Chapter 16
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It seemed like only five minutes, but, when she turned around, Mack had eased his way through a crowd that had gathered outside.
He shut the door on them. As he stared at the room, she smiled, and he opened his arms. She walked into them, and he just dropped his chin onto her head.
Mugs barked excitedly at their feet, and even Thaddeus walked up onto his shoulder.
“I don’t do this deliberately, you know?”
“I know that,” he said. “On the other hand, when I called the hospital to ask them to take a closer look, the doctor told me that he didn’t need to and had already determined that she had apparently ingested a drug, not one among her normal prescriptions.”
“Ah,” Doreen muttered.
“That alone has me down here looking at why you’re the one who always comes up with this stuff.”
“I’m not coming up with anything, and I’m literally in everybody’s way,” she pointed out. “Look at the people trying to peek in Birdie’s room right now.”
He laughed. “I won’t argue with that. The captain knows where I am, and he knows what’s happened, and he knows why I’m here.”
She winced. “So, is he mad at me too?”
“He can’t get mad at you. You’re the one who keeps making things happen in the department.”
“If he wants me to push for a bigger budget,” she offered, with an uncertain smile, “I can go campaign for that too.” He stopped and stared at her. She shrugged. “Why not? I think you guys need a bigger budget.”
“We do,” he agreed, “but I don’t see how that would exactly be up your alley. Maybe Birdie’s though.”
“No, not necessarily. No telling how many people she’s blackmailed over the years in order to have things in her world happen the way she wanted them to.”
“That’s not how we operate,” he pointed out. “At least not now.”
She grinned. “No, it isn’t. On the other hand, if a certain concerned citizen was willing to make a decent-sized donation to the police department …”
He stared at her and started to laugh.
She shrugged. “I mean, surely that’s not bribery.”
He gave her a kiss. “Unfortunately an awful lot of the world does work in that way,” he admitted. “But remember that you don’t have any money yet.”
“I know,” she admitted, “so we’ll have to do it the other way for a while.”
Still shaking his head, he looked around and asked, “So, what do you think we’ve got?”
“I think we’ve got an old lady who started to raise a lot of questions that made somebody angry. Or she was next on the list anyway.”
“That’s a pretty big or,” Mack noted, his lips curling in a smile. “And there could be completely different issues between them.”
“I know,” she agreed, “but I’m not willing to take one off the table yet.”
He smiled at her. “You’re even starting to talk like a cop.” She winced, and he clearly noticed. “What? What’s wrong with being a cop?”
“Nothing,” she said, “but you know that would never happen.”
“Right,” he replied, smirking, “not likely. At least I don’t think you would want to go through all that training, do you? And, even then, you need more training to be a detective.”
“Gosh no, I don’t want to do any of that,” she said, with a laugh. “Besides, according to your brother, my hands are going to be full dealing with all this financial stuff.” She frowned. “I thought money was supposed to make life easier.”
His lips twitched. “It will make life easier, and you’ll have a lot of fun deciding who you’ll hand that money to.”
“It could also be very depressing,” she noted sadly.
“And why is that?” he asked.
“I suspect there’ll be an awful lot of areas that need money, and I may not have quite enough to hand out.”
“We will deal with that when the time comes,” he stated. “Right now, we have this to focus on.” And, with that, he gestured toward the mess in the room.
She sighed as she looked around and nodded. “I guess the real question is, if somebody was here and did this, what could they possibly want from this eighty-something-year-old woman?”
“She’s eighty-three.”
“According to her file, yes, but I will suggest she’s probably older than that and has been doing a heck of a job pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes,” Doreen clarified, looking at him, her own lips twitching.
“There is nothing quite like ego and hiding the truth when it comes to some of these women.”
“You mean, like Nan?”
“I think Nan will be one of those ladies who goes sliding into home base at the very last minute, happy that she lived her life to the fullest,” Doreen suggested.
“I don’t know about Birdie. I suspect she’s been trying to blackmail her way in and out of various situations to make her life easier with varied success. ”
Mack grimaced. “And that could very well be true, especially if she’s been pushing or manipulating people to do what she wants.”
“I’m pretty sure she has,” Doreen muttered.
“Then she won’t stop doing that anytime soon.”
“No, she won’t. And, if I’m looking at it correctly now,” she added, “I’m pretty sure she’s been doing this for quite a long time.”
“And that would make sense, but what would somebody want from her?”
“Either she has blackmailed somebody far above her pay grade,” Doreen replied, “or something from her past has come back to haunt her in her old age.”
Mack winced at that. “Or they were potentially looking for proof that somebody was involved in something. So, still blackmail-related then.”
“Not necessarily,” Doreen noted. “You won’t like this.”
He groaned and closed his eyes. When he reopened him, he frowned at her animals. “How is it you get to bring them into a place like this?”
She shrugged. “Honestly, they’re just such a part of me now that people don’t say anything.” Then she turned to Mugs and said, “Mugs, could you just look around and see if anything is here?”
His ears twitched, but he wandered the small apartment, sniffling through the rooms, not showing too much interest.
Mack shook his head. “Okay, back to what you were saying earlier. … What will I not like?”
“What if,” Doreen began, then raised her hand. “What if Birdie actually hired someone to kill her grandson?”
He stopped and stared at her. “Good God, why?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s quite possibly related to money.”
“Money,” he repeated, as he looked around, but the room was fairly barren.
Doreen nodded. “I think Birdie has spent her lifetime cloaked in pretentiousness.” He nodded as she continued. “But I think she’s also bullied everybody into believing that she has money all this time.”
“And what now?” Mack asked. “You’re thinking she was broke?”
“Again, I think we’ll have to talk to management,” she suggested, studying the room carefully, “to see if we can find out whether that is true or not. Derrick Hanson suggested she probably wasn’t happy that the house went to her grandson when Devon’s mother died.
In Birdie’s mind, it was supposed to come back to her because she was the one who bought and paid for it. ”
“Right,” Mack noted, “and yet …”
“And yet,” she repeated, with a nod, “she gave it to her daughter. Cassandra was her only child, so that’s not surprising. But, according to everybody I’ve spoken with, Cassandra was an alcoholic, and how does an alcoholic raise money?”
“If they own a home, … how do you think?” Mack quipped.
“Cassandra could have taken out a mortgage if she lived a reasonably stable life, had a steady job, could show that she was capable of paying back said loan. Maybe all she needed to do was point to her mother, as some sort of big shot at the time …”
He frowned at that and then shrugged. “I guess, and considering we’ve got a lot of other things happening in this case, that’s a possibility too.
What we don’t know is who Birdie would have hired to do the deed and whether that person is the one who came back around today to make sure she couldn’t blackmail them. ”
Then Doreen added, “I also have an alternative theory.”
“Of course you do,” Mack muttered, sighing as he stared at her.
“Not about Birdie’s attack, but I was thinking we needed to check out the victim’s family. The victim of Cassandra’s drunk driving accident.”
He nodded. “I agree with you on that one. We do need to check it out. I just haven’t gotten that far. Some of us actually work a job, and this isn’t my only case, you know?”
She nodded. “I get it,” she muttered. “I’m a whole lot more adaptable to the circumstances because I am also a whole lot faster because I’m not limited by a job.”
“No, you’re not,” he agreed, “but you are still limited in what you’re allowed to do.”
“I know,” she muttered, with a sigh. “However, we also have to take into account that both the mayor and the MLA rep fought to have me brought onto the case.”
Mack frowned. “Which is also an interesting point in its own right.”