BUT A FEW hours later, back at my home, I decided that my acceptance of Charlotte as a viable suspect would be more unlikely than I’d thought.
Lexie and I had just arrived. I’d driven around slowly before pulling the Beamer into its spot, making sure no reporters still lurked to spoil our constitutional. I intended to take Lexie on a neighborhood walk of our own before settling down to study till Jeff arrived.
I’d peered into the garage window before heading upstairs to our apartment. No cars had been inside.
Had Charlotte and Yul fled?
Nope. I learned they hadn’t as I heard an engine and peeked out to see Yul pull onto the property. I soon felt my floor vibrate as he drove his grumbling sports car into the garage below. He was alone. No Charlotte riding shotgun.
I waited till he was inside the house before leashing Lexie and heading downstairs. I wasn’t in the mood for a single-syllable conversation about what had happened to Chad Chatsworth.
No sooner had Lexie and I gotten to the front gate than it began to open for Charlotte’s brand-new brilliant red luxury sedan. As she pulled in, I waved.
She stopped. Her window rolled down.
So did her tears. I’d never seen the perky brunette with perfect makeup so upset. “Oh, Kendra,” she sobbed, laying her head down on her steering wheel.
Only she hadn’t parked yet, and the car crawled forward, not to the right, toward the garage, but straight toward the parking space beside it.
“Be careful, Charlotte,” I called to her. I cringed as her auto approached the rear bumper of my Beamer. “Charlotte!” I shouted. “Stop your car!”
She did, maybe an inch away from stoving in my poor Beamer’s butt.
Giving Lexie a little tug to tell her to follow, I hurried back up the drive toward her stopped car.
The driver’s door stayed shut.
As I looked in, I beheld Charlotte, head still down, crying uncontrollably.
“Sorry, Lexie,” I murmured. “Looks like our walk will have to wait until later.” To Charlotte I said, “Let’s get you into the house, okay? Then you can tell me all about what’s wrong.”
As if I couldn’t guess.
Chapter Nine
TO MY SURPRISE, Charlotte invited herself upstairs. My usually high-flying tenant had never before seemed interested in visiting my modest second-story flat. All our landlord-tenant interaction had been in my much-missed mansion or on its grandly maintained grounds.
She even led the way, Lexie and I bringing up the rear as we all mounted the garage-side steps. I held back to make sure that
her
rear, sashaying from side to side as she scaled the steps, stayed far from my face. I had to catch up and squeeze around her, though, to unlock the door.
My little kitchen would have fit into one corner of my much more magnificent culinary environment in the main house, but it was still where I did most of my meager entertaining. I showed Charlotte to one of the chairs at my round table, and sighing, she sank into it, resting her small chin on trembling hands. Her perfume began to permeate my apartment, and I made a mental note to open some windows later.
“Would you like something to drink?” I asked. “I’ve water, apple juice, diet soft drinks, red wine—a nice Bordeaux, I believe—amber beer or—”
“Rum and cola, if you have it,” she ordered. “Mostly rum.”
I turned before she could see how my brows reached for my hairline. I considered joining her in something strong. I had a feeling that whatever she was about to spill to me wouldn’t be easy to imbibe. I settled on a beer.
A little later, Lexie at my feet, I sat across from Charlotte at the table, watching her swig her strong rum concoction as if she were an overheated runner just handed a bottle of water. I sipped my Sam Adams from a mug to brace myself, then began, “Tell me why you’re so upset, Charlotte—though of course I can guess. I’m sorry about your friend Chad. It must have been a shock to learn what happened. Especially because it was in the house where you’re living.” I’d developed tremendous tact as a litigator. The idea was to start the wheel turning with what I intended to learn, then let her respond with her own spin on it.
“I feel terrible that he’s dead, even though he wasn’t my friend anymore,” she said, sounding surprisingly sad after what I’d witnessed the other night.
“Chad crashed your party,” I said to Charlotte, “so I wondered how close you were. Especially since you and Yul didn’t welcome him with open arms. But I heard that Chad and you were an item not long ago.”
“Only in front of the cameras,” she shot back, the glare from her blue eyes so pointed that I felt the stab in my cheek.
“But from what I gathered, he was the last guy standing on a show where you had to choose the supposed love of your life.”
“Well, yes.” She shrugged a slender shoulder beneath a snug, white shirt whose hem barely met the top of her gray sweatpants. Then she took a good stiff swig of her drink.
“Were you just acting for the camera?” I pushed.
“Not really.” She sighed. “He was the best of the fifteen-man pool I started with. I knew that right off. And . . . well, by the end I actually was in love with him.” Another hefty swill.
“I see,” I claimed, while my mind mulled over this revelation. “Did you know you’d have to choose between him and a bunch of money when you picked Chad?”
She shook her head. “No, but there’ve been a lot of reality shows that have a catch. A few made the main player choose between
mucho
money and supposedly true love. Some shows were straightforward about their endings, some weren’t. I figured something like that could happen in this one, too, and I was fully prepared to pick love over money.”
I felt floored. That wasn’t what I’d anticipated. Charlotte had Yul now and a whole lot of loot. Plus a burgeoning career in reality TV.
And she’d chewed out Chad but good at her party, without hiding it from any of her house full of guests.
“But you dumped Chad on the last day, right?” I asked.
She nodded sadly. As she spoke, her speech was slurred. “That was when I found out he was really in it for the fame and fortune. Not that
he
was offered money and a show to dump
me,
but he accidentally let slip about his girlfriend from home, how his being on the show had been her idea, and how she was still in the picture.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does, sort of. Hardly any couples in these shows actually stay together long enough to still be an item months later, let alone get married. But most major contestants became media celebrities, at least temporarily. There’s lots of money in that. It’s what Chad and his girlfriend apparently counted on—together. Only when I found out, I decided that if I couldn’t have him, I might as well settle for fortune and fame, and a reality show of my own.”
“Might as well,” I agreed. My mind was definitely boggled. I’d already decided that, huggy habits or not, Charlotte was probably a mercenary queen, ready to kick a guy who was down on his knees to propose to her right in his impoverished teeth.
Instead, she’d settled for a bushel of money as second best.
“And then Chad showed up at your party. Didn’t his visit threaten what you’d gotten?”
“Yes,” she acknowledged. This time, she just took a sip, maybe because her drink had nearly disappeared. “I was pretty damned mad about it, especially since he and his girlfriend nearly made a fool of me. I guess I made a spectacle of myself.”
“Everyone understood,” I said sagely, then added, “Of course it also gave you a good motive to kill him.”
“Kendra, you can’t believe that!” she squealed. “I mean, that nasty detective said the ferrets had human help, but not even he has accused me of having anything to do with Chad’s death.” She paused, eyes rolling upward as she pondered. “Not directly, at least. He really upset me.”
Hence her histrionics in the car? Maybe.
I’d found out the hard way that Noralles wasn’t a nitwit. I wondered how he’d become certain the ferrets hadn’t acted alone in killing Chad—the autopsy?
And whom did he suspect, if not this possible perpetrator who’d had motive, means, and opportunity? Or was he playing cagey with Charlotte, waiting for her to implicate herself?
“I suppose, by ‘nasty detective,’ you’re referring to Detective Noralles?” I asked dryly.
“You know him?” She looked at me in confusion till her blue eyes narrowed in understanding. “He was the one who tried to pin those murders on you, wasn’t he?”
“The same,” I acknowledged with a smile as wry as I could grin it. “What has he asked you?”
“Mostly about ferret habits.” She swung herself to her feet. She had to hang on to the table, I figured, since she’d chugged the hefty helping of rum in less than a minute. To make sure the table and Charlotte stayed erect, I held on, steadying it, feeling it tilt in my tenant’s unstable grip. My beer stein was nearly drained, but I set it on the floor anyway to ensure it didn’t slide off and smash. She went to the counter and refilled her glass with rum, not even a hint of cola this time.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Their favorite food, for one thing.” She sat once more, swaying unsteadily in her chair and taking another swig. “But he knows that. It was all over the place. I asked
him
questions, too. Sure, the ferrets chewed on Chad, but whoever killed him dumped ferret kibble all over his body, especially around his neck. Of course the poor little creatures would chew on what they thought was just an extension of their food.”
My sudden shuddering segued into a valiant attempt to deactivate my gag reflex. I croakingly continued, “Then the police believe someone killed Chad and set the ferrets up—scattering food to make them feast on him, and hoping the evidence would indicate they did it all?” As much as I hated discussing the disgusting details, that sounded feasible. More feasible than pinning the murder on the ferrets.
“Yes, poor, innocent creatures.”
Well, not totally innocent. I’d seen some treacherous teeth marks. My voice shook as I said, “Did you ask if there were any marks on Chad to suggest someone killed him before he sank to the ferrets’ level?”
“I kind of asked, but the detective didn’t answer.”
“So I don’t suppose he told you who they think would do such a thing.”
“Like I said, the detective didn’t tell me much, but some questions he asked make me sure he thinks
I
did it. Or Yul did.”
Big surprise. Only, wasn’t that a little too obvious? Okay, maybe I was doing an about-face, but my suspicions were turning elsewhere, to suspects as yet unknown.
Chad had been killed in the house Charlotte and Yul rented, after a party where they’d all but punched him out. The ferrets may have been set up to take the fall. But would either Charlotte or Yul have tried to do that to such prized pets?
Probably, if it would eliminate them as suspects.
Which it apparently hadn’t.
Charlotte’s mind seemed to stagger along the same initial lines but stopped short of what I’d concluded. “We wouldn’t do that to the ferrets. They’re Yul’s, but I adore them, too. And now they’re in ferret prison.” Her voice broke, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “I don’t know whether the cops have determined yet how much the ferrets actually did contribute to Chad’s death. The best scenario for them will be if they’re found totally innocent. Then, they’ll be shipped off to some ferret rescue place, probably in another state. The worst case . . .” Her voice trailed off as she dropped her face into her hands.
She didn’t have to finish. I heard the Animal Services lady in my head:
They’ll be humanely euthanized
.
Charlotte’s tears became contagious, though I contained mine in moist eyes.
Shaking so hard that the table between us started to shimmy on the tile floor, Charlotte swept her hands from her head and stood again. Her reddened eyes grew grimmer. “The thing is,” she said hoarsely, “that even if the ferrets are cleared, the police will still want to know who killed Chad in the first place . . . and that detective might accuse Yul. Or me. But we didn’t do it.”
I genuinely hoped they hadn’t. Either of them. “You’re sure Yul—”
“We’re each other’s alibis, for whatever good that’ll do.” Though her sigh was soggy, she took yet another swig of rum. “We’d gone to Vegas for the fun of it, but I was supposed to have a meeting on my show ideas yesterday so we didn’t stay overnight but decided to come back. The thing is . . . Well, you might have noticed that Yul’s a sexy-looking guy, and in this case looks aren’t deceiving. We took a little detour, pulled off the road, and spent the night . . . I’m sure you get the idea, but we won’t be able to prove it.”
I chose not to pursue questions about where they’d been or what they’d been doing. A picture glowed graphically in my mind, though, till I switched to something else. “Did you have any idea Chad would be in the house when you were gone?”
She shook her head so vehemently that her long braid gave a whiplike lash. Her ensuing unsteady blink suggested her drinking, plus her head movement, had made her dizzy.
“And do they know how he got in?”
“The police shed . . . er, said, that some of the plastic stuck to the wall that the Hummer smashed in was loose.” She slurred an occasional word despite the clarity of what she said.
When I’d arrived, the front door was ajar. How had it gotten open in the first place? Maybe the killer and Chad came in through the plastic and only the killer exited from the front . . .
“Chad had no business being there,” Charlotte continued. “He knew I never wanted to see him again, and I told him that once more at the party. But he wanted to ruin everything, out of revenge. Only he was the one who hurt me, you see?” She paused till I nodded. “Never mind that he’d planned all the time to stay with his girlfriend. He was so pished . . . pissed off after I dumped him on the last show that he made it clear he’d do anything to convince the producers I was really madly in love with him and intended to see him secretly. And he knew full well that my seeing him would mean I wouldn’t get to keep the money or be able to help develop new shows. Spite, that’s all it was.”