A Cutthroat Business (19 page)

I nodded. “This old woman showed up, and then a police car with Officers Spicer and Truman, and Spicer told me she used to live at the house and had gotten confused and still thought she did. Apparently she escapes from the nursing home regularly, and Spicer and Truman are called in to find her. It made me wonder, because she shouldn’t have been able to sign legal papers in her condition.”

I decided not to mention anything about going to the FinBar with Alexandra Puckett. There were a couple of different reasons why Detective Grimaldi might find fault with that, and it was just as easy to keep Alexandra out of it by implying that it was Tondalia Jenkins’s behavior that had caused my snooping. It had contributed, anyway, so it wasn’t even really a lie.

Detective Grimaldi made another scribble on her pad. “So you thought Brenda Puckett might have taken advantage of Mrs. Jenkins’s illness?”

“The thought crossed my mind,” I said.

“Is that something Mrs. Puckett would do?”

Hell, yes!

“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead...” I began. Detective Grimaldi looked surprised, probably because I had been doing very little else since the murder, especially in my conversations with the detective. “I wouldn’t put it past her. Did you happen to catch the article in the
Nashville Voice
yesterday?”

Something like a shutter came down over Tamara Grimaldi’s face, leaving it smooth and expressionless. “I did, yes.”

“Then you know that she didn’t always do things entirely by the book. She kept houses on the market when they already had contracts, and accepted higher prices than the list price so she could kick the difference back to the buyer in cash. It’s mortgage fraud, at the very least.”

Grimaldi made another note. “So you came here last night to snoop. Then what happened?”

I grimaced. “Clarice showed up.”

“What was she doing here?”

I explained about the envelope. “She took it out of a locked drawer in her desk. I don’t know what was in it.”

I hesitated for a second before I added, “Although it might have been the same envelope that Heidi told me she’d seen earlier in the day. If so, it just contained Clarice’s contract with Brenda, and maybe another piece of paper.”

“I haven’t gotten around to speaking with Ms. Hoppenfeldt yet,” Grimaldi said, in a tone that indicated that she wasn’t looking forward to it. “She seems to be having a difficult time, and is lying down in her office. I’ll ask her about it when I see her. Let’s get back to what happened to you. Clarissa came in?”

I nodded, running through the conversation I had had with the dead woman while Detective Grimaldi made notes on her legal pad.

“Can I ask you a question now?” I added when it looked like she had penned her last period. She nodded, although the look in her eyes was wary. “What happened to her?”

Grimaldi hesitated. “Didn’t Mr. Lamont tell you?”

“He said he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. But maybe he couldn’t tell.”

“Oh, it wasn’t hard to tell,” Detective Grimaldi said. I looked politely inquiring, and she added, “Her wrists were slashed. She bled out.”

“Oh, my God!” The room spun for a second, and I could feel my own blood leaving my head and pooling in my stomach. At least that was what it felt like. “Did she do it herself?”

“That’s the most likely explanation,” Grimaldi said cordially. She waited for me to start breathing again, and then asked, “She didn’t tell you whom she was meeting last night?”

I shook my head. “I probably wouldn’t have known who it was even if she had mentioned his name. We didn’t associate outside work.”

“But you know it was a man?”

I thought for a second. “Not really. She was married once — her husband died just before she came to work for Brenda, I think — and her demeanor... I guess I just assumed she was meeting a man.”

“But she didn’t specifically say so? Did she mention where the meeting was to take place?”

I shook my head again. “All I know is, I saw her drive east from here. Towards downtown and the university area.” And the restaurant and nightclub district, as well as
101 Potsdam Street
, the Milton House Nursing Home, and Brenda’s house on
Winding Way
.

“And you didn’t see her again?”

“No, of course I didn’t. I’d tell you if I had.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I was about to ask if the interview was over when she posed another question. “What did
you
do?”

I blinked. “After I left here, you mean? I waited for Clarice to leave, then I drove home, called my brother, spoke to him for a few minutes, and went to bed. Why?”
 

“Alone?”

“Did I go to bed alone, you mean? Yes, I did.” I’d been going to bed alone for almost two years, not that that was any of the detective’s business.

“So no one can verify your whereabouts after you got there?”

My stomach did a weird back-flip. “Not after I hung up the phone with Dix. Why? I thought she committed suicide. Why do I have to have an alibi?”

She didn’t answer. “What would have happened if Clarissa had told Mr. Lamont that she had caught you going through Mrs. Puckett’s office?”

I drew a (shaky) breath. “Not a lot. I told him myself, this morning. Before I realized that Clarice wouldn’t ever get a chance to. He took it better than I expected. But then I guess he had other things on his mind.”

Poor, sensitive
Walker
, going to check up on an employee and finding her dead in a pool of blood. He must have been absolutely sickened. No wonder he had locked himself in his office after telling the rest of us the news.

“But if he hadn’t had other things on his mind, how would he have reacted? What did you expect would happen, when Clarissa told you that she’d have to tell him?”

“I wish you’d stop calling her Clarissa,” I said irritably. “Her name was Clarice. And I guess I expected a reprimand if I was lucky, and if I wasn’t, that he’d tell the real estate commission and they’d give me an official warning and flag my record.”

“But that didn’t worry you?”

“Not enough that I’d kill Clarice to shut her up, if that’s what you’re implying. My God, what is wrong with everyone?! I’m a nice person! I don’t do things like that!”

Detective Grimaldi looked at me, unemotionally, for a moment, before she said calmly, “I think that’s it for now. But stick around, will you? I may have something else I want to ask you.”

I promised — grudgingly — that I would stay in the office until she gave me leave to go, and headed for the door.

“By the way, Ms. Martin,” Detective Grimaldi said as I reached for the door knob, “her name was Clarissa. Not Clarice. Clarissa Webster. Just thought you ought to know.” She smiled sweetly. I grimaced.

I was almost to my office door when Detective Grimaldi’s words penetrated. By then she had asked Heidi Hoppenfeldt into
Walker
’s office and was busy interrogating her. I wondered if I ought to knock on the door and tell her what I knew, or thought I knew, but I decided that it could wait a few minutes. It might just be a coincidence anyway. There are a lot of people named Webster in the world, and just because Brenda had had a brush with a man named Webster fifteen years ago — just about the time Clarice went to work for her, a tiny voice in my head reminded me — there wasn’t necessarily a connection there. It was a suggestive idea, certainly, but by no means a sure thing.

And then I realized that if I told Detective Grimaldi about Graham Webster, she’d ask where I’d gotten the information. She had read the
Voice
article, so she’d know it wasn’t mentioned there. I could say I’d checked the newspaper archives, of course, and actually come up with Graham Webster’s name, but what if she wanted to know how I knew that Graham Webster was the person in question, instead of Joe Shumaker or Mr. Bigelow? Or I could say that I’d asked Dix’s help and he’d told me, but then she might call and verify it with him. I’d be forcing my brother to lie, and although he might, if I begged and pleaded and promised to baby-sit every Saturday from now until his youngest daughter was in college, it wasn’t right to put him in the middle of a police investigation.

The thought of Dix made me wonder if he had discovered anything about Tyrell Jenkins, and I decided to use the time until Detective Grimaldi wanted me again to give him a call. He hadn’t contacted me, so he was either busy with work or didn’t have anything to report, but it gave me the illusion that I was doing something. I had no clients (except Rafe, and he didn’t really count), no leads to follow, and no business to conduct, but maybe I could do my good deed for the day by tracking down Tyrell and trying to right the wrong that Brenda had done his mother. And it was better than sitting in my office with nothing on my mind except the realization that the police seemed to believe me capable of slitting Clarice’s — Clarissa’s — wrists and leaving her to die.

The phone rang a couple of times on the other end, and then my brother picked up. “This is Dixon C. Martin, and I can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message at the sound of...”

“Come off it, Dix,” I said, tilting my office chair back, “don’t you think I can tell the difference between the real you and a machine? What’s the matter? Don’t you want to talk to your baby sister?”

“Not particularly,” my only brother answered candidly. “I found what you want, and you’re not going to like it.”

“You found Tyrell Jenkins?”

“I
 
found out what happened to Tyrell Jenkins,” Dix corrected.

I frowned. “He’s dead? Or in prison?”

“Dead. More than thirty years ago.”

“Damn. I mean, darn. How did it happen?”

“He was shot,” Dix said. “A couple of times in the chest, outside his house late one night. The police had no suspects, and no one was ever arrested. The only witness was his mother, who claimed he was shot by a white man in a pick-up truck, but you can imagine how much credence was given to that piece of evidence. So I guess that takes care of Tyrell.”

“I guess it does. There’s no help to get from him. Poor Mrs. Jenkins.”

We sat in silence for a moment. Then Dix said, “I’ve also got some information about your new boyfriend.”

“Oh, God! Dix,” I said. “He’s not my boyfriend, and you didn’t have to check him out. There’s nothing going on between us. Why did you bother?”

“I didn’t, actually.” I could hear the shuffling of papers. “It turned out Todd had already started a background check of his own. So he gave me what he had and said he’d add to it as he got more.”

I didn’t respond for a moment. “You know,” I said finally, “I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“What? That your family and friends care enough about you to want to be sure you’re not getting involved with someone dangerous?”

“That my family and friends don’t believe me when I say I’m not involved with him! Dix, please, listen to me. There is
nothing
going on between me and Rafe Collier. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I’m not seeing him, dating him, interested in him. He’s not my type. You know Todd. You remember Bradley.
That
’s the type I get involved with. Conventional, settled, respectable. Those bad-boy alpha males are all well and good in fiction, but I wouldn’t know what to do with someone like Rafe Collier even if I could get him!”

I stopped, panting.

“I think you’re protesting too much,” Dix said coolly.

“Aargh!” I answered.

Dix added, “So does this mean you don’t want to hear what Todd discovered?”

“No!”

“You
do
want to hear what Todd discovered?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t care what Todd discovered. Rafael Collier is a client, nothing more. All I’m interested in, is whether he can afford to buy the property he’s looking at.”

“He can’t.”

“He can’t?!”

“Not with what he’s got in the bank.” Dix shuffled more papers. “And Todd wasn’t able to find anything about a job. Looks like he’s unemployed. Sorry, sis.”

“So why is he interested in the house?”

“Maybe he’s planning to burglarize it,” Dix suggested.

“He must be going for the brass door knobs and the fireplace tile, then. Those are the only nice things in the house. Oh, and the avocado stove and fridge. I suppose he could get twenty bucks for those at a yard sale.”

Dix didn’t answer. “All right,” I said, “since Todd’s taken the trouble to gather the information...”

“Yes?”

“What happened twelve years ago?”

“What do you mean?”

“Rafe left high school, and left town, and a couple of months later he came back and was arrested. Mother said it was for assault. Does Todd’s research say anything about that?”

Dix shuffled papers. “Todd must have asked his dad. I’ve got a copy of the arrest record here. I’m sure that’s not supposed to be floating around—”

“It helps to have friends in high places,” I commented. “What does it say?”