Клер Донелли - The Big Kitty

*

She arrived tofind Oliver Barnstable sitting behind her desk like a judge ready to pass sentence. “About time,” he said, ostentatiously looking at his watch.

Sunny put the box in front of him and handed him the key.

Ollie the Barnacle unlocked and flipped open the lid, then gawked. Bouncing around in the cab of the truck had left bills, change, and receipts scattered all over the box. But he could still see the sheaf of hundreds at the top of the pile.

“Er—ah,” he said.

“Maybe I lived in New York too long, but the bank had closed, and that seemed like too much money to leave in an office that’s this open to the street. That’s what I did with the last big cash infusion.” Sunny tried hard to keep her voice calm. “I keep a running tally of income and outgo, so it should be easy enough to check.”

“Um.” Ollie’s round, florid face was even redder than usual. “I can see that’s probably not necessary. It’s just—finding it gone after a rather difficult week—”

Excuses, but not an apology, she thought. You really are a prince among men, Ollie.

The opening door interrupted Barnstable’s self-serving speech. “We’re closed,” he called, without even looking at the visitor.

Sunny turned around to recognize one of the constables she’d seen driving past the office in the last few days.

“Ms. Coolidge, I have to take you to headquarters,” the cop said.

That got Ollie’s attention. He goggled when he saw the uniform. “Oh, now what the hell is this?”

The constable ignored Barnstable, concentrating on Sunny as he spoke. “We have a report that you left the scene of a crime. The sheriff would like to question you.”

“What crime?” Ollie’s question almost came out as a moan.

“Attempted murder,” Sunny told him.

The constable spoke at the same time, but his answer was shorter.

“Murder.”

21

“Murder?” Sunny echoedweakly. Then her voice got louder. “What are you talking about? I’m fine.”

The constable looked as if he’d just taken a big, healthy mouthful of spoiled milk.

He probably wasn’t supposed to give that away, Sunny thought. But who got killed? Then she remembered the boom of the shotgun going off. She’d thought the SUV had gotten damaged. But what if it was the driver? That mental image made her queasy and weak in the knees.

The young man took her by the arm and tried to recover his authority. “You have to accompany me now, ma’am.”

Sunny turned stricken eyes to Ollie Barnstable, who stared at her with something between amazement and fright. “Don’t call my dad!” she begged. “This would just about kill him!”

Sunny clung to the hope that they’d quickly resolve this mess and she’d catch a little rest after the events of the early morning and the late afternoon. But that hope quickly died when she arrived at the police station. The place looked even busier than on her last visit, and it only got more so as people in state police uniforms appeared. Apparently a killing received a full-court press.

Then she got to sit down in an interrogation room with Sheriff Nesbit and a guy in a rumpled suit who turned out to be Lieutenant Wainwright, a state police homicide investigator.

For the next couple of hours, it wasn’t so much good cop/bad cop as tough cop/furious cop.

“What the hell was the big idea of leaving the scene?” Nesbit demanded.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea to stay around where their car stopped,” Sunny replied with complete honesty. “Not when I saw one of them trying to aim a shotgun at me earlier.”

“But why didn’t you stay put after you’d gotten safely away and reported the crime?” Wainwright asked.

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” Sunny admitted. “My boss told me I had to get to the office for an urgent meeting or he’d fire me, so I was freaked out even before I saw the guy with the gun.” She shrugged helplessly, looking at the men. “I need the job.”

She glanced over at Nesbit. “Besides, I had no idea there had been a murder! When I made the other reports, it always just ended up in me wasting—uh, spending—a lot of time on them and then being told that whatever happened wasn’t really a crime.”

The sheriff swelled up so much, Sunny was afraid he was going to explode.

“What other reports?” Wainwright asked as Nesbit sputtered.

“I’ll send for the files,” the sheriff said shortly. He went to the door while Sunny happily outlined for Wainwright some of the things that had happened since she started looking into Ada Spruance’s death.

The state police investigator listened, nodded, and then asked, “Do you own a gun, Ms. Coolidge? Have you ever handled one?”

Sunny stared at him. “No.”

“Do we have your permission to search your car for any weapons?”

Sunny began to wonder if this was the time when she should start talking about a lawyer. But she gave her permission.

“She could have tossed it anywhere between the shortcut and reaching town,” Nesbit growled.

Sunny stared back and forth between the two lawmen. “What’s going on?” she said. “The only gun I know about is the shotgun one of those guys was carrying. I thought I heard it go off when they hit a major bump—”

“It did,” Wainwright told her. “Wrecked the SUV’s transmission and did quite a job on the driver’s right ankle. He was a small-time Portsmouth thug named Eddie Deever.”

“He bled to death?” Sunny asked, horrified.

“The constable dispatched to the scene found two men dead, both with bullet holes in their heads,” Nesbit said. “Probably nine millimeter.”

“And you think I shot them?” Sunny’s voice rose to an indignant squeak.

“They match the descriptions you gave of two men involved in an altercation while you were recently in a known criminal hangout,” Nesbit said.

“I was in O’Dowd’s trying to talk to Gordie Spruance—you remember, the guy who got killed the next day? I think those two staged a fight to distract me while somebody else dumped a handful of pills in my drink!” she replied heatedly.

Both of them glanced at Lieutenant Wainwright and shut up.

“It raises an interesting question,” Wainwright said. “The kill shots were at very close range. Deever’s usual partner in crime, Vernon Galt, was the other person in the car. As you reported, he had a shotgun.”

He looked at Nesbit, gesturing to Sunny. “If they’d been chasing this young woman with the intent of killing her, I don’t think they’d have let her come that close with a weapon.”

The sheriff didn’t have anything to say to that, so Wainwright went on. “The fact that Galt let the shooter get so close suggests that he considered that person to be a friend.”

Wainwright turned back to Sunny. “This young woman already gave a description of the two to the police in another complaint—that doesn’t make her look like a friend.”

Nesbit looked like a kid who’d just seen all his Christmas gifts go up in flames. For one bright moment, he must have thought he could get a quick solution to a murder case and get rid of a political thorn in his side at the same time.

Instead, he obviously faced a lot more work. There was no way for him to pass off these two most recent murders as “accidents,” and there went Elmet County’s so-called spotless crime record.

Wainwright assumed the lead in the interrogation, taking Sunny through the whole chain of events. Along the way, he asked Sunny a number of questions she couldn’t answer—for instance, had she noticed the SUV following her before the attack?

“I don’t know,” Sunny had to admit. “I saw it in the rearview mirror, zooming up, about half a mile after I left home.”