“And terrorize us,” Charlotte reminded Jordan stoutly.
“Arrest her!” Walters screamed at Darcy. “She assaulted me. And get me an ambulance right now! I need to go to the hospital.”
“He certainly is a distressingly unappealing man, is he not?” Hattie asked.
“Yes, my dear, he is,” Seavey replied gently. “He gives respectable criminals everywhere a bad name.”
Jase got to his feet and yanked Walters upright by his arms, which set him to wailing again when he landed on his ankle.
“Get her away from me!” he yelled, eyeing Jordan wildly while he held his injured foot in the air. “She’s going to kill me!”
Jordan looked at the baseball bat, seriously contemplating his suggestion. Then, with a sigh, she dropped it on the ground.
“Shut the hell up,” Jase told Walters, “or I’ll kill you.”
“Did you hear that?” Walters asked Darcy. “He threatened me! I don’t have to take that!”
Darcy rolled her eyes.
“How many times do I have to tell you,” Jordan snapped, “I didn’t steal your goddamn papers!”
“You did, too! You and Stilwell both thought you could make money off items that belong to me.”
Jordan gaped. “Why in the world would you think that? I didn’t even know what was happening until I found Holt’s body.”
“You and Holt were in on it together from the very beginning!”
“What ‘it’?” she asked. “You’re making no sense at all.”
“You planned to steal the papers, then find and sell off the items listed in them.”
“Do you even know what is in the papers?”
“Things that belong to me, that’s what!” Walters snarled.
“I beg to differ—items from the Cosmopolitan Hotel belong to me,” Seavey interjected. “This ill-mannered squatter has absolutely no claim to them.”
“Let’s not go there,” Jordan told Seavey.
“Go where?” He looked confused.
“Why not go there?” Walters retorted. “There’s no honor among thieves. You stole the papers from Stilwell, then killed him.”
“Okay, that’s it, you are officially insane. I had absolutely no reason …” Her voice trailed off as the clothing Walters was wearing—a dark hoodie and jeans—finally registered. “You broke into Holt’s house looking for the papers, didn’t you? And when I arrived, you shoved me down the steps, because you didn’t want me to know you were looking for them.”
Jase yanked Walters’s arms higher into the small of his back, causing him to yelp. “You shoved Jordan down concrete steps?” he asked in a deceptively soft tone.
“Jase,” Darcy warned quietly. “Give him to me.”
“Give me five minutes alone with him,” Jase growled.
“No.”
Jase held on to Walters a moment longer, then with a sound of disgust shoved him at Darcy.
“I did nothing wrong,” Walters sniveled. “I’m entitled to take back and protect what’s mine.”
“That refrain is getting old,” Hattie observed. “Can’t you encourage your friends to escort him off our property?”
“I’m working on it,” Jordan replied grimly.
“Working on getting away with murder, and blaming me for it!” Walters whined.
Before Jordan could point out the sheer idiocy of that statement, another patrol car and an ambulance pulled up, lights flashing. They were attracting a crowd—several neighbors had emerged from their houses, looking bewildered.
“I glimpsed a gun lying on the floor of the conservatory,” Frank told Jordan. “He must have dropped it when you hit him with the bat. I suspect it may be .22 caliber.”
“I’ll go get it!” Charlotte volunteered, sounding excited.
“No!” Jordan said hastily, envisioning a gun going off randomly. “Leave it alone; I’ll get it.”
“Get what?” Darcy asked, confused.
“He left a gun in the conservatory,” Jordan explained.
“I did not!” Walters yelled. “It’s hers, I’m telling you! How would she know it was there unless it was hers?”
Darcy sighed. “Leave the gun where it is. I’ll have one of my deputies bag it for evidence. We can test it to see if his fingerprints are on it.”
“I don’t own a gun, and I didn’t bring one with me!”
“We’ll see if it matches the bullet we pulled from Holt,” Darcy informed him.
“You know, I just don’t get it,” Jordan said. “Why are you so hell-bent to find those papers?”
“Oh, come on,” Walters sneered. “Everyone knows you and Stilwell were looking into the murder of his ancestor. And that you’ll do just about anything to solve murders for the ghosts in this town. But it’s bad for business, don’t you see? I need Seavey’s ghost to hang around—he brings in more than half my bookings! I couldn’t have either of you figuring out what happened, so that Seavey would have crossed over permanently, now could I?”
Jordan gaped at him. “You’re shitting me.”
“Good Christ!” Seavey remarked. “Does he really think I would cross over and leave my hotel in his hands, to be run into the ground? The man is truly delusional.”
Darcy rolled her eyes. “Well, congratulations, Clive. You just got yourself arrested for attempted armed robbery. And provided an excellent motive for why you killed Holt. You’re going away for a very long time, which means you won’t be around to worry about the bookings in your hotel after all.”
“Thank goodness,” Hattie said. “I certainly wouldn’t wish his continued presence on Michael.”
“It’s not robbery if I’m retrieving what she stole in the first place.” Walters’s tone was sullen.
“That’s not how it works, pal. I have two witnesses who can testify that you attempted to break into Jordan’s house, armed with a handgun.”
“She has six witnesses!” Charlotte corrected.
“You can’t testify in a court of law,” Jordan pointed out.
“Sure I can—why couldn’t I?” Jase asked, then clued in. “Oh, got it.”
“Got what?” Walters asked suspiciously. “You can’t talk like that in front of me. That’s entrapment!”
Darcy closed her eyes, obviously reaching for patience. “Why don’t you save us all a lot of time, Clive, and just admit that you killed Holt?”
“She killed Holt, I’m telling you!” he raged, spittle flying.
Darcy motioned to a deputy, handing Walters over to him. “Go with him to the hospital,” she told the deputy crisply. “After they set his ankle, move him downtown to a holding cell. I’ll be in tomorrow morning to take down his confession. Oh, and don’t forget to read him his rights. The good news, Clive, is that you’ll have plenty of time in jail to read law books and figure out how clueless you are about the justice system.”
“I’m not confessing to anything!” he snapped. “I want a lawyer.”
“In that regard, it appears that he is most knowledgeable,” Frank observed.
Chapter 19
AFTER her first good night’s sleep in two days, Jordan woke early and decided to take Malachi out to breakfast. Darcy had promised to call her as soon as she heard whether the ballistics for Clive Walters’s gun matched the bullet pulled from Holt’s corpse. If so, she hoped Walters would simply confess. Jordan didn’t have anything pressing until she was due at the marina at nine for the telephone interview with Bob’s historian friend regarding her sighting of the ghost ship. That left her with a couple of hours of rare peace and quiet in which to gather her thoughts and gain some perspective.