Sleuthing Women

by Lois Winston

  “You’re letting your imagination run away with you, like you always do. If you’re this worried, you should give this information to Larry and let him track it down. He’s Jim’s lawyer, after all. Or better yet, Mark Anderson.”

  I started to protest, but she held up her hand to silence me. “Having said that, we’ve been best friends forever and you know there’s nothing I won’t do for you. No matter how crazy. So, what do you want me to do?”

  “I know you’re right about telling Larry or the police what I found out today,” I said slowly. “But everything I just told you is pure unsubstantiated gossip. The kind of thing women know instinctively is true, even if it’s unproven. So, I thought we could start by finding out if Davis Rhodes was his real name. I also wondered about the Survival Center building. He must have either bought it or leased it, right? And to do any kind of real estate transaction, he had to sign official papers, and he probably had a real estate agent. That’s where you come in.”

  Nancy’s eyes widened. “Brilliant, Carol. Absolutely brilliant. I’m glad we’re here at the office, because there’s computer software here that I don’t have at home.”

  Nancy plugged in the name of “Rhodes” and did a quick search of all real estate transactions over the past year. Nothing came up.

  “Let’s try this,” Nancy said. “We have a huge database of all the local real estate agents. I’ll send out a blitz email to everybody and find out if anyone handled the transaction. What’s the exact address? And do you have any idea if it’s a business property or a residential property? There are agents who specialize in each.”

  To be on the safe side, Nancy finally decided to email everyone on the database for the property information. “I’m going to ask agents to email me either here or at home, as quickly as possible. I’ve stressed that this is extremely urgent and highly confidential.” She pressed the “Send” icon.

  “You know, I have another idea,” she said. “It’s just possible that Rhodes’s wife also saw a real estate agent while she was here about either renting or buying property. It would certainly help if we at least had a first name, though.”

  “Maria didn’t remember,” I answered. “And she was kind of annoyed that I called her about it.”

  “So what?” Nancy shrugged her shoulders. “You’re her client now. She needs to be nice to you because she wants your business. Call her again.” She held out the phone to me.

  “Oh, no,” I protested. “I’m not calling her.”

  “Stop being a jerk, Carol. This is just like the first day of school when you made me go into the classroom first.”

  Seeing the nervous expression on my face, she relented. “Okay. Give me the phone. I’ll call her.” Five minutes later, through the intercession of I don’t know what saint, we had a first name for Rhodes’s wife.

  “Maria actually apologized for being abrupt with you before,” Nancy said. “I guess she felt bad about that, so she asked the servers who came in to work the dinner shift if anyone remembered the wife’s name. Apparently, even though the dinner-in-question happened a fewweeks ago, Rhodes and his mystery woman made quite an impression on the staff. The waitress who took care of them said Rhodes called the woman Gracie. That made the woman very angry. She kept insisting he call her Grace. Maria also mentioned one other thing which could be important. She said the waitress remembered Rhodes telling the woman that she couldn’t stay with him. He was very adamant about it. So she must have just arrived in town. Want me to send another email and see if any of the agents had any business with her? Who knows? Maybe she looked at some property around here.”

  “That’s a great idea,” I exclaimed. “Sure, send another email. Let’s find out as much as we can. At last I feel like I’m doing something positive, instead of just sitting around waiting. Be sure to mention that she had beautiful white hair.”

  “Done,” said Nancy. She quickly composed another email query and sent it off into cyberspace. Then, she started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You know those ads on television, when a person signs up for a wire- less phone plan, and the announcer says, ‘No matter where you go, you’ve got the network’? You, my friend, have the power of the real estate network behind you now. And believe me, there’s nothing this network can’t find out. Now, let’s get out of here. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”

  ~*~

  When I got home a few minutes later, Jenny was already there. I walked into the kitchen and she was sitting at the kitchen table. She jumped up when she saw me. Her face was white.

  “Mom, where have you been? Is Daddy with you? I’ve been so worried!”

  “I was with Nancy. And your father is meeting with Sheila Carney about the Davis Rhodes memorial service. What’s the matter? You look terrible.”

  “I had coffee with Mark Anderson today, remember?”

  “Yes, I certainly do,” I said. “How did it go? Did you have fun?”

  Jenny smiled, just a little. “We had a great time, Mom. In the beginning. We talked about school, and old friends. I’d forgotten how easy he is to be with. But then he got a call on his cell phone from his partner.” She paused, and her voice got very shaky. A preliminary toxicology report on Davis Rhodes’s death came in today. Some sort of drug interaction killed him. The police think he could have been poisoned. I was afraid when I didn’t know where you were that Dad had been arrested.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Q: Why are retirees so slow to clean out the basement, attic, and garage?

  A: They know that as soon as they do, one of their adult kids will want to store stuff there.

  I’ve read in all my mysteries that poison is a woman’s favorite murder weapon. Less messy than guns or knives. Yuck. There was a least one person in Rhodes’s life who had a dandy motive to bump him off. No, make that two: his wife, and dear Sheila. But not my husband.No way.

  “I don’t know if anyone else knows about this yet,” Jenny said. “Mark wouldn’t have told me anything except, of course, I was sitting right there when he got the call. He reacted so strongly I just knew it was about Rhodes. But he warned me to keep the new information to myself. He told me Dad would be questioned again. The police have to examine all the possibilities, since it looks like Rhodes was poisoned.”

  I noticed that Jenny shied away from using the word “murdered.” But I knew she was thinking it. Me too.

  I decided to share my afternoon’s adventure with Jenny. She’s tolerated my insatiable curiosity for years, unless I’m snooping into her personal life, of course. “We’ll have to tell Dad about this when he gets home,” I said. “And I’m not looking forward to that conversation. In the meantime, let’s talk about something else. I’ve decided to plan a retirement shower for Mary Alice at Maria’s Trattoria….”

  Jenny held up her hand and stopped me in mid-sentence. “Wait. I think I’ve missed something here. Mary Alice is leaving the hospital? When did she decide that?”

  “With everything else going on around here, I forgot to tell you. Mary Alice is retiring at the end of the summer. But she’s going to do private duty nursing and some consulting, so she’ll still be connected to the hospital. She made her big announcement the same day that the police came to interview me about Rhodes’s death. I’m planning a party for Mary Alice at the Trattoria, and while I was meeting with Maria Lesco today, I got some real dirt on Davis Rhodes. Maria told me Rhodes was a regular customer at the restaurant, and the staff couldn’t stand him. He was unbelievably rude to everyone who worked there. Maria also told me that one night he’d brought a woman named Grace to dinner. Their waitress overheard some of their conversation, and figured out that Grace was Rhodes’s wife. The waitress told Maria it wasn’t a friendly dinner at all. And Grace called Rhodes ‘Dick,’ not ‘Dave’ or ‘Davis’. How about that?”

  “Wow, Mom. I’m impressed that you got Miss Lesco to give you all this info. Way to go. But what does it mean?”

 
; “I know I could be jumping to conclusions,” I replied, “but it dawned on me after I talked to Maria that ‘Davis Rhodes’ may have been an assumed name. I called Nancy to see if Rhodes or his wife had been involved in any local property transactions.”

  I gave Jenny a moment to be proud of my deductive skills, then filled her in on my trip to Nancy’s office, and her emails to other local real estate agents. “Nancy says the network is very efficient, and she should have some information soon about both Rhodes and his mysterious wife. Maria also told me that Rhodes and his assistant, Sheila Carney, came into the restaurant a few times together, too. She said they had a really bad argument there a few days before he died. Maybe Sheila wanted to take over the Center. She’s already changed the webpage to feature her picture. She certainly could be involved in Rhodes’s death.”

  I shook my head to clear my muddled brain. It didn’t help. Too many possibilities.

  “Your father is going to be working very closely with Sheila from now on,” I said. “He’s been officially assigned to the account by the office, and I guess he’ll be helping plan Rhodes’s memorial service.” If he’s not in jail by then. I didn’t really say that, of course.

  Jenny slumped back in her chair. “This is too much for me to take in. When I’m teaching a class, I have an outline of what I want to cover. But there’s no outline for anything this crazy. What do we do now? Dad is going to freak.”

  I had no doubt that Jenny was absolutely right. I also knew from years of experience that there was only one aspect that Jim would zero in on—one thing he would harp on again and again. My Beloved would gloss over the fact that Rhodes had probably been poisoned and that he could be considered a suspect in the murder, ignore the importance of Rhodes’s wife, and dismiss the possibility that “Davis Rhodes” could be an assumed name. Only a logical person would be concerned about any of that stuff.

  What Jim was bound to zero in on, and harp on over and over, would be the fact that I’d meddled. Interfered. Nosed around. I asked a few innocent questions about a party for Mary Alice and presto. Look what I’d found out. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I got Nancy and her entire real estate network involved.

  As upset as I was about Jim’s increasingly vulnerable situation, I was not about to make myself the sacrificial lamb to his all-too-predictable outburst. I’d been down that particular road too many times in the past.

  So, I made a snap decision. I wasn’t going to tell Jim what I’d found out today. At least, not until Nancy had provided some with hard facts, like whether “Davis Rhodes” was the retirement coach’s real name.

  “Jenny,” I said, “I have a suggestion. You and I both love your father very much. And we know him very well. I think hitting him with all this as soon as he gets home is a bad idea. You should definitely tell him what happened with Mark and the phone call. He needs to prepare himself in case the police do want to question him again. But all I’ve got to tell him so far is just gossip and speculation. I know he won’t react well to that. I think it’s best for me to keep quiet and wait to see if Nancy and her real estate buddies can come up with any solid information. I’ll tell your father everything once we have something concrete, and I’ll pass on what I find out to Mark, too. I certainly don’t want to be accused of hiding information from the police. How does that sound?”

  My daughter gave me a look that proved she had my number, all right. “I get it, Mom. I used the same technique when I was living with Jeff. Men can only focus on a one issue at a time, and they go a little nuts when they get too much information to process, right? So, only give them a little. After it’s been processed, give them a little more. Kind of like spoon-feeding a baby.”

  I had to laugh. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Jenny gave my hand a little squeeze. “Try not to worry,” she said. “I have a feeling that everything’s going to work out okay. Of course, I have no clue how that’s going to happen.”

  “It’s going to happen because the women in this family are going to make sure that it happens,” I responded with more confidence than I felt. “Now, tell me more about your coffee date with Mark. You said you two were having a good time before that phone call from his partner interrupted it. Did you fill each other in on what you’d been doing over the past ten years?” I’d promised myself I wouldn’t ask Jenny any questions about her “date,” but, what the heck, it beat worrying about Jim.

  Sure, Carol. Like you’re not dying of curiosity.

  “You’re very subtle,” said Jenny, laughing. “What you mean is, did we talk about any long-term relationships we’d been in, that kind of personal stuff, right?”

  My daughter was getting to be way too smart for me. “Yes, I have to admit that’s exactly what I meant,” I said with a grin. “But you know I won’t pry. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine with me. But isn’t Mark handsome now?”

  Subtle, Carol. When in doubt, stress the superficial.

  “Yes, Mark’s very good looking,” Jenny said. “I never would have expected he’d be so handsome after the skin problem he had when we were in high school. I remember he wore geeky glasses, too. But I suppose I was no beauty back then, either.”

  “You and Mike were always perfect in every way to Dad and me,” I replied loyally. “But let’s get back to Mark. I completely lost track of him after high school. Did he stay here in town, go away to college, join the service, what?”

  “That’s three questions, Mom,” said Jenny. “You get seventeen more, according to the rules of the game. But Twenty Questions and then that’s it. Yes, Mark went to college in Maine, and graduated with a degree in history. He said he bummed around Europe for a while after graduation, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life, and finally came back here when his money started to run out. He never intended to stay, but he met a girl and thought she was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.”

  Jenny paused for a minute, then continued. “I gathered from what Mark didn’t say, though, that his parents were less than thrilled with her and tried hard to discourage the relationship. He moved in with her in spite of his parents, and needed to get a job and earn some money. I think he joined the police force because he thought it would please his parents, especially his father, and take the heat off their objections to his personal life. The relationship ended badly. Mark didn’t say what happened, and I didn’t press him for details. But apparently that was several years ago, and he’s been kind of turned off the dating scene since then. I know how he feels.”

  There was nothing I could say to that, so wisely, for once in my life, I kept my big mouth shut.

  “You know, it was so good to be with an old friend today,” Jenny said. “I think he felt the same way. When you have a shared history, like we do, you can just relax and be friends and not have to get into the role-playing lots of people do these days. I knew I could tell him pretty much anything and it’d be all right. But then his partner called and, well…” Jenny sighed. “I don’t know how we can see each other again with Davis Rhodes’s death hanging over our heads. Especially if Mark’s forced to ask you and Dad more questions. Talk about a weird situation.”

  “What’s a weird situation?” Jim asked. I turned around in surprise. Jenny and I had been so engrossed in our conversation that neither one of us had heard him come home. How much had he heard?

  “Hi dear,” I said. “How’s everything with Sheila and the Center?”

  “Don’t try and divert me, Carol,” Jim said. “I want to know who you and Jenny were talking about. Who could be forced to come back here and ask us more questions? About what? Did something else happen? What’s going on?”

  Jenny intervened before I had a chance to answer. “I’ll tell him, Mom. It’s my story.” She turned to her father and said, “Now, Dad, don’t get excited.”

  “God, you sound just like your mother,” Jim said. “I am not excited. At least, I wasn’t until I got home just now. Who and what are we t
alking about?”

  “I had coffee with Mark Anderson today,” explained Jenny.

  “A very nice young man,” said Jim. “He treated me with the greatest respect the other night at the Center.”

  “He is a great guy,” agreed Jenny. “But while we were together, he got a phone call from his partner with some bad news. It was about the cause of Davis Rhodes’s death. I had to worm it out of him, but the bottom line is that, according to the preliminary report, it looks like Rhodes died from a drug interaction. The police think he may have been poisoned. I’m pretty sure, from what Mark said, that the police are going to ask you some more questions.”

  Jim didn’t respond for at least a full minute. The room was so quiet I could hear the grandfather clock ticking in the front hall. Or maybe it was the sound of my heart thudding against my chest.

  Then he placed his briefcase, very carefully, on the kitchen counter, and sat down at the table. For a brief moment, I saw his cheeks flush, a sure sign he was under stress. He reached down to give each of the dogs a gentle pat. They responded by licking his hands. Positive reinforcement from our two nonjudgmental canines.

  “I want you both to know that I have nothing to hide, and nothing to be ashamed of,” Jim finally said. “If Mark and his partner want to question me again, fine. Let them. With or without Larry present. This whole thing is absolutely ludicrous.”

  Jenny and I didn’t speak. What was there to say?

  Jim cleared his throat. “Now, let me tell you both about my day. That

  Sheila Carney sure is something.” For the next half hour, Jenny and I were regaled with the wonders of Sheila. What was it about long-legged blondes that made men act so stupidly? You would have thought, listening to Jim sing her praises, that she was a combination of Mother Theresa and Princess Diana.