Board Stiff (Mattie Winston Mysteries) (23 page)

“Well, you were right, Trisha,” Hurley says. “I won’t be picking this thing open.”

“Hold on a sec,” I say. I walk over to the desk and look at the day calendar. One of the days is circled in red and has a special notation on it. I do a quick mental calculation in my head using Bernie’s age, a fact I recall from the paperwork I saw at the office. “Try this combination—three, thirty, sixty-eight.”

Hurley dials the numbers in and opens the door. “How did you know that?”

“It’s his birthday.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Trisha says. “He used his birthday for the combination? How stupid is that?” She steps up quickly to see and commandeer whatever is in the safe. She starts to reach inside, but Hurley grabs her arm and stops her.

“You don’t touch anything in there until you put some gloves on,” he says.

Trisha pulls her arm loose. “Fine. Where are they?”

I grab a pair of gloves and hand them to her. While she’s pulling them on, Hurley is looking inside the safe. “I think we’re going to find the contents a bit disappointing. I see a passport, some cash, a few loose pills, and some letters.”

Now that she’s gloved, Trisha walks over and starts pulling things out of the safe. The first thing she grabs is the passport, which is Bernard’s. It’s been well used. There are stamps from several European countries, a couple South American countries, China, and Japan. Next, she removes the cash, which turns out to be four stacks of fifty dollar bills. We don’t take the time to count it all, but it appears that there are close to one hundred bills in each stack. I do some quick math in my head and realize there is somewhere around twenty thousand dollars in total. It’s a large amount of money to have lying around in cash, and it makes me wonder why Bernard felt he needed to have it.

Next, Trisha removes the pills from the safe and hands them to me. There are seven of them in total and they are all the same: pear-shaped, beige-colored pills with a script letter
C
inscribed on them along with the number twenty.

“Do you know what those are?” Hurley asks.

I shake my head. “No, I don’t. I’ll have to look them up using our pill identifier software. But I’m pretty sure they aren’t narcotics or any type of street drug.” I drop the pills into an evidence bag, seal it, and then label it. While I’m doing this, Trisha removes the stack of letters from the safe, and after a quick glance, she hands them to Hurley. “What are those?” I ask after he’s looked at a couple of them.

“They appear to be love letters from Regan to Bernie.”

“Interesting,” I say.

Hurley nods his agreement. “I’m guessing Bernie didn’t want these or the cash found if he and Vonda moved forward with the divorce.”

“Bernard and his wife are getting a divorce?” Trisha says.

“If what his wife told us is true, then yeah, they are,” Hurley explains. “According to her they’ve been separated for some time. They even divided the house into separate wings so that they wouldn’t have to cross paths.”

“If he had a lover and there was that much animosity between the wife and Bernie, maybe his wife killed him,” Trisha proposes.

“Maybe,” Hurley says. “But I’m not seeing a strong motive there. His wife is very well-off financially on her own. She doesn’t need Bernard’s money, and given their living arrangements, I don’t see his affair as being that important, either. We plan to visit her again today and conduct a search of the house, so we’ll see if anything else turns up.”

D
r. Zimmerman is the first board member we talk to. Because he doesn’t have an office of his own at the nursing home, we question him off to one side of the cafeteria. It’s a short interview as he has a strong alibi that is quickly and easily verified. He was at the hospital making rounds on his patients Saturday morning between the hours of nine and twelve.

Next, we invite Al Hubbard into his office. Al is in his forties, overweight, balding, and wears thick glasses. He blinks all the time, though I can’t tell if it’s an attempt to adjust his vision or a nervous tic, and his features are coarse and kind of blubbery. He is wearing khaki pants that are too short, possibly because they are being held up with a pair of blue suspenders. His shirt is a lightweight cotton blend button-down in a blue and green plaid with two breast pockets. His socks are basic white cotton, and his shoes are a pair of black penny loafers that are so scuffed and creased I suspect he’s probably had them for a decade or more. Despite their worn condition, each one bears a shiny copper coin in the penny slot. All Al lacks to be the poster boy for middle-aged nerds is a pocket protector.

As he unlocks his office, Hurley asks him who else has a key to it.

“All the board members have keys to the offices back here,” Al says. “And I believe there are office keys on the master set that the nursing supervisors have. As far as I know, that’s it.”

His office is less than half the size of Bernie’s and it lacks any warmth or personalization. There are no pictures on the wall, there are no family pictures on the desk, and other than a coffee mug that says
FINANCE GUYS MAKE MORE CENTS,
there is no evidence that a human being with a personality ever occupied the room.

When Hurley asks Al where he was yesterday morning, he says, “I was home, watching TV.”

“Was anyone with you?”

“No, I live alone.”

“Did anyone see you at home? Like a neighbor or a friend?”

Al shakes his head. I get the sense that he’s very much a loner, though whether that’s by choice or not, I can’t tell.

Nothing in the office jumps out at us and when Hurley asks Al for the financial information he said he wanted earlier, Trisha says she’ll have Al pull it together and send a copy to the police department by the end of the day.

We go back to the dining room to get Jeanette Throckmorton, a thin, mousy woman with brown hair who I guess to be in her late thirties. A bit of discussion clarifies the fact that Jeanette is not actually a member of the board of directors, but rather the administrative assistant or secretary. However, in this role she is privy to much of the same information that the board members have because she attends and types minutes for all their meetings, and processes nearly all the paperwork that comes through the facility. She also has a key to each of the administrative offices, just as the board members do.

As we are walking down the hall of the administrative wing toward her office, which is right next to Bernie’s, Hurley asks her if she knew about the affair between Bernard and Regan Simmons.

“Yes, I did,” she says very tight-lipped, making it apparent she did not approve. “Neither she nor Mr. Chase were very good at being sneaky. There were mornings when I would come in and find condoms in the trash, and articles of clothing lying on the floor by the couch in his office. And Regan was calling him all the time.”

It’s clear by the way she wrinkles her face when she says the word
condom
, as if she just touched something gross, dirty, and nasty, that Jeanette is disgusted.

As we enter her office, Hurley asks, “Are you married, Ms. Throckmorton?”

“No.”

“Any love interests?”

She hesitates a beat before answering and I see her eyes dart toward her desk. “Not at the moment,” she says finally.

“Where were you yesterday morning between the hours of nine and noon?”

“I didn’t get up until after nine. I went out around ten to get something to eat. After that, I drove around for a while since it was such a nice day.”

“Can anyone verify that?”

“I got my food at the McDonald’s drive-through, so I guess they can vouch for that part of the time. But beyond that, I don’t think so.”

“Do you know of anyone who would want Mr. Chase dead?” I ask.

“No, of course not,” she answers quickly.

“What about this rumor the patients have been talking about, that Mr. Chase was killing off the patients who became too expensive?”

“That is utterly ridiculous,” she says angrily. “Mr. Chase is a thoughtful and kindhearted man. He would never do anything like that.”

I walk around behind the desk, scanning the items on top of it. Like Bernie’s desk, Jeanette’s is covered with neat stacks of papers, most of which appear to be dealing with official nursing home business. “Jeanette, would you mind just opening the drawers of your desk for us?”

“I don’t see why that’s necessary,” Trisha jumps in. “As Mr. Chase’s secretary, Jeanette may have proprietary documents in there. I reserve the right to look through the desk first.”

“I’m not interested in reading any papers that might be in the drawers. I would just like Jeanette to open them so I can take a quick look inside.”

“To what end?” Trisha asks.

“To satisfy my curiosity,” I say vaguely. I shift my gaze from Trisha to Jeanette. “You don’t have anything to hide, do you?”

Jeanette shakes her head, but she looks frightened. She defers to Trisha, who after a moment’s hesitation says, “Go ahead and open the drawers.”

Jeanette unlocks her desk and proceeds to open the drawers, beginning on the top left. There are three drawers on either side—two regular drawers atop a larger one made to hold hanging files—and a shallow one spanning the middle. The top drawer on the left contains typical office items such as boxes of extra staples, paper clips, pens, and pencils. The drawer beneath that contains two packages of printer paper and some sticky notes. The bottom drawer is filled to capacity with hanging files. A quick glance at the tabs indicate they are all work-related. The center desk drawer is filled with loose paper clips, pens, pencils, binder clips, and more sticky notes. The top two right drawers are filled with files—manila folders stuffed with papers. When Jeanette opens the bottom right drawer, my hunch is finally confirmed. Inside, I see a coffee mug, the back side of some greeting cards, and a bouquet of dried roses. I glance at Trisha and ask, “Any objections to me taking a closer look at the coffee mug?”

Trisha looks inside the drawer and shrugs. “Be my guest.”

Jeanette, however, looks anything but indifferent. I reach down and pick up the mug, reading what it says on the side. At the top are the words,
WORLD’S GREATEST,
and below that the crossed-out word
Below that are the crossed-out words
, and at the bottom is the word LIFESAVER.

“A gift from Bernie?” I ask Jeanette, holding the mug aloft.

She nods, her face flushing a bright, flaming red. “He gave it to me for National Secretaries Day.”

“Were the flowers from him, too?”

“Yes.”

I return the mug to the drawer, and then give Jeanette my best sympathetic look. “You were in love with him, weren’t you?” I say softly.

Jeanette stares at me for several seconds as tears well in her eyes. When the tears flood over and run down her face, she swipes at them with shaking hands. She opens her mouth as if to speak several times, but all that comes out are sobs. Finally she just nods.

Hurley turns to Trisha and says, “I believe we have motive and opportunity here. I intend to search this entire office. Now.”

Jeanette finally finds her voice. “You think I killed Bernie?” she asks, her voice quivering. “That’s ridiculous! I could never hurt Bernie.”

Trisha sighs heavily, gives Hurley and me the go ahead and we spend the next twenty minutes searching through Jeanette’s thankfully small office. With Trisha looming over us the entire time, we do no more than fan through the pages inside the manila file folders, and finger our way through the tabs on the hanging files. We’re not looking for anything that would be on paperwork; we’re looking for something that could be used as a poison. We come up empty-handed, and when we leave the office Hurley makes Jeanette turn over her key. We then have the police officer who is currently guarding the wing cordon off the office with police tape to keep anyone else from entering.

Jeanette continues her vociferous denials the entire time, and when Hurley asks her if it would be okay for us to search her house, she readily agrees. I can tell her adamant denials along with her willingness to let us go through her house have left Hurley feeling skeptical about her possible guilt. After giving it some thought, he gets on his cell phone and calls Bob Richmond in, asking him if he would be willing to take Jeanette home and search her house with the help of one or two other off-duty officers who might be looking for overtime. Bob agrees, and Jeanette is returned to the dining room where she is to remain under the watchful eye of Trisha’s cohorts until Richmond comes to get her.

Next up is Dorothy Granger, and I can tell from the way she’s watching what’s going on with Jeanette that she’s very curious about what has just happened. To her credit, she doesn’t ask. As we’re walking down the hallway of the administrative wing toward Dorothy’s office, Hurley asks her where she was yesterday morning between the hours of nine and noon.

“I was home until about ten or so, and then I was out running some errands,” she says.

“Such as?” Hurley prompts.

“I had to gas up my car, and then I took it through the self-serve car wash. After that, I walked around downtown window shopping. I have a niece with a birthday coming up and I was hoping to see something that might make a nice gift.”

“Do you have any receipts?”

She looks over at Hurley, brow drawn down in thought. After a moment she says, “You know, I don’t believe I do. I paid cash for the gas and I have a stash of tokens that I keep in my car for the car wash. And I never actually bought anything downtown. I was just looking.”