Gossip Can Be Murder

by Connie Shelton

  Chapter 15

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll quit snooping around here.” The voice sounded raspy, light, neither male nor female.

  I struggled to get a glimpse of my attacker, but the hand held me firmly and the padded edges of the table blocked my vision on all sides.

  “No one asked you to butt in here. Rita ended up as she deserved.”

  My voice struggled to scream but only muffled squeaks came out. I swung out with a fist, but contacted nothing. The attacker must be standing near my head.

  “I mean it!” came the nasty whisper again. “Leave this alone or you die!”

  The clawlike hand jammed my neck downward with enough force to make sparks jump in front of my eyes, then it released me as suddenly as it had appeared. I fought against the sparks and raised my head until I could stretch the crackly feeling out of my neck. I whipped my attention to the door, but it was designed to open away from the treatment table and I couldn’t see the person as the door softly swung shut. I clutched the light blanket in front of me and hit the floor on rubbery legs, nearly blacking out from the sharp stab in my neck. I staggered to the door and pulled it back.

  “Help!” My voice croaked pitifully in the silent hallway. “Joanne!”

  “Charlie? What is it?” she said, emerging from the reception area. “What’s happened?”

  “Did you see anyone come through here just now?”

  “Several,” she said, guiding me back into the massage room. “A lot of people are milling around.”

  I allowed her to steer me back to the table. I sat weakly on its edge.

  “What’s wrong with your neck?” she asked, standing in front of me and giving me the critical eye. “You’re holding it crooked.”

  I gave her a quick recap. “I think that final shove did it,” I said. “I saw sparkles.”

  She made me sit up straight and place my hands in my lap. “Hold still.” With gentle hands on both sides of my head she straightened it, staring at me critically. “Does that hurt?”

  “No, not really.”

  She walked around behind me and touched the sides of my neck and head, guiding, making minute adjustments to my position, touching the vertebrae carefully. “Nothing seems out of place, but you should probably have an X-ray.”

  I wanted to get off this table and start searching the building, not waste away the evening in some hospital ER. However, common sense told me that the person was long gone.

  “I’ve got to find out who threatened me,” I insisted.

  “Well, I can see that you aren’t going to lie quietly and let me finish the enlivening part of this treatment. You’re about as enlivened right now as anyone I’ve seen.” She moved around to face me again. “At least let me work those shoulder muscles for a minute. Bolting from the table like that wasn’t good for you.”

  No kidding. Going from melted-butter relaxation to scared-to-death probably hadn’t done my heart any good either. I allowed her to recline me once more and knead some of the tension from my shoulders and neck. After insisting once more that I didn’t want to be taken to the hospital (I promised to drive myself there later), she gave me a hand in sitting up slowly.

  “Now go take a hot shower and try to keep those muscles as relaxed as possible,” she advised. “And get that neck X-rayed.”

  I made obedient noises as I slipped into my robe and headed for the locker room. After the prescribed hot shower I stopped at the spa reception desk. During my shower I’d mulled over the possibilities of my attacker’s identity. While it could be anyone, guests were usually attended in the building and someone would surely know who had been in here at the time. We were given our white robes when we checked in for our appointments, we wore them from the locker room to the reception area, then we were escorted to a treatment room. Afterward, as I’d just done, we left the robes hanging in dressing rooms, where an attendant promptly tidied up after each guest. Anyone who came in could grab a robe and blend in perfectly.

  “Can you tell me who had spa appointments this afternoon?” I asked the guy at the desk. He must have caught a hint of the trouble because he didn’t question me. He ran a hand through his dark, spiked hair and consulted a sheet of paper on the lower desk, hidden from my view by the counter top.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Mayhew, Ms. Carlotti, and Dr. Gaston are here now,” he said.

  “And thirty minutes ago?”

  “The same. The late afternoon appointments have all finished and most left before you got here, Ms. Parker.” Anticipating my next question, he added, “We don’t book appointments during the dinner hour, and we have no evening appointments today.”

  I thanked him and wandered out. Neither of the Mayhews nor Dina seemed like likely candidates, and I didn’t even know a Dr. Gaston. Presumably, he or she was one of the medical doctors here for the professional portion of the seminar. I could catch up with

  Linda in the dining room and ask her while she ate dinner.

  Chapter 16

  In the restaurant Linda had already gotten a table and our little glasses of digestive elixir waited at each of our place settings. Linda’s concerned frown dissolved as I approached.

  “Well, you look okay,” she said. “Feel all right?”

  “I guess you heard. How far has the gossip mill spread it so far?”

  “Pretty much through the whole conference,” she said.

  “Oh, great.” I’d been hoping to find out who’d threatened me without their necessarily knowing I was after them. Obviously a dumb thought.

  “I want to examine your shoulder right after dinner,” Linda said.

  “It was my neck. That’s the problem with gossip as a source of information.”

  She looked slightly chagrined. “You’re right. So I’ll want to look at your neck.”

  “Lucky me, being right in the midst of all these doctors.” I told her what I’d learned, or rather not learned, in the spa. “I have a hard time believing either of the Mayhews or Dina was involved in this. And I don’t even know Gaston.”

  “I do,” she said. “Soft-spoken woman, about my age. I can’t figure how she’d be involved in something like this, although she is a chiropractor. She’d know how to snap your neck without doing any visible damage.”

  Bright thought, that.

  Our waiter came just then with salads, and I declined, not mentioning that I’d just filled myself with fat, sugar and caffeine.

  “I think I’ll go to the room,” I told Linda. “I should check in with Drake and be sure he got home okay.”

  “Lie down and relax your neck.”

  Before I got out of the dining room I was interrupted four times by people wanting to know if I felt all right. Some were attendees I didn’t even know, and one was Dr. Light himself. He seemed to study my face an extra few seconds, but didn’t indicate that he remembered me. He was back in form now in his loose cottons. The earlier business suit image was completely gone. I felt myself itching with curiosity about his dealings with David Ratwill. But that was information best saved for later.

  I went to the room and called Drake. He said he was eyeball-deep in the accident file and he sounded so preoccupied that he probably didn’t hear a thing I said anyway. I purposely didn’t mention the attack in the massage room. He would worry needlessly. We kept the call short and wished each other a good night’s sleep.

  I reached for the phone directory in the nightstand, a twinge grabbing my neck as I did so, and Linda chose that moment to walk into the room.

  “Hey, what’s this—there’s no lifting heavy objects when you have a neck injury,” she said.

  “It’s hardly a ‘heavy object’.” I held up the book, which was barely over an inch thick. “And I’m not really injured.”

  “That’s for me, your doctor, to say.” She snatched the book out of my hand and set it aside, making me sit straight and stare into her eyes while she did some mumbo jumbo, moving her finger back and forth in front of my face and making sure
my eyes weren’t tracking off in wacky directions or something. She ran her hands gently down the sides of my neck, and I have to admit that I flinched at one point when she pressed on a muscle.

  “See, there’s some tenderness here,” she said.

  “Well, yeah. When you jab me ruthlessly.”

  By this time her fingertips were doing a little dance up and down my vertebrae and I guess she didn’t find any of them missing. “Looks like you’ll live. I’ll give you a mild muscle relaxant for tonight, and that spot should feel a whole lot better by morning.”

  “Thanks, doc.” I gave a little eye-roll and she snicked my shoulder with her nail. “Just shut up and take your pills.”

  I did both, and within fifteen minutes I’d drifted into a happy slumber.

  When Linda suggested that I skip yoga the next morning, just to give my neck an extra day to recover, I was secretly not unhappy. The classes were okay, especially now that Dina had taken over, but I knew I wasn’t going to be able to really concentrate on the postures.

  The minute my roomie left, I pulled the business card from my bag and made a call to Detective Gallegos at the Santa Fe PD. The short answer to my question was that they’d ruled Rita’s death an accident.

  “Suicide sometimes gets tricky for the family—emotions, religious beliefs and all,” he explained. “So we avoid that unless we have a real reason to go that way. I’ll admit this could have been either, so we went with accidental death.”

  I couldn’t believe that David Ratwill didn’t get closer scrutiny, especially given the facts that he was on the property that morning and that she was in the process of divorcing him, and I told Gallegos so.

  “His alibi checked out.” He wouldn’t explain further.

  My next call was to Ron, who had apparently just arrived at the office because I heard the kitcheny sounds of coffee being poured into a mug and the carafe going, clumsily, back onto its stand. Clumping footsteps up the stairs, along with Ron’s labored breathing, took me visually into his office where he would rummage for a minute or so before finding a blank notepad to write on. I filled the empty space with a mini-lecture on losing some weight. He gave me some yeah-yeah-yeah about that.

  “I need some information,” I said. I filled him in on the threat I’d received in the massage room yesterday afternoon and the strange transformation of Celeus Light into Mr. Businessman, along with my following the other guy and finding out that it was Rita’s husband or ex- or whatever, with whom Light had the meeting. “I’d like to know if any of this ties together. It just seems a bit much that I’m warned away from asking questions about Rita while the police are sure it was an accident. And how strange is it that Celeus and David Ratwill seem to be doing some kind of business together.”

  “David Ratwill, you said?”

  “Ron, where have you been?” I wanted to pull my hair out sometimes.

  “Taking notes,” he said, somewhat defensively. I heard a loud slurp at the coffee mug. Okay, in all fairness, my brother isn’t truly awake—usually—until cup number three.

  “Write down these names: David Ratwill and Rita Ratwill. I’d like background on both of them.”

  “I can give you an interesting tidbit on David right now, if you’ll just let me speak,” he said. “He’s a partner in the firm that we’re up against in this helicopter case.”

  Now I needed coffee. This wasn’t making sense.

  “They’re representing one of the victims’ families, and they’re wanting to find Starland Helicopters and S-Jet Engines at fault.”

  “I’m not really following.”

  He slurped again and went on. “It’s a complicated story. Do you want all of it?”

  “Just the highlights.”

  “Three families, several law firms. Ours—Graham and Valdez—represents the company that made the engine. Valdez thinks he’s got a good case for pilot error rather than mechanical failure, really thinks that’s how the case will come down. Drake’s looking at the evidence, but doesn’t think that’s true. The Santa Fe firm is going for the bigger money—find fault with a manufacturer and go after their insurance. Widows and kids of those other two families get a pile of money, attorneys get a bigger pile.”

  I couldn’t get a grasp on how any of this fit with Rita’s death or the person who sneaked into the massage room to deliver me a headache, so I suggested he concentrate on background that went further back. “Find out about David and Rita, when they met, how long they were married, and all that. Rumors here are flying thicker than bats on a starry night, and I’ve heard that they weren’t officially divorced yet. See if you can find out whether that’s true.”

  He mumbled some um-hm kinds of things, apparently scratching notes as fast as I could talk.

  “Oh, another thought. If the names Mayhew, AceChem Corporation, or Trudie Blanchard come up anywhere along the way, pay attention to them. I have no idea where this might lead.” By the time we hung up, my head was pounding. I found aspirin in my travel bag and swallowed three.

  I managed to catch Linda between seminar sessions and we walked outside and followed the meandering path through the gardens. The fresh air and sunshine felt good after spending half the morning on the phone. After she asked how my neck felt she said, “There’s the farewell dinner tonight and don’t forget tomorrow’s special meditation session led by Dr. Light himself.”

  I couldn’t quite tell her how very little that excited me. I didn’t mention the headache. I did not want to be sent to an ER and waste the rest of the day.

  “Word is getting around that the police decided Rita’s death was an accident,” she said.

  “I know, Gallegos told me. Can I be blunt? I think it’s bullshit. Otherwise, why did someone feel it necessary to warn me away from the investigation by nearly breaking my neck yesterday?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I want to keep attending the sessions for you, but I also feel like there was a reason I was threatened. I have to look into it.” Once the conference was over the participants would scatter. I could let the police ruling stand, but that would leave a killer running free and I just couldn’t bring myself to let go of it.

  She gave me a light hug. “That’s okay. I’m sure Dina can share her notes with me. And Shirley will give me copies of the handouts. You do what you gotta do.”

  “Thanks—you sure it’s okay?”

  “Absolutely.” She glanced at her watch. “I need to make the next session. If I see you at lunch, we’ll chat again then.”

  I felt like a rat for a minute as I watched her walk back to the conference center but my phone vibrated in my pocket before I could give myself over to too much guilt.

  Ron. “Hey, got some new stuff for you.”

  I fished in my bag for a scrap of paper and pen and found a deserted bench where I could sit down.

  “The background check you asked me to do on Rita Ratwill? Interesting stuff. Turns out she was once committed to a mental facility in California. Checked herself in, about two years ago. Stayed ninety days, felt all better and checked herself out again.”

  Two years ago. Somewhere around the time her husband was up to his neck in the AceChem trial. Had something about the case bothered Rita so much that she couldn’t stand being around it? The Mayhews mentioned that she’d been working in her husband’s office at the time. I realized Ron was still talking and pulled myself back.

  “Sorry, Ron, what was that last part? My attention wandered.”

  “One of her nurses at the facility was a Trudie, spelled T-r-u-d-i-e, Blanchard. Didn’t you mention that name to me?”

  “Wow, how did you get that kind of info? I’m surprised they’d give that out.”

  “They wouldn’t. Not to me. But Sally came to our rescue. Posed on the phone as Rita’s sister, who was trying to track down her present whereabouts. Lucked out in finding a gabby nurse who’d also treated her.”

  “Really.” I tried to imagine our sweet, open Sally managing a lie with a strai
ght face but couldn’t put the picture together.

  “Yeah, apparently Rita confided to this night-shift nurse that the day gal was weird.”

  An understatement.

  “Nurse says Rita felt tense and nervous every time Trudie entered her room. This nurse told Sally that she didn’t know what it was, but it was like there was a big, deep secret between them.”

  “Something pertaining to Rita’s care?”

  “She didn’t know for sure but doubted it. Medical information would have to be entered into her chart. Any treatment would be logged. When Rita told the nurse that she felt intimidated around Trudie, this other nurse checked the file but didn’t find anything out of order. Her conclusion was that it was something personal, maybe just paranoid delusion.”

  “And yet Rita stayed there three months,” I said.

  “Yeah. According to the story, Trudie got hired on sometime during Rita’s stay. She was put on Rita’s case about a month before Rita left.”

  Puzzling. I tried to think back to those first yoga classes, remembering the way Rita and Trudie had interacted. I couldn’t think of anything out of the ordinary. Rita’s interaction with everyone had seemed strange at the time. They definitely hadn’t acknowledged knowing each other.

  Chapter 17

  Drake rolled over and looked at the bedside clock. 4:37. The last time he’d checked it was 3:21. He groaned and turned back to his right side. On the floor beside the bed, Rusty stirred briefly in his sleep, but didn’t even raise his head. Charlie’s side of the bed was cold and empty. He missed her but it was probably just as well that she wasn’t home. He’d be keeping her awake with this constant tossing and turning.

  At five-thirty he gave up on sleep. Made his way into the kitchen and brewed a double strength, full pot of coffee. He rummaged in the breadbox and found two cinnamon rolls that had been there at least a week, but he didn’t care. He crammed one down before the coffee finished dripping and the other as soon as he had a full mug in his hand. He let the dog out, brought in the newspaper from the front porch, and tried to read it. No use. The headlines were meaningless and the rest of the small type just became a blur. He went, instead, to his computer and started a search, almost hoping that the results would contradict some of the data he’d studied last night.