Authors: Elizabeth Adler
“Surely the contracts were always checked by his lawyers before they were signed,” I said as the thought suddenly occurred to me.
“Always,” he said firmly. “But as far as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with these contracts anyway.”
“Except that the land is worthless,” Eddie said bluntly, and J.K. glanced at him with surprise.
“That’s the partners’ department,” he said with a shrug. “You’ll have to talk to them. I know nothing about it.”
“And what exactly was ‘your department’ Mr. Brennan?” I asked curiously, wondering why this innocuous young man had proven so indispensable to Bob Keeffe.
“I guess I was a kind of a ‘man Friday.’ I just took care of all the things Bob didn’t want to. It varied from day to day, month to month. Maybe he would send me to Italy to check why the marble shipment was delayed, or to London to talk to a banker. Or Pittsburgh to talk money with a new supplier of steel girders. Or Hong Kong to see what the building action was, or to inspect building sites in Sydney or Timbuktu. I was everything to him that he wasn’t himself. It got so that sometimes I would think of things before he did and then he would say them a minute afterward. He
said sometimes we were just like terrible twins. We knew too much about each other.”
I wondered whether Bob had known too much about J.K. that night he was shot and I said suddenly, “And did you kill your employer, Mr. Brennan?”
He looked at me with shock. Then he turned to Shannon and said, “My God, how can you even think such a thing? Bob Keeffe gave me my start. He literally took me from the street when I knew nobody else would have.” He walked across to the window, staring out at the pale sea lapping the rugged coastline, his shoulders hunched miserably.
“I’m sorry if we’ve upset you, J.K.,” Shannon said quickly. “It’s just that we had to ask. We’re just investigating, you know.”
“Amateur sleuths,” I said, beaming. The man looked genuinely upset and though I could not get a reading on him, I did not have the feeling he was a killer. “Maybe we could change our minds about lunch,” I suggested to jolly things along. After all, he had been kind to Shannon, and her father had cared about him.
His face lit up and he hurried to light the barbecue, and I saw that a salad had already been prepared and that fresh swordfish steaks were already marinating, and I knew he had hoped we would stay.
Eddie and Shannon relaxed and we drank a bottle of California wine with our pleasant meal and afterward we went for a walk around the garden, inspecting his neat soldierly rows of onions and carrots and potatoes, and the regimented ranks of beans and peas climbing up over trellises, and the rampant over-size squash. “If you take your eye off them for a day or two, they just go wild,” he said apologetically, as though we might care that he had allowed his zucchini to take over their own destiny.
After lunch, he drove us back to the airstrip, and as we took off I could see him, sitting straight-backed in his white Range Rover, one hand shielding his eyes from the sun as
he watched us soaring off into the distance. And I wondered about him.
We were silent on the flight back to Manhattan, each thinking gloomily that we were no further ahead than when we had started. I apologized to them both as we drove back through the choking traffic to the hotel. “Maybe I’ve been leading you up the wrong path,” I said. “I’m an interferin’ old woman, and you probably know best, after all.”
They laughed and told me not to be silly, we were all just floundering around, searching for the truth. And after all, thanks to Joanna, we had already proven Brad and Jack were the thieves.
“Let’s go back to Nantucket,” Eddie suggested to Shannon. “Let’s search the white house and Sea Mist Cottage from top to bottom, end to end, for clues.”
I waved good-bye to them as the limo dropped me at the Ritz-Carlton and then turned around to take them back out to the airport again. I was sad, but glad to see them go, because it gave me a little time on my own to think things out.
I opened the door to my suite and stopped in my tracks, staring with astonishment at the litter of tissue paper and glossy carrier bags, and I groaned. The worst had happened. Brigid, who had never shopped further away than Galway in her life, had gone mad with consumerism in Bloomingdale’s.
I followed the trail through the foyer into the sitting room. Garments of all sorts were draped over the sofas and chairs. There was silky lingerie, and packets and packets of black stockings, some with glittery stripes and others with stars or lace, strewn on the floor. There were colorful skirts and blouses and sweaters, and at least half a dozen black dresses. And, ranged in front of the marble hearth, were six identical pairs of black, high-heeled trotty little boots. Italian and, I could see, very expensive.
Brigid appeared in the doorway of her room, flushed with triumph and the excitement of it all. She was wearing
a long quilted housecoat in hot Florida colors, orange, fuschia, and lime-green, with the label still dangling from the sleeve, and she beamed proudly at me.
“What d’ya think, Maudie?” she cried excitedly. “Isn’t it all wonderful? Sure and there’s nothin’ they don’t have in New York. And those salesgirls are a miracle, y’just tells ’em what you want and they find it for you. ‘No problem,’ they say, and ‘Six pairs? Of course, madam.’ And ‘How about this one, too, it’s exactly right for you.’ God bless ’em, for they made me a happy woman today. I’ve never had so much fun in me whole life.”
“In that case, Brigid, it was worth every cent,” I said approvingly, because I’m all for a woman having a good time, whatever it takes to make her happy.
She glanced apprehensively at me and then slowly lifted the hem of her robe. She was wearing lizardskin cowboy boots with Cuban heels and fluffy tassels and her plump pink knees stuck out over the top like a pair of Florida grapefruits. “What d’ya think?” she asked cautiously.
“Brigid, I love ’em,” I said enthusiastically, and I went over and gave her a great big kiss. “And I love you too,” I added.
“I was thinking of getting them in another color also,” she said thoughtfully, and I laughed. “Well, there’s still plenty left from Mammie’s sapphires to pay for them,” I said, because what was mine was hers, even though she had her wages for the past thirty years tucked away in the Bank of Ireland.
“I’ll niver accept that,” she said, shocked. “Yer mammie’s earrings are rightly yours, and you should only have been there spending along with me today instead of ‘investigatin’,’ as you call it.”
“Sleuthin’” I said, flinging myself wearily onto the sofa and the piles of clothes. I sighed. “And no nearer we are to a solution either, Brigid.”
I told her the results, or lack of them, of today’s encounter with J. K. Brennan, and she looked thoughtfully at me
and said, “But all you know about J.K. is what he’s told you himself.”
She was right, and it was so obvious I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it myself. Yet the story he had told Shannon about his past had had the ring of truth about it: the poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks whose mother was a bad lot and whose father was a drunk. And about the grandmother who had been the only person to love him and give him dreams.
Dreams of what? I wondered. The past? Or the future? There was only one way to find out.
“Put on your new clothes, Brigid,” I said, springing to my feet again. “We’re going on a little trip.”
I remembered Shannon telling me that J.K. came from South Carolina and that he had gone to college in a small town there, and I called down to the concierge and asked him to book us on the next flight.
“To what city, madam?” he asked me.
“Wherever the planes go, just as long as it’s South Carolina,” I replied, forgetting all about the vast distances of the American continent.
We arrived in Charleston late that night and checked tiredly into the airport hotel. We sent down to room service for sandwiches and tea and sat, each in our own queen-size bed, munching silently and gazing at the TV like a pair of zombies. It had been a long day and half an hour later we were both fast asleep.
I was on the phone the next morning at nine sharp, and I soon had a list of all the small-town colleges in the state. There were so many I feared it would take me a week to check them all, but I began at the top of the list with
A,
and struck lucky paydirt with
B.
Jonas Brennan had attended Boonespoint Valley College from 1980 to ’83. That was all the information they would give me, but Brigid and I had our bags packed again in a flash and with me at the wheel of a hired Cadillac convertible, we set out for Boonespoint.
It was one of those ugly, sprawling little towns that you
never seem to find the center of: just a series of long straight roads lined with used car lots and gas stations, and McDonald’s arches and Wendy’s chains. There were cheap-looking supermarkets and tired minimalls with closed-down yogurt parlors, and beauty salons with grubby windows and old-fashioned hair dryers that had seen better days. A creek ran across the middle of town and on the bluff on the far side we could see rows of larger houses, with trees and gardens and smart cars in the driveways, and we knew that must be on “the right side of the tracks.” The part of Boonespoint we were in was J.K. Brennan’s territory.
We found the college and took a look at the straggle of prefabricated concrete buildings that no architect had ever had a hand in creating. The kids were mostly wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, back to front, chewing gum and chatting up the short-skirted cute-looking girls. They stared curiously at the two old biddies in the big Cadillac, cheering as we roared past. “Go, dude,” they shouted after me, and I grinned with delight.
I remembered from the movies and detective novels that if ever you want to find out something about somebody, you go to the local newspaper offices and ask to check their archives. And we did just that.
The
Boonespoint Echo,
a weekly rag, covered everything from high school graduation ceremonies to funerals, from golden wedding anniversaries to arrests for car theft and brawls, and a myriad other crimes of which there seemed to be a great many for such a small town. It showed the latest fashions to arrive at Elite Style in the Boonespoint Mall, and the cheerleaders in action at the Boonespoint Valley College football games, and it had been in existence for fifty years.
“Must be one of the oldest in the state,” the middle-aged perky little woman at the front desk told us, showing us into the gloomy airless dungeon where copies of all the newspapers dating back to its beginnings were housed.
“Anything you want, just holler now,” she said, leaving us staring hopelessly at the files, wondering where to begin.
Remembering the graduation pictures, I started with the year Jonas Brennan had graduated from Boonespoint Valley College. And there he was in the photograph, half-hidden in the second row from the front among forty or so youths and girls, Class of ’83.
Brigid and I peered excitedly at the photograph and I decided he had changed very little since then; he was still smooth-faced and smooth-haired and bespectacled and stocky. Only now he looked rich. Richer than any of his fellow classmates of ’83, I’d be willing to bet.
Just how rich was J.K.? I wondered. And how truly “poor” had he been? I remembered his grandmother had died a month before he had graduated. Poor though she was, surely the
Echo
would have reported her death. I searched carefully, page by page, through every newspaper for the two months before J.K.’s graduation, while Brigid sifted through even earlier issues looking for a report of his mother’s death. I found nothing, and heaved a disappointed sigh.
“Glory be to God, will y’only be lookin’ at this, Maudie,” Brigid exclaimed, shocked, peering over her spectacles at me. Her finger shook as she pointed to the photograph above a headline.
LOCAL BARMAID FOUND MURDERED IN ALLEY.
There was a picture, horrifying even by tabloid standards, of a bloodstained body lying amid a litter of trash and garbage cans. And next to it was a photograph of a hard-faced, flashy-looking woman with a big smile on her face and none at all in her calculating eyes. And her name was Alma Brennan.
“I thought he said she had died of cirrhosis,” Brigid said indignantly. She forgets nothing, and that was exactly what Shannon had told us J. K. had said. That they had
“scooped her up from the sidewalk one night, hemorrhaging from the mouth.”
“It seems J.K. must have been lying, Brigid,” I said, busily
reading the report of how the body had been found by a store owner arriving early to open up his shop. And that Alma Brennan had worked for years as a barmaid in the Red Rooster Saloon on First and Main,
“and she was a well-known woman about town.”
“And what will they be meanin’ by that?” Brigid asked.
“You know. A tart,” I replied, reading on.
It said the body had been taken to the county morgue and an autopsy was being carried out that very afternoon. And police inquiries were underway for her assassin. Meanwhile her mother-in-law and her son, Jonas Brennan, who lived out at Jekyll’s Farm, had been informed.
We glanced apprehensively at one other as we pulled out the next edition of the
Echo.
B
ARMAID
S
HOT
F
IVE
T
IMES BY
U
NKNOWN
A
SSASSIN
the headline said. I could just imagine young Jonas flinching as he read that, along with the report on her private life, or, more aptly, her “public life,” because Alma Brennan had been known as a woman with plenty of men friends. “Could have been any one of ’em killed her” was the indifferent consensus of those on the street who were interviewed about her death.
We found the next
Echo
and this time there was just a short report.
MURDERER STILL AT LARGE
it said, over a three-line statement that Alma had been buried the previous afternoon.
I looked disappointedly at Brigid and she said, “Don’t give up yet. Maybe they found who did it.” So we went on scanning a couple of months of newspapers until our eyes glazed over from fatigue. But we couldn’t have missed the headline anyway.
SON HELD FOR QUESTIONING IN BRENNAN MURDER.