Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance) (27 page)

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Authors: Carolyn McSparren

BOOK: Ride a Painted Pony (Superromance)
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“Yessir, Mr. Policeman, sir.” Taylor threw him a salute.
She’d tell him no more than she wanted him to know.
She’d always been able to con Danny, and she had no intention of turning over a new leaf now.
 
“HELLO, CECE,” Taylor said. “My mother here yet?”
“Taylor, how nice.” CeCe stood behind a glass case full of antique jewelry with a large spray bottle of glass cleaner and a wad of paper towels. “Come to help out? I still haven’t hired anyone.”
“Ask me again in a couple of weeks. I’m going to need a job.”
CeCe raised her eyebrows. “Well, I just might do that little thing.”
“Obviously, my mother’s late as usual.” The shop was not yet fully organized, but opulence overflowed in every direction. “CeCe, I need a favor.” She told CeCe about Estelle Grierson. She expected CeCe to respond grudgingly, but instead the woman seemed elated at the prospect of digging through the ruins of Eberhardt’s shop.
“I’m so glad you asked me,” CeCe said, rubbing her hands together. “A lot of it may be junk but there’s bound to be some marvelous things left.”
Taylor gave her Estelle’s telephone number and breathed a sigh of relief. She owed Estelle Grierson.
“I can see why mother loves this place,” she said. “She’s crazy about antique jewelry.” Taylor ran her eye casually over the cloisonné necklaces, old jade amulets, and soft baroque pearls. She leaned forward and pointed at a gold necklace and pendant at the end of the case. “Could I see that thing? I know somebody who’s got one.”
CeCe opened the case and pulled out the necklace. “Lovely piece. A lady’s gold pencil from about nineteen-hundred.” She handed the necklace to Taylor. “Not expensive. The chain is, of course. But the pencil’s only a hundred and fifty dollars—and it’s twenty-four-carat gold.”
Taylor touched it and felt an almost electrical tingle run from it up her arms. “It’s a pencil? It’s only four inches long.”
CeCe laughed throatily. “Here, dear.” She took off the top of the pencil and spread it like a telescope, then put the top back on. The pencil was now a respectable ten inches long. “See,” she said, “you put the lead into the end and it feeds down through the hole at the bottom in that little narrow part.”
“I thought it was an old-fashioned hypodermic needle.” Taylor handed it back. “Are they rare?”
“I’d say so. Not unique, certainly, but quite rare. I’ve never seen another one like it, and I’ve been in the business for forty years.”
Taylor picked up her satchel and threaded her way to the door. “Would you tell my mother I had an emergency? I’ll call her tonight.”
Irene was climbing out of her car outside.
“Taysie, darling, I’m sorry I’m late.”
Taylor kissed her cheek on the fly. “Sorry, Mother, something came up. I’ll call you.” She ran to her truck and climbed in. As she backed out, she saw Irene staring after her openmouthed.
No grateful hospital board had given Margery Chessman a fancy antique hypodermic needle.
One lady’s gold pencil, circa 1904 had been missing from the inventory of Helmut’s store after the robbery. Taylor had assumed that it had been destroyed, but this was too much of a coincidence to be ignored. Unless there were three pencils kicking around—highly unlikely given the rarity of the thing—that pencil around Margery’s neck came from Helmut Eberhardt’s store. And it had been listed on his inventory when he died.
So unless Margery or Josh Chessman drove to Oxford the day of his death and bought the thing—and both of them denied having been out of town that day—that pencil was taken either just before or just after Eberhardt was killed. Margery surely had no reason to kill Eberhardt. That left good ol’ Josh.
Taylor could imagine his eyes lighting on it in Helmut’s display case as he made his way out the front door and away from the flames that lapped Helmut’s body. A gold pencil would appeal to an academic, surely. But why on earth would he be crazy enough to give it to his wife? Unless she found it and thought it was a present for her. Josh would hardly deny that under the circumstances. Nobody was likely to connect it with Eberhardt, after all. Perfectly safe for Margery to walk around with it hanging among her other baubles.
Taylor knew she ought to call Vollmer, but if she guessed correctly, he’d still be interrogating Nick. A lousy little pencil was not hard evidence. She dialed Mel and got the Borman Agency answering machine. She called information for Veda’s number and got an answering machine there too. She called Rounders on the assumption that Veda—or at least some of the carvers—would be there.
Another damn answering machine! The world was being run by robots who couldn’t even talk to one another.
In desperation she called Max Beaumont. No answer, no machine. She couldn’t call Josh Chessman. What would she say to Margery? Margery had sworn Josh had been in his office at seven-thirty on Monday night while Clara Eberhardt was being stabbed to death.
Chessman had sworn he’d been duking it out with his latest abandoned mistress. They’d accepted his story. Margery could be lying, or the mistress might still be very much in love with Josh and happy to lie for him. Maybe Josh had paid her off.
Finally, Josh might have had his calls forwarded to his car phone. He might have been answering Margery’s call as he tried to avoid sideswiping Taylor coming out of the Rounders alleyway Monday evening.
He had opportunity to steal. He had keys to Rounders. He knew Clara Eberhardt well. He even owed her—or she might have felt that he did.
Maybe Josh wanted enough of his own money to be able to dump Margery. She was the one with ambition. Josh seemed more likely to want a nubile young wife, a cushy tenured job and plenty of free time to play at Rounders.
If all the animals in Rounders had been sold, he stood to make in the neighborhood of three-hundred thousand dollars in nontaxable income that he could hide in a safety deposit box and dole out in such small amounts that the I.R.S. wouldn’t be suspicious.
But one gold pencil didn’t make a case.
Taylor needed the Eberhardts’ records right now! She needed to be able to tie Chessman to the stolen animals.
She called Chessman’s number. If she were going on a fishing expedition, she didn’t want to run into the resident shark. Margery answered and told her that Josh had office hours tonight until eight. He wouldn’t be available to talk to her until the following morning.
“Are you going to be home? Can you give him a message?” Taylor asked.
“I have a board meeting and a dinner engagement. I will be home very late.”
Taylor decided that counted as a ‘no.’ She thanked Margery and hung up. So Josh was safely out of the picture. So was everyone else including Nick. She had the next two hours to find those records.
She pulled into the nearest parking lot and cut her engine. She had a feeling that if she put her mind to it, she could figure out where those blasted records had to be. If they were on computer disks, they’d make up a fairly small package. The police had searched Eberhardt’s house, shop, rental property and warehouse, and had come up empty. Policemen knew how to search. They got plenty of practice going after drugs.
So either the records did not exist, or they were in a truly weird place.
But Eugene swore they existed. The killer thought they existed. Taylor had to believe they existed. Otherwise, why would the killer continue to target her and Nick?
Where was there left to search? The police would have found records or lockbox keys or disks even if they were taped to the bottoms of drawers or the backs of picture frames.
And chances were that Helmut and Clara would have wanted to keep their records accessible, able to be updated fairly quickly. They wouldn’t have used the local bank.
She leaned her head against the back of her seat. She was developing a major pain behind her right eye. She longed to stop worrying about the records...and Nick...and Vollmer... and these murders... It almost made her wish she had one of those crystal glasses full of single-malt whiskey that Marcus Cato had thrust at her from the belly of his fancy armored horse.
Suddenly her eyes widened. Oh, yeah. She knew one place she’d bet the police had not searched. And it was just weird enough to be the right place. She grinned and started her truck.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Y
OU DO KNOW FIRING A GUN is against the law?” Vollmer said for the sixth time.
Cabrizzo came to attention. “My client was in fear for his life.”
“Hell, Cabrizzo,” Detective Harrison said, “the guy was running away.”
“For all my client knew, he was running to his vehicle for another weapon. Did you find another weapon in his car?”
“None of your business.”
“Certainly it’s my business. Do you have any reason to believe that any of the shots he fired after this retreating criminal could have caused said criminal’s death?” Then, when nobody answered, “Come on, Vollmer, give already.”
Vollmer shrugged. “Okay. Eugene Lewis was shot once at close range while he was sitting in the front seat of his car fifty miles from that place the Eberhardts were using. He died almost instantly.”
Nick surged to his feet.
Harrison and Vollmer did the same thing so quickly that their chairs fell over backwards.
“Vollmer, you bastard, you put me through hell for three hours when you knew I didn’t shoot Eugene!”
Rico grabbed Nick’s arm. “Sit down.”
Rico gathered up his notes and opened his briefcase. He said cheerfully, “Okay, you guys, we’re outa here. You want to talk to my client again, you get a warrant. Okay?”
“Wait a minute,” Harrison said, “we’re not through.”
“Sure you are,” Rico said.
Nick laid a hand on Rico’s arm and spoke to Vollmer. “If I were you, Detective, I’d stop letting my personal feelings interfere with my job and go looking for whoever set Helmut Eberhardt on fire, because the same person who did that stole my animals, killed Clara and Eugene, and, if you’re not careful, could kill Taylor Hunt.”
“Taylor’s out of it,” Vollmer said.
“The hell she is.”
“I had lunch with her today. She’s the one gave me the gun.”
Nick looked confused.
“She said you were clear on Lewis and she’d testify for you. She’s getting out of the P.I. racket.”
“She said she was not going to be a P.I. any longer?” Nick asked. “Her precise words?”
“She said she’d given Borman two weeks’ notice.”
“Can we get out of here now?” Nick didn’t believe that Taylor had simply given up. He wanted to know where she was and what she was up to, and he wanted to know immediately.
 
TAILOR CALLED MARCUS FROM HER TRUCK. Better to confirm her theory before she wasted a lot of time. He picked up the phone himself.
“Child, how you doin’?” he asked.
“Fine, Marcus. Got a quick question for you.”
“Sure.”
“How hard is it to hollow out one of those animals to set up something like your bar?”
“Bodies are put together from a bunch of different pieces of wood. They’re naturally hollow.”
“So what you’re telling me is that the bodies of all wooden carousel animals are at least partially empty?”
“Pretty much. Why?”
“Thank you, Marcus, thank you very much.”
Computer disks would fit easily into the hollow belly of a carousel animal.
Twenty minutes later, Taylor stepped from her truck onto the dark loading dock of Rounders, held her penlight between her teeth, and went to work on the padlock that held the door to the back stairs. When and if Vollmer turned Nick loose, he’d see her truck parked in his spot in the alley and know that she was here. Just to be safe, she’d left word on his answering machine outlining her suspicions of Josh.
She’d already left word on Mel’s. Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody occasionally answered a telephone?
The lock clicked and she ran up the stairs, ignoring the eerie sound of her shoes against the metal treads. She pushed through the door to the storeroom and flicked on the overhead lights.
She figured that Nick’s newly returned animals should be among those at the very back, closest to her. In ten, fifteen minutes max, she’d know whether the Eberhardts had stashed their records in the belly of one of Nick’s stolen animals.
She tried to remember what the six animals she’d seen at the warehouse looked like, but she’d had eyes for nothing but Eugene and his gun. She’d have to start with the back row and try them all until she found the right one.
She tried tapping. They all sounded hollow. She tried looking for hinges. None. She tried looking for seam lines.
Finally she laid her satchel on the seat of one of the chariots and began to crawl around on her hands and knees. At this rate, it would take her not fifteen minutes, but several hours to test her theory.
Clara must have been crazy or unbelievably greedy to leave the safety of The Peabody lobby to come bopping up here with the man who abandoned her in college.
Suddenly the note slid into Taylor’s mind like an overhead being projected on a wall. It hadn’t said “Meet
at
PB...” but “meet pb...”—lower case.
Maybe pb stood not for Peabody but for “prissy bitch.” Which prissy bitch? Estelle had referred to all the sorority sisters as prissy bitches. A name popped into Taylor’s mind. Margery Chessman! She’d been ex-president of the sorority.
Margery could have stolen the gold pencil herself and hired Eugene. She knew Rounders as well as Josh did and was at Ole Miss at the same time as Clara. If Margery had been Helmut’s co-thief, Clara wouldn’t have been afraid of her. Certainly not if Margery offered to keep the scam going.
And after Margery stuck a chisel into Clara, she could easily call Josh from her car phone and ask him when to put the lamb chops on. She’d know she had plenty of time to beat him home.
Taylor ducked under an ostrich.
“Two minds with but a single thought.”
Taylor jumped, banged her head painfully on the ostrich’s belly, and lifted her head.
Margery Chessman, impeccable as ever and wearing at least half a pound of antique gold around her neck, stood in the open doorway pointing a large black automatic at Taylor’s breastbone.

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