The Gift of Grift Page 7

  Did she want him to follow her? Ray figured he didn’t have anything to lose, so he turned on his heel and followed her out of the doors and onto the street.

  Judy marched to a coffee shop two stores down and sat at a table, glancing over her shoulder as if she thought someone was following her. Other than Ray, he guessed.

  Ray joined her at the table, although he hated to take up space in a restaurant without buying something. “Are you worried about something?” he started the conversation.

  Judy shrugged. “Whoever did that to Brian could be just as mad at me,” she murmured. “And for all I know they’re using you to find me.”

  Good point. And also a good way to start the conversation. “Do you have any idea who might have done that to Brian?”

  She sighed and plucked a napkin from the holder on the table, starting to shred the thin brown paper into fuzzy bits. “We visited half a dozen places in town. Any of them could be mad enough.”

  “Most of the shop owners I’ve talked to only lost ten or twenty or thirty dollars,” Ray pointed out. “Hardly enough to kill over.”

  “Yeah. Could be the principle of the thing.”

  “Brian was also from the area.”

  “I know.” Judy cringed, showing her neat white teeth. “It seems like it stings worse when it’s someone you used to know.”

  Yes, Ray was intimately familiar with that theory of motive, unfortunately. But that wasn’t why he’d brought it up. “Do you know if he had any enemies in town from when he was growing up?”

  “What, is someone going to beat him to death because he was homecoming king?” Judy rolled her eyes.

  Ray was pretty sure Brian hadn’t been homecoming king — hadn’t that been Mitch? — but he decided not to mention that. She might have been using a hypothetical.

  Or she might have been his first victim.

  “How long have you known Brian?” Ray asked.

  “Little over a year.”

  “And have you been working with him all that time?”

  Judy’s fidgeting hands slowed for a moment. “Most of it,” she said. “We’ve been in New England, but he said we could make better money and it would be warmer back home.”

  “Are you from North Carolina, too?”

  “No, New York.”

  Of course. “So you pull these scams everywhere you go?”

  One corner of her mouth quirked up for a second. “Professional grifters. Living the dream.”

  Ray couldn’t imagine what kind of childhood she must have had if this looked anything like a dream. It looked to him like making less than minimum wage and running from the law, constantly living on the lam. He couldn’t fathom why Judy — a cute girl who could have had her pick of men, and certainly seemed as if she could have other qualifications and skills — would agree to such a life.

  Unless she’d fallen in love with Brian. “Were y’all just business partners?” Ray asked.

  Judy dropped the napkin, then snatched it up again and covered her face. She sniffled behind the napkin. “No,” she managed after a minute.

  Ah. Ray would have pegged her for Brian’s daughter’s age, but he shouldn’t judge. “Brian mentioned children?”

  She shook her head. “Part of the con.”

  Well, at least there wouldn’t be any devastated kids out there waiting to hear from their father, wondering why he’d never come home.

  Still, Ray needed to know what had happened to Brian, and for more than just his peace of mind. “Judy, I need you to think very hard about anything that happened while y’all were in town,” Ray said. “Anyone Brian spoke to. Especially if it seemed as though there might have been bad blood.”

  Judy pressed her lips together, but her eyes scanned back and forth, as if she were reading her memory like the pages of a book. “There was one woman,” she said after a moment. Then she sat up. “Yes, it was not far outside your shop, actually. She was wearing a purple pantsuit.”

  Ray raised both eyebrows. He knew exactly who’d been in his shop Monday wearing a purple pantsuit: Pam Richter.

  The same woman who’d been so upset just to hear Brian’s name.

  “What happened?” Ray asked. “Did they argue?”

  “Oh yeah. She was pretty much screaming in his face. If her hands hadn’t been full — with a bag from your shop, I think? — she probably would have been whaling on him right there. Said he deserved it, too.”

  “Did you pick up on why?”

  Judy bit her lip and started shredding the napkin again. “She said something about leaving her? Sounds like a bad breakup, but I don’t really know. Brian left town after high school, and it seems silly for anyone to hang onto a grudge about a high school sweetheart for . . . well, longer than I’ve been alive.”

  Yep, then she really was as young as she looked. Ray sat back in his chair to absorb this information. He didn’t remember anything about a romance between Brian and Pam, but he was likely the last person to know about such a thing. Normally, Ray would have asked Mitch about this, but a murder investigation or, rather, a murder investigation that might have a tangential relationship to high school gossip didn’t seem like a good enough reason to interrupt his honeymoon. He’d make a note to ask Chip.

  “Anybody else?” Ray asked.

  “We split up most of the day. We wouldn’t have even seen each other there if she hadn’t stopped him.”

  If they had five victims of Brian and they’d mostly worked separately, had Judy conned others? “Who did you hit on your own?”

  “Um.” She pressed her lips together and managed a thin smile. “Two restaurants and the Quik’n Easy.”

  Ray frowned at her, but at least he felt a little assured that she might have been telling the truth about the rest.

  It was certainly a start. He checked his watch. Was it really that late already? He needed to get back to Dusky Cove to make sure Katie got dinner and her medicine on time.

  “Thank you,” he said to Judy, standing. “Please, call me if you think of anything else.”

  She nodded, staring into the middle distance.

  He hated to leave her there, looking so sad, but he turned away slowly.

  “Mr. Watson?” she called, her voice hardly above a whisper.

  He turned back, and she held out two bills to him: a ten and a twenty. The money they’d scammed from him.

  “Thank you.” He accepted the notes and hesitated. “Here.” He handed back the ten-dollar bill. “Treat yourself.”

  As soon as Judy took the money, he realized how empty and hollow that must seem. She’d just lost someone she loved, and he was trying to fill the hole with a pastry and coffee?

  “Thank you,” Judy murmured anyway.

  Ray stopped by Lowes Foods on the way home and picked up some fresh ingredients for Katie’s favorite: low country boil.

  Once the pot of water was finally boiling on their stove, Ray dumped in the ingredients spaced out at the right time: potatoes and sausage, fresh corn cobs, crab legs and finally shrimp. With a generous sprinkling — well, okay, it was more like a generous dumping — of Old Bay seasoning, the kitchen smelled like a feast almost instantly.

  Fortunately, the cooking time was very short, and within a few minutes, Ray was turning out the fully cooked dinner.

  The “traditional” serving method was to dump the whole thing onto sheets of newspaper, usually with a large crowd. But tonight, he’d made just enough to serve him and Katie for two meals.

  He dished up their plates and climbed the stairs to Katie’s room. “Hello, sweetheart.”

  “I’m guessing it was something pretty important that meant you closed the shop early,” Katie greeted him. If it weren’t for the mischievous tilt to her lips, Ray would have thought she was angry instead of teasing him.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  “Hm.” She pursed her lips again and cast a meaningful glance at the plates in his hands. “And you’re making my favorite just because?”r />
  Ah. He should have known better than to try to distract Katie, although he hadn’t consciously been attempting that. Ray set her plate on her table and got to work cracking open the crab legs on her plate.

  “What’s the latest word on Brian’s murder?” Katie asked while she watched.

  “I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Nothing to add to the paper?”

  Ray glanced at the Dusky Chronicle on the table beside the plate. It had covered the official story. He switched to cutting the kernels off her corn cobs. Ray definitely didn’t want to offer up the things he knew in addition to that: that he’d secretly met with Judy, that Chip was holding Ray responsible until they figured out who’d really done it, that Clark was trying to reframe the DCBOA meeting this morning to make Ray look guilty when there still wasn’t any logical reason to even think that.

  Ray turned to his own plate. He took a bite of potato and paused. Potatoes for two meals a day was a bit much, even for him — but he’d forgotten what had happened at the restaurant while he was waiting for his potato. “Do you remember the woman who called the buoys out front a ‘larceny lure’ on Monday?”

  Katie nodded. “Sure. Why?”

  “I ran into her at the Salty Dog this afternoon. She’s stuck in town with car trouble.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  Ray nodded absently, mulling over the conversation with Gail. “She came in for the wedding. Said she grew up down the street from Lori.”

  “Do you think she could have taken the buoys?” Katie asked.

  “One of Lori’s friends?” Seemed doubtful.

  “I heard you calling the partner,” Katie said.

  “Well, if you knew that, why didn’t you just come out and say that?” Ray asked. He busied himself with cracking open his own crab legs, hoping that was the end of the matter.

  Of course it wasn’t. “Did you meet with her?”

  “You sound like a jealous wife,” Ray teased.

  Katie laughed between bites of corn and sausage. “Should I be jealous?”

  “She’s a very cute little girl.”

  “So she’s about seven?”

  “Maybe twenty-seven, if that.”

  Katie smirked at him. “You might as well just come out with it.”

  So Ray did. He recounted everything Judy had told him. As the story continued, Katie’s expression grew more and more skeptical. “I don’t know if I believe her reasons for staying in town.”

  “Do you think she killed him? You don’t even know the girl.”

  “Neither do you,” Katie pointed out. “Don’t let her charm you.”

  Ray laughed, although he wasn’t sure she was joking. “Did you know anything about Pam and Brian?”

  “Who can remember thirty years ago?”

  Katie’s question was rhetorical, but Ray knew the answer: Katie did, all the time.

  “I don’t recall hearing anything about it,” she finally added. “Maybe you should go ask Pammy.”

  Maybe he should.

  Once Katie was settled in with an old DVD of Matlock, Ray decided to take her advice and do exactly what she had told him to do: go talk to Pammy about it. Ray drove to the strip mall that included both the local department store, Roses, and the River Nondenominational Christian Church. Tucked between them, Pam’s office still had the lights on. Hardly surprising for the hardest working real estate agent in the county.

  The OPEN sign wasn’t illuminated, but Ray knocked on the glass door anyway. After a minute, Pam poked her head out of the back. Ray waved to her, and she came to open the door to him.

  “Ray, what are you doing here?” she asked good-naturedly. “Not looking to sell the shop, I hope?”

  He laughed. “No, never.”

  “Oh, good.” Pam gestured for him to come in. Just inside the door, there was a floral loveseat and coffee table, as if they were stepping into a living room in one of her properties rather than an office. Ray took a seat on the loveseat, and Pam settled into an armchair.

  “Hope I’m not interrupting anything important,” Ray said.

  “Some paperwork. It can wait. Can I get you some water? Lemonade?”

  He couldn’t have turned down some fresh squeezed, perfectly tart lemonade, but he had a feeling Pam was talking about stuff from a can. “No, I can’t trouble you for that.”

  “How are you doing?” Pam asked.

  “We’re just fine. Did your client like the buoys?”

  “Yes, I think they did.”

  Ray nodded appreciatively, and the conversation lagged.

  It didn’t seem there would be an easy way to bring up the subject of Brian, so Ray would just have to get the awkwardness over with. “Did you hear the news about Brian McMurray?”

  Pam pressed her lips together and simply nodded.

  “Did you know him in high school?”

  “Not really.”

  Ray cocked his head. “Oh? Because Clark said you did this morning when we were talking with Chip.”

  Pam flinched, her dark ponytail bobbing with the movement. “He said what?”

  “He said you knew Brian.”

  “Oh.” She visibly relaxed.

  Ray didn’t have to have Katie’s powers of observation to see that something was off about her reaction. “So did you know him or not?”

  “Well, we were part of the same group of friends,” Pam had to admit. Chip knew that just as well as Mitch and Debra would have.

  Ray nodded, his mind going over all the reasons he thought he needed to speak to Pam. She had bought the buoys, which she said she’d given to her clients already. Clark said she knew Brian, and obviously she did, despite her protests. And Judy said she’d seen Pam and Brian arguing.

  “Would it surprise you to hear that someone saw you arguing with Brian on Monday?”

  Pam’s eyebrows lifted, answering his question without a word. “Why would I argue with Brian McMurray?” she asked.

  “Well, this person said it sounded like a breakup gone wrong.”

  Pam laughed, but her voice sounded too high and loud. Definitely nervous. “A breakup? How can you break up with someone you’ve never dated?” Sarcasm rang in her voice.

  In an instant, Ray saw a flash of pain behind Pam’s eyes. It was definitely a breakup gone wrong.

  “When did you date Brian?” Ray asked gently.

  Pam shook her head as if to protest, but Ray just pursed his lips, giving her the universal parent look of tell me the truth, now. Pam’s shoulders dropped. “In high school,” she finally confessed. “It was a secret, though. After everything that happened with Chip and Mitch over Debbie, we didn’t want to cause another civil war in our friend group. At least, that was what Brian said.”

  Ray nodded sagely. Apparently the man had gotten his start in conning people early on.

  “We were planning to get married.” Pam’s volume dropped even lower. “We were going to elope the summer after graduation. I had my bags all packed and sat up all night waiting for him.”

  “And he never showed up?”

  Pam met Ray’s gaze, and tears shone in her eyes. “He asked me to pay for the marriage license. That was all it took. Twenty-five dollars. He left town that night, and until this week, nobody in town had ever seen him again.”

  Ray nodded, remembering, too. Even when Brian’s parents had died, he hadn’t come back for the funerals. Someone had even started a rumor he was dead, too, but clearly that wasn’t the case. Unless it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Ray turned back to Pam. Could she have been the one to start the rumor years ago? And then when she saw him again, the man who’d broken her heart, had she decided to make those rumors come true?

  Seemed pretty far-fetched, although she did have the means and the motive now. But what about the opportunity?

  Ray wasn’t sure when Brian had died, but Chip had asked Ray his whereabouts early on Tuesday. “Where were you Tuesday morning?” Ray asked.

  Pam
instantly went on alert, sitting up straighter. Clearly she knew where this line of questioning was headed. “I got up at six thirty and went for a run.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Ray didn’t have to ask if anyone could account for her before that. Pammy had been divorced for ten years, and her kids were all grown. “And then what?”

  “Um, I’d have to check my calendar.”

  “It might be a good idea to do that.”

  Pam scowled, her ire finally getting the better of her. “You don’t seriously think I killed Brian because he jilted me thirty years ago.”

  “Pammy, even the most nonsensical leads have to be pursued. Chip is hounding me because I sold the buoys.”

  She cocked her head, then her eyes widened. “Are they the murder weapon?” she gasped.

  Oh, he probably shouldn’t have said that.

  “And I bought some buoys.” Recognition dawned behind Pam’s eyes. “And I was seen arguing with Brian. And I have a reason to have hated him for thirty years.”

  Ray nodded, trying to soften the blow with a sympathetic smile. “We all know you didn’t do it, but you’ll have to watch out. Chip’s friend got killed, and Chip is having to face the reality that Brian might not have been a good person, so I think he’s taking it pretty hard.”

  Pam nodded, her gaze shifting to the middle distance for a moment as she took this all in. Finally, she stood. “Let me get my calendar.”

  Pam hurried to the back office and returned a minute later with a day planner. “On Tuesday, I had a nine o’clock in Bolivia and an eleven o’clock in Shalotte.”

  That didn’t leave much time between to come back to Dusky Cove and bash Brian’s head in, but if her nine o’clock wasn’t long, she might be able to do it.

  “Could be better,” Pam mumbled, flipping through pages. She pulled out her phone next and tapped on the screen for a minute. “I think my cell phone records would prove I wasn’t in Dusky Cove at all that morning. I had to go straight from Bolivia to Shalotte, I remember.”

  Her head snapped up and her eyes locked on Ray’s. “Am I in trouble?” she asked, her eyes wide and serious.