Dead Man Waltzing (4 page)

The nearest neighbor would have to use binoculars to spot us, but I didn’t argue. “Let’s get it over with,” I agreed.

Maurice reached for the ornate doorknob, but the door swung inward before he could touch it.

Chapter 4

Maurice sprang back, bumping into me, and I almost toppled down the steps. Only my dancer’s reflexes and core strength saved me. I regained my balance in time to see Maurice slip the key into his pocket as a beautiful young man appeared in the doorway, dark brows arching high and an expression of surprise on his face. Pale skin and silky black hair set off intensely blue eyes. He wore jeans and a rugby shirt, but looked like he should have been dressed in an ascot and spats, like a character from an Evelyn Waugh novel. Not that I’d ever read Waugh’s books, but I’d seen the miniseries. The young man spoke, spoiling the effect with a blatantly mid-Atlantic accent and a scornful tone.

“Maurice! What the hell are you doing here?”

“We were just about to knock,” Maurice lied. “What are
you
doing here, Turner?”

“I was staying with Grandmama when she—” He broke off, pressing his lips together as if overcome by grief.

“Thrown out of another school?” Maurice asked with spurious sympathy. I looked at him; I’d never heard him sound so contemptuous.

“No,” Turner spit. “It’s summer break. Duh. Who’s she?”

“This is Anastasia Graysin,” Maurice said. “Anastasia, Turner Blakely.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand. “It’s Stacy.”

“Nice to meet
you
,” he said, running appreciative eyes over my figure and holding on to my hand too long. A smile that would have been charming if he hadn’t been so conscious of its effect curved his sculpted mouth.

I almost laughed; he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two. I tugged my hand away forcefully and he jolted forward a half step. He covered it up by descending the stairs past us and walking partway down the driveway to pick up the newspaper. He returned, slapping it in one hand.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” His suspicious gaze tracked from me to Maurice.

“Last time I was here, Thursday night,” Maurice said smoothly, “I left a pair of reading glasses. I was going to ask Mrs. Laughlin if she’d found them.”

“I fired the judgmental old witch this morning,” Turner said, stepping back into the foyer. Behind him I glimpsed a magnificent chandelier dangling with thousands of crystals, rounded walls painted a pale salmon, and a Chinese rug. “I’ve got to hit the road. Bachelor party for a buddy down in Virginia Beach tonight.” He started to close the door without even a polite good-bye, but Maurice stopped the door with his hand.

“When will the funeral be?” he asked.

I heard the sadness in his voice.

Turner looked like he wasn’t going to answer, but then said, “Friday. Ten a.m. First Presbyterian.” He shoved the door closed.

I resisted the juvenile temptation to call, “Nice to meet you, too,” at the impassive doors. Instead, I turned and descended the steps. “Mrs. Laughlin?” I asked Maurice.

“The housekeeper,” he said, keeping pace with me as we returned to the car. “She’s been with Corinne for years. Decades. I can’t believe Turner fired her before Rinny is even buried. She must be devastated. She’s my age, at least, and it’s unlikely she’ll get another job. I hope Rinny left her enough to live on.”

“You were pretty quick, coming up with an excuse for our being here,” I said.

He smiled. “I’m lucky he didn’t ask why we were there when he first opened the door. I would have stuttered and given the game away. Corinne didn’t mention that he had moved back in with her. It must have been over the weekend, because he wasn’t here Thursday night.”

I almost asked,
Or Friday morning?
but didn’t for fear of embarrassing Maurice. I was getting the distinct impression that he and the unconstant Corinne had been
close
friends. Friends with benefits, even.

“Why didn’t you ask him about the manuscript?” I asked as I pulled back onto the Mount Vernon Parkway going north.

“He and his father are among the people who may not come off so well in Corinne’s memoirs,” Maurice said. “If Turner knew Corinne had a book deal, he’d probably do what he could to destroy the manuscript.”

“Oh?”

“He’s got a little problem with cheating,” said Maurice, “which is why he’s been to three colleges in as many years. His father, Corinne’s son, Randolph, is addicted to painkillers. He broke his back in a skiing accident some years back and has had troubles with prescription drugs since then. I know Corinne’s paid for a couple of stays in rehab programs, but Randolph can’t seem to stay clean.”

“A Charlie Sheen type,” I said. “His dad’s had no luck helping him, either.”

Maurice looked at me blankly, apparently not a devotee of
People
magazine or gossipy entertainment shows.

“Never mind.”

I mulled over the situation as Maurice stayed silent. He’d been lunching with Corinne Blakely when she died—possibly poisoned—and the police considered him a suspect. He was convinced the real killer was someone afraid that Corinne’s book would expose a secret the murderer preferred to keep secret. That seemed far-fetched to me; I suspected that if Corinne was murdered, it was for a more concrete reason, like money. Pulling up in front of Maurice’s house fifteen minutes later, I asked, “Who inherits Corinne’s estate? Her son?”

Maurice shook his head. “No. She wrote him out of the will two years ago when it became clear his last stint at rehab didn’t ‘take.’ She was afraid that if she left him all her money he would use it to feed his addiction and eventually kill himself. No, I think the bulk of her estate goes to Turner. At least, that’s the direction she was leaning last time we talked about it.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Will you inherit anything?” I was worried that if Corinne had left him a substantial bequest, the police would consider it motive.

He chuckled. “She used to joke about leaving each of her husbands something to remind us of our time with her. If she did, I’m sure it will be no more than a token, a memento.”

“Okay.” I glanced at my watch. “Look, I’ve got to go. Are you okay?”

Patting my cheek, he said, “I’ll be fine, Anastasia. Thanks for springing me from the pokey. I’ll see you this evening for the Latin class.”

“You don’t have to come if you don’t feel up to it,” I said. “I can call Vitaly.”

“I’ll be there.” Maurice got out of the car. “Ciao.”

* * *

I arrived late to the furniture store, where I had promised to help my sister, Danielle, pick out a new sofa. The old one had collapsed under her and her boyfriend, Coop, when they were, she alleged, simply watching
Jeopardy!
a couple nights ago. The store was a freestanding building on Lee Highway, surrounded by a gymnastics place, a restaurant, and an oil-change garage. Traffic whizzed by. Dani was pacing the concrete walkway in front of the store, curly red hair billowing around her, frown etching her pretty face.

“Sorry,” I started as I came up to her, thinking her uncharacteristic anger was directed at me.

“Have you talked to Mom today?” she asked, ignoring my apology.

Ah, now I knew where her anger was coming from. She and our mother had had a difficult relationship since Mom chose to follow her passion for horses and dressage rather than stick around to be a wife and mother. Dad had given her an ultimatum—him or the horses—and she’d chosen the nags. I’d been fifteen when she left and I’d sorta, kinda, maybe understood her choice. By then, I’d been ballroom dancing for several years and knew I wouldn’t be me if I couldn’t continue. Danielle, a couple years younger, had never forgiven her.

“No, I haven’t been home. Is she okay?”

Danielle snorted. “‘Okay.’ That’s one word for it.”

I moved into the air-conditioned cool of the store and Danielle trailed after me. We waved away the saleswoman charging toward us like Yogi Bear after a pic-a-nic basket.

“She wants us to join her on a vacation,” Danielle said, clearly incensed.

“So?”

“So, she’s going to a dressage competition in Georgia and she wants us to meet her afterward on Jekyll Island. Her treat.”

“Oh.” The reason for Danielle’s anger became plain: Jekyll Island was the site of our last vacation as a family, before Mom moved out.

“She wants to ruin our memories of our last vacation together,” Danielle said, plopping down onto a brown plaid sofa. “Too hard.” She popped up again and punched the pillows of a beige microfiber conversation pit.

“Not beige,” I objected, drawn to a red leather sofa.

“Beige blends,” she said.

“There’s such a thing as too much blending.” I admit I was biased; I’d rather go naked than wear beige or brown or any of the other “blendy” colors Danielle stocked her closet with. As a union negotiator, she thought a “nonthreatening” wardrobe helped her connect with the employees she was helping. I didn’t think that perspective needed to extend to her living environment. “Don’t you want something that pops?”

“Not really.” Checking the price tag, she added, “You’re not going, are you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even talked to Mom. It would depend when it is, I guess.”

“Well, I’m not going.”

“Did you tell Mom that?”

She bit her lip. “I told her I’d think about it.”

I sighed. For a woman who dealt with confrontation day in and day out in her job, Danielle was strangely loath to lay things on the line in her personal life. “Well, if you said you’d think about it, why not think about it? It might be fun . . . a girls’ weekend at the beach, mani-pedis, piña coladas, shell collecting.”

“Daddy should be there.” She put on a little-girl-lost face, eyes wide, mouth trembling.

Sheesh
. Getting all maudlin wasn’t going to help. “Dad? With Beryl, I presume?” His second wife, a woman he’d married five years ago, after Dani and I had already left home. “They could have a room that adjoined ours, and Mom and Beryl could compare notes while they had their toenails painted.” I put on a New Jersey voice like Beryl’s. “‘Didn’t you just hate the way Ronald tossed his socks near the hamper but never in it, Jean?’”

“Not like that!” Dani tried to suppress a laugh but failed. “You know what I meant.”

“Yeah. You meant you want to turn time back a dozen or so years. Not possible, baby sister.”

“I don’t see why not,” she grumbled.

I wisely left that unanswered. Instead, I distracted her by telling her about Corinne Blakely’s death and Maurice’s involvement.

“I can’t see Maurice poisoning someone,” she said.

“We don’t know that she was poisoned,” I cautioned, even though I had told her that poison was my guess for the murder weapon, since Maurice would have noticed a gun, knife, or garrote.

“Poison’s a woman’s weapon.”

“How sexist.”

“It is,” she insisted. “I read it somewhere. Who does Maurice think did it?” Crowding me onto an ottoman as she passed me, she fingered the fringe on a pillow.

“Someone whose secrets Corinne was going to reveal in her new tell-all memoir.”

Danielle stopped examining furniture to look at me. “Really?”

I nodded. “But I think it might have been her grandson. He struck me as the kind of whiny rich kid who expects to have things—everything he wants—handed to him on a platter. Immediately.”

“Was he at the restaurant?”

“Not as far as I know. Good point.” Danielle’s question made me think: Were there slow-acting poisons someone could have administered to Corinne earlier in the day/week/month that resulted in her death at the Swallow? My knowledge of poisons was severely limited. I knew better than to drink household cleaners or splash them in my eyes, and I thought oleander leaves were poisonous to animals—and maybe humans?—but that’s where my expertise stopped.

“What about this?” We had wandered halfway around the store and I pointed at an olive green sofa with puffy cushions and a faint red stripe thinner than angel hair pasta. Not too bright, not too boring. Best of all, it was on sale. Dani sat on it, leaned back, and reclined with her feet hanging just off the edge.

“It’s nice,” she said, “but I don’t think it goes with my Aegean Sunset walls.”

“Maybe I should come over and see the apartment, now that you’ve off-loaded the broken sofa on Goodwill.” I made a frame of my hand and pretended to peer through it. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the place; I haven’t been over since you repainted.”

“Sure,” Dani said. “How about tomorrow night? Cooper left today for a business trip, some sort of security convention in Las Vegas—ha!—so I don’t have plans any evening this week.”

I never had evening plans unless I was teaching, so I didn’t feel too sympathetic that she was dateless for a few days. I pointed out another sale couch, but she said, “I’ve got to think about it. This is the first store I’ve been to; I want to look in a couple other places.”

I rolled my eyes but said nothing, used to my sister’s habits. I was impulsive and made decisions about sofas or clothes or holidays on a whim, on intuition. Dani pondered things, researched products in
Consumer Reports
, and spent forty dollars in gas trekking around to eighteen stores in order to save ten bucks on something.

“Fine,” I said. “Let me know when you want to go looking again. I’m getting ideas for when I can afford to replace Aunt Laurinda’s midcentury atrocities.”

“You know,” Danielle said as we threaded our way back through the displays to the door, “her furniture might be worth money, like to a collector or something.”

“I don’t think they’re legitimate antiques. They’re just old.”

“Retro,” Danielle corrected me. “Collectible. Maybe you could make enough off of them to buy new furniture.”

“It’s worth a thought.” We pushed through the glass door to the parking lot. “How would I find someone who would know if it’s worth something? I don’t think that Cari Something from the
Cash and Cari
show is likely to drop by, or the crew from
Antiques Roadshow
.”

Dani tossed her hair and sniffed, knowing I was making fun of her love of do-it-yourself and home-makeover TV shows. “Laugh if you want, but I’ve learned a lot from those shows. I’ll find someone to give you an estimate.”

“Really?” I hugged her good-bye. “Thanks, Dani.” She headed toward her car and I called after her, “Think about it.” I wasn’t talking about the sofa.