Artful Dodger (Maggie Kean Mis-Adventures) (9 page)

The intercom remained silent for several seconds. “Why are you here?”

I took a deep breath. “I came to get Elizabeth’s picture. The one she left me in the will.”

“You couldn’t wait until tomorrow to get the damn thing?” His words seemed to jump in explosive bursts of static. “You’re a greedy little bitch.”

“Glad to see your mood has improved. Now could you please answer the door and let me in?”

Several long minutes went by, long enough to make me wonder if he planned on making me stand outside until I finally gave up and went home. Suddenly the door swung open and Preston stood in front of me, his feet apart, the hall light silhouetting his rigid body.

My heart sank when I recognized the barely controlled anger. I was not in the mood to deal with another tantrum. I was here on a mission and I needed time alone. Judging by the look on his face, though, he was going to hound my every footstep.

“Well, if it isn’t the little gold digger,” he sneered.

I sighed. “I just came for the picture, Preston. I’m not here to engage in a verbal fistfight with you or Cassie or anyone else. Now... may I come in, please?”

Preston moved imperceptibly and I took the opportunity to slip past him.  I stood behind him, waiting, until he shut the door and turned around.

“The picture is in Grandmother’s office. I’m surprised you didn’t take it this afternoon.”

“I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Some of us were more overcome by sadness than others,” I said pointedly. 

His face darkened. “You’ve accused me of not caring about Grandmother for the last time,” he warned. “You have no right to speak to me that way. My feelings are my own business and I see no reason to debate the issue with someone who clearly took advantage of her advanced age and loneliness.”

“Don’t bother with the lies, Preston.  Save the grieving grandson routine for someone who is gullible,” I said, starting down the hallway. “Right now I’m going to Elizabeth’s office. Don’t feel obligated to show me the way. I was here this afternoon when you got the bad news, remember?”

The flush started at his collar and worked its way up his face. When it passed his forehead, I half expected the top of his head to blow off like a cartoon character. “Don’t think for one minute that you’ll see a dime of our money, Maggie. Cassandra and I are already working with another attorney to get the will invalidated.”

“What is it you expect to find?” I asked, spinning around to face him. “That I tampered with the will? Do you think I deleted your name and typed in my own?” His chin jutted out like the pouty little boy he still was.

“Grandmother would never forget me. She told me the money was Cassandra’s and mine, not some stray oddball she picked up next door.”

If I hadn’t been so intent on getting to Elizabeth’s office, I would have popped him right then and there.  A broken nose would have done him good. Preston’s face was mottled with anger and the skin under his chin was beginning to sag although he was only in his late twenties, somewhere close to my age. Despite the softness, Preston was still skinny, with sharp elbows, and a pointy chin. Peering myopically through his black horn-rimmed glasses, he looked like Poindexter with a bad attitude.

“If you thought I was such an oddball, why did you agree to take me out to dinner?”

“It was Grandmother’s idea. She thought we’d make a cute couple.”

I grimaced at the picture we made that night—me in my standard bag dress and Preston nervously sweating in his coat and tie, one hand fidgeting with the keys in his pocket.

“You didn’t have to agree to go at all, you know. You’re a big boy. I’m sure Elizabeth would have gotten over the disappointment.  You could have saved us both a fairly long evening, to put it politely.”

“You know very well how persistent Grandmother can—could—be. She thought it was a good idea and she kept pushing until it happened.  She was a stubborn old lady.”

I detected a faint note of wistfulness underneath his obnoxious exterior. Every once in a while a glimmer of something rose to the surface that actually made him seem human. Preston worked hard to squelch this side of himself and, unfortunately, he was quite successful at doing so. So Preston remained Preston, obnoxious and rude on the outside... and obnoxious and rude on the inside.

“You know, Preston. Stubbornness and persistence are usually not adjectives we use to describe weak, lonely old ladies. You might want to spend time with a thesaurus looking up some new words if you want to convince the judge that Elizabeth was a crazy old lady with cotton for brains.”

“You little—” he began, but I cut him off.

“Yeah, I drive men crazy that way,” I said, sauntering off down the hall, praying he wouldn’t follow. A door slammed behind me and I was fairly sure Preston had stomped into the library to drown his sorrows in bourbon.

Elizabeth always began her fancy dinners with champagne cocktails and martinis in the library. I could still see her, standing in my studio, staring out the window and regaling me with stories about her evening while I worked on my latest sculpture.

“Ah, Maggie, you should have seen Marianne floating into the room, wearing some little slip of a thing that was three sizes too small, with a décolletage that dipped down to her navel, the whole ensemble precariously held up by two thin spaghetti straps. I spent the whole evening waiting for the straps to break and for her superb breasts to flop into the lobster bisque, but the damn things held up magnificently.” She turned to study my work in progress and sighed deeply. “Unfortunately, nothing happened, and it was another mundane evening with the kind of dull, polite conversation so often associated with a good cause.”

“And these are the evenings you’d like me to attend?”

“Ah, yes!” she said, clapping her hands together. “We would have such a delightful time together. It would be wonderful to share them with someone who sees the world the same way I do. Who knows? If you’d been there last night, we might have found a way to snip the straps on Marianne’s dress just to see everyone’s expression.”

I had forgotten about that mischievous sparkle that danced in her eyes whenever she wanted to do something this side of naughty.

“Elizabeth, someday when I have nothing else to do— and I mean nothing else—I’ll let you drag me to one of these dinners of yours. In the meantime, I’ll just have to be content with your stories to spice up my boring little life.”

I forced the memory aside and swiped at my eyes with the back of my hand as I reached Elizabeth’s office. The door was open an inch or two, so I nudged it a little and quickly stepped in. The room was dark and eerie, her scent still permeating the air. I closed the door softly and leaned against it. The moonlight slid noiselessly through the windows and bounced off the back of the same chairs we’d occupied earlier, still arranged in a semicircle in front of her desk. Shadows pooled on the carpet like dark stains. Realizing I had very little time to spare before Preston became suspicious, I tiptoed to Elizabeth’s desk. Her leather chair squeaked as I sat down behind the desk and began to open the drawers one by one, not sure what I was looking for. I could only hope that if I came across something important, it would have the sense to be stamped and filed in an envelope marked IMPORTANT MURDER MATERIAL.

It came as no surprise that Elizabeth’s desk was meticulously organized. The center drawer held perfectly aligned pens and pencils, paper clips, personalized notepads, and other types of stationery. The larger drawer on the right-hand side was actually a small file cabinet filled with twenty or thirty separate folders, each one neatly labeled with the names of different charities and organizations Elizabeth contributed to in some form or other over the years. In the last drawer on the left, there were folders stuffed with financial information. I pulled a few and flipped quickly through the pages, but the numbers began to run together in my head and were nothing more than gibberish to me.

Without warning, the faint sound of footsteps disturbed the silence, growing louder as they rapidly approached Elizabeth’s office. With my heart pounding and my palms breaking out in a sweat, I shut the drawers, jumped up, and pushed her chair back into its original position. I took one last look around, praying that I had returned everything to its original spot. But as I started to turn away, my eyes fell on the appointment book sitting on top of the desk. Without thinking, I tossed it into my large leather bag.  Moving quickly, I had both hands on the frame of Elizabeth’s picture just as the door was thrown open hard enough to slam against the opposite wall. The crash seemed obscenely loud in the deep silence.

“What the hell is taking so long?” Preston demanded.

I jumped back, tripped over a small painting leaning against the wall, and nearly stumbled to the floor. “My God, Preston, do you have to barge into the room like you thought I was stealing the family jewels?”

“I’ll enter any room in this house exactly the way I want to. This is my house and I want to know why you’re still in it. Quite frankly, you’ve been in here long enough to actually steal whatever valuables you found.  I wouldn’t put it past you.”

My throat closed at the thought of Preston becoming suspicious enough to rummage through my purse. It would be difficult to explain Elizabeth’s book thrown in with my Chap Stick, checkbook, and sketchpad.

“You really do have family jewels?” I exclaimed, hoping to distract him. “Tiaras and diamond necklaces and emerald chokers?”

“Of course we do, just not right out here in the open. They’re in a vault—” He stopped and narrowed his eyes. “Why do you care?”

“I don’t. Just making polite conversation,” I called over my shoulder while carefully lifting the landscape from the wall. “Elizabeth was quite talented,” I said softly.  “It’s too bad she gave up painting for so many years. I think she could have been a very important artist.”

“It certainly wasn’t her choice. It was that bastard she was married to.”

“I never met him.”

“No, he died several years ago, a true blessing. It gave Grandmother a few years to live her life the way she wanted without him trying to force her to bend to his will all the time.”

“Sounds like he tried to force all of you.”

Preston walked over to the circle of chairs and slumped down in one of them. “Not me. He didn’t bother to acknowledge me with anything more than a nod of his head as we passed in the hallway. Sometimes I used to wonder if he even knew who I was or whether he thought I was just another one of the servants.”

Uh-oh. I was starting to feel guilty for my small act of burglary. Maybe Preston’s whole loathsome, repulsive act was a poignant cry for help. Maybe this was his way of grieving, not only for Elizabeth, but for an entire loveless childhood.

“You know, Preston, sometimes you say things that could actually be construed as human. Maybe you ought to try and expand that side of you a little more instead of keeping it so well hidden most of the time.”

He laughed. “Don’t go getting all mushy and female on me, Maggie. The only thing I’ve ever remotely liked about you is your tough-as-nails attitude.”

Great. So much for my sparkling personality.

“And the only thing that made the old man tolerable was knowing I would eventually inherit his estate through Grandmother,” he added for further clarification.

“How sentimental,” I responded dryly.

“Sentiment is a waste of time. It doesn’t get me, or Cassandra, any closer to the money that Grandmother assured us. The fact is, after all her promises about how I would be a wealthy man when she died, she ended up betraying me. Well, now she’s dead. Grandmother is dead and she lied to me. So if you expect me to be devastated, you’re going to be very disappointed.  The only thing on my mind is how to get rid of any obstacle that lies between me and the wealth that is rightfully mine.” He took a deep breath and stared right at me, his eyes cold and flat. “And right now that obstacle is you.”

My guilt flew out the window. Right then, if I could have found the tiaras, I would have gladly dumped them in my bag, too.

Chapter Six

Escaping Preston was not as easy as I had hoped.  He hovered behind me, shadowing me like a police dog sniffing for drug.  He followed me down the hallway, through the front door, right to my jeep.  I hurriedly placed the portrait in the back, slid into the driver’s seat and shut the car door in his face before peeling out of the driveway. 

But I made it. Safe at home, I leaned Elizabeth’s picture against the wall. I tossed my purse onto the middle of the bed and took a hot shower to wash away what felt like an inch of grime from my body.  Twenty minutes later, washed, dried, and snuggled into a pair of old sweats and a soft flannel shirt I stole from my father’s hunting closet, I crawled onto the bed, flopped on my back and let out a huge sigh of relief. After a few minutes, I took in a deep breath, reached across the bed, and tugged my bag onto my lap. I dug around inside until my fingers closed over the appointment book. Pulling the slim volume from my purse, I studied the cover for a long time without moving. I wasn’t really sure why I had taken it.  It was a simple, leather bound appointment book.  Understated but obviously expensive...and a little old-fashioned in some ways.  Elizabeth had never really warmed up to computers, so I wasn’t surprised that she preferred to organize her life in longhand.

I shook away the guilt. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I had to start somewhere.  Preston wasn’t the only enemy. Villari was out there combing the area for information to put me behind bars, and I wasn’t going to stand idly by while he lined all his ducks in a row. I didn’t have that luxury. The longer the case dragged on, the colder the killer’s trail. If the detective wanted to single me out as the guilty party, fine. But I couldn’t let Elizabeth’s memory be forever overshadowed by her violent murder. The only way I knew to fight back, the only way to free me from the nightmarish pictures that continually bombarded my brain, was to find the murderer myself. At least I would try.

And if Villari refused to help me, then Elizabeth would. Resolutely, I flipped the cover open and quickly riffled through the pages. Nothing jumped out and cuffed me on the head, so I took a deep breath and calmed down. I told myself that what I was doing wasn’t any big deal...a little devious perhaps, definitely a little nosy, but certainly not worth a jail term if I got caught. Surely the inmates in maximum security were guilty of bigger crimes than diary snooping.