Old Loves Die Hard (A Mac Faraday Mystery)

by Lauren Carr

  “I’m not interested in lunch. I need a drink.”

  Noticing the bruise on his forehead, hospital ID bracelet, and his disheveled appearance, she agreed. “What happened to you, sir?”

  “I was in a head-on collision with a German shepherd.” Mac climbed up onto a stool and slapped David on the back, hitting his dislocated shoulder. “What do you want? It’s on the house.”

  “Anything?” David hesitated.

  “You do like cognac, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Mac turned to Justine. “Two snifters of cognac from my special reserve. Make it Camus Jubilee.”

  David grinned. “Jubilee. Dad’s favorite. I was only al-lowed to have it a couple of times.”

  “Then this should be a treat.”

  Camus Jubilee was a special blend of the oldest cognac. Robin Spencer had a special collection of the most expensive and decadent wines, champagnes, and spirits reserved for herself and her special guests. Now they belonged to Mac. He still didn’t know the complete inventory. Archie had been gradually introducing it to him and his taste buds.

  Mac feared that he was becoming horribly spoiled.

  After Justine delivered the drinks, Mac held up his snifter to David’s in a toast. “To murder. The ultimate puzzle.”

  “Some people do crossword puzzles. Mac Faraday solves murders.” David swirled the liquor in the snifter before savoring a sip of it.

  Both men groaned with pleasure while the smooth spirit slid down their throats.

  “Better than sex,” Mac declared.

  “Equal to, but not better,” David countered.

  Mac chuckled when he thought about how long it had been since he had been with a woman. “When I was your age, I thought the same thing. Funny how age has a way of shifting your priorities.”

  “Now you prefer cognac to a fine woman?” David asked. “Tell me the truth. If you had to choose between a snifter of Jubilee and an evening alone with Archie, which would you choose?”

  Mac grinned. “You’ve forgotten that I spend most evenings alone with Archie.”

  “Have you forgotten about Gnarly?”

  “Gnarly doesn’t count.”

  “Do you want me to tell him you said that?” David laughed.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Mac saw Justine listening to their conversation while trying to appear busy completing her inventory check list. She was good at appearing nonchalant. The tilt of her head in their direction gave her away.

  “How long have you been working here, Justine?” he asked so abruptly that she dropped her pen to the floor.

  After retrieving the pen, she smiled broadly at him. “Four years.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Did you know Stephen Maguire?” David held up his badge for her to see. “The man killed here at the Inn.”

  “No,” she said quickly. “I served him a couple of drinks, but that was it. I didn’t know him.”

  In silence, they sipped their drinks. Mac set his drink down on the bar and peered up at her. “You are aware that we have security cameras all over the place, Justine.”

  Her cheeks turned a bright shade of pink. “All we did was have sex. That was it. Nothing else. I didn’t know him—except in the biblical sense. I didn’t really know him. I mean, I knew nothing about him, except that he was a big lawyer and knew lots of important people and was great in bed. That’s all.” She waved her hands and the bar’s dishrag like it was a flag, while repeating, “It was sex. Nothing else.”

  Mac nodded his head. “Okay, I get it. You had sex with Stephen Maguire and nothing else.”

  “He was in here for drinks Friday night and we hit it off,” she rambled on. “He invited me up to his room and we were attracted to each other.” In a choked voice, she asked, “Am I going to get fired for this?”

  “Were you on the clock when you had sex with him?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” Mac answered, “because I don’t want a reputation for running that type of hotel. We can have murder, but no sex on the clock.”

  David asked, “Where and when did you have sex with Stephen Maguire?”

  “His room. Saturday afternoon,” she said. “I went up to his room around one o’clock. I went on duty at four. I was there a few hours. We made the date for lunch. He’d sent for room service. Fruit and cheese and strawberries dipped in chocolate.” Giggling, she twisted the dishrag in her hands. “But we didn’t eat that much. He was really great.”

  Uncomfortable with her discussing the sexual prowess of the man with whom his wife had cheated on him, Mac shifted in his seat, took a large sip of his drink, and rubbed his aching head.

  David resumed the interview. “Did he talk to anyone while you were there? Get or make any phone calls or texts?”

  She shook her head before changing her mind. “I take that back. He did get a phone call. They got into an argument. I remember thinking he sounded like those hardball lawyers you see on television.”

  Mac asked, “Do you remember the conversation?”

  She proceeded to wipe down the bar with the dishrag. “It had to be a woman, because they were talking about her husband.”

  Mac and David exchanged glances.

  “He was telling her that he wanted to talk to her about her husband’s case,” she said slowly while recalling. “I guess she wanted to know why, and he said because the case had come to his attention, and he thought there had maybe been some irregularities about it. That was the word he used. Irregularities. I guess she didn’t want to talk to him because then he said—and this was when he started talking hard ball, it was a real turn on, too—”

  “Focus on what was said,” Mac directed her.

  “He asked her if she knew Randolph Maguire. I don’t know who that is,” Justine said.

  “He’s a high-ranking official with the IRS,” Mac told her.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, he told her that this Maguire dude was his uncle, and one phone call from him and he could have her company come to a grinding halt with audits, and she’d be up to her eyeballs in IRS agents. Then they made an appointment to meet later on for dinner.”

  “Dinner?” Mac repeated. “And this was Saturday?”

  She nodded her head quickly.

  David clarified. “They met for dinner on Saturday night?”

  “I guess,” Justine said. “I saw him having dinner with some woman. She didn’t look like she was having a good time either. Is that any help?”

  Mac jumped when he felt a strong hand clasp his shoulder. “You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

  Garrett County prosecutor Ben Fleming had decided to make his presence known. With his blond good looks and upscale style, he resembled a golf pro more than he did a lawyer. Judging by his athletic togs, he’d been visiting the club on the ground floor. He looked the Inn’s owner up and down. Even with a layer of sweat, Ben Fleming’s breeding was several degrees more evident than Mac’s.

  “As you can see, Mac went several rounds with Gnarly and lost,” David explained.

  “And you?” Ben touched the sling on David’s arm. The curl in his lip told them that he had already heard via the Spencer grapevine.

  “T-boned by a van filled with geezers,” David said. “You should see the van.”

  Ben gestured for Justine to serve him a snifter of the same cognac they were having. After getting his, he invited them to join him in the sitting area around the fireplace.

  “By the way, Chief, I got a call about you this morning,” Ben said before slipping into a pub chair.

  They could only imagine which suspect had called the county prosecutor to complain about David. It could’ve been anyone from Judge Sutherland to Natasha Holmstead to Hamilton Sanders.

  “Sabrina Carrington,” Ben announced.

  “My sister-in-law?” Mac corrected himself, “Ex-sister-in-law.”

  Ben smiled into his snifter. “She claims she was a
ssaulted by our chief of police.”

  Before David could reply to the accusation, Mac argued, “In defense of me.” He showed Ben the scratches on his cheek, which the bruise on his forehead had made him forget. “David told her to stand down and she refused. He had no choice but to shove her back and that’s all it was.”

  The prosecutor said, “She claims he tackled her and manhandled her breasts in the process.”

  “It’s like Mac said,” David replied. “She was out of control. I warned her to back off and she continued the assault on Mac. I ended it.”

  “How big was this woman?”

  David hesitated, then revealed that while Sabrina wasn’t very tall, she was a hefty weight, which caused the prosecutor to chuckle at the image of the athletic young police chief taking down a heavyset middle-aged woman in defense of Mac.

  “You haven’t met this woman,” Mac told him. “Sabrina Carrington can be as mean as a snake when she’s riled, which happens frequently.”

  “In that case, don’t worry about it.” Ben dismissed the matter with a smirk. “I’ll handle it. Other than Mac’s out of control relatives—”

  “Ex-relatives,” Mac corrected him. “Ex-in-laws.”

  “Ex-relatives,” Ben repeated. “How’s it going otherwise? Any headway we can speak of?”

  “We’re making some headway.” Relieved that the prosecutor wasn’t taking Sabrina’s complaint seriously, Mac sat back into the chair. “We have an APB out on Hamilton Sanders. He was Stephen Maguire’s assistant.”

  David explained, “He has to know what this Themis is. Archie is searching the Internet to find a common denominator about all the names on the list we found in Maguire’s folder. We believe it has to be more than that they all got off for murder, especially since someone took a shot at us and killed Bonnie Propst, the widow of one of the defendants on his list.”

  “Do keep me informed about any developments.” In a casual tone, Ben announced, “I got an interesting phone call from a friend of mine. Broderick Maguire.”

  “Broderick Maguire is a friend of yours?” Mac sensed, rather than knew, that Ben, who came from old money, was well connected. He appreciated that the prosecutor didn’t indulge in name-dropping. Even so, he would’ve thought that if his friend was connected to billionaire Broderick Maguire, he would have mentioned it at some point.

  “So you’re the one he called,” David said. “We’ve been wondering why we haven’t heard anything from the Maguires wanting to know the status of our investigation.”

  “I went to college with Broderick’s youngest son,” Ben explained. “Straight up guy. You never would have known that he came from so much money and political power.”

  “What did you tell Broderick?” Mac asked.

  Ben scratched the side of his head. “Don’t you want to know what he was asking me about first?”

  “Okay. I’ll bite,” Mac said. “What did he want to know?”

  “He wanted to know why he and his family have been getting all these calls from the media asking how they felt about some dude they’d never heard of getting killed at the Spencer Inn.”

  Forgetting about his aching head, Mac jerked upright in his seat. “What? Some dude they’d never heard of?”

  Ben chuckled. “I don’t know where you got the idea that Stephen Maguire was any relation—Broderick said he has no grandson named Stephen. He’s got twenty-three grand-children, but none of them are named Stephen. He’s got a nephew named Stephen, but he’s a retired dentist in Florida. To Broderick Maguire’s knowledge, he’s never even been to the Spencer Inn.”

  Mac spat out, “He lied. Maguire lied about belonging to the Maguire family.”

  “Is his name even Maguire?” Ben asked.

  “David ran a background check on him.” Mac pointed in David’s direction in an accusing manner. “It said that he’d gone to Ohio State University. I thought that was odd, because I was told that he went to Oxford.”

  Ben said, “Then his name may be Maguire, but he’s not related to the Maguires.”

  “That’s why he never introduced Christine to his family, because they weren’t his family.” Mac felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. All the years that he had known Stephen Maguire, he’d bought the lie as well. He put up with Maguire’s arrogance because of the family connections he believed he had. “Who lies about things like that?”

  “Con men,” Ben answered.

  “And the con worked,” Mac said. “Hunter put Stephen Maguire on the fast track, specifically because he wanted his family’s endorsement for attorney general. Wealthy women supported him in the life style of the rich and famous, with the promise of being part of high society as soon as Grandpa Maguire kicked the bucket and he came into his share of the family dynasty.”

  “It happens all the time,” Ben said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Con men say they’re from money, but it’s tied up in a trust or an overseas bank. They flash enough cash around to convince you that it’s true—”

  Mac said, “The U.S. Attorney bought it. Washington bought it. Maguire had a lot of influence. I was ordered by my supervisors to walk on eggshells around him for fear of his wrath against them.”

  Mac’s fury rose. “Maguire has probably been playing this con ever since hit-ting Washington. It probably started when someone asked if he was any relation to those Maguires and he said yes. When he saw people bowing down to kiss his feet without actually checking to see if he was telling the truth, he took a liking to it and decided to start living it. Then he conned women like Christine into supporting him in that life-style with the promise of being introduced into high society.”

  Ben held up a hand to study his manicured fingertips. “Living the debutante life has a high overhead.” He gestured at Mac’s worn and discolored jacket. “If you got more into it, you’d see that for yourself.”

  “I prefer my jackets broken in, thank you.” Mac brushed his fingers over the worn leather of his three-year-old jacket. “If Maguire wasn’t already dead, I’d fill him full of bullets and dump his body in the lake.”

  “What did I just hear?” David asked.

  “Hey, I’m only now finding out about this,” Mac said when he recalled that he didn’t have an alibi for the murders.

  “Think about it,” the police chief suggested. “Look at how mad you are about this fantasy pedigree that Maguire pulled over everyone’s eyes. Imagine if you were one of his mistresses who got taken for a ride, or a colleague who had spent years kowtowing to him only to discover that he was a fraud.”

  “Like when Maguire’s so-called illegitimate daughter calls his office saying that her mother and he were friends at Ohio State instead of Oxford,” Mac said.

  “Maguire was stabbed twenty-seven times,” David said, “which points to his murder being a crime of passion.”

  Mac nodded his head with a grin. “If Cameron told any of Maguire’s enemies about his pedigree being a fake, then I can imagine the blow-up it would have caused in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” He added, “There’s one thing that I can’t figure out. The federal government runs background checks on all of their employees.”

  Ben agreed. “In order for Maguire to have pulled this off, he had to have someone working in the Office of Personnel Management to go along with it. He would have had to have falsified transcripts and they run checks on all of that. He had to have an accomplice.”

  David asked, “Who?”

  Mac shrugged his shoulders. “In all the years that I was a homicide detective, I thought I’d seen it all. But this, conning the United States Attorney’s Office into believing that you were local nobility…” He shook his head. “I can’t believe he pulled it off.”

  Taking his cell phone from his pocket, David rose up out of his seat. “I think I’m going to have another conversation with Cameron Jones to find out who she contacted in Stephen Maguire’s world and what she told them.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Archie met Mac at the do
or with a hug and a kiss after David dropped him off at the manor. For a moment, Mac imagined that he was coming home to a lovely wife who smelled of roses…and their dog, who was hiding under the coffee table.

  “Don’t tell me.” Mac sniffed.

  A familiar odor met his nostrils. Instantly, he knew what it was. It went with the Cadillac parked in front of the manor. It was the sisters, who were making something overcooked and bland in his kitchen.

  “Sabrina said that it was your favorite,” Archie told him.

  “English pot roast,” Mac said. “Why are they cooking it here?”

  “Mac Faraday, whose wife and her lover had been found dead last week in his penthouse, was in a car accident. It made the news,” Archie explained. “They wanted to do what they could since we’ve been dodging dead bodies while sorting out their sister’s murder. I have to admit, I was surprised when Sabrina told me that pot roast was your favorite. I’ve never seen you eat pot roast.”

  Aware of them nearby in the kitchen, Mac whispered, “I didn’t hate pot roast until I ate Sabrina’s. Christine told her about how it was my favorite as part of a cruel joke.”

  He pointed at Gnarly who was still hiding under the coffee table. “What did he do?”

  “He came running out here with his tail between his legs when Sabrina tried to feed him a bite.”

  They could hear Sabrina and Roxanne quarreling in the kitchen. Mac assumed the argument was about cooking techniques and other culinary tidbits. Suspicious about why the sisters-in-law who had always hated him would be cooking dinner for him, he wondered if the pot roast was a bribe to get him to sign over Christine’s share of the lake house.

  Ed Willingham was adamant about Mac not promising any-thing to Roxanne until he had time to ensure she had paid Christine.

  Taking his hand, Archie led him into the living room, where her mini-laptop was set up on the coffee table. “I’ve made some progress. I’m still working on the other names on your list, but I found out about Emma Wilkes, whose name was listed next to Dylan Booth’s.”