Black and Blueberry Die (A Fresh-Baked Mystery Book 11) (17 page)

“Well, that’s what she told me.”

“You never saw her yearbook or anything like that?”

Danny’s frown deepened. “No, she said her folks never bought any of them. They were too cheap for that, she told me.” His hands, with plastic restraints around the wrists, clenched into fists. “Are you saying she lied?”

“I think maybe there were things about high school she didn’t want to remember—like Brian. What happened first, did you and Brian go into business together, or were you and Roxanne married?”

“Brian and I opened the shop while Roxanne and I were dating.”

“So you introduced her to him and they acted like they had never met before.”

“Yeah, because they hadn’t!” Danny shook his head. “This is nuts. You’re saying Roxanne lied to me. What’s next? Are you gonna say the two of them...that they—”

“Take it easy, Danny,” D’Angelo said sharply. “If you get mad, the guards will come in and take you back to your cell, and I don’t know if we’re finished here.”

“Danny, listen to me,” Phyllis said. “There was nothing going on between Roxanne and Brian. I’m positive of that. She had her own reasons for not telling you the truth about where she went to school and knowing him, but there was nothing between them, you can be sure of that.”

“I don’t know anymore. I don’t know about anything.”

“You will. This is going to be over soon.”

He looked and sounded like a little boy again as he said, “You promise?”

“I promise,” Phyllis said, hoping she could keep it.

Sam stood up from the bench where he was waiting in the jail lobby and asked, “Did you find out what you needed to know?”

“I did,” Phyllis said as she and D’Angelo walked up, their footsteps echoing a little in the big room. “Roxanne acted like she did at the salon because she expected to get her hands on a considerable amount of money. Pauline Gibbs’ instincts were right. I’m convinced Roxanne was going to quit. Remember how Mike said Danny told him they were going on a second honeymoon?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I do.”

“According to Danny, that windfall was going to pay for the trip
and
get them out of debt.”

D’Angelo said, “You’re just getting me more confused. Roxanne was a hair stylist. Where was she gonna get her hands on a bunch of money?”

“Brian Flynn can tell us that,” Phyllis said. “If he’s at his shop today, and I think he will be.”

Sam and D’Angelo looked at each other. Sam spread his hands and told the lawyer, “Might as well play along with her.”

D’Angelo sighed. “Then I guess we’re going to this paint and body shop. I don’t know where it is—”

“I can tell you how to get there,” Phyllis said.

A few minutes later, they were on the West Freeway, heading away from downtown. Phyllis used the time to mentally check back over every step of her theory. When she was finished, she knew it made sense and answered all the questions. She thought she knew how to prove it, too.

She navigated from the passenger seat and soon had D’Angelo approaching the paint and body shop. The doors on both repair bays were up, she saw. Brian had come to work today, just as she expected.

“Park in front of the office,” she said, pointing. Then a thought occurred to her and she went on, “No, park in front of the bays, at an angle, so that you’re blocking them.”

“That’s a little rude, isn’t it?” D’Angelo said.

“There’s a good reason for it.”

He shrugged beefy shoulders and turned the wheel, angling the car off the road and bringing it to a stop where Phyllis had indicated.

Brian came out of the left-hand bay carrying one of the rubber mallets he used for beating dings out of fenders. He was moving slowly, and his face was pale and drawn as if he were sick or exhausted.

He managed to summon up a friendly smile, though, as Phyllis, Sam, and D’Angelo got out of the Caddy. He greeted them by saying, “I was about to tell you that you couldn’t park there, but seeing as it’s you, Mrs. Newsom...” Brian looked at D’Angelo. “Who’s your friend?”

“This is Mr. D’Angelo, the attorney handling Danny’s appeal,” Phyllis said.

“Is that right?” Brian switched the mallet from his right hand to his left and extended the right. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I hope you’re doing a good job for Danny.”

“Doing my best,” D’Angelo said as he shook hands. “Right now, it seems like his fate is riding on Mrs. Newsom’s shoulders.”

Brian looked quizzically at Phyllis. “Is that right?”

“Yes, I’ve figured out a few things,” Phyllis said. “For example, I know that you and Roxanne went to high school together.”

“We did?” Brian seemed baffled. “I don’t remember her from back then, and you’d think I would. Maybe we weren’t in the same grade, though. And there were a lot of people at Western Hills. It’s a big school.”

“You graduated the same year. And you not only knew her, you dated her. The two of you were an item when you were the quarterback and she was captain of the cheerleaders. There’s a yearbook picture to prove it.”

Brian laughed and shook his head. “Okay, I definitely ought to remember that. But I swear, I don’t. I guess maybe I smoked too much pot back in the old days.” He looked at D’Angelo. “Will I get in trouble for admitting that in front of a lawyer?”

“I’m not interested in what you smoked,” D’Angelo said. “I’m just trying to find out who killed Roxanne Jackson.”

“Wait a minute.” Brian was starting to look upset now. “You’re not trying to say that
I
killed her, are you, Mrs. Newsom? Maybe Roxie and I dated back in high school, but there was nothing going on between us now—”

“We’re not saying that there was,” Phyllis told him. “And I don’t think you killed Roxanne.”

“Well,
that’s
a relief—”

“D.J. Hutton killed her,” Phyllis said. “Or to use her full name, Desiree Joan Hutton Chilton. But you’re the one who shot her husband Hugh Chilton a couple of nights ago. At the very least, you’ll be charged with conspiracy and attempted murder. If he dies, as is likely, the charge will be murder.”

“Capital murder,” D’Angelo added, picking up on what was going on well enough to back up Phyllis’s play, even though he didn’t know all the details yet.

Wide-eyed, Brian looked back and forth between them, then turned his shocked gaze toward Sam. “Mr. Fletcher, you seem like a level-headed guy. You haven’t gone crazy enough to believe all this, have you?”

Sam shrugged and said, “It all adds up as far as I can see.”

“Adds up? A friend of mine marries a girl I used to go out with in high school! Things like that probably happen all the time!”

“They probably do,” Phyllis agreed. “Did you try to start something up with Roxanne again, after all these years?”

“Hell, no. Even if I’d wanted to, she wouldn’t have had anything to do with it. I found out later she’d hated my guts for a long time.” Brian grimaced as he realized that he’d just admitted recognizing Roxanne after all. In a defensive tone, he went on, “Look, I had no idea she was pregnant back then. She never told me, and she sure as hell never told me about any miscarriage. All that was a long way behind us. We talked about it once and both agreed that for Danny’s sake, we’d just leave the past buried, for good. I even tried not to spend any more time around her than I had to, just to make it easier for her.”

“But you went with Danny to the salon a couple of times, and one of those times you recognized another old girlfriend: D.J. Hutton. You dated her before you went out with Roxanne. In fact, you dumped her in order to date Roxanne.”

Brian shrugged. “I’ve always liked to play the field.”

“No matter who got hurt.”

“It was just high school romance, for God’s sake! Nobody was supposed to take it seriously.”

Phyllis said, “But it was different when you and D.J. met again after all this time. It
was
serious now. The two of you started having an affair. And Roxanne knew about it, probably because D.J.—Desiree—let something slip at the salon sometime. Roxanne knew that Desiree was a trophy wife, had married a man a lot older than her who had a lot of money. Maybe Roxanne and Desiree were friends now—a lot of old grudges tend to fade as the years pass—or maybe they just pretended to be and Desiree was still nursing a lot of anger toward her for taking you away from her. But even if they were friends, Roxanne wouldn’t have let that stand in the way of what she saw as a way out of debt for her and Danny.”

“She started blackmailing this other girl!” D’Angelo exclaimed as the light dawned for him.

Brian’s face was more haggard than ever now, but he didn’t say anything.

Phyllis continued, “Roxanne may have even found out about the plot you and Desiree hatched to murder her husband. She would leave the alarm off, you’d come in and shoot Hugh Chilton, ransack the place, and give her a minor wound to make it look like a botched home invasion. Was there some sort of stringent pre-nup so that Desiree couldn’t get out of the marriage with any money? The police would have suspected her of being involved, of course, but they wouldn’t know anything about you. They wouldn’t be able to tie Desiree in with the person who actually pulled the trigger. It must have seemed like a risk worth running...until Desiree said too much to her old...what’s the word?”

“Frenemy,” Sam suggested.

“That’s it. Her old frenemy from high school, who threatened to ruin everything unless she was paid off. Desiree must have decided she wasn’t going to stand for that, so she went to the salon to have it out with Roxanne, and then all that old anger and resentment boiled to the surface, and...”

“Pow,” D’Angelo said.

“Luckily, Danny came along to take the blame for the murder,” Phyllis said. “You and Desiree held off on your murder plot until a couple of nights ago. She must have gotten spooked when you told her about how I was investigating Roxanne’s death. She wanted her husband dead before anything else could turn up. But it didn’t work out like the two of you planned. Hugh Chilton wounded you, badly enough that you didn’t take the time to finish him off. You couldn’t go to the emergency room or a doctor with a gunshot wound, so you patched it up yourself as best you could and came on to work today so everything would look normal here at the shop. I think the blood must have soaked through the bandage, though. I can see it on your coveralls.”

Brian looked down sharply at his right side. There was nothing there.

“Aaaannd that’ll just about do it,” D’Angelo said. “No matter how much you and Mrs. Chilton tried to clean up, I’ll bet you left some DNA on the scene, Flynn, and once we tip them off to check it against yours, that’ll be all they need to arrest you. You think a woman like that’s gonna go to bat for you, pal? She’ll roll over on you so fast it’ll make your head spin. She’ll claim the whole thing was your idea and that she was so scared of you she had to go along with it. She’ll probably even tell the cops it was
you
who killed Roxanne, not her.”

Phyllis could tell by the horrified look in Brian’s eyes that he knew D’Angelo was right. His lack of an apparent connection to the Chilton shooting had been the only thing keeping him safe. Once that link was exposed to the police, they would turn up the evidence they needed to convict him.

With an incoherent yell, Brian suddenly lunged at D’Angelo, swinging the rubber mallet.

Displaying surprising grace and agility for a man of his size and build, the lawyer ducked under the blow and hooked a hard left into Brian’s side. Brian howled in pain and staggered back a step. Now there really was blood on his coveralls from the damage D’Angelo’s punch had done to the bullet wound.

Sam had slid over to get behind Brian. He grabbed him in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his sides. D’Angelo got hold of Brian, too, and together they forced him to the cement floor of the repair bay.

“We’ll hang on to him!” D’Angelo said. “Call 911, Phyllis!”

“I already am,” she said as she pushed the numbers on her cell phone.

••●••

Sam said, “This girl Desiree, D.J., whatever you call her, she was the one we saw kissin’ Brian the other day?”

“That’s right,” Phyllis said. She and Sam were back in the living room of her house, where she had just laid out everything for Carolyn and Eve. “I should have recognized her then, and it took me a while to figure out why I didn’t, since I was sitting just a few feet away from her at the beauty salon while I talked to her. But that day, I never saw her without some sort of herbal mask smeared all over her face. It covered up her features enough that when I saw her later, without it and with her hair different, I didn’t know her right away. And I certainly didn’t recognize her as the cheerleader D.J. Hutton from that yearbook photo. Now that I know, I can see the resemblance, but...”

“What’s going to happen now?” Eve asked. “Are they going to let Danny go?”

“Mr. D’Angelo has filed a motion to have Danny’s conviction set aside and the charges against him dropped, and as soon as a judge grants that, he’ll be a free man again.” Phyllis paused. “A free man with a murdered wife, a business partner who’s in jail, and the knowledge that the woman he loved turned out to be a blackmailer.” She shook her head. “It’s better than being locked up for a crime he didn’t commit, but it’s not really what you’d call a happy ending for him, either.”

“Happy endings are overrated,” Carolyn said. “It’s justice that’s important.”

“Never hurts to have a little bit of both,” Sam said.

“Why didn’t they just wait to try to murder the woman’s husband?” Carolyn went on. “If they hadn’t done that, you never would have seen that newspaper story and might not have solved the crime.”

Eve said, “Phyllis would have solved it some other way. I’m sure of that.”

“I’m not,” Phyllis said with a slight smile. “I had figured out that Roxanne must have been blackmailing someone, and whoever it was, most likely was the killer. Maybe I would have narrowed it down to Desiree Chilton eventually, but who knows? Once Brian told her the case might not be as closed as they thought it was, Desiree panicked. Just like she lost her head and her temper that evening the salon after Roxanne let her in. She lashed out. This time it’s probably going to cost Mrs. Chilton her freedom for the rest of her life.”