CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

On the stage, Dee was sitting on a golden throne, presumably left over from some student production. Somehow, instead of looking ridiculous in furniture more than a few sizes too large, she made the chair look like it had been custom-made for her.

A parade of numbered storage bins—three columns wide, with each of the lead bins already packed onto a handcart—was lined up at the far end of the stage directly in front of a ramp down to the auditorium floor. All they needed was a drum major—I pictured Emma in a band uniform—to lead them off the stage, and then Dee could follow the bins, carried on her throne by guild minions, like a small-town celebrity waving from a parade float.

Emma came up behind me. "Dee was worried about you. She was planning to kidnap a guild member who's a doctor and force her to make a house call if we didn't hear from you today. Lindsay said you've been working too hard."

"I'm fine. What about you and Dee? You both had a lot to deal with, even before Tremain's murder. How are you holding up?"

"Dee's still irritated that Tremain went and got himself killed before we could prove he was a cheat. Other than that, she's her usual self. The only one who's a wreck is Matt."

"Matt Viera? I saw him earlier, and he seemed fine."

"That man always looks fine," Emma said. "I'm not too old to notice that. But what I meant was he's worried about something. He got a message from one of his colleagues about the murder investigation and took off like a shopper at the front of the line when the doors open at Keepsake Quilting's annual sale."

I'd visited the popular quilt shop in New Hampshire to see some miniature quilts on display last summer. I wasn't there during the annual sale, but even so I'd noticed how purposeful many of the shoppers were, hunting down the perfect fabric. I could imagine how fast they'd have moved if their prey was not only beautiful but also on sale.

The only thing I couldn't quite imagine was Matt moving quickly for anything. Even when he'd raced out to check on Alyse after she'd screamed yesterday, he'd still given the impression of ambling down the hallway. Whatever had inspired him today to move fast enough that Emma noticed his speed, it had to have been serious.

"What did his colleague tell him?"

"Matt didn't say." Emma caught the upper arm of an uncertain-looking woman who seemed vaguely familiar, probably from yesterday's protest, and redirected her and the numbered bin she was carrying to the end of the parade. "He asked me to tell you he's following up on a lead, and he's counting on you to keep your friend from doing anything drastic. Who's your friend?"

Matt was probably referring to the prosecutor, being cryptic so as not to worry Dee or Emma. "He was kidding. No one's going to do anything drastic." At least, I hoped not, but against the backdrop of Matt deigning to sprint, it was worrisome that he felt the need to warn me about Wolfe. I still needed to go talk to the detective, and Wolfe's office was on the way. I ought to stop in and see him first, just to make sure he wasn't, as Matt had said, doing anything drastic.

The only other woman on the stage who was under the age of forty came over to announce, "Dee wants to talk to you."

Emma answered. "Please tell her I'll be right there."

"Not you." The young woman nodded at me. "Her. Although you can come too, if you're not busy. But Dee wants to see your friend now. I'm supposed to be getting drinks. Do you want anything?"

I declined, and Emma thumped her quilted fanny pack to demonstrate she had her own bottle of water inside, so the young woman raced off on her errand.

I approached the throne and dropped to one knee. "All hail, Queen Dee."

"Oh, do get up," Dee said. "You're no use to anyone with a sore knee."

I stood with a grateful smile. The stage floor was harder than it looked.

Emma gestured for one of the assorted minions to bring her a straight-backed chair and place it next to Dee's right arm. She offered it to me before moving to stand on the other side of Dee's throne, where she could lend her support and still keep an eye on the women working all around us.

"Are you here to help us set up?" Dee said.

I sank into my much-less grand seat. "I don't have time right now, but you can sign me up to help next year. I just came by to make sure you're both okay after the events of yesterday."

"We're fine," Dee said. "Why wouldn't we be?"

"Most people are traumatized by death."

"I'm too old to worry about dying," Dee said. "At least when it happens to other people."

"I also wanted to be sure you've made arrangements to talk to a criminal defense lawyer. This could get serious."

Dee glanced at Emma before saying, "We don't need no stinkin' lawyer. Except you, of course. We trust you to take care of us."

"I don't do criminal work."

"Just until after the quilt show," Emma pleaded. "We'll talk to whoever you recommend on Monday, but we don't have time until then."

It was as futile to argue with them as it would have been to argue with a real monarch on a solid-gold throne, back in the days when the king's—or queen's—word was viewed as the word of God.

"I'll do what I can." I wasn't optimistic. Not without a better suspect to offer Wolfe than the landlord. Maybe Lindsay would dig something up about Tremain's other victims. That might not impress Wolfe either, unless I could convince him just how much money was involved. "I was wondering about something. How much would it have cost Tremain to make his fake quilts?"

"It's hard to give a precise cost to make any quilt, original or reproduction," Dee said. "It depends mostly on the quality of the materials. The fabrics and batting alone, not including labor, would run somewhere between $200 and $500 for a bed-sized quilt. Don't you agree, Em?"

Emma nodded, although most of her attention seemed to be on the women adding bins to the back of the parade.

"Women tend to underprice their labor," Dee went on, "so I'd guess Tremain's total price would have been around twice the cost of the materials. So, a total of between four hundred and a thousand dollars per quilt. If you're wondering what Tremain was selling them for, I saw a price of twenty grand on the quilt hanging on the back wall of Tremain's shop."

"That's quite a mark-up." That kind of money presented a serious temptation to mislabel a contemporary quilt as an antique or, giving Tremain the benefit of the doubt, to overlook the clues that a quilt he was purchasing wasn't as old as it appeared. If Tremain was making close to twenty thousand dollars on each of his reproduction quilts, it might be enough money to make even Wolfe pay attention. Now that I had some numbers for him, I should go talk to him.

I stood and said, "I'll leave you to your work while I go do some of my own."

"Don't worry about us," Emma said. "We're back on schedule. All we need now is for everything to go smoothly tomorrow and for you to have a killer speech to open the show with on Friday."

"I'm working on it." The sudden swell of nausea reminded me to take a deep breath. I still had time to finish my speech. If it turned out to be a little dull, well, that might be a nice change of pace in the aftermath of someone in the quilt world taking "knock 'em dead" literally.

 

*   *   *

 

On my way to Wolfe's office, I dialed Lindsay to find out if she'd made any progress obtaining the court documents from Stefan's attorney.

"I've got the pleadings from the court's website, but I'm still working on the rest," Lindsay said. "The complaint is pretty sparse. It only took like two minutes to read the whole thing. Every single word. Commas too."

That was disappointing. I'd hoped Stefan's attorney was among those who liked to throw everything into a complaint, rather than the bare minimum. "Did he include anything about how many reproduction quilts had been made?"

Papers rustled. "They alleged at least six of Stefan's quilts had been copied, but not how many copies might have been made from each one."

Generally, a competently written complaint only claimed the minimum required description of the alleged wrongdoing and the maximum potential damages, so as to leave the judge and jury a great deal of leeway at trial. If the attorney had alleged six quilts were copied, there could well be far more than that.

"It's a start," I said. "Six quilts, each one defrauding the buyer out of ten to twenty thousand dollars, add up to some serious money. Keep digging to see what else you can find out and call me if you get any more details. Maybe ask Stefan's attorney if he has contact information for any of Tremain's victims. They'd be good suspects for the police to interview."

"I'm sort of on it already."

"And you're double-checking everything, right?

"Double and triple. I won't let you down." Lindsay ended the call.

I had to hope she was right. Not so much for my own sake, but for Lindsay's future at the law firm and Dee's and Emma's futures as non-jailbirds. I didn't know which would upset them worse: being separated by the prison system or not being allowed to keep sharp scissors in their cells for working on their quilts.

 

*   *   *

 

Wolfe greeted me from behind a cluttered desk barely large enough to hold a flat-screen monitor, an in-box, and a stack of legal-sized files. "Here to turn your clients in to me with a confession and a plea deal?"

"If you mean Dee and Emma, they're not my clients."

"Are you absolutely sure? Swear on your bar card?" Wolfe said. "It would be great to bounce some ideas off of someone familiar with the case, and who isn't going to steal it out from under me. But not if you're going to turn around and use it in the women's defense."

"I'm not qualified to handle a murder trial." Of course, from what I'd seen, neither was Wolfe.

"Then why do you care so much about who I charge with murder?"

"Dee and Emma are friends. Besides, they didn't kill anyone. Shouldn't we both be concerned about making sure the right person is charged?"

"Whatever." He glanced at the open file on the top of his desk. "It's a pity though. You could get some real mileage out of representing Dee and Emma, even when you lose. The victim's a big, powerful businessman in his prime, and the killers are little old ladies angry about a bunch of blankets. Reporters are going to be all over it."

"Don't you think they might make you look like the villain? You know—the big, bad prosecutor going after helpless little old ladies?" Not that Dee and Emma were helpless, but Wolfe didn't need to know that.

He shrugged. "All publicity is good publicity."

"O. J. Simpson once thought the same thing," I snapped. "It didn't work out so well for him."

"Hey, you know his name, don't you? His prosecutor's name too, I bet," Wolfe said. "Tremain's case won't be the murder of this century, even here in Danger Cove, but it'll get me some name recognition among the people who matter."

Wolfe was wrong, at least if he wanted his name remembered in a positive context. If it was just his reputation at stake, I'd let him make a fool of himself, but I couldn't let him drag Dee and Emma through the mud with him. "What if you could get the same recognition, but as the good guy? Think about photo ops with you surrounded by adoring little old ladies grateful to you for finding the real killer, saving them from being dragged into court in handcuffs."

"That would be pretty good." He stared past me as if picturing himself on the front page of the Cove Chronicles or possibly in a national paper.

"So?" I took a bit of pleasure in interrupting his daydream. "Aren't there some other suspects you could be investigating?"

He shook his head. "It would be a waste of time. Your friends obviously did it. They've been trying to ruin Tremain for weeks, they were right there at the scene of the crime, and they don't have a credible alibi. They'll vouch for each other, but it would be a piece of cake to show the jury that they'd both lie to protect each other. And one of them"—he glanced at the open file on his desk again—"Emma Quinn. She's got a criminal record. Assault and shoplifting. I bet you didn't know that about your clients."

I'd been hit with even more unexpected revelations during negotiation sessions in the past, so I'd long since learned to quash any visible signs of my surprise. That didn't sound like Emma at all. Still, while Wolfe was a jerk, I didn't think he'd make up something like that completely without foundation. He knew that he'd have to share the evidence with defense counsel, and he'd look like even more of an idiot than he was if he couldn't back up his claim.

To cover up any lingering indications of my surprise, I retreated behind legalese. "The prior record won't be admissible at trial." Of course, we both knew that while inadmissible evidence might not sway a jury, it could certainly sway Wolfe's boss, who would make the final decision about whether to prosecute Dee and Emma.

"There are ways around evidence rules," Wolfe said. "I'm more concerned your friends will just up and confess to the murder during interrogation so there won't be a trial. It would look better on my resume if I can take this all the way to a jury verdict than if I just negotiate a plea."

"At least consider who the defense will use as an alternative suspect to raise reasonable doubt. You need to be prepared to prove that whoever the defense implicates isn't a viable suspect. Like Tremain's business partner. She could have been angry about how his actions affected her reputation and her investment in their partnership."

"I've already talked to her, and I'm satisfied she didn't do it."

"What about his competitors?"

"Other antique dealers?" Wolfe said. "Do you know how many of them there are looking for tourist dollars in this county alone? The dealers breed faster than feral cats. Once I start looking into Tremain's competitors, where do I stop? Just the local dealers, or everyone in the state? Perhaps the whole world if he had an Internet business too?"

"You wouldn't have to talk to all of the competition." I didn't need to delay him for weeks, only a few days until Dee and Emma consulted with a criminal attorney. "You could start with the other antique shops here in town. They're the ones most likely to have had both the motive and the opportunity to kill him."

"Look around you." He waved an arm to encompass the tiny perimeter, bare walls, and dreary shabbiness that was his office. "It's not like I have a legion of paralegals at my beck and call like you used to have. Oh, yes, I did some research on you. I always check out my opponents."

"I'm not your opponent." Not as long as he left Dee and Emma alone for the duration of the quilt show.

"I know who you are," he insisted. "You were the darling of the personal-injury crowd for a few years. What happened, anyway? None of the reports on your retirement said anything other than that you were pursuing other opportunities. I can't believe you found anything worth your time in quaint little Danger Cove."

"I found exactly what I was looking for here. A nice, quiet atmosphere where there's no one who needs to be sued, so I can just enjoy the beach and the shops and the cultural events without anticipating everything that could go wrong. I had too much history in Seattle, too many places I knew were the scenes of pain and suffering, too many people I'd irritated by pursuing my clients' cases." That much was true, even if it wasn't the whole truth. Just thinking about it caused nausea to stir in my stomach. I tried to ignore it, preferring not to have to lean forward and put my head between my knees in front of Wolfe, if at all possible. "That's totally beside the point though. If you've seen my track record, you know I'm persistent. I'm not going to stop pestering you until you start thinking about other suspects in Tremain's murder."

"There aren't any." Wolfe thumped his file on Dee and Emma. "It's the pair of old ladies. Coconspirators. The little one got the bigger one to do it. I know it in my bones. Bud Ohlsen will come to the same conclusion eventually. I've already convinced my boss to assign me to the case. It's going to be great experience for my resume."

Only my vast experience with similarly blind opponents kept me from rolling my eyes. I had no patience for an attorney who made the case all about himself and how he could benefit personally. Wolfe seemed to find it a little too easy to forget someone was dead. I hadn't liked Tremain, but he was a human being, and he hadn't deserved to die. Surely someone else wanted justice for him. "Have you talked to Tremain's family about the case?"

Wolfe shuffled the folders on his desk and then opened a much thinner one than Dee's and Emma's. "No close family."

"No one at all? Wife, girlfriend, best friend?"

"Not that anyone can find," Wolfe said. "There's a half sister, but they're estranged and haven't been in touch in years."

That was disappointing. Ironically, a family member putting pressure on the prosecutor's office might have forced Wolfe to slow down. His boss wouldn't have wanted to take the risk that he'd have explain to the family how, by rushing to an arrest, the prosecutor's office had undermined the chances of later convicting the real killer. "Still, the half sister might get involved if there's an inheritance."

"She doesn't want anything to do with the estate. Told the detectives he'd cheated her one time too many when he was alive, and she wasn't going to take the chance he'd found a way to do it again from the grave."

Interesting. Most people waited until they knew whether they might get an inheritance and how much it might be before they rejected it. "Do you know who is inheriting his estate? Whoever it is had a financial incentive to kill him."

He shrugged. "His business partner has a key to his home, and she promised to let me know if she finds a will."

"Is it possible Alyse was more than just his business partner?"

"Not according to her, and I believed her," Wolfe said. "You sure you're not defending Dee and Emma? You're being awfully nosy for someone who's not being paid to get answers."

"I feel a little responsible, as if I precipitated the murder. If I'd handled Tremain differently, I might have been able to convince him to close down his fraudulent activities without anyone getting hurt."

"Shoulda, coulda, woulda," he said. "You can't spend your life looking at what might have happened."

"I suppose not." I still couldn't shake the feeling I owed it to Tremain to help make sure his killer was identified. "What about the quilt? The one found on top of Tremain. Has anyone figured out what it was doing there?"

Wolfe pulled an eight-by-ten picture from a stack of papers on his desk. "It's just a quilt. See for yourself."

Someone had taken a picture of the entire quilt spread out flat instead of the crumpled mess it had been when I'd last seen it. I tried to look past the massive blood stain at one end to focus on the actual quilt design. It was a four-patch and appeared to be from around the same era as Stefan's, but there were distinct differences between them. The most obvious difference was that Tremain's quilt wasn't rectangular, but square, which was somewhat odd for an older quilt.

There were more subtle differences too, things that only an expert would notice. In a lot of antique quilts, either due to fading or the relatively limited number of fabric choices, some prints were more of a medium intensity instead of either emphatically dark or light, as their placement called for. These medium shades tended to blend together in older quilts, visually blurring the lines where the contrasting prints met. This quilt's squares had substantially stronger and more uniform contrast between dark and light than the one in Stefan's shop. Of course, that could just be because the quilt had been exceptionally well preserved, with minimal fading, but given the allegations against Tremain, I suspected the real explanation was that it was a reproduction.

"Well?" Wolfe said. "What's the quilt telling you?"

"Not enough." I'd need a magnifying glass, my reference books, and more time before I could even offer an educated guess about whether it was a real antique. I'd never tried to do an appraisal from a picture before, and I wouldn't ever confirm a quilt's age or value without seeing the quilt in person. Still, a careful inspection of the picture might be enough to spot something to disprove its bona fides. "May I have a copy of this?"

"Sure. You can take that print. I've got several more. It's not going to help your friends though. Using the quilt to cover up Tremain only helps my case against them. Looks like they used it to keep from getting any blood on themselves."

"That only makes sense if the quilt's a fake," I said. "Dee and Emma wouldn't ruin a new quilt, let alone a real antique. And if it is a fake, they were right about Tremain's fraud, and his victims would have stronger motives to kill him. You know, as long as you've got that quilt in custody, you should have someone give you an opinion about its age and value."

"I don't have time for anything that's not directly related to the murder."

"The quilt's value might well be related to the murder," I said. "Do you have any idea what it's worth?"

Wolfe glanced at the duplicate copy of the picture and shrugged. "A few hundred bucks?"

"That's about what it costs to make a new quilt. If it's a museum-quality antique, the purchase price could be fifty or a hundred times as much. I just finished appraising a similar quilt, and I haven't set an exact price yet, but definitely five figures. Something truly extraordinary could hit six figures."

Wolfe picked up the picture gingerly, as if the print itself were museum quality. "Seriously? Six figures for a blanket?"

"Seriously," I said. "For a legitimate and rare antique. If Tremain was passing off copies as antiques, he was defrauding his victims of four to five figures with each transaction. I've seen allegations he copied at least six different real antiques, and there's no limit to how many copies he could have made of each one."

Wolfe's eyes narrowed while he did the math in his head.

While he was still interested, I added, "If I were you, I'd really like to know if the rest of the quilts in his shop are real. You don't want to be ambushed at trial with evidence that Tremain was a crook and dozens of his victims had threatened him. If you know ahead of time, you can prepare for it."

"You angling to get hired as an expert witness?"

"We both know I wouldn't be able to testify in this case since I'm too personally involved. But I could give you a quick heads-up on whether the quilts are fake, at no cost to you, and then you could hire an independent expert for trial."

"What's in it for you?"

"First, it'll satisfy my curiosity." Judging by Wolfe's skeptical expression, he couldn't understand the need to know, purely as a matter of principle, whether Tremain had been committing the fraud he'd been accused of. I needed to make it seem like I had a more ulterior motive in mind. The only one I could think of was that I wanted something in return that would help Dee and Emma's defense attorney. "But beyond that, if I review Tremain's quilts for you, saving you the cost of an expert to make a preliminary review, and it turns out he was a crook, you'll agree to investigate all of Tremain's clients to see if they're viable suspects."

"At this rate, you're going to have me investigating everyone in the state. First his business rivals and now his customers. Anyone else you want added to the list?"

I pretended not to notice the sarcasm. "Not yet."

Wolfe stared at the quilt picture. "Five figures, huh? Times six. Or a multiple of six."

I was pretty sure I had him hooked, and now I knew what bait to use: the total value of the fraudulent quilts. "There were at least that many, possibly a lot more."

"Okay." He picked up the handset for his phone. "I'll arrange for his partner to let us into Monograms. You can check out the merchandise. If you're right that they're fakes, it will confirm your clients' motive for me. If you're wrong, I'll still be able to use it to make them look less sympathetic since they killed him for nothing."

I didn't care what Wolfe thought, as long as he let me view the inventory at Monograms. I could be wrong, but just as I trusted my gut reaction when doing an appraisal, I had to trust my hunch that Tremain's quilts held the answers to his murder.