Page 24 of A Week Away
It was a very large room with windows on opposite sides. There was her private bathroom and a walk-in closet. In the center of the far wall sat a very large four poster bed. It had a frilly canopy and looked like the kind of bed Scarlet O’Hara would enjoy. There was a floral love seat and a makeup table. The love seat had too many pillows and a comfy looking chenille blanket. The latest Harlequin romance was tangled in the blanket. The makeup table was covered with perfumes, tubes of lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara brushes, foundation, powder, eyelash curlers, tweezers, eyebrow pencils and thick brushes to spread it all around.
I took a look in her bathroom. It also had a lot of fuzzy pink rugs and things. These looked pretty new, and I had the feeling that as soon as they began to look shabby she’d put them into the other bathroom and buy new. Her towels looked recently purchased and there was a souvenir glass from Las Vegas holding her tooth brush next to the sink. I wouldn’t say her bathroom was spotless, but it was definitely clean.
I opened the medicine cabinet. In addition to a selection of hairsprays, there was a row of prescription medications. I read the labels. The first bottle I picked up was Prozac. I’d heard of that. The bottle was full and the prescription was nearly a year old. She wasn’t taking them. She was taking something called alprazolam. I wasn’t sure what that was, but she was taking a lot of it. She’d only filled the prescription a month ago and it was nearly gone.
Back in the bedroom, I cracked the closet open. It was deep and crammed full. There was a lot of money in her bedroom. There was a lot of money in the house itself. Cass had mentioned that his mother had taken cards in her husband’s name and never paid them. Just looking around the bedroom, I knew she was up to a lot more than that. Exactly what I couldn’t be sure, but it did make me wonder how long she’d been up to it and whether it might have to do with Dom Reilly’s disappearance.
Fortunately, the kid was taking a long shower. Longer than you’d expect from a kid with a high tolerance for filth. I went back into the junk room and finished making the bed. Then I went downstairs.
The living room was neat and expensively furnished. The only thing I could see that was out of place was Cass’s backpack, which he’d left on one of the two facing sofas. There was a large mahogany coffee table with matching end tables. Against the walls were a couple of side chairs, a console television that looked like a liquor cabinet, and a cabinet that didn’t but probably was. At the far end of the room was a double pocket door opening onto a den.
That room held a sturdy looking mahogany desk. There were a couple of short filing cabinets. I went in and sat behind the desk. There was a beige desk phone in one corner sitting on an answering machine, a stack of three yellow legal pads, a bunch of pens in a cup from the MGM Grand, and not much else. I opened the center drawer, and among the paperclips and receipts found an address book. It was old with a cartoon koala bear on the cover. I began flipping through it.
It was obvious she’d been using the book for a long time. It was probably time to replace it. First, I flipped to the R’s. The first listing was for Patrick and Verna Reilly, but it was crossed out. Well, they were dead. Several names down was a listing for Suzie Reilly. Her address was crossed out and replaced by her parents’, which was in Roseville. Wherever that was.
It didn’t seem like something Joanne would forget, but I appreciated her letting me know Suzie had inherited her parents’ home. I wondered if half the house had been left to her brother or whether her parents had given up and left it solely to her. I picked out a pen and wrote down her address and phone number. Not that I’d need it. I didn’t think Cass would be letting me go anywhere on my own.
Then I flipped to D. There was an entire page of Di Stefanos. There was a Carmen and Ophelia Di Stefano. Ophelia was crossed off, so I assumed she’d died. My guess was these were Joanne’s grandparents. I had no idea which of these Di Stefanos I should talk to. Cass would have to tell me.
Though the book was pretty full, I realized the oldest addresses were at the top of the page. I flipped through the alphabet looking for one in particular. I didn’t find it until I got to the letter S. Szymanski. Heather Szymanski. My guess was that this was the Heather who’d been with Joanne when she met Dom Reilly. I quickly scanned through the S’s to see if she had another listing. It made sense that she might have moved. There wasn’t one.
Well, she could have gotten married and changed her name. That meant she could be under any letter. I opened both bottom drawers looking for a telephone book. It was on the right. The drawer on the left was locked. I decided to deal with that in a bit. I grabbed the phonebook.
I got lucky. Heather Szymanski was listed. I wrote her name and address down on the pad. Then I put the phonebook back so I could tackle the locked drawer. First, I pulled out the drawer above it. As I’d expected, there was a thin piece of unfinished veneer between the drawers. At some point, someone had tried to break through it, so I could see into the drawer below. There was an accordion folder in there. The hole wasn’t large enough for me to get my fingers through, so I had no idea what was in there. I felt the bottom of the drawer above, then put it back. Then I felt the bottom of all the other drawers. Taping a key to the bottom of a drawer was an easy way to hide it. Just not this time.
The smart thing would be to keep the key on your key ring or, at the very least, hidden in a different room. Most people didn’t do the smart thing. I found Joanne’s key when I took all the pens out of the MGM Grand cup and flipped the cup over. The key fell out.
After I opened the drawer, I took out the accordion folder and looked it over. In the first pocket were about ten letters sent to different individuals explaining that their debt had been purchased and was now owed to Top Dawg Collections. That matched the name at the top of the stationery. Each letter was signed by Cassidy Reilly, administrative assistant.
It seemed all wrong. Was Top Dawg Collections where Joanne worked? Cass had just said she worked for a lawyer who did collections. Lawyers usually worked under their names.
The file made it seem like Joanne had her own collection business. Each letter had notes that reflected how many phone calls had been made to the debtor. A lot of them. Enough to qualify as harassment.
The next pocket contained bank statements for Top Dawg Collections. The account had well over fifty thousand dollars in it. Fifty two thousand six hundred and eighty-five to be exact. That was a lot of money.
The next pocket held a packet of papers which were the LLC Operating Agreement for Top Dawg Collections. I flipped through it. It was pretty simple with the members being Cassidy Reilly and L&J Holdings, LLC. There were several empty pockets, and then in the last there was a number 10 envelope. I opened it and found six credit cards. Two of the names on the cards matched letters in the first pocket.
It took me a moment to work that out. People with debts in collection were often in a lot of financial trouble, but not all. Sometimes it’s a forgotten hospital bill or a credit card company that lost track of you. Those people might still be able to get new credit, albeit at higher rates. She was taking out cards?—
Something hit me. When Cass said he’d taken one of his mother’s credit cards, he hadn’t meant one ofhers. He’d meant one of the ones she kept in this envelope. They were hers but not hers. They were definitely not cards she’d be paying for. Suddenly, I was annoyed with the kid. He’d let me pay for very expensive plane tickets from LAX to Reno and Reno to Detroit. Granted, I wouldn’t have accepted, but he didn’t even offer.
Upstairs, the shower finally stopped. I put everything back into the desk, ripped off the page I’d been writing on, and walked out of the office. I wanted to look at the rest of the house before Cass got dressed and came downstairs. I went the living room, crossed the foyer, and was in the dining room. There was a lovely dining table with six chairs, thick drapes, a China closet with a few pieces sitting in it, a soup tureen shaped like a rabbit and a mixing bowl. I walked through to the kitchen. It was a nicely designed room with newish appliances. The first thing I did was open the refrigerator. It was full; and yet it wasn’t.
There was an entire shelf of Diet Coke in cans. The top shelf was packed with leftover take-out in white boxes. The vegetable bin was filled with packets of catsup, mustard, mayonnaise and soy sauce. There were two bottles of champagne. I opened the freezer compartment and found a frozen pizza and a half-eaten container of vanilla ice cream. It seemed pretty scant for a woman who was charging her seventeen-year-old son board.
I opened some of the cupboards, which were mostly empty. She was definitely committed to this no-cooking thing. She didn’t even have anything to do it with. I pulled open the drawers. One held silverware, one held take-out menus from dozens of restaurants and the rest were empty.
The kitchen had a built-in breakfast nook and a sliding door out to the patio. There was a door that I thought might lead to the garage. It did.
Inside the two-car garage sat a recent model, bronze Cadillac Eldorado. There was more in the garage than there was in her kitchen cupboards but not by much. I didn’t see a lawn mower so she must hire a company to do that. Most people would pay their teenage son to mow the lawn. But, given the state of his room, I could see why she might not.
“What are you doing out here?” Cass asked, standing in the door to the kitchen. His hair was wet so he was obviously clean, but it looked like he’d put the same clothes back on. I was already getting tired of the red hoodie.
“Snooping. That’s how we’re going to figure out who killed your father. By snooping.”
“Yeah, well, my mother’s car didn’t kill him.”
“She likes expensive things, doesn’t she?”
