Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 05 - Trouble on the Doorstep (15 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“I BET IT WAS THE peeping tom,” Morehouse said. “Course, I’m not gonna do any assuming.” He and Scoobie were sitting at the oak table with me. Morehouse had actually plugged in the kettle. I was still shaking when the patrol car drove up, and Morehouse was only behind it by about a minute.

“What peeping tom?” Scoobie asked.

I had a vague memory that I’d heard something about that. “George,” I paused.

“He hasn’t done that for years,” Scoobie said, trying to get a grin out of me.

“Shut up, Scoobie,” Morehouse said, in a conversational tone.

“I think George said that was why we should walk Megan and Alicia home from the boardwalk one night last summer.”

“Damn it. Don’t do no good for him to hold a story if he blabs about it to you.”

“People’d want to know that,” I said, crossly.

“We almost had him. He’d been in Megan’s neighborhood a lot. Haven’t heard from him since, oh, mid-September. Musta got spooked.”

“Back to this,” Scoobie said, quietly.
“I don’t think we should assume it was a peeping tom.”

“I said I wasn’t assuming,” he replied, in his crossest tone.

I had a clean kitchen towel that I had dampened and used to dab at the scrapes on the palms of my hands. “I wish I’d seen him,” I said.

“Too bad you can’t hypnotize a damn dog,” Morehouse said.

Miss Piggy barked.

“No one’s talking to you guys,” Scoobie said.

I looked at the sliding glass door.
Mister Rogers had positioned himself there the moment we walked in and had not moved.

“Now what?”
I directed my question to Morehouse. “Somebody gets murdered in this room and then there’s a guy in the back yard. Aunt Madge is going to freak.”

“You don’t have to tell her until she gets back,” Scoobie said.

Morehouse closed the small notebook he’d used as he talked to me. “You put the alarm on soon as I go.” He nodded in the direction of the hallway that had the door to the basement. “Who put the new deadbolt on?”

“George and I,” Scoobie said.

“Good thinking.” He turned to me. “Get the lock fixed on the basement window?”

I nodded.
“I called the locksmith the next day. And Scoobie’s staying tonight.”

“Keep your cell phone with you,” he said, as he stood.
“I’ll have some of the guys look for footprints early tomorrow, but I can’t really justify bringing in a couple of investigators tonight. I took a quick look, and there are dozens of footprints out there from when we all trooped around after Eric was killed. Won’t be anything we can use.” He looked at my glum expression. “I wish I could do more, but right now there’s not much except let all the others know.”

I took this to mean the other police.
Scoobie walked him to the door and I could hear the little beeps as he pushed the buttons that would activate the alarm. I wondered for a moment if anyone could know I’d gotten information from the file at Silver Times and again rejected the idea. No one had seen me actually walk out of the office. Not even Hank.

Scoobie came back through the swinging door.
“You know, I think we should talk to Madge about adding onto her security system. Maybe just a couple of monitored cameras.”

Uh oh
.

I HAD NOT THOUGHT about cameras. It gave me the chills just to think about it. Surely if cameras had seen me leave the Silver Times office after hours yesterday, Morehouse would have been on my doorstep a lot earlier, and not because I called him.

Time for an early New Year’s resolution.
I will not break into any more buildings
. I was pretty sure I could keep that one.

I was doing an appraisal of a beach cottage that sat just two blocks back from the ocean on the northern edge of Ocean Alley.
The request had just come in this morning and the owners wanted the sale finalized quickly.

Lester had told me that the first question any potential buyer asks these days is how a house coped with Hurricane Sandy?
Apparently the agent handling this sale had wanted potential buyers to have the answer to that question by seeing a relatively short list of repairs, which he also gave to me. I figured he had shared the list in the hope that I would see all the new stuff and appraise the house for a larger amount.

That would be tough.
Probably home values would go back up if we had a couple years with no major hurricanes. Right now, for the few houses that had sold in the last few weeks and were what I had to use to compare this one to, prices were in the toilet.

I glanced at his list of repairs or replacements.

New roof.
Like half of Ocean Alley
.

Gutters and downspouts.

Garage door.
Probably dented by blowing debris
.

Siding on the west side of the house.

Four windows.

On the whole, not too bad. There was the usual fresh paint and scrubbed clean look. I was looking for hints about water damage. It was up to the buyer to judge the condition of a home, but I didn’t want to give an appraised value and have the buyer find out in six months that the moisture from spring rains would be enough to have part of the dining room floor buckle. It wouldn’t be our fault, but Harry and I had decided to take far more pictures than we usually did. It’s hard to argue with a photograph.

I finished measuring and taking the outdoor pictures and headed back to the office.
As soon as I entered the information into the appraisal software and started on the full report I was going to take a break and compare the estimate Eric Morton and Steve Oliver had planned to present with Nat Markham’s figures. With Scoobie and George in and out of the Cozy Corner, it was too risky to do it at home. It was just lucky that I got the file put away before Scoobie got there last night.

En route I stopped at Mr. Markle’s in-town grocery store.
A thank-you note was in my purse. Grouse though he might about ordering food at a discount if we needed something quickly, Mr. Markle really has a heart of gold. Or so I tell myself.

He and his clipboard were in the laundry detergent aisle.
“Good morning, Mr. Markle,” I said, with as much cheeriness as I could inject.

He raised his eyes from the clipboard and then returned to his checklist.
“Morning, Jolie.”

“Thanks so much for getting us the cheap hotdogs and buns.”

“Be easier if you ordered them earlier,” he said, not looking up.

“Be easier if George didn’t put articles in the paper about a practice contest.”

At that he looked up, and almost cracked a smile. “Heard you’re dating.” Back to the clipboard.

“Unless he does that again,” I said.
I plopped the note on his clipboard. “Just wanted to say thanks.”

Would it hurt him to smile
?

HARRY’S HOUSE WAS COLD. He had turned the thermostat down to sixty-five and put a space heater in the office we shared so I could be warm when I worked. By the time the room warmed up I was usually done working.

I put my coat back on and looked over my shoulder a couple of times as I typed and examined information on recent sales that I had picked up at the courthouse.
You should be used to empty houses. I reminded myself that no one had ever been murdered in Harry’s house, or even knocked down in the back yard. That you know of.

Half an hour later I had finished using the computer.
It took longer than usual because I kept looking around the room. Once I even got up and looked out the window. Get over it.

I told myself to concentrate on Steve and Eric’s estimated bid.
I had it on the left side of the work table and my notes about Markham Construction’s estimate on the right. There weren’t too many similarities.

None of the projects had resident names associated with them, but the list of projects was identical, since they had started with the same information from Silver Times.
It wasn’t too hard to pick out Elmira’s. Steve and Eric’s estimate was more detailed, and they estimated three thousand less than Markham Construction did. If you figured Steve and Eric were the same proportion less on each project, it would be close to $400,000 difference.

I thought about this.
Nat Markham had been doing this work a lot longer than Eric and Steve, and if his father helped him with the estimates it would be more than half a century of experience combined. Even so, it seemed like a huge variation. If Silver Times had seen both estimates, surely they would have gone with Steve and Eric. Or would they?

If there was some kind of padding or scam going on it would be hard to tell who was involved.
Maybe Nat had a better idea of costs, maybe Steve and Eric were ridiculously optimistic. If Nat’s bid was deliberately high, was he the only one who would benefit?

I thought about things like kickbacks to Silver Times or Nat saving for his kids’ college education or paying off a bookie.
You don’t even know if he has kids
.

Fred Brennan had said that residents were not responsible for repairs.
Usually an insurance company would have the final word in repair costs, but since Silver Times self-insured it was probably the board that oversaw the costs. I wished I knew at least one of them personally. Surely they would ask for an audit or something.

Fred Brennan exuded confidence, and he ran a private business.
Presumably he and the board could do largely as they wanted. Fred could easily influence them. Even so, I figured there must be an annual report that residents would see. Reports usually had financial statements. It might be hard for Markham Construction to totally take Silver Times to the cleaners.

Unless the board was in on it.
There were six members of the board. That was a lot of people to conspire for any level of malfeasance, but especially if it was for hundred of thousands of dollars.

I thought about the board’s composition.
A social worker and dietician were not likely to know much about accounting or construction estimates. Lance said the others were residents. My guess was that they were not selected for the board for their business acumen. They could be really good board members when it came to housing or senior citizen services, but they could also be clueless about the business side of the operation. Plus, everyone wanted repairs to be made quickly. Maybe even some of the projects were for board members’ residences.

I called George.
“Does Silver Times do an annual report or anything like that?”

“What do you care?”

“I keep looking for a reason anybody would kill Steve and Eric. What makes more sense than money?”

“You remember the bit about you leaving this to the police?” he asked.

“Kind of like you do?” I asked.

“That’s different.”

“Uh-huh. Come on. Are there financial reports or something?”

There was a three or four second pause.
“The reports are mostly cream-puff stuff,” he said, “and I can’t get hold of any financials.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Don’t know. Since they get Medicare and Medicaid funds for the nursing home, there’s some public reporting there, but it would be after the fact. As a private firm, they don’t have to make other financial stuff public.”

“So,” I said, thinking aloud, “for the repairs other than the nursing home, they could pretty much spend what they wanted.”

“Yeah. I’m thinking of asking Bill if he can get hold of any of Steve’s figures, you know, what he planned to bid.”

“I told Bill I’d touch base in the next couple of days…”
I let my voice trail off.

“Jolie…”

I could hear George’s editor bellowing in the background. George said goodbye and hung up. With any luck I’d never have to tell George that I’d had Steve’s numbers for a couple of days.

I stared at the estimates, not taking in much from either set.
There had to be a way to know more about Silver Times than the brightly colored brochures told me.

My cell phone chirped and I almost fell off the chair.

“Jolie. Andrew Markham here. Thought I’d give you a day to wind down before I called.”

Since when do you call me?
“I’m not sure I’ll be calm for a week, but I’ve caught up on sleep.”

“Louise and I mentioned Harvest for All at our bridge club yesterday.
I have a few more checks for you. What’s a good time to get together?”

Cameras.
It has to be the cameras.
“My schedule’s pretty flexible.”

“How about if we meet at Java Jolt?
Say in half an hour?”

I agreed, feeling somewhat relieved.
If Fred Brennan had told Andrew Markham that I’d been in the office after hours surely Markham would not sound so friendly. And he was asking to meet in a public place.