I willed myself not to point out that I was in her daughter’s company only because she’d pleaded for my help. “Steph, I don’t mean to overstep my bounds, but if you are concerned about her welfare, don’t you think you should consider taking her to a therapist?”
She sat up in her chair and gaped at me for a moment. Then she looked away and fidgeted with a fingernail. “You think my child is crazy?”
“No. I just think she could use some help to express and examine her feelings. Especially about her father’s death. You say she’s being ‘stoic,’ but why should she be? She needs to grieve, not bottle it up inside. It would be so sad if she grows up to be…” another you, I thought, but said, “cold and emotionless.”
“There’s plenty to be said for being cold,” Stephanie said under her breath. “Coldness numbs the senses. Makes things hurt a lot less.”
“And also blots out joy and love. What’s the worst that could happen if you took her to a good therapist?”
“The worst?” she repeated with a sad chuckle. “She might learn to hate her mother.”
Her candor took me by surprise. Believing she’d expressed a valid concern, I had no ready response and changed subjects. “Can I see the baby?”
“No. He’s asleep.” She looked at me for a moment, then glanced at her watch and sighed.
“Are you interested in how my search for your husband’s killer is coming along?”
“Why, of course. I assumed that was the reason you were here. Was I supposed to prompt you?”
I cleared my throat and fought down my typical reaction to Stephanie, which was to picture myself with my hands around her neck. “What has Tommy told you about an organization called Sisters Totally Opposed to Pornography?”
“He mentioned something about Preston posing as Mike Masters and submitting a pornographic cartoon of yours to a contest. And that he won the contest and, consequently a bet against some friends of his at the club. Tommy also told me the…sorority had sent both Preston and you threats.”
“Did you ever hear about STOP prior to Preston’s publishing my cartoon, or since then?”
“No.”
And did you know Preston subscribed to a magazine called Between the Legs behind your back?”
“Between the Legs Behind Your Back sounds like a publication for contortionists. But, yes, I knew about it: I allowed Preston to think he was fooling me by having it sent to a P.O. box. At least that prevented him. from leaving copies on our coffee table.”
“Did you know he’d entered the cartoon contest?”
“No, not until Tommy discussed all of that with me.”
“And did you tell Tommy who’d made the bet with Preston?”
“No, I have no idea. It could be anyone at the Carlton Country Club, and they have hundreds of members.”
“But Preston said he won the bet. So those particular friends should have paid him a thousand dollars apiece. That edition had been in print for more than a week before Preston was killed. He probably received an advance copy and would have had proof he won the bet for three or four weeks.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, the thing to do would be to go through his bank records.” She rose. “Come with me, Molly. We’ll take a look in his library.”
I followed Stephanie into a gorgeous room of polished oak and brass. An enormous desk ran almost the full length of the room. The room had everything anyone would want in a library, with the exception of books. The built-in bookshelves held mostly sports trophies and bric-a-brac. Preston apparently hadn’t been much of a reader.
Behind the desk hung a lifelike portrait of Preston, looking downright regal in a maroon smoking jacket Did people actually wear smoking jackets anymore? It seemed like such a cliche.
Ignoring my protestations to let me help, Stephanie pushed Preston’s desk chair against the back wall and stood on the chair as she removed his portrait. My eyes widened. Here was the quintessential “Princess and the Pea,” stepping onto a chair just days after giving birth. Was she disposing of Preston’s portrait now that he was dead? I wondered. Then I realized there was a wall safe behind it. She handed the painting down to me, and I set it on the floor.
Stephanie quickly worked the combination and swung open the door. Then she pressed her index fingers on the opposite corners of the safe. The back wall of the safe popped open.
“Secret compartment,” she explained, glancing over her shoulder in my direction. “My husband tried to hide things from me. As if.” She reached into the compartment and removed the contents: a stack of magazines and a few papers. She closed the compartment, stepped off the chair, and set the safe’s contents on the desk. I glanced at the spines of the magazines. They were the last six editions of Between the Legs.
“Ms. Saunders?”
We both looked up. Estelle was standing in the doorway. “Michael is awake. He wants to nurse.”
“Oh.” She shot a nervous glance at me, then at the still-open safe. “Well.” She crossed the room, then patted an uncomfortable-looking chair near the door. “Sit right here while I’m gone, Estelle.” Then she looked at me, still standing by the desk. “Go ahead and look through those papers, Molly, but don’t touch anything in the safe.” Her vision darted between me and Estelle. “I’ll be right back.”
Her parting words betrayed such mistrust I couldn’t help but smile. Estelle rolled her eyes and returned my smile. Though plump, she was a pretty woman, some ten years older than me. “Darn it,” I said. “If only she hadn’t left you to watch me. I was planning on stealing her blind.”
Estelle laughed.
I studied the paper on top of the stack of magazines, which was a bank statement. The beginning balance was a little over twelve thousand dollars, and the final balance was over fifteen thousand. There were three deposits in the amount of one thousand dollars, each made a week to ten days before Preston died.
I looked at the sheet of paper underneath the bank statement. It was a contract detailing the terms of Preston’s bet among him and three other men. In a messy scrawl, it specified that Preston had to supply indisputable proof (misspelled in the document as “indesuptable proof”) that he’d won the contest by next June; otherwise he would lose the bet and have pay each of them a thousand dollars.
Because they had paid him, they had apparently agreed that his published photograph under the pseudonym Mike Masters was “indesuptable.” All four men had signed it. The names meant nothing to me; I jotted them down on a sheet of memo paper from the desk and pocketed it. Hank Mueller had apparently penned the contract, judging by his signature. The two other names were Richard Worthington and Chase Groves.
Maybe one of these three men had killed Preston and had concocted this whole STOP thing to disguise his real motive. Among the remaining papers was a document about the post office box number, which matched the address label on the magazines. The other papers were bank statements from the same account, which had been opened with ten thousand dollars a year ago. I scanned the statements, but nothing noteworthy jumped out at me. There were a few deposits and withdrawals most months, but no particular patterns that might indicate blackmail or that he was trying to squirrel away large sums of money.
I picked up the magazines by their spines, flipped through them, then shook each one, hoping something would fall out. Nothing. Not even one of those annoying advertisements on postcards. I then started to flip through one of the magazines, but stopped when I got grossed out by photos of a woman having an unnatural relationship with a beer bottle.
Had Preston really devoted a whole compartment in his safe just to this? A stack of dirty magazines and bank statements for one personal checking account?
I glanced over at Estelle, who looked half asleep, and tried to assess whether or not she’d want to give me, a total stranger, information about her employer. She’d been hired as a nurse, but was being used by Stephanie as her maid and girl Friday. If this were me, I’d not only want to blab, but to start vicious rumors.
“Estelle, have you seen Stephanie open this safe before now?”
Her face lit up. “Just the one time. Right after that red-headed police officer left here last Friday. She was going through—”
“Here’s my little angel boy,” Stephanie announced as she waltzed into the library carrying Michael. “He’s asleep again, but I thought you’d like a chance to hold him before I had Estelle put him down.”
Quite unwittingly, my voice shot up a couple of octaves as I spoke admiringly to him and held his warm little body. That didn’t used to happen to my voice. I hadn’t squeaked or cooed even once the first time I visited my future in-laws and held Jim’s new nephew, who peed on me. But as a mother, I found it impossible not to be enchanted by the presence of a newborn.
A minute or two later, I allowed Estelle to take the baby away. My usual non-squeaking voice promptly returned as I showed Stephanie the handwritten contract and said, “These are the names of the men who bet Preston he couldn’t win the contest. Do you recognize any of them?”
“I barely know any of them, but they were all in Preston’s regular golf foursome. They played eighteen holes every Tuesday afternoon, even in atrocious weather.”
This was a Tuesday, and the weather was reasonably nice. Perhaps the three men had a tee-time. Then again, knowing how unfaithful Preston had been, maybe many of those Tuesdays had been used for extracurricular activities unrelated to golf. “I was looking at the bank statements here. It does look as though Preston received payments for his bet.”
She looked at the statement, “Hmm. You’re right This was Preston’s private account where he kept his mad money.”
“It’s got fifteen thousand dollars in it. You consider that mad money? That could cheer most people up in a hurry.”
She shrugged. “He withdrew ten thousand dollars in cash from the account the morning he died. I found the withdrawal slip in his pocket.”
“Why did you search his pockets?”
After a brief hesitation, she flicked a wrist and said casually, “I really don’t know. I guess old habits die hard.”
“What did Tommy say about the missing money?”
“I didn’t tell him. I think it was a payoff to Tiffany’s boyfriend to compel him to leave her alone.”
“Why wouldn’t you want Tommy to know that?”
“It looked bad for Tiffany, obviously. If she found out that Preston had given Cherokee ten-thousand dollars to keep away from her, she might have come home in a rage and shot him.”
“I know that having her father payoff her boyfriend would be deeply hurtful, but I still don’t understand how you can possibly believe that Tiffany would resort to murder.”
Stephanie narrowed her eyes, not answering, and I had the chilling realization that I knew nothing about Tiffany’s behavior at home. Maybe, all along, I’d resisted taking too close a look at Tiffany because she was someone I had trusted my children with.
Pushing that thought away for the time being, I continued, “I would think she’d have been more angry at her boyfriend for accepting the money. Did you ask Cherokee if he’d gotten money from your husband?”
“Yes, and he denies it.”
“So what makes you think—”
“What else could Preston have done with the money? I checked his wallet and his pockets. There was no money on him at all when he died. And the time stamp on the withdrawal slip indicated he’d gone to the bank and driven straight home. The only scenario that makes sense is, while I was in the bathtub, he paid someone off, who shot him. It must have been Cherokee. Who else would have wanted to kill someone over a measly ten thousand dollars?”
“People have been killed for a pair of athletic shoes. Ten thousand isn’t measly to most people in this world.”
Somehow I had to get a tee-time at the country club, preferably with Preston’s former golf partners. But as a mother, my priorities were steadfastly focused on my children. For me to be able to golf this afternoon, they needed someone to watch them. So I drove to school, signed in at the office, and dropped in on Karen’s class.
As soon as I stepped inside the doorway, Karen leaped up from her nearby desk and gave me a hug, which, given her stature, meant she wrapped her arms around my waist. Her wispy, light brown hair now looked decidedly wind-blown, but she was the prettiest girl in the world in my eyes, now and always. Lauren’s daughter, Rachel, also ran up to me to show me the tooth that had popped out during music class.
Their teacher was roughly my age, a delightful woman whose wild curls and messy desk could give the false impression that she was a scatterbrain. The antithesis of Nathan’s teacher, she greeted me with enthusiasm and encouraged me to stay and type up a couple more of her students’ stories, which we would then bind as keepsakes for each of them.
By a lucky coincidence, Karen told me she’d been invited to her friend Katie’s house. I gave her my permission to go and said I’d call Katie’s mom from the office as soon as I’d finished my typing.
Now I just needed to arrange for Nathan to go to his friend Jon’s house, which wouldn’t be difficult because Jon’s mom would arrive shortly to walk Jon home from morning kindergarten, and she would remember her son had been at our house for the boys’ last three get-togethers. Plus, during his last visit, Jon had managed to roll the bottom portion of a snow man through the back door and into our formal dining room. In other words, the woman owed me.
One of the perks of Jim’s “temporary” assignment was a year’s pass to the Carlton Country Club. After a brief search, I found the card with his membership number in Jim’s nightstand, along with other ID cards he often kept in his wallet.
Both Jim and I love to golf, but this was an individual pass only, no family members. In fact, Jim loves golf so much that I’d once accused him of accepting this assignment purely because of the golf pass. He gallantly offered to let me use the pass instead of him…proof positive that my accusation was correct and I’d hit a nerve.
Now I needed to take Jim up on that offer.
I called the club and learned that there was a tee-time for a threesome at two this afternoon under the name Mueller. I told the scheduler I was a single and he put me down to join the Mueller threesome. I was all set, except for one thing: my conscience bothered me. Jim had apparently left his golf pass at home by mistake. My taking it without his knowledge was deceitful. I had to tell Jim what I was up to. I called his office.
“Hi, Jim?”
“Uh-oh. I hate it when you greet me that way. That little lilt to your voice when you say ‘Jim’ always means you’re going to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”
Time for a strategy change, to ease slowly into the subject of where I’d be this afternoon. “That shows what you know. I was just calling to say I love you.”
“I love you, too. And?”
“And…” Damn! My mind was blank! “I ran over a camel on the Northway. It was going south in the northbound lane.”
“What? Are you trying to tell me you wrecked the car?”
“Kidding.” Babbling, actually. “The car’s fine. I just wanted to tell you I was taking you up on your offer to use your pass to the Carlton Country Club.”
There was a pause. Knowing Jim, he was probably searching his wallet for his golf card right about now. He said, “But the weather is finally getting nice. In six months now, I haven’t been able to use that pass even once. I was hoping to get out there today myself. Besides, you said they were all a bunch of snobs and you’d rather play on the public course.”
“No, all I said was that I didn’t want to belong to any club in which the Saunderses were members.”
“You’re hoping to investigate the murder, using my pass to get in, aren’t you? Molly, where’s my card? It’s not in my wallet.”
My stomach knotted. I shouldn’t have called. My reasons for being willing to go to these lengths to find the killer were too complicated to relay in a two-minute phone conversation. “It must be around the house.
When I find it, I’ll give it back to you by, say, Saturday?”
“By, say, tomorrow, you’re going to be on a flight to Florida!” He hung up on me.
Chapter 11
Fore!
I knew I was out of my financial league when I drove up to the clubhouse and saw that they had a valet service. This ranked as one of the most absurd things I’d seen in a long time. Golf was a sport, after all, so theoretically golfers should expect to get some exercise. Being spared a walk across the parking lot was tantamount to taking an elevator to use a stair-stepper at a gym.
I pretended I didn’t see the valet signs and parked at the far end of the lot, only to have a young, muscular man decked out in white pants and a bright yellow monogrammed shirt follow me in a golf cart and offer to help me get my clubs out of the trunk. When I declined, he gave me a look of disgust and said, “You do have a tee-time here at the Carlton Country Club, right?” His expression grew even more disgusted as he eyed my inexpensive bag and clubs. “Some people get us confused with the public course across town.”
I slung the strap of my bag over my shoulder. “Oh, I’m pretty sure this is the right place. This is the course with the cute little windmills and bridges, isn’t it?”
He widened his eyes. “You’re thinking of the putt-putt course on Route Nine.”
“Oh, well, just the same, I’d better check in with the starter. I have a two o’clock tee-time.”
When I tried to walk past him, he backed the cart directly into my path, then glanced at his phone screen. “Are you Masters?”
“Yes.”
“Get in. We have mandatory cart rentals. Your playing partners haven’t arrived yet. You’ll share this cart.”
Apparently use of the valet service was also mandatory.
He glared at me the entire time I loaded my bag onto the back and barely waited for me to sit down before taking off. I regretted my earlier sarcastic reply. Alienating staff members was a lousy start to learning about Preston’s foursome, and I had jeopardized my marital bliss just to come here and help a woman I disliked intensely.
Death Comes to Suburbia (Book 2 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 12