Look the Other Way

by Leigh Jones

  “I’m here to see Mr. James Finney,” he said.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No.” Johnson pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and flipped it open to his badge, which he held in front of her face. “Please tell him Detective Peter Johnson with the Galveston Police Department needs to speak with him on official business.”

  The woman’s eyes widened at the sight of the badge. She responded to the command as he hoped she would.

  “One moment, please. I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  Johnson watched as the woman walked to the hallway that ran parallel to the reception area and turned left. He counted to three and followed her. She knocked on a door at the end of the hall and opened it, stopping just inside. When Johnson walked up behind her, she jumped.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I just thought I would save you the trouble of coming back to get me.”

  With round eyes and gaping mouth, the woman stood aside and gave Johnson a free path into the room. The man behind the desk looked almost as alarmed as his receptionist. He stood as the detective approached but gripped the edge of the desktop with both hands, as if for support. He had dark circles under his eyes, and although it was only mid-morning, he had already loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar.

  “D-Detective,” he stammered as Johnson crossed the space between them. “Please come in.”

  When Johnson held out his hand, Finney stood a little straighter and offered a weak smile. His handshake was limp, his fingers cold. He motioned for Johnson to take a seat in one of the stiff wingback chairs in front of the deep desk.

  “What can I do for you?” Finney asked, gingerly perching on the edge of his chair. He picked up a fat pen and weaved it through his fingers.

  “I need to ask you a few questions about a necklace you bought back in October from Getz Jewelers.”

  Finney fumbled the pen and it hit the top of the desk with a thud. Without the distraction to keep his fingers busy, his hand trembled slightly. Johnson’s pulse quickened.

  “Ah, yes. Have you found it?”

  “Found it?”

  “Yes, someone stole it, from this drawer, in fact.” Finney pulled open his top right desk drawer and pointed inside. “It was a couple of weeks ago.”

  Johnson’s eyes narrowed as he considered the response. “Did you report the theft?”

  “Well, no,” Finney said with a slight laugh that sounded apologetic. “I didn’t. I felt like I was partly to blame for leaving it here in the first place. I didn’t mean to, but I had to get home in a rush the night I bought it. My daughter had a volleyball game I just couldn’t miss. I bought the necklace at lunch, you see. And I had intended to give it to my wife that night. But then I left it. When I got to work the next morning, it was gone. I’m sure it was one of the cleaning crew.”

  “You bought the necklace for your wife?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Mr. Getz thought you were buying it for your daughter.”

  “Oh? No. No, for my wife, in fact.” Finney picked up the pen again. He stared at it as though twirling it through his fingers required all his concentration.

  “Well, it turned up around the neck of a dead girl.”

  Finney winced and dropped the pen but didn’t immediately say anything. Johnson’s heart beat faster. Most people, when told something like that would have offered exclamations of surprise and horror. Finney swallowed and licked his lips.

  “That’s terrible, detective. Truly terrible. But I don’t see what that has to do with me. As I said, it was stolen. Who knows what happened to it after that.”

  “Maybe the dead girl is one of your cleaning crew. I’d like to show you a picture, to see if you recognize her.”

  Finney looked like he was about to protest, but Johnson had the photo in front of him before he could say anything. He took one look at the girl’s bloated face and turned swiftly away, his hand over his mouth. Johnson could hear his pulse pounding in his ears now.

  “Do you know who she is?”

  Finney shook his head violently. “No! I’m sorry. Please excuse me. I’ve never seen, a … a… ” The businessman stood abruptly, walked to a credenza, and poured a glass of water from a crystal pitcher sitting on a silver tray. He drained the whole tumbler before turning back to Johnson.

  “I’m very sorry, detective. I’m afraid I can’t be of any help to you at all. I have no idea how my necklace turned up on that poor girl.”

  “Your wife’s necklace.”

  “What?”

  “You said you bought the necklace for your wife.”

  “Yes, of course. My wife’s necklace.”

  “Have you been to Galveston recently, Mr. Finney?”

  “Galveston? No. No. I don’t think we’ve been there since last summer. My daughter has a friend whose family rents a beach house every July. We went down there for a few days. That’s the last time, I think. I’m afraid I don’t have much time for trips to the beach.”

  Finney smiled weakly. His already pale face had turned downright pasty. He looked like he might throw up in the leather-trimmed trashcan next to his desk.

  “What did whoever leads your cleaning crew say when you mentioned the stolen necklace?”

  “What? Oh. I didn’t mention it, in fact. I doubted it could be recovered, so I didn’t pursue it. My wife has plenty of jewelry. It really was just a trinket. I decided pursuing it would be more trouble than it was worth.”

  “And is the same crew still cleaning your office?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid they are,” Finney said, a little sheepishly. “Without going into the whole incident of the stolen necklace, I didn’t see how I could have our administrator dismiss them. I guess that was probably a mistake.”

  Johnson looked long and hard at the sandy haired man in front of him. Finney met his gaze, but only briefly, before picking up his pen again.

  “I’ll need a contact name and number for that crew. Perhaps you could have your receptionist look that up for me before I leave.” Johnson slid a business card out of his pocket and snapped it down in the middle of the desk as he stood to go. “If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”

  Finny rose from his chair, relief flooding his features. “Of course! Of course, detective. Anything I can do to help. I really feel terrible about this. I hope … I hope you catch whoever did this.”

  As Johnson walked out the office door, he heard Finney pick up the phone and ask the receptionist to look up the contact information he’d requested. Johnson didn’t believe for one minute the cleaning crew knew anything about the necklace. But he waited silently while the woman wrote down a name and number on a sticky note and handed it over.

  As he stepped into the glass elevator again, he was sure of two things: That necklace had never been stolen and Finney knew the girl who was wearing it when someone dumped her body into Galveston Bay. Now all he had to do was figure out how a middle-aged businessman from Houston was connected to a young Hispanic girl that no one seemed to have missed.

  Chapter 29

  After he got off the elevator, Johnson sat in his car, key in the ignition, and considered his next move. If he went back to the station and told the chief what he had discovered, he would most likely end up in the DA’s office making a case for a warrant. But he didn’t have enough evidence to go on yet. Finney’s story about the necklace theft would be hard to disprove. Or at the very least, it would be time consuming. He would have to interview all the cleaning crew members, look into their backgrounds, interview their family and friends. And he was convinced it would turn up nothing.

  Finney might not be the murderer, but he knew more than he had said. And if he didn’t have anything to do with the girl’s death, why wouldn’t he tell what he knew? He could at least tell them her name. Unless she stole the necklace from him, Finney must have given it to her, which meant he must have known her very well. There were only a few ways a man like Finney got to know a girl li
ke that. Johnson thought about the prostitution ring at The Clipper. This girl could easily have been a high-priced call girl. And the girl shot in Fish Village was just like her, only without the polish. Were they both part of a well-organized prostitution ring operating in Galveston? If so, where did that leave his second murder victim, Julian Costa? Was his death related or just a random outlier?

  Johnson tapped his fist against the steering wheel. He had too many pieces and only a hazy picture of how they might fit together.

  But if Finney had been spending time with a prostitute in Galveston, he had to have left some clues behind. Credit card charges for food or gas. Maybe a speeding ticket down that long stretch of Interstate 45. Johnson flipped open the laptop attached to the dashboard of his department-issued Crown Victoria. Accessing financial records would take a court order, but he could pull up Finney’s driving record right now. He tapped the businessman’s name into a search box on the screen, scrunching his eyebrows together in frustration as he waited for the results to pop up.

  There it was. A speeding ticket on September 15, issued by the La Marque Police Department at 2 a.m. A man like Finney only had one reason to be speeding home in the wee hours of the morning—a wife. What had he told her he was doing out that late? Surely she didn’t think he was working. And if he had a habit of coming home that late, she had to have been suspicious. He’d learned from other cases that wives were rarely as clueless about their husbands’ activities as the men thought they were.

  But they weren’t always willing to sell their husbands out either.

  Johnson tapped Finney’s address into his computer and pulled up the only other driving record linked to that home. Amanda Finney. Her license photo showed a woman with short blonde hair, sharp green eyes and a strand of pearls around her neck. She looked as shrewd as her husband was soft.

  Johnson’s pulse quickened as he turned the key in the ignition and pulled the gear lever into reverse. His best bet for getting anything from Amanda Finney would be to surprise her with her husband’s connection to a dead girl. Would she tell him what she knew, without calling a lawyer? Or would she circle the wagons and protect her husband, no matter what he might have done?

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  The two-story brick house Johnson pulled up in front of twenty minutes later had black, plantation-style shutters, a red front door, and an immaculately landscaped yard. One of the shrubs had been trimmed into the shape of a corkscrew. As he got out of the car, Johnson looked up and down the street. Three houses down, a lawn crew was mowing the grass. Otherwise, it was quiet and deserted—a world away from the streets of Galveston, which hummed with activity at almost all hours.

  The hair on the back of Johnson’s neck rose with every step he took toward the front door. The heavy brass knocker slipped through his fingers and crashed back to the wood with an insistent thud. Almost a full minute later, Johnson heard high heels clicking across the foyer. When the door swung open, Amanda Finney stood before him, eyes narrowed and lips scrunched in annoyance.

  “Yes?” she asked ungraciously, her eyes flitting from Johnson’s face to his boots and back again.

  “Mrs. Finney, my name is Detective Peter Johnson, with the Galveston Police Department.” He pulled his badge out of his pocket and held it up for her inspection. “I’m here to ask you about a piece of jewelry your husband reported missing.”

  Amanda Finney frowned. “I’m not missing any jewelry.”

  “According to your husband, you are. May I come in?”

  She glanced over her shoulder, as if looking for an excuse to turn him away.

  “I promise I’ll be as brief as possible,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t ask him to wait while she called her husband. “It really is very important.”

  She looked at him searchingly, as if trying to figure out what she was in for if she invited him in. His heart thudded, but he smiled reassuringly, hoping she couldn’t hear it. Reluctantly, she stepped back and swung the door open wide enough for him to cross the threshold.

  “Please be brief, detective. I have a lunch date at the country club in an hour, and I simply can’t be late.”

  She led him down a wood-paneled hall into an expansive living room. Flowery curtains banked tall windows that looked out over a glistening pool. Prints of English hunting scenes adorned the cream-colored walls. A vase filled with what must have been at least two dozen white roses sat in the middle of a delicate coffee table. The room had a very masculine feel with a pervasive feminine touch. Amanda perched on the edge of a dark blue leather sofa and clasped her hands loosely in her lap. Johnson sat on the ottoman of the easy chair across from her, where he could easily see her face.

  “Now, detective. What is this about? As I’ve already said, I’m not missing any jewelry.”

  Johnson pulled the small plastic bag containing the heart pendant out of his pocket and held it out to her. She frowned as she took it from him, turning it over in her hand to examine it.

  “Your husband bought this pendant from Getz Jewelry in October. Mr. Getz thought your husband said he was buying it for your daughter. But he told me he bought it for you.”

  Amanda frowned and handed the bag back to Johnson. Her eyes scanned his face. Although she said nothing, he sensed she was looking for some clue about where the conversation was going, calculating what kind of disruption in her perfect world this unexpected interview was likely to create.

  “He told me the necklace was stolen from his office the same day he bought it, before he had a chance to bring it home. Did he mention anything about a theft to you?”

  “No. But it hardly seems likely he would, if it was meant to be a surprise gift.”

  “That’s true. Does it seem like something he would buy for you, or your daughter?”

  Her eyes narrowed and her white-tipped fingernails dug into the backs of her hands.

  “Not especially. But there’s no accounting for a man’s taste, detective. My husband is easily persuadable. Perhaps Mr. Getz was trying to move some excess merchandise.”

  Johnson nodded as though carefully considering her answer. He looked down at the pendant and back at her. She had become very still, her face frozen into a brittle mask. Johnson’s fingers trembled with excitement. She was hiding something.

  “Do you have any reason to believe your husband might have bought this for someone else?” he asked quietly.

  Amanda broke his gaze and looked out the window at the pool, where a waterfall trickled over a cascade of rocks into the deep end. Johnson held his breath, exhaling slowly when she turned back to him with hard eyes and a derisive sneer.

  “You’re asking me whether I think my husband is having an affair, detective. I can hardly see what business that is of the Galveston Police Department.”

  “Did you know your husband got a speeding ticket on I-45 at two a.m. on September 15?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any idea what he was doing out that late, or why he was so anxious to get back to Houston?”

  Amanda had begun to chew on her bottom lip, her red gloss smearing across her bright white teeth. She shook her head, unclasped her hands, and moved as though to get up. Alarm shot up Johnson’s spine, and he scrambled to think of what he could say to persuade her not to throw him out. But after half rising from the couch, she sank down again, sliding up against its tufted back. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest.

  “My husband makes frequent trips to Galveston with a group of other businessmen. They fish. And drink, I suppose. Sometimes they’re out late. Several times he hasn’t come back until the next morning. He swears there are no women involved.”

  A shot of excitement coursed through Johnson’s chest. He tried to keep his face expressionless. Amanda sighed, her features softening slightly to reveal what Johnson guessed was a deeply suppressed vulnerability.

  “Obviously, I’ve had my doubts,” she said.

  “But you think the group trips are real, not just a ruse to get him ou
t of the house?”

  “Oh, no. They’re real. I’ve heard some of the men joking about them at the club, although it’s supposed to be a big secret. They call wherever they meet ‘The Retreat.’ I don’t know whether that’s the name of a boat or a house. I know they don’t spend all the time on the water.” Her mouth twisted in disgust.

  The muscles in Johnson’s shoulders and neck were so tight an ache had taken root at the base of his skull. Excitement surged through his arms and legs, leaving him slightly breathless. He chose his next words carefully, afraid at any moment Amanda would shut down or realize she might not want to be so open with a police officer without a lawyer present.

  “You said you thought women might be a part of these trips. Do you think there’s a specific woman your husband might have grown attached to?”

  Amanda sprang off the couch and stood, trembling. Her mouth compressed into a tight, angry line. Her nostrils flared. Johnson’s heart sank as she fixed him with a livid glare.

  “Honestly, detective, I have no idea. Why does it even matter? I’m tired of these questions. What do you really want, and why are you so interested in my husband’s dalliances?”

  Johnson stood slowly fixing his eyes on her face. He held up the bag containing the heart-shaped pendant.

  “We found this necklace around the neck of a dead girl who washed up on the island two days ago. We’re still trying to figure out who she is. The only clue we have is this necklace, which we know your husband bought four weeks ago. He claims it was stolen. But he also told me he hasn’t been to Galveston since last summer.”