Slay it with Flowers (23 page)

At that instant, Simon began to howl from the bedroom. He’d had enough of being a prisoner.

“Ignore him,” I said quickly, trying to salvage the moment. “It’s Simon’s nightly ritual, like a wolf baying at the moon. Simon bays at doors.”

I closed my eyes again.
Here it comes. Any second now.

“What the hell is this?”

I opened my eyes and found Marco studying the fingers and palms of his right hand, which were smeared with black eye shadow. “Whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll wash off. Now where were we?”

“Where did it come from?” He hit the light switch in the hallway and began an inspection of the door.

I slid between him and the doorknob. “What do you say we go wash your hand?”

He moved me out of the way and rubbed a finger over my not-so-ingenious cover-up. “What did you do to the door?”

“We didn’t have time to finish installing the lock, so I rigged a temporary cover.”

“With boot polish?”

“Eye shadow.”

“You were trying to hide it from me.”

“Why would I try to hide it from you?”

He pulled away the tape, drew out the paper towel, and dangled it before my nose. “Because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Sure I do. That’s merely step two of the installation process.”

Marco handed me the discarded paper and started for the bathroom. “Get out the parts and I’ll show you how to do it—if I can get this stuff to come off. You might want to wash your chin, while you’re at it.”

I scrubbed my chin with the paper towel. What a way to end an evening that had started with such promise.

As soon as Marco returned, hands freshly scrubbed, I thrust the sack of parts at him. “Here. Go for it.”

He made short work of it, too, and although he walked me through each step so that I knew exactly what to do if I was ever again called upon to install a lock, I was very glad that he was doing it. The last thing my budget needed was to have to pay for a new door.

“Have you ever heard the voice on the answering machine before?” he asked as he lined up the screws with their holes.

“No.”

“It wasn’t an Oriental accent,” he mused. “Other than the men you caught on camera, have you angered anyone else lately?”

“No. And for your information, only one of the men saw me, and he wouldn’t know how to reach me. Oh, wait. I forgot about the man in the black Crown Victoria.”

Marco stopped instantly and turned to look at me. “What man in the Crown Victoria?”

“A guy I saw taking a picture of the back of my Vette this morning.”

“He took a picture of the back of your car? With your license plate on it? Do you know who drives black Crown Vics? G-men. Feds. Agency-types. Were there a half-dozen antennae sprouting from the trunk?”

Marco’s reaction was really making me nervous. “I wasn’t counting his antennae. Couldn’t the car belong to someone in New Chapel? Sheriff’s police, maybe?”

“They don’t use Crown Vics. You see a black Crown Vic around here, you can bet it’s government issue, and having the government looking at you is never a good thing.”

There had to be some other explanation. “Maybe he’s a Corvette afficionado who by coincidence works for the government.”

Marco tightened the last screw and handed me the screwdriver. “Whoever he is, you’ve got his attention.”

I
let Simon out of his holding cell so he’d stop howling, then Marco and I sat around tossing a plastic straw to him while we tried to figure out what I might have done to put me under the microscope of the federal government. Coming up with nothing better, Marco finally conceded that it was possible the man simply had an affinity for vintage Corvettes. There were a lot of us like that.

Before he left, Marco made me repeat my promise to stay away from the spa and to call him if I saw the old man watching me or the Crown Victoria following me. Then he scratched Simon under the chin and headed for the door. Clearly, the moment for amour had passed.

To my utter astonishment, he pivoted, came back to the sofa, pulled me up against him, and planted one on me—a nice, firm kiss that told me he cared. He gazed down at me for a moment, then brushed my hair away from my face and said tenderly, “Be careful, sunshine. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

All I could do was nod. My heart had completely melted.

I was in my pj’s, washing my face, when I heard several light knocks and a whispered, “Abby, my key won’t work.”

I opened the door and let Nikki in. “Sorry. Marco installed the lock.”

“He saw through your cover-up?”

“He saw through it
and
got it all over himself. Your new key is on the counter.”

“Why are you smiling?”

“Marco cares,” I said and headed back to the bathroom.

 

I lay awake for another hour going over the next day’s hectic schedule in my mind and finally fell into a sleep so deep I barely made it to church the next morning. I slid into the back row of the balcony, put in a few prayer requests to the Big Guy, and ducked out at the end of the service so I wouldn’t be spotted by any family members prowling the narthex.

I’d no sooner got into my car when Aunt Corrine came tapping across the street in her pumps and Armani suit. “Abby, I’m so glad I caught you. Have you found anything to clear Flip?”

“I’m still working on it.”

She folded her hands together beseechingly, the gesture of a desperate woman. “Please, Abby. Do something soon. I’ve got to get Jillian out of my house.” In a sudden switch of moods she said, “Oh, and that darling antique pedestal table in your display window? Would you be a doll and bring it to the country club when you come? I want to put the guest book on it.”

“I can do that.”

She patted my head as if I were her pet poodle. “I won’t even mention to your mother that you were twenty minutes late for church this morning.”

There were spies in the balcony.

My next stop was the county jail, situated two blocks from the courthouse in an unfriendly looking box of a structure five stories high, with narrow, barred windows and a flat roof. I parked in the visitors’ lot across the street, put the top up on the Vette, and locked the door, then wondered why. With all the police buzzing in and out, was there a safer place to leave my car?

Inside the jail, I came to a stop in front of a steel wall with a glass window cut into it, behind which sat armed guards. I signed in and asked for Matron Patty, who turned out to be a five-foot-four, one-hundred-forty-pound, gum-snapping ball of fire.

“Great to see you, Abby!” she said, shaking my hand with a grip that could have bent iron. “You probably don’t remember, but your pop brought you here when you were about this high.” She held her hand to her waist, around which hung a fully equipped police belt. “Course, you didn’t go any farther than this door here. You got a swell pop, you know. He was always polite to me, not like some of these bruisers. So, this is your first time here all grown up, is it?”

Patty said all this as she patted me down and ran a wand over me. Then she took my purse, made me forfeit my shoes, and pressed a button behind a counter. A buzzer loud enough to be heard at the North Pole sounded, then a thick steel door opened. I followed her through it and down a narrow hallway past a row of identical doors, stopping at the fifth one. She opened it and gestured me into a stark cubicle that was just big enough for me and a wooden chair.

“You’ve got fifteen minutes, honey.” The door shut behind her with a snap.

I sat down at a counter facing a pane of glass with a speaker in it. The room smelled of old wood, pine cleaner, and sweat. Good thing I hadn’t planned to eat lunch anytime soon. Through the thin paneled walls on either side of me I could hear the murmurs of voices, and from somewhere in the bowels of the building I heard the hard clang of steel doors being shut.

A few minutes later the door on the opposite side of the glass opened and Flip shuffled in. He had on an orange jumpsuit and shower sandals. His face was nicked from a dull razor, but his long brown hair was clean and neatly combed. He sat down in a chair identical to mine, folded his hands together on the counter, and gazed at me with the air of a beaten man.

I leaned toward the speaker, not sure how the sound would carry. “How are you doing?”

He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter.

“Are you aware that Jillian asked me to help with the investigation?”

“You’re wasting your time. They’ve already decided I’m guilty.”

“But a jury hasn’t. Innocent until proven otherwise, remember?”

“I appreciate the offer,” he said dejectedly, “but let’s be honest. What can you do?”

“What the police don’t want to do—investigate other suspects.” I dug in my bag for paper and a pen to take notes. I’d been so busy, I’d had to formulate questions in my mind on the way over. “I know you’ve been over this many times, Flip, but bear with me; I don’t have access to the detectives’ reports. So let’s start at the beginning. Where were you last Tuesday and Wednesday?”

He heaved a heavy sigh, as if the very thought of telling it all again was too much to bear. “I went up to Lake Michigan to do some photographing.”

I wrote it down. “Why didn’t you tell anyone where you were going?”

“I felt like being alone.”

“Did it occur to you that your friends might be worried?”

He bristled, the first real emotion I’d seen. “Is this a lecture?”

“I’m just trying to piece together everything that happened.”

He didn’t respond for a few moments, then he said in a tight voice, “I needed time to cool down and think.”

“Were you angry?”

He lifted his shoulders, his gaze fixed on his hands.

I felt my annoyance growing. With a busy day ahead I didn’t have time to wring answers from him. “Flip, I can’t help you if you’re going to be secretive—or maybe you don’t care if they find you guilty.”

“Whether I was angry then or not doesn’t have anything to do with why I’m here. The reason I’m here is because of sloppy police work.”

“Fine. Let’s remedy that. Tell me what happened at the dunes and why you were angry. Let me decide if it’s important.”

For a moment he studied me, then he spread his fingers on the counter and began to recite, robotlike, “I went to the lake to take photos and get away from people. There’s nothing odd about that. I’ve done it for years. It helps me get my head together. I didn’t call anyone because I knew they would come looking for me, and I just didn’t feel like explaining myself. I hiked around the park, then set up camp for the night at Clay’s bird blind. I did more hiking and more photographing the next day and was getting ready to leave when Punch happened upon me.”

I had been jotting notes, but at his last words I stopped. “Punch didn’t happen upon you, Flip; he was looking for you.”

Angry red blotches sprang up on Flip’s pale face. “I don’t know who told you that, but it’s not true. Punch was meeting someone there.”

Had Jillian guessed right about the mystery woman? “Did you tell that to the police?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know he was meeting someone? Did he tell you?”

“He didn’t have to,” Flip said bitterly. “I knew the signs. Punch was in love—if he understood the meaning of the word. All love meant to him was sexual attraction. When that wore off he was on to the next woman who caught his eye.”

“Do you know who he was meeting this time?”

“His latest tart-of-the-week.”

This man claimed to be Punch’s friend? “Could it have been Onora?”

“Onora was history.”

“Punch asked the hotel clerk to wish him luck before he left that evening. Any idea why he would say that?”

Flip hesitated a moment, then shook his head. Those hesitations always made me wary.

“Are you sure? Go back to when he appeared at the blind. What did he say?”

Flip shifted in his chair, suddenly edgy. “He swore at me because I’d made everyone worry. Then he tried to get me to use his cell phone. He wanted me to call Clay to let him know I was okay. I suggested we just go back to Clay’s house, but he said he had other plans, and I should make myself disappear.” Flip glanced away, but I caught the hurt in his eyes.

“Did Punch say what those plans were?”

“He didn’t need to. We argued, and he said some terribly cruel things.” Flip gazed past me, as if seeing the scene all over again. “I threw the camera at him and ran.”

“Did you hear the camera hit him? Or hear him cry out?”

Tears spilled out of Flip’s eyes. He immediately brushed them away. “I would never have left him if I’d known he was hurt.”

I studied my notes, giving him a moment to compose himself. “Where did you go after you threw the camera?”

“Into the woods. I followed a trail for a while until I realized I had no idea where I was. I came to a small clearing where I could see the sun setting, then I headed in that direction, knowing I’d come out by the lake eventually.”