Frosted Shadow, a Toni Diamond Mystery: Toni Diamond Mysteries (18 page)

“So, you didn’t know Nicole Freedman.” She paused, glancing sideways at him. “Did you?”

“Lord, no.” He shuddered. “Those makeup women terrify me.” Then, realizing to whom he was speaking, he added, “Present company excepted, of course.”

She smiled, feeling unaccountably better now she had someone to talk to who really understood what she was going through. “We’re not so bad once you get to know us.”

“Especially one on one.” He turned his head just so and a lock of poetically Irish hair fell artistically across his brow. If her mom could see him coming on to Toni she’d say, ‘Well, ain't he just the tom-cat's kitten?’

Even if she’d had any interest in this guy, all she had to do was remember what happened to the last woman he was intimate with and her interest was squashed.

“They searched my room, you know. Went through my things.”

She imagined unknown cops pawing through her stuff and was horrified. “How awful.” Then, because she always spoke when she should shut up said, “Did they find anything?”

“No. But I’ve agreed to voluntarily hand over some correspondence. It’s obvious her husband killed her, and her love for me is the motive, so the letters are evidence. Amy had a lovely way with words. She wrote some passionate letters and cards as well as emails. I couldn’t bear to destroy them. Horrible to think of strangers reading them out of context.” He stared into his drink. Brooding. “I had led the police to believe we’d only just met here. Trying to be a gentleman in my own hopeless way.” Or protect himself from suspicion?

“So you didn’t just meet?”

“No. We had in fact enjoyed a passionate, physical relationship. I believe she misunderstood my intentions. I’m a man of the world, Toni. I travel a great deal and meet a number of interesting women.” He glanced up, let his gaze travel lower than her face. “Such as yourself. But it’s not in my nature to settle, or to tie myself to one woman. She misunderstood. Had already started divorce proceedings.”

“She left her husband for you?” Poor, poor Amy.

“No. She left her husband because the marriage was over. I was a convenient excuse and I like to think I helped her get over the rough emotional ground.”

“I’m guessing she didn’t see it that way?”

“You’d make a good detective, Toni,” he said with a slight smile. “No, she did not. She was angry and upset and the nights we’d planned together here never happened.” He shook his head. “She was never in my room, which was at least helpful in keeping me from being arrested for her murder.”

“Are the police making you stay in the area?”

“No. After the mystery readers conference ends tomorrow, I’m free to leave.” He took another sip of his drink. “I intend to stay however. It’s not every day that a true crime writer is on the scene for a double murder. And implicated in one of them.”

“Sounds like you’ve got your next book.” And she had a feeling more strangers would end up reading poor Amy’s impassioned letters.

He shrugged. “I didn’t ask for this to happen, but I’d be a fool not to take advantage.”

“But what about Amy’s—“

“Damn. My least favorite cop just walked in.” He drained the drink. He rose, gave her a practiced come to bed look. “I have a copy of my book upstairs if you’d like to see what I mean about coincidence?”

Smooth as a greased pig. “Thanks. But I’ve had all the excitement I can stand for one day.”

He took the brush off in good humor. “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Toni. I’m in Room 1213 if you change your mind.” He held out his hand and she shook it.

From the other direction, Luke was approaching. He gave Joseph the barest hint of a curt nod before taking the seat on the other side of Toni.

He didn’t waste time on greetings. “How do you know Mandeville?”

“I don’t. He was hitting on me.”

“Huh.”

“I see the hand cream’s working for you.”

He shook his head at her. “Why would you think that?”

“Because your hands don’t have dirt under the nails. And the skin’s smoother.”

“Maybe I didn’t work on my truck last night.”

And maybe she’d had a full night’s sleep. “Why can’t you just admit that our products are great?”

“Because I know you. You’ll try and sell me a pedicure set for men.”

He looked as tired as she felt. “We don’t sell pedicure sets for men, silly.” She glanced at him from under her lashes. “But there’s a
Moisturizer for Him
that would –”

“No!”

She shrugged. One day he’d learn to love his skin. Maybe not today, but one day. “Joseph Mandeville said something interesting just now.”

“I doubt it.”

She ignored the sarcasm. “He quoted Holmes, saying that ‘When the probable has been excluded, the improbable remains.’”

“Yeah? I got a quote for you. ‘Everybody lies.’ Especially Mandeville.”

She felt as though she’d been smacked. It was at that moment that she began to see a glimmer of possibility in the darkness of puzzlement.

“Everybody lies.” She leaned forward toward Luke. “If we stop believing everything that can’t be proven, then it all looks different, doesn’t it?”

He looked at her as though she hadn’t been getting enough sleep lately. Which was true. “What exactly are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about things we’ve been assuming that could be completely the opposite.”

He scooped peanuts out of the communal bowl on the counter in front of him and popped one in his mouth. “You got something you want to share with the rest of the class? We can use all the fresh ideas you’ve got.”

“Hmm? Oh, no. I was thinking about business. My business, I mean, not yours. Sorry.”

The bartender came by. “What can I get you?”

He ordered a beer, motioned to her drink with his brows raised but she shook her head. His badge gleamed on his belt as he turned.

He acknowledged the beer with nod, took a drink, all the while keeping his gaze on her. “I can see the gears turning.”

“If you stop believing everything that can’t be proven, things can start to look different.”

“You got any specific things in mind?”

“You can’t prove there’s a connection between Amy Neuman and Nicole Freedman. It’s improbable that the murders have nothing to do with each other, but not impossible. And there are some things I’m going to check on. Lady Bianca stuff.”

He didn’t look entirely convinced but neither did he look as though he were going to push her, which was just as well. The notion that had smacked her was still vague and she wasn’t anywhere near sure that she was right.

“Any luck finding those threatening emails?”

He rubbed a hand over his face. He was as tired as she was, she thought. “Nothing on her laptop here. Henderson’s driven to her home to see if there’s anything there.”

“Henderson drove all that way?”

“He’s meeting some tech guys there, but we wanted someone from our department on scene to check out Nicole’s home.”

“Isn’t it awfully far?”

“About a four hour drive.”

“Huh. I never knew Nicole and I lived so close together.”

“All those tea parties you missed.”

Since she couldn’t possibly explain that she was going to miss Nicole in a strange way, she didn’t bother answering.

“What did you think of the emails as Melody described them?”

“The word creepy springs to mind.”

He shifted on his seat to get a better view of her face. “The wording.”

“We’re assuming Melody remembers that one email word for word?”

“Seemed like she was repeating something she’d memorized, yeah.”

He sipped his beer and glanced over the room, as a reflex action she bet, who was here? Where might potential trouble start? She wondered if he ever truly relaxed.

He asked, “Did Nicole have a boyfriend?”

“You asked Melody that this morning. She said no.”

“Now I’m asking you. You see things other people miss.”

She was absurdly flattered by the compliment, which seemed more sincere because of the casual way he said it. Like he was merely relating a fact.

“I don’t think so. She got divorced a few years back and as far as I know her heart belonged to Lady Bianca.”

“What about her body?”

There was a silent ping in her mind as the obvious truth hit her. “She had sex the night she died, didn’t she?”

“Why would you think that?” He watched her face.

Once more her mind flipped back to finding the woman dead. She replayed the scene. Again. “She wasn’t wearing panty hose. I noticed when I pushed her knees and ankles together.” The sound of tinkling piano keys intruded. The nightly pianist was starting his first set off with
The Girl from Ipanema
. “And when I smoothed her skirt, I didn’t feel a panty line.” She gulped a little wine. “Do you think whoever she slept with killed her?”

He shifted in his seat. “I think you should be careful about spreading these opinions of yours.”

“I wouldn’t –”

“And of getting too friendly with Mandeville.”

“Mandeville? But he –”

“How many men do you see around the hotel, Toni? It’s a sea of estrogen.”

“Okay, Mandeville was sleeping with Amy Neuman.” At his look she rolled her eyes. “He told me. But he didn’t even know Nicole.”

Luke popped another peanut in his mouth, his eyes steady on hers. “We only have his word for that. He likes to pick up women in bars.”

“I turned him down.” And exactly why had she been so eager to tell him that?

He glanced around the bar again and his face relaxed into a grin. He nodded in recognition to an extremely colorful older woman sitting at one of the round tables for four with a much more conventional looking senior. She raised her glass to him. Some amber-colored liquor. Scotch maybe.

She spoke to her friend and then motioned them over. Luke glanced at her. “Do you mind if we join them?”

Since when were she and Luke a
we
?

He introduced her to the colorful woman whose name was Miss Barnes, “Call me Helen,” and her friend Betty Tait. The pair of them were with the mystery writers conference.

“Helen, you were an English teacher I believe?”

She nodded. “For forty years. Everything from remedial composition to advanced English lit.”

“I’m interested in what you think of this wording in an email, hypothetically, of course.”

“Of course.” She leaned forward. All three women did, in fact.

He quoted, “A person like you doesn’t deserve to live.”

Her brown eyes snapped to his and Toni immediately got that hot, sick feeling like she’d forgotten to do her homework and was about to be nailed. She even held a pencil in her hand and rolled it between her fingers as though getting ready to tear apart an essay. “That’s it? No salutation? No closing?”

“That’s it.”

She blinked slowly and the iridescent green shadow on her lids glinted like wrinkled opals. When she opened her eyes she said, “Interesting phrasing for a threat. Passive construction. Vague subject. Ends with an infinitive.” She swirled her drink and then took a sip. They all waited. “Back in the day, if a school kid had a problem with another kid he might scrawl, ‘You die’ on his locker. ‘I’ll get you’, and then refer to him by some vicious, socially-demeaning epithet. You know the ones.”

“I can guess.”

Her jaw worked up and down. “Angry, visceral, blunt nouns, active verbs. This is almost at a distance. Polite even. Certainly unusual. I’m no psychiatrist, though after forty years of teaching high school I feel like one. It could be this person’s a foreigner so their English is learned from a textbook. Or they are very uncomfortable with their anger, so they try and distance themselves from it. Passive aggressive.”

Luke nodded.

“I can’t even tell if it’s a male or a female. But when those types blow, they tend to make a big mess.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Detective, is that your strongest clue?” Helen sounded worried as well she might. Toni noticed she was wearing one of the
No, I don’t want a Lady Bianca makeover
buttons on her forest green cardigan. Even so, Toni adored her on sight. She was like the funhouse mirror version of a sweet old lady. She smoked, based on the nicotine stains on her fingers and her teeth, she drank, she wore the most bizarre color palette of make up Toni’d ever seen, and she’d stuck a black bow in her red wig. “You won’t solve a murder with one email.”

He smiled at the extraordinarily colorful woman. “Miss Barnes. What I need is some help from your fictional friends.”

She chuckled, a deep-chested sound that veered away from a coughing fit at the last second. “Holmes, or Lord Peter Whimsey or Miss Marple would have the mystery wrapped up by now, the killer confessed and the tea on to boil. You’re sadly behind schedule.”

“But the author would obligingly leave a trail of clues for the plodding gumshoe to follow.”

She shook her head and an aviary of bright birds hanging from her ears took flight. “Ah, don’t forget the absence of clues, Detective.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Silver Blaze?”

“Very good. The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” She nodded at him approvingly.

“I feel like a toad in a dryer trying to figure out what you two are talking about,” Toni said, looking from one to the other.

“Sherlock Holmes.” Helen Barnes explained in her English teacher way. Again with the Holmes. “One of his most famous cases. A vital clue was the dog that didn’t bark when it should have.”

The other three at the table all had that reminiscent look people get when they share a memory. Toni figured she just looked confused. “Why didn’t it bark?”

“Because the dog knew the villain. So it had no reason to bark. A vital clue and a famous one because, of course, sometimes what’s not present is as significant as what is.”

“You mean, no clue can be a clue?”

“Exactly.”

“Wow. It’s kinda like one of my favorite sayings to my sales reps. ‘A No isn’t a No until the potential customer says that word. You’d be amazed at how rarely women say no. They’ll give excuses like “I’m too busy,” or “I don’t wear much make-up,” which are all great openers for a motivated sales person to turn that excuse into a sale. Imagine using that same technique to solve a murder.”