Pineapple Lies (27 page)

“It wasn’t me!” he said. “I took the gun and drove to PJs to have a few beers. Then I went and stayed at my brother’s for a night…maybe two. I left the gun in the glove compartment and sold it back to the pawnshop a few days later.”

“Oh PJs!” said Darla. “I totally forgot about that place.”

“They made the best Stingers,” said Mariska.

“Didn’t they? I liked—” Darla caught sight of Charlotte’s hard stare and stopped. “It was a nice little bar,” she mumbled.

“Maria, did it look like the girl was bleeding?”

Maria shook her head and shrugged. “She went very fast. She didn’t talk.”

“But the stain?” Charlotte looked at Penny. “You must have seen the blood? Replaced the carpet?”

“We had hardwoods then,” said George. “We installed the carpet years later.”

Penny nodded.

“What about when you patched the wall? You had to have seen the blood on the floor.”

“I didn’t patch it.” said George. “By the time I came back it was fixed.”

“I did it,” said Penny, her voice nearly a whisper.

“You patched it?” asked George.

Penny nodded. “I had my drink and then I had it patched. I was so upset. I couldn’t bear the idea of looking at the hole in the wall…”

“You had someone do it? So you didn’t do it yourself?”

Penny huffed a mirthless laugh. “Of course not. I told him George was cleaning the gun and it went off. I was mortified.”

“Him? Who?”

Penny stood. “I need a drink,” she said. “I feel sick. My nerves…I need a drink. I couldn’t have killed her. It was an accident…”

“Penny, this is important,” said Charlotte. “Who patched it for you? Who saw the blood if it wasn’t you and George?”

Penny shuffled down the hall towards the stairs, clutching her stomach with one hand and waving the other above her head as she went.

“Harry, of course,” she said. “He did all our handiwork.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Frank and Darla came to Mariska’s house while the technicians removed the bloody flooring for DNA testing. Charlotte was already there.

“You have to go pick up Harry,” said Charlotte. “I mentioned seeing the floorboards before I could stop myself. Who else could replace the old floorboards but the guy who cleaned up the mess?”

“Let’s think about this a second,” said Frank, taking a sip of bourbon. “Why would Harry get involved?”

“Harry was George’s foreman and all-around right-hand man back then, right? He would have been the guy at the building site. The guy who found Erin’s body.”

“But why would he bury her? Why wouldn’t he just call the police?”

“He knew George was having an affair with her. Or maybe he saw the bullet hole and the blood and found her body the next day. He put two and two together and buried her to protect George. To protect his job.”

“Maybe. But why try so hard to find the bullet
now
? The bullet that is the most damaging piece of evidence against George? He could have buried George years earlier.” He realized what he said and winced. “Figuratively.”

“
Did
he find it?” asked Charlotte. “Or did he already have it? Wasn’t it strange that the professionals didn’t find it? Isn’t it weird he bought a metal detector? And wouldn’t a guy who kept bloody floorboards probably keep a bullet if he could?”

“It was stuck in the floorboards?” said Darla.

“Oh my god,” said Charlotte.

All eyes trained on her.

“What?”

“The bullet chipped her rib. It couldn’t have been in the floorboards.”

Frank jaw fell slack.

“Oh no…he didn’t…”

“What?” asked Darla.

“If he found the body… There was a chip in her rib where the bullet lodged. A chip with scratch marks around it. He didn’t find the bullet.
He dug it out of her
.”

“Charlotte!” said Mariska, horrified.

“He pulled it out of her before burying her for insurance. So he’d have some way to attach the crime to George in the future.”

“That is disgusting,” said Darla.

“Do you think Harry has been blackmailing George all these years?” asked Frank, thinking aloud.

“That happens on
Dateline
a lot,” said Darla.

“This is crazy,” said Frank. “You’re sucking me into your craziness. Why would Harry bury the body, let alone dig a bullet out of it? George had to have done it. He’s unaccounted for. He said after the blow-up with Penny he went to his brother’s house, but his brother died of cancer years ago and can’t corroborate his story.”

“But Al can,” said Charlotte. “He saw Erin on the side of the road wearing a red belt. Only, it
wasn’t
a belt. She was bleeding out. Running for help and home, bleeding with a bullet in her gut. She was embarrassed for Penny to find her and thought she could make it.”

Frank shook his head. “It’s too much. You’re saying Harry finds her body, knows she was sleeping with George and figures
he
shot her? And then what? He buries her to protect George? Protect his job? And why protect him all these years only to throw him under the bus now? And if he was the anonymous tip about the love letters, how did he know about them?”

“He was the only one who knew I saw the clean floorboards. Who else could have replaced them?”

“Penny?” said Darla. “She slept there last night.”

“So you’re sure you told Harry about the floorboards last night?” asked Frank.

Charlotte nodded, recalling their conversation. She gasped.

“What?”

“I told him Penny shot at George and he said, ‘Why would she shoot a gun in her own house.’ Only I never said she shot him in the house. In fact, I was doing everything I could to be sure he didn’t know we were
in
the house before I slipped up with the floorboards!”

“Hm. At the very least, I need to question him,” said Frank.

“No. We have to get him to confess. We don’t have anything to prove any of these theories.”

Frank rubbed his hands over his head.

“I don’t know Charlotte. I don’t know. We should turn over what we know and let the big boys find the truth.”

He stood. “Harry isn’t going anywhere and it’s getting late in the day. I’m going to sleep on this. Darla?”

“I’ll come home in a bit,” said Darla.

“You and the gossip,” he muttered. He waved goodbye and shuffled out the door looking tired and annoyed.

The moment he left Darla looked at Charlotte.

“What are we going to do?”

Charlotte chewed on her fingernail, deep in thought.

“We need to get into Harry’s.”

“How?” asked Mariska. She looked at Darla who was already poised to speak. “I know you can break in Darla, but what if he’s home?”

“I know he takes a walk every night. There has to be a pattern.” Charlotte looked at Darla. “This sounds like a job for Tilly.”

Tilly was the biggest busybody in the neighborhood, and that was saying something.

“I’m on it.”

Darla fished in her purse for her phone while Charlotte mulled her plan.

“Tilly,” said Darla. “What time does Harry walk and what’s the pattern and time?…Harry Wagner, right…Okay…Left or right?…Okay…Time? Got it. What’s that? I don’t know what you’re talking about…You live on the other side of the neighborhood, how could you…never mind. Okay, well, I’ll let her know. Thanks. Bye.”

“What was that?” asked Charlotte.

“She saw us breaking into Penny’s.”

Mariska scowled. “But she lives—”

“I know,” said Darla. “I don’t know how the old bat could have seen us sneakin’ into Penny’s. I think she’s a witch.”

Charlotte put her hands on her cheeks. “That means we’re in The Book.”

Tilly’s obsessive-compulsive personality had spawned a mythical book of charts that everyone in Pineapple Port had heard about, but no one had ever seen. In the book, she logged every movement in the neighborhood. If it happened in Pineapple Port, chances were good that Tilly logged it in The Book.

“What did she say about Harry?”

“He leaves at seven p.m. during the summer, six after daylight savings time. He always goes to the right. He does the main loop three times and it takes him exactly thirty minutes unless he stops to talk to someone.”

“Good,” said Charlotte. “If he stays on the main loop, that means he doesn’t pass his house again. Darla, I need you and your lock picks. Mariska, you stand post at the end of Harry’s street so if he comes back early or it takes us longer than we hoped, you can chat him up and stall.”

“Got it.” Mariska looked down her hallway. “Do you think I should bring Bob for protection?”

They all looked down the hall. They could hear Bob snoring.

“You’ll be fine,” said Charlotte. “But if he has a shovel,
run
.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Charlotte and Darla hustled through Harry’s yard to get to his back door. It was still too light to spend time picking the front lock beneath the watchful eye of the Pineapple Portians. Especially since Tilly apparently had a crystal ball.

Darla unzipped her fanny pack, retrieved her lock picks and went to work.

“Can you teach me how to do that?” asked Charlotte, watching with interest.

“Sure Sugar, as long as you promise to always use your powers for good.”

Charlotte held up her hand. “I promise. I’ll use my powers for good and for breaking into your houses when I run out of chocolate.”

“That works. My definition of ‘good’ is pretty loose so you should be safe. I once broke into my neighbor’s house to steal her peach jelly recipe.”

“Shame on you!”

“Well, the she-devil wouldn’t give it to me after I asked nicely
and
gave her my shoofly pie recipe.”

“Oh, well then, she got what she deserved. You didn’t say it was a shoofly infraction.”

“Exactly.”

Charlotte heard a pop and the door opened.

“Ta da,” said Darla, shoving her picks into her pack.

“You need to get a utility belt, like Batman. The fanny pack just isn’t as cool.”

Darla grinned. “It’s a diversion. It tricks people into thinking I’m less cool than I am.”

They crept into the house, listening for signs of life. A low buzz combined with a steady percolating caught both their attentions and they turned in unison to see a large saltwater fish tank happily bubbling against the far wall of the living room. A yellow tang and a blue dory gawked at them from behind their glass prison.

“I didn’t know he had fish,” said Darla.

“Me neither. But then, people tend to shut down when you try to tell them what a cute thing your fish did that day.”

Darla barked a sharp laugh. “Like boring the pants off someone ever stopped him.”

Charlotte looked down the hallway. The layout of Harry’s house was similar to Mariska’s with a large combination kitchen/living area and a hall that led to the bathroom and bedrooms.

“I don’t think he’d hide anything in his living room or kitchen. Let’s go down there.”

Charlotte could see the back bedrooms and the bathroom doors were open, but the first door on the right, the one that Mariska used as an office in her home, was locked.

“I’m guessing in here.”

Darla pulled out her tools and got to work.

“It’s also the only door with a key lock,” she mumbled. A moment later, the door eased open.

The room inside looked like a cross section of a police station. Even the floor had cheap linoleum tile instead of the carpet that ran through the rest of the hallway and bedrooms. There were binders and papers piled everywhere, and a phone with twenty unused extensions.

“Has he been working as a cold case detective from his home?” asked Darla.

“Maybe he consults?”

A two-drawer file cabinet sat next to a sturdy metal desk. Cardboard tabs labeled the drawers as
Solved
and
Unsolved
.

Charlotte opened the
Unsolved
drawer to find it full. She flipped through the tabbed folders.

“Jessica Hampton…Anthony Vera… These are the cases he brags about
solving
,” she said, recognizing the names from Harry’s endless tales of heroics. “They’re all in the
Unsolved
drawer.”

“He’s been lying?”

“Unless he switched the labels on his drawers.”

Charlotte pulled open the
Solved
drawer. There was only one folder hanging in it, labeled
Erin Bingham
. She looked over her shoulder at Darla before extracting the file and laying it open on the desk, careful not to disturb the mess around her. Inside were a few yellowed newspaper clippings about Erin’s disappearance held together with a paper clip and a lined piece of paper with a sketch of a home and lot.

“That’s my house,” said Charlotte, noting her address scribbled in the corner.

The drawing of her backyard had an X where she’d discovered Erin’s body.

“I don’t think this is new. I think he made this drawing a long time ago.”

Darla squinted at the paper.

“How can you tell?”

“It’s done with a Bic pen model 3452, which they discontinued in two thousand two.”

“Really?”

Charlotte smirked. “No, but wouldn’t that be cool if I knew that?”

“Ha! That would be very cool.”

“It just looks old. Maybe he did it to remember where he buried the body.”

Another sheet of paper, clipped to photocopies of what appeared to be the love letters found at George’s house, had the words ‘orange tree’ written in red ink.

The back of the folder held a plastic baggie. This wasn’t the Ziploc she’d lent Harry at her home, this was an
official
evidence bag. Charlotte pulled it out and held it to the dying light filtering through the partially closed blinds. There was no mistaking what she held.

Darla stopped flipping through a pile of binders she’d found stacked against the wall and moved to the window, drawn by the contents of the bag.

“Is that
hair
?” she asked. “And blood?”

Behind a clump of dark hair tied with a string, a small swatch of white cloth stained reddish brown sat, small and terrifying.

“It must be Erin’s. It looks like there are nail clippings, too.”

“Oh gross. Why?”

“In case he needed them?”

“For what?”

“For making sure George was arrested. See the scratchy little bubble in the bag? I bet the bullet used to be in here. He kept it waiting for the day he’d have everything he needed to finally solve the case. Namely, the body.”

Darla covered her face with her hand. “This is so awful.”

“This means he
had
to have buried the body. Where else would he have gotten her hair and nails? And she was already bleeding when he found her; he took a piece of her shirt.”

Darla shook her head

“No. This is nutty fruitcake with a big dollop of cuckoo cream on top. Why didn’t he just turn George in if he had all this evidence? Why would he
bury a girl
?”

“Maybe he found Erin, suspected George, and wanted more time to think about what he should do before he sent his boss to jail?”

Charlotte recalled the conversation she’d had with Harry on the day he’d found the bullet.

“He mentioned the request for a larger patio took him by surprise. Maybe they laid the cement over her and he lost his chance to go back? He said the extra work was a pain, but maybe he was angry about the cement for a whole other reason.”

Darla stared at her, shaking her head.

“Baby girl, you had me up until the part
where
he buried her
. There’s no point in a sane person’s life where you think,
well, I’ll just bury this body for now
.”

“Yeah. I’m having trouble with that part, too.”

Darla’s gaze roamed over Harry’s office, inspiring Charlotte to do the same. They ended up staring at a cheap particleboard shelf filled with books about forensics and cold cases. There was a boxed DVD set of the television show
Cold Case
and tiny figurines of police officers mixed with a single Sherlock Holmes. The bookend was a realistic human skull.

“I’m starting to get the shivers,” said Darla, staring at the skull. “Please don’t tell me that is real.”

“Please don’t ask me to check. I’ve had my share of skulls this year.”

Charlotte looked back at the opened
Solved
drawer, devoid of files.

“Darla,” she said.

Darla jumped. “What? What is it?”

Charlotte looked at her. “What if he was never going to turn in George?”

“Whaddya mean?”

“What if he wanted to solve a
cold case
? He
failed
in Chicago. When Erin fell in his lap, maybe he saw a chance to stack the deck in his favor.”

Darla turned back to the bookcase.

“You might be right,” she said.

Charlotte placed the hanging folder back in the drawer. As she did, she spotted a small megaphone tucked in the back. She grabbed it and held it aloft for Darla to see.

“I guess he likes to talk people off ledges, too,” said Darla.

Charlotte squeezed the trigger.

“Hey Darla, we should get out of here.”

Her voice sounded low and creepy.

Darla’s eyes grew wide. “The anonymous phone call! That’s the voice I heard when I answered Frank’s phone; the call that told him about the orange tree.”

“Shoot! My fingerprints are all over it!” said Charlotte, rubbing the handle on her shirt.

“Now you’re wiping off
his
fingerprints!”

“They’re going to find it in his file cabinet, shouldn’t that be enough?”

Holding it with her shirt, she dropped the megaphone back into place and pushed the drawer shut.

“Why didn’t we wear gloves?” she asked, rubbing down the handles of the file cabinet.

“I didn’t think for a second we’d
find
anything. Certainly not locks of hair and some kind of sicko museum to cold cases.”

“Look,” Charlotte pointed to floorboards propped between the file cabinet and bookshelf. “There are the clean floorboards. He
did
swap them out.”

“The crazy thing is this almost makes sense to me now,” said Darla. “I don’t know what that says about me.”

Charlotte nodded. “I think we have it. Penny shot at George to scare him, accidentally hitting Erin who was hiding in the closet. When the coast was clear, Erin ran for home, but she was hurt worse than she thought. She ended up collapsing near my future home, possibly trying to avoid Al’s car. Harry found her, maybe on his way back from patching the hole, maybe just before. Either way, he thought he had a case to solve.”

“If he fixed the closet first, he would have seen the blood in the closet. Wouldn’t he have said something to Penny?”

“Maybe he thought there was a fight and was embarrassed to say anything. Even patching a bullet hole, the blood was in a strange spot. You wouldn’t assume a murder took place. You’d think maybe Penny punched George in the nose or someone cut their hand trying to fix the wall and then gave up.”

“And then he found Erin and he knew their history…”

“Exactly. He realized the blood in the closet was hers, and hid her body so he could be the one to solve her case. He assumed
George
had murdered her, so he went back and swapped out the floorboards to have proof of Erin’s being there.”

“But why wouldn’t he think Penny killed her? She was the woman scorned.”

“Would you call someone to patch your wall with blood in the closet if you’d just killed a girl there?”

“Probably not.”

“And George was gone, mad at Penny. Harry probably thought he was laying low.”

Darla sighed. “All this when that poor girl was trying to end it with George and do the right thing. What terrible luck.”

Charlotte grimaced. “Let’s get out of here. We have to tell Frank.”

Darla took one step outside the room and screamed, which in turn made Charlotte scream. She caught her breath, still shaking, and stumbled forward, pushing her way into the hallway past Darla who stood frozen, staring toward the kitchen.

Charlotte saw the figure at the end of the hall. It took everything she had not to scream again.

“Harry,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what’s terrible luck…” he said.

“Now Harry, don’t do anything stupid,” said Charlotte, holding up her hands as she visually searched him for weapons. He appeared unarmed.
As her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the hallway, she saw he was pale as a boiled potato, beads of sweat covering his brow.

“Not
your
bad luck,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Mine.”

“What?” said Charlotte. She felt like she was clinging to the wing of a jet; no one was moving and yet everything was moving too fast.

“I was wrong again?” said Harry, putting his hand on the wall to steady himself. “Penny shot her?”

“Yes,” she said, the world beginning to focus. “Harry, Erin was hiding in the closet. When Penny shot at George, the bullet went into the closet and hit her. Penny and George took their argument to another room and she ran out.”

“Then you found her,” said Darla, trying to push forward.