Just Desserts (21 page)

“I know,” he said, looking sympathetic, “I heard. I just thought you would still have access to ... well ... never mind.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about me?” She was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable. Was he a bodyguard, or a private investigator, or what? He seemed far more clever than the average hired muscle.

“I don’t know why you’re continuing to investigate Jonathan Winston’s murder after the department fired you,” he said. “Are you just tenacious or—?”

“I have my reasons,” she replied. “They aren’t important. Why have you been investigating
me?”

“I have my reasons.” His smile mocked her. “And they
are
important.”

“What are they?”

Rather than be shocked by her bluntness, as she had expected, he laughed. “Okay, so we’re going to lay it all on the line, huh?”

“I’ve always found that to be the best way in the long run. Saves a lot of time.”

“All right.” He took his last bite of the Salmon Mousse and wiped his lips with his napkin. “I’m interested in you for a couple of reasons. Primarily because I think you can help me find out who killed Jonathan Winston. I was supposed to be protecting him and—”

“Where were you at four that morning?” she interjected.

“Is that the time of the murder?”

She nodded.

“I was home, sleeping.”

“Alone?” She reminded herself that it was a legitimate question, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that she had a burning desire to know if he had a girlfriend or not.

He smiled. “Do I need an alibi at this point?”

“Not really,” she answered honestly.

“Then I decline to comment until I do. Shall I go on?”

Not exactly the answer she had been hoping for, but ... “Yes, please.”

“I left Jonathan at the showroom about eleven o’clock the night before. His idea, not mine. By then he had polished off a considerable amount of Scotch and wasn’t showing any signs of stopping. I offered to give him a ride home, but he said he wanted to stay awhile longer. When I told him he was foolish to consider driving any time soon he told me he didn’t intend to. Someone was coming by to ... visit. He said they would take him home.”

Suddenly Savannah forgot all about the attractiveness and animal magnetism of the man sitting across from her. Her pulse quickened as she considered the intriguing possibilities.

“Who? Do you know who he was expecting?”

He smirked, and she realized how much he enjoyed baiting her like this. She didn’t care. Let him have his fun; she’d get even sooner or later.

“Yes,” he replied.

“Yes?”

“Yes, I know. He told me.”

She waited another five seconds that felt like an eternity. “Well? Damn it, who?”

“He didn’t mention any names.”

Her stomach sank as though she’d swallowed a boulder along with her dinner. “But you said ...”

“I said he didn’t mention any names. But he did say he was expecting his wife.”

“His wife?” Her stomach sank lower. “His wife. Oh, great; as we say in Georgia, that’s just peachy.”

B
y the time Savannah had finished a forty-five-minute phone call to her union steward she was ready to just go hang herself and get it over with. She stood, fuming, in her kitchen, hand still on the receiver.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Reid,” he had said in a less-than-remorseful tone, “but I’ve pursued every possibility and there’s nothing I can do. Perhaps if you were to drop about thirty or forty pounds in the next couple of months, I could ask them to reconsider and ...”

Thirty or forty pounds in two months! Obviously this guy had never dieted in his life. Probably one of those scrawny-assed, pencil-necked geeks who basically disappeared if they turned sideways.

Let him eat rice cakes and celery, drink chalky 280-calorie milk shakes, or go to a dieting center run by anorexic, self-righteous twenty-year-olds who claimed that their slender figures were due to eating overpriced TV dinners that tasted like sawdust and running ten miles a day.

And, of course, if you lost three and a half pounds the first month, you gained back five the next month. Gee, it was so much fun, the dieting game. Wonder why so many people found it difficult to drop those unsightly pounds?

From where she stood Savannah could see into her backyard, where Atlanta lay, stretched out on her favorite Betty Boop beach towel, “catching some rays.” The teeny, tiny red bikini left little to the imagination. Savannah wondered if the residents of the apartment complex across the alley were enjoying the view.

The phone rang and she jumped. God, her nerves were tight these days.

Beverly Winston wanted to know how things were going, so Savannah told her about Ryan. She also asked her about the large bank withdrawals that Jonathan had made recently.

“I have no idea,” Beverly replied. “Not that he ever asked my permission when conducting his business, but usually I would have known if he was dealing in sums that large.”

“Did he have any other savings accounts?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Savannah thought back on what Ryan Stone had said about Jonathan’s expected visitor the night he was murdered. “Beverly, tell me something, and please, don’t lie. It’s very important that I know the truth.”

“Okay; shoot.”

“Did you go to Jonathan’s showroom the night he was killed, or that morning?”

“No, not at all.”

“Then why would he have told Ryan Stone that he was expecting a visitor, his wife?”

Beverly was silent for a long time; then she said, “This probably isn’t that important, but I do have one bit of information that might interest you. I was going through some of his papers and I found that he had changed the beneficiary of his sizable life-insurance policy.”

“I would assume it was you,” Savannah said, “if he had no children.”

“It had been. But a month ago he reassigned the benefits to his first wife, Fiona. Maybe she was the wife he was expecting that night.”

“Maybe,” Savannah said thoughtfully. “I guess I need to speak to Mrs. Winston Number One again.”

This time Savannah decided to visit Fiona at home, rather than work, to see another side of the woman. She was surprised at how different that other side was.

Had Savannah encountered her on the street she wouldn’t have recognized this unkempt, sickly looking woman as the one who had been singing the other night with the sultry voice and the seductive moves.

With her hand poised, ready to knock on the screen door to the shabby little apartment, Savannah saw Fiona O’Neal, sitting on the floor of her living room, surrounded by cardboard boxes, arms around her knees, rocking and sobbing. Her beautiful, long red hair spilled around her, a stringy, tangled mess.

Her simple cotton shirt looked as though she had slept in it, but her eyes looked like two burned holes in a blanket, as Gran used to say. Savannah estimated that she probably hadn’t slept well for a very long time.

“Fiona?” she asked softly. No one cried like that unless they were truly, deeply hurting. Savannah couldn’t help feeling a rush of pity toward her. “Fiona, it’s Savannah Reid.” She pressed her nose to the screen. “Do you need help? May I come in?”

With a loud sniff Fiona focused on Savannah, seeing her for the first time. Her crying momentarily subsided and she brushed the ratted hair from her face. She said nothing, but she nodded.

Savannah opened the door and stepped inside. The tiny room reeked of alcohol, cigarette smoke, and unchanged cat litter. Savannah fought the urge to hold a scented handkerchief over her nose as she walked over to Fiona and sat on a threadbare recliner near her. The room was sparsely furnished, with only a few of the most basic necessities. Cardboard boxes, piled with paperback books of every genre, lay everywhere. At Fiona’s feet was a roll of packing tape and a pair of scissors.

The kitchen appeared to be full of cardboard boxes, too. Apparently, Fiona O’Neal intended to move. Soon.

“Fiona, what is it?” she asked, feeling the need to probe gently. If she pressed too hard, the woman would close up, and she wouldn’t find out anything.

“Nothing,” Fiona replied between sobs. “I mean, nothing new. I just get to thinking about Jonathan sometimes and ...”

Her voice trailed away as her sobs renewed.

“Did you love him that much?” Savannah asked.

“More than anything. I always did, from the first moment I met him.”

Fiona picked up a nearly empty whiskey bottle from the coffee table nearby and took a long drag from it. Then she did the same for the cigarette that dangled between her fingers.

The sunlight, which poured through the living room’s one window, was less kind than the dim lights of the nightclub. Its brightness exposed the sallow color of her translucent skin, the dark circles and wrinkles around her eyes, the nicotine stains on her teeth and the fingers of her right hand. Makeup and dim lighting had done a lot to conceal just how tough Fiona O’Neal’s life had been to date.

But the record of those difficult years was there, plainly written on her face for all to see.

“He was coming back to me, really, he was.” The fingers that held Fiona’s cigarette were trembling. “We were saving money so we could leave this damned place. We almost had enough; then we were going to run away, away from Beverly, away from the fashion industry and all of its sharks, away from the people who were suing him over nothing.”

“That’s what Jonathan was running from, but how about you, Fiona? What were you trying to escape?”

Fiona thought for a moment, took another slug of whiskey, and stubbed the cigarette into the Las Vegas ashtray on the coffee table. “Who knows?” she replied, visibly closing off.

“You do,” Savannah replied; “you know.”

Fiona looked uncomfortable, as though she was unaccustomed to sharing her innermost secrets.

“All right,” she said. “I was running from dreams ... old dreams that are never going to come true. I was going to be a successful singer someday. Make a lot of money, go on national tours, appear on talk shows, play to sold-out audiences three times a week. But now I know that isn’t going to happen. If it hasn’t by now, it isn’t going to. I’m not exactly getting younger by the day.”

Savannah nodded but refrained from saying something inane and mundane about never being a go-go dancer. Fiona wasn’t talking about the passing fancy of a naive adolescent. Hers was a life’s dream that had died and taken a large part of the woman’s spirit with it.

“What were you running to, Fiona?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone who’s running from something is also searching for something. What were you hoping to find at the other end?”

Fiona sniffed again, then reached for a box of tissues that sat on top of a pile of sheet music on a nearby end table. “A life with Jonathan, just the two of us, like it was in the beginning, before she came along.”

“Beverly?”

“No, Danielle. She’s the one who took him away from me. We had a good home until she decided she wanted him. She wasn’t all that sexy, but she seduced him by telling him that they were going to be this world-famous designing team.”

“But it didn’t work out?”

“Of course not. Danielle didn’t have an ounce of talent on her own; that’s why she needed Jonathan. She stole all of his best designs, then threw him away.”

Savannah did a quick mental check and found contradictory information in the files. “I thought Danielle sued Jonathan for ripping off her designs. And won.”

Fiona shrugged and blew her nose. “Well ... they don’t call it ‘blind justice’ for nothing.”

Since the conversation was going so smoothly Savannah decided to press her luck a little farther. “Where were you and Jonathan intending to go when you ran away?” .

Wrong move. Instantly a wariness appeared in Fiona’s eyes, and she drew back several inches, crossing her arms over her chest.

“We hadn’t decided exactly,” she said.

“Is that where you’re moving to now?” Savannah waved a hand, indicating the stacks of boxes.

“No,” she replied, but Savannah could tell she was lying. “There’s no point in me being there without Jonathan. Or anywhere, for that matter.”

Savannah didn’t like the sound of that, or the look in Fiona’s eyes when she said it. At that moment Savannah began to be concerned about Fiona O’Neal’s mental state. She was obviously deeply depressed, possibly suicidal.

Savannah wished she could help, but she sensed she had already alienated her.

Oh, well, she had blown it; might as well make it a complete bust. “You say the two of you were saving money to leave.... Can you tell me where that money is now?”

Fiona’s disposition temperature gauge plummeted from cold to freezing in an instant. “No. I can’t.”

“You can’t tell me because you don’t know or you won’t because—”

“I can’t, I won’t; take your pick.” With fidgety fingers she lit another cigarette. “Why did you come here today anyway?”

“I wanted to ask you a couple of important questions. I understand you’re the beneficiary of Jonathan’s life-insurance policy.”

“That isn’t a question,” Fiona replied. “Aren’t you really asking why?”

Savannah nodded.

“Because he loved me best. I’ve already told you that. But it doesn’t really matter now. With him being murdered, the insurance company is going to take forever to come through with any of it. I’ll probably be too old to spend it; if and when I get it, that is.”

Thinking that over, Savannah agreed. She had seen cases like this drag on for years as the insurance company conducted its own investigation. So she changed the subject with her second big question of the day. “Jonathan told someone that you were coming to the showroom to pick him up that night. Did you go?”

Fiona looked shocked for a moment, as though Savannah had knocked her breathless with an unexpected tap to the diaphragm. But she quickly recovered. “Who told you that?”

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“Ryan, that bodyguard guy—I’ll bet he told you. Huh?”

“Did you go, Fiona? Were you there later that evening or during the night? In the morning?”