She’d been watching the news about Lucinda Cruz, too. Seeing someone’s dead body makes you form some kind of connection to them.
“You know the guy they arrested? He’s my ex-husband.” I didn’t feel like going into the whole ex-or-not-ex issue.
“You’re kidding!”
“He couldn’t have done it, though. I mean, I know everyone says that about people they know, but seriously…if Tony didn’t kill me while we were married, he’s simply not capable of killing anyone.”
Viv laughed and slapped the steering wheel. “Know what you mean! I gave a couple of mine a decent case for justifiable homicide, myself. Why do they think he did it?”
“No idea. That’s what I’m trying to find out.” I told her about the cleaning company that Tony owned, and how Lucinda worked for him.
“Oh, I know. I watch the news.”
Of course she did. I nodded and felt like a goof.
“I guess it’s got something to do with their working relationship, then,” I said lamely.
“I’m sure. It’s a double shame if he is innocent. That kind of accusation can ruin a person's life, even if they are exonerated.” She took her hands off the wheel and made air quotes. The car shot to the right and almost clipped the curb before she swung it back to the left edge of the lane. “How do you think this is going to affect his relationship with the church, or with any of his clients, for that matter?”
I frowned as I hung onto the armrest for all I was worth. I hadn't thought that far ahead.
“Do you think people in this church are going to stand for an accused murderer working up here after hours, with keys to all the rooms? What about the offices and banks he cleans? Who's going to trust his company after this?”
“He cleans offices and banks, too?”
“That’s what The Journal said.”
Well, that was why she knew more than I did. The Lubbock Journal cost fifty cents, whereas television – where I got my news – was free.
“What else did The Journal say?”
“Just that the girl, whatever her name is –”
“Lucinda Cruz.”
“Right, Lucinda, it said she came from Mexico about six months ago, and went to work for Solis' company about six weeks ago, cleaning offices and the church and a couple of other places.”
So, I hadn't destroyed Tony’s life too completely. It sounded like he'd found a way to be successful, despite my interference.
“Did the paper say anything about her? The girl? Like if she had any enemies or anything? What she did before she went to work for Tony?”
“I don't think so.” She pulled up in front of the church and barely grazed the sidewalk with one tire. A successful landing.
“Do you still have the article?” I was really curious about Tony. I'd seen different people around, emptying wastebaskets and shampooing carpets. I wondered why I'd never seen him.
“I'll look. I hope Louise Murtz hasn't been messing around with my music again. She always goes in there and fiddles with my stuff till I can't find a blasted thing.”
I got out of the car and hefted Stump with me.
“Cute dog,” Viv said. “She's good natured. I like dogs.”
“Maybe you could tell my grandmother that. She thinks Stump is constantly on the verge of doing something stinky.”
Viv clucked and rubbed Stump's ears. Stump thumped her leg, which was a bit awkward for me since her leg was against my ribs at the moment. “Nothing stinky about this sweetheart.”
“Viv, would you mind doing me a favor?” I asked as we walked up the sidewalk. “If you're not in too big a hurry, I mean.”
“Of course.”
“Would you mind talking to George for me? He doesn't seem all that comfortable with me –”
“It's just because you got so irate about the coffee.”
“All I said was it was a little strong.”
Viv raised an eyebrow.
“I swear. Anyway, would you mind asking him if he could show us around where the police were looking? I’m afraid if I ask him he'll think I'm up to no good.”
“Mmm-hhhmm. And what are you up to?”
I sighed. “I don't even know. Trying to figure out a way to help Tony. I’m worried about him and I want to find some way to help him.”
“Well, I'll admit I’d like to have a look myself, just for curiosity’s sake. If there's some reason we can't, George will just tell us no and that will be the end of that.”
She marched to George's office with me following in her Shalimar-scented wake, wondering if the pantsuit she wore actually cost as much as it looked like. She tapped on George's door, and within twenty seconds we had the go-ahead to go into any room in the church except the offices. George looked taken aback when he saw that I held Stump.
“I hope it’s okay if I carry my dog with me,” I said. “It’s too hot to leave her in the car. I won’t put her down.”
George looked uncomfortable. “Well…’
“Of course it’ll be fine,” Viv said. She patted George’s arm. “If anyone asks, we’ll just say she’s a seeing-eye dog. Where do we start?”
“Ummm,” George said. “Yes, well…” He looked from me to Viv, then back at Stump, lying like a slug in my arms. “Okay, yes. First, we’ll go to the storeroom.”
He led us to a squeaky elevator and pushed the down button. I was a little dismayed. I didn't go to the basement much because it was creepy and cavernous, and I knew myself well enough to know what places I need to avoid if I didn’t want to give myself a heart attack. I wasn't comfortable being down there even with Viv and George right beside me. I hugged Stump and she grumbled. George eyed her as if she was about to attack him.
He led us down a few dark linoleum-tiled hallways and around dark corners. “The police were in here a lot, of course,” he said as he stopped at a solid metal door and pulled out a large ring of keys. The door opened onto a room full of equipment: floor buffers, carts with wastebaskets and cleaning equipment, electrical cords, and mops and brooms.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. A murder weapon. A clue that would be obvious to me, but that the police had overlooked. I knew, of course, that was unlikely. In my experience, only the police in movies are that dumb.
Viv and I walked around the room for a minute, as if we knew what we were looking for. I started to get depressed again, and shifted Stump to my other hip. I hoped Tony’s cleaning business clients included some good lawyers.
“Where all did the police look, George?” Viv asked, poking her way around a floor buffer.
“Oh, the whole building.”
“That must have taken a while.”
He shrugged. “A couple of hours. I went with them and unlocked all the doors as we went. Most of the time they were in here and then out on the stairwell.” He nodded toward another sturdy metal door on the opposite side of the closet.
I hadn’t realized we were on the other side of the wall from where the body had been found. “Can we – can we go out there? Please,” I remembered to say, so George wouldn’t think I’d demanded it.
He shrugged again. “That detective told me they had all they needed and we were free to go, so I suppose it would be okay.” He pulled the key ring from his pants pocket again.
“The detective, was it Detective Sloan?”
George’s face went slack with panic, like a kid who’d just been called on in class for an answer he didn’t know.
“Tall, dark hair, nose a little crooked?” Chest like a marble slab? Cute dimples that stretch an inch-and-a-half long when he laughs?
George nodded. “Yes, that was him!” He breathed a sigh of relief.
I smiled brilliantly at him and I wished I had a gold star to put on his forehead. It wasn’t as if this was revelatory information, since I already knew Bobby was working this case, but he seemed so pleased with himself for being able to answer.
Stump was getting heavy again, and I wished I could put her down, but I wa
s afraid poor George would have a stroke. I shifted her again and rubbed her ears. “Did he talk to you about the investigation at all?”
“Well, ummm, ahh, no, no, not really. Not much. Just, ‘What’s through that door?’ ‘Who uses this office?’ Stuff like that. They asked for the surveillance tapes and what we knew about the, ummm, the girl.” He inclined his head toward the door. Then he brightened, as if remembering something. “But I did hear him telling another officer that it looked like the murder had taken place in this room and then she’d been dragged outside, because there were marks in the dust or something.”
I nodded. Everything looked clean to me, but I supposed the crime scene guys knew how to find clues.
I shook my head. “I don’t know why, but I had it in my head that she was thrown from the bell tower.”
“I’m so sorry,” George said. “I don’t believe that’s – well, as I understood things that’s not the way it happened, but of course the police might be wrong, they are sometimes, you know, but from what I heard…” He trailed off, the panic back in his eyes. He glanced again at Stump and inched toward the door.
“I’m sure the police know more than I do –”
“Well, I don’t know about that –”
“I just had that picture in my mind from the first, you know, because her neck was all crooked like it was broken, I suppose.”
“That’s funny, that’s the same thing I thought,” Viv said. “Shoot. I hoped we’d get to go up in the bell tower and look around.”
George’s eyes got wide. “Oh, you can’t go up there.” He snapped his mouth shut and looked at me as if he was about to cry. “I am truly, truly sorry. The trustees have strictly forbidden me from letting anyone up there. It’s the trustees. Believe me, if it were up to me, I would take you up there in a heartbeat.” He put his hand over his heart. “On my life, I would take you up there.”
Viv stepped close and put her arm around George. “You are just the sweetest thing! Don't worry about it, hon, we were just talking. Nobody blames you.”
George looked both relieved, and shocked that Viv was hugging him. He threw a glance over at me to make sure I wasn't going to pick up a mop and bean him. I smiled and nodded. Geez, what was it with this guy? I was beginning to wonder if maybe I'd done something to him when I was drinking, too.
“We'll just quit playing amateur detective and get out of your hair,” Viv said. “Thank you so much for showing us around.”
“Oh, anytime. As long as it not someplace that's off limits, like that bell tower, why, you just ask and I'm there. Anytime. I mean it. Any time.” He blushed and backed up again, bumping into the door.
“Well, I doubt we'll need to do any more investigating. As I'm sure you can understand, this situation has been weighing heavily on our minds and we've become a bit preoccupied with it all. But it's not as if we're going to solve the mystery by looking around the basement storeroom.”
“I suppose not,” George said with a laugh as we left the room. “Although believe me, you're not the first ones to be preoccupied with this. As you can imagine, we've been getting all kinds of calls. It's all anyone can talk about.”
I tagged after them, thanking George as we left him at his office. I wasn't ready to go yet, but Viv was right. It wasn't as if we were really going to discover anything. I'd hoped that something would have leapt out at me, but it didn't look that way.
I dragged after Viv, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my day. I needed to see if I could get something done about my car, but I put that off because I knew there was going to be no good news in that direction. I was debating whether or not to try and hike up to Flo’s so I could arrange a ride to work the next morning when Viv ducked suddenly into a dark alcove along the hallway and yanked me after her.
I yelped as I bumped into the wall behind her. “What - ?”
“Look what I got!” She held out her hand, where George's keys rested. “Can you believe it? After all these years, I've still got it!” Her bony fingers clutched around the keys and she shook her hand in triumph. “He didn't feel a thing, did he?”
Chapter Six
I blinked. “Viv? Did you –?” My jaw dropped, and I stared at the keys in her hand.
She giggled and pressed her hands against mine. “Shhh. Don't look like that, it's not as if I took his wallet, although I could have!” She giggled again, enough triumphant light in her eyes to bring a glow to the dark recess where we hid. “I'll bet anything I could have.”
She heaved a great satisfied sigh and smoothed her jacket. “Well now, that felt good. I haven't had a thrill like that in years. So are we going up or not?” She leaned around me to peer down the hallway.
I was too stunned by the revelation that she was a pickpocket to grasp what she was asking.
“Going up where?”
“To the bell tower, of course. Why else would I have lifted his keys? You heard him yourself. He would let us in any other room in the building.”
I wasn't quite sure what to say. I wanted to feel around the edge of Viv's neck to see if she was an imposter with a Viv mask. “I can't believe you took his keys and he didn't even know it. I didn’t know it, and I was standing right there.”
“Smooth as butter, that's what they always used to say about me. Buttercup was my nickname.” She raised her brows and gave an unabashedly proud grin. “Come on.”
“Don’t you have choir rehearsal to get to?” I asked. She ignored me. Clearly, she had more interesting things on her agenda.
It only took three false starts before Viv found the right key to get us into the stairwell.
I don't know what I was expecting, something gothic and majestic, I suppose. The door opened onto a small group of rooms – two offices and a teeny bathroom, all with rotten orange carpet and used-to-be-white walls. More stairs led up to another level. Every inch within view, with the exception of a narrow path through the middle, was full of junk: old desks, filing cabinets, cardboard boxes ripped at the corner and spilling out the sides.
I looked around, disillusioned. “This is what the trustees have forbidden people to see?”
Viv was already halfway up the first set of switchback stairs. “Probably they don't want people to see what a mess it is in here.”
I could relate to that.
For an old lady, Viv could scurry up the stairs pretty darned quickly. I was huffing to keep up with her. The stairs were steep and narrow, switching back every ten steps, and my tight pants were not making this easy. Every other set of stairs opened onto an identical set of offices, with a nearly identical mess.
My legs felt like logs after the third set of stairs. The third story had even more junk, if that was possible. Two long racks held play costumes – or else someone just had bizarre taste in clothes – and boxes full of fabric of some sort, blankets or draperies or something.
“Must be the stuff from the church's big musical,” Viv said.
I knew they put on a play every year, but I had never gone. Tickets were forty bucks a pop.
“This place is a disaster area,” I said, flipping through costumes on wire hangers. I shifted Stump and tugged at the waistband of my jeans. All the exertion seemed to be stretching them some, but they were still uncomfortable. “Someone could murder eight or ten people up here and no one would ever know.”
There was another door at the top of this set of stairs, and after rattling the knob, Viv pulled out her set of stolen keys. I waited on the steps and tried to appear like I wasn’t breathing hard.
It dawned on me that Viv picking George’s pocket was, of course, illegal. Since I knew about it and hadn't done anything, I was either an accessory or an accomplice. Plus I was now probably trespassing; not good for someone on probation.
“Are we sure we want to do this?” I said. “I really don’t need to be in any more trouble.”
Viv waved a hand carelessly. “You only get in trouble if you get caught, and we’re not going to get caught.�
�
She opened the door onto a stone-walled room without interior walls. It was the same size as the office suites we’d just moved through – these rooms made up a five- or six-story bell tower – but this section looked bigger because it was open. At about every story level, window openings a foot wide and four feet long cut into the walls. The openings were covered with a wire mesh on the inside and white shutters on the outside. The ceiling hung a good three stories above us, and a single spiral staircase stretched through the center of the room. The staircase had a disturbingly rusty quality to it.
“We're going up there, aren't we?” I said, somewhat fatalistically. I tugged again at my jeans.
“I didn't pick George's pocket so I could look at old costumes from The King and I.”
She darted up the stairs like a squirrel racing up the trunk of a tree. I looked at Stump who, since we were so far off the ground, now weighed about a thousand pounds. She looked at me. “We wanted to do this,” I reminded her, as if this had been partly her idea.
I heaved a sigh and followed after Viv, feeling even more like Jabba the Hut as I dragged one stiff leg after another up the metal risers. I had to keep Stump tucked under my left arm so I could hold onto the skinny metal handrail with my right.
About halfway up, the stairs began to sway a little. Not as if they were crashing over, exactly, but enough to be alarming. I looked down and readjusted my estimation that it was three stories. It had to be at least five.
“Kind of wobbly, isn't she?” Viv called down to me. It didn't sound like she was even breathing hard.
I, on the other hand, was certain I was having a heart attack either from the exertion or the fear of the whole staircase coming undone at the top and crashing me into one of those brick walls.
I looked up and felt a sinking in my stomach when I realized we still had a long way to go. Ever one to look on the negative side, I mentally ran through all the scenarios that could possible play out here. The stairs really could come loose at the ceiling and topple over. There would be an investigation, of course, which would conclude that Viv and I had stolen the keys and entered a “forbidden area,” and that I had exceeded the weight limit of the stairs, causing them to come crashing down, costing the church a huge sum in repairs and landing me in jail for probation violation. Or, I could give way to the panic building inside me until I cowered, frozen on the risers, and Viv would have to call 911 and firemen would come, television crews would appear, the shutters and wire would be taken off those big openings and they'd haul me out in a cherry picker, the same way they got the big carillon bells inside. Again, Viv and I would be caught with the stolen keys, and I would go to jail.
The Middle Finger of Fate (A Trailer Park Princess Cozy Mystery Book 1) Page 10