Tree of Life and Death (11 page)

"I'm just saying." Faria underlined something in his notes. "You're editorializing."

"I know the difference between a statement of fact and an opinion." I'd prepared enough witnesses on that issue. "So. Just the facts. It was no more than forty minutes between seeing him leave here and hearing the screams. I ran outside with Matt Viera. I saw Sunny and then saw the body on the ground. There was a great deal of blood, and Alan wasn't moving."

"That's better," Faria said. "Where were you between the time the victim left and the time you heard the screams?"

"Right here, doing appraisals and then mingling with the other volunteers." I pointed over my shoulder and a bit to the right. "If you want an alibi, check with Dee Madison, Emma Quinn, and Matt Viera."

"Emma Quinn? Isn't she the old biddy with a rap sheet? Suspected of murdering Randall Tremain?"

"She has a criminal record for shoplifting." I swallowed my irritation and kept my voice even. "You'll recall, however, that she did not have anything to do with Randall Tremain's murder, and she was gracious enough not to sue the town for false arrest."

"We had reasonable cause," he said defensively.

"Perhaps," I said. "And now that you've got my name and contact information, I think we're done."

Faria clearly wanted to ask me more questions, but he had to know he'd gone quite a few steps beyond his actual authority. He hesitated, probably weighing how much of a fuss I was likely to make if he pushed me any further and whether I might get him pulled off this assignment completely.

"If that's how you want to play it," he said, "it's fine with me. For now, just stay in this room and don't talk about the incident with any of the other witnesses. Wouldn't want anyone's memory being altered."

Too late for that, I thought. Except he'd been the one giving me information instead of the other way around. Not that I'd learned anything truly useful talking to the various quilters. No one seemed to know anything about the murder. After all, the assault had happened outside, and there were no windows overlooking the parking lot. It was entirely possible that the only person who had seen anything useful for figuring out who had killed Alan was the killer herself, and she certainly wasn't going to admit to that knowledge.

I stood up and saw that Carl had escorted ten of the quilters over to the chairs along the wall, where people had waited much more happily for their appraisals earlier. Carl stood at the front of the line, leaning against the wall. His dog came over and nudged him. Carl unhooked his water bottle, went to take a drink, only to shake it, apparently surprised to find it was empty. He patted the dog's head and murmured what I thought was "in a minute," and then resumed chatting quietly with Trudy, who was seated in the first chair.

Despite Carl's attempts to keep Trudy calm, she looked terrified, and her face had turned red again, this time with anxiety, I thought, rather than embarrassment. If I weren't a witness of sorts myself, and even a potential suspect until someone confirmed my alibi, I'd have been tempted to whisper something reassuring into Trudy's ear. In the circumstances though, all I could do was smile encouragingly.

I needed to talk to Ohlsen before Trudy fell under Faria's influence. Carl already knew about Alan's history, so he'd be safe enough as the next person to be interviewed. That would give me time to find Fred and get a leash placed on Faria. "Are you going to interview Carl next?"

Faria laughed, clearly amused by the foolishness of an amateur like me. "I know how to get in touch with Carl, and it's obvious he's got nothing to tell me about what happened, or he would have done it already."

If it had been Detective Ohlsen who was that dismissive of interviewing Carl, I'd have mentioned what I knew about the verbal altercation I'd witnessed and the threat that Jayne had told me about. Faria, however, didn't need to know that information, and it wasn't my responsibility to teach him how to be a detective. Instead, I needed to find a way to have a chat with Ohlsen before Faria did too much damage to the investigation. Fred would be able to arrange it.

"If you're done with me, I'd like to go see what's happening with our lunch delivery."

"Sure, sure." Faria gestured for Trudy to take my seat.

Carl dropped into Trudy's vacated chair. As I approached him, I noticed that his dog was whining, and he had the stuffed blue nylon tube in his mouth, instead of hanging loose from his collar.

"Oh, hell," Carl said just before he slid out of his chair, hitting his head on the wood floor with a solid thump.

I hadn't realized that Sunny and Stefan had returned to the boardroom while I'd had my back to the doors, but Sunny was kneeling beside the unconscious Carl before I recovered enough from my surprise to be able to move. She sent Stefan off to see if anyone had a hard candy in her purse and snapped at Faria to call 9-1-1 for an ambulance, with instructions to tell the dispatcher that the victim appeared to be having some kind of diabetic event.

She had the situation under control, so I stayed out of the way, returning to the desk to stand beside Trudy. I'd been on the receiving end of well-intentioned but clueless attention after a few of my syncope events, so I knew better than to try to help.

One good thing came out of Carl's passing out: Richie Faria was too busy dealing with the crisis to interrogate Trudy. On the other hand, Trudy was so pale, I thought she might be the next one to pass out.

"Is he going to be okay?" Trudy asked me. "He was so kind to me."

"Help is on the way, and until then, Sunny is a nurse, so she knows what to do." Even as I spoke, the paramedics came trotting through the door. I went around the desk to where Faria had left his notepad, and sat across from Trudy. The dog had dropped the blue nylon tube and was hunkered down next to his master's head, but I thought he seemed less frantic than before. "Drag your chair over here with me, and you can keep an eye on things without being in the way."

Trudy plopped down next to me, and we watched as Carl regained consciousness and the paramedics wrapped a blood pressure cuff on his arm and asked him a bunch of questions. His responses were groggy but coherent. I recognized from my own experiences the moment when he became fully aware that he was the center of all sorts of unwanted attention. He struggled to sit up, while the paramedics insisted that he remain lying still until they'd finished their tests. I recognized that little
pas de deux
too. The lawyer in me understood that the paramedics needed to be sure there wouldn't be a relapse, but the patient in me cringed at the self-conscious helplessness Carl had to feel. It had to be even worse for him than for me, because of his masculine ego and a lifetime of relying on his physical strength. I wasn't a weakling, but my self-image had always been more connected to the strength of my brain than to the strength of my body.

Carl insisted he was fine and claimed that Rusty's having dropped the bringsel—so that was what that blue nylon tube hanging from the dog's collar was called—indicated that there was nothing seriously wrong with him now. He'd just become dehydrated, or possibly his blood sugar had dropped too far, and the candy that Sunny had given him had taken care of the problem.

"Better safe than sorry," the overly perky blonde paramedic, who looked to be about twelve years old, said. That sort of cheerful but implacable insistence might have worked on some patients, but I had a feeling that Carl saw her as I would have: an annoying housefly buzzing around his head. Only his lifelong commitment to law and order was keeping him from swatting her away.

Trudy stood. "It's all right, Carl. You should go get checked out. I'll be fine without you here. I'll be strong for you."

Trudy still looked pale, and I thought worrying about Carl was upsetting her more than the possibility of being interrogated by the police. Apparently Carl thought so too, because he nodded begrudgingly. "All right. But only if Rusty here can ride in the ambulance with me."

*   *   *

I still needed to talk to Detective Ohlsen, but I couldn't leave to find him until I was confident Faria wouldn't traumatize Trudy. The last thing we needed right now was another person passing out.

I decided to stick around and keep an eye on Trudy until Faria was done with her. I gave up my seat behind the desk to take Carl's spot leaning against the wall at the front of the line, where I could listen to the interrogation. Trudy took her chair back to the other side just in time for Faria to return and resume his duties. Carl's incident appeared to have dimmed Faria's enthusiasm for his work though, since he limited his questions to the basic ones he'd been assigned to do, instead of trying to do real detective work. I couldn't be sure whether it was just because he assumed Trudy was an airhead, or if he had truly reformed. I still needed to have a chat with Ohlsen about reining Faria in.

Once Faria let Trudy leave the hot seat, I turned to observe the rest of the room. The mood was even more somber now than it had been immediately after Alan's death. Gil was holding nervous hands, patting shoulders, and occasionally providing the vocals for the music in the background. I wasn't sure when she'd left to take care of it, but at some point, she'd replaced this morning's upbeat music with more somber instrumental music, like the classic orchestral version of "Silent Night," which was playing now.

Gil must have felt me looking at her. She gestured for me to follow her over to the door, where we could talk somewhat privately.

That was where I was headed anyway, since I was hoping I could catch sight of Fred from there. I crossed the room and managed a quick peek out into the deserted hallway before Gil bent down to whisper, "I'm so sorry you got dragged into this. But I'm also glad you're here. I can count on you to help me keep everyone from panicking."

"It's probably too late for that." I glanced at where Trudy was huddled behind the sewing machine Carl had been using earlier. She was patting the top of the sewing machine, as if reassuring it that Carl would return to operate it again.

The anxious edge to Gil's voice reclaimed my full attention. "They're all looking to me for answers, and I don't know what to tell them. My business school instructors didn't teach us anything about police investigations. The legal classes I took were all focused on things like contracts and intellectual property, not murder."

I wished I could offer some reassurance, but I was outside my comfort zone too. "The only thing I know about dealing with detectives is that if you're going to talk to them, it's best to tell the truth, and if you can't do that without incriminating yourself, you should refuse to say anything at all until your lawyer is seated next to you. I imagine everyone knows that much these days, just from watching television."

"I wonder if I should get a lawyer before I talk to the detective," Gil said.

"I'd never tell anyone not to get a lawyer, but I can't see why anyone would think you might have killed Alan."

"I'm not worried about that." Gil pulled me just outside the room into the hallway, where we were less likely to be overheard. "For at least half an hour before Sunny screamed, I was down in the museum's lobby, dealing with a visitor who had some questions the staff couldn't answer. One of the museum's security guards was with me the whole time, and the interior cameras are working, so it will be easy to prove that I wasn't anywhere near the parking lot at the time of the murder."

"Then why are you worried?"

"This is privileged, right?" She peered back into the boardroom until she was apparently reassured that no one was within earshot and then turned to me again. "I'm saying this to you as a lawyer."

"Of course." I was still licensed, even if I didn't have an active practice. And I wanted to know what Gil was so worried about. "Is it about the cameras? Are you thinking about the museum's potential civil liability for not having the cameras working out back?"

"Exactly," Gil said. "The detectives have probably already gone to the control room and found that the exterior cameras aren't working, but I'd rather not discuss it with them until I've gotten legal advice."

"That's understandable. Detective Ohlsen knows better than to keep asking questions after someone's requested legal representation, and I'm pretty sure Faria doesn't have the authority to collect anything except names and addresses, so you can be even more emphatic with him."

"I just hope it will turn out that the murder didn't have anything to do with the museum or the lack of video surveillance. People should feel safe when they come here, and I've been trying to convince the board to take security more seriously."

"I'm not sure what else you can do," I said. "You do have video surveillance usually, there's security staff inside the building, and patrol cops like Fred Fields maintain a solid presence all along Main Street."

"Still, there must be something more we could do. You'd be amazed how much petty crime goes on, even in a little town like this. Not committed by the local residents usually, and not even by most of the visitors, but wherever there are tourists, there are pickpockets and people trying to steal identities. We've had a few visitors report that their wallet was stolen while they were here, but we couldn't find any evidence of it on our cameras. It might have happened before the visitors came in here, and they just didn't realize it until they went to buy something in the museum shop, especially if they'd prepaid their admission tickets online."

That definitely changed the cheerful, positive image I'd had of the holiday-shopping tourists I'd passed on the way to the museum. Now it felt like the dangers that had given rise to the town's name had moved inland. Unwary shoppers could fall victim not to eddies, rocks, and sharks but to pickpockets, thugs, and killers.

Was it possible that criminals were specifically stalking the museum's patrons? The stolen wallets could have been due to criminals lurking outside the building, possibly even in the parking lot. In that case, then maybe the police theory of what had happened today was right. Alan could have bumped into a less-than-savory friend outside, someone other than the person giving him a ride, only to have a falling-out that had ended in murder. That would explain why Alan had been way over in the corner of the parking lot instead of out front on the sidewalk. If he'd been conspiring with a criminal, they wouldn't have wanted to be in plain sight of anyone who might be walking or driving past the museum.