Paint the Town Dead

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Paint the Town Dead Page 23

by Sybil Johnson


  “I should have known it was too good to be true. It was the Show Special. I guess I know why now,” Stella said.

  “He didn’t find out about the problem until a few people complained. I’m sure he’ll take it back and give you a refund.”

  “Can’t do anything about it right now. I have to get to the airport. I don’t think he’s around now, anyway. I’ll contact him about it when I get home. Thanks for letting me know.”

  In no time, they’d repacked the tote bag and bundled everything into Rory’s sedan. On the way to LAX, they talked about everything that had happened in the past week.

  “The convention was fun,” Stella said. “Got some great footage to show the chapter. I’m so sorry about Jasmine’s death. And Viveca’s, of course.” She laid a hand on Rory’s arm. “Makes you wonder if there’s a curse on the family.”

  “Thanks. At least you and Veronica got some good photographs of both of them so Hulbert and Peter have recent ones to remember them by.”

  “They all got along, didn’t they? Though there was one time, the day Jasmine died. I saw Hulbert and her arguing. They were standing near the restaurant.”

  “What about?” Rory turned off Sepulveda onto the road for the departure level.

  “I’m not sure. All I heard was Jasmine say ‘I’ll tell Aunt Viveca.’ Maybe he was having an affair.” Stella peered through the windshield at the signs announcing the airlines. “That’s my airline, right here.”

  After dropping the woman off, Rory headed home and settled down at her desk, intending to catch up on work. But she had a hard time getting back into the swing of things. Her mind kept drifting back to the OPS convention and the argument Stella had witnessed between Hulbert and Jasmine. She doubted the man was having an affair. He seemed too devoted to his wife to stray. She wondered what else her friend could have been threatening to tell Viveca about.

  Rory examined the print of the photo taken of Hulbert and Jasmine in front of the restaurant when the argument must have occurred. She peered at their faces, trying to discern the reason for the dustup, but soon realized how stupid that was. She went back to work, but gave up after reading a dozen email messages.

  Instead, Rory checked out various social media sites for videos and photos convention attendees had posted. A short video of Liz hamming it up at the pajama painting party brought a smile to her face. She wished she’d been in the mood to participate in the event. Everyone seemed to be having a good time. When she replayed the video, something behind Liz caught her eye. Rory backed it up and peered closely at the screen. In the background, Stella poured a capful of varnish into her water bottle, turning the liquid inside blue. Then she shook the bottle up and took a sip.

  Rory puzzled over the woman’s odd behavior. She sat back in her chair and wondered why anyone would be swigging varnish. It seemed like a dangerous thing to do, even if the product was eco-friendly. Something tugged at her brain. She searched the internet, but didn’t find anything that would explain Stella’s actions.

  Rory dismissed the thought from her mind and ran through the photo gallery in Vista Beach Confidential to see if any new pictures had been added. When she once again came across the photograph of Hulbert and Jasmine, her gaze strayed to the bottle in the young woman’s hand. She enlarged the portion she was interested in. A blue label peeked out above her friend’s arm.

  The same color as the liquid Stella had poured into her water. In all her years of painting, Rory had never seen varnish that color. What if the blue-label varnish wasn’t varnish at all?

  Rory closed her eyes, going over every conversation she’d had in the last week. When she went over her most recent talk with Peter and recalled what she’d read on the internet, everything fell into place. GHB was often tinted blue.

  It all made sense now. Stella having all the bottles of blue-label varnish in her luggage. Her dramatic weight loss. What Peter had told her about people using GHB to lose weight. She knew where the GHB had come from that had killed Viveca. Jasmine must have discovered the truth about the blue-label varnish and been killed to prevent her from telling the world about VivEco’s side business.

  But Rory had no proof. She couldn’t go to the police without it. She needed to get hold of one of the bottles of varnish and test it. She couldn’t ask Stella for one of hers. The woman was already on a plane back to Minnesota.

  She needed to go to the source, to get a bottle straight from the VivEco booth. She grabbed her bag and ran out the door. On her way back to the Akaw, she rehearsed the cover story she’d give if anyone objected to her presence on the trade show floor: She’d lost her keys somewhere and was retracing her steps.

  But, when she reached the Hermosa ballroom, there was no need for the story. No guard manned the entrance, and no one seemed to care who was walking around. She slipped through the door and headed down the aisle toward the VivEco booth, nodding at a burly young man rolling a stack of boxes toward the entrance. Half the booths she passed had already been emptied, the other half were full of boxes waiting to be wheeled away.

  When she reached her destination, she stopped and stared in dismay. Except for the banner announcing the name of the booth, the area was completely empty. Every cardboard box had already been taken away. Rory checked under the table where the box she was looking for had been all through the convention, but it was no longer there.

  Defeated, she leaned against a table to think. She was too late. Then she remembered what Nixie had told them about the schedule. She found a hotel worker at one of the other booths.

  “Everything is going to the loading dock, right?” she said to him.

  “That’s right.”

  “Have any trucks picked up boxes yet?”

  The man shook his head. “Not until tomorrow.”

  “That’s what I thought. Thanks.” Rory headed toward the exit. Assuming Hulbert hadn’t taken the box of blue-label varnish with him, she should be able to find what she wanted on the loading dock. But she would have to wait until the ballroom had been completely cleared. She would tackle the loading dock later tonight when it was sure to be deserted. She only hoped she wouldn’t be too late.

  Chapter 30

  Later that evening, after darkness had fallen over the city, Rory returned to the Akaw, looking for the corridor that led to the loading dock and the evidence she needed to prove VivEco was selling a weight loss product containing GHB. Now that the OPS convention was over, few people traversed the hotel’s hallways. The area where the convention had been held was virtually deserted. When she peeked in the Hermosa ballroom to make sure no burly men were still at work, the whole place had been dismantled. Even the walls of the booths were gone.

  Rory continued her search for the loading dock, smiling at anyone she encountered, pretending to be exploring the hotel. Every once in a while, she felt someone watching her, but after turning around half a dozen times and not seeing anything suspicious, she decided her imagination was working overtime.

  After several wrong turns, she finally found the correct hallway which, to her great relief, turned out to be empty. She didn’t relish the idea of explaining why she was headed toward an area where no hotel guest should want to go.

  Rory entered the loading dock through a gray metal door, far more industrial in appearance than the guest areas of the hotel. With the outside roll-up door closed and no windows, it was too dark to see anything, let alone conduct a search. The only light came from the hallway she’d just left. Not wanting to leave the door open, in case someone from the hotel staff noticed it, she groped around on the wall until she found the light switch. As soon as the lights came on, she closed the hallway door, then set to work.

  Rory surveyed the groups of cardboard boxes that covered the concrete floor. Stacked two high in some areas, corridors divided them into sections. The dim light given off by the overhead fixtures provided enough illumination that she could just make out the lettering on the sides of the boxes. She passed over the ones filled
with janitorial supplies and gift shop items, moving on to the group closest to the entrance. When she couldn’t decipher the handwriting on the side of one of the boxes, she searched the cage near the hallway door where a guard usually sat and found an industrial-sized flashlight.

  Training its beam on the sides of the cardboard box nearest her, she read HennaMe written in a cramped hand. She moved from group to group and was almost at the roll-up door before she found the boxes from the VivEco booth, stacked two high.

  Rory looked in dismay at the brown packing tape sealing each box. She hadn’t expected them to be taped shut. She checked the area where the hotel supplies were kept, relieved to find a roll of packing tape and a box cutter. She searched the top layer of VivEco boxes, taping them shut again after she’d searched each one. Inside she found bottles of paint and green label products, but no blue-label varnish.

  Rory put her flashlight on the floor, its beam trained on the boxes, and lifted the top box down onto the concrete floor. Not finding what she wanted in the one underneath, she moved another box down. Soon all of the top boxes were on the ground and, in the final one of the group, she discovered the bottles she’d been searching for.

  Rory lifted one of the bottles of blue-label varnish out of the container. When she tried to open it, the cap wouldn’t budge. After a number of unsuccessful tries, she was considering using the box cutter to cut the top off the bottle when the cap finally loosened and came off. She placed drops of its contents onto the test spots on one of the coasters she’d bought at the pharmacy, then picked up the flashlight and pointed its beam on the spots. When they both turned bright blue, indicating a positive test for GHB, she felt relieved she’d been right, yet saddened at the same time.

  After recapping the bottle, she set it carefully to one side along with the now turned off flashlight while she returned the boxes to their previous configuration. She was lifting the last one into place when a male voice said, “You had to interfere, didn’t you?”

  Her back to the new arrival, Rory took her cell phone out of the front pocket of her jeans and as surreptitiously as possible called Liz’s number. Stuffing the phone back into her pocket and hoping her friend would hear and understand what was going on, she plastered an innocent expression on her face and turned around to confront her adversary.

  Hulbert Forster stood five feet away, his face suffused with anger.

  “Hi, Hulbert,” she said as brightly as she could, hoping to hide the sound of her heart thumping wildly in her chest. “I accidentally packed my keys in one of the Scrap ’n Paint boxes. Had to use my spare ones to get home last night. Didn’t want to wait until they delivered everything to the store tomorrow.” She held up her keys and jingled them, hoping the light was dim enough he would believe she’d taken them out of one of the boxes and not the pocket of her jeans.

  The man shook his head and took a step toward her. “Do you think I’m stupid? I can read.” He nodded toward the writing on the side of the box she’d just replaced.

  Rory backed away from him, hoping to put some distance and a few boxes between them, doing her best to ignore the man’s angry face. “What are you doing here in the hotel’s loading dock, Hulbert? I can call you Hulbert, right?” She kept her voice loud, emphasizing certain words, hoping Liz could figure out what was going on from the little she heard. “And why are you so angry? I wasn’t stealing any of your supplies. Honest.”

  When she backed up further, her heel hit something. She glanced down. The bottle of varnish she’d set aside rolled down into the chasm between the edge of the dock and the roll-up door, landing with a soft thud as it hit the ground. The flashlight almost followed it, but she managed to stop it with her foot before it could disappear into the darkness.

  “Why didn’t you just believe Jasmine overdosed? I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

  Rory gave up trying to pretend she didn’t know what he was referring to. “Why did you, then? Kill Jasmine? Did she find out about your little side business? The weight loss product?”

  Hulbert nodded. “And threatened to tell Viveca all about it if I didn’t stop. I couldn’t let her do that. The money from that part of the business was the only thing keeping VivEco afloat. I couldn’t let my wife’s dream fall apart. It meant too much to her, and she meant too much to me. So I told Jasmine I’d stop. I wanted to keep her happy until I figured out some way to get rid of her.”

  “You got the Xyrem out of her medicine bottle, didn’t you?”

  “She brought her medicine into the booth when she came to work. It was easy for me to take a bit out, only she left for class before I could replace the bottle. So I took the key card out of Viveca’s purse and put the medicine back in her room. No one suspected a thing. Not even the police.”

  “Weren’t you afraid someone would see you?”

  “People were so enthralled with being able to talk with Viveca and get her autograph, there was little chance anyone would notice anything I did.”

  “Not even setting off the alarm?”

  “Put on a cap and coveralls, no one pays attention to you. And with everyone running around, trying to get out of the hotel, it was easy to slip inside the ballroom and put the medicine in the soda I saw her buy earlier.”

  “You tried to throw me off by saying you saw Peter dressed in coveralls going into the classroom.” Rory’s words were more of a statement than a question.

  “I figured it wouldn’t hurt to cast suspicion on someone else. Admit it, you suspected him for a while, didn’t you?”

  The two men did have similar builds, Rory thought, even if they were decades apart in age. Dress them in shapeless clothes and obscure their faces and most people wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “Did Viveca know what you were doing? She wasn’t in on it, was she?”

  “No, she wasn’t. She had no idea the blue-label varnish wasn’t varnish at all. I have a feeling she suspected something wasn’t right before she died.”

  Rory wondered if that was what Viveca had wanted to talk to her about after the meet and greet.

  “She would have been okay with it. I’m sure of it. She was always into helping people, encouraging them to make the best of themselves. That’s what I was doing with this diet aid. Helping those who had tried everything to lose weight and couldn’t.”

  “But it’s dangerous.”

  “Not if you take it correctly. Viveca would have understood.” Hulbert wiped a tear from his eye. “It’s all your fault she’s dead, you know.”

  “Why do you say that? You’re the one who put the GHB in her drink.”

  “That was meant for you, not her. If you hadn’t meddled, my beloved Viveca would be alive now. The police never really considered Jasmine’s death a murder, at least not seriously. I made sure of that. I told them about her suicide attempt so they’d focus on that. You should have accepted Jasmine’s death as an accidental overdose like the police did, but you kept on pushing, asking questions, rummaging through dumpsters.”

  “You were the one who hit me over the head and pushed me into the dumpster, weren’t you? Why did you go back for the coveralls?”

  “You gave me the idea, talking about the police searching the trash for evidence. I didn’t know what they might find on them, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Only you got there first.” Hulbert stepped closer. “You wouldn’t even give up after I hired that PI to harass you. He was only too happy to take my money. He has a bit of a beef with you.”

  So that’s why Hulbert had been coming out of Oscar Carlton’s office, Rory thought.

  “When you gave me that photo of me and Jasmine,” Hulbert continued. “I was sure you knew then. I figured you were getting ready to blackmail me.”

  “I just thought you’d like it. I wasn’t threatening you. I didn’t even know the photo’s significance until later.” Rory inched back toward the roll-up door and pushed the flashlight closer to the edge. The man was so angry he didn’t seem to notice the slight movement.

  �
��I gave you the champagne. Why didn’t you just drink it? Why did you have to set it down and let Viveca pick it up? Why? Why? Why?” Hulbert kicked a nearby box repeatedly.

  One swift kick and the flashlight rolled over the edge to join the varnish bottle. When it clattered to the ground, Hulbert’s attention turned to the roll-up door.

  Taking advantage of the distraction, Rory crouched down, ducking behind the VivEco boxes. Walking crablike, she began the slow progress toward the door into the hallway and safety.

  Halfway to her destination, a large gap between sets of boxes opened up in front of her. She peeked over the boxes she was hiding behind to find the man on the other side of the stack only a few feet away from her.

  “I see you,” Hulbert said as Rory slid back behind a box marked AS&P. She opened it up and discovered thirteen-inch round wooden plates inside. She grabbed three of them and threw them like a Frisbee, one after another, toward Hulbert. He flung his hands in front of his face and danced back and forth, shielding his head from the flying objects. She raced across the floor. She’d almost reached the hallway door when she tripped over a mop handle her opponent had flung out in front of her legs.

  Momentarily stunned, she rolled over onto her back. Hulbert jumped on her chest, a bottle of the blue-label varnish in his hand. He tried to force her to drink, but she clamped her mouth shut and moved her head from side to side. When he punched her in the stomach, she gasped and her mouth dropped open for a fraction of a second. Before she could close it again, he poured some of the liquid in her mouth. She tried to spit it out, but felt some of it go down her throat.

  She continued to resist as he held her down, but he was too strong for her. She felt herself fading away, getting sleepier and sleepier until she could no longer fight back. In a dreamlike state, she didn’t resist as Hulbert supported her, walking her down the hallway and into an elevator.

 

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