A Draw of Death (Helen Binney Mysteries Book 3)

by Gin Jones

  Apparently cute felines were of interest only to the Internet, not mainstream media, because both reporters immediately turned on their heels and scurried back to lurk in their nice, warm vans until a more promising interviewee came along.

  Helen continued on to the gate. Marty Reed's distinctive van, painted in a green, tan, and black camouflage pattern, was parked about twenty feet away, just off the right side of the driveway. She would have missed it if he'd parked any closer to the tree line, but it stood out reasonably well against the asphalt. The van's presence meant Marty himself was probably somewhere nearby, and she wouldn't have to rely on the intercom. She called out his name, and a moment later, the big, muscular redhead popped into view from the right side of the gate. He wore khaki pants and a matching shirt, with a heavy, zip-front green sweatshirt. He carried a rusty three-foot-long wrecking bar in one hand.

  "Ms. Binney," Marty said. "What are you doing here?"

  "I wanted to see if Art had found Vic's cat yet."

  "Not as of about fifteen minutes ago," Marty said, holding out his left hand to display a long but superficial scratch across it. It had stopped bleeding, but the scab looked fresh. "The nasty little creature took offense a little while ago when I reached for a tool and brushed against its head. I didn't even realize it was sitting next to me. It blends in well with the shrubbery along the wall."

  "Maybe it's still near here. Let me in so I can catch it."

  "Are you crazy? It's vicious."

  "That's what everyone says, but it seems to like me."

  "There are enough dangers in the world without going out looking for trouble."

  "My family and friends would tell you that's what I'm best at: looking for trouble." Helen glanced over her shoulder to make sure the reporters hadn't decided to try to slip through the gates in her wake. "Whoever ends up with the cat ought to rename it. Maybe call it Trouble. Anything's better than Broadway."

  "At least let me give you a pair of leather gloves. I've got some spares in the van."

  "Thanks."

  Marty hit the button to open the gates. Helen heard two van doors slide open behind her, presumably releasing the reporters to converge on the gate.

  "Hurry," Marty said. "The vultures are coming."

  Helen slipped inside as soon as she could fit through the opening. She waited while Marty closed the gates, counting on his presence to keep the reporters from getting too pushy. He was a big, beefy guy with what looked like a lethal weapon in his hand, someone they couldn't get past, even if the gates were wide open.

  "So," she said to Marty once the reporters were scurrying back to their van, "where did you last see the cat?"

  "First, you need gloves." Marty led her to the back of the van and propped the pry bar against the bumper.

  While he rummaged through the neatly stacked bins, Helen remembered what she'd forgotten to ask him about the last time she was here. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was within earshot. The fans were in a huddle across the street, presumably working out a strategy for finding a lost cat. The two reporters had shut themselves back inside their vans, and unless they had some kind of long-range listening device, they wouldn't be able to hear her.

  "I was wondering," Helen said. "Did you install cameras on the outside of the mansion or just inside?"

  "It took me a while to convince Vic of the need for any exterior cameras at all, but he authorized a few of them eventually. Just on the front of the house and the one side where he has a neighbor. I tried to explain that there were too many blind spots with that configuration, but he didn't really care about anything except the cameras in the poker room."

  "I heard the house alarm wasn't set the night Vic was killed. What about the cameras? Where any of them working then?"

  "Unfortunately, no." Marty backed out of the van and straightened, holding a pair of leather gloves, each of which was big enough to fit both of her hands and probably at least one foot. He slapped them against his palm. "I blame myself for what happened to Vic. I'd gotten everything set up while he was at the library. I'd tested all the internal cameras, and I was about to test the external ones when I heard his limo arriving. I knew he'd start yelling if he found me there. I was tired and irritable, and I didn't want to argue with him like that, so I just scooped up my tools and jumped into the van. It was parked out back. He wouldn't see it because I'd been carrying stuff in and out of the basement. I waited until the limo left, and then I took off. If I'd stayed behind to finish the job and risked the argument, I could have made sure everything was working. Then the exterior cameras would have caught the person who killed him."

  "Unless, of course, they came at the house from one of the blind spots," Helen said. "It wasn't your fault. Besides, I heard that the system had been vandalized by the time the cops arrived on Sunday. That would have knocked out the exterior cameras too, wouldn't it?"

  Marty shook his head. "The sabotage was only to the line for the alarm. As it turns out, the killer didn't have to sabotage the cameras. I'd missed a connection, so they weren't working at the time of the murder. I really should have stayed and made sure I'd gotten everything on line. If I'd finished the job, it might not have saved his life, but at least there might have been some solid evidence for the cops."

  It struck her as odd that the killer had disabled the alarms but not the video feeds. Unless he hadn't realized how extensive the system was. "Who knew about the exterior cameras?"

  "Just me and Vic and anyone he told," he said. "Well, Jay and Zee knew I was planning to install them, but they wouldn't have known whether I finished the job. Not until they got to the site on Sunday morning."

  "How visible are the cameras? Would a random person notice them?"

  "Not if I did my job right. There's a sign at the gates that says the house is monitored by video cameras, but I like to make it hard for criminals to figure out exactly where they are, so they can't calculate the blind spots." He sighed. "Of course, in this case, there are more blind spots than visible ones."

  "What about the cameras on Freddie's house next door? Any chance they might have caught the killer if he cut through her yard to get here instead of coming through the front gates?"

  "She's got cameras?" Marty said, more irritated than surprised. "I wish she'd come to me instead of doing it herself. Amateurs never get them lined up right. Most of the systems sold to the general public don't produce good-quality pictures either, especially at night. You'd be lucky if you could see movement in her yard, forget about identifying a face."

  "Maybe Vic's death will make her realize she needs a better system, and she'll call you."

  "I wouldn't blame her if she called someone else," he said. "It doesn't reflect well on my business that my system failed to help Vic."

  "You can't keep blaming yourself," Helen said.

  Marty handed her the huge leather gloves. "I wish Detective Peterson was as convinced as you are. He thinks the killer was someone working on the renovations, so he's got his sights set on all of us."

  Helen refrained from commenting on how many wrong people Peterson had had his sights on before. Besides, for once Peterson seemed to be on the right track. The damage to the security system did suggest an inside job. The killer apparently knew where the controls were for the security system. He couldn't have known that Vic had failed to turn it on Saturday night, so the killer must have at least believed he could access the system without triggering it. Possibly because he knew Vic's password. The damaged wires could have been a ploy to throw suspicion on someone else, someone who couldn't simply over-ride the system.

  The murder weapon seemed to suggest an inside job too, since Tate had said it appeared to be some sort of tool, rather than a knife. That didn't exactly narrow down the options, other than to suggest it was one of the people working on the renovations. It could have been anything from the chisels and other carpentry tools of Stevie's crew to the screwdrivers belonging to Marty's crew.

  Marty left to
continue troubleshooting the glitch in the gates' electronics, taking his wrecking bar with him.

  Helen peered at the underbrush along the wall for any signs of the cat. Even without their summertime leaves, the briars, thistle, and skeletal remains of assorted other weeds presented a significant barrier to anyone hoping to jump over the wall to gain access to Vic's property. Just to add to the challenge, there were also some vines that might have been poison ivy. She would need more than a pair of gloves if she had to drag the cat out of that little jungle, but for now she just wanted to find it.

  Helen had only taken a few steps before being startled by a metallic screech from where Marty was working. If the cat had been anywhere nearby, the sound would have scared it off.

  Exasperated, she turned to see what Marty was doing. He pried a recalcitrant cover off the recessed electrical box and then propped the wrecking bar against the stone wall.

  She hadn't paid much attention to the wrecking bar earlier, but now it struck her that it had a lot in common with the chisels and screwdrivers that were being considered as the possible murder weapon. One end was wide and curved in on itself, but the other was fairly straight and narrow. She didn't know how sharp it was, but it was certainly sturdy enough to withstand being forced into a body.

  Could Vic have been stabbed with a wrecking bar?

  * * *

  Helen decided her lupus fog wasn't just messing with her memory—it was messing with her sanity. She could not possibly believe, even for a moment, that Marty might have killed someone. Sure, he had a lethal weapon in his possession, he was strong enough to use it, and he was angry with Vic over the various delays in the project. But murder was completely antithetical to everything Marty believed in. Security wasn't just a job for him—it was a calling. He was dedicated to protecting people, and it would go against every instinct he had to actually hurt someone, let alone kill them.

  Even though Marty was at the top of the list of suspects in terms of "opportunity," since he could certainly have bypassed any of the security measures he'd designed, he didn't have much in the way of a motive. There had to be someone who'd hated Marty enough to sneak around the gates and into the mansion at four in the morning. If it wasn't someone from Vic's contentious career in reality TV, then unfortunately, Stevie was the most likely candidate.

  Helen turned to head up the driveway only to see Art walking toward her in the space between the van and the tree line. She waved the huge leather gloves at him and said, "I was just arming myself to look for Vic's cat."

  "No need for that," Art said. "We've got it safe and sound in the house where it belongs. It's already gobbled down some food with its pill ground up in it."

  "You must be relieved." Helen tossed the gloves into the back of Marty's van. "What's going to happen to the cat now?"

  "I'll make sure it's fed and kept safe," Art said. "Taking care of Broadway has always been part of my job, and now it's almost the only thing left for me to do. I need to start looking for a new job, but for now I've got a written employment contract through the end of the year. Detective Peterson said the estate will have to honor it and pay my salary."

  "I meant, what will happen to the cat long-term," Helen said, glossing over how bad an idea it was to rely on Peterson for legal advice when he couldn't even do the job he was actually trained for. "Unless you expect to be caring for the cat for its whole life. Did Vic leave money for the cat's care?"

  "I don't know," Art said. "Mr. Rezendes told me he had a will, and I've got a call in to his lawyer to find out more, but I haven't heard back from her yet. I've been searching the home office for a will, but he had a filing system that only he understood. If it's in the mansion, though, I'll find it eventually. I don't have much else to do, and the police asked me to move into the mansion so it's not empty while there are people camping out at the gates."

  If it had been up to Helen, she'd have assigned someone who wasn't directly involved in the victim's life to keep an eye on the mansion. Preferably a municipal employee. But the Wharton police department was small and didn't have enough personnel to put a round-the-clock watch on a place where the crime had already happened and couldn't be prevented.

  Still, Detective Peterson's theory, which for once Helen agreed with, was that the murder was some sort of inside job. In theory, Art had to be a suspect, although she didn't know if he was handy with tools, and she couldn't see what his motive might be. Killing the boss wasn't exactly good for long-term employment prospects, even if the murder was never solved. There was no point in asking Art for an alibi either, since, like everyone else, he'd probably been asleep at 4 a.m.

  "Doesn't it make you nervous, staying in a place where someone was just brutally murdered?"

  Art shrugged. "Not really. This is Wharton, after all, not some big city. No one has any reason to kill me. Not like they did for Mr. Rezendes. I mean, I worked for the man, and I admired his poker skills and business acumen, but he wasn't a very nice person. There's a reason why he left Hollywood to move to a quiet little town no one's ever heard of on the far side of the continent. If you dug deep enough, I bet you'd find that it wasn't just because of his deal with the new casino in Springfield."

  "Do you think someone from his past followed him here to kill him?"

  "Have you seen any of his television appearances?" Art said. "The man was the opposite of Will Rogers: he always met men he didn't like, and the feeling was mutual. He taunted and humiliated every single big-name Hollywood actor who claimed to be a good poker player."

  If Art was right, then maybe there were better suspects than Stevie and the construction crews. That would put Tate's mind at ease. "I hope you told Detective Peterson about Vic's enemies."

  "I did," Art said. "I'm not sure he believed me, though. Kept fobbing me off on a newbie. Detective Almeida."

  "As long as someone in the department has the information, you've done everything you can."

  There was nothing else Helen could do right now either since the cat had been found, and she no longer had an excuse to poke around the grounds. She would have liked to have seen just how invisibly Marty had installed the cameras, although she supposed it didn't much matter if they hadn't been operational at the time of the murder.

  Helen turned to leave, and her glance fell on the area where Marty had last seen Vic's cat. There was a tortoiseshell Maine coon cat sitting there, watching her and Art with unblinking green eyes.

  "Does Vic's cat have a twin?"

  "No. Why?"

  Helen pointed. "Perhaps Vic should have called it Houdini instead of Broadway."

  Art took a step toward the cat, but Helen reached out an arm to stop him. "It doesn't seem to like you. Why don't you let me try to catch it?"

  "Whatever," he said. "I'll go back and see if I can figure out how it escaped. You can let yourself into the house if you catch it. The front door's unlocked."

  If Helen were a better person, she wouldn't have been so happy to see the cat. It would be safer indoors, but it had been given its pill, after all, and now she had an excuse to roam the grounds and look for clues.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The cat might like Helen more than it liked Art, but it liked being outdoors even more. It maintained at least a six-foot distance at all times, retreating whenever Helen approached and then inching forward again if Helen stepped back. Eventually it tired of the game and leaped up to the top of the six-foot wall and trotted off toward Freddie Wade's property.

  There were shouts on the other side of the wall as Vic's fans caught sight of the cat and gave chase. If they followed it all the way to the end of the property, they'd see that the wall didn't encompass the whole property. There was no way she'd catch the cat before that happened, but she could warn Art to keep all the doors locked in case the fans and the reporters made their way onto the property.

  At the front door, Helen knocked just to be polite and then let herself in.

  The foyer had a cathedral ceiling and a sweeping
marble staircase to the left, leading up to a balcony that overlooked the floor below. Running under the balcony was a short, wide hallway that led to what appeared to be a formal living room, although the furniture was draped with canvas to protect it from the renovations. About halfway down the right wall of the foyer was a pair of pocket doors, crisscrossed with police tape. That had to be the scene of the crime.

  Thanks to the high-quality, full-color video cameras, the view into that room on Sunday afternoon had been stomach-churning. The dark blood spatter had contrasted starkly with the pale purple walls. It had to be even worse in person.

  Helen knew better than to open the doors. If she ever crossed a police line without written permission from the police department and without Tate standing beside her when she did it, he would make good on his promise to let her rot in jail. No amount of exotic wood offerings would ever change his mind.

  And yet, she found herself mere inches from the doors, drawn by the challenge of the police tape. She had never liked being told what she couldn't do, even when it was for her own good. Especially when it was for her own good.

  Before she could do something foolish, the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs stopped her in her tracks. Helen turned to see Nora, dressed in jeans and the same sweater as yesterday, but with a different exquisite scarf loosely tied around her neck.

  Nora dropped down to sit on the third step from the bottom. "Can't resist meddling with other people's business, can you? Just like in the governor's mansion where you influenced your husband's decisions. If it had been up to you, there wouldn't be casinos in Massachusetts, would there?"

  "I wasn't enthusiastic about the idea, no." And not just because the legislation's failure would have reflected badly on Nora. The possibility that Nora would have either lost her job or been forced to relocate to some more gaming-friendly area of the country, far away from Helen and her then husband, had only been a bonus. "But Frank was a big boy by the time we married. He made his own decisions, and he made them based on rational arguments. He didn't let personal considerations influence him."