The Sleuth Sisters (24 page)

Chapter Three: Faye

I was pleased when Barb asked me to do the initial interview with Winston Darrow. It showed she had confidence in me, that I wasn’t just the office manager in the agency. Of course I’d done other interviews and client meetings before, but this was only our second murder investigation. It’s a little scary when the stakes are so high, but it was good that she trusted me to handle it.

Darrow was being held in the jail one county over from ours, Bonner. It was comprised of a lot of small lakes and patches of forest, which made it one of those you-can’t-get-there-from-here places. The county’s roads meandered through touristy little towns, following shorelines and skirting hills, and it was impossible to go anywhere very fast. It took me an hour to get to the jail in the town of Canton, though it was probably only thirty miles from the Allport city limits as the crow flies.

I introduced myself, ignored the raised eyebrows at a woman of my age being a detective, and asked to see Darrow, who at this point was being charged only with failure to report a murder. After some back and forth, I was shown into a bland room containing only a table and three chairs, the kind with metal legs and a one-piece, molded plastic seat.

After I’d been there for about two minutes, a deputy brought Darrow in. If he’d been two decades younger he’d have qualified as eye candy, and he still didn’t look bad. Thick black hair with just a touch of gray at the temples; a trim build, not athletic but hardly gone to seed; and large green eyes set into a fine-boned face. The jarring note was his manner which, though it probably pleased some women, raised my hackles immediately. Stepping in close in a move designed to make me feel small and feminine, he tilted his head down and to one side and gave me a look that was meant to be sincere. “Mrs. Burner, it’s good of you to come so quickly.”

Stepping out of his personal space and recapturing my own, I put out a hand. “Mr. Darrow.”

“Please, call me Win.”

We shook, and he held on that extra half-second men like him use to let a woman know she’s interesting. I was trying to maintain objectivity, but he hadn’t gained any points so far. It was obvious that Winston “Call me Win” Darrow lived on charm, and I’ve never been able to abide men like that. A bunch of words came to mind:
greasy, sleazy, egotistical, lothario, scuzz-bucket
—I could go on.

“Mr. Darrow, I’m sorry for your loss. Please tell me what you know about your wife’s murder.”

He sat down opposite me, glancing around the room. “Are the police listening?”

I shrugged. “I guess they could be. This isn’t a privileged conversation.” I met his gaze. “Were you intending to tell me something you didn’t tell them?”

“No, no,” he said, waving his hands. “I’m told them the truth, just like I’m going to tell you.”

As he talked, I noted fraying around the edges of Win’s smooth persona. His un-shaven look was a tad too long, not Duck Dynasty but not Hugh Jackman, either. He looked rumpled, and his eyes were glassy, as if he was operating in a semi-conscious state. When I asked him to tell me what he knew, however, he pulled himself together and gave me a pretty good accounting.

“I was with your sister, Mrs. Stilson, Thursday night until about twelve. We had dinner at that new Mediterranean restaurant then she invited me back to her place. She’d made a pie, and she said she’d never eat it all by herself.” He tried to look innocent. I tried to look like I could care less what he and my sister had done after eating pie.

“When I left Retta’s house, there was a lot more snow than there’d been earlier. It was drifting pretty badly on the east-west roads. It took longer to get home than usual, and it was white-knuckles all the way.”

“What time did you get home?” I almost added “to your wife” but he was the client. I had to attempt objectivity, even if he was a louse.

“I think about one-thirty. When I tried to pull into the driveway I couldn’t see the posts, and I missed it. Everything was white, and I ended up stuck. I tried to get out for a while, but I couldn’t. The car was off the road far enough that it wasn’t a hazard, so I left it there, figuring I’d borrow my neighbor’s tractor in the morning. I went into the house. It was dark, and my hands and feet were freezing from trying to push the car out of the snow bank. I didn’t look to see if Stacy was in bed. I just went to my own room.”

“You had separate rooms?”

He glanced up at me then back down at his hands. “Stacy likes—liked her own space, and god knows we had plenty of room.”

“You didn’t look in on her?”

Darrow met my gaze. “My marriage wasn’t very good, Mrs. Burner. Stacy had become completely uninterested in–pretty much anything that had to do with me.”

“Was that because you went around telling other women you were divorced?”

He wanted to be angry, but in the end he just lowered his head. “We might as well have been.”

“You stayed because the money was hers?” It was a guess, but why else would a schmoozer like Darrow stay with a woman who ignored him?

He shrugged, and for a few seconds I thought he was going to cry. He didn’t, but his voice was choked as he said, “Yes. But I’d have been a better husband if Stacy had been a better wife.”

How many times had I heard that rationalization? Every bar in the world has a guy moaning “My wife doesn’t understand me!”

Okay, to be fair, there are women doing the same thing.

“Do you think she had someone else?”

“I don’t see how, unless it was one of those on-line things. She never went anywhere.”

I leaned forward, putting my hands on the table. “How did you two meet?”

He gathered his thoughts briefly. “In New Mexico, in one of those artsy places in Taos. I was having lunch at an outdoor café. It was getting crowded when Stacy came in, and she asked if we could share a table. We got to talking, like people do in those situations. She said she was from Delaware, but her husband had died so she decided to start a new life somewhere else.”

“Delaware,” I repeated, writing it down. “How did her husband die?”

“Car accident. Anyway, we hit it off, and I ended up asking her out to dinner. From there on things went really well, and it wasn’t long before we got married.”

“How long, exactly?”

“Three weeks.” He looked embarrassed, and I thought I knew why.

“By then you’d realized she had money.”

This time his anger was more genuine. “Look, just because a guy knows something like that doesn’t mean--”

“He’s a gigolo?” I finished.

“I really liked Stacy. She was fun, she was gorgeous--”

“She was fifteen years younger than you. How’d you pull that one off, Win?”

He shook his head like a kid that doesn’t want to take his medicine. “She said we made a great couple. It was only later that she--” He looked at his hands again. “She lost interest.”

“Did she make you sign a pre-nup?”

“Um, no.” He looked uncomfortable. “She kind of thought I had money too.”

“Wonder where she got that idea!” It was time to back off a little. “Where do you come from?”

His eyes turned sneaky. Win was going to tell me something that wasn’t the truth he’d promised earlier.

“My family comes from California,” he said. “There’s no one left out there now, but we lived in the San Joaquin Valley when I was a kid. My parents were pretty well off, but the dot com bubble wiped out everything. Dad had a heart attack and died, and my mom went within a few months.

“No siblings?”

He smiled. “Mom was a true California girl, into Zero Population Growth.”

“When they died you went to New Mexico?”

“Yes. Dad had an old friend there, and he let me stay in his guest house for a few months.”

I was winnowing out the lies as best I could, trying to find kernels of truth. Win might or might have had well-to-do parents. I guessed he preferred not to work for a living. “Entrepreneur” in his case meant
I’ll see who I can get to support me
.

He’d been lucky with Stacy, who apparently hadn’t minded when it became obvious he wasn’t wealthy. Or had she? “Your wife changed after the marriage?”

“Yeah. She wanted to leave New Mexico right away, said she’d found a place in Michigan that was really nice. I was a little hesitant, because I’ve never been much for winter, but she said we’d look for a second home somewhere warmer once we got the one up here settled.”

“So you moved to Bonner County.”

He gave a dry chuckle. “We don’t even have a real town in the whole county.”

“She liked it here?”

“I guess. There wasn’t any more talk of getting a second place, that’s for sure. Stacy settled into that house like it was the last place on earth.”

“She didn’t go out?”

“Sure she did.” His tone was sarcastic. “She went to the barn to see her horse; she went to the woods to ski; she went to the pond to sit and think. Everything else came to her. I bought the groceries. I got the car serviced. Except for the banking, which she did herself, I did everything that meant going where there were people.”

That didn’t sound good for Win. His wife hadn’t trusted him with money.

“So you got bored and started going out to places where they didn’t know you, meeting people, and telling them you were a single guy.”

He turned on the charm. “Look, Mrs. Burner, I don’t claim to be a saint, but I’m not a monk, either. Stacy didn’t sleep with me, she didn’t talk to me—hell, there were times I don’t even think she saw me.” He looked down at his fingernails. “She should have just hired a personal assistant to do what she wanted. It would have been a lot easier, and a lot kinder, too.”

I sighed. “All right, Mr. Darrow. Tell me what happened Friday morning.”

Licking his lips, Win said, “I got up around nine, had a bowl of cereal, and watched a little of the morning news. When it dawned on me I hadn’t heard Stacy moving around, I went and knocked on the door. There was no answer, so I looked in. The bed was made, the computer was on, and there was a full glass of water sitting on the desk, like she’d sat down there and then left again.

“I started looking then, not sure where she’d have gone. I found nothing in the house, nothing in the garage. I’d about run out of places to look when I noticed an odd hump under the snow on the porch. I went out there, and--” There was real emotion in his voice. “—I knew it was something bad. I bent down and--” His voice caught but he swallowed and continued. “It was Stacy. She was buried in the snow, but--” He looked up at me. “I never saw anything like that before. I never--”

When I realized he wasn’t going to finish that thought I said, “Why did the police arrest you?”

Once again he pulled himself together, and I saw the sneaky look return to his eyes. “I don’t know. I swear to you, Mrs. Burner, I did not kill my wife. I know lots of guys say that, but why would I leave Stacy? I mean, I had to ask her for money, but she didn’t care how much I spent. She wouldn’t travel with me, but I took all kinds of trips and stuff. I had no reason to kill her. None at all.”

Darrow’s statement got a laugh from the Bonner County sheriff when I repeated it to him a few minutes later. A sun-burned, raw-boned man, Wade Stabinski seemed pretty accepting and not likely to pat me on the head and tell me to go back to the kitchen. He did, however, end any illusions I might have had that Win had told me the truth.

“Ask your client why he didn’t call us,” he said. “The Darrows’ cleaning lady came Friday morning and found his car still in the ditch next to the driveway. When she went to the garage, she saw their truck was missing. She went inside, saw the tracks in the snow, and found Mrs. Darrow’s body with his footprints all around it. That’s when she called us. We found Mr. Darrow at the bank, where he’d just withdrawn all the money from their joint account.”

“He says she let him have money whenever he wanted it. Why would he kill her?”

“It’s early in the investigation, and I can’t share information with you. I can tell you she was shot at close range with a pistol, possibly the .38 that’s missing from the home. In most homicides, the motive is either emotional or financial. We believe both motives were in play here.”

I started for home, thinking we at least had enough to decide whether to take the case or not. I’d have leaned toward not if it wasn’t for the fact that Retta was involved. We could try to protect her reputation, making sure nobody thought she’d been in on the murder with Darrow.

The day was bright, and the snow glistened, making sunglasses a necessity. As I navigated the twisty, snow-covered roads around Crockett Lake, I felt pleased with my recently-acquired vehicle, new to me but a 2010 model Ford Escape. It held the road well, it was an attractive shade of green, and I liked its roominess after years of driving a car too small for a woman my size. When the Smart Detective Agency had begun to make a profit, I’d taken the chance to upgrade my ride.

Once I left the lake shore, woods took over, with only a few cleared fields here and there. The fields were buried in snow, but corn stalks, stumps, and rock piles interrupted the otherwise solid blanket of white.

Five miles out, I saw him lying beside the road. At first I thought it was a bag of garbage someone had tossed from a car window: rumpled black with spots of white. When it moved, I realized it wasn’t trash, but something alive. Checking the rearview mirror, I pulled the car close to the banked snow along the road and turned on my flashers. There wasn’t much room for a car to pass, but I had to see what it was.

It was a dog, about the size of a breadbox. His curly hair was matted with ice; his eyes were large but dimmed with suffering. As I approached he raised his head slightly and made a sound that might have been a growl if it had any strength behind it.

“Hey, buddy. Hey, boy. What are you doing out here?”

I looked around. There were no homes in sight.

The dog kicked one leg weakly. “Are you hurt, buddy? Can I touch you?”

Ever so slowly, I stretched out a hand toward him. Again he growled weakly, but I spoke softly, crooning encouragement. I let him sniff my hand, waiting until he relaxed a little. Next I touched the spot behind his ear where every dog in the world likes to be scratched. He tensed but let me rub the spot. I talked to him in a soft voice as I moved my hand to his head and petted him for a few seconds. I sensed he wouldn’t have allowed it if he’d been well, but he wasn’t. Gradually he relaxed, and I moved my hand to his body, feeling it carefully.

His back seemed okay, as did his front legs. When I got to the back, however, he let out a yip of pain. He nipped at me, though it was only a gesture. “I’m sorry, buddy. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

At that point a car went by, the driver goggling at me as he passed. I couldn’t dally, because if two cars came at once, we might all be in trouble. I sat back on my heels, looking at the dog. He was malnourished, neglected, and hurt. What was I going to do with him?

It didn’t take long to make my decision. Going back to my car, I got an old blanket I kept there for emergencies. Returning to the dog, I started with an apology. “You aren’t going to like this, buddy, but it’s got to happen.”

Quickly I tossed the blanket over his head, hoping it would prevent him from biting me. I wrapped the blanket tightly around him, sliding it under his back and making it into a bag. When I picked it up, supporting his body with mine as best I could, he whined, and I knew the leg had to hurt. I didn’t know what else to do, though, so I carried him to the car and put him on the back seat, tucking the blanket ends into the cushions so he couldn’t get free. A healthy animal would have easily escaped, but this one was too weak to resist.