Day Shift
Page 23

“Do you think . . .” Manfred trailed to a halt.
“That I can do it?” Olivia smiled, not troubling to make it a socially acceptable smile. “If anyone in Midnight can and will, it’s me.” She regarded the psychic. “You know I have skills, right?”
“Ah . . . I figured. But.” He floundered for a moment. “The thing is, Olivia, your skill set, as far as I know, is kind of drastic.”
“Awwww . . . squeamish?” The shark smile was very much in evidence. Olivia was enjoying being herself.
“Yes,” Manfred admitted. “More than you, anyway. I hope we can find a way to solve this problem without doing anything . . . undoable.”
“I was never as young as you.” She looked away for a long moment before turning back to say, “I’m going to do this whether you approve of it or not. This is a town issue, not just your problem. So tell me what’s happened.”
Okay, this is what I’ve got to work with, Manfred told himself. “Arthur Smith was here this morning right on the heels of the newspeople. Lewis Goldthorpe’s accused me of stealing jewelry from Rachel. My client who died,” he added. “And as it turns out, she might not have died of natural causes. But they haven’t gotten all the bloodwork results back yet.”
“What do they suspect?”
“Arthur asked a lot of questions about her water bottle. I got the impression that he’d been told it might have had something in it that shouldn’t have been there.”
“Something you didn’t drop in?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Don’t make a joke of this,” he said. “You know I didn’t. And I’m pretty scared, in case you couldn’t tell.”
Manfred expected her to say something cutting, but instead, Olivia simply nodded. “Okay, then the first step is to determine where Lewis has stashed the jewelry he says you stole. Because we’re going to assume that he’s hidden it. Why do you think he’s doing this? And where do you think he’s put it?”
“I’ve had a couple of hours to think about it. First, Lewis is crazy. But he’s also devious and shrewd, at least according to Rachel. She talked about him a lot. Lewis and his problems were the main reason she was so hung up on keeping contact with her dead husband.”
“Which you were glad to help her do.” Olivia didn’t exactly sneer, but Manfred thought it was a close thing.
“Yes,” he said evenly. “I was glad to help her. And it was easy to reach him. He was more accessible than a lot of spirits.”
Olivia’s mouth crimped in a skeptical line. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go along with that. To get back to the subject. Why does Lewis have such a hard-on for you?”
“First, because he never liked Rachel to spend money he thought she should leave intact for him. Second, because a lot of the advice Morton gave her was about curtailing Lewis’s schemes. And she followed that advice. Third, because Lewis became convinced I was angling to marry Rachel.”
Olivia raised a questioning eyebrow.
“No, of course not,” Manfred said. He tried a smile. “Rachel was a sweet woman, but she was older than my mother. Not my thing.”
“So you believe Lewis has stolen this jewelry and pinned it on you to get even. Also so he can sell the jewelry, I presume?”
“I believe Rachel hid it to keep Lewis from stealing it from her. That’s what she told me.”
“So she didn’t have it with her at all. When are you supposed to have gotten this jewelry?”
“Lewis is alleging that Rachel had it in her purse because she was going to get it appraised. He maintains that I rifled her purse before I called the front desk for help.”
“I was in the lobby when she dropped her purse,” Olivia said.
Manfred stared at her. “You were?”
“I helped her pick up everything. Me and some other people. And there was nothing like a jewelry case in there. So I know you’re telling the truth. I’m going to assume you didn’t even touch her purse?”
“No,” Manfred said firmly. “I did not.”
“I also assume the police tested it for fingerprints and didn’t find yours.”
“I assume the same thing.”
“Since she told you she’d hidden the jewelry—what did she have, by the way?”
“She mentioned diamonds and rubies, I think.”
“Okay, so she told you she’d hidden it from Lewis. Where might she have done that? It would almost certainly be at her house. When people hide things, they want to keep them close.”
“Since she’d been sick and she’d been staying close to home, that would be my guess, too. I hoped she would get a safe-deposit box, but I don’t think she did. She wouldn’t have said ‘hidden’ if she’d put the jewelry in a bank. She would have told me it was safe.”
Olivia nodded. “So, it’s in the house. You’ve been there, I hope?”
“Yes.” Manfred clearly didn’t recall the visit with any enthusiasm. “I didn’t want to go, but after our first face-to-face session, she insisted I see where Morton had lived.”
“Surely that’s pretty unusual?”
“Oh, absolutely. Usually, people are at least a little embarrassed about going to a psychic. But not Rachel. She wanted me to meet her family. She was so excited about being in touch with her husband again.”