Motion for Murder (14 page)

Curt nodded, thinking. "How long was he gone?"

"I don't know," I said. "I didn't really pay attention. We were all in shock. Why does that matter?"

Curt shrugged. "Probably doesn't. You told me before that everyone had fought with Heath at some time or other. About what?"

I considered. There had been so many reasons, some of them ludicrous, some of them legitimate. Howard once hadn't talked to Dougie for four days because Dougie had taken his parking spot. "You name it," I said finally. It was as good an answer as any. I didn't have a better one.

I turned to check on Sherri. She appeared happily in the midst of throwing serial gutter balls, and the teenagers beside her appeared happily in the midst of gawking at her. If I didn't get over there soon, she'd become someone's junior prom date.

Curt waved his pen in front of my face to get my attention. "
You
name it. You brought it up."

I sighed. "Dougie's commercials. His choice of cases. His behavior. His girlfriends." Like Missy?

Curt nodded and made some more notes. "Hilary know about the girlfriends?"

I thought again about Howard's payoff check. "Probably, but other things seemed more important to Hilary. Besides, she was nowhere around when it happened. She didn't come to the office until this morning."

"How's she get along with the other partners?"

"Hilary gets along with no one," I said. "Except possibly her plastic surgeon."

"Yeah, from what you've said, I kinda got that impression of her." He slapped his notepad shut.

"Then there's Adam Tiddle," I said. The notepad opened again. "He tried a gun, a knife
" I shuddered. "
and a can of Static Guard."

Curt blinked. "Static Guard?"

"He thought he could gas Dougie," I said. "He seemed determined to kill him. But he seemed so…inept about it, I doubt he could have pulled it off."

"You believe in coincidence?" Curt said.

"No, really," I said. "I mean, he cut off his own finger. He thought Static Guard was a lethal weapon."

"And if he'd had a single bullet," Curt said, and I looked at him. In a weird way, it was comforting to think Adam Tiddle might have actually killed Dougie. It would mean I didn't work with someone capable of murder, and I wouldn't have to go job hunting. But I'd seen Adam Tiddle in action. He was like the geeky kid who couldn't find a seat in the cafeteria at lunchtime. I doubt he'd had success in any aspect of his life, and that included attempted homicide.

But clearly we'd reached an impasse on Adam Tiddle, so I thought I'd try a different tack. "So what's the Black Orchid?" I asked, hoping to ambush him.

He didn't even blink. "Someplace a little flower like you should never go. Now go beat up some alleys. I'll see if I can pick up a game of eight ball."

"But Paige goes there," I said. "How bad could it be?"

He let out an exasperated sigh that reminded me of my father. The kind that said Jamie had just made yet another unwise life decision. "People aren't always what they seem to be," he told me, which even sounded like my father. I'd been getting that kind of sage advice all my life, and it didn't satisfy me now any more than it had before.

But it was all I was going to get. Curt pushed back his chair and got up, tucking his pad and pen away, and putting on the inscrutable cop face he'd learned from his brother.

"We'll probably be awhile," I warned him, even though I didn't really want to be awhile. It had been a long day, and I was tired. Plus I was getting hungry. Maybe I could go out to the Jeep and have a little dessert.

I took another look at Sherri. She was snuggled up to a reedy blond guy learning the finer points of ball handling, so I made a fast break for the exit as soon as Curt disappeared into the billiard room. He'd parked at the corner of the building in a row of impractically massive SUVs, and of course he'd locked the doors. I pressed my nose to the rear passenger window and stared at the bags in the back seat. Meatloaf in one, spice cake and Italian cookies and marble cupcakes in the other. The windows were cracked a minuscule amount in deference to the Northeastern summer weather; I took a deep breath and the faintest scent of inaccessible food taunted me. Not an infrequent occurrence in my life, metaphorically speaking.

It took everything I had to turn my back on it, but I managed to push myself away from the Jeep and head back inside to get my sister away from the children and keep her out of jail.

I was out of bail money.

Usually I regarded weekends as a treasured break after five days of chaos and mayhem. I felt a little different on Saturday morning. The weekend stretched ahead of me, empty of everything but the opportunity to think some more. Problem was, I wasn't thinking; I was visualizing. Missy, making Dougie's daily protein shake. Donna, going out to buy protein powder. Dougie measuring the poisoned powder and pouring it into the blender, then taking a drink and collapsing. I didn't want these thoughts in my head, but I couldn't let them go.

I drifted aimlessly around my apartment for a few hours, listening to thunder rumble in the distance. Hopefully a thunderstorm would break the stifling grip of humidity. To snap my lethargy, I did a quick yoga session, which only increased my lethargy when I fell asleep during Shavasana. Then I took some time for less transcendent activities. I stripped the sheets off my sofa bed and changed them, scrubbed the bathroom down, and wiped the kitchen counters. Dust bunnies followed along beside me at baseboard level, and those I kicked beneath the microwave cart. There was a limit to my industry.

By lunchtime, I was tired of waiting for rain and cogent thought, so I grabbed my car keys and headed out to visit my sister.

Williams Bridal was a small salon nestled between big box stores, a throwback to the pre-bridal warehouse age. Sherri had been there through four years and two owners. Its delusional present owner considered the store exclusive enough for Rodeo Drive. She was right, if Rodeo Drive sold bridal gowns for $99 with free alterations. The store had a unique hub-and-spoke layout, with the selling floor as the hub and private fitting rooms as the spokes. It sounded posh, except Clark Kent would have had trouble changing in one of those rooms.

I found Sherri by a rear spoke holding an armful of wedding gowns and gnashing her teeth. "Wait'll you see this one," she hissed at me. "She's getting married at
twenty.
It ought to be illegal."

I took a few of the gowns off her hands and together we stood like servile mannequins, waiting for the twenty year old in the fitting room to issue orders.

"Do you have time for lunch?" I asked over a mound of seed pearls. "I need to talk."

"Twenty years old." Sherri craned her neck to look at the wristwatch buried beneath a cloud of tulle. "Not for half an hour. I mean, what does a twenty-year old know about marriage?"

No less than either of us did. "Listen," I said, "I need a dress I can wear to Darrow's."

Sherri brightened. "Hot date?"

I grimaced. "Funeral."

"Oh." She took a look around at acres of whites and pastels. "I'll have to lend you something. Is navy okay? Never been much of a fan of black."

"Navy's fine."

A perky brunette flounced out of the fitting room in a mile of white satin. "I need to see something else," she announced. "This makes me look old, like thirty or something. And it doesn't show off my chest."

"Her chest," Sherri muttered under her breath. "What does a twenty—?"

"Here you go." I stepped forward with my supply of gowns. "Maybe there's something here you'll like. And congratulations."

She cocked her head, appraising the dresses, then pointed. "I want to try that one."

That one was at the bottom of the pile, naturally. I juggled and shifted and with Sherri's help, pulled out the right dress, and the brunette disappeared back into the fitting room without a word.

"You see what I put up with?" Sherri asked, pulling a face in the brunette's direction.

"It doesn't show her chest. She wants to show her chest, she should get married in a bikini." She fell back against the wall with a sigh. "God, what a day. So what do you want to talk about? I didn't know that guy was only sixteen, I swear."

"It's not that," I said. Although it might be, later. "It's Dougie. I'm not dealing too well with his murder." I swallowed hard. "I think Missy might have had something to do with it."

Sherri's eyes widened. "You're kidding. Why?"

"I think they were having an affair." I shifted the bundle of dresses in my arms. "She took something out of his desk and wouldn't tell me what it was. Plus," I lowered my voice, "she always made his protein shakes. She could easily have put something in the can."

"Wow." Sherri stepped aside to let a matronly looking woman enter a fitting room with a peach satin dress featuring a large floppy bow in precisely the wrong place.

I shook my head sadly. "That's not going to work."

"Tell me about it." Sherri slung her armful of dresses over a rack, lifted mine from my arms, and piled them on top. The satin and tulle rustled gently. "So if she's having an affair, what's the point of killing him? He can't be that bad in bed."

I thought of his eleven fingers. Maybe he could. Then I thought about Missy's motive. "Maybe he refused to leave his wife."

Sherri snorted. "'So what? She could still get the bucks out of him without being saddled with his name."

Interesting logic for a woman desperate to marry. But it held some truth. "You've got a point," I said. "I don't know why she'd want to kill him." I had a sudden thought. "He did hit on a new client recently, right in front of her."

Sherri rolled her eyes. "Like that's never happened before."

"It's all I've got," I admitted.

"It's not enough," she said, and she was right. Unless I was missing something, Missy was lacking a motive to kill Dougie. I flashed back to all the late-night crime shows I'd watched. The experts claimed there were three main motives for murder: money, sex and… I was blanking on the last one. Probably because I didn't want Missy to be guilty. I didn't want Dougie to be dead, either, which only proved sometimes you don't get what you want.

"And here's something else," Sherri said. "Is Missy the only one with access to the can of powder? Do you lock the kitchen cabinets?" I shook my head. She poked me in the shoulder triumphantly. "There you go. It could've been anyone. It could've been Howard."

I fished for a motive for Howard and found one without too much trouble. Howard hated Dougie's way of doing business. The commercials, the crassness, the spandex in a pinstripe office. If I remembered right, he'd mentioned buying out Dougie, which meant he wanted him gone. But how badly?

The brunette was back, plucking at her seed pearls with the exasperation of a bored little girl. "This doesn't show off my backside," she announced, spinning around so we could judge for ourselves.

Sherri let out a groan that sounded like metal twisting. "Here's a thought." She brushed the girl's hand aside and smoothed the folds of the gown. "Why don't you save us all some trouble and get married in the nude?" She grabbed my arm and tugged me in the opposite direction. "Come on, let's go eat."

Plenty of people showed up for Dougie's funeral on Tuesday, and not all of them came to mourn. Curt begged off at the last minute because he got tapped to drive to New York City on a delivery, so I sat alone in the back row in my borrowed navy dress, unnoticed by the movers and shakers, watching judges and lawyers and clients and the merely curious file past the deceased. Hilary stood among the explosion of flowers at the head of the casket accepting condolences and looking lethal in black Donna Karan. She eyeballed them all as if she were calculating their net worth. Maybe she was shopping for her next husband. Her twin daughters stood to either side of her like bony bookends, their vulpine faces expressionless. At eighteen, they were already chips off their mother's glacier.

Most of the purported mourners looped right out the door after paying their respects, eager to get back to their unopened mail and unreturned phone calls. A few past and present clients lingered, chatting with Ken and Howard and shaking their heads at the senselessness of premature death. If they only knew. I wondered what it had cost the firm to keep everyone from finding out Dougie had been murdered. I'm sure Janice was aware, but she wasn't talking. To anyone. She was off in a corner playing with her key ring and fidgeting. Donna was invisible, as usual. Wally was circulating, shaking hands and patting shoulders and swapping war stories with trial lawyers, although he was still in basic training while his audience was filled with five-star generals. It was sad and tedious and a little ugly, both there and at the cemetery, and I was relieved when the funeral director announced the luncheon at Darrow's to the leftover stragglers. A fraction of them made the trip, and we remained grouped more or less by socioeconomic status as we were seated, which meant I'd be sharing my chicken picante with the other secretaries. Janice had been cast off with us and didn't look any too pleased about it. Donna hid behind her water glass and speared me with dirty looks. It didn't take long to decide I'd have been better off making a wrong turn on the drive from the cemetery, and that feeling got stronger when Hilary Heath slithered up behind me and laid a bloodless hand on my shoulder. I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming.