Oh, sure, I told myself. Tempt Tommy to arrest me as an accomplice. But, there was no place better to start rehashing possible overlooked clues than by talking to Stephanie. “Come on in.” I scanned the empty street for police vehicles before shutting the door.
She hung up her London Fog overcoat on the brass rack on the entranceway wall, and we settled into seats in the living room. Stephanie was not the sort of person simply to drop in on anyone, least of all me, without an ulterior motive. Nonetheless, I went through the ordinary motions of offering her something to drink and asking about the baby, determined to let her settle in and then glean as much information from her as possible. In the meantime, Karen gave one peek down the stairs, saw it was only Stephanie and not a friend of hers, and went back to her room and shut the door.
“Have you talked to Tommy lately?” Stephanie asked.
“Why do you ask?” I responded, avoiding the question.
“Just a feeling. He’s going to arrest me, isn’t he?”
“Is he?”
She picked some lint off the armrest of her chair. “That’s twice now you’ve answered me with another question. That’s not like you. You’re usually so blunt.”
“Am I?” I asked automatically, then shrugged in apology. “I’m turning over a new leaf.”
“Well, turn it back,” she snapped. “It’s annoying and I’m in a hurry. Who killed my husband?”
Surprised at the unexpected question, I answered simply, “I don’t know.”
In a rare display of frazzled nerves, she pounded the tops of her thighs and cried, “Then think, damn it! I don’t want to get arrested! Tell me what your best clues are.”
Not wanting to repeat the awful scene at the Saunderses’ house when I’d allowed Tiffany to overhear, I excused myself, summoned Karen, and insisted she play out in the backyard with her brother. When the sliding glass door was safely closed behind them, I returned to the living room and reclaimed my seat.
“I don’t know who killed Preston,” I admitted to Stephanie. “Just as soon as something starts to make sense, it winds up only making everything more confusing. So be straight with me. Why did you search Preston’s pockets?”
“I’m minutes away from getting arrested, Molly. You’re wasting my precious time.” She rolled her eyes. “The truth is…” She averted her gaze. “He was leaving me for another woman. He’d told me he would stick around to help me through the birth, but that afterwards he would file for a divorce.”
I was completely taken aback, though now I chastised myself that I should have known. It went a long way toward explaining Stephanie’s hard-heartedness regarding Preston’s death. “Who was the other woman?”
Though her cheeks were flushed and she fidgeted with a cuticle, her voice was steady as she said, “I still don’t know. That’s why I was searching his pockets. I thought if I could find a name or phone number in his pocket, I’d also find out who killed him…an angry husband or jilted lover.”
“But you told me his last word was ‘Tiffany.’ That you were afraid she might have done it. Why would you have immediately decided the killer was actually his mistress’s lover?”
She flicked her hand at me impatiently. “Okay, okay. So I told you one little fib. I never really suspected Tiffany. She’s the main beneficiary of Preston’s estate, once she’s of age.”
Preston was probably afraid for her life.”
“You lied about suspecting your own daughter just to get me to help you?”
“Yes, I lied to you. I’m sorry. There. All better?”
“No! You owe one hell of an apology to Tiffany!”
She pursed her lips.
To prevent myself from slapping her, I dug my fingers into the cushions of the couch and gritted my teeth. “What about the bank withdrawal slip for ten thousand dollars? Did you lie about that, too?”
“Of course not. Why would I lie about something like that?”
I counted to ten, then asked, “And you really did ask Cherokee if Preston had paid him off?”
“Yes, and he was quite indignant about it. He denied that he would ever have accepted money to stop seeing our daughter. I believe him. Especially because Preston had been trying to hide money from me. He’d probably withdrawn the ten thousand intending to get it to his girlfriend, but the killer stole it.”
“So you don’t have any idea who the other woman is?”
She shook her head. “Frankly, at first I thought it was you.”
“Me?” I shrieked. “Why would you think such a ridiculous thing?”
“I found a long, straight brown hair on his jacket, so I knew she was a brunette. He’d refused to tell me, claiming I’d freak out if I heard who it was. So you were the brunette person it would have bothered me the most to have run off with my husband.”
That was either a backhanded compliment or a front-handed insult, but I chose to ignore its implications. “Well, you were absolutely wrong. I would never cheat on Jim. Certainly not with Preston. I didn’t even like him.”
“I realize that now.”
“Now? When exactly did you stop suspecting me of being the other woman?”
She blushed and said quietly, “Shortly after you came to my house. You showed no emotional reaction to seeing Preston’s body. I knew then you couldn’t possibly have been in love with him.”
“So you really called me over there to find out if I was his lover?”
She gazed out the window for a moment, stalling for time, trying to compose herself. In a sad voice, she quietly began, “Molly, you have to understand. Here I was, my husband of sixteen years about to leave me. An hour after he’d supposedly left for work, I’m in the tub for fifteen minutes when I hear shots, rush downstairs, and there he is, dead on the floor. There was no doubt in my mind who the prime suspect was going to be. I had gone to sleep every night for months fantasizing about killing him.”
She leaned toward me and met my gaze. “I desperately needed help. If I’d told you the truth about everything, you’d have just suspected me, too. So once I realized you weren’t his mistress, I told you the fib about Tiffany, hoping you’d uncover something. But it didn’t work.” She burst into tears. “M-mm-molly, oh, Molly! I’m going to go to jail! To jail! Me! For a murder I didn’t commit!”
I groaned, still knowing in my heart that despite her life-long pattern of lies, obfuscations, and half-truths, Stephanie did not kill Preston. I rose, grabbed a box of tissues from the kitchen counter, and handed it to her. She blew her nose, then curled her lip at the tissue and glanced at the brand name on the bottom of the box then set it on my coffee table with a look of disgust.
The woman was truly amazing. Faced with the prospect of being whisked off to prison at any moment, she still had the time and moxie to be disdainful about the quality of my facial tissues. I paced, trying to block out my annoyance so I could think. Long, straight brown hair. That let out Preston’s ex-girlfriend Lindsay, and Emma Groves.
“The morning Preston died,” I said, “he came over here and showed me the magazine. He told me he was on his way to work.”
Stephanie nodded. “I didn’t know anything about the magazine at that time. I assumed he was already at his office.”
“So why would he suddenly withdraw ten thousand dollars and return to his house? Maybe someone was blackmailing him, someone who’d arranged to meet him there, then killed him. Is it possible he was being blackmailed?”
“Yes. It would be impossible for me to tell from his financial records. As I said, he was moving money all over the place, trying to hide it before the divorce. But if it was blackmail money, Molly, why kill him? Why kill the goose laying the golden eggs?”
I sat down on the couch again. “Maybe it was someone whose primary intention was to kill him, and just hoped to get some money from him first. Someone to whom ten thousand dollars would seem like an enormous sum. Like his former girlfriend, the waitress at the club.”
Stephanie’s expression changed to
one of pure shock. “What former girlfriend?”
“Lindsay, the woman who had Preston’s baby when they were teenagers. She could have overheard about the—”
“Whatever are you talking about, Molly?”
“Don’t you know that Preston fathered a child when he was a teenager?”
“That’s absurd,” she scoffed, accentuating her words with a toss of her hair. “Who told you that?”
“His sister. Sabrina Mueller.”
“She’s lying. Preston couldn’t have fathered anyone’s child. He was sterile.”
Astounded, I muttered only, “What?”
“We tried for years to have a baby. Eventually, when Preston finally agreed to see a fertility expert, we learned the problem was with his sperm count. We spent thousands of dollars on artificial inseminations with Preston’s sperm that failed. So finally we used an anonymous donor, and that’s how Michael was conceived. As a matter of fact,” she continued, her features tightening with anger, “that was something Preston pointed out to me. I asked him how he could leave me when I was about to have our baby. He said that ‘it’ wasn’t really his baby anyway.” Her eyes filled with tears and she said evenly, “So trust me on this one, Molly. Preston has not fathered any children, let alone illegitimate ones.”
I let this information sink in for a minute, thinking I needed a chart to keep track of who had what child with whom. Claiming ‘it’ wasn’t his child after Stephanie had endured countless fertility procedures! No wonder Stephanie wasn’t forthcoming with the truth about her relationship with Preston. No wonder she could waltz through her kitchen without a second thought about her husband’s death. At the moment, I agreed completely with what Emma Groves had said earlier this afternoon: Preston got exactly what he deserved.
But was this the whole truth? Or had Stephanie returned to her typical creative augmentation of facts? Thinking out loud, I muttered, “It seems strange to me that his own sister didn’t know that Preston was sterile.”
“There was never a lot of communication in that family. The Saunderses are not exactly the Waltons. That may be news to you, but it certainly isn’t to me.”
Karen slid open the back door and called, “Um, Mom? Nathan hammered a board to the deck. And we—”
“It was an accident!” Nathan cried, on the verge of tears.
“We can’t get it off,” Karen continued.
Happy to attend to a fixable matter, I deserted Stephanie in favor of my parents’ deck. At first try, I was unable to pull up the board. I lectured Nathan that he’d broken our rules about using only preapproved nails on preapproved boards and had damaged the deck Grandpa had built.
Nathan, however, cut me off and handed me the hammer. “Here,” he sobbed. “Hit me in the head with the hammer. I’m the stupidest person in the whole world. You should put me on time-out for the rest of my life!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Nathan! You’re not stupid, you just used bad judgment. You may lose hammering privileges as a result, but you’ll be allowed to leave your room.” He put himself on time-out, marching tearfully past Stephanie and Karen in the living room, then up the stairs. I called after him, “It’s not that bad, you know. If worse comes to worse, we can always build a permanent picnic table on that spot.”
He slammed the door.
Stephanie, who’d been watching all of this without comment, now rose. “Well, I should be going.” She smiled at Karen. “Sorry I kept your mom tied up for so long. How’s school going?”
“Fine.”
Stephanie nodded, then turned to me. Her eyes brimmed with tears, yet she smiled. “It’s time for me to go home and let myself be you-know-whated by you-know-who. I’m truly sorry for all that I’ve put you through the last two weeks. Thank you for your help. I’m sure you tried your best.”
I felt so sorry for her. Despite Stephanie’s plethora of faults, she was innocent and shouldn’t be going to jail. I rose, too, and my strangest moment to date, I gave Stephanie a heart-felt hug, which she returned. Then she composed herself and left. Karen, who’d been watching all of this with great interest, looked up at me as I shut the front door. With wide eyes, she asked, “Is Tommy Sergeant going to arrest Tiffany’s mom?”
“I’m afraid so, sweetie.”
“Did she kill Tiffany’s father?”
“No.”
“Then how come she’s getting arrested?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
Karen, showing no signs of her brother’s relentless persistence, let that answer suffice. I turned my energy away from her and to resolving Nathan’s current crisis. I carefully pried the board off the deck. The resulting nail holes were barely visible. His recent behavior of coming down harder on himself than I would as authority figure was a relative new one on me. This was one of those times I wished there were an eight-hundred number with a parenting adviser at my disposal.
By the time I went upstairs, Nathan had stopped crying but was curled up in bed, his pale green comforter pulled over his head. I told him his time-out was over, that he was “hanging up his hammer” till further notice, and that we’d help him fill the holes on the deck and write a letter to his grandparents explaining what happened.
Half a minute later, an inspiration hit me. I grabbed the portable phone and locked myself in the bathroom for some privacy while I called our family doctor’s office. I told the receptionist I had to ask Dr. Harris an urgent question, and that I would hold for however long it took till he could get to the phone. After a few minutes, he got on the line and I asked, “Is it possible for a man to become sterile after he’s already fathered a child?”
“Certainly, that’s possible.” His voice sounded deeply concerned. “There are some…sexually transmitted diseases, for example, that can lead to sterility in certain circumstances.”
“Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”
“How’s Jim?”
“He’s fine. No STDs. I’ll let you get back to your patients now.”
I hung up and quickly dialed next door. She answered.
“Lauren. Thank God you’re home. Can you watch Nathan and Karen for an hour or so?”
“Sure. What’s up?”
“I’m going to go speak to a waitress named Lindsay at the Carlton Country Club. I have a hunch she may be Preston’s killer.”
“You’re not going to go talk to the murderer! Molly, for God’s sake! Have Tommy go to the club and talk to this woman!”
“He won’t listen to me after I just cried wolf about someone else I erroneously suspected. And I don’t even know for sure that this person really is Preston’s ex-lover, let alone his murderer. Besides, I’ll be at the country club, where there’s a zillion people around.”
“What if you’re right about her and she takes you hostage?”
“With what weapon? Her tray? She’ll be waitressing.”
She let out a long sigh. “Send the kids on over. But call me as soon as you know everything’s all right.”
I thanked her, then called Jim. I got his machine and left a message that I was going to the Carlton Country Club and would be home in less than an hour. I then rifled through my purse for my cellphone. The battery was dead.
My thoughts raced ahead of me as I drove to the club. Lindsay may or may not have given birth to Preston’s child. If the father had been someone else, she may have tried to con the Saunders family into believing otherwise for money. Either way, having overheard the men making their bet on my cartoon, she might have hatched a plot to exact her final, ultimate revenge.
It all began to make sense to me as I pulled into the entrance. By framing his golf buddies, Lindsay would get back not only at Preston, but also at the rich country-club members she so disdained.
The lot was surprisingly full, considering the weather conditions. Despite this, the valet service was operating, though the valets wore clear plastic ponchos over their uniforms. Once again I drove past the service and parked. And once again the same young man
met me in a golf cart.
I decided not to waste any time and quickly got into the seat. He grinned and said, “Hey, if it isn’t Ms. Masters. How’s B.O. doing?”
“He’s fine, thanks.” Someday, probably soon, my poor, dear husband will have some perfect stranger come lip to him and say, “Hey, B.O. Is your VD all cleared up?” Then Jim would kill me, and Tommy would have a whole new murder case to investigate. “I don’t have a tee-time, I just need to speak to the waitress who took care of our table Tuesday afternoon.”
“Tuesday afternoon?” he repeated, stopping our cart at the awning that covered the length of the front walkway. “You mean Lindsay Mintoff?”
“Yes. Is she a friend of yours?”
He shook his head. “You’re not going to find her here. She quit last night.”
“Really? Why?”
He shrugged and said, “Claimed she got a better job someplace else.”
I got out of the cart, saying, “Maybe I can speak to the manager and get her phone number.”
“We don’t give out employees’ numbers or addresses. Corporate policy.”
That policy might not cover former employees, I said to myself. “Huh. Oh, well. I’ll just use the bathroom, then. Thanks for the lift.”
I dashed into the restaurant and asked the bartender for a phone book. In a town this size, how many Mintoffs could there be?
According to the local directory, the answer was none. Then I looked through The Capital District Directory and found an L. Mintoff listed as living in downtown Schenectady. I jotted down her phone number, now chiding myself for not having my cellphone.
I heard footsteps behind me. An instant later, a deep voice boomed, “Well, look who’s here. Ms. Molly Masters.”
I turned. It was Richard Worthington, who was weaving so badly he looked like he was trying to navigate one of his own private Seven Seas. He was wearing a red sweater, red knickerbockers, and plaid socks—a drunken, beardless Santa Claus out for a round of golf.
“I was s’posed to be golfing today,” he explained with a goofy smile, “but the rain took care of that.”
He put a beefy hand on my shoulder. Was I supposed to sway with him or support him?
Death Comes to Suburbia (Book 2 Molly Masters Mysteries) Page 22