Weddings Can Be Murder (17 page)

“Would the listing be a Ralph Van Horn on
Tanoan Drive?”

“It’s gotta be.” I wrote down the address he
gave me. I miss the old days of carrying a phone directory in my
car, since I’m still not great at finding everything in the world
on my cell phone.

Rather than risk a rebuff over the phone
from the woman known to be a “pill” I decided to head that
direction and take my chances at her front door. I negotiated my
way out of the shopping center’s parking maze and stuck to major
streets, heading east on Academy to Tanoan’s residential entrance.
A man stepped out of the guard house, asking my name and my reason
for being there. I was afraid he would phone the Van Horns to be
sure I had an appointment, but he just wrote something on his
clipboard and let me through.

I followed the winding road where dozens of
manor houses sit snugly near their fellow McMansions. Seems any of
them would be more comfortable with a little acreage on which to
breathe rather than standard city lots. But that’s just my take on
it. The address numbers led me around two curves before I came to
the Van Horn place, a Spanish colonial reminiscent of those I’d
seen in old Hollywood movies where stars of the ’30s lived. I
wouldn’t say it exactly fit with its modern, boxy neighbors but it
had a lot more character.

The beveled-glass door was answered by a
woman in her late seventies who stood a smidge over five feet, even
with her elegant peach-hued French roll and modestly high heels.
Even at home, here she was in her Chanel suit and double strand of
pearls.

“Oh my, yes, we know Victoria,” she said
when I gave the quick reason for my visit. “Ralph and I adore her.
Do come inside.” And here I’d been worried about getting an earful
about sofa fabric.

Ida didn’t seem like much of a stinker to
me. Another way in which Ms. Fields and my perceptions
differed.

“We’re just having a little happy hour,” she
said, picking up her highball glass from the console table near the
front door and leading me through nicely proportioned rooms with
Saltillo tile and thick area rugs.

“Ralph, we have a guest. Make her a drink.”
Maybe the prickly personality had drowned in that glass.

She turned to me as we entered a solarium
with a bar across one end of the room. “What would you like,
dear?”

With my recent consumption of both tea and
coffee I already felt as if my teeth would float, but I agreed to a
small glass of sherry. Ida’s own glass contained a martini and
Ralph topped it off for her with a heavy dose from a shaker.

I begged use of the powder room before I
picked up my glass, returned five minutes later and took a seat in
the chair they offered, a blocky thing that was far too deep and
soft.

“As I mentioned, I’m Victoria Morgan’s
sister-in-law—well, I would have been as of Saturday.”

“Oh, dear, I imagine your family is worried
sick.”

“Yes, we are. My brother and I are trying to
find out if there’s anything we don’t already know about how
Victoria spent the past few days, anything that might have been
worrying her, something she might not have wanted to trouble us
with. Really, almost anything could be a clue for us.”

She gave me a slightly blank look. I’d
better phrase this more directly.

“When was the last time you saw
Victoria?”

“Oh, well, I guess that would have been last
Wednesday or Thursday. She was supposed to have some fabric for me
but it didn’t come in. I guess she wanted to give me the news in
person because she stopped by. It was right after my tennis lesson,
so that would have been Wednesday morning.”

“Did she talk about anything other than your
decorating job? Maybe mention a phone call or anything?”

Ida shook her head. “She talked a little
about the wedding. I had already told her Ralph had other plans
that day.” She took a hefty slug of the new martini. “Now that I
think about it, she did receive a phone call while she was here.
Normally, she’ll ignore the phone when she’s with me. She’s the
most polite young woman.”

From behind his whiskey glass, Ralph
nodded.

“Did she do that—ignore the call?” I
asked.

“Well, I had gone off to the kitchen. She
was in the salon, measuring for the new drapes, so I guess she knew
I didn’t need her right that minute. I heard the phone, then I
heard her speaking. It didn’t last long. Less than a minute.”

“Did you hear what was said?”

She gave me a long look. “I don’t
eavesdrop.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that. I thought maybe you
walked into the room or something and might remember.”

“Well, I was passing by the door. I heard
her ask ‘Who did you say this is?’ and then she got kind of short
with him. Said ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ and hung
up. When I went in there she was rummaging through her purse and
came up with a pen. She jotted down a name.”

I wondered if whatever she’d written the
name on was still in the purse. Not that it would do me a lot of
good since the police had it now.

“I asked her if everything was all right,”
Ida said. “She seemed very distracted after that.”

“You said she got short with
him
on
the phone. Are you sure it was a man?”

“Oh yes, she told me that. She said ‘That
was odd, some older man. I’m sure I’ve never heard of him before.’
Then she put the pen and paper away and went back to the
measurements.”

“And she was distracted?”

“Definitely. She had to measure three times
and then she went off and left her tape measure here. I still have
it, if you want to take it back.”

If only the forgotten item had been the
phone itself. It could have given us a world of information.

* * *

I got back to the office to find Ron dozing
at his desk. Sally would have left at one o’clock. Freckles danced
in my path as I made my way through the rooms. She was more than
ready to have her dinner.

“We should go home,” I told him. “Maybe stop
at Pedro’s on the way.”

He admitted he’d spent most of the afternoon
staring at Victoria’s computer screen without gleaning any solid
information. This is not like my brother.

“I don’t want to face those microphones
again,” he said. His face and posture seemed ragged.

“Maybe they’re gone by now.”

But when we switched on the office TV it was
still the top story in Albuquerque and had now made the national
networks as well. I could only imagine the new influx of vans,
satellite dishes and cameras. It made me want to avoid home, too,
but we had to go there sometime. Sleeping at the office held no
appeal.

“Come on. We’ll get out of our cars and walk
right past them.”

Ron made the stop at Pedro’s after I phoned
our take-out order. I’d created a stir with the reporters but I’m
pretty quick and dashed right past them and into the house. The
curtains remained closed but I peeked around the edge and was ready
with my hand on the knob when Ron made his own run for the front
door.

We ate Pedro’s fabulous green chile chicken
enchiladas but had to settle for homemade margaritas, since Pedro
can’t do those up to go. While we ate, I filled Ron in on my
afternoon—the visits with Victoria’s friends and customers, the
phone call from the mysterious man who’d obviously worried her.

“Are you sure she never said anything about
that call to you?” I asked.

He thought about it but shook his head.
“Nothing. Do you suppose there was something going on that I never
picked up on?”

“Doesn’t make any sense. This was an older
guy, for one thing, and the call was very short, according to Ida
Van Horn. Plus, it is absolutely not like Vic to sneak around. She
would have been up front and told you.”

“So, why didn’t she? If she was upset about
something, that’s what she’s supposed to talk to me about, to share
with me.”

He had a point. Spouses should share. I
couldn’t imagine keeping anything of true importance from Drake. I
cleared the Styrofoam containers, washed the silverware and
glasses, spoke briefly with my hubby who sounded tired but happy to
have had a productive day. I wished I could say the same. I went to
bed with repetitive thoughts rattling around in my head.

What could someone have said during such a
short call to upset Victoria so much?

Chapter 16

Six weeks passed. Juliette found her ears
tuned to every conversation in the office. It was a miracle she
could keep up with her correspondence, the construction bids and
Al’s complicated appointment book. Three times, she’d been able to
catch brief glimpses of paperwork that passed through Marion’s
office, but none of them revealed anything. She’d not seen another
reference to kilos, although a few things Al had said on the
telephone when he thought the door was tightly closed led her to
believe he was talking about shipments. Those shipments almost
certainly had to be drugs, she concluded.

Everything else passing through the yard or
the job sites was well documented. So many pallets of block, a
certain tonnage of steel, quantities of glass for the windows in a
high-rise. The amounts and costs were staggering, but they all made
sense. The hushed conversations held a different tone and quality.
But each time she’d fished for more information Al treated her
comments as nothing.

“Sure, we buy some of the materials in
kilos,” he would say. “A lot of this stuff comes from Europe. You
know that.” Or, “Don’t worry your pretty head about anything that
doesn’t cross your desk, baby.”

Perhaps her mistake was that she always
tried to catch him relaxed and talkative when she brought up those
things. His response was always to distract her with a gift, an
extra drink, or sex. He wasn’t taking her concerns seriously, but
what did she expect?

The calls from New York worried her most.
During those conversations, Al’s tone turned deferential. Whoever
the man was, Al treated him as a boss. And yet, in every other
aspect of his life, he was the leader, with no question who was in
charge. Specifics were never given, nothing she could directly
question. She wanted to be trusted, to share his burden, to offer
advice and suggestions, but that was not happening.

Juliette finally quit posing her guarded
questions. She couldn’t express doubt in her man. Surely he knew
what he was doing. She took to watching Marion instead.

The bookkeeper, as usual, worked with her
door closed and rarely exchanged more than basic pleasantries with
the other women. When she did, Juliette found it suspicious, as on
the day Marion had offered tea—a once-only thing. Marion was in and
out of Al’s office quite a lot, but her official path rarely
crossed Juliette’s so there were no excuses for dropping off
something at the bookkeeper’s desk or handling her files. It was
the most bizarre working environment Juliette had ever
encountered.

She had lunch with Sheila a couple of times
and tried to hint at her concerns. Sheila’s only comment had been,
“I’ve learned that it’s best to do my own job, collect my paycheck
and keep office life separate from personal.”

It might have been a way of telling Juliette
that she disapproved of her affair with the boss. Maybe she was
saying not to question or dig too deeply. Maybe Sheila simply had a
philosophy that a job was a job and her real life took place at
home. She was probably telling her young co-worker to get a life
outside the office.

During a weekend when Al wasn’t around,
Juliette resolved to do that. She called Carol Ann who,
miraculously, was free.

“There’s a new Steve Martin movie out,”
Carol Ann said. “Let’s go.”

The show was called
The Jerk
and
Juliette couldn’t remember having laughed so much in ages. Maybe
her Texas cornball humor was returning.

“Oh my god, there are some classic scenes in
that movie, aren’t there?” Carol Ann said as they emerged from the
theater.

“The one where he’s walking down the street
…” Juliette caught herself giggling at the memory.

“‘All I need is this thermos’,” quoted Carol
Ann, mimicking Martin’s doleful tone. She paused as they approached
Juliette’s car. “Hey, let’s go grab some tacos. We haven’t done
this in way too long.”

Juliette felt her heart lift.

They chose a little Mexican food stand where
they’d frequently gone together and found a table under the
palm-covered patio roof. With orders placed and margaritas in front
of them, Carol Ann suddenly got a coy look.

“I’ve been meaning to call you for a week,
Jules,” she said. “I have some big news.”

Before Juliette could ask, Carol Ann whipped
her hand out from under the table and dangled it before Juliette’s
face.

“I’m engaged! Tommy proposed last weekend
and I accepted.”

Juliette took her friend’s hand and studied
the plain gold band with its small diamond, feeling an unreasonable
flash of envy. She quickly covered the emotion with a smile.

“Congratulations, you two—that’s great
news!” She raised her glass, waited for Carol Ann to do the same,
and they clinked them together. “To a happy marriage.”

Carol Ann blushed a little. “There’s
actually a bit more. Tommy has been putting in applications all
over the place for a better job. So, this one company accepted him,
but they don’t have openings in their plant here. What they offered
him is in Alabama. So … right after the wedding we’re moving to
Birmingham.”

“What? I mean, my god, that’s sudden.”
Juliette felt as if the floor had shifted beneath her.

“Yeah, kind of.”

A waitress walked up to them and placed
plastic baskets with tacos in front of each place. An inquiry as to
whether they needed drink refills or anything else. Asking if
everything was all right.

Nothing
is all right, Juliette
thought. My best friend is moving away, my boyfriend hasn’t
proposed, and I don’t even know what’s going on in our lives
anymore.