Frame Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 5) (21 page)

The man spoke, deferentially:

“Ms. Bannister?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Officer Peterson; this is my colleague Office McReynolds.”

“I’m happy to meet you.”

“Yes, ma’am. We’re––well, we need to ask you some questions. That is if you feel all right.”

“Yes. I’m all right.”

“Then,” said Jackson, “maybe we should all sit down.”

They all sat down.

There was silence for a time, and Nina, much to her own surprise, asked the first question:

“I have a question.”

The young male officer leaned forward, his hands folded upon the table:

“Yes, ma’am?”

“What the hell happened?”

Some smiles.

Jackson answered:

“Nina, as far as the fire department and the police department can now tell, it looks like someone put a bomb in Elementals.”

She tried to speak, but there was that tightness in the throat again.

That was going to come and go for a long time now, wasn’t it?

Yes, yes, it was.

“Why,” she was finally able to ask, “would anyone do that?”

“We don’t know, ma’am,” said the young woman.

“I thought, sitting there being examined, that it might have been something like a gas leak.”

Jackson:

“That was what everyone thought, at first. It’s an old building. But they got the fire out quickly. Good that the Fire House is only four blocks away. Anyway, the fire was out within ten minutes of the explosion. They found what was left of the…device.”

“What was it?”

“A plastic explosive of some kind. They’re analyzing it now.”

“And Elementals?”

Jackson smiled:

“It’s not that bad, Nina.”

“Oh, Jackson––I saw the flames pouring out…”

“No, no, the town got lucky. We still have our Elementals. The blast was all outwards, into the street. The front wall of Elementals is gone, but the rest of the store was untouched.”

“The garden?”

“Garden’s fine. All the displays are just the way they were.”

“Oh, thank God. Margot! Margot’s got to be told!”

Jackson smiled.

“I’ve taken care of that. I called her half an hour ago, at The Candles.”

“You woke her up?”

“Nina, it was eleven thirty.”

“Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten that we’re talking about Margot Gavin.”

“She’d barely gotten up for the day and was only on her third gin.”

“And tonic?”

“No, just gin. Anyway, the only thing she was really worried about was you.”

“Not Elementals?”

“I told her ninety-five percent of the place was untouched. She just said ‘Damn, with the insurance I’ve got, we could have rebuilt it in its entirety if it had been destroyed.’ She said, in fact, that she herself had thought about dynamiting it a hundred times, but didn’t have the courage.”

“Yes, that sounds like Margot.”

“Anyway, I assured her that you were fine. She’s coming down anyway. Probably be here tomorrow. But Nina…”

Jackson looked at the other officers in the room:

“About the bomb…”

“Yes, Jackson?”

“Well, there’s something that we’ve got to tell you…”

“Yes?”

“It’s something we’d all rather not talk about, but…”

“Go ahead.”

The male officer took a deep breath, then asked:

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to blow up Elementals?”

She shook her head:

“It’s a curio shop, for God’s sakes! Who’d want to blow up a curio shop? We sell clay pots! Who hates clay pots?”

Silence in the room.

Then, the same officer:

“Then…and I hate to ask this, but––then, do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt you, specifically? You or Miss Walker?”

“No! Carol is new in town, hardly known, and the nicest person anyone might want to meet. And as for me….”

Jackson:

“Nina, no one in Bay St. Lucy is more admired than you are. But––during your time as principal, is there someone you might have angered?”

“I––I got thrown out of a basketball game once.”

Jackson could not help smiling.

“I remember that.”

“You think the referee…”

“No.”

Silence again.

The wisps of inappropriate humor dissolved into the air.

And the young officer continued:

“The problem is this, ma’am. It appears that the bomb had been connected to a timing device they’d attached to the front door of the shop. It was set to go off a certain number of minutes after the front door opened.”

“The front door,” she said quietly, “was unlocked when I got there.”

Nods.

“They probably picked the lock to get in; then they set the bomb up and left; but they couldn’t relock the door.”

“Why,” asked Jackson, “did you go down there so late?”

“Patty Brewster called and said she’d seen a light on.”

“You didn’t call the police?”

“I didn’t think it was worth calling the police. I thought I’d probably just forgotten to turn off the light.”

The young officer continued:

“This is the hard part, Ms. Bannister: the bomb was planted under the front desk. Probably, the plan was, at a specific time tomorrow morning, one of the people responsible for this would call Elementals at precisely that time…”

“…and I’d answer the phone.”

“You or Ms. Walker.”

“And then the bomb would go off.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So the bomb wasn’t meant to destroy Elementals.”

“No, Ms. Bannister.”

“It was meant specifically to kill one of us.”

Jackson leaned forward and said, quietly:

“You, Nina. It was meant to kill you.”

She stared at him:

“How can you be sure it was meant to kill me and not Carol?”

“Because Carol was already supposed to be…I mean, a short time ago, at your place…”

“What?”

Silence in the room.

What were they not telling her?

“Where’s Carol?”

Then Jackson rose and said:

“Come on, Nina. There are some things you have to know.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
 
THE BIG UGLY GOON

Nina spent the night at Jackson Bennett’s house.

It was there, sitting on Jackson’s couch, flames crackling in the fireplace—all right, it was only forty three degrees, but certainly that was cold enough for a fire, especially if one had a fireplace—it was there, a little after two AM, that she learned of the events that had taken place only a little over an hour earlier, in her house.

There she learned that a man of unknown identity or motive, apparently a well-dressed man by all accounts, had knocked on the door, been let inside by Carol, uttered two incomprehensible (at least to Tom Broussard, who, except for Carol, was the only one there to hear them) words, taken a 38 caliber pistol out of its shoulder holster, and pointed it directly at Carol.

There she had learned that Tom Broussard, good Tom, Tom who would never be able to acquire a table at Sergio’s or be considered one of the better people of Bay St. Lucy, or even really one of the
people
of Bay St. Lucy, had, by his own words, “done what I could.”

She could imagine the scene.

She remembered Tom, at what must have been the exact same location just inside her door (Why were fights always breaking out in her shack? But then, why were murders always breaking out in Bay St. Lucy?)—remembered Tom almost throwing out of her window one of Eve Ivory’s ‘security men.’

But this man had, apparently, been tougher.

Better trained.

For he’d placed Tom in what must have been a kind of judo hold (‘I couldn’t move! He had me!”), and held a switchblade knife against his throat (“I could feel it beginning to cut me—I knew I was dead”).

At which time, Carol Walker––shy, meek, short, soft-spoken, from a farm in Georgia, just north and east of Athens—had picked up the gun and blown the man’s head open.

These things Nina had learned.

Then Jackson had given her a strong sleeping pill—two actually—and she had lain on the couch, watching the fire, trying not to imagine what happened when a man’s head was blown open—until the world went away.

Now it was nine AM the following morning.

She was sitting in one of the interview rooms of police headquarters, Moon Rivard at the desk across from her, a secretary of some sort seated beneath one of the windows, taking advantage of white morning light filtering through the blinds to set up her computer—and she was sipping a cup of coffee that tasted better than it had any right to, given that this was not Carol’s Cup or Morning Wake Up!, but jail.

Or at least one of the rooms adjacent to jail.

Pre-jail as it was.

Jackson Bennett, who’d driven her here, was also seated a foot or so beside her.

He was her Atticus Finch.

He had been there all night, sitting beside her.

And he would be here this morning.

“Where is Tom now?” he was asking.

Moon rose and took two steps toward the door, then peered down the corridor.

“He should be here anytime now.”

“Did he spend the night at home?”

“Yeah. He insisted on it.”

“Is he,” asked Nina, “all right?”

Moon nodded:

“As far as anybody can tell. It must have been a close thing though.”

Silence for a time.

Then Nina asked one of the questions that was going to be asked inevitably, anyway.

“Moon. Who was this guy?”

A shake of the head.

“We don’t know anything.”

“But he must have had…”

“He had nothing on him at all. No ID of any kind. No credit card. No driver’s license. He was just a blank slate of a human being. Even the vehicle he used has no identifying marks, at least none that we’ve been able to trace.”

Jackson:

“Fingerprints? He must have had fingerprints. Please don’t tell me he somehow burned them off.”

“No, he didn’t. His fingerprints are just as clear as you’d want. They just aren’t any good for anything.”

Jackson persisted:

“Why not?”

“We’ve sent those prints everywhere we know. The FBI. Interpol. All state and local agencies. All national data banks. The man clearly has no record.”

“At least not in this country.”

“And not anywhere else in the world, as far as we can tell.”

Nina’s turn.

Another of the inevitable questions.

Did she really want to ask it?

No, but…

“Moon, this attempt on Carol’s life and the bombing. Do you think they’re related?”

“Yes, Ms. Bannister, I do. We all do. It’s a scary thing, but you need to be aware of it.”

“Go on.”

He nodded, slowly:

“This man’s job was to assassinate both you and Carol Walker. He probably had just left the bomb in Elementals when you arrived.”

“He saw me?”

“That’s our thinking now. But if he did see you, he also saw the explosion, and knew that you were all right.”

“My God.”

She could feel herself beginning to shake.

The thought that this man had seen her go into the store; could have done anything to her while she was there…

“Why,” she found herself asking, “didn’t he just kill me while I was lying there on the sidewalk?”

Another shake of Moon’s shaggy head:

“Too many people arriving.”

“All right. So when I couldn’t get me…”

“He knew that Ms. Walker was staying at your place. He decided that, if he couldn’t get both of you…”

“He would at least get one.”

“Yes. That’s the way it looks now.”

“If his plan had worked right…”

“You would have been dead the next morning, a few minutes after you’d opened the door—and the moment you answered the phone call, which would have been placed at the exact time the bomb had been set to go off. Then he’d have driven over, and…”

“…and Tom wouldn’t have been there.”

“No, ma’am. He wouldn’t have.”

Moon took another step forward into the doorway and said, quietly:

“He’s here now though.”

And he was.

Nina sprang up almost instantaneously when he appeared in the doorway, which seemed small given his frame. She buried her face in some part of his stomach, and for a time was unable to ascertain whether the shaking in her head came from her heart or his bowels.

Finally he moved her some inches away and peered down:

“Hey, teacher.”

“Tom…”

He shrugged:

“I’m in trouble again.”

“Tom...”

Was that all she could say?

Apparently.

He continued to smile through his great, black, tangled, shaggy mane:

“Another fight.”

She could only laugh, foolishly.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

He nodded.

“Just can’t seem to straighten up. You’re going to suspend me, I guess.”

She shook her head, trying not to cry any harder than she already was.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.”

Then, impulsively:

“Tom, you saved her.”

He shook his head:

“I don’t know.”

“You may have saved both of us. If you hadn’t been there, then when I got home…”

“I don’t know exactly what I did.”

Moon interrupted.

“That’s what we need to find out, Tom. We need to get your statement. A man’s dead. This may be a difficult time for you, but…”

“No, I understand. I’ll tell you the whole thing as well as I remember it.”

“Ok, let’s all sit down.”

They did so.

The stenographer beneath the window was working, typing now.

“I’d walked over to Nina’s place from my own. The truck was down at Penn’s on the wharf.”

“Why did you go to Nina’s in the first place?”

Tom smiled:

“I wanted to buy a painting. Kind of as an early shower present for Penn. I still do want to buy a painting, Nina.”

She shook her head:

“You’ll never buy another painting from me, Tom Broussard.”

“No?”

“Of course not. They’re all on the house from this moment on.”

“Even the visceral ones?”

“Especially the visceral ones.”

“Go on, Tom,” Moon said, quietly.

“All right. Well, Carol answered the door.”

“Did she seem upset or nervous?”

He shook his head:

“No, she was fine. She asked me to come in and said Nina had gone down to Elementals. Something about a light being on.”

“Yeah, we know all about that. Now, that is.”

“So I told her I wanted to buy a painting but none were hanging in the store. I’d been over there that morning.”

“Right. Keep going.”

“She said there was a painting in the bedroom, and maybe I could buy it. I went in to look. The painting was propped against the bed. I’d just bent down to pick it up, when I heard a knock on the door. That seemed a little strange to me, I don’t know why. Anyway, I put the painting on the bed, turned around, and walked out into the living room; all the time listening to the door open and this deep voice say something.”

“Say what?”

“Sounded like two words.”

“What two words, Tom?”

He shook his head:

“Damned if I know. Looking back, it must have been another language.”

“And you have no idea what language?”

“No idea at all.”

“Did Ms. Walker answer?”

“No, she didn’t have time. By the time I’d reached the doorway, they were both standing in the middle of the room, and this guy was pulling back his suit jacket. I’ve seen my share of guns before, and I knew this one was a .38 automatic. I saw him take it out and point it, but then…”