17
Iwas glad the feds cleared up the phony credit card case. Honest. Of course, Ella and Jim couldn’t have agreed more. Seeing as how they’re both big-time cemetery geeks, the fact that the memorial was being used by the crooks as a drop-off and pickup point didn’t sit well with them. As much of a cemetery fan as I’m not, I can’t say I blamed them. Even though I knew better than anyone that they didn’t all deserve it, there is a certain amount of respect we owe the dead. The memorial as a stash house . . . that went above and beyond, even in my book.
Needless to say, the president was thrilled to have that part of the “commotion” explained. He was convinced that now that the phony cards were taken care of, things would get back to as normal as they can be when you’re dead and running the country as you would have more than a hundred years ago from the inside of a tomb you can’t leave without poofing into nothingness.
Have I mentioned how the life of a PI to the dead can get complicated? In my world, all that made perfect sense.
But none of it helped me much. I mean, not with Marjorie’s case. Sure, I could have backed out gracefully. Thanks to Patankin, who was talking up a storm in the hopes of staying in a nice, cushy federal pen like the one my dad was in rather than the nasty place that was waiting for him back home, the feds had plenty of new information to go on; they’d made huge strides in cracking the international counterfeiting ring.
At the risk of sounding too full of myself, let’s face it: they couldn’t have done it without me. I was something of a heroine and I knew it, and that meant I could throw in the towel without losing face.
But I still didn’t know who killed Marjorie, and truth be told, it was driving me nuts. Besides, Quinn was now on to the fact that I was conducting my own investigation into Marjorie’s murder, and I knew how his devious little brain worked. He was going to try doubly hard to solve the case, just to beat me to the punch.
And there was no way I was going to let that happen.
With that in mind, I closed up the memorial at four that Friday and went over to the administration building. It’s not like I’m a hidebound traditionalist or anything, but on previous cases, I had done some of my best thinking back in my office behind my own desk. It was where I sat now, scribbling the names of my remaining suspects across the top of a legal pad.
Jack. Er . . . excuse me . . . Jonathan Bryce-Conway.
Nick Klinker.
Ted Studebaker.
Gloria Henninger.
As for motives . . .
I added an entry below each of their names.
Jack could have known Marjorie took the credit card, and I guess if you’re a criminal mastermind, that kind of thing pisses you off.
Nick and Ted were in cahoots about something, and if it was something Marjorie didn’t agree with, either one of them (or both) could have had a reason to kill her.
Gloria was crazy, and as I’d learned in the course of my PI career, crazy people don’t really need a motive. Then again, she did have that statue staring little Sunshine in the face every time the pug went outside for a potty break. In Gloria’s book, I bet that was motive enough.
That’s as far as I got when there was a knock on my office door and Ella popped in. I turned the legal pad over on my desk.
“I’m so glad you’re still here,” she said. As is typical of the weather in Cleveland in the fall, it was freezing the day I went out to Chagrin Falls to see Ted Studebaker, and now it was hotter than blazes again. Ella looked a little like a pumpkin in her orange flowing skirt and matching top. She’d been on pins and needles ever since the feds set up the stakeout at the memorial and she hadn’t come down from the adrenaline high. Standing just inside my office door, she fidgeted with the string of earth-colored beads she wore around her neck.
“I didn’t want to go to Jim with this,” she said. “Even though I probably should. And I will. I mean, of course I will. Eventually. But you’ve been such a help when it comes to things like this, Pepper, I wanted to let you know about it first and see what you think. I’m pretty sure Jim won’t mind. After all, he agrees with me that you’re just amazing. He said it himself just this afternoon when we were talking. I couldn’t be more proud of you if you were one of my own girls. I mean, just look at the way you helped out the FBI! Sometimes I think you’re some kind of superhero in disguise.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but it was nice to be appreciated. Whatever Ella was going to ask of me, I was more inclined to do it now than I was when she walked into my office. Anybody else, I would have accused of thinking I was shallow and playing to my weakness. Ella? Not so much. Ella didn’t have a mean-spirited bone in her body.
“What do you need?” I asked.
She scrunched up her face. “I can’t believe it completely slipped my mind, but of course, it did. With everything that’s been going on around here lately, it’s hard to imagine any of us are keeping anything straight. But there I was, sitting in my office just a little bit ago, finishing up the fall schedule of seminars and tours, and that’s when I remembered.”
Just in case my blank expression didn’t say it all, I asked, “Remembered what?”
Ella threw her hands in the air. Her left arm was loaded with beaded bracelets that matched her necklace and they jangled when they clanked together. “The volunteers’ lockers, of course.”
I breathed what I hoped didn’t look like too big a sigh of relief. This was going to be easy and it involved absolutely no effort on my part except to remind her, “The volunteers don’t have lockers anymore.”
“Of course.” Her smile was shaky. “You were in on the meeting when we decided we would no longer provide lockers to the volunteers. Like Jim said then, it’s too much of a liability from a security standpoint, what with having to keep an eye on their personal possessions and then having the volunteers going up and down those steps into the basement. A lot of them aren’t as young as they used to be, you know, and I’d hate to think that someone might slip and fall. And it’s not like the old days when most of our volunteers lived right in the neighborhood and walked to work. Back then, they needed a place to store umbrellas and coats and things. Now most of our volunteers live outside the area, and they drive here to the cemetery. They leave a lot of their stuff in their cars, and their coats, of course, get hung in the main coatroom off the reception area. You remember how Jim thought that was such a good idea. Jennine can see the coatroom, right from her desk, and we don’t have to worry about anything getting misplaced or stolen.”
I nodded, and waited for more, but even before Ella said it, a spark ignited inside my brain. Like that idea was the rocket that propelled me, I rose to my feet. “But Marjorie was a volunteer for a long time. That means—”
“She still had her locker.”
We finished the thought in unison.
A world of possibilities spun through my head, but before I could get them in any sort of order, Ella continued. “She was told not to use it anymore, but you know how Marjorie could be. She thought she was special and she didn’t have to follow the rules like everyone else. I just thought of it a bit ago, the locker I mean, and I went downstairs to check and . . .”
“You found something?” My spirits soared to the ceiling. If the clue I needed to wrap up the case was under my nose all this time, I’d give myself a mental slap—but not until I flaunted my success in front of Quinn. I was moving toward the door even before I realized it and I only stopped when Ella put a hand on my arm.
“I didn’t find anything. Not exactly,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t even look inside the locker. I just came right up here to get you.”
“Because . . . ?”
She led the way. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
I hate basements. They’re mostly damp and stinky, and the dark and the quiet along with the moldy smells freak me out. This is especially true at Garden View, where the basement of the administration building is as old as the cemetery itself and had once (back in the olden days) been used to store bodies in the winter when the gravedigger’s shovels couldn’t penetrate the frozen ground.
Naturally, I wasn’t at all sorry when Jim decided to eliminate the locker room down there. It meant I never
