Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “You were visibly upset when you got off the phone. You can’t blame Duke for noticing that.”

  “No, but I can blame him for making the remark about my boyfriends.”

  “I’ve seen people say worse to you, and you let it go,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So why now? What did Forrester say on the phone that got you so rattled?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You know, I defend you when people say that you’re sleeping with Forrester. I tell them, ‘She wouldn’t have been best man at his wedding if his wife didn’t trust Blake,’ but you’re acting like the phone call was more personal than just partners.”

  “Are you asking me if I’m sleeping with Ted?”

  “No,” he said, “absolutely not.” He sounded offended, almost panicked in distancing himself from the question, which meant either he really didn’t want to know or he really did.

  I debated how much to share with him and finally realized that if I was truly afraid of Olaf and he might become our backup, Newman had a right to know at least part of it. I was still debating when the driveway spilled out into a circle with a huge fountain in the middle of it. The house rose up like a dark cliff face. Even the few lit windows didn’t take away from the sensation that the house was part of the landscape like the forest that bordered everything.

  “Is that just a huge-ass fountain or a moderate-size swimming pool?” I asked.

  He gave a small laugh, but it was a start. “It’s a fountain. The water around it is too shallow for anything but wading.”

  Leduc was out of his car and yelling at another man in a similar uniform. We couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the porch light above them let us see their faces. The second man was fighting not to recoil from the sheriff’s pointing finger, which was stabbing at his chest. If it had been a knife, it would have gone through his heart.

  “Who’s Leduc yelling at?” I asked.

  “Rico Vargas. Deputy Rico Vargas.” Just the tone in Newman’s voice made me raise an eyebrow.

  “I take it he’s not your favorite deputy,” I said.

  “No,” Newman said, and got out of the car before I could ask why.

  I guessed we were both allowed to keep our secrets. I got out on my side of his car and had to double-time it to catch up with his longer legs.

  “What the fuck were you thinking, Rico? This is the kind of shit that Troy usually pulls. You’re supposed to be the smart one,” Leduc was thundering, or maybe it was just the acoustics of the stone arch they were standing under that made his voice into a bass rumble of noise like having a verbal rockslide thrown at you.

  Deputy Rico mumbled something, but Leduc yelled, “No, I don’t want to hear one more goddamn excuse from you, Rico!”

  We were close enough to hear the deputy say, “But it’s their house. How can I tell them they can’t come into their own house?”

  “This is not their house. This is our crime scene!” Leduc said, pushing the flat brim of his hat into Rico’s forehead so that the only thing that kept them from touching faces was the hat.

  It took me a second to realize that the hat brim was almost cutting into the skin of Rico’s forehead above his eyebrows. He was taller than the sheriff, so he had to be careful not to stand as straight as he could or the hat’s edge would have cut across his eyes. On some police forces, it would have crossed the line from getting your ass chewed to talking to your union rep, but I guessed on a force this small, there wasn’t a union. Who do you complain to when there’s no one higher than the boss?

  Thanks to the sheriff yelling at the gate intercom earlier, I knew that Deputy Vargas had not only allowed family members into the house, but had allowed them to change the security code, which meant without it the police didn’t have access to the crime scene unless the family let them in. Family is almost always the first suspected in a murder. You don’t really want them running amok at the crime scene until you’re certain they didn’t do it.

  Newman didn’t exactly yell, but he raised his voice enough to be heard. “When did they release Jocelyn from the hospital?”

  Leduc stopped yelling, just stood there with his hat brim shoved into his deputy’s forehead like a knife-edge poised to strike. He nearly growled his next words into Deputy Vargas’s face. “Answer the marshal’s question, Rico.”

  Rico swallowed so hard, I could see it from yards away. “I don’t know, Sheriff.”

  Leduc moved back minutely so that his hat wasn’t actually touching the other man. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I think he was counting to ten. He spoke in a very careful voice, as if he was afraid of what he’d do if he lost his temper again. “How long has Jocelyn been here, Rico?”

  “It’s not Joshie, Sheriff.”

  “You said the family was inside,” the sheriff said, frowning at him.

  “Yeah, Muriel and Todd Babington are inside.”

  “God give me strength,” Leduc said. “Muriel and Todd don’t live here, Rico. It’s not their house. The only one that should be changing the security is Jocelyn Marchand, not Ray’s little sister and her husband.”

  “They said they were worried that whoever murdered Ray had the security codes and that there were a lot of valuable antiques in the house.”

  “Yeah, and they’ve had their eyes on the valuables in this house for years,” Leduc said, pushing past his deputy. The door wasn’t locked, thank goodness. I’m not sure what Sheriff Leduc would have done to Vargas if he’d allowed himself to be locked outside of the crime scene by possible suspects. Of course, maybe Leduc didn’t see Muriel and Todd as suspects, but I did. If Bobby hadn’t done it, then Aunt Muriel and Uncle Todd had just made the top of my list.

  10

  LEDUC MOVED SO fast through the house that I got only glimpses of it, but what I saw looked like antiques, with real crystal dangling from every light fixture and candleholder, and there seemed to be a lot of those everywhere. The paintings looked like originals, and the statues, from life-size people to tabletop designs, were marble and metal. It was like rushing through a mini museum. Leduc was like a tour guide who had forgotten his job, but he certainly knew his way around the place, because he opened doors only to certain rooms, checked they were empty, and then rushed to another one.

  There seemed to be no order to the rooms he was looking at downstairs, and finally he headed for the upstairs, but he didn’t go back to the front of the house and up the grand staircase that was near the front door. He went through a small hallway tucked under an archway. I got a glimpse of a kitchen sitting dim and empty, and then he led us round a sharp turn to a much smaller set of stairs that was so narrow, I wasn’t sure Leduc’s waistline would fit, like Santa trying to squeeze through a chimney. Maybe I’ve always been so small that I just don’t understand how to navigate the world if you’re big. Leduc had no issues; he just had to duck a little on the tight turns of the stairs. Newman, who was nearly a foot taller than me and a few inches taller than Duke, had to take off his hat and bend over a little so he didn’t hit his head. I caught movement around the edges of him and realized that Deputy Vargas was behind us rather than staying at his post. He was as tall as Newman, with broader shoulders, but he seemed to be squeezing through just fine, which meant he was a lot more agile than he’d looked while the sheriff was chewing him out. Meanwhile I was keeping one hand touching each wall so that I could feel how rough the plaster was, because it was narrow enough that my claustrophobia wasn’t happy. I knew from experience that my eyes might tell me the walls were collapsing in on me, but my hands would stay the same width apart. So as long as my hands didn’t move, I could talk my brain out of believing the optical panic. Maybe the stairs weren’t as narrow as they felt, but I could keep my fingertips on either side as I followed Leduc up them, and with my smaller shoulders—the stairs were narr
ow enough.

  Leduc opened a door at last, and he was through it before I had time to take a deep breath and let my body know it was in a broad, richly carpeted hallway instead of on the torturously narrow stairs. A heavyset man was carrying a small suitcase out of an open door. He saw us, or maybe just the sheriff, and froze like a deer in headlights. He blinked, and his round head with only a fringe of dark hair left made him look owlish, all big eyes and round face. He drew the suitcase into the curve of his arms protectively.

  “Hey, Todd,” Leduc said all friendly, as if they were in town just bumping into each other.

  “Hello, Duke. What brings you here so late?” Todd’s voice wasn’t as matter-of-fact as Duke’s, but he tried.

  “Work.”

  “Oh.” Todd glanced back at the open door. I kept expecting him to call out and warn the mysterious Muriel, Ray Marchand’s sister.

  I was fighting not to push past Leduc and see what was in the case and what Todd’s other half was doing in the room behind him. Newman moved up beside me enough for me to look at him. He gave a small shake of his head. This was his town and his warrant. I could chill—for a while.

  Duke took the few steps he needed to be within reach of Todd. He held his hand out wordlessly. Todd hugged the case to himself a little tighter. Duke turned his hand upside down and moved his fingers in a give-it-to-me motion.

  Todd glanced back at the open door and called out, “Muriel, we have guests.”

  It was so not on my list of things I expected him to say. It was the politest thing I’d ever heard anyone say when confronted by the police in the middle of committing a crime.

  “Guests,” a woman’s voice said from inside the room. “What do you mean, we have guests? Rico would have asked our permission before letting anyone else into our house.”

  I felt Deputy Rico shift uneasily behind us without having to see around Newman. The sheriff moved so he could keep an eye on Todd and still give Rico a dirty look. Leduc got some of his brownie points back because he kept Todd in his sights as he moved. The man in front of us looked harmless, but a lot of “harmless” people end up killing cops every year. Just because Todd was clutching the case to his chest like a baby didn’t mean there wasn’t a gun tucked into his belt.

  A woman—Muriel, I assumed—walked through the doorway. An angry scowl crossed her face before she got it under control and smiled pleasantly at us, but she couldn’t quite get her eyes under control, while the rest of her nearly perfect face was all gracious hostess. She was tall, with blond hair that was almost the same shade of yellow as Bobby Marchand’s. The family resemblance was strong enough that I’d have thought they were mother and son, not just aunt and nephew, if I hadn’t known better. She was a handsome woman, like a blond Jane Russell, but slenderer, fewer curves. But some things even good cosmetic surgery can’t change, so the thin arm she held out to Leduc had more loose skin in places than the rest of her seemed to promise. She kept herself thin but didn’t worry about muscle tone, and without that, you can nip and tuck anything you want, but age will catch up. Maybe it always catches up—I didn’t know yet—but Muriel Babington had done her best to stay ahead of time.

  Thanks to Jean-Claude’s love of jewelry, I knew that the gold chain with its simple diamond and the pair of understated antique earrings in gold and more diamonds cost more than most people’s yearly salaries. The watch on her left wrist was a vintage Rolex. It complemented the cream pants and vest buttoned over a blue silk blouse that made her gray-blue eyes look closer to Bobby’s brighter blue. I didn’t know the designer of the clothes, but I was betting that everything she was wearing was designed by a name I should have known. Jean-Claude would have known, even Nathaniel might have known, but I didn’t. The best I could do was recognize expensive when I saw it.

  As Muriel glided down the hallway toward us, her pants gave glimpses of pale leather boots with stiletto heels, though once heels go that high, I think they’re just high heels with boot fronts. Boots imply practical, and these shoes were not, but they did give her slender frame more feminine swish, which was the goal of heels like that. I had a few pairs that did the same thing, but after a few date nights when I danced in them, I was beginning to rethink the sexy-heels-to-comfort ratio. The closer the wedding got, and the more Jean-Claude insisted on dressing me up, the more I wanted to rebel against the whole impractical idea of women’s fashion.

  “What brings you by so late, Duke?” Muriel asked.

  “Like I told Todd, work.”

  “You have the murderer locked up. Case solved,” she said.

  If I hadn’t known that it was her brother who had been brutally murdered and her nephew locked up for the crime, I’d have thought she was an uninterested bystander, maybe a distant family acquaintance.

  “Muriel, you know you can’t be in here right now.”

  “I know no such thing. My brother is dead, and that’s awful, but I warned him about Bobby.”

  “What did you warn him about?” Leduc asked.

  She gave him a pitying look, as if he were being too stupid for words. Disdain dripped off her well-manicured hand as she put it on her hip. “You know what Bobby is, Duke. Don’t play games after you saw what he did to Ray.”

  I fought to keep my face and body very still and not give away the spurt of adrenaline I’d felt because of the wording. If they knew details about Ray Marchand’s body, then they had been here before the cops were called.

  “What did he do to Ray, Muriel?” Leduc asked.

  Her look went from disdainful to scathing. “Come on, Duke. I didn’t see Ray’s body, but seeing the study where he was killed was enough. It looks like a damn butcher shop.”

  Duke looked at the husband still clutching the small case to his chest. “What did you think of Ray’s body when you saw it, Todd?”

  Muriel touched her husband’s shoulder. “We didn’t see the body, Duke. Todd wouldn’t even come into the study with me.” Her voice held scorn and disappointment, as if she was often scornful of and disappointed in her husband.

  “I saw the bloody footprints in the front hallway up here,” Todd said. “That was enough for me.”

  “It would be for you,” she said, and her tone was humiliating. I couldn’t imagine being married to someone who would talk to me like that in front of strangers or at all.

  Todd didn’t say anything in return, just huddled more tightly around the small case in his arms.

  Duke said, “What’s in the case, Todd?”

  Todd glanced at his wife and then at the floor but didn’t meet anyone else’s eyes. He didn’t answer the question either.

  Duke held out his hand. “Give me the case, Todd.”

  Muriel pushed in front of her husband so that Leduc either had to back up or let her invade his personal space. He didn’t move back. Underneath the panic and pain of earlier was a good cop. I hoped to see more of that side of him and let the bad cop be an unfortunate moment we could all forget.

  In the heels, she was a few inches taller than Leduc. “We don’t have to let you see inside the case, Duke. It’s our case. We brought it into the house. Rico there will tell you he saw us bring it in. Didn’t you, Rico?”

  The sheriff was already standing so he could keep Muriel and Todd in his peripheral vision and see the deputy, but Newman and I had to move to the other side of the hallway opposite Duke so we could help keep an eye on everyone.

  Rico gave her a less-than-friendly look, and something about the darker emotion made him look better or more real. I realized he was handsome in that generic Hollywood way, if you were going for a mix of old-fashioned Latin lover and Midwestern college athlete. The hair I could see around his Smokey Bear hat was as black as mine and had curl left even though it had been cut short. He looked like he’d tan darker than I did, but I was betting that his heritage was mixed like mine. The last name Vargas should have been
a clue. Sometimes I’m slow, but mostly if you do your job, I just don’t care.

  “Yes, they had it with them when they drove up,” Rico said.

  “Where did they park, now that you bring it up? It’s only your cruiser out front,” Duke said.

  “Your deputy was kind enough to let us use the garage,” Muriel said.

  Duke’s eyes narrowed at the deputy. “So, you have no idea what they may have taken from the house and put into their car?”

  “I was made to understand that it was their house and their stuff,” Rico said. His face showed that he didn’t like giving the answer, because he knew he was wrong now. He took off his hat and started running his hands around the brim like a comfort gesture. He looked better without the hat, showing that he had more curls left than the short sides had promised.

  “Well, you were made to understand wrong,” Duke said.

  “I know the will hasn’t been read yet, but our father always meant the house and contents to stay in the family,” Muriel said.

  “Not waiting for the will to be read is one thing, but your brother’s body isn’t even cold yet. That’s jumping the gun more than I can overlook, Muriel.”

  “I’m about to become the wealthiest person in this county, Duke, and sheriff is an elected position.”

  “Are you threatening me, Murry?”

  “Don’t call me that awful nickname.”

  “How about El? You didn’t mind that nickname once.”