nod and gestured her toward the stairs. “I guess I should take a look around while we’re waiting on the cops to see if any wire or tools are missing. Curt’s been worried about those bastards who stole our copper last week paying another visit.”
Darla had come to much the same conclusion. Bad enough that since Curt’s warning the week before, she’d worried over the possible loss of her street numbers to the scrap thieves. Now she had to fear the possibility of falling victim to criminals who were bold enough to commit murder if they were crossed?
They retreated upstairs to the main floor again, leaving the body alone in the basement. The body. Darla felt uncomfortable referring to someone whom she’d personally known in such a manner, but she found it hard to reconcile the ghastly corpse sprawled beneath the stairs with her boisterous if obnoxious customer Curt. To be sure, she had tolerated the man rather than liked him, but never would she have wished such a fate on him. And of course, the situation was far different for Barry, who had been both a friend and a business partner to Curt for more than half their lives.
She glanced Barry’s way. Once he had determined that nothing seemed to be missing from the work area, he had joined her in the parlor. Now, he sat slumped against the wall, hands limply propped on his knees as he stared at a gaping hole in the plaster opposite him. She couldn’t think of an appropriate platitude for this particular situation, and so she simply sat with him in what she hoped he’d view as sympathetic silence, though the truth was that she was guiltily wishing she’d turned down his lunch invitation and thus avoided the whole unpleasantness.
She remembered abruptly that Robert was alone at the bookstore. She’d better let him know she was going to be delayed.
Robert answered on the second ring, his “Pettistone’s Fine Books, this is Robert, and how may I assist you today?” greeting enunciated in respectable imitation of James’s precise tones.
Feeling rather like she was breaching some major etiquette rule by making her call, she murmured, “Robert, this is Darla. Yes, your boss,” she clarified before he could ask for further identification. “There’s been a bit of trouble here at Barry’s place. I-I might be later than I thought. Will you be all right until James gets in?”
“Under control,” he replied. “It’s a bit slow, so I’m working on a window display for those new political autobiographies from last week. You know, the ones that turned out to be, like, real dogs.”
Momentarily returning to retailer mode, Darla winced, knowing to which ones he referred. Nothing worse than moving only a half dozen copies in a week of what was supposedly a blazing New York Times best seller. “A window display, huh? Do you know how to do that?”
“Sure,” was his enthusiastic answer. “There was this one the time Bill meant to order two copies of an old Naughty Teacher Nancy DVD but got two cases instead. You should have seen the cool display I made with a chalkboard and some notebooks. We sold, like, twenty DVDs in one day.”
Great. Marketing tips courtesy of the adult bookstore industry. Darla rolled her eyes. But hey, if it had worked for Naughty Teacher Nancy, maybe it would work for the flavor-of-the-month politicians, too.
“Go ahead, then,” she agreed, “but only use whatever you find lying around the shop for props. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
As she hung up the call, Robert’s mention of window displays made her think of Hilda Aguilar, whose talent at window dressing had always made her envious. What would happen to Jake’s investigation, given that the subject of said investigation was now dead? And more important, what would Tera Aguilar’s reaction be to her boyfriend’s untimely end? Even if Tera had felt as casual about the relationship as Curt apparently had, this would still have to come as a huge shock.
A heavy pounding on the open front door was accompanied by a barked demand: “Police. Anyone home?”
“In here,” Barry called, promptly rising and offering Darla a hand up.
Her relief at seeing a uniformed officer arriving on the scene was tempered by the fact that she recognized the broad-faced, mustachioed cop. Officer Hallonquist had once caught her parked in Great-Aunt Dee’s old Mercedes in a no-parking zone. Despite Darla’s honeyed attempt at explanation, Hallonquist had gleefully written her a traffic citation, disproving her previous