Getting Rich (A Chef Landry Mystery) (23 page)

I climbed the back steps, unlocked the door and walked in.

“It’s dark in here. Turn on the light,” Toni said in a low voice.

“Give yourself a minute and your eyes will adjust.” Sure enough, after a few seconds, it didn’t seem so dim anymore. I made my way as silently as my crutches allowed, crossing the mudroom into the kitchen. I looked around, surprised at how tidy everything was. The floor was scrubbed clean. The counters were spotless. Even the refrigerator and stove had been polished until they shined. I couldn’t help but notice that all the decals had been removed from the decades-old fridge. Was this the work of Mitchell or of the production crew? Maybe something
was
going on in here after all.

Toni stood in the middle of the charmless kitchen, her mouth hanging open. “You mean to tell me a production company wants to use
this
dump for a set? What are they filming, a horror movie?”

Funny, I’d had the same thought. “Be quiet. There might be somebody here.”

“Don’t you think we’ll look even guiltier if we skulk around? We should act naturally. If we run into anyone, we’ll just tell them the truth—that you’re Mitchell’s girlfriend and that you’re just checking on his place.”

I paused. “You’re right,” I whispered. And then said it in a normal tone, repeated, “You’re right.”

We continued on through the dining room and then to the living room. “What’s that?” Toni asked.

I followed her finger to where she was pointing. There, against the common wall that divided Mitchell’s home from mine, was something that looked like an audio system. There was a rectangular black box—a receiver—with dozens of blinking lights.

“That’s not usually here,” I said, coming closer. A number of wires were running from the receiver down to the floor. One continued along the baseboard, until it split, one part disappearing into the wall. Underneath was a fine dusting of white powder—plaster dust? The other part ran along the floor into the dining room. Others continued up the staircase to the second floor. I stepped closer and reached over to touch it. Toni slapped my hand away.

“Ouch! Why—”

She placed a finger to her lips and leaned in close. “That’s surveillance equipment.”

I gasped, turned and stared at the contraption again, taking new notice of the dozens of buttons and flashing lights. “How can you be sure? Maybe it’s just movie-making stuff,” I whispered.

“Believe me. I know what I’m talking about.”

All at once I remembered the drilling sound I’d heard a few nights ago. Surveillance? Who was spying on who?—surely not on me. But even as I was trying to come up with some other possibility, I knew that was it. Somebody had been listening in on all my conversations. A wave of nausea washed over me. Toni tapped me on the shoulder and gestured for me to follow. She tiptoed up the stairs.

I crept up behind her as quietly as I could, which wasn’t very. Crutches were not made for tiptoeing. Reaching the landing, I noticed one wire going off toward the front bedroom. We followed it until it stopped in the middle of the room, where it once again disappeared into the wall above a small pile of plaster dust.

Why in the world would somebody want to spy on me? Toni nudged me, taking my mind off the questions whirling in my mind. “Let’s get out of here,” she mouthed.

I nodded. We were just about to walk out, when, from downstairs came the sound of a door opening and closing.

“She’s back!” I glanced at Toni. “We have to get out of here.”

All color drained from her face. She looked around frantically, and crept to the closet, swinging open the door. The inside was jam packed with boxes and piles of clothes. So that was how Mitchell had cleaned up. He’d just stashed everything in closets. Toni shut the door, her eyes darting from one possible hiding place to another.

“Toni,
do
something.”

“I am. I am.” In a nanosecond she’d scooted and disappeared behind the bed’s dust ruffle, leaving
me
in the middle of the room.

What if the blonde’s toting a gun?
Oh my God
,
I’m dead!
I went from panicked to terrified
.

The footsteps reached the bottom stair and I swung into action. I dropped to all fours, hoping whoever was on the stairs hadn’t heard the thump of my knees as it hit the floor. I pushed my crutches under the bed, lay flat on my back and—
damned cast
—began to worm my way under the bed, sliding and undulating as fast as I could, and making a lot of scratching noises in the process.
Dear God
, please
don’t let her hear me.
The footsteps reached the landing, no more than fifteen feet from the bedroom. I wiggled faster. Half my body was still in full view. The footsteps were getting closer. Another few seconds and she would see me. Beads of perspiration moistened my forehead. I was so fucked. At just that moment, Toni grabbed my arm and pulled hard. In the next instant I was behind the bed skirt. Not a moment too soon.

The footsteps marched into the bedroom, coming within inches of where I had been a second ago. Now I was panting so hard I was certain she could hear me. Suddenly the theme song for
Sex in the City
began to play—Toni’s cell phone—and my heart nearly exploded. All she had to do was lift the dust ruffle and she would catch us. And then, as suddenly as it started, the phone stopped ringing.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice spoke from a few feet away, almost startling me out of my skin. Shit! She’d answered Toni’s phone. We were so screwed. I looked at Toni. Her eyes were big as quarters, her pupils tiny in all that white. She mouthed something I couldn’t make out, and then she tapped my arm with...
her cell phone
? How...? And then I understood. The ringing had come from the blonde’s phone. I almost wept with relief.

Meanwhile she was still talking. “I forgot to adjust the volume in the upstairs bedroom. I had to come back. You said yourself you couldn’t make out anything she said when she was in her bedroom...I am not...Besides, you heard her yourself. She never even saw whether the driver was a man or a woman. Even if she notices me, she’d never recognize me in a million years.”

Toni’s hand gripped mine and squeezed.

The blonde was the one who had been behind the wheel of the hit-and-run car. But evidently, she wasn’t alone in this plot. Whoever was at the other end of that phone was at least a co-conspirator. Who the hell was it?

I listened hard, trying to hear what was being said at the other end. It was faint—too faint to make out any words. Was it my imagination or did the voice sound male? Steven’s? I couldn’t tell.

“Don’t worry, I’m finished. I’m leaving right now. I’ll be there in half an hour.” There was a faint click followed by the sound of footsteps walking away. A few seconds later the front door opened and closed.

I stayed frozen in place, my heart still racing madly. I almost wept in relief.

Next to me, Toni exhaled. “I think it’s safe to go now,” she whispered. “But be quiet, that equipment can probably pick up sounds from this side too.”

I scrambled out, scooping my crutches under my arms. I brushed dust bunnies from my coat and my hair, and hoofed it over to the window, hoping to get the license plate. Too late. The Audi was already halfway up the street.

“What are you waiting for? Let’s go,” Toni whispered urgently from the doorway.

I scampered after her, down the stairs and through the kitchen, with my heart still pounding against my ribs. I closed the back door and locked it, replacing the key in the fake rock. Only then did I breathe normally. We hightailed it back to my place.

I was about to open my back door, when it dawned on me. “We can’t say anything inside.” I said. “Everything is being recorded.”

“You look sick. Are you all right?”

I didn’t feel well. My stomach was in turmoil. Somebody had been listening in on my every word. It felt like such an invasion of privacy. “I’m fine,” I said.

She gave me a half smile. “Just thank your lucky stars lover boy is in New York, otherwise they’d be entertaining themselves with porn audio.”

“Toni,” I said sharply, blushing. “This is no time to joke.”

She looked at me wide-eyed. “Who’s joking?”

“I don’t even want to stay in my own home anymore. I feel violated.”

“You don’t have to stay here. We can go to my place if you like.”

“You wouldn’t mind? I’d have to take the dogs.” An idea came to me. “Oh my God. That was probably her, wearing a wig.”

Toni looked at me, confused, until a light lit her eyes. “You mean the crazy woman? You think that was her?”

“It must have been.”

“You could be right,” said Toni. “We already know she was driving the hit-and-run car.”

A dozen questions crowded my mind. “But why? Who is she? Do you know her from anywhere?”

“No, other than seeing her go into Mitchell’s place, I never saw her before in my life.” She planted a fist on her hip. “If that bitch comes anywhere near us, she is so dead.” She gave her pocketbook an ominous pat.

“You’re not still walking around with that gun in your bag, are you?” I whispered, darting glances around.

She ignored my question. “Should we call the police?”

My mouth dried with dread. The thought of having to deal with the gruesome twosome again was more than I could handle right now.

“Bad idea.” I shook my head. “I can tell you what they’d say. They’d accuse us of breaking into my boyfriend’s house, which is illegal, and they’d say that Mitchell put in the listening devices. Then
he’d
be in trouble. I say we have to figure out who this woman is, and how she’s involved in all of this.”

Tears sprang to Toni’s eyes. “It’s got to be Steven. She’s just his type—blonde and gorgeous, and a decade younger than me.”

“What makes you think she’s younger? As far as I’m concerned she doesn’t look a day younger than you. And for all we know she might have been involved with Charles or with Jennifer’s ex. You realize what this means, don’t you? Even if they have alibis, either Jennifer’s ex or her brother could have planned this.” I was thoughtful for a moment. “What I can’t figure out is, why the surveillance equipment?”

“Somebody obviously wanted to listen in on your conversations. Tell me, are you certain Mitchell trusts you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I didn’t even want to imagine that possibility. It would be just too awful.

She shrugged. “Just a thought. You know, if I really am the intended victim, Steven knows I confide everything to you. He knows I tell you things I’d never tell him, like how I’d change my will.”

“Supposing you’re right, how would he have known to use Mitchell’s house?”

We mulled this over until Toni said, “If we look at all the people who know you and Mitchell live next door to each other, that’s practically everybody we know—Charles, Jake and Marley, Scott, and Steven.”

“But why would any of them want to listen to our conversations?”

She thought about this, wrinkling her forehead. “Maybe to find out if we suspected them?”

I was happy to know Toni was considering somebody else than Steven, although as far as I was concerned, finding the surveillance equipment had changed everything. I was now convinced somebody wanted Toni dead, and very possibly me too. “You’re right,” I said, deciding to keep my opinion to myself.

“There’s one other person we never considered,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this. “If I die, and you inherit, and later marry Mitchell...” She let that thought unfinished.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said,” I snapped. But even as I said this, I couldn’t help remembering how unworried Mitchell had sounded when I told him it didn’t look to me like any movie was being shot in his place. What if the blonde was his co-conspirator? What if she was his girlfriend? It wasn’t as if I’d never been made a fool by a boyfriend before. I was notoriously bad at picking good ones. I chased those thoughts away. That was in the past, I told myself. Mitchell was different.

Toni had been watching me in silence. Now, she said, “Some people would go to a lot of trouble to inherit the kind of money I have.”

I remembered Crawford’s words, “seventeen awfully good reasons.” But Mitchell? “Come on, Toni. It’s got to be somebody else. What about Jennifer’s brother?”

She paused. I could see how much she wanted to believe that, but she shook her head. “You’re only trying to make us feel better. One thing we can be pretty certain of is that Charles had nothing to do with any of this. And, just between you and me, I doubt Jennifer’s ex or her brother are involved either. I mean, with the hit-and-run, the restaurant connection, and now the spying equipment, it’s just too farfetched.” She frowned. “We have an even bigger problem now. Whoever has been listening in knows everything we know, everything we even suspect.” She gasped. “Oh my God. If it
is
Steven, he knows that I suspect him. Not only that, he knows I lied when I told him that I met with my estate lawyer.”

“Well then,” I said, “if he knows, doesn’t that prove he’s innocent? Why would he kill you if he knows he’s not in your will?” Her panic was starting to rub off on me. “Hold on. The woman said something about having to adjust the volume a few times. So, if he couldn’t hear clearly, maybe he thinks you kept your appointment with your estate lawyer.”