We pulled up to the grey and blue Victorian known around town as the Morrow Home, and Alex turned off the car but didn’t make a move to get out. I sat there in the passenger seat silently wondering what was holding him up since he seemed to be just staring blankly out the front window. When he didn’t move for a full minute, I figured it was time to say something.
“What’s up? You look a million miles away,” I said, pushing on his bicep to give him a nudge.
“Hang on,” he said curtly, practically brushing me off.
I grudgingly did as he ordered and looked around to see what he could be looking at. He’d seen this neighborhood countless times, so that couldn’t be it, unless he’d had a complete change of heart about the section of town he called Victorian Row and was checking out one of the homes as a potential buyer. I dismissed that idea as quickly as it came into my head, sure that Alex didn’t plan to have us become residents of this section of Sunset Ridge.
Other than homes and their perfectly manicured lawns and landscaping that cost a small fortune, I didn’t see anything else that would have attracted his attention. There wasn’t a soul out walking their dog or tending to their award winning flower gardens on this beautiful May day.
Then I remembered what day it was. Sunday. Checking my phone, I saw it wasn’t yet eleven. That explained why the streets were empty. Everyone still sat in church.
“If you’re wondering where everyone is, I can tell you it’s nothing worth your time. There’s no mystery here.”
Alex nodded but didn’t turn his head to even look at me as he said, “Church. Yeah.”
“Okay,” I mumbled, feeling a bit put off by his behavior.
Then, as if someone had lifted a veil from over him, he smiled and looked over at me. “Ready to go in?”
He moved to get out of the car, but I grabbed a hold of his right arm to stop him. “No way. You don’t get to act all weird like that for the last five minutes and then pretend like none of it ever happened. What was going on with you? Why were you just staring off into space like that?”
“What do you mean? I was just getting a feel for the place,” he said in his most casual tone.
I closed my fist around his sleeve to keep him from bolting since that answer told me nothing. “That’s nonsense, and you know it. You’ve been to this part of town enough that you don’t need to get a feel for anything. So what were you doing?”
A slow smile spread across his lips. “Okay, fine. I was watching a man in the driveway at the Morrow’s house.”
Turning my head, I looked out the window toward the side of the house and saw the man Alex had been watching there washing a silver Mercedes. He had to be at least six feet tall and had arms that looked like they could crush coconuts they were so muscular. The man had a military look to him because of his closely cropped light brown hair and the serious look he wore.
“Who is he?” I asked, even though I doubted Alex knew the answer any more than I did.
“From what I’ve seen him do so far, my only guesses are car wash boy or driver.”
I replayed what the maid had told us yesterday when we came to break the news to Eliza Morrow. She hadn’t mentioned anyone driving her employer, just that she had gone to D.C. for the day.
“Do you think he works for the Morrows?” I asked, suddenly quite protective of Samuel’s home in his absence because of the strange, very muscular man who stood outside it hosing down the car like some guy posing for one of those beefcake calendars.
“I have no idea, but he caught my attention. I wonder if he’s caught anyone else’s,” Alex said with a knowing grin.
Of course he’d caught others’ attention. This was Sunset Ridge, after all.
“Let’s go in and speak to Mrs. Morrow.”
As we walked up the sidewalk to the front door, I snuck one more look at the man still rinsing off the car near the garage. I guessed he couldn’t be more than twenty-five. Maybe twenty-six, at most.
“Should I be worried that my fiancé can’t take her eyes off some guy?” Alex asked.
I snapped my head in his direction and saw him smiling. “No. Don’t be silly. I actually just feel really bothered by the fact that there’s a man in Samuel Morrow’s driveway. Even if it’s completely innocent, it looks bad. I don’t like that.”
“Maybe it’s like you said, completely innocent. I never got the feeling Samuel cared what others thought of him anyway.”
The two of us stepped up onto the porch and I said, “Well, it still bugs me. I don’t like the idea of people thinking this guy has replaced Samuel already. It’s just not right.”
Alex nodded and rang the doorbell. I wanted to be understanding because I understood what it felt like to lose someone close to you, but part of me wanted to tell Eliza Morrow that her decision to let whoever that guy was stand outside and wash the car looked bad.
“I get that you’re upset by him, so let me do the talking in here, okay?” Alex said just as the front door opened.
“Fine. I’m not really feeling like I’m in a talking mood much right now anyway,” I grumbled, leaning back to try to see what that guy was doing now.
The woman we spoke to yesterday appeared in the doorway. “Yes? Can I help you?”
“We’d like to speak to Mrs. Morrow,” Alex said sweetly. “Can you please tell her Officer Alex Montero and his partner Poppy McGuire are here?”
The maid hesitated for a moment before remembering her job was to do exactly as Alex had asked. Opening the door, she stood back as we walked into the gorgeously designed home. A high-ceilinged foyer spacious enough to fit my first apartment from college flowed into a pale blue room to the left, and as we moved into that space, I had to admit of all the Victorians I’d been in around town, the Morrows’ home surpassed them all.
“I’ll let her know you’re here,” the maid said before leaving us alone in what I was calling in my mind the living room.
I slowly turned around to allow myself to take in all the room’s design as Alex sat down on a white high-backed couch trimmed in dark wood. Large bookcases painted in the same pale blue as the rest of the room towered up to the ten foot ceilings and flanked a large portrait of some woman with deep red flowing hair sitting on the edge of a brook. On the opposite wall, a fireplace with a grand wood mantle surround painted white was the focal point around which two burgundy upholstered Queen Anne chairs were arranged along with a dark wood coffee table.
The room showed a deliberate mixture of old and new to accentuate the Victorian architecture of the home while melding more modern furnishings. The result was breathtaking while at the same time cozy. I had to give Eliza credit. She knew how to create a look.
“You look like you’re in love, Poppy,” Alex said with a chuckle as I continued to take in the room’s design. “Should I assume you’re going to want to move to one of these Victorians at some point?”
I rolled my eyes and sat down beside him on the couch. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is too much for someone like me. I can’t even figure out how anyone gets up high enough to dust those top shelves on the bookcase, for God’s sake. That said, I can appreciate a beautiful home, and this is stunning.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I’m not a big fan of these drafty old places. I like my home to be a bit more intimate.”
“I get that, but I can see why someone would want this too. It’s gorgeous. She’s done an incredible job with this room.”
“Thank you, Miss McGuire,” a soft voice said, and I turned around to see Eliza Morrow walking behind us toward one of the black modern chairs situated across from us.
Even more willowy in person, Mrs. Morrow seemed to glide over to her seat, her long navy blue top swaying above her beige pants as she moved, giving her an ethereal look. Wearing her black hair pulled back in a classic chignon, she looked more severe than ever before when I saw her, but something in her dark eyes hinted at her being softer than her look made her seem.
Up close to her for the first time, I quickly realized my judgment that her nose was too big had been correct. Not by much, but enough to make her face look imbalanced. It didn’t mean she was unattractive, by any means, but it did cause her to look off somehow.
“Officer Montero, my maid told me you came by to see me yesterday to break the news of my husband’s death but I wasn’t home. I wanted to thank you for that.”
Alex nodded and said, “Please let me express my condolences for your loss, Mrs. Morrow. Poppy and I knew Samuel and thought the world of him. Just recently, we’d been working with him designing our wedding bands.”
Eliza Morrow smiled warmly in what seemed to be genuine happiness at hearing Alex talk about her late husband. “He had an eye for what was beautiful, to be sure. You gave me the credit for this room, Miss McGuire, but it was all Samuel. This entire house was his favorite design project,” she said, extending a single arm and moving it through the air like a model on a game show displaying that day’s prizes.
“It’s stunning. His choices for this room are perfect. It’s grand and elegant while being welcoming at the same time,” I said.
“Your maid told us you were in D.C. when we came yesterday. Did you drive the silver car I saw outside?” Alex asked.
The question seemed to be a strange one, but we did need to know who that man outside was.
Eliza shook her head and frowned. “No. I don’t drive. I don’t even have a license. I never have. My driver Bruno took me.”
So that’s who he was. I found it odd at first to hear someone in the twenty-first century didn’t drive, but then I thought about how much driving I actually did living in Sunset Ridge. As a small town, it offered almost everything I needed within walking distance. Only the Food King was too far to really walk to.
Perhaps her having a driver to take her places wasn’t strange.
“Is that the man I saw outside as I walked up to the house?” Alex asked, once again in a very measured tone.
Her gaze moved to the hallway behind us and then back to Alex. “Yes. His name is Bruno Carter. He’s been my driver for two years now. He’s a godsend since I don’t drive and I never wanted to bother Samuel with driving me whenever I wanted to go anywhere.”
“What time did you leave yesterday morning?” Alex asked as he jotted down the word GODSEND next to Bruno’s name in his notebook.
When she didn’t immediately answer, he stopped writing and looked up at her. “Is something wrong, Mrs. Morrow?”
She drew her dark eyebrows in toward her nose, making her look almost sinister as she glared at him. “I have a feeling you think I had something to do with my husband’s death, Officer Montero. Well, I can tell you that I had nothing to do with it. Samuel was a very nice man to me, and I cared for him very much. I would never do anything to hurt him.”
Shaking his head, Alex relayed his experience with the spouse being the first person questioned in any case like this. “Mrs. Morrow, I understand what you’re going through at this time. I lost my wife years ago, and I was the first one the police came to. It’s not that the spouse is necessarily the first suspect, but no one knew your husband better than you, so it’s only logical that we start the investigation with you. I hope you can see we mean no disrespect.”
I’d seen Alex cajole witnesses, and I’d seen him charm them into telling him exactly what he needed to know. But never was he a better cop than when he showed someone suffering from the loss of a loved one that he truly understood them. Each time he let that part of him be seen, I couldn’t help but love him even more.
“Thank you, Officer Montero. I appreciate that,” Eliza said quietly, giving him the cue that he could continue with his questions. “Bruno drove me to Georgetown University yesterday. We arrived at ten, and he picked me back up at around three-thirty.”
Her answer surprised me. Why would she go to Georgetown on a Saturday in May?
Alex smiled. “Thank you. Why did you go there, Mrs. Morrow?”
“Why does it matter why I went there? I can have any number of people prove that I was there,” she said angrily.
“It’s just something we cops have to ask. That way we can rule you out completely. So what were you doing there yesterday for nearly six hours?”
“I was at the library.”
Her answer sounded forced and odd, but instead of focusing any more on her, he moved to who else may have wanted to hurt Samuel.
“Do you have any idea who could have wanted to do this to your husband, Mrs. Morrow?” he asked.
She immediately shook her head. “No. Everyone liked Samuel. He was a nice person. He kept to himself, ran his business, and in his spare time, continued to design the interior of this house. There was nothing to dislike about him. I’m sure if you spoke to most people in town you’d find they thought he was a nice person too.”
“Have there been any problems with anyone that you can think of? Anyone ever have an issue with him at the store? Even something small could be important. You’d be surprised at what is usually at the bottom of most crimes like this. Something seemingly insignificant to us might have meant the world to someone else.”
Eliza Morrow thought for a moment and then shook her head again. “I can’t think of anything. He didn’t tell me much about the business, so I can’t be sure about that, but he didn’t mention any problems with anyone recently. In fact, in all the time I knew my husband, I don’t think he ever had an issue with another soul.”
I listened intently to everything she said, curious as to why she only seemed to describe her late husband of twenty-five years as nice. Of all the adjectives used to show how you felt about a person, none were more tepid than nice. A gift you didn’t really want you’d call nice to spare someone’s feelings. Food you disliked but didn’t want to be rude about was nice.
What did it say about their marriage that the best she could muster up for the man she claimed to care for was to call him nice?
“What about life insurance? Can you tell me what kind of policies Samuel had?” Alex asked with a hint of frustration in his voice.
Eliza Morrow likely didn’t pick up on it, but I heard it loud and clear.
“I don’t know, but let me check his study. I know he kept important papers in there,” she said before walking out of the room.
Alex turned around and watched her leave. When she was gone, he whispered, “What’s your initial feeling so far?”
I saw in his dark eyes that he had something in mind already. “I’m not sure. I think I feel bad for Samuel that all his wife can say about him is he was a nice man. I’ve known you for just over a tenth of the time she knew him and nice is the last thing I’d use to describe you.”
He laughed, mistaking my intent with my comment. “Nice. What would you say?”
Tapping him on the arm, I shook my head. “You know what I meant. They were married for a quarter century and all she has to say is he was nice.”
He nodded and shrugged his shoulders. “I guess. Maybe we’re being too hard on her. Everyone mourns differently. You did say she was severe, and you were right. Maybe she’s just a closed off person. It just seems so odd compared to Samuel, who was so gregarious and open.”
The whole time he talked, he kept looking out into the hallway at something, but I didn’t know why. Finally, I asked, “What’s so exciting out there? I’m sure she’ll be back any moment.”
“It’s not her I’m interested in. That driver guy was standing out in the hallway listening the whole time we were talking, but now that’s she’s gone to Samuel’s study, he’s disappeared. I want to talk to him before we leave.”
“Are you thinking there’s something between them?” I asked, surprised since I would have guessed Bruno wouldn’t be Eliza’s type.
She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would be with a manual laborer kind of guy. And she had to be at least twenty years older than him. Not that Eliza wasn’t appealing, in a strident kind of way, but I didn’t fully peg them for a couple or her as a cheating wife.
At least I didn’t want to.
She returned moments later and sat down with a small stack of papers in her hands. “My husband had a policy at Maryland Life for one million on himself.”
Alex jotted the detail down and looked up at her to ask, “And who is the beneficiary?”
Without a hint of emotion, she answered, “I am.”
Alex said nothing but simply stared at her in that way he used to make people he was questioning uncomfortable enough to continue speaking. It worked like a charm on Eliza, who quickly added, “I hope you don’t think that would ever make me want to kill my husband. And just in case it does, I should tell you that my husband made far more than a million dollars a year alive.”
I sensed her claim surprised him as much as it did me. While Morrow’s Jewelers had a wonderful reputation in Sunset Ridge, I couldn’t say that the place was teeming with customers on most days of the week. Then again, jewelry had a tendency to be a high ticket item, so maybe it wasn’t the quantity of customers that helped him make that much.
Whatever Alex thought of her statement, he said nothing. Instead, I saw out of the corner of my eye he wrote a note about finding Samuel and Eliza’s bank accounts.
Taking the opportunity, I asked, “Mrs. Morrow, do you know anything about the day-to-day running of the jewelry store?”
My question seemed to catch her off guard, and she immediately answered, “No. Samuel took care of everything at the store. I haven’t been in there for years.”
She quickly followed up with, “I hope you understand, but this is a very difficult time for me. I have my husband’s funeral to plan, so please excuse me.”
Alex stood up at her cue. “I understand, Mrs. Morrow. I want to speak to your driver anyway, so now seems like the appropriate time to leave. Once we have more information on who did this terrible crime, we’ll be in touch again.”
A look of concern in her eyes made me wonder why she’d be bothered that we wanted to speak to Bruno. She didn’t say anything against the idea, but she was clearly uncomfortable with us talking to him. But she couldn’t very well say no without looking suspicious.
Just before we left, Alex asked, “Oh, Mrs. Morrow. One last question. Did your husband have a cell phone? We didn’t find one at the store.”
With a tiny smile, she said, “No. My husband never thought he needed one.”
We found the driver outside tending to the Mercedes. Crouching down, he sprayed cleaner on the tires just as we walked up to him.
“Hello, Bruno Carter? I’m Officer Alex Montero and this is my partner Poppy McGuire. We’d like to ask you some questions in regard to the investigation into Samuel Morrow’s murder yesterday.”
The man reacted to Alex’s announcement by looking up at us with a blank stare and then standing up. At his full size, he proved my estimation vastly incorrect, towering over Alex by at least four inches and me by nearly a foot. I had to crane my neck to make eye contact with him.
“I don’t know anything about that. I’m just the driver,” he said in a deep voice that had a sort of dopey sound to it.
Alex slowly removed his pad and pen from his shirt pocket and flipped the pages until he got to the notes for the current investigation. Looking up at Bruno, he asked, “Well, what time did you leave to take her to D.C. yesterday?”
“Eight. Do you mind if I continue cleaning these tires? If you leave the stuff on too long, it’s a bear to get off,” Bruno asked as he crouched down to return to his task, not even bothering to wait for Alex’s answer.
My partner turned to give me a look that told me he didn’t appreciate this driver’s lack of respect for the police and then continued with his questions. “Where did you go in D.C. and what time did you arrive there?”
Bruno thought about the answer for a second while he scrubbed the cloth over the Mercedes’ right front tire and then looked up at us. “We got to Georgetown at ten.”
Alex instantly jumped on his claim. “Why did it take so long since that drive should only take just over an hour?”
“There was an accident on the George Washington Parkway that tied us up for nearly forty-five minutes. You can check with the police. It was a huge accident between two tractor trailers and a bus.”
“We will, thank you. Now what did you two do all day since she didn’t get home until after five last night?” Alex asked.
“I don’t pry into my employer’s business, so I have no idea what she did. I dropped her off at the Georgetown University library at ten and picked her up when she called me at around 3:30. And if you’re going to ask what took us so long to get here, it was rush hour and the city was mobbed. Something to do with a presidential motorcade or something like that. You can check it all out.”
While Alex jotted the details down, I asked, “What did you do all day while Mrs. Morrow was busy at Georgetown?”
“I caught a double feature of Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes at the Royale in Penn Quarter. The originals, not the new ones with all the CG. It’s easy to prove. All you have to do is call them and they’ll tell you the movies that were playing.”
Bruno sure was a real film aficionado.
Alex snapped his notebook shut. “But that doesn’t prove you were anywhere near that theater. Thank you, Mr. Carter. If we have any other questions, we know where to find you.”
With that, he turned on his heels and we walked down the driveway to the street. Once we reached the car, I said, “He wasn’t helpful at all, was he?”
Nodding, Alex looked back at the driveway where Bruno remained cleaning his employer’s tires. “He’s certainly big enough to fracture a man’s larynx, wouldn’t you say?”
I didn’t have to think about that answer. Bruno Carter was big enough to fracture the side of a house. One man’s larynx probably wouldn’t even make him break a sweat.
“I’d say so. Are you thinking he and the widow were having an affair?” I asked as we opened our doors to get into the police cruiser.
Alex slid behind the wheel and shut the driver’s side door. Turning to face me, he said, “I don’t know. They’re one of the oddest couples I’ve ever seen if they are. I have a feeling the gossips will know, though, so I think it’s time to go visit them.”
Oh goodie. Another visit with the hens of Sunset Ridge. And I knew exactly where to find them at this time of year.
“Then just point yourself toward the former first lady’s house on the next block. I imagine you should be able to catch them all there discussing the Founders’ Day plans right after church.”
He put the car in gear and began driving toward the Gerards’ house. As we rode there, I couldn’t help but notice the irony of how willing they’d be to discuss a fellow citizen’s private business right after leaving church services.
That would have been lost on them, though.