Skirting the Grave (13 page)

For Werner’s benefit, I twirled so the dress would flare, one of my favorite moves in a gathered skirt since I could walk. “It’s from the fifties; I wore it in honor of our mutual love for fifties music.”

He chuckled. “Until today, I didn’t know we shared a mutual love for fifties music. It’s not something I usually admit.”

“I love the decade, which is why I talked Brandy into making her upcoming fund-raiser a fifties event. Pure luck or karma brought that trunk to my door in the middle of fitting everyone for the do.”

“I thought Isobel brought that trunk to your door.”

“Essentially, she did.”

Werner ran a hand through his hair. “It makes me nervous to think that karma might have had anything to do with you falling half-naked into my arms this morning.”

“I’d be nervous about it, too,” I admitted, “if karma had anything to do with, well, us.”

“So you understand my reaction? You’ve assaulted me in every way possible—including my senses—at one time or another. If karma had anything to do with it, I’d have to start wearing armor.” He rubbed at his five o’clock shadow. “Just saying it out loud is like tempting fate.”

I shrugged and tried to keep my mouth shut, though my mind raced as I thought of the ways fate had thrown us together, and just to scare him, I allowed him to see the twinkle in my eyes.

“You feel okay?” he asked. “Not nauseous or anything?”

“I’m not planning to barf on you, if that’s what you mean. But thank you for holding my hair back this morning. Not that I remember.”

“Blocking it myself, thanks.”

See, when I passed out, I took this trip to the nineteen-fifties. Yeah, he’d buy that. “Too much chocolate,” I said.

“I’m a detective; I knew that right away.”

I hiccupped an involuntary chuckle as I opened my grocery bag and set a bottle of Dos Equis in front of him.

“You already sound drunk,” he said. “Close my door.” He had an eye twinkle of his own that I’d come to appreciate, one I often tried to elicit.

I closed his door, then I set down the six-pack and took one of our favorite Mexican beers for myself.

“Your tummy okay?” he asked. “You sure you’re up to this?”

“Watch me and find out. So, do we have cause of death yet?”

“No, we don’t. I probably never told you, but in ninety-five percent of deaths, the autopsy will reveal cause of death on the same day.”

“And the other five percent?” I asked, confused.

“The only time you have to wait weeks for a cause of death is with a toxicology report tied to drug use.”

“Your forensics lab found drugs?”

“It looks like she’s a recreational user, an experimenter. Plus the medical examiner did find one fresh needle mark, but it didn’t lead to anything definitive.”

“You know, Isobel implied that her sister and cousin got into trouble, and it made me assume drug use.”

“You know what assumptions are worth.”

“I know,” I said. “How about time of death? Do we know when she died?”

“She had to have died on that bench while the ambulance was on its way to her. The tip came from an anonymous 911 call. We’re thinking a disembarking passenger saw her on the bench.”

“So this isn’t an FBI case? Though Nick’s case is somehow entangled.”

“Yes. No. Maybe. He’s looking at some of the same players, big embezzlement case. Repeat that to Nick, and I’m toast. But this case is all ours. I mean, all mine.”

I hid my satisfaction, but in my heart I did a happy dance. He was beginning to accept my sleuthing. He hadn’t once said, “I can’t discuss the case,” or “Madeira Cutler, are you sleuthing again?”

I cleared my throat. “Next step, then?”

“The deceased will be on her way to the nearest forensics lab in the morning.”

As Nick suggested, I told Werner about Isobel’s deep-voiced caller saying she should be dead. I also told him about Brandy’s train car gorilla.

Werner took notes as quickly as I could talk, though I noticed that he didn’t turn on his recorder the way he had with Isobel’s father earlier.

“You’re good at that. Can you read what you wrote?” I turned his notebook my way. He turned it back his way. “I can read it, but I’m the only one who can.”

“The only one who’s allowed?”

He kept an end table–sized fireproof floor safe behind his desk—a stack of crime and investigative technique books on top. He reached over and swung the door open. Inside, stacked, bound notebooks were topped by index cards with years, months, and case names.

“Ever heard of a database?” I asked. “Eve could set you up with a beauty.”

“Got one, thanks. But I like to have a personal relationship with my cases. Notes remind me of an interviewee’s facial expressions, the way some women cross their legs to distract you when they’re lying.”

I admired the wool gabardine out of him for his distinctive techniques. “It looks like those notepads only date back to January. Where does your secret decoder ring stash go from here?”

“That’s classified, and you don’t have a ring.”

I raised my Dos Equis, and we clicked bottles.

“Here’s to suspects,” he said.

I raised my chin and looked him in the eye. “Got any?”

He tapped his notebook on his desk a couple times. “Definitely a few suspicious characters.”

I batted my lashes. “I have a list, too.”

“So we each have a list.” The detective sipped his beer, his bright gaze boring into mine over the mouth of the bottle.

He swallowed and raised his chin. “Show me yours, I’ll show you mine.”

Twenty-two

Where’s the man could ease a heart like a satin gown?

—DOROTHY PARKER

“I’m up for another bottle while I tell you about Isobel’s freaky family. You?”

He nodded. “Every family is freaky. Even yours.”

“Oh, especially mine. You don’t know the half of it. My mother was a witch.”

“Hah!” he said. “Mine still is.”

We sipped our beer contemplatively for a minute, and I decided this wasn’t the time to tell Werner I wasn’t kidding about my mother, but I did recount what I’d learned about Isobel’s unusual family.

Werner stopped writing and looked up as I opened another beer. “Then what?

“Then you showed up to keep me from puking into a trunk of primo vintage and killing a Dior mink.”

“Right.” He winced. “Tryin’ to forget that.” He sat back and steepled his fingers. “I’m not sure about the campaign manager,” Werner said. “I don’t trust a guy with so much clout, especially when it’s somebody else’s power. I’m waiting for his financials.”

“Ruben Rickard. Isobel described him as her father’s cutthroat protector,” I said. “He’s on my suspect list, too. I’ll see if I can learn anything more about him.”

“Who else is on your list?” Werner asked.

“Madame Robear.”

“I guessed as much. But being voluptuous is no crime, Mad.”

It is to those of us with average boobage. “Your peeps need to get a better timeline. Finding Robear on a train coming this way, hours after the murder, is a little too coincidental for me.”

Werner marked “Robear’s timeline” in his notebook. “Who else is on your list?” he asked, not bothering to argue my point.

“The candidate’s mother, Payton’s grandmother. They call her Grand-mère. Gets chauffeured around town in a powder blue stretch limo. She’s here in Mystic, checking on her granddaughter. She was in my shop before I went to pick up Isobel at the station. I just didn’t know then that it was her.”

“I find that hard to swallow,” Werner said. “Who’d kill a grandchild?”

“Who’d kill their own child? But it happens every day, right? Instead of Grand-mère, let’s call her a pushy, aggressive woman determined to see her son in the White House. A woman who’d do anything for power, even assuming her intentions were pure and she had her family’s or her country’s best interests at heart.”

“Kill a grandkid, save a country?”

“Well, when you put it that way. Actually, I was thinking of sacrifices for the greater good, but in this context, it sounds trite and skewed, even to me.”

“For argument’s sake, what’s Grand-mère’s motive?”

I tapped my chin. “Isobel said she’d do anything to get her son elected. So, power, greed, personal aggrandizement—his station would raise hers. Check into her financials, why don’t you?”

“Will do.”

“Now,” I said, sitting forward, “suppose the granddaughter of a woman like that did something morally reprehensible, which could destroy her son’s chances at getting elected—as in lousy father, lousy . . . name the office. Would that be motive enough?”

Like maybe Payton had been standing on that boat. Should politicians have call girls in the family? Should they have carhop-working girls for mothers?

Werner sharpened his pencil with an electric sharpener and blew on the tip as if he’d fired it like a gun. “Wouldn’t Grand-mère’s embezzling son have ruined his brother’s chances of being elected, anyway?” Werner suggested. “I mean, no matter what the grandchildren did?”

“Not if the honest, upright candidate was the one who turned in the embezzler.”

Werner placed the flat of his hands on his desk and leaned toward me. “Your mind’s too busy. What are you not telling me?”

“Is this Nick’s embezzlement case? Is Patrick York not the embezzler? Does it go higher up than that?”

Werner sort of growled low in his throat.

“Nuff said. But I’m working on instinct, here.” And my secret psychic ability. “You’d understand if you heard Isobel talking about Grand-mère. She’s powerful, she’s rich, judging by her discarded Dior mink, plus she owns an island, Kingston’s Vineyard, with which she plans to outshine Martha’s Vineyard. Oh, and she thinks her son, Isobel’s father, is the second coming of JFK.”

“Sounds like she’s a few vines short a vineyard.”

“Judging by what Isobel didn’t say, I think Grand-mère can be scary. How about Isobel’s uncle?” I asked. “Is he still in prison?”

“He is,” Werner said. “He needed to be told about his daughter, so I did some investigating before I made the call. The money he embezzled was never found. Maybe Payton knew where it was, and her killer was after her for it?”

“In which case, she might have needed to hide behind her cousin Isobel’s identity,” I suggested.

“Actually,” he said, “that’s a better reason for the killer to plant Isobel’s ID on Payton than to make Payton a target. I mean, who asks for your ID before they kill you?”

Twenty-three

Fashion is an art. You express who you are through what you’re wearing.

—DANIELE DONATO

“Right,” I said. “They kill you first and ask for your ID later. Give that man a cigar.”

Werner rubbed his earlobe, looking pleased with himself. “Don’t mind if I do.” He grabbed a cigar from his desk drawer.

“Give me that.” I plucked it from between his lips and snapped it in half. “Smoking kills.”

He looked like a pup that lost his meaty bone. Ah, shouldn’t put Werner and meaty bone in the same thought.

“Do you know how much that Cuban cost?”

“Word for word, the perfect epitaph for your headstone. ‘Do you know how much that Cuban cost? My life.’”I leaned slowly over his desk, so he’d focus on my cleavage, and while his gaze was otherwise occupied, I raided his cigar drawer, breaking all three Cubans into pieces too small to smoke.

His jaw dropped.

I raised it with a finger. “I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t care. Now, where were we?” I dropped the pieces into his wastebasket, dusted my hands together, and sat down. “Power and money are good motives, and they often go hand in hand. What happened to the money Patrick York stole?”

“Right. Marry the two motives,” he said, “and you have almost everything anybody could want.”

“Well, they could want revenge.” I took a long sip of beer. “Suppose Payton was killed to get back at her father for the money he stole? Who did he steal it from?”

“His brother, the politician.”

“Isobel’s father? Didn’t see that on the Net while paying for the beer.”

“The very man. As for the details, we’ve petitioned the Feds for access to the case files.”

Werner tapped his mouth with a finger for a thoughtful second. “Since those voice-modulated phone calls started before Payton or Isobel arrived, it may also be a matter of mistaken identity, as in, Payton might have been the wrong target carrying the right train ticket. Where does your sister Brandy come into it? Which York girl is she friends with?”

“It’s a friend of a friend thing, but Isobel, my intern. Brandy begged me to take her on. You know, if it is a case of mistaken identity, Isobel needs a bodyguard. How about Nick?” I suggested. “His ego could use a boost. He can’t talk, but he can still shoot and beat the crap out of anybody.”

“Except you.” Werner grinned. “You beat the crap out of him.”

“You know how that feels,” I said to take the grinning starch out of him. I’d beat Werner up a time or three.

He raised both hands. “Ya got me.”

“I am not proud of myself. I am really, really sorry I hurt Nick.”

Werner rubbed the bump on his head. “I know, like you’re frequently sorry you hurt me.”

“For Nick to be Isobel’s bodyguard,” I said, “I guess he would have to live at my house.”

“Damn,” Werner said. “Tell you what, Isobel can move in with me.”

I stood, jarred by my own reaction. “Gotta hit the ladies’. Don’t need any help this time, thanks.”

I shut his office door behind me, while something that smacked of jealousy followed me down the hall. I mean, so what if Isobel lived with him; I wouldn’t let her, but not because of that.

From the high, transom-style open window in the ladies’ room, on the E-shaped center hall of the municipal building, I saw Werner across the parking lot in his office, tipping back a bottle that might be a cola for all anybody knew.

He was also being watched by the two people standing beneath a tree outside the ladies’

room: Nick and Isobel. Odd, seeing them as a pair.

I realized that I didn’t like it any more than pairing Isobel and Werner in my mind. Hmm. Two men vied for my attention, and I liked it. What did that make me? The only word that came to mind was “normal.”

“Wasn’t my boss supposed to bring you some hot broth?” Isobel asked, as if she thought I didn’t and pointed out my lack. Nah. I was imagining things.