Caught Dead Handed (2 page)

I turned to run. To get help. To tell somebody. I stumbled over a large yellow cat and fell forward, scraping my knees and palms on the pebble-strewn pavement. I scrambled to my feet, pulse throbbing in my ears. Breaking into a run, I fumbled in the unfamiliar depths of the new handbag. A blank screen on the cell phone reminded me too late of the charger still in my suitcase. I shoved the station door open and crashed into a tall blond woman.

“Whoa, Red.” She grabbed my arm. “In a hurry?”

“Dead.” I gasped. “In the water. Call 911.”

“Slow down. What's dead in the water? Your boat?”

“Look,” I tried to speak slowly. “There's a body back there. Somebody should call the police.”

“A body?” The blonde gripped my arm more tightly. “A dead body? Are you sure?”

I nodded, seeing again the platinum hair floating beneath the surface like so much pale seaweed, the tiny fishes nibbling at that hand with its witch's ring.

“I'm sure.”

“Okay. Come on.” She headed for a door marked
STAIRS
. “Damned elevator takes too long.” The stairwell was gray and dingy, with metal treads curving toward a solid green door.

“Janice Valen,” my companion announced as we pounded around a triangular landing halfway up.

“Huh?”

“I'm Janice Valen. Program director. You?”

“Oh. Lee. Lee Barrett.”

Another Valen?

We tumbled out into the corridor, with its gallery of photos, and arrived at the glass door together. If we hadn't been there to announce a death, it probably would have been funny. Like a Laurel and Hardy entrance.

“Dial 911, Rhonda,” Janice shouted to the brunette. “Quick.”

Rhonda blinked and dropped her
People
magazine. “911? Why?”

“Oh, for Chrissake!” The blonde stretched a long, slim arm across the purple countertop and grabbed the telephone. “Here. I'll do it.” She punched in the number.

Janice Valen gave her name and the address of the station. I walked over to a tall window overlooking the parking lot, half expecting to see a crowd gathering where I'd seen the body. But there was just the granite wall. The blue-gray water. The stunted brown grass. The yellow cat.

“I don't know. Just a minute.” Janice covered the mouthpiece. “Hey, Red. Lee.”

“What?”

“Man? Or woman?”

“I think it's a woman.”

Should I tell them I think it's their missing psychic? What if I'm wrong?

“Woman,” Janice repeated. “Better hurry. Tide's going.” She hung up. “Stick around, Lee. The cops want to talk to you.”

Rhonda looked at me with new interest. “You found a body? Wow. Cool.”

“Rhonda, call my brother. Tell him to get down to the seawall,” Janice commanded. “We need to get a camera down there before the cops come.”

Of course. Cameras. This is a TV station, after all. And George is her brother.

Rhonda picked up a pencil and poked a few buttons on the phone with the eraser. Janice headed for the office marked MANAGER.

“Hey, Doan,” she called. “Guess what?”

I glanced around, not knowing what to do next. Down below, the once-empty vista was becoming crowded. Sirens and flashing lights heralded the arrival of police. The WICH-TV truck and camera crew arrived. I recognized George and wondered if the tall guy with him was the new field reporter.

That should be me out there, getting ready to do the live shot. But then I wouldn't have found the body, and poor Ariel . . . if it is Ariel . . . might have disappeared with the outgoing tide.

The next hour was a blur of activity. Two uniformed officers hovered around Rhonda, asking about who had been working at the station the previous day. Another officer disappeared into the manager's office. A tall, broad-shouldered man identified himself as Detective Mondello and joined me at the window.

A tall, broad-shouldered, good-looking man.

The thought surprised me. I hadn't paid much attention to that sort of thing since Johnny's death.

Poor Johnny. Poor me.

The detective made notes as he took my statement about hearing the phone and finding the body. “Did you touch the phone?”

“No. I guess it must still be there.”

He nodded. “Just how did you happen to be here in the first place, Miss Barrett?”

“I was here applying for a job, and my car is parked next to the seawall.”

Janice had come back into the room and stood next to the detective. Her brown eyes seemed to study me closely, and a surprised expression crossed her face. She snapped her fingers. “Barrett. Of course! I should have recognized you from the audition tape you sent! You're very good.”

“Thanks.” I didn't voice the obvious question. Then why didn't I get the job?

Detective Mondello looked from one of us to the other. “So you're a new employee here, Miss Barrett?”

“No. They hired someone else.”

“I see.” He was silent for a moment, scribbling in his notebook, and I turned back to the scene at the water's edge. As I watched, wet-suited divers placed their heavy burden, mercifully covered by a tarp, onto a wheeled gurney.

“Miss Valen?” The detective faced Janice. “We understand that there's a station employee missing.”

“An employee?” Janice looked puzzled. “Oh, yes. Ariel . . . the night-show host, left last night in the middle of her show. Oh no! You think it could be . . .” She looked at me. “You said it was a woman. Oh my God!”

“Were you able to distinguish any features of the person you saw in the water, Miss Barrett?”

“Not really. I couldn't see the face. But she had blond hair. And a big ring on her hand.”

“Jesus! It's Ariel. I have to tell Doan.” Janice turned, pushing her way past the officers, hurrying to the station manager's office.

The detective grew silent again, watching Janice's retreating back. Down below, the new field reporter was on camera. He stood next to a long white van, doors open to receive the drowned woman, and the large yellow cat I'd tripped over sat beneath a nearly leafless tree, licking his paws with seeming unconcern as the body of his late mistress was trundled by.

“Miss Barrett, were you acquainted with the missing employee at all?”

“What? Oh, no,” I answered. “No. I've never even seen her TV show. I just arrived from St. Petersburg last night.”

“I see.” He continued making notes. “And you say you came to Salem for a job interview?”

“Yes. Well, also I have family here.”

“You weren't hired.”

“That's right.”

“Will you be returning to Florida soon, then?”

“I don't think so.”

Returning to what?
Johnny was gone. My job was gone. And I'd signed a two-year rental agreement on my condo in St. Petersburg.

“I see,” he said again. “Do you have a local number? Somewhere you can be reached if we have further questions?”

I gave him the numbers for my cell and Aunt Ibby's house, and he snapped his notebook shut.

“Thank you, Miss Barrett.”

“You're welcome, Detective.”

He strode to the reception desk, pulled out the notebook again, and began speaking in low tones to Rhonda, who seemed to enjoy the attention. The scene in the parking lot had changed again. The white van was gone, and yellow tape was festooned along the wall. A mobile unit from one of the Boston TV stations had pulled into the lot, and the crowd had grown.

“Is that your Buick? Right in the middle of all the action?” Janice Valen spoke from behind me.

“Yes. Well, it's my aunt's car.”

“You might want to stick around here for a while,” she said. “You'll walk straight into that mess if you try to leave now.”

She was right. I certainly didn't want to be interviewed as the one who'd discovered poor drowned Ariel's body.

“Come on into my office. I want to talk to you, anyway.”

Janice Valen's office was, thankfully, different from the turquoise and purple decor of the reception area. The walls were a soft golden color. The Scandinavian modern furniture was sleek and stylish.
Like Janice,
I thought.

There were a few nice prints of old Salem sailing vessels on the walls. On the desk was a small framed nightclub souvenir – type photo of a sparsely clad, slender woman wearing the tall feather-and-sequin headdress of a showgirl. Stamped across the bottom in purple metallic ink was
The Purple Dragon, London, New Year's Eve 2005.

“Looking at the evidence of my misspent youth?”

“It's lovely,” I said. “You looked beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

“You're an actress?”

“Was. That was taken in London back when the skinny, anorexic Diana look was still in.”

“London. That must have been exciting.”

“It was okay. Here. Please sit down.”

The chair was soft and comfortable, and I realized just how tired I was. For the first time I noticed that my hands were scraped, my knees bloody, and my hose ripped. I tried to pull the green skirt down to cover the damage.

“Look, I'm sorry I didn't recognize you right off,” she said. “What with all the excitement, I didn't make the connection until you started talking to the cute cop.”

“That's all right,” I said. “No reason you should have.”

She shook her head, and her short, fine hair flared out, then fell perfectly back into place. Mine never does that.

“Really, I should have picked up on it. You're the Emerson grad. Best school in the world for theater arts. You have great TV experience, too. Doan was supposed to interview you this morning.”

“Yep. That was me.”
So if I'm so darned qualified, why'd you hire some guy ? Where is this conversation leading, anyway?
I tried changing the subject.

“How did Mr. Doan take the news? About Ariel?”

She shrugged, a slight lift of one elegant shoulder. “Doan is Doan. He said it was her own fault, always going down to the wall to sneak a smoke during the movie. He said a woman of her size ought to know better than to get too close to the edge—especially since she couldn't swim a stroke. He's mostly ticked off because now he has no late-show host.”

“That seems cold,” I said. The anger was back. “And so was the way he hired that man without even giving me the courtesy of an interview.”

Again the ladylike shrug. “He decided to grab the other guy. Scott Palmer.”

“So I gathered.” That sounded snarky. I didn't care.

“I don't blame you for being mad,” she said. “But Palmer had another appointment with a Boston station, and Doan didn't want to lose him.”

“Is he all that good? How did Mr. Doan figure that I might not be better?”

“You don't do sports.”

“Excuse me?” Nobody had said anything about sports.

“He compared résumés. It was down to you two. You can do weather and shopping. Palmer used to do sports. Doan figured since he already has a weather girl and we don't do shopping, he'll get more for his money with Palmer. Our regular sports guy does only the pro teams. Sox, Bruins, Celts, Pats.” She gave a soft laugh. “He's going to get Palmer to cover the high school basketball and football games. Two talents for the price of one.”

So the station manager isn't only rude, but he's cheap, too.

It was my turn to shrug. “I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense, but it was still a rotten way to treat me after I came all this way for an interview.”

“I know it was, but listen. Are you still interested in working here?”

The question surprised me. “Why? Doing what?”

“Look,” she said. “Doan told me to find a replacement for Ariel, pronto. Like, in time for next Monday's show. Tonight we'll probably do some kind of Ariel tribute or something, and we don't do
Nightshades
on the weekend. Doan said, ‘I don't care how you do it. Just do it!' How in hell am I supposed to do that?” She spread her hands in a hopeless gesture.

“Beats me.”

“Yours is the only résumé I have that even remotely approaches the qualifications for show host.”

“Well, thanks, but no thanks.” I almost laughed out loud. “I'm not the least bit psychic.”

“So what? Neither was Ariel. They're all a bunch of fakes. It doesn't matter. I mean, you have an acting background. You've hosted a show before. You look good on camera. You know how to pitch a product. That's all it takes.”

“It can't be that simple. George told me that
Nightshades
is one of your top-rated shows.”

“You know George? My brother?”

“Not really. We met earlier this morning. In the corridor.”

She shook the perfect hair again. “George does make friends easily. But listen, Lee. Help me out here. Where else am I going to find a good-looking Emerson grad with TV credits and a brain in a couple of days?” She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ”And it gets you into the station. Of course, it's not as much money as the field reporter job, but it's not as many hours, either.”

“Miss Valen,” I said. “Thanks, anyway. . . .”

“Janice. Call me Janice.”

“All right then. Janice. Mr. Doan has seen my tapes, and he's already turned me down once today. Besides, I've never even seen
Nightshades.
”

“Look at it this way, Lee. You don't have to sign a contract if you don't want to. And if a better position opens up, or if the Palmer guy falls on his face, why, there you'll be!”

She had a point there. “True. But I'm not sure I can pull off the psychic thing.”

“Oh, it's not that difficult. It's mostly just introducing old movies and reading a few commercials. I'll give you a couple of DVDs of Ariel's old shows, and you can see how she handled the callers. It won't take too long to watch it. No movies, just the calls and a few commercials.”