A Darling of Death

by Gin Jones

  She hadn't really considered him a solid suspect in the murder investigation, mainly because she'd seen how easily Danica had beaten him in the sparring session. But now she was starting to wonder. His "poor me" attitude was getting on her nerves and making her wish that he was guilty. After all, as Almeida had said, fighting was different outside the competition setting, away from rules and oversight. Ronny could have ambushed Danica, getting her in some kind of hold before she recovered from her surprise, so her fighting skill hadn't mattered. And athletes were known for working through the pain. He could have treated her murder just like a workout when he pushed himself beyond normal endurance limits.

  On the other hand, Helen hadn't seen him exhibit any significant tolerance for pain. Danica had certainly thought he gave up too easily. And if he'd been in the hospital when he claimed to have been, then he had a pretty good alibi. She wasn't prepared to accept his word alone on that, but she couldn't exactly go to the hospital and demand a copy of his admission records to see if he was there at the time of Danica's death. Fortunately, that was something that Almeida would do once she heard about Ronny's stay in the hospital, so Helen didn't need to get involved.

  She didn't need to, but it was so tempting to help just a little.

  After all, if Ronny was, as she suspected, under the influence of something from his stay in the hospital and not thinking too clearly, it would be the perfect opportunity to ask him, point blank, if he'd killed Danica because of what she'd done to his shoulder and his ability to participate in the competition. It wouldn't be fair to take advantage of his mental impairment, but as a private citizen, she didn't have to be fair.

  The only problem was that she had promised not to say anything about the investigation in front of Zubov. Was it worth jeopardizing her friendship with Almeida in order to get a confession? And what if Ronny didn't confess and instead went and complained to Hank Peterson, who then would remove Almeida from the case?

  Helen couldn't risk it.

  "I am sorry," Kolya said. "It is true that Danica is dead. And Detective Almeida has been asking about you. She wants to have the talk with you."

  This time, Ronny seemed to comprehend the implication immediately. "You think I could have killed her? Like this?" Ronny indicated his wrapped shoulder. "Even if I weren't injured, I wouldn't be foolish enough to take Danica on outside the protection of studio rules. She fights dirty. Only a 'roid rager would be stupid enough to go after her when she didn't have any limits at all."

  "No one in my studio uses the steroids," Kolya said with more irritation than he'd shown up to that moment.

  Helen remembered what Spencer's parents had said about Danica's worsening anger issues. Could she have been taking steroids? "Are you sure?" Helen asked. "Not even Danica?"

  "No," Kolya said firmly.

  "You didn't see her at her worst," Ronny said. "She was always on her best behavior—not that it was ever actually good behavior—in front of you, Zubov. She was different when she knew you weren't watching. Plus, she'd gotten worse in the last week or two. She was always a jerk, but recently she'd been alternating wildly between highs and lows. About a week ago I got here the same time she did, and her nose was bleeding when she got out of her car. I don't have to tell you that's a symptom of steroid abuse. I asked her about it, and she said it was nothing, that she'd had an argument with her boyfriend and things had gotten a little out of hand."

  Had that been the day Danica and Spencer had broken up? Helen refused to believe that Spencer had hit anyone. That hadn't been the only time Danica had had a nosebleed either. "I saw her nose bleeding the day she died. I thought it was from the sparring, but what if it wasn't?"

  "You may be correct," Kolya said thoughtfully, and his perfect posture slumped slightly. "There was one day last week when I thought she was drunk, and I sent her home. I should have paid more attention. It is true that her slurred speech and clumsiness that day could have been from the steroids. If I had known, I would have banned her immediately, and then she would not have been killed."

  "And I wouldn't have been injured," Ronny said, looking at his wrapped shoulder.

  Kolya gave him a quelling look. "I will speak with you in my office after I finish with Ms. Binney. Go now."

  Once Ronny was out of sight and the office door slammed shut behind him, Kolya said, "I should have been more vigilant. It was foolish of me to believe that none of my pupils would dare to use the steroids. If Danica was using them, it could have contributed to her death."

  First Jack had blamed himself for the vandalism to her car, and now Kolya was blaming himself for murder. It was ridiculous and counterproductive, but Helen understood why they felt that way. Feeling guilty was better than feeling helpless to fix or prevent a bad situation. She knew she would blame herself if Danica's killer was never apprehended. She had to do everything she could to make sure the police got the culprit.

  "You know," Helen said, "I bet Detective Almeida could give you some pointers on how to deal with any potential steroid abuse among your students if you were willing to sit down and have a nice, long conversation with her. And you didn't place any limits on what you would talk about."

  Kolya snorted. "You do not give up, do you? You win. I will call your Detective Almeida."

  "Thank you."

  "You may not be thanking me when I am done," he said solemnly. "I will also be telling her that you are asking questions that only the detective should be asking. I believe that is frowned upon here as much as it is in Russia."

  * * *

  Helen emerged from the House of Sambo half an hour later to find Jack, as expected, waiting right out front, the engine of the latest loaner car idling and the air conditioning blasting as much as it could. She climbed into the front passenger seat and said, "To Wharton Wheels, please."

  He hesitated with his hand above the gear selector. "I know your car isn't ready to be picked up yet. Is there a problem with the loaner?"

  "No, this is fine for now." The sedan wasn't as easy to get in and out of as the Subaru Forester, and its air conditioning was struggling to keep up with the heat of the day, although the temperature in the car was much more pleasant than inside the gym. "Elaine Clary called while I was changing. Apparently the insurance on my car doesn't cover the damage to the rental car, but something else does, so there's additional paperwork for me to sign."

  Jack held off putting the car in gear in order to peer at her suspiciously. "Are you sure? You'd tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn't you? With the car or anything else?"

  "If it was anything you could fix, I'd definitely tell you."

  He hesitated before turning the key, clearly skeptical, but he had to know Helen well enough by now to realize he wouldn't get answers from her if she didn't want to share them. He finally put the car in gear and headed out of the underutilized parking lot.

  Upon opening the door to the dealership's lobby a few minutes later, Helen felt like she was experiencing her own version of the movie Groundhog Day. Once again, her vehicular nemesis, Van Taylor, was standing at the counter with his back to her, his massive upper body and shoulders blocking her view of whomever he was facing. He was complaining that his rental car still wasn't ready. A voice that sounded like Elaine Clary's explained, with remarkable patience, that she still didn't have the authorization from the Decker Insurance Agency.

  Helen thought that was odd. The same agency also represented her—a not terribly surprising situation in a town as small as Wharton—and they had done whatever was necessary to confirm her coverage immediately. It was possible that the agency's owner, who was a friend of hers, had expedited the processing of her claim, but she was more inclined to think that they gave all their customers good service. It certainly shouldn't have taken two days to confirm that Van had the requisite coverage for a rental vehicle while his truck was out of commission because of an accident.

  "You must have it by now," Van said, as if arguing would make the paperwork magicall
y appear.

  "I don't."

  Helen moved to one side so she could see around Van. The person he was talking to was indeed Elaine. She had stayed seated at her desk instead of coming up to stand at the counter within reach of Van.

  Elaine continued, "I called the agency just a few minutes ago to see what was holding it up, and they said they're waiting for some information from you."

  "They're lying," Van snapped. "My wife went there first thing this morning to take care of it."

  "That's between you, your wife, and the agency," Elaine said. "Come back after you've straightened it out."

  "I'm definitely reporting you to the Better Business Bureau now," Van said as he turned away from the counter. His face was red and the veins in his massive neck were bulging beneath his long hair. "You and my insurance agency."

  He took two heavy steps toward the door before he noticed Helen between him and the exit. He continued in her direction, waving one of his small-boned fists at her and saying, "And I'll deal with you, too, next time I see you."

  Helen made sure she was well out of his way, so he couldn't bump into her again as he passed. She waited for the door to shut securely behind him, so she was certain he wouldn't change his mind and come back, before she ventured forward again across the lobby.

  Elaine had a file open on her desk and was pulling out some of the papers. She stood and carried them over to the counter for signing. "Looks like you've had quite the string of bad luck this week."

  Helen picked up the pen tethered to the counter and began looking for all the spots that needed a signature or initials. "I hope bad luck is all it is. It's starting to feel like someone's out to get me."

  "You don't strike me as the type to bring trouble on yourself." Elaine glanced through the glass door in the direction her last customer had been heading after stomping out.

  "Unlike Van, you mean."

  Elaine shrugged. "He's not so bad. Just doesn't think before he opens his mouth. Once he calms down, he realizes he was wrong and he does apologize. I was actually thinking of Danica Darling and how no one was terribly surprised she was killed. I heard you were the one who found her body."

  "It's become something of a habit." Helen pushed the signed papers back across the counter. "I'm trying to give it up, but it's more addictive than any of the other pastimes I've experimented with."

  "Danica was addicted to winning," Elaine said, ignoring the signed papers for the moment. "My son had to tell her he wouldn't sell her another car. She would replace hers every couple of years, and each time, it was this grueling marathon of negotiations with constant threats to go elsewhere if she didn't get her unreasonable demands met. Ed tried so hard because he really does like to make his customers happy, and it completely went against the grain to tell her to go ahead and buy from someone else and never darken his doors again. And then, as soon as he told her no, she was suddenly desperate to buy a car from us and price was no object. Like it was forbidden fruit or something, and she couldn't get a virtually identical vehicle elsewhere. It just had to be the specific car in our lot."

  Helen couldn't imagine having to deal with a customer like that. It had to have made poor Ed Clary a little crazy. Unlike Helen, though, he probably had a number of ways to vent his frustration with all of the tools in his repair shop. Despite owning the car lot, he was very hands-on with the repair work, so he could always work off his anger by disassembling a parts vehicle or pounding out some dents in a fender. But what if that hadn't been enough and Ed had been tempted to disassemble the customer instead of a vehicle?

  "When was it that Ed ran out patience with Danica?"

  Elaine snatched up the signed papers. "If you're thinking Ed might have killed her, well, he did say he wanted to during that last negotiation, but even if I weren't his mother, I'd have known he didn't mean anything by it. He was just letting off steam. In any event, he's had plenty of time to cool off since then. It's been at least a year since she was last on the lot."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Absolutely." Elaine flipped through the twelve pages of paper, confirming that all the marked spots had been signed. "I'm usually here whenever the business is open anyway, but for the first month or so after Ed banned her, I made absolutely sure I was here every minute of every day, so I could call the police if she started bothering anyone. But she never showed up. I think she eventually convinced herself that she'd somehow defeated us, rather than the other way around. I didn't care what she thought, as long as she stayed away from Ed. He loves his work, but he has a hard time accepting that some people will never be satisfied."

  "Like Danica."

  "And our buddy, Van Taylor." Elaine placed the signed paperwork in an inbox on her desk. "At least on the surface, their behaviors are similar. In fact, her last words to me weren't all that different from Van's. She was going to report us to the Better Business Bureau. The big difference between them is that Van will be back in a few hours, at most, to say he's sorry. She would never, ever acknowledge that she'd made a mistake."

  "I wonder if she'd been in this kind of battle with some other local business in the last few weeks."

  Elaine nodded. "That's exactly what I was thinking when I heard she'd been killed. Considering how often she antagonized people, she was bound to run into someone who was just as competitive as she was eventually. Someone who wouldn't or couldn't retreat like Ed did, so it turned into a battle to the death."

  That sounded entirely plausible, Helen thought, from what she'd seen and heard. Danica hadn't been able to back down from any fight, and she'd thought she was invincible. Unfortunately, if she'd ever realized she wasn't as tough as she thought she was, the epiphany had come too late.

  If Tate were here—and if he weren't being so reluctant to tell her what he was thinking—he'd say there was a lesson for herself in Danica's death. Helen liked to think she was tougher than she looked, but she didn't have even a small fraction of the physical strength and athleticism she'd observed in Danica. If the highly skilled Sambo competitor hadn't survived an encounter with her killer, how on earth could Helen?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On the way home from Wharton Wheels, Helen stopped by the Seafood Shack to pick up a couple of lobster rolls—Tate's favorite—for lunch. She'd decided she'd been a little harsh with Tate the previous day, taking her own bad mood out on him by rejecting what might have been a well-intentioned attempt to cheer her up. She really hadn't been good company lately and wouldn't blame him if he decided to return their relationship to a professional one. Not even the semi-personal lawyer-client one, but the totally distant landlord-tenant one.

  As Jack left to go check on the progress his niece and nephew were making on their business plan, Helen headed for Tate's studio in the garage with considerable trepidation. Would he even want to have lunch with her today? As she neared the door, she heard the reassuring sound of the lathe in action. Things couldn't be too bad if Tate was working with his beloved wood.

  She shoved at the usually recalcitrant door, only to have it fly open, practically taking her with it. She stifled a surge of unreasonable irritation so as not to take out her frustration on someone who didn't deserve it. Tate had meant well by finally fixing the door. If she hadn't almost fallen as a result, she'd have been more grateful for the repair, and her lack of stability on her feet really wasn't his fault.

  The bang of the door hitting the wall had apparently been audible through Tate's ear protection, alerting him to her arrival. He immediately stopped the lathe and headed over to the corner table to set the table. He was being nice again. Otherwise, he'd have ignored her until he reached a good stopping point in his work, and there would have been at least one grumble about how he was always getting interrupted at critical moments. She would have preferred to think his eagerness for lunch was just because of his love for lobster rolls rather than his recent excessive and totally unnecessary concern for her feelings, but he couldn't have identified the contents from the plain
brown paper bag she carried.

  Tate silently set out the wooden trenchers and a stack of napkins. At least waiting for her to choose the topic of conversation wasn't unusual for him. He'd once told her that he didn't argue unless he was paid for it, and she sometimes thought he held all of his conversations for ransom, doling words out only when absolutely necessary.

  Fortunately, she knew what he considered important enough to spare at least a few words on without begrudging them. "How are your nephew and his paralegal feeling about the murder investigation?"

  "On edge."

  Tate peered inside the bag, and it was barely noticeable, but she thought his eyes lit up a little at the realization of what she'd brought. She could be nice sometimes too, and she could do it without changing who she was.

  "Detective Almeida is a good detective," Helen said as she sat in her usual place. "She won't just glom onto the first suspect she trips over."

  "That's what I told Adam." He emptied the bag, setting a sandwich on each of the trenchers.

  "There seem to be plenty of other suspects for her to consider." Of course, none of them was any more likely a killer than Spencer was, at least to an objective observer.

  Tate looked up from unwrapping his sandwich. "Does that mean you've been investigating?"

  "Absolutely not." Helen couldn't help it if people insisted on telling her things that might be relevant to an investigation. "I don't want to jeopardize Almeida's career by giving Peterson a reason to pull rank on her."

  Tate rubbed a hand over his face, probably to stifle his involuntary snort. "So who are you not investigating?"

  "No one." Technically, that was the truth, but it wasn't the whole story. She was tempted to let it go at that, but then she'd be doing exactly what he was doing: avoiding difficult subjects. If they couldn't say what was on their minds, even when it wasn't easy, then their relationship was doomed. She'd rather not prolong the misery, so she might as well tell him what she was thinking and then let him decide whether to reciprocate or not. "I'm not actively investigating anything, but if I were considering suspects, I'd be looking at Danica's sparring partner, Ronny West, and perhaps a business rival, Neil Campbell. Or anyone else she'd ever done business with, although I don't have any specific names. There's also Mia Randall, who was a rival for the attention of a man they were both interested in, but since she can't even find the courage to tell him she likes him, it's hard to imagine her killing in order to have him."