Tomb With a View

17

Iwas glad the feds cleared up the phony credit card case. Honest. Of course, Ella and Jim couldn’t have agreed more. Seeing as how they’re both big-time cemetery geeks, the fact that the memorial was being used by the crooks as a drop-off and pickup point didn’t sit well with them. As much of a cemetery fan as I’m not, I can’t say I blamed them. Even though I knew better than anyone that they didn’t all deserve it, there is a certain amount of respect we owe the dead. The memorial as a stash house . . . that went above and beyond, even in my book.

Needless to say, the president was thrilled to have that part of the “commotion” explained. He was convinced that now that the phony cards were taken care of, things would get back to as normal as they can be when you’re dead and running the country as you would have more than a hundred years ago from the inside of a tomb you can’t leave without poofing into nothingness.

Have I mentioned how the life of a PI to the dead can get complicated? In my world, all that made perfect sense.

But none of it helped me much. I mean, not with Marjorie’s case. Sure, I could have backed out gracefully. Thanks to Patankin, who was talking up a storm in the hopes of staying in a nice, cushy federal pen like the one my dad was in rather than the nasty place that was waiting for him back home, the feds had plenty of new information to go on; they’d made huge strides in cracking the international counterfeiting ring.

At the risk of sounding too full of myself, let’s face it: they couldn’t have done it without me. I was something of a heroine and I knew it, and that meant I could throw in the towel without losing face.

But I still didn’t know who killed Marjorie, and truth be told, it was driving me nuts. Besides, Quinn was now on to the fact that I was conducting my own investigation into Marjorie’s murder, and I knew how his devious little brain worked. He was going to try doubly hard to solve the case, just to beat me to the punch.

And there was no way I was going to let that happen.

With that in mind, I closed up the memorial at four that Friday and went over to the administration building. It’s not like I’m a hidebound traditionalist or anything, but on previous cases, I had done some of my best thinking back in my office behind my own desk. It was where I sat now, scribbling the names of my remaining suspects across the top of a legal pad.

Jack. Er . . . excuse me . . . Jonathan Bryce-Conway.

Nick Klinker.

Ted Studebaker.

Gloria Henninger.

As for motives . . .

I added an entry below each of their names.

Jack could have known Marjorie took the credit card, and I guess if you’re a criminal mastermind, that kind of thing pisses you off.

Nick and Ted were in cahoots about something, and if it was something Marjorie didn’t agree with, either one of them (or both) could have had a reason to kill her.

Gloria was crazy, and as I’d learned in the course of my PI career, crazy people don’t really need a motive. Then again, she did have that statue staring little Sunshine in the face every time the pug went outside for a potty break. In Gloria’s book, I bet that was motive enough.

That’s as far as I got when there was a knock on my office door and Ella popped in. I turned the legal pad over on my desk.

“I’m so glad you’re still here,” she said. As is typical of the weather in Cleveland in the fall, it was freezing the day I went out to Chagrin Falls to see Ted Studebaker, and now it was hotter than blazes again. Ella looked a little like a pumpkin in her orange flowing skirt and matching top. She’d been on pins and needles ever since the feds set up the stakeout at the memorial and she hadn’t come down from the adrenaline high. Standing just inside my office door, she fidgeted with the string of earth-colored beads she wore around her neck.

“I didn’t want to go to Jim with this,” she said. “Even though I probably should. And I will. I mean, of course I will. Eventually. But you’ve been such a help when it comes to things like this, Pepper, I wanted to let you know about it first and see what you think. I’m pretty sure Jim won’t mind. After all, he agrees with me that you’re just amazing. He said it himself just this afternoon when we were talking. I couldn’t be more proud of you if you were one of my own girls. I mean, just look at the way you helped out the FBI! Sometimes I think you’re some kind of superhero in disguise.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but it was nice to be appreciated. Whatever Ella was going to ask of me, I was more inclined to do it now than I was when she walked into my office. Anybody else, I would have accused of thinking I was shallow and playing to my weakness. Ella? Not so much. Ella didn’t have a mean-spirited bone in her body.

“What do you need?” I asked.

She scrunched up her face. “I can’t believe it completely slipped my mind, but of course, it did. With everything that’s been going on around here lately, it’s hard to imagine any of us are keeping anything straight. But there I was, sitting in my office just a little bit ago, finishing up the fall schedule of seminars and tours, and that’s when I remembered.”

Just in case my blank expression didn’t say it all, I asked, “Remembered what?”

Ella threw her hands in the air. Her left arm was loaded with beaded bracelets that matched her necklace and they jangled when they clanked together. “The volunteers’ lockers, of course.”

I breathed what I hoped didn’t look like too big a sigh of relief. This was going to be easy and it involved absolutely no effort on my part except to remind her, “The volunteers don’t have lockers anymore.”

“Of course.” Her smile was shaky. “You were in on the meeting when we decided we would no longer provide lockers to the volunteers. Like Jim said then, it’s too much of a liability from a security standpoint, what with having to keep an eye on their personal possessions and then having the volunteers going up and down those steps into the basement. A lot of them aren’t as young as they used to be, you know, and I’d hate to think that someone might slip and fall. And it’s not like the old days when most of our volunteers lived right in the neighborhood and walked to work. Back then, they needed a place to store umbrellas and coats and things. Now most of our volunteers live outside the area, and they drive here to the cemetery. They leave a lot of their stuff in their cars, and their coats, of course, get hung in the main coatroom off the reception area. You remember how Jim thought that was such a good idea. Jennine can see the coatroom, right from her desk, and we don’t have to worry about anything getting misplaced or stolen.”

I nodded, and waited for more, but even before Ella said it, a spark ignited inside my brain. Like that idea was the rocket that propelled me, I rose to my feet. “But Marjorie was a volunteer for a long time. That means—”

“She still had her locker.”

We finished the thought in unison.

A world of possibilities spun through my head, but before I could get them in any sort of order, Ella continued. “She was told not to use it anymore, but you know how Marjorie could be. She thought she was special and she didn’t have to follow the rules like everyone else. I just thought of it a bit ago, the locker I mean, and I went downstairs to check and . . .”

“You found something?” My spirits soared to the ceiling. If the clue I needed to wrap up the case was under my nose all this time, I’d give myself a mental slap—but not until I flaunted my success in front of Quinn. I was moving toward the door even before I realized it and I only stopped when Ella put a hand on my arm.

“I didn’t find anything. Not exactly,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t even look inside the locker. I just came right up here to get you.”

“Because . . . ?”

She led the way. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

I hate basements. They’re mostly damp and stinky, and the dark and the quiet along with the moldy smells freak me out. This is especially true at Garden View, where the basement of the administration building is as old as the cemetery itself and had once (back in the olden days) been used to store bodies in the winter when the gravedigger’s shovels couldn’t penetrate the frozen ground.

Naturally, I wasn’t at all sorry when Jim decided to eliminate the locker room down there. It meant I never had a reason to go into the basement.

Except, of course, when Ella had a hold of my arm and was leading the way.

We got to the door outside what used to be the volunteer locker room and she drew in a calming breath. “You ready?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. If there’s a body, or—”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that,” she said. She pushed open the door and flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dull light. In the recent past, the locker room had been used for storage, and against the wall to my right, there were boxes piled on the tan linoleum floor. At the far, shadowy end of the room was a door that I knew opened up to stone steps that led right into the cemetery. Directly across from the door were two rows of gray metal lockers with a wooden bench between them.

“That’s Marjorie’s,” Ella said, pointing to the left, all the way down at the end of the row and farthest from the door. “It was just like that when I came down here.”

“Just like . . .” I closed the distance between the door and locker, taking a closer look. “It was open? It was—?”

Ella nodded.

I stood in front of the locker. Not only was it opened, the lock had been forced, and it didn’t take a genius detective to figure that out. The door near the lock was smashed and dented.

The contents of the locker itself looked as if they’d been put through a blender. “Ransacked,” I mumbled. “Just like Marjorie’s house.”

“What do you suppose they took?”

I’d been so busy examining the locker, I hadn’t realized Ella had crossed the room and was standing right in back of me. When she spoke, I jumped.

“Sorry.” She patted my arm and leaned forward. “What do you suppose they took?”

I shrugged. “If something’s missing, we can’t possibly know what it is.” I was tall enough to see up on the top shelf of the locker. “Head scarves,” I said, making a face as I plucked a pile of the nasty, filmy things out of the locker and handed them to Ella. “Our thief didn’t take them, so whoever it was, he had better taste than Marjorie.”

“That’s mean, Pepper,” Ella scolded, but I didn’t have to turn around to know she was smiling when she said it.

I poked through the rest of the locker. There was a ratty sweater hanging from the hook on the door, and in the main body of the locker, one of a pair of battered black loafers, an extra bottle of that gag-in-the-mouth gardenia perfume Marjorie always wore, and a pair of black polyester pants. The seam at the crotch was ripped. “There’s nothing but junk in here,” I said, stepping back to get an overall look and maybe a feel for what somebody could have been after. “There sure isn’t anything worth taking. Or is there?”

From where I was standing, the light reflected against something on the top shelf, all the way in the back that had been hidden by the scarves. I reached a hand in, and slid out a pile of credit cards.

“Holy—!” I counted them below my breath. “Six more,” I said, and I spread them out like a hand of cards to show Ella. “And all with different names on them. So Marjorie really did have a get-rich-quick scheme. I bet she was planning on using these babies little by little, and thinking that if she did, no one would ever trace them. Whatever our thief was looking for, it wasn’t these.”

“Which means . . .”

Ella had been in on all the same meetings with the FBI and the local cops that I’d taken part in, but I couldn’t blame her for thinking like a civilian. She’d never had to deal with the criminal mind before. “It means that whoever broke into Marjorie’s locker, it probably wasn’t Jack.” I didn’t need to fill her in on the details. Because of those meetings, she knew (almost) all about Jack. “If he broke into the locker, he would have taken any cards he found. He’d have to be thorough. Any loose ends might lead right back to him.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

This, I had to think about. I was relieved to think that maybe Jack wasn’t the killer after all. I mean, the thought of kissing a guy who’d just recently tossed a woman over a balcony railing was enough to make anybody shudder.

But I still didn’t have all the answers I was looking for, and not having them didn’t sit well with me.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“But you’re going to find out, right? We need to get things back to normal around here, Pepper. A murder in the cemetery is bad for business. People are afraid to even come visit their loved ones. We need closure.” The look in Ella’s eyes was so hopeful, how could I possibly let her down?

In keeping with my promise to Ella, I did something I never, ever do except in the direst emergencies: I went into work on the weekend.

For one thing, there was that whole deal about how the detecting part of my brain worked better when I was in my own office.

For another, I wasn’t kidding when I said that the murder and the stakeout had kept us all on our toes. It’s not like I’m a cemetery whirlwind, but I do have work to do. And I was way, way behind on it all. Ella was nearly done with that fall schedule of hers, and she’d been bugging me about how many tours I had planned. It was early September. I had to get hopping.

My final reason for going into the office on Saturday should come as no surprise. Now that Scott was knee-deep in his case, we were talking on the phone, but he’d been busy, and we hadn’t been able to hang out together. Staying at home—alone—and risking the chance of Mr. Doughboy showing up at my apartment was not my idea of a good time. Even on the weekends, Garden View is fairly busy. After all, it’s never a good day to die, and most Saturdays, families come in to buy plots for their recently departed loved ones. Unlike a certain president, I was grateful for the commotion. With people coming and going, I felt safe. Since I didn’t have to worry about stalker boy, I could concentrate on my case.

That was what I was doing. Or at least it was what I was trying to do. Too bad my brain was stuck in a loop that went something like this:

Jack, Nick, Ted, Gloria, Ray, Doris.

Then it started all over again.

I was getting nowhere, and it was making me crazy. I’d brought my lunch and I’d just decided to step outside so I could sit at the picnic table behind the administration building. Maybe a little fresh air and sunshine would work wonders on my fact-clogged brain. I was headed out there, just passing the steps that led down to the basement, when I heard a noise.

I knew better than to go down there alone. But I’m not a detective for nothing. (I mean, I am since the whole Gift thing that got me into it in the first place wasn’t my choice. But even on my own and if I didn’t have this dumb Gift, I’d still be plenty curious. And have I mentioned plenty anxious to solve the case before Quinn did?)

With that in mind, I looked around for a likely weapon and grabbed the one and only thing I could find, a laser pointer Jim had recently used for a presentation to the Board of Trustees and had left out on the credenza in the reception area. If there was an assailant down there, I was ready. Maybe I couldn’t bean him with the pointer, but I could at least blind him long enough to run away.

Since it was Saturday and I wasn’t officially on the clock, I hadn’t been too worried about what to wear that day. Of course I still looked like a million bucks, but I was a million bucks in skinny jeans, an emerald green T-shirt, and sneakers. Good thing, too. Sneakers don’t make noise on steps.

I was at the bottom of those steps, holding my breath and wondering what to do next, when I saw that the door into the old locker room was opened a crack. I knew that wasn’t the way Ella and I had left it the night before. I crept closer.

And heard another noise.

It sounded like a muffled gasp, and I wondered if our burglar had caught some other employee by surprise and was holding that person hostage. Or worse. Just in case I needed it, I flicked on the laser and charged into the locker room.

If I had been a little less enthusiastic and a little more careful, I wouldn’t have interrupted Ray and Doris doing . . . well, what it was they were doing.

“Ew!” I jumped back and squeezed my eyes shut, the better to let Doris get up from Ray’s lap, where she was sitting with her legs sprawled on either side of him and her blouse unbuttoned. I heard shuffling and waited what I thought was an appropriate amount of time before I dared to open my eyes again. By that time, Doris was standing next to Ray. They were holding hands and smiling like lovestruck teenagers.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Ray asked. “You’ve never seen two people canoodling?”

“I’ve never seen . . . I never want to see . . . You’re too old for sex!” I wailed. When I shuddered, the light of the laser pointer did a jitterbug across the wall.

Doris and Ray laughed.

“Never too old,” Ray said. He slipped one arm around Doris’s shoulders and gave her a hug. “Thanks to that little blue pill you hear so much about, I’m never going to be too old.”

“And you two? . . . Together? . . . Here at the cemetery . . .” I am anything but straightlaced when it comes to sex, but I couldn’t find my voice.

My embarrassment didn’t faze Doris in the least. She smoothed her little old lady black skirt into place and carefully buttoned her blouse. “You’re not going to tell Ella, are you? She’s such a nice lady, and I love her dearly, but somehow, I don’t think she’d approve. Then again, we are volunteers. It’s not like we’re being paid and we need to be accountable for every minute we’re here.”

“Not to worry.” I congratulated myself for stringing together three coherent words and flopped down on the bench where Ray and Doris had just been—

I stood up again.

“I’m not going to tell Ella. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” I glanced around the gloomy locker room. “There’s got to be a better place for you two to . . .” I searched for the right words and decided on, “Get together. It’s depressing down here. And anybody could walk in on you.”

As if he were the teenage boy and I were the angry parent, Ray hung his head. “Well, nobody ever comes into the locker room anymore. That’s why we figured we’d be all right. Besides, we’ve never done it down here before, but we just couldn’t wait, you know?”

I did. I didn’t want to discuss it. Or think about it. Or think about thinking about it. Murder was a far more acceptable subject than old people sex. I crossed my arms over my chest. The laser pointer made a zigzag pattern against the far wall. “Hey, while you were down here, you didn’t see anything unusual, did you?”

Doris giggled. “We weren’t looking for anything. We weren’t looking at anything. Anything but each other’s eyes.”

Their sighs overlapped.

I stayed strong. “Somebody has been down here,” I told them. “And just recently, I think.” It wasn’t a warning because, really, what they did and where they did it weren’t really any of my business, but I hoped they appreciated the subtle advice. “Ella and I were down here just yesterday, and when we were, we saw that somebody else had been down here, too. We found something interesting.”

Ray’s expression sobered. He took a step in my direction. “You mean something that relates to Marjorie’s murder?”

I reminded myself that, though they weren’t on my short list, I had considered both Ray and Doris as my culprits. Maybe I’d need my laser pointer after all. I clutched it tightly in one hand. “You didn’t like her,” I said, looking at both Ray and Doris because, of course, it applied to both of them. “Ray, you hated Marjorie because she played you for a sucker. And Doris, I’ll bet you were jealous.”

She made a pish-tush sort of sound. “Marjorie was the one who was jealous of me,” she insisted. She looked at Ray, her eyes glistening with mischief. “After all, I’ve got the hot hunk of a boyfriend she always wanted. That’s why she was so mean to me all the time. She knew Ray didn’t love her. She knew he was only spending time with her because she was leading him on about the money. Yes, I was angry that she took up so much of Ray’s time. But as you can see, Ray and I have worked that out, and I came out the winner.”

“But the day Marjorie was killed, you were both in the cemetery, and when I saw you that morning before I headed over to the memorial, you both looked a little guilty and a little flustered. Because . . .” If I wasn’t supposed to be a professional detective, I would have slapped my forehead. “I saw the two of you coming out of the copy room. You were doing . . .” I made a funny little waving gesture toward the bench. It was better than actually saying the words. “You were doing up there what you were just doing down here.”

“Not exactly,” Ray corrected me. “The copy room . . . that’s too public. You know, too much of a risk. But we were getting a few smooches in.” He grinned at Doris. “Right, honeybun?”

Doris hurried forward to put a hand on my shoulder to console me. “So you see, Pepper, we couldn’t have killed Marjorie. I’m sorry to disappoint you.” I’ve got to say, I had to love a woman who apologized for not being a murderer. “I know you’d like to get to the bottom of the mystery, but it couldn’t have possibly been either me or Ray. We were busy. You know, together.”

Now that we’d cleared all that up, there didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Doris was still twinkling like a prom queen, but Ray must have suddenly realized just how awkward the situation was. He shifted from foot to foot. “You think we should all go upstairs together? You know, so we don’t look too suspicious?”

“That’s probably a good idea. That way, if anybody asks, we can tell them we were down here checking on the envelope supply or something. Only, Ray . . .” Honest, I just couldn’t bring myself to say it. I touched the light of the laser pointer ever so briefly to Ray’s fly. “You might want to zip your pants first.”