Dead for the Money (6 page)

Mildred seemed to read his mind. “They told me you have a case. I’d be very grateful if you’d let me come along and observe how you handle it.”

“It might be a good one for a first timer,” he said, weighing the options. He could make Gabe and Mike happy by acceding to their request, and the case seemed likely to be open and shut. Either the grandson did it, or Dunbar had fallen due to age and infirmity.

“Is it a murder?” she asked.

“Possibly.”

“What exactly would I be doing?”

“Exactly what I tell you.” Fingering a pack of cigarettes in his inside coat pocket, Seamus summarized what Dunbar had told him.

“And you’re willing to let me come along?”

“I’ll let you know in the morning.”

She reached out as if to touch his arm and then apparently thought better of it. “I’d like to help you solve this case, Seamus.”

“We don’t have to solve it. Dunbar wants to know if his grandson killed him, that’s all.” Seamus glanced out into the distance, adding, “I would guess he did, though.”

She looked surprised. “Should detectives form an opinion before even beginning?”

“Millie, fifty million dollars is a lot of incentive.”

“Mildred,” she corrected. “But it does sound intriguing.” She leaned close, allowing Seamus a hint of a haunting perfume. “Please let me come along.” With that she left him, her retreating figure swaying in a most feminine manner until she disappeared from sight.

T
HE
SOUND
OF
A
MOTOR
alerted Brodie to the approach of intruders. She jumped to her feet, scraped the sand around her with her cap to smooth out her footprints, and headed into the trees. She did not leave, but instead crouched in the foliage to eavesdrop. Brodie had cultivated the skills of observation without detection, which was how she knew that most of her family wished they’d never heard of her.
Brodie the spy
, she thought of herself, although Arlis phrased it differently. “I wish you wouldn’t act so sneaky, Brodie,” she had said more than once with a disapproving sniff. Sneak or spy, Brodie knew that Arlis drank more than she admitted, that Arnold told more than he should about his employer’s family to friends on the phone, and that Briggs kept a stash of nudie magazines in a crate at the back of the garage. It made her feel a little less abnormal to know that others had secrets too.

The vehicle she heard was Gramps’ golf cart, but two people she had never seen before rode in it. One was a youngish man in the uniform of the local sheriff’s department. The other was a woman in a dark green pantsuit, a no-nonsense type, judging from her flat shoes, short hair, and focused expression.

They parked the cart a short way from where Brodie lay in the dense brush. She followed quietly as they walked the crooked path to the viewing spot. Once there, they both took in the view for a few seconds. It would have been hard not to pause and appreciate it. Then they looked over the edge, around the fencing, and into the trees on either side. Neither spoke for a long time, but finally, the woman said, “Vertigo.”

The deputy’s response came a beat too slowly. “Possible.”

She picked up on it. “You think something else?”

He smirked a little, and Brodie decided she did not like him. “Lots of money to be had if the old guy died.”

“Yeah. But the grandson pretty much had control of it. He could have anything he wanted.”

“Except
total
control.” The deputy tapped his chin lightly with a closed fist, letting that sink in. “Rumor is they’d disagreed about things lately.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m just sayin’.”

“Office Reiner, if you’ve got something more than suspicion, I’d like to hear about it.” The woman’s tone was mild. One of Brodie’s tutors had always spoken to her in that tone, which signaled, “I have to deal with you, but I don’t like you.”

“Sergeant Schell, don’t you think we should investigate a little more? Mr. Dunbar was a respected member of this community—”

“Who had a dizzy spell and fell off this bluff. He had no business being up here, old as he was. If the grandson did anything wrong, it was leaving him alone for even a few minutes.”

“That’s the other thing. This animal crying in the woods. Don’t that sound fishy to you?”

“Not really. If I heard it, I would probably go see what it was too.” She made an impatient move. “There are a dozen things I should be doing, and I don’t see anything here to convince me Dunbar’s death was anything but an accident. You can’t prove young Dunbar pushed his grandfather over the edge.”

“But you can’t prove he didn’t.”

“Reiner, the grand jury, the district attorney, and the voters of this state don’t ask me to spend my time proving that a murder did
not
happen. They’re only interested if I can prove that it did.” With that, chell took a final glance at the lake and turned to go. She disappeared from Brodie’s sight almost immediately, but Reiner hung back.

“There has to be a way to prove he did it,” Reiner said to Lake Michigan before he too, left the scene.

When they were gone, Brodie climbed out of hiding and started for the house. Their exchange had ruined even the tiny bit of peace Gramps’ favorite spot had brought her.

Chapter Four

“
O
KAY
,”
S
EAMUS
TOLD
M
ILDRED
the next morning when he found her leaving the breakfast buffet. She wore pink. Everything. “I’d like to leave as soon as possible.”

Her face lit like a candle. “Oh, I’m so grateful, Seamus. Thank you.” She moved forward, almost certainly intending a hug.

He held up a hand. “You should meet our client. Let’s see if Dunbar is around somewhere.”

They found him reading in a deck chair, his feet propped on a low table. When he saw Mildred, he rose politely.

“Mr. Dunbar, this is Mildred. She is going with me while I investigate your case.”

Dunbar frowned slightly, and Mildred stepped toward him, extending a hand. “I’m a detective in training. Seamus is going to let me observe so I can learn what he knows about crossing back.”

Seamus almost sneered at the implication that she could learn in one trip what he knew, but he stuck his hands in his pockets and examined the deck instead.

Dunbar took Mildred’s hand and she moved closer so that he looked down into her upturned face. “I wonder, Mr. Dunbar—”

“Please, call me Will.”

Now Seamus quashed an urge to sniff in objection. Dunbar had not invited him to that familiarity.

Mildred smiled coquettishly. “Will, then. Could you tell your story again, for my benefit? Seamus has given me the basics, but it would be so much clearer coming from you.”

I wasn’t clear?
Seamus almost said it aloud. Still, it couldn’t hurt to go over the facts of the case again.

Dunbar obediently told the whole story once more. As he talked, Mildred stopped him occasionally, touching his arm lightly and asking a question. Seamus had to admit that they were all good ones.

“So your sister lives with you. Does she have a good relationship with the child, Brodie?”

“Well, no. Arlis tried, of course, but Brodie is...difficult. She was treated badly by her mother, and unfortunately took a dislike to my sister from the first. For my sake, they came to a sort of compromise. Arlis generally leaves Brodie alone, and Brodie generally pretends Arlis does not exist.”

Disrespectful
, Seamus thought, but he did not let disapproval show on his face. He sensed that Dunbar thought the kid made the sun rise and set each day.

Later, Mildred had another question. “You say your grandson went into the woods to find a creature that was in pain, but you did not hear it. Did he say what it sounded like?”

“I don’t remember him mentioning a particular animal. He might have, but—”

“That’s quite all right. I just wondered.”

As Dunbar described the members of the household, she stopped him once more. “This Scarlet. Does she benefit in any way from your death?”

Dunbar seemed shocked. “Certainly not enough to be involved in it. She was a waitress I met last year when Bud and I were on Mackinac Island for a conference. She’s Irish, and she mentioned that she’d trained to be a teacher but had not yet found a position.”

“An Irish schoolteacher waiting tables at a tourist spot in Michigan?”

“The money is good. Young people come from all over the world each summer to work in the hotels up there. At any rate, I took an immediate liking to Scarlet. When I returned home and learned that Brodie had driven yet another tutor away, I asked her if she’d take the job.” He raised a hand. “After I’d checked her out thoroughly, of course. We extended her visa, and things worked out very well from there.”

The questions went on a while longer. Mildred was, Seamus had to admit, a shrewd interviewer, getting Dunbar to expand on things he had not thought to ask. She learned that Arnold Wilk, Dunbar’s personal assistant, was “a bit of a worm but very efficient.” Shelley the cook had been a surrogate mother to both Bud and Brodie. And it was Bud who first suggested Scarlet as Brodie’s tutor.

Finally, Mildred seemed satisfied. “I appreciate your candor, Will,” she said, patting the old man’s arm. “We will do our very best to find out the truth for you.”

Seamus thought that “we” was a little presumptuous.

They left Dunbar to his novel, walking the deck as they discussed what they had learned. Mildred took Seamus’ arm as if they were on promenade. Her pink heels clicked softly on the deck surface. “I think that went very well.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sure you noticed the same things I did.”

“Okay, what did you notice?”

“Well, there are two ways to explain why Will did not hear an animal crying in the woods.”

“Yeah, like there wasn’t any animal.”

“That’s one. But there is another possibility. Will is—well, he was—quite deaf.”

“Deaf!”

“Yes. Of course, here, everything works fine. But you must have noticed that he turns one ear toward whoever is speaking. It’s habit, left over from years of straining to hear with what is undoubtedly his good ear. It was the left ear he turned toward us, so his right, where the sound supposedly came from, was possibly so bad that he wouldn’t have heard a thing.”

Seamus was impressed. The woman was intelligent, as Gabe had said. Not just book-smart, college intelligent, but observational and deduction-type intelligent. “That’s pretty good.”

Mildred looked pleased. “The other thing I got from his story is more important. I think we can narrow the list of suspects already.”

“Didn’t you recently lecture me about keeping an open mind?”

“Oh, I will,” Mildred said airily. “I always do. But I think we’ll find that a woman is our focus.”

“The sister, Arlis?”

“Arlis seems unlikely to go tromping through the woods, no matter how much money is at stake. But Scarlet seems much too good to be true.”

“The tutor? What does she gain from Dunbar’s death?”

“She’s after the grandson, you silly man. He’s wealthy, and she’s been under his nose for the past year, working on getting him hooked.”

B
RODIE
INTENDED
TO
RETURN
to the viewing point the next morning, preferring its solitude to the presence of people who disapproved of her. But Scarlet asked her to remain in the house, and she obeyed, lying on her bed and watching tiny white clouds drift by her window like passing ships.

Brodie considered Gramps half of her life, and that half was gone. The other half she divided among Scarlet, Shelley the cook, and her husband Briggs, the handyman. Everyone else she imagined as outside an invisible circle. There were times when she had to speak to those outside people, but she had as little to do with them as possible. They made her feel like a misfit. They spoke louder than normal when they talked to her, and something in their eyes conveyed discomfort at her presence.

Just because she’d set one tree on fire.

It had been an accident. She’d been a kid then, and she’d taken it into her head to build a fire in her tree house and roast marshmallows. The stupid thing wouldn’t go, and she used up all but one of her matches on it. Finally, she had a brilliant idea: gasoline would make it burn. But how to get some up into the tree? She had hit on an idea she thought was clever. Using a narrow tube, she sipped some gas from the can Briggs kept in the barn into her mouth and climbed carefully back up to the tree house. Lighting her last match, she spit the gas on the kindling she’d amassed. That was pretty much all she could recall for a while. When it was all over, she had no eyebrows, a receding hairline, and a reputation as a budding arsonist to add to her other crimes. When she thought about it, she could still taste the gas in her mouth.
Stupid.

Scarlet knocked softly on her bedroom door. “Brodie? Can you come downstairs? There are things we have to discuss.”

Dragging herself off the bed, Brodie made herself presentable, knowing Scarlet would send her right back upstairs if she did not wear shoes and comb her hair. No doubt funeral arrangements were being made. They would bury Gramps, then what? Would they send her away? Put her in some snobby girls’ school so nobody had to deal with her? She was pretty sure nobody wanted the ugly, crazy girl around. Nobody ever had except Gramps. Briggs and Shelley were good to her. So was Scarlet. But it was their job.

When she’d come to the Dunbar house, Brodie ate only what she could manage with her hands. It had felt natural for food to go from her fingers to her mouth. Her caregivers would put her to bed in her lovely room only to find her asleep on the couch in the family room the next morning. Over time, she had adapted to society’s simple demands. She ate with a fork, combed her hair once a day, and learned to sleep in a bed. Although not as wild as she had been, at twelve years of age Brodie still refused to go to school, associated only with a few people she was used to, and would not eat meals in company. A long line of nannies, caregivers, and tutors had been endured with very little grace. Each was tested, most beyond their ability to withstand it. Brodie considered it a kind of duty.