Silk Stalkings (21 page)

“Okay, fine, tell her it was a wonderful evening and we both can't wait to do it again.”

“Is that the truth?”

I made a big show of looking over my shoulder in both directions, then turned back to him. I put my hands on his cheeks and made him stare me directly in the eyes. “It's our best bet for not blowing our cover,” I said. I rose to the balls of my feet and gently kissed him on the mouth.

I turned around and walked toward the entrance. Vaughn caught up to me on the short flight of stairs in front of the building and turned to face me. “I'll distract Mum, see, and you get the goods,” he said in a low voice. His eyes looked out over the top of my head, across the street and at a family idling in the parking lot. He winked and opened the door. My playful attitude vanished when I spotted Sheila behind the hostess station. I sobered quickly and looked to Vaughn, making no secret of why I'd come in the first place. He had turned the opposite direction into the dark wooden vestibule, where he stood, studying one of the photos hanging on the wall. I was on my own.

“Hi, Sheila,” I said. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

Her lips pressed together into a flat line. “You need to leave me alone,” she hissed in a low voice. “I need this job.”

I lowered my voice, too. “I already know that you lied about your pageant results. If you want me to leave you alone, you're going to have to tell me the truth.”

“Fine.” She grabbed my elbow and pulled me down the hall. Vaughn looked as shocked as I felt when Sheila pulled me into the men's room.

“I don't think we're supposed to be in here,” I said.

She locked the door from the inside and then turned around. “Why won't you just leave me alone?”

“Because a man is dead and you've been acting very suspicious.”

“You think I killed Harvey?” she said. Her eyes grew wide and all of the color drained her face. “Why me?”

She wasn't acting like a guilty person, but that didn't mean anything. I had one chance to confront her with what I knew and this was it. “Someone slipped nitroglycerine into Harvey's drink at the Garden Party. I found out later that you gave a vial of pills to someone to give to him.”

“Because when I found them on the drink station, somebody told me they were his.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don't remember. It was dark and there were a lot of people in front of me. I don't usually work the beverage station. I was just trying to keep up with the drink orders.” She looked confused. “The pills weren't his? And that made him pass out?”

“They might have killed him that night,” I said. I had no reason to think that was true, but then again, I didn't have a medical background so what did I really know? “You were lying the other day when you told me you thought you were a contestant. You already knew you weren't. How did you know only nineteen young women would show up at Material Girl?
If Lucy had been there, we all would have known that you didn't belong.”

Sheila deflated before my eyes. She leaned back against the wall between the metal fixture that blew out hot air to dry freshly washed hands and the edge of the sink. Even though I was intent on what she had to say, I hadn't forgotten where we were and what was mounted along the wall behind me. It wasn't my first time in a men's restroom thanks to the years I'd spent living in downtown Los Angeles, but it was an experience I hadn't been itching to repeat.

I could tell that Sheila wanted to get out of there, but her body language wasn't that of a caged animal, ready to strike, or a scheming psychopath calculating her next move. It was of a lost little girl in the body of a twenty-two-year-old.

“What's going on, Sheila? What are you trying to hide?”

She stared down at the floor and pushed the toe of her shoe back and forth over the ceramic tiles. “I have really bad credit,” she said. “When I graduated from high school, I applied for student loans, but I cashed the checks and spent them on an apartment and clothes and a car. I dropped out of school and kept charging things until they wouldn't let me charge anymore.”

“That would have shown up on a background check,” I said.

“When I got this job, I was going to make a change. I wanted to put all of that behind me and earn my own way. But then I heard from my family back in Illinois. My dad got laid off and then got sick. My mom hasn't worked in years. What kind of a job could she get? Her biggest talent is reading
People
magazine the day it comes out. They needed my help so I started sending money to them.”

“Why did you enter the pageant?”

“I thought, if I had a chance to win, I could make them proud of me. Instead of seeing me as a college dropout with a hundred grand of debt, I would be famous. My mom likes famous people.”

“But the background check disqualified you from the pageant,” I said.

“I should have let it go and moved on, but then that Lucy stopped me while I was walking to work and she asked me for directions. She said she was a finalist but that she didn't really care about it. That's not fair, you know? Why should she get to participate when she doesn't even want to, and I can't? So I told her she was in the wrong area of San Ladrón. I told her to get back on the highway and take the third exit, and then turn left. If she followed my directions, she'd be gone for over an hour. I just wanted to be a part of it for a little while, just feel like somebody.”

I stepped toward her and put my hand on her arm. “You
are
somebody,” I said. “Adelaide Brooks counts on you to help run the Waverly House. And your parents probably don't say it enough, but I'm sure they love you for the person you are.”

There was a knock on the door, and then it rattled against the lock. Sheila and I both looked at the door. The knocking persisted, and then came Vaughn's voice. “Poly? I saw you go in there with Sheila. I—um—there are people waiting to use the facilities.”

I'd gotten what I came for. I unlocked the door and pulled it open. Vaughn faced me. “Excuse me,” I said. I led Sheila out of the men's room as if we'd had every right to be there, but I stopped a few feet short of the hostess station and turned back to face her. “You owe it to Adelaide to tell her the truth,” I said. “She's going to find out one way or the other. If you're honest with her, she might let you keep your job.”

•   •   •

It took a lot longer to reach Halliwell Industries while battling traffic than it had the other times I'd gone. I hadn't waited for Vaughn when I left the Waverly House. Nolene was expecting me and the clock was ticking. If there was a way for me to blame the traffic on the pageant, I would have.
Sure, my shop was benefiting from the involvement in the pageant, but I was beginning to think that anybody who aligned themselves with Miss Tangorli was in for a streak of bad luck by association.

I pulled into Halliwell Industries around quarter after seven. The lot was half full. I parked in a space marked
Visitor
by the back and walked down the sidewalk between the two buildings that faced each other. At the end of the sidewalk, I turned left and approached the security desk. A bald Mexican man dressed in a navy blue blazer over a white shirt and orange tie sat behind the desk. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place him.

“Hi, I'm Poly Monroe. Have we met before?”

“I'm Xavier. You probably saw me at the Waverly House.”

“That's right,” I said. “You were working on the gardens for the Midnight in Paris party.”

“I work part time covering the front desk here. Second job. Can I help you with something?”

“I don't know,” I said. His presence behind the desk threw me off. “I called earlier. Did I talk to you?”

“Nope. We've had musical chairs at the desk today. Half of the regular staff is out sick. My shift started at six.”

“Oh. Well, Nolene said I could stop by any time.”

“She's up there?” he asked. “That woman covers more territory in a day than most people do in a month. My fiancée wears one of them Fitbits—you know, the thing that tracks how far you walk?—and I bet she still doesn't clock half the mileage of Nolene.”

Xavier opened up a visitor log and placed it in front of me with a pen. “Sign in at the next available space and I'll give you a pass.”

I wrote my name and set the pen down. “Is this a new procedure? The other night I came here with Inez and I didn't have to sign in.”

“After hours?” he asked. I nodded. “Yeah, things get a
little more relaxed at night. You gotta be with someone who can give you access, though. Key cards track everybody so we can tell who went where. If you don't have a key card, you can't get in.”

I silently thanked Inez for lending me her key card the other night. If she hadn't trusted me with it, I would never have found the paper trail of money that went right through Nolene's office. And almost immediately, I felt guilty. Inez had trusted me with her key card and what had I done? I committed a crime while I was there and stole information that shed a less-than-flattering light on her former boss. If anyone ever discovered what I'd done, how would it have looked that Inez had been the one who gave me access?

Xavier spun the visitor log around to face him and set it on the desk blotter. He bent down to a drawer on his right and pushed a bunch of white plastic tags around inside a drawer until his fingers landed on one he wanted. “Easier for me if it's not coded already.” He fed the key card into a small box and pressed a couple of numbers on a keypad.

“Why do you keep coded key cards?”

“New employees, interns, what have you. Mr. Halliwell used to have lots of tour groups coming in and out. He loved showing the place off. We'd go through a hundred cards in a month,” he said.

“What would happen if someone didn't turn theirs in when the tour was over?”

“If they ever tried to use it to get back in, I'd know. I know everywhere everybody goes, thanks to those cards. Every staff card is programmed with their employee numbers.”

“What about at night when you're not here?”

“The locks track the activity and I review it when I get in.” He shook his head. “Nolene sure has been putting in a lot of hours since Mr. Halliwell was murdered. When I came in this morning, the key card activity from last night was all in her office.”

But Nolene hadn't been in her office. I had. Which meant somebody had duplicated Nolene's key card, and why do that? To make it look like she'd been in the building. So someone could have the run of Halliwell Industries without ever being detected.

“Don't worry, you're
not asking anything the cops didn't. I take pride in my job. Never lost a visitor pass yet,” he said proudly. He pulled the white card out of the small box and handed it to me. I clipped it onto the strap of my messenger bag and thanked him. I was halfway to the elevators when Xavier caught up with me and pressed the call button on the elevators.

“Ninth floor. You'll need the card to activate the elevator once you're inside and then again to open the doors to Nolene's floor. Her office is the first one on the left.”

I pretended all of this was new information and thanked him. What was I going to say to Nolene when I arrived? Would she already have noticed the missing notebook, or could I get it back into the bookcase without her noticing?

The ninth floor was dark. I used the key card to open the offices and followed the carpeted path to Nolene's office. Her
door was shut and locked. Unfortunately for me, it required an actual key, not a rectangle of plastic with a magnetic strip.

Xavier had said she was here, so I called out to her. “Nolene? It's Poly Monroe. Are you here?”

No answer.

The longer I stood in the dark sea of cubicles, the more I realized that I'd been tricked.

We'd all been tricked.

Nolene wasn't here. She hadn't been here earlier, and she probably hadn't been in the office for days. Xavier said he could track the employees by the use of their key cards. What a perfectly marvelous way to make him think someone had been there who hadn't.

I sank into a black office chair and thought through what I was starting to suspect. Xavier had told me that Nolene was putting in long hours, but he hadn't even seen her. He'd only seen activity from her key card. He had even talked about last night—the night that I'd been in the offices—and specifically mentioned Nolene. I knew for a fact that she hadn't been in the offices that night, because I'd been here.

Maybe Nolene hadn't been here, but her key card told a much different story.

Every move I'd made required the use of that card. What if the card that Inez had lent me wasn't coded with her employee information but with Nolene's instead?

I pulled out my cell phone and called Vaughn. The call dropped due to poor reception. I spun the desk chair around and searched the surface for the desk phone. When I found it, I pressed zero, hoping to be connected with Xavier at the security desk. The phone rang eight times before I hung up.

Xavier could have gone to the restroom. He could have gotten up to buy a coffee. He could be on another call. He could have been distracted from his post. And who could have distracted him? Someone he already trusted with the front desk.

A bell in the hallway announced the arrival of the elevator. The red neon of the
Exit
sign cast a glow across Beth's cropped gray hair as she advanced from the elevators to the glass doors. I dropped to my hands and knees behind the cubicle and wrapped my arms around my legs. I couldn't see her, but she couldn't see me, either.

Beth had been the person to first throw suspicion onto Nolene. And Beth said she had a medical condition. Was it related to her heart? If so, Harvey would know about it. He might have recognized the pills. Enough that he would have arranged a confrontation with her the day after the party—the day that he was killed.

Beth had means. She had opportunity. And she certainly could have seen what went on in Harvey's accounts.

The locks by the glass doors clinked as if they'd been opened. Moments later the particular grating sound of a key being threaded into a lock told me where Beth had gone. I crawled out from under the desk and looked up at Nolene's office. The door was open. The back of a white lab coat filled the doorway, until Beth moved out of my range of vision to the wall of financial notebooks. She laughed the low rumble of a woman who has discovered that the trap she laid was successful. The laughter grew louder and she walked out of the office. I ducked back down and lost sight of her. Her feet were silent on the carpet, but there was no denying the sound of the glass doors closing and locking behind her. I crawled to the edge of the cubicles and peered around the edge, watching her stand by the elevator. The doors opened, she got on, and they closed.

I had to get help.

Out in the hallway, I ran to the fire extinguisher. As predicted, a building map indicated the stairs. I ran to the end of the hall, pushed the door open, and started down the eight flights. I tripped once, between the sixth and fifth floors, but scrambled back to my feet and kept going.

The exit opened onto the greens behind the building. It took me a second to get my bearings, but when I did I headed to the greenhouse. I kept close to the building so the large lights that illuminated the grounds wouldn't draw attention to me.

The greenhouse was lit from the inside. Orange heat lamps cast a glow over rows of trees that were being spliced and seeded. A mist clung to the inside of the glass walls, making it hard to make out much more than the silhouette of a person moving about inside. I crept as close as I could, dropped onto my knees into the damp soil, and pressed my face up against the glass. The bottom corner had escaped the film of moisture thanks to the leaves of a large tree that sat in front of me. What I could make out between the leaves wasn't much. But it was enough to see that Beth wasn't alone.

Nolene Kelly was on the floor, her hands and feet bound with green tape. A smear of something dark was caked to the side of her face.

Blood.

Nolene's head moved up and down, as if she'd been asked a yes or no question that needed to be answered. Her eyes were only half open. I fished my phone out from my pocket and called 911.

“What is your emergency?” a female voice asked.

“Someone's being held at Halliwell Industries. Send the police as soon as you can,” I whispered.

The operator continued. “Hello? Can you speak up? I can barely hear you.”

“Halliwell Industries. Send the police to the greenhouse. Hurry,” I said.

“Tell me what's happening,” she said.

I turned to look back inside the greenhouse and froze. Nolene was still tied up on the floor, but Beth was gone. I turned my back on the greenhouse and shrank down behind
the overgrown foliage that lined the perimeter of the glass structure.

The voice of the 911 operator was audible through the phone in my hand. “Hold one moment,” I whispered. I put the phone on speaker and turned up the volume. I threw it as far as I could.

The operator spoke again, this time loud enough to sound as though she were there. I peered around the side of the building and watched Beth raise her head at the sound of the voice. She moved in that direction. I moved to the opposite side of the building, staying out of Beth's vision.

“What the—?” she muttered, and then, seconds later, she cursed. Bent over, I ran around the rest of the greenhouse until I reached the door and ducked inside.

Nolene's eyes widened when she saw me. I raised my finger to my lips and pointed behind me. “Beth will be back soon. We have to get you out of here.”

She shook her head back and forth quickly. I reached around the back of her head and untied the strip of fabric that had gagged her. As soon as it was loose, I cut through her wrist and ankle bindings with an oversized pair of gardening shears.

“Poly, you have to get us out of here. You don't understand.”

“As soon as I untie you, we have to run.”

The door to the greenhouse shut behind me. I turned, expecting to see Beth. Instead, I saw her distorted silhouette on the other side of the glass. Her hands fumbled with something by the door. She turned and disappeared into the dark night.

I raced to the door and pushed. The doors bowed out slightly but snapped back when they met with resistance. She'd threaded a thick length of pipe through the greenhouse handles, trapping us inside. Moisture broke out on my forehead and under my arms. The greenhouse was hot—hotter
than it had been the previous night when I'd been there. I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm and looked around for another exit.

That was when I saw that the glowing orange lamps were aimed at a large rubber balloon that was suspended from the ceiling.

“What is that?”

“I don't know. I don't know how long I've been here. Beth keeps saying it's poetic. Over and over—‘It's poetic.'”

As I moved closer to the lamps, the heat became almost unbearable. It was like a tropical rain forest inside the glass enclosure: hot, wet, and itchy, as if I'd been bitten by a thousand mosquitoes and then rubbed down with salt. I waved my hand in front of the lamp and felt a scorching heat.

“What's in the balloon?” I asked.

“I don't know. I don't know anything.” Nolene leaned forward and sobbed openly.

With one arm, I swept dozens of small seedlings onto the ground and then climbed onto the table in the middle of the room. The rubber on the outside of the large balloon had started to blister. Under the balloon was a large metal funnel connected to a series of black soaker hoses that were draped, like a string of Chinese lanterns, to the far corners of the room.

Droplets of orange liquid oozed out of a tear in the balloon, followed by a trickle, and then a stream. Once the rubber tore, the liquid gushed out into the metal funnel. It bubbled and hissed. Soon the black soaker hoses jumped with the contact of whatever it was that was filling them.

Beads of orange liquid pulsed out of the hoses and dripped onto the plants. The first to come into contact with the liquid wilted immediately. The green plastic of the pot melted.

Acid, I guessed. I glanced up at the other hoses and realized if we waited any longer, we'd be unable to escape the shower. The plants would die. The future of Halliwell Industries would be demolished.

Poetic.

I put my hands under Nolene's arms and hoisted her to her feet. “We have to get out of here now,” I said.

“We can't. She locked us in,” she said.

I ran to the doors and shook them again. The spray of acid hit my hands and burned like bee stings. I pulled a thick black plastic tarp from under a table of seedlings and held it over Nolene's and my head. Why had I used my phone to create a diversion?

I searched for a way out. The acid fell from two hoses, killing the plants below them on contact. To my left was a large oxidized tin watering can. I grabbed the handle and swung it against the wall of the greenhouse. The glass cracked.

I pulled back and swung again, this time with both hands. The glass cracked more, and then it broke. I kicked at the broken panes until the opening was big enough for us to fit through. I pushed Nolene first, then bent down and crawled through.

“Go to the main building and call for help,” I said to Nolene. “Hurry.” I gave her a push.

Nolene took off across the greens. I swiped at the skin that had been exposed to the hot acid, brushing away imaginary irritants. Too late, I saw Beth alongside the greenhouse, weaving in and out of the pageant seating.

“You have no connection to Halliwell Industries. But still, you had to play the hero.” She held a lit torch. The dancing flames illuminated her twisted expression. “Do you know what the funny thing is about heroes?”

“What?” I said. I looked back and forth between her face and the torch. The weather had been dry—scarily so. I didn't know what the open flame would do to the acid-soaked trees inside the greenhouse, but I knew the Tangorli fields would go up like a match set to a scarecrow if she got close.

She stepped away from the greenhouse and thrust the torch at me like the Wicked Witch of the West in a face-off against
Dorothy. “Heroes make excellent victims. People try to rescue you. And if you die, they'll celebrate you all the same.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“There's a million dollars in a bank account with my name on it.” She staggered a moment and put her hand to her chest. “I paid my dues with this company. I'm not going to live forever and it's time to make my move.”

“Your medical condition—it's your heart, isn't it?”

She dropped her hand from her chest and pointed at me. “You should have minded your own business. Nobody would have known if you didn't go snooping around.”

“Harvey knew,” I said. “He figured out that the fifty-thousand-dollar deposits were to you,” I said.

“You know about them? That's too bad. Too bad for you,” she said. She put both hands on the torch and waved it in my face. I stepped back but didn't say a word. “Congenital heart defect. That's what I have. Harvey wanted people to think this juice could make people live a long life. Not me. No amount of Tangorli juice is going to change the condition I was born with. When I started working for him, it was my job to audit the financial records. You know what I found, don't you? A fifty-thousand-dollar deposit sent to a nobody from Encino. The payment happened right in the middle of the pageant planning and nobody ever questioned it. That's when I first got the idea.”

“You've been stealing from Halliwell Industries ever since.”

“I opened an account and wrote threatening letters to Harvey every year, demanding payment.”

“Harvey wouldn't have paid them off. He wasn't trying to bury a secret.”

“Harvey never saw the letters. I wrote them, filed them, and sent the money to the account. If anybody looked into it, there was a paper trail in place to point to a mechanic in Encino who was extorting money all these years. And the
beauty of the plan was that I never got greedy. Fifty thousand every year for twenty years. A million dollars, with interest. And nobody questioned it.”

“So why kill Harvey now?”

“I saw the application for that Lucy girl. The address was the same as the one where Harvey sent the original money. I didn't know the relationship between that family and Harvey, but I couldn't chance it. I sent a letter—a real one—saying that I knew about the girl in Encino. I didn't know why he'd paid them off all those years ago, but there had to be a reason.”