A Wedding and a Killing (18 page)

Located at the midway point on the Pennsylvania turnpike, Breezewood was an immensely popular stop for truck drivers and other travelers. By mid-morning, most of the weary trekkers passing through the town were finishing their breakfasts, gassing up their vehicles, and gearing to continue their travels.

At the largest of the many roadside motels, the staff was busily cleaning the now empty rooms in preparation for the next influx of guests. Upon the arrival of the Pennsylvania State Troopers and Spencer, Maryland, police chief and deputy chief, two older looking cleaning women pushed their carts around the corner of the building and ducked for safety.

After leading the police to the room on the ground floor, the motel desk clerk gestured to indicate that this was the one. After easing him out of the way with his arm across the older man’s chest, David stood to the side of the doorway and pounded on the door with his fist. “Helga Thorpe! This is Police Chief David O’Callaghan! We have a warrant to take you in for questioning. Open the door!”

“Police?” A woman’s high-pitched shriek came from inside the room.

A crash that resembled the sound of furniture overturning came from inside the room.

“What the—” A young man’s voice followed the crash. “You have the wrong room! There’s no one here by that name!”

“That doesn’t sound like Helga,” Bogie whispered from where he was perched with his gun drawn on the other side of the doorway.

David looked questioningly at the desk clerk who checked the clipboard under his arm. “It was our night clerk who checked her in.” He ran his finger across a line on the roster. “This is the room assigned to that credit card.”

“This is the police!” David called out. “Open the door and come out with your hands up!”

“I can’t go to jail!” the woman screamed.

“Shush! Be quiet and they’ll go away!”

“Where’s my bra?” she yelled. “I need my bra, damn it!”

“Here!”

“That’s a shirt, you idiot! Don’t you even know what a bra looks like?”

The curtain covering the window rustled.

“We’re going in!” David gestured at the desk clerk. “Open the door.”

The clerk rushed forward, unlocked the door, and dropped back with his hands over his head. Guns drawn, David, Bogie, and four troopers from Pennsylvania’s state police rushed inside to find a young woman standing in the middle of the room wearing only a pair of black lace panties. Her long dark hair fell down into her face and over one shoulder.

Upon the all-male police entrance, she clapped her hands, in which she clutched a black lace bra, over her naked breasts. Her eyes were wide and her mouth hung open. “Don’t shoot! I didn’t do anything!”

After tossing her head to get her hair out of her eyes, she glared at the young man sitting on the edge of the bed. He was dressed in nothing but a pair of red silk boxer shorts. In their hurry to get dressed, the blankets had fallen off the bed to land in a heap.

“I mean,” she said, “I did nothing illegal. He did it all.”

“Did what?” David asked.

“Whatever you’re here to arrest him for.”

“First of all,” David said, “who are you?” He held out a shirt that he had picked up off the floor to the woman still covering her bare breasts with only an unhooked lace bra.

“Candace Stengel,” the girl said. “And this is Kendell Richards—”

In spite of his effort to shush her, she rattled on with pride. “He’s a famous male model. He’s replacing Michael Jordan in the Hanes underwear commercial. Next week, they’re going to put his picture up in Times Square wearing nothing but his briefs. We met and fell in love last night in the motel lounge. He’s traveling through from New York to visit his mother in Ohio and I’m on my way to New York to break into theater.”

Lurking in the doorway, the desk clerk laughed. “Male model? New York?” He gestured at the man cowering in the bed. “You’re good, Kenny.”

“Do you know this man?” David asked the clerk.

“He’s a bus boy in the hotel diner,” the clerk said. “His good for nothing older brother is the night clerk who checked in the guest with that credit card you had flagged.”

“You lied to me!” Candace dropped her bra to the floor and lunged for Kenny. “Have you even been out of this burg? You probably don’t even have an agent. You took those pictures of me for yourself.”

While the troopers stood in stunned shock at the suddenly topless woman, Bogie threw both arms around her waist and lifted her from the floor to cut off her attack. “Come on, sweetheart, let’s get you dressed and calm you down.” Whirling her around, he carried her kicking and cursing from the room. One of the troopers followed with a blanket to cover her up outside.

Still laughing, the motel clerk sauntered out of the room and back to his office.

David turned to the man on the bed covering himself up with the sheets. He had long blond hair and a goatee. “Get dressed, Romeo. You have a lot of questions to answer.” The police chief picked up a pair of blue jeans from the floor. They still had the factory creases and stiff texture of new pants. He tossed them at him. “Where did you get Helga Thorpes’ credit card, Kenny?”

“I
am
going to be a model … someday.” Kenny turned his back to the police officers to put on his pants.

“I’m not here about your dreams and aspirations.” David set his foot on a chair next to the bed. “I want to know where you got that credit card that you used to book this room.”

“I found it.” Kenny turned around and zipped up his pants. “I found a purse in a booth in the diner yesterday when I went on duty. It was still there when I finished my shift. No one called or came back for it. So I opened it up and there was a wallet with cash and credit cards and—”

“Cash? How much?”

Kenny hesitated before answering. “Five-hundred and fifty-four dollars.”

“Where’s the cash?” David asked even though he knew the answer.

“I didn’t steal it.” Kenny gently fingered a tribal tattoo that covered his entire shoulder and traveled the length of his arm down to his wrist. Depicted an assortment of brightly colored bird feathers, the tattoo showed signs of being freshly re-touched.

The police chief cocked his head to take note of an oily lotion that had been applied to the fresh artwork. “You spent it.”

“Hey, I would have given the purse back if someone had come in asking for it,” Kenny said. “I waited all day, and when no one did …” With a shrug of his shoulders, he admired his new tattoo. “Besides, finders keepers.”

“And in this case the finder is also going to be a weeper.” David stepped up to him so that his face was inches from Kenny’s. “I want to see exactly where you found this purse.”

Kenny swallowed. Beads of sweat formed around the mustache of his freshly trimmed goatee. “Am I in trouble?”

A wide grin crossed the police chief’s face. “Kenny, don’t be silly.” In response to Kenny’s sigh of relief, he added, “Of course, you’re in trouble.”

Chapter Sixteen

“Do you think Kenny is guilty of anything beyond credit card fraud?” Mac asked David on his cell phone while keeping an eye on their rental car’s GPS.

Mac kept the other eye on the road weaving through an upper scale subdivision littered with small mansions on landscaped lots. Archie, who was driving, was notorious for getting so involved in hands-free phone conversations that she would ignore the GPS instructions.

“Turn right up here, Arch,” Mac directed.

“I’ve got it.” She turned on the right turn signal. “If someone stole Helga’s purse, then why did they leave over five-hundred dollars and her credit cards?”

“I doubt if it was stolen,” Mac said. “More likely she dumped it.”

“That makes more sense to me,” David said. “Kenny found the purse in a booth in the busiest restaurant at the biggest truck stop in Breezewood, a major stop on the Pennsylvania turnpike with people going in all different directions. If Helga had been lucky, a dishonest traveler would have found the purse and used up the cash on his travels before resorting to the credit card, hundreds of miles in the opposite direction from where she was heading.”

“Which would have sent you on a wild goose chase,” Mac said. “But as luck would have it, a less-than-swift busboy found it and used it up right there in town.”

“He spent over three hundred of the cash on a tattoo,” David said.

“Over three hundred dollars?” Mac replied. “For a stupid tattoo that’s going to sag into an ink blotch when he gets old and wrinkled?”

Seeing by the GPS that they were approaching their destination, he tapped Archie’s arm and pointed. “We’re here.” Enthralled in the phone conversation, Archie hit the brake pedal so hard that they jerked to a stop. Mac’s cell phone clattered to the floor. “Easy!”

“I am taking it easy,” she yelled. “Geez! Next time you’re driving.” Grumbling about backseat drivers, she eased the car over to the curb.

Mac picked up the cell phone from the floor to discover that his call to David had been disconnected. He cursed. “I didn’t get a chance to tell him about the feds arresting Hawkins and Nichols and our lead on Portia.”

“Portia Hagar had an alibi.” Archie parked in front of what had once been Jason and Scarlett Fairbanks’ home.

The sprawling French country home rested at the end of a paved circular driveway in the middle of which rested a rhododendron bush. A four-foot brick wall marked the boundary between the home and the property next door that sported an elaborately landscaped garden, which included a goldfish pond and footbridge.

“Jason Fairbanks allegedly raped Portia Hagar.” Mac followed Archie when she strolled over to the edge of the driveway to the house next door. “He got away with it because his father owned the law in this county. She was fired and her career over. Don’t you think it’s possible that she got mad enough to take matters into her own hands to get the justice she deserved?”

“And frame an innocent woman in doing so?” Archie dared to step up the driveway.

“Maybe that wasn’t her intention,” Mac said. “How was she to know that Scarlett—”

“Ruth,” she corrected him from over her shoulder before stepping over to the flowers surrounding the fish pond.

“Ruth—was leaving on that day at that time—unless she was Madame X. Maybe she intended to frame Ruth all along.”

Archie bent over to peer more closely at the red flowers.

“Smells like a set up,” Mac said. “What are you doing? Nichols said Mrs. Weber passed away.”

She smelled one of the flowers. “Are these bloodflowers?”

Mac was about to respond with “Who cares?” when a feminine voice replied in broken English from the home tucked behind the exotic garden, “Yes. You have good eye.” A young Asian woman with black hair that hung down to the middle of her back stepped from among a bed of rose bushes. Her gardening gloves and worn clothes coated in potting soil and other planting substances revealed that they had interrupted her yard work. “You admire garden? Yes?” Her voice was laden with an oriental accent that revealed her foreign upbringing.

“Very much so,” Archie said. “These gardens are lovely. You must have a green thumb.”

“Yes, I do,” she replied, “but I can’t take all credit. Most of garden was planted by my aunt many year ago. She pass away. Now I care for it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Archie said.

“Was your aunt Tuyon Weber?” Mac asked her.

Instead of answering, she cocked her head and looked him up and down with suspicion in her eyes.

“I’m Mac Faraday.” He offered her his hand, which she ignored. “This is Archie Monday. We’re investigating Jason Fairbanks’ murder for the lawyer representing his widow, Scarlett.”

“Everyone call me Lee.” Relaxing, she took off her gardening gloves to shake his hand. “I remember Scarlett. Yes. Nice lady. Pretty daughter named Holly.”

“Then you lived here,” Mac replied.

“I was at university when Mr. Fairbanks die,” she said. “I was raised in Vietnam. Aunt Tu come to United States with American soldier. She had promised to send for all of us after she become citizen but, when that happened, they did not have money. After uncle die, Aunt Tu send for me.” She frowned. “My mother too sick to come. She pass soon after I come.” A smile came to her lips. “But Aunt Tu take good care of me. She send me to school so I run her business.”

“What business is that?” Archie asked.

“Nursery.” Lee waved her arm around to indicate the elaborate gardens. “Aunt Tu start plant nursery after uncle die. Biggest in whole area. Right off interstate. Everyone go there.”

“Did your aunt ever talk about Fairbanks’ murder?” Mac steered her back to the reason for their visit.

“He wasn’t nice man,” Lee said. “No one sad when he die. Very mean. He hit Scarlett and Holly. Aunt Tu call police and they do nothing. She said it shameful thing for man when his death set living free.”

“How profound,” Archie said.

Gauging the distance between the two homes, Mac narrowed his eyes. “Was your aunt here at the time of the murder? Was she working in her garden—”

“Aunt Tu always gardening,” Lee said. “But she say she see and hear nothing.”

During their conversation, Archie was squatting next to the bloodflowers to admire the red blooms. “What kind of mulch do you use?” She brought a handful up to her nose to sniff.

“It is a special mixture that I make myself,” Lee said with a grin full of pride. “Aunt Tu created it. Spend many years mixing and experimenting.”

“What’s in it?”

“Many things. Make flowers big and bright.”

“Do you sell it at your nursery?” Archie asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Stop by and tell them I send you. They give discount.”

While Archie gushed at the offer of a discount, Mac once again eased them back to the reason for their visit. “We were hoping that the current owners of the Fairbanks’ home would let us in to take a look at where the murder happened.”

“I’m sure they would, if home,” Lee said. “They on vacation. Disney World with two children. So sorry.”

Mac was ushering Archie back to the car when he said, “I guess now we have to stop by the plant nursery.”

“We probably should.” She brought her hand up to his nose for him to sniff. Smelling the sour scent, he rubbed his hand over his nose to wipe out the odor. “What is that?”

“Many things.” Archie wiped her hands together. “I’m willing to bet one of them is chicken feces—which means our killer walked through Aunt Tu’s garden on his way into the Fairbanks home to kill Jason.”

Mac noticed the brick fence separating the two properties. “That wall is the perfect place to hide behind while waiting for the ideal opportunity to slip inside once Jason was alone to take him out.”

“And frame Scarlett in the process.”

“Ruth,” Mac corrected her with a smile.

“Ruth.” Playfully, she shoved the rental car’s keys into his chest. “You’re driving.”