by Gin Jones
"No, you wouldn't," Zee said. "You'd probably get the job, but it's not the right one for you, so you'd be miserable, and I'd have to come bail you out. We've got a plan, and we just need to stick to it."
"You have a plan," Jay said. "I just do what I'm told."
"Same thing," Zee said. "You agreed to the plan when I laid it out."
Jay shrugged. "I know what's good for me. Your plans are always solid."
Helen thought he'd agree to any plan his sister suggested, solid or not. Zee probably didn't even realize how much influence she had over her brother. Jay was a lot more good-natured about being on the receiving end of marching orders than Helen ever would have been. Jay was probably used to it, having been pushed around by Zee all his life. He was lucky that Zee really did have his best interest at heart. She could tell him to jump off the proverbial cliff, and he'd do it.
What if she'd told him to push someone else off a cliff?
If Zee had decided Vic's death would get them their dream job in California, would she have been able to convince her brother to kill him? Or at least to help her to kill him? Zee was a hard worker, willing to do her fair share of the work, after all, so she wouldn't have made her brother do the whole job.
It would break Jack's heart if his niece and nephew turned out to be killers. And, really, Helen couldn't believe it of them. Not just because she liked them but because it didn't fit with Zee's organizational skills. If Zee had planned the murder, she would have done a better job of making sure they both actually had an alibi, one at midnight and the other at 4 a.m., and it would have been something better than "at home, asleep, with no witnesses except each other."
No, Zee and Jay hadn't plotted to kill Vic, but who else might have teamed up to do it? Helen had been assuming that one person acting alone had committed the murder, and therefore an alibi at either midnight or 4 a.m. would clear a suspect. But if two people had worked together, one of them could have tied Vic up at midnight and then the second person could have taken over at 4 a.m. to finish Vic off.
Helen needed to reconsider everyone she'd dismissed simply because they had an alibi for one of the two timeframes. To be truly airtight, an alibi had to cover the entire period of midnight to 4 a.m.
Nora had an alibi at midnight, but not at 4 a.m., and Donald had an alibi at 4 a.m., but not at midnight. They both had reasons to want Vic out of the picture, and together they would make a formidable team. Nora's skills made her a natural at manipulating people, far beyond Zee's skill with her brother, and Donald appeared to be a natural follower like Jay, dutifully carrying out the goals of the Compulsive Gambling Recovery Group.
Helen glanced down at the can in her hand and realized it was empty. Her head was spinning a little. Perhaps she'd overdone the caffeine, considering how unused to it she was. But it was working, helping her to see things she'd missed before. The police should definitely be considering the possibility of a pair of killers, not just one person.
She needed to tell Tate. Like everyone else, he was operating under the assumptions that the killer was just one person and that several otherwise credible suspects had solid alibis.
Helen dug her phone out of the yarn bag and was stymied for a moment by the screen's failure to light up. Then she remembered turning it off last night to avoid interrogation by her nieces.
She turned it on and saw several voicemails. One from each of her nieces, which she ignored, and one from Vic's long-haired fan. She tapped the screen to listen to the message.
"Miss Binney. It's Larry Warner. You wanted to know if Freddie Wade came back. It's about 2 a.m., and she just woke us up, slamming her van's doors. I'll try to keep an eye on her and let you know if she's making any preparations to leave again. I may not be able to for long, though, because the cops said we need to move on by the end of today, or they'll figure out some charges to file against us."
So Freddie hadn't fled the jurisdiction. Tate needed to know that too. Helen dialed his number and got his voicemail. He was probably at the police station again. She left him a message explaining that the killer could have been two people and that Freddie had returned, so Helen was going to see if she could get a copy of the license plate log.
"Slight change to our destination," Helen told Zee. "I want to stop at Freddie's house first."
* * *
Helen walked up Freddie's driveway, leaving Jay and Zee to park on the street near Vic's mansion. One bay of the two-car garage was open, and the large white van was backed up to the opening.
Freddie emerged from the garage with a scowl, obviously prepared to shoo off another unwanted visitor. "Oh, it's you. I thought it was one of those crazy gamblers again. They've apparently decided it's not enough to occupy the street across from Vic's. They're expanding their operations to staking out my property too."
So much for Larry and his friends being unobtrusive. Apparently they didn't know how to translate their skills with people watching during a poker game to real world applications like surveillance. "They'll be gone soon. The police have asked them to pack up and leave by the end of today."
"You'd think they'd have something better to do," Freddie said. "Don't they have jobs or something?"
Helen suspected that poker was their job, or at least the bulk of their income. "They're just saying goodbye to someone they admired. And speaking of Vic, I was wondering about something. I heard you were keeping a log of his visitors' license plates for your lawsuit. Did you take down any numbers the night Vic was killed?"
"I'd have told the police if I had," Freddie said. "That was about the only night he didn't have any visitors. Art left at his usual time, and that woman, his PR person, came in around 2:30 in the morning."
"Don't you ever sleep?"
"I don't have to be awake or even at home to collect the information." Freddie pointed at the two security cameras on the front of her house. "They're motion-activated and automatically take pictures of any cars that pass my driveway. Vic's is the only house after mine, and it's an otherwise quiet dead-end road, so we don't get many people coming down here who are simply lost and need to turn around, especially since everyone has GPS now. Even if you discount a few of the cars on my list as lost drivers, I've got more than enough evidence that Vic was bringing in customers in violation of the residential zoning."
If that was true, and Helen didn't see any reason to doubt it, Freddie really didn't have any motive to kill Vic. She just needed to wait him out while the case went through the legal system and she got her injunction against Vic's operating a business in his home. Without the ability to teach his poker classes from home, Vic would most likely have lost interest in living here and would have moved away, leaving Freddie and her boys free of his influence. Freddie didn't seem like the emotional, undisciplined sort who might resort to violence except in an extreme situation or as a last resort. As long as she had a reasonable chance to take care of Vic legally, she wouldn't have felt the need to kill him.
While Helen was trying to think of what other useful information Freddie might have about the night of the crime, a movement near the garage door caught her attention. Vic's cat came trotting out, dragging a small red leather handbag. The cat dropped it at Helen's feet. Before she could stoop to grab the cat, it raced back into the garage.
Freddie swooped in and grabbed the bag with an irritated huff. "That stupid cat. Something's got to be done about it. The boys saved for months to buy me this purse."
They must get one heck of an allowance, Helen thought. She recognized the designer. His purses had retailed in the vicinity of five hundred dollars the last she knew. Maybe more now.
"I'll go see if I can catch the cat while it's looking for something else to steal." Helen took a step toward the garage, but Freddie held out a hand to stop her.
"Wait. You'll need something to wrap around the cat so it doesn't hurt you." Freddie opened the van's passenger door and grabbed a canvas bag out of one of the cubbyholes near the front seat. She handed it to Helen
. "You wait here by the front of the van, and I'll shoo it in your direction. The cat is pretty slow when it's dragging its ill-gotten gains, so you might actually be able to catch it. You'll have to be fast, though, because it'll drop whatever it steals as soon as it realizes you're going to try to catch it."
Helen knew how to slow the cat down. While waiting for the cat to be shooed out of the garage, she got out the tuna fish she'd brought as bait. She set the yarn bag on the van's hood along with her cane and placed the opened tuna can on the ground at her feet. She crouched down next to the food with the handles of the canvas bag looped over her wrist. A moment later, the cat emerged from the garage, dragging another red leather purse, this one shrink-wrapped. There was something odd about the purse.
Freddie appeared in the cat's wake to shoo it in Helen's direction, although it seemed to have been heading that way already. It spit out the shrink-wrapped purse next to the can of tuna and began eating. Helen talked nonsense to it, covering the sound of her arm moving closer to its back until she was able to grab it by the scruff of the neck where a mother cat picks up kittens. She managed to stuff the cat into the canvas bag and gather the fabric to secure the top. To her total surprise, the cat didn't even struggle, although that might change when she was ready to pick up the bag. It meowed its irritation with having its dinner interrupted, so Helen dropped the can of tuna inside the bag. After a moment, the cat returned to eating and even began to purr.
Freddie came out from behind the van carrying a cardboard box. "I hope you'll do a better job of keeping that horrible creature locked up than Vic did." She picked up the second red leather purse and tucked it beneath her arm before kneeling to slide the box under the cat's canvas bag. She wrapped the top with a bungee cord to keep it closed.
"It will be up to Art to contain the cat, I'm afraid. I'm just the animal-catcher, not the owner." Helen checked to make sure the bungee cord wouldn't come loose when she picked up the bag. As she did, she tried to figure out what was bothering her about the second purse the cat had stolen.
Stolen.
That was it. The red leather purse had been stolen before the cat ever got to it. Why else would anyone have two identical designer purses? Even if she could accept that three teenaged boys could save more than a thousand dollars over the course of a few months, she couldn't see them buying two identical bags. And then there was the shrink-wrapping. It wasn't the neat, custom job done at a factory but looked more like it had been wrapped by a vacuum sealer designed for food.
Helen was reasonably certain the bag was being prepared to sell on the black market. Where had it come from? Not from Vic's mansion, obviously, and the other neighbors weren't likely to have two identical purses. No, it was more likely stolen from a store. Maybe the outlet mall where Almeida used to respond to shoplifting calls. There was a shop there that carried products by the purses' designer.
The image of the day she'd met Freddie and the boys flashed through Helen's mind. Freddie had been overseeing a practice drill that consisted of handing off a small object as quickly and accurately as possible. What if they hadn't been practicing for a relay race, but had been preparing to shoplift? Nimble fingers, when added to their angelic, above-suspicion appearance, would make them ideal thieves.
Was Freddie acting as a real-life Fagan, sending her boys out to steal things for her to sell online? If so, it was no wonder she hated Vic so much and was so desperate to get him to move. The previous owners of the house had been too blind and deaf to notice that Freddie's business violated far more laws than Vic's poker classes ever could, but Vic's hearing and eyesight, if not his memory, were perfectly good. And then Vic had installed cameras. Freddie had to have seen Marty installing them on the side of the house facing hers, even if she couldn't see the cameras themselves. That could have been the last straw for Freddie, the thing that provoked panic and the need to get rid of Vic quickly instead of waiting for the legal system to work.
It was all just speculation, much like her theory that more than one person might have been involved in the murder. She needed more than that to convince Detective Peterson to look beyond his certainty that Stevie was guilty.
Helen might not have any solid evidence connecting Freddie to the murder, but if she could prove Freddie was selling stolen goods, even Peterson might be willing to consider the possibility that the woman had also committed murder.
But how to prove that Freddie was a thief? Freddie had put away the suspicious shrink-wrapped purse, so Helen couldn't grab it and race to the police station with it. As a private citizen, she couldn't get a search warrant to look for stolen property in the garage, and Peterson wouldn't be willing to apply for a search warrant based on Helen's suspicions alone. He'd want something concrete.
The cat meowed and scratched at the canvas bag that held it. If it weren't for the cat's medical condition and how difficult it could be to catch it again, Helen would have been tempted to help it escape so it would steal some more merchandise from Freddie's garage.
Wait. She didn't need to do that. Art had mentioned that there was a cache of the cat's stolen booty over at Vic's mansion. It probably included some of the items Freddie had said were missing from her house. Except they weren't items of sentimental value, they were evidence of her black market operation. The cat had probably dragged them over to lay at Vic's feet, the way cats often brought back their prey as gifts for their owners. If Art would let the police see those items and they could be identified as stolen like the expensive red leather purses, it might be enough for a search warrant and a more thorough investigation of Freddie as both a thief and a murderer.
Helen concentrated on picking up the box to see if the cat would panic when it found itself being carried. When it didn't, she propped the box against her more reliable hip. She grabbed her cane from the hood of the van. "I'd better get the cat home."
"And make sure Art keeps it locked up this time." Freddie returned to the garage, letting the overhead door drop with a crash.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Helen hurried down the driveway as fast as she could manage with the cat. One hand kept the box propped against her hip, and the other held her cane. If she had another hand or a voice-activated calling feature, she would have called the police and asked them to meet her at the mansion to discuss Freddie's criminal enterprise.
Maybe it was just as well that she had to wait until she got to the mansion, she thought. She needed the time to figure out how to convince the police to listen to her theory of the murder. Hank Peterson would just laugh, but Eleanor Almeida might listen. Stolen property was right up her alley, and she might still have contacts in the outlet mall's jurisdiction who could compare what the cat had dragged home with items reported stolen recently.
Helen reached the street, and Zee rolled down the driver's side window. "Do you need any help, Ms. Bee? Jay can carry the box for you."
Helen could use some help, but she was afraid the cat would panic if anyone else approached. "I'm all set. You can do me a favor, though, and call ahead to let Art know I've got the cat, and ask him to open the gates for me."
"Oh, we don't need Art to open the gates," Jay said. "We can do it remotely."
"That doesn't sound like something Marty would approve of," Helen said.
"Oh, he'll never know. I can erase the log entry."
Zee punched her brother on the upper arm. "You can, but you won't. Don't worry, Ms. Bee. We'll call Art to let him know you're on your way and get his permission to open the gates."
Helen kept walking, wishing she hadn't just heard that Jay could erase the system's log. If the police knew Jay and Zee could activate the gates remotely, they might look at the siblings' possible involvement in the murder a little more closely. Hank Peterson would definitely find it more credible that a couple of young Clarys had committed a crime than that a respectable parent of well-behaved young boys was the mastermind behind a theft ring that had branched out into murder.
As Helen passed t
he lavender fan-van, she nodded at Larry Warner and his friends. They were packing up to end their vigil. At least the on-site activities. They would probably still spend the rest of the weekend playing poker together, partly because that was just what they did, and partly because they were honoring Vic's memory in the only way they knew how.
The gates swung open, and Helen continued on up the driveway to the mansion, leaving Jay and Zee to wait with her car outside the gates so the engine wouldn't scare the cat.
Art was standing in the front doorway. As Helen climbed the steps, she thought she heard someone moving around in the back of the house, but she hadn't passed any parked cars on the way to the front steps. Then again, there was a five-car garage at the end of the driveway out back, so Art could have a houseful of guests without a single car being visible from the front yard.
"I'm sorry," Helen said. "I didn't realize you had company. I caught Vic's cat and wanted to get it secured as soon as possible."
Art glanced over his shoulder. "It's just me here. Ever since the renovations, the house has made some weird sounds. I think the new materials are settling in place."
At the sound of Art's voice, the cat howled and scratched at the canvas bag, desperately trying to escape.
"We'd better get the cat secured before it claws its way out of the bag."
"Of course, of course." He started up the stairs. "This way."
That could be a problem. Helen couldn't carry the cat, lean on her cane, and use the railing, all at the same time. The obvious solution would be to ask Art to carry the cat, except that was just asking for the cat to escape again. It had calmed down a bit once Art moved a few feet away, but it would probably go berserk if Art came close enough to hold the box. She wasn't sure if the bag would hold if the cat made a real effort to escape.
Helen was going to have to leave the cane behind and hope she didn't need to walk to the far ends of the mansion once they got to the top of the stairs. She set the cane down beside the railing at the base of the stairs, realizing only then just how dependent on it she'd become. She felt vulnerable without it. She didn't actually lean on it most of the time, but she could never predict exactly when she might step wrong and need the extra support. At her tiny, single-story cottage, there wasn't all that much damage she could do to herself if she fell on the relatively soft wood floors, but here at Vic's mansion, she felt like she should be wearing a helmet with knee and elbow guards. If she tripped at the top of the sweeping marble staircase, it would be a long, bumpy ride down to the stone floor at the bottom.
