2 Pane of Death (28 page)

The twists and turns of this woman’s logic continued to amaze me. Was I sleeping with him? Was she? What did it matter? Whoa, wait a minute: She had said she had killed Peter. I’d save that bit for future examination. Right now, Peter was dead and we weren’t—yet. But we were likely to be shortly if somebody didn’t do something practical now, and I nominated myself as that somebody. It was a short election and I won. I hoped Maddy would be as biddable for me as she had been for Ian.

“For the record, no. Never mind that for now, Maddy. Did Ian steal the glass pieces?”

She nodded.

“What’s he done with them?”

She gulped down a sob. “When Peter . . . died, the schedule got screwed up and he had to hurry things up. I think he’s still waiting for the truck to move them to LA.”

My brain was working overtime trying to process new information. She had said there was a schedule? “Hang on—you mean you and Ian had planned the theft?”

She nodded. “Yes. I know it was wrong, but Ian—”

“Never mind. Are you telling me that the glass panels haven’t left Tucson? They’re here?” Wherever the heck “here” was.

“Maybe. Probably. Oh, I don’t know!”

I fought the temptation to shake some sense into her. “Maddy, focus. You set Peter up for the theft?”

“Ian made me. He wanted me to use my ties with Peter to get access to the house.”

“But his death wasn’t part of the plan?”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes, at least as far as I could tell in the dim interior of the truck. “No. Em, I’ve loved Peter almost my whole life. But he never paid me any attention. Then when he moved here, and he got in touch with me, I thought, ‘Finally!’ But it turned out that our mothers sweet-talked him into doing me a favor and letting me work with his collection. Em, don’t look at me like that! I know I don’t have a whole lot of talent, but I needed the money, and it meant I’d get to spend time with Peter, so I just kept my mouth shut and took his charity. I didn’t even mind when he wanted to bring you in. I just thought that at last I’d have a chance to be alone with him, and maybe he’d see the real me and come to care for me.” She sniffed. “But then you came in and the two of you hit it off, always talking about the art—all that highbrow stuff. And he ate it up! I saw the way he looked at you. I knew you were going out to the house when I wasn’t there.”

More sobs threatened. I was torn in about six different directions. My head hurt, I was straining to hear if our captors were coming back, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing from Maddy, and I was trying to figure out what to do next. And I didn’t think we had a lot of time before Ian hatched a new plan. “Maddy, what the hell are you talking about? Sure, we talked about the art—that’s why he hired me. I’m with Matt, remember? I don’t sleep around, and I wasn’t interested in Peter.”

This statement threatened to set off a new storm of tears. “That’s what he said, but I didn’t believe him! All these years, and then I thought it was all happening at last, and then he starts paying attention to you. We had this huge fight, and he threatened to fire me, no matter what his mother said, and I just got so mad . . . .”

“That you stabbed him with the first thing that you could grab.” At least that made sense, in a strange way.

She nodded vigorously. “Yes. I’d been showing him some glass samples, for color. And then we got to arguing, and he said awful things to me, called me a hack, and . . . the next thing I knew, I had stabbed him, and then he fell down and he wasn’t moving, and there was blood, and I got all panicky, and I called Ian on his cell phone and he said he’d be right over, and I shouldn’t touch anything, or do anything.” Her words tumbled out, faster and faster.

I had to stop the flood. “Breathe, Maddy. So Ian came over to Peter’s house then?”

“Yes, and he told me to leave and he’d take care of everything.”

“You mean the art, right? Because he left Peter lying right there, bleeding to death.”

“What do you mean? Peter was dead.”

Aha—I recognized one small fact I hadn’t known I knew. “I don’t think so. Not right away, anyway. There was too much blood on the floor around him. If his heart had stopped when you stabbed him, there wouldn’t have been that much blood.”

I should have kept my mouth shut. Clearly Maddy was having trouble grasping all this. Her renewed sobs threatened to grow into full-blown hysterics. I decided I would welcome the opportunity to slug the idiot woman, if that would shut her up.
No, Em, that wouldn’t be constructive.
Right now I needed whatever feeble help she could provide to save both our lives, retrieve the art, and save the day. Yeah, right. Em Dowell, superwoman.

I could hear Ian and Chas heading our way, and they were arguing. “Put a cork in it, Maddy,” I hissed, trying to listen. Mostly it was Ian talking, with Chas protesting.

“No, Chas, we don’t have a choice. We have to eliminate them, and we have to make it look accidental.”

“Damn it, I didn’t sign on for this! You said I just had to make a shipment and I could go. You never said anything about killing people.”

“Well, it’s a bit late to worry about that now, because you’re right in the middle of it. All I’m asking is that you keep an eye on things here for a bit longer. I have to go meet with my people, and I’ll take a look at Madelyn’s shop. I don’t think it should be too difficult to stage an unfortunate incident there, and it’s already established that Madelyn and Em have been working together. It would be perfectly reasonable to assume Em had gone to see Madelyn and something tragic occurred. Madelyn was always flighty, probably left a soldering iron on and forgot about it, that kind of thing, and they were both overcome. But we have to move quickly—Em has already been absent from her own shop for an hour or more, and someone will be bound to send up the alarm.”

“I don’t have to hurt anyone? Just keep an eye on things here?” Chas was clutching at straws.

“Yes, Chas,” Ian replied with remarkable patience. “You stay with the truck, and I’ll be back as quickly as I can. Under an hour.” Footsteps, a slamming door, and Ian was gone—for now.

My mind began to race. So Ian was planning to stage an accident at Maddy’s shop, and Maddy and I would be found dead.
Not if I could help it.
Now I also knew that we weren’t very far from downtown, if Ian could make the round-trip in less than an hour. The downside was, that didn’t give us much time to overpower Chas and call the Mounties: Matt.

Maddy was sniveling again. I let her go ahead, since it was in character. In fact, I decided that she should ramp up the noise. That would annoy Chas—and would give me cover to get ready . . . to do what? I scanned the interior of the truck. There was my cullet, as Chas had said, but I couldn’t see any way to use that as a weapon. Throwing handfuls of glass chunks at him would annoy him but wouldn’t slow him down. But there were some other boxes alongside my supplies. I stood up as quietly as I could and tiptoed over to investigate. And when I saw what was in them, I began to see the glimmerings of a plan.

I went back to where Maddy was sitting and whinging, leaned toward her, and said, “Okay, Maddy, here’s what we’re going to do.”

“What?” Maddy sniffled.

At least I had her attention. “Look, we don’t have much time before Ian comes back, probably with reinforcements. You heard what he said—whatever is going to happen has to happen quickly, or someone will notice that I’m missing.” At least, I hoped someone would. “So our best bet right now is to overpower Chas and make a run for it.”

Maddy snorted. It was an unbecoming sound. “And how do you intend to do that? He’s a lot stronger than we are.”

“Maybe than you are, lady, but I sling hot glass, remember? Anyway, if we surprise him, I’m betting that we can get him under control quickly. And there are two of us. What’ve we got to lose? If we don’t do anything, Ian’s going to kill us.”

“Maybe you’re right. So what do we do?”

I explained.

Maddy turned out to be a better actress than I expected. She gave a very convincing performance, cranking up her wails until Chas pounded on the side of the truck and yelled, “You in there, shut up!”

At my prompting, Maddy wailed louder. The noise gave me plenty of cover to rip the cartons open and arm myself. Then I went back to Maddy. “Okay,” I whispered, “quiet down a bit, and then ask to use the bathroom.”

“This is so undignified.” She sniffed.

“Hey, you want to come out of this alive?”

Maddy nodded, pouting. She subsided into whimpers punctuated with occasional sobs. I retreated to the back of the truck and nodded to Maddy. “You’re on!” I hissed.

She nodded back, then got up and went to the doors and pounded on them. “Chas? Chas, where are you?”

Nothing. For a brief moment I panicked—if he was out of range, we were screwed.

“Chas?” Maddy said again, more loudly, with a convincing note of hysteria in her voice. Of course it was convincing—it was real.

Finally I heard footsteps approaching. “What?”

In a small voice Maddy replied, “I have to use the bathroom.”

Silence. Obviously Chas hadn’t considered this possibility. “You can’t.”

“Chas, I have to go! Really badly! Do you want me to pee in your truck?”

More silence as Chas worked through the implications of that. Presumably he hoped to return to a normal life after he got out of this mess, and a truck that stank of urine was not good advertising for his business. At least, I hoped his mind would work that way.

“She still out?”

“You mean Em? Yes, she hasn’t moved. Oh, God, Chas, maybe she’s dead! Maybe I’m locked in here with a dead person! You’ve got to get me out!” I was beginning to think that Maddy had a future in the theater.

I held my breath as I heard Chas unlocking the truck doors. We would have a brief window of opportunity before Chas’s eyes adjusted to the dark interior. As instructed, Maddy moved front and center, blocking his view of me, as I rose up from my crouch and started lobbing . . . salsa.

Those other boxes had been loaded with a shipment of Tucson’s finest, and I knew just what to do with it. As Maddy stepped clear, I dashed the contents of an open jar of extra spicy straight into Chas’s face, and the chiles did their work. He clawed at his eyes and spat. But I didn’t stop with one jar. I’d opened several, just to be prepared, and I let loose with all of them. Then I followed up with unopened jars, which must have weighed two pounds each. After all my glass work, I had a strong arm, and what I lacked in accuracy (I never was much into baseball) I made up for in power and enthusiasm. Even Maddy got into the act and tossed a few jars, although several of them fell short of the target, smashing on the floor and adding to the mess.

Chas fell down, blinded, and curled up into a ball, protecting his head. “Maddy, the bungee cords!” I yelled.

She tossed me the cords, and I wrapped them around any moving parts of Chas that I could grab. I had neglected to take into account the fact that the salsa would make him slippery, but I managed. “Duct tape—now!” I ordered, and Maddy scrounged around the truck until she found a roll and tossed it to me. I reinforced the bungee cord bonds, then stepped back to admire my handiwork. “That should hold him.”

Maddy stepped delicately down from the truck and joined me in contemplation of our captive. “Good job, Em. I don’t think he’s going anywhere soon.” She poked him, not gently, with her foot. “Now what?”

I hadn’t thought much beyond this first stage of my plan, but I knew that we had little time before Ian returned. “You—find a phone and call the police. I’m going to see if the glass pieces are here.”

Chas moaned. “My eyes! I’m going to go blind! Do something!”

I looked down at him, lying in a colorful pool of condiment. I couldn’t muster up a lot of sympathy for him. “Why should I help you? You kidnapped me, and if I’m not mistaken, you were going to let Ian kill me.”

“It hurts!” he protested.

“I think being dead might hurt too. Okay, hotshot, where did Gemberling go, and what’s he bringing back?”

“He was going to go set up an accident at Maddy’s shop, and then he was going to meet the guys with the truck.”

I knew the first part, but I was more curious about the second. “What guys? He wasn’t going to use you to ship the goods?”

“No. He didn’t think my truck was good enough for his precious artworks. He called some guys he’s used before. They’ve got a fancier truck. The only reason I got into this at all was because he needed somebody in a hurry.”

“Not to mention somebody who would be willing to bend the law. More than once.”

“Hey,” he said, “I didn’t know the stuff was stolen. All he said was he needed some stuff moved fast, and he offered good money.”

“Pal, first you conveniently ignored the dead body on the floor when you picked up your shipment. Then you grabbed me right out of my own shop. You’re just an innocent bystander, right?”