Savages: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) Read Free Page B

couch with tufted velvet upholstery, and laid the box down beside her. I perched on the edge of a matching chair with my hands flat on my knees. I could feel sweat under the collar of my shirt. Surroundings like this, women like her, always made me feel poorly dressed, poorly socialized, and vaguely inadequate. Kerry says it’s low self-esteem and there’s no good reason for it. She’s right about the low self-esteem, anyway.
    I said, “As I said on the phone, Mrs. Ogden, I doubt there’s anything I can do for you.”
    “Reserve judgment, please, until you’ve heard what I have to say.”
    Whatever that was, she’d insisted on saying it in person rather than over the phone. And offered to pay me for my time if I’d come see her, whether I agreed to help her or not. That was as much the reason I was here as curiosity about the circumstances of her sister’s sudden death.
    “And try to keep an open mind,” she added. “You may think me an unduly fixated and suspicious woman, based on our past association, but I assure you I’m not. I have good reason for my feelings about my brother-in-law.”
    “Suppose you start by telling me how your sister died.”
    “It was prominent in the media. You didn’t see any of the news stories?”
    “I’m sorry, no, I didn’t.” That was because I make it a policy not to read newspapers or watch TV reportage.There are news junkies and then there’s me, the anti–news junkie.
    Celeste Ogden drew a deep breath, composing herself, before she said, “The official verdict was an accidental fall. Down a long staircase at her home in Palo Alto . . . severe head trauma. It happened sometime between ten and eleven at night and the light in the upstairs hall was burned out. The police believe she was on her way downstairs for some reason and tripped in the darkness.”
    “But you don’t think it was an accident.”
    “No, I don’t. She was pushed or thrown down those stairs.”
    “By her husband?”
    “By his order. He’s much too calculating to have done it himself. He was in Chicago when it happened, at a business conference.” Ridges of anger puckered her mouth, bent it down tight at the corners. “The perfect arranged alibi, while somebody else did his dirty work.”
    Hired killing? Well, maybe. It isn’t as easy to hire a hit man as Hollywood and fiction writers would have you believe, particularly for corporate businessmen like Brandon Mathias who move in the upper echelons of society. On the other hand, if you’re cunning and ballsy enough and you’ve got enough money to spread around, anything is possible.
    I asked, “Your sister was alone in the house at the time?”
    “Except for whoever killed her, yes.”
    “No evidence of an intruder?”
    “None. Nothing was disturbed and all the doors andwindows were locked. The only way anyone could have gotten in was with a key, and he is the only person who could have provided one.”
    Not quite true. Keys can be lost and found, or obtained in other ways. Nancy Mathias could also have let another person into the house, someone she knew or a fast-talking stranger with the right kind of story. But there was no benefit in pursuing any of that now.
    “Who found the body?” I asked.
    “Her cleaning woman, early the following morning. Philomena worked for Nancy for several years and had a key to the house.”
    So much for providing that angle. “You said you had good reason to suspect your brother-in-law, Mrs. Ogden. What would that be, exactly?”
    She arranged her hands in her lap, palms up, one on top of the other, and sat staring at them for a few seconds before she said, “Have you ever lost someone close to you, someone you loved very much?”
    Uh-uh, I thought, I’m not going there. Not with her, not with anybody at this point in my life. “No,” I said. And I’m not going to.
    “It’s devastating. Totally devastating. Nancy and I were very close, or at least we were until the past couple of years. She was