False Premises

by Leslie Caine

  “But I already tried that. Shot a sample commercial while wearing a dark suit. I looked like a funeral director.”

  The mention of the word funeral gave me a pang for Laura’s sake, but the men’s conversation continued without a hitch. Robert sighed and shook his head at Sullivan and me. “Kind of makes you wonder what he’s paying me all this hard-earned money for, doesn’t it?”

  “Hey,” Henry said. “On the bright side, I haven’t lost even one employee in the last two months! And a couple days ago, I met the perfect gal, exactly the type you’ve been nagging me to go out with.”

  “Fabulous,” Robert replied. “Fabulous! So, in other words, you’ve finally stopped robbing the cradle?”

  Henry grinned and sat up straight, giving his dustcover hair a reassuring pat. “This gal’s my age . . . in other words, old enough to refuse to say how old she is. But I hear she had a birthday recently, and I do know she’s at least sixty. We’ve got a lot in common, too. We’re both local celebrities. Met her at the TV station where I was shooting my last commercial. She gave me her number, and we’re going out Saturday.”

  I dug my fingers into the arms of my chair. Just the night before last, Audrey had mentioned that she’d agreed to go on a date next Saturday “with an obnoxious man, during a weak moment.” I forced a smile and asked, “You’re not talking about Audrey Munroe, are you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.” Henry beamed at me. “How’d you know that?”

  “I rent a room from her, and she mentioned she was going out with someone new this Saturday.”

  “Well, now. How do you like that!” He reached over and patted my knee. My skin instantly prickled. “So you’re my designer and my inside edge with my new lady. I’ll have to be sure and stay on your good side, darlin’.”

  I fought back a smile at the thought of how swiftly Audrey would pound this joker into the turf if she ever heard him call her his lady . “Yes, you will.” Not that he’d ever been on my good side.

  “What other changes have you made to Erin’s orders, Henry?” Robert asked.

  Henry held up his palms. “That’s it. Just the one sofa.”

  There was a plastic quality to Henry’s facial expression that made me nervous, but if Robert noticed, he didn’t reveal it. “Good, good,” he said. “In that case, we’re all set. Though, remember, you will ultimately be picking up the tab for Erin’s having to increase her fee.” He grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “Erin, I’ll be checking on your progress in Henry’s home periodically.” Grinning, he ran his eyes over Sullivan. “And, Steve, welcome to the team!”

  “We’ll need to double check Henry’s new furniture that’s been delivered to my storage unit,” I said to Sullivan as we left the hotel parking lot.

  “Yeah. He might have switched around half your orders. I don’t trust that dime-store cowboy as far as a petting-park pony could throw him.”

  I chuckled at the image. “They’re delivering the sectional tomorrow. Let’s stop at U-Store now. Even if I trusted Henry, which I don’t, I need to make sure there’s no smoke damage. My unit’s just three doors away from Laura’s . . . too close for comfort.” I shuddered.

  Sullivan was silent. I knew he was even less fond than I was of the concept of going back to the scene of the recent, harrowing crime, but Henry’s furniture needed to be examined. Sullivan muttered, “I don’t trust Robert Pembrook any farther than that pony could throw him, either.”

  “You don’t? I like the guy immensely!”

  “Granted, he’s infinitely more likable than Henry, but come on, Gilbert. He’s a convicted criminal, and—”

  “Which he’s already paid his debt to society for.”

  “And he used to work with Evan Cambridge.”

  “You were partners with Evan!”

  “Until the bastard ripped me off. Yet he didn’t rip off his ex-con former boss. What does that tell you?”

  “That Evan knew better than to cross someone who’d done jail time,” I fired back.

  “Or that Pembrook taught Evan everything he knew that landed him in jail in the first place.”

  I sighed, deeply annoyed. If only Sullivan could keep quiet, he’d be wonderful eye candy, but he insisted on opening his mouth and ruining the effect every time. “Robert came right out and told his client that he’d once been convicted of a white-collar crime. He isn’t putting up any false fronts . . . quite the contrary. And if the government is willing to consider that his debt has been paid in full, it seems to me that we should be, too.”

  Sullivan said nothing, so I glanced over at him. His brow was deeply furrowed, and I was sorely tempted to tell him that if he didn’t cut out all that frowning, his face was going to get stuck that way. He must have felt my eyes on him, because he said, “Two days ago, I might have agreed with you, Gilbert. Not now.” He didn’t have to explain that two days ago he hadn’t known that Laura Smith was back in Crestview.

  A horrid pang of guilt hit me. That one piece of information—the news that Laura had returned to town— could have been the catalyst to Laura’s murder.

  Our path to my storage unit took us past Laura’s. The outer walls were blackened but still standing. It was cordoned off, but otherwise the place had its usual austere, giant-building-blocks appearance. The odor of charred wood hung in the air.

  I started to unlock the door to my unit. Something immediately felt wrong with the lock. I felt a surge of panic as the knob moved freely before the key had fully clicked into place. “Oh, damn it! It’s unlocked!” I cried to Sullivan. “I’m supposed to have the only key and I definitely locked it!” Terrified that there was going to be another dead body inside, I flung open the door and made a cursory inspection from the doorway. The contents seemed to be the same as when I’d last left it, the unit still about two-thirds full. “Things could have been stolen. We’ll have to check off every item.”

  Sullivan started to brush past me to go inside, but I grabbed his jacket. “Wait. There could be evidence in here, fingerprints or something.” Then I sighed. “Never mind. Too many people have been in here for fingerprints to matter.”

  “Could anyone else have the key?”

  “Nobody but the U-Store manager. And our phantom security guards. Damn it all! If anything’s missing, I’m going to sue these idiots for all they’re worth!”

  “Which probably isn’t much,” Steve pointed out.

  I dialed the U-Store central office on my cell phone, and they sent out a security guard and a manager in no time. Both were unable to say how or when someone had managed to break into my rented space, but they did give me plenty of obvious advice about making sure nothing was missing and reporting anything that was.

  Glowering at the U-Store personnel as they left, Steve said to me, “I’m never using this place again. The security here is either inept or corrupt.”

  “Or both,” I grumbled, and reached for my cell phone again. “I’m going to call our little cowboy on his cell phone to discuss this. And maybe play a hunch.”

  Henry answered, “Howdy, y’all. Hammerin’ Hank speaking.”

  “This is Erin. I’m at the storage unit I rented to house your furniture, and I discovered that someone other than me has a key to the place.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. There were no signs of a break-in, yet the door was left unlocked. Did you pay off a U-Store employee to slip you a duplicate key, Henry?”

  There was a pause. In his Henry-from-Delaware voice, he replied, “Technically, you realize, it’s my storage unit. I’m the one picking up the tab. And everything inside it is mine.”

  “True, and you’ll be very lucky if everything inside it is still here, since you forgot to lock the place!”

  “Hey, now hold your horses, honey. It must have been one of my employees who did that. I always keep doors locked. You can’t trust anybody anymore.”

  “No, you can’t,” I snarled. “But why on earth would you give an employee access to a st
orage unit containing your home furniture?”

  “Ah. Well, I had some furniture to move around in there. See, I needed to wait till after our meeting with Pembrook to tell you this, but I’ve made a few more adjustments to your design. No sense in my going head-to-head with a convict to get my own house the way I like it, you know? And you’re so talented and creative, I’m sure you can fluff things over just fine.”

  Enraged, I reached for my confidence-and-optimism mantra and a quick count to ten. I was interrupted by a familiar voice from the doorway, saying, “Hey, guys.”

  I whirled around. It was John, looking handsome as always, but with a somewhat sheepish expression on his face. To Henry, I snapped, “I’ll do my best. I’ve got to go. Bye,” and hung up. “John,” I said. “Hi. How did you know we were here?”

  “I didn’t. I’m setting up a couple of demo homes and have space rented here myself.”

  He seemed to sense that I didn’t want him to greet me with a kiss, and to my relief, he hung back. “The police contacted me this morning, and I heard about Laura . . . and the fire. I was checking my furniture for smoke damage . . . happened to spot your van as I was about to head home.”

  John gave Steve a darting glance, then walked over to me, put his arm around me, and said quietly, “I’m so sorry about Laura. She had some severe shortcomings, but she sure didn’t deserve this.”

  Not wanting to discuss his relationship with Laura, I merely nodded and asked, “Is all your stuff okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks. Is that what you’re doing now, too? Checking for smoke damage?”

  “Running inventory,” Steve quickly interjected. “Haven’t had a chance to start yet, though.” He raised his eyebrow and gave me a look. Was he trying to signal me that he was considering John a possible suspect? No way! If he was going to consider his good friend a suspect, Sullivan was truly losing all perspective.

  “Was your storage unit properly locked when you got here?” I asked John.

  “Yeah. Why? Wasn’t yours?”

  “No. Someone left the place unlocked.”

  “Jeez.” He took a moment to let the news sink in. “Let me help you take inventory. Where are your shipping lists?”

  I retrieved one set of copies from the inside of the door, where I’d taped the plastic envelope for safekeeping, handed him a sheet, gave Sullivan a second, and kept the last one for myself.

  A moment later, John shined the beam of his pocket flashlight through a hole in the box made from punchouts for handles and said, “Hmm.” He opened the box. “What line of work is this client of yours in?” he asked me. “Leading African safaris?”

  I stared at the ottoman in disbelief. The leopard-skin upholstery appeared to have been made of real fur. “That’s got to be a mistake.”

  “You think the factory screwed this up?” Sullivan peered into a tall, thin box. “Huh. An African mask. Henry, or some lackey of his, must have swapped in all this circa-George-of-the-Jungle merchandise, then left the door unlocked.”

  “You’ve got to wonder why he’d bother,” John said, peering into more boxes. “Seems so childish. Did he honestly think you’d never notice that the furniture wasn’t what you ordered?”

  “Beats me. I never know what’s going on underneath that stupid cowboy hat of his.”

  Sullivan groaned. “A chartreuse velour beanbag!” he cried. “Henry must be channeling Elvis Presley.”

  “Huh. This is odd,” John said.

  “What is?” I asked, unable to see him behind a wall of furniture boxes.

  “You’ve got some junky little side table back here. It’s out of its packaging and all dinged up.”

  Steve and I exchanged puzzled glances and wove our way over to John. “I’ve never seen that table before.”

  “Could this be one of Laura’s inexpensive reproductions, maybe?” Steve suggested.

  “It’s possible, I guess. But I can’t think of any antiques I selected for her that looked anything like that piece. Her reproductions were duplicates of my purchases.”

  John was tugging on the side table’s knob. “It’s got a fake drawer front. Your basic seven dollars of materials with your seventy-dollar discount-store price tag. This knob’s loose. That’s weird. A slot’s been sawed into the wood, to either side of the knob.”

  He gave the knob a quarter turn and tugged on it again. “Holy shit!” he cried. I watched in stunned silence as he removed a long, narrow blade from the interior of the table.

  Chapter 10

  Twenty minutes later, we were showing John’s gruesome discovery to a pair of Northridge policemen—a young Hispanic who was handsome enough to be a TV cop and his pickle-barrel-shaped partner. Gripping the knife at the corner of the plastic bag in which he’d put it, the stout officer held it up to the light. “There’s blood on it,” he said to the Adonis. “See that?”

  Adonis nodded and gazed in our direction; due to the cramped quarters, John, Steve, and I were huddled just inside the door. “We’ll have to fingerprint all three of you to eliminate your prints for the lab’s tests.”

  “I was the only one who touched the table or the knife,” John said.

  I explained, “Steve and I were going through the boxes. We didn’t even notice the table till John called us over to look at it.”

  “So your prints will be on the table and the handle of the knife?” the barrel-like officer asked John.

  He frowned and replied, “Maybe the blade, too.”

  “They wouldn’t be on the blade,” Sullivan told him. “You never touched that.”

  A corner of John’s lips twitched, and he replied, “I think I might have touched it as I was setting it down, right while you were calling the police.”

  Sullivan scowled and gave me a worried glance. Annoyed, I pretended not to notice. No way was I going to let Sullivan’s paranoia rub off on me! If John’s fingerprints were on the blade, it happened as he set the knife down prior to the police arriving. End of story.

  “What about the other contents of this shed?” the handsome cop asked me. “Can you give me a list of everyone who’s been in this space since you first rented it?”

  I shook my head. “That’d be nearly impossible. The merchandise has been shipped from more than six places, with various delivery personnel each time. We also had a couple of U-Store employees in here when we found the place unlocked.”

  “There’s no sense dusting the storage room for prints, then,” Adonis told his partner. “We’d be better off taking the table to the lab. We can fit it into the backseat, if not the trunk.” He turned his attention to me. “You got any objections to our taking the table?”

  “None. Like I said, the side table isn’t mine or my client’s. It shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”

  “I’d better talk to your client, too,” the second officer said.

  I gave him Henry’s address and phone number, then went into the story of how he’d swapped out my original purchases. After I’d spoken my piece, the rotund officer asked John and Sullivan if they had anything to add.

  “Either the door was left unlocked by mistake by Erin’s client, or the lock was picked,” Sullivan said, stating the obvious. “I think Laura’s killer stashed the table here to get rid of the evidence.”

  “Maybe he chose my storage area out of coincidence,” I added, hoping to convince myself that was the case.

  “What’s strange is that there’re other units closer to Laura’s than yours,” John remarked. He looked at the officers. “Why bother to carry the table that much farther? Unless he figured that’d make it less likely the murder weapon would be found right away.” He turned his attention to Sullivan, who had his omnipresent scowl on his face. “But why move the table at all? If you set the place on fire, you’d want to burn up the weapon, too, not carry it some fifty yards and stash it someplace.”

  Another indication that the killer hadn’t been the one to set the fire, but, unlike John or Sullivan, I didn’t want to play co
p in front of the real thing. It also occurred to me that, in the few minutes that Sullivan and I had lost sight of his car, Dave Holland would not have had the time to kill Laura, set the fire, return the knife to its camouflage as a harmless table knob, break into a storage unit a short distance away, stash the table toward the back of that unit, then speed away in his car—in the darkness, his headlights off.

  As we stepped outside, John said, “I’ve got to get back to work in Crestview, if that’s all right, Officers.”

  The handsome officer said, “You can come down to the station now or later today, so we can get those fingerprints. It’ll just take a minute.”

  John grimaced, looked at his watch, then said, “I’d better follow your patrol car and get this over with now. I don’t even know where your station is.” He smiled at me, took both my hands, gave them a gentle squeeze, and, searching my eyes, said quietly, “I’ll call you tonight.”

  I returned his smile and nodded, but saw Sullivan watching us, looking deeply concerned. I wanted to smack him. Sullivan had no right to rain on my relationships!

  After fifteen or twenty minutes of taking inventory in, essentially, dead silence, Sullivan said, “You gotta wonder what your beau was thinking. Why speculate to the cops? It was like Norton was trying to get them to award him his Junior Detective Decoder Ring. Or was covering up for himself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? You’re the one who announced that the killer broke into my space and hid that table here. John was just getting his two cents in.”

  Sullivan’s frown deepened. His jaw was clenched so tight, his teeth must be ready to crack.

  I persisted. “And what do you mean that John may be ‘covering up for himself’?”

  He didn’t look up from his work. “John’s a good buddy. We like to hang out every so often . . . shoot some pool, that kind of thing. But we’re not so close that I could predict how he’d react if he felt his neck was on the line . . . just don’t know him well enough to say.” He met my gaze for a moment, then went back to the inventory sheet. “And all I’m saying is, you don’t know him well enough, either, Gilbert.”