False Premises (15 page)

“Beats me. I never know what’s going on underneath that stupid cowboy hat of his.”

Sullivan groaned. “A chartreuse velour beanbag!” he cried. “Henry must be channeling Elvis Presley.”

“Huh. This is odd,” John said.

“What is?” I asked, unable to see him behind a wall of furniture boxes.

“You’ve got some junky little side table back here. It’s out of its packaging and all dinged up.”

Steve and I exchanged puzzled glances and wove our way over to John. “I’ve never seen that table before.”

“Could this be one of Laura’s inexpensive reproductions, maybe?” Steve suggested.

“It’s possible, I guess. But I can’t think of any antiques I selected for her that looked anything like that piece. Her reproductions were duplicates of my purchases.”

John was tugging on the side table’s knob. “It’s got a fake drawer front. Your basic seven dollars of materials with your seventy-dollar discount-store price tag. This knob’s loose. That’s weird. A slot’s been sawed into the wood, to either side of the knob.”

He gave the knob a quarter turn and tugged on it again. “Holy shit!” he cried. I watched in stunned silence as he removed a long, narrow blade from the interior of the table.

Chapter 10

Twenty minutes later, we were showing John’s gruesome discovery to a pair of Northridge policemen—a young Hispanic who was handsome enough to be a TV cop and his pickle-barrel-shaped partner. Gripping the knife at the corner of the plastic bag in which he’d put it, the stout officer held it up to the light. “There’s blood on it,” he said to the Adonis. “See that?”

Adonis nodded and gazed in our direction; due to the cramped quarters, John, Steve, and I were huddled just inside the door. “We’ll have to fingerprint all three of you to eliminate your prints for the lab’s tests.”

“I was the only one who touched the table or the knife,” John said.

I explained, “Steve and I were going through the boxes. We didn’t even notice the table till John called us over to look at it.”

“So your prints will be on the table and the handle of the knife?” the barrel-like officer asked John.

He frowned and replied, “Maybe the blade, too.”

“They wouldn’t be on the blade,” Sullivan told him. “You never touched that.”

A corner of John’s lips twitched, and he replied, “I think I might have touched it as I was setting it down, right while you were calling the police.”

Sullivan scowled and gave me a worried glance. Annoyed, I pretended not to notice. No way was I going to let Sullivan’s paranoia rub off on me! If John’s fingerprints were on the blade, it happened as he set the knife down prior to the police arriving. End of story.

“What about the other contents of this shed?” the handsome cop asked me. “Can you give me a list of everyone who’s been in this space since you first rented it?”

I shook my head. “That’d be nearly impossible. The merchandise has been shipped from more than six places, with various delivery personnel each time. We also had a couple of U-Store employees in here when we found the place unlocked.”

“There’s no sense dusting the storage room for prints, then,” Adonis told his partner. “We’d be better off taking the table to the lab. We can fit it into the backseat, if not the trunk.” He turned his attention to me. “You got any objections to our taking the table?”

“None. Like I said, the side table isn’t mine or my client’s. It shouldn’t have been here in the first place.”

“I’d better talk to your client, too,” the second officer said.

I gave him Henry’s address and phone number, then went into the story of how he’d swapped out my original purchases. After I’d spoken my piece, the rotund officer asked John and Sullivan if they had anything to add.

“Either the door was left unlocked by mistake by Erin’s client, or the lock was picked,” Sullivan said, stating the obvious. “I think Laura’s killer stashed the table here to get rid of the evidence.”

“Maybe he chose my storage area out of coincidence,” I added, hoping to convince myself that was the case.

“What’s strange is that there’re other units closer to Laura’s than yours,” John remarked. He looked at the officers. “Why bother to carry the table that much farther? Unless he figured that’d make it less likely the murder weapon would be found right away.” He turned his attention to Sullivan, who had his omnipresent scowl on his face. “But why move the table at all? If you set the place on fire, you’d want to burn up the weapon, too, not carry it some fifty yards and stash it someplace.”

Another indication that the killer
hadn’t
been the one to set the fire, but, unlike John or Sullivan, I didn’t want to play cop in front of the real thing. It also occurred to me that, in the few minutes that Sullivan and I had lost sight of his car, Dave Holland would
not
have had the time to kill Laura, set the fire, return the knife to its camouflage as a harmless table knob, break into a storage unit a short distance away, stash the table toward the back of that unit, then speed away in his car—in the darkness, his headlights off.

As we stepped outside, John said, “I’ve got to get back to work in Crestview, if that’s all right, Officers.”

The handsome officer said, “You can come down to the station now or later today, so we can get those fingerprints. It’ll just take a minute.”

John grimaced, looked at his watch, then said, “I’d better follow your patrol car and get this over with now. I don’t even know where your station is.” He smiled at me, took both my hands, gave them a gentle squeeze, and, searching my eyes, said quietly, “I’ll call you tonight.”

I returned his smile and nodded, but saw Sullivan watching us, looking deeply concerned. I wanted to smack him. Sullivan had no right to rain on my relationships!

After fifteen or twenty minutes of taking inventory in,
essentially, dead silence, Sullivan said, “You gotta wonder what your beau was thinking. Why speculate to the cops? It was like Norton was trying to get them to award him his Junior Detective Decoder Ring. Or was covering up for himself.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?
You’re
the one who announced that the killer broke into my space and hid that table here. John was just getting his two cents in.”

Sullivan’s frown deepened. His jaw was clenched so tight, his teeth must be ready to crack.

I persisted. “And what do you mean that John may be ‘covering up for himself’?”

He didn’t look up from his work. “John’s a good buddy. We like to hang out every so often . . . shoot some pool, that kind of thing. But we’re not so close that I could predict how he’d react if he felt his neck was on the line . . . just don’t know him well enough to say.” He met my gaze for a moment, then went back to the inventory sheet. “And all I’m saying is,
you
don’t know him well enough, either, Gilbert.”

“In other words, trust no one. Live in fear.”

He didn’t reply, and I was too annoyed with him to strike up a new conversation. For the next half hour, we didn’t exchange an unnecessary word. Afterward, I gave Sullivan a ride home. Our conversation was superficial and chilly, Sullivan thanking me as he got out of my van and telling me to “take care.”

I headed straight to my office, eager to let my thoughts focus on something noncriminal for a change. Though I was loath to admit this to anyone, Henry Toben’s misdeeds had given me a task that part of me—the immature daredevil part—relished. It’s typically a pleasure when clients present me with some unusual furnishing to blend into a room design, such as when a client has an appreciation for the whimsical that doesn’t necessarily match my own, or when a beloved relative has given them some bizarre item. This was the first time, however, that I’d been trapped into adding so many incongruous pieces at the eleventh hour. I wanted to see how well I could meet the challenge.

Once at my office, I spread my presentation boards around me in the center of the pine floor and diligently crossed out the dozen nice items now missing and noted their gaudy, tasteless equivalents. This was going to be a major challenge, indeed. It felt tantamount to a client suddenly announcing that I had all of two hours to find him a trained seal to juggle the exquisite Wedgwood china that I’d spent a month hand-selecting for him. As I stared at the fiasco in growing dismay, my cell phone bleated.

“Erin,” John exclaimed, sounding almost boyish in his excitement, “I’ve been asking around, and I got a name for you.”

“A name for what?”

“I found out who supplied the reproductions in Laura’s house. I thought you might be curious.”

“Definitely.” I was already scrambling to my feet, snatching a notepad from a desk drawer.

“It was George Wong. Have you heard of him?”

“No. Have you?”

“I’ve worked with him a couple of times, getting some custom furniture for our showrooms. George has a national operation, mostly through the Internet. Guess where his home base is.”

“Crestview?”

“Bingo. He’s got a good-sized factory out in the boonies, northeast of the city limits.”

Pen in hand, I dropped into my leather desk chair. “What’s the address?”

He gave it to me, and I said, “I’ll look into it. Thanks.” There was a pause. “Erin? When you say you’ll ‘look into it,’ you mean through the police, right? Not that you’ll look yourself.”

“Right,” I immediately replied, not sure if I meant that or not.

“Good, because I’ve had some dealings with this guy myself, and he’s no pushover. From everything I’ve heard, Mr. Wong is nobody to trifle with.”

“I won’t trifle. Promise.”

Silence.

“John?”

“Yeah. I was just . . .” He sighed. “Are we okay?” he asked.

Oh, God.
I hate any and all where-is-our-relationship-heading conversations, even under the best of circumstances. These were about as far from good circumstances as one could get. “Fine. Why?” I stalled. “What do you mean?”

“You discovered the
body
of someone you knew, and who I knew, as well. Yet you didn’t call me last night or this morning. Not even later in the day. Most women . . . most people, I mean, would have needed to talk to someone close to them, who they could trust.”

I winced, realizing that if our situations were reversed, I, too, would worry about this same thing. “I was about to call you, when Sullivan told me about your having once dated Laura, and I . . . needed some time to let the news settle.”

“Laura and I dated more than three years ago, and it only lasted a couple of months.” He sounded defensive, and annoyed with me. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but do the simple math: he’d gone out with Laura for roughly as long as he and I had been dating.

“Sullivan told me that, too. And I’ve since realized that it would have been odd for you to have blurted it out to me during lunch yesterday: ‘By the way, Erin, I dated her first, before she destroyed Sullivan.’ It’s just that . . . I tried to take today off, but everything immediately blew up in my face. Things keep snowballing on me. I hardly know which end is up right now, John.”

“Let me help you, Erin. Let’s get out of town for the weekend so you can forget about all this misery for a little while. We’ll run off to some nice resort in Aspen, and I’ll help you figure out which end’s up.”

I tightened my grip on the phone, unsettled at the unexpected suggestion. We’d certainly been moving toward sexual intimacy, but . . . “Um . . . I think I’d rather wait another week or two. I want to see when the funeral is, and . . . now’s just not the time.”

“That’s okay. It was just a thought. I’ve got to get back to work.” His tone was rife with disappointment.

We said our goodbyes, and I stashed my phone back in my purse. My spirits had plummeted once again. John’s phone call had only reminded me how out of control my life had suddenly become. I sighed and returned the display boards to my portfolio case. There was no way I could concentrate on Henry Toben’s design now. But I wasn’t willing to sit around and mope about my waxing and waning feelings for John. What I
wanted
to do was something proactive that could let me regain some measure of control over my life and my confused feelings; I wanted to meet with George Wong.

I glanced at my watch. It was nearly six P.M., and the drive would take at least half an hour. If Mr. Wong had a storefront to his furniture workshop, it would surely be closed by the time I arrived. Even so, a nice drive through the countryside could help clear my head. . . .

I locked up and took off in my van.

Forty minutes later, as I pulled into the empty hard-
packed dirt parking lot at the address John had given me, I was thinking that John had certainly been accurate in describing this building as “in the boonies.” There was nothing nearby but cornfields. So much for the drive clearing my head; my brain still felt as cluttered as the average junk drawer.

An old-fashioned carved wood sign on the door read “Finest Furnishings,” but there were no business hours listed. With little expectation, I tried the brass knob on the front door. It turned. And as I crossed the threshold, shutting the heavy oak door behind me, I found myself stepping back in time and into an absolutely stunning room. I felt giddy for a moment. This was like leaving a kid alone in an ice cream parlor with a big silver spoon in her hand.

The lighting, while electric, was housed in reproduction lamps that resembled gas lanterns. I strode into the shadowy center of the room and slowly turned a full 360 degrees. I drank in the vision of the adorable corner desk complete with a quill pen. Two fabulous Hepplewhite chairs upholstered in a crimson damask. A lovely cyan wingback with cabriole legs. Astonishing end tables, coffee table, and a long, gold sofa with astonishing mahogany leaf carvings. On the two narrow walls, matching gilded pier mirrors had been hung to brighten the space. A mahogany desk along the back wall was the only item that hinted at a more modern function; a receptionist was probably stationed there during the daytime. Wanting a closer look, I rounded the deserted receptionist’s desk. A phone and an intercom were built into the desk and tucked beneath a hinged cover. A flat-panel display terminal was hidden from immediate view within a wooden handcrafted box.