Double Booked for Death

THIRTEEN

SCRUNCHING DOWN AGAIN, DARLA GRABBED HER CELL AND quickly dialed Jake’s phone, only to hear the “Yellow Rose of Texas”—the tune Jake had downloaded as the default ring for Darla’s number—playing behind her. Jake’s phone must have fallen out of her pocket and onto the seat when she squeezed out of the back door.

Darla shut her phone in frustration. She didn’t know Reese’s number, and since she already knew that Jake’s phone couldn’t be unlocked without the correct password, she couldn’t search her friend’s contacts for that information. That meant she’d have to wait until the protester was safely past and then run inside the coffee shop to find them. The problem with that plan was that, in the meantime, the Lone Protester might grab another cab or disappear into another shop. It seemed that her only choice would be to follow the girl once again . . . but this time, in such a way that the teen didn’t know she was being tailed.

Darla frowned. Though her Wayfarers would serve as something of a disguise, it would be hard to hide her red hair unless Great-Aunt Dee had tucked a convenient scarf a la Audrey Hepburn into the glove box. She made a quick, hopeful rummage through the compartment but came up empty. No matter. The Lone Protester couldn’t be expecting to be followed a second time today, anyhow, right?

By this time, the girl had passed the car and was continuing at a casual pace down the sidewalk. Darla swiftly made her decision. She’d follow the girl and go on the assumption that her quarry wasn’t packing a weapon or fists of fury, or anything else that might require Darla needing immediate backup should she be spotted and recognized. Not the ideal plan, she conceded, but no way she was leaving Maybelle alone and unlocked. This meant that if Jake showed up at the Mercedes before Darla returned, the most she could do was stare through the car window at her cell phone, which was still lying on the back seat. She could only hope that Jake had her cell number memorized so she could use Reese’s phone to call her and find out what was going on.

She had just grabbed her purse and was about to reach over and pull the keys from the ignition when a sharp rapping against the driver’s side window glass made her jump. Choking back a surprised gasp, she glanced up to see a beefy uniformed police officer staring at her through the tinted glass, his expression one of extreme disapproval.

Bad cop.

That was Darla’s reflexive categorization of the broad-faced, mustachioed officer as she recalled Reese’s earlier take on this new kinder, gentler breed of law enforcement. As for Reese, he fell into the infamous never-one-around-when-you-need-one cop category. Here, he’d instructed her to park illegally, and now he wasn’t available to do the promised badge flashing to get her out of it. Frantic, she glanced from the coffee shop door to the Lone Protester’s retreating figure. Not only were they going to lose their sole suspect in Valerie Baylor’s possibly suspicious death, but she was about to get slapped with a substantial fine as well. She needed to talk her way out of this ticket, and quickly.

She took a deep breath and powered down the driver’s side window via the center console, and then leaned toward the uniformed man.

“Hello, Officer,” she said with a broad smile, deliberately thickening her East Texas twang into even more honeyed southern tones. She’d found that most middle-aged New York men responded positively to that accent. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it? Is there something I can help you with?”

“Yeah,” he replied, still disapproving and apparently immune to sweetness and light. He flipped open his citation book and started to scribble. “You can make sure whosever’s car this is gets this little love note. In case you didn’t notice, lady, you’re in a loading zone.”

“Are we? Oh dear, and here my friend, Detective Reese, said it was fine for us to park here while he checked out a suspect.”

“Suspect?”

The cop paused to squint at her, and Darla anxiously pointed to the Lone Protester, who now was peering into the window of a shop a few doors down.

“That girl with the long dark hair and black scarf, right near the red awning,” she said, giving up the southern-girl routine and cutting to the chase. “I was just about to go after her. She knows something about a murder. If we lose her now, we might never find her again.”

“Yeah? So where’s this detective friend of yours, and where’s his parking placard? And why isn’t he following this so-called murder suspect?”

“He would be, but he’s still checking out the coffee shop,” she exclaimed, not bothering to correct his assumption about who owned the Mercedes. Shaking her head in frustration, she grabbed the keys from the ignition. “Look, if you need to write a ticket, write it, but I really need to go now.”

“Lady, where you really need to go is out of this loading zone. You’ve got the keys, so do your friend a favor and move his car for him. I still see it parked here a minute from now, I’m booting it and calling a tow truck.”

Baring oversized teeth in what probably was supposed to be a smile, he ripped the citation from the book and tucked it under the windshield wiper. “Now, you have a nice day,” he told her and climbed back inside his patrol car.

Biting back a groan of frustration, Darla powered up the window again and yanked open the passenger door, almost falling out it in her haste. She climbed up on the door frame for a better look at her quarry. The Lone Protester had moved on down the block now and was approaching the busy intersection. The familiar orange hand flashed on the pedestrian crosswalk sign, meaning Darla still had several seconds to catch up before the light changed again. Otherwise, the girl likely would escape her a second time. She hopped down again and slammed the door, only to hear Reese’s voice behind her.

“I told you to wait in the car. Your protester sees you hanging around here, and she’ll take off again.”

Darla whipped about to find him and Jake surveying her with the same disapproving look Officer Bad Cop had just used on her. The needle on her own disapproval meter promptly swung way over into the totally p.o.’d zone.

“Where in the hell were you two, roasting your own coffee beans?” she demanded. “The Lone Protester wasn’t in the coffee shop, she was next door in the consignment store. And now she’s standing on the corner about to vanish again as soon as the light changes.”

Though, in fact, the light had already switched over from orange hand to walking man. As Darla pointed in the girl’s direction, the latter stepped off the curb and headed down the crosswalk with another dozen or so pedestrians.

Reese said nothing but dashed off in that direction. Jake was on his heels, though not before she ordered, “Wait here, Darla. We’ll be back in a minute.”

“I can’t wait,” Darla called after her, waving the ticket like a flag. “I just got fined for parking in a loading zone. The cop is going to call a tow truck on me.”

“We’ll take care of it,” Jake’s voice drifted back to her.

Despite her limp, the older woman was swiftly closing the gap between her and Reese. He, in turn, had already reached the corner. Unfortunately, from what Darla could see through the passing traffic, the Lone Protester had already made her way safely across the street and was headed down the next block, oblivious to any chase going on behind her.

By now, Jake had joined Reese there on the corner. Darla watched the distant pantomime as the pair seemed to confer for a moment, Reese gesturing in the girl’s direction. Then, shaking off the restraining hand that Jake had put on his arm, he plunged into the stream of cross traffic.

“No!” Darla gasped and shut her eyes, certain a repeat of last night’s deadly accident was imminent. Sure enough, horns blatted, and more than one set of brakes squealed. When a few more seconds passed and she didn’t hear the impact of steel against human flesh, however, she assumed he must have made it across the street safely.

She sighed and opened her eyes again, only to find herself nose to nose with the same policeman who’d just given her a parking ticket.

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear, lady. I told you if you didn’t move your friend’s car, I was gonna slap a boot on it and call a tow truck. Well, you didn’t, so I am.”

“Wait!” she told him, urgently pointing down the street. “Here he comes . . . and he has the suspect.”

For the Lone Protester, looking tiny and defeated, was indeed walking between Reese and Jake. Leaving her to stand alongside the Mercedes, Officer Hallonquist—she’d finally gotten a good look at the name pinned to his uniform—hurried to join them.

The four halted a short distance from her. She saw Jake speak to Reese for a few moments before breaking away to head back in Darla’s direction. The two men remained where they were, the girl between them as they conferred. A moment later, they hustled the girl into Hallonquist’s patrol car, which was double-parked a few cars from Darla, and then climbed in after her. The car took off down the street, presumably headed to the nearest precinct.

Jake, meanwhile, had made it back to the Mercedes. She grinned and thrust a fist at Darla for the obligatory bump.

“Good work, Nancy,” she exclaimed as their knuckles collided. “You were right about your Lone Protester, whose name is Janie, by the way. She admitted right off that she was the one holding up the anti-Valerie signs. Of course, she denied shoving her into the street to be squashed like a bug, but she agreed to go in for questioning. We’ll let Reese worry about getting a confession out of her.”

Rather than joining Jake’s moment of triumph, however, Darla felt herself gripped by a nagging sense of guilt. Anyone who’d had a hand in killing someone else deserved prison time, at the very least; still, the girl looked awfully young to go to jail for the next twenty-odd years. And something about her defeated air seemed unlike the attitude one would expect of a brazen murderer. Could the girl’s claim of innocence be legitimate?

Jake seemed not to notice Darla’s dismay. Instead, after ruefully snagging her abandoned phone from the rear of the Mercedes, she hopped into the front seat, furtively massaging her bad leg while pretending to do an after-workout stretch. “Jeez, I didn’t realize how much I missed the old running-down-a-perp routine,” she exclaimed as Darla slid behind the wheel. Snatching the citation Darla still clutched, she added, “I’ll see that Reese takes care of this. Your friend Officer Hallonquist won’t mind, not after he’s had the chance to help collar a murderer.”

“Alleged murderer,” Darla sourly corrected as she turned the key. “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say until someone is actually convicted?”

Jake waved away such trivialities, though she gave Darla a keen look. “So what’s got your panties in a twist, kid? I thought you’d be thrilled that Hamlet and you have a knack for detecting.”

“I am.”

Darla pulled out into traffic again and turned Maybelle back toward Brooklyn. “What was going on inside the coffee shop?” she asked instead, deciding she needed to wait until she was alone to contemplate the other topic. “Unless it’s a heck of a lot bigger than it looks, you should have been in and out of there in a couple of minutes.”

“Yeah, the kid behind the counter played us, I think. He claimed your girl had been in the shop but had to leave to find an ATM, and that she’d be back any minute. It sounded kinda fishy to me, but it was all we had, so we decided to wait it out for a while. Good thing you were keeping an eye on things from here.”

“So much for street smarts,” Darla muttered, recalling how Jake had praised Reese’s innate instincts the day before. Apparently, his intuition had taken a vacation this afternoon. “What happens to Janie now? I guess she’s under arrest?”

“Not at this point. Like I said, right now she’s going in for questioning. We’ll see what happens after that. And who knows, maybe they won’t find anything to charge her with after all.”

The remainder of the trip back to the brownstone focused on whether or not Darla would be open for business as usual in the morning. “It wouldn’t be fair for James to lose a day’s pay,” she finally decided. “Besides, if we get the kind of sales tomorrow that I had in just a few hours today, I can’t afford not to be open.”

“Business is business, kid,” Jake agreed. “And you know that if the situation had been reversed, Valerie Baylor darn sure wouldn’t have taken a day off touring out of respect for you.”

Darla swung by the brownstone first before heading to the garage, telling Jake she was worried about how things were going at the Valerie shrine. In truth, she was more concerned about her friend. She’d noticed the older woman still massaging her bum leg when she thought Darla wasn’t looking her way. The impromptu sprint outside the coffeehouse hadn’t done her any good, and Darla didn’t want her to walk back from the garage while still in obvious pain.

She’d halfway expected Jake to protest this special treatment, but she agreed to have Darla drop her off outside the building. As they approached their block, they could see that the shrine had continued to grow exponentially in their short absence. Now only a narrow strip of sidewalk remained for pedestrians to pass by, and the tribute’s length almost reached the antique shop. The shrine had become a gawking hazard for drivers as well, with most of them slowing as to stare in amazement at the profusion of candles and flowers. Pretty soon, the city would have to send some sort of traffic control down to keep things moving . . . that, or assign a front-end loader to clear it all away!

Darla took advantage of the confusion by pulling right up to the store’s curb. “I’ll be back in a few,” she told Jake.

She waited until the other woman climbed out, and then pulled back into Monday afternoon traffic. A few minutes later, she had situated Maybelle in her usual spot in the parking garage and was headed back to the brownstone on foot.

Normally, the walk would have been a pleasant one. The weather was fine, and the handful of crazies who wandered her neighborhood had apparently decided to stay inside for the duration. But Darla couldn’t stop thinking about Valerie Baylor and the Lone Protester—Janie—who might well be responsible for the author’s death.

More unsettling than that, however, was a selfish concern. Though she had tried at the time to dismiss it, she couldn’t help but worry that Robert and Sunny’s threatened boycott might come to pass. Chances were the teens had several hundred so-called friends each on their respective pages, meaning it wouldn’t be hard for them to drum up a few dozen people to march around just for the fun of it. It was hard work keeping a bookstore afloat these days. Should too many people jump on their emo bandwagon, Pettistone’s Fine Books might meet much the same fate as Valerie.

Jake was waiting for her on the stoop, seated on the concrete steps leading up to the quaint wood and glass door. She apparently had been talking on her cell, for she snapped her phone shut at Darla’s approach.

“That was Reese,” she announced. “Seems Janie sang like a canary. Problem is, she only knew one verse.”

“What do you mean?”

“She admits to the whole protest routine, but she said someone paid her to do it. And she swears she wasn’t the one who tossed your author under the bus . . . er, church van. She claims she ditched her sign in the alley and left the scene almost half an hour before the accident, and had no idea what happened until she saw the news story online.”

“Did Reese believe her?”

The older woman shrugged. “He’s hedging his bets, but I think he’s inclined to accept her at her word. All I know for sure is that they didn’t charge her with any crime, so she’s free to do her own thing for the moment.”

“So who’s the person who hired her?” Darla persisted.

Jake rose from the steps and gave an elaborate stretch. The routine reminded Darla of Hamlet, minus any legs thrown over any shoulders. Kink-free now, she said, “That’s where it gets interesting. Your girl claims she answered a help-wanted ad for a performance artist on TheEverythingList.”

TheEverythingList, Darla knew, was a popular Internet want-ad site that listed, well, everything. It was a place where people bought and sold and hired and advertised availability by means of online postings. Darla had used the site herself, or, rather, she’d had Lizzie post some of the store’s old fixtures for sale and found it an easy way to unload unwanted goods.

“Since she’s a theater major at Tisch,” Jake went on, referring to the well-known school of the arts in New York City proper, “this gig was right up her alley. She got her instructions by email, and only met the person who hired her when it came time to collect her first payment. They hooked up at a fast-food joint.”

“Don’t tell me,” Darla interrupted with a snort, “the guy she met was in disguise.”

“Actually, the guy was a woman, but otherwise you’re right. Janie says she was wearing a scarf and dark glasses, so Reese didn’t get much of a description out of her. From what she said, the woman claimed to work for Valerie’s publisher. The whole protest thing was supposed to be a publicity stunt.”

“But Valerie didn’t need publicity,” Darla pointed out. “Besides, Koji Foster was her publicist, and he certainly didn’t indicate he was in on the joke the night of the signing.”

Jake nodded. “I think we can pretty well eliminate the possibility that Scarf Lady was legit. The emails were sent from one of those free email accounts, not from the publishing house. And, of course, the payment was all in cash. Janie’s a little ticked, too, because she’s still owed fifty bucks for last night, and the so-called publicist wasn’t at the fast-food place this morning to pay like she said she’d be. Reese said he’d passed on the email address to one of the department’s IT guys to track. But here’s the real kicker—”

Her words were cut short by a sudden chorus of angry horns as someone slowed a bit too long while passing the Valerie shrine. The driver who’d drawn the ire of his fellows responded with a single-finger salute. Jake shook her head and shouted a few choice Jersey-isms at them all.

“We’re going to be pulling more bodies off the street if this keeps up. I’m going to call a friend of mine in Traffic and see what they can do. So, where was I?”

“The real kicker,” Darla helpfully supplied.

Jake hesitated, and then went on, “According to Reese, Janie claims that Scarf Lady spoke with a southern accent.”

Something in her tone made Darla hesitate as well. Then understanding dawned, and she gasped. “Don’t tell me that Reese thinks I’m Scarf Lady?”

“Well, he did kinda float that theory for about five seconds, until I told him he was being an idiot,” Jake admitted.

At Darla’s yelp of disbelief, she grinned a little before continuing. “Of course, if you think about it, it’s not that far-fetched. I mean, drumming up a publicity stunt like that in advance of the signing could get people talking, which equals you selling more books. Besides, the first rule of police work is that everyone’s a suspect until they’re not. But I told him how upset you were over the whole protest thing, and that I was pretty sure you weren’t the second coming of Meryl Streep who could fool me. I think I convinced him, but heads up in case he wants to put you in a photo lineup.”

“Great,” Darla muttered. Then the obvious thought hit her. “What about Marnie? Talk about a prime suspect. Southern accent, hated Valerie Baylor, ran her over with her van,” she persisted, ticking off the points on her fingers.

Jake shrugged. “True, but Janie’s first meeting with the Scarf Lady was a week before the autographing. Even if Marnie had someone else mail that letter for her to throw us off with the postmark, she drove up here with a carful of other people. The timeline’s off. Nope, we gotta keep looking.” She glanced at her watch and added, “Reese is going to drop by my place with pizza and an update around six. You’re welcome to join us if you want, listen to his theories, protest your innocence and all.”

“Sure, why not? Nothing better than spending an evening dodging suspicion with your friends.”

So saying, she stood and spared a final look at the most recent worshippers gathered at the spontaneous Church of Valerie. Jake could have them and the traffic snarl. Darla was going to grab some quiet downtime in the peaceful confines of her third-story apartment.

Peace, however, was not quite what she found when she unlocked her front door.