by Sandra Brown
“Reverse psychology? I’m not that clever, Hammond.”
He looked at her in a way that said, Oh, yes, you are.
“Okay,” she said, accurately interpreting his expression. “I am. But I would also have to be industrious, and no one has ever accused me of inconveniencing myself, or sacrificing creature comfort, no matter what the reason. I’m just not that passionate about anything.”
“I believe you,” he told her, meaning it. “But I don’t think there’s any legal precedent for basing a defense on laziness.”
“Defense? Do you truly think I’ll need one? Will Detective Smilow seriously consider me a suspect? That’s crazy!” she exclaimed. “Why, he would come closer to killing Lute than I would. Smilow never forgave Lute for what happened with his sister.”
Hammond’s brow furrowed.
“Remember? Smilow’s sister Margaret was Lute’s first wife. Probably she was an undiagnosed manic-depressive, but marrying Lute was her undoing. One day she went over the edge and ate a bottle of pills for lunch. When she killed herself, Smilow blamed Lute, saying he’d been neglectful and emotionally abusive, never sensitive to poor Margaret’s special needs. Anyway, at her funeral, they exchanged bitter words that caused a huge scandal. Don’t you remember?”
“Now that you’ve reminded me, I do.”
“Smilow has hated Lute ever since. So I’m not going to worry about him,” she said, repositioning her hips on the table under Sandro’s guidance. “If he accuses me of killing Lute, I’ll just turn the tables by reminding him how many death threats he’s issued.”
“I’d pay to see that,” Hammond told her.
Returning his smile, she said, “You’ve finished your champagne. More?”
“No, thanks.”
“I’ll have some.” While he was pouring, she asked, “Monroe Mason contacted you, I suppose? You’ll be prosecuting when they capture the killer?”
“That’s the program. Thanks for the recommendation.”
She drank from the flute he handed her. “For whatever else I am, Hammond, I’m a loyal friend. Never doubt that.”
He wished she hadn’t said that. County Solicitor Mason had informed his staff of his pending retirement. Deputy Solicitor Wallis was terminally ill; he wouldn’t seek the top office in the upcoming November election. Hammond was third in the pecking order. He was virtually guaranteed Mason’s endorsement as his successor.
But Davee’s speaking to Mason on his behalf made Hammond uneasy. While he appreciated her recommendation, it could later turn out to be a conflict of interest if she was the one put on trial for her husband’s murder.
“Davee, it’s my duty to ask… how good is your alibi?”
“I believe the term is ‘ironclad.’ ”
“Good.”
Throwing back her head, she laughed. “Hammond, darlin’, you are just too cute! You’re actually afraid you’ll have to charge me with murder, aren’t you?”
She slid off the massage table and moved toward him, holding the sheet against her front and trailing it behind her. Coming up on tiptoes, she kissed his cheek. “Lay your worries to rest. If I was going to shoot Lute, it wouldn’t have been in the back. What fun would there be in that? I would want to be looking the bastard in the eye when I pulled the trigger.”
“That’s no better a defense than laziness, Davee.”
“I won’t need a defense. I cross my heart I did not kill Lute.” Putting her words into action, she drew an invisible X on her chest. “I would never kill anybody.”
He was relieved to hear her deny it with such conviction.
Then she spoiled it by adding, “Those prison uniforms are just too dowdy for words.”
* * *
Davee lay on her back, eyes closed, replete and relaxed from Sandro’s massage, followed by sex that had required no participation from her except to enjoy her orgasm. She felt the pressure of his unappeased arousal against her thigh, but she was ignoring it. He lightly stroked her nipple with his tongue. “Strange,” he murmured in accented English.
“What?”
“That your friend made his hints, but he never asked you if you had killed your husband.”
Pushing him away, she looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “Because he’s your friend, he doesn’t want to know for sure that you did it.”
Davee’s eyes moved to an empty spot just beyond his shoulder and involuntarily spoke her thought aloud. “Or maybe he already knows for sure that I didn’t.”
Chapter 11
As Hammond pulled away from the Pettijohn mansion, he hoped to God that he never would have to cross-examine Davee on the witness stand, for two very good reasons.
First, he and Davee were friends. He liked her. She was hardly a pillar of virtue, but he respected her for not pretending to be. When she claimed not to be a hypocrite, it wasn’t an empty boast.
He knew dozens of women who gossiped viciously about her but who were no more moral than she. The difference was that they sinned in secret. Davee sinned flamboyantly. She was considered vain and selfish, and she was. But it was a reputation she herself cultivated. She deliberately spoon-fed her critics reasons to shudder over her behavior. None realized that the persona they censured wasn’t the real Davee.
The finer aspects of her personality Davee kept concealed. Hammond reasoned the charade was her self-defensive mechanism against getting hurt even more than her childhood already had hurt her. She turned people away before they had an opportunity to reject her.
Maxine Burton had been a lousy mother. Davee and her sisters had been deprived of Maxine’s attention and affection. She had done nothing to earn their love or devotion. Nevertheless, Davee visited her mother faithfully each week at the elite nursing facility where she was confined.
Not only did Davee finance and oversee her mother’s care, she was directly involved with it, taking care of Maxine’s personal needs herself during her routine visits. Probably he was the only person who knew that, and he wouldn’t have known had Sarah Birch not confided it to him.
The second reason he wouldn’t want to cross-examine Davee at trial was because she lied so beguilingly. Listening to her was such a delight, one ceased to care whether or not she was telling the truth.
Jurors found witnesses like her entertaining. If she were called to testify, she would arrive at court dressed fit to kill. Her appearance alone would make the jury sit up and take notice. While they might doze through the testimony of other witnesses, they would listen to and anticipate every sugar-coated word dripping from Davee’s lips.
If she testified that, while she hadn’t killed Lute, she wasn’t sorry he was dead, that he had been an unfaithful husband who cheated on her too many times to count, that he was basically wicked and cruel and deserved to die, jurors of both sexes would probably agree. She would have persuaded them that the son of a bitch’s character and misdeeds justified his murder.
No, he wouldn’t want to put Davee on trial for her husband’s murder. But if it came down to that, he would.
Being awarded this case was the best thing that could have happened to his career. He hoped that Smilow’s team would provide him plenty to work with, that the accused wouldn’t plead out, that the case would actually go to jury trial.
This was a case he could sink his teeth into. Certainly it would be challenging. It would require his total focus. But it also would be an excellent proving ground. He fully intended to run for county solicitor in November. He wanted to win. But he didn’t want to win because he was more attractive, or had a better pedigree, or was better funded than the other candidate or candidates. He wanted to merit the office.
Only rarely did a muscle-flexing case like the Lute Pettijohn murder come along. That’s why he needed it. That’s why he had omitted telling Monroe Mason about his meeting with Pettijohn. He simply had to have this case, and he was unwilling to let anything stand in his way of taking it to trial. It was the perfect vehicle to gi
ve him the public exposure he needed before November.
It was also the perfect vehicle to spite his father.
That was the most compelling reason of all. Several years before, Hammond had made a career decision to move from defender to prosecutor. Preston Cross had vociferously opposed that decision, citing the differences in earning potential and telling Hammond he was crazy to settle for a public servant’s salary. Not long ago Hammond had learned that a prosecutor’s income level wasn’t his father’s major hang-up.
The switch had placed them in opposite camps. Because Preston was partners with Lute Pettijohn in some unscrupulous land deals, he had feared being prosecuted by his own son. Only recently had Hammond made that discovery. It had sickened him. Their confrontation over it had been bitter, adding a new dimension to the enmity between them.
But he couldn’t think about that right now. Whenever he dwelled on his father, he became mentally bogged down. Peeling away the layers of their relationship for closer examination was time-consuming, emotionally draining, and ultimately unproductive. He held out little hope for a complete reconciliation.
For the time being, he shelved that problem and focused on what had immediately become his priority—the case.
The timing of his breakup with Steffi had been fortuitous. He was free of an encumbrance that was making him unhappy and might have hindered his concentration. She would be pissed to learn that she’d been assigned the copilot’s seat, but he could deal with her peevishness as the need arose.
For Hammond Cross, today spelled a new start—which actually had begun last night.
Steering his car away from the Pettijohn mansion with one hand, he reached into his breast pocket for the slip of paper he had tucked there earlier and consulted the address he’d written down.
* * *
Breathlessly, Steffi barged into the hospital room. “I got here as fast as I could. What’ve I missed?”
Smilow had reached her on her cell phone shortly before she left Hammond’s place. As promised, he had called when the attending physician granted permission for his patients to be questioned.
“I want in on this, Smilow,” she had told him over the phone.
“I can’t wait on you. The doctor might rescind the offer if I don’t jump on it.”
“Okay, but go slow. I’m on my way.”
Hammond’s condominium neighborhood wasn’t far from the hospital complex. Even so, she had exceeded every speed limit to get here. She was very anxious to know if the food poisoning patients had seen anyone near the penthouse suite of Pettijohn’s hotel.
Following her abrupt arrival, she paused in the doorway for a moment, then crossed the tile floor toward the hospital bed. The patient in it was a man about fifty years old, whose face was the color of bread dough and whose eyes were sunken into his skull and rimmed with dark circles. His right hand was hooked up to an IV drip. A bedpan and a kidney-bean-shaped basin were within easy reach on the bedside table.
A woman that Steffi presumed was his wife was seated in a chair beside the bed. She didn’t look sick, just exhausted. She was still dressed for sight-seeing, wearing sneakers, walking shorts, and a T-shirt on which was spelled out in glittering letters: GIRLS RAISED IN THE SOUTH.
Smilow, who was standing beside the bed, made the introductions. “Mr. and Mrs. Daniels, Steffi Mundell. Ms. Mundell is from the district attorney’s office. She’s closely involved with the investigation.”
“Hello, Mr. Daniels.”
“Hi.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“I’ve stopped praying for death.”
“I guess that indicates some improvement.” She looked across him at his wife. “You didn’t get sick, Mrs. Daniels?”
“I had the she-crab soup,” she replied with a wan smile.
“The Daniels are the last ones I’ve talked to,” Smilow said. “The others in their group couldn’t help us.”
“Can they?”
“Mr. Daniels is a definite maybe.”
Seeming none too happy about it, the man in the bed grumbled, “I might have seen somebody.”
Failing to curb her impatience, Steffi pressed him for accuracy. “Either you saw somebody or you didn’t.”
Mrs. Daniels came to her feet. “He’s very tired. Couldn’t this wait until tomorrow? After he’s had another night’s rest?”
Instantly Steffi saw her mistake and forced herself to relent. “I’m sorry. Forgive me for being so abrasive. I’m afraid I’ve picked up a few bad habits from the people I prosecute. I’m accustomed to dealing with killers, thieves, and rapists, usually repeat offenders, not nice folks like you. It’s not too often I get to interact with tax-paying, law-abiding, God-fearing people.” After that speech, she didn’t dare look at Smilow, knowing that she would see derision in his expression.
Gnawing her lower lip, Mrs. Daniels consulted her husband. “It’s up to you, honey. Do you feel like doing this now?”
Steffi had sized them up and immediately concluded that there would be no contest between her I.Q. and theirs. She took advantage of their indecision to do some more manipulating. “Of course if you want to wait until morning for our questions, that’s fine, Mr. Daniels. But please understand our position. A leader in our community has been murdered in cold blood. He was shot in the back with no provocation. None that we’ve determined, anyway.” She let that sink in, then added, “We hope to catch this brutal killer before he has another opportunity to strike.”
“Then I can’t help you.”
All were taken aback by Mr. Daniels’s unexpected declaration. Smilow was the first to find his voice. “How do you know you can’t help?”
“Because Ms. Mundell here said the killer was a ‘he,’ and the person I saw was a woman.”
Steffi and Smilow exchanged a glance. “I used the pronoun generically,” she explained.
“Oh, well, it was a woman I saw,” Daniels said, settling back against his pillow. “She didn’t look like a killer, though.”
“Could you elaborate on that?” Steffi asked.
“You mean what she looked like?”
“Start at the beginning and talk us through,” Smilow suggested.
“Well, we—that is, our choir group—left the hotel directly after lunch. About an hour into our tour, I started feeling queasy. At first I thought it was the heat. But a couple of the kids with us had already got sick with upset stomachs, so I suspected it was more than that. I got to feeling worse by the minute. Finally, I told my wife that I was going back to the hotel, take some Pepto or something, and would catch up later.”
Mrs. Daniels confirmed all this with a solemn nod.
“By the time I’d walked back, I was on the verge of… of being real sick. I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it to my room in time.”
“When did you see the woman?” Steffi asked, wishing he would get to the point sooner rather than later.
“When I got to our room.”
“Which was on the fifth floor,” Smilow verified.
“Five oh six,” Daniels said. “I noticed another person at the end of the hall and glanced in that direction. She was standing outside another door.”
“Doing what?” Smilow asked.
“Doing nothing. Just facing the door, like she had knocked and was waiting for somebody to answer.”
“How far away from you was she?”
“Hmm, not far. But pretty far. I didn’t think twice about it. You know how awkward it is when you make eye contact with a stranger and you’re the only two around? It was like that. You don’t want to seem either too standoffish or too friendly. Got to be careful of folks these days.”
“Did you speak to her?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I just glanced her way. Truth is, I wasn’t thinking of anything except getting to the bathroom.”
“But you got a good look at her?”
“Not that good.”
“Good enough to determine her age?”
&nb
sp; “She wasn’t old. But not a girl, either. About your age,” he said to Steffi.
“Ethnic?”
“No.”
“Tall, short?”
Daniels winced and rubbed a spot on his lower abdomen. “Honey?” his wife said, anxiously picking up the basin and tucking it under his chin.
He pushed it aside. “Just a mild cramp.”
“Want some Sprite?”
“A sip.” Mrs. Daniels brought the covered cup to his lips and he sucked through the bent straw. When he was finished, he looked at Smilow again. “What’d you ask… oh, her height?” He shook his head. “Didn’t notice. Not too extreme one way or the other. I guess about average.”
“Hair color? Was she blond?” Steffi asked.
“Not too.”
“Not too?” Smilow repeated.
“Not too blond. It didn’t strike me that she was a Marilyn Monroe type, know what I mean? But her hair wasn’t dark, either. Sorta medium.”
“Mr. Daniels, could you give us a general body description?”
“You mean was she… like fat?”
“Was she?”
“No.”
“Thin?”
“Yeah. More thin. Well, sorta thin, I guess you could say. See, I really didn’t pay her much mind. I was just trying to keep from having a god-awful accident out there in the hall.”
“I think that’s all he can tell you,” Mrs. Daniels said to them. “If you think of something else to ask, you can come back tomorrow.”
“One final question, please,” Smilow said. “Did you actually see this woman go into Mr. Pettijohn’s room?”
“Nope. Quick as I could, I unlocked my door with that credit-card-looking thing and went inside.” He rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “For that matter, I don’t know if it was the room where the guy got killed or not. It could have been any room down the hallway from mine.”
“It was the penthouse suite. The door is slightly recessed,” Steffi said. “It’s different from the others. If we pointed out Mr. Pettijohn’s suite to you, would you be able to determine if that was the door you saw the woman standing in front of?”
“I seriously doubt it. As I told you before, I only glanced down the hall. It registered with me that there was a woman standing at a door waiting for it to be opened. That’s all.”