Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dash called from the hospital parking lot.
I was in the back room of the shop, sitting on the little wooden stool with a cold cup of tea I hadn’t touched, still wearing the yellow dress that had felt like such a good idea this morning.
Through the door, I could hear the shop going on without me—the register, somebody laughing at something, the familiar hiss of the espresso machine that didn’t know or care that a man had just died in his own kitchen while the rain came down outside his river windows.
“He’s gone,” Dash said.
I’d known. I’d known before the ambulance made it down the block that he wasn’t going to make it. Hearing it out loud was something different though. It settled into my chest and stayed there.
Dash’s voice was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. “There was nothing to be done for him. He’d taken a bunch of prescription pills right before we’d gotten there and chased it with the whiskey. He’d planned to go out his own way.”
“We still don’t know who killed Henry,” I said. “Unless James was lying.”
“I don’t think he was,” Dash said. “He had nothing to lose with a confession. But he did tell us where to go next. Let’s see how Jackie responds to the police showing up at her door.’
“Do you want me to go with you?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to.
“Yeah, you’ve already established a relationship with her,” he said. “A familiar face puts people at ease.”
“I thought you didn’t want her at ease.”
I could almost hear his smile through the line. “And now you’ve learned about good cop, bad cop. I’m leaving the hospital now. I’ll be by to get you in about forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour if the weather has messed up traffic.”
“Put your sirens on,” I said.
I put the phone down and sat there another minute. Then I got up, smoothed my dress, and went back to work, because there wasn’t anything else to do with forty-five minutes and an uncomfortable feeling in my chest.
The rain was still coming down when Dash pulled up to the back of the shop.
He’d changed out of his uniform shirt into a dry one somewhere between the hospital and here, and I knew he always kept extra clothes in his unit.
He’d told me the chances of getting some kind of fluid on a uniform at any given point of the day were high for cops.
I knew this to be true. My interaction with law enforcement was still fairly limited, and I’d witnessed a deputy have the whole back end of a burrito explode down his shirt.
Added to Galloway’s run-in with the septic tank, bringing extra clothes to work seemed like a good idea.
I handed him a fresh cup of coffee in a to-go cup as soon as I climbed into the passenger seat, and put my own in the cup holder while I buckled up.
“You’re drinking coffee?” he asked, eyeing my cup.
“It’s one of those days,” I said.
“You eat anything?” he asked.
“Genevieve made me a sandwich.”
“Good.” He pulled out onto the street and I watched the shop disappear in the side mirror. The island was gray and dripping, the live oaks heavy with it, and the streets were mostly quiet.
“Why do you think he told us to talk to Jackie?” I asked. “Do you think she killed Henry?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m willing to bet she left out more than just the affair the first time she talked to you.”
Dash turned onto Cypress Point and pulled into the driveway of Jackie’s white coastal contemporary.
“Let me do most of the talking at first,” he said. “I want to make an impression.”
“And then I can be good cop?”
“Just go with the flow.”
Jackie had the door open before we reached the top of the stairs.
“Miserable out here,” she said. “Y’all come in out of the wet.”
She was in high-waisted leggings and a sleeveless muscle shirt, and I could only assume she was just getting back from Pilates again.
She did have a great body for a woman her age. I was going to have to check it out. I wouldn’t be able to live off good genetics for too many more years.
And then I remembered what James said about Jackie’s other talents, and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to look her in the eyes again.
“I can only assume, Mabel, that this handsome fella is the new sheriff,” she said. Her voice had changed into a low purr, and my eyes widened at the sudden transformation. She was standing different, a hand on her hip, and suddenly I could see every curve she had. And she had plenty.
“Sheriff Beckett,” Dash said, not giving her his first name. “We need to ask you some follow-up questions regarding the Henry Wainwright murder.”
She looked at him, taking his measure, and what she saw must have changed her mind on how she should approach him, because all of a sudden she was all business.
“Come on in and have a seat in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ve got groceries to put away. You can ask your questions while I do it.”
I raised my brows at Dash once she turned away, and we followed behind her.
“James killed himself today,” Dash said, taking a seat at the kitchen island on a stool. I took the one next to him.
I was as shocked as she was as to how he delivered the news.
“What?” she asked, leaning against the counter. “That’s terrible. I don’t understand.”
“Guilt weighs heavier on some people than others,” Dash said.
“Are you saying James is the one who killed Henry?”
“James told us an interesting story during his last minutes on earth,” he said, not answering her question. “Why don’t you tell us your version?”
“I’m guessing James told you he and I were involved,” she said, deciding to take one of the barstools instead of putting away her groceries.
“He did,” Dash said.
Her spine straightened and he chin tilted defiantly. “So sue me. I had sex with a married man. It’s not like he left his wife for me.”
The way she said it made me think she expected him to do exactly that.
“He bought you this house?” Dash asked.
“Does every rich man with a sidepiece do that?”
He leaned forward so his forearms rested on the island. “You never wondered how he spent that kind of money and his wife didn’t find out?”
“His personal finances weren’t really my business.”
“But they weren’t his personal finances, were they?”
“I know he and Henry started that foundation and that it brought in millions of dollars every year. I saw a statement once on James’s desk. It was their foundation. They could spend the money however they wanted.”
“Mmm,” Dash said. “That’s not really how nonprofits work if you want to stay out of jail.”
“Like I said, not my problem. I was just the benefactor.”
“Tell me about the blackmail.”
Her brow arched in surprise. “I guess James really was chatty.”
“A man who overdoses on pills doesn’t really have much to lose while he’s waiting to die.”
The lines on her face hardened, and for the first time I could see the age that Botox and fillers couldn’t hide.
“All I know is that the last few months before Henry died James was becoming more and more stressed and tense,” she said.
“He was always a big spender, but I never thought much of it because he obviously had it to spend. We took weekend trips together when we could both get away, and I would do volunteer work with the foundation too so I could take trips with him. He’d always add extra days to the end of those trips so we could go somewhere fun and exotic.
Then I started to worry about his health.
His color wasn’t good and he had shortness of breath every once in a while.
I thought he was going to have a stroke or a heart attack.
That was the first time I really thought about the consequences of what we were doing.
You’re a cop. No one wants to explain to a wife that her husband died in another woman’s bed. I was going to end things.”
The more I listened to Jackie talk, the less I liked her.
I don’t care what kind of magical Mata Hari she was.
She’d been having an affair with the man for almost three years, had taken extravagant gifts and vacations from him, and then was going to dump him once she’d wrung everything out of him, including his health.
Some people might call that judgmental, but this was the South. Judgment of others was a calling, to be worn like a badge of honor.
“I knew he was hiding something from me, so I confronted him. That’s when he showed me the note and the pictures.”
“There were pictures?” Dash asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Some good ones too. I could have had any man on the planet at twenty-five. You don’t realize what you once had until you turn fifty.”
Every man except Henry, I thought to myself.
“What did the note say?”
“It was like the ones in the movies,” she said, shrugging.
“It was mailed to the office and put on his desk like all of his mail. Inside was a note written on regular typing paper and pictures. And someone had written instructions along with an address, time and date. And then there was an amount at the bottom. Five thousand in cash or the pictures would be sent to his wife.”
“Do you remember the address?”
“It was in Charleston somewhere,” she said. “All of them were.”
“How many did he get like that?”
“By the time he told me about it there’d been five different demands for money. Each one increasing by five thousand dollars, and each one had a different address for delivery.”
“What kinds of places were the deliveries?”
“Taped to the underside of a bench. In a flower urn on a headstone at the cemetery. Under a manhole cover. Places like that. It was very I spy.”
“Do you know if all the drop spots were near each other?”
“I don’t remember,” she said. “It’s been twenty-five years.”
“How long was he blackmailed?” Dash asked.
“Just a few months is what he told me,” she answered. “I remember the last one came the day before Henry died.”
“No idea who the blackmailer was?”
“No, but I told him he probably wasn’t the only one.”
“That’s interesting,” Dash said. “Why’d you tell him that?”