Two Sleuths Are Better Than One

by Elizabeth Ashby

"It's risky but better than doing nothing and waiting for another murder to happen," Keely said. "I can get the quilters to seed the rumor mill. They've got one of the best grapevines in town, so anything they know about will be pretty widespread within the hour."

  "And I'll tell all the market vendors. They're anxious about the investigation, so I'm sure they'll be relieved to hear about a possible end to it and will want to tell all their customers that things will be back to normal soon."

  "Good," Keely said. "Then we just need a time and place for it to happen."

  "I was thinking of the beach, right beyond the rocky arm of land that shelters the historical garden. It's near where the salsa demonstrations will happen but out of easy view of people there or in the market. It's visible from the rest of the beach, but it's usually unoccupied since the ground is rocky, so no one would be lying on a blanket near enough to hear a conversation. Visible to any cops quietly keeping an eye on us but also secluded enough to tempt the killer out of hiding."

  "You know the terrain better than I do," Keely said. "Matt won't like it, and I'll have to tell him about it. He's a worrier, and we've had some trust issues in the past, so I try not to hide anything from him. He'll probably plan to loiter somewhere nearby in case we need help."

  "Merle wouldn't like it either if we set the trap without him," I said. "He's still got a strong protective streak from his days as a lawyer. You probably know how that is from your own experience. Having the guys with us will be fine, as long as they can be inconspicuous."

  "I like it." Keely sipped her iced tea thoughtfully. "There's something you should know about me though. I don't tell many people, so I'd appreciate it if you'd keep it confidential. It's just that I have this medical condition that involves me passing out when I experience too much stress. If things don't go well, I may not be any help. Might even be a liability, lying on the ground unconscious."

  "So that's why you changed careers," I said. "I'd wondered about that. I was ready for a big change when I left my financial planning practice, but from what I'd heard, you always seemed a little sad about having to leave your old work."

  "I do miss it sometimes," Keely said. "But I would never have moved to Danger Cove if I hadn't had to change careers, and I really do love being here."

  "And being with Matt Viera," I teased.

  "That too." Keely's grin faded. "But seriously, you need to understand that I really might pass out if things get too crazy when we confront the killer. There are usually signs that it's about to happen, and I can take precautions. In the worst-case scenario, Matt knows what to do if I'm unconscious."

  "I'm sure it won't come to that," I said. "But just in case, is it okay if I warn Merle so he won't be shocked if you pass out?"

  "Sure."

  "I should warn you too that Merle is probably going to want to question you about what it's like to pass out from stress. He's thinking about adding some fainting goats to his herd, since they're supposed to be easier to keep contained. They tend to fall over from the excitement of trying to jump over fences."

  "If he does get some, you have to promise to invite me over to meet them," Keely said. "Maybe I can learn something about the proper way to fall without hurting myself."

  "It's a deal," I said. "Assuming we both survive this coming weekend."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Keely Fairchild

  After Maria left, I locked the community room behind me and went to return the key to the museum's director.

  "All done?" Gil Torres was a statuesque black woman in a bright turquoise suit, and she dominated the space even while half hidden behind her cluttered desk.

  "For now." I handed her the key. "I forgot to ask you something earlier though. I'm looking into Gabe Portillo's death for the quilt guild, and I heard that he left behind a trail of unpaid bills all around Danger Cove. I was wondering if one of them was from the museum. You have some amazing quilts here, and he was a collector, so I thought he might have done some shopping while he was in town."

  "He did stop by, but the worst that happened was that he knocked over a ceramic reproduction of the lighthouse and smashed it. Refused to pay for it, even though it was clearly his fault. He'd been talking on his cell phone to someone who upset him, and he wasn't paying attention to where he was walking. He bowled right into the display."

  "I'm glad that's all it was."

  "I let it go after it became obvious he was going to do more damage if I insisted he pay the relatively small amount for the broken lighthouse." Gil hummed a bit of "Que Sera Sera" before adding, "It was only later that I realized how lucky we were that he hadn't been interested in our quilt collection. I was complaining about the broken lighthouse to Stefan Anderson, and he had it much worse."

  Poor Stefan. He owned the Anderson Gallery a little way down Main Street, which sold folk art, including some amazing quilts. He wasn't much of a businessman, though, and seemed to have a target on his back, visible only to con men, that made him an attractive mark for every cheater who came to town. "What happened?"

  "Around the same time Gabe contracted with Zoe for a quilt, he hired Stefan to find another quiltmaker for a future commission. Stefan was supposed to get a percentage of the final price. Stefan spent hours and hours talking to his contacts and following up leads until he found someone who does great work and whose work will probably be highly collectible in the future not just due to time but artistic skills, like Zoe's. He even helped draw up the contract and negotiated the basic terms that Gabe agreed to. Stefan was ecstatic because business had been slow lately and his finder's fee was going to be a big help in keeping the gallery open until his next big deal."

  "So what went wrong?"

  "Nothing that Stefan did," Gil said. "Apparently Gabe just texted him out of the blue to say he'd changed his mind and he'd signed a new contract with someone else. For less money and no finder's fee."

  "Stefan was still entitled to a commission. An oral contract would be enforceable in those circumstances. Stefan could have taken Gabe to court."

  "He considered it, but you remember what happened before when he tried to get justice in court."

  "How could I forget?" Shortly after I'd moved to Danger Cove, Stefan had been a suspect in the murder of another quilt dealer, Randall J. Tremain III, because of an unresolved legal battle the two had engaged in. Stefan had eventually dropped the case due to runaway legal costs, but his initial outrage over Tremain's actions had deepened with the frustration of not being able to get his day in court.

  Gil continued, "Stefan might have sued anyway on behalf of the artist, but fortunately the breach happened before she'd started making the quilt, so she hadn't lost much besides some time spent designing the quilt, and she was confident she could find another buyer for it. So it was just his own loss that he'd be suing for. And if Stefan's bad experience suing Tremain wasn't enough to dissuade him, he talked to some other people in town who'd been victims of Gabe, and they'd all said he was every bit as determined as Tremain had been to make the other side's legal costs astronomical. Stefan would have ended up spending more money on legal expenses than he'd have recovered from Gabe."

  I really hoped Stefan had an alibi for the time of Gabe's murder and hadn't been pushed over the edge by the latest mistreatment of his trusting nature. "How upset was Stefan?"

  "I don't think it was murderous rage if that's what you're wondering," Gil said. "It was mostly righteous indignation. He was outraged on behalf of artists everywhere. It helped that I recently came into some funds for another quilt acquisition this fall, so I was able to hire him to find me something, which resolved some of his financial stress."

  That was a relief. I liked Stefan and didn't want to consider him a suspect in Gabe's death. If he hadn't killed Tremain, who had cost him a serious chunk of change, then it was highly unlikely he'd have killed Gabe for a much smaller dispute.

  "You said Stefan spoke to others in town who'd been cheated by Gabe," I said. "Do you know who they
were?"

  "He didn't say," Gil said. "But you could ask him. He's usually at the gallery this time of day."

  It wasn't always easy to catch Stefan at work, since he kept somewhat erratic hours. I did too though, since it was a perk of self-employment that I'd come to enjoy after the more rigid schedule of my legal practice. I didn't have to be anywhere else at the moment, so I could stop by his gallery on my way home.

  *

  I found Stefan in his gallery, and he gave me five names of local residents who'd told him about being cheated by Gabe. I was able to reach three of them on the phone as I walked home. All of them echoed what Gil had told me—and Stefan had confirmed—about Gabe's reputation for randomly breaching contracts and then gloating over his ability to drag out a court resolution of the case beyond the financial resources of the person suing him. I still needed to talk to the other two who hadn't answered my calls, but I'd gotten enough similar answers from the various victims to see a clear pattern emerging. Everyone was indignant, and they'd been cheated out of far more than the cost of the ceramic lighthouse at the museum but not so much that they couldn't resign themselves to their losses and move on.

  I also looked up the digital court records on Jack Condor's lawsuit against Gabe since Condor was the only one of the victims, as far as anyone knew, who'd gone to court, regardless of the cost to himself. I thought that was more a reflection of his personality than any other factor. Condor's financial loss had been comparable to the others, more of a nuisance than something that would send him into bankruptcy. He was used to bullying others, though, and obviously didn't like it when someone tried it on him. I still didn't see him as a killer, except in the metaphorical sense of making a killing in real estate. He bullied people with money and the law, not with fists.

  By the time Matt came through the front door of my house at dinnertime, I'd heard from one more of Gabe's victims whose experience followed the same pattern. Looking into any other local creditors as possible killers was a waste of my time.

  Matt was carrying a sheaf of papers and a canvas tote bag full of what appeared to be groceries, topped off with a bunch of huge tomatoes. He tossed everything onto the peninsula that divided the kitchen from the great room.

  "You're going to love this," he said, gesturing for me to have a seat at one of the barstools facing where he stood in the kitchen.

  "Love what?" I climbed onto a stool.

  "Give me a sec. I need to think how best to explain."

  These days, Matt was seldom in front of cameras—professional ones, anyway, rather than phones held by people who wanted a selfie with him—but he was still always at least subconsciously aware of the impression he was making on his audience. Whenever he had something particularly important to say, he made an effort to set the scene first so that people paid attention.

  "You're starting to make me nervous. My stomach is getting upset."

  "No, no," he said. "This is good. I promise."

  It had taken a while for me to trust him after we met—trial lawyers and the press were often at loggerheads, so the caution was practically instinctual—but I'd long since come to believe he wouldn't lie to me. I'd kept secrets from him far longer than he had with me.

  "Picture, if you will," he said, picking up a glossy brochure and holding it in front of him, "a stove. In the log cabin."

  "Seriously?" I asked, leaning forward to get a better view of the brochure. "You found the perfect stove?"

  "Better than that." Matt opened the brochure to show me a fairly standard stand-alone stove/oven combination with a black finish. Nothing at all like the fancy appliance he'd been dreaming of. Had he just picked out the first thing he saw after I'd pressured him to make a decision? I hadn't wanted him to be unhappy, just realistic about the options.

  "Where's the grill you wanted?"

  He dropped the brochure and picked up a fat contract to wave it in my direction. "This one doesn't have a glossy picture. It's for a separate grill in an outdoor kitchen, complete with multiple burners and a pizza oven. Alex Jordan said she can do everything except the masonry work, and she's got a subcontractor for that. We spent all afternoon working out the details." He flipped through to the back of the contract. "There's even a preliminary sketch in the back."

  I didn't even have to look at it to know it would be amazing. Alex owned Finials and Facades Restoration and Renovation Services and had renovated my house, so I was completely familiar with her work. "It's going to be perfect."

  "It is," he agreed. "That's what I was aiming for all along: perfection. And I wouldn't have thought to separate out the various pieces if you hadn't given me a deadline. The only problem is now we're going to have to wait a couple months to have it all done. And I need to prepare some beans tonight."

  "Help yourself." I nodded at my stove. "But why beans?"

  "It's a secret," he said, "from everyone but you. I want to experiment with a salsa recipe that contains black beans. I've made it before, and I was wondering if it would be better if I cooked the beans myself instead of using canned ones."

  "I didn't think you were all that into the contest."

  "I'm trying to think like the competitors do so I'll have a true, insider's point of view when I write the story." He emptied the contents of the bag—tomatoes, onions, corn, cilantro, and bags of black beans—onto the counter. "I'd have dropped out, though, if Maria had asked me to emcee in Coach Andy's stead. But I'm kind of glad she didn't. Mayor Kallakala will do a good job, and now I get to show I'm a good cook and not just a pretty face."

  "I like your pretty face."

  "And I like that you like it," Matt said, even as he began filling a large pot with water to soak the beans. "How was your day?"

  "Not as productive as yours." Ruling out suspects was a useful thing to do, but it felt as endless as all the months when Matt had been sorting through possible stoves with no end in sight. "I did cross some possible suspects in Gabe's murder off my list—the people he cheated here in town—but I think I'll have to wait until the weekend to do anything more. I've pretty much run out of leads."

  "How's the weekend going to change that?"

  I took a deep breath, aware that the nausea that had threatened earlier was returning in full force. Matt wasn't going to like the plan to catch the killer at the market. "We're going to set a trap for the killer. We're counting on you and Merle to be nearby, and there will be lots of extra police too, so it's perfectly safe."

  "Nothing is perfectly safe," Matt said. "You're a lawyer. You know that."

  "As safe as humanly possible then," I said. "We're going to let it be known that Maria and I have some information that the police won't listen to and we've arranged a time and place to meet with Mayor Kallakala to get him to intervene."

  "So you're going to set yourselves up as bait." Matt gave me a disapproving look, something he hardly ever did. He was usually open to anything I suggested and I was the one putting the brakes on his plans.

  "Don't look at me like that," I said. "There will be police all over the place. Lester Marshall is having some of the suspects staked out, Bud Ohlsen is covering the others, and Fred Fields will be coordinating the uniformed officers at the market. Nothing's going to happen to us."

  "I'm pretty sure you've said, or at least thought, something similar before, and you were wrong."

  "Which is why the plan calls for you and Merle to be nearby," I said. "No one's going to risk taking on four people all at once. And we won't be anywhere we could be pushed to our death. We'll be meeting on the beach, near the boulders that separate it from the historical garden."

  "And Merle agreed to this?"

  "I suspect Maria is having pretty much the same conversation with him that we're having right now."

  "I could tell Ohlsen what you're doing, and he'd lock you up."

  "But you won't," I said, not entirely confidently.

  He turned off the faucet and carried the pot over to the stove. He still didn't say anything as h
e upended a bag of beans into the water and turned on the burner. His tone was reluctant when he finally spoke. "No, I won't turn you in. But I need you to promise you won't go to this fake meeting without me and Merle."

  "I promise." I stood up and took his hand to pull him out of the kitchen. We had fifteen or twenty minutes until the beans came to a boil and were ready to be drained. Plenty of time to reassure him that everything was going to be okay. Matt could never say no to me when we were in his favorite room, the converted bank vault.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Maria Dolores

  Saturday afternoon was forecast to be unusually hot, without much in the way of a cooling breeze, and it was already getting warm when Merle and I arrived at the market that morning. We weren't the only ones to get there earlier than usual, since I'd told all the vendors they needed to have their online orders ready for Scott by nine o'clock instead of nine thirty, giving him an extra half hour to make the deliveries before the noon deadline. The early start also gave Keely and me more time to set our trap.

  While Merle set up the Pear Stirpes stall, I helped Scott and Cary pack up the market orders for delivery. I felt gratified by how close we came to not being able to fit all the items into Scott's SUV. The app really was gaining traction among local residents, and soon I would have to hire a second driver to make all the deliveries. We quickly ran out of space in the back of the SUV, and I thought that only Cary could have managed to stack the remainder in the front passenger space. I went over to make sure everything was stable and watched him carefully secure the seat belt around the bins there.

  He stepped back to show me his work. "I had to move some of Scott Ingell's safety supplies from the floor to underneath the seat again, but now everything fits."

  "Good job," I told him. "Now it's time to get started setting up the salsa contest site."

  "I can do that." He closed the front door carefully but securely and raced off to get the contest supplies from Merle's truck.