Diva 03 _ Diva Paints the Town, The (30 page)
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Authors: Krista Davis
Tags: #Murder, #Winston; Sophie (Fictitious Character), #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #General, #Dwellings
BOOK: Diva 03 _ Diva Paints the Town, The
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Her gleeful explanation of how they manipulated customers brought Mordecai and his bequest to mind.
“Hon? You okay?” she asked. “It’s not a big deal. Even department stores do it.”
I nodded and made my way to the doughnuts, where I selected two with chocolate icing and the biggest coffee they offered. Something was bothering me. Consequently, I didn’t see a single other item the store offered as I paid and left. I made my way to the fountains at Market Square and sat down, steam rising from my coffee in the cold air.
I had been looking at the murders all wrong. I never considered Mordecai as a possible killer of Tara or Kurt because he was dead. But through his bequest he had reached back from the great beyond to manipulate us. Had Mordecai provoked a chain of events that resulted in Kurt’s or Tara’s murder?
He set up the bequest to remind his students of the party they’d attended in his home more than two decades ago. The food, the lilacs—he hadn’t wanted substitutions because the tastes and scents were supposed to trigger memories. And someone, Mike maybe, had suggested that Mordecai built the opening in the wall unit to operate only when all five students were present with their keys. Mordecai wanted them together. That made perfect sense. And it seemed clear to me that the paintings and other treasures beneath the house were the bequest.
But what struck me as very peculiar was that Mordecai had intentionally led his students to a grave. Just like the store that manipulated people and forced them to find the doughnuts in the back, Mordecai had wanted his students to discover the grave. What would possess him to want his students, or anyone, for that matter, to find the grave he had hidden so carefully for so many years? If he had wanted to clear his conscience, he could simply have left a note with his attorney regarding the grave. But he hadn’t done that. Instead, he wanted his students to find it. And he’d left the bottle of insulin there, too. A shudder ran through me. Surely the students hadn’t killed the person who was buried there? Had there been a sixth student? Perhaps the one who had sabotaged the cottage they built for Mordecai’s class?
I looked up to see Ted headed my way. “Gorgeous day for February, isn’t it?” He sat beside me and munched on a take-out burger.
To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed the weather until that moment. I nodded, though.
“We’re supposed to get snow again tomorrow. Who’d have thought it would be sunny today? Like life, huh? The unexpected around every corner.”
“Ted, when you guys built the straw cottage—the one for Mordecai’s class—how many people worked on it?”
He pulled the top off a cup of coffee. “All of us. Posey, Kurt, Mike, Nolan, and me. Well,” he snickered, “Nolan had already perfected the art of looking like he was doing something when he was really just telling everyone else what to do—and we did a lot of griping about that. Mordecai pitched in a little, and his wife helped with decorating decisions.”
“No one else?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just thinking about Mordecai and the body in his basement.”
Ted swallowed a bite of his burger. “Blew me away. I’ve known Mordecai forever, and that’s the last thing I expected. Just goes to show that even the smartest person can flip out, I guess.”
“You knew Mordecai before you were his student?”
He nodded. “My dad did lawn work for a bunch of people on your street. I was an impressionable kid, and Mordecai was like a magician. He always had a trick up his sleeve or some game in store for me.” Ted sucked in a deep breath. “Mordecai is the reason I went to college. My dad had enormous respect for him.”
“That’s why you know Iris and Bedelia. Your dad worked for Bedelia, too?”
“Yes. Great people, the Ledbetters. They were always good to us.”
“Did you know my neighbor, Francie?”
He chuckled. “Francie’s husband thought he was a horticulturist and wouldn’t let anyone else touch their lawn. But I mowed your grass for Faye when I was a teenager.”
As far as I knew, Mars’s Aunt Faye, who had left us the house, had never married. It came as no surprise that she had employed a lawn service.
Ted wiped his mouth with a cheap paper napkin and crammed it inside his empty coffee cup. “Gotta check on my men. It wasn’t easy escaping from Natasha. She doesn’t understand that I have other jobs going on and I can’t drop everything for her.”
“Mike still there?”
Ted stood up. “I don’t know what’s up with him. He found another place to stay, and he’s acting odd and mysterious.”
If Mike had chosen not to tell Ted that Beth was Hot Lips, it probably wasn’t my place to spill the beans.
“He’s broke, but suddenly he has money to pay for a room somewhere?”
I tried to think of a way to change the subject. “Nina thinks Earl killed Tara and Kurt.”
“Earl?” Ted wiped a hand across his mouth. “I never considered her. She’s really the one who threw Mike out of the kitchen business, you know. She didn’t want to split profits with anyone.”
THIRTY-FOUR
From “THE GOOD LIFE” :Dear Sophie,I adore my Havanese, so people are always giving me cute decorative items with Havanese dogs on them. My mother says my house looks tacky—like a Havanese shop. How do I display all these items?—Happy Havanese Mom in HavanaDear Happy Havanese Mom,Instead of spreading everything around, place clusters of three or five items together. More than five items on a horizontal surface can be a bit overwhelming. You might consider selecting one wall where you can display similar items as a group. Walls can absorb a greater number of similar objects without being overpowered.—Sophie
Ted bit his upper lip. “Do you think Mike is trying to get revenge? His entire life might have been different if Earl hadn’t ruined it by kicking him out of their kitchen business.”
Mike and Beth? Was it possible that the lovebirds had planned this? If Wolf and I hadn’t spotted the smoke from their fire, would they have continued to pretend they didn’t know each other?
I searched for an innocuous answer to Ted’s question. “You know Mike better than I do.”
Ted acted like the garbage receptacle was a basketball hoop and launched his trash at it with dead-on accuracy. He wiped his hands, displaying his satisfaction. “I never dreamed that Mordecai could have killed anyone, and I thought I knew him very well.”
Although I needed to get back to the mayhem at Rooms and Blooms, when Ted left, I took a few extra minutes to sort my thoughts about the murders and possible suspects. There was quite a bit to keep straight.
Mike harbored resentment against Kurt, but unless he lied about living in Pennsylvania, I doubted that he knew Tara. So although he might be implicated in the first murder, it was hard to see how he would fit into the second. I thought I understood Beth when I found out she was Hot Lips, but it was possible that she was helping Mike. She had known Kurt, and might have had reason to dislike him since he came on to so many women, but if she’d just moved here, I couldn’t imagine why she would want to murder Tara.
Surely Camille hadn’t killed anyone. Did she even know how to shoot a nail gun? She did seem put out with Nolan. Had she taken advantage of the murders to try to get rid of him?
I was beginning to think that Posey’s temper matched the dark flame in her hair, and wasn’t sure if she had loved Tara or hated her. She’d certainly been involved with Kurt once. She seemed to be one of the few who had a connection to both victims.
Iris had brought charges against Kurt, and didn’t want to work on the same project as him. But did she even know Tara?
And then there was Ted. It had to be more than a coincidence that someone had shot nails into his pond liner and that Tara had been killed by a nail gun. I wished I knew how long Kurt had been dead. Maybe Nina had been right all along, and it was Kurt who killed Tara. But then, who killed Kurt?
Kurt had certainly alienated a lot of people. And that brought me back to Earl again. I had to find out where Earl had been the night Nina went out with Kurt. If I had to bet, I’d have chosen Earl as the killer. She knew both of the victims and hadn’t acted like a worried wife.
With renewed vigor, probably from the coffee, I returned to the hotel conference hall and took stock of what needed to be done. I walked the hall, making a list of exhibitors whose booths remained. The mini bulldozer chugged past me, and I wondered if Camille had managed to break Nolan’s contract. And then I wondered if Nolan was even alive. I felt ashamed of my thought, but Nolan hadn’t been seen or heard from since he was mugged.
On my way to the lobby, I swung by the Finkel Kitchen and Bath booth. A couple of young men were loading the last of the cabinets.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Have you seen the redhead who worked for Kurt?”
“Do you mean me?”
I turned around to find the redheaded girl who’d manned the booth.
“Do you have a job available?” she asked. “Mrs. Finkel fired me. I came by to see if I could persuade her to write me my last paycheck. I mean, I spent days of my life sitting here. I deserve to be paid.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t have any employees.” She looked like she might drift away, so I got to the point. “Mrs. Finkel went out of town during Rooms and Blooms. Do you know where she went?”
The redhead shrugged, and I couldn’t help thinking that if I were hiring, I’d want someone with more spunk.
But the two men snickered, and one said, “Everyone knows that. You’d have to be blind not to figure it out.”
Feeling stupid, I said, “Could you be a little more specific?”
“She got implants.”
The redhead finally came to life. “Oh yeah. My mom said Mrs. Finkel is a pathetic old crow trying to regain her youth and hold on to her husband. That’s why she thought I was after Mr. Finkel. As if! Like I need a geezer?”
In spite of all my suspicions, I felt sorry for Earl. A woman who would go to those lengths to make her husband happy probably wasn’t planning to kill him. Or had Earl’s efforts caused her to be even more disappointed when she learned Kurt had dinner with Nina?
I thanked them and took my list up to the lobby to phone the people who hadn’t collected their belongings. I was in the middle of a heated discussion with a man who claimed he couldn’t remove his exhibit until the following week when Francie and Humphrey burst into the hotel.
Francie pointed at me. “There she is!”
They waited politely while I wound up my call, but the second I clicked the phone shut, Francie said, “We have a problem.”
Humphrey whispered, “Kurt died from a blow to the head by a hammer.”
Ewww
. “But that’s good news, in a way.” I brightened up. “That clears Nina.”
. “But that’s good news, in a way.” I brightened up. “That clears Nina.”
Humphrey didn’t look happy. “When Kurt disappeared, so did Bernie’s hammer. And Bernie’s the one who figured out how to open the wall unit.”
“Then it ought to be obvious to you that had Bernie killed Kurt, he wouldn’t have opened the wall unit.”
Humphrey and Francie exchanged a foolish look.
“Where’s Nina?” I asked. “I thought she didn’t want to be alone.”
“We left her at the vet’s with the menagerie. She’ll be okay there.” Humphrey looked at me like a confused puppy. “You don’t think someone is really after her?”
I doubted it. “She’s very frightened, though.” I checked the time. “You pick up Nina. I have to close up here and run a few errands. I’ll meet you back at my house in a couple of hours.”
When I returned to the hall, only one Rooms and Blooms exhibit remained. The hotel crew was already busy setting up for the next convention. Amid the clanks and reverberating sounds of items being wheeled in and assembled, I realized how easy it had been for someone to lurk among the exhibits and kill Tara. No one paid any attention to me, and if I suddenly vanished, I doubted any of them would remember that I had walked by.
I was on my way to find the manager when the guy who’d insisted he couldn’t dismantle his exhibit until the following week appeared, and began packing up his display of tools. Although he shot some nasty glances in my direction, I was thrilled to wrap up Rooms and Blooms.
When I left the hotel, I headed to the address Camille had given me for a sofa for the family room. Although I went with a buttery color in mind, I chose a deep, cushy sectional in a bittersweet coral. They promised to deliver it the next day.
Nolan and Camille’s antiques store was only a couple of blocks away. I stopped in to see if Nolan was back at work yet, and to pick out some items for the family room.
Borrowing from Nolan’s store was way too much fun. I didn’t have to pay attention to the frightening price tags, and imagined that the extremely wealthy probably shopped with the same gleeful abandon. I found mismatched side tables with interesting wrought-iron bases, and selected a host of colorful urns and decorative items.
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