But Henry growled when Rick was around. He was still happily nipping his catnip.
The doorbell rang again and I set my cake on the coffee table then slowly made my way across the room, my knees rubbery and protesting with every step. My rational mind knew there was no madman standing on my porch, but my rational mind has never had the starring role in my life. I knew I’d open the door to see Fred or Paula or Rick or a salesman, but I was really glad I’d given in to my paranoia and locked all my doors and windows.
The pile of potential weapons I’d found on Sunday still lay on the living room floor (did I mention I’m not obsessed with housekeeping?), and I picked up the iron skillet on my way to the door.
I flipped on the porch light and peered through the peep hole.
Detective Adam Trent stood there, tall, dark, and macho, looking not at all like a cop in his blue jeans and T-shirt. He was scowling against the light or at me, or maybe both.
In spite of appearances, he was a cop, this obviously was not a social visit and there were a lot of things I didn’t want to talk to him about. Nevertheless, I was so relieved to see him instead of the alternatives—Lester or Rick—I unlocked the door and swung it wide.
“Come in,” I invited with a big smile. “You’re just in time for dessert.” Maybe if I gave him enough chocolate, he’d become so euphoric, he’d forget to ask those questions I didn’t want to answer.
He barged into the room, and I wondered if there was enough chocolate in the world to soothe this savage beast. “You tampered with evidence in Lester Mackey’s apartment,” he snarled.
“You’re cute when you’re angry.” He really wasn’t with his face all red and that vein throbbing in his neck. But I couldn’t help myself. It came from watching all those old movies with Fred.
Trent’s face turned several shades darker and his scowl deepened. This was going to take a lot of chocolate!
“Have a seat.” I waved the skillet in the general direction of the recliner.
“What are you doing with that thing?”
“Oh, just cleaning up in the kitchen.”
“If you cooked something in that, I hope you’ve had your tetanus shot. It’s covered in rust.”
I shrugged. “Haven’t you heard? Women need extra iron. Rust is oxidized iron. Kind of like taking chelated vitamins. I’ll just put this up and be right back.”
Once I got into the kitchen, I considered running out the back door, but Lester might be lurking. Instead, I fixed Trent a smaller version of the dessert I’d concocted for Fred.
When I returned to the living room, he was sitting in the recliner and Henry was in his lap. Traitor cat. Maybe I’d change his name to Benedict.
I handed Trent the bowl of cake and ice cream. He didn’t accept immediately, and I could tell he knew he ought to refuse.
“Don’t tell me there’s a no chocolate while on duty rule.”
“No.” He accepted the bowl and took a bite. His facial expression relaxed a little. “As long as this isn’t a bribe.”
Omigawd! He was teasing me! The man was actually attempting levity! I plopped down on the sofa and snatched up my own bowl.
“This is good,” he said…a little unwillingly, I thought.
“Thank you.”
“Very good. But not good enough to make me forget that you’re still in trouble for destroying evidence.”
I didn’t say anything. Discretion dictated that I wait until he’d had a few more bites.
“George Stinson told me you were over there yesterday with your husband, and the two of you handed him some cock and bull story about an inheritance.”
“Rick is my almost-ex-husband, and I was not at that apartment building with him yesterday or any other day.”
Trent took another bite, and I could see a further mellowing. His face was almost back to its normal color, and his lips weren’t scrunched up quite so tight. “Maybe the man wasn’t your ex, but the woman was definitely you. Stinson described you in detail, right down to that red hair and the freckles on your nose. It’s no wonder he couldn’t remember much about the man. He spent the whole time ogling you.”
“Yuck!”
“If it wasn’t your ex, it must have been your neighbor, Fred. Was he the one that tampered with the evidence?”
“Fred had nothing to do with it!”
Trent got a smug look on his face and I got a sick feeling I’d been tricked. “So it was you. What did you do with the hairs in that little cup? Have you still got them?”
“I don’t have to answer that! The Fifth Amendment guarantees my rights against self-incrimination.” I’ve always thought that was a strange amendment, since as soon as a person invokes it, that pretty much says the facts would be self-incriminating. But it was the only defense I had since I was guilty.
“I can get a search warrant for your house.”
“Go right ahead. Search it now. You have my permission. I didn’t make my bed this morning, but that’s the worst you’re going to find.”
“You flushed them, didn’t you? Stinson said he heard you flush the toilet while you were up there.”
I sat straighter, trying to look indignant instead of guilty. “Prove it.”
Trent slapped one big hand on the arm of the chair. Henry opened one eye then closed it again. “Damn it, you can’t go around destroying evidence!”
“I should have flushed that bloody toilet paper, too,” I grumbled.
“But you didn’t, and as soon as we get the tests back, your friend’s going to be in big trouble.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I’d bet money on it.” He took a slow, leisurely bite of cake and ice cream, his eyes narrowing as he scrutinized me. “I’ll tell you what,” he continued, “I’ll forget about the evidence tampering charge if you’ll tell me what’s going on, and don’t try to bull shit me by saying nothing’s going on. I know better. Your friend’s involved right up to the blond roots of her phony brown hair. I’m supposed to be the good guy here. I’m supposed to be helping innocent people, but I feel like I’m trying to work this case wearing my own handcuffs.”
I sighed and sat back. Trent knew far too much already…or maybe, like he said, too little. I hesitated. My gut instinct was to trust this guy with his faded jeans and clear, hazel eyes. He had good eyes. But my gut instinct had been known to be wrong. After all, I’d married Rick.
Henry liked Trent, though, and Henry didn’t like Rick. I suspected that cat’s instincts were way better than mine.
“I can’t tell you Paula’s story, but I swear to you she hasn’t done anything morally wrong, and Lester Mackey is not who he says he is.”
He waved a negligent hand. “We already figured that one out. The address he gave in Dallas was phony. He bought that car from an individual, paid cash, and never even had the title transferred. The tags are phony. What’s his real name?”
If I told Trent even that much, he’d be able to find out who Paula was and what she’d done.
“I can’t tell you. But he has a grudge against Paula, and he’s setting her up. He took Zach to make it look like she’s a bad mother. He switched her aspirin for those pills so she’d crash and he could snatch Zach. They were sleeping pills, weren’t they?”
Trent nodded. “Heavy duty sedative.”
“I’d be willing to bet Lester made those calls to the police. He planted two bugs in her house, and he’s been listening and watching from across the street. He’s an evil man. He beats his wife.”
“He planted two bugs in her house?”
“Yeah, you know, hidden microphones, not cockroaches.”
He scrunched up his mouth again. “I know what bugs are. I want to know how you know, how you found them and when I can see them. I also want to know why this man has a grudge against Paula, what his motive is for setting her up.”
I couldn’t very well tell him that Lester Bennett had a grudge against Paula for killing his son, and I had a feeling Fred wouldn’t want
Trent to find out about his involvement in locating the bugs or about his unusual skills. “I can’t tell you any of that.”
He studied me quietly for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I gotta say this for you, Lindsay Powell, you go to the mat for your friends.”
I shrugged and had more chocolate. “They’d do the same for me.”
“Would they? It seems to me you may be far too trusting for your own good.”
“Yeah, well, it seems to me you may be far too cynical for your own good.”
“What’d your almost-ex do to make you divorce him? Another woman?”
I focused my attention on the last bites of pudding cake in my bowl. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“No, it’s not. I heard he was arrested last night, but you refused to press charges.”
I didn’t answer, but felt he was chastising me for that refusal.
We ate in silence for a few seconds. I heard him scraping his bowl at the same time I did. I set mine on the coffee table and looked up to find that he’d set his on the lamp table and was looking at me.
“I did a little checking on your Rick,” he said. “If you hadn’t trusted him, you’d have caught him years ago.”
“You checked on Rick? You already knew what he did? How dare you! I suppose you checked on me, too!”
“Yep, sure did. That’s what cops do when we’re trying to solve a crime. Check out everybody involved.”
I suddenly saw an opportunity to find out something I’d been wondering about. “Fred, too?”
He hesitated maybe half a second, just long enough for me to know he’d found something he didn’t like or understand in Fred’s background. “Fred, too.”
“So what did you dig up about him?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.” He sounded a little puzzled by that.
“What does he do for a living?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Of course I know. Fred and I are close friends. I just want to see if you know.”
“He’s a day trader in the stock market.”
I nodded as if I’d known that all along. “Sure, everybody knows that, but what did he do before?”
We stared at each other for several moments. I’m pretty sure he knew I was bullshitting him.
“He did everything,” Trent finally said. Apparently he was curious enough about Fred to play along with my bull shit and see what he could get out of me. “A clerk in a grocery store, a maintenance man at an apartment complex, a bookkeeper for a small trucking company, you name it, he did it.”
None of that sounded at all like Fred, and none of it involved finding bugs or breaking and entering. I wondered if Trent was using one of my favorite techniques…toss out bogus information in the hopes the other person will correct you and tell you what you want to know.
Again I nodded knowingly and left it up to Trent to decide if that nod meant I knew Fred had had those jobs or if it meant I knew he was trying to con me.
“I was a little surprised,” he finally said. “I’m usually a pretty good judge of character, and I had Fred pegged for more the white collar type.”
Apparently he wasn’t trying to con me. I decided this was a good time to change the topic of conversation.
“What else did you find out about me?”
“That you drive too fast.”
I shrugged. “Travel time is wasted time. I have a lot to do. I don’t think I like the idea of your knowing so much about me when I don’t know anything about you.” I looked at his T-shirt. “Except that you’re a baseball fan.”
“I’m the cop. I’m the one who gets to know things.” He avoided my eyes and stroked Henry, oblivious to the cat hair that flew up then settled all over his clothes.
“I know you like cats.”
“Yeah. I like cats.” He sat there for a minute, stroking Henry and looking at me, his lips tight. I could almost hear the thoughts going round and round in his cop brain. I’d turned the conversation to him, and not him as a cop but him personally. I sensed that he wasn’t sure he liked that, but he wasn’t sure he disliked it, either. I waited. If I do say so myself, I have nosiness down to an art.
Finally he cracked. “In my business,” he said, “you learn real quick not to trust anybody. But you can trust all cats and most dogs.”
I watched Henry wallowing in the affection. Henry trusted Trent.
“You ever been married?” I asked him. Hey, if you don’t ask the questions, you sure won’t get the answers.
His hand stilled on Henry’s head. Henry, however, took the initiative and moved his head under Trent’s hand until Trent started petting him again. “Three years,” he said. “Divorced for ten.”
“Any kids?”
“No kids.”
“What happened?” You really have to pull information out of some people.
“We got married, we lived together for three years, then we got a divorce and stopped living together. Well, actually it was the other way around. We stopped living together and then got a divorce.”
“Wow,” I said sarcastically. “That’s a pretty dramatic story.”
“I’m a dramatic kind of guy, but enough about me. Let’s talk about you and how far over your head you are in this situation with your friend, Paula.”
I didn’t want to talk about that again. “I think I’ll have some more cake,” I said. “You want some?”
He looked longingly at his bowl, and I knew he did. But he stood, set Henry on the floor, and began to brush off the hair. “If you’re going to be the quiet type, I’ll just go home. Tomorrow’s another long day. The owner of that house across the street is sending us a key and his permission to search it. Think you could do me a favor and stay away from there in the meantime? Avoid tampering with any more evidence?”
I shuddered. “You think I’d go near that place knowing that creepy guy could be over there?”
He drew in a long breath and exhaled slowly. “Lindsay Powell, I wouldn’t be surprised at anything you did. I’d just like to think that if there’s a dead body lying around, it’ll still be there for me to find instead of winding up in your garbage disposal.”
“Oh, gross!”
He strode to the door. I was right behind him. I wasn’t going to let that door remain unlocked for longer than a few seconds.
When he suddenly stopped and turned around, I ran into him. I put my hands on his chest to balance myself, and he put his on my shoulders. Kind of an intriguing position, and for just a minute I thought he was going to say, or maybe even do, something interesting. We had kind of bonded, shared war stories about our ex-spouses. For just a minute I thought I wanted him to do something interesting. Must have been the chocolate.
“Thanks for the cake. It was really good.”
“Welcome. Come by the shop sometime and I’ll show you what else I can do.” Oh, God! Did that sound like I thought it sounded? “Chocolate, I mean,” I added hastily, removing any doubt that I knew my first comment could be taken as something else. When would I learn to keep my mouth shut and settle for embarrassment instead of total humiliation?
“I’ll take you up on that.” He smiled and I prayed for a live volcano to open up under the floor and swallow me. “Chocolate, I mean,” he added, making it worse. I wished for a volcano and a hurricane. “Be sure to lock up after I leave.”
He left, and I closed the door behind him then turned the deadbolt and leaned against it for a minute, berating myself. I had no control over my mouth or my curly hair. I’d given up on the hair years ago. I hated to admit defeat with regard to the mouth, but I might have to.
I took the rusty skillet upstairs with me when Henry and I went to bed. Locking the door was a good idea, but Lester and Fred had both slipped past Paula’s locks without a problem. Didn’t make me feel really safe. The skillet had the potential to crack a skull as well as give the crackee tetanus. Tomorrow I’d buy some mace and maybe some pepper spray, too.
And m
aybe a muzzle for my mouth.
***
I was dreaming about a creepy man with moles all over his face trying to smother me with his hair piece when Henry woke me. He was making those horrible jungle noises again.
I sat upright in bed, heart pounding, afraid to put my feet on the floor. I just knew if I did, Lester would reach out from under the bed with big, nicotine-stained fingers and grab my ankles.
“Having another attack of gas?” I asked Henry, trying to convince myself. It had made a nice theory earlier, but that unearthly sound in the middle of the night conjured up images of monsters and madmen, not gas attacks.
I swallowed hard and retrieved the rusty iron skillet from my nightstand. “He’s here again, isn’t he?”
But Henry wasn’t looking out the window…the window I had closed and locked just in case Lester decided to use a ladder. Henry was pacing back and forth from the bed to the bedroom door. Was Lester in the hallway?
I listened between Henry’s yowls and didn’t hear any boards creaking.
“I’ll bet you need to go outside and potty, don’t you?” I asked hopefully, clutching my skillet with both hands. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You really, really need to go to the bathroom. I know how that is. Terrible feeling. I’ll just go downstairs and let you out and then you’ll feel better and so will I.”
It sounded logical, but logic didn’t stand up to a cat pacing back and forth from my bed to the door, making noises like an alien creature. I couldn’t convince myself to put my feet on the floor, to move out of that bed.
I have a phone on the night stand. All I had to do was lift the receiver and call Fred or 911. But if I lifted that receiver and found the phone lines had been cut, I’d probably die of a heart attack right on the spot, and Henry would have to learn to use the can opener himself.
Nevertheless, I made myself pick up the phone. I don’t think I’ve ever lived through a longer split second waiting for the dial tone to kick in. It did, of course. I was overreacting. I felt silly.
I punched in the first three digits of Fred’s phone number then stopped. Either Henry needed to go to the bathroom, or Lester really was down there. In the first case, I’d be waking Fred for no reason, and in the second, I’d be putting him in danger.
Sally Berneathy - Death by Chocolate 01 - Death by Chocolate Page 16