Софи Келли: A Night's Tail

Melanie was in her office. She put in a lot of long days. Once again, the desk clerk directed me across the lobby and down the hall. The office door was wide open as before, and I knocked on the jamb. She looked up in surprise. “Hi, Kathleen,” she said. “Did we have a meeting I forgot about?”

“No,” I said. I hesitated. My mother had an expression; in for a penny, in for a pound. She’d learned it from a British wardrobe mistress and could quote the words using the woman’s precise British accent. I could hear her voice in my head now.

I gestured at the woven blanket still tossed over the arm of the leather chair. “I know you went to Saint Edwin University. You and Lewis Wallace were friends in college.”

The color drained from Melanie’s face. She swallowed. “No, we weren’t.”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at her.

Her mouth worked. Her eyes slipped away from mine. “I should have guessed you’d come to see me. Detective Gordon was here earlier today.” She cleared her throat. “Lew and I weren’t friends. I was his tutor for a couple of his classes. He was failing pretty much everything, mostly because he was lazy and entitled. On the field he was fast and strong, the proverbial immovable object. He didn’t see the point in studying. He thought the rule that he had to maintain a minimum grade point average was stupid. He knew how much the team needed him. He thought it was going to be his ticket to the big time. Turned out he was wrong.”

“He was accused of cheating.”

Melanie stared at me for a moment. “Yes, but he was cleared of all that. Like I said, Lew was mostly lazy—at least off of the football field.”

“How did you end up working together?” I asked.

“That was just chance. I didn’t stay at the job very long. I could see that the company was only headed down.”

“He wanted your support for the deal he was pitching to the town.” It was a guess but a good one it turns out.

She smoothed her hair with one hand. “I told him I couldn’t get involved because I worked for the hotel and they had a policy about that sort of thing.”

“Is that true?”

Melanie shook her head. “Not specifically, no. I didn’t want to get involved because I wasn’t sure the deal was going to work. I know what kind of a student he was and that his first business failed.”

“You didn’t think that he’d changed,” I said.

“I just wasn’t convinced he had what it took to run a successful business.” She looked away again.

“You admitted you knew Wallace. Why wouldn’t you say the two of you went to college together?”

“Lew asked me to keep that quiet. He said most people didn’t care if you had a business that went under. It happens all the time. But he said that anytime someone found out that he’d been suspected of cheating back in college they got antsy, even though he was cleared. Two other students were expelled; one for using the stolen answers and one for stealing them.” She sighed softly. “I agreed, partly because all those years ago, with that cheating business, I was questioned, too. I had nothing to do with any of it and no one ever said I did, but I want to move up in this company. Maybe I was overreacting, but I know how people think: Where there’s smoke there’s fire. So I said yes.”

I believed her.

She got to her feet. “For what it’s worth, I know it was stupid of me in the first place to keep the fact that Lew and I knew each other in college a secret. And I just made things worse when I didn’t say anything after he was killed.” Her gaze slid away from mine again.

I believed her as far as her explanation went but I also knew she wasn’t telling me everything. That much was clear from the way she had trouble keeping eye contact. But the conversation seemed to have gone as far as it was going to for the moment. I thanked her for talking to me and headed back toward the lobby.

I was almost to the front entrance when I remembered that I had downloaded a photo of Zach Redmond onto my phone because I’d intended to ask Melanie if any of the staff might have seen him the night Lewis Wallace died. Should I go back to her office? Before I could decide I bumped into someone. My phone landed on the floor. “I’m sorry,” the young man said. Then he smiled. “Hey, Ms. Paulson.”

I smiled back. “Hi, Levi.” Levi Ericson worked part-time as a waiter at the St. James. He was a voracious reader, at the library at least once and often twice a week.

Levi bent down and picked up my phone, automatically glancing at the screen as he did. “Hey, is this guy a friend of yours?” he asked.

“Sort of,” I said as he handed my cell back to me.

“That is so great. See, the thing is, he was in here last week wearing a 1987 Guns N’ Roses T-shirt for their Appetite for Destruction European tour. That shirt is a collector’s item worth more than a thousand dollars. I’d kinda like to know where he got it.”

“He was here?” I pointed at my phone screen. “This man? You’re sure?”

Levi nodded. “Oh yeah. Like I said, collectors would spend a lot for that shirt.”

“Do you remember what day it was?” Mentally I crossed my fingers.

“Well, it could only be last Saturday night because that’s the only time I worked last week.”

Last Saturday night. The night of the murder.

I realized Levi was looking at me, a frown knotting between his eyebrows. “He’s a . . . a friend of a friend,” I said. “But I’ll ask about the shirt if I get the chance.”

Levi thanked me and headed for the back of the hotel.

I still had more questions than answers. I did think Melanie had told me the truth. I just didn’t think she’d told me all of it. And now I knew that Zach had been at the hotel the night of the murder. I’d gone from no suspects to possibly two. Now what?

chapter 14

My mind was racing and I knew there was no way I was going to be able to sleep for a while. I couldn’t think of anything I could do with respect to what I’d learned about Zach, or the fact that I still believed Melanie was hiding something, but I could do more digging into Lewis Wallace.

I sat in the middle of my bed and read the last article from the third of Burtis’s magazines. It was a follow-up to the piece they had done on a group of freshman players four years earlier. I didn’t learn anything new from the few paragraphs about Lewis Wallace but there was a photo of twenty-two-year-old Wallace and his Canadian fiancée, Julie Kendall.

Hercules had wandered in at one point and was sprawled out on my shoe.

I remembered that Melanie had mentioned Lewis Wallace might have been married briefly during his CFL playing days. “Would Julie Kendall have any reason to want her ex-husband dead?” I asked the cat.

His whiskers twitched. “Merow,” he said.

Maybe.

I stood up, stretched and headed for the bathroom to brush my teeth. Hercules followed me.

“What is Melanie still hiding?” I asked him around a mouth of toothpaste. “Whatever it is has to be connected to her and Wallace’s college days. Do you think they could have been mixed up in that cheating business somehow?” It seemed like a weak reason to kill someone.

I yawned and the cat did as well. “I don’t know,” I said with a sigh. “Maybe I’m wrong thinking Melanie did anything. Maybe it’s Zach. Maybe it was a Romulan.”

It was a busy Wednesday at the library and I didn’t really have any time to think about Melanie, Zach or rogue Romulans. Ethan and the guys were going to a concert at the high school that evening at the invitation of Ruby.

“I didn’t know you liked band music,” I said to Ethan. I had a feeling the music wasn’t the reason they were going.