A Bead in the Hand (Glass Bead Mystery Series Book 2)

by Janice Peacock

  At least something was going well this weekend.

  • • •

  “Hi, Ms. O’Connell. Let’s chat now,” said Detective Houston as she approached my table. She looked startlingly different than when I had seen her last night. Today she had on a crisp white button-down blouse, only a conservative number of buttons undone, and a serious navy skirt. She looked respectable.

  “Tessa, can you stay and watch my booth while I talk with the detective?”

  Tessa sighed and blew her hair out of her eyes. “Don’t take too long, I’m missing valuable shopping time.”

  “I’ll hurry back, I promise.”

  As we crossed the lobby, the detective’s cell phone rang. “Sorry, I need to take this call,” she said, taking a few quick steps to get ahead of me so I wouldn’t hear her conversation. I kept pace, hoping to eavesdrop and learn what, if any, progress had been made in the murder investigation.

  “The victim’s room wasn’t sealed? Get up there and do it. Now,” the detective said, keeping her voice low. Without saying good-bye, she hung up. Then she brought me into a conference room, closed the door, and sat down across from me.

  “Ms. O’Connell, so nice to see you again,” she said, reaching across the table to shake my hand.

  “Yes, nice to see you, too, Detective Houston.” But the truth was she was the last person I wanted to see.

  “Please call me Tiffany. Oh, and I’m sorry you had to see me looking like that last night,” she said. “Ms. O’Connell—”

  “And you can call me Jax.”

  “Did your parents really name you that?”

  “My real name is Jacqueline.”

  I watched as she typed my name into her iPad. She looked up and smiled. She was different from the other detective I’d met earlier this year. Detective Zachary Grant had been more than a little testy during a murder investigation at Aztec Beads. But after that case had wrapped up, he definitely seemed like a much kinder guy. And cute, in that Clark Kent sort of way.

  “Let’s see. My first question. Did you kill Saundra Jameson?” Tiffany looked at me, her head cocked, waiting for my answer.

  What? This is not how these interviews are supposed to go, are they?

  “No.”

  “Hmmm. Do you know who did?”

  “No.” Seriously, where did this woman learn her interrogation skills?

  “Can you tell me who might have wanted to kill Ms. Jameson? I need to make a list of individuals to chat with.”

  Chat? Is that what this is? A chat?

  “Miles, who was Saundra’s assistant. You might want to check him out,” I said.

  “Why do you think he would kill Ms. Jameson?”

  “She didn’t treat him well. But Miles killing Saundra doesn’t make a lot of sense because he worked for her. Without Saundra, Miles is unemployed.”

  Tiffany was furiously taking notes on her iPad. Since when did police departments have enough money to supply their staff with state-of-the-art computer hardware?

  Tiffany saw me eyeing her iPad. “We got them in a drug seizure. After the case was closed, no one claimed them, so the department found a use for them,” she said defensively and got back to business.

  “There were hundreds of people at the sale the night Ms. Jameson died. Might one of them have had some issues with her?” Tiffany asked.

  “Most of us who were selling at the bead bazaar knew Saundra, and most of us didn’t like her. But seriously, bead people aren’t known for their violence,” I said.

  “Jax, unfortunately, you’re one of the suspects, and at the top of my list.”

  “And why is that?” I asked defiantly.

  “You were seen arguing with the deceased. That’s a motive. Your booth was located next to Ms. Jameson’s, and there was a blackout—giving you the opportunity to kill her. And the means to kill her—well, I’m not at liberty to discuss how she died. We’ll be looking into her assistant’s background and motives as well,” she said, looking up at me, more serious now. “I want you to help me. Got it? You’re going to be my eyes and ears here at the bazaar.”

  “Uh—” I said, being particularly eloquent at that moment.

  “And you know why you’re going to help me?” she continued without waiting for an answer. “Because if you don’t cooperate, I’ll be taking you down to the station and booking you on suspicion of murder.”

  “Me?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “You. My helper. Isn’t it terrific to be on a team?”

  I thought it was great to be on a team when it was voluntary. I didn’t really like the idea of being forced to help Tiffany.

  “I don’t think—” I started.

  “You don’t want your friends to see you cuffed and escorted by me and two uniformed police officers through the bead swap meet.”

  “Bead bazaar.”

  “I’m glad you agree that you don’t want that to happen,” Tiffany said without waiting for me to capitulate. “Now, who would have a list of all the vendors and buyers who are participating in this event?”

  I was officially on Team Tiffany. Ugh.

  “Sal, the sale’s producer, he’d know all of the vendors, and any registered wholesale buyers. But he wouldn’t have the names of the retail buyers and hobbyists who showed up for the sale without registering.”

  “I’d like to chat with him. Do you know where I can find him?”

  “Sure, I can introduce you to Sal.”

  We exited through the back door of the hotel into a large parking lot. Sal’s small dingy RV sat on the far side of the lot.

  Note to self: Do not become a bead bazaar promoter because you will have to live like this.

  Off to the side of the lot was Indigo’s Ford minivan. A small cooler and a folding chair were sitting next to the front wheel, which likely meant she was camping this weekend.

  “Hello?” I called tentatively through the crack in Sal’s open door. I slowly pushed the door open. “Sal?”

  He was facing away from me, sitting at the table in his tiny kitchen. He jumped up and looked at me, startled. His eyes looked more bloodshot than ever.

  “Hi, Sal.”

  “Do you need to lie down?” he asked, nodding his head encouragingly, ushering me in.

  “Sal, this is Detective Tiffany Houston. She’s investigating Saundra Jameson’s murder,” I said as she squeezed herself into the room behind me. There was definitely not room for three people in here. “She needs to talk with you.”

  “I’m not talking to nobody without my lawyer,” Sal said. How did this guy own and run a successful company with grammar like that?

  “Why don’t you call your lawyer?” Tiffany asked.

  “I don’t got one.” He crossed his arms and squinted at us.

  “Thank you, Jax. I’ll take it from here,” Tiffany said.

  “You’re welcome. No problem,” I said. She had dismissed me. Closing the door behind me, I dropped down the RV’s three steps to the parking lot pavement. I’d left Sal trapped inside with the detective. Or, was it that the detective was trapped inside with Sal? Now that I’d shut the door, I knew there was no way I could eavesdrop, so I started back to the hotel.

  I heard the door to the RV swing open. I stopped in my tracks.

  “Yo! Jax! Can you come back in here for a little minute?” Sal asked. “The detective here, she wants to ask me some questions, and you know, last time I was alone with a cop, it didn’t go so well. Like I got accused of some things that maybe I did, maybe I didn’t do.”

  Detective Houston stood behind Sal in the doorway of the RV. Gritting her teeth, the detective said, “Yes, Jax, if you wouldn’t mind joining us, that would be nice.” The long hiss at the end of the word nice told me otherwise. She was unhappy that I was joining them in the RV, just about as unhappy as I was. I had not escaped.

  I reluctantly mounted the steps of the RV and squeezed myself into a banquet seat across from Sal. The detective did the same.

/>   “Listen, Mr…” Tiffany said, prompting him for a last name.

  “Salvatore.”

  “Okay. Sal Salvatore.” She said the words out loud as she typed them into her iPad.

  “No, really, my first name is Bernard. I hated that name, it wasn’t a good tough name. Plus, the initials were B.S. So I made all the guys call me Sal back when I was growing up.”

  “Look, Mr. Salvatore.” Tiffany’s voice was taut with impatience. “All I need to do is ask a few simple questions. It won’t take long, and it will help with my investigation.”

  “Okay, shoot. Well, well, well, not really, of course,” Sal stammered.

  “I’m a detective. We tend to just talk to people, not shoot them,” she said, trying to reassure Sal that she wasn’t the shooting type. “What is your relationship to Saundra Jameson?” She was speaking more quickly now, trying to get on with the interview and out of the room. It was muggy and with Sal’s less than perfect personal hygiene, the smell was approaching vile.

  “She was one of the vendors at my Bead Fun bazaars,” Sal said, trying to act casual, but not doing a good job of it. “She’d rent a booth a couple times a year and teach some classes.”

  “Anything else you’d like to add?” asked Tiffany, leaning closer to Sal, and then, thinking better of it, leaning back again in her seat. We sat there quietly for a few minutes, Tiffany idly tapping a fingernail on the table. Sal had more to say, but needed some encouragement. He was trying to be a tough guy, but clearly something was bothering him.

  “Hey, Sal, listen. If you know something that will help us…” I said.

  “Look, I might as well say it, because if you do some snooping around, one of those nosey bead ladies is gonna tell ya,” Sal said, rubbing yesterday’s five-o’clock stubble. “She pissed off some students, always lookin’ down her nose at everyone, telling them their work is a piece of crap. One time in Los Angeles, she just didn’t bother to show up to teach a class. Just sayin’—”

  “She had a way of pissing off a lot of people,” I said, but decided it wouldn’t be prudent to add that I’d been one of the people she had angered recently.

  “Can you get me a list of Saundra’s students? Are any of those students here this weekend?” asked Tiffany.

  “Yeah, there’s one guy who’s here who was really angry. He came all the way from Sydney for the class in L.A. This guy, Luke, he was plenty pissed off from losing all that money flying out.”

  Now that was interesting. Luke from Australia. Would he be angry enough to kill Saundra because he’d lost at least a thousand dollars when she was a no-show? And the night of the blackout, the night Saundra died, he’d been drinking and was blitzed in the bar. Maybe getting drunk was his way of dealing with guilt after killing someone.

  “I’ll need a list of all the vendors at this event, plus any other buyers you’re aware of,” the detective said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I got that here somewhere…” Sal pushed aside a plastic keychain shaped like a giant bead that had the words Bead Fun pasted across it, a grubby cell phone, and some crumpled gum wrappers. He picked up a stack of papers.

  “Oh, just one more thing. Do you have an address for Ms. Jameson?” asked Tiffany. “We’ve been attempting to contact her next of kin, and the phone number we’ve been calling has not been answered. I thought I’d send an officer out to the property. She’s local, isn’t she?”

  “She told me once she lived somewhere out in the country near here with a brother. That’s probably who you’re trying to reach.” He flipped through the stack of papers in his hands and found the page he was looking for. “Here’s her contract,” Sal said, shoving it across the table. “You can have it. I don’t got a use for it now.”

  I glimpsed Saundra’s address on the contract before Tiffany folded it into the cover of her iPad. That information might come in handy.

  “And where were you during the Preview Night?” Tiffany asked Sal.

  There was a pause long enough to drive a freight train through. Sal was looking straight at us, actually just above our heads so that he didn’t have to make eye contact, arms still crossed. He wasn’t talking any more.

  Tiffany stood up abruptly and moved around the table toward Sal. As she moved past him, she snapped a business card next to his elbow on the table.

  “We’ll just have to bring Mr. Salvatore downtown to do a more thorough interview,” she said.

  Once we were out in the parking lot, Tiffany said, “Thanks for your help, Jax. We have some valuable new information that may help us find the killer.”

  “But I’m wondering if this really is a murder. I mean, couldn’t Saundra have fallen and whacked her head?”

  “Oh, Jax, you’ll just have to trust me on that one,” she said as we crossed the tarmac. “Now, that assistant of Ms. Jameson’s—where can I find him?”

  The detective and I crossed the lobby and went back into the ballroom, where the bazaar was in full swing. Tessa was finishing up a sale as we arrived at my table.

  “That’s Miles over there,” I said, pointing toward Minnie’s table, where he stood taking a credit card from a customer. “Do you want me—“

  She cut me off.

  “No, Jax. You’ve been quite helpful enough, for now. No packing up early and heading home. I’m sure I’ll need you again,” she said, diving into the crowd of bead-obsessed shoppers.

  “You’re assisting the detective?” Tessa asked.

  “She sort of strong-armed me into helping her. The sooner she finds the killer, the better. She’ll be off my back, and I can get back to what I’m here to do—sell some beads.”

  “Well, I’ve sold quite a few while you’ve been gone.”

  I peeked in the cash box. “Excellent job.”

  The detective escorted Miles toward the lobby. He looked like he was going to throw up and was as pale as when I’d seen him standing in the doorway of Saundra’s room. As he passed my table, he dropped his messenger bag behind it. Without making eye contact with me—too embarrassed, no doubt, from me catching him so exposed—he asked, “Watch my bag for me?” He kept walking with the detective close behind him, without waiting for my response.

  They were, no doubt, headed to the conference room to have a little chat.

  I was quiet for a while. I knew what I wanted to do. I just didn’t know how to broach the subject with Tessa.

  “I don’t like it when you’re this quiet. It almost always means you’re scheming.” Tessa gave me her most indulgent smile. “You’re going to Saundra’s room, aren’t you?”

  “I heard the detective say that Saundra’s room hadn’t been sealed yesterday and ordered an officer to clear out her things and seal it,” I said. “I’ve got to get in there before it’s too late—before everything’s gone. And we know Miles and Minnie aren’t in there right now.” It was probably not the best idea to go snooping around Saundra’s room. My stealth skills were terrible. Ryan had slammed into me the night before when I was trying to be sneaky. Though, I had to admit, that had turned out all right.

  I liked Ryan and wanted to help him. He seemed like my kind of guy—easy to talk with and kind. His broad shoulders and warm smile made me like him even more. If I could learn something about Saundra and what had happened to her, it might help Ryan with the investigation. And beyond that, it would be great if he didn’t think I was a murderer.

  “You better be back here in fifteen minutes, or else.”

  “Or else what?” I asked.

  “Or else I’m calling the cops!”

  “You’re not going to do that, Tessa, you love me too much,” I said, heading out the door.

  • • •

  Armed with the key card to Saundra’s room, which I’d easily located in Miles’s messenger bag, I slowly climbed the stairs, hoping to slide in the side door undetected. I had a stitch in my side by the time I got to the fifth floor and promised myself I’d start doing more cardio when I got home. I crept out the stairwell door. Several
room doors were open, and a yellow housekeeping cart was at my end of the hall. A Spanish-language radio station was playing, and the vacuum roared in lucky room 513, nearest the stairway. I needed to pass by that room to get to room 511. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  Just like Wile E. Coyote carrying around a bush as his own portable camouflage while stalking the Roadrunner, I was going to use the maid’s cart and roll it along past the open door where the housekeeper was Hoovering. She was probably so far inside the room that she wouldn’t see the towel cart rolling by, as if guided by mysterious forces. She probably wouldn’t remember where she left the cart and become suspicious when she found it in a new location. She probably wouldn’t even care if she found me in the room. Probably.

  I crouched down behind the cart and started rolling it down the hall, the cart shielding me from the door of 513. As I duck-walked beside the cart, I hoped no one would open another door. Not only would they be astonished to find a middle-aged (well, pre-middle-aged) woman hiding in the hallway behind a stack of towels on wheels, but they’d scare the crap out of me. The cart’s wheels made a squee-squee-squee sound as I sidled along. Fortunately, you couldn’t hear anything above the sound of the radio and the vacuum. When I finally reached my destination—it was only about twenty feet, but it felt like a mile—I slipped around the end of the cart. Room 511 had been sealed with crime scene tape. Dammit! I was too late. The police had already been here. I tried to figure out how hard it would be to peel off the tape, gently tugging at a corner of it. This was not a good plan. I needed to get out of there before anyone saw me trying to break in.

  The hallway was quiet. The silence was deafening. The vacuum was off and the radio was, too. As I slowly turned, I saw the maid, hands on her hips, her black hair pulled into a tight bun, her eyebrows pulled into a single V above her dark beady eyes.

  I gave her my most winning smile, the one my mom always told me I should use when I wanted to make new friends.

  “Hola,” I said, as confidently as possible.

  She ripped into me with the fastest and most aggressive Spanish I’d ever heard. I’d been caught. And my Spanish was basic at best—even with three years of high school Spanish and my whole life in Miami, about all I could do was order margaritas. Which sounded pretty good right now.