Murder in the Marketplace

by Lora Roberts

  I took the glass of tea she handed me. “That’s nice. Why?”

  “Because you have to be proactive, Liz. People take advantage of women who don’t stand up for themselves. That meathead Drake could very well decide to make you the scapegoat, like he tried to last time.”

  “Boy, don’t you hate when that happens?”

  “Stop it.” Claudia looked at me over her bifocals. “Clowning around won’t make this go away. This last poisoning could be pinned on you—you had opportunity. We have to plan your strategy.”

  I opened the refrigerator so I could stick my hot face in its cool interior. “Have you got any lemons?”

  “Liz. Why can’t you see that somebody at that company may want you to take the blame?”

  “Claudia, it’s just possible that Jenifer’s death was suicide—the most the police will say is that the evidence is ambiguous, and maybe someone fed her a bunch of pills when she was groggy from a doctored drink. Why? Why would anyone want to kill a nice young girl like her? What could she have that anyone would want to kill her for?”

  “Was she raped? Hurt?” Claudia leaned against the kitchen counter. From the open kitchen door came the deep, thundering roar that is Bridget’s elderly Suburban coasting to a stop.

  “No.” I watched the door. “Nothing like that. Just dead. Very neatly, peacefully dead.” I thought about Jenifer lying there in front of the sofa. “She was wearing a bathrobe— looked like she’d had a shower, gotten her nightie on ready for bed. The same way she looked that noon.”

  Bridget came up the steps. Her arms were empty—no baby, no little boy clinging to her hand. “Now, what’s this, Liz? Why didn’t you tell me things were getting worse?”

  “They’re not—not for me. Nobody’s trying to kill me.” I took another sip of iced tea while Claudia poured Bridget a glass. “But Claudia thinks I need saving anyway.”

  “Your party the other night.” Claudia ignored my chaffing. “Ed Garfield was there, Liz says. Who else from his company?”

  Bridget thought. “I don’t really know any of them but Ed and Suzanne—we meet them sometimes at industry whizbangs. Let’s see, Suzanne was at the party, wasn’t she? Yes, I spoke to her. She spent most of the time standing in the corner with a beer.”

  Claudia set a bag of pretzels and half a box of Girl Scout cookies on the table. “Who did she talk to?”

  “All I noticed was that she watched Ed.” Bridget took a pretzel out of the bag. “They lived together for years and years. I remember one night a few years ago we saw them in St. Michael’s Alley. It was soon after we’d seen Steve Jobs there, and Emery pointed out Ed and Suzanne and said they were starting a new company, and maybe one of them was the next Steve Jobs.”

  “A great honor, I’m sure.” Claudia selected a pretzel after much careful scrutiny. “Who, pray tell, is Steve Jobs?”

  Bridget rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Anyway, I thought that was interesting, because she’s the programming brains of the two. Emery said Ed is better at the marketing stuff.”

  Claudia looked up from her pad. With paper and pencil, she’s at her most formidable. “Just a minute. I thought this dead girl was Garfield’s girlfriend.”

  “That was what I heard at the office, that he was romancing her and she was up for it.” The iced tea glass was cold and as wet as Barker’s nose in my hand. “But before that, he was supposed to have been Clarice’s boyfriend. Jenifer’s roommate.”

  “Probably he was,” Bridget said, nodding. “Emery said there was a lot of gossip about SoftWrite when they broke up—about whether they’d split the company like Solomon’s baby or keep on. And Ed started playing the field like a maniac—he had a lot of status dates. Rumor had it that Suzanne was pretty depressed about it all.”

  “So there.” Claudia looked at me triumphantly. “We’ve only been at it for less than an hour, and we’ve already got a great suspect to take your place, Liz—this Suzanne. She had motive, opportunity, and she’s a smart woman, which means nothing is beyond her. You’re safe.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think Suzanne would do things like this.” I shoved my glass away. “She’s not matey, exactly, but she wouldn’t kill someone out of jealousy. I don’t think so. And she wouldn’t poison Ed, would she? Not if she killed Jenifer to get him back?”

  “Ed was poisoned?” Bridget put down her glass and stared at me. “I didn’t know about this.”

  “Yesterday afternoon. He survived. But another guy died—the HR manager.”

  Before Bridget could answer, Claudia cocked her head toward the front of the house, and then we all heard it—the faint sound of the front door knocker.

  “Salesman, probably.” Claudia looked at me. “Liz, do you mind? Your legs are younger.”

  I didn’t mind, especially when I opened the front door and found Amy there. “Amy! How did you know Claudia’s address?”

  “I looked it up in your Mr. Drake’s phone book.” Amy was all but wringing her hands. “Aunt Liz, while I was watering the flowers you told me to, he came out, and asked me all these questions about what we did last Thursday. I said my mom would be out pretty soon, and he told me to come to his house, so I did, even though I thought it might be the wrong thing, but he made me write down what we did—you know, when we went to the grocery store and then to your friend’s, and when we came home, and what times and everything!”

  I led Amy back through the hall as she spoke. When we got to the kitchen, mercifully, she’d reached the end of her story. “Hello, Mrs. Montrose,” she said dutifully to Bridget. “Hello, Mrs. Kaplan. Sorry to barge in on you.”

  Claudia looked gracious at this scanty evidence of manners still existing in the young. “It’s quite all right,” she said, gesturing to the refreshments. “Have a cookie or a pretzel. Did you say Detective Drake was asking you about Liz’s movements?”

  Amy sat down in my chair and reached for the pretzels. “Yes, he was! Why, Aunt Liz? Is this about that girl who died? I thought she died the day before.”

  “The police are checking into another death they think might be related.”

  Amy’s eyes grew round. “Do they think you killed the body? I mean—”

  “No, they don’t.” I was speaking more to Claudia. “They talk to everyone who ever saw or spoke to the person. It doesn’t mean they suspect me.”

  “You have to protect yourself.” Claudia sounded determined. “You should go back and tell him this Suzanne is at least as good a suspect as you.”

  “Who’s Suzanne?” Amy crunched her pretzel. “Oh, I know. Suzanne Hamner from SoftWrite. They mentioned her in that Barron’s article I told you about Thursday night. I went back to the library and looked it up again yesterday. It was SoftWrite—the Palo Alto firm that’s going public.”

  “Suzanne was in Barron’s ?”

  “No, mostly they talked about that guy who came to the house Thursday—the hunky one.” Amy glanced at me slyly. “I told Aunt Liz he liked her. Barron’s said he was one of Silicon Valley’s brilliant young executives. Their initial offering is expected to go like hotcakes.”

  I somehow couldn’t tell Amy that the brilliant young executive was recovering from strychnine poisoning. “The phones were sure busy yesterday. I thought it was because of their new release.”

  “Yeah, that, too.” Amy took a Thin Mint and sniffed it suspiciously. “Is this one of those Girl Scout cookies? Oh.” She put it on the napkin in front of her and had another pretzel. “The article said they would really cash in big.”

  “There! You see?” Claudia was triumphant. “Suzanne wants her cash that she’s been working for and putting up with all this humiliation for. But somehow Jenifer stands in the way, so she has to kill her.”

  “Shaky.” I got to my feet. “Don’t worry, Claudia. I won’t let them bully me. Thanks for the help, Biddy. Amy, you can ride back with me if you want.”

  Amy stood up, too, and politely thanked Claudia. Her manners when her mother wasn’t in the room were re
ally very good. “I need to go downtown, Aunt Liz. I have to get some things for Monday.” Fidelity had come through with the internship, and Amy was already anticipating her tiny salary. “I can walk if you don’t want to drop me off.”

  “I’ll take you. I’ve got to work on my census register.”

  I had the paperwork and a clean T-shirt in the bus. But the register wasn’t the only reason I was going back to Jenifer’s neighborhood. There was someone there I wanted to talk to, someone who maybe could tell me what anyone had to gain from killing her.

  Chapter 24

  Curtis Hall opened his front door as far as the chain would allow. He was surprised to see me.

  “It’s Ms.—Sullivan, isn’t it? You know, the police have been around here asking about you.”

  I noticed he wasn’t taking the chain off the door. “Have they? That doesn’t surprise me. Didn’t they ask about everyone else, too?”

  “Well, yes.” He looked a trifle friendlier. “They made me feel incredibly guilty, and I didn’t do anything.”

  “It’s their way.” I glanced at the bench beside the door. “Can we sit out here and talk for a moment? I admit, I’m just here for the gossip. It’s so strange to know that people are dead, maybe murdered, and not have the details.”

  He hesitated. “Actually, ghoulish as it seems, I’d like to talk it over, too.” The door closed briefly, then opened without the chain. “Come on in. I was just about to have a cup of coffee. Care to join me?”

  “No thanks.” I followed him into the living room I remembered from last time, its white walls and bold artwork like an oasis in a sea of suburban mediocrity. “I will take a glass of water, though.”

  “Pellegrino or Perrier?” Curtis was in the kitchen. I didn’t follow him; plainly he was a little spooked by me, and I didn’t want to make it worse.

  “Wet is all I care about.” His laugh floated into the room, and then he came in, carrying a tinkling glass and a cup for himself.

  “So.” He sat in the other chair and looked at me expectantly. “I’ll be glad to gossip for you—I know practically nothing anyway. But you’ll have to shake loose, too.”

  “What did they tell you?” I sipped the water. It tasted like fizzy tap water, as far as my untutored palate could tell.

  “The detective that came—the same guy who was here the night you found Jenifer—”

  “Drake, that would be.”

  “Yes, that’s him. Well, he said they were just trying to eliminate extraneous people. He asked me about several others I didn’t know and had never seen, and then he asked about you—if you’d been hanging around after Jenifer’s death, if I’d seen you with Bill, if I’d seen Bill—you know the kind of stuff.”

  “And had you?”

  “Seen you?” He laughed again, a little uneasily. “Of course not. I told the detective I hadn’t seen anything at all.”

  “Do they think Bill saw something, and that’s why he died?”

  Curtis fidgeted with the tassel on the broad arm of the sofa. “Well,” he said in a burst of candor. “Bill had a tendency to want to cash in. He was always spying, you saw that.” I nodded. “Once he told me that he knew I was a faggot, and what was it worth to me for him to keep quiet.” Curtis giggled. “I had to tell him, absolutely nothing! I came out of the closet a long time ago. Now that I’m on disability, I don’t even have coworkers to shock. Bill was a little disappointed, I think. People like him really flourish in a closed society.”

  “So he might have seen something, offered someone the same kind of deal, and ended up dead.” I shook my head. “I’m confused. I still can’t figure out what a girl like Jenifer Paston could know that would make her a murder victim.”

  “Oh, any number of things,” Curtis said, surprisingly. “I’ve been thinking about this. Jenifer was going through a religious conversion, you know. I asked Clarice about it yesterday when she was here moving out, and she told me a little. Clarice is deeply into it. She got divorced, and had some kind of affair, and was pretty unhappy for a while, until she started seeing this guru-type guy. Sounded like a mixture of AA and TM to me. Anyway, she had to go around for a while telling everyone how they had wronged her and that she forgave them, and the bad things she’d done that they were supposed to forgive her for. It was boring, believe me.” Curtis sighed. “It turned out that I had wronged her by planting calla lilies in the planter box downstairs when she’d wanted to plant dahlias but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. And she’d had evil thoughts about my perversity.”

  “How—daunting.” I drained my glass, but didn’t put it down anywhere. All the horizontal surfaces seemed too beautiful for a water glass to mar.

  “So anyway, Jenifer was getting into this, too. We had a long talk at the mailbox a couple of weeks ago, and she told me how it was making such a difference to her, and she was really going to clear the negative things out of her life. She looked a little grim when she said that. I made some remark like you just did—that such a nice young girl couldn’t have that much to clear away, and she said, ‘You’d be surprised, Curtis. You’d be surprised.’ Just like that.” He shook his head. “Guess someone didn’t like whatever it was she was going to clear away.”

  This seemed to me a much more nebulous motive than the jealousy propounded by Claudia.

  “So what could Bill Aronson have seen?” I was really speaking to myself but Curtis answered.

  “Oh, the car, I should think.”

  “What car?” I gaped at him.

  “The car of whoever killed Jenifer.” Curtis spoke simply, as if it must be self-evident. “Bill was kind of a crank about parking spaces. They’re assigned, you know. If anyone transgressed—if visitors parked in someone else’s space, he was livid. He didn’t even like it when people parked at the curb, because he used his assigned space for this old truck he was working on, so he wanted the curb space for his Chevette. He took pictures of any unfamiliar license plates. Once he even went so far as to find out from the DMV who was visiting me—hoping, I guess, to uncover some raging fag romance.” He grinned at me lopsidedly. “He was very frustrated to learn it was just my physical therapist. I would have told him if he’d asked, but he was so secretive. I figure he got the goods on Jenifer’s killer and applied some pressure.”

  “The car.” I shook my head. “I was here that day, knocking on doors. He didn’t answer. How could he have seen any car if he wasn’t here?”

  “Was that Wednesday?” Curtis leaned forward. “He was here, more than likely. He’s off—he was off on Wednesdays. Probably just didn’t answer the door. Also, he had some kind of camera rigged up to take pictures automatically—his bedroom overlooked the street, you know. The police took the camera away after I told them about it. Of course, Bill probably developed the film as soon as he heard about Jenifer’s death. He’d be tickled to think he could profit from something like that.”

  “He wouldn’t have committed suicide?”

  Curtis looked thoughtful. “I didn’t know him that well,” he said apologetically, as if this were a fault. “But I would have said no. A person like that doesn’t blame himself when things go wrong. And that’s what suicide is—taking it out on yourself instead of on other people. If something had been bad enough for Bill to want to kill himself over it, he probably wouldn’t have kept it a secret. Really,” Curtis said mildly, swirling the coffee in his cup, “it’s surprising he lived as long as he did, given his little hobby.”

  I left Curtis’s place, kicking myself a little for coming. I had hoped to uncover something that wouldn’t mean anything to the police—something Curtis wouldn’t have thought of telling them. But Drake was good at getting that stuff out of people, and he’d obviously squeezed Curtis dry—plus getting actual physical evidence, if Bill Aronson had taken pictures. Sleuthing wasn’t my strength. All I could see was that if the “suicides” were actually murders, anyone could have done them—Jason, for instance, because he was enraged by what Jenifer had told his fiancé
e she’d “remembered.” I wondered if she could have been similarly influenced in some other direction. Perhaps she had “remembered” another episode—a rape, a crime—that would discredit someone else.

  It wasn’t likely. I just couldn’t see anything compelling enough in Jenifer’s life to cause it to be snuffed out like that.

  I had gotten through a few pages of the register before talking to Curtis; there was just one more block to go, and then I’d be finished. I didn’t want to go home. Amy was probably still downtown, and Renee would be raging around looking for prey to vent her spleen on. I drove past Rinconada on the way home, wishing I could swim, but the lap-swimming hours are curtailed on summer afternoons, and it was already too late. I could hear the kids yelling and splashing when I went by.

  I wanted to get back to writing. I wanted to get on with the article for Smithsonian. I wanted to be free of sudden death and crime forever, though I’d settle for a few placid years.

  Renee popped out of the house as soon as I drove up. “Where have you been?” She seemed more than usually agitated.

  “Around.” I got out of the. bus, pushing past her.

  “I need to call home. Why don’t you have a phone, anyway? What are you trying to hide?”

  “I’m trying to avoid expense,” I said, remembering my vow to be civil, if possible. “There are pay phones downtown, Renee.”

  “Impossible. Too much noise. You used a phone to call me. Where is it?”

  She’d been through the living room, that was certain. The Hide-a-bed was still stretched out like a sleeping monster. My desk was disordered, the stacks of different projects askew on its scarred surface. The doors to the built-in bookcases next to the fireplace were swinging, and a couple of books had fallen to the floor.

  Renee pushed in behind me. I turned and looked at her, and she took a step back.

  “I—thought you must have a phone,” she stammered, glancing at the disorder. Then she drew herself up. “I looked everywhere for it, and then Amy finally told me on her way out to goodness knows where that you didn’t have one. Don’t worry, I’ll straighten your little place.”