Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #2: Books 5-8 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [readnow TXT] 📗

“Let’s go to Eastchester, Stone, and call upon the Cavendishes.” She looked up at me without smiling. “I’ve heard they do provide the most splendid alibis. Simply to die for!”

It took about twenty minutes to get to Country Club. The Cavendishes had their house right on the shore, on Country Club Road. It was a big, sprawling, terra cotta affair with a double-entrance drive. I parked my Jag next to their Buick and Dehan rang the doorbell. The door was blond wood with stained glass panels. I noticed Dehan looking at them and sucking her teeth.

“What’s the matter? You don’t like the stained glass?”

“You telling me that’s art? You disappoint me. I’ll give you twenty bucks if that was made a day before 1973.”

I heard the flap of Havaianas and the door opened onto a woman who had been attractive a decade earlier and thought she still was, despite her sustained efforts at systematic self-destruction. All of this you could read in the mocking regard of her watery, slightly oversized eyes, and the way she held her gin and tonic as though it were an extension of her hand. Her jeans were too tight and her skin was too loose.

“My God, you look the part,” she said. Dehan’s eyebrows slid toward her hairline and I pulled out my badge. I was about to speak, but she said, “I know who you are. Paul told me to expect you. Come in, the name’s Liz, and for God’s sake, loosen up and have a drink. Or a joint. You want a joint?”

I said, “Thanks, I’ve already eaten.” But she turned and walked away from us. Dehan followed and I stepped in and closed the door. We followed her voice, which called to tell us she was by the pool.

We found her sitting in a large wicker chair by a garden table, on a patio by a manicured lawn. The pool was some thirty feet away, shining a luminous turquoise with liquid, silver streaks. She pointed languidly to a trolley of drinks and said, “Make free. Is the sun over the yardarm yet, Detective Stone? Or am I being a very naughty girl?” She leered at Dehan. “You won’t object if he uses his handcuffs on me, will you, Detective Dehan?”

We sat and I leaned on the table. It was barely midday and I already felt exhausted. “How many of those babies have you had, Mrs. Cavendish?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, you sound like my mother! What’s it to you? There’s no law…”

I sighed and interrupted her. “I don’t give a damn how many you’ve had, Mrs. Cavendish. You can drink yourself into oblivion, for all I care. But I am here to check on Reverend Truelove’s alibi, and if you are too drunk to be coherent, then we are all wasting our time. If you’re drunk, we’ll leave. If it’s an act, cut it out.”

Her cheeks flushed. She had large brown sunglasses perched on the top of her head, which she now lowered over her eyes and looked away.

“How rude,” she said. “This is my first of the day, in fact.”

“Good. I need to ask you about the night of the 5th of September, 1999. Now, I know it’s a long time ago, but it’s important that you be very accurate. If you are not sure, it is better that you tell us, rather than lie.”

“I remember,” she said, still staring at the pool. “Paul came to dinner that night.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because the next morning he telephoned to tell me about poor Sylvie. Such a sad girl.”

Dehan lifted her aviator shades onto the top of her head, in a strange echo of Liz Cavendish’s recent and opposite movement. She narrowed her eyes and asked, “He phoned you in the morning? Can you remember what time that was?”

Mrs. Cavendish shrugged. “God, I don’t know. I was still in bed, I remember that much. It must have been nine or ten at the latest.”

There was something that wasn’t squaring up for me. “How do you know Reverend Truelove, Mrs. Cavendish? Forgive me for being blunt, but you don’t strike me as the Bronx Methodist Community type.”

She finally looked at me and gave an ironic smile. “Finally, a compliment. Paul and I go back a very long way. We’ve been friends for decades. I met him in Brazil over thirty years ago, in the mid eighties. He was half a ton of trouble back then, I can tell you that for free.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“Not really.”

I sighed. “Is Mr. Cavendish at home? We would like to talk to him as well.”

She snorted. “Reggie? Reggie is always at home. He never leaves.”

Dehan leaned forward. “Mrs. Cavendish, perhaps we haven’t been clear enough with you. See, here’s our problem. This is a murder investigation, and we have a very small pool of suspects. So that means that these people’s alibis are really important. Because if the alibi doesn’t hold up, or is unconvincing, that person could go to prison for twenty or thirty years. Which I figure would bring Reverend Truelove to somewhere around eighty-five or ninety before he joined you for a dinner party again. We are trying to discuss something important with you, Mrs. Cavendish. And the frivolous act isn’t helping anyone, least of all your pal Paul.”

She gave Dehan a look that was long and hostile. “My husband is paralyzed from the neck down. He also has brain damage. Forgive me if I seem frivolous, Detective. It’s how I cope.”

I asked, “How long has he been in this condition?”

“Twenty-five years. It’s the reason we came back from Brazil. It was an accident, white water rafting.”

“Was Reverend Truelove already back in the States?”

She took a long time to answer. “We all came back at roughly