Wall-To-Wall Dead (19 page)

He’s a pretty cat, a silvery-blue gray with brown eyes. His mother was Pepper, a Russian Blue that belonged to Gert Heyerdahl, the thriller writer—now Irina Rozhdestvensky’s husband. Mischa’s father was some Rowanberry Island tomcat that Pepper got involved with. I have no idea who. All I know is he must have had brown eyes. Pepper’s eyes are bright emerald green, as they should be, so Mischa must have gotten his from his father. The rest of him is pretty solidly Pepper, though. You’d most likely think him a purebred Russian Blue…until you saw those eyes.

The eyes that were now staring fixedly at my lunch.

Mischa loves tuna. All the cats do. They have their own diet, dry and crunchy bits mixed with canned cat food—and I don’t doubt that Jemmy and Inky at least may supplement with the occasional small rodent they run across outside the house—but Mischa looked so cute sitting there that I shortchanged the sandwiches a little, just enough to scoop a spoonful or two of tuna into a bowl that I put on the floor for him. He attacked it as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks, in spite of having been fed canned food twenty hours ago, before I left for Portland, and having had dry kibble to tide him over while I was gone.

While he licked the bowl clean, I carried the sandwiches over to Derek, who was sitting at Aunt Inga’s enameled-top kitchen table watching me.

“Thanks.” I got a flash of blue eyes and a grin before he fell on his food, almost as eagerly as Mischa had done. I picked up my own sandwich and bit into it.

Last summer, when Derek and I first met and started renovating Aunt Inga’s house together, we’d spent a lot of lunches at this table sharing tuna fish sandwiches. I’d probably fallen in love with him over this table. Or at least in this kitchen. He’d kissed me here, for the first time. He’d taught me to tile the kitchen counter with pieces of Aunt Inga’s broken china. And once he’d peeled his T-shirt off, preparatory to painting the hallway, and had pulled it over my head to protect the clothes I was wearing, leaving me speechless and blushing as he sauntered off, half-naked.

Derek half-naked is a very pretty sight.

“What?” he said now, eyeing me over the table.

I pulled myself together. “Nothing.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing. You’re pink.”

“I was thinking,” I said.

“About what?”

“Last summer. When we were working on Aunt Inga’s house.”

Derek looked around. “Turned out good, didn’t it?”

It did. I loved my house. And look at that: I even called it
my
house, and not Aunt Inga’s. “We’ll live here after we get married, right?”

“Course. There isn’t enough room in the loft. Especially after we start adding kids.”

“If you prefer, we could sell both of them and buy something that would be ours. Together.”

He tilted his head to look at me, and that damnable lock of hair fell over his brow again. My hand twitched. His voice was quizzical when he said, “Is that what you want?”

“I thought maybe it was what you wanted. Something that hadn’t belonged to either of us before. Somewhere we could start over. Together.”

“Don’t be silly,” Derek said. “This is a great house. I should know, I renovated it.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. As long as it’s what you want. I don’t care where we live, as long as you’re there, too.”

Awww.

“So tell me about the ideas you had for the condo. You said you were there on Friday night thinking about things we could do.”

“Right.” It was hard to remember what I’d thought about before the conversation between Candy and her maybe-boyfriend had derailed my attention. “It was something about aluminum, and a chair rail in the dining room, and maybe an etched mirror in the hallway, on the sliding door…Can we go over there? Maybe I’ll remember when I see it again.”

“Sure,” Derek said with a shrug. “I’m not doing anything else this afternoon.”

“Just let me visit the bathroom first.”

“I’ll clear the table.” He got up and suited action to words. I headed down the hallway and up the stairs to the bathroom with Mischa dogging—catting?—my heels.

It was business as usual when we got to the condo. The only difference was that there were more cars in the parking lot today. Most people seemed to be home. Robin’s station wagon sat next to what must be Bruce’s truck, while Candy’s hybrid and Jamie’s compact were rubbing elbows on the other side of the lot. William Maurits’s sedan was in its usual space, but the space next to it was empty of Mariano’s Jeep. Perhaps he was working the early shift at the Tremont today. Or maybe he and Gregg had gone out for a Sunday drive. Josh’s Honda was also missing; he was probably hanging out with Shannon, or perhaps having Sunday dinner with his dad and stepmom. Or he might be in the computer lab at Barnham College, working.

It must be laundry day for someone, because as we entered the building, we could hear water running and the sound of the dryers tumbling behind the wall on our right.

Everything was quiet on the first floor, of course. Hilda Shaw’s apartment was unoccupied, with yellow crime scene tape still strung from doorjamb to doorjamb, and William Maurits must not be into music or television, because not a sound emanated from behind his closed door.

“Should we knock?” I asked Derek when we got up to the second-floor landing and I was waiting for him to fit the key in the door to the condo.

“Where?” He followed the direction of my gaze across the landing to Gregg and Mariano’s door. “Why?”

“Remember last night? Mariano was working at the Tremont with Gregg’s name tag?”

“It’s none of our business,” Derek said, pushing the door open.

I walked in and turned to look at him. “But aren’t you curious?”

“No,” Derek said and shut the door behind me. “I’m sure he has his reasons. They don’t concern us.”

“But—”

“No,” Derek said. “He saw us yesterday. He knows we saw him. If he wants to talk about it, he can come find us.”

“But—”

“Tink.” He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me closer, until he could look down into my eyes. His own are a lovely, clear blue, the color of forget-me-nots, surrounded by long, curved lashes. That particular blue might look very nice on the hallway walls. “How Gregg and Mariano choose to structure their lives is up to them.”

“But what if he’s worried that we’ll tell on him? Shouldn’t we reassure him?”

“No,” Derek said, “it’s none of our business. Leave it alone.”

“But what if it has something to do with Hilda Shaw?”

He sighed and let his hands drop from my shoulders. “Why would it have anything to do with Hilda Shaw?”

“Well,” I shrugged apologetically, “everyone says she liked to know things about people. What if she’d figured out that Mariano is an illegal alien and is committing Social Security fraud—”

“
If
he’s an illegal alien who’s committing Social Security fraud,” Derek said.

I waved the objection away. “What if she found out, and told him that she knew, and he killed her to shut her up?”

Derek’s eyes widened for a fraction of a second, and I wasn’t sure whether it was in amusement or shock. Then he said, “First of all, we don’t know that he’s doing anything illegal. Maybe he accidentally put on the wrong shirt in the dressing room yesterday, and it had someone else’s name tag on it. Maybe he didn’t even realize it.”

“That’s highly unlikely.”

“But not impossible,” Derek said. “Secondly, even if he
is
doing it deliberately, we don’t know that Hilda Shaw knew. And even if she did, can you imagine Mariano killing anyone?”

“If the provocation was great enough, I could imagine almost anyone killing someone. Even you. Or me.”

He arched his brows. “Who would you kill, if you were going to kill anyone?”

Right now, him. He was annoying beyond words. In reality, though…“Probably no one. I can’t imagine anything important enough to kill for. But if Mariano is an illegal alien, and he’s looking at being put in jail, or maybe even deported, and he doesn’t want to be separated from Gregg, he might think that getting rid of Miss Shaw was worth it. We’ve talked about that before, remember? How what’s a legitimate reason for murder to one person isn’t necessarily legitimate to someone else.”

“There’s no legitimate reason for murder,” Derek said. “But be that as it may, you’re forgetting the most important point, Avery. Hilda Shaw wasn’t murdered.”

Oh. Yeah. I bit my lip. “Are you sure?”

“It’s not up to me to be sure. Wayne seems sure, and it’s his job.”

“But what if he’s wrong? What if Miss Shaw had found out something about someone, something they didn’t want her to know, and they killed her?”

“How?”

He hadn’t been at the meeting Friday night, when I’d explained all this to Wayne. “By planting something in her food they knew she was allergic to. Wayne said cause of death was a trace amount of peanuts in her cereal. It wouldn’t be hard to manage something like that. Buy a bag of peanuts, put a few in a plastic bag, and smash them with a hammer or a mortar and pestle. And then eat the rest. Get rid of the evidence, like the wife in that short story, who bashed her husband over the head with a roast and then cooked it. And invited the police to dinner.”

Derek blinked at me.

“You know the one I’m talking about. Anyway, that’s not important. Someone could have bought the peanuts, crushed some of them, eaten the rest, and then gotten into Miss Shaw’s apartment under some pretext and poured the crushed peanuts out of the Ziploc and into the cereal. And then whoever it was took away her EpiPen, so she wouldn’t be able to give herself the emergency medicine she needed. It would look like an accident, and maybe whoever did it would get away with it.”

Was
getting away with it, the way things were going. Of course, we had no proof it had happened that way, and no real reason to think it had.

“Do you have any evidence at all?” Derek wanted to know.

I shook my head.

“I don’t think that’s going to be enough for Wayne, Avery.”

“What about motive?”

He arched his brows. “What about it?”

“Doesn’t it seem like a lot of people in this building are doing things they’re trying to hide? Mariano, Candy, Jamie…”

“You don’t know that,” Derek said. “Just because Jamie didn’t tell you that she’s picking up extra money as a stripper doesn’t mean she’s trying to hide it. We don’t really know her, and it isn’t something someone would just come out and say. ‘Hi, nice to meet you; I’m Jamie and I take my clothes off for money.’ I’m not even sure it was her I saw. It looked like her, but I’d had a couple beers by then, and with the flashing lights and the music and the way she was dressed—or not…”

I arched my brows and he trailed off, blushing. “Sorry. Even if Candy is having an affair, it doesn’t mean she’d bump off poor old Miss Shaw to keep it quiet. Why would she?”

No reason I could think of. I mean, he was right. Even if word got out that Candy was sleeping with the man from Guido’s, it wasn’t like she’d get in trouble over it.
He
was the one who’d want to keep things quiet, if the woman and children I’d seen were his family. Candy was, as far as I knew, unattached, and could sleep with anyone she wanted. Morally and ethically one might object to her sleeping with a married man, but it was the married man who had everything to lose if they were found out.

“Maybe he killed Miss Shaw,” I said. “So she wouldn’t rat him out to his wife.” That might be a strong enough motive for murder. “How can I find out who he is?”

“Check the property records,” Derek said. “They’ll tell you who owns the house in Wellhaven. But you should probably leave it alone, Tink.”

“Why?”

“Because if he killed Miss Shaw because she found out about the affair, he’d probably kill you, too, if you started asking questions.”

He had a point. I ignored it. “If he killed her, it was probably because she was blackmailing him. The guy must
have money; he drives a very nice car, and that house didn’t look cheap. The wife had some killer clothes on, too.”

“Properties in Wellhaven go for over half a million,” Derek confirmed. “So yes, he’s probably got money. But I doubt he killed anyone. Especially Miss Shaw. It was an accident, Avery. Just because we happen to have stumbled onto a couple of murders in the past doesn’t mean every death that happens in Waterfield is a murder. Wayne is the chief of police, Avery. Not you. And if he says it was an accident, then it was an accident.”

“He could have made a mistake. It’s not like he’s infallible.”

“No,” Derek said, “but in this case, I happen to agree with him. So does the medical examiner. Why do you have this need to make it into something it isn’t?”

“I don’t. I just don’t want anyone to get away with murder.” I changed tacks. “What about the fact that someone went through her condo the night after she died? Doesn’t that seem sinister?”

“It seems strange,” Derek admitted. “But the murderer wouldn’t have done that, Avery. It’d be stupid. All it did was draw more attention to Miss Shaw’s apartment.”

“So who do you think did it, then?”

“Maybe it was just someone who was curious,” Derek said. “Or maybe you’re right and Miss Shaw knew things about people. Things they didn’t want her to talk about. It could have been one of the neighbors who was doing something he or she shouldn’t be, someone who wouldn’t kill for it, but who saw the opportunity to go into Miss Shaw’s apartment and maybe look for whatever proof the old lady may have had.”