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Well, I couldn’t really blame Josie for feeling that way. She took a lot of pride in her work and was very thorough, and for someone to suggest she hadn’t done her job correctly was enough to wound her professional pride for all eternity.
“Okay,” I said, then paused. My neighbor with the antique/junk store next door was passing by the display window out front, and so I waited to make sure he was safely gone before I said anything more. Not that Al had ever come inside the shop, except for my opening night party way back in March, but I really didn’t need him to see me sitting there and having a conversation with what appeared to be thin air. “How about we focus on people here in Globe for now? Who at that party might have had a problem with you?”
For the first time, Danny looked almost uncomfortable. “Well, Mike Harrison was there.”
The name didn’t ring a bell, but that didn’t mean much. I’d gotten to know a lot of people during my tenure in Globe, and yet I didn’t try to fool myself that I’d met anywhere close to all of them, especially the ones who wouldn’t dare to darken the door of a pagan shop.
“Why would Mike Harrison be a suspect?” I asked.
Danny picked at a nonexistent speck of lint on his sleeve. It seemed he could interact with his clothing just fine, since it was all a part of his new, ghostly form. “Well….”
The word drifted off into the air and just hung there. I waited patiently. I might not have had as much time to play with as Danny Ortega, but since I also didn’t have any customers currently beating down the door, I could afford to sit this out until he got past the current mental block he was having.
At last he said, “I might have been having a thing with his daughter her senior year.”
“What?” I exclaimed, the word escaping with a bit more force than I’d intended. After all, I’d heard through the grapevine that Danny was something of a player, but I’d never once heard that he messed around with his students.
At least he had the courtesy to look vaguely embarrassed. “She was over age,” he said, as if that excused everything. “Her birthday was in March, and we didn’t start, well…anyway, there wasn’t anything illegal about it.”
Maybe not illegal on a strictly technical level, but I had to think there was something pretty damn immoral about sleeping with one of your students when you were a high school principal. A sigh escaped my lips, and I said, “And her father knew?”
“I think so,” Danny replied. “That is, he never confronted me directly, but Taylor told me a week or so before graduation that she couldn’t keep seeing me, that ‘people’ had found out and she needed to end things. Frankly, that was fine by me. I was ready to move on.”
Judging by the blithe tone he used when talking about the situation, I had to guess he hadn’t been too emotionally invested in his relationship with Taylor Harrison. I could feel my brow furrowing and did my best to smooth it out before Danny noticed. In general, I really wasn’t a judge-y person, figuring that “live and let live” was the best philosophy to guide my life, as long as said “living” brought harm to no one.
But when it came to a forty-two-year-old man having an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl, well, it was just a wee bit harder to set thatlaissez-faireattitude aside.
Being judgmental wouldn’t solve Danny’s murder, though, and so I told myself I needed to approach the whole thing as objectively as possible. “Did Mike come up to you at the party or do anything that would lead you to believe he was going to get revenge on you for having an affair with his daughter?”
Danny scratched the back of his head as he considered my question. “No, he kept his distance. I mean, I think he glowered at me a few times, but since he was dressed up as a vampire and was wearing fangs and some funky makeup, I can’t say for sure.”
Which didn’t mean a whole heck of a lot. It was entirely possible that Mike Harrison had gone to the party with murder on his mind, but had kept his distance so as to not attract attention.
I made a few notes in my notebook, although I had a feeling I didn’t need a written record of all this. The salient points were going to stick with me for a long time.
“Well, let’s circle back to your wine,” I said. “If it really was poisoned, we need to do our best to narrow down when that might have happened. At what time did you get the glass you were drinking from when…it…happened?”
“Not too long after you did my reading.” Danny paused there, brown eyes almost amused. “It was pretty accurate, don’t you think?”
More accurate than I would have liked. I gave a helpless lift of my shoulders and said, “Well, in most cases, the Death card doesn’t mean actual death, but — ”
“Only this time it did,” he cut in. “Anyway, I went to get a drink, but then I realized I needed to go to the bathroom, so I set my glass down on the buffet table off to one side, then went to use the bathroom. There was a line, though, so I had to wait a bit before I got back to my drink.”
Meaning there was plenty of opportunity for someone to drift by and pour whatever nasty mixture they’d concocted into his wine while no one was looking. Too bad Josie didn’t have security cameras mounted in her dining room the way I did in my shop; I could have gone back and inspected the footage and probably discovered right away who the murderer was.
But of course she didn’t have that kind of surveillance system in her house, and so I’d have to do this by process of elimination. The prospect daunted me — there had been nearly a hundred people at the party, flowing in and out of the various rooms, all of which had been appropriately moodily lit to achieve a proper Halloween atmosphere. And that didn’t even take into account the reality that the vast majority of them had either been wearing masks or some kind of exaggerated makeup as part of their costumes. Even if someone had seen something that appeared a little odd, would they be able to guess who had sidled up to the buffet table and poured a little something extra into Danny’s drink?
I managed to prevent myself from letting out a sigh. “So…you went back to the dining room and started talking to Lisa Callaway.”
At once, Danny’s face lit up. “Yeah, she was there getting herself a drink. I’d been hoping for a chance to talk to her, so I got my wine and we started chatting.”
The words slipped out before I could stop them. “What is it with the young girls?”
“Lisa’s twenty-two,” Danny pointed out, sounding wounded.
“Which is still twenty years younger than you are,” I countered, and now he just grinned.
“Well, I seem to recall I was more than willing to express my interest in you, but you just weren’t into it.”
