No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (No Such Thing As...: A Brandy Alexander Mystery)

by Shelly Fredman

  Detective Moody didn’t feel inclined to discuss the subtleties of the suicidal mind with me. In fact, he suggested that I was looking for trouble where there wasn’t any, as a way of lessening my own feelings of guilt over not being able to save my friend from herself. I made a counter suggestion for Detective Moody to perform an anatomical impossibility involving his head and his butt and then the line went dead. Must’ve been a bad connection.

  “So what do you think?” I asked Franny, when I’d caught her up to speed.

  She gave me a long look, and I swear there was pity in her eyes.

  “You’re not going to like it,” she said finally.

  “Then never mind.”

  “Too late,” she said. “You already asked. Brandy, did you ever think there might be a little bit of truth to what that cop said about you feeling guilty? Not that you have anything to feel guilty about,” she rushed on. “But you said yourself you barely knew this woman. Isn’t it possible she was more troubled than you thought, and it just got to be too much for her?” Franny nabbed me with a look. “Hon, I think you may be plunging headlong into this whole murder theory as a way to avoid your own issues.”

  “What issues, Fran? I have no issues. I am issue-free.” I folded my arms in front of my chest, my body language screaming, “Woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”

  “Fine,” said Fran. “You’re the picture of mental health. I’ve got to get back to work.” She squeezed her way out of the booth, pausing to take one last chomp on a rib.

  “Franny,” I sighed.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll admit I may have a few teensy issues where I might benefit from professional help. But if I’m right about Tamra and her death wasn’t a suicide, don’t you think she deserves to have the truth come out?”

  “Even if you are right, Brandy, why does it always have to be you?”

  Boy. First Bobby and now Fran. How could they ask me to just ignore two people who can’t defend themselves? Jeez. Don’t they know me at all? “If not me, Fran, then who?”

  I thought about our conversation all the way back to my house. I mean it’s not like I went looking for trouble. I didn’t ask to be kidnapped and I certainly could have lived without the image of Tamra’s decomposing body… Y’know the average person could go through his entire life without experiencing even one of these events… How weird is that, anyway? I get mistaken for some unknown woman and almost killed because of it, and then my co-worker ends up dead… Talk about co-incidence… Shit! I am so stupid! I flung myself through the front door, grabbed the phone and punched in Bobby’s number.

  Chapter Five

  Bobby didn’t pick up. Damnit! I tried his cell, the station and his house. I even called DiVinci’s Pizza, thinking he may have stopped in for a quick lunch. He wasn’t there, but since I had them on the line I ordered a large pepperoni and a root beer.

  While I waited for my pizza to arrive, I called Eric. “Have you heard anything more on Tamra?” I asked when he picked up the phone.”

  “Just that her husband’s back in town. Lisa Stanley interviewed him last night. He’s staying at his brother’s. Apparently he’s too broken up to stay at the house. She said Rhineholt appeared pretty devastated. They were coming up on their fifth wedding anniversary.”

  “When’s the funeral?”

  “Tomorrow. A small private service, family only, after the cremation.”

  Cremation. Shit.

  I leafed through the phone book and punched in the number for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office.

  “Giancola.”

  “Vince, it’s Brandy.” Vincent Giancola was my boyfriend in the third grade. He used to cheat off of me during spelling tests. He’s an assistant D.A. now.

  “Hey, I’ve been meaning to call you. My mother told me your parents will be in town on Saturday and your mother’s invited me over for dinner.” He hesitated a beat, and when he spoke again his voice turned raspy, like he’d swallowed a lemon. “The thing is,” he said, “I think I’m coming down with something,” which was followed by the fakest cough I’ve ever heard.

  “Take something for it and be there, Giancola. If I have to suffer through my mother’s lasagna, so do you.” Bobby once said my mom’s cooking could be considered a lethal weapon. Of course I defended her, but we did have a cat once that died under suspicious circumstances…

  “Anyway, Vince, I’m calling about something else. You probably heard about the Tamra Rhineholt suicide out in Jersey.”

  “Yeah,” Vince said quietly. “I heard you found her too. Of all the freakin’ luck. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “As a matter of fact, there is. Can you stop a cremation and order an autopsy?”

  “What? Are you, kidding me?”

  “I wish I were.”

  “How soon can you get over here?”

  “Twenty minutes. I’ll bring a pizza.”

  “Okay, so you’re telling me someone tried to run you over, they cut your break line, kidnapped you, stuffed you in a trunk and then left you for dead in a gutter, and you didn’t tell the police… why?”

  “I thought it would put a damper on Paul’s festivities.”

  “You’re nuts, y’know that?”

  I was seated in Vince’s office chair, polishing off the last of the pizza. Vince was behind his desk, pawing through one of the drawers. After a minute he extracted a half-empty pack of Camels and some matches. He picked up a small fan he kept stashed behind a mini fridge and set it on his desk. Then he lit up the Camel and took a long drag.

  “Hey, isn’t it illegal to smoke in a government building?” I asked.

  As he flipped me the bird, there was a knock on the door and Vince’s boss stuck her head in. “Put it out, Giancola.”

  I stifled the urge to laugh. He was mad enough at me already. “Look,” I said, when she was gone, “my point is I think Tamra was the real target, not me. People mistook us for each other all the time. It’s just too co-incidental that all those near-death experiences happened to me and then she winds up dead.”

  “So how do you know you weren’t the real target, and she ended up dead by mistake?”

  “Because the guy took a look at me close up and said they got the wrong girl. They wouldn’t have let me go if I was the one they were after. Vince, you’ve got to talk to the Jersey police. The husband plans to have her cremated tomorrow. And did I mention he thought she was having an affair and they had a big fight at a restaurant?”

  Vince smiled. “You may have mentioned it once or a thousand times. Look, Brandy,” he said, drumming sausage-like fingers on the top of his desk, “you know I’d do anything in the world for you, but I can’t go telling the Jersey police how to run their department. They looked at the facts and determined it was a suicide. End of story.”

  “Well, could you at least call them and tell them what I told you?”

  Vince took another long drag off his cigarette before tossing the butt into a Styrofoam cup. “Sure.” He sighed deeply. “Just don’t get too excited. Like I said if the cops thought there was foul play involved they would have jumped all over it.”

  “Thanks, Vincent. I owe you one.”

  “Does that mean I don’t have to come for dinner on Saturday night?”

  “If you don’t show up I will hunt you down.” I stood to leave when suddenly I thought of something. “Vince, Tamra came around here pretty regularly, right?”

  “Yeah. I liked her. She was a good reporter.”

  “Well, right before she died she told me something big was about to break. What if she was killed because she knew too much?”

  “So now you think her death might be related to a story she was working on?”

  “Maybe. And don’t give me that look, Vince. Do you recall any conversations you might have had the last time she was in here?”

  “No… Yeah, come to think of it. She was asking a lot of questions about David Dwayne Harmon, the guy on death row wh
o’s scheduled to be executed next month. He claims he’s innocent.” Vince shook his head. “They always do.”

  The sun was setting as I left Vince’s, and the anxiety that lately accompanied the darkness began to creep up on me. I looked in the rear view mirror. No one looked back. That’s a good sign,” I thought. Then I looked again just to make sure.

  I knew I should go straight home, and I had every intention of doing just that, so I was as surprised as anyone when I found myself instead crossing the Betsy Ross Bridge into Pennsauken. I called John along the way and asked him to stop by my house and feed Rocky and Adrian.

  “No problem. Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What kind of an answer is that?” A really stupid one. I should have just made something up.

  “I have some errands to run. I’ll talk to you later,” I said, quickly hanging up. He called me back as I knew he would, but I let it go to voicemail. How could I explain to John what I didn’t understand myself?

  I pulled onto Tamra’s block and parked across the street. The house was shrouded in darkness, her car sitting forlornly in the driveway, as if it knew she wasn’t coming back. The thought made me irrevocably sad and I felt my eyes fill with tears. I quickly wiped them away, telling myself that inanimate objects don’t have feelings—except, of course, for stuffed animals.

  I reached into my bag for a tissue and my fingers grazed a small, metal object hidden under the weight of my pepper spray. Tamra’s key. I’d forgotten all about it. “I really should return this to the neighbor’s,” I thought. They didn’t appear to be home, but I figured I’d get out and stretch my legs and maybe wait for them.

  I popped open the glove compartment and extracted a flashlight. It was dark on the street, I reasoned, and I didn’t want to trip and fall. It was also freezing out, so I pulled my hood up over my head and slipped on a pair of gloves I found in my coat pocket. Quickly I scanned the street and, finding no one out there, I climbed out of the car.

  As I approached the sidewalk in front of Tamra’s, I was sure I heard a soft meow, which could have just been the wind, but why take chances. What if her cat Mittens was stuck all alone in the house again? It would be so easy for Jeff to forget about her in the throes of his grief. That settled it. I would simply go inside to make sure Mittens was okay and I’d come right out again. After all, by the time Jeff came home, the cat could starve to death. I took a cursory glance around and opened the front door.

  Someone had tried to air out the place. The living room windows had been left open a crack, but even the crisp winter-night breeze couldn’t mask the lingering odor of tragedy. I flicked on the flashlight and made a half-hearted attempt to look for a cat I already knew wasn’t there. “Maybe she’s upstairs,” I announced, keeping up the ridiculous charade, on the off chance someone popped out of the closet with a video recorder. “See, I’m just in here lookin’ for the cat.”

  What was I looking for, anyway? Did I really believe Jeff had murdered his wife, or was this, like everyone else seemed to think, just an elaborate way for me to assuage my guilt over my friend’s death?

  As I am much more functional when I’m irrationally confident about my convictions, I decided to stick with my murder theory. I may be emotionally stunted, but my gut feelings are always dead-on. (No pun intended.)

  I went into the bedroom and began opening drawers. It felt really uncomfortable rifling through the Rhineholts’ personal belongings. Not that I’m averse to checking out other people’s stuff—I’m inherently nosy—I just didn’t want to get caught. I found an open box of condoms on the nightstand next to the bed and wondered if they had been used recently, in which case, their relationship was probably in a lot better shape than I had imagined.

  I moved on to the office. It looked marginally different from the last time I had been in there, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. “The computer screen is lit up,” I suddenly realized. Who had turned it on? Had Jeff come by the house to sift through his dead wife’s e-mails in search of proof of her infidelity?

  As I thought about this, I noticed Tamra’s cell phone lying on the floor, under the bookshelf. I held it in my gloved hands and scanned the menu for recent calls. Resting the flashlight on the table, I scribbled down the numbers for the last calls she’d made. I knew one of them by heart—my own.

  Next, I hit incoming messages. A guy’s voice, demanding and gruff filled my ears. “Goddamit, Tamra. You can’t keep avoiding me forever.” Hmm… an angry bill collector, perhaps, or the mysterious— and evidently cranky Richard? I checked for a callback number, but it was restricted. Message number two was from Jeff. “Honey, I’m sorry about earlier. Can we please just talk about this? Call me. I love you.” His voice was soft and pleading and I began to feel very ashamed of myself for invading their privacy. I placed the phone on the computer table and looked around some more.

  My flashlight battery was beginning to dim and I hadn’t found anything incriminating yet. No bloody razor discreetly tucked away in his underwear drawer, no confessionary note proclaiming, “I did it, signed Jeff.”

  Okay, assuming for a minute it wasn’t Jeff, who else would have a vested interest in killing off Tamra… hey, maybe her death was work related. What was that big story Tamra was about to break?

  I opened her desk drawer and there among a pile of unrelated news items, I found a reprint of an article about a man who had been convicted of raping and killing a college student, out in Manayunk. It was dated four years ago. Vince said Tamra been asking questions recently about a Dwayne Somebody on Death Row.

  I stared down at a blurry mug shot of a large, muscular African-American man. David Dwayne Harmon. He appeared to be in his late twenties, shaved head, a small tattoo located above his left ear; good looking by anyone’s standards, even with his homicidal tendencies. Okay, that clinches it. I’m definitely going to hell.

  Tamra had highlighted parts of the article. I held the paper up to my face and tried to make out the words in the fading light, but was suddenly distracted by a faint rustling noise. My body stiffened. “Mittens?” I whispered hopefully. The noise was coming from just outside the door. I was surprised I could hear it over the pounding of my heart.

  I grabbed my bag and reached inside for the pepper spray, knocking the flashlight onto the rug in the process. The light went out, leaving me in pitch darkness. I quickly crouched behind the desk, taking a fraction of a moment to ponder how I always seemed to end up in these predicaments. I guess my fourth grade teacher Mr. Brownstein was right on the money when he wrote on my report card, “lacks impulse control.”

  Oh God, the door was opening. I heard a soft intake of breath and suddenly the room was flooded with light. I stood and pressed hard on the pepper spray, aiming straight for the face that loomed in front of me. Too late, I recognized the uniform and gun that accompanied a command. “Don’t move! Police.” It was followed by a “Jesus Christ” and a few other choice expletives as the spray connected with his eyes.

  His partner rushed into the room and tackled me to the ground, knocking the wind out of me. Squashed beneath his weight, I was hauled to my feet, hands bound behind my back and gasping for air.

  Tears streamed down the first cop’s face. I must’ve gotten him good because the rims of his eyes turned all red, like a white rabbit. So in my mind I started referring to him as Officer Bunny. “What the hell did you spray me with?” he barked, wiping his face on his sleeve. “It smells like Binaca.”

  “It is Binaca,” I huffed, trying to catch my breath. “I couldn’t find my pepper spray. I’m very sorry,” I added. “I didn’t know you were a cop.”

  “Tell it to the judge, sweetheart. You’re under arrest.”

  “For what? Assault with a breath freshener?” Oh my God. I’m in real trouble here. Why can’t I just grovel like a normal person?

  “What’s your name, ma’am?” Officer Bunny’s partner interjected, and I could see he was making a concerted effort
not to laugh.

  “Brandy Alexander.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  I resisted the urge to say “bite me” and nodded towards my pocketbook.

  “My identification is in there. Officer, what exactly am I being charged with?”

  Cop number one did a quick check of my drivers’ license. “Breaking and entering for starters. A neighbor saw you skulking around the property and called the owner. You have the right to remain silent.” Boy that guy could really hold a grudge.

  “Look, officer, this is all just a big misunderstanding. If you’ll let me explain—”

  He cut me off and read me my rights while his partner gave me the once-over. I thought I saw a glint of recognition in his eye. He must have seen me on the morning news. Maybe he was a fan. This would be cleared up in a minute. “Now I know who you are,” he said finally. But before I could offer him an 8 X 10 color glossy photo, he turned back to his partner. “She’s the nut who keeps calling the station saying the woman who lived at this house was murdered. It seems little Nancy Drew here wants to do our job for us.” Seeing as he had a gun and the authority to haul my ass off to jail, I let the sarcasm slide.

  I sighed. “The woman who lived here was a friend of mine. I was the one who discovered her. Look, I realized I still had her house key and I wanted to return it to her neighbor. But when I got here I became concerned that their cat was left for days all alone in the house, so I went inside to see if it needed to be fed.”

  “Why would you think that?” demanded a new voice. We all whipped around to see who had entered the room. It was Ricky, the buttinski kid from next door. “You were the one who told me to take the cat over to my house,” he said. “Don’t you remember?” Note to self: When the cops aren’t looking, push Ricky down.