by Annie Knox
I suspected I knew how Ken had pried open Hal’s pockets: He knew that Hal and Sherry were having an affair and he blackmailed Hal into backing his restaurant. That’s why he wouldn’t fess up about who he saw Sherry with at the Mission.
“To be honest,” Pris continued, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, “I find him a bit off-putting. A little too aggressive. But his food is divine, so . . .”
It was ironic, really, that she found Ken’s personality too aggressive when Ken didn’t even come close to the bulldozer-style of Hal Olson.
“You should really be a bit more discreet in your inquiries, dear, if you don’t want to get people to talk.”
“Well,” I said, taking a deep breath, “discretion has never really been my strong suit.”
She laughed again. “I’m beginning to gather that. Inviting me here today, for example. Our business could have easily been conducted by phone, yet you brought me out in the freezing cold for some reason. And I think I know what it is.”
I swallowed hard. Rena was in the kitchen, and if anything went wrong I knew I only had to call to her, but the thought of confronting a potential murderer alone was still way outside my comfort zone.
“So I guess there’s no point in me mincing words,” I said.
“No. By all means, let’s get to the good part.”
“We know you killed Sherry.”
The smile melted from Pris’s face. “Excuse me?”
“We know.”
“Who’s this ‘we,’ and what do you think you know?” Pris snapped.
“Rena and I figured it out. Your husband left the house after you got home that night, so you could have come back downtown yourself. You’re a member of the gardening club, so you’d be familiar with native plants, including the water hemlock that killed Sherry. Your cat horped up Sherry’s Kabbalah bracelet the morning after her death. And you certainly had the motive.”
“First, my cat did not ‘horp up’ a bracelet, as you so delicately put it. She got into my embroidery floss, just like Hal said. I found all the skeins in a complete tangle later that morning. Second, I’m one of many members of the gardening club, so that’s hardly evidence of anything.
“And what, pray tell, would be my motive for killing Sherry? She was picketing my competitor’s establishment. Seems I should have been baking her cookies, not killing her.”
“What about her affair with Hal?” I challenged.
“Her what with who?” Pris gasped.
She seemed genuinely surprised. Oh dear.
“You mean you didn’t know?”
“That my husband was having an affair with that horrible hippie? No, I did not.” She began to laugh . . . not a dry chuckle or a polite ripple of laughter, but full-on, losing-it hysterics. “Oh,” she wheezed, “oh dear. That’s astonishing. I can’t imagine how I missed the stink of patchouli on him. Are you sure?”
“Unless he had another reason for taking her out to dinner at the Mission or for buying her a disposable cell phone, I’m pretty sure they were having an affair. But where did you think he went the night Sherry died? You knew he wasn’t really looking for his wallet at the office because you knew he had the wallet at the grand opening . . . you ordered him to take it out to show me the pictures of Kiki.”
“Oh, I knew he wasn’t going to look for his wallet, and I was hoping he was meeting a little piece on the side, but I thought it was you.”
“Me? Seriously?”
“Of course. He had the wallet at the party, he goes out on the pretense of having lost it, and you bring it by the next morning. If you were a deeply suspicious wife, wouldn’t you have suspected that the woman dropping off her husband’s wallet was really his lover?”
She had an excellent point.
“I actually thought that’s what today was about,” Pris continued. “I thought you were going to confess all. Maybe pledge your undying love and demand that I let Hal go or something equally déclassé.”
“But if you thought I was running around with your husband, why have you been so polite to me? You actually seemed happy to see me this morning.”
“Oh, Izzy. Don’t you get it? I’m dying for Hal to have an affair. Hal Olson is about as exciting as unbuttered toast. I want out of this marriage so badly, while I’m still young enough to have a little fun. But ‘our’ money is really his money, and I signed a prenup. The only way I get half is if he commits adultery. I’ve been looking for the dirt on him for years.”
The hysteria bubbled up again, and she wiped tears of mirth from her eyes. “You thought I killed Sherry out of jealousy, but her death is most inconvenient for me. If she were still alive, I could sic a private investigator on her and get proof of the affair, break the prenup. As it stands, the information is probably good for nothing but a good laugh. Unless, of course, I can get Hal to confess.”
She sobered suddenly and cocked her head. “I was tickled pink this morning, thinking you were going to pour out your heart to me and make my life so much easier.”
She reached into her handbag and withdrew a silver box about the size of a pack of gum. “I even brought a digital recorder so I could get the evidence I needed to get out of my marriage with my bank account intact.”
“Really? You were that certain I was having an affair with Hal?”
She shrugged. “Actually, I carry this with me at all times. You never know when someone will say something incriminating. And when you have a philandering husband to nab, well, it’s a handy tool. But that’s not the point.
“Don’t you see? I’m the last person who would want Sherry dead.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-three
That evening, Sean, Rena, and I held another strategy meeting in the Trendy Tails barkery. Rena was just finishing putting the peanut butter filling in another batch of carrot pupcakes. She dipped her finger through the peanut butter cream and licked it clean, then held out the spoon in offering to Sean or to me. We both declined, and she shrugged.
“Don’t know what you’re missing,” she muttered.
“I know your food is great, Rena. But I just can’t get past the fact that you’re making this stuff for a dog.”
“Whatever,” she grumbled, as she took a seat at the table. “Let’s talk about the bigger issue of whether or not I’m going to the hoosegow for murder.”
“It feels like we’re treading water,” I said. “I keep getting glimpses of land, but we’re not making any real progress.”
Sean nodded. “This pursuit of the mystery man got us nowhere fast.”
“Great,” Rena said, folding her arms on the table and letting her head fall on them with a soft thunk. “My future is looking brighter and brighter.”
“We have to look at this with new eyes,” Sean insisted. “Presumably Sherry’s death had nothing to do with her love life.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. “At the beginning, we assumed it was an enemy who killed her, not a lover. Sherry had lots of enemies. We’ve been too focused on one possibility to the exclusion of others.”
“So what do you think we ought to do?” Rena asked, raising her head to look back and forth between us.
“We use our best asset: our ability to get into Sherry’s apartment. We search it again, this time with an open mind about what we might find.”
“Am I still benched?” Rena asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sean said. “In your current predicament, we can’t risk you being anywhere near Sherry’s home. You’re just going to have to sit this out.”
“Good thing I trust you two,” Rena said with a halfhearted smile.
It broke my heart to see my feisty friend so dejected, and it filled me with fear to think I might not be up to the task of saving her. Never in my life had I been more scared of living up to my nickname: Dizzy Izzy.
• • •
Sean and I headed to the Silent Woman to fetch Nick and ask him to let us back into Sherry’s apartment.
“Why?”
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“Because we’re still trying to figure out who killed her,” I said.
“That’s what cops are for, right? Maybe if they’re busy solving murders, they can lay off guys like me who are just minding their own business,” he grumbled.
The bartender leaned over the bar. “Nick here got picked up for public intoxication a couple of days ago. Passed out on a bench in Dakota Park.”
“I wasn’t hurting anyone. Just resting.”
“Listen, Nick,” I said, “the cops are focusing on Rena. You like Rena, right?”
“Rena’s good people,” he agreed, repeating that familiar mantra.
“Then help us help her. We thought we were onto something, but we’re back to square one, and we’re hoping that something in the apartment will give us a lead.”
Nick squirmed on his barstool. “I have to tell you something first. I’ve been staying at Sherry’s place.”
“Not at your mom’s?”
“Nah, she effing evicted me.”
I silently cheered Nadya’s decision to kick her abusive baby bird out of the nest and make him fly on his own.
“I figured, my name’s on the lease and the rent is paid up through the end of the year. It’s what Sherry would’ve wanted. But I know the stuff inside is Sherry’s, and I haven’t sold anything. I swear.”
Which meant, of course, that he had sold some of Sherry’s belongings. But that was Carla’s problem, not mine. As long as he hadn’t inadvertently sold something that held a clue to Sherry’s murder, I didn’t care if he’d gutted the place.
Sean patted him on the back.
“It’s okay, Nick. We don’t care if you’ve been crashing at Sherry’s. We just want to look around. For Rena.”
“Okay. For Rena.”
• • •
The apartment was every bit as cluttered as I remembered. But there was a faint whiff of bleach in the air, and the stacks of paper looked marginally straighter. If clutter could be tidy, this was it.
“Nick, have the cleaning people been here?”
“I s’pose so. They came every week, and they were paid up front, just like the rent.” He sniffed loudly. “Yep, they’ve been here. They have their own key, come and go like ghosts. Only way you know for certain they’ve been here is the smell and the tiny triangle on the toilet paper.”
Nick kicked off his shoes, made his way to the brass daybed, and curled up in a bony little ball there. He cocooned himself in the red chenille throw and inhaled deeply. It must have smelled of Sherry.
On the floor next to the daybed were three pizza boxes, an empty plastic bottle of cheap vodka, and dozens of crumpled tissues. It looked like Nick hadn’t so much been living in Sherry’s apartment as nesting there.
The first time we’d been to Sherry’s apartment, we’d been looking for something very specific: the identity of her mystery man. This time, we were casting a broader net.
I started in the bedroom, while Sean took the living room.
Sherry’s closet was bursting at the seams with long, flowing dresses, patchwork jumpers, and those chunky, brightly colored sweaters that are hand knit in Central America . . . but I found nothing besides clothes. Her dresser and a bookcase were littered with scarves, bangles, and piles of her photographs, but nothing new.
I joined Sean in the living room. “Any luck?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “I think I found her calendar.”
I rushed to his side. “Did she actually keep a calendar? Like actually have appointments and stuff?”
He flipped through the pages, looking at the notations in the small squares, but before he could answer me, Nick piped up.
“’Course she kept a calendar. I told you, the woman had effing irons in the fire. She belonged to a couple of big organizations that met in Minneapolis, one to save the environment and one to ban nuclear power plants, so she had to keep track of their meetings. And her protests.”
Sean pointed at the date for the Trendy Tails grand opening. Sure enough, she’d scrawled “TT Open” in the box.
“Is there anything unusual in the days before her death?” I asked.
“Nothing I can make out. But look at this.” He pointed at the square for tomorrow, Wednesday, October 30. “It’s starred and circled, so it must have been important.”
I leaned in for a better look, and my arm brushed Sean’s. We both pulled back quickly, as though the point of contact had burned.
“Excuse me,” I mumbled, silently cursing myself for reacting like a love-struck teenager with Sean of all people: a man I’d put squarely in the friend box many years ago and who was now quite involved with another woman.
I turned my attention back to the starred date on the calendar. “Courthouse, eight a.m.,” I read aloud.
“Another protest?” Sean questioned.
“Maybe. Jolly said that Sherry had been hanging around the bank, making a pest of herself, and you know how much she loved a good conspiracy theory. A protest at the courthouse could be part of a grander plan. It seems the most likely theory. But it’s so specific. Why eight a.m.? Maybe she was meeting someone there. Or was there some specific event she was protesting?”
“I suppose it’s something,” Sean said. “But whatever she was planning to do at eight a.m. at the courthouse, she’ll never get the chance.”
We continued our search through the detritus of Sherry’s life, while Nick quietly snored away on the daybed, for another thirty minutes. That’s when something caught my eye.
“Sean,” I called. “Check this out.”
I held up a stack of papers I’d found nestled between two mounds of old newspapers on the big oak dining table.
When he reached my side, I started leafing through them, turning over one after the next.
“Bank statements?”
“Yeah. And tax returns.” I raised my voice. “Hey, Nick, I thought you said Sherry didn’t have a checking account.”
“Nah, man. I said she didn’t have a checkbook. ’Course she had an account. But Carla handled all the money stuff. She just brought by a stack of checks every month and had Carla sign them. Then Carla gave Sherry her cash, and they went their separate ways.”
“What about her taxes?”
“Same deal. Sherry didn’t like paying her blood money to Uncle Sam and didn’t want to waste a minute of her life on them. Carla brought the papers, Sherry signed, and boom, they were done.”
Beside me, Sean continued flipping the pages.
He was going too slowly for my taste, so I gently knocked his hand away. For an instant, we both glanced up and our gazes met.
I cleared my throat. “This looks like five years’ worth of bank statements and tax returns for the same timeframe.”
“What’s so strange about that?” he said. “Your sister is an accountant. Surely she has told you that you should always have five years of your financial documents on hand in case of an audit.”
Indeed. And thanks to her relentless indoctrination, I kept five years’ worth of tax returns and all the supporting documentation in a pretty blue flowered box beneath my bed.
“If it were anyone else, there wouldn’t be anything strange about it at all. But every single person we’ve talked to has emphasized that Sherry didn’t handle her own finances. Nick just said she didn’t even have a checkbook, didn’t bother reviewing her tax forms before she signed them. She let Carla handle everything. Can you imagine her being worried about an audit?”
Something was niggling in the back of my mind. Five years. It wasn’t just the standard record-keeping period. There was something else.
“Nick,” I called, trying to rouse him again from that state between awake and passed out. “How old was Sherry?” I knew she was a few years older than I was, but not exactly how much older.
“Thirty-five,” he replied, a hint of annoyance creeping into his voice. “Her birthday was last month. I remembered. Even got her a card, but she sent it back.”
Thirty-fiv
e. So the statements and returns dated back to when she turned thirty.
“These documents go back to when Sherry started drawing money from the Harper trust,” I said to Sean.
“Well, that explains it. Five years ago was when Carla moved back from Minneapolis and started managing the trust. I’m sure Carla cracked down on Sherry, Maybe Carla is like Dru and made Sherry keep her statements.”
I gestured around the apartment. “You think Carla would trust Sherry to keep important documents in this chaos? No, I would lay odds that Carla does Sherry’s taxes, pays all her bills, handles her banking, and keeps the records herself.”
“Then what is Sherry doing with these?”
“Excellent question.” I flipped through the stack until I found what I was looking for. “Here. Take a look at this. See all these notes in the margins of the tax returns? Question marks. Like something didn’t add up. Same with the bank statements. It looks like Sherry was going through all her deposits and withdrawals, and something struck her as off.”
Sean laughed. “Are you suggesting the bank made an error, and Sherry of all people was able to spot it? Besides, Carla’s a wiz. She started law school when she was nineteen, and got her job at the white-shoe law firm in Minneapolis when she was only twenty-two. She’s brilliant. If the bank had made an error, she would have caught it. We can just call her and ask. Unless you’re suggesting Carla’s the one who made the error.”
I realized I was on thin ice here, implicating Sean’s girlfriend of any sort of wrongdoing, no matter how unintentional. Who would he trust: Dizzy Izzy or Carla the prodigy? It wasn’t even close. But Rena’s life was on the line, and that mattered more to me than Sean’s relationship with Carla . . . or my relationship with Sean.
“I’m not suggesting anything,” I said, though my pause had surely telegraphed my true feelings on the matter. “I just think it’s strange that Sherry was going through her own bank statements and tax returns.
“Let’s show them to my sister Dru first. If she can’t find anything, then we’ll talk to Carla.”
