The Good Girl's Guide to Murder (27 page)

I heard other things as well.

Like the fact that the deputy chief had spoken to Carson Caruthers privately, before she’d allowed him to leave. She’d chatted with Beth Taylor again, then Renata and Janet, too.

Guess she’d saved Mother and me for last.

We were the only ones remaining in the dining room when Deputy Chief Dean ambled in and sat across the table, arms folded on its edge. She broke the tension by chatting with Mother for a few minutes about an upcoming fundraiser for the Widows and Orphans Fund, before she eased into questions about Marilee, how long we’d each known her, if she’d been in ill health or if she’d had any problems with particular employees that we were aware of.

I admitted that Marilee wasn’t exactly beloved on her set, but that I couldn’t imagine anyone who’d actually resort to murder. I did spill what I’d heard about the spider incident and the falling boom microphone, though the deputy chief nodded like those were old news.

It was Mother who brought up Justin Gable and his romancing Kendall before worming his way into Marilee’s life. As I cringed in silence, she shared her theory with the deputy chief that Justin was responsible for Kendall’s near-fatal dose of ma huang.

For some reason, that prompted Anna Dean to look directly at me, locking her narrowed eyes on me like a bomber pilot zeroing in on a target. “You were over at the studio this morning, is that true?”

I slid my hands into my lap, wedging them between my knees. “I had to drop by to pick up my evening bag and my Jeep. I’d left them both there after the fire.”

“Were you in the kitchen while the food was being prepared for the shoot?”

Okay, who’d blabbed? Carson? Renata? It could’ve been either one, I guessed.

“I wasn’t in the kitchen for more than thirty seconds,” I said, finding myself blinking rapidly, while Deputy Chief Dean stared like an eyelid-less gecko. “First, I ran into Gilbert Mabry . . . well, he ran into me, coming out of Marilee’s office. They’d been arguing.” I winced. “I really hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but they were shouting.”

“About what?”

I sighed, knocking my knees together, hating to be put on the spot. “He was mad that she hadn’t called him from the hospital to tell him about Kendall. She told him he’d been a crummy husband and father. He accused her of stealing a three hundred fifty dollar bottle of 1973 Dom Perignon from his stash in their basement before their divorce . . .”

“Hold on a second.” The deputy chief pulled a slim notebook from her breast pocket, licked her forefinger, and flipped through the pages until she found what she was looking for. “The 1973 Dom Perignon Oenotheque that Kendall Mabry drank before she collapsed?”

I glanced at my mother, who appeared to be listening as intently as the policewoman. She had her arms crossed, her head tipped, and her lips pressed into a thin line that worried me.

“Yes, that bottle,” I confirmed before resuming my story. “After Gilbert left, I went in to Marilee’s office to get my purse. I asked about Kendall and then I asked Marilee why she didn’t get tested for the long QT. I read about it online, and it’s usually genetic.”

“So I’ve been told. Dr. Taylor was pretty insistent about that, so we’ll have the lab check it out. We’re putting a rush on the results, and I’m gonna lean on them myself, so we should have preliminaries pretty fast.”

“Marilee mentioned having physicals for insurance purposes, for her TV show, and that nothing serious had ever turned up. She got a call from the mayor, so she blew me off, but not before she suggested I go to the kitchen and remind Carson that they had to pack up and leave within the hour.”

“Carson Caruthers?” Anna Dean asked, her notebook still out.

“Yes.” I wet my lips. Mother hadn’t shifted position, and I figured she’d have a fairly painful crick in her neck by the time I was through. I didn’t think I’d mention Carson’s remark before he took the cake out to the living room: “
Get out of my way so I can deliver the poison
.” He’d been joking, after all, and I couldn’t see getting him in any trouble because he had a dark sense of humor.

“You saw Mr. Caruthers at the studio earlier?” the deputy chief prodded.

“Yes,” I picked up where I left off. “Carson and I went into the hallway to talk. The kitchen was too crazy. He said it was like Grand Central Station, that even Mr. Mabry—as in Gilbert—had been there already, getting some water to take his headache powder.”

The deputy chief thumbed through a few pages, nodding. “Mr. Caruthers noted that Justin Gable and Kendall Mabry visited the kitchen as well, helping them finish up with the desserts.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, not personally.” Though Marilee had told me as much on the telephone. “The only other person I saw was Renata Taylor. We bumped into each other before I left the building. She had her arms full of papers.” I squinted, trying to recall what I’d seen. “Call sheets for the crew, scripts, medical insurance papers.”

“Anything else, Ms. Kendricks?” Anna Dean asked, eyes pinning me down, like she could see I was holding back.

“There is one thing, maybe,” I started, wetting my lips. “It’s about Justin Gable.”

“Yes?”

“It’s just that he’s . . . never mind.” I clammed up and glanced down at my lap.

Oh, man, how I itched to confess what I’d learned about Justin’s past from Janet in the car coming over, but I couldn’t. I’d promised I wouldn’t repeat a word, but it was killing me to keep it in.

“The boy’s a con man,” Cissy stepped in. “He’s left a trail of lovesick older women from Galveston to El Paso, perhaps even points beyond. He steals their hearts and then their money. Marilee was just another notch on his bed post.”

I raised my eyes to stare at my mother, my heart pumping. So she had known, just as I’d suspected.

The deputy chief smiled dryly. “We’re running a background check on him, so we’ll see what turns up. By any chance, did Marilee Mabry know about his past relationships?”

Mother glanced at me sideways before she admitted, “Yes, she knew. Because I told her.”

I stared at her, wondering what else she’d been hiding from me.

“How did she react?” Deputy Dean asked.

Cissy tugged at the tail end of her scarf. “I thought she’d be upset, but she wasn’t. She took it in stride, told me that it didn’t matter what Justin had done with other women. She insisted she didn’t care, because she wasn’t in love with him. He gave her great pleasure and he doted on Kendall, was how she put it, and she said that’s what mattered at this point in her life.”

“Thank you for your candor, Mrs. Kendricks.” She nodded at Mother, then at me. “Thank you both for your cooperation. I’ll be in touch.”

“Will you be going over to see Marilee’s daughter now?” I asked. “If so, I’d like to come. She’ll need a friend.” And I didn’t count Justin as one, I left unsaid.

Anna Dean shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Ms. Kendricks. I’ve already asked Dr. Taylor to ride along, because of young Ms. Mabry’s heart problem. What we don’t need is an audience.”

An audience?

Mother pressed her pump into my shin, and I sighed. “Okay. But please tell Kendall I’m around if she needs me.” I fished into my purse and withdrew one of my business cards, which I passed across the table to Anna Dean. She scooped it up and slipped it in her breast pocket.

The deputy chief apologized again for the inconvenience and the mess—since the police wouldn’t let the crew remove any of their equipment, and they’d confiscated the tape from the shoot. She did request that we stay out of the living room, at least for another day or two, until they had some answers from the medical examiner’s office.

She pushed away from the table and stood.

Before she’d taken a step, I blurted out, “You think she was murdered, don’t you, Deputy Chief?”

For an instant, I didn’t think she was going to answer me. Then she said, very deliberately, “They don’t hire me to investigate what I
think
, Andrea, just what I
know
. And I’ll know soon enough in this case. We should have some preliminary blood work back before long,” she remarked, then excused herself.

Mother gave me one of her looks.

But I didn’t care if I’d been rude.

Anna Dean was more than suspicious about Marilee’s death.

So I wasn’t the only one.

“I’m pouring myself a brandy and then retiring to the sun porch,” my mother said as she rose from her seat.

“You never drink before five o’clock,” I said.

“I’ve never had anyone die in my living room, either,” she tossed over a shoulder as she sashayed off.

My cell phone let loose a muffled ring, and I reached over to free it from the purse at my feet. The number was Janet Graham’s work extension, and I braced myself as she went into a breathless monologue about how exciting the past few hours had been and how she’d already gotten a thumbs up from her editor at the paper to do a piece about Marilee, a three-part feature on her life and death. Which, she added, would be great publicity for the book she was writing.

As she rushed on, I hung my head, wishing we could do this afternoon over again, only with a different ending. Like with Kendall.

“Tell Cissy I’ll be sensitive to her situation, being at the center of this whole mess, okay? I don’t want to take advantage of our friendship . . .”

I imagined her frantically typing up a story with the headline:

DEATH BY CHOCOLATE
(
REALLY
)

Or maybe:

THE DALLAS DIE
-
IT CLUB

Oy
.

“My photographer showed up late as usual, damn him, but this time it was a good thing . . . he snapped a few shots of them removing the body . . .”

I dropped my forehead to the table, holding the phone loosely to my right ear, barely listening.

Last night was bad enough, but this was worse than I could’ve dreamed.

I still couldn’t believe Marilee Mabry was dead. No matter what I thought of her, it was strange to realize I’d never see her again. She was like a tornado, sucked up into the clouds, there one minute and gone the next. A force of nature silenced.

Poor Kendall
, I thought again.
Poor confused and lonely girl
.

“Mother told the police about Justin,” I confessed, hoping she wouldn’t think I’d betrayed her. “She knew about him, Janet, everything. At least as much as your sources.”

“Crap,” she murmured. “I was planning to do a sidebar about Marilee’s boy-toy and his prior relationships. I’d wanted it to be an exclusive.”

“I’m sorry.” What else could I say?

“Hey, it’s not your fault. And just because the cops know doesn’t mean our readership does. Oops, gotta go, but I’ll call you tomorrow and see what’s shaking. I’m thinking of taking a trip out to Gunner tomorrow. I’ve finally got a lead on the aunt Marilee supposedly lived with for a while when she was sixteen. There’s a woman named Doreen Haggerty in a nursing home there that has to be her. You want to keep me company?”

“Ask me later, okay?”

“Sure, Andy, sure. Hey, tell your mom I’m sorry about everything.”

“Right.”

When I hung up and put away the phone, Sandy was escorting the last of the police contingent to the front door.

I followed in my mother’s footsteps and headed to the stillness of the sun porch.

She reclined on the chaise, cradling a brandy snifter. From the few drops remaining, it appeared she’d made a good dent already.

“Not quite happy hour, is it?” I said as I collapsed onto the cushioned sofa.

“We’ve never had anyone pass away at a Diet Club meeting,” she murmured and rolled the remainder of the brandy around in the bulb of the glass. “Bunny Beeler did break out in hives once from eating a cookie made with peanut oil, but it wasn’t serious. Do you think there was something in the cake, Andrea? It couldn’t have been the coffee. We all drank from the same pot.”

“Once they get the tests back, we’ll know for sure. If it was a natural death, then nobody’s at fault.”

“But if it’s not?”

“Then it’s homicide.”

“Oh, God.” She brought the snifter to her lips and knocked back the liquor till she was on empty. Then she pressed the glass to her forehead. “I should never have let Marilee bring her crew into my home. It was a mistake, and I should have turned her down when she suggested the idea. What if someone poisoned her, Andrea? Dear Lord, I hope they don’t think I had anything to do with it.”

I hated to be the bearer of bad news, but I’d never been less than brutally honest with her. Okay, maybe once in a while. But not over something as important as this. “They’ll probably suspect everyone close to Marilee, at first.”

“I can’t believe this,” Cissy moaned. “I’m a Daughter of the Republic of Texas, a member in good standing of the Society of the Bluebonnet Ladies, and a direct descendent of Sam Houston himself. Could the police honestly believe I would have killed someone in my own home? On the very rug your dear daddy bought me at auction in London the year before his heart attack?”

She looked distraught, too much so for me to poke fun at her. I didn’t feel so hot, either. “No one’s going to suspect you, Mother. You were one of the few people who didn’t have a beef with Marilee. You were probably her only real friend in this world.”

Setting aside the bone-dry snifter, she reached for the ends of the Hermès scarf looped gracefully around her neck, dabbing at the damp on her cheeks. “You know, Andrea, it’s not like I haven’t lost my share of friends. When you get to be my age, it’s something you expect, though you never grow accustomed to it. But Marilee was such a ball of fire. I can’t believe she’s really gone.” She pursed her lips, looking off for a moment, out the window at the rose gardens, now bathed in late afternoon light. “She was a survivor, a fighter, and so terribly driven. She may have upstaged Mrs. Perot at the Salvation Army luncheon, but she didn’t deserve
this
.”

I pictured the worried faces lined up around the dining room table: Carson Caruthers and his kitchen crew, Renata Taylor and the other production assistants, the director with his arm in a sling, and a dozen others. I thought, too, of Gilbert and Amber Lynn, and I wondered how many of them felt that Marilee got exactly what she deserved.