by Nina Post
“What’s going on?” Sarah asked.
“I’ll check.” He opened the front door and crossed the porch to the right side. The Sylvain’s Mercedes was gone. He rubbed his chin, took a breath, and went back in.
“They left.”
“The Sylvains left?” Sarah’s eyes widened with disbelief and anger.
“Yeah. They’re gone.”
“They only stayed for Lyle’s service?”
He exhaled. “Yep.”
“We’re the only ones here for her service?” She spat out the last few words in a seething, icy rage. If Shawn still suspected that Sarah could have killed Haviland, which he didn’t, those concerns would have disappeared at that moment.
Dr. Oliver came in from the back of the house, and then a few people came in the front. Shawn recognized Robert Westrom from his photo right away.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Shawn said in a low voice.
“What? Who?” Sarah looked up.
“Westrom.”
“You’re right, that’s him,” she said. “He’s signed for documents before.”
Robert Westrom, a ragged-looking man in his late forties, looked exhausted and anxious, possibly from the pressures of managing a gigantic house, or possibly from the pressures of murdering his employer.
He was wearing stone-colored khakis, comfortable shoes — Hush Puppies? Rockports? — and a hand-knit sweater with snowflakes and two facing reindeer on the front. He didn’t look like he had showered or slept in days.
Robert Westrom took a seat in the back. Carolyn Lewis also showed up, looking dried-out and haggard. These people were really falling apart without Haviland Sylvain to hold them together, Shawn observed.
Carolyn did a double-take at Robert, looked at Shawn but didn’t acknowledge him, and sat in the front. A few more people came in that Shawn didn’t recognize, but they were wearing Jamesville Animal Shelter polo shirts.
The minister, a large man in his early fifties, approached the podium again. He talked about knowing Haviland Sylvain slightly and being impressed by her scholarly devotion, her grace in bearing her sorrows, and her enormous generosity, especially to the cause of animal rights and care.
Shawn watched both employees closely. The minister continued, and said that Ms. Sylvain had come to him for spiritual counsel, which interested Shawn very much. He asked if anyone who had stories to share about Haviland Sylvain could step up to the podium and share them.
Robert Westrom went up to the front and faced the rows of chairs. He started to speak. His face collapsed and he tried to control it, but his chest heaved as he gave into sobs, hands clutching the sides of the rostrum. The minister hurried up, took him by the shoulders and led him off to a chair by the stairs. The minister returned and asked if anyone else would like to talk about Haviland Sylvain.
No one volunteered.
“Hell.” Shawn crossed his arms.
“What?”
Shawn pressed his lips together. He knew he shouldn’t do it, that it was ethically iffy, but he had to. Someone had to. Because Haviland didn’t seem like a bad person — in fact, he knew more about her than almost anyone. A little screwed up, sure, but probably for good reason.
If he died, he assumed his own family would, like the Sylvains, show up for the booze then leave before his service started.
So he went up to the podium and held the sides of it for a moment.
The sky turned ominously dark. It was very suddenly almost night-like, then it passed, lightening back to normal. Just when Shawn began to speak again, a large tree fell across the street onto a power line, taking out the power in the funeral home.
“Someone really doesn’t want me to talk,” he muttered, backing away from the podium.
The minister shut down the service and suggested that they all go to the cemetery for the burial.
Shawn watched Robert get into his car, and Carolyn into hers. He kept a close eye on them in the five minutes it took to drive to the small cemetery on the top of a hill.
Everyone parked on the unpaved roads within the cemetery, then walked over to the burial site.
As the minister opened his mouth to speak, there was an ear-ringing explosion.
Everyone ducked forward or crouched and covered their heads. Shawn turned to Sarah, picked her up by the waist and twisted around like he was some kind of forklift in a warehouse. He turned, still covering her with his body while making sure Carolyn, but especially Robert, were still there.
But the new car he had requisitioned from the motor pool, which he had parked down the drive so you almost couldn’t see it from the site, was now a charred husk.
Shawn took out his phone, called the squad room, and asked for the closest available patrol officer to swing by the cemetery.
Then he approached Robert. “Robert Westrom?” Shawn said to the high-strung man, who had a film of sweat on him.
“Y-yes.”
“Come with me.” Shawn took his arm and led him out to edge of the grass by the unpaved drive, where he kept a firm hold of his arm. Sarah followed.
“That was your car, wasn’t it?” Sarah asked.
“It’s a motor pool vehicle, but yeah, I was using it.”
The patrol officer pulled up several minutes later and Shawn passed Robert to him. “Take him down to the station and put him in the box, then let him sit.”
“You got it,” the officer said, and put Robert in the back seat.
“Do you think it’s him?” Sarah asked.
Shawn pretended to ponder this. “Do I think he’s The One? I don’t know, he’s not really my type.”
“Your suspect.”
Shawn watched the car drive off. Carolyn was still standing in the same place, staring at nothing, hugging herself. He walked up the slope, glanced at the very confused minister, and stood in front of her.
“What do I do now?” Carolyn asked in a third rail of a voice, with a quiver of fear.
“Go home.” Though Shawn knew what she was asking him.
“No.” She shivered. “What do I do now? Without her.”
Sarah drove Shawn to her father’s law office after the services, both to pick something up, and because she was sure the Sylvains would be there. They were there, and Shawn saw them standing around a large desk that took up most of the square footage in the small office. She picked up a sheath of papers from the reception desk and gave them to Shawn. “I think you’ll need these. You can post them at work.”
They were flyers with a photo of one of the new cats — though they all looked exactly the same — with a headline on top, a description in the middle, and cut-out tear-off sheets with Sarah’s cell phone number along the bottom.
“Oh, are you saying that maybe I shouldn’t have more than thirty-eight cats at home?” Shawn admired the flyer. “Let’s put these up on the bulletin board, then.”
“And one in here,” Sarah posted it up underneath an oil painting to the side of the reception desk by the door. “There’s no business in town that won’t let a homicide detective put up a flyer that’s trying to find a good home for a cat. Maybe if you walk around shirtless, holding the cat — ” She put up her hands in a camera square.
“No way. The captain wouldn’t like it. But I do look amazing without a shirt.”
She snorted a laugh. “I could make a video, post it online.”
“Uh-uh.”
“Why not?”
“Shy.” He batted his eyelashes.
The door opened and the Sylvains propelled out of the office in a cloud of expensive scents.
“We’re going back to that wretched bed & breakfast,” the husband’s aunt said, pointedly loud, after she brushed past Shawn. Like he gave a rat’s ear that the local B&B was beneath their standards. Oh, you don’t like it? Well, let me just clean up that crime scene where someone you don’t care about who has your last name was brutally murdered so you can stay there, you ghouls.
Not to mention his own house had been ransack
ed.
Shawn smiled at the aunt and uncle, ferally.
Sarah’s father saw the Sylvains out the door then fell back on the sofa with a groan. “Why aren’t I a skiing instructor?” He stretched out his long legs, crossed his ankles, and folded his arms over his chest.
“Maybe another version of you is a skiing instructor, Dad. And let me get right on that law school thing, it sounds great.” Sarah delivered a jocular soft punch to his arm.
Her father shot her a look. “Notwithstanding my fleeting rumination, count your blessings that you grew up the daughter of a staid, small-town attorney, not a ski instructor.” He let out a long breath through his mouth. “I’m just lucky they weren’t here any longer than they were. They hate that Haviland Sylvain got all the money. They’ve been fighting over it for years, and will even more vociferously now that she’s dead.”
Shawn took a seat. “I’d like to know more about that document Sarah delivered to the house on the night Haviland Sylvain was killed.”
“Oh, it was just a codicil to her will,” the attorney said.
Sarah opened the file cabinet.
“Haviland signed for it?” Shawn asked, as though he had forgotten. Restless again, he pushed himself out of the chair and paced around the room.
“Yes, but she gave it to Robert right away,” Sarah said.
“He — Robert Westrom — handled all of the invoices from this office. And he managed Ms. Sylvain’s finances, as well as the finances of the house.”
Sarah quickly found the document, pulled it from the file, and handed it to her father.
“Basically, she left everything to Lyle.” The attorney peered down at the document through his glasses.
“Ha. I’m sorry, what?” Shawn stopped and put a hand on the wall. “Did you just say that she gave all the money to her pet tortoise?”
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
Shawn laughed again and rubbed the back of his neck. He hadn’t slept in a long time and was starting to wonder if this was when his case started to really get to him.
“With relatively nominal but actually extraordinarily generous sums to a few animal rescue agencies and endangered species groups.” The attorney glanced up and adjusted his glasses. “Nothing fringe, all of them established and well-vetted. She also had some real estate holdings she specified were to be used only for animal shelters, or by scientists whose work was dedicated to saving endangered species.”
“What were those holdings?”
“A chalet in Courchevel, France, valued at twenty-two million U.S. dollars.”
“Wow. Okay. And her employees?”
“They each received three month’s salary.”
Three month’s salary, with millions left to a tortoise? That was a good enough motive for each of them.
Back at the squad room, Shawn put up two of the flyers on the bulletin board and two in the break room.
“You’re giving up Comet?” someone said behind him, one of the detectives from the General Investigations division.
He wanted to sock the other detective in the jaw for mentioning his missing cat.
“No, and this cat looks nothing like Comet.” He was amazed the guy knew Comet’s name. “Do you know anyone who would like a cat or are you just busting my chops?” Shawn’s expression said the latter option wouldn’t be wise.
“My wife has a few nieces, now that you mention it,” the detective said.
Shawn ripped off one of the phone numbers and gave it to him. “That’s not my number. But you can also let me know if she wants to take one or more.”
“How many cats are we talking about, here?”
“Too many.”
“Comet had a litter, huh?”
“Comet is male.”
The other detective walked away confused. Shawn’s head felt like the spaceship from John Carpenter’s The Thing was inside his skull and trying to resurface to fly home. But he had to interview Westrom.
“Why aren’t I a skiing instructor?” he mumbled. “The other Shawn probably takes off two months to teach skiing. Hate that guy.”
The house manager was waiting in one of the interview rooms. Though the Division had a few guys who were exceptionally good at interviewing, Shawn was also considered pretty good. And he wanted to do it himself, anyway. Shawn figured that Robert had been in there alone long enough, and looked even more anxious than he did before.
Shawn went in and tossed his file on the desk. Robert Westrom didn’t look, at the moment, like the punctilious house manager everyone had talked about. He was still in that reindeer sweater, which was good for him since they kept the room cold. Despite the cold, he looked sweaty and clammy. But whatever was wrong with him that he could disappear for a couple of days then show up at Ms. Sylvain’s memorial service looking like that, he was still the order-obsessed majordomo of a huge estate.
Shawn confirmed Robert’s identity and sat back in the metal chair.
“I saw a lot of mistakes in your records,” Shawn said, knowing exactly what sort of reaction that would get from him.
“Mistakes? No. Impossible.”
Bingo. “Oh yes. I had a forensic accountant go over your records” — not true, but worth a try — ” and he was appalled. This wasn’t GAAP, that wasn’t GAAP, all over the place. Whatever that means.” Admitting false ignorance lent verisimilitude.
Robert recoiled. “My accounting is perfect, and always GAAP-compliant! I have an accounting degree!”
Shawn pretended to look at something inside the folder. “And the way you ran that house, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.”
Robert Westrom was now red in the face, eyes blazing wide. “You must have me confused with someone else. You can look in my house manager’s book to see how scrupulous I was about every last detail in that house. I have read the nine-hundred page National Trust Manual of Housekeeping front to back more than once.”
Shawn rubbed his forehead above his eyebrows. “If that’s the case, Mr. Westrom, then how could you let the lady of the house be murdered in the house? Do they not cover that topic in the National Trust Manual of Housekeeping?”
Robert crumpled and sagged.
Shawn waited for some kind of answer.
“I wasn’t there,” Robert mumbled. His eyes shone.
“That’s your excuse? Why weren’t you there?”
“I don’t live there, first of all. I’m never there at that hour, anyway.”
“Did you have some other reason to not be there? Where have you been since Wednesday night?”
Westrom looked haggard, like a salmon that had swam upstream to spawn. “I have,” he licked his lips, “a problem.”
“You have a huge problem right now.”
“No, a personal — a personal problem.”
“You killed Haviland Sylvain? Is that your ‘personal problem’?”
“I did not kill her.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know,” he said, with a keening pitch, then took a breath. “I don’t know.”
“You didn’t sign for a document Wednesday morning, read it, become enraged, and decide to kill her after everyone in the house had left for the night?”
“What document?”
“The one you signed for on Wednesday morning. We have a witness who can testify that Haviland Sylvain signed for the document, then handed it to you to take care of.”
“I never looked at it,” Robert said, brow furrowing in the middle, eyes searching the table as though confused. “I put it — I put it away to deal with later.”
“Why?”
“I had to take care of my kitchen duties first.”
“Where did you put it?”
“A drawer in the dining room, where I often keep paperwork I’m working with.”
“Was it a locked drawer?”
“Yes, of course.”
“When did you leave the house that day?”
“Five-thirty in the evening, as usual.”
<
br /> “Then what did you do?”
“I went home, slept until six a.m. — though I barely slept at all — then drove to Charles County and checked myself into a facility there.”
“What kind of facility?”
Robert tilted his head. “A mental hospital, Detective.”
“Why?”
“I have a condition I normally take a medication for. I had not been taking it.”
“Why not?”
He smiled. “I wasn’t feeling well on it.”
“Why didn’t you ask your doctor to change your medication?”
“I don’t know. I just didn’t.”
“So that’s where you’ve been. This mental hospital in Charles County. They let you go to the funeral?”
“I was there voluntarily and checked myself out,” Westrom said. “I told them I would be back, but then you made me come here.”
“Did you check yourself in there because you murdered your employer, Haviland Sylvain?”
“No,” Robert said in a choked voice. “I would never — I would never.”
Shawn leaned forward. “Do you know anyone who would?”
Robert looked down. “I can’t imagine.”
“Anyone angry with her? Anyone you hear complain about her? Maybe complain that they didn’t get paid enough?”
Robert laughed.
“What?”
“Who would possibly complain that they weren’t paid enough? We all had good salaries, and you’re talking about people who would be lucky to get a dishwashing job. We didn’t get corporate benefits, but she took care of everyone, fed them, paid for their medical bills, was kind to them.”
“Why?”
“Why what, Detective?”
Shawn spread out his hands in a gesture of incredulity. “Why did she do that? Take in a bunch of criminals and societal rejects to work for her? No offense meant.”
Robert chuckled. “Oh, she had a soft spot for people like that. She just wanted to give them a good meal, see that they were content. She would probably hire a whole house full, if I hadn’t put my foot down. And she suffered from a condition herself, you know.”
