Twice Told Tail

by Ali Brandon

  “We can get Jake to help with that,” Darla agreed. “She was waiting for things to settle down a bit with Reese and all his people before going over there, anyhow. And I’ll be sure to let Mary Ann know that if she needs help with any of the arrangements over the next few days, one of us will be glad to step in.”

  Leaving James to check his online book sales, Darla made her way upstairs to the empty coffee lounge. She found Robert there slumped in one of the bistro chairs. Hamlet was perched at full length on the table near him. With his front paws tucked beneath his chest and long tail wrapped tightly about him, he looked like a small black sphinx as he studied the young barista through narrowed green eyes.

  Darla did a little studying herself—of Hamlet, not of Robert. Had the cat predicted Mr. Plinski’s death with his book snagging the day before? Or had it been nothing more than a sad coincidence? Hamlet didn’t seem inclined to elaborate on the subject, however, but instead kept his focus on Robert.

  Dismissing her uncertainty for now, Darla pulled out the chair opposite the pair and sat. “Hey, how are you doing?” she softly inquired of Robert.

  The youth lifted red-rimmed eyes to meet hers, the black kohl he normally wore now smeared as if he’d rubbed a hand across it. His expression was haunted—not in an angsty teen attempt to appear put-upon, but in true adult grief.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said in a choked voice. “I mean, I know Mr. P. was old and stuff, but I just talked to him this morning and he was fine. How can he be dead?”

  “Oh, Robert, I know it sounds cliché, but it was his time. Sometimes people just wear out,” she told him. “I saw him, and it looked like he’d gone to sleep. He was in his own store doing what he enjoyed, so if you have to die, that’s probably the best way to go.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  He pulled a paper napkin from the holder on the table and wiped his eyes, smearing the kohl even more. Then, giving Hamlet a pat, he rallied a little.

  “He could have, you know, had to go off to one of those old-people homes and die there. So this is okay, I suppose. But I’m sure going to miss him. He was really smart and all.”

  “Yes, he was. And remember, Mary Ann is going to need us, so we need to be thinking of her, too. I’m going to see if she’ll stay with me or Jake, at least for tonight. Can I count on you to join us for a while and help keep her company?”

  “Yeah, sure, Ms. P. I’ll need to check on Roma first, though . . . you know, feed her and walk her.”

  “How about you bring the pup up to my apartment with you after you’re done? I know that Mary Ann likes her, and maybe some of Roma’s doggie antics will help take her mind off things for a bit.”

  At Robert’s eager nod, she finished, “I’ll text James with the plan when I’ve confirmed with Mary Ann, and he’ll let you know what’s going on when. I’m heading back over to Bygone Days now. You can stay here with James and Hamlet as long as you like.”

  She gave Hamlet a scritch and then left the stoic feline to serve as confidant to the youth. Once downstairs again, she told James as she headed toward the door, “This shouldn’t take long with Reese. There’s not much to tell.”

  Making another swift, coatless run through the freezing outside air, she hurried back to the antiques store. A funeral home vehicle was now parked on the street in front of the building, causing the afternoon traffic to have to swerve around it. She shuddered, and not just from the cold. She’d hoped to miss this part of the process, seeing the old man wheeled away.

  A uniformed officer she recognized from earlier stood just inside the shop’s doorway. He nodded to her to come inside, and she gratefully rushed in out of the cold. She heard a murmur of male voices, and then Reese strode over to her.

  “Darla.” He greeted her with a nod. “Let’s step over here so we can talk.”

  “Where’s Mary Ann?”

  “I sent her down to Jake’s. We’re not ready to release the place yet, and I didn’t want her stuck in the middle of all this.”

  Darla frowned. The way Reese was talking, it was almost like he was treating the place as an actual crime scene, rather than simply dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s necessary for a natural death. Certainly, nothing she’d seen had made her think anything suspicious was going on. Couldn’t he stop being a cop about things just this once?

  “And Connie?” she persisted.

  His words took on an impatient note. “I got her statement already, so I called a car for her and sent her home. End of roll call?”

  Darla shot him an angry look . . . because if she didn’t get mad, chances were that she’d burst out in tears instead. “Just checking on my friends,” she clipped out. “I want to be sure all of them are doing okay under the circumstances.”

  “Sorry, Red.” His attitude momentarily softened. “I get it. Believe me, I hate like hell having to be here. Why don’t you sit”—he gestured to one of the two ladder-back chairs that had been moved into the aisle in an impromptu conversational group—“and we’ll get this over with.”

  She sniffled, nodded, and then sat.

  He pulled out a notebook from his jacket pocket. “What time did you arrive here at the store? Tell me what happened, starting from the minute you walked in the door.”

  Darla complied—leaving out, of course, her whole inner debate about her ex-husband’s email and how she should respond to it.

  “Connie was the one who found him,” she said when she got to that part, to clarify. “I heard her scream, and I ran over to see what was wrong. I don’t know if she told you what happened in the bridal shop yesterday, when that girl fainted. I thought she was just being dramatic again, until I took a good look at him.”

  She couldn’t tell from Reese’s expression if Connie had filled him in on the bridal shop incident or not, but it likely didn’t matter, for all he said was, “Did you touch Mr. Plinski . . . move him, at all?”

  Darla nodded. “I-I touched his shoulder to see if he was sleeping. But when I realized he wasn’t . . .”

  She trailed off momentarily to take a steadying breath. “When I knew he was dead, I backed away and told Connie to call you. Neither of us touched anything after that. We were headed to the front door like you told us, when we heard the bells ringing. Mary Ann walked in. I tried to keep her talking until you got here, but Connie accidentally blabbed, so I had to tell her—Mary Ann—everything.”

  He nodded. “It’s okay; you did good. Now let’s talk about what you saw around Mr. Plinski. There was some kind of weird ceramic dish that looked like a pie sitting on the counter. Any idea what that is?”

  “That was mine,” Darla told him, smiling a little. “I was planning to buy it and I set it down there when I went to check Mr. Plinski.”

  “Fair enough. Now how about that pillow on his lap . . . was it there when you found him?”

  “Yes.”

  Darla sobered again as she nodded. How could she ever forget that uncannily prescient example of needlework propped on the old man’s knees like a grisly billboard? But why would Reese care about a pillow?

  “You’re sure about that?” he persisted. “You didn’t maybe pick it up off the floor and prop it on his lap before you realized, well, you know.”

  “No. Why, what’s important about it?”

  But rather than answering that question, he asked her something even more disconcerting. “What do you know about Mary Ann’s friend, Rodger Camden?”

  It took her a moment to figure out just who Reese meant.

  “You mean Hodge? All I know is what Mary Ann told me last night. He was her boyfriend back in high school, and apparently, there was some sort of falling-out between him and Mr. Plinski. She broke up with him, and they just reconnected a couple of months ago.”

  “Mr. Camden initiated this reunion?”

  “Actually, she found him. From what Mary An
n told me, she hadn’t seen the man for decades until she got some kind of wild hair and tracked him down on social media. And they’ve been a couple again ever since.”

  “Uh-huh,” he replied, pausing to scribble a note. Then, fixing her with a bland blue gaze, he asked, “And you’ve met Mr. Camden?”

  “Just once, when she brought him by the bookstore to introduce him. But she wasn’t making a huge production about it.” Not like a certain future Mrs. Fiorello Reese, she thought with a mental roll of her eyes.

  “So, this falling-out thing. What did Mary Ann tell you about Mr. Camden’s relationship with Mr. Plinski?”

  “Nothing, really. She indicated there was some sort of bad blood, but I think it was just an old high school rivalry.” By this point, suspicion was taking hold. Frowning, she added, “Reese, is there something about Mr. Plinski’s death you’re not telling me?”

  “Just covering all the bases,” was his noncommittal reply. Then, in what seemed to her a deliberately casual manner, he added, “You still have those exterior security cameras at the bookstore?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “Just checking. I was kind of surprised when Mary Ann told me she didn’t have any cameras here in the shop. I thought most antiques stores had a whole bank of cameras to watch for shoplifters.”

  She nodded. “Most of the ones I’ve been in do. I asked Mary Ann about it one time. She said she and Mr. Plinski thought having cameras all through the store was too unfriendly. Most of the really valuable things were either in cases, or else too big to sneak out with, and she said she’d rather lose a few cheap collectibles than make her regulars feel like she didn’t trust them.”

  “Too bad,” he muttered, and it occurred to Darla that what he was looking for was a recording of the events leading up to Mr. Plinski’s death. The idea made her shudder . . . made her wonder why he seemed to be making a federal case of an old man’s passing from natural causes.

  “Reese, you’re really starting to make me nervous,” she told him. “What’s with all these questions? I mean, poor Mr. Plinski was eighty years old. Is it really so strange that he might have had a stroke or heart attack?”

  “You know the drill, Red. We cops don’t make the determination as to cause of death.”

  He’d explained this more times than she’d cared to remember over the past year and a half—something to the effect that, unless the departed died with a doctor holding his or her hand, the death was treated as suspicious until determined otherwise. But surely the cause of death here was more than obvious.

  And yet Reese was asking about security cameras . . . and about Mary Ann’s friend Hodge.

  Abruptly, Darla recalled the shadowy figure she and Hamlet had seen outside the antiques store the previous night. At the time, she’d dismissed it—him?—as a passerby grabbing a smoke. Could somebody—Hodge?—have been scoping out Bygone Days for some reason? She tried to recall what she could of the unknown person’s size and shape. It could have been Hodge. On the other hand, it could have been half the people in Brooklyn. Either way, it made no sense that some late-night skulker was tied into Mr. Plinski’s death.

  She debated a moment longer about mentioning what she’d seen, and then decided against it. Reese would probably just dismiss her misgivings as her and Hamlet’s imagination, having little respect as he did for Hamlet’s sleuthing instinct.

  Instead, she asked, “Anything else, Detective?”

  Reese gave her a slanted look as he flipped the notebook shut. “That’s it for now, but I might want to look at those camera recordings later. Will you be there?”

  “I shut the store down for the day. James and Robert are still there doing busywork, but I don’t think any of us are up to dealing with customers. Before I go back, though, I’m going to stop at Jake’s place and talk to Mary Ann. I think she should stay with me or Jake tonight.”

  “Good idea.” He stood and gestured her toward the door. “Do me a favor, would you, and don’t say anything to her about me asking you about this Camden character. She might get the wrong impression, know what I mean?”

  Or she might give Hodge a heads-up that he is on Reese’s radar, was Darla’s thought. But she would go along with his request and wouldn’t tell the old woman anything. Mary Ann had enough to deal with without worrying that her boyfriend had attracted the detective’s notice.

  Darla gave Reese an absent nod as she plunged again into the cold. At least Mary Ann would be in good hands with Jake, since the ex-cop-turned-PI had experience in dealing with the recently bereaved. Hurrying past the wrought iron railing with the sign “Martelli Investigations” bolted to it, she ran down the few steps to Jake’s garden apartment and swiftly knocked on the door. Barely waiting for the other woman’s “Come in,” she rushed inside and shut the door behind her.

  Jake’s garden apartment boasted an open floor plan similar to Darla’s, with a single large space serving as a combination living room, dining room . . . and now, as the office for Jake’s detective agency. The place was a study in Mid-Century Modern that always reminded Darla of old television sitcoms. From what Jake had told her, the apartment’s previous tenant had left behind a mishmash of old furniture dating from that era.

  Rather than hauling it all to the curb, however, Jake had embraced the style. She’d methodically continued the decorating in that same vein with finds from various thrift shops, changing up a piece here or there when she got bored with it. From the chrome dinette table with a red Formica top that served as her desk, to the mod floor-to-ceiling lamp with its three shades that looked like melted red plastic bowls, the décor had a funky kitschy look that usually made Darla smile.

  No one was smiling now, however. Handkerchief to her eyes, Mary Ann huddled in a turquoise leather tufted club chair—one of Jake’s more recent acquisitions—looking smaller and frailer than Darla had ever seen her. Jake was walking out from behind the trifold red lacquered screen that divided the living area from the galley kitchen, a steaming blue-flowered teacup and saucer in hand. She gave Darla an acknowledging nod and then addressed Mary Ann.

  “Sorry, the only tea I have is the bedtime kind,” she said, indicating the tea bag perched on the saucer as she set the beverage on a glass-topped end table. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “Fine, dear,” the old woman murmured, tucking away her handkerchief. She dunked the tea bag into the hot water and then glanced Darla’s way.

  “Oh, hello, dear. Have you finished talking with Detective Reese?”

  “We’re finished,” Darla told her, not wanting to worry her by mentioning that he still wanted to review the bookstore’s security camera recordings. “I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be investigating, though. But Reese agrees it would be a good idea if you stay with me or Jake tonight.”

  “We already talked about that,” Jake interjected. “She’ll stay here tonight, and we’ll see how things are in the morning.”

  Darla nodded. That way, Mary Ann wouldn’t have to navigate the two flights of stairs up to Darla’s apartment. But that still left the matter of Robert. While the old woman sipped at her tea, Darla gestured Jake over.

  “Robert’s pretty upset over all of this,” she murmured. “I didn’t want to send him home all alone to his place, and I know he wants to talk to Mary Ann. Before I knew the plan, I was going to have him and maybe James join me and her for supper. But if you don’t mind, maybe we can move the gathering over here. I can whip up a quick casserole to bring over.”

  “Sure, kid, that sounds fine. I’ve got some stuff in the fridge we can add to it. And a couple of bottles of wine if we need some fortifying.”

  She sighed, looking weary all at once. Darla reminded herself that Jake, too, had known the Plinskis for several years.

  “I’d appreciate the company myself,” the PI conceded in a low voice. “This has been tough on all of us, and I’m afraid things wil
l get morbid if it’s just me and Mary Ann trying not to talk about what happened.”

  “Great. Let me run back to the apartment and start throwing things together. We’ll all meet back here at, what, five?”

  “Sure, but give me a few minutes first to run over to Mary Ann’s place and see if Reese will let me pick up some things for her tonight. She gave me a list, and I’ve got her spare keys.”

  While the PI made a quick exit, Darla took a seat on the short leather sofa across from Mary Ann and gently asked, “Can I get you more hot water, or anything else?”

  “Really, my dear, you don’t have to treat me like an invalid,” she replied in a quavering voice. “This is a terrible shock, but at my age I’ve outlived plenty of friends and family. This is hardly my first brush with death.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I promise, I’m not trying to patronize you,” Darla told her in chagrin. “But I’m glad you’re taking Jake up on her offer to stay here tonight. I’m going to cook us supper and bring it over here. Robert will come with me . . . James, too.”

  “That’ll be nice, dear.”

  Mary Ann took another sip of tea, then abruptly set her cup back into its saucer with a clatter.

  “Oh, Darla, I don’t know what to do,” she cried. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Jake, because she would feel obligated to say something to Detective Reese. But I’m so worried about Hodge. I think Detective Reese thinks he had something to do with Brother’s death.”

  Then, before Darla could respond to that, the old woman added in a voice so quiet she could barely hear it, “And, Darla, I’m afraid he did, too.”