Death Under Glass (12 page)

A series of chimes sounded, growing steadily louder. Melanie sat up straight, peered at the purse hanging off the back of her chair. “Does anyone call when I'm getting a pedicure and my hands are free? No.” She huffed out a breath and returned her attention to her manicure.

“Is that the only kind of law Russ does? Divorce law?” I asked. “Or Herb? Does he do anything else?”

“They do boring stuff. Contracts and wills and taxes.”

“Contracts? What kind of contracts?”

She shrugged. “Like, rental agreements and property sales. Things like that.”

I winced as the nail technician got a bit too eager with the trimmer, proving my fear was well-founded. I tried another “be careful” and got another “suck it up, buttercup” glare for my trouble. I opted to distract myself from the discomfort by taking another run at the questions swirling through my mind.

Carrie and Russ co-owned the property the law office sat on. What kind of agreement did they have with one another for payment of the mortgage, the taxes, and everything else that went with being a property owner? Were any of them more favorable for Carrie?

But that mental trail led me right back to suspecting Russ of burning down his own business and questioning what benefit he would gain from trashing Carrie's shop. It still didn't add up.

“How long is Russ usually gone for when he's off on these fishing trips?” I asked.

Again, she looked at me suspiciously from the corner of her eyes. “I really can't say.”

As best I could manage with my hands outstretched toward the technician, I turned in my chair to face Melanie. “Look, you're protecting your boss, I understand that. I want to protect my friend. Even if Russ wasn't off chasing trout, I doubt we'd be able to get him and Carrie into a room together to try and sort out why they're both being targeted. So anything you can tell me about Russ's current caseload . . . I don't know if it will help, but it's a start, and I'll at least feel like I was doing something.”

“Well.” She blew out a breathy sigh. “Herb would know best what kind of work was in the office. You should try talking to him.”

I almost said a silent prayer. “What's the best way to get in touch with him?”

“He has a house down in Wenwood. The address is in my phone. As soon as my nails are dry I'll copy it down for you.”

Her nail technician set down the little bottle of primer and handed Melanie a pencil. “I will get your phone,” he said. He scurried around the table and peered into the purse hanging off the back of Melanie's chair.

“Side pocket,” Melanie said, watching over her shoulder.

The technician tugged the phone out of the purse and set it on the table face up.

“Oh,” Melanie said, in a tone generally reserved for the moment you learn you're overdrawn at the bank.

“What is it?” I asked. “Something wrong?”

“That missed call.” Melanie's gaze sought mine. “It was the police.”

I
waited at the salon long enough for my nails to dry and to learn the police had called because they had more questions. Trusting they were pursuing the likelihood of the connection between the fire and the break-in, and already imagining Detective Nolan's displeasure should Melanie tell him I'd been by asking questions, I gave myself a moment to admire my first manicure in over a year while I tapped Herb Gallo's address into the map app on my phone.

The Wenwood address Melanie gave me led to a road I was unfamiliar with in words, but I had my suspicions as I approached, and knew it by sight when I made the final turn onto Herb's street, Berlin Road.

Berlin Road curved gracefully along the waterfront, sometimes parallel to, sometimes turning away from
Riverside Drive—the road that functioned as a barrier between Wenwood and the river and led directly to the front gates of what was the old brickworks and what was becoming the new marina. The homes on Berlin were tiny compared to the near-palatial houses populating the lower Hudson Valley. These were homes built for brickworkers and their families nearly a century earlier, not for millionaires entertaining clients. And they possessed a charm that called to mind words like
cozy
,
quaint
, and
homey
, words that would never be applied to the showplace houses of other towns.

I flipped down the visor on the Jeep, blocking the worst of the early afternoon rays from blinding me as I searched for Herb's house. Having approached from the north end of the road, I watched the numbers on the houses decrease, beginning at 102 and dropping by twos. When it became clear I was within three houses of Herb's, my heart sank at the same time my breath stilled.

Two police cruisers were parked in front of Herb's, number 44. Behind them, blocking the driveway, was an unremarkable silver sedan.

If the police were making the rounds of Russ Stanford's staff and stopping by just to ask Herb some questions, why would there be so many? The large presence couldn't mean anything good. And certainly meant I wasn't getting any information on caseload from Herb Gallo anytime soon.

I should have kept a steady speed and cruised on by the little saltbox house. But reflexes are funny things, and as I gawked at the scene, trying to catch some clue as to
what had drawn the police, my foot lifted off the accelerator. Just enough so that the moment Detective Nolan stepped out of the silver sedan, there was no way to stop our gazes from locking.

The muscles in his jaw bulged and rolled and I could only imagine he was grinding his teeth. When he lifted a hand from his side I half expected him to wave me past. When instead he continued to raise his hand until he'd achieved the “stop” position, I brought the Jeep to a slow halt.

Sliding down the window, I opted against a fake cheerful smile, opted against playing innocent, and asked straight out, “Everything okay, Detective?”

One hand on his hip, one hand on the Jeep's door, he leaned close. “What are you doing here, Georgia?”

“I was hoping to talk to Herb Gallo,” I admitted. What good would it do to lie? Detective Nolan would either see right through me immediately or find out the truth later on.

He let out a heavy sigh, as though I'd just confirmed a fear he didn't want to admit. “And what business would you have with Herb? You're not going to tell me he's your lawyer, are you?”

“That would be untruthful,” I said. “Why are you here?”

Leveling his immutable brown-eyed gaze at me, he said, “I'm on police business, Georgia. Now tell me why you wanted to talk to Mr. Gallo.”

I reached for the air-conditioning controls and increased the fan speed. What with the window open and Detective Nolan blocking the breeze, it was getting hot in the driver's seat. “He's Russ Stanford's law partner. He
might have some idea what Russ was working on that warranted someone burning down the office.”

His nostrils flared as he sucked in breath.

“And if I knew that, I might be able to figure out why that same someone would break into Carrie's shop and shatter everything they could get their hands on.”

“You have no way of knowing if those two incidents are related,” he said.

I let my head drop back against the headrest. “Oh, come on, Detective. There's no way they're random. Just like there's no way your presence here at Herb's house is a coincidence.”

“Georgia.” He shook his head, gaze on the ground. “What am I going to do with you?”

So much for relaxing against the headrest. His words, the tone of his voice, brought me upright in my seat. “That sounded almost friendly, Detective. Like you care,” I teased.

He shot me the briefest half smile I had ever witnessed, then he slid back into stoic cop mode. “Listen, I'm not going to say anything stupid about only running into you when there's trouble. It's the nature of my job that I see people when the worst happens. But what I am going to do is ask you to head on home and stay there and not go poking around in Russ Stanford's law business.”

“What about Russ's law business impacting my friend's business, and my business for that matter?” I asked. Visions of shattered stained glass danced through my head like serial-killer sugar plum fairies.

Detective Nolan huffed. “How about I do the police work
on this one and you get busy re-creating stock for Carrie's store?” He tapped the door of the Jeep with the flat of his palm. “Go home.”

“Detective, I drove all the way out here—”

“You're not getting in that house, Georgia.” His voice, his glare, his stance—all were unshakeable. “Go. Home.”

With a hitch of his belt—very cowboy—he strode away, crossing the street and walking across the lawn of the little house.

I was dismissed. If I wanted to talk to Herb, I was going to have to wait until the police completed their questioning.

Unless they were questioning Herb because he was the number one arson suspect. But . . . Herb? With his classic fishing hat and fragile handshake? I supposed it was true that you never really know a person, but . . . hmm.

I powered up the window and stepped on the gas. Detective Nolan might have prevented me from pursuing one source of information that might help my friend, but lucky for me I had other sources.

*   *   *

“O
h, God, that's so Nolan.” Diana rolled her eyes with such force she nearly toppled off the barstool.

The crowd at the Pour House, Wenwood's single watering hole, wasn't much of a crowd at all. A few long-term residents clustered at one end of the bar, elbows on its age-stained wood, eyes on the television above, showing a baseball game. At one of the four booths lining the
wall opposite the bar, two couples shared a pitcher of beer and some manner of intense conversation.

Carrie, Diana, and I had taken our customary places at roughly the center of the bar and ordered our customary single glass of wine each.

I took a sip of my white, then said, “It's not like I wanted to barge in on his interrogation or whatever. I just—”

“Oh, it wasn't an interrogation,” Diana said.

“Okay, questioning,” I amended.

Carrie swirled the wine in her glass as though she were about to sip a more exclusive vintage than the House's seven-dollar-per-liter red. “Yeah, questioning sounds more like something that could happen at home. Or in a coffee shop.”

But Diana leaned closer, pitched her voice low enough not to be overheard. “What I mean is, it wasn't any kind of question and answer. It was a crime scene.”

“No no no no no.” Carrie held up a hand. “Don't tell us anything that's going to get you in trouble. If it's official police business—”

“Don't listen to her. This is exactly what I wanted to ask you about,” I said. “Tell us everything. What do you mean a crime scene? What happened?”

“It's okay. It's on the blotter. Public record, you know?” Diana paused to take a sip of wine, glance over her shoulder at the other patrons of the bar. “It will be in the news tomorrow. I just don't want to be answering questions from all the benchwarmers here.”

“Fair enough.” I leaned in, Carrie doing the same, so our three heads formed a human cone of silence.

Diana rested an elbow on the bar, gazed at us both from beneath lowered brows. “So. Nolan's been trying to get hold of Herb Gallo about the fire, right? But there was no answer at his house—at the door or over the phone. We've had a couple of uniforms checking during their shifts but there's been nothing until this morning when they noticed”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“a kind of a, you know, odor.”

“Oh my God,” Carrie and I said in unison.

I had met Herb Gallo only once, and in the brief exchange we had at the luncheonette I took him to be a kind man, a gentleman of the old guard. Guilt at thinking for even a second that he might have burned down the law office made me momentarily queasy. And an irritating lump lodged in my throat as I thought of that lovely man dying alone, his remains undiscovered for days. My heart squeezed with sorrow. For a moment I couldn't meet Diana's eyes and instead focused my attention on my hands, on the abundance of tiny cuts and scratches that a kitten and a stained glass hobby made unavoidable. Those cuts were as bad as it got for me, but poor Herb Gallo.

“You said crime though,” Carrie said, her voice small and shaky.

Diana nodded slowly, almost dramatically. “When the uniforms went in, they found the house had been tossed and old man Gallo murdered. He had his throat cut with a piece of broken glass.”

Carrie's breath hitched and she put a hand to her throat. I grabbed at the bar, because the room seemed to tilt and threaten to knock me to the ground. Herb . . . murdered.
A piece of glass. He'd told me his departed wife had collected glass, told me he never had the heart to pack her collection away. And now . . . Dear heaven.

“Glass?” Carrie echoed.

Both sets of eyes turned to me.

“What?” I asked, lifting my head, trying to focus as I glanced back and forth between my friends. “Just because there was glass you think I have some insight?”

Diana lifted a shoulder. “Glass is kinda your thing.”

“Yes, but I create things with glass. I don't—” I paused, brought my voice down to a conspiratorial level. “I wouldn't kill anyone with it. I wouldn't kill anyone at all.”

“Oh, no, that wasn't even a thought,” Carrie assured me.

“Point is,” Diana said, “Herb Gallo is dead. It can't be a coincidence that Gallo and your ex were partners and the building they both worked in was—”

“I know,” Carrie said. “I know.”

She lifted her wineglass as the mood among us sank. I wracked my brain, looking for the right thing to say, looking for anything to say. But what was left that didn't either sound like a platitude or come off like I wanted to revel in her hardship?

“So you, uh, you talked Drew into giving you a job, huh?” Diana nodded, her eyes wide with encouragement telling me to follow along.

“Uh. Yeah. He didn't really take too much convincing. The man has paperwork everywhere.” I lifted my wineglass. “It's not like his file room looked like something from
Hoarders
, but he really didn't stand a chance of
pretending he didn't need help. Seriously, wildflowers are more organized.”

“You'll still be able to help me clean up the shop, though, right?” Carrie asked.

My jaw fell slack. “Of course. You come first. How could you even doubt that?”

She turned the wineglass slowly in her hand. “You'd make actual money if you went to Drew's, though, right?”

“Carrie, you sell my stained glass pieces for me. I make actual money through you, too. Pick me up in the morning and we'll get the store put back together. I'll start at Drew's next week.”

“What about your glass work? Like the window you're designing for Trudy Villiers? And pieces to replace what was . . . lost?” Carrie asked. “Will you still have time?”

“I won't be at Drew's every day,” I assured her. “And it's not as if my nights are packed with romance and excitement.”

Carrie reached out and patted my hand while Diana asked, “How can you say this isn't exciting?” She waved a hand to indicate the nearly empty bar and the old men intent on the baseball game.

“This isn't romantic,” I clarified, and finally became aware of what I'd been saying. Was I really troubled by a lack of romance? Was I ready to start
dating
again? Or was it the wine talking?

I lifted my glass and held its rim against my lips. The pain of my breakup with my fiancée had seemed so acute only weeks earlier. But little by little, when I wasn't looking,
it seemed, the wounds had begun to heal. I spent less time lost in sorrow and regret and more time laughing and looking ahead to tomorrow. Maybe the time had come when I could be open to possibility again. Not to say that I was ready to risk reopening some of the deeper cuts, risk—gulp—falling in love, but I might have been ready to share my time again. I might even have been ready to fall in like.

“Romance is only in movies,” Diana grumbled. “In real life, someone has to do the dishes.”

“Here here.” Carrie raised her glass.

Diana obliged by tapping Carrie's glass with her own, the thick, cheap glass making more of a
clack
than a
ching
. “How are you holding up?” Diana said. “You know, what with being caught up in your ex-husband's mess and all.”

Even in the half dark of the bar—or maybe because of it—the flush of color in Carrie's cheeks was obvious. She took a quick sip of her wine then half turned away. “Would you keep your voice down?” she asked. “Bad enough the whole town is talking about the break-in. I don't need them talking about me and my ex-husband, too.”