“You did a hell of a job with that distraction,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you.”
“We might hug you though,” Gertie said.
Lil let out a huge breath and her shoulders relaxed.
“I’ve never been so scared in all my life,” she said as she made her way off the stage. “When I heard her admit to killing Gil, I was shocked, but when she admitted to killing Gwyn, I was just mad. I couldn’t let her get away with it.”
Gertie pulled Lil into a hug and squeezed her so tightly, Lil winced.
“Of course you couldn’t let her get away,” Gertie said. “Especially with your daughter sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial for a murder she didn’t commit. Or did you even know Tiffany had been arrested?”
Lil nodded and started to cry. “A boy she knew in high school called me. He said she’d been arrested and was afraid he was going to be as well. He knew I’d been trying to get in touch with Tiffany and he wanted me to know that she didn’t kill anyone. I told him I never thought she had.”
“Well, lucky for us you were working late,” I said.
“Oh, I wasn’t,” Lil said. “I left hours ago, but when I drove by earlier, I saw Brigette’s car in the parking lot. I was afraid something might be wrong with the props that were set up for shipping, so I let myself in. That’s when I heard you talking.”
“You’re a hero, Lil,” I said.
She blushed and stared at the ground. “No. I’m definitely no hero.”
“You were tonight,” Ida Belle said. “Fortune is the best at what she does, but even she can’t outrun a bullet. And Gertie and I wouldn’t have stood a chance at all.”
I nodded. “Brigette might have gotten away with killing five people if you hadn’t stopped tonight, and sending two more to the death chamber. You could have called the police and just waited silently for them to show.”
Lil shook her head. “I stuck my head in the sand in ignorance once before and it cost me my daughter. I will never make that mistake again.”
Sirens sounded outside and we all put up our hands as cops rushed into the auditorium, guns drawn. Detective Casey was the last one in and she took one look at us and groaned.
I grinned. “How do you like me now?”
Detective Casey hadn’t been lying about her captain’s hatred for PIs. He wouldn’t believe a word Carter said, so I had to roust Morrow from bed to verify my credentials. I made an emergency call to my former federal prosecutor friend, aka the Grim Reaper, and while that had the captain lowering his voice while he chewed me out, it still hadn’t gotten me out of a jail cell visit. Finally, I pulled my Louisiana trump card and mouthed ‘Mannie’ to Ida Belle. She managed a text and a couple minutes later, the captain’s personal cell phone rang.
He stiffened as he looked at the display, then stepped out of the room and into the hallway. We watched through the window as he complained, then shut up, then his shoulders slumped and he sighed.
Gotcha.
He walked back into the room with a completely different attitude. “You have an interesting set of allies, Ms. Redding,” he said.
“That’s because I’m fighting for the good guys,” I said. “You just need to believe that.”
“Well, considering your service to this country, I suppose I can allow that your focus is different from the majority of these pissant PIs I have roaming my city like rabid dogs. But that still doesn’t excuse breaking and entering, regardless of your reasons.”
“It was only entering,” I said. “The door was open. Someone must have forgotten to lock it. So you could book us on trespassing. What’s that—a fine? A couple hours community service?”
Gertie snorted. “You just did a couple hours of community service. You caught a murderer, exposed an art smuggling ring, and kept an innocent woman from the death chamber. I’d say your debt to society is more than paid.”
The captain’s jaw flexed and I knew he was mad but he couldn’t really argue. His department would have worked with the DA to get a murder conviction on Tiffany, and given the evidence, it would have stuck. But what if the truth surfaced years later? It was the biggest black mark in the world for law enforcement to put an innocent person in prison, especially for something like murder. Heads rolled everywhere when that happened. So I’d saved the captain and his department from the potential of career-ending trouble.
He knew it but he definitely didn’t like it, and no way he was admitting it.
“Just get out,” he said finally. “I expect all of you back here tomorrow morning to give your statements.”
As we left the station, Carter said, “Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”
“Not as lucky as Tiffany, Kip, and Liam,” I said. “Far luckier than Gil and Gwyn.”
He slung his arm around my shoulder and pulled me close.
“Why couldn’t I fall in love with a real librarian?” he asked.
“Because you’d be bored in a day.”
“Yeah. I’d miss out on all those pink glitter explosion skunk adventures. I see it in your scalp. Totally busted.”
“I probably have it everywhere,” I said. “Gertie flung a bag of it over all of us at the craft booth. She even got your mother.”
His look of dismay was comical. “Of course she did.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Wednesday was a whirlwind of activity. Ida Belle, Gertie, and I made yet another trip to New Orleans—this time to give our official statements. Detective Casey had seemed a little miffed over being upstaged, but finally thawed as I laid out the evidence we’d collected and how it had finally all come together because of some random statements by other people and a kid’s drawing at an arts and crafts booth.
Brigette wasn’t talking but there was so much evidence against her, she didn’t really have to. Casey told us the painting had been confiscated and my suspicions were correct. The original painting had a layer of special varnish over it and then had been painted over to disguise the valuable—and stolen—item underneath. She had a replacement for the prop shipped to the buyer and just swapped them out when they came to collect. After collection, the buyer had an artist delicately strip the fake painting from the top, revealing the perfectly intact painting below. Brigette had been smuggling art in plain sight and the cops suspected it wasn’t just limited to paintings. Vases and other high-end items could easily be camouflaged with removable coatings and moved as props for the play.
My theory about Brigette’s finances had been correct as well. Emmaline’s comments about the real reason her father had stepped away from his public life combined with Mannie’s comment about the good interest rate Brigette had on her condo mortgage, her constant complaints about the lack of budget for the play, and her diverting conversation about displaying the family emeralds all added up to Brigette being broke, the emeralds being long gone, and Brigette not the least bit happy about any of it. She’d been raised with a certain lifestyle and had figured out a way to get back to it.
Unfortunately, Gil had decided to step into his role of a detective in real life and had gone up against someone who had no problem killing to hide her side business. Getting into character had been a deadly choice. His curtain drop, you might say. And poor Gwyn was the real tragedy in all of it. She’d gotten caught up in something she knew absolutely nothing about and had died because of it.