Paws For Murder

by Annie Knox

  Sean wasted no time.

  “We’ve seen Sherry’s tax returns and bank statements.”

  For an instant, Carla looked off balance, like she might tip over in her chair. But in a heartbeat she was steady again, her mask of cool indifference firmly in place.

  “And?” she drawled.

  “And there’s a lot of money missing from that account,” Rena snapped.

  “What do you mean? Sherry’s life wasn’t free. Trust money went in, living expenses came out.”

  “I mean that we saw her checking account statements for the last five years.”

  “Since you took over her finances,” I added.

  “Right,” Rena continued. “And there are a large number of extremely unusual withdrawals. Big ones. Withdrawals that seriously sapped Sherry’s savings.”

  “She should be loaded,” I chimed in. “She maintained a thrifty lifestyle. She should have tons of money in her account.”

  I handed Carla a copy of the bank statements, the unusual check withdrawals highlighted in yellow.

  Carla glanced at the papers, and shrugged.

  “Maybe she invested it,” Carla said.

  “Maybe,” Sean said. “But she hasn’t claimed any capital gains income. Ever.”

  “So she didn’t tell me about her income. That’s her fault, but not mine.”

  The look on Sean’s face was killing me. He was clearly torn between what he wanted to believe and what he was starting to realize.

  “Come on, Carla, you were the one writing the checks. Sherry didn’t have her own checkbook, so she would have had to come to you for the money. You mean to tell me you never followed up with Sherry about those huge sums of money when you did her taxes?”

  “She was a grown-up. It wasn’t my job to follow up.”

  “Carla. You would have followed up.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she snapped, all pretense of civility gone. “For all I know, she gave her money away to those filthy hippies and druggies she was always hanging around with. Nick Haas. You.” She indicated Rena with a narrow-eyed glare.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but that’s not what I think happened at all.”

  “Oh, really. Please, do tell me what you—a tailor for dogs—think about my cousin’s finances.”

  “Carla,” Sean warned. “There’s no call for that.”

  “Really? These two have somehow robbed you of your senses, Sean. They’ve convinced you to come in here and accuse me of something.”

  “No one has made an accusation,” Sean responded, the “yet” suspended, unspoken, in the tense air of the office.

  “So,” Carla said, “what are you not accusing me of?”

  “Look,” I said. “Sean’s been standing up for you. He’s here because he’s certain you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the one who’s not so sure. I don’t think the withdrawals were for Sherry at all, because she’d taken the initiative to get copies of her bank statements and made little question marks all over them. Sherry had no idea what those withdrawals were about.”

  “I think you’re giving Sherry too much credit. Just because she doesn’t remember the withdrawals doesn’t mean she didn’t make them. She couldn’t manage her own life. Half the time, she didn’t remember what day of the week it was.”

  “That’s not fair,” Rena said, her tiny chin lifted in defiance. “Sherry was a little scattered, a little off the beaten path, but even Sherry would have remembered giving a hundred grand to someone.”

  “I’m telling you,” Carla ground out, “I have no idea what Sherry did with that money or why it even matters.”

  I exchanged a look with Sean. He swallowed hard. I recognized his expression: mingled anger, confusion, and hurt. The expression he’d worn all those years ago when he’d tried to save me from my own foolish self. After a moment, he sighed and nodded, then turned his head away as though he couldn’t bear to watch.

  “Carla, Sherry didn’t do anything with that money. We have these.” I held out three documents: Sherry’s grocery-slash-love note, the last page of one of the tax returns, and the cancelled check Lois had given me. A check—made out to cash—for $100,000 dollars, drawn on Sherry Harper’s account. I laid them on Carla’s desk, lined up so that all of the signatures were visible.

  Carla leaned forward, and the color drained from her face.

  The signatures on the tax form and Nick’s note were childish scrawls, barely legible. But the “S” and the “H” on the larger check were completely clear.

  “Sherry didn’t even sign this check.” I said.

  “I handled her finances,” Carla answered, a tremor in her voice. “Sometimes, she’d disappear for weeks on some crazy protest trip or yoga retreat. Sometimes I had to sign the checks.”

  She glanced around at the three of us, our matching grim expressions letting her know that we weren’t buying the load she was trying to sell.

  Carla looked stricken, but then her full lips tightened into a stingy line.

  “Sherry was a fool. Teal and Tarleton took their payouts from the trust and managed their own business. But not Sherry. She insisted she didn’t believe in banks and checks and such.”

  “Nick said she was responsible with her money,” I said. “Paid her rent up front every three months.”

  “No, I paid her rent every three months. Me. And her utilities, and her cleaning service. Where did she think her rent was coming from? Magical fairies? It came from the bank, paid by a check, just signed by me instead of her. And I gave her cash every month so she could eat.” She laughed. “Enough cash for her to buy the poster board for all her protest signs. No, Sherry wasn’t responsible with her money; she just didn’t care about it. I had to handle all of her affairs or she would have been out on the street.”

  “So you helped yourself to a little piece of her pie?” Sean said.

  “Why not? My mother gave her entire youth to this family, marrying my dad when she was only seventeen. They always treated her like the hired help, just because she didn’t have the great good fortune to be born rich. And then after years of suffering, married to my stone-hearted father, he dies and she discovers that all the money is wrapped up in the trust. There’s nothing for her. She’s middle-aged and broke. She deserved to have something of her own. Deserved it more than Sherry deserved to have someone else paying all her bills. So what if I took some of Sherry’s mad money—money she didn’t even want—and invested it in my mother’s business?”

  “‘So what’?” Sean said, his voice tight with some emotion . . . frustration, anger, betrayal. “‘So what’? It’s illegal. You’re an officer of the court and the trustee of the estate. You had a fiduciary duty to Sherry. You weren’t supposed to help yourself to her money.”

  “But that’s just it. Why was it Sherry’s money? What did she ever do to earn it? Nothing. Heck, she called it blood money.” She tipped her chin down and went on in a mock serious tone. “‘Money earned on the back of the working man. Torn from the earth itself.’ What a load of malarkey. If she thought the money was dirty, she shouldn’t have taken it. She had no principles at all. At least I wasn’t squandering the money on woo-woo crystals and fake psychics and harebrained causes. If she was so concerned with the working man, she would have given my mother the money herself.”

  “You’re right,” Rena said. “Sherry could be a raging hypocrite. But did you even give her the chance? I mean, did you ever go to her and say ‘Sherry, my mom’s business is failing. Could you pitch in some cash?’”

  Carla sighed. “No. I didn’t. Because if I had asked, Sherry would have said no. You know how contrary she was. If I suggested she buy a condo, she insisted she should rent. If I suggested she buy a car, she’d insist her bicycle was just fine . . . even if it meant riding it through four-foot drifts of snow. If I’d suggested she invest in the Grateful Grape, she would have had some reason why she shouldn’t: because we didn’t pay the dishwashers enough, or because we didn’t use locally sourced wine
s, or because our cheese plates weren’t rennet-free.”

  She had a point. Sherry did have a marvelous knack for finding something wrong with everything. But this time she’d been in the right and trying to do something genuinely good. She’d been trying to save Soaring Eagles from being turned into a bunch of condos.

  “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just give your mother your own money,” Sean said. “You got the same disbursement as Sherry. Why risk everything to take Sherry’s money?”

  “I don’t start drawing on the trust until I’m thirty. Next month. Right now, it takes every dime I have to pay my own bills. When my dad was alive, he was the recipient of the trust, and he didn’t exactly share. I have my entire private college tuition and my entire private law school tuition to pay back. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, some of them held by private banks. And then I went to work for a white-shoe law firm in Chicago, and I was expected to live up to that image: the thousand-dollar suits, the fine jewelry, the swank apartment. I put all those expenses on credit cards, thinking I’d be making big-law-firm paychecks for years to come.

  “But instead, I got called back to this backwater to take care of family business. I can pay my debts, but just barely. Why do you think I’m still living with my mom? I can’t afford to rent a place of my own. I certainly can’t afford to supplement my mother’s income.”

  “So you stole money from Sherry,” Sean said, his voice filled with fury. “I can’t believe you would steal.”

  Carla’s affect changed, softened, and her eyes pooled with tears. “Sean, I didn’t steal. I borrowed. I would have paid her back eventually. I thought she’d never know. But my mom just kept needing more and more, and the amount I owed her just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

  I leaned in to speak gently to Carla. “When Sherry decided she was going to buy the Soaring Eagles camp, she came to you for the money,” I prompted.

  “Yes. And I just didn’t have the cash to give her. Even if the land went for back taxes alone, it would cost a small fortune. If I’d written a check—on her account or mine—it would have bounced.”

  “What did you tell her?” I asked.

  “That there wasn’t enough money in the account.”

  “How did she respond?”

  “She didn’t believe me. She thought I was holding on to the money because I didn’t approve of her plan to buy the Anderson property and turn it into a wildlife preserve.”

  “That’s why she sent you the text,” Rena said.

  “And that’s why she ended up in a screaming match with the bank manager,” I added.

  “Yes. It was all going to come out.”

  Sean pinned her with an icy stare. I did not envy her being on the other end of that look.

  “Did you kill her?”

  “What?”

  “I said, did you kill her? Did you kill Sherry to cover up your crime?”

  “Lord, no. You have to believe me.”

  “Why should I believe a word that comes out of your mouth?”

  “Because it’s the truth!”

  Rena jumped in. “We’ll go to the police with this. They’ll audit your accounts, prove that you embezzled the money. And they’ll prove that you killed Sherry.”

  “They won’t because I didn’t.” She didn’t spare so much as a glance for either me or Rena. All her attention was fixed squarely on Sean, eyes filled with pain, as though she could keep hold of him as long as she didn’t look away. “Sean, you have to believe me. I know I did a stupid thing.”

  “A wrong thing,” he said.

  “A stupid, wrong thing,” she amended. “I will have to learn to live with what you must think of me, but I cannot live with you thinking I would kill my cousin to cover up my mistake.”

  “Dammit,” Sean said. “It wasn’t a mistake. It was five years of continued criminal behavior. Of course you would kill to cover it up.”

  “Sean, you know me better than that!”

  “Apparently I don’t. I never guessed you could abuse your position like this.”

  “You have to believe me: I didn’t kill Sherry.”

  “Why? Why should I believe you? Do you have an alibi? Something that will exonerate you? Because right now it looks pretty bad.”

  “I . . .” She trailed off, and I could see the indecision in her eyes. Was she going to manufacture an alibi? Offer some reason why she couldn’t possibly have been the killer? Finally, her inner struggle ended with a sigh.

  “I was home. Right where you left me.”

  “Home alone, I suppose,” Sean said, the words falling like gravel from his lips.

  Carla glanced off to the side and caught a tiny breath. Sean’s tone must have hurt.

  “No. I wasn’t alone. My mom was with me.” Sean opened his mouth to cut in, but Carla held up a restraining hand. “I know. I’m a lawyer, too. As alibis go, ‘home with my mom’ hardly even counts. But it’s the truth, and you’ll just have to trust me.”

  “I don’t,” Sean said.

  I thought I should break in, suggest that we call the cops sooner rather than later. But before I opened my mouth, I glanced at Sean, who sat stoic and still in the leather side chair, his usually expressive face devoid of emotion.

  “Rena, Izzy, could you give us a few minutes? Carla and I need to have a talk.”

  CHAPTER

  Twenty-eight

  On the one hand, I knew that Sean and his love life were really none of my business. I’d given up my right to pry about fifteen years earlier, and even though we’d been spending time together over the last couple of weeks, I didn’t think we’d gone back to being confidants. On the other hand, I’d seen that look of betrayal on Sean’s face, and I knew that feeling only too well.

  I sent Rena back to Trendy Tails to help Dolly and Ingrid mind the store. I trusted Ingrid to rein in the worst of Aunt Dolly’s reckless enthusiasm, but I expected business to pick up that afternoon as people stopped by to get last-minute costumes and accessories before the Halloween Howl.

  I, on the other hand, decided to wait for Sean outside Carla’s office. I only went as far as the hallway before I slid down the wall to sit and wait. As I did, I went through what we’d gleaned from our conversation with Carla. We’d learned she was a thief, that she’d stolen money from Sherry in order to bankroll her mother’s failing business and her own overextended financial situation. We’d learned she had a motive for killing Sherry, and not much of an alibi. But that was it. We still had nothing connecting Carla to the water hemlock, nothing placing her in the alley that night. When it came right down to it, we’d ruined Sean and Carla’s relationship, but we hadn’t exactly gotten Rena off the hook.

  And once again, I had this sense that something wasn’t quite adding up. It was like having a splinter in my finger: I could feel it, it was definitely there, but no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t see it.

  Sean nearly tripped on me when he emerged from Carla’s office.

  “What the heck are you doing here?” he snapped.

  “Waiting for you.”

  “This is not the best time, Izzy.”

  “It’s exactly the right time, Sean. I’ve been where you are right now. You shouldn’t be alone.”

  He laughed dryly. “Well, fine. I’m going back to my place for a hot shower and a stiff drink. You want to tag along, I don’t have the strength to fight you.”

  I clambered up from the floor and scrambled to catch up to him as he shoved open the door to the building and made his way to his car. It wasn’t a typical lawyerly car. In fact, the car reminded me of teenage Sean: a vintage Dodge Charger. The passenger-side door squealed in protest as I pried it open and slammed it shut, right as Sean started pulling away from the curb.

  We rode to his apartment in silence, me watching Sean, Sean staring hard at the street before him. When he came to a stop, we were outside a two-story Victorian with wraparound porches on both levels. I suddenly realized I’d had no idea where Sea
n lived until that very moment.

  He led the way to the front door.

  “Watch the step,” he muttered, pointing at a spot where the concrete of the third step had started to crumble.

  When he opened the door, Blackstone trotted out to see him, ears flopping and tail wagging. Sean dropped to a knee and grabbed the dog’s face in his hands, resting his own forehead on the top of Blackstone’s noggin.

  He stood up again, whisked off his coat to hang on the hooks by the door, and held out a hand for mine.

  “Make yourself at home.”

  He disappeared down a hallway, and a few minutes later I heard the groaning of the old house’s pipes coming to life.

  I wandered into his living room. I felt like a spy, like a peeping Tom, getting this glimpse into his life all on my own. With Blackstone waddling at my heels, I made a circuit of the room. The walls were a creamy white, hung with black-and-white prints of Tucker ancestors and Southern landscapes—endless-looking bayous, trees draped with Spanish moss, a piece of wrought-iron railing that might have been plucked from the French Quarter. Despite their old, almost haunted subjects, the pictures were all matted in stark white and framed with modern black metal.

  A magnificent tiled fireplace dominated the room, built-in bookshelves on either side. I ran one finger over the books as I passed, catching the occasional author or title: James Ellroy, Tom Clancy, a handful of biographies of Supreme Court justices.

  Despite the austerity of the walls, the furniture was welcoming and well-loved. A large green sectional sofa, scattered with rust-colored pillows and tawny woolen throws, curled around a coffee table topped with a horizontal slice of some massive oak. By the large front window, two more chairs and their ottomans stood sentry. Bronze and glass lamps were scattered around the room, so you could easily cuddle up with a book in any nook or cranny.

  I finally settled in a corner of the sectional. Blackstone sat at my feet, his big head resting against my leg. I gently rubbed the fold behind his ear. As simply as that, Blackstone and I became fast friends.