A Penny for Your Thoughts (30 page)

For Alan Bennet, I knew, his motive would probably have been about money. I was suspicious of anyone who lived above their means, but Alan’s marital history alone pointed to a man willing to go to a lot of trouble for the almighty dollar. I considered the ways he would benefit financially from Wendell’s murder.

The most obvious way, of course, was taken in light of his relationship with Judith. Thanks to her inheritance from her father, Judith was now a much wealthier woman. If Alan’s intention was to marry her, then I supposed it made certain sense to see that she was as wealthy as possible first. On the other hand, the timing seemed kind of dumb. After all, why not marry her first,
then
kill her father?

Of course, increasing Judith’s wealth wasn’t the only possible motivation for Alan. It could’ve been company related. Perhaps he had been diverting funds from Feed the Need into his own personal account, and Wendell had found out about it. Rather than facing the music, Alan could’ve killed Wendell to protect himself.

Or maybe it was less complicated than that. Maybe it was simply a matter of ambition. Perhaps Alan felt that with Wendell out of the way, Judith would move up to President and he could step in as CEO of Smythe Incorporated. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had killed just to get ahead.

I scanned the screen and thought a bit about Judith. What did I know of her so far? She was heartless, direct, ambitious, and up to something. Her ridiculous acts of vandalism against Sidra might have nothing to do with the death of her father. But at least I knew now that she wasn’t quite right, that she was acting out of some sort of desperation. Was it too much of a leap to imagine her committing a murder?

I might have believed she had done it if the family dynamics were different, if she had perhaps suffered from years of abuse or neglect, which was the usual pattern for patricide. But from what I could tell, Wendell had been an exemplary man and a wonderful father; the usual child-parent murder motivation just wasn’t there. Despite Judith’s vicious acts of vandalism, for some reason I just didn’t peg her as the murderer—unless Alan Bennet had somehow pulled her in and twisted things around until she had become a party to something that ordinarily would’ve been unspeakable.

Derek’s possible motivations seemed even further far-fetched. Could he have been involved in financial funny business within
his own company? Perhaps his father discovered the mess, decided it was Derek’s doing, and threatened to fire him or turn him in to the police. It just didn’t fly for me, particularly when I thought about Derek’s personality. Certainly, he had his faults; he was weak, complacent, and a bit confused spiritually. But he just didn’t seem like a murderer. About the most likely scenario I could come up with regarding Derek had to do with the medical report I had found in his bedroom. Apparently, Derek was slated to donate a kidney to his ailing father. Was it possible that in a moment of fear—and knowing it was likely his father would die anyway and the whole thing would’ve been for naught—Derek had changed his mind and murdered his father instead? I doubted it, but I could think of no other motive.

Gwen Harding was a bigger mystery, though my gut told me she wasn’t guilty. She had had the easiest access for committing the murder, but I knew she couldn’t have done it alone because of the person I chased from the bathroom. I did feel that Gwen knew something, something she wasn’t telling me. But I just didn’t think she had any part in her boss’s death. Her shock at the situation had been too great, her grief at his demise too genuine.

And then there was Nick. I thought about our conversation in the kitchen, his proclaimed affection for the Smythe family. Was he really to be believed? I remembered how offended he was when I mistook him for a chauffeur, and I thought that perhaps his tremendous pride might’ve played into some sort of motive for him. Beyond that, the only thing I could think of was what Alan Bennet had said, about Wendell being on a nephrotic syndrome diet. What torture it must’ve been for Wendell to sit back and watch his family eat Nick’s heavenly cooking, only to have to deny himself of it completely! What if Nick had been slated to be let go—perhaps even sent back to Italy—now that Wendell could no longer enjoy his delicious cooking? To stay in America, to keep his job here—would that have been worth killing for?

I was stretching, I knew. A good chef could always find work in a gastro-oriented society like ours. I put down my notes, rubbed my eyes, then saved the file, closed the laptop, and stashed it in my briefcase. Brainstorming had its place, but now it was time to examine the physical evidence and see if it held any important secrets.

I went to the radiator and lifted the cover. I reached down to pull out my little collection, only to find myself grasping at air. Kneeling down to look, I was shocked to find the paper bag and its contents gone!

I stood, scrutinizing the room, a chill going through me. Everything seemed the same, though now that I knew someone had been here, I could see some subtle differences. A drawer that wasn’t quite closed. The few items hanging in the closet pushed farther to one side.

My adversary, whoever it was, was smarter and more determined than I had originally thought. At the office, my briefcase had been rifled through. Was I really surprised that someone had now gone through my room? I berated myself for not finding an even better hiding place for my evidence.

I had made several mistakes now in this case, and I knew I was sorely out of practice for this type of investigation. I thought back to my conversation with Tom when he asked me to find Wendell’s murderer. I had warned him then that my usual financial investigations were a far cry from a murder investigation. He had scoffed, insisting that my talents and instincts would prevail.
How wrong he was,
I realized.

I sat on the bed, trying to remember what had been in the bag that had been taken. I thought of the knife and photo from Sidra, along with the pack of letters, the comb, and the dinosaur from her apartment. There was also the pad of paper I had taken from Judith’s room, scribbled on with a pencil to reveal the information about me. I walked to the closet and looked inside, digging through my dirty clothes. The paintbrush was gone, too. Whoever had been here had found it.

There was no way to figure out who might have done this. Because I had been the first one to leave this morning, it could’ve been almost anyone who lived here. Beyond that, someone could’ve broken in while we were all at the funeral—perhaps this Mitchell Ralston after he shoved me into the empty grave. Trying to figure it out was futile.

I felt the worst about the pack of Sidra’s letters. If I hadn’t taken them from her drawer, they wouldn’t be missing now. I wondered how I could tell her what I had done, what had happened. Worse than that, I no longer even possessed the knife or the paintbrush, both of which assuredly showed Judith’s fingerprints as final proof of her evil acts of vandalism.

I went to the window and looked out at the rich green lawn, exhaling slowly, letting my heart rate return to normal. I knew that if I was smart, I wouldn’t let the invasion of my room here undermine my confidence as an investigator; instead, I would use my anger as a way to steel my resolve.

My room may have been rifled, but I still had the two notes from the cemetery. Perhaps one of them had a good print. I wanted an ID on the man who lured me there, to see if the fingerprints belonged to “Mitchell Ralston,” the name that Harriet had given me from the car registration.

“You wanna play dirty?” I whispered. “Then let’s get down to business.”

Crossing to the door, I made certain that it was locked. Then I cleared an area at the desk and spread out my tools. The fingerprinting kit Duane Perskie had given me included the three most common types of fingerprinting powder: black for light objects, white for dark objects, and silver for glass and mirrors.

I pulled out the black dust and then went to work on the paper, using an ostrich feather fingerprint duster to swirl each of the notes in a fine coat of dust. I then carefully applied the special tape to the prints that showed up, lifting them right off of the page. Once I was finished, I got out my phone and called Duane. He said he could get someone to run the prints if I brought them right
over, so I straightened up the mess I had made, locked everything in my briefcase, and headed out the door.

Thirty-Four

The trip to the Perskie Detective Agency was uneventful, but by the time I got back to the Smythes’ house my side was aching and I was exhausted. It was around four in the afternoon—too late for a nap, too early to go to bed for the night. Wishing I could take a little canoe ride, I parked the car around back and headed for the house just as Sidra and Carlos came out of the cabana.

They were dressed in bathing suits, carrying towels. As I watched, they walked to the pool and set the towels on a wrought-iron table nearby. Suddenly, a dip in the pool seemed like the most wonderful notion in the world.

“Callie!” Carlos called out as he saw me walking up.

“Hi!” I said, pausing near the back door. “May I join you?”

“Of course,” said Sidra. “Please do.”

I headed upstairs, changed into my bathing suit, and came back down as quickly as I could. By the time I got back to the pool, Sidra was sitting on the side, her feet dangling in the water, and Carlos was doing cannonballs into the deep end.

I set my towel and my briefcase on the table next to theirs. I was going to offer an explanation about the briefcase by saying I thought I might catch up on a little paperwork poolside. But Sidra didn’t even seem to notice, and I was glad. From now on, I wouldn’t risk having anything else taken from my room when I wasn’t there.

“A lovely afternoon for such a sad day, isn’t it?” Sidra said, adjusting her sunglasses.

“Yes,” I agreed. “It is.”

The sun was bright but the air was chilly, and I headed down the steps quickly, finding the warm water to be an invigorating counterpoint to the cool air. I slipped under the water and then surfaced, face upward, relishing the heavenly relaxation that came with a heated pool.

As I leaned back in the water, floating gently, Sidra stood and stepped into the water, easing down the steps. How stunningly beautiful she was. In a bathing suit, she could’ve been a contestant for the Miss Universe pageant.

“This feels so nice,” she said, relaxing into the water. “Carlos and I couldn’t quite figure out what to do with ourselves this afternoon.”

“I know what you mean. Days like this are always tough.”

She leaned back, letting her long brown tresses float out behind her. I did the same, thinking again how nice it would be to have a pool like this of my own.

“I just hope Marion doesn’t think us disrespectful for coming out here,” Sidra said softly. “But Carlos was going stir-crazy. I thought this would be a nice break for him.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m sure Marion would understand.”

I, too, felt a little guilty for swimming on such a somber day. But my shoulders were stiff and my side was still throbbing from my fall this morning. I knew the warm water would be the perfect antidote to my pain.

As Carlos played energetically in the deep end, Sidra and I languished in the shallow, floating and softly chatting. This was really the first conversation she and I had had when she wasn’t hysterical or crying, and I found her to be a fascinating woman, very articulate. As we spoke, I asked about her life in Honduras, about what it had been like to move to the foreign culture of the United States.

“It’s one thing to learn English, which I did as a child,” she said, smiling. “Quite another to speak ‘American.’”

She told me a funny story about her early days here when she was told they used napkins to wipe their mouths at dinner.

“In my village, ‘napkin’ is the word for—how do you say it?—a
diaper
. I thought we were all expected to wipe our mouths with diapers!”

I laughed out loud, trying to imagine this girl and her dinnertime
faux pas
. She talked about how much Carlos liked it here, how many friends he had made, how he was excelling in school. I avoided any talk of the knife in the photo, and she didn’t ask. As for her disintegrating marriage, I had said what I had to
say to Derek that morning; I could only hope that when everything came to light, he would be the one to take things from here. I thought it was his place to tell Sidra about Judith, not mine.

As Carlos perfected his back flip, our talk turned inevitably to Wendell Smythe and to the wonderful relationship he had shared with his grandson.

“Wendell would sit there,” she said, pointing to a wrought iron chair placed beside the pool at the deep end, “for hours on end, coaching Carlos with his dives. He never raised his voice, never lost his patience.”

“Did Wendell use the pool much himself?” I asked.

“Almost every day,” she said. “He liked to wade in up to his waist, then climb on his inner tube and float around.”

I smiled, trying to picture it.

“Of course, that was up until the last few weeks.”