“I show this to you because it’s an example of what can happen when folks get mixed up in this whole counterfeit business.”
I was angry. “This is disgusting, trying to make a point by showing me something like this, trying to scare the hell out of me. This has nothing to do with Sheila.”
“The police believe our man with the many names, the one we’ll call Madden Sommer, may have done this. The man your wife phoned the day she died.”
Madden Sommer sat in his car across the street, and three houses down, from the Garber house.
He had his hand on the door when another car pulled up. A black GM sedan. A well-dressed man got out. Soft looking. The rounded stomach hanging over his belt. The way he carried himself. When the front door opened, the man flashed some ID to Garber.
Interesting, Sommer thought, taking his hand off the door. He didn’t get the sense the man was a cop, but anything was possible. He took note of the car’s license plate, then placed a call on his cell.
“Hello?”
“It’s me. I need you to run a plate for me.”
“I’m not exactly at work right now,” Slocum said. “I’m with family. My wife’s sister is here.”
“Write this down.”
“I just said-”
“F, seven-”
“Hang on, hang on.” Sommer could hear Slocum scrambling to find paper and a pencil.
“Christ’s sake, go ahead.”
Sommer read off the rest of the plate. “How soon?”
“I don’t know. It depends who’s on.”
“I’ll call you back in an hour or so. Have it for me by then.”
“I told you, I don’t know if I can get it right away. Where are you? Where’s this car you-”
Sommer slipped the phone back into his jacket.
Garber had let the man inside his home. Sommer could see shadows in the living room. He’d also been watching the other windows of the house. There was a light on upstairs. Occasionally, a shadow crossed the curtains, and at one point, someone had peeked through them to take a look at the street.
A child. A young girl.
I stood up, so angry I was shaking. The idea that Sheila had any dealings, even so much as a phone call, with a thug like Sommer was deeply disturbing to me. And I’d already had enough troubling revelations about Sheila.
“You’re wrong. Sheila didn’t call that guy.”
“If she didn’t, someone using her phone did. Did she lend her phone out to people?” Twain asked.
“No. But-it doesn’t make sense.”
“But your wife has purchased knockoff purses?”
I remembered when I was standing in the closet on Friday, wondering whether it was finally time to do something with Sheila’s things. There were dozens of purses in there.
“There might be a couple,” I said.
“Would you mind if I looked at them?”
“Why?”
“When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you learn to spot certain characteristics. Just as someone could note the differences between a Coach and Gucci bag, I can sometimes notice differences between a bag made in one factory in China versus a bag made somewhere else. It gives me an idea which counterfeiters are making more of a dent in the market, for one thing.”
I hesitated. Why help this man? What difference did it make now? If anything, Arthur Twain was going to tarnish Sheila’s memory. Why help him do that?
As if reading my mind, he said, “I’m not here to hurt your wife’s reputation. I’m sure Mrs. Garber never knowingly broke the law, or intended to. This is one of those things like, like stealing cable. Everyone does it, so no one thinks that there’s anything-”
“Sheila never stole cable. Or anything else.”
Arthur held up a defensive hand. “Sorry. It was just an example.”
I said nothing, ran my tongue over my lip. “She hosted a party here,” I said. “Once.”
Arthur nodded. “When was that?”
“A few weeks-no, a couple of months before Sheila died.”
“When you say hosted, did she sell the merchandise? Or did she turn that over to someone else?”
“Someone else.” I hesitated, wondering whether it was fair to drag anyone else into it. Except the person I was going to name was as immune from prosecution as Sheila. “A woman named Ann Slocum. A friend of Sheila’s.”
Arthur Twain looked up something in his Moleskine. “Yeah, I have that name here. My information is that she was in regular contact with Mr. Sommer. I’ll be wanting to talk to her, too.”
“Good luck,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“She died the other night.”
For the first time, Arthur looked taken aback. “When? What happened?”
“Late Friday night, or maybe early Saturday morning. She had an accident. Got out to check a flat tire, stumbled off the pier.”
“Oh my. I didn’t know.” Twain was taking it all in.
So was I. The day that Sheila died, she’d put in a call to some kind of mobster. A man Twain was telling me was a suspect in a triple homicide. I thought about what Edwin had said, quoting Conan Doyle. How when something seemed impossible, the other possibilities, no matter how improbable, had to be considered.
Sheila had called a suspected killer. And before the day was out, she was dead.
She hadn’t died the way the people in those photographs had. She hadn’t been shot. No one had walked up to her and put a-
