The Readaholics and the Poirot Puzzle (14 page)

Dad bellowed about police incompetence and their willingness to settle for the suspect that first came to hand, rather than putting time and effort into finding the real killer, and added that “Clarence Uggams better not show his face at Thursday night's poker game.” Then he, too, calmed down and we discussed the situation and whether or not to tell my sisters.

I had to admit I didn't know if Derek was allowed visitors, and we were on our way out the door to see
when we stumbled over a tall young woman on the veranda, preparing to ring the doorbell.

“I'm Courtney Spainhower,” she introduced herself. “Derek's lawyer.”

When Derek said that a basketball buddy was representing him, I'd assumed it was a guy. Mentally slapping myself for my sexist assumptions, I shook her hand. “Amy-Faye Johnson. These are my folks, Norm and June. I guess you've heard?”

Courtney was at least six feet tall, even in flats, and dressed professionally in a black pantsuit with a white open-neck shirt. Her black hair was cut short, and she moved with an athlete's grace. She was attractive, I thought, rather than pretty, but there was something arresting about her—maybe the intelligence in her brown eyes or the way she seemed totally focused on the person she was talking to. I wondered if she and Derek were more than basketball buddies.

Mom invited her in and Courtney took us through the legalities of the situation, saying she was sure the judge would grant bail at the arraignment later in the day. “Derek's not much of a flight risk,” Courtney said. “He doesn't have much money, he's got longtime ties to the community, and his business is here. They'll make him surrender his passport, of course.”

I'd forgotten Derek even had a passport, but then I remembered that he'd spent time in Germany and Belgium, studying brewing a couple of years back. While my parents talked finances with Courtney, I first wasted time wishing the Readaholics were enmeshed in a Grisham legal thriller or a Scott Turow book, so I'd
know more about what was likely to happen with Derek's case. Then I turned my mind to the practicalities of proving my brother innocent. It seemed to me that my next step should be talking to Susan and Kolby Marsh. Angie Dreesen knew them better than I did, and if she thought they were capable of bopping Gordon on the head and tossing him off the roof, they were worth talking to.

Courtney told us not to try to see Derek at the jail, but just to wait for his release. “I don't think he wants you to see him like that,” she told my mom gently, when it looked like she'd insist on going downtown.

“Oh,” Mom said, and for all her bulk, she seemed small.

“Orange isn't his color,” I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “It's even worse on him than on me.” When I escorted Courtney to the door a few minutes later, I joined her on the veranda and closed the door behind us. “If you've got a minute . . .”

I let her know about everything I'd seen and heard since Friday night and she took notes furiously.

“I work with an investigator, of course,” she said when I wound down, “but she's got nothing on you. If you get tired of event organizing, give me a call.” She grinned, which crinkled her nose in a cute way that made her look less intimidating. “There's enough
reasonable doubt in what you've told me to fill a silo, which will come in handy if this ever gets to trial, which I don't think it will.”

Buoyed by her words, I thanked her for helping Derek, watched her drive off in a utilitarian SUV, and headed for my van. I knew Gordon's ex owned a boutique downtown; if I left now, I would get there before closing. Time to channel Sharon McCone and do some PI-type detecting.

I
drove back into town and parked diagonally in front of Susan Marsh's boutique, West of Eden. The single display window framed a mannequin wearing fall attire of slim-fitting dark jeans that no real ranch hand could afford (or woman with real thighs wear), a corduroy jacket over a silk T-shirt, and hand-tooled ostrich boots that probably went for more than my monthly mortgage. A bell tinkled when I opened the door, and a butterscotch-colored Pomeranian yapped from a dog bed under the window.

“Marshmallow, hush,” Susan said, dark head popping up from where she was arranging a boot display on a low shelf. She came toward me wearing half her inventory, to include a saucer-size silver-and-turquoise belt buckle around the slim waist of her denim skirt, and a smile that faded when she recognized me. Up close, her hair was a bit too dark to look natural against the slight crow's-feet and mouth brackets of a woman whose fiftieth birthday was a couple of years past.

“Your brother killed my ex,” she greeted me. “Bianca Appleman was just in here, and she heard it from her husband, who heard it from his mom, who works at the police department.”

Thanks, Mabel
. “He didn't do it.” Could I just have
that tattooed on my forehead so I didn't have to keep repeating it? Marshmallow trotted over on tiny paws to sniff at my feet. He was unbearably cute with his lion's ruff of fur framing his pointy nose and ears.

“The police arrested him.” Susan smoothed her feathered hair back.

I didn't feel up to going into the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing, so I had started to ask her about Friday night when she cut me off.

“Don't get me wrong. He did me a favor. He did lots of people a favor. Gordon had a dark side that not everyone saw, you know? Hey, you want some herbal tea?” She swished to a counter behind the register, Marshmallow following with his funny straight-legged gait, and popped a pod into a Keurig machine without waiting for an answer. The scent of peppermint drifted to me.

“That doesn't mean he shouldn't do time for what he did,” she said in a self-righteous voice that made me want to punch her, “but I'm happy to contribute to his defense fund. I can put a jar—you know, with a sign that has a photo of Darren and says something about paying for legal fees, blah-de-blah—for people to put change in, right here by the register.” She patted the counter with a manicured hand with a thumbnail torn almost to the quick. “Opening stock boxes,” she said, following my gaze to her nail and folding her fingers around her thumb.

“Derek,” I said, accepting the mug of tea she handed me. “Not Darren.”

“Sure, whatever.” Marshmallow yapped once and
she picked him up, cradling him in her arms and stroking his head absently.

“You know,” I said, “I don't see what Gordon did to make people so mad. Yeah, he was a hound dog, and he had to make hard decisions as a businessman, but he didn't strike me as the kind of ogre lots of people say he was.” I sipped the tea and tried to look unthreatening and only mildly curious.

“You weren't married to him.”

Because I'm not that dumb,
I thought about saying, but didn't.

“He was selfish and stingy. Why, he even quit paying his own son's college tuition. It's not like I could afford to pay it, not off what I make here.” She flung out an arm to encompass her high-end Western merchandise. “This place barely pays for my utility bill and cable,” she complained. “And he was going to stop the alimony payments when—” She broke off and continued with “I didn't mind so much for myself, but a mother's got to look out for her son, you know?” She set the dog down and he yipped a demand to be picked up again, which she ignored.

I wondered how she defined “look out for,” and tried to assess how much muscle there was under her long-sleeved shirt. She was about my height of five foot four, and looked fit for a woman in her early fifties. Not as fit as Maud, who made her living slogging through the forest after game, or winching her boat on and off the trailer, but gym-fit. And she had a strong, healthy son . . . Good grief! I was getting as bad as Maud, seeing conspiracies all over the place. But the idea
wouldn't go away. Both Susan and Kolby were at the pub Friday night, and Kolby had discovered his father's body. In many of the police procedural books the Readaholics had discussed, the cops made a point of suspecting whoever discovered the victim's body.

Leaving my mug on the counter, I drifted to a nearby rack and began to riffle through Western shirts with yokes and pearl snaps, pretending I might be interested in buying something to prolong the conversation. “So . . . I saw you with the WOSC group Friday night. Have you known those women long?”

“I don't know them at all,” Susan said. She dinged open the cash register and began to tally receipts in preparation for closing. “Well, except for Guinevere, who stole Gordon away from me but who got hers when their marriage went belly-up in six months, and that bartender gal who worked for Gordon, Brenda.”

“Bernie.”

“Yeah, her.”

“Were you with them the whole time on Friday?”

Her head came up at that. “You think one of them might have offed Gordon?”

Actually, I thought she might have, but I said, “It's a possibility.”

She sucked on her lower lip. “I'd love to be able to point you at Guinevere, but there's no way she did it. She was still in love with him, the poor sap. I think she only organized the ‘outings' because it gave her a chance to see him. If one of his floozies had been pushed off the roof, then, well, okay, I'd nominate Guinevere. The big green monster has her in its grips,
but good. But Gordon? No way. Although she did go off looking for him soon after we got there,” she mused, cocking her head.

If Guinevere was jealous . . . “How long was she gone?”

“I don't know. Ten, fifteen minutes?”

Long enough. I pulled a green shirt decorated with white embroidery off the rack and held it against my chest. Cute, but not worth the three-figure price.

“One of the other women—Sally? Cindy?—didn't leave the table all night. Must have had a bladder the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. And that Bernie, she didn't get there until late, and then she kind of came and went in between serving drinks.”

I wandered back to the counter, where Susan had closed the register and given in to Marshmallow's demands to be cuddled. My phone vibrated with a text alert, but I ignored it, refreshing myself with peppermint tea. Unsure how to work the conversation around to Susan's own movements, but sure that Kinsey Millhone or Sharon McCone would have finessed more information from her, I tried another tack. “I heard you inherit everything,” I lied, watching her over the lip of the mug.

“What idiot said that?” she asked indignantly, almost dropping the dog. She set him on the floor, and her face was flushed when she straightened. “Gordon wouldn't leave me his belly button lint. It all goes to Kolby. The market's down, and Gordon's been making some strange financial decisions recently,” she groused,
“but it should still be in the neighborhood of eight or nine million, all Kolby's.”

And he would undoubtedly share generously with his mother, until she pissed him off, that is. “That should take care of his tuition,” I observed.

“Oh, he's not going back to college, not now. There's no need.” She looked at her watch.

Before she could kick me out, I said, “Is it true that Kolby tried to kill Gordon before? Before Friday night, I mean?”

She slitted her eyes and the warning about mother bears protecting their cubs came back to me. “That is total BS! It was an accident.”

To keep my excitement from showing, I stooped to pet Marshmallow. My fingers sank deep into his plushy fur, and his little pink tongue licked at my chin. “Really?”

“Kolby had just gotten his permit. He was only fifteen and a half. Anyone can get ‘drive' and ‘reverse' mixed up, especially when they're first learning to drive. Gordon should have known better than to stand in front of the car. Kolby barely nudged him. Okay, yeah, he was pinned up against the garage door, but Kolby hit the brakes as soon as he realized it. It was Gordon's own fault that his back got all scraped up because he wouldn't let Kolby try to back up and made him hit the garage door remote to raise the door instead.

“Mrs. Goudge from next door, the old bi—busybody—was the one who called the police. She came outside to fetch her cat in—the nasty animal teases my
poor Marshmallow and does his business in my iris bed—and saw the whole thing. She told the police it was attempted murder, but even the police knew that was nonsense. It wasn't the first time she cried wolf. Why, the year after we moved in, she called nine-one-one to say someone had broken into her house, when it was her own son, checking up on her because she wasn't answering her phone. And she reported a pack of kids with weapons one Halloween. It was Halloween, for crying out loud! They were in costume, trick-or-treating, or, at any rate, not doing anything very awful. Teenagers, you know.”

She was breathing hard by the end of her recital, clearly still upset by the incident. “Gordon was fine, perfectly fine,” she added, “but Kolby was so traumatized by the incident that he refused to get behind the wheel for at least six months. He didn't get his driver's license until he was seventeen, the last of his friends to get one.”

Oh, the tragedy of being the last kid with a driver's license. “Huh,” was all I could think to say. The way she spun the incident, it certainly sounded like an accident, but what would have happened if the neighbor hadn't come outside?

Susan didn't give me time to think about it. She checked her watch again and said, “Hey, I need to close up. So, if you're not going to buy anything . . . The jeans over there”—she nodded to neat stacks on shelves by the fitting room—“come in a curvy cut.”

Hmph.
“I don't have time to try them now,” I said. “Maybe later in the week.”

She followed me to the door to turn over the Closed sign. Marshmallow frisked around her feet, clearly knowing that a walk or ride was forthcoming shortly. “Let me know about that jar,” Susan said as I left, “for your brother.”

“Will do.” Under no circumstances could I see Derek tolerating the humiliation of people slotting dimes and pennies into a jar to pay his lawyer, but I didn't want to spurn Susan's offer outright. Ten steps from the store, I brushed against a mustached man wearing a cowboy hat who rapped at the West of Eden door Susan had just locked. I paused, pretending to answer my phone, and watched as Susan let the man into the store. I heard him say, “Hey, honey bunch,” and then the door closed.

Interesting. Susan had a significant other. Gordon was going to turn off the alimony spigot if she remarried, I suspected from Susan's comment, and unless the new man was richer than his worn jeans indicated, that would have meant a reduction in lifestyle. The man in the store with Susan was more than burly enough to have maneuvered Gordon's body over the roof wall. It might be useful to figure out who he was and where he'd been on Friday night. I didn't remember seeing him at the grand opening, but there was a crowd and I might have missed him.

Checking my phone, I read the text I'd received in
the store: “Derek home. Family meeting tomorrow at seven so you can come before work.” I knew it was from my mom without even checking the sender's phone number; she couldn't bring herself to abbreviate anything, even when texting, and she thought emoticons were a poor substitute for language. I thumbed back a quick “ok. cu@7.”

My phone rang. I thought it might be my mom or Derek, but caller ID said “Lola.” “Hey, Lo, what's going on?”

“Thank goodness,” she said in a breathless voice unlike her usual slow, measured speech. “I'm in a bind. My delivery van won't start and I've still got a load of shrubs to deliver to that new housing development, Jubilee Acres. Is there any chance—?”

“Of course,” I said immediately. My van had hauled much stranger things than shrubs in its day. “I'll run home and change and be there in twenty.”

“You're a lifesaver, Amy-Faye,” she said gratefully.