A Whisker Оf Trouble

Chapter 15

I walked back downstairs with Mr. P. “Sarah, what exactly do you know about Ronan Quinn?” he asked.

“Well, he was extremely knowledgeable about wine. He had the designation of Maître Sommelier from the Union de la Sommellerie Française. And he’d been an expert witness in several court cases.”

“I don’t suppose Nicolas has said anything to you about the man?”

“Where are you going with this?” I asked, leaning back and studying him. He might have looked like an unassuming little old man, but there was a sharp intellect underneath his mild expression.

“I’ve just been thinking, what exactly do we know about Mr. Quinn’s character?”

“Are you asking if he was like Caesar’s wife?” I teased.

His eyes twinkled behind his glasses. “Above reproach?” he said. “Yes. I guess that is what I mean.”

“You’re thinking maybe he wasn’t?” We were stopped in the middle of the store.

Mr. P. looked thoughtful. “I’m not exactly sure, my dear,” he said. “So if this sounds off-the-wall, I won’t be offended by you pointing it out.”

“I somehow doubt anything you’re going to say will be off-the-wall,” I said. For the most part Alfred could be counted on to be the voice of reason, especially when Rose got her mind set on something. “What are you thinking?”

“We know that Mr. Quinn was also a broker, a dealer who sold wine to collectors.”

“Yes.”

“And we know that he was investigating the con artists who had defrauded Edison Hall and other people.”

I nodded.

Mr. P. cocked his head to one side. He reminded me of an inquisitive baby bird. “What if everyone is wrong about Mr. Quinn?”

I rubbed the space between my eyes. I was beginning to get a headache from trying to follow Mr. P.’s reasoning. “What do you mean by wrong?”

“Well, not to speak ill of the dead, but what if he got involved in the fraud investigation to protect himself? Do you see where I’m going?”

I reached over and straightened the pillows on the nearby tub chair. “I do,” I said. “You think that maybe Quinn could have been part of the original con. That maybe he was involved in some way with selling those fake bottles of wine.”

Mr. P. nodded. “We’ve all been assuming he was completely aboveboard.” He held up one veined, wrinkled hand. “And maybe he was.”

“But maybe he wasn’t,” I finished. I pointed to the photo Alfred was still holding. “So how does Thorne Logan tie in to this? You do have a photo of him talking to that woman who seemed to be promoting exactly the kind of thing Edison ended up losing his money in.”

“What if Mr. Logan is the one in the white hat?” Mr. P. asked. “What if he was talking to that woman because he was trying to get more information about the con? What if he wasn’t part of it at all?” He held up the photo. “What if he was trying to catch the people who were? He was at Feast in the Field twice and he tried to buy a bottle from Edison Hall’s collection. We’re just assuming he’s part of the con. That doesn’t mean he is.”

It didn’t seem like a good time to point out that I hadn’t assumed anything. “I don’t know,” I finally said.

It was far-fetched. But there was also a vein of logic that ran through the old man’s reasoning. I pulled a hand over the back of my neck. The headache had crept up over the top of my scalp. “I can’t tell you you’re wrong.”

“I think it’s worth doing a little more digging into Mr. Quinn’s background,” Mr. P. said.

I let out a slow breath. “I think it is.”

He smiled. “I’ll let you know what I find out.” He headed for the sunporch, moving quickly like a man with a purpose, which in fact he was.

Charlotte walked over to me. She held out a blue message slip. “Someone from Seaward Properties called. They want some measurements off the chandelier from Doran’s.”

She was referring to the chandelier that Mac and I had brought into the shop. It had once been the focal point of the Portland department store. I’d bought it back in the fall along with several mannequins and a few other things. It had almost been sold twice.

I held up my crossed fingers. “Maybe third time’s the charm.”

“Oh, I hope so,” she said. “I hate to think of that beautiful old piece ending up out of the state or even worse.”

“Not going to happen,” I said. “I think Mac’s made the sale, but if we can’t find a home for that light here in town, I’ll twist Sam’s arm until he lets me hang it down at The Black Bear.”

Charlotte laughed. “I think a chandelier is just what that place needs.”

I went up to my office and called the Seaward office. We set up a time for someone to come take some measurements.

Elvis had come back upstairs while I was on the phone, settling himself on my desk directly in front of the phone so that when I went to hang up I had to reach around him to do it.

“Mrr?” he said in what seemed—at least to me—to be an inquiring tone.

“If this newest development proposal actually goes ahead”—I held up my crossed fingers—“we may finally have a home for that big brass chandelier.”

His response was to yawn.

“You may not be impressed, but I thought I was going to have to coerce Sam into hanging it down at the pub.”

I looked at my watch. “Mac and Rose should be back anytime now,” I said to the cat. His ears twitched and he lifted his head to look around.

I wondered what Rose would think of Mr. P.’s new line of inquiry.

Then in some kind of unexplainable thinking process, my brain lined up the last things I’d said to Elvis. When I didn’t immediately say anything, he nudged me with his furry head.

I reached over to stroke his fur. “I’m stupid,” I said to him.

He murped softly.

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I said, “but I am. We could have called Sam.”

Elvis blinked his green eyes at me. He had no idea what I was talking about.

Sam knew everyone and he ran a bar. The odds of him knowing someone who knew someone who could tell us more about the two wine dealers had to be good. I didn’t know Ronan Quinn, but I wanted the person who had killed him caught. And I wanted the person who had scammed Edison Hall caught. I wanted whoever it was to pay—hopefully financially so Ethan’s wife, Ellie, could have that operation she needed. I liked it when the world was fair, when the bad guys got what was coming to them. Even though it didn’t always happen, I wanted it to.

Sam answered the phone on the third ring. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

“I need to pick your brain,” I said. I leaned back in the chair and Elvis took that as an invitation to climb down and settle himself in my lap.

Sam laughed. “Whatever I have is yours.”

“What do you know about wine?” I asked.

“Box or bottle?”

I laughed. “Very funny.”

“I’m more of a beer guy, but I like a good California merlot,” he said. “Does that help?”

“I was thinking about something a little more high-end,” I said. I explained about Ronan Quinn.

“That’s the guy whose body you found at Edison Hall’s old place.”

Elvis laid his head on my chest and I began to stroke his fur. “That’s him. We’d like to know a little more about him. Do you maybe know someone?” I didn’t finish the sentence.

“We?” Sam said.

“Stella Hall hired the Angels to look into Quinn’s death. She thinks it might be connected to all those bottles of wine that Edison bought that turned out to be worthless.”

“So you’re in the detective business again?”

I could picture him behind his own desk in his office, feet propped on the corner of the desk.

“No, I’m helping, that’s it,” I said. I leaned back a little in my chair and Elvis gave a small sigh of contentment. “I like Stella.”

“So do I,” Sam said. “I can think of a couple of people I can call. Can you give me some time?”

“Take all the time you need,” I said. “I appreciate this. Thank you.”

“Hey, I’m happy to help.”

I pictured him smiling because he was the type of person who really was happy to help anyone.

We said good-bye and I leaned over and hung up the phone.

“Sam is on the case,” I told Elvis. He started to purr, which probably had more to do with the fact that I was scratching behind his right ear than his enthusiasm for Sam’s help, but I decided to rationalize it as the latter anyway.

I spent the next hour downstairs in the shop helping Charlotte with customers. We sold another guitar, a wooden rocking chair and a bread pail. Charlotte spent several minutes explaining the bread-making process to the young man who bought the pail, even writing out her favorite recipe on a piece of paper.

I put my arm around her shoulders once we were alone in the shop. “I’m so glad you were here,” I said. “The only thing I could have told him about bread was to read the best-before date on the little plastic tag before you buy it.”

Charlotte shook her head, smiling at the same time. “You can’t use that ‘I can’t cook’ line anymore. Your gravy last night was very good.”

“It came from a package.”

“So does my angel food cake,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with using some shortcuts.”

“True,” I said. “But you make the strawberry/rhubarb sauce. You even grow the berries and rhubarb yourself.”

She smoothed the front of her apron. “And at Thanksgiving I chopped a few dried-up leftover cranberries from the bottom of my vegetable crisper, microwaved them with half a bottle of marmalade that was in the gift basket I won at the animal shelter fund-raiser and added what juice I could squeeze out of half a wizened lemon, and you all thought I spent half the afternoon in the kitchen.” She smiled at me. “Things are seldom as perfect as they appear, and that includes cooking.”

I was at the workbench taking the paintings I’d bought from Cleveland out of their frames when Sam called back.

“Linda Fairchild,” he said, reciting a telephone number. “She’s a lawyer in New Hampshire—Manchester, I think—and she’s been involved in a couple of civil lawsuits over all this fake wine business. She’s expecting your call.”

I leaned against the workbench and pushed my hair back out of my face with one hand. I should have called Sam much earlier. I’d had no idea it would be so easy. “Thank you,” I said. “I owe you big-time.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” he said. “You owe Vince, although I don’t think you need to give him a kidney or anything. I think if you buy him a beer next time you see him, he’ll call it square.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Vince? Vince Kennedy?”

“How many other Vinces do you know?” Sam asked.

“Uh, none, but I didn’t know he knew anything about wine.”

I heard the creak of Sam’s old desk chair. “Neither did I, but it turns out he actually knows a little. And more important, he knows a lot about playing guitar.”

“And the two are connected, how?”

“Vince put some learn-to-play-guitar videos up on YouTube. They’ve turned out to be pretty popular. This lawyer found them, thought they were great and got in touch with Vince to say thank you. They struck up an online friendship and maybe a little more. He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. I know they’ve met in person several times.”

“I had no idea Vince was seeing someone,” I said. “Let alone a lawyer.”

Sam laughed. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure how much of her he’s seen and I don’t think I really want to know.”

“You and me both,” I said. “Tell Vince thank you and I’m buying next time I see him.”

“I will, kiddo,” Sam said. “I hope you get what you need.”

I had scribbled down the phone number on the back of an old envelope that Mac had left on the workbench. Sam had said the lawyer was expecting my call. Mr. P. would say “no time like the present.”

I decided this was a call best made from my office. I went back into the shop. “Can you handle things here for a little while?” I asked Charlotte. “I need to make a phone call.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Rose and Mac are on their way back and I can always get Avery to come in if I need help.”

I called Linda Fairchild’s office and when I gave the receptionist my name I was put directly through to her office.

“Hello, Sarah,” she said. “Vince said you have some questions about Ronan Quinn.” She had a warm, husky voice. I knew Vince well enough to know he would have been intrigued by the woman the first time he heard her speak. He wasn’t the first musician I’d met to have a thing about voices.

“I do,” I said. “I appreciate you talking to me.” I explained how we were clearing out the house for Stella and how all of Edison’s savings had gone into his wine collection. And I told her about Ellie’s need for surgery without going into too many details that would violate her privacy.

“I don’t mean to make it sound like some hokey old movie in which the widow with the six kids is going to lose the farm unless everyone pulls together and puts on a show,” I said. “But I know the family was hoping Mr. Quinn would be able to put together enough of a paper trail for them to go after the people that defrauded Edison Hall.”

“I’m sorry,” Linda Fairchild said. “Ronan told me about Mr. Hall’s wine collection. I’ve heard stories like that before—and worse. But it could take years for a lawsuit to move through the courts and there’s no guarantee the family would end up with anything. These people can be very . . . creative at hiding their money. I’m surprised Ronan didn’t explain that.”

“Maybe he did,” I said. “I didn’t ask a lot of questions.” I hesitated. I wasn’t sure how to ask her if there was any chance Quinn had been involved in any sort of scam. I settled for asking her what kind of person the man had been.

“Ronan was a straight arrow,” the lawyer replied. “He was the kind of person who did what he said he would do when he said he would do it.” She went on to talk about how much work Quinn had put into building the case that she’d taken to court. “In that case we were able to get some money for the woman who had been defrauded. And now the police are looking at bringing criminal charges against the two people involved. They didn’t sell any wine to Mr. Hall, by the way.”

I flashed to the image of Ronan Quinn’s body on the kitchen floor of the Hall house. I had the feeling I would have liked the man. And I also had the feeling that Mr. P. was on the wrong track.

“So he was one of the good guys?” I said.

“He was.” Now it was her turn to hesitate. “Sarah, are you thinking that Ronan might have been involved in something illegal?” she asked, almost as though she’d read my mind.

“That was a possibility,” I admitted. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, but from what you’ve said, he just doesn’t sound like that kind of person.”

“He wasn’t. I worked with the man for months and I can promise you that all he wanted was to catch the bad guys. He wasn’t one of them. In fact, when I spoke to him last week he seemed to think that he was onto something.”

My office door swung partway open, seemingly by magic. Then in a moment Elvis jumped onto my desk. He walked over and sat down next to the phone. “Something to do with Edison Hall’s wine collection?” I asked.

“I think so,” she said. “In the case I mentioned, the fraud involved just a few faked bottles. Ronan said this seemed to be deception on a larger scale. He was planning to drive down and see me a couple of days after he was killed.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be any more help.”

“You’ve actually helped more than you realize,” I said. The first thing I was going to do after I hung up was go tell Mr. P.—gently—that his idea that Ronan Quinn had been involved in conning people was off base. “I have one more question.”

Elvis leaned against my shoulder and looked expectantly over at the half-open office door.

“Do you know a wine broker named Thorne Logan?” I asked.

“Yes, I do. His real name is Thornton Logan.”

Mac slipped around the door, set a steaming cup of coffee on my desk, smiled at me and left again.

“Would you say he’s the same caliber of man as Ronan Quinn?”

She hesitated, cleared her throat again. “I have no personal knowledge of Mr. Logan being involved in any illegal endeavors,” she finally said.

That was about as close to a no as I was going to get. I thank Linda Fairchild for her help and we said good-bye. I leaned back in the chair again, wrapping both hands around my coffee cup. “How did Mac know I needed this?” I asked Elvis. He craned his neck to look at my cup and then almost seemed to smile at me.

I thought about Liam, urging me to make a move on Mac. I shook my head. Mac and I had way too good a relationship for me to do something like that.

I took another sip of my coffee. “I have to go tell Mr. P. and the others that we’re on the wrong track as far as Ronan Quinn is concerned. It wasn’t any lack of honor among thieves that led to his death.” On the other hand, it seemed as though it was worth taking a closer look at Thorne, formerly Thornton, Logan.

I pulled a hand back through my hair. “You know what Nick would say?” I said to Elvis, who was looking over the side of my desk at the left drawer where he somehow knew I’d put a box of kitty kibble that morning.

The cat looked up and cocked his head to one side. I’d seen him do that enough times to know he was faking an interest in what I was saying because he thought it would get him a treat.

“Nick would say this is what I get for getting involved in something that is really none of my business.” I opened the drawer, fished out half a dozen tiny bits of the dry cat treats and lined them up in a row on my desk.

Ever polite, Elvis meowed his thanks before starting to eat.

I took another sip of my coffee. Aside from the information about Ronan Quinn, one other thing had stuck in my mind from my conversation with the lawyer: the fact that she’d stressed that there was no big payout in a lawsuit against these con artists. Ethan had told me that he wanted the people who had defrauded his father punished. What had he said, quoting Ronan Quinn? If the law can’t get them, then at least we can hit them in their wallets. Had Quinn really said that or had Ethan misinterpreted his words. Each time I talked to Ethan I couldn’t help noticing that he was a little self-absorbed.

Elvis was crunching away happily on a star-shaped piece of kitty kibble. “You know what?” I said, lowering my voice so the cat would be the only one to hear me. “I like Stella a lot. But there’s something about Ethan . . .” I didn’t finish the sentence.

As if he’d understood my words, the cat turned and glanced at the doorway before bending down for the last treat on my desk. “I know,” I said with a sigh. “That’s probably not something I can share with anyone else.”