Murder in Store (17 page)

Grace smiled briefly. “You know, it would be fairly easy to find a rat in that condition in the stable area.”

“The house in Wayne?”

She nodded. “I’m not saying I think she did it, but she would have had the opportunity.” She seemed to tangle with a thought for a moment. Then she said, “Do you think she might have killed Preston?”

I couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was hoping for a yes or no answer.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She might have. But if she was hurting things she was jealous of, it doesn’t make sense for her to kill Preston.”

“Perhaps not,” Grace mused.

“What was their relationship?”

She smiled and considered that before answering. “It wasn’t very good. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too, as they say.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, she wanted Preston’s adulation, but she also wanted the attention of any other man who looked vaguely interesting. And, believe me, she wasn’t very fussy. One man was not enough for dear Diana, and Preston wasn’t the sort to put up with that for very long.”

“From what I gathered, Diana’s behavior was a grandstand play for attention.”

Grace shook her head. “I don’t think so. Oh, she might have been angered by the fact that Preston was becoming bored with her, but she wouldn’t let that get in the way of her liaisons.”

“Was Preston considering divorce?”

“He mentioned it in passing. Although I don’t believe he ever took any action.”

“Was Preston considering selling Hauser’s?”

She was obviously taken aback by that question, but recovered quickly. “Where did you hear that?”

“Was he?” I prodded.

“No. Definitely not.” Her response was terse and invited no further discussion.

“That’s not what Diana told me.”

Grace emitted an exasperated sigh and shook her head. “That woman has a gift for making mountains out of molehills.”

“Then you’re saying that Preston never considered selling the store?”

“That’s not what I said.” She paused, apparently to collect her thoughts. “Preston went through a phase where he thought he was tied down by the store, that he wanted to be free to pursue whatever interest grabbed his fancy.

Diana was quite concerned. She suspected that those other interests might not include her.” “Was she right?”

“Possibly. At any rate, it was just a whim of Preston’s. It passed.”

Grace studied me for a moment, then said, “Correct me if I’m wrong. You are looking at all the evidence you have and most of it points to Diana. But you are not totally convinced it was her. Is that correct?”

I nodded. “I guess so.”

“What would it take to convince you?”

“A threatening letter addressed to the horse. Membership to the poison-of-the-month club. A signed confession.” I shrugged. “Wouldn’t take much.”

“Well,” Grace said, “as I told you before, if I can answer any questions or get you any information, please don’t hesitate to call me. I’ll do the same for you.”

A few moments later I was watching the white limousine wind its way down the road toward the entrance to the cemetery and almost jumped out of my skin when a voice behind me said, “Can I get a lift from you?” I whirled around. It was O’Henry. Just what I needed.

“How did you get here?” I asked.

“My wife dropped me off. We just came from visiting her sister.”

I studied the stocky man. “You really take a lot for granted, don’t you?”

“Only when I think I’m right about someone.”

“I’m parked over there.” I gestured toward my Honda. What else could I say?

19

 

D
RIVING OUT OF
the cemetery, O’Henry asked, “Have you had lunch yet?”

I looked at him. “You buying?”

He grunted something that I interpreted as a yes, and I instinctively drove to the White Hart.

We both ordered sandwiches and Guinness. O’Henry took a long swig. “Great stuff,” he said. Perhaps I’d misjudged the guy.

He devoured half his sandwich and sprinkled vinegar on his french fries. He tasted one, added a little more, tried another, and nodded in satisfaction. Finally he said to me, “Don’t you think it’s time we started pooling information?”

“Why would you want to give me any information?” Once a skeptic, always a skeptic.

“Two reasons.” He had drained the glass of stout and waved the empty glass toward the bartender. “One. I figure that’s the only way I’m going to get any information from you. And two. You check out all right, even though people around you are dropping like flies, and I think you play both ends against the middle when it comes to women. Also, to tell you the truth, I’m not convinced you don’t have something going with that Hauser woman.”

I didn’t answer. I figured at this point anything I said might get me in trouble.

“You think she killed her old man?” he asked.

I waited until the bartender exchanged O’Henry’s empty glass for a full one. Then I said, “Maybe. I think Diana

Hauser is probably very unstable, but I don’t know if she’s the best suspect.”

“There’s a lot of evidence that says she did it.”

I wasn’t going to fall for this. “Like what?”

O’Henry smiled.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?” I asked. “Something like that.”

“Okay. You first.” I lit a cigarette and placed the pack on the table.

“Well.” O’Henry leaned back into the booth, glass in hand. “She needed Hauser’s money.” He punctuated that with a long pause, watched for my reaction. He picked up my cigarettes and removed one from the pack while he waited. “You mind?” he asked. I shook my head. He lit the cigarette and absently pocketed my matches.

“What does she need his money for? From what I hear she comes from money.”

“The family inheritance, and it is a big one, doesn’t apply to her anymore.”

“Oh, really?” This was getting interesting.

“Really. She didn’t stand to inherit a penny from her father. Apparently she posed in the altogether for one of those men’s magazines, and Daddy didn’t like it one bit. Wrote her out of his will so fast she didn’t know what hit her. Some people think that’s why she married Preston.”

“For the money or because she was looking for a replacement for her father?”

O’Henry shrugged. “I hadn’t thought of it that last way. Guess there might be something to that.”

“And if she married Preston as a father replacement, then the scenario that says she killed him for his money doesn’t work.”

“Maybe not, but I’d need some convincing there.” He leaned forward. “Now. You tell me something I don’t know.”

I considered this. I could tell him about the rat, but that

was personal and bound to make him more suspicious of my relationship with Diana. If I told him that Diana wrote the letters, he’d have to charge her. If I didn’t, I’d be real close to withholding evidence. Besides, I was starting to like the guy.

“She sent him the letters.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“She says she did it for attention, the same way she lifted underwear out of his store. He was ignoring her. That was how she fought back.”

“She stole stuff from her old man’s own store? Her own store?” He added, more to himself than to me, “That’s not even stealing.”

I shrugged. “You had to be there.”

“I guess,” O’Henry said.

He drained his Guinness and waved for another. I finished my first and nodded my thanks as the bartender brought us two more.

“It’s too neat, too obvious.”

O’Henry nodded. “I used to feel that way. Then I remembered that sometimes it
is
obvious because the murderer doesn’t, for whatever reason—stupidity, conceit—the murderer doesn’t think he or she will get caught”

I didn’t say anything. He had a point.

Finally O’Henry said, “Okay. If you don’t think she’s the best suspect, then who is?”

“What about Griffin?”

O’Henry raised his eyebrows and didn’t respond for a minute. Finally he asked, “Why?”

This opened a whole new set of decisions for me. Should I tell him about the files and put everyone who gave Preston Hauser the creeps under suspicion? But if I wanted to enlist O’Henry’s aid for this afternoon, since I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go see Griffin without any backup, then I’d have to tell him something. I decided to test out how

little I could reveal and still be effective.

“Let me just tell you a few facts. Then you have to talk for a while. I’m way ahead of you in dispensing information. First, it looks like Griffin had a mistress named Melinda Reichart. Very beautiful and also, as it happens, very dead. Shot in what was officially listed as a robbery. I’d be real curious to see if the bullet that killed Melinda and the one that killed Art might have come from the same gun.”

“I was going to get to Art. Looks like that wasn’t a mob hit. He owed them money but he was paying them off. They usually don’t blow away paying customers.”

“Bad PR,” I agreed, swishing the stiff foam around in the glass. “Any idea where Art was getting the money to make those paybacks?”

O’Henry shrugged. “Hauser and him were pretty buddy-buddy.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore. That relationship was dissolved some time ago.”

“What are you thinking?” O’Henry squinted at me and ran a hand over his mouth. “Blackmail?”

“It happens,” I said. “If he knew about Griffin and Melinda. Even if he didn’t know she was dead, if he knew Griffin was having an affair, Griffin might be willing to pay to have him keep his mouth shut.”

“You think maybe Art got too greedy?”

I shrugged. “It’s possible. I wouldn’t put it past him. A debt like that can make you do some pretty desperate things.” I considered again whether to tell O’Henry about my meeting with Griffin for later in the afternoon and decided it might be to my benefit to have some assistance. Griffin didn’t have a lot of conscience to struggle with when eliminating members of the human race. “I mentioned the woman to Griffin at the service this afternoon. He’s concerned enough to want to hear more.”

“Oh yeah?” O’Henry was way ahead of me. “What if we

wire you. Where you meeting him anyway?” “His office at five-thirty.”

“Okay. I’ll have ballistics check on those bullets and see if we can get a match. You going straight home, or whatever it is you call it?”

“Not right away. I have to stop and see someone first. I’ll be there in an hour.”

He glanced at his watch. “Two-thirty. I’ll call you at four. If it looks like we might be onto something, we can have you wired up before you go to Griffin’s.” He finished the glass of stout and wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “I’m still not convinced that the lovely Mrs. Hauser didn’t engineer the whole thing.”

“To tell you the truth, neither am I.”

I dropped O’Henry off at the station and drove over to Pam’s. I figured Elaine would still be there. She was. Pam was in pretty good shape, considering. They had been talking for a while when I arrived, and the strain of listening and comforting was beginning to show on Elaine. She looked relieved to see me.

“Have you talked to the police?” Pam asked. “Do they have any idea who killed Art? They won’t tell me anything.”

“Pam,” I said, trying to sound convincing. “They don’t know anything yet. It’s really too soon.”

I could tell by the look Elaine was giving me that she didn’t believe me, but if Art had been killed because he was blackmailing someone, I wanted to be damned sure of my facts before I laid that one on Pam. Meanwhile, there was one other thing I wanted to check out.

“Can I use your phone, Pam?”

“Sure,” she said like it couldn’t possibly make any difference.

I wasn’t sure where I’d find Grace Hunnicutt after her

brother’s memorial service, but I had a hunch she’d be minding the store. I was right. I had to give my name before getting through to her. When she came on the line, she sounded like she was greeting an old friend.

“Quint,” she said. “It’s good to hear from you. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I hope you can clear up something for me.”

“I’ll try.”

“How much did you know about Diana’s financial situation before she married Preston?”

“Well.” She paused as if giving my question careful consideration. “Her father owns a very successful law firm on the West Coast. I believe she is an only child so I suppose she stands to inherit a sizable fortune. Why do you ask?”

“Do you know anything about a falling out she had with her father?”

There was silence for several seconds, and when she spoke again it was with great reserve. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, I have heard that Diana was cut off from her father’s inheritance. It doesn’t matter why, the point being that she didn’t stand to gain a penny from him.”

“What?” was all she said.

“Grace.” I was still not quite comfortable calling the wealthy matron by her given name. “Do you think that Preston would have married her if he had known that?”

“I … I.” She seemed genuinely disconcerted. “I don’t know. Forgive me, Quint, this news has really caught me off guard. I don’t know what to say. Preston never said anything to me about Diana’s, uh, misfortune. He usually did confide in me. I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Sorry I dumped this one on you.”

“Oh, please, Quint,” she said quickly, “don’t apologize. I admit I am a little shocked, but I want to be able to help

you find whoever did this to Preston. If that means a few shocks in my life, well, I can certainly live with them.”

“Okay, Grace, thanks.”

“Can I do anything to help?”

“No, but please, don’t tell Diana what I just told you.”

“I doubt she’d be able to grasp it anyway. I’m not sure that very much of reality is seeping into Diana’s life at this point. She is quite beside herself.”

“Have you called a doctor?”

“Oh, yes. The family doctor knows what is going on.”

“Well,” I said, “keep me posted.”

“I will,” she said before hanging up.

Elaine watched as I replaced the phone in its cradle. “So it’s beginning to look like the beautiful, wealthy widow might have had murder on her mind.”

I sighed. “I don’t know. Are you going to be here for a while?”

Pam had gone into her bedroom to lie down. “A little longer. Why?”

“I’ve got to stop at the apartment. I thought if you weren’t going back there for a while I’d take advantage of your parking space.”

She smiled. “Be my guest.”

I didn’t tell her what O’Henry and I were cooking up. I figured I’d keep her informed on a need-to-know basis, and she didn’t need to know that I had a date to keep with a prime suspect.

My Honda slid into Elaine’s parking spot like it belonged there. I decided I could get used to that. There were a lot of things about Elaine that were very pleasant getting used to. I got out of the car with my coat draped over my arm.

Maybe I was thinking about the intensity of the few days we had had together. Maybe I was thinking about the list

of suspects in Hauser’s death. Or maybe I was reveling in the fact that not only did I have a parking space, it was in a garage—a heated garage no less. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t one hundred percent attentive to the present, and I didn’t have so much as an inkling that anything was out of order until I heard a footstep behind me. I started to turn, but before I could, a blinding explosion went off inside my head.

As I started to reel into the blackness, it occurred to me that this might very well be the end, and that there must be something seriously wrong with my priorities if my last conscious thought was to be that I was dying in a heated garage.