Murder on the Eightfold Path Read online

They walked out together to the front porch.

  He seemed to hesitate. “Night.”

  “Night,” she murmured as he kissed her cheek.

  She watched him walk across the yard, boot heels scraping the flagstone walk. The door slammed as he got in the SUV. He backed up slowly, flashed the headlights at her, and drove away into the night.

  Eighteen

  Morag was making herself right at home. It was not a pretty sight. The contents of Elysia’s purse were scattered across the kitchen counter and in the sink. The trash bin had been turned over, the contents of the silverware drawer were scattered over the floor—along with less benign tokens of the ferret’s presence.

  “Yikes,” A.J. said, watching Elysia deal quickly, if grimly, with the mess. The pointy-faced culprit gazed down at them from the recipe books on the shelf above the stove. “Is that—?”

  “It is,” Elysia said darkly. “We’re working on potty training.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Oh, she’s not so bad,” Elysia said quickly. “A little mischievous, perhaps. In fact I was thinking Monster might like a little sister.” As convincing performances went, she’d given better.

  “You’ve got to be joking,” A.J. said. “A little snack maybe. A little sister, no. He’s definitely an only child.”

  They both studied the ferret peeking out at them.

  “She’s very cute,” A.J. said.

  “Yes. I suppose she’s missing Maddie.”

  “Well then she’ll probably settle down, don’t you think?”

  “I think she’s a fiend from Hell in cuddly clothing,” Elysia stated for the record. “On the bright side, I’ve been reading up and they don’t live that long. Usually six to ten years, and I believe Maddie said something about her being seven years old.”

  “Mother.”

  “I’m just being realistic, pumpkin. She’s as adorable as a stuffed toy, yes, and if she were stuffed, we’d get along beautifully. As it is, she’s one hell of a nuisance.”

  A.J. had to bite her lip to keep a straight face. “Look at that little face. That little pink nose, those little beady eyes.”

  Elysia sniffed. Morag sniffed back. Or perhaps she hissed. It was uncertain at that height.

  “Maybe next time you’ll think twice before you nab someone’s pet.”

  Elysia ignored this and went back to restoring order to her ransacked kitchen. A.J. found a sponge under the sink and scrubbed the granite counter as she filled her mother in on everything Jake had told her the evening before.

  “Perhaps we should go see Dora Beauford,” Elysia said thoughtfully, tossing the soiled sponge in the trash bin.

  Her kitchen was once more immaculate. However, if the sounds of tinkling glass from the dining room were anything to go by, Hurricane Morag was striking the west wing of the house.

  A.J. thought it might be in Morag’s best interests if she were to otherwise occupy Elysia’s attention. “I’m not sure there’s a point. Jake seemed to think Beauford’s alibi was pretty much unshakeable.”

  Elysia shook her head in the manner of Holmes lamenting Watson’s general obliviousness to the significance of tropical flowers. “One doesn’t question suspects merely to eliminate or convict them. Suspects often have useful information about other suspects. We need to gather as much information as possible to form an accurate picture of what really happened to poor Dicky.”

  “Dora might not want to talk to us.”

  “We won’t know unless we ask, will we?”

  A.J. used her Palm Pre to look up Dora Beauford on the Internet. There were two Dora Beaufords. One was an elderly South Carolina widow who had passed away in 2001 and one was a professor at Warren County Community College.

  “Got her!” Elysia’s smile would have given Snow White’s stepmother pause for thought.

  “How do you want to approach her? Drop her an e-mail or call the college?”

  “Why shouldn’t we call her directly? She’s in the phone directory.” Still smiling that alarming smile, Elysia held the book up.

  Dora Beauford lived in a very old brick apartment building in the small, historic borough of Washington. A.J. had been lucky and caught the archeology professor just before she left the college campus for the day: mention of Dicky Massri had apparently convinced Dora to see them. Within a few minutes of walking into the relaxed but stylish clutter of Dora’s apartment it was immediately clear to A.J. why Dora loved to talk. Especially about herself.

  “Coffee, tea, mineral water . . . wine?” Dora inquired as they seated themselves on the long zebra-striped sofa. The room’s furnishings were modern and eclectic: tailored, upholstered furniture, oriental tables and chests, lamps of blown glass and bronze, and a quantity of Egyptian-looking statues and objets d’art.

  Replicas?

  The long, low, carved table in front of the sofa was covered with papers, books, folders. Dora appeared to have been grading papers when they interrupted.

  “Tea would be lovely,” Elysia said.

  A.J. agreed.

  “Well, I’m having a glass of wine,” Dora stated. She disappeared in the apartment cubbyhole of a kitchen.

  Elysia nodded at the resin cat statue on a low bookshelf. She raised her eyebrows.

  A.J. shrugged. She whispered, “Do you think her voice sounds anything like the voice we heard in Dicky’s apartment when we were searching it?”

  Elysia considered. She was still considering as Dora reappeared with a glass of wine and sat down on a blue tailored chair across from them. “The kettle’s on. Chin chin.” She sipped her wine.

  A.J. curiously scrutinized their hostess. Dora was a trim brunette in her mid-fifties with dark hair and brown eyes. She was very put together: designer jeans, a shortsleeved silk blouse, and ethnic jewelry.

  “So how did you know Dakarai?” Dora inquired, looking from Elysia to A.J. with her bright, dark eyes.

  Elysia said, “We were seeing each other shortly before his death.”

  Dora gave an unexpectedly harsh laugh. “Oh yes?” She took another sip of her wine. “Well, if you want to know my opinion, the little twerp got exactly what was coming to him.”

  It didn’t get much blunter than that. A.J. had to wonder at such frankness to strangers. Once again she considered Dora’s voice. Had it been the voice of the woman in Dicky’s apartment? By now it was difficult to accurately remember those slightly harsh but definitely feminine tones.

  “What did he do to you?” Elysia asked the other woman with genuine interest.

  Dora said flatly, “He lied to me. He cheated on me. He broke my heart—”

  “Did he try to blackmail you?” A.J. questioned.

  Dora, mid-tirade, stopped. “Blackmail? No. What could he blackmail me about?”

  Now there was a good point. Blackmail was only possible where the victim had something significant to lose by exposure. Dora did not seem like the retiring flower type.

  “The papers said something about extortion. Some women are sensitive to—”

  “Some women are idiots,” Dora retorted. “If that little weasel had ever suggested blackmail, I’d have . . .” She described in lavish and loving detail what she would do to any man foolish enough to, in Elysia’s vernacular, “put the squeeze on her.”

  Two things became immediately clear to A.J. First, Dora had a slight impulse control problem. Secondly, Dora would be a very bad person to try and blackmail. If Dicky had been foolish enough to try, A.J. could believe that Dora might very well have killed him. Unfortunately, there remained the problem of Dora’s alibi.

  Could it be broken? It seemed unlikely. If there was one person whom it would be all but impossible to fake out, it would be one’s hairdresser. She—or he—would be bound to notice one disappearing in the midst of the cut or color.

  Besides, Jake was thorough about such things. He understood what was at stake.

  Elysia was asking, “Where did you meet?”

  “Egypt. I was part of an internati
onal professor exchange. My field is archeology. I met Dakarai in Cairo. He told me he was wary of involvement, a poor risk for a relationship; that he was getting over a bad marriage to a rich American actress.” She sneered at some memory and took another swallow of wine. “Oh, he did it beautifully, I’ll give him that. I realize now none of it was true.”

  “He was briefly married to a friend of mine,” Elysia said. “The actress Medea Sutherland. That was probably what he was referring to.”

  Dora the Explorer had no comment on that revelation. “Anyway, we had an affair. The sex was incredible. Then it was over. Just like that. He dumped me. No warning. I have no idea to this day what went wrong.”

  Dora was a strange lady, but her pain and bewilderment seemed genuine, and A.J. felt sympathy—even if no one had tried to blackmail Dora, her life had still been disrupted. No one had the right to yank other people around like that.

  “How long did you see him for?”

  “Five weeks. I was in Egypt for one semester. Frankly, I never expected to see Dakarai again, but one day I was coming out of the dry cleaners, and there he was.” Her gaze zeroed on Elysia. “With you.”

  Elysia’s eyes widened like a startled cat, but she said nothing.

  Dora smiled. “Oh, yes, I recognized you right away. I followed you that day, you see. And it was obvious that I’d been played. Played from start to finish.” She drained her wineglass.

  “So you started calling Dakarai,” A.J. guessed aloud.

  She wondered if they were about to have a Miss Marple in the Drawing Room moment, but Dora scotched that when she said briskly, “That’s right. I started calling him. And following him. And, in general, harassing him. I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I went through.” To Elysia, she added, “Not that you weren’t old enough to know better.”

  Elysia offered an acidic smile.

  “In fact I called the DHS to try and get him kicked out of the country. They said they’d look into it, but I don’t think anyone ever did anything.”

  “Did you ever try to talk to him directly?”

  “I tried, of course. Oh, I admit when I first saw Dakarai I still had feelings for him. Embarrassing but true. They died fast. I realized he was just on the make. And apparently I wasn’t in his target income bracket.”

  A.J. thought that was one possibility, but more likely Dora’s hostility and aggressiveness had made her a bad candidate for blackmail, regardless of her financial standing.

  “What did he say when you recognized him?”

  Dora laughed that edged laugh. “His first instinct, believe it or not, was to pretend I’d made a mistake.”

  Not the brightest bloke, Elysia had been right about that. Not even a very developed sense of survival if he’d thought he could possibly get away passing that old line off on Dora. Why hadn’t he just told her his puppy ate his homework and been done with it?

  Dora said, “Then he tried to suggest that we should . . . relive old times.” Her eyes were hard as onyx as they rested on Elysia.

  Elysia said mildly, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he? That’s exactly the sort of thing he’d try if cornered. He was a lover not a fighter.”

  “He was a user. A liar, a cheat, a—” Dora was on another roll.

  A.J. interrupted, “Did you ever hear anything about Massri being involved in the theft or smuggling of Egyptian antiquities?”

  Dora didn’t answer for a moment, her gaze on her empty glass. “There were rumors. Nothing overt. It was more a suggestion that he was lazy and not doing his job properly. He was lazy.”

  “Apparently it was more than a rumor. He was fired from his position at the SCA.”

  Dora’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”

  A.J. lied. “I contacted the SCA directly.” She thought it would be better if Dora didn’t know that their own relationship with the police was anything beyond adversarial.

  “Well, I’m not surprised.” The teakettle was whistling in the kitchen. Dora rose to get it.

  “She has the wherewithal to commit murder.” Elysia kept her voice low.

  “The wherewithal?”

  “The you-name-it. The gumption, the means, the motive.”

  “But she’s got an alibi. Plus . . .”

  “Plus what?”

  A.J. opened her mouth, but Dora poked her head out of the kitchen. “Milk? Honey? Lemon?”

  “Honey and lemon,” A.J. said.

  “Milk,” Elysia said.

  Dora disappeared, but her voice floated back to them. “Were you really going to marry him?”

  Elysia’s smile was odd. “No,” she returned. “My experience was somewhat different from yours, Dora, but no.”

  Dora reappeared with two mugs, which she set on the piles of paper on the long table.

  “When was the last time you saw Massri?” A.J. asked.

  “Months ago.” She seemed definite on that point. “After I turned him over to the DHS, I decided it was out of my hands.”

  “There’s a colorful character,” Elysia commented as they left Dora’s and walked back to where they had parked the SUV.

  A.J. snorted. “Boy, if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black—as the Bard would say.”

  Elysia gave her a cool look. “I do think she was telling the truth, though. At least as far as she understands it.”

  A.J. agreed. “It seems unlikely that if she had killed Dicky she’d keep talking about how he got what he deserved and how angry she was with him.”

  “Mmm.” Elysia said thoughtfully, “Perhaps. She doesn’t strike me as a particularly wise woman.”

  “True.” A.J. remembered her impression that Dora might have impulse control issues. “She did seem a little headstrong.”

  “If someone is running some kind of blackmail scheme I can’t imagine why they’d kill Peggy Graham and leave Dora running loose. I’d kill Dora, given a choice.”

  A.J. said, hoping to discourage that line of commentary, “First of all, we don’t know for sure that Peggy was killed. It’s still very possible she committed suicide. Secondly, if Dora wasn’t being blackmailed, then she didn’t have much in the way of ammunition. Thirdly, Dora seems like a woman well able to take care of herself.”

  “She does. Very true.”

  “If Peggy really was killed, she must have had possession of damaging information. Dora, well, she knew Dicky was a rat, but there’s no law against being a rat, and however much a misery she made his life, she wasn’t really threatening the business enterprise because she didn’t really know anything.”

  “Dora was working to have Dicky thrown out of the country. Had she succeeded, that would have been a disruption to the business plan.”

  “True, I guess. Although there was still Cory. Besides, Dora didn’t succeed in having Dicky deported.”

  “We need to find Cory,” Elysia remarked.

  A.J. gave her an uneasy glance. “One thing. I thought her expression changed when we mentioned Dicky was fired from the SCA. She sort of hesitated.”

  “I noticed that,” agreed Elysia.

  “Maybe it was just surprise, but what if it was something else? After all, her field is archeology. What if all those artifacts and objets d’art in her apartment aren’t replicas? What if she was involved in some antiquities smuggling scheme with Dicky and he double-crossed her?”

  Elysia looked delighted. “Pumpkin, that’s very good. In fact it’s brilliant. You’re beginning to think like me. Just because Dicky was a blackmailer doesn’t mean he was killed because of his blackmailing.”

  “But we keep coming back to the problem of that alibi of Dora’s.”

  “It is annoying.”

  “Yes. I don’t think it’s an easy one to break. You can’t really rush out of a salon with those little foils on your head or hair full of glaze and not expect someone to notice.”

  “Perhaps she has a twin sister. I remember once on an episode of 2—”

  “I really doubt that’s th
e solution. Besides, knowing Jake, he probably checked.” A.J. considered their interview with Dora. “Come to think of it, why wasn’t she able to get Dicky thrown out of the country?”

  “Perhaps he was here legally. Some people do enter the country legally. I did.”

  “It would be one of the only honest things he did,” A.J. said.

  Nineteen

  “Mara Allen on line three,” Emma said briskly over the intercom.

  A.J. blinked at the phone as the call rang through. She picked up on the second trill.

  “A.J.,” Mara greeted her in that carefully modulated, super-serene voice. “I was wondering if you were free for lunch?”

  “Of course.” A.J. answered automatically, her gaze sweeping her day planner.

  “Wonderful. Why don’t I meet you at Butterfly Bistro on Main Street at, say, eleven thirty?”

  “I’ll see you then,” A.J. said cheerfully. In fact she was more curious than cheerful, and her curiosity was tinged with wariness. But at least now she might finally hear exactly what was behind these weird rumors of buyouts and takeovers.

  The morning flew by. A.J. taught her Itsy Bitsy Yoga class, her Yoga for Kids, put together an ad for hiring a masseuse, and before she knew it, it was time to leave for her lunch meeting with Mara.

  She opened her office door and found Suze and Emma Rice hovering.

  “What’s up?”

  “What did Mara Allen want?” Suze demanded in a stage whisper Lily could probably hear through the hallway walls.

  A.J. threw a meaningful look at Lily’s closed office door and Emma said, “She’s upstairs teaching Attila the Hun Yoga.”

  A.J. bit her lip. It would be highly inappropriate to laugh at such disrespect. It wasn’t easy to keep a straight face, though. She said truthfully, “I don’t know what Mara wants. I guess I’ll find out at lunch.”

  “I know exactly what she wants,” Suze said. “She wants Sacred Balance.”

  “You can’t sell to her,” Emma said. “I’ve seen those commercials of hers on late night TV. She’s like . . . like . . .”

  “She’s like one of those energy vampires!” Suze exclaimed. “Like a succubus.”