“You have a very mature way of looking at it.”
She smiled a little. “Well, at my age, I better be mature. Why were you going to call me? To apologize? Not necessary.”
“Not that. Well . . . that, but also . . .” He seemed embarrassed. “Look. Angel. Neither one of us has forgotten that little party we had, all those years ago.”
Her grin was probably too big. “Really? How can you forget what you never remembered? I was pretty wasted that night.”
“As I recall of those days? You mostly just got high. Weed, beer. I don’t remember you doing pills or lines or anything.”
“Well . . . you’re right. I didn’t. Hardly ever, anyway.”
He shrugged a shoulder and opened a hand. “I don’t know whether you were roofied that night or were just high or in the bag or, hell, just into it. But we both know it got out of hand. I mean, I didn’t participate!”
“You had other tastes, Danny.”
“You knew that, even then?”
Her shrug was tiny. “A girl knows. Nothing more frustrating than a beautiful man who has zero interest in you.”
They both laughed some. Not a lot. Some.
“You’re doing well,” he said.
“I’m doing fine. A daughter and a son, grown and happy and gone. See them now and then. No grandkids yet.”
“That’ll come. Has there been anyone since your husband died?”
“No. Not really.”
“Been a while since he passed, hasn’t it?”
“Five years.”
“But his business is alive and well.”
“Yes it is.”
“Flourishing, I understand.”
“You could say that.” She grinned, definitely too big. “I’m not exactly rolling in it, but, yeah . . . we’re doing fine. Business is fine.”
He rolled his eyes. “I wish I could say the same.”
“Oh?” She suspected Danny’s pop culture take on antiques wasn’t working in a town whose nostalgia had more to do with General Grant than Paul McCartney.
“My online business is building,” he said. “Sell a lot of vinyl that way. I think if I could invest in that more, buy private collections and increase my stock, I could really get this thing going.”
“Well, I wish you the best. This is outside my area of expertise, of course.”
“I understand that.” He sat forward, held her eyes with his. “But I know what I’m doing. See, I’m not asking for a handout. This isn’t blackmail.”
The corner had been turned.
“What,” she asked, “isn’t blackmail?”
He leaned back. Sighed. “I need an influx of cash. As I say, to buy more collectible stock. To keep this store going and maybe vary my merchandise here, to make it more palatable to the Galena tourist market.” His eyes sought hers again. “You could be my silent partner.”
“And you’d be mine? Staying silent about what exactly?”
Now the eyes looked away. “I hate to even get into it.”
“Force yourself.”
He gulped more coffee. Then: “I saw you that night.”
“What night? Saw what?”
“Arnolds Park.” He raised his palms as if in surrender. “Hey, I didn’t see anything. Nothing that happened inside that cottage. But I was staying at the West Wind, too. I saw you and Rick in what must have been your car. You pulled around and through the parking lot and over to his cottage.”
Queen was doing “Body Language” up at the front of the shop.
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I was there awhile, yes. Didn’t stay the night.”
He wasn’t looking at her. “I don’t know what you did. I don’t want to know. My reaction at the time was a weird mix . . . disgust, melancholy—it made me sad and a little sick that, after everything that went down, back then? You were willing to be with him again. I don’t necessarily mean ‘be’ in the sexual sense, but even just to . . . hang out with that lout again. Hell, at the induction concert, I didn’t even like being onstage with him!”
“I can see that.”
He leaned back in his chair, kept his voice low. “But you were with him that night. And you didn’t come forward. So I’m thinking that maybe that might not’ve been a heart attack. That maybe you . . . did something to him.”
“Are you accusing me?”
“No! Well . . . sort of. The thing you have to understand is . . . I don’t care. I don’t care what you did or didn’t do to that creep. Somehow Rick finally got what he deserved and I’m fine with that. I don’t know if you hated him or not, but I did. If you were responsible for his death, I don’t care. Hell, I applaud you. You need to believe that.”
She thought about that. Should she keep denying it? Why?
So she said, “All right. But are you saying you need money from me, not to care? How much?”
His head went to one side, as if this kind of talk was mildly painful or distasteful, if necessary. “We can discuss that. And if you don’t want to invest—and you really should, we can do very well in the vintage vinyl field—we could make it a loan. A no-interest loan, but a loan.”
She remained calm. “Okay. All right. We can discuss that. But just because I didn’t come forward after Rick’s heart attack, and let the world know I was with him, in the run-up to it? That doesn’t mean I killed him.”
“That’s right, it doesn’t.” He sat forward again. “But your reputation would be at risk, even so.” He frowned, shook his head, not angry—frustrated. Embarrassed. “Please don’t put me in this position. Let’s not make this dirty, or sleazy.”
But blackmail always was both of those things, wasn’t it?
“Let’s not,” she agreed. “But there’s something you should know.”
“Which is?”
She scooched forward. “Last night, you said you were running camera, at that ancient . . . party. Did you know Rick had the tape with him and was planning to show it to the guys? For old times and laughs?”
He shook his head firmly. “No. I didn’t. Rick didn’t invite me, if he really invited anybody. Maybe it was just him being an asshole and trying to make you feel bad.”
“Maybe. But he had the tape, all right. And he gave it to me, when I asked for it.”
Danny said nothing, but his eyes told the story: he knew Rick would not have handed over that tape out of the goodness of his heart. Either she had paid him blackmail for it, or she really was responsible for Rick’s death and had then searched the cottage for it and found it.
Which she had.
“As you might guess,” she said, cool, confident, “I destroyed that tape.”
Which she also had.
He was looking at her, his eyes practically screaming, You killed him, then destroyed it, you mean!
But Danny only said, “I don’t blame you. Whatever Rick got, he deserved. Whatever you did, or didn’t do, I’m fine with. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“There’s something you should know, though.”
“What?”
“I ran camera, like I said. And I have it.”
“Have what?”
“The master tape.”
She said nothing. Sipped her coffee, which was still warm.
“Listen,” he said, “it’s yours.”
“If I invest.”
“Let’s not look at it that way. It’s an opportunity for you. Take the damn thing. There are no copies. You are on the tape, but I shot the stupid thing! In today’s climate, I’d be seen as worse than you. And that’s how it should be.”
She sighed. “Do you have anything you can show me to demonstrate the kind of money you’re getting in your online business? How much all this vinyl is going for? What you’re realizing?”
He’d perked up at that. “Certainly. Would you like to see it? We can go up front.”
She frowned, concern, not anger. “If we’re silent partners, maybe we shouldn’t be seen through your front window going through th
e books.”
“Good point,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
He went off, moving quickly, perhaps too quickly, because she heard him groan once. Something was hurting him. A health problem of some kind. It would not be bothering him for long.
She got the tiny glassine envelope from her purse and poured the granules of succinylcholine into his half-drunk coffee. She stirred it in with her finger, which she dried off with a tissue, also from her purse.
He returned with a ledger in his hands and rested it on the table. She almost smiled—anyone younger would have brought a laptop or tablet; but Danny lived in yesterday. The book took up considerable space as he spread it open and ran his finger down the figures and began explaining things to her. She pretended to listen. He did this for about a minute before pausing to gulp his coffee.
He returned to his explanation of the ledger, but within a minute or so, the drug began taking effect. His head came up and he looked at her, alarmed, and then he began to twitch all over, still seated while he did the same pre-death dance Rick had, a jerky thing any punk rocker back in the day might have envied. It sent him tumbling onto the floor, landing on his back, arms outstretched as if he wanted a hug, legs still in the knees-in-the-air position they’d been in while he was sitting down.
The dance didn’t last long, though, as full muscular paralysis quickly set in, leaving Danny unable to speak or even blink or, more to the point, breathe. But he remained wide awake, unable to do anything but feel himself suffocate.
She didn’t care to watch this, so she gathered the coffee cups and took them into the storeroom beyond the pop culture area. The restroom was back here and she’d used it on a prior trip, so she knew what to expect. Into the sink she emptied the coffee cups, then washed them out. On the other side of the storeroom, a door was open on a stairwell to the apartment above, and she went up the steps to see if the door was unlocked. It was, which was nice, because that meant she didn’t have to go fishing in his pockets or rummaging around elsewhere for a key.
Then she returned to her purse, which she’d left on the chair, and dug out the cotton garden gloves she’d brought along. She snugged them on and went about the place, rubbing any surfaces she’d touched, though she’d already been careful not to go throwing fingerprints around.
Throughout all this, Danny—on his back, like an upended beetle (near a poster of Hard Day’s Night, as it happened)—remained frozen, knees-up-Mother-Brown and arms outstretched and still wanting that hug. She was finishing her cleanup task when he relaxed, his muscular paralysis over, meaning he was finally dead (it had taken maybe five minutes) and his corpse looked natural now, for a corpse, knees down, arms sprawled.
She was sorry. A little sorry, anyway. Danny wasn’t a bad person, like Rick. But he was flawed, certainly. If he hadn’t tried to blackmail her—and, let’s face it, that was no business opportunity, that was no “loan,” but sheer unadulterated blackmail—he might be alive now.
From her purse she took the coil of nylon rope. This she rested on the table. She pulled one of the chairs over, near where Danny stared up at her, and climbed onto the seat and, with her gloved hands, pushed a ceiling tile aside to get access to the beamed ceiling.
What came next was an effort. Thank God she’d taken her back-pain meds beforehand. She got him up off the floor and sat him in the chair, under the dangling rope. This was awkward, and though he was skinny, he was heavy enough for this to be like dealing with a big bag of sand. She had already formed a noose at home, and this she looped around his neck. With both hands, she yanked on the rope, levering him up and off the chair, which she nudged aside. He was well off the ground when she got back up on the chair and secured the rope over the beam, so that the rope would hold him there, sufficiently off the ground. It was hard, exhausting, even painful work, but it had to be done. She climbed down and kicked the chair over, as if Danny had done that himself.
Hands on her hips, she looked up at him, appraising her work. She no longer felt bad about it. The effort had been grueling enough to override that and, anyway, he’d manned the camera, hadn’t he?
She went upstairs into his apartment, to look for the master tape.
EIGHT
When the call came in, Krista and her father were still at lunch at Vinny Vanucchi’s in the cozy dining room upstairs with its traditional red-and-white tablecloths and vintage photos of long-gone Italianos. Half of the handful of tables were taken up and they got a few glances from the other diners. With her in uniform and her dad in his Dubuque PD sweatshirt and jeans, they looked like two very different cops, though really they had a lot in common.
Right now they were sharing a big bowl of salad and some garlic bread, ordering no pasta to follow, Krista working to stay trim (with the restaurant’s trademark garlic bread the only splurge), Pop already having had a big meal today—breakfast, after foolhardily braving all those steps down Quality Hill.
She clicked off her phone and looked across at her father, who was finishing up a plate of the delicious salad with its tart Italian dressing and generous fresh Parmesan.
“That was Booker,” she said. “He’s already headed over there.”
“Where?”
She answered with another question. “What frame of mind was Dan Davies in?”
He had told her briefly and in passing about trying unsuccessfully to get the original Pistons rhythm guitarist not to step down from the coming reunion tour.
Pop frowned, a bite of salad on his fork paused in midair. “A little down, I’d say. Why do you ask?”
“You must not have cheered him up any,” she said. “He’s killed himself.”
In her unmarked dark blue Toyota, making the short trip to Antiques A Go Go, she got a more detailed recap of the conversation between her father and Dan Davies.
“This recent breakup with Lee Jeffries,” she said. “How depressed over that did Dan seem?”
“It was an ugly breakup,” he said.
“Dan despondent?”
“Not that I picked up on. Maybe I misread him. He didn’t seem like the gun-owner type, but you never know.”
“Didn’t shoot himself, Pop.”
“Not pills, surely. Hardly time for that since I saw him.” His eyes were on his daughter. “What, did he hang himself?”
“You’re a detective.”
“Sometimes I wish I weren’t.”
Neither mentioned that Keith Larson was a retired detective, and that Krista could have dropped him off at home before going to the scene. But that never occurred to either Larson, nor did having her non-departmental employee father wait in the car while his daughter checked out the situation.
Her father asked, “Any note?”
“Not that’s been found.”
They parked in front of the post office, put on latex gloves taken from a glove compartment that had finally earned its name, and headed together across the street. They had no traffic to wade through. The tourists would come to Galena in full force soon, but just a trickle so far.
One of her people, Officer Wendell Clemson—mustached, a onetime Galena High football tackle, today a nicely imposing presence—stood outside by the door. A Ford Explorer, white with blue trim and GALENA POLICE markings, was pulled up sideways nearby, blocking several angled parking places.
Clemson, a thumb in his duty belt, said, “Chief” and, as they approached, added, “Mr. Larson,” with a nod.
Since the Class Reunion Murders, as everyone around here now referred to them, and her father’s role in that case, nobody was surprised to see him around. And he did drop by Krista’s office fairly frequently, often for them to have lunch together as they had today. But, really, her dad hadn’t been involved in any Galena PD business since then.
Krista planted herself before her officer and she didn’t have to ask a question—Clemson went right into it.
“Twenty minutes ago a local called this in,” he said, and gave Krista the name of the woman, who she w
as familiar with—a travel agent in town.
Clemson went on: “She phoned from her car. Pretty spooked by what she saw.”
Krista said, “Which was?”
“Well,” Clemson said, “she had a box of old record albums in her trunk to show to Davies. He buys old records. Bought. She had an appointment with him. When she got over here, with her box of albums in her arms, the place was locked up, ‘Closed’ sign in the door. First reaction was irritation, but then when she bent down and looked in the window, she could see him in there. The shop guy. Davies.”
Krista said, “Saw him.”
“Yeah. Not much of a look, ’cause he’s way at the rear of the store. But enough to get the idea, and really throw her for a loop. She just hauled those old records back to her car and left.”
“You’ve called for an ambulance?”
The officer shook his head. “No rush. He’s past needing a siren.”
That was too flip for her taste, but Krista knew cops were prone to gallows humor, the term at once appropriate and inappropriate here.
Clemson was saying, “Haven’t even cut him down yet. East Dubuque’s been called, of course.”
The Jo Daviess County Coroner’s Office was in nearby East Dubuque, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River bridge from Dubuque, Iowa.
She asked, “Any ETA on the coroner?”
Clemson said, “Should be here within the hour, they say. Booker’s in there taking pictures.”
She nodded. “We’ll join him.”
“Yes, Chief.”
Clemson opened the door for them—it had been forced open, so that didn’t take much doing—and Krista led the way down the long central aisle through the funky antiques, her father following.
Arms and legs slack, Danny Davies in his black Cyndi Lauper T-shirt and jeans was hanging by the neck from a nylon rope looped and secured around a beam that had been exposed by pushing a ceiling tile up and over and out of the way. A hardwood chair was on its side, apparently kicked aside by the suicide. He was only about three feet off the floor.
Booker, in a black suit and looking appropriately like a casual undertaker—his blue-and-white-striped tie loose around his neck, a noose that would do no damage—was pausing between pictures, leaning against the back-to-back bins of old LPs.
Girl Can't Help It: A Thriller (Krista Larson Book 2) Page 8