Deadly Deceptions (14 page)

I guided her through the dining room, then the kitchen and then to the umbrella-covered table where she'd been sitting, according to Jolie, when I got back from Angela Braydaven's place.

“Do you own a gun, Greer?” I asked, once I'd sat her down and taken a chair for myself.

She swallowed. “You sound like the police,” she accused. She paused, squinted at me. “What happened to your face?”

“I've been crying,” I said. “Stop stalling.
Do you own a gun?
”

“Is it over Tucker Darroch?” Greer persisted, still stuck on the mascara stains. “I
told
you you shouldn't get involved with a married man.”

“He's divorced,” I said, rising above the temptation to point out to Greer that Alex had still been married to Beverly when she'd snagged him. “Answer my question.”

“A .45,” she said grudgingly. “Automatic.”

“Do you have it?” I know, I know, it sounds like a dumb question, since if said lethal weapon had been found, the police would hold it as evidence, but I needed to know what she'd say.

“It disappeared weeks ago,” Greer said. “And I reported it missing as soon as I knew it was gone.”

I could ask Tucker later if the gun had been found, examined by the lab and stashed in some evidence room. And if Greer had filed a report when it disappeared. “How come it never came up in conversation that you had a .45?” I inquired.

Greer hesitated, bit her lower lip. “It was my gun, wasn't it?” she whispered, skirting my question yet again. “Alex was shot with
my gun.
My fingerprints will be all over it. The
real
killer probably wore gloves—”

“Take a breath, Greer. I know you didn't kill Alex, and I'll find a way to prove it. Right now, you have to tell me about Shiloh.”

She looked as though I'd punched her in the stomach. “Shiloh,” she repeated woodenly, and that fevered, hunted glint was back in her eyes.

“Your old hometown,” I said, and though I was going for casual, I probably sounded accusatory. “I can find out everything I need to know about the place in five minutes, just by logging on to the Internet, but I'd rather hear it from you first.”

Greer rocked in her chair, huddled in on herself, trying to disappear. “Who told you?”

“That's beside the point,” I said. “What happened in Shiloh?”

“N-nothing.”

I started to get up. “Okay, fair enough. I'll just check out Google awhile.”

“Don't,” Greer pleaded.

I hovered between the chair seat and my full height, with my knees bent. “One more time, Greer,” I said. “What happened in Shiloh?”

She sighed.

I sat, even though I wasn't sure I'd won the little standoff. Between last night's sex marathon, Alex's visit to my kitchen and the interlude with Justin, his mom and Pepper, my legs were noodly. “You told me you did something terrible,” I reminded her. “What was it?”

“They'll kill me if I tell.”

This job takes a lot of patience. Sometimes a lot more than I happen to have on hand. I managed to refrain from getting Greer by the throat. “Who is ‘they'?”

“I don't know.”

“You must have some idea,” I insisted.

“You should wash your face,” Greer said. “It can't be good for your skin, all that smudged mascara.”

“Greer.”

“I really don't
know,
okay? Someone must have seen—or stumbled across something—”

“Tell me what you did.”

The phone rang, and since the receiver was sitting in the middle of the patio table, Greer reached for it.

I stopped her by grabbing her wrist. “Let voice mail pick up,” I said.

“It could be the blackmailers,” Greer said, and she looked so frightened, so frantic, that I let go of her so she could take the call. “Greer Pennington,” she chimed, as though it were an ordinary day, and Alex might stroll in with an offering of conciliatory jewelry at any moment.

“Put it on speaker,” I said, expecting resistance.

Greer surprised me by thumbing the speaker button immediately.

“This is Jack Pennington,” the caller said flatly, and a chill went through me. The voice of a probable murderer, and not just
any
cold-blooded killer, either. The man might well have rubbed out his own
father,
over money. “The police won't release Dad's body right away, so we'll have to move the funeral up a week. Not that that will matter to you, since you'll probably be in jail.”

Greer opened her mouth, but no words came out, just a barely audible croak. It was literally all I could do not to turn the tables on Jack Pennington, and tell him I had reason to think
he'd
been the one to empty the magazine of an automatic pistol into Alex's chest. I didn't want to give him the options of hiding evidence, skipping town, or shutting me up for good, along with Greer and possibly even Jolie.

“Greer?” Jack demanded. “Are you there?”

“I didn't kill your father,” Greer said.

He laughed, the bastard. He actually
laughed.
“Of course you did, Greer,” he said. “Or did you hire your sister the detective to do it? That would amount to the same thing, you know. You'd still be charged with murder one.”

Another chill whispered against my nape. It was ludicrous to be afraid—I
hadn't
killed Alex, though God knows I'd wanted to, more than once. But I
was
afraid. What if Jack found a way to frame me for the shooting? Fingerprints or none, the police probably didn't think Greer could have strong-armed Alex out into the desert and sprayed him with hollow-points, especially with one arm in a cast.

I couldn't have strong-armed him, either,
The Damn Fool's Guide to Self-Defense for Women
notwithstanding. But I could have jumped him in the parking garage beneath his office building, thunking him on the head with something hard, like the butt of a pistol, bound his hands with duct tape and put a bag over his head. It would have been a struggle, but I could have hoisted his inert form into the trunk of a car, driven him out into the desert, slipped on a pair of gloves and let him have it with the .45.

Motive?

Revenge, possibly. I'd done Alex's medical billings for a long time, and he'd fired me recently, when he found out I'd been snooping, at Greer's behest, into his extramarital escapades. On top of that, he'd accused me, in front of television cameras no less, of murdering my own parents. Even though the actual perpetrators had been arrested and charged, with trials pending, there were probably a lot of people out there who still believed I'd somehow picked up the gun, held it in a five-year-old's hands and fired the fatal shots.

“Don't call here again, Jack,” I heard Greer say, and realized I'd been woolgathering when I should have been listening. “And I
will
be at the funeral. Alex was
my husband.
”

“You were setting him up—” Jack began, but Greer ended the call, slammed the receiver down.

“About Shiloh,” I said, calmer now that I'd had a few moments to recover from my brief foray into raging paranoia.

“I'm going to throw up!” Greer cried, and dashed into the house before I could stop her.

By the time I caught up with her, she was behind the locked door of the powder room off the kitchen, hurling.

I raised a fist to pound on the door, but lowered it to my side.

Greer wasn't going to tell me about Shiloh, which meant I'd have to find out on my own, probably with her working against me the whole time.

I wanted to go straight out to the guesthouse, get my stuff, load it all into the Volvo and wheel it back to Bad-Ass Bert's. Live in my own apartment again, where I belonged.

But I couldn't abandon Greer. In a lot of ways she was as helpless as Gillian. I knew she was hedging, but the vomiting was for real. She could have faked the sounds, but the smell would be hard to duplicate. What if she was seriously ill? What if she needed an ambulance?

An ambulance.

Brilliance strikes at the most unexpected times.

“Greer,” I called forcefully, “if you don't open this door, I'm going to call an
ambulance.
The paramedics will break it down.”

More spewing. Then “Go away!”

“I'll do it, Greer.”

“No—” gag “—you
won't.
”

“I'm heading to the phone right now—9-1-1. I am calling 911—”

“Stop!” The knob jiggled, and the door opened a little way.

Seeing Greer on her knees in front of the commode, looking wretched, I almost called my own bluff and summoned the medicos. She immediately started the barf-o-thon again, and I held her hair, washed her face when the spasms subsided, flushed and sprayed.

I'm a sympathy barfer. By the time I'd handled that situation, I was on the verge of retching myself.

“I have a migraine,” Greer moaned, and I believed her.

“I'm calling your doctor,” I said.

“No,” she protested. “I just need to take some medicine and lie down.”

I helped her upstairs to the sumptuous suite she'd once shared with Alex. Got her settled in the enormous round bed, brought her bottled water and her pills.

“Pull the drapes,” Greer groaned after gingerly swallowing a tablet and a sip of the water. “The light hurts my eyes.”

I complied. “I still think I should call your doctor—or take you to the emergency room.”

Greer shook her head. “Please, Mojo,” she whispered. “Just leave me alone. Let me sleep….”

Given her state of mind, and the trouble she was in, I was afraid to leave the migraine pills where she could get them. I dropped the small brown bottle into the pocket of my pantsuit jacket, took the phone receiver from the base on the bedside table and laid it near her hand. “I'll be in the guesthouse,” I said quietly. “Call if you need anything.”

Greer merely nodded, her eyes already closed.

“I'll look in on you in a little while.”

She nodded again.

I crept out, closing the bedroom door softly behind me.

Paused a moment or two in the hallway, grappling with my conscience. I wasn't going to get a better chance to search the place for any clues to the Shiloh secret, but what if Greer needed me, called the guesthouse and got no answer? The mansion was seriously big; she'd have no way of knowing I was within shouting distance.

Provided she had the strength to shout, after all that throwing up.

I dashed out to my place, hoping there wouldn't be any ghosts in residence—though I
was
getting a little concerned that Gillian hadn't put in an appearance since she'd popped out of Helen's double-wide the evening before.

One thing at a time,
I told myself.
The Damn Fool's Guide to Maintaining Sanity.
I toyed briefly with the idea of writing that one myself, despite a glaring lack of credentials.

The guesthouse was empty. Snatching up my phone, I hotfooted it back to Greer's.

She and Alex shared a “study” on the ground floor of Casa Pennington—a swank layout with a pair of matched antique desks, probably looted from some hacienda in Mexico, leather chairs and a wall of oak filing cabinets.

There were twin computers, one on each desk, and I headed for Alex's first, tapped in with the password he'd given me and found the file containing the bank account numbers we'd discussed. There were four of them, and I copied the numbers carefully onto a piece of monogrammed notepaper, folded it and tucked it into my pocket. I shifted to Greer's computer with some reluctance—I figured there might be evidence against Jack Pennington on Alex's hard drive, and I wanted to get to it before the police confiscated the whole works as part of their investigation. The trouble was, I didn't know how much time I had before Greer miraculously recovered from her migraine and caught me snooping.

She'd stored her password, just as I'd hoped, and I went straight to her e-mail, with only a mild pang of guilt, and scanned the senders' names for potential blackmailers.

Jolie's was there.

So was mine.

There were the usual generous offers from multi-level marketing companies and Internet porn providers.

And that was it.

The phone rang. For a second I didn't realize it wasn't the one I'd stuck in my pocket out in the guesthouse, on top of Greer's pill bottle. Nor was it the main line into the house, since it was muffled. No, the cheery little jingle came from the top drawer of the desk I was sitting at.