Unless I could uncover some hard evidence to poke a hole in Jack’s story, all I had was a nagging suspicion. Granted, that suspicion was very strong, but that wasn’t going to exonerate Sophie.

  With Jack’s alibi having been confirmed by his friend, he had no interest in answering any more of my questions. And, since I didn’t have the authority to force him to talk, I reluctantly left the café.

  Chapter Ten

  With two disappointing suspect interviews behind me, I was
hoping that the next one would bring better results. For this one, I had to make a few changes to my appearance. As Henry Mankiewicz worked at a production company in the film industry, he would most likely recognize me from my television days.

  I had a taxi bring me to a costume shop where I bought a big floppy hat, a scarf, a rubber Halloween costume witch nose, and a pair of large-framed sunglasses. Between the four items, I managed to make myself look just different enough that he probably wouldn’t recognize me.

  After finishing at the costume shop, I headed over to Paul Franklin Productions, the production company where Sophie had worked. Once there, I talked to the receptionist, who led me to Henry Mankiewicz’s office. The place was lined with movie posters from the various films the company had produced over the year. When I entered the doorway to his office, Henry was sitting behind his desk reading a screenplay.

  The nebbish, balding fifty-three-year-old had the look of a man who enjoyed pouring over actuarial tables in his spare time. While that wasn’t true, his thick glasses didn’t do him any favors. It was almost as if he’d lost his primary pair of glasses and had been forced to wear his backup pair to work today.

  “Mr. Mankiewicz,” I said.

  He was annoyed as he looked up from the screenplay on his desk as if I had interrupted him during a particularly entertaining portion of the script.

  “Yes?” he replied.

  “I was wondering if I could have a few moments of your time.”

  He did not warm up to me in the least. “That depends. What is this regarding?”

  “I wanted to ask you some questions about Paul Franklin.”

  Henry’s lips curled into a snarl at the mere mention of Paul’s name.

  “Who are you again?” he asked.

  I pulled my honorary deputy badge out of my purse and held it up briefly. In addition to my disguise, I didn’t want to give him my real name. Instead, I made up a new one.

  “My name is Jane Coolidge.”

  So far, so good. Henry seemed to buy the whole act, and most importantly, the police badge.

  “What questions do you have about Paul?” Henry replied.