Killer Getaway (21 page)

 

Chapter 25

H
OLLY WAS HOME,
packing to spend the rest of the weekend at The Breakers, when we got back to her house.

“Everything's perfect with Howard!” she told us. “And look at this.” She pulled up the Indianapolis society column on her phone, on which the top story was Dawnelle Stewart's engagement to a twenty-­five-­year-­old backup quarterback for the Green Bay Packers.

“Dawnelle's totally out of the picture, and Howard completely understands about J. D. and Scooter,” she said happily, grabbing her Celine handbag. “And everyone's invited for dinner at the steak house at The Breakers tonight. Seven p.m.!”

I looked longingly at the pool, wondering whether I'd finally be able to jump in this afternoon.

“Holly, do you think I could come back down in March . . . just for a long weekend?” I asked Holly. “Maybe without Bootsie, Joe, and Sophie? No offense,” I added to Bootsie.

“I already got you a ticket,” Holly told me, waving away my protests that I'd pay my own way. “Don't get upset, I have about four million frequent flyer miles.

“Plus,” she added, “I don't want to be all alone down here in March, especially since I'll be spending three weeks in February with Howard in Indianapolis. Dawnelle might be engaged to an NFL player, but that doesn't mean I'm taking any chances.”

A
T 4:00 P.M.,
I dove into the pool, while Waffles lounged on a chaise nearby. At 5:00, Bootsie waved good-­bye.

“I'm meeting Brian the Zoning Guy for mojitos!” she told me. “After all, I did promise him. See you at the steakhouse!”

T
HE
F
LAGLER
S
TEAKHOUSE
was paneled with lots of candles and gorgeous ocean views, perfect for a perfect-­last-­night-­in-­Florida dinner.

“I'll have the artichoke hearts, the crab Louis, the dumplings—­actually, we'll have two of all the starters,” Bootsie told the waitress.

She looked around the table, which included Brian the Zoning Guy, who she'd brought along to dinner, and who was currently talking to Sophie about why there wasn't a Versace boutique right in Magnolia Beach.

Adelia and Gerda were to my right, hatching a plan for Gerda to stay on in Adelia's guest room through April. Gerda would help Adelia and Ozzy with odd jobs and some light Pilates classes. “Then I move back to Pennsylvania in the spring,” Gerda told her new employer. “I think Sophie needs me. I probably move back in with her, maybe get her boyfriend to work out more, too.” My eyebrows shot up at this news. A summer with Gerda was probably not what Joe had been envisioning in the farmhouse he and Sophie were renovating so beautifully.

“Should I order for everyone?” Bootsie asked and, without waiting for an answer, started listing what seemed to be most of the contents of the menu to the aproned server. “Okay, steaks. We'll have the strip, the T-­bone, the tomahawk, and a ­couple of filets. Let's do some veal Milanese and a ­couple of lobsters, too—­maybe two three-­pounders?”

After adding about seven different side dishes and three orders of creamed spinach, Bootsie paused, while Howard (who'd be footing the massive bill) paused to order two bottles of a fancy-­sounding French wine.

For my part, I began to calculate the total cost of just the steaks Bootsie had ordered. The total was so colossal that I gave up and tried not to think about it. Howard is one of the most generous guys around, and he loves steak houses. I knew he'd sign the dinner to his room charge and forget the whole thing.

“Hey, isn't that the pizza kid?” I said to Bootsie, snapping out of my reverie about tomahawk steaks.

“That's totally him!” Bootsie said. “Hey, Andy!” she shrieked. “Get over here!”

Andy the pizza delivery guy was in a Flagler Steakhouse busboy uniform. He came to our table, looking scared he'd get in trouble with his bosses for lingering at our table, but more scared that Bootsie would go ballistic on him again.

“I got a new job here,” he whispered. “Please don't screw this up for me.”

“Okay,” Bootsie told him, “but I still think you lied to us the other day. There was more to the story about the meatball sandwich delivery.”

“That part was true,” Andy insisted. “I just dropped off the sub. I had nothing to do with hitting that dude in the head.”

“We know who did that,” I assured him. “Was there something else you didn't tell us, though?”

“Yeah,” he said, squirming. “I did another weird errand that night. I stopped to get a beer after the police interrogated me, and I was sitting at a bar in West Palm feeling all depressed, when this hot girl in leather pants and her boyfriend came up to me and offered me two hundred bucks to drop off this fancy Hermès shopping bag at a cottage in Magnolia Beach.”

He paused for a second, embarrassed. “I really needed the money for tuition, and the girl was kinda scary, too. She told me if I didn't drop off the bag, she'd hunt me down and make me regret it. She said not to look in the bag, either, which, by the way, had something alive in it. So I did it! I just hope it wasn't a kitten or something in that bag!”

“It was a baby alligator,” Bootsie told him.

“Oh, okay, that's cool,” said Andy. “Can I get you guys some more butter?”

 

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“
Y
OU
FOUND
B
ARCLAY
Shields after someone tried to kill him last night?”

I didn't have all that much information about what had happened to Barclay Shields, local builder of shoddy mini-­mansions that are about as well constructed as your average game-­show set. But I knew from long experience that Bootsie McElvoy would never leave until she had put me through a Guantanamo-­style interrogation that would stop just short of waterboarding.

“I did find him.” I sighed as Bootsie flung open the screen door to my antiques store, The Striped Awning, and charged toward a little French chair in front of my desk. “How did you hear?”

“More like, how would I
not
hear?” responded Bootsie, her sky-­blue eyes bulging with intensity. “Let's start with the police report,” she said, rummaging in her canvas tote bag, and emerging with a sheaf of papers, which she brandished triumphantly. “I have a lot of questions.”

I sat down at my in-­the-­style-­of-­Chippendale desk, pushing aside a stack of paperwork—­actually, a pile of unpaid bills—­ resigned to being grilled like a rib-­eye.

What a waste of a gorgeous, sunny May morning. All around Bryn Mawr, lilacs were blooming in front yards, drivers were tooling by in convertibles, and women were happily pulling out their summer clothes—­which in Bootsie's case meant a pair of flowered Talbots shorts, a Lacoste shirt, and pink sandals embroidered with whales. My dog Waffles, a freckled, drooling basset hound with an oversize belly, a permanently soulful expression, and an addiction to Beggin' Strips, wagged happily at Bootsie from his bed in the front of the store. He likes to sit up there, close to the tall front windows, where he can chew his rawhide bones and check out passing poodles.

Bootsie ignored Waffles—­she doesn't believe in any dogs that aren't Labs, which are the preferred breed of her L.L. Bean–catalog family. Bootsie
defines
preppy: Even her marriage is preppy, with her two adorable toddlers, a chintz-­filled brick Colonial, and tennis matches galore.

Bootsie, who graduated from high school with me fifteen years ago, is six feet tall, has chin-­length blond hair and a permanent tennis tan, and is married to a former Duke lacrosse star named Will, whom she met through her equally bronzed, blond brothers. Bootsie and I don't have much in common, but we've stayed friends over the years—­she works just down the street from my store, at the
Bryn Mawr Gazette
, the local newspaper in our small town outside of Philadelphia, where she covers both real estate and charity events. Basically, she writes about gossip.

Working at the newspaper is perfect for Bootsie, because she's incredibly nosy. She has a network of family members and friends placed around the suburbs of Philly who funnel her information each day. When she's not on her cell phone, she's working the aisles of the Publix, the liquor store, and the post office. She's honestly pretty talented at intelligence gathering: Bootsie once called me in the middle of the night to tell me that our friend Holly Jones was getting divorced, which Holly herself didn't even know until the next morning.

“You probably remember Will's cousin Louis from our Christmas party,” Bootsie went on. “Tall? Blond? Big on golf and skiing?” This described every member of the McElvoy clan, but I nodded agreement.

“Louis is a lawyer, and he's defending Barclay in a lawsuit about those town houses Barclay built that fell into the giant sinkhole. And Louis got a call from Barclay's wife at one-­thirty this morning about the attack on Barclay,” said Bootsie triumphantly, pleased that her husband had such a useful person for a cousin. “Of course, the police called Barclay's wife to let her know about him being attacked, even though Barclay and his wife are in the middle of an epic divorce. So, anyway, Louis got the police report faxed over, which said that a Kristin Clark—­
you
, that is”—­with this, Bootsie pointed a tennis-­tanned finger at me—­“found Barclay after he'd been bashed in the head with something heavy. Like a hammer.”

I nodded glumly, and shuddered at the memory of the inert mass of real estate developer, prone under a hydrangea. It all seemed unreal, and the memory was especially blurry given that it had been made late at night, in the dark, after three glasses of Barolo wine at a party. Waffles, sensing my discomfort, gave a sympathetic whine.

“Obviously, this is going to be big news,” Bootsie continued happily, not looking upset in the least at the thought of Mr. Shields's recent head injury, “because Barclay Shields is loathed by pretty much everyone in Bryn Mawr, the entire Philadelphia area, and even as far as Wilmington, Atlantic City, and Lancaster County. Even Amish ­people hate Barclay! And it's not like ­people are whacked in the head with blunt objects around here very often.”

True on both counts, I thought to myself. Thanks to his habit of cramming as many townhomes as possible onto tiny plots and his zestful overcharging of unsuspecting buyers, Barclay was one of the biggest and least popular builders around Philly. (And I do mean big: Even in the dark last night, I could see that the man weighed a good two hundred and seventy-­five pounds.) In addition to the man's real estate notoriety, a violent attack in Bryn Mawr is unheard of: In downtown Philly, ­people get beaten to a pulp all the time, but things are pretty quiet in the suburbs. Bryn Mawr is where ­people live in charming old stone houses, play tennis, and break out the vodka tonics at five-­thirty every night. A dog show or a restaurant opening constitutes big news. For instance, a new place called Restaurant Gianni had been front-­page fodder this week for Bootsie's newspaper. Actually, Wednesday's entire front page had been devoted to the chef, the fabulous decor, the chef's girlfriend—­who happened to be a decorator and had designed the place—­the wine list, and his recipe for cappellini con vongole.

Bootsie and I had both been at Restaurant Gianni's opening party the night before, and it was after the party that I had found Barclay, right across the street from my house, while I'd been taking Waffles for a quick late-­night stroll. Barclay had been bleeding from the head when I'd last seen him, but definitely alive when police and medics had arrived and whisked him into an ambulance headed for Bryn Mawr Hospital, if you can use the word “whisk” to describe hoisting a man the size of a vending machine.

“I called the hospital an hour ago, and as luck would have it, our old babysitter Jeannie was at the nurses' station”—­Bootsie has a seemingly endless supply of nursing-­student nannies—­“and she told me that not only did Barclay make it through the night, he's awake. Awake and eating—­he ordered in a salami-­and-­egg hoagie from the diner this morning.

“But none of that is important,” Bootsie finished. “What matters is: Who do you think hit him?”

“You must be talking about my husband,” squeaked a petite blond woman from the doorway, in an accent that rang with the unmistakable tones of South Jersey. “Can you believe the police had the nerve”—­in Jersey, that's pronounced “noive”—­“to ask me where I was last night? Like I have the upper-­body strength to knock Barclay out!”

She had on four-­inch heels, purple jeans, and a swoopy Roberto Cavalli multicolored silk blouse that retailed for seven hundred dollars. I knew this only because I'd seen the same blouse in my friend Holly's closet, with the Neiman Marcus tags still dangling from it. Behind her, a massive Cadillac Escalade was idling in the no-­parking zone in front of my shop.

Clearly, this apparition was Sophie Shields, aka Mrs. Barclay Shields. Bootsie stared at her, her mouth agape and her eyes registering gossip nirvana.

“Besides, I was with my Pilates instructor all night last night—­Gerda's from Austria, and she lives in our guest room—­and then before that I was at Restaurant Gianni's party, so I've got an alibi,” Sophie Shields chattered on. “You two were at the party, too, right?” Sophie said to us, a gleam of recognition in her puppylike brown eyes. I could only nod back at her, too stunned to speak. Her voice had the timbre of Fran Drescher mixed with the intonation of Tony Soprano, all in a package the size of your average fourth-­grader.

“I thought ya looked familiar! Anyway, the police told me you found him, and then I tracked you down to this place. So I wanted to come by and thank you for finding him,” she continued. “You saved me a bundle. If he dies before the divorce is finalized, I'm screwed. I need him alive! He hasn't signed anything yet, except some papers that cut me out of his will if he croaks before the divorce is done.”

“That's too bad,” I said weakly.

“Cute store,” she said, looking around at the pieces in my shop, which range from little French sofas to English dining tables to mid-­century lamps. “This is like a museum of, you know,
old stuff
!”

“Thank you,” I said uncertainly, getting up to make sure Waffles didn't tackle Mrs. Shields in his overly friendly way, since he definitely outweighed her, and was already huffing over toward her happily. I took hold of his collar before he could drool on her shoes.

“My ex hates antiques,” squawked Sophie. Looking around again, her small face broke out in a smile. “And you know what, since we're splitting up, I can buy as many as I want! And this junk—­I mean, these things—­really would add an old Philly feel to the place. I gotta bring my decorator back here. Well, when I hire a decorator, I'll bring him here.”

“Thank you,” I said again, hoping I could show her around the shop a little. Sophie was clearly the Holy Grail of Retail: the Revenge Shopper. Just then, though, incessant honking erupted from the Escalade waiting at the curb, and a woman with incredibly muscular shoulders in the passenger's seat gestured sternly at Mrs. Shields to hurry it up and get back in the car.

“That's Gerda,” whispered Sophie, looking scared and waving at her passenger in an attempt to placate her. “But anyway, I really do like your store.” She teetered indecisively on her heels for a second, while Gerda gave another thunderous blast on the Cadillac's horn.

“What the hell!” Sophie finally shrieked. “I'll take all of it. I have to meet with my lawyers in five minutes, and then I got Pilates at eleven-­thirty, so I can't dick around looking through all this stuff. Just wrap up the whole store, all the tchotchkes and the furniture—­the whole nine yards. Here's my Visa card. I'll have a truck pick it up tomorrow!”

A
FTER
I
'D DULY
recorded Sophie's Visa number, she, Gerda, and the SUV whooshed away, Bootsie and I high-­fived each other, and I did an impromptu happy dance for a few seconds. Bootsie knows I've been struggling to make rent on The Striped Awning (and, well, pay my AmEx bill, too), since I inherited the store from my grandparents last year. The contents of the whole store—­sold! I started calculating in my head how much money I'd make, and took out a notepad to start listing my inventory and totaling the bill. I turned over the sign on the door to read “Closed.”

Unfortunately, though, Bootsie didn't take the hint.

“Well, now we know that Barclay Shields's wife claims she didn't attack her husband, and she has reason to want him alive. Why were you wandering around across the street at midnight, anyway?” she asked.

This was a good question, because I'm not really a midnight kind of person, and Bootsie knows it. I'm more of a pajamas-­at-­8:30-­p.m. kind of person. “It also says here in the report that you were with someone, the guy who made the emergency call when the body turned up. Named”—­she consulted her paperwork—­“Mike Woodford. Who is
that
?”

“Is Woodford his last name?” I blurted out. I had never met this guy Mike before last night, and had only been in his company for about thirty minutes before we'd stumbled onto Barclay Shields. And I really didn't want to talk about said person with Bootsie, because, truth be told, I had been slightly drunk when I'd met him last night, but if memory served, he was very cute. Bootsie was tapping her foot while I considered all this; I could feel my face turning fuchsia, and I started hedging.

“Mike works across the street from my house at the Potts estate,” I told Bootsie. “Waffles needed to go out, and then we bumped into this guy Mike, and then the three of us found Barclay Shields,” I said, heading into the back storeroom to grab some newspaper and boxes to begin wrapping up my entire store.

“Well, I better start packing all the silver and china!” I yelled cheerfully over my shoulder. “Thanks for coming by!”

“You took the dog for a walk that late?” demanded Bootsie.

“Well, I don't think it was
that
late,” I said, returning with my boxes and resisting an urge to scream.

“Yes, it was. It was 12:04 a.m. when Mike Woodford called 911 and said he'd found a body at Sanderson,” she sang back at me, brandishing her fax, which I was tempted to grab and rip to shreds. “It's on the police report.” Bootsie's a good person at heart, but her persistence was taking on the quality of Barbara Walters during an Oscar night interview. “And why were you walking that mutt over at Sanderson, anyway?” she prompted.

Sanderson, an estate in Bryn Mawr, is home to the blue-­blooded Potts family, which has, amazingly, kept three hundred acres of valuable real estate intact as an exceptionally lush farm around their 1920s stone manor house. There's a barn, a ballroom, a greenhouse filled with rare orchids, and a library that holds thousands of rare books, and all of this happens to be across the street from my tiny, slightly creaky old cottage, which is, no doubt, a blot on the landscape in the eyes of the Potts family.

Waffles, sensing that he was part of this story, went around my desk to Bootsie and pawed at her leg, then unleashed a pint of drool on her knee. Bootsie glared at him, and rose to leave.