Deadly Deceptions (5 page)

Did I mention that I never deliberately cook?

We made a detour, Gillian and I, and I zipped into a megabookstore to look for a
Damn Fool's Guide to Sign Language.
Sure enough, there was one, complete with the hand alphabet and lots of illustrations. Inspired, I grabbed a second volume from the series, this one on popularity.

I was only a
little
embarrassed to buy a book that had probably been written for grossly overweight computer nerds and aspiring middle-school cheerleaders, but, hell, there wasn't anything else for the socially challenged.

Back at Greer's place, I led Gillian to the guesthouse, and she immediately plunked down on the couch. No orange velour here—Greer's furniture was all decorator approved. True to my word, I brought the TV down out of the ceiling and cruised the channels until I found a cartoon.

Gillian was instantly engrossed.

I studied her ballerina outfit. If I bought her some clothes at Wal-Mart in the morning, I wondered, would she be able to wear them?

Nick, my ex-husband, had always shown up in the suit he was buried in. I had a feeling ghosts didn't have extensive wardrobes. Still, it was worth a try.

Gillian's leotard, tights and tutu were bedraggled, and she was still wearing just the one slipper. It haunted me, that missing slipper.

I wanted to cry every time I looked at her.

Which wasn't about the outfit, I know, but I needed to
do
something.

While Gillian watched TV, I brewed a pot of tea and sat down at my kitchen table to study
The Damn Fool's Guide to Sign Language.

After two hours I knew how to say, “The cow is brown” and ask for directions to the nearest restroom.

Not very impressive, I know. But it was a start.

When I finally went to bed Gillian was still sitting on the couch, staring blindly at the TV screen.

G
ILLIAN WAS GONE
when I got up the next morning, and the TV was still on. Closed-captioned dialogue streamed across the screen.

I sighed. Picked up the remote and switched to a news channel, clicking off the subtitle feature.

This was an act of courage. Because of my last excellent adventure, I'd been all over the media for days. That's what happens, I guess, when you suddenly remember who killed your parents when you were five years old, and the guilty parties try to shut you up before you can spill the proverbial beans.

That was
last
week,
I told myself, but it wasn't much consolation.

The talking heads were prattling about obesity in children, and I regarded that as a positive sign. Nothing bombed, nothing hijacked. A slow news day is a
good
news day.

Trying to decide whether I ought to go to Wal-Mart for ghost clothes or run down another lead on Greer's cheating husband, I padded into the kitchen to start a pot of java. Greer's coffeemaker was state of the art, unlike mine, and I had my choice of everything from cappuccinos and lattes to cocoa and hot cider.

All I wanted was coffee, damn it. Plain, ordinary, simple
coffee.

Again I missed my apartment and the chortle-chug of my own humble brewing apparatus. Heebie-jeebies or not, I was going to have to bite the bullet and go back. All this luxury was getting to me in a big way.

I wrestled a single cup of caffeine from the sleek monster machine, with all its shining spouts and levers, and headed back to the living room, blinking blearily at the TV screen as the theme shifted from fat kids to Gillian Pellway's murder investigation.

Tucker Darroch's harried face appeared, close up, then the camera panned back. He was wearing a blue cotton work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, along with jeans and Western boots, and he looked as though he'd like to be anywhere else but in front of the sheriff's office with a microphone practically bumping his lower lip.

“An arrest has been made, and yet the investigation continues?” the reporter asked. “Does that mean you aren't sure you have the right man in custody?”

“Mr. Erland hasn't been formally charged,” Tucker answered, tersely patient. “He's being held for questioning.”

“He's been in the county jail for almost a week,” the reporter pointed out helpfully. She was ultra-skinny—obesity clearly
wasn't
rampant among media types—and wore a pink suit with a pencil skirt and fashionably short jacket. Her hair was blond and big. “Doesn't that indicate that Mr. Erland is a prime suspect?”

Personally, I thought she was standing a tad closer to Tucker than absolutely necessary. I get sidetracked by things like that.

I took another slurp of coffee and reminded myself that I had no claim on Tucker Darroch. Oh, no. He still belonged to Allison, the divorce notwithstanding. While I'd tossed and turned in my lonely bed the night before, dreaming about dead people, he'd probably been snuggled in his ex-wife's arms.

I almost choked on the coffee.

“Mr. Erland,” Tucker said evenly, “is a person of interest, not a suspect.”

Copspeak,
I thought. Tucker
couldn't
make a definitive statement regarding Erland's innocence or guilt—I knew it, Tucker knew it and so did the reporter, along with most of the viewing audience, a few flakes excepted. It was all rhetoric to fill airtime.

Translation: nobody knew jack-shit.

The interview ended.

The telephone rang.

A wild fantasy overwhelmed me. It was Tucker, I decided, calling to ask if I'd seen him on TV.

As if he'd ever do that.

“Hello?” I cried into the cordless receiver I'd snatched up from the coffee table.

“Who is this?” an unfamiliar female voice demanded.

I bristled, disappointed. “You first,” I said. “After all,
you're
the one who placed the call.”

There was a short standoff, and I was about to break the connection when the caller relented.

“My name,” the woman said, “is Mrs. Alexander Pennington. And I'm looking for Mojo Sheepshanks.”

I hadn't had all that much coffee. It took a moment for my brain to grope past Greer, the only “Mrs. Alexander Pennington” I knew, to the ex-wife with the drinking problem. I'd met her once at Fashion Square Mall, and her image assembled itself in my mind—overweight, expensively dressed, too-black hair worn Jackie O bouffant.

“This is Mojo,” I said, against my better judgment. “What do you want?”

All right, maybe that question
was
a little abrupt, but it was direct and to the point. The first Mrs. Pennington knew I was Greer's sister, and that meant she'd probably called out of some codependent need to harangue the trophy wife in a flank attack. It's always better to be direct with that kind of person.

“I understand you're a private investigator now,” Mrs. Pennington #1 said with drunken dignity. I wondered if she was still under the influence of last night's cocktail hour, or if she subscribed to the hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-you theory and had started the day with a Bloody Mary.

I closed my eyes. Damn all that TV coverage, anyway. Why had I touted myself as a P.I. every time I got in front of a camera? Now people actually expected me to solve things. “How did you get my number?” I asked.

“You're in the book.”

Right. And I'd programmed my phone at the apartment to forward calls to Greer's guesthouse. I needed more coffee.

“Yes,” I said, scrambling for a little dignity of my own.

“I'd like to hire you.”

“That would be a conflict of interest, Mrs. Pennington,” I said, intrigued in spite of myself. “As you know, your ex-husband is currently married to my sister.”

“I'm aware of that,” she replied moderately. “Believe me. This is a separate matter, and it's delicate, which is why I would prefer not to discuss it over the telephone.”

It finally occurred to me that Mrs. Pennington-the-first might be one of Greer's blackmailers. As I said, I hadn't had enough coffee.

While it seemed like a stretch, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and, besides, you can dig up dirt on just about anybody if you have the resources to hire enough muscle to do the shoveling.

Suffice it to say that an instinct kicked in. There was something important going on under the surface here, and I had to find out what it was.

“When did you want to meet?” I asked.

“Noon today,” Mrs. Pennington answered readily, reeling off a posh address not that far from Greer's. “I'll have Carlotta serve her special lobster salad, so don't eat before you get here.”

I wasn't sure eating anything prepared under the
grande dame'
s roof would be smart, but I liked lobster, and my budget didn't allow for much of it. I had my stash in the bank, thanks to Margery DeLuca, but I didn't plan on blowing it on seafood.

“Noon,” I repeated cautiously. I'd scrawled the address on the front of a
TV Guide.

“I'd rather you didn't tell your sister about this meeting, if you don't mind,” Mrs. Pennington went on. “At least, not immediately.”

“I can't promise that, Mrs. Pennington,” I said, frowning. Elsewhere on the
TV Guide
cover someone had written, in lopsided, childish letters, “DOG.”

Gillian, of course.

She could write? Not much, probably, since she was only seven. Still, the word opened up a whole new realm of possibilities. Mentally I added an item to the shopping list in my head.

“Call me Beverly,” Mrs. Pennington said.

I wasn't planning an ongoing relationship with Beverly Pennington, but calling her by her first name would certainly be less awkward, given that on the rare occasions the words
Mrs. Pennington
came to my mind, it was always in reference to Greer.

“Beverly it is,” I agreed.

We said our goodbyes, and I hung up. After a glance at the clock I took a quick, cool shower, donned a blue-and-white-print sundress with spaghetti straps and a pair of sandals and subdued my hair with a pinch clip. Tufts stuck up on my crown, giving the do a decidedly
un
done look, but hey, it wasn't as if I was a TV reporter or anything. I was a
detective,
Tucker's snide remarks about my mail-order license aside.

I was sort of expecting Gillian to materialize in the front seat of the Volvo as I backed out of the driveway, but it didn't happen. I hoped she hadn't returned to the graveyard to hang out. I was no expert on ghost behavior—maybe she'd gone home, the way Justin had, or to her school, or any one of a number of familiar places—but I'd found her at the cemetery once before.

All those possibilities stuck in the bruised places in my heart like slowly turning screws.

I couldn't go to the school, or to the Erland home—at least, not without an excuse, and I hadn't thought of one yet. I'd take a spin through the cemetery, though, I decided, on my way to Wal-Mart.

My cell phone jingled inside my purse as I was pulling onto the 101, heading south. I upended the bag and fumbled for the phone, afraid to take my eyes off the road. Arizona drivers, I've gotta tell ya, are stone-crazy. Maybe it's the serotonin, from all that sunlight. Seasonal affective disorder in reverse. Maybe it's the flat, straight roads. Whatever it is, most of them drive like maniacs, and last time I checked Phoenix was the number one city in the country for red-light fatalities.

“Hello?” I said, swerving to avoid a white Expedition crossing in front of me to make a last-moment exit. “Tucker?”

I hadn't dared to glance at the caller ID panel before I answered; even a split second could have meant months in traction, and I don't have that kind of spare time.

“Sorry,” Jolie said. “It's only your sister. You know, the black one?”

I was glad to hear her voice. “Yeah,” I replied, grinning. “I remember. What's up?”

“I'm on the job,” Jolie answered, and from the change in her tone I figured she must have cupped the phone with one hand, hoping her voice wouldn't carry. For Jolie, “on the job” probably meant she was standing over a body. “Moje, this is bad.”

“What?” I asked, navigating the road leading to the cemetery. If I wasn't careful, I'd end up checking in for good, and the adrenaline rush brought on by Jolie's words wasn't helping.

“I can't talk long,” Jolie said, hush-hush. “The short version is I'm standing in the desert about twenty yards from a corpse, and I'm ninety-nine percent sure it's Alex Pennington's.”

The Volvo's tires squealed as I wrenched the car off the road, came to a stop in a restaurant parking lot. I was shaking. “No!”

“Yes,” Jolie replied with a sigh. “The uniforms are here, and homicide is on its way. But it's Alex, all right. I'd know that asshole anywhere.”

“Who found him? How was he killed?”

“Gotta go,” Jolie chimed, and hung up.

Something Greer had said the night before stung my brain.
For all I know, he's lying dead in the desert somewhere.

“Shit,” I said to my empty car.

She couldn't have done it. She
couldn't
have killed Alex. The Greer I knew, while self-absorbed and famously high maintenance, simply wasn't capable of that.

I shook off the agitation and switched the dial to damage control.

How was I going to break news like this to Greer? Even though she'd hired me to get the goods on Pennington, I knew she loved the guy, even hoped to have a family with him, which was why I didn't seriously entertain the notion that she might have killed him. I also knew she was still hoping he'd come out pure on the other end of my investigation. Instead, he'd come out
dead.

A new and even more alarming thought elbowed its way to the forefront of my mind. What if he haunted me?

Goose bumps sprouted on my forearms, and even though it was a hundred degrees outside, I felt as though I'd just stepped into a meat locker.

I did some deep breathing—
Damn Fool's Guide to Relieving Stress—
and waited until the shaking subsided.

What to do?

Motor back to Greer's and wait, pretending I didn't know Alex was a goner, until the police called or dropped by to tell her what had happened?

For one thing, I couldn't pretend that well. For another, Greer probably wasn't home. Even though she had a cast on her left arm, she attended her yoga class faithfully every morning, had lunch out and then went shopping.