A Denial of Death

by Gin Jones

  * * *

  It was after 10:00 on Monday morning, and Jack hadn't arrived. Helen couldn't even pass the time by pestering Tate about his knowledge of the Friends of the Library president, since he too was running late. He was retired, after all, as he was always reminding her, so he didn't show up at the exact same time every day, but he was usually here by now. It was as if he knew she had questions for him. In fact, it was starting to feel like everyone was avoiding her. She hadn't heard back from her nieces or Tate's nephew yet either.

  The heat wave continued, making the air too oppressive, even in the shade of the trees around the cottage, to wait outside. Stuck indoors, Helen tried working on her crocheting, since Betty and Josie claimed the work was soothing. Maybe it was for other people, but her restlessness was causing her to make a bigger mess than usual. She kept at it, hoping it would get better, until Tate's arrival finally gave her an excuse to put it down.

  When Helen entered the garage, Tate was still setting up his lathe. A new floor fan created a breeze in the un-air-conditioned space, blowing the sawdust around without appreciably cooling the humid air.

  Tate didn't bother to turn and look at her before starting to grill her. "Have you been staying out of trouble, or have the police just not gotten around to arresting you for meddling yet?"

  "The police never notice me. It's my superpower."

  Only the most microscopic crinkling around Tate's eyes betrayed his amusement. "Think you could be invisible to me too? I've got work to do."

  "I'll disappear in a minute," Helen said. "I just wanted to see if you knew where your nephew was."

  "Even the old public service ads only expected adults to make sure their kids were safely tucked away at night, not every minute of the day," Tate said. "It's kind of early in the morning to worry about the youngsters in our families."

  "You should know better than most that people can get into trouble at any time of day," Helen said. "I can't get in touch with Lily, and I thought Adam might know where she is. No one's returning my texts."

  "Anyone else would take the hint and stop pestering them."

  "I don't pester—I inquire politely."

  Tate snorted, but he also took out his phone and called a number. After a moment, he left a message for his nephew to call Helen so she'd stop interrupting his retirement. "Adam's probably with a client or at a closing and had to turn off his phone. He'll get back to you when he has a minute. You can leave me to my work now."

  Helen approached the workbench and inspected the blanks that would soon become lamp stems. "It's not like Lily to ignore me. She promised she'd get me some information on SLP, and that was yesterday morning. You know her. Nothing slips her mind. And she never turns her phone off. Laura's always complaining about it, in fact, and usually when Laura cares enough about something to complain, she gets her way. Lily hasn't given in on this one issue, though."

  "Maybe Laura finally convinced her," Tate said. "Or Lily and Adam finally stopped trying to pretend their relationship is casual, and they've eloped. I doubt even Lily would leave her phone on while she was running away to get married. She wouldn't give you the chance to talk her out of it."

  "Like I would try to talk my nieces out of anything they'd set their hearts on, any more than you could say no to your nephew. We're both just big frauds, pretending to be tough with them."

  Tate leaned against the worktable and crossed his arms over his chest, as if to prove her wrong. "So why do you think Lily's not answering your texts?"

  "I don't know. It just seems strange that my loving, concerned nieces, who usually hover over me, electronically if not in person, suddenly stopped returning my calls right after I asked one of them to investigate SLP. It's like everything to do with SLP is cursed. First Angie, who received money from them, disappears, and then her sister disappears, and now Lily disappears. For all we know maybe Laura and your nephew are gone too."

  "That's quite a stretch." Tate unfolded his arms but didn't turn back to the lathe. "No jury would believe all those supposed disappearances were connected. You don't even know that anyone other than Angie has really disappeared. Charlene could be home again by now or at the police station answering their questions, and your nieces could just be busy with their own lives."

  "I hope you're right," Helen said. "If I don't hear from Lily by dinner time, though, Jack's taking me up to her house to make sure she didn't disappear too. I'll stop by Adam's office before I leave in case he knows something. You'd think that with his cut of what I'm paying you, he could afford a paralegal or a receptionist, and then we'd at least know where he is."

  "Just promise me you won't break into your niece's house if she's not home." Tate paused in the act of putting on his safety glasses. "Or let Jack break into anyone's house. Or into any offices. If Jack gets arrested his burglary record won't look good, and even I might not be able to keep him from serving some time."

  "You could come with us. You've got a key to Adam's office, so it wouldn't be breaking and entering."

  "I've got to finish these lamps," he said, gesturing at the blank installed on his lathe. "And you haven't convinced me there's anything to worry about."

  "Then you haven't been paying attention." She thumped her cane on the concrete floor in frustration. "Something serious is going on. It's really looking like Angie's dead, not just missing. Her trail stops cold at the casino. She had to have been killed there, but I can't figure out why. Unless perhaps she went to meet up with someone from SLP."

  "You're still making an awful lot of assumptions," Tate said. "Some killings—not many, but some—are just random. The victim's in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  "But if Angie's death was random, wouldn't her body have been found by now?" Helen said. "She apparently stayed on the resort premises the whole time she was there, since she didn't have a car and none of the drivers there remember seeing her. People are awake and gambling around the clock in a casino, so it can't be easy to dispose of a body without being seen."

  "You might be surprised. Gamers are so focused on their games you could probably drag six dead bodies right past them, and they wouldn't notice," Tate said. "But you're right that it's an unlikely setting for a random murder. The casinos work hard to keep the premises safe for the casual visitor. They have to, especially these days, with more and more competition for customers. They can't afford to get a reputation for being unsafe, or people will go somewhere else. Most of the danger in a casino is of the financial sort, not the physical sort. Players can lose money on the games or get their wallets stolen, but they're not likely to be assaulted." He stared at the blank on his lathe for a moment before saying, "Are you absolutely sure Angie didn't go somewhere else? Take a day trip or something?"

  "I'm certain. You heard Jack say none of the drivers at the casino had seen her. He's talked to the local taxi and bus drivers too, and none of them have seen Angie in Wharton since the day she disappeared," Helen said. "We know she got to the casino, but she never left. At least not alive."

  "She didn't leave in a taxi or bus, but her sister could have taken her somewhere else."

  Helen shrugged. "So Charlene lied to me to give Angie a head start while her pursuer was looking in the wrong place. I just can't see why she'd lie after all this time."

  Tate shrugged. "I'm just looking for reasonable doubt, not trying to prove my theory. You'd have to ask her why she lied, if she did."

  Helen mentally added Charlene's house to her itinerary for the day. Right after she visited the insurance agency and the library, and before she went to Lily's house in Boston. "She'll just lie again."

  "The trick is to figure out what she's hiding and pretend you already know it." Tate pulled up the closest director's chair and dropped into it. "Let's say the casino is just a cover story. Apparently, she didn't care if people thought her sister had a gambling problem. What could Angie be doing there that's worse than succumbing to an addiction, one she's been public about condemning?"


  Helen climbed onto the second ragged, sawdust-covered director's chair and settled in to think. Over the years, quite a few of her ex-husband's cronies had tried to keep their secrets hidden, seldom with any success. "Drug or alcohol addiction might seem worse, and she could be in some sort of rehab program. Except everyone says Angie didn't drink or do drugs."

  "They say she doesn't gamble either, but she paid for a week at the casino, and she'd been there before," Tate said. "What was she doing there, if she wasn't gambling?"

  "Someone suggested she might have gone there to do some work without interruption, but no one's ever heard of Angie doing any work other than taking care of Ralph, and she couldn't do that from the hotel." Of course, between the SLP money and the revelation of her fascination with the casino, there was a lot that people didn't know about Angie. "Or maybe she really was involved with money laundering, and she met her partner in crime at the casino, and he killed her after she'd done her part of the job."

  "It's pretty far-fetched to think Angie was involved in something like that, but you may be on to something. A casino isn't just a convenient place to meet up with a criminal partner. It can also serve as the means to the actual laundering. The procedure's pretty simple. Just buy a bunch of chips with the money that needs laundering, play a few games, and cash out the chips. Doesn't matter whether the player won or lost, he claims it all as winnings, and now he's got a paper trail for where the cash came from."

  "So, her criminal partner gets Angie to do that for him, and then he kills her."

  "It's theoretically possible but not very likely," Tate said. "For one thing, I can't see why they'd need to hire a third party like Angie to do the laundering. The criminal with the dirty cash could do it himself just as easily. On top of that, I can't see any reason why her partner would want to kill her. She was helping him. Why kill her?"

  "What if she was skimming from the cash? Maybe she was supposed to get seventy-five thousand dollars, like it said on the tax form, but what if she got greedy and took more than that? Or maybe she was having second thoughts and wanted to get out of the business."

  "A better question is why would Angie have gone into the business in the first place."

  "Charlene said the insurance agency was having some trouble during the recession," Helen said. "Ralph didn't think so, but he doesn't really pay much attention to the agency's finances. Angie always took care of it for him. She probably thought she could control the criminals the same way she bullied everyone else she's ever met."

  "But killing her isn't a good way to keep her from quitting," Tate said. "They'd still need to find someone to take her place. If she was threatening to quit, it would make more sense for them to threaten to kill Ralph if she didn't do her part of the crime."

  That was a more likely scenario, Helen had to admit. "Unless Ralph is actually the one doing the money laundering, and he's the one who had second thoughts, and the bad guys killed Angie to keep him in line. Ralph could have put the money in her name for some reason, instead of his own, and now he's lying about not knowing where it came from."

  "You must be really desperate for a theory of the case if you're picturing Ralph as a master criminal." Tate stared across the garage at the pile of exotic wood she'd given him.

  Helen was just about to decide she'd lost him to the allure of his hobby when she said, "There's another possibility, logically speaking. What if she never left Charlene's house? She could still be here in town, and Charlene's hiding her. Maybe even in her own house."

  "I suppose," Helen said, prepared to consider any possibility. "I didn't exactly search Charlene's entire home, room by room. All I saw was the living room. Angie could have been in the next room, for all I know. Charlene might have been afraid the police would search her house if they questioned her there, and that's why she disappeared after I talked to her. She and Angie figured they'd run out of time, and the police would be getting involved soon. They needed to leave before the police showed up so they wouldn't have to lie to the cops."

  "It's a reasonable theory, at least. One I could present to a jury with a straight face."

  "It would be nice to be able to confirm Angie was in Charlene's house until recently. I bet she left something behind. Like scraps of yarn from her knitting."

  "Don't even think it," Tate said, standing up to loom over her. "If you do anything as stupid as breaking into Charlene's house, I won't bail you out of jail or defend you in court. Not for all the wood in all the exotic lumber yards in the northeast."

  She glared right back up at him. "Doesn't that violate the lawyers' equivalent of the Hippocratic oath?"

  "Nope. We just promise to uphold the Constitution and pay our Board of Bar Overseers dues. The oath doesn't say anything about representing clients after they ignore our advice."

  "It's not like I'd know how to break into a house, anyway," Helen said. "And I wouldn't want to get Jack into trouble by asking him how to do it."

  "I'm serious. You break into Charlene's house—or anyone else's house or business—and I swear I'll testify at your sentencing hearing to recommend a life sentence."

  "I'm not going to break into anyone's house."

  "Or business?"

  "Or business," Helen repeated irritably. "I still think it's most likely Angie was killed at the casino, but just in case, I'm going to check out a couple people here in town who had reason to dislike her more than most people do. Don't worry. It's perfectly safe, and I'm sure it won't get me any real information, but I want to be thorough. I'm just going to talk to Ralph's office manager, who supposedly would like to get rid of Angie in order to have Ralph all for herself, and then I'm going to chat with the president of the Friends of the Library, who was on the verge of brawling with Angie right before she disappeared."

  Tate stepped away, returning to his lathe. "I'd be relieved except I suspect you can get into more trouble than Angie ever did. With you, even the library isn't safe."

  "I'm tired of safe," Helen said. "I did that for twenty years with my husband's career. I'm ready for a little excitement."

  Tate slipped on his safety glasses and reached for his ear protection. "Just do me a favor and don't tell anyone at the library that you know me. The local librarians are brilliant at finding obscure woodworking books for me through the inter-library loan program, and I don't want them upset with me. I've had enough experience with conflict, and I'd like a little peace and quiet in my retirement."

  "That's what I thought when I first moved here," Helen said. "It gets old, fast."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Jack arrived at 10:30 with a…well, Helen didn't know exactly what it was. Some sort of sedan, but so nondescript she couldn't come up with a more distinctive description than "car." It was smaller than the huge SUV they'd tried, larger than the two-seater sports car, and as unmemorable as the Mini Cooper Countryman had been memorable. The car was even painted an average sort of beige, as if it needed that little bit more blandness to be completely forgettable.

  "Sorry I'm late, Ms. Binney. I've got a big order that needs to get shipped the end of this week, and they're not coming out right. I was trying to come up with a solution this morning, and I lost track of time, and then Ed kept me waiting while he had his team prepare this…" Jack seemed to have trouble finding the right description for the vehicle too. "This car."

  "Who chose…it?"

  "I did," Jack said proudly and then deflated a bit, apparently realizing it wasn't immediately obvious why he'd chosen it. "You did say you wanted it to be something that wouldn't draw any attention to you. I had the devil of a time convincing Ed you wanted to try it out. He only keeps it on the lot as a loaner, for when customers are having repair work done on their vehicles. He insisted I tell you he doesn't think it's worthy of you, and I took it off the lot against his best advice."

  "I'll be sure to tell him you warned me."

  "He only got off his knees and stopped begging me to pick out a different car when I convinced him this
one would make everything else on his lot look so much better by comparison."

  "What if I actually like this one?" Helen pulled on the passenger door's handle, and the door moved about three inches before refusing to budge a speck farther.

  "I really don't think that will happen." Jack ran around the car to add his strength to hers, and they finally tugged the door open far enough for her to squeeze through it. "I bet Ed had one of his mechanics do that on purpose while he claimed he was just cleaning it up for you. I wouldn't be surprised if we find other glitches he normally wouldn't be able to keep himself from fixing."

  Throughout the entire trip to the insurance agency, Jack kept apologizing for the car's shortcomings, from poor acceleration to jerky stops. "I swear, I never thought it would be this bad. Ed must have sabotaged it six ways from Sunday before he turned over the keys."

  Helen hadn't even noticed the various glitches that bothered Jack. She would have been perfectly okay with riding in this car, once the door was fixed so she could open and shut it without assistance. It was the right size, the price had to be less than astronomical, and it wouldn't draw unwanted attention. But if Jack hated it, she wasn't buying it. There had to be a vehicle they could both agree was just right.

  At the insurance agency Jack managed to get the passenger door open far enough for Helen to climb out. He stayed with the car, presumably to play with his phone's games, rather than out of any concern someone might steal the vehicle.

  The insurance agency was located in a converted old Colonial-style house. The exterior was maintained as neatly as the Deckers' home, with siding and trim that looked like it was regularly washed and windows that didn't have so much as a single streak or dried raindrop on them. Inside, the decor was dated, consistent with the twenty years the agency had been in business, but there wasn't a single sign of wear and tear on the busy wallpaper or the lovely wood floors.

  What was once a parlor was now bisected with a long counter, creating a space for customers on one side and a work space on the other. The counter held two computer monitors, and beyond were two desks in front with a third centered between them but close to the back wall. The front right desk, closest to the entrance, was unoccupied, while at the other front desk, a twenty-something blonde woman was typing furiously and pretending not to notice Helen's arrival. At the back desk was a woman perhaps ten years older with natural-looking coppery-red hair and wearing a conservative beige pants suit. She looked at the blonde, who must have been aware of being watched, since she stiffened but didn't stop typing. The woman at the back desk sighed and then rose to say, "May I help you?"