A long pause followed. “I underestimated you, Harry. I promise you I will think about it.”
As Harry rose to leave, she noticed when Folly stubbed out her cigarette in a cut-crystal ashtray that it was a Virginia Slims. She would tell Cooper.
As they walked to the mighty double front doors, Harry said, “I am very sorry to upset you, but your welfare is so important, not just to me but to the entire community.”
“Who knows you’ve come to me?”
“No one.”
“Thank you for that.” Folly kissed her on the cheek.
24
The slap slap of the paintbrush provided a rhythmic counterpoint to Mike McElvoy’s staccato yap. Orrie Eberhard, applying the second coat to the rococo molding, said nothing.
“Emotional, rude, difficult—I mean, I can work with anybody, but she was a whistling bitch.” Mike slapped his clipboard against his thigh.
Orrie fought the urge to dump the bucket of Benjamin Moore paint right on Mike’s head. Some would have splashed on Cynthia Cooper, though, and he liked her, so he kept on doing his job.
“Show me the punch list.” Cooper reached for the clipboard, ran down the list quickly. “All right, Mike, let’s start with the kitchen.”
“Fine.” He thought he could blow his way through this, but her attention to detail was unnerving.
In the cavernous kitchen he pointed to the outtake-exhaust hole in the ceiling.
“Right. It says here that it needs to be widened by two inches.” Coop pulled out a little measuring tape and measured the hole. “Read the code last night. This is code.”
“Well,” he stammered, “she was bringing in one of those twenty-thousand-dollar stoves, and it needs a larger exhaust pipe.”
“That’s not what the code says.”
“Yes, but the county commissioners will change it soon enough, and she’d have to rip out everything. I was doing her a favor.”
“She wouldn’t have to rip out anything, Mike. This house met the code when it was built. To date, the building code has not been retroactive.” Cooper smiled indulgently, which further discomfited Mike. “All right, the disposal. Let’s have a look.”
By now he knew she was going to slide under the sink. He also knew he was sinking.
Two hours later, everything had been measured and written in her notebook, plus she’d snapped photos with a disposable camera, which she’d slipped in her shirt pocket. Cooper wallowed in damning detail.
“We’ve gone through the punch list.” Mike, no longer belligerent, wanted to get out of there.
He wanted to call his lawyer.
“Yes, we have, and you’ve been most helpful. I’m glad Jurgen will finish the house.” She looked up from her copy of the list, which she’d also written down while making him wait. Steely-eyed but quiet, she said, “I’ve kept you from your next appointment. Tell them it was my fault. They can call me if they want to do so.” She handed him two cards, one for him, one for the next poor soul building a house.
He read it, slipped it in his back pants pocket. “You still haven’t told me why you’re doing this. I know the general reason, but this crawl”—he emphasized “crawl”—“seems more than that.”
He used “crawl” in the old way, meaning she was crawling over him, not a crawl on a movie screen.
“We’re working with Bedford’s sheriff department. I know building this caused a lot of stress for Carla and for you. Have to dot the i’s and cross the’t‘s.”
“Well, I didn’t kill her.”
She chilled his blood when she said, “I hope not, but everyone is a suspect until we understand the motive. You were at Poplar Forest, and you’re on the list of those not at their table during the time of the murder.”
“She pushed Tazio Chappars over the edge. Motive enough for me.” He flared up.
“And convenient for you, too, Mike.” Coop needled him. “It takes strength to cut through the gristle and muscle of someone’s neck. Tazio, perhaps, could have sliced through, but I know you could have done it. You’re strong enough.”
His jaw dropped slightly. He looked at her, mouth agape, then closed it. “Wasn’t me.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I need to go.”
“Mim Bainbridge—Little Mim,” Cooper added. “You’ve written down the name and address as well as the date, September thirtieth, Tuesday. The page behind this punch list. You saw me flip it up. Give her my apologies. I kept you too long.”
He nodded curtly, closed the front door without slamming it.
Cooper admired Orrie’s work. “I knew a lady once named Orrie. Guess it’s like Dana or Francis or Douglas. Spelling may be different between the male and female versions, but they sound the same.”
“Sidney is another one. A lot of them when you start counting. I was named for my uncle.”
“Can you tell me anything about this job?”
“Beautiful house. No shortcuts. Best materials. Best architect.”
“From your observation, do you think Tazio could kill someone like Carla? Let me be direct: would she?”
“I don’t know about that.” Orrie wasn’t being evasive but truthful. “I could have killed Carla. She got right under your skin. Raised in a barnyard. No manners. Oh, she had them with people she thought were on her level or above her or she needed, but with the likes of me or Mike or Tazio, she was one hateful bitch.”
“I can see you’re a fan.” Cooper laughed. “How do you feel about Mike?”
“A piece of shit.”
“Well,” Cooper laughed again, “tell me how you really feel.”
“Never liked him. Known him all my life. I was standing on this ladder last Monday when Carla and Mike had their loud creative disagreement—is that the bullshit phrase? Anyway, they were back in the guest room, but I overheard Carla offer him money. She would have paid cold cash to get him the hell out of here, and he refused.”
“Of course he did, Orrie, he knew you were on this ladder.”
“Thought of that myself, later.”
“Think he put the squeeze on people?”
“I never heard any loose talk. On the other hand, he sure buys anything he wants.” Orrie carefully wiped the brush on the rim of the paint bucket, then laid it across the top. He climbed down the ladder to be level with Cooper and because he wanted to stretch.
“Cramps?”
“Get tight. Painting ceilings is the worst. I’ll keep that crick in my neck for days.”
“You’ve won the contracts for a lot of these new houses, haven’t you?”
“I have. We really earned our reputation doing restoration work. I started out with just myself and Nicky Posner. Now I have twenty people working for me plus college kids in the summer. Not good to brag, but me and the boys can do anything.”
“How come you’re here alone?”
“Most everything is done except for this last bit of trim work. Got a crew at Penny Lattimore’s—that’s an outside job; wanted to put another coat on the gardening shed. You and I could live in the shed. Another crew is out in Louisa County at a big place. I figured this would give me a few days of quiet. Course, I never expected Carla to be murdered. Still, it has been quiet.”
“Jurgen came out?”
“No. He called me and told me to keep going.”
“Your jobs—has Mike always been the inspector?”
Orrie fetched a blue bandanna slipped through the loop on the side of his painter’s pants. He dabbed his brow.
“Orrie?” Cooper waited.
“Sorry. Mike and Tony about even.”
“Is there as much acrimony when Tony’s the inspector?”
“No.”
“Orrie, if you think of anything that might be relevant to this case, no matter how trivial it might seem to you, please call.” She handed him a card.
“I will.” He slipped the bandanna back through the pants’ loop. “Don’t think Tazio did it, do you?”
“I found her standing over the body with a bloody knife in her hand. I have to go with what I saw. If I were Bedford County’s prosecuting attorney, I’d have an open-and-shut case.”