False Premises (10 page)

“Furniture?”
he said accusingly, although he accepted the phone and started to dial.

His retort stung, but I trotted toward the fire nevertheless.
Both
of us couldn’t desert her body, but I would have expected Steve Sullivan, of all people, to understand that one of us had to put some effort into firefighting.

Desperate to find the nearest container, I grabbed a drawer from a bureau just inside the door of Laura’s rented space. I vaguely recalled seeing an outdoor spigot near my rental unit, which was only three units away, and soon located it.

I fought to douse the flames. It was painful and largely futile. One drawer full of water at a time, I limped back and forth between the tap and the storage unit. My efforts felt like a sick joke told by an idiot. It was as if I’d somehow become mired within a sadistic computer-animation game.

After what felt like an eternity, the firemen arrived. I gladly got out of their way and returned to Steve’s side. He was slumped on the pavement, staring straight ahead, his face pale and his eyes black holes.

“Where the hell are the security people?” I cried out of sheer frustration. “The gate’s supposed to be locked tight at night!”

“I have to contact Laura’s parents. They moved from Indiana. I’m not sure how to reach them anymore.”

“The police will locate them.”

He rose but said nothing.

Thinking aloud, I said, “Dave must have started the fire. There’s no other reasonable explanation. The fire hadn’t been burning all that long before we arrived.”

Steve remained silent.

“Maybe Dave started the fire from the back of the place and only discovered her body on his way out. Or do you think he killed her, then started the fire?”

Steve grumbled, “I don’t want to talk.”

“Fine. I won’t say another word.” Inwardly, though, my thoughts were a torrent of self-recriminations and defensive rebuttals. Maybe if I’d been smarter about Laura, had paid more attention, I could have recognized earlier that she wasn’t playing straight with me. Should I have known she was a con artist? Insisted on swearing out some sort of complaint against her right away?

Who could have known that she was here, at an obscure storage facility in Northridge late at night, other than Dave? A partner in crime, maybe?

She’d been blessed with so much beauty, which our society holds so dear and rewards so greatly. Why had she opted to live her life by cheating the people who tried to get close to her? Had one of them killed her?

The police arrived shortly after the firefighters, and
eventually Sullivan and I were driven by a patrol officer to the Northridge police station. Sullivan was taken to one room and I to another, where a female officer helped bandage my wounds, then interviewed me for what seemed like hours. At one point, when I’d been left alone briefly with the door open, I heard one officer mutter to another, “Sounds like a case of domestic violence.” They obviously suspected Dave Holland of Laura’s murder.

I answered the officers’ questions, but my brain was feeling the effects of the late hour and the horror of finding the body of a woman I had believed was my friend. I went over my story a couple of times for two different officers. As time went on, my words seemed to be slurring of their own accord.

My third interviewer was a paunchy, middle-aged detective. He asked me, “You’re sure it was Mr. Holland driving the car as you left Crestview?”

I hesitated. “I know that it was Dave Holland’s
car.
. . . I saw him pull into his driveway in full daylight just this afternoon. And I could see that the driver was a man, and that his silhouette looked very much like Dave’s . . . his basic size and shape, I mean. But it was too dark for me to know for certain that it was Dave.”

“You didn’t see the driver’s face at all when the car nearly ran you down?”

“No. I was too busy trying to get out of the way.”

He nodded and made a notation on his pad.

“Has anyone talked to Dave Holland yet?” I asked.

“I’m sure someone’s working on that,” the detective replied without looking up from his note-taking. When he’d finished, he met my eyes and gave me a pinched smile. “You and Mr. Sullivan were together tonight from eight P.M. on, right?”

“No, it was closer to nine. I met with Officer Delgardio at eight, while Sullivan was already keeping an eye on the house.”

“I could have sworn you said . . .” He furrowed his brow and flipped back through his notes. “Huh. Mr. Sullivan’s the one who said it was eight.”

“If so, he was mistaken. It was nine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. If he said it was eight, it was an innocent mistake, Detective. He certainly didn’t kill Laura.”

The detective held my gaze. “You understand the importance of the times, right, Miss Gilbert? It’s not like the stuff you see on TV, where the coroner can establish the time of death to the minute.”

“I understand. And I’m certain that I joined Steve in his car a few minutes before nine.”

The detective nodded, impassive, and referred again to his notes. “The victim was a friend of yours?”

“I considered her a friend, yes.”

“You mean . . . back before you learned she’d left the country with the contents of Mr.
Sullivan’s
bank accounts?”

“Exactly.” I’d answered quickly, but then it hit me that the detective had emphasized Steve’s name.
Had I just
implied he was guilty, after all?

“Okay.” He closed his notebook and stood, giving me another miserly smile. “Thanks for answering our questions. We’ll have an officer drive you home now.”

“Actually, I’d rather wait until Steve Sullivan can drive me. He can give me a ride to my car.”

The detective narrowed his eyes. “And where
is
your car?”

“Near Laura Smith’s house. In the mountains a few miles west of downtown Crestview. We drove Steve’s car to the storage unit when we saw Dave Holland drive past us.”

The detective held the door for me. “It’d be best if an officer escorted you, instead.” He gave me a practiced smile and deposited me in the lobby. “I’ll send an officer out who can drive you to your car. But if you think of anything else you need to tell me first, just have our dispatcher give me a buzz.” He nodded at the woman wearing the headphones, pivoted, and left.

She winked at me while speaking into her phone. I felt like protesting Steve’s and my innocence to her, even though she probably had not the slightest idea who either of us was or how much trouble we might be in.

It was nearly dawn by the time I got home. A patrol
officer had driven me to my car, then followed me to my house. He must have been worried that I would immediately head right back up to Laura’s and tamper with evidence. Or, perhaps, that I would warn Dave Holland or Steve Sullivan that they were prime suspects in a murder/arson investigation. In any case, I was very happy to reach the sanctity of my own bedroom, undetected by Audrey, who I hoped was blissfully asleep.

My alarm woke me at nine. Audrey, I knew, would have already left for work by then. I rescheduled my appointments for the day, then stumbled to bed again, but was unable to fall back to sleep. My bruised knee and hands were hurting again, and my heart was aching as well. Just two days ago, I’d been looking forward to spending the evening with my friend Laura Smith. Now she was dead. Our friendship had been exposed as a lie. My friendship with Steve Sullivan had probably been permanently derailed. Maybe life in general and the state of humanity in particular were every bit as dismal as Sullivan seemed to believe them to be.

Hildi squeezed through the doorway and sprang onto my bed, her yellow eyes smiling at me. “Morning, little one. People can be mean and nasty,” I assured her as I stroked her soft black fur. “Cats are much nicer, aren’t they?” She touched her pale pink nose to mine to signal the affirmative and rubbed her whiskers against my cheek.

Until Laura’s murderer was behind bars, I would be a mass of raw nerves and unresolved hurts. People generally tended to open up to me, so if I asked around, I might be able to provide Linda Delgardio with some insider information. I sat up, my brain foggy and thrumming as though I’d spent the evening downing tequila instead of dousing flames. Paprika’s would be open in less than an hour, and talking to Hannah Garrison seemed a logical first step. I needed to know more about the protestor-turned-pseudo-undercover-cop Laura had confronted that night. Also, Hannah and Laura had had a history that had left Hannah bitter and Laura furious. It would surely be enlightening to hear the story behind the two women’s frayed relationship. Maybe I could find some way to extract a truth or two from the lies Laura had told to the various individuals in her life.

Paprika’s was, as usual, doing a brisk business, at least
in terms of the number of customers browsing the merchandise. Like me, others too enjoyed coming in simply to examine the displays and the new merchandise, with no intent of actually buying anything.

After a minute or two, I found Hannah. She was helping an overly perfumed woman who wore a dress in a garish, primary-colors floral pattern that would have worked better on lawn furniture. Hannah, too, was wearing a boldly patterned blouse, to go with her black slacks. From a distance, the short, buxom Hannah resembled a mini version of the customer—as though they were a pair of nestle dolls. Hannah turned and spotted me, and I held up my index finger to let her know I wanted to speak with her when she was free.

Now more than ever, I needed a reminder that there were still beautiful things in the world. I tried my best to focus my thoughts on Paprika’s awesome array of salad bowl sets. There is something immensely appealing about the aesthetics of a finely crafted salad bowl, and my vision was drawn to an exquisite hand-carved mahogany salad bowl set. The rich color and dense grain of the wood were amazing. The asymmetrical bowls were so beautifully curved and balanced that they not only looked lovely but felt wonderful to hold—even in my still-tender hands.

Just as I was vacillating about whether or not my budget justified the purchase of yet another salad bowl set, Hannah joined me. Now that I wasn’t with Laura Smith or being tailed by a gun-bearing Rastafarian imitator, she greeted me with her typical warmth, saying, “Good morning, Erin. Are you shopping, or just looking?”

“Just looking. And hoping to visit with you for a couple of minutes.” I doubted that she had already heard the news of Laura’s murder down in Northridge. Reluctantly, I returned the salad bowl to its spot on the shelf, then did a double take at Hannah’s lips. She had what was either a slight injury or a cold sore that she was covering up beneath ruby-colored lipstick. “Can you take a coffee break with me?” I asked her.

“I was just about to suggest that myself. Come on back to the office, and we’ll grab a cup.”

With Hannah’s typical arm-pumping, no-nonsense walk, she strode up to the counter, told the clerk that she’d be gone for a few minutes, and ushered me out of the immediate area.

She babbled to me about what “a delightful spring day” this was, and I responded with a few appreciative adjectives, although in truth, the weather this morning hadn’t registered with me. We entered Hannah’s “office,” part of the storage room in the back of the store. Going from the brightly lit and colorful showroom to this dreary storage space with its stack of boxes and bare lightbulbs in the ceiling was like leaving a fabulous kitchen for an unfinished basement. Still chattering about how marvelous the climate in Colorado was, she emptied a Pyrex coffeepot into a pair of checkered aqua-and-dusty-rose mugs and handed me one. I did my best to settle into one of the two wooden slat-back chairs by Hannah’s metal desk, although the seat was so uncomfortable that it was clearly designed for the function of keeping its occupant fully awake. I thanked her for my beverage, blew on the surface, and took a tentative sip. The coffee was half an hour or so shy of having been burned into sludge.

Choosing to omit the reason for my curiosity, I asked, “Did that man who claimed to be an undercover cop come back into the store yesterday?”

“No.” She furrowed her brow. “I didn’t want to upset everyone again by saying this at the time, but I can’t believe for an instant that man was really a policeman. He’d been acting like a complete lunatic ever since he first walked into Paprika’s.”

“You mentioned that you’d had an encounter with him before . . . ?”

“Oh, it was way more than
one.
” She took a sip and grimaced, either from the dreadful flavor or from her thoughts regarding the protestor. “I’ve had almost daily visits and the occasional picket sign from the jerk for a whole month now.”

“Picket signs about
what
? ‘Make charity donations, not household purchases’?”

She chuckled. “Essentially, yes. He claims a couple of the kitchen-products lines we carry have unethical practices . . . that the manufacturers use rain-forest woods, and so forth. As a matter of fact, that bowl you were examining was one of his hot points, yet the wood it’s made from is forested in Florida. I tried to tell him that Paprika’s would never sell rain-forest products. . . . In an earth-first town like Crestview, it would be professional suicide. I even double-checked . . . contacted the companies he complained about myself, and I gave him the results, which showed none of his claims are true.”

“And that still didn’t discourage him?”

She shook her head. “He just gabbled on about what he calls ‘American gluttony’ . . . how this country uses more resources per capita than any other country in the world. Like that’s
my
fault?”

“So he’s an anti-consumerism activist?”

“I guess that’s what he calls himself.” She snorted. “Apparently the guy’s trying to save the world by impacting Paprika’s sales revenues.”

“Yeesh. That must be really frustrating for you.”

“Mm-hmm.” She frowned and took another sip of her coffee, then emptied a third packet of sugar into the murky liquid. “It’s not winning me any popularity contests with Paprika’s owners, I can tell you.”