“Ah, well, that’s all in the past now,” she said. “You look lovely, dear. Much better than that dreadful photograph of you in this morning’s newspaper.” She smiled sweetly.
They’d probably chosen the most unflattering photo of the lot. Peter had read the Chronicle this morning but hadn’t let me look at the paper. “Don’t stress out over these idiots,” he said. “People are commenting just to stir up trouble. Of course you had nothing to do with Thalia’s death.” Shit. They were sensationalizing the murder, with me as the star villain.
I promised myself that I’d talk to Detective Hernandez again on Monday morning. This emphasis on me as a suspect was ridiculous. I needed to convince him that the blackmail threat was real. Too bad the notes hadn’t turned up. Maybe the police hadn’t searched thoroughly enough. I was pretty certain Thalia wouldn’t have thrown them away. The urge to look through her papers took hold.
Excusing myself, I went upstairs to her study, locking the door behind me. I sat in her silk-upholstered chair and slid open the top drawer of the desk. Empty. I opened each of the side drawers. Also empty. Had the murderer been in Thalia’s office, covering his tracks? Then I realized the police had probably taken everything, which I found reassuring. Maybe they hadn’t completely dismissed the possibility of blackmail. Maybe they’d find the notes.
I closed the drawers and pushed the chair back in. As I stepped out into the hall and shut the door quietly behind me, a voice said, “What were you doing in there?” I jumped. It was Peter. “Are you all right? I saw you go upstairs a while ago.”
“Yes, I’m fine. I just wanted to go into Thalia’s office.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I . . . I just wanted to sit there and think about her.” I knew Peter didn’t approve of my sleuthing.
He gave me a hug and said, “I want to apologize for all the times I complained about Thalia. I know she meant a lot to you. I’m sorry she’s gone.”
We went downstairs and saw that people were beginning to leave. “Peter, I’m going to stay and help clean up. Why don’t you go home and come back for me later.”
“Are you sure you’re up to that?” he asked, stroking my cheek. “You look exhausted.”
“Yes, I’ll actually feel better to be doing something useful.”
“OK. Do you want me to stay here with you?”
“No, no. I’ll be fine.”
I began clearing the buffet table. Sonia came over, raincoat in hand. “How are you holding up?” she asked me.
“I’m OK. I just need to grab some food,” I said, snatching a crab cake from the platter. “I’m going to stay a few more hours and help clean up. I don’t want Garrett to be alone. Luc has moved to a hotel with his mother.”
“Are you all right? Want me to keep you company?”
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
Luc came over to say goodbye. “Are you OK?” he asked, holding on to my shoulders and looking at me with concern.
I smiled. “You’re the third person to ask me that in the last five minutes. I’m fine.” I’m fine, I silently repeated. I’d made it through the funeral. On Monday I’d have a long talk with Detective Hernandez. It would all get straightened out.
“I’m flying out tomorrow night,” he told me. “It was wonderful to see you. You’ll come for a visit, won’t you? I can’t leave unless you agree.”
I promised I would and hugged him goodbye, the loss of Thalia somehow magnified by Luc’s departure.
CHAPTER 13
It was eight in the evening by the time I had put away three dishwasher loads of clean plates, stowed the leftovers in the fridge, and stacked all the caterer’s paraphernalia to be picked up the following day. I was longing to go home, but Garrett had asked me to do one more thing: to look through Thalia’s closet and take anything I wanted before Helena boxed it all up for donation tomorrow. Reluctantly, I trudged upstairs.
I walked into the darkened bedroom, my feet sinking into the plush carpet. As I fumbled for the switch on a bedside lamp, a voice from across the room said, “I loved her, you know.”
“Oh, God, you scared me.” I turned the light on, revealing Garrett seated on a settee opposite the bed, a glass of scotch in one hand and a nearly empty bottle in the other. He murmured an apology. He was clearly drunk and looked absolutely miserable.
I offered to come back in the morning to go through Thalia’s clothes, but he insisted that he welcomed the company. “She was something,” he said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe she’s gone. Rae, to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I can keep going without her. She took care of me. She had my shirts ironed. Hell, she bought my shirts. I never knew what looked right.”
I had been struggling with similar doubts of my own. Sure, Thalia exasperated me at times—a lot of times. But she was my rock. No matter what happened, I knew she’d be there for me. And now . . . well, I needed to be my own rock. “Garrett, you’ll be fine. It will get easier. Not right away, but it will.” I hoped the words didn’t sound as trite to him as they did to me.
Not knowing what else to say, I decided to take a quick look through Thalia’s clothes and go home. As I opened the louvered doors of her enormous walk-in closet, a faint trace of her scent wafted out. “Have the police gone through all this?” I asked.
“Dunno. They emptied her nightstand drawers, but they spent most of their time in her office. Boxed up all her personal papers.”
I wasn’t expecting to find anything I wanted among Thalia’s clothes. Although everything was lovely, it just wasn’t my style—lots of pale hues and silky fabrics that suited her well but didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t a pastels kind of gal. Idly, I tried on a few pairs of her elegant shoes, but they were too big. The charity shop would certainly be pleased with this sizable haul of designer couture.
Two boxes on the top shelf caught my eye. I hauled one down and brought it to the bed, quickly becoming absorbed in its trove of photos from years past: birthday parties, summer vacations, a young Thalia and Luc opening Christmas presents. I wondered whether it had been hard for Luc when Thalia and her mother came into his life. His father had married Helena mere months after his first wife died. And Helena certainly wasn’t the warmest person in the world. “My mother never hugged me because it creased her blouse,” Thalia once told me ruefully. Not exactly what a recently bereaved boy wants in a stepmother.
What a contrast to my own mother, who welcomed every neighborhood kid into our Brooklyn apartment, no matter how much mess they created—or how much food they devoured. I smiled at the memory. Even now, my mother worried about me. She’d been calling daily since the murder, making sure I was OK and offering to fly out to help.
“I’m going to offer a reward,” Garrett said, interrupting my thoughts. “Ten thousand dollars. Maybe then the dickhead police will finally get the right person.” He swallowed more scotch. “They think it’s me, you know. Because Thalia was having an affair.” He was mostly talking to himself and didn’t seem to mind that I offered no response.
I fetched the second box and returned to the bed. More photos, which I didn’t linger over, some old letters, and, beneath those, a pair of tiny white gloves wrapped in tissue. They must have been Thalia’s once upon a time, judging from the way her mother dressed her in the photos. I decided to stash these boxes in Thalia’s office so that Helena didn’t send them off to the thrift store. I took the first box down the hall. When I returned to the bedroom, Garrett was standing by the bed, staring at the little white gloves.
“She was saving these,” he said, “hoping that someday we’d have a daughter.”
I was speechless. Thalia had wanted kids? That was something she’d never mentioned to me.
Garrett took a gulp of Scotch and began pacing the room. “We had been trying for a year to have a baby. But I wasn’t worried. It’s something we thought we had time for.” He laughed humorlessly. “Of course, it didn’t work out the way I thought.”
“No,” I sai
d with sympathy.
“She was pregnant. That’s what the police told me.”
I froze. “What?”
His eyes narrowed. “You don’t have to pretend.” His lips curled upward, but it was more a baring of teeth than a smile. “Yes, Thalia got knocked up by her French lover. How’s that for a kick in the face?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Rae,” he growled. “You must have known. You were her closest friend.” He glared at me with a murderous look on his face. “Of course, she couldn’t be bothered to tell me. I’m only her damn husband.”
I swallowed. “Garrett, what are you talking about?”
“Did everyone know but me?” he said plaintively, resuming his pacing. “It’s bad enough that she was screwing that Frenchman, but pregnant? Pregnant? Four weeks. Do the fucking math,” he shouted. He came over to me, his face looming inches from mine. The alcohol scent was overpowering. “You knew,” he said accusingly, jabbing his finger into my chest. “She told everyone but me.”
I swallowed. “No, of course not. I had no idea.” I was pierced by grief—for Thalia’s lost baby, for Garrett, and for myself. How much worse could this get? I wanted to flee, to be alone and process this bombshell.
“How stupid I was!” Again his voice rose. “Did everyone know but me? That pansy-ass Frenchman, her brother, everyone. And I had to find out from the goddamn police!” He was shouting even louder now.
“Garrett—”
“No, don’t you dare say a word.” He raised his palm toward me, and I winced, fearing he was going to strike me, but he spun around toward the settee again and almost lost his balance. “I’m tired of everyone’s sympathy. She played me for a fool!” He sat down with a thump and drained his glass. “She played me for a fool!”
Thankfully, my phone rang. It was Peter, calling to see if I was ready to be picked up. “Yeah, I’m just finishing,” I told him, my voice shaky. “Come get me. Right now.”
Garrett put his head in his hands. “Oh, God, Rae, I’m sorry. It’s all too much.” He began to sob.
“We both need to get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll be done here in a minute.” I closed up the second box and carried it into Thalia’s office, then came back and said good night, giving the closet one last look. Maybe I should take something after all, I thought, something to hold on to. I spotted Thalia’s gray blazer. It was the jacket she’d worn when we met at the farmers market, the day I’d stormed off in a huff. “Garrett, would it be OK if I take this?”
“Of course.”
I took it off the hanger and went through the pockets, emptying out the spare change onto the nightstand. And there it was in the inside breast pocket. Before I even unfolded it, I knew what it was. I stared at the note demanding money.
“What’s that?” Garrett asked.
Without a word, I handed it to him.
He stood looking down at the page for a long time—much longer than it could have taken to read the few sentences. Was he, too, feeling that the person he thought he’d known was an utter stranger?
Finally, he sat down on the bed, looking miserable. “I . . . I guess the police need to see this.”
I took the note gently from his hand. “I’ll bring it to them on Monday,” I promised.
CHAPTER 14
On Monday morning I marched into Park Police Station at one minute to eleven. “I have an appointment with Detective Hernandez,” I said to the officer at the desk, this time a woman. Hernandez came out and led me into that same sparse room with the scuffed table and the uncomfortable chairs. Warren was there. I extracted the letter from my purse and handed it to Hernandez, feeling quite proud of myself. “I found this in Thalia’s jacket.” I refrained from making a snide comment about their failure to search thoroughly.
Hernandez put on a pair of latex gloves before reaching for it. He read it slowly, then passed it to Warren, who also donned gloves and scanned it more quickly. Then Hernandez sealed the note in an evidence bag and labeled it. “Tell me where you found this,” he said.
“I was going through Thalia’s things. It was in the pocket of one of her jackets.”
“And you’re sure this is the note you saw earlier?”
I insisted that it was the same one I had seen at the farmers market. “You’ll test it for fingerprints, won’t you?” I asked.
Hernandez assured me they would but wanted to know who else had handled it.
“Just me and Garrett,” I said. “He was there when I found it.” They gave each other a meaningful glance. “Oh, and my husband,” I added. “I showed it to him when I got home. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Warren asked facetiously. I realized I should have been more careful. What if someone had smudged Marcel’s fingerprints? “Sorry,” I said contritely. “I handled it before I realized what it was.”
“And how about after you realized?” Warren inquired. I didn’t have a good answer to that. Hernandez said quickly, “Thank you for bringing this in. We’ll send this off to forensics right away. We’ll need to take your fingerprints so we can eliminate them. And we’ll need your husband to come in, as well. But first we have some additional questions for you.”
“Of course. I’m happy to help.”
“It’s about the life insurance payment.”
I waited. Presumably he had a question.
“According to the documents, you’ll personally be getting half a million dollars.”
“No, that can’t be right,” I said with a laugh. “The business wasn’t worth that much—”
“It’s based on earnings over the next twenty years. With the loss of either partner, the business would be in serious difficulty.”
“Yes, but—”
Hernandez held up a hand. “Mrs. Sullivan, what you think is reasonable is not the issue here. The fact is that you are about to be paid a sizable settlement.”
Warren jumped in. “I’m sure your husband will be pleased.”
“Well, yes . . . of course. But no! He wouldn’t want Thalia to die just so we could collect the insurance! What are you saying?”
“What we’re saying is actually pretty simple,” Warren said, leaning across the table. “Your husband is in a financial bind. A big one. He has some pretty unsavory characters that he owes money to. Being in hock to loan sharks is dangerous business.”
His self-satisfied expression made me want to hit him. “That’s not true!” I protested. “You’re making that up. He’s had some real estate losses, but nothing we can’t handle. Are you accusing him of killing Thalia?”
“No. Not directly. His alibi is airtight.” He consulted his notes. “He was at that architect event from seven thirty on, and Thalia called you at 8:22. Your husband didn’t leave until around ten, except for a quick break when he phoned you. And you’re apparently in the clear too, since you had a dinner guest. But you see, when this much money is involved, well, it makes us wonder.”
This was incredible. Did they seriously think that Peter and I had plotted Thalia’s murder? I stared at them, Warren looking smug, Hernandez’s face showing concern. They weren’t kidding. “By your own admission,” Warren said, “you knew that Mrs. Holcombe would be a sitting duck alone in the park. In fact, according to you, you’re the only one who knew.” I was about to ask for a lawyer but stopped myself. First off, I didn’t have a lawyer—other than Garrett. Second, on TV the blustery suspect who demands a lawyer is invariably guilty, and I didn’t want to give the wrong impression.
Instead, I decided it was time to leave. “Your allegations are ridiculous. I have another appointment. Can I go now?”
“Not quite yet,” said Hernandez. He opened another folder and scanned some papers. “Tell me about your work at Barnaby & Sloane.”
First the reporter, now the police. “What about it?” I asked. “I was the associate director of the collectibles department. I worked there for three and a half years.”
Warren said, “Yea
h, until the company was caught selling stolen antiquities. The CEO is lucky he’s not serving time. And so are you. You authenticated the merchandise.”
“Yes. Yes, I did. But it was authentic. That was never in dispute.”
“Authentic but stolen.” Warren leaned in close to me as he said the last word. “We’ve been talking to some of your former colleagues. They say that you were Robert Barnaby’s protégé. He brought you in, groomed you, and promoted you after only two months.”
“What’s your point?” I asked, struggling to maintain my composure.
“My point is that if you were such a superstar, how did you screw up so badly? By the way, some of your former coworkers don’t like you very much. They blame you for bringing down the company and costing them their jobs. The way I see it, it’s entirely possible you and Barnaby and that Swiss guy were in on this little scam together.” I started to protest, but Warren cut me off. “Sure, I know no charges were filed, but lack of proof isn’t the same as innocence.” He gave Hernandez a wink. “We’ve seen that happen more times than we can count.”
Warren still wasn’t done. “Then the company was sued by the purchaser of the urn. Tell us, what was the result of that suit?”
“I’m pretty sure you already know,” I said angrily. “The auction house was found liable and had to repay the buyer, plus one hundred thousand in damages. And of course the artifacts were returned to Italy.”
“And that was the end of Barnaby & Sloane, wasn’t it? Not to mention that your own reputation was ruined too. No one would hire you at an auction house or art gallery after that little incident, would they?” I said nothing. “You were not trustworthy.”
“What happened had nothing to do with my honesty! I told you, my boss was away and there was no one to research the provenance. We trusted Hubert Grebe because we’d worked with him before.”
Warren wasn’t interested in my explanation. “That’s when your pal Thalia Holcombe bailed you out. She took you on as a partner. But my guess is you resented her—”
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