The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) (2 page)

I was not in a good mood. Faith had left me in a world of trouble when she left me years earlier. This sounded like same song second verse.

“What do you want?” I asked. “And should I have an attorney present for this discussion?”

“It’s just a friendly chat,” Jamison assured me. “No need to be all hot and bothered.”

“I am hot and bothered,” I told them. “In fact, I’m downright pissed. My wife left me, wiping me out financially in the process. She ran off with my best friend, cheated me out of my share of the proceeds of our condo, left me in a world of hurt for not paying taxes, and now she’s telling the world I’m the one who killed her? Please. If I were going to knock her off, I would have done it years ago—before she let our condo go into foreclosure and before I had to declare bankruptcy just to get out from under the mountains of credit card debt she ran up.”

“You sound angry.”

“You’re damned right I’m angry. Now what do you need from me to get this straightened out? Besides, in cases like this, isn’t it always the husband who did it? What about her current husband? What about Rick Austin, her ex-husband and my ex-best friend, who also happens to be a wife-stealing bastard? What about him?”

“Our records indicate that Richard Austin and Katherine divorced three years ago when she first came to Vegas. The timing involved in the move would suggest that she came to Nevada and established residency for the purpose of obtaining a quick divorce from Mr. Austin.”

“Well well,” I said. “Fair enough. What goes around comes around. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. So let’s cut to the chase. How about telling me what happened?”

“Her husband, Cliff Melcher, reported his wife missing on the morning of October sixteenth when he returned home from a business trip. Her body was found two days later in her wrecked Cadillac Escalade, crashed into a gully northeast of Searchlight. The M.E. tells us she died of blunt force trauma that isn’t consistent with injuries due to a car crash. She was already dead when the car went into the wash. So far we have no known suspects, but we’re currently investigating all her known friends and associates.”

“Including her former husband?”

Jamison nodded.

“Does that mean I’m a suspect?”

“At this point you’re a person of interest,” Jamison conceded. “One of several, in fact.” He paused long enough to pull a tiny notebook and the stub of a pencil out of his jacket pocket. The gesture served notice that our friendly chat was no longer friendly—not in the least.

“Do you mind telling me where you were that weekend?”

There was no point in lying. I had no doubt that these two guys already knew exactly where I was the middle of October.

“I was in Las Vegas,” I said, an admission that I had the opportunity to commit the crime. The cops already knew I had plenty of motive. “I was there for a convention—Bouchercon.”

“What is that exactly?” Jamison asked. “And would you mind spelling it for me?”

I dictated the spelling and then explained, “It’s a convention for mystery writers and readers.”

“Which are you,” he asked, “a writer or reader?”

“A reader so far,” I admitted, “but I’d like to be a writer someday.”

“A mystery writer?”

“Yes.”

“As in a murder mystery writer?” From the way he verbally underscored the word murder in the question, I could tell exactly what he was getting at.

“I don’t know of any other kind,” I told him.

I did, actually. There are a lot of different kinds of mysteries, and I’ve read them all, from cozies to police procedurals, from thrillers to true crime, but it’s usually always murder. Right that moment, however, I didn’t feel like giving Detective Jamison an overview of crime fiction. He didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who spent a lot of his time reading books of any kind, much less mysteries.

“What do people do at this convention?”

“Chat with each other, listen to authors,. go to panels, visit the booksellers, get autographs.”

“What kind of panels?”

The panel entitled “Murder and How to Get Away with It” had been top on my list of must-sees. The room had been packed—standing room only. I had also enjoyed the interview session with the author of
The Poisoner’s Handbook
, which turned out to be less of a how-to book and more of a history of the birth of forensic science. I attended both of those, but the thing about Bouchercon is, there’s no official sign-up sheet for any of the panels or events. They give you a list of the programs and then you attend the ones that interest you. Once you show up, if there’s enough space, you sit. Otherwise, you stand or go somewhere else. It occurred to me that, under the circumstances, I probably shouldn’t mention my having attended the panel about getting away with murder.

“I went to several panels,” I said, ticking them off one by one. “ ‘Agents: Why You Need One,’ ‘Is Traditional Publishing Dead?’ ‘How to Win the E-book Wars,’ ‘Humor and Murder Do Mix,’ that sort of thing.”

“Which hotel?”

“The convention was at the Bohemian on the far end of the Strip,” I said. “By the time I signed up, I was too late to get the convention price there, so I stayed at the Talisman a few blocks away. One of my customers had recommended it and given me a coupon for one free night.”

“Anyone with you on this trip who could verify your whereabouts on the evening in question? Girlfriend maybe, or maybe a gal pal you picked up somewhere along the way?”

I knew what he meant. Jamison was wondering if I had picked up a hooker to keep me company. I hadn’t.

“I went by myself,” I told him. “Drove up on Friday evening, came back late Sunday afternoon, with no gal pals in the mix at all.”

“You drove across Hoover Dam?”

I nodded. Ever since 9/11, they’ve installed all kinds of security on that road, along with plenty of surveillance cameras, too. If someone went to the trouble of checking the tapes, they’d be able to find me eventually, creeping along in the miserable traffic and driving back and forth in my old beater Honda all by my lonesome. Some day they’ll open up that new bridge they’re working on—a bridge that crosses the whole canyon. Until they do, crossing the Colorado River at Hoover Dam takes for-damn-ever.

“You said you stayed at the Talisman?”

Recalling the place, I cringed. My customer’s idea of “great” and mine don’t exactly jibe. The Talisman isn’t a hotel I’ll be visiting again any time soon.

“Yes,” I answered. “It’s a few blocks off the Strip, which means it’s less expensive, but it was also close enough for me to walk back and forth to the convention. That way I didn’t have to pay for parking.”

“Do you remember which room you were in?”

“Do you remember hotel numbers weeks after you check out?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

“Me, neither,” I told him. “Check with the desk. They’ll be able to tell you which room I was in. The Talisman is a low-rise hotel. My room was on the second floor, with the swimming pool down below.”

“How much did you lose?” Jamison asked.

“I didn’t lose,” I said. “I went to a convention. I don’t gamble in Vegas. The house always wins.”

“I mean, how much did you lose when your wife left you?”

“Oh, that,” I said. “I lost everything.”

And that was the simple truth. I’d had a restaurant off Michigan Avenue. It was called Uptown. At the time, it was a going concern. I had money in the bank, a cool condo close to downtown, and a sizable retirement account. Faith and I also had cars—a late model BMW for me and a Volvo for her. Taken altogether, it added up to more than a mil, including the equity in the condo. When Faith took off with the goods, there wasn’t ever any hope of my getting it back. If she and Rick had deposited the money in a bank somewhere, maybe I might have stood a chance of recovering some of it. Instead, it all went up in smoke—literally. It doesn’t take long to go through that kind of money when you and your druggie pals are all doing cocaine.

“So how’d it happen?” Jamison asked.

He didn’t say,
How could you be so stupid?
He didn’t have to. I’ve said it to myself countless times, but I never saw it coming. Not at all.

I took a deep breath before I answered, remembering back to the first day I ever laid eyes on her.

“Faith showed up in my restaurant one day. She came in at lunch with a guy in a suit and came back later that evening alone. It wasn’t long before one thing led to another. She was beautiful as all get out, smart, and charming. I fell for her hook, line, and sinker. She claimed to have an MBA from Fordham, which, I found out later, was bogus, but even without that degree, she knew way more about accounting than I did. After we were married, she was only too happy to take over the bookkeeping and accounting jobs at the restaurant. That’s how she met Rick Austin. He was my financial advisor and also my best friend.

“Once they hooked up, the two of them managed to drain my bank accounts—all of them. The first I knew anything at all about it was when I wrote a check to pay the next month’s rent on the restaurant, and the damned thing bounced. That’s about the time both the IRS and the Illinois tax collectors came calling. Even though I had dutifully signed all the tax forms Faith handed me every year, she hadn’t bothered to file them, or to send along the taxes that were due, either.

“By the time I wised up, she had slapped me with a restraining order so I couldn’t even go home to get my clothes, couldn’t even get into the building to get my car. It was February in Chicago. I had no vehicle, no money, no working credit cards, and the tax men breathing down my neck. Fortunately, I was wearing the sheepskin coat I had bought two years earlier when we went to Vail on vacation. I ended up walking to the building where my former maitre d’ lived and crashed on his couch.”

“So after she wiped you out like that, I take it you hit her?” Jamison asked. “You were violent?”

“I was not,” I replied hotly, feeling my blood start to boil all over again. “I never so much as raised a hand to the woman, not once, but that didn’t keep her from claiming I had. She went crying to a local domestic violence shelter with some cock-and-bull story about how I had beaten the crap out of her. They helped her do the paperwork to take out a restraining order and helped her find a shark of an attorney to come after me. I ended up being ordered to pay five thousand a month in temporary support while she and Rick got to stay on in our condo. Of course, with the restaurant shuttered, I couldn’t make the support payments. That’s when she had me served with papers taking me to court for nonpayment.”

“What did you do?”

“The night I got served was the night I hit bottom. I was completely busted. I had gone from having everything to having less than nothing, and here she was threatening to take me to court for not sending her monthly support checks? What kind of deal is that? To drown my sorrows, I drank far too much of my former maitre d’s easily accessible booze and very nearly threw myself off his balcony. Ten stories up would have been more than enough to do the job. Luckily for me, I passed out before I could make it happen.

“The next morning, I woke up with a terrible hangover to the sound of a ringing telephone. Grandma Hudson always claimed to be psychic, and maybe she was, because she called me that morning when I was at my lowest ebb. When I had nowhere else to turn, she offered me a lifeline. She told me to wipe the slate clean—to put it all behind me, come to Arizona, and start over. I think it’s the best advice anyone has ever given me.”

“So that’s what you did?” Jamison asked. “You came here?”

“I left town, came to Arizona, and started over from scratch.”

“Never tried to get your money back?”

“That would have taken lawyers, and lawyers cost money, which I didn’t have. Besides, there was no point. From what I could tell, Faith and Rick had run through most of it by then anyway. Instead, I went to work with my grandmother here at the Roundhouse and lived rent free with her in the apartment upstairs. I filed bankruptcy to get out from under the credit card debt Faith had run up, but that didn’t fix my back taxes problem. Grandma Hudson found someone here in town, a retired IRS agent, who helped me cut a deal with the tax man. It took every penny I made for the first three years I was here to pay off the back taxes.

“The restaurant I’d owned before—the Uptown—had been more of a fine dining establishment. Grandma taught me the basics of running your ordinary blue-collar diner. When she died a few years later, she left the restaurant to me—lock, stock, and barrel. By the way, I’m still driving the car she left me, too—an early nineties vintage Honda with very low mileage.”

“And when’s the last time you saw Kather . . .” Jamison hesitated and then corrected himself. “When’s the last time you saw Faith?”

“The day the divorce was final—seven years ago, October thirty-first. It always seemed appropriate that we got divorced on Halloween. I was living in Arizona then, and she’s the one who filed. I flew into Chicago the morning of the court appearance and flew back out again that same night. On Halloween, I always allow myself a single trick-or-treat toast in the witch’s honor.”

“Faith maybe cleaned you out, but it looks like you landed on your feet,” Jamison suggested. “After all, you’ve got all this.”

He sent a significant glance and an all-encompassing gesture around the bar, which was starting to fill up. A group of golfers—several foursomes, boisterous, loud, and fresh from some local course—had turned up and were busily making themselves at home by ordering drinks all around, wings, and platters of nachos.

“I already told you. My grandmother owned the Roundhouse, and she left it to me when she died. You may not realize this, but inheriting a restaurant isn’t what I’d call ‘landing on my feet.’ It’s called landing in a pile of work. The whole trick about running a restaurant is making it look easy. It isn’t. It’s like that duck gliding effortlessly across the water without anyone seeing that, below the surface, he’s paddling like crazy. By the way, that weekend in Vegas was my first weekend off—my first days off—in months.”

“At the time you went there, did you know Faith was living in Las Vegas?”