by Gale Deitch
I shifted my gaze back to the front table. There was unassuming Myra Keating, sitting by herself, no longer flanked by her tablemates, Belinda and Gwendolyn. Remembering the way Ben’s eyes had glossed over me the first time I’d met him, I didn’t think Myra would be anyone who would attract Ben’s eye. Also, like Belinda, the success of the conference would be important to Myra as the Mystery Writers’ Association president. She certainly wouldn’t want the event blemished by a murder. Or would she? I recalled her anger when she spoke about Gwendolyn Chong taking over this event. On the other hand, after she and I had witnessed the disturbing encounter between Ally and Ben, Myra had headed back to the dining room.
The fact remained, however, that Gwendolyn Chong had been brutally murdered, and the killer was in this building and probably in this room. I shivered, thinking about the bloody hammer lying beside her body. Where did someone get a hammer? I froze and swallowed hard. Where indeed? I stood and began skimming the tables, weaving between them to check the centerpieces. I made my way toward the head table where the most obvious suspects were seated, but the hammer sat untouched in its center basket. Other table centerpieces still held their hammers as well. I continued my search, slowing as I reached the last table in the back, the one nearest to the kitchen where Ally and I had stood watching Ben speak.
No hammer.
I circled the table, thinking someone might have lifted the hammer out of the basket and laid it on the table. I checked the chair seats and the floor beneath the table.
No hammer.
Daniel walked up on the stage and surveyed the room as officers collected the remaining cards. “All right,” he said. “It looks like we’re ready to begin. We’ll be conducting interviews in several classrooms so we can wrap this up as quickly as possible.” He checked his watch. “It’s nine-twenty. I’m hoping to have all of you on your way home by eleven.”
A collective groan emerged from the crowd.
Daniel signaled one of the officers to read out the first group of names.
“Wait one minute.” Myra Keating stood and glanced up at Daniel. “I’ll save you the trouble, Detective Goldman. I know who murdered Gwen. It was that woman.” Myra extended her arm and pointed it directly at Ally.
Chapter Three
Amid gasps and murmurs, all heads in the room turned toward Ally.
Still on Zach’s lap, she sat up straighter, her mouth open, obviously as stunned as I was by Myra’s outrageous accusation. Wide-eyed and shaking her head, Ally shifted her glance between Myra and Daniel. “What?” she asked. “Why would you say that?”
“You know exactly why,” Myra said, one hand on her hip. “I heard you arguing with Ben Knight in the corridor. She heard you, too.” She pointed at me. “Right, Trudie?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“We heard your threat,” Myra continued. “You said, ‘someone needs to hammer some sense into that woman.’ Trudie, admit it. You heard her, too.”
All heads were now riveted in my direction. The walls seemed to close in, and I found it difficult to breathe, the oxygen sucked from the room. A stifling heat flushed over me.
I peered up at Daniel. His eyes locked on mine, unspoken questions burning behind them.
“Don’t answer that,” he said to me then turned to the others. “Each person in this room will be questioned individually. We need to get down to the facts. Miss,” he said, looking down from the stage at Myra. “Please follow me.”
As they left the room, Will mounted the steps to the stage and began calling names, directing each person to follow the appropriate officer. I noticed his eyes shift back and forth between me and Ally, his brow lowered in thought.
A buzz of voices rose and fell, electrifying the air like faulty wiring in a toaster oven.
I turned to look at Ally, who was speaking quietly to Zach, probably trying to explain why she had been in the hallway arguing with Ben Knight. By the expression on his face, the truth was going to hurt him, just as I’d feared. But what was the truth? Even I didn’t know. Apparently, Ally’s “fling,” as she called it, was more than a one-night stand. How long had the affair lasted and how had it ended? Most likely on Ben’s terms by the way Ally had confronted him.
I felt a tap on my arm and jumped.
“Trudie,” Will said. “I’ll have to be the one to question you tonight.”
I nodded, knowing it wouldn’t be appropriate for Daniel to interrogate his own fiancé. I followed Will to an empty classroom, where he closed the door and gestured for me to sit in a chair facing the teacher’s desk.
The hard plastic seat, meant to conform to a typical young adult body, curved in all the wrong places for my ample derrière. I shifted to try to get comfortable. The chrome legs scraped the floor with a screech. I cringed at the sound.
Will glanced at me from where he’d been pacing behind the teacher’s chair. “Are you comfortable, Trudie?”
“I guess. Are you? You should sit down, too. You’re making me nervous walking back and forth like that.” I remembered the first time I’d met Will, four months before in a scenario very much like this one. My first impression of him had not been good, with his serious demeanor and lack of manners. Since then he’d become not just Daniel’s partner, but a trusted friend. He also was dating my friend Katie, a pregnant young woman whose boyfriend, the baby’s father, had been murdered. I admired the way Will supported and cared for Katie, even attending childbirth classes with her, something he’d soon put into practice since she was now in her ninth month.
Will swiveled the chair around and sat down, swinging to face me. In front of him on the desk sat a yellow legal pad, a pen, and a small recorder. “Are you okay with me taping this interview?” he asked.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
Will pressed the on button and waited for the green light. “Please state your name and address,” he said.
“Trudie Fine.” I recited Daniel’s address where I lived.
“And you’ve agreed to have this conversation recorded. Correct?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Now Miss Fine,” he said with a smirk. Will knew I hated being called Miss Fine or even Ms. Fine. I grinned back at him and shook my head. I knew he wanted the recording to sound official, so I went along with it this time.
“In what capacity were you here tonight?” he asked.
“My company, A Fine Fix, is the caterer.”
“And who else is here to assist you in that?”
“My partner Zachary Cohen, my friend Allison Schwartz, and five people from the staffing agency. We specifically requested the services of Gordon Reynolds. The others I met for the first time tonight. I don’t remember all their names.”
“And tell me, Miss Fine. Had you ever met Gwendolyn Chong previous to this evening?”
I shook my head. “No. Never. I had to check the program to see who she was.”
“And what about Allison Schwartz? Do you know if she’d ever met Ms. Chong before this evening?”
“No. I don’t think so.” After listening to Ally’s argument with Ben and the fact that she’d never told me about their relationship, how could I confidently answer anything about Ally?
Will glanced up from his pad. “Is there any reason to believe she did know Ms. Chong?”
“No,” I shook my head again more vehemently, not wanting to project the doubt that I was sure he had detected in my voice. “Ally isn’t a member of Gwendolyn’s Ben Knight fan club or the writers’ association. She doesn’t even read Ben Knight’s books. So how would she know the woman?”
“You tell me,” Will said, his eyes boring into mine.
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said a little too loudly.
He sat silent a moment, not breaking eye contact and causing me to squirm in my seat. Then he consulted his legal pad and continued. “Now you said that Allison Schwartz was here to help you tonight. Correct?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Doesn’t she have her own restaurant to run?” Will asked.
“Yes, she does. But her manager and staff are capable of handling things when she’s not there.”
“Why did she think it necessary to help you out tonight and leave her own restaurant?” Will stood and began to pace again behind his chair.
Bright fluorescent lights above my head bore down on me, and a rivulet of perspiration ran from my neck down inside my dress. “We had a hundred fifty people to serve and were glad to have the help.”
Will stopped pacing and looked at me. “So, you asked Ms. Schwartz to assist you tonight?”
He just wouldn’t let this go, would he? I shifted in my seat. “Well, not exactly.”
“Not exactly? What then?”
“Ally asked if I could use her help.”
He bent toward me, resting his hands on the desk. “Why did she want to help you tonight?”
“She…wanted to see Ben Knight.”
Will’s eyes locked on mine, and he was silent for a moment. On the one hand, I knew he didn’t want to incriminate my friend, but I also knew that as a law enforcement officer he saw everything as black or white. He would dot every i and cross every t and follow the law to the letter.
“Why did she want to see Ben Knight? Had she ever met him prior to this evening?”
I peered down at my lap and picked a loose thread off my dress. I could feel Will’s frustration; trying to get information from me was like plucking the seeds out of a pomegranate. Why prolong the inevitable?
I looked up at him. “Well, yes. She had. We both had.”
Will jerked his head back. He hadn’t expected that answer. “Tell me when and where that was, please.”
I related the details of the meeting ten years before at the bookstore in Charlotte. “Ally and I were roommates in college at the time. We just wanted to have a famous author sign our books.”
Will sat down again and made a few notes on his legal pad. Then he turned his attention back to me. “So, you and Ally went to see Ben Knight at this bookstore. He signed your books and then what?”
I swallowed the dry lump in my throat. “He asked her out for coffee that night, and I went back to the dorm to study.”
“And did Ally tell you what happened with Ben Knight in that encounter?”
“She told me they had a great time. She liked him a lot and thought he’d call her the next day. But as far as I know, he never did.”
“And what was Ally’s reaction to that?”
“Of course, she was disappointed. Any girl would be. But that was ten years ago. Ally was nineteen years old. She had a crush on Ben. That’s all.”
Will’s jaw moved in and out as if he was gnawing on the information I’d given him. He squinted at me. “Why would she want to see him tonight, ten years later?”
I sighed. I’d thought I knew the answer to that question, but obviously I didn’t have all the facts about Ally’s relationship with Ben. And I wasn’t going to make any assumptions. “I think you have to know Ally well to understand. Men have always found her attractive, and she’s never had problems getting dates or boyfriends she’d set her sights on. Most relationships ended on her terms.” My bottom was starting to ache, and I tried to shift into another position. I hoped this interview would be over soon.
“Go on,” Will said.
“Ally was head over heels about Ben and he blew her off, something she just was not used to. She stewed over it for quite some time. I think she wanted to come tonight to see if he remembered her.”
“So, she had every intention of confronting him some time during the evening. Correct?” Will asked.
“She just wanted to see him, talk to him. That’s all.”
Will tapped his pen on the legal pad. “Myra Keating said that you and she observed Ally in a confrontation with Ben. What were they arguing about?”
I blew out a breath. “Will, you’ve met Ally. She is not a murderer. Yes, the two of them were having words. Ally was upset that Ben didn’t remember her name, and he pretty much admitted to her that sleeping with women on his book tours was a natural part of his life. She accused him of sleeping with women who were right in this room tonight, including Gwendolyn Chong, and he didn’t deny it. Ally was angry that he used women so callously. But she is not a murderer.”
“Okay, Miss Fine, let me ask you one more thing. Did Ally tell Ben that someone needed to hammer some sense into Gwendolyn Chong?”
I glanced away.
“Trudie?” Will’s tone was questioning, but insistent.
I turned back and looked into Will’s eyes.
“Yes, she did.”
Chapter Four
A chilly rain pummeled the windshield on the ride home with Daniel, and the glare from oncoming headlights caused me to shield my eyes. It was after midnight, and I was feeling physically and emotionally sapped. All I wanted was to get home and into bed curled up under the covers in the safety of Daniel’s arms.
I peered at him from the passenger seat. He’d been silent since we’d left the scene, and I wondered what Will had told him about my interrogation. Was Daniel angry that I was somehow involved as a possible witness or was he just trying to internalize and analyze everything he’d learned so far from the investigation?
I began to tremble as pictures of Gwendolyn Chong’s battered body, her bloodied face unrecognizable, flashed through my mind, my nerves as exposed as the nooks and crannies inside an English muffin. This was definitely a crime of rage and passion by someone in that room tonight. I remembered the pounding Sam and I had heard from the ladies’ room. Construction noises, we’d thought. No. It was the sound of Gwendolyn’s head being bashed in. I shivered again.
Once inside the house, I turned to face Daniel, waiting for him to lecture me about always getting involved and putting myself at risk.
Instead, he pulled me to him and wrapped his arms around me, murmuring in my ear. “Trudie, how am I ever going to protect you when you always seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“You know that’s all it was,” I said.
He pulled back a little, looked me in the eye, and nodded. “I know. I just don’t want to lose you.” Then he backed me against the wall, lifted my chin and kissed me with an intensity that sent shuddering waves through my body. My knees buckled like taffy.
“Bedroom,” I mouthed into his lips.
A ringing telephone roused me from the depths of contentment, snuggled under the blanket, curled into Daniel’s body.
“Don’t answer it,” he muttered when I attempted to dislodge myself from his embrace.
“Let me just see who it is.” I reached for my phone and squinted at the display.
“Whoever it is will leave a message,” he said. “It’s Saturday morning. Who calls so early? What time is it anyway?”
I rolled over to face him. “It’s Ally. I’ll call her back,” I said. “It’s seven-thirty.”
“Oh.” He turned onto his back and frowned at the ceiling, obviously recalling the murder investigation from the previous evening.
My phone then made a swishing sound, letting me know I had a new email. Probably Ally again, although I wondered why she didn’t text me instead. I’d check it later.
For now, I decided to finally address the elephant that we’d brought home with us. “Uh—did Will tell you about his interview with me last night?”
Daniel looked at me. “He gave me the gist of it.”
“So, you know why Ally was there? And that we’d both met Ben Knight before?”
“Yes.”
I propped myself up on an elbow. “And you have nothing to say about it? Nothing to ask me?”
He turned onto his side to face me, his body so close I could feel its heat. “Trudie, you know I can’t discuss the case with you. Will and I will go over the interviews this morning after we compile all our notes. I’m sure we’ll be making some follow-up visits today.”
Daniel gently brushed the hair fr
om my face and ran his thumb along my jawline. Then he closed the space between our bodies, nudging me onto my back. “Anyway,” he continued. “I’ve got a few minutes, so let’s not waste any more time.”
After he left for work, I showered and dressed. Zach and I had planned to meet at the office to evaluate the event, the food, the staff, and any issues that needed tweaking. I knew he had most likely unloaded the van and cleaned and shelved everything from the event.
But for the first time this morning, I remembered the look of distress on Zach’s face as he listened to Ally’s explanation. I wondered in what state of mind I would find him. As I gathered items for my purse, I realized I hadn’t checked my messages.
First, I played back Ally’s voicemail. “Trudie, please call me. Zach is so angry; he won’t even answer my calls. You’ve got to speak to him for me. Make him understand. But call me first. As soon as you can. Please.”
I opened my email account, sure the new message was also from Ally. But no, the email had come from Zach. “Don’t be angry, Trudie, but I won’t be in the office today. I need a few days to think. I thought I could trust Ally. But now I know she will never change. I’d go away if the police hadn’t told everyone not to leave town. Please don’t try to contact me. And don’t worry. I’ll be back at work in plenty of time to help with the Spring Fling sorority event next Saturday.”
Don’t worry, I thought. Of course, I was going to worry, not about the sorority event, but about Zach. Ally had hurt him—again. I gritted my teeth thinking how she had planned that confrontation with Ben Knight, how she had dressed for the meeting, and how she’d kept their past relationship from me, her roommate and best friend. I never should have allowed her to help out at the dinner.
Well, I was not about to return Ally’s call. Instead, I would visit her in person and finally get the answers she’d been hiding from me for years. It was Saturday, and I knew exactly where to find her. At her restaurant, Savor.