Dead as a Door Knocker

by Diane Kelly

  “The B-word?” he repeated, looking slightly confused.

  I cringed. “I think that threat was probably directed toward me. I was the one who handled their eviction. Jackson also drove by here in his pickup earlier in the week. When he saw me, he sped off. One of his roommates mentioned that he had a criminal record. I don’t know what for. But Patty said she’d called the cops on him when he’d gotten into a fistfight with another young man on the lawn. It could have something to do with that.”

  He jotted more notes before looking up again. “Did Jackson ever meet Mr. Dunaway?”

  “Not that I know of. As the property manager, I handled the interactions with the tenants.”

  “Seems the boy’s beef is with you, then, not Dunaway.”

  He had a point. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Anyone else you know who might have a grudge against Rick Dunaway? Even a small one?”

  Boy, did I. “Thaddeus Gentry. He’s in real estate, too. He and Mr. Dunaway are competitors. Gentry owns the property next door.” I pointed at the adjacent house to the right. “He’s converting it into a beauty salon.”

  The detective glanced over at the house. “That explains the tractor.”

  “I heard from both Gentry himself and the neighbor on the other side that Rick Dunaway fought to keep the property from being rezoned. He got the other homeowners in the area involved and hired lawyers to represent their interests at a hearing.”

  “So he gave Gentry a hard time,” Flynn said, appearing to be thinking out loud. “Probably cost him quite a bit in legal fees of his own.”

  I nodded and continued. “Mr. Gentry made an offer on this house, but Mr. Dunaway said he’d only sell the place to Gentry…” I had to swallow hard first to get the words out. “Over his dead body.”

  The detective’s brows rose and he issued an accusing hmm.

  “Dunaway gave me right of first refusal and a big discount,” I said. Of course now I knew why. The house needed several thousands of dollars in electrical upgrades and would suffer a sharp decline in value when the house next door was converted to commercial use. “Mr. Gentry later offered to buy the house from me as is for twenty percent over my purchase price, but it didn’t seem right for me to turn right around and resell the house to Mr. Gentry for a profit when Mr. Dunaway never would have sold the house to Gentry.”

  “So you felt a sense of loyalty to Mr. Dunaway,” Flynn said.

  “I did.” Of course I now doubted Gentry had offered Rick Dunaway $450,000 for the place. Dunaway had probably lied to me about that to entice me to accept his offer. But I supposed that was water under the bridge now. “Rick Dunaway is a big name in real estate and landing the Abbot-Dunaway Holdings account made me proud. Truth be told, I was surprised when he chose Home and Hearth to handle his residential property management. Several of the bigger management firms had been vying for his business, too.”

  Flynn watched me intently and lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “Did you have a personal relationship with Mr. Dunaway?”

  The mere thought made me recoil, but I tried to hide my disgust. No sense insulting the dead. “No. He’s married.” Not to mention that he was not my type at all.

  “Why do you think he gave you the gig?”

  I mulled things over for a moment. “At the time, I thought I’d won him over by telling him that he’d be our biggest client and our number one priority. But now, well, I hate to admit this, but he probably thought a smaller outfit like Home and Hearth would be easier for him to manipulate than one of the bigger management firms. He took advantage of me several times.”

  His gaze narrowed. “Took advantage of you?”

  An instant blush blazed on my cheeks and I waved my hand as if to erase the wrongful impression I’d given the detective. “Not in that way,” I assured Flynn. “He took advantage of me financially. He constantly complained about the maintenance and repair bills on the units, so I tried to keep the costs down by doing a lot of labor myself for free. I’m a carpenter. So is my cousin, Buck. He’s an equal owner in the house with me.”

  Flynn made another note and twirled his pen some more as he mulled things over for a moment or two. “Let’s talk a little more about the offer Thaddeus Gentry made you on the house. Seems to me that Mr. Gentry might have been angrier with you than he’d be with Dunaway. He offered you a quick, easy profit and you refused. Powerful men are used to getting their way. They aren’t happy when they don’t.”

  “That’s very true.” I’d learned that lesson quickly after Rick Dunaway had hired me. The wealthy man had often behaved like a spoiled, petulant child. “Mr. Gentry was next door earlier,” I said. “I didn’t know his plans for the house until he told me this morning. He rubbed in the fact that I would’ve been better off to have sold this house to him.”

  Flynn cocked his head and gave me a pointed look. “You think there’s any chance that the college kid, Bobby Palmer, or Thad Gentry came to the house last night planning to do you harm? Maybe you were the intended victim and Mr. Dunaway unintentionally got in the way.”

  The thought turned my knees to noodles and I had to put a hand on the mailbox to steady myself. “I hope that wasn’t the case. I’d feel terrible if it was!”

  Again, he eyed me closely before saying, “Let’s explore that angle a little more. You mentioned that you had evicted this boy—” He glanced down at his notes to refresh his memory. “Jackson Pharr. That he’d written a threat on the door that seemed to be directed at you. It seems Palmer and Gentry are at odds with you, too. Who else might have it in for you?”

  Sheesh. The detective was making me feel like some kind of pariah. Even so, he had asked a valid question. “There’s a woman who works—” I quickly corrected myself. “Worked for Mr. Dunaway. I guess she still does. Works for Abbot-Dunaway Holdings, I mean. Her name is Presley. She was Rick Dunaway’s right hand.” Poor choice of words. Once again I was thinking of his left hand, the one that had been sticking up out of the dirt. I forced the thought to the back of my mind. “Presley has never warmed up to me, which is unusual.”

  Flynn’s eyes seemed to spark. “Is it important to you to be liked?”

  What an odd question. “Doesn’t everyone want to be liked?”

  He shrugged. “Go on. Why do you think Presley never warmed up to you?”

  “At first it was because Dunaway hired me to manage his residential properties. He’d told me she had tried to convince him to keep the business in-house, to give the duties to her. She was looking to move up within the company, to learn more about the real estate business.”

  Flynn’s head bobbed. “Makes sense.”

  “More recently,” I added, “she let me know she was annoyed that Mr. Dunaway had sold this house to me without informing her first that he planned to sell the property.”

  “You think she would have wanted to buy it for herself?”

  “We actually discussed the matter,” I said. “But Rick Dunaway is notoriously cheap. He didn’t pay her enough to afford this house on her own. He paid us below market rate for our management services and, like I said earlier, he routinely balked at making repairs, even small ones.”

  “That must have been frustrating for you.” He gave me a pointed look.

  “It was,” I admitted. Why deny something so obvious? “But he owned a lot of properties so our management company was still making a profit on the account overall. And having him as a client gave us some clout, convinced other people to hire us, too. All in all, working for Abbot-Dunaway Holdings was good for me and Home and Hearth.”

  He bobbed his head thoughtfully.

  “There’s one other person,” I added. “Though I’m not sure it’s anything. The day I evicted Jackson Pharr and Mr. Dunaway met me here, there was a man sitting in a white sedan across the street a few houses down that way.” I pointed down the street in the direction the car had been parked. “He was reading a newspaper. Mr. Dunaway seemed to hesitate when he spotted the
car. I hadn’t noticed the car until Mr. Dunaway pointed it out so I’m not sure whether it had been there before Mr. Dunaway arrived or not. When I went to the Abbot-Dunaway office after the fire, I might have seen the same car in the parking garage, down the row a little ways from Mr. Dunaway’s Mercedes. It was backed into its spot so the license plate wasn’t visible. A sunshade was up inside. It seemed strange that the driver would put up a shade since the car was inside a garage, but I figured they did it out of habit. I wonder now if the shade was up to hide the fact that someone was in the car spying on Dunaway. Could he have been under government surveillance?” After all, if Dunaway had defrauded me, he might have been involved in bigger financial shenanigans, ones that had caught the government’s attention.

  “I’ll have to check into it. It’s also possible that Dunaway knew he was being targeted and had hired security.”

  “You mean the man in the car might have been a bodyguard?”

  “It’s possible.”

  If he had been a bodyguard, he hadn’t done his job well. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here right now with Mr. Dunaway lying in my flower bed. And if Mr. Dunaway had been targeted, who was it that was targeting him? The mob? I’d heard the mob was involved in construction fraud along the East Coast, but I hadn’t heard of such things taking place here in Nashville. Still, Mr. Dunaway was in the real estate business and worked with large contractors regularly on development projects. It seemed possible there could be a mob connection.

  Parallel lines of concentration formed between the detective’s brows as he readied his pen again. “What was the make and model of the car in the garage?”

  “Sorry.” I cringed. “At the time, the similarity just struck me as a coincidence and I didn’t go over to look. My mind was occupied with the fire and getting the house repaired. I didn’t even notice if the car was still there when I left.”

  Although his jaw flexed with what was likely frustration, he seemed to forgive me for failing to make better mental notes. “Understandable. You’d been through a lot.”

  Having obtained all the information he could from me, the detective headed down the sidewalk to have a chat with Patty. I sat down on the curb and put my face in my hands. What a morning this has been. I hoped the detective would solve this murder right away. With all the trouble the house had been for me, I wanted to get it sold and never look back.

  CHAPTER 22

  SPRUNG FROM THE KLINK

  SAWDUST

  Finally!

  A woman wearing latex gloves opened the door to the cage and reached in to pick him up. It’s about time!

  “Be a good boy,” she told him, looking into his face. “No biting, okay?”

  She held him up and looked him over thoroughly before kneeling down to peer into his cage. She picked the carrier up by its handle and looked underneath it. Sawdust had no idea what the woman was looking for, but whatever it was she hadn’t seemed to find it.

  She returned him to his cage and carried it over to Whitney, setting his carrier down on the sidewalk. “Here you go.”

  Whitney wasted no time opening his cage, taking Sawdust in her arms, and cradling him to her chest, murmuring how sorry she was that he’d been stuck in the cage for so long. He was so happy to get out of the joint that he gave her a grateful lick on the chin and his loudest, most appreciative purr.

  PURR-URR-URR-URR!

  CHAPTER 23

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

  WHITNEY

  As I stood and cuddled my sweet, furry baby, the detective spoke privately with Patty on her porch. The two glanced over at me occasionally as they talked. What’s that about?

  When the detective returned, he seemed stiff and cold, not unlike the corpse composting in my garden. “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me, Ms. Whitaker? Any detail you left out that might be important?”

  “No,” I told him. “Not that I can think of.” Of course I was more than a little rattled at the moment. It was possible my mind had overlooked something … or someone. But I could always give the detective a call if something else came to mind, right?

  He ducked back under the tape. He ascended the porch steps and looked the front door over from top to bottom, taking a moment to gaze at the Green Man door knocker. When he finished, he came back down into the yard and walked over to my toolbox. He called out to the female crime scene tech, and she promptly came over. The two spoke quietly, the woman bobbing her head as he spoke. The two crouched down and the woman opened the toolbox with her gloved hands. Flynn looked down at something inside. His eyes slid to me and held for a long moment, his expression assessing. When he stood, the woman closed the latches on the box and picked it up, carrying it over to the van.

  “You’re taking my toolbox?” While I was in no condition to work on the house today given the events that had transpired, Mr. Dunaway’s death didn’t relieve me of my obligations to Home & Hearth and its other clients. I wouldn’t be able to go without my tools for more than a day or two. I used them routinely to make small repairs at the rental properties.

  The tech and detective exchanged glances, and Flynn came back over. “Do you know how Mr. Dunaway was killed, Ms. Whitaker?”

  Why is he asking me? Isn’t that something he and the techs should figure out? Even so, it would seem rude to point that out to them, wouldn’t it?

  Sawdust rose in my arms as I shrugged. “I assume he wasn’t shot or someone would’ve mentioned hearing a gun go off and would have called the police at the time.” I swallowed hard before speculating further. “If he’d been stabbed here, there would have been a lot of blood on the porch or on the grass by the bed, wouldn’t there?” How else are people killed? Poison was a possibility, but weren’t most poisons put in food? And didn’t poisons work rather quickly? I was no expert, but from what little I knew it seemed that if Mr. Dunaway had ingested poison prior to attempting the drive to the house, he would have perished in his car along the way. I could think of only one other option, a term that I’d heard in television crime shows and movies. “Was it blunt force trauma? Isn’t that what you call it when a person is hit with something?”

  “It is,” he said. “And that’s a really good guess.” Flynn’s pointed gaze drilled into me, as if he were trying to see inside my mind. He turned to the tech and called, “Bring it over.”

  I wondered what it would be.

  The woman stepped over with a large plastic bag in her hand. She handed it to the detective and he held it up. Inside was my dead blow mallet, the one I’d inadvertently left outside the night before.

  “Oh, no!” I cried, my arms reflexively retracting in shock, inadvertently squeezing Sawdust against my chest. “Is that the weapon the killer used?”

  “We believe it might be. It’s yours, isn’t it?”

  With the initials W.W. clearly written on the handle, there was no way I could deny it even if I wanted to. Then again, maybe I could say it belonged to Wonder Woman or Willy Wonka or Woodrow Wilson. But I had nothing to hide here, no reason not to be truthful. “Yes,” I replied. “That’s mine.”

  “When was the last time you used it?”

  “Yesterday. I used it to pound the Whitaker Woodworking sign into the ground. I must’ve forgotten to put it away because I found it on the porch this morning.” It seemed like hours ago that I’d discovered it covered with that dark and sticky substance. Had the substance been Rick Dunaway’s blood? My intestines writhed at the thought.

  “Your neighbor said she saw you out here cleaning the tool and washing down the porch. She said she didn’t see any eggs. I saw no sign of the threat or the B-word on the front door, either.”

  Panic began to grip my throat, but I fought it. There was nothing for me to worry about. The truth always prevails, right? “I sanded the threat off the door,” I told him. “If you look closely, you should be able to tell where it was. The paint will be smoother. As for the eggs, I’d already washed them off the sign and the door before Patty came outside earli
er. Check the soil in the flower bed. You’ll find pieces of shell mixed in.”

  “What about the tool?”

  “The mallet had something wet and sticky on the head. It looked like syrup or barbecue sauce to me.”

  “Syrup?” Both his expression and tone were dubious. “Barbecue sauce?”

  Holding Sawdust firmly with one arm, I tossed the other hand in the air. “Blood wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind! It’s not like I was expecting to find a body in my yard.” I knew the detective had to perform a thorough interrogation of each witness or suspect, but, really. This was a bit much.

  “The techs need to get into the house and take a look around,” he said. “May we borrow your keys?”

  “Of course.”

  I pulled my key ring from the pocket of my coveralls and handed it to him, pointing out the appropriate key. He passed it on to the crime scene team and stood silently by as they went inside. After a few minutes, they came back out. When Flynn looked her way, the female tech shook her head. I supposed that meant they hadn’t found any further evidence inside.

  He turned to me. “Okay if they search your car?”

  I swept my arm toward my SUV. “Be my guest.” They wouldn’t find anything incriminating, but I knew they weren’t going to take my word for it. In the meantime, while they were wasting their time interrogating me and inspecting my property, the actual killer could be destroying evidence or putting more distance between himself—or herself—and the body. Maybe the killer was headed down to Mexico, or had gone into hiding somewhere in the Smoky Mountains to the east.

  My cousin Owen pulled up in his van a short way down the street. Owen was a slightly younger, clean-shaven version of Buck. Through the windshield, I could see his face contort in question. Like Buck, Owen would have preferred to sleep in on the weekends. Owen’s wife would’ve enjoyed the extra shut-eye, too. But that wasn’t going to happen, not with them having three girls under the age of five who needed to be fed and dressed, and who liked their daddy to get up with them at the crack of dawn to watch cartoons, their Saturday-morning ritual. Heck, he’d probably been up for two or three hours already.