Scales of Justice Read online

  My phone beeped with a reminder, but I didn’t need to look to know what it was about. Today the father of my favorite bride, she of the attempted porta-potty lawsuit, Big Daddy Johnson, was coming to my office to talk.

  When he had made the appointment, he’d described the subject matter as “personal.” And since I couldn’t imagine that he wanted to be a client, I wasn’t quite sure what he would talk about. But it was not a meeting I was looking forward to.

  I checked my hair in the hallway mirror and straightened my posture. No rich Misty-on-the-Sound blowhard was going to scare me, I said to myself, making a serious face. I called to Woogs as I walked to the kitchen and let him out the back door to do his thing. As he loped around the side yard, I looked up at the sound of a car coming down Waterview Boulevard. A black Mercedes with vanity plates spelling out DADDY J, as if to say “Here comes Big Daddy Johnson.”

  I called to Woogie, then scooped him up and rushed back in through the kitchen, taking a quick trip up to my bedroom to stash him out of sight. The bell rang. I came downstairs in a rush. I paused to catch my breath for a second, then opened the door, smiling.

  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Johnson. Won’t you please come in? My office is just back here. It’s the former dining room of the house.”

  Daddy Johnson walked in like the important man he was, taking in his surroundings and striding confidently through the living room.

  He sat down in front of my ornate desk and crossed his big shoe over his big thigh. “This is the haunted house, right? You bought it in foreclosure, I understand.”

  “Well, I did buy it in foreclosure.”

  “You’re not afraid to live here?”

  I gave him a level gaze. “Not at all. Do you have an interest in my house, Mr. Johnson? Because it’s not for sale.”

  “This house? No indeed. But I do have an interest in the house next door. Your friend Dr. D’Amore’s home.”

  “Well, I don’t represent him in connection with real estate matters, Mr. Johnson.”

  “I don’t want to buy it!” Johnson slapped his hand flat against my desk. “I want him to wise up to the reality that his so-called spa is not welcome in our town.”

  I leaned back in surprise. “And by that you mean...?”

  “You know very well what I mean. We’ve been very open-minded here about his buying one of the historic homes. This is not a provincial town.” Johnson moved his foot off his thigh and planted both legs on the ground. “We have those gay fellows—the dirty gardener business—and we have foreigners.”

  “Foreigners? He’s from New York!”

  “All right. That’s fine. But prostitutes, drug users... they are unwelcome here. Undesirable element. And I intend to draw the line.”

  “Mr. Johnson, Dr. D’Amore is a fine man. He is no more interested in having prostitution and drug use in Misty than you are. Where did people get such an idea? It’s absurd.”

  “And then there’s that murder—Roger Winthrop. Seems to me something strange is going on over there. Something dangerous.”

  “If there’s something dangerous going on, I’m quite sure it’s not of Dr. D’Amore’s making.” I tried to keep my voice even. “I don’t think we have anything further to discuss, Mr. Johnson. If you want to debate the merits of spas, I suggest you take it up directly with him.”

  Johnson stood, and suddenly I felt very small. “Tell him what I said. He needs to hear it.”

  I pulled myself up to my full height, wishing I had worn heels today. “Are you making a threat, Mr. Johnson?”

  “I don’t need to threaten anyone. If I’m unhappy, I don’t warn anyone. I wipe them out.” Johnson leaned over the desk, his bulky shoulders supported on his long arms, and stared at me. “Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “You can find the door, I’m certain,” I said, my arms crossed, leaving him to make his own way out.

  Johnson walked through the living room toward the front door, then turned back to face me. “Glad you feel safe here. A woman alone and all that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  After Johnson left, I felt kind of rattled. Which was no doubt what he had intended.

  It was looking more and more as though he had been behind the death at Angelo’s house. But that didn’t make sense. Why would he have wanted Roger Winthrop dead? Winthrop had been on an errand for Big Daddy himself. He was supposed to serve legal papers on Angelo that would stop him, at least temporarily, from completing the renovations on the spa. Clearly, I needed to tell Logan about Johnson’s implied threat.

  It was time to get to the bottom of that balcony collapse.

  I got online to see if I could find pictures of Angelo’s house from before the accident. After digging around, I found a few. I could see the ornamental balustrade on the balcony that apparently went back to before the turn of the century. The spindles that held up the railing on the balcony were ornate and appeared to be made of wrought iron. That certainly fit with what Pops had told me about Shrimpy coming into his store to look for old spindles.

  But of course, hundred-year-old wrought iron could be weak. Or maybe it could bend? Maybe it wasn’t the spindles themselves but their connections to the floor, the external wall, or the banister. I had no doubt that Logan would have investigated carefully.

  I started looking for videos about old houses and construction methods. I found out a lot about how to anchor a wrought-iron railing with spindles to the floor of a balcony and the building it protruded from. All very interesting, but it didn’t give me any answers as to what had happened next door.

  I needed to catch up with Logan directly and tell him about Johnson’s threatening visit, as well as what Pops had said about Shrimpy. I figured that Logan would have interviewed the construction workers by now, but he probably didn’t know about the foreman’s visit to Pops’s hardware store.

  I got Mr. Woogles set up with water in the kitchen and explained to him that I had to go out for a while. “I think it’s time that I talked to Logan again, don’t you agree, Woogie? I’m hoping that if I share my information with him, he’ll open up a little bit about what he knows. I know he has to be careful about not disclosing anything, but I have a stake in this too. Anyway, he ought to know that he can trust me by now.”

  I got into the car and made a call to the sheriff’s office as I was rolling down Waterview Boulevard. Logan wasn’t in, but they told me he should be back within a half hour, so I thought I’d use the time to try to track down Scarlett myself. I drove to the Mermaid’s Tail, a decent restaurant with a kind of divey bar, and asked the hostess if she was there.

  “Scarlett? Nah. She doesn’t work here anymore,” the hostess said. Her expression said that she wasn’t very happy about it.

  “She quit?”

  “That’s one way of putting it. She didn’t show up, starting last week. I called her to find out what was going on, and she said she wouldn’t be able to come in to work for a while. She was going out of town. So obviously we couldn’t keep her, even if she’d wanted to stay.” She lowered her voice. “Between you and me, it’s not a big loss. She was a cute girl, but she wasn’t always reliable.”

  The hostess pointed to a mural on the far wall, which featured the Misty seawall, a view of the Sound, and the lighthouse in the distance. “She was talented, though. She painted that mural for the boss. Apparently she went to art school.”

  “Thanks for letting me know.” It was starting to look like I might never catch up with Scarlett. I turned to leave.

  “She a friend of yours? If she calls back or something, I could give her your number.”

  I reached into my bag for a business card, but then I decided that advertising myself as a lawyer was less likely to get me a call. “Do you have a piece of paper? I’ll write it down for you.” I scribbled my name and number on the message slip she handed me and passed it back. “I appreciate this. I’d really like to get in touch with her.”

  “Sure thing
,” the hostess said.

  I got back in the car and headed for the sheriff’s office, reflecting on how Scarlett had told Pops that she was sick and told the restaurant that she was going out of town. Finding her was looking less and less likely. I was eager to stop by Pops’s store, but I needed to let Logan know about what I’d learned first.

  When I pulled into the parking lot, I saw Logan getting out of the sheriff’s car. He spotted me at the same time and walked over to me.

  “Hi, Pepper. They radioed that you were looking for me. Do you have something?”

  Despite my eagerness to tell him about what I had discovered, I had to suppress a grin and the urge to respond sarcastically. I was just grateful that he was willing to consider information I brought him. “I think I do.”

  “Let’s do this in my office,” he said.

  Once we got inside and he’d closed the door, I brought him up to date on how Pops had told me about the foreman of the construction crew coming in to look for information about old wrought-iron spindles.

  “Pops never saw the guy again until the day I was there, when he came looking for Scarlett. I got the impression that he might have come into the store earlier, at a time when she was there alone. It’s possible she knows something.”

  Logan looked across his desk me. “So... let me guess. You went looking for Scarlett by yourself.”

  I felt myself blush. He knew me too well. “Well, of course I asked Pops about her, and he said she called in sick a few days ago and told him she wouldn’t be in for a while. So I went to the Mermaid’s Tail, and they told me that she hadn’t shown up for about five days and had quit... or been fired.”

  Logan furrowed his brow. “You know it’s not a good idea for you to go checking around on your own, Pepper. This could be dangerous for you. I don’t know who we’re dealing with, but clearly they mean business.”

  “I understand that, Logan. And I appreciate your concern. I won’t be foolish, I promise.” I hesitated for a moment before continuing. “I should also tell you that Big Daddy Johnson came by this morning to tell me in no uncertain terms that Dr. D’Amore and his spa weren’t welcome here in Misty.”

  “Did he give you a reason?”

  “He mentioned prostitution and drugs.”

  Logan didn’t roll his eyes, but he might as well have. “Did Johnson say anything about not wanting competition for his hotel plan?”

  I shook my head. “I figured he had something like that in the works. I saw that he’d bought a huge amount of land. But no, he didn’t mention it. He did, however, ask me if I ever worried about being a woman alone. Presumably he was referring to the ‘dangerous elements’ coming to the spa rather than directly threatening me.”

  For a moment I could practically see the steam coming out of Logan’s ears. Then he seemed to put his professional face back on.

  “I hope that’s just bluster. But we will keep an eye on him.” Logan reached out and touched the top of my hand. “Please let me know if this escalates, Pepper.”

  He pulled his hand back. “We haven’t focused on Johnson, since he’s the one who sent Winthrop to deliver the legal papers—he doesn’t have a motive to kill Winthrop as far as we know. Of course, I’m not at all happy to hear that he’s talking that way. To you or to anyone.”

  I remembered the internet search I had done earlier for photos of the original house. “Logan, I’ve been thinking about the railing on that balcony, and how the spindles shouldn’t have been so weak unless they had been tampered with—”

  Logan put up a hand to stop me. “Listen. I’m going to share a little bit of information with you, and I trust you to keep it confidential. I also hope you won’t take it as encouragement to run around playing detective. Okay?”

  I nodded, deciding it was better to keep silent than sound too eager.

  He clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. “What has us puzzled is that there seemed to be no barrier blocking access to the balcony. And the balcony was obviously very treacherous, since there were a couple of the spindles missing from the start. It should have been clearly marked as dangerous.” He looked down at a file in front of him. “Even if the construction workers knew the precarious state of the balcony, someone who wasn’t familiar with it could have wandered out there. Other guys who came in to paint or to work on electrical issues...”

  “What do you mean there were spindles missing?”

  Logan gave me a quizzical look. “What I mean is... that railing was never secure. It was missing three spindles.”

  Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “No, it wasn’t. I walk by that house every day. I see it from my own front yard, and from the beach. That balcony was perfectly intact.”

  Logan looked skeptical. “Are you sure? Maybe they took out some weak supports to replace them?”

  “Maybe. But it would have had to have been pretty recently.” I shook my head. “Wait a minute. I might have a picture.” I dug around in my purse for my phone and scanned through the photos that I took constantly of the beach and my house. I found one that I’d taken from far enough away that I could see Angelo’s house too. I passed the phone to Logan.

  “See? The date on that is only a couple of days before the accident. There isn’t a single spindle missing.”

  Logan stood up. “This puts things in a different light. Seems like someone took them out on purpose.”

  He examined the photo on my phone again. “Thanks for this, Pepper. I wonder where those spindles went? We’ve looked all over that house for evidence, but maybe we need to look again.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  After Logan headed out to Angelo’s house to see whether there was any more physical evidence related to the state of the balcony, I drove back to Main Street to see Pops again, this time with Logan’s knowledge. I knew he was right. I needed to be careful. Anyone who would be willing to kill could certainly kill again.

  I thought Pops would be surprised to see me twice in one day, but he didn’t show any indication that he remembered my earlier visit. That in itself was pretty concerning.

  “Hey, Pops. I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Scarlett recently, have you?”

  He nodded. “As a matter of fact, Pepper, I have. She called me a couple of hours ago. Said she was sorry, but she couldn’t work here anymore. She was just too busy. She asked me to send her last paycheck to her.”

  “Did she give you an address?”

  “Yeah. She said to send it to her boyfriend. Gave me an address in the Bronx.”

  I definitely wanted that address. I also had to be careful about not doing anything unlawful. Which was never a good idea but was a major no-no for an attorney. But as long as I was honest, there was no harm in asking.

  “The sheriff is going to want to get in touch with Scarlett to ask some questions about the accident with Roger Winthrop. Can you show me the address so I can copy it for him?”

  “Sure, Pepper.” Pops walked over to his old-fashioned cash register and opened the bottom drawer. He pulled out a piece of paper. When he showed it to me, I could see that Scarlett’s “boyfriend” had only a post office box address, but it was better than nothing. I took a photo of the paper.

  “Thanks, Pops.” I was regretting that I hadn’t caught up with Scarlett before she left town. “Sheriff Bateman is interested in the guy who asked you about old wrought-iron parts for the spa house. Could he have come back in and bought anything when Scarlett was here? Maybe you keep an inventory of what is sold?”

  Pops nodded. “Actually, I do. Before my wife died, she got me on a system. I’m not always perfect about keeping track of everything, but Scarlett was pretty good about writing things down.” He put the paper with the address back in the drawer and gestured for me to follow. “I have a book in the back here.”

  I followed him through the door into a small office where it was, if possible, even more musty. He walked over to a big book on the shelf and opened it to July. “What do you think the sheriff i
s looking for?”

  “He’s trying to figure out whether the man who was looking for spindles for a railing bought anything.” I peered over Pops’s shoulder as he ran his dry finger along the columns. It was obvious which ones were in his handwriting and which were in a younger hand. Pops wrote in a quavery cursive, while Scarlett printed with a messy block style. As my eyes skimmed over the page, I saw one entry that said “twenty percent.”

  “Is that some kind of a discount, pops? That looks like something Scarlett wrote.”

  He leaned down closer. “My eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be, but that’s definitely Scarlett’s handwriting. Not mine, for sure!” He laughed. “I don’t think they teach the young folks to write very well anymore.”

  “Well, she sure doesn’t have your penmanship.”

  “Ah, I see what that is. Scarlett bought some paint. Black and brown, apparently. That doesn’t sound like a beautiful color scheme for a young girl’s room.” He chuckled again. “So I guess she was painting furniture. She gets an employee discount. That’s where the twenty percent off came from.”

  “I see. Anything there about spindles or railings, or anything to do with wrought metal?” I was dying to pull the book away from him and look it over myself, but I tried to be patient. Just as his finger, still sliding down over the different entries, reached the bottom of the page, I realized that we were looking at dates that were after Winthrop’s fall. My heart sank. Maybe this clue about the spindles wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  “Pops, can we try the page before this? I guess that would be the sales for June?”

  “Of course.” He flipped one of the large pages back, and my eyes skimmed until they were stopped by a line that read “six decorative wooden spindles.” Pops’s finger landed on top of it, and he said, “Do you think this might be what you’re looking for, Pepper?”