Dark Tort gbcm-13

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Couple of things. Why?”

  “Well, did you ever see any of Charlie’s paintings in Richard’s part of the house? Paintings that you didn’t think he’d bought?”

  She considered. “No. The most we ever do is have some wine together. Okay, it’s not the most we’ve ever done. Once we had a lot of wine,” she said with an embarrassed laugh. “And then one thing led to another…”

  Aha! I thought. Maybe there was more than one reason they were still sharing a house. And I had to admit, albeit shamefully, that the Jerk had successfully seduced me a couple of times, after we were separated.

  “Funny you should ask about Charlie Baker, though,” K.D. said. “The next night, I mean the night after the show, Richard came home just looking miserable. I asked him if he wanted a glass of wine, and he said no, he wanted a glass of bourbon. He hardly ever drinks the hard stuff, Goldy. But he looked like hell, so I fixed him a drink, and I fixed one for myself.” She shook her head, seeming apologetic. “Richard always talks too much when he drinks, and that night was no exception.” She paused and gave me the full benefit of her hazel eyes. “He said Charlie Baker had come into the office that day and changed his will.”

  My mouth fell open. “Changed his will?” I echoed. So much for client confidentiality. “Changed his will how?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Goldy. Richard wouldn’t tell me that. Why? Do you think Charlie wanting to change his will has something to do with Uriah Sutherland?”

  “I’m not sure. I do know the bishop has been involved in setting up the Mountain Pastoral Center, which is being funded by Charlie’s bequest. Maybe Charlie was planning to leave some of his paintings to Uriah, but then what Althea Mannheim told him changed his mind. Or maybe there’s no connection between Mannheim and the bishop at all. You’re not certain exactly what the dying woman was saying, K.D.”

  K.D. furrowed her brow and considered. “No, I’m not certain. Still, her words were so strange that they stuck with me. And then when you introduced us at the party…well, you saw how startled I was. I hadn’t had a chance to meet Nora’s father before now. I’ve been pretty busy this year, and then I just tried not to have much to do with anyone at the firm because, well, because of everything. And then this horrible disaster with Dusty happened…and oh my God, then Louise was arrested for it. And now you’re bringing up Charlie Baker.”

  A bad thought entered my brain. Althea Mannheim, who may have known something about Uriah Sutherland, had died outside of the gallery mounting Charlie’s last exhibit. Not long after that, Charlie had asked Meg about finding a private investigator…maybe to check on Uriah’s past in southern Utah? And Charlie had also told Richard that he wanted to change his will. The next day…the very next day, Charlie had fallen to his death.

  What if Charlie’s death had not been an accident or suicide, what if he’d been pushed? What if everything that had happened so far was connected to Charlie, to his will, or to the stolen artwork? If so, Dusty had been in the thick of it. I figured she must have had a role in Charlie making changes to his will. She’d said as much in her journal: Especially after what I was asked to do tonight. Dusty was the one whom Charlie trusted…maybe even more than he trusted Richard. It made sense that she would have helped him get rid of a bequest to Uriah or whatever he’d wanted altered in the will. And depending on what those changes were, they might have been what led to Dusty’s death.

  I said, “This next part’s important, K.D. What happened to the new will?”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to ask Richard, with Charlie falling down the stairs so soon after Richard had told me Charlie was changing his will.” She snorted. “But he’d sobered up by that time, and didn’t want to talk to me about it.”

  “Did you tell the cops?”

  “I wanted to,” she said, biting the inside of her cheek, “but Richard said he could be disbarred for telling me about the new will, and then I would have to pay for his defense, plus get nothing from the divorce settlement. Oh, we had an awful fight. But in the end, he told me, ‘There is no new will.’”

  “I thought there was.”

  “No, Richard told me, ‘There’s no new will if the person making it doesn’t come in to sign it, once we have it all typed up.’”

  I felt as if all the air had gone out of my body at once. Could the alterations Charlie wanted to make to his will have been unimportant ones? Or had someone murdered Charlie so that the new will would never be valid? Maybe, if, could be. I kept running into dead ends. I wanted to ask K.D. more questions, but at that moment, her cell phone beeped.

  “Gotta go,” she told me, once she’d hung up. “They’ve got a kid coming in to the ER whom they suspect has shaken baby syndrome.” She gave me a rueful glance. “And as if I didn’t have enough problems, somebody sideswiped me on the way over here, and I’m going to have to have my damn car—”

  “Whoa, whoa,” I said, suddenly alert again. “Listen, K.D., the police are tracking a guy who may have tried to run down someone who’s helping the Routts. And this Althea Mannheim was killed by a hit-and-run driver, remember. A wannabe killer in a car is not something you even want to be thinking about. In fact, would you vamoose out of town for a while?” I was remembering K.D.’s intense, frightened reaction to Uriah’s name at the birthday party. If Nora’s father was somehow involved with Charlie’s or Dusty’s death, or if he’d had a hand in the theft of Charlie’s paintings, he might now view K.D. as a threat. Then again, someone else could wonder what K.D., as Richard’s wife, knew. My paranoia might be running overtime again. Still, at this point it seemed best to be cautious about the good doctor’s safety.

  K.D. put on her camel-hair coat. “Well, I suppose I could use a break from Richard and his moods. Not to mention how he listens in on my calls.”

  “Best not even to tell him you’re going.” I thought of how Tom had wanted to take Vic right down to the department. “But I’ll need your cell number, because I know Tom, or somebody from the department, will want to talk to you when your shift is over, before you go anywhere.”

  “Okay.” She reached inside her purse, rummaged around for a bit, and pulled out a card. “I’m building a house in Santa Fe, with a guesthouse, too. It’s too big for me, but it’s my reward to myself for putting up with Richard and his antics. The guesthouse is done, and I can get on I-25 and drive straight through after I talk to whoever comes down from the sheriff’s department. That card has my Santa Fe number, which Richard doesn’t know, and my cell, which has caller ID.”

  She dug around in her purse again and brought out another card. “Almost forgot. I wrote down the name, address, and number of Althea Mannheim’s cousin in Boulder. That’s what I had to go to the hospital for this afternoon. Grace Mannheim, on Pine. Nice lady. Elderly, like her cousin. I know she wouldn’t mind talking to you.”

  “You’re going to get out of town as soon as you talk to the cops?” I asked her, just to be sure.

  She opened our front door and peered into the darkness. “Well, I suppose. But it’s already past sundown, and when you have to get out of Dodge—” She stopped again, grinning at the stricken expression I knew was on my face. “All right, all right. Can’t you take a joke?”

  CHAPTER 17

  Once I’d had a shower, I fairly flopped on our mattress. It had been such a long day, with a party, a wrecked Rover, a lot of cooking, and ending with an enigmatic visit from K. D. Chenault. My old pal K.D., who had been sideswiped, and whom I’d urged to get out of town. I’d had wild fluctuations in energy levels all day, and I finally felt as if I’d reached the nadir.

  Tom had been in the shower when K.D. had been called away for the shaken baby. When he came out, he said he was getting Julian settled in a sleeping bag between Gus and Arch, in Arch’s room. From the sound of their talking down the hall, it was going to be a Long Night in Boyville. I was, as ever, thankful for Julian’s presence in our family.

  Once Tom had moved into bed next to me, I told
him about K.D.’s visit. When I got to the point about the will change, Tom sat up, turned on the light, and reached for his trusty spiral notebook. I said, “I think Dusty referred to the will change in her journal. She said there was something she wasn’t allowed to talk about. Dusty was the person Charlie trusted, so I think it’s entirely possible she helped Richard draw up the new will.”

  Tom finished taking notes, then called the department and got patched in to one of the detectives who was working on Dusty’s murder. He related the salient details, then gave the fellow K.D.’s numbers.

  When he was back beside me, he reached out and pulled me in close, snuggling my breasts into his warm, still-damp chest until I giggled.

  “I’m so glad you don’t have to go down to the department,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Then I don’t have to explain to you why we have to gather a lot of information while we’re in the process of a murder investigation. A lot. And unlike some caterers, we don’t go barging in trying to gather evidence and arrest people—AGH!”

  I’d found just the spot on his abdomen that, if I tickled it with my fingertips, would drive Tom wild.

  And it didn’t stop there.

  Sunday morning arrived cool and sunny, with one of those deep blue skies you see in Colorado and nowhere else. Most of the snow and ice had melted, and the golden-leaved aspens quaked in a breeze off the mountains. Julian and I whipped around the kitchen, drinking espresso, checking our supplies, and readying all the foodstuffs to take to St. Luke’s. To Tom I had given the unenviable job of rousting Gus and Arch from their warm beds, getting them showered, and making sure they were dressed in clean, not-needing-mending clothes. Luckily, the boys wore the same sizes, so if there was a sock or shirt missing, they could probably do some borrowing to come up with two clean outfits and matched pairs of shoes.

  Tom also got the job of stuffing the guys with some breakfast, as the service was long. No promise of after-service brunch, it had been my experience, was enough to get a kid to quit complaining about being starving during church. Tom promised to meet us at the church fifteen minutes before the service. This was a good thing, as I wanted to have plenty of time to visit with Wink Calhoun, if she bothered to show up, as I’d requested.

  Once Julian and I had set up in the church kitchen, the Episcopal Church Women arrived and began unfolding the long tables that would hold the food and beverages. While Julian was doing his perfect slicing job on the fruit, I finished the Prosciutto Bites and laid them out on cookie sheets. This particular combination of crunchy, warm croissant, piquant preserves, delectable prosciutto, and dots of cream cheese had been a great favorite at H&J. I wanted to pop one in my mouth, but resisted. I was stronger than an adolescent boy, right?

  Wrong. So…there I was munching on one of the Bites, when Wink Calhoun, her eyes still rimmed with red, appeared in the church kitchen.

  “You wanted to see me?” she asked, without preamble.

  The kitchen was empty except for the two of us. Keeping my voice neutral, I said, “I need to ask you about your affair with Donald Ellis.”

  She lifted her chin. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do, Wink. Other people saw you together.”

  She began to cry. “I can’t talk to you about it.”

  “I don’t want to intrude unnecessarily into your personal life, but this is important. Was Dusty involved with Donald?” This made her sob even harder. “Wink, you said you wanted to help figure out what happened to Dusty, and you promised you’d answer my questions. I told you we think Dusty had a new man in her life, a relationship she was keeping secret. Could it have been Donald Ellis?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I was involved with him, yes. But I broke it off because I felt so guilty, you know, having a fling with a married man.”

  “Did Nora know about your affair?”

  “I don’t think so. Donald hates Nora, though, did you find that out?”

  “No. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “They have terrible fights. Once she was so mad at him, she hit him across the face. Not a slap, but a real”—here she demonstrated—“whack.”

  “How about you, do you get along with Nora?”

  “She’s been pretty nice to me. We’ve played squash a few times, since I told her I played in high school. And there was that time I told you about, when she stood up to Ookie for me at the club, but that may have been just to annoy Ookie. They’re always trying to one-up each other.”

  Peachy, I thought. I decided to change course. “Do you know anything about Charlie Baker changing his will right before he died?”

  “What? Who told you that?”

  “How about paintings missing from Charlie’s house?”

  Wink’s mouth hung open. “Who told you that?”

  Out in the narthex, the choir was warming up.

  This was my cue to remind Wink that the sheriff’s department would not be happy that she had been withholding critical information from them. But she started to cry again, so instead I simply told her not to share the details of our conversation with anyone. I took off my apron and went in search of my family, not feeling as if I’d really gotten any closer to the truth.

  Gus’s grandparents arrived, looking nervous. But they were so enthusiastically greeted by Gus, that their agitation seemed to melt. They, in turn, embraced Arch, which made him feel wonderful, although he pretended to act embarrassed. With no grandparents living nearby, he reveled in their attention, their store-bought cupcakes, their inappropriate, but still treasured, gifts of stuffed animals, jacks, and marbles. We were all like the boys’ clothing: we could fill in one another’s gaps and, between us, make a big family.

  During the service, I watched Bishop Uriah Sutherland closely. K.D. had given me information about him that might or might not shed light on who he really was.

  Could he be the thief who took Charlie’s paintings? Even worse, could he have killed or been involved in the deaths of Dusty or Charlie? I shuddered to think such a thing. It definitely didn’t sound plausible. Some mumbled words from a dying woman wouldn’t be enough to get a search warrant for the Ellises’ house. Yet I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that those same mumbled words might have been a secret about Uriah, as K.D. suspected, something very damning, and that those words might have been what Althea told Charlie Baker at his last show.

  I focused my attention on the service. Gus beamed when he flipped back his hair, wet with holy water, after he’d been dunked. He looked right at me and smiled. Dear Gus, I thought. I am so thankful for you.

  The highlight of the service was the moment when Meg Blatchford, whose smile was as wide as Gus’s, announced to the congregation: “You may welcome the newly baptized!” And everyone clapped.

  After the service, parishioners young and old chowed down enthusiastically on Asparagus Quiche, Prosciutto Bites, fruit salad, and sheet cake. It didn’t take long for the little kids to realize that their plastic plates—slick with bits of asparagus, jam, and cake frosting—made really great Frisbees. Before you could say “definitely unorthodox,” disks were sailing across the parish hall more thickly than flying saucers in a science-fiction movie. Bishop Sutherland’s chasuble took a direct hit from a plate covered with plum jam. Luckily, several members of the Episcopal Church Women insisted on bustling forward with cold wet towels to minister to the bishop and his vestments. He laughed just as he had before, at Donald’s party, with guacamole down his shirt. He seemed jovial and relaxed, and imagining him as a thief or killer began to seem foolish.

  The only dark cloud to pass across the lovely morning occurred when Richard Chenault, fire coming out of his eyes and sparks coming off of his silver hair, stalked up to me in the parish hall and asked what I’d done with his wife.

  “What have I done with her? Nothing!”

  “She was on the phone with you. You told her to come see you—”

  “Are you
adding eavesdropping to your list of sins, Richard?” I asked mildly.

  “She came to visit you, didn’t she? Next thing I know, her answering service is saying she’ll be out of town for a couple of weeks! And the hospital won’t tell me where she is!” He must have realized he was sounding a bit shrill, so he forcibly got himself under control. “I just want to talk to her.”

  I didn’t say what I thought, which was: If you’re getting a divorce, why don’t you go through your attorneys?

  “Goldy,” he said, “I’m sorry. I apologize for my tone. I just…need to talk to her.” He licked his lips, then said, “I understand from…from, well, I understand that you were quite close to my niece.”

  “Yes, she was a neighbor. And a friend.” I swallowed, determined not to melt down.

  “She didn’t leave anything for me, did she? With you? The cops won’t tell me anything, and I’m missing some important papers.”

  “She didn’t leave anything with me,” I said truthfully. “Did you talk to Sally?”

  When he straightened his tie and said yes, I felt a flash of fear: What if Sally had told him about the paintings I had taken? Had I told her not to tell anyone? I couldn’t remember.

  “With Louise arrested—” he began. “You did hear that, didn’t you?” When I nodded, he said, “With Louise under arrest, the office is once again being searched. So I don’t believe we’ll be needing you tomorrow morning.”

  The ultimate power jab. But I smiled anyway. “Thank you for telling me. I guess I’ll see you and the Ellises tomorrow night. At the ribbon cutting for the Mountain Pastoral Center.” He looked momentarily confused. “I’m catering the dinner afterward.”

  Richard turned and made a discreet motion to Donald and Nora Ellis, as well as Alonzo and Ookie Claggett, all of whom had been hovering nearby. I smiled in spite of myself. Richard and K.D. had joined St. Luke’s because they’d wanted to be married there. Nora Ellis was an Episcopalian because her father was a clergyman, and it was easy to see how Donald had taken the path of least resistance. Alonzo and Ookie, I suspected, had joined for social-climbing purposes. But before I could give voice to these theories, Richard and his retinue departed.