Sharma walked out of the squad room a dissatisfied and jealous man. Human emotions make people dangerous. After their conversation, Billy was even more certain the doctor had killed Caroline.
She may have told him about the baby—forget the big wedding, she wanted to be married right away, and she wanted to wear her dress. Sharma agreed then shot her believing she’d gotten pregnant by another man. A man’s wounded pride is a powerful motivator.
Detective Kloss had closed a similar case a year ago, a woman who ran off with the captain of her husband’s bowling team. Three weeks later she called her husband, said she was pregnant with his child, and wanted to come back. He’d said, “Sure baby, come on home.”
He met her in the garage and cracked her skull open with his bowling ball. When officers pulled up, the man was waiting for them on the front steps. He said that not knowing if the baby was his had sent him over the edge. He’d apologized to them for the mess he was leaving in the garage.
The heart can be an assassin. Billy knew that from experience.
Frankie returned from taking Caroline’s sweater to the lab. While she was gone, he’d transcribed the recording from his conversation with Sharma. A copy would go into the case file as insurance against Vanderman’s possible attempt to use Sharma’s visit as an excuse to have the case thrown out.
Billy picked up the phone. Zelda Taylor was his next target. She knew things about Caroline he couldn’t find out anywhere else, plus he wanted to know what had provoked the argument between Caroline and her at the office. She answered.
“Ms. Taylor, it’s Detective Able.”
“I’m glad you called. I’m worried about Caroline’s cat.”
“He’s fine. We put out plenty of food and water. I want you to come to the CJC this morning. I need your help clearing up some details.”
He heard flamenco guitars playing in the background. “Ms. Taylor?”
“Leo is a rescue cat. He hides from strangers.”
He thought a moment. “That’s no problem. Meet me at Caroline’s house in an hour.”
“Great. And call me Zelda.”
When Billy pulled up, the cruiser he’d requested as a safeguard against a “he said, she said” incident was waiting in front of the house. He wasn’t about to risk a compromised investigation. The officer followed him up the driveway to wait on the porch.
Inside, the entry hall felt lifeless. The essence of Caroline in the house was beginning to seep away. He was uncomfortably aware that the CSU team had jostled her personal things, drawers left open in the living room, magazines scattered on the table. He took a moment to look at the photos in the library of kids grouped in front of the big house at Airlee. Finn Adams came back to him now, a skinny, earnest kid. A young Judd Phillips stood next to him. Another shot was of Caroline and Zelda, teenagers in cowboy hats and bikinis goofing around on horses bareback.
In the corner the gift boxes on the table had been re-stacked after the techs had gone through them. He picked up the top box. Buried inside the tissue he found an antique spoon, the bowl shaped like a clamshell with an “S” for Sharma monogrammed on the handle. The spoon was a sugar shell used for formal teas. Probably not what Zelda had been searching for.
His mother had taught him about sugar shells, pickle forks, and asparagus servers. He knew the proper placement of the fish knife, a pastry fork, and dessert spoon. The afternoons she’d been sober, she would lay out the family’s sterling flatware and instruct him on its proper placement for formal meals. He was confident Caroline had been given the same lessons. They weren’t the last generation who could tell the difference between sterling and silver plate, but the pool of people who cared about such things was drying up. Lose your family’s culture and you lose yourself—like knowing the origin of every Christmas ornament on the tree and knowing what kind of pie people expect to see at Thanksgiving. He hadn’t grown up with that kind of tradition, but because of his mother, he could set a hell of a nice table.
He considered the critical comments made by Rosalyn and Gracie Ella Adams about his mother. Yes, she drank. Some days he’d come home from school and find her in the kitchen polishing the Wm. A Rogers flatware and weeping. She would pull him to her side and recite her family’s lineage. His great, great grandfather had been a governor of Arkansas. He’d moved to Georgia and bought a thousand acres near Atlanta, worth millions now. Dementia had taken hold and the land was stolen from him. She would tell the story of her great, great uncle, Dr. Tom Rivers, who had assisted Dr. Jonas Salk in developing the polio vaccine.
His mother had begun drinking well before her visit to friends in Tunica one summer after graduating from college. She’d met Jackson Able. They ran off and got married. Her parents had been appalled but made a wedding present of thirty thousand dollars for a down payment on a house. Jackson used the money to buy an appliance store in Pontotoc, Mississippi.
He ran the store into the ground, left town owing money, and abandoned his wife with a young son to raise. Billy had wondered why she stayed in Pontotoc instead of going home to her folks in Georgia. Later on he understood it had been about alcohol and shame.
Hard to know the direction your life will take when you fall in love. What Rosalyn said about his father had been true. His mother had come to that realization too late.
He was in the kitchen checking on the cat’s food and water when he heard Zelda speaking with the officer on the porch. He wasn’t prepared for the change in her appearance as she came through the door. Instead of flip-flops and a nightgown she had on a russet suede jacket, skinny jeans, and high-heeled boots. He hadn’t noticed on Tuesday how slender she was. She came toward him swinging a cat carrier, her vulpine features reminding him of a friend’s pet fox that used to nip his ankles. Sometimes it drew blood.
“Thank you for meeting me here,” he said.
“Glad to. Is the guy on the porch your backup in case I try to take advantage of you?”
“Good guess.” He took the carrier from her.
She peered around him into the kitchen. “Any sign of Leo?”
“Just an empty food bowl and a full litter box from the smell, so he’s around.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You check the guest rooms for him. I’ll take the master.”
She strode down the hall and into Caroline’s bedroom like a perp who knew exactly where to find the loot. Whatever she’d been looking for in the library she now thought was in Caroline’s bedroom. He waited one minute then went down the hall and found her in the large walk-in closet poking through a drawer full of costume jewelry.
“Shopping?” he asked.
She straightened. “You scared me. I can’t stand sneaky people.”
“Me either.”
She slammed the drawer. “I’m looking for a ring. A big sapphire.”
“Diamonds set on either side of the stone?”
She came over to stand in front of him. “Where is it?”
He’d noticed Zelda hadn’t mentioned Caroline, not a single sign of grief, not a question about the investigation.
“In Caroline’s handbag,” he said.
She frowned. “The one she had with her the night she died?”
He nodded.
“That’s my mother’s ring. When will I get it back?”
“I can’t say. But if it’s so important, why did you give it to Caroline?”
“I didn’t give it to her. She borrowed it for the wedding as her ‘something borrowed, something blue’ item. Then she refused to return it, so I assumed she’d lost it. We argued about it.”
“Is that what the fight was about on Monday?”
She scratched her nose. “Yes.”
“Why didn’t you say that earlier?”
“I was upset. You were acting like I’d killed her.”
“Did you kill her?”
She narrowed her eyes outlined with black kohl. Stage makeup. He reminded himself that this woman was a performer.
“You think I shot Caroline over a ring?” she asked.
“Just answer the question.”
“I didn’t kill her. I told you how I feel about guns.” She blinked rapidly and bit her lower lip. “I don’t want to discuss this.”
The nose scratching, the blinking, the lip biting—they were all signs of lying. He decided to let her stew for awhile. “There’s a closet full of expensive suits with tags still attached. What can you tell me about that?”
She rolled her eyes. “That was Raj. He disapproved of Caroline’s wardrobe. She has these great retro finds and custom leather jackets from LA. She’d tone it down when she went to court, but otherwise she loved dressing in edgy clothes. I’d kill for a wardrobe like that.” She winced. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Go on.”
“Raj had those stuffy suits delivered without even asking her. He wanted her to dress conservatively like the wife of an important doctor. She refused. He wouldn’t take them back so she left them in the closet. The bastard tried to bully her into giving in.”
Billy glanced around. “I don’t see her wedding dress. You think she sold it?”
“No way. It was custom-made with heirloom lace. She probably stored it in one of the guest rooms. I’ll check.”
She started past him. He put his hand on her arm. “Caroline was wearing the dress the night she died. She was on her way to be married.”
Zelda shrugged off his hand. “To whom?”
“We don’t know.”
She sucked in a breath and pushed past him. He found her seated at the foot of the bed, staring at the portrait of Caroline and Saunders. Tears streamed down her face. He found a box of tissues in the bathroom and brought it back.
“You think it was Raj?” she asked.
“Do you?”
“It doesn’t make sense. She’d cut ties with him.” She stopped, reasoning it through. “A wedding. That’s why she wanted to keep the ring.” She covered her face with her hands then dropped them. “This hasn’t seemed real until now, but thinking of her dying in that dress . . . I have to confess—I lied about Caroline and me being close. We weren’t even friends. It’s been that way since we were kids. I admired her and I was envious. Sometimes I hated her. Now I feel really rotten about it.”
She swallowed. “Uncle Saunders indulged her. He called her Sparrow like she was a helpless little bird, but she wasn’t. The girls at school got her into coke. She craved the stuff. It kicked off the first of her manic episodes. She started shoplifting, sneaking out of the house to party. Then a cop stopped her for a broken taillight and busted her for a gram of coke. Aunt Rosalyn intervened with the DA. They wanted to ‘protect her future.’” Zelda made quote marks with her fingers. “The charges were dropped.”
She looked out the window and wiped her cheeks. “My freshman year at Rhodes I drank too much PGA punch at a frat party and got so drunk I plowed my car into the back of a dump truck. Aunt Rosalyn told my mother that a few days in jail would be a maturing experience. They left me there for two days. They weren’t so worried about my future.”
“What about the time you and your buddies waylaid the president of the NRA?” he asked.
She sighed. “I’d forgotten about that. We wanted to make a point about guns. You can’t open a closet in my family’s houses without seeing a shotgun. My dad owned shotguns. He—you don’t understand how much I hate guns.” She turned watery eyes on him. “I shouldn’t have told you about Caroline doing drugs.”
“Why?”
“It makes her look bad. And I can tell you still have feelings for her. First love and all.”
“No harm done. But I’m curious. Did Caroline talk about me?”
“Yeah. She said you’re a really good kisser.”
He studied her. “You’re lying again.”
She gave him a half smile. “I was guessing. I always thought you guys had something going with the way you looked at her.”
That pissed him off. “This isn’t a game. She called you on Monday evening. You’re one of the last people she spoke with. Tell me again where you were that night.”
She stopped smiling. “I didn’t kill Caroline so quit asking me.”
A muffled meow came from under the bed. A large black cat—scrappy-looking with a bony skull and an ear half chewed off—jumped on the bed. He padded across Zelda’s lap to sit on a folded blanket beside her.
“Hi, Leo,” she said.
The cat blinked at her then blinked at Billy.
“He likes you. Caroline said he prefers men.”
A gray scar zigzagged across the top of his head and swooped down to his left eye. “What happened to his head?” he asked.
“A Rottweiler got him down behind the air conditioning unit in the firm’s parking lot. But Leo got his licks in.”
The cat switched his tail.
“Tough guy, huh,” Billy said.
“Caroline had a vet patch him up and she took him home. Raj said she had to get rid of him before the wedding. I think that was the final straw.”
Zelda sneezed and scooted away from the cat. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“You brought the cat carrier. You’re taking him home.”
“No way. I signed up to feed him and empty the litter box.” She sneezed again. “I’m allergic.”
Leo yowled from the back seat all the way to the barge. Billy wondered how he’d ended up with the cat even temporarily although he admired the way the cat had landed a cushy home with Caroline. He didn’t mind helping out as long as Zelda did as she’d promised and found a home for him in a few days.
At the barge he set up the litter box in the bathroom and gave Leo a can of salmon fillet. The cat knocked back the whole can and looked for more, which Billy gave him.
“You ready to chill?” he asked.
The cat groomed his whiskers and ignored the question. Billy had never owned a cat, but knew they were good at working their own agenda. Not too often a human gets something over on a cat. As a cop, he couldn’t fault that behavior.
Leo slept on a towel in the bathroom while he made coffee with chicory, heated a can of Stagg Chili, cut a big wedge of cheddar, and grabbed a handful of saltines. A breeze was blowing off the water, so he pulled on a jacket and took his food out on the deck. Sunlight sparkled on the eddies behind the bridge pylons. A flock of Canada geese flew downriver in squadron formation while he ate. He saved his coffee for last and made notes on his conversation with Zelda.
No alibi, he wrote. Angry about the ring, clueless about the dress. Hard to know if she’s telling the truth or doing a good job of acting. Honest about her DUI, dishonest about her relationship with Caroline. Dishonest/honest. Interesting woman. Beautiful woman. He couldn’t help but wonder what was going on under that hood. He scratched out the part about her being beautiful. Not the place for that observation.
Had she exaggerated Caroline’s drug use and behavioral issues? Difficult to verify. She’d admitted being envious and even hating her cousin. Zelda didn’t fit the profile of a murderer, except that she was part of Caroline’s long-term inner circle, which meant she didn’t need to develop a reason to kill her.
He took his dishes inside and heard the cat meowing in the bathroom, so he opened the door. Leo jumped on the bed, stretched out, and began to purr.
“Good idea, bud,” he said. “Wish I could join you.”