Death Loves a Messy Desk (23 page)

“Oh.” I searched for something to make sense of this. “Maybe . . .”

She filled the awkward pause. “In fact, I know Fredelle Newhouse very slightly, and we’d be glad to have her. She could help with lots of tasks, but she hasn’t volunteered to date. Maybe she was thinking about it and mentioned that to you.” She didn’t bother to mention the head injury again, but I could tell she figured it accounted for my mistake.

“Sorry, I must have misunderstood.”

“No harm done.”

“You’re kinda pale,” the stocky officer said after I hung up.

No damn wonder I was pale. Innocent round-faced silver-haired fairy godmother type Fredelle Newhouse had deliberately misled me about her involvement in Therapy Dogs. The only reason, I imagined, was to entice me into Quovadicon and the rat’s nest it had turned out to be. Looked like Fredelle was just one more person who couldn’t be trusted.

Of course, it was just a matter of time until the defective detective showed up again.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said.

“Nick.” I sat up. A bad idea, as it turned out.

He said, “Okay, you want to start by telling me why you hit that lady? Was it an accident?”

I lay back again, causing a bit of havoc in my head. “I think you’re supposed to take my statement before you pull out the rubber hoses. Where’s Detective Tierney, by the way?”

“Didn’t anyone take your statement?”

I bit my tongue so I wouldn’t blurt out that the detective shouldn’t rely on the suspect to do his job for him.

I said, “No one did.”

“That’s weird.”

The keen officer stared at Nick with astonishment. Or at least that was my assumption.

I would have rolled my eyes, except I thought that would hurt. “I have been here in Emergency under police guard since the ambulance picked me up at Quovadicon.”

“Oh, so no statement. Hmmm.”

How long, I wondered, before the Woodbridge police department found itself under the media microscope for some essentially stupid miscarriage of justice due to the sheer incompetence of Nick Monahan? How would Pepper ever hold her head up in town?

Oh well. Not my problem. I’d warned her not to marry the jerk.

“You could take the statement,” I suggested. “Then I could get out of here and . . .”

“Unless we arrest you.”

“Bad idea.”

“It’s my job, Charlie. Sometimes I got to do the hard stuff.”

“Margaret just went back to her office to get some work material. We’ll wait until she gets back.”

“Margaret? Why do you need a lawyer?”

My head throbbed. Nick can have that effect. And I hadn’t done anything. “Fine. Just take the stupid statement and you’ll see why that won’t be necessary.”

“Okay, then. Want to tell me what happened?”

“Sure. But you have to write it down.”

“Course I’m going to write it down, Charlie. I’m the detective, remember?”

I did my best to describe my trip to Quovadicon without making my behavior look suspicious or, worse, lunatic. A challenge. As writing was never Nick’s best thing, the statement took longer than it should have.

Nick frowned and said, “Why did you go again?”

“I’ve explained that. Dyan called me and said she had something to tell me.”

“What was it?”

“Well, I don’t know, Nick. I never found out. We didn’t talk. She was badly injured when I got there.”

“And no one noticed this? Only you?”

“Do you recall the phone call that requested all staff to go to Mr. Van Zandt’s home? And Dyan didn’t go.”

“So she stayed behind?”

I massaged my temple. “Yes.”

“To meet with you.”

“Yes.”

“And that was because . . . ?”

“She claimed she had information for me. Perhaps Dyan made the call, a bit of subterfuge to clear the office of witnesses.”

“What?”

“She claimed—”

“No, that word.”

“Subterfuge? Means a trick.”

“I knew that. How do you spell it?”

“S-u-b—”

Nick stopped to scratch his head again. “I’ll just put
trick
.”

“Good thinking.”

Nick glanced over at me, looking sneaky. “The only thing is that Dyan didn’t make that call: You did.”

“I did not.”

“The call came from your cell phone.”

“That cell phone was stolen.”

His look morphed from sneaky to smug. Possibly he planned to run through all known facial expressions starting with S. Say
strange
,
stunned
,
stupefied
. Any of them would have worked. Or maybe he was just tired of writing and had decided it was more fun to tease me.

He said snidely, “Oh, yeah. Did you report that?”

“I didn’t because I thought my dogs had hidden it. We are still working our way through . . . issues about possessions. But it is patently untrue that I made the call.”

“Patently. Big word for a little lady.”

“Untrue. Bad word for a cop.”

“But maybe Fredelle Newhouse made that call herself. She misrepresented herself to me.”

“Your cell phone number showed up on the call display record when that call was made. Fredelle Newhouse didn’t make it. The call was transferred to her from reception. The number’s right there on the screen. Now, don’t go saying your dogs made the call.”

“Now I see that it must have been stolen by someone who . . .”

“Tough one, Charlie. Not sure if a jury will buy that.”

“What jury? I didn’t make that call, and I wish you’d get that through your—”

He raised his hand. “Okay, don’t panic. You don’t need to take everything so personally.”

“Don’t take it personally? Don’t take a jury personally? Don’t take insinuations that I may have killed someone personally? Are you . . . ?”

Before I could choose between
demented
and
dimwitted
in reference to Nick, the sturdy cop stepped forward. As if he needed protection from me. Nick the Stick had obviously found another emotional patsy. Better her than me, although I wanted to warn her not to let Pepper ever get a look at that lovesick cow expression or this officer would be looking for another police force. In Montana maybe.

At that moment the curtain was flung back with more than a little drama. Nick gasped, the officer gasped, and I gasped, too.

Pepper raised an eyebrow. She was in full makeup, nicely dressed, and with her hair fixed. This was the Pepper I was used to.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” I blurted. “Nick wants to arrest me for murdering Dyan. He’s hoping I’ll get discharged soon.”

“Is that a fact?” Pepper said.

The female officer stared at Pepper’s bump with barely disguised something. Envy maybe. Nick stared at Pepper with fear and confusion. I just stared. I would need to know what was going on before I could conjure up the right kind of emotion.

I said, “It goes without saying that I didn’t do it.”

Nick said, “All the evidence points to her, no question about it. You never really know about people, do you, babe?”

The officer said, “She’s been stalling to stay in the hospital, but she won’t be able to get away with that much longer.”

Pepper said, “Do I have to do everything around here?”

“What do you mean?” Nick squeaked.

“Am I or am I not on sick leave because of this pregnancy?”

“You are, babe.”

“Did we not both create this baby? And do we not both want this baby to go full-term?”

Nick scratched his head. That kind of complicated negative sentence was bound to throw him off. After thirty seconds he said, “Yeah, yeah. We did. We do. And you look beautiful. More beautiful than ever. You ask me, you’re the most—”

“Blow it out your ear, Nick.”

Nick’s mouth shut with a click of his teeth.

I took a chance. “But you do look good, Pepper, even if you’re not feeling well. Motherhood agrees with you.”

“Yeah well, getting hit on the head doesn’t agree with you. You look like crap and you have blood oozing through that bandage. Someone has to see to that. Where’s the doctor?”

“There’s blood oozing out of my head?” I said woozily. “Really? Are you sure, because—”

“Lie down and shut up, Charlotte. You.” She pointed to the officer. “Get a doctor in here, right now. Unless you want to be part of some kind of lawsuit.”

“Lawsuit?” Nick said.

“You know, harassment, mistreating witnesses.”

“But, babe, I didn’t . . .”

“Just take a hike, Nick.”

He gawked at her. His mouth was open again, slack-jawed, in fact.

“Now!”

I lay there not knowing whether to be more concerned that my head was oozing blood and apparently people died of that sort of thing, or that Pepper and Nick didn’t appear to be getting along. I was pretty sure that wasn’t my fault, but I could never really tell what was going on with them.

Nick slunk out through the curtain. The officer had already scurried off in search of a doctor.

Pepper narrowed her eyes in my direction. “Look at you,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you not to stick your pointed little nose into this business?”

“And I didn’t!”

“Oh, not so much, Charlotte.”

“This woman, Dyan, called me to tell me that she had to talk to me about Barb Douglas. It was the middle of the afternoon, during a workday in a respectable business. How could I know it wasn’t safe?”

“That’s not what I said. I told you not to get involved. So when the woman called you, you needed to tell her that it had nothing to do with you. You could have referred her to the police. And now look.”

I felt tears sting my eyes. “Pepper, they told me she’s dead.”

She was pale under her makeup. Up close I could see that she wasn’t feeling as well as she looked. “I am aware of that.”

“I tried to get you to listen to me. Do you think she’d still be alive if I’d sent her to the police?”

Pepper slumped into the hard plastic chair next to the chrome bed. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“And I suppose I could sue the police for harassment.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I just said that so that Nick would learn a lesson. He’s putting his feet in everything lately.” Pepper stroked her baby bump and glowered. Something told me that Nick had been foolish enough to make some remark to send Pepper through the roof. His life would be hell until he groveled enough to make that remark go away. I almost felt sorry for him.

“So you don’t really think that I killed that woman?”

“Of course not. But you could have been killed. And this was a clumsy attempt to frame you. What will it take to keep you from meddling in police business? Just go home, do your little closet fix ups and your color-coded rituals and leave the investigations to people who know what they’re doing.”

Behind her, the curtain was whipped open again. I saw the pasty face of the young cop. She was hovering behind the fresh new doctor.

“What’s going on here?” the doctor said.

Pepper barked, “She’s bleeding. Someone has to take a look at that wound.”

“Actually,” she said, “it’s just a scrape. I’ve just been able to get a look at her X-rays, and she was very lucky.”

I sat up. “As it’s
my
X-ray of
my
head, Doctor, I think you should talk to me. Directly.”

“Very lucky and very crabby, too,” Pepper said.

“Another inch to the left and a blow like that might have been fatal.” She did turn to me, but her gaze drifted back to Pepper.

“Told you,” Pepper said, shooting me the kind of look your mother used to give you when you got hurt falling out of a tree you’d been told not to climb.

“So I was lucky?”

The doctor said, “Yup. Are the police still waiting to question you? Because we want to monitor you for another two hours. And I don’t think you should be under any more stress. I’ll keep you overnight if they’re talking about taking you in.”

“They have her statement,” Pepper said. “She should just go home and go to bed.”

“Is there someone who can keep an eye on you?”

“Oh sure,” I said. “Maybe a few too many people.”

“You don’t fool around with head wounds, even superficial ones. Any dizziness, nausea, and you get someone to bring you back in right away. Are you paying attention to this?”

“She is,” Pepper interjected. “And she will. There are half a dozen people waiting to take on the job.”

“Good.”

“Thank you,” I said, but the doctor’s white coat had already disappeared behind the curtain. “Thank you, too, Pepper, for intervening with Nick and this officer.”

The officer sniffed.

Pepper said, “Now you listen up. Your luck can run out, you know. This better be the end of it.”

I nodded, although it hurt.

Pepper said, “Margaret called me. She’s on her way back. Sally had to go home for a bit to give Benjamin a hand, but she’ll be back, too. They’ll take you home.”