Closet Confidential (37 page)

Lorelei’s predicament was not my only problem. I put in a call from my cell phone to Margaret to see if she’d been able to see Pepper today. I got her voice mail. The blessing and curse of our times. I couldn’t concentrate on my business. I decided to knock off the rest of the hotels in the interim. I checked out two off I-87 and one near the south end of Woodbridge. No purple key cards in either case. Plus the staff of all three looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. It was tedious and it made me glad I hadn’t chosen private detective as a job. I had the belated thought that perhaps a private eye would have called and asked.

Still, it was a positive action and it took my mind off waiting for Margaret to call me back, and kept me from wondering if I should get something in for dinner as Jack was bound to have worked up an appetite looking after Little Nick.

Most important, it kept me from dwelling on what Pepper had asked me to do, which was find Nick, and what I wanted to do, which was find out how Anabel had died.

I pulled over as my cell phone trilled. I was surprised to hear Thalia Waverman’s sweet quavering voice on the line.

“I am sorry to bother you, but I was chatting with my friend who lives on Potter Street and I told her you were here asking questions. It’s so nice to have a bit of news to share. At any rate, she mentioned something that she’d seen. I thought you might like to hear about it.”

“Thank you, Thalia. What is it?”

“I’ll put my friend on, will I? Turns out the police didn’t come to her door, either,” she said.

An even more quavery voice came on the line. “That’s right,” she warbled. “No sign of them. Asleep at the wheel my late husband would have said. This is Jane Cantley speaking. Thalia can’t be allowed to think she’s the only one who could ever come up with a scrap of news.”

“I’m glad you’re both on the job,” I said with a smile in my voice.

“
I
certainly am. And I didn’t see the person that Thalia described, but I wondered if the police officer wouldn’t have seen everything.”

“Which police officer?” I asked.

“Well, the one who went behind the fence, of course.”

“Behind the fence at the site? You mean the first officer to respond? They didn’t—”

“No, dear. I mean, the officer who was already there. He seemed to be meeting with someone that I couldn’t see. It may have been your Anabel Beauchamp, but I don’t think so. I had the sense of a large person. I didn’t see the young woman because, naturally, the Friesen Street entrance isn’t visible from my apartment. I could only see him entering.”

“He must have been responding to a 911 call.”

“Oh no, dear. I don’t think so. It was ten minutes at least before there was the first hint of a siren.”

“Thank you, Jane,” I said. “May I have your telephone number if I need to call you again?”

“Oh, Thalia knows where to find me,” she said as the line went dead. After that, I heard only the sound of things falling into place in my mind.

Margaret arrived at my place seconds after I did. She seemed to be missing her usual air of cool, detached competence.

The dogs leaped off the sofa and raced to the door doing their best Rottweiler imitation.

“I’m glad to see you, too, pampered little pets,” Margaret said to them as she walked in. They were all over her. I was in their bad books because of the training regime and the fact I’d hardly been home that week.

Margaret said, to me this time, “Do you think that everyone in the world has lost their mind lately? The whole idea of the guardians for Little Nick has me creeped out. I hate the idea that he might need guardians, although we have to accept the idea that brain injuries can be very unstable. I lost a client not too long ago after what looked like a slight injury. And there’s a chance Pepper might not make it.” Margaret ditched her lawyer suit jacket and flopped on the sofa. Truffle and Sweet Marie jumped up to snuggle. They love women. Soft, cuddly, and nice smelling. And in this case, worried.

I said, “I refuse to believe that Pepper won’t make it, and I don’t believe that Nick is behind her injuries. I understand why she wouldn’t want Little Nick raised by the same people who made her childhood miserable. Isn’t it good to get these things taken care of legally before rather than have a court battle if it . . . not that it will come to that.”

“But we’ll have to have everything nailed down to make sure he’s the guardian. Both sets of grandparents would have a stake. The right lawyer could make the case that Pepper’s decision was flawed by her head injury.”

I said, “But her own father was abusive. Surely that would . . . what do you mean ‘he’? ‘He’ who?”

“Jack, of course.”

“What? Jack? The buddy who doesn’t wear winter clothes in the snow? The guy who has bike parts stored in his oven?”

“Well, to repeat, she does have a head injury. Like I said, I don’t know that any decisions she makes under these circumstances would hold up in court anyway. But is Jack such a surprise?”

“He’d be great emotionally. But you know, not the most conventional of homes. Someone else would have to be in charge of snowsuits and baking cookies for school events.”

“I hear you and I think we’d have better luck if it was Sally and Benjamin.”

“Who already have four kids of their own?”

“Doesn’t matter. Stable. Respectable. House full of toys. Yada, yada. Not my decision of course. Pepper wants your name as a guardian, too.”

I squeaked, “Are you kidding me?”

“It is pretty weird. You have a hard enough time raising your dogs. Discipline is definitely an issue.”

I hoped that wasn’t a growl I heard from Sweet Marie. I said, “Margaret, what’s going on? How can all these terrible things have happened to Pepper and Nick?”

“I have no idea.”

“What does Frank say?”

“He has no idea, either, which is the main reason why I have no idea. You know cops, they clam up.”

“What’s the good of marrying one if you can’t extract information from him? Have you never heard of pillow talk?”

“I hate to break it to you, but the police have cornered the market on investigating. You shouldn’t make it one of your new business lines.”

“But I have helped before.”

“And you got hurt. Other people got hurt, too. Leave it to the pros.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Mainly because it makes sense. For a sensible girl like you, it shouldn’t require explanation.”

“Very cute. Of course, the police, that is to say, Pepper and Nick, are the ones in the messy situation.”

“Well, whatever is behind it? You should steer clear. That’s my advice as your lawyer and even more so as your friend. And don’t bother sulking. I get enough of that from my parents. It rolls right off my back and trickles away.”

“I’m not sulking,” I said sulkily. I headed into the kitchen to get some treats for the dogs. Unfortunately, we were out of ice cream.

“Doesn’t matter either way is my point.”

“Where do you think Nick is hiding out? Ah, c’mon, Margaret, don’t roll your eyes.”

“Huh. I’m amazed that you can see that from the next room. You’re very good, Charlotte.”

“Okay, never mind Nick. Listen to this: Lorelei went to Friesen Street because she’d had a note from Anabel saying she was getting married. I am almost certain it was her. She was seen. I think that Anabel ducked behind the fence to avoid her mother and she was wearing girlie shoes and lost her footing.”

Margaret stared. “That would be the most awful thing that a mother could ever deal with.”

I nodded. “But there’s another wrinkle. One of the women in the neighborhood says that a police officer was already behind the fence. And that he was meeting with someone else who entered on the Potter Street side.”

“What?”

“There’s more. The cops don’t seem to have talked to any of the people who might have witnessed this. So since Nick was the first on the scene, that could mean—and I hate to say this—that he was there, that he saw Anabel fall in, but for some reason failed to help her or to phone it in in time.”

“You think Nick killed her?”

“I can’t believe that. But he could have mismanaged the whole thing. He might not have figured out how to save her or, being Nick, even that she needed saving. Living with that might explain why Nick has been acting so crazy lately. Pepper said he was afraid of something. Felt threatened. And if someone else knew he’d let Anabel die, they could be blackmailing him.”

Margaret said, “Letting a girl drown? That’s heavy stuff. Nick would be terrified of exposure. Losing his standing in the police.”

“That’s it. And in the end, maybe it all took a toll. Maybe it triggered some kind of psychotic break and that explains what happened to Pepper.”

Margaret rubbed her forehead.

I added, “That’s my thinking to date, but I could be wrong. It doesn’t seem enough to account for his behavior. I wouldn’t have thought Nick capable of any of this, but of course, it wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about a man. Maybe DeJong was right and he just snapped.”

After Margaret left, I decided to check on Pepper in person before I tried to find Dean Oliver to get his spin on the whole tale. I needed to know that she was all right. And she needed to know that Little Nick was all right. I called Jack first. I also needed to know what he might like to eat when he got home and if he needed more baby food. “We’ll be late. Business is booming,” he said. “We had an excellent day. And we’re good for dinner. Sally dropped off some jars of weird strained concoction for the little dude and people food for me. And I had that great chili for lunch. I think the dude can’t wait to grow out of all that jarred grub and eat chili like a man. Anyway, don’t worry about us getting dinner.”

I called the hospital and once again, the nursing station staff was evasive. I fed the dogs, popped them out for a constitutional, promised them a nice long walk the next day, and tore off to Woodbridge General.

Pepper was not in her room. An unfamiliar police officer was guarding an empty space. He did not know where she was. The nurse in charge was unwilling to say where she was as I wasn’t family. “I’m a lot closer than family,” I protested, but it got me nowhere.

After an hour or so of frustration trying to find out where Pepper was, I was informed that visiting hours were over. The cop was still guarding the empty room, waiting for Pepper to return from wherever. Surgery? Tests? No one had told him, as he wasn’t family, either. More to the point, he was told to stay put. I asked conversationally if Dean Oliver was on duty that night.

“Dean?” he said. “I think he’s days this week.”

I left and headed home. I called Sally from the parking lot and asked her if she could find out through Benjamin what had happened. Next I phoned Tierney and got, naturally, his voice mail. I mentioned I had something that might be a lead on Nick’s whereabouts. Let
him
follow purple key cards all around town. See if people looked at him as if he had two heads. I added that I had an interesting tidbit from witnesses in the Friesen and Potter Street area, witnesses who had not
ever
been interviewed by the police, although far be it from me to criticize the pros. The voice mail cut me off before I said everything that was on my mind.