“There are a lot of people checking in on her. A lot.”
“Like who?”
“Her family, George’s family. The neighbors. The company George worked for. Her refrigerator is filled with food that other people brought. How do people know what she likes? Or what she wants to eat?”
“That’s what people do.” He snapped off another piece of pretzel and chased it with black coffee.
“They do what?”
“They bring casseroles. Stuff that can be frozen so she won’t have to worry about cooking. Maybe her close friends will take over her daily errands like laundry and dry cleaning.”
“Aren’t we her close friends?”
“Yes, but Tradava’s got me so busy there’s not much I could do other than decorate her house and hire a maid service to clean for her twice a week.”
“You hired her a maid service?”
He shrugged. “I wish I could have done more.” He took another swig of coffee. “You’re helping her with the store, right? That’s big.”
“I guess so. I’m just trying to be a good friend.”
I hadn’t heard the toilet flush or the stairs creak, so when Cat spoke behind me, she took me by surprise. “What’s this?” she asked. She stood in the doorway. Her palm was face up and the velvet ring box with Nick’s engagement ring sat in the center of it.
“It’s an engagement ring.”
“Nick asked you to marry him?” she asked.
“Yes, but I haven’t said yes yet.”
“You didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to hear about that, not now, not with everything that’s happened.”
Cat set the ring box down on the bookcase next to her. “I have to go,” she said. She pulled on her coat on the way to the front door. I looked at Eddie, expecting him to say something.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Nick proposed and you didn’t tell us?” He stood up. “ Cat, hold up. I’ll give you a ride.”
“Wait!” My chair tipped backward as I stood up and chased after them. “You’re crazy busy with Tradava and Cat’s got this whole baby-George-pearl thing to worry about! I was trying to be a friend and support you both. Why are you mad?”
The front door was open and Cat was halfway to Eddie’s VW Bug. The street lamps were on, backlighting flurries of snow that blew through the wind. Fluffy flakes melted into her red hair on contact. She turned around and faced me. “You’re trying so hard to be a good friend but you know what you forgot? How to be a good friend.”
“Cat—”
“I lost everything, Sam! My whole life. Don’t think that pretending you don’t have a life makes any of this easier for me. I don’t need you to figure out why George died because that’s not going to bring him back. It’s not going to change anything.”
“But—”
“Do you know what I need? I need life to feel normal. I need for you talk to me about Nick’s proposal or to complain about your job or to calculate how many pair of satin cargo pants you need to sell on eBay in order to pay the mortgage. I need you to eat an entire pizza and have room for ice cream. I need to know that some things change and some things never will. Do you get that? I mean, really, Sam. Do you even understand why I’m hurt?”
I looked at Eddie. “She’s right, dude. That thing about you saving Nick’s dad’s life around your birthday? I had to read about that in the paper. If you want people to bring you casseroles when you need them, you’re going to have to learn to open up.”
“My life is an open book! You two know everything about me.”
Cat crossed her arms. “Really? When’s the last time you had sex?”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re sharing. Friends share. And I’m going to need something really personal to make up for this. So, when’s the last time you had sex?”
“Two nights ago in the parking lot of the Ribbon Designer Outlets. It was the night Nick came home from Italy and I convinced him to come with me for overnight surveillance on your store. We got distracted. And oh, by the way, that was our first time and he proposed the next morning and I’m not sure what to make of the timing. Are you happy now?”
Across the street, the front window curtains moved to the side. Mrs. Iova, my occasionally nosy neighbor, stared out at me. I glared at her and then turned around and stormed back into the house.
The kitchen was a mess. Logan was on the dining room table sniffing for leftovers. I moved him to the floor and cleaned up the empty bottles of birch beer that lay scattered next to the pizza boxes. My hands were shaking. The front door opened but I didn’t turn around. It wasn’t every day that I told the whole neighborhood about my love life, and, frankly, I was a little embarrassed.
“Well, that should be good for a couple of casseroles,” Eddie said. He was alone. I looked at the window. “She’ll be in in a second. Her phone rang and she wanted some privacy.”
“Nice concept.”
“Dude, did you hear anything she said to you out there? Because she’s right. You’re amazing and loyal and you help us all, but the reason we’re friends is because you’re kind of a mess.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No, seriously. Listen to me. I’m a mess too. I’m a single guy who spends three quarters of my life at my job. I don’t even have a pet. The most exciting thing to happen to me this month was to win an auction of an original red Devo Energy Dome on eBay.”
“You mean one of those flowerpot hats?”
“Energy Dome, dude. I could have gotten a flower pot for a lot less.”
“You didn’t tell me about that.”
“Because that being the most exciting thing in my life is pathetic. But you and Nick? That’s been over a decade in the making.”
The front door opened a second time and Cat walked in. This time she wasn’t alone. Detective Madden was behind her.
“Ms. Kidd,” he said. He stepped forward and held his hand out to Eddie. “Detective Madden.”
“Eddie Adams,” Eddie replied.
“He called,” Cat said to me. “I gave him your address and told him to come here.”
The four of us stood around my living room. Detective Madden was the last person I’d expect to show up at my house tonight, but I was having a hard time regrouping on details of the investigation thanks to Cat and Eddie.
“Detective, would you like a cup of coffee?” Cat asked.
“Do you have decaf?”
“Yes. Follow me.” Cat headed toward the kitchen. When she passed me, she reached out her hand and put it on my hand and squeezed. I looked at her face. She smiled a genuine smile that let me know we were going to be okay. I squeezed back. She let go and Madden followed her into the kitchen. About two seconds later, Madden asked, “What’s all this?”
Oh, crap! The wall of observation!
I ran into the kitchen. Cat handed Madden a mug of coffee. Madden thanked her and looked at the giant Post-It sheets that hung from the wall. His eyes scanned from the left page to the right, pausing on the photo of Lela Sexton in her lingerie. Between the scene out front and the wall of observation in my kitchen, my secrets were pretty much out in the open.
“Don’t mind the mess,” I said quickly. I grabbed the packages of giant Post-Its and covered the existing wall of observation with blank sheets. “We’re helping Cat work out her staffing issues.”
He held his mug, but didn’t drink from it. “Sorry to drop in unexpected, but I thought you’d want to know that we ran tests on your gun and it came back clean. Hasn’t been fired in some time.”
“I already told you that,” Cat said.
“And I appreciate your honesty, Ms. Lestes, but I hope you understand we have to follow procedure. You can pick it up at the station at your convenience.”
“I don’t want it. I never wanted it,” Cat said. “Is that all?”
“No, there’s something else. A pretty significant break in our investigation, actually, although I’m not really
sure what it means yet. Ms. Lestes, your store is going to have to be closed indefinitely.”
“I haven’t been back, not since the second murder,” she said. “I already told my staff so there’s no reason anybody would try to open the store until I contact them.”
“That’s just the thing. A member of your staff threw us this new curve ball.”
“I’m sorry, detective. I don’t follow.”
“Your assistant manager, Shana Brice, came to see us this afternoon. She said it’s time she told us the truth. And then she gave us a full confession.”
26
MONDAY NIGHT: TOO LATE FOR POLITE VISITORS
“Shana killed my husband?” Cat asked. She sank down into a dining room chair. Eddie stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders.
“No, ma’am, she confessed to the burglaries. Seems she and Mr. Aguilar have been stealing from the mall on a pretty regular basis. Small, petty thefts originally intended to help complete their holiday shopping that turned into a way to profit on the side. Mr. Aguilar got her into the mall after hours. Ms. Brice committed the actual thefts. She put the stolen merchandise in a bag and threw it out in a public trash can. Mr. Aguilar retrieved it from the designated spot and they reconvened after hours to divvy up the goods.”
“But Cat started to carry more expensive jewelry,” I said. “A fact Shana would know because she worked there. She’d know where it was kept and how much it was worth. Even if it was locked up at night, she’d be able to get at it.”
“She said she learned the true value of the new merchandise at the party that night.”
“Shana wasn’t at the party,” Cat said.
“She was the woman in the restroom,” I said slowly. Now I realized why Shana had seemed familiar to me when I first met her at Catnip. “I didn’t put two and two together. She was all dressed up, not in goth attire. Her hair wasn’t blue, and she took out her piercings.”
“I think I still would have recognized her,” Cat said.
“When I saw her talking to George, I feared the worst—that maybe he was having an affair—so I kept you distracted so you wouldn’t see her.”
“The two of them had gotten away with smaller thefts for weeks,” Madden said, “and had a false sense of confidence in the simplicity of their plan. Ms. Brice could have stolen the jewelry during her shift, but that night she waited until after the mall closed. Aguilar told her security would be busy with the party. He volunteered to cover the rest of the mall so she wouldn’t have to worry about being caught. It was risky, but the temptation of stealing merchandise of that value was too great. For someone who carried a healthy amount of credit card debt, the take was potentially life-changing.”
“And the murder? How did she do that?” I asked.
“She claims she didn’t have anything to do with the murder. We drilled her about that pretty well and her story never changed. She was in the store. She smashed a case of jewelry with the tire iron. That’s when she saw the body. You screamed and it snapped her out of shock. She was afraid you were the killer. She grabbed the jewelry and ran, knocking Ms. Lestes out of the way in the process. We checked her footprint against the print we found in the carpet and it’s a match.”
“Why didn’t she say anything before now?”
“For the past several days, she kept quiet because her confession didn’t cast her in innocent light. But when Mr. Aguilar was found dead in Ms. Lestes’s office, she looked at things differently.”
“She thought Cat killed George?”
“That is her opinion. She came to us to point the finger at Ms. Lestes.”
I didn’t like it. Cat was at the store the night George was murdered, but so was Shana. Cat had access to her own office, but so did Shana. The only person who could have fingered Shana as having been there was Aguilar—who was now dead.
“What do you think?” I asked Madden.
“I have to admit, her statement confuses things.” He set his mug down on the table. He zipped his coat and pulled on a hat. “I’ll be on my way now. Heard there’s a storm coming. Oh, Ms. Kidd, we caught the vandals responsible for your flat tire. I never saw your report but I thought you’d want to know. You three take care.” He shook each of our hands and then left.
I wasn’t buying Madden’s whole “just happened to discover” this and “thought you’d want to know” that. It was all too convenient.
We returned to my dining room table. I took down the blank Post-It sheets and we stared at the wall of observation. Despite several rounds of “Did-Shana-do-it?” Eddie remained unconvinced.
“She described in detail what was stolen,” I continued. “She even said I almost caught her. She dropped a necklace in the public bathroom the night of the party. I picked it up and handed it to her. She told Madden that she was scared I figured it out so she panicked and threw it away right in front of me.”
Reasoning through the rest of the details after reaching this conclusion raised a whole other set of questions.
“Cat, how much of your jewelry assortment was stolen?”
“A lot.”
“No, you misunderstand me. What’s the value? Ballpark.”
Her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling and her head bounced back and forth while she did some mental math. “About thirty-four thousand dollars retail, unless you want cost.”
“I thought you owned an outlet. How come you have such expensive stuff?”
“Technically it’s an outlet, but I prefer the term ‘off-price retailer.’”
“What’s the difference?” Eddie asked.
“An outlet sells last season’s merchandise, stuff that’s been severely discounted because it’s not current. I get that merchandise from jobbers—people who buy end of season merchandise from department stores. I usually buy entire lots of product sight unseen. The jobbers sell it by a piece count. Like, two hundred pair of jeans, or thirty designer handbags, or something like that. There’s always a gamble with jobbers, because if the price is right and the description sounds good I’ll take it, but it’s mine to either sell or throw away.”
Eddie got up and refilled his coffee.
“What about the rest of your inventory?” I asked.
“Mostly off-price. I go to market and visit with designers and vendors. Sometimes they end up with overruns of merchandise that didn’t sell, that they produced to meet minimums. Sometimes stores negotiate inventory returns to them for various reasons. If I have good relationships with the vendors that I want to carry, they know they can call me and I might buy that inventory discounted. That way they’re getting more than if they had to sell it to a jobber or at a sample sale.”
“What about the jewelry? Didn’t you tell me you came up with a luxury goods strategy recently and that’s why you bought the pearls from Kenner & Winn?”
“It was something like that. I noticed about a year ago that there weren’t any good jewelry stores in the designer outlets, so I started bumping up my average price to test the waters. Nothing too classic, but pieces that I found in the market. A few designers were willing to work on consignment. The merchandise sold so I gradually built up the category. I knew I could go to the five hundred dollar range. George’s inventory was a risk. Those pieces were a couple thousand dollars cost, even with a discount. I told you my terms were Net 30, so I had thirty days to pay the invoice. The risk was whether I’d sell the jewelry before the bill was due. I thought I could because of the time of the year.”
Eddie and I exchanged glances. I knew what he was thinking. “So you don’t normally carry this much jewelry?” he asked.
“Oh, God no. I usually have a couple of necklaces and earrings and an assortment of bangles. Very minimalist. I arranged through the outlet center to have extra jewelry cases put into the store so I could carry more merchandise this month.”
“Did the rest of your assortment change much? Because of the holidays?”
“Not really. Like I said, it’s an outlet, but also an off-
price store. I change the way I merchandise some things, but other than the jewelry it’s still the same.”
“Who else knew about your business strategy?”
“I asked Shana to come with me to select the merchandise. I thought it would be a nice opportunity for her since she doesn’t get out of the store much.” She looked dazed. “I tried to help her with her professional growth and she thanked me by stealing from my store and then implicating me in the murder of my husband. What kind of a world do we live in?”
Eddie leaned forward. “What do you think about this?” he asked me. “Do you believe her confession?”
“I don’t believe anything any of these people say,” I said, gesturing toward our wall of observation. “Shana confessed because it was the safest thing for her to do. But I saw her talk to George at the party. And before you say it, it wasn’t like she was talking to her boss’s wife. They knew each other knew each other.”
Cat spoke in a low voice. “I told George I was going to Catnip after the party. I think he went there to tell me what was really going on. You took a long time to get to the store because you had to get your underwear out of the bushes, remember?”
I pointed a finger at Eddie. “Don’t ask.”
He held both hands up in mock surrender. “Dude.”
“Shana was there to steal from you. She knew the lights would be out and she thought you were at the party. Maybe George knew what she had planned. Maybe he went to stop her. He could have overpowered her. He could have pulled off the mask, and maybe she killed him because he could identify her.” And then she realized she could easily frame Cat for everything. Everything was falling into place.
We hashed things out into the wee hours of the morning. I told Cat and Eddie to go to sleep, but my mind was alert. I didn’t want to tell either of them, but Shana’s confession still troubled me. Why had someone knotted the pearls around George’s throat after shooting him? And why hide the merchandise in the ceiling if she intended to confess? There were other details just slightly out of reach in my mind, that I knew I was missing. The information felt like chapters pulled from several different novels.
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