The Decorator Who Knew Too Much

by Diane Vallere

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I had one chance at the element of surprise. I took a deep breath and screamed as loud as I could.

  The gun went off. Hudson cried out. The sports car shuddered with the impact of a bullet. A figure dressed in black ran from the side of the crane toward the line of houses.

  I ran to Hudson and dropped down next to him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” he said. “The bullet nicked my arm and went into the car. Did you call the police?”

  “My handbag is missing from the car. I think whoever shot you stole it.”

  “My phone’s in my pocket. Can you get to it?”

  I felt down the outside of his jeans pockets until I located the rectangular outline of his phone, and then reached my hand in wriggled it around until my fingers closed around it. He gave me a feeble smile.

  “Is that what you wanted?” I asked, keeping my tone light.

  “It’s a nice bonus,” he said. He smiled, but I could tell the effort hurt.

  The screen of his phone was shattered. “It’s dead,” I said.

  “Get to Emma’s and call the cops. I’ll be okay. Go.”

  I stood up and took two steps away from him and then doubled back. “I won’t leave you.”

  I bent down, putting my hands under Hudson’s arms. He dug his heels into the ground and pushed, and together we moved him backward until he was up against the sports car. I grabbed the door handle and yanked it open. A tumble of papers fell out. I tried to kick them away, but one stuck to my shoe. “Get inside,” I said. “You’ll be less vulnerable than if you’re out here exposed.”

  “I’m good. You have to go.”

  I dropped to a squat and took his face in my hands. “I’ll be right back,” I said. I leaned forward and kissed him, and then, just as my knee screamed out in agony, stood up and ran toward the exterior of the closest house. I crept forward, sticking to the shadows. It wasn’t until I tripped the floodlight outside Jo’s house that I saw there was blood covering my arms, hands, and feet. Hudson’s blood.

  There was no time to spare for tears over whether or not he would be okay. The only way for me to save him was to get to the house and get help. I cut across the front of Jo’s yard and ran to Emma’s front door. It was locked. I rang the bell over and over and then pounded on the door.

  Jo’s hatchback pulled into her driveway. She turned off the lights and got out. “Madison, is that you? Is everything okay?”’

  I stood back from the door. “No, everything isn’t okay. Have you seen Jimmy or Emma? Is Heather with you?”

  “I haven’t seen anybody. I’m just getting home from the concert hall. I thought I was a mess because of the makeup, but you’re worse. What is that—chocolate?”

  I looked down at my clothes, stained dark red from my contact with Hudson after he was shot. “I need to use your phone. Can I use your phone?”

  “Sure, sure,” she said. She reached into her handbag. “My cell always gets lost in here. Hold on.”

  I walked toward her. Something was stuck to my left sneaker sole. I put my hand on the hood of her car for balance and lifted my foot to peel the paper off. It was an ad for Jo’s concert series that she’d probably dropped earlier.

  I crumpled the paper into a ball. That’s when I noticed the blood.

  This flyer hadn’t been dropped earlier. It had fallen out of the car Hudson was resting against. The blood was Hudson’s. But if the flyer had fallen out of the car, that meant the driver had been Jo.

  It had been Jo. All along, everything that had happened. Jo had been the driver. Jo had been the shooter. Jo had been the person who’d been running prescription drugs under everybody’s noses.

  Jo was a murderer. She’d killed her ex-husband. And now she’d shot Hudson.

  I glanced in the car. The keys were still dangling from the ignition column. Slowly, I looked up at her. Her face, made up in garish stage makeup, looked grotesque under the floodlights. She held her handbag in one hand, her other hand concealed by the interior. I had a feeling she wasn’t holding her cell phone.

  “Cute trick back there,” she said. “Your scream startled me just enough to make me lose aim.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’ll bleed out,” she said, as if she were talking about the odds it would rain. “I’m not much for predictions, but I don’t think the same thing is going to happen twice.”

  “Where’s Emma?”

  “Probably at the movie theater waiting on the girls. I told her to meet me there. Now she and Jimmy can waste the rest of the night pretending to get along while I wrap up things here.”

  “I thought you had a performance tonight?”

  “Sore throat,” she said. “My understudy was happy to step in. Lucky for me she left her keys in the dressing room. Not sure how happy she’ll be when she finds out about the bullet hole in the side of her car though.”

  “But your car—where did you come from?”

  “Try to keep up, would you, Madison? If you’d seen my car in my driveway earlier, you would have known I was home. I parked it at the end of the lane.”

  “And you drove back here so you could pretend to just be getting home. The stage makeup is all part of your story. You killed your ex-husband because he stood between you and the pills.”

  “I killed him because he destroyed my life. He was supposed to deliver the pills to me that morning. He had the bag and it looked full. It wasn’t until I looked inside and saw the stuffed bunny that I realized he tricked me. He weighted the bag down with buckshot. The last thing he said after taking the overdose was that Emma had the pills. Sweet little Emma who never recognized that Albert was just using her, and not for sex. He laughed in my face right before I pushed him into the river. I thought I’d take the bunny back to their house, and then play the comforting friend. Help poor Emma through her divorce. But then they have house guests—you. People going through divorce don’t suddenly get hit with the desire to be hospitable.”

  “That’s why you encouraged me—us—to get a room at the motel,” I said. “You wanted us out of the way so you could search for the drugs. You’re the one who slipped the note into my towel.”

  “Technically Benji left you the note after I told him where to find you.”

  “Did you send him to the quarry too? And to Salton to attack Jimmy and Hudson?”

  “Benji was the only one who knew I killed Albert. I told him Albert’s body was in the river and to make it disappear. Nobody counted on you seeing his face in the water or calling the police before Benji finished the job. When the police notified me of Albert’s death, I found out what they knew. You were a loose end. I told Benji to watch you, and if you made trouble, to make you disappear too. He should have taken care of you by the quarry. He told me you wandered off by yourself. Benji’s not known for his kind heart and generous nature.”

  Hearing her say with extreme calm that she’d sent thugs to our motel to kill me let me know how far gone Jo Conway really was. It also filled me with fear. Anyone who could talk about murder in such a completely detached voice was already beyond the point of having something to lose. If Jo had nothing to lose, then there was little I could do to distract her. But the image of Hudson, shot and bleeding in the construction site behind the property line, stayed with me.

  “Albert was an idiot. He had a nice little thing going, selling prescription pills on the street. But then he has a crisis of conscience and stopped. What he didn’t realize was that there’s a simple law of supply and demand. As soon as the police department declared war on drugs, drugs became a lot more valuable. Albert had amassed a lot of inventory when he was selling. He wrote bogus prescriptions and sat on a mountain of pharmaceutical samples. It wasn’t hard to drain his stash, not at first. And after I stole his prescription pad, I thought I was home free. The genius of my plan was I never got greedy. A couple of pills sold here and there
was enough to make up for his indiscretions.”

  I thought of the bags of pills Ernie Middleton had found on the side of the road. “But you did get greedy, didn’t you? I saw the bags of pills. That wasn’t a pill here and there. There were enough to mess up a lot of people.”

  “Albert figured out what I was doing and he freaked. He moved his stash. If he really wanted to fix the problem he would have destroyed all of those pills, but he wanted to be a hero. He was going to plant the pills and then be part of the bust.”

  “He hid the pills at Emma’s house,” I said. “Some in a secret compartment behind her medicine cabinet, and probably more elsewhere. She saw him from your kitchen and went over to talk. That’s why he was in such a hurry when he left. He caused our accident that first day, trying to get out of there before you noticed him. All he wanted was to keep you from getting your hands on them.”

  I’d wondered about the sheer volume of pills Ernie had found and I’d been suspicious of Emma because the pills had been in her cabinet. Albert must have hidden the prescription drugs in pill vials until he could move them. If what Jo was telling me was true, then I’d known about the pills before Emma had. The day she saw Albert at her house—the day Hudson and I arrived—must have been the day Albert realized what his ex-wife was doing. He’d gone to Emma’s house to hide the pills, but when Emma told him we were coming to stay, when she broke things off, he needed a plan B. That was the day he’d almost run us off the road. The day the bags of pills had ended up in the Middletons’ driveway. Whether he’d been planning a bait and switch all along or if the idea came to him spontaneously, we’d never know. But it looked now as though he tossed the duffel bag with the pills out of his truck when we came around the bend—possibly to recover later—and took the duffel bag with the bunny to the pier.

  “What now, Jo? Are you going to shoot me? Right here in the driveway? How are you going to explain it to your daughter when she gets home? That there’s a dead woman in front of your house? Or do you have a plan to dispose of me too?”

  I stood on the opposite side of her hatchback. Her handbag rested on the hood, and she’d relaxed both arms while answering my questions. She was distracted. It was my only chance.

  Before she could answer, I dropped to a crouch. Pain speared my knee. I yanked the door open and dove in to the car. The keys dangled from the ignition column. I flipped them and the engine caught. I jammed the car into reverse. Jo aimed the gun at the windshield. I ducked down and pressed my hand onto the gas pedal. The windshield shattered as the car lurched backward. Seconds later, it slammed into something. My head ricocheted forward and then back and the world turned black.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I opened my eyes and stared into the face of Ernie Middleton. It took a moment to realize his odd coloring was due to the blue and red lights flashing behind him. I tried to sit up and he pushed me back down.

  “Settle down, missy. Everything’s under control. You got banged up pretty good back there. Cops are taking care of things now. Medics checked you out and said you’re going to be okay. Right now, you rest.”

  “But Hudson’s out back.”

  “Your boyfriend? Nope, he’s over there talking to Officer Buchanan.” He stood up and snapped his fingers at an EMT standing nearby. “Hey! A little help over here. She’s conscious.” Ernie sat back down in a folding aluminum beach chair next to me.

  “Did I back into your car?”

  “Yep. Ever since the cops lectured me about those pills, I’ve been keeping watch on the neighborhood. Saw two cars driving like teenagers at the construction site out behind your house. I got into my own car so I could get a closer look. You came right at me. Lost a couple of years when I didn’t see anybody behind the wheel.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. I keep telling Eunice it’s time for a new car. No excuses now.”

  I closed my eyes and felt myself falling back into darkness. When I heard my name, I fought to open my eyes.

  Detective Drayton stood over me. “Ms. Night,” he said. “You’re a lucky woman.”

  I put my fingers to my forehead. The skin was tender and raised in a lump by my hairline. “What happened?”

  “Not sure anybody knows the full story. When you’re recovered, we’ll get your statement. Right now we’re going to move you to the hospital with Mr. James.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He lost some blood, but he’ll be fine.”

  “Did you catch her? Jo Conway?”

  “We took her into custody while you were out.”

  “How’d you know?” I looked at Ernie. “Did you call the police when I hit you?”

  Drayton cleared his throat. “Mr. Middleton may have had something to do with detaining Ms. Conway until we arrived, but Officer Buchanan was the one who figured it out. We were already on our way when your accident took place.”

  There was so much I didn’t know, but all I wanted was to close my eyes and go to sleep for a long, long time.

  Rocky’s cold, wet nose nudged my fingertips. I opened my eyes and stroked his fur. It took a moment to realize that I was in the guest bedroom of Jimmy and Emma’s house. I woke naturally, not screaming over memories or groggy from drugs. Mortiboy was on the opposite side of my legs from Rocky, his paws curled up underneath him and his black kitty head resting on my calf. His eyes were closed and the smooth fur of his body raised and dropped evenly. If there was a scrapbook of cherished moments from our lives waiting for us in Heaven, I sure hoped a photo of this would be included.

  “Hey, Lady,” Hudson said. I turned my head and smiled. He rested against the door frame, the man in black surrounded by white molding. A white bandage protruded from underneath the sleeve of his right bicep. “Looks like your trouble with sleep is over. I was starting to wonder if it was going to take a kiss from a prince to wake you up.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt, just to be on the safe side,” I said. “Come here.”

  Hudson crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. Mortiboy opened his eyes and raised his head. Hudson ran his hand over his cat, and then picked up my hand and held it. He bent down and kissed me gently.

  “You going to make it?”

  “I will now,” I said. “Can you tell me what happened? The detective said Buchanan was the one who figured it out. How? And how did they know you were behind the houses? Where did Jimmy go? And Benji. Did they catch him too?”

  “Whoa, slow down. There’s plenty of time for all of your questions.”

  “Humor me. Right now there’s not much more I can do other than ask questions.”

  “You’ve got a point.” He gingerly touched my forehead and eased his hand down the side of my face. He ran his thumb back and forth over my lips and I kissed it, then raised my hand and moved it away.

  “Stop trying to distract me,” I said.

  He laughed. “Okay. Understand this is a Frankenstein version of the story because I’ve had to piece it together from a whole lot of sources. Nobody knows the whole thing.”

  “Understood.”

  “Jo must have jumped out of the car after reaching the construction site. She thought you were the one driving—that you were the one she was aiming at. When you screamed from right next to her, you took her by surprise. She lost her aim and the bullet only grazed me.”

  “I know what happened after that. After I left you, I ran to the house to call for help. Jimmy was gone and their house was locked up. I was about to break in when Jo pulled in next door. If I had broken in and called the cops, none of this would have happened.”

  “If you had broken in and called the cops, she would have gotten away.”

  “She admitted to everything,” I said. “She killed her husband. She sent Benji to scare me at the quarry and to jump you and Jimmy in Salton. Dr. Hall had the stuffed bunny in his duffel bag instead of the pills. He fille
d the bag with buckshot so it would appear heavy and full. After Jo killed him, she took the bunny. She thought it would be a good excuse to get back into the house to search for the pills. She put the threatening note in my towel. The day Heather was in the park, that was all orchestrated by Jo to get Emma out of the house, but then I showed up and ruined her plan.”

  He stroked the side of my face again. “You sure you want to talk about this?”

  I nodded. “I want closure,” I said. I rearranged myself as best as I could, sitting up against the pillows. “Detective Drayton said something about Buchanan figuring everything out. How?”

  “He said he kept thinking about the day he came over with Rock, the day Heather was missing. Emma said Jo usually picked up the girls, but Jo said she pulled Gina out of school early so she could get to rehearsal. Buchanan checked with the orchestra. There was no rehearsal that day. He went back to the school to question the vice principal, who said it wasn’t prearranged like Jo said. Jo showed up and pulled Gina out of the middle of her last class.”

  “You and Jimmy got into that fight in Salton. She wasn’t counting on that. She had to do damage control—keep us from asking questions about you by making up a bigger threat with Heather.”

  I’d wondered about that day. I’d brought it up to Tex, right before I told him I didn’t trust Buchanan. And Buchanan was the one who followed up on the detail and saved us all.

  “What about the truck by the river?”

  “The SUV was rented to Dr. Hall. Nobody knows the truth, but it looks like he might have jammed those keys between the pier slats himself to draw attention to the car, just like you thought.”

  “But it didn’t work. If I had never noticed the keys, the car would have been impounded within a week. That’s what Lora told me.” I closed my eyes and thought about the park ranger and how she’d told little Heather she was lucky not to have an older brother. “Lora, the park ranger—she was Benji’s sister, wasn’t she?”