Free Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam by Elizabeth Parker, Mark Ebner Page A

phone on the drive in wasn’t just her being paranoid after all.
DALIA: We have cameras, though. Why would he answer the door?
    SHERIDAN: I don’t know.
    DALIA: He doesn’t answer for anybody he doesn’t know. And, like, his probation officer is the only person who . . .
    SHERIDAN: I have no idea.
    She’s thinking this through. Her voice starts to rise.
DALIA: He would not answer the door. We have cameras at our house.
    SHERIDAN: Maybe he knows this person. I didn’t know you have cameras. Because when we got there, some of your neighbors heard the commotion.
    Sheridan is backpedaling. He’s looking for a path out of this that will allow them to split the difference and walk it back to their neutral corners.
DALIA: We have cameras. The front door has cameras and the back door has cameras.
    SHERIDAN: That’s great.
    DALIA: But they don’t record. Nobody knows. We told everybody they record, but they don’t record.
    SHERIDAN: Oh God.
    Now it’s Dalia who’s backpedaling. Cameras mean there’s a permanent record, which defeats her purpose.
DALIA: Because he didn’t want them to make a hole in the garage for the recorder to be there, because of his car.
    SHERIDAN: When the officers got there, your door was wide open. They went in to look. They said there were two dogs in the house in a crate or a cage or something like that. And he was found in the bedroom. He’d been shot twice in the head.
    DALIA: He went and opened the door and let somebody he didn’t know in the house? We don’t open for anybody.
    A slight edge of anger has entered her voice. Whatever tacit plan she had with the hit man, this wasn’t part of it. In fact, Mike’s paranoia would have been one of the pillars of certainty on which she built her strategy. If this toppled, then the rest of it was in danger of giving way as well.
    Retracing her steps, Dalia remembers that she put the little dog—her white Maltese purse-dog, Bella—downstairs, while Mike stayed upstairswith “the big dog,” his English bulldog, Linguini. Backing out of this culde-sac, Sheridan tries to focus on the latter.
SHERIDAN: Will he bite somebody?
    DALIA: No. He loves everybody. I mean, he will run off with whoever he sees. The one that’s very aggressive and mean is the white one.
    SHERIDAN: It’s the small ones. Thinks he weighs 200 pounds, right?
    But Dalia’s still got more stories burning a hole in her outbox.
DALIA: There’s a lot that I want to tell you.
    Sheridan excuses himself, saying he wants to call the officers at the crime scene to determine if the house had been burglarized. Maybe this will explain the discrepancy. He and Anderson leave the room, and Dalia folds up on the table and starts sobbing. Sheridan will later claim that her tears weren’t real, meaning this is exclusively for the benefit of the camera. Anderson returns and asks for her phone, apologetically, and Sheridan retakes his seat.
SHERIDAN: Are there any drugs in your house now? Don’t worry about somebody being charged.
    DALIA: I don’t know what you consider steroids.
    SHERIDAN: Steroids? For whom?
    DALIA: For him. He takes steroids.
    Then Sheridan gets cagey.
SHERIDAN: Are you sure that you don’t know anybody that would want to kill your husband? You wouldn’t want to kill him, I hope.
    She shakes her head no.
SHERIDAN: Not at all.
    Dalia interprets the question as a referendum on their relationship.
DALIA: I mean, we were fine. There was nothing.
    SHERIDAN: There are no problems between you guys? No financial problems? I mean with you and him.
    DALIA: No, there’s nothing. I mean, his business has slowed down, like anything. He’s been having a hard time with his partner. They use the same accountant, and his partner found out—he was going to see his partner today. His partner found out how much the company really made, and so that was a problem.
    SHERIDAN: Oh, wow. Oops.
    DALIA: And he told his partner not even half of what it was, and I guess he ended up finding out