Death at a Premium (10 page)

“You heard about the dead man down on Josie’s work site, right?” Rodney asked.

“The fact is, Josie didn’t see fit to share that information with me,” Sam answered. Josie felt his fingers tighten on her shoulder, but his voice betrayed nothing.

“Yeah, the guy was stabbed to death before someone popped a blond wig on his head, wrapped him in a blanket, and stuffed him behind a wall just waiting for one of Josie’s crew to find him. Course, who woulda known that one of the people to find him was convicted of murder just awhile ago herself?”

No one had any idea what to say about that. The only sound in the room was chewing as Mike Rodney scarfed up Risa’s fine food.

TWELVE

THE NEXT MORNING when none of her employees showed up for work, Josie knew her company was facing its most serious crisis since she inherited it. Alone in her office, she was wondering what to do when her son appeared in the doorway. Nothing else could have cheered her up. She was so pleased to see him that she didn’t ask about the large cardboard box he carried in his arms. Besides, she didn’t have to ask: plaintive mewing preceded a tiny white head peeping out of a hole in the cardboard.

“I hope you have enough kitten chow for this gang,” Tyler said, placing the box on the floor with more care than he usually displayed.

Josie tried hard not to sigh or make any gesture that could indicate disapproval. “How many? And where did they come from?”

“Six. They were found next to the Dumpster by the Dairy Queen. Two are pure white—they’re amazing. Wait until you see.” Tyler had opened the box and he slowly tipped it on its side, allowing the kittens to venture into their new environment in their own time. A caramel-colored tiger flew out and raced around the room. His brothers and sisters followed more cautiously.

“Have you had breakfast yet?” Josie asked.

“Just a bowl of cereal and some . . . some juice.” Josie suspected her son’s “juice” had come out of a Coke can, but she didn’t say anything. “Want to come to Sullivan’s with me? We could have pancakes and sausage if you’re still hungry.” She knew he was always hungry.

“Yeah, but don’t you have to get to work?”

“I can be a little late today. After all, I’m the boss.” Josie smiled at her son and hoped he wasn’t remembering all the times she had explained that being the boss meant setting an example—starting work early, leaving late.

“Yeah. There weren’t a lot of you when Noel died, were there, Mom?”

She wasn’t sure exactly what he was asking. “Women who owned contracting companies, or female carpenters?”

“Both, I guess.”

Josie glanced up at her handsome son while searching in her jeans pockets for the keys to her truck. She had been a working mother all his life; she couldn’t remember him ever asking questions about her work, and was deeply pleased by his interest. “Well, things have changed a bit since I started working for Noel . . .” she began, opening the door for them both.

By the time they had traveled the five or six miles between her office and Sullivan’s General Store, she had pretty much reviewed her early years with Island Contracting and had begun to explain how bookkeeping and paperwork had entered her life after Noel’s death. She found a parking spot directly outside the store and followed Tyler in the door.

Sullivan’s was a local institution. At one time the only store on the north end of the island, it had moved twenty years ago to its Ocean Drive location and expanded to include a small kitchen, a long lunch counter, and some small Formica-topped tables. Tourists loved the place— they rented bicycles and sea kayaks there, bought plastic beach toys and boogie boards for their children when it was sunny, and purchased playing cards, games, and jigsaw puzzles when it rained. Josie usually came for the food. The eggs were prepared on griddles that had been producing crisp bacon and well-done sausage patties for two decades, and the result was delicious. She asked for the usual when she sat down, and knew two fried eggs, their edges crispy, their yokes slightly runny, would appear surrounded by strips of bacon, fresh hash browns, and a pile of buttered rye toast. Tyler was more unpredictable: he always had a difficult time choosing between pancakes and French toast. This morning, he wanted pancakes and sausages. He didn’t sit down until he had personally spoken to the chef and both waitresses, and his mother knew he would find double orders of everything on the plate when his meal arrived.

Naturally, everyone in the place was talking about the body, and it wasn’t long before the questions—and teasing—began.

“There’s a rumor going around that your mother’s company has got another body on its hands,” their waitress, a girl Tyler had grown up with, teased, setting down two glasses of orange juice on their table.

“The body has nothing to do with Island Contracting,” Josie protested.

“Chief Rodney was in earlier, and that’s not what he said,” she explained. “He said the body was someone on your crew.”

“He what? That’s not right. You must have misunderstood. Someone on my crew discovered the body, that’s all.”

The young woman frowned, but she didn’t argue. “I must have misunderstood. I heard that it was someone on your crew. But then it was a man, wasn’t it? And everyone knows you don’t hire men.”

“That’s not exactly true.” Josie would have explained further, but their food arrived, steaming and fragrant.

Tyler was tall and thin, but he enjoyed a high-calorie, high-fat meal as much as his mother. They didn’t speak again until the bottoms of their plates could be seen. “Risa says she’s going to cook for your wedding reception,” Tyler commented, pouring about a quarter cup of maple syrup on the last and previously saturated pancake on his plate.

“She’s been so wonderful to us, I really couldn’t refuse.”

“But where are you going to hold it? Our place is too small and anyway, I thought Sam told me that the reception was going to be at one of Basil’s restaurants.”

Josie looked up from her food. “That’s right. Oh sh— oh da—” She gave up trying not to curse in front of her son. “What the hell am I going to do?”

He smiled happily. “I don’t know, but you’ll figure it out. You know, I have some questions . . .”

But Josie was sitting where she could see through the large windows that looked out onto Ocean Drive and she had an unobstructed view of an Island Contracting truck traveling south. She stood up. “That’s my truck. I have to get to work. Tell someone to put our meal on my account. Do you have any cash? Can you leave a tip?”

“Sure. But I’m still hungry. Do you think I could have a bagel and some cream cheese?”

“Anything you want,” his mother answered, heading for the door. Tyler knew most of the year-round population on the island and had probably met about half of the summer people in the weeks since he had been home from school. He wouldn’t have any trouble getting to where he was going on his own. It was a sign of how confused she was that she didn’t stop to wonder exactly where he needed to be that morning; she had to find out who was in that truck and where
they
were going.

She caught up with her truck, and her crew, at the Bride’s Secret Bed and Breakfast. Everyone was there except Leslie, and everyone there was huddled around Vicki, who was crying. Josie asked the obvious questions. “What’s wrong? Where’s Leslie?”

Nic looked up. “Leslie’s what’s wrong. He’s been down at the police station all night.”

Vicki stopped crying long enough to speak. “He’s been arrested and no one will tell us why!”

Vicki began sobbing even harder. Josie looked around. They were all on the front porch, and although it was still morning, the early beach crowd was passing by, beach chairs slung over their shoulders, towels, books, sunscreen, and all the day’s necessities stuffed into brightly colored straw and canvas bags. She and her crew hardly fit in with this cheerful scene. “Let’s go inside.”

“We can’t get in. We don’t have a key,” Nic pointed out.

Josie pulled the key from her pocket and tossed it to Nic. “You unlock. I need to make a phone call before I come inside. And you might make some coffee.”

“No problem.”

Josie ran back to her truck as her crew entered the house. She had her cell phone, but she wanted a bit of privacy to make her call. By the time she joined her crew in the kitchen, the scent of fresh coffee had joined the musty odor of a building in which old walls were coming down. Vicki was holding a steaming mug and sniffling. Josie accepted a mug from Mary Ann and jumped up to sit on the counter. “What exactly is going on?”

“Last night . . . the police . . . Leslie . . .” Vicki seemed unable to complete a sentence.

“Nic can explain. She was there,” Mary Ann suggested.

Nic nodded and put down her coffee. “I was over at Vicki and Leslie’s apartment last night. We’d rented a bunch of videos and picked up a couple of pizzas. We planned on a nice quiet evening—it had been a long day.”

“Then the police . . .” Vicki didn’t have to finish her sentence for everyone to know what had happened.

“Did they tell you why they were arresting Leslie?” Josie asked.

“They didn’t arrest him. At least not then,” Nic said. “They said they wanted him to come down to the police station and answer some questions. Leslie said sure.”

“They arrested him!” Vicki wailed.

“You don’t know that,” Mary Ann said. “They may have just wanted to ask him some questions like they said.”

“All night?” Vicki stopped sobbing long enough to interrupt.

“A lot of questions,” Mary Ann said.

“So he hasn’t come back to the apartment?” Josie asked.

“Noooo!” It was a wail.

Josie asked another question. “Did he call or anything?”

“No one’s heard a word,” Nic answered.

“Not that that means anything,” Mary Ann said.

Josie thought about what she had just heard. “I called Sam as soon as you told me about Leslie, and he’s on his way to the station. He’ll be able to find out what’s going on, unless Leslie doesn’t want him to.”

“Why Sam?” Mary Ann asked.

“Sam’s a lawyer.”

“I thought he owned that fancy liquor store a few blocks from here,” Nic said.

“He does. He doesn’t practice anymore. He used to work in New York City, and he retired and bought the store. But he still has his license.”

Vicki stopped crying. “Will he get Leslie out of jail?”

“We don’t know that he is in jail,” Mary Ann reminded her.

“And Sam won’t represent Leslie—although he can help us find someone if Leslie does need a lawyer—but the island police won’t dare do anything they shouldn’t with Sam around. If Leslie is being held down at the station, well, Sam will make sure everything’s okay.”

“Sounds like a good thing. The cops on this island are something else.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Josie said. “But, remember, Sam can’t do anything at all unless Leslie allows him to.”

Vicki was listening and her tears had stopped flowing. “Do you think Sam can convince Leslie to accept help?”

“I have no idea,” Josie said.

“Listen, there’s no reason to cry,” Nic spoke up. “Leslie’s probably just fine. Besides, there are worse things than being arrested for murder.”

“How do you know?” Vicki wailed.

“I do know. You see . . .” She took a deep breath. “You see, I was arrested for murder years ago.”

“You were arrested for murder?” Josie repeated. So Mike Rodney had been telling the truth.

“Yeah. And convicted,” she added, looking down at the floor. “But it was different then. I was different then. It happened when I was in high school and hanging around with the wrong kids. Well, the truth is that I was hung up on the wrong guy.”

“Something that’s happened to all of us,” Mary Ann spoke up.

“But this wrong guy was really wrong—he was involved in a lot of criminal activities and he wanted me to prove how much I loved him by . . . by helping out.”

“What did you do?” Mary Ann’s eyebrows had risen so high they were hidden by her bangs.

“I was the driver for a convenience store robbery. He said having someone sitting in the car would make the getaway easier. He didn’t say he was going to kill the clerk—who was just a kid himself—in his stupid attempt to get enough money for some dime bags.” She looked around at her companions. “We were caught, and I was convicted along with him. I spent four years in prison. In fact, that’s where I learned my trade. Getting a job was a condition of my parole. A great social worker connected me with a group that puts women in nontraditional jobs. I’ve been doing this ever since.”

“And none of your employers have known about your background?” Josie asked.

“Up until now, they all have. I hoped . . . to tell you the truth, I thought it was time to leave my past behind. You don’t ask about a criminal record on Island Contracting’s application form, so I figured . . .” Nic shrugged. “I figured that the past was the past and that was it.”

“Sounds good to me.” The voice came from the doorway where Leslie and Sam were now standing.

“You’re not under arrest!” Vicki’s face lit up.

“No, the cops don’t know what to do with me.”

“Why should they do anything with you? You found the body, but what other connection is there?” Josie asked.

“The dead man had my ID in his wallet.”

“Your ID?”

“My driver’s license,” Leslie explained.

“How the hell did that happen?” Nic asked.

“Damned if I know, but it seems to have made me the primary suspect in the guy’s murder,” Leslie said.

Vicki started to cry again.

THIRTEEN

THEY WERE ALL professionals, and that day they proved it. Despite everything that had happened in the previous twenty-four hours, everyone worked and worked hard. By evening, all that remained on the first floor were support beams, the load-bearing walls, and some of the original woodwork. The room where the body (as yet unidentified) had been found was off limits, but at this rate demolition would be done by the end of the week. Josie needed to check the status of orders at the local hardware store. If everything was in place on the island—and having worked with the same suppliers for over a decade, she expected that to be true— construction would begin the next Monday. She reminded her crew to get to bed early that night and to be on site early the next day—and reminded Leslie and Vicki to call Sam if the police appeared. Then she headed straight for the hardware store.