Sketch a Falling Star (11 page)

Richard beamed, the thin skin around his eyes crinkling like finely shattered glass. “Precisely my point. You’d be amazed by how many people can’t tell the difference.”

Rory shook her head, thinking she wouldn’t be amazed at all.

After several minutes of sipping tea and polite but inane conversation, she felt another tap on her shoulder. It took all of her willpower not to snap at Zeke out loud. She wanted to get on with the interview as much as he did. But if he didn’t work on his patience, he wouldn’t be accompanying her in the future. Courtesy might not count for much in his world, but in the world of the living, it was still held in fairly high esteem.

Rory waited for a natural break in the conversation, at which point she said politely, “We can get started—if that’s okay with you?”

“By all means.” Richard leaned back against the cushions as if he was settling in for an evening’s light entertainment.

She set down her cup and withdrew a small pad of paper and a pen from her handbag. When she looked up again, she focused on Richard’s face so that she wasn’t distracted by the barren darkness beyond him.

“How well did you know Brian?” she asked.

“Not as well as I should have, as it turned out. You’ve heard the saying ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’? ”

Talk about an attention grabber. That was quite an opener for someone being interviewed in a murder investigation. In her experience, even innocent people withheld that sort of comment for fear that it might be taken the wrong way. Either Richard had no reason to worry or he wanted to give her that impression.

“How do you mean?” She kept her tone neutral with a dash of ho-hum, as if she heard that sort of remark in every case she investigated. She called it her “you have nothing to fear from me” gambit.

“Over time, it became apparent to me that he wasn’t the person I thought he was,” Richard said. “I believe you’ll find that sentiment echoed by a number of the other Players.”

Rather than press him for details, she finished jotting a few notes then looked up at him expectantly. It was a subtle ploy that had served her well in the past. The interviewee almost always felt the need to fill the silence and answer the questioning look on her face.

Richard was no exception. “This is somewhat embarrassing for me,” he said, his cheeks and neck pinking up nicely in support of his disclaimer. “Brian told me that he’d invested in a green company, a start-up specializing in renewable power sources like solar and wind. He was very enthusiastic about it, dazzled me with statistics and projections. Gave me a copy of the company’s prospectus. It appears that even at my age, I’m still a naïve fool.” He looked down and wagged his head as if he were giving himself a silent scolding. “Although I daresay most people would be intrigued by the prospect of easy money. But that’s neither here nor there. I was so busy at work that instead of researching things for myself, I begged him to get me in on the ground floor too. I’m sure you can guess the rest—the company was stillborn. And I have mostly myself to blame.”

“That’s horrible,” Rory sympathized as she scribbled more notes. “After it all went south, did you try to verify what he’d told you about it?”

“Yes, well, I’m quite good at closing barn doors after the horses are long gone. In any case, I did find out that the proper papers had been filed by a company with that name. Bottom line—I could hire an attorney to try to recoup some of my losses, but the odds were against there being any money to recoup, which meant that I’d just wind up with big legal bills. So I licked my wounds in private and vowed not to be so damn trusting in the future.”

“Did he apologize to you, try to make it right?”

Richard laughed, a tight knot of a laugh with no humor. “Actually, he did a rather splendid ‘woe is me’ act and claimed he lost a lot more than I did. To listen to him you’d think we were just two fools caught up in the same despicable scam. Brian was a slick operator.”

There was that word “slick” again. “Do you know if anyone else in the troupe had business dealings with him?”

“I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure. People tend to be pretty closemouthed when it comes to finances. And I was feeling so ashamed of being taken that I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up.”

“It must have been difficult seeing him and working with him since that happened,” she said. “I give you a lot of credit. I probably would have left the troupe or lashed out at him in a fit of rage.” She’d added the last to see his reaction. Sometimes that kind of commiseration was just enough to pop the cork on a magnum of bottled-up confession.

But Richard just shrugged. “Look, it’s not as if it left me destitute, and as I said—I blame myself most of all. Truth be told,” he added with a sheepish grin, “I couldn’t bear to leave the troupe. I do so love acting—all the strutting and fretting, you know.” He drained the last of his tea and set the cup down on the inlaid mahogany coffee table in front of him.

“You mentioned earlier that some of the other Players didn’t care for Brian either. Why was that?”

“Mostly soap-opera stuff—liaisons, heartbreak, the usual.”

“Nothing specific? Nothing that made you think one of them was heartbroken enough to be interested in revenge?”

“No, that didn’t even occur to me at the time of the flood. Let’s face it—what normal person hears that someone died in a flash flood and immediately thinks, ‘Aha, sounds like murder to me’?”

Rory would have loved to see Zeke’s expression at that moment. She was pretty sure he’d take exception to being classified as abnormal. Her next thought was that he’d damn well better not show his displeasure by tossing objects around the room. She breathed an internal sigh of relief when everything in the room went right on obeying the laws of physics.

Richard seemed to be momentarily lost in thought. “I suppose I could pick the Player I think the likeliest to resort to such an extreme measure,” he said finally, “but it would be a rather arbitrary guess. And I’d probably be doing that person a grave injustice.” He chuckled. “Pun not intended but quite delightful nonethe—my apologies,” he cut himself off, his smile vanishing. “That was dreadful of me. I certainly didn’t mean to treat Brian’s death or your investigation as fodder for grade-school humor.”

In spite of Rory’s assurances that he was being too hard on himself, Richard looked chagrined and miserable. Given his mood and the fact that she’d run out of questions anyway, she wrapped up the interview and thanked him for his time. Just because he wasn’t devastated by Brian’s death, it didn’t automatically mean he was guilty. If that was how justice worked, a majority of the world’s population would be doing hard time.

When Rory climbed back in her car, it was well past rush hour, and the traffic had thinned out dramatically. With her radio tuned to her favorite FM station, Rory merged onto the Meadowbrook Parkway and was settling in for the trip home when the dashboard lights flickered, and she was no longer alone in her car.

Chapter 11

“A
re you sure you want to be wasting your energy this way?” Rory asked the marshal, who was now occupying the passenger seat. Any time away from the house was problematic for Zeke, and he’d already spent more than an hour at the interview with Richard Ames. Although he didn’t expend as much energy when he was invisible and therefore didn’t need as much time to recoup, they still had a long list of suspects ahead of them.

“I’m not stayin’ long. Just wanted to get your thoughts on the doc while they were fresh.”

Rory shrugged. “He seems like a nice enough guy, pretty laid-back, and like he said himself—a bit naïve for his age.”

“Maybe a bit
too
naïve for his age? He’s no Easter Bunny, you know.”

“I think you mean ‘spring chicken’,” Rory said, trying to keep a straight face. “I suppose that’s possible. On one hand, you wouldn’t expect doctors to be naïve, what with all the miseries they see. But on the other hand, some of them are so wrapped up in the medical world that their social skills aren’t what they should be.”

“Just don’t you forget these people are actors, darlin’. The doc might not actually be a nice guy. He might have just learned how to act like one.”

She considered that possibility for a minute but found it hard to accept. “Are you saying you think he’s guilty?”

“Nope, I’m sayin’ you can’t be gettin’ bamboozled by a snappy accent. I imagine the redcoats we fought gettin’ our independence sounded every bit as charmin’ as this fella.”

Rory was about to protest that she would never be taken in by such a superficial trait when it struck her that he might be right. Had she been judging Richard more favorably because he sounded so polished and civilized?

“I can tell you about the time we arrested two cattle rustlers,” Zeke went on, falling into his ‘good old days’ voice. “Same evidence on both of them. One had a fancy French accent, and the other never had a day’s schoolin’. The jury let Frenchie go and hanged the other man. Turned out Frenchie was the brains behind the whole thing. The man they hanged had hooked up with him that very day just to earn a dollar so he could eat.”

“Point taken,” Rory said, not interested in being regaled with more stories. “Getting back to Brian, though—it’s obvious that he dabbled in a variety of unethical, and possibly illegal, enterprises.”

“Love and money—it’ll be interestin’ to see what we turn up next.”

“Then you should go tuck yourself into whatever passes for bed and get some rest.”

“My thought exactly,” Zeke said, apparently pleased that they were of the same mind. “I surely did enjoy this outin’ with you.”

Rory was about to warn him not to vanish while there was a car in the lane to their right, but he left before she could open her mouth. When she stole a peek at the other driver, the light from his dashboard was just enough to illuminate the look of horror on his face.

F
our days after the funeral, Clarissa called Rory. She wanted to finish the conversation that had been interrupted when Jessica and Brett arrived at the wake to pay their respects. Rory had been prepared to give her a week to tie up whatever loose ends Brian had left behind before calling her. Clarissa was definitely a “taking care of business” kind of gal. She suggested they continue their talk right then and there over the phone, but Rory had found that being face-to-face with an individual almost always provided helpful and often unexpected insights. In deference to what should have been Clarissa’s period of mourning, Rory offered to drive out to her home in New Hyde Park.

Zeke was still away restoring and refreshing himself, and since Clarissa wasn’t a suspect, there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to contact him even if she’d known how to go about it.

She’d never brought up the subject, because he generally seemed to be there when she needed him, as well as plenty of times when she didn’t. But since it seemed like something she should know in case of an emergency, she made a mental note to find out.

She arrived at Clarissa’s home at nine o’clock the next morning, having braved the morning rush hour, when a thirty-minute trip could take a leisurely hour or two. The house was in a cookie-cutter development, a trend that started on Long Island with the building of Levittown, after World War II. Clarissa’s house sat in the middle of the block, a cute Cape Cod with gable dormers like all of its neighbors. What made it stand out from the rest was the meticulous, updated landscaping. The overgrown bushes from the fifties had been ripped out and replaced by newer, dwarf varieties that were in proper proportion to the dimensions of the house. It reminded Rory of a man with a well-trimmed beard standing in a row of ZZ Top wannabes.

Inside, the house had the polished look of a model home or designer showcase, everything in its proper place, right down to the perfectly spaced fringe on the Persian rug in the living room. Rory found it all strangely sad. It was as if no one lived there, no one to leave a stack of newspapers on the table or an unwashed glass in the sink. No pet to leave hair on the couch or drip water across the floor from its bowl. It was beautiful in a sterile sort of way, but it didn’t feel much like a home.

Clarissa seemed inordinately pleased that Rory was on time. She invited her into the kitchen, where a carafe of coffee waited on the sparkling granite countertop alongside a plate of crumb cake. Rory politely declined both; she’d already had breakfast, and given the impeccable state of the house, she suspected her client might be distracted by the possibility of a crumb or spill.

Clarissa set the cake on the table in case Rory changed her mind. Once they were both seated, Rory opened her notepad to a fresh page.

“Okay,” Clarissa said. “Here’s the Bad and the Ugly. Unfortunately, there isn’t any Good.”

There was nothing Rory could say after such a remark, so she simply waited with what she hoped was a neutral and understanding expression until the older woman continued.

“Ten years ago Brian hit what I consider a personal low when he was convicted of mail fraud and had to do time in prison.”

“Was that his only conviction?” Rory asked.

“The only one I know about. Brian was always a quick learner, and he seemed to become more careful in his dealings after that. He moved around a lot and kept changing his name. The only communication we had was by cell phone, but he changed that number frequently too. Months would go by when I wouldn’t hear from him, and then out of the blue, he’d start calling again. I have to admit,” she added, “that I gave up trying to stay in touch with him in the last few years. It became too painful. It’s hard enough to lose someone you love once; I lost Brian over and over again.” Those words coming from someone else’s mouth would likely have been fraught with emotion. But Clarissa’s voice was as stoic and steady as if she were discussing a set of keys she’d misplaced and given up on ever finding.

Rory wondered how far down one would have to dig to reach the wellspring of the real Clarissa, the young mother buried for decades now beneath the crushing mound of disappointment and hopelessness. Although Brian’s sudden death had caused a crack in the bulwark, the bleeding had been brief and quickly stanched. Everything back in its proper place.