Dead in the Rose City: A Dean Drake Mystery by R. Barri Flowers Page A

“All right, Drake. I’m gonna give it to you straight. Your
story doesn’t hold up worth a damn. There is no other woman—at
least not by the name of Catherine Ashley Sinclair.” He paused. “At
the morgue, the housekeeper identified the dead woman as none other
than Catherine Ashley Sinclair.”
    “What—?” My lower lip dropped several inches.
“But that’s impossible.”
    “It’s not only possible,” stated O’Malley
brutally, “it’s true! Her driver’s license verified the I.D. If
this is the woman you say you took pictures of with Gregory
Sinclair, you photographed him having an affair with his own wife!”
O’Malley blew his nose nosily into a discolored handkerchief. “It
gets worse—” he said ominously, and I wondered how it could.
    I was about to find out.
    “From what we’ve been able to put together so
far, Catherine Sinclair was the money bags of the family rather
than her husband, as you claim you were led to believe. Apparently
she was born on an easier street than you or I will ever know. So
you see, it doesn’t figure that you would have been hired to spy on
a supposedly wealthy man who stood to lose far more than he gained
in the event of a divorce.”
    Damn! I cursed under my breath. What
type of dark and deadly game had I gotten myself into?
    My thoughts quickly turned to the real source
of my troubles—the woman who led me to believe she was Catherine
Ashley Sinclair. If she wasn’t the real thing, much less dependent
upon a prenuptial agreement for her life’s blood, then who the hell
was she?
    The obvious answer seemed to be Gregory
Sinclair’s real mistress/lover. It made sense the more I thought
about it, though I’d never in fact seen them together. With the
rich wife out of the way, the two of them could get all her money
and still have each other without missing a beat. It wouldn’t be
the first time greed and lust led to murder. But that still didn’t
account for all the weird things about this situation I found
myself in.
    If the dead woman was the real Catherine
Ashley Sinclair, why was she secretly meeting Gregory Sinclair at
such out of the way places as a dumpy motel across the river in
neighboring Vancouver, Washington?
    Speaking of the bereaved husband, I asked:
“Where was Sinclair when the murder occurred?”
    “He’s still unaccounted for,” said O’Malley
nonchalantly. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him, assuming he’s still
alive—”
    O’Malley flashed me a doubtful look. I met
his eyes man-to-man, hostility building up inside me like a volcano
threatening to explode. “What the hell are you trying to say,
O’Malley? You think I killed Gregory Sinclair?” My mouth became a
straight line.
    “Did you?” He glared.
    “No, I didn’t! No more than I killed
Catherine Sinclair—” I breathed in deeply. “Why would I kill a man
I didn’t even know?”
    I had a feeling O’Malley was not listening to
anything that contradicted what he wanted to believe. He walked
back and forth as if he had lost his direction while retrieving
another cigarette.
    “I’ll tell you what some of the guys around
here think,” O’Malley said. “They think that you got involved with
a wealthy, beautiful white woman and decided you wanted more
of her money and more of her. When she refused to leave her husband
for you, you got drunk, stupid, beat her face to a bloody pulp, and
strangled her. Then you came up with this cockamamie story of
another woman to try and save your ass from a death sentence for
aggravated murder.”
    I shot up from my chair with indignation and
disappointment, if not total surprise. It wasn’t enough that people
I used to work with were railroading me. They were using age-old
stereotypes to try and do it.
    “Why does it always have to come down to a
racial thing?” I asked O’Malley, standing an inch from him and
around four inches above him. “It’s getting really old. Why can’t a
black man romance a white woman without it