“Honestly, you’re doing us a favor,” I said as I let them out and locked the door behind them.
“That was brilliant,” Maddy said. “Only now what do we do?”
“Something’s been nagging me ever since we first went over those papers we took from Grant’s apartment. Would you mind indulging me so we can go home and look at them again?”
“If you have a hunch, we should go with it,” she said.
It felt odd closing up the pizza place early, but there was a special mood in the air tonight, as though something big was about to happen, and I didn’t want to miss out on it.
We got back to my place, and before we could even take our jackets off, I headed for the bench where Maddy and I had stored the papers we’d found. It just took a second for me to find what I was looking for.
On the back of one of the pages in front of us was the piece of paper covered with a scribble of numbers that were all crossed out with single lines. I’d noticed it before, but I’d been distracted before I’d had a chance to examine it closely. Something Bob had said about a Web site address had stuck in my mind, because it was out of place.
When I looked at the paper again, there it was.
Among the clutter of useless information, I found what had to be a Web site address.
“Maddy, pop out your magic telephone for me, would you?”
“I’d be glad to. Who are we calling?” she asked as she dug her phone out of her purse.
“Nobody. I want to see what this site is all about.”
I handed her the piece of paper, pointed out the Web address, and she nodded as she typed a few keys on her phone pad. After a few seconds, she pulled up the site and then said, “I wonder what this means.”
“What did you find?” I asked.
She showed me her phone, and I saw an image on the screen, something that looked like an aerial view of someone’s house and yard.
“Whose place is this?” I asked as I searched for clues in what we could see.
“Hang on a second and I can tell you.” She went through a few steps, and after more than three hundred of the promised seconds had passed, she finally said, “I’ll be. It’s Sharon Whitmore’s place.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would Grant care about the view of the house where he was living? If anyone would know what it was like there, it would be him.”
She returned to the first screen and then tapped a few buttons on her phone, blowing up the view. “Eleanor, what does that look like to you?”
I stared at the small screen for a moment, and then I finally realized what I was seeing. “It’s a freshly dug hole, if I had to guess. What does it mean, though?”
“Come on. Grab your coat. I want to see what Grant Whitmore buried in the yard.”
“How long ago was this shot taken?” I asked. “What makes you think there’s even anything there now?”
“Look at the date. It was taken sometime last week, so there’s bound to still be signs that he’d been digging.”
“How did he even know that this photograph was there?” I asked.
“He could have checked the website occasionally. I know other folks that do that. It must have given him a heart attack when he saw the image on the screen.”
“Maddy, what are we going to do? Go over there with shovels and try to unearth who knows what after midnight? Besides, he probably moved whatever he buried there the second he saw fresh dirt.”
“Maybe not. There’s a chance that he didn’t have enough time to do anything about it before he was murdered.”
“So, we’re going to go find out for ourselves.”
“What other choice do we have?” Maddy asked me. “If we wait until tomorrow, we might be too late.”
“Okay. Let’s do this before my sanity starts creeping in,” I said. “I have a shovel and a pick in the basement, but my flashlight batteries are just about dead.”
Chapter 18
“I don’t think we’ll need the batteries, anyway,” Maddy said as she pointed outside. “There’s a full moon out tonight.”
“That’s just going to make it easier for someone to spot us. We should have some kind of cover story to explain what we’re doing before we go.”
She just smiled and shook her head. “If you can think of anything that would make any sense to anyone who might catch us, then you’re three steps ahead of me.”
“Okay, then it will be on to Plan B,” I said as we changed into the darkest clothes we had.
“What’s Plan B?” Maddy asked.
“If someone comes by while we’re digging, we drop the tools and run.”
“That sounds good to me.”
“Hey, who said we couldn’t plan things out?” I asked. “But instead of dropping our tools when we take off running, we have to take them with us. They belonged to Joe before we got married, and I’ll be hanged if I just leave them behind.”
“That’s what I love about you, Eleanor. You’re practical to the end. We might not know who killed Grant, but at least we have a shot at retrieving the money he probably buried there. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.”
We parked down the street after driving past Sharon’s house. I was afraid that Rebecca might still be awake, but there were no signs of her, so hopefully she’d be sound asleep, like any sane person would be at that hour of the night. Maddy and I walked together in the darkness, ready to run the moment we saw anyone’s headlights, but thankfully we didn’t see anyone as we made our way into the yard.
“Where was that spot exactly?” Maddy asked, peering around in the darkness. Though there was light from the moon, it was obscured by clouds that had come barreling in, and we were left with flashes of illumination, only to be plunged into darkness and, just as quickly, back out again. In addition, the view from ground level was quite a bit different from the one looking straight down from a satellite. It took me a moment to orient myself, and then I spotted the largest tree we’d seen in the image.
“It’s got to be right over there,” I said as I led the way.
“There it is,” Maddy hissed when she spotted the disturbed soil, and we both hurried toward it.
“Let’s start digging,” I said.
As we worked at removing the clay soil, Maddy asked, “Do you think there’s a chance that Bernie Maine really killed Grant?”
“I don’t think so, but the chief of police does,” I said. The repacked hole was tougher to dig than I thought it would be, and we were having a difficult time breaking up the soil even using the pick. “Maine seems like he’s the type who would get his money back before he killed Grant. He’s still hanging around here, though, and he’s following us, so I think that means that he doesn’t have the money himself.”
“What about the others?” Maddy asked as she took the pick from me and drove it home. The clay began to break up a little easier once we got past the top crust of it, and my shovel went in easier this time. It actually felt as though we were making some real progress. “Wouldn’t any reasonable person want to have that money before they killed the only person who knew where the cash was?”
I nodded as I pulled another shovelful out. “Nobody’s run yet, so whoever killed Grant is obviously still looking for the money.” I stuck the shovel back in the hole and wiped my brow. This was harder going than I’d ever imagined. “That could mean that the murder was an act of passion instead of greed.”
“Well, all three of our remaining suspects could have had that motivation,” Maddy said. “Kenny was jealous of Grant, Rebecca felt that her brother was cheating her, and Samantha had both motivations.”
I started to dig again, but then I stopped. “What’s the difference between the three of them, then? We know that Rebecca and Kenny plan to hang around, and Samantha is the only one leaving, isn’t she? Doesn’t that look bad on her?”
“She’s fleeing an abusive ex,” Maddy said. “That’s reason enough for her to escape, isn’t it?”
“Only if we believe her. Think about it, Maddy. Every time we’ve heard her interact with Kenny, she’s played the victim, but what if she was just doing it to divert suspicion away from herself? She clearly knows which buttons of Kenny’s to push, so it wouldn’t be all that hard to get him to lose his temper whenever they were together. It would make a pretty convincing argument for her to run away.”
“What about the money, though? Doesn’t she care about that?”
I dug another scoop of soil out. “How about this? What if she believes that it’s already lost to her? She waited around long enough so that it wouldn’t look suspicious when she finally left, and Kenny gave her the perfect excuse. You know, Chief Hurley was right. We have no outside verification that anything she told us about him abusing her is true.”
“But we heard them together,” Maddy protested. “He was clearly threatening her.”
“At the pizzeria she could have been playing us,” I said. “What if she already had her exit planned and was just setting us up as her alibis for running?”
“Maybe that’s true, but what about what we overheard backstage? Eleanor, there’s no way that she even knew that we were there.”
“I’m not sure that she didn’t see us, but even so, she was egging him on. Sure, he was bossy and pushier with her than either one of us would ever stand for, but did he say anything that would make us think that he was capable of murder? Remember when he had the stun gun and refused to use it on us?”
“The way you tell it is pretty convincing. Should we call Chief Hurley and stop him from making a mistake with Bernie Maine?”
“Let’s see if the money’s here first,” I said.
Instead of sliding into the dirt on my next lunge, the shovel in my hands hit something hard.
Maddy heard it, too. “Is that what I’m hoping it is?” she asked.
“There’s only one way to find out.” I got on my knees and reached down into the hole. It took ten seconds, but I finally found something I could pull up on. When we wrestled the object out of the hole, I realized that it was an old suitcase, and from the look of it, it hadn’t been buried that long.
I was about to open it when I heard a man’s voice behind me say, “Nicely done, ladies. I’ll take that, if you don’t mind.”
It was Kenny Stout, and when I looked up at him in the light of the moon, I saw that he’d brought a shovel of his very own to the party.
“You didn’t kill Grant, did you?” I asked. I hated to see my carefully reasoned solution to the crime fall apart just before I breathed my last breath.
“What? Of course not. I knew he took the money, though, and I figured that whoever killed him didn’t have it. I broke into his place over there, but I didn’t find a thing, so I thought I’d keep an eye on you two and see what you were able to come up with.”
“But you had to know that something was buried here. Why else carry a shovel and pick around in your station wagon?”
“Truthfully? I was going to plant a flower bed,” he said with a smile.
“But you rent.”
“What can I say? I like a little color in my life. It just worked out that I had all the tools I needed with me when I spotted you two sneaking out of your house tonight.”
“But you bought that huge footlocker,” Maddy protested.
“Sure. I needed a new one so I could put some of my things in storage. Why? What did you think I bought it for?”
“We figured you were going to kill Samantha and bury her in it,” I said.
That brought out a full laugh from him. “Are you kidding me? Why would I kill my meal ticket? Without her, I’m just an okay musician. She’s the draw onstage, and we both know it.”
“You know, it took a while, but it’s finally nice to hear you admit it,” Samantha said as she stepped out of the shadows behind him.
The moonlight revealed the gun in her hand, and I felt little consolation knowing that I’d been right about who had killed Grant Whitmore after all.
“How did you find us?” I asked her. “And why did you even come looking for us in the first place?”
“I spotted your pizza boy following me earlier today,” she said. “He wasn’t very clever about it, so it wasn’t all that hard to do. I had a hunch that something was up, so as soon as he left my apartment, I began trailing Kenny.” She looked at her ex-husband and added, “You’re too easy. You know that, don’t you? There were two of us on your tail at one point, and you didn’t see either one of us.”
“Why were you following me?” he asked.
“I was going to kill you, of course,” she answered. By the tone of her voice, she could have just as easily said that she was going to take him out to dinner, and I realized that something in Samantha must have snapped. “I’m leaving the country, and I wasn’t about to let you think that you ran me off. You bullied me onstage and offstage in our marriage, but I was going to get the final say.”
“What about us?” Maddy asked her.
“Sorry, but you’re just collateral damage from friendly fire.”
“Surely you can’t expect to get away with killing all three of us,” I said.
“Four, actually. Don’t forget Grant. That was a mistake, actually.”
“Killing him? I’d think so,” Maddy said.
I tried to figure out what chance we had of stopping her as she spoke. Should I throw my shovel at her like a spear? She was far enough away from us that I doubted I’d be able to do any damage. How about if I shouted out for help? No, the neighborhood was as dead as we were about to be if we didn’t do something quickly.
“No, I don’t regret that, but I do wish that I’d found the money he stole first.” Then she looked down at the dirty suitcase. “I see you’ve done that for me, though. Why don’t you be a good girl and toss it over here to me,” she demanded.
“I’m not strong enough,” I said, though I probably could have managed it. I wanted her to come closer so I’d have a chance of using it as a weapon. “Whatever is in there is weighing it down.”
She didn’t fall for the trap, though.
“Kenny, make yourself useful. Drop your shovel, get the suitcase, and bring it to me. You might not have done what I asked you to while we were married, but you have a little more incentive to make me happy right now, wouldn’t you say?”
Kenny dropped his shovel as he said, “Samantha, you’ll never get away with this.”
“As a matter of fact, I believe that I will. Now, do as I say!”
Kenny walked over to the suitcase, picked it up, and then started toward his ex-wife with it.
When he was six feet away, she ordered, “That’s far enough. Drop it right there.”
Instead of doing as he was told, though, Kenny held the suitcase up as a shield in front of his body and ran straight at her. What was the fool trying to do?
Samantha didn’t even hesitate. She shot him from two feet away, and he crumpled at her feet.
I knew then that if there was any doubt before, it was gone now.
We were all about to die.
While Samantha looked down at her ex-husband with a sick grin on her face, it was time for action. I might be about to die, but I wasn’t going down without a fight.
I threw my shovel at her with everything I had.
Maddy didn’t throw her pick, though.
She, too, ran straight at Samantha, the pick held high over her head.
“No!” I shouted just as Samantha looked up.
Maddy’s pick left her hands in that instant, turning end over end as it flew toward Samantha’s chest.
My shovel hit a glancing blow off her arm, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the one holding the gun.
Maddy’s aim with the pick was truer than mine, though. It sank into Samantha’s shoulder, and the gun flew up into the air as the murderer fell to the ground.
As I rushed toward the weapon to keep Samantha from recovering it, we heard a voice from the house call out, “What’s going on out the
re? I’m going to call the police.”
“Do that,” I said as I reached down and picked up the gun.
“Eleanor, is that you? What’s going on?” Rebecca asked.
“There’s too much to even tell you right now,” I said as I pulled out my own phone and dialed 911.
I had a lot to say, and I wanted to have to say it only once.
Chapter 19
“Tell it to me one more time, from the beginning,” Chief Hurley ordered as Maddy and I sat in his office an hour after the confrontation had taken place.
“Our story’s not going to change,” I said. “Have they counted the money yet? Is the entire hundred and fifty grand that went missing there?”
“It’s with the forensic accountant right now,” he said. “She’ll let me know when she gets a final count. I don’t envy her the mess the courts will have on their hands, figuring out who gets what after the trial is over.” The police chief glanced over at Maddy and added, “If any of it is even coming to you, I wouldn’t count on seeing it within the next ten years.”
“I’m not holding my breath,” she said. “Just knowing that Sharon thought so much of me is enough of an inheritance for me.” Maddy added with a grin, “Besides, getting Bob off the hook is really all the payment I need. Did you ever catch up with Bernie Maine?”
“We found him, all right,” Chief Hurley admitted. “We had to let him go, though, given Samantha’s confession.” He looked down at his notes and then shut off the video camera and tape recorder he had running before he spoke again. “When did you two figure it out?” he asked softly.
“Don’t give us too much credit. We didn’t get it until about two minutes before Samantha showed up,” I explained. “We were still digging the hole when we realized that she was the only one of our suspects who planned to run. She must have known how it would look, though, because she orchestrated a pretty elaborate cover for it from the first moment we saw her after the murder. She didn’t let it rest with that, though.”
The chief nodded. “If we didn’t go after Kenny, she was ready to frame Bernie Maine. Planting Grant’s bloodstained wallet at Maine’s place was pretty brilliant.”
The Missing Dough (A Pizza Lovers Mystery) Page 21