A Bitch Called Hope (9 page)

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee and I’ll be on my way,” Lennox said.

“I don’t think Scott would want me to.” Priscilla stepped outside and locked the door behind her. When Lennox refused to move, Priscilla brushed past.

“Excuse me.” Priscilla clattered down the sidewalk in high-heeled boots. One of her scarves unwound and trailed over her shoulder.

For a short person Lennox was a fast mover. She caught up with Priscilla and walked alongside her. “It’s up to you,” Lennox said. “I can dog you all morning, or you can have a cup of coffee with me and I’ll go on my way.”

The Bean was an industrial-style coffee shop two blocks from the Mirabella. Corrugated metal counters, cement floor, chrome tables populated with young hipsters. Lennox and Priscilla ordered their coffees and snagged the last seats.

Lennox pulled her notebook from her bag and crossed her legs, her pant leg hiked up exposing an ostrich leather boot.

“Nice.” Priscilla pointed to Lennox’s boots.

Priscilla didn’t seem like the kind of girl troubled over the fate of an ostrich. Lennox nodded.

“Louis Vuitton.” Priscilla’s voice was coated with approval. “Last year’s?”

“Aurora found them in a resale shop. She’s always trolling the resale shops. I could have her look for you.”

Priscilla smiled, a little smugly Lennox thought, and snapped the clasp on the front of a mustard leather bag, a diamond sparking light from her left hand. Lennox figured it at a full two karats. Where did those two daisies come up with enough cash for two karats?

“What a gorgeous ring,” Lennox said. “Wow! Congratulations.”

Priscilla smiled a wide smile that showed the gold crown at the back of her mouth. “Thanks.”

“Delia must be thrilled,” Lennox said.

Priscilla went from smug to deer in the headlights in no time at all. “We want to keep it from the family for a little while.”

“But why? Delia could use some good news.”

“We’ll tell them in a few weeks.”

“I don’t understand,” Lennox said.

Watch Priscilla try to suss out whether to confide in Lennox or risk having Delia find out about the ring. Then watch her cave.

“Once the will is read,” Priscilla said. “Scotty’s a millionaire.”

“Wow. The will has been read already?”

Priscilla’s face closed so tight, you could almost hear the snick of a deadbolt. Lennox was taking it too fast. Okay, so she sipped her espresso and watched the action around the other tables, let the world take a spin or two. Pressurized steam punctuated the fifteen some conversations in the coffee house. It was like fishing. It was like cards.

Sure enough, when she looked back, Priscilla was watching her. “Not exactly,” Priscilla said. “Scott ran across it.”

“They had something like that lying around?”

Priscilla shifted in her chair.

“Naughty boy,” Lennox said. Thinking here was a solid motive for both Scott and Priscilla.

“Please don’t tell Mrs. P. She already wants to pin Bill’s death on Scott.”

Lennox could feel her antennae rise up out of her head, twitching for signals. God, she loved this job. She kept her voice noncommittal. “Why would she do that?”

“She needs someone to blame Bill on.”

A cloud of caffeinated steam wafted over their table. Priscilla’s mouth turned down. “Now that there’s trouble, she’ll go after him like she always does.”

Lennox said, “I talked to Delia just yesterday. She never implied that Scott was in any way connected with Bill’s death.”

“Mrs. P thinks she can get away with it, but I was standing there when she yelled at Bill,” Priscilla said.

It was a little kiss, no big deal, she said. If Mrs. P was so
sensitive
why did she hang mistletoe all over the place? Scott understood once Priscilla explained how trivial it was. God! But Mrs. P had always acted jealous of Priscilla. Was it Priscilla’s fault she was young?

“Once she gets that the police aren’t going to release her she’ll start pointing fingers. Scott will get the blame.”

Lennox jotted notes and smiled encouragingly, the whole time marveling that Priscilla held herself blameless.

When Priscilla exhausted the topic of Delia’s jealousy, Lennox said, “You said Scott will get the blame. Can you be more specific?”

Priscilla shrugged. “Anything goes missing, we get a call. Money. Drugs. You name it.”

“Drugs?”

“Yeah. How do you think Mrs. P stays so thin at her age?”

Speed. No wonder Delia wore a size two and her jaw was clenched all the time. Lennox said, “Street?”

Priscilla smirked. “She doesn’t need the street. She’s got the Candyman, M.D. in her pocket.”

Lennox leaned forward. “You’re talking like you think the cops have the right person for the murder.”

Priscilla leaned back in her chair and looked bored. “Duh,” she said.

Chapter 12

Lennox worked the rest of the afternoon poring over the one-hundred-nine pictures from the party. All the grinning senior citizens in their party finery. She studied them picture by picture. Bill in a tux, his arm thrown around his cousin Father Mac, Bill with Dan, big smiles on both their faces. Delia stick thin in black trousers and a red sequined top, smiling for the camera. Lennox looked for stress lines and read the disappointment, maybe embarrassment.

Photograph after photograph, Lennox looked for anything false and came up with nothing. She closed the program and got ready for her meeting with Ham. A half an hour later she was at the Shanty.

“It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”
crooned from the Shanty sound system. The bartender had draped even more garland on the back bar.

Lennox and Ham sat at the corner table, her with her Blitzen, the bartender’s holiday spin on a vodka stinger, and Ham with his perennial pint of Fat Tire ale. It was eight thirty and slow for a Tuesday night. Lennox figured all the uniforms who usually gathered at the bar must be doing extra traffic duty, keeping the streets safe for last-minute shoppers.

“At first pass, it doesn’t look like anyone outside the family had a financial motive.” Ham licked the beer off his mustache.

“What about the councilwoman?”

“Plenty of folks funding her campaign even if Bill backed her opponent.”

“The carpenter?”

Ham shrugged. “He pays his bills on time. He’s busy. He got the occasional job from Bill. No motive.”

“The family.” Ever since Lennox’s interview with Priscilla earlier in the day, a feeling between alarm and panic had vibrated up Lennox’s spine until it lodged in her neck bones. She had to say it out loud, get her fears out on the table.

“What if the murderer turns out to be Delia?”

It was only when Ham said, “I don’t think so,” that her spine relaxed.

He said, “Financially speaking, Delia would’ve been much better off divorcing him. That way, she’d get half his assets instead of a fraction of them.”

“She wore a hot pink slip to her husband’s funeral,” Lennox said.

“Is that a bad thing?” Ham said.

“She’s taken down all of Bill’s pictures, and you should see Doctor E,” she said. “He’s been hanging out in front of the jail like someone’s lost dog. It would be a helluva thing, my first shot back in the game and it turns out the perp is the client’s boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend?” Ham said.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Gus was planning on using the doc as a witness for the defense,” Ham said.

“Gus?” she said.

“Mr. Kline to you.”

“It’s a bad move. Our Doctor E prescribed insulin inhalers to Delia and it’s rumored he prescribed diet pills as well. He’s going to make things worse. Tell
Mr. Kline
that.”

Ham licked beer foam off the top of his lip. “I’ll run the doc’s books. How far back?”

She thought five years was sufficient.

Ham said, “Who else do you got?”

“Scott Pike. According to Priscilla, Delia has blamed Scott for missing money and missing prescription speed. I went back and talked to Delia. She said Scott’s never respected their boundaries. Takes whatever he pleases. Add to that, Scott found out about the will prior to Bill’s death.”

“That’s not unusual,” Ham said. “What’s weird, their estate wouldn’t go in total to the surviving spouse.”

“I thought that, too. Delia said Bill was paranoid she’d marry again and the new husband would inherit.”

“Doctor E?”

“If Delia had anything of a romantic nature going on, she would’ve told Aurora.”

“Are you sure of that?” Ham said.

“As sure as I am of anything,” Lennox said and sipped her Blitzen. “Anyway, Delia swears that she and Bill kept the will secret. She said they didn’t want to sap their boys’ ambition. Seems to have worked on the older son.”

“You mean Dan?” Ham said. “He may have ambition, but his credit score is in the toilet.”

Lennox felt disappointed, then surprised she felt disappointed. “What do you have?”

“His condo foreclosed on nine months ago, a couple months later, his car repoed.”

Mr. Dan Pike in his Dolce & Gabbana funeral duds, Aurora going on and on about how successful and tasteful he was. Don’t even ask how much his clothes must’ve set him back, she had said. More than your friend, Tommy, has in the bank. Lennox had to hand it to him: no one would guess he was broke.

“I found these in his trash.” Lennox handed over her photos of the credit card receipts.

Ham paged back in his notebook before examining the pictures. “Yeah. This one,” he said, pointing to the receipt ending in 4637, “is his MasterCard. He’s down to just one. I don’t know about the receipts ending in 2331. It was charged at a Chicago bank?”

She nodded. “I found a boarding pass from last weekend, Chicago to Portland.”

“He probably had business he needed to conduct in person,” Ham said. “I’ll see what I can find out.” He leaned back in his chair and made a circular motion with his finger signaling another round to their waitress. “Anyone else?”

“Scott’s girlfriend, Priscilla Krahn. I interviewed her this afternoon. Now that Bill is dead she’s wearing the biggest honking diamond I’ve ever seen. ”

Ham grimaced. “Near as I can tell, Bill pulled the plug on Scott’s rent and allowance last June. But he’s still paying Priscilla’s tuition.”

“It’s occurred to me that maybe Bill had his eye on Priscilla.”

“He cuts off funds to Scott to make him look bad?” Ham said.

Lennox nodded. “It’s possible. Here’s another thing: I talked to Alice Stapely this morning.”

“The caterer?”

“The very same,” Lennox said.

From the television screen over the bar, an adoring Donna Reed looked up at Jimmy Stewart. The bartender, mercifully, had set the movie on mute. What Lennox could hear were the hard clicks of billiard balls colliding in the back room.

“And?” Ham said.

Lennox told him about Alice’s affair with Bill, the confession, the frame-up. “Her basketball coach,” Lennox said.

“You think Father Mac had Alice expelled to protect Bill’s reputation?”

“Or his own. How would it look? The coach is his cousin,” she said. “Father Mac probably figured if Alice confessed the affair to her priest, maybe she’d confess to her parents or teachers. Discrediting Alice was probably the safest way to block her accusations. Then there’s the parking attendants at the party. I knew Resnick was a felon. Turns out the other one, Emory Zimm, has spent half his adult life behind bars. Father Mac has them on his payroll at least part-time. You got to wonder about the priest’s character.”

A micro smile hitched the corners of Ham’s mouth, a smile you could miss under that mustache of his. “There’s more about the priest than you know,” he said.

You could always count on Ham to find the juicy parts in someone’s financial records.

“Each of Bill Pike’s apartment buildings is its own financial entity.” He took a sip of his beer. “Those properties he held in partnership with Father McMahon, including their Hunter’s Ridge subdivision, were set up with a cross-purchase plan.”

“Meaning what?” Lennox said.

“In the partnership agreement, the surviving partner agrees in advance to buy the deceased partner’s share of the company. You want to know how they would fund the buyout?” He raised his eyebrows. “Each partner takes out a life insurance policy on the other.”

Lennox rocked back in her chair. Katy brought drinks and exited with their chowder bowls. Tony Bennett singing “Snowflakes.”

“How much are we talking here?”

“A lot.”

“Ten thousand is a lot to Alice,” she said.

He turned the pages in his notebook. “I’ve only glanced at his books. I’d say thirteen million?”

Just hearing a figure like that made her head buzz. “That’s a big bunch of motive. No wonder Delia’s unhappy about it,” she said. “I’ve got an interview with the priest tomorrow morning. Can you fax me the numbers?”

“Can’t have it by tomorrow. The earliest would be the end of the week. So first, finish up with the priest. Second, the doc,” Ham said. “Third?”

“Both brothers.”

“Priscilla I told you about.” Ham looked up from his notebook. “Does our client know that we’ve zeroed in on her family?”

“Not exactly.”

“Doesn’t she need to be informed?”

“We’ll leave that up to Kline,” Lennox said. “How many hours is he giving you?”

“Open-ended.” Ham jotted notes in his black notebook. The look on his face, intent, the way he got when he was in the accounting zone.

Her first homicide case in over a year and she got to work with Ham. Lennox was just filled to the brim with how good life could be. The gold garland, the Christmas lights, the warm, sweet feeling the Blitzen gave her.

“Oh, Hammy.” She squeezed his writing hand so that he had to look at her. “They’re playing our song.”

“‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?’” he said.

Chapter 13

The next morning at ten to eight, Lennox had just enough light to appreciate the gardens that stretched across Saint Mary’s courtyard. Rain bounced off the baldpate of Saint Francis, who anchored the north end of the grounds. Lennox walked to the back of the courtyard where she saw a brass sign indicating the office. When no one answered her knock, she tried the door.