Death by Inferior Design Page 10

  If the Axelrods did turn out to be my biological parents, at least Myra seemed to be a nice enough woman. She had to be scared out of her wits right now. A quick visit to let her know someone was thinking about her and her ailing husband was just the natural, human thing to do.

  I walked through the main doors and did my best to stifle the torrent of memories that the antiseptic-laced air brought me. A shiny blue garland rimmed the receptionist’s desk. Below the garland, a slightly faded cardboard Santa had been captured in a permanent “Ho, Ho, Ho.” On the credenza, a two-foot-high artificial tree was laden with red, blue, silver, and gold balls on its forest-green scouring-brush branches. I asked the receptionist for Randy Axelrod’s room number.

  She glanced at her computer screen and asked, “Are you a family member?”

  I hesitated, thinking that the truthful answer—I don’t know—would not go over well. “No. If that’s a problem, is there any way I could get a message to—”

  Just then I caught sight of Myra. Her chin was held high as she entered the lobby, and her lips were so tightly pursed that they were white. She did a double take and then came over. “Erin, hello. It’s so good of you to come. You must have heard the news.”

  Confused, I studied her face. She had a drugged-out glaze to her gray eyes that might have been shock. “I . . . was there when your husband collapsed.”

  She shook her head. “Randy passed away. Two hours ago. Heart attack.” Her voice was emotionless.

  Frustrated, I balled my fists. With him had died my only chance to get to know the man who might be my biological father. What little I did know of Randy Axelrod, I hadn’t liked, and now that was all that would remain of him in my memory banks. My own concerns and emotions were meaningless, however, when face-to-face with his new widow. “I’m so sorry,” I told her, staring into her eyes and hoping that she could sense my sincerity within such a well-worn response.

  “Thank you.”

  We stood there in the hospital lobby in silence. Myra wrapped her tan cardigan tight around her shoulders, clutching the garment with both hands as if it were a security blanket.

  “Can I . . . give you a lift home?” I asked.

  “That would be lovely. Thank you. I was just about to call for a cab.”

  “Come on. My van’s in the parking lot.” She gave me a small smile of gratitude as I touched her shoulder. We walked side by side toward my car in silence. Was this woman my mother? Was my having been kept in the dark all these years now robbing us both of the chance to comfort my own biological mother upon the death of my father? The agonizing questions made me so tense, it was hard to breathe.

  “The cold air feels nice,” she murmured. “Refreshing.”

  I opened the door on the passenger side without comment. What could I say?

  Myra sat in silence as we pulled out of the lot. Then, as if reading my mind, she said, “I should be more upset than this, I know, but I’ve had a long time to prepare myself. This was Randy’s third heart attack. We both knew it was coming eventually, and that it would probably be his last.”

  “I guess it’s good, then, that you’ve had time to adjust.”

  She sighed. “Truth be told, Erin, I tried to leave Randy half a dozen times, but he’d always track me down . . . promise me that he’d changed, plead with me to stay. The first two times I left him, I found jobs teaching high school chemistry.” She added by way of explanation, “I was a professor at CU when I met him, but he made me give that up. He was insanely jealous of all the men I would come into contact with at the university. By the third time I’d left him, my past record with the school district was suspect—those abrupt midsemester departures. After a while, I guess I lost the desire to even bother to leave him. Sooner or later, I’d give up and return to Randy . . . he’d come find me.”

  My stomach was churning. Her story was confusing; I’d seen no evidence of Randy being jealous.

  She gave a mirthless chuckle. “I’d have been better off if we’d never met in the first place. At least I outlived him. Despite . . . everything.”

  What could I say? Congratulations on the achievement of outlasting your miserable marriage? If this was the worldview my biological parents had to offer, it was no wonder Mom had made me promise not to find them. Then again, I didn’t even look like Myra or Randy. I was probably leaping to wild, baseless conclusions.

  There was a slight noise as I turned the corner into Myra’s neighborhood. Something in my tool box was rattling around. With a pang, I remembered that the container of cyanide was still back there.

  A wave of guilt all but paralyzed me then, and I drove the rest of the way to Myra’s home in bewilderment, thoughts roiling. The numerous houses decorated for the holidays now not only seemed cheerless to me, but mocking. Myra had said it was a heart attack, and maybe so. But what if my message had never been delivered to the emergency room by the hospital receptionist? What if the doctors’ efforts to revive Randy had been impeded by cyanide in his system? Could my failure to report the cyanide to the police have cost the man his life?

  Taylor’s explanation had made no sense. Some of the poison had been removed. Besides, if he’d been curious about what cyanide looked like, why not just leave it in my van and sneak a quick peek there? Why bring it to his work area and drop it on the ground? The bottle was sure to be discovered whenever Steve removed the tarp from his materials. It seemed to have been staged—the cyanide put there deliberately for someone to find it there.

  Could Taylor have been lying to protect someone else?

  Maybe cyanide poisoning could push someone with a weak heart into cardiac arrest. All that Bill, my chemist ex-boyfriend, had taught me about poison was that it worked by shutting off oxygen to the body—or rather by interfering with the way oxygen is processed. He’d explained something about the cyanide itself taking the place of some other substance and thereby blocking the step that traps the energy gleaned from the oxygen. See, Bill? I told him in silence, I was listening. He had been the one who’d had no interest in my job. As if a glorious French bergère chair in chocolate Italian-leather could possibly be boring in comparison to the chemical-bonding process of phosphates!

  We pulled into her driveway. Myra turned toward me. In a matter-of-fact voice, she said, “Now that he’s gone, I’d like to hire you to decorate my entire house, instead of just the one room. Would you accept that kind of challenge, Erin?”

  Surprised and caught off guard, I answered, “I’m not sure.” My father had warned me just a few hours ago to stay away—that my birth parents were dangerous. Even setting my own issues aside, there was that old cliché about grief talking. Myra surely hadn’t given herself enough time to weigh the consequences of a complete interior transformation in the home she’d shared with a spouse who’d died just hours ago. But she was waiting for me to go on. “I’m very flattered. But I’d really have to think about that, Myra.”

  She frowned. “Is there a problem?”

  “My schedule is hectic for quite a while, and I doubt I’ll be able to take on more jobs just now.”

  “Well.” She rotated in her seat to face front. “There’s no great rush. I could have you get going on this as soon as tomorrow or as late as six months from now. I’ll let you think about it for as long as you need.”

  “All right. I’ll do that. Thanks.”

  She reached for the door handle.

  “Are you . . . going to be okay alone tonight, Myra? Is there anybody I should call? A relative, or somebody?”

  “No, I wouldn’t know who to begin to suggest, even if I did feel as though I needed some company. But don’t worry, my dear, I’ll be just fine.”

  “If you’re sure . . . Take care. And good night.”

  “You, too. Goodbye.” Her voice remained impassive. I’ve had clients take the news that a sofa delivery was going to be delayed with far more emotion.

  I almost asked again if she couldn’t at least ask Debbie Henderson or Jill McBride to come ov
er for a while. But I held my tongue and watched as Myra opened her front door and slipped inside the darkened interior.

  Although I kept an eye on the place in my rearview mirror, Myra still hadn’t turned on any lights by the time my van rounded the corner and left the neighborhood.

  I had every intention of heading straight home but couldn’t sway whichever portion of my brain was steering. I turned and headed south on 30th Street toward the police station, the very last place on the planet I actually wanted to go. Nevertheless, I had told the receptionist at the hospital that I would talk to the police about the cyanide because, like it or not, that’s what needed to be done. With just a modicum of luck, all my fears about Randy being poisoned would prove unfounded.

  The police were using the same bargain-basement style of Christmas decorations that the hospital had. The metallic-paper garlands here were silver, and they’d hung silver and white paper snowflakes from the ceiling. I stammered my story to the receptionist and then to a bald, uniformed officer, who let me get as far as the word “cyanide” before he held up a hand and said, “Lemme have you talk to the detective on duty, miss.”

  While he ushered me into the official areas of the police station, my path happened to cross with an attractive, young female officer who looked familiar. Our eyes met. She smiled at me and said, “It’s the stemware lady.”

  I realized then who she was, though she looked quite different now, wearing a police uniform. Last week she’d attended a presentation on selecting glassware that a local store had hired me to give. “Linda, right?” I remembered her because she’d shown genuine interest in my talk. Plus, there had only been five glassware shoppers in attendance; the rest of my audience had come disguised as empty chairs.

  “Right.” Linda glanced at the bald officer at my side, then back at me. “Trouble?”

  “Someone . . . collapsed in the house I was redecorating. Probably a heart attack, but . . .”

  “I’m going to have Detective O’Reilly speak to her,” the male officer beside me explained.

  She nodded and touched my arm. “My last name’s Delgardio, Erin, if you need anything.” She continued on her way but added over her shoulder, “The guys here all call me Del.”

  It was nice to discover that I had an acquaintance in the police department.

  The other officer ushered me to a small room and told me to wait there a few minutes until Detective O’Reilly finished making a call. There was nothing in the room to occupy myself with. A rectangular table topped with dark brown linoleum had cheap aluminum legs that matched the black plastic-and-metal chairs. A large mirror on one wall that was bound to be one-way glass. The smoke-gray, industrial-grade carpet was a short-fibered polyester that, installed, retailed for $11.99 a yard.

  To amuse myself, I mentally redecorated the space. By the time a tall, thirtyish, mustached man wearing a cheap, gray flannel suit entered, he was crossing a lovely Berber carpeting toward me. I was seated in the conversation nook—gently framed to either side by ficus trees— comprised of two comfy contemporary club chairs upholstered in a geometric art deco pattern and an elegant, oversized leather ottoman that doubled as a cocktail table.

  The image was shattered as he slapped his notepad on the table and said, “I’m Detective O’Reilly. And you are . . . ?”

  Suddenly scared half to death, I mentally replied, but said, “Erin Gilbert.”

  I told my story of the past weekend. It was slow-going; he stopped me every other sentence and made me repeat myself. Afterward, the detective seemed to be more interested in attempting to stare me down than in uncovering any further information about Randy’s death. There was something about being watched this way that made me unbelievably nervous. I half felt like confessing—to anything at all—just to get his pale eyes off me and end this conversation.

  Detective O’Reilly sighed. “That’s it? Nothing to add?”

  “That’s all I can think of.”

  He leaned back in his chair, regarded me for a moment, then rose and said, “Sit tight for a moment. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Once again, he was gone for so long that I had time to mentally refurbish the room twice, and was in the process of redesigning it into a romper room for cats, complete with climbing structures and cubbyholes and a multitude of dangling cat toys, when he finally returned. He kept smoothing his mustache as he studied a piece of paper in his hand. He reclaimed his seat, then put the paper facedown on the scarred table. “Well, Miss Gilbert. I just got some interesting news.”

  I waited, with increasing anxiety, but he didn’t continue. Finally, I felt compelled to say, “Oh?”

  He gave me a solemn nod. “Because of your call to the hospital this morning, the lab ran some preliminary tests . . . blood workups and so forth.”

  The mention of blood work made me sit up. I so hadn’t wanted to hear that there was any possibility of the cyanide in my vehicle having had anything whatsoever to do with Randy’s death. “Mr. Axelrod was poisoned?”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  “Oh, God. Someone actually did pilfer the cyanide from my bottle. I never expected anything like this to happen, ever, or believe me, I’d have called someone . . . found some safe way to dispose of the poison.”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “It wasn’t cyanide that they found in his system.” He was staring into my eyes again. “Miss Gilbert, what reason would you have had to be carrying around arsenic?”

  “Arsenic?” I repeated in confusion. “No, no—it was cyanide.”

  He said nothing.

  My heart was racing. “I think arsenic can also be used as a hardening agent for metal plating, but I’ve never used either cyanide or arsenic. And I’m sure it was cyanide in my bottle—in the bottle,” I added firmly.

  “So you don’t use arsenic in your line of work? Just cyanide?”

  “No.” Had that been some sort of trick question along the lines of When did you stop beating your wife? If so, I’d just flunked. My mouth felt dry, and it was an effort to swallow.

  He said nothing.

  “It’s not as if I do metal plating, along with designing interiors,” I heard myself yammering. “Like I explained before, the cyanide was a . . . gift from my ex-boyfriend.”

  He nodded, removed his notepad from his jacket pocket, and jotted down something.

  Great. If I were in his shoes, listening to me babble, I would arrest myself right on the spot.

  While he wrote, he muttered, “That’s what the victim died from. Arsenic poisoning.”

  “Arsenic?” I echoed. “Not cyanide?” My mind flashed back to my conversation with Steve Sullivan. Hadn’t he mentioned my container of arsenic when he’d meant to say cyanide? Surely that had just been a meaningless slip of the tongue.

  Detective O’Reilly flipped his notepad shut, then leaned forward in his seat. “That would be a real clever ploy, to suggest someone died of one type of poisoning when all the while another type of poison was the killer. Might be a nice way to frame someone else and make yourself look innocent.”

  chapter 8

  “When opened, draperies are picture frames, meant to enrich and enhance the view by providing a touch of texture and a splash of color. When closed, draperies are the artwork itself.”

  —Audrey Munroe

  “Whew!” Audrey wheezed, dropping into the seat beside me as she waltzed into the living room, her complexion ruddy from the cold night air. “I am positively exhausted. I’m like that little skunk from the Bugs Bunny cartoon show. As the French would say if they were Americans, ‘I am Pepe Le Pooped.’ ”

  The remark was so silly, it made me laugh in spite of my troubles. Despite her words, Audrey appeared to have more energy than I did— and it was easy to picture her thirty years younger, having just now danced off the Broadway stage to thunderous applause.

  In sharp contrast, too keyed up to sleep upon returning home from the police station, I’d taken it on myself to unroll her rug and rearrange her parlor. I�
��d then done my best to relax by cuddling into my favorite corner of my favorite sofa and reading a novel, but I’d merely held the book open and stared at the page, unable to command my eyes to read the words or my brain to comprehend them.

  “I’m glad you’re still up, Erin. I wanted to enlist you to do a guest spot on my Friday show.”

  My pulse quickened with the beginnings of stage fright at the mere suggestion of appearing on television. “No, uh-uh, Audrey. Can’t do. I’ve got far too much on my plate these days.”

  “If you don’t do it, dear, I’m going to have five minutes of dead air.” In the Here, kitty, kitty . . . tones that I used to call Hildi when it was time to take her to the vet, Audrey added, “The topic is one of your pet subjects— curtain rods.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks, Audrey.”

  Her jaw dropped.“Who else am I going to get to talk about curtain rods at length?” she demanded theatrically.

  “Is that a pun . . . talk ‘at length’ about curtain rods?”

  “No, and don’t try to discourage me from choosing you by making lame remarks. You have got to get over your shyness in front of the camera, Erin. I’ll be with you, and you can pretend we’re having a regular conversation, just the two of us.”

  Though I’d never told her in so many words about my stage fright, she’d seen through me. I could speak in front of groups of people without fear, but to do so on TV was another matter entirely. I replied, “A sizable portion of our ‘conversation’ will need to be spent looking out at the camera instead of at each other.”

  “What’s hard about that? Pretend the camera’s the third person in our conversation. With a bad case of laryngitis. And one big eye in the middle of his or her forehead.” She patted my knee. “My show would be marvelous publicity for you.”

  True, but irrelevant; I morphed into a blathering idiot in front of a camera.“You know who would be terrific for the job? Steve Sullivan. He’s a fellow designer I’ve been working with this past weekend.”