All's Well That Ends (24 page)

“He got awfully angry when you suggested that Phoebe might not have killed herself,” I said mildly.

“That he did.” She was quiet again, frowning slightly. “But even so . . .” She’d been holding Phoebe’s pocketbook all along, and now she looked at it as if suddenly remembering that it was hanging from her shoulder. “I have to tell you, this isn’t going to be nearly as interesting as the idea that Dennis has been secretly in town. Or that he and Toy . . .”

“Mackenzie’s checking it out and I bet he finds out where he was and is. It just takes longer if he’s been in a private home.

However, that’s all speculation and the pocketbook is real, so give it here.”

“I looked in it.” Her expression was suddenly that of a young child expecting to be chastised. “Before you called about it. Was that wrong? I mean tampering with something that might be evidence? Important? Messing up fingerprints and all?”

“No, no,” I said. “Unless you got rid of its contents, which you did not.”

“Then, that’s the good news. But the bad news is that there is truly nothing interesting in it.”

Of course I was sure my semi-trained eye would spot what she’d missed. My non-credentials had gone to my head.

“In fact,” Sasha said, “I thought that was the only interesting thing about the bag—the fact that there wasn’t anything interesting, meaning personal, in her pocketbook.”

“You think somebody went through it before you? Took that mysterious something out—the interesting thing?”

Sasha shook her head and settled onto the leopard-print love seat. “That’s what I thought at first, but then I really looked at the contents and changed my mind. I think she’d just experienced a getting-organized attack, and she died too soon after it GILLIAN ROBERTS

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for the normal flotsam to collect in there again. Everything was in separate see-through zip-up bags by categories, see?” She pulled one out now, a silvery mesh that held lipstick, comb, mirror, and face powder. “Cosmetics.”

“Writing implements,” Sasha said, “credit cards,” pulling out two more bags, one orange, one green.

“Color coded, too,” I murmured.

“This makes it easier to switch purses quickly, and she had this awesome collection.” Sasha pulled out the little handheld version of the online calendar and address book. “I knew that anything on this would be on the computer, too, so that didn’t seem significant, and that was pretty much that.”

“No notebook or scraps of paper? What did she do with her random thoughts, shopping lists, memos to herself?”

“There’s this, but look at it. It’s got nothing interesting, either.” She handed over a tiny soft-sided notebook. The used pages were gone, ripped out on the small perforated line. All that was still in it said, “dz. eggs, lib, b-dy crds, tpe.” I tried to find subtle and meaningful coding there, but no matter how I looked at it, it seemed simply to be a list of chores. Phoebe had needed to buy eggs, birthday cards, and tape, and visit the library. Sasha was right. Hard to ascribe any significance to the list.

I shrugged. “Her money? A wallet?”

Sasha passed the entire pocketbook over to me. I understood why she’d appropriated it. It was a clever, crazy quilt of lizard skins dyed purple and topaz, immediately desirable, especially to the skinless shivering lizards left in its wake. I reached inside and was pulling out a slender wallet when the doorbell rang.

I looked at Sasha, who put her hands out, palms up. “I have no idea,” she said. “It can’t be my client. He’s an impatient sort, but he gave me till tomorrow morning. If he . . .” She continued muttering to herself as she went to the door and looked through the peephole. “I don’t believe it,” she said, then turned and mouthed “Dennis.”

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“No.”

She nodded vigorously.

Then there he was, walking—make that storming—through the door before Sasha had it fully opened.

“What the hell have you been telling people?” he demanded.

“Good afternoon to you, too, Dennis,” she said. “Isn’t this a surprise. I thought you were in Chicago.”

“Obviously I’m not. And don’t try to avoid the question.”

“Why not? You’re avoiding mine.”

They stood in belligerent positions facing each other. “Why don’t you both sit down?” I asked. I squashed Phoebe’s purse down beside me. I was pretty sure Dennis wouldn’t know this had been his mother’s pocketbook, or notice that I had another bag, my own, at my feet.

He nodded brusquely, and he and Sasha found seats as far apart from each other as possible in the room. He was barely into a sitting position before he started up again. “The police asked me all kinds of questions. The Bordentown police!”

“In Chicago?” I asked softly.

He glared at me. “Here.”

“Back so soon?” Sasha cooed.

He chose not to answer. He had questions of his own. “What did you tell them?” he demanded.

“Tell whom? About what?”

“The police! About me! You and your crazy ideas about my mother’s—about Phoebe’s death.”

“They asked you about that?”

He shrugged. “They asked me lots of things. Why?”

Time to stop beating around the bush. “Was it maybe about Toy Rasmussen’s violent death? You recall the name, right? The stager you hired? She was murdered,” I said.

“Just because somebody recommended her and I hired her doesn’t mean I’d—it doesn’t make any sense, anyway. Use your brains—why would I?” He glared at Sasha. “Only somebody GILLIAN ROBERTS

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who hates me, who has been jealous of me and has undermined me forever every way she could think of—including now—only that one person would even think that.”

The vanity of his paranoid and misplaced anger struck me.

Sasha had been in his life—in fact, in his zip code—for only a few years. I hadn’t heard her mention him, even in passing, in two decades, let alone bad-mouth him. He had not been on her mind at all.

But she’d been on his. He’d demonized her, carried her with him through all the intervening years, making her the villain behind his every ache and pain. I had a moment’s panicked fear on her behalf, but he didn’t seem about to inflict physical harm.

“I can’t believe you told the police I
killed
her!”

“Which ‘her’ are you talking about?” Sasha asked quietly.

“You’re lumping everybody together.”

“Toy,” he said. “Her. Nobody killed my mother except my mother. But they asked me about her, too. About the circum-stances surrounding her death.”

“Well, that’s good,” Sasha said. “Finally.”

“What the hell are you saying? You
did
turn them on me, didn’t you? You told them I killed my mother? Is that what you said to them?” His skin had reached the color of a ripe eggplant, and I worried whether his head might explode while I watched.

“I only meant that they were finally considering the idea that somebody did her in. And I never said a word about you, Dennis, not because I think you wouldn’t or couldn’t, but because I never spoke with them about you or anybody else. Amanda and I found the . . . Toy. That’s when we spoke with the police. They found you on their own. I, for one, thought you were in Chicago, the way you said you were.”

“I had my reasons.”

“If you’re so innocent, even though you lied about where you’d be, why don’t you drop the huffy act and just plain say what your reason for being here and saying you were there might be?”

Sasha’s color was darkening, too.

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Dennis bit on his bottom lip as if to censor himself. “I had business, all right? Turns out, it was better trying to take care of certain things here, rather than in Chicago. I just—I didn’t want to be hassled, is all. By you. By anybody.”

Business. “What is it you do again?” I asked softly. “I thought you worked at Marshall Field’s.”

He waved that away with one hand. “Yeah, sure. You ever heard of the American Way? What’s it to you if I’m looking to be more on my own?”

“I think the police talked with you because you were Toy’s boyfriend.” I kept my voice in a calm, soothe-the-savage-beast mode.

“
Were.
Was. As in past tense. It was over.”

“Nothing quite like a ruptured romance to trigger other sorts of passions.” I watched his face move around the color wheel again. We were approaching crimson when he finally took a deep breath that calmed him enough to speak.

“It wasn’t like that. It was never a big thing, and then it was a friendly breakup. She moved here, what was supposed to happen? Look, I got her a job, didn’t I? If I hated her or wanted her dead, why would I do that?”

We both stared at him. I don’t think anybody blinked for much too long.

“Sweet mother of God!” he shouted. “Only you”—he scowled at Sasha again—“only you would even think of something that incredible! Like it was a setup? Something I planned? I can’t believe you said that—thought that!” He grew silent for a moment. “No. I can believe it. It’s just like you.” He stood up.

My muscles tensed and I got ready to spring, but he simply stood there, looming.

“Good thing the police aren’t as mentally disturbed as you are,” he said. “They know I didn’t do anything. Just make sure you don’t go to them with any more of your crazy, vindictive theories.”

“Or what?” Sasha stood up as well, looking at him eye-to-GILLIAN ROBERTS

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eye. There is much to be said in favor of being as tall as your enemies.

“I’m not wasting any more breath on you. Just stay away from me!”

“Stay away from you? You need help, Dennis. Look at me.

I’m not in your city,” she said. “I didn’t burst into your apartment like a storm trooper. And I didn’t lie about where I had to be or was.”

“Where have you been, really?” I asked.

“None of your business,” he snapped.

Sasha plowed on. “Stay away from you? I’d love to—if you’d stop stalking me!”

“Stalking! I—” He simply shook his head. Maybe the airflow he produced would cool him down. He looked like a stroke waiting to happen.

I know about sibling rivalry and sibling conflict, but this was a rarefied subset. They were former short-term stepsiblings still at war. I hoped that Sasha and Dennis were not typical.

“Hey, you guys,” I said. “Hey. This is a rough time. Simmer down.”

“Don’t involve me in anything else, do you hear?” he said.

“That’s all I have to say.”

“What about the house?” Sasha asked. It was a valid question.

It was not, however, a question Dennis wanted to answer. His color flared, he grimaced and fumed, but there it was between them: the house that was going to put money in his pockets.

“Sell it,” he said.

“And you won’t say I’m cheating you? I did something wrong or evil or malicious or—”

“Just sell it,” he growled. “Not that anybody’s going to rush to buy a place that had a murder in it.”

“Two,” Sasha said softly. “And I can reach you in which city?”

she added.

He opened the door himself and slammed out. Sasha double-locked the door and turned to me with a long sigh.

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“You were pushing it, dear friend,” I said.

She shrugged. “So was he. But I’m glad the police talked to him, and I hope they keep tracking him.”

“I thought you didn’t think him capable of violence.”

“Maybe I was wrong. Besides, Phoebe was killed in a cow-ardly way. That’d be like him. As for Toy—oh, I don’t know. I hate him and I’d like him locked up even if he didn’t do it.”

Democracy is sometimes so unfair. Locking up whomever we didn’t like is an enticing idea. But here we were, stuck with rule by law; and Dennis was gone, having managed to avoid explaining why he’d lied about his whereabouts after the memorial service. We had nothing more than we’d had before he barged in, and we couldn’t lock him up.

Therefore, by all the rules of fair play (because of course, life does play fair, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?), I would now get my reward for good behavior. I pulled Phoebe’s purse out from under my thigh and opened it with a deep sigh of anticipation.

Phoebe’s credit cards were in one of those cunning mesh bags, a purple one. The wallet I’d started to extract before Dennis arrived was a slender number holding only bills, coins, and—my anticipation went into happy high gear—receipts.
Now
I’d find something. Sasha probably hadn’t even considered them.

I found lots of somethings, but unfortunately they were, without exception, extremely dull. Phoebe had bought stamps and gone to the supermarket—for those eggs on her list, I supposed. Also the ATM, where she’d withdrawn $200, not enough to believe anybody was threatening her or forcing her to make the withdrawal. She’d had lunch and left a 17 percent tip. She’d been to the dry cleaners and possibly still had clothing there.

She’d bought something and pulled the tag off. It said it was a

“Genuine Hoffer” and whatever that was, it said we should never settle for less. I sighed and tossed down the final contents, an appointment reminder for her dentist, a coupon for 20 percent off any purchase of towels at The Bubble, and a fabric-covered button.

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Sasha watched me with a bemused expression. “Dull, right?”

I felt a completely irrational wave of indignation. How could Phoebe have exited this world without an incriminating letter in her pocketbook? Why not a slip showing a huge withdrawal from the bank—or even an out-of-line huge deposit? What about a telegram, or a matchbook from a seedy-sounding nightclub?

Wasn’t that supposed to happen? Why was nothing given me that I could cleverly analyze, that could provoke even a tiny “Aha!”?

Sasha was watching me, nodding. “You were warned,” she said. “And so, my friend, if you have no further need of me, and you can’t think of a way we can destroy Dennis without our going to prison, I will return to the editing job. I’d grumble about it, but they are paying me good money to work at breakneck speed.”

I stood up. “And you’re paying us good—”

“—not so good,” she reminded me.

“—you’re paying us pathetically small amounts of money to help you get to the bottom of this, and I’m afraid I haven’t been much help at all. My apologies.”