DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS (4 page)

“You’re going to bring him in and question him just based on something I think I saw for about half a second?”

Ethan assessed her. “You think I shouldn’t?”

“No. I mean, no, I don’t think you shouldn’t. I just—”

He waited.

She moistened her lips. “I don’t know if I could swear that the logo was Davis’s. I only saw a corner, maybe a little more. It did look like it, though.”

He didn’t comment. He just went on with his questioning. “So the killer, who had heard the elevator and wanted to get away, turned around enough that you could see a big gaudy belt buckle he was wearing?”

Laney shot him a suspicious glance, probably because of the tone of his voice. He hadn’t meant to let his skepticism show, but maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that she wondered if he believed her.

“Yes,” she said shortly.

“Why?”

“He didn’t say.”

Ethan pressed his lips together, partly in irritation, partly to hide his smile. “Why do you think?”

“I think he was wondering if he had time to shoot me again.”

“Hmm. Apparently he decided he didn’t.”

“Apparently.”

“So what happened next?”

“Like I told you, he ran out the door and the bellman came in and called the police—well, hotel security— for me.”

“Right,” Ethan said. “And why was that?”

“Why was what?” she echoed, genuinely puzzled.

“Why him? Why didn’t you call?” Ethan watched her. She was looking at her hands, and she seemed more at ease, now that they had left the subject of her father and Buddy Davis and were back to talking about what had happened.

“I was trying to get to the senator, to see if he was alive, so I yelled at the bellman to call.”

“Didn’t you have your phone with you?”

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t,” she said with exaggerated patience. “As I told the officer at the hotel, I’d left it on the computer table in the sitting room. I was trying to make myself get up and go back in there to get it when I heard the pop.”

“The pop?” Ethan knew what she was talking about, but he wanted to hear her tell it. He’d read the hotel reports from the hotel’s security guard and the first responding officer.

“You know, Detective, this might go a lot faster if you’d stop trying to trip me up. I’ve been over the pop I heard through the connecting door, too. I’m sure it’s in the first responding officer’s report.” She gestured toward the folder open in front of him.

“I’m not trying to trip you up. And yes, the officer mentioned the sound you heard. But I’m asking you the question. I’m going to be asking you about a lot of things you’ve already told other people.”

Her brows went up. “Yes, sir. Understood, sir,” she said. “I heard the pop, so I got up to check on the senator. Then I—”

“Hang on. What did you think it was?”

“The pop?” She shook her head.

“You had an opinion about what you thought it was. Tell me.”

“I’d rather not say,” she replied. “It’s not relevant.”

“You let me decide what’s relevant,” Ethan said. “You just tell me.”

She glared at him, but answered. “It was loud, but for a second I thought it might be a cork. Senator Sills enjoys a scotch now and then.”

Ethan took mental note of the wry tone of her voice. “Did you hear anything else?”

She nodded, then winced. “A thud, as if something had fallen.”

“And what did you think that was?”

“At the time I didn’t know. But obviously it was when the senator fell.”

“What time was that?”

“I’m not sure.” She paused. “Don’t the electronic locks on the rooms keep track of entries and exits by room number and time?” she asked.

Ethan smiled to himself. He liked the way she thought. Her attention to detail. His estimate of her level of intelligence kept going up. She was extremely smart. Irritatingly smart. Strangely enough, he liked that about her. “They can, but the hotel doesn’t have that function turned on. The security guard said it would be cost-prohibitive to hire enough people to handle the amount of data all the comings and goings would dump into the computer.”

“That’s too bad. I can’t imagine how the killer timed his attack on the senator so perfectly. I had just left the suite after making the last changes to the breakfast speech.”

“I was wondering the same thing,” Ethan replied evenly. He met her gaze.

She frowned. “You don’t—oh, come on,” she said, exasperated. “You don’t think I’m involved in this? That’s ridiculous. Senator Sills was my boss.”

Ethan shrugged, watching her closely. Truth was, he didn’t think she’d had anything to do with killing the senior senator. It was another attempt to catch her off guard. He wanted her rattled. Rattled and talking. “You surprised the killer, but he didn’t kill you. He left you alive, knowing you might be able to identify him.”

“He left me alive because someone was coming. But he knows I can’t identify him. He was covered from head to toe in black. He
shot me.
Why would he do that if I were involved?”

“Maybe
he
wasn’t there at all. Maybe you made him up.”

“Oh, give me a break. You cannot be serious.” She glared at him.

Ethan just watched her.

Her expression changed from irritation to surprise to frustration. She spread her hands. “Okay, then. I guess I’m getting the picture. So tell me, Detective. Am I under arrest? Should I have a lawyer? And don’t bother telling me that if I was innocent I wouldn’t need one. You might not think much of police shows on TV, but they do teach people a few things, like exercising their right to an attorney.”

Finally, she was agitated. Her cautious demeanor was cracked. Ethan was glad. The confident, controlled person he’d seen in the hotel room and who’d walked into the interview room as if it belonged to her was gone, and in her place was a woman who had at the very least witnessed a murder and whose protective wall was cracking, piece by piece. And he knew—he
knew
—that he was getting closer to what she was hiding.

“I wouldn’t dream of telling you that innocent people don’t need lawyers. But you aren’t under arrest. You are the victim of a crime and its only witness. You don’t need a lawyer. I don’t think you had anything to do with the senator’s death. I do, however, think you’re not telling me everything—”

“Why wouldn’t I tell you everything?” she interrupted, spreading her hands. “I have nothing to hide.”

“Really?” Ethan said, leaning back in his chair. “I think you do. I asked you before if your father’s relationship with Sills was the reason Sills hired you. You didn’t answer, but it’s true, isn’t it? The daughter of the infamous Elliott Montgomery, who lobbied for the Port of New Orleans Import/Export Council for over forty years, happens to be hired as Senator Darby Sills’s personal assistant? How likely is that?”

A muscle ticked in her jaw for an instant, then she took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. Then a little smirk quirked her lips. “Oh, come on, Detective
Delancey.
Nepotism has been a long and honored tradition in Louisiana. You of all people should know that. It has worked for generations without undue harm to anyone. Senator Sills was kind enough to let me intern with him for a year while I was getting my master’s in political science.” Her shoulders straightened. “He was pleased with my work, so he hired me. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Ethan gave her a hint of a smile. “Neither do I,” he said.

She raised her brows. “Then what was all that?”

“Just demonstrating how you aren’t telling me everything.” He spent a few moments perusing his notes, not that he needed to. He wanted to keep her hanging for a little while, to demonstrate that he had the upper hand. Finally, he asked, “Is there anything else about the killer that you noticed?”

“No. I don’t think so. The desk lamp was the only light, so the room was pretty dark. And of course he was in solid black.”

“Not solid black,” Ethan reminded her.

“No,” she said, looking at him assessingly. “You’re right. There was that belt buckle.”

“Why do you think a killer who worked so hard to hide himself would put on something as distinctive as a Buddy Davis silver belt buckle?”

Laney shook her head. “I don’t know, maybe to frame him.”

Excellent guess. “But you’re absolutely certain that’s what you saw? You would swear under oath that it was one of Buddy Davis’s solid silver belt buckles?”

“I told you, I’m not that certain. I thought the glimpse I got looked like one of them, but I can’t swear to it.”

“What
would
you swear to under oath?”

She shrugged. “I guess I’d say that I saw a large, oval silver belt buckle. I only saw it for a second and didn’t see the whole thing because the man’s shirt was covering it. I did see what looked like an engraved arc—possibly part of a circle, and an image inside the arc that looked like the edge of a crown. So if it wasn’t Buddy Davis’s Silver Circle belt buckle, it certainly bore a strong resemblance.”

“That’s about as precise a description as I’ve ever heard, even from experts,” Ethan said, and meant it. She was an excellent witness. Irritating, but excellent.

“As Kate Hepburn said to Spencer Tracy in
Desk Set,
‘never assume.’”

“What? Desk set?”

Laney waved her hand. “Never mind. My dad loved the really old movies and the older TV shows, so I know way too much about them.”

Ethan had never heard of the movie and he doubted seriously that it mattered, so he went on with his next question. “Describe what you did and what you saw when you crawled over to check on the senator.”

“I was hoping he’d done what I had—dived to the floor, hidden under the desk, something. But—” She shook her head and a shadow crossed her face. “He was dead.”

“Did you touch him?”

She nodded, pressing her lips together. Ethan noticed that her eyes shone with tears. “Yes. I turned him over to see where he’d been shot. But as I said before, his eyes were...dead.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I listened to see if I could hear him breathing, and I felt his neck, trying to find his carotid pulse. By that time the security guard was there. Almost no time later, the police officers showed up, and then you.” She spread her hands as if to show him that she had nothing else.

Ethan watched her thoughtfully, letting the silence stretch, as he had earlier. He waited to see if she’d break the silence this time, because, while he had no idea if the information she was guarding so closely had anything to do with the murder of Senator Sills, he knew with a hundred-percent certainty that she was still holding back.

After a few moments, she looked at her watch. “It’s after noon. I need to call the senator’s family. I have to tell them—”

“That’s been taken care of,” he said with a wave of his hand. She’d broken the spell of silence without revealing anything—again. She was good. He’d like to have her on his team in a fight.

“What is your precise position on Senator Sills’s staff?”

She fixed him with a frosty glare. “My
precise position
is personal assistant to Senator Sills.”

Ethan nodded and jotted “personal assistant”
on his pad. “And what are your duties as the senator’s personal assistant?”

If possible, the glare turned even colder. Had he sounded sarcastic?

“Pretty much what you’d expect. I wake him up every morning, make sure his meals are to his liking and on time. I type up his personal correspondence, update his social media pages, keep up with his appointment calendar and his committee schedules, and—”

“So you’re his secretary.”

Her shoulders stiffened. “No. He has a secretary. She works in Baton Rouge. I travel—traveled with him wherever he went.”

“Okay. You’re more of an administrator.”

“I suppose you could say that. I do a lot of administrative work. I also edit the memos and letters the secretary sends over for his signature, and often, I stamp them with his signature stamp. Especially all the congressional letters we send out in response to constituent problems.”

“You also travel with him and stay with him?”

Ethan hadn’t figured her shoulders could get any more stiff, but she managed it. “Many of my duties are last-minute. So yes, I generally will stay in an adjoining room near him in case he needs something in the middle of the night.”

“What kind of things did Senator Sills need in the middle of the night?”

Now she was becoming visibly angry. “Last night he worked on his speech until after eleven o’clock,” she said through gritted teeth. “So I didn’t finish typing the last revision until after midnight. Then—”

The door to the interview room opened and Ethan’s partner stepped inside, smiling in a friendly manner. “Afternoon, Ms. Montgomery. I’m Detective Dixon Lloyd.”

Elaine Montgomery gave Dixon a smile like nothing he’d seen from her yet. “Nice to meet you. Please call me Laney. You must be Good Cop, because Detective Delancey here is definitely Bad Cop.”

“You have no idea,” Dixon said.

At the same time, Ethan asked loudly, “What’s up, Dixon?”

Dixon handed him a file folder. “We got the report back on the weapon that killed Senator Sills. There’s a partial print on the barrel. Probably not enough for a positive ID. It could be marginally helpful along with other evidence.”

“Did they check it against Ms. Montgomery’s prints?”

Dixon nodded. “First thing. No match.”

“I didn’t touch the gun,” she said.

“And therefore your prints were not found on it,” Ethan said evenly.

“You want me to stay and play good cop?” Dixon asked, obviously noticing the tension between them.

“No,” Ethan said firmly.

At the same time, Laney said, “Yes.”

“Okay, I’m going,” Dixon said on a laugh, reaching for the doorknob. “Oh,” he said, reaching into his pocket and coming out with a piece of paper. “Here’s a note I was told to give to you.” He handed it to Ethan.

Ethan skimmed it. “Is he serious?” The note was from Commander Wharton. He wanted an in-person report from Ethan about the Whitley and Stamps interviews. “He should have the transcriptions on his desk by now.”