Real Murder (Lovers in Crime Mystery Book 2) (7 page)

Chapter Seven

It wasn’t until Joshua had pulled up in front of the little white house located one block up the hill from Rock Springs Boulevard that he realized how long it had been since he had visited his childhood friend’s home. Mike Gardner had been his best friend. Yet in the decade since he had been back in Chester, Joshua had never stopped by to visit Mike’s parents—until this moment.

Stopping by to visit Mike’s parents at the same home where Joshua used to hang out with his best bud would confirm that Mike was no longer around. He was missing. Presumed dead.

Now he was truly gone—his body was in Tad’s morgue.

There was no denying it any longer.

After sucking in a deep breath, Joshua let it out, unhooked his seatbelt, and climbed out of his SUV to descend the steps down to the two-bedroom house built into the hillside that made up the oldest part of Chester.

Cynthia Gardner, Mike’s mother, opened the door before Joshua had the opportunity to ring the doorbell. Her eyes were red rimmed. She clutched a worn tissue in her wrinkled hand. “Josh … it is him, isn’t it?”

Joshua nodded his head.

She clutched his arm in both hands and sobbed. “I should be relieved. Now I know, but I guess … as long as there was no word, then there was a tiny bit of hope. Now … it’s gone.”

“I am so sorry.” Joshua wrapped his arm around her, eased her across the threshold, and closed the door.

He half-expected to find Lyle Gardner sitting in his easy chair in the living room. Seeing the worn, blue recliner, he recalled that as children, they knew better than to sit in Mike’s father’s chair. Seeing it empty, he asked, “Where’s Mr. Gardner?”

“He’s at the club.” She wiped her nose with the tissue. “He spends a lot of time there now—ever since …” Her voice trailed off.

She offered Joshua a seat. Still too intimidated to take the recliner, he chose to sit on the sofa. “I’m hoping that … with our finding Mike’s body … maybe you can remember more details about the time leading up to his disappearance to help us catch whoever killed him.”

Her face went blank. Eying Joshua, she eased down onto the recliner. “So it wasn’t an accident?”

Slowly, he shook his head. “I’m sorry. No, he was murdered.”

She stared at him in silence. Her face was devoid of expression. Her eyes were searching as if she didn’t know what to say.

The only sound in the room was the ticking of the big cuckoo clock on the wall.

Finally, Joshua spoke. “Mrs. Gardner, I need to ask you a question.”

“I don’t know who would have wanted to hurt Mike,” she said with a shake of her head.

“I was the last one to see Mike alive except for his killer,” he reminded her. “He told me that he was investigating the murder of a prostitute—”

A flash of anger lurked beneath the surface when she said, “You told me that already and I told you long ago that I have no idea what he could have been talking about. Have you talked to Belle?”

“Yes, she doesn’t—”

“She was married to Mike. If anyone knew what types of cases he was investigating on his own and had gotten into, she does.” Cynthia’s tone was bitter. “If she was a loyal wife,” she added under her breath, “she would have kept on top of that type of stuff.”

Joshua pounced on her anger directed toward her daughter-in-law. “Was Belle less than loyal?”

“She only waited the minimum amount of time before having Mike declared dead so that she could marry her boss and move to that big house,” Cynthia said in a low tone. “She’s done everything that she could to cut us out of her  life. For years after she remarried, I tried to maintain a relationship with her. I’d call the house and she wouldn’t even speak to me. Royce told me that she said it was too painful talking to me because I reminded her of Mike.” She blinked away the tears of anger in her eyes. “Hunter is all we have left of Mike.”

“Royce keeps a firm rein on his family, huh?” Joshua recalled how persistent he had been when they had visited Mike’s widow the night before.

“He considered Mike beneath him,” Cynthia said. “He was just a lowly police officer. Royce is a highly regarded  scientist and executive. He wasn’t one bit pleased when Hunter got accepted to the police academy.” A hint of pride and pleasure came to her face. “He’s starting this fall.”

“So I heard,” he said before gently taking her back to the reason for his visit. “Mrs. Gardner, someone murdered your son. If someone killed my son, I would reveal every family secret we had if it meant finding who was responsible.”

She sat up tall with her shoulders back. Her chin jutted out when she asked, “What are you talking about, Joshua?”

His tone was equally firm. “Was Mike adopted?”

“How dare—”

“I have it from a reliable source that he was,” Joshua  replied. “I also did a background check and found that you had a sister whose employment was listed as a dancer.  Ava Tucker. In nineteen seventy-six, she was murdered at a boarding house in Newell where she was living. Now this area does not have a big dancing community. There are a few clubs around that employ women who would call themselves  dancers. Was that her real profession?”

Tears were streaming down her face when she stood up and turned away. Joshua heard her sobbing with her back to him.

Hating himself for what he had to do, he stood up. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gardner, but you do have to make a decision. Would you rather protect your family’s reputation or find Mike’s killer?”

She kept her back to him. “Do you know what it’s like to be responsible for someone’s death?”

“Yes.”

She whirled around to face him.

“I was an officer in the navy,” Joshua said. “I served in Desert Storm. It’s the hardest thing anyone can do, make a  decision that you know could result in people, good people, being killed. But someone has to make the hard decisions. I can only pray that the decisions I make are the best ones overall.”

“I’m talking about a kid making a foolish, purely selfish decision that cost a good man his life.”

“What decision was that, Mrs. Gardner?”

“Ava was a fool.” Her face was hard. “A selfish fool. Her boyfriend, Douglas O’Reilly, got appointed to West Point. He went away. She was scared to death that she was going to lose him, so the next summer, when he came home, she got herself pregnant.”

“Got herself …”

“She seduced him with the intention of getting pregnant and then forcing him to marry her,” Mrs. Gardner said. “She was sixteen years old and so wrapped up in herself that she thought that he would take her back to West Point as his wife.”

“Wives can’t live on campus—”

“This was nineteen sixty-six,” she said. “You couldn’t be a cadet at West Point and be married. In order to marry her, Doug would have had to drop out of West Point. Or, to stay  in school, he would have had to abandon her. He was nineteen. Back then, if he had done that, he could have been charged with statutory rape, which would have gotten him kicked out.” She dropped her head. “The morning after she told him, he was found in his Mustang at the bottom of Raccoon Creek. Everyone knew that Ava drove him to kill himself. I was already married to Lyle. After she had the baby, we moved here, hoping that people wouldn’t know about  it. Ava blamed herself … I guess. She was completely lost. Next thing I knew, she was one of Dolly’s girls.”

“Dolly’s girls?” Joshua asked.

“Private club out by the race track in Newell,” she said. “Dolly’s. The girls would dance for the customers and then, if they wanted something extra …”

“My father dealt in libations.”

“Libations?” Cameron fought the tug at the corners of her mouth at the old-fashioned term Dolly used to describe her father’s business.

The inside of Dolly Houseman’s red brick colonial home was exactly as the detective had imagined. It was neat, tidy, and old. Cameron guessed that the décor was like a flashback to the 1940s, or maybe even to the 1930s.

Jan had unsuccessfully tried to give her an out. “You look tired,” she noted when Cameron climbed out of the SUV along with Dolly. “The doctor said you shouldn’t exert yourself. You really should rest.”

“I’ll go home and rest after visiting with Dolly,” Cameron said with a slam of the door before taking the elderly woman’s arm to help her up the sidewalk to her porch.

Lorraine, who appeared to still be stewing about Dolly’s comment at lunch, had climbed out of her seat in the front of the SUV and closed the door.

“Lorraine,” Jan objected, “I’ll drive you home.”

“No need to,” Lorraine replied over her shoulder while storming up the hill to her home, which was on the street behind Dolly’s house. “I’ll walk.”

“But I was plan—”

“I’m old, not crippled,” Lorraine shot back.

With a sigh, Jan climbed into the driver’s seat of the  SUV, put it in gear, and pulled it into her driveway across the street and next door to the Thornton’s three-story stone home.

After Cameron took a seat on the Queen Anne style sofa, Dolly placed a photograph album in her guest’s lap.

“Is Ava’s picture in here?” Cameron opened the cover to look at the first picture.

“If she isn’t in this album, she’s definitely in another one.” Dolly tottered over to the bookcase against the wall and peered at the album covers. “I have pictures of all my girls.”

Cameron let out a gasp and instinctively reached for her gun, which she forgot she didn’t have strapped to her hip, when there was an abrupt movement next to the sofa.  A black and white body leapt from the floor to land on the arm of the sofa. With a sigh of relief, she realized it was Irving who had tucked his head under her hand to demand a petting.

“Oh, it’s only you,” she said before realizing her cat was in someone else’s house and she didn’t bring him. “Irving, what are you doing here?”

“Most likely he let himself in through the cat door,” Dolly replied while studying the dates on the spines of the photo albums lined up along her bookcase. “That’s how he lets himself in.”

“Lets himself in?” Cameron gave Irving a chastising look. “How long has he been doing that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the elderly woman said. “The days have all blended together for this old mind. He just showed up one day while I was eating my Cheerios and demanded  the milk at the bottom of my bowl. I gave it to him and he’s been coming over ever since. He’s here every morning for breakfast. He loves Cheerios.”

Irving flicked his ears with their tuffs sticking out at his mistress. He seemed to smirk at her while plopping down on the arm of the sofa to wash his paws.

“You naughty boy,” she said before turning her attention back to the photo album.

“Most boys are.” Dolly patted Irving on the head. “Naughty, I mean.”

Cameron gasped when she saw a familiar face in one of the pictures. The heavy-set man was sitting in a wing-backed chair with a small girl with curls in his lap. “Is this—”

Dolly squinted her eyes to study the picture that Cameron was pointing at. “Oh, that’s me with Uncle Al,” the elderly woman said in a matter-of-fact tone before turning back to the bookcase to resume her search. “Ava can’t be in that  album. That was at least two decades before she was born.”

“Uncle Al,” Cameron said with a stutter. “Do you mean Al as in Al Capone?”

“Yes, that was his name.” Dolly pulled a heavy album from off the shelf and handed it to Cameron.

“You called Al Capone ‘Uncle Al?’”

“He was really a very nice man,” Dolly said. “He was one of my father’s biggest customers.”

“Libations?” Cameron said. “Was your father a bootlegger?”

The elderly lady lowered herself into a wing-backed chair across from the detective. Irving leapt off the arm of the sofa to jump into Dolly’s lap. His face filled with content, he curled up and purred while she petted him with both hands down the length of his body. Cameron recognized the chair Dolly was sitting in as the same chair in the picture.

“Bootlegger is such a derogatory term for what my  father did,” she said. “He was one of the best libation makers of his time. Why, orders for his moonshine came from all over the eastern half of the country. Uncle Al used to say that Daddy had the Da Vinci touch. He was an artist, and his booze was the best there ever was.”

“How did you end up in Chester, West Virginia?” Cameron asked.

“Prohibition ended, and suddenly everyone was making booze. It wasn’t such a specialized profession anymore,” Dolly said with a frown. “By the nineteen fifties, Daddy was looking for another line of work. The race track was bringing in a lot of people looking for entertainment—especially men. So he bought a big old farmhouse outside of Newell and opened up a club. But it was a very private club. Extremely exclusive.   The only way people could get in was by knowing a member who would vouch for them.”

“But alcohol was legal,” Cameron said. “What made this club so exclusive and private that—” She gasped.
Eight girls when she was never married.

“Daddy named it Dolly after me,” the elderly woman said with pride.

“Your girls!” Cameron said. “They weren’t your daughters.”

“I never said they were my daughters,” Dolly said, “but they were like daughters to me. I cared very much about every one of my girls. Why, after Daddy passed away and I inherited Dolly’s—”

“You were a madam,” Cameron said.

“And a very good one.” With a scoff, she waved her hand. “But Dolly’s wasn’t like any run-of- the-mill bordello. We were special.”

“How?”

“It wasn’t just sex that brought the men to Dolly’s,” the elderly woman said. “Oh, if a man wanted sex, he could go to an alley across the river in East Liverpool or the East End and get it for a fraction of what we charged for an evening with one of my girls.” She shook her head. “At Dolly’s, men were paying for an experience that you could get no place else. My girls were the most beautiful ladies in the Ohio Valley. They were dancers and entertainers. Every evening, each one would give a performance on the stage in the lounge. Then, if she had a client, she would take him up to her room. The lounge served only the best in spirits. Some club members would come only to drink and sit by the fire in the drawing room.” She leaned over to whisper, “You would not believe some of the deals that got made and broken right there in my parlor.” Her giggle took on a naughty tone. “Even a few murder conspiracies.”

Cameron didn’t know whether to believe her or not. “Murder conspiracies? Really? Is that why one of your girls was murdered?”

Dolly turned serious. “I don’t know. No one has looked into her murder to confirm that.”

“Why not?”

“Because she was a dead hooker,” Dolly said, “and no one cares about a dead hooker.”

“Except maybe a young deputy?” Cameron asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Yes, there was a deputy who came to visit me one day,” Dolly said. “He had heard about Ava and had a lot of questions about her. He left here swearing that he would find out what happened to her.” She added in a solemn tone, “I never saw him again. He had a young son.”

“Mike Gardner,” Cameron said. “His son’s name was Hunter.”

“I guess he got too close to the truth,” Dolly said. “There are people who prefer that the past stays right there—in the past—especially when revelations of the truth about their dirty little secrets threaten their power grip.”

“What kind of secrets?” Cameron asked. “Whose power grip?”

Dolly patted the top of a stack of photo albums resting on the table in front of her. “It’s all there. Take it. I’m an old woman. My time here on earth is about to end. Then I will need to be answering for keeping the devil’s secrets. Maybe God will grant me mercy if I make things right for those I have hurt by doing so.”

“Was your girl killed because of the devil’s secrets?” Cameron asked.

“Do you know the Nulls?”

“No,” Cameron said.

“Russell Null runs the family business now,” Dolly said. “The landscaping business just outside of Newell. He’s on the board of county commissioners. Ava was with his younger brother, Virgil, when some maniac suffocated them with duct tape across their faces.”

“When did this happen? How long ago?”

“February thirteen, nineteen seventy-six,” Dolly said. “Friday the thirteenth. The police never really cared to investigate it. Ava was such a nice girl, and no one had a bad thing to say about Virgil. Sweet, sweet boy. It was his first date with Ava.”

Cameron dug her notepad out of her purse. “Ava. February thirteen, nineteen seventy-six. What was her last name?”

“Tucker. Her name was Ava Tucker.”