by Amy Saunders
“Come in!” she heard Colleen belt out from inside, followed by some other choice words.
Belinda smiled to herself and pushed the front door open, wiping her feet on the Paris mat atop the black and white foyer tiles. “You know, I could’ve been a psycho killer. You should probably look through your peephole before letting people in.”
“Your psycho killers must be a lot more polite than mine.”
Belinda found Colleen on the couch in the living room to her right in front of the window. She stopped at the threshold in shock. Colleen was in sweat shorts and a matching gray tank, her hair pulled into a ponytail, with no makeup. She definitely looked different without cosmetics. An empty pizza box sat cracked open on the coffee table along with a couple beer bottles and water glasses. Colleen lounged across the couch, one foot dangling off the edge. She didn’t bother to sit up when Belinda came in.
“Are you sick?” Belinda examined Colleen, thinking her roots were even worse than the other day. Or maybe it was just because she hadn’t combed her hair.
“No,” she said, sounding offended by the suggestion.
“Then why are you…like this?”
“It’s my day off.”
“So you usually don’t comb your hair on your days off?” Belinda threw her purse into the nearby Louis chair.
“If you had to wear the amount of makeup I have to on an almost nightly basis, you wouldn’t either.” Colleen wound the tie on her shorts around her finger. “But you’re right. That’s not why I’m like this. I’m wallowing.”
“Over what?”
Colleen gave her a pointed look. “If anyone, I’d think you could guess.”
“Oh.” Belinda perched on the edge of the couch on the other end from Colleen. “Still nothing from Jonas?” Belinda wasn’t surprised. He seemed preoccupied with Ardith at the moment.
“No, I talked to him.”
“So he did call back?”
“Not exactly.”
“You didn’t call him at the station again, did you?”
Colleen bit her bottom lip. “I went to see him the other morning.”
“At his apartment or the station?”
“His apartment.”
“At least you got the location right,” Belinda muttered.
Colleen wrenched a pillow from behind her back and hugged it to her body. “What was I supposed to do? He wouldn’t call back. And I would’ve liked to see you give up on Bennett so easily.”
She’d used his name, so she got points for that. Belinda rubbed her temple, getting more comfortable on that end of the couch. “Tell me what happened.”
Colleen gave her a synopsis of her meeting with Jonas, Belinda asking for details here and there. It was brief, which was probably better. Belinda felt convinced Colleen had left Jonas stumped, which would explain why he broached the subject with her at the marina.
“He knows I told you, by the way,” Colleen said when she’d finished.
“Why?”
“Because I told him.”
“Of course you did.” Belinda sighed. “I think your problem is that he doesn’t trust your motive. You need to find someone you can’t get a story from. Like…like a car mechanic.”
“Five o’clock exposé on the rampant corruption of car garages.”
“Okay, how about a lifeguard?”
“Nighttime feature on swimming safety.”
Belinda aimed her finger at Colleen. “A…a toymaker!”
“Projections on this year’s hottest toy.”
Belinda threw up her hands in exasperation. “Never mind. You’ll have to die alone.”
“Stories are everywhere, Belinda. You just have to look for them. You see them too, Ms. Community Outreach.”
“I thought you said you were wallowing.” She’d left Colleen a message about her Portside House Cleaning story idea, but never heard back, which is why she ventured to Colleen’s house.
“I can wallow and check my messages at the same time.” Colleen picked at a loose string on the pillow’s embroidery. “You just call it PR, but it’s essentially the same thing. I bet you were thinking about bringing Gary Wolman into the story, tying in the charity he created in Elena’s name.”
Belinda opened her mouth to protest before realizing that Colleen was right. She had.
Colleen smiled. “You’d make a good journalist.”
“I did actually consider that option in college.”
“What changed your mind?”
Belinda shrugged. “I wasn’t assertive enough naturally. It was too exhausting.”
Colleen yawned. “It can be. Sometimes I wish I’d taken up something quieter.”
“Like what?”
“Admin work?” She laughed. “I don’t know. I never thought of anything my whole life but journalism. In the end, I’m not sure I can stand anything less exciting.”
Colleen hefted herself up straight, more herself now that they were talking about work. “What are your ideas about this Portside Cleaning bit?”
“No argument?” Maybe Belinda should have kept that as an internal comment, but it slipped out too quickly.
“Why would I argue? It’s a good angle. And we’re always looking for features to squeeze in here and there.”
Belinda started to dive into her ideas when her phone blipped with a text. She got up and checked it quickly, a mix of emotion painting her face.
“Trouble?” Colleen said.
“For someone.” She sat on the Louis chair, squashing her purse. Then she bounced up again, tossing the handle over her shoulder. “I’ll need to call you about the story. Something’s come up.”
“Okay. Sure.” Colleen looked her over. “Everything alright? You look confused.”
“That’s because I am.” Belinda half smiled. “We’ll continue this conversation later, but for now, I recommend taking a shower and walking into town. It’ll get your blood moving and distract you. Plus, you can get gelato. And there are few maladies in this world that gelato won’t soothe.”
Colleen sighed, pushing off the couch to see Belinda out. “I guess you’re right.”
“I am. Talk to you soon. Stop wallowing!”
“Yeah, yeah,” she heard Colleen mumble from inside as she closed the door.
Mia had texted her to call as soon as she could. It sounded urgent, and Belinda’s stomach did jumping jacks while she waited for Mia to pick up. The conversation on Belinda’s end pretty much went like, “Oh…. Oh…. Oh…” Each “oh” getting progressively more meaningful and dramatic. She stayed in her car for a while after they’d finished, just staring out the windshield.
The reasons for the missing money were nothing like she anticipated. Ironically, it could mean money for her and Bennett. Belinda came back to earth and started driving toward the hardware store where Bennett worked. It was a big warehouse on a packed four-lane road. She hadn’t texted him or anything, but now she at least knew what department he worked in and found him with a customer in the house siding area.
She pretended to browse, getting close enough to make out the conversation. His customers finally thanked him for his help and left, leaving Belinda still faking examining a piece of gray shingling.
“Can I help you?” Bennett stood off to her side with a glint in his storm cloud eyes. “Planning on siding your house?”
“Oh, absolutely. Right after I put an addition on the back and redo the roof.”
“So how did I do? I know you were listening.”
“Let’s see…you get perfect marks for politeness and answering all of their questions. So I’d say you were superb. No firing today.” She grinned. “You look cute in your little apron.”
Bennett snuck in a kiss while no one was around.
“You smell like sawdust,” Belinda said.
“The whole building smells like sawdust.”
“True.”
“You here for something? I, uh, made note of some drawer knobs I saw that I think you’ll like. I know yo
u want to replace those plain ones on the kitchen cabinets.”
“I may need to take a detour on my way out. But I actually just came to talk to you about something. I wouldn’t normally bug you here, but…I talked to Mia.”
Bennett came to attention, listening intently while she summed up the conversation with her cousin. “She’s replacing the money she took out in the next day or two,” Belinda said to finish. “So, what do you think? I told her we’d have to discuss it first before I gave an answer.”
Bennett’s face tensed as he considered what she’d just proposed. “I’ll need to think about it. And you should too. We could be inviting trouble here.”
“I know. There are a lot of cons to this proposition.” But then there was a pro…a big pro. Money. She hadn’t told Bennett how much yet, but she was sure it would make a nice dent in his current financial issues. If Mia’s friend was telling the truth and she actually had the money to give. “But I was thinking maybe we should at least meet with her before we totally make up our minds.”
Bennett raised an eyebrow. “You’d want to do this?” Then he shook off that thought. “Of course you would. I’m warning you, though, these things are not always as straightforward as people make them sound.”
“I haven’t made up my mind. Quite honestly, if you decide not to do it, I’m saying no too.”
“Really?”
“Of course. We’re partners.”
Bennett’s face softened and he glanced up as someone walked by their aisle. “Alright, Poirot. We’ll talk about it more over dinner tonight.”
“Grilled steak kabobs.”
Bennett lit up and they slipped in one more kiss before Belinda followed his directions to the drawer knobs, spotting the one he described and taking a photo of it, along with some others, to compare at home later. His hardware store gig wasn’t so bad after all.
Chapter 23
A gem of a piece of information had been salvaged from Kevin’s smartphone–a possible location where Kevin might have been right before his death. The afternoon Kevin went into town with his friends and supposedly left the group and went off on his own, Kevin had pulled up walking directions to Leon’s Auctions in downtown Portside. It sounded like a place where you might either be able to sell artwork or get information about it.
Jonas finally found a parking spot after circling several times along with all the tourists. He missed his bike, but it had been too hot, and he had new clothes he was trying to preserve. The first cooler day that cropped up, though, he vowed to skip the car and take the bike instead.
He met Adrian Leon, owner of the auction house, in his office, which was more traditional than Jonas expected, considering the building was some sort of converted old firehouse or something. He had a large, antique-looking wood desk and dark paneling on the lower half of the walls. He had more art leaned against the walls on the floor than on the walls themselves, and he had a few things arranged on his desk, but it was mostly crowded with papers and a computer.
Leon strapped on black reading glasses and studied the photo of Kevin with his mouth open in an ‘O.’ He barely came up to Jonas’ shoulders. He closed his mouth and stepped away, tearing off the glasses. “I’m afraid I don’t recognize him,” Leon said. “You think he came here?” He sounded doubtful. At a glance, Jonas would’ve doubted it too.
“We have reason to believe so.”
“Interesting.” Leon moved his glasses on top of his head. He was wearing a long-sleeve button down shirt, with the sleeves buttoned at the cuffs. If Jonas didn’t need to, he wouldn’t be in that shirt, even with AC. “I can’t imagine what a kid like that would want here.”
“He may have been seeking an expert opinion on this painting,” Jonas held out a photograph of the forged Simone. “Ever seen this?”
Leon examined it, scrunching up his forehead. “No. What happened to it?” He pointed to the hole in the corner of the canvas, courtesy of Belinda.
“It washed ashore with Kevin Pratt. We believe he may have wanted to sell it.”
“Well, he didn’t come here.”
Jonas smiled. “All the same, I’d like to ask anyone who works here if they’ve seen him.”
“Please, go on. If that’s all you need from me, I have some business to take care of.”
Jonas let him go, noting various security cameras in the building. He flashed the photo of Kevin around, but came up empty. No one admitted to having seen him, except on the news as the now infamous beach body. Other than right after he washed ashore, the news hadn’t prevented anyone from going to the beach. If anything, Jonas almost felt it had drawn more people to that particular one.
He was coming up short and needed ideas. Jonas got in touch with Bennett and asked them to meet him at the police station that night. While he talked to Bennett, his phone buzzed with a new text message–from Ardith. Finally! Jonas thought, then felt pathetic. He supposed waiting by the phone for her to call served him right. He was sure he’d put plenty of girls through the same thing over the years.
She asked if he was available the next Saturday afternoon. He texted back that he was and asked why. Ardith responded immediately that he’d have to wait and see with a winky face. Jonas smirked. Her secrecy was both frustrating and attractive. If nothing else, it was effective. He’d struggled to think of much else.
That night, Jonas, Belinda, and Bennett, along with Jonas’ colleague Soto, gathered around a table at the station with gloves on. Soto had laid out all the paintings–the fake Simone and the ones Alec tried to burn up.
“Do you have to stare at that?” Bennett said to Belinda, startling her out of staring blankly at the nude.
Belinda blinked at him. “I was looking at the signature.”
“Sure you were,” Soto said from across the table. Bennett shot him a glare.
Jonas figured he better jump in before a smackdown happened. Maybe these paintings were the catalyst for the murders after all. “Does anyone have anything to say that doesn’t involve the nude?”
Belinda raised her hand, then rifled around in her bag, receipts and empty straw wrappers and sticky notes pushing up toward the top, muttering to herself the whole time. Her face lit up finally, and she spread out a small sheet of paper on the table.
“I was right!” Belinda showed Bennett the slip of paper. “Dinah Andersen Lachappelle. She’s a painter, too.”
Jonas maneuvered around the table to read the check image from a bank deposit. Clearly at the top of the check, it read, “Dinah Andersen Lachappelle.”
“A.L.,” Belinda said excitedly. “Andersen Lachappelle. She could’ve just been using it as a cover.”
Jonas splayed his hands on the table, examining each of the paintings. Could Dinah have painted the fake Simone? When he’d asked her that first time if she was also an artist, she’d acted like that was in her past, and she was more focused on Shelby’s career than her own. They’d found nothing in the Lachappelle home that indicated Shelby was the art forger, or that Dinah was. But that didn’t mean Dinah had left off pursuing a career–of a sort–herself.
Soto took a call, his face stern when he came back in the room. “A top floor apartment in town was on fire, and they found a body inside.”
“You mean someone died in the fire?” Jonas’ eyes snapped in Soto’s direction.
“I mean someone was already dead when the fire was set.”
Belinda bounced up, ready for action.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Jonas knew where she was going, and where Bennett was going, as the two of them kept pace while they booked it to a car to get to the crime scene. But it was still fun to ask.
“Where do you think we’re going?” Belinda said. “We’re coming with you.”
Soto drove, which under any other circumstance would be fine, but this time they had an audience, and Soto got a little crazy with his evasive maneuvers. They hit traffic at a light, headed downhill to the center of town. Soto swerved into the empty right hand
lane at top speed, which was empty for a reason.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Jonas stared back through the rear windshield at four orange cones Soto had just pulverized. “Really, man?”
“I didn’t know there was road work.”
Belinda stifled a laugh in the backseat. “I always wanted to do that,” she said.
They made it across town in record time, Bennett and Belinda hanging around beyond the police barrier while Jonas ducked under the tape. Police, ambulance, and fire truck lights lit up the street like a row of night clubs, people walking to and fro, garbled speech blaring from walkie-talkies. This was some kind of mess.
The top floor apartment was in a row house on a main cross street at a corner of a four-way stop. Diagonal from it sat the big old church atop the park where he’d had coffee with Ardith just the other day. The crime scene was devastated, but the body had escaped being burned to a crisp because a tourist walking on that street at just the right time saw smoke spewing from one of the top floor windows. The studio apartment, including the canvases strewn about on the wood floor, had been doused with paint thinner, which caused the fire to spread faster and hotter. That wasn’t great, but at least the fire had been dealt with in time to leave the body intact.
An officer brought him to the body–a woman sprawled across a desk up against the wall by the door. He was told she was wearing a wig, and he could see strawberry blonde hair falling out from underneath it, where the wig had been pushed askew. What he could make out of an arm was peachy with light freckles speckled across it. Her license read Dinah Lachappelle.
Dinah had been knocked out on the back of the head, like Kevin Pratt. The killer had left behind the object used to hit her, no doubt intending it to disappear with everything else. It was a heavy glass sculpture of a dolphin that the landlady said was visible on one of the windowsills, pieces of Dinah’s brown wig now stuck to the bottom. Jonas figured the impact knocked her wig off to the side. But the entire crime scene screamed that someone was in a hurry, desperate to cover their tracks, but leaving more as a result.