Assignment Denver: The Case of the Eccentric Heiress: Jae Lovejoy Cozy Mystery One (Jae Lovejoy Cozy Mysteries Book 1)

by Lucey Phillips

  “And it’s missing?” Jennie asked.

  I nodded.

  I swiveled around on my stool to tell Colin, sitting on my other side, that Jennie and I were going to the saloon. But when I saw him my mind went blank. Then I nearly fell off of my stool.

  Autumn was standing on Colin’s other side, her arms thrown around his neck and her face buried in his shoulder. At first I thought they were kissing, but after a moment I realized she was crying.

  Colin must have sensed me gawking, because after a moment he turned his head toward me. He wore a flat expression that I couldn’t read.

  “Me and Jennie are going to the saloon for a minute.”

  “I’ll come too,” Colin said.

  “No, I think you should stay. I’m hoping Gus won’t remember me from the other day,” I said. “If he sees us together, he might remember.”

  Colin furrowed his brow.

  “I just need to stay under the radar. I won’t be gone long.”

  When I stood to leave, Jennie looked me up and down.

  “Uh. You need to lose the work satchel,” she said.

  I looked down at my messenger bag. I’d always thought it could pass for a purse, but I guess not.

  “We need to go into the saloon like we’re just a couple girls out for drinks, not like we’re on a mission—or we just came from the library.”

  “Good point.” I held out my hand and asked Colin for the keys.

  Then Jennie and I walked out. I tossed my bag into the back of the Nissan after shoving some cash and my ID into my pocket.

  “Is Autumn going to be okay?” I asked Jennie. “I guess she and Mitch are pretty close.”

  “No, they’re just a regular boss and employee, as far as I know,” Jennie said. “She was talking about health insurance. Her daughter has really bad asthma and needs a bunch of expensive medications. I think that’s why she was so upset. Got herself all worked up about the lager house closing.”

  We could hear music coming from the Tin Pan Saloon long before Jennie and I opened the front door. When we got inside, it seemed like a different place than the sleepy gambling dive it had been the other day.

  In the corner, one man had a makeshift stage set up with an amp, a microphone and a couple of theater lights. He was singing Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack.” Nearly all the tables and bar stools were occupied. It was noisy, with all of those people trying to speak to each other over the music.

  Jennie walked up toward the bar. I followed her, my stomach beginning to knead itself into a nervous lump. We probably should have put together some sort of attack plan before we’d come here. What were we going to do, just bust into Gus’s office and pretend we’d gotten lost on our way to the bathroom?

  “What are you having?” Jennie asked loudly in my ear.

  “Just a Coke.”

  Jennie did a nearly-imperceptible double-take, then nodded and leaned in toward the bar to get the bartender’s attention.

  I have received many unwelcome reactions to the revelation that I’m a non-drinker. I’ve dealt with everything from laughter and disbelief to wildly inappropriate, probing questions about my health and religious beliefs. Jennie’s moment of discrete hesitation was actually a refreshingly considerate response.

  Of course my lifelong friends and family members—people who have met my mom—never act surprised about my choice of non-alcoholic beverages. They know.

  I surveyed the room for open seats, preferably someplace that would give us a good view of the hallway to the back. It was near the slot machine room and the bathrooms. Gus’s office was most likely back there, too.

  Gus was over near the singer. He checked the thermostat on the wall, then he walked into the slot machine room.

  I found an empty table with two chairs. The view of the stage was blocked by a wide column, which was probably why it was the only vacant table I could find.

  Jennie followed me to the table, plunked our drinks down, and leaned back in her chair. She was much better at playing it cool than I was.

  After a quick squeal of feedback from the amp, the singer set his guitar on its stand. Then he leaned in to the microphone.

  “Be back for another set in twenty minutes,” he mumbled in his gravelly tenor.

  Jennie sat up and said, “Perfect. Bar’s gonna be slammed the next twenty minutes. Let’s go.”

  She was gone before I could question her logic or ask her if there was a plan B. I guessed I’d be sticking with my restroom navigational error excuse if we got caught.

  I followed Jennie past the slot machine room. The back hallway was crowded with people waiting in line for the restrooms. Jennie turned around and whispered, “confidence.” Then she fixed her gaze straight ahead and made her way gracefully between bodies without saying “excuse me,” or bumping into anyone, or even being noticed at all.

  I followed in the slipstream of gaps she’d left behind. We rounded a corner where I’d expected to find doors leading to an office or store room. There were no doors. Instead, there was a staircase leading to the basement.

  We jogged down the stairs. Jennie managed to walk soundlessly in her athletic shoes. Meanwhile, I cringed each time one of my boots clomped on a wooden step. The hallway was dimly lit with one bare yellow bulb overhead.

  The first door Jennie tried was unlocked. It was a storage closet with shelves full of toilet paper and cleaning supplies on one side, and brooms and mops on the other.

  I moved on to the next door. It was locked. The only other door in the hallway was a heavy metal door, locked from our side with a deadbolt and padlock.

  Jennie pulled a bobby pin out of her hair, straightened it, and wiggled it into the keyhole. She got the door opened in just a few seconds. I would have expressed my surprise, and maybe admiration, at her breaking and entering skills, if I weren’t so scared of making a noise.

  I found a light switch while she locked the door behind us.

  Jennie rushed toward the desk and started opening and closing drawers. I started sifting through the messy piles of papers, magazines, and unopened mail on the desktop.

  “What’s this?” Jennie whispered as she removed an antique-looking pearl necklace. A gold, rose-shaped pendant hung from the center of the strand. “Do you think it’s Bunny’s?”

  “Could be,” I said. “But even if it is, it’s not necessarily proof they were still seeing each other. He could have bought it at her store.”

  She shrugged and tossed the necklace on the desktop. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and snapped a photo of the necklace before she resumed rifling through desk drawers.

  As Jennie was sliding the wide, shallow, middle drawer closed, I saw what looked like a lavender shoe string. The feminine color stood out among Gus’s patently dark and dingy belongings.

  “Wait,” I whispered. “What’s that?”

  I scooped up the string with the end of the pen. It wasn’t a shoe string. It was a loop—a lanyard. Several keys dangled from it. One looked like a typical padlock key from the hardware store. There were also two smaller keys that were made of polished brass.

  The key that stood out the most looked old. Its top was an oval loop, which was connected to a long cylindrical barrel with the teeth at the end.

  Jennie looked unimpressed.

  “It’s the murder weapon,” I whispered urgently.

  A click came from the office door.

  Other than staring at each other with desperate, wide eyes, Jennie and I had no time to react.

  Gus walked into the office. For just a second, a startled expression took over his face. But then his mouth twisted as he opened it and began screaming.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  Jennie’s voice was calm and even when she said, “Run.”

  She bolted around the desk, with one elbow in the air to block Gus’s arm as he reached for her. He missed, but used all of his momentum to round on me as I was just taking my first step to follow Jennie out the door.r />
  Gus grabbed my forearm. His thick fingers instantly digging into my skin. His grip was so tight on my arm that my hand became numb and tingly.

  With his other arm, Gus snatched the lanyard away from me so forcefully that the pen it had been hanging on flipped out of my hand and flew through the air, clattering to the floor.

  “What’s this? Where did you get it?” he shouted.

  He held my arm over my head at an angle that was so severe, any effort I made to pull or wiggle myself free did nothing but cause my shoulders and torso to jerk pitifully.

  “I’m asking you for the last time. What the hell is going on here?” Gus bellowed. “You were stealing my wife’s pearls!” His gaze was now fixed on the necklace laying on his desktop.

  I said nothing. Even if I’d thought of something useful to say for myself, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to form any words around the sick, helpless lump in my throat.

  Gus shook my arm hard, as if he could jerk some sort of explanation or apology or confession out of me. My eyes searched the office wildly as I began to wonder what would happen next. And what had happened to Jennie? I thought about my phone, too—how I’d carelessly left it in my bag, now locked in the car.

  “Answer me,” Gus shouted, his tobacco breath bursting hot against my face.

  I turned my head away and pulled harder against his grasp, my skin stinging and burning where it twisted beneath his.

  Then Gus’s face lit up with shock and pain. He let go of my arm as he stumbled to the side. I could see Jennie standing behind him, shoving at his ribs with a mop handle. Gus took one big step back, regained his balance, and grabbed the handle, shoving it back toward Jennie.

  I ran past Jennie and headed up the steps as fast as I could go. I heard the wooden mop handle fall to the ground and almost immediately Jennie was behind me, her hand pressing on my shoulder urging me to go faster.

  Jennie squeezed past me when I reached the top of the steps, breathless.

  “Here,” she said as she led me to the right, through a metal door, instead of to the left, which led back into the bar.

  We were in the alley. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. The struggle with Gus and short sprint out of the saloon had left me sweaty. Now we were outside where it was probably forty degrees.

  “You okay?” Jennie asked me as we started walking back toward the lager house.

  “Yeah,” I said with a nervous cackle. “Are you?”

  “Fine.” Jennie actually sounded chipper. She must be one of those people who loves the mania of an adrenaline rush.

  “Thanks for, you know, coming to my rescue,” I said. “Do you think he’s going to call the police?”

  “Doubt it,” she said. “If so, what’s he gonna say? Two women he doesn’t know broke into his office then ran away. Big deal.”

  “Yeah. Not to mention he probably wouldn’t want to lead police to the murder weapon—that’s in his possession.”

  “What do you think we should do next?” Jennie asked.

  “Well, obviously what we did was totally illegal and, if anyone finds out, it could totally mess up the case,” I said. “I guess we need to try to get the police to look at Gus some more.”

  “What if you dig into his background, find out about other relationships, or maybe crimes in the past?” Jennie asked.

  I shook my head. “My friend is a fact-checker at ANA, she already looked him up. She didn’t find criminal records or anything like that.”

  “You believe me now?” Jennie asked. “That it wasn’t Mitch?”

  “I think so. The case definitely isn’t as simple as the police say it is.”

  “Well, if Gus has the murder weapon, that means he did it, right?”

  “That’s probably the murder weapon, but we don’t know for sure,” I said. “But why would Gus kill Bunny?”

  “Because he’s the boyfriend, and the killer is always the boyfriend,” Jennie said. “Besides that, he lied about being in a relationship with Bunny. What reason would he have for lying unless he killed her?”

  “People lie about being in relationships all the time. He told the detectives that her family didn’t approve. Maybe he just didn’t want it getting back to the nephew, to Pat, that they had been involved.”

  “We have to tell someone what we found,” Jennie said. “Maybe this could get Mitch’s charges dropped.”

  “We can’t. We got the information illegally—that could hurt Mitch’s case,” I said. “I’ll talk to his lawyer in the morning, interview him for a story. Maybe I can, you know, nudge him to take a closer look at Gus.”

  | Eleven

  Iwas still trembling with adrenaline when Colin and I began the drive across town, back to the hotel. It was after midnight, but I wasn’t sleepy. I was bursting with energy. And, like a little kid who throws a fit when it’s time to leave the playground, I did not want to go home.

  I tried to think of something else to investigate, somewhere else to go, but there really wasn’t much work that I could do at this hour. Besides, Colin’s eyelids were looking heavy. I’d have to channel my energy like a professional—into teasing my colleague.

  “So, Autumn. She’s pretty,” I said, making no attempt to hide my delight in finally broaching the subject of Colin’s personal life and, hopefully, giving him a hard time about it.

  Colin’s only response was to give me a brief sideways glance before returning his sleepy gaze to the road.

  “I hear she’s single,” I said with a giggle.

  He exhaled an annoyed sigh. “It’s not like that.”

  “Well. It would be fine if it were like that. Besides, it looked like, for her anyway, it’s exactly ‘like that.’”

  I used air quotes, which is an annoying habit, but I was behaving annoyingly right now, so it worked.

  “For one, I don’t even live here and I have no plans to come back. Secondly: It’s. Not. Like. That.” Colin’s tone was exaggerated irritation, but I could sense a laugh threatening to break through.

  “It’s called a one-night stand, Colin. People do it all the time.” Not me, I thought, but some people.

  “I don’t go for those,” he said.

  Really? His reputation would say his lifestyle is precisely the opposite of that statement.

  “Well, no one’s judging. Sometimes true love only lasts a few hours. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “True love?” Finally—Colin grinned. It was a smile that seemed to light up the night. He shook his head and said, “You’re punch drunk. Let’s get you home.”

  »·×·»

  Giving Tyler Soundingsides, Mitch’s lawyer, the opportunity to say no to a pre-planned interview was too risky. So I’d opted to just show up at his office unannounced.

  I’d had a difficult time convincing Colin to go do his own thing while I came to Tyler’s office solo. The night before, when I’d described my encounter with Gus, Colin had a slightly-horrified look on his face. It was only for a moment, though. The he went back to his typical cool and collected demeanor as he grumbled a complaint that he didn’t want to be the one who had to call Lance with the news that his travel reporter had gotten herself arrested.

  But eventually, I was able to convince Colin that his time would be better spent shooting cityscapes while I talked to Tyler. I really needed him to trust me today. That’s much easier accomplished one-on-one—not two-on-one.

  The public defender’s office receptionist was a terrible liar. She looked away, fidgeted with her bracelet, and even turned a little pink when she told me Tyler Soundingsides wasn’t in.

  “No problem. I’ll wait,” I said cheerfully before plopping myself in a plastic armchair right between her desk and the door leading back to the attorney’s offices. I would expect someone whose office’s entire business is defending accused criminals would be a little, I don’t know, harder.

  My meeting with Tyler had to be face-to-face—not an email or phone call or press release. Somehow I needed to u
se this supposed interview to help him figure out that Gus was probably the killer and that he had the murder weapon.

  And that’s just assuming Gus didn’t blow the whistle on the previous night’s little breaking and entering incident. He’d already lied to the police, so it was a pretty safe assumption that he wouldn’t be rolling out the red carpet for them to enter his office and search it for evidence regarding the two club-goers who broke in and rummaged through his desk, taking nothing.

  While I waited for Tyler to realize he’d have to face me sooner or later, I texted Quinn about my latest theory—that Gus Grubler killed Bunny Malone.

  “Found the lanyard. Gus Grubler, the saloon owner, has it,” I texted her.

  She wrote, “Found? Grubler is the ex-boyfriend, right?” Quinn knew better than to put my illegal activity in writing.

  “Pretty sure they were still together,” I replied.

  “I don’t think he could be a killer. No violent record.”

  “But why else would he have the murder weapon? And he’s limping. Whoever was in Bunny’s shop that day probably jumped five feet off a loading dock.”

  Quinn replied, “He did lie about the limp being a work injury, remember? He’s not getting workers compensation. What about Mary Pettigrew? She was stalking Bunny, right?”

  “I think it’s Gus. Pettigrew is just your typical cat lady who’s obsessed with antiques. ‘Stalking’ is kind of a stretch.”

  “Just check her out,” Quinn wrote.

  “Okay. Might have time later today,” I said.

  Almost involuntarily, I jerked my head up when the door beside me opened. But it wasn’t Tyler. Just some other man in a suit.

  When a FedEx delivery woman entered the office, the receptionist glanced over at me nervously after greeting her. When the delivery woman had left, the receptionist picked up her phone and murmured into it. I couldn’t hear what she said, but less than a minute later, Tyler emerged wearing his overcoat.

  “Hi, Jae,” he said, as if he hadn’t been rudely avoiding me for the past hour.

  “Hey Tyler, I’m glad I caught you,” I said, smiling to myself over my use of the word “caught.”