The False-Hearted Teddy Read online

  “And then what happened?”

  “Nothing. It was the final betrayal. First Gus, then God killing my little boy, and then Jen. I couldn’t deal with it, so I just skulked out of there with my tail between my legs.”

  “And your grave-robbing ‘friend’ went on to turn the bears you’d made to comfort your dying son into a cheesy but lucrative enterprise. How long was it before you made another bear?”

  “Almost two years.”

  “What made you start up again?”

  “It was either that or drink myself to death and I missed my friends from the teddy bear community.”

  “Yeah, for the most part they’re good people. When you signed up for this show, did you know that Jennifer would be attending?”

  “Of course. You saw the pre-event brochure with their smug pictures plastered on the front.”

  “Were you planning some sort of showdown?”

  “No, I was going to ignore them.”

  “But something happened to change your mind.”

  “It was their booth.”

  “Huh?”

  “That vulgar booth with the flashing lights and music. My son died surrounded by angel bears and that filthy pair of monsters had them on display like they were cheap prizes at a third-rate carnival. First it made me sick. Then it made me mad.”

  “So, you weren’t upset over them signing the big contract with Wintle and the cartoon series?”

  “This wasn’t about money,” Donna snapped.

  “I understand.”

  “It wasn’t enough that Jen stole those bears, she’d turned them into something tawdry and vile and in doing so deliberately dishonored the memory of my son. She might as well have set that goddamned booth up on Benjamin’s grave.”

  My brain couldn’t quite follow the logic, but my heart did and I nodded in full agreement. “So, what did you do?”

  “Last night at the reception, I started drinking and the drunker I got, the more I wanted to remind Jennifer of just what an evil thing she’d done.”

  “Where did you go after you finished talking to Ash and me?”

  “Out to the lobby. You were right. I pretended to be Jennifer to get a key card to their room. The clerk didn’t think twice about issuing a new one.”

  “And what did you do then?”

  “I went up there and—I’ll admit it—for a few seconds I considered either destroying or stealing the angel bears they had stored in their room.” Donna glanced away for a second, clearly embarrassed at the admission. “But, I didn’t do it.”

  “Actually, I’m not as worried about the fact that you considered committing vandalism and theft so much as whether or not you put superglue into Jennifer’s inhaler.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I didn’t kill her.”

  “Any idea of who did?”

  “Probably someone else she stabbed in the back and if I knew the name I certainly wouldn’t tell you or the police. And let me ask you a question.” She pointed a finger at me. “Would it be so wrong for Tony to go to jail for Jen’s murder? Both of them were very bad people.”

  “They may have been, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to commit a brutal murder and imprison a man for life for a crime he didn’t commit. That’s dangerous thinking because what happens if somebody decides that you’re evil and deserve to die?”

  “I suppose.” She didn’t sound convinced, however.

  “So, what did you do in their room?”

  “I took one of the angel bears from a box and propped it up on the bed next to the pillows. Then I got a picture of my son that I used to carry in my wallet…” Donna took a deep ragged breath. “And I put it so that the bear was holding the picture. Then I left.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all I did. I wanted to remind her of what a ghoul she was.”

  “Yet you didn’t get the response you were hoping for from Jennifer.”

  “I—how did you know?”

  “Your B-52 strike that I regret interrupting at breakfast. Something obviously happened to make you even angrier than the night before.”

  “Late last night, Jen called my room and told me that she wasn’t going to tolerate any further harassment and that if I so much as blinked at her wrong, she was going to have me arrested for stalking and trespassing.”

  “Not exactly the penitent response you were hoping for.”

  “No, and then she told me I was crazy. She said that the cherub bears were her idea and that I was just jealous of her success. How could she have lied like that?”

  I chuckled humorlessly. “Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. But this woman was so sleazy that she stole your dead son’s teddy bears, which were supposed to be donated to a hospital, and you’re actually surprised that she lied to you?”

  “When you put it that way, I guess it does sound ridiculous.”

  “But at the time you were angry.”

  “Furious.”

  “Enough to go back to their room this morning while they were at breakfast?”

  “No. Besides, I couldn’t. Right after I got off the phone with Jen, I began worrying that she was going to call the police or hotel security.”

  “So you got rid of the card. Where?”

  “I threw on some clothes and went down the hall to the elevator. There was a trash can there.” Donna emptied the glass again. “Can I have some more?”

  “Just a little. I want to save some for my wife.” Once I finished pouring, I sat back and rubbed my eyes, suddenly weary. “What do you suppose happened to the picture of Benjamin?”

  “I’m assuming she threw it away.”

  There was a pair of gentle taps on the door. Donna gave me a nervous look.

  “It’s okay. It’s probably Ash.”

  I limped over to the door and received an ugly surprise. No sooner did I press down on the handle far enough to disengage the latch, than the door slammed into me with enormous force. I fell backwards, bounced off the dresser, and crashed to the floor, landing hard on my hip. Meanwhile, a platoon of heavily-armed cops came piling through the doorway in a never-ending stream, like clowns from a car, all of them shouting, “Police! Get your hands up!” Behind me, Donna screamed.

  Although I often find fault with the mystery novels that Ash loves, the supposedly more realistic thrillers can be just as fake. For example, the male protagonists in thrillers are usually endowed with an uncanny ability to immediately identify the manufacturer, country of origin, model, and caliber of the firearm being pointed at them. Even more amazingly, they sometimes can even venture a guess as to the sort of ammunition inside the gun, which should qualify as some sort of extra-sensory perception. Real life is a little different, however. Having had guns aimed at me several times during my career as a cop, I can assure you that your thoughts aren’t: Gosh, that’s an American-made, Smith & Wesson brand, Model 4040PD, .40 caliber, semiautomatic pistol with a black matte finish—and probably loaded with hollow-point bullets—being pointed directly at my melon. Rather, your brain simply registers it’s a gun as you try not to wet your pants.

  So, although I didn’t recognize the guns, I did know one of the persons holding them as they charged into the room. It was Lieutenant Sarah Mulvaney and, insofar as her frozen facial muscles allowed, she was smiling. With her gun pointed directly between my eyes, she said, “Hey, wiseass, move and you’re dead.”

  It was a bad bit of dialogue from a Grade B cop movie, but I decided not to say anything. Nor did I move.

  Since my prone body completely blocked the pathway into the room, two of the uniformed cops ran across the top of the bed to get to Donna, who was whimpering with fear. They quickly handcuffed her and then dragged her back over the bed. Just before they got to the door, it occurred to Donna that I was the most recent in a long line of people to betray her, so she let loose with such a volley of inventively obscene insults that all the cops paused momentarily to listen in admiration. And I’ll allow it was a magnum opus
performance as she abused my parentage, sexual practices, gender orientation, eating habits, weight, physical equipment or lack thereof, and how I loved my mother. Her voice continued to echo from down the hallway until she was ushered into an elevator. Meanwhile, Mulvaney continued to keep her pistol—by now I’d been looking at it long enough to tell it was a semiauto—pointed at me.

  “Am I allowed to ask what this is all about?”

  “Yeah, it’s about twenty-five years, if they don’t give you the lethal injection.” Mulvaney slowly raised the pistol and nodded at a trio of waiting cops. “Get him up and in handcuffs.”

  They yanked me to my feet and a second later I was wearing a set of stainless-steel bracelets—and not the kind that’s the hot look in jewelry in Italy this year. I looked around for Sergeant Delcambre, but couldn’t see him, so I assumed he was still at the police station.

  Leaning against the dresser, I said, “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “We’ve got information that says otherwise.”

  “Information from who?”

  “An anonymous informant who called the front desk at the police station to tell us we could find evidence linking you to Jennifer Swift’s murder in this room.”

  “Why am I not surprised that you’re one of those dishonest cops who likes to run the ‘anonymous informant’ hoax?”

  “We actually received a call,” Mulvaney said hotly.

  “Right, as if I don’t know how this game is played. I refused to give you permission to search my room and, what do you know? Some ‘anonymous person’—that you’ll never have to put on the witness stand, because he doesn’t exist—was kind enough to telephone you and provide you with precisely the information you wanted. It’s a freaking miracle.”

  “Believe what you want.” She turned to a uniformed officer. “Search him.”

  One of the cops patted me down for weapons and pulled my wallet out. He flipped it open to show my SFPD badge to Mulvaney. She took it and stuffed it into her jacket pocket.

  “There’d better be sixty-eight bucks in that wallet when you hand it back to me.”

  “For a killer, you’re a funny guy.” Turning to the doorway, she yelled, “The evidence techs can come in now.”

  “I’d like to see your search warrant,” I said, wishing this didn’t feel so much like the final scene of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.

  “I don’t need a warrant. This is a search incident to a lawful arrest.”

  “I’m under arrest?”

  “That’s right. For the murder of Jennifer Swift.”

  “You’re making a huge mistake.”

  “Why don’t you just shut up until we get back to headquarters?”

  I watched as two investigators in dark blue jumpsuits came into the room. One had a digital camera while the other carried a metal suitcase that undoubtedly contained evidence collection equipment. Both immediately went into the bathroom. There were several bursts of white light as the camera strobe flashed. Then one of the techs emerged from the bathroom dangling a clear plastic bag with some items inside, but she was too far away for me to make out what they were.

  “It’s here in the trash can, all right,” she said.

  “What’s here?” I demanded.

  Mulvaney snatched the bag from the tech and shoved it under my nose. “This. The proof you killed Jennifer Swift: a pair of latex gloves and two empty superglue tubes. You’re dead meat, Lyon.”

  Thirteen

  I’ll tell you, I felt pretty stupid. We’re talking world class-stupid: racing to beat a fast train at a railroad crossing-stupid; joking about having a bomb in your carry-on luggage to Transportation Safety Administration guards at an airport-stupid; the kind of breathtakingly transcendental stupidity that caused the NFL to contract with an outfit like MTV to produce the Super Bowl halftime show and then be shocked when there was a “wardrobe malfunction.”

  It was all suddenly and painfully clear. Donna was the killer and the gloves and superglue tubes used to turn the inhaler into a murder weapon had been hidden inside her purse right up until the moment she’d dumped them into my wastebasket. It’d happened when she claimed she needed to use the bathroom. For all I knew, maybe Mulvaney had told the truth about the anonymous caller. Perhaps Donna had a cell phone in the purse, too, and had quietly duked in the call to the Baltimore cops while supposedly powdering her nose. And then she stalled me with a teary dog-and-pony show until they arrived.

  However, an awful lot still didn’t make any sense. For instance, why hadn’t she planted all the evidence in the ventilation duct in the Swifts’ room when she framed Tony? Why hang onto it? Another thing I couldn’t figure out was why the cops had arrested her. But I guessed I’d have a good long time to figure that out. The bottom line was that I felt like a first-class idiot and with good reason: I was.

  Yet the thing that bothered me the most was the knowledge that my arrogance was going to cause Ash pain and upset. My only option now was to focus on keeping her from being sucked into the whirlpool, which meant portraying my wife as being completely unaware of my unofficial investigation.

  Mulvaney dangled the evidence baggie a couple of inches from my eyes. “This was stupid.”

  “You’re a mind-reader.”

  She tossed the baggie to the evidence tech and then jerked her head in the direction of the Frangelico bottle and glass on the table. “And this is a cozy little scene. Does your wife know that you’re up here entertaining another woman?”

  “No, and that other woman is—”

  “Donna Jordan. I know all about that disturbance she caused this morning at breakfast. We’ve been looking for her.”

  “Good, because she’s the killer.”

  Mulvaney’s eyes glittered with merriment. “Nice try, but I know exactly who murdered Jennifer Swift. My only question is whether your wife helped with the killing.”

  “She knows nothing about this.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll arrest her, too, just to cover my bases.”

  “Leave her out of this and I’ll provide you with a complete statement.” I hoped that Mulvaney wasn’t paying close attention to the careful way I’d phrased the proposal, because I hadn’t offered to confess, although that’s the way I’d intended it to sound.

  “You’ll tell me everything?”

  “Everything.” Which, again, was technically the truth. “If Donna’s not a suspect, why did you arrest her?”

  “Hit-and-run and accessory after the fact to murder. I figure the threat of criminal charges will improve her memory and make her a better witness when it comes time to get a statement from her.”

  “So, if she doesn’t remember things your way, she goes to jail.”

  “Basically.”

  “And after perjuring herself to implicate me, the real killer goes free. Do you have any idea of just how dishonest you are?”

  She shoved me in the direction of the door. “You can tell me all about my ethical shortcomings over at district headquarters. Then, when you’re done, you can tell me why you killed that woman.”

  As I left the hotel room, the crime scene techs began to take more photos before searching for evidence. There were a couple of cops out in the hall and they fell in behind Mulvaney and me as I shuffled down the corridor. My bad leg makes walking challenging enough, but with my hands secured behind my back, I felt as if I were about to lose my balance at any moment. We arrived at the elevator and rode it down to the ground floor, where my day immediately went from bad to worse.

  The door slid open and the bright spotlights from no less than four TV video cameras blinded us. Somebody had obviously alerted the media that Mulvaney was about to escort a homicide suspect through the lobby and you didn’t need to be the Amazing Kreskin to know who’d tipped off the tragedy merchants. Microphones were shoved in our faces and I heard several voices simultaneously ask if Mulvaney or I had something to say. I glanced at Mulvaney and saw that she was wearing the patented police I’m-far-too-professional-
to-grin-but-we-caught-the-bastard expression.

  It hit me all wrong and so, just to prove that my colossal misjudgment of Donna wasn’t a fluke, I did something else extremely stupid by saying, “Yes, I’d like to make a statement.”

  The cops began to push me toward the door, but the reporters kept pace. Someone shouted, “Did you kill her?”

  I leaned close to a microphone. “No, I’m innocent. I’ve been arrested for a murder I didn’t commit, but I don’t blame Lieutenant Mulvaney on account of her medical condition.”

  Mulvaney paused to shoot me a surprised and questioning look.

  “What medical condition?” The question came from the reporter with the dandruff.

  “This poor woman has had so much BOTOX injected into her face, that it’s leaked into her brain and paralyzed it.”

  There was a moment of silence and then several of the reporters began to chuckle. Mulvaney gave me a venomous stare and jerked me toward the doors. As we passed through the revolving glass doors, I heard the officer behind me trying to smother her laughter, while the shoulders of the cop in front of me were quivering. However, I wasn’t feeling particularly jolly, because I realized that I might have just talked Ash into jail. Outside beyond the portico, the wind-driven rain was pelting down. It was cold, but not half so much as Mulvaney’s expression.

  She growled, “Innocent, huh? I thought we had a deal.”

  “We still do, but you had that coming.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I agreed to cooperate and then you parade me through the lobby for the media like I was some sort of big-game trophy? That was just wrong.”

  Her gaze flicked downward. “I had no idea that was going to happen.”

  “Yeah, and I’m the Sultan of Brunei. But don’t be upset. Think how good you’re going to look at the press conference when you modestly tell all about how you got the wise-cracking killer to give a full statement.”

  “You’d better, otherwise I’ll be back for your wife. Are we clear on that?”