03-Keeping Mum

by Alyse Carlson

  “He lives here?”

  The man stuttered for a minute. “Well, sometimes.”

  “Would you mind if we came in and had a look?” Jake asked.

  “Yeah, uh . . . I’d be happy to let you if it was my place and all. But it’s not. I’d have to ask Sully, and I don’t expect to hear from him for a couple days.”

  “So I need to get a warrant?”

  “Yeah, I guess I’d have to let you in then, right?”

  “That’s right. Then it’s the law.”

  The guy looked uncomfortable, but Jake pressed on.

  “Do you know this woman?” he held out a picture.

  “Ellie. Sure.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “Knew her since we were kids. She and Mike lived around the corner—she’s closer to my age, so we went to school together.”

  “She and Mike lived together as kids?”

  “Yeah, and Lenny, and their parents. Ellie’s the baby sister, isn’t she?”

  “That was my news I forgot to tell you,” Annie whispered. “I found some wedding pictures at Dad’s place.”

  “Sister? I thought her maiden name was Chamberlain,” Jake said, voicing Cam’s question.

  The man shrugged. “It’s his sister. I don’t know why the names are different.”

  Cam tried to assess how that changed the situation. Was it any better to have your brother kidnap your husband than your lover? Possibly, but the degree of difference was pretty minor in relation to the act of kidnapping somebody. It eliminated the likelihood they were having an affair, though.

  Jake left after that. Cam wasn’t sure if Rob followed, because Annie flatly refused to get back in her car.

  “Jake may not be able to go in there, but we can,” Annie said.

  “Annie, that’s breaking and entering!”

  “Not if we show up with a half case of beer pretending we want to party with Mike.”

  Cam stared at her. “Holy crap, Annie. Do you know how dangerous that is?”

  “If by dangerous, you mean brilliant!”

  Annie finally hopped in the car, but only to go as far as a corner market. She ran in, Cam trailing. They discussed beer and decided on something just a little exotic. They bought a half case of Molson and then got back in the car.

  “I can’t believe you want to do this.”

  “Tell Rob to come as backup—to knock in about twenty minutes and start a fight so we have a reason to leave.”

  “If I call him now, he’ll start the fight immediately.”

  “Okay, draft a text that you can send in about fifteen minutes.”

  “You’ve gotten more devious since you started dating a cop, you know?”

  “Well, yeah. I look at it as a challenge.”

  Cam rolled her eyes, but somehow had never been able to resist these risky ideas of Annie’s.

  Cam’s phone vibrated when they pulled back into the apartment complex, but she chose to silence it instead of telling Rob what they were doing just yet. She didn’t want to argue. An apology after the fact was always easier.

  Annie gave her an evil smile and led her up the stairs to the apartment. The mailboxes said Sullivan was in number eight, so they knocked.

  The man they’d seen earlier opened the door, and Annie, bold as brass, just walked in.

  “Sully around?”

  “No. Who are you?”

  “Fiona. This is Ursula. He said to stop by with some beer sometime, so we’re stopping.”

  “He’s not here.”

  Annie got really close to him. “Do you want a beer?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she set the half case on a coffee table, opened it, and sat back with a beer on the sofa, throwing her feet up next to the box.

  “Er . . . I guess. But I really can’t let you stay long.”

  “Why not? Is your girlfriend coming over?” Annie asked, sounding like she was actually interested.

  Cam thought she might as well join the act. Standing there gawking, she was only going to interfere with Annie’s plan, whatever that was. She strolled over, grabbed a beer, and then sat in a chair.

  “So do you live here?” she asked.

  “No. Sully’s out of town. He asked me to stay to watch the . . .” He looked at the beer longingly and seemed to give up his hesitation, so he grabbed one and sat.

  At that, the end of the guy’s sentence jumped in Cam’s lap. A big black cat so heavy it felt like it almost crushed her.

  “Well, hello.”

  “That’s Frank, and Joe is around here somewhere.”

  Annie snorted. “Who woulda thunk Sully was a Hardy Boys fan?”

  “I think he inherited them from a girlfriend, but he likes them. They’re good cats.”

  Frank had begun kneading Cam’s legs and she was glad she had on jeans instead of the linen slacks she’d worn earlier. When she scratched his ears he settled right in.

  “I should use the loo before I get buried in cat, too,” Annie said.

  “It’s on the end,” he said.

  “We didn’t catch your name,” Cam said.

  “Leo. And I think you’re the first Ursula I’ve ever met.”

  “There aren’t a lot of us,” Cam said, cursing Annie for giving her such an odd name. “Does Sully have any snacks or anything?” She was unsure what someone in this situation would really say. She’d never been in the habit of dropping in on people, let alone friends of friends.

  “I think there’s chips and salsa or something. You want some?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  When he left the room she spent the better part of a minute trying to figure out how to encourage the cat to jump off her without offending it too badly, but then she opened a couple of drawers. Finding nothing, she turned to the one bookshelf. There was a framed picture of three people who Cam now believed to be the Sullivan-Chamberlain siblings. They were at a marina in front of a fancy boat. It was a large sailboat and it didn’t look like their positioning was accidental. She pulled her phone out and snapped a picture of the picture and then sent the text she’d drafted for Rob.

  Annie finally came back. Cam was shocked Leo hadn’t noticed her missing so long.

  “Anything?” Annie mouthed.

  “Maybe,” Cam whispered, sitting down again and calling the cat back to her lap.

  Leo came back in with the chips and salsa and cracked himself a second beer.

  “So how do you know Sully?” Annie asked conversationally.

  “Same neighborhood. We’ve been friends for years. How do you know him?”

  “Betting party from the Kentucky Derby last year,” Annie said. Cam wondered how she came up with these things off the cuff, but this one backfired.

  “He went to the actual Derby.” Leo frowned.

  “Well, yeah. I did, too,” Annie said, not missing a beat, but Cam thought she had aroused suspicion. A betting party would not be confused with the actual Derby. He probably wouldn’t confront them, but she was very glad Rob was on the way. As soon as they left, Mike would be getting a call. She didn’t believe for a minute Leo didn’t know how to reach him—cats or no cats, Leo was here to keep an eye on things.

  Thankfully, much faster than expected, there was a pounding on the door.

  “Is she here?” Rob shouted.

  Cam squealed, half acting, but half to head off any name Rob might use.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to disappear without telling you!”

  “And you’re here doing what? Yukking it up with . . . who’re you?”

  “Leo Portnoy.”

  Leo stuck out his hand and Rob scowled. “I told you we had to be at the club at nine and look at you. It’ll take at least two hours to whip you into shape. And you,” he turned to Annie. “Xavier has been looking for you. He’s going to be ticked.”

  “Yeah, well Xavier should pay better attention if he doesn’t want me to go looking for a party,” Annie sassed.

 
Rob glared again, grabbed the beer, and tugged Cam’s arm, then gestured for Annie to leave ahead of them. Leo just looked stunned.

  • • •

  • • •

  They met back at Cam’s place, Cam and Annie gleeful, Rob alternating between angry and amused. Annie poked him and said “Xavier” several times, and that finally got him to lighten up. When he took the half case of beer, less about four, and put it in Cam’s refrigerator, he was chuckling.

  “Anybody need one?”

  “Yes,” Cam shouted.

  Annie nodded, but looked a little surprised that it had been Cam who had responded so quickly.

  When Rob joined them, Annie looked at him. “So why did they think that was Sully?”

  “That was his car—the one that wasn’t home that night, obviously. They spotted it parked at the airport and watched it.”

  “So he might actually be out of the country or something, and this Leo was just picking up his car?”

  Rob shrugged.

  “If I had just committed murder, I’d probably get out of town,” Cam said. “Maybe he really did off Derrick Windermere . . . Hey, wait a minute. Isn’t this the guy who is supposed to be Derrick’s son-in-law?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why doesn’t he live with his wife—in a nice house?”

  Rob shrugged and changed subjects. “You know, I tried to see Chad Phillips earlier today. See what he thought about all this.”

  “Tried?” Cam asked.

  “He has a nasty-tempered receptionist. Best I could manage was the front office, where I met this woman, Lorraine Patterson, and two guys.”

  “Do you think they’d talk?”

  “Doubt it.”

  Cam pulled her phone out of her pocket to sit and looked at the blinking screen.

  “Shoot!”

  “What?”

  “Shoot, shoot, shoot! Evangeline! We forgot to listen. Geez. I hope it went okay.”

  “Well maybe it’s still going on,” Annie said. “We weren’t gone that long.”

  Cam listened to the message, hoping that was true, then scrambled to her computer to tune in to the frequency of the bug. Rob and Annie followed her as she set up at her table and fiddled.

  “Let me do that.” Annie scooted Cam aside.

  Annie was much more proficient at these spy gadgets than she was. Cam thought she probably played games with Jake using them, but she was afraid to ask in case she got more information than she was hoping for.

  “There!” Annie said, as voices came over the computer.

  “. . . tied up. You know he’s completely helpless.”

  “That’s horrible. Wasn’t there anything you could do?” Cam recognized Evangeline’s voice. She sounded panicked.

  “You’ll suffer the same,” he said. Or that’s what Cam thought he said. There was a lot of loud crinkling, and Cam wondered if there were papers being shuffled next to the bug.

  She turned to look at Annie and Rob. “We have to help her!”

  “Where is she?” Rob asked.

  “Her message said at the office. We can be there in five minutes. Hurry!”

  • • •

  • • •

  The Jeep was the most conveniently parked, so they piled in and Rob drove as fast as was safe to the Patrick Henry. He parked in the loading zone, and Cam rushed to the stairs, unwilling to wait for the elevator. Rob was right on her heels with Annie bringing up the rear.

  When she got to the second floor and burst into the office, she realized she hadn’t come up with a reason to be there. It wasn’t that she wanted Evangeline to be in trouble, but she really hoped she didn’t need to explain.

  Evangeline and Melvin sat in the conference room, which was off to the left, and had a full view of the panicked trio.

  “Cam!” Evangeline said.

  “Sorry! Running late! I forgot the tickets in my office,” she said.

  “And it took three of you to fetch them?” Melvin observed.

  “Erm. We’re on foot, and I guess we didn’t think about it,” Cam said. “Evangeline, could I have a word?”

  Melvin frowned.

  Evangeline came out and Cam whispered, “Is everything okay?”

  “It was until you three burst in acting so strangely. He’s been perfectly reasonable.”

  “And you don’t need us to stay?”

  “I think that would be pretty awkward now, you running late and all.”

  • • •

  • • •

  “So now Melvin knows we’re investigating,” Rob said back at Cam’s place. “Jake’s going to be ticked.”

  “Not necessarily. I don’t think he did it,” Annie said.

  “Why not?”

  “I just don’t, but I’m going to go stay at my dad’s. With Elle gone, I can turn it over with a fine-tooth comb and I will find something. I’ll look for stuff on Melvin, on Sully, on Elle, on anybody else there might have been bad blood with.”

  “I’ll come, too,” Cam said.

  “No. You and Rob should work on the murder, because if it really was about that and Dad was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, then we need to solve the murder to find him.”

  Cam was worried about sending Annie off alone, but she agreed that if they followed both paths at once they should get there faster.

  CHAPTER 12

  “So who are all the murder suspects?” Rob asked when it was just the two of them.

  They had gone into Cam’s kitchen, Cam fetching each of them a beer. Rob sat with a notebook. Cam stood to pace while she thought.

  “Melvin Entwhistle, for reputation smearing. Chad Phillips, as a political rival of Jared. He might have resented Jared getting both men’s support.”

  “Vivian Macy has political reasons, too,” Rob said.

  “I don’t think so. Did you know she was my mom’s college roommate?”

  “She was? How did I not hear this before?”

  “I didn’t know about it until the fund-raiser, and things have been a little crazy since then. Dad thinks a lot of her, and he said she’s running for the State House, not Senate, so she wasn’t intending to run against Jared. She just wanted the lay of the land.”

  “What about Jared?” Rob asked.

  “Jared? Why?”

  “Maybe he’d just learned his number-one supporter was going to have some embarrassing skeletons come out dancing. Hey, wait. Let me see something.”

  Rob logged on to Cam’s computer and went to his email.

  “Remember the missing security tapes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, the one that wasn’t missing . . . my informant sent me a copy—not official, of course, but so we could watch,” Rob said.

  “Nice!”

  Rob opened the file and they began watching the garden reception in double time. A short way in, they slowed it down to get a closer look. The man who’d annoyed Senator Schulz had gotten a major lecture from Derrick Windermere and then stormed off.

  “Thanks to you and Annie,” Rob said, “we now know this guy, Mike Sullivan, is also Senator Schulz’s brother-in-law. He’s connected to both victims.”

  “Do we think he has a motivation to kill Derrick?”

  Rob scratched his head. “Well, there’s no shortage of in-law jokes. But why does Mike have an apartment with some guy staying at it when he should also have a house with Windermere’s daughter?”

  “Maybe things are strained at home? Let’s see if there’s anyone else.”

  They watched the rest of the tape and saw one more argument between Derrick Windermere and a man they didn’t know, a man who, strangely, at the end of the tape was the same man they saw borrow Joel Jaimeson’s phone. Cam didn’t know who he was, but his hat was nautical, which reminded her of another detail.

  “The boat!”

  Rob looked at her like she’d grown a second head.

  “When I was thinking on my feet, wandering around Mike’s place, there was a picture of M
ike, Elle, and what’s-his-face—the cop who’s their brother. It was in front of a boat.”

  “And a boat . . . this time of year might be very private,” Rob said.

  Cam grinned. “We can hope.”

  Cam plugged in the cable between her phone and computer and transferred the picture over so they could enlarge it. It was too bad it hadn’t been taken with one of Annie’s good cameras—the enlarged picture was grainy, but Rob had some photo manipulation skills. Reporters occasionally had to work with what they had rather than what they wanted, so he knew how to select smaller pieces of the picture and sharpen them into focus.

  The sailboat was white, as were ninety-nine percent of all sailboats, but it had royal blue piping in a double line up the sides, and the rim around the top was the same blue. Most telling, though, was the name written in a nice cursive on the side. Coraline.

  “Are you sure that shouldn’t be Caroline?” Rob asked when Cam said it.

  “I don’t think so; look at the ‘a’s. But I’ve heard the name.”

  “Probably not that common on boats,” Rob grinned.

  “No. Especially when we have a pretty good idea who might own it. What we need to figure out is where they moor it.”

  “This would be a lot faster if we brought Jake on board. He has access to more search routes than we do.”

  “Try yours first. Then we will bring him in. I’d just rather not have this battle until we have something bigger to dangle as success.”

  “He said he wanted our help,” Rob argued.

  “Do you really think that includes going inside Sully’s apartment?”

  Rob grinned again. “Probably not. Why do you follow her impulses?”

  “Can you resist her ideas, hotshot?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Right. Add a twenty-year friendship on top of that.”

  He shook his head, but Cam knew he understood the truth of it. Annie was a force of nature when she wanted to do something.

  Rob fiddled on the computer for a while and started throwing out factual nuggets. Apparently, the Sullivan-Chamberlain family were boating enthusiasts with a few different boats, and nothing unofficial noted which one was kept where.

  “If they have a couple of boats, shouldn’t we check them all?” Cam asked.

  “We should check the ones registered to Mike and Elle.”