by Ali Brandon
James, however, was ready to change the subject. “How did Mary Ann hold up getting the estate sale put together?”
“Pretty well. We had to whip out the tissue box a few times, but overall she got through it fine. And I saw some pretty high-ticket items while I was there, so with luck she will make a nice percentage off it.”
“I am pleased to hear that.” Then, frowning a little, he added, “And should I presume Detective Reese has not phoned with any updates?”
Darla shook her head. “We’re talking a total news blackout. Even Mary Ann hasn’t heard anything. But I’m tempted to get hold of him and see if he can tell us something.”
“Then here is your opportunity,” James replied as the bells on the front door jingled. “It appears it will not be necessary to send the mountain to Muhammad.”
Darla was just about to ask him what in the heck that meant, when she turned in the direction of the door and saw a grim-faced Reese stalking toward them.
Bad news, was her first thought. But before she could ask what had happened, he jerked a thumb toward the door and said, “Car’s running. Hurry up and let’s get going.”
“Going? Where?’
Darla felt her stomach clench. Was she being brought in for more questioning about Mr. Plinski’s death? Or maybe Reese needed her to identify a new suspect in a lineup. Whatever their destination, she had a feeling it wasn’t going to end well for her.
And his answer proved her right.
“Today’s Tuesday. Connie’s got her alteration appointment over at the bridal place, remember? Jake bailed on us, so it’s just you. I’ll drop you broads off, but you’ll have to hoof it back.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Hurry up. We’re running late. Grab your stuff, and we’ll meet you in the car.”
Before Darla could finish her objection, Reese was already out the door again, bells jangling in protest at his hurried exit.
Darla turned a helpless look on James. “What the heck? I never said I’d go,” she sputtered. “Maybe she assumed . . . I really don’t want to . . . I mean, do I really have to suck it up and go?”
“Certainly not,” James replied. “But rather than railing at cruel Fate, you can look at this as an opportunity to build a bit of goodwill with Detective Reese by way of his fiancée. And perhaps said goodwill may make him a bit more forthcoming regarding the whole Bernard situation.”
“Maybe. But he can be pretty closemouthed when he wants to be. He’ll probably talk about how revealing evidence is on a need-to-know basis, and that I don’t really need to know.”
Then, as her manager chuckled a bit at that, she went on, “Seriously, it’s a beating doing anything with that woman. All that bragging and complaining can wear a person out . . . and I’m not talking about her being the tired one. If you’ll remember, our first two outings weren’t exactly a picnic, especially the second.”
“Then perhaps your third excursion will be the lucky one,” James reassured her. “And if I get too busy down here, Robert can always leave the coffee bar temporarily and lend a hand.”
“You’re supposed to tell me that you can’t possibly spare me,” Darla grumbled, even as she reached beneath the counter for her purse.
“Might as well take this with me, too,” she added, pulling out her copy of The Marble Faun and sticking it in her bag. “At least I’ll be able to get in some reading.”
Grabbing her heavier coat off the rack and checking to make sure she had both scarf and gloves, she gave James a sour wave good-bye and headed out of the store.
Reese was waiting at the curb alongside his illegally parked sedan, looking like a presidential bodyguard ready to hustle her into the backseat of the vehicle. But before he opened the door, he stopped her with a hand to her arm.
“I really appreciate you coming along,” he told her, sounding fractionally less impatient than before. “I know this whole situation with Mr. Plinski has been pretty tough on all of you, so it means a lot that you made the time to do this for Connie.”
“Sure, I’m glad to,” she responded, feeling a bit guilty for her small tirade to James a few moments earlier. In the scheme of things, what was an hour or so spent doing a favor for a friend? Or, rather, the fiancée of a friend? Still, she intended to collect on her part of the bargain she’d made with him . . . not that the detective actually knew anything about said bargain.
“Look, Reese,” she said in a rush as he reached toward the car’s door handle. “I haven’t called or texted you since the other night with Jake, since I knew you were busy investigating Mr. Plinski’s murder. But all of us are getting pretty nervous knowing that Mr. Plinski’s murderer hasn’t been caught yet. Can you tell me anything about what’s going on?”
“No.”
He opened the door and gestured her inside. Biting back her retort to that negative monosyllable, she climbed in and slid over so that she was behind the driver’s seat.
As Reese closed the door after her, Connie spun around in her seat to look at her, her expression one of exaggerated relief.
“Oh, Darla, thank Gawd you can make it,” she said with a pop of her gum for emphasis. “I was afraid maybe you’d forgotten after . . . well, you know. But I really need you there with me. I’m feeling real nervous now about going places alone, know what I mean?”
Darla felt a sudden surge of sympathy for her, since she’d dealt with similar anxiety after her own past encounter with violent death. While it was easy enough for someone to suggest that one simply get over it, she knew firsthand that the aftermath could be debilitating.
“I get it,” Darla assured her. “It’ll take some time, but that feeling will pass. And if it doesn’t, well, I know Reese—er, Fi—will know someone you can talk to. But let’s try to forget that for now and just concentrate on how great you’re going to look in that dress.”
By now, Reese had opened his door and slipped into the driver’s seat. Connie flipped back around to face him, giving him a sly little pout.
“I am gonna look great in that dress,” she told him. “Too bad you can’t see it in person until I’m heading up the aisle to the altar.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Conn,” he absently said as he signaled and pulled out into traffic. “You look good in anything, you know that.”
The pout became a bit more genuine, but Connie apparently decided her fiancé had more important things on his mind than wedding dresses. Still, she did content herself with a quick aside—“Well, just wait ’til you see what I bought for our wedding night”—before settling in for the brief ride.
By the time they pulled up to Davina’s Bridal a few short minutes later, Darla had decided to try breaking through the news blackout again. Since she was seated behind Reese, he opened her door first.
She scrambled out and let him shut the door again, then said, “Look, I know this is an active investigation, you can’t talk about it, blah, blah, blah . . . but, bottom line, this murder happened to all of us. Can’t you tell me something about what’s going on?”
“What’s going on,” Reese said as they walked around to Connie’s side, “is that Mary Ann’s boyfriend is still on my radar. I don’t suppose you knew that Camden’s wife died in an accident, and he just collected a nice little insurance settlement.”
The merry widower!
Darla stared at Reese in alarm. Could Doug’s theory have been right, after all? But then she remembered how Hodge had rushed down the stairs that night to protect Mary Ann against a seeming intruder. Surely that wasn’t the work of a man plotting yet another murder. Still, it seemed that at least once a week she read a news story about a husband arranging an “accident” for his spouse, usually to collect on a convenient insurance policy.
“Are you saying you think Hodge had something to do with his wife’s death?” she cautiously asked him.
Reese shrugged as he opened Connie’s door for her. “Insurance company paid up, so I guess they didn’t see any red flags. Is Mary Ann still seeing him, do you know?”
“Yeah, she’s been seeing quite a bit of him.”
She thought about adding, and actually, so have Jake and I. But she didn’t want to embarrass either Hodge or Mary Ann, even indirectly, so she kept her mouth shut. Besides, if Reese still believed Hodge was guilty of murder, he’d be making sure that Mary Ann stayed far from the old man.
Connie, meanwhile, had climbed out of the sedan and was balancing in three-inch-high blue wedge ankle boots. Her designer purse was slung over one shoulder of her leopard-print jacket, and she cradled a fancy shopping bag in which Darla knew were her official heels to go with the wedding gown.
“We gotta go now,” Connie told Reese. “Now, remember, you’ve got to pick us up when we’re done.”
“Text me when you’re done, and if I can break free I’ll swing by and get you girls. If not, just call for a car. Deal?”
“Deal,” she echoed, leaning in to give him a loud smooch on the lips. Turning to Darla, she said, “We better hurry, before someone else tries to take our spot.”
“Connie, go on in,” Reese told her. “I need to talk to Darla a sec.”
The other woman paused, and the look she turned on Darla was—if not exactly suspicious—questioning. Then, with a shrug, she said, “Fine, see you in there.”
He waited until the shop door had closed after her before addressing Darla again.
“All right, I guess I owe you a little something,” he conceded. “Let me see what I can tell you that’s not going to come back and bite me. For starters, I did go through that whole security camera file you downloaded for me. Do you know that in the original two-hour window we looked at, we’ve got nineteen pedestrians caught on video? Twenty-four, if you count the ones who made the return trip. And that’s not including you and Connie.”
“That’s a lot of people to eliminate from the list, I guess. Did anyone else have cameras filming the street?”
Reese shook his head as he leaned against his car door, muscular arms crossed over his broad chest, looking even more like a bodyguard.
“Nope. I checked the Plinskis’ neighbor on the other side, but they don’t have cameras, either. The guy across the street does, but the way his is angled, there’s not much view past his sidewalk. But what I’m trying to get to is, when I ran through the whole twelve hours of video, I found something kind of interesting.”
He paused a beat as Darla gave him an expectant look, and then finished, “I caught Mary Ann Plinski getting out of a hired car about seven that morning and heading toward her place.”
“Wait, what?”
Darla stared at him, wondering what in the world could have caused the old woman to be traveling about the city at that time of the morning. And then it hit her. She scrambled a moment for the right words before finally blurting, “Are you trying to say you caught Mary Ann doing the walk of shame the same morning her brother was murdered?”
“Kind of looks like it,” he replied, and to Darla’s surprise he didn’t look even faintly amused. “I haven’t gotten the records from the car service back yet, but chances are she was picked up from Rodger Camden’s place.”
“Wow.”
Though, of course, the revelation shouldn’t have been that surprising, since she and Jake had already caught Mary Ann and Hodge in flagrante, as the old woman had put it. She added a silent You go, girl! And then it occurred to her that she probably owed Reese a bit of clarity on that last.
“Did Jake tell you that Hodge was at Mary Ann’s Saturday night when we stopped by?”
“Yeah, she said it got interesting.”
His dry tone told her that Jake had shared at least some of the gory details, sparing her having to tell him about their elderly friend’s sex life. Then, since the conversation had started to get off track, she brought it back on line. “Maybe you can keep that part out of the official record. You know, so you don’t embarrass her. But that’s it? You didn’t see any other suspicious people on the video?”
“I didn’t say that.”
With that small bombshell, he paused and glanced toward the door of Davina’s. “You ought to get going. Connie will be waiting on you.”
He straightened and started walking back around to the driver’s side. Darla shot him an incredulous look. “Hold up. You can’t just hint that there’s something else going on and then drop the subject. Who’s this other suspicious person?”
Reese halted near the front of his sedan and turned. Whipping off his sunglasses, he fixed her with a cool blue gaze that sent tingles through her . . . and not the good kind.
“Need-to-know basis, Red. This is still an active police investigation.”
“I understand that. And, Reese, I really need to know.”
She held his gaze for a few moments. Finally, he shook his head and strode back to her so they were standing eye to eye . . . or, rather, eye to chest.
“I’m going to tell you this only because I told you too much already,” he said, lowering his voice even though there were no passersby to listen in. “What I’m about to say isn’t for public consumption. That means no blabbing to Jake or to James or to Robert. Or to the butcher down the street, or to the guy at the newsstand. And, especially, you can’t breathe a word to Mary Ann. Got it?”
“Got it,” was her uneasy reply. Maybe she didn’t want to know . . . especially not if she couldn’t talk about it with someone. Too late now.
“You already know this part. Mary Ann’s official statement was that she left her place around nine the morning her brother was murdered to talk with the estate executor in Queens.”
Darla nodded.
“Well, I did the math on the trip,” he continued. “If she left around nine, with the traffic that morning she’d have had about a forty-five-minute trip. Up and back, that’s an hour and a half. You made the same trip yesterday. Am I right?”
“Pretty close,” she conceded.
Trying to follow what she assumed was Reese’s logic, she did the math herself. Since Mary Ann had been back at Bygone Days a little after eleven, that would have left the old woman a thirty-minute window to discuss the whole estate sale shebang with the executor.
Seemingly reading her thoughts, the detective said, “A half-hour meeting is pretty short for a project like that.”
“But it’s not like this is her first rodeo—her first time handling an estate sale.” She hurriedly translated from the Texanism to Standard English when he gave her a questioning look. “If they’d already done a lot of the work over the phone and by email, maybe that’s all she needed with the guy.”
“Maybe. But it kinda bugged me that she was on such a tight schedule, on that day of all days. Perfect timing, so to speak.”
Darla felt her stomach clench as she realized in a flash just what he was implying. But she was going to make him say it out loud.
“What are you getting at? Mary Ann got home early in the morning after a night out, took a shower and got changed, and left again at nine, while Mr. Plinski was still alive. I still don’t see what’s so suspicious.”
“Darla, I’m a cop. I’m supposed to be suspicious, even when we’re talking about a seventy-five-year-old, really nice lady who I admire a lot. So I got hold of the executor to make sure that she really did meet him. And the guy confirmed she was there.”
Darla heaved a sigh. She’d been there. Who cared about the timetable?
But relief had barely flashed through her when he added, “The problem is, she was there on Thursday morning, not Friday morning.
“Darla, Mary Ann lied about where she was the morning of her brother’s murder.”
FOURTEEN
“Hey, Darla,” Connie called from the door of the bridal shop, “you coming i
n, or you gonna stand there yakking with my fiancé all day? Hurry, they’re bringing out the dress.”
Darla, meanwhile, gave Reese a despairing shake of her head.
“I can’t believe Mary Ann, of all people, lied. I know there has to be a good reason she did that, and I know it had nothing to do with Mr. Plinski. But if she didn’t go meet the executor in Queens, where was she that morning?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.”
He put his hands on her shoulders, and for a fleeting moment she thought he would pull her in for a hug. Instead, he spun her about and gave her a gentle shove forward.
“Go help Connie. I’ll try to stop by the bookstore later today so we can talk again. Remember,” he added as she stumbled toward the door where Connie waited, “not a word to anyone.”
Connie shot her a suspicious look as Reese got into his car and pulled out into traffic. “I heard that. What did he mean, not a word to anyone?” Her suspicious squint deepened. “Is something going on between you two?”
“Of course not,” Darla replied, managing a smile and a slight laugh. Then, thinking quickly, she lowered her voice and said, “Don’t tell him I told you, but he’s planning a little something special for the engagement party on Saturday, and he was getting my opinion on it.”
“O-o-o-oh.”
Her squint turned into a wide-eyed smile. “But what—oh, never mind, it’s more fun if it’s a surprise. I promise, I won’t say anything. And sorry for thinking anything bad about you. Like I said, it’s just nerves.”
“No need to apologize . . . and I’m totally on board with the nerves thing. Come on, let’s get this dress squared away.”
They went inside the bridal shop to be greeted by an unctuous Daniel, dressed in his same uniform of black tuxedo pants and pleated white shirt. Taking Connie by one arm and holding the other out to Darla, he escorted them from the front desk and out onto the showroom floor.
They halted at the same mirrored spot where they’d gathered the first time while Connie did her try-ons.