A Draw of Death (Helen Binney Mysteries Book 3)

by Gin Jones

  "I should probably get back to…" Stevie patted the pocket where she'd stashed her phone. "Actually, there really isn't anything to get back to. Not until the mess at the Rezendes site is straightened out, and it won't do any good to keep leaving messages for Uncle Tate. There is something I wanted to discuss with you, if it wouldn't be too presumptuous."

  "Presume away," Helen said. "That way I can do the same in return."

  Stevie grinned. "Uncle Tate did say you were interesting."

  Once they were seated at the kitchen island with a pot of tea and the last of her stash of Girl Scout shortbread cookies, Helen said, "So, what's the problem?"

  "It's Uncle Tate," Stevie said. "He's such a worrier, and it's not good for him to be alone with his thoughts all the time."

  He had seemed distracted when Helen had talked to him this afternoon. He hadn't even been able to concentrate on his beloved woodworking. Still, he hadn't been gnashing his teeth or pulling out his hair or anything that would indicate a dangerous level of anxiety. "I know he sees gloom and doom and the risk of arrest around every corner, but that's just part of being a lawyer, isn't it? Nothing personal. "

  "It is personal for him, though." Stevie waved the hand holding a cookie. "I thought you'd want to know, since you're the one he's worrying about these days. I suppose it's better that he only has one client to worry about now, but from what I've heard, you can get into a dozen clients' worth of trouble. He's really good at his job, but he still worries constantly about whether he's given his clients the best possible advice and what will happen if the clients don't follow it."

  "He never seems that bothered to me," Helen said, feeling a brief moment of guilt over how often she'd…not ignored, exactly, but certainly discounted in the excitement of tracking down a killer.

  "That's the whole problem," Stevie said. "He hides it and lets it eat away at him. That sort of stress will probably kill him someday. It would be better if he were more like me. When I take something personally, everyone in the vicinity knows about it. Anyone messes with one of my friends or my crew, and I'll mess with them. I'm probably responsible for more than a few of Uncle Tate's gray hairs, in fact. He was convinced I'd land in jail for assault before I finished the first project my crew worked on."

  "Is the fact that you're free to have tea with me today a tribute to your learning self-control or a tribute to your uncle's legal skills?"

  "A little bit of both." Stevie said ruefully. "My temper led me to do some pretty stupid things, but fortunately I wasn't provoked too badly, and I believe in proportionate responses, so Uncle Tate could fix everything. I'm mellowing as I age, so it's harder to get me to react these days."

  The idea of a twenty-eight-year-old having "aged" in any significant sense made Helen feel older than her almost-forty-six years. "I'm heading in the opposite direction, getting more irritable instead of less."

  "Poor Uncle Tate," Stevie said, helping herself to another cookie and dunking it in her tea. "We thought he'd have a lot less to worry about once he retired. Then he met you, and from what I've heard, you keep dragging him back into the practice of law. And now I've gone and found a dead body. Uncle Tate's not taking it well. You'd think I was accused of the murder or something."

  Apparently Tate hadn't shared with Stevie his concern that she might be at the top of Detective Peterson's suspect list simply because she'd found the body and had a key to the gates. The fact that she'd had some brushes with the law in the past and they'd apparently involved physical confrontations after losing her temper only made her a more likely suspect.

  It sounded to Helen as if, in this case at least, Tate was right to worry. Maybe it was time she repaid him for all the anxiety she'd caused him. The sooner Vic's killer was caught and Stevie was released from the cloud of suspicion, the sooner Tate could stop worrying and go back to the woodworking he loved almost as much as he loved his niece.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After Stevie left, Helen called Art to see if he was okay after yesterday's shock. He sounded fine except for his anxiety over the missing cat, so she seized on that as an excuse to visit the mansion, talk to whomever might know something about the murder, and maybe even get a closer glimpse of the crime scene. Art was skeptical that she'd be able to catch the cat, but he was also too desperate to turn down help.

  The next morning, Helen was still groggy when Jay and Zee arrived to pick her up at 10:00. Helen was halfway to the mansion before she realized that, for once, it was Jay behind the wheel, instead of his sister. Zee was busy searching the Internet for reactions to Vic's murder.

  "It says here that Matt Damon had a vendetta against him," Zee told her brother. "Can you imagine? What if he sneaked into Wharton in order to kill Vic Rezendes? We should have camped out in front of the mansion so that if any of Vic's famous enemies showed up, we could have asked them for a job. Too bad we missed our chance. I'd have loved to work with Matt Damon."

  "Bummer," Jay agreed.

  "I can't imagine Matt Damon going anywhere without a dozen people recognizing him before he got anywhere near Vic's house," Helen said. "If an A-list star ever showed up in Wharton, it would be bigger news than the murder."

  "I suppose," Zee said, although she still seemed convinced she'd missed out on a real opportunity.

  "You're so smart, Ms. Bee," Jay said before asking his sister, "So, what other theories are out there for who killed Mr. Arr?"

  "Nothing that would get past Ms. Bee," Zee said. "If she thinks Matt Damon coming to town is unlikely, she's probably not going to buy the theory that the ghost of some long-dead king killed him for wearing purple when he didn't have any royal blood."

  "Where on earth are you getting these ideas?" Helen asked.

  Zee waved her smartphone over the front seat. "They're all over the Internet."

  "Aren't there any reputable sources?"

  "Not really," Zee said. "The reputable ones don't speculate. All they do is rehash Mr. Arr's life and career. That's pretty dull after the first four or five times you read it."

  "Still, a credible biography is probably where you'll find the real reason he was killed," Helen said. "Tate once told me that most crimes are done by a family member or someone with close ties to the victim. Do the reputable stories say anything about Vic's family and friends?"

  Zee poked and swiped at her smartphone for a couple minutes, before saying, "There isn't much to say. He was an only child."

  "Lucky him," Jay muttered cheerfully.

  Zee continued as if her brother hadn't said anything. "His parents died a few years ago. They were only children too, so he didn't have any cousins. Some rumors about flings with various actresses, but nothing was ever confirmed. Not even a photograph of him with anyone outside of the poker events and reality show sets."

  "I've always wanted to be a loner," Jay said.

  "You wouldn't know what to do with yourself if I didn't tell you." Zee scrolled through the information on her smartphone. "It says here that despite his on-screen temper tantrums, Mr. Arr was a clear-headed businessman. Negotiated his contracts with the reality show producers himself, and always sealed the deal, although he generally dragged out the discussions for months. Took it to the brink before finally capitulating. Most celebrity watchers think he was doing it as a publicity stunt. When negotiations are going well, it isn't news, but when they break down, the reporters are talking about parties, asking for interviews, speculating in their columns about whether they're going to sign the deal."

  "Considering the way he kept changing his mind about his renovations," Helen said, "the reporters may have been giving him too much credit. Maybe he just wasn't very good at making decisions. Or he kept making bizarre requests for his contracts, like the purple M&Ms he wanted for the library event."

  "Oh, that was just a test," Zee said. "He picked up the idea from another celebrity I read about once. The idea is to make an odd, but still feasible little request and see if the other party carries through. If the little thin
gs are messed up, then chances are the big things will be too, but if the little details are respected, then you can trust that the rest of the deal will go smoothly."

  "I'm going to ask for a state-of-the-art game console in my dressing room when I'm a star," Jay said.

  "You're not going to be a star," Zee said. "You're going to be a crew member, the power behind the pros."

  "Oh, right. I forgot," Jay said. "I'm still going to ask for the game console in my employment contracts. I'll deserve it, if I can really make someone like Mr. Arr look all bright and sparkly."

  It would definitely take a lot of skill to do that. Helen had never been much impressed by celebrities, perhaps because she'd seen more than enough of them in her political career, and she'd seen them up close where, with only a few exceptions, all the support staff in the world couldn't make them bright and sparkly.

  Helen had also seen how hard the support staff worked to protect their employer's image. In her experience, the rate of burnout was generally in direct proportion to the height of the celebrity's popularity. A job with someone as low on the celebrity totem pole as Vic Rezendes could have been a long-term career for his assistant. The work probably wasn't terribly exciting, especially now that Vic had relocated to Wharton, but Art could have counted on stable employment for the indefinite future. Now that the job security was gone, Art might well have to settle, like Jay and Zee did, for working for a non-celebrity.

  * * *

  Jay and Zee weren't the only people in Wharton who were obsessed with celebrity. Parked across the street from Vic Rezendes's mansion was a refurbished commercial van, painted lavender. On one side, the logo for the reality show that Vic Rezendes had participated in, Betting with the Pros, was faithfully reproduced, while underneath it, "official fan club" had been painted less skillfully.

  Three people dressed entirely in purple, from their wool hats to their sneakers, were affixing black streamers along the roofline to form bunting that dipped down in places to partially obscure the custom paint job.

  As Jay drove past them to pull into the driveway, Helen could see that the van's two back doors were painted to look like giant playing cards, with the king of diamonds on the driver's side and the queen on the other. The Connecticut license plate read VIC2WIN.

  Three other vans, white except for the logos of network television affiliates, were parked on the same side of the road as the mansion, and a police cruiser blocked the entrance to the driveway. Jay continued down the dead-end road to find a spot to turn around. A memorial had sprouted to the left of the gate consisting primarily of lavish bouquets in Vic's favorite color and accessorized with stacks of playing cards and black balloons. There probably wasn't a stem of iris, gladiolus or lavender left in any flower shop within fifty miles of Wharton.

  Jay was able to pull over and park about fifty feet past the driveway. He turned around to ask, "Do you want me to go back and buzz the intercom for you, Ms. Bee?"

  Without knowing which officer had left the cruiser in the driveway and what his past experience with the Clary clan was, it probably wasn't a good idea to wave a Clary in front of his nose. "No, I can do it. Just wait here for me, please. I'll let you know if I'm going to be more than an hour or so."

  Helen ignored the curious stares from the three people outside the purple van and prayed that none of the reporters in the other vans would recognize her from her days in the governor's mansion. She'd dressed casually in jeans, an old denim shirt, and a couple of layers of sweatshirts appropriate for searching the grounds for the cat. With luck, the reporters would assume she was just another rubbernecker who'd be turned back at the gate. By the time they realized their mistake, she'd be inside the grounds already.

  At least that had been the plan. After three attempts to get a response to the intercom buzzer, she decided it still wasn't working properly, and she'd better call Art on her phone instead. She tried to pull his number up from her contacts list, only to realize that she had no service.

  Helen trudged back to her car and climbed into the back seat. "I don't suppose Vic had you install some sort of dampening field for cell phone service, did he?"

  "That would be illegal," Zee said primly.

  "I know," Helen said, turning her phone to face the front seat to demonstrate her lack of service. "But did he ask you to do it?"

  Jay looked at his sister, and she sighed. "Okay, he did ask. First he tried Marty, who threatened to quit the job if Mr. Arr so much as mentioned it to him again. Then he tried to bribe us."

  "It was tempting," Jay said. "He offered to introduce us to some folks he knows in LA."

  "But we don't do anything illegal," Zee said in a quelling tone.

  "Of course not," Helen agreed. "I'm sure we just hit a pocket of poor service. Perhaps we can drive back down the road a bit and see if it gets better."

  Jay put the car in gear and made a U-turn before heading back toward the main street. He kept the speedometer needle exactly at the thirty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit in case the cruiser's owner came out and noticed him.

  They'd just passed what Helen thought was the edge of Vic's property when her cell phone service magically improved. "You can pull over here while I call Art."

  Jay slowed and made another U-turn, coming to a stop beside the neighbor's driveway. Unlike the way Vic's home was hidden behind walls and trees, this one was open to the street. The house was almost as large as Vic's, in the same basic neocolonial style, but with white clapboards instead of a brick facade. The front door and shutters were a more standard black instead of Vic's signature shade of purple. The only thing unusual about the house was the pair of oversized security cameras, one mounted over the garage and the other on top of the far end of the porch.

  A tall woman who looked to be in her late thirties and was wearing a red hat, navy pea coat, and jeans stood in the front yard, refereeing a game played by four boys ranging in age from about eleven to fourteen. They'd been divided into two pairs and were practicing handing off a foot-long piece of PVC pipe, as if it were a relay race baton, to their partner while running toward a goal. They were intent on their game, seemingly unaware that they had an audience other than their mother, and absolutely silent. There were none of the jeers or cheers or name-calling Helen associated with sports, even when one of the boys inadvertently ran with a painful-sounding thud into the large white van parked in front of the two-car garage. Instead, they all looked like angels who'd been sent to earth to try to study and perfectly replicate age-appropriate human activities. The golden blond hair that haloed their round faces only reinforced the image.

  The woman had to be Freddie Wade, the neighbor Geoff Loring had mentioned as being opposed to the renovations at Vic's mansion. Judging by the binoculars she'd been using yesterday, she liked to keep an eye on activities at the mansion, so maybe she'd seen something that would help the police solve Vic's murder. Calling Art could wait a few minutes while Helen had a quick chat with Vic's neighbor.

  As soon as Helen opened the car door, the woman shooed the boys inside the house. They took the PVC pipes and left without a single complaint, just like the angels Helen had imagined them to be.

  The woman, however, was far less sweet and silent. She jogged down the driveway shouting, "Go away, and get a life! This is private property!"

  Helen had already slid out of the car, but she remained in the door's opening. "I'm sorry. We didn't mean to bother you."

  "That's what everyone says," the woman insisted. "And then they start grilling me about what it's like living next door to someone as famous as Vic, the Purple Pig of Professional Poker, Rezendes. I'll tell you the same thing I told all of them. It's hell. Pure, living hell. And the only thing worse than being right next door to where he lived is being right next door to where he died."

  Zee's window lowered. "Morning, Ms. Double-U. You remember me? Zoey Clary? I was in that bookkeeping class you taught at the library a couple years ago. We're not like the others. Honest. We just stopped on
the side of the road here to get cell phone service. Ms. Bee wouldn't bother anyone. Except for criminals, of course. She annoys them mercilessly. But you've got nothing to worry about."

  "Ms. Bee?" The woman frowned. "Are you Helen Binney? The woman who meddles in police investigations?"

  "I wouldn't quite put it that way, but yes, I'm Helen Binney."

  "Well." The woman huffed. "I don't know what you're doing here then, when you should be talking to one of Rezendes's many, many, many enemies."

  Helen didn't bother to point out that that was just what she was doing since Freddie Wade appeared to be one of those enemies. Instead, Helen stuck to her official story for today's visit. "I'm not here about the murder. I'm just here to help look for Vic's cat."

  "That cat is as bad as its owner," Freddie said. "Always digging in my garden, doing its business there, exposing me and my boys to its germs."

  "Are you sure it's Vic's cat?" Helen said. "I'm told the cat wasn't allowed outdoors."

  "Ha!" Freddie said. "That's what Rezendes told me, but it was definitely his cat in my yard. I've got proof. It doesn't just dig up the garden; it steals things too. The boys' shirts, my underwear, beach towels. Pretty much anything it can drag back home. It started the day Rezendes moved here, so I knew it had to be someone from his house. At first, I thought Rezendes was a pervert or something, stealing the stuff himself, so I checked my security camera footage and caught the cat red-pawed. No mistaking the coloring on that creature either. Too bad it didn't have a better owner. It really is a gorgeous animal, and it would be a lovely pet if only it had better manners."

  "Did you talk to Vic about the thefts?"

  Freddie shook her head. "I wasn't allowed to talk to Rezendes after we became involved in some litigation with the zoning board."

  "What about his assistant?" Helen said. "From what I've seen, Art is a very efficient young man. I'm sure he would have fixed the situation if he knew about it."

  "Could you talk to him for me?" Freddie said. "Not just about keeping it from happening in the future, but it would be nice to get some of the missing items back. Most of them didn't matter, but a few had sentimental value."