The Tell-Tale Con (7 page)

Harrison put the car into park next to a shiny Jeep that looked like the farthest off road it had ever been was the dirt driveway.  Which was likely pretty horrible to traverse once winter set in.  You'd think with all the money these people had, they'd pave the road.  Or at least throw some pebbles down to help with traction and cut down on mud. 

“That's Nate's car.”  He pointed to the Jeep like he might have been talking about some other car and it needed a descriptor.  I glanced around to be sure, but it was definitely the only car. 

“Well, then.  Let's do this thing.”  I released the seatbelt and hopped out.  It was windy and cold up here on top of the mountain, but the sun was bright and warm, and it smelled like pine trees and deliciously cool air. 

Harrison climbed out and took a moment to zip up his jacket before we approached the door.  I didn't think he was cold.  I thought he was stalling.  It was no business of mine how he chose to deal with his issues, but I would have burst into the house and punched Nestor in the face. 

The front door was, not surprisingly, made of glass, streak free and gleaming in the mid-morning sun.  I couldn't see a lock mechanism.  Maybe, in addition to not caring about being seen streaking by the neighbors, people in the mountains didn't worry about locking up.  Harrison hit the doorbell located to the right of the doorframe, and it chimed cheerfully, sounding like someone playing elevator music on a pan flute, part two. 

No one answered.  My fingertips were starting to freeze, so I put my hands in my pockets.  It was cold up here.  While we waited I asked, “What are you going to say?”

Harrison shrugged.  “I don't know.  I guess I'll play it cool to start.  Ask him if he remembers the whole demon thing from the party or the fair.  Maybe he'll just come clean and say it was a prank without me having to say anything at all.  Nate's pretty bad with the pranks.  His parents took away his car when he wouldn't stop pranking his dad.  So mostly he's stopped now.” 

When we stood there for another long second with no response, Harrison pushed the doorbell again.  I could hear the song floating through the house.  One would have thought that inside it would have been louder, but Nate didn't coming running.  Maybe he didn't want to talk to Harrison.  Or maybe he just didn't want to lose his Jeep again for pulling the demon prank. 

Sighing, Harrison pulled his keys from the pocket of his jacket, an enormous jumble of metal, and sorted through it until he found the key he desired.  He moved to the side of the door, and inserted the key into a lock that was so tiny and unobtrusive that I hadn't seen it.  For such a small locking mechanism, it sure made a loud noise, clanking like prison doors when Harrison turned it.  He pulled on the right side of the double doors, sliding it back into the wall.  A pocket door.  Well, sure.  Why not?  If you live up in the mountains, without fear of wild animals or indecent exposure, then why not have glass pocket doors? 

Why was I not rich?  I would find something to do with all that money that wasn't this stupid.  Inside, the entire bottom floor was open to our view.  Not a single dividing wall that I could see, except for a small partitioned area in the corner that was most likely a second bathroom.  It was like an ocean of cedar.  Everywhere.  And all the furniture was made out of logs.  The bedrooms were above us on the second level, which curved around the main living area and disappeared back into the house, because no one wanted the process of sleeping to stop them from having twenty-six foot ceilings. 

“Nate?”  Harrison's shoes squeaked against the uber polished wood as he moved into the center of the living room.  There was no answer.  I understood wanting to hide from your family, but this was a little ridiculous.  Especially since for all Nate knew, Harrison was there to say hello. 

Discomfort crept over me, making my skin itch.  It was a feeling I'd learned to trust over the years.  Nate's house was creeping me out.  “Harrison…”

He didn't respond to the caution in my voice.  Instead, he moved farther into the house, heading towards the kitchen.  Everything was open concept in the house, but there were areas I couldn't see because of furniture or because of kitchen built-ins, like the island.  Harrison stopped where he could see into the kitchen, but I still couldn't.  My eyes were on the door, and his were on the floor.  When I looked back his way he still hadn't moved.  He was standing there, staring.  The prickling of my skin got worse. 

“Harrison?” 

He didn't respond.  Just stood there, staring down.  Against my better judgment, I crossed the room, knowing the whole time that I was going to be sorry. 

He didn't raise his eyes, even when we were practically touching.  Then I kind of wished we were touching, just because I could have used the physical comfort.  I pretended to be unaffected by the world, and generally I was, but I'd never seen a dead person before.  I wished I could have continued that trend. 

It wasn't clear to me how the guy on the kitchen floor behind the island had died, but he was definitely all kinds of dead.  He was lying, twisty-limbed, in a big puddle of blood that almost blended into the dark wood floor.  From my vantage point, I couldn't tell where he was injured.  Until I saw the pinpoint entry wound in his black button up polo.  He'd been shot in the heart. 

Young, maybe twentyish, he looked like he'd otherwise been healthy.  Before the gun and all.  “Nate?”

Harrison nodded, his head barely moving.  “Nate.”

 

 

 

Rules of the scam #50

Know when to get out…

 

I'd spent a lifetime avoiding the police, and as a result I always felt vaguely like I'd done something wrong, even if I wasn't doing anything at all.  If I was at 7-11 buying a Slurpee and a cop came in, I spent the rest of my time in the store staring furtively like I was debating a major heist when really I was looking for some corn chips.  It had only gotten worse since Dad had been caught selling insurance that didn't actually exist to old people in Pasadena. 

But there was no avoiding the police in a case like this.  Harrison had to call them.  Then he had to call his aunt and uncle, who, it would seem, were out of town.  I didn't envy him.  In fact, I felt sorry for him.  Which was something I certainly wouldn't have admitted.  I didn't think he'd appreciate it anyway, and sympathy wasn't my deal. 

I just tried to stay out of the way when the police showed up and more out of the way when Harrison's grandparents showed up, frantic and hysterical.  I felt bad for them, too.  Their grief appeared to be genuine, while Harrison seemed to be in a daze, unaware of what was going on around him. 

The police questioned me briefly, but after corroborating Harrison's statement about how we'd gotten here and found the body, they ignored me.  I heard Harrison tell the police that he had something he'd wanted to return to Nate and that's why were here.  Which was, in a way, perfectly true. 

There were cops everywhere, but it didn't take me all that long to peg the two that were in charge.  An enormous Pacific Islander type with a mustache that belonged on a bad detective show and a very small woman in her mid-40's with a perm that was much too curly.  They moved around the house with authority, picking through Nate's things. 

I realized, after perhaps fifteen minutes, that no one was paying any attention to me at all.  And really, I mean no one.  I hadn't been glanced at in forever.  So I started moving around the perimeter of the room, watching to see what the myriad cops would do.  Still no one paid any attention to my actions.  I decided to see what would happen if I left the room.  I wandered into the partitioned off bathroom area and glanced around.  There was an office too. 

No one yelled at me so I stayed back there.  This area of the house was much more interesting than the open area.  In the office, there were pictures of Nate's family.  He had a sister, older from the look of the pictures.  I would have known from Harrison's grandparents anyway, but being in the room full of pictures made it relatively obvious why Harrison looked so different from Van Poe. 

His mother's side of the family was East Indian.  When I had considered his obvious multicultural background, East Indian had never crossed my mind.  For good reason.  I'd only been in New Mexico for a few months, but I'd never, once, seen a person of Indian origin.  Even the Indian food grocery next door to Mr. Wong's was owned by a Hispanic guy named Moe. 

I discovered that Harrison's uncle, Balveer Malhotra, worked for Sandia Labs, which a lot of people around here did.  But he was also the president of some kind of organization for people who made ceramics as a profession.  I had no idea what he made from ceramics.  All I could picture were those places where you could paint your own unicorn statue. 

The office was extremely tidy and filled with books about everything from design to animal husbandry to quantum physics.  Maybe this room wasn't only used by Balveer Malhotra.  Maybe it belonged to the whole family.  And that meant some of this stuff was probably Nate's. 

I took a pen from my purse and poked around on the desk a little, pushing papers around.  They were stacked in neat piles, and the police might notice if I rifled too much, so I moved a few papers, mostly bank statements and financial documents, that sort of thing.  Harrison's name caught my eye, so I risked moving a pile to the right.  Disappointment flared when I saw it was just a piece of paper where someone had jotted, in bad handwriting, their bank account numbers.  Someone named C.A. Harrison had given the author twelve thousand dollars. 

In a house like this, that kind of money changing hands was no big whoop.  I read up the page and saw that the author was Nate.  No one who kept an office this organized was going to keep their accounts that way.  I pushed again and spotted a checkbook that belonged to Nathaniel Malhotra.  A glance at the checkbook revealed that his account was at a local bank with an account number that was ridiculously easy to remember.  He should have been more careful with that checkbook.  Nate had a bipolar checking account.  It was up and down sporadically, though typically more down than up. 

He got most of his money from his father, something I knew because his snazzy accounting system included large sums of money with plus symbols next to them and the word ‘Dad' tacked on at the end.  But wherever he got his money aside, Nate had serious issues hanging on to a dollar.  He took out large cash withdrawals with alarming regularity.  As a person more familiar with the dirtier underbelly of the world we lived in, that suggested to me that Nate was into something like drugs or gambling.  But what did I know?  Maybe he liked kitten figurines and spent hundreds a month adding to his collection.

Either way, it wasn't mine to figure out.  The police would gravitate here when they stopped toying with the body and started looking for other kinds of evidence.  I was no cop, and I had no real desire to find out why Nate had been killed.  I pushed the papers back into order and noticed that the computer was on and the massive Mac screen, like the size of me, was actually on, but asleep.  Nate's family wasn't home.  If anyone had been on here it would have been Nate before he was killed. 

I
accidentally
bumped the mouse with the end of my pen and waited impatiently for the screen to wake up.  The police were going to find their job too easy this time, I suspected.  The page that came up was a calendar, no doubt Nate's since it couldn't reasonably be anyone else's since no one else was in town.  There, filled in for this morning, right before we'd arrived, was an appointment.  Nate had done the police's job for them.  All they had to do was figure out who C.A. was, and they were good. 

Whoa.  Wait.  C.A.  I had seen that.  I pushed the papers aside again and found Nate's bank info.  What if twelve thousand dollars from C.A. Harrison was actually twelve thousand dollars from C.A., for the purpose of demon-hunting Harrison?  

I took a deep breath, mentally added another tally mark to the list of reasons I'd someday be going to hell, and snatched Nate's drivers license off the desk, shoving it deep in the pocket of my jeans. 

When I came back out into the living room, the police were talking to Harrison's grandmother, who was weeping as she answered.  I heard her tell the male detective that she'd seen Nate just that morning. 

"When was this?" the detective asked her.

She sniffed.  "I don't know.  8:00 maybe?"

He jotted that information down, and I made mental note of it.  If she'd been with him as late as 8:00, and we'd arrived two hours later, that didn't leave a big window of opportunity for whoever had killed him.  

The detective finished with her, and I watched Harrison say goodbye to his grandparents.  I couldn't hear what he was saying because he stood too far away and spoke only in whispers, but his expression and body language spoke of sympathy and kindness.  He was being a good grandson. 

The female detective with the crazy hair pinned me, suddenly, with an icy glare.  She crossed the room to me.  “What did you say your relationship to the victim was, again?”

I evaluated what take would work best with her.  The truth, most likely, since I hadn't done anything wrong.  “I didn't have one.  I'm Harrison's friend.  Nate's cousin, I mean.”  I indicated to Harrison where he still stood with his grandparents.

“We
will
be calling you to ask a few more questions.”  Her voice was hard and brooked no argument.  Which was why I was surprised when she asked, “Is that okay with you?”

No.  It most certainly was not okay with me.

I flashed her a benign smile.  “Of course.”

Her eyes narrowed, but she didn't say anything else.