Death by Inferior Design Read online

  Smiling, he searched my eyes, then averted his and drained his beer. Weird. If I hadn’t known better, I’d think he was battling an attraction to me.

  The waitress came to our table to ask if we needed anything else. Steve looked at me, and I shook my head. “It’s time to call it a night, don’t you think? I might be getting a little tipsy,” I said as I threw down a twenty and a ten to pay for the drinks and my dinner.

  Steve gallantly offered to pick up the entire tab but finally relented. “Are you okay to drive?” he asked as we got to our feet.

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  “I’m going to follow you home, just to be sure.”

  “There’s no need to—”

  “Hey, it’s more or less on the way to my place, anyway.”

  “So are you okay to drive? I hope you don’t think I’ll be lenient if you wind up rear-ending my van just ’cuz I was the one who bought your beers.”

  Steve smirked at me. “I’ll be extra careful, Gilbert,” he promised.

  We left the restaurant. The evening air was chilly. I pulled my wool coat closer, but I felt a glow that I knew wasn’t entirely a matter of the two beers I’d consumed. We walked so close together that our coat sleeves occasionally brushed. We discussed the logistics of his following my van, and parted to go to our separate vehicles. I’d managed to find a space on Eleventh Street, and Steve had parked in the outside lot for the restaurant.

  As I slid behind the wheel and started the engine, I scolded myself aloud. “Get ahold of yourself, Gilbert. No way are you ever going to fall for Steve Sullivan! It would never work out.” I glanced into the rearview mirror and said, “Are you listening to yourself?”

  Just then the headlights of an approaching car flashed in my mirror—a couple of points of light appearing on the wall of my van. Thinking my eyes had deceived me, I turned and looked back as a second car headed north on Eleventh. Something was wrong with the side of my vehicle. There seemed to be two holes in the metal.

  I got out to look at the holes from the outside, still not quite believing my eyes.

  One hole had pierced the letter G in Gilbert, and the second was dead center in the letter b. And I knew without question that they were bullet holes.

  chapter 17

  Just then Steve’s van was turning the corner of the parking lot, which looped past my car toward the exit gate. I waved frantically with both arms, and he braked and opened his window. “Someone shot at my van!” I called.

  He hesitated, said, “Be right there,” and backed up to reclaim his parking space. Jogging over to me, he asked, “Did I hear you right just now? Were you saying that . . . ?”

  His voice faded. Then he ran his fingertips over the damaged metal. “This might just be a random prank . . . some teenager, showing off his shooting prowess to his buddies, maybe.”

  “No way. Why hit two letters in my last name, and no place else?” My voice sounded odd in my ears. I had to struggle to catch my breath. “I think it’s a message to me from whoever killed Randy Axelrod. I think the killer’s after me now.”

  Too frightened to think straight, I couldn’t stand the idea of talking to Detective O’Reilly or Detective Martinez. O’Reilly would probably speculate that, at some point, I could have fired bullet holes into my own van to make myself look innocent. Martinez would probably hint that if I’d simply come to the station house sooner, this somehow wouldn’t have happened. I called the police station and asked for the only officer I knew for certain would be friendly to me—Linda Delgardio. The dispatcher informed me that Linda wouldn’t be on duty again until early tomorrow morning. I left Linda a message and told the dispatcher that I needed some assistance as soon as possible.

  A ruddy-cheeked, blond officer arrived fifteen or twenty minutes later. He retrieved two “slugs” from inside my van and determined that the shooter had most likely been standing on the sidewalk directly across the street. He was unable to find any witnesses, and although he combed the area for another fifteen minutes or so— sweeping the steady beam of his flashlight across every inch—he was also unable to find any “spent casings.” He was solicitous in his discussions with me, but seemed ready to simply take down the information and leave until Steve told him about my connection to the ongoing murder investigation. Then he told us to stay put for a minute, and he got into his police cruiser to make a call.

  I grew more anxious with each passing minute. The shooter might return to see if my van was still here. I kept looking behind me and to either side of Steve, certain that some stranger was going to pop out of the shadows and end my life here and now.

  The officer finally returned and asked if we could come to the station house to make a complete statement. Before I could reply, Steve said, “Yeah,” then looked at me and said, “Let’s go.”

  We caravanned to the station house. Inside, Steve was ushered off in one direction, and I found myself back in the same sterile room as before, speaking to the same detective—O’Reilly. He was still in a foul mood and the same cheap gray suit. Maybe his pants were itchy.

  Letting me speak my piece about the bullet holes, Detective O’Reilly glanced at his notes, rested an elbow on the table, and said, “Nobody heard gunshots. That seems strange to me. A crowded place like Eleventh and Lincoln Boulevard at eight p.m., and not a single person reports hearing a gun being fired . . . not just once, but twice.”

  His routine was missing a cheerful partner to play good cop to his bad cop. I fought back a sigh and replied, “Short of seeing someone actually fire the weapon, most people probably would have assumed it was just an engine misfiring, wouldn’t they?”

  “You’re absolutely positive that the bullet holes were put there while you were in the restaurant?”

  “Not absolutely positive, no. I know for sure that the holes weren’t there yesterday, but I guess it’s remotely possible that I just didn’t notice them when I drove downtown this evening.”

  “Is it?”

  “Like I said, it’s remotely possible. I barely noticed the holes in the side of my van when I got into the car at the restaurant. But I would have heard the gunshots if anyone had fired a gun earlier, while I was in Randy Axelrod’s or my own quiet neighborhood.”

  “So you’re not sure when the bullets were fired at your van after all.”

  That was what he took away from what I just said? “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that it happened while I was in the restaurant tonight,” I said firmly.

  O’Reilly drummed on the table for at least ten repetitions with each finger. My gaze unwittingly drawn to his hands, I noticed that he had an unusual amount of body hair. The observation reminded me of a joke from my childhood about hair on knuckles being one sign of insanity—and looking for hair on one’s knuckles being a second sign. That, in turn, led to me thinking about how bad it would look if I were to start laughing about the detective’s hairy hands, which brought on such an urge to laugh that my eyes teared up. My thought pattern made me realize that I was not, as of yet, completely sober.

  Finally, he said, “Okay.”

  “So I can leave now?” I started to scoot my chair back from the table.

  He scowled. “We’re still investigating the poisoning death. I understand Detective Martinez asked you to come in and answer some questions, yet you never showed.”

  “I’d already told you everything I knew about that.”

  “We’ve noticed your van in the neighborhood quite a bit these past couple days.”

  “I’m working there, designing Myra Axelrod’s rooms.”

  He considered this information worthy of a notation in his pad. “That’d be the victim’s wife,” he muttered. “You’re now picking out curtains and new furniture for the recent widow?”

  “It’s what I do for a living, detective.”

  He gave me a disdainful look. “And it doesn’t bother you that the husband of the woman who hired you was recently murdered.” It wasn’t a question.

  “It bothers m
e, sure, but it certainly doesn’t stop me from doing the job I was hired to do.”

  “Did it occur to you, Miss Gilbert, that you might be the key to the whole thing? The final straw that caused someone to break and take Mr. Axelrod’s life?”

  I gritted my teeth before I replied, “Detective O’Reilly, I don’t need to have you try to lay a guilt trip on me.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?” He spread his hands a little in a gesture of innocence.

  “I think you’re trying to gauge my reactions to upsetting accusations, yes.”

  He drummed on the table, just two cycles this time, regarding me through both cycles. “It’s just that I’m a bit puzzled by your lack of curiosity, Miss Gilbert. Seems to me it’d be human nature to want to know who put your kiddy picture there . . . inside a virtual stranger’s wall.” He added under his breath, “If everything happened like you claim.”

  “It did happen exactly as I claimed. Myra Axelrod told me the whole story this afternoon. Her husband, Randy, put the picture in the wall, so that I’d discover it there when I was remodeling. Myra’s my birth mother, and years ago she put me up for adoption for my own protection. Apparently Randy was prone to violent behavior.”

  O’Reilly dropped his black Bic pen on the table as if too disgusted with me to be able to keep a grip on the implement. “Let me ask you something, Miss Gilbert. You just got through telling me you had no additional information regarding the ongoing investigation.” He retrieved his pen and began to write furiously in his pad. “What do you call your last statement, then? Idle gossip?”

  Oops. My cheeks grew warm. “I . . . told you about it now.”

  He stopped writing and returned to his staring-contest mode. He augmented his side of the contest with nonstop drumming. It was as though his fingers were doing a miniature performance of Stomp. At length he said, “Not right away, though. Not voluntarily. Why is that?”

  “It seems to further incriminate Myra Axelrod in her husband’s death. Apparently I’m related to them. Maybe part of me didn’t want to be the one to have to get the police involved in all of that.”

  “So it appears.” Once again he leveled his gaze at me and, for what felt like an eternity, said nothing. I grew to miss the tapping fingers; at least that provided a slight distraction. “Anything else?” he finally asked.

  I felt like a ten-year-old being scolded by the school principal. It had been an oversight on my part not to tell him much sooner what Myra had said, but admitting to an officer of the law that I was slightly intoxicated didn’t strike me as all that terrific an excuse for withholding information, even temporarily. “Not that I can think of.”

  He gave me a sour look and started paging through his notes. I rose and headed for the door.

  Just as I grabbed the doorknob, O’Reilly asked, “Ms. Gilbert, what’s your blood type?”

  It was A-negative, but I turned toward him and asked, “Why?”

  “I was just wondering if it was the same as the victim’s . . . as Axelrod’s. That’s all.”

  “What was his blood type?”

  Detective O’Reilly rose, leaned past me to open the door for me, and replied, “It’s A-negative.”

  The ruddy-cheeked officer who’d accompanied us to the station now led me to the lobby, which was still dressed up in its paper-products’ pseudo-cheer—a cheap veneer if there ever was one. Steve was waiting and mustered a smile as he got to his feet. He rushed over to grab the door for me, and we crossed the parking lot together in silence.

  The air was chilly, but the black, moonless sky was still not releasing any snow. This was only my third winter here in Colorado, and I’d originally envisioned the sight of Christmas lights on crystalline snow against a breathtaking mountain backdrop. Friends who’d lived in Crestview much longer than I had warned me that there is almost never any snow either on the ground or falling on Christmas day; with less than a week till Christmas, the weather seemed to be holding true to form.

  Relieved to see that my van—bullet holes and all— was still where I’d parked it, I muttered, “At least they didn’t confiscate my vehicle as evidence.” I turned to face Steve, his features cloaked in shadows, his hands buried in the pockets of his pea coat. “Do you know anything about blood types . . . how common they are, how they’re inherited?”

  “I just know a couple of random facts. O is the universal donor and, I think, the most common. AB is the universal receiver and the least common.”

  “Lots of people have type A blood, too, though, right? I remember that it’s the second most common blood type. And A-negative?”

  “I had a boring teacher in biology. I didn’t pay much attention. Why?”

  O’Reilly had made me feel like carpet lint. I couldn’t bring myself to explain how miserable this was for me. After eighteen months in her care, my genetic mother had chosen to give me up for adoption to “protect” me from her husband. Then she’d remained with “that monster” for more than twenty-five years. Wasn’t nature supposed to infuse mothers with an unconditional love for their babies?

  I unlocked my van. “It’s not important. Good night, and thanks for . . . everything.”

  He chuckled a little. “ ‘Everything’ would include . . . what, exactly?”

  “For keeping me company while waiting for the police. And escorting me here.”

  “Yeah. That was downright princely of me.” He headed toward his own van, three spaces down. “I’ll follow you home, just in case the goon with the gun decides to take another potshot at your van.”

  Not even a professional bodyguard could truly prevent some maniac with a gun—and surely not one with the skills to dot the i in Gilbert—from taking me out. “No, thanks. I’ll see you soon, though.”

  He pivoted and said over his shoulder, “Yeah. Great. Maybe next time we can really go for a classy evening and visit an emergency room together.”

  Once home, and after a perfunctory exchange of greetings with Audrey, who declared that she’d “decided to pack it in early tonight,” I dug through every item of personal effects in the box in my closet. Going through my mother’s things had been so painful for me immediately after her death that I’d never done a thorough job. I had some of her sheet music for the piano, although I couldn’t play myself, and now I was careful to go through each one, page by page. Yet there was nothing—no birth certificate, no records from the adoption agency, no enlightening photographs stashed between the folds of music. There were also no hidden compartments in her jewelry box, no magic potions stored in her perfume bottle, no answers tucked inside the pockets of the coral cardigan she’d worn so often.

  I shoved the box into the back of the closet, thoroughly annoyed with myself. I was now deliberately breaking the promise I’d made to Mom. I hadn’t actually sought out Myra and Randy Axelrod, but my poking around for clues among her things was undeniably by conscious choice.

  It would be so simple, now that I knew that I’d been born in this town, to call the county clerk and get a copy of my birth certificate. Detective O’Reilly was probably going to have that information in his hot, hairy hands five minutes after the clerk’s office opened tomorrow morning. Or had he already done so? Perhaps he’d been sitting with me in that miserable room, drumming his fingers, knowing a piece of fundamental personal information about me that I myself wasn’t privy to.

  With Hildi watching me from her perch on my bed, I began to pace, outraged at the unfairness of it all. What was next in store for me? Only this morning, the Crestview Sentinel had run an update to the murder investigation. The brief article was almost an exact duplicate of one they’d published two days ago. Was some nosy reporter going to break the story? So far, my name had been mercifully absent from all news stories on Randy’s death. Was that good luck about to end? Would I, along with this entire town, learn who my biological parents were from the newspaper, when it was revealed that the victim’s long-estranged daughter had called 911?

  Time was ru
nning out on me. It was either find out for myself once and for all who my parents were, or get the information crammed down my throat from a grouchy detective or the media. Despite my promise to my mother, it was now imperative that I find out once and for all who my biological parents were.

  Myra’s story just wasn’t adding up for me. If Randy had been this dangerous “monster,” why would she stay with him all those years, yet give up her child? The implication was that Randy wasn’t my father. But Randy had been the one to find me. Why would he look for his wife’s banished child?

  Maybe he was my father but Myra was not my mother. Steve Sullivan was right: I did look remarkably like Emily Blaire; or at least we certainly shared more physical similarities than Myra and I did. Not that that proved anything. I’d been told at least a dozen times over the years that I was a dead ringer for this person or the next.

  Myra had to have other old photographs of herself— pregnant with me, pictures of herself and me at the hospital maternity ward. I could ask to see them. And if that didn’t work, I would call the county clerk to get my birth certificate.

  The phone rang. The double-short ring indicated the call had been placed to my office number. Not wanting the shrill noise to wake Audrey, I answered quickly, and there was a pause. “Erin, hello. This is Jill McBride. I was expecting a machine to pick up. I didn’t realize you’d be at your office this late.”

  Forcing myself to sound perky, I asked, “What can I do for you, Jill?”

  “I have some decorating plans that I’d like to discuss with you.”

  If she wanted to bring me in after the fact to get rid of the mounted fish or redo Steve’s elegant design, she was wasting her breath. “Are you thinking of redoing another room?”