Who Killed the Ghost in the Library: A Ghost writer Mystery (20 page)

Chapter 35

Amelia Ashton and her lawyer, Charles Prufrock Jr., showed up thirty minutes late. I’ve never known a socialite to show up on time for anything. I wondered if she had been late to her own wedding. But thanks to their tardiness, I was able to print off the email from Randy, go through the papers from my bag, and put the important ones we would need in a manila folder. We even made an extra copy just in case the lawyer wanted a set for himself, which I was sure he would.

I heard the lawyer loud and clear at the front desk from Mike’s office. “I’m Charles Prufrock
Jr., and this is my client, Mrs. Stanley Arthur Ashton III. If you will kindly direct us to Chief Penhall’s office, I would greatly appreciate it.”

I couldn’t hear what the officer at the desk said, but whatever it was upset Prufrock tremendously. “
This is unacceptable. Treating her like a common criminal, I won’t stand for it. Where is Chief Penhall? I demand to see him right now.”

“I do believe that’s our cue,” Mike said. “Are you ready?”

I picked up the folders, the Dr Pepper and stood up. “I’m good. Let’s go.”

Mike poured himself a cup of coffee and led the way to the front desk. “Is there a problem here, sir?”

“Are you Chief Penhall?” the lawyer said. He was wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt, red power tie, and black wingtip shoes.

“Yes, I am, and you are?”

“I’m Charles Prufrock Jr., Mrs. Ashtons lawyer. This officer informs me that we are being put in a common interview room.”

“That’s correct. Is that a problem?”

“Of course it is! Mrs. Ashton is not a criminal. She came here voluntarily.”

“Mrs. Ashton refused to leave her hotel room and come down here with my officer to have a civil conversation. She insisted that you be here. That doesn’t sound voluntary to me. That sounds like someone with something to hide,” Mike said.
“This way, please.”

Mike led the way down the hallway on the right side to the first interview room. He allowed the three of us to enter first before following us inside and closing the door. “What is she doing in here?” Prufrock said, pointing at me.

“This is Camille Shaw. She’s a special consultant to the police department on this case.”

“How do you do, Mr. Prufrock? Amelia, good to see you again.”

Amelia nodded at me but didn’t say anything. She was wearing a royal blue pants suit and matching shoes today, with a white blouse and a string of pearls around her neck. “You will address my client as Mrs. Ashton, young lady,” the lawyer said.

Mike and I looked at each other; it was going to be like that. Fine, we would play hard ball, too. “Mr
. Prufrock,” Mike began, “your client needs to account for her whereabouts for the past five days, ten would be better, but we’ll start with five for now.”

Prufrock leaned over and whispered in his client’s ear for a minute. Amelia listened and nodded. He straightened up. “Mrs. Ashton has been staying at the Marriott near the airport, where your officer found her this morning.”

“Has she been there the entire five days?”

“Of course.”

“She never left the hotel.”

“I believe she had business to attend to in the area, so naturally she had to leave the hotel.”

“I see. I will need her to provide us with a list of names and locations that she went to so we can verify her whereabouts.”

“May I ask why?”

“Because this is a murder investigation, Mr. Prufrock, and your client is my best suspect right now.”

“Suspect? Are you insane? She’s an elderly woman; how on Earth do you think she killed someone? With her knitting needles?”

I touched Mike’s arm. “You know, I’ve seen some of those needles. They are pretty sharp. It would be pretty easy to kill someone with one of those things.”

“If she’s going to continue to make snide comments like that, then this interview is over,” Prufrock angrily said.

“Do try to control yourself, Miss Shaw,” Mike said with a wink.

“I’ll do my best, Chief
Penhall. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Sir, regardless of your belief of Mrs.
Ashtons innocence, I still need to verify where she’s been since she’s been in the area. If she is truly innocent, this shouldn’t be a problem.”

Prufrock and Amelia spoke quietly to each other for a minute. “Mrs. Ashton has agreed to provide you with the information you requested, Chief
Penhall.”

“I’m very glad to hear that, Mr. Prufrock. Now, let’s talk about a certain bank account that Mrs. Ashton opened after the death of her daughter, Cecilia, in 1968.”

“What does this have to do with your murder investigation?”

“Someone hired Jake Yarborough, a mercenary, to kill Clifford Scott, a retired police officer of this department. The savings account that Mrs. Ashton opened using the money from her deceased daughter’s trust fund is missing several million dollars, Mr. Prufrock. There was more than enough money in that account to hire someone to kill Mr. Scott. There are many men and women in this department that knew and loved Mr. Scott, and they don’t appreciate someone runni
ng down one of their own and leaving him to die in the middle of the street.”

“I didn’t hire anyone to kill Cliff,” Amelia said.

“Mrs. Ashton, not another word,” Prufrock said, putting a hand on her arm.

“Oh shut up, Charles. You’re worse than your father.” He removed his hand from her arm and sat back, his mouth hanging open. “I didn’t kill Cliff Scott, Chief
Penhall. I loved him.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “The other night you told me you loved your husband.”

“It’s true, I do. But Stanley was too wrapped up in his bank and his mistress to pay attention to me. I was shopping downtown one day in 1953 when I bumped into Cliff as he was making his rounds. He was very nice and polite, helped me pick up the packages I had dropped when we ran into each other. He carried them to my car and put them in the trunk. It was so nice having someone pay a little attention to me. The next week, I went into town and made sure I ran into him again. He invited me for coffee the next day, and things just seemed to grow from there.”

“But you left town in two months a
fter your husband’s death in 1954,” Mike said. “Surely you didn’t see Cliff again.”

“That’s not true,” she replied. “I saw him every year when I came down here for the annual board meeting. We always met at the Marriott.”

“Did you see him this week?”

Amelia nodded. “The night before he died.
He spent the night with me at the hotel.”

“Can anyone verify this?”

“I’m sure the room service bill will be sufficient enough proof for you, Chief Penhall,” she said.

“Explain the missing money from the savings account,” I said.

“Blackmail, Miss Shaw, pure and simple blackmail.”

“By who? Aggie Foley?”

“At first, it was her husband. Then after his disappearance, it was her.”

“What were they blackmailing you with?”

Amelia glanced at Prufrock, who shrugged and nodded. “Because they knew who killed my husband.”

“And who did it, Mrs. Ashton?” Mike said.

“My son.”

Chapter 36

We talked to Amelia and her lawyer for an hour, but we didn’t get much more from her. Prufrock didn’t demand to see a copy of the files I had, and I didn’t offer them to him. We escorted them out, with Mike reminding Amelia not to leave town after her board meeting was over. Prufrock wasn’t happy that we still considered his client a suspect, but he agreed to make sure that she made herself available whenever Mike needed to talk to her.

We walked down to his office. “Do you believe her?” I said as I sat down.

Mike refilled his coffee mug and sat down behind his desk. “I’m not sure. What do you think?”

“You
honestly want to know my opinion?” I said, surprised.

“Of course I do,” he said.

I thought about it for a minute. “My instincts tell me she didn’t hire Jake Yarborough. She’s been meeting Cliff Scott every year for years. Why would she suddenly want to kill him? If there was anyone she wanted to see die, it was Aggie.”

“I can’t see her killing Aggie and dragging her body halfway across the Ashton property to dump her in the well, can you?”

“No. Is there any word from the medical examiner on her cause of death?”

“Blunt force trauma
to the head and upper body. Some of it was inflicted in the guest house kitchen, the rest of it when the murderer threw her down the well.”

“What about the bones?”

“Doc thinks they’ve been down there about forty-five years.”

“So, say…1968?”

“You still think it’s Ray Foley?”

I nodded. “And Aggie
had to know he was dead; why else would she close the account?”

“So that’s one murder solved: Aggie killed her husband,” Mike said. “We’ll never know why, of course. Now we just have to solve three more murders.” He took a drink of his coffee. “How did you know that Amelia was paying blackmail money to Aggie?”

I grabbed one of the folders and pulled out the pages with Aggie’s bank account and Amelia’s savings account. “Twenty thousand dollars a month was being deposited into her account like clockwork the first of the month. Twenty thousand went out of Amelia’s savings account the same day. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together.”

“Do you think it’s possible that she hired someone to kill Aggie?”

“No. And technically, we only have two more murders to solve. We know Jake killed Cliff Scott and blew up his house.”

“But we still need to find the person who hired him. And we still have three murders to solve: who killed the hitman?”

I suddenly remembered the redhead. “Have you talked to the woman who tried to kill your grandfather yesterday?”

“Crap, I forgot about her,” Mike said, picking up the phone. “Take that woman we brought in yesterday to interview room one.” He stood up. “Come on, let’s go.”

I didn’t argue with him, just followed him out the door and back to the interview room again. They were bringing her down the hallway from the cells as we came around the corner. Orange was not a good look for her with that red hair. The officer named Danny was the one who brought her into the room and handcuffed her to the ring in the middle of the table. Funny I hadn’t noticed that when I was in here earlier.

“They tell me you’ve been rather uncooperative,” Mike said. “I also heard that you bit one of my officers last night.” She just stared at him. “But today is a new day, so let’s start over, shall we? Let’s start with your name.”

“Kiss off.”

“I see. I
s that Kiss with an ‘i’ or a ‘y’? And is ‘off’ your middle name or your last name?”

“Drop dead, cop. I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Well, see, that’s the funny part, you do. If you don’t want to tell me your name, that’s fine. NCIC did that for me. Let’s see, according to their records, your name is Jasmine Rogers, you’re twenty-five, five foot three…”

“I’m five foot five.”

Mike looked closer at the report. “You’re correct, my apologies. You’re five foot five, 120 lbs, red hair, green eyes, a career pickpocket, two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of armed robbery, and five counts of assault on a law enforcement officer.”

“Yikes,” I said, “violent little thing, aren’t you?”

She looked me over. “Beating the crap out of you would be an appetizer, sweetie. Not much fun in doing it, but I’d enjoy the practice.”

“Known associates,” Mike continued, “well, what do you know? One Jake Yarborough. You d
idn’t feel much loyalty to him, obviously, if you helped someone get inside the hospital the other night to kill him.”

“It’s not about loyalty, it’s about money.”

“Isn’t it always?” I said.

“Shut up. What do you know about it? You’re probably some rich brat whose daddy buys her everything she needs.”

“My father is a retired Methodist minister,” I said, standing up and getting in her face, “and nobody gave me anything. I worked hard for everything I have. I’ve never stabbed anyone in the back, or in Jake’s case, shot them in the face, for money. You can’t say that, can you?”

Jasmine spit in my face, and I raised my
fist to punch her in the face. Mike grabbed my arm and stopped me. He handed me a handkerchief from his back pocket, and I wiped my face off. There was a knock at the door as I sat down. “Chief?” Danny stuck his head in the room.

“What is it, Danny?”

“Um, her lawyer is here.”

“Her lawyer? When did she hire a lawyer?” Charles Prufrock walked into the room, and Mike groaned. “You hired him? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Ms. Rogers, I’m Charles Prufrock. I got your message and hurried over here as fast as I could.”

“Slumming now, Prufrock?” Mike said. “Isn’t she beneath your normal pay grade?”

“Can you pay my hourly rate, Ms. Rogers?”

“Not a problem, Mr. Prufrock.”

“Then this interview is over, Chief Penhall,” Prufrock said, putting his briefcase on the table. “I’d like to speak to my client privately, please. You and your little consultant can leave now.”

Mike and I went back to his office. “Why didn’t you let me hit her? Just once.”

“It would have hurt you more than her, not to mention she could have sued us for police brutality.”

I sat down, ran my fingers through my hair
before massaging my temples. That little headache I had earlier was starting to really hurt. “So what now?”

“Now you go home and get some rest. Let me check on a few things here. How about I come over after work and grill something for dinner? We can compare notes and talk.”

“Dinner sounds fine. I’m thinking about talking to Stanley III before I go home.”

“Why?”

“To see if he remembers anything else about that night, maybe look around for that secret passageway.”

“I’m not sure about this,” Mike said.

“You want me to take the Sig Sauer with me?”

“Do you have a permit?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me dubiously. “Let me see it.”

I took my wallet out of my bag, pulled out the permit and showed it to him. “Satisfied?”

“At least take Randy or Jo with you, preferably Randy. Don’t go out there alone.”

“I’ll see if Randy’s free. Do you need me to pick up anything from the store for dinner?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

I put one of the folders in my bag and handed Mike the other one. “Just in case you need it for something.” I took the bottle of Advil out and put it on his desk. “I’m pretty sure you’re going to need this.”

“Thanks,” he said, putting the bottle in the top drawer of his desk. “Why don’t you call Randy ri
ght now and make sure he can go? Just amuse me; do it.”

I called him. “Hey, are you free to go out to the Ashton house with me today?”

“No can do, toots. I’ve got a big shipment coming in and I need to be here to make sure it’s all there. There were some boxes missing the last time, and the idiot deliveryman claimed he didn’t know anything about it. Could you wait until tomorrow?”

“Hold on a minute,” I said. “He can’t go out until tomorrow.”

“That would be great. I should be able to go with you two.”

“Tomorrow is fine, Randy. Mike says he can go with us.”

“Oh joy, something to look forward to,” Randy said sarcastically. “What a way to spend my Sunday.”

“Goodbye, Randy. I’ll call and let you know what time we’re going out there.”
I hung up and put the phone in my bag. “Well, I guess it’s a quiet day of reading those papers at home.”

“I think that’s a good idea, especially after the long day we had yesterday. I should be over at your house by six, if that’s alright.”

“That’s fine,” I said, standing up. As I did, I got dizzy and grabbed the edge of Mike’s desk. He jumped up and came around the desk and helped me sit back down.

“Do you want me to take you to the doctor?”

“No. He’s just going to tell me to go home and rest.”

“And that’s exactly what you’
re going to do. Just sit there; I’ll be right back.”

What did he think I was going to do? All I wanted to do was to throw up. I closed my eyes to stop the room from spinning.

Mike came back with Danny. “We’re going to take you out to my Bronco. Someone will drive your car home later.”

“You don’t have to do that. I feel better, really.”

“Then why are you as white as a sheet?”

“I can make it out to my car by myself,” I said, standing up. Unfortunately, I could talk a good game, but the dizziness betrayed me and I grabbed the desk again.

“Yeah, I can see you’re just so much better,” Mike said. “Help her out to the Bronco, Danny. Leave your bag; I’ll bring it with me when I come out.”

The phone on his desk rang. Mike hit the intercom button. “What?”

“The mayor is on line one, and he doesn’t sound very happy.”

“Oh great, that’s all I need right now,” Mike said. “Go ahead and take her out there, Danny. Stay with her until I get there.”
He handed Danny his keys before he picked up the phone. “Good morning, Mayor Hightower. And how are you today?”

Apparently, the mayor was
n’t doing well; he was yelling so loud I could hear him as we left the room. “What is going on around here, Mike? Explosions and shootings all over town! This kind of thing is bad for business. What are you going to do about it?”

I didn’t hear any more than that. Danny and I walked slowly down the hall, out the front door and over to Mike’s Bronco. He unlocked
the passenger side door and helped me into the seat. He went around to the other side and started it, turning on the air conditioner to keep me cool. I closed my eyes and put my head on the headrest.

Mike came out fifteen minutes later. “Thanks, Danny. Call me if you need me.”

“Yes, sir. Hope you feel better soon, Miss Shaw.”

“Thank you.”

Mike pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward my house. “Do you feel like eating? It’s almost noon.”

“To be honest, no. I’m feeling a bit queasy. But why don’t you stop and get something for yourself?”

“Let’s get you home first. I’ll worry about food after that.”

“What did
the mayor have to say? I heard a little bit of it.”

“He wants to know why I haven’t found the mad bomber and cold blooded murderer that are on the loose in town. What am I doing about it, do I have any leads, how long before I make an arrest, that sort of thing.”

“Does he think they’re going to hold up signs saying ‘I’m the one you’re looking for, arrest me’? What an idiot,” I said, shaking my head. I shouldn’t have done that.

Mike glanced over at me. “You probably shouldn’t move your head around too much.”

“You think?”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to the doctor?”

“And get chewed out for going on adrenaline overload yesterday and not resting like I should have? No thanks.”

“I could call your mom…”

“She’s not very happy with me at the moment, either. I’ll be fine on my own. I’m going to lie down on the couch, watch a little TV, and get some rest.”

He pulled into my driveway, turned off the engine, got out and came around to help me out. “Take it slow,” he advised me. He walked me to the door. “Where are the keys?”

“In my bag.”

“Crap, I left it i
n the car.” He retrieved my bag and dug around for my keys and unlocked the door. I walked over to the couch and sat down gratefully. “Go ahead and lie down.”

“Being a bit of a bossy butt, aren’t you?
And how are they going to drive my car home if we still have the keys?”

“That’s why I wear the big shiny badge. I know how to get people to do what I want,” Mike laughed.
“Don’t worry about your car; I’ll get it here, I promise.”

“Well, Captain Bossy Pants, if you don’t mind, I’d rather change into more comfortable clothes first.”