Death by Inferior Design Read online

  He sighed and fumbled again at his glasses. “True. True. I just wonder about this whole mess. Why my wife would suddenly want to keep some office furniture of his.”

  “I’m sure it’s more the need for surface space than anything else.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” He made a derisive noise as he stared at the credenza. “I guess not too many people would get attached to this hunk of junk as a memento of a former lover.” He sighed again. “Anyways, I really appreciate the great job you did with my room. I’m sorry it didn’t land you the feature story you deserved.”

  “Thanks. Actually, although the whole thing pales in comparison to Randy’s death, Debbie did mention that since she freelances at Denver Lifestyles, she might be able to get an article about your bedroom published after all.”

  Carl set the clasp on the pneumatic door closer to keep the storm door propped open. “Debbie’s a lot more than a freelancer. Hell, she practically . . .” He let his voice fade and he grabbed his end of the desk, so I followed suit. “Getting the feature published would be a snap for her to arrange. Now that that windbag Axelrod is out of the picture.”

  I tried to let the insult to the man who was probably my biological father slide off me; after all, Carl suspected the man had been having an affair with his wife. “He did strike me as somewhat arrogant,” I murmured when we set the desk down in the foyer so that Carl could shut the door behind us.

  “Thought he was God’s gift to magazine writing. But the guy couldn’t spell cat if you spotted him the c and the a.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. He claimed it was his spell-checker that let him be lazy.”

  That did seem strange. It was also strange that his home had so few books, and that he’d been rather inarticulate for a writer and editor. Not to mention the lack of any interest in interior design, all of which led me to further suspect that Debbie had been ghostwriting for him. “Had he always been an editor? For as long as you knew him, I mean?”

  “Nah. He was out of work when we bought the place from him . . . something like five years back. I think he used to be a gym teacher.” He snorted. “I guess they call themselves fitness instructors now.” He shook his head and muttered, “Must’ve had one hell of a good insurance package. Otherwise, Myra couldn’t have hired you.”

  I helped Carl carry the desk into Debbie’s basement office, and by then it was starting to feel very heavy indeed. Nevertheless, with Carl’s help, we got the credenza nicely situated behind her existing desk.

  “Do you mind if I take one more look at the bedroom?” I asked. “I’d like to take some photographs for my portfolio, too, if that’s okay.”

  “I suppose that’d be all right. Did you ask Debbie if it was all right with her?”

  “If what’s all right with me?” Debbie asked, coming down the stairs to join us.

  I repeated my request to take photographs.

  “Heavens. Of course it’s fine with me. I’m flattered. In fact, please give my name to as many people as you’d like, anytime you need a reference.”

  She led me upstairs and into the room, leaving Carl to catch his breath on the sofa. “I’ve got to tell you honestly, Erin,” Debbie said. “At first I was so nervous about this! It was just such a shock to see that Carl had done something like this . . . hired a decorator without my knowledge or checking any references.”

  “I’m sure he checked my credentials—”

  “Oh, probably so. I just meant that it all seemed to be done in great haste. Not at all the way I like to do things. It’s just—”

  The doorbell rang.

  Debbie hollered, “Carl? Are you getting that?”

  She continued to rave about the wallpaper. I heard the low rumbles of male voices downstairs, but ignored them to take my shots and get a 360-degree view of the room. Just two frames into the task, however, heavy footsteps came tromping up the stairs. Carl entered, followed by two uniformed officers.

  Debbie cried, “Carl? What’s going on? What are the police doing here?”

  “That’s my wife, officer.” He looked at Debbie and explained, “They have a search warrant.”

  “A search warrant! For what? What do you want to search my house for?” she demanded of both officers.

  “We need to look inside the north wall, ma’am,” the officer closest to us said. “You’ll be reimbursed for any repairs.”

  “Repairs?” she shrieked, and we both stared at the sledgehammer that the second officer was carrying. “Oh, my God! My beautiful bedroom! You’re going to tear it up?”

  “We have to search the hiding space for evidence that might help us to identify your neighbor’s killer,” the officer explained, nearing the wall with his sledgehammer. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  “There’s no evidence in my walls!” Debbie cried.

  “Your husband found some items that could be linked to our investigation.”

  “Carl?” she screeched.

  “I already burned the letters.” He shrugged. “And they picked up the garbage this morning, so the necklace is gone, too.”

  Debbie grabbed her head. “But why—”

  “We have to check inside the wall, ma’am,” the officer with the sledgehammer interrupted, his eyes gleaming at the sight of my beautiful work.

  In what I’ll confess will not go down in history as one of my more dignified moments, I did a spread-eagle against the wall and blocked his path. “Wait! You can get to that space from the other side. By knocking a hole through the back wall of the closet!”

  “She’s right!” Debbie cried. “Please, please do it that way!” She looked pleadingly at Carl, who stood motionless by the entrance, as if none of this affected him directly.

  The two officers exchanged glances, then peered around the corner into the dressing area. “Looks like they’re right, Tony,” one policeman said to his partner. “So, why do you suppose someone put the opening in the middle of the bedroom wall instead of in the back of a closet wall?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to get all the clothes in the closet dirty,” I suggested, even though I knew at once that the real reason was that it was easy to hide a hole behind paneling, but not in an unadorned closet wall. “The plaster dust from the drywall is a total bear to get out of clothing.”

  “You live here too, miss?” the not-Tony, non-sledgehammer-wielding officer asked me.

  “No, I’m the interior designer. I plastered up the hole and hung the wallpaper.”

  “Nice,” the officer said with a nod as he studied the wallpapered surface.

  “Yes, it is,” I said desperately, “so please be sure not to swing—”

  Debbie gasped, and we both jumped back a little as the sledgehammer suddenly slammed through the wall from the other side.

  chapter 14

  Oops,” the officer with the sledgehamsadly, “. . . too hard.” muttered, just as I continued

  “No-o-o-!” Debbie screeched. “My wall, my beautiful wall! The paper is ruined!”

  “Sorry, ma’am, but—”

  She balled her fists and raged: “Do you people have any idea how long I fought to get this project done? Five years! Ever since the day we bought this place, I’ve been telling my husband that I wanted it fixed up. I didn’t even want to move in until the walls were painted something other than . . . than primer white, but no!” She pointed at her husband, still standing in the doorway. “Carl insisted that it’d just take a couple of hours to repaint it, and there was no sense holding up the closing date just for that. He promised he would paint it himself, the very next weekend. It has taken me five years of pleading and cajoling to get a bedroom that I love, and I only had the chance to sleep in it once! Just once! You idiots just put a sledgehammer right through my dreams!”

  Carl, his face reddening, reseated his glasses, but maintained his stubborn post by the door. “Debbie, calm down. It’s—”

  “Shut up, Carl! Do you know how infuriating it is to be told to calm down? As if I hadn�
�t realized all on my own that I was upset! As if that would make me go”—she smacked her own forehead—“ ‘Oh, that’s what I need! I need to calm down! Thank heavens my husband was here to tell me that, or I might have raised my voice!’ ”

  “It’s really okay, Debbie,” I interjected desperately. “I have an extra roll of this paper with the same dye lot in my van. I always overorder by at least two lengths, in case of disaster—”

  “Oh, thank God,” Debbie exclaimed, pulling me into a hug. “I love you. I will adopt you right now on the spot.”

  The words were unnerving. I said as evenly as I could, “We’ll just plaster over the hole again, let it dry overnight, then I’ll pull down the one sheet and put up another—”

  Another blow reverberated, promptly ending our hug. Debbie shrieked again. A second hole appeared in the wall. This time, a second panel of wallpaper was ruined.

  “Jeez, Tony!” his fellow officer complained. “What did you go and hit it that hard for?”

  “What are you doing?” I hollered at the sledgehammering officer. “That’s a good two feet over from where the cubbyhole was located!”

  “Figured we’re going to have to check the whole inside of the wall. That means we’re going to have to bust through all the sections between the studs.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” Debbie wailed. “I can’t watch this.”

  “Neither can I,” I agreed, but watching the wall destruction was something like spotting the aftermath of an accident at the side of the road: my eyes seemed to be glued to the scene of their own volition.

  I glanced at Carl to see if he was going to go comfort his wife, but he’d averted his gaze and pretended to be transfixed by a magazine that had been lying open on her side of the bed. Debbie shuffled down the stairs alone. I waited through one more blow from the closet wall and gasped as the hammer merely dented the wallpaper this time and just missed banging into the back corner of the chest.

  “Watch it!” I shouted through the wall at Officer Tony. “This chest is worth thousands of dollars! I can repair the freaking wall, but not the furniture!”

  “Sorry, miss,” he called back, unrepentant. “It won’t happen again.”

  I studied the dent in the paper. That section of Sheetrock would also have to be repaired. The wallpaper would need to be removed, the Sheetrock patched or perhaps replaced, and the wallpaper rehung. If the store happened to be out of this dye lot, I’d have to exchange my emergency roll and start over again, replacing the paper for the entire wall.

  I went downstairs to console Debbie. She was the picture of a woman in a deep state of shock. She was seated at the table in the kitchen, staring straight ahead with unfocused eyes. She didn’t even blink when I came into the room and pulled up a chair across from her.

  “I’ll get another double roll of wallpaper, and we’ll send the bill to the police. If I have to, I could do a patch behind the chest that—”

  “No. There’s no point. I should have known better. It wasn’t meant to be. There’s no way to build the bedroom of your dreams when you’re sharing the bed with a man who doesn’t love you. He can’t even keep me straight from Emily. I’m in a sham of a marriage that was over before it even started!”

  “Oh, Debbie. I’m sure you don’t really mean that!”

  “I do.” She gave a sardonic laugh. “Ironic choice of wording.” She sighed. “It was the first time I said ‘I do’ that was wrong.”

  We said nothing for a full minute or two. “What are you going to do now?” I asked at last.

  “Move out, I suppose. Maybe I’ll ask Myra if I can stay in her guest room for the time being.”

  Her statement shocked me. Carl strongly suspected that Randy and Debbie had been lovers. If that were true, she surely wouldn’t want to move in now with his widow. Unlike me, however, Carl had actually read the love letters; he was in a far better position than I to know who the author and the recipient were. “Those love letters . . . were they yours?” I asked Debbie gently.

  “No.” She brushed her red hair away from her face brusquely and clenched her jaw. “I’m sure they were Emily’s. Carl probably couldn’t bear to part with them, so he brought them with him to our new home and hid them. And then he forgot about them.”

  Hadn’t the hiding spot been built just a few months ago? By Taylor? Trying to weigh Debbie’s mood against the possibility that she was lying to me, I asked, “You didn’t read them yourself?”

  “Carl wouldn’t let me. But I glanced at them when Taylor was trying to revive Randy, and it looked like Emily’s handwriting.”

  “But . . . just today, Carl gave me the distinct impression that he thought they were yours . . . written to you. He found some stationery in Randy’s desk that he thought was the same paper.”

  She shook her head. “In a weak moment, after a fight with Carl, I wound up in Randy’s arms—for all of two seconds. Literally. Ever since then . . .” She shuddered. “Anyway. Emily’s handwriting and mine are very similar. I wouldn’t be half surprised if Carl’s gotten us confused in his head once again. In any case, Randy didn’t write them. As if that man would ever write a love letter!”

  I tried to make sense out of her explanation. If Emily had written the letters to Carl, he would be intimately familiar with their contents. He couldn’t possibly think that his current wife had written them. “Could they have been from Emily to some other man? To Kevin, perhaps?”

  “Then what would they have been doing inside our wall? Emily and Carl were, of course, already divorced when Carl and I got married and bought this place.”

  I frowned. This wasn’t any of my business. Even so, the letters seemed to be a major factor behind the terrible troubles in the Hendersons’ marriage, and the two of them could erroneously be pointing fingers at their spouse. “Maybe Kevin wrote them and put them there to get Carl’s goat for some reason.”

  Debbie shook her head again. “Kevin is an incorrigible flirt, but he would never do anything so foolish as to write love letters to another woman. If one of those letters were to find its way to Jill—aka Miss Moneybags where Kevin’s concerned—he would lose his precious funding for his vast plans.”

  She released a heavy sigh and dabbed at a tear. “It’s not as though I could blame him, really. Dreams are important. You lose them, and what’s left? You find yourself in your fifties with no goals, no plans, no children or grandkids to dote on. You just . . . do what I did, eventually. Marry some man you think you love and hope he’ll fill in what’s missing. When that’s impossible. What you’re missing is your own soul, and nobody else can find something like that for another person.”

  I felt horrible for this woman. I watched helplessly as she struggled to regain her composure. “Are things really that bad for you, Debbie?”

  She nodded, blinking back tears. In a halting voice, she said, “I shouldn’t talk about this to you; we barely know each other.”

  “Maybe that’s why you can talk to me about it.”

  There was a considerable racket around the corner as the three men came down the stairs and Carl ushered the officers out the door. I wanted to give them a few seconds to get in their patrol cars, then I intended to beat a hasty retreat myself. The Hendersons needed some privacy.

  Carl lumbered into the kitchen and began to pace in front of us. “Well, crap,” he said before I could excuse myself from the house. “Looks like Taylor’s in big trouble now. They did some sort of test where chemicals they put on the inside of the wall changed color if there were drugs—even the smallest of traces—and it turned, all right. Taylor had been stashing drugs in our wall, just like he said he was.”

  I was confused: Taylor had already served time for the drug possession. Right now, however, I was more concerned with getting out of here. I pushed my chair back from the table. Debbie looked up at him, a blank expression on her face, and said, “I want a divorce.”

  As if Debbie had never spoken, Carl continued. “They didn’t find anything
other than the drug traces. But they only came clear through the wall the two times . . . when you were there, too, and saw it. Erin, you’ve got enough on that extra roll to replace two pieces, don’t you?” His face was slowly growing flushed as he spoke. I wanted desperately to get out of here. Unfortunately, Carl was standing directly in front of the doorway, blocking my exit.

  “Carl, I want a divorce,” Debbie repeated firmly.

  He pushed his glasses against his nose and looked at her. “Stop saying that, Debbie! If you’d wanted a divorce, why would you have sent me across the street to get you some free furniture?”

  “Do you think I’d stay married to you just because you got me a free desk?”

  He spread his arms. “Why would you ask me to remodel the bedroom one day and then leave me the next? I didn’t care what the damned room looked like in the first place!”

  I got up from the table and muttered, “I’ll let myself out.”

  “I’m coming, too,” Debbie replied, rising.

  Carl snorted. “No, you’re not. You can’t just say, ‘Carl, I want a divorce,’ and then leave with the interior designer. You don’t even know each other from a hole in the wall. That doesn’t make any sense!”

  She swept up her purse from the kitchen counter. “I’m going to ask Myra to let me stay with her for a couple of days.”

  “But I built you your damned bedroom! Why would you want to leave me now? I thought you’d finally be happy!”

  “Carl, we’re a terrible match. You don’t care about anything. I care about too many things at once. It’s better this way.”

  A marriage was breaking apart in front of me, and there was nothing I could do to reverse the tide. Yet another situation that had never been covered in my education at Parsons. “Sorry to run out on you like this, but I’ll call about the . . . wallpaper.” I strode out the door as quickly as social decorum allowed—just short of an all-out sprint.

  Reading the Crestview Sentinel had kept me informed of the key details regarding Randy’s funeral. Though I’d been so exhausted that I had finally slept solidly, my nerves were shot throughout the morning service. There was a twitching muscle beneath my left eye that was driving me nuts, and I kept rubbing at it, to no avail. At least that gave me the appearance of having to dry my eyes, unlike anyone else in attendance. My raw feelings were probably due to my deep suspicion that we were laying my biological father to rest.