“Murder has been committed for less,” Detective Grimaldi said.
“Maybe, but not by me.”
Grimaldi didn’t answer. “Did you know she was going to be at 101 Potsdam Street this morning?” she asked after a moment’s pause.
I shook my head. “She didn’t tell me what she was doing. Except for when she was rubbing something in. Like yesterday, when she had five closings and made sure we all knew it. She might have told Clarice, her assistant.”
“Would Clarice have written it down somewhere, if she did?”
I shrugged. “There’s an appointment book, I think. You’d have to ask her. I’m not on the Brenda Puckett Team, you see.”
“I’ll do that.” Detective Grimaldi made a note in her folder. She didn’t say anything else, and after a few moments, I broke the silence.
“So is that it? Can I go?”
“Unless there’s something you’d like to add.”
I shook my head.
“Take my card, in case you remember something you haven’t told us.” She handed it across the table to me. I picked it up and glanced at it.
“Thank you. Um . . . when will the funeral be?”
“There’ll be an autopsy,” Tamara Grimaldi said, as I got to my feet. “The next of kin will be notified when it is completed and the body can be released. Would you happen to know who Mrs. Puckett’s next of kin is?”
“She’s married,” I said, my mind still on the autopsy. “His name is Steven. And there are a couple of kids. Teenagers. I guess I should call and ask if there’s anything I can do . . .”
“Give it some time,” Detective Grimaldi said firmly. “Go home and take care of yourself first. Officer Truman will drive you back to your car. And don’t leave town in the next week or two.”
Iwasalmosttothedoor,walkinginadaze,butthislast statement made me stop and turn around. “Excuse me?”
She looked up from the folder. “Don’t go anywhere. In case we need to talk to you again.”
“But it’s my mother’s birthday on Tuesday. She’ll have a fit if I’m not there!”
Detective Grimaldi thought for a second. “Sweetwater?” she asked. I nodded. “All right. You may go to your mother’s birthday party. Just don’t go anywhere we can’t get hold of you.”
I promised I wouldn’t, and opened the door. Young Officer Truman escorted me to the parking lot and drove me back to Potsdam Street, looking less green and more like himself again. I guess I must have looked about as shaky as I felt, though, because he offered to follow me home, to make sure I didn’t get into an accident on the way. He was very sweet and solicitous, as if I were his aged, white-haired grandmother, and I wanted to swat him upside the head and tell him to save it for someone who’d appreciate it, but, of course, I’m far too well brought-up to do something like that.
My car was parked where I left it, and the house and grounds were swarming with cops, both uniformed and plainclothes, just like Officer Spicer had said. None of them paid any attention to me. Rafe’s black HarleyDavidson was still there at the foot of the steps when I drove slowly down the graveled drive and turned right onto Potsdam.
3.
I spent what was left of Saturday in my apartment, curled up on the sofa staring miserably at the TV. Usually my cozy one-bedroom rental, with its view of East Main Street through the glass doors of the patio, and the comfortable furniture I had gathered from consignment stores and estate sales over the past two years, made me feel safe and relaxed. Not so today; after what had happened, I jumped every time I heard a noise in the hallway, and the running of water in the pipes made me break into a cold sweat. I went to bed before nine, just because I couldn’t stand being awake any longer.
Not surprisingly, I had bad dreams. The corridors and rooms at 101 Potsdam seemed to go on forever, and I ran from room to room calling Brenda’s name, ever more hysterically, and all the time I knew that someone else was in the house with me, trying to find me the way I was trying to find Brenda, but a lot more silently. The dream ended in the library, with Brenda lying on the floor in front of the fireplace. But unlike that morning, she wasn’t dead yet. Her eyes were fastened on my face and she was trying to speak, but couldn’t because her throat was slit from ear to ear. Blood was bubbling out of the wound and dripping onto the dusty floor. The part of me that was aware I was dreaming wished I would faint again so I wouldn’t have to look at it. And then I saw her eyes shift, and felt a presence loom up behind me, and I swung around on my heel, just as the knife came up, and the last thing I saw was Rafe Collier’s face—dark eyes narrowed in concentration as he prepared to cut my throat.
I woke up with a scream, so wrapped around with nightgown and sheets that I resembled a mummy. It was five o’clock in the morning, and just beginning to turn light outside. I put away any thoughts of going back to sleep—I’d rather have bags under my eyes than another such nightmare—and swung my feet over the edge of the bed. And watched some more TV. And managed to choke down a piece of toast and a couple of sips of coffee.
By mid-afternoon I was starting to feel a little more human again. I even went outside for a walk, down to the corner market to pick up the Sunday paper. Mostly I wanted to know whether any of the papers had mentioned my name, but I admit that I was a little curious, too.
The murder was front page news, just as it had been the lead story on all the news shows the night before. top
realtor murdered in empty house!was the headline in
the Nashville Banner, with a sidebar on the crime statistics in the neighborhood around Potsdam Street. (The Banner is a conservative, factual kind of paper.) The stats were staggering: home invasions, muggings, drive-by shootings, gang violence . . . The reporter suggested that Brenda’s death could have been the result of a robbery gone wrong, and called for the mayor to do something about the criminal underclass preying on upstanding citizens.
real estate queen assassinated!screamed the
headline in the Tennessean. (The Tennessean is less conservative and more widely read than the Banner.) Not to be outdone, the Tennessean reporter suggested, none too delicately, that maybe Brenda had been the victim of a sexual crime. Rapes, too, were prevalent in the Potsdam Street area, and the ripe Mrs. Puckett—his word, not mine—might have caught someone’s eye. The article was accompanied by an archive photo of Her Highness busting out of a strapless gown, and ripe didn’t even begin to cover it.
The last paper was the City Paper, which had sent a photographer with a telephoto lens to Potsdam Street to take pictures of the police cars and medical vans. Rafe’s black motorcycle had made it into one of the shots, but my Volvo had escaped that honor. Maybe I had left before the photographer got there. It made me wonder how long the police had kept Rafe downtown, and whether the Harley might still be there.
The City Paper reporter had had the brilliant idea to interview some of the neighbors, and between them they managed to give a pretty good description of both Rafe and myself. I hadn’t noticed anyone hanging out of any windows watching us, but someone must have, because the descriptions were spot-on. “A classy-looking blonde in a tight skirt,” was how they described me, while one witness called Rafe “tall and dangerous-looking,” and added, “It wouldn’t be surprising ifhe’d had something to do with it.”
The phone rang just as I was contemplating this last statement, and I steeled myself before picking it up, certain it would be the grieving husband. Steven Puckett hadn’t answered the phone when I called yesterday, and I wasn’t surprised; if the light of my life had been snuffed out—and Steven might well have considered Brenda the light of his life, difficult as that was for the rest of us to fathom—I wouldn’t want to talk to all the well-wishers, mourners, and just plain nosy-parkers, either.
“Hello, Savannah,” a smooth voice said in response to my greeting. I managed to bite back a heartfelt “Oh, God!” but only just.
“Hi, mother,” I said instead, politely. “What can I do for you?”
&
nbsp; “How are you, darling?”
“I’m fine,” I said, not entirely truthfully.
“You sound tired, darling. You’re taking care of yourself, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” I said. “I eat right, I get enough sleep, I give my hair a hundred strokes with a brush every night . . .”
“And you’re being careful, aren’t you, darling?” “Of course I am,” I said. Mother hesitated. “It’s just that one hears such stories . . .”
I smothered a sigh. I should have known this was coming. Brenda’s death would be news all over the state, and quite possibly to the ends of the earth. Wasn’t it just too ironic for words? All the notoriety she could possibly desire, and she was dead and couldn’t take advantage of it!
“You’re talking about what happened to Brenda Puckett, right? She was universally disliked, bless her heart. There must have been at least a dozen people who would have liked to murder her.” Including myself, on that day I was tying ribbons. “But there’s nobody who wants to murder me, so don’t worry.” None of the papers had mentioned my name, so mother was unaware that I’d been involved in the discovery, and I wasn’t about to tell her.
“A mother always worries, darling,” my mother said smoothly. I suppressed an unladylike groan. I knew what was coming, and it didn’t help to realize that I had walked right into it. She continued, on cue, “Especially when her daughter is all alone. It’s been almost two years since the divorce, darling. Don’t you think you should find someone else?”
“I’m not interested in finding anyone else,” I said. “One failed marriage was enough, thank you.”
Mother thought for a moment. Her next remark might sound like a non sequitur, but only to someone who didn’t know her well. “You’re still coming down for the birthday party, aren’t you?”
“Of course I am.”
“I’ve invited Todd Satterfield to join us. He’s back in town, you know, and working for the district attorney’s office. You remember Todd, don’t you, darling?”
I mentioned Todd in passing earlier, when I was talking to Detective Grimaldi. Todd’s daddy has been Sweetwater’s sheriff for as long as I can remember—he was the one who arrested Rafe Collier back then—and Todd and I have known each other our whole lives. We’d even dated for a while in high school, more to please our families than because there were any real feelings between us, but we had lost contact when Todd left for college and I went to finishing school and then married Bradley. I knew that Todd had gotten married, too, but if mother was trying to fix me up with him, it was a safe bet that he wasn’t married any longer.
“Of course,” I said. “How is he? And his wife?”
Mother clicked her tongue. “He’s not married anymore, darling. That little gold-digger wife of his—I always suspected that he married her because he couldn’t have you. She looked quite a lot like you the one time I saw her, although without your breeding, of course, darling. Anyway, she left him. I thought, now that you’re both single again . . .” She let the sentence trail off suggestively. I rolled my eyes.
“It’ll be nice to see Todd again. Thanks, mother.”
Mother hung up, well contented, and I flopped back on the sofa with a groan. Great; now I’d have to spend all of Tuesday night swapping war stories with Todd, who had probably been very fond of his wife, despite the fact that my mother didn’t like her, and I’d have to commiserate and comfort while the entire rest of my family and Todd’s daddy shot us covert glances out of the corners of their eyes to judge how we were getting along. Marvelous.
The phone rang again, and I picked it up with a snarl. If it was my mother calling back with a suggestion for what I should wear to the party, in order to make the best possible impression on Todd, I was going to kill her. “Yes?”
“Ms. Martin?”
Oops. “Yes, Detective,” I said smoothly, while my mind started running probabilities. “What can I do for you?” Had they arrested someone? Were they about to arrest me?
“I was wondering if you might do me a favor, Ms. Martin.”
“Sure,” I said blithely.
“The forensic team is finishing up at the house, but we haven’t been able to find the key to lock up. It wasn’t on the body or anywhere else in the house. I thought you might be able to help.”
I hesitated. There was probably a spare key at the office, but the idea of digging through Brenda’s belongings was unpalatable. Plus, I didn’t want to go back to Potsdam Street. I’ve always been a little afraid of the dark anyway—I grew up being fed ghost stories by my older brother Dix; trueghost stories, the South is rife with them—and discovering a corpse hadn’t helped matters any. And in addition to the fear of meeting Brenda’s angry ghost, there was the even-less-appealing possibility of meeting her murderer. I’ve seen enough TV shows to know that the killer often returns to the scene of the crime, and occasionally kills someone else who happens to be hanging about.
On the other hand, I couldn’t in good conscience say no.
“Sure.” My voice was a lot less happy this time, and Detective Grimaldi noticed.
“If you prefer, I can meet you somewhere and get the key from you. That way you don’t have to go back there.”
She didn’t even bother to try to hide her scorn. “No,” I said, stung, “that won’t be necessary. I’ll take care of it.”
She reverted back to her cordial manner. “Thank you, Ms. Martin. I’ll be in touch.”
She hung up before I had time to say anything else.
So that was how I came to be driving up Potsdam Street around eight o’clock that same evening. I drove slowly, looking around, ignoring the drug deal taking place on the corner, but inspecting the grounds of 101 Potsdam for lingering forensic experts. The drug dealers ignored me and everything else was quiet as I turned the car into the circular drive and crunched up to the front steps. The gravel was a mess from all the cars that had come and gone, and there were cigarette butts and empty gum wrappers littering the front yard. I grimaced. I would have thought cops had better sense than to clutter up their own crime scene with garbage. Or maybe the droppings had come from the reporters or the general public, who had probably stopped by to gawk at the scene of the crime because of all the publicity Brenda’s case had received in the media.
I was already a little jumpy from something that had happened earlier: I had stopped by the office to look for Brenda’s spare key, and while I was there, someone had walked in, and I had ducked down behind the desk to avoid talking to them. I was planning to come into the office in the morning, to tackle everyone’s questions at the weekly sales meeting, but until then I was avoiding people. So when I heard a keyin the back door, I switched off the desk lamp and crouched behind Brenda’s desk, holding my breath.
Thesteps,lightandquick,wentpast,andintoanother office further up the hall. The light came on down there, and spilled out into the hallway. I could hear drawers opening and closing, the rattling of keys or maybe coins, and singing. Then the light was shut off again, and the steps came back. They halted outside Brenda’s open door. A hand snaked around the doorjamb and flicked on the overhead light. I held my breath and squeezed my eyes shut.
That brassy tenor voice couldn’t belong to anyone but Timothy Briggs, who had spent a couple of years in New York City, trying to get on Broadway, before returning to Tennessee and becoming a realtor. I could even make a pretty good guess as to what was going through his sleek, blonde head as he stood there, and it wasn’t that he thought he had heard a noise and wondered if someone was hiding behind the desk. No, he was admiring the office, the second largest in the building, with a solid mahogany desk and a leather chair bearing the permanent imprint of Brenda’s broad butt, and imagining the day when it would be his.
I guess I should be grateful that he didn’t decide to try it on for size. Attempting to explain why I was hiding behind the desk would have been even more awkward than explaining what I was doing in Brenda’s office in the first place. Lu
ckily, after a moment, Tim turned the light off again, leaving me crouched in darkness, before he pranced on down the hall and out the door, whistling merrily. Just before the back door opened again, I heard his voice. “Hey, Larry. It’s me, Tim Briggs. Do you have a minute? There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
The door closed with a dull smack, but I waited until I heard the growl of his Jaguar’s engine outside before I crawled out from behind the desk. I had already pocketed the key I came for, and I made it down the hall and out of the building without mishap.
And now I was standing outside the door of 101 Potsdam Street, preparing to do my duty and then get out of there ASAP. There was only one problem. There was a light on in the library, spilling out into the front hall. The forensic team must have forgotten to turn it off when they left.
I suppose I could have decided to come back the next day to deal with it, but that would mean another thirty-minute drive. It was easier, if more unpleasant, just to take care of it now. After all, I had a key.
A piece of yellow police tape hung across the front door, and I had to snake my hand under it to find the doorknob. I took a deep breath before I pushed the door open.
It had gotten darker in the thirty or so minutes it had taken me to get here—I hadn’t driven hell for leather this time, so the trip had taken a few minutes longer—and the interior of the house was pitch black, except for the glow from the library, casting a yellow square on the dusty hall floor. I took a tentative step into the foyer and stopped. Silence and darkness enveloped me like a shroud. My heart started beating faster. I reached out and tried the ancient light switch on the wall next to the door. It turned over with an audible click, but no light came on. The bulb had probably burned out.
The next second, as if in response, the light in the library went out, too. I stopped breathing, and I had the dizzying feeling that at the end of the hallway someone else was doing the same: peering in my direction just as I was peering in theirs, and blinking at the sudden absence of light.
A Cutthroat Business Page 3