A Draw of Death (Helen Binney Mysteries Book 3) (13 page)

Still, no one was universally liked, especially in competitive situations like poker and reality TV. The set of
Betting with the Pros
was like competition squared.

Helen's skepticism must have shown on her face, because Larry added earnestly, "It's true. You'll see when everyone from
BWTP
shows up for his funeral. The fake fights have been well documented, at least among the real fans. Only the casual viewers got it wrong."

"If no one involved with the show had a reason to kill Vic, then who did?" 

Larry shook his head, causing the headband to slip again. It would have fallen all the way down to his neck if it hadn't caught on one ear. "I don't know. I wish I did, but I just don't know. It's frustrating, not being able to help find who did this. So frustrating."

Helen struggled to find something encouraging to say, but she couldn't bring herself to claim that he could count on Hank Peterson to nab the culprit. "I'm sure Vic would have been pleased to know how much his fans cared."

"That's not enough. Not anywhere near enough in return for all he's done for us."

"Actually," Helen said. "There is one thing you might be able to do for him. His cat got loose, so if you see it, you should let Vic's assistant know about it."

"Vic had a cat?" If Larry were playing poker right now, the excited anticipation on his face would cause everyone else to fold. "Are you sure? I never heard about him having any pets. In fact, about six months ago he was quoted as saying he made sure never to have ties to anything that would make him go home in the middle of a winning streak. That meant no spouse, no pet, and no real estate. He lived for the game."

"He obviously changed his mind about owning a house, so maybe he got the cat at the same time, and the news hadn't leaked yet." Helen had to wonder if Vic might have also acquired a spouse no one knew about. If so, there was at least one person who was a more likely suspect than Stevie.

"I'll spread the word about the cat. Looking for it is the least we can do for Vic. Least we can do." Larry took a step toward the poker table and then paused. "Wait. What does it look like?"

"Tortie-colored Maine coon cat."

He looked at her blankly, apparently as clueless about feline jargon as Helen was about poker terms.

"Large, long-haired cat with a mottled black and orange coat. No white."

"Got it."

At the poker table a middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair was claiming the chips in the middle of the table. Larry took advantage of the break in the game to start rallying his troops to search for Vic's cat.

Helen braced herself to run the gauntlet between the two television vans idling on either side of the gate.

The two reporters, one male and one female, both young and carrying a microphone, jumped out of their respective vans to confront Helen. As if they'd practiced it, they both shouted simultaneously, "Are you a friend of the deceased?"

"I didn't know him well enough to give an interview." Helen caught a bit of the fans' excited chatter behind her as they prepared to honor their idol by finding his beloved pet. "I'm here for the cat."

Apparently cute felines were of interest only to the Internet, not mainstream media, because both reporters immediately turned on their heels and scurried back to lurk in their nice, warm vans until a more promising interviewee came along.

Helen continued on to the gate. Marty Reed's distinctive van, painted in a green, tan, and black camouflage pattern, was parked about twenty feet away, just off the right side of the driveway. She would have missed it if he'd parked any closer to the tree line, but it stood out reasonably well against the asphalt. The van's presence meant Marty himself was probably somewhere nearby, and she wouldn't have to rely on the intercom. She called out his name, and a moment later, the big, muscular redhead popped into view from the right side of the gate. He wore khaki pants and a matching shirt, with a heavy, zip-front green sweatshirt. He carried a rusty three-foot-long wrecking bar in one hand.

"Ms. Binney," Marty said. "What are you doing here?"

"I wanted to see if Art had found Vic's cat yet."

"Not as of about fifteen minutes ago," Marty said, holding out his left hand to display a long but superficial scratch across it. It had stopped bleeding, but the scab looked fresh. "The nasty little creature took offense a little while ago when I reached for a tool and brushed against its head. I didn't even realize it was sitting next to me. It blends in well with the shrubbery along the wall."

"Maybe it's still near here. Let me in so I can catch it."

"Are you crazy? It's vicious."

"That's what everyone says, but it seems to like me."

"There are enough dangers in the world without going out looking for trouble." 

"My family and friends would tell you that's what I'm best at: looking for trouble." Helen glanced over her shoulder to make sure the reporters hadn't decided to try to slip through the gates in her wake. "Whoever ends up with the cat ought to rename it. Maybe call it Trouble. Anything's better than Broadway."

"At least let me give you a pair of leather gloves. I've got some spares in the van."

"Thanks."

Marty hit the button to open the gates. Helen heard two van doors slide open behind her, presumably releasing the reporters to converge on the gate.

"Hurry," Marty said. "The vultures are coming."

Helen slipped inside as soon as she could fit through the opening. She waited while Marty closed the gates, counting on his presence to keep the reporters from getting too pushy. He was a big, beefy guy with what looked like a lethal weapon in his hand, someone they couldn't get past, even if the gates were wide open.

"So," she said to Marty once the reporters were scurrying back to their van, "where did you last see the cat?"

"First, you need gloves." Marty led her to the back of the van and propped the pry bar against the bumper.

While he rummaged through the neatly stacked bins, Helen remembered what she'd forgotten to ask him about the last time she was here. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure no one was within earshot. The fans were in a huddle across the street, presumably working out a strategy for finding a lost cat. The two reporters had shut themselves back inside their vans, and unless they had some kind of long-range listening device, they wouldn't be able to hear her.

"I was wondering," Helen said. "Did you install cameras on the outside of the mansion or just inside?"

"It took me a while to convince Vic of the need for any exterior cameras at all, but he authorized a few of them eventually. Just on the front of the house and the one side where he has a neighbor. I tried to explain that there were too many blind spots with that configuration, but he didn't really care about anything except the cameras in the poker room." 

"I heard the house alarm wasn't set the night Vic was killed. What about the cameras? Where any of them working then?"

"Unfortunately, no." Marty backed out of the van and straightened, holding a pair of leather gloves, each of which was big enough to fit both of her hands and probably at least one foot. He slapped them against his palm. "I blame myself for what happened to Vic. I'd gotten everything set up while he was at the library. I'd tested all the internal cameras, and I was about to test the external ones when I heard his limo arriving. I knew he'd start yelling if he found me there. I was tired and irritable, and I didn't want to argue with him like that, so I just scooped up my tools and jumped into the van. It was parked out back. He wouldn't see it because I'd been carrying stuff in and out of the basement. I waited until the limo left, and then I took off. If I'd stayed behind to finish the job and risked the argument, I could have made sure everything was working. Then the exterior cameras would have caught the person who killed him."

"Unless, of course, they came at the house from one of the blind spots," Helen said. "It wasn't your fault. Besides, I heard that the system had been vandalized by the time the cops arrived on Sunday. That would have knocked out the exterior cameras too, wouldn't it?"

Marty shook his head. "The sabotage was only to the line for the alarm. As it turns out, the killer didn't have to sabotage the cameras. I'd missed a connection, so they weren't working at the time of the murder. I really should have stayed and made sure I'd gotten everything on line. If I'd finished the job, it might not have saved his life, but at least there might have been some solid evidence for the cops."

It struck her as odd that the killer had disabled the alarms but not the video feeds. Unless he hadn't realized how extensive the system was. "Who knew about the exterior cameras?"

"Just me and Vic and anyone he told," he said. "Well, Jay and Zee knew I was planning to install them, but they wouldn't have known whether I finished the job. Not until they got to the site on Sunday morning." 

"How visible are the cameras? Would a random person notice them?"

"Not if I did my job right. There's a sign at the gates that says the house is monitored by video cameras, but I like to make it hard for criminals to figure out exactly where they are, so they can't calculate the blind spots." He sighed. "Of course, in this case, there are more blind spots than visible ones."

"What about the cameras on Freddie's house next door? Any chance they might have caught the killer if he cut through her yard to get here instead of coming through the front gates?"

"She's got cameras?" Marty said, more irritated than surprised. "I wish she'd come to me instead of doing it herself. Amateurs never get them lined up right. Most of the systems sold to the general public don't produce good-quality pictures either, especially at night. You'd be lucky if you could see movement in her yard, forget about identifying a face."

"Maybe Vic's death will make her realize she needs a better system, and she'll call you."

"I wouldn't blame her if she called someone else," he said. "It doesn't reflect well on my business that my system failed to help Vic."

"You can't keep blaming yourself," Helen said.

Marty handed her the huge leather gloves. "I wish Detective Peterson was as convinced as you are. He thinks the killer was someone working on the renovations, so he's got his sights set on all of us."

Helen refrained from commenting on how many wrong people Peterson had had his sights on before. Besides, for once Peterson seemed to be on the right track. The damage to the security system did suggest an inside job. The killer apparently knew where the controls were for the security system. He couldn't have known that Vic had failed to turn it on Saturday night, so the killer must have at least believed he could access the system without triggering it. Possibly because he knew Vic's password. The damaged wires could have been a ploy to throw suspicion on someone else, someone who couldn't simply over-ride the system.

The murder weapon seemed to suggest an inside job too, since Tate had said it appeared to be some sort of tool, rather than a knife. That didn't exactly narrow down the options, other than to suggest it was one of the people working on the renovations. It could have been anything from the chisels and other carpentry tools of Stevie's crew to the screwdrivers belonging to Marty's crew.

Marty left to continue troubleshooting the glitch in the gates' electronics, taking his wrecking bar with him.

Helen peered at the underbrush along the wall for any signs of the cat. Even without their summertime leaves, the briars, thistle, and skeletal remains of assorted other weeds presented a significant barrier to anyone hoping to jump over the wall to gain access to Vic's property. Just to add to the challenge, there were also some vines that might have been poison ivy. She would need more than a pair of gloves if she had to drag the cat out of that little jungle, but for now she just wanted to find it.

Helen had only taken a few steps before being startled by a metallic screech from where Marty was working. If the cat had been anywhere nearby, the sound would have scared it off.

Exasperated, she turned to see what Marty was doing. He pried a recalcitrant cover off the recessed electrical box and then propped the wrecking bar against the stone wall.

She hadn't paid much attention to the wrecking bar earlier, but now it struck her that it had a lot in common with the chisels and screwdrivers that were being considered as the possible murder weapon. One end was wide and curved in on itself, but the other was fairly straight and narrow. She didn't know how sharp it was, but it was certainly sturdy enough to withstand being forced into a body.

Could Vic have been stabbed with a wrecking bar?

*   *   *

Helen decided her lupus fog wasn't just messing with her memory—it was messing with her sanity. She could not possibly believe, even for a moment, that Marty might have killed someone. Sure, he had a lethal weapon in his possession, he was strong enough to use it, and he was angry with Vic over the various delays in the project. But murder was completely antithetical to everything Marty believed in. Security wasn't just a job for him—it was a calling. He was dedicated to protecting people, and it would go against every instinct he had to actually hurt someone, let alone kill them. 

Even though Marty was at the top of the list of suspects in terms of "opportunity," since he could certainly have bypassed any of the security measures he'd designed, he didn't have much in the way of a motive. There had to be someone who'd hated Marty enough to sneak around the gates and into the mansion at four in the morning. If it wasn't someone from Vic's contentious career in reality TV, then unfortunately, Stevie was the most likely candidate.

Helen turned to head up the driveway only to see Art walking toward her in the space between the van and the tree line. She waved the huge leather gloves at him and said, "I was just arming myself to look for Vic's cat."

"No need for that," Art said. "We've got it safe and sound in the house where it belongs. It's already gobbled down some food with its pill ground up in it."

"You must be relieved." Helen tossed the gloves into the back of Marty's van. "What's going to happen to the cat now?"

"I'll make sure it's fed and kept safe," Art said. "Taking care of Broadway has always been part of my job, and now it's almost the only thing left for me to do. I need to start looking for a new job, but for now I've got a written employment contract through the end of the year. Detective Peterson said the estate will have to honor it and pay my salary."

"I meant, what will happen to the cat long-term," Helen said, glossing over how bad an idea it was to rely on Peterson for legal advice when he couldn't even do the job he was actually trained for. "Unless you expect to be caring for the cat for its whole life. Did Vic leave money for the cat's care?"

"I don't know," Art said. "Mr. Rezendes told me he had a will, and I've got a call in to his lawyer to find out more, but I haven't heard back from her yet. I've been searching the home office for a will, but he had a filing system that only he understood. If it's in the mansion, though, I'll find it eventually. I don't have much else to do, and the police asked me to move into the mansion so it's not empty while there are people camping out at the gates."

If it had been up to Helen, she'd have assigned someone who wasn't directly involved in the victim's life to keep an eye on the mansion. Preferably a municipal employee. But the Wharton police department was small and didn't have enough personnel to put a round-the-clock watch on a place where the crime had already happened and couldn't be prevented.

Still, Detective Peterson's theory, which for once Helen agreed with, was that the murder was some sort of inside job. In theory, Art had to be a suspect, although she didn't know if he was handy with tools, and she couldn't see what his motive might be. Killing the boss wasn't exactly good for long-term employment prospects, even if the murder was never solved. There was no point in asking Art for an alibi either, since, like everyone else, he'd probably been asleep at 4 a.m.