I pointed at the notepad that he held in his left hand. “Then why are you taking such copious notes about her answers?”
He gave me a serious look and I knew the answer before he said anything. “Because I believe in you, even if I don’t believe a word that comes out of her mouth.”
“Still unhappy with me about that whole thing at the hotel last night, aren’t you?”
“I’m sure you’ll tell me when you’re ready.”
Rose returned before I could tell him my idea had been totally wrong. I’d expected to find out that Delilah Roberts had contacted Canton Walters at the hotel. Since it wasn’t her but his wife, I really didn’t want to admit my foolish theory when Rose was so obviously a better suspect.
“I’m sorry for that, but as I told you before, you’re wrong. I didn’t kill my husband. I know it seems hard to believe, but I still loved Canton. For all that he’d done, I loved him.”
Alex leveled his gaze on her. “You didn’t sound like you loved him when we first got here.”
“I said I loved him, not that I still love him, Officer Montero. I could handle a lot of things, but losing my home and being forced to move back in with my mother with my three young children is past even my line of things I’ll tolerate.”
“You certainly sounded like a woman who was mad enough to drive up to that hotel and let him know what you thought of his philandering, not to mention how much you hated losing your house.”
She gave him a look of disgust and sighed. “First off, I didn’t find out until yesterday that the bank was foreclosing on my house. I can show you the letter they sent postmarked after his death.”
“And his cheating? You wouldn’t have wanted to kill him for that?” Alex asked.
“Typical man. You can’t see the forest for the trees when it comes to love. I would have hated to find out for sure he was cheating on me, but I think I could have forgiven him for that. I had three children with him, so I would have at least tried.”
Even though she had shown herself to be a repeated liar, I believed she could have forgiven him. Alex didn’t, though. “So you’re saying you would have been able to forgive him for sleeping with another woman while you stayed here to take care of the house and kids?”
“You don’t know much about women, do you? Your partner knows what I’m talking about, though, don’t you? I saw it in your eyes when I was talking about Canton cheating on me. You know what it feels like. Well, when you have kids with the man who’s stepping out on you, the choice of just cutting him out of your life isn’t there anymore. At least not for me.”
Alex glanced over at me for a moment and then returned his attention to Rose. For my part, I had no idea how she saw anything in my eyes when she was talking about her husband cheating on her. It had been a long time since I felt what she was going through, and I’d thought I’d pushed that far enough down that it didn’t show anymore.
“Where were you Tuesday night and the early hours of Wednesday?” Alex asked, undeterred by her chastising of him.
Rose shifted in her chair and straightened her back before answering. “I was here, like I told you already.”
“Did anyone see you here, other than your children?”
I knew he had to press her for the truth, but the way he sounded it felt like an interrogation of someone who had already been shown to be guilty of a crime. Gently, I nudged his knee with mine as he and Rose stared one another down.
“I’m sure if you asked around the neighborhood someone would be able to tell you when I got home and that I didn’t leave all night.”
“I’ll be sure to ask around. Can you think of anyone else who would be able to show you were here that night?”
Rose glared at him for so long that I had to look away it was so uncomfortable, but Alex continued to stare right back at her as he waited for her answer.
Finally, she gave in and said, “My mother called me at around eleven that night. She wanted to check on her granddaughter.”
He handed her a piece of paper and the pen. “I need your mother’s name, address, and phone number.”
She did as he’d ordered and shoved the paper and pen back at him. “Are we done here or are you planning to haul me off to jail now?”
He stood from his chair and looked down at me before telling her, “We’ll be in touch if we need anything else, Mrs. Walters.”
Then he turned and walked out without saying another word. Rose Walters glanced over at me and I saw her expression once again was far more pleasant than when she had to deal with Alex. Part of me wanted to apologize for how he acted, but I knew that would be wrong. He hadn’t done anything uncalled for. Any cop would have asked her the same type of questions. Maybe it was the way he asked them of a woman who had just lost her husband that made me uneasy. Then again, he didn’t see her that way. He saw her as the prime suspect in our victim’s murder.
She looked up at me as I stood to leave and said, “I didn’t kill my husband. If your partner bothers to actually do his job, he’ll find that out.”
“I wouldn’t worry about Officer Montero doing his job.” Feeling like I needed to defend Alex, I added, “He’s good at what he does.”
“Then I don’t expect to see him again. Now if you don’t mind, I need to pack up the last of our things before I leave my house and then I have to plan my husband’s funeral.”
I sheepishly expressed how sorry I was for everything that she was going through and left as quickly as possible. I found Alex waiting outside in the late morning heat, his arms crossed as he leaned up against the car. As I approached him, I saw he wore a look that made me think he was angry.
The question was why.
“Stay behind for a little chat with the grieving widow?”
“You were pretty hard on her. She did just lose her husband, Alex. I wonder if you could have been a little more sympathetic.”
He gave me the same look he’d given her and said, “I know exactly what it feels like to lose someone you love. If she was acting like she actually cared that her husband was dead instead of being unhappy that her meal ticket had gone away, I would have been more sympathetic, Poppy.”
What was I supposed to say to that? No matter how I answered, he seemed to be looking for a fight, so I pressed my lips together and said nothing at all.
Alex hung his head and then looked up at me with a smile. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I have to do my job, though. I hope you understand that.”
I didn’t want to fight with him over this. It wasn’t worth it. So I accepted his apology and quickly moved to change the subject. “It’s getting hot out here and I have to get back to The Eagle, so let’s get in and get that air conditioning going.”
“Sounds good. I talked to her next door neighbor while you were in there and she said everyone but her on this block is still out of town for the Fourth of July holiday. She said she saw Rose and her kids get home around seven but she doesn’t know if she left any time after that.”
I didn’t ask him what he thought about that. I already knew he considered Rose a suspect.
We drove off from Canton Walters’ house and headed toward home. I closed my eyes and let the cool air hit me as some song on the country music station played. Figuring it could give me a chance to break the iciness that had settled in between us, I joked, “I never figured you for a country music fan.”
“I’m not. Too much sappiness for me. I think Craig was the last one to use this car. Turn it off if you don’t like it.”
I opened my eyes and chuckled. “I can see Craig liking this kind of music. My wife left me and took my dog, and I miss the dog so much.”
Alex looked over and laughed at my indictment of the entire country music genre. “So what was Rose Walters talking about with you back there? She seemed to have your number when it came to how she was feeling about that cheating husband of hers.”
“I have no idea,” I answered in my best casual voice, truly hoping he
didn’t pick up on how hard I was trying to be nonchalant. I so didn’t want to talk about that with him.
“Really? More secrets, Poppy?” he asked sharply.
Hating that I had to tell him about one of the worst times of my life, I swallowed my pride and said, “It’s nothing really. I just know how she feels because I was with someone I cared for and he cheated on me. It was a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He looked at me and I saw his eyes were full of pity. I hated that. I didn’t want to be pitied because I’d foolishly believed in someone and they’d turned out to be nothing like I thought they were.
“No need to be sorry. I got over it, and now it’s just a bad memory.”
We rode along silently for a few miles until I said, “So I guess you’re thinking Rose Walters is truly a suspect now, right?”
“Right. She had motive since Canton was cheating on her. She had means as much as anyone else. And she had the opportunity since even if her mother’s call does pan out, there’s still a few hours she can’t account for.”
I looked out the window as the trees raced past us and thought about Rose Walters as our killer. She certainly had the whole woman scorned act down pat, but I had a hard time seeing her leaving her kids to drive an hour north just to kill their father.
But as I knew all too well, betrayal brought out things in a person they never knew existed in them before.
Chapter Fourteen
The car sped over the hot pavement toward home while I daydreamed about what fib I’d tell my boss when I got back to my desk since I had the distinct feeling he’d be waiting for me. I hadn’t spent much time in my office at The Eagle since this Canton Walters case began, and even though Howard hadn’t said anything about it yet, I didn’t see that silence on the matter continuing much longer. It was all well and good to claim I was getting details on the local crime scene, but they didn’t pay me to hang out with Alex and solve crimes.
I wish they did. I was never happier than when we were trying to tease out the facts of a case, whether it was the minor theft of a few paintings from the Danford house in late May that revealed their son-in-law wasn’t who he said he was but an art thief who’d targeted the family or a murder like the one we currently worked on.
That art heist case had been relatively easy compared to the death of Canton Walters. While we had no shortage of suspects, none of them but Elizabeth Freely seemed to have had opportunity to commit the crime. That was really the only thing keeping her as a suspect in my mind. I was nearly one hundred percent sure this case hinged on some kind of rendezvous gone bad, but who had our victim let into his hotel room that night and what went wrong between them?
“You’re quiet over there. Everything okay?”
Alex’s tone signaled he was still worried he’d upset me by pressing me to tell him why Rose Walters had believed she and I had something in common when it came to cheating men. I wasn’t bothered by his desire to know as much as I was by her seeing something in me that said I’d gone through what she was. Granted, I hadn’t suffered through a husband cheating on me after years of marriage and three kids, but a cheating fiancé running around with some woman he met one snowy night at the bed and breakfast he was checking out for our honeymoon was almost as bad.
Cringing at the memory of finding out the man I planned to spend the rest of my life had been a cheating bastard, I forced a smile and said, “I’m good. Just daydreaming as I watch the clouds float by.”
Alex turned to look at me with concern in his eyes. “I’m not used to you not talking. I thought something might be wrong.”
“I thought I’d give the Chatty Cathy routine a break for a little while.”
Focusing on the road again, he smiled like my answer had put his mind at ease. “Well, I’m getting pretty bored over here just driving. It’s so hot out there I think I’m seeing heat waves coming off the side of the road, or I might be imagining that. I don’t know.”
“I’m happy to turn the chattiness back on, if that will help,” I offered, eager to talk about the case so my head didn’t get stuck in the past. That’s the last thing I needed.
“Okay. Want to talk about our case? I think we have all the pieces to this puzzle. We now have to find out how they fit together to show us our murderer.”
I knew what he was thinking. He’d never trusted Canton Walters’ wife, and after that visit today, he saw every reason to believe she had something to do with his death.
“So do you think you know who did it?”
He nodded and said, “Yeah. Do you have your suspect?”
“Yes and no, but I don’t think we’re going to agree on who did it.”
The car turned off the highway onto a less traveled road on the second leg of our trip back to Sunset Ridge. A tree lined road, it was far shadier than the highway from Virginia.
“We don’t always agree, Poppy, so that’s okay. Talking like this helps us get our ideas straight. It’s one of the reasons we work so well together.”
I liked when he said things like that. It made me feel like I wasn’t the only one in this partnership who enjoyed what we did.
“Okay, you go first. Give me who did it, why, and how. It’s like Clue we played when I was a kid. I need to warn you, though. I was always very good at that game.”
“Clue, huh? Like Miss Scarlet in the billiard room with the lead pipe? I’m imagining little Poppy McGuire sitting around with her friends and being quite good at that game,” he said with a smile as he glanced over at me.
“I was, so you’ve been warned. So hit me with whodunit.”
“The grieving widow. Rose Walters has been on my radar since the first time we spoke to her. Too much of what she said didn’t make sense that day, and the more we learned about her husband, the more I thought she could be our killer.”
Just as I suspected. “Well, I respectfully have to disagree. I don’t think she’s our murderer.”
Alex stopped the car at a stop sign and turned to face me. “How can you not think she’s involved in this up to her eyes? The woman couldn’t find the truth if you handed it to her in a bag.”
“She really only lied about being at her mother’s the night of the murder. That’s the only direct lie she told,” I said, surprised by how forceful he’d been in giving his opinion.
Alex’s eyes flashed his frustration at my insistence on disagreeing with him. “Poppy, she had motive to kill her husband. The man was cheating on her and she knew. She came right out and told us that.”
The car began to move again, so I didn’t have to face that angry expression of his, thankfully. I’d never seen Alex so upset with anyone but me, and that was only because he thought I was sneaking around his house and trespassing that night. Even then, he didn’t look as angry as he did at that moment driving down the back road to town.
“I admit she did have motive, but I don’t think she did it. She had no opportunity, and I’m not even sure she could kill someone she loved like that.”
Alex shook his head as his expression morphed to one of complete disbelief. His reaction seemed entirely over the top. Why was he acting like this just because I didn’t think Rose Walters had killed her husband?
“Poppy, what makes you think she couldn’t drive to the Hotel Piermont in the hour it takes, find her husband and stab him to death, and then go back home all in the span of a few hours? You think she sat down rationally and thought, ‘Gee, I really want to kill that cheating bastard of a husband of mine, but that would mean driving to find him at that hotel and who will watch the kids?’ I don’t think so.”
“Whoa, what’s with the attack mode? I just don’t think she’d leave her kids like that.”
His jaw set, he said in a low voice, “It’s not attacking when you believe something.”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I believed in him and his opinions, and I thought that he believed in me and my opinions too. But as he sat there scowling, I had to w
onder.
“Do you think I don’t believe what I think is true?”
“That’s not what I’m saying, Poppy. You know that. You know I trust your opinions as much as I trust my own.”
“It’s not that I don’t think she’s capable of murder, Alex. I think that she knew he was having an affair and may very well have wanted to kill him when she heard he was at a hotel so close to home. I just don’t think she got to that point before someone else did.”
In a calmer voice, he said, “No one else has motive to the extent that she did. Elizabeth likely didn’t even know him. Delilah and her husband may have known him, but so far we have no proof of that. And you can’t believe Mary could kill anyone, so who does that leave us with?”
“I get that you’re frustrated, Alex. I am too. This case seems to be all leads that go nowhere but dead ends. I’m frustrated too. I just don’t know why you can only see Rose as the killer. I think we might be missing something that points to someone else.”
He turned toward me, and I saw how discouraged this case had gotten him. “Like who? As far as we know after checking out all the leads, Canton Walters didn’t know many people in Sunset Ridge. I called all the people on Delilah’s list a second time to ask them if they remembered ever seeing him at one of her parties, and to a person they all said they didn’t recall a man ever being present at any of them.”
“Alex, those women are all Delilah’s friends. Don’t you think it’s possible they’re all lying to you to cover for her?”
“All fifteen women and only Mary seems to remember him? Which seems more likely?”
I almost laughed at his question. The idea of fourteen women lying for their friend seemed perfectly normal to me, a fellow female. It was almost a rite of passage for girls to lie to protect one of their own. I’d done it myself dozens of times, regardless of whether it was parents, school principals, or even cops doing the asking.
After Hours Page 15