Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) (7 page)

She hesitated. “Don’t know.” I jerked my head to look at her. She realized this was a tad shy of believable and recovered pretty nicely, “Donna. Our dog’s name is Donna.”

All of a sudden I appreciated Paul for being a wonderful boyfriend to my friend. “Paul? You were asking what my husband thinks about the situation in the Middle East. Well, he says that to understand the region you have to accept the fact that everything you ever heard about the Middle East is true.”

“Oh, thanks.” He did that head tilting thing again.

As soon as we heard the door click I turned to Victoria. “Hon, why didn’t you want to tell him what you named your dog?”

“I know he thinks Mr. Benz is a dumb name for a dog. And all of a sudden I was scared we might lose Tiara.”

Tara walked over to her. “We will not let that happen!”

“No, we won’t.”

“What are we going to say to Detective Kent?” Victoria asked.

Tara folded her dish towel. “My Daddy always said, ‘Once you’re explaining, you’re losing.’ So let’s not say much.”

“That’ll work out fine since we don’t know much.” I turned to Tara, “Paul is so nice. Do you two ever fight?”

“Sure we do. Sometimes I’ll pick a fight just for the make-up sex. When he gets exasperated his Northern accent really comes out. Like last night we had a few words, and I said, ‘Stop talking like a Northerner.’ He said, ‘I am a Northerner!’ Then I said, ‘Well, I’m a Southerner, and you don’t hear me talking with an accent.’” Tara turned off the oven. “What the hell?”

I looked around to see why she had said this last part. Victoria was crying. “Sorry. That is just so sweet.”

Tara took her a tissue and started rubbing her back. “Menopause, Honey?”

“Yeah, menopause.”
 

“I really like Paul. I don’t usually like such nice people. They make me do things like spell cuss words.” I said this to get us perked up again. “And mark my words we are going to kick a-s-s at that police station this afternoon. Now where is that note I wrote about staying out of Cracker Barrel?”

“I don’t have it.”

“I don’t have it.”

I checked the table, not there. “It was probably thrown away. We can’t worry about that now. Every time I think about talking to that detective, I get as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

“Victoria, are you okay?”
 

“Yeah.
I’m glad he got that straightened out about the in-patient. Once again he’s overcome my mistake.” Then to prove she had recovered from being spoken to like that, she said, “Let’s get our meeting with Detective Kent over with. I’m as nervous as a whore in church.”

“That never made me nervous,” Tara answered.

Five

C
ontinuation of statement by Leigh Reed.
An hour later the Tiara detectives, heretofore described as untrained, ill-equipped and incompetent, walked into Detective Kent’s office in Lawrenceville, the county seat. We wore pant suits. Mine was khaki, Victoria’s was cream colored linen, and Tara’s was dark brown silk.

“Ladies.”
He led us down the hall to a conference room. The chairs were aluminum with vinyl covered seats, the table was made of pressed wood, and the concrete block walls were painted beige. No waste of taxpayers’ money here. They could not have made the room uglier if they had tried.

“I would remind you to be honest in answering my questions.”

“Excuse me?” I raised my hand and interrupted, but I had a valid reason for doing so. “Do people ever forget
to be honest?”

His lips moved, and I think he whispered, “For the love,” but instead of finishing his sentence he cleared his throat.
 
Next he explained he would be taping our statements, and we would be asked to return to sign them after they were transcribed.

Victoria asked if we were being observed, noting the mirror on the wall behind my head. Kent declined to answer; he just looked down and pretended to ignore her. Tara took this as an affirmative response. “That’s hot. It’s vinyl seat-hot.”

I didn’t get what was so hot about two-way mirrors, but then she explained herself.
“Maybe for our cars?”

“Tara, you can’t drive down the street with a mirror for a windshield,” I said.

Detective Kent took a deep breath. “Can we proceed?”

He centered the microphone on the table. It was three sided and pretty hi tech compared to the rest of the room. Tara leaned over the table and tapped it twice. “Testing, test …”

“It’s on. It’s on for the love of
pete
!” He gave the current time and our location and then said each of our names. He should have known better.

“Leigh Reed.”

“Present.”

“Victoria Blair.”

She gave the room a bow. “Thank you all for coming today.”

 
“Tara Brown.” She gave a beauty queen wave with fingers held together and wrist rotating. He ignored us the way you do when a child is acting silly and you don’t want to encourage it, I mean, him.

He said that this statement concerned the death of David Taylor and then he gave the Taylors’ address. We listened with what passes for rapt attention on our parts. Actually, when you hear something you already know, it’s rarely what you’d call absorbing.

 
“Why were you sitting in front of the deceased’s house last night?”

“Surveillance.
His wife telephoned us, and we were going to follow him.”

“So he was cheating on his wife?”

“She suspected he was.”

“And that he was going to leave her for another woman?”

“Hold your horses. Aren’t we getting a little ahead of ourselves? We never said that there
was
another woman.” I was cool as a cucumber.

“Did Kelly Taylor suspect he might be planning on ending the marriage?”

“We never discussed that with her.”

“That’d be nice to know, since his will leaves everything to her.”

“To the other woman?”
Tara shrieked, almost coming off her chair.

“I thought you said you didn’t know if there was one.” Detective Kent mistakenly thought he had us there.

“We don’t.” Then I turned to Tara, “He was saying everything would be left to Kelly Taylor.”

Kent shook his head. “His business had recently become extremely lucrative. If he was about to end the marriage, he was worth more to Mrs. Taylor dead than alive. When you learn who …”

I interrupted him.
“If.”

He turned the volume all the way down on the recorder. “
…
if
and who the third party is, I expect you to tell me. I’m still considering filing a complaint against Tiara Investigations with the state board.”

“Sure, we’ll let you know if we find a girlfriend,” said my lips, but my brain was saying
,
you’re not going to file a complaint against us and tell the board how you learned about our agency.

He turned the volume back up. “How did Mrs. Taylor seem last night when you spoke with her?”

Victoria took this one. “She seemed in control.”

“What does that mean?”

“She didn’t look like she was out of control?”

He looked at me. “Since you’ve had a few hours to think about it, did you all see anything to help us identify the perpetrator?”

My brain:
Thank you Lord for not letting him
say
perp.
Lips: “Nothing, we’re sorry about that.” And I was.

Turning to Victoria he asked the same question, but it was Tara who spoke up, “There may be something in the photos.”

This time it was Kent jumping out of his chair. “You have photographs?
With you?”

“They’re being developed,” I said.
 

“
Developed?”
he asked with disdain that he didn’t have the decency to try to hide. “Does your little detective agency have any equipment at all?”

We didn’t answer, and he assumed we had chosen not to dignify his remark with a reply. In fact, unless you count our wigs, the photocopier and some postage stamps, you’d have to say we don’t have any equipment.

“How soon can I get them?”

Tara answered, “One hour or they’re free.”

“We’ll pick them up and bring them to you,” I told him.

“Don’t make me get a warrant and confiscate them.” That sounded familiar, and then I remembered, ‘Don’t make me pull this car over.’ He gave us each a business card with his cell phone number underlined. We were to call him when we had anything to report.

“And another thing, I will need you three to stay available.”

“Available?” Tara tilted her head. “They’re both married. I’m the only one that’s available.”

“Tara, aren’t you forgetting something?” I prompted her.

“Paul?”

“No, Sweetie. The person the dogs went after.”

“You saw someone outside the Taylor house last night?”

“Actually,
saw
is a bit of an overstatement. There was someone out there running away, but Tara didn’t see the person. That’s why the dogs were pulling her.”

“Can you give a description?”

“I’m sorry, no,” she answered.

“A man or a woman?”

“A man.”

“You could tell that how?”

Tara stared at the ceiling. Victoria answered for her, “Let’s just say it’s a gift she has.”

“For the love of Pete.
I’ll have the neighbors interviewed.”

On the way out Victoria took one last look at the two-way mirror and then requested a copy of the DVD. His answer was his Dirty Harry glare, which we construed as a no.

~

We drove over to Target to pick up the developed photos. Tara was driving, and she started the debriefing, such as it was. “Didn’t that seem a little, um, informal?”

“Was it?” I asked. “I’m usually reading by the time those police shows come on so I wouldn’t know.”

“Last night he should have separated us and then conducted interviews.”

“Tara, I’m so glad you’re an attorney.” Vic was cleaning her eyeglasses. “Are there any other procedures he’s easing up on? And why?”

I rummaged through my handbag for my cell phone and checked for missed calls.
“Hmm.
Maybe his opinion of us isn’t as low as he would like us to think.”
 

Tara laughed. “Or maybe he’s just lazy.”

“I hope you didn’t drop off my camera for developing. I didn’t take any pictures,” Victoria said.

“Neither did I, but I turned in all three, because I couldn’t tell which camera was mine.”

I knew what was coming. “Wait, I didn’t take any pictures either. So this means we have no photos at all?
Nothing on any of the three cameras?
I guess that shoots
my he
-came-to-his-senses-and-realized-we’re-brilliant theory all to hell and back.”

Tara pulled right back out of the parking lot. “For the love of Pete,” she mimicked.

“Why are we still using those stupid yellow cameras?”
 
Victoria winced and rolled her head back.

On a practice run, we had tried using the cameras on our cell phones, but since so much of our surveillance takes place after dark, this was a nonstarter. The cell phones worked well enough, but we had to turn on the car’s interior lights to use them. Not good.

“That does it. Tomorrow I’m going shopping for a digital camera.” Then I called Kent and told him none of the photos were able to be developed. It’s what we like to call constructive ambiguity. We drove back to Tara’s house and got in our own cars. On the way we hadn’t said much; we needed a break. Tara seemed especially quiet.

I unlocked the door to my house and went in. Sometimes there’s arrogance to a quiet house, like it’s snubbing you. That afternoon the house was a shelter, and that was a good feeling. I checked for phone messages, and there were none. Sometimes my husband can get a phone line, and sometimes he can’t.

The morning’s long run had caught up with me, and the events of the last twenty-four hours leaned on me, too. It felt good to be alone except for Abby. Once upstairs I changed into an ivory silk
charmeuse
nightgown and robe. At the time I could not have told you why I was dressed like that to save my life. I realized I didn’t need a
nap,
I just needed some down time.
 
I headed back downstairs and went out to the deck to my flower arranging table. I pulled on my gardener’s smock and went to work. I had saved flowers from my summer cutting bed to dry for an arrangement. Most of them were ready. I began by cutting a base of Styrofoam and securing it to the planter. Next, I inserted stub wires into the roses. The pink roses symbolized love, grace, and beauty. Then I added lamb’s ears for gentleness. I looked at my handiwork and found myself smiling. That was when I realized I was chilly. I went inside thinking how time had flown. I hung my smock on the hook and picked up the newspaper and took it to bed.

Abby was already on the end of the bed and snoring lightly. She whined and then kicked what my husband calls her rear driver’s side leg twice. I gave her an air kiss, and she came out of her bad dream. It was time to lie down and read the
New York Times
, but not before the nighttime ritual I had resumed a year or so ago. I rubbed the excess night cream and eye cream onto the back of my hands instead of a towel and realized I was getting a kick out of doing all this. My
pedicured
feet sank into a soft rug with a pattern of cabbage roses. I don’t know if it was caring about my looks again or spending time on myself or what, but I felt like I had been away and come back.

Finally in bed under damask bedcovers, I read Bob Herbert’s column. A paragraph below the first column noted that “Thomas Friedman is off today.” Wouldn’t he have been off yesterday? And if he is really off today, are we going to have his column tomorrow? I was just wondering.

 
The phone rang, and I rolled over to the side of the bed to answer it.

“Leigh? Turn on your TV.”

“What’s up?”

“Turn to Channel 75. It’s one of those shopping channels.”

I did as she said, and then I heard a familiar voice. “Is that Tara talking?”

“Oh, yeah.
The segment is on improving your retirement years. She’s asking questions about a sound amplifier.”

“So how big a room can you hear across? Can you, like, hear someone across the street?”

“Yes,
m’am
!
Are you going to be ordering?”

“Just one more question. If you were sitting in a car outside someone’s house, would you be able to hear what the
couple, or whoever’s inside the house, were
saying?’

“We’ll go on to our next caller, who has purchased the sound amplifier before. Hon, go ahead.”

I turned off the TV.

“Leigh, are you there?”

“Yeah, but I just don’t know what to say after that. Wait, I’m getting another call.” I looked at the phone and saw it was Tara so I used three-way calling to include her.

“Hi! Guess what I just did for us!”

“You bought us old-people hearing gizmos so we can eavesdrop on people,” Victoria answered.

“
Uhh
, I get how you know Internet everything, but …”

“Tara, we heard you on a shopping channel. Did you order three?”