The Weekend Was Murder (7 page)

Fran and I left that room in a hurry. He ran to tell Mrs. Duffy what had happened, while I stabbed at the elevator button. Luckily, an elevator arrived in just a few seconds, so I flung myself in and rode it to the lobby floor.

The lobby was filled with the people who were playing the mystery game. In the midst of them I could see the stiff, broad-shouldered figure of Lamar Boudry, who was in conversation with Detective Pat Sharp, and the breath I’d been holding came out in a loud hiccough of relief.

But he turned and began walking away.

Frantically, I shouted, “Mr. Boudry! Wait, Mr. Boudry! You’ve got to come upstairs! There’s been a murder!”

Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee detached themselves from the crowd and elbowed their way toward me. “Another murder!” Mrs. Bandini yelled excitedly.

Everyone in the lobby had heard, and now they all raced toward me.

“Help!” I yelled, and flattened myself against the wall. My mom was going to be really mad if I got trampled to death.

“Where was it?” someone screeched.

“Who was it?”

“What happened?”

Everyone was shouting questions at me at the same time, and I was trapped.

“Don’t tell everybody, Liz. Just tell our team,” Mrs. Bandini said as she and Mrs. Larabee tried to make a human wall to shield me. “Goodness knows we are handicapped by having a member on our team who thinks that Agatha Crispy is some kind of cookie.”

“How can I know who you mean if you don’t pronounce her name right?” Mrs. Larabee complained.

“Move back, please.” The voice was so authoritative that the crowd parted without question. I was never so glad to see Lamar Boudry in my life.

“What’s the problem, Liz?” he asked in a tone that implied I’d better come up with a good one … or else.

The crowd immediately quieted, many of them leaning toward me, all of them listening intently—all of them, that is, except the man I’d smashed into earlier. His face was bleached white, his lower lip trembled, and he tried to edge his way out of the crowd. I hoped he’d make it. He looked like he was going to be awfully sick.

“Can I tell you in private?” I asked Lamar.

“No fair!” a few of the people around us shouted.

Eileen had reached us by this time, and she didn’t look very happy. “This isn’t in the script,” she mouthed at me.

“I know,” I said, miserable that her mystery weekend was being ruined, and doubly miserable that I was the one who had to ruin it. “I can’t help it, but there’s a dead body upstairs in room nineteen twenty-seven.”

The man in the Sherlock Holmes hat twisted his mouth in disgust. “You already told us that,” he said.

I shook my head. “This is for real.”

“Wait,” Mrs. Bandini said. “Think carefully, Liz. Are you saying there are
two
bodies in room nineteen twenty-seven?”

“Uh—that depends,” I answered.

“Mr. Pitts is one of them,” she said. “Who’s the other?”

I gulped and closed my eyes, remembering that I’d been speaking to him just a short time ago. “Randolph Hamilton,” I answered.

Everyone began talking and writing notes like crazy, but Eileen put her lips up against my ear and said, “This is decidedly not in the script! What do you think you’re doing?”

I clutched her hand. “Please believe me,” I begged. “You and Lamar had better come upstairs in a hurry! This isn’t make-believe. Just like I told you—Randolph Hamilton is dead.”

Eileen’s eyes widened, and she gave a little gasp, but immediately she became Pat Sharp the detective. “We’d better look into this, Mr. Boudry,” she said. She took my hand and dragged me into the nearest elevator.

The entire group of mystery sleuths tried to crowd in with us, but Lamar gave them one of his Clint Eastwood-type, don’t-you-dare-try looks and said, “No one—I repeat no one—is allowed on the nineteenth floor until you are given permission, and that won’t be until tomorrow morning.”

Everybody backed off in a hurry, and the three of us rode the elevator to the nineteenth floor.

Mrs. Duffy and Fran were waiting for us outside room nineteen twenty-seven in the hall.

“Mom?” Eileen asked her mother. “What happened?” She didn’t look like a detective now. There were tears in her eyes, and her hands were trembling.

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Mrs. Duffy said. “The door automatically locked when Mary Elizabeth and Fran left, and we didn’t have a key to get in.”

“What did I do with the key?” I asked aloud, but Lamar simply stepped forward, pulled out his passkey, and opened the door.

The room was just as we had left it. The lights blazed brightly, and the body of Randolph Hamilton lay in the middle of the living-room floor.

Eileen let out a cry and ran to the body, dropping to her knees.

“Don’t touch anything,” Lamar said. He felt for a pulse at Randolph’s neck, then stood up, shaking his head. He picked up the phone on the desk and called the police.

Both Mrs. Duffy and Eileen began to cry, and I felt so sick to my stomach I just wanted to get out of there, but I couldn’t.

“There’s something I’d better tell you about this room,” I began.

But Lamar scowled and said, “Not now. Wait until the police come. You can tell them.”

“It’s not right that he should lie here in that silly wig and mustache,” Eileen sobbed, and reached out toward Randolph’s face.

“I said, don’t touch—” Lamar began, but Eileen had already jerked her hand away. She fell back on the carpet with a thump.

“It’s not a wig!” she cried in amazement. “It’s not a fake mustache!”

We all crowded around the body and stared. “It’s not John,” Mrs. Duffy whispered.

“You mean Randolph?” Fran asked.

“I mean John Wallgood,” she said. “Randolph is the name of the character John is playing.”

“Who is this man?” Eileen asked as she climbed to her feet and moved away from the body. “He looks so much like John—uh—John’s Randolph.”

No one answered, but in the silence I began to remember a couple of things, and they added up.

“I think I know someone who can tell us,” I said. “The sequestered witness.”

They all stared at me. “You’re mistaken, Mary Elizabeth. I don’t have a sequestered witness in my script,” Mrs. Duffy said.

“Not in your script,” I said. “Next door in room nineteen twenty-nine. Lamar can tell you about her.”

After a puzzled look at me, Lamar did tell us about
the witness, and I listened carefully, because I didn’t know much about her either.

The woman’s name was Stephanie Harmon, and she worked as secretary to a man who was going on trial for taking part in stealing security bonds from England and trying to launder the money by passing it through what they call
offshore banks
in the Cayman Islands.

At least now I knew a little bit about what laundering money meant, but I asked, “What are offshore banks? What does all that mean?”

“The Cayman Islands are a tiny group of British-owned islands in the Caribbean,” Lamar said. “On the main island there are a few resort hotels, some restaurants, shops for the tourists who come from the cruise ships, and there are hundreds of banks.”

“Why do the people who live there need so many banks?”

“They don’t. It’s other people who use them. A great deal of money flows through those banks, often on to Swiss banks with their secret accounts. Much of the money is illegal or is sent to evade paying income taxes.”

“The banks there can do this?”

“They do it,” Lamar said and smiled. “A friend of mine in the feds nailed a guy who claimed to be broke, but who was suspected of salting money in the Caymans. The only contact made is by phone, when account holders call the last day of the month to see what their bank balances are. My friend subpoenaed the guy’s long-distance phone bills and found that, sure enough, on the last day of the month he’d called his
Cayman Island bank. Since the feds then knew the name of the bank, they were able to take it from there, and the guy was later convicted of tax evasion.”

“What’s Miss Harmon so scared about?” I asked. “Does she think she’s going to be arrested too?”

“According to what I was told, Miss Harmon claimed to be unaware of any illegalities in what her boss was doing,” Lamar said.

“How could that be? Wouldn’t she have access to his files, write this letters, and all that stuff?”

“Miss Harmon’s boss was a financial consultant,” Lamar answered, “and much of the business with which he was involved was legitimate. It’s possible he could have kept her from seeing any transactions which weren’t.”

“If she didn’t know what he was doing was illegal, then how can she be a witness?” I asked.

“She can name names, identify some of the people who came to the office—that sort of thing.”

“But if she doesn’t know what kind of business these people did, then she wouldn’t be able to prove it was illegal. They could have come to try to sell office supplies.”

Lamar sighed patiently, which really meant he was getting impatient in a hurry. “You’re nit-picking,” he told me.

“I just can’t understand why she’s scared herself into being a gibbering basket case. She thinks someone is after her. If she doesn’t know anything about what was going on, then why would anyone be after her?”

“I don’t think Miss Harmon needs any more of your analyzing,” Lamar said. “I’d like to hear you explain
why you think she knows the identity of this murder victim.”

“She saw all the actors when you were taking her into the back door of the hotel. Remember?”

He nodded, and I said, “But when Randolph knocked at her door by mistake and the policewoman answered, Miss Harmon screamed her head off.”

No one reacted, so I said, “Don’t you see? Randolph looked different. The second time he was wearing his wig and mustache and looked like this man.”

“Liz is right!” Fran said. “I was there both times, and that’s exactly what happened.”

Mrs. Duffy broke in, asking Lamar, “Why don’t you ask the policewoman to bring Miss Harmon over here and see if she can identify this man?”

We all took another look at the man on the floor, and I shuddered, fighting back the nausea again.

“Whether or not to bring Miss Harmon here will be the decision of the HPD detective,” Lamar said.

The phone rang, and we all jumped, but Lamar took it, spoke briefly, and hung up. “That was the front desk,” he said. “Detective Mark Jarvis has arrived. He’s on his way up.”

Detective Jarvis! Great! Detective Jarvis had been in charge of the investigation of Mr. Kamara’s murder at the Ridley Hotel, and I liked him. He’d certainly be surprised to see me at the scene of the crime of this second murder.

But a few minutes later, when Detective Jarvis entered the room, along with some other police personnel, he glanced in my direction and said, “Well, I’m not
surprised to see you here, Liz Rafferty. Have you solved the murder yet?”

“No,” I said, “but I think I’ve found someone who can tell us who this man is.”

Jarvis was just as I remembered him—tall, large boned, and muscular, with sun-bleached hair and a face that was more rugged than handsome, unless you thought rugged
was
handsome, which Eileen Duffy seemed to be thinking, judging from the expression on her face. Jarvis looked carefully at each person in our group. “Okay,” he asked. “Which one of you is here to I.D. the body?”

“No one,” Lamar answered. “It’s a sequestered witness in the next room.”

“These are people who have come to the Ridley for a murder-mystery weekend,” I told Jarvis, and introduced Mrs. Duffy as the famous mystery writer and her daughter, Eileen, as the actress-director who was playing a detective from Houston homicide.

Detective Jarvis winced. “In a trench coat and fedora hat?” he mumbled. “What makes you think any self-respecting detective would wear a getup like that?”

“The mystery fans like it,” Eileen answered, “and so do I. It sets me apart and establishes my character’s job.”

Jarvis shrugged. “At least you haven’t got a badge.”

Without batting a long eyelash, Eileen turned back the lapel of her coat to show the shiny metal detective badge that was pinned there.

“Huh,” Jarvis grunted. “That badge looks like it came from Toys Aplenty.”

“That’s where I got it,” Eileen said and her grin was so filled with mischief that Jarvis grinned back.

I thought he seemed more interested in Eileen Duffy than in the body he was supposed to be investigating, but he did get to work, conferring with the other officers, some of whom were with the crime lab. I tried not to look in their direction, pretending that there
hadn’t
been a murder and there
wasn’t
a dead body on the floor, but it was impossible.

Jarvis studied the wallet that was found in the victim’s pocket and its contents. “Plenty of money here,” he said to one of the other officers, “and he’s wearing an expensive watch and ring, so it doesn’t look as though the motive was robbery.”

A police photographer took photos of the body from all angles, and finally Jarvis left the room and came back with Stephanie Harmon and the policewoman, whom he introduced as Maria Estavez.

With wild eyes, Miss Harmon checked out all the bodies standing up before she looked at the one on the floor. She seemed reassured at being surrounded by police officers, so she allowed Detective Jarvis to lead her over to the corpse.

For a long moment she stared, then she glanced up and nodded her head. “This man had dealings with my boss,” she said.

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “He came to the office a number of times, but whatever business was conducted wasn’t recorded. I never heard his name.”

“You have no idea what kind of business your former boss was doing with this man?”

“None.” She whimpered and murmured, “I could be lying there instead of that poor man. How do we know the murderer wasn’t after
me
?” She walked to one side of the glass door in the dining room and rested her forehead against the glass as she stared out at the rooftops.

In a low voice Officer Estavez said to Detective Jarvis, “I hope she doesn’t go to pieces before the trial is over. I suggested she try to rest, and she finally did go to her bedroom and nap just a little while ago.”