Page 62 of Pied Sniper

A thought occurred to me. “Flavia, did you and Tiffany spend Wednesday afternoons together?”

Flavia tried, but failed, to frown. “No. Don’t be weird. I don’t even live in this pit of a city.”

I shushed them both. “Flavia, you are Tiffany’s friend and she might have confided something in you that she wouldn’t tell Grace. Grace, as Tiffany’s assistant, you might have seen or heard threats made to her that might have been dismissed. I need you both to think very hard now and tell me if you remember anything strange.”

“What about the tip line money?” asked Flavia.

“We’ll get to that and we appreciate your generous offer,” I said. “Now, think. Grace doesn’t remember anyone following Tiffany. Flavia, do you?”

“No, but we mostly met in my apartment or hers, well away from prying eyes.”

“Could anyone have known about your meetings?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe the doormen of our buildings but we always wore hats and sunglasses, you know, that kind of thing.”

“Okay. Did Tiffany tell you with whom or where she spent every Wednesday afternoon recently?”

Flavia’s forehead attempted a wrinkle. “That’s oddly specific. No, she didn’t. And we haven’t seen each other at all since she moved here. We just talk on the phone.”

“We’ll check the phone records,” said Solomon, but I knew we didn’t need to. Flavia wasn’t lying. She seemed genuinely concerned.

“Do you know why she moved?”

“I… don’t really know,” said Flavia.

“Um…” said Grace.

“Yes?”

“Officially, Tiffany said she was sick of the big city and wanted a change but I saw a bunch of overdue bills at her apartment, the one she had in New York, and they were huge amounts. I asked her about them and she snatched them out of my hands and told me to mind my own business. She insisted it was a big mistake.”

“Bills for what?”

“Designer clothing stores. Jewelry. Restaurants. Credit cards. Legal notices too. She hadn’t paid the mortgage on her apartment for three months and the bank was threatening foreclosure. The bills had to mount to well over a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Shut! Up!” shrieked Flavia. “Tiffany makes a ton of money.”

“Do you know if she paid them yet?”

Grace shook her head. “I never saw them again, and I think Tiffany started filtering her mail. I saw something else too.”

“What?”

“A letter from someone called Catherine. She said their grandmother was ill so she must be a relative. I don’t remember the return address but it was definitely in Montgomery. That’s why I thought of using it for an excuse to get out of here. I figured if her grandmother was ill, she’d have some compassion for mine. Even though I did fake it,” she finished with a shrug. “The only mail I saw since she moved here were parking tickets. On the same road every time! One Hundred Pines Road. You’d think she’d learn!”

Solomon stood quietly in the background. Now he spoke. “Could she have borrowed the money? Maybe to pay off those bills?”

“Maybe,” said Grace. “I never saw another bill like that again, but a week later, someone approached her in the lobby of her building and I think they served a subpoena on her. Tiffany never confirmed it to me, but I think that’s what it was.”

Solomon and I exchanged a glance. I knew what he was thinking: we needed to dive deeply into her financial records. If Tiffany were in debt and struggling to access credit, she could have borrowed money from the wrong people. The kind that could hurt her. Except those kinds of people don’t serve subpoenas; they prefer a bullet to the knees. What the hell was going on?

“Where the hell am I?” growled a throaty voice.

I jumped and spun around to see Jonathan standing in the doorway, his face crumpled from sleep. I could smell the booze on him from across the room. Grace hurried over to him and he gave her a lopsided smile before they folded into each other’s arms. I could hear her saying something but couldn’t make out what it was. When Jonathan looked up again, his eyes were filled with worry. Or was it anger? His gaze darted around, taking in me, then Solomon. He frowned at Flavia who offered him a finger wave. Then he curled his fingers around Grace’s and seemed to try to pull himself up straighter.

“I think we need to talk,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “We sure do.”

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