Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Holy shit,” Juliette breathed, the glass separating her from the interrogation room fogging up as she leaned in so close her nose pressed against the cold surface. “Did I just hallucinate that? Did the cotton candy vodka finally claim my sanity? Did they really just say they killed Warren?”
“You’re missing the rest of the confession,” Charlie said, though he sounded just as thunderstruck as she felt.
“We would have been more than outcasts,” June said, as if that excused everything she’d done.
As if it excused murder. “We would have been absolute pariahs. We would have lost everything. Do you understand that, Detective? Do you know what it means to lose everything? Not just a business, a house, a few cars.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never owned more than the one car, ma’am,” said Detective Marks.
“We would have lost friends, family, our very livelihood,” June said acidly. “Everything we’d spent our entire lives building, gone in one bad deal. It wasn’t fair. We deserved another chance to make things right.”
“We were leveraged to the hilt everywhere, but there was money in the club,” said Robert, rubbing at his eyes. “Warren made sure of that. The old bastard always was a tightfisted miser. The club was his brainchild—well, his and Phillip’s.”
“Did you even know there was a third founding family at Pacific Pines?” June said, her tone strident.
“No, of course you didn’t. No one does. They convinced Warren to invest in a bad business deal in the late nineties.
Warren lost a few million, nothing he couldn’t easily recover over time, but Phillip and Charlotte lost their entire fortune.
All of it, everything. And what did Warren do?
Did he help them out in their time of need, loan them the capital to get back on their feet?
No, he erased them from existence. Kicked them out of the club, replaced their names on the plaques in the entryway, removed their photos from the history wall.
Over a couple million dollars that barely made a dent in his portfolio.
One bad business decision, and they were absolutely ruined. ”
June sniffed, pulling a tissue from her purse and dabbing at her cheeks.
Was she trying to cry? Juliette truly couldn’t imagine it.
“We’d already seen what it was like when one founding family fell from grace.
I couldn’t let that happen to us. I knew Robert could make the money back that we borrowed. We just needed time.”
“Only, the market was slow to recover, and our finances were even slower,” Robert said. “We had to keep shelling out to noisy investors to keep them quiet. It felt like we were never going to catch up, but things finally started turning. Until spring 2020.”
Everyone groaned at the mention, even Juliette and Charlie.
“We were going to pay it all back, we swear we were,” June said.
“We raised the membership dues on the premise of renovating the club, but Warren kept dragging his feet on executing the contracts! We could have gotten the work done and replaced the money we took without anyone the wiser. People started complaining, and no matter how hard we pushed Warren to begin the work, he pushed right back. And then Warren decided—out of the blue!—to run an audit on the club. He gave us some excuse about rumors of gambling on the greens, which is ridiculous. Our members would never. But if he went through with the audit, he would find everything before we had the chance to put it all back to rights.”
“That must be why they started renovations so quickly after his death,” Juliette said, crossing her arms. “To hide the missing money like they wanted all along.”
“We tried a more discreet approach, but Warren wasn’t exactly a man of discretion,” Robert was saying ruefully.
“More like a junkyard dog with a juicy ham. He had a knack for collecting nasty secrets and using them to manipulate people into doing what he wanted. He had June and every other member of the club scared half to death about that memoir of his.”
“We thought he was going to expose us,” June added.
“We just wanted to rattle his cage. Make him question his mortality, give him something else to focus his attention on. We certainly didn’t think we’d given him enough to kill him!
We thought maybe he’d have chest pains, or palpitations.
A little scare, to distract him. We were going to put some in his glass when we delivered the whiskey, but then Brad and his wife showed up and interrupted us and someone panicked and dosed the whole bottle. ”
“I told you, my hand slipped,” Robert said, sounding aggrieved.
“Bradley and Brigitte Ellingham were in Warren’s suite the night of the party?” Detective Marks asked, no longer playing the slow game as he tipped forward hard in his chair.
“Yes, some business about signing final paperwork on Troy Pham’s new restaurant deal,” said June. “Brad was in a real tear about it, insisted on pouring a glass of our whiskey for himself. I tried to warn him off it, but the man was like a belligerent moose.”
“The fifth glass,” Juliette said suddenly. “Brad was the fifth glass. But what about Brigitte? Why didn’t she drink?”
“And Brigitte, was she dosed as well?” asked Detective Marks, as if he could hear her through the glass. Which she sincerely hoped he couldn’t.
June shook her head. “We had to offer it after Brad insisted, of course, but she declined. Claims to only drink champagne, though I’ve seen her put away her fair share of Long Island iced teas at the pool. Such a snob for a girl who made her living posing for pictures.”
“That’s a boss move, actually,” Juliette mused. “I might have to use that myself. But what if Brigitte saw them dose the bottle, and that’s why she didn’t drink it?”
“Why stay quiet?” Charlie asked. “Why not tell Brad and Warren?”
“Why not indeed,” Juliette murmured, but Detective Marks had moved on.
“What about the sound system at the party?” he asked. “Who was in charge of the wireless microphone setup?”
“The microphone?” June asked, looking truly confused. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Were you in charge of hiring the band?” Detective Marks pressed on. “Setting up the audio equipment?”
“Good heavens, no,” June said, turning to Robert in horror. “As if we would have hired those cocaine addicts.”
“I told you, Junie, just because they play top forty hits doesn’t make them drug addicts,” Robert said.
He turned to the detective. “Brad insisted on hiring the band. We had a quartet all lined up, but Brad said the party needed some juice, or some absurd thing. I don’t know, but I couldn’t tell Warren’s son to buzz off.
Only Warren was allowed to do that. As far as we know, they managed all the equipment.
I didn’t even know there would be a sound system until Brad started in on that god-awful speech of his. ”
“It really was a travesty,” June agreed. “Ruined our pristinely planned party.”
“The party where you dosed one of your oldest friends with your heart medication to give him a good scare?” the detective said dryly.
“Don’t pander to me, Detective,” June said.
“If we’d known the consequences of our actions, we never would have set out to give him the digitalis in the first place.
It was an accident, pure and simple. How were we supposed to know he had an underlying heart condition?
He was always bragging about how he had the resting heart rate of a triathlete.
We couldn’t have imagined it would kill him! ”
“They haven’t seen the autopsy,” Juliette said suddenly, turning to Charlie.
“They think they killed Warren because of the digitalis, but they don’t know about the electric shock.
June did handle the microphone before Warren, but she had nothing to do with hiring the band or bringing in the sound equipment.
Brad did. Which means only Brad could have known that that model of microphone has a reputation for shorting out.
It still points to Brad being responsible for his father’s death. ”
“But how could he have known about the digitalis?” Charlie asked. “If the Piedmonts were the ones who dosed the whiskey, how would Brad have known to create the short?”
“Maybe he saw them do it,” Juliette said. “When he interrupted them in Warren’s suite. Or maybe once he felt the effects, he realized what they’d done and decided to take advantage. And then he slunk off during his dad’s speech to discharge the defibrillator.”
“There’s still another looming question here,” Charlie pointed out. “Even if Brad killed Warren, who killed Brad? And why?”
“I mean, the fact that he was an awful human being comes to mind,” Juliette reasoned. “But I see your point. There’s no way the two deaths aren’t related, but what I don’t know yet is how. Who stood to gain from both Warren’s and Brad’s demises?”
Detective Marks seemed to once again be on the same wavelength, because he’d changed tack with the Piedmonts. “With Warren gone, his son inherited everything, including his stake in the club, is that correct?”
“Brad never cared about the club,” June scoffed.
“Except as his personal playground with the female tennis pros. We may not have always seen eye to eye with Warren on how to manage Pacific Pines, but he at least had clarity of vision for the place. Brad was a drunk and a lecher, and he brought down our reputation with his presence. God rest his soul.”
“Sounds like it would have been a lot more convenient for the both of you if Brad were out of the picture, too,” said Marks.
“We were nowhere near that locker room when Brad was killed,” Robert said, looking taller now that he’d unburdened himself of their secret.
“June was hosting the luncheon in the tent and trying to run damage control after the scene Brad made arguing with our chef, and I was meeting with our lawyers across town.”
“That scene you mentioned Brad making, who was he arguing with?” Detective Marks asked.
“Uh-oh,” Charlie murmured, as Juliette tensed up. Was this why the detective had called her down? To make her witness her own implication in a murder?
“It started with our chef, Troy Pham, over this restaurant deal that Warren was supposedly going to let through,” June said.
“Though that hardly sounds like something Warren would do. Far too magnanimous. And then it was that vile woman out there, Juliette Winters, who’s been stirring up all kinds of trouble regarding Warren and his missing manuscript. ”
“Legitimate trouble,” Juliette hissed.
“And Clayton, the poor boy,” Robert said. “Didn’t you say he was fighting with Brad about something at the Group?”
“Oh, yes, Clayton Westminster, a good boy if a tad above his station,” June sniffed. “After all those years with Warren, I can’t imagine how he was coping with a boss like Brad. What a nightmare. I’m sure he’ll be more relieved than anyone that Brad is gone.”
Clayton. He’d certainly been unhappy with Brad at the funeral, and fuming about his hiring choices for Ellingham Group at the luncheon.
Mad enough to kill? Juliette wasn’t sure.
But she knew one thing—it was time to call in that dinner offer.
Whatever Marks wanted from her could wait; she needed a proper suspect to serve up to him before he went around making accusations about her again.