Deadly Décor (A Caprice De Luca Mystery) (7 page)

“I did. She’s a cocker spaniel, and she’s pregnant. So I don’t like to be away too long at a stretch. I have a video conference at two, and lots of paperwork to finish. I had an open house yesterday, and I have to make follow-up calls about that.”

Grant eyed her speculatively. “And then?”

She might as well tell him, because eventually he’d find out she wasn’t going to leave this case alone. “I might take a look around the community center.”

“Caprice, it’s a crime scene. Stay away from it.” His voice was hard.

Vince, Bella, and Joe were all looking their way, obviously interested in the interchange.

With others watching, she kept her cool and refused to let her usually long fuse ignite. “I know it’s a crime scene, and I wouldn’t even consider crossing the yellow tape. But there’s a basketball court outside of that tape. I expect there’ll be some teenagers dribbling and shooting baskets there, out of curiosity if nothing else. The center will probably put one of its counselors outside just to watch over them.”

“And just why do you want to talk to the teenagers?” Grant seemed to be holding onto his temper, too.

“Because some of them might have been working with Bob on the mural. Some of them might have heard things. I want to give the police suspects other than Bella and Joe.”

Vince stepped in now. “Detective Jones won’t appreciate your interference again.”

“I solved his case for him the last time.” When Vince was about to protest, she held up her hand. “I won’t do anything he wouldn’t approve of. Really. I’m just going to talk to some teens.” When Vince and Grant exchanged looks, and their mouths went taut with everything they weren’t going to say, Caprice motioned to Bella and Joe. “Come on, I’ll get the two of you home.”

Then maybe Bella and her husband would talk. Maybe they’d draw closer instead of pulling farther apart.

The first thing Caprice did when she returned home was find Sophia again. Giving both her and Shasta the run of the house last night and this morning might not have been the most intelligent thing she’d ever done. But she didn’t feel it was fair to lock Sophia in the bedroom and give Shasta free rein. On the other hand, she hadn’t wanted to put Shasta in the garage when she didn’t know how long she’d be gone.

The only evidence that the two might have had another chase was the scrambled throw rug. Other than that, nothing was broken. Nothing was scattered. Nothing was where it shouldn’t be. However, once more she found Sophia in the closet.

Staring down at her, Caprice asked, “Are you going to do this every time I leave? A nap’s one thing, but holing yourself up in here is another.”

Sophia looked up at her with eyes that said,
You let that creature loose again
.

“You need to make friends,” Caprice told her. “Shasta could be around for a long time, let alone her pups.”

She crouched down and gave Sophia a good, long petting session while Shasta sat outside the office door, waiting and whining a little.

Finally Caprice stood and told her cat, “I’m putting food out in the kitchen, and Shasta will be outside playing for awhile. So stop pouting and come join us when you’re ready.”

Sophia blinked, crossed her paws, and didn’t look as if she were going to move anytime soon.

With a shrug, Caprice took Shasta to the back door and let her outside. When she’d dropped Bella and Joe off at their house, they’d both seemed shell-shocked. The silence in the van had been uncomfortable and scary. Caprice wanted them to hug each other and support each other, but . . .

She’d brought in the stack of mail from the mailbox attached to the brick outside the front door. As Shasta wandered about the yard, Caprice stood at the doorway and watched, absently sorting through the envelopes. She stopped when she came to an official-looking one with the return address
Women for a Better Kismet
.

She’d spoken to the group a couple of times since she’d been home-staging, and had attended their monthly meetings when she could. She often made contacts there. She also enjoyed the rapport from the mix of stay-at-home moms and professional women who just wanted to make their town a better place. Usually notices of meetings arrived in her e-mail. Maybe this was about plans for something special they’d organized.

But as she opened the envelope and read the letter inside, she realized this event was a done deal. She was nominated to receive an award! She was familiar with the yearly banquet at the Country Squire Golf and Recreation Club on the edge of Kismet. It was an event that raised money and helped spread the word about the group. But this year, it was going to be a very special event for her. She’d been nominated for the organization’s Woman of the Year Award for her achievement in developing her small business into a success, for her work with stray animals and for her assistance to the police in solving the Ted Winslow murder case. The winner would be announced at the banquet. How exciting was that?

Without any hesitation, she found her phone and speed-dialed Nikki. She was sure her mom would be tied up on the phone with Bella for a while.

A half hour later, still tossing a ball for Shasta, Caprice ended the call with her sister and found she was both happy and sad. Nikki had been so excited for her, and Caprice was sure she’d spread the news. But they’d also talked about Bella, and Caprice was genuinely worried. They all were.

But worrying just took her in circles, so she decided to do more than worry. After her video conference, she was heading to the community center. Grant had his reservations, and she knew they were valid ones, but those reservations weren’t going to stop her. She had to help Bella.

Around four o’clock Caprice parked about a half block from the center. She walked down the opposite side of the street, passing the downtown park. This year the center was planning on holding a fund-raising day there. Had the plans for that been derailed because of the murder? The board would have to decide.

The day had grown quite a bit warmer. After spending the afternoon in her air-conditioning, Caprice worked up a sweat quickly as she hurried across the street and down the broken pavement toward the community center’s basketball court. Yellow crime scene tape still surrounded the building and parking lot. Caprice knew the York County forensic team would finish as quickly as it could because manpower to keep a crime scene intact was expensive.

A basketball game was in progress, and lots of dribbling and guarding was going on. Groups of girls bent their heads together along the perimeter, watching the game. Well, not watching the game, but watching the guys play the game. She spotted an older gentleman who looked to be around her dad’s age in a polo shirt and khakis with a whistle hanging around his neck. If she tried to talk to the kids, he’d probably disapprove, so she might as well just introduce herself and go from there.

Approaching him, she stood beside him and watched the game. “It’s a good thing these kids have the community center so they can let off some energy.”

“Wish I had some of that energy,” the man muttered and turned to her. He asked, “Are you one of the volunteers?”

She held out her hand. “Caprice De Luca.”

He extended his hand to shake hers. “Elias Treadwell. Everyone calls me Eli.”

“It’s good to meet you, Eli. To answer your question, no, I’m not one of the volunteers. But . . . my sister found the man who was murdered here.”

“Bella Santini.”

“You know her?”

“I know her in a roundabout way. She made costumes for my grandkids for Halloween last year. She and my daughter sometimes carpool. I spotted Bella one afternoon last week when she stopped in here to talk to Preston.”

So Bella had seen Bob other than for their coffee dates?

“Bob was here working on the mural?” Caprice guessed.

“Yes, it’s something the kids enjoy doing with him. At least those who don’t like basketball so much.”

“I was hoping to talk to some of the kids who worked with Bob on that mural. Do you think that’s possible?”

Eli studied Caprice and, putting two and two together, came up with the right combination. “Is your sister a suspect?”

“The police have questioned her, like they’ve questioned everyone. But I am worried about her. I thought a little additional information might not hurt.”

“I watch those cop shows on TV, and you’re probably right.” He pointed to a boy standing by himself. Eli nodded to him. “That’s Danny Flannery. He was working with Bob on the mural, but . . .”

“But?” Caprice prodded.

“He actually got into a fistfight with Bob and threw a couple of punches. Bob just mostly defended himself, but I think Danny was intent on doing damage.”

“They had a fistfight here?”

“Yep. No one knows what it was about. Danny wouldn’t say, and neither would Bob. He was suspended from the center for a while because of it.”

“When was this?”

Eli thought about it. “A couple of months ago. He and Bob have hardly talked since. You might want to start with Danny.”

A few moments later, Caprice wasn’t sure what angle to take when she approached Danny Flannery. Then she decided honesty was the best course. Why would he talk to a stranger otherwise?

The boy’s expression was sullen and his body language defensive as he leaned against the fence, baseball cap backward and slightly askew, and oversized T-shirt drooping practically to the knees of his worn jeans. He looked a little rough, and Grant’s warning still rang in her head. But fear wasn’t an emotion she wanted to lay claim to, not when Bella and Joe’s future could be in jeopardy.

She smiled and asked the teenager, “Is basketball not your game?”

He narrowed his eyes. “What’s it to you?”

Maybe she had to tell him exactly what she wanted. Maybe she had to be careful how she did it. But she intended to get a few answers from Danny Flannery . . . today.

Caprice studied the teenager and suddenly realized the designs on his T-shirt and those on his sneakers were hand-painted. Acting on a hunch, she asked, “Did you paint your T-shirt and sneakers?”

His eyes widened as if he hadn’t expected anything like that. “Yeah,” he answered warily, looking over her tank top, which sported a huge decal of a white Persian cat, and then the fifties-style pedal pushers she’d found at her favorite vintage clothing shop, Secrets of the Past. “But you didn’t paint yours,” he muttered.

She laughed. “Nope, I didn’t, but I wish I could. I hear animals are tough to sketch or paint.”

“That depends,” he said with a shrug. “Furry ones are the worst, but they can be done.”

Talking about art was obviously a lot different than talking about basketball. “Are you helping with the murals on the game room wall?”

“I was.” He jutted his chin toward the building. “I was banned from there for a while, but I’ve been helping to finish them.”

Danny was tapping his foot, bursting with indignation about his work being interrupted. That indignation had apparently made him spill something he might not have spilled otherwise.

“Caught smoking or something?” she asked easily.

He eyed her again and asked, “What’s it to you?”

Dropping all pretense, she said flatly, “My sister found Bob Preston’s body.”

His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.” She took out her phone and quickly found a picture of Bella. “If you spend a lot of time around the community center, maybe you can tell me if you’ve seen her here.”

At first Danny looked as if he didn’t want to get involved, but then innate curiosity must have made him reach for the phone.

Studying the picture, he gave a quick nod. “Yeah, I’ve seen her around. Were your sister and Preston hooked up?”

“Old friends,” she answered easily.

But Danny narrowed his eyes, and he could see through that evasive answer. “Friends with benefits,” he mumbled.

Caprice was about to protest in outrage when he went on, “He always had a couple of women hanging around. I saw him with a blonde with long, red fingernails and dressed like she didn’t belong in Kismet.”

That could be Eliza, Caprice thought. She always dressed impeccably in expensive clothes, and long red fingernails were usually part of the outfit.

“There was a redhead, too. She met him out back last week. Bob was a popular guy.” There was resentment and bitterness in Danny’s tone, and Caprice wanted to get at the reason why.

“So what did you and Bob fight about?”

He didn’t seem surprised that she knew. Maybe there had been many witnesses. “Nothing.”

If he thought that was going to end their conversation, it certainly wasn’t. “
Nothing
shouldn’t have started a fistfight.”

Avoiding her gaze, Danny said in a low voice, “We just disagreed about something.”

“Do you take swings at everybody you don’t agree with?”

She’d apparently gone too far, because Danny said, “It’s none of your business.”

It was her business if this teenager had killed Bob, but she wasn’t going to out-and-out say that. Eking out information little by little was probably the best way to go. It wasn’t the fastest, but it was often the surest.

She switched the course of their conversation. “The murals are looking good. Do you think they’ll let you finish the last one?”

“I don’t know. Bob was in charge. I already did most of it.” He hastened to add, “Bob was just sort of there. He didn’t actually do most of the sketching and painting.”

That might be true, but from what she understood, Bob was getting the credit for the murals. Is that why he and Danny had fought?

Danny pushed himself away from the fence. “I gotta go. Nothing’s happening here.”

She wondered what he expected to happen here when he didn’t play basketball and couldn’t go inside because it was a crime scene.

Without another word to Caprice, or anyone else hanging around, Danny sauntered past a group of girls and off the property. When he hit the street, he jogged across and kept jogging.

Caprice wondered if he was running from her or running away from something he’d done. Hopefully, she could soon figure that out.

Caprice hadn’t seen or heard from Eliza, and she wondered how her client was faring since Bob’s murder. If they had been dating . . . if they had been close . . .

She would be passing Connect Xpress on her way home. She might as well stop in and see if Eliza was there. Caprice knew her house with its freshly painted walls and de-cluttered look didn’t feel like home to Eliza anymore. People liked their belongings around them—memorabilia, pictures, and furniture that carried memories of regrets as well as good times. Caprice understood that she was messing with people’s lives when she staged a house because it wasn’t exactly “them” anymore. It wasn’t exactly “theirs” anymore. And that was really the whole point. All Caprice wanted to do was invite newcomers in, newcomers who would want to live there and make that home theirs.

Even though Eliza was eager for her move to L.A., she’d had trouble with the whole staging concept. But, again, that wasn’t unusual.

Five minutes later, Caprice drove past the building where her brother lived, an old school now transformed into condos. Downtown Kismet’s charm was rooted in its early 1900s heritage. Red-brick buildings were trimmed in white around windows and eaves. Oval signs on wrought-iron brackets hung in front of many businesses.

She drove another block, past a deli where Vince often bought takeout and an old movie theater that ran marathon film fests, mostly on weekends. It was a masterpiece of old movie decor inside. In the oldest part of Kismet now, she passed Cherry on the Top and, a few storefronts down, Secrets of the Past. Glancing at the arts and crafts mall on the other side of the street, topped by the Blue Moon Grille, she spotted the driveway for Connect Xpress. Unlike other shops, its red-and-black sign looked almost garish on the front of the building. Huge, it was topped by halogen lights that illuminated the storefront at night.

No one could miss it. That was for sure.

Instead of parking in front of the building at a meter, she swerved into one of the spaces perpendicular to the side of Connect Xpress. After she climbed out of her van, she locked it. A few seconds later, she was opening the heavy glass door and stepping inside the video-dating business.

The reception area carried through the red and black theme with two leather couches, black enamel tables, and dark red carpet that was so plush her footsteps were soundless. Usually, though, someone was at the counter, ready to greet anyone who walked in. Caprice knew the setup because Eliza had shown her around when they’d had one of their meetings here about her house. There were two taping rooms in the back and an office area that veered down a hall to the right.

As Caprice walked that way now, her sandals clacked slightly on the hallway tile.

She called into the office. “Is anyone here?” Taking a few more steps, she glimpsed someone sitting at a computer at a long station that accommodated two other desktops. She supposed this was where the editing was done on the videos that Connect Xpress recorded.

The redheaded young woman at the computer didn’t notice Caprice and didn’t answer. She was just sitting there, staring at the monitor.

“Excuse me,” Caprice said, a little louder.

The woman looked up, obviously startled. Her eyes were red, and so was her nose. She looked as if she’d been crying. “Can I help you?” Her voice was thick, and she cleared her throat.

“I’m looking for Eliza. Is she here?”

“No, she said she wouldn’t be in today, and I . . . I shouldn’t be. It’s not as if I’m getting anything done. The guy I was dating . . .” Her voice broke and she turned away.

Caprice’s radar went on alert. Danny had said Bob had also met with a redhead.

She approached the young woman and sat at a chair at the computer station next to her. “I’m Caprice. You seem really upset. Is there anything I can do?”

“I’m Jackie,” the woman told her. “There’s nothing you can do. My boyfriend was . . . Bob was . . . killed.”

Caprice took another good look at Jackie, with her red hair and very blue eyes. Was this the woman Danny had spoken about? For Caprice, the shock of Bob’s death had been swallowed up with Bella’s involvement in it, but now she felt the reverberations and sadness of it. She could only imagine what Jackie was feeling if she’d been close to Bob.

“I knew Bob. I stage houses and often used him and his crews. I’m sorry you lost him.”

“We’d been dating a couple of months, and I really like . . . liked him,” she corrected herself. “He made me laugh, and he acted as if he cared about me.”

“Bob could make anybody laugh. He was a charmer, too.”

“I know,” she admitted. “I’m the one who shot his video here.”

“Do you mean a dating video?”

“Yeah. Do you want to see it? That’s what I was watching.”

Caprice knew Bob didn’t have any trouble getting a date. Had he wanted to expand his dating pool? “Bob shouldn’t have had any problems getting a girl to go out with him. As you said, he was fun.”

“So good looking too. I couldn’t believe it when he looked my way.”

“If you’d like to show me his footage, I’d be glad to watch.”

Jackie moved the mouse and the screen saver went off. The video was right there. She pressed the arrow to start it.

Sitting on a high stool, Bob smiled into the camera, looking like a model for a TV ad in a crew-neck sweater and khaki slacks, so different from the attire she usually saw him in—a T-shirt and jeans.

She heard Jackie’s voice as she suggested, “So tell me what you like to do on weekends.”

“I like to go dancing . . . or canoeing. As long as I’m doing something, I’m good. I work out at the gym. Been a member of Shape Up for years.”

One thing Caprice knew—Bob liked to keep moving.

“I work out there, too,” Jackie murmured. “That’s where the two of us really got to know each other.”

The gym. Another place to explore where she might find Bob’s friends . . . or foes.

“Tell me about your family,” Jackie’s voice prompted from off camera.

And Bob did, explaining that he was an only child and his parents had been older. He mentioned they had passed away, and he sometimes missed not having any family. But he had lots of good friends.

Jackie stopped the video as if it was too painful for her to watch. “He did have so many friends,” she said. “He was always getting a call or texting someone.”

She said to Jackie, “Bob and my sister were supposed to have coffee together the night he died. Did you know that?”

“Really?” Jackie asked, looking startled.

“They ran into each other and had coffee last week, too. They were catching up with old times.”

“How did they know each other?” Jackie asked casually, but Caprice knew the question wasn’t casual. If Bob had lots of friends and Jackie suspected he might not be seeing her exclusively . . .

“They knew each other in high school. They were pretty serious at one time.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, I don’t know if I should say. Bella was in school in Philadelphia, and a long-distance relationship is tough.”

“Did Bob go out with someone else?”

Caprice kept silent.

“I know he had a reputation. I knew that before I started dating him. When we were out together, sometimes I saw him looking at other women, but I didn’t want to believe he’d cheat on me. I can’t believe he cheated on me.”

“My sister’s married, so I really think they were just catching up.”

Jackie’s eyes were stormy, and that pretty blue maybe wasn’t so innocent after all. What if she’d found out Bob was supposed to have coffee with Bella? What if she wasn’t surprised at all by the information Caprice had given her?

Jackie was at least five-eight. In her Connect Xpress shirt and shorts, Caprice could see that she was fit. Could this pretty woman wield a murder weapon in jealousy?

Caprice guessed anything was possible. Someone killed Bob, and Jackie’s motive stacked up in the same way Bella or Joe’s would. She’d have to check out the gym and see if she could find out anything there.

She’d learned a lot today. She’d go home to her pets and take care of work that was mounting up. Also on her to-do list was to post a photo of Shasta on her Web site and send notices to the radio station, the
Kismet Crier
, and the free community paper.

Tomorrow she’d continue her investigation. Tomorrow she also should probably consult with Vince and Grant about what she’d learned. After a few more minutes of conversation with Jackie, and with another expression of her condolences, she left the woman at the computer again, suspecting Jackie would be running that video again and again and again.

In love . . . or with regrets?

The following morning after breakfast, Shasta wanted to sit at Caprice’s feet and be petted more than she wanted anything else. Better than anyone, Caprice knew she not only needed food and water, she needed attention. For however long she’d been on her own out in the big world, she hadn’t received it.

Finding photos she’d taken of Shasta on her computer, she chose a few she liked and wanted to add to a page on her Web site. She sent them to her Web mistress, along with copy. Afterward, she thought about everything she’d learned about Bob and possible suspects. She really should talk to Grant or Vince about what she’d discovered. The thing was, Shasta seemed particularly needy today. Pregnancy hormones?

Picking up the phone on her desk, she called Grant’s and Vince’s receptionist/secretary/Girl Friday while she played with Shasta’s ears and petted her. She and Giselle were more than acquaintances and less than friends, but they had a good relationship. She asked if either Grant or Vince were free.

Giselle said easily, “Grant is free for the next hour.”

“So if I just show up, he’ll let me in?”

“I’ll make sure he does. Lawyers need breaks, too.”