For Whom the Limo Rolls

by Lorena McCourtney

  Fitz ignored the small gaffe. “They made kind of a party of it, then?”

  The poodle was trying to get to my ear now. It had a front foot buried in my throat, as if it were exploring the possibility of a tonsillectomy.

  A new thought about Mary Beth’s scam occurred to me, and I managed to shove the poodle far enough aside to say, “Drugs?”

  “Not when I was there.” The woman lifted her shoulders delicately. “But when I wasn’t—?” Another pause, as if a new thought had just occurred to her. “Although Mrs. Delaney did appear to be in a rather peculiar state when she was speaking in that strange voice. I’m wondering now if that could have been drug induced?”

  The thought had never occurred to me, but now it loomed like a new possibility.

  “Did you ever participate in a private session?” Fitz asked.

  “Mrs. Delaney suggested a private session would be, as she put it, so much more enriching. But I declined.”

  “Was she talking enriching in a spiritual or monetary sense?” Fitz asked.

  “I assumed she meant in a spiritual way, but now that you mention it. . .” Her blonde head tilted thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Are you talking about her ‘love gifts,’ or are you suggesting she had some other scheme for extracting money from those gullible people?”

  “We’re just exploring all the possibilities,” Fitz said smoothly. “Could you give us names of anyone who participated in the group sessions?”

  Now the poodle had turned around and was waving the ball on the end of its tail in my face. I wanted to inject some pertinent questions, but it’s difficult to be an effective sleuth with a dog’s tail swatting your chin. I determinedly set the animal on the floor. It just as determinedly jumped back up.

  “There were introductions, but I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention,” Danielle said. “Although the second time I went I was surprised to see a man I knew there.”

  “And this person you knew was—?” Fitz prompted, since she seemed less than eager to identify him.

  “Will you be contacting him?”

  “Possibly, if it seems relevant to the investigation.”

  “I wouldn’t want him to know you got his name from me.”

  “Our investigation is quite confidential,” Fitz assured her.

  “Perhaps you’ll recognize the name. Anderson McClay? He was an important figure in a local bank before he retired, and now he’s running for county commissioner.”

  “Does he live close by?” Fitz asked.

  “No, he and his wife have a lovely place out on Hornsby Inlet.”

  The name Anderson McClay sounded vaguely familiar, although my bank dealings tended to be with the ATM machine or a teller, not an “important figure.” I don’t pay a lot of attention to political hype, but I may have heard the name in connection with the county commissioner’s position.

  Danielle tucked an angular strand of hair behind an ear and smiled self-consciously. “I think we were both embarrassed to see each other there. Actually, Anderson came over afterwards, and we were laughing about the ridiculousness of it all.”

  “Did Mr. McClay participate in a private session, do you know?” Fitz asked.

  “I have no idea. Although he said, in a rather confidential way, that he’d come only because his daughter had been to a few sessions, and he wanted to see what she was getting into.”

  A former banker, now a local politician. The kind of person who probably had enough money to attract Mary Beth. Although also not someone you’d think would be interested in a dialogue with some other-worldly entity. Yet the situation came back to the number of seemingly intelligent, aware people who got taken in by get-rich-quick schemes. I wanted to write his name in my notebook, but it’s not easy to take notes with a poodle tail whapping your face. I stuck the name in a mental file instead.

  “Anyone else?” Fitz asked.

  “An acquaintance with whom I was formerly on a Cultural Club board. Annabelle Dietz. She had a friend with her, but I didn’t know the other woman.”

  The widows Tom had mentioned? Widows who might be interested in upping their income with an investment?

  “But most of the people I didn’t know. She had group sessions every week, but I went only twice. It made me wonder about the gullibility of so many people.”

  “Did you see the man who’s accused of the murder, Tom Bolton, there?” I asked around the poodle’s wiggling hind end. Tom’s photo had been in the newspaper.

  “He was there at the first group session I went to, but mostly I saw him when he and Mrs. Delaney were going out together. He struck me as rather . . . plebian, but he seemed quite gentlemanly toward Mrs. Delaney. He always opened the car door for her.”

  I wondered if Danielle realized what she was revealing here, that she apparently spent considerable time peering out windows to watch her neighbor’s activities.

  “I was surprised to see he’d been charged with the murder,” Danielle added.

  “Did she have other male friends?” Fitz asked.

  “People came and went at all hours.” Danielle wrinkled her aristocratic nose. “Some of them came for private sessions, I suppose, but other visitors may have been of a personal nature. A red Corvette parked around back a few times. I never saw the driver, but I believe the car had out-of-state license plates.”

  A red Corvette. Hiding around back. Call me judgmental, but that shouted towel-snapper to me.

  And why was he hiding?

  Fitz stood up. I set the poodle politely but firmly on the blue carpet and also stood up so I no longer had an available lap. Fitz shook her hand. “Thank you so much, Mrs.—”

  “Danielle. Do call me Danielle. And I’ll be in touch with you later about a charter trip on the sailboat.”

  “I’ll be looking forward to it. We’re listed under ‘Charter boats’ in the yellow pages of the phone book.”

  We were at the door when Danielle deigned to notice me. “You seem to have a lovely rapport with animals,” she said. “Bébé doesn’t usually take to strangers.”

  Lucky me.

  Another thought occurred to me, and now that I didn’t have a tail waving in my face I could say it. “I understand a relative of Mrs. Delaney’s may be coming to take care of the estate. If you happen to see someone over at the house, would you give me a call? My number’s on the card. I’d like to talk to her.”

  Danielle looked at Fitz as if she’d prefer to call him. He smiled and, without offering his private cell phone number, said, “That would be very helpful. We’d really appreciate it.”

  “I’d be glad to do it, then,” Danielle said.

  Back in the limo, waiting for a car to pass on the street before I pulled out, I said, “What a sphere of charm you radiate, Mr. Fitzpatrick. A veritable blonde magnet.”

  “What can I say? It’s my nature to be charming.” He smiled. “Would we have been able to get the information we did without my charm?”

  Good point, I had to admit.

  “And you were radiating your own sphere of charm,” he pointed out. “Bébé found you quite irresistible.”

  Right. I opened the glove compartment and dug out the packet of disinfectant wipes I keep there. I scrubbed cheeks, ears, and hands.

  Fitz leaned over and kissed my scrubbed cheek. “Also irresistible to one visiting senior male.”

  I started the engine, but before I could pull into the street a blue and white vehicle with official insignia passed in front of us. It turned in at Mary Beth’s driveway.

  What I wanted to do when I recognized the driver was slink away unnoticed. He was not going to be happy to find us here. I slid lower on the seat.

  But it’s difficult to go unnoticed in a limo.

  He got out of the vehicle and lifted a hand to motion us to remain where we were. I hesitated, then jumped out to meet him.

  Attack is the first line of defense.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Detective Molino,” I said brightly. “I’
m so happy to run into you! I left a message at the office asking you to call me.”

  “You were making a social call on Mrs. Lawrence?” he asked, obviously suspicious that Fitz and I were sticking our noses in where he figured they didn’t belong. “Or was this limo business?”

  I didn’t want to answer his questions but I wasn’t going to fib, so I jumped in with another subject. “What I wanted to talk to you about, I presume you know that Mary Beth was involved in what’s called channeling? It’s been in some of the news reports. That this other-dimensional entity supposedly spoke through her?”

  Detective Molino gave an exaggerated sigh. “How come when you’re involved in a murder, Mrs. M, it’s never just a nice, straightforward case? There’s always something peculiar about it?”

  “I suppose there are some unusual aspects to this case,” I admitted.

  “I’ve had lots of suspects try to blame a crime on someone else, but I’ve never before had one try to blame it on some other-dimensional entity. So chalk this one up as a first.” He raised a hand and drew a finger mark in the air.

  “Have you talked to other participants in the channeling sessions?”

  “Now, Mrs. M., you know I can’t discuss—”

  I held up a hand too. “Of course not. I understand. But something you may not know is that Tom says this Trafalgar – that’s the other-dimensional entity – was going to give him some important investment advice, some way he could make big money.”

  Detective Molino’s sharp blue eyes looked reluctantly interested. “I hadn’t heard anything about that.”

  “I think it’s a scam Mary Beth had going. So what I’m also wondering is, has she, through her entity, gotten other people to invest in some fly-by-night scheme? If so, there may be some unhappy investors out there somewhere.”

  “An investor unhappy enough to commit murder?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering.”

  He appeared to chew on the information for a minute, but then he said, “I appreciate the information, Mrs. M., and we’ll give it consideration. But we have a very solid case against Tom Bolton.”

  “I know. Motive, of course. Plus his fingerprints at the house where she was killed. But he had a good explanation for why he was there. He just wanted to get back the necklace he’d given her.”

  “The necklace is missing, as you’re no doubt aware. Which suggests to us that Tom did get it back.”

  “But you couldn’t find it when you searched his place.”

  Detective Molino gave a big, I’m-trying-to-be-patient sigh. “There’s more to it than that, Mrs. M.”

  An appalling thought occurred to me. “The flesh under her fingernails. That wasn’t Tom’s was it?”

  “No, she’d clawed at her own throat when she was being strangled.”

  The vision that gave me of Mary Beth’s last moments made my own throat feel painfully tight. I managed a swallow. “You know what precipitated the argument between Tom and Mary Beth, that it concerned another man?”

  “The man in her shower, yes. We know about that. At least Tom’s version. We haven’t located the man yet, but we will. We expect he’ll be an important witness for the prosecution concerning Tom Bolton’s anger with his girlfriend.”

  “But maybe the man in the shower killed her!”

  “Motive, Mrs. M.?”

  “Since I don’t know who he is, I can’t know that. But there may be one.”

  “It’s my understanding that although motive can definitely help a case, it doesn’t necessarily have to be provided in court,” Fitz tossed in.

  Detective Molino’s gaze shifted to Fitz. “From one of your TV murder cases?” He sounded more resigned than sarcastic.

  “We tried to be as accurate as possible with details on the show.”

  “Okay, Mrs. M., and you too, Fitz, I probably shouldn’t tell you this. It’s confidential information, very confidential information. But I’d like to keep you from involving yourself in this situation. And we know you do tend to get involved.”

  Detective Molino’s glance toward Danielle Lawrence’s house suggested he suspected we were already involved. I wondered if he’d ask her why we’d been there.

  “Anyway, as I said, we have a solid case against Tom Bolton. Fingerprints, in general, are extremely difficult to retrieve from skin, although the techniques have improved in recent years.” He looked at Fitz again, dark eyebrows lifted, as if to suggest this technology was more recent than Fitz’s P.I. show on TV, and so beyond his level of expertise.

  “Superglue fuming, with a fuming hood. Or perhaps magnetic fingerprint powder and a film transfer method,” Fitz said.

  Detective Molino frowned and didn’t question how Fitz knew that. Neither did he argue the accuracy of the comments. “The techniques take skill and sometimes luck. But let me just say this: we have more than Tom’s fingerprints in the house to convict him.”

  I didn’t need diagrams. They had Tom’s fingerprints on Mary Beth’s skin. “On her . . . throat?”

  Detective Molino nodded, and I had to agree. They had a very solid case against Tom. Yet I couldn’t get past Tom’s unswerving belief that Trafalgar had killed Mary Beth.

  “So you’re not going to investigate further,” I said. “As far as you’re concerned the case is solved and closed. Tom is the killer, and that’s that.”

  “We may think we know the identity of the killer,” Detective Molino said, “but our minds aren’t closed. If information turns up to give us reason to investigate further in another direction, we’ll do it.” He frowned as if that didn’t come out right. “But I do not want you two trying to provide us with reason to investigate further.”

  “Tom’s fingerprints were the only ones you found?”

  “There were a couple of yours on the counter,” Detective Molino said.

  “Um, well, yeah. Others?”

  “There were a number of unidentified prints, probably of family members who’d used the kitchen. We’re in the process of identifying them.”

  “Has Mary Beth’s next of kin been notified of her death?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  An uninformative statement that said he wasn’t going to share the information about next of kin with us. I wouldn’t have expected more from him, of course. I’d just have to hope that Danielle Lawrence came up with something.

  “I know you see this as not doing our duty properly, but trolling in a very large ocean for a very small fish that may or may not exist is not a wise allocation of our resources when we already have a big fish on the line.” Detective Molino lifted his eyebrows toward Fitz as if to point out that he’d used the fishing analogy because of Fitz’s connection with the sailboat and ocean.

  “Sometimes you catch a fish that has to be tossed back,” Fitz murmured.

  Detective Molino’s exasperated twitch of eyes suggested he wished he hadn’t bothered with the fishing motif.

  “We understand,” I said hastily. “The sheriff’s department is very busy.”

  “We have another big case we’re also working on now.”

  An appalling thought occurred to me. “That girl who’s missing, she isn’t dead, is she?”

  “Actually, I believe she called home, and that case has taken a different twist. The case I’m working on has to do with the body of a transient found in Vigland Bay with a couple of bullets in his back last night. So many bodies, so little time.” He spoke lightly, but I knew Detective Molino didn’t take any of his cases lightly.

  “Andi and I don’t have anything to do with that one,” Fitz said.

  Detective Molino gave a little bow of head. “For which we can all be grateful. But let me remind you, this information about the fingerprints in Tom’s case is highly confidential and must go no further. I give it to you only to keep you from getting involved in some futile effort to absolve Tom of the murder, and putting yourselves in danger, as you’ve done before.”

  Putting myself in danger was all too true, I had
to agree reluctantly. The bullet holes in the trunk of the limo, which finances still hadn’t permitted me to get repaired, were mementos of a shootout with a killer. I’d also, unlikely as it might sound, had a dangerous run-in on a skateboard with another killer.

  “But if Tom is the murderer, as you believe,” Fitz said, “where’s the danger? That means there isn’t some other killer to come after us.”

  I looked at him, surprised and grateful for that logical observation.

  I don’t know if Detective Molino was surprised, but he definitely wasn’t grateful. “Dealing with a murder, there’s always danger,” he muttered finally.

  He walked back to his squad car without a goodbye.

  “Have a nice day,” I called after him. His day probably needed brightening, after running into us.

  We got back in the limo, and, as we watched Detective Molino drive on up to Mary Beth’s house, Fitz said. “He’s right, you know. Sniffing around in this could be dangerous.”

  “Because if Tom isn’t the killer, the real killer is out there somewhere,” I suggested. “And he won’t like our snooping around.”

  “Right. So we can just leave the snooping to Detective Molino and his gang, right? Where would you like to have lunch?”

  Except Detective Molino wasn’t snooping any further where Tom was concerned. Even with the additional fingerprints-on-skin evidence against Tom, the fact that Detective Molino wasn’t actively digging further troubled me. And then an unrelated thought, the obvious reason the Anderson McClay name Danielle had mentioned sounded familiar hit me. How could I have missed it?

  “Let’s go home first. I need to look up something.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Back at the house I rushed to the desk in the spare bedroom where I did limo business. I dug out the daily log I kept of clients, where I’d taken them, how much they’d paid, and any other pertinent information. Like the note I had on a young couple named Windsor: (“Avoid these people. They can’t tell the difference between a limo and a bedroom.”)