A Done Deal Read online

  Leaving my bag on the floor of the office, I headed back down the hallway to the kitchen. It took a few tries, but eventually I located what Alexandra had called the junk drawer. Like everything else in Maybelle’s house, it was organized to within an inch of its life. I have a junk drawer in my kitchen, and it’s a jumble of rubber bands, paperclips, screws and nails, a bottle opener, and a collection of Allen wrenches, to name just a few things. Maybelle had all of those things too, but they were sorted into little compartments in a plastic tray, neatly separated by shape and function.

  There were a couple of keys nestled together; one I recognized as another spare house key, one as a spare car key, and then there were a few others, which looked like they might go with the couple of padlocks in a separate compartment of the drawer.

  I spent a minute or two matching them. After that was done, I ended up with two keys that didn’t fit the padlocks, the house, or the car. Those I took back to the office with me to try in the filing cabinet.

  By now I’d been in Maybelle’s house for thirty minutes or so, and I was starting to get a little more comfortable. I shrugged out of my winter coat and hung it over the back of the desk chair. Maybelle didn’t live here, so she kept the thermostat set in the mid-sixties: high enough that the pipes wouldn’t freeze and low enough that the bills would be negligible. Too warm for wool. I’d probably start getting chilly in a little bit, but for now, it was easier to be without the coat. That said, I kept my leather gloves on. I had no reason to think that Maybelle would realize I’d been here, or that she’d call the police who would do a sweep and collect fingerprints, but it was just as well to be careful. The Nashville PD had my prints on file from when I found Brenda Puckett’s body, and I didn’t want to take any chances. The gloves made it a little harder to handle the small keys, but I decided it was worth the hassle.

  One of the keys fit the file cabinet drawer and I pulled it open, my heart beating a little faster. If she kept it locked, surely there must be something of interest in there.

  At first glance it didn’t hold anything of interest. Just more paperwork. A closer look showed me that the information was more personal than in the top drawer. This was birth- and marriage certificates, insurance payouts, and some additional medical information.

  Harold Driscoll had died of a heart attack, in his own home, with only his wife in attendance. He was 56, a good bit older than Maybelle, who was 39 at the time, and there was nothing sinister about his death. He’d left a million dollar insurance policy payable to his wife. I hadn’t seen a sign of the money in the bank folder in the top drawer, but there was more financial information here, including a few time deposit accounts and mutual funds. Between them, they accounted for the million plus some. Maybelle was very well off.

  She had been born in Florence, Alabama, forty three years ago. Her maiden name was Maybelle Hicks. She married Harold Driscoll four years before his death, right here in Nashville. But by then her name was Maybelle Rowland.

  I sat back on my heels. Was there a second husband, then? Or a first one, more accurately?

  Or had something else happened? Like, Maybelle’s mother—what was her name? I looked on the birth certificate again—Laura had divorced Bobby Hicks, or maybe Bobby had died, and then Laura had remarried and her new husband, Mr. Rowland, had adopted Maybelle?

  No way to know without further research, and there was no other marriage certificate, nor any adoption paperwork, in the drawer. There was, however, a combination printer/scanner/copier on a table next to the desk. I wandered over to it and opened the lid. Might not hurt to make a copy of the birth certificate and the marriage license, just in case.

  That done, I put everything back in the drawer and prepared to leave. There was nothing here. No evidence of anything sinister. No proof, or even a suggestion, that Maybelle had murdered Harold. No real reason to think she had.

  Sure, the million dollar life insurance policy made for a dandy motive. Maybelle was wealthy. But it wasn’t like she’d been suffering before. Harold clearly doted on his wife, as evidenced by the photographs in the dining room. He’d probably given her whatever she wanted. And if bad sex by itself was a motive for murder, Bradley wouldn’t have survived the two years we’d been married.

  I stuck the papers in my bag and shrugged on my coat. I locked the filing cabinet and turned out the lights and made sure everything looked the way it had when I arrived. I put the keys back in the junk drawer in the kitchen, including the spare key to the back door. If I took it with me, Alexandra would just have to make another trip over here to put it back, and it made more sense to just leave it now. If Maybelle came to check on the place and found the deadbolt unlocked but the key in the drawer where it was supposed to be, she might just conclude she’d been amiss last time she was here and had forgotten to lock up. It seemed the safest, simplest solution.

  I hitched my bag securely over my shoulder and opened the back door, making sure I had everything I had come with, and that everything looked the way it had when I arrived. Cold air rushed in. I flipped the switch on the handle behind me and pulled the door shut, waiting for the click that signaled that the lock had caught. And then I turned around preparatory to going back to my car and walked right into someone.

  I bounced back, and was grabbed by the elbow and steadied.

  “Miz Martin,” a voice said, and my heart sank all the way into my boots when I recognized it.

  “Officer Spicer.” I did my best not to let it show. “What are you doing here?”

  Officer Lyle Spicer and his partner, Officer George Truman, were the two cops who had responded to my call back in August when I contacted 911 to report Brenda’s murder. I’d seen them quite a few times since then. They were special friends with Tamara Grimaldi, my acquaintance in the Metro police department, and she often sent them on special errands for her. Whenever she wanted to talk to Rafe, which had happened a few times, Spicer and Truman were the ones she charged with bringing him in. As a result, they’d caught the two of us together on more than one occasion, sometimes doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, at least according to my mother.

  Clearly, this time they’d caught me doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. And not just in my mother’s eyes.

  “Gotta call,” Spicer said laconically, backing up a step after he’d made sure I was able to balance on my own. “Neighbor-lady called, said something was going on over here.”

  Damned nosy neighbors. I shot a glare over the bushes lining the driveway to the house beyond and smiled sweetly at Spicer.

  “It’s just me.”

  “Right,” Spicer said. He removed his uniform cap and scratched the top of his head through the thinning, ginger hair. “Whatcha doin’ here, Miz Martin?”

  “A favor for a friend,” I said firmly.

  “You and Miz Driscoll are friends?”

  “We’re friendly.” Sort of. “But I’m talking about Alexandra.”

  “Alexandra who?” Spicer wanted to know, while Truman just watched and listened. He’s no more than twenty two and still blushes when I smile at him. I did it now, just to see if it would work. He blushed.

  I turned back to Spicer. “Alexandra Puckett. You know, Brenda’s daughter? They live across the street, in the big Tudor. Maybelle’s engaged to Steven Puckett.”

  “The widower?”

  I nodded. “Alexandra was supposed to keep an eye on Maybelle’s place, but she forgot. And she can’t do it right now. So she told me where to find a key and sent me over to do it instead.”

  “Uh-huh,” Spicer said. “Where’s the key?”

  “I left it inside. In the junk drawer.”

  He arched his brows and I added, indignantly, “Surely you don’t think I picked the lock? Where would I learn how to do that?”

  “Couldn’t say,” Spicer said, and then added, “How’s Mr. Collier?”

  I swallowed the first and second responses that came to mind. “As far as I know he’s fine. I saw him l
ast night. He looked healthy.”

  “Uh-huh,” Spicer said again. “Back in town, is he?”

  “So it seems. And he never taught me to pick locks.”

  Spicer nodded. “So whatcha lookin’ for, Miz Martin?”

  “I told you,” I said, “I’m not looking for anything. I’m just doing a favor for a friend. You can call Alexandra if you want, and ask her. I’ve got her number right here.” I pulled out my phone.

  Spicer looked askance at it. And then we both jumped when it signaled. Truman smiled.

  “Speak of the devil,” I muttered.

  “Scuse me?”

  I held it up. “It’s a text. From Alexandra.”

  “Lemme see.” Spicer took the phone in one beefy hand. I read over his shoulder.

  On our way home. Everything go OK @ M’s?

  “See?” I said.

  Spicer sent me a sideways look. “How’d I know it’s from her?”

  “Do you want to call her? That’s her number right there.” I pointed.

  Spicer hesitated.

  “Would you like me to do it? She’ll tell you she asked me to do this. I swear.” I held my breath. I had no doubt that Alexandra would back me up, but I didn’t want her to have to do it in front of Maybelle.

  “No,” Spicer said eventually, “I guess not. If you say you’re just helpin’ out a friend, I guess that’s all you’re doin’.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But next time you might wanna knock on the door over there and tell’em your here. It’s one of these neighborhood watch neighborhoods. People look out for each other around here.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  Chapter 5

  Spicer and Truman backed their cruiser down the driveway and I followed suit. We drove together up the street to the big intersection with Gallatin Road, where they zoomed south towards East Nashville and I turned north toward Briley Parkway because it was in the opposite direction of the one they were going.

  That was close.

  In fact, if I hadn’t been lucky and it had been another pair of cops, I’d probably be on my way to jail right now. Handcuffed in the back seat of the cruiser.

  I shuddered, and the Volvo shuddered too, as I turned onto the ramp for Briley Parkway.

  I was home twenty minutes later, after making a sort of loop around East Nashville instead of driving straight through. After parking in the garage, I headed up to my apartment and booted up the laptop while I sliced a couple pieces of Brie to put on crackers, and popped the top of a Diet Coke. I’d skipped lunch in my hurry to get to Maybelle’s house, and I was starving.

  The phone rang while I was slicing, and I put down the knife to answer it, expecting Alexandra. It wasn’t.

  “Hi, this is Aislynn?” the voice on the other end said.

  Of course.

  “Hi, Aislynn. How are you? And Kylie?”

  “We’re fine,” Aislynn said, “Hey, d’you have any time tomorrow to show us a couple houses?”

  “I’m sitting an open house from two to four,” I said, tucking the phone under my cheek to keep slicing while I talked, “but other than that I’m free. Before or after?”

  “Um... before?” Aislynn had a tendency to speak in questions, as if she wasn’t quite sure she meant what she was saying.

  “Ten o’clock? Eleven? Twelve?”

  “Um... twelve?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Give me the addresses or MLS numbers of the properties you’re interested in, and I’ll schedule the showings and call you back.”

  She gave them to me, her voice rising at the end of each one. It gave the impression that she was asking me questions, as if expecting that I’d come up with some reason why she wouldn’t be allowed to see the houses.

  “I’ll call you back in a little bit to confirm,” I promised, and abandoned the Brie to get on the computer and schedule showing appointments for the next afternoon. That done, I gave Aislynn a call back to tell her where to meet me. Work accomplished, I returned to the Brie, and then the Brie and I returned to the computer to get some work done.

  Not real estate work this time. No, I was looking for information on Maybelle Driscoll, her husband, and her past.

  I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a whole lot of knowledge when it comes to cyber investigations. Membership in the realtor’s association allows me access to some information that the general public can’t get—for instance, how much someone owes their mortgage company and whether they’re at risk of foreclosure—but it’s all real estate related. Property tax records are public in Davidson county. I did check the records for Maybelle’s house and saw that she had been added to the deed a month or so after marrying Harold, seven years ago now. Before that, Harold had owned the place by himself for just six or eight months, after a quit claim deed removed someone named Carolyn Driscoll from ownership.

  A quit claim deed is something that often happens after a divorce. Whether Maybelle had been married or not before marrying Harold, it looked like Harold may have been married before marrying Maybelle.

  The house was paid off by now, I noticed. I guess that’s why Maybelle could afford to let it sit empty; she didn’t owe anything on it.

  Another property search, this time on Carolyn Driscoll’s name, turned up a handful of women by that name who owned property in Davidson county. I started to eliminate them, one by one. Three were married to men named Driscoll and so couldn’t be Harold’s ex-wife. Two had lived in their homes longer than Carolyn and Harold had been divorced. One had bought her house as recently as last year. She was a possibility; Carolyn could have rented for a while before buying another house, although renting for six years seemed a little excessive. Then again, I’d rented for the past few years myself, after getting divorced, so maybe I had no room to talk.

  The last Carolyn Driscoll lived in a stone cottage in Madison. Two bedrooms, two baths. The exterior looked very similar to Maybelle’s house on Winding Way. The interior layout—which the powers that be had supplied as part of the tax records—was also similar. And the clincher: she had bought it within a month of Harold’s marriage to Maybelle.

  I wrote down the address and the phone number, not quite sure what I planned to do with it, but at least now I’d have something to share with Alexandra when next we spoke.

  Now, for Maybelle and her changing last name.

  Her birth certificate said she’d been born in Florence, Alabama. I Googled the town and found their tax records, as well as their demographics and the name of their hometown newspaper, the Times-Daily. It went back a few years, and a search of their archives, on the name Maybelle Hicks, showed me that in the dark ages of the 1980s, Maybelle had been active in high school drama club. There was a grainy picture of her as Sandy in “Grease,” younger and thinner than now, in a poodle skirt and yellow blouse, with her hair in a bouncy ponytail.

  So she’d been Maybelle Hicks until her teens. That pretty effectively ruled out an adoption by a stepfather. Adoptions don’t usually happen once a child is that old.

  Marriage was more likely. If she’d married Harold at—I counted on my fingers; forty three minus three minus four more—thirty six, then she’d had eighteen years during which to get married and divorced before marrying him.

  I tried the Times-Daily announcements, but without success. If Maybelle had gotten married in Florence, there hadn’t been a wedding announcement published.

  When I married Bradley, mother announced it everywhere. The Sweetwater Reporter, the Tennessean and the Nashville Banner, the Natchez Sun and Democrat (where Bradley was from), the Savannah Chronicle and Morning News (where mother’s family was from), the Charleston Post and Courier, where I’d gone to finishing school... it was a major miracle that she didn’t take out ads in the New York and L.A. Times to announce the marriage of her lastborn.

  Of course, two years later, when I quietly divorced Bradley, there wasn’t an announcement anywhere.

  Would she announ
ce my second marriage? Margaret Anne Martin is pleased to announce the marriage of her daughter, Savannah Jane, to Rafael Collier...

  But no. Mother wouldn’t be pleased, and would not announce such an embarrassment publicly. Nor would there be anything to announce, since the groom was busy wining and dining another woman. Bastard.

  I abandoned the fantasy and dragged myself back to the case at hand. There was no marriage announcement for Maybelle. No divorce announcement either. But that didn’t mean anything. Lots of people get married without announcing it first.

  After a moment spent gnawing on my bottom lip, I Googled ‘public marriage records’ and hit Enter. In just a few seconds, a glut of websites appeared on the screen that promised to give me what I wanted. I played around with them for more than an hour, but eventually I had to admit defeat. I could get the records, but I would have to pay for them, and under the circumstances I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  So I did the next best thing and called my brother.

  Like my father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather, not to mention my sister, my brother-in-law, my ex-husband and the man who wants to marry me, my brother’s a lawyer. He and Jonathan, Catherine’s husband, run Martin and McCall, on the square in Sweetwater. Our great-grandfather started the firm, and Martins have run it ever since. When Catherine married Jonathan, their name was added to the window. I’m the only Martin of my generation who didn’t get a law degree. I started, but ended up dropping out to marry Bradley instead. And I don’t regret it, but there are times—like now—I wished I had access to the various databases and search engines that lawyers do. And that’s when having a big brother comes in handy.

  I dialed the number and waited while the phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times.

  “This is not a good time,” my brother’s voice said in my ear.

  “Nice to talk to you too,” I retorted.

  “Yeah, yeah. Can this wait, sis? I’m kind of busy.”

  I heard noises in the background, and not the kind of noises I expected. It was a Saturday night, going on seven o’clock by now. I figured I’d find him at home, hanging out with Abigail and Hannah. I expected the background noise to be the sound of a Disney movie.