Beware False Profits (18 page)

“No, I didn’t.”

“Well, he is. And the food bank means a lot to him. Hazel’s death right there at Mayday! could have a negative impact on their donations.”

“And so you promised him you’d solve the murder when you’re not running car pool and selling Girl Scout cookies?”

“I solve murders because it’s a pleasant little break from the hard work of real life. After a day of doing what I do, we’d have to scrape you off the sidewalk.”

He grinned. I knew he’d been razzing me. Beneath all the barbs we respect, even like each other.

The grin disappeared as quickly as it flashed sunshine in my direction. “Where is Joseph Wagner, anyway? We really need to ask him some questions.”

“I’m sure you asked his wife, right?”

“They don’t make them vaguer than Maura Wagner. I’m not sure that woman knows where
she
is.”

“Joe’s the mover and shaker in the family.”

“So where’s he moving and shaking these days? Mrs. Wagner gave me a phone number in New Jersey, but nobody answers.”

I wondered how Maura had come up with a number for Roussos to call. A friend on vacation?

I felt my way. “Joe’s not having an easy time of it. I imagine he’s too busy, maybe too upset, to be answering phone calls.” That was most likely true, wherever he was.

Roussos finished his coffee, without taking his eyes off my face. Then his cup followed the path of mine. “We’d better start back.”

“I’m actually parked that way.” I nodded behind me toward Give Me a Break.

“You know something about the Wagners you’re not sharing, don’t you?”

“You know something about what killed Hazel that you’re not sharing.”

“They pay me not to share. Nobody’s paying you.” He frowned. “Tell me nobody’s paying you.”

“I can tell you that.”

“Do you know where Joe Wagner is?”

I considered. I’d struck out on the poison, but maybe all wasn’t lost. “I don’t know why you care. Isn’t Brownie Kefauver your prime suspect?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Motive and opportunity. Although I don’t know about means since you won’t tell me exactly what killed her.”

He didn’t answer. Roussos is a master at keeping things to himself, but I thought I saw a flicker of something in his eyes, enough to almost confirm that Brownie was, as I’d expected, their focus.

“I don’t know where Joe is,” I said. “If you have a phone number, you know more than I do.”

“Yet you’re looking into this murder because you’re worried about him and the food bank?”

“It’s amazing, isn’t it? All these little threads that weave the tapestry of life.”

He shook his head. “Stay out of the investigation.”

“Which one, Hazel’s murder? Why Joe’s not answering the telephone? Why I have to bring you coffee because nobody at the station can make a decent cup?”

“I mean it, Aggie.”

“I know you do, Kirk.”

He went his way; I went mine. I think he was muttering.

I’d already had fruitless conversations with both my daughters and now Roussos. It wasn’t even nine thirty. This was a brand-new record. As if to make sure that
fruitless
was the word of the day, I saw Mabyn Booth and her daughter Shirley coming toward me.

I told myself I was lucky. Now I could find out about Mabyn’s rummage sale purchases. But I knew the news wasn’t going to be good. How could it be, unless the universe was finally about to take pity on my good intentions?

I didn’t run, although I was tempted. I stood my ground and flinched as Mabyn and Shirley drew closer, waiting for the next blow.

Mabyn shifted Shirley so she could give a friendly wave. “I got your message, but it was so late last night I didn’t want to call you back. You must have left the house early this morning.”

“An errand day.” I said hello to Shirley, now a contrary two-year-old. She glared at me. Mabyn is a charmer, and her husband is a regular nice guy. But Shirley skipped an entire generation of genes and seems to be a clone of her grandmother. I was glad Mabyn and Howard had years ahead in which to modify the worst of Grandmother Fern’s traits.

“So what’s up?” Mabyn asked.

I couldn’t think of a way to ask about the boxes of glasses without an out-and-out lie. Mabyn wouldn’t believe I was checking to see if everybody was happy with their rummage sale purchases, even if, for the most part, this was true. I mean, whoever opened the box with the punch bowl was probably very happy, a state I wished to correct.

I settled on a bigger piece of the truth. “I heard you bought a couple of boxes of glasses at the rummage sale.”

“Uh-huh, I did.”

“Have you opened them yet?”

“No, I just stuck them in the basement. I’m taking them over to the Munchkin Theater next week. We serve punch after rehearsals, and we’ve had complaints that paper cups are environmentally unfriendly. I’ve signed on to do their PR. It’s something I can do with Shirley in tow.”

Munchkin Theater was a children’s theater group that Teddy had evinced some interest in joining. From what I’d gleaned during our disjointed conversation this morning, I doubted Mabyn would be promoting my daughter anytime soon.

“Will you do me a favor?” I lowered my voice. “Will you open the boxes and look inside before you take them to the theater?”

“Sure, but why?”

“If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.”

She laughed. “Do I need to paw around in them?”

“Nope, if you see glasses, feel free to take them to the Munchkins.”

“Someday you’ll tell me?”

“You bet. Oh, and please don’t mention this to anybody, especially your mother-in-law.”

“There’s very little time in my conversations with Fern to mention anything.
She
is the mentioner.”

I nodded in commiseration. “My mother-in-law lives in Boston and thinks transportation to Ohio is conducted by riverboat and covered wagon.”

“She never visits?”

“She came for Ed’s installation, but that didn’t change her mind. She asked us to do all the visiting in the future. She gets palpitations when she has to leave New England.”

“I’ll trade.”

I laughed, but now I wondered if Nan, who for all her faults did know Boston up one side and down the other, might be able to find out something more about the Belcore family scandal for me. I’d have to give that some thought.

We parted company, and I felt fairly secure that my secret—at least what Mabyn knew of it—was safe for the moment.

I had one more errand before I drove over to the Victorian to meet Lucy. I was close enough to City Hall that I had time to take a slight detour. I wanted another crack at finding Brownie.

Emerald Springs City Hall has nothing particular to recommend it. The building is three stories of ordinary tan brick, with narrow slits for windows, like Moonpie’s eyes before he jumps on his favorite catnip mouse. The roof is flat enough to almost disappear, if not to cave in during a winter blizzard.

I looked at the directory in the entry hall and took stairs to the second floor. Brownie’s office suite sat at the end, and even from a distance I could see that the walls were paneled in walnut and the floors carpeted in thick maroon plush.

I entered and nodded to the secretary who sat at a Louis XIV desk outside what was obviously Brownie’s office.

That door was closed, and I heard voices from inside.

I stopped in front of the desk. “I was hoping to see the mayor.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

I wondered how Brownie had gotten this babe past Hazel. She was exactly the kind of va-va-voom siren who walked into the private eye’s office in a Mickey Spillane mystery. Blonde, stacked, and always trouble. This one was also too young to have any work experience.

“No appointment.” I made a guess. “You must be new.”

“My first week.”

I
really
had to talk to Brownie. “What happened to…” I snapped my fingers, as if I couldn’t remember the former secretary’s name.

“Maude? Oh, she retired.”

Before or after Hazel’s death? And did it matter? Brownie needed arm candy sitting outside his office like he needed a Miranda warning. Va-Va-Voom was a neon sign.

“Brownie told me to stop by.” I glanced down at my ragged fingernails, which compared unfavorably to Va-Va’s red talons. “Is he tied up in a meeting?”

She shrugged. “There are people in there. I don’t think they had rope.”

I
so
hoped she had a sense of humor, but I was desperately afraid she was serious. “Any idea how long they’ll be?”

Fortunately, she didn’t have to answer another question, since I was afraid I had already unfairly taxed her. The door swung open and Brownie walked out with the police chief and several overweight men in suits. Brownie’s eyes widened when he saw me. He wore a three-piece suit and a bright red four-in-hand tie with matching pocket handkerchief. My heart sank.

“Excuse me,” he told the others. “I won’t be a moment.”

He extended a hand to me, then he gripped my shoulder and marched me to the other side of the room.

“What are you doing here?” He sounded frightened.

I had come to give him some much-needed advice. But clearly I couldn’t do it with all these people watching. “I need to talk to you.”

He nodded, even as he whispered, “Not now.”

I realized my real mission was hopeless, but at least I could get one question answered. “I found some items of Hazel’s in the clothing you donated to the rummage sale.”

He raised his voice a little, to be overheard. “Yes, dear Hazel would have wanted her things to go to charity.”

I smiled and lowered my voice to a whisper. “Not
that
fast, she wouldn’t have. And do you want me to bring you what I found? I found keys, money—”

“I don’t want—” He stopped himself. “How much money?”

No surprise he didn’t want
that
going to charity. “I’ll give it to you later. But there were some other things, like china—”

“Just throw them away. Give them away. I don’t want them.” He raised his voice again. “I’m too distraught.”

I lowered my voice even more. “Be careful. People watch what you do.”

He looked perplexed. The men had been talking among themselves, but now their conversation ended. Two of them were looking our way.

I held out my hand and we shook. Then I left. Brownie was under enough scrutiny as it was.

I arrived at the Victorian a few minutes before Lucy. I hadn’t expected to find anyone working since Closeur Contracting only agreed to work on weekends and occasional evenings. Still, the work had been progressing so well and quickly that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Closeur pickup outside.

Unfortunately, there were no trucks, ladders, or tool-boxes on the porch, but I was surprised to see a light upstairs and a window open. Junie had been here with Teddy yesterday, and I guessed that after a bathroom break or a tour to investigate the renovations, the light and window had been forgotten.

I unlocked the door and called for Lucy, just in case she had arrived by foot and gone upstairs. There was no answer, but just as I was about to step over the threshold, I heard a door close.

Window open. Gusts of wind. Bedroom door slamming shut. Perhaps I could have accepted this as an explanation if the door
had
slammed, not clicked quietly. And
if
the sound had come from upstairs.

It hadn’t.

I froze in place. The sound had come from the back of the house right here on the first floor, not far from where I was standing. I was fairly certain someone had been inside, then left by the back door. I wondered if I sprinted through the house and into what had once been the kitchen, flung open the back door, and screamed “I got you!” who I would catch.

Nobody, it seemed, because I was still rooted to the spot.

“What are you doing, Ag?”

“Yikes!” Uprooted at last I whirled to see Lucy right behind me.

“You didn’t hear me?” She sounded incredulous. “Are your ears plugged from that cold?”

I shook my head and held my finger to my lips, actions that required more coordination than I seemed to have. My finger landed on an earlobe.

“I heard somebody inside,” I whispered. “The back door closed when I opened this one.”

“Why didn’t you check it out?”

“You wanted me to confront whoever it was by myself?”

“You said you heard the door close, as in, hel–lo, whoever it was had already left!”

“Maybe. But maybe they were just coming in.”

“What, to find you standing here like you’re playing statues?”

I stepped aside and ushered her past me. “Be my guest, oh brave one. Are you carrying Mace?”

We were still whispering. She rummaged in her purse and came up with a small cannister. “I’ve always wanted to see if this works.”

“You might get your wish. Just don’t spray me.”

“Tiptoe,” Lucy said.

“Really? I thought I’d do my fe-fi-fo number and clump over there like the angry giant!”

We tiptoed, and without patting myself on the back, I will say that those years of ballet we’d both endured as children hadn’t been a complete waste. We were as light on our feet as the fairies in
Sleeping Beauty
. Tchaikovsky would have wept.

No one was in the kitchen, a relief so great that
I
almost wept. I peered out the back door, and Lucy peered out the back window. Of course by then whoever I’d heard was long gone.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Lucy jammed the Mace in the pocket of her blazer. “Let’s check out the house and see if anything’s been disturbed.”

We each grabbed a soft drink, then, together, we began our search.

The downstairs looked the way it always had, but upstairs I put my hand on her arm and stopped her. “What do you notice?”

“Just tell me.”

“Smell. The bathroom’s been tiled.”

She frowned. “Yesterday?”

“Nobody was here yesterday except Junie.”

“Then I guess Hank came last night.”

I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and handed it to her. “Let’s find out. Call Hank. Dial his last name.”

“And there’s a reason you can’t do it?”

I just looked at her.

“You’re hopeless.” She shook her head, turned on my phone, and punched in the number.

Lucy reached him, which surprised me. I think either Hank forgot to check caller ID, or none of my other calls had gone through, which was more likely.

“Hank, this is Lucy Jacobs. Aggie and I are over at the Victorian on Bunting Street…” She stopped talking and just listened for a full minute. She finally answered. “Hold on a moment would you?”

She covered the receiver. “He hasn’t been here since the day they started building the island in the wrong place. He’s apologizing. He says he’ll try to get here this weekend and see what he can do about fixing it.”

We stared at each other. “Let
me
fire him,” Lucy said. “I know it’s your phone, but if I hand it over to you, who knows what will happen.”

I nodded magnanimously. She uncovered the receiver. “You’re fired, you son of a—”

I covered my ears. I uncovered them when she closed the phone.

“Well, that went well,” I said.

“So who’s been remodeling the house?”

I didn’t know, but I did know that we’d yet to check the basement or attic. Clearly we weren’t on the trail of a fiend. How many people have a mystery contractor? Our guy wasn’t breaking and entering. He was building and entering.

“Maybe we should just go away.” I walked over to the bathroom and pushed the door open wider. Tile adhesive perfumed the air. Sure enough, the tile wasn’t yet grouted, but it had been perfectly laid. “Do we really want to catch him before he finishes? We’ll never find anybody this talented again.”

“We have to figure out what’s going on here. We’ll finish looking through the house.”

We struck gold in the attic. Somebody was living here. Hidden behind boxes Junie had moved here from her camper, we found a sleeping bag, neatly rolled and tied, a small camp stove, a store of dried food, and copies of
Field & Stream
that had been well thumbed through. Behind a couple of pieces of old furniture salvaged from the house, I found a backpack with a few toiletries, a towel, and some work clothes. Size forty-two.

“A big homeless guy?” Lucy asked.

I thought of my experiences with the homeless. They never seemed to travel this light because they were carrying an entire lifetime with them. This guy had packed for a short camping trip.

“We have to talk to him,” I said. “I don’t think we have a thing to worry about. He clearly means us no harm. He’s doing a great job here. If nothing else we definitely owe him wages.”

“How do you propose we arrange that?”

“We could leave him a note. We know he reads.”

“That might scare him away.”

“Then we have to confront him.”

“How do you propose we do that?”

The answer seemed all too clear. “We have to come back later tonight and catch him. We can enter through both doors so he doesn’t escape the way he did today.”

“And you think Ed will be in favor of this?”

“I think Ed will believe that you and I have gone to a movie.”

“Now you’ll spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to word that so you aren’t exactly lying to him.”

But I’d already come up with a scheme. “Nope, I’ll just tell Ed there’s a movie you and I have always wanted to see, and I’ll be home late. I just won’t mention that those two thoughts aren’t necessarily connected.”

“I think we may have created a monster.”

I let Lucy worry. After all, I was learning these skills from her. But of course I was going to tell Ed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. I just hoped I didn’t have to tell him before we confronted the Victorian’s new resident. And the chances were good. Because I happened to know that Ed had a board meeting tonight.

Lucy and I made a list of what still needed to be done, although we had no idea who would complete the work for us. I was hoping that once confronted, our attic dweller would agree to stay and finish the job. We could move in some furniture to make him more comfortable, set up a microwave and toaster oven, and stock the fridge. I wanted to keep this guy.

Since it was lunchtime, she followed me home and we made omelets to eat with blueberry muffins Junie had baked for yesterday’s breakfast. Afterwards, while Lucy washed the pans, I cleared the table. Still vaguely sneezy, I opened a drawer to rummage for a pack of tissues and saw the envelope of Hazel’s things that had been stuffed inside.

“When’s your next appointment?” I asked.

“I need to go back to the office at some point to do a little paperwork. Why?”

“I found a clue, Nancy Drew,” I singsonged.

We settled in the living room with big cups of spiced tea, and I opened the envelope, having given Lucy all necessary information while it brewed.

“So Brownie said he didn’t want any of this, without even knowing what was here?” Lucy sounded skeptical.

“Except the money. Don’t you think if he was really guilty, he’d want to see every scrap, just in case?”

“Unless there’s nothing he could have left behind.”

“He’s not behaving sensibly.” I told her about Va-Va-Voom and the four-in-hand tie with matching handkerchief. “Next up, hair plugs,” I said.

“Is he
trying
to look suspicious?”

“Would he know how?”

“Brownie was more or less the lap dummy, and Hazel was the ventriloquist. Who knows what he’ll be like without her running his life.”

This was an interesting thought. If we could keep the little guy out of jail, then watching what he made of himself in the years ahead might be interesting. I was betting he’d ditch the mayor’s office lickety-split. He would need lots of free time to deplete Hazel’s family fortune.

I ripped open the envelope and dumped the contents on the coffee table, which was getting something of a workout these days. First Joe’s past, now Hazel’s.

“You couldn’t throw away the old tissues?” Lucy asked, wrinkling her nose. “You thought we’d need to check DNA?”

“I missed a few, okay? I was working at top speed.”

Lucy got up and came back with a plastic grocery bag. She dropped the tissues inside, along with an empty package of cough drops, a tube of lipstick, and an Estée Lauder metal compact with just a residue of powder.

“Now that you’ve tidied up, can we get down to business?” I began to stack papers. Lucy took my cue and assembled everything else into piles. There was more than I’d remembered.

“Okay, what have you got?” I asked.

“A gold-plated bracelet with a broken clasp. It’s not worth much, but you could sell it at next year’s rummage sale.”

“Try not to bring that up, okay?”

“Keys, a comb…” She dropped the comb in our trash bag. “A leather organizer, a book of stamps, a pocket calorie counter—”

“Hazel was on a diet?”

“Or pretended to be.”

I told her what Keely had said about Hazel’s addiction to chocolate.

“Living proof.” Lucy held up one miserly square of a chocolate bar, then dropped that into the trash bag, too.

I retrieved it, pinching the wrapper between my fingers and avoiding the chocolate. “Maybe we shouldn’t be so hasty. She was poisoned, remember?”

“You think she was poisoned by a chocolate bar?”

“Let’s not take chances.” I set it to one side, although it looked so old I doubted it had come from recently worn clothing. “Anything else?”

“I wish.”

“Except for the extremely remote possibility that we have the murder weapon in our possession, nothing seems particularly helpful. Except maybe the organizer.” I picked it up and thumbed through, hoping for a calendar filled with information like “Met with So and So today who wants to murder me.” Instead I saw that the organizer was from 1999. Apparently, Hazel had only rarely cleared out her closet. I gave it to Lucy, who dropped it in the bag.

“Okay, your turn,” she said.

“You take half, I’ll take half.” I handed her a stack of papers.

“This feels familiar. Didn’t we just do papers?”

“Those were Joe’s, and a good detective knows repetition is part of every case.”

“I’m beginning to worry about you.”

We worked in silence, but by the time we finished, only one thing had really jumped out at me. Hazel had folded several pages of handwritten notes about food bank supplies into her pockets. I remembered Cilla saying she was convinced Hazel had been out to get Joe. Hazel had spent a lot of time poking around his office. I wondered what Hazel had hoped to find and if this innocuous listing of ears of corn and sides of beef had been part of it?

“Is this evidence of some food bank problem?” I asked, handing it over to Lucy. “Or are these just some notes Hazel needed as board chairman?”

“Who knows? We’d have to talk to somebody there. I could show it to Cilla.”

“Of course if something is going on, Cilla could be part of it.”

“We do have Hazel’s keys, you know. Didn’t Cilla say Hazel had keys to the offices?” Lucy jingled the ring enticingly.

“What, you mean break in and go through their files without having any idea in the world what we’re looking for?”