Haunting Harold Read online

  But no, I wasn’t sure there was ever a good time to mention that. And if there was, this wasn’t it. “I guess you’re on call?”

  He nodded. “Would you like to explain what you’re doing here?”

  “I followed you through the gate,” I said.

  “More generally.”

  Oh. “I was following Harold.” Or planning to. “I’ve been tailing him for the past three days. Since Heidi hired me on Tuesday night.”

  Mendoza nodded. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was down on the road,” I said, “waiting for him to come out of the subdivision. I park around the corner, on this little stretch of road right there. I can’t remember the name of it, but if you go left, and then right at the stone wall, it’s right there. I was just hanging out, waiting, when I heard what sounded like a shot. Then the fire truck and ambulance came.”

  “Any reason you didn’t go inside with them?”

  Oh. “I… um… wasn’t exactly there anymore when they got to the gate.”

  Mendoza folded his arms across his chest. The sleeves of the gray sweatshirt were pushed almost up to his elbows, and the muscles bared were very nice. I’ve always enjoyed a good set of forearms. At the moment, I was enjoying them enough that I barely noticed the question. “Where exactly were you?”

  “It’s a long story—”

  “Then it can wait,” Mendoza said. “You’ll have to, too. I have to figure out what’s going on.”

  I nodded.

  “Stay out here until I tell you otherwise.”

  It wasn’t like I hadn’t expected it, but it was still annoying.

  Nonetheless, I tried to keep that emotion out of my voice when I told him, “Let me know if I can be of any help.”

  Mendoza gave me a jaundiced sort of look, and I added, “The way it looks, either my client or the guy I was supposed to watch is dead. I’ve known both of them for a decade or more. If either of them needs a shoulder to cry on, just let me know.”

  “If anyone’s in need of a shoulder,” Mendoza told me, “I’ll provide it.”

  He walked away before I could ask him what that was supposed to mean. Not that it was difficult to guess. If Heidi needed consoling, Mendoza wanted to be the one to console her. And if Heidi was dead, Harold was, I assumed, the main suspect, and Mendoza wanted to talk to him.

  I watched him exchange a few sentences with the couple of guys hanging out in front of the fire truck before heading up the steps to the front door and letting himself into the manor.

  It crossed my mind to, perhaps, approach the two firemen to find out what they knew about what had happened, but I thought there was a chance that Mendoza might have warned them not to talk to me, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I had, in fact, tried to do just that.

  So I stayed where I was, and looked around.

  The nearest neighbor was a football field away, over to the right and down. A Spanish-looking house with terracotta tiles on the roof—real terracotta—and creamy stucco walls. There was no sign of life, so either they were sleeping in—it was still fairly early—or they just didn’t care what had happened over here.

  On the other side of Chatsworth was an overgrown Cotsworlds-style cottage with a low roof. There was no sign of life there, either. Between the two was an ostentatiously thick hedgerow that probably blocked out any view between the two houses. It wasn’t hard to see where Zachary had been hiding yesterday.

  Would I have to tell Mendoza about that? That I had encouraged my employee to break into the Somerset subdivision?

  I probably would. But maybe not until he asked.

  The front door opened and Mendoza stood in the opening. He beckoned.

  I looked around. There was no one else behind me, and the two firemen weren’t moving.

  I raised my eyebrows and pointed to myself.

  Mendoza nodded.

  OK, then. I left the Lexus and trotted up the flagstone steps to the front door. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  He stepped aside. “Come on in.”

  I squinted at him. “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. You said you wanted to help. Now you can.”

  “Sure.” It must be Heidi who was dead, and now Mendoza hoped I’d be able to get something useful out of Harold.

  I stepped across the threshold and into the foyer. And looked around. “Wow.”

  The house in Hillwood has a nice foyer. I’m not saying it doesn’t. This one could have swallowed that one whole, and had room for more.

  Mendoza glanced up and around, too, and shrugged. I guess in his position, he’d seen all sorts of houses, from the most humble to ostentatious showplaces, and they didn’t faze him.

  This was an ostentatious showplace. No expense had been spared. The floors were Italian marble, the walls silk wallpaper, probably imported from France. The antiques were real, and the flower arrangement on the center table was grandiose.

  The whole effect was stunning, jaw-dropping, planned to the tiniest detail, and it held absolutely no appeal beyond being expensive and beautiful in a museum-like way.

  “Where’s the body?” I asked.

  It wasn’t soiling the marble of the foyer. The room was big, but not that big. If there’d been a dead body here, I would have seen it.

  Mendoza’s lips twitched. “This way.”

  He started across the expanse, the rubber soles of his sneakers squeaking against the stone. I followed, heels clicking.

  Beyond the foyer, we entered into an equally ostentatious dining room—silk walls again, old mahogany furniture, and a drippy chandelier that tinkled softly in the draft as we went by.

  Or maybe it wasn’t as we went by. Mendoza led the way into a large kitchen—more marble, acres of white cabinets—and toward the open door in the rear wall.

  The door led out to a flagstone patio surrounded by a low balustrade. Beyond it was a pool, and then a patch of lawn surrounded by bushes, and beyond that, an iron fence and the brush of the hill rising behind the house. The patio itself held a lot of plants in glazed pots, and a nice old wrought iron patio set: four chairs around a round table. Probably French.

  The body was sprawled on the flagstone, next to a broken mug and a large spill of dark liquid. Coffee, I assumed.

  Hysterical sobbing from over on the left drew my attention, and when I turned, I saw Heidi more or less collapsed onto the low stone wall encircling the patio, with a female EMT next to her, futilely trying to calm Heidi down.

  “I thought maybe you could do something,” Mendoza said.

  I shot him an incredulous look.

  He shrugged. “As you said, you’ve known her a long time.”

  I guess I had said that. And Heidi obviously didn’t want to cry on Mendoza’s shoulder. Or maybe he’d just been joking when he said that, and he hadn’t offered. Maybe he didn’t like weeping women. Or new widows whose husbands’ bodies weren’t even cold yet.

  Maybe that was why she was crying. Being rejected by Mendoza would have made me cry, too.

  I gave Harold one last look—there was a quantity of blood on his chest, and a tiny bit trickling from under his gray hair; he’d probably cracked his head when he fell—before I squared my shoulders and marched toward Heidi.

  * * *

  “Gina!”

  She saw me coming, and launched herself out of the chair and at me, blubbering. “Harold! It’s Harold.”

  “I saw,” I nodded, holding on to her. Her spine was bony under the robe, but her breasts were like squishy melons. No way were those real.

  The shudder that ran through her body was. “He’s dead.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She lifted her head and looked in my face. She even cried beautifully. Her eyes were big and luminous with tears, and one or two had run down her cheeks, but her eyes weren’t red and her mascara wasn’t running. “You know what that’s like. You’ve been through this!”

  I made a non-committal so
rt of sound. The situation had been quite different when Mendoza came to tell me that David was dead. The body had been elsewhere, not dead on my patio, and besides, David and I had been separated because David had been cheating on me.

  Then again, Harold may have been cheating on Heidi, too. She’d certainly suspected as much, hence my employment.

  She clung to my arm, weeping copiously. “I don’t know what to do!”

  “Why don’t we start by going inside and sitting down,” I suggested, “away from the body.”

  The paramedic looked relieved. And Mendoza nodded approvingly. Maybe he’d been trying to get Heidi off his crime scene since he walked in, and she’d refused to budge.

  I didn’t take no for an answer, just muscled her toward the door. She went, somewhat reluctantly. Just before we passed through the door into the kitchen, she glanced back at Harold and let out a keening wail. I grabbed her arm and held on, just in case she planned to throw herself on top of the body. Mendoza wouldn’t like that.

  But she didn’t. She passed across the threshold into the house. I nudged the door shut behind us before steering Heidi toward the other side of the house, where I assumed the bedrooms were.

  I wasn’t wrong. After a thirty minute walk—or one that felt like it, through room after room of priceless antiques and fabulous decorating—we ended up in the master bedroom, on the opposite side of the house. It sported a fairytale bed draped in gauzy white, with copious amounts of pillows and what I was sure was a goose down comforter with a silk cover.

  The walls were papered with climbing vines and roses, and over in the corner was a settee, something that wouldn’t be out of place in Jane Austen.

  The adjoining bathroom was all modern, though. I discovered that after I dumped Heidi on the settee and stepped back. “Can I get you anything?” Water? A stiff drink?

  “There’s Xanax in the medicine cabinet,” Heidi said, and waved a limp hand toward the bathroom. She had the other up over her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to look at the world.

  I arched my brows, since she couldn’t see me anyway. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Detective Mendoza is going to need to talk to you in a little bit. And I’m sure you want to be coherent when he does.”

  “Just do it!” Heidi said.

  I rolled my eyes, but did as she said. If she wanted a Xanax, and a doctor had thought she needed a prescription, who was I to quibble?

  The bathroom was marbled and fancy with a big jetted tub and a shower big enough for two. David had certainly managed to keep me in style during the time we’d been married. I hadn’t had any complaints. But the style to which I had been accustomed had nothing on Heidi’s. This bathroom wouldn’t have looked out of place in Marie Antoinette’s palace.

  I found the Xanax next to several other bottles of pills—a quick look showed me that Harold had been on medication for high blood pressure and middle age, or to put it more bluntly, he had a prescription for Viagra—and then I shut the cabinet door and filled a glass with water, and went back into the bedroom. “Here you go.”

  Heidi put the pill in her mouth and washed it down with the water. “Thank you.”

  She collapsed back against the settee like sitting up was too much for her.

  I looked around for somewhere to take a load off, but there was nothing nearby. After a second, I shoved the frothy bottom of Heidi’s negligee over enough that I could fit my butt on the end of the settee, and squatted there. The (otherwise spotless) negligee sported some small, dark spots along the bottom, that I didn’t notice until I’d pawed at the fabric, and then I looked at my hand to see whether I’d inadvertently touched blood.

  There was nothing on my palm. Heidi had noticed my reaction, though. “Coffee,” she told me. “I dropped the mug when I heard the shot.”

  That was certainly no surprise. “You should change,” I told her. “Mendoza will probably want to take your negligee in for testing.”

  Heidi’s mouth dropped open.

  “Sorry,” I added. “It’s routine when someone dies.”

  “Did he take your clothes in for testing when David died?”

  No. But I hadn’t been twenty feet away when David died. “He investigated me. I was the obvious suspect.”

  “Well, I certainly had no reason to want Harold dead!” Heidi sniffed, offended.

  “I didn’t want David dead, either. It’s just routine.”

  She didn’t move, however—maybe she was hoping I was wrong and she wouldn’t be considered a suspect, and I added, “What happened?”

  Heidi bit her lip, and tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, Gina! It was horrible.”

  “I’m sure it was,” I said. Heidi gave me a look, and I added, “I saw someone a few weeks ago who’d been shot in the chest. It was awful.”

  Heidi shuddered.

  “Maybe it’ll help to talk about it.”

  Heidi sniffed. I waited. Eventually she said, “We were having a lazy morning at home. It’s Saturday, so Harold didn’t have to go to work. We were taking it easy. You know.” She glanced at me from under her lashes.

  The goose down comforter was rumpled. I figured I did know.

  “After,” Heidi said, and paused delicately to emphasize the words she didn’t say, “we went to the kitchen for coffee. I poured Harold a cup and suggested that he could take it outside. It was such a nice morning. And soon it will be too cold for coffee on the patio.”

  It was a bit too cold today, if you asked me, but to each their own. “So Harold went outside.”

  Heidi nodded. “I stood at the counter pouring my own cup, and I planned to follow him, but then I heard the shot.”

  She shuddered again, less delicately The negligee fluttered, and her voice caught. “It was so loud. It sounded like it was right next to me. I turned to the patio door, and I saw Harold fall.”

  She hiccupped delicately.

  “Where did the shot come from?” I asked.

  Heidi shrugged helplessly. “I just saw him fall.”

  On his back, with his feet pointing toward the hill behind the house. Chances were the shot had come from there.

  “Did you see anyone?”

  Heidi shook her head. “Just Harold. I ran outside to him. I didn’t even worry about getting shot myself...”

  She trailed off, maybe just realizing what could have happened.

  “Good for you,” I said bracingly. “I take it nobody shot at you?”

  I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, and saw a glimpse of Mendoza appearing and then disappearing in the doorway. If I failed to elicit whatever information he wanted, he’d probably make himself known, but as long as I kept Heidi talking, I guess he’d decided to lurk in the hallway and eavesdrop.

  “Was it you who called 911?”

  “Yes,” Heidi said.

  “They got here quickly.”

  “The fire station is just down the road,” Heidi said.

  Of course it was. “Any idea who might have wanted Harold dead?”

  “That’s why I hired you,” Heidi said.

  I sat back, in a sort of instinctual rejection of the premise. “You certainly didn’t mention that the other night. If you’d given me any idea that you thought Harold’s life was in danger, I would have told you to call the police instead.”

  I got into PI work to catch cheating spouses. Murder investigations are above my paygrade.

  “I wanted you to figure out what was going on,” Heidi said. “That’s what I asked you to do.”

  Yes, but… “I thought you thought he was cheating. Not that you were afraid someone might kill him. I would have done things differently if I’d known that.”

  Heidi didn’t say anything, just sniffed. We sat in silence a minute. I waited for Mendoza to make his presence known, but he didn’t. Maybe he’d left again. Maybe he’d just wanted to know that Heidi was all right and being taken care of before he went back to work.

  Or maybe he was still outside in the hallway, taking notes,
just not letting us know he was there.

  I thought about what else he might want to know, and then scrapped what Mendoza might want in favor of what I wanted.

  “Tell me what happened yesterday.”

  Heidi looked blank, so I added, “Obviously Harold figured out that you’d hired me. Was he upset? Did you argue?”

  “Of course not,” Heidi said.

  “He didn’t threaten to divorce you or anything?”

  She stared at me. “Because I was worried enough about him to hire a PI? Don’t be silly, Gina. Of course not.”

  Of course not. If anything, yesterday had probably ended with some vigorous makeup-sex that would have assured Harold of Heidi’s devotion.

  “Any idea why he wanted me here this morning?” Was he going to fire me? Or hire me? Or have me assure Heidi, in his hearing, that there was no evidence of him being unfaithful?

  “I didn’t know he had invited you,” Heidi said.

  I nodded. “Last night. He called around nine, and asked me to be here this morning. Are you sure you can’t think of a reason why?”

  “I have no idea,” Heidi said. “He didn’t mention it to me. Or I would have made sure I had something for breakfast.”

  That made sense, anyway. “Did anything happen yesterday, other than that he figured out that you’d hired me?”

  “Nothing he mentioned,” Heidi said.

  I tried to think of any other questions I might have, or that Mendoza might have, and came up empty. I wanted to run Tara Cullinan’s name past her, to see if she recognized it, but if Mendoza was in the hallway listening, I didn’t want to do it now. So instead I asked, “Is there anything I can do for you before I go? Would you like me to call Gwendolyn? Or someone else? Your mother?” Did Heidi have one? “One of the neighbors?”

  She shook her head. “The lady over there—” She waved to the left, where the cottage was located, “hates me. And the people over there—” to the right, the Hacienda, “are out of town for the weekend. I’ll be all right. I think I’d like to be alone with my sorrow.”

  And with Mendoza, my mind added.

  “In that case,” I said, getting to my feet, “I should probably—”