Haunting Harold

by Jenna Bennett

  I thought for a second about what I could and couldn’t say. Heidi was just a few feet away, and Mendoza was obviously worried about her overhearing. I had my back to her, but I could tell, by looking in the mirror above the console table, that she was sitting very still. I couldn’t exactly see her ears vibrate, because ears don’t, but the impression that they did was there.

  “Did he admit that he committed the burglary?” I asked eventually. Heidi would ask me about that as soon as I got off the phone, so it seemed like a safe question.

  “Yes,” Mendoza said, “and he copped to the painting, and the cash, and the loose jewelry, and the prescription meds. And also what went missing from the house next door. And he admitted to casing the other neighbor’s house on Saturday morning, with the idea that he’d break in that night. But he didn’t say a word about the handgun.”

  Well, if it was the murder weapon—and it seemed logical that it might be—maybe he wouldn’t. “Did you ask?”

  “Yes,” Mendoza said. “He said there was no gun in the house. Or at least not where he found the rest of the stuff. He would have taken it if he’d found it—it’s easy money—but he didn’t see one.”

  I hesitated again. “Do you believe him?”

  “I’m inclined to,” Mendoza said, “since he admitted to everything else.”

  “He didn’t…” I trailed off, but Mendoza knew what I was asking. Or what I hadn’t asked.

  “No. He didn’t admit to shooting Harold. He was very adamant that he didn’t. He said he didn’t go into the backyard at all on Saturday morning, and that he had no idea what was going on over there. He went into the Barretts’ house—that’s the neighbors—through the front door, and stayed inside until he heard the gunshot. At that point he decided that the safest course of action was to get back to the gate as fast as possible, so he wouldn’t be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  So like Tara, it hadn’t crossed his mind to help, either. The world is full of cowards.

  “Isn’t that also what he’d say, though, if—?”

  “Yes,” Mendoza said. “It is.”

  We stood in silence a moment. Or I stood. Mendoza might, for all I knew, have been sitting.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  “Now he’s in jail until we can get him a hearing,” Mendoza said, “on the burglary charges. I’ll charge him with murder if I find evidence that he committed murder, but so far I haven’t.”

  “He was nearby at the time of the shooting, though. Or at least the golf cart was. Tara can testify to that. I can testify to the fact that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. And you have the report of the burglary—that included the gun—and his confession that he broke in and stole the rest of the stuff. It makes sense that he’d deny taking the gun, if he used it to shoot Harold.”

  Heidi was looking at me over the back of the sofa. I avoided meeting her eyes in the mirror.

  “Yes,” Mendoza said. “I’m on my way to his apartment now. The search warrant is on its way. I’ll let you know what I find.”

  “Can I tell Heidi what you told me?”

  He hesitated. “I suppose it can’t hurt.”

  “She has the right to know.”

  He sighed. “Yes. Just be careful.”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s nothing to worry about. We’re just sitting here having a glass of wine. So you’ll let me know what you find out?”

  He said he would, and I wandered back into the living room with the phone in my hand. “Aaron confessed to the burglary. Mendoza’s on his way to Aaron’s apartment now. I guess he’ll be looking for the gun.”

  “Good,” Heidi said, and leaned back against the sofa.

  “Aaron said he didn’t shoot Harold, but of course that’s what he would say.”

  Heidi nodded. “Did Detective Mendoza ask him about whether he’s the one who shot at us last night?”

  “I’m sure he did. Although I forgot to ask.” But that was probably one more thing Mendoza would be looking for. The presence, or absence, of the rifle.

  If it wasn’t there, in the apartment or in Aaron’s car, it was a logical assumption that it was the same rifle Mendoza had found on Tara’s property this morning. Maybe Aaron had dropped it off with her after the incident last night. Before either I or Mendoza reached the duplex.

  “Strange that he didn’t mention it,” Heidi said, looking at me.

  “What? Oh… the shooting last night? I guess. So much has happened today that I almost forgot about it.”

  Heidi looked doubtful, and I have to admit I was a little surprised, too.

  “I had lunch with your brother-in-law and your mother-in-law,” I said. “And before that, I talked to Nick Costanza, and before that, to Tara. And of course there was the whole scene with Aaron. A lot’s been going on.”

  Heidi smirked. “How did you like Eunice?”

  “Who? Oh… Harold’s mother? I liked her just fine. She—”

  “She never liked me,” Heidi said.

  “David’s mother never liked me much, either. She always preferred Sandra. I think they’re just old-fashioned, and would like their sons to marry once and stay married.”

  Heidi didn’t say anything, but her sniff was eloquent.

  “And you’re done with her now.” Which was, perhaps, not the nicest way of putting it. “I mean, you’ll have to be polite to her, of course. She just lost her son. But she probably won’t expect you for Thanksgiving and Christmas anymore.”

  “No,” Heidi said, and sounded pleased. I hadn’t minded Eunice’s company over lunch, but that was as an outsider. If I had to deal with her as my mother-in-law, I might feel differently about it.

  “Greg told me Harold had invited him to the house on Saturday morning because he had a story to tell him,” I said. Heidi straightened. “Apparently he did that sometimes. Saw or heard something he thought Greg might be able to use in his writing, and shared it with him.”

  Heidi nodded. “I didn’t know Greg was coming on Saturday. Harold didn’t mention it.”

  “Did he mention that he’d invited me and Tara?”

  “I knew you were coming,” Heidi said, with emphasis on the pronoun. “He told me what happened Friday morning, with the PI. The other PI. I didn’t know about Tara, though.”

  “Do you know what he was planning to tell Greg? Did it have something to do with Tara and me, or had he figured out that Aaron was the one who broke into your house?”

  “I have no idea,” Heidi said. “We didn’t talk about it.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Just what he’d found out that morning. He was upset because I’d hired you, and upset because I thought he was cheating. He spent some time trying to convince me he wasn’t.” Her lips curved.

  “Anything else?”

  “I showed him the pictures you sent me,” Heidi said.

  “Including the one of Tara?”

  She nodded.

  “That must be how he figured out what was going on. Where did he go when he left that afternoon?”

  “To the office,” Heidi said.

  “And then Aaron showed up. What did he want? Had Harold said something to him on his way out of the gate?”

  Heidi hesitated. “He said Harold had asked him to come to the house the next morning. He wanted to know why.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I had no idea why,” Heidi said. “At that point, I didn’t know he had invited you and Tara. I just assumed he wanted to talk to Aaron about something.”

  That made sense, I guess. At that point she wouldn’t have had any reason to suspect Aaron of having broken into their house, either. And at that point, Harold hadn’t done anything about inviting me or Tara to the house the next morning.

  “I guess Aaron must have gotten the wind up, since he knew—even if you didn’t—that he’d broken into your house. And he decided to eliminate Harold instead of taking the risk of Harold having him ar
rested. I guess, when he came to speak with you, he was trying to figure out whether Harold had told you.”

  “Maybe,” Heidi said. After a second she added, “You mean, he was trying to decide whether he’d need to kill me, too?”

  I nodded. “He and Tara must have been working together. She gave him Cressida’s key this summer, to let him break in. And she told him she had set up that appointment with us,” or with me, more specifically, “last night, and told him to go shoot at us.”

  “I told you!” Heidi said. “I told you he was trying to kill me!”

  “Maybe. Although it’s more likely that he was just supposed to take the suspicion off Tara. If she was coming down the street toward us, she couldn’t be up on top of the hill shooting.”

  Although that didn’t make a whole lot of sense now that I thought about it. Heidi and I hadn’t noticed Tara’s car by the time the shooting started. Mendoza hadn’t mentioned seeing it, either. Zachary was the one who’d seen it, and she—they—couldn’t have anticipated that Zachary would be there.

  “What?” Heidi asked.

  “Just trying to get things straight in my head. I guess, after he shot at us, he drove over to Tara’s place and left the rifle there. Mendoza found it when he searched the place this morning.”

  Which was pretty stupid, too, when I thought about it. It would have made more sense for Aaron to hang onto the rifle. He wasn’t under suspicion at that point. Tara definitely was, so finding the rifle in her possession would only reinforce her guilt. And besides, if Tara knew the rifle was there, which she should have known if she was working with Aaron, why hadn’t she taken steps to get rid of it?

  For that matter, why hadn’t Aaron? Dumping it on Tara made no sense whatsoever. Dumping it in the Cumberland River made a lot more sense.

  Heidi watched me think. “What’s going on?” she wanted to know.

  I smiled apologetically. “Just some pieces that don’t fit right. I’m probably lacking the right information to figure it out.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  I looked at her. She smiled brightly.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “If Aaron and Tara were working together—”

  Tara because she hated Harold or maybe because she’d wanted the painting from the robbery; Aaron because… he’d fallen for Tara? And he wanted the money from the robbery? Without the painting, how much would that amount to, though? Especially if he didn’t sell the gun, either.

  “—why didn’t Tara provide an alibi for Aaron on Saturday morning? They were both here, near the house. Tara was sitting in her car—”

  Unless she’d been shooting Harold.

  “—and Aaron was inside the neighbor’s house…”

  Unless he’d been shooting Harold. But either way, wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to alibi one another? It wouldn’t have been hard to do. “Sure, I saw her sitting in the car when I came outside,” and “Sure, I saw him in the golf cart when I passed.” If they were working together, why hadn’t they tried to take suspicion off each other?

  “Too obvious?” Heidi suggested.

  Maybe. “It also seems strange that Harold would suddenly, out of the blue, figure out that Aaron was responsible for the break-in. Nothing that happened Friday morning had anything to do with it. It makes more sense that whatever story he was planning to tell Greg had something to do with me and Tara. But there’s no story in that…”

  “I think it’s funny,” Heidi said. “I hired you to follow Harold, because Tara was following Harold, and then Harold hired his own PI because Tara was following him, and the PI found you…”

  Well, yes. I guess that was funny, as strange coincidences go. But was it the kind of thing Harold would invite Greg over to talk about?

  Of course, if Harold actually had killed Carly twelve years ago, that might have made for a better story. But he hadn’t. He was alibied by everyone in his office. And Mendoza seemed sure they weren’t lying about it…

  “Were you at work the morning Carly died?” I asked Heidi.

  She stared at me for a second. “That’s a long time ago.”

  “Can’t you remember? Everyone in the office said that Harold was there, that he couldn’t have killed her…”

  “He couldn’t,” Heidi said. “Carly killed herself.”

  “So he was in the office?”

  “Of course he was.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Yes,” Heidi said. The pause in front of the word had been almost imperceptible, but it had been there. And I guess my face must have changed, because she added, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “If you were there, and saw him, then I guess…”

  But now Heidi’s face changed, too. “Just spit it out,” she told me.

  Fine. “It’s probably just a mistake. But Mendoza told me your name wasn’t on the list of people in the office that day. So you couldn’t have seen him.”

  “Maybe they just left my name off the list,” Heidi said. “Or maybe I worked in the afternoon instead of the morning.”

  “Maybe you did.” But if so, why not just say so? “Carly overdosed on some combination of antidepressants and painkillers, right?”

  Heidi nodded.

  “The antidepressants were hers. Prescription drugs. And she got the painkillers from Harold’s office. When did that happen?”

  “She must have stopped by sometime,” Heidi said impatiently. “They were still married. She was there occasionally.”

  “Tara said she didn’t even go outside most of the time. Sometimes she didn’t even make it out of bed.”

  “She was in the office the day before she died,” Heidi said. “She found out about me, and she came to yell at me.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t imagine it came up,” Heidi said with dignity. “The rest of the staff probably didn’t want to talk about it. It was quite a scene.”

  I could imagine. “What happened?”

  “Harold told me to go home,” Heidi said, “so I did. Carly calmed down, and Harold took her back to the house.”

  “And the next day she killed herself?”

  Heidi nodded. “Harold came to me that night and told me to be patient, that we’d get married just as soon as he could divorce Carly. He hadn’t wanted to do it when she was so fragile…”

  Considerate of him.

  “So you’re saying Carly took the drugs then. It must have been before she started yelling at you, I guess.”

  Although that didn’t make much sense, either. Unless she’d gone there to get the drugs, and while she was there, she realized that Heidi and Harold were carrying on. But that wasn’t what Heidi had said.

  “Does it matter?” she wanted to know when I asked. “Harold couldn’t have killed her, Gina. He was at work. Everyone saw him.”

  “Except you. You weren’t there. He wouldn’t have wanted you to come back, just in case Carly showed up again.”

  “What are you saying?” Heidi asked. “Are you accusing me of killing Carly now?”

  “I wasn’t.” I hadn’t been. “Although now that you bring it up…” It made a lot more sense than anything else. Carly was married to Harold. He hadn’t divorced her so far. Maybe Heidi had been afraid he wasn’t going to. “You had keys to the office, I’m sure. You could go there and get whatever drugs you wanted. And put the blame on Carly. And you weren’t at work that morning. You could have gone to her house on some pretext—maybe to apologize or assure her that you’d leave her husband alone or something like that—and fed her an overdose of pills. Maybe you didn’t actually dose her. Maybe you just talked her into killing herself. She was so depressed that it might not have taken much convincing.”

  Heidi didn’t answer, but for a second, her lips curved in a smirk. “Why would I do that?”

  “Maybe, when Harold came to you the night before, if Harold came to you the night before—”

  The flinch was slight, but perceptible.

&nbs
p; “—he didn’t tell you to be patient until he could divorce his wife. Maybe he told you that it was over between you instead. Maybe he refused to divorce Carly, either because she was sick or because he loved her. Maybe you realized that you were losing him, and the prestige, and the money. Unless Carly died.”

  “That’s crazy,” Heidi said, but there was no conviction whatsoever in her voice.

  “Is it? As soon as you got married, you got rid of everything Carly owned. You even pushed Harold into giving up his daughter. Until last summer, he hadn’t seen her for twelve years. And all because you didn’t want to be reminded of Carly.”

  “She didn’t love him,” Heidi said. “All she cared about was herself. She didn’t take care of him, or of the baby. She didn’t deserve him.”

  She’d been ill. But that wasn’t the point. Not now. “What happened on Friday? Did Harold figure it out?”

  She nodded. “We were talking about what Tara was doing, and why. Harold was telling me that he hadn’t done anything to Carly, that she’d committed suicide. Like I didn’t know that. And I guess I must have said something, or looked at him wrong, or something like that. He stopped talking and looked at me. And then he asked me whether I’d seen Carly after she stopped by the office that day. And of course I said no. But I wasn’t sure he believed me. And then he said he wanted to go to the office. And I thought I’d better do something about it.”

  “So you found the gun. The one you’d reported stolen in the burglary.”

  She nodded.

  “Aaron didn’t take it. You did.”

  “I thought maybe I could use it to get rid of the brat,” Heidi said.

  “The… you mean Cressida?”

  “She came to Nashville, and it was all Harold could talk about. How nice it was to have his daughter back. How much she looked like Carly. She said she liked that picture in the dining room, the one from Paris—the one Harold and I bought on our honeymoon!—and he said he’d give it to her. My painting!”

  Her eyes were blazing with righteous indignation.

  “So you told Aaron to steal it.”

  She nodded. “Damn right I did. I knew he’d broken into the house next door. I saw him there while Ms. Duncan was away.”