Gilley grinned, clearly happy with his call to bring the coffee cake. “I made it from scratch,” he told her. “It’s a recipe from my pastry class.”
Sunny smiled eagerly and moved to the cupboards to grab three dessert plates and a knife. We waited while she portioned out a piece for all of us and then handed out forks. I had a sneaking suspicion she was stalling a little because the topic of conversation frightened her, and I felt bad for bringing this to her, but I also knew she might be the key to developing a pool of suspects.
After waiting for her to take a bite (and roll her eyes up with an appreciative moan, which pleased Gilley no end), I got us back on track.
“So, as I was saying, Greta kills for a reason. Not for pleasure or sport. So what I’m wondering is: what was the reason she had for killing Lenny?” I asked Sunny.
She opened her eyes again as she chewed her bite of coffee cake and stared at me with concern. “I have no idea.”
I believed her. I also believed that Lenny had had a hit put out on her, and maybe there was someone in this town who’d gotten away with murder.
“Sunny, I want to ask you something and I’m hoping you’ll be totally honest with me, and also, maybe you’ll do us a kindness and not tell your brother that we were asking about his ex-wife’s murder,” I said next.
“If you need me to keep this conversation from him, I have no problem with that,” Sunny reassured me. “He’d only get all worked up about it anyway. And of course I’ll be honest, Cat. Go ahead, ask me your question.”
I reached out and squeezed her hand in gratitude. I genuinely adored Sunny. “Thank you. What I wanted to ask is do you think it’s possible that Lenny had an enemy who was willing to pay to have her murdered?”
Sunny’s jaw fell open. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Gilley said.
Sunny’s eyes blinked rapidly. “I . . . I can’t imagine it,” she said. “Lenny was such a well-liked, gentle soul. She didn’t have any enemies that I know of. And I can’t even fathom why anyone would want to hurt her, much less kill her.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you for that. Now let me ask another hard question. Do you think Lenny could’ve had some connection to organized crime?”
Sunny barked out a laugh. “You’re joking, right?”
“No. I’m not. Greta worked for the Chechen mafia. She was their contract killer, and we know she was responsible for Tony Holland’s death and she was also awarded the contract for Heather Holland too. All that’s to say that the work she did here in East Hampton was mostly for money.”
“You think someone put a hit out on Lenny?” Sunny said, her eyes wide and disbelieving.
I looked her in the eye as I answered. “I’m saying it’s possible. But, you were her sister-in-law, and besides your brother, probably one of the closest people to her. Was there ever a time when you might’ve thought there was something off about her business?”
Sunny bent at the waist again and set her elbows on the counter to rock her hips side to side while she thought about my question. “No,” she said at last. “Lenny was on the level. She was an honest person. In fact, I’d known her since we were all eighteen, and I’d never known Lenny to lie. Like, not even a white lie. She’d tell you the truth to your face and if that made you upset, she was okay with that because she liked to live her truth every day of her life. Which is also why she and Steve broke up when they did.”
“What do you mean?” Gilley asked.
“Well, Lenny was super honest with herself. And, when things started getting rough between the two of them, she told him she was having doubts about their compatibility. He took it a little too personally, and instead of trying to work through the issue, he told her to go if she wasn’t happy. So she did.”
“Yikes,” Gilley said, mirroring my thoughts. Tom and I had at least attempted to work through our issues, but I just couldn’t get past his affair with the bartender from his country club.
Sunny held her palms up like, what’re you gonna do? “In the end, Steve was offered up a valuable lesson, I think. Even if he chose not to learn it then, he was still given a chance to understand what it means to hang in there and fight for a relationship.”
I suddenly understood why Sunny was hanging on to her own dysfunctional marriage so determinedly. She’d seen what’d happened between her brother and Lenny, and she’d be damned if she’d make the same mistake of quitting before giving it everything she had. It made me feel even more sympathetic to her, and I was, in that moment, very glad we’d dropped by for the visit. Even if we did have an ulterior motive.
“So you genuinely don’t believe that Lenny had any connections to anyone nefarious or suspicious in their business dealings?” I asked again.
“No way. Lenny was married to a cop for fifteen years. She definitely wouldn’t have entangled herself in anything like that.”
“Was she dating anybody else when she was murdered?” Gilley asked.
Sunny sighed. It was a sad sound. “No. She was totally focused on her career. I tried to encourage her to get back out there—that was around the time that Darius and I were thinking about having kids, but Lenny was hesitant to start a new relationship, and at the time she was murdered, I couldn’t help but feel she was at the loneliest point of her life.”
“Oh,” Gilley said. “That’s so sad.”
“It was,” Sunny agreed.
“Was there anything else going on in Lenny’s life that maybe hit you as strange?” I asked next.
Sunny stood up and put a hand on her lower back while she stretched and rubbed her belly with her free hand. “Not really. Lenny was just living her life, Cat. I swear. She’d recently opened up her own realty practice, and she was putting a ton of effort into making that work.”
Then I thought of something. “Real estate commissions around here can be worth a pretty penny, Sunny. Do you think Lenny could’ve been murdered because someone saw her as the competition?”
Lenny shrugged and shook her head. “Anything’s possible. Especially in the Hamptons’ real estate market, which is pretty cutthroat from what I hear.”
Following up on that statement, I asked, “Did she ever mention any issues with other real estate agents?”
“Oh, yeah, all the time!” Sunny said. “I mean, those bitches were bitches if you get my drift. Lenny had a dozen stories about the unprofessionalism of other agents, but to my recollection, nothing that seemed threatening or even overly alarming.”
“So, nothing bad or suspicious was going on in her life at the time of her murder, huh?” I said.
“Nope. Just the opposite, actually. She’d just moved into a really cool new condo on the ocean and she was getting ready to close a huge sale that was going to bring her a commission big enough to completely cover the cost of the major renovation project she had planned.”
“Huh,” Gilley said. “What happens to the sale on your house when your agent suddenly passes away?”
I looked at Gilley in surprise. What kind of a question was that?
“In Lenny’s case, her partner took over and the Reynolds sale went through, which was fortunate, because the buyers’ agent was an idiot and nearly bungled the whole thing.”
“How do you know all that?” Gilley asked curiously.
“Cordelia Reynolds is Darius’s cousin.” Darius D’Angelo was Sunny’s husband. “I actually put Lenny and Cordelia together when she told me that she was thinking of selling her home.”
“So, Lenny had a partner?” I asked. This was the first time I’d heard that.
“Yes. Chanel Downey.”
Gilley made a note in his iPhone, while Sunny moved over to cut another piece of coffee cake, offering the slice to us. I declined but Gilley nodded.
“Chanel’s a sweet girl. You’d like her,” Sunny said, heading back over to the coffee cake to slice another sliver for herself.
“How long had they been partners?” I asked.
“Only two years. C
hanel was Lenny’s protégée when they were at the other realty office. Lenny knew she could hold onto her entire commission if she started her own office, so she and Chanel got their brokerage license at the same time and became partners.”
“Is Chanel still selling real estate around here?”
Sunny shook her head. “She moved back to Connecticut right after closing on Cordelia’s house to be closer to her family . . . her grandmother lives there, I think.”
Gilley made a face. “Hard to believe the sale went through when someone was murdered in that home. You couldn’t pay me to buy a house where someone was murdered.”
Sunny shook her head. “Lenny wasn’t shot in the Reynolds place. She was murdered in another house in Apaquogue. She was there to host an open house that day so she was there alone when she was murdered.”
“I’m assuming your brother checked out the people who owned that home?” I said.
“You mean to make sure they didn’t have any mafia connections and Lenny’s murder was simply a case of mistaken identity? Yes, he checked out that lead, but that house was owned by an elderly woman whose husband had recently passed away from natural causes. And as much as Steve wanted to find something suspicious about them to maybe point to a motive or a reason why the Angel of Death had gone there, he found nothing. The old man had been a prominent heart surgeon with no known mafia connections, and the wife, who was in her eighties, had never held a job.”
“Another dead end,” Gilley said, smirking at his own pun.
“Now you see why Steve has been so haunted by Lenny’s murder,” Sunny said, ignoring Gilley’s gallows humor. “He’s looked at every angle, considered every possibility for a motive, and he keeps coming back to square one. As far as he can tell, Lenny was murdered for no reason.”
But I didn’t buy it. And I don’t really know why, other than I’d looked into Greta’s eyes and I’d seen the calculating, cold-blooded killer, but I hadn’t seen that discernable glint that was in the eyes of every serial killer I’d ever seen interviewed on TV.
No, there was a reason Lenny had died; we just didn’t know what it was yet.
I set my paper napkin on the now empty dessert plate and took note of the time via the brightly colored clock on the wall. It was getting late and we’d imposed on Sunny long enough. “We should be on our way,” I said.
Gilley got up too, making sure to scoop up both our plates and bring them over to the sink for Sunny. “Thank you, sugar. You make a delicious pot of tea.”
Sunny grinned and rubbed his shoulder in a friendly gesture. “Thanks, Gilley. And you make a delicious coffee cake.”
We saw ourselves out and as we got into the car, Sunny waved at us through the kitchen window.
Gilley waved back and said, “Do you think she’ll tell her brother about our visit?”
“No,” I said, starting the car. “Sunny’s trustworthy. She’ll honor our request to keep the conversation on the down-low.”
“She was a good resource at least,” Gil said.
“She was. Almost too good. I mean, where do we even start?”
“I think we should start at the scene of the crime, Cat.”
“You mean the house where Lenny was murdered?”
“Yeah. Maybe something will jump out at us.”
“But we don’t even know where that is. I mean, Sunny only said it was up in Apaquogue.”
Gilley wiggled his phone. “I could find it.”
I glanced over at him. “How quickly?”
Gilley began to tap at the device. “Give me two minutes.”
I drove out of Sunny’s driveway, down the street and parked on the side of the road while Gilley conducted his search. He took the two minutes plus just one minute more. “Found it,” he said. “There was a news article about Lenny’s murder and it listed the address. It’s about ten minutes from here.”
“Navigate me,” I said, getting back on the road.
We wound our way through East Hampton, heading east toward Apaquogue—a small, very expensive section of the Hamptons, with breathtaking views and real estate prices that start in the low millions but can get up into the tens of millions depending on the lot size.
“There,” Gilley said, pointing through the windshield at a three-story structure painted a steel gray with black shutters.
I looked through the glass. “That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
Easing the car over to the curb across the street from the house, I stared up at it, as Gilley did the same. It was dark save for one lit room above the garage. The window there had no curtain, and we could both see a bright light hanging from the ceiling, and the top of an easel with a canvas propped on it.
The easel was facing away from the window, so it was impossible to say what image it held, and there was no movement in the room that we could see, so it was hard to tell if the artist was at the easel painting or not.
“I wonder if anyone’s home,” I said.
“Hard to say. Someone could be up there and behind the easel, though,” Gilley said, pointing to the room above the garage.
“Makes you wonder what he or she is painting, huh?”
“My guess—it’s a fruit bowl.”
I laughed. He was probably right. “Hey,” I said to Gil. “Could you track down who lives here now?”
“I could but I’d need my laptop.”
“Good. Do that.”
“Can I ask why?” he said.
“No reason other than I’d like to be thorough. And maybe I’m a little curious about who buys a house where there was a cold-blooded murder?”
Gilley shuddered. “Someone who doesn’t believe in ghosts, that’s for sure.”
I sucked in a breath. “You don’t think that Lenny’s spirit is now haunting that house, do you?”
Gilley shrugged. “Probably not, but don’t order me to find out. I left that life behind for good.”
“How would we know, though?” I asked him.
“You’d know,” he said with another shudder.
“What if we asked Heath?”
Gilley shifted in his seat. “If Lenny were grounded, I’m not sure what Heath could do about it being all the way out in Santa Fe.”
“Could he make a connection to her if she wasn’t grounded?” I asked, suddenly getting a big idea.
Gilley jumped right onto my train of thought. “You’re thinking you want to ask her about her own murder, don’t you?”
“Well, obviously.”
“Yeah, good luck with that, Cat. M.J. used to get a ton of requests to talk to the dead to find out the circumstances of their deaths, and in just about every case, the victim was foggy on the details of their crossing.”
“Huh,” I said. “I wonder why?”
“M.J. used to say it was because the actual method of crossing wasn’t important to them. It only mattered that they’d crossed over.”
“But what if their life had been cut short, like Lenny’s?”
Gilley shrugged. “See, that’s the part that’s tricky to explain. The other side is heaven, Cat. Like, it’s awesome. There’s no sickness, no old age, no stress, no heartbreak, no anger, no violence, no hunger, no loss, no want, and no need. It’s free of all the stuff that we stress out about down here, so when spirits move home—to the other side—they’re actually happy about it.”
“Even if they were murdered in cold blood?”
“Mostly yeah. Weird, huh?”
“Very,” I said, a bit unsettled by that notion. I doubted that, if I were to die before seeing my sons grow into men, I’d be “happy” to be away from them. In fact, I couldn’t imagine a worse scenario.
“Still, could you ask Heath anyway?”
Gilley nodded. “I’ll call him when we get home.”
“Thank you,” I said. I was about to pull away from the curb, but I took a moment to look all around the street. “There’re some nice homes in this area, no?”
“That’s the understatement of
the evening.”
Ignoring the sarcasm, I said, “A sale’s commission on a house over here would be worth, what? Anywhere from the low hundred-thousands to a million bucks?”
Gilley whistled appreciatively. “That’s a lot of money for an agent to make for one transaction.”
“It is,” I agreed. And then something else occurred to me. “Gunshots in this neighborhood would’ve likely been heard too. There aren’t any woodlands or hills to muffle the sound.”
“Yeah, but Greta’s used a silencer before, so not necessarily,” Gilley said, reminding me about that particular detail.
“Did the article you read mention any witness statements?”
Gilley lifted his phone and began to read. The light cast by his phone gave his face an eerie glow. “No mention of gunshots heard. Lenny’s body was discovered by a couple who came to the open house. They passed a woman exiting the house, wearing a pink, yellow, and lime-green dress with white go-go boots.”
“Greta,” I said. “The go-go boots are the dead giveaway—no pun intended.”
“Yep,” Gilley agreed.
“What time of day was it again?”
Gilley scrolled through the article. “A little after ten a.m. On a Saturday.”
I looked up and down the street again. “Lenny would’ve thought it was totally safe to host an open house around here at ten a.m. on a Saturday.”
“I’m sure she did. I’m sure anyone would.”
“So what was the reason she was murdered?” I wondered.
“Don’t know. But if we answer that question, I bet we figure out who hired Greta.”
“Okay,” I said, moving the car away from the curb again. “Tomorrow, let’s tackle the leads Sunny identified for us and figure out what was really going on.”
With that, we headed home.
Chapter 6
We heard from Willem early the next day. “Good morning!” I sang, when Gilley patched him through to my line. “How are you, Willem?”
“I’m fine, Catherine, thank you,” he said. But he didn’t sound fine. He sounded stilted and stubborn.
“Did you have a nice chat with Heath?” I tried.
To Coach a Killer Page 9