Designed for Death (19 page)

“I suggest you change the locks. Today. And lock the paint cans in the office.”

“You got that right.”

“And no 301 ads in the
Naples Daily
for a while.”

“Right again, Deva.” He sprang to his feet, ready for action. I was about to follow him out of the room when I spotted an envelope on top of the dresser. I looked closer. The word
Dick
was printed on it in big, bold letters. I handed it to him. “For you.”

“Jeez, who’s that from?”

“You’ll have to open it to find out.”

He turned the envelope over and inserted a finger under the flap. As he removed a sheet of paper, something tumbled out and fell to the floor—a gold bracelet, a tiny ruby heart suspended from one of the links.

“What the hell’s this?” Dick bent over and picked up the bracelet. “She don’t want it?”

He dropped the bracelet in his shorts pocket and, after scanning the paper, handed it to me without a word and flopped back on the mattress.

Dick,

It’s my turn to paint the town red. Thought I’d start in here.

Give the bracelet back to AudreyAnn. My lawyer will be in touch.

I will not.

Marilyn

I folded the note, slid it back in the envelope and laid it on the bed next to Dick. He moaned and covered his eyes with a hand. “She’s gonna divorce me.”

Why bother to tell him you don’t give a piece of jewelry to your girlfriend, take it back, then present it, secondhand, like a love gift, to your wife?

Stretched out flat on the bed, he was as unmoving as a corpse. A weak stirring of pity caused me to say “Maybe you can talk her out of it.” I stopped short of adding “again.”

“Yeah!” He jumped up, his eyes suspiciously moist, and hurried out of the room. “Lock up, will you?” he called over his shoulder, not giving me a chance to tell him the rear end of his shorts sported two big British Red bull’s-eyes.

Chapter Eighteen

Any minute now Simon would come barreling up the stairs, searching for me. I hurried back to the clubroom to head him off.

In my brief absence, the funeral luncheon had escalated to a noisy, swinging party.

Chianti, lasagna and garlic bread sure were great icebreakers. Mike in hand, AudreyAnn was belting out a karaoke number off-key to a CD of Italian love songs. While she bellowed “That’s
Amore!
” Roy and the brunette in the sundress swayed together in rhythm, armlocked side by side. Marilyn, of course, was nowhere in sight. I spotted Simon huddled in a corner with the other sundress, the pretty blonde one. Both of them were obviously enjoying whatever they were talking about. I sure had overestimated his concern.

I sashayed over to them. Up close, she looked twenty, tops. Maybe nineteen.

“I was about to go searching for you,” Simon said.

“I can tell.”

He grinned. “Not to worry.” He turned to the blonde. “Irma Jansen, this is Devalera Dunne, a close friend of Treasure.”

“Oh, hi. My sister and I were her friends too.” She indicated the brunette now deep in conversation with AudreyAnn. Maybe planning a karaoke duet.

“Is Dick all right?” Simon asked me quietly.

“He will be. Wave a red flag at a bull, you know what happens.”

From his expression, I knew my flip response raised more questions than answers, but Simon was too discreet to press for more in a crowded room. Guaranteed, he would later when he got me alone.
If
he got me alone.

Before I could ask Irma how she knew Treasure, Hedda shouted, “Ta dah! Imaginary drumroll, everybody!”

Roy sprang over to open the door wider. Like a woman holding a precious newborn, Fayette slowly entered, easing the flat cake ahead of him and carefully placing it on the buffet.

“Sweets for the sweet,” Fayette declared, pointing at the vanilla crème image in the center of the cake. “That picture there is Tommy Kozlowski. You all knew him as Treasure. But that was after his operation.” He picked up the cake knife, waving it like a toy sword. “Have a piece of him, everybody. He would have loved that. He always gave of himself.”

“I’ll do the honors, dear,” Roy said, taking the cake knife from Fayette’s shaky hand. He cut off a sizable chunk from a corner of the sheet cake and plunked it onto a paper dessert plate. “Who’ll be first?”

“I will,” I said, stepping forward. I’d rather have a couple of blue frosting roses than a bite of Tommy’s chin, or ear, or eye…

A buzz had started up. Clearly, after Fayette’s bombshell, explanations were in order.

“Help me, lovey,” Fayette whispered in my ear. “I can’t talk about it anymore.”

I squeezed his hand then lofted my laden paper plate. “A few words, everybody.” The room quieted. “Treasure, as we all knew her, had a secret.” I gulped in a deep lungful of air and expelled it slowly. “Before she bought her condo here at Surfside, she had surgery, transgender surgery.”

I glanced at Fayette. White-faced and trembling, he looked ready to collapse. I tucked my free arm through his to steady him.

“While Fayette can recall memories of two different people, like you, I only remember one.” I raised my cake plate even higher. “A toast.” The stunned mourners hoisted whatever they were holding, even their empties. “To Treasure. And to Tommy.”

Anybody who had anything left in his glass gulped it down. Chip, sensitive to the occasion, hurried out to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of Chianti in one hand, a pitcher of beer in the other. I let go of Fayette to take a bite of blue rose.

Irma, glassy-eyed, let Chip fill her plastic glass with wine. “Oh, my goodness, I never suspected.”

“How well did you know her?” I asked.

“Not well, I guess.” Irma took a long, fortifying swallow. I re-estimated her age to twenty-two. Maybe twenty-three. “Elsie and I go to the Island Grill after work some nights. Especially Saturdays. We used to see her at the bar. She was always so friendly, greeting everybody, having a ball. When she wasn’t there, the place seemed dead.”

At the word
dead,
she took another gulp. “Elsie and I had such a fun time with her the night she died that—”

“Really?”

She nodded. “When we read about the funeral in the paper, we wanted to pay our respects.”

I’d lost my appetite for funeral cake and put the paper plate on a table. “Tell me about that night. Was she alone?”

“More or less. She was already at the bar when we got there, looking sensational. All in red with a neckline down to here.” Irma indicated an area somewhere near her belt. “She drew the guys like flies to flypaper…not a good comparison, but you know what I mean.”

Simon crushed the empty Bud can he’d been holding. “I need a refill,” he said, stomping off. But before he did, I sensed a silent signal coming from his eyes. The problem was I couldn’t interpret it. Was it
Stop this questioning, it’s none of your business?
Or
Go for it, find out as much as you can?
Red or green?

I went for the green and asked Irma, “Who was she talking to that night? Anyone in particular?”

“For a while. He took off, though, long before she did.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

“No, not really…the bar was crowded and he mostly had his back to me. From what I could tell, though, I’d say sort of middle-aged. You know, thirty-five or so.”

Middle-aged.
I stifled a groan.

“Let’s see…not too tall…touristy clothes. He had on a purple shirt. Other than that, I didn’t really get a good look at him. My sister might have. She’s very detail-minded.”

Irma beckoned to the brunette, a big-boned girl with a happy, I-want-to-meet-you kind of face. We acknowledged each other with smiles.

“Elsie, you know that last night at the Island Grill?” Irma asked. “Remember the guy Treasure talked to for quite a while? The one she sat next to at the bar and kept laughing at whatever he said.”

“I remember that. He left before she did.”

“What did he look like?”

Elsie frowned, trying to relive an incidental moment, one she probably never expected to recall. “Let’s see…he wasn’t what you’d call tall, not short, either. Kind of broad through the shoulders. I think he had dark hair. What I remember most are his sunglasses. I just caught a quick glimpse of them when he got up to leave. They keep the bar kind of dark, you know, on purpose, so that struck me as sort of funny.”

“Anything else?” I asked. “Anything at all?”

Elsie shook her head. “Nothing else, we were too far away. Except that he sat all hunched over on his stool like he was tense or something. But I can’t be sure. I never met him. Maybe he just didn’t like Treasure laughing like that.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

She shook her head. “I doubt it.”

“Still, you need to tell what you saw to the police,” I said.

Irma fired a quick glance Elsie’s way. “We talked about it but didn’t think we had anything to report. Not really. Treasure chatted with a lot of guys that night.”

“Maybe somebody followed her. Or saw her leave with someone.”

They both looked at each other, guilt stricken. “Elsie, I told you, we should’ve gone to the police,” Irma said. “You can’t avoid trouble all the time. If Mom finds out we were at the Island Grill, so what? We’re old enough.”

“But the bar was so crowded that night. It could have been any one of, of…” Elsie shrugged, “…a dozen guys.”

No doubt that was true. So in a whole week why had no one come forward to say they’d seen Treasure alive on the night she was murdered? No one? The
Naples Daily
had gone into the story in vivid detail—at least for the first few days. Some people who’d been at the bar must have read about it. Maybe somebody else who’d been there had gotten a better look at this mysterious guy than the girls had.

On the other hand, how would I know if someone
had
gone to the police? Rossi wouldn’t reveal information like that. Yet even if someone had contacted him, Irma and Elsie still needed to tell their story, and I had a story of my own to reveal—my visit to Lee Skimp at Kmart. Her assailant had worn sunglasses in the dark, too. Coincidence or something more? I’d bet my money on something more.

“It’s not too late to tell what you know,” I said, though undoubtedly the trail had cooled. As if I were speaking the truth, not just spouting wishful thinking, the clubroom door opened and Lieutenant Rossi sauntered in. The curmudgeon was scowling as usual, so I couldn’t understand why I was so glad to see him.

“Here’s your chance in the flesh,” I told the girls. “That man who just came in? The crabby-looking one? He’s the homicide detective on the case.”

As though she’d been caught committing a crime and needed the support of a family member, Elsie reached out and grabbed her sister’s hand.

I patted her arm. “Don’t worry. He frowns a lot, but he’s really a pussycat.” I was lying through my teeth, but I didn’t want to scare them off. “Here he comes,” I said as Rossi caught sight of me in the crowd and carved a path straight toward me.

“The funeral’s really heated up, Mrs. D,” he said, glancing around. “Another manifestation of the old I’m-glad-I’m-not dead syndrome.”

“Well, would
you
want to be the guest of honor, lieutenant?”

He didn’t bother answering as he continued to survey the room. The conversational buzz of a few minutes earlier had accelerated. Unfazed, Hedda pounded out her version of “My Way” into the handheld mike. Nobody was listening, but she didn’t seem to mind. The only one not acting as if it were New Year’s Eve at Times Square was Fayette, who sat slumped at a table in a corner sipping a mug of hot tea. Even Neal, staid, conservative Neal, was up dancing cheek to cheek, chest to chest, with AudreyAnn. They must have really connected the night we went to the Foxy Lady.

I looked for Simon, finally spotting him out by the pool chatting with Marilyn, of all people. So she hadn’t fled in terror from Dick’s rage over the paint fling. She wasn’t wasting any time getting to a lawyer, either. I wondered if tax attorneys handled divorces.

Rossi turned his back to the crowd. “Can I talk to you alone for a minute?” he asked.

“Of course, Lieutenant. Wait for me, I’ll be back, okay?” I said to the girls. “Promise you won’t go away.”

Wide-eyed, they nodded. “We won’t.”

“Have some cake,” I called over my shoulder as I led Rossi into the office. Tommy’s mouth and chin were gone, but his vanilla crème eyes stared at the revelers as if he were enjoying the scene.

Rossi closed the office door behind us and looked around at the half-empty paint cans, the splattered ladder, the electric saw. “Charming.”

He did sarcasm well.

“It’s a work in progress. How’s
your
work progressing? Make any arrests yet?”

“That’s enough, Mrs. D.”

“I don’t see you carrying any cuffs. It’s been a week already. The first forty-eight hours are critical, aren’t they? That’s when the bulk of the cases are solved, right?” I was giving him a hard time and enjoying it, my pleasure at seeing him a minute ago evaporating in the heat of his lousy attitude.

He jerked his head toward the clubroom. “Now let me help you do your job. I think a lighter tone of that hot dog mustard on the walls out there would be good in here. Some matchstick blinds. A coffee table.”

I leaned against the edge of Dick’s cluttered desk, hoping a pointed object wouldn’t jam itself into my rear. A pit bull ready for the attack, Rossi stood with legs apart, facing me. Then obviously thinking better of whatever retort he had in mind, he heaved a sigh and said, “It’s been a bad week. We’re both on edge. What do you say we back off?”

So he was taking the high road, being professional. Damned if I’d let him out-professional me. “Deal,” I said, mad as hell.