by JoAnna Carl
After they’d taken J.J. away, one of the EMT’s checked Arnie and ordered him off to the hospital as well. I went with him, and we were waiting for the doctor when Mike put his head in the door to the examining room, then joined us.
“Just how did you come to be galloping in on your cavalry horse just as the presses rolled?” I asked.
“I read the message on your VDT.”
“Oh! I guess I was so excited when I saw it that I just got up and left the office without killing it.”
Mike nodded. “We were already looking for J.J., and Ruth told us that J.J. Jones knew enough about the newsroom computers to send such a message.”
“You were looking for J.J.? How did you know he was the one?”
“Pure routine. Boone kept checking on those employment records, and he found out that twenty years ago J.J. Jones was district manager for a mid-sized chain of newspapers. His territory would have included Michigan, even though he lived in Memphis.”
“That’s why you called and double-checked the name of the chain Arnie worked for!”
“Right. Boone called Jones’s ex-wife, Margaret Gordon Jones, and she told him she’d gotten a divorce because of his womanizing. And, yes, she’d suspected he’d been involved with your mother.”
“He wasn’t,” I said. “But he wanted to be. My mother threatened to tell his wife and his father-in-law that he’d made a pass at her.”
Mike nodded. “Her threat gave him a motive for killing your mother. Then he let your dad take the rap. But two years later, or so his wife says, their taxes were audited, and she found some credit-card records that showed he’d been in Holland, Michigan, the night your mother was killed—when he was supposed to be someplace else.”
Mike turned to Arnie. “I don’t think she realized he’d killed Nell’s mother.”
“She probably thought he and Sally were involved—just the way I thought Sally had a boyfriend,” Arnie said.
“She says she held him morally accountable for Sally Matthews’ death,” Mike said. “But she still thought Sally had been killed by Alan, by her own husband. She didn’t offer to tell the Michigan authorities the name of Sally’s boyfriend because she didn’t want to be mixed up in a scandal. She divorced J.J., shoved him out of his job with the newspaper chain, and went on. But eighteen years later, J.J. turned up on the ad staff of a paper that employed Martina Gilroy.”
“And Martina knew everybody’s business,” I said.
“Well, at least she knew the business of the former Mrs. J.J. Jones,” Mike said. “She’d graduated from the University of Missouri with her.”
“I remember! Martina and Dan Smith’s wife and Margaret Gordon Jones were college classmates.”
“So when Martina checked that Eastwick College yearbook and realized that the Alan Matthews of twenty years ago was the Arnie Ashe of today—Martina probably figured out that J.J. had known Alan Matthews, so she might have asked him to take a look at Arnie to confirm her identification.”
“But why would that bother J.J.?” Arnie asked. “He wasn’t the man who was wanted in Sally’s death.”
“His wife could easily have told Martina that he’d been involved with Sally Matthews,” Mike said. “Martina might not have realized that this made J.J. the missing suspect in Sally Matthews’s death. But you, Alan Matthews, always thought the man she’d met at the motel was the one who killed her. If you found out that J.J. had been in Holland at the right time—if you told Ronald Vanderkolk, and he looked into it—”
“It would still have been ‘small’ trouble for J.J.,” I said.
“He had to act fast,” Mike said. “First he tried to asphyxiate Martina—and to make it look like an accident. A guy who had spent his whole adult life around newspapers would have known enough about the mechanical department to do that. When that didn’t work, he stole the coveralls and shoes from a basement locker, kicked Martina down the stairs, and then beat her head against the concrete floor until she was dead.”
I shuddered. Both Mike and Arnie reached out toward me. Then Mike’s lips tightened, and he moved away. Arnie took my hand.
“If Martina’s death had been passed off as an accident, he would have been in the clear,” Mike said. “But Nell and I found the jacket with the footprint. So he hid the stolen shoes in Arnie’s desk to call attention to him. Later he hid the bloody coveralls at Bob Johnson’s house as another little smoke screen.”
“And I did have a motive,” Arnie said. “I did not want to go back to Michigan and face trial for a crime I didn’t commit. I was still convinced that the man Sally met at the motel had killed her, but I had no idea who he was.” He touched his head. “J.J. Jones never crossed my mind. Guess I couldn’t picture somebody named Jones registering at a motel as Smith.”
The doctor came in then and examined Arnie. He wanted to insist that Arnie stay overnight, but Arnie resisted. He didn’t think he’d been unconscious more than a few minutes. The doctor relented when Arnie pointed out that he’d only been at the Gazette three weeks and wasn’t yet covered by our health insurance. The doctor finally agreed to let him go home, if someone stayed with him.
The doctor turned to me. “You’re his daughter? You’ll have to wake him up every hour all night. Make sure his pupils are the same size. Make sure he’s conscious. Any problems? Call right away.”
Since Arnie had moved back into his own apartment, I said I’d sleep on his couch that night.
Mike drove Arnie home, while I went by my house to pick up a toothbrush and some clean underwear. By the time I got there, sometime after two a.m., Arnie was already in bed.
“I checked his pupils fifteen minutes ago,” Mike said. He reached for his jacket. “Try to get some sleep. And call me if anything happens.”
“Don’t go for a minute. I want to talk to you.”
“Sure.”
I took the jacket from his hand and laid it over the back of a chair. Then I took his hand and led him to Arnie’s couch. I kept hold of his hand after we sat down.
“What’s the problem?” Mike asked.
“Mike, you’re not jealous of Arnie, are you?”
He grinned and put his arm around me. “Maybe I am. Don’t tell me it’s stupid, because I already know that.”
“Arnie and I are just getting acquainted. I suppose I have been sort of obsessed with him lately—”
Mike laughed. “I’ve always told you I’m a spoiled only child,” he said. He leaned back into the corner of the couch, pulling me against him and resting his chin on the top of my head.
“You know, Nell, in addition to your intelligence, charm, beauty, and great body, you’ve had another attribute of the perfect girlfriend.”
“Golly! Something besides intelligence, charm, beauty, and a great body? I’m a paragon!”
“True.”
“Not true,” I said. “Well, what’s my other good quality?”
“In the past you’ve been an orphan.” Mike hugged me. “It wasn’t so great for you, but it had its advantages for me. You haven’t had a family! I mean, you didn’t have one you were close to. There was no problem about going to my mother’s house for Thanksgiving, no argument over our quiet Christmas at my house, no required visits to Grandma on Sunday afternoon, no interfering questions from a bossy mom. And you’ve been patient about putting up with my family—”
“There’s just your mother, really. And she has her own life.”
“—but now things are going to be different. You need to be obsessed with Arnie for a while, really get to know him.” He kissed the top of my head. “I’ll get used to that. I’ll even get used to him riding me about when we’re going to get married.”
“Has he done that?”
“You betcha. He’s looking out for his little girl’s interests. Just the way a daddy’s supposed to do.”
I had to gulp a few times. “Don’t let him push you into anything you don’t want to do.”
“I won’t. Besides, I promised you I wou
ldn’t do it for another nine days.”
“And you always keep your promises.”
“The important ones. Unless the circumstances change.”
“Have our circumstances changed?”
“Maybe. Maybe they’ve gotten even better.” He slid down on the couch, and so did I, so that we were lying side by side. He nuzzled. I caressed. We both snuggled.
“Nine days,” I said. “Nine days.”
Keep reading for a preview of the third mystery in the Nell Matthews series
THE SMOKING GUN
Available now from InterMix
“Michelangelo took four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. If he’d used a roller, he could have done it in a weekend.”
Most of us had brought paintbrushes and rollers to the workday at the new Grantham Women’s Shelter. Patsy Raymond had come equipped with a batch of painting and repair jokes, which she shoehorned into her usual stand-up routine, belting them out in her raspy voice.
Petite, peppy Patsy—as a bad writer had once described her in a feature story—was the executive director, founder, heart, soul, and dictator of the shelter. She was a cute little thing with a cute little haircut and a cute little figure and a cute little face.
Only her rough and raspy voice wasn’t cute. But that was part of Patsy’s persona, too. We all knew her ex-husband had gone to jail over the injuries that made Patsy sound like a frog that was getting over a bad cold.
Having a raspy voice didn’t keep Patsy quiet. She talked all the time. Since we were all painting and repairing, her jokes fit right in. Which was Patsy’s point, of course. Even a professionally cynical newspaper reporter like me could figure that out. A big part of Patsy’s job was to keep volunteers happy—and coming back and believing that their efforts were making a difference in the lives of battered women. Jokes were one of her tools.
The stand-up routine was also designed to remind those doubters among us that Patsy Raymond was a wonderful person and that we should continue praising her and giving her money and not listening to those few folks who didn’t think Patsy was absolutely perfect.
Patsy was in top form that day.
The most important man in my life, Mike Svenson, was in good form, too. He’d assumed the persona of a volunteer painter and carpenter, putting aside his normal duties as a Grantham police officer. Of course, cops are never really off duty; he’d stashed his pistol in my purse, just in case we should run across a robbery in progress or a kidnapping attempt. Wearing old jeans and a ragged T-shirt, red hair touched here and there with cream-colored paint, he was on his knees inside the office storage closet, installing a stout dead bolt and acting as Patsy’s straight man.
“Mike,” Patsy said, raspy as ever. “Did you hear about the old lady who called the electric company to complain that the linemen working at her house were using bad language?”
Mike swung the closet door almost shut, and when he answered, his voice was muffled.
“No, Patsy, I hadn’t heard about that particular old lady.”
“Well, the linemen’s supervisor went out to the house and told the two guys about the lady’s complaint. ‘Boss,’ one of them said. ‘We haven’t been using bad language! All that happened was Joe dropped a monkey wrench from the top of the pole, and it landed on my head. And I said, “Joe! You should be more careful!”’ ”
The half dozen of us laughed, and I scratched my nose with the back of my hand—one of my few paint free body parts. I looked around at the others. I knew I should be taking notes.
As a reporter for the Grantham Gazette, the only daily newspaper in our city of 350,000, I was assigned to cover non-profit organizations and other do-gooders. I couldn’t pretend that I was thrilled with the beat, which I’d been handed two weeks earlier. I’d always been a cop reporter, writing about robbery, rape, murder, and mayhem—topics with a lot of excitement built into them. It was going to be a struggle to make worthy causes interesting to the reader. But it’s unprofessional to refuse an assignment, so I was determined to do a good job. I was beginning with a feature about the community-wide effort to move the Grantham Women’s Shelter from three ramshackle old houses into a freshly remodeled building that had once housed a nursing home—from a high-crime, run-down neighborhood into a middle-class area. As research, and also to be with Mike, I’d taken part in the workday.
Patsy had spent her day entertaining volunteers, and at five-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, only a few were left. I didn’t know much about two of them. Lacy Balke was a tall and elegant blond whom I had picked out as a poster child for the Junior League, and Mary Baker was middle-aged and sweet. The third woman present wasn’t exactly a volunteer; Dawn Baumgarner was a meek and excessively neat woman who was on the shelter staff. I guessed her age at late twenties, but she dressed more conservatively than Mary Baker.
I knew more about the two guys still present. Mike was a patrolman and chief hostage negotiator for the Grantham P.D. and was the guy I planned to marry once I convinced him we could get engaged without a diamond ring exchanging hands. Boone Thompson was the youngest detective in the Grantham P.D. They were cochairs of the philanthropic committee of the Amalgamated Police Brotherhood, the local union for Grantham cops. Mike’s mom—one of Grantham’s biggest real estate operators—was on the board of the shelter and had helped the organization buy its new property. She’d told Mike and Boone the shelter could use a lot of manual labor of the type off-duty cops might be willing to donate, and the union members had okayed the project.
So Mike and Boone had come to be good examples. They’d overseen the herd of cops who’d been there earlier, painting the bedrooms, and they’d stayed on because they were nice guys and there was still stuff to do.
Boone had white, cottony hair and a ruddy complexion that gave him a perpetual blush. He was on a ladder, finishing the paint job on the top shelf of a wall of floor-to-ceiling shelving that would eventually hold office supplies. As I looked at him, he gave a final little touch to a corner. Then he beckoned to me.
“Hey, Nell, help me pack up this paint,” he said. “I’ve got to go home and get a shower before I pick up Martha.”
Boone handed me his paint can and brushes, then climbed off his ladder and folded it up.
“Boone, that looks great,” Patsy said. “You and Mike have really turned the work out. Believe me, I appreciate it a whole bunch.”
“Glad we could help,” Boone said. “But I’ve really got to run now.”
“Of course!” Patsy smiled sweetly. “We don’t want to cut into an eligible bachelor’s social life!”
Boone’s face turned slightly redder. He was dating one of my roommates, Martha. They didn’t seem too serious just yet, but he’d brought her to a benefit concert for the shelter two weeks earlier, and Patsy had found out she existed.
Now she beamed at Boone. Peppy Patsy apparently hadn’t let her own ugly marital experience sour her on romance.
Boone was wiping his hands on a rag. “Before I go,” he said, “I’ve got a question.”
“Anything!” Patsy said. “We have no secrets here!”
Except the financial statement, I thought. So far Patsy had cheerily refused to give me a detailed budget.
Boone pointed toward the door where Mike was working. “Patsy, what do you keep in your office that requires a closet with a steel door and a serious dead bolt?”
“Oh, that’s our weapons storage,” Patsy said airily.
“Are you preparing for an attack?” Boone said. Then he bit his lip and turned an even brighter shade of red.
I tried not to grin. The new shelter was a cheerful-looking place. Once you got by the high-security front door—intercom system, triple locks, bulletproof glass, and password—it was easy to forget that the shelter only existed to meet the threat of violence.
Boone was trying to recover from his faux pas. “I mean . . . I mean—what kind of weapons do you keep?”
Patsy ignored Boone’s embarrassment.
“Oh, lots of our clients pack,” she said.
Boone blinked. Then he nodded. “That makes sense. They wouldn’t be coming here if they didn’t feel threatened. Want to protect themselves.”
“Right. So one of our intake questions is about weapons. We can’t allow them to have knives or guns on their persons while they’re staying here, of course. We’ll use that closet to lock them up.”
“So that’s why it has all those little compartments?”
“Sure. It makes a client feel secure if she knows her pistol or can of Mace is right there, in a compartment with her name on it. And please don’t ask us to make sure all the pistols are licensed. That’s not our concern.”
Patsy moved over to the closet and looked inside. “Is it ready, Mike?”
“You try it,” Mike said.
He and Patsy tested the lock, and Mike gave it an extra shot of graphite. Boone left, followed closely by Mary and Lacy. Dawn dithered around until Patsy impatiently told her to go home. I went into the kitchen—equipped to prepare meals for thirty women and thirty children—and put my paintbrush to soak in the sink. I washed the paint off my hands, dug my purse out of a kitchen drawer, and combed my hair. Then I returned the purse to the drawer, took a black garbage bag back into the office, and began picking up trash.
Patsy had pulled a plastic tarp off a pile of furniture that had been shoved to the center of the room. She took a key from the pocket of her blue jeans and opened a drawer in a desk she’d uncovered.
“I already moved the weapons over from the old place,” she said. “They’re stashed in here.” She pulled out a cardboard box and began to unload pistols and knives. She laid them on top of the desk. Mike took a couple at a time and carried them into the closet, putting each in a compartment at the back.
“I hope none of these pistols are loaded,” he said.
“We keep any ammunition separate,” Patsy said. She pulled out a couple of boxes of shells and handed them to Mike.