Borrowed Time

by Tracy Clark

  “My day’s looking up,” he said, his gorgeous eyes latching onto mine and lingering there.

  Friendly, I thought, standing there all tall and athletic too. For a half second, I forgot why I was there. “Vincent Darby?”

  He was dressed in workout clothes, his hair damp with sweat, the ends of it curling up at the nape of his neck in cute, little angel ringlets. He dried long, tapered fingers on a small terry towel, eyed me quizzically, his smile positively lethal. “That’s me.”

  I held up his business card, the one Ganz had given me. “Sterling Associates?”

  I could see the wheels turning. He was likely wondering how I got to his front door from the information on the card, which offered nothing more than his name, place of business, and work number. “That’s right.”

  I smiled broadly, knowing that his smile was not going to be long-lived. I took one final appreciative look, then waded in. “You handed these cards out at Tim Ayers’s party.” I put the card away, but plucked one of mine out of a pocket and handed it to him. “Cass Raines,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Tim, if you have the time?”

  Like the sky after a storm cloud passes in front of the sun, Darby’s Hollywood smile dimmed, then died. For a nanosecond, something else flickered across his flawless face, something I couldn’t immediately put a finger on. Ganz mentioned that something about the man appeared rough and unpolished. For a split second, I could almost see it, but then whatever it was blew away.

  “Private detective?” He ran the towel along the back of his neck to dry the sweat, and then ran it across his face and arms. “Sorry. You caught me at the end of a workout. What’s this about?”

  I stepped up to the top step, so we could be, more or less, eye to eye. “You were at a party Tim threw. You handed out your card. How were you two connected?” He read my card again, but didn’t answer. “You two argued. Mind if I ask what about?”

  Darby slid the towel under the waistband of his knee-length shorts, fisted his hands on his narrow hips. “I think you’ve gotten your wires crossed somewhere. I didn’t argue with him.”

  “But you did crash?”

  His eyebrows lifted, but he didn’t answer.

  The smile was back, though, but this time it didn’t quite make it to those gorgeous eyes. He chuckled slightly. “I had no beef with Tim, and I certainly didn’t crash any party. I stopped by to take a look at his paintings, maybe buy a piece. I thought it might cheer him up.”

  “Did he need cheering up?”

  Darby, again, let a moment pass before he answered. Did he measure every move, every response, before he made it? Why? “He was a little down, but you’d expect that. I can’t go into specifics about a client. It wouldn’t be ethical.”

  “He was dying,” I said, watching for a reaction. “And he was estranged from his family.” Darby drew back ever so slightly.

  “He had a lot to deal with,” he said.

  “But you were on the boat?”

  “I stopped by, but like I said, it was about the paintings. When I saw he wasn’t in a good place, I left. There were a lot of people there. He seemed to be into some things, recreational things. I’m not into that, so I took off. I couldn’t have been there more than ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “Long enough to pass out your business card,” I said.

  Darby shrugged, grinned. “Hey, they might have all been stoned, but business is business. It’s a shame what happened to him.” He flashed the smile again. “But when I left, he was literally feeling no pain, definitely not in the mood to get into an argument with me about anything. Whoever you’re getting this other stuff from is pulling your leg.”

  “It sure looks that way, doesn’t it? Still, I had to ask.” I moved to leave, Darby reached for the door to step inside. “Sorry. Almost forgot. After you left, because Tim wasn’t in a good place, and stoned, do you remember what time you boarded your own boat? The one with the blue canopy? And were you in for the rest of the night, or did you go back out later, say around midnight? I ask only because, if you did go back out, you might have seen something or someone out of the ordinary hanging around Tim’s boat.”

  I would swear Darby twitched, just a little, just enough to catch my eye, but he ramped the smile back up big-time all the same. Darby and I watched each other for a moment or two. I couldn’t tell what was going through his head, but it looked like he was cycling through something. He rubbed his hands on the towel at his waist, slowly, as though giving himself time to collect his thoughts. The smile flashed back, and the dimples, too. Seriously, it was like he turned it off and on at the drop of a hat. He let out a slow whistle. “Someone sure has sold you a bill of goods, haven’t they? I don’t own a boat, never have. Wish I did, though.”

  I eyed the house, the neat little window boxes. “Then you were home here the night Tim died?”

  “I was out with friends and got home late. I heard about Tim on the news the next morning.”

  “You were out with friends in the middle of a thunderstorm?”

  The gorgeous eyes bore into mine. ”Most people own an umbrella. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  He stepped back to close the door in my face, marking the end of our conversation, but stopped. “How’d you know where I lived?” There it was. I’d been waiting for him to ask the question, and I wondered now what had taken him so long. That didn’t mean I’d answer it, though. Had I made him uneasy, nervous? “I’m not at liberty to say,” I said.

  “Who hired you then?”

  I shrugged. “Back to the liberty thing.”

  His face held no expression. “Cass Raines,” he said, seemingly committing my name to memory. “Word of advice?”

  I took a step back. “Go for it.”

  “Don’t believe everything some schmuck tells you. Next time, don’t go off half-cocked.”

  He was cute and condescending, what a combination. The door began to close. “Uh, last one. Promise.”

  Darby glared at me, but held the door ajar. “You didn’t buy a painting the night of the party, but did you go back later to buy one?”

  For a moment, I thought I’d get a slammed door in the face, instead of an answer, but then he spoke. “No, never got the chance.”

  The door closed, and I heard Darby lock it tight from the inside. I stood on the stoop, trying to process what I’d just heard. He’d admitted to being on Tim’s boat, but to buy art, which he didn’t end up buying. He’d found Tim feeling a little down, not himself. That didn’t jibe with what Jung had told me about Tim, but it did match what Stephen Ayers told Marta and Cap. According to C.D. Ganz, the night of Tim’s party, he was not only down but drunk, which was the same state he was in the night he died. Darby had upped that by saying that Tim appeared stoned. Which one was lying, or was it both?

  I could see why Darby might not want to admit to arguing with Tim, in light of what happened. If it turned out Tim killed himself, Darby admitting to arguing with him could lead some to think the confrontation they’d had could have pushed Tim toward suicide. But what reason would Ganz have for making the entire thing up?

  Darby didn’t have much of an alibi for the night Tim died. Dinner with friends? But if he’d killed him, he’d have had plenty of time to come up with a much better one. Or did he figure not having much of an alibi made him look all the more innocent? If he had reason to kill Tim, didn’t it stand to reason it might be related somehow to Sterling? The two didn’t appear to be connected any other way. I’d need to keep digging.

  I started to walk away, but stopped when I heard Darby’s muffled voice coming from inside the house. He was talking to someone, but I could only hear his end of the conversation. He was on the phone and he sounded agitated. Who was he calling so soon after talking to me? I strained to make out what was being said, but couldn’t catch any of it.

  I made a big show of walking back to my car and unlocking the door, getting in, and driving away, but I didn’t go far. I drove up the block
, turned around in an alley, and headed back, pulling into a spot across the street and down a bit from Darby’s place where I had an unobstructed view of his front door. It was the phone call so soon after he closed the door on me that made me suspicious. Who was Darby checking in with? What had gotten him so upset?

  The boat with the blue canopy—it would have been a strange detail for Ganz to offer up if it wasn’t true, and an even stranger detail to get wrong if it was. Why deny owning a boat in the first place? Owning a boat wasn’t a crime. Mooring a boat at the same marina as someone you knew wasn’t, either. Darby hadn’t mentioned anything about Tim having OCD or being bipolar. Maybe he didn’t know? He wasn’t his doctor; he only set him up with an insurance payout. And feeling a little down didn’t automatically make you a prime candidate for suicide. If so, half the world’s population would be at the bottom of a lake.

  I eyed the house, the red door, the windows. Maybe Darby was calling someone to ask them what he should do about the nosy PI at the door. If so, that meant three things: One, Vince Darby, as good looking as any one man had any right to be, knew more than he was letting on about Tim’s last days. Two, whatever was going on, he wasn’t in it by himself. Three, Darby and his phone mate, whoever he or she turned out to be, were going to have one heck of a time shaking me loose.

  I popped a Roberta Flack CD into the slot, but only got two tracks in before Darby rushed out of the house, scanned the street, and jumped into a clean white Mercedes parked at the curb. He started his engine; I started mine. When he pulled off, I waited until a couple of cars got ahead of me and then eased out after him, following at a “tailable” distance.

  A rusty Toyota Celica and a fresh Chrysler sedan separated his back bumper from my front fender. None of us seemed to be in any particular hurry as the tiny caravan pulled up to a stoplight at Wabash and Roosevelt, the wide, congested street clogged with cars, trucks, and death-defying Divvy bike riders weaving through the bottleneck. On the sidewalk, texting pedestrians took their lives in their hands as they crossed the street distractedly, a bleating car horn their only salvation.

  When the light turned green, Darby turned right, heading toward the Drive. I followed. Halfway through the intersection, though, Darby abruptly stopped with a screech of his wheels. The drivers of the Celica and the sedan honked at the show of bad form, but didn’t linger to make a federal case out of it. They swerved around the impediment and took off, which left me with no buffer and a growing unease, my efforts at covert surveillance shot to hell.

  “This can’t be good,” I muttered, my foot still firmly on the brake.

  Darby got out of his car, his cell phone up to his ear, glaring in my direction. He could clearly see me; I could clearly see him. I was busted. I waved. There was no reason not to be cordial. He scowled, snapped my picture, and then mouthed something that didn’t look at all like a Christian blessing, then jumped into his car and sped away. Vince Darby, one; foiled PI, zip. It took me less than a second to rise above the insult, but now I was well and truly over my crush.

  Chapter 16

  Wednesday morning was a perfect day for either a bike ride or to sleep in with all the windows open to let a light breeze in, but Darby’s slip the day before still stung. I was bound and determined to find out what he was up to, but first, I wanted to take a shot at talking to Tim’s mother. Stephen had gone out of his way to cast Tim as unstable, and I wanted to know why. So far he’d done a good job of avoiding me, going so far as to point his lawyer in my direction. If I wanted to get anything from him, I was going to have to try to force his hand by going over his head.

  I slipped out my back door just after ten and raced down the back stairs. There were no strange cars idling in the alley, nor did I see anyone loitering anywhere. Good. I breathed a sigh of relief. Since the assault on my home months earlier, I saw shadows and threats looming around every corner. I couldn’t convince myself, no matter how hard I tried, that all I was seeing were ghosts of past tragedies. My home was safe. My family was safe. Yet, the ghosts remained. I ran down the wooden steps, past the second-floor landing, headed for the first floor. I was hoping to breeze right past Mrs. Vincent’s back door without rousing her, only to round the corner and come face-to-face with her. I stopped, dead in my tracks.

  “Looks like you’re in a hurry.” She rocked slowly in her patio rocker, as though time meant nothing, as though she were looking out onto some scenic vista, instead of out over the alley and the city’s battered garbage carts. “Haven’t seen you much lately.”

  She was dressed in a pink housecoat and matching slippers, her gray hair pulled back from her round, dark face and held in a neat twist. She was sitting at her white café table, a teapot and a dainty plate of tea cakes on top, hanging pots of fragrant hydrangea swaying gently in a light breeze. She stared up at me, and I stared back.

  “Work,” I said.

  The rocking was steady, slow, a little creepy. Like that rocking-chair scene at the end of Psycho. A slow, steady, dead-body rock. “Uh-huh.”

  “Everything okay with you?” I asked.

  She smiled, picked up her teacup, took a sip. Unhurried. “Me? God’s got me in the palm of his hand. And that’s the gospel truth.”

  I eased toward the steps. “Good. That’s great. I’ve got to run. I’ll pop in later. We’ll catch up.” I hit the stairs and flew.

  “Uh-huh. You do that. Real soon,” I heard her say, though by then I was half a flight down.

  I was sweating buckets when I hit the backyard. When I glanced up, Mrs. Vincent was still rocking, calm as anything, watching.

  * * *

  I’d been warned away by a rich guy’s lawyer, and then caught flat-footed by a cute guy with a dubious connection to a dead man, and something didn’t smell right. Someone was lying, and I needed to find a link, a thread that would made everything make sense. Cease and desist. That’s what Felton warned. Fat chance. GPS calculated I’d hit Barrington Hills and the Ayers home in less than an hour, give or take a traffic jam or two. I’d figure out my game plan when I got there.

  I drove more than thirty miles northwest of the city and knew I’d hit Barrington Hills when the trees got greener, the streets wider, and sleepy horse trails replaced the city’s clogged expressways. I circled the white gazebo in the center of the village a few times before GPS finally got it right and pointed me south.

  The Ayerses’ place came up at me at the end of a country lane, looming large behind a high stone wall covered in English ivy. A black iron gate barred the circular drive, and entry here was strictly monitored by use of a discreetly placed intercom box. Behind me, BMWs, Bentleys, and Range Rovers whizzed past on meandering Woodhaven Lane, the name sounding like something out of a Disney princess movie. I punched the button, marveling at the castle beyond the gate, counting windows, losing interest after reaching twenty, waiting for someone to holler back. There was also a camera on the box, which, of course, made sense. If you live this exclusively, you’d want to see who it is that you’ve let beyond the velvet rope, or what would be the point of moving all the way out here?

  “May I help you?” The voice was stately, deep.

  It was probably a butler. A house this huge had to have a butler. “My name is Cass Raines. I’d like to speak with Mrs. Elizabeth Ayers? I’m a private investigator looking into the death of her son Timothy.” I held my ID up to the camera, and then smiled nicely.

  “Mrs. Ayers is not accepting visitors at this time.”

  I looked into the camera. “Perhaps I can arrange to come back at a more convenient time?”

  “One moment, please.” The intercom went cold, and I sat idling at the gate for a good five minutes until a black SUV, with POLICE, BARRINGTON HILLS emblazoned on the side, pulled up behind me, lights flashing, blocking me in at the gate. Two cops got out. I caught on quickly that the answer to my question concerning Mrs. Ayers’s availability was a resounding no. I got out of my car slowly, keeping my hands up and out. Out of the corner o
f my eye, I watched a short, fat man in a pin-striped suit stroll out of the Ayers front door, down the drive, and through the gate where I stood. There was a gold watch fob in his right vest pocket, a pocket watch attached. Watch fob? What was this, 1918? The fat dandy scowled at me as he moved past me to greet the suburban cops, who didn’t look all that eager to engage. After a brief discussion, Watch Fob padded over to me. My height, and his lack of it, gave me a bird’s-eye view of the growing bald spot on the top of his freckled head.

  “I thought you might try and wheedle your way in to see Mrs. Ayers, even after I warned you to stay away.” He shot me a self-satisfied smile, behaving as though he’d single-handedly nabbed Bonnie Parker in the middle of a stickup.

  I slowly put my hands down, eyeing the cops cautiously. “Robert V. Felton, Esquire. So you decided to camp out here on the off chance that I’d try to swim the moat?”

  “I have resources. You have a reputation for being both tenacious and recalcitrant. I thought it best to head you off, which I’ve successfully done.” He pointed to the cops behind him. “These gentlemen will escort you from the premises. If you return, which I strongly advise against, the Ayers family is prepared to press charges for trespassing and harassment.” He stepped back, and then snapped his fingers as if summoning his very own pet giant to squash an encroaching villager. “Gentlemen?”

  The cops—both white, one tall, one wide, both with buzz cuts—stood staunchly upright, stern faces advertising their unwillingness to take part in a lot of needless chitchat.

  “Where were you when Tim fell from his boat, Felton?”

  Felton’s eyes, ferretlike, bags under them, flashed a warning. “You have no idea who I am, do you?” He smiled, but it was the kind of smile that might send little kids cowering under the covers, screaming for Mommy.

  “Actually, I do. You see, I also have resources. Long story short, you’re a bully in a thousand-dollar suit who charges wealthy clients, like the Ayerses, exorbitant amounts to haul their pampered asses out of whatever cracks they manage to fall into. They likely have your number on speed dial, and when they call, like now, apparently, you run right over to make the unpleasantness go away.”