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He approached the woman, speaking in a reasonable voice. “Bertie, listen. You don’t know me. All you know about is an old reputation. I’m here to help Gladys—I swear it. We have to search for her. She’s not in her right mind.”
Bertie’s lashes fell over her eyes and she looked downward quickly; she did know that he was speaking the truth.
She looked up at him again. “I have no idea where she is. She’d gone up to her room. Now, she isn’t there.”
“Which room?” he asked.
“Up the stairs, go down the balcony, first door to your left.”
He hurried past her and took the stairs two at a time.
Walking along the balcony, he saw that he was passing the spot where Hank Simon must have hurled himself from the upper level to the floor beneath, breaking his neck. An accident? No...
“Gladys! Gladys, where are you?” he called. “I’ll get the bust out of here right now! Gladys!”
No reply. He dashed into the woman’s room.
Genteel, pleasant, charming. There was a white knit cover on the bed and the pillows were plumped high. An old-fashioned dressing table stood on one side of the room, while a more masculine set of drawers, matching in wood and design, stood against the far wall. White chintz curtains covered the window that overlooked the courtyard. Oils portraying different aspects of Jackson Square and the river graced the walls.
“Gladys?”
The breeze ruffled the curtains. Nothing more.
“Mr. Quinn!”
Bertie hadn’t followed him up the stairs. Her voice wasn’t panicked, nor did it sound relieved. He walked back out to the balcony that looked over the foyer below and leaned against the rail.
It was solid.
Bertie was standing just inside the entry, but she wasn’t alone.
Danni Cafferty had arrived.
“We may be too late,” he said.
Bertie let out a gasp.
Danni frowned, gazing up at him with her deep blue eyes. “Too late?”
“Bertie, go through the rooms downstairs. Look in every closet,” Quinn said. “You—” he pointed at Danni “—get up here with me and start going through all the rooms on the second floor. Bathrooms, storerooms, closets, you name it.”
“Mr. Quinn,” Bertie said indignantly. “Mrs. Simon doesn’t make a habit of hiding in the closet!”
“Just do it!”
Bertie was worried; that much was obvious. She pursed her lips, not happy taking orders from him but willing at that moment to do anything.
Danni, still frowning, made her way up the stairs. He ignored her and returned to the room Gladys had shared with her husband.
He checked in her bathroom and the huge walk-in closet that had probably been another room or a nursery at one time. He peered under the bed. Then he hesitated, studying the open window. Dreading what he might find, he walked to it, stepped out on the inner courtyard balcony and glanced down.
He sighed in relief. There was no broken body on the patio stones below. He inhaled. Had the woman slipped out the back and gone for a stroll?
Danni came in. “I’ve been in a study, two guest rooms, a sewing room and an office and there are no more rooms. I opened every closet door—and checked the other two bathrooms. There’s no one here.”
“It’s all wrong,” he muttered.
“Why are you so sure of that?” she asked.
“I’ve seen what the bust can do,” he told her. And he had. He’d seen the madness in Vic and he knew what Vic had done.
“The bust is just an object!”
He brushed past her. There was a garage on the other side of the courtyard with an apartment above it. There had to be some kind of entry via the bottom of the U—the traditional design of the house—that surrounded the courtyard. He started down the hall but then paused, noting that the trapdoor to the attic wasn’t completely closed.
He cursed, barely aware of Danni standing behind him, watching him as if he should be in a mental ward.
Quinn pulled down the stairs that led to the attic and quickly climbed up them.
At first, he could see nothing. The attic was lit only by a single dormer window and his eyes had to adjust.
Then he heard a scream of horror behind him. Danni had followed him up. She was pointing.
He blinked, and then he saw it. In the shadowed space that fell just to the side of the window, there was a body swinging from the rafters.
He rushed to it, lifting the slim form of Gladys Simon so that the rope around her neck could no longer strangle her. He held her, dug in his pocket for his knife and cut the thick cord, easing Gladys down to the wooden floor. He straddled her, desperate to perform CPR.
But he’d been a cop—and he’d been around.
Gladys was gone.
He kept up his efforts, anyway. He could be wrong....
He vaguely heard Danni calling the police. And he felt her hand on his shoulder.
“She’s dead,” Danni said softly.
He knew it was true.
He sat back on his haunches, bitterly ruing the time it had taken to reach her. When Danni touched him again, he jerked away.
At that moment, he hated her as much as he hated himself.
* * *
Danni felt disjointed.
Horrified and disjointed. The morning had started out like any other—and now she was sitting in the parlor of an uptown home while police and paramedics moved in and out, listening to Bertie cry and Quinn speak with a detective in controlled tones. The way he’d looked at her when he’d given up on resuscitating Gladys had cut her to the core. She felt tremendous guilt, and anger that she should feel that way. She had come when he’d told her to come. She couldn’t have known the woman was going to commit suicide! And she had called the police, and they’d promised to send social services out to investigate.
She was still sitting here—waiting, as the police had asked—feeling as if the earth had tilted slightly off its axis.
She wanted to leave, to go home, forget the horror of seeing Gladys Simon’s body swaying in the shadows, forget she’d seen the woman’s face when Quinn had brought her down.
She’d never forget it, though. Something was unalterably changed and she hated it.
“What do you know about this?”
She startled to awareness; the detective—a man named Jake Larue—was standing beside her, looking down at her.
She raised her hands. “I don’t know anything. I wish I did. Mrs. Simon came into my shop today, swearing that a bust her husband had bought had killed him. She was extremely agitated. I called the police—not the emergency line, she wasn’t walking around with a knife or a gun—and I was assured someone was going to see to her.” Her words sounded defensive, like an excuse. They were an excuse.
Could she have said or done anything that would have saved the woman’s life?
Larue turned to Quinn, shaking his head. “She was bereft. Her husband had just died. You’re trying to tell me she didn’t kill herself?”
“No, I believe she might well have killed herself, but if anyone can answer that question for sure, it’ll be the medical examiner. We searched the house before we found her. The police response when Ms. Cafferty called in the death was excellent—I think a cruiser was here in two or three minutes. No one was crawling around the house or the grounds. I didn’t, however, get into the garage,” Quinn said.
“I have men searching the area now, but if she did kill herself, there’s no reason to expect that someone was in the house.”
“But someone was in here,” Quinn said with certainty.
Larue groaned. “You just said she killed herself.”
“Yes, I believe she did.”
“Then why would anyone have been here?” Larue asked, his eyes narrowed. Danni noted that he wasn’t looking at Quinn as if he was crazy; instead, Larue looked as if he wanted to groan again, sink down in a chair and clamp his head between his hands. He held his ground, though, only a long breath escaping him as he stared at Quinn.
“The bust is gone,” Quinn told him.
“The bust...the bust that supposedly killed Hank Simon?” Larue asked skeptically.
Quinn nodded. “Mrs. Simon was convinced it killed her husband.”
“And you think a bust killed her, too?” Larue asked.
“It doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is what was in her head. If she believed the bust killed him, she might have believed it would kill her,” Quinn said. He shrugged. “Or worse—maybe she believed it would have some kind of dangerous effect on her...I don’t know. I can only say she was acting very erratically and that’s why I came here. I’d seen her in the French Quarter, and to my deepest regret, it seems she was in a far worse frame of mind than I’d imagined.”
Larue sighed. “Quinn, it’s going to get more and more complicated, isn’t it? Every time you’re involved—”
“Wait!” Quinn protested. “You’re the one who asked me to check on Vic Brown and his raving about the bust, remember?”
“I’m not publicizing the fact that I brought you in, you know,” Larue reminded him.
Quinn grinned and nodded slightly.
“We were partners once,” Larue explained to Danni.
“He’s a good cop,” Quinn said. “A really good cop.”
“And Quinn is a damned good investigator, but I am a cop and...well, police forces all over sometimes call on P.I.s. With Quinn, I know it’s cool because even if he doesn’t make big bucks on a case like this, he’s going to be okay financially.”
Danni sensed that Quinn could feel her looking at him curiously. “I have a trust fund from my grandmother, who managed to buy just the right stocks at the right time,” he explained. “So I’m okay when I work on something that doesn’t involve a paying client. Something I’m interested in. And I’m always available for Larue when he needs a little help.”
“Thank God, since the force isn’t rolling in money and I’m going to be stretching the budget to the limit to bring in the overtime on this. I can already see it coming!” Larue turned to Danni. “Thanks to Quinn,” he added.
“But you have to admit it’s worth it. Because I’m usually a step ahead, and you know I do my damnedest to get answers,” Quinn finished for him.
Larue was silent for a minute, then sighed again.
Danni was surprised. She’d never imagined that Quinn was actually accepted by the police force—a force he’d left.
“All right,” Larue said briskly. “So you figure this bust—which Mrs. Simon believes killed her husband—is missing? That someone broke into the house as she was killing herself and stole it?”
“I don’t know if the thief broke in before or after she killed herself, but whoever stole it might have been ready to kill for it, anyway,” Quinn told Larue.
Danni spoke up. “No one needed to kill her for the bust. She wanted it out of the house. She would’ve given it to anyone who asked.”
Both of them looked at her—as if they’d forgotten she was there.
“Yes, she wanted it gone,” Quinn agreed. “But the person who stole it might not have known she was desperate to get rid of it. That’s irrelevant. We were too late, the bust is gone and there’ll be more deaths over it.”
“You’ve lost me, Quinn,” Larue said. He didn’t wait for a response, continuing with, “What about the housekeeper?” He glanced down at the notes on his iPhone. “Roberta Hyson. She didn’t see or hear anyone in the house.”
“This is a big house,” Quinn reminded him. “And I’m not sure about her eyesight or her hearing.”
“Nice...I hope people are kind to you when you’re old one day.”
“I’m not being insulting. The woman is elderly—and she isn’t in this room, so she can’t be insulted.”
It was crazy. Crazy. Danni’s head was pounding. She stood; the men had forgotten her again, anyway.
“If there’s nothing else you need from me, I’m going home,” she said. Her voice sounded distant and a little shaky.
Once again, they both gave her their attention.
“Of course, Ms. Cafferty. If we need you, we know where to find you,” Larue said.
“You’re leaving? Just like that—after this?” Quinn frowned.
“Just like that,” she told him, nodding gravely.
She thought she’d made her escape when she walked out the front door, moved down the steps and past the two uniformed officers standing guard at the entry like carved sentinels.
But she’d barely reached the street when she heard him behind her. And she wasn’t surprised when he grabbed her arm.
She spun around, seething. “Let go of me, Mr. Quinn...Michael, whatever.”
He did, staring at her. She hated the fact that she felt compelled to stare back.
