Deadly Deceptions

by Linda Lael Miller

  Meanwhile, I’d bide my time.

  There were a surprising number of Web links for Shiloh, Montana. I started with the chamber of commerce, mostly because it was first on the list, but also because I didn’t have a map handy and I wanted to pinpoint the place.

  It was in the western part of the state, population “3000 and Growing,” nestled on the “gloriously timbered shores of spectacular Flathead Lake,” and offering “incomparable” opportunities for fishing, hunting, boating, swimming, et cetera. There was the requisite Native American casino—a point in the town’s favor, from my perspective, since I’ve rarely encountered a slot machine I can’t loot—along with grocery stores, bars, restaurants and a couple of “family motels,” meaning, I supposed, no vibrating beds, dirty movies and hourly rates.

  I printed the chamber material and went back to the Google list.

  Next I found the Web page for the Shiloh Bugle.

  Cute, I thought. A major battle in the Civil War had been fought at Shiloh, Tennessee, and the “bugle” part was probably a reference to that, meant to conjure images of the cavalry riding over the hill at top gallop. Never mind the topographical distance between Flathead Lake and the Union-Confederacy action—I guess even towns can be wannabes.

  I scanned the articles in the archives.

  As far as I could tell, no one had ever been murdered in Shiloh. There had been no kidnappings, no heists at the Farmer’s and Cattleman’s Bank, the only institution of its type in the town. Zip. The biggest news in a decade, apparently, was Miss Rainbow Trout of 2003 having to step down before her year was up because of “family responsibilities.” As in, I thought cynically, she’d probably started one, necessitating a hasty wedding.

  Glumly I logged off the Bugle site. I was going to have to start from scratch and go to Shiloh in person if I wanted to find out who was blackmailing Greer—and I had to know. Surely I could pick up some kind of thread there, and follow it to the truth.

  I opened the desk drawer and peeked in at the cell phone again, frowning.

  It hadn’t moved.

  The phone in my pocket rang.

  Phones are handy. No doubt about it. But they always ring when I’m busy doing something else.

  Expecting an upstairs-downstairs call from Greer, I didn’t stop to check the caller ID panel. I just thumbed it and said a quiet—make that resigned—hello.

  “We had an appointment,” Beverly Pennington said tersely. “Carlotta made lobster salad, and you didn’t show up. You didn’t even call. Am I supposed to be impressed by that, Ms. Sheepshanks?”

  Bitch, I thought. There were a lot of people I would have liked to impress, but she wasn’t one of them.

  “I figured you were busy, what with the police being there to tell you your ex-husband had been murdered,” I said in a crisp professional tone. “Under the circumstances, calling you seemed like an unnecessary intrusion.”

  Beverly was quiet. I wondered if she was crying. If she’d still loved Alex Pennington, hoped he might have overlooked the small problem of all-out alcoholism and come back to her one day.

  I softened a little. Waited silently for her to recover. Her turn to talk, not mine.

  “The bastard would have left me penniless,” she said presently, and with venom, “if I hadn’t had the good sense to pay up the life insurance policies out of my divorce settlement.”

  So much for treading lightly around the delicate subject of mourning the father of her children. I considered warning her that her son Jack might be about to erase her from the planet to collect a few bucks, but that would have been defamation—if not definition—of character. In any case, Alex had been wrong about the financial situation wife #1 would be in following his sudden and tragic demise. I hoped he’d been wrong about some other things, too—like Greer being a sociopath.

  Greer talks a good game, I heard him say, but if it’s her or you, she’ll throw you to the wolves.

  Jack was the dangerous one, I reminded myself.

  “Be careful, Mrs. Pennington,” I said—carefully.

  I didn’t need to see her face to know she was frowning. I heard it in her voice.

  “Of what?” she asked, nonplussed.

  Of your son. “Just be careful.”

  Another thoughtful and clearly unfriendly pause. Then, “I would still like to discuss hiring you to do some…work for me. When can we meet?”

  “I’m tied up today,” I answered moderately, unsettled and at the same time curious as hell. What could this woman possibly want from me, besides a means of sticking it to Greer somehow? There were plenty of established P.I.’s listed in the Yellow Pages. Why call me? “How about tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Two o’clock,” Beverly said. “You have the address?”

  I confirmed that I did, and we hung up.

  I jammed the phone back into my jacket pocket.

  The trouble with being a detective is that you always have to be thinking about what to do next.

  A noise in the entryway, just outside the study, sparked a fizzy little burst of alarm in the pit of my stomach.

  It was probably Greer, feeling better and wanting something to eat, or some company.

  Tell Molly she’s a dead woman.

  Or it could be whoever had called on the throwaway cell phone, expecting to get Greer.

  I stiffened in my chair. Listened.

  Carmen, Greer’s housekeeper, appeared in the archway, smiling.

  “Hello, Mojo,” she said, her speech heavily accented in a Spanish direction. “Where is Mrs. Pennington, please?”

  Hallelujah, I thought. With Carmen to look after Greer, I could hit the street, get some gumshoeing done. “Upstairs,” I said. “She has a migraine.” I remembered that Greer had said her housekeeper was on vacation. “I thought you were out of town.”

  “My husband, he call me in San Miguel,” Carmen said, no longer smiling. Her dark eyes glistened with emotion. “He say Dr. Alex is killed. I hurry back for Mrs. Pennington.” The housekeeper was a small, compact woman, her black hair tidily braided and wound into a knot at the back of her head. She’d been working for Greer and Alex for about a year, by my best estimate, and though she’d served me a number of meals and appeared at my elbow a thousand times with a pitcher of iced tea while Greer and I dished on the patio, I didn’t know her well. Now I studied her carefully. She wore a pink polyester uniform and sensible shoes and carried a purse the size of a duffel bag.

  “Mrs. Pennington is sick?” she asked, plainly worried.

  I wondered how badly she needed this job, and how long it would be before Greer couldn’t pay her salary any longer.

  “She’s been throwing up a lot,” I said. “Is that new?”

  Carmen blinked. “She was fine when I leave for San Miguel.” There was a defensive note in the woman’s voice; clearly, she wouldn’t have gone on vacation if Greer had been ill when she left. “Upset because the doctor, he move out of the house. But only that.”

  More wondering on my part. Did Carmen know Greer was being blackmailed? And if so, could she be persuaded to share the details?

  I fished. “There wasn’t any other sort of—problem?”

  Carmen set the mongo purse on top of one of the oak filing cabinets against the far wall of the study. “What do you mean?”

  Was she stalling, hedging—the way Greer had done every time I tried to get the skinny on the blackmail? Or was she sincerely confused? I couldn’t tell.

  I took the skull-and-crossbones cell phone out of the desk drawer and rose to cross the room, holding it out to her, balanced on one palm.

  “Have you ever seen this before?”

  Carmen peered at the instrument, as if reluctant to touch it, and crossed herself hastily when she spotted the pirate sign in the photo panel. She shook her head. Up close, I could see wariness in her eyes. My internal lie-o-meter lit up.

  “It’s disposable,” I said, playing it by ear. “The kind of phone drug dealers like, because the calls ar
e hard, if not impossible, to trace.”

  Carmen gasped. “Drug dealers?”

  “Criminals of all kinds,” I said wisely, though I didn’t really know what I was talking about. Nothing new there, either. You have to wing it a lot in my line of work. “Kidnappers.” I paused for dramatic effect, then leaned in a little and whispered, “Blackmailers.”

  Carmen crossed herself again. Her eyes went wide and she leaned back. She looked over her shoulder, then confided, with a nod at the cell, “Phone come in mail one day last month. Mrs. Pennington, she very frightened when she see it. Go off by herself.”

  “But she didn’t mention who might have sent it?”

  Carmen shook her head, probably wishing she hadn’t spilled any information at all. As I said, I didn’t know her, which meant she didn’t know me, either. Her loyalties lay with Greer, of course, and I had figured out that she wasn’t given to idle gossip. If I hoped to get anything else out of her, I would have to convince her that the boss lady was in grave peril first.

  “Mrs. Pennington,” I said, “is being blackmailed. And today—just a little while ago, in fact—somebody called on this phone and threatened her life.”

  “Madre de Dios,” Carmen whispered, staring at me. “You call police?”

  “Not yet,” I answered. “I want to handle this very carefully, because whoever these people are, I think they mean business. I have a—contact at the sheriff’s department.”

  Oh, Tucker and I had made contact, all right.

  I felt suddenly pantyless, even though I was wearing bikini briefs fresh from my underwear drawer in the guesthouse bedroom.

  “I’ll talk to Detective Darroch when I see him tonight,” I added, hoping I sounded moderate. I’d be doing a lot more than seeing Tucker, come eventide, if he had his way. And I knew he would, because where he was concerned, I was downright easy. “Right now, Carmen, if you know anything else about this, please tell me.”

  “I don’t know about blackmailing,” she said, and my gut told me she was lying. She glanced at the printouts on Shiloh, the numbers scrawled on a sheet of notepaper.

  I saw her bristle.

  “Greer has been understandably upset over her husband’s death,” I said. Would that I’d had time to hide the evidence of my snooping, but I hadn’t. “She’s scared half out of her mind, Carmen. Too scared to tell me anything, so I can help.”

  Carmen weighed my words, studying me with what appeared to be mingled suspicion and a growing concern for Greer’s safety. Her glance strayed again to the printouts. For all she knew, I was the one blackmailing Greer.

  We were at an impasse.

  Lots of questions, not very many answers.

  I remembered Greer’s prescription painkillers and checked the label for a physician’s name. Alex Pennington, M.D.

  Interesting, but not unusual. A lot of doctors prescribe medicine for their families, and for themselves. Still, it occurred to me that Alex might have given Greer something lethal, trying to solve one of his many problems the no-muss, no-fuss way. That problem being Greer.

  She’d run him into bankruptcy, after all, contributing to Jack Pennington’s alleged decision to hijack him and then gun him down in the desert. And who knew what else had happened between them?

  I popped the lid on the pill bottle and shook one out, hoping I could persuade Jolie, a forensics expert, to run a tox report on it. Surely she still had access to lab facilities. Most likely, though, the stuff was just what the label said it was: migraine medication.

  I handed the bottle to Carmen. “I have to leave,” I said, dropping the tiny white pill into my jacket pocket and hoping the seams were good. Then I produced a business card, newly printed with “Sheepshanks, Sheepshanks and Sheepshanks—Private Investigations” and my phone numbers. “Could you stay with Mrs. Pennington, Carmen? Overnight?”

  Carmen took the card, glanced down at it, considered the question briefly—it was safe to assume she had a life outside the walls of Casa Pennington—then nodded, the set of her face conveying resolve rather than resignation.

  “Call me if there are any problems,” I said. “And keep the doors locked. Look through the peephole before you let anybody in.”

  Carmen started looking scared again.

  I waited for her to cross herself, but she didn’t.

  I headed for the door, eager to get out before another phone rang, precipitating another crisis. “And Carmen?”

  She stared at me bleakly.

  “Do you know Dr. Pennington’s son, Jack?”

  She nodded, still speechless.

  “Does he have a key to this house?” I asked.

  Another nod.

  “Have the locks changed. Today. And get a new security code for the alarm system, too.”

  At this, Carmen actually paled. I hoped she wouldn’t grab her big purse, rush to her car and boogie for home as soon as I was gone. “Mr. Jack—?”

  “Could be dangerous,” I said.

  She followed me to the front door, in order to lock it behind me, and that gave me a chance to ask one more question.

  “Do you know where Mrs. Pennington keeps her gun?”

  “It was stolen, this gun,” Carmen answered very quietly, after gulping once. “She kept it in a wall safe, in her closet.”

  I figured it was time to let the poor woman off the hook. As it was, she’d probably try to barricade the door with the entryway breakfront as soon as it closed behind me. “Try not to worry,” I said. “I don’t mean to alarm you, but you can never be too careful.”

  I slipped out, stood in the brick-paved portico for a few moments.

  I didn’t like leaving Greer, even in Carmen’s care. It froze my blood to know that Jack Pennington had a key to the front door, and almost certainly knew the alarm code. Come to that, he could let himself into the guesthouse, too, if he wanted to.

  It was time to shop for that Glock I’d been wanting.

  It was definitely time.

  GUNS ARE PLENTIFUL in Arizona, and a lot of unlikely people pack heat—soccer moms, TV talk-show hosts and even preachers. It’s that kind of state; the Old West is still part of the collective psyche. There’s no helmet law to keep motorcyclists from bashing their brains out on roads, and when it comes to daylight saving time, just forget it. When the rest of the country springs forward or falls back, Arizonans don’t adjust their watches.

  I drove to a shop in Cave Creek, the kind of joint where they sell postcards, tacky souvenir fridge magnets, mugs and ashtrays, Tshirts, mineral specimens and plastic rabbits with antlers.

  Oh, and serious firepower, too, though that’s often a sideline.

  “I want a Glock,” I told the clerk, who looked as though he might belong to one of those radical patriot groups who gather around pool tables and in detached garages amid rusted-out pickup trucks, where they smoke, drink beer and plot the overthrow of the United States government.

  Bubba, who was missing several teeth, needed to wash his hair and had a coiled snake and the words Don’t Tread On Me tattooed on his right forearm, straightened behind the grimy souvenir counter and looked me over. I saw recognition register. When guys like Bubba actually think, it startles the rest of their body, and causes a visible chain reaction—twitching, restless fingers, shifty eyes and some foot shuffling.

  “I’ve seen you around Bad-Ass Bert’s,” Bubba said. “And on TV, too.”

  Media fame can be a burden. I dug in my purse for my wallet.

  “Shame about ole Bert biting the dust the way he did,” Bubba went on when I didn’t speak. “I heard he left the bar to you in his will. You gonna open it up for business anytime soon?”

  “Probably,” I said. The way my P.I. career was going, I’d need the income, but the truth is, it made me sad to think of setting foot inside the saloon again. Russell, the basset hound, wouldn’t be around, and neither would Bert. Besides, I’d had some traumatic experiences there.

  “Why a Glock?” Bubba asked conversationally.
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  Because Kay Scarpetta carries one in Patricia Cornwell’s books didn’t seem like a good answer. Nor could I admit to the other reason—that my boyfriend, the cop, owned two.

  I leaned in, even though it was a rash move, considering Bubba practiced poor oral hygiene and needed a more reliable deodorant product than he was currently using. “Gun of choice for private investigators everywhere,” I said seriously.

  “I saw in the papers where you were a dick,” Bubba said, bending, presumably to bring some of his wares out from under the counter for my inspection.

  I let the dick remark pass, even though it was rife with possibilities for sarcastic comebacks.

  “You know how to shoot one of these things?” Bubba inquired after laying two battered plastic cases on top of the counter.

  I planned on getting Jolie to teach me, or maybe Tucker. There might even be a Damn Fool’s Guide on the subject. Suffice it to say, if I had to do anything technical, like release the safety or slam in a cartridge magazine to qualify to buy the gun, I’d be leaving Bubba’s unarmed.

  “Yes,” I lied. “Of course I do.”

  Bubba opened the cases. The Glocks gleamed inside, one black, compact, with a short barrel, one shiny steel, with a long one.

  I went with black, because it looked like Tucker’s gun and would be easier to carry in my purse. Plus, black goes with everything.

  “Bullets?” Bubba asked mildly.

  “Lots of them. Whatever fits. And definitely hollow-point.”

  Bubba whistled. “They’ll do some damage, them hollow-points,” he said, smiling conspiratorially.

  “How much?” I asked, wallet in hand.

  “Well, these here guns are secondhand,” Bubba mused. Then he named a price that made me catch my breath. Glocks, alas, are not cheap.

  I imagined Jack Pennington possibly abducting and then gunning down his own father in the desert. I’d never met him, but he was active in the community, and I’d seen his picture in the paper a lot.