Eddie shrugged. “Nobody I know.”
The radio in Eddie’s police car crackled. So did the one on his shoulder. He flicked a button and listened to his headphones.
“They found Zeb’s pickup in the Embry lot,” Eddie told me. “Nobody’s there, though. . . .” He made a sour face. “Chief Ciders is on his way.”
“What the hell happened to my truck!” Seymour cried, hands on his head. “I just had it repainted!”
Seymour raced out into the street. Eddie and I ran to intercept him. At that moment, the paramedics lifted the stretcher and moved toward their ambulance. They weren’t in a hurry, and with the ghastly amount of blood on the side of Seymour’s truck I could understand why.
“Wait!” I cried. “I have to know!”
Eddie nodded. He reached down and gingerly pulled the white sheet away from the victim’s face.
Even in the flickering scarlet light and the blood-flecked cheek, I could make out the young man’s features. The corpse on the stretcher was Josh Bernstein.
CHAPTER 20
The Girl in the Frame-Up
Pinning a frame on an innocent dupe is the cheapest, low-down dirtiest swindle of them all. Only a third-rate miscreant would do it, the kind of bum who’s lookin’ to earn two slugs through the girdle.
—Jack Shield in Shield of Vengeance by Timothy Brennan, 1958
IT’S A FRAME job. And pretty as a picture, too, with Deirdre trimmed to fit. But the charges are smoke and the case is a Tower of Pisa—it’s shaky and not on the level.
The Quibblers’ meeting was over, the mess from the “accident” outside mopped up. Spencer had arrived home from his cousin’s Newport birthday bash via the McClures’ chauffeur—mercifully after evidence of the tragedy was gone. He was so tired, I put him straight to bed. Sadie had retired, too. Now I was alone in the store, listening to interior dialogue courtesy of Jack Shepard’s ghost. He would not stop badgering me on the subject of Deirdre Franken.
If you don’t do something, an innocent kid is going to walk that last mile to the electric chair.
“The electric chair? You’re living in the past. Almost nobody goes to the chair these days.”
Maybe that’s what’s wrong with this Coney Island geek pen of a “modern” world you live in. Too many square johns take it on the chin and too few grifters get what’s coming to them.
“Listen, Jack, I’m not comfortable with anything that’s happening. I know Deirdre Franken is innocent. But what do you propose I do? Go to the State Police and tell them the ghost haunting my bookstore insists that Deirdre has been framed and the evidence planted? They’ll either think I’m crazy or they’ll think I’m guilty. And I’m not ready to make my son a de facto orphan, either way.”
But you can do something.
“What?”
You can solve this yourself and find evidence they will believe.
“How, for heaven’s sake?”
Use your head, for starters. Trace the murder weapon backward. Frankly, I can’t think of a bigger flimflam than putting water in a bottle and charging money for it, but that’s the grift on the table, so where did those bottles of H 2 O come from, anyway? Who had access to them—before you opened up the joint to the general riffraff, that is?
“The bottled water came from Koh’s Grocery. Mr. Koh’s son delivered two cases on the morning of the event. The cases were shrink-wrapped and well sealed. I had to use a knife to cut through the thick plastic. One of the last things I did to prepare for the event was pull the bottles out and arrange them on the goodies table.”
All right. Suspect one: the grocer. We can eliminate him because I doubt your Chinese pal had a motive—
“Mr. Koh is Korean.”
I don’t care if the guy’s Samoan. Who had access after that?
“You’re not going to like the answer,” I replied. “Deirdre had access. Deirdre and her husband, Kenneth. They were moving the tables around because Brennan didn’t like the setup for the cameras . . .”
I slapped the table. “Hey! What about the two cameramen?! Brennan was very rude, pushing them around. And they sold the footage after the murder angle broke. Those are good motives, aren’t they?”
Rude works mainly for assault and battery beefs. People die because they’re rude to a guy with a gun or a knife in a gin joint or crap game—not in a bookstore.
“But they benefited financially from the crime.”
So let me get this straight. You figure one of those spool-junkies spiked Brennan’s fancy tap with peanut oil, on the off chance that he’s allergic, that he’ll get hinkey in front of the cameras, do the danse macabre, then croak deader than vaudeville?
“Okay, maybe that’s not the best scenario,” I told him with a sigh.
Go back again to the night of the murder. Take it step by step, from the moment the happy author arrived.
“Brennan didn’t like the setup, so he bullied Deirdre and Kenneth to move the tables around. Some of the water bottles tumbled to the floor, and Deirdre picked a few up. So did Kenneth.”
What about our other suspect? Miss Priss?
“Shelby Cabot? I had to leave the events room, so I didn’t see what happened next, but I doubt she lifted a finger. She’s not the type.”
And yet Miss High-and-Mighty showed up yesterday, in the middle of the night. And a rainy night, too, risking ruination of the hair and makeup. She served you up some insult for a midnight snack, and then she left.
“That’s right. Doesn’t make much sense. I mean, her affair with Kenneth Franken was obvious from the conversation I’d overhead, but I never did stop to figure out why she’d come by in the first place—”
Yeah, and he just happened to show up right after she arrived, don’t forget that.
“What are you getting at?”
He followed her. Maybe because he was helping her tie up some loose ends.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed. “Last night, when Shelby came here, she asked to use—”
The ladies’ john—to “freshen up.”
“I didn’t get suspicious because she’d asked to use the one upstairs—”
Misdirection, babe. Made her appear innocent. Oldest trick in the book.
“Did you see what she did in there?”
No, I stuck with you. Franken was with you at the time, and I wanted to hear what he had to say.
“I remember Shelby was pale when she came back from ‘freshening up.’ She seemed nervous, too.”
Because she didn’t find what she was looking for. Josh Bernstein had already snatched it.
“I don’t know, Jack, this is going to be awfully hard to prove—”
Suddenly a wave of raw emotion washed through me, and I reeled, grabbing the counter to steady myself against what felt like the wind being knocked out of me.
We can’t let this frame-up artist get away with murder—twice. You and I know that hit-and-run tonight was no traffic accident. Brennan is dead. Brennan’s daughter is innocent. And some peach-faced kid ended up as roadkill, maybe because he tumbled onto his boss’s and her lover’s plan and was ready to dish dirt to the cops.
I took a deep breath, not sure whether I was more shaken up by Jack’s reality check or the intimate rush of his intense emotions.