Donut Shop Mystery 25 - Devil's Food Defense (8 page)

Grace was just finishing up with her phone when I got back to the Jeep. “Catastrophe averted?” I asked her as I started it and continued on to Rand’s office.

“For the moment,” she said. “What did Barry have to say for himself?”

“He tried telling me that Gray owed him money because of a poker game, but he folded pretty quickly when I told him I didn’t believe him.”

“Did he tell you the truth then?”

“No, but it’s obvious that Gladys saw something pass between them. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to dig a little harder into the mailman’s life to find out.”

“We can do that,” she said. “After all, that’s one of the things we’re best at.”

“Let’s forget about him for now and focus on Donald Rand. It’s too bad we can’t use a cover story with him, but after he found out that we lied to him once, he’d never believe another one.”

“It was fun pretending to be someone else, wasn’t it?” Grace asked me.

“I have to admit, once I got into the spirit of it, it could be,” I agreed. “Unfortunately, this time we’re going to have to just play this straight up.”

Chapter 10

I
t had been years since I’d set foot in BR Investments, but nothing had changed as far as I could tell. The lone desk was the same cheap one I’d seen before, and the carpet was just as ugly a green, though perhaps a little more worn. Donald Rand was a little worse for the wear himself. His clothes were even more frayed than they’d been before, and his massive belly made me fearful that a button might pop off his shirt and blind me at any moment. At least he’d finally given up on nurturing the wispy strands of hair that had been precariously arranged on top of his head; he was now completely bald.

“Unless one of you ladies has suddenly come into a fortune you need help investing, I’m busy at the moment,” he said the moment Grace and I walked into his office.

I saw Grace’s face light up, and knew that if I didn’t act quickly, one of us would be about to inherit a sizable fortune from some fictitious long-lost relative. “We’re here about Gray Vincent’s murder,” I said.

Grace frowned at me for a moment for killing her fun, but we didn’t have time to mess around.

“I don’t talk about my clients with other people,” he said flatly.

I glanced down at some of the paperwork spread out across his desk and caught a few glimpses of Gray’s name written here and there.

Grace asked, “Should you even be admitting that he was a client of yours, if that’s the case?”

Rand frowned, realizing that she was probably right. “I don’t know anything about Gray’s murder,” he said dully. “So don’t bother asking.”

“You two didn’t get along very well, did you?” I asked him. “I’m really surprised he kept you on as his financial advisor.”

Rand’s face darkened. “We got along just fine.”

“Really?” I asked, leaving it up to him to fill the silence that only grew between us. It was an old trick that Grace and I liked to use when the situation called for it. It was amazing how many people would do their best to fill in empty gaps in conversation, if you just gave them enough opportunity to talk and fill the voids.

He couldn’t take it for very long. “I don’t care what you heard. I advised him on something, and he did just the opposite. When I pressed him on it, he pushed back. I was right, I knew that he was making a mistake. How could I not try to talk him out of it? Was he happy with me? Probably not, but he would have come around sooner or later.”

I caught Grace’s glance, motioned to the desktop, and then pled for her to make a distraction for me.

I wanted a better look at that paperwork.

My partner caught on immediately. She started to put her purse down on the edge of the desk and then “accidentally” spilled the contents onto the carpet. “I can’t believe I’m so clumsy,” she said loudly. I thought she was overacting, as she had a tendency of doing sometimes, but evidently Rand didn’t have a problem with it. Both of them dropped to their knees to recover the contents while I did a quick scan of the desktop. Grace did her part; she’d reach to pick something up, only to knock it farther away. Rand grew tired of the game quickly, though, and that’s when he must have noticed what I was really doing.

He stood up quickly and covered his desktop with his jacket. “See anything interesting, Suzanne?” he asked me sarcastically.

I decided to tell the truth. “Why was Gray Vincent in the process of changing his beneficiary?”

“Get out of my office,” Rand said slowly.

“But my purse,” Grace protested, trying in vain to buy us a little more time.

“I’ll mail anything else I find to you,” he snapped. “You are both trespassing. Now leave!” The last bit was said with a great deal of force.

We had no choice. Grace scooped up the last bits of the contents of her purse, and we did as we were told.

Once we were outside, Grace asked me, “Suzanne, what exactly did you see in there? I thought he was going to take a run at us both on the spot.”

“It was paperwork for a brokerage account Gray evidently had with Rand. I saw a change of beneficiary form letter on top. There weren’t many blank spaces, and two of them were already filled in.”

As we walked back to the Jeep, she asked, “Whose names did you see?”

“I couldn’t tell which was which, but I know for a fact one was Rand’s name, and another was Gladys. It appeared to me that Gray was about to change his beneficiary. If he was going to take Rand’s name off the forms and replace them with Gladys’s, it could give the broker a motive for murder. He knew that he had to strike before the paperwork was officially filed so he could get control of the account.”

“What if he was changing the forms from Gladys to his name instead?” Grace asked me.

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“They broke up, remember? If their relationship really was over in Gray’s mind, why wouldn’t he give his money to someone else? Why not his investment counselor? If that was the case, how would Gladys react if she knew that she was going to lose her inheritance from Gray? For all we know, she was counting on the cash.”

“Are you saying that you think she killed him for his money?” I asked her. The idea was difficult to wrap my mind around. I never would have thought of the older cook as a gold digger, but it was clear that events may have been interpreted exactly that way.

“Suzanne, we’ve both seen murder committed for money in the past. Just because we think we know Gladys doesn’t mean that she might not be capable of it herself.”

“I know you’re right, but still I’m having a hard time believing it,” I said after a few moments.

“We need to dig into Gladys’s life a little more than we thought we might have to,” Grace said. “Maybe there’s a pressing reason that she needs money, like a dying sister or something.”

“I still don’t think she’d kill someone,” I said.

“I don’t want to either, but if we’re going to do this, we need to be thorough. Just because we like her, we can’t just forget about her involvement in this case.”

“Agreed,” I said.

I didn’t like it, but what choice did I really have? As I drove back toward the donut shop, I was surprised to see Gabby Williams standing out in front of her shop.

The moment she saw my Jeep, she started waving in my direction.

“What do you suppose she wants?” Grace asked me as I pulled my vehicle into a parking spot in front of Gabby’s shop.

“I don’t know, but I have a hunch we’re about to find out.”

“Who was that man you two were chasing around in the park earlier?” Gabby asked the moment we were all inside her store. Before I answered, I looked around the shop to make sure that it was empty. There were no customers, but I found some really nice items, gently used clothing pieces that were more fit for Grace than they ever would be for me, and a mannequin that appeared to be looking at my outfit with disdain. Why shouldn’t it? It was dressed much more nicely than I was.

“You saw that, did you?” I asked her.

“How could I miss it? Once moment you were talking with Gladys while the three of you were sitting on a bench in the park, and the next thing I know, you both take off running as though the pair of you were on fire. I’d seen that strange man hovering around town earlier, but I didn’t realize that he had anything to do with Gray’s murder.”

“We don’t know that he does one way or the other just yet,” I said, trying to keep our conversation as cryptic as I could manage.

“Then why on earth did you chase him?”

It was a fair question. “I thought he might be eavesdropping on our conversation,” I said. “When I went over to see what he was up to, he was gone.”

“But you found him soon enough, didn’t you?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Gabby, how can you possibly know that? I understand that you can see the gazebo from your window, but I know for a fact that you can’t see my cottage.” I glanced through the window to be sure that I was right. Sure enough, the trees blocked the view.

“I was concerned for your safety, both of you,” she amended quickly. “Naturally I wanted to be sure that you two were okay. I went as far into the park as I needed to in order to confirm that you were both okay, and then I came straight back to the shop.”

“The truth is, we need more information about him,” I conceded. “But what could we do? He decided to leave, and there wasn’t anything we could do to stop him.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for him in the future,” she promised, which I knew might be of some help. There was little that Gabby missed in our little town. She added, “A little later, I saw you talking to Barry Vance, Suzanne,” she said. “I must say, I’m not surprised you think he might be up to something.”

“Do you honestly suspect him of killing Gray?” I asked her.

“Does it matter what I think?” she asked. “
You
were the one grilling him on Springs Drive. By the way, it was brave of you to face him alone. Where were you, Grace?”

“I was in the Jeep taking care of some business,” she said firmly, “but if Suzanne had needed me, I was just ten steps away.”

“And I wasn’t grilling him,” I corrected her. “We were just having a conversation about his relationship with Gray. You should know from firsthand experience that’s the main way we’ve been able to figure
anything
out in the past. Grace and I are just gathering information at this point,” I said. “Is there some reason in particular we should have him on our radar?” Even though Gabby had given us Gladys’s name as a lead, I wasn’t about to disclose the fact that the cook had told us to speak with Barry. I’d promised to respect the cook’s wishes, and that was exactly what I was going to do.

“No, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Gabby said. “He almost lost his job last year. Did you know about that?”

“What happened?” Grace asked. She was still tentative about dealing with Gabby, as the two hadn’t always gotten along well in the past. I knew one thing with full certainty; Gabby Williams was a bad enemy to have, and I was glad that she and my best friend had come to some sort of understanding. They might not be the best of buddies, but at least they’d found grounds for mutual respect, if not affection.

“He’s a snoop,” she said in explanation.

“So are we, for that matter,” I said without thinking. “What else can you call what we do?”

Gabby raised one eyebrow. “Are you talking about you and Grace, or the two of us?”

“Us, not you,” I quickly corrected her. Gabby was indeed nosier than Grace and me put together, but it wouldn’t do any of us any good calling her on it.

She seemed mollified by my answer. “Don’t be too hard on yourselves. He’s on a level you can’t even imagine.”

“What does he do, read other people’s postcards before he delivers them?” Grace asked lightly.

“I’m really not at liberty to say,” she said smugly. That was the Gabby Williams I knew. She may or may not have had something on the mailman, but if she could keep from disclosing the fact either way, I knew that she’d score it as a personal victory.

“Okay, so he’s bad at his job. How does that tie in with Gray? Evidently there was
something
going on between them,” Grace said. She wasn’t exactly violating any confidences, but I wondered about the wisdom of sharing that information with Gabby.

“Did you ask him directly about it?” she wondered aloud. “Sometimes people will readily confess to the most unusual things if you only ask.”

“We did. At first he said that Gray owed him money from a poker game.”

“That’s complete and utter nonsense,” Gabby said quickly before I could finish.

“Which I told him. He immediately backed down from that lie, but when I pressed him more about it, he pretended to get offended and ended the conversation. He was clearly hiding something; I just don’t know what.”

“Keep digging,” Gabby said. “You’ll find it. Who else have you spoken with?”

I was about to deflect the question when Grace answered, “Donald Rand.”

I gave her a sharp look, but she just shrugged in response.

Gabby pursed her lips in thought a moment before replying. “That’s interesting. It’s hard to imagine Gray having enough money to invest with Rand. I know one thing; the man’s bad at his job, and he takes a commission for his mistakes, to boot. Then again, Gray hasn’t had any obvious means of support since he first came to town. He’s been living on
something
all these years.”

“I thought he retired,” I said.

“Clearly he did, but from what, exactly? Did Rand have anything to share? You know he’s in dire straights, don’t you?”

I hadn’t heard about that. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“I’m surprised you missed it,” Gabby said, arching one eyebrow. “The rumor is that he’s about to declare bankruptcy. As I said, he’s bad at what he does, so that’s not really that great a shock, but I also heard something much darker.”

“What’s that?”

“That he’s been stealing from some of his clients,” Gabby said in a near whisper, though the three of us were still all alone in the shop.

“Do you have any proof of that?” Grace asked her.

“No, but when there’s enough smoke, there’s bound to be a fire somewhere.”

It was my turn to reveal something we’d uncovered. “I wonder if that might explain why he had some paperwork on his desk naming a new beneficiary for Gray’s investments with him. What better time to steal from someone than after they’re past caring?”

“Oh ho! That might be your motive right there.”

“Actually, there were two names on the documents that I could see,” I said, “but I couldn’t determine who was getting his money, and who was going to be losing it.”

“What were the names, Suzanne?”

Before Grace could tell her, I said, “I’d rather not say until I know more about it.”

Gabby looked frustrated by my refusal. “Honestly, how do you expect me to help you if you won’t share your information with me?”