"I have many skills. Impeccable timing is one of them." He set the folder on my counter and opened the cutlery drawer. He got out a fork and started destroying a poached egg.
“You’re in jeans,” I commented.
“I’m flattered you noticed,” he said around a mouthful of food.
“I meant you’re not on duty.”
"Nope. Here unofficially." He flipped the folder open, turned it so it faced me. "Financial records. Evelyn's accounts, going back two months. Don't ask how, and don't repeat anything to your guests."
I looked down. It was mostly numbers that just jumbled together. Though Evelyn had some cash. “Who inherits all this money?”
“A niece in Texas.”
That hit a little too close to home.
Somebody had highlighted two lines in yellow on the bank statement.
"There's a wire transfer," he said. “Two weeks before the gala. Fifteen thousand dollars, from Evelyn's personal account to Hyacinth Maxwell's."
I set my coffee down slowly. My hand had gone just a little shaky. "Fifteen thousand."
"And a second one." He tapped the lower line, smaller, tidier, the kind of number that seemed like an afterthought. "Three days before the gala. Two thousand."
"Three days before Evelyn died. That’s…wild."
"Give or take."
"That's not a birthday gift." I'd meant to sound clever about it, but it came out flat.
“Not in my family,” Hollis said.
"That's not Evelyn quietly smoothing things over out of guilt, or being the fairy godmother of an estranged protégée. Fifteen grand and then a second, smaller payment right before she died. That's a pattern."
"That's what it looks like," Hollis agreed.
"So what's the theory? Blackmail?" I said it the way Dorothy hadn't, out loud, and it landed heavier now that there was a number attached to it. "Hyacinth had something on Evelyn? Something worth fifteen thousand dollars to keep quiet, and then, right before the gala, worth a little more."
“Why kill the golden goose then? It couldn’t be Hyacinth if that’s the theory.”
“True.” I bit my lip. Then tapped it. Teddy wandered out of the laundry room, took one look at Hollis, then retreated again.
"Or Evelyn was paying Hyacinth to do something," Hollis said. "Not to keep quiet about something. To go do a thing. The second payment being closer to the event matters. Retainers don't usually come in installments like that unless the job's got a deadline."
I hadn't thought of it that way, and I didn't love that he had. "You think Evelyn hired her."
"I think two payments, two weeks apart, with the second one landing three days before a woman turned up dead at her own gala, is not a coincidence I'm willing to file under generosity." He said it evenly, the way he said everything, but there was something underneath it, a kind of grim satisfaction that told me this was the piece he'd been waiting on. "Doesn't tell me what the money was for. Doesn't tell me who ended up doing what. But it tells me Hyacinth Maxwell was lying to you at that gala, about more than a bracelet."
“Was Evelyn trying to kill someone else? And it misfired?” That actually seemed logical to me. The silver straw as a weapon was Evelyn-coded, not Hyacinth. Clever, pretentious, confident…that all read Evelyn to me. “And either Hyacinth found out or Hyacinth was helping her?”
Teddy ambled back into the kitchen, like he approved of the direction of our reasoning. Hollis, without breaking eye contact with me, reached down and scratched behind his ears, which undercut the whole grim-detective energy considerably.
"I need to talk to her," I said. "Properly. I need her across a table with nowhere to go."
"That's the detective’s job, Harper."
“Detectives make people lawyer up the second you flash a badge. My sunny and trustworthy disposition gets people to tell me things over mimosas because they think I'm harmless."
“Trustworthy is a stretch.”
