Chapter Fifteen

 

“That’s what I thought!” I said.

Seamus’s face was a study in shock: mouth agape, eyes squinting as he winced in the glare of my phone’s flashlight. But his recovery was quick. I had to give him that.

“You’re up late,” he said casually. “Can’t sleep?”

“With you dropping armoires and chaise lounges overhead every few minutes? No.”

He put his hand up to block the blinding beam. “Do you mind?”

“Do I mind that you’re searching my aunt’s home in the middle of the night? Yes. I rather do.” But I removed the light from his eyes.

Seamus put his hand down and offered, “There’s an explanation.”

“I’d love to hear it.” It occurred to me that we were both speaking softly. I could understand why Seamus would want to keep our encounter quiet, but why was I half whispering?

Seamus said, “You probably won’t believe me, but I saw a light moving around up here and thought I’d come up to investigate.”

I scowled. “You’re right. I don’t believe you. Try again.”

“Well, what do you think I’m doing at two o’clock in the morning?” His tone was perfectly reasonable.

“I think you’re systematically searching for something,” I said.

He managed a grin. “The family jewels maybe? I wouldn’t be looking in a dusty closet.”

Was he seriously going to try and flirt his way out of this?

“I’ll tell you what else I think. I think you’re no more a gardener than I’m Noel Coward.”

He stopped grinning. “Noel Coward, huh?” He was clearly giving himself time to think. “I’m not a thief. If you want to search me—” He linked his hands behind his head, mimicking someone in police custody, which only served to convince me I was on the right track.

“I don’t think you’re a thief,” I said. “I think you’re a cop.”

That surprised him. Nonplussed him, in fact. “A cop.” He quit clowning around, studying me with narrowed eyes. “That’s an interesting theory.”

“And more interestingly, you don’t deny it.”

“Would you believe—”

“Nope.”

Seamus grimaced. “Then I won’t waste my time.”

“Good.” I held out my hand. “I assume you have some identification?”

That earned a rueful half-grin. “You’re not very trusting, Artemus.”

“No. I’m not. I’ve learned the hard way not to take things at face value.”

Seamus muttered something, reached for his hip pocket, pulled out a square of leather, and handed it to me. “The married boyfriend,” he commented.

It was my turn to be startled, which I tried to cover by opening his identification holder and studying its contents. I couldn’t help saying, “You’ve done your homework.”

“That’s what they pay me for.” He sounded less lighthearted.

The picture ID and blue-and-gold NYPD badge registered on my consciousness.

Sergeant Seamus A. Cassidy, Grand Larceny Division.

“NYPD. You’re a long way from home,” I said. I was thinking, grand larceny? “What are you supposed to be doing in our garden? Looking for counterfeit cabbage?”

“Ha. I’m working in liaison with SFPD’s Financial Crimes Unit.”

“Investigating what? Who? Er, whom?” Seamus hesitated, and I said in alarm, “Aunt H.?”

“Shh.” He took my arm. “We can’t talk here.”

I freed myself. “We can talk here as well as anywhere else. No more lies. Why are you at Green Lanterns? What are you looking for?”

Seamus looked pained. “Artemus—”

I wasn’t having any of it. “Talk. Or go pack your bags.”

Seamus studied my face, then groaned softly. “All right. But…keep your voice down.”

“That’s going to depend on future events. If you’re after my dear old auntie, you’re done here, Cassidy.”

He made another of those pained sounds. “It’s not… You’re making this very difficult.”

“I may soon make it impossible. What is it you think Aunt Halcyone has done?”

“Aside from knocking off her ne’er-do-well husband?” He said it almost lightly.

The lightness was both cue and clue. “You’re not a homicide detective.”

“True.”

“What are you up to?”

His gaze searched mine, and whatever he read there caused him to capitulate. “I believe your aunt knows the whereabouts of the three million dollars your uncle Ogden embezzled when he fled New York six years ago.”

“Three…million…”

“You heard me.”

I sat down on the edge of the mattress and stared up at Seamus.

His face was stern and unfamiliar as he met my stunned gaze. No sign now of the easy-going, not terribly efficient, but definitely charming Master Gardener. This man was on a mission, and woe to whoever got in his way.

“Embezzled from whom? From where?” I asked finally.

“From his own company. Blue Moon Books.”

My initial reaction was simple surprise. “Ogden ran a successful publishing company?”

“For a time. He was publishing soft-core porn and did very well financially until he branched out into filmmaking.”

“P-P-Porn films?”

“Correct. He had a couple of big hits, but that was followed by a string of flops.”

“Ogden was producing porn films?”

“Writing, directing, and producing, yes. Six years ago, Blue Moon Books was on the verge of financial collapse due to his pending divorce settlement, the poor box-office performance of his final film, Hot Wet Mutant—”

“Hot Wet what?”

“—and a lawsuit which halted the release of Pink and Naked. Foxworth embezzled over three million dollars from the Blue Moon bank accounts and vanished.”

This was a lot to absorb. I latched on to the one thing that stood out. “Foxworth? And this Foxworth is supposed to be Ogden?”

“Oscar Foxworth is Ogden Hyde. Was. I was on his trail a long time. Despite the extensive plastic surgery, there’s no doubt in my mind.”

Porn films? Plastic surgery? Police investigations? What next? Where the hell to begin?

I said, “If you think Aunt H. was involved in any of that, you’re nuts.”

“I don’t believe she was initially involved, no. There’s no evidence to prove Foxworth knew your aunt before Ogden Hyde turned up in Russian Bay. But your aunt is a smart woman. Too smart not to have figured things out. Maybe she didn’t kill Foxworth for that money, but I’m betting she has a pretty good idea where he stashed it.”

Great. Maybe not a murderess. Just accessory after the fact. He believed it too! I said clearly, carefully, “You’re out of your tiny little mind, Cassidy.”

He shrugged. “Naturally, you’re going to feel that way. You’re probably not aware that keeping Foxworth in the style to which he was accustomed ate up a large part of your aunt’s fortune. She’s not broke, but she’s not far from it. She needed the inn to be a success, but it wasn’t. She could sell this house, but she won’t. That doesn’t leave her a lot of options.”

I stood up, pugnaciously thrusting my face in his. Disconcertingly, I could see the flicker of his dark eyelashes and feel the warmth of his breath against my mouth. “My aunt is not some femme fatale in a neo-noir pastiche. There is no possible scenario in which Aunt H. would consider murder a viable option.”

He opened his mouth, and I added, “I mean, where does Liana fit into all this? She would have to know the truth. What’s her story? Is she even Ogden’s sister? Maybe she knocked him off.”

I remembered the first séance when Liana had called the ghost “Oscar.” I’d thought I’d misheard or that it was a slip of the tongue or too many tranquilizers. Maybe it had been a slip of the tongue, but it had also been the truth. Of course she’d known Ogden’s real identity the whole time.

“We’re considering all possibilities,” Seamus said in an official, stolid tone that made me want to conk him over the head with the nearest marble bust.

“You didn’t answer my question. Is she his sister or not?”

We tried to stare each other down. He blinked first, admitting with disarming candor, “Artemus, I could get kicked off this case for what I’ve already told you. I can’t—”

“You’ve told me too much to stop there, that’s for sure.”

“I can’t force you to cooperate with this investigation, but if you lie to me, hide evidence, or act to hinder this investigation in any way—”

I snapped, “You mean by firing your ass and throwing you off this property?”

He stopped trying to appeal to my better nature and glared. “Don’t try it. I’m warning you. You’ll only make it worse for your aunt.”

“My aunt is innocent. I’m not worried about that. I’m worried about the fact that she’s surrounded by treacherous assholes who aren’t who they pretend to be, starting with you and possibly including Ogden, who is clearly not dead.”

“You’re wrong there,” Seamus said regretfully, apparently only hearing part of my speech. “Oscar Foxworth—Ogden, if you prefer—is dead all right. We’ve got the body to prove it.”

Well, no. They didn’t. Because what remained of Ogden—which had been little enough—had been since cremated.

“Burned past recognition. Did anyone bother to actually test for DNA?”

He looked both pained and patient. “Even if we had reason to believe Foxworth faked his death, given the state of his remains, the results of DNA testing would be at best inconclusive.”

“So in other words, no.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“He pulled a runner once before,” I said.

“He didn’t try to fake his death. That’s not an easy thing to do, you know. For one thing, it requires getting hold of a corpse—unless you’re suggesting Foxworth also committed homicide?”

“Why not? You seem to think Aunt H. is capable of it!”

Seamus chose to overlook that. “Anyway, of course we investigated that possibility. No bodies were hijacked from local morgues or mortuaries or graveyards.”

“What about missing persons? Anybody MIA?”

Seamus looked torn between sympathy and exasperation. “I understand how difficult this is—and how convenient it would be to pin everything on Foxworth. But Foxworth was not a master criminal. He was not a murderer. He was an embezzler—and not a very good one. And yeah, also a terrible filmmaker. But that’s still a long way away from committing murder. Homicide would be skipping a few grades for a guy who had no record of violence.”

“That you know of.”

“He was the subject of an ongoing investigation for six years. There isn’t much about Oscar Foxworth we don’t know. Other than where he hid his loot.”

“What makes you think he didn’t spend it?”

“The money trail. Or, more exactly, the lack of a money trail.”

“The kind of plastic surgery you’re talking about is expensive.”

“Not that expensive. It looks like Foxworth used just enough of his resources to…salt the mine.”

“What does that mean? Salt the mine?” I had the unpleasant feeling I knew exactly what it meant.

“Foxworth bought a fancy car, a fancy boat, and rented a fancy apartment. He joined all the right social clubs and local business organizations so that he could meet…the right people.”

“A rich widow,” I said bitterly.

“Yes.”

I thought it over. “None of that proves he couldn’t have decided to strike out for greener pastures and pulled the plug.”

“Why would he?”

“You just said he bled my aunt dry. He’d need a new mark.”

“It would be a lot simpler to divorce your aunt than fake his death.”

True. Ogden faking his death was tremendously more complicated—and risky—than just telling Aunt H. he wanted out. Plus, faking his death meant starting over completely, starting from scratch, rather than capitalizing on the social and financial network he’d spent time and effort building.

“Maybe he knew you were closing in on him. Maybe he didn’t have a choice.”

Seamus shook his head. “No. There’s no way he could have known that because we weren’t closing in. We weren’t even sure we’d located him until shortly after his death.”

I said stubbornly, “The guilty fleeth. Maybe he was paranoid. Maybe his criminal instincts told him it was time to pull up stakes.”

“No. Trust me on this. No. Foxworth had dug in for the long haul. I believe he was completely invested in this identity. Even if he did decide to run, why not just disappear? Why attempt something as dangerous and problematic as faking his death?”

“Maybe he was more desperate this time around. How many times can he successfully fake a new identity? He’d already used the plastic surgery trick. You said yourself he expected to remain Ogden Hyde for a long, long time.”

Seamus was shaking his head again. “You’re arguing my case for me. Anyway, again, to fake his death, Foxworth would need a body, and where would he get that body? Violence was never part of his MO.”

“You know whose MO has never included any crime of any kind? My aunt’s.” I didn’t wait for his response. “You didn’t answer me about Liana. What’s her rap sheet look like? Maybe she’s your femme fatale.”

“She doesn’t have a rap sheet.”

“Is she really his sister?”

He hesitated.

“She’s not, is she? Jesus Christ. So then who is she? His ex? His girlfriend?”

“I’m trying to be honest with you, but you’ve got to give me your word you’re not going to do something stupid like confront—” He broke off, both of us freezing at the unmistakable sound of footsteps fading down the hallway.

We jumped for the door together, both jockeying for position and managing to get completely in each other’s way. I settled matters by jamming my elbow into Seamus’s ribs. He woofed out a breath like an outraged German shepherd but gave way, and I yanked the door open and shot into the drafty hallway.

Which was as dark as a dungeon and silent as a tomb.

I felt for my phone, nearly dropping it as Seamus lurched into me. We both stumbled forward, automatically steadying each other. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and shone it down the long, empty corridor.

Where the hell had the owner of those footsteps disappeared to?

“Damn,” Seamus muttered. “Tarrant. I wonder how much he knows.”

“Tarrant?”

I felt rather than saw his nod. “He prowls this place at night.”

“That makes two of you. At the least.”

“I haven’t been inside the house until tonight.”

“Sure.”

“That’s the truth.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m telling you the truth. That wasn’t me the evening you thought you were chasing a ghost. I was peering through the window all right. But I hadn’t been in the house yet.”

I tried to read his face in the gloom. “Then how do you know it’s Tarrant wandering through the halls?”

“I’ve watched him. I’ve got a perfect view of the house from my front window.”

“And a trusty pair of binoculars, presumably?”

He avoided that one. “Tarrant doesn’t just stick to the main house either. He’s been snooping inside the garage, the pool house, the greenhouse.”

I said slowly, “He’s looking for something.”

“It seems so.”

“Maybe your missing three million. Or whatever it’s down to by now.”

“Maybe.” He sounded noncommittal. Why? Why wasn’t Tarrant as good or better a possible villain as Aunt H.?

I said, “It wasn’t Tarrant I chased down the staircase. And it wasn’t Tarrant I heard laughing in Ogden’s study. I don’t think I’ve ever heard so much as a titter from Tarrant.”

“What laughter in Ogden’s study?”

Seamus and I had covered so much territory that evening, it only then occurred to me he didn’t know about the eerie chuckle that had seemed to emanate from behind the walls of Ogden’s study. I filled him in, sure now I hadn’t dreamed up that ghostly laughter.

“Some kind of recording device,” Seamus guessed. “Triggered when you sat down at the desk. Or when the light went off.”

“But who turned off the light?”

“Could it be on some kind of timer?”

I scoffed, “Talk about an elaborate scheme. You can’t suspect my aunt of faking the haunting of Green Lanterns.”

“No. That seems pretty unlikely.”

“And what’s the point of it anyway?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. Yet.”

I could feel his gaze. I met it directly.

Seamus said, “A lot of these Prohibition-era houses were built with secret rooms.”

“I know. That was my first thought too. Aunt H. always insisted there were no such rooms at Green Lanterns. And frankly, if there was a secret room or a hidden passageway, I think I’d have found it by now.”

“Those rooms were built to foil full-scale police searches, let alone one pissed-off theater critic with a tape measure.”

I made a face. “Fair enough. The thing is, someone hiding in a place as large as Green Lanterns wouldn’t require a secret room. If he’s clever—and patient—he could cover his presence, sneak food from the pantry and larder, sleep in a different room every night. It could be done.”

I could see this thought had already occurred to Seamus. Instead of answering, he put his hand on my shoulder and turned me in the direction of the staircase. “We should finish this conversation later. When there’s no risk of being overheard.”

“You may not be here later,” I said grimly.

His hand closed tight, stopping me in my tracks. “I meant what I said, Artemus. If you hinder this investigation in any way—”

“Go. To. Hell.” I glared back at him. “My aunt has the right to know she’s got an undercover cop on staff—not to mention the fact that said cop is conducting what I’m pretty sure are totally illegal searches.”

It was impossible to tell in the weird light thrown by my flashlight, but I thought his face darkened. I know it tightened into angry sharps and planes. “I confided in you so that you could pro—”

“You confided in me because I caught you red-handed,” I burst in. “So don’t try to pretend you were doing me any favors.”

“I am doing you a favor,” he snapped. “And your aunt as well. If I can find that money, if most of it is still intact, we might be able to come up with a believable story for its safe return that exculpates your aunt.”

I stopped glowering. “What about the rest of it? The fact that you think Aunt H. murdered Ogden or whatever the hell his real name was.”

He said bleakly, “I don’t know if she killed him or not. I’m not a homicide cop. That case is officially closed. Who am I to second-guess the findings? I don’t have any concrete reason to request the case be reopened.”

As brief as our acquaintanceship was, I knew instinctively that halfhearted attitude was not typical for Cassidy.

“Why would you do that?” I asked slowly, suspiciously.

“I just told you.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re up to something. Again.”

A flicker of some emotion crossed his face. Irritation? Offense? Surely not hurt?

Seamus released a long, weary breath. “Because… Because you would never forgive me otherwise.”

Now that, I did not expect. I was too confused to find it even remotely reassuring.

“You’re right. But why would you care? How do my feelings come into it? You don’t even know me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Seamus said. “I know pretty much everything there is to know about you.”