Fatally Flaky (7 page)

But I didn’t know what to do. “So, Charlotte, what do you think of the figures?” I tried again.

“They’re fine.” But she’d spent only a moment looking at them. She pulled out her checkbook and wrote me a check. “Goldy?” she asked. “Can you be out at Gold Gulch Spa at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, so we can do the walk-through, and you can figure out how to use their kitchen?”

“Sure,” I replied, although I didn’t feel too sure of it, frankly.

“Yes,” said Jack, “I’ll bring her.”

“That’s not necessary, Jack,” I said.

“Jack,” said Charlotte, attempting to be mollifying, “you don’t need to be there. I want to spend time with you, but not there, not tomorrow. If you need to grieve for your friend, then you should do that. Out at the spa, you’ll just get in the way, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart?

When nobody said anything, Charlotte said, “Will you call me tonight, Jack, if you need me?” He looked up at her hopefully and nodded. “Well then,” she went on, “I guess I need to go home and change before the fund-raiser.”

When the door had closed, I turned to my godfather. “Jack, you don’t have to take me out to Gold Gulch tomorrow. I can manage.”

Jack made his face blank, a practice I’d seen him do before. “No, but I want to go. To protect you from this Victor Lane character.”

“I don’t need protecting, thanks.”

“Uh-huh. Last time I looked, your first husband disproved that particular theorem.”

“Oh, Jack, don’t—”

“Now,” he interrupted, “tell me why Tom is investigating the death of my best friend.”

“I have no idea that that’s what he’s doing.”

“Bull. When I had too much to drink and hit a tree with the seventy-one Mercedes I had before I got the seventy-three, the whole thing was handled by state patrol. That’s how they do accidents in this state. I know, ’cuz I asked.”

“Jack, I don’t know—”

“Yeah, yeah, you said that already.” He stood up. “All right, I’m walking across the street to my own house.”

“Jack? You’re not angry, are you?” I asked anxiously as I walked him to the door. “I really don’t know what Tom is doing now. But I want to help with…with you feeling better about Doc Finn.”

“Uh-huh.” He heaved on his jacket and opened the front door. “Let me tell you something I learned in the years before I became a recovering lawyer.”

“Jack—,” I began, but he held up his hand.

“I always know when a witness is lying.”

D
OGGONE IT,
I thought, as I cleaned up Marla’s dishes. I wasn’t lying. Okay, I did suspect that Tom’s disappearance from the O’Neal wedding was related to the discovery of Doc Finn’s body. But I knew no more about the situation than Jack did.

When Tom finally came home, it was almost nine o’clock. I’d kept the ragout going on a low simmer, just in case.

“Miss G. You should have gone to bed. I’m sorry I’m so late.”

“Did you eat?”

“No. I’ll fix myself a plate.”

“Sit,” I commanded. Tom washed his hands and slumped at the table. He shut his eyes tight, either from exhaustion or to block out what he’d seen that evening. When I put a dish of cooked penne, steamed broccoli, and ragout in front of him, you’d have thought it was steak on the
QE2.

“Oh my,” he said. “This looks wonderful.”

While he ate, I gave him an animated account of the rest of the day after he’d left, the reception, packing up with Julian, the visits from Marla, Jack, and Charlotte Attenborough. He shook his head and smiled briefly. But then the smile vanished.

“Can you tell me what kept you down at the department?” I asked.

“I can, but you can’t mention a word of it to anyone, especially that nosy lawyer godfather of yours.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Last night, a driver going west up the canyon spotted a reflection in the rain. Called in that she thought a vehicle might have gone off the road and landed down in that deep ravine where folks dump trash sometimes.”

“Yeah, I know the spot.” Despite the no dumping sign, people didn’t chuck their unwanted furniture and garbage down that hillside sometimes; they did it as a matter of routine.

“Last night, state patrol had their hands full with accidents in the rain, but they finally got around to checking that ravine. And there was Doc Finn’s Porsche Cayenne, on its side.”

“Did he slide off the road?”

“The mud has made it impossible to tell exactly what happened. But state patrol called us after they’d spent about an hour down in the ravine.”

The taste of acid filled my mouth.

“Somebody,” Tom continued as he pushed his plate away, “came down into the ravine and used a rock to break the driver’s-side window. It looks as if whoever the person was then used another rock, or something, to smash in Doc Finn’s skull.”

“The rocks couldn’t have come loose somehow, when the Porsche slid into the ravine?”

“No, Miss G. That’s why state patrol is good at what they do.” He shook his head. “Doc Finn was murdered.”

I
slumped into the kitchen chair closest to Tom. My feet and hands were suddenly freezing. “So, what are they up to now, down at the department?”

“The ME’s been called. They’ll try to do the autopsy as soon as they can. And our department is analyzing the contents of Finn’s car, to see if that will give us any leads. There are only a couple of houses nearby, and our guys have canvassed the whole area. But nobody saw anything.”

“Do they have any idea where Doc Finn was going?”

“Yeah. He had his cell in the car. According to the Received Calls on there, he got a call from your godfather last night, but that went straight to voice mail. Before that, there was a longer call. It came around half past seven Wednesday night, from Southwest Hospital, from inside a patient’s room. He saw a neighbor as he was backing his car out of his driveway, and he said he was off to see an old patient. Only problem is, that room is on the maternity ward, and the patient in that room was out with her husband looking at their baby at the time. And she’s never been a patient of Doc Finn’s. She’s never even heard of him.”

“No security cameras recording the goings in and out of the patient’s room, I take it.”

“Nope. My gut tells me we’re talking about a clever killer here. Of course, during visiting hours there are all kinds of people in the hospital, so basically it could have been anyone.”

“Did Doc Finn even have any patients in Southwest Hospital at the time?”

“That’s something we’re checking on.”

I hugged my shoulders, but that couldn’t dispel the chill I was feeling. “You know Jack’s going to be devastated that his pal was murdered.”

Tom nodded. “I figured.”

“He really wanted to talk to you to night. He waited here a long time, wondering where you were, asking questions. Said when he hit a tree, remember, not long after he got here? State patrol handled the whole thing. He kept asking me why you were down at the department. It was almost as if he knew something was wrong with Doc Finn’s accident.”

Tom pulled out his small notebook. “Almost as if he knew something was wrong, huh?”

“Oh, Tom, for heaven’s sake. Doc Finn was Jack’s best friend.” My tone grew hot and defensive. “And anyway, Jack wanted to talk to you.”

Tom pushed his chair back from the table. “Well then, maybe we should oblige him. Care to take a walk across the street?”

“You’re going to interrogate my godfather?”

“I’m just going to ask him a few questions.”

“Tom!”

“Trust me, Goldy, your godfather is a wily old coot. He can read people the way preachers recite Bible verses. If he even sniffs this is an interrogation, he’ll lawyer up faster than you can say, Glory Be.”

I gritted my teeth and reached for my trench coat in the hall closet. While Tom waited for me on the porch, I felt a pang of guilt that we were going over to Jack’s with the intention of…well, what ever it was we were intending to do. I dashed back into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Sauternes, a little seventy-five-dollar-a-bottle number that a grateful client had given me. So far, I hadn’t had the heart to open it.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Tom asked me when I appeared on the porch with the wine.

“I’m taking Jack this bottle—”

“Put it back.”

“Can’t I just—?”

“Absolutely not. Y’ever hear of the old saying, ‘Beware the gift giver’?”

“I can give Jack something if I want to!” I retorted. “I just brought him bread this morning!”

“He sees us coming? With you holding that? He’ll think,
Here comes Tom the cop with his wife, my godchild, and she’s holding a bottle of wine that she thinks she’s going to pimp me with, so I’ll tell them all the dirt on Doc Finn.
”

“Tom!”

“You trust me on this, or not?”

Well, of couse I did. I put the bottle back. But I felt my nerves becoming even more frayed…and they’d been unraveling ever since Tom had arrived home.

“Tom, Gertie Girl, come in.” Jack’s tone was grateful as he opened his massive door, a large sculpted oak number that he had picked up at a salvage yard.

And so we entered Jack’s Jumble, as Arch called it. My godfather kept saying he was renovating, but as yet, there were few visible signs of improvement, either on the exterior or the interior. I could see why the persistently rainy weather would have prevented him from putting up new cedar-shake shingle siding, which was what he claimed he intended to do. But on the inside, he had no excuse that I could see. Fishing and carousing tended to derail motivation, in my view.

As we stepped into the gray-walled foyer that still showed the rectangular outlines of the previous owner’s pictures, it was clear Jack hadn’t made much progress. He’d gutted the first floor, so that instead of having a parlor, dining room, and who-knew-what-all Victorian-type rooms, he now had a big, open space. In the far-left corner, he’d put state-of-the-art appliances into what was going to be an open-plan kitchen…but he still had no cabinets or countertops. My feet gritted across the hardwood floors that Jack had uncovered when he’d torn up the old green-and-brown shag carpeting. As far as I knew, Jack had not made a move to refinish the floors, or even to call someone to get an estimate to have them done.

“Thanks for coming over.” He was trying to sound cheerful, but his voice was as forlorn as the long, high-ceilinged room that, he’d told me, would eventually double as both living and dining room. The whole area contained only a few pieces of furniture that Jack had bought from the local secondhand store, while his “good furniture,” as he called it, stayed in storage.

“Sit,” Jack invited us, sweeping his hand toward a threadbare, Victorian-style maroon velvet couch that had seen better days, I guessed, in a brothel. On each side of the couch, and in front of it, stood out-of-context teak Danish-modern tables that, more than the couch, had seen much better days. And then there were the two director’s chairs that looked as if they’d been fished out of a well, back when Orson Welles had been a director.

Tom sat in one of the director’s chairs, while I took my place at the far end of what I affectionately thought of as the johns’ couch.

Tom grinned. “I can see you’ve been keeping your nose to the remodeling grindstone.” He liked Jack, and the feeling was mutual.

“Can’t rush these things,” Jack commented. He gestured to an open bottle of scotch on the table, where there were also, I noted, three glasses, a carafe of water, and an ice bucket. Next to these cocktail fixings was a yellow legal pad and a pen, two lawyerly accoutrements that Jack had never been able to give up. “Drink?”

To my astonishment, Tom replied, “Sure.” I blinked, and tried to catch Tom’s eye. I had never once witnessed him take a drink from someone he wanted to question. He was always circumspect, if not downright wary.

“Gertie Girl?” Jack asked. “Same as usual?”

“With a lot of water, please, Jack. I’ve already had some sherry.”

“Tom?”

“Straight with a bit of ice, thanks, Jack.”

“Well, Tom-boy.” Jack shook his head. “You must really suspect me of doing something.” So, Tom was drinking and Jack was acting suspicious, and I was left to wonder what was going on. Muttering unintelligibly to himself, Jack poured us each a couple of fingers of scotch, added some water and ice to both, and handed them across. “Trying to throw me off guard, eh, Tom? Drink my scotch, see if you can get me to drink more than you do, loosen up my tongue, find out what I know about Doc Finn. Is that it?”

“Hey, neighbor, back off a bit,” Tom replied. He took a long swig of the proffered drink. “I know you were friends with Finn, and I’m sorry he’s gone.” Tom paused. “Goldy said you wanted to talk to me, that’s all.”

“I do.”

When no one said anything, Tom sipped his drink again and said finally, “So, you know anyone who wanted to hurt Doc Finn? Did he have any enemies?”

Jack surprised me again, this time by putting his head in his hands and starting to sob.

“Jack, Jack,” I said. I moved over next to him and put my arms around his heaving shoulders.

“This is my fault,” he howled. “It’s all my fault.”

I looked at Tom helplessly. Tom, in turn, gave me a warning glance that I knew meant—
Say nothing, do nothing.
But Jack was my godfather, I’d always loved him. For crying out loud, I’d known him before I’d even met Tom. So there was no way I was going to follow Tom’s directive.

“It’s not your fault, Jack,” I protested. “It’s the fault of the person who—”

“Goldy!” Tom shouted.

“Person who what?” Jack asked. He didn’t seem to be crying anymore, and he’d picked up the pen he’d put by the legal pad.

I took a deep breath and settled back into the lumpy couch. In front of the couch was a large picture window that had been put in by a previous owner, so Jack had a perfect view of our house. I resolved to look at our house and say not a word. If Tom and Jack were playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game, I didn’t have a rule book.

“Why is Doc Finn dying all your fault?” Tom asked gently.

“He was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Tom replied. “Is that your fault?”

Jack shook his head. “It’s too complicated,” he said, his somber mood reasserting itself. He threw down the pen.

“I work all day at complicated,” Tom commented.

“Can you tell me how he was killed?” Jack asked.

“No can do, you know that, Counselor.”

“Gertie Girl?” Jack’s large eyes implored me.

“Don’t start with her, Jack,” Tom said sharply. “Or else we’re going to have to leave. Now tell me why it’s all your fault, okay? Or else tell me who Doc Finn’s enemies were.”

Jack considered. Time stretched out for so long that I finally looked around for a clock. Big problem: this was Jack’s mostly empty house, and there was no clock. He wore a Rolex, so he probably figured he didn’t need another timepiece.

“All right,” Jack said finally. “But if I talk to you, will you tell me what you know?”

Tom said, “Nope.”

“Did someone run him off the road? Shoot him while he was driving?”

Tom shrugged.

Jack exhaled and stared at the legal pad. “I don’t know too much about Finn’s enemies. There were a few women who wanted to get married, and he didn’t.” Jack stopped talking and considered. “You know Finn had retired. But recently, he had a few patients. There…were problems, I don’t know what.”

“What kind of problems?” Tom asked sharply. “Medical problems? Financial problems?”

“I don’t know,” Jack replied, still disconsolate, still staring at the legal pad. “Finn just told me there were problems, and that he was doing some research. But then before I could find out what kind of research, exactly, he stopped answering his home phone and his cell. I went over to his house and banged on the door. No answer there either.”

Tom grunted and refilled his drink. I wondered if he meant to rattle Jack by doing this. Ordinarily he’d have taken out his notebook to write down what Jack was saying; I knew that much about my husband.

“How recently was all this, Jack?” Tom asked. “Today’s Friday. When, exactly, did Finn stop answering his home phone and his cell?”

“Why?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what you’re telling me, how it fits with our timeline.”

“What’s your timeline?”

“I’m very tired, Jack,” Tom replied. “Goldy’s even more tired, and she and I both have to get up early tomorrow morning, even though it’s a Saturday.”

“Okay,” Jack said. He set his glass down on the table. “Today’s Friday.” He cast his eyes up to his ceiling. “I was supposed to meet with Finn, let’s see, last night. I didn’t see him or hear from him after yesterday afternoon. I went to his place real late last night, but he wasn’t there. Then this morning, he was supposed to pick me up for the O’Neal wedding, but he didn’t show.”

Tom pondered this. “So you were supposed to meet with Finn last night to find out what kind of research he was doing, and he didn’t show. You called him on both his home phone and his cell, and then you went over to his place. Did you call anybody else, another friend, say, to see where he might be?”

“Nope.”

“After Finn said he was doing some research, he suddenly disappeared and didn’t call. Did you suspect foul play?”

Jack shook his head in frustration. “I didn’t know what to think. Now could you please tell me what is going on?”

“I can’t,” said Tom.

A
ND SO TOM
and I went home. I hugged Jack before we left, and he hugged me back and muttered something about seeing me in the morning.

“Where’re you going with him in the morning?” Tom asked me, once we’d come into our house and put the animals back outside.

“Gold Gulch Spa. Jack’s insisting on coming. Why? You don’t think I’m in danger when I’m with him, do you?”

“No,” Tom said thoughtfully. “I’m just trying to figure out what he’s not telling us. There’s something, I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“He’s secretive, you know that. He…loves puzzles. He used to give me all kinds of different ones when I was growing up. Plus, he’s a risk junkie. Maybe he’s sure he can figure out what happened to Doc Finn…on his own.”

“Oh, man, that’s all we need. Another amateur sleuth mucking things up. What do you mean, he’s secretive?”

We moved into the kitchen and sat down.

I said, “I didn’t even know until a week before he got here that he was moving to Aspen Meadow from New Jersey. And that he’d bought that decrepit old place across the street.”

“You didn’t know anything?”

“Nope. And that was only six months ago, as you know. Plus, I think the only reason he told me about the move was that he had told his son, Lucas, what he was doing, and Lucas had had a fit that Jack wasn’t moving across the street from
him
. So to avert Lucas showing up on our porch and accusing me of trying to steal Jack’s affections, which he’d done before, mind you, Jack calmly called and told me his plans.”

“Huh.” Tom looked around our kitchen and insisted on tidying up. “It’ll give me a chance to think.”