The Arrangement

by Suzanne Forster

  She banged on the door frame. “Hello? Anyone home? Josephine Hazelton?”

  A mad scramble ensued inside. The woman squealed and began buttoning herself up, and the man shot out the back door and was gone before Marnie could get a look at him.

  She banged again. “Hello? Who’s there?”

  She thought the woman might try to make a run for it, too, but a moment later the door swung open. All her clothing was buttoned now, but the amorous intruder did not even have the decency to look sheepish about the situation she found herself in. The smile on her face was defiant, and Marnie was stunned when she saw who it was.

  16

  “LaDonna Jeffries? What are you doing here?”

  “Excuse me?” LaDonna struck a haughty pose when she saw who it was at the door. “I could ask you the same question.”

  Marnie reminded herself that her friend from years past thought she was dealing with Alison Fairmont, whom she obviously didn’t like. Marnie caught the insignia on LaDonna’s untucked blouse and realized she must be on a lunch break from the drugstore. It gave all new meaning to the phrase hot lunch.

  “I came to see Gramma Jo,” Marnie said, thinking quickly. “I heard she makes a natural soap with the herbs from her garden. It’s supposed to be good for sensitive skin.”

  In reality, Marnie had been trying to help her grandmother develop an herbal soap before the accident, but she didn’t know whether or not Gramma Jo had gone on with it.

  LaDonna tweaked her blouse into place. “I don’t know anything about that. She asked me to keep an eye on her house while she was gone, and I’m trying to help out. I come three times a week to water her plants.”

  She was doing a good job of getting her own garden watered, too, but Marnie kept her mouth shut about that. “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “She had to go to the hospital. But that was like a month ago.”

  “The hospital?” Marnie’s voice nearly turned to a squeak. For a moment she couldn’t find the breath to speak. “Are you sure?”

  At LaDonna’s nod, she asked, “Was something wrong with her?”

  “She never did say, and I didn’t want to pry. She called and asked if I would watch the place, and she told me where the key was. But she acted like she didn’t know how long she’d be gone.”

  There had to be some mistake. “I’d heard she might be going on a cruise,” Marnie said.

  “That may be what she was telling people. Maybe she didn’t want to deal with a lot of personal questions. Actually, I think it was more like a nursing facility than a hospital, but I don’t have the name.”

  “Do you know if she’s all right?” Marnie’s heart was racing, and she told herself to calm down. Alison would not have been panicking like this over Gramma Jo.

  “No, and I haven’t heard a word from her. I’ve been asking around, but nobody else has heard anything from her, either. It’s weird, like she just disappeared.” Worry clouded LaDonna’s expressive brown eyes. “I’ve been a family friend for years, and I really love Gramma Jo. I wish she hadn’t been so secretive about where she was going.”

  Marnie was grateful for that much. It helped to know that someone shared her concerns, and LaDonna was a family friend. “I don’t see her car here. Did she drive herself to the facility?”

  The family car had been an ancient station wagon, and in the early days before the flea market, Gramma had parked alongside the road and sold her vegetables and her wares right out of the back. She’d told fortunes in those days, too. Marnie could remember her asking customers for a personal item, which she’d clutch in her palm.

  Marnie never knew whether Gramma had the “sight” or not, but some people swore her predictions came true. Gramma should have warned them all about February second.

  “I don’t know that, either,” LaDonna was saying. “One day she was here, and the next day she was gone, but she took hardly anything with her that I could see.”

  “That is strange.” Marnie had been racking her brain, but she wasn’t aware that Gramma Jo had any health problems. Of course, grief and worry took their toll on the body, and her grandmother wasn’t a young woman. Marnie could hardly bear the thought that this was her fault. She would not be able to forgive herself.

  Whoops of excitement drifted up from the beach. Beyond the sand dunes, maybe a couple hundred feet away, a mother with two young children was laying out a blanket, apparently for a picnic on the sand. They all wore their swimsuits, and the kids were dragging inner tubes as big as them toward the gentle surf.

  “I don’t know what to do besides keep my eye on the place,” LaDonna said.

  And meet your creepy boyfriend here, Marnie thought. Her stomach was churning, but it wasn’t because of her old friend’s sex life. LaDonna had always been a sucker for male attention. She traded sex for love, and wondered why she never felt good about herself, much less loved.

  Marnie was worried sick about her grandmother, who’d lived on this patch of land her whole life. It had been left to her by the eccentric maiden aunt who’d raised her, and Gramma Jo had nothing else as far as Marnie knew, certainly not insurance to pay for medical care and hospital stays. There were no other relatives, either. Gramma Jo had married briefly after dropping out of high school, but found she had nothing in common with a young husband whose sole interests were drinking beer and working on junker cars. She’d kept the name, but happily said goodbye to the man. There’d been no one else until Marnie came into her life many years later.

  Marnie fought to keep her voice detached when she spoke. “I guess that’s about all you can do,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear about Gramma Jo. I hope she’s okay.”

  She wanted to say more as she stepped back to leave. LaDonna had shown an appalling lack of respect for her grandmother’s home, and Marnie wanted to extract promises that LaDonna would actually water the flowers and lock the place up tight—and most of all, stop turning it into a love shack. But she doubted that Alison would have cared about any of that, and once again, Marnie couldn’t take the chance.

  Like every obsessed investigator, Tony Bogart had a love-hate relationship with crime scenes. He was intimately familiar with the frustrations of coaxing forensic secrets from a blood-spattered bedroom or a barroom back alley. He’d heard all the analogies to seduction. Probably he’d compared too many of life’s frustrations to sex and women, but not when it came to crime scenes.

  The allure wasn’t about seducing secrets from dead bodies and inanimate objects. It wasn’t about the guesswork. It was about the inevitable—the return of the suspect. Tony lived by the age-old theory that the perpetrator could not resist his own sense of horror or triumph or whatever other irresistible emotion had held him in thrall when he committed the crime.

  He had to return to the scene to be a witness to his own guilt. Or genius. Sometimes it was to try and undo what he’d done, but every perpetrator came back. Even if he revisited the crime only in his mind, he showed up. Always. They all did. And most showed up in the flesh.

  This morning was no exception. Tony had only been hoping for one suspect. He got three, maybe four.

  The crime scene was the tide pool hidden on the oak glen behind Josephine Hazelton’s cottage, where his brother, Butch, had been murdered. Tony had been keeping an eye on the place since he got back. He’d noticed immediately that it was vacant, and he’d found out from the nearest neighbor that Gramma Jo had been gone for about a month, but the neighbor didn’t know anything more than that.

  This morning Tony had noticed activity in the cottage, and he’d decided to stake it out long enough to see who was inside. He hadn’t been there fifteen minutes when he’d had the good fortune to see Alison Fairmont drive up and get out of her car.

  Of course, Alison was already a suspect, but her strange behavior this morning had cemented that in his mind. For no reason that Tony could understand except guilt, Alison stood by her BMW convertible, staring at Josephine Hazelton’s ramshackle cottage,
and cried as if her heart would break.

  Tony was hidden in the glen, near the pool where Butch had been killed. He’d been waiting for Alison to come over to the actual scene, but maybe her guilt was too great for that. Or maybe she’d noticed the activity in the house, too. Alison had never struck him as having a functioning conscience, which was why the tears had surprised him.

  He watched her take the steps to the porch, and from there it got even more interesting. Alison had barely knocked on the front door when Bret Fairmont scrambled out the back, trying to stuff his hard-on into his pants, which wasn’t easy when you were running.

  Not all investigators would have pegged Bret as a suspect, but Tony had no problem making that leap. Having sex in or near a crime scene was one of the weird things some perpetrators did, especially if the original crime was sexual in nature. There’d been no evidence of a sexual assault on Butch, but that didn’t mean his murderer might not have been a gay man who’d come on to Butch and then killed him after being rejected. That would make even more sense if Bret were a homophobe who couldn’t admit his homosexual tendencies. Tony had no proof that Bret was gay, but a serious investigator thought in terms of all possibilities.

  He’d quickly moved to a cover that allowed him to get a better look at the front door, but he’d also cursed himself for not carrying a camera. He’d missed several beautiful blackmail shots. He would have used them to extract information rather than money, but he would have used them.

  Apparently Alison didn’t see her brother flee out the back. She kept banging on the door, almost as if she was angry. Tony waited for another unzipped male to follow Bret, but it didn’t happen that way. Instead, a woman appeared at the front. Women rarely returned to the scene of a crime for sex, but this one just might have.

  LaDonna Jeffries? Suspect number three?

  It was beginning to look like a high school reunion.

  Tony couldn’t get close enough to hear their conversation, but he could see the tension in their exchange. LaDonna had her arms crossed and her chin high, the classic defensive posture. Alison looked angry at first, and then, strangely, anxious. Tony knew the two women weren’t friends, but he wouldn’t have thought them enemies. Watching them, he wasn’t so sure.

  The conversation had ended abruptly, and Alison had seemed in a hurry to go. LaDonna left moments after Alison drove away. She’d jogged down the gravel road in her Skeetcher tennis shoes, apparently to wherever she’d parked her car so it wouldn’t be seen.

  Tony had decided not to follow either woman, intending to check out the house instead. But the surprises weren’t over yet. Another car pulled up just after he retrieved the key that LaDonna had left under the mat, and let himself into the cottage. Tony ducked out the back door, just as Bret had done.

  But Tony didn’t sprint for the woods. He glued himself to the outside wall by the door, which he’d left open a crack. And now he was observing suspect number four.

  Andrew Villard entered through the unlocked front door and scanned the room, apparently to assure himself that he was alone.

  Tony watched him quickly work his way from the living room to the kitchen, going through the drawers and the cabinets, checking the messages by the phone and the notes stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. He used a tissue to avoid prints, which was interesting. But if he was looking for something specific, he didn’t seem to find it.

  When he disappeared into the cottage’s only bedroom, Tony slipped inside and crept to the doorway to watch him. Villard had stopped at one of the dressers, and he was looking at some pictures of Josephine Hazelton and her granddaughter, the missing Marnie. He took a snapshot from the mirror and slipped it into his pants pocket. A small jewelry box caught his attention next. He bent down, looking closely at the box, quickly checked the contents, then slipped it into his pocket, as well.

  He wasn’t stealing from the woman. No one stole a snapshot.

  What the hell was he doing?

  He went through the rest of the bedroom, carefully searching dresser drawers, cabinets and closets. A paisley shawl in soft pinks and greens was lying on the bed as if it had been tossed there. He picked it up, but didn’t take it with him.

  When Villard left the house, he went straight to the scene of the crime. He made his way around behind the cottage to the oak glen where the murder had taken place. He walked the perimeter of the pool, taking in everything around him. A natural formation of boulders created a path that extended a few feet into the pool, and when he reached the last stone, he knelt and measured the depth of the water with a branch he’d picked up.

  Maybe he was trying to recreate the scene in his mind. Tony couldn’t figure it out, but as Villard stared at the shiny black water, he looked disturbed, even shaken.

  That was when Tony realized that he himself had no such feelings about this place. His brother had died here. Butch had been butchered, yet Tony felt little more than a flicker of irony at the gallows pun. That was wrong. It was sick. He should have been enraged. The victims of violent crime deserved that, even his asshole brother. They deserved justice, and yet all Tony cared about was solving the puzzle, winning the game, getting the prize. Sometimes, he wondered why.

  Tony put the soul-searching out of his mind when Villard tossed the measuring stick away and left the glen. Moments later, as the man got into his car, Tony crept through the trees to the side road where he’d hidden the Vette, and waited for Andrew to drive by. Tony wouldn’t need to follow closely. The rooster tail of dust would tell him which way Andrew had gone, even when he got to the main road. It would also hide Tony’s car from his view.

  Tony tailed Andrew to Mirage Bay, where he pulled up in front of the local jeweler’s shop and went in. Fifteen minutes later, he came out and walked across the street to a real estate office. Tony could venture a guess as to the reason for those visits, but he would wait until Villard left the area before he confirmed his suspicions.

  Of all the visitors to Josephine Hazelton’s house that morning, Villard was the only one who had ventured to the actual crime scene, but Tony had to admit that he was the least likely suspect. He was an outsider with no real connection to Butch and no particular motive to harm him.

  Butch had more reason to want to harm Villard. A normal kid might have hated the guy because he’d stolen his brother’s girl, but Butch had never been normal, although he did once confide to Tony that he hated Villard’s guts because Villard had done something to embarrass him in front of his friends. Butch hadn’t gone into detail, and Tony hadn’t pressed. They’d never been close that way.

  As much as Tony wanted to nail the French bastard, he didn’t have the goods on him. Not yet, anyway. And there was something far more intriguing about Villard. Tony had had him under surveillance for several days, and with the exception of this morning, he was starting to see a pattern in Villard’s movements. The man had an objective, but unfortunately, it didn’t make any sense to Tony. Andrew Villard seemed to be investigating the death of a woman who was very much alive.

  His wife.

  Julia took great pleasure in gazing at her new circlet bracelet as she drove through the light afternoon traffic on the San Diego Freeway. She didn’t have to take her eyes off the road because her hands were right there in front of her, and the way the round-cut diamonds caught the sun was dazzling.

  She didn’t think of that kind of pleasure as bad, although her mother would have. Eleanor would have called it materialistic. But how could it be wrong to take so much pleasure from just one new piece of jewelry? She wasn’t bringing home bags of baubles, thousand-dollar designer shoes or Citation jets, even though she could well afford them. It was one bracelet, and it made her happy when so little else could these days.

  Julia relaxed her grip on the wheel. Her knuckles had gone white around edges just from thinking about her mother. Eventually she would tire of the bracelet and buy something new and sparkly to boost her spirits, but that might be months, even years from now. She s
till loved her S600 Mercedes, too, and it wasn’t new. She understood value. She’d bought a car that would last.

  She spotted the sign for her freeway exit ahead and glanced in the rearview mirror, getting ready to change lanes. As she did she saw the car behind her moving with her. The dark green sedan followed her from the fast lane of the freeway into the middle. Julia didn’t think much about it. Southern California freeways were hell in the best of circumstances, and she liked to be in the exit lane well ahead of time.

  She was also dreading this afternoon’s rendezvous. She’d gotten carried away at the gym, and she was running late. But that was probably intentional. She didn’t like how things had been going with her lawyer, Jack Furlinghetti. He was stringing her along, playing her, and there was little she despised more than being played.

  As she got ready to change lanes again, she checked both mirrors, rear and side, and saw that the car was still with her. Curious, she began to pay attention. The sedan took the exit with her, too. The sun was reflecting against the windshield, and she couldn’t see the driver, but the vehicle looked like a standard midsize four-door, nothing fancy.

  Julia turned right at the exit, and the other car did, too. The sun was coming from a different angle now, silhouetting the driver, and Julia thought it might be a woman. She could see what looked like long hair, although she couldn’t make out any details.

  When the sedan was still with her at the next turn, she fished her cell out of her purse and, with one hand, keyed in the speed dial code for Jack Furlinghetti’s cell phone. She knew he wouldn’t be in his office. He was waiting for her in a motel room, hopefully not as sleazy as the last one.

  He answered on the first ring. “Where are you?”

  He must have seen her number come up on the display. “I’m being followed, Jack. I think it’s a woman. It might even be…my assistant.”

  Julia hadn’t realized she suspected it was Rebecca until she’d said it. She glanced in the mirror again, trying to get a better look at the car and the license. Rebecca drove an old Volkswagen Rabbit. It couldn’t be her—unless she’d picked up a rental. Julia still couldn’t see the driver clearly. Rebecca normally wore her hair up. The color might have been hers, reddish-brown, but with the bright sun, she couldn’t tell.