Shaken, she went down the hall to the large kitchen.
There was a half-full sack of Enlightenment on the tiled counter. A teapot and a kettle stood beside it. Zolanda had not run out of her special blend.
“Damn,” Adelaide said softly.
A movement in the doorway made her spin around. Jake stood in the opening. He looked at the tea things.
“Can I assume that bag on the counter contains Zolanda’s special tea?” he asked.
“Yes,” Adelaide said. “What’s more, there is plenty of it. Why would Thelma Leggett lie? Why would she call me this morning and insist that I come over here immediately?”
Jake met her eyes. “You know the answer to that as well as I do.”
“She was trying to set me up to take the fall for the murder of Madam Zolanda.”
“Obviously,” Jake said. “And I can think of only one good reason why she would do that.”
“She’s probably the person who is responsible for Zolanda’s death.”
“If I were the detective investigating this death, I’d certainly consider Leggett my number one suspect,” Jake said. “However, it’s possible that she simply got scared when she found the body, and decided to run. Regardless, I think she took Zolanda’s secrets with her.”
“You didn’t find the diary you are after, did you?”
“I didn’t find it or anything else that looked like blackmail material.”
“Maybe Thelma Leggett murdered Zolanda for her stash of extortion secrets,” Adelaide said.
“At the moment Leggett is at the top of my personal list. But if I’m right about Zolanda collecting blackmail secrets, we’ve got a long list of mostly unidentified suspects. She was playing her psychic games with some of the most powerful people in Hollywood. The studios employ fixers whose job it is to get rid of extortionists like her.”
It was probably a measure of her paranoia that his words actually lifted her spirits, Adelaide thought. She was oddly relieved by his analysis. If Zolanda was in the blackmail business, a number of people would have had a motive to murder her. There was no reason to assume that the perfume bottle had contained drugs from the lab at the sanitarium.
“We’d better call the police,” she said.
Jake raised his brows at her enthusiasm for summoning the authorities, but he did not comment on it.
“Yes,” he said. “The longer we wait, the farther away Thelma Leggett will get.”
“What, exactly, are we going to tell the police?”
“The truth.” Jake crossed to an end table that held an elegant telephone. “Most of it. We’ll tell them that this morning you got a phone call from Thelma Leggett pleading for an emergency delivery of tea. When we got here, we found the body and, good citizens that we are, we immediately called the police.”
“We don’t mention the missing diary, I take it?”
“No,” Jake said. “If that diary ever became part of a police investigation, there would be no way to keep the contents out of the press.”
“What about us—you and me? The police will wonder why we’re both here at this hour of the morning.”
Jake tightened his jaw. “My apologies for the failure of chivalry, but I’m afraid we’ll have to tell them the truth about that, too.”
“You mean we tell them that we spent the night together. Yes, I understand.” Adelaide crossed her arms and shook her head, resigned to the inevitable. “They’ll assume the worst, of course.”
“The worst?”
She glared at him, flushing a little. “They’ll think we’re involved in an affair. Don’t worry, it’s not a problem for me. I told you, I’m not concerned with my reputation. This is Burning Cove, after all. People here are much more interested in which leading lady is sleeping with which leading man at the Burning Cove Hotel. They won’t care about the private life of a tearoom waitress.”
“Maybe not in other circumstances, but as of this morning that tearoom waitress is one of the people who found the body of the psychic to the stars. Don’t kid yourself; that will show up in the afternoon edition of the Burning Cove Herald.”
“Things might be a little awkward for a while.” She brightened. “Probably good for business at Refresh, though. Curiosity is bound to bring a lot of people into the shop. Florence will be thrilled.”
“That’s the spirit; look at the marketing angle.” Jake’s eyes got colder. “A small reminder, if this case blows up into a full-scale murder investigation, you’re not the only one who will need an alibi.”
It took a beat before she got his meaning. When she did, she drew a very deep breath.
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I never thought of that. You could be viewed as a potential suspect. After all, you believe that Zolanda was an extortionist.”
“In other words, I have a very good motive for killing her.”
Adelaide unfolded her arms and spread her hands. “Looks like we’re stuck with each other.”
“I prefer to think of us as allies.”
“Right. Allies.”
“By the way,” Jake said. “I found this in the other room under the liquor cabinet. Would you mind putting it in your handbag?”
He held out the perfume bottle stopper.
The crystal stopper glittered darkly in the palm of his hand. Adelaide got a little light-headed. Jake obviously thought that the stopper was important. That did not bode well.
Reluctantly she crossed the short distance between them, reached out, and plucked the stopper from his palm.
“Can I assume we’re not going to tell the police about this, either?” she asked as she dropped it into her handbag.
His smile was razor sharp. “No, we are not going to tell the police about that perfume bottle stopper.”
She swallowed hard. “Why not?”
“I doubt if the cops would think it was important, but it might get dumped into an evidence file where we won’t be able to get at it.”
“Why would we want to get hold of it again?”
“A couple of reasons. The first is that it’s the one thing that looked out of place in the living room.”
“Most women have bottles of perfume,” Adelaide pointed out.
“But most women keep their perfume on their dressing tables, not in their living rooms.”
She could not argue with that logic. “What’s the second reason for taking it with us?”
“That stopper looks like it belongs to a very expensive bottle of perfume,” Jake said. “If we find the missing portion, we might find the killer.”
“You really think Zolanda was murdered, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
He picked up the elegant telephone and dialed the operator.
Chapter 18
“The police are going to conclude that Zolanda jumped to her death, aren’t they?” Adelaide said.
Jake looked at her. She sounded almost hopeful—enthusiastic, even—about the possibility that the cops would call the psychic’s death a suicide. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but he was certain that she had undergone a few changes of mood from the time they had discovered the body until that moment in the kitchen when he had given her the top of the perfume bottle.
At the moment she was standing next to him in the gardens at the edge of the patio. They were watching a handful of uniformed officers and a detective named Brandon from the Burning Cove Police Department. A doctor named Skipton, who evidently served as the local medical examiner when one was needed, had taken charge of the body.
“I’m not so sure,” he said. “Detective Brandon doesn’t like the fact that Thelma Leggett has disappeared. Got a hunch he’ll look for her, but if she left town, which seems likely, there’s not much he can do. There’s no point mentioning my theory that Zolanda was a blackmailer and that Leggett is now in possession of the extortion material, because I have absolutely no proof.”
“If the police do find Leggett, they’ll probably find the diary.”
“Which means I have to find her first.”
Adelaide regarded him with a thoughtful expression. “You’re planning to look for Thelma Leggett yourself.”