Never Saw It Coming

Twenty-five

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Keisha said to Kirk, drawing him into the kitchen while Gail Beaudry stayed in the living room.

“Are you crazy?” she whispered to him once they were out of earshot.

“It’s five grand,” he said. “Just don’t go into the house and go all weird and say holy shit, I think I did it.”

“I can’t go into that house. Not again.”

“Sure you can,” he said. “Might as well make something out of this fucked-up day.” Kirk didn’t know she’d actually gotten some cash out of Garfield before things went off the rails. But even if he did, he’d still want her to go after this. Five thousand was a lot of money.

“It’s wrong,” Keisha said. “You don’t see something wrong, taking this woman’s money to help her figure out who killed her brother? You don’t see something just a bit off with that?”

Kirk shrugged. “So? Like you’ve never faked this stuff before?”

“I can’t do this. I-”

“Is everything okay?” Gail asked. She was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Yes,” Kirk said. “Keisha was just saying, she hates to ask you at a time like this, but she needs her fee up front, in cash.”

Gail’s eyes popped for a second, but she said, “We can stop at the bank on the way to my brother’s house. Would that be okay?”

“That’d be fine,” Kirk said.

Keisha struggled to focus. She said to Gail, “Why don’t you wait in the car and I’ll be right out.”

Once the door was closed, Kirk said, “This lady has to be loaded. I bet you can get even more out of her. Where’s she get all the dough?”

Keisha shook her head, like this was not uppermost in her mind, but said, “Her husband’s in real estate and she inherited some fortune when her parents died. I don’t care if she’s married to Bill Gates, I’m not going to milk this beyond the five grand.”

Kirk gave her a disapproving look.

“And you,” she said, “have to go back and find out what happened to that bag.”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear ya.”

Keisha glanced at the wall clock. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be with her. You have to be back here for when Matthew gets home.”

“Why? He’s got his own key. Since when do I-”

“What if the police are here? I don’t want him coming home, finding a cop on the doorstep. He’ll be scared to death, thinking something has happened to me.”

Kirk sighed. “Fine, I’ll be here. But you’re really turning him into a momma’s boy.”

Keisha got in Gail Beaudry’s Jaguar. The woman talked non-stop all the way to her bank in downtown Milford, on the green.

“I don’t know why they have Melissa in custody or why they think she had anything to do with this. They say she confessed, but that’s ridiculous. Why would a girl kill her own mother? That’s absolutely unthinkable. I don’t understand how something like that could happen. Maybe if it were an accident, like if she’d backed into her with her car, didn’t know she was there, but to deliberately do it? That defies belief. I know that girl was a world of trouble to her mother, but deep down she loved her very much. I just know that.”

Keisha wondered whether she was going to be sick again. Any second now, she might have to ask Gail to pull to the side of the road.

Since killing Garfield, she’d devoted all of her energy to covering her tracks. Going back for the earring, disposing of her clothes (a problem she hoped would soon be resolved), standing in the shower until the water ran cold, getting Kirk to clean her car. And after an initial panic about her business card, she’d come up with a creative solution involving Gail that she believed could withstand scrutiny.

But having made all these efforts to distance herself from the event, here she was, sitting in this car, heading back to the crime scene.

“I’ll just bet the police put Melissa in a room and browbeat her with questions and that was how they made her confess to something she never did,” Gail continued. “That’s what the police do. We think that kind of thing only happens in Russia or China or Latin American countries, but it happens right here in the good ol’ USA, don’t you kid yourself. The police just want to close cases. It doesn’t matter to them whether they’ve got the right person or not. And I don’t even know what happened to Ellie. If they’re charging Melissa, what is it exactly they think she did to her mother? And what does it have to do with Wendell. I’m telling you-”

“Please stop,” Keisha said.

“What?”

“I… I need to concentrate.”

“Of course, of course you do. I’m so sorry. Here we are anyway. I’ll go in and get your money.” Gail left the motor running as she got out of the car and went into the bank.

Take the car and run, Keisha thought. Or leave the car, but still run.

But where would she go? How far could she get? How long would it take for the police to find her? And if she wasn’t already a suspect, wouldn’t running change that? And how could she even think of leaving Matthew behind?

She’d never do that. Keisha was a lot of things-and she knew it-but she was not the kind of mother who’d abandon her child.

I could take him with me.

Sure, that was a plan. Go on the run with a kid. Keisha told herself to stop it. She was in this up to her eyeballs now, and she was going to have to see how things played out.

Gail returned in five minutes, clutching a plain white banking envelope, the kind used for deposits at the ATMs. She got in the car and handed the envelope to Keisha.

“There you go,” she said, doing up her seat belt. “Good thing I have my own account. Jerry would have an absolute heart attack if he knew I was doing this.”

“Thank you,” Keisha said, putting the envelope into her purse. She’d had to grab one of her other ones as she was leaving, and toss her wallet into it.

“You don’t want to count it?”

“I trust you,” Keisha said.

That made Gail Beaudry smile. She reached over and touched Keisha’s arm. “I trust you, too. I want to thank you for helping me.”

Keisha couldn’t look at her.

“Let’s go over to Wendell’s house now and see if any of the police there will tell us what’s going on. Maybe, as we get close, you’ll start picking up some signals or something,” Gail said.

They could see police cars as soon as Gail turned onto the street. Cruisers had been used to block off the street in both directions about a hundred feet each side of the house. Gail pulled the Jag over to the shoulder and said, “Watch your step. It looks slippery here.”

They came around the front of the car and approached the house together. As they started walking up the driveway, a female uniformed officer came down to meet them.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Gail said, “I’m Mrs. Beaudry, and this is my associate. We’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge here. Is that you?”

“No, ma’am. What’s your interest here?”

“This is my brother’s house. Wendell Garfield. The man who was killed.”

The officer nodded. “If you’ll wait here, I’ll see what I can do.” Keisha watched her go into the house and close the door.

Don’t want to go in there.

Gail stood with her arms crossed. After a couple of minutes, she said, “This is what they do. They keep you waiting to wear you down. It’s all part of the game they play.”

Keisha thought that if anyone was playing a game, it was herself.

The officer came back out of the house and told them she had reached the detective in charge of the investigation, and she’d be coming by shortly.

“Would that be that black woman?” Gail asked. “Wedmore?”

“Yes.”

“Fine, but can we wait in the house, where it’s warmer?”

“I’m sorry, no, you can’t come in. Not without Detective Wedmore’s approval.”

“We’ll be in the car, then,” Gail said, and the two of them turned to start walking back to it. They were just about to open the doors when an unmarked car pulled up and Rona Wedmore got out.

She recognized the dead man’s sister from their meeting at the station. “Hello, Mrs. Beaudry.”

“I want some answers,” Gail said. “I want some answers right now.”

Wedmore cast an eye at Keisha, then looked back at Gail. “What would you like to know?”

“What happened to my brother?”

Wedmore’s gaze turned back to Keisha. “Who are you?”

“I’m Keisha Ceylon.”

The corners of the detective’s mouth turned up. “I was just talking to someone who knows you.”