Double Shot (32 page)

“Courtney was arrested?”
“I saw the police come myself. We all did! They took her away!”
“In handcuffs, Priscilla? Did they read her her rights? Or did she just agree to go in for questioning — “
Priscilla’s tone changed. “Is this why you’re calling me when I’m entertaining friends at the country club?” Clearly, she wasn’t going to allow someone, especially a caterer, to water down her story. “You called to ask questions about Courtney MacEwan? Or do you have something else on your mind?”
I took a deep breath, and smelled smoke. It was sweet, and it was . . . billowing out of our oven. ”Just a sec, Priscilla!” I put down the phone and looked around wildly for pot holders. When I pulled out the pie, it was a steaming, gurgling mess. Hot strawberry goo dripped relentlessly from the pie-plate rim. A quart of red lava had already bubbled onto the bottom of the oven, where it was blackening into a smoking island. Tom grabbed his own pair of pot holders and helped me ease the pie onto a rack.
“Goldy?” Priscilla’s voice called from the counter.
“Coming, coming!” I called. I’d made dozens of fruit pies. What had I done wrong?”
“Goldy! I’m a busy woman, you know!”
Tom waved for me to return to the phone.
“Sorry about that, Priscilla, Ah . . . remember this morning, when you and the committee were talking about the Vikarioses?”
“I don’t remember. Is this going to take long?”
“Priscilla,” I stage-whispered, “I could keep you posted on Courtney’s status.” Tom stopped wiping up the mess and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “What the charges are, who her lawyer is, that kind of thing.”
“Well, then,” I could hear Priscilla’s salivating through the phone line. “All right, Goldy, so. What were you wondering about the Vikarioses?”
“Remember when the committee was discussing their daughter? The one with the child? I, uh, heard she died. The Vikarioses’ daughter, that is.”
”She did,” Priscilla replied crisply. “Talitha. Last month, in Moab, Utah. A truck accident, was the story I got. Somebody cut off a pickup, which then swerved into the oncoming lane and hit Talitha.”
“Do you . . . know what happened to the child? Talitha’s child, that is?”
Priscilla snorted. “Ted and Ginger are taking care of the boy. He was hurt in the accident, and he doesn’t have any other family, of course. I think it’s a terrible idea. They’re too old to have children.” She inhaled. “Is that all, Goldy?”
“Um, yes. Thank you.”
She lowered her voice. “When will you know about Courtney? One of the women here said Courtney precipitated her husband’s heart attack by making sure he was having sex with that flight attendant before she stalked into their bedroom and surprised them. That’s how she ended up inheriting all that money that she lavished on your worthless ex-husband.”
I smiled in spite of myself. With Courtney, or with John Richard, nothing surprised me. “As soon as I know anything, I’ll call you.”
“By the way, I’m doing the flowers for your ex-husband’s memorial service. That’s one thing the garden club can’t take away from me. That, and the planting we’ll be doing up in the preserve, if they can ever manage to put out the fire! Did you hear they think some hikers are trapped back there?”
I told her that I had not heard that, then signed off. I asked Tom if he had picked up on a story about the blaze threatening some hikers in the preserve. He cocked a bushy eyebrow and replied that this sounded like more horse manure from Priscilla Throckbottom. Meanwhile, bless him, he had cleaned up the entire pie mess. His brownies had managed to bake alongside the strawberry volcano and were now cooling as he sliced his super-sub sandwich. Arch, sensing that a meal was imminent, had slipped back into the kitchen. To my astonishment, he washed his hands and began setting the table without being asked. The next time I got a big tip, it was going to Arch.
Arch pushed his glasses up his nose, peered around, and sniffed. “Did something burn?”
“It’s okay, hon,” I said.
“Good, ‘cuz I’m starving.”
But I wasn’t. In fact, I was desperate to do something else altogether.
“Guys,” I said to Tom and Arch. “I want to go over to the Vikarioses. Now.”
It was the second time that evening that Tom laughed. “Forget it!”
“Mom,” Arch pleaded, “I’m so hungry.”
“Eat,” Tom urged Arch. “Your mother’s hallucinating and will snap out of it soon.”
“Tom, I want to go and I want to go now. If you aren’t going to come with me, then I’m going alone.”
“What happened to your promise not to go into dangerous situations?”
“You can come. And bring a gun.”
Tom put down the knife, then leaned forward on his knuckles. “I’d like to keep my job, thanks. You want, I’ll call the department and Blackridge and Reilly can go over there tomorrow.” When Arch shuffled into the walk-in in search of lemonade, Tom whispered to me, “And anyway, what would you say to Ted Vikarios once you got there?” He brought his voice up an octave to mimic mine. “Ted, did you kill my ex-husband? Could you please wait here while I call the cops?”
“No,” I said calmly. “I’d say we were grieving and we needed pastoral care. We heard he was a pastor, and we’d like to come in and talk.”
“Who is we, white woman?”
Arch had returned and was munching on a large wedge of sandwich. “If you guys go, ask Mr. Vikarios why he’s been following me.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving Arch home alone if Tom and I both went. But I truly had no idea what we might be encountering at the Vikarios condo. I wavered. Maybe this idea was foolhardy.
“All right, all right,” Tom said, his voice resigned. “Let me go call Boyd. I’ll ask him to come here and stay with Arch.”
Thirty minutes later, with Boyd and arch scooping out vanilla ice cream to make enormous brownies à la mode, I followed Tom to his sedan. My husband was wearing a brown corduroy jacket, which I hoped concealed a shoulder holster, and he was holding a pair of high-powered binoculars. Once we were bucked in, Tom said, “We are not getting out of this car when we get there. I’m parking up on the road and then the two of us are going to see if we can spot anything suspicious. Then we’ll make a decision.” He held up his key chain. “We’re not going anywhere until you promise not to go crazy on me.”
“I promise.” Sheesh! “Before you can say tiddlywinks, we’ll be back home digging into your sandwich.”
We chugged down toward Main Street. Tom said, “I’d rather be back home, thank you very much. On such a beautiful night, I’d rather be working with and devouring food — thank you very much. This very minute, you and Arch and I could be eating that sandwich on our deck, by the light of the pearly moon, instead of traipsing around on a wild-goose chase — “
At the light on Main Street — there was only one, so locals just referred to it as “the light” — Tom eased the sedan to a stop. I turned to him.
“What did you say, Tom?”
“Goose chase. Eat outside. Deck. All of the above.”
“Be serious for a second. Something about the pearly moon.”
The light turned green; Tom accelerated. “All right then. How’s ghostly moon?”
I was reaching for a memory. I’d seen something. Something as luminous as a ghost. Something that hadn’t belonged where I’d seen it.
“The Vikarioses don’t live far from John Richard’s rental. Could you just swing by there?” I begged. “I think I dropped something. In the street, not at the house.”
Tom shook his head. “It’s a good thing I’m crazy about you, Miss G. Then again, maybe I’m just plain crazy.”
The moonlight cast a pale light over the grate-and-moss rock pillars flanking the entryway to the country-club area. We passed a few cars — luckily, all the gapers had left their decks — and within moments were crunching over the gravel washout on Stoneberry. The evergreens, aspens, and Alpine roses ringing the cul-de-sac shrouded the pavement in darkness. When we stopped in front of the rental. Tom drew out a Maglite from the floor of the backseat. He held it in his lap for a moment, as if unsure if he should give it to me.
“What did you drop?” he wanted to know.
“A piece of jewelry. Several pieces of jewelry. They’ll just take a sec to find, if they’re still there.”
“You don’t wear jewelry, Miss G.”
“Are you doing to give me the light or not?”
When I slid out of the front seat, I snapped on the Maglite and tried to remember exactly where I’d seen what Tom is always telling his investigators to look for: something out of place. The smoke seemed to have dissipated, thank God, and the mountain breeze was sweet as sugar. Alpine roses by the curb bobbed to and fro. I trod gingerly over the asphalt and lustrous flood of gravel, sweeping the Mag as I went.
And then I saw them: a spill of pearls glowing in the moonlight, among a fall of creamy rose petals. I directed the flashlight’s pool of light to where the wash of tiny, uneven stones had deposited the oyster’s perfect nuggets. I reached down and picked them up, one by one. When they were securely in my pocket, I turned off the flashlight and returned to the sedan.
Maybe they were nothing. Maybe they were something. Should I bother Blackridge and Reilly again?
If the pearls were significant, there was a logical explanation as to why the crime-scene investigators hadn’t found them. Everything — grass, trees, pavement — had been coated with dust when I’d discovered John Richard on Tuesday. The pearls would have been easy to miss. But that night the hailstorm had bathed away the dust. Gravity and a stream of dirt had swept the pearls out of John Richard’s yard and into the street, where anyone looking could have found them.
<19>
“So they’re not yours,” Tom said. “What good will a handful of pearls do you? Scratch that. What good will pearls do the investigation?”
“It depends on what kind of pearls they are. Pearls from the Persian Gulf aren’t cultured. Cultured pearls, which are the great majority of the pearls sold in this country, usually come fro Japan.”
“And you’re going to tell me how you know this, right?”
I gave him a sheepish smile. “I grew up as a middle-class girl in New Jersey, and then went to a girls’ boarding school. You don’t think I know from pearls? On the way home, we can drop some of them at Front Range Jewelry, leave the owner a note.”
“Humor me. Your theory is that if Courtney’s the killer, they would be . . . . what?”
“Cultured. But if we’re looking at, say, Ginger Vikarios, it could be something else together. Holly Kerr and Ginger Vikarios are inseparable, now that they’ve reconciled. Ginger Vikarios’s life was ruined by her daughter having a child out of wedlock. And if my theory, and Ted’s theory, is that Vikarioses just discovered that the Jerk impregnated their daughter, then that certainly would be a motive for murdering him.”
“So . . . how do the pearls fit in?”
I sighed. “If the pearls are from the Persian Gulf, then Holly could have given them to Ginger! Holly has more pearls in her house than Tiffany’s.”
Tom chuckled and started the car. “Thin, Goldy. Wafer thin.”
“I don’t know from wafers.”
“Clearly. But you’re going to have to tell the detectives investigating the case about finding the pearls. You might not want to share these theories, though.”
“You can tell Boyd tomorrow. I don’t want the cops to know I was here. Now can we please make our other stop?”
He grunted assent and pulled out his spiral notebook. He looked up the address he’d jotted down and eased the sedan around the Stoneberry dead end. It was a good thing, too, because lights had begun to wink on in the houses rimming the cul-de-sac. Several faces appeared at windows.
I certainly didn’t blame the Stoneberry residents for being nervous. Their neighbor had been murdered and his house had been vandalized. I just didn’t want these folks to call the sheriff’s department to come out and check on a car belonging to an investigator from . . . the sheriff’s department.
When we had wound down one street and then another — then concept of blocks was foreign to Aspen Meadow — Tom drew to a stop under a streetlight. The wind rustled the aspens close by as Tom peered up at the sign for Club Drive. When he turned right, the smell of fire smoke drifted into the car. I exhaled, suddenly thankful that Boyd was staying with Arch.
The country-club condominiums had been built along an embankment that sloped down from Club Drive. Facing east, the condos could not boast the coveted view of the mountains, but some of them overlooked the golf course, and their clever design as multi-storied duplexes gave them the look of large, mountain-style houses. Like the clubhouse itself, their beige exteriors — no change of color allowed — and cedar-shake-shingle roofs screamed Upscale Mountain-Resort Holiday Inn, but for retirees who wanted proximity to the clubhouse, they were perfect.
When Tom slowed to read mailbox numbers, I wondered how, exactly, the rift between the Vikarioses and the Kerrs, not to mention between the Vikarios parents and their daughter, Talitha, had been healed. Had Ginger written an angry letter to Holly, Your husband impregnated our daughter out of wedlock, and now we’re ruined? Or had Ginger been so dumbfounded by Talitha’s claim that she’d been embarrassed even to ask Holly if it could be true? Holly must have heard the story from someone. Knowing that Albert couldn’t have fathered Talitha’s child, Holly’s forgiveness and generosity toward her old friends — a club condo alone cost half a mil — didn’t look like a payoff at all, no matter what Nan Watkins said. It looked like true charity — all the more so because it wasn’t widely known.
Tom pulled up to a dark driveway, turned off the lights, and cut the motor. My palms were damp. Tom lifted the binocs and focused. Then he moved them slowly until he stopped and refocused. He waited for what seemed like a very long time, but probably wasn’t more than five minutes.
“Bingo.”
“What?” I demanded. “Show me!”
He pointed to the northernmost of a set of three duplexes, then handed me the binoculars. “Condo on the left of the far one. Lower level. Looks like a family room. Shades are up, windows open, TV on.”
As I’d learned on an ill-fated birding expedition, I wasn’t too adept with binoculars. Still, after a few minutes I was able to make out Ginger, clad in a dark top and pants, sitting in a rocking chair. Ted was perched on a couch directly across from a brightly lit color television. On a coffee table in front of him, I could just make out . . . three glasses? My fingers began to hut. I didn’t even know what I was looking for.
“I’m not seeing,” I said. “Oh God.”
Just then, a young teenager — maybe fourteen — strode into the room. He was holding what looked like a bowl of popcorn. Ted and Ginger both said something to him, and the teenager laughed. He had toast-brown hair, glasses, and a thin face.