Diane Davidson - Chopping Spree

“All right, all right!” Heather cried, blushing. “Barry… gave me this chain, a free gift from Barton’s Jewelry! And he gave my dad a case of Glenlivet. My mom asked for a Vuitton bag and he surprised her with it. That’s it , I promise! We didn’t take any other gifts from Barry and I don’t know where he got the stuff. So… are you going to turn me in?”

I exhaled and remembered that someone with evidence about Barry’s headaches had hired a lawyer to offer that evidence in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Would that prosecution have been for receiving gifts without paying gift or income taxes? “What did Barry give Pam Disharoon? Do you know?”

Heather’s eyes widened. “Nobody knows that for sure. But lots of people wanted to.”

“Like?”

“That private eye,” she replied, with a dramatic wave of one hand. No question, this girl had seen too many TV crime shows. “The cops. And some tall blond woman who said she was from the IRS, but I didn’t believe her for a second. She looked a lot like Pam, too. Maybe she was her cousin.”

“ Do you know exactly what Barry gave Pam?” If it was big, I thought, if it was really, really, really big, then maybe someone had been so angry, jealous, or something , that he or she had felt justified in killing Barry Dean.

Heather shrugged and popped a piece of ham into her mouth. “Barry showed me some of the jewelry. That diamond Rolex I told you about, a diamond bracelet, some emerald earrings. I asked him if he was giving pieces to Ellie, too. He said, ‘Of course! Only her taste is so conservative. And anyway, she’s already got lots of jewelry.’”

“What else did Barry give Pam?”

“He… let her have his Audi, I think. His car got wrecked, and the Audi was in the shop, so he ended up with two problem vehicles, plus he didn’t drive his BMW, usually. He only wanted one new car, the Saab, plus the Beemer racing car. Oh, and he gave Pam tickets for luxury trips, although I’m not sure they had a chance to have sexual relations anywhere but in that new car of his. Barry thought he was being followed on the weekends. Looking back, you know, I figured it was that investigator—you know, the one Ellie McNeely hired—who was following Barry.”

“Barry and Pam had sex in the new Saab?” Was that before or after he drove me out for a latte? Blech! Anyway, I wasn’t sure Heather was telling the truth. She was at that age when imagined sexual details made any story more fun. Come to think of it, I suppose that was any age.

“I’m not kidding!” she protested. “Barry told me about it, along with all the juicy details. I should have sued him for sexual harassment. ‘Ever done it in a car, Heather?’ he used to ask me, after lunch. He was laughing. His clothes were all rumpled; he’d gone out with the emerald earrings and come back empty-handed, so I just knew he and Pam had done it. He said, ‘The car is just the best place. You’ve got leather smells and risk, and then every time you drive it, you can think back to what you did in it a few hours ago.’ I mean, is that sexual harassment or what?” She punctuated her question by taking another bite of pizza.

So much for Rufus Investigations being able to tell Ellie definitively what was going on. Whatever had been going on between Pam and Barry, it had not been a “mental affair,” it had been the genuine article. No wonder he’d missed all those dates with Ellie. I felt a pang of sympathy for my old church friend. “Did Barry give Pam anything else?”

Heather folded up the pizza box and pushed it into her trash can. “Double discount coupons at all the stores, part of a promotion campaign to get mall workers to shop at the mall. He also gave her at least one mink jacket that I know of. I haven’t the faintest clue how he got that. Oh, and he sent her lots of flowers. Denver Floral wanted to lease here really bad.” She arched an eyebrow. “Mrs. McNeely probably got really upset when she found out about what he was doing for Pam, huh? What he was doing to Pam. I mean, that he was doing Pam.”

CHAPTER 18

I thanked Heather and left. Two minutes later, I locked myself into a bathroom stall and opened the envelope. I wasn’t tampering with evidence, I reasoned, because Barry had left this for me. Besides, Barry had always been interested in what dishes I’d be serving. Maybe it was just menus.

It was not menus. The manila envelope contained two newspaper clippings, a business-envelope-size piece of opened mail, and three cardboard boxes from the same high-end line of women’s cosmetics.

First I studied the slightly tattered envelope. My name was scrawled above a typed address: Lucas Holden

General Delivery

Prescott, Arizona 86301-9999

The envelope also bore a post-office-stamped pointy finger. I’d always thought those inked pointed forefingers looked vaguely accusatory. The reason given for the return, Addressee Unknown/Return to Sender , included a penned date-of-rejection, from a month before. The return address was the Westside Mall office. Inside I found Lucas Holden’s paycheck, five thousand and change, plus a handwritten note: Lucas, here’s your last check. I sent it to the place you said you were going. Please come back. I know we can work things out.

B. Dean

I put the letter on top of the toilet paper dispenser. So, I figured, that was at least one thing Barry had wanted me to figure out: what had happened to Lucas. Maybe Barry hadn’t been sure; maybe he thought Lucas was on the road, or just plain sulking. But I had found out what had happened to Lucas, hadn’t I? The ex-construction worker had died in a motel. Being extra cautious, though, why would Barry not have called the cops and reported Lucas as a missing person?

I knew the answer as soon as my mind posed the question. Barry’s own words— Nothing clears a mall like a security threat —would surely have applied to a construction manager who’d quit in a huff and then turned up missing. So Barry wanted me, the amateur sleuth, to locate Lucas, because he couldn’t afford any bad publicity. No doubt, the charming Mr. Dean couldn’t have imagined the way I would find Lucas, any more than he would imagine the way I would stumble over his own corpse.

Unfortunately, the other items in the manila envelope were much more baffling. First was a clipped editorial from the February twenty-sixth issue of the Mountain Journal. The title, Does Furman County Really Need Forty More Stores? , was hysterically answered in the first paragraph: No way. But if Barry had been truly interested in my keeping this editorial, why had he clipped it off mid-point? The page’s other side was a pastiche of ads, and included an ‘81 Mercedes At a Great Price , a lot out by the Elk Preserve where the owner would Build to Suit , a sale on delivered topsoil from We Got Dirt, and a heartfelt ad for homemade dog biscuits from Caring for Canines , which implied that if you really loved your pet, you wouldn’t feed him those nasty treats from the grocery store.

Frowning, I reread the editorial that was missing part of its text. It was the standard stuff about the mall addition ruining the environment, encouraging big corporations to usurp state jobs, funneling profits out of state, and, horrors, contributing to the mindless growth of materialism! Maybe it was to avoid this kind of rap that Westside had offered their mall for shopaholics’ meetings. But why would Barry want me to have a slice of Mountain Journal polemic?