by Jessica Beck
“How on earth could I possibly have an informed opinion about that? I’m not a meteorologist, and neither is my date for the weekend. Now, if you’ll excuse us,” he said, taking his companion’s arm in his and walking her over to the windows. It was clear Candida had no choice in the matter.
“Jake doesn’t want you talking,” I reminded them both.
Neither one deigned to answer me, which I suppose was answer enough.
There was only one person Candida would hesitate to incriminate, and that had to be her date, Bernard Mallory. Where exactly had she seen him emerge? From Jason and Elizabeth’s suite, perhaps? Was it possible that Bernard had ignored his own best interests and gotten rid of Jason in spite of the fact that it would hurt his financial situation? I wasn’t sure, but I needed to speak with Jake to see what he thought about the possibility.
My husband was emerging from the suite area when I caught him before he could summon his next suspect. “I need a second.”
“Okay, but that’s about all I’ve got,” Jake said as he watched everyone in the room suddenly watching us. “What’s up?”
In a soft voice only loud enough for him to hear, I asked him, “Did Bernard mention that he was with Candida during the time of the murder, or did he admit that they got separated for a bit? By the way, the timeline has to be between seven ten and seven forty.”
“Yes, I worked that out as well,” Jake said with a slight smile. “It’s true, Bernard told me that he went to their suite alone to get his medications for the night. Evidently he’s on several different prescriptions for hypertension, and he said if he didn’t take them at the right time, he’d feel a little off for days. He was reluctant to admit it to me at first, but I finally wore him down. Evidently no one knows he’s taking meds, not even Candida.”
That would certainly explain why he hadn’t taken her along with him, but why keep it such a secret from her? A lot of people had high blood pressure, but they didn’t find the need to hide it. Then again, I was guessing that Bernard had to present a strong front to the world, or people might think he was weak and try to take advantage of him.
It all seemed silly to me, but in his world, it might have just been true.
“Okay. She told me that he slipped away while Hazel grilled her about interior decorating, and when she looked up, he was just rejoining everyone else.”
“So I don’t need to speak with Candida. Thanks, that will help,” Jake said with a nod. “Keep up the good work.”
“Who are you going to speak with next?” I asked him.
“I haven’t quite made up my mind yet, so I’m open to suggestions,” he admitted.
“I’d talk to Cheyenne if I were you. Death by blunt force trauma seems right up her alley.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to save her for yourself?” he asked.
“No, be my guest. She’s all yours.”
“Okay, I’ll take her. Who are you going to tackle next?”
I looked around the room and noticed that out of all of them, Joan was the only one to even pretend that she wasn’t watching our every move. Her desire to be inconspicuous caught my attention immediately. “I want to speak with Joan.”
“Really?” Jake asked, clearly surprised by my choice. “She seems harmless enough to me.”
“I don’t know why, so don’t ask me to explain myself. Let’s just call it a hunch.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Jake said as he touched my cheek lightly. “You’ve got good instincts. Trust them.”
“Yes, sir,” I said with a grin.
“I’m serious, Suzanne.”
“So am I. We can catch up after you finish with Cheyenne. One thing, though.”
“What’s that?” Jake asked, already distracted, thinking about what his line of questioning would be for Jason’s suspected lover.
“Don’t get caught up in her charm and let her beguile you,” I said quite seriously.
Jake shook his head as he grinned. “There’s only one woman in the world I want to be beguiled by, and I’m looking right at her,” he said as he stared into my eyes.
“And don’t you forget it,” I said, and then I gave him a quick kiss just in case he needed a reminder.
He didn’t, but it was fun, anyway.
“Cheyenne, do you have a minute?” he asked her.
She was clearly startled by being called next and just as obviously not happy about it. “Are you sure you want to talk to me? I don’t know a thing,” she said.
“Then it shouldn’t take long,” Jake said with the hint of a smile.
“Oh, fine. I’m coming,” she replied as she glanced back at Joan for a second. Did she shake her head quickly, or had it been my imagination? I had to wonder if she was warning her coworker about something or if it had just been my mind playing tricks on me.
I didn’t know for sure, but I was about to find out.
It was time to put a little pressure on the woman and see if I could get the truth out of her.
“Please don’t,” Joan said as I approached her. She looked as though she’d rather do anything but speak to me, but sadly for her, she wasn’t going to get a choice.
“Don’t what? I just want to ask you a few questions.”
“Ms. Hart, I didn’t kill Mr. Martin!” Her voice had gotten shrill and loud. Everyone was looking at us, and they weren’t even trying to hide their interest in what had set her off.
“Let’s start over, shall we? Take a deep breath and try to relax, Joan,” I said. “And by the way, I’m Suzanne, not Ms. Hart.”
“Okay,” Joan said as she lowered her voice. “Suzanne it is. I meant what I said. I didn’t kill him. The truth is that I didn’t really even know him very well. It really surprised me when he asked me to come this weekend. Honestly, it wasn’t really a request. It was more of an order.”
“Do you think that he really just invited you along to explain his financial situation?” I asked her. It was an innocent enough question, but it certainly got a reaction from her.
“Why? What have you heard? You can’t listen to office gossip. I never had a personal relationship with him, no matter what anybody might have said to the contrary. Well, not for a long time, anyway.”
I hadn’t been digging all that hard, and I’d clearly already hit a sore spot. “Joan, you need to tell me all about it. Trust me, not only will it do you good, but it’s going to come out eventually anyway. After all, the man was murdered tonight.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she asked in a hushed whisper. “I’ve been dreading the day Cheyenne found out about us. She’s going to literally lose her mind when she hears,” Joan whispered as she kept glancing over at Elizabeth. “Do you think she knows, too? Of course she does! How could she not have heard what happened? What am I going to do?”
“What exactly was the nature of your relationship?” I asked her, trying to be as calm as I could about it.
“It was at the office Christmas party five years ago,” Joan admitted as a blush spread across her cheeks. “The alcohol was flowing pretty freely, and Mr. Martin found me at my desk working. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been celebrating, too, but I had a thought about how to handle a tricky amortization problem I’d been having, and I wanted to jot down a few notes so I wouldn’t forget it the next day. I was leaning over my desk writing when he came up behind me and kissed me.”
“And then what happened?” I asked.
“Nothing, I swear it! Okay, I might have kissed him back, but only for a few seconds. When I realized that I was kissing a married man, I pulled away and slapped his face, and I mean hard. I thought he was going to fire me on the spot, but he just laughed. We never spoke of it again, but we both knew what happened that night.”
I’d been expecting much worse. While I didn’t condone women going around kissing married men, it wasn’t exactly a full-blown affair, either. I had a feeling that the reason Jason hadn’t ever mentioned it to her was because he probably hadn’t even re
membered doing it in the first place. No doubt he’d been drunk, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d made a pass at Mrs. Claus herself that night. Was that why Joan had been looking so guilty? It wasn’t exactly a moment of her life that she could proudly point to, but then again, was it cause for murder? I had a hard time believing it, especially since it had happened so long ago.
“You won’t tell her, will you?” Joan pled with me.
“I don’t see any reason to hurt Elizabeth with the information at this point,” I admitted.
“I’m not talking about her. Well, her too, but I mainly meant Cheyenne. She cannot find out!”
There was a stab of fear in her voice as she said it, and it was enough to catch my attention. “Joan, are you afraid of Cheyenne?”
“You don’t know what she’s like! She’s got a horrible temper! Did you know that she’s been arrested in the past for threatening old boyfriends? I’ve heard stories around the office that confirm that she doesn’t take being scorned lightly.”
“Do you think she might have actually killed Jason?” I asked her softly.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice clearly on the edge of hysteria. “We were hanging out together while you and your husband were gone, but I lost track of her for a few minutes at some point. How long does it take to kill someone? I heard someone talking earlier. The killer hit him in the head, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“How awful. He wasn’t exactly the best person in the world to work for, but he didn’t deserve that. You and your husband need to figure out who did it.”
“We’re doing our best,” I said. “Did you happen to speak with anyone while Cheyenne was off somewhere else by herself?”
“I was talking to Mrs. Jackson at one point,” she admitted. “I spotted her coming out of the suite area, and we made eye contact for just an instant. She seemed flushed, and her voice was kind of all in a twitter when she spoke.”
“What did you two happen to talk about?” I asked her.
“Her hand,” Joan said.
“Her hand? What about it?”
“It looked to me as though she had cut her palm on something,” Joan said. “She had a guest washcloth wrapped around it, and there was some blood on it. I hate blood.”
That was interesting. “Did she happen to say how she injured herself?”
“She tried to make light of it, like she was so clumsy that she was constantly hurting herself, but I’m not sure that I believed her.”
I looked over at Lara and saw that she’d been watching us intently. The moment we made eye contact, she looked away, but it was too late.
I’d seen the fear in her expression about what Joan might be divulging to me.
“Thank you so much. You’ve been a big help,” I said as I started to walk toward Lara Jackson.
I didn’t make it, though. Joan put a hand on my shoulder, and I was surprised by how strong she was. I’d been about to discount her involvement, but she was pretty intense as she spoke. “Don’t tell anyone what I told you!”
“I have to share it with my husband,” I told her, trying to pry off her hand. “He’s conducting the investigation, and it’s valuable information.”
“How is what I did so long ago important now?” Joan asked me.
“Whether we like it or not, we have to consider everyone here a suspect,” I explained to her.
“Me? You think I could have done it?” she asked, her voice suddenly getting loud again.
Anyone who hadn’t been watching us before was certainly paying attention to us now.
“I’m not saying that at all,” I said loudly so everyone there could hear me, too.
That seemed to mollify her a little, even though I hadn’t told her what she’d clearly thought I had. I wasn’t discounting her from consideration, but I had a hunch that’s the way she’d taken it. “Okay, but I can’t risk Cheyenne finding out about what happened,” Joan said, her voice starting to tremble a little again.
I finally got myself free of her grasp. “I’ll do what I can to protect your secret from everyone else, but I can’t make any promises.”
“I’m not sure that’s good enough,” she said, narrowing her gaze at me.
There was nothing else I could say to ease her concerns, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, anyway. She was a suspect just as much as everyone else there was. “I really do need to go,” I told her as I glanced back in Lara’s direction.
The only problem was that she was gone.
Why had she left in such a hurry, and really, where was there to go?
CHAPTER 14
“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked Lara Jackson as I spotted her heading for the penthouse exit door.
“Things are getting a little close in here,” she said as she took her hand from the doorknob as though it were on fire. “I thought I’d step out and get a breath of fresh air.”
“I’m sorry, but you need to stay here with everyone else,” I reminded her. I looked down at her hand. It was no longer wrapped in the washcloth Joan had seen. Now she had a silk scarf tied around it, as though she were trying to make some kind of fashion statement instead of hiding her wounds. I pretended to notice it accidentally. “What happened to your hand?”
“I scraped it leaning against the fireplace, okay?” she asked with a hiss. “Have you seen the sharp corners on those stones? I knew that blabbermouth would say something to you. What did she tell you?”
“Nothing that might necessarily concern you,” I lied, “but it seems curious that you’re reacting so aggressively at the moment. I just asked you a simple question.”
“I’m on edge, okay?” she asked after she took a few measured breaths. The woman was good at gathering her composure quickly. “Everyone here knows that I didn’t exactly worship the ground that Jason walked on. You all heard me berate him earlier, and now he’s dead. I’m not stupid, Suzanne. I know how it looks.”
She referred to his demise almost as though it had been the victim’s fault that he’d been murdered, as though it was an inconvenience for her, instead of a tragic end for him. “When was the last time you saw him alive?” I asked her.
“Why do you want to know that?” Lara asked me.
“Well, besides the fact that we’re asking everyone that question, it’s a legitimate request. As you just said, you two were arguing in front of all of us, and now he’s dead. Why wouldn’t we want to talk to you about what happened to him?”
“I didn’t kill him!” she said, her face flushing for just a moment. I didn’t know about Jake, but I was getting a great many reactions to what seemed on the surface like simple questions that I was posing. It was almost as though the people gathered together couldn’t wait to deny the fact that they’d killed one of our hosts.
“I never said that you did. However, you never answered my question. When was the last time you saw Jason Martin alive?” I asked, reminding her that she wasn’t going to get the chance to duck my question with histrionics.
“I saw him just after you and your husband left,” she finally admitted. “We had words, as I’m sure Joan told you earlier, so don’t act so surprised.”
It was my turn to be legitimately startled by her statement. “She told me that she saw you coming out of the suite area, but she never said anything about you being with Jason just before he died, let alone that you two were arguing about something.”
“Because it didn’t mean anything!” Lara snapped.
Everyone else there was watching us with great interest again. I hadn’t had so much attention paid to me since I’d played a daisy in the grade school spring play. “Why should I believe you?”
“Because it’s the truth,” she said. “I saw Jason in the hallway, and it’s true that we had a few words, but that was it. If you don’t believe me, you can ask Hazel. She came looking for Jason as I was storming off, and she looked thoroughly upset about something. If you ask me, she should be at the
top of your list!”
“What really happened to your hand, Lara?” I asked, pushing her even harder. I didn’t believe her story about the fireplace stones. She had tried too hard to act nonchalant as she’d told me the story. Clearly something else had happened, and I meant to find out the truth.
“I told you earlier, I scraped it on the fireplace stones,” she repeated, her gaze darting downward and avoiding mine for a split second.
“Are you sure it didn’t happen when you grabbed the murder weapon and killed Jason? I need to know exactly what happened,” I said calmly. I wasn’t about to back down. One way or the other, I was going to get the truth out of her.
After a full twenty seconds of awkward silence, she finally spoke. “Okay, I was lying about the fireplace before,” she said, looking incredibly guilty. “I just didn’t want anyone to know what really happened.”
“Go on. You can tell me,” I said in my most sympathetic voice. Was I about to get an impromptu murder confession?
“I broke a glass, okay? I was so mad about Jason blowing me off that I had to go into the bathroom to collect myself. They have crystal in there! Can you believe it? My husband and I had to take a second mortgage out on our house just to pay our bills, and they are throwing a party with crystal in the bathroom!”
Henry came over at last to see why his wife was so agitated. “Is everything okay here?”
“It’s fine,” Lara said, doing her best to keep her voice calm.
“What did you do to your hand?” her husband asked her.
“I cut it on some broken glass,” she admitted. “It’s nothing, really.”
“Let’s go to the bathroom so I can look at it,” he insisted.
Before they could take a step though, I said, “Sorry, but I need to go first.” I jumped ahead of them and went in, locking the door behind me. I wasn’t about to let her break a glass after her confession just to “prove” that she’d really cut her hand in there and not in the master suite committing murder.
When I searched the place though, I didn’t see any evidence of a broken crystal tumbler.