Murder Follows Money (14 page)

“Well, maybe you should write a mystery.” Hannah nodded at the book tucked under Bridget’s arm. “Then yours would be worth hundreds someday.”

“They’re too hard to write.”

“You’re better at solving mysteries than I am.” I had to put in my two cents’ worth.

Hannah planted her hands on her hips. “Do you all do nothing but deal with murdered people? That does it. You’re going to solve this one so I can get back to work.”

She marched us up to the cash register to buy the hem-stitched damask tablecloth she’d found. Bridget and I paid for our items. Bridget earnestly told the cashier that next time, they should keep back the books that were worth a lot and sell them themselves, but the cashier just looked at her blankly.

“Now,” Hannah announced when we were back in Bridget’s car, “we’re going to sit here until you solve this crime. If you’re both so used to doing it, that shouldn’t pose any problem.”

Bridget and I looked at each other. If we stayed in the parking lot long enough, either the San Carlos police would come to give us a parking ticket or the tow truck would come to take us away. Either way, we’d be out of Hannah’s frying pan and into the uncertain fire of police custody.

“Okay,” said Bridget. She folded her arms across her chest. “Start by telling me the whole story.”

“Wait a minute.” Hannah looked around. “Someone may notice us parked here.”

“You think?” Bridget shrugged. “Probably not.”

Hannah narrowed her eyes. “We’ll go to your house,” she said finally, waving the gun in Bridget’s direction. “They might be looking at Liz’s house.”

Bridget started to say something, but I poked her. If Hannah knew that her house was only a couple of blocks from mine, and that people were constantly coming and going, she might decide to really go to earth. Beneath the rumble of the Suburban’s engine, Bridget said to me, “I don’t like this one bit. I don’t want her waving that gun around at my house.”

“The kids aren’t there, right? Someone will see her or come in and recognize her, and call the cops. Better than having her decide to rent a motel room for the duration.”

“I guess.” Bridget drove down El Camino, her brow creased. “So if the fastest way to get rid of her is to solve the crime, why don’t you fill me in on what happened?”

So that’s what I did on the drive back to Palo Alto.

Chapter 13

Bridget’s house was one of the Victorian bungalows that used to be far more prevalent in Palo Alto before people decided to tear them down in favor of monstrous lot-hogging fortresses. She and her husband, Emery, were committed to fixing their old house, but everything cost more in a rehab, so progress had been slow. They had gotten so far as to paint the outside and reshingle the roof. It looked very nice from the street.

Bridget pulled the Suburban into the drive and turned around to face Hannah. “I have a no-gun policy in my house,” she announced. “Even toy guns are frowned on. Yours is not a toy."

Hannah appeared to find this amusing. “Didn’t you say you have sons? I can’t imagine little boys playing without guns."

“Well, your imagination needs work.” Bridget crossed her arms. She and I both knew that her boys made weapons out of everything that crossed their paths. But Bridget still held fast to her rules. No toy guns in the house, and any visiting guns were put away until it was time for their owners to go.

“Well, I won’t give up my gun.” Hannah scowled. “I need it to keep you from interfering with my plan.”

“You don’t have a plan,” I said brutally.

“And you don’t need the gun,” Bridget added. “Liz has told me the story. I’m not sure how much help we can be to you, but I’m willing to take a stab at it. Though I think the police would do a much better job of figuring the whole thing out. They probably already know the cause of death, which we don’t.”

“Yeah,” I chimed in. “Maybe it was natural, and this whole thing is for nothing.”

Hannah didn’t like my comment. “Naomi was healthy as a horse. We just had our yearly checkups. She did the office workout every morning, like the rest of my staff. Believe me, that was not a natural death.”

“Okay, I believe you.” Bridget made her voice soothing. “But you still don’t need the gun. If you’ll take responsibility when the police find out and want to charge us as accessories or something—”

“And they will want to do that,” I muttered.

“I will gladly clear my schedule for the next few hours and sit down to go over everything.”

Hannah thought for a minute. “I’ll put the gun in my purse, which is where I always carry it. If we’d met under other circumstances and you’d invited me into your home, you would never have known about it.”

Bridget appeared to accept this tortuous logic. We went inside.

The inside of Bridget’s house didn’t measure up to the outside. The floors were scuffed, with finish worn off in spots. The kitchen was still as it had been forty years ago, with the exception of the microwave oven perched on one counter. Nevertheless, the whole house exuded a welcoming warmth that no amount of paint and polish could create.

Bridget went straight to the telephone. “I have to arrange child care,” she told Hannah, who’d made an alarmed grab for her handbag. “I’m not going to fink on you, no matter how much I think you should just go to the police.”

Hannah stood over her while Bridget dialed. “Melanie,” Bridget said into the receiver, “could you pick up Mick and Moira and keep them this afternoon? I’ll be glad to reciprocate next week.”

I could hear Melanie Dixon’s high, carrying voice from where I stood in the kitchen doorway. She would be consulting her enormous book of appointments and finally, after impressing Bridget with how busy and important she was, she would confirm that the Salvadoran woman who looked after her own two girls would be equal to the task of looking after Mick and Moira also.

Moira loved to play with the Dixon girls. I’d picked her up there once after a play date, and she’d been very reluctant to relinquish a pink, frilly ballerina doll. At home, the taste in dolls ran heavily to cartoon action figures, which Moira appeared to enjoy engaging in violent pretend games as much as her brothers did. But when there was pink around, she wanted it.

“Thanks, Melanie. What? Oh, something’s come up. I’ll tell you about it later.”

She dialed again, this time a mom in her older son Corky’s class, and arranged for Corky and Sam to play after school.

Hannah was taken with the dial phone. “This is marvelous. Where did you find it?”

Bridget raised an eyebrow. “We had it put in when we moved here some twenty years ago. It wasn’t particularly cutting edge then, and Emery wants to replace it.”

“Oh, no.” Hannah wiped a smudge off the red plastic casing of the wall phone. “You mustn’t do that. This is—”

“Let me guess. Collectible.” I looked at Bridget. “Like everything in my house, evidently.”

“Well, you do live in a time warp,” Bridget pointed out. “No phone, no TV, no e-mail, no Jacuzzi—”

“You don’t have a Jacuzzi either, or a dishwasher, or a garbage disposal.”

“Yes, but I want them,” Bridget admitted. “You don’t.”

Hannah marched over and sat at the kitchen table, clutching her purse to her midsection. “This is fascinating,” she said in the polite voice that contradicts its words, “but it doesn’t have anything to do with our problem.”

“Your problem.” Bridget put the kettle on.

I got out the teapot and chose a calming green tea blend, while Bridget rummaged in the pantry and came out with a plate of cookies. “I hesitate to serve Hannah Couch anything,” she said, putting the plate on the table. “No doily, and they aren’t fresh baked. I made them yesterday.”

“I’m surprised there are any left.” I took one eagerly. Bridget’s oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies were always acceptable in my book.

Hannah took one, turning it over analytically before she bit in. “Interesting combination,” she said. Then she stopped analyzing and ate the cookie. I had another, and so did she.

Bridget plunked the filled teapot and some cups onto the table, and fetched a pad of paper and some pens. “I think better when things are written down,” she said, uncapping her pen. “Now, we are supposing that Naomi’s death was murder.”

“Right.” Hannah watched Bridget writing. She reached into her handbag, and Bridget and I froze for a moment, before she pulled out a thick leather-bound agenda, the kind that says serious scheduling goes on. She opened it and took out a Cross pen and prepared for jotting down her own inspirations. I felt left out, but my notebook was in my knapsack near the door, and I didn’t want to wander away in case I needed to protect Bridget from any sudden moves Hannah might make.

“So if you didn’t kill her, and Liz didn’t kill her, that leaves who?”

Hannah stirred uneasily. “That’s just the problem. It couldn’t have been Kim, because Naomi was her aunt.”

“But didn’t you accuse Naomi of causing her brother’s death? Seemed to me Kim was very close to her uncle.”

Hannah tapped the pen against her closed lips. “I did say that,” she admitted, then scowled at me. “You must have been eavesdropping.”

“So you said it, but you didn’t mean it.”

Hannah’s gaze slid away. “Look, Naomi said things she didn’t mean too.”

“She said you fed your husband poison mushrooms.”

Bridget scribbled busily.

“Don’t write that claptrap down,” Hannah commanded. “We were arguing. Words were spoken in the heat of anger.

“I’m writing everything down,” Bridget added. “Sometimes it’s the smallest things that lead you to the solution.” I caught her eye and she glanced away. “At least, that’s what Inspector Gadget says.”

“Who?” Hannah looked confused. “I told you, no police. We’ll get to the bottom of this without them.”

“Right.” I thought this was futile. We didn’t have the resources to figure it out. But I would play the game. “So Kim might have thought Naomi poisoned her favorite uncle. You thought she was writing a tell-all book about you—”

“I know she was.” Hannah’s lips tightened. “She sent me pages out of it, where she talked about the past in a very unflattering way.”

“The part about Roxy—”

“Don’t go there.”

Bridget was curious. “Roxy who? What?”

“It’s nothing important.”

“It’s not important now,” I pointed out. “Now that Naomi is dead and you can keep anyone from finding out. Unless she had her manuscript with her, in which case the police have already found it and figured that into your motive."

“I don’t have a motive!” Hannah threw her hands into the air. “I keep telling you. None of this mattered. I could always squash anything Naomi tried to do, and she knew it. Besides . . .“ She stopped talking, looking from one to the other of us.

I felt as if Bridget and I were the jury, sitting in judgment of Hannah while she had to drag all the tawdry bits of her life out and justify them for us. There is a certain amount of power attached to feeling like that, but I didn’t care for it. The whole thing was starting to make me want a shower.

“Besides what?” Bridget was made of sterner stuff. She meant to get to the bottom of this and reclaim her life.

“I found her manuscript. Last night, when she was dead drunk.” Hannah spoke in a rush, the words tumbling out as if it was a relief to her to let them go. “She had it in her suitcase, and I found it and sent it down the hotel’s incinerator chute.”

Bridget and I looked at each other. “Was it computer generated?”

“What?”

“Had she written it on a computer? If so, it’s still on her hard drive, and maybe copied on a disk.” Bridget spoke patiently, as befits a Silicon Valley resident to a member of the technically challenged class.

Hannah brushed these objections away. “It was typed, but the only computer Naomi has is in her office at Couch Productions. I can secure that with one phone call.” She started to reach into her handbag, then remembered that her cell phone was turned off for the duration. “Damn.”

“You can’t call from here, either,” Bridget said. “Unless you want them to know where you are. The police have probably got every phone you might call under surveillance."

I had a moment’s chill. Would they have done that to her lawyer’s phone? Did they know that Hannah had called him from Drake’s line? That might be very bad for Drake. I would hate it if he got into trouble because Hannah made me let her use his phone.

“Well, no one will think to go into her computer.” Hannah seemed uneasy, though.

“And probably the police have already commandeered it. Probably they’re the only ones going through it.”

Hannah thought about that. Her mouth folded down.

“My advice, for what it’s worth,” I said, “is to write your own memoir, and just say very frankly that you were driven to exotic dancing for a brief period before you realized you could make your way through college by cooking."

Bridget’s eyes grew round. “You were an exotic dancer?” She looked Hannah up and down. “That’s a compliment, in a way. You’re very attractive now, so you must have been a knockout when you were younger."

Hannah was still glaring at me for letting the cat out of the bag. She brushed Bridget’s comment away. “It’s not the kind of thing I want to be questioned about in an interview, and believe me, everyone wants to dig up your dirt in an interview.”

“At any rate, no one would kill to keep that quiet. It’s no big deal in today’s world.” Bridget spoke briskly. “I’d be more worried about her saying that you killed your husband with poison mushrooms."

“I did not.” Hannah clutched her handbag closer. “I loved Morton. He was a good man. He really helped me get my career off the ground. He never held it against me that I couldn’t have children. We were happy.”

Bridget raised her eyebrows at me. “If you say so. How did he die, then?”

“It was something he ate,” Hannah admitted. “He had been on a business trip, and he would eat in the little dives, no matter what I told him. He was sick when he got home, and nothing I could do helped. I insisted he go to the hospital, and finally he went, but it was too late—he had a heart attack brought on by his extreme dehydration.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “He was my best friend, more than Naomi. My only friend, really. Now they’re both gone.”