Wedding Cake Killer (12 page)

Chapter 18

I
t was a
painful ride home with Eve sobbing in the backseat and Carolyn trying to comfort her. Clearly, today’s events had pushed Eve to the end of her emotional rope. She had collapsed now in the grief that overwhelmed her, grief not only because of Roy’s death but also over the way Tess Coburn had destroyed everything she’d believed about him.

If she ever found herself in such a situation, Phyllis thought, she would be just as distraught as Eve was. She wanted so badly to do something to help her friend.

But no matter what she wanted, she couldn’t change the past. Roy was what he was, and based on what Phyllis had seen so far, that wasn’t very good. But at least maybe she could prove that Eve hadn’t had anything to do with his murder.

When they got back to the house, Carolyn took Eve upstairs. Phyllis and Sam followed. Phyllis was anxious to get out of her funeral dress, and Sam had already taken off his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. Blue jeans and comfortable shirts were in the near future for both of them.

When Phyllis got back downstairs, she took some of the food that had been dropped off from the refrigerator and set it out on the counter, uncovering the bowls and casserole dishes. Sam came into the kitchen, and Phyllis nodded toward the spread and said, “Help yourself.”

“I don’t have as much of an appetite as I did, but I guess I can still eat,” he said as he got a plate from the cabinet. He started filling it.

Carolyn came in a few minutes later, still wearing the dress she had worn to the funeral. “I got her to lie down,” she said. “She dozed off quicker than I thought she would. The poor dear is just exhausted.”

“Bein’ so upset will do that to you,” Sam said from the kitchen table, where he and Phyllis were sitting.

“Would you like a plate?” Phyllis asked.

“Maybe in a few minutes,” Carolyn said. “As soon as I go get this blasted girdle off.” She blushed, clearly embarrassed that she’d been so upset she had said something that intimate in front of Sam. Phyllis could tell that he was pretending not to have noticed any of it.

The food helped. Later, they would try to get Eve to eat something, Phyllis thought. Right now, though, a nap would probably be as good for her as anything.

After Carolyn had come back downstairs, Phyllis told her, “Tess Coburn is coming by here in a little while.”

“That horrible woman? Why? Hasn’t she done enough damage already?”

“I want her to tell me everything she knows about Roy,” Phyllis said.

Carolyn shook her head. “I’m not sure why. It’ll all be a pack of lies anyway.”

“You saw that mug shot and that newspaper clipping,” Phyllis pointed out.

“So she found someone who looks a little like Roy—”

“That
was
Roy. As much as we might like to believe otherwise, we saw the pictures with our own eyes. That was Roy, Carolyn.”

For a moment, Carolyn glared across the table defiantly, as if she planned to keep denying what they all knew. But then she sighed and her shoulders slumped in resignation.

“I guess it was,” she said. She brightened suddenly. “Unless he has a twin somewhere. An evil twin.”

“A doppelganger,” Sam said. “We didn’t consider that.”

“No, because this isn’t a soap opera,” Phyllis said.

“Hey, some of ’em aren’t
that
far-fetched.”

“It was Roy,” Phyllis forged ahead, “and I want to know as much about his past as I can. That has to be where the key to his murder is.”

“You’re right about that,” Carolyn said. “Since he’s been here in Weatherford, nothing has happened that would cause someone to want him dead.”

Phyllis tended to agree with that, yet she didn’t know it for sure, she reminded herself. Roy had spent most of his time with Eve since coming to Weatherford, and Eve hadn’t mentioned any incidents that might have led to murder. But they hadn’t been together twenty-four hours a day, and Phyllis had no idea what Roy might have been doing when he wasn’t with Eve. That might be something else to look into.

First things first, though, and that meant the private investigator Tess Coburn. Would Tess be willing to reveal who had hired her to track down Roy, or would that be considered a breach of ethics? Phyllis didn’t know, not having had many dealings with private investigators.

Sam stood up and said, “I’m gonna go wait for Ms. Coburn in the livin’ room. I can keep an eye out through the front window. We don’t want her ringin’ the bell. That might wake up Eve.”

“Yes, whatever we do, we don’t want Eve to know that woman has been here,” Carolyn said. Her expression made it clear that she still thought inviting Tess to the house was a bad idea.

After Sam had left the kitchen, Carolyn picked up her plate, which was still half-full of food, and said, “I think I’ll go upstairs to finish this, if that’s all right with you.”

“Of course it is,” Phyllis said. She understood why Carolyn was angry. But she was confident that once Carolyn thought it over, she would realize how important it was to learn as much as they could about Roy’s background.

Phyllis put the rest of the food away. The refrigerator was full. They would be able to make meals from what was left for several more days. She wasn’t sure how it was in other parts of the country, but in Texas, food went hand in hand with funerals, especially where Baptists were concerned.

Because hunger reminded people they were still alive, she mused, and so did satisfying that hunger.

She had just closed the refrigerator door when Sam called quietly from the hallway, “She’s here.”

Phyllis hurried into the hall and said, “Can you get the door?”

“You bet,” Sam said. He went to it and opened it before Tess could ring the bell.

“Thank you,” she said as she came in.

“I’ll take your coat,” he offered.

She nodded, said, “Thanks,” again, and took off the long brown coat, revealing that she wore brown slacks and a tan blouse underneath it. She handed the coat to Sam.

“Eve’s upstairs asleep, so we won’t disturb her. You can put your purse on that table,” Phyllis said, nodding toward the small table in the foyer.

“Thanks, I’ll keep it with me,” Tess said.

“Fine,” Phyllis said. She wondered if Tess had a gun in her bag. She was a private eye, after all. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, iced tea?”

Whether she liked Tess Coburn or not, she wasn’t going to be inhospitable.

“We’ve got soft drinks, too,” Sam added.

“A Diet Coke would be good, thanks,” Tess said.

“Be right back with it,” Sam said.

“Have you eaten lunch already?” Phyllis asked. “We have plenty of food. People have been dropping off covered dishes ever since . . . well . . .”

Tess smiled and nodded. “I know what you mean. And yes, I’ve eaten, but thanks anyway. What I’d really like to do is get down to business. You want to know about the man you knew as Roy Porter.”

“Can’t we go ahead and call him by that name?” Phyllis asked as she ushered Tess into the living room. “That’s the only name we ever knew him by.”

“Sure, I don’t see why not. It’ll certainly simplify matters, since he’s had at least a dozen names over the years. And those are just the ones I know about. There’s no telling how many more aliases he used.”

Sam came in with a can of Diet Coke. “You want a glass and some ice . . . ?”

“No, that’s fine,” Tess said as she took it from him.

Phyllis waved to the armchair directly across from the sofa and said, “Have a seat.” She and Sam settled on the sofa facing the visitor.

Tess took a sip from the can and then set it on a coaster on the small table next to her chair. “So, Roy Porter,” she said. “If you don’t mind me asking a question first, what did he tell you about his background?”

“Well, he said he was from Houston,” Phyllis replied, “and that he was semiretired from a company that does consulting work for the oil and gas industry. He claimed he was able to handle all his jobs on the computer, so it didn’t matter where he lived.”

“He said he was a widower, too,” Sam added. “He was married to a woman named Julie who sold real estate down there. But she died a while back.”

Tess nodded. “If you were to look up any of that online, I’d be willing to bet that the company he mentioned really does exist. Also, I know that there was a real estate agent in Houston named Julie Porter who was married to a man named Roy until she died. But Roy’s dead, too, and I’m not talking about the one who was buried today. The real one died sixteen months ago, which probably wasn’t very long before your friend Eve met the fake Roy online. That
is
the way they met, isn’t it?”

Phyllis nodded. “On the Facebook,” she said, quoting what Eve had told them.

“The Internet has certainly made life easier for the con men and swindlers, and I’m not just talking about the Nigerian princes,” Tess said. “Before that, men like Roy had to find their victims through correspondence or actually go out and meet them through singles’ clubs and things like that.”

“Roy was good on the computer,” Sam said. “A real whiz compared to fellas like me.”

“I don’t doubt it. He would have had to be good to create all the false identities he did. It never seemed to take him long to find a dead man who would have been about the same age and general description that he was. My theory is that he was able to hack into various databases and create new Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, and things like that to match whatever new identity he was adopting. I’ll give him credit: You don’t find too many people his age—no offense—who are so proficient with computers.”

“Yeah, he had good Google-fu,” Sam agreed. “How did you get onto him?”

Tess smiled. “I have pretty good Google-fu myself. I wrote a program to cross-reference the Social Security death index with new applications for those documents I was talking about. Most of the hits were simple, innocent cases of similar or even identical names, but there were enough matching parameters in some of them to prompt a deeper search. I put together a list of possibles and then did on-site investigations. That allowed me to come up with a fairly complete history of Roy Porter, as we’re calling him.”

Phyllis frowned and said, “I thought private detectives shadowed people.”

“That’s what I was doing,” Tess said, “only I was doing it with technology. By the time I had boots on the ground anywhere, Roy was already long gone, of course, but I was able to talk to some of the people who had crossed paths with him, usually to their great regret. He left a trail of broken hearts and empty bank accounts behind him.”

Phyllis leaned back against the sofa cushions and shook her head. It was so hard to believe that the Roy they had known was this manipulative criminal genius Tess was describing. And yet, to do the things she claimed he had done, he would have had to be a master of getting people to like him and trust him.

“You have actual evidence of all these previous identities you say he had?”

Tess nodded. “Photos, copies of marriage licenses and bank records, newspaper clippings like the one I showed you . . . Most of the women were fairly involved with the society scene where they lived, since they were all well-to-do. I can document seventeen different cases of fraud and embezzlement over the past twenty years, stretching from Florida to Maine to Colorado.”

“You happen to know what the fella’s real name was?” Sam asked.

Tess shook her head. “I was never able to uncover that. He seems to have surfaced for the first time in Virginia. But he was in his forties at the time, so either he had a long career as a swindler before that and managed to cover his tracks completely, or else he took up the game rather late in life. Now that he’s dead, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the answer.”

“That’s a shame. I’d like to know what would prompt a fella to do things like that.”

“So would I, Mr. Fletcher.” Tess shrugged. “But in my business, sometimes you have to settle for knowing what happened and try not to worry about the why.”

“Speaking of your business,” Phyllis said, “could you tell us who hired you? I’m assuming it was one of the women who Roy bilked out of their money. Not all their money, of course, or else they wouldn’t have been able to hire someone as competent as you seem to be.”

Tess smiled and said, “Thanks. That’s a good deduction on your part, Mrs. Newsom. Unfortunately, the identity of my client is confidential, but I can say that in general terms, you’re right. As a matter of fact, I’ve been working for more than one of Roy’s victims. As you can imagine, there’s a long line of people who’d like to see him brought to justice.”

“Who’d like to get even with him, you mean,” Sam said.

“You could call it that,” Tess admitted. “Now, of course, they’re out of luck. Although they may take some satisfaction out of knowing that he’s dead.”

“I would think some of them might take a great deal of satisfaction out of that,” Phyllis said.

Tess took another drink of her Diet Coke and asked, “Is there anything else I can tell you?”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll prepare reports for all my clients. In fact, I’ll probably send e-mails even to the ones who didn’t hire me, just so they’ll know what happened. I think they have a right to know, too, don’t you?”