A Dead Husband (Jessica Huntington Desert Cities Mystery) (31 page)

“I think he’s going to kill me next so I tell him everything
. That Roger was holding money for me but also something more. I gave him an SD card with serious information stored on it. You know what SD card is, right?”

“Yes, I know Margarit, but not because Roger gave one to me.”   

“Well this card has important information about Alan’s business with important customers. I take this from Alan’s computer last time I go to his office in LA. I’m not sure what it all means but I take it thinking I could use it to get away. That way he would have to let me go, see? You know, so I won’t geeve it to the police or the FBI? Kind of like insurance.” 

“Or kind of like blackmail,”
Jessica thought. “Okay, Margarit, I get it.  Did you tell Roger what was on the SD card?”

“Yes, I tell hee
m but he wasn’t sure it was such a good idea that I took it.  He was nervous after I tell him what was in the bag of money he was holding for me. He said I should geeve it to the police instead of trying to use it for my getaway. Now, because of me, he’s part of big trouble with Alan. I said he should go with me. His business was bad and he wasn’t so happy in his marriage. I knew that from our talks together. He was thinking and thinking about it.  Finally, I told heem it was time to stop thinking and take action. Then I got his answer. He gave the money back and said I should leave.”

“When was that, Margarit?”

“Last week, Jessica.  I stopped by his house on Friday night to try to talk to heem. To have heem make up his mind. I couldn’t wait longer, but he wanted more time to decide. But what was to decide? Alan knew something already. I’m at Roger’s house and Al he calls me to see where I am, like he didn’t already know.  I make up some story, but after that I know it was just a matter of time before Alan would decide he was done with Roger and with me.”

“So what happened then, Margarit?”

“Roger went to his car and gets the money.  He geeves it to me and said I should just go. So I left. That was the last time I see heem. Then I hear from you, the next thing that he’s dead.” Tears filled Margarit’s eyes.

“I thin
k maybe one of Alan’s men was watching when Alan called me.  They must have come in after I left, and killed Roger. If only we had left that night. Maybe we could have gotten away and we’d be somewhere beautiful together waiting for the sun to set.” Margarit reached over and pulled a tissue from a box on the end table.  She dabbed at her nose and eyes then her face did one of the momentary morphs into something more like predator than prey.

“Instead, I’m trying to stay a
live. The only reason I’m still alive is that Alan is looking for that SD card. It was not in the bag with the money where I put it. I get my money back from Roger but he keeps the SD card.  Your Boy Scout turns out to be a double-crosser after all. If I don’t get my hands on that information I’m dead.”

With those last words, the pity party started inside Margarit’s head again and she snapped back into desperate prey mode
. Her eyes darted about from side to side, her shoulders drooped and the tears fell freely. Jessica was fascinated and repulsed at the same time. How could someone so skillfully move between those roles? What might Margarit-the-predator, mastermind of a plot to put one over on Bedrossian-the-mob-boss-wannabe, actually be capable of?

“That’s why I have to find it, Jessica
. You have to help me, please. You must have it. It wasn’t in his house.”

Jessica was startled again
. “How do you know that, Margarit?”

Her eyes narrowed a little, making her nose look beaklike
. She was a hawk or a falcon, sizing up its quarry.  A chill ran through Jessica.

“My friend, he goes to search for me but then he runs into you and that handsome guy with you at R
oger’s house. I don’t know this when we meet at the Adobe Grill. Then I put two and two together after my friend tells me that he has to stop before finishing his search.  Carlos says he has to fight off a crazy woman and punches her in the face. I have a leetle laugh about it. His face eez bigger disaster even than yours, Jessica.”  Margarit made no effort to hide the cruelty in her smile.

“So it was
you
, not Alan, who sent the guy we caught hiding in the closet?”

“Yes! Carlos, he ees i
diot!  A nobody, who did leetle things for Alan and for me. A nobody who wanted to be somebody.  He thought he could get on Alan’s good side by doing me a favor. Some favor!  He gets drunk and goes to sleep when he should be doing what I ask. He should go and look around in the night while it’s dark out and no one is around. But no, he waits ‘til next morning and then, there you are.  He better hope the poleece find him before Alan’s men do.  Alan doesn’t believe my story about my meeting with you at the Adobe Grill, so I have to tell heem everything. Then he sends his own guys back to the house to look. They finished the job Carlos started, I think.” She paused a moment searching Jessica’s face to see if that registered. It did. Jessica had learned, that morning, that Laura’s house had been searched again, leaving it in ruins.

“You have to help me, Jessica or you’re going to end up just like your friend Roger
. You’ve been lucky so far, but that can’t last too much longer.  Alan wants that SD card back and so do I.  It’s better for you if you find it, then geeve it to me first. You can make a copy, I don’t care.  I use it to get away or as a get-out-of-jail card. You use your copy to put Mr. Bedrossian behind bars where he can’t hurt either one of us, or anyone else again. You saw what his men do to people who don’t cooperate, Jessica. Your friend’s waiter boyfriend was not at all helpful. I don’t know what to think when Alan tells me Roger’s wife has a boyfriend.  Roger was such a fool. Then I think maybe the wife was not a fool, that she knew what Roger was up to trying to help me and takes matters into her own hands. Maybe she and the boyfriend have plans of their own for the missing information. I tell that to Alan and he looks at me like I am lying. Then he hits me a couple more times but leaves, thank God, and I am still alive.” She paused and looked Jessica in the eye with that penetrating mind-reading stare at work again.

“Margarit, I don’t understand
.  If I can make a copy of that card why does Alan want it back?”

“I make a leetle
mistake and move some files from his computer. I think I only make a copy.  How did I know this?” She spread her hands and shrugged her shoulders, the bewildered victim of circumstance.

“Al
l you need to understand is this: Al, he wants that card back or else.  Alan and his men are not so charming as I am. No spa treatments and conversations over tea will come from them. So, you can deal with them or me, Jessica, you choose. Go have your facial. I call you later and you tell me how you can help me find what we all must find.”

The last few words were spoken in
a near-whisper. Their estheticians had come into the room just as Margarit finished issuing that ultimatum. As Margarit left the room she blew a little kiss to Jessica, smiling brightly.

“Wonderful chat, Jessica, dear
.  I’ll call you later, ciao!”

CHAPTER 30

Jessica was a basket case
.  The replay of her conversation with Margarit ran over and over in her head.  There were a lot of things about Margarit’s story that just didn’t sit well. How could Roger have been such a sap or so desperate that he let himself get entangled with the likes of Alan Bedrossian or Margarit Tilik?  He
was
desperate for money. Money, while not the root of all evil, was certainly fertile ground for misguided choices. Her own life of privilege had shown her that. She had met plenty of men, much better off than Roger, who let the pursuit of money override their better judgment.  Such poor judgment had helped push the economy off a cliff, landing a few of the more egregious profligates of unbridled greed, like Bernie Madoff, in prison. 

Roger’s financial situation was pretty t
ough but was he a rube or rogue? Was he a Boy Scout conned by Margarit, or was he actually considering Margarit’s offer to run off and leave his troubles behind? Did he keep the SD card because he had plans of his own for the information on it? If so, did he plan to give it to the police or back to Bedrossian—for a price?  He
had
told Sara and Dave he expected to get enough money to pay them back.  Did that expectation involve extorting money from Alan Bedrossian?  Surely he couldn’t have been desperate or foolish enough to believe he’d come out ahead on such a scheme with a man like Bedrossian?

Heck, for all she knew Margarit might just be toying with her
. Maybe she already had the SD card and was trying to determine how much Jessica and the police knew about what went on Friday night. Or perhaps she was just using Jessica, feeding her a line about her jealous, murderous boyfriend to deflect attention from herself as Roger’s killer. Margarit was a proficient liar and as capable of killing Roger as anyone Jessica had ever met. She could easily have gotten her hands on a .38 like the one used to kill Roger, from her friend Carlos or elsewhere. But then, why send Carlos back into the house on Sunday unless the SD card was, indeed, missing?  

At least one part of her story sort of made some sense
.  Why Bedrossian was still chasing that SD card even though the information on it could have been copied a dozen times had been confusing. It seemed believable that the wily Margarit botched her ill-conceived caper by moving, rather than merely copying, files from Bedrossian’s computer. She could easily have made a mistake like that if she was as loaded as she had been on the phone the night before. 

That would explain how Bedrossian knew the SD card, or something like it existed, before he
apparently beat a confession from the love of his life.  He must have had some reason to suspect the lovely Margarit was up to no good and finding some important files missing from his computer would have done that.  Of course you’d think a guy like Bedrossian would have had a system for backing up such important information, and he had to know that anyone coming into possession of the missing SD card could make a copy. Perhaps he was intent on killing anyone who had access to the SD card, whether or not it was in their possession. In that way he would get rid of everyone who could have made a copy too. Jessica’s head was spinning. That was potentially a lot of people Alan Bedrossian had to kill if it included, not just Roger’s family and close friends like Laura and Jessica, but poor unwitting acquaintances in their circle like Eric and Joe. 

What was still m
ost puzzling to Jessica was how he, or anyone else for that matter, found out about Eric before Jessica identified him to the police?  Eric and Joe were no shows at work on Sunday. That meant by Saturday or early Sunday they were already dead or at least being detained by the thugs who searched their house, beat them and then, shot them.  How long had she, and Laura and others embroiled in this fiasco been under surveillance as Margarit now indicated was the case? 

Her head hurt from the effort to untangle the knots in Margarit’s web of larceny and deceit
. Jessica thought about leaving the spa immediately but was in no shape to drive or face what awaited her outside the doors of the spa. She opted instead to get the facial using the time to try sort out her jumbled thoughts and calm her jangled nerves. 

By the end of the hour with her esthetician
, not Barb this time who had gone off with Margarit, Jessica had decided a number of things. First, Margarit had told her some version of the truth. If she had money
and
the SD card, whether or not she had killed Roger, she’d be on the run or dead.  Margarit had confirmed for Jessica that someone was indeed looking for something and willing to kill to get it back. More importantly, that “something” was a little flash memory device not much bigger than a postage stamp containing information that put Alan Bedrossian in a compromising position. That SD card was last seen in a bag of money given to Roger Stone by Margarit and was missing when she retrieved that bag.

Jessica wasn’t sure how
Margarit was still alive, but her days were surely numbered.  Maybe Bedrossian had some feelings for her after all, although that was hard to believe. More likely he wasn’t sure what to believe about Margarit’s story either and was waiting to get the goods back. He was making his way through possible co-conspirators, one maimed or dead body at a time, and would continue until he retrieved that card. Then he would tie up loose ends.

That Jessica and Laura were on Bedrossian’s list of possible co-conspirators and loose ends was also obvious
. Margarit was, no doubt, pointing fingers anywhere she could in her effort to stay alive, get the SD card back, and maybe still get away. Eric and Joe Abernathy were sheer collateral damage. No more than a piece of the furniture that happened to be in the room when the killers trashed their place during that search for the missing SD card. 

Jessica
needed to find that SD card and fast. Something that small could easily have been concealed in any number of ways. One thing was certain. The card was not at Roger and Laura’s house, or what was left of it anyway.  Margarit had been right about that, too. Roger’s mother, Sylvia, was visibly shaken when she arrived at Desert Memorial for the visitation. Sylvia had made a last minute decision to stop by and pick up a watch that Roger’s grandfather had given him when Roger was still a teenager.  She wanted to put it in the coffin with Roger. Laura had not objected, since the clean-up crew had completed their work the day before. 

A
ccording to Sylvia, when she went into the house it looked as though a tornado had struck. Furniture was smashed to bits. The mattresses had been slashed, drawers dumped, dishes broken, the contents of cupboards and the refrigerator strewn about. In some places, the dry wall had been pulled off, exposing the struts, pipes and wiring. When Uncle Don arrived at Desert Memorial, they told him what Sylvia had found. He insisted on calling it in, filing a report of yet another break-in at that address. 

Uncle Don told them later that t
he house, garage, and even Roger’s car had been systematically searched, just as Margarit claimed. They left behind a message of lethal determination. evident in the vehemence of the destruction wreaked on the house in Panorama. It wasn’t just searched, it was dismantled. It was hard to believe no one, not even the ever-vigilant Mrs. Gomez, reported anything out of the ordinary to the police. The demolition team must have been there for hours.

Jessica thought about the things she and Jerry had taken from Roger’s office.
They hadn’t known, then, that they were looking for an SD card. So, perhaps it was still in among the items they had removed from his office.  Jessica would go through everything again. Now that she knew what Roger had taken, she would ask Laura to think again about anything Roger might have given her in the days before his death. Something that small could have been secreted almost anywhere.

The last thing Jessica decided to do was find another way home
.  She had figured she might need to call for a ride, depending on what transpired at the spa. She did not relish the walk back to her car with the idea that Bedrossian’s guys might be milling about, on the lookout for Margarit or her. She wasn’t at all confident about how incognito their meeting had been. Margarit was not only a liar, but an idiot. She was a narcissistic, maybe psychopathic one, but an idiot nevertheless. 

When the esthetician stepped out of the room to let Jessica slip on her robe and sandals, Jessica used her cell phone to call Jerry
. She tried to sound calm as she explained where she was and that she needed him to meet her at the entrance to the spa as soon as possible. Her effort to project dire need with a modicum of nonchalance must have worked.

“I’m on my way
, ten minutes, max!” There was no hesitation in his voice, nor a single question about why she was where she was, or why she needed him to pick her up.

“Thanks, Jerry
.  I have a lot more to tell you when you get here.”

With that, Jessica made her way back to the lounge area where she bumped into Barb.

“Jessica, honey, your friend Margarit had to go. She was in a real hurry today. Your face is beginning to heal up already. What a shame your friend had another accident.”  Barb shook her head sadly.  “Do you need anything else before you go?”

“
No thanks, Barb, but I’ve got to run too. I’m just going to shower and change, then dash to my car. Everything was terrific. I’ll be back soon.”  Jessica plastered what was as close as she could get to a pleasant smile on her face as she rushed passed Barb toward the locker room. 

She had already decided to forego a shower so she wasn’t sure why she had lied about that to Barb
. It made Jessica’s freshly massaged and exfoliated skin prickle knowing that Margarit was back out there on the street, and up to whatever it was she was up to. Of course, if Margarit had actually left, perhaps there was
less
chance Jessica would have a run-in with Bedrossian or one of his goons keeping tabs on the lovely Margarit. But maybe Bedrossian had another set of stealthy ruffians lying in wait for Jessica. Thank God Jerry was on his way.

Jessica slipped back into the leggings and t shirt she had worn to the spa, comfortable, nondescript sportswear
. She plastered her hair down with a load of hair gel in the women’s lounge area. That made her hair color look darker than it actually was. She donned a baseball cap she had brought with her to shield her face from the summer sun and put on the large, dark sunglasses she had also brought along.  Not much of a disguise but the overall effect rendered her rather absent of distinguishing features.

Opening the door that led to the front desk at the spa, Jessica looked around to see who might be in the outer waiting room
. It was late afternoon on a summer day at the spa so, not surprisingly, the room was empty. As she passed through the door into the lobby she could see outside, through a small courtyard, to the street in front of the building.  Jerry pulled up, beating his promise to be there in ten minutes by a minute or two. Jessica did not bother to check out with the spa staff standing behind the counter. Instead, she gave a little wave with a “thanks” as she dashed out the door and into the waiting cab of Jerry’s pickup.

“Where are we going?” he asked as she slammed the door and put on the seat belt
.  She took a quick look around and didn’t see anyone obviously lurking on foot or in any of the cars parked nearby.

“Take me home
.  I need to talk to Laura right away.” As Jerry drove her back to Mission Hills, Jessica filled him in briefly on her meeting with Margarit.

“When you said you were at the La Quinta spa I knew something was up
. You do know you shouldn’t have gone to that meeting, right? At least not without telling me or someone else where to look for the body later.”  He was stern, his jaw rigid. “You’ve been attacked twice in less than a week.  So, not smart, Jessica.”

“Jerry, I do know
. I’ve got the battle scars to remind me every time I look in the mirror or step on my right foot the wrong way. If I
had
told you about the meeting, would you have let me go?” Jerry paused for a moment before answering.

“Probably not
.  No, of course not.”  He would have gone on but his cell phone rang. 

His cell phone was in hands free mode so Jerry could answer without much effort or breaking California law about driving and using the cell phone.

“Hey Paul. Yeah she’s okay. She’s here with me now. You want to talk to her?”

Jerry handed her the phone.
“It’s Paul Worthington.  I was on the phone with him when you called me. He knows what happened in the parking garage and he was pretty concerned when I told him I had to go get you immediately.” Jessica picked up the phone to speak to Paul, taking it out of hands-free mode.

“Hi, Paul, it’s Jessica.”

“Are you really okay? Jerry seemed to think you were in some kind of trouble.”

“
Yes, I’m really okay. I had a meeting with Margarit Tilik. You know the woman I told you about who’s engaged to Alan Bedrossian? It was in a public place, the spa La Quinta, so I figured it was safe to meet with her.  Afterward it felt a little too public so I called Jerry as backup.”