“Yes. Yes, yes I did,” she stammered out before looking away toward where her hands sat in her lap.
“Were you at the most recent party she held last month?” he asked in a matter-of-fact tone I knew he was using to try to calm her down.
“No. Well, yes. I got there late, but I was there. For a little while, at least.”
“Can you tell us what transpired at that party, Miss Jessick?”
Mary’s cheeks turned bright red, and she kept her gaze pinned on her lap. “Oh, I…nothing really happened. You know how those things go.”
I looked over at Alex and gave him a nod to let him know I understood what was going on. Mary was embarrassed talking about a sex toy party with him. He smiled and nodded, giving me the sign that told me I could take over the questioning. With my head, I motioned for him to get up from the table and walk over to the window. He’d still be able to hear what she said since the room was barely big enough to hold the table, refrigerator, and stove, so it wouldn’t be like he was leaving the questioning entirely.
He slid his chair back from the kitchen table and moved away, and I saw Mary’s body language instantly relax. Leaning forward toward her, I offered my hand. “It’s okay. There’s nothing to be scared of.”
She pressed her hand into mine and squeezed as she raised her eyes to look at me. “I’m a little embarrassed is all. All my neighbors think I’m some town slut, and now the police are in my house asking me about a sex toy party. I’m really not like that at all.”
I smiled, hoping to make her feel better. “It’s okay. Really. My partner intimidates everyone, so don’t worry. Do you know the first time I met him he barely spoke four words to me, and then the next time we met he aimed a gun at my head?”
Mary’s eyes grew as wide as saucers. “He did? Really? Why?”
“I was sort of trespassing on his property, so he probably had every right to, but I know how scary he can be. You don’t have to be frightened, though. We’re just here asking questions about a case we’re trying to solve. You see, that man at the hotel, Canton Walters, was murdered and we need to find out who did it.”
A frown marred her beautiful face and she shook her head. “I know all too well about murder in Sunset Ridge.”
“What do you mean?” I asked and then looked over toward Alex, who raised his eyebrows in surprise. Even I hadn’t expected her to be that forthcoming after a few nice words.
“My husband was murdered, Miss McGuire. Five years ago, I came home to find him dead and even though no one on the police wanted to listen to me, I know someone murdered him.”
“How? I thought he died of a heart attack.”
“My husband was older than I was, but he wasn’t that old. A heart attack in a man who wasn’t even forty? I don’t know how they did it, but whoever killed him found a way.”
“Why would someone kill him?”
Mary hung her head. “It doesn’t matter now. The police never believed me, and even the autopsy didn’t show anything, but I know in my gut he was murdered.”
I looked over at Alex, who stood writing feverishly in his notepad. He lifted his gaze from the details he’d just put down and mouthed that he had no idea about her husband or his death.
“I’m sorry, Mary. I didn’t know this about your husband.”
Lifting her head, she forced a smile. “It’s okay. I miss him, but I’ve accepted what happened. That’s why I want to help to find this man’s murderer, but I don’t know what I can do.”
“Just tell me anything you can about the parties at Delilah Roberts’ house.”
“It’s really not as bad as everyone thinks. Delilah is alone most days since Alan spends all day and even some nights at his office. She understands that he’s dedicated to his practice, and all she ever asks of him is to let her have parties every so often. We don’t do anything terrible at them, Miss McGuire.”
I patted her hand and smiled. “Oh, I know. I’ve been to one once. It was fun.”
“They are. We get together to drink some wine and giggle at sexy toys and things we can wear when we’re with our boyfriends and husbands.”
She looked over at Alex and blushed. “You know what I mean.”
“Not really. Men prefer to get together and watch sports,” he said with a chuckle. “It usually involves beer.”
Mary turned her head toward me and said, “Well, I bet your girlfriend understands, right? You know what I mean, don’t you? It’s fun to get together with the girls and laugh and drink wine. Nobody gets hurt and Delilah makes a little money on the side.”
I didn’t bother to once again explain to another person that Alex and I weren’t a couple and stayed on the topic at hand. “I completely understand wanting to enjoy yourself with the girls. My friends and I get together for a few drinks every so often, and it’s always great fun. So nothing out of the ordinary ever happened at one of the parties?”
Looking away, Mary thought about what I’d asked. “My brother-in-law has never liked Delilah having them. I can tell you that.”
Her admission didn’t surprise me in the least. Dr. Roberts was a man who thought women should behave demurely, and his wife having friends over to drink and look at the sex toys she sells wasn’t modest in the least.
“Did he tell her not to have the parties anymore?”
Hesitating, she thought about what she wanted to say for a moment and then answered, “I don’t know, but I can tell you he didn’t like her having them. At her third one earlier this year, he came in while the party was in full swing and pulled her into the kitchen right in front of all of us. They had a big fight. I heard a little of it when I was walking past on my way to the bathroom.”
“What was it about?” I asked as Alex inched himself closer to where we sat.
“He threatened to throw everyone out of his house and her too. His house. That’s what he said to her. After all that she’s done to make such a lovely home for him, and he threw it in her face like that. That’s why she started having the parties. She wanted to contribute something to their home other than cooking and cleaning. She’s told me so many times that she wants to be more than just a doctor’s wife who stays at home all day making sure the rugs are vacuumed and her husband’s dinner is served whenever he gets home.”
“Did he follow through on his threat to throw everyone out that night?”
Shaking her head, Mary sighed. “No. They fought for about fifteen minutes in the kitchen, and then Delilah returned to all of us in the living room looking like she always did. Her makeup was perfect, but I know he made her cry when they were fighting. She would never let anyone see her as anything less than that perfect face because she knows Alan wants her to look like that. She never said anything to any of us about what he said, and when I asked her about it after everyone had left, she made excuses for him like she always did. He works hard. He’s just shy about things. All reasons why he could bully her.”
I had to admit I felt sorry for Delilah Roberts. I couldn’t imagine every day of my life being dedicated to cleaning a house that could be taken away from me on a whim if my husband chose to. My streak of independence ran deep, probably because I’d been single for so long, so the mere thought of someone threatening to throw my friends out or telling me what I could or couldn’t do was completely foreign to me.
“She continues to have the parties, though,” Alex said as he stepped closer to the table. “Her husband must have come around to being okay with them.”
Mary looked up at him and shook her head. “No. He still doesn’t like them. I don’t know how she keeps having them, but I can’t see Alan ever being okay with them. They aren’t his style. He couldn’t find fun if it was sitting on top of him.”
“Can you tell us if you’ve ever seen this man?” Alex asked as he took out the picture of Canton Walters. Placing it in front of Mary, he added, “Anything you can remember.”
She stared down at the picture, and I thought I saw a look of sadness cross her
face. But it was momentary, and after it passed, she pushed Canton’s picture away. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen this man.”
“Are you sure?” Alex pressed, surely seeing the same look on her face that I saw.
She shyly smiled and said, “There were only women at the parties, Officer Montero.”
“That’s not exactly true, now is it, Mary? Dr. Roberts was there at least for one party since they had that fight in the kitchen you told us about.”
I’d been Alex’s partner long enough to know when he thought someone was lying. I could always hear it in the way he said things like he’d just done with Mary. There was a lilt to his voice that told anyone who was listening carefully enough that he didn’t entirely believe what they were saying. It wasn’t a threatening or menacing tone, but there was something about how his words came out that made it clear he wasn’t going to just walk away before asking more questions.
She looked at me with a fearful expression, which told me she knew more about Canton Walters than she had let on. I gave her hand a supportive squeeze to let her know she needed to tell us what she knew.
“Let me look at that picture again.”
Pulling it toward her across the table, she held it in her hands and looked down at it. That same sad look came over her face again, and she traced the outside of the picture with her fingertips like it meant something to her.
I looked up at Alex to see him giving me a look that said he expected we were about to find out something important from her. I hoped he was right. Our investigation hadn’t made it very far yet, and Mary providing an important clue would give us something to go on.
She swiveled her head left and right to look up at Alex and then at me. “You know, there was a male dancer at one of her parties, the second party last year. He might have been that man.”
“A male dancer? That might be a reason why her husband doesn’t like these parties,” I wondered aloud.
“I don’t think so. He never knew about that. Alan was out of town at a conference for that party, and even though Delilah didn’t really want to have a dancer there, her friends hired him to come. She’d never do that on her own. For all the awful things Alan does, she wouldn’t disrespect him like that in his own home. That was her friends, not her.”
Mary obviously cared for her sister-in-law and friend, as evidenced by her defense of her every time we’d said something even slightly against Delilah. Alan was another story, though. She clearly didn’t like him. I found that interesting since I remembered hearing around town that her brother-in-law had been devastated at the loss of his brother when he died and they’d turned to each other for comfort. The busybodies of Sunset Ridge had even wondered if in all the time they spent together whether he’d cheated on his wife with his brother’s widow.
Alex handed Mary a sheet of paper from his notepad his pen and said, “Mary, please write your phone number down for me so I can get in touch with you if we have any more questions.”
“Okay. I hope I was able to help in some way. I would never want anyone to feel the way I did after my husband’s death. Some things shouldn’t remain a mystery.”
She wrote her number as Alex had ordered her to and handed him back the paper and pen. As he held it so I could see what she’d written, I noticed she printed instead of using cursive writing, even for her name.
Alex folded the piece of paper and stuck it into his pocket. With a smile, he said, “Thank you. One last question. Where were you Tuesday night after midnight?”
“Tuesday after midnight I was at Poppy’s father’s bar until around one in the morning and then I came home and went to bed.”
“Your neighbor next door, Mrs. Stark, told us she saw you come home late with a man that night. When she looked at the picture I showed you, she said she thought it could have been that man with you when you got out of the car.”
All the blood drained from Mary’s face until she was pale as a ghost, and her hands began to shake as they had when we first arrived. Clearing her throat, she looked Alex square in the eyes and said, “My neighbor thinks she sees a lot of things because she wants to see them. She thinks I should live as the mourning widow for the rest of my life wearing black and a veil like some medieval nun, and because I refuse to, she spends her days judging me like many people do in this town. You can ask Poppy’s father where I was from ten to one in the morning. He saw me and I remember him saying hi when I went to the bar for a drink at one point in the night. As for getting out of a car on Tuesday night with some man, that never happened. I walked home from McGuire’s because I hadn’t taken my car since I knew I wanted to have a few drinks.”
“Okay, thank you again, Mary. I’ll be in contact if we need anything more.”
She stood from the table to show us to the door, and as I followed Alex outside, she tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see she had something on her mind and she said, “Don’t believe everything you hear, even from the most respectable people in this town. Even those with spotless reputations have skeletons in their closets.”
I smiled and nodded, agreeing with every word she said more than she could ever know. By the time I caught up with my partner, he was already behind the wheel and ready to drive away. I climbed into the car and enjoyed the cold air blowing from the vents since just going from Mary’s house to the car had made me break out into a sweat.
“What’s her address again?”
Turning to look at her house, I watched her close the door and then said, “1525. Why?”
“Look at this.”
Alex handed me his notebook and the loose sheet of paper with her phone number. In his notes, he’d circled a number. 15253348256.
“What’s this number?” I asked.
“That’s the number we found on that sheet of paper in Canton Walters’ hotel room. Look at her phone number.”
I stared down at his notepad and then at the sheet Mary had written her number on and then back at the notepad. “It’s a combination of those two numbers.”
Unsure if I wanted to hear his answer, I asked, “Do you think we have our third suspect?”
“Third or fourth. I haven’t decided which of the Roberts is more on my list, so I’ve got them both on it. I have a feeling the next time I speak to Mary, we’ll be sitting at the station instead of in her kitchen.”
I thought about beautiful Mary with her long black hair and big brown eyes and couldn’t imagine her jamming that knife into Canton Walters’ back. I did have to admit there certainly was something off about her story, and I had the feeling she had spent time with our victim, but killing him?
No. I just couldn’t see it.
Alex was a different story, of course. He saw guilt in people I couldn’t.
“Thanks for letting me take the lead in there. I know you probably didn’t understand why she’d be uncomfortable talking about Delilah’s sex toy parties in front of you, but I figured if she thought she could talk freely around another woman, she might open up.”
A smirk came across his face that seemed strange, but then he said, “I trust you, Poppy. I don’t understand a grown woman being embarrassed about doing anything in the twenty-first century, but I’m not from this town, so maybe that’s why. You always go with your gut when it comes to the people here, and I respect that. I’ve been telling you since the day we began as partners that I believe in your instincts. They’re good, so I follow them.”
He didn’t say it, but I’d been acting like I didn’t believe in him as much. The problem was I didn’t know how to tell him I really did trust him.
“I’ll find out from my father what time Mary got to the bar, who she spent time with there, and what time she left when I go over there tonight.”
“Okay. By the way, there’s one thing I can’t figure out. Why is Mary’s last name not Roberts if she was married to Alan Roberts’ brother?”
“If I remember correctly, Jessick is her maiden name,” I explained as I pulled my seatbelt across me. “I gu
ess she decided to go back to that name after he died.”
Alex made a humming noise but said nothing as he started the car. To me, the far more interesting thing about Mary was that she clearly thought there was something nefarious about her husband’s death. I didn’t remember hearing anything about that, though. It had always been said he died of a heart attack.
“What did you think of what she said about her husband, Alex? Do you think it’s possible he was murdered?”
He put the car in drive and as we pulled away from her house, he said, “Anything’s possible, I guess. It isn’t impossible for a man in his late thirties to die of a heart attack, though. I’ll look into it on my next shift. What was his name?”
I had to go back deep into my memory for that, but as we turned the corner onto my street, I remembered. “His name was Jacob. Jacob Roberts.”
“Okay, I’ll take a look and see what I can find.”
He stopped in front of my house and I opened the door to step back into the scorching heat. “Tomorrow at our usual time?”
“Sure, but who knows? Maybe I’ll stop in at McGuire’s tonight. Nothing like an ice cold beer on a hot summer night, and I can see if you father remembers anything about what Mary was doing on Tuesday night.”
“You don’t trust me to get the details, Officer Montero?” I joked as I swung my legs to get out.
He leaned over against the passenger seat and smiled up at me. “Okay, then maybe I’ll just stop in for the cold beer and good company.”
Chapter Eleven
McGuire’s had a few regulars at the bar, but for a Friday night it was pretty dead. My father stood next to a table in the back talking to Albert Lightenton, his barber for life, as he called him. He’d cut my father’s hair for nearly forty years, which according to my father was the longest he’d ever stayed loyal to any person other than my mother. As a result, Andrew never paid for any drinks at the bar. It seemed like a fair trade-off.
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