Four-Patch of Trouble (23 page)

"Not that work," Stefan said. "He's wasting his true talents."

Just then, the customer who'd inquired about walking sticks yesterday came through the door. "Mr. Anderson," he said. "Is my acquisition ready?"

"Excuse me," Stefan said to me before turning to his customer. "Of course. It's behind the counter, just waiting for you."

I grabbed one of Stefan's trailing shirt cuffs to stop him. "Just one more thing. Did you see anyone else go into the shop? Besides the landlord, me, Dee, Emma, and Matt?"

"Just the prosecutor," he said. "He was there for the meeting too, right?"

I shook my head. "He didn't know about the meeting. Wolfe came later, just before the police arrived."

Stefan frowned. "I know I saw him earlier than that. I recognized him from when I tried to get criminal charges filed against Tremain last year. He wouldn't listen, so I had to sue Tremain myself. Wolfe arrived maybe a second or two after Dee, Emma, and Matt came out of the shop to go to the bakery. If they'd turned around, they'd have seen him. I remember being irritated that it had taken so long for him to get interested in Tremain, but I figured it was better late than never. Then I saw him storm out of the shop just a few minutes later, and I was irritated all over again. He couldn't be bothered to show up on time, and then it looked like he'd gotten angry that you'd gone ahead without him. I thought you talked to him then."

"I didn't see him until after we found Tremain's body." I needed to have another talk with him.

Wolfe had made it clear he wasn't going to listen to anything else I said until I had the real killer's confession, but for once I wasn't going to do the talking; he was. He needed to explain just what he'd been doing at the shop before the body was found. There was probably a simple explanation, but one thing I'd learned about preparing a civil case was that it was impossible to tell what information might be important until I actually asked the question and got the answers.

The man at the counter was getting impatient. I released my grip on Stefan's shirt cuff. "I'll let you get back to work. Thanks for your help."

"Anything for Dee and Emma," Stefan said before scurrying over to his customer.

*   *   *

Wolfe dropped his phone into the receiver just as I was walking into his office. He was standing, and his briefcase was on top of his desk, as if he were about to leave. It was still early, just closing in on 3:30, but he probably wanted to get his beauty sleep before tomorrow morning's press conference.

"Don't tell me you got someone to confess," he said.

"Not yet." I remained standing to signal that this wasn't a social call. "I need to ask you something. What were you doing at Monograms at the time of the murder?"

"I told you. My boss wanted me to have a chat with Tremain. His friends at the state house had been calling our office, demanding that we declare him
not
to be a person of interest with respect to any crimes whatsoever. Like we'd ever do that. But I was supposed to go reassure Tremain that we weren't taking any of the little old ladies' nonsense seriously."

"You didn't tell me you'd gotten there
before
I saw you.
Before
the 9-1-1 call even."

"So what?"

"So you're as much a witness as I am. You were in the shop right around the time Tremain was killed. You need to recuse yourself from the case."

"Damn." Wolfe flopped back into his chair. "I just can't catch a break."

"What were you really doing there?"

"Just what I told you," Wolfe said irritably. "I was supposed to make nice with the good old boy. Except he didn't want to hear anything I said. He was ranting about providence and stupid old biddies interfering with his livelihood."

"You mean provenance?"

"Yeah, whatever," he said. "Tremain had a few choice words about you too."

"I bet he did."

"I'm not surprised he got himself killed," Wolfe said. "I was there on a peace mission, and he was so angry he couldn't see it. He thought I was part of your group, and he started threatening me with libel and slander charges. Wouldn't listen to anything I said."

I could picture it: neither of the two men was particularly skilled at listening, so it would have been like one brick wall shouting at another. "Did he get physical?"

"Tremain?" Wolfe looked skeptical. "Not his style. From what my boss told me, Tremain liked to twist people's words, but I never heard of him twisting any literal body parts."

"What about you?" I said. "You must have been tempted to flatten him."

"Back when I was a stupid kid in high school, I probably would have. But these days I've got a reputation to uphold. If I'd so much as tapped him with my pinkie, he would have brought assault charges against me, and that would have been the end of my political career. Tremain wasn't worth it. I just walked out on him. I could hear him stamping his feet the whole time until I shut the outer door behind me. Which I did very, very carefully. Didn't want to give him a reason to claim I'd vandalized his property."

"You came back a few minutes later, though."

"I cooled down and decided to try again to get him to see reason. My boss was really insistent that I needed to get Tremain to call off his buddies. Failing to soothe Tremain was going to be a huge black mark on my work record. By the time I got back there, you'd already found the body." He gave an ironic laugh. "And then my boss got even more phone calls from Tremain's friends. Probably blames me for that. I should have known that having dibs on this homicide case was too good to be true."

"So you'll withdraw from the case?"

He sighed. "Yeah. It won't help your friends, though. I can't have Emma released without some solid evidence against someone else. Can't risk her fleeing the jurisdiction. People will forget that I delayed recusing myself, but they won't forget if I got the right killer and then she escaped because of me."

I didn't have the kind of evidence it would take to change Wolfe's mind. At least not yet. Alyse and Stefan were both likelier suspects than Emma, but I needed to be sure before I implicated anyone. At the moment, I wasn't sure about anything except that I was running out of time. There just weren't enough hours left between now and lunch tomorrow to write my speech and finish the appraisal for Gil, let alone find the critical evidence that would get Emma out of jail.

At home, I brewed a pot of coffee, anticipating a long evening ahead of me. I was almost done with the written appraisal for Gil when Matt knocked at my front door.

"I did some digging into Tremain's landlord," he said. "Want to hear about it?" 

I let him inside, and he stopped at the doorway between the old ATM enclosure and the large open space that contained my living room and kitchen. He spent a minute taking in the changes I'd made to what was once the bank's lobby and teller enclosures.

"I like it," he said finally. "But where's the vault?"

"Over there." I pointed to his left at the side wall. "Through that door, next to my office."

"Does that mean you trust me now?"

"About as much as a lawyer or appraiser trusts anyone." It helped that Stefan had given Matt an alibi, so while I might not trust him with personal information about me yet, at least I no longer wondered if he might have been the one to kill Tremain. I also trusted him to help with getting Emma out of jail. "We need hard evidence before we reach any conclusions. So what did you find out about Tremain's landlord?"

Matt gave the direction of the vault a longing look. "Plenty, but you promised to show me the vault."

"I didn't promise
when
I'd do it. Now is not a good time."

He threw himself onto a stool at the kitchen peninsula and patted his cargo pants pockets until he found his notebook. "The landlord didn't answer his phone, so I left a message. While I was waiting, I got to thinking that we never did ask Martha where she was when Tremain was killed. She had a public feud with him, after all. I swung by her office, and she told me she'd been in the hospital for a bit of minor elective surgery. She'd been expecting the police to ask her that exact question, so she'd even gotten copies of her medical records to prove where she was."

"So we can cross her off the list. What about the landlord?"

"He says Tremain was about six months behind on the rent, supposedly because of defects in the building. More likely, judging by the picky little things he was complaining about, Tremain just didn't have the money to pay."

"That sounds like a motive to me." I'd never handled landlord-tenant cases, but my ex-colleagues had told me horror stories about tenants who withheld rent over the slightest of perceived defects in their apartments. As long as Tremain was cheating his customers, why not cheat his landlord too? "We know the landlord was at Monograms the day of the murder. What if he saw everyone leave and followed Tremain back to his office to collect on the rent? They got into an argument, and Tremain ended up dead."

"I ran that scenario by him, and he just laughed. Said it would have been a lot simpler to evict them than to kill one of them. You'd know better than I do, but apparently it's harder, or at least more time consuming, to evict a dead person than a living one."

That sounded right from what little I knew about estates and landlord-tenant law. Still, people weren't always rational. In the heat of the moment, they committed crimes that would make their lives more difficult even if they were never caught. "If the landlord wasn't involved in Tremain's death, then why did he hide when the police were there?"

"That's where it gets interesting," Matt said. "The landlord had already left before the police arrived. It was maybe a couple of minutes before we all took a break from the meeting, when he realized he didn't have all the supplies he needed. While he was out, he got a call from another tenant with a true emergency repair, so he went to take care of that and never returned to Monograms that afternoon. He didn't even find out about the murder until he heard it on the news after dinner."

"I suppose he has a time-stamped receipt to give him an alibi."

"He does. But here's what's interesting. He saw two separate people enter the shop before he left. People we didn't know were there."

"I know about Wolfe," I said. "Who's the other?"

"Stefan Anderson," Matt said. "Alyse must have left the back door unlocked for her cigarette breaks, and that's how he got in. The landlord was at the top of the corridor's stairs when he saw Stefan slipping inside Monograms from the back door."

"You don't really think Stefan could have killed Tremain, do you?"

"I hope not, but I just don't know." Matt didn't seem pleased by the idea that his persistent critic was a suspect.

"I'm not offering Stefan up to the detectives as a suspect until I know whether you've got a reason to frame him. It's obvious you two have a history, and not a particularly happy one."

"Stefan's the one who's into history, not me," Matt said. "I don't have any problems with him. I completely understand why he's so disappointed in me, and I even respect his opinion. I just have different priorities than he does."

"So tell me. Why is he so disappointed in you?"

"It's a long story." He glanced over his shoulder at the door leading to my office and the bank vault. "If you're so pressed for time that we can't do a tour, you really don't have time to hear the story of my checkered past. I promise it's got nothing to do with Tremain or his murder. You can ask Stefan for confirmation, if you want."

"I will. Right after I ask him why he didn't tell me he was at Monograms around the time of the murder. I still hate to offer him up as the only viable suspect, though. Did you learn anything about the names on Tremain's client list?"

"Nothing solid," Matt said. "Not one of the politicians has a reputation for collecting antiques. Are you absolutely sure all of those people were actual clients? They might have been his dream clients, people he hoped to work with."

"I don't know exactly where Alyse got the names. I don't even know how much Alyse knew about Tremain's business dealings. If she truly didn't know about the fraudulent quilts, maybe the two of them ran their portions of the business separately. Tremain had his textile clients, and Alyse had her silver clients, and never the twain shall meet."

Matt's notebook disappeared into one of his pockets. "I'll keep looking into the politicians on the list, but I've pretty much given up on that story."

The logical part of my brain insisted I should drop the whole thing and let the police do their job. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was distantly responsible for Tremain's death. Not legally, of course, but that didn't change the nagging sense of responsibility I felt for making sure the killer was caught. It was just one more thing, like my unfinished speech, to keep me from ever attaining the state of calm that might put a permanent end to my syncope events.

"There could be a politician who was connected to Tremain who wasn't a client. Wolfe said his boss is getting political pressure to keep Tremain's reputation unsullied, and Gil's getting the same thing. I wish I knew who was pressuring them, although I don't know how I'd get them to talk to me. I can't exactly subpoena them."

"They'd talk to me," Matt said. "Politicians always love free publicity."

"Not if it links them to a con man."

"That's the great thing about being an arts reporter," Matt said. "They always expect me to ask fluffy questions. I guess they don't actually read my stories."

*   *   *

After Matt left, it didn't take long to proofread the museum's appraisal. I printed the final version and tucked it into my quilted messenger bag with two hours left to deliver it before closing time. I even had time to stop at Stefan's gallery to find out why he'd failed to mention being inside Monograms around the time of the murder.

As I walked down Main Street, I noticed movement inside Monograms. Could the quilt thief have returned? If the theft had been related to the murder, then Tremain's killer could be inside the shop right now.