Tomb With a View

20

Oh yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking, and with the plan in mind, I called in the big guns. Figuratively and literally.

I should have known better. My previous cases had taught me that nothing mucks up an investigation like involving the professionals.

“I still don’t think this is a good idea.” Scott was so fidgety, I had a feeling he would have paced the office of the memorial if Quinn hadn’t positioned himself just to the right of the desk. The way Quinn was standing there—his feet apart and his arms crossed over his chest—it was clear he wasn’t about to move and just as clear that Scott wouldn’t get past him. Not without a physical confrontation, anyway.

“What if he doesn’t show?” Scott asked. “What if he does, and we can’t get to you in time? If you’re putting yourself in danger, Pepper—”

“Pepper likes to put herself in danger.” It was the first thing Quinn said since he’d shown up in answer to my phone call. “It’s one of the things she does best.”

I didn’t bother to respond to this comment. It was juvenile, for one thing, and for another, it wasn’t true. I did a whole lot of things better than I put myself in danger, and Quinn should have remembered that.

“It’s too late,” I said, responding to Scott because I mean, really, why even try to reason with Quinn? “Ella pulled some strings and got the information out to the media, and the story about it was on the news this evening. They didn’t say what it was, but they talked about the fabulous thing we’d found and how it’s related to President Garfield and how we’re all set to put it on display here at the cemetery. We made a big deal about how, after the commemoration, the item is going to be donated to the National Archives. He’s bound to show up looking for the letter. It’s his only chance to get his hands on it and sell it before it’s out of his reach forever.”

Yes, it was brilliant, but I have to admit, the plan wasn’t mine alone. Civil War soldier and strategist that he was, the president had actually helped me come up with it. The whole thing made sense to us, and waiting for confirmation from the two guys who would enforce it, I looked back and forth, first to Scott, then to Quinn. When neither one of them said a thing, I gave up trying to be reasonable, flicked off the lights in the office, and headed into the rotunda.

“Hey, what can possibly go wrong?” I asked neither one in particular. “I’ve got you two superheroes here watching out for me.”

Was I trying to convince them, or myself?

Not them. I knew that. Scott was nothing if not good at his job, and he took his responsibilities seriously. Quinn . . . well, he was a royal pain and I was still plenty bitter about the way things had ended between us. But Quinn was a professional, too. In his deepest, darkest fantasies (and believe me, I knew a thing or two about Quinn’s fantasies), I had the feeling he’d like to see me fall flat on my face. But he wouldn’t let anything happen to me. Not from a safety standpoint, anyway.

Now all I had to do was convince myself.

Listening to my heart beat out a rumba rhythm in my chest, I stepped into the empty rotunda. It was after hours, and the crowds of tourists were long gone. The chandelier above the president’s statue was lit, and it threw a circle of light onto the marble dais. Beyond its glow, the far ends of the rotunda sloped into shadow.

Believe me, I took a good, long look into those shadows before I went to station myself at the table Ella and I had set up to the right of the lighted dais.

The news story we leaked talked about how anxious we were to get our “fabulous” find on display. I’d even appeared on camera to give a quote that went something like, “I can’t wait to get started on the commemoration. I’m going to be putting in some extra hours, day and night, to get the display ready.”

Anyone who knew me would have seen right through this, of course. Me, extra hours? Day and night? It was ludicrous.

I was counting on Nick Klinker not knowing me that well.

Surprised? Come on! Nick was the logical suspect from the beginning. I’d bet anything Marjorie told him about the letter the moment she found it. After all, the letter proved what Marjorie had been trying to prove all her life—that she was related to the president. Of course, that meant Nick was, too. I could imagine the way her warped mind worked, and in Marjorie’s mind, there was nothing more exciting than that news, and nothing that could possibly have made Nick prouder.

I wondered if he shared her excitement, and I realized it didn’t matter. Marjorie would have decided the moment she saw it that the letter was the most precious thing in the world. And Nick?

A small noise from the direction of the entryway caught my attention. It might have been Scott or Quinn in the office, but remember what I said about them being professionals. Professionals on a stakeout know better than to make any noise.

My hands stilled over the table where Ella and I had piled much of the Garfield memorabilia the cemetery owned. After all, we needed to make it look like I was knee-deep in commemoration preparations and we’d pulled out all the stops. There were stacks of old magazines and newspapers. There were boxes of photographs of the president and his family. There were framed souvenirs, including the letter we were using as bait to draw Nick to the memorial.

My stomach soured when I realized that, sooner or later, I would actually have to sort through it all. Marjorie or no Marjorie, the commemoration would go on, and without Marjorie, guess who was left holding the bag.

That is, if I lived long enough to have to worry about organizing the commemoration.

The unmistakable sound of stealthy footsteps made my heart bump, and I drew in a deep breath and held it. Scott and Quinn had my back, I reminded myself. Taking care of the rest of the plan was my responsibility.

I told myself to breathe and forced my hands to move, dragging over a stack of magazines and flipping through them like I actually cared at the same time I hoped Nick didn’t see through our trap. Could he actually be so dense to think I would be in here alone without locking the door?

If I ignored the next shuffle of footsteps, it would have looked too fishy, so I spun around.

“Is somebody here?” I called into the semidark rotunda, and when no one answered, I mumbled, “You’re imagining things, Pepper,” to myself, told myself it actually might be true, and got back to what I hoped looked enough like work to fool Nick Klinker.

I guess it worked, because I heard a voice behind me. It was husky and muffled, like he was trying to disguise it, but I’m not a detective for nothing. There was no mistaking that the voice belonged to Nick.

“Don’t turn around,” he said. “I’ve got a gun and I’ll use it if I have to. Where is it?”

“Your gun? I assume you know where it is.”

“Not my gun!” He forgot himself and used his regular voice, and when he realized it, he rumbled and tried to sound all strange and mysterious again. “You know what I’m talking about. The letter. Where is it?”

The framed letter from the president to Lucia was on the table, and I let my right hand drift over to it, the better to tantalize Nick into telling the truth. I rested my fingers on the frame.

“Could it possibly be worth all that much?” I asked him. “It’s just an old letter.”

“It has historical significance.”

“Maybe for loonies like Marjorie, but let’s face it, nobody else is really going to care. Not enough to make all this worth your while, anyway.”

“I have a buyer.”

I paused like I had to actually think about this. “You mean Ted Studebaker. How much is he going to give you?”

“It’s none of your business.” I still had my back to Nick, and I heard him take another step closer and waited to feel the cold barrel of his gun press into my back. When I didn’t, I should have been relieved, but waiting for the touch of the steel only made me more anxious. I sure hoped Scott and Quinn were paying attention.

“Give me the letter,” Nick growled.

“You are the rightful owner. I mean, being Marjorie’s only living relative and all.” I threw out this morsel in an attempt to wheedle a confession out of Nick, just the way Scott and Quinn had instructed me to. “Why not just go home and work on proving you own it. That way you can walk in here, take rightful possession, and do anything you want with the stupid letter.”

“I can’t take that chance.” Another step closer. I held my breath. “What if there’s no way to prove it’s mine? It’s worth too much.”

“Was it worth killing Marjorie to get?”

“What?” In his surprise, Nick forgot all about his goofy disguised voice, and hearing him sound genuinely shocked, I spun around. I found him with his mouth hanging open, and yeah, the lights were dim and the shadows edged in on us from every side, but I swear, in that one instant before he stuck his right hand in his pocket, I saw what I saw, and what I saw was that his hand was empty. The second he stuck it in his pocket, though, it looked like he had a gun in there.

Or like he was pointing a finger, pretending it was a gun.

The tension washed out of me and I tossed my head. “Oh, come on, Nick. That’s just about as lame as it gets. You don’t have a gun.”

He made a face. “I figured you’d give me the letter if you thought I did.”

“Is that what you told Marjorie that morning you came here to the memorial? That you had a gun? That she had to turn over the letter or else?”

Even with the shadows, I could tell his face went ashen. “I tried to reason with her,” he said, his voice squeezed thin. “Aunt Marjorie was not a reasonable woman.”

That was neither here nor there. I stuck to my case. “So when she wouldn’t hand over the letter so you could sell it, you tossed her over the balcony.”

“No. I didn’t. I swear.”

He started to shake, and seeing it, I got a fresh dose of courage. I took a step toward Nick. “I know you were here that day, Nick. You took the brownies.”

All the gray washed out of his face and left him as white as a sheet. Nick staggered back and swallowed hard. “How . . . how did you know?”

“Because of what Bernadine said. She said you were nervous about the wedding and your tummy was acting up. But it wasn’t nerves, was it? It was the brownies. Gloria Henninger put Ex-Lax in them.”

All that pale skin was suddenly shot through with a color that reminded me of blood. “I’ll sue!” Nick yelled. “That woman is a menace. This certainly proves it. She . . . she tried to kill me.”

“But here you are, alive and well.” I let this comment settle before I added, “But Marjorie isn’t, is she?”

Nick whirled around, then spun back to me. He tugged at his hair, his voice choked and desperate. “Yes, I was here that morning. Yes, when I left, I took the brownies. I love chocolate, you see, and I figured it would serve Aunt Marjorie right to not get any of the brownies. She was . . .” Looking for the right word to describe a woman who was indescribable, he blubbered.

“She was impossible! For once, I wanted to get the best of her, so when I arrived here that morning, I told Aunt Marjorie something she didn’t know. A couple weeks earlier, after she showed me the letter for the first time, I smuggled it out of her house and showed it to Ted Studebaker. You know, so that he could value it. I should have sold it to him right then and there, Aunt Marjorie be damned. But no!” He was so overwrought, his voice gained an octave.

“I had to be the good nephew. Just the way I’ve always been. I had to give in to Aunt Marjorie’s whims. Just the way I always have. I returned the letter to her along with the good news about how much it was worth. She said she’d consider selling it and that I should come here to the cemetery and we’d talk about it further.”

“And when you did?”

“When I did, she laughed in my face.” Nick’s eyes were rimmed with red. He swigged his nose. “She told me I was stupid if I ever thought she’d sell that letter, that it was the most wonderful thing in the world and that she’d never part with it. I felt like a little kid all over again, always being corrected by Aunt Marjorie, always being told by her that I wasn’t smart enough, that I didn’t care enough about family history. She made me so angry . . .” Nick’s hands curled into fists. “I wanted to . . . I wanted to—”

“Kill her?”

Nick went motionless and the only sounds in the rotunda were the echoes of his rough breathing. “I . . .” He drew in a breath and it stuttered out of him on the end of a sigh. “I didn’t kill her. I swear I didn’t kill her. We fought, yes. We yelled. We screamed. But when I left here, Aunt Marjorie was alive.”

I wasn’t about to believe him, not without proof, anyway. “You were the only one here that morning, Nick,” I said.

“Well, obviously not. Someone threw Aunt Marjorie over that balcony. But it wasn’t me.” He wiped the tears from his cheeks and threw back his shoulders, and suddenly, his voice was as calm as it had been distraught only moments before. “Now you’ll need to give me that letter, Pepper. I may not have a gun, but I am a man, and stronger than you. I’m not leaving here without the letter. Even if it means I have to hurt you to get it.”

Before I could decide if he was bluffing, Nick darted toward me, and honestly, I think I could have taken him if not for the fact that all the lights came on in the place and Scott and Quinn showed up out in the entryway. I was distracted, watching as they jockeyed for position, each trying to be the first into the rotunda. All they managed to accomplish was to trip over each other.

In the meantime, I lost precious seconds, and in those seconds, Nick closed in on me and I stepped back and bumped into the table. Before I had a chance to figure out which way to run, his hands had already closed around my neck.

“Give me that letter!” he said, his voice deadly serious. And even though I struggled to breathe at the same time I fought to loosen his hold, I recognized the important word there.

Deadly.

He was stronger than any IT geek had a right to be. He shook me like a ragdoll. “It’s mine. Give me the letter. Now.”

Never let it be said that Pepper Martin isn’t willing to oblige. I was getting nowhere trying to pry Nick’s hands away from my neck so I groped for the framed letter. Once I had a hand on it, I swung. Hard.

When the frame and the glass shattered on Nick’s head, the noise was as loud as a gunshot.

I guess that got Quinn and Scott’s attention. They untangled themselves from the doorway and scrambled over just as Nick’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he crumpled to the floor.

“Nick Klinker, you’re under arrest—”

They did it again. Started talking at the same time.

Quinn and Scott exchanged cutting looks. But maybe Scott is the smarter of the two. Or maybe he just knew that the case was officially Quinn’s and there was no way he was going to scoop it, anyway. He stepped back and Quinn cuffed Nick and called for the paramedics.

What did I do while all this was going on?

Well, I still had a hold of what was left of the frame, and I looked down at the letter, but I couldn’t really see it clearly. That’s because my hands were trembling.

“You OK, Pepper?” Scott asked. He put a hand on my arm.

“I’m fine,” I lied, but only because Quinn looked up, anxious to see how I was going to answer.

“I’ll just . . .” My knees were mushy, and I figured it would be more graceful to sit down in the office than to fall down on the floor, so I headed that way. “I’ll wait inside the office.”

This, too, was a good plan.

Or at least it would have been, if Nick Klinker hadn’t been telling the truth about Marjorie’s murder, and the real murderer wasn’t lying in wait for me.

I had already slumped down into the chair behind the desk when the office door swung shut, clicked, and locked. Too late, I realized someone had been standing behind it.

“Thank goodness for Nick causing all that commotion. I never could have gotten in here unnoticed if your two cops friends hadn’t been so busy trying to one-up each other.” Ted Studebaker stepped out from the shadows. Good old Ted, always the showman. He wasn’t content using the ol’ finger-in-the-pocket-like-a-gun trick. He really did have a gun, a small, silver pistol with a pearl handle. It was aimed right at me.

“Let’s get this over with as quickly as we can,” he said. He held out his left hand and jiggled his fingers, urging me to hand over the letter. “If I can get out of here fast, we can avoid any messy consequences.”

“If you shoot me, Scott and Quinn are going to come running.”

This sounded reasonable to me, but it wasn’t about to make Studebaker change his mind. “By the time they stop what they’re doing and figure out where the shot came from, I’ll be out of here. That’s the thing about surprise. It’s . . .” He grinned. “Surprising!”

“All this for a stupid letter?” What was left of the frame was on the desk and I looked down at the President’s fancy, curlicue script. “Come on, it can’t be worth that much.”

“It isn’t.” Studebaker stepped closer. “But what’s on the back of it . . .”

I hauled in a breath, and if I wasn’t so worried about living through the next couple minutes and about how if I didn’t, my body would be found with a big, ugly red mark on my forehead, I would have given myself a slap. “Of course, Jeremiah Stone said there wasn’t any blank paper in his portfolio. He went to get some, but the president couldn’t wait. He grabbed a piece of paper, anyway. And if there was no blank paper, that means something has to be written on the back of this one.”

Carefully avoiding both Studebaker’s confused “What are you talking about?” and the sharp bits of glass still left inside the frame, I took out the president’s letter and flipped it over. Even though the writing on the other side of the paper was stiff and old-fashioned and hard to read, I skimmed over the words and my breath caught.

I looked up at Studebaker in wonder. “This isn’t possible. You mean—”

“When word of this gets out . . .” He dangled the word to reflect the possibilities.

OK, so I’m not exactly a whiz when it comes to politics. Or world affairs. Or treaties and such. But even I knew the piece of paper in my hands would blow the lid off international relations.

“That’s why you were so anxious to get at this. It wasn’t because the letter from the president to Lucia is so valuable. It was for what was on the other side of it. And nobody knew about it but you. When I brought you that newspaper page I wanted to sell, you said you’d have to have an archivist look at it. That’s what you did with this. You took it out of the frame, and you saw what was on the back of the letter, and you . . .” There was nothing to be gained from not going for broke. “You killed Marjorie Klinker to get it.”

“It would have been easier to kill Nick.” Studebaker sniffed. “I was hoping he’d talk his aunt out of the letter and then I could simply eliminate him. I waited for him to leave the memorial with the letter in hand, but then I heard them arguing. She hadn’t even brought the letter with her, the stupid woman. After Nick left—”

“You moved in on Marjorie. And when she wouldn’t tell you where the letter was—”

“Things got out of hand. Yes. As they are about to get out of hand again.” With the barrel of the gun, he motioned me to stand. “I can’t say for sure, but my guess is that once a man has killed for the first time, the second time can’t possibly be hard. The letter, please. Now.”

I got to my feet, and just as I did, I heard the door handle jiggle.

“Pepper?” Scott was outside, and he tried the door again.

“Pepper, are you in there?” This question was from Quinn. “Is everything OK?”

“Tell them it is.” Studebaker mouthed the words.

Let’s face it, I never have been very good at taking direction. Especially not from a murderer.

I yelled something I vaguely remember as, “Watch out, it’s Studebaker and he’s the murderer,” and dropped to the floor, and just as I did, I heard the crash of the door getting kicked open, the sound of a single gunshot, and a muffled cry from Studebaker. I would like to be able to describe exactly how Scott and Quinn subdued him, but truth be told, I crawled under the desk, and stayed there the whole time.