Baylin House (Cassandra Crowley Mystery) (26 page)

Friday morning Cassie left her message on Rob’s voicemail at
7:20, and arrived at Baylin House ten minutes before eight o’clock.

She gasped when the door opened. Bea’s round face was dark
like someone suffering high blood pressure about to stroke. “There won’t be any
work today,” Bea wheezed, “but you might as well come and sit down a minute. We
need to talk.”

Cassie stepped into the foyer and closed the door,
remembering how shocked she was when Rosalie showed her the birth certificate. She
dreaded how much that whole scene might have affected Rosalie after Cassie
left.

“Is Rosalie worse today?”

“She was okay when she got up,” Bea answered as she led the
way across the living room. “But she needed another infusion to get her calmed
down after Miss Dorothy left.”

“Dorothy was here this morning?”

“Only for a few minutes, but it was enough.”

In the kitchen, Cassie pulled Harvey’s chair out a few
inches and sat. Bea filled a glass with sweet tea from the refrigerator, and
set it in front of Cassie before she eased into her own chair.

Then she handed Cassie a folded sheet of orange paper from
her pocket.

Cassie read the official notice from the Cordell County
Health Department. It was a boilerplate of legalese, filled-in blanks for
address and particulars, basically stating that ‘Required Improvements’ had not
been made and the business license was revoked effective July 1st. Baylin House
was ordered to close and vacate the property no later than July 31st. It was
signed by the scribble Cassie recognized now was Inspector Fozzi.

“I don’t understand,” she stammered. “Where did this come
from?”

“Miss Dorothy found it taped to the front door when she got
here this morning.”

“This morning?” Without Sydney here to fight for it, Fozzi
must have reversed the 30-Day Extension she issued. Damn him!

Cassie read it again. The notice gave them six days . . . then
what? Would the Health Department padlock the doors with Rosalie sick in her
bed? Would they come with bulldozers and knock the place down?

“Dorothy showed this to Rosalie?”

Bea nodded.

Cassie wanted to scream. She ground her teeth, holding it in
until she could speak calmly. “I have some errands to run, and then I’ll work
at home. Please let Rosalie know we can still make our deadline and that I’m
trying to find a way around this thing. And call my cell number if anything
else changes.”

Bea promised she would.

***

Cassie left Baylin House and drove straight to the Zimmer
address on Tenderfoot Lane. It was barely nine o’clock; she hoped not too early
to ring someone’s doorbell.

She smelled bacon and chocolate before she even reached the
door. “Mrs. Zimmer?” she called through the dense screen. The inside door had
to be open for the cooking smells to be that strong and for Cassie to hear the
slow rhythmic thump of the oxygen generator. Somewhere inside a TV blared one
of the daytime game shows.

“Mrs. Zimmer, it’s Cassie Crowley . . .”

“I see you,” the woman said, scraping footsteps toward the
door. “You’re that writer who wants to talk about Fred in your book.”

“Yes, ma’am. I had another appointment on this side of town that
cancelled at the last minute, so I took a chance it would be okay to stop over
and see you?”

The floor creaked. The simple lock on the handle clicked.
Then the screen door edged a couple inches toward Cassie.

“You gotta step aside so I can open this thing or it’ll
knock you on your ass.”

Cassie moved a wide pace to the left, and waited until the
metal door had swung past her. “Thank you, Mrs. Zimmer. I don’t mean to
disturb--”

“Call me Delona, Mrs. Zimmer makes me feel old.”

“Yes ma’am, thank you. Delona.” Cassie walked through the
opening into a traditional parlor much like Noreen Crowley’s living room in
California; dark furniture, a few old photos, threadbare rug over an oak floor.

“Come in here,” Delona commanded, giving a tug on the long
plastic hose connecting her to the oxygen machine. She led the way into a large
kitchen covered in checkerboard squares of turquoise and white tile, outfitted
more like a restaurant than a home. Cassie counted six burners on the massive stove,
and four oven doors in the wall. The chocolate and bacon smells were strong
enough in here to make Cassie’s jaws ache.

“Sit! You drink coffee?”

“Yes, ma’am, black, no sugar.” Cassie eased onto one of the
stools that banked a wide tile-topped counter.

“Good girl.”

Delona brought two mugs freshly filled, and sat on a stool
opposite Cassie.

Then for more than an hour Cassie listened quietly while the
woman reminisced about her husband and his Navy career, and raising a son and
daughter right here in Cordell Bay. It sounded right out of a storybook.

Or a daytime TV drama.

“Do your son and daughter still live here in Cordell Bay?”

“No, my daughter is married to an oil company engineer and
they live all over the country. She stays in touch by phone mostly.” As she
spoke, Delona slipped off the stool and opened one of the oven doors. She slid
out two pans of chocolate cupcakes and placed them on a rack at the other end
of the long counter. Cassie wouldn’t have thought the chocolate-and-bacon aroma
could get any stronger, but it did, enough to make her eyes water.

“And your son?”

Delona opened the refrigerator and took out two more pans of
cupcakes, and placed them on the counter near the others. “Our son died in ’90,
wrecked his car on the way to a NASCAR meet.”

“Oh . . . I’m so sorry.” Cassie was sorry she asked.

“No need to be,” Delona told her with a wave of a hand.
“That was sixteen years ago. Fred’s first heart attack was the day of the
funeral; you might want to know that for your book.”

Cassie nodded, and quickly blotted her eyes with the tail of
her shirt while Delona was busy with the cupcakes. Four dozen was a lot of
cupcakes for someone who lived alone, didn’t drive, and whose only daughter
lived out of state. Surely she could spare one for Cassie?

“Are you active in charity work here in Cordell Bay?”

“Not me,” Delona assured with a grunt. “Fred did some, after
the Navy docs released him. He went to work at the high school as an
administrator, and then assigned himself to help coach the basketball team in
his spare time.”

“Basketball . . . here in Cordell Bay?”

“Yeah, he loved it,” Delona confirmed. “Working with the
boys was good for him. They loved him, too. After the second heart attack he
couldn’t drive, but they sent high school kids over to pick him up and take him
to practice so he wouldn’t feel left out.”

Cassie felt her adrenaline spike “Do you remember any of
their names?”

“Who . . . the basketball kids? No, I was busy in my own
business.” Delona waved a hand toward the stove area. “Catered office lunches,
mostly, but a few parties for people over in Golf Estates too.” She crooked her
thumb toward the cupcakes. “I still do a job now and then. You want a party
catered, just call me and we’ll talk about it.”

Cassie swallowed her disappointment. “What years would that have
been?”

“The whole time after we moved here. I’m pretty well known
by the downtown office crowd.”

“I mean what years did Mr. Zimmer coach basketball?”

“Well, Fred’s been gone since the summer of ‘96, so it was most
of the school year before that. Why?”

Cassie shrugged. “I was just thinking of people who would
know Mr. Zimmer’s car was sitting in the garage and that you weren’t using it.”

Delona waved a hand again to push that idea away. “Wasn’t
any of the kids. The man who stole the car was old. He told one of the
neighbors he was buying the car from me and--”

“One of the neighbors spoke to the car thief?”

“Yeah, Marcia Pike on the other side of the alley.” Delona gave
a sarcastic cackle. “She’s the neighborhood busybody. She about peed her pants
telling that good looking detective about it.”

Cassie could imagine what detective she meant. “Did you hear
what Mrs. Pike told him?”

“Claimed she saw the guy working in the garage on Saturday
after July Fourth. Asked him what he was doing, and he told her he was buying
the car and needed to make sure it would run.”

Cassie nodded, and finished her cup of coffee before she asked,
“Have any of the basketball kids stayed in touch with you?”

“No reason they should. Why do you care so much about what
those kids do?”

“It’s possible the basketball team could be where Mr. Zimmer
connected with somebody from Baylin House. It gives me another lead to track
down.”

Delona bobbed her head thoughtfully a couple times. “You
might check the library downtown. They should have old high school annuals in
the reference room. The basketball players will be listed there.”

Cassie drove away from Delona Zimmer’s house with every
intention of going straight to the library to look for a photo of Brent
Mitchell with Coach Zimmer. The kid had to be the connection between Zimmer’s
car and Skolnik. And it wasn’t hard to draw loops connecting him to Skolnik’s murder,
and Brady Irwin’s arrest, and now the lien against Baylin House.

There were holes in her logic – beginning with what could
the kid gain in that scenario that justified a man’s death. The
two-hundred-grand lien wasn’t worth it. Neither was the Baylin House property. But
she could worry about that after she proves the connection between Brent
Mitchell and Fred Zimmer’s stolen car.

Driving south on Mayfair, she slowed for the signal at
Hefner Lane, and glanced down the street toward the parking lot separating the
Strickland & Yates black marble building from Skolnik’s little bungalow
office.

A giant
Bayside Movers
truck sat outside the
bungalow’s rear door. The front door stood wide open. Cassie turned and parked
across the street, and for a few moments just watched shadows moving around
inside.

It was too hard to tell what was going on. She left her car
and went in through the front door, smiling at the two workers dressed in jeans
and
Bayside Movers
uniform shirts.

“Hi,” she said, “I thought Mr. Mitchell might still be
here?” She glanced around looking for him, and confirmed the bungalow’s layout.
Two doors near the end of a short hall stood closed. The nearest door was open
to a bedroom office holding a school teacher style desk and chair, and a 2-drawer
file cabinet with a photocopy machine sitting on top.

The older worker shook his head. “He’s gone downtown, said
he wouldn’t be back until after lunch.”

Cassie groaned for effect. “Oh, rats, I wanted to go over
the notes he asked for before I start on the rest of the files. Did he show you
which ones to give to me?”

As she hoped, the man only shook his head and leaned down to
the packing box he was taping closed.

“Well, I’m too glad to have a job to complain,” she said. “I’m
from the accountant’s office and I’m supposed to copy some files before they
get packed so we can finish Mr. Skolnik’s taxes.”

The man didn’t even look up.

She took a few steps into the office. “I’ll just work in here
to make the copies and stay out of your way.” Then she went straight to the
copy machine and hit the switch to start it warming up. While it hummed to
life, she verified the file cabinet drawers weren’t locked. The men continued
putting boxes together in the main room, talking between them.

A quick glance through the open door from behind the desk showed
bright sunlight, and a clear view across the parking lot to the door of Strickland
& Yates. Good! If she kept an eye on it, she would have advance warning if
someone comes to check on the moving crew.

She pulled the file cabinet’s top drawer -- empty except a
box of business cards and some office supplies.

The bottom drawer, labeled
S&Y
, contained four
years of file folders labeled by calendar quarter.

Cassie pulled the most recent date, the 2006-Q3 folder, and
glanced through the pages inside. Not much to see – four typed pages signed by
Brent Mitchell, requests to verify addresses and employment history of friends
and relatives scheduled to testify in court cases. Clipped behind each were
copies of reports by Douglas Skolnik Private Investigator.

That didn’t prove Skolnik went to the San Miguel
neighborhood on S&Y’s request, but Cassie made copies of two of the packets
to at least prove Skolnik worked for the law firm, and specifically at Brent
Mitchell’s direction.

Cassie sat down in the padded chair behind the desk, and glanced
toward the doorway for any S&Y people in the parking lot -- there was no
one.

The desktop was bare except for a dead houseplant and a
green desk mat bearing more stains than a mechanic’s shop rag. No family photos
or anything indicating the man had a life outside this office. The wide center
drawer held a handful of quarters along with the usual paperclips, pens,
business cards, stray receipts, and a few lint covered pieces of hard candy
even the ants probably wouldn’t eat.

She glanced again toward the parking lot . . . feeling her
stomach twist until she confirmed there was no foot traffic between the
buildings. Deep breath.

One by one she pulled all three drawers on the right hand
pedestal, and thumbed through the contents. There were brochures for vacation
spots, city maps that were familiar and a dozen more she’d never heard of, cash
tickets for fast food and local convenience stores, and a couple pounds of
business cards for contacts with addresses in every state of the USA.

Cassie shook her head; Skolnik was too disorganized to run a
decent business. Her frantic search for anything that could help Baylin House
was turning into a waste of time.

Then the bottom drawer on the left made the trip worthwhile.
Cassie glanced quickly through file folders labeled Albany, Atchison, Baker,
Carter, Cornwall – and so on, all the way to Sanchez, Thomason, Wilson, and
Zanes. No folder for Zimmer; not that she actually thought there would be. But
it helped confirm that Mitchell was the
only
connection between Skolnik
and the stolen car.

Behind the client folders was a stack of envelopes Cassie
recognized; Bank of America on the return address, Douglas Skolnik Private
Investigator LLC through the envelope window.

She glanced toward the parking lot; the empty dolly stood in
the doorway waiting for more boxes, still no pedestrians in the lot.

She pulled out the top statement. It was postmarked July 6
^th
.

Skolnik’s business account carried an average balance close
to six-thousand for the whole month, maintained with only three deposits, large
ones. Most of the dozen or so deductions were small amounts, but two checks had
cleared at $5,000 each.

That was curious enough for Cassie to fish through the
cancelled checks in the envelope. She found checks made out to three utility
companies and two credit card companies, then a payroll check to Douglas
Skolnik at net $3,400, a check to GM Finance, another payroll check to Skolnik,
a gasoline credit card, and finally two $5,000 payroll checks that gave
Cassie’s heart a squeeze – they were made out to Carl Fozzi!

Nervous sweat trickled behind her ears and under her clothes
while she fumbled the cancelled checks to Fozzi onto the copier glass. She
turned and watched the parking lot while the machine groaned a pass of light
and finally slid out a sheet of paper. Cripes, it was taking a long time . . .
and she really, really wanted to get out of here now, before anyone else
spotted her.

With jerky movements she grabbed up the page, turned off the
machine, replaced the checks in the envelope, and dropped it into the back of
the drawer where she’d found it.

She wished she had the nerve to look at more bank statements,
but this would have to be enough. The last place Cassie wanted Fozzi to find her,
was in Skolnik’s office.

With the photocopies in hand and a forced smile that almost
hurt, she waved to the man loading another box on the dolly, and slipped out
the front door.

The dashboard clock read 11:55 as she pulled into traffic on
Mayfair headed north. Visiting the library would have to wait. Cassie was
drenched with sweat that reeked from adrenaline and fear. She needed a large
cup of something wet to drink, and then a shower and clean clothes.

She didn’t call Rob again that day.

She didn’t call him when she left the motel Saturday
morning, either.