You Better Knot Die

by Betty Hechtman

  “Pink, you have to help me,” she said. “The books are at William’s.” She sounded desperate. “I left the keys to his place in my cubby.” She asked me to get them and actually added a please. I must have really gotten through to her.

  On the way to the parking lot I ran into Ryder making a video of a woman in a Santa hat sitting on the curb. He saw me rushing and wanted to know what was up. When I told him, he asked if he could tag along. Dinah was just turning the corner. The kids were helping Commander at the mail-it center. When she heard I was on a mission, she said she’d come along, too.

  Ryder had his mother’s Mercedes SUV and offered to drive. We all piled in and headed for William’s house. It was late afternoon as we drove onto his street. In the time since I’d been there, the rest of his neighbors had put up their holiday decorations, though for now the lights weren’t on and the street looked normal.

  We passed the giant Koo Koo on the lawn as we walked to the front door. Adele had told me she thought the books were in the living room. I was going to get the box and go, but Dinah wanted to see what had made Adele think William was the real A. J. Kowalski. The three of us went into his writer’s room and I cautioned everyone to keep their hands to themselves. I pointed out the worktable. The crochet books were still on it.

  Ryder had picked up that William might be the vampire author and was filming the room and adding his commentary. I put my hand in front of his camera and ordered him to stop. No way was he going to post anything to YouTube and ruin the bookstore’s thunder. In my haste I knocked into the table and books and papers fell off. I explained about William’s eye for detail and the three of us went to try to replace all the things on the table just as they had been.

  I set down the crochet book William had borrowed from Adele where I thought it had been. A piece of green paper had fallen down with the book. I recognized it as the sheet I’d seen when I’d been there with Adele. I had only gotten a glimpse of it then and remembered she’d said it was notes she’d made when she was figuring out the pattern of the afghan for me. This time I looked at her scribbles. There were all kinds of notes, and in the middle she’d drawn a rectangle and divided it into rows of boxes. The first couple of squares had Xs that probably were meant to stand for the flowers in them. Then she’d changed to just writing in numbers in a couple of the boxes. She’d just drawn one flower with a question mark in each of the rest of the squares. Across the top, in big letters, she’d written a note about the tassel situation stating that there should be one tassel on each corner or just one tassel on one corner, but not one tassel on one corner and two tassels on the next one and then none. I studied the sheet and showed it to Dinah and said William must have been really hard up for a bookmark to have kept the paper.

  “Or maybe he was planning to have Anthony make the afghan in the next book,” Dinah joked.

  “He’d have a hard time using this for a pattern unless he understood Adele’s secret code,” I said. As I said it my eye went to a book on the floor.

  “Ciphers and Codes?” Ryder said, noticing what I’d focused on. I stared at it for a long moment and then suddenly I had a thought.

  We all gazed at the paper as I pointed out the afghan drawing. “What if the flowers really were some kind of code?” I said. Before anyone could answer, I pulled out my BlackBerry and scrolled through the contacts until I found Madison’s number.

  I called and asked her how she’d come up with the pattern of flowers for the afghan she’d given her brother as a wedding present.

  “Not that afghan again,” she said with annoyance in her voice. “I don’t know who told you it was a wedding present. Bradley paid me to make it for him. He wanted it to be some kind of numerology thing. He gave me several long numbers and said they represented important dates for him and Emily and her kids and he wanted them incorporated in the coverlet. They had to be in the right order,” she said. As she said it, I thought of Adele’s note about the tassels and something clicked in my mind.

  “And so that’s why you put a tassel on one corner and two tassels on the next. You were showing where the numbers started, weren’t you?” I said.

  “Right. It made it weird looking, but Bradley didn’t seem to care,” she said. She said she’d given him the paper with the numbers when she gave him the blanket and forgotten all about it. She faltered and I said I knew she’d made another crocheted blanket for her brother. She admitted that Emily had contacted her with some confused message that Bradley wanted another afghan like it. She’d made up something quickly, but the only thing it had in common with the first one was that the background was green and it had some flowers incorporated in it.

  When I repeated what Madison had said, Dinah got a skeptical expression. “Important dates? I don’t think so. I bet all that fuss Bradley made about getting the afghan had nothing to do with sentiment.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “More likely it had to do with where he stashed all the money.”

  “Numbers, stashed money, huh?” Ryder said. “Like maybe he had one of those Swiss accounts. There was this show on the Crooks and Spies channel called Dude, Where’s the Money? It was all about those accounts that don’t use names, just numbers.”

  Ryder’s words hung in the air for a moment, and then everything really made sense. “Of course, that has to be it. Talk about hiding something in plain sight. What a way to keep track of the account number so no one would know. That’s why Bradley wanted the afghan before his faked suicide. And why he took the risk of breaking into my house twice. Now it makes sense why he kept upping his offer to Emily to get it to him. And now I understand why whoever killed Bradley took the afghan with them.”

  “Right,” Dinah said. “They had to understand what the flowers meant.”

  Ryder held the sheet of paper. “Do you think the clown figured it out?”

  I suddenly had a strong urge to look in the garage.

  Dinah and Ryder followed me. When I turned on the light, I saw it. The mountain bike was leaning against the wall, and when I took out my print of the photo, it was a perfect match to the size of the tire and the tread.

  “Oh my God, William is the killer,” I said. And something else popped forward in my mind. The image of William buying the wool-lined boots for his trip. “He’s not going to Miami, he’s going someplace cold, like maybe to Switzerland.

  “We have to stop him,” I said, rushing toward the front door. We got outside, hopped into Ryder’s mother’s Mercedes and he put the car in gear. By now it had gotten dark and all the holiday displays in all the front yards were illuminated. Ryder started to back out but stopped with a start. He hadn’t seen that the street was clogged with cars because they had all turned out their headlights so they could see the lights of Candy Cane Lane.

  He finally was able to pull out, but now we were part of the procession of slow-moving cars. I tried Barry’s cell and got his voice mail. I began leaving a message, but it was so convoluted that it didn’t make sense even to me. I took a deep breath and called Detective Heather. I got her voice mail, too. I cut to the chase with her message and just gave her the facts that I thought William was the killer and that he was on his way to the airport, and I bet he had the afghan. I had no idea if she would believe me.

  “Adele is going to have to keep him from leaving,” I said as I called her cell.

  I heard Dinah snort from the backseat. I admitted it was going to be a challenge.

  I got Adele in the car. She cut me off before I’d even finished hello. “Pink, just tell Mrs. Shedd I’m dropping William off at American Airlines and then I’ll come back to the bookstore and straighten everything out about the books. I cut her off and told her I had to tell her something very important and that she should just listen and say nothing.

  “Pink, if it’s some of your detec—”

  “Hush,” I yelled at her. “I said just listen. You’re not going to be happy with what I’m going to ask you to do. I need you to keep William from getting o
n the plane.” She made a sputtering sound, but I quieted her again. I told her he wasn’t going to Miami. I took a deep breath and told her that he had killed Bradley and I could prove it. I heard her gasp and then tell me I was nuts.

  I told her to check his ticket and she’d see that he wasn’t really going to Miami.

  “You’re ridiculous and I’m not going to do anything,” Adele said. I made one more attempt to get through to her.

  “I know you don’t want to believe me because he’s your boyfriend and what I told you is a total shock. I hate that it’s true, but it is. I always thought you were too good for him, anyway.” She didn’t say anything else, and when we hung up, I figured the last thing she’d said still stood. She was in total denial and was going to let him leave.

  By now Ryder had gotten out of the clog of cars and hit the gas as we headed for the freeway. The freeway wasn’t moving, but Ryder said not to worry, he knew all the short-cuts.

  I tried Barry again, thinking we were never going to make it in time. Ryder did know every back road. We went up steep streets and along the paved part of Mulholland before getting onto Sepulveda as it paralleled the freeway. I was leaning forward, willing the SUV to go faster. Ryder was a typical young adult male driver. He wove through traffic like he was braiding a ribbon. I finally closed my eyes and hoped for the best.

  “Hey, MP, here we are,” he said, finally pulling up to the white curb in front of American Airlines. I got out and he started to follow me, but the recording playing over a loudspeaker reminded us it was for loading and unloading only. Dinah came around to the front seat and said she’d park the car.

  We looked in through the glass door at the line waiting to check in, but there was no Adele or William in sight. We took the elevator up a level to the area just outside the restricted zone on the slim chance William was up there.

  There was just a small area before the first checkpoint for last good-byes. I didn’t see Adele at first. She was hidden behind a post. When I checked the screening area, William was just putting his shoes, jacket and carry-on in plastic bins to go through the X-ray machine. He took off the vampire scarf around his neck and added it to one of the bins. Ryder was right behind me with his video camera going. What was he going to call this YouTube piece—“Murderer Escapes”?

  What could I do? It only took a moment to realize the answer was nothing. If I made some kind of fuss, the only one who’d get detained would be me. All I could do was watch him go. He was pushing the bins with his stuff onto the conveyer belt and the TSA guy said something to him and pointed. William nodded and reached into his pockets. As he pulled his hand out, he looked down and his face registered surprise as his hand came up.

  Suddenly it was like everything went into slow motion. The TSA guy pointed at William’s hand and yelled, “Gun,” just as I saw it. All the people waiting in line screamed and dove for the floor as another TSA guy jumped over the row of metal tables and tackled William, before two uniformed officers ran from their station and joined the fray.

  “Is it over yet?” Adele said, stepping from behind the post.

  As they led William away, he caught sight of Adele and his usually placid face twisted in a grimace. “You,” he spit out in anger. “I should have known that you’d ruin everything. The only thing you were good for was pushing the Koo Koo books.” He grunted at her. “You and your ridiculous clothes, you’re nothing but a big—”

  Before he could finish, I stepped in. “Shut up,” I shouted at him. “You should have been grateful to have a girlfriend like Adele. She’s one of a kind and special. You’re not good enough to kiss the hem of her colorful clothes.”

  William snarled at all of us before being led away.

  A SHORT TIME LATER, DINAH, RYDER, ADELE AND I were sitting on the curb outside the terminal. The message about the area being set aside for loading and unloading kept playing, but we didn’t care. We all needed to regroup.

  “Did you really mean all that, Pink?” Adele said, leaning against my side.

  I had to ask myself the same question. Yes, I did mean it, particularly the part about her being one of kind. Nobody could argue with that.

  “I didn’t want to listen to you, Pink,” Adele said. “But when I went to get his carry-on out of the backseat, I finally checked his ticket and saw that he was only changing planes in Miami for one to Geneva. His passport was there, too. When I realized everything he’d said to me was probably a lie, I got angry.”

  “How’d you plant the gun on him?” I asked.

  “It isn’t real,” she said, reminding me of the kid who’d brought the cap gun to story time and how I’d made her stick it in her car. “I found it under the seat of the car. I made a big deal of saying good-bye to him and insisted on him taking the vampire scarf I made for him. I had wrapped the gun in it and when I tried to stuff the scarf in his pocket, put the gun in instead. Then I said it was better to put the scarf around his neck. I was so smooth, he didn’t know what was going on,” she said, beginning to turn back into the Adele we all knew and were annoyed by.

  A black Crown Victoria pulled up as we were sitting there and Detective Heather got out.

  “You came,” I said, surprised. “How’d you find us?”

  “I just followed the ruckus,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  They wouldn’t have been able to hold William for long since the gun was a toy, but Detective Heather was able to look in his carry-on and found the afghan. There were traces of blood and no doubt tests would confirm it was Bradley’s. She figured the knife was probably hidden someplace at William’s, which she’d find when she got a search warrant.

  We all had to go back to the station to give our statements. To my surprise Detective Heather even mumbled a thank-you for what my friends and I had done to stop him. That was as far as she went, though. She didn’t mention that me and my friends basically solved the whole thing for her.

  Then Detective Heather did something else, which totally surprised me. She didn’t say anything in explanation, but she let me watch her question William. I suppose it was her way of showing off what she could do.

  I didn’t get to sit in one of those rooms with the window that looks like a mirror on one side like you see on TV. I had to watch on a grainy monitor with a bunch of her colleagues just outside the interview room.

  I thought for sure William would clam up and ask for a lawyer as soon as she read him his Miranda rights. But no, William insisted it was all a misunderstanding and he was sure once she understood everything, she’d let him go. Detective Heather never did get a chance to show off her skill at interrogating. In fact, she barely got a word in. William insisted he wasn’t like the others who invested money with Bradley. “I wasn’t after fancy cars or mansions. I was going to use the profit to devote myself full time to the Koo Koo book series and the legacy I would be creating.

  “Bradley Perkins not only stole my money, he stole my dream,” William said, looking Detective Heather right in the eye. “I’d committed to buying a house, and set up the perfect writer’s studio for myself.”

  But when he had told Bradley he wanted to cash out, Bradley had stalled him. William had become more insistent. He needed the money to pay for the house and he’d given notice at his job. Finally William became suspicious and called the SEC and instigated an investigation.

  “I believed Bradley had killed himself at first. If it was true he’d lost everybody’s money and the SEC was after him, it made sense. But then I overheard things at the bookstore and began to think Bradley had faked the whole thing. It made me wonder if he’d really lost all the money after all.” By chance William said he’d been paying attention when Adele was ranting about the afghan pattern and when he heard Emily demanding it back at the holiday event, he figured there was more to it than crochet. It had taken a little while, but he’d figured out what was hidden in the afghan. The problem was Adele had changed the tassels and messed with the numbers of flowers, so that there was no way he
could get the correct sequence of numbers.

  “All I wanted was the money he owed me,” William insisted. He’d been in the bookstore when we’d been following Emily. Adele was glad to tell him about all our theories and crazy sleuthing. He’d realized we might know something and followed us. He’d been planning to ride his mountain bike anyway and it was in a rack on his car.

  As he said that, I remembered that when I’d parked behind the bookstore, the car next to me had had a bike in a rack on it. It must have been William’s.

  “I passed the three of them and hid in the bushes until I saw where they were headed. I know all the trails up there. It was easy for me to go another way and not be seen. I waited until his wife gave him the crocheted thing and left. I saw Molly Pink and her friend take off. This was my chance; I was going to make a deal with him. I’d keep quiet about everything. All I wanted was what he owed me.”

  William claimed he tried to reason with Bradley, but he kept insisting the money was all gone, that he’d lost it gambling. When William tried to grab the afghan, Bradley had pulled out the knife.

  “I held on to the afghan and tried to make a run for it. Bradley wouldn’t let go and neither would I. He stepped back and tripped over a branch. When he fell, he pulled me and the afghan with him. He was going to stab me. We struggled over the knife and I got hold of it. I was just defending myself when I stabbed him.”

  But that didn’t explain why he’d stabbed Bradley so many times and then left him there to die. And why did he say he was going to Switzerland with the afghan? “I was going to get the money and then share it with all the investors.”