A Wee Homicide in the Hotel
Page 24
He hardly answered at all. Just texted that he’d get back to me.
Karaline couldn’t have cared less about the delay. She was busy herself with wedding plans.
Harper kept putting me off, so I finally quit calling and texting him. If he wanted me—that is to say, if he wanted to meet with everybody—he’d have to make the first move.
By the time we all got together, more than a week later, most of our questions had been answered. All we had to do was read the paper or pay attention to the news. But we still had a few outstanding queries.
Karaline and Drew brought doughnuts, as well as a pan of lasagna for later. I made the coffee. The four of us gathered in my kitchen.
Shorty hopped up in my lap and Silla curled herself beside my left foot. Now that I was settled, I could start with the questions. “Just before the arrests, I saw you texting like crazy. What was that all about?”
Harper grinned. I loved that not-quite-a-dimple he had. “I was convinced Windsor was the murderer.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“But the only person who could identify him for sure was my sislaw, Amy, since she’d treated him in the ER when he went in with the dog bite.” Harper leaned sideways—carefully, since his ribs were still taped—and looked at Silla lying by my feet. “Good dog!”
“You can say that again.” I leaned down to stroke her back and she woofed gently.
“I couldn’t figure out how to get a picture of him. Murphy tried, but Windsor was always slightly turned away from the camera, almost like he was afraid of having his picture taken, which of course just made me that much more suspicious. Finally, Murphy saw Robert’s wife taking a picture of the two brothers together. Murphy stepped behind her, clicked the photo over her shoulder, and texted it to me.” He stopped talking and pulled out his cell. “Here’s the picture if you want to see it.”
We all did, so he passed it around. “I didn’t realize how much the two brothers look alike,” I said.
Harper agreed. “If Murphy hadn’t caught the two of them together, Amy said she might have thought a picture of Windsor was the one of Smith. But seeing them together, she said it was very obvious who’d been the man with the dog bite.”
Drew grabbed another doughnut—with maple frosting, Karaline’s specialty. “Was Amy there Sunday night?”
“No. She was working, so I texted it to her, asking, ‘Is this the guy?’ Of course, I meant Windsor. She was with a patient, so it took her a while to text me back with ‘Yes. Smith is guy in tall furry hat.’ That really surprised me. I got the text just seconds before I went up on the stage.”
“And got whacked for your efforts,” Karaline said.
“Otherwise,” Drew said, “you would have arrested the wrong guy?”
“That’s right.” Harper sounded perfectly cheerful about it. “And now I owe my sislaw a steak dinner.” He turned to me. “Do you want to come along?”
“I . . . uh . . . uh, sure.”
“Good. I’ll let you know when.” He patted his shirt pocket, for some reason, and I could see something lumpy in there. Before I could think much about it, he continued. “Of course, once we had him in custody, we had the evidence of the dog bite on his leg . . .” He reached down a little farther this time, slowly and gingerly, and ruffled the hair on Silla’s head. She stood up, shook herself to resettle her coiffure, and laid herself back down. I handed Harper a doughnut drenched in dark chocolate. He’d just asked me out for a date. Those charcoal eyes of his were something else.
“Good dog,” Karaline and Drew said at the same time, and Tessa added a canine vote of approval. They were all three going to have a great life together.
Harper ate the doughnut, watching me all the time. Karaline and Drew didn’t notice a thing. They were too busy looking at each other.
“Is all of that enough evidence to get a conviction?” I sure did hope so.
“Yes,” he said with a smile, but I had the feeling he was answering some other question, one that was just between the two of us. Then he turned serious. “We also had the bruises on his fingertips, which we photographed very carefully. Luckily, Amy had noted them on his hospital records.”
Drew looked up from his fourth or fifth doughnut. “Bruises?”
“Remember how you told me that Silla could barely bark at all?”
“She sounded raspy,” I said.
“And then you texted me that you’d taken her in to get her checked out?”
I nodded.
“I called the vet, and we had a long talk. Apparently, when Scotties bite, they hang on. They don’t let go. So when she bit Robert’s leg, the only way he could get her off him was to choke her until she passed out. Her rabies tag pressing against her windpipe constricted the airflow, and the vet said that could have caused her to lose consciousness. That’s the only way Robert could have gotten out of that hotel room without a dog hanging on to his leg by her teeth.”
“Good dog,” Karaline and Drew said again, only this time they sounded like they really meant it.
“The pressure was enough to make her throat swell, which is why she sounded raspy.”
Beneath the table, Silla let out a full-throated woof, as if to inform us that she was fully recovered.
After we all laughed, and after I gave Silla a special chewy bone treat and one for Tessa just to keep things even, Harper went on. “We found a clear half fingerprint on the chanter. It must have gotten in his way. He probably just pushed it to one side without thinking and forgot to wipe it down the way he did the drones.”
“What I’d like to know,” I said, “is why Robert trashed Big Willie’s hotel room. What was he looking for?”
Harper scratched at his jaw, and I could hear the rasp of his five-o’clock shadow. I wanted to reach out and see what it felt like. I glanced up and found Dirk watching me watch Harper. His smile was wistful. What a good ghost. I was truly sorry he was so lonely for his ladylove.
“The best we can deduce,” Harper said, “is that Willie found out what Robert had done, and Robert was afraid he might have left some notes about it. Motive for both the murder and for the frantic search.”
“So, tell us,” Drew said. “Where did you find the necklace, the one they stole from my twin?”
“You mean the one you helped Fairing track down the provenance on?”
Karaline reared back and studied that fiancé of hers. I studied my brother. He spread his hands. “I told you I wanted to be in on the action. I don’t hang around museums all day for nothing.”
“What would be a ‘profenants’?”
Karaline and I both looked at Dirk. I couldn’t think of a way to answer him.
Harper looked at me. “Did he just ask you something?”
“Yeah,” said Drew, “I asked where you found the necklace.”
I pressed with both hands along the ridge of my eyebrows and peeked at Harper between my fingers. “Things like this happen a lot.”
“Like what?” Drew sounded bewildered.
I could see why.
“In case you’re interested,” Harper said, turning toward Drew, “it was in Windsor’s sporran all the time.”
“He lied to his wife?” Karaline sounded incredulous.
“He put a priceless Ming necklace in his sporran?” Drew sounded appalled.
“It was okay,” Harper said. “He’d wrapped it in a couple of disgusting used handkerchiefs. I guess he thought nobody would want to touch it.”
“I’m sure he had that right,” I said.
“Good thing we had latex gloves on when we opened it up.”
In between all the eewww and yuck sounds, I heard someone knocking on the front door. Shorty vaulted from my lap and ran upstairs. Silla looked up at me as if to ask what I was going to do about the excess noise. She unfolded her curled-up body and preceded me, lo
oking much more impressive than a silly old drum major any day, with those natural tassels of her black hair swishing from side to side.
Paisley Mackenzie stood on the porch, wearing her long plaid skirt, a white blouse, and a green paisley scarf. “I’m ready for my tour,” she said, “so I can see what you’ve done to my house.”
Harper slipped his hand around my waist, and I leaned against him. Even Paisley Mackenzie couldn’t dampen my spirits this evening.
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