Murder in a Nice Neighborhood

by Lora Roberts

  He turned and looked at me, and then I knew. “Someone else is dead, is that it?”

  “That’s it.” He was still looking at me. “Alonso, the guy who was Murphy’s good buddy. Somebody found him under a bush this morning, close to the same place. He was stiff already.”

  I thought of Pigpen’s open eyes, the congealed blood beneath his head, and felt sick. Fighting it, I rolled down the car window and took some deep breaths. “Was he—murdered?” My voice didn’t sound right.

  Drake shrugged. “We don’t know yet. It might have been exposure—it was cold last night. The autopsy results haven’t come back yet.” He hesitated. “There were certain signs that contraindicate a natural death.”

  I barely heard this police-speak. “Alonso.” I shook my head, wondering. “I saw him yesterday, you know.”

  Drake pounced on that. “You did? When? Where?”

  “Hey, it was no big deal.” I looked at my hands as if they belonged to a stranger. They were shaking. “It was mid-afternoon—maybe three, three-thirty. I was trimming the ivy in Claudia’s front yard. Alonso came down the street, and he was acting funny—furtive, sort of. He was collecting those little sample boxes of cereal off people’s front porches—had a whole bag full.” I swallowed. “He had evidently been to Goodwill recently, just like Pigpen. Gave me the willies.”

  Drake made me go over the whole incident, from beginning to end, with a complete description of what Alonso had been wearing. I was numb now, waiting to be arrested. It was suspicious, I could see, that I would be one of the last people to see each of these men before they died.

  What I didn’t understand was why. Why should I be among the final visions they’d have in this mortal plane? Was there some kind of frame-up happening on a cosmic level? Or did I just have to lay eyes on a bum for him to be marked for death?

  I took some more deep breaths. Drake was talking again. I’d missed something.

  “—to make a statement,” he said. His voice was coming from far away. It was hard to hear him over the rushing sound in my ears. “You must see—Liz! Are you all right?”

  My head was down between my knees. After a moment I realized that the heavy weight on the back of it was Drake’s hand, pushing me down. “Breathe deep,” he instructed.

  “I have been.” My knees probably heard me clearly, but no one else could have. “Let me up.”

  Finally he took his hand away. I came up slowly. Fainting isn’t at all what you might think from reading books. My heart was racing in a feeble sort of way, and I felt distinctly unwell.

  “You gonna toss your cookies?”

  “Cake,” I muttered. “No, I’m not.”

  He peered at me closely. “I was going to ask you to identify him.”

  Cold moisture sprang into being on my forehead. I gulped more air. “If it’s necessary.” I tried to keep my voice even.

  Drake looked at me, but didn’t answer right away. He pulled the shoulder harness across me and buckled it in before starting the car. “You’re really shook by all this, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m shook.” I gripped my hands together, for warmth as well as to conceal their trembling. “These guys are not real assets to the world, but all the same—” I rolled the window down more. “Seems all I have to do is see them, and they keel over. It’s not me, you know. I’m not murdering them, but—”

  “But you wonder if someone is killing off people to make it look like you’re doing it.” He turned the heater on, to counteract all my fresh air, I guess. “That could be it. Seems kind of convoluted, though, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a lot of trouble to go to.” Outside the car window, streets of quiet houses went past, their gardens bright with chrysanthemums and asters. A pomegranate tree waved red globes against the sky. It was so peaceful. I felt that I stained the cleanness of the October day, that a black film wrapped me and those I touched.

  “Is Claudia safe?” I had to ask. “Is Bridget?”

  “I don’t know.” Drake didn’t like to make that admission. “If we had unlimited staff, I could assign someone to watch them all the time. As it is—” he shrugged.

  “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “What gave you that idea?” He glanced at me. “I told you, we’re just going down to make your statement. After that you’re free to go.”

  “Why aren’t you arresting me?” It came out very placidly, as if I was asking about some social matter. Drake looked uncomfortable.

  “Because I don’t think you did it.” He turned into the parking garage beneath City Hall. “Don’t tell anyone I said that, but I don’t see you committing these crimes. For one thing, they have no subtlety.”

  “Is that so?” I felt absurdly pleased. “Thanks, I think.”

  “But my superiors might not agree, so why don’t you try to keep a low profile?” He glared at me when he punched the elevator button. “I don’t want to have to arrest you, although jail might be safer.”

  “Safer for me, or safer for my friends?” I muttered it to myself, but he heard me.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” The elevator came, and we climbed in, standing silently facing the doors while we waited for enlightenment to come.

  Chapter 16

  Detective Morales greeted me like an old friend. He’d arranged three big cups of cappuccino from one of the downtown espresso places on his desk, as if we were having a party. Cappuccino is not as obnoxious as most other coffee drinks, but I still couldn’t manage to get any down, thinking about what was ahead.

  “Liz said she’d identify the body,” Drake told his partner. Morales looked at me, worried. “Is it necessary? There must be someone else—”

  “I don’t mind.” I grabbed a lungful of air and managed a smile.

  “She can handle it,” Drake said brusquely. “After I get a statement from her we’ll go down to the morgue.” He glanced at me. “Sorry this cuts into your writing time.”

  “What writing time?” I stirred my cappuccino, admiring the swirl of soft creams and tans it made. Vivien’s house would look nice painted those colors. “I haven’t had any writing time since Pigpen Murphy decided to die under my bus.”

  “He didn’t decide,” Morales said gently. “It was done for him. That’s what this is all about.”

  “I know.” I felt chastened, ashamed of my petulant outburst. “It isn’t fair at all—to rewrite the master plan of someone’s life like this. These guys may have looked like useless bums, but that doesn’t make it okay to kill them.” I set the cappuccino down without tasting it. “Who knows? I might be the next useless bum to get taken out.”

  Drake and Morales exchanged a look, and I saw that this thought was not new to them. “Well,” Morales said heartily. “Let’s get this statement out of the way.”

  They took me through what I’d done the previous evening and that morning. I was as detailed as I could be. It was impossible to help comparing this visit to the last time I graced the police station. Then I had been frightened and angry, just like now. But then my anger had been directed toward the police. Now I was coming to see them as allies. Now I wanted to cooperate. It was immensely comforting to know that Drake believed in my innocence.

  All the same, I didn’t enjoy regurgitating my actions to them. I like my privacy. After they’d finished writing down everything I said, they went off and conferred for a while. Then Drake took me back down the elevator to his beat-up Saab.

  It took about half an hour to get to the Santa Clara County morgue in San Jose. We enlivened the journey with a heated argument over the relative merits of the Romantic poets and the Victorians. I was firmly in Browning’s camp; Drake threw his weight behind Shelley. Ordinarily poetry doesn’t do much for me, but it was useful as a distancing mechanism. When we’d exhausted the poets, we moved into fiction. I’m Victorian there, too. Drake tried to defend Norman Mailer, but it was an impossible task.

  The morgue was located near Valley Medical in San Jose. I
had nerved myself so heavily for the ordeal that its commonplace nature surprised me. First they showed me the clothes, and I agreed that they were the ones I’d seen Alonso in the day before. Then they took me into a room like an enormous walk-in refrigerator, lined with big drawer-fronts. Drake put his arm around me; I thought about shrugging it off, but it felt too warm and human across my back, his hand cupped absently around the ball of my shoulder.

  The attendant drew out one of the drawers, pulled back the government-issue sheet that covered Alonso. He didn’t look anything like the funeral-parlor variety of dead person. His hair was lank and matted, his skin waxy. There was stubble covering his jaw. His eyes, mercifully, were closed.

  “That’s him,” I said. Through the strong smell of Lysol that blanketed the room, there was a hint of corruption. As soon as I noticed it, I began feeling nauseous. It wasn’t Alonso so much as the thought of what lay behind those other drawers.

  Drake led me out of the room, taking his arm away when we crossed the threshold. I was sorry, and then was angry with myself for being sorry. No matter how matey we became over these murders, nothing could change my true relationship with the police: they were in charge of moving me along; I would forever resist being moved. I couldn’t afford to lose sight of that.

  “Do you want some lunch?” We stood on the sidewalk, where I gratefully breathed in the bus exhaust and faint urine scent of your typical street in front of an urban public office.

  “No.” I swallowed, looking at Drake incredulously. “Do you?”

  “I can always eat,” he mumbled, leading the way to his car. “But never mind.”

  During the ride back to Palo Alto I was silent, and Drake forbore to reopen the discussion about writers. I was having a dichotomy attack of the worst kind, and it left me feeling paralyzed. Did I assist the police, grow to like them, understand them, and endanger my whole way of life—assuming that the murders were cleared up and my way of life was once again open to me? Or did I clam up, go my own way, and hope that I could keep the murderer from claiming another victim without dragging the police in?

  Both points of view looked hopelessly naive. I was involved, Drake and Morales were involved, in something that had its own parameters, that took its own path, regardless of our attempts to stop it. Discovering that path might be possible for the police; it was damned near impossible for me to do alone. Others might be killed; if I didn’t cooperate in the investigation, I would feel their deaths on my head.

  Drake dropped me off at the library. I went in to clear up the microfiche, and didn’t hear a word of the gentle lecture the reference librarian gave me. I drove to Claudia’s and began bundling up the ivy I’d clipped the day before. There was great satisfaction to be found in subduing something.

  Chapter 17

  “We sat in the waiting room for hours, and then the doctor sent us over to radiology.” Bridget spoke in a low voice, her eyes fixed worriedly on Claudia.

  “What’s the word?” I watched Claudia too. She was in better shape than Alonso, at least, but she was pale and obviously in pain.

  “It’s not broken.” Claudia tried to scowl, but it wasn’t up to her usual standard. “He strapped it up and told me to stay off it.” She shook her head. “These pain pills make me groggy as hell. I’ve got to lie down.”

  Bridget and I helped her up the stairs. “Sorry about the roses. Her voice was raspy with fatigue. “We’ll get to them tomorrow, okay?”

  “Fine with me.” I put a glass of water on her bedside table and followed Bridget back to the kitchen.

  “What’s the matter?” She set the kettle on the stove and came over to lay one palm against my forehead in a maternal gesture. “Are you coming down with something? You don’t look much better than Claudia.”

  “They found another dead person. Pigpen’s friend, Alonso.”

  She sat down limply at the table. “Oh, no! Surely they don’t think—”

  “Evidently not. But they wanted me to make a statement and then I had to identify the body.”

  “Oh, Liz.” Bridget reached toward me. “That must have been hard.”

  For just a moment, since she wanted to, I let her mother me. A hug, a pat on the shoulder—I felt my control slipping and pulled away. “It wasn’t too bad,” I muttered. “Where’s the baby?”

  “She went to sleep in her car seat and I just left her there while I helped Claudia. I’d better get her.”

  We sat in the kitchen, Moira making a centerpiece again, and talked the latest development over. Bridget offered to take my class at the Senior Center to spare me having to fool with it, but I wanted the distraction. That class didn’t need to meet twice a week, since the ladies didn’t usually do that much work. But they enjoyed any opportunity to get together and gossip under the heading of working on their writing.

  “Well,” said Bridget, gathering up her baby and her things, “just be careful, Liz. If whoever is murdering these people doesn’t know where you’ve living right now, so much the better.”

  That sounded like sense to me. I felt like a stray dog that’s so far eluded the dogcatcher and the gas chamber. Paranoia is rampant on the streets anyway, but there usually isn’t such a good reason for it.

  I could hear Claudia snoring from the foot of the stairs. When I checked on her, she was deep into the kind of sleep you get when you’ve taken medication, her mouth wide open, her body looking utterly relaxed. She would be out for hours yet.

  Leaving the bus behind the garage, I drove her car. The afternoon wasn’t as nice as the morning had been. There was a cold wind, strengthening every minute, and the sky was clouding over.

  Vivien’s house was on the way, so I swung by to see if I could give her a lift. She doesn’t like trying to get in and out of my bus, but I figured Claudia’s car wouldn’t pose much of a problem. She was already heading down the sidewalk, leaning heavily on her footed cane.

  She climbed into the car, sighing with relief. Vivien believes in keeping active, but it can be painful for someone so crippled with arthritis. “Is this a new car, Liz? It’s very nice.” Vivien hadn’t bought a car in the past twenty-five years; though she no longer drove, she still had her 1966 Ford Fairlane in her garage. It was probably worth some money.

  “A friend’s car I’m borrowing.” I let it go at that. No point in alarming Vivien with the tribulations of the last two days.

  Carlotta came out while Vivien was tucking her skirt under her. I shut the door and waved at Carlotta, who stared short-sightedly back. It took her a moment to recognize me without my bus, I guess. Finally she waved, too, heading for her own car.

  “There’s Carlotta,” I said unnecessarily as I started up the Honda.

  “I see her.” Vivien bit off the words.

  “You two at outs?” I glanced sideways at her, pausing at the stop sign.

  Vivien sighed. “Not really. This stupid thing is all her fault, anyway. It’s none of her business whether I sell my house or not, but she’s acting like I’m single-handedly keeping her from moving into that retirement place.” She snorted. “Let her sell her house any old time. It doesn’t have to be to Ted Ramsey. I’m not about to sacrifice my home so she can live it up in one of those places.”

  “That sounds reasonable.” I drove around the corner, past a couple of guys survey.

  Vivien craned her neck, making little tsking noises. “Dear me, so soon?”

  “What’s soon?” There was a gaggle of children crossing the street, shepherded by two harried young women. I waited at the stop sign while they took their time getting to the other side. “Are they tearing something down back there?”

  Vivien was still looking over her shoulder. “They probably will, I guess. That’s Eunice’s house, you know. Not a week since she died, and already the surveyors are there. I always liked her little house, but people don’t seem to want little old houses anymore. They tear them down without thinking twice.” She pulled a handkerchief out of her worn patent-leather handbag. “E
unice was such a nice person. She always said there’d be no one to mourn when she passed on, her having no children. I’ve thought of that so often since her death. I’ve no children living either.”

  “Well, you’re mourning her,” I pointed out.

  “Of course.” She sniffed into her hanky. “No one ever had a nicer back-fence neighbor. Our backyards intersect, you know. And Carlotta’s house is like the missing puzzle piece. I bet Ted Ramsey called those surveyors out to Eunice’s. He’s probably got a—what do you call it?—an option on her place.” She shook her head. “He’s such a nice boy. But he just doesn’t understand how I feel about my house.”

  I murmured an assent, zipping into a parking place that miraculously opened up in front of the Senior Center. I could see Delores Mitchell in my rearview mirror, her BMW reflecting the weak light with a well-polished glitter. She didn’t look too pleased at losing out on the space; in fact, it wasn’t difficult to read her lips on the subject, even in the mirror.

  By the time I helped Vivien out of the car, Delores had found a place to park. She came briskly up the sidewalk, a symphony in teal and silver-gray. “Liz,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know you in a different car. Is your van in the shop? How can you get along without it?” She smiled at Vivien.

  “I always think of Liz as being like a turtle, carrying her house with her. So adventurous.”

  A line from a Janis Joplin song flashed into my head. Janis had sung about being a turtle, hiding inside a hard shell, but ended with a defiant pledge to take good care of herself, knowing the world as she did. She hadn’t really managed it, though. I hoped I could do a better job.

  Delores was all graciousness as she patted Vivien’s shoulder. “So nice to see you, Mrs. Greely. When are the painters coming?”

  Vivien beamed. “Soon, Delores. It’s like a dream come true, to have that money on hand.” Her eyes clouded over. “Did you know they’re already surveying at Eunice’s house? Do you think it’s that nice Ted Ramsey’s idea?”