Fatal Feng Shui (5 page)

chapter 5

T
he Crestview police station was an austere, white
stucco building a couple of miles east of downtown. Before getting out of my van, I donned leather gloves to avoid getting fingerprints on what I hoped would be crucial evidence. An officer showed me to Detective O’Reilly’s desk. O’Reilly, in turn, ignored me and completed his phone conversation, although his scowl deepened at my presence. While he spoke his noncommittal
I see
s and
Sure
s into the handset, I set the paint can on his desk and lined up the four photographs to face him.

His work space was every bit as drab and colorless as he was. His institutional, fake-wood Formica desktop was bare except for two pens, his computer screen and keyboard, a few papers and notepads, and one of those hand-sized squeeze balls for relieving stress. There were no photographs of family members or pets, no cartoons tacked to the blue-gray carrel wall behind him. Even his coffee mug was plain white. I studied the not unattractive streaks of clotting cream within the inch or so of coffee at the bottom of his cup. Those mocha hues would look quite fetching on the walls in Shannon’s family room.

He finally hung up and gestured for me to take a seat. “What’s this?” he asked, his voice flat. He eyed the photographs without reaction.

“Emily Blaire, Taylor’s mother, gave them to me to give to you. Taylor hid them in her garage. I’ve made sure I didn’t get my fingerprints on them. And I brought the hiding place with me as well.”

“The paint can?”

I resisted the temptation to reply that, no, I’d brought him a can of magenta paint so that he could spruce up the police station. “Yes. It was on the shelf among the actual partially full ones.”

“Good hiding place. How’d it get discovered?”

“Emily had been trying to keep tabs on him, and she found it.”

I expected him to give me a hard time about my not having left this “hiding place” for the police to discover for themselves, but he said nothing, merely examined the photographs with new interest.

He arched an eyebrow. “This is that Berringer woman, who’s got some dopey housewives’ show on local TV, right?”

“Her show is about interior design and lifestyle tips.”

“Yeah. And this is the guy I talked to today. The owner of the house you’re working on.” He smirked. “Wonder if the wife knows.”

“My guess is that she doesn’t.”

He stared into my eyes and said nastily, “And let’s try ’n’ keep it that way, okay, Miss Gilbert?”

“I told Emily not to tell anyone about the photographs, and I’ll do the same.”

Well, not counting Audrey. And Steve Sullivan.
He and I were partners. Keeping him up to speed was the least I should do. Not to mention that watching Rebecca flirt with him had galled me, so how bad could my showing him her true colors be?

“Thanks for bringing this in.” O’Reilly grabbed the top sheet of paper from his kneehole drawer and focused his attention on that. I’d been dismissed.

“You’re being almost nice to me, Detective. What’s up?”

He looked up and held my gaze for an uncomfortably long time. Finally, he sighed. “Erin, you do realize this is almost certainly an accident?”

He had suddenly put me on a first-name basis, which made his statement all the more grating. “No, Detective O’Reilly. I
don’t
realize any such thing!”

“Hey, I’m not saying we won’t investigate thoroughly, I’m—”

“Good. Because Taylor was murdered. He called me with
evidence
. He said he’d
figured out
what was going on. I told you that when I gave you my statement. Don’t you think it was terribly convenient that, right after he’d arranged to give me this evidence, he had a fatal
accident
? While he was supposedly at work? On a Saturday—his day off?”

O’Reilly leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head, scowling at me. “You
also
told me he was short on money and was on the outs with his boss. Which could explain why he was putting in some overtime. And my hunch is his tox screens will come back positive. That’ll prove he was stoned out of his gourd. While using dangerous tools.”

I shook my head stubbornly. “He’d sounded lucid when he called me just a couple of hours before it happened.”

Again, O’Reilly released a weary sigh, then snatched his notepad from the pocket of his brown suit jacket. He scanned his notes. “You didn’t describe him as ‘lucid,’ Miss Gilbert. You said he sounded ‘out of breath’ and ‘anxious.’”

“So? I’m telling you now that he
also
sounded lucid. And his being a little anxious is a far cry from sounding ‘stoned out of his gourd’!”

“We’ll investigate his death, Miss Gilbert.” His tone was patronizing. And infuriating. “I’m just trying to let you know how I’m reading things at this particular juncture.”

“Good thing you’re keeping such an open mind, Detective.” I left without awaiting his reply.

The next morning, my heart wasn’t up for one of my
favorite activities—perusing the furniture and home improvement fliers in the Sunday paper. I ate breakfast with Audrey, but then went back to bed while she went to church. The phone rang, jarring me awake. I grabbed for the handset, feeling groggy and disoriented. It was Sullivan, who promptly asked how I was. “Fine,” I mumbled.

“Somebody once told me what ‘fine’ really means: Feelings Internal, Not Expressed.”

I had no response to that remark.

When the silence grew heavy, he asked, “How’d things go at your…at Emily’s house?”

“It was difficult.”

“She going to be all right?”

“I hope so. She’s fairly strong. She’s endured more than her fair share of tough times already.”

“You’re thinking this was murder, I take it.”

“Of
course
I am! Taylor was shot with a nail in the side of his head! Did you think he put it there himself?”

“It’s possible. It could have been an accident.” His gentle tone of voice was maddening. I wanted to fight. I wanted somebody to be as angry with me as
I
was with me for…not being clairvoyant.

“That’s stupid! Have you been talking to the police? Is that what you told them yesterday?”

“No, Erin. I’m just saying…things like that have happened before. A nail gun was fired through a hollow wall a few years ago and killed a young carpenter at a distance of twenty-plus feet. I read about it on the Internet last night. I couldn’t sleep, so I did some research. There’ve been a handful of accidental deaths from nail guns.”

“Well, please spare me any more of your research. This is my
brother
we’re talking about, Sullivan. Granted, we weren’t close. We barely knew each other, in fact. But I don’t want to talk about his death as if it’s some ‘Story of the Weird.’” (That was a column that the
Crestview Sentinel
ran every Sunday.)

“Sorry.”

I sighed. Snarking at Sullivan wasn’t helping me feel any better.

Come to think of it, Audrey had ferreted away the front section of the newspaper before I could read it. Probably trying to spare me the headlines about Taylor’s death.

“Erin? You still there?”

“Yes. I’m going to solve this murder without the police if I have to. I promised Emily. And I promised myself.”

“I’ll do everything I can to help you,” Sullivan said, without hesitation.

I spent much of Monday afternoon with Emily, helping
her with funeral arrangements.

Sullivan was already hard at work, revising Shannon’s presentation boards, when I arrived at our office early Tuesday morning. I wheeled my red leather desk chair beside his, and we brainstormed. We both had a tendency to overstate our objections to each other’s ideas and take polar positions, but would then find compromises that captured the best in both of our tastes.

The design of our office was the perfect example. His decorating style was purely masculine—sleek, simple lines, heavy on the mahogany hues and burnished steel. You half expected him to offer you bourbon and a cigar when you sat down in front of his exquisite knotty-alder desk. My style was more feminine—I loved vertical lines, asymmetrical balance, soft luxurious fabrics, a wide-ranging palette of colors and textures—yum!

Even so, we’d succeeded in blending our tastes beautifully. Upholstered in a delicate print, my slipper chairs were invitingly placed in front of his tiger maple coffee table. My vases and glass accent pieces warmed and added sparkle to the room. When spouses whined that their styles were in such opposition that the situation was hopeless, we merely had to show them this space. We’d tell them honestly about how we’d been in despair at first. (Although the truth was,
I’d
been in despair. Whereas Sullivan had been in an angry funk.) When we’d finished cramming my stuff in, he had stormed out the door, announcing we were going to have to lease a bigger office. I’d worked feverishly, and when he returned an hour later, he scanned the space in obvious surprise and said, “Huh. I didn’t realize you were
this
good.” Considering the source, that was the highest compliment I’d ever received.

The phone rang. It was Shannon, saying she needed to schedule “an emergency meeting as soon as possible.”

My thoughts immediately went to the photographs of her husband and Rebecca. Had Detective O’Reilly already spilled the beans? “Is everything all right?”

“Of course not,” Shannon shrilled at me. “What part of ‘emergency meeting’ did you fail to understand?”

I took a quick calming breath. “I meant that I hope you and Michael aren’t sick or injured, or something.” Sullivan looked up from his drawing and watched me in curiosity.

“We’re fine. How soon can you get here?”

I relayed that question to Sullivan, and we agreed on noon. Shannon was irritated that we couldn’t come any sooner. She gave me a curt “Thanks” and hung up.

“Any idea what the emergency’s about?” Sullivan asked.

“Not really. She said ‘we,’ so I doubt it’s a marital crisis.”

“Why would you immediately suspect
that
?”

“I meant to tell you yesterday…Taylor had apparently snapped some very suggestive Polaroids of Michael and Rebecca Berringer. Emily and I found them tucked away in Taylor’s hiding spot.”

“You’re sure that it was Rebecca and Michael?”

“I’m one hundred percent sure. I gave the photographs to Detective O’Reilly. He said to keep the story quiet, so whatever you do, don’t tell Rebecca, please…or anyone else, about them.”

“Goes without saying,” he grumbled.

His mood had darkened considerably. I couldn’t help but wonder if that was because he was disappointed that Rebecca’s flirtations hadn’t been reserved for him alone.

Michael greeted us when we arrived. The look on his
face—and the cloud of Shannon’s cigarette smoke—told us all we needed to know: Shannon had gotten herself worked into a major stew.

My eyes, however, immediately drifted to the spot where I’d last seen my brother’s body. There was a stain—a shadow of darker color on the once-white portion of the checkerboard floor pattern. Michael read my mind and murmured, “We’re having the carpenters pull up all the linoleum today. We were going to do that soon enough anyway.”

He put his hands on my shoulders. Disgusted by his infidelity, it was all I could do not to shudder and pull away. He didn’t seem to notice. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Erin. I had no idea Taylor was your brother. I tried to tell Shannon it was cruel to expect you to come here today, but she—”

“Thanks, Michael, but I’m fine. Really.” The last thing I wanted now was to alienate Shannon or Michael and get fired from this job; I’d be hindered when poking around into the circumstances of Taylor’s murder. “I barely knew him, to be honest with you. I was adopted. We were raised by different parents, halfway across the country from each other.”

“Oh. Still. I’m sure—”

“Erin. Steve.” Shannon whisked into the room as though fueled by her jet trail of cigarette smoke. The thought of what her husband was doing behind her back gnawed at me. I felt a pang of empathy for Shannon. “Thank God you’re finally here! Have you read the papers this morning?”

“No, I—”

“Have you heard about Pate Hamlin?”

“About Pate?”
My God. Had he been killed too?

“There’s a big story on him this morning. As it turns out, Pate is one of the
owners
of BaseMart.”

“The discount-store chain?” Sullivan asked.

“Right. The very one that Erin’s landlady, Audrey, and I have been working our asses off to keep
out
of Crestview.”

“Oh, that’s right. You and she are on that ‘No Big Boxes’ committee together,” I recalled.

“They’re co-chairs,” Michael interjected. “And speaking of chairs, Shannon, how about allowing our guests to sit down?”

She sighed and whirled on a heel. “Let’s go into the living room. Now that all the hammering and sawing’s stopped. Lunch break. They can never follow any kind of a schedule, except when it comes to stopping work. Noon to one every day, it’s quiet as a church around here. And by four
P.M
. on the dot, they pack up and race out.”