The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco (18 page)

I
called Flavia Dunbarton on the half mile back to my office and listened to her squawk when I confessed I’d given her name to the police. She accepted my position enough to hang up politely by the time I arrived back at my office to find Maud Bell reigning in my waiting room, erect posture making it easy to read her T-shirt’s slogan: “I’m not paranoid. You’re just misinformed.” Her legs were crossed at the ankle and her booted foot jiggled. She was flipping the pages of a
Discover
magazine so quickly I knew she couldn’t be taking in any of it. She leaped up when I came in, letting the magazine fall to the ground. “Amy-Faye! Finally! I’ve been waiting for hours.”

“She’s been here twelve minutes,” Al said with a pointed glance at his watch. “I told her I’d let you know she came by, but she insisted on waiting. I told her I could call you, but she wouldn’t let me. All she’s been doing is distracting me with her pacing and foot tapping.”

“Come into my office,” I invited Maud.

“No. We’ve got to talk.”

I noticed she was clutching her purse like it contained the cure for baldness, and raised my brows. “We can’t talk here?”

“No. Somewhere private.” She slid a sidelong glance at Al, which he intercepted.

His look of affront sat oddly on his young face. “Believe you me, I’ve got better things to do than eavesdrop on you. I’ve got statistics homework to finish before my six o’clock class, and a bat mitzvah to set up, and lots more besides. I don’t know what makes you think you’re so fascinating anyway, or that anyone would want to hear what you have to say. Just because you’re old doesn’t mean you’re interesting.”

I winced and decided it was time to have another talk with Al about thinking before he spoke.

Rather than take offense, Maud laughed. “Right you are, young man. But we’re still going out.” She grabbed my arm and steered me to the door. “No offense, Al. It’s not about you. You never know who’s listening.”

“I get you.” He nodded sagely and gestured to the computer. “The NSA.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great. Now you’ve infected Al.”

“I’ve enlightened him, you mean.” She nodded to Al as we left.

“Where are we going?”

“The lake. No one can sneak up on us out there.” She stopped beside her pickup, which was parked at an expired meter, beeped it open, and went around to the driver’s side.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get a ticket,” I said, pointing to the approaching meter maid.

“I was out of coins, and you don’t really expect me to use my credit card, do you? The town council only installed the meters that take credit cards so they can keep tabs on our movements.” She pulled out without checking traffic and a screech of brakes sounded from behind us.

I shut my eyes and pretty much kept them that way until we jolted to a stop at the lake. Driving with Maud was like getting on an amusement park ride: three parts terror and one part gratitude when it ended.

“Okay,” I said when we got out of the car and headed toward the gazebo. “What’s the big secret?”

Maud didn’t answer until we had reached the white-painted gazebo with its pretty gingerbread work. She turned 360 degrees and apparently decided no one was surveilling us—the nearest potential spies were a four-year-old and his dog climbing on a fallen tree trunk a hundred yards away. The kid’s mother was some yards beyond them, reading a book.

“I broke the code.”

“You did? That’s great! Was it
Ender’s Game
?”

She shook her head. “No, the Merriam-Webster dictionary. It’s a good thing, too, or it would have taken much longer to decode it. Half those books in Clay’s office were textbooks, and some of them were out of print, so I’d’ve had to find them online at specialty bookstores, and it might have taken
months to test them all against the ledger page numbers.”

“We should call the others.” I pulled out my cell phone, but she batted it out of my hand. That was a bit extreme, even for Maud, and I gave her a “what the heck?” look as I picked it up.

“Sorry. But you don’t know how big this is.”

“Tell me.” I settled on one of the steps leading into the octagonal gazebo and leaned back on my elbows.

Maud remained standing. “It’s gambling.”

I made a “go on” gesture when she paused.

“It looks like Clay Shumer was—is—running a bookie operation. Each line of the ledger is a bet. It records who placed the bet, for how much, and on what. There are bets on everything from horse and dog racing to sports events to election results. He used a shorthand even within the code, so I couldn’t figure out what some of the bets were for, but I don’t think it matters. The big thing here is that he’s running a criminal operation worth millions probably. If Ivy was going to expose it—him—by talking to that reporter, then I’d say he had a damned good motive for killing her.”

A chill brushed me and I crossed my arms over my chest. I don’t know what I’d expected the ledger page to reveal, but it wasn’t this. Clay Shumer as a criminal mastermind and murderer. I didn’t much like the man, but I wouldn’t have guessed he was capable of this.

“I wonder why he didn’t keep this on his laptop—wouldn’t that be easier?”

Maud gave me the “how can you be so clueless?” look. She should patent it. “Easier—yes. Smarter—no. I don’t care what kind of security you have—someone can hack your computer without even being in the same state. Heck, the same country. And it doesn’t have to be an NSA-caliber someone, either. And let’s face it—most folks don’t have great security. They write down their passwords, never change them, leave their screens up when they go to the bathroom or out to lunch, go to wonky Internet sites for porn or games and pick up spyware. The ledger, especially with this code, is much more secure. The only way it gets compromised is the way it did—someone close to Clay stole it.”

I held up my hands in surrender, guilty of all her charges except the porn thing. “So why are we out here? Why aren’t we at the police station, handing over the ledger page so they can arrest Clay?”

“Because Clay’s not the only one involved.” Looking over her shoulder to make sure no one had approached while we talked, Maud pulled a piece of paper from her purse. “Here’s the decoded page.” She squatted and held it so we could both look at it.

I scanned it, noting that it must have been from several months back since there were a lot of football bets recorded. I wondered if Ivy had copied this page months ago and hung on to it, or if she’d copied it at random when she decided she wanted proof of Clay’s activities, or for some other reason. I scanned the lines horizontally, but Maud used her fingers to focus me on the names of the
bettors, rather than the events and amounts. “School superintendent, state senator, gazillionaire ski resort owner, Gordon Marsh—isn’t he Derek’s pub partner?—and look at the last name.”

My gaze followed her pointing finger. As I read the line, my eyes widened.
Oh no
. I looked at Maud and she nodded grimly.

“Yep. It says ‘Widefield.’ Only problem is, with the corner torn off like that so the first name is missing, we don’t know if it’s Brooke’s husband or her father-in-law. Or even Brooke.”

“No way!”

Maud cocked her head and shrugged. “You’re probably right. For one thing, I can’t see Brooke betting fifteen thou on a NASCAR race. I’d be surprised if she even knows who Jimmie Johnson is.”

“Do we tell her?” I thought it through aloud. “If we tell her, she’ll be upset. On the other hand, she might know who it is.”

“Or she might not, and confront Troy Jr. or Sr. and spark a family row . . . or worse.”

“Worse?”

Maud met my gaze levelly. “Clay might have been running this gambling ring, but he’s not the only one with something to lose if it blows up. This is all illegal.” She shook the page. “How many people on this list stand to lose their jobs, their reputations, or possibly their families if it becomes public? I’m not voting for a state senator who bets fifty K on who the next
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit edition cover model will be.”

She was implying that one of the gamblers might have killed Ivy, but I spotted a flaw in her logic.
“Maybe, but how would they even have known Ivy had the ledger page?”

Without a blink of hesitation, she said. “I can think of two ways. One”—she held up her bony forefinger—“Ivy told them. Two”—her middle finger went up—“Clay discovered she’d copied the page and told his clients that they might be compromised.”

Compromised.
It sounded like jargon from a spy novel. If Maud started talking about “wet work” or “termination with extreme prejudice,” I was going to have to insist the Readaholics cut thrillers from our reading list. I let it go for now. “Why in the world would Ivy tell them?”

I read her thoughts in the look she gave me.

“No way,” I said again. “Ivy is not—wasn’t—a blackmailer!”

“I don’t think so, either,” Maud said, “but we’ve got to consider the possibility.”

I shook my head so hard my hair flew around my face. “No. It’s not a possibility.”

Maud gave me a smile that was half-admiring and half-pitying. “You’re too loyal, Amy-Faye.”

“I’m not,” I said, “not if you mean it makes me blind to my friends’ faults. I know Ivy wasn’t perfect—heck, she was dating a married man—but she wasn’t a crook. Ham got all the crook genes in that family. I think she was doing just what she told Flavia: gathering evidence to support the story she was going to give her.”

“One that would land her lover in prison.”

I nodded unhappily. “I didn’t say she was perfect. It had to be about revenge, didn’t it? Getting
revenge on Clay for breaking up with her?” I wanted Maud to tell me I was wrong, but she didn’t. “I think Clay knew. I overheard him tell Troy Widefield Sr. that his assistant had been copying something.”

“So Troy Senior and Clay both knew that Ivy was up to something, even if they didn’t know what.”

I nodded unhappily.

After a long pause, she said, “Do we show this to the others?”

I grimaced. The Readaholics were all involved in this, but I didn’t think it was fair to the people whose names were on that page to expose them to more people than strictly necessary. I hated cutting Lola and Kerry and Brooke out of the investigation, but I couldn’t think it right to show the page to all of them. I struggled to find a compromise. “Maybe we tell them about the gambling, but we don’t show them the page or share the names?”

“That’s all right by me,” Maud said.

“We do have to share it with the police, though.”

“Are you out of your mind? This is only one page out of potentially hundreds.” Maud shook the page and then looked around to see if anyone had noticed.

The kid and his dog were gone, and I was pretty sure the blue jay jeering from a nearby pine was not interested.

“We don’t know who else’s names are in that ledger,” Maud continued in a lower voice. “Don’t forget that everything in the evidence room mysteriously went up in flames after you turned in the
actual ledger page. I’m betting”—she caught the irony and let out a “Hah!”—“that one or more of Heaven’s finest has a gambling problem. And don’t you dare say ‘No way,’” she added as I opened my mouth.

I shut it.

“Consider what happened to Ivy. I don’t want someone poisoning my coffee, thank you very much. Or yours, either,” she added as an afterthought.

After a moment’s thought, I tried again. “Okay. Let’s pretend it’s remotely possible that someone from the police department deliberately destroyed the ledger page. Couldn’t we make multiple copies of the list, give the police one, and let them know we have others that will come to light in the event anything happens to us?” I felt unutterably silly saying those words. I mean, really? It was the stuff of bad spy novels: the hero handing his faithful sidekick or lawyer a packet to be opened or sent to the nearest media outlet if he died. Fifty percent of the time, the faithful sidekick or lawyer betrayed him anyway; heroes frequently have poor judgment when it comes to sidekicks.

Without waiting for Maud to acquiesce, I folded the page and tucked it in my purse. “I’m assuming you have electronic copies of this?”

She nodded.

“Okay. Then I’ll give this to Detective Hart—he hasn’t been here long enough to get mixed up with a gambling ring, I hope—and tell him we have copies of it. Okay?” I could see genuine worry in her eyes, so I added, “If I could think of
any other way to investigate this and find out who killed Ivy, I would, but we can’t interview everyone on this list, and as you pointed out, it’s probably only the tip of the iceberg. The police can take this to Clay and force him to turn over the whole ledger. Then they can sort it all out.”

Maud nodded reluctantly. “Marginally the best of several bad options. Be careful.”

“You, too.”

We looked at each other for a long moment and then made our way slowly back to Maud’s truck. A squirrel chittered behind us, sounding like he was laughing.

I
had work to do, so I didn’t trot over to the police department right away. At least, that’s what I told myself as I sat at my desk making calls and marking items off my to-do list. I suspected I was merely postponing another awkward confession to Hart. He’d be mad I hadn’t told him about having a copy of the ledger page.
Later. Worry later. Focus now.
I pulled a legal pad close and began to sketch the gazebo. Then I doodled a blond bride. Beside her, I drew a long, stalky potted plant, giving it a bow tie and cummerbund. Beneath it, I wrote, “Do you take this potted plant to love and to cherish, to repot and fertilize, to water regularly and to deadhead, as long as you both shall live?” Cocking my head, I studied the cartoon, adding some curlicues to represent flowers at the altar. I quite liked it. Using a black pen, I darkened one of the bride’s thumbs.

Tucking it in a drawer, I made myself get back to work. I’d recently landed a job organizing
Heaven’s first-ever triathlon, which wasn’t until next summer, and I was reaching out to contacts with some experience in that arena, figuring out what all went into organizing a major race. I wasn’t in charge of laying out the course or anything like that, but I needed to get a Web site set up for the event with registration details, contact all the area lodging facilities, talk to my fave publicity guy about getting the word out, and dozens of other tasks. It took most of the afternoon to begin to realize how much I didn’t know about an event of this type, and my brain was on overload when Al poked his head in at almost four.

“Mayor on the phone. I’m off to class.”

I waved good-bye to him as I picked up the phone. “Hi, Kerry.”

“You are not going to believe what just happened,” she said in a low voice. “The police were here.”

“Here?”

“City hall. My office.”

“They finally caught up with you, huh? What is it—unpaid parking tickets? Jaywalking? Payback for cutting the police department budget?” I was typing an e-mail to a Web designer as I talked, amused at the notion of the police citing Heaven’s mayor for something. It couldn’t be anything too serious, because Kerry was a straight arrow.

“They pulled Clay out of a meeting and took him to the station for questioning!”

“What?” I stopped typing.

“We were having the weekly staff meeting in
my office and my secretary interrupted to say the police needed to talk to Clay. That new detective, the one from down south—”

“Atlanta. Detective Hart.”

“Sounds like you’ve been getting to know him,” Kerry said suggestively, momentarily distracted from her story. “He’s attractive in a lanky sort of way.”

“Clay?” I reminded her.

“Right. They asked Clay very politely if he’d come with them down to the station to answer a few questions. Clay got up, acting like it was no big deal, an inconvenience, and went with them without making a fuss. I could tell he wasn’t happy about it, though. Tense. They didn’t handcuff him or read him his rights or anything. Should I call Fee?”

The question took me by surprise. “I wouldn’t. She’ll find out one way or another. It’s not your responsibility just because he was in your office at the time.” I thought rapidly. There was no point in my taking the ledger page to Hart this second because he’d undoubtedly be tied up with Clay. I’d call him, hoping to get voice mail, and leave a message saying I needed to talk to him about the case. Meanwhile, I should give Kerry a heads-up about what the town’s chief financial officer was up to, but I didn’t want to do it on the phone. Maud’s caution had infected me. “Look, Kerry. There’s something I need to tell you about that
project
we’re working on, the Ivy project. Maud made a breakthrough today.”

She started to say something, but I talked over
her. “We should talk about it
in person
. When are you done for the day?”

“I’ll be home in ten,” Kerry said decisively. “Meet me there.”

*   *   *

Kerry’s daughter Amanda and her grandson were playing in the front yard when I arrived at Kerry’s house twenty minutes later. Amanda and Henry lived in an apartment over Kerry’s detached garage and had ever since Henry’s father had ditched them. Amanda had been a college dropout of twenty at the time. Now she was back in school part-time and worked part-time. Kerry groused that Henry’s other grandmother, who provided day care, was spoiling the toddler rotten. At the moment, he was shrieking with joy as he ran away from his mother and Amanda pretended she couldn’t catch up. When the little boy headed toward the street, I stepped in front of him and Amanda lunged forward to scoop him up. “No, you don’t,” she told the two-year-old. “Hey, Amy-Faye. Mom’s inside. Just go on in.”

“Thanks. How’re classes?”

“I hate math,” she announced, “but I can’t get my nursing degree without it.”

I smiled sympathetically and made my way up the flagstone walkway to the double doors. Kerry lived in the large gabled house she’d inherited from her parents. She complained about being “house poor” and I knew a significant chunk of her Realtor’s income went to maintaining the old place. She’d learned to do a lot of repairs herself, and she’s the one I consulted whenever I had a
house question. If I had some time on my hands this summer, I was going to ask her to help me refinish my front door.

“In here,” Kerry called when I pushed open the door with a perfunctory knock.

I followed her voice to the larger of two living rooms, where I found her flat on her back in front of the brick fireplace. Old sheets covered the floor around her. She’d changed into jeans and a faded sweatshirt and had a smudge of soot on her cheek.

“Do you know what chimney sweeps charge?” she greeted me. On the words, she poked what looked like a giant-sized wire toilet brush up the chimney.

“Too much, I’m guessing.”
Mary Poppins
was the source of everything I knew about chimney sweeps, and I was pretty sure Colorado sweeps didn’t dance across rooftops.

“Got that right. If you were a bird, would you build a nest over an open flame where your eggs are more likely to end up hard-boiled than hatched? What’s wrong with a lovely fir tree for a nest, or a nice, secure spot under the porch eaves?”

It seemed to be a rhetorical question.

“We built a fire two nights ago with that cold snap and you wouldn’t believe the smoke. So tell me what Maud discovered. She decoded the ledger page, am I right?”

“Right. Is Roman home?” I didn’t want her seventeen-year-old son listening in.

“Upstairs. Plugged into his iPod, allegedly doing homework, more probably Skyping with his
buddies while playing Xbox. Trust me, he’s not listening to us.”

While she worked the brush into the chimney, I told her about Clay running a bookie operation.

“On city time?” She sat upright, looking outraged. If the brush had been a sword and Clay had been present, she’d have run him through.

“Presumably. Anyway, Maud and I think Ivy knew about it, or found out about it, and went to the reporter with the story.”

Kerry chewed on that for a moment while a gentle rain of soot sifted from the hearth opening behind her. “Watch out for a woman scorned,” she finally said.

“That’s what Maud and I figured,” I agreed. “She wanted revenge when he dumped her.”

“You think he killed her?” She twisted and began to attack the chimney with a sharp upward plunging motion.

The wire brush against the bricks grated on my ears. I took a precautionary step back.

“It seems likely.” A thought occurred to me. “Do you know what made the police want to talk to Clay today? I haven’t told them about the ledger page yet.”

“Uh-uh.” Kerry’s voice echoed strangely as she peered into the chimney. “That dratted nest is hanging by a twig. I can just about—”

A sound like pebbles rolling down a hill presaged an explosion of soot. It puffed out of the hearth opening, coating the sheets and hanging in the air so thickly I couldn’t see Kerry. She coughed,
and as the air cleared, I saw her, drenched in soot, her hair and brows thick with the stuff, her eyes the only spot of white in her blackened face.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Fine.” She coughed again and wiped a hand across her face. It didn’t help. She looked around at the room, at the film of black on the walls and furniture, and sighed. “You’re going to need a shower when you get home,” she said.

I looked down and saw that the soot clung to me as well, albeit much more lightly, like an even haze of dust. A finger swiped across my cheek came away black. At least I wasn’t wearing my white suit. “Me?” I said with a grin. “You’re going to need a fire hose to get that stuff off you.”

“At least I got it.” With her toe, she prodded a mass of twigs and leaves that lay on the hearth. “Roman!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, making me jump. “Come down here, and bring a bucket and a package of sponges.” Satisfied by the incomprehensible (to me) mutterings that answered her demand, she turned back to me. “So case closed? Clay killed Ivy?”

I frowned slightly. “I guess so. It just feels kind of . . . anticlimactic.”

“You wanted a confrontation with guns blazing and fisticuffs, à la
Falcon
?”

Her words stirred a memory. “Did you know Clay had a gun in his office?”

“No! The way our budget meetings go, I’m surprised he didn’t pull it out and shoot anyone. I’ve been tempted myself, on occasion.” Looking a bit self-conscious, as if worried her comment was too
flip for the circumstances, she added, “I wonder why. Protection? If he’s big-time into the bookie biz, he might have received threats.”

“Or he used it to threaten people who didn’t make good on their debts. I wonder if he had a— What do they call them? Enforcer?”

“You know,” Kerry said, “the more I think about it, the more I’m sure Ivy must have known about his sideline all along. I mean, come on—she was his assistant; she answered his phone half the time. She had to have known something was going on besides city business.”

“I don’t know. He probably used a cell phone, something that couldn’t be traced to him. How likely is it that he’d give the office number to his gambling clientele?” If Kerry was right, though, did that mean that Kirsten, Clay’s new assistant, knew what was going on?

Clomping footsteps heralded the appearance of Roman, a big kid with a mop of black hair and a couple of acne spots. He stopped on the bottom tread and stared at us. “Shit, Mom, what happened? This is worse than that time I set the spray paint can on the stove, not realizing it was hot, and—”

“Don’t use that kind of language, and no, it’s not. Find the bucket—no, get the Shop-Vac first—and get started in here.”

When Roman had disappeared into the garage, I said, “You know, I think I’ll check with Detective Hart”—Kerry put on a knowing smile but I ignored her—“and see if he can tell me why they picked up Clay. They didn’t arrest him—maybe
he’s ‘helping the police with their inquiries,’ or however they say it on cop shows.”

“Right. And the Publishers Clearing House guy is pulling up to my door right now.” Kerry shooed me out. “I need a shower—I’m starting to itch. Heaven knows what’s in this soot. Let me know if you find out anything.”