Nashville Noir (17 page)

“May I help you?” she said, barely looking up from some papers on her desk.

“Yes, I hope you will. My name is Jessica Fletcher.”

A ray of recognition crossed her face. “Oh, yes, the writer. I read about you in the paper this morning.” She removed her glasses and folded her hands on the desk.

“And you’re Edwina Anderson, I presume.”

She didn’t reply, simply stared at me.

“Well, I’m—as you probably learned by reading the article, I’m working with the defense team for Ms. Gabriel.”

“Yes, I did read that. Frankly, Mrs. Fletcher, I’m not of a mind to cooperate with anyone looking to get that young woman off the hook.”

“Even if she’s innocent?”

“But she’s not. I’ve read the accounts of Mr. Marker’s death. She’s obviously as guilty as sin, if you’ll pardon my use of a cliché.”

“Pardon granted,” I said, “but I strongly believe that Cyndi has been wrongly accused.”

“Just because you believe it doesn’t make it so,” she sniffed.

“That’s true,” I said, “but it would be a travesty of justice if a thorough investigation were not conducted, taking into account a history of the victim and all the people he knew who may have had issues with him. Everything is not always as clear-cut as it appears initially.”

“Are you questioning the authorities? Nashville has an excellent police department.”

“I absolutely agree,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean they can’t use a little extra help from time to time. I’m simply hoping to point out possibilities they may not have considered.”

“Well, what do you want from me?”

“I understand on the night Mr. Marker was attacked, you saw Cyndi coming into the building when you were leaving for the day.”

“That’s what I told the police.”

“So I heard. Had Cyndi made her appointment to see Mr. Marker through you?”

“She did not have an appointment.”

“Was anyone with Mr. Marker when you left the office?”

“No.”

“At least not that you knew about,” I said. “But Mr. Marker didn’t always tell you about everyone he saw in his office, did he?”

“I don’t know where you’re getting your information,” she said.

“I stopped in the other day and had a brief conversation with Mr. Whitson, and with Buddy.”

She rolled her eyes at the mention of Buddy. “Really?” she said in a stern, haughty voice. “I don’t have time to deal in innuendo and rumor. Is there something specific you want?”

“As a matter of fact, there is. I wanted to take another look at Mr. Marker’s office.”

“May I ask why?”

“I’d like to examine the other door in the office and where it leads.”

“And if I say ‘no’?” she said with a smirk.

I decided I could be just as obstinate. I straightened up and said in my best schoolteacher voice, “You should know I’m not only working with Ms. Gabriel’s defense attorney, I’m discussing the case with the lead detective, Detective Biddle. You’ll only delay me for a short time. I’m sure I can arrange for a warrant to allow me to take another look at the crime scene.”

I had no idea whether I could do as threatened, but it seemed an officious thing to say. It obviously had some effect, because her expression changed from abject defiance to something closer to reflection.

“But Mr. Whitson isn’t in right now,” she said, a blatant attempt to shift the direction of the conversation.

“That’s perfect,” I said. “I won’t take up a lot of your time. I need to spend only a few minutes in his office. There’s an emergency exit outside that door, isn’t that right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Where does it lead?”

“To the parking lot in the back.”

“And do people use that entrance to come into the building from the parking lot?”

“No. The door is locked. Everyone comes in the front entrance.”

“If the door is locked, then that implies a key. Can people with a key use that door?”

Her sigh was dismissive. “I suppose so,” she said, “if they have one.”

“Do you have one?” I asked.

“Yes, but I don’t use it. I come in and out the front entrance like everyone else.”

“But if you have the key, I assume that others may also have a key. Perhaps Mr. Marker gave a key to someone who could then have access to his second door from the parking lot.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Just an assumption,” I said pleasantly. “Now, may I see the office again?”

Another sigh, more prolonged this time. “Mr. Whitson won’t be pleased.”

I said conspiratorially, “He never even has to know.”

She got up from her chair with exaggerated effort and came around the desk. She was a tall, solidly built woman whose floral dress reached to her calves and came high up around her neck. She led the way into Marker’s office, which now belonged to his business partner, Lewis Whitson.
Was gaining a larger, more elaborately furnished office—and one with a second door—motive enough to kill?
The question crossed my mind. Marker’s partner had not wasted any time taking over the larger office, and I wondered if there were others who would have a claim on the partnership, if Whitson was marking his territory, so to speak. Then too, Whitson may have had a lot more to gain by Marker’s death than simply a more impressive office. Or could Edwina Anderson have secured her position by ridding herself of a boss who clearly wanted to fire her? I’d slipped into my “what if ?” frame of mind, which opened the door to any and all possibilities without self-censoring.

The office looked markedly different than the last time I’d seen it, which was only two days ago. The rose-colored plush carpet was new. Marker’s desk was gone, replaced by a large glass one. Whitson’s high-back chair was red, as opposed to the black tufted seat I’d seen in the office before. An overstuffed green leather couch substituted for the long gray sofa, and where the glass coffee table had stood, there was now a series of three small tables—not one of them strong enough to support an exuberant dancer when the latest M&W talent topped the charts. I glanced at the walls. Many of the same photographs of their more famous clients were still there, augmented by a grouping of color shots that appeared to be family photos. Marilyn Marker wasn’t in those pictures; they must have been Whitson’s family.

“I see that you’ve changed the decor,” I said.

“Mr. Whitson wanted the office to reflect himself.”

“And not reminders of his partner’s demise,” I added.

“Satisfied?” she asked.

“Almost,” I said, going to the second door and opening it. It was unlocked. I stepped into the hallway and looked at the fire door.

“And these stairs lead to the parking lot,” I said to myself.

“I already told you that,” she said, making a point of looking at her watch.

Back inside, I stood in the center of the room and tried to envision the murder scene. I saw someone—I wasn’t sure whether it was a man or woman—arguing with Marker over something. A business deal gone sour? Money promised and unpaid. A vow broken? A jealous competitor. A betrayal of a lover—or a wife? All possible motivations were on the table at this point.

I turned and looked at the first door to the office, the one through which we’d just passed. I could see Cyndi, frustrated and impatient, waiting in the reception area to see the man she felt had taken away her best chance for stardom, hoping to change his mind. She comes through that door and looks for him, doesn’t see anyone. She spots the music award on the floor, picks it up to place it on the corner of his desk, puts it there, realizes there’s blood on it, wipes her hand on her jeans, and sees him lying facedown on the floor behind the desk, not moving.

She panics, turns, and runs from the office into the arms of the building’s security guard, who pushes her down into a chair in the reception area. While he goes into the office to see what has happened, she panics even more and races down the main stairs, out into the street, and tries to think of a safe haven where she can stay until she decides what to do next.

I wiped that vision from my mind and looked at the second door again. Cyndi had heard Marker arguing with someone while she waited to see him. No, that wasn’t entirely accurate. She thought he was on the phone, which meant she hadn’t heard a second voice. Was he on the phone? Possibly not. Maybe he was talking in person with the man or woman who would murder him. I made a mental note to encourage Cyndi to try and remember whether she ever heard a second voice through the closed office door.

“You’ve had enough time to do whatever it is you’re doing,” Ms. Anderson, better known as Eddy, said sharply.

“Yes, and thank you for your courtesy,” I said. “I think I’ll leave by the fire door, if that’s all right with you. Is it alarmed?”

“Should be. I’ve told Buddy it should be, but he functions in his own little world. They all do.”

“They?”

“His type. Suit yourself. Goodbye.”

She waited until I left by the second door and locked it behind me. I opened the fire door and peered down the stairs, seeing in my mind someone rushing down the steps, realizing what he or she had just done, desperate to flee the premises.

I slowly descended, reached the steel fire door, which opened from the inside with a bar release. I pressed it, and the door swung open easily. I stepped outside and looked around. The parking lot was half full. The door slammed closed behind me. I turned and tried to reopen it, but there was no latch on the outside, only a pull and a keyhole. Clearly, anyone who would enter the building through this door needed a key. Marker & Whitson might require their staff who parked in the lot to walk around the building and come in the front entrance, but there could be a select few who were given the key and used this door, even people who didn’t work in the building.

I peered up into a pewter sky that promised rain, and followed a sidewalk around to the front of the building, where I entered again. A guard, who hadn’t been there earlier, was standing at the counter. A burly man with a paunch hanging over his black leather belt, he wore a gray uniform with a shoulder patch on which the letters SMSS were superimposed over an embroidered image of a mountaintop. Detective Biddle had said the guard who caught Cyndi was from the Smoky Mountain Security Services.

“By any chance, are you Clevon Morgan?” I asked.

He straightened. “Yes, ma’am. How can I help you?”

I didn’t want to confess that I was looking to find evidence to exonerate Cyndi, especially to the man who’d been hailed for catching a killer. Instead I put on my best impression of a gossipy biddy and batted my lashes at him.

“I read about you in the
Tennessean,
” I said, slapping the counter. “Terrible shame about Mr. Marker. I heard
you
were the one who found him—and the girl.”

He smiled. “Yes, ma’am. Got her red-handed. In fact, really red-handed; the blood was still on her fingers. Told the police that. Gave them a good description. That’s how they found her. Took a coupla days, though. I should’ve locked her up good, so’s she couldn’t run. Still riled about that.”

“No need at all. My goodness, you’re a hero! Your family must be so proud.”

“Yes, ma’am. They are.”

“It’s got to be so difficult trying to guard this place, what with people coming and going all the time and using the back door to the parking lot.”

“You got that right. That back door is a pain in my butt, if you’ll excuse my French.”

“Of course,” I said, injecting my voice with sympathy. “When she escaped, did the killer run out that back door?”

“No, ma’am. She sneaked out the front when I was callin’ the cops.”

“How can you be so sure she went out the front?”

“Easy. Mr. Marker, he had a second door in his office, right outside them stairs leadin’ to the parking lot. If she’d gone out that way, I’d know.”

“And you can see right through his door. Is it glass?”

“No, ma’am. It’s wood, but it was open.”

“Of course. How silly of me.”

“If I’da seen her, I woulda caught her again. She wouldn’ta got away from me then.”

I left the building and paused on the sidewalk, peering down the street in hopes of spotting a taxi. As I stood there, someone in a shiny silver Jaguar with tinted windows pulled up next to a fire hydrant and turned off the engine. Lewis Whitson emerged from the passenger door and walked around the car to the driver’s side. He held out his hand to the driver. A long black-stockinged leg appeared, and then the rest of the woman in black. It was Marilyn Marker. Whitson’s back was to me, but Marilyn scanned my face, and there was a fleeting hint of recognition in her eyes. However, she said nothing. Whitson took her elbow and they hurried into the building.

I looked at my watch. It was almost three.
How interesting,
I thought,
that the widow of the victim and his business partner arrived together. And what business could they need to address at the office on the day of Marker’s memorial service?

An empty cab turned the corner. I hailed it and asked the driver to take me to central police headquarters. If Detective Biddle was serious about meeting to, as he put it, compare notes, I didn’t want to waste any time taking him up on it.

B
iddle was in a meeting when I arrived at the central precinct, but sent out word that he’d be free in fifteen minutes. I sat in a hallway outside the honeycomb of offices until he emerged. “Come on in,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“This is the cold case office,” Biddle said, as we passed a half-dozen cubicles in which other detectives were on the phone or working with their computers. We reached the office he’d said was his temporarily while the department finished renovating the west precinct, and he closed the door behind us.

“Cold cases,” I said. “How successful are you in solving old cases?”