Chapter Twenty-Four

Twenty-four

Everyone started talking at the same time. It was just like in an Agatha Christie. Sherry wondered whether that was from demonic interference. Probably not: probably the chaos that ensued after you'd just announced that you were pulling a Poirot was the natural, organic reaction from any normal group of people. "Oh, come on, seriously? Like some kind of Sherlock Holmes thing?" This was Corey again. "If you know who killed Dad, then why didn't you just call the police?"

"I did," Sherry said. "Sheriff Brown is right here with us." She gave him a nod and received a slightly reluctant-looking nod back. Then she spoke directly to the demon. "There's someone also in the room with us who I think may have been…involved with some of the strange things that have happened recently in Winesap. I hope that my doing this will encourage that person to speak with me, as we agreed they would."

Everyone was staring at her. Father Barry very discreetly made the sign of the cross. Sherry swallowed and thought her way back to every old-fashioned detective story she'd ever read or seen. They did this with flair, usually. She suspected that the demon liked flair very much. Fine: that's what she'd try to provide.

"It was very clear from the crime scene that Alan knew and trusted his killer," she began. "He invited them inside and made tea for them before he died. Everyone in this room knew Alan well enough for him to have willingly let them in late on a snowy Saturday night. Almost everyone in this room might have profited in one way or another from Alan's death. I wasn't short of motives in this case. The problem was that there were too many people who might have benefited from his getting sick or having an accident, but no clear individual who both had the opportunity to kill him last Saturday night, and who was truly desperate enough to follow through and kill a man who was in the process of serving them a cup of tea."

She let her eyes flick over the assembled people. Some looked away, some at the table. Jason looked fidgety and anxious. Alice looked close to tears. Mrs. Thompson was stone-faced; Eli was glancing around the room like he thought there might be secret cameras recording the scene. Corey was scowling. Todd gazed straight back at her, looking amused and engaged by the proceedings, as if he'd paid for a night at the murder mystery dinner theater and was already enjoying the show.

She continued. "In an investigation like this, the first people that the police look at are usually the victim's nearest and dearest. I'll begin in the same way, with Alan's wife and children."

"This is bullshit," Corey said. Sherry ignored him and continued.

"All of Alan's immediate family members profited enormously from his death. None of them were rich a month ago, but with Alan gone, all three of them are millionaires. Out of everyone here, Susan Thompson might have one of the strongest motives for wanting her husband dead. He broke up their marriage after many years together, then refused to come to what she felt would be equitable terms in their divorce. People sometimes kill their exes just for revenge, but in this case, she'd also finally be getting the money that he'd been denying her for years. She was also seen with Alan on the day that he died. There was also Eli, the older son. I got the sense that Eli must have been used to his father taking him for granted. There he was, working hard every day at the office to provide for his family, while his father regularly handed cash to his younger brother.

"The only problem with either of them as suspects is that they both have strong alibis. I made some phone calls this afternoon and was able to confirm that Susan Thompson attended a gala and Eli Thompson was enjoying beers with his running club in Connecticut. Though it might be theoretically possible that one of them managed to slip away, get up to Winesap, kill Alan, and then get back home again without anyone noticing, it seems unlikely that either of them could have done it in time."

She looked toward Corey. He was still scowling, his arms folded over his chest. It made him look much less attractive than he was in his Instagram pictures. "Corey Thompson," Sherry said, "was the son that his father worried about. He has a history of asking his father for money, and his father had a history of paying up. Alan was very happy when Corey started expressing interest in working with him for the antiques shop, and he was absolutely delighted when it seemed that Corey had a real aptitude for sourcing and framing fairly valuable pieces of fine art to resell. By the time Alan died, Corey was practically co-owner of the shop."

She took a sip of tea, then continued. "Corey has all of the million-dollar motivation for murder that his mother and brother have, on top of an interest in his father's business, and a very expensive lifestyle to maintain. What he lacks is an alibi. Is that accurate, Corey? Is there anyone who could confirm where you were on the night your father died?"

His scowl deepened. "No," he said shortly. "I was home alone. I'd been out late Friday night and didn't feel like doing anything."

"Thank you," Sherry said. "We've established that young Corey has motive, and he doesn't have an alibi. Those are two points against him. What doesn't exist is any evidence that he was here, in Winesap, at any time when he could have committed the crime. I'd therefore like to set him aside for now.

"Now that we've moved on from Alan's immediate family, we need to consider other people in his life who might have wanted to see him dead for one reason or another. Friends, lovers, employees. Alan had a few friends in Winesap, but none of them would have any reason to have a grudge against him, and none had any financial entanglements with him that I could discover. He also had an employee, Alice, and a—girlfriend. Me."

Her face felt hot. She continued, anyway. "I've claimed to have never known that Alan was still married, or that he'd left me his house in his will." She had to pause for a moment at the muted murmur in the room at that. "It would be reasonable to doubt me. Jealousy or desire to inherit a million-dollar estate would both be very convincing reasons for a woman to want to kill her boyfriend. I was also the last person to have seen Alan alive. For both of those reasons, I should probably be the biggest suspect in the case."

The room was very quiet. Janine leaned in closer to Sherry's side as if she was preparing to catch her if she suddenly collapsed. Sherry continued. "There's also Alice. On the day he died, Alan mentioned to me that he was unhappy with Alice's performance at work. Could he have fired Alice earlier that day? Alice had been struggling with money, and having been fired might keep her from being able to claim unemployment benefits."

"He didn't fire me," Alice said.

Everyone turned to look at her. Alice shrank back into her chair, visibly diminished by the attention. "He didn't," she said, almost in a whisper. "He said he felt like I was zoning out a lot lately. I said I would try to do better. That's all that happened."

"We only have your word for that, though it does fit with what Alan said to me," Sherry said, as kindly as she could under the circumstances. "What's more important is that you have a fairly strong alibi. Both of us do." She addressed the wider room. "Alan's estimated time of death was between ten and midnight. He dropped me off at home at about ten fifteen, and I walked across the street to talk to Alice before I went home and went to bed. She woke me up again at a quarter after midnight to ask me for my help after her power went out. Neither Alice nor I own a car. In good weather it takes about forty-five minutes to walk from where we live to Alan's house, and more than an hour to walk back. I couldn't have possibly killed Alan at ten and walked up to have a chat with Alice a few minutes later, and she couldn't possibly have talked to me, walked down there, talked to Alan, killed him, and walked back again all in under two hours in the middle of a blizzard. Barring a conspiracy between the two of us, or between one of us and an unknown getaway driver, I'm prepared to set aside both Alice and myself as suspects for now."

"Oh, come on ," Corey burst out. "You can't just rule yourself out as a suspect. Is everyone seriously letting her get away with this? This is crazy ."

"I don't know," Todd said. "I think we should let her finish. Maybe at the end she'll reveal that she was the killer all along and tell the sheriff to slap the cuffs on her and haul her away." Todd, at least, seemed to be enjoying himself.

"Thank you, Todd," Sherry said. "I promise that I do have a point to make with all of this. Everyone should have some more tea, if they want it. We're just about to get into the complicated parts."

Someone gave a very quiet groan. Others took her advice. Tea was poured. "My next suspect is probably unfamiliar to those of you who don't live in Winesap," Sherry said. "Jason Martinez works at the diner here in Winesap. He met Alan many years ago, when Alan was working as a public defender in Schenectady. Jason was accused of murder, and Alan mishandled the case so badly that Jason was sent to prison for several years for a crime that he didn't commit."

This caused a small, brief commotion as Alan's family reacted. Alan really had done a good job of keeping it a secret: it was clear from their expressions that Alan's sons were both dismayed by the news. Todd was craning around to look at Jason, who was still standing by the door. "I didn't do it, though," Jason said. He was looking very steadily right back at Sherry. "You know that I didn't, Miss Pinkwhistle. I'm not a murderer. You know that."

She flushed again but didn't respond. She was going to finish what she'd started no matter how guilty anyone tried to make her feel about it. "The motive, in this case, doesn't have to be explained. Revenge. We also know that Jason lives only about a mile and a half from Alan's house, so it wouldn't have taken him very long to get there and back. His only alibi comes from his own wife. So far, he still seems like a viable suspect, until we come to the old lady who lives across the street, and her neighbor's horrible Chihuahua."

"A mysterious hound!" Todd stage-whispered. Charlotte made a noise that sounded very much like she was struggling not to laugh.

Sherry ignored them. "Mrs. Sherman is elderly, but her hearing is excellent, and she's a very light sleeper. Her next-door neighbor has a small dog who frequently wakes her up by barking at pedestrians. On the night in question the dog didn't bark. Jason couldn't have left his house on foot that night, even if he'd wanted to choose the evening of his wife's birthday to struggle through a blizzard on foot in order to get revenge on a man who had wronged him—though very seriously—many years ago. If Jason Martinez killed Alan, he must have driven there."

" So? " Corey asked. "So he drove there, then."

"Yes, that's what I would have assumed," Sherry said. "Until I got a chance to look at his truck. The Martinez family only owns one vehicle. I'd noticed over the past two weeks that I kept hearing what I first thought was a motorcycle driving through Winesap about half an hour after the diner closed. When I walked past Jason's truck I checked to see if my hunch was right and saw that his muffler is missing. If it was missing on the night Alan was killed, his driving back and forth between ten thirty and midnight would have been more than loud enough to disturb his insomniac neighbor, but she went to bed at nine that night and slept through until the morning. Jason, did you try to get that muffler repaired any time before Saturday?"

Jason's entire body relaxed. He smiled, then stepped forward, pulled out a chair, and sat down at the table with everyone else. He even grabbed the nearest teapot and a cup. "Yeah," he said. "It fell off on the highway a few weeks ago. I went to my guy on Route 20 about it, but he had to order a part, so I've just been driving around like that. You can call him and ask, he'll have the records and everything."

"Thank you, Jason," Sherry said, and gave him a small smile. Then she said to the room, "It might not hold up in a court of law, but considering that we don't have any other evidence to suggest that Jason was with Alan that night, on top of his wife insisting that he was home, I feel confident in crossing Jason off of my suspect list."

"At this rate you're going to run out of suspects," Todd said. "Unless the surprise twist at the end is going to be that it was the butler who did it all along."

"Oh, don't worry about that," Sherry said pleasantly. "I still have a few suspects left to go through. Like you, for example."

Todd raised his eyebrows. " Me? "

Sherry nodded, smiled politely, and continued, addressing the whole room again. "This is the point when this case gets complicated. There were other crimes being committed beyond the murder, and they involve three people, two of whom are in the room with us right now: Corey Thompson and Todd McCarthy. The third, Mr. Mike Kaminski, lives and works down in the city."

"I'm not listening to this," Corey said, and stood as if he was planning on storming out. Then his mother's hand shot out and caught his wrist.

"I think that you should, Corey."

Corey went very red and settled silently down into his seat again. Susan Thompson gave Sherry a short nod. "Go ahead, Sherry."

Sherry's throat felt oddly tight. "Thank you, Susan," she managed, and swallowed. "I first started thinking that something strange might be going on when Alan told me about how incredibly well Corey had been doing at finding art for the shop. It just seemed unlikely that someone would be able to so consistently find pieces that would be snapped up for hundreds or thousands of dollars up here in little Winesap. It wasn't quite strange enough to make a fuss over, though. Corey wasn't bringing back any Van Goghs. Everything was just on this side of reasonable. That's what I thought at first. That's what Alan thought, too, until the day that he started getting suspicious.

"I'm not sure what first made Alan think that something wasn't right, but he definitely suspected that there was something strange going on in his shop. Before he died, he'd been clearly worried about something involving the business, he'd checked out a number of books on art appraisal and contemporary American artists from the library, and he'd been poring over the books for the shop. I think he was looking for inconsistencies between the pieces that were coming in, their provenance, and the prices that Corey was asking for them. And there were inconsistencies. But what, exactly, was going on?"

She took a gulp of tea, partially to wet her dry mouth and partially so she could take a moment to get her thoughts together before she continued to speak. "As I said, there were three people involved, though it took me a while to establish a connection. I first noticed that something was off when Todd, Father Barry's twin brother, arrived in town appearing to already know Corey Thompson, Alan's son. They claimed that they'd met only very recently at a party and coincidentally bumped into each other again on the train up to Saratoga. I very quickly learned that this was a lie. They've known each other for at least six months, on what seems to have been fairly intimate terms. Why would they feel the need to lie about that? Both of them are single. Corey's family have known that he's gay since he was very young. There's no obvious reason for them to want to downplay their connection unless they have something else to hide. I decided to dig into that."

"Maybe I just value my privacy, Sherry," Todd said. "I don't like letting everyone on the planet know more than they need to know about my personal life."

"Yes, I'd noticed that about you," Sherry said. "Corey posts practically everything he does on the internet, but you keep things much more private. I did learn a few things about you, though. You have a very colorful criminal record, for such a young man. That one romance scam that got you in the papers was very clever. Cruel, but clever."

Todd shrugged. "That was years ago," he said. "I was young, broke, and stupid. I've grown up since then."

"You've definitely gotten less stupid," Sherry said. "From what I've seen. Anyway. While I was digging, I found something else interesting: you've known Mike Kaminski for many years. Mr. Kaminski," she said to the room, "is an antiques dealer, and the man who seems to have purchased a large percentage of the items that Corey brought into the shop. Alice, who works in the shop, mentioned to me that he was recently very annoyed when he learned that Alan had taken home one of the pictures in a set of small, realistic charcoal drawings of Western scenes that Mr. Kaminski had wanted to purchase. I didn't think anything about that, really, until I looked into his shop and realized that nothing that he sells looked even remotely similar to small charcoal cowboy drawings. So why was he so desperate to purchase a full set of them?

"I looked into him some more and learned something interesting. Mr. Kaminski has a criminal past of his own. Specifically, many years ago he served eighteen months in prison for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. The police suspected him of involvement with a larger organization but couldn't make the charges stick."

She looked around the room. Corey was stiff in his chair, his eyes fixed rigidly on the table. Todd was relaxed, comfortable, still watching Sherry as if he was having a night at the theater.

"Here's what I think happened," Sherry said. "Todd met Corey some time ago. Maybe six months ago, maybe a year or more. He learned that Corey was a talented artist who wasn't doing much with his skills and was living far, far beyond his means. He learned that Corey took frequent trips to the Caribbean on a wealthy friend's yacht. He learned that Corey's father ran a small antiques store up in Winesap, where Todd's twin brother, Barry, just happened to be preparing to take over as the parish priest. Todd himself was unemployed, increasingly aware that relying on older ladies and gentlemen to pay for his incidentals was a way of life with an expiration date, and looking for a new route to easy cash. He was friends with Mike Kaminski, who he knew still had connections in the drug trade. I suspect that Mr. Kaminski never stopped selling cocaine: as he got into the antiques and design business and started socializing with the people whose homes he helped to decorate, he merely restricted his sales to his own circles, and the police don't pay much attention to what rich people and their pet artists do at parties. Todd, being in the same circles, would have been aware of this.

"Eventually Todd came up with a scheme: Mr. Kaminski would reach out to his contacts to find a source of cocaine in the Caribbean. Corey, with money he'd asked for from his father plus possibly a contribution from Todd, acquired the drugs on his next trip with his friend. At some point he would have also gotten very busy creating convincing-enough-looking framed works of art by moderately well-known dead artists that he would bring to his father's shop, along with other works of art that he had purchased elsewhere and would be much more moderately priced. The fake pieces would then be purchased by Mr. Kaminski, who would distribute the drugs down in the city. The goal was to make pieces of art that an ordinary person wandering into an antiques store in Winesap would never consider purchasing for the marked price, but that could, plausibly, be sold for that much to enthusiasts or discerning resellers like Mr. Kaminski. They did it this way just in case Alan got curious or suspicious and started looking up the artists whose works he was supposedly selling: he'd find out that, yes, this artist existed, and that similar-looking works of theirs sold for a similar price. He'd be unlikely to pursue it any further after that. The whole thing fit together perfectly: the money coming to Corey would be laundered through the shop, and Mr. Kaminski had his own business to make everything look nice and reasonable on his end. Todd probably negotiated a cut from Corey's share. The one thing that they didn't think to factor in was the fact that Alan, who loved Westerns, would like one of his son's charcoal drawings so much that he'd willingly pay the shop the massively inflated price to bring it home with him and hang it on his living room wall."

There was a box of tissues on the table. Sherry pulled a tissue from the box and used it to grip the framed charcoal drawing in her bag and hand it across the table to Sheriff Brown. "Sheriff," she said, "would you please open up the back of the drawing?"

The sheriff did so silently, peeling away the paper and then popping out the cardboard backing. Behind the cardboard, packed tightly into the frame, were dozens of small plastic bundles of white powder.