But that thought was pushed out of my head when I heard Ken’s voice. ‘You’re looking in the wrong place.’
I swung around to see Ken and both boys standing in the doorway to the master bedroom, Trisha behind them, jumping up and down in some sort of warning frenzy. I hoped she realized it wasn’t working.
‘Ken – I’m sorry. I was looking for the bathroom—’
‘Save it, E.J. I know what you’re looking for. I was hoping that was the real reason you came over. The food’s great, and we thank you for it, but—’
‘We know what you do, Miz Pugh,’ one of the boys said.
‘And we’ll help you anyway we can,’ the other one said.
‘I’d rather the boys stayed out of it—’ Ken started, while both boys interrupted with ‘Dad!’
He looked at his sons and tousled the hair of the one closest to him. ‘I know you want to find out who did this, guys, but E.J.’s a pro at this. We’ll leave it to her.’ Looking back at me, he said, ‘We know the police are going to be looking into it, but I also know that you can go places and do things the police can’t. I’ll pay you any amount of money you want to find out who did this to Kerry and why.’
I moved to Ken, Sr and hugged him. Stepping back, I said, ‘I won’t take your money, Ken, that’s an absolute. And I’m not a pro. I’m a bumbling amateur who doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing half the time. But Kerry was my friend and I’ll do whatever I can to find out what happened. Just don’t tell Willis.’
THREE
F
ather and sons sat on the taupe tuxedo sofa in Kerry’s living room while Trisha and I took our places in high-backed, armless, tightly-stuffed chairs covered in black, white and taupe-striped silk. The coffee table, with the new ring on it, was a galley door from an old ship, and had been covered in glass – so the ring was no problem.
‘If you’re sure you want to do this—’ I started.
Ken interrupted me. ‘I’m sure. Ask any questions. Our lives are an open book.’
‘OK,’ I said and looked at Trisha. She shrugged. So I asked what I thought was an important question. ‘Did you know Berta Harris?’
Ken frowned. ‘Berta Harris? Do you think she has something to do with this?’
‘No, not at all. We had her memorial service yesterday morning. I’m just wondering if you knew her.’
‘She’s dead?’ Ken said, standing up from the sofa. ‘How? Was she murdered too?’
I stood up and went to Ken, taking him by the arms and encouraging him to sit back down.
‘Ken, you need to calm down or this isn’t going to work. She may have been murdered, but there’s no proof yet. It’s all very confusing.’ I then went on to tell him about my encounter with Kerry and how she’d acted about the news of Berta’s death. I ended with, ‘How did you and Kerry know her?’
Ken shrugged. ‘I didn’t, not really. I came home from work early one day because I had the flu and Berta was in the living room. I had no idea who she was. But when she saw me she looked terrified. Then Kerry came downstairs and saw me and
she
looked terrified. And I asked them what the hell was going on, but then Kerry just laughed and said I’d startled her. Then she introduced me to the Harris woman, said she was a client, and then she walked her to the door. But the thing is, she tried to hide it but I saw that she handed the woman a wad of cash. I don’t know how much.’
‘Did you ask Kerry about it later?’ Trisha asked.
Ken shook his head. ‘No. I figured it must have been a refund or something. Maybe the woman gave her cash to hold a house before she made a bid or something. I don’t know. Real estate is not my thing.’
‘Did you ever see Berta Harris again?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘Did Kerry ever mention her again?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Ken said.
One of the boys said, ‘I heard Mom talking to her on the phone once. It seemed like she was trying to calm her down or something. I know she said “Berta” because I remember thinking that was a weird name.’
‘Do you know what she was calming her down about?’ I asked.
The boy shrugged. ‘Naw, and I didn’t ask. Mom’s always on the phone with somebody.’ Then his head dropped. ‘I mean, was.’
I stood up and Trisha followed suit. ‘Ken, I’m going to keep looking into this, but I can’t promise I’ll do better than the police. Just tell them everything, including what you just told me. I did mention to Lieutenant Luna what I just told y’all about Berta Harris, so she might ask you about it.’ As we headed to the door, I thought of something else. ‘Oh, and, ah, don’t mention to Lieutenant Luna that I’m, um, looking into this, OK?’
Ken nodded. ‘Don’t tell Lieutenant Luna and don’t tell Willis.’
‘You got it,’ I said and hugged him goodbye.
‘So now what?’ Trisha asked as we got in the minivan. I so wished I already had my new two-seater. It would be so much cooler doing this in a sports car with the top down. My hair blowing in the breeze – forget it. It would be a tangled mess.
‘Now we go back to Berta’s house,’ I said, and held up a key card I’d found in Kerry’s top drawer. ‘I think this will get us into the lockbox on the door.’
Trisha grinned. ‘Way cool,’ she said, taking me back to tenth grade. God, if I only had my sports car!
The sign was still up in Berta Harris’s yard on Weed Willow. I pulled into the driveway of the single-story house like I owned the place and we got out. ‘Walk confidently. We belong here, in case the neighbors wonder. We’re with the new real estate company representing the property. Ah, Black Cat Realty.’
‘Is there a Black Cat Realty?’ Trisha asked.
‘We’re new,’ I told her.
‘Roger.’
So I marched confidently up to the front door and tried to stick the card key into the lock, but it wasn’t that kind of lock. You had to punch in numbers, not a card key. My confidence was ebbing when, just for kicks and giggles, I turned the knob. The door opened.
Trisha and I looked at each other and I wondered if I was the only one thinking about running back to the minivan and buying a nice conservative sedan. I took a deep breath and opened the door. Behind me, Trisha pushed and I found myself in Berta Harris’ foyer. To the left was a small formal dining room with nothing in it. Directly in front was a large living room with a fireplace and a glass wall looking into a sun room with a patio and pool beyond. It was also empty of furniture. A wet bar was just to the left of the fireplace and between that and the dining room was an opening that led to a large kitchen and family room, with the fireplace from the living room doing double duty in the family room. The kitchen had a breakfast area at the front of the house that was surrounded on one side by a large bow window. There was a card table and one folding chair set there. In the family room was a broken-down recliner and a fourteen-inch television sitting on a TV tray. Beyond that, towards the back of the house, was a hallway that led to a door to the laundry room and the attached garage at the back of the house (there was an alley entrance), another door that led to a bath with a large shower, and yet another door leading to a room set up as an office. There were built-in bookcases with nothing in them, and a folding chair in front of the built-in computer center with a laptop sitting there. Another door in the office led to the sunroom.
On the other side of the living room were two doorways – one an actual door, the other an entrance to a hallway. The hallway led to two empty bedrooms with a shared bath in between. The door in the living room led to the master suite, a large bedroom with his and her bathrooms and separate walk-in closets. There was an air mattress on the floor with a blanket thrown on top, and a box with clothes. The bathroom held a few toiletries in the female half (you could tell which was which because the female half had the giant sunken tub. What man wants that, right?). The tub, however, held something else.
Blood.
Not a great deal, but enough to shake up Trisha and myself. Not only that, but the tinted glass window that was one wall of the tub and looked out at the landscaped garden and pool of the backyard had been broken out. And not just a little break – a great big one. The only way I knew the window had been tinted was by the tiny shards still clinging to the window frame.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ I told Trisha. ‘Let’s just back out. We need to call the police.’
We moved into the living room where I dialed Luna’s private number at the police department.
‘What part of “stay out of this” did you not understand?’ Luna said, not even pretending to glare at me.
‘We were just driving by—’
‘Her bathtub?’
‘You know Kerry didn’t have a partner, and Ken asked me if I’d check Berta’s house to see if there was anything on next of kin. He wanted to notify Berta’s family.’
‘Did he give you a key?’ Luna asked.
‘The door was open,’ I said, not for the first time.
‘So that takes breaking off the table. Now let’s talk about entering,’ she said, giving me a look.
‘Ken said we could!’ I said, knowing how childish that sounded but unable to stop myself.
‘Ken had no right to say you could, if he really did, which I don’t believe for a moment. Meanwhile, we have break— Sorry, entering without permission and vandalism.’
‘This is all on me, Luna. Trisha had nothing to do with it,’ I said.
She turned and looked at Trisha. ‘And I thought you were sane,’ she said, sadly shaking her head.
‘We could have called you from a payphone,’ Trisha said, ‘and you would have never known it was us. But instead we do our civic duty and this is the way we’re treated?’
I was frantically making hand signals behind Luna’s back, but Trisha either didn’t see them or was ignoring them.
‘Civic duty,’ Luna repeated. She turned to me and smiled. It was a big smile. A big, phony smile. ‘Civic duty! My, my. Is that what we’re calling it? Civvv-ick dooo-ty. Hum. Kinda just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Civvvvvv-ick dooooo-ty. Is that what you’ve been doing all this time, Pugh? Exercising your civic duty?’
‘Luna—’ I started.
‘Falling over dead bodies all the time – that’s your civic duty?’
‘I did not fall over anyone or anything this time!’ I protested.
‘Yet you felt a need to extend your civic duty to breaking and en— I’m sorry,’ she said, oh so sarcastically, ‘I just mean
entering
the former Berta Harris’s home.’
‘I think we’re forgetting the main thing here!’ Trisha said, little hands on little hips as she glared up at Luna. ‘There is blood in the bathtub and the glass wall of the tub is shattered! Someone did break in here but it wasn’t us.’
‘And how do I know that?’ Luna demanded, her face getting red. ‘So you broke the back window to get in and do whatever it is you did, then lied about the front door being open! Martinez!’ she shouted at the other plain clothes cop in the room.
‘Yeah, Lu?’ he asked.
‘You think maybe these two here,’ she said, pointing at us, ‘broke that tinted window, entered this home and then lied about the door being open?’
‘Well, now, Lu,’ Martinez said, scratching his head, ‘that could very well be! Ma’am, I think you done solved this case!’
Luna smiled brightly at him. ‘Thanks, Martinez, you got your cuffs?’
‘You betcha!’ he said, pulling out his handcuffs and heading toward me.
I backed away, saying, ‘No, oh no, get away from me!’
As I was being read my rights and Luna was cuffing Trisha, I heard Trisha say, ‘I have small children! My husband’s an attorney!’
And then we were stuffed into the backs of separate squad cars. It was going to be a long night.
I have never had any desire to run for office. Good thing. With my record, it could be problematic. I’ve never been actually tried for anything, have never even been before a judge, but I have been arrested a few times. OK, maybe more than a few. But the charges have always been dropped. Of course, not before Willis became involved. This time I didn’t call him to rescue me. I called my son Graham. OK, I agree, not a motherly thing to do. But having bailed him out of jail two months ago for dropping cherry bombs in the girls’ bathroom, I thought it was more or less tit for tat, so to speak.
Unfortunately, Willis was the one who showed up. Graham and I were going to have some serious words. But the first thing my husband (and I use that term loosely) said was, ‘Don’t blame Graham.’ He used his head to point at Trisha. ‘Tom called me.’ Tom was Trisha’s husband.
‘Is he mad?’ Trisha asked.
‘Concerned,’ Willis said. ‘But I’m afraid he’s not going to let you play with E.J. anymore.’
‘Willis—’ I started.
‘Trisha, please explain to your friend that I’m talking to you, not her.’
Trisha looked at me and opened her mouth to speak. I just said, ‘Don’t.’ So she didn’t.
‘I have bail money for both of you, although Lieutenant Luna is going to let you go, Trisha. Your friend, however, is another story.’
‘I can go?’ Trisha asked, jumping to her tiny little feet. ‘Right now?’
‘Yep,’ my husband said. He moved aside while a guard unlocked our cage and escorted Trisha out.
Looking back at me, she said, ‘Sorry, E.J.’
I shrugged. ‘Not your fault. Enjoy your freedom.’ I looked after her as she was escorted out of the jail wing. And for a while after she was no longer visible. It beat looking at Willis.
‘You’re going before a judge in the morning,’ Willis said. ‘This time Luna’s serious. There will be actual bail set; we may have to put the house up as collateral. You’ll have an actual record. You may end up going to prison. Have you reached your goal yet? Is this the ultimate thrill? Have you been all you can be?’
I didn’t look at him.
‘Answer me, damn it!’ he said in a very loud tone.
Finally I turned to face him. ‘I did not do what Luna has accused me of. I’m innocent.’
‘You didn’t go in Berta Harris’s house?’ he asked in a sarcastic tone.
‘Of course I went in her house! I just didn’t break the window to get in! The door was open!’
‘What difference does that make?’ he yelled at me.
‘I. Did. Not. Break. And. Enter!’ I yelled succinctly. ‘I just entered!’
‘Are you saying the window was broken by someone else?’ he yelled.