A Denial of Death (19 page)

"He spends time at the library?" Helen said. "Does he do any volunteer work there? Perhaps work with the president of the Friends of the Library?"

"Not as far as I know," Jack said. "He's not terribly social even now that he's left the monastery behind. He might give the library any money he's got left over at the end of the month, but I can't see him attending meetings."

"I know it's clutching at straws, but that's all I've got. I'd like to talk to him in case there's anything else he might remember. Could you set up a meeting for me?"

"He's kind of shy. Doesn't talk to his passengers much but he wouldn't turn down a fare. You might have to pay for a trip around the block."

"That's fine," Helen said. "I'm sure it's a waste of time, but that's one thing I have plenty of. What I don't have is credible suspects."

"What about that SLP company you mentioned?"

"Lily's looking into it, but she still hasn't returned my calls," Helen said. "If I don't hear from my nieces soon, I'm going to hunt them down in person."

"Have you checked with Tate's nephew? He might know where Lily is."

"Good idea." She found Adam's number in her phone's contact list, and when he didn't answer she left a message for him to call her back. She was tempted to call Tate to see if he knew anything about Angie's involvement with the Friends of the Library or its president. Tate had donated money to the group, so maybe he'd donated his time there as well and knew the woman Angie had been fighting with.

Talking to Tate could wait until morning when he would show up at her garage and wouldn't be able to avoid her. She tucked her phone away in her yarn bag and turned to Jack. "I know I've been taking up a lot of your time lately, more than we'd agreed on, but do you have time to drive me to a few places tomorrow?"

"I have some clay pieces to finish and ship this week, but I can always find time for you, Ms. Binney."

"I'll see you around ten tomorrow morning, then. But swap out the Mini Cooper for something a little less conspicuous, please. It was great for drawing out Francesca, but tomorrow I may need to go undercover, and I can't do that in this car."

*  *  *

It was after 10:00 on Monday morning, and Jack hadn't arrived. Helen couldn't even pass the time by pestering Tate about his knowledge of the Friends of the Library president, since he too was running late. He was retired, after all, as he was always reminding her, so he didn't show up at the exact same time every day, but he was usually here by now. It was as if he knew she had questions for him. In fact, it was starting to feel like everyone was avoiding her. She hadn't heard back from her nieces or Tate's nephew yet either.

The heat wave continued, making the air too oppressive, even in the shade of the trees around the cottage, to wait outside. Stuck indoors, Helen tried working on her crocheting, since Betty and Josie claimed the work was soothing. Maybe it was for other people, but her restlessness was causing her to make a bigger mess than usual. She kept at it, hoping it would get better, until Tate's arrival finally gave her an excuse to put it down.

When Helen entered the garage, Tate was still setting up his lathe. A new floor fan created a breeze in the un-air-conditioned space, blowing the sawdust around without appreciably cooling the humid air.

Tate didn't bother to turn and look at her before starting to grill her. "Have you been staying out of trouble, or have the police just not gotten around to arresting you for meddling yet?"

"The police never notice me. It's my superpower."

Only the most microscopic crinkling around Tate's eyes betrayed his amusement. "Think you could be invisible to me too? I've got work to do."

"I'll disappear in a minute," Helen said. "I just wanted to see if you knew where your nephew was."

"Even the old public service ads only expected adults to make sure their kids were safely tucked away at night, not every minute of the day," Tate said. "It's kind of early in the morning to worry about the youngsters in our families."

"You should know better than most that people can get into trouble at any time of day," Helen said. "I can't get in touch with Lily, and I thought Adam might know where she is. No one's returning my texts."

"Anyone else would take the hint and stop pestering them."

"I don't pester—I inquire politely."

Tate snorted, but he also took out his phone and called a number. After a moment, he left a message for his nephew to call Helen so she'd stop interrupting his retirement. "Adam's probably with a client or at a closing and had to turn off his phone. He'll get back to you when he has a minute. You can leave me to my work now."

Helen approached the workbench and inspected the blanks that would soon become lamp stems. "It's not like Lily to ignore me. She promised she'd get me some information on SLP, and that was yesterday morning. You know her. Nothing slips her mind. And she
never
turns her phone off. Laura's always complaining about it, in fact, and usually when Laura cares enough about something to complain, she gets her way. Lily hasn't given in on this one issue, though."

"Maybe Laura finally convinced her," Tate said. "Or Lily and Adam finally stopped trying to pretend their relationship is casual, and they've eloped. I doubt even Lily would leave her phone on while she was running away to get married. She wouldn't give you the chance to talk her out of it."

"Like I would try to talk my nieces out of anything they'd set their hearts on, any more than you could say no to your nephew. We're both just big frauds, pretending to be tough with them."

Tate leaned against the worktable and crossed his arms over his chest, as if to prove her wrong. "So why do you think Lily's not answering your texts?"

"I don't know. It just seems strange that my loving, concerned nieces, who usually hover over me, electronically if not in person, suddenly stopped returning my calls right after I asked one of them to investigate SLP. It's like everything to do with SLP is cursed. First Angie, who received money from them, disappears, and then her sister disappears, and now Lily disappears. For all we know maybe Laura and your nephew are gone too."

"That's quite a stretch." Tate unfolded his arms but didn't turn back to the lathe. "No jury would believe all those supposed disappearances were connected. You don't even know that anyone other than Angie has really disappeared. Charlene could be home again by now or at the police station answering their questions, and your nieces could just be busy with their own lives."

"I hope you're right," Helen said. "If I don't hear from Lily by dinner time, though, Jack's taking me up to her house to make sure she didn't disappear too. I'll stop by Adam's office before I leave in case he knows something. You'd think that with his cut of what I'm paying you, he could afford a paralegal or a receptionist, and then we'd at least know where he is."

"Just promise me you won't break into your niece's house if she's not home." Tate paused in the act of putting on his safety glasses. "Or let Jack break into anyone's house. Or into any offices. If Jack gets arrested his burglary record won't look good, and even I might not be able to keep him from serving some time."

"You could come with us. You've got a key to Adam's office, so it wouldn't be breaking and entering."

"I've got to finish these lamps," he said, gesturing at the blank installed on his lathe. "And you haven't convinced me there's anything to worry about."

"Then you haven't been paying attention." She thumped her cane on the concrete floor in frustration. "Something serious is going on. It's really looking like Angie's dead, not just missing. Her trail stops cold at the casino. She had to have been killed there, but I can't figure out why. Unless perhaps she went to meet up with someone from SLP."

"You're still making an awful lot of assumptions," Tate said. "Some killings—not many, but some—are just random. The victim's in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"But if Angie's death was random, wouldn't her body have been found by now?" Helen said. "She apparently stayed on the resort premises the whole time she was there, since she didn't have a car and none of the drivers there remember seeing her. People are awake and gambling around the clock in a casino, so it can't be easy to dispose of a body without being seen."

"You might be surprised. Gamers are so focused on their games you could probably drag six dead bodies right past them, and they wouldn't notice," Tate said. "But you're right that it's an unlikely setting for a random murder. The casinos work hard to keep the premises safe for the casual visitor. They have to, especially these days, with more and more competition for customers. They can't afford to get a reputation for being unsafe, or people will go somewhere else. Most of the danger in a casino is of the financial sort, not the physical sort. Players can lose money on the games or get their wallets stolen, but they're not likely to be assaulted." He stared at the blank on his lathe for a moment before saying, "Are you absolutely sure Angie didn't go somewhere else? Take a day trip or something?"

"I'm certain. You heard Jack say none of the drivers at the casino had seen her. He's talked to the local taxi and bus drivers too, and none of them have seen Angie in Wharton since the day she disappeared," Helen said. "We know she got to the casino, but she never left. At least not alive."

"She didn't leave in a taxi or bus, but her sister could have taken her somewhere else."

Helen shrugged. "So Charlene lied to me to give Angie a head start while her pursuer was looking in the wrong place. I just can't see why she'd lie after all this time."

Tate shrugged. "I'm just looking for reasonable doubt, not trying to prove my theory. You'd have to ask her why she lied, if she did."

Helen mentally added Charlene's house to her itinerary for the day. Right after she visited the insurance agency and the library, and before she went to Lily's house in Boston. "She'll just lie again."

"The trick is to figure out what she's hiding and pretend you already know it." Tate pulled up the closest director's chair and dropped into it. "Let's say the casino is just a cover story. Apparently, she didn't care if people thought her sister had a gambling problem. What could Angie be doing there that's worse than succumbing to an addiction, one she's been public about condemning?"

Helen climbed onto the second ragged, sawdust-covered director's chair and settled in to think. Over the years, quite a few of her ex-husband's cronies had tried to keep their secrets hidden, seldom with any success. "Drug or alcohol addiction might seem worse, and she could be in some sort of rehab program. Except everyone says Angie didn't drink or do drugs."

"They say she doesn't gamble either, but she paid for a week at the casino, and she'd been there before," Tate said. "What was she doing there, if she wasn't gambling?"

"Someone suggested she might have gone there to do some work without interruption, but no one's ever heard of Angie doing any work other than taking care of Ralph, and she couldn't do that from the hotel." Of course, between the SLP money and the revelation of her fascination with the casino, there was a lot that people didn't know about Angie. "Or maybe she really was involved with money laundering, and she met her partner in crime at the casino, and he killed her after she'd done her part of the job."

"It's pretty far-fetched to think Angie was involved in something like that, but you may be on to something. A casino isn't just a convenient place to meet up with a criminal partner. It can also serve as the means to the actual laundering. The procedure's pretty simple. Just buy a bunch of chips with the money that needs laundering, play a few games, and cash out the chips. Doesn't matter whether the player won or lost, he claims it all as winnings, and now he's got a paper trail for where the cash came from."

"So, her criminal partner gets Angie to do that for him, and then he kills her."

"It's theoretically possible but not very likely," Tate said. "For one thing, I can't see why they'd need to hire a third party like Angie to do the laundering. The criminal with the dirty cash could do it himself just as easily. On top of that, I can't see any reason why her partner would want to kill her. She was helping him. Why kill her?"

"What if she was skimming from the cash? Maybe she was supposed to get seventy-five thousand dollars, like it said on the tax form, but what if she got greedy and took more than that? Or maybe she was having second thoughts and wanted to get out of the business."

"A better question is why would Angie have gone into the business in the first place."

"Charlene said the insurance agency was having some trouble during the recession," Helen said. "Ralph didn't think so, but he doesn't really pay much attention to the agency's finances. Angie always took care of it for him. She probably thought she could control the criminals the same way she bullied everyone else she's ever met."

"But killing her isn't a good way to keep her from quitting," Tate said. "They'd still need to find someone to take her place. If she was threatening to quit, it would make more sense for them to threaten to kill Ralph if she didn't do her part of the crime."

That was a more likely scenario, Helen had to admit. "Unless Ralph is actually the one doing the money laundering, and he's the one who had second thoughts, and the bad guys killed Angie to keep him in line. Ralph could have put the money in her name for some reason, instead of his own, and now he's lying about not knowing where it came from."

"You must be really desperate for a theory of the case if you're picturing Ralph as a master criminal." Tate stared across the garage at the pile of exotic wood she'd given him.

Helen was just about to decide she'd lost him to the allure of his hobby when she said, "There's another possibility, logically speaking. What if she never left Charlene's house? She could still be here in town, and Charlene's hiding her. Maybe even in her own house."

"I suppose," Helen said, prepared to consider any possibility. "I didn't exactly search Charlene's entire home, room by room. All I saw was the living room. Angie could have been in the next room, for all I know. Charlene might have been afraid the police would search her house if they questioned her there, and that's why she disappeared after I talked to her. She and Angie figured they'd run out of time, and the police would be getting involved soon. They needed to leave before the police showed up so they wouldn't have to lie to the cops."