Читать книгу Dial M for Mischief - Kasey Michaels, Кейси Майклс, Kasey Michaels - Страница 9

SAM WALKED INTO THE living room after an hour spent holding Jolie in the privacy of his bedroom suite. He’d taken her up the back staircase from the kitchen to avoid the living room and her sisters. She’d cried and apologized for crying and then cried some more. When he’d left her, she was in the bathroom, washing her face and applying makeup. He believed she was putting her mask back on but didn’t think he should point that out to her, poor kid.

“She was crying about Teddy, not you. Right?”

He looked at Jade, one eyebrow raised at her sharp tone. “I beg your pardon?”

“Jade sneaked upstairs and listened at the bedroom door,” Jessica informed him. “We wondered if we should knock, come in and check on her, make sure she was all right. We took a vote and it was a draw. I voted to leave the two of you alone, and Jade…well, you know how she voted. But that’s to be expected. Jade’s off men right now, especially Becket men.”

“I think the day finally hit her,” Sam explained as he retrieved his car keys from a small table just inside the door. “The finality of it.”

“Exactly what I told Jade. Is she all right now? She probably needed a good cry, Sam. Me, I think I’m all cried out for now, but I cried buckets. God only knows what Jade did until we got here. Jade doesn’t share easily, do you, Jade?”

Jade pointedly turned her back to both of them, picking up a small silver bowl and turning it over, examining the maker’s mark—or pretending to so that she could hide her face.

Leaving Sam to wonder why women always said things like that, that someone needed a good cry. The statement had never made any sense to him, but Sam only nodded, sure it was a female thing men weren’t meant to understand. “Jolie will be downstairs in a couple of minutes. We’re going to go over to the house to pick up her clothes. She can’t stay there anymore, at least not yet. She hates that she can’t, but I think I convinced her that people handle things differently. There is no right or wrong way to grieve.”

Jessica, who had gone back to reading one of the files, looked up at him, a pencil caught lengthwise between her teeth. “I erk,” she said, nodding. “Alwus id.”

“She works. She always did,” Jade translated. She put down the bowl and turned around when Jolie joined Sam, once more clad in her simple but elegant black dress. “I turn into a monster and go looking for a fight. Sorry, Sam. Do you remember the alarm code, Jolie?”

Jolie nodded, wiping at her eyes one last time with the increasingly large wad of crumpled tissues she held in one hand. “Teddy’s birthday. One—two—four—three. I’m sorry I’m bailing on you guys…”

“You’re not bailing,” Jade assured her. “We know where to find you when we need you. Besides, you and Sam are going to work the bride case together, right? We’ll meet here every night to talk over what we’ve done each day—eight o’clock good for everyone? Good,” she said, not waiting for anyone to answer. “So just go now and get your clothes. I’ll wait until five and then call for a pizza delivery at six, so be back by then. Sam? Does the guy at the gate like pizza?”

“Probably. With or without the box,” Sam said, visions of Jade running his life poking at his brain and making him spare a moment’s pity for his cousin Court. Then again, Courtland Becket always liked to be in charge, the go-to man. It might be considered a success that his and Jade’s marriage had lasted a full six months. “Do either of you want anything else from the house while we’re there?”

“See if Teggy as marcus.” Jessica removed the pencil from her teeth. “Sorry. Could you check in Teddy’s office, see if he’s got markers? You know, highlighter pens? Stupid, but I have a system when I work, and that includes highlighters. Pink would be nice, but I’ll use yellow in a pinch.”

“Pink highlighters,” Sam repeated. “Got it.” He put his hand on Jolie’s waist. “Ready to go?”

But Jolie just stood there, staring into the middle distance, every muscle in her body taut. “Jade?” she asked quietly. “When you got home the night you found—when you got home? Was the alarm engaged?”

Jade shook her head. “Sorry, honey, I see where you’re going, but that won’t work. We need the code to shut off the alarm after we enter the house, but anyone can just push the set button on the way out and arm the alarm again. The cops say suicide in a locked house. We can say Teddy let his murderer in and the killer just set the alarm again before he left. We can say Teddy turned off the alarm, which he’s been known to do, so that the killer entered the house without Teddy knowing it. Face it—a man who insists on using his birth date for a code isn’t really taking the alarm system seriously in the first place, as I always told him. Any scenario works, but the cops bought the suicide version.”

“You should change the code in any case,” Sam pointed out, feeling himself being drawn into this whole murder/suicide conspiracy thing. Much against his will, not to mention his better judgment. “If you’re right, that is, and Teddy let his murderer into the house that night. Even if you still need a key for the front door, the guy could—”

“The perp,” Jessica interrupted brightly. “If we’re going to play private dicks, let’s use the snappy lingo, okay? You’re a guy, Sam. The killer is a perp.” Her smile faded slightly. “Besides, I’m having trouble thinking Teddy and killer in the same thought. Somehow perp is easier.”

“All right, the perp,” Sam conceded. “If there was a perp, and Teddy admitted said perp to the premises, said perp may have seen Teddy punch in the code. In other words, ladies, change the damn code, all right?” He looked to Jade because he wasn’t stupid, he recognized the pecking order in their little group: Jade, Jessica, Jolie and, fourth, finishing out of the money, himself. “Jade? We agree on this?”

“Hmm?” she said, blinking as she looked at him. “Sorry. I was trying again to remember if the alarm was on or not that night or even if the door was locked. Teddy was so lax about setting the alarm. In fact, to get real about the thing, if it was on, that alone would be unusual. I just can’t remember if it was engaged or not. As for the front door lock? I always use my key, but that doesn’t mean the door was locked when I put the key in, you know? I think I’ll take Rockne for a walk in the garden, if nobody minds. I have to go think about this, mentally retrace my steps. If it was on, that might tell us for certain that Teddy was killed—not that I’m questioning that…”

Sam looked at Jessica, who was making notes on a scrap of paper and totally ignoring everyone, and then glared at Jolie. “Humor me. Change…the damn…code.”

“We will,” Jolie promised as she headed for the front door. “You want to explain to me why you’d think the murderer would come back?”

“If I had all the answers, sweetheart,” he told her as he opened the car door for her, “I’d be king of the world. I’m basing my concern solely on books and TV shows wherein the murderer—excuse me, the perp—always returns to the scene of the crime. Like it’s part of their job description.”

Jolie buckled herself in as he started the car. “So you’re going along with us? You’re willing to believe Teddy was murdered?”

Sam put the transmission into gear and the car pretty much on autopilot as he headed toward the Sunshine family home in nearby Ardmore. “I just walked in on this earlier today, Jolie, and haven’t had much time to think about anything but the moment following the one that just preceded it.”

“Our fault, I know. The Sunshine girls invaded, and you haven’t had much chance to do anything but listen to us rant and rave. So think about it now, Sam. Do you think Teddy was capable of suicide—for any reason? I really do want your opinion.”

“Okay, I’ll think about it.”

A minute later Jolie gave him a soft punch in the arm. “Out loud, Sam. Think about it out loud.”

“All I seem to be doing today is taking orders.All right. Teddy was one of the most alive people I ever met. That’s one. He loved you three girls more than anything else in the world, and I can’t see him taking the coward’s way out of trouble, leaving you three behind to clean up his mess—and I mean that in any way imaginable. Whatever trouble he might have been in couldn’t have been more important to him than…well, he had to have known Jade would be the one to find him. So, no, Jolie. I can’t see Teddy doing something like that to Jade, no matter how much distress he might have been under at the time.”

Jolie nodded, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap. “That’s what Jade kept telling the police. Teddy wouldn’t have done that to her. He would have gone somewhere private, away from the house. Somewhere someone else would find the…find the body. And he would have left a note, too. Explaining what he did, why he did it. He would have apologized, told us that…told us that he loved us.”

This was something new to Sam. He looked across the car at Jolie. “He didn’t leave a note?”

“No. Nothing. Jade said there was an almost empty bottle of Irish whiskey on the desk. An overturned glass on the floor across the room, as if he’d flung it away from him. That’s how Jade described it, anyway. The case Teddy kept his old service revolver in was on the desk, too, open, the key beside it. The gun was on the floor next to him, two shots fired.”

Sam nearly ran off the road as he looked over at Jolie. “Two? Two shots?”

Jolie sighed, nodded. “According to the police, the first was a test shot to see if he really had the nerve to pull the trigger. A lot of people do that, supposedly. They dug that shot—slug?—out of the floor. But there was no note. Not in his handwriting, not on his computer.”

Sam turned onto the street where the Sunshine family lived ina small Georgian-style brick two-story house and slowed the car to a crawl when he saw a nondescript blue van parked at the curb.

“Only one still sticking around, Jolie,” he said, looking at the blond man sitting on the second of two steps that led up to a long cement walkway and another half flight of steps that ended on the front porch of the house. He had one shoe off and was rubbing at his foot. “Looks like my new friend from the cemetery. And he’s trespassing. What do you want to do?”

Jolie leaned forward in her seat, lowering her sunglasses and squinting into the sun. “Oh, God. It’s Gary Tuttle.”

“I should recognize the name? I mean, I did run over his foot.”

“Nobody should know him. He should live under a rock. Maybe Gibraltar. Tuttle works freelance, which means he’ll do anything for a photo, a story, and then sell it to the highest bidder. He’s been sued at least three times and got out of it each time, claiming he was just trying to make a living and the person he was harassing was a public figure and not entitled to privacy. Whoever thought up that law also should be living under a rock.”

“So Tuttle’s not destined to be one of my best friends.” Sam pulled to the curb behind the van, more than ready to take out his frustrations on the so-called reporter. “You stay here. I’ll get rid of him.”

“No, Sam. You’ve already done enough, more than enough. We’ll be happy if he doesn’t sue you for pain and injury.” She pulled down the sun visor and turned her head side to side, practiced a smile. “How do I look? My eyes are sort of puffy, but if I keep the sunglasses on it shouldn’t be too bad, right?”

“You’re going to pose for the bastard?” Sam felt his temper climbing.

“The proverbial performing seal, yes.” She shoved the visor back up and put her hand on the door handle. “It’s the easiest way, and Tuttle knows it, which is why he stuck around. Three seconds to make up your mind, Sam—do you want to be in the photos or not? Because we’re going to give Tuttle a cover shot that should make his day. And make him go away.”

“I don’t freaking believe this,” Sam said, pushing open his door and walking around the front of the car, glaring at Gary Tuttle the entire time, his left arm out, warning him to keep his distance. “I’m beginning to have a lot of sympathy for anybody who ever popped one of these guys in the nose with his own camera.”

Jolie turned on the seat, her long bare legs exiting the car first. She took his hand and allowed him to help her and then touched at her sunglasses once more and began walking down the sidewalk. To the idle observer, Sam thought, she looked the picture of calm, of confidence. More than ever he longed to run over Gary Tuttle’s other foot. With a tank.

Gary Tuttle was already on his feet, his open cell phone aimed at them, snapping pictures. “Call off the muscle, Jolie, sweetheart. I don’t want any trouble from him,” he shouted, backing up a few paces even as he kept snapping photos. “A man’s gotta eat, Jolie, you know that.”

“I know that, Mr. Tuttle,” Jolie said, linking her arm through Sam’s. “Just as you know that I’ve just buried my father this morning. Now, we’re going to keep walking and you snap as many pictures as you can, and we’ll call it a victory for both of us, all right?”

Tuttle held on to the camera phone as he pulled a notebook and pen from his pocket. “You’ve always been the best, Jolie. Abso-toot-lee aces! Give me a name, okay? Who’s the hottie? Been a while since we’ve seen you with anyone special. Guess Mick’s been replaced, huh? He know it yet? He will tomorrow when my photos hit the papers, right? Give us a smile. Hey, how about a kiss while we’re at it?”

“Sam, don’t,” Jolie whispered as Sam growled low in his throat. “Michael Carnes is on location in Australia, Mr. Tuttle, as you know. My old family friend Samuel Becket was kind enough to offer his comfort and support in my time of grief. That’s Becket—one T, Mr. Tuttle.” She stopped in front of the first short set of steps, turned with Sam, tilted her head intimately toward his shoulder as she squeezed his arm and looked into the camera one last time, her expression unreadable.

“Careful, Mick will be jealous,” Sam whispered, actually beginning to get into the ridiculousness that surrounded Jolie Sunshine, movie star.

“Shh, don’t ad-lib,” Jolie warned before addressing the news hound once more. “We’re also, you might want to know, investigating the circumstances surrounding my father’s death. We’re confident, my sisters and myself, that we will soon be able to prove that he had nothing to do with the murder of Melodie Brainard and in fact was a victim of murder himself. You have that, Mr. Tuttle? I’m not speaking too quickly for you?”

“Got it, got it,” Tuttle said, still scribbling. “Comfort, Jolie? What kind of comfort is he giving you?”

“Okay, that’s it, Tuttle, quit while you can still chew soft foods,” Sam said, tugging on Jolie’s arm so that she had little choice but to follow him up the cement path to the house. “I never knew you were a masochist, Jolie. You live with that crap all the time?”

She stepped forward with the key when he pulled open the old wooden screen door. “It comes with the territory. I’ve learned to go along to get along, unfortunately. And Tuttle’s right. There are times we’re more than happy to have guys like him around. So it cuts two ways.”

She opened the door and moved inside, going to the security panel and punching in the code: 1243.

“Don’t forget to change that,” Sam said, standing in the small foyer and looking around, beginning to reacquaint himself with the house he hadn’t seen in five years. “Doesn’t look as if anything’s changed. Not even the smell.”

“What smell?”

“You don’t smell that? It always smells like roast beef in here for the first few moments. I get hungry every time I come into the house.”

Jolie smiled, but the smile was sad. “Pot roast, Teddy’s favorite. He also said it was the only thing he knew how to cook. We ate a lot of pot roast growing up, even after Jessica took over kitchen duty while she went through her wanting-to-be-the-next-Martha-Stewart phase.” She put her hand on the newel post and hesitated, one foot on the first step leading up to the bedrooms. “Sam? Mick Carnes was my costar. We made appearances together for publicity, and that’s all. He’s dating a script girl, but he knows if the press finds out, they’ll shred her, so I agreed to be his cover. Not that I should have to tell you that.”

“I didn’t ask,” he reminded her.

“No, you didn’t. Thank you for that. You, um, you can wait here. I’ll be just a few minutes. Oh, and we should pack up some of Rockne’s toys and some of his food if I’m staying with you. I’m sure I can get him to eat something soon. If not, we’ll have to take him to the vet tomorrow.”

Sam walked into the living room that also hadn’t changed since the last time he’d been invited into the house. Not that he’d been there long—just long enough for Teddy to warn him off Jolie. Let the girl have her head, he’d said. She’s young, and she’s chasing her dream. If it’s you she wants, she’ll be back on her own.

Sam had agreed but only because he’d had a plan of his own. The one that had backfired right in his face.

He spent a few moments looking at a collection of photographs of the three Sunshine sisters and then could no longer avoid the door on the far wall. The door to Teddy’s office.

“Pink highlighter,” he muttered as his excuse and turned the knob, entered the room where Teddy Sunshine had died.

Knotty-pine paneling out of the sixties or maybe the fifties. A huge oak desk strangely clear, as it had always been littered with files, with the humidor containing Teddy’s favorite cigars, with at least one family-size box of Tastykake chocolate cupcakes. And photographs of his girls. You couldn’t walk more than five feet in any direction in Teddy’s house without running into photographs of his girls.

The commendations Sam was used to seeing hanging on the wall behind the desk were also gone, lighter rectangles visible on the aged paneling showing where they had once been displayed. The desk chair, a massive piece of cracked burgundy leather, was also missing, as was the carpet. There was a raw hole in the floor, probably where a bullet had been pried out and removed as evidence. The entire room reeked of cleaning materials, and the smell burned at Sam’s nose, the back of his throat.

Teddy simply wasn’t in this room anymore, wasn’t a part of it. And yet his ghost was also everywhere in the room.

“We’ll stop at a store, get Jess’s damn high-lighters,” Sam told himself, told Teddy’s ghost, leaving the room and softly closing the door.

With nothing else to do, he climbed the stairs to offer to carry down Jolie’s suitcases.

“Oh, you startled me,” Jolie said as he knocked lightly on the doorjamb and she turned around to face him, holding several hangers in her hand.

“I thought I could help,” he explained, looking about the room. There were movie posters tacked to all four walls, her degree from Temple University almost lost among them, the furniture merely dark and old rather than antique. Funny, he’d never seen her childhood bedroom, had never been upstairs in the Sunshine house. Which gave him an idea. “Did the police search up here that night?”

“Up here?” Jolie frowned as she carefully laid the blouses, hangers and all, in the suitcase opened on the bed. “I don’t know. Why would they search up here?”

“Isn’t Jade’s office up here?”

“Yes, but—oh. You’re saying that someone might have come here to demand something that Teddy had and then somehow shot him with his own gun and left before he found whatever it was that he wanted?”

Sam didn’t say that he found it difficult to believe that Teddy could “eat” his own gun unless he’d done it himself. He certainly couldn’t say that he was just plain nosy, even if he was. “Anything’s possible,” he said, shrugging.

“We’ll have to ask Jade.”

“True, but she’s been under a strain these last days. You all have. Plus, Teddy might have hidden something in his bedroom rather than keep it in his office if he was worried about something.”

“I didn’t think of that. We only went into his room one time, to get clothes for the burial.”

“Maybe if I took a quick look around?”

“I can’t go in Teddy’s room again, Sam. Not yet. You do it while I finish up here.”

He didn’t need a second invitation or even bother to ask Jolie which room was which.

The first door he opened had to be to Jessica’s room. Pink and white, complete with a canopy bed littered with stuffed animals and a half dozen huge cheerleading trophies lined up on wall shelves. The huge wall poster of Dan Rather during his years of reporting in Vietnam would have seemed out of place expect for the career path Jessica had chosen.

He opened the other door on that side of the large, square hallway and stepped into Teddy Sunshine’s bedroom. It was a small room, clearly not designed as the master bedroom, and held only a single bed, a large dresser that was probably the companion to the one in Jolie’s bedroom and a small desk on the far wall. The only thing on the desk was an ancient twelve-inch television set.

Sam opened the door to the closet and smiled at the colorful array of Hawaiian-print shirts and a short row of identical khaki slacks. Teddy’s post-cop uniform. Sam wondered if he’d been buried in his only suit and then wondered if Teddy had even owned a suit.

“We buried him in his blues,” Jolie said from the doorway as if he’d spoken out loud. “Even as a detective, he had to keep a set of blues for certain occasions. He was so proud to have been a cop. And then to be denied a cop’s funeral? Right now we should all be crowded in down at Shandy’s Pub for one hell of a party, laughing, telling stories about Teddy, listening to more outrageous stories, all while lifting pints to his memory. That’s the way he wanted to go out, Sam, he always said so. No tears. Laughter.”

Sam closed the door on the Hawaiian shirts. “Jade’s room is across the hall?” he asked, feeling stupid because he had nothing to say that could make up for the honors Teddy had been denied.

“She won’t like us looking around in her room,” Jolie said, leading the way. “Just look at her desk, Sam, that’s all.”

He waited for her to enter the room and then followed after her to see that Jade had the largest bedroom.

Once again Jolie seemed to be reading his mind. “When Mom left, Dad took over Jade’s room and gave her his. He just couldn’t stand being in the room anymore. Jade was the oldest, so she got it. I don’t think she wanted it, to tell you the truth. But it worked out in the end, because it’s large enough to also serve as her office.”

Sam looked around the room, one word repeating inside his head: spartan. No photographs, no prints or paintings, no knickknacks on the furniture tops, just an alarm clock next to the bed and a single lamp. The space was as impersonal as a hotel room, maybe even more so. And the empty curio cabinet and wall shelves seemed almost ominous.

“What did Jade do in high school and college?” he asked.

“Do? What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. You’ve got movie posters on your wall, Jessica’s got her cheerleader trophies and stuffed animals—I’d mention Dan Rather, but I’m not sure I want to go there. Jade’s got nothing here, nothing of herself. It just seems strange, that’s all.”

Jolie looked around the room. “You’re right. I guess I wasn’t paying attention. She used to collect Belleek china. You know, that china made in Ireland? Oh, of course you know what I mean. Teddy brought her a few pieces back from a trip he took to Dublin years ago, and she added to it a lot over the years. Pretty pieces, mostly with little green shamrocks on them. I wonder what happened to it all.”

While Jolie spoke, Sam made himself busy walking around the room, inspecting the areas around the locks on the filing cabinet and the desk drawers. Everything seemed neat, with no signs of tampering. As a private eye, he was pretty much striking out. Hell, as a nosy snoop, he was also batting zero, less than zero. Then he opened the door to Jade’s closet.

“Omigod! Oh, Jade…”

Sam caught Jolie’s arm as the two of them looked down at the floor of the closet, littered with shards of once-treasured Belleek china. He pushed aside the clothing, exposing gouges in the back wall of the closet where the pieces had hit, shattered and fallen to the floor. Pieces thrown in rage, grief—what?

When presented with her father’s death, Jolie had held it together as long as possible, denied her grief until the floodgates opened on their own. Jessica had “cried buckets” and then gone to work.

And Jade? Sam could see her in his mind’s eye. All alone in this house, waiting for her sisters. Unable to cope with the horror of what she’d seen, Teddy’s body being taken away in a body bag, listening to people telling that her father was a murderer and, worse, a coward who had killed himself knowing his oldest daughter would find his body.

She hadn’t cried. No, not Jade. She’d come up here and taken out her anger, her grief, her rage, by methodically smashing her beloved collection against the back wall of her closet.