Decorated to Death Page 7

  “Hold it,” she cried, removing the chef apron and smoothing out the folds of her pale green, A-line linen dress, “I’ll be darned if I’m going to look like the hired help in my own home. Okay, now I’m ready. Come on, Jean, let’s knock ’em dead.”

  In view of the fact that I was on Chief Stevens’s short list of murder suspects, I felt Sally’s phrasing left something to be desired. With my own list of suspects still forming in my head, and with my heart in my mouth, I followed Sally down the short corridor that led from the kitchen, past the dining room, and into the formal living room.

  Chapter

  thirteen

  “Hastings you say. Would that be Jean Hastings as in Designer Jeans, the interior design firm? Dona was really looking forward to having the cottage redone. She had some truly fabulous changes in mind for the old place.”

  I was about to answer when a tall, willowy, brown-eyed redhead with a picture-perfect face and figure sauntered into the small but cozy beige-and-rose-colored living room. “Good lord, Goody, Dona’s been murdered and you want to discuss decorating ideas? Give it a rest.”

  “I suppose you’re right, Maxine. I guess the reality of Dona’s death, especially the murder part, hasn’t quite sunk in yet. To do something like that, the killer must have been filled with hate.” Goody sounded sadder than she appeared.

  “Or fear. Maybe even love,” said Maxine, looking around the room before zeroing in on Todd Masters, Dona’s personal trainer, and according to Goody, her latest love interest. “How about it, Todd, would you kill for love?”

  “Aren’t you asking the wrong person?” replied Todd, his handsome face dark with anger. “If I remember right, I was told a few nights ago that I was incapable of loving anyone. The point was emphasized by the glass of wine thrown at me. Luckily, the glass is as replaceable as the person who threw it.”

  Everyone in the room was staring at Maxine Roberts, whose beautiful face had turned as red as her hair.

  “Hey, knock it off,” barked Ruffy Halsted, shoving a sheaf of papers into the battered briefcase he’d placed on a nearby walnut chair-side table. “The only one who cared about what was goin’ on between you two and the sheets was Dona and she’s dead. Pick somethin’ else to talk about.”

  “You mean like which one of us was stupid enough to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?” said Goody with a wicked smile. “I do hope our alibis for Saturday morning hold up under police scrutiny, don’t you?”

  The questions posed by the woman with the closely cropped brown hair and athletic physique hung in the air like so much chimney soot before being dispersed by the tinkling sound of a small, porcelain bell. The ringing of the bell was Sally Birdwell’s polite way of announcing that the Sunday breafast buffet was ready.

  Although it came as no surprise to me that Ruffy Halsted didn’t adhere to the practice of women and children first, I was somewhat taken aback by Todd Masters’s eagerness to reach the buffet ahead of Goody, Maxine, Sally, and me. Ellie Halsted and her bodyguard had yet to make their appearance.

  I watched as the blond Adonis heaped enough food on his plate to feed a small army, or a certain little Keeshond, before plunking his muscle-bound body down in the nearest chair.

  “Now that Dona’s gone to that big health spa in the sky,” Todd remarked to no one in particular, “maybe we can all go back to eating real food and not that crap she peddled.”

  “And that’s the truth,” Sally whispered to me. “I’ll tell you later about Saturday’s breakfast. Believe me, it was nothing like this.”

  From the way his fellow guests attacked the contents of the buffet, it was obvious that they agreed with Todd Masters’s assessment of Dona’s line of expensive health food products. Once seated at the table, the feeding frenzy began. When it finally subsided, Marsha Gooding once again brought up the subject of alibis.

  “The way I figure it,” said Todd, flashing a dazzling smile, “Dona was murdered sometime after leaving here at a few minutes past seven and when the body was found at nine thirty yesterday morning. Since none of us left the house until at least eight o’clock, we only need alibis that cover an eight to nine thirty timeline, which is exactly when I happened to be jogging in the park. I don’t know about the rest of you, but my alibi is as simple as it is solid.”

  “Your alibi is about as simple as you are, buddy boy, and it’s about as solid as dog pee. Who’s gonna swear to it that you were in the park? Name me one person,” challenged Ruffy.

  “I can’t but I’m sure when the police chief checks it out, he’ll find plenty of people who’ll remember seeing me at that time,” said Todd. Then he added, “I don’t imagine the local yokels in this town see a well-toned, muscular body like mine very often, so it follows that they’ll remember the ‘bod’ even if they can’t recall the face.”

  I immediately thought of half a dozen young men in Seville, all of whom were built as well or better than the conceited personal trainer, including Billy Birdwell. But anxious to hear more, I let it pass without comment.

  “I can do you one better when it comes to an alibi,” said Goody, sipping from a seemingly bottomless mug of herbal tea. “I arrived at the Book Nook a few minutes after eight o’clock yesterday morning and didn’t leave there until after ten. Maxine saw me there. Isn’t that right, Maxine?”

  Instead of answering in the affirmative, Maxine Roberts shook her her head, “Listen, Goody, let’s get something straight. I drove over to the Book Nook by myself as did you, sweetie. When I arrived, there was a sizable crowd waiting to get in and the store manager jumped the gun. He opened the doors at eight instead of nine and the people flooded in. I was busy setting things up for the book-signing gig, which included photo ops and interviews. With all that and the crowd, I didn’t keep tabs on when you came and went.”

  “So what are you saying, Maxine?” asked Goody in a most unpleasant voice. “That I killed Dona, then drove over to the Book Nook to establish an alibi? Or maybe you think that I sneaked out of the store, murdered Dona, and then sneaked back in again?”

  “I’m not saying anything of the kind but you have to admit, either scenario is a possibility.” The gorgeous redhead helped herself to a biscuit, strawberry jam, and another cup of coffee. “In view of the scenarios that you just suggested, I’d be a fool to jeopardize my rock solid alibi by validating your rather questionable one. No way, no how, sweetie.”

  Goody was visibly shaken. For a moment there, I thought she might bolt from the room. Instead, she shifted the attention away from herself and onto Rufus Halsted.

  “How about you, Ruffy? I know you had the motive to do the crime, so did you also have the time?” Goody had gotten her groove back. She even managed another sly smile.

  “Hey, stuff it, Goody. I slept in yesterday mornin’ ’til ten, just ask Miz Birdwell.” Rufus Halsted’s eyes had narrowed into snakelike slits. “And don’t give me that motive crap. Every one of us, ’cept maybe Ellie, had a reason for wantin’ Dona dead,” he hissed, “including Salerno, the bodyguard. I wonder what the hell his alibi is because he wasn’t with the kid. Ellie told me that when she went for a walk after breakfast yesterday, she didn’t see him or his car, ain’t that right, Miz Birdwell?”

  “Really, Mr. Halsted, I was rather busy in the dining room, so I couldn’t say who did what, when, where, or even with whom. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to check on something in the kitchen. Jean dear, would you give me a hand?”

  Once Sally and I reached the kitchen, she motioned to me to close the door between the two rooms. Then, following her lead, I stepped into the walk-in pantry.

  “Good, nobody will hear us in here,” said Sally. “Let me tell you about yesterday’s breakfast. It was a fiasco with a capital F.”

  “Okay, Sally, I’m all ears. What happened? Talk fast. I don’t think it’ll look good if we’re away too long.” I didn’t mention that I also didn’t want to miss anything.

  “First off, I tried to make a nice breakfas
t, although it certainly wasn’t as grand as the one today, but then I’m not a professional chef like my Billy.”

  I nodded my head impatiently. “Hey, if you were, Pesty would be your new best friend.” The pantry was getting stuffy. It had a faint onion odor that Sally either didn’t notice or chose to ignore. “Now, tell me what happened.”

  “It started at about seven on Saturday morning,” Sally began, “with Dona walking into the dining room and finding that all her people were still in their rooms. She dashed upstairs and pounded on the doors, shouting that they had five minutes to get downstairs for breakfast or—and these are her words, not mine—she would kick ass and replace the freakin’ lot of them with people who would abide by her rules.

  “Everybody but Mr. Halsted came running downstairs and into the dining room. They began filling their plates with those nice little microwave and toaster breakfasts. I probably should have cooked from scratch but there simply wasn’t time. Dona took one look at what they were about to eat and screamed that they were going to contaminate their bodies with useless carbs, empty calories, and bad cholesterol. Then she dumped all the food on the floor and put a big jar of pills, along with sticks of what looked and smelled like moldy bird food, in the middle of the table.”

  “Let me guess,” I said, interrupting Sally’s recap of the event, “the pills and smelly sticks were part of what Todd Masters poetically referred to as the crap that Donna peddled.”

  “Exactly,” Sally said, bobbing her head in agreement. The movement allowed a ringlet to escape from the pale green scrunchy that encircled an almost picture-perfect chignon.

  “Then Dona stormed out of the house shouting that there was one more thing that she had to take care of before—again these are her words—the freakin’ sideshow at the Goddamn Book Nook. By the time I’d finished cleaning up the mess, it was after eight and everyone had gone out except Mr. Halsted. He says he slept ’til ten but how would I know?”

  “Listen, Sally, I think maybe it’s time that I level with you. What I’m about to admit to you mustn’t be repeated to anybody, not even Billy.”

  “Don’t tell me—you killed Dona Deville! You didn’t, did you?” The prim and proper widow looked mortified. “How much does Charlie know?”

  “In answer to your questions—no, I didn’t kill Dona and Charlie doesn’t know anything. He’s in Garrison General with a broken kneecap.”

  “Oh, you poor thing. Why didn’t you tell me this last night? I never would have insisted on your coming over this morning to help me out.”

  I purposely ignored her response. “Sally, what I’ve been trying to tell you is that I’m conducting a secret investigation into the murder at the request of someone. It’s a someone who has asked that their name be kept out of it.”

  “My goodness, and here I thought the murder was making my life more complicated. What can I do to help?”

  “Well, for starters, get us out of this pantry and back to the dining room before we both end up smelling like leftover chip dip.”

  “Of course,” said Sally. “Gee, this is exciting. You probably want to grill the suspects or whatever it is you need to do.” Giving me an unexpected hug, she added, “I’m so relieved that you’re not the murderer. Think how embarrassing that would have been for your family.”

  Once back in the dining room, I’d just poured myself a needed cup of fresh coffee when Ellie Halsted, along with the bodyguard, entered the room. Sally, the perfect hostess, graciously handled the introductions.

  The twentysomething girl’s coloring favored her father rather than her mother. She had jet-black hair, dark eyes, and an olive complexion. Her height, like her weight and facial features, was in the average range. But there was nothing average about her megawatt smile or the deep dimples that accompanied it. This was the same smile that helped propel her mother, Dona, from local cutie to celebrity beauty.

  As with the subject of the Deville/Halsted divorce, I found myself questioning comments made by Marsha Gooding regarding Ellie Halsted and the apple falling far from the tree and out of the orchard.

  Chapter

  fourteen

  “Just call me Vinny and I’ll call you Jean,” announced the stocky man with the shaved head. His brown eyes squinted in a futile effort to block the smoke produced by the cigarette that dangled from the side of his turned-down mouth.

  I’d taken what I thought would be an opportunity to go one-on-one with the bodyguard when I followed him out to the redwood deck. Being the only other smoker among the guests, the likelihood was practically nil that anyone would join us in the designated smoking area. But before I could stick my nose in his business, I found myself outmaneuvered.

  “Word has it, Jean, that you’re a talented interior designer. I understand your daughter, Lieutenant Cusak’s wife, is a junior partner in Designer Jeans, the decorating service you operate out of your place here on Blueberry Lane.”

  The man’s rapid-fire delivery, along with his knowledge of me and mine, caught me by surprise. It wasn’t easy but I made an effort not to let it show, although the same could not be said of my growing irritation.

  “Maybe you and your daughter should consider yourselves lucky that the cottage job fell through.”

  “Oh really? Would you care to explain that to me, chum?” I shot back, taking advantage of a pause in the so far one-sided conversation. The pause occurred when the bodyguard stopped talking long enough to take a deep drag on his cigarette.

  “Sure, no problem. Old places like that cottage can be hazardous to your health. Look what happened to Dona Deville.”

  Not sure if I’d just been warned or threatened, I was determined not to let the beefy bozo think that he had frightened me. “Hey, chum, like they say, nobody lives forever.”

  “Yeah, so I hear. I also hear that you fancy yourself to be a detective of sorts. Take it from me, Jean, stick to decorating. Not only is it healthier but it pays better, too.”

  The man’s smile was about as sincere as the overused, seldom-meant “have a nice day” tagline.

  More angry than frightened, I decided it was time to find out if Mr. Salerno could take as well as he gave. I proceeded to hit him with what I hoped were probing questions. To my frustration, he ignored most of them and the few he didn’t, he answered with about as much candor as the Nixon White House displayed during the dark days of Watergate.

  Ask a stupid question and you get a stupid answer, which is what happened when I pressed the bodyguard for his alibi.

  “My alibi? No problem,” said the cagey guy. Finished with his cigarette, he quickly lit another. “My horoscope said that I should watch for signs of change so Saturday morning I got in my car and went looking for them.”

  “You don’t say! Was that before or after the dog ate your homework? You’re going to have to do better than that, if not with me, then with the people in there,” I replied, jabbing my thumb in the direction of the dining room, “and certainly with the police.” If the last part of my comment bothered him, he hid it well.

  In the end, about all I did learn was that he, Salerno, had been hired by Dona as Ellie’s bodyguard shortly after the death of Dona’s elderly aunt. When Ruffy insisted on driving Ellie to Seville, minus the bodyguard, Dona gave the okay with the stipulation that Salerno was to be at the Birdwell house no later than eight o’clock Friday night. According to him, Ruffy’s purpose for being alone with Ellie was to enlist her aid in convincing Dona to sell off some property that was jointly owned by Ruffy and his former wife.

  I felt much of the information I’d gleaned from my conversation with the chain-smoking bodyguard was, both literally and figuratively, more smoke than substance. But I was firmly convinced that “Just call me Vinny” and the early-morning cell phone talker were one and the same.

  Perhaps, I said to myself, my old friend Horatio Bordeaux would like to take a crack at getting the lowdown for me on the secretive Vincent Salerno. Horatio (a former CIA agent and retired professor o
f science) and I had become good friends when he hired Designer Jeans to transform his inefficient, drab home office into a cheery, modern, handicapped-accessible workplace. Suffering from diabetes, the rotund, wheelchair-bound widower started his own business on the web. His specialty is locating hard-to-find people, places, and things, including information, which is why I added his name to my growing lists of “must see” people.

  I left the bodyguard in a cloud of his own making, stubbed out my cigarette in a nearby sand-filled coffee can, and returned to the dining room. The once-bountiful buffet had been reduced to a few scraps and crumbs in the relatively short time I’d been out on the deck. Even the commercial-size coffee urn had been emptied.

  Back among the less-than-grieving entourage, I came to the conclusion that when Hilly Murrow filed her report on the group’s reaction to Dona Deville’s murder, the newshound must have been on something stronger than baby aspirin. Either that or Maxine Roberts was one heck of a public relations person. My inherited Irish intuition told me that most likely, it was the latter rather than the former.

  After helping Sally clean up the mess from the breakfast buffet, I returned to Kettle Cottage and the little Kees with the insatiable appetite.

  Chapter

  fifteen

  “Listen, you bossy little ball of fur, lunch in this house isn’t served until noon. You have to wait,” I said to Pesty, who had dramatically draped herself over her empty food dish. “Go ahead and pout, but it won’t do you any good.”

  Ignoring the dog, I fixed a cup of instant coffee, opened a package of snickerdoodles, and settled down at the kitchen table. I wanted—make that needed—a bit of time to relax and collect my thoughts before heading to the hospital for my afternoon visit with Charlie.

  Despite Pesty’s insistence that it was time for her lunch, I managed to concentrate long enough to review Vincent Salerno’s alibi. The man didn’t have a sense of humor, at least not that I’d noticed, so why the convoluted alibi? The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that the bodyguard had deliberately presented me with a puzzle within a puzzle. Did he really expect me to believe that he was following his horoscope and spent the time during which Dona was murdered looking for signs of change?