Scared Money (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 13)

by Jenna Bennett

  “Not much,” I said, as I watched my club sandwich and Grimaldi’s patty melt come across the floor. “They’ve been dating for as long as I’ve been working at LB&A, so more than a year. But I’ve only met Devon a handful of times. The annual Christmas party the last two years, and the couple of times he’s stopped by to talk to Brittany about something. Other than ‘hello’ and ‘nice to meet you,’ last night was the first time I’d actually had a conversation with him.”

  The sandwiches arrived, and were arranged on the table. The waitress asked us if we needed anything else. We said no, and she withdrew. Grimaldi picked up the conversation. “No arguments that you’ve heard of?”

  “They’ve certainly never argued in front of me. And Brittany and I aren’t exactly best friends, so it isn’t something she’d confide in me, if they did.” I pulled the little cocktail spear out of one of my sandwich quarters and put it on the edge of the plate. “Yesterday, she told me they were going to go on their honeymoon this weekend. To Curacao. She was buying her trousseau.”

  Grimaldi got a funny look on her face as I bit into the sandwich. “Trousseau?”

  I chewed and swallowed. “Old-fashioned word for wedding wardrobe. We talked a lot about trousseaus—or trousseaux—in finishing school.”

  “I bet you did.” She shook her head. “So they were planning to go to the Caribbean this weekend. She didn’t mention that.”

  “Maybe she didn’t think it was any of your business. Or maybe she just didn’t think of it. She had just been told her boyfriend was dead, so she must have had other things on her mind.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll have to have another talk with her when she’s calmed down. I asked whether she wanted me to call someone to come stay with her, but she said no.”

  “Maybe I should stop by,” I said, “and pay my respects.”

  Grimaldi rolled her eyes, but didn’t tell me not to. “Let me know if she says anything that might apply to the shooting.”

  “Of course.” I licked a smear of mayonnaise off my fingers and lifted the next triangle of bread, turkey, lettuce, tomato, etc. “Anything else I should know?”

  “I can’t think of anything,” Grimaldi said.

  “I don’t suppose there were security cameras in the garage? Even at the entrance, so maybe you’ve got the shooter coming or going?”

  “That would be too easy,” Grimaldi said. “But there are cameras on some of the buildings in the area. There’s a traffic cam on the light down at the corner. We might get lucky there. And the liquor store across the street also has a camera on the parking lot. We might be able to see a car going by.”

  It sounded like tedious work.

  Grimaldi nodded when I said so. “A lot of police work is tedious. Talking to people and checking alibis and sitting through hours of camera footage. The same kind of things you did yesterday.”

  “You’ll figure out who did it, won’t you?”

  “We usually do.” She sounded calm. “Nine times out of ten, it was someone the victim knew. It just takes time to sort through all the relationships and reasons someone might want to do away with him. Although if it was random, maybe we won’t. If someone happened to be walking by, and saw him pull into the garage, and thought it looked like a fine way to make a buck...”

  “You said he drove a Jeep Wrangler, right? That doesn’t sound like it would say ‘loaded’ to anybody.”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “It was seven or eight years old, and a little dinged up. He’d probably had it since he got his license at sixteen. And you’re right, nothing about it said ‘the owner of this car is carrying a lot of cash.’ But we have to consider every angle. Someone might have followed him inside and robbed him. If nothing else, I have to rule it out.”

  Understood. I ate a couple of French fries and washed them down with milkshake while Grimaldi chewed and swallowed.

  “Anything you want me to find out from Brittany when I go there? Something she might be more likely to tell me than you?” Not that she was necessarily likely to tell me anything at all. We weren’t close. Although between me and the police, she might consider me the lesser evil.

  “Just anything suspicious,” Grimaldi said. “You know what to look for.”

  The compliment made me feel ridiculously good about myself. I grinned. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t let it go to your head.” She put what was left of the patty melt on her plate and reached for the iced tea. “And of course keep in mind that if she killed her boyfriend, and you show up asking questions, she might shoot you, too.”

  Theoretically, I knew that. In reality, the idea that I had to be afraid of Brittany because she might shoot me was ridiculous. “Does she even have a gun?”

  “She says not,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll check, of course. I’ll also check the alarm system on her apartment, to see if the door was opened during the time in question. But until I do, just keep in mind that you don’t want to piss her off. Don’t say or do anything stupid until we’re sure she isn’t involved.”

  Chances were Brittany wouldn’t even invite me in, so it was most likely a moot point, but I nodded.

  Grimaldi leaned back against the red Naugahyde. “So what else is new?”

  I did the same. “What isn’t? My mother’s drinking, I have a new sister, and Rafe may have knocked up Carmen Arroyo.”

  So much for Grimaldi’s relaxed demeanor. She straightened so fast I feared for her spine. “What?”

  “I thought Dix might have called you. Remember Darcy?”

  She and I had visited Grimaldi at police headquarters the week before, to take a look at some files the police had removed from St. Jerome’s Hospital concerning the adoption ring that had operated there. It was what had given us our first loose thread to start unraveling the mystery of Darcy’s birth.

  “Of course,” Grimaldi said. And then she caught on. “Darcy is your sister?”

  “Half sister. She’s Audrey’s daughter. Audrey and my dad had a fling before he met my mother.”

  Grimaldi looked overwhelmed, and granted, it was a lot to take in. “I thought Audrey was your mother’s best friend.”

  “She was. Until yesterday. Now Mother’s drowning her sorrows in whiskey and tea and refusing to leave the house. Dix and Catherine drive over there several times a day to check on her.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Grimaldi said.

  “It isn’t. I’ll probably have to drive down this weekend. Rafe suggested we should bring David. She likes him.”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Grimaldi agreed. “What’s that you were saying about Carmen Arroyo?”

  “Oh.” I winced. “I guess I didn’t tell you. When Darcy and I went to the Tennessee Women’s Prison on Sunday, to talk to Denise Seaver, I saw Carmen Arroyo. The woman who managed Hector’s nightclub, remember? Back in December?”

  “I remember her very well,” Grimaldi said.

  Yeah, me too. “Well, she’s pregnant. Due in a couple of weeks, according to Doctor Seaver. Which would make the time she got pregnant right around the time she was sleeping with my husband.”

  “Who wasn’t your husband then,” Grimaldi reminded me. “He wasn’t even your boyfriend then. Not according to you. Every time I called him that, you corrected me.”

  I grimaced. “I know. I don’t blame him for sleeping with her.” Much. “We weren’t together. He could sleep with anyone he wanted to.”

  “I don’t think he wanted to,” Grimaldi said. “It was more that she wanted him to, and saying no would have made her suspicious. Jorge Pena had a reputation for liking the ladies.”

  And Rafe was pretending to be Jorge Pena, while Jorge was in the morgue. I nodded. “I was mostly over it, you know? I didn’t think about her anymore. We worked things out between us, and then we moved in together, and then I got pregnant again, and then Rafe got abducted, and then we got married. Carmen wasn’t really a blip on my screen for months.”

  “No reason why she would be,” Grimal
di agreed.

  “Exactly. But then I saw her on Sunday. And she was pregnant. And she might be having my husband’s baby. And now it’s all I can think about.”

  “I suppose you’re going to tell me that’s why you’re getting involved in my case? Because it’ll give you something else to think about?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that,” I told her, “but it’s true. On Sunday and Monday morning, I had Darcy to worry about. And Mother. Then on Monday afternoon, there was that incident with the gang-banger at Alexandra’s house.”

  Grimaldi nodded. She had stopped by to pick up said gang-banger, but being busy, we hadn’t had a chance to speak.

  “Monday night,” I continued, “I had to tell Rafe about Carmen. And Tuesday morning, Tim told me about the money. It gave me something else to think about all day yesterday. Which was helpful.”

  “No doubt,” Grimaldi said. “Can you tell me what’s being done?”

  “About Carmen? At the moment we’re just trying to figure out whether the baby is Rafe’s or not. Until we know that, there’s nothing we can do, and no reason to do anything.”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “The TBI lab is rushing through a paternity test. She was scheduled for a checkup today anyway, so the doctor out there—not Doctor Seaver—said they’d get a blood sample over to the TBI. And Rafe stopped by to have his own blood drawn, as well. It’s apparently not quite as conclusive as testing the baby, but they can’t do that without Carmen’s consent, and at the moment, Rafe doesn’t want to alert her to what’s going on.”

  “If the baby is his, though...”

  “Then she’ll have to know. Of course.”

  “What will happen?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Doctor Seaver told me that Carmen’s sister is taking the baby. It can’t stay in the prison with Carmen after the first few weeks. But that was before. If it’s Rafe’s baby...”

  “He’ll have more of a claim on it than Carmen’s sister.”

  I nodded. “And if it is his baby, he’ll want it with him. He lost his chance with David because Elspeth never told him she was pregnant—”

  “He might have lost that anyway,” Grimaldi pointed out. “He was in prison when David was born.”

  True. “He’s not going to lose it this time. If that baby is his, he’ll want it. If he’s the father, he’ll probably get it. And that means I’ll have to bring it up. Along with my own baby. And I’m not sure how that’s going to work out.”

  What if I couldn’t treat them the same? What if I favored my own? Or what if I favored Carmen’s, because I was so afraid of favoring my own?

  “It’ll work out just fine,” Grimaldi said firmly. “You’re a lot stronger than you think you are.”

  While I stared at her, mouth open, she added, dryly, “Of course, you’d have to be, to marry your husband.”

  I closed my mouth. And opened it again. “I’m not sure what to say. Thank you?”

  Grimaldi waved it away. “If that baby is his, you’ll love it. It won’t matter that it isn’t yours. If it’s his, you’ll love it just as you would your own.”

  I wished I could be as sure. “I hope so,” I said.

  “I know so.” She looked around for the waitress. “And on that note, I should get back to work.”

  So should I. “Will you let me know how it goes?” I asked as I dug for my wallet.

  She waved it away. “It’s on me. Get me something good. Something that’ll help me figure out what happened to Devon. Right now it looks like a random mugging, and if that’s the case, this could be one of those unsolved mysteries. So find me something I can use to prove that it wasn’t.”

  I nodded. “I’ll do my best.”

  NINE

  I followed Grimaldi over to Franklin Road and the crime scene. She disappeared into the garage, and I went around to the front of the building and looked for Brittany’s name on the doorbells.

  It wasn’t a terribly big place. Four stories tall, with what looked like six apartments on each floor. Brittany’s apartment seemed to be on three. Closer to the top of the list than the bottom.

  I pressed the bell and waited. And waited some more. And pressed the bell again. And held it, for good measure.

  It took a couple of minutes before Brittany answered. “Yeah?” She sounded tired and angry. Maybe I’d woken her.

  “It’s Savannah,” I said. “Can I come up for a minute?”

  “Why?”

  “I brought you lunch.” A late brainstorm, just before we left the diner. It seemed like a nice gesture, since she probably didn’t feel much like cooking, and I thought it might gain me entry.

  “I’m not hungry,” Brittany said.

  “There’s a milkshake, too.”

  She hesitated. “What kind of milkshake?”

  I glanced at it. “Chocolate. With whipped cream and little chocolate shavings.”

  If it had been me, that would have done it. Brittany hesitated. But then the buzzer on the door sounded. I juggled the food and drink containers and pushed it open.

  “Third floor,” Brittany said as I headed in.

  There was an elevator, and I took it. On a full stomach, with a baby on board and things to carry, I didn’t feel like climbing the stairs. So sue me; I’d worry about losing the baby weight after the baby was born.

  When the doors opened on three, Brittany was waiting, leaning on her door jamb like she couldn’t quite keep upright on her own.

  She looked horrible. And I’m not just saying that because I feel more and more like a small hippopotamus with every day that goes by, and I envy everyone who still has a waist.

  Nor is it because deep down, I don’t really like Brittany.

  The truth is, she looked awful. Pale, haggard, and at least ten years older than I knew her to be, with dark shadows under her eyes that a medium-sized burglar could hide in.

  “I’m sorry about Devon,” I said, as I handed her the milkshake. “Tim told me what happened.”

  Rather than asking if I could come in—there was a chance she’d say no—I just maneuvered myself and the bag of food past her and into the apartment. “Are you hungry? I brought you a sandwich and fries from the diner on 12th.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Brittany said, pivoting slowly to watch me look around for the kitchen.

  The place was small. Just a one-bedroom, judging from the layout. Open concept living, dining, and kitchen just inside the front door, with a single door on the opposite wall. Similar to the apartment I’d lived in, between my divorce from Bradley and when I moved in with Rafe.

  It was decorated in IKEA minimalist modern, with a royal blue couch the only splash of color. Everything else was white, black, and shades of gray. It looked good, but I wouldn’t have wanted to live in it. Too cold.

  I turned to Brittany, who had taken the time to close and lock the door. “Would you like me to put this on a plate for you?”

  “I’m not really hungry,” Brittany began, although her nostrils quivered.

  “Just try a little.” I moved past her into the kitchenette, where I put the bag on the counter and started opening cabinets looking for a plate. “You have to eat. It’s important to keep your strength up.”

  “I don’t know why,” Brittany said. “It doesn’t matter, now that Devon is dead.” She put the milkshake on the counter and buried her face in her hands.

  “I know how you feel,” I told her, as I transferred the sandwich and fries onto a blue plate I’d found in the cabinet. “My sister-in-law was murdered last November, remember? I know what it’s like, having someone you care about die violently.” And it wasn’t too long before that, that Rafe had been shot and Dix told me he had died. For eight interminable hours, I had believed the man I loved was dead. I’m sure Brittany’s hysterics had had nothing on mine. Grimaldi had been very kind in not mentioning that little incident, when I had showed up in her office at police headquarters, screaming like a banshee and accusing her of lying
to me.

  “Why don’t we have a seat?” I picked up the plate and snagged the milkshake on my way past. And put them both on the pub-height dining table between the kitchen and the living room. “If you can’t eat, at least sit down.”

  I took the chair on the other side of the table, and waited. It took a few seconds, but then Brittany climbed onto the chair across from me. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  “I’m always nice to you,” I said. More commonly, she was the one being snooty with me. “And I told you, I know what you’re going through.”

  “No one knows what I’m going through!” Brittany wailed and buried her face in her hands again.

  I refrained from rolling my eyes, just focused on making there-there noises. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Brittany said, lifting bloodshot eyes to glare at me. “Not until that detective came and knocked on my door this morning.”

  I nodded. “Detective Grimaldi’s good at her job. She’ll figure out who did this.”

  Brittany sniffed.

  “At least have something to drink,” I said and nudged the milkshake closer to her. “You probably haven’t put anything in your stomach today. It isn’t good for you.”

  Brittany stuck the straw in her mouth and slurped. My mother would have been horrified. In the interests of obtaining information I decided to ignore the uncouthness.

  “So you didn’t know anything had happened until Detective Grimaldi rang the doorbell this morning?”

  Brittany shook her head, still sucking up milkshake. I guess maybe she’d decided she was hungry after all.

  “Why was Devon out so late?”

  “Rehearsal,” Brittany said.

  “Rehearsal?”

  She gave me a superior look. I deduced she must be feeling better. “He’s a musician. Musicians rehearse.”

  Of course they do. But they don’t do it in our real estate office.

  “When did the rehearsal start?”

  “Seven,” Brittany said and reached for the sandwich. “Every Tuesday.”

  “Do they always rehearse so late?”

  “Seven o’clock isn’t late,” Brittany said, around a bite of BLT.