A Motor for Murder (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 1) (13 page)

That by itself was a compelling motive. That invention certainly seemed promising and might be worth millions very soon. Together with the forged check I found earlier, it made a pretty tough situation for the kid. But to think that he killed his chief investor, AND the husband of his sister, still seemed preposterous.

I kept rooting for the underdog, kept looking around, shuffling the papers and skimming them, looking for the missing piece. Feeling very confused. Even confronted by this additional motive, I didn’t want him to be the murderer – he looked so young, so geeky, so engrossed in his world of cars! But maybe it was for the sake of his engrossment into that world that he killed George.

Something still didn’t make sense if Roger was the killer. The murder could have happened some other day as well. Why chose the party day though, if one always lived at the house? A party would have multiple suspects with credible motives present. Also, loud music and lots of commotion. That also meant more possible witnesses, if things went wrong. But that brought to my mind a particular type of personality – risk-taking (the public manner of death, the body ending up in a pool with a crowd surrounding it, the possibility that the victim makes it out alive; as opposed to, say, one on one in a dark alleyway somewhere). That didn’t jive with my impression of who Roger was – a geek who preferred the online forums to a party, if his alibi was to be believed.

I should have thought of this sooner. If anything, such a public death indicated revenge, or a risk-taker, or a public personality – someone who might enjoy showing off, like Rita herself, or Caitlin. Or even Wayne, with his antique cars and the adoration he elicited for them. It didn’t seem to fit with my idea of Roger – but then again, he did drop out of Stanford, where we was apparently doing very well, to work on his brand-new idea. So yes, he could take risks...

And then I heard a clicking noise.

23 

When I lifted my head, the first thing I saw was a gun pointed at me from across the room.

“Stay where you are.” A man’s voice said.

I stopped, my heart almost jumping out of my chest.

John Sargent was standing in the room. The clicking noise I heard must have been him closing the door behind him as he came in. His gun was still on me, and he was squinting. In a moment of panic, I thought he didn’t recognize me.

“It’s me, it’s Veronica!”

He didn’t move the gun.

“Why did you come in here?” he asked. There was an edge to his voice. He didn’t sound like the polite gentleman he’d been in my previous interactions with him.

“I... I was bored downstairs, and decided to come up. I was just browsing around”.

“What were you looking for in the drawers?”

“I… I don’t know. I was just looking around. I thought I could find something interesting to... to read in George's office.” I wasn’t sounding very convincing to anybody. “I wasn’t looking to steal anything.”

By now, I expected him to lower the gun; at most – get his phone out, call the police and have me arrested for trespassing. But he kept looking at me. I might have imagined it, but his hand holding the gun was shaking.

And I wished the security camera in the office wasn’t off.

“John, it’s me. Please put down the gun.” He kept looking at me over the gun, and shook his head from side to side.

“Why?.. John?.. Please? ” My thoughts were turning into a jumbled mash in my head, and I was struggling to make sense of what going on. As my eyes swept over the lawyer’s figure in fear and confusion, one of the racing thoughts triggered another, and then another, and I held on to them for dear life as they dragged me to the conclusion. I suddenly understood what was happening.

“You did it. You killed George.”

That didn’t seem to have any visible effect on John. I had expected some change in his manner, not sure what – maybe diabolical laughter? Maybe a confession?

Instead, he said, almost with glee: “You can’t prove it. What motive would I have? I do not benefit directly from his will.”

“No, not directly.” As I spoke, I was feeling more confident in my words. “But George was essentially the owner of Roger's new invention. You were trying to advise Ba-Ele Tech Inc on intellectual property. You thought the new idea had huge potential, and you wanted to go forward. You knew that George wouldn’t let go of it willingly, even with that minor spat about the totaled Maserati between them.” I did not mention that I knew that George withheld the funding. “You though that with George out of the way Roger would do what you told him – meaning, license or sell it to someone for a lot of money. We are talking millions here, aren’t we? And that you would get a nice chunk of it, too.”

He smiled, baring his upper teeth. The smile sent a chill down my spine. “That’s good. But you won’t be able to prove it. Besides, why would I chose that evening to do it? What would trigger me to act? I am respectable public citizen, generally not prone to murderous impulses.”

I thought I knew what happened: John had forged a check to Ba-Ele Tech; George found the forged check when he was writing a check to Paul, realized that John did the forgery, and confronted John in his drunken state; and John, fearing exposure, disbarment and the end of his career, and seeing the opportunity to both silence George and get control of the promising invention, took it.

I did not want to tell him or show what proof I found, lest he would try to destroy it if I were to meet with an unfortunate end right now. Instead I turned my attention to a very urgent topic.

“What are you going to do? Shoot me right now? In broad daylight? Here in the office? That’s just stupid.” I put much more bravado into my voice than I felt.

“I could. I could say I mistook you for a burglar. Technically, you are somewhere where you are not supposed to be, ruffling through George’s papers. You broke in to his desk. And don’t you know that over 60% of burglaries occur in residential neighborhoods, and mostly during the day time, like those ads for security systems tell us?” His eyes narrowed over the barrel of the gun aimed at me, and I felt cold. Mentally, I was saying good-bye to my family, and to Bitty and reciting in my mind the provisions for her care that I put in my will after adopting her.

“Are you going to just shoot me in cold blood?” I didn’t want to believe it. “Is that how you killed George? In cold blood, when he was too drunk to resist?”

“You are trying to keep me talking. It won’t work.”

“What about Rita? She’ll hear the shot!” My voice was rising. I knew that it was highly unlikely that she would hear me scream with the door closed.

“She took a sleeping pill and she’s out cold. I don’t think she will hear anything. Regardless, I'll just feed her my burglar story. Those drawers were locked. You broke in, don’t forget. She’ll believe me.”

I was desperately trying to argue with him, as if by my debating skills I could convince him not to kill me. I was trying to extend my life, clawing for reasons against the rock of reality.

“This isn’t your house. Why would you go checking for burglars, with a gun, in someone else's house?”

“I was concerned about my client’s safety. She was a woman, alone, under tremendous emotional strain since the murder of her husband, and in no condition to defend herself.”

I swallowed hard and cast around for something in the recesses of my mind. The word “alone” sent the mental gears turning. There was no footage of me breaking into the office – but there was footage of me coming in, from the outside cameras!

“There are cameras outside the house, they’ll show that I walked in through the front door and that Rita let me in! And she would say that you saw me come in to the living room with her!”

John blinked. He did not think of that. I bought myself a little bit of time. Maybe I still had a chance.

“I would say I forgot you were still in the house. You told Rita you’d be in the home theater. I absolutely didn’t expect to find you in George's home office, in a different part of the house.”

His voice sounded tentative. Then, whatever he was thinking, he made a decision. He shook his head and raised the gun a little.

“OK, get moving. We are getting out of here.”

“What, you are going to shoot me somewhere else and then dispose of the body? The tape from the security recordings would still be evidence that I was here. And how are you going to march me out under the barrel of a gun in full view of the cameras outside? You are not going to get away with it.”

“I will come back and fix that footage. It would look like you left by yourself. C’mon, go!”

Given his involvement with a tech start-up – yes, it was plausible that he knew enough to doctor that footage in a way that a casual observer would not be able to detect.

I slowly and carefully went around the desk the towards the door, trying not to turn my back to John. He was circling the room as well so as not to get too close to me, not taking his eyes and his gun off me. I finally reached the door and turned to face the hallways, which seemed to be 40 years long all of a sudden. That made me think that another 40 years of life would be a sweet proposition right about then, something I may not get to experience. I kept walking forward slowly.

24 

I went thought the door way and several steps into the hallway.

And then suddenly heard a loud crash.

I jumped to the side and saw John in a heap on the floor. Rita, with a cast-iron pan in one hand, a picture of cool and toughness, stepped out from behind the door where she had waited to hit him over the head. I was too stunned to do anything but look at her. She bent down, checked that he was out cold and then pulled out a phone with her other hand and dialed.

“Hello, police?”

Before the police came, we spent several very tense minutes watching John, unconscious, on the floor. Rita held her pan and I held his gun, ready to tell him to not move until the police show up. And I had the presence of mind to ask Rita, before the police arrived, to corroborate my story: that the desk drawers were unlocked and that I had her permission to look at all the papers in the office.

The police came. John regained consciousness. They checked that he was OK, then put hand-cuffs on him and took him away. Detective Davis came over and took my statement. (I omitted the fact that I had in my possession the lock picks, as they are strictly speaking illegal for me to have by Washington state law.) The pan was taken in evidence, as were the files and print-outs on Ba-Ele Tech Inc that I dug up.

Several hours later, everyone else had left. The silence in the big house seemed endless. Looking around, it felt like all these events were receding into the past already, and I was trying to acknowledge them before they become ghosts and disappeared altogether.

After e-mailing, calling and texting Roger and leaving him a detailed message describing what had happened, we ordered in some Malay food and settled in to wait for it to arrive on the big blue sofa in the central living room. Rita was staring out into space.

“Thank you, you saved my life!” I said for the nth time.

Rita sighed. “I am sorry this happened. I got you involved in this, and you nearly got killed in my house.”

“Well, technically, I think John was planning on killing me somewhere else. And my own curiosity got the better of me here. You are not at fault at all.”

“I asked you to find out who killed George. You were doing this at my request. And I am very grateful for everything you’ve done.” She gave a weak smile. And then continued: “I kept thinking about the murder, all these nights when I couldn’t sleep. And then today, John became jumpy and seemed to be in a hurry to finish our conversation after you came in. But he was very insistent on me taking a sleeping pill right after we talked, saying that I needed to relax. So I knew that wasn’t because he didn’t want to keep you waiting to talk to me. I realized, just this morning, that he might have had a motive. So I told him I was taking the sleeping pill, and went to my room. And then I heard him move through the house – I assume he went to check the home theater, and then I heard him come upstairs, as if he were looking for something. I thought you might be in danger. So I ran to the kitchen on the second floor and grabbed that pan.”

She reached for a tissue and dabbled her eyes. “Involving you in this entire thing was my fault. You must have learned so much unpleasant stuff about my social circle.” I thought about some of the people I met over the last two weeks – the greed, the false facades, the obsession with status, the showing-off. “And about George. But he wasn’t all bad, really. He wanted to show off so much. He… he liked being able to do whatever he wanted. He liked buying people, you know?”

I nodded. “It sounds bad, but I can understand.”

“And he could be genuinely kind and helpful, and expect nothing in return. Like he was to Roger, giving him the chance to pursue his ideas. And he did help out Paul and Claire, even if he – we – did get something in return.” Her eyes welled up, and I put my arms around her. I felt tears burning my eyes.

After a couple of quiet sobs, she continued.

“And I’m disappointed in myself. I had become too passive, I was just going with the flow, swimming in my newly-found lack of financial worries. I sat back, and let him deal with the money. With all the obstacles, in fact. I had worked so hard earlier in my life to support myself and Roger, that it felt good to... just coast for a while. On the money, and the comfort, and the fancy gifts. And ignore the person that he was becoming. And I was becoming, I guess. And the people surrounding us wanted a piece of that money.”

She swallowed.

“When I met you at the farmers’ market that day, I wanted to show off my new life, my fancy house, my having everything. But of course I knew not everything in my life was perfect... And look, I did it again, tried to go along for a ride on someone else’s coat-tails: after George’s death, I asked you to investigate, sort of passed the responsibility to you on that. Got you involved into this whole mess, nearly got you killed. I’m so sorry.”

“No, you were in shock. You were a suspect, I was glad to help.”

After the food delivery came, I said over some roti canai:

“There is something I still need to ask. It is about the affair.”

Rita put down her fork.

“You probably figured it out. I suspected that George was having an affair, but didn’t know who with. I overheard them talk at the party, as Caitlin was screaming at him. I was almost angry enough to kill George at that moment. That’s why I made up the story of the therapy and the divorce lawyer – to create an illusion of some time passing between my discovery and George’s death. Because it wasn’t that far-fetched for anyone, even myself, to believe that I could kill him on the spur of the moment over the affair. I apologize for not telling you the truth from the beginning.”

“What are you going to do now, Rita?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t want to be here during the trial any more than I have to. The house seems so empty and enormous to me now. And sad. I don’t need this... Maybe I’ll move back to California.”

Around midnight, I finally headed home. On the drive back, sitting at a stop light, I burst into tears, that felt hot running down my face. Tears for George – an ambitious and driven (if not always moral) guy, done in by another’s greed; for Rita, betrayed and suspected of killing him; for all the victims of violence; for their loved ones; for Claire and Paul, and others, caught on the treadmill of trying to make enough money; and even John, caught on the same treadmill, running after some prize, coldly writing everything else off to collateral damage.

It was about money all the way through, after all.

I came into my doorway, and a little black cat ran excitedly towards me, saying “Meow, meow”. It meant: “Finally, you’re here to feed me dinner!” I scooped her up into my arms and gave her a kiss, burying my nose in her warm black fur. She squirmed, wanting to get to the food.

After she ate (first things first) and then jumped up on my lap, I told her the story of my day, explaining about going to work, and then stopping by the Ellis house, and there running into the real killer and being rescued by Rita. Bitty looked at me with her enormous serious eyes, as if she understood. I gave her another kiss on the top of her head. She sat on my lap and purred. It felt so good to be home.