Most of the cab drivers I had met in years past had been on the quiet side. It was a stroke of awful luck to get a motor mouth this time.
Cab driver aside, the reality of the situation really sunk in for when I entered the police station. It was a cold, depressing place that gave me shivers the moment I entered. With a brother on the police force back home, this was far from the first time I had ever been in a police station. Only this time, I walked into the station under far different circumstances.
The Hollywood, Florida, police station was far less intimidating. Not just because my brother’s friendly smile greeted me back home. This Los Angeles precinct was cavernous, grimy, and drab.
Of course, the drug addict yelling nonsense as an officer dragged him into the back of the station didn’t help calm my nerves at all. I approached the front window of the precinct and talked to an officer who was sitting behind a pane of bulletproof glass.
After checking in, a deputy led me back to the cell block. Luckily, the drug addict was not there. Maybe he was being interrogated. Between the disturbing environment, the distraction of the drug addict, and the general uneasiness of knowing my old friend was in jail, my mind was being torn in so many different directions.
All the tangential matters instantly faded into the background when I saw Sophie behind bars. My focus was squarely on her.
Sophie’s head was sunk low as she sat in her cell. My eyes meanwhile were wide with disbelief. She was out of place there. All the other cells were filled with heavily tattooed men and women that I would be afraid to run into in a dark alley.
Sophie looked like she had been put there by mistake. I saw her trembling. The poor thing was terrified. The sight of this new ghastly reality was striking.
I stood there for a second, in complete shock. At first, I don’t think she noticed me. Sophie seemed to be trying to avoid eye contact. I tried to pull her out of her stupor.
“What happened?” I asked.
That was a dumb question. That words had just dribbled out of my mouth. She had been arrested, obviously. I had meant that in a more general sense—as in what had happened to cause her to be arrested? My verbal follies aside, Sophie was just glad to hear the sound of my voice. Her head darted up.
That’s when I saw a look in her eyes that I’d never seen before.
“This is all a big mistake,” she replied.
She said the words, but all I really saw was the fear in her eyes. I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. This station was depressing enough, and I was on the other side of the bars. It must have been a soul-crushing experience to be locked in a cell.
So many words came to my mind, but the only ones that made it to the tip of my tongue were the simple variety. “I can’t believe this.”
“How do you think I feel?”
She had a good point. While I could empathize with her, luckily, I had no firsthand experience being behind bars. I could have spent more time in a state of disbelief, but I wanted to get to the bottom of this. “What did they arrest you for?”
“Murder.”
I went dead quiet. Murder? What? Was she for real? If her situation wasn’t hard enough to believe before, it had reached absurd heights. I could not make heads nor tails of this.
Part of me didn’t want to repeat the word out loud. The sound of them being uttered out loud was too terrifying.
A shock reverberated in my voice. “Murder? You?”
Sophie reluctantly nodded.
None of this made sense to me. I tried to piece it together one question at a time. “But, who was the victim?”
“My boss.”
That answer made me shudder. It hit a little close to home for me. At the same time, despite, Sophie and Paul’s recent spats, could things really have devolved into murder?
I delved deeper. “Why would they think that?”
Sophie was slow to answer. I couldn’t figure out why until the words came out of her mouth.
“Because…they found me at the scene.”
That sent me into a tailspin. The revelations were coming fast and furiously now, each more shocking than the last. Until then, my disbelief had been directed at the police’s actions in arresting her. Now, I had questions specifically for Sophie.
“What? What were you doing there?”
“I wanted to talk some sense into him after he fired me.”
“Wait a minute. He fired you?”
She nodded.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“After I returned from the restaurant.”
“On what grounds did he fire you?”
“He said it just wasn’t working out and that letting me go was the best move for the company.”
I could read between the lines. “So basically he fired you because you broke up with him?”
“As far as I can tell. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t get over it. So, a few hours later I went over to his house to tell him that he couldn’t get away with firing me. That what he’d done was grounds for a wrongful termination lawsuit.”
Instinctually, I stepped back. “You went to his place after he fired you?”
She looked ashamed as she replied. “I know it wasn’t the best idea—”
I interrupted her. “You’re right. That was a terrible idea.”
“I fully admit that it wasn’t the best decision on my part, but I just wanted my job back. Unfortunately, I didn’t even get to say my piece to him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was dead when I got there.”
“Did you tell that to the police?” I asked.
She nodded. “I did.”
“Yet you’re behind bars.”
“That’s because they showed up at his house a few minutes after I did.”
There was so much information being thrown at me all at once. I had to take a moment to myself just to process it all.
While I let all the recent revelations sink in, Sophie’s level of panic ratcheted up.
“I didn’t do this. You have to believe me.”
I was still trying to process all of the information she’d given me when Sophie’s patience grew thin. Apparently, my response came too slowly for Sophie’s tastes.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” she asked.
“I want to.”
I had spoken the truth. The problem was, those weren’t the words she wanted to hear.
Sophie kept peppering me with a new variation of the same question. “You want to? So, you’re not convinced of my innocence?”
I didn’t like how she was coming at me. She’d had a lot of time to think about all this in her cell. To me, this was all new information. Not to mention there was so much of it. There was so much to process in such a short time.
With everything that I was trying juggle all at once, my deepest thoughts, the ones I tried to keep at the back of my mind, ended up slipping out of my mouth by mistake. “I don’t know what to think. So much has happened. When we met up for dinner last night, you were much different than I’d ever seen you before. Then, this morning, I find out that you’ve been arrested for murder.”
I wished that I’d kept that to myself. My statement only served to push her further to the brink.
“Hope, you know me. We’ve been friends for years. We’ve seen so much together—we’ve been through so much together. Do you really think I’d kill someone?” Sophie asked.
The evidence was stacked against her, but it didn’t speak to one thing—the fact that I had known her for decades. That we had a history. True, she had changed, but she was still Sophie Paulson.
I looked deep into her eyes. For the first time since I had arrived in Los Angeles, I saw a semblance of the old Sophie staring back at me. She looked like a scared child needing her mom. What she didn’t look like, was a killer.
I answered from the bottom of my heart. “No.”
She breathed a sigh of relief.
It didn’t last long. That proved
to only be a temporary respite. Shortly after, she began pleading about a new topic.
“Good, because I really need your help here,” Sophie said.
I had a feeling where she was going with this, but I was going to let her say the words.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I know you’ve solved a slew of murder cases in the past. I’m asking you to solve one more. I really need your help here.”
Given the fact that she was one of my oldest friends and that I still had so many questions bouncing around in my head, I didn’t see how I couldn’t take this case. To not investigate this matter further meant letting my friend rot behind bars. That wasn’t something I was prepared to do.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
Relief came to Sophie’s face. “Good. You’re my only hope.”
She wasn’t wrong. The police had already been clear about what they thought had happened. They wouldn’t have arrested her otherwise. With no police to turn to, if I was to find out the truth, there was no other choice but to do it myself.
“I promise I’ll do everything I can to find out the truth,” I said.
“Good. Because I’m being framed here. I mean, think about it, how else would the police know to show up so quickly after I had arrived at Paul’s place unless the killer had seen me approach and had put a call into 9-1-1 to tip them off? Kaitlin Doherty could have done this. Or Jack Sprague. Henry Mankiewicz even.”
That was a solid point. The timing of the police’s arrival at the scene was curious. And, considering all I had learned in previous cases that I had investigated, it did seem consistent with having been staged by the killer.
There were still questions that I wanted Sophie to answer, but I suddenly found my attention drawn elsewhere as I saw Detective Wright walk by the cell block. I quickly excused myself and ran off to flag the detective down.
Chapter Four
I caught up with the detective shortly after in the hallway of the precinct. He did not look happy to see me. Then again, he didn’t look like he’d smiled in years. Detective Todd Wright had the look of jaded big city cop who had seen the worst of humanity and had subsequently lost the ability to see the good in people anymore. While he was dealing with modern crimes, the fifty-two-year-old detective had a very retro look.
Detective Wright was sporting a fedora, a trench coat, and a thick mustache. I couldn’t pretend that his tough outer shell was an unfamiliar sight to me. That seemed to be the default look for law enforcement officers. I’d seen it plenty of times with my own brother, who was also a police detective back home.
That gruff exterior was meant to keep the crimes and suspects they dealt with on a daily basis at arm’s length. Emotional detachment was important in their line of work.
The difference was, my brother was not nearly as jaded as he led on. I felt like the same could not be said for this detective. Ultimately, that was neither here nor there. Regardless of the detective’s demeanor, there were matters that needed discussing, and I wasn’t going to stop until they were addressed.
“Detective Wright, I’d like a word with you.”
The detective had no interest in speaking with me.
He brushed me aside. “Ms. Hadley, I don’t have time to argue with you.”
Detective Wright kept walking at a brisk pace. Fortunately, he ran out of real estate when he reached his desk. That’s where I made my move.
“Who is arguing?”
I made sure to say that in as calm of a manner as possible. To him, that was just semantics.
I clearly wasn’t the first civilian to try to point holes in one of his cases. Although, he obviously hoped that I’d be the last.
He stopped me before I could go any further. “I know what you’re going to say.”
That was presumptuous. A lot of detective’s had serious egos about them. It was a delicate dance, not just navigating those egos, but also making my point without disrespecting an officer of the law. The feminist in me wanted to chew him out for patronizing me. I refrained from doing so, mostly because I knew that would only succeed in derailing the conversation and turning it into a tug of war for respect.
Instead of going down that road, I tried a different approach, indulging his bull-headed opinion.
“Fine. What was I going to say?” I replied.
“That you don’t think your friend is guilty.”
That was when I usually laid down the hammer, asking how he could possibly jump to such a grim confusion so quickly? Once again, I found restraint and went with a subdued, yet pointed response.
“It’s safe to say that I have my doubts. So should you.”
The soft glove approach wasn’t working. He was a stubborn man who was immune to picking up the subtleties in my responses. His answer made me realize how fruitless my efforts truly were.
“Well, before you come at me, examine the facts. Your friend clearly told you she didn’t do it, but facts tell a different story. I know which one I believe. Now, I have work to do.”
He directed his attention to the papers on his desk. I was only a few feet away from him, but he ignored me like I was invisible.
Did he really think that would work? If so, he was a fool. I wouldn’t be cast aside that easily. I knew all the tricks.
I stood my ground. “Detective, we’re not done here.”
Detective Wright didn’t look up. He just continued to scan a paper on his desk. “I told you I’m really busy here.”
I held firm. “Do you really think it’s wise to arrest my friend presumptuously?”
The detective did not like my tone. He wanted to put me in my place.
Detective Wright groaned, looked up, and stared me down. “Don’t push me. It’s not presumptuous. There’s a good reason she’s behind bars.”
“There are still a number of questions that need to be answered.”
“Ms. Hadley, I know you’re just being a good friend, but I have a job to do.”
“Then make sure you’re doing it right.”
His stare turned into a glare. “I warned you not to talk to me like that. You are her friend. Of course you’d say that. Look at it from my perspective. We found her at the scene of the crime. There was no one else around. As far as I’m concerned, this is a rock solid case.”
Those were all good points, most of which I could dispute. That being said, there was a lingering question in the air.
“Except, how did you know to come to the scene in the first place?”
“We got a call about suspicious circumstances at the location. When we arrived, we found your friend there.”
He made it seem so open and shut. What he failed to acknowledge was that his answer led to another question.
“Who was this call from?”
“They didn’t give their name.”
“So, you got an anonymous call?” I asked.
The detective didn’t directly answer my question. Instead, he deflected. “They were right.”
I wasn’t going to let myself be thrown off. “That’s not what I asked. The call was anonymous?”
“Technically.”
I waited for him to continue and was surprised when he didn’t.
I filled in the blanks for him. “Well, doesn’t that seem curious?”
“Not everyone wants to attach their name to things.”
“If the call just came from a neighbor, what do they have to worry about? If the person calling had nothing to do with the crime, what would they have to worry about? Unless, the killer was the one to call in order to frame Sophie.”
He raised his eyebrows at me. “You’re basing your entire argument on that?”
“Don’t diminish my point. Tell me it doesn’t reek of a setup.”
“Look, I feel for you. You care for your friend and she’s staring down spending the rest of her life in prison. You want to defend her. But there’s one thing you’re forgetting—some things are indefensible. Admit it, she did this.”
“You seriously want me to reopen this case because the call we got happened to be anonymous?”
“That’s not all. I have more questions.”
“Like what?”
“Like, did you find fingerprints on the murder weapon?”
“No, but we didn’t need to in this case. We already had enough on your friend to arrest her.”
“So, an anonymous call brought you to the scene, where you found a murder weapon but no fingerprints. Those are two pretty big points. Haven’t you even thought about who else might have wanted Paul dead? Do the names Kaitlin Doherty, Jack Sprague, and Henry Mankiewicz mean anything to you?” I asked.
He’d heard enough. If I thought he was gruff before, he lost all semblance of manners right then.
The detective laid down the law. “No one wants to believe their friend is capable of murder. But, given the right circumstances, anyone is capable of it.”
I had heard that exact statement before coming out of my brother’s mouth. That must have been one of the lectures they taught at the police academy. Joe had said that exact phrase to me too often for my liking. As many times as I had heard it, I didn’t believe it was true. Mostly, because, no matter what the circumstances were, I couldn’t commit murder. If that was true for me, it had to be true for others as well.
I stood firm. “I don’t believe that.”
“I don’t care if you believe it or not. It’s the truth.”
He tried to go back to looking at his paperwork, but I kept my eye contact with him. As I stared, I saw something in his eyes. He waited a moment, saw that I hadn’t left, then stared at me with a deep sadness in his eyes.
I didn’t know if he was going to try to hide it or if he’d come out with it.
The detective then opened up to me. “I had a partner once. He killed someone. It was a case of excessive force against a perpetrator. I was convinced that it was an accident, but it wasn’t. My partner had killed the perp on purpose.” He stopped as he got choked up.
Sweets, Suspects, and Women Sleuths Cozy Mystery Set Page 41