by Jessica Beck
“You might as well tell us everything,” I said. “You’ll feel better if you get it all off your chest, I promise.”
“Maybe I will. Okay, he also was trying to put the touch on another woman in April Springs.”
Who else had Morgan gone after? I thought about all of my friends and acquaintances, but I couldn’t imagine any of them having anything they had to hide.
“Go on. You’ve got our attention,” Grace said. “Tell us her name.”
“It’s a woman named Polly North. She’s been dating the mayor in April Springs, even though he’s her boss.”
I laughed out loud at the supposed revelation. “It’s no secret, Larry. Everyone knows they’ve been seeing each other on the sly.” I felt relieved knowing how far off-base Morgan had been with at least part of his blackmail scheme. The man must have been really desperate.
“That wasn’t the secret, according to Morgan,” Larry said.
My laughter died in my throat, and I believe that I must have choked a little on it as it did.
“What could she have possibly been blackmailed about?” Grace asked.
“It was her husband,” Larry admitted. “Morgan claimed to have evidence that the man had a little help from his wife there in the end. He wasn’t sure that it had been all that appreciated, or even done with his knowledge, if you know what I mean.”
“Hang on a second,” I said, forgetting to keep my voice low. “Are you telling me that you’re accusing Polly North of killing her husband, a man everyone knows that she loved? Even if she wanted to, Polly barely weighs ninety pounds. It’s ludicrous to even think that.”
“So you know her, then,” Larry said.
“Our paths may have crossed a time or two in the past,” I said. Larry still didn’t realize that I was the daughter being blackmailed, and if I had my way, he would never know.
“I’m not accusing her of anything,” Larry said. “All I’m telling you is what Morgan told me. I don’t even know the woman.”
“For a man who supposedly had a lot of evidence,” I said, “not a single bit has shown up so far. If you want to know the truth, I’m starting to wonder if he was just making it all up.”
“You don’t know about the key, do you?” Larry asked softly.
I looked at Grace, who stared back at me. How should we answer this one?
Before either one of us could say a word, though, Larry said, “Don’t bother trying to deny that you knew about the key. I could see it by the way you just looked at each other. You both know.”
“Where is the key, Larry?” I asked, doing my best to keep my voice level. Whatever was in that locker might be able to answer questions about my father that I never would have believed I’d be asking. It also could hold the fates of several other women I’d recently met.
“I don’t know,” Larry said, the disappointment in his voice clear to anyone within earshot. “I don’t even know where to start looking for it. Do you?”
“Think about it, Larry. If we knew where the key was, why would we need to hunt you down?” Grace asked. “That wouldn’t make much sense, now, would it?”
“Then it’s lost forever,” Larry said.
“Just because we haven’t found it doesn’t mean that we won’t,” I said.
“Well, I’m giving up,” he answered. “It’s just not worth it to me. I’m not going to jail over something that I didn’t do.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” I said. “My friend and I are going to find that key, and when we do, we’re going to turn it over to the police. Do you have any suggestions where we might look?”
He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue; I’ve looked everywhere that I could think of. Sorry, but you’re on your own. Can I go now? I’ve told you everything I know.”
Grace glanced at me, shrugged, and I said, “Go, and thanks for your help. If I were you, I wouldn’t mention this conversation to anyone else.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it never happened,” he said.
Larry started to walk out of the laundromat, and I spoke loudly enough so that everyone there could hear me. “Larry, if you do happen to find that key and try to use anything you find, you’re going to regret the day you were ever born. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“I’m not worried about the two of you,” Larry said, trying to brush off my threat.
I wasn’t about to let him, though. “You should be. We’ve got friends everywhere, on both sides of the law. All it would take would be one word, and you’ll regret the day you ever crossed us.”
He studied Grace and me for a second with a mixture of anger and fear on his face, and then Larry slunk out of there before I could say another word.
Grace waited until we could see him walking back into the bar when she turned to me and spoke. “Wow, you had me going there with that last bit, and I’ve known you my entire life. That was some bluff.”
“What makes you think I was bluffing?” I asked, keeping my expression as steady as I could.
“Hey, Suzanne, now you’re scaring me a little.”
“Don’t worry; you’re not the one who should be afraid. I just hope that Larry took me seriously there at the end.”
“How could he not? So, what should we do now?”
I glanced at my watch. “If we hurry, we might be able to catch Polly before she leaves her office for the day.”
“What are we going to tell George?” Grace asked.
“Whatever we need to. This isn’t the time to tiptoe around our suspects. We need to ask Polly for the truth.”
“George isn’t going to like that very much,” Grace said.
“I’m not too fond of the prospect myself, but what else can we do?”
We made it back to town, found a parking spot for the Jeep in front of the municipal building, and Grace and I bolted up the steps two at a time to try to catch Polly.
She was already gone, though.
There was a note on her door addressed to George, though.
It said,
Boss,
Meet me at the Boxcar. I have that report you’ve been looking for.
Polly.
Grace looked at me after we both read it. “It appears that we’re going to be doing this with an audience.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s no way that we’re going to ask the questions we need to ask Polly in front of everyone else at the diner.”
“Well, we can’t exactly hang around, and then ambush her when she leaves the Grill,” Grace said.
“No, that would be just as bad. I need to call her and see if she’ll meet us somewhere else right now.”
“I’m glad that you’re doing it instead of me,” she said. “That’s why you’re the lead investigator, right?”
“I suppose so,” I said as I dug out my phone and searched in its database for Polly’s number. It was a call that I definitely didn’t want to make, but the alternatives were even worse. At least I wouldn’t have to find a way not to tip George off about the real reason I wanted to question his secretary and current girlfriend.
It wasn’t much, but I’d take it.
Chapter 12
“Polly, I’m so sorry that I’m interrupting your dinner, but Grace and I need to talk to you, and it might be in your best interest if George doesn’t know anything about it.” I’d rehearsed that line a few times, trying to get as much information into it as I could. It had come out as though it had been stoppered in a bottle, spilling out over the phone in one long rush.
“I see,” she said calmly. “And you’re certain that it needs to be now?”
“The sooner, the better,” I said. “We can meet you anywhere you’d like. Just make up an excuse for George, and let us know where you want to talk. We wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”
“Yes, I understand. I’ll be home shortly, and thank you for calling.”
She hung up on me, and Grace asked, “What did she say?”
“Who knows? Maybe she was,” Grace said.
“In another life, right? I wonder if we should just go over to her place and wait for her there?”
Grace shook her head. “Let’s hang around here and see if George takes her home, or if they split up.”
“He’ll know my Jeep,” I said. We’d been friends for too long for him not to know what I was up to, even if he hadn’t been a cop before he retired.
“Then we’ll park it at the Donut Shop and he’ll just figure that you left it there. Come on, we need to move, Suzanne. I don’t know how much time we have.”
I backed my Jeep into a spot that allowed us a clear view of the Boxcar, and we sat chatting until we saw George and Polly driving toward us in separate cars.
“Duck,” I said as I grabbed Grace’s shoulder.
“Beat you to it,” she said as she slid silently down in her seat.
Once they got out onto Springs Drive, George followed Polly out of the parking lot, and I waited a full thirty seconds before I pulled out myself.
“If you don’t hurry, you’re going to lose them,” Grace said urgently.
“First off, we already know where they’re going, and second, if I left any earlier, George would have surely spotted us. Take it easy.”
We crept along until we got to Polly’s place, and I held my breath as I searched the driveway for George’s car, but thankfully, it wasn’t there.
We’d just parked and climbed out of the Jeep when Polly came walking quickly toward us. “Okay, ladies, I hate subterfuge, and I dislike lying to my employer and friend even more. You need to tell me what this is all about right now.”
“It concerns your late husband,” I said.
Polly seemed to fade just a little when she heard that, and with a weary sigh, she turned to her front porch and said, “You might as well come inside.”
We did as she suggested, and after we were seated in her neat and tidy living room, Polly stared hard at me and asked, “What about him?”
“Somebody tried to blackmail you about him in the past few days, didn’t they?”
Polly looked at me as though I had just sprouted three heads. “How could you possibly know that?”
“He’s tried to extort money from us, too,” I said. “What did you tell him to do?”
“I said that he could go howl at the moon or take out an ad in the paper if he wanted to, but I wasn’t paying him a cent. How did you hear about it? I didn’t tell anyone, not even George.”
I had no trouble believing that Polly would take such a stand. The woman was many things, but a coward was not one of them.
There was a question that I had to ask, one that seemed to stick in my throat before I could even get it out. “Someone told us today that you might have killed your late husband. Is there any truth to it?” I asked, trying my best not to cry as I asked her the hardest question I’d had to ask anyone in recent memory.
She hesitated for nearly a minute before answering, and then Polly finally said, “From one point of view, I suppose I did.”
“What point of view is that?” Grace asked. I wasn’t the only one holding my breath waiting for her answer, but we weren’t going to get it, at least not right away.
“You both remember my late husband, don’t you?”
“Vaguely,” I said, and Grace nodded as well. “He always played Santa at the library Christmas party, right?”
Polly’s stern look softened for a moment. “He did indeed, up until the very end. Van weighed two hundred and twenty pounds at one point, and I kept warning him that if he didn’t lose weight, he wasn’t going to be around long enough to enjoy our retirement. At first I thought he was listening to me, because the weight suddenly started dropping off like crazy. I accused him of secretly exercising behind my back, but he denied it. He did lose some of his appetite, but it couldn’t account for the weight he was losing. I finally talked him into going to a doctor to get checked out, but it turned out that we were too late. Cancer was eating away at him, and I was too blind to see it.”
I reached out and patted her hand. “How could you have known? You can’t beat yourself up about something like that.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but I still have a difficult time believing it, even if the doctors later confirmed that it was true,” Polly said as a few tears trickled down her cheeks. If she noticed them at all, she didn’t react to them. “In two months, I hardly recognized him. We were told that the cancer was spreading fast, and that it wouldn’t be long, but none of the specialists took my husband’s spirit into consideration. The hospice nearly gave up on him, but one nurse stayed by his side during the day while I worked, and I took the night shift here alone. Long past the date they’d given him, he was still here in his hospital bed, each day worst than the last. I couldn’t stand seeing him in such pain.”
Polly hesitated, but I kept my mouth shut. I wanted her to be able to tell this at her own pace, and I could see that Grace was willing to wait her out as well. After a few moments of silence, Polly continued. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but one night, in his darkest hour, I urged him to just let go, and I told him that I’d see him on the other side. He finally agreed that he just couldn’t take it anymore, and he begged me to help him. I put together a mixture of all of his drugs; ones we were told would be a deadly combination. I dissolved everything in a glass of water, added a touch of sugar to make it a little sweeter going down, and I walked into that bedroom ready to do what he’d asked me to.
“When I got there, he was already gone.”
Now her crying came in earnest, this time in a steady flow, as though she’d wanted to tell that particular story for a long time.
After a full minute, Polly got her composure back, and she finally said, “If I’d stayed with him, he wouldn’t have had to die alone. I should never have said a word. Because of my selfishness, he had to die alone, and I can never forgive myself for that.”
“Polly,” I said as I put an arm around her shoulder, “You didn’t give him the drugs.”
“No, but according to my pastor, the thought is as bad as the deed, and I was surely willing to help him cross over. If he’d been alive when I walked into that bedroom, I would have done it, ten times out of ten. So you see, in a way, I really did kill him.”
Grace spoke softly. “How can you be certain that you would have gone through with it, though? You could have changed your mind at the last second, and so could he.”
“Not my dear, sweet, stubborn husband. His mind was made up,” Polly said, refusing to be let off the hook.
“You said it yourself, though,” I chimed in. “Things can change in an instant. Are you telling us right now that if he’d told you that he’d changed his mind and that he wanted to live, that you wouldn’t have flushed those drugs down the toilet?”
“No, I can’t say that,” she admitted.
“There’s something else you aren’t considering,” I added. “Maybe he was just tired of fighting, and he decided to just let go. It’s not unheard of, you know.”
“There are too many ifs and theories, though,” Polly said. “I can’t ever know what might have happened, can I?”
“That’s the whole point. None of us can. Polly, if it were me in that bed, I’d hope that someone would have the courage to help me.”
“As much as I hate the thought of it, I’d do it for you,” Grace said.
“I’d do it for you, too,” I said, happy that I had someone who cared more about me than the consequences her actions might bring. I was suddenly aware of the fact that all three of us were crying now.
“The thing is, who knew what you’d done?” I asked as I wiped away my tears. “Did you tell anyone?”
“Not then, but later, a police officer came by the house to interview me,” Polly said.
“I
t wasn’t George, was it?” I asked her, hoping that they hadn’t met through such a cruel set of circumstances.
“No, as a matter of fact, it was a woman officer on loan from the Union Square Police Department. I told her everything, and she promised me that no one could arrest me for what had happened. She was very reassuring, in her own way.”
I suddenly knew who had interviewed her. “Her name wasn’t Ellen Briar, by any chance, was it?”
Polly seemed to think about it, and then she nodded. “As a matter of fact, it was. How could you possibly know that?”
“It turns out that her brother was the one who tried to blackmail you,” I said. It was the missing link that we’d been searching for. Evidently Morgan had found a way to dip into his sister’s files, and I was going to make certain that she knew about it.
“That was Morgan Briar?” Polly asked.
“Didn’t you recognize his picture in the paper?” Emma’s dad had found Morgan’s mug shot, and he’d blown it up for the newspaper article he’d written.
“I never saw him. He was just a shadowy voice on the phone, and I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop since he first called me. Somebody must have stopped him first, though.”
“That’s what Grace and I are trying to figure out,” I said.
“Ladies, I appreciate what you’re doing. I need to ask you a rather large favor. Would you keep my story to yourselves, at least for the time being?”
“Of course we will,” Grace said. “You don’t have to worry about Suzanne or me. George won’t hear it from either one of us; I can promise you that.”
“I know he won’t, at least not from you. I’m going to tell him myself as soon as you leave.”
“You don’t have to share this with him,” Grace said.
It was Polly’s turn to pat her hand. “I know that. I want to, though. It’s high time we were completely and utterly frank with one another. Speaking with the two of you, I’ve suddenly realized that it’s the only way that either one of us is ever going to be able to move forward.”
As she stood, Grace and I followed suit, and after we left her place, I reached for my cell phone.