Deadly Illusions Read online

  “Where do you work?” Jill asked.

  “Maxxim Motor Freight Lines. I’m taking a few days off. My nerves are shot.”

  She didn’t look all that stressed out to me. I also couldn’t picture her in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler but couldn’t resist asking. “Do you drive a truck?”

  That brought a frown I took as irritation. “No. I’m an administrative assistant. I work directly under Mr. Crenshaw, the owner.”

  I had heard of Grant Crenshaw. He was a wheeler and dealer around Nashville, owning several large office buildings among other investments. He had started out with the truck line and had a reputation as a hard-driving businessman, the quintessential laissez-faire entrepreneur.

  “Has your husband done anything else that concerns you?” Jill asked.

  “I just feel it in my bones,” she said. “It’s the way he looks at me. Things he doesn’t say. Damon was in Vietnam. One of the drivers at work told me about some guys who fought over there. He said they did some real nasty things when they came back.”

  I’d about had enough of Miss Molly and her goofy generalizations. “That was thirty years ago,” I said. “Those guys are either in prison or mental hospitals or living on the streets. Most of the guys who fought in Vietnam are no different from the rest of us. I doubt you have anything to worry about. If your husband should start stalking you or making threats, you can go to court and get a restraining order.”

  Jill grimaced. “Come on, Greg. You know how that works. Restraining orders don’t restrain men determined to do bodily harm. Why don’t we find out a little more before we make any judgments?”

  My wife can be so damned rational at times.

  “Tell us about Damon, how you met him?” Jill asked. She wheeled the chair out from behind her desk and sat facing Molly.

  The young woman rubbed her cheek with one hand and looked around. “You got a water fountain? My mouth’s awful dry.”

  “How about coffee?” I asked. We were coffee drinkers, first and foremost.

  “Just water’ll be fine.”

  We didn’t have a water fountain, but we had a supply of soft drinks in a small refrigerator in the storeroom. “We’ve got Cokes, Sprite, that sort of thing,” I said.

  “A Coke would be nice,” she said.

  I headed to the back room as Jill rephrased her last question. “How did you meet Damon?”

  “It was around five years ago,” she said. With the door open, I could easily hear her reply. “I had just broken up with this guy I’d been with for quite a while. I was at this bar having a few drinks one night and somebody suddenly started talking beside me. He was a very ordinary-looking guy, you know. I hadn’t paid any attention to him before that. Anyway, when he spoke he had this deep voice like a radio announcer. Only he talked real soft like and polite.”

  She accepted the Coke can and a plastic cup with a silently mouthed thanks.

  “So he wasn’t the handsome prince?” Jill said with a grin.

  “Hardly. But there was something attractive about him. He was around your height, lots of muscles, long black hair. I never went for guys with long hair before that. I guess it was the eyes that really got to me, though. They’re dark as night, and when he looked at me, I felt like he was seeing right down into my soul. Whatever he saw, he must have liked. He asked me out the next day.”

  “Was it a very long courtship?” Jill asked.

  “Ha!” She took a swallow of Coke. “I went out with him two or three times and suddenly he wanted to marry me. Like I said, I was on the rebound. He seemed nice enough. What the hell, I thought. Why not?”

  I figured there was more to it than that. Most likely some shenanigans in the bedroom she didn’t care to go into.

  “So you married him,” Jill said. “How much did you know about him at that time?”

  “Not enough, obviously.”

  “How about some specifics,” I said.

  She sipped on the Coke, then twisted the cup in her hands. “Well, he said he was raised in an orphanage and had no family.”

  “Where was he raised?” I asked.

  “Chicago.”

  A big city. It could be a little difficult to check out but was no big deal. “What did he tell you about his military service?”

  “Said he served in Vietnam. He retired from the Army later and lived mostly on his pension.”

  “How much pension does he get?”

  “He never said. It goes directly to his bank account, which is separate from mine.”

  She was certainly on target when she said her knowledge of her husband was pretty meager.

  “You say he lives mostly on his pension. What else does he do?” I asked.

  “He works for Heritage Car Rentals. Ferries cars back and forth between local and out-of-town offices. They let him work as much or as little as he wants to.”

  “Is he working today?” Jill asked.

  She nodded as she finished her Coke. “I called the office. He left for Chattanooga this morning. That’s why I came over here now.”

  Jill turned to me. “What do you think, Greg?”

  I spread my hands and looked at Molly. “Nothing you’ve told us raises any major alarms. Apparently he didn’t harm the dog you mentioned. He was probably just chasing it off. I still don’t see any reason to panic. And I have no idea what you want us to look for.”

  Molly clasped her hands again, stared down at them, then back up at me. “I guess I’d just like to know more about him. You know, has he been in any trouble? Has he hurt anybody? I want to know if my fears are real or just imagination.”

  Before I could reply, Jill jumped in. “Let us talk it over tonight, Mrs. Saint. We’ll give you our decision in the morning.”

  That was not the reply I had intended to give. I sometimes wondered about this monster I had created when I let Jill talk me into her being a detective and my partner in crime. She had even bought a small revolver that would fit in her handbag and took firing lessons, despite having expressed great reservations over the necessity of my carrying a gun while on active duty. She did really well on the range, though with that little .38 the targets weren’t too far away. My choice of weapon was a 9mm Beretta a bit smaller than the one I was issued in the Air Force. We both had permits to carry concealed weapons but, like most private investigators, saw no need to carry them routinely.

  At any rate, I heard Molly exhale sharply as I sat there looking flustered.

  “Don’t call me,” she said. “I seldom know where he’s gonna be. I’ll call you.”

  3

  The phone rang as Jill accompanied Molly Saint to the door. Jesse Logan greeted me with word that he needed a little more embellishment on my ideas regarding how to pursue the King Cole’s investigation. I had been talking off the top of my head during lunch and told him quite frankly what I had in mind only amounted to bare bones at the moment. I would need more time to flesh out the plan. However, I did some quick improvisation and came up with enough meat to hopefully satisfy his bosses.

  “I guess you got caught in the same dragnet I did after lunch,” he said when we finished our business.

  “Right. Did you get interrogated by the cops?”

  “Did I,” he said, a note of irritation in his voice. “After I finally convinced them I was a guest in the hotel and had just eaten lunch in the Lakeside restaurant, they let me go. I had no idea what was going on until after I got to my room and turned on the TV.”

  “We’ve been too busy to check out the tube,” I said. “What’s the latest?”

  “According to the last I heard on CNN, I’d say there was a little friction between the FBI and your local police. An FBI spokesman said it appears to be the work of a professional assassin. He said it could be a conspiracy that relates to Bernstein’s position with the Fed. The Nashville police chief leans to the theory that it might have been somebody local with a grudge against the chairman.”

  “They have any evidence of that?”

>   “Seems the Fed office in Washington received a threatening letter from Nashville several months ago. It was anonymous.”

  “Looks like they have their work cut out for them.”

  “Yeah,” Logan said. “The cops apparently think the murder was committed by a black male who’s a present or former employee of the hotel.”

  “So that’s why you got the treatment,” I said. “I’m sorry about that. I hope you won’t hold it against us.”

  “Hey,” he said, “you guys had nothing to do with it. In fact, I understand you’ve had your own troubles with the local gendarmes.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Detective Adamson. He said it was all a big misunderstanding, that I shouldn’t believe anything I might hear about it.”

  “Phil’s a good guy. By the way, did CNN say what brought on the black employee theory?”

  “Something about a black guy in a black hat and trench coat seen heading through an employee exit.”

  When I got off the phone, I told Jill what Logan had said about the Bernstein murder and his request for more details on our investigation. She quickly let me know she had more interest in Logan’s problems than those of the police and the FBI. I did, too, of course, but I couldn’t ignore the lure of a high-profile murder case.

  “What kind of initial retainer do you think we’ll get from Leisure Foods?” she asked.

  I scratched my chin, entertaining thoughts about what this case might lead to in the future. “Enough to take care of the office for a few months, I’d think.”

  The rent wasn’t all that much, but the overhead included lights and water and telephone. Fortunately, our interest in the agency didn’t center primarily on the money. It might be more properly called a rehabilitation project. I equated the term “retiree” with being put out to pasture, and I had no desire to lie around and eat grass. But the Air Force had declined to promote me to full colonel and cited regulations that insisted I had overstayed my welcome in the service. After re-locating to Jill’s hometown, I quickly found I had enjoyed all the leisure I could stand and took a job as an investigator for the DA. Then came the big flap over my comments in the newspaper about Detective Tremaine. The DA insisted I retire again. After I took on the task of solving the murder of a friend’s son in Florida last fall, Jill was nearly ecstatic. She said I acted like a new man. Not merely new, but someone with a purpose and, even more gratifying to her, a man with a pleasant disposition—something I had apparently lacked during my latest round of forced inaction. Since she had been a major factor in solving the Florida slaying, she proposed that we start our own detective agency, picking and choosing the cases we wanted to pursue.

  “Let’s talk about Molly Saint,” I said.

  I sat behind my desk, arms folded, head cocked at just the right angle, looking very judgmental and not at all compromising.

  Grinning, Jill walked over and put an arm around my shoulder. “I had thought we would save that for pillow talk.”

  I looked askance. “I’m shocked, babe. You would stoop to using womanly wiles to sway a business decision?”

  Spinning my chair around, she plopped into my lap and looked up with those big brown eyes that made you feel in danger of falling in and drowning. “Unconscionable,” I murmured, then laid a big kiss on her.

  Pulling away, I shifted my head and looked toward the front window. “What’s that boy staring at?”

  Jill jumped off my lap and turned toward the window, straightening her skirt. She frowned. “What boy?”

  “Just kidding,” I said with a chuckle. “You’ll have to admit it would’ve made a pretty steamy scene if a potential client had walked in.”

  She punched me in the ribs. “You dog. I’d have told them I was just your secretary asking for a raise.”

  “Well, you certainly got a rise out of me.”

  She shook her head and returned to her desk. “I think we should take Molly Saint as a client.”

  “I’m not sure her carpet goes wall-to-wall,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “That bit about feeling it in her bones. Things he doesn’t say. Unfounded inferences because he was a Vietnam vet. Hell, she married him on a lark. What did she expect?”

  “I’m sure she didn’t expect to be frightened out of her wits. The look in her eyes was fear, Greg. Fear with a capital F.”

  “I have some reservations about that.”

  “There’s another thing that concerns me.” She continued right on as though I hadn’t spoken. “There’s something vaguely familiar about Molly. I’m sure we’ve never met before, but it’s...well, I have this eerie feeling about her.”

  I had often spoken of hunches I’d had on cases, about going with my intuition. I figured that’s what she was driving at.

  “What about King Cole’s?” I asked. “We’ll probably have our hands full with that.”

  “Logan said they wouldn’t be ready for a day or so. It shouldn’t take long to check out Mr. Damon Saint. If something is really wrong, you don’t want to be responsible for what might happen to that young woman, do you?”

  I let out a deep breath that must have sounded like what it was, a sigh of capitulation.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ll take the case. But if there’s any inkling that she’s gone off the deep end or lied about any of this, we’ll cut her off in a flash. I don’t care if she’s Saint Molly or Saint Mary. And we’ll demand a healthy advance against our fee.”

  4

  Molly Saint called from a pay phone the next morning at nine, just after we arrived at the office. Jill took the call and gave her the good news—from her point of view. Molly agreed to come by at ten and provide all the information she could on her husband, including his Social Security number and a photograph.

  She arrived in skin-tight jeans and a brown denim shirt open so low I found myself searching for a glimpse of her navel. Pulling a chair in between the two desks, she sat down, reached into her bag and slipped out a color photo. I took it from her and laid it on the corner of my desk. Jill scooted her chair over and joined me in studying the picture.

  “Must be your wedding,” Jill said.

  Molly nodded.

  The photo showed her wearing a dark green suit and a broad smile, a corsage of red carnations pinned to her shoulder. The man at her side, whose hand she clutched, wore a gray pinstripe suit, no flowers. However, he didn’t impress me as being the pinstripe type. He was stocky, a little taller than Molly, almost black hair down to his shoulders and intense black eyes that mirrored no happiness over the occasion. I wondered if he’d had second thoughts about the quick proposal.

  “Don’t you have a more recent photo of Damon by himself?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t like pictures. Won’t have a camera in the house. I don’t know if it’s something he picked up in Vietnam or where, but he says he’s one of those people who believe taking your picture steals a part of your soul.”

  I’d heard that about some primitive tribes, but Damon Saint did not impress me as being an aboriginal.

  “Does he still wear his hair long?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s about like yours.”

  I took that to mean he looked like an average guy, with maybe a small balding spot in back. While I doubted the term “average” applied to me particularly well overall, my hair and a few other features probably fell into that category.

  “How old is Damon?” Jill asked.

  “Mid-fifties.”

  “And you’re around forty?”

  She grinned. “Good guess.”

  I pushed the photo aside and looked back at her. “How long has he worked for Heritage Car Rentals?”

  “I think maybe a year or so before we met. I know he mentioned living in an apartment not far from the Heritage office.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  She gave an address in Antioch, a suburb on the south side of town that bordered Priest Lake, a lar
ge man-made body of water backed up by J. Percy Priest Dam.

  “It’s a little rental house,” she said. “Damon moved in a year before we got married.”

  “Do you live near the lake?” I asked.

  “Within a few blocks.”

  “Does he like to fish, maybe? Hunt?”

  “No.”

  “What does he do in his spare time?”

  “He runs a lot.”

  Jill glanced back at the photo. “You mean he’s a jogger?”

  “A runner. He doesn’t do marathons, but he runs just about every day.”

  “Any hobbies?” I asked.

  “Well, he makes jewelry.”

  I straightened up in surprise. “Jewelry?”

  “Yeah,” Molly said. “Kinda wild, isn’t it? He has this workshop in the basement. He’s given me a few pieces.” She held out her right hand. “He made this little diamond ring. I also have a ruby necklace and a few other pieces.”

  I got up and moved around to the front of the desk for a closer look. “Where did he learn to do that?”

  She shrugged. “I have no clue.”

  “What does he do with the stuff he makes?” I asked.

  “Sometimes he goes to flea markets.”

  Jill was studying the ring. “That’s very nice. He must have a lot of small tools in his workshop.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I’ve never been down there.”

  I gave her a skeptical look. “In five years, you’ve never seen his workshop?”

  “He says it’s very tedious work. He doesn’t want anybody interfering with his concentration.”

  “I can’t believe you haven’t sneaked a peek when he wasn’t at home.”

  “He keeps the door locked. Can’t blame him there. If somebody knew what he had, they could come in and steal him blind.”

  “Mrs. Saint, if a thief wanted in, he would jimmy the lock.”

  “Well, he’d be sorry if he did,” she said. “Damon says the door’s booby trapped. I don’t know what it would do, but he’d sure as hell know if anyone tried to steal some of his jewelry.”