“Good morning,” Rose replied. She set Elvis on the bench. Her blue and white canvas tote was over her arm and I hoped she had cookies inside because I needed some sugar. I caught a whiff of Mac’s coffee. And more caffeine.
“How are you connected to the woman who was found last night down by the waterfront?” she asked.
I frowned at her. “How did you know?”
Elvis walked over to Mac and poked his furry nose in the top of Mac’s coffee cup. I made a shooing gesture at him and he made a face back at me before sitting down and starting to wash his front paws.
Rose was looking at me. “I pay attention. And you and Nicolas aren’t exactly quiet when you’re talking.” She gave me a pointed look when she said “talking.”
Mac turned to me. “Nick showed up last night?”
“This morning.”
I waited for him to say something in response, but he didn’t. He set down the tiny screwdriver he’d been holding and turned all his attention to Rose. “The woman’s name is Erin Fellowes. She is—she was—my wife’s best friend. My wife’s name is Leila. She’s in a rehab facility in a coma. Erin came here to talk to me but I didn’t get a chance to talk to her before she died.” He paused. “And for the record, I didn’t kill her.”
Rose made a dismissive gesture with her free hand. “Well, of course I know that,” she said. “We’ll all meet at my apartment tonight at seven. I’ll make cheesecake brownies. You can explain everything to all of us at once.” She started for the shop. “I’m going to put the kettle on,” she called over her shoulder.
We watched her go. I realized that Rose had to have heard pretty much all of my conversation with Nick. She always said she had ears like a wolf. And the conversation on the ride over—Hitchcock, sexism and man buns—had all been a way to distract me.
Mac picked up the screwdriver again, turning it over in his fingers. He looked up at me. “I can’t let them get involved in the investigation into Erin’s death,” he said. “You know how much trouble it’s going to make. With Michelle and with Nick.”
I couldn’t help it. Maybe it was all the stress of the last twelve hours, but I started to laugh. “You’re not going to get a vote on that,” I said. “Give it up, Mac. Like it or not, the Angels are on the case.”
Chapter 4
Mac knocked on my apartment door just before seven. “I’m not so sure this is a good idea,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a gray Red Sox T-shirt and he’d shaved.
“Would you like me to repeat everything you’ve said to me about the Angels investigating a case?” I asked.
He smiled. “Okay, I get your point.”
I smiled back at him. “All the things you said to me were true. Rose, Mr. P. and the rest of the crew are good investigators.” Even as I said the words I realized how much I meant them.
I locked the door and we headed down the hall to Rose’s apartment. “Where’s Elvis?” Mac asked. “Shouldn’t he be sitting outside Rose’s front door waiting for us already?”
Rose was one of Elvis’s favorite people. She talked to him like he was a person and she always seemed to have a bit of chicken or a chopped sardine for him.
“He went early to help her get set up.”
“You’re not joking,” he said.
I shook my head. “No, I’m not. We got home and he followed Rose down the hallway. When I called him she turned around and said, ‘Elvis is going to help me get things set up.’ That was pretty much that. I didn’t get a vote.”
Everyone was seated around the table in Rose’s small kitchen—even Elvis had a chair. Rose got everyone settled with tea and brownies, then she turned to Mac, gave him an encouraging smile and said, “Go ahead.”
Mac’s forearms were propped on the edge of the table, his hands wrapped around the cup Rose had set in front of him. I could see the muscles tense in his arms. He looked around the table before he spoke. “I have a wife,” he said. He let the words sink in for a moment. Mr. P. didn’t look surprised, which told me Rose had shared what she’d learned that morning with him, but everyone else did.
I saw Rose shoot Liz a look. Liz glared back but said nothing—which was actually a bit of a surprise.
“Her name is Leila,” Mac continued. “A couple of years ago we bought a house, an old one, and we were working on renovating it on the weekends and paying to have some things done, too.” I saw a brief smile flash across his face at the memory. “We’d been having problems with the old furnace and the water heater and we’d decided it made more sense to just have the whole HVAC system replaced.”
His voice was calm and steady but his hands were squeezing his cup so hard the skin was stretched tightly across his knuckles.
“I was out of town on business and Leila was sleeping in a room downstairs that we were eventually going to turn into a den. She’d made a makeshift bed on the sofa that was in the room, because of the smell of varnish on the hardwood floors on the second floor. And it was colder up there, too, because of the issues with the furnace.” He glanced down at his cup and swallowed. “I wasn’t supposed to be back until the next morning but my meetings finished early and . . . and I wanted to get home. It was just after two a.m. when I got there. I didn’t want to wake her up because she’d had a cold and she’d been having trouble sleeping. So I went to sleep in our bedroom upstairs. I opened the window a crack and I kept the door shut against the odor. I didn’t mind the cold.” He stopped, raised his head and looked around the table again. I could see the pain in his eyes and the tight lines around his mouth. “I found her unconscious when I got up about five o’clock. Carbon monoxide. She’s been in a coma ever since.”
Liz pressed her lips together. Charlotte reached over and gave Mac’s arm a gentle squeeze.
“The police suspected you,” Mr. P. said. I could see the concern in his eyes. He was a bald and bespectacled little man, whip-smart, with a generous heart and the computer skills of a dark Webmaster.
Mac nodded. “Yes. The hot water heater turned out to be the source of the carbon monoxide. It was old, like everything else in the house, and it was leaking just enough that the heater didn’t shut off, trying to keep the water hot enough. Plus it turned out there was a problem with the flue pipe that vented the heater. The opening was blocked outside and there was a very small gap between two sections of the ductwork.”
Mr. P. glanced at the rest of us. “It would have been the same as if a car engine had been left running in a closed garage for several hours.”
“Why did the police suspect you?” Rose asked. “Was it just because you were Leila’s husband?”
Mac pushed the cup away and shifted in his seat to face Rose, who had taken the chair to his right. “That was part of it. The spouse being the bad guy became a cliché for a reason after all. But that’s not the only reason. Leila was—is a beneficiary of a trust set up by her great-aunt. The other beneficiary is her cousin, Stevie. For now, they each receive a monthly payout from the interest earned, but on Leila’s thirty-fifth birthday, which is just a few months from now, she’ll receive half of the trust just as Stevie will a bit more than a year from now when she turns thirty-five. If Leila dies before her birthday, all the money in the trust will go to Stevie.”
“What happens to the money if Leila dies after her thirty-fifth birthday?” Mr. P. asked, adding a bit of milk to his tea. “I’m assuming it goes to her next of kin, which is you.”
“It does,” Mac said. “And yes, I know how bad that looks.”
“If you were going to kill your wife for her money I think you would have been smart enough to wait until she actually had it,” Liz commented, raising an eyebrow at him. She was elegantly dressed in a cream-colored shirt and a pink-and-yellow-flowered skirt. Her blond hair looked like she’d just left a stylist’s chair—which she probably had—and as usual she was wearing ridiculously high stiletto heels, which would have left me with a broken ankle if I’d had them on for very long.