Ill-Gotten Panes (A Stained-Glass Mystery) (15 page)

At least the entrance to the grocery store had automatic doors. In my present state, I doubted I could reliably work out whether to push or pull the door open.

I bypassed the little selection of newspapers and shopping guides decorating the store’s entrance, grabbed a handbasket from the stack, and headed directly for the produce aisle. At the rate I went through fresh fruits and vegetables, it would have made sense for me to set up a vegetable garden in a corner of Grandy’s yard. I wondered again if it was too late to start planting.

Turning into the aisle, I spotted Bill Harper smack in the middle, adding lemons to the citrus display. I froze. I really didn’t want to talk to the man, didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to pick up something healthy to have in the house without having to deal with anyone else asking after Grandy.

“Well, hello again, Georgia!”

Too late to turn tail and run. I forced myself to smile. “Afternoon, Mr. Harper.”

He grabbed another trio of lemons from a box on the cart he stood behind, the blue of his latex gloves against the yellow of the fruit making me think of putting flowers in the garden I could plant in Grandy’s yard. The splashes of color would look nice if, you know, I planned on staying and Grandy was released from jail.

“Everything all right?” Mr. Harper was watching me from below lowered brows. I must have been lost in thoughts of gardens longer than I’d realized.

“Sorry.” I shook my head and tried a little laugh and a little lie. “Forgot what I needed for a second there.” I scurried to a display of honeydew. Ducking my head with embarrassment, I studied the melons.

“How’s Pete doing these days? Haven’t seen him around much,” Mr. Harper said.

If he didn’t know Grandy was in custody, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. I could use a few moments of denial. Besides . . . “I heard you were in the hardware store with Pete last week, the day before they found Andy.”

“Oh?”

At the sound of something hitting the floor, I turned. A lemon had gotten away from him and was rolling toward me. I stooped to pick it up. “I was wondering, did you happen to see anyone else in the store? Tall guy, maybe? Brown hair, beard?”

He reached a hand out for the lemon and I crossed to him, handed him the fruit so he could drop it into a little box of loose leaves and a badly bruised banana. “Sorry, I didn’t notice anyone like that.”

I supposed I should have tried to get some idea of time frame from Tom. When he described who he’d seen, it sounded like all the men arrived fairly close together. But time appeared to move at a unique pace for Tom. If I wanted to know whether Matthew had visited the hardware store, the only way to find out was to ask Matthew himself.

“I only stopped in long enough to remind Andy about his rent being due.”

I tried for another smile. “It’s okay. Thanks anyway.”

I turned my attention back to the melons. If I wasn’t careful, I’d end up leaving without what I came for.

“You give Pete my regards when you see him, okay?”

I assured him I would.

If only I knew when that
when you see him
would be.

*   *   *

M
y call went straight to Drew’s voice mail. Three times. I phoned the police station in hopes of learning from them the outcome of the arraignment, but they had no information and only advised I contact Drew. I tried asking directly for Detective Nolan, planning to use the laundry they were holding as an excuse, but recognizing Diana as the desk sergeant who answered the phone, I opted not to leave a message requesting a return call,

I stood in the kitchen of the quiet house, missing the rattle and clatter of Grandy’s morning routine, and listened to the ticking of the clock instead. It was the sort of sound I never noticed normally. Like the hum of the refrigerator’s compressor, it stayed in the overlooked background. In the empty house, however, this simple rhythm was amplified into a disturbing noise.

Friday lay belly up in my arm, allowing me to stroke her stomach while I turned over thoughts in my mind. Mostly I needed to talk to Drew. I needed to know when bail would be set for Grandy and what to do if—or when—my depleted savings couldn’t cover the cost.

Friday wriggled and let out a teeny
mew
. I ruffled her head one last time and lowered her to the floor. She bounded out of the room, tail straight up like a feline antenna. I couldn’t imagine where she was going in such a hurry.

Alone in the kitchen, I sat down at the table and put my head in my hands.

Alone. I could have turned on the radio or the television, used the electronic world to keep me company. Instead, I tugged my cell phone free of my purse and opened an Internet browser. There were at least a few things I could do that were better than sitting and feeling sorry for myself. Punching the name of the East Coast lumber giant into the search bar, I realized I was going to have to return Tony Himmel’s call.

Learning the price per square foot of lumber presented a steep challenge. I knew numbers. I knew glass. I was learning about kittens. I didn’t know lumber. What was the difference between pine and whitewood and Douglas fir? My knowledge was limited to what would make a good Christmas tree, not what would make a good building. And the prices varied widely.

I clicked out of the browser and stared at the wallpaper on my phone. The image was of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s dogwoods in stained glass. Typically, losing myself in the depth of color, the brilliant use of shape, the rich-hued background soothed and centered me, allowed me to tackle the next moments of my day with a fresh perspective.

That afternoon, gazing on a place of beauty only made me restless. Maybe it was the ticking of the clock. Maybe it was the absence of human company. Maybe it was an emotion I was too much of a wimp to attempt to identify.

One deep breath, and I tapped on the missed call icon on the phone, selected the option to return call.

Moving the phone to my ear, I gripped the device tighter than necessary while I listened to the ringing on the other end. Two cycles elapsed before Tony picked up the call, giving his name as a greeting.

“Tony. Georgia Kelly returning your call.”

“Georgia, how are you?”

Yeah, I was in no shape to answer that question. “How did you get my number?”

He responded with one of those heh-heh chuckles that only men can pull off. “I took a chance that the number on the ‘Found: White Kitten’ flyers belonged to you.”

“Are you calling to tell me it’s your kitten?”

“Not a chance. I’m still recovering from puncture wounds sustained during our first meeting.”

“So you called to request reimbursement for medical expenses. How much do Snoopy Band-Aids go for these days?”

“I called to ask if you would meet me for a drink, or dinner, whichever you’re comfortable with. Tomorrow night? I’d like a chance to apologize for my bad behavior. Again.”

A measure of unease prickled my spine. Meeting with Tony would be an ideal time for me to learn what he was being charged for lumber. It also meant I might be meeting with someone who would benefit a great deal by Andy Edgers’s removal from the supply chain. But I wanted answers, and neither Detective Nolan nor Drew was around to consult with. Mostly, though, the house was too quiet. I would have gone mad there. A crowded restaurant sounded not only safe but far more pleasant than sitting in the house alone.

“Dinner sounds fine. But I’m going to need a favor.”

T
ony had graciously allowed me to select a restaurant and having been secretly harboring a craving since leaving the city, I suggested Italian food. This turned out to be a stroke of luck. Nothing was as comforting to me as a big plate of pasta, and when Drew had called the prior afternoon with the news Grandy’s bail had been set at sixty thousand dollars, I developed a need for serious comfort. I neither had that kind of money nor any property to use as collateral against a bond. Grandy would be stuck in jail until his trial date, or until the police found the real killer. Any information I could gather to help the police with that was well worth the effort, and Mr. Jaguar definitely had information, if not outright guilt.

Arriving at the restaurant, I made sure to locate Tony’s car and park on the complete opposite side of the lot. This, I reasoned, would allow me to part company with him at the door, announcing, “I’m this way.” And yes, I purposely arrived late to facilitate that plan.

Dressed in a summer top, narrow skirt, and flip-flops, I sidestepped the maître d’ by pointing to the interior of the tiny restaurant and announcing, “I’m meeting someone.”

Those damned butterflies were once again doing aerial exercises in my belly as I wove my way between tables. Tony had been easy to spot, the only table with one occupant, the only occupant who made my hopeless heart skip. Was it possible for someone to be too handsome to be a murderer? Or wait. Weren’t there statistics that showed most murders were committed by family members? If that was the case, the odds of Tony having murdered Andy were slim.

But slim wasn’t the same as zero. And women who have recently emerged from a heartbreaking engagement need to remain impervious to handsome men, rather the same as people just recovering from surgery need to avoid crowds because they are more susceptible to disease.

Patting my hair to be certain it remained in its loose ponytail, I gave myself the same silent pep talk I’d used when walking into a boardroom full of skeptical men.
You’re every bit as smart as these guys
, I’d tell myself.
It’s okay to let it show
.

As I reached his table, I announced my presence by stating, “Tony.”

He glanced up from the smartphone he had set on the table. He grinned and half stood from his chair. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me. Please, sit. I just have to finish up this message.”

Regaining his seat, he focused his attention on the phone, typing madly with one finger.

On the one hand, I was put out by his dismissal. On the other, his actions proclaimed the dinner all business, no romance. The clarification put me marginally at ease. A two percent margin, I estimated.

A busboy rushed over and pulled my chair out. As I settled into the seat, he filled my glass with water and promised to send the waiter over to take my drink order.

I sipped at the water, blissfully cold after the heat of the outdoors.

Tony punched one final button on his phone. He looked up at me as he slid the phone to the far edge of the table. “My apologies.” He nodded to the phone. “My sister. She’s considering breaking off her engagement and was asking my advice.”

My first instinct was to offer unsolicited advice based on my own experience. The second, overpowering instinct was to heed the alarm bells going off in my mind. It was mighty convenient, wasn’t it? Tony Himmel just
happened
to have a sister with a troubled engagement? He just
happened
to be e-mailing or texting with her when I arrived? What were the odds?

“That’s too bad,” I said.

Tony nodded. “She deserves to be happy. I keep telling her if this guy isn’t making her happy, it’s not going to get any better. She should call it off.”

I took another sip of water.

“Do you agree?” he asked.

Lifting a shoulder, I looked around the restaurant, hoping to make eye contact with a waiter. “I really couldn’t say. I don’t know your sister.”

When I returned my gaze to Tony, I found him watching me with a speculative expression generally reserved for reviewing expense accounts. “So,” he said. “Anyone contact you yet about the cat?”

“You’re the only one who’s called.”

“What happens if you don’t find the owner?”

“You mean if I don’t find the person who threw her away?” I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’d like to keep her, but my grandfather’s not too keen.”

He lifted a glass of wine, nearly empty. I wondered how long he’d been waiting while I played the
fashionably late
game. “How is he, your grandfather?” he asked.

I nodded, playing for time. As near as I could tell, Grandy’s incarceration was not yet widespread knowledge. Somehow the Pace County PD had kept a lid on news of the arrest. Telling Carrie the news hadn’t been easy, and I had come to consider her a friend. Was that something I wanted to share with Tony Himmel?

Then again, perhaps his reaction to the news might inform me about whether I was about to dine with a killer.

I took hold of my water glass, wished for the waiter. “The police took him in the day before yesterday,” I said.

Tony’s brow furrowed. “More questioning?”

“They believe they’ve found—” I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t put a murder weapon in the same context as Grandy. “Further evidence.”

He knocked back the rest of his wine, which did nothing to clear the furrow. “In the Andy Edgers case?”

Was there more than one case he thought Grandy should be implicated in? “That would be the one.”

Resting both elbows on the table, he leaned a little weight upon his forearms. I had to wonder if the pose, with its resultant emphasis on his shoulders, chest, and biceps, was an intentional move to distract me. He had to know he was handsome, right? He had to know he had a decent physique and these two things combined had a tendency to turn a girl’s head.

“That just doesn’t make sense. What kind of evidence would they need to find to link Pete with that crime?”

I locked my eyes with his. “They think they have something.” I didn’t want to give anything away, and didn’t want to miss any hint of reaction he might show.

He turned away from my gaze. “Must be pretty convincing.” After a moment’s scanning the restaurant, he lifted an arm ever so slightly. “I’m sorry he’s caught up in all this,” he said an instant before a waiter appeared at our table.

“Something from the bar?” the waiter asked.

Something strong would have been wonderful. But I was driving. Moreover, I needed to stay alert, needed to be able to observe Mr. Himmel with my mind clear. I ordered a dry white wine on the grounds I didn’t really care for it and so would sip it slowly while still appearing social.

When the waiter departed, Tony resumed the conversation as though there had been no interruption. “What sort of evidence did the police find? Fingerprints? DNA?”

“No, it was nothing quite so definitive.” I drew out the statement, all the time watching for a reaction.

He shook his head slightly, shook his concerned expression into a neutral one. “It’s a shame they’re holding him, then. He has a lawyer?”

I nodded while mentally counting the hours since I had last left a message for Drew asking if Grandy was willing for me to visit. “I’m waiting to hear back.”

“Is he local, the lawyer?”

Again, I nodded, and Tony nodded in return. He was mirroring my movements, a classic method for putting the person you are talking with at ease. “Why do you ask?” I shifted in my chair, leaning one elbow and my upper body weight on the left armrest.

He echoed my action by leaning to the right. I wondered why he felt he needed to win me to his side . . . in the split second before the waiter placed our wine upon the table. “If he didn’t have anyone, I could give you a couple of names,” he said, lifting one shoulder dismissively.

“No, I mean, why does it matter that he’s local?”

“The lawyers I could recommend wouldn’t be, that’s all.” He glanced at his phone, glanced back at me. “I’m starved. You ready to order?”

We reviewed the menu, selected entrées, both of us agreeing to take a pass on the appetizer and go straight to the main course. With the order placed, it was an easy enough matter to get Tony talking about his marina project.

As he spoke to me of slips and repair docks, tackle shop and restaurant, he sat straight, his eyes brightened, he smiled around every word, every gesture. Even when our food arrived, his posture didn’t change. He talked intensely of the years of planning, of seeing the old brickworks falling into ruin while taking vacation trips as a child with his family and dreaming of one day making something of the wreckage. When at last his management group had earned sufficient respect, he’d been able to attract investors, which put him on the path to achieving his dream.

“I can’t tell you what it felt like,” he said, taking a break to gather some spaghetti on his fork. “The day they told me I had the financing was probably the best day of my life thus far.”

The glow on his face told me he was reliving the moment a bit, once again feeling that combination of relief and euphoria present when a goal is achieved. I almost hated to bring him back to the present reality. Almost.

“And then you had to face the Wenwood Town Council,” I said.

He rested the fork on his plate. Sitting back in his seat, he shook his head while chewing. He turned his gaze to the window. “What a mess,” he said, reaching blindly for his wine.

I knew the mess. I had a lawyer explain it to me. What I wanted was Tony’s opinion of it. “How so?” I asked.

He nearly snorted on his way to a wry laugh. “You’d think the town would be happy to have a new business come in. Without something new, Wenwood is destined to become a ghost town.” He peered into his wineglass then set it away from him and reached for the water instead. “The marina will bring a whole new revenue stream to the town. New visitors. New residents. New life. And me . . . I should have known better.”

The manicotti was the best I’d had in months, but I swallowed down the mouthful after barely a taste. I needed to keep him talking. “What do you mean?”

He took a long drink of water. “Look, I knew the agreement was restrictive and basically over the top.”

“The agreement?”

Tony’s gaze bore into me as if he knew, as if someone had told him I’d visited Town Hall and gotten a copy of the agreement. “The list of requirements set down by the Town Council to ensure my project failed. Your friend Carrie brought it up the other night at the funeral parlor, in fact.”

“Wait,” I said, “you think the town . . . what? Rigged the deal so you—”

“So the marina would fail, yes.”

“Well, that’s just crazy. Why would they do that?”

He stabbed a fork into the spaghetti. “You tell me. You’re a resident. Or at least, related to one. You can probably explain the mentality better than I could. That crazy attachment to the brickworks, to the past. The resistance to moving forward. They’d rather let the town fade away than see it thrive again.”

“I don’t think that’s so,” I said. “I think folks genuinely love the town and want to see it survive. The fact they granted you the right to rebuild the brickworks is a perfect example of that. They could have just refused your request or application or whatever it is you had to submit. But the Council came up with an agreement to help everyone benefit now instead of waiting any longer than it had to for your project to help local businesses get back on their feet, or stay on their feet.”

Setting his fork down carefully, he leaned back and stroked a hand across his chin. “Maybe you’re right. I can’t think clearly about any of this anymore. Too involved. Too emotionally attached.”

I sensed that was not the moment to push. I took a tiny bite of pasta, drawing out the quiet moment by chewing slowly. The busboy refilled the water glasses. The table of four beside us pushed back their chairs and departed.

At length, Tony met my gaze again. “I’m an outsider here in Wenwood. My family comes from Connecticut, not Pace County. I went to college in Boston. That makes me the next best thing to a terrorist. I can’t even get served a decent cup of coffee in Wenwood.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s you.” I smiled. “I think that’s the water.”

He smiled back, reluctantly it seemed. “That may be so, but it doesn’t negate the rest of it. The stares. The odd looks.”

“Geez. You’re as paranoid as a teenage girl. You’re nothing special, Himmel. They look at everyone like that. Small town. Low on trust.”

“I could handle all of that, okay? I’ve had tougher gauntlets to run. But Andy Edgers constantly hiking the lumber costs, that was the pinnacle. That’s where I drew the line.”

Belatedly I recalled this was the information I wanted to ask him about. This was why I agreed to meet him. But . . . “What do you mean,
constantly hiking
?”

“On an escalating basis.” He reached into the pocket of his suit jacket hanging over the back of his chair. Handing me a collection of folded papers, he said, “I brought these, just like you asked. You’ll see, the first order was slightly above market. The next slightly more so, and the one after that more so again.”

“How much are we talking? What’s above market?” I riffled through the papers, Tony’s copy of the orders Andy sent to the national lumber giant. The numbers on Tony’s orders clearly did not match those on Andy’s.

“Lumber is sold by piece or by square foot, that’s how the price is derived, right?”

I nodded as if this was knowledge I had possessed my whole life.

“I’m ordering by square foot. The first order goes in, Edgers is charging twenty cents above average. Okay, that’s maybe a variance in who he’s using to fill the order. But the next order is thirty-five cents above, and then sixty cents above. I don’t need to tell you that sixty cents is one thing if you’re looking at replacing a few beams and another if you’re rebuilding something the size of a factory.”

“No, you don’t,” I put in.

“That’s what led to the argument you witnessed at the hardware store.”

“And did not tell the police about.”

He flashed a quick grin. “And did not tell the police about. I couldn’t have Andy Edgers overcharging me anymore. If it was a matter of finding another supplier, he’d have to find one. He said that the price he was giving me was the best price he could get. That’s a crock. I could pick up the phone now and call six guys that will give me a better price.”