Phantoms Can Be Murder: Charlie Parker Mystery #13 (19 page)

You can afford a
lot
of
nice little somethings with that kind of cash.

A more important question came to
mind.

I turned through the stapled
pages of the actual trust document. It was written in typical
triplicate-legalese wording but I was looking for one thing. And I found it.
Upon the death of the beneficiary, the estate would pass to the beneficiary’s
legal next of kin, her spouse. If she was unmarried at the time of her death
and had no children, the estate would pass to the Royal Society of Orchid
Growers.

Here, surely, was Archie’s
motive.

Chapter
24

I stuffed all the pages back into
the brown envelope, pondering.

In the days when he held his
management job he probably pulled in about the same income that Dolly got from
the interest on her trust. But his losing the job changed the whole picture.
Archie could never get divorced from Dolly. That much was clear. And he didn’t
dare wait until she inherited it all. The Orchid Society might be her father’s
pet project but I doubted it was Dolly’s. She would have pulled the money from
her trust as soon as legally possible and she would do anything with the money
that she wanted. Including writing Archie out of her will if he did any little
thing to piss her off.

Poor, passive Archie. I’d often
wondered how a man so dynamic in the workplace, with his winning sales team and
all the business perks had become so dominated by his wife. The money was
probably the answer.

But even a docile pet will strike
out eventually. And perhaps Archie had reached the breaking point. In love with
another woman, knowing that in a few months Dolly had the power to cut him off
financially, living with the knowledge of the severe penalty for divorcing her.
The only solution, it seemed, was to get rid of her.

I stared back at the box of
papers. Afternoon sun came through the room’s one window, the square of
brilliance hitting the brown envelope. I could say that I saw the light but
that would be way too corny. I only knew I had to get this information to
someone in authority. The sensible, legal thing would be to copy down the name of
the law firm in London and put them in touch with the police. But sometimes
sensible and legal are a little too iffy and way too slow for me.

Archie wasn’t going to look
through every item in the house—he was moving, things would be in a mess for
awhile. I grabbed the trust documents out of the brown envelope, folded and
stuffed them into the inside pocket of my jacket.

The apartment door opened. Yikes!

I pulled some random papers from
one of the other files and stuffed them in the envelope as replacements, jammed
the packet back where I’d found it and used the roll of packing tape I’d
brought with me to seal both boxes shut.

By the time Archie entered the
bedroom I’d stacked the two boxes by the wall, making a show of brushing dust
from my hands.

“These look like memorabilia so I
just taped them up,” I said. I stared into the open closet. “I was wondering if
you had plans for Dolly’s clothing or if I should just bag it up for charity.”

He gave me a firm stare and I
hoped my guilt, or the bulge in my jacket, didn’t show.

“Ah. Sure. Charity is fine.”

“Do you want to go through the
items yourself?” I asked, adding as much sympathy to my tone of voice as I
could muster.

“No, it’s all right. I wouldn’t
know what to do with them.” He walked over to the nightstand where he’d left
his wallet. He gave me one glance, thumbed through the cash, and apparently
satisfied that all was intact, started for the door. “Need to reimburse
Gabrielle for the lunch she brought me.”

I transferred the legal papers
and Dolly’s journal to my purse and looked around the room for any other
evidence of my intrusion.

Although my inclination was to
run and run fast, some sense of obligation told me that having promised Archie
I would bag up Dolly’s clothing I should stick with the job. I found plastic
trash bags in the broom closet and hastily emptied drawers of lingerie and
sweaters, then pulled the hanging garments from the closet and bagged those as
well. I didn’t touch the collection of costume jewelry, but I did put the
cosmetics and creams from the bathroom into the trash. Duty completed, and
having a reasonable amount of work to show for the time I’d spent in the
apartment, I went back down to the shop.

The stock room looked like a
tornado had passed through. The large worktable in the middle was littered with
boxes, mostly empty, and the shelves contained only the ragged remnants of
unsold merchandise, things Gabrielle must have taken from the displays and
stashed here for lack of anything better to do with them. The tea kettle sat, cold
and unplugged, on the short counter where Dolly always kept it along with
several utilitarian mugs. She’d apparently learned to leave the good china
upstairs.

Voices came up the stairwell from
the cellar, the one-word commands of the moving boss and the responding grunts
of his helpers. I could hear Archie’s voice, nearer, and Gabrielle responded
from somewhere farther away down there.

I wandered into the sales room.
Outside, the lane was filled with pedestrians, people getting their shopping
done before end of day. A normal day in a normal enough setting. The moving van
sat at the curb, partially filled.

Catherine Devon passed the window
and came inside, wearing a rich bronze-tone dress that set off her blond hair
amazingly, with a long coat in geometric print, heavy gold jewelry and pumps
that had to be dyed to match. Her smile perked up when she saw me—or was she
merely flashing that confident look of a woman who knows she has out-dressed
you by miles? I knew my jeans and jacket must be dusty but I refused to look.

Archie walked into the shop, over
to the register.

I busied myself restacking the
boxes I’d earlier placed at the edge of the room, pretending to make space for
more. I’d not seen the two lovers interact all that much so it was interesting
to blatantly spy a little bit.

From the cellar below, the
workingman voices grew louder as the movers apparently wrestled with those
large pieces. Catherine walked straight to Archie and as she spoke quietly to
him, I saw her run her long fingers down the sleeve of his plaid shirt. Their
eyes met but he quickly averted his, instinctively checking the rest of the
room. He spotted me and went back to bagging up the money from the till.
Gabrielle came in from the stockroom, made an impatient sound and I saw that
she was wrestling with a large garbage bag. She got it tied shut and dragged it
toward the door.

“Looks like everything will soon
be gone,” I said, realizing that Archie had looked up with a
what-can-I-do-for-you stare.

He put on his grief face again. Even
with what I knew of Dolly’s inheritance, I couldn’t be sure of his emotional
state. I’d seen cases where a spouse who seemingly couldn’t stand the
other—brink of divorce and all that—suddenly went into deep anguish upon the
death of the partner. Belated remorse? Guilt? Maybe that’s what was happening
here. Of course it was entirely possible that Archie was doing a great job of
selling the act. He’d been a salesman for a lot of years.

Catherine had stepped back a
little, maintaining a proper distance, but her eyes went often to Archie’s face
and I realized that she genuinely cared for him. My thoughts vacillated back
and forth. Cold blooded killers, or star-crossed lovers?

“Comin’ through, please,” a burly
man’s voice called out.

Two men appeared at the stockroom
door awkwardly balancing the big leather sofa, the one I’d napped on during
that very long night when Louisa and I had stayed here on our ghost hunt. I
tucked myself against the wall. Gabrielle was at the door, returning from
taking the trash bag somewhere, and she held it open for them using one hand to
dampen the sound of the little bells. As the sofa passed through she gave the
back of it a stroke with one hand, admiring the soft leather.

“Well, I’d best be off,”
Catherine said. Her tone was bright but her eyes were on the dust motes
floating in the air in the wake of the sofa. I imagined that she didn’t want
her expensive clothing to get dirty.

She tapped her index finger twice
on the counter near Archie’s arm, a private little goodbye. There wasn’t much
point in staying subtle now—the wife was gone and everyone in the room quite
easily picked up on the nuances. I returned the pleasant smile she sent my
direction as she walked out the door.

“You’re about finished, then,
Gabrielle?” Archie asked. “Thompson’s should be by soon to take the fixtures.
That’s about all for the shop. I’ll need to turn your key back.”

The younger woman looked around
but it seemed her duties were done. She reached into her jeans pocket and
extracted a key ring, from which she worked one key loose. She stepped behind
the sales counter and placed it there, then she reached out to give Archie a
hug.

“I’ll miss you,” she said with a
glance toward me, “and the shop and the customers, of course.”

He patted her back, tried to extricate
himself, succumbed to a longer hug. About the time he was going to physically
pry her arms off him, she broke away.

“Well, then,” he said.

“Stay in touch,” she told him.
“I’ll make you dinner anytime, you know.”

I caught the wistfulness in her
voice. When he rounded the counter, creating a barrier between them, she didn’t
have much choice but to leave.

The moving men clumped back into
the shop. “It’ll require two days, sir,” said the senior guy. “That cellar’s
plumb full, heavy stuff, the stairs.”

Archie didn’t look happy with the
verdict but didn’t have much choice about accepting it. The day was getting
late. I realized Louisa would probably be off work soon. I made a token gesture
to help some more but he wished me goodbye and I headed toward The Nutshell Pub
to meet my aunt. We had agreed we should have a drink there on this, my final
evening in Bury.

The lights were still on in that
electronics store where I’d listened to Archie’s message tape and a neon sign
in the window said “Copies.” Without thinking twice I ducked in and used the
self-service machine to copy all the documents I’d taken from the Jones
apartment. Depending on my next conversation with Archie, I better be ready to
turn these over to the police in the morning.

Stuffing all the pages into my
purse I set out once more and came to the tiny pub where I spotted Louisa
standing outside.

We squeezed onto one of the two
built-in corner benches in the cramped area, which surely couldn’t be more than
a hundred square feet total, with close to twenty people filling the space and
spilling out the open door. Once I got past the mummified cat that hung from
the ceiling and the various other heads of dead creatures adorning the walls,
the place did hold a certain charm. Louisa caught me eyeing the cat.

“I was just remembering what you
told us about the cats being entombed in the walls. I wonder if a mummified cat
would only catch mummified mice.” I glanced up at the stiff carcass again and
found myself casually draping my hand over the top of my wine glass, just in
case of drifting skin cells or something.

She chuckled. “The collection in
here was once far more extensive. The health department made them clear out a
lot of it.”

Reassuring.

Two young guys in black T-shirts
manned the bar and the crowd was a lively one. With no possible way to have a
private conversation, the banter merely bounced around the narrow room and
anyone who wanted to could join in. A girl who barely made the legal drinking
age flirted outrageously with a slick guy in a leather jacket. He dropped
F-bombs liberally as he regaled the crowd with a tale of how he’d managed to
elude the police on his motorcycle after a little altercation at an
intersection in Stowmarket. Between his exaggerated accent and the hip slang, I
probably got only half of that right.

We finished our wine, set the
glasses on the bar, and edged through the crowd and out to the sidewalk. The
close little neighborhood hid any true view of sunset as I’m accustomed to it
in the wide-open spaces of New Mexico; this was more like a gradual dimming of
the light.

“I know a charming, very out of
the way place where they serve a hearty dinner, if you’d like,” Louisa said.
“We’ll go past St. Mary’s, then it’s just a short way.”

After my investigative afternoon,
my head becoming crowded with way too much information followed by the noise
inside The Nutshell, the quiet street provided a nice respite. I gave myself
over to simply enjoying the historic buildings, the hanging flower baskets
under soft street lamps, and the relative silence now that workers were closing
up shop and heading home for the night.

Over a nice cut of beef with
mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables I told Louisa about my findings, from my
visit to the news office to the subtle glances I’d caught between Archie and
Catherine.

“I’m afraid to admit that I did a
little pilfering too.” I held up Dolly’s journal and told her about the trust
fund. “I keep going back and forth, wondering if Dolly’s over-possessiveness is
all that’s behind her writings and the things that were happening in her shop.”

“Or, did she genuinely have
something to worry about? With an inheritance of over two million pounds coming
to her, maybe she really did have reason to be worried.” Louisa sipped at her
wine.

“I also have to admit to making
copies of the documents. In case the police need the evidence. But they don’t
even believe there was a crime. I don’t know what to think.”

Louisa’s blue eyes looked sad.
“And now you’re leaving tomorrow. I wish you could stay longer.”

I had the feeling that she’d come
to enjoy having someone else around the house, a pal to do things with. I felt
a little sadness too.

“Well, I will just have to come
back. Or you’ll have to come to Albuquerque. The house is certainly big enough
to accommodate a guest for awhile.”

“Yes, without your father it
would—” She gave a tight little smile.

I felt a lump rise in my throat,
a type of regret for events past, even though I’d not even been born when it
all happened. There seemed to be so much still unsaid. My mouth opened, then
shut again.