Laughing Heirs (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Read online

  “I may have heard him splashing,” Macy said, sniffing, wiping at her nose with the crisp-looking handkerchief.

  That got people’s attention.

  “I was across the street for our appointment, but nobody answered when I rang the bell. I was standing by my car with my cell phone, trying to call him—I had just talked to him not twenty minutes before to make sure he was going to be home—when I heard splashing, or thought I did. Jared’s back yard is just across the street, you know. I thought, wow, it’s February. Who would be using the pool? I didn’t think about the hot tub.”

  “You went on to your next appointment?” I said.

  “What could I do? Robert didn’t answer his phone.”

  “I guess he was conscious enough to be trying to pull himself out. Was the splashing pretty violent?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t really focus on it. I mean, I hardly noticed it at the time. It was only later…” Her bout of loquaciousness seemed to be at an end. A muscle in Jared’s jaw was jumping; Nathan only looked bored.

  Jordan and Hernandez intercepted me on the way to my car, one falling into step on either side of me. I looked at one, then the other, but I didn’t break stride. “Gentlemen,” I said in acknowledgment.

  “You don’t mind sticking your nose in, do you?” Hernandez said.

  Jordan said, “What’s your interest in the case really?”

  “I’m still working on it. Whitney may hire me to represent her interest in the estate.”

  “And on the strength of that you’re at the funeral pumping people for information?” Hernandez sounded incredulous.

  “The police presence piqued my interest. Besides, business is slow.”

  Jordan said, “You’ve been on your own, what, three, four months now?”

  “Two months. What did you think about Macy’s story? Had you heard it before?”

  “Unh unh,” Hernandez said. “We had no way to prime the pump. Nothing like a nosy female making like a verbal fire hydrant to get people to talk.”

  “That sounds like a sex-based put-down,” I said.

  “It’s a sex-based compliment. You’ve got a knack for getting people talking.”

  “My knack doesn’t seem to be working on you two,” I said.

  “We really don’t have anything to share.”

  “Which isn’t the same as saying you don’t have anything.”

  Jordan’s mouth twitched. “I’m afraid it’s close enough. You’ll let us know if you stumble across something interesting, won’t you?”

  “Of course. I like doing volunteer work for the police and getting nothing in return.”

  It was not quite three, and I had nowhere in particular to be until five o’clock. I decided to run some errands. I couldn’t buy ice cream or anything else from the freezer aisle, but it was cold enough that any other groceries would keep in the car as well as in a refrigerator. I turned on my car, turned up the fan on the heater a notch even though the air was still blowing cold, and cranked 96.1 The Planet, where Bob Seger was singing “Hollywood Nights.” I rubbed my arms, rubbed my thighs, and sang, “Higher and higher and higher they climbed.” Singing is not my forte, and no one would have recognized the song had Bob himself not been singing backup. In my defense, “Hollywood Nights” has some pretty challenging vocals, at least in my humble opinion.

  Jordan and Hernandez drove out of the parking lot, Hernandez tapping his horn as they went by me. Brian and Whitney got into his rather battered-looking black Corvette and drove off, closely followed by Macy Buck in a boxy Honda Element. None of them noticed me.

  Jared Walsh walked by with a white-haired man on either side of him, one short and curly haired, the other tall and nearly bald. They seemed to be telling him something, and Jared flinched visibly when the short man made a sudden movement. I turned off my radio. Bob Seger had given way to John Cougar Mellencamp singing his little ditty about Jack and Diane, which didn’t measure up to getting some lowdown on Jared. I lowered my car window about an inch to facilitate the eavesdropping.

  “With you, it’s always wait,” the tall man said. “We’re not going to wait much longer.”

  “Before I had no real prospect of paying,” Jared said. “Now I’ve got prospects.”

  “Prospects don’t pay the bills,” the short man said.

  “And we’re not sure you even have prospects. What you’ve given us is a list of accounts and account numbers, but those accounts are virtually empty.”

  “You can’t know that.” Jared’s voice.

  “Virtually empty as near as we can tell,” the short man said as the three of them passed out of my field of vision. “At the moment we’re having to rely on some unofficial sources.”

  “Listen.” Jared, sounding edgy. “There are assets. We just haven’t found them all yet. You’ve got to trust me.”

  “Oh we trust you all right. That won’t keep us from doing a little checking as we’re able.”

  A group of women went by. They were chatting about flowers, which perhaps wasn’t unusual for a funeral, but was certainly less interesting than a conversation about missing assets. I opened my door and stood to look out over the car roofs, but Jared and his companions were nowhere in sight.

  Chapter 4

  Carytown is a trendy shopping area in midtown Richmond a bit south of the Museum District. A lot of the buildings date from the 1930s, possibly including the one that housed Carytown Joe. It had a narrow storefront with plate-glass windows and a recessed door.

  In late afternoon on a weekday the parking wasn’t bad, and I managed to find a place on the curb only a few cars down from the entrance. The store was dark when I reached it, though, and the door, when I tried it, was locked. I cupped my hands and peered through the door glass. It was getting colder again, and my breath fogged the glass. I rubbed it with the sleeve of my jacket and held my breath while I looked again. The floor was a checkerboard of black and white tiles, and the stamped-tin ceiling was high overhead. Benches lined both walls with round tables in front of them and chairs across from them. Down the middle of the room was another row of tables with the chairs upside down on top of them. The display counter was at the far end. Just inside the door were a small wrought-iron table and two matching chairs, probably something they set out on the sidewalk to one side of the door when they opened each morning.

  I looked at my watch. I had already been at the Kroger at the other end of Carytown and bought groceries enough to fill the back seat, but it was still just 4:37, more than twenty minutes early for my appointment. I was going to look like I was desperate for work, which I pretty much was. Certainly I didn’t have anything else to do this afternoon that had the prospect of bringing in money, even as little prospect as this job had. Hugging myself for warmth, I stepped back. The lights were on in the wine shop on the corner just two doors down. I walked down to it, hoping for someplace warm to pass the time.

  The clerk at the register greeted me with a friendly smile, asked if I had ever been in before, and invited me to browse. I did. I knew the names of a few grape varietals. I generally liked pinot noir and merlot, found cabernet a bit more challenging. The distinction I could make most readily, though, was price. Here I found bottles priced as high as thirty dollars—a pretentious little vintage, I thought, sliding one back into the rack—and as low as seventeen, still a bit pretentious for my budget, which was oriented more to the six-dollar bottles available at Food Lion. There was a wine bar at the back of the shop with a row of fancy stools in front of it and a smiling woman behind it.

  “Can I offer you a taste of something?”

  I thought she just had, but I returned her smile and shook my head. There were cards, T-shirts, coasters, and other knickknacks labeled with aphorisms like “Life is too short to drink bad wine.” I passed them by and left the shop, exchanging more smiles and nods with the underworked sales staff.

  It was still not yet five o’clock, so I went around the corner to the alley. As I turned in
to it, I heard a woman’s voice say, “But they cost money, Brian. I just don’t see the point.”

  I stopped walking. A man was saying something in response, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “What do you think she’s going to do for me?” the woman said, emphasis on the what.

  I thought I might be listening to Brian and Whitney, so I listened harder, hoping to hear what helpful thing I might do for Whitney, but Brian’s response was too soft and in too low a register for me to make out the words. I retreated and walked back to the corner. It was 4:59. I waited five minutes, then walked down the sidewalk to Carytown Joe and pulled at the handle.

  The door opened—though, except for a light at the counter at the far end, the shop was still dark. The chairs had been removed from the table closest to the display counter and were standing right-side-up around it. As I walked through the restaurant, Whitney, carrying a tray of mugs, pushed through a swinging door behind the counter and placed the tray on a long, white-wood table than ran along the back wall.

  “How about a decaf latte?” she said, turning toward me. “Brian and I are having one.”

  “Sure. I guess you drink a lot of coffee, working at a place like this?”

  She packed coffee into a little filter basket and twisted it on. “Not as much as you’d think.” She touched a button. “Usually just a cup in the morning. Have a seat.”

  “I’m sorry about your uncle. It was a good service.”

  “Thank you. I’ll miss him.”

  As the espresso machine began to sputter, Brian pushed through the door with another tray of mugs, which he set on top of the one she had brought in. We said hello.

  “How long have you had this place?” I asked.

  “Two years last October,” Whitney said. “Almost two-and-a-half now.”

  “You own it?”

  Whitney glanced at Brian. “Us, the bank, and a few silent partners—friends of ours that put in a few thousand dollars apiece.”

  “The two of you are partners?”

  Brian said, “Actually, I’m one of the ones who put in a few thousand dollars, which was all I could raise at the time. Whitney’s the one on the bank loan.” He turned one of the chairs around to sit in it backwards, one forearm resting on the chair back.

  “Me and Uncle Robert,” Whitney said. “Just me now, I guess, unless the estate is still on the hook as cosigner. I’m going to make mine vanilla. How about you?”

  “Vanilla’s fine. My guess is the estate’s still liable, but it depends on what the note says. I ought to have a look at it for you.”

  “Does it matter?” Brian asked.

  “Probably not, but the worst possibility is that Uncle Robert’s death constitutes a default on the note, making the whole thing immediately due and payable. You shouldn’t worry, but on the other hand…”

  “You should look at it,” Whitney said.

  “To be safe.”

  She began frothing the milk. It wasn’t long before the three of us were sitting around the table, each with a mug in front of us. Coffee, like wine, was a recently acquired taste for me, but I found the latte sweet and good.

  “I could get used to this,” I said.

  “We open every morning at seven,” Whitney said.

  “That seems late for a coffee house.”

  “When we started out, we opened at six, but we never had many customers in that first hour.”

  Brian said, “Now, we’ve usually got a few waiting at the door when we open up.”

  It wasn’t enough to tell me the place was profitable, but it was early in the relationship to press for details about Whitney’s finances. “Brian suggested you had some concerns about how your uncle’s estate was being handled?” I said.

  “Not necessarily. I understand the will leaves everything to us three cousins in equal shares—Jared, Nathan, and me.”

  “Yes, it’s on file at the courthouse. I’ve seen it.”

  “Did you find out anything about the lawyer handling probate?” Brian said. It wasn’t cold in the coffee shop, and he didn’t seem agitated, but his right knee was pumping.

  I shook my head. “Haven’t had the chance.”

  Whitney said, “That’s the one thing about all this that makes me uneasy. That lawyer keeps calling me, and he gives me the creeps.”

  “A creepy lawyer,” I said. “That’s one for the books.”

  They looked at me questioningly.

  “Sorry. Little joke.”

  “That lawyer’s not the only thing that makes you uneasy,” Brian said. “They’re planning to drill the safe tomorrow, and it’s just by accident that we know anything about it.”

  “We heard Nathan and Macy before the funeral,” Whitney said. “You met Macy, didn’t you? We were standing just around the corner from them, and they didn’t know we were there.”

  “What safe are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Uncle Robert has a safe in his walk-in closet.”

  Brian said to Whitney, “If they get in that safe and you’re not there, everything in it’s going to disappear.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “We have every reason to suspect it.”

  “When is this supposed to take place?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” Brian said. “Sometime tomorrow.”

  “That lawyer seems to think I know the combination. That’s one of the things he’s been calling me about. I guess they’ve given up on finding it written down anywhere.”

  “Is the lawyer going to be there?”

  “We don’t know that either.”

  Paul called to ask if I’d like him to join me for dinner.

  “At my place?” I said. “Sure, though I’m not quite there yet. Ten minutes.”

  “What have you got for us?”

  “That may be a problem. I have the makings of a salad, but that’s about it.”

  I thought he might offer to bring takeout, but he said, “A salad’s good.”

  “I can mix in a little turkey I got from Kroger’s deli counter, so there is some protein.”

  “Protein’s good.”

  “Listen. Have you talked to Mike yet? I’d really like to get the lowdown on this Rupert Propst, if he knows him.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  I spelled Propst for him.

  “I’ll give him a call. Do you think you and Deacon will be going for a walk after dinner?”

  “At some point.”

  “I thought I might go with you.”

  Usually, he tried to time his arrival so as to miss any aerobic activity on my part, and, failing that, he watched TV—or me, depending on what I was wearing—until it was over. “Are you having some kind of midlife crisis?” I asked.

  “I’m only thirty-two.”

  “So you say, but it occurs to me I’ve never seen a birth certificate.”

  “That’s because I’m a man of mystery.”

  “Ah. So that’s the attraction.”

  “That and my easy charm.”

  “I was forgetting your easy charm.”

  “Better keep it in mind. It’s in the car and headed your way.”

  When I got home, I changed clothes and walked across the street to retrieve my dog from Dr. McDermott. I patted Deeks and rubbed his sides while his hindquarters wagged and he turned his head this way and that in a mostly unsuccessful effort to lick my hands. All the licking and the wagging wasn’t enough to express his joy in the occasion, and he ran figure-eights around me as I walked back across the street, hugging myself against the cold.

  We were wrestling in the living room—probably not the smartest thing to do with a dog that might grow to weigh a hundred pounds—when the doorbell rang. Deeks broke away to charge the door, dancing and turning until I got there. As soon as the door opened, Deeks pushed his head between Paul’s knees, his tail wagging.

  “Hey, Deacon. Hey, buddy,” Paul said as he administered the expected ear-scratching.

  I was
eying Paul closely. “You have lost weight,” I said.

  He looked up at me, still bent to work on Deeks. “I’m glad it shows. I look at myself in the mirror, and I can’t really tell.”

  “When did you say all this started?”

  He gave Deeks a final pat and straightened. “You make it sound like I’ve been having an affair.” He gave me a peck on the cheek, the sort of kiss that might have been administered to the forehead if I hadn’t been five inches taller than his five-six.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t mean to cross-examine you. I haven’t started on the salads yet, but it won’t take a minute.”

  Paul watched as I made them. I sprinkled a little raspberry vinaigrette on mine and held the bottle over his, but he shook his head.

  “I have some merlot open in the fridge. I usually have half a mug with my salad. Or you’ve still got a beer left from that six-pack of Dos Equis you brought a couple, three weeks ago.”

  “The Dos Equis sounds good.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I said as we carried our bowls to the table.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought I was going to have to tie you down and engage in some enhanced interrogation, find out who you are and what you’ve done with my boyfriend.”

  “As it happens, I did emerge from an alien pod just this morning.”

  “I don’t think enhanced interrogation would be as much fun for you as you seem to think.” I got the wine and Paul’s beer out of the refrigerator and carried them to the table. When I sat, Deeks, who had been following me from refrigerator to table, sat too and fixed his eyes on the edge of my salad bowl.

  “He looks like he’s expecting something,” Paul said.

  “He shouldn’t be. I’ve never fed him from the table.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  “Not in this case. I go through the door first, I eat first—Deeks has to know I’m the alpha dog.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay what?” I said, noting the hint of a smile.