by Joanne Pence
“Not with the drugs here,” Richie said. “The Fillmores aren’t the type who would know crooked security guards to hire.”
On that note, Rebecca hurried to the wing of the house with the master bedroom, while Richie strolled out to the garden, drink in hand.
As he neared Wong, he glanced in his direction to find Wong eying him. “Ah, Detective Wong, how nice to see you. Do you remember me? Richard Amalfi.”
“Of course.” The two men shook hands.
“And where is your friend, the Inspector?” Wong asked with a smile.
Richie smirked. “This isn’t exactly her kind of party.”
Wong’s smile vanished, and he made no reply.
Richie made small talk with Wong about their hosts, their beautiful home and many guests. Wong seemed so ill at ease, Richie finally asked, “Do you enjoy these parties?”
“Very much.” Wong was clearly lying. “It’s good to get to know people on a personal basis. My husband always encourages me to be more social.” He forced a laugh.
“Oh, is he here?” Richie asked.
“No. Jason rarely attends such things.”
“So, his name is Jason,” Richie said as if he and Wong were sharing a secret.
Wong smiled. “Jason Carlyle.”
“A nice name,” Richie said.
“I think so.” Wong beamed, clearly enjoying talking about his partner, but then he looked over the party. “Well, I’d better do some mixing. Be sure to tell Inspector Mayfield to let me know if she gets any good leads on the Larkin case.”
“You’ll be the first to know,” Richie said with a phony smile. He watched Wong mingle with the other guests for a while, and then put in a call to Shay.
o0o
Rebecca stood in a guest bedroom with the door slightly ajar so she could keep an eye on the hall to the master. The lights were off in that wing of the house, and the sun had set, but there was some ambient light from the party. So far, the wing had remained completely quiet.
She saw the form of someone in the hallway, heading in her direction. She went on alert for a moment, but then relaxed. Even in minimal darkness she recognized that strut. “Richie,” she whispered.
He ducked into the bedroom and told her what little he had learned.
“Wong being here feels off to me.” Rebecca went back to the door, opening it a crack so she could watch the hallway.
“I agree.” Richie stood by the door jamb. “But do you think there will be a burglary? They don’t happen at every party.”
“True,” Rebecca said. “But this place is just begging to be robbed. It’s as if the Fillmores don’t really care.”
“I’m sure they keep the most valuable jewels in their bank, so who knows? Anyway, it might not yet be quite late enough yet for the robbers,” Richie whispered. “We could kill some time, and we’d never even have to leave the bedroom.”
“Just go away.” She couldn’t help but smile. “I was surveilling quite fine before you … shush!”
Rebecca stooped as she watched so Richie could also see what was going on.
A woman walked slowly down the hall. They could tell she was wearing a dress and high heels, and seemed to be carrying a drink along with a large tote bag. She might have been a guest who was lost, or looking for a bathroom.
The woman didn’t try any of the doors, but went directly to the master bedroom. When she reached it, she looked back down the hall, then quietly slipped inside, shutting the door behind her.
“Do we go in?” Richie asked.
“Give her time to open the safe … if she’s the thief. If not, she could always say she went in to use the master bathroom or something.”
They waited five minutes and then tiptoed down the dark hallway.
Rebecca turned the clasp on her clutch purse to take out her Glock.
“Stop right there!” a voice ordered.
They both froze, but turned their heads towards the sound, watching as a tall figure eased himself away from the wall and walked towards them.
“Your handbag,” he said. “Put it on the floor and both of you back off.”
Rebecca did as he asked, still trying to make out who he was. Richie, beside her, also backed away. The gunman kept aim on them as he picked up the bag, opened it, and put the gun in his waistband, her phone in his pocket, and then dropped the bag to the floor and kicked it under a small hall table.
“You,” he waggled the gun towards Richie. “Open the door.”
“Take it easy with that thing,” Richie said as he did as asked.
The woman who had first entered now stood in front of an open wall safe, flashlight in her mouth as she filled her tote with jewelry. She then took hold of the flashlight, shut the safe, and turned saying, “It’s a good haul. Let’s … who the hell are they?”
As she pointed the flashlight at Rebecca and Richie, she illuminated the area around them.
“Well, if it isn’t the newlywed,” Richie said. “Jason Carlyle. I was thinking it might be you.”
“How do you know me?” he demanded.
“Larry keeps a wedding photo on his desk. Real cute. I wonder if he knows about you and her.”
“Although,” Rebecca added, “your hair is considerably longer now, and the mustache is new. But now we know you’re the person who met with Karen Larkin just before she was murdered.”
“Who are these people?” the woman cried. “any why did you bring them in here?”
It was the voice that gave her away.
Rebecca stared at her in shock. She was the flower vendor from Gate 6 Road—the woman who kept warning her to stay away, to get her nose out of Karen’s murder. Now that she had lost the sunglasses, wore an expensive yellow dress, and her brown hair was pulled back into a low pony tail instead of hidden in a scarf, Rebecca saw that her face was round and flat, and she was somewhat overweight.
“She’s a cop. They were watching as you entered the bedroom,” Carlyle replied, then turned to Rebecca and Richie. “But you two aren’t the only ones who watch. I saw you both at the party. I had looked up Mayfield’s photo when you started hanging around Larry—the newspaper doesn’t do you justice, Inspector. I watched you come to this wing, and knew what you were up to. You think you’re so smart, but you didn’t notice me, did you?”
He smirked, then continued. “I could have stopped this theft, stopped Simone from entering the bedroom, but I thought, why bother? Why not get rid of the problem, right here, right now.”
He took zip ties from his pocket. “Simone, bind their hands tight behind their backs. We need to get them away from this place.”
Richie shook his head at Rebecca, the look he gave her clearly indicating she was not to fight them. She didn’t get it. Did he have a death wish she hadn’t known about? His gaze was stern. She held her hands behind her back and let them be bound, hoping he knew what he was doing.
Carlyle ordered them out the patio door, far from the partiers. They went through the back gate to the street, where he directed them into the back seat of a Buick. Carlyle jumped into the front passenger seat, still holding the gun on them, while the flower vendor, Simone, got behind the wheel.
Simone turned the key. The car made a grinding noise, but nothing more. She tried again with the same result. “What the hell!”
“Does it have gas?” Carlyle asked.
She glanced at him as if he were an idiot. “Of course.”
“Try again,” he ordered, still facing Rebecca and Richie, his handgun aimed at them.
She tried three more times with the same result. “Can’t you fix it?”
“No time. We’ll take the car in front of us,” Carlyle said. “I’ve got the tools I need in the trunk. Hold the gun on them.” He then hurried to the back of the car and opened the trunk.
The inhabitants of the car waited.
“Jason?” Simone called.
No answer.
“Jason, what are you doing?”
The trunk was ra
ised, blocking her view to the back.
Rebecca glanced at Richie, her eyes questioning. He raised his eyebrows a moment and gave a half-smile.
The flower vendor tried to open the window, but it didn’t work without power. She opened the door a crack. “Jason, what’s going on?”
When he didn’t answer, she kept the gun aimed at the two passengers as she backed out of the car. As soon as she turned towards the trunk, Rebecca saw Vito lunge at her from the front of the car where he had been crouched, waiting. He knocked her to the street.
“Go!” Richie said, twisting around so he could open the car door even though his hands were tied behind him. Rebecca did the same, and soon both were out of the car to find that Shay had trussed up Jason Carlyle like a turkey. Shay cut the zip ties off Richie and Rebecca, then got the bag of jewels from the car and tossed it into Rebecca’s hands.
Vito brought the dazed flower vendor to them. Her nose was bleeding; she looked like she had landed hard on it when she hit the street.
While Shay used masking tape on Simone’s hands, Rebecca retrieved her gun and cell phone from Jason. She was about to make a call, but first turned to Richie. “You planned all this?”
“Not exactly. I knew we’d have to catch whoever it was red-handed, and I was afraid they might escape or we’d simply miss them among all the other people around. So I asked Shay and Vito to be lookouts. I called a couple times from the party to keep them updated, finally suspecting the thieves would arrive late, probably parking near the bedroom. I knew Shay would disable their getaway car, and we’d see how things progressed from there.”
“Those two were suspicious from the minute they arrived,” Shay said. “We knew we would stop them, but things got a little more complicated when we saw they had you two.”
“Don’t scare me like that ever again, boss,” Vito said to Richie. “You should’na been involved.”
Richie shrugged and looked at Rebecca.
She nodded in agreement with Vito, then faced Carlyle and the vendor. “In case you didn’t realize it,” she said, “you’re both under arrest.” She called the Tiburon PD. As she was talking, she saw Vito carrying cases of wine and putting them in the trunk of Carlyle’s car. Then he shut the trunk.
When she finished the phone call, she backed away from the prisoners as she whispered to Richie, “What are you doing? Was that Uncle Sil’s?”
He nodded. Speaking softly, he explained, “It’s a little present for the ABCers. When they look into it, they’ll find leads that even they should be able to follow straight to Charkov’s house, with proof that he’s illegally wholesaling wine.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Richie grinned with satisfaction. “He’s already got the FBI after him. Why not a bunch of bureaucrats constantly trying to fine him? He might get so irritated by their nagging, he’ll turn himself in.”
“I can only wish,” she said.
Richie then nodded at Shay and Vito before he put the keys to his Porsche into Rebecca’s hand. “Better love has no man than he should give a woman the keys to his sports car.”
Rebecca realized they were all leaving. “But …”
Richie shrugged, and walked off with Shay and Vito.
She watched a moment. As she heard the police sirens in the distance, she put in a call to Mike Vargas.
CHAPTER 28
Rebecca spent the rest of the night and well into the morning at the Tiburon police station with Vargas and the local police. Since it wasn’t her case, she could do no more than listen and watch from behind one-way glass as Vargas questioned Carlyle and Simone Boudin.
Vargas first interviewed Carlyle.
“None of this is my fault,” Carlyle began. “It all happened because of Simone.”
“You’re saying Simone Boudin was the master mind?” Vargas asked.
“Yes. We met when she was doing tarot readings in a coffee shop in Sausalito. She told me I would be rich and famous one day so, of course, I listened to her. Then, we kept meeting. One day she told me how she had been a professional safe cracker.”
“She was a thief?” Vargas asked.
Carlyle chucked in a way to show he could understand Vargas’ mistake. To Rebecca, he was trying and failing miserably, to charm. “No, no. It’s a legitimate job. A number of old-fashioned safes continued to be found in people’s homes, particularly older homes. More often than one might suspect, the safe’s owners would at times lose the combination, or people would inherit safes from older family members without getting the combination, or companies would go out of business and the combination lost, and so on. People would need to either hire a safe cracker or destroy the safe to open it.
“She said a lot of those older safes are still in use by wealthy people in Marin, and that they were filled with quite a fortune. She knew that Larry and I had money problems. Living here is very expensive, and cops don’t make that much money. Finally, she persuaded me to pull a few burglaries with her. I’ll admit it, okay? But all I was involved in were simple burglaries in which no one was hurt, nothing more.”
“If that’s the case, why was Karen Larkin killed?”
At this point, all Carlyle’s forced charm and supposedly captivating ways vanished, and the look he gave Vargas was haughty insolence. “I had nothing to do with that. I know who did, and what happened. I’ll tell you, but only if I’m sure I won’t be spending time in jail for what someone else did, so I want a lawyer before I say another word.”
As soon as he asked for a lawyer, Vargas ended the interview, left the room, and went to talk to Simone Boudin.
Boudin story was similar to Carlyle’s about their meeting, but then it veered away. She said that after she told Carlyle about her skill at safe-cracking, he warmed up to her, and eventually convinced her he loved her and she should help him steal some jewels from rich people who won’t miss them anyway, so that she and Jason could afford to leave the country and run off to Belize or the South Seas. He told her his marriage to Wong meant nothing, that he wasn’t really “that way,” but had no money and needed someone to take care of him. Wong was an easy mark.
Rebecca was disgusted to see that Simone still believed Carlyle to the point she was in tears as she talked to Vargas about him.
“How could I refuse to help him?” Simone asked through her tears. “I love him.”
“Did he kill Karen Larkin?” Vargas asked.
Simone shook her head. “No. That was all Karen’s fault, and nobody else’s. She was a meddling bitch. Jason told me she wanted to horn in on our plans. That she thought she could steal him away from me, and wanted him to run off with her. He had me keep an eye on her out on Gate 6 Road, to see who she talked to, and what she was up to.”
“That was why you pretended to sell flowers?” Vargas asked. She nodded. “How did that lead to Karen Larkin’s death?”
Simone shut her eyes a long moment. “One day, Jason came to me all upset. He told me the bitch invited him to her home, the houseboat. He told me he didn’t want to go, but he would do whatever it took to make her believe he loved her so she wouldn’t go to the police. I understood what he was telling me, even though he was too much of a gentleman to say it. It made me sick. I knew I had to protect him. I went to her houseboat, and sure enough, there she was, all dressed up, waiting to seduce him. I stopped her. I made sure she’d never threaten my man again.”
Rebecca found it particularly difficult to listen to Simone Boudin. She wasn’t sure if she was more sickened by Carlyle’s lies, or by Simone for being such a stupid, love-sick fool as to act on those lies.
In the end, it was Vargas’ interview with Wong that provided the missing pieces of information.
“For the first time,” Wong told Vargas through his tears, “I believed that Jason was sincerely interested in police work. That he might even want to join the force some day. He had lots of suggestions, good suggestions I thought. He even helped me work out police stake-outs at some of the parties where the h
omeowner had valuable jewels. Of course, the thief never struck those places.” His face contorted into a bitter laugh. “And now I know why.”
Rebecca couldn’t take staying mute at that point, and knocked on the interview room door, then handed Vargas a slip of paper with her question on it. He read it, nodded, then shut the door and went back to Wong. “Did you discuss with Jason that an insurance company was working with a local woman who had a lead on the jewel thief?”
“I believe I mentioned it. But I didn’t know who the woman was.” Wong paled. “You aren’t … you aren’t suggesting the woman was Karen Larkin, are you?”
Rebecca shut her eyes, not even able to look at Wong after hearing that. Since Karen had contacted Carlyle, he didn’t have to be a genius to realize she was the person working with the insurance company.
Vargas leaned back, folded his arms and glared at Wong. “Throughout all this time, as we tried to work the Larkin murder, you insisted that her husband was her killer, yet all this other garbage was going on around you. How could you look me and others in your department in the face and continue to insist that Yuri Baranski was guilty of his wife’s murder?”
Wong covered his face with his hands. After a moment, he put them down and folded them together. “Whenever I had doubts, Jason was there to buck me up. He convinced me I was right, and said others were simply not as good at police work as I am.”
Vargas gave Wong the courtesy of laying out for him the facts of the case against Carlyle and Boudin.
At that point, Rebecca thought she had heard everything, but nothing prepared her for Wong telling Vargas that he would hire an attorney for Carlyle, and the attorney could work on a plea deal. Carlyle would provide evidence against Simone Boudin as Karen’s actual murderer in order to save himself from being charged as an accomplice. All neat, tidy, and sickening.
Rebecca saw that Wong was in denial over much of what he had learned about his spouse, but reality would soon hit. Not only would he never become police chief, but his loose lips had caused a good woman’s death. He would lose his badge over that. Simone Boudin would face murder charges. Jason Carlyle would probably get a light sentence for burglary because of his cooperation with the police. And a little girl was going to grow up without her mother.