A Parfait Murder (14 page)

Deena chuckled. “Scut-work for Jackson and Ver Steeg will look better on Jason’s résumé than scooping ice cream for you. And he’s been making a little extra cash bartending for me.” Deena ran a popular catering company, the Silver Spoon. “Thankfully, Crystal’s mama loves her a lot and won’t let her and her new groom go hungry.”

“Does Jason like what he’s doing?”

She laughed louder. “Cut the crap. You don’t care a bit about Jason’s job satisfaction. You want the skinny on Kristen Ver Steeg.”

“Busted,” I admitted with a smile.

Deena shrugged. “Jason says Kristen and Madeline are struggling a bit. New legal practice and all. And after the scandal with Madeline’s uncle, they lost some clients.”

Ridiculous as it was, I felt a pang of guilt. Madeline Jackson’s uncle had been bilking the local university and the federal government for serious money for a number of years. After his efforts to cover his tracks resulted in the deaths of two of Alice’s friends, my snooping led to his arrest. It wasn’t my fault that Madeline’s uncle was a thief and a murderer, but I still felt responsible for her business woes.

“Is it bad?”

“Definitely bad. Jason’s gotten a couple of postdated paychecks, and he was grumbling about the firm letting its license for the high-end online legal research service lapse. He’s sneaking into the Dickerson U library to use the more barebones academic version of the service, but he feels pretty slimy doing it.

“As a result,” Deena continued, “they can’t be very choosy about their clients. Jason can’t say much about the workload—privilege and all—but he’s hinted that they’re taking any and all comers.”

“That’s pretty normal for a law firm, though, right?”

A shrug rippled through Deena’s voluptuous body. “Look, Jason’s not supposed to talk about his work, but he’s not exactly a crack poker player, you know? Sitting at the dinner table, he’ll drop a little tidbit of interesting information, like maybe he just stumbled across it in the paper or something . . . but it’s clearly related to a case. Well, the other day, Jason starts in about this fascinating nonprofit organization founded by retired Texas judges that provides advice about legal ethics questions.”

“Subtle.”

“I know. He’s such a good boy, and smart, too, but not very canny. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I think Jackson and Ver Steeg had taken on a case that was making Jason’s ethics radar ping. They’re young lawyers. They can’t afford to play fast and loose with the rules of ethics. They don’t have the kind of friends who will keep them from being disbarred.”

“So they must be pretty desperate,” I said.

“Yep. Pretty darned desperate.”

“And now one of the partners is dead.”

“Yeah,” Deena said, “I wonder what Kristen’s death does to the firm’s bottom line.”

 

I slipped into the Law Offices of Jackson and Ver Steeg, drafting in Deena’s sweeping wake. She held a beribboned cake box in one hand and waved the other in a grand gesture worthy of a game-show hostess.

“What can I do to help?” she asked, without preamble and to no one in particular.

Jason Arbaugh, Deena’s son-in-law, was wedged behind a pressboard desk in the office entry. He had a solid build, but boyish with his smooth cheeks, roundframed spectacles, and baby blond brush cut. Honest, if you’d shoved him into a Cub Scout uniform, he could have passed as a husky fifth grader. But instead of a yellow kerchief and a slew of merit badges, he wore a slightly shiny gray suit, the button tugging across his middle, and a blue-and-red-striped tie.

He pried himself out of the too-small desk chair and moved forward to unburden Deena of her cake.

“Hey, Mama,” he said, bussing her on the cheek.

“Hey, boy,” she replied fondly. “We’ve come to offer our condolences.”

Jason threw a glance at the hallway leading to the rest of the office. “Everyone’s really busted up,” he said, voice low. “I think Neck’s gonna lose it.”

“Nick the Neck is here?” I asked.

Jason nodded and rolled his eyes. “He’s here all the time.”

“Does he work here?”

“Technically, no. He’s got his own business, Hard Case Legal Services. Does some investigation work, private security, process-serving. That’s what we use him for.”

“Don’t you need a license to do those things? I thought Neck had a record.” My recollection was that Nick DeWinter left school because he was arrested, but sometimes history gets twisted in small towns.

Jason checked the hall again. “He did,” he whispered. “But it was all petty stuff, a long time ago. Kristen helped him get it expunged.” He shook his head. “Guy worships her.”

I remembered how protective—possessive, even—Neck had seemed when he and Kristen had served Bree with the paternity suit. They seemed like an unlikely couple, beauty and the beast, but there was truth to the old saw that “opposites attract.” I wondered if Kristen returned Neck’s regard with equal fervor.

“We got your flowers, Ms. Jones,” Jason said. “I’m sure Maddie would want to thank you in person. Let me run and grab her.”

“Oh, I hate to bother her.” True, I didn’t want to bother her. But I was itching to meet Madeline Jackson. I’d heard so much about her from her aunt, Rosemary Gunderson, and I was intrigued by the woman who now shouldered the weight of this law office all on her own.

“Jason, honey, rather than you bringing Maddie to us, why don’t we just poke our heads in her office and say hey? We’ll be in and out in a jiff, and that way we don’t drag the poor woman away from her desk.”

Jason glanced nervously down the hallway, clearly wondering whether giving us license to roam the office would be better or worse than going and fetching Maddie. Just then, though, the phone on the tiny reception desk rang. He sighed, reached over to pick up the handset, and waved us down the hall.

The physical offices in which Jackson and Ver Steeg operated were small but in a nice, new office complex. The walls shone with an eggshell coating of neutral cream paint, and the dark taupe carpet still gave off a faint chemical smell. Maddie and Kristen had decorated with inoffensive—and inexpensive—prints of Impressionist paintings. For a law office, it was surprisingly feminine.

Which is why Neck’s hulking presence in the conference room seemed particularly jarring. The door stood wide open, revealing a room with barely enough space for the glass-topped table—the sort you purchase in pieces with a single Allen wrench and instructions in Swedish—and a handful of cheap, metal-framed chairs. A polished brass bowl filled with green glass marbles and branches of curly willow adorned the middle of the table. And Neck sprawled in one of the metal-framed chairs, his huge body draped over the table as though he’d passed out there.

We had just moved past the door, Deena in the lead, when another voice from inside the conference room halted us both in our tracks.

“Keep it together, Nick,” the unseen woman hissed. “We’re on thin ice here.”

“I loved her,” the leather-clad side of beef at the table moaned.

The woman sighed. “Yeah, well, clearly she didn’t love you back.”

Neck raised his head then, the retort stirring him to life, and I found myself staring into the flat black eyes of Neck DeWinter. The harsh geometry of his face was broken by furrows of pain, and his reptilian eyes were red-rimmed.

Neck had been crying. “Who the eff are you?”

I almost piddled on that new taupe carpet. “I—uh, I’m . . .”

Deena, God love her, pushed past me in a flurry of jingling jewelry and billowing skirts. “I’m Deena Silver, and you must be the boy they call Neck. I’m Jason’s mama-in-law, and I just wanted to stop by to offer my condolences. And bring you a little cake. You look like you could use a slice of cake, honey.”

The flood of syrupy sympathy knocked some of the starch out of Neck, and his oil-slick eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, darlin’,” Deena gushed as she bustled around the table and enveloped Neck in a motherly hug.

By that point, the other occupant of the room had stepped forward: a young woman with a halo of dark curls and a smattering of freckles across her broad, plain face. The sensible heels on her navy pumps brought her eye-to-eye with me, so she couldn’t have been more than five-three in stocking feet. A navy crepe sheath dress topped with a matching open jacket revealed a sturdy body and the telltale bulge at her midsection where her control-top panty hose gave way to unconstrained tummy.

Only her brilliant blue eyes that blazed with intelligence—and a healthy dose of suspicion—saved Maddie Jackson from being as neutral and forgettable as the museum souvenir prints on the walls of her neutral, forgettable office.

“And you are . . . ?”

I forced myself to step forward and offer my hand. “I’m Tally Jones. I’m a friend of Deena’s and I worked a bit with Kristen on stuff at the fair. We were both judges in the edibles competition. I, uh, wanted to offer my sympathies. I don’t know if Kristen has family nearby . . .” I let my voice trail off, inviting her to volunteer information.

“No. No family.”

“Oh. Well. I’m real sorry.”

“So you said.” Maddie Jackson wasn’t even pretending to be civil. She crackled with barely suppressed annoyance.

“Can I dish you all up some cake?” Deena offered, her generous arms still wrapped around Neck’s broad shoulders.

Maddie turned to face her. “I appreciate the offer, but as you can imagine, I have a lot of business matters to attend to. If you’ll excuse me . . .?”

“Of course,” Deena said.

Maddie nudged her way around me, but turned back before heading toward her office. “Nick. Remember what I said.”

Deena was patting Neck, cooing softly to him, and I continued to loiter nervously when the slam of Maddie’s office door rattled the brass centerpiece on the conference table.

“She’s real shook up,” Deena said. “Bless her heart.”

Bless your heart
is the all-purpose Texanism. While it’s true that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and “bless your heart” is sometimes a genuine benediction, it’s also code for “you’re dumb as a stump,” “you’re bass-ackward wrong,” “you’re pitiable and sad,” and “I’m just a hairbreadth away from smackin’ you upside your head.” In this case, I think Deena was using it in the “smackin’ upside the head” sense of the expression.

Neck took her more literally. “She’s all business, that one. Not at all like Kristen.”

“You and Kristen were close?” Deena asked.

His big shoulders sagged. “She was an angel,” he choked.

“She sure was pretty,” I said. “I heard she was a beauty queen.”

“She was
my
beauty queen.”

I locked eyes with Deena over the poor beast’s head. Heartbreaking. No other word for it. The big man had crumbled before our eyes, destroyed by the loss of the woman he so clearly loved. And, from what Maddie had said, the love was one-sided.

Never thought I’d feel bad for a badass like Neck DeWinter, but at that moment, I surely did.

He shook himself, shaking off his funk as a retriever shakes off lake water. With a liquid sniff he stood, sending Deena back a step to accommodate his truly staggering size.

“I gotta work,” he said curtly. He reached into his inside jacket pocket for his sunglasses, which neatly hid the telltale signs of grief. As he pulled out the glasses, though, a white scrap of paper followed and fluttered to the carpeting.

Before Deena could huff and puff her way to the floor to retrieve the paper, Neck had already muscled his way around the dainty conference table and past me, heading for the front of the office.

Deena gasped for oxygen as she rose with the paper—a torn envelope, its plastic address window crackling softly as she handled it—and passed it across the table tome.

I snatched it, and hustled after Neck to give it back. But the darker angel of my snooping self forced me to glance at the scrap in my hand, to read the note written on it in pencil, the printing painfully childish:

“Neck,” I called, before my brain had processed what my eyes had seen.

He stopped, his body filling the narrow hallway, sealing off any hope of escape. A finger of fear tickled up my spine.

As he pivoted slowly to face me, two things happened in rapid succession. First, I realized I held Neck’s “to do” list and Bree wasn’t the only one he had served with court papers. Someone was suing Tucker Gentry. And second, following hot on that realization, I impulsively crumpled the envelope in my hand, hiding it from sight.

“Neck,” I repeated to his face—his scary, scary face. “I’m real sorry about Kristen. She’ll be missed.”

He didn’t flinch, didn’t respond, just spun around and plowed out of the office.

I hadn’t even realized I was holding my breath until it left me in a rush.

Deena sidled up next to me. “So, Velma. . . did we nab a clue?”

“Velma?”

“Jinkies,” she exclaimed, holding her hand to her chest in mock surprise. “Clearly I’m Daphne.”

I chuckled, relief making me a little giddy. “Grab your keys, Daphne. I think we need Fred’s input.”

O
ddly, we tracked down Finn at the A-la-mode. He’d camped out at a table in the back, laptop flipped open, sweating glass of iced tea at his side.

“No ice cream?” I chided as I leaned down to kiss the top of his head.

He patted his flat stomach. “What’s that song lyric? ‘She’s like a baby, I’m like a cat . . . when we are happy, we both get fat.’”

“Are you saying I’m fat?”

Deena, right behind me, whistled low. “You better watch it, boy. She’ll trim your nuts just like a cat, if you aren’t careful.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I felt bad when I did it to Sherbet. But you. . .?” Finn laughed, and I kissed his head again. “What are you doin’ here?”