“I bet I can guess,” I said.
“What?” Mannie asked.
“She was having an affair with Gil,” I said.
Mannie whistled. “This Gil really left a wake of destruction wherever he went, didn’t he?”
“Seems like it,” I said. “He also seems to be collecting as many victims in death as he did in life.”
I told Mannie about suspicion falling on Liam and putting his future in a precarious position and the attack on Tiffany the night before.
“There’s a lot going on with that man at the center,” Mannie said. “Too much going on.”
“I know,” I agreed. “I wish I could clear out the things that don’t matter so that I could focus on the things that do.”
“Maybe it all matters,” Mannie said. “Anyway, let me know if you need anything else. I’ll call back if I get more.”
He disconnected and I looked over at Ida Belle and Gertie.
“What the hell?” I said. “Please tell me we did not cause Gwyn to take her own life.”
Gertie shook her head, her expression sad. “All we did was tell her something she would have found out anyway when Casey got a hold of her.”
Ida Belle nodded. “And quite frankly, something she probably already knew but just didn’t want to admit to herself.”
I blew out a breath. “Yeah, I guess so, but man, I feel horrible. Gwyn obviously had some things she needed to work out but this wasn’t the solution. And God knows, Gil wasn’t worth it.”
“This wasn’t about Gil,” Gertie said. “Not really. He was just one piece in the bad decisions Gwyn was making. Maybe if she’d been honest with herself and gotten help, things could have been different. But please don’t blame yourself. She knew he was married when she got involved with him.”
“And if it hadn’t been Gil, it probably would have been another guy who sent her over the edge,” Ida Belle said. “Remember what Lil said about predators. I happen to agree with her. Men like Gil can spot women like Gwyn a mile away.”
“Yeah, but most of them don’t get murdered,” I said.
“It’s an unfortunate set of events,” Ida Belle said. “But we didn’t do anything to put them into motion.”
I shook my head. “How in the world does a person cause more trouble after dying than he did while he was alive? And I’m talking someone who caused a serious amount of trouble while he was alive.”
“He definitely outplayed himself on this one,” Gertie said.
“And wasn’t even here to see the dramatic fallout,” Ida Belle said. “Typical of Gil—create a mess, then skip away and pretend it had nothing to do with him.”
I stared out the windshield and frowned. “Do we think Gwyn could have been the one who killed Gil? I mean, she had opportunity. What if she knew the truth about Gil’s marriage? Or what if even though he was divorcing Tiffany, he told Gwyn he wasn’t going to settle down with her? We only have her word that they were an item. Maybe that was in the recent past. Maybe Gwyn was just as tired of men taking advantage of her as Lil was of seeing it.”
“And we see how Lil flipped over two men doing people she didn’t even know wrong,” Gertie said. “There’s nothing saying Gwyn couldn’t have flipped the same way.”
“Anything is possible,” Ida Belle said. “But could Gwyn have pulled it off? She doesn’t strike me as the sharpest of people. Disposing of the car in Sinful, changing the plates…that’s all things that require some planning and a cool head.”
“True,” I said. “But she’s also on-site for his rehearsal and would have known about the faulty security cameras, just like Lil.”
Gertie sighed. “Can you please stop adding suspects to the list? I’m going to have to write them all down.”
“Just pull out the phone book for southern Louisiana and you might have it under control,” Ida Belle said. “At this point, I’m convinced Gil had more enemies than friends.”
“Well, since it appears he had no friends except Judith, I’d agree,” I said.
“Who is also a suspect,” Gertie said. “It’s like the man was an anger and disappointment pandemic.”
I nodded. It was a totally accurate description.
But it didn’t mean I wasn’t going to figure out who killed him.
Ida Belle dropped me off and headed out, saying she’d be back to pick me up at 6:00 p.m. for the festival that night. We decided to skip costumes because the makeup took so much effort and we were all feeling rather tired. I hoped fat snacks from the festival vendors would perk us up some. We were really counting on tonight being normal. No dead people—except those in costume—and no skunks. If we were really lucky, no seeing Celia’s underwear. We couldn’t hope to avoid the woman herself as she always seemed to be there trying to ruin fun, but we could pray for limited contact with no fleshy displays.
I headed straight for the kitchen and grabbed my laptop to make some notes on our conversation with Lil and on the background information that Mannie had given me. When I was making the notes on Brigette, I remembered that Mannie had said her father stepped away from everything suddenly, so I did some googling. He’d passed away a year after his retreat from society but no cause of death was given. Just the ole standard ‘had been suffering from illness,’ which would explain his disappearance from the public and his firm.
There was a photo of him, his wife, and Brigette included with the obituary. Brigette had definitely taken after her mother in the looks department. She also had that refined structure to her face. I did a quick search on the mother and found that she’d passed less than a year after Brigette’s father had from heart issues. Brigette was an only child, according to the article, so I felt a moment of sadness for her. It was hard losing both parents, even though Brigette hadn’t been a child when it happened. Well, and technically, I hadn’t necessarily lost my dad to death. At least, not that I was aware of. But since he wasn’t exactly around, I figure it counted as death.
I heard Carter call out from the front door and directed him back to the kitchen. He had abandoned his trudge, which had been his elected walking method of late, and this time strode purposely into the kitchen, looking both aggravated and flustered.
“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” I said.
He grabbed a bottle of water from my refrigerator and plopped into a chair across from me. “I know you didn’t do it. Tiffany did.”
“What?” I sat up straight. “Do you mean…”
He nodded. “Casey’s forensics team found the murder weapon in the attic under some insulation. The only prints on it are hers.”
I stared. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I wish to hell I was.” He threw his hands up. “Do you know how this makes me look—that my team missed that gun? Things like this are the reason small-town cops get a bad rap.”
“Ah,” I said, understanding now why he was so upset. His team had dropped the ball.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Detective Casey was cool about it all—at least to my face—but I know what she was thinking because I would have thought the same thing.”