Collared For Murder (19 page)

“Jack. I think you are a good, strong man. I think you make me smile at the most outrageous moments. I think you keep me from falling too far into myself, taking myself too seriously.” My balance tottered, and I took a breath to steady myself. “And I think I love you.”

A flash of lightning—gentler this time, as though the storm was finally moving away—illuminated Jack’s face. The raindrops caught in his lashes glittered, and he swiped an arm across his face to clear them away. I searched his face for signs of a reaction, but he remained stoic.

“Seriously. Sean has moved on. He’s not interested in me that way anymore. And I’m not interested in him that way either. We both thought—I don’t know—that maybe we could have that magic back. The magic of being teenagers. But we can’t, and frankly, now I don’t even want to.”

“Hush.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, hush. You really do talk a lot.”

“Well, I’m pouring my heart out to you, and you’re just standing there. Didn’t you hear me? I think I love you.”

A flicker of amusement lit up Jack’s eyes, and for a second it looked like he was fighting a smile. “Think?”

I raised my hands to his chest to give him a gentle shove backward. “Okay. I know. I know I love you. You’re making this hard.”

He caught my hands in his and held them trapped against the heat of his body. “No. This couldn’t be any easier,” he said.

With the tiniest tug, he pulled me into his arms and kissed me senseless.

I let myself lean into his embrace for a moment before kissing him back, trying to convey a promise to him. A promise that I didn’t just
think
I loved him but that I
knew
I loved him. That Sean’s friendship was no threat to him. That the bond between us was real.

He slipped the sleeve of my peasant blouse down
to expose my shoulder and planted a hot kiss there. The angle of his head allowed the velvety brush of his hair to caress my cheek, tickling my nose with the crisp scent of his shampoo.

Lightning flashed, and I startled, but he shushed me by placing a finger to my mouth and then his lips on mine. At that point, the entirety of the outside world disappeared. Jack consumed every one of my senses.

I don’t know how long we stood there, each caught in the orbit of the other, but finally I pulled away. My movement caught him off-balance as he continued to follow my mouth with his. I giggled, and he chuckled in response. I could feel the laughter in his body more than I heard it, and I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.

“Jack,” I chided softly, “this is delightful, but I have to tell you something.”

He sobered instantly, pulled back. “What?” he asked, wariness deepening his voice.

“Don’t get all bristly on me. I think I know who really killed Phillip Denford.”

Twenty-one

“I
don’t know how I feel about this,” Jack muttered.

“I do. You hate it.”

“You’re right. I hate it. On many levels.”

I laughed, but threw my arms around him to give him a placating hug. “It will be all right. You know we won’t get a confession if you’re in the room, and I’m the perfect bait for our suspect.”

“Bait? I really don’t like the sound of that.”

“You’re going to be right on the other side of the door, and Xander has worked his electronics magic so you’ll be able to see and hear everything my phone picks up as it is happening.”

Jack frowned. “We should have backup.”

“You’re all the backup I need, baby.”

He kissed me hard, then let me go. We had a killer to catch.

*   *   *

“So tell me more about this dot-com thing,” I shouted.

“Now? Here?” The ballroom was thumping with the bass of some 1980s techno band, and I could barely hear him above the people packed in close around us. I couldn’t hear him, but I could certainly see him. He wore an elaborate costume, Rudolph Valentino in
The Sheik
, and he leaned in so close I could feel the heat from his body and smell the musk of his cologne.

I wasn’t proud of it then and I’ll never be proud of it in the future, but I leaned forward just enough that my low-cut peasant shirt showed a bit of cleavage. “How about the hotel bar?” I suggested.

I’d wanted to get a room, someplace really private where I knew I could get Peter to let his guard down, but Jack had put the kibosh on that immediately. The hotel bar had been our compromise. With the hotel filled with cat fanciers who were all attending the masquerade ball, the bar was nigh on empty, and the instrumental soft rock they played over their speakers wouldn’t interfere with the sound from my phone.

As expected, Peter glanced down at my cleavage before his eyes bounced right back to mine. He looked confused for an instant, then shrugged. “Sure.”

I led him away from the raucous ballroom, down a dimly lit corridor to the hotel’s Aurora Bar. The bar
could have been in any hotel in Middle America. The only thing that set it apart at all was the swoosh of green, blue, and purple neon lights, which were meant to mimic the aurora borealis.

I ordered Peter a gin and tonic and got myself a glass of pop. We took a seat in a high-backed booth set away from the bar.

“So the thing with theartisanway.com is that people will simply stumble over you there. For your Web site, someone has to be searching for pet clothes or something similar to find you, but if you’re on Artisan, people who are just generally browsing homemade goods might see your store. Or maybe you’ll be featured on the main page someday.”

“Mmm-hmm. Listen. I don’t really want to talk about theartisanway.com. Though I do appreciate the tip. It sounds great.”

“Then why . . .? Oh.” He smiled a sultry bedroom smile and nudged his glass forward with one knuckle until it clinked against mine. “I have to admit I’m flattered, but I’m with someone else now. Once upon a time, I would have taken you up on your offer, though. You
are
hot.”

“Get over yourself, Peter. I’m not the least bit interested in you. I don’t just fall into bed when a pretty boy with a daddy complex gives me a little wink. Though it’s nice to know I’m hot.”

“Then why . . . ?”

“I don’t think you’re getting it,” I said, trying to keep my tone as businesslike as possible, given our setting and my ridiculous getup. “I know what you did.”

“You’ve lost me,” he said, but there was a note of trepidation in his voice.

“For instance, I know you stole the jeweled collar dangle.”

He narrowed his eyes. “What makes you think that?”

“Because I talked to a fence down at the Silent Woman. I know you were at the bar, because you got yourself thrown out. And Jonnie G says you approached him about moving some big stones.”

“I don’t know any Jonnie G. I was drunk out of my mind that night at the bar.”

I shook my head. “Well, you may not remember him, but he sure remembers you. You were talking business and then you hit on his girl. He described you to a tee and even knew that you were an artist.”

“Okay. First of all, I wasn’t hitting on his girl. I was making friendly conversation. Like I said, I’m involved with someone else. Besides, so I talked to some guy when I was drunk. That doesn’t mean a thing.”

“It does when you add it to the fact that the dangle that rolled out of Pris Olson’s bag was a fake.”

“Do tell.”

“Jolly said she always solders her jump rings together so the real dangle would have had limited
movement in its cage. It should have been nearly silent as it rolled. But I could hear the fake one clanking as it rolled from clear across the room. It must have gotten knocked loose from the jump ring so it was freely tumbling against the sides of the cage, something that couldn’t have happened if the ring had been soldered together. In fact, when the little cage came to a rest, the dangle was lying flat on the bottom as though it weren’t attached to the cage anymore at all. The dangle that was stolen that day was a forgery, because the real one—with the genuine gems—had already been taken.”

“That doesn’t mean that I’m the one who took it.”

“It had to be you. Before the show, the only people who had even seen the design for the dangle were you, your father, and Jolly Nielson. You’re the only person involved who had the pattern and the skills to make such a perfect replica. But you knew that when the show was over and someone actually won the thing, they’d get a new appraisal and the forgery would be caught. You had to steal the fake one, too.”

“I don’t understand what you want me to say,” Peter said.

“I want you to admit what you did. Planting the dangle in Pris’s bag was brilliant. You knew she had financial troubles, so people would believe she was a thief if they found her in possession of the dangle. But you also knew that if she simply found the thing in
her purse later that night, she couldn’t go to the cops without looking like a suspect.”

I cocked my head to one side. “It was really rather genius.”

“It doesn’t make any sense. Let’s say, hypothetically, that I stole the original dangle and replaced it with a fake. I couldn’t have stolen the fake. I saw you not long after the lights came on. You saw that I was kitty-corner across the room from Pris’s stall. How did I get out to darken the lights and then get back in, steal the dangle, get to Pris’s stall, plant the dangle, and then get clear to the other side of the room . . . all while still holding the cup of coffee you said I abandoned on the table? I never leave a cup of coffee half-drunk. That’s stuff’s my lifeblood.”

He was right. He’d still had his coffee in his hand after the lights went out. And the day the cat fanciers came out to Red, White & Bleu for lunch, he’d taken his coffee black, but the coffee I’d thrown away that day was pale with cream or milk.

And it had smelled like Taffy’s Happy Leaf Tea Shoppe. Like flowers.

Like lavender.

Suddenly the pieces fell into place. We’d had such a hard time figuring out who’d done it because we’d been looking for one person . . . when it was actually two.

Peter would have had to have help in order to steal the collar ornament: one person to turn out the lights,
one person to steal the dangle. And Peter never got close enough to Pris or her station to dump the dangle in her purse, but Peter’s partner had. Marsha Denford.

I remembered it as clear as day then. First the brush of someone moving past me during the blackout: Peter moving to the corner from which he eventually joined our little group. Then Peter and Marsha clasping hands and Marsha turning to pull a startled Pris into her arms. The transfer of the collar dangle from one person to the next went off without a hitch.

But why would Marsha have helped Peter steal the counterfeit collar dangle?

For the same reason Mari fell all over Phillip and Marsha and Pamela couldn’t stand the sight of each other. They were in love.

It’s in the blood
. Like father, like son. Marsha and Peter hadn’t had a mother-son relationship at all. They were virtually peers, tied together by their need for Phillip’s money. It was natural that their common situation would drive them into each other’s arms.

“Next I suppose you’re going to accuse me of killing my father,” he said with a smug smile.

“Actually, yes.” I straightened in my seat. I was starting to doubt that I’d get him to admit to anything.

“Someone was driving Phillip around town the morning he died, and I know you did that.”

“Everyone drove my father around. He lost his license years ago, after a string of unfortunate DUIs.”

“Right, but Marsha isn’t one to play the errand boy, and Mari was sick that morning. She wouldn’t have wanted to be in a moving car. It had to be you.”

“I still don’t see how this adds up to murder.”

“Did he catch you?” I asked.

“What?”

“Did Phillip catch you and Marsha together in the ballroom that morning? Is that why you killed him?”

He didn’t respond.

“Look, between my statement and the physical evidence, the police have all the pieces already. They’ve got the forged collar dangle, which is sure to have your prints on it. Someone at Joe Time surely saw you that morning, ordering a black coffee for yourself and a lavender latte for Marsha. They’ll surely pull prints from the piece of wood used to beat poor Ruth to death. The pieces are all there, Peter. It’s just a question of putting them together, and they’ll do that eventually.”

He sighed and looked up, over my shoulder. I glanced back and saw that Jack had made his presence known.

“It was my idea.” Peter sighed. “Let’s be perfectly straight. I love Marsha, and I won’t see her go to jail for my crimes.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, leaning forward and raising a hand to warn Jack from coming closer.

“It was my idea to replace the stupid cat collar with a fake and hawk the real gems. You know how much
my father spent on that thing? Nearly a hundred thousand dollars for something a dang cat would wear on its collar. It was obscene. All that money that he got by stealing other people’s dreams, and then he wouldn’t spend even a few thousand to help me get my art degree, help me get a show in Minneapolis, or even help my buddies and me set up theartisanway.com. Instead, he spent all that money—which could have launched my career ten times over—on a piece of jewelry for a cat.

“So I decided to steal the gems so I could start the Web site. My father didn’t know it, but he was my secret investor. I needed the money to put out the call for artists, to drive traffic to the site, to make sure the site looked as high-end as it should. I just needed to get my foot in the door.

“I stole the original, but then I realized I’d eventually have to steal the fake, too, so no one would know it was a forgery. I didn’t want to get Marsha involved, but she knew how dire my circumstances were and she offered to help. All Marsha did was turn off the lights. Then, later, after the hubbub over the dangle going missing had died down a bit and everyone was focused on my father’s death, I passed it to her so she could drop the bauble in Pris’s bag.”

I remembered the dance they had done, Peter embracing Marsha and clasping her hands so tightly—
around the dangle, as it turned out—and then Marsha pulling Pris into an unexpected hug, the perfect time to drop the dangle in Pris’s big shoulder tote.

“So Marsha helped a little with the theft, but the murder was all me.”

“Why did you kill your dad?”

“You know. He was supposed to go up to get changed after I brought him back to the hotel, but he didn’t have his room key on him. For a savvy man, he was helpless. Marsha and Mari managed everything for him. I don’t think he even knew how to use an ATM. So he came into the ballroom, looking for Marsha, and found us together. Just holding hands, but he knew. He’d been suspicious for months. He threatened to divorce Marsha and disinherit me. After all those years I was his toady, he was going to leave me with nothing. I grabbed the shears from Ruth’s station and stabbed him.”

“What did Marsha do?”

“She took the rest of Ruth’s grooming kit and got rid of it. I don’t even know why. There were so many pairs of shears in that room, what did it matter where they came from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Turns out it was a really bad idea. Ruth suspected that her shears were the murder weapon, and while you were asking questions, she was, too. She got too close. She actually followed Marsha when she slipped
away for one of her regular afternoon ‘naps’ and saw me open my hotel room door to let Marsha in. Thankfully, I spotted Ruth ducking behind a room-service tray. It was only a matter of time before she put all the pieces together and realized what happened, especially if she compared notes with you. When I heard her telling T. J. Leuzinger that she was going to meet you out by the agility course, I followed her. She looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘I know what you did.’ I didn’t even think. I just picked up the closest object—part of the hurdle—and swung at her. When I realized she was dead, I stuffed her in the tube to buy myself time to slip back into the crowd and disappear.”

That was what stung the most. I would never wish anyone dead, but if ever there was a man who needed killing, it was Phillip Denford. Ruth Kimmey, though, was innocent of every crime, save curiosity—something I could hardly fault her for. To think that one man’s greed could lead to so much pain made me especially grateful for all the generous people in my
life.