Ditching David

by Jenna Bennett

  Gone were the jeans and running shoes from the middle of the night. He was back into the nice business suit and tie this morning. The shoes were black with squared-off toes, and he used one of them to scuff the fluffy carpet. “I’m here to drive you back to your house. You can get your car and go to the mall.”

  Wonderful. “Does that mean none of my clothes survived?”

  “I don’t know,” Mendoza said. “I haven’t been back there this morning. The fire chief is meeting us in thirty minutes.”

  We’d better get a move on, then. “I’ve spent the morning cleaning up the mess our burglar left,” I told Mendoza as I bent to zip up the boots. He made a weird choking sound, but when I straightened and turned, he was looking at the ceiling light.

  When Mendoza didn’t respond, I added, “If anything’s missing, I have no idea what it is. I took some of the bank statements with me earlier this week. I didn’t notice anything else being gone from the drawer in the kitchen, although of course I could have overlooked something. As for the bedroom, it’s not like anyone would steal David’s clothes. And the business files, again, are just copies. The originals are in the office. So stealing the copies wouldn’t help anyone.”

  Mendoza nodded.

  “Maybe there was something here that meant something to someone, and I just didn’t realize it.” I looked around.

  “No safe on the premises?” Mendoza asked.

  I shook my head. “David had a safe at the office. He could leave anything valuable there. There was no need for a safe at the house or here. He spent half his time at the office, anyway.”

  Mendoza nodded. “Ready to go?”

  “Yes.” I wrapped the trench coat around me and tightened the belt. As I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I realized that all I needed to look like Mata Hari, was a pair of big sunglasses.

  “I look like a spy,” I told Mendoza, grinning.

  He grinned back. “Or a wife—”

  And then he stopped, and blushed.

  Or a wife going to surprise her husband, in a trench coat and heels with nothing underneath.

  Except my husband was dead, and I had no one to surprise.

  “Sorry.”

  The tops of his cheekbones were still hot.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, my voice steady. “I’m fine. It probably makes it easier that we weren’t living together the last couple of months of his life. He wasn’t an everyday part of my life anymore.”

  Mendoza nodded and held the door for me. “Still, it was unprofessional of me.”

  I shrugged. “So you’re human.”

  “Was there any doubt?” He pushed the button for the elevator. We could hear things start to whirr inside the shaft.

  Luckily he didn’t seem to want an answer. “Sleep well?” he asked, before I had thought of anything to say.

  “Like the dead.” Another not-so-appropriate remark. I winced. “Yes. I slept very well, thank you. Conked out as soon as I got into bed, and didn’t stir until nine. I didn’t even have bad dreams.”

  “Would you mind going through what happened again, now that you’ve had time to recover?”

  The doors to the elevator opened, and he gestured me in.

  “I’d be happy to,” I said, watching him push the button for the lobby, “but I don’t know what good it’ll do. I told you everything last night.”

  “Humor me.”

  Of course. I went through everything again, from the moment I woke up coughing in the middle of the night, to the moment his car screeched into the driveway. In every particular, it was the same story I had told him last night. Because it was all I knew to tell him.

  Halfway through the reiteration, we arrived in the lobby, and Mendoza squired me out of the elevator and toward the doors. Zachary jumped up from behind the desk. “Mrs. Kelly! Are you all right? The detective told me what happened!”

  “I’m fine,” I said, with my most brilliant smile, “thank you for asking.”

  He flushed all the way to the roots of his hair. He even stammered. “Is there anything I can do?”

  I couldn’t think of anything, and told him so. “I’ll probably see you later, though. I expect I’ll be staying here a while.”

  Mendoza nodded, so obviously he agreed. “Do me a favor,” he told Zachary. “Pull those security tapes from the secondary doors and start going through them. I doubt you’ll see anything, but it has to be done. After last night, we can’t afford not to look at every angle.”

  Zachary nodded. “Right away.”

  Mendoza didn’t say anything while we were inside the lobby, but once we were outside on the sidewalk, he said, “He’s got a crush on you.”

  I shook my head. “He can’t possibly. He knows I’m forty. I’m probably older than his mother.”

  “You don’t look forty,” Mendoza said.

  Maybe not. Although I wouldn’t be too sure, especially this morning. However— “I don’t look twenty, either.” And that’s what I’d have to be, to be anything like suitable for Zachary.

  “You don’t have to look twenty. A lot of young men like older women. Haven’t you ever watched The Graduate?”

  “Yes.” I shuddered. “Please don’t mention it in the same breath as Zachary.” And for God’s sake, don’t call me ‘older.’

  Mendoza smirked, but abandoned the subject. “So you’re sure you didn’t leave any candles burning last night? Or leave the stove on? Turn the stove off but leave an oven mitt inside?”

  “That would be crazy,” I said. “Do people do that? No, I didn’t leave anything running or burning. I didn’t use anything that ran or burned.”

  “Hair dryer? Curling iron?” He was starting to sound a bit desperate.

  “Why would I curl my hair before going to bed?” I asked. “No. I didn’t take a shower, and I didn’t dry my hair. I didn’t curl it. I didn’t cook anything. There were still leftovers in the fridge. I ate them cold. I had wine, so I didn’t use the microwave or coffee maker. I didn’t wash and dry clothes. The cell phone was plugged in and charging in the kitchen. Other than that—and things like the TV and refrigerator; things that are always plugged in—nothing else was on.”

  Mendoza grunted. We had reached the gray sedan he drove, and he stopped to open the door for me before walking around the car to get in himself.

  I waited until we were moving and had made the turn onto Charlotte Avenue before I opened my mouth again. “Krystal’s boyfriend was out behind the house sometime on Friday afternoon, smoking pot. I don’t suppose it’s possible that one of his joints was lying around smoldering for that long?”

  Mendoza glanced at me. “I wouldn’t think so, but we can ask.”

  I nodded.

  “I would say that it would either burn itself out or catch fire much sooner, if that was the case. Not more than twenty-four hours later. Especially since Friday was a wet sort of day.”

  That’s what I’d say, too, but I was grasping at straws here.

  “Maybe the cell phone really did explode,” I said. “I think I’ve heard of that happening.”

  Mendoza grunted.

  “It makes as much sense as anything else,” I insisted. “Because I know I didn’t leave anything running.”

  Mendoza shrugged. “The fire chief will tell us,” he said.

  * * *

  WHEN WE GOT to the house, the chief was already there, and poking around in the debris with a stick.

  There was a lot of debris. In the harsh light of day—the weather was nice, with crisp, blue skies and sunshine—everything looked a lot worse than it had under the merciful cover of darkness.

  From the front, things didn’t look too bad. The fire station is only about a mile away, so the first fire truck had gotten here in time to save the front half of the house. As we turned off the main road and headed up the driveway, I told myself that this really wasn’t that bad at all.

  And then we got a little closer, and I saw that the damage was mostly localized to
ward the rear, and it was hideous.

  All the windows on the second floor were blown out, not just the one I had burst through to save myself. The ground was littered with shards of glass. The cream-colored walls were smeared with soot, and the underside of the roof was charred. On the first floor, the French doors to the family room stood open, and black water stood in puddles and trickled in rivulets across the now-buckled hardwood floors. The Persian rug was a soggy mess. The painting above the fireplace—David’s debutante mother in her younger days—had been reduced to a few shreds of canvas inside a charred frame. The ceiling timbers had turned into blackened beams, and the drywall had burned away. What was left of it, lay in charred flakes across the floor. And everything stank to high heaven.

  I couldn’t help the tears that gathered and overflowed. My bottom lip quivered as I tried to keep myself from breaking down completely.

  “Don’t cry,” Mendoza said, a trace of panic in his voice. He put a careful arm around my shoulders. “It’s just stuff. The most important thing in the house was you. And you got out.”

  I knew he was right. But this house had been my home for eighteen years. And seeing it like this—all of David’s (and the designer’s) meticulous beauty reduced to soot and ashes—hit me hard. I turned and leaned my forehead against the detective’s broad shoulder. What I wanted to do was wrap my arms around his neck and have a good cry against the side of his neck, but that probably wouldn’t go over well. So I took what he was willing to give—a careful embrace and awkward patting on the back—and controlled myself as best I could.

  It can’t have been very well, because as I kept sniffing, the patting became increasingly frantic. I could feel the relief permeate his body at the sound of a throat clearing behind us. Or behind me, rather.

  I lifted my head and turned around, to face the fire chief. “Sorry.”

  It was tough to get a good look at his face due to a very impressive handlebar moustache that took up a lot of real estate, but he appeared to be acutely uncomfortable. About as uncomfortable as I imagined Mendoza might be. The detective had stopped patting me, but kept a steadying hand under my elbow. When I turned my head to glance up at him, he quirked his brows.

  “Gunn,” the fire chief grunted. It took me a second to realize this was his name, not a warning.

  “This is Mrs. Kelly,” Mendoza said. “The home owner.”

  Gunn nodded. “Gotta big mess here.”

  No kidding.

  “It can be saved,” I asked worriedly, “can’t it?”

  “Gotta ask a contractor that,” Gunn said. “You’re gonna need a new kitchen and a new bathroom upstairs. New fireplace, new family room. Lotta new windows.”

  “I’ll call a contractor tomorrow morning,” I said. “And get an estimate.”

  Gunn nodded. “Fire started in the back. First floor. You sleeping upstairs?”

  I nodded. “Right up there.” I pointed to where the silk curtains were hanging in soggy ropes through the broken window.

  We all peered up at it, and at the bedraggled holly bushes below. From here, it looked like a pretty far drop. I couldn’t quite believe I had jumped out of a second story window last night, and was standing here now, able to tell the tale.

  “Lucky you got out,” Gunn told me. “The fire spread fast.”

  I had noticed that. “I’m just glad I woke up when I did.”

  Both men nodded. “Any idea what started the fire?” Mendoza asked. “Mrs. Kelly says she didn’t leave anything on or burning, but...”

  Gunn waved us both around the corner of the house, and pointed to a spot on the ground by the foundation, right next to the chimney. The earth was charred. “There.”

  Mendoza blinked at it. I did, too. “That’s where the fire started?”

  “How can you tell?” Mendoza asked.

  “Been doing this thirty-five years,” Gunn grunted. “Longer’n you’ve been alive. You gonna question my expertise?”

  “Of course not.” I smiled sweetly, and when Mendoza opened his mouth, I put the heel of my boot on his foot and pressed down. I don’t think I hurt him—he was wearing a nice pair of leather shoes—but he winced. I added, still smiling at Gunn, “I’d just like a little more of an explanation. I assumed the cell phone exploded, or...”

  “The yucca plant,” Mendoza muttered.

  Gunn looked from one to the other of us. “Wasn’t no plant. And no phone, neither. This was arson, plain and simple.”

  There was a moment of silence. A rather long moment.

  “You’re kidding,” I said, at the same time as Mendoza said, “Arson? Are you sure?”

  Gunn pulled himself up to his full height—about an inch shorter than me, but a lot bigger around—and before he could cite his vast experience once again, Mendoza added quickly, “I’m not questioning your conclusions, Chief. I’m just surprised. How do you know? Specifically?”

  “Burn pattern,” Gunn said, and went into a highly technical explanation of which I only understood about half. I won’t bore you with it, especially since it would be incomplete anyway.

  By now Mendoza was scribbling notes in his little book. “What did you say the accelerant was?”

  Gunn repeated the same multi-syllabic name. “Gasoline,” he added.

  “The kind you put in a car?”

  Both men turned to me. Mendoza’s eyebrows had crept halfway up his forehead. Gunn’s expression was mostly hidden behind the handlebar, but I could tell what he was thinking.

  “Yes,” Mendoza said. “The kind you put in a car.”

  “Thank you.”

  Nick would have access to gasoline. More than likely, it was sitting around his place of business.

  Then again, anyone can go to the nearest gas station with a can and fill it up, so that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Everyone I knew owned a car. Some people owned several. No one would have thought anything of it if someone showed up with a gas can they wanted to fill. Even someone like Jacquie or Martha Hollingsworth.

  Not that I suspected either of them of torching my house.

  Or at least I didn’t suspect Martha. That would be ridiculous.

  Jacquie...

  Well, if Jacquie hadn’t cut David’s brake lines—and she probably hadn’t—but she thought I had—and judging from her performance at the funeral, it seemed like she did—she might resent me for killing her cash cow. She might have reasoned that if she couldn’t get her hands on David’s house and David’s money, I didn’t deserve to keep them, either.

  It was a bit kooky, true. But then her outburst at the funeral hadn’t been exactly sane.

  I glanced at Mendoza. He was deep in conversation with Gunn, so I made a mental note to run the idea past him later. Then I went back to thinking about it.

  If Jacquie wanted to burn me out of David’s house, she wouldn’t dirty her own hands with gasoline and matches. I could no more see her creeping around my house in the dead of night, than I could see Martha doing it.

  But I could see Nick wanting to please Jacquie.

  I could imagine Nick breaking into the penthouse, too. What I couldn’t imagine, was why. I’d been over that penthouse from top to bottom. There was nothing there that could possibly interest either of them. Jacquie and Nick wouldn’t care about David’s hidden bank accounts, or about David’s old client files.

  Had she left something there she wanted back? Something stupid, that it wouldn’t even cross my mind to notice? Had she bought him a gift—expensive black boxer shorts, like the pair I was wearing—and now that he was dead, Nick wanted them?

  It made as much sense as anything else. Not a whole lot, in other words.

  “Thank you for your time,” Mendoza said behind me. “Can you make sure I get a copy of that report?”

  Gunn grunted something to the effect that he would, and headed for his car. Mendoza turned to me.

  Chapter 18

  “WHO CALLED THE fire department?” I asked before he could say anything. “I didn
’t.”

  I’d been too busy saving my skin. And besides, my phone had been downstairs in the kitchen, in the thick of the flames.

  “One of the neighbors,” Mendoza told me. “Mr. Owen Harrison.”

  I knew who Mr. Harrison was, but I didn’t really know him. He lived directly across the street, an eighth of a mile away. I’d seen him come and go a few times, but he’d only been living there a couple of years, and he stayed busy, so we hadn’t been formally introduced.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve talked to him?”

  Mendoza shook his head.

  “Do you think he might have seen something? The fire spread very fast, so he might have been awake when it started.”

  “It’s possible,” Mendoza said. “We can knock on his door and ask.”

  “Could we?” With any luck, maybe Owen Harrison had seen a dark pickup speed away from the house just as the flames took hold, but he’d forgotten all about it in the excitement of having to call 911 and then watching what was going on across the street.

  “Why not?” Mendoza said philosophically. “Get in the car. You have big properties around here.”

  I got in, and he drove down the driveway, a few yards down the street, and then into Mr. Harrison’s driveway on the other side.

  A minute later we were knocking on Mr. Harrison’s door. A minute after that, Harrison answered.

  He was a small, spare man, David’s age or maybe a few years younger. Thinning hair, and dressed in faded jeans and Tennessee Vols sweater. From within the house, we could hear the sound of a TV, or maybe a radio.

  “Yes?” He looked from one to the other of us.

  “Mr. Harrison?” Mendoza hauled out his badge. “Jaime Mendoza, Metro Nashville PD.”

  I got a flashback to him standing on my doorstep, doing and saying the same thing. Six days ago now.

  It felt like a lifetime.

  “Regina Beaufort Kelly,” I added when Harrison turned his attention to me. “From across the street.”

  His face changed. “The fire.”