Dinner is Prompt-ly at Eight - 11. Purloined

Purloined – Prompt #374

“Large dinner, shopping, a fight, snow, and a football.”

“Why won’t anyone tell me anything?” Donnie demanded. He wiped his eyes, and glared at the police woman. Officer Slayton wouldn’t respond to him. She stared at him with a mixed measure of confusion, revulsion, and some contempt.

“Slayton, a word?” the smelly man asked after a few moments. “There’s more information coming in.”

Donnie sighed in disgust. This entire affair was taxing him. After a lovely large dinner at Beacon’s, with a nice well prepared order of short ribs, finding a body and engaging in this weird fight with the police, the chain of events had freaked him out. His mind was awhirl with the issues involved.

He found a dead body of a woman he didn’t know. The entire staff of the residence had seemed to melt away, like snow in May, and now they were accusing him of something nefarious. Donnie wished he’d never responded to that dumb letter, the one Kevyn sent to him. Sure, he’d be broke and maybe living on the streets, but it couldn’t be worse than this? Could it?

The letter was the answer to his problems. If he could show them the letter, the police would stop this ridiculous line of questioning. It may force him to reassume his debts and that was a fight he didn’t cherish, but his life wouldn’t be in jeopardy any longer. That was it. The letter would solve all his problems and prove he was a pawn in this entire affair.

That Slayton woman was arguing with the other two men outside the room. She was throwing her hands up like a referee at a football game calling for a touchdown. There was no touchdown. He was alone, scared, and completely at sea about what had occurred.

Donnie came home. He took a nap. He walked into the library and saw the dead woman lying there on the white sheepskin rug in front of the fireplace. He didn’t know who the woman was. The butler was a man he’d never met. Fahd had disappeared. His wife had vanished. This was all just a bad dream, wasn’t it?

“Mr. Malone. We’re having a psychologist come here to talk with you,” the female cop said after coming back into the room, sounding defeated. “You’re story doesn’t make sense.”

“You need to find the letter,” Donnie said breathlessly. “There’s a letter offering to release me from my debts if I marry Kevyn Woodsman. I married her so the estate wouldn’t go to her brother. Just find the letter.”

Slayton looked perturbed. “So this letter will explain the blood on you and your wife’s dead body?

Donnie swallowed hard. “No. That’s not my wife,” he said with a choke. “It will explain how I married a woman so she could keep her inheritance. It will prove I’m not making this up.”

Slayton snorted. “Fine. I’ll look for this letter. Where is it?”

Donnie squirmed in his seat. “I don’t know. They probably took it after killing that woman.” He chewed thoughtfully on his lip. “But, the letter tells you how I got into this mess. I swear. I have never seen that woman before in my life.”

Slayton looked out the interrogation room window. The other two officers were watching her closely. She felt like she was a mannequin in a display in shopping store window. Malone’s story and the entire scene were unreal. Finally, she grunted a response to the man and got out of her seat.

“Let’s go to the mansion and look for this letter. I doubt it even exists,” she said once outside the room. The other two officers nodded in agreement.

******

“There is no letter,” Hayden said to the female police officer as he rifled through the last documents in the drawer in the study. “I see nothing that explains Malone’s bizarre story.”

“It is strange,” Slayton said. “But, for some reason I believe him. There is a letter and he was genuinely confused by Ms. Woodsman’s corpse. The medical examiner has confirmed. It is Kevyn Woodsman, no doubt about it. The marriage license states she married a Donald C. Malone. However, the man at the police station wasn’t acting like a guilty man denying his role.”

“No. He’s talking like a nutjob about a letter which probably doesn’t exist and a woman who isn’t even around.” Detective Hayden was as perplexed as the officer. None of this was usual. Usually, when they received a call, they’d go around, people admitted or denied guilt, and eventually everything would come out in the wash. This case wasn’t like that.

“Why wouldn’t she just marry a woman?” he asked. “Lesbians can marry other women and it’s just as legal as a man and woman in this state. That’s why Malone’s story is so goofy.”

“Maybe he never thought of that,” Slayton said, fingering her way through a file. “I’m convinced this Malone guy is either a crazy man or really believes he married someone by the same name as the deceased. Either way, he’s not really guilty of anything.”

“Seems more like he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs to me,” Hayden said, opening another drawer.

“I don’t see this letter anywhere,” Slayton said, throwing her hands in the air. “It’s not in his room either. We looked into all these papers twice. I’m getting a little annoyed.”

“So am I,” Hayden admitted, carefully thumbing through financial papers that listed sums he’d only dreamed of ever seeing. “Rich people suck.”

“They’re still people,” Slayton said, slamming the drawer shut. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Hayden finished looking through the drawer, finding nothing more than old bills, and shut it. He sat back in the chair and mused over the facts. Kevyn Woodsman was found dead with her husband standing there looking down at her. He denied touching her. Hell, the man denied knowing her. Malone repudiated even knowing the butler though records showed he’d worked for the family for over two decades.

Who was this Fahd? Malone kept talking about an employee named Fahd, which wasn’t a name that just appeared out of thin air.

Hayden looked at the neatly aligned frames on the wall. They were impressive diplomas and degrees that Woodsman had achieved during her short life. There were also some lovely letters from famous people thanking her for her largess.

As he looked at the display, something bothered him. The line in the middle didn’t fit with the other two. It was slightly off as though the symmetry of the rest of the arrangement didn’t matter. Then, Hayden saw the discoloration that peeked behind one of the frames.

Something had been moved or altered.

Hayden got out of his chair and went over to that one frame. He started reading. He heard as Slayton came in. “Find anything?” she asked him.

“Malone’s telling the truth,” Hayden said, pulling the frame off the wall. “He was asked to marry someone. It’s right here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Slayton said, taking the frame from the detective’s hands. “Oh my God!”

“Yep, hiding in plain sight,” Hayden said. “We have ourselves a full blown murder mystery my friend.”

Slayton licked her lips. She grinned at her colleague. “So it would seem.