“He’s married,” Grimaldi said, which didn’t answer either question.
“He’s going through a divorce.” At least that’s what he’d said on that memorable occasion when my mother had asked him whether he wanted to marry me: that he’d better wait until his divorce was final. “He probably cheated on his wife, didn’t he?”
“Undoubtedly,” Grimaldi said. “Women commit crimes just so they can get arrested by Jaime Mendoza.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’d only met him that one time, but it was no problem bringing the image to the forefront. He’d looked like an old matinee idol. Drop dead gorgeous. One of the best-looking men I’d ever seen. A bit too clean-cut for my taste—I wouldn’t have considered marrying him even if I hadn’t still been convinced that Rafe would turn up—but unquestionably handsome. “Is he any good?”
Grimaldi’s tone was frosty. “Excuse me?”
I rolled my eyes. “Not in bed.” Sheesh. “As a detective. Is he any good?”
“Yes,” Grimaldi said. “He’s very good.”
“So if there’s something fishy about Virgil’s death, he’d know?”
“If there’s something fishy about Mr. Wright’s death,” Grimaldi said, “I’m sure he’ll figure it out. He isn’t someone who takes the easy way out.”
Good to know. “Can you ask him about it?”
“I was just about to do that,” Grimaldi said. “Do you want to hang on, or do you want me to call you back?”
“I’m on my way home from the office. Why don’t I just drive,” without holding the phone to my ear, “and you can call me when you find out something.”
Grimaldi said she would, and we hung up. I put the car in gear and rolled out of the parking lot toward the house on Potsdam.
It wasn’t even five minutes before the phone rang. Not unexpectedly, it was Grimaldi calling back.
“Good news?” I wanted to know.
“Depends on what you consider good news. And I can’t give you any confidential details.”
Of course not.
“And all I have are the basics from the file. I tried to call Jaime, but he didn’t answer. So these are just the basics.”
“OK,” I said.
“The murder happened Wednesday night, sometime between seven-thirty and eight. Mr. Wright was seen entering the park a couple of minutes after seven-thirty. He’d jogged from his home on Warner Avenue. His car was still parked there, and one of the neighbors saw him leave.”
So far, so good.
“He took the route around the baseball diamonds,” Grimaldi said. “That doesn’t mean anything to me, but it might to you.”
It did. I lived in East Nashville, and was familiar with the park. However, I had thought the detective was, as well. “You were there in February, weren’t you? When what’s-his-name was killed? The guy in the sheet?”
“Only in the area where the body was found,” Grimaldi said, “and that was nowhere near the baseball diamonds.”
“Where was this body found? Virgil’s?”
Grimaldi must have consulted her notes, because it took her a second to answer. “He went around the lake, past the duck habitat and the public restrooms, and then he chose a smaller path that ran through the woods back in the direction he’d come.”
“That’s interesting.” The smaller paths weren’t anywhere near as comfortable to run on as the paved roads. And by then—close to eight o’clock—the path through the woods must have been getting dark. The roads had lights, but the paths didn’t. “I wonder why.”
“It might just have been what he did,” Grimaldi said. “Or maybe he saw someone he knew. Or had an assignation with someone.”
Maybe. “So that’s where he was killed? On the path?”
Grimaldi said it was. “When he didn’t come home by nine, the boyfriend went looking for him.”
“And found him?”
“No,” Grimaldi said. “The boyfriend was in his car. He couldn’t drive the path. So Mr. Wright wasn’t discovered until the next morning, by a man walking a dog.”
Poor Kenny. No wonder he was distraught.
On the bright side, he hadn’t been the one to find his dead lover. But on the other hand, he must be thinking that if he’d only found Virgil the night it happened instead of the next morning, maybe there would have been a way to save him.
I tried to shake it off. “Does Detective Mendoza have any suspects?”
“That’s something I can’t tell you,” Grimaldi said.
“Why? Because you don’t know?”
“That. And also because it’s none of your business.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that. She was right. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up. “Tim said it might have been a hate crime.”
“It’s possible,” Grimaldi said.
“Is Detective Mendoza investigating it as a hate crime?”
“I just told you,” Grimaldi said, “I don’t know what Jaime’s doing. But I’m sure he’s looking into all the possibilities.”
He probably was. “I just want to know if there’s a connection, you know? I mean, it’s suspicious, isn’t it? Aislynn and Kylie get threatening anonymous letters, and the guy who lived in their house before them ends up dead.”
“Do you think Aislynn and Kylie killed him?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
“No!” God, no. Of course not. “Why would they?”
“Maybe he wrote the letters,” Grimaldi said.
“Why would he do that?”
I think Grimaldi shrugged. I got the impression she shrugged. “Why would anyone?”
I had no idea. It seemed singularly pointless. Unless the point was getting between Aislynn and Kylie to break them up. But Virgil would have had no reason to do that. “Does Detective Mendoza know about the letters?”
“Not yet,” Grimaldi said. “Until you called, I had no idea there was a connection between his DB and your anonymous letters.”
They weren’t my anonymous letters, even if I had sort of claimed them. “Will you tell him?”
“Of course,” Grimaldi said. “It probably won’t be connected—I don’t see how it could be—but as you said, it’s an interesting coincidence.”
“He’ll probably want to talk to Aislynn and Kylie, won’t he?”
“I’m sure he will,” Grimaldi said. “Is that a problem?”
Not for me. And likely not for them, either. Even though Mendoza would be totally wasted on both of them.
“Not at all,” I said. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’ll want to talk to me?”
Grimaldi was smiling. I could hear it. “What do you think Mr. Collier would say to that?”
“I don’t think he’d say anything. He isn’t the jealous type.” Nor did he have any reason to be. Detective Mendoza was good-looking, but he had nothing on Rafe. “Will you let me know what he says?”
“I’ll tell you everything I can,” Grimaldi said, and since that was the best I could expect, I had to be satisfied with it.
I pulled up in front of the house on Potsdam a couple of minutes later, and lingered in the circular driveway to admire the view.
Not the house, although it’s a very nice, three-story red-brick Victorian with white gingerbread trim on the porch and a circular tower on one corner. You don’t see a lot of those around, especially not in this neighborhood. Most of the big, fancy, brick mansions are on the other side of Main Street, in the Edgefield neighborhood. This one was surrounded by rinky-dink 1940s cracker-jack boxes and the occasional new construction infill, where some intrepid builder with more hope than sense had bought a vacant lot and ventured into the ‘hood. The area was, as we say in the real estate business, ‘transitional,’ which is another way of saying that it has a long way to go, but that a few brave souls have moved in and started renovating.
Rafe was one of the first. The house was his grandmother’s, and he’d moved in with her last August, and started fixing the place up. No one had done any work to it for at
least thirty years before that, so it had been in desperate need of some TLC.
Mrs. Jenkins was in a home now, sad to say. She had dementia, and we couldn’t trust her not to wander off and get lost, so Rafe had found her a lovely facility that she enjoyed, and we went and visited her on the weekends. Half the time she knew us, and half the time she didn’t, but she was happy to get visitors either way.
The house looked a lot better now than the first time I’d seen it, all decrepit and overgrown. But that was not the reason I slowed the car to a crawl to admire the scenery.
No, my husband was mowing the lawn. Stripped to the waist, with a pair of worn jeans hanging low on his hips, with his upper body glistening with perspiration and muscles bunching under smooth skin, he was pushing an ancient lawn mower back and forth across the front yard.
My tongue got stuck to the roof of my mouth.
After a second, he shot me a glance over his shoulder. I eased my foot off the brake and crept forward. He went back to mowing. Down to the edge of the driveway and back. But when I stopped the car at the bottom of the steps, behind the Harley-Davidson parked there, but didn’t cut the engine—why lose the air conditioning?—he dropped the handle of the mower and put his hands on his hips.
I powered down the window. “What?”
“What’re you doing?”
“Admiring the view,” I said.
He grinned. “Gimme ten minutes. I’ll meet you upstairs.”
“I think I’ll just stay here and watch until you’re done,” I said.
The grin widened. “Or maybe I’ll just finish later. When it cools down.”
“Maybe you should do that.” I rolled up the window and turned the car off. By the time I’d opened the door and swung my legs out, he was standing next to me. A minute later we were inside the house, with the door locked, the lawn mower abandoned on the lawn, and my clothes strewn from the front door all the way up the stairs to the master bedroom. Rafe’s jeans and boots were in a tangle at the foot of the bed, and we were in a tangle on top of the covers.
And that’s when the doorbell rang.
We both froze.
“Expecting someone?” Rafe asked, his voice a bit breathless.
I shook my head. “Ignore it.” I was breathless, too.
And we tried, we really did. But when the doorbell rang again a minute later, Rafe muttered a curse and rolled off me. “Hold that thought.”
No problem. “Put something on before you go downstairs.”
“I ain’t going downstairs.”
He stalked over to the window, which happens to be above the front porch, and yanked the sash up. And stuck his head and upper body through the opening. “Hey!”
I tried to suppress a smile, although I didn’t try all that hard, since he had his back to me and couldn’t see what I was doing. But the sight of him—upper body outside the window, and his naked butt and muscular legs inside the bedroom with me—was funny.
A few moments passed, while—I assume—the person downstairs tried to figure out where the voice had come from, and then backed up off the porch to see him. I heard a voice—male—say something, and then a snarl from Rafe.
The voice said something else. It sounded soothing.
“Grrr,” Rafe said, and pulled his head and torso into the room. He slammed the window shut so hard I was afraid it would break, and turned to me. “We gotta go downstairs.”
“We?”
“The cops are here.” He yanked his jeans on and tucked himself away, wincing, before pulling up the zipper.
Cops? “Tamara Grimaldi?”
He shook his head as he stalked toward the door. “Put some clothes on. He wants you, too.”
He disappeared into the hallway.
“Pick up my clothes on your way down!” I called after him as I scrambled out of bed.
Chapter Seven
By the time I made it downstairs two minutes later, my scattered clothes were gone from the stairs and the hall floor. I had no idea what Rafe had done with them. Shoved them in the coat closet, maybe?
At the moment, I didn’t care. They were out of sight, and that was all that mattered. There were voices coming from the kitchen, so I headed in that direction. And almost walked into the door jamb when I saw Detective Jaime Mendoza sitting across from Rafe at the kitchen table.
Talk about sensory overload.
My mother had been extremely taken with Detective Mendoza the one and only time she saw him. Taken enough to blurt out the suggestion that maybe, since Rafe was gone, Mendoza would like to marry me in his place.
Not only is he exceptionally handsome, but he’s well-groomed and well-dressed, too. All characteristics my mother appreciates. A man in an expensive business suit will always appear more suitable to my mother than a man in faded jeans and no shirt. No matter how good the man in the jeans and nothing else looks.
And unlike Rafe, Mendoza doesn’t have that between-the-eyes sex-appeal that can knock a girl flat. To my mother, that’s not an admirable quality either, although I’ve always appreciated it. Or at least I’ve appreciated it since I got over my upbringing and my need to shut him down.
But I digress. There they were, two of the best-looking men I have ever seen, sitting across from one another at my kitchen table. The testosterone was steaming up the windows.
Rafe turned a jaundiced eye in my direction, and I shook it off. “Here. I brought you a shirt.” I had thought he might want something to cover up the cross-stitch of fresh scars across his chest and stomach. The cuts had all healed by now, a month after the abduction, but they were still pink and sort of obvious.
He took the shirt I handed him and prepared to pull it over his head.
“I heard about that,” Mendoza said, with a nod toward the damage. “Very impressive, what you did.”
Rafe arched a brow, but didn’t respond. It had been impressive, though. Most people with the damage he’d taken, who were pinned to a table with a knife through the forearm, would have been content to stay there. Or wouldn’t have had the fortitude to even try to escape. The fact that he had, that he’d gone through all that to get back to me, had played a big part in winning my mother over.
Not that she was won, entirely, but at least she had stopped opposing our marriage long enough for us to tie the knot. Although any day now, she’d probably be back to disapproving again.
Mendoza didn’t seem bothered that Rafe didn’t answer. He just turned to me. “Mrs. Collier.”
Grimaldi must have updated him on the fact that the marriage had taken place after all. When he met me, I’d still been Ms. Martin.
“Detective Mendoza,” I responded. “Good to see you again. How’s the divorce coming?”
He grinned, and showed dimples. “Very well, thank you.” He was ridiculously good-looking, and Rafe’s eyes narrowed.
“What can we do for you?” I asked, to forestall any comments.
Not that I couldn’t guess. Grimaldi must have told him about Aislynn and Kylie’s connection to Virgil Wright, and now Mendoza wanted to talk to me.
I walked around to Rafe’s side of the table while Mendoza explained that he’d heard about the anonymous letters, and he wanted some more information. Rafe made to get up so I could sit, but I put my hand on his shoulder and kept him there. “I don’t know that there’s a lot I can tell you, Detective, other than what Grimaldi already did. Aislynn and Kylie bought the house in January. I was their real estate agent. They called me yesterday and asked me to come over so we could talk about putting the house back on the market. They told me they’d been getting anonymous letters, and they thought, if they sold the house and moved out, the letters would stop.”
Mendoza nodded. He had removed a small notepad and pen from the pocket of his very elegant jacket, and was taking notes. “Did they know the previous owners before buying the house?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I was the one who brought the house to their attention. The listing agent was someone in
my brokerage. Tim Briggs.”
Mendoza wrote it down. Rafe made a little noise. It might have a been a strangled laugh, perhaps at the idea of Tim and Mendoza coming face to face. I had to admit it had appeal. Tim would take one look at Mendoza and fall into instant lust. As unrequited as what he’d always felt for Rafe. I wondered how Mendoza would handle it. Rafe had been amused, but Mendoza’s Latin heritage might make him too macho to laugh at something like that.
“Did you talk about the possibility that Mr. Wright might be responsible for the letters?”
We hadn’t. “Do you think he was?”
“I’m just exploring the possible connections,” Mendoza said mildly.
“He wouldn’t have had any reason to. Would he? He and his partner made lots of money when they sold the place. Virgil moved into another house in the same neighborhood. He wasn’t suffering. And if he’d accidentally left something in the house, he could have just knocked on the door and explained, and asked for it back. Aislynn and Kylie aren’t unreasonable.”
Mendoza didn’t reply. “I’ll be speaking to them next,” he said instead. “To see what, if anything, they know.”
I nodded. If it had been Grimaldi, I would have asked to come along. But I didn’t think Mendoza would agree to let me, nor did I imagine he needed my help. Grimaldi didn’t need my help, either, but she was a bit more... let’s say abrasive, than Mendoza. And also a bit more inclined to like me. Mendoza was slick and friendly, but thoroughly professional.
“You also spoke to Mr. Kelleher today.”
It wasn’t a question. I nodded anyway.
“Tell me about that.”
I did. There wasn’t much to tell, really. I covered it all in less than a minute, and then Rafe muttered something.
Mendoza glanced at him. “Excuse me?”
“He opened the door wearing a towel and nothing else,” I said. “Rafe objected.”
“So he was there, too?” He eyed my husband.
“Just for a minute,” I said. “To make sure I was OK. He was in the neighborhood.” Or approximately three neighborhoods away, but who’s counting? Same side of town, anyway.
“Impressions?” Mendoza asked him.
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