Silk Stalkings

by Diane Vallere

  I turned around and scanned the rest of the floor. Closed doors painted in citrus shades lined the perimeter of the floor. Cubicles sat in the center of the space.

  “Nolene? Are you here?” I called. No answer. I stepped inside her office, put my hand in my sleeve, and tapped her keyboard through the fabric. The screen remained dark. A peek at the tower told me the computer had been powered off. Had she left for the night? I rolled her desk chair back and found her handbag on the floor by the foot of her chair.

  She was still here, somewhere. I stepped back out front and called her name again. No response. It appeared that for now, I was alone in the executive offices. There was no telling how much time I had. I used the flashlight app on my phone to illuminate the shelves in Nolene’s office and zeroed in on a shelf of notebooks marked “Financial Records.”

  Bingo.

  The spines of the notebooks were each labeled with a range of years. On the third shelf up the dates corresponded to the years Charlie lived with Ned. I wedged my phone under the bottom of a binder on the second shelf and aimed the light down at the pages. It was slow going, first figuring out how the notebook was organized. I was halfway through the third notebook when I heard a sound in the hallway.

  Twenty-seven

  The binder fell from the shelf and landed on the carpet. I bent down for it and tried to put it back on the shelf. The surrounding notebooks had tipped, leaving no space. In a panic, I shoved the notebook into my messenger bag and left Nolene’s office. Inez stood on the other side of the glass doors. She fed a key card into the slot and the doors clicked open.

  She stepped inside the offices and looked back and forth in the dark. “Did you find Nolene?” she asked.

  “No. I called her name but she didn’t answer.”

  “Maybe she left.”

  “Her handbag is still in her office.”

  “That’s odd.” Inez clicked on the overhead lights and went to Nolene’s office. “Were you in here all this time?” she asked.

  “When she didn’t answer me, I thought maybe she was in the ladies’ room. I was kind of hoping she’d come back and tell me where it was,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other to make a convincing show of my lie.

  Inez brushed her long black hair off of her shoulders. “Come with me. I’ll show you where it is.”

  I followed her out of the offices and down the hall to the restrooms. “I’ll wait out here for you. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m calling it a night and I don’t feel right leaving you alone in the offices.”

  “Sure, I understand. I’ll be out in a second.” I went into the ladies’ room, locked myself into a stall, and shoved the financial records into the bottom of my bag. I didn’t feel great about stealing information from Halliwell Industries, but after talking to Mr. McMichael, I had a feeling Harvey’s murder had something to do with money. I flushed the toilet for good show and then washed my hands. The paper towel fixture was empty so I dried them on my T-shirt. Inez stood in the hallway waiting for me.

  “How are the pageant dresses coming?” she asked.

  “They’re all done. The young women are picking them up on Sunday afternoon.”

  “Isn’t that pushing it a little close, with the pageant being on Sunday night?”

  “Nolene’s timetable, not mine.”

  Inez pushed the down button by the elevator wells. “Nolene is the master of scheduling,” she said. “She probably ran downstairs to check on the event setup.”

  The elevator doors opened and we got inside. I looked around for a slot for the key card and Inez waved me off. “What goes up must come down,” she said. “You only need the card to activate the up elevators.” She held out her palm and I set the card in it.

  We reached the front doors. Inez exited first and held the door open for me. “If I see Nolene, do you want me to have her call you?”

  I became self-conscious about the fact that if Nolene discovered the missing binder, Inez could very easily finger me as a thief.

  “No, I’d actually prefer if you didn’t mention that I was here. This whole pageant, well, I’m afraid I’ve made a nuisance of myself with questions. That’s why I didn’t bother to call first. Would you mind not saying anything?”

  Inez smiled. “If the trees won’t tell, neither will I.”

  • • •

  It would have taken me approximately ten minutes to get home from Halliwell Industries if I hadn’t driven right past the intersection of San Ladrón and Bonita Avenue and ended up near Vaughn’s place of business. Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. Too bad it was well outside the range of normal business hours. But as long as I was in the neighborhood . . .

  I called Vaughn, secretly hoping he wasn’t asleep or on a date.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Vaughn, it’s Poly.”

  “Good. That means my Caller ID hasn’t been compromised.”

  “I didn’t call too late, did I? If I did, I’m sorry. I— We—Can you—”

  “This isn’t a purely social call, is it?”

  “I need to talk to someone I can trust.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The parking lot in front of McMichael Investments.”

  “How late do you think I work?”

  Despite my growing concerns about what I’d learned that evening, I laughed. “You know how you keep telling me you bought a fixer-upper around here? If I promise not to mention the circular saw in the living room, can I come over?”

  “Sure. You’re about five minutes away.”

  He gave me directions, which I repeated three times to make sure I had them straight. He was right about the time, and about five minutes later (six and a half), I pulled up in front of a six-story apartment building. Vaughn stood out front, talking to the doorman. He jogged to the car and opened the door before I had a chance to double-check my reflection.

  “If I’d known your building had a doorman I probably wouldn’t have invited myself over.”

  “What doorman?”

  I pointed to the man in the uniform and Vaughn laughed.

  “That’s Rubio. He lives in the apartment below me. He wants to pay off his mortgage in five years so he moonlights as a chauffeur.”

  I might have been mistaken about the doorman, but when we got into the old elevator and Vaughn pushed the button labeled PH, I knew there were a few things I had assumed that would turn out to be right.

  The elevator had black-and-white marble on the floor and the walls. Dim lighting filtered down from behind decorative metal scrollwork that I suspected hid the means of escape should the whole contraption malfunction. We reached the penthouse floor and Vaughn led the way around a ten-foot-tall ficus tree that sat below a skylight to a large black door. A silver doorknocker hung above the peephole, and to the right of the door was a tarnished nameplate that said V. McMichael.

  Vaughn rubbed his fingers over the nameplate. “Hand-me-down from my father. It pays to share his initials, at least when it comes to monograms.” He unlocked the door and I followed him inside.

  The interior smelled faintly of garlic and basil. A colander of pasta stood on a counter in the kitchen and an empty skillet, still shiny from olive oil, sat on the stove. I leaned over the counter and inhaled deeply. Vaughn stepped behind me and closed the door.

  “Welcome to my abode,” he said. “It’s nowhere near finished, and so far the only people who have seen it, aside from family, have been here to deliver something.”

  “I guess that means I’m special,” I said.

  Vaughn put his arms around me. “I guess it does,” he whispered.

  I leaned back into him and looked around the room. The flat ceiling had been decorated with a mural that radiated out from the center to the corners in metallic colors. Gold, silver, bronze, and copper. The shapes had no hard edges like
a decal or a design that had been taped off, but instead floated against the creamy white of the ceiling.

  “It’s a late deco design, isn’t it?”

  “The whole apartment is. The last owner hid the beauty of the space. I’m trying to undo what he did to cover it up.”

  The floor was wood parquet, assembled in a chevron pattern of alternating shades of pine and cherry. The walls were painted a creamy white in alternating stripes of matte and gloss. The room was anchored by a dark gray velvet sofa and two matching chairs around a glass coffee table. All of the furniture exhibited the tubular influence of the art deco era. A vacuum sat off to the side of the room, and in the center of the coffee table, as if it were a Marcel Duchamp readymade piece of art, sat a circular saw.

  “I didn’t want to disappoint you,” he said. He slid his fingers up my arms and gently turned me around. “But you didn’t come here to see my circular saw,” he added.

  “No, I didn’t.” I took his hand and led him to the sofa. “In the past couple of days, I’ve learned things about people that I don’t think they’d want me to know. One of those people is your sister.”

  “Charlie’s a private person. I don’t blame her for that. I admit I was hurt the other night when she told us what it was like for her when she grew up, but that was a selfish reaction. It’s hard to accept that I had opportunities she didn’t, but I can’t change the past.”

  I leaned forward and ran my hands over my head. How was I going to ask for Vaughn’s help without telling him what his father had told me? Could I violate his dad’s trust in order to help his sister? Or to help Lucy? Even if it meant learning that her father—Charlie’s guardian—turned out to be Harvey Halliwell’s killer?

  “Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” Vaughn asked. He reached forward and brushed a tear off my cheek. Until that moment I hadn’t realized I’d started to cry.

  “I know too many secrets. I have to violate someone else’s trust in order to confide in you and that’s not an easy thing for me.”

  “Can you tell me anything without using names?”

  “You’ll know who I’m talking about.”

  “Try me.”

  I inhaled through my nose and blew it out of my mouth, the way the doctor tells you to breathe when he’s listening to your lungs with a stethoscope. “Ned Rains knew your father was Charlie’s father almost the entire time she was staying with him. When Charlie turned eighteen, Ned asked your dad for money.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “There are only two people who could verify that story. Ned Rains and my father.”

  “I’ll let you draw your own conclusion.”

  “So Dad gave Ned the two thousand dollars that he gave Charlie?”

  “No. Your dad arranged for a trust of fifty thousand dollars for Charlie. But he didn’t want it to be traced back to him. He asked Harvey Halliwell to set up the account and handle any correspondence. His instructions to Harvey were to manage the situation with the utmost discretion. He didn’t even want to know details. He felt he had given up the right to be involved in Charlie’s life, and he didn’t want to cause her any more pain by trying to assuage his own guilt over how she grew up.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I can’t tell you,” I said again.

  “But you’re sure it’s true?”

  “Beyond the shadow of a doubt.”

  “Then that means Ned kept forty-eight thousand dollars for himself.”

  “It might mean that. It might also mean that he continued to ask Harvey for money. He’s the one who asked Charlie to leave. What if he never told Harvey that Charlie moved out? Harvey might have continued to give him money when he asked and nobody would know.”

  “Why would Harvey keep making payments?”

  “I don’t know. I keep remembering what your dad said about them understanding each other. But that’s a lot of money. Is that how the rich operate?”

  “Not my dad,” Vaughn said. “But if Harvey ever stopped sending money, Ned might show up in San Ladrón and confront him face to face,” Vaughn said. “You said you saw Ned take something from Harvey when he passed out.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “I wish I had. I would like nothing better than to back you up on this.”

  We sat next to each other in silence. Vaughn leaned against the back of the sofa.

  “There’s one other thing that bothers me,” I said.

  “Only one? I can think of half a dozen.”

  “Nolene told me she handled Harvey’s accounts. What if she knew about this? Either she did and she approved the money, or she didn’t at first and cut it off when she found out that Charlie left.”

  “She could have been the catalyst for Ned confronting Harvey at the party.”

  I glanced up at Vaughn. “If you were to see the financial records of Halliwell Industries for the years after Charlie moved to San Ladrón, could you tell if there were withdrawals that stood out?”

  “Poly, I don’t know that I like what you’re asking me.”

  I leaned forward and put my hand on his thigh. “Vaughn, someone killed Harvey. If I’m right, and he was murdered over this money, then your father, your sister, and Lucy are all wrapped up in it and a killer is on the loose. Those people are important to both of us.”

  “What are you asking me to do?”

  I pulled the notebook out of my messenger bag and set it on the table. “I borrowed this from Nolene Kelly’s office.”

  His eyes were trained on the leather cover of the notebook. “Borrowed,” he repeated.

  “I’ll get it back to the shelf where I took it as soon as I know what it means.”

  He opened the notebook and flipped through the first few pages. I didn’t interrupt him. The only sound in the room was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway. Several pages in, he sat up a little straighter and flipped backward to an earlier page. His finger traced down the row of numbers and he flipped forward again. Finally he sat back against the sofa and shut the notebook.

  “You were right. Harvey’s been making deposits into an account every year for the past eighteen years.”

  “For how much?”

  “Fifty thousand dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” I said. “Close to a million dollars. Why would Harvey pay that kind of money to someone he hadn’t met?”

  “That’s what we have to find out next.”

  Twenty-eight

  The amount of money that we were discussing was staggering. Two thousand dollars might not have seemed like much of a motive, but a million dollars sure was. Someone had been moving that money out of the Halliwell accounts for eighteen years.

  “How do we find out if that account is Ned’s?” I asked.

  Vaughn set the notebook on the table. “Your guess is as good as mine. Probably better, since you found out this much. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “I can go two ways with it.” I pulled my feet up under me Indian style and ticked the first point off on my index finger. “Ned has been lying to Harvey and collecting the money all this time. Harvey finds out and cuts him off. Ned comes to San Ladrón on a night when he knows he has a good chance he’ll run into Harvey—it was the social event of the year, right?—and confronts him. Ned gets angry with whatever Harvey says, but we show up and he has to leave. The next day he goes back and kills Harvey.”

  Vaughn shook his head. “There are too many holes. Why would Ned kill Harvey if Harvey is the goose that laid the golden egg? And if it was the heat of the moment, wouldn’t the murder have happened when we saw the confrontation? Coming back makes the whole thing seem premeditated, which sounds even worse for Ned.”

  “I also can’t justify why he’d risk killing. He knew we saw him. Remember? I called out to hi
m when he took something from Harvey’s jacket.”

  “Okay, what’s your second theory?” Vaughn asked. He moved a pillow from behind him to the top of the sofa. I moved it behind my head and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Nolene had access to Harvey’s money. She told me so herself. What if she saw the money going into the account all those years and started asking questions? Or worse, what if she started taking the money for herself? Ned might have confronted Harvey at the party, but if Nolene figured out the connection between Ned and Harvey, she would have known that sooner or later they’d find out she’d been diverting the deposits to herself. Maybe Harvey found out and Nolene freaked.”

  “Any other theories?” Vaughn asked.

  “A couple. There’s Violet, Sheila, Inez, Beth . . .”

  Vaughn stifled a yawn. It was contagious, and I yawned next. “Violet’s been making threats about shutting down the competition. She left town a few days ago and hasn’t been back. Her store is next to mine, and she could have very easily murdered Harvey and taken the shortcut from the Waverly House to her shop without anybody noticing. She had opportunity. And Sheila maybe has a motive, depending on the results of her background check. Inez might be holding a grudge for the lab accident that scarred her. And Beth could just as easily have discovered the money since she works for Nolene.”

  “Have you told Sheriff Clark any of these theories?”

  “What’s there to tell? It’s all guesswork. Clark is going to be extra careful with this case, and that means I need evidence.” We both glanced at the notebook on the table. “Evidence that I can explain how I came to be in possession of without acknowledging that I’ve committed a crime myself.”

  “You have to return this to Halliwell Industries. Do you know how you’re going to do that?”

  “Not really.”

  “We need a game plan, and as much as I like having you here, I think we both need some sleep before we can focus.” He yawned again. “You’re welcome to stay over if you want.”