Died with a Bow (28 page)

She grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. The boat stalled. “You think you know who killed Vienna?”

“No,” I said. Because until that moment I didn’t know. But suddenly the smell of bluebells, raspberries, melons and apples filled my nostrils; even there in the fresh air I could
smell it. It was her. “I don’t even know what happened to her necklace,” I said calmly.

“Really. I pawned it.”

“You? Why?”

“For the money, stupid. Why else do people pawn necklaces? So I could buy the Rolls Royce Lex wouldn’t give me.”

“But he’s a car salesman.”

“It doesn’t matter. Not to him. The cobbler’s wife has no shoes, ever hear that? So now you know why I took it from her. But not just for the money. Because I didn’t want her to have it. I was furious that she wore it that night. It wasn’t hers.”

“It was her grandmother’s,” I said. This whole thing was a misunderstanding, I told myself.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Bobbi said, shoving me back down onto my seat. “It belonged to Lex’s mother. He gave it to Noreen years ago, and she never gave it back when they got divorced. She gave it to her mother for safekeeping, but didn’t dare wear it. Of course not. When I saw Vienna had it on that night…I was furious. I thought Lex gave it to her. He gave her money, presents, a car. And now the necklace.”

“Yes, but—”

“You had to get into it, didn’t you?” she demanded. “You had to tell the cops it was me. They came to see me yesterday. But I got rid of them.”

“I didn’t…It’s not my…Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me you’d figured things out. Nobody had to tell me. San Francisco is a small town. Everything you did got back to me. Like your going to the pawnshop to get my necklace.”

“But it was gone.”

“Of course it was gone. I bought it back when Lex said he’d buy me a Rolls of my own. Get it?” she asked, leaning toward me with a maniacal smile on her face.

“Yes, I get it,” I told her, eyeing the steering wheel and the throttle. If only I could overpower her and get back to shore. But she was at least three inches taller than me and heavier.

“Bobbi,” I said, “why did you…?”

“To get the necklace. Are you dense? Don’t you see?”

I shook my head.

“I wanted the necklace back. It was mine.”

“But it belonged to Vienna’s grandmother.” I don’t know why I said that, I just knew I had to stall for time. Think, I told myself, think of how to convince Bobbi you don’t know anything. Pretend you still don’t get it. How hard can it be to act clueless?

“I just told you, that’s a lie,” Bobbi said, her face mottled with pink splotches, her hair whipping around her face in the wind. “That was not her necklace. When I saw it on Vienna that night at the auction, I saw red. I demanded it. Told her it belonged to my family, not her mother’s. She refused to hand it over. I followed her to the shop, and she still wouldn’t listen to reason even after I told her how it was stolen from my mother years ago. I can show you pictures of it from the family album. I think I know what’s mine and what’s not. I didn’t mean to kill her. I just wanted the damn necklace back. If she had handed it over, if she hadn’t struggled, she’d still be alive.”

I stood and stared at Bobbi openmouthed while the boat rocked beneath us. What part of her story was true? That she took back the necklace when Lex gave her her own Rolls? That it had belonged to her mother, and not Lex’s? It
didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she’d killed Vienna. I knew it and she knew I knew it.

“So where is it now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” she screamed. “Somebody bought it.”

Why she bothered to lie when she intended to do me in I’ll never know. She was not making sense, and I wasn’t either. Under the circumstances, who would?

I only had a moment to ponder all this conflicting information before she shoved me backward. I fell down but got up on my knees and lunged forward. I grabbed her by the ankles. She toppled over like a tall stone statue. She screamed and got back up. We shoved and pushed each other. I was desperate. I knew she wouldn’t want me to live to tell her convoluted story. Whether she’d meant to kill Vienna or not, she’d done it.

“You used the hanger, didn’t you?” I demanded, breathing hard. “And you almost strangled me the other night.”

“I wouldn’t have killed you then. I needed to wait until now, when there are no witnesses.”

I looked around. We were on the other side of the island. No boats, nobody around. I couldn’t let her get away with it. Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe the salesman would say, What ever happened to that attractive young woman you left with? Then would Bobbi tell him I’d fallen overboard? Or gone for a swim and disappeared? But I’d be dead and Bobbi would get off Scott free.

“Bobbi, I won’t tell anyone,” I said earnestly. “Your secret is safe with me. Let’s go back to the boat show. We’ll forget this ever happened.” I knew I was being naïve, but I was desperate too.

Her answer was to grab me by the hair and yank me
forward and back like the doll Vienna and Athena fought over. Would I lose my arm too? Or would I lose my life?

She pushed me hard one last time, and I toppled overboard. I hit the cold water with a painful thud, and I knew I’d be dead from the elements in minutes. Bobbi walked to the front of the boat just as a rogue wave hit. She fell over and hit her head on the side of the boat before tumbling into the water. I screamed at her. She didn’t hear me. She sank like a stone.

I swam the few strokes back to the boat, pulled myself up and into the boat with my arms aching and the adrenaline pumping. Otherwise I could never have done it. I knew I should dive back in and try to find her, but I was shaking with the cold. I had to get back and get warm or I’d die too. And that wasn’t fair. I hadn’t killed anyone.

Fortunately the engine was still running. I plopped myself in front of the steering wheel and pushed the drive lever forward the way I’d seen Bobbi do. The engine roared and the boat surged forward. I turned the steering wheel and headed back to the boat show. My teeth chattered, my body ached, but I was alive.

There was a crowd waiting for me on the pier, including Detective Wall, Lex Fairchild, the boat salesman and many of our customers, as well as quite a few curious strangers. I didn’t really know what I was doing as I banged the boat against the pier before it came to a shuddering halt. Detective Wall jumped in the boat, threw a blanket around my shoulders and said, “What happened?”

“Bobbi killed Vienna,” I mumbled, my lips cold and stiff.

“I mean what happened out there?” he said.

“She tried to kill me.”

“So what did you do, kill her first?” he asked as he led me inside.

I shook my head. “We fought. She tried to throw me over, but she fell instead. I couldn’t save her.”

He looked disappointed I hadn’t tried to save her, but not surprised. I wasn’t sure what he felt. What I felt was weak and empty. I sat on a bench and kicked off my boots. When I turned them upside down, gallons of water gushed out.

Jack directed the police boats to go out on a search immediately in case Bobbi had resurfaced. Then he insisted that I change into dry clothes immediately, a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt in my size he had in his car. Don’t ask me where he got them. I didn’t want to know about other women in his life who’d left a set of clothes with him. I just went into the bathroom and stuffed my wet clothes in a plastic bag. A glance in the mirror told me I looked like I’d been shipwrecked, hair hanging in strings, face pale. Then we went to the hospital so I could be checked out.

I told Jack I was fine, and I just wanted to go home. He nodded, but he was on the phone to the Coast Guard telling them about the accident. I knew he wouldn’t let me leave right away. I’d have to go make a statement somewhere, probably at his station. He said having a medical checkup was police procedure. While he stayed in the Urgent Care waiting area, I went into a small examining room wearing a paper gown. On my way in I looked up and down the hall just in case Jonathan was on duty, but he probably still worked nights. The room I was in had a list of do’s and don’ts on the wall, like “Don’t Drink and Drive.” It might have been the same room where I was treated for a concussion and sprained ankle last year after falling off a ladder.

This time, I was diagnosed with shock and hypothermia. They could tell because my temperature was hovering
around ninety-five and I was still shivering despite a heat blanket they’d wrapped around me.

“Where were you?” the young doctor asked. A man with none of the bedside manner of my favorite MD.

“In the Bay,” I said, my lips still stiff.

“Without thermal protection, swimming in the Bay is not advised,” he said sternly.

“I know,” I said.

“Without a life jacket, drowning is inevitable.”

“Then I’m very lucky to be alive, since I didn’t have a life jacket or protection against the cold.”

He gave me a pamphlet on the causes of hypothermia, which I glanced at. Then I added, just to see if he’d stop lecturing me, “Besides, someone wanted to kill me.”

“They did? Why?” He looked mildly curious. Maybe he heard that a lot in the ER.

“It’s a long story. Can I go home now?”

After he told me to drink hot liquids, keep warm and get plenty of rest, he added, “No alcohol. No caffeine. You may seem irrational, but you’ll get over it.”

“I doubt it,” I murmured.

I got dressed and then took one more look around for Jonathan, but it was just as well he wasn’t on duty. I couldn’t imagine recounting my unbelievable story of survival in the San Francisco Bay again. Maybe later, after I’d recovered.

“You think you can live through a brief session at the station before I take you home?” Jack asked. “I can promise you some hot soup and the use of my Forty-niners football blanket to wrap around you.”

I sighed. “I guess so.” Even though I was feeling a little better, especially knowing he was doing his best to keep me comfortable, I wanted him to think I was doing him a big
favor after all the times he’d told me to butt out of this investigation. Besides, there were a few things I wanted to know in exchange for my cooperation.

One was, what was he doing at the boat show?

“Believe it or not, I
was
not, I
am
not on duty today. I was thinking of buying a boat. In fact, I made an offer on a small sailboat. Then I heard someone yelling. A guy who said his wife had disappeared and he was afraid she’d gone out in a boat by herself.”

“Lex.”

“Yes. He didn’t know she wasn’t alone. Why the hell did you go out in a boat with a murderer?” he demanded as he drove down the street toward the Central Police Station.

“I didn’t know Bobbi was the murderer.”

“Then why did she try to kill you?”

“It was all a misunderstanding. She thought I was after her.”

“Who were you after?”

“Anyone and everyone. But not her. I suspected Vienna’s old boyfriends, her roommate, her family, and yes, Bobbi too. But I didn’t know it was her until she told me. How did you know?” I asked him.

“The prints on Vienna’s clothes and her skin and even the hanger used to kill her just came back from the crime lab in Sacramento. I’d gone to arrest her this morning, but she wasn’t there. There was an all-points bulletin, and I had a deputy and a crew watching her house.”

“But she was at the boat show.”

“Yeah. And now…”

“She’s at the bottom of the Bay. You don’t have to find her body, do you?”

“We have to make sure she didn’t survive. The boats are out there now searching the area.”

“I learned today that nobody could survive more than fifteen minutes in that water. Untreated hypothermia leads to heart failure, respiratory failure and death.”

“Did Bobbi tell you how she killed Vienna?” he asked

“Just like she tried to kill me, by strangling her. Only she used the hanger on Vienna, and a Hermes scarf on me.”

“I wasn’t aware you reported an attempted murder,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“No, but I will next time, I promise. Shall I go on?” I asked impatiently. “After the benefit Bobbi followed Vienna to the shop, where I assume she was going to change out of her gown, and when Vienna refused to give up the necklace, she killed her.”

“But how did the necklace end up at the pawnshop then?

“Bobbi took it there to get money for it so she could buy herself a Rolls that Lex wouldn’t buy for her. But he did, so she decided to keep the necklace. Only she didn’t get it back until the night she killed Vienna. Then she took it back to the pawn shop for safekeeping, knowing it would be a damaging piece of evidence if it was found anywhere near her.”

I sipped the hot soup Jack had brought from a vending machine, while he went behind his desk and unlocked a drawer. He pulled out the famous necklace and held it in the palm of his hand.

I gasped.

“Is this it?”

I nodded. “
You
got it from the pawnshop.”

“Just dumb luck. I happened to be passing by while in my old neighborhood and I saw it in the window, but I didn’t
want to make the purchase myself where they know me, so I sent my assistant in to buy it.”

“But the pawnshop guy said the same woman who dropped it off bought it back.”

“Not true,” he said. “He was confused.”

“But you’d never seen the necklace. So how did you know…”

“I’d heard a lot about it.”

“Who gets it now?” I said, admiring the way the diamonds sparkled around the deep pink stone.

“I’ll let you know,” he said and locked it up again.

Jack drove me home and made sure I was warm and safely ensconced in my small bedroom. “You going to be okay?” he asked when he saw my eyelids drooping.

“I’ll be fine. When I wake up later, I’ll call Meera at the pizza place and have something delivered.”

“What time would that be?”

“I can’t believe you’d cadge another dinner invitation from me. Have you no shame?” I asked. Then I drifted off into a deliciously warm slumber, knowing I’d solved another crime and the streets were safe for well-dressed honest citizens again.