Twelve to Murder (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (16 page)

Chapter Seventeen

Why do the best ideas always come to you in the shower?

Against Archie’s objections, Mac accepted David’s invitation to go interview Derrick Stillman at his suite at the Spencer Inn. That meant an aspirin, a shower, and getting dressed.

Sitting in the steam shower, waiting for the aspirin to take effect, Mac’s thoughts turned to Archie and pushing past his fear of giving marriage another try. Funny—once he pushed beyond his fear of being left as devastated and humiliated as he had been with his first wife, he was anxious to make it official.

He had to do it right. Archie had been so patient with him for so long. She was the love of his life and it had to be perfect.

That means a ring. Not just any diamond. Archie deserves the best. It takes time to find the perfect ring, or to have one custom designed. I can’t waste anymore time. She’s waited long enough.

Like a lightning bolt shooting down from the heavens to strike Mac in his seat in the steam shower, it hit him.

Yes, that’ll be perfect.
He stood up and grabbed the handle to turn off the shower.
No need to buy a ring. I already have it. Right here in Spencer Manor. 

He threw open the door. Without taking the time to dry off, he shrugged into his bathrobe and ran into the master suite to search through the jewelry armoire that Robin Spencer had left him.

Constructed of oak, the aged armoire was the size of an end table and filled with antique pieces, priceless jewels that had been passed down through the Spencer family for several generations. Ed Willingham, the Spencer lawyer who had handled his mother’s estate, estimated that Robin’s jewelry collection was valued at over five million dollars. Mac had given some of the less ornate pieces to his grown daughter, Jessica. Eventually, he expected her, and his son Tristan’s wife, whenever he married, to split the collection. But otherwise, the bulk of the extensive collection was gathering dust in the corner of Mac’s bedroom.

There was one particular piece for which he was hunting.
Why didn’t I think of it before? This ring has a history that’s perfect for sealing Archie’s and my commitment to each other.

He had all the drawers open and jewelry hanging out when Archie walked in. “I thought you were getting dressed. David is waiting.” Her voice shot through him and made him jump as if he had been struck by another bullet. “What are you looking for?”

Mac slammed the drawer shut and closed the doors. “I was looking for a pair of earrings for Jessica.” Closing the bathrobe that had fallen open in his search, he turned around. “She’s going to New York with a bunch of her friends and they’re going to a huge fashion show. She had a dress made by some big designer and she wants the perfect earrings and necklace and I thought I had seen some in here that would look nice.”

Archie’s eyes narrowed. Then, she placed her hands on her hips and cocked her head at him. “Really?”

“Really.” Mac saw Gnarly had come in with her. The German shepherd sat next to her and cocked his head at him. Obviously, Gnarly wasn’t buying his lie either.

Best defense is a good offense.

“What?” Mac shot back at them.

“Since when have you become a fan of fashion?” she asked with a laugh. “Like you would know what would go with a dress that you haven’t even seen.”

“She described—” To Mac’s relief, David blew the car horn to urge him to hurry up. “I have to go.” With a peck on her cheek, he hurried past her to go out the door. 

Archie was still laughing. “Go ahead. I’ll call Jessica to ask her—”

“No!” Throwing his hand up to stop himself at the door, Mac whirled around. “Don’t call her.”

She turned around. “Why not?”

He wasn’t prepared for this question. Finally, he came up with, “I want them to be a surprise.”

In an effort to take their current conversation off her mind, he grabbed her and kissed her forcibly on the lips. What had started as a distraction dissolved into a sensuous moment. He wrapped his arms around her and held her close to him. She reached up to take in the taste of his mouth.

David blew the horn again. This time he held it longer to signify his impatience.

Reluctantly, Mac pulled back and gazed down into her beautiful eyes, the color of emerald jewels.  

“I guess your headache is gone.” She was breathless.

“It’s certainly better,” he said. “I have to go.”

“I’ll be waiting for you.”

“You do that.” He went out the door.

Running her fingers through her hair, Archie sighed deeply. Her heart still fluttered and she still tingled when he kissed her.

Mentally, she was returning to earth when the bedroom door flew open and Mac, ripping off his bathrobe, ran back inside. “I forgot to get dressed.”

Standing next to Archie on the front porch of the Spencer Manor, Chelsea’s expression was of concern for David, who was still nursing his broken ribs, which were tightly wrapped. Worry made her face paler.

Even Molly cocked her head with concern at the two men. Only Gnarly, who was too busy licking Molly’s ears, didn’t seem to care about their well-being. He was more concerned with getting back on Molly’s good side.

After getting in the cruiser and closing the door, Mac noted David staring straight ahead through the windshield. He snapped his fingers in the police chief’s face to capture his attention. “What are you thinking so hard about?”

“Want to trade my broken ribs for your headache?” David turned the key in the ignition to start the cruiser.

“I would if I could,” Mac said.

“You are aware that Lenny’s kidnapping is completely out of our jurisdiction?” David eased the cruiser around the circular driveway and pulled out onto the road toward the other end of Spencer Point to take them up the mountain to the five-star resort, another part of Mac’s inheritance from his birth mother.

“Yes, I do know that,” Mac said.

“Then why are you so interested in it?”

“Because the Stillman murders, which are very much in our jurisdiction, are very much connected,” Mac replied. “Derrick Stillman was the last one known to have had possession of the ransom money. Maybe, with the passage of time and the shift of loyalties, he’ll be ready to tell the truth about what happened to it.”

“That tells me that you think he was working with the kidnappers.”

“Not necessarily because he wanted to.”

“Do you remember I told you that Derrick Stillman was suspected of operating a drug dealing operation in his club?” David asked.

“Vaguely.” Mac didn’t want to confess that most of the previous day was a blur.      “Well yesterday I realized how much power an assistant to the boss can have, especially if they have passwords to email accounts, and how easy it would be to set up an operation and make it appear to be someone else’s.”

“Identity theft,” Mac said.

“Derrick Stillman is a former addict who seems to go out of his way to avoid the drug world,” David said. “I think he’s sincere about staying clean. If Drake’s kids killed his parents in retaliation, he would have said something by now.”

“If he’s so clean, why does he own a club?” Mac said.

“His mother set him up in business,” David said. “I called the federal agents running the investigation and told them to take another look. They called this morning. It looks like I was right. According to their undercover agent, the major deals go down when Derrick is not around—Friday and Saturday. But, you know who is around?”

“His assistant,” Mac said.

“Zoe Reese.” David nodded his head. “They wouldn’t give me any details, but something is going down this week—coincidentally while Derrick is taking time off to deal with his parents’ deaths.”

“Could the dealers have arranged for this time off to get Derrick out of the way? Maybe struck a deal with the Drakes?”

“Interesting question.” David pulled the cruiser off the mountain road to park in Mac’s reserved parking space next to the main door. “The sad thing is that according to the feds, the Stillmans disinherited Derrick, who most likely did nothing wrong. Now Lenny gets the club.”

“But we don’t know if Lenny knows that.”

“No, we don’t,” David said while unclasping his seatbelt. “Nor do we know if Derrick was aware of being disinherited. He could have arranged his parents’ murders for revenge.”

“But you don’t think he did it.” Mac opened the door to climb out.

“No, I don’t.”

On the top floor of the Spencer Inn, Derrick Stillman’s attorney, a short bald-headed man, answered the door to the penthouse in response to David’s knock. “Chief O’Callaghan. I’m Boris Ambrose.” The lawyer peered up at David from over the top of his glasses while pumping his hand. “I was going to come see you this afternoon. Thank you for stopping by.” When David introduced Mac to him, the lawyer released his hand to pump his. “Mr. Faraday, what a pleasure to meet you. Lovely resort you have here.”

After thanking him, Mac extracted his hand and flexed it.

Boris waved them into the sitting area where Derrick was reading over a stack of papers. “I had stopped in to give my condolences to Derrick, and to go over his parents’ wills. There are a lot of details to go over. Unfortunately, during such a terrible time as this, there are decisions to be made.”

David and Mac exchanged glances. While Derrick’s expression was one of grief, he did not look like he had recently received news of being disinherited from a multi-million dollar fortune.

Mac took the lead by asking, “I guess since Derrick was their only son, the Stillmans left him well taken care of.”

“Austin Stillman was a savvy businessman,” Boris said. “Janice had received a very large inheritance from an aunt, which she used to set her husband up in business, plus she bought the comedy club as an investment for Derrick. Both have done very well, and now it all goes to Derrick.” He gestured at the distraught looking young man.

Obviously, the disinheritance didn’t happen, Mac thought. He could see by the arch of David’s eyebrow that he was thinking the same thing.
What happened here? Did the lawyer lose the new will or what? Maybe a pay off? Or did the feds get their information about the change in the wills wrong?

“I saw in the news that Lenny was arrested last night,” Derrick said. “Are you charging him with murder?”

“We found the murder weapon,” David said. “It was in Zachery Harris’ possession when he took a shot at Lenny. Harris was killed in a car crash while trying to escape the police.”

“Harris?” Derrick repeated the name. “That writer who accused my folks of being behind Lenny’s kidnapping and taking off with the million-dollar ransom?”

“He was Carson Drake’s son,” Mac said.

“Madelyn Preston,” David said, “the woman you had spent Friday night with…she was really Carson Drake’s daughter, Sela. She drugged you to get the security passcode, and then she called her brother here in Deep Creek Lake so that he could get into the house to kill your parents as revenge for making their father the fall guy in Lenny’s kidnapping.”

Mac told him, “We found evidence to place Harris in Deep Creek Lake at the time of your parents’ murders. He used his credit card to purchase gas in McHenry.”

“My parents weren’t behind Lenny’s kidnapping!” Tears came to Derrick’s eyes. “No wonder he wrote that pack of lies he called a book. Harris had no proof that they did it. He spouted all this stuff based on circumstances—all because he—and now his sister?—refused to believe that their father was a second-rate actor who thought he could schmooze his way into the movies by getting big-name actors hooked on drugs.”

“Is that what Carson Drake was?” Mac eased down into the chair across from him. “A small-time actor and drug dealer?”

“Exactly,” Derrick said. “Do you want to know the worst part?”

“Tell me.”

“Carson was on the studio payroll,” Derrick said. “While Lenny was big, the studio wanted to keep him happy. Carson was Lenny’s assistant. He
assisted
Lenny by getting him girls, booze, and drugs. Since I was his best friend, Lenny’d give me his leftovers. We both got hooked.”

He gritted his teeth. “Then, when our habit got to be a problem—with Lenny losing it, coming in late or not at all, and getting bad publicity for behaving like an idiot—the studio started putting a limit on what we could have. Carson would stay in our good graces by giving us more—as long as we paid for it. Lenny did. At the end of the third season of Lenny’s show, when his ratings started to drop, the studio fired Carson because Lenny wasn’t worth the expense to them. Our party was over and Carson was out of a job. That’s why he kidnapped Lenny.”

“Was Lenny still buying from him?”

“Yeah, of course,” Derrick said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Carson was Lenny’s drug connection. But it wasn’t that easy.”

“Why wasn’t it that easy?” David asked.

Chuckling, Derrick shook his head. “Everyone thinks these child stars, teenaged stars, have it easy. Money is flowing everywhere. But the stars really don’t get that much of it. Lenny’s folks had control over his money because he was a minor.
They
gave him a hot car to drive, and he had a generous allowance compared to other kids his age—including me. But the rest of the money went to his parents. They set up the financing so that they got paid big salaries, which they put up their noses. When Lenny turned eighteen, at which point he was a has-been, he got the money that they had put into a trust fund for him. He got a total of fifty thousand dollars. He’d been working since he was six years old. His parents had blown every penny. They claimed that it went to supporting Lenny and their family—he was the breadwinner, but he got nothing.”

“So when Lenny had to start buying his drugs, he didn’t have the cash to keep him in the lifestyle to which he was accustomed,” David said.

“Carson gave us a lot free of charge,” Derrick said, “on account that we lied to him. We kept promising him that my mom would represent him—be his agent—as long as he kept us happy.”

David tapped Mac’s hand. “That’s why Drake was telling people that Janice was going to represent him. She didn’t promise him that. It was Lenny and Derrick.”

Mac asked Derrick, “Did your mother ever consider representing Drake?”

“She considered him a low-life drug dealer and hanger-on,” Derrick said. “Kate Coleman—do you remember her?”

Mac and David nodded their heads.

With tears in his eyes, Derrick took in a shuddering breath. “I loved…” He cleared his throat. “Mom represented her and blamed Carson Drake for her death. He had gotten her hooked on drugs and she died in a car accident. The police said she was under the influence when it happened.” Derrick stared down at his hands. “Mom never forgave Drake for getting her hooked.”

When Mac reached out to touch his hand, he startled Derrick out of his thoughts. “You cared about Kate, didn’t you?”

“Is it that obvious?” Derrick asked.

“Yes,” Mac said in a soft voice. “I thought she and Lenny were a hot item.”

“Only for the media,” Derrick chuckled. “They were the hottest pop stars. Fans wanted the two of them to be an item. So they were—for all the cameras. When the cameras weren’t around, it was me and Kate.”