False Premises (8 page)

“All I know is that Laura’s been really tense and upset about something lately. She said it was because she’d found out an old friend of hers has cancer. But . . . that was the same story she gave me the last time . . . said she was visiting an old friend with cancer when she was really seeing Sullivan here, on the sly.”

Sullivan took a sharp breath, but to my relief, he said nothing.

“Were the antiques insured?” Linda asked. “And was your policy registered under your name or Laura’s?”

“Both our names.” He was growing steadily more pale, and I started to worry that he was going to faint at any moment. Poor Dave.

“Why don’t we sit down for a couple of minutes and discuss this?” Linda asked gently, obviously worried about the same thing.

Dave shook his head. “No.”

“Do you want me to take your statement?”

“Statement?” he repeated dully.

“A grand-larceny report.”

“No. Not yet . . . anyway. I need to think.”

“Do you want me to examine the rest of your furniture?” I asked, feeling deeply sorry for the man. Unless he was an even better actor than Laura was, he was utterly devastated to learn that his pricey furniture was gone. “I can help you make out a full report of every item that’s missing or has been duplicated.”

Again he shook his head, and sank into the nearest seat—the erstwhile black horsehair camelback sofa with hand-carved leaf filigrees on the front and back. The tell-tale squeak of springs, which hadn’t even been invented at the time of the original’s manufacture, made me wince. “Just go. Please. All of you.” He sank his head into his hands. “This is the worst day of my life.”

“Thank you for your time,” Linda told him. “If you see Miss Smith, tell her I’d like to ask her a couple questions. I’m leaving my business card on the table.”

We let ourselves out and walked toward Linda’s squad car. “It’d be nice to get the name of whoever supplied her with these reproductions,” I said. “She probably ordered them well in advance. She was always really specific about what pieces she wanted. Even if she saw fit to destroy the paperwork before she took off, it should be easy enough for us to call her bank and get a name, right?”

“Us?” Linda repeated in a near growl.

“
You
, I mean. The Crestview police.”

“Erin, we can’t investigate a theft until the owner reports it. Not unless he or Miss Smith puts in a claim against her insurance company.” She opened the door of her squad car. “So
you
can’t call her bank to get any names of furniture manufacturers, either.”

“Understood.” I gave her a warm smile. “Thanks so much for talking to Dave, Linda.”

“Hey, no thanks are necessary. I smell a rat here, big time. I’d like nothing better than to get this Laura Smith put out of business permanently.”

After she drove past us and out of sight, Sullivan and I walked down the driveway to his car. The night air felt frosty, but not nearly as ice-cold as my companion. “Damn it all!” he said. “I
knew
she’d run!”

“I’m sorry I discouraged you from going straight to the police.”

He opened the passenger door for me. “Ah, hell.
That
didn’t make much difference. She’d have been gone by the time the police arrived, too. It was
my
fault for not heading straight back up here with my van, instead of wasting all that time borrowing a car.” We got into the car and he started the engine. He made a U-turn and drove the short distance to my van. He pulled up beside it, obviously waiting for me to leave.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Make a night of it, if I have to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m staying put . . . waiting to see if Dave Holland makes any sudden midnight trips someplace.”

“In other words, you think Dave’s
lying
when he says he doesn’t know where she is?”

“Nah. I think right about now he’s digging through every receipt he can find till he finds a clue about her whereabouts. She’s probably stored those antiques somewhere in the general area, where she can keep an eye on them.”

“Oh, you’re right. Of
course
she did.” I shook my head, disappointed for not thinking of that myself.

Picking up on my body English, Sullivan gave me a second shrug. “Yeah. Well, don’t forget: I’ve been in his shoes.”

I put my hand on the door handle, but couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Sullivan to sit alone in this miserable car, waiting for Dave to make a move. Stalling, I said, “You and Dave have obviously had some confrontations in the past.”

“You could say that. He followed Laura one time to my place . . . one of those occasions when she claimed she was visiting the friend with cancer . . . and he burst in on us.”

“Did you know then that she was living with another man?”

“Yeah. But she’d told
me
he was this violent monster that she was scared to death of . . . that he’d cut her throat the last time she tried to leave him. She—”

“Wait. She claimed it was
Dave
who cut her throat?” Had she deliberately played on my vulnerability over my mother’s death? “She told
me
that she got that wound when her father killed her mother and her younger brother. Before he took his own life.”

“No way. Her parents live in Indiana someplace. Or they used to, last time I spoke to them. When Laura took off with Evan for Europe, I called them, hoping they’d heard from her, but she never contacted them. They sound like nice, quiet people, unable to explain or control their wild daughter.”

Lying to me about her scar felt like a much worse betrayal—more personal—than the fact that she’d used me as a pawn in a swindle.
That
was just business, whereas she’d used my mother’s death to bond with me on a false pretense. I shook my head. “I don’t believe Dave gave her that scar. He seems to be a decent, mellow person.”

“Yeah. In retrospect, it’s more likely she got it from some botched scam . . . that she chose the wrong mark one time and nearly paid the price with her life. But at the time, I hadn’t even
met
Holland, and I believed her every word. She was all distraught when she showed up at my house that night, and she had a shiner . . . worse than the one Holland’s got now. And he just barged into my house, screaming at Laura. Far as I was concerned, that was proof positive that the guy was an abusive maniac. So I threw him out, and Laura wound up moving in with me.”

“Back then, why do you suppose she targeted you over him? It’s so illogical. After all,
he’s
the millionaire, not you.” Still, the three hundred thousand dollars she’d stolen from Sullivan was a lot of money. . . .

“Not
then,
he wasn’t. His company didn’t hit the big time till a year or so ago, shortly
after
Laura moved in with me.” He snorted. “For a while there, that was the only thing that cheered me up . . . the thought of how badly the timing of Dave’s skyrocketing wealth must have rankled Laura.” He frowned. “Figures she’d find a way to come back to Crestview and scarf up what she missed the first time.”

My mind raced back through the troubling events of the last twenty-four hours. “I wonder what her relationship was with that gun-toting man in the dreadlocks wig last night. She might be running from him now, as much as from us. For all we know,
he
could be the guy who slit her throat.”

Sullivan ignored this tangent and asked, “Need me to walk you to your car?”

“Actually, I’m going to wait with you, if that’s all right.”

“Why?”

Good question. Maybe I just needed to assuage my guilt for not believing him when he’d said that Laura would immediately run away. In any case, my instincts were telling me to stay. I shrugged. “To keep you out of trouble, I guess.”

Chapter 6

We debated for quite a while about what Laura’s connection might have been to last night’s gun-toting, wig-wearing phony cop. We agreed that he was most likely tracking down Laura to bring her to justice for some previous scam. Because he’d proven to be singularly inept at keeping a low profile, my theory was that he was a scam victim himself, taking matters into his own hands. Steve thought it likeliest that he was “a P.I. who happens to be shitty at his job.”

I argued, “But neither of those possibilities explains why he was harassing the store manager. Hannah Garrison says he’s been targeting Paprika’s for selling merchandise that he supposedly found offensive.”

“Maybe the guy’s Laura’s new partner. Their tussle last night could have been staged.”

“Yeah . . . but why? How on earth could their charade have helped them?”

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Steve muttered.

We sat in glum silence for several minutes, till I said, “I’ve got a personal stake in this. I spent days upon days selecting those pieces, dickering about their cost, assembling that magnificent collection of furnishings. Despite what Linda Delgardio told me about not poking around in police business myself, I’d really like to find whoever it was that duplicated Laura’s antiques. That person could be in on this thing with Laura. Evan isn’t an expert on antiques, is he?”

“No. Though he could’ve studied up on ’em.”

“He wouldn’t have the resources to manufacture a household of knockoffs himself, would he?”

“No way. And even if he
could
, that guy’s not about to do anything resembling manual labor, such as building furniture. Evan’s the sort to call a paramedic if he so much as gets a splinter in his pinky.” Steve fought back a yawn.

Still determined that we could eventually hit on the answers if we kept theorizing, I suggested, “So maybe Evan and Laura parted company, and she teamed up with somebody who’s making the fakes for her. Maybe this is just the start of a new operation of hers, and she’s planning on repeating it at the next fall guy’s house.” Steve made no reply, so I added, “It’s worth checking out, in any case.”

He shrugged, and muttered, “I guess,” obviously humoring me. He was probably too focused on his own predicament to care how extensive Laura’s latest path of thievery might prove to be. Even in the dim lighting, Sullivan looked haggard, his features drawn. His quest to track down a professional con artist was a long shot. Maybe I’d only made matters worse by volunteering to keep him company.

“Steve, there’s been no sign of Evan here in Crestview. He’s probably still in Europe. Even if we find Laura and manage to bring her to trial, I doubt if you’ll be able to get your money back.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’m not letting her get off scot-free again. Not a second time. Not without a fight.”

To put a positive spin on matters, I said, “We can always hope that, once she gets arrested, she’ll reveal Evan’s location. And maybe you’ll get your money back, after all.”

“That’d be great.” But his tone told me he held out no hope whatsoever for that possibility.

We fell into another silence, till Steve finally muttered, “I wish you’d brought some coffee with you, Laura. I could—”

I stiffened. Steve broke off abruptly as he realized what he’d just said. He flashed a sheepish smile at me. “Got a little tongue-tied, is all. I meant to say ‘while we watch for Laura.’ ”

“So. I remind you of Laura?”

“No!” He raked his fingers through his hair, a frequent nervous gesture of his that I was beginning to think was what poker players call a “tell.” “I was just . . . She’s on my mind right now. You two are nothing alike. Other than a few . . . superficial similarities . . . maybe.”

“Such as?”

He remained silent for a long time. Then he replied quietly, “You look a little similar, now that you mention it.”

Laura was remarkably beautiful, so that was a compliment, but I’d designed too many bedrooms for recent divorcés to miss the underlying ramifications of Sullivan’s equating the two of us. However lovely those bedrooms already were when I first arrived, the clients invariably wanted a radical change that would eradicate all reminders of their former spouses. “That’s why you pushed me away, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Sullivan focused his perpetually angry eyes on me. “I never pushed you away.”

“Oh, no? And what do you call fixing me up with your buddy John? A
bonding
experience? Just what do you think I am? Shag carpeting?”

“No, I . . .” He gripped the steering wheel so tightly that I half expected it to crack into pieces. Through a clenched jaw and without looking at me, he said, “That’s not how it was, Erin. I never said you should go out with him.
You’re
the one who leapt at the chance to get all hooked up with a good friend of mine!”

“Your precise words to me when you introduced the two of us were: ‘Erin, this is John Norton, who I think you should meet.’ ”

“I
meant
that you should meet him because he does demo homes for the residential developer he works for, and I thought you might want to
work
with him in the future.”

“Uh-huh. And you’re a designer, too, one who’s fallen on hard times and needs all the work he can get.”

“So what, Gilbert? Maybe I just . . . didn’t want to have to ask a friend of mine for favors by hiring me! Did you ever think of that?”

Even while I silently wondered how this conversation had gone so wrong so fast, I heard myself snipe, “Or maybe you’re being less than honest with me right now! Did
you
ever think of
that
?”

“You want honesty, do you? Fine! Go home! I
honestly
think I’d be better off waiting for Holland on my own!” He returned his gaze to the road ahead, as if too disgusted to continue to look at me.

I stared at him in profile and stayed put. If I did as he demanded, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that we would revert to the barely civil relationship that we’d had for my first two years in Crestview. He was going to have to say something else to me eventually, and his words would either repair or worsen this ever-deepening chasm between us.

“Anyway, he’d seen you before as you were leaving my office a couple days earlier and started bugging me for an introduction. I was hoping you wouldn’t go for it, okay? But you practically threw yourself at him.”