by Kylie Logan
“Yeah, and hanging around too much with a cop.”
A smile flickered across his face. “Not yet, but I’m hoping you will be hanging around with a cop too much very soon.”
She could not be so easily put off. Not even by that old, familiar glint in his eyes.
Too keyed up to sit still, she finished off the tartlet. “You’ll look into it?”
He sat back, raised his chin. “Already have.”
Just like that, her excitement dissolved. “You mean you already knew all that stuff?”
“Not about the kid,” he admitted. “That was pretty clever of Florie and it explains all the weird clothes in her closet. Good work on your part finding it out.”
“But…” She couldn’t help but stammer. He’d pulled the rug out from under all her theories, all her work. “But…”
“You’re right,” he said, and apparently, that was supposed to make her feel better, because he allowed himself a quick grin. “Florie worked part-time for Moritz. And yes, she was following people. As for her scooping up business for herself … If he knew about it, Moritz never told me.”
She slapped both hands, palms down, on the table. “You talked to him?”
“And every single one of his clients who Florie was following.”
“And…?”
“And they’ve all got credible alibis, including Moritz. Thanks to a gallbladder attack, he was in the ER the night Florie was killed.”
“You could have told me.”
He controlled a grumble of frustration, but just barely. “I didn’t need to tell you. I don’t need to tell you.”
He was right.
Which didn’t mean Jazz was going to give up. “Then what about Grace Greenwald?” she asked. “Grace and Florie were always at each other’s throats. Grace might have killed her. And then there’s Parker Paul over at the film festival. He says he was in Atlanta at the time of Florie’s murder, but—”
“He was in Atlanta at the time of Florie’s murder.”
“Then what about Billy DeSantos at the film festival? He’s—”
Nick sat up, his jaw tight, his eyes narrowed. “Stay away from Billy DeSantos. He’s got a record.”
It wasn’t often that he went caveman on her, but every time he did, she reacted the same way.
Jazz inched back her shoulders, and maybe the tartlet wasn’t sweet enough, because her voice was suddenly edgy.
“All I did was talk to him.”
“All you have to do from now on is stay away from him.”
“Why? Do you think he’s the murderer?”
“If I thought he was the murderer, I would have arrested him by now.”
“Not if you didn’t have evidence.”
“Evidence.” Maybe the tart wasn’t sweet enough for Nick, either. His mouth twisted. “It would be great to have some evidence.”
Before he was even done grumbling the words, his phone rang. He swiped the screen. “Kolesov,” he said, and listened. “Really? Where?”
Just like that, Jazz felt the weight of all their yesterdays settle on her shoulders. It was always the same, always the job.
Nick was already out of his chair when he told the caller, “I’ll be right there,” and when he ended the call, regret softened his eyes, rounded his shoulders. “I gotta go.”
She didn’t mean to snap. Blame it on the sugar rush. Or the fact that he’d ignored the suspects she’d mentioned. Well, except for the ones he’d already eliminated. And the one he’d ordered her to avoid. “Of course you do.”
“If you hadn’t been so late, we would have had more time together.” His frown told her he hadn’t meant to snap, either, but there it was.
Nick dug out the money to pay for their coffee and dessert and more than enough to cover a tip and stacked it in the center of the table. “How about…” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then, like a kid making a wish in front of a birthday cake, he lowered his voice. “Next Tuesday? Right here?”
“Will it ever be any different?”
“I dunno,” he admitted. “But I think it’s worth trying to find out, no matter how many Tuesdays it takes.”
With that, he was gone, and Jazz was left with nothing but the question of what she’d do next Tuesday. That, and a half a cup of cold coffee and the thought of pink envelopes with white polka dots on them.
CHAPTER 18
Joyce Wildemere was no more a fashion plate that evening than she had been the first time Jazz stopped to see her. Last time, it had been a long black skirt and a pair of dirty boots. The evening of Jazz’s date with Nick, the screenwriting instructor was decked out in a pair of farmer overalls and wore a long-sleeve gray T-shirt underneath that was sprinkled with stars that matched the silvery color of her hair.
For a moment, all Jazz could do was stare.
“Yes?” Wildemere looked up from her computer and over to the doorway. “Do I know you?”
“Jazz Ramsey.” She offered a smile that wasn’t returned. “I stopped in a few days ago to talk to you about Florie Allen. You told me she failed your class.”
Wildemere was holding a pen, and disgusted, she tossed it down on the desk and sat back. “What, you’re going to argue with me about the girl’s grade?”
“No. Not at all.” Jazz took a few steps into the office. Unlike Tate Brody’s, with its antique banker’s lamp and wooden bookcases, Wildemere’s office was bare-bones basic, standard issue from the school, no doubt—a gray metal desk, a couple chairs, a metal bookcase against one wall where books were piled one on top of the other.
“Actually…” Jazz tried for another smile. “I was going to ask if Florie was blackmailing you.”
Whatever Wildemere had expected, it wasn’t this. What little color was in her face washed away completely, then returned again in blotches that dotted her doughy cheeks and nose. The left corner of her mouth twitched. “What the hell are you talking about?” she demanded.
“I think I’m talking about a motive for murder,” Jazz confessed. “Not that I think you killed Florie or anything.” This she was not sure about at all, but it seemed the safest way to continue the conversation. “I’m just trying to confirm a theory to myself. You see, Florie was working for a divorce attorney, following people and taking photographs. Only I think maybe she decided to get a little cut of the action on her own, to cut out the middleman and see if she could turn a profit. If you know what I mean.”
When she spoke, Wildemere’s voice was tight. Her fingers curled into her palms. “No, I don’t know what you mean. I do know you need to leave. Now.”
“I will,” Jazz promised. “I just want to know if—”
“Get the hell out of here.” Like a glacier inching toward the ocean, Wildemere stood. She leaned forward, her palms pressed to her desk. “How dare you accuse me.”
“I’m not. I’m not accusing anyone. I just thought if Florie was involved in something she shouldn’t be involved in, if she took some pictures of you—”
“What makes you think she did?”
Jazz looked at the desktop where only days before, she’d seen the proof. “Pink envelope,” she said. “White polka dots.”
Wildemere looked where Jazz was looking, exactly where the envelope had been the first time Jazz visited. For Jazz, that pretty much confirmed her theory.
The instructor shrugged. “Whatever you’re talking about, I don’t see any pink envelope here, do you?”
She didn’t. Jazz swallowed down the familiar taste of regret. First she’d accused Tate Brody. Now she’d nearly come right out and called Joyce Wildemere a murderer. Regrouping, she closed her eyes.
“It’s just a theory,” she said.
“Maybe you’d better get your facts straight before you start throwing your theories around.” Her fists on her wide hips, Wildemere faced Jazz. “You think I’m hiding something.”
“If you are, it only makes you look guilty. At least that’s what the cops will think. It makes you look like
a suspect.”
Wildemere barked out a laugh that pinged against the metal furniture. “Suspect? If that’s what you’re looking for, you’d be better off talking to Tate Brody.”
“I have,” Jazz told her. “He says—”
“Oh, I can imagine what he says. Pure as the driven snow, right? That’s what he’d like everyone to believe. But let me tell you, I walked in on them once, on Tate and that Allen girl. It was not the usual teacher-and-student meeting, if you get my drift.” She added a broad wink so Jazz would, indeed, get it. “That ought to be enough to tell you something isn’t right about that guy and if it isn’t…” There was a window behind her desk, and Wildemere stalked over to it and flicked aside the blinds.
“You didn’t notice the cop cars outside?” she asked Jazz.
Of course she’d noticed two police cars parked out on the street, but Jazz hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention. She was used to seeing police cars in the city. Now, she took a step closer to the window and looked at the street, three stories below. There were two patrol cars out in front of the building and there were two more cars parked nearby that she hadn’t been able to see when she walked in. Unmarked cars, like the one Nick drove.
“I saw the patrol cars when I came in,” she told Wildemere. “I just figured—”
“What?”
Jazz twitched her shoulders. “There are always police in this area of town. I didn’t think anything of it.”
Jazz took another step toward the window, another look at the cars outside. She gave the teacher a sidelong glance. “What have you heard?”
Wildemere made a noise, half grunt, half raspberries. “Maybe you need to watch the news like everyone else.”
“You already know. School grapevine?”
“Grapevine. Text messages. Emails.” Wildemere’s smile was tight. “We’re a small school and when something happens, word travels fast.”
“Word about…?”
“What, we’re best friends now and you expect me to pour my heart out to you?” When she laughed, her stomach jiggled beneath the bib of her overalls. “You just walked in here and accused me of being a killer.”
“Actually, I just walked in here and asked if you were a victim. If Florie was blackmailing you—”
“She wasn’t.”
Wildemere’s denial was a little too quick. A little too forced.
“If you know if she was blackmailing anyone else—”
“Can’t say.”
“Which isn’t the same as you don’t know.”
“Which isn’t anything since I asked you to leave a few minutes ago.”
“I will. Sure.” Jazz backstepped toward the door. “But if you could tell me what the police are doing here—”
“Sweet baby Jesus, you are one annoying woman!” Wildemere’s eyes bulged, and her already blotchy cheeks got even redder. “They found her phone, all right? They found Florie Allen’s cell phone.”
This was news, and the enormity of it took Jazz’s breath away. “Who—”
“Somebody on the maintenance staff. At least that’s what I’m hearing from the text messages that have been buzzing around for the last hour or so. Found it dumped in a trash can, and whoever it was who found it, he was smart enough to turn it in to security. They were the ones who called the cops.”
“Do they know how it got there?”
“Now, see…” Wildemere wagged a finger at Jazz. “You’re thinking like the blockhead kids around here think. I present them with a scenario and they right away jump ahead of themselves. At this point, you shouldn’t be asking how it got there, you should be asking where there is.”
“You said. In a trash can.”
Wildemere nodded. “In a trash can, all right. One right outside Tate Brody’s office.”
* * *
Tate Brody’s office was in a different wing of the building, on a different floor, and Jazz slowly made her way there. Now she understood why Nick had raced out of the coffee shop. She also understood that, good cop that he was, he’d never let her—or any other civilian—anywhere near the scene.
Jazz took the steps rather than the elevator and pushed out of the stairwell door and into the hallway that intersected the one where Brody worked in the elegant glow of his banker’s lamp. There were … one, two, three, four … office doors between her and the L where the hallway cut to the right. Brody’s office was two doors down from there on the left.
And there was yellow crime scene tape between her and there.
She wasn’t surprised, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aggravated. She grumbled a curse, and when she caught the sound of a familiar voice, she swallowed anything else she might have been tempted to say and stepped around a trash can and toward a nearby drinking fountain.
“Get the ones over this way,” she heard Nick say. “Clancy and his team are checking the trash cans on the other floors.”
She didn’t hear the crime scene technician’s response. She didn’t have to. Nick was younger than most of the detectives in the department, but he had a reputation for being smart and thorough and for kicking asses when he had to. He was well respected, well thought of, and easy to work with as long as everybody pulled their own weight and didn’t drag down either Nick or his investigations.
When a technician rounded the corner carrying a black garbage bag, Jazz took a long drink of water, watching out of the corner of her eye as the man dumped what was in the school trash can into the bag he was holding.
She supposed in the best of all possible worlds, she would have called out to him when he turned to leave and a piece of paper fluttered from the bag and landed on the floor.
Instead, she waited until the technician disappeared again beyond the yellow tape. Then she closed in.
“It can’t be,” she mumbled, and in the next breath reminded herself to be quiet. She didn’t need either Nick or the tech to come around the corner, not until she retrieved the scrap of paper.
There wasn’t much to it, a three-inch-by-four-inch sliver of paper, its edges ragged, ripped. She wouldn’t have noticed it at all if not for the colors.
Bright psychedelic swirls, and so familiar.
* * *
“Good God, Jazz, why do you smell like the lunches my boys leave in their backpacks over the weekend?”
The next day Jazz was so busy studying the photograph propped against the bookcases in her office, she didn’t see Sarah sail into the room. She barely spared her a glance, just curled her lip to let Sarah know what she thought of the comment.
“You’re not close enough to smell me.”
“I don’t need to be close.” Sarah waved one hand in front of her face before she went over to the far end of the office and threw open a window. “Honey, you need to go home and take a shower. You can’t spend the rest of the day smelling like that.”
Jazz knew she was right. But at that moment, she didn’t really care.
“I want you to take a look at this picture,” she told her friend.
Giving Jazz a wide berth, Sarah came back across the room. She stopped four feet to Jazz’s right and cocked her head, studying the photograph. “Nice. What is it?”
“It’s Florie’s.”
Sarah raised her eyebrows.
“I stopped to see Florie’s parents yesterday and I went back there this morning. I bought the picture from them just a little while ago. Well, after I unearthed it.”
She hadn’t had a chance to tell Sarah about her visit to the Allens’ the afternoon before, about the house, the mounds of junk, the smell. No wonder Sarah looked skeptical.
“They’re hoarders,” Jazz explained.
“So the smell—”
“Kind of goes with the territory.”
“And the picture—”
“There were two of them. This one was hanging in Florie’s bedroom at her apartment.” She waved toward the photograph across the room. “This one…” She plucked the scrap she’d found outside Brody’s office fro
m her desk and waved it in Sarah’s direction. “This is all that’s left of the other one, the one Tate Brody took out of Florie’s office at school because he thought it was the most wonderful work she’d ever done.”
“It is magical.” Tipping her head from one side to the other, Sarah closed in on the photograph. “So why did he rip it up?”
“That’s what I’d like to know.”
“And what’s it supposed to be?”
Jazz kept her gaze on the photo. “You’re the art expert.”
“Well yeah, but…” A couple more steps, and when Sarah parked herself between Jazz and the photograph, Jazz had no choice but to round her desk so she could stand beside her.
Sarah wrinkled her nose.
“Sorry,” Jazz said.
“The kid just died. The picture couldn’t have been stored for all that long a time. The smell shouldn’t be clinging to it.”
“You have no idea. I saw it yesterday in an upstairs bedroom. This morning when I stopped by, the Allens didn’t even remember the picture, and let’s face it, it’s pretty hard to forget. Fortunately, they were cooperative. They let me go up and find it myself. Between yesterday and today…” She shivered at the memory. “Less than twenty-four hours and things had already changed. It’s like the whole house is alive. It morphs and grows. Like some kind of giant fungus or something.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “There was a stack of Life magazines that wasn’t there yesterday on top of the photograph. And two bags of shredded paper. And the cat’s litter box.”
Sarah digested this information in silence.
“How much did you pay them?”
“All I had, and I only had it because I stopped at an ATM on the way over to their house. It’s a good thing Friday is a payday. I wiped out my account. Two hundred bucks. They didn’t haggle.”
When Sarah tipped her head to the left, her purple dangling earrings brushed her shoulder. “It’s worth it.”
“You think?”
“It would look great in your living room.”
Sarah had long been trying to get Jazz to introduce more color—more style—into her home. It never worked. Jazz liked her world simple. Clean lines and colors that wouldn’t jar her senses and that she wouldn’t easily tire of. Like gray. And beige. No muss, no fuss.