Baby, It's Dead Outside
Page 23
Jablonski gave her a thumbs up and turned to confer with the other investigators in the room as they photographed and bagged the new evidence. Josie took Bert and hightailed it back outside—as stealthily as someone with a sore ankle could—in hopes of confronting Aloysius while the others were otherwise occupied.
“Hey,” she whispered as loud as she dared after doing a lopsided race-walk step over to his car.
The sun was up, and it was fully daylight. She could feel the exhaustion pulling her eyelids down and making her entire body feel heavy, but discovery of the second gun had given her a tiny boost of adrenaline.
She tapped on the window and shout-whispered his name. Maybe he’d taken off when he’d had the chance. She leaned closer to the dark-tinted back window and shaded her eyes, pressing her hand against the glass.
He suddenly popped up directly on the other side.
“Geeze! You gotta stop doing that!”
She could see he was saying something—his mouth was opening and closing at about the same rate as a carp in a koi pond—but the cushy sound-proofing of the Lexus made him sound like a sad-trombone teacher from the Charlie Brown animated cartoons.
“I can’t understand what you’re saying. Unlock the door.” She indicated downward in case he couldn’t hear her either. Apparently, pointing downward while standing outside a car door was a universal gesture, because he seemed to have an internal monologue—or maybe an internal fistfight—for a second before he used the key fob in his hand to release the locks.
“Quick, girl, get your tushy in here,” he told her, pushing the heavy door open.
“I can’t. I have him,” she said, holding up the end of Bert’s leash, which she had wrapped around her wrist, so he couldn’t try to explore the yard or make new friends while there were cops investigating.
Aloysius huffed out a breath. “If I come out there, I’m going to get myself killed. And if I die my mama will never see me again and it will be all your fault.”
She seriously doubted that his decision to shoot out her front window and run from police was because of her poor judgment. While she wasn’t the best decision maker on a good day, she was not going to take the fall for him doing a Butch Cassidy standoff in the back of a Lexus.
“Answer me one question and I won’t make you come out.”
“Josie, you know this place is covered with police. If they find me, I’m as good as dead.” His voice started to rise as his fear escalated.
“Was Sandra already shot when you went into the basement?”
“What does that matter? It’s my word against all of theirs. If they say I did it, that’ll be the end of it. I won’t even need a lawyer. My mother and all of my aunties will never see me again.” His mouth distorted into a downturned grimace and his hand clutched the front of his puffy jacket.
“Just answer my question. Was she already dead when you got there?”
“Yes, all right? Yes, she had already been shot. She was making some coughing sounds, which scared me. I might have accidentally shot my gun, but it was pointing up when it happened. The bullet didn’t go anywhere near her. The only thing I’m guilty of is firing my gun into the plaster and growing my own marijuana plants to make my condiments and spices. The only reason I was down there was to bake some cookies with edibles and check on my plants. I’m a legitimate small business owner.” His eyes filled with tears.
Aha! So they were pot cookies. Poor Bert.
Behind her came Jablonski’s voice, “Put your weapon on the ground and step out of the car with your hands up.” He repeated his command and added, “And Josie, please get your butt out of the frickin’ way.”
She had to make a split-second decision whether to trust Jablonski to do the right thing, and luckily, Aloysius didn’t scream. One of his glass-shattering shrieks definitely would not have helped to diffuse the situation. She was in no shape to stop a physical altercation—not between two armed combatants—never mind interrupt a verbal standoff.
As she froze in between them with her back still to Jablonski, Bert sensed the rising tension and, true to his nature, attempted to flee the scene. With the end of the leash wrapped around her wrist, Josie was pulled off her feet and dragged halfway across the frozen lawn, mostly on her chin, before Bert abruptly stopped and sat down, looking at her as if she was the crazy one who’d bolted from a confrontation.
Okay, maybe I could learn a thing or two from my dog.
Both Aloysius, who had placed his gun on the concrete outside the car exactly as he had been directed, and Jablonski, who had holstered his weapon, dashed toward her, making her feel more like the world’s biggest dork than if they’d just stood their separate ground and laughed at her.
“Oh, Precious, did you hurt yourself again?” Aloysius said, helping her up into a seated position on the cold, hard ground.
Jablonski untangled Bert’s leash from where it had cut into her wrist, and she checked out her bruised palm ruefully, brushing the embedded rocks and frozen grass off her skin. “I got a first aid kit in my cruiser,” he said.
“Nah, I’m fine,” she said even though a couple drops of blood had welled up just below her thumb. She rubbed them away and stood up with their help, one hand from either man under her elbows.
She wasn’t even going to blame Bert for this spill. He didn’t belong caught between two people with guns any more than she did. He was the smart one here.
“All right, brother,” Jablonski said to Aloysius. “I need to ask you some questions about what happened, and I’m not gonna lie, there might be a citation for discharging your weapon inside the city limits, but you can probably get a lawyer to help you with that. If you don’t know a lawyer, Dan Beardsley’s pretty good, but I have to say, if we find the old lady’s prints on the murder weapon, you’re probably not going to have too bad of a time, especially if you cooperate through all this.”
Thus placated, Aloysius agreed to go with him under the condition that they knock on the door of his house and ask his partner to follow them to the police station.
The last she saw of either of them was when Jablonski put Aloysius in the passenger front seat of his police cruiser and then got into the driver’s side. The two of them were chatting as they drove away, neither one of them giving her a backward glance.
It’s nice that they’re new BFFs, but what am I, chopped liver?
She rolled her eyes.
That settled, she patted the front seat of her car to get Bert to jump in. She closed the door and went around to the driver’s side, where she sat for a few minutes doing an internet search for a hotel on her phone. When she found a generic but acceptable chain, she slowly backed her car out, threading her way through all the official vehicles down the driveway using the backup camera, but no longer afraid of Harris’s erratic and angry driving on the opposite side of the street.
Of course, he is dead now…
As she passed the house at the end of the road where the old man in the cap with the ear flaps had chatted with her, he came out to check his mailbox. When he saw her, he gave an abbreviated wave, stopped to stare at all the emergency vehicles, and then shot her a questioning look.
She shrugged as if she had no idea about any of it.
“Not my fault, buddy. I swear.”
She was going to deny any culpability until her dying day…even though she felt guilty as heck about all of it.
Chapter 46
Dan Beardsley came by her hotel room a couple days later to interview her for an article he was writing. “Sorry to keep bothering you for details, but some of the national news sites have been picking up my stories, which is exciting.”
She was glad for his success but couldn’t help thinking he was a bit ghoulish about the details. Josie had had a couple of nightmares herself. Most of them involved her exploring creaky old Victorian houses that smelled like ganja with tons of dolls staring at her through their round, unblinking eyes. Shiver.
He dro
pped his coat and knit hat on the utilitarian-looking couch and pushed the staticky blond hair back from his forehead. “Start at the beginning,” he said, sitting directly on his own coat, more interested in getting details from her than where he was sinking down on his tush.
Bert gave him the side-eye from his spot on the carpet. Her dog had just been out and seemed to have taken to hotel life like a canine Howard Hughes.
“I don’t want to bore you with too much history,” she began.
“Are you kidding me? I live for history.”
She spent the next couple of hours giving him a brain dump of everything she knew about Lynetta, her complaints, symptoms, and death; the Chicago cough drop connection; and Betty Edwards and her evil minions. She neglected to mention that she was still looking for a legitimate heir to take the cough drop fortune off her hands. He didn’t need to know the depth of her personal horror over that little matter.
“What I haven’t been able to connect yet is who among them—Sandra, Betty, or Harris—is the link to Lynetta and thought they were going to get her money.”
In the end, he sat back with pensive look and then dug around in his pockets for his phone. “If I can get a signal in this hotel room, I can search Public Records for one thing I’m wondering…Because Betty is the right age in her mid-70s to be a child of one of those Downes family members who came over from England. Was she maybe previously married to one of the sons of Olivia and Antony Beardsley? The ones you thought I might be related to?…and I have to say, I really wish I was. The things I could do with money like that. I’d set up a museum. Plug some funds into a community center. Beef up the summertime festivals around here. Maybe fly in some famous actors to freeze off their rear ends during our Gabby the Goose winter festival. I don’t know if there are any famous goose-related celebrities, but maybe a hockey player or an Olympian, something like that—
“Aha!” he said. “Betty Edwards was married previously. Before she was Edwards, she was Elizabeth…Martins. Well, that doesn’t help, does it? I’d kind of been thinking she was the missing connection behind all of this since it looks like she killed both Lynetta and Sandra…and although she’s probably going to deny it, I suspect she shot Harris, too. Just the idea of this dangerous killer masquerading as a helpless little old lady is absolutely diabolical. That little mastermind didn’t have dementia at all, did she?”
“From the limited information the police have released, no. She was one hundred percent lucid.” And downright evil. Josie frowned. “We’re missing a connection here. Something right in front of our noses. I just have this gut feeling that if we don’t open our eyes, it’s going to bonk us right on the head—oh, wow.”
“What is it?”
“What do you know about Harris’s wife, Ann?”
Josie thought he might not like to speak ill of the dead, but he said bluntly, “She was a crabby soul not many people liked, including Harris. She had fibromyalgia, which probably didn’t help the situation, or perhaps was at the root of the problem.”
“Do you know how long she and Harris had been married? And no kids, right?’
He didn’t even have to consult his phone browser for any of that information. “Sure. I was at their wedding. About seven years ago this coming June. Nice ceremony right in the town square gazebo. Beautiful day for it and they got some local folk band to sing. No spawn, but there was plenty of talk about fertility issues. Not sure on whose part, but after Ann quit her job at the school and had to stay home on disability, people were a bit relieved they didn’t have kids. She had become short-tempered with her students, maybe as a result of her chronic pain.”
“Before they were married, was she local?”
“Yep. Her parents are Jack and Connie. They lived two streets over from Harris and Ann, but after the last of their two Newfoundland dogs died, they moved to a condo in Asheville, North Carolina. Some kind of screenwriting retreat down there. Maybe because they didn’t have any grandkids to keep them up here. I mean, a lot of people don’t like the cold.” He gave her ankle, which was propped up on the table in front of them a wry look.
“What about Connie? Was she from around here?” Josie realized she was going out on a limb, but she felt like the answers to all this was sitting just outside of reach…just under the next stone they were about to overturn. She didn’t want to leave Lake Park Villa without kicking over the right pebble. Of course, in Arizona, you let rocks lie. Who knew what kind of creepy crawly lived underneath it…
“Nah, I think she was from Wisconsin. Let me look her up,” he said, nose glued to his phone screen. He looked like he was going to go blind straining to see the tiny display. “Left my readers in the car,” he explained, squinting down his nose. “Hey, I was totally wrong. Connie was local as well. Graduated from Lake Park Villa High School, class of 1984. Younger than me. Go, Tornadoes!” He pumped his fist and then swirled it over his head in some kind of secret tornado-ish salute. “Huge 80s hairdo and a metal mouth. I don’t even recognize her. You’d think I’d know someone who had the same last name as me…Constance Beardsley.”
They stared at each other.
Can you get us inside the jail to question Betty?
Betty had been treated at LPV Hospital and was now being held at the local county jail. When Josie texted Jablonski to see what the likelihood was of them speaking with Betty, he put the kibosh on their idea.
His terse text came back:
No can do too many lawyers
Josie, of course, wasn’t going to be able to hang around for the slow wheels of the American justice system to dole out its sentence for Betty. She was just going to have to rely on Dan Beardsley to keep her informed after she went back to Boston.
“Rumor is, she’s already planning to play the dementia card for her defense,” he said, gathering up his now even more wrinkled coat.
“I wonder if poor Ann even knew about her link to Lynetta…or if Harris knew either,” Josie said. “Or if Betty had just discovered it and had manipulated them all so she could get ahold of their money.”
“I doubt Harris and Ann would have been living in that situation if they had known,” he said. “I really don’t think they liked each other.”
“What about Aloysius?” Josie asked. She hadn’t gone to see him again, but she did still have his number in her phone contacts.
“Attorney-client privileges,” Dan said and laughed. “But I think I can get him off with some community service thanks to his help in building the case against Betty and his involvement in her so-called capture.”
That news was nice to hear. Aloysius had, after all, come to her rescue when she’d needed someone. Nothing like a nosy neighbor to lend a helping hand when she’d needed it. Even one with pot cookies.
Chapter 47
For some reason, the drive back to Boston seemed a lot quicker to Josie than the trip out. Usually the opposite was true, but this time with nothing weighing on her shoulders and no worrisome situation lying ahead, the roads were smooth and wide open.
On the seat behind Josie sat a box of Lynetta’s belongings. For some reason, Josie had kept a couple of the woman’s brightly colored silk scarves and her loud orange sweater. A jewelry box of costume pieces rattled around in the bottom of the box as well as a couple of old photos.
Josie hadn’t found any papers of note. No cute or startling photos of Lynetta and Greta as children or even as young women. Just one of Lynetta at Wrigley Field in what looked to be the 1950s and one of her in maybe the 1980s at a costume party. She was dressed as some kind of fortune teller with scarves and heavy eye makeup. In the photo, she was laughing with her head tilted back, her mouth wide and smiling, looking as if she were having the best time in the world.
When Josie was just crossing through Pennsylvania, her phone rang and her rental car automatically picked up the call. She heard Greta’s voice come through all of the speakers surrounding her like an omnipotent voice of the Powers That Be.
Josie was so taken aback, she didn’t return Greta’s greeting. “I have the rest of Lynetta’s belongings. I didn’t find any pictures of when she was a child. None of the two of you,” she said.
“I have all those,” Greta said.
“Oh.” This news was a surprise to Josie. She had never known Greta to be sentimental about anything, not even her own sons.
She tried a different topic. “I’m having a lawyer contact Ann Kane’s parents in North Carolina so I can give them the cough drop money. They live somewhere in North Carolina, so I think their retirement just got a little bit easier...even though they lost their daughter. ”Not a great trade off in Josie’s book.
“That’s fine, if you don’t want to keep any of the money,” Greta said.
“No, I don’t want it.” That amount of money, never mind the circumstances under which it had come to Josie made her extremely uncomfortable. Even if she had been unable to find its rightful owners, she probably would have set up a foundation or a trust and had someone else manage it.
Betty had set off a chain of murders starting with Lynetta and ending with Sandra—all for money. Josie didn’t even want to think about all the deaths that had occurred because of it.
Greta was silent again, which was a surefire way to get Josie to start rambling nervously, saying dumb things that were better kept to herself.
“Look, I just want to say…” Josie drifted off as she struggled to find the right words, to apologize for not preventing Lynetta’s death, to express condolences for the loss of Greta’s sister and for feeling as if she hadn’t helped settle anything in the sisters’ complicated history. Instead she went with, “I’ll be back home and have this rental car ready for pickup in two days.”
Greta’s subsequent silence made Josie clear her throat uncomfortably a couple of times, almost certain she was about to be fired for incompetence, that their strange arrangement was over because she’d failed on this trip.