Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
11.
“I’ve been putting together a murder board,” Leda solemnly informed Grady. They were riding in his low-key cop sedan, wending through a posh and hilly neighborhood alongside Lake Washington called Leschi—dodging cyclists and dog walkers and skateboarders and random joggers wearing earbuds.
His eyes audibly rolled. “A murder board? You don’t say.”
“It’s a whiteboard. It’s only about the size of a poster, but it does the job. I’ve got Tod Sandoval written on one side, and Gilman Murders written on the other. Below that, all the clues for each case.”
“You have basically zero clues for the Gilman case. Except for the one you gave me, and we haven’t even talked to that guy yet.”
“But we’re about to, so I put him up there anyhow.”
Curious, he asked, “What did you put under Tod’s name?”
She adjusted her seat and accidentally kicked her purse. “The basics. The name of the woman who died by the same gun, where the car was found. You know. Stuff like that. I’m just trying to do what you said—take a step back and look at the big picture. See if there’s any place where the two cases overlap, or meet up, or whatever.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Visualizing all the details in one place can be helpful.”
“Thus the concept of a murder board. Don’t cops have them all over the station? I’ve seen probably thirty years’ worth of Law and Order, and I swear—it’s like you work in these little rooms that are just one murder board after another. A veritable labyrinth of murder boards, from wall to wall.”
“You watch too much TV. Seattle isn’t New York City, and nobody has that many murder boards.” He pulled into a driveway in front of an impeccably kept craftsman home, and he pulled the parking brake. “Anyway, we’re here. You know the drill, right? Please, before we knock on this man’s door, I’m begging you: Assure me that you know the drill.”
“Keep my mouth shut and don’t volunteer any information. If I get a flash, I keep it to myself until we make it back to the car.”
“Attagirl.”
“I’m not in middle school. I know how to behave like an adult.”
He opened his door and climbed out. Leda did the same.
Once she was free, and they looked at each other across the top of the car, he said, “I know you’re an adult. But there are so many fiddly police rules, even though we’re doing this on our own time.”
“You don’t want me to jeopardize the case. Either case. Both cases. Whatever.”
“Right. It’s not personal. Let me do the talking, and everything will be fine. Beckmeyer is expecting us.”
They climbed a paver path up to the house, then a short stack of stairs to the front door. A curtain that covered one of the sidelight windows fluttered.
“Detective Merritt.” He greeted the cop with a smile and a handshake. “Good to see you again.”
“This is my associate, Ms. Foley,” said Grady. “I hope you don’t mind her joining us.”
“Not at all,” Beckmeyer said brightly. He was a tall pink fellow with a vivid shock of snow-white hair and the healthy glow of a man who can’t see himself retiring anytime soon, even though he was free to do so a decade ago. Was this the silver fox from the photo she’d briefly glimpsed? Maybe. Probably. He reached for Leda’s hand to shake it, but she hesitated.
“I’m sorry, it’s very nice to meet you—but I’m recovering from a bit of the flu. Best to play it safe.”
“Absolutely, absolutely,” he said with a short, shallow bow. He held the door open wide for them to come inside. “Thank you for your consideration. Please, come on in.”
The house was as lovely inside as outside, with high tray ceilings and antique decor that was tasteful without being dull. All in all, Leda gave the place two thumbs up, and she said so out loud. Richard politely gave all the credit to his wife, who was presently at work.
“She’s on the board of directors at Swedish,” he said, meaning the medical center. “She’s the designer, and the shopper. Always, she’s had such an eye for quality, and for bargains. So many people have antiques and simply don’t know what they’re worth, or how to take care of them—but not Sheila. Once in a while I raise an eyebrow, like the time she shipped that thing home.” He pointed at a lovely art deco buffet with a bar setup on top. “It only cost her a hundred dollars, and she paid three times that to ship it here. Then we had a fellow who specializes in these things appraise it at three times the total, so I was forced to eat my words.”
He led them to a seating area that once might have been a parlor and offered them drinks.
“I never partake during the day,” Leda lied through her teeth.
“And I have to head back to work after this,” Grady said. “But thanks for the offer. We’re here as part of the… let’s say ‘ongoing conversation’ about the Gilman deaths.”
“It’s been ages, and we don’t have any resolution yet.”
“Oh, it hasn’t been that long—and plenty of murders go even longer without being solved,” Leda noted. “Some of them never are, right? A lot of them, probably.”
Grady gave her a look that said he’d happily, swiftly elbow her if he were sitting any closer. “But we do our best with every case, and yes—even after this vast epoch of eighteen months, we’re still working on this one. They don’t always come together neatly.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Richard Beckmeyer poured himself a bit of Scotch and took a swallow. “Nothing much ever went neatly when it came to the Gilmans. Why should their deaths be any different?”
“I have no idea,” Leda answered, and Grady gave her another look. She remembered she had agreed to stay quiet.
He pulled out a little notebook and returned his attention to Beckmeyer. “I know we’ve been over some of this before, but I hope you don’t mind refreshing my memory. How long had you worked at Digital Scaffolding when Chris and Kevin died?”
“I was never really an employee,” Beckmeyer said. “Sheila does a bit of angel investing, here and there. She put up some money and managed the books. They let me hang around and help them with their in-house digital tools, mostly as a courtesy to her, I think.”
Leda opened her mouth to ask what that meant, but a sharp side-eye from Grady stopped her.
“What kind of in-house tools?” he asked.
The older man hesitated, holding up his hands like he was trying to describe the shape of something—and words weren’t quite cutting it. “Digital Scaffolding helped smaller companies interface with larger companies, like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. They had a number of in-house tools that made it easier for these corporate systems to talk to one another, help them sell one another’s products and hire consultants and monitor their money. I did some of the design, fiddling with the user interfaces and making them more”—he hunted for a word, his long fingers still swaying, like he could pluck one from the air—“user-friendly. I was really a consultant, more than anything.”
Leda piped up, “Same here.” And offered him a fist-bump.
He returned it with a grin. “But to answer your question,” he continued, “I’d only been with them a few months—and at the time, I didn’t see myself staying much longer. It was a toxic work environment, let me put it that way. Usually Sheila’s nose is on point, and she sniffs out the creeps before getting involved… but Christopher Gilman was a hell of a salesman. I’d give him that, if nothing else. He was a grade A asshole, but it took people a little time to figure that out.”
Grady nodded and jotted something down. “Yes, I seem to recall that you didn’t like him much.”
“Nobody who worked with him longer than a month liked him. But Kevin was all right. I think the young man honestly wanted to do something good with his father’s money. He saw the same potential that Sheila did, and the two of them got along smashingly. But Christopher… well, he was a bit of a con man.”
“Do you think he was actually involved in any illegal activities, or was he just an asshole?”
Richard held out his hands, palms up as if he were weighing something in each one. “Eh… a little of column A, little of column B. Wait, he’s dead, right? It’s not like he can sue me for slander.”
“Correct.”
“Then I’m confident that the man was a full-blown crook. Couldn’t prove it, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. He was a terrible fellow, with terrible impulses and terrible attitudes. Honestly, his death is the only reason I stayed on as long as I did with that company. I’d been on the verge of quitting when he died. Oh my, wait—that doesn’t make me a suspect, does it? I’m sure I have an alibi.”
Grady grinned. “You were cleared in the original investigation. You were in the hospital with kidney stones when the murders occurred. The hospital confirmed it.”
He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. The kidney stones. I knew there was some reason I couldn’t have done it, but it’s been so long that the details escaped me. I’m definitely not the murderer, so I have no reason to lie to you: Nobody liked the guy. His own wife went out of her way to avoid him. She’s probably someone you should talk to, if you’re revisiting the case.”
“Janette,” Grady said, checking his notes. “Yeah, she’s on our list.”
“She seemed like a cool lady, though it’s hard to say. I only saw her a handful of times, mostly with Kevin. Neither one of them was Christopher’s biggest fan, and I don’t know why she stayed married to him—except, one must assume, it was cheaper than a divorce.”
Leda nodded vigorously. “I would put up with a lot of garbage for a lot of money.” Then she saw the stink-eye Grady was giving her. “Probably.”
Richard smiled and gave her a wink that was intended in a grandfatherly manner, she was pretty sure. He reminded her of Joe Biden, without all the hair-sniffing.
Grady shook his head slowly. “At any rate. Mr. Beckmeyer, off the top of your head—and remember, this is just between us—do you have any thoughts as to who else we ought to speak to?”
Beckmeyer hemmed and hawed, leaning his head left, then right. “I suppose if you forced me to make some guesses, I’d start with Janette. Isn’t the spouse usually the guilty party, in this kind of situation?”
“More often than not, but you don’t think she murdered her son, too—do you?”
“Kevin was her stepson, but now that you mention it… no, I don’t. She and Kevin seemed to get along pretty well; they were more”—he hunted for a descriptor—“from the same planet, if you know what I mean. But no, I don’t think she would’ve hurt him. If anything, I might have suspected the pair of working together, if poor Kevin hadn’t bitten the dust along with his dad.”
“So do you have any second-tier suspicions?” Leda prodded.
“I’d take a look at… well, let’s see. You should probably talk to that fellow, Abbot somebody. He was a low-level consultant, newer to the company. Supposedly he and Christopher had some kind of in-office row, and nobody knew exactly what it was about—but Chris didn’t fire him, and I remember he laughed off any suggestions that he ought to. Then there was Brian Doherty, the old CFO, but wait… he’s dead now, isn’t he? I heard he died of a heart attack or a stroke, a few months back. I saw something about it on Facebook, maybe.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Grady mumbled down to his notebook as he scribbled away. “But I’ll double-check it when I get back to the precinct. Any other names you want to hit me with?”
“I can only think of one more: Kim Cowen. She was Christopher’s secretary, but that really undersells her position. She was his right-hand woman. Nothing happened in that office without her knowing about it. I heard through the grapevine that she was up all night after the funeral, shredding documents in his office.”
“Ooh,” Leda exclaimed softly. “Juicy!”
“Dear, if you want juicy… well. There was a rumor going around that Kim and Kevin had something going on, out of office, if you get my drift.”
Leda said “Ooh!” again with a little more oomph behind it.
Grady looked up like he’d been thinking about rolling his eyes yet again in response to this nonsense, but now he was just thinking. “Good to know, thanks. I’ll see if I can’t confirm or deny it. I don’t remember hearing anything about it at the time.”
“It was only office gossip—you know how that goes. I’m not even sure that it’s worth checking out. It might not mean anything at all. Sheila had access to everything Kim had, too… so you might want to swing back around and talk to my wife.”
“You know what, we’ll be sure to do that. Listen, I want to thank you for your time,” Grady said, folding his notebook away and stuffing it into his pocket. “We all know you didn’t have to sit down with us today, and I appreciate it.”
They exchanged parting pleasantries, and Grady and Richard shook hands before Grady and Leda left.
Back inside the car, still parked on the steep driveway in front of Richard Beckmeyer’s house, Grady asked Leda, “Did you get anything? I didn’t see you throwing up any time-outs; and if you had any psychic flashes, they must’ve been more low-key than the ones I’ve seen so far.”
“Not a thing,” she told him. “But Mr. Beckmeyer seems lovely.”
“Nice guy, yeah. And probably not the murderer, so that’s always a plus.”
“So what happens next?”
“Next?” He put the key in the ignition, started up the car, and left it in park for a few seconds. “Next, I drop you off at the destination of your choosing, and I go back to the precinct to poke around in the files a little more. That Abbot guy…” He brightened and threw the car into gear. “Keyes, that was his name.”
“Abbot Keyes? Sounds like a Victorian orphan.”
Grady chuckled. “I guess, but he was an exceedingly normal-looking guy, maybe five foot eight or nine. Dark hair that didn’t want to lie down right. I remember the whole time I talked to him, I wanted to offer him a comb and a tub of hair gel.”
“Did he have an alibi?”
“Almost everyone had an alibi. Abbot was at a funeral. His brother’s? Half brother’s? Something like that. Pictures put him there. He showed up in the background of the church shots, and he was present for the reception later that night.”
“So not our guy, either.”
Grady looked over his shoulder and checked for traffic, then pulled back into the street. “Yeah, but here’s the thing about alibis: anybody can get one—even someone like Beckmeyer, who seems so… how’d you put it? Lovely. His alibi wasn’t rock-solid, either. The only rock-solid alibi is being dead, in my experience. Not sick, not injured. Dead. All others vary. You can buy one, you can make one up, you can bribe friends into giving you one. You can even fabricate one, if you know what you’re doing. There’s almost no such thing as an airtight one.”
She frowned. “You mean we can’t even check that nice old man off the list?”
“He’s moved down the suspect list, but no. He hasn’t escaped it entirely. Nobody has, until we’ve got a confession or a smoking gun.”
“What if, while somebody was being murdered, the suspect was in the middle of a live TV broadcast? In front of a live crowd?”
“That would be pretty airtight, but there’s always the chance the suspect paid somebody else to do it. Those are always the trickiest cases, when people have enough money to outsource their murder needs.”
“Sounds like the wife would have had enough money to pay a professional.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Christopher Gilman was rich, but our investigation turned up evidence that he was also richly in debt. I don’t know how much of the estate was left when he was gone.”
Leda nodded. “Right, but what if she didn’t care about inheriting all his money and stocks and things? What if she just wanted him gone? Even if it meant she’d be broke? Some people are just that terrible—it doesn’t matter how you get away from them, as long as you get away.”
“I’ve rarely seen it play out that way in real life, except in cases where there’s a lot of abuse. But anything’s possible. I’ll talk to her again, if she’ll agree to see me. I’m not sure where she is right now. She left the country for a while—I believe she had family in England—but I think she’s back in town. I’ll find out for sure—”
Leda interrupted. “Once you get back to the precinct, I know, I know. You’ll go do all the real detective work downtown without me.”
“Yeah, I will. And don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not a real detective.”
She folded her arms and sank back into the seat. “Says you.”
“Says literally everybody, including the city of Seattle, King County, and the great state of Washington. Don’t get all huffy on me. I let you come along for the interview, didn’t I? Even though I said no way, at first.”
“Yes, but come on. You’re as close as I’ve ever gotten to any answers about what happened to Tod. You’ve put actual vengeance on the table for the first time, and I don’t want to just… walk away and let you do it all yourself. This is my murder, too.”
He looked like he really wanted to beat his head on the steering wheel, but traffic was too bad to allow it. “Okay, first. This is not your murder, Leda. This is a murder to which you might possibly have a tangential connection. And second, vengeance? Is that really what you want?”
“Justice, whatever. I deserve justice.”
“I never said you didn’t. I just don’t know how much I can help you find it if I get fired from the force and you go to jail for obstruction of justice.”
“I’m not obstructing it, I’m hunting for it!”
“That’s not how the authorities will see it. What you’re doing looks like meddling, you understand? It looks like interference, to a certain sort of district attorney. I’ve enabled it. I am trying to keep you as far away from trouble as I can, while still keeping you involved. You’re just going to have to get okay with that.”
Her posture in a full-body sulk, she stared out the windshield. “I’d be okay with you letting me go meet the widow.”
He squinched his lips and said, “Hmm.” He straightened them out again. “We both know that I shouldn’t let you, but I probably will—if for no other reason than having another woman present might put her at ease. I remember her being jumpy, but that might have only been the timing of our introduction. I got the impression she didn’t like or trust most men, me included. Maybe she was always high-strung, or maybe Christopher really did a number on her psyche.”
“Why don’t we go see her next? Like, right now? Today?”
“No.”
“Why not? We’ve got momentum, baby!”
“For a variety of reasons.” He tapped them out on the steering wheel. “One, like I said—I have to go look her up. Two, I don’t know if she’ll agree to an informal conversation about her husband’s death with an unknown third party in tow. Three, it’s already, what? Almost three in the afternoon? By the time I can scare up her contact information, call her up, and show up in person, it’ll be a little late in the day for police business.”
“Okay, I get it. Why don’t we go to Detective Whiteside’s place instead? I want to talk to him again, but with you there this time. I never felt like he took me very seriously. He might actually tell you something useful.”
“I know what you mean. He had a bad habit of calling his fellow officers ‘little lady,’ if you know what I’m getting at.”
“Then let’s go to his house. I want to pet his dogs.”
He sighed wearily and sang the same tune as before. “We can’t just show up on his doorstep unannounced. I don’t even know where his doorstep is, exactly. I know you don’t like it, but your investigatory work is finished for today. We’ll circle back around to retired Detective Whiteside and widowed Janette Gilman another day.”
“Which other day?”
“Whichever one is convenient for them, for me, and for you.”
Leda batted her eyelashes slowly, sweetly, ridiculously. “You swear to God you won’t go see them without me?”
“Nope. But I’ll try, and that has to be enough right now. I have other work to do, too. You do realize that I’m an active-duty police officer. I have open cases to work, and you have travelers to shepherd through airports, and visas, and travel vouchers, and rental-car agreements. I already paid your fee the other day, and you volunteered for this particular run. This is now an unpaid side hustle for both of us.”
“Right. You’re absolutely right. I do have clients. I have a job. I earn money.”
He hit a stop sign and took the pause to give her some stink-eye. “Now that you put it that way, I have to wonder.”
“Okay, it’s a fairly new enterprise,” she said with a touch more defensiveness than she liked to hear in her own voice. “My job is both taking care of clients and getting more clients to take care of. You’re right. I have work to do. You can drop me off back at my office, and we can both return to being full-time professional adults.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
She dipped into her best Captain Picard impression, which was terrible—but it got the job done. “Make it so, Number One.”
He banged the back of his head gently on the seat rest. “I will, but not because you told me to. And not because you called me… Number One? What?”
“It’s a Star Trek thing. You must not be a fan.”
“More of a Star Wars guy, to tell you the truth.”
She groaned. “This is never going to work.” She said it half joking, but the words sank into her soul regardless. If they couldn’t agree on which sci-fi memes to deploy in conversation, how could they work together long enough to fix anything? Solve anything? Save anybody? “We’re never going to solve these murders—Tod’s, or the Gilmans’, or anyone else. We are wasting our time, and we’re going to get each other in trouble, I can feel it.”
“Like, feel it feel it?” he asked. But something about the look in her eyes must’ve told him no, and she didn’t answer otherwise. Her frown declared that this wasn’t the time to ask. This was the time to agree. So he agreed, for practically the first time all day. “You’re absolutely right. We haven’t got a chance in hell.”