The Minstrel & The Campaign

by Lila K Bell

  As I lay the papers on his desk, I watched his reaction. His gaze darted across the page, from the date to the details. The corner of his eye twitched. A bead of sweat appeared along his brow.

  A moment later, he bowed his head and propped his elbow on the desk to rub his forehead.

  “All right,” he said. “I was there. I don’t see that it matters now, but something like this… it could still ruin me, you understand? What do you want? Money?”

  I frowned. Did he honestly think I was here to blackmail him? For what? “I just want the truth, Mr. Carlson. If no crime has been committed, I just want to know why you lied to me.”

  “Because of the reason I stayed at the office late that night,” he said. His gaze darted to the door, then back to mine. “I was with Veronica.”

  The admission came out in such a mumble, I had to play it again through my head to make it out. “Veronica Moore?”

  He nodded. “We were in her office. Things got… interrupted when John and Amelia started fighting, and I left shortly after. I never mentioned it to anyone and Veronica swore she’d never tell. We didn’t want my wife finding out. I’m not proud of it. A young man’s weakness. I hit the truck on my way to the hockey tournament.” A smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. “Despite everything, I got there just in time for the game to start. Missed practice, though.”

  I had to work hard not to gag.

  “I hope this hasn’t changed your opinion of me too badly, Miss Gates.”

  “Of course not,” I said. And it was true. My opinion of him had never been very high. “We all have our slips and guilts that rest on our conscience.”

  “You won’t say anything?”

  His question told me everything I needed to know about his opinion of his behaviour. He had no regret over cheating on his wife or carrying out an affair in the office. He was just embarrassed he’d been caught. The show of remorse was in the hopes that I wouldn’t spread word around and ruin his chances in the election.

  I knew the type and I didn’t think much of them.

  I also wasn’t about to spread his story around. At least not until I’d confirmed it.

  “Not a peep,” I said.

  He breathed out a sigh of relief. “I swear to you, I had no idea that anything happened to Amelia that night. They arrested the right man when they picked up John Kingslake. He was a jealous, angry fellow about to hit his peak. He was pouring money into a campaign he never would have won, he was about to be audited and his finances were a mess. He must have come back later that night and had it out with her. Whatever they were arguing about must have pushed him over the edge.”

  “It must have done,” I said, and as I got to my feet, I took the insurance papers and slipped them into my pocket. I didn’t want to give him a chance to destroy them. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Carlson.”

  “No, thank you for addressing your concerns. I hope I was able to alleviate some of them.”

  “You were indeed.”

  Man, this guy was needy.

  He shook my hand, and I got out of there as quickly as I could. I swear Ms. Creepy Smile stared at me the whole way out. Had she moved at all? Had someone shut her down and that was her sleep-mode smile?

  I hoped I never had to step foot in here again.

  And why would I have to? I’d accomplished my mission here, didn’t I? He’d answered my questions, accounted for the two hours, confessed to a scandal that was inferior to murder but still enough to get him in trouble if anyone found out…

  Despite all that, I didn’t feel I was done with him.

  Maybe once I confirmed his story.

  There was only one person who would be able to do that, but I’d already bothered Veronica at work today. If I really wanted to get to the meat of the questions I had, maybe it would be worth catching her off guard. Somewhere she wouldn’t expect me to turn up.

  For now, I wanted to go home. Have dinner, see Gramps.

  Who knew? Maybe a few hours thinking about something other than the case would be exactly what it took to pick apart these tangled webs and discover which of my suspects had been cursed with the serenade of Amelia’s beating heart under the floorboards for the last twenty-five years.

  ***

  The drive home did nothing to trigger any useful epiphanies, but the house was blessedly empty and quiet when I got there.

  I’d forgotten it was Friday, which meant Gramps’s bridge night. He wouldn’t be home for hours. As for my parents, well, they could be anywhere. There was never a shortage of social occasions in Rose Gates’ calendar.

  I made myself a quick dinner in the hopes that I would finish before anyone got home, but Father arrived just as I was sitting down to eat. At least Mother wasn’t with him. No doubt she was at some kind of Ladies’ Auxiliary event or something, which I knew were some of my father’s favourite nights. He’d never tell me so, of course, but I suspected he relished the evenings where he could stay at home with his newspaper and leave the socializing to his wife.

  He didn’t say much as he passed through the dining room to go to the kitchen, or when he sat down with a plate of heated leftovers. Ladies’ Auxiliary nights were the few times he would stoop to such a level as to eat reheated food, but I wondered if he even cared. Did he notice the difference? He never made much fuss over Mother’s cooking, so it was hard to say where he stood on eating it a second time.

  He set the plate down across from me, greeted me with a short nod, then unfolded his evening edition newspaper. I watched him flip straight to the financial pages and thought I spotted a glimmer of concern in his eyes, but it faded so quickly I didn’t bother to ask him if everything was all right.

  I doubted he’d tell me either way.

  He wasn’t chatty at the best of times. My mother tolerated me as an accessory — less so now that I was grown up and opinionated — but he’d never exactly shown an interest in having me around. I couldn’t blame him: we didn’t have much in common. He liked to earn money; I liked to steal it. In book form, but still.

  “Anything interesting in the paper?” I asked, more to strike up some kind of conversation than with any particular interest.

  “Not especially,” he said without looking up. “A six-page spread on the mayoral election candidates, breaking down their platforms, offering biographies that, I’m sure, are well-padded.”

  “Anyone promising?”

  “One young man is looking to improve Brookside’s night life. Apparently it’s not to his tastes.”

  Then he just wasn’t looking hard enough.

  “Otherwise, the only viable candidate is Robert Carlson. That man’s been campaigning for years. Frankly, it’s time Evelyn Flannery sat down and gave some new blood room to run things, and Brookside could do worse than the grandson of Michael Carlson.”

  I bit my lip. It wouldn’t do to flag the fact that, grandson of a founding father or whatever the heck he was or not, Carlson was a suspect in a murder investigation. The biggest reason for keeping that little detail to myself being that he was only a suspect in my books, which I doubted would count for much in this house — except maybe with Gramps.

  The conversation lapsed into silence, and I made no move to interrupt it, speeding through my dinner and then heading out to the car.

  It was getting on eight o’clock, but I didn’t care. I hoped Veronica would have had time to get home and comfortable by now. All the better to take her unawares and hopefully get some honest answers out of her.

  Apologies if you don’t wish to be disturbed, Ms. Moore, I thought, but I’ve got a murder to solve.

  I sat in the driver’s seat and did a quick search for Veronica’s phone number. These days, in the world of no landlines, I ran the risk of not finding anything except the salon, but lucky for me that Veronica had her after-hours business for people who couldn’t make it to the salon during the day.

  And to avoid the extra taxes, I’m sure.

  I dialled the number and stared out
the window as the phone rang. The weather had turned, the moon shining behind dark heavy clouds. To my horror, a few white flakes tumbled from the sky and slid across my windshield. Not enough to call it the first snow of the year, but enough to make me turn the heat on. Amazing the damage a single snowflake could do to my psyche.

  The phone continued to ring, not even going to voicemail, and eventually I hung up.

  All right then, we’d do this the inconvenient way.

  I could have just kept calling, but I didn’t want to waste the rest of my night. It would be much faster to drive over to her place and confront her in person.

  My patience had reached its limit. It was time to get my hands dirty.

  I plugged the address from her website into my GPS and started down the street.

  The drive only took me twelve and a half minutes, so it was just eight-thirty before I pulled up in front of a swank bungalow. White with black trim, a tidy little garden — low maintenance, but still eye-catching, which was just my style — and what I guessed was very expensive patio furniture on the front porch.

  The porch light was off, so as soon as I turned off the car, shadows blanketed the front of the house. No lights came from inside, nothing to indicate Veronica was home.

  Just my luck that she might have had plans this evening. Still, I was willing to take the chance.

  As I climbed the steps, the motion sensor light clicked on, drowning the porch in a harsh daylight hue. Shielding my eyes from the glare, I knocked on the door. While I waited, I poked my nose into her mailbox, which was empty except for a handful of flyers — the same ones I’d thrown into my own recycling bin this afternoon.

  When Veronica didn’t answer the door, I knocked harder. Considering the work the woman did in putting herself together every morning, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was getting ready for some big plans tonight and hadn’t heard me.

  Again, I waited, this time passing the time by peering between the cracks of her front blinds. There were no lights on inside, no sign of movement. From what I could see thanks to the glow of the porch light, the living room was tastefully decorated with red furniture on a cream carpet, the walls a soft pink with white trim. Veronica had mentioned finding someone rich enough to help her open her salon, but there was no sign of a man living here now. Divorced or widowed? Either way, neither of them answered the door.

  As I made to knock a third time, a voice cried out, “Hey!”

  I turned toward it and raised my hand to the woman standing on the porch next door. She looked to be in her mid-sixties, and based on the silk dressing gown she sported, I guessed she had both money and a declining sense of modesty. That was an awful lot of leg to be flashing at the passing traffic, especially in the cold.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought you were Vero coming home.”

  I walked to the end of the porch, closing the distance between us so she didn’t need to yell as far.

  “She’s not home?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t look like it.”

  The woman frowned. “That’s so strange. I had an appointment with her two hours ago to do my makeup — private appointment, under the table, you understand. We’ve been neighbours for so long that we do all sorts of favours for each other. I tend her garden and she touches up my nails.” She flashed me the impressively detailed work splayed across her fingernails, and I offered a nod of acknowledgement. “Anyway, she hasn’t come home.”

  What time had Sybil and I seen her at the salon? Just after school, so around three-thirty.

  “What time does she usually make it home from work?” I asked.

  “No later than six most days. The salon is open until eight, but she focuses on makeup, so it never made sense for her to work too late in the evening.”

  “Is it possible she came home and left again?”

  The woman shook her head. “The noise her Mustang makes, I always hear it when she pulls up. And like I said, I’ve been waiting for her.”

  I thought of the flyers in the mailbox. Today’s mail.

  A sharp breeze blew in, sending my companion’s robe billowing up around her hips. She pressed it down and edged toward the door. “If you find her, tell her I’m disappointed. It’s my introduction to the Brookside Film Society, and I’m going to be the only one there whose done her own makeup. After all these years…”

  She was still shaking her head as she disappeared into the house, and I returned to the door to give it one more try, though at this point my hopes had blown away on the wind.

  This time I skipped the knocking and went straight for the bell. When that failed, I went as far as trying the handle, but the house was locked.

  One missing person turns up dead just in time for another woman to disappear?

  It was too strange to be a coincidence.

  I debated reaching for the lockpicks in my jacket pocket, but no doubt the neighbour was watching and I didn’t need to give her an excuse to come back outside. Somehow I doubted I’d find anything anyway.

  Another hour of my evening gone, and the only thing to show for it was more questions.

  I had just turned away from the door when the glow of headlights splashed over the house and a car pulled into the laneway.

  16

  Any I hope I had that it was Veronica faded as I recognized the frowning face coming toward me. She was lit only by the headlights of her dark blue Honda, but that was all I needed.

  “Detective Curtis,” I greeted as she got closer. “I didn’t expect to see you out this way.” I thought you were satisfied with arresting the first suspect you came across.

  I bit my tongue to prevent the thought from slipping out. While I wasn’t impressed with the way John’s case had been handled, and while Angela Curtis and I had butted heads on more than one memorable occasion — butted in the sense of she told me to butt out and I ignored her — I actually had great respect for the woman’s abilities. Which was partly why I was so surprised that she’d been so lazy this time around.

  “I didn’t expect to spot your car outside the home of someone related to my case,” she said. “Though maybe I should have. I thought your recent absence was suspicious.”

  I flashed her a smile. “I didn’t think you’d miss me. I’m flattered.”

  Why did I insist on playing with fire? Never once in my acquaintanceship with the detective had she expressed even the slightest pleasure in my company. If she wasn’t questioning me as a witness, she was threatening to bring me in as a suspect. This time around, the latter was out of the question for her — hard to suspect someone who hadn’t yet been born when your victim was killed — but that would only leave her more space and energy to lecture me about getting in her way.

  So why was I goading her?

  I think I’ve made it pretty clear by now that I don’t like to do things anyone’s way but my own. I poked the bear because I would rather be the poker than the pokee.

  Unfortunately, the result was sometimes getting my finger bitten off.

  “Miss Gates, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’ve had it up to here with you,” she said, propping one hand on her hip. “I’ve asked you nicely, I’ve ordered you, I’ve even threatened you, and yet here you are — right where you shouldn’t be.”

  “I had an appointment with Veronica this evening,” I said, and help up my hands. “My nails.”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot, Miss Gates? Somehow I suspect you already know that Veronica Moore was the secretary of the man currently in custody for the murder of Amelia Wright.”

  “It’s a small town,” I said, refusing to back down. “Veronica’s good at what she does. Despite what it seems, coincidences do happen.”

  “If you’re here for a manicure, then I’m here for a facial wax. Read my lips, Miss Gates — we’ve arrested John Kingslake. We have the evidence to prove it was him. There is nothing for you here. So go home.”

  “You do have evidence,” I said. �
��A lot of it. Some might say too much of it, wouldn’t you?”

  Curtis’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing.

  I crossed my arms. “An intelligent man murders his fiancée, then leaves behind every single clue that would lead the police straight to his door?”

  “A man who didn’t expect his fiancée to be found, so didn’t think it mattered.”

  “A man who remembered the cement truck was due the next morning. Who buried her deep enough that her body wouldn’t be discovered before the cement was poured. This has to be the most contradictory man I’ve ever heard of. Planning for half the possibilities and not even considering the rest.”

  Curtis pressed her lips together and I drew in a breath. I didn’t want to pick a fight with her.

  “As you say, Detective, you’ve already arrested Mr. Kingslake. As far as you’re concerned, the case is closed. So what issue do you have with me asking a few questions?”

  “There are some very delicate matters at hand, Miss Gates. Matters I don’t expect you to be aware of. Do you realise Robert Carlson’s connection with this case and his position in Brookside society?”

  Carlson? How did she know I’d spoken to him already?

  “Do you mean his grandfather being some kind of super important person? He mentioned something about that a few times when I went to speak with him.”

  She glared at me, her gaze boring holes into mine. “Then you’ll know why the department, and therefore you have to tread carefully. Digging up old questions, dragging names through the mud, this isn’t something we can afford to do.”

  “Especially when your superior officers tell you not to, right?”

  I expected her to blast me, but all she did was raise an eyebrow, and the danger of her silence struck me right through.

  “You are a nuisance, Miss Gates. A liability. But go ahead and ask your questions. I’m just warning you that at the slightest hint of a scandal — a single complaint — I’ll have you up on obstruction charges.”

  She turned on her heel and stormed away, leaving me staring after her with a tight feeling in my stomach and a sense that I’d just gone and done something incredibly stupid.