The Detective's Dilemma

Jester split another gauging look between them, accepted the obvious and shrugged. “I didn’t get much out of her,” he said baldly. “She just kept saying that Ms. Maitland called often, sounded mad and stopped by sometimes to shout at everyone. She couldn’t remember dates, and she kept apologizing, saying she didn’t want to hurt Ms. Maitland but couldn’t help it.” He looked at Beth. “She begged me to help you, says she knows you’re a good woman.” He addressed Ty. “I can’t help feeling that he’s got something on her.”

Ty looked at Beth. “What about that? You know any reason Ms. Velasquez could be coerced to give testimony against you?”

“It could have to do with Frankie,” Beth suggested.

“Her son?” Jester clarified.

“Yes. I know Brandon helped him enter the country once after he’d been deported. I don’t know how Brandon worked it. I just know that Letitia was weeping and thanking him one day. Her English was all jumbled together with Spanish, but it was all about Frankie. I know that.”

“Okay. That’s where we’ll start then,” Ty said.

“Maybe I should go with you,” Beth suggested quickly. “My Spanish is pretty good, and—”

“No.” It was a flat refusal, no room for compromise, and it hit her as patently unfair. It was her neck in the noose, after all.

“But—”

“No,” he repeated. “Officially, you’re still a suspect. I can’t let you tag along on an investigation. Jester will take care of the Velasquez question.”

“What about you?” she demanded.

He slid his hands into his pants pockets. “I want to take a look at Brianne Dumont’s background.”

“She had some socially prominent friends,” Beth pointed out quickly. “I could—”

“No!” Ty reiterated strongly.

Beth felt like a little girl being scolded for requesting a cookie. She shot to her feet, arguing, “They won’t tell you anything. They’ll speak more readily to someone they know.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just that I know these people. I know how their minds work. They’ll talk to me.”

“But not me,” he said, “because I’m not one of the club.”

“They’ll talk to me because they know me,” she argued.

“You’re one of their own, you mean!” he accused, jerking his hands from his pockets to snap up the folder on the table.

Paul made a sound that told Beth she’d overstepped, but she wasn’t sure how exactly. She glanced in his direction, then back to Ty. “Well, yes, if you want to put it that way.”

A flash of temper lit those midnight eyes. The mask slipped away, revealing his disdain. “I may not get my name into the society pages, but I know what I’m doing.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. You’re misreading me completely.”

“Leave the detective work to the professionals, Ms. Maitland,” he snapped. “Social standing doesn’t figure into this in any way.”

“I never said it did.”

“No, but you meant it,” he told her, striding toward the door. He threw it open and slid a scathing look over one shoulder. “I know exactly what you said and exactly what you meant. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have work to do.”

He was throwing her out. She considered, for a moment, digging in her heels, but a glance at Paul Jester told her that he wouldn’t recommend it. Another time then. Coolly, she snatched her purse and lifted her chin.

“I trust you’ll keep me informed, at least,” she said regally, sweeping toward the door.

“We’ll be in touch,” was the cool reply.

She meant to walk out without a backward glance, but she couldn’t do it, not after what had almost happened in this room only moments earlier. At the last second she stopped and turned, seeking his gaze with her own.

“Ty?” she said softly, imploringly.

For an instant, that icy disdain seemed to melt a little, but then he swept back the sides of his coat and parked his hands on his hips in a gesture of sheer implacability. “Go home, Ms. Maitland,” he ordered, “and let us do our jobs.”

Angrily, she whirled, fleeing a deep disappointment. But he was more than just wrong if he thought she was going to sit on her hands and wait for him to slowly dig up what she could uncover in a twinkle. It wasn’t the only thing about which Ty Redstone was wrong, but it was the one in which she was going to rub his handsome nose.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE DOLL-LIKE COUPLE smiled with practiced civility and murmured patent responses. Sitting side by side on their immaculate sofa in their immaculate home, they looked like magazine cutouts, perfectly groomed, perfectly dressed, and they did everything in tandem, including smile and politely evade substantiative answers to direct questions. With some inborn sense of protocol and timing, the husband politely checked his watch twice before bringing a firm end to the interview, if the efforts of Detectives Redstone and Jester could be called such.

More like a waste of time, Ty thought glumly as Jester aimed their nondescript, department-issue sedan toward the next address on their list. So it had gone for days now. The interviewees were interchangeable. The results as well. Nada. They hadn’t learned a darned thing. Brianne Dumont remained a cipher, a dead cipher, unfortunately. The answers to their questions were rote.

“I really couldn’t say.”

“I pay no attention to gossip and rumors.”

“One doesn’t like to pry into the private lives of others, you know.”

“We were friends, but casual acquaintances more than intimates.”

Brianne Dumont might have been a cardboard cutout for all the attention her “friends” seemed to have paid her. Undoubtedly she’d moved on the very fringes of the upper echelon of Austin society, but if she’d had another circle of intimate associates, they hadn’t been discovered yet. Her co-workers might have been more forthcoming than her so-called friends, but the late Mrs. Dumont had held herself aloof, letting them all know that they were beneath her consideration socially. Those listed in her personal address book and calendar were saying the same thing, albeit very politely, about her. The gist of it seemed to be, “She was around a lot, but we didn’t really know her and didn’t care to.”

As much as he hated to admit it, even to himself, Ty sensed that they were getting the royal runaround, just as Beth Maitland had predicted. What he wouldn’t give for one lousy scum sucker in the mix. That sort always had something to fear from law enforcement and so could be pressured, shaken, fouled up. These society types had money, prestige and respectability to fall back upon; they wouldn’t allow themselves to be intimidated by mere civil servants.

“Who’s next?” Paul asked, after flashing his badge and guiding the sedan expertly through the guard gate of one of the city’s more exclusive neighborhoods.

Ty checked his itinerary. “Name’s Giselle Womack. According to Dumont, she and Brianne were roommates for a short while after college until Giselle married.”

“Womack,” Paul said thoughtfully. “Hmm. Wouldn’t be any connection to Womack Industries, would there?”

Ty sighed. “Oh, yeah.”

“All this money in the world,” Paul said, shaking his head. “You’d think a little of it would fall on us, wouldn’t you?”

“Speak for yourself,” Ty said. “I don’t much like what money does to people.”

“Most of us don’t have that prejudice,” Paul quipped. “Personally, I’d like to see what a little of it could do to me.” He slowed the sedan and turned it off the broad, tree-lined street onto the pebbled circular drive of a large Italianate house in cream stucco and white marble.

Paul whistled. Ty groaned. “Does the term ‘exercise in futility’ mean anything to you?”