Boss, Your Wife's a Whole Detective novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Furniture
At the Garvey Group gala the CEO's quiet wife steps over a body in the cellar and names the killer in ten minutes, and her husband asks who she is.
The staff at Garvey Group called me the furniture.
I heard it myself at the coat check, from a girl who didn't know I was standing behind her.
"That's her," she whispered to the bartender. "The CEO's wife. You just walk around her."
I was six weeks married, and I had learned to be a woman people walk around.
An oatmeal cardigan over a grey gown. Plain glass in round frames. My hair pinned flat to my skull.
Nobody looks twice at a woman who wants to be furniture.
That was the point of her.
It was the founders' gala, in the ballroom of Garvey House, with two hundred guests and a string quartet playing to nobody.
My husband stood across the room with his board, taller than all of them, head shaved, hands behind his back.
Rowan Garvey had barely spoken to me since breakfast, mostly just, "Excuse me, I'll be late."
Sleet ticked on the windows.
I slipped out through the service corridor for some quiet, and stopped on the tile.
Somebody had tracked water down it.
Not a smear. Whole prints, a leather sole, a man's size eleven, wet and still shining.
They ran past the kitchen and stopped at a door I knew led to the wine cellar.
The door was open a hand's width.
I told myself it was none of my business.
I had been telling myself that for fourteen months, and it had never worked.
I took off my flat shoes and went down in my stockings.
The cellar was stone and cold and bone dry, which made the third stair stand out.
There was a wet print on it, the same sole, turning to go back up.
At the bottom, between two racks, a man lay on his back with one arm bent under him.
I knew him by his tux and his reading glasses on a cord.
Garvey Group's controller, fifty-one, who had called me "the lucky girl" at the wedding.
I crouched and put two fingers on his neck, out of habit.
Warm. Not breathing. Maybe ten minutes gone.
I touched nothing else and went back up the stairs.
I told the first waiter I saw, "Call 911. Nobody comes down."
Nine minutes later the cellar was full of uniforms.
The detective on scene was young, with a tie he'd tied in the car.
He looked at the stairs, the man and the broken bottle, and decided out loud.
"He fell. Steep stairs, expensive wine, open bar. Take statements from the guests."
Two hundred people in evening clothes were already crowding the corridor behind the tape.
My husband was at the front of them.
Rowan looked down at the controller, and his face did a thing I couldn't read.
I should have kept my mouth shut.
I had a cover to protect, and a reason I was in this house at all.
"He didn't fall," I said.
The detective turned. So did the corridor.
"Ma'am, this is a police scene."
"His hands are clean," I said. "A man who falls down stairs grabs the rack. His fingers aren't even scratched."
"Also, somebody laid him down and tidied him. Nobody falls with their glasses folded in their pocket."
The young detective opened his mouth.
"Under the bottom rack," I said, and pointed with my chin. "Look."
He got a flashlight and knelt, and he found it there in the dust.
A gold cufflink, small as a thumbnail, shaped like an anchor.
"That's not his," I said. "His links are plain steel. That one is the company's service pin. You get them at fifteen years."
Someone in the crowd breathed in.
"The print on the third stair is wet, and this cellar is dry."
I pointed at the ceiling. "Whoever did this came in from the loading dock, out of the sleet."
I looked along the faces behind the tape.
"And somebody told you he never left the lobby tonight."
The head of security stood at the edge of the crowd, a broad man in a black suit with an earpiece.
He had been standing at the front door all night, he'd told everyone, in the same polished shoes he'd worn at six.
I'd watched him say it twice.
"His left cuff is held shut with a green florist's rubber band," I said. "He lost a link tonight."
Nobody moved.
"And the shoes on his feet are dry. The wet ones are in a shopping bag at the coat check."
I heard the girl at the coat check make a small noise.
The young detective looked from me to the head of security.
It took him four seconds to understand the whole thing, and one more to get his hand on his cuffs.
The man ran for the stairs.
He got as far as the ballroom doors, where two waiters and a violist put him on the marble.
Ten minutes, start to finish.
I stood in my stockings at the bottom of the stairs and my hands began to shake.
Lionel Lonergan, who sat on the board and had smiled at me twice all evening, came and stopped beside my husband.
He looked at me for a long moment, over his half-moon glasses.
"What a remarkable wife you have, Rowan," he said softly.
Rowan wasn't looking at him.
He was looking at me.
"Who ARE you?" he said.
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