by Janet Dawson
On the surface it did look like a murder-suicide. Did Claude kill Martha and then turn the gun on himself? Or did Martha kill Claude, then take her own life? And why the hell hadn’t one of them left a note detailing all the whys and wherefores?
I looked up at Wilcoxin. “No reason?”
He shook his head, his voice edged with frustration. “Out of the god damn blue. The cops talked to family, friends, business associates, neighbors, anyone, anywhere, who might have known or met the Terrells. There’s no apparent reason why Claude would kill Martha, then kill himself. Or vice versa. They were both in excellent health. They had no money problems. From all reports they were a happy, loving couple.”
Happy, loving couples don’t usually blow each other’s brains out. So maybe the Terrells weren’t as happy and loving as everyone thought. Or maybe something else was going on here.
“I’d like to take a look at the house.”
Wilcoxin pulled open a desk drawer, fished out a brass key on a metal ring, and handed it to me. “The house is vacant, can’t be sold until the estate is sorted out.”
I fingered the cardboard tag with the Terrells’ name and address printed in black ink. “Who else has keys?”
“All four heirs.”
That didn’t sound like a good idea to me. He noticed my raised eyebrows. “The Terrells gave each of their children keys when they bought the house.”
“The heirs have access to the property?”
“After the police took down the crime-scene tape, the lawyers let them remove personal belongings—family photos, clothing, things like that.”
“What about everything else, like jewelry, and Martha’s silver? I assume they’re not still at the house.”
“The lawyers put all the rest, except the furniture, in storage. It’ll stay there until the lawyers figure out who gets what. The wills are more complicated, but that’s the attorneys’ battle. My battle . . . My concern is who gets the money from the insurance policies.”
“Does the housecleaner still have a key?”
Wilcoxin shook his head. “That’s hers.”
“Any of the neighbors have keys?”
“Not to my knowledge,” he said. “I’ll give you the code for the alarm system.”
I left with Wilcoxin’s headache. I spent the rest of that Friday afternoon in my Oakland office, examining the Terrell file and making some notes of my own.
Saturday morning I drove to Alameda. The Terrells had lived at the end of a wide, tree-lined street in a part of town known as the Gold Coast, full of solid old homes. I’d grown up in a Victorian house nearby. The street, like others in this section, deadended at the lagoon which had once been the shore of San Francisco Bay until the late 1950s, when developers had filled in a portion of the bay to create the area called South Shore.
The Terrells’ house was a two-story stucco that looked as though it dated to the nineteen thirties. I parked in the double driveway and let myself in the front door. After deactivating the security system, I stood in the entry way for a moment, getting my bearings, waiting for . . . What? Vibrations, maybe, or feelings. I’ve felt it at other crime scenes. I felt it here.
The investigators had long since located and removed any physical evidence. The gore had been scrubbed away. Drapes covered the windows and there was dust on the nearby stair rail. The house had that air of disuse a place gets when there’s no one home for a long time. It had been closed up since the Terrells’ deaths, while the heirs and their lawyers duked it out over who got what.
In the living room to my left, a sofa faced an empty fireplace. Heavy chairs surrounded a long table in the dining room. A cabinet with empty glass shelves stood against the wall.
Upstairs I found a large master suite with a bathroom, and three smaller bedrooms sharing another bathroom. Closets, drawers and cupboards were empty, stripped bare. There wasn’t much left in the Terrell house, just furniture and the house itself, awaiting disposition.
I went back downstairs. A small room off the dining room had served as Claude’s office. Behind this, separated from the kitchen by a counter, was a family room. It had once been furnished, according to the photographs in the file, with a sofa, several reclining chairs, a large-screen TV, and other entertainment appliances. Now all the electronic toys were gone.
In front of me, a sliding glass door led outside to a covered patio and a fenced back yard that sloped down to the lagoon. The police report indicated the door had been open a few inches the day the Terrells died.
I walked into the kitchen, noting the location of sink, stove, refrigerator, and pantry. I saw a laundry room, where a washer and dryer crouched in semi-darkness.
The breakfast nook was at the back of the kitchen, an alcove containing a round table and four chairs. Between the breakfast nook and the patio door was a bare space where the crime scene photos showed a tall ficus in a terra cotta pot. The floor tile was slightly discolored where the plant had stood.
I set my purse on the counter between the kitchen and family room and dug out a tape measure and a rough sketch I’d drawn. The police report indicated the bodies of Claude and Martha Terrell were found lying diagonally in the middle of the kitchen, with their feet toward the plant. Claude lay on his left side, right arm resting on his hip. Martha lay on her back, to Claude’s right. The autopsy report said there had been a large bruise on the back of Martha’s head. Had she gotten it when she fell? But her head wasn’t near a counter.
I measured distances, noting the information on my sketch. Then I lay down in the space where the Terrells had died, arranging my body in an approximation of the position of Claude’s body. I gazed at my own right hand, imagining my fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun. Then I looked down the length of my legs, placing the gun on the floor beyond my feet, thinking that if either Claude or Martha had fired the weapon, it seemed to me the gun would have fallen near their bodies. So how did the gun wind up under the table in the breakfast nook, which was near the entrance to the laundry room?
I stared at the sliding glass door that had been open when the housecleaner found the bodies. Maybe that initial theory of an intruder wasn’t that far off the mark. Murder-suicide didn’t feel right, particularly without a note. Of course, suicides don’t always leave notes that lay out their reasons in neat and tidy prose.
My hunch was murder. If I was right, someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the Terrells’ deaths look like murder-suicide. So why wasn’t there a note, to scotch all my reasonable doubt? What if the killer hadn’t finished setting up the scene? What if the housecleaner’s arrival had interrupted the killer? How had Martha gotten that bruise on the back of her head?
I got to my feet, set the tape measure on the sketch, then walked to the laundry room, where another door led outside. It had revealed no sign of forced entry or fingerprints the day the Terrells had died. I glanced out the small glass window and saw a concrete-covered side yard, hidden from the street by a gate at the front of the house. Arrayed against the fence were garbage cans and recycling bins.
Just then I heard voices. Someone had entered the house. A man and two women walked into the kitchen. “Who are you?” the man demanded. “What are you doing here?”
I looked him over. His petulant expression was his own. His curly dark hair and brown eyes were mirrored in the young woman on his right. In fact, they looked so similar they might have been twins. Claude’s adult children, Eric and Erin Terrell, I guessed, and the second woman was Eric’s wife, Lisa.
“Jeri Howard,” I said, offering my hand. “I work for the insurance company.”
Eric Terrell ignored my hand and didn’t bother introducing his two companions. “So when is the insurance company going to quit stalling and pay the insurance money?”
I shrugged. “You’ll have to discuss that with Mr. Wilcoxin.”
“We have discussed it with him, and the lawyers.” Erin looked exasperated as she tossed her brunette curls. “Discussed it ad nauseum.�
��
“Then you know there’s a question about who died first.”
Eric snorted in derision. “That’s just a stall. The insurance company wants to hang onto the money.”
“There’s no question in my mind who died first,” Erin declared. “That bitch killed my father, then killed herself.”
“Really? Why would she do that?”
“It’s no secret that my father was planning to divorce her,” Erin said.
That was news to me. News to Wilcoxin, too. He’d described the Terrells as a “happy, loving couple.” I hadn’t seen any mention of a pending breakup in the police report, either. That’s the kind of question a cop would—or should—ask.
“Daddy wanted out of the marriage,” Erin continued. “Martha didn’t want to lose all of Daddy’s money—they had a prenup, of course—so she killed him. Then she turned the gun on herself. She would have saved us all a lot of trouble if she’d left a note.”
“I thought Mrs. Terrell had her own money,” I said.
Eric’s contemptuous expression let me know exactly what he thought of that. His sister shook her head. “Martha had some money. Certainly not much compared to my father’s net worth.”
“It seems I was misled about Mrs. Terrell’s net worth,” I said. “Why did your father want out of the marriage?”
Erin shrugged. “I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“He confided in you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then how did you know they were having problems? And that your father wanted a divorce?”
Erin made a little face. “Well, my brother . . .”
“My father confided in me,” Eric said sharply. “Look, Ms. . . . Whatever your name is . . . I don’t know what business this is of yours.”
“My name is Jeri Howard, Mr. Terrell. I work for the insurance company. Anything regarding the company’s investigation into your parents’ deaths is my business.”
“She wasn’t my parent.” Erin’s voice turned snippy. “My mother is very much alive, thank you.”
Lisa had been watching me. She looked as though she’d like to change the subject, so she did. “You haven’t said what you’re doing here, Ms. Howard. I thought the insurance investigation was done.”
Two could play that game. “Mr. Wilcoxin asked me to take a look at the scene. Why are the three of you here? I understood the heirs had already removed personal items, and all valuables are in storage.”
Eric scowled at me, but said nothing as Lisa reached for his arm. Erin said, “I’m looking for something that belonged to my father. Just a little trinket. Not important to anyone else but me. Or my brother. It wasn’t in my father’s things that we took earlier, so we thought we’d come over and see if we could find it.”
I’d already looked through the rest of the house. I knew how empty it was. But I’d play along—for the time being.
“Have a look around. I’ll finish up in here.” Exasperated looks passed between Erin and Eric. Lisa, however, was staring at the counter, at the tape measure and the sketch I’d drawn.
They went upstairs. I opened the sliding glass door and stepped out onto the patio. A redwood fence, about six feet high, separated the Terrells’ property from the house behind it. To my left a tall privet hedge hid the house next-door. On my right the backyard sloped gently down to the lagoon, where several ducks paddled on the water. Across the lagoon houses of more recent vintage were grouped around a cul-de-sac. Several homes had docks, some with boats.
I walked toward the lagoon, where a little rocky beach provided a landing, surrounded by overgrown bushes. Now I could see the house across the street from the Terrells’ place, a big two-story Victorian. Any one of the upstairs front windows would have provided an excellent view of the Terrells’ house and yard, but the police report said none of the neighbors had been home when the Terrells died.
When I returned to the house, the surviving Terrells were ready to leave. I set the alarm on my way out. Eric drove a boxy silver SUV, new and expensive, with a license-plate holder from an Oakland dealership. He’d parked to the left of my Toyota, so close it was as though he was marking territory by taking up as much of the driveway as possible. He must be one of those irritating people who parked his car straddling two spaces in parking lots, so that his car wouldn’t get hit. I squeezed into the gap between the vehicles. When I opened my car door, it brushed against his.
“Watch it,” Eric said sharply. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to repair the finish on one of these?”
I didn’t say anything. It’s childish, I know, but I found myself fighting down the urge to key his car. It would have been enormously satisfying to scratch that expensive silver finish. But I didn’t.
“That’s their version,” Pamela Allen said that evening when I told her what Eric and Erin Terrell had said about their father’s plans to divorce Pamela’s mother. “Mom and Claude were happy, as far as I know.”
We were in the living room of Pamela’s house in Hayward. Her husband Ralph and their young daughter were outside, washing the family car.
“Would your mother have confided in you?” I asked.
“I don’t think she would have kept something like that to herself. On the other hand, she may not have wanted to burden me with her troubles. I have enough of my own right now.” Pamela glanced out at her husband. Did her troubles have something to do with her own marriage?
“Whether they were having problems or not,” she continued, “I can’t imagine Mom killing Claude—or anyone, for that matter. My brother and I were devastated by this. Our father wasn’t around after he and Mom split up. So she was all we had.”
“What about the possibility that Claude killed your mother, then himself?”
She shook her head. “I just can’t see it. I suppose it’s possible, but why? None of this makes any sense.”
“How did you get on with Claude’s children?”
“We weren’t close,” she said. “We tolerated each other for our parents’ sake. Erin and I don’t have much in common. Eric’s a pompous ass. His wife’s all right. I haven’t seen them since shortly after the funeral. Neither Eric nor Erin wanted their father to remarry. They never accepted my mother.”
“This insurance policy leaves you and your brother a lot of money.”
“I know. And we could use it. Six months ago my husband got downsized. My brother’s between jobs. So yes, things are tight right now. We’re living on my salary as a teacher and our savings. That insurance money, and what Mom left us in her will, would really come in handy. But neither Colin nor I had anything to do with Mom’s death.”
“What about Claude’s kids?”
She shrugged. “As far as I know they had good relations with their father. I don’t think either of them have any financial problems.”
Whether any of the heirs had any financial problems was something I intended to find out. I started a background check on both sets of offspring. Later that day I went back to the neighborhood where Claude and Martha Terrell had lived. The big Victorian across the street, with a view of the Terrells’ yard from its upstairs windows, was owned by the Brandons, who both worked. They hadn’t been home the day of the deaths, and their two teenaged daughters had been in school. I got similar stories at other houses. The only people who were in the neighborhood that day were the housecleaner who had discovered the bodies and the gardener who had called the police.
I met Estrellita Mejia the next day at her Oakland home, as she returned from cleaning other people’s houses. She sat down in her living room recliner and flipped up the foot rest. “When you called earlier, I didn’t want to talk with you. But I decided I should.”
“Why didn’t you want to talk?” I asked. “Are you afraid of something? Or someone?”
“It’s not that. What happened to the Terrells was awful. It was horrible.” She shuddered. “Finding them like that. I’d like to help. But I wonder if I’m breaking a confidence to talk ab
out them, even under these circumstances.”
That sparked my interest. I wondered what Mrs. Mejia might have overheard in the Terrell household that fell into the category of confidences.
“I know this is difficult for you. But I need some answers. What time did you get there that afternoon?”
“About one o’clock that day. I went there every Friday, though usually later in the afternoon. One of my regulars had canceled that morning, so I was early. I walked to the back of the house, heading for the laundry room, where the cleaning supplies are kept.”
“Before you saw the bodies, did you see anything out of the ordinary?”
“The sliding door was open.”
“Did you see anything on the floor between the end of the counter and the plant?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see the gun. Believe me, I would have noticed a gun.”
“Then what?”
“I came around the end of the counter. From the corner of my eye I saw something on the floor in front of the sink. I looked down—” She grimaced. “I saw two people lying there, covered in blood. I didn’t even realize who it was. I just saw all that blood.”
“What did you do then?”
“I backed away. I had my hands up, like this.” She held her hands up as though warding off a blow. “I backed into the plant. It scared me. It was as tall as me. When I felt the leaves brush against the back of my head and my face, I screamed. I thought someone had grabbed me from behind. I panicked. My foot kicked something. I thought it was the pot. But it must have been the gun. I looked down and saw something moving across the floor toward the table. I didn’t stick around to see what it was.”
That explained how the murder weapon wound up in the breakfast nook.
“I ran out the front door,” Mrs. Mejia continued. “The gardener was next door. He called the police. Later I gave my statement. Then I came home.”
“How long had you worked for the Terrells?” I asked.
