Death of a Hot Chick (22 page)

Okay, so it took fifteen minutes to get
there. They’d started eating pizza without me.

“
Where were you?” Kaye
demanded.

“
Is Teddy coming?” I asked.

Kaye said, “You’re just going to waltz in
here and not tell us where you’ve been? I went by the boat, and you
weren’t there.”

“
Nope. I guess Teddy isn’t
coming.”

“
Got two pieces left,” Finley said as
she popped the last of the pizza into her microwave.

“
If you must know, I was on a job
where Mr. Joline warned me about living on his daughter’s boat. I
wanted to find out if he could do that. But that lawyer of yours
ducked out a back door while I waited for an hour.”

“
Mr. Joline? Where did you see
him?”

“
If we’re gonna get any business done,
let her eat, okay?” Finley said as she served up a paper plate with
the heated pizza. “Pepsi, iced tea, or water. Out of
beer.”

Which was a surprise. “Pepsi,” I said and
helped myself. “Glad you saved some pizza.” Kaye rolled her eyes
and shrugged, but didn’t say another word. I took shameful
advantage, chewing each bite and looking at anything but her
steaming face. I realized, also surprisingly, that Finley’s kitchen
was not cluttered with papers, books, clothes, and the kind of toys
that involve ingenuity and dexterity. I remembered her apartments
of years ago. Cluttered but homey. A box of spare parts on the
kitchen table vying with a loaf of bread. A glass waiting to be
washed. A puzzle bottle lying on its side with several twisted
metal pieces in various stages of rescue. Finley always had some
game in progress.

Not today. She’d cleared the decks for
action, evidently in honor of Kaye, for it surely wasn’t because of
my visit. Instead, a bowl of wrapped butterscotch candies sat front
and center on the table. Assorted napkins accompanied the bowl. And
that empty pizza box sat next to the microwave.

“
Yo,” Finley said as I took my last
bite. She pulled out a chair and plunked down. “Now that we’re all
here, have I got a trap for you guys. Listen up. I’ve got the goods
on Brandon. You see, I’ll get in his face and tell him that Nicole
was here that night just before he killed her. She told me she was
meeting him at the marina, and that he’d threatened to kill
her.”

Kaye took advantage as well. “Really, Cyd.
You should have asked me. Jonathan would have seen you, I’m sure.
He probably forgot your name.”

I ignored Kaye and asked Finley, “She did?
Nicole actually said that?”

“
Doesn’t matter. He’ll believe me,
’cause he’s guilty as sin, and he as much as said nobody could
stand her. I’ll throw in some descriptive language, like, ‘she aced
me out too.’ Not true, but he’ll believe that. Then I’ll give him a
choice. Admit it to me, or I’ll go to the cops. And you two will be
listening from somewhere out of sight. How’s that for a trap?” she
asked.

“
For one thing, he’s smart enough to
know admitting murder to anybody wouldn’t be a good choice,” I said
before I rolled up the paper plate and consigned it to a waste
basket.

“
It’s an interesting concept,” Kaye
said. “However, our trap must catch the real guilty one. And,
despite what you think, we haven’t agreed that Brandon is the
killer.”

“
Okay, what did you two decide before
I got here?” I asked.

Kaye answered. “We discussed my work with
Mr. Joline’s charity. Finley hadn’t known I was doing it for
Nicole.”

Finley grabbed a Pepsi and opened it. She
took a long drink and finally said, “Like I said, she knew enough
already.”

“
But did she have any proof? Did she
leave any records with you?”

“
No papers. No records. Nothing except
clothes. And you aren’t going to toss her stuff just out of
curiosity. I sent it all to her parents.”

“
You can see the problem,” Kaye told
me. “I truly believe that Nicole’s situation with her father is
behind her murder. And, we must learn what she found out. But how
can we?”

“
Hey, it’s over,” Finley said. “Her
dad will get his stock back and nobody will stop him. Nicole did
her thing and I did mine. She lost. She’s gone.”

I watched their verbal jousting.

“
Then what are we even doing here?”
Kaye asked. “You don’t care if we find her killer, do
you?”

“
Hey, lady fuss-budget, you wanna chop
down her dad—that’s your thing. Getting her killer—that’s my
thing.”

Kaye hesitated, then said, “When I first
knew Nicole, she was withdrawn, almost as if she did not want to be
noticed. Was she always like that?”

“
Didn’t we have this conversation at
your house?”

I twisted my bottle of Pepsi and tried to
ignore their rising anger. But Kaye kept needling Finley. Not the
way to go, I could tell her.

Kaye must have sensed that because she
switched subjects. “Have you been to the butterfly garden in
Queen’s Circle?”

“
So?”

“
Is that a yes?” Kaye asked. Finley
shrugged again, so Kaye added, “You probably know all about it. How
Nicole set it up, how she called it the Garden of Gethsemene. Do
you know why?”

Finley sipped her Pepsi. “What’s that got to
do with anything?”

“
I’ve often wondered why that name.
She liked to sit there—she said it renewed her spirit. But, in
Christian tradition, the Garden of Gethsemene was where Judas
betrayed his spiritual father.”

“
Oh, yeah. You got symbolism up the
kazoo. But Nicole’s dead, not her father.”

“
If she confronted him before her
death, she wouldn’t necessarily take him there. Can you visualize
any scenario that would bring him to the marina for a
meeting?”

“
You want to trap him at the marina,
go ahead.”

The situation obviously needed a new entry.
“I’ve been thinking of a way to trap Chester.” I chugged some Pepsi
and waited for a response.

“
Yes, we must have traps for them
all.” Kaye pulled a bunch of paper out of her humongous bag. “Cyd,
you were right, Chester wasn’t killed in that auto crash. I’ve
researched each of our three suspects. We either do three traps, or
we choose a venue frequented by all three. I’ve narrowed it down to
these areas of Smith Harbor.”

“
A map? Ain’t that a flash,” Finley
said.

“
We must not rush into this as we
might scare our perp away,” Kaye said as she unfolded a second map.
“Now, this one could signify an excellent listening
post.”

I thought, “Perp?” but said, “Kaye, you
don’t have any traps, do you?”

“
Oh, but I do. I actually have two
possibilities for Mr. Joline. The first would involve my contacts
with the legal profession. It may be possible to trace the records
of a particular donation to see where it goes. Could be
revealing.”

Finley asked, “And how long have you been
looking for this elusive evidence?”

I said, “And what makes you so sure that
lawyer wants to see you again? He didn’t see me, and I’m supposed
to be his client.”

Kaye shrugged. “There are public records
open to all. I’m sure I can dig into Mr. Joline’s records through
my volunteer job with his charity. I’ll find the evidence of theft
in his records, then we turn him over to the police with the hint
that he’s the killer. They have methods to make one talk.”

“
Oh, send him to some third world
country to a secret prison where they torture the truth out of
him?” Finley asked.

“
The theft will put him
away.”

Finley snorted. “White collar crime. A year,
maybe two.”

“
And he still has everything he
inherited from Nicole to pay for the best lawyer, so he won’t even
get that,” I added.

“
So, what do you have to
offer?”

I said, “Maybe we could find out how
much he wants
Snapdragon
. I
can offer its use for his charity, but I’ll ask for all kinds of
certification, papers to sign. One of them is his confession,
hidden under a lot of other papers. He’ll get so confused, or
eager, that he’ll sign them all. There’s our proof.”

Finley snorted. “Uncle Ed would no more sign
a paper without reading it than he’d leap off the top of a ten
story building.”

“
Cyd, a tricked signature is not
proof. Such a signature is not allowable evidence under any
law.”

I said, “None of our plans for those two
will work. We’re trying to trick a couple of guys who are smarter
than we are. The only possibility is Chester. If Nicole could trick
him into giving her his boat, which it now turns out he didn’t want
to give her, why can’t we trick him into admitting he killed her?
He’s definitely the type to act before thinking. If his idea of
clever action is to kill Nicole so he can get her boat, he has a
problem.”

“
Good thinking,” Kaye said, rather
sarcastically, I thought. “What is your trap?”

“
We set him up inside the boat, and
we’d have a cell phone set for video watching him. So why does he
want the boat? Has anyone thought of that? I mean, he had the boat
for years and never paid any attention to it.
Evidently.”

Finley said, “Old buddy, you don’t know a
hell of a lot about cell phones, do you?”

“
Won’t work?”

“
Nope.”

“
I have a second plan for Mr. Joline,”
Kaye said. “I could invite him to the academy as a guest lecturer
on charitable giving, and running a charity. I would supply
questions to the students, all of them leading—or most of them.
Example: ‘What percentage of the total take does a management
company earn?’ ‘What are the tax problems or advantages?’ ‘Does
every donation go into the same fund, or do you maintain separate
accounts for each charity?’ And of course, the shocker: ‘Why didn’t
your daughter work with you?’”

“
And, after all those questions, Uncle
Ed says, ‘Sorry, kids, I killed my daughter.’ I don’t think
so.”

Kaye said, “In the meantime, I do have an
all-inclusive trap planned. We’ll leave those to last. Cyd, do you
have one for Brandon?”

“
Sure,” I mumbled. “Except...why isn’t
it possible to use a cell phone to video.”

“
For starters, who’s there to turn it
on, to aim it, to turn it off? And if it’s hidden behind something,
it can’t see anything but whatever it’s hidden behind.”

“
Which is why my plan is better,”
Finley said. “Real people, with more hiding room to overhear a real
confession. Like I said, I don’t believe Uncle Ed is the killer,
but my idea is better than yours. Similar to catching the real
killer. Invite him over. Maybe invite my aunt as well. He wouldn’t
suspect a trick. Auntie falls asleep after a couple of drinks, then
I start in on Uncle. Tell him a few choice facts that I heard from
Nicole. Accuse him of killing her to get back control of his
company. He’ll naturally want to kill me, so you two will be here
to save my ever-loving hide.”

“
So, you set yourself up to be killed
one way or the other and Kaye and I rush in to save you. Does that
go for Chester too? How will you get him over here?”

“
I’ll sic you on him. See, you tell
him I’ve got all the necessary papers, you bring him here, and we
pop the accusation.”

“
He doesn’t kill. He burns
things.”

“
Yeah, right.”

“
We are not getting anywhere,” Kaye
said. “What’s the use of all this?”

“
Oh, I don’t know,” Finley said. “How
about advertise in the newspaper. One thousand dollars to the
person who proves the identity....”

“
Hey,” I shouted. “The newspaper! We
do use the newspaper. This Sunday. It’s the perfect trap. Won’t
make a bit of difference who’s the guilty one. We’ll catch the
killer Sunday night. And I know
exactly
how we’ll do it.”

Chapter 17

I caught the look that passed between Kaye
and Finley. “Another addle-brained, nit-wit idea,” it seemed to
say.

“
No really. We will catch the killer
on Sunday. Teddy’s writing an article for
The Orbit
about people who live on boats. She
adds a few words to her article, the killer reads the paper, he’ll
come to kill Lizzie, and we’ll be there to catch him.”

“
Run that by me again,” Finley said.
“What is this with Teddy?”

“
Yes,” Kaye said. “And the newspaper?
You may have a kernel of an idea, but the time is much too short
for proper planning. How about next week.”

“
No,” Finley said.

“
The article will be in Sunday’s
paper, whether she changes the words or not. I’d better call right
away.”

“
It’s too soon. We’ve done no
planning,” Kaye said.

But I had pushed the final number and
immediately got Teddy’s message center. “This is Cyd. Can you still
add a few words to the boat article? Call me, no matter how
late.”

“
Cyd, we haven’t discussed this at
all. I said it has possibilities, but this is too fast.”

I ignored Kaye and said, “We get Doug
Yarnell’s help. I mean, we do need someone official. When the
killer comes after Lizzie the police will be there to arrest
him.”