In her blue jeans and a cotton sweater, Lainie felt grossly underdressed as she entered Jackson Bray’s third-floor office suite a few blocks from Boston Common. But she hadn’t come here to hire Bray, so maybe her outfit wouldn’t work against her.
She crossed directly to the receptionist, cleared her throat, and said, “I’d like to see Jackson Bray, please.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but—”
“I can set up an appointment for you. Mr. Bray has some openings in June.”
“June?” This couldn’t wait until June. “It’s important that I see him now,” she explained. “I have information regarding one of his cases.”
That snagged the receptionist’s attention. For the first time since Lainie had approached the curving desk, the woman ignored her flat-screen computer monitor and gazed directly at Lainie. “What case is this in reference to?” she asked.
Lainie hesitated. If she mentioned Patty Cavanagh’s name, would it open doors for her? Or would the receptionist press some hidden alarm button to summon the police? Lainie was out on bail, but she wasn’t free. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts viewed her as a heinous—or perhaps a highness—criminal.
She opted for caution. “I’d rather not say,” she answered.
The receptionist pursed her lips and gave Lainie a dubious stare. “Wait here,” she said, then rose and sauntered down a corridor and out of sight.
Lainie blew out a breath. She’d taken a gamble coming to Bray’s office—a big enough gamble that she hadn’t discussed it with Peter first. She was afraid he would have advised her to stay home.
But she had to talk to Bray. If he was investigating Arthur’s murder, Lainie had to convince him that she was innocent. She had to persuade him that the case wasn’t closed yet.
Heaven help her if Bray decided to charge her for his time. She didn’t know how she was going to pay Peter—and she refused to believe the firm would let him defend her without billing her. She wasn’t destitute, so she wouldn’t qualify as a pro bono client. Besides, Peter knew her in-laws had deep pockets. But she couldn’t accept additional money from Margaret any more than she could take advantage of her friendship with Peter.
She’d figure out a way to pay him. Paying this fancy-schmancy detective would require her to raid Randy’s college fund, however, and she hoped to avoid that drastic step if she could.
She checked her watch—not her bulky sport watch but the slender gold timepiece Roger had given her for her fortieth birthday. The receptionist had been gone for several minutes, but Lainie had grown used to waiting. Waiting seemed to be her main activity these days. Waiting, jogging, kicking a soccer ball against the garage wall, trying to figure out how she’d gotten herself into such a predicament, fretting about how she’d get herself out of it, and waiting some more.
Over the past several days, she’d tried to distract herself by doing all the things she never had time to do when life was normal and her hours were filled with teaching, the Colonielles, and socializing with friends. She’d repaired the sink faucet in Karen’s bathroom so it would no longer spit when the hot water was turned on full force. She’d hauled out the ladder and cleaned the dead leaves from the gutters. She’d updated the family photo album, pulling Randy’s high school graduation pictures from the envelope in a shoebox where she’d stored them a year ago and filling three pages of the album with them.
He’d looked so handsome that day, towering over her and Karen, his gentle eyes tinged with sadness because his father hadn’t survived to see him celebrate this rite of passage. Lainie had refused to flip back through the album and linger over photos of the kids when they were younger and Roger was alive. Doing that would have made her cry, and she was sick to death of crying.
When she hadn’t been doing chores, she’d been fielding phone calls. Her mother had handled the news of Lainie’s arrest reasonably well, considering. “This is an outrage!” she’d squawked, which was true. “You know, Uncle Solly’s son Leonard is a very good lawyer.”
“He’s a patent attorney,” Lainie had pointed out. “I’ve got a good lawyer here, Mom. Someone from Roger’s firm.”
“That hoity-toity Waspy snob firm?”
“My lawyer is Italian-American and he’s gay,” Lainie had said.
“Oy! His poor mother,” her mother had lamented, as if having a gay son was a greater heartache than having a daughter charged with being an accessory to second-degree murder.
Lainie had also spoken with Randy. He’d already heard about her arrest from Karen, he said, but he’d assured Lainie that he had complete faith in her, and besides, everyone knew the Rockford Police were totally clueless; kids were drinking and using drugs all over town and the cops had no idea. If this had been intended to ease Lainie’s mind, it had failed, but Randy had continued, undeterred: “Karen said you went on a date, Mom. I think that’s cool. Keep up the good work.”
Right. As if Lainie would ever trust herself to go on a date again.
She’d received quite a few phone calls from her colleagues at Hopwell offering their support, from Angie and Sheila offering to withhold their property taxes until the Rockford Police Department came to its senses, and, most troubling, from Jodie Blumenthal, who’d contacted her Sunday afternoon. “I’m so sorry to bother you at home,” she’d said, as if she could have talked to Lainie somewhere else. Lainie could no longer be reached at Hopwell, and the odds of their running into each other at the supermarket two weeks in a row were pretty slim.
“That’s okay,” Lainie had reassured her.
“I’m calling because I’m worried about Hayden. She’s not talking.”
“What do you mean?”
“She refuses to speak. The substitute they hired for your class . . .” Jodie had lowered her voice. “Lainie, I don’t think you did what they’re accusing you of doing. Not that I even know what they accused you of, but I don’t think you did it. You’re the best teacher Hayden ever had, and she’s made so much progress this year, and now this new substitute who doesn’t know how to deal with Hayden’s stammering has taken over your class, and I think she said something to Hayden. Something mean. Hayden won’t tell me what happened. She won’t say anything. She writes notes.”
“She’s not talking at all?” Lainie had frowned so hard her forehead had ached.
“Just communicating through these little scribbled notes. When will you be back at Hopwell? I don’t know how much longer we can go on like this.”
“It’s up to Frank Bruno,” Lainie had said. “Call the principal’s office and tell him to let me return to my classroom. I’d love to go back to work, but the decision is out of my hands.”
“You have to go back,” Jodie had insisted. “Hayden won’t talk until you go back.”
If Jodie Blumenthal had contacted the school and demanded Lainie’s reinstatement, word hadn’t reached Lainie. One person who hadn’t called her was Frank Bruno.
Another person who hadn’t called her was Bill Stavik. She was glad about that, but not glad that she wasted so much of her time thinking about him. She resented the fact that she still harbored erotic memories of their lovemaking. She hated that she couldn’t simply hate him. He’d acted genuinely bewildered about the BlackBerry when she’d seen him at Emerson Village Estates. Could she believe he really didn’t know how the damned thing had wound up in her purse? Was she that stupid?
The return of the receptionist, moving in sure-footed strides despite the three-inch heels on her shoes, dragged Lainie out of her thoughts and back into the private investigator’s waiting room. “Mr. Bray will try to squeeze you in,” she said. “Please take a seat.”
Lainie thanked the receptionist, crossed to one of the leather sofas, and sat at one end. The woman occupying the other end glanced up from the magazine spread open across her lap. Her ski
n had the taut, shiny look of someone who’d already undergone several sessions with a plastic surgeon. The corners of her mouth twitched in what could have been an attempt at a smile or a nervous tic, and then she resumed reading.
Was she here to hire Bray to catch a straying husband, like Lucinda Whipple-whatever from the club? Or had some other catastrophe led her to seek out Bray’s services? His website had listed all sorts of specialties—insurance fraud, employee background checks, missing persons, identity theft, due diligence, security systems, asset searches, and the euphemistic “domestic investigations.” The website also mentioned “criminal investigations,” but the woman at the far end of the sofa, like the other women in the waiting area, didn’t have an out-on-bail aura about her.
The phone on the receptionist’s desk chirped. The receptionist lifted it, listened for a moment, then hung up. “Mrs. Smith? Mr. Bray will see you now.”
All the women in the waiting area except for Lainie rose to their feet. They halted, looked at one another, and chuckled nervously.
“You, please,” the receptionist said, pointing to the oldest of the Mrs. Smiths. The other Mrs. Smiths sat down.
If these women thought they could conceal their identities from Jackson Bray, they clearly didn’t have much faith in his detective skills. Lainie deduced that they were hiding their identities only from one another and the receptionist. Given the way Margaret’s friend had let slip that Patty Cavanagh had hired Bray, supplying the receptionist with a fake name was probably a wise idea.
Lainie lifted the magazine closest to her. Its pages teemed with celebrity gossip. These beautiful people were getting married, those were getting divorced, this one might be pregnant, that one drank too much at a famous restaurant that Lainie had never heard of. Fourth-grade teachers traveled in much less glamorous circles.
Twenty minutes later, the first Mrs. Smith emerged from a back hallway, her eyes suspiciously red and glistening and a lacy handkerchief clutched in one hand. She conferred quietly with the receptionist, then swept out of the office suite, head held high to avoid the gazes of the other waiting women. At the far end of Lainie’s couch, Mrs. Smith eyed the departing woman curiously, then turned the page of her magazine and sniffed.
She was the next Mrs. Smith called in. She emerged forty-five minutes later, looking smugly satisfied. Nearly fifteen minutes after her departure, the third Mrs. Smith was summoned to meet with Bray.
Lainie wished she’d brought a book with her. She could spend only so much time catching up on the doings of B-list celebrities before their stories of cellulite crises, film premiers, lesbian dalliances, and noble charitable works began to cloy. She also wished she’d brought something to eat. The hour hand on her watch crept past one and her stomach rumbled ominously. Whenever she heard the faint whisper of the elevator’s motor outside the office suite, she stared anxiously at the door, afraid another Mrs. Smith would enter the waiting area. If one did, Lainie’s meeting with Bray might get pushed back even further.
But no other Mrs. Smiths invaded the office suite, and twenty minutes after the third Mrs. Smith had left—and Lainie’s empty stomach sent a desperate plea for food through her nervous system—the receptionist nodded to her. She smoothed the ribbing of her sweater over her hips, slid the strap of her purse onto her shoulder, and followed the receptionist down the back hall to a door. The receptionist tapped on it, cracked it open, and stepped aside. Obviously, she couldn’t announce Lainie because she didn’t know who Lainie was. Lainie supposed she could have been introduced as Mrs. Smith.
She entered the office and did her best to conceal her disappointment. The man seated behind a massive desk near the window was no Humphrey Bogart. Slight of build, with a boyish face and short styled hair, he wore a pinstriped suit and a shirt with French cuffs held shut by onyx cufflinks. Jackson Bray, detective to all the wronged Mrs. Smiths in the Greater Boston area, looked like nothing so much as a successful insurance agent.
He stood and gave her a friendly smile. His eyes were the color of a golf fairway. His voice was dewy. “What can I do for you, Mrs. . . . ?”
Lainie felt the now-familiar throbbing in her tear ducts, but she resisted the urge to weep. She had come here to save herself—or at least to make sure Bray kept investigating Arthur’s murder—and not to be comforted by a man who earned his living listening to rich women sob over their husbands’ cheating hearts. “Lovett,” she said. “Elaine Lovett. Ms. Elaine Lovett.”
“Ms. Lovett. Please, sit down.” He gestured toward one of the visitors’ chairs by his desk. She crossed the expanse of moss-smooth carpet, noting along the way the framed certificates hanging on his walls and what appeared to be a barometer imbedded in a decorative mahogany shell. She supposed even a detective might enjoy checking on the air pressure in his posh corner office every now and then.
She reached one of the chairs and sat, sinking into the plush cushion. Its softness made her want to cry, too. “Were you recommended by someone?” he asked.
“No. I mean . . .” She swallowed and ordered herself to get a grip. “No.”
“Okay.” He took his seat behind the desk, nudged a box of tissues closer to her, and then tapped his fingertips together. His nails were buffed and his hands looked as soft as the upholstery engulfing her. “Well, then. What can I do for you?”
“I’m here about the Arthur Cavanagh case.”
His eyebrows flickered with apparent surprise. “The Cavanagh case?”
“I know Patty Cavanagh hired you.” Actually, she didn’t exactly know that. She’d only heard it third hand.
“The Cavanagh case is closed,” he said.
Not what she’d hoped to hear. “I know people have been arrested for Arthur Cavanagh’s murder. Unfortunately, I’m one of the people who’s been arrested, even though I had nothing to do with his death. Absolutely nothing. Patty is a teammate of mine. We play soccer together.” Don’t get off track, she admonished herself. “The police have completely bungled their investigation, and I hate to think you’re no longer working on it.”
“Ms. Lovett—”
She plowed ahead, not wanting to give him a chance to tell her he was satisfied with the job the police had done in ostensibly solving the murder. “I don’t know about the other person they arrested, but I’m innocent. I didn’t kill Arthur. I hardly even knew the man. All I did was go to Emerson Village Estates to see if it was true that he was dead, and then I met this man who the police think killed Arthur, and that man planted evidence on me. If you close the case, the truth may never come out.”
“I’m confused, Ms. Lovett. The Cavanagh case was closed a couple of weeks ago.”
“What?” Arthur hadn’t been dead a couple of weeks ago. How could Bray have closed the case then?
“We ended our investigation immediately after Mr. Cavanagh’s untimely death.”
She fell back in her chair and gaped at him. Was he saying he hadn’t been hired to investigate Arthur’s murder? “What were you doing for Patty, then?”
“I’m afraid I can’t go into that, Ms. Lovett. Perhaps, since you and Mrs. Cavanagh play soccer together, you could discuss it with her.” He looked sympathetic—the kind of sympathetic a sane person felt for a lunatic.
Still baffled, she shook her head and smiled sheepishly. “I guess I could. Forgive me for wasting your time.” She rose. Her entire body felt weak, and not just from hunger.
He courteously stood when she did. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful, Ms. Lovett. If you should need some investigative work, I’d be happy to draw up a contract.”
“No—that’s all right.” She did need some investigative work to exonerate herself, but she doubted she could afford Bray’s rates. A detective who wore cufflinks could probably burn through Randy’s college account in three days. “I’ll see myself out, thanks.”
She hurried t
hrough the door, down the hall, across the waiting area—where another bleak-looking but impeccably dressed woman sat reading a magazine—and into the elevator lobby. Only after she’d entered the car and pressed the ground floor button did her respiration return to normal. She couldn’t believe she’d driven all the way into Boston, parked in a garage that was going to charge her almost as much to free her car as the court had charged her to free herself, and read about the sex lives of Hollywood has-beens while her stomach cried out for food, only to learn that this detective was not working on Arthur’s murder. He couldn’t prove her innocence, at least not unless she signed a contract with him.
So why had Patty hired him?
Outside the building that housed Bray’s office, Lainie strolled down Newbury Street toward the garage, spotted a Starbucks, and ducked inside to purchase some nourishment so she wouldn’t faint from hunger during her drive home. Once she’d forked over an unconscionable sum of money for a latté and a chocolate chip biscotti, she settled at a small round table in the corner to eat and think.
She recalled Angie saying that Patty had traveled to this very street after Arthur’s death to pick up a new outfit for his funeral. She recalled assuming, after Margaret had shared her gossip about Patty’s having hired a detective, that Patty had met with Jackson Bray the day she’d bought her funeral dress. Obviously, she’d engaged Bray’s services before Arthur had died, if the investigation had ended a couple of weeks ago. So why had she hired him?
Had Patty been one of his Mrs. Smiths?
“Shit.” Sitting in the Starbucks in Boston’s Back Bay, on leave from her job, out on bail with an accessory to murder charge hanging over her head, Lainie was allowed to curse. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Dead Ball Page 21
