Gin Jones - Helen Binney 01 - A Dose of Death (20 page)

A cab driver would expect a specific destination, though, and would be less inclined to wait around for her to make up her mind about where to go. She
‘d better make sure Betty and Josie were back at the nursing home before she arranged her ride.

The receptionist at the nursing home told her that Betty and Josie had been confined to their rooms until late afternoon, to make sure they
‘d rest after their exhausting day out with family. She left a message for them to call her when they were able to have a visitor.

With Jack in custody, she couldn
‘t waste the hours until then. She needed to do something to help him.

Helen settled at her desk to review her spreadsheets on suspects for Melissa
‘s murder. She, herself, was the first entry, but of course she hadn’t done it. Jack was next, just for the sake of thoroughness, but she was equally certain that he wasn’t guilty either.

Then there was Melissa
‘s employer, Gordon Pierce, who annoyed her, but she couldn’t see what motive he’d have had for killing one of his own employees.

Beyond that, there were mostly just generic possibilities: family, significant other, co-workers, patients, friends. Who could put names to them, other than Betty and Josie? The reporter, Geoff Loring, perhaps, but he was out of commission and probably too scared to talk to anyone about Melissa. There was Gordon Pierce too, but she
‘d rather not talk to him again until the contract with his agency had been terminated. Besides, she wasn’t entirely sure she believed anything he said. He kept pretending he cared about Helen’s well-being, while making it clear he only cared about her money. That wasn’t unusual for a business owner, and providing nursing services was a business after all. She wouldn’t normally consider his puffery to be dishonesty, but he’d made other comments that made her doubt him. He’d claimed that Melissa had no family or significant other, but Betty and Josie seemed to think otherwise.

What else had Gordon Pierce told her that she could check on?

Helen pulled out a pad with random notes she’d made before starting the spreadsheets. She scanned it until she found a summary of Pierce’s visit when he’d scared Rebecca off. Most of it was just a rant about how annoying he was and how sorry she felt for Rebecca. At least Helen could look forward to an end to her dealings with Pierce, but Rebecca would continue to be bullied by him, probably for her entire career, too meek to look for a better job. What if Adam could rescue Rebecca at the same time he was getting Helen out of the nursing agency’s contract?

Helen sighed. She didn
‘t have the time to save Rebecca right now. Maybe later, after Jack was absolved of Melissa’s murder.

She read her notes on Pierce
‘s visit again. He’d said something about Melissa interning at the local radio station on her days off. Maybe she’d managed to upset someone there. The people there would make better suspects anyway, since they weren’t confined to the nursing home and could easily follow Melissa to Helen’s cottage.

The cab driver dropped her off in front of a downtown bank building. The place had been built around the same time as the local courthouse, but at least this landlord had heard of the Americans with Disabilities Act and had installed an elevator, which took her to the second floor where the radio station was located.

Across from the elevator glass doors opened into a bland reception area that could have belonged to an insurance agency or dentist’s office or just about any other sort of small business. There was a cheap, built-in counter between the lobby where Helen stood and the three work desks. Two of them were unoccupied, although there was enough personal clutter and piles of paper to suggest that they were used regularly. The third desk held a cheap, plastic-encased sign indicating that its occupant was the sales manager for the station, and the tense-looking woman perched on the edge of her chair and stared intently at her computer monitor without ever looking up. Helen wondered if the woman was as uninterested in visitors as she seemed, or was she merely pretending to be too busy to care about a potential advertiser. Helen wasn’t sure if she should take the woman’s lack of interest personally, as yet another example of being ignored. The woman might act like this all the time, as some sort of ploy to convince advertisers of the scarcity of the service he was buying.

Helen had more important things to worry about, so she concentrated on the receptionist, an elderly woman wearing an earbud and wrapping up a conversation on it. Apparently having disconnected the call, the receptionist greeted Helen with a nod.
“If you’re looking for the Chamber of Commerce, they moved three buildings down the street.”

“
I’m in the right place,” Helen said, glancing at the only decoration on the wall, which was a three-foot high version of the station’s logo. “I’d like to speak to whoever coordinates your volunteers.”

“
Volunteers?”

“
Maybe you call them interns.”

“
We don’t have any interns. Not anymore.”

“
I know,” Helen said. “That’s why you need me. I’m looking for some volunteer opportunities, and I heard that Melissa Shores interned here, and now that she’s unavailable, I thought you might be looking for someone to take her place.”

“
Were you a friend of Melissa’s?”

The sales manager had torn herself away from her studied lack of interest and was staring at Helen, intent on hearing her answer. Was it guilt or mere curiosity? Could she have had some sort of personal relationship with Melissa, either positive or negative?

Helen watched the sales manager while answering the receptionist. “We were just acquaintances.”

The sales manager sighed and turned back to her computer. It looked more like disappointed curiosity than any real anxiety about the situation. Nothing personal there.

Helen focused on the receptionist. “What about you? Did you know Melissa well?”

“
We never really had the chance to get to know her well,” the receptionist said, and the sound of a stifled snort came from the sales manager. “Okay, so no one really wanted to get to know her well.”

Helen wondered if Melissa had even noticed that no one liked her here.
“She was a difficult person to get along with. But she’d been coming here for a long time, and this is a pretty small space. There must have been someone who dealt with her regularly.”

“
She worked in a back room most of the time. It was make-work mostly. She had some sort of local political connections, I think, so the manager had to find something for her to do. It wasn’t anything that really needed doing.” There was no animosity in her voice, not even true irritation. Nothing that might give rise to murder.

The receptionist smiled apologetically.
“It’s not likely that we’ll need an intern again, but I can take your name and number, and keep it on file.”

Even if none of the rank and file employees had anything against Melissa, there was still the station manager. He could have resented the way Melissa had been foisted on him by someone with political connections. Or he might have spent enough time with Melissa for her to have pushed him into the same sort of unreasonable anger Helen herself had felt toward the nurse. She needed to talk to him before she wrote off the station
‘s employees as potential suspects.

“
Maybe the station’s manager could find me something to do,” Helen said. “Could I talk to him?”

“
It’s not a good time.”

The place wasn
‘t exactly hopping with activity, as far as Helen could see. The sales manager was dutifully staring at her monitor, but she’d relaxed, dropping the pretense of being in high demand by other advertisers.

In other circumstances Helen might have accepted the polite brush-off, but with Jack on the verge of arrest, she couldn
‘t afford to give up so easily. She hated to do it, but there was one way to guarantee that someone would talk to her. She wouldn’t do it for herself, but Jack didn’t have many other options. Whatever connections Melissa might have had to get this job, Helen was certain her own connections were even better.

“
It’s just that Governor Faria—he’s my ex-husband, you know, but we’re still on good terms—always said that I’d be an asset to any news organization if I weren’t already working for him. Now that I’m on my own, I figured I’d see if he was right.”

“
You know the governor?” the receptionist said, her hand hovering over a button on her telephone console.

“
We’re just friends these days,” Helen said. “We don’t see each other much, but we do talk.”

“
Let me see if Sam’s back from lunch.”

A minute later, a short, thin man in his sixties, came through an unmarked door to the left of the reception counter and stood in the opening.
“Mrs. Faria,” he said, in a booming radio-announcer voice completely at odds with his small size. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

“
It’s Binney now,” she said. “Call me Helen.”

“
I’m Sam Johnson, the station manager.” He backed through the door he’d just come through, holding it for Helen. “Let me show you around.”

“
I’ve heard so much about this place.” Most of the time Helen hadn’t been listening to Melissa’s constant chatter, but some of it must have been about the radio station. “Where did Melissa work when she was here?”

“
Melissa?” he said. “Oh, you mean the woman who got killed the other day. We had her doing transcripts of shows, in case someone might request a copy. Not that anyone ever does, but it kept her busy and out of our way.”

“
I had the impression she wanted to work in the studio booth itself.”

“
Everyone does,” he said with a smile that, like his voice, was bigger than seemed physically possible. “But we start them out in a safe location. After a while, everyone in radio develops a sort of extra-sensory awareness of the on-air light, so they just know when to stay out of the studio and even to keep quiet in the hallway. Melissa never got the hang of that, so she never graduated from her initial assignment.”

That fit with the chatty woman Helen had known. Melissa would have wanted to be on air, spouting her own opinions. Sam seemed to take his work seriously, although she had a hard time envisioning him in a murderous rage. Sam turned the corner, and a door marked Studio A had its on-air light glowing. Across from it was another door marked Studio B, and that light was off. He jangled a
key ring that weighed more than he did and opened the door to the dark studio. He turned on the ceiling light, revealing a cramped space, crowded with computer monitors and less easily identifiable electronic equipment. He ran a loving hand over the tabletop’s electronics. “This is where I do my shows.”

It was still a long shot, Helen thought, but she could imagine him engaging in a physical defense of his beloved electronics.
“Melissa wasn’t the sort of person to accept limitations. Did she ever sneak into the studios?”

A brief flicker of horror passed over his thin face at the idea that she might have touched his electronics, but no flash of anger.
“Not as far as I know.”

“
I guess she was happy enough just listening to your show,” Helen said. “You’re a news station, right? Where are the reporters?”

“
We do talk shows,” Sam said in a defensive tone. “Mostly national issues, not local stuff. Nothing for us to actually investigate.”

“
You don’t do any local news at all?”

“
It’s not like we’re ignorant of what’s happening. I do read a dozen newspapers every day, and that information gets passed along in my shows.” He brightened. “Plus, we’ve got Geoff Loring. He does a weekly show about local stories. Sunday afternoons.”

“
I heard he’d been injured,” Helen said. “Will he still be able to do his show?”

“
He should be,” Sam said. “We can give him some help with the controls until his wrist heals.”

“
He isn’t afraid to come back to work? I heard he’d been told not to talk about some big story he was working on. How can he do his show if he’s not going to talk about his big story?”

“
I don’t know anything about any big story. I just need him to fill an hour of otherwise dead air on Sunday afternoons.”

“
But if he had a big story, and he’s abandoning it, wouldn’t it be a great opportunity for you to take over and get the scoop?”

“
I’m just the manager and the news announcer,” Sam said. “No one here is a reporter. At best, they’re on-air personalities. I read from the syndicated feeds we subscribe to, and press releases from the town departments. But that’s not what anyone really wants to hear. If we want to stay in business, we need to stick to what people really want to hear.”

“
Which is uninformed people throwing sound bites at other uninformed people?”

He shrugged.
“We just give the audience what it wants. They’d love to hear from you. Someone who has an insider’s view of the governor’s mansion.”