St. James Investigates by Inez B. Phillips

Author:Inez B. Phillips [Phillips, Inez B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: murder; San Francisco; private detective; cat; conspiracy; crime; theft; cops; family; friendship; humor; estate; fighter; greed; homicide; investigat
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

The investigation of the tainted IV could be carried on without me. Liam would update me when something happened. I needed to get back to my life and Caroline Rand Gardiner. I had ignored the case while Max was recuperating from his knife wounds, and the visit from Liam’s ex-wife had set his recovery back. Now he would have to be moved to a safer location.

I had avoided my apartment since the day Max was stabbed. The walls and floor should have been cleaned by now, but the odor of blood still lingered in my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Max’s bloody body.

Mail had stacked up in my letterbox since the last time I was in the building. I pulled out an armload and thumbed through the ads until I found a letter from Duke, Smith, and Holmes, Attorneys at Law. The velum envelope was an exquisite example of the printer’s art. Anything looking that official should be framed rather than opened. The last time I received one of these, it was an invitation to a how-to-become-a- millionaire seminar.

I ripped into the envelope as I walked down the hall to my apartment. It was a confirmation of the meeting with Jesse Duke, the attorney for the Gardiner estate. This would be the first time I could meet with him since Caroline hired me to look into her death.

My sofa had been pulled out into the hall with two paint-speckled chairs stacked on it. The filing cabinet sat on the other side of the open door. I heard the growl of cleaning equipment. The landlord was a cheapskate. He would want the building super to clean the blood and paint out of the carpet instead of replacing it.

The red splotches on the walls had been painted over. Not the entire room, just the spots. The institutional beige walls looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. I followed the noise into the bedroom where Ivan was working on the bloodstained carpet.

“Do you think all of that’ll come out?” I shouted over the slurping noise.

Ivan shut off the machine and mopped his brow. “It doesn’t look like it.”

“Why not replace it?” I asked.

“Mr. Wilson wants to save it, if possible.” Ivan squatted to look under the bed. “The blood ran under the bed and soaked in. I don’t think cleaning will help.”

“Perhaps he will just want to cut out the damaged parts.” I tried to keep a straight face. “The pad will stink if it isn’t replaced, too.”

Ivan nodded.

“I’ll leave you to your work. I want to pick up some clothes” This was the longest conversation we’d had since I moved in seven years ago.

I looked in the closet hoping that there were some clothes without paint spots. Mandy had dribbled paint across everything on the hangers. I found some clothes in the dresser that she had missed and stuffed them into my carryall.

The handle on the small safe was covered with the red paint. Liam had made fun of me for locking my current files and tax records in it.

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