Death by Inferior Design (29 page)

“Is it?”

“Like I said, it’s remotely possible. I barely noticed the holes in the side of my van when I got into the car at the restaurant. But I
would
have heard the gunshots if anyone had fired a gun earlier, while I was in Randy Axelrod’s or my own quiet neighborhood.”

“So you’re not sure when the bullets were fired at your van after all.”

That
was what he took away from what I just said? “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that it happened
while
I was in the restaurant tonight,” I said firmly.

O’Reilly drummed on the table for at least ten repetitions with each finger. My gaze unwittingly drawn to his hands, I noticed that he had an unusual amount of body hair. The observation reminded me of a joke from my childhood about hair on knuckles being one sign of insanity—and looking for hair on one’s knuckles being a second sign. That, in turn, led to me thinking about how bad it would look if I were to start laughing about the detective’s hairy hands, which brought on such an urge to laugh that my eyes teared up. My thought pattern made me realize that I was not, as of yet, completely sober.

Finally, he said, “Okay.”

“So I can leave now?” I started to scoot my chair back from the table.

He scowled. “We’re still investigating the poisoning death. I understand Detective Martinez asked you to come in and answer some questions, yet you never showed.”

“I’d already told you everything I knew about that.”

“We’ve noticed your van in the neighborhood quite a bit these past couple days.”

“I’m working there, designing Myra Axelrod’s rooms.”

He considered this information worthy of a notation in his pad. “That’d be the victim’s wife,” he muttered. “You’re now picking out curtains and new furniture for the recent widow?”

“It’s what I do for a living, detective.”

He gave me a disdainful look. “And it doesn’t bother you that the husband of the woman who hired you was recently murdered.” It wasn’t a question.

“It bothers me, sure, but it certainly doesn’t stop me from doing the job I was hired to do.”

“Did it occur to you, Miss Gilbert, that you might be the key to the whole thing? The final straw that caused someone to break and take Mr. Axelrod’s life?”

I gritted my teeth before I replied, “Detective O’Reilly, I don’t need to have you try to lay a guilt trip on me.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?” He spread his hands a little in a gesture of innocence.

“I think you’re trying to gauge my reactions to upsetting accusations, yes.”

He drummed on the table, just two cycles this time, regarding me through both cycles. “It’s just that I’m a bit puzzled by your lack of curiosity, Miss Gilbert. Seems to me it’d be human nature to want to know who put your kiddy picture there . . . inside a virtual stranger’s wall.” He added under his breath, “If everything happened like you claim.”

“It
did
happen exactly as I claimed. Myra Axelrod told me the whole story this afternoon. Her husband, Randy, put the picture in the wall, so that I’d discover it there when I was remodeling. Myra’s my birth mother, and years ago she put me up for adoption for my own protection. Apparently Randy was prone to violent behavior.”

O’Reilly dropped his black Bic pen on the table as if too disgusted with me to be able to keep a grip on the implement. “Let me ask you something, Miss Gilbert. You just got through telling me you had no additional information regarding the ongoing investigation.” He retrieved his pen and began to write furiously in his pad. “What do you call your last statement, then? Idle gossip?”

Oops.
My cheeks grew warm. “I . . . told you about it now.”

He stopped writing and returned to his staring-contest mode. He augmented his side of the contest with nonstop drumming. It was as though his fingers were doing a miniature performance of
Stomp.
At length he said, “Not right away, though. Not voluntarily. Why is that?”

“It seems to further incriminate Myra Axelrod in her husband’s death. Apparently I’m related to them. Maybe part of me didn’t want to be the one to have to get the police involved in all of that.”

“So it appears.” Once again he leveled his gaze at me and, for what felt like an eternity, said nothing. I grew to miss the tapping fingers; at least
that
provided a slight distraction. “Anything
else?”
he finally asked.

I felt like a ten-year-old being scolded by the school principal. It had been an oversight on my part not to tell him much sooner what Myra had said, but admitting to an officer of the law that I was slightly intoxicated didn’t strike me as all that terrific an excuse for withholding information, even temporarily. “Not that I can think of.”

He gave me a sour look and started paging through his notes. I rose and headed for the door.

Just as I grabbed the doorknob, O’Reilly asked, “Ms. Gilbert, what’s your blood type?”

It was A-negative, but I turned toward him and asked, “Why?”

“I was just wondering if it was the same as the victim’s . . . as Axelrod’s. That’s all.”

“What was
his
blood type?”

Detective O’Reilly rose, leaned past me to open the door for me, and replied, “It’s A-negative.”

The ruddy-cheeked officer who’d accompanied us to
the station now led me to the lobby, which was still dressed up in its paper-products’ pseudo-cheer—a cheap veneer if there ever was one. Steve was waiting and mustered a smile as he got to his feet. He rushed over to grab the door for me, and we crossed the parking lot together in silence.

The air was chilly, but the black, moonless sky was still not releasing any snow. This was only my third winter here in Colorado, and I’d originally envisioned the sight of Christmas lights on crystalline snow against a breathtaking mountain backdrop. Friends who’d lived in Crestview much longer than I had warned me that there is almost never any snow either on the ground or falling on Christmas day; with less than a week till Christmas, the weather seemed to be holding true to form.

Relieved to see that my van—bullet holes and all— was still where I’d parked it, I muttered, “At least they didn’t confiscate my vehicle as evidence.” I turned to face Steve, his features cloaked in shadows, his hands buried in the pockets of his pea coat. “Do you know anything about blood types . . . how common they are, how they’re inherited?”

“I just know a couple of random facts. O is the universal donor and, I think, the most common. AB is the universal receiver and the least common.”

“Lots of people have type A blood, too, though, right? I remember that it’s the second most common blood type. And A-negative?”

“I had a boring teacher in biology. I didn’t pay much attention. Why?”

O’Reilly had made me feel like carpet lint. I couldn’t bring myself to explain how miserable this was for me. After eighteen months in her care, my genetic mother had chosen to give me up for adoption to “protect” me from her husband. Then she’d remained with “that monster” for more than twenty-five years. Wasn’t nature supposed to infuse mothers with an unconditional love for their babies?

I unlocked my van. “It’s not important. Good night, and thanks for . . . everything.”

He chuckled a little. “ ‘Everything’ would include . . . what, exactly?”

“For keeping me company while waiting for the police. And escorting me here.”

“Yeah. That was downright princely of me.” He headed toward his own van, three spaces down. “I’ll follow you home, just in case the goon with the gun decides to take another potshot at your van.”

Not even a professional bodyguard could truly prevent some maniac with a gun—and surely not one with the skills to dot the
i
in
Gilbert—
from taking me out. “No, thanks. I’ll see you soon, though.”

He pivoted and said over his shoulder, “Yeah. Great. Maybe next time we can
really
go for a classy evening and visit an
emergency
room together.”

Once home, and after a perfunctory exchange of greet
ings with Audrey, who declared that she’d “decided to pack it in early tonight,” I dug through every item of personal effects in the box in my closet. Going through my mother’s things had been so painful for me immediately after her death that I’d never done a thorough job. I had some of her sheet music for the piano, although I couldn’t play myself, and now I was careful to go through each one, page by page. Yet there was nothing—no birth certificate, no records from the adoption agency, no enlightening photographs stashed between the folds of music. There were also no hidden compartments in her jewelry box, no magic potions stored in her perfume bottle, no answers tucked inside the pockets of the coral cardigan she’d worn so often.

I shoved the box into the back of the closet, thoroughly annoyed with myself. I was now deliberately breaking the promise I’d made to Mom. I hadn’t actually sought out Myra and Randy Axelrod, but my poking around for clues among her things was undeniably by conscious choice.

It would be so simple, now that I knew that I’d been born in this town, to call the county clerk and get a copy of my birth certificate. Detective O’Reilly was probably going to have that information in his hot, hairy hands five minutes after the clerk’s office opened tomorrow morning. Or had he already done so? Perhaps he’d been sitting with me in that miserable room, drumming his fingers, knowing a piece of fundamental personal information about me that I myself wasn’t privy to.

With Hildi watching me from her perch on my bed, I began to pace, outraged at the unfairness of it all. What was next in store for me? Only this morning, the
Crestview Sentinel
had run an update to the murder investigation. The brief article was almost an exact duplicate of one they’d published two days ago. Was some nosy reporter going to break the story? So far, my name had been mercifully absent from all news stories on Randy’s death. Was that good luck about to end? Would I, along with this entire town, learn who my biological parents were from the newspaper, when it was revealed that the victim’s long-estranged daughter had called 911?

Time was running out on me. It was either find out for myself once and for all who my parents were, or get the information crammed down my throat from a grouchy detective or the media. Despite my promise to my mother, it was now imperative that I find out once and for all who my biological parents were.

Myra’s story just wasn’t adding up for me. If Randy had been this dangerous “monster,” why
would
she stay with him all those years, yet give up her child? The implication was that Randy
wasn’t
my father. But
Randy
had been the one to find me. Why would he look for his
wife’s
banished child?

Maybe
he
was my father but Myra was
not
my mother. Steve Sullivan was right: I
did
look remarkably like Emily Blaire; or at least we certainly shared more physical similarities than Myra and I did. Not that that proved anything. I’d been told at least a dozen times over the years that I was a dead ringer for this person or the next.

Myra had to have other old photographs of herself— pregnant with me, pictures of herself and me at the hospital maternity ward. I could ask to see them. And if that didn’t work, I would call the county clerk to get my birth certificate.

The phone rang. The double-short ring indicated the call had been placed to my office number. Not wanting the shrill noise to wake Audrey, I answered quickly, and there was a pause. “Erin, hello. This is Jill McBride. I was expecting a machine to pick up. I didn’t realize you’d be at your office this late.”

Forcing myself to sound perky, I asked, “What can I do for you, Jill?”

“I have some decorating plans that I’d like to discuss with you.”

If she wanted to bring me in after the fact to get rid of the mounted fish or redo Steve’s elegant design, she was wasting her breath. “Are you thinking of redoing another room?”

“Not exactly. You mentioned the other day that you decorate for holiday parties. We’re throwing a New Year’s Eve bash for some potential backers for Kevin’s business. I was going to decorate the place myself, but then I thought, why should I take that on, when you do this sort of thing for a living?”

I was already booked to decorate for one New Year’s party, but I could squeeze in a second one. “I’d be happy to do that for you. Let me grab my Palm Pilot.” I made a few fist pumps as I headed to the foyer closet; I so loved getting new clients that, even as down as I’d been just moments earlier, it always made me feel as though the cutest boy in school had just asked me for a date. I snatched up my purse from its usual spot on the shelf and retrieved my Pilot. As I paged forward to December 31st, I asked, “Do you have a particular theme in mind, other than the obvious one?”

“The obvious?”

“The new year.”

“Oh. That.” She giggled. “By ‘obvious,’ I thought you meant, ‘Give us your money.’ ”

I chuckled. “No, but I’m willing to bow to your wishes. I can string garlands with dollar bills if you’d like.”

“Something more subtle, perhaps. Maybe just IOUs as door prizes.”

“Have you hired a caterer?”

“Yes, they’re from Denver. Super exclusive.” She paused. “So much so that I’ve forgotten the name of their business. I’ll give you their business card the next time we meet. You’ll need to coordinate everything with them, I assume?”

“Yes. Some caterers bring their own bar carts and serving tables. How soon do you need an estimate from me?”

“Oh, I don’t care about the precise amount. I want this to be extravagant and expensive. As they say, the way to get money is to spend money. Just so long as you spend two or three grand, which would, of course, not include the food and beverages, you’re my new best friend.”

“Easy enough,” I said with a grin. My mind was already awhirl with images of crystal garlands and silver baubles that could transform the McBrides’ home into an enchanting gala at the Ritz.