Unti Susan McBride #2

by Susan McBride

  Max leaned back in the chair and shrugged. “I’m in no hurry,” he remarked. “It’s pretty much a no-­brainer that everything Grace had is mine.”

  The man sounded so sure. Frank cocked his head, saying dryly, “Unless you’re the one who murdered her.”

  “Ah, a lawman and a comedian,” Max quipped. Then he crossed his arms, looking suddenly serious. “Back to that book of hers you mentioned. I imagine I’ll own the rights to it, too.”

  “You’ll have to ask her publisher about that.”

  Max picked himself off of the chair and patted his muscled thighs. “So am I free to go? Or is there anything else?”

  “Please, sit down, Mr. Simpson.” Frank clenched his jaw. He was losing patience with the man. “We’re not done yet.”

  “I’ll stand if you don’t mind,” Max said. “This won’t take much longer, I’m sure. I don’t have anything to hide.”

  So Frank spit out the Mother of Questions: “Where were you between seven and nine o’clock last evening?”

  He prepared himself for a blustery show of indignation, a sputtered, How dare you, do you think I killed my wife? but he was unprepared for laughter.

  “Oh, God, where was I?” he remarked, guffawing and wiping tears from his eyes. “It’s incredibly ironic, considering the reason Grace dumped me in the first place.”

  “Why don’t you spell it out,” Frank suggested, wishing he could slap handcuffs on Max Simpson and arrest him for being so cavalier about a murder.

  “More fodder for the gossip mill,” Max remarked airily and cast his gaze downward, flicking lint off his perfectly immaculate shirt. “I was with a woman who was not my wife,” he said.

  “Where?” Frank asked.

  “Why, Sheriff”—­a thin smile curled on Max’s lips—­“I was in her bed.”

  Frank’s face heated up, but it didn’t stop him from pushing the paper and pen across his desk again. “I want her name and number—­”

  “I’m sure you do,” Max cut him off. But he wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “I’ll need to check out your alibi,” Frank said.

  “All right, but she’s a married lady, Sheriff, so be discreet.” Reluctantly, Max came forward and picked up the pen, writing quickly and, Frank could tell from upside-­down, almost illegibly.

  “By the way,” the sheriff said before Max Simpson could bolt, “did you happen to leave a baseball bat at your wife’s house?”

  Max squinted. “Yeah, yeah, I guess I did. Grace said she kept it for protection, but I wonder if she didn’t hold onto it just because it was a favorite of mine from my baseball days in college.” He put his hands on his hips, nodding thoughtfully. “A solid maple Louisville Slugger, dense and not prone to flaking,” he described as though reading ad copy from one of his sporting goods catalogues. “It’s known for delivering a satisfying crack on impact.”

  “Is that so?” Frank murmured.

  He suddenly got the strongest feeling that he knew the owner of the smudged prints on the bat that had fatally struck Grace Simpson. And he couldn’t help but wonder if any of them were recent.

  Chapter 19

  DUSK SETTLED, DARKENING the room so that Frank had to get up from his chair and switch on the lights. He finished some paperwork and intended to head out. He wanted to get back to Grace Simpson’s office before he called it a day and went home for dinner.

  He was nearly to the door when the phone rang. “Sheriff Biddle,” he said into the receiver, hearing his contact from the county crime lab on the other end. “What’ve you got for me?” Frank asked, and the answer was plenty.

  Max Simpson’s fingerprints were on the bat, all right, just as he’d suspected. There were several smudged ones buried beneath those of Grace and Nancy, along with a partial thumb. They matched up with a set on file with the St. Louis Police County Department, as Max’s store was located in West County. Show Me Sporting Goods sold several dozen different models of firearms, from small-­caliber pistols to hunting rifles. Max’s prints had been logged with his permit to sell.

  “Lucky for us,” Biddle said, adding a “thanks” before hanging up.

  He sat down at his desk, pulled out his pad, and scribbled down a few thoughts while they were fresh on his mind.

  He’d forgotten to ask Max when exactly he’d last seen Grace. Or maybe it would be a better idea to ask Mattie Oldbridge. The old girl seemed to keep pretty good tabs on her neighbors, particularly since she’d been burgled the week before.

  The sheriff mulled over his impression of Grace’s not-­quite ex-­husband. Tall and good-­looking, younger than Grace by a decade, and cocksure to a fault, he was hardly the picture of a grieving spouse. But then, Frank had heard they’d been estranged for quite a while, so there probably wasn’t much for him to grieve about.

  Frank pondered what Max had to gain by Grace’s death.

  For one thing, he spared himself the trouble of going through a divorce. Those could be costly and painful.

  Would Max inherit Grace’s house and her practice? Though Frank hadn’t seen Grace’s financial records, he had to wonder if she owned either free and clear. In this economy, he highly doubted it. Would a man like Max risk committing murder for Grace’s money as well as her debt?

  And what about the missing manuscript?

  Frank wasn’t sure he bought Max’s ignorant act. How could he not have gotten wind of the infamous book when, in just one stop at the diner, he’d heard about Nancy Sweet being under suspicion for murder?

  So many questions and so few answers, the sheriff thought and tugged on his hat. Then he ventured outside to the dusty black-­and-­white parked at the curb.

  Gray-­haired Agnes March was in the process of locking up her antiques shop adjacent to his office. She nodded and uttered a brisk, “Good evening, Sheriff.”

  He tipped his hat. “How do, Agnes.”

  “Have you nabbed the killer?” she asked and took a step toward him. She cocked her head and waited, studying him through her owlish glasses.

  “Well, ma’am, I can’t say that I have.”

  “Bully for that,” she said and gave a little clap.

  Bully? Frank wondered if she’d gone as cuckoo as those old clocks on the wall of her shop that he could hear going off every hour on the hour.

  She smiled at his bemusement. “I think it’s what they call the curiosity factor, Sheriff. Instead of scaring ­people away from town, they’ve been coming through like ants to a picnic. News of the murder’s all over the Internet. I’ve sold twice as much today as I normally do this time of year. I heard a ­couple say they drove up from Springfield just to soak in the atmosphere.”

  “Huh,” the sheriff murmured, hardly knowing how to respond.

  Agnes marched up to him and patted his shoulder. “As you were then, Sheriff,” she said, and off she went, heading up the road, the streetlamps seeming to glow brighter in her wake, though Frank knew it wasn’t magic, just the falling dark.

  He scratched at his jaw, hardly knowing what to make of the exchange. Had Agnes just insulted him? Or was it a compliment?

  He recalled Max Simpson labeling folks in River Bend as bumpkins, and he knew that wasn’t true at all. What they were, Frank decided, was quirky. Quirky with a capital Q.

  He made sure he had the keys to Grace’s office in his pocket before he got into his car. He drove the block and a half to the place and parked out front.

  Once inside, he flooded the place with light. Then he pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

  He went to Nancy’s former office first and hunted in her desk for the box of staples. When he shook it open, he found the set of keys inside, exactly as she’d promised.

  He entered Grace’s cranberry-­walled sanctum and sat behind her desk. Through trial and error, he found the key that unlocked the drawers. He didn’t find the flash driv
e Nancy had mentioned, but he did locate Grace’s old-­fashioned appointment book.

  He thumbed through the pages, stopping when he found yesterday’s date.

  Several familiar names had been penciled into morning slots, but they had angry lines drawn through them. Frank figured they’d cancelled, and he could hardly blame them.

  “Beauty Shop” was penciled in at six-­thirty and, at eight o’clock, “Dinner with Harold.”

  Frank flipped to pages for the days before, but nothing jumped out at him. Had he expected to find the killer’s name written down in bold print?

  He took his time going through the rest of her desk, turning up nothing of interest. Then he checked out the room again, pulling up couch cushions and feeling behind the rows of books on the shelves.

  “Nothing,” he said to himself.

  He took the appointment book with him into Nancy Sweet’s former office. He could go through the pages more thoroughly later.

  Using the keys from the box of staples, he began unlocking file cabinet drawers.

  The first drawer he inspected contained nothing but files about the office equipment and procedures, the bills for letterhead and envelopes, certificates for hours of credit at this seminar or that, a personnel folder with Nancy Sweet’s job application, rolls of stamps, a zippered bank bag filled with petty cash, and copies of Grace’s curriculum vitae.

  The sheriff moved on to the two drawers below that one, finding they contained blue billing envelopes and insurance information, checks received and not yet deposited, checks returned from the bank, and letters sending clients with overdue balances to collection.

  Frank marveled at the paper trail Grace’s computer phobia had left behind, and he was suddenly grateful for it.

  A folder stuck near the back with “SUIT” written on its label caught Biddle’s eye, and he removed it from the pack. He flipped the file open and read a memo that had been paper-­clipped to a stack of other pages, instructing Nancy to turn over copies of everything inside to her lawyer.

  “Suit” as in malpractice lawsuit? Frank wondered. Did that happen to psychotherapists even though they weren’t medical doctors? Frank squeezed into Nancy’s desk chair and gave the folder a serious look-­see. From what he could make out, the “suit” had to do with Grace billing a deceased client’s estate. Scribbled notes mentioned the dead woman’s children having been against Grace seeing their mother in the first place. So they’d filed a complaint against Ms. Simpson.

  Unfortunately, Biddle didn’t find that a motive for Grace’s murder.

  He put the folder back, then pulled the top drawer from the adjacent cabinet toward him.

  Ah, here they were: her client files from A to Z. Well, from A to H, anyhow. He quickly found I through P in the middle drawer and Q through Z in the bottom one.

  There had to be two hundred files, he figured, each one belonging to a separate client with a different name, different trouble, and, possibly, a motive.

  Biddle sighed heavily, knowing he couldn’t go through the things without a court order. If he needed anything evidentiary from Grace’s client files, he’d have to get a subpoena. No prosecutor wanted a cop who had plucked fruit from the poisonous tree. Truth be told, Frank didn’t really need to see the contents. He only wanted to confirm the names of a few of the townsfolk alleged to have seen Grace.

  So if he happened to take a peek—­off-­the-­record, of course—­what could it hurt?

  Instinctively, he looked around him even though he’d come into the office alone and was, as far as he knew, alone still.

  Then he thumbed through the neatly typed labels on each file, seeing many familiar names, and learning more than he needed to know. Apparently Grace had seen not only the sheriff’s wife but Bertha Beaner, wife of the chairman of the town board, as well. In fact, Frank saw so many names he recognized that it felt like he, Helen Evans, and the town’s newly appointed minister were the only ones who hadn’t sat on Grace’s couch to spill their guts.

  Feeling sick to his stomach, Frank gathered up the keys and the appointment book. He switched off the lights and got out of there, stripping off the latex gloves as soon as he got into his car. He drove the block and a half to Grace’s house as fast as his beat-­up car would carry him. If he couldn’t find a copy of the book manuscript, then he was heading home.

  He planned to have a few words with Sarah. If she had something to talk about from now on, he wanted her to talk to him.

  Frank loved his wife, but he realized she was prone to gabbing too much and too often. And suddenly he found himself fearing that because of the blabbermouth he’d married, he himself might appear, however thinly disguised, in the pages of Grace’s yet-­to-­be-­published book.

  Chapter 20

  HELEN COULDN’T STAND it another minute. She had to do something. If the sheriff wasn’t going to search for any suspects other than Nancy, then Helen was going to find some answers on her own.

  Before she left the house, she fed Nancy dinner and settled her in front of the television. They didn’t get cable here—­it had to do with the way River Bend sat in a valley between the bluffs—­but everyone had satellites. Helen had held out as long as she could, using rabbit ears on her old set and enduring grainy Cardinals games for years, until she’d finally caved, getting a dish on her roof and more channels than she knew what to do with.

  But at least Nancy had found a show she liked well enough to stay put. The flicker of light cast ever-­changing shadows on the girl’s face. Even still, her features looked too pale, and her eyes stared at the screen, rarely blinking.

  Helen shook her head. She couldn’t blame Nancy for acting like a zombie. Until Grace’s real killer was caught, how could anyone expect the girl to move on?

  Of Helen’s nine grandchildren, Nancy had always been the quietest and the quickest to blush. Helen thought of all the summers the girl had spent in River Bend with her and Joe. Ever softhearted, she’d brought orphaned cats to their doorstep—­which is how they’d ended up with Amber—­or butterflies with battered wings. Wounded frogs had found their way from creek bottoms into glass aquariums that had remained on the porch until the smell had gotten too much to bear. “A snake had it in its mouth, Grandma,” Nancy would explain, tears in her eyes. “So I threw rocks until it let it go. It’s missing a leg now, but if I just take care of it for a ­couple of days, it’ll be hopping again in no time.”

  Helen smiled at the memory. Nancy was too kind, if anything. How Sheriff Biddle could believe the young woman could murder someone, even a cold woman like Grace Simpson, troubled her and frightened her at the same time.

  Purposefully, she retrieved her windbreaker from the closet, pocketed a slim flashlight, and located the key to Grace’s that Nancy still had in her possession—­and which Biddle had apparently ignored. She had the screen door open when she heard Nancy’s voice.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Helen said, crossing fingers behind her back, “I’m just going out for a breath of fresh air. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Then she hurried out the door, down the porch steps, and into the night.

  She walked briskly, pumping her arms as she went, hoping she could find something—­anything—­that Biddle had missed. Because as long as the sheriff held fast to his ill-­conceived notion that Nancy had killed Grace, the real murderer went scot-­free. That thought, Helen mused with a shiver, was hardly comforting in the least.

  Lights warmed the windows of the houses she passed. Ahead, on Main Street, the streetlamps glowed cheerily above shops now darkened behind plate glass.

  The diner had not yet closed, and Helen could see a dozen heads inside. She spotted Darcy, the young woman she’d seen at Doc’s office, scurrying about in checkerboard pink. A coffeepot in one hand, she kept busy refilling cups.

  Helen thought of
something a woman she’d met at a bridge tournament in St. Louis had said to her upon learning she lived in River Bend. “My dear,” she’d intoned, staring down her nose through glasses tinted pink and speckled with rhinestones, “what do you do to amuse yourself? I’ve heard tell the whole town shuts down after dusk.”

  Why, we country folk just settle into our rocking chairs, sip some white lightning, and listen to ourselves breathe till we’re either too potted to care or fall asleep, Helen had felt like telling her if only to see the powdered-­white skin flush. Instead, she’d ever so politely answered, “We do the same things as other ­people, I’d imagine. Watch the ball games on TV, play cards, or read a book.”

  “You read books?” the woman had said, her eyes wide.

  “We even have a library,” Helen had assured her.

  “Is that so?” the woman had remarked, leaving Helen to wonder if in some folks’ narrow minds, River Bend was akin to Siberia.

  By the time Helen reached Grace Simpson’s street, she was winded. She slowed her steps and slid her hand into the pocket of her windbreaker, feeling for her flashlight. As she passed Mattie Oldbridge’s place, she looked up, recalling Mattie’s statement to the sheriff that she’d seen no one come or go from Grace’s after seven-­thirty last evening, not until Nancy had shown up in the morning. Just as she figured, all the shades were drawn. Newly bought porch lights blazed, illuminating her rose bushes, as well as half the yard. No doubt she had one of her prime-­time shows turned on loudly enough to drown out all else.

  Helen felt reassured that Mattie hadn’t been aware in the least of any visitors to Grace’s the evening of the murder. The burglary had shaken Mattie so that she kept herself insulated once darkness fell. If she’d heard any unusual noise, she would have certainly called the sheriff and awakened him, even if it had been after midnight.

  Helen went over what she knew to be true, the first fact being that Grace didn’t make it to her eight o’clock meeting in St. Louis. Mattie had seen her depart, which meant that Grace had turned around and come back to her house unobserved. That surely implied that the murderer was already inside. Grace must have been killed shortly after entering, or else, as efficacious as she was, she would have called her publisher to tell him she’d be late. Clearly, she’d had no opportunity to do that.