If Walls Could Talk (34 page)

Robbie was going for his gun, ducking the whole time. He kicked at Dog.

I threw the entire light fixture at Jason, and jumped from the ladder on top of Robbie.

This was one of those moments I was glad I was a solid, substantial woman. Even a man of Robbie’s size went down under my weight and the force of gravity. The gun fell away from us, skittering along the stone floor.

We struggled. Robbie flipped me over and fell on top of me. He was huge. Heavy. The breath was knocked out of me. Before I could move, he wrapped his mitt-sized hands around my neck.

He squeezed.

I choked.

Dog barked incessantly.

Panic surged through me. My muscles ached with the effort of keeping my neck taut, fighting off the agonizing pressure of his hands.

Jason scrambled around us, picking up the raw diamonds.

Black spots danced in front of my eyes.

Dog lunged, biting Robbie on the upper arm. Robbie yelled, released one hand from my neck, and stretched it out, reaching for his gun.

He popped up in my peripheral vision, just to the side of us. Holding his arms overhead, his hand curled like a claw, the other a bloody stump, he snarled. Dog yelped and ran, tail between his legs.

Then Robbie screamed and leapt off of me.

Kenneth had managed to materialize enough for others to see him.

Jason squealed as well. Both men ran up the stairs, away from the apparition.

Kenneth chased after them, laughing maniacally, the very stereotype of a bloodthirsty, vengeful spirit.

I heard the whine of the circular saw upstairs, and the men screamed again.

Massaging my neck, I collapsed on the ground and tried to catch my breath.

Brice Lehner burst in through the front door, his gun drawn. He ran to me and knelt beside me.

“Are you all right?”

I nodded. “They’re upstairs.” My voice was raspy; it sounded unlike me.

He ran up the stairs.

With a sudden burst of strength, I followed.

Jason and Robbie were in the den. Jason kept wiping his hands, à la Lady Macbeth, as though to clean them of blood. Robbie just held his arms over his head, whimpering. The saw was running, ready to cut. But the cord wasn’t plugged in.

“Get them away!” Robbie yelled.

“All right, everyone just relax,” Inspector Lehner said, looking frightened himself. “It’s okay. You’re both going to come with me, and nobody gets hurt. Understand?”

Two other uniformed officers stormed up the stairs and joined us in the den. Lehner instructed them to take Robbie and Jason into custody; they cuffed them, read them their rights, and led them out.

In the reflection of the French doors, I caught a quick flash of two men: one in simple miner’s attire, the other in a fine smoking jacket. Buchanan and Giametti, I assumed. They disappeared as soon as the inspector spoke.

“What the hell just went down here?” Lehner asked me.

“I think it’s called justice. Who called you? How did you know to come?”

“This whole thing . . . it spun out of control. I guess you know by now that I was involved? It was supposed to be just a regular investment opportunity.” He shook his head. “And then it turned out Kenneth was trying to cash in on the house, and Rory and Jason started talking about the possibility of finding jewels in the walls. . . . But Jason took things too damned far. Still, I didn’t have any evidence to connect him to Kenneth’s murder. I’ve been tailing him for a few days, figuring he might try something stupid.”

“Thank you for coming.” I tried to swallow. My throat felt bruised, along with my knee and arm.

“I’ll need to get a full statement from you.” Lehner hesitated. “We could probably leave out some of the details about saws working without electricity, that sort of thing. Best to move on, I think. I’ve seen a lot of things over the years, and some don’t bear investigating.”

“That works for me.”

I heard Dog barking hysterically, and ineffectually, from downstairs.

“Could I go get my dog first?” I asked. The inspector agreed, and I was able to give him my full statement with my new canine companion sitting at my side. Dog leaned into me, and I returned the hug as I talked. He was my hero.

“One more thing I wanted to ask you,” Lehner said to me half an hour later as we finished up. “About Kostow’s body . . .”

“What about it?”

“You want it? Morgue held on to it for a while, but they couldn’t find any relations. It’s sad, people go through life without family, friends.”

But Kenneth wasn’t without friends. Not really. Matt was his friend.

And I guessed I was, too.

“D
’ya suppose he wanted to be cremated?”asked Matt the next day, as we met with the funeral directors.

“Yes,” Kenneth said. “Definitely.”

“Cremated. Definitely,” I said.

Matt looked at me, eyebrows raised in question.

“We talked about it once,” I improvised.

“Let me guess—was this when you were threatening to kill him?”

I laughed. “It may have been then, yes.”

“Meet me in the bathroom,” Kenneth said to me in a dramatic whisper, as though Matt could hear him.

“I’ll be right back,” I told Matt.

In the women’s room I could look Kenneth in the eye by meeting his gaze in the mirror.

“Stick a fork in me—I think I’m done,” Kenneth said.

“Done?”

He nodded. “I feel ready to move on. . . . It’s hard to explain, but I think I needed to get back to my body, somehow. Finish things up.”

“So that’s it?” I asked.

“I think so. I actually did a good deed, managed to scare the crap out of those guys so they didn’t kill you. Of course, you wouldn’t have been in that position in the first place, if not for me, I know . . .”

“I don’t blame you, Kenneth.”

“You know, now that it’s too late, I remember that morning. I woke up, hungover, of course, with a gun in my face. I guess Jason had been looking all night for the diamonds, with no luck, and he really thought I had taken them, hidden them somewhere. He also found out about my plan to sell the house. Philip Singh went to eat at Rory’s restaurant, drank too much, started bragging about the new house he was getting from me for a steal.”

Kenneth shook his head, his eyes looking off into space. “Robbie was Jason’s muscle. They kept asking me where the gems were, over and over. Jason made Robbie put his gun down—I don’t think they ever meant to actually kill me—but they used the nail gun on me, and then the saw. It was terrible.”

That seemed like an understatement.

“They panicked when they heard your car pull up,” Kenneth continued. “Jason tossed Robbie’s gun and they took off.”

“The police weren’t able to recover any prints from the gun,” I said.

“Yeah, they were both wearing latex gloves. Matt provided them for safety at the party—he said you made him promise to supply safety equipment. Ironic, huh? Anyway, they just went out the fire escape and left me there. . . . After that, I couldn’t even think.”

“I’m so sorry, Kenneth.”

He smiled. “You and Matt are giving me a real memorial service, and I feel good. Grounded.”

I had wanted this moment, yearned for it. But now that it was here I felt sort of choked up.

“Well, then . . . so it’s time to move on?”

“I think so.”

“To what, do you know?”

He shook his head. “No, but I feel uncharacteristically optimistic about it. Talk about a chance to turn over a new leaf. And I don’t mean that in the sense of the rehab clinic.”

We smiled, our gazes meeting and holding in the mirror.

“Good luck, Kenneth. It was . . . nice to know you. Strange. Surreal even, but nice.”

“Good-bye.”

And just like that, he was gone.

 

“It’s not going to bite you,” I said, stifling a smile.

Matt crouched over a peeling paneled door lying atop two sawhorses, in the front room of the Vallejo Street house. His blue eyes were barely visible through dust-covered safety goggles. The lower part of his face was obscured by a cartridge respirator rated for lead—the kind that made everyone look like World War I insect-people. His long, graceful fingers clutched the random orbital sander, holding it away from him as though it were a dangerous animal.

“Really, Matt,” I continued. “You have to hold power tools like you mean it, show ’em who’s boss.”

Matt said something in response, but his words were muffled by the mask and drowned out by a loud compressor that switched on right at that moment.

Dog looked over his shoulder laconically, disturbed by the loud noise but not motivated to actually budge from his makeshift cardboard bed in the corner. Now that I gave him his motion sickness pills, he was becoming a real construction pup, accompanying me everywhere. His mellow demeanor was a good antidote to my frenetic daily schedule.

He wagged his tail and gave a low
woof
of welcome, looking toward the front door.

“Heya, Dog,” Graham said as he walked into the room. He wore his work uniform: Cal-OSHA shirt, jeans, boots, and a clipboard under his arm. “What’s Matt saying?”

“Not sure,” I chuckled. “Probably had something to do with going back to guitar playing. Either that or he was suggesting where I might shove my random orbital sander.”

Graham returned my smile. “What are you up to?”

“Are you asking that in an official capacity?”

“Not really. Actually, I thought you should know that I’ve given Cal-OSHA two weeks’ notice. I’m turning in my clipboard.”

“Are you serious?”

“I hear the Green Revolution is upon us. Wouldn’t want to let it pass me by.”

“That’s so exciting, Graham! I’m really happy for you. You’ll be great.”

“I stopped by to let you know that the forensics came back on the skeleton in the basement,” Graham said. The anthropologists had taken a couple of days to dig everything up and document the burial area. Then they took the remains back to their lab, releasing the house for further construction. “It’s a male in his twenties or early thirties; they can’t date it to a specific year, but it fits into the timeline you suggested. The medallion you found was from the era as well. It looks like you’re probably right: It’s Giametti.”

“What will happen with the bones? Will he be given a decent burial?”

“As soon as they finish up all the tests he can be laid to rest. You suppose Matt would volunteer to pay for it?”

“Now might not be the best time to ask,” I said with a smile, watching as the sander once again rotated right out of Matt’s grasp.

I was glad for Giametti—I hadn’t felt his presence in the house since his bones had been removed, and now that his story was known I hoped he would be able to rest. It must have been horrific to remain here in this house, all these years, with his own murderer.

Walter Buchanan, on the other hand . . . I still caught whiffs of his pipe, sensed his guilt and shame from time to time as I walked through the halls. I hoped he might move on, too, now that his secret was out, but until he spoke to me directly, it was hard to know how to help. Maybe I should ask Meredith to come check it out, or I could always consult with Brittany Humm. Or even Celia. We could set up a séance. I smiled again, this time at myself. It was hard to believe that I now knew a handful of people with whom I could theorize about lingering ghosts and haunted houses.

“
Bollocks!
” exclaimed Matt as he whipped off the glasses and mask. His face was red and sweaty underneath. “I give up. Maybe I could try, ya know, some other aspect of the job. For instance, I’d be happy to run for doughnuts. Or how about
your
job? I’d even be willing to wear your fancy dress costumes.”

“That’s the whole point,” I said. “You can’t have my job until you understand construction.”

Graham raised his eyebrows in question.

“I insisted that Matt get a hands-on feel for the job,” I explained. “If he’s going to be flipping houses, he needs to know how it’s done.”

“Or I could just hire a professional,” said Matt. “Which is what I thought I had done.”

“Even if you have a contractor do the actual work, wouldn’t you feel better if you understood what the builders were talking about?”

“Not really, no,” said Matt, crouching by Dog and caressing his silky but dusty brown coat.

“I take it the charges were dropped?” Graham asked Matt.

“Thank heavens,” Matt said. “With the others in custody, I’m off the hook. Even the inspector admitted misconduct and intervened on my behalf.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Graham. “So, what’s next for you, then?”

“Basic carpentry,” I said.

Matt rolled his eyes. “Guess I’m here for the duration. I don’t seem to have much choice. She’s the boss.”

“Yes,” said Graham, casting me a significant look. “Yes, she is.”

H
andprints. On the ceiling.

Dammit.
My mind cast about for a way to explain them to my clients. The marks weren’t flat, the kind that could be explained away by someone using their hand to steady themselves while teetering atop scaffolding or a tall ladder. Rather the prints looked as though someone had dragged five fingers along the surface of the ceiling’s wet plaster or paint, resulting in a subtle chicken-scratch pattern fanning out in concentric circles around the hole for the light fixture.

Not to mention the marks hadn’t been there yesterday.

As with so much of what happened on this job site, it was disturbing.

My clients Carlotta and Jim Daley stood amidst the construction debris and dust. The workers had finished for the day, so the house was quiet aside from the cooing of eight-month-old Quinn, who squirmed in a padded pouch slung across his father’s stomach like a baby kangaroo.