by Blair Howard
I still had the case at the forefront of my mind—it’s who I am—but other than mull things over and hope for the lights to turn themselves on, there was little, other than that damned bottle, that was new information. Tommy Quinn was, I thought, back in Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas, and all was peaceful—until my phone vibrated on the glass top of the table.
“Harry?” It was Quinn. “I need you back up at the Mount, soon as you can. Alicia Margolis is dead. It looks like suicide. Dr. Wilson, the ME, is on his way over from St. Thomas and should have arrived by the time you get here.”
For a moment I didn’t say anything. I was stunned, flabbergasted, dumbfounded, buffaloed, gobsmacked; all of those and more. All of my theories had just gone out the window. Maybe literally. My mind was a total blank, but I told him I could and would be there, then I disconnected and slammed my phone down on the table. What I wanted to do was throw the damned thing in the pool.
“Friggin’ hell,” I all but shouted. I would have said something a whole lot stronger had my father and Rose not been seated right next to me.
“What?” Amanda asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Alicia friggin’ Margolis is what’s wrong. She’s killed herself. Sorry Amanda, folks. I gotta go. Kate?”
She nodded. “I’ll be right back. I need to change first.”
“Bob. There’s no need for you to come. It shouldn’t take long.”
“That’s okay. I’ll stay here with your folks.”
Ten minutes later, Kate and I were on our way to the resort office to find Michael Collins to see about getting a ride to the house.
We found him in his office, told him what we needed, but not why, and once again he agreed to let us use one of the resort’s courtesy cars.
Tommy Quinn, along with both Leos, Vivien Martan—her eyes and face bloated from crying—Moore, and Jeffery Margolis were waiting for us when we arrived some twenty minutes after ten; the ME was still on his way. Leo wanted to take us right on up to the Margolises’ suite, but I insisted we wait for Dr. Wilson.
“Where is she, exactly?” I asked.
It was Jeffery Margolis who answered. “In… in the bathroom,” he managed, his face white, his hands shaking. “She… she… she’s in the bath. She cu… cu… her wrists, she….”
“You went into the bathroom, right?”
He nodded.
“Who else?” I asked, mentally crossing my fingers.
“I went in,” Martan said. “But only as far as the door, and I didn’t touch anything. I got him—” he nodded at Jeffery “—out of there and locked the door. No one else has been inside.”
I nodded, and inwardly heaved a sigh of relief.
We didn’t have to wait long. In the distance I heard the thumping of a helicopter’s rotors, the noise growing louder as it drew closer. We walked around the house and watched it set down next to Leo’s machine, and Dr. Wilson, accompanied by Daisy Patel and someone else I’d never seen before, stepped out. The unknown man was carrying a large cardboard box.
The box contained several sets of Tyvek coveralls. We suited up and put on latex gloves in the hallway outside the Margolises’ suite. While we were doing so, I couldn’t help but notice the faint traces of blood in the door opening and down the hall.
Not good, I thought. Not good at all. Jeff Margolis, for sure, and he’s contaminated the scene.
I was impressed with Wilson. I’d talked to him on the phone; in person he was, however, not at all what I’d expected. He was a very thin man, about five foot ten with a great shock of white hair and a white toothbrush mustache—and he was all business.
The bathroom was huge, with a walk-in steam shower, a second walk-in shower stall with a multi-jet rainfall system, two vanities, two white leather chairs, and an ornate, free-standing bathtub. Alicia Margolis, dressed only in a bra and panties, lay semi-submerged in the tub. The water was bright red and almost at the rim. Her left hand was underwater. Her right lay across her breasts at surface level. There was a serrated steak knife lying on the floor beside the tub; there was blood on the blade, and what I took to be arterial spray all around the right side of the tub. And there were footprints, what looked to be a man’s footprints. Jeffery’s? Probably.
We stood back and waited while Daisy Patel took photographs, then Wilson leaned over the tub and lifted Alicia’s right hand. Sure enough there was a deep gash across her wrist, almost to the bone, from what I could see. He laid it back down, walked around the tub, and fished in the bloody water for her left arm. He pulled it up, looked at it—I looked at it—then he looked at me and nodded.
“Do you mind, Harry?” he asked, indicating her right hand with his head.
I stepped forward, picking my way carefully through the blood spatters, and lifted her right hand. Together we looked back and forth, first at one, then the other, comparing the cuts. I laid her hand back on her breast and stepped away.
“It’s not suicide, is it,” I said. “Even I can see that. Both cuts were made from left to right, and both are angled the same way: up the arm from the base of the palm in the case of the right hand, and from the base of the thumb on the left. Both are right-handed cuts. You can’t cut your own right wrist with your own right hand. Not only that; if I’m correct, the cut to her right wrist is so deep it must have cut the tendons. In which case, the hand would have been rendered useless and she wouldn’t have been able to make the second cut.”
“Very impressive, Harry. Right in every respect. No, this was a homicide, no doubt about it, and a clumsy one at that.”
Jeffy-baby, I thought. But why? Hmmm. Perhaps not.
“Time of death, Doc?”
He looked sharply at me, obviously not happy with the term of address.
I tilted my sideways and shrugged. “Sorry, habit. Doctor.”
He nodded once, looked down at the corpse, put his hand in the water, and swished it around.
“Hard to say. The water’s room temperature. I’ll take her body temperature when we get her out, but I don’t think it will help. Eight to fourteen hours would be my best guess. I’ll be able to give you a better estimate once I’ve done the post, and analyzed the contents of her stomach. Until then….”
I nodded and left him to it. I stopped at the bathroom door, checked for a clean area of floor, removed the booties, and stepped onto it. I leaned out through the doorframe and saw Kate checking out the living room.
“Hey,” I said. “Would you mind getting me some fresh booties, please?”
She did, and I put them on, bagged and labeled those I’d just removed, set them aside for forensics, and then joined her in the living room.
“And?” she asked.
“Homicide. The killer tried to set it up to look like a suicide. Poor job. Might even be the break we were looking for. We’ll see. You find anything yet?”
“Not much of anything out of place. There are those.” She pointed to an almost-empty bottle of red wine and an empty wineglass on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
I knelt down beside the table, leaned over the glass, and sniffed.
“Chlorine,” I said. “The odor’s weak, but it’s there…. That probably means ketamine. She was drugged.” I looked around. Daisy was in the kitchen doing something I couldn’t see.
“Hey Ms. Patel,” I called.
“Mr. Starke,” she said as she joined us in the living room.
“I need you to dust this glass and the bottle for prints, please, and there’s a knife on the bathroom floor. I need that done too, but you’ll probably need to wait for the ME to finish before you can get in there. Also, there’s a lot of blood on the floor, in the bathroom and out in the hall. The killer had to have gotten some of it on his shoes. We know Jeffery Margolis has been in there—he found the body—but check to see if there are any other shoe prints…. What?”
“You don’t need to be telling me how to do my job, Mr. Starke. Now, if you’ll get out of the way, I’ll dust the glass and bottle for
you.”
“Oh, hell, Daisy. I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
“Think? I know. Now please move.”
I moved. It took her just a few seconds to dust the two items.
“Nothing on the bottle. Looks like a thumb, forefinger, and two fingertips on the glass.”
“See what I mean?” I asked Kate. “The bottle’s been wiped, but not the glass. Whoever did it obviously didn’t touch the glass, but the bottle…. That wasn’t too smart. And only one glass…. Hmmm. If she’d had company, surely she wouldn’t have drank alone… would she have…? Wait. I need to check something.”
I went into the kitchen. There was nothing on the draining board.
I opened the cupboard over the sink. There was a wine glass rack attached to the inside of the top; you know the type of thing: several rows of slits where you slide the stems of the glasses in and they hang upside down.
“She had company,” I said over my shoulder. “There’s a glass out of place in here. The stem is slightly longer. It should go here.” I pointed. “It’s the only one out of place. Daisy, I need you to dust it, if you would, please.” She did. There was nothing. The glass had been washed and wiped clean. I smiled.
“Why would the killer wash one glass but not the other?” Kate asked.
“Probably to make us think Alicia was drinking on her own, got drunk, and decided to kill herself.”
“And wiped the bottle and washed the glass,” Kate said, nodding.
“Yeah. As I said, not too smart.”
I walked through to the bathroom. Wilson was on his knees by the tub, mumbling into a recorder. He stopped when he saw me at the door.
“Can I grab the knife?” I asked.
He nodded and, taking extra care to avoid the blood, I stepped over the tiled floor and picked the knife up by the tip of the blade, and then returned to the living room.
“Here,” I said, handing the knife to Daisy Patel.
“No,” she said. “Just hold it up. Yes, just like that.”
I was holding the point in my fingertips. She dusted the handle.
“Yes!” she said brightly. “I see one, two, three, four perfect prints.”
“Perfect?” I asked. “That never happens. One, even two, maybe, but four?” I shook my head. I looked at Kate. “You wanna bet they all belong to Alicia?”
She smiled, at the same time slowly shaking her head. “You’re not suggesting someone placed them there, are you?” she asked sarcastically.
“Uhhh, yeah!”
Daisy carefully took the knife from me and placed it in a paper evidence bag, being careful not to disturb the blood.
“When?” I asked.
“Give me thirty minutes. I need to go to the chopper and get my gear. I’ll lift and scan them, and give you a copy of the file.”
“Great. And please do the glass too. I’ll have Tim run comparisons, but we all know damn well who they belong to.”
“How long will it take you and your buddy to process the suite and hall?” I asked Daisy.
She looked at her watch. “It’s almost eleven thirty now. I doubt we’ll get done with it today. Not unless we work all… night?” She looked sideways at me, her head tilted, her eyes wide, questioning. I looked back at her and shrugged.
“Okay,” she sighed. “You got it. Okay if I wake you up when I’m done?”
I grinned at her. “Not hardly.”
“Yeah, right. Go on; get out of here. I need to get to work.”
“Ok… ay,” I said. In the middle of it, I had another thought. I picked up the wine glass by its stem, waved it under my nose, breathed deeply, and handed it to her.
“Daisy,” I said. “It smells like chlorine. Ketamine, right?”
She raised the glass to her nose, closed her eyes, and breathed in, slowly. She took her time about it, but eventually she nodded. “I can’t be absolutely sure, but yes, I think so. I’ll test it, along with everything else I have to do…. By the way,” she said sweetly, “would you like me to stick a broom up my ass and sweep up as I go?”
“Whatever you think will get the job done,” I said, just as sweetly.
“Hah.”
Kate and I went out into the hall and stripped off the Tyvek coveralls.
“Let’s go see if there’s coffee in the dining room,” I said.
Chapter 26
Saturday November 19, 11:30am
Coffee there was aplenty, so we each grabbed a cup and then went out onto the patio and sat down. The view was, as always, breathtaking. One of these days, maybe….
“So what do we have?” Kate asked, lifting her feet up onto the chair next to her.
“Well first of all I think we can say that neither Alicia nor Vivien killed Gabrielle. True, Alicia’s death doesn’t completely rule Vivien out, but if she did kill Gabby, why? I’m damned sure that Vivien wouldn’t murder her own daughter. So someone else killed her and, by default, Alicia too. Once again, though, there’s very little physical evidence, and I doubt there will be. Maybe footprints, if we get lucky, but I’m not holding my breath. Reality TV has a lot to answer for. You?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that both were killed by the same person, but why….”
“Oh, I think we know that.”
“Oh? Do tell.”
“Whoever killed them was, I think, a little too smart for their own good: wiping the wine bottle, washing the second glass, planting the fingerprints on the knife; those were all stupid mistakes a four-year-old wouldn’t have made. Whoever killed Alicia did so to divert attention away from himself, to make it look like Alicia killed Gabrielle and then, in a fit of either remorse or fear of discovery, killed herself. It might have worked, but for the obvious mistakes. Alicia and her mother were my prime suspects. Her killer effectively eliminated them both from the list.”
“So, you have a list of suspects,” she said over the rim of her cup. “Are you going to share it with me?”
“Maybe,” I grinned at her. “What about you? Who do you think it was? And don’t say the damned butler.”
She smiled at me. “But I do like the butler for it, at least for this one. Think about it. Didn’t he tell you if he found out who killed Gabby, he’d take care of it? And he was screwing Gabby….”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
“Yes we do. Well I do. I’ve seen the look he had on his face before, on someone else, haven’t I Harry.”
“Yeah,” I said, ignoring her obvious innuendo. “We both have, many times. Maybe he was; maybe he wasn’t. He was certainly fond of her….”
“He was having an affair with her, Harry. It was obvious. And, well… I know. I just know.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s assume, just for a moment, that he was. Why would he kill her?”
“For any one of half a dozen reasons I can think of right off the top of my head. The most obvious being, she wasn’t taking him seriously.”
“Oh?”
“Sure. I think he would have liked to marry her; but she didn’t want to marry him. A lowly servant? She wouldn’t go for that, would she? So it’s simple. They had a falling out. He lost his temper. Whack. He thinks he’s killed her and dumps her over the balcony.”
“Nope. I don’t think so. Moore is ex-special forces. He’d know she wasn’t dead. Not only that; if he had hit her, he would have killed her. He’s a tough son of a bitch.”
“Well,” she said, “there’s that, I suppose. So come on, give. Who do you like for it?”
“There are three, actually….”
“Hey, hang on, something just hit me. What about Georgina? She was having it off with Alicia. Maybe she killed her…. Jealousy? Now Alicia’s dead, she has no alibi for Gabby’s TOD.”
“Sheesh.” I sucked air in through my teeth. “That would be a stretch. I don’t see that. I think Alicia was in love with her.”
She looked quizzically at me over the rim of her cup.
“As I was sayi
ng, I have three suspects: I moved Leo Jr. to the top of the list. He’s the one with the most to gain. He’ll grab something like fourteen million. I’ve known people to kill for less than fourteen dollars, and so have you. Then there’s Alicia’s husband, Jeffery. He was in love with Gabrielle, and he hated his wife. More good motives….”
“No, Harry. That one I’m not buying. Leo, maybe, but not Jeff. Yes, he could have killed Gabrielle, but I don’t think so, because if the killings are linked, he must have planned the second one. Think about it. He had to get hold of the drug. Ketamine’s not something you can get off the shelf at the local pharmacy. That’s premeditation…. Wait. Didn’t Leo Jr. mention something about Miami? Ketamine would be easy to get on the street there. Maybe he….” She shook her head, clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, thinking, and then she continued. “It fits. He, Leo, is not too swift in the head. He drugged her and calmly cut her wrists. Did you see the depth of those cuts? Jeff’s a wimp. He doesn’t have it in him to kill like that, not anyone, let alone his wife, for God’s sake. So yeah, Leo. Who else ya got?”
“The pirate captain?”
“Carriere was on his boat.”
“He said he was on his boat. And even if he really was, it’s just a short walk, or run, from the dock to the side entrance of the house, five minutes each way at the most. He’d only need to be away from the boat for thirty minutes, with a little bit of luck, to do the deed and get back. A little bit of luck…. We need to find out what he was doing last night. Eight to fourteen hours, Wilson said, that would have put her time of death sometime between eight in the evening—but I’d guess it was later than that—and two in the morning. We need to find out where he was.”
“We can do that, but what about the other two?”
“Let’s go find out,” I said, setting my cup down and getting to my feet.
We found Jeffery Margolis in the living room, watching Fox News.
“Just the man we’re looking for,” I said, dumping myself down onto the sofa beside him. “So tell me.” I was done wasting time on the niceties. I wanted to get out of there and get back to living my new life. “Where were you, Jeffery, between eight last night and two this morning?”