Framed For Murder (An Anna Nolan Mystery)
Page 20
“I heard from the police that you were out snooping around my place last Saturday, Anna. Sorry I wasn’t home. What did you want?”
I thought quickly. I couldn’t admit that I wanted to check out the woman who had reported seeing Ben’s car at the O’Cleary ranch since I wasn’t supposed to know who the witness was, and I surely didn’t want to tell this woman that I was looking for my husband’s murderer. Instead, I took a deep breath and said, “I thought it was high time that I met the woman who broke up my marriage.”
Jessie laughed in a husky, deep voice, a laugh which men would find sexy, no doubt. “Yeah, I heard that you’ve been nosing around Jack’s women since he died. Amy Bright, Karen Quill, and now me. Jack and I were ancient history, though, so you needn’t have bothered. And I’m not blind, by the way. I saw you on the set last Thursday night. We may have never officially met, but I recognized you. I checked you out four years ago when Jack and I were together. I always check out my competition. Were you curious about how you stacked up against me? Not doing too much for your self-esteem, now, am I?” She looked me up and down with a look that said I was no better than the dirt beneath her boots, and flicked a strand of hair off my shoulder. I pressed my lips together and stared at her, trying to hide the trembling in my left leg.
“If I were you, I’d look to my own house, Anna,” she said, lowering her head and breathing in my face. “I’d have thought you’d have all the trouble you could handle with the police trying to find Jack’s killer. First they find you with Jack’s body, and then your boy’s car is spotted outside the O’Cleary ranch. They’re thinking that Jack was killed in that barn, have you heard? Good thing I happened to be driving home from the set that way, or no one might have seen Ben’s car there.”
“It wasn’t his car,” I said, starting to feel angry.
“Oh no?” she said, leaning her hand against the glass behind my head. “Well, why don’t we let the police decide that? I hear they went over your son’s car last weekend, and they’re just waiting on the test results before arresting him for his father’s murder. Imagine that – a son murdering his own father. Ben must be deranged or something. No doubt you helped sonny boy move Jack’s body out of the barn, too. They’ll arrest you as his accomplice, Anna. Couldn’t leave Jack’s body hidden if you wanted the insurance money, right?
“You knew about the insurance policy?” I asked in amazement.
“Yeah, Jack mentioned it four years ago when he talked about leaving you. He said that the insurance policy was about all you’d get out of the divorce, and he figured he owed you that after seventeen years of marriage. For being such a good housekeeper and all. Then he laughed and said you’d have to wait a long time to get it. I guess you got tired of waiting.”
I looked away, hurt by this information, until Jessie laid her hand on my shoulder. “Let me give you some good advice, sugar,” she said. “Why don’t you and your son skedaddle before it’s too late? Clear out before the police get you.” She flapped her hand as if she were shooing away a fly.
“Ben and I aren’t going anywhere,” I said, stepping around her out onto the deck. “Because we didn’t have anything to do with Jack’s murder.”
Jessie shrugged and strolled back to pick up her hat, gracefully scooping it up off the deck and planting it on her head. “Suit yourself, Anna. Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether or not to lay trespassing charges against you. If Sergeant Tremaine hadn’t shown up when he did, I bet you would have broken into my place. Then you just about drowned the poor man when he tried to stop you.” Jessie shook her head. “Don’t know why you’re still walking around free, to tell the truth. You and your son are definitely a menace to society. I don’t think I’d be able to sleep at night if I weren’t so sure that the two of you were going to be arrested any day now.”
She turned and stepped off the deck, waving the tips of her fingers over her shoulder. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll let myself out. See you later, Anna.”
I watched her saunter across my back yard and disappear around the side of the house. Straining my ears for any sound of her, I let Wendy out to make sure that Jessie was gone. Wendy bolted out of the kitchen, turned back for a second to sniff at me, and then tore around the side of the house. She returned a few seconds later and started searching the yard, nose to the ground. Jessie must have left.
I collapsed onto my recliner, wondering what I was going to do about Jessie. My first instinct was to call Tremaine, but I was afraid he’d only say that I’d gotten what I deserved for sticking my nose into police business. Besides, Jessie hadn’t actually threatened me or done anything illegal, other than trespassing in my backyard. She’d only intimidated the hell out of me.
Actually, once I’d calmed down and my heart rate had returned to normal, I thought that maybe I might have done the same thing in Jessie’s situation. Oh, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to confront someone the way she had confronted me, but she was letting me know in her own venomous way that I’d better stay away from her and her property. And wasn’t that just what I was going to do? Jessie’s visit was just one more inducement to mind my own business. From now on, I was going to lay low until the investigation was over and my life could get back to normal. That, and try to talk my son into not hating me, once he’d had time to cool off.
But Jack’s murder investigation kept sucking me under like a treacherous undertow. Two nights later, I was in bed drifting off to sleep when I felt Wendy tense beside me and her head spring up off the mattress. I opened my eyes and saw that she was listening for something.
I tensed, too. “What is it, girl?” I whispered. She responded with a rumbling growl from deep within her chest. I turned my head and looked at my bedroom window. The curtains were drawn and backlit by my porch light. I heard a creak outside, and Wendy growled again.
My heart started thumping as I sat up, staring at the window. Thank goodness it was closed and locked. A shadow hovered over the curtains and paused, as if someone were trying to peer inside. Wendy froze, and the breath caught in my own throat. Something scratched on the glass, a bony, clawing sound. Wendy barked sharply – once – and sprang off the bed.
The scratching stopped as Wendy bolted from the room. She ran to the front door and clawed at it, anxious to get outside. I crawled out of bed and slid my hand beneath it to pull out the baseball bat I always kept there, just in case. Steeling my nerve, I crept across the carpet, hesitated, and then slid back a corner of the curtain. A shadowy face stared in at me. I shrieked and jumped back. Wendy raced back into the room, barking.
A hand rose up and waved at me, then pointed toward the front door. As the face turned in profile, I recognized Karen Quill. She disappeared from the window and I heard her walk across the porch. I stood there clutching my baseball bat with one hand and my chest with the other. There was a knock at the door, a really good knuckle-rapper. I stomped out of the bedroom and down the hallway while Wendy tore past me, barking all the way.
I seized Wendy by the collar, flung open the door, and snarled, “Karen, what the hell are you doing, waking me up in the middle of the night?” She swayed on my door mat for a moment, then opened the screen door and pushed her way in past me. Phew, she was stinking drunk. I closed the door behind her and flicked on the hall light. Her normally smooth blond hair looked like a rat’s nest shoved on top of her head. Mascara was smeared under her eyes. She wore a green leather jacket over a short red nightie and knee-high boots. She scowled and pointed a lavender-manicured finger at me.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, leaning toward me. I waved the fetid air between us with one hand. “Let’s go talk in there,” she added, pointing past me to the living room. She stumbled towards it, and I followed her as she negotiated her way around the coffee table and collapsed onto the couch. I snapped on a lamp and sat down beside her. Karen laid her head on the arm rest and closed her eyes. After a moment, she started snoring. I shook her shoulder, and her eyes flicked open.
“It’s that no good, lying, scumbag of a husband of mine,” she said, lifting her head to stare at me.
“Connie?” I asked.
“That’s him,” she said with a nod. “I just found out he’s been cheating on me with our bitch of a marriage counsellor. She’s been charging us a hundred and fifty bucks an hour to save our marriage and banging him on the side. And she’s fat! She’s old! She doesn’t even wear make-up. What the hell’s the matter with him, Anna?” Karen began to cry, a noisy, wet, blubbering sound that turned into wheezy sobs. I rolled my eyes and fetched a box of tissues from the kitchen.
“Here,” I said, shoving them at her and sitting back down again. She looked at me out of bloodshot eyes.
“Thanks,” she muttered, blowing her nose thoroughly, balling up the soggy tissues, and dropping them on the carpet. Wendy sniffed at them, and then lay down on the floor beside me. Karen sighed and fell over sideways onto the couch, cradling her head on the arm rest.
“Oh no, you don’t,” I said, shaking her shoulder again. “I’m sorry to hear that Connie’s been cheating on you, Karen, but what’s that got to do with me?”
Her eyes opened and she struggled into a sitting position. “I almost forgot,” she said. “It’s the alibi. For Jack’s murder. Connie and I weren’t at the marriage counsellor’s that night. I was home watching TV. Don’t know where Connie was, but I’m not going to cover for him anymore. Came here to tell you that, Anna. Don’t care about him anymore, that lying, cheating rat.” Her head wandered back toward the arm rest and her eyes shut. “Gotta tell Anna – Connie wasn’t in Calgary that night. No alibi.” She stopped talking and started breathing deeply.
I stared at her for a moment, my assumptions about the night Jack had died collapsing around me. Karen and Connie’s alibi had seemed unshakable, so I had dismissed Connie as the jealous murderer weeks ago. Now there was every chance that he was the killer. I fell into the chair across the coffee table from the couch and stared at Karen. Her mouth opened, and she started snoring again. Nice.
I had to tell Tremaine. I dug his card from my wallet and dialled the number. It rang and rang before switching to voice mail. I shut off the phone and stopped to think. A drunken Karen might be a whole lot more cooperative than a hung-over Karen with second thoughts. I had to get her to tell her story to the police before she sobered up.
Then I thought of another important detail: I still had Connie’s gun. For all I knew, it might be the murder weapon. I hurried to my bedroom closet and removed the gun from its hiding place in an old shoe box. I wiped it down with a sock before carrying it to the bathroom. I might be erasing evidence, but I didn’t want my fingerprints on it. I wrapped the gun in a towel and put it in a plastic bag to take along with me. Then I put a coat over my pyjamas, and spent the next half hour hauling Karen off my couch and taking her to the police station.
Fortunately, Steve was on duty and willing to take Karen’s story seriously. I sat in the interview room and held Karen’s hand as Steve poured coffee into her and listen to her spill the beans about Connie. While she was indulging in a crying jag, I slipped Steve the plastic bag containing the gun and told him that Karen had brought it with her to my house. Steve raised his eyebrows and said that Connie had never come in to fill out a missing gun report.
“What was all that at Amy’s house if the Primos still had the gun?” he asked. I shrugged, doing my best to appear perplexed. Let them figure it out; I was just thrilled to be rid of the gun. Karen eventually fell asleep with her head lying on top of the table. Steve and I went out into the hallway to talk.
“What do you think, Steve? Do you believe her?” I asked, glancing at his face. Steve leaned against the wall with his arms folded over his chest.
“Oh yeah, I believe her,” he said. “Drunken witnesses don’t always make sense, but they usually tell the truth. Wait until Tremaine hears about this. It will make his day.” He looked at me and shook his head. “I don’t know how you keep landing in the thick of things, Anna, but you sure got into a humdinger tonight.”
I held up both hands in front of me. “I didn’t have anything to do with this one, Steve. She just turned up on my front porch.”
“All tied up in a pretty red bow,” he said, pushing himself off the wall. “You better go home now, Anna. It’s almost 1 AM. I’ll get a female officer to put Karen in a cell, and she can sleep it off in there. If Karen has any complaints in the morning, I’ll tell her that I could have charged her with drunk driving. I can’t believe she drove over to your house in that state. What’s the old saying, that angels look after fools and drunks?”
I shrugged. “Something like that. When will you tell Tremaine, Steve?”
“I’ll give him a call first thing in the morning. He’s out of town right now.”
“Really?” I said, taking a step closer. “What’s he up to?”
“Something to do with the investigation, Anna. He flew to Toronto earlier today – yesterday now. We don’t expect him back until the beginning of next week.” I stared at Steve, waiting for more details, but he shook his head. “I don’t know any more than that, Anna, so don’t bother to ask. Look, I’ll pass Karen’s information onto Tremaine, and we’ll let him take it from there. Go on home and get some sleep. You did good, kid.” He grinned at me and I smiled back at him.
“You’re pretty cute, calling me ‘kid,’ you juvenile delinquent,” I said.
He rubbed the top of my head, mussing my hair. “Night, Anna. And thanks.”
“Night, Steve,” I said. It felt like things were back on an even keel between us as I headed out to the parking lot.
On the drive home, I realized that Karen could have killed Jack, too, now that she no longer had an alibi. Maybe she had fallen in love with him and seen him as her solution to an unhappy marriage, until she found out that Jack was messing around with Amy. You never know what someone is capable of when it comes to love and jealousy. So, now we were back to three suspects: Karen, Connie, and Jessie. I started to get excited, but restrained myself. I would stick to my resolution. This was police business, and I was going to let them figure it out without any help from me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I was pretty exhausted at work on Friday and went to bed early that night. After a good sleep, I called Frieda the next morning about my promised visit. She told me to come on over that afternoon. I arrived a few hours later bearing a chocolate hazelnut torte, a special recipe of my grandmother’s, as a thank you gift. Frieda licked her lips and insisted that we cut into the cake right then and there. She made a pot of tea, and we sat down in wooden rocking chairs with the cake between us on a beautiful green and blue bubble glass-topped table.
I looked around the sunny cabin while Frieda cut into the cake, noticing an easel and some canvases leaning on the wall next to the kitchen. Of course – Frieda was an artist. I should have guessed that with her spiked red hair, avant-garde clothes, and one-of-a-kind jewellery, but I had been too worried about Tremaine on the day of the accident. Today she wore a necklace of chunky wooden cubes and discs painted in bright primary colours.
We rehashed the accident, which naturally led to talk of Tremaine. I discovered that Frieda’s attitude toward Tremaine and me was not all that different from Amy’s.
“So, have you seen Charlie then?” she asked. “You two looked pretty cozy together in bed when I came back with the ambulance attendants.”
“No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t,” I said in a casual tone. I glanced at a bouquet of beautiful red roses on her kitchen counter. “Aren’t those roses lovely,” I added, trying to change the subject.
“Yes, they’re very beautiful,” she replied. “Charlie brought them, along with a bottle of French brandy. He visited me the day after he got out of the hospital, so I guess he likes me better than you.”
“I guess so,” I said, managing a smile. “What di
d you two talk about?”
“Oh, he came to thank me for helping him, and also to talk about my neighbour, Jessie Wick.”
“And what did you tell him about her?”
“That in the three years I have lived here, I have never seen Jessie bring anyone to her house. She is a very private person – a loner, you might say. Still, she’s a good neighbour. She keeps her property tidy, never has noisy parties, and pays her share of the winter ploughing even though she doesn’t come here very much in the winter. I have no complaints.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “You know that Jessie’s a stuntwoman, right? A friend of mine who’s working on the same movie tells me that Jessie enjoys male companionship. She stays at her brother’s ranch from time to time, but I can’t see Jessie entertaining men friends there. If she doesn’t bring them to her cabin, where does she meet them?”
Frieda shrugged. “I have no idea, Anna. Speaking of entertaining men, what about you and Charlie?”
I sighed at the clumsy change of topic. Frieda was like a dog with a stick – she just wouldn’t let go. “Nothing about Tremaine and me, Frieda. He’s investigating my ex-husband’s murder, for heaven’s sake. Not too long ago, he even said that I was the prime suspect.”
“I don’t believe he really thinks that. It makes no sense. If you were the murderer, why would you bother to save him when you could have let him drown? I wouldn’t have known what was going on if I hadn’t heard you screaming.”
“I hope he feels the same way,” I replied.
“He’s a very nice man, Anna, and good-looking, too. I think that he is fond of you. Why don’t you give him a tumble?”
I sighed. “He doesn’t act as if he’s fond of me, and he’s nine years younger than I am. Why does everyone keep pushing me at Tremaine?”
Frieda sniffed. “What’s nine years? I’m almost sixty, and I wouldn’t mind his Birkenstocks under my bed.”