Murder in a Nice Neighborhood

by Lora Roberts

  She was right, but I knew I couldn’t write with such an unsettled churning going on inside me. At least the cabinets were clean. I took three bags of trash out to the garbage cans, and went to potter around in the greenhouse. If we were going to plant seeds from the rose hips the next day, we would need to soak them overnight. I found some plastic cups and used a marker to write on them, according to the labels on the hips, before I filled them with water.

  The flesh of the hips was gooshy around the knobby seeds; I broke them open one at a time, gently, and emptied the seeds of each into its cup. If the seeds floated, they were no good.

  A person could spend a good deal of time in garden work and never get tired of it. I thought about my vegetable plot, how I needed to go and harvest the rest of the beets, check the brussels sprouts and broccoli seedlings, clean up and mulch for the coming winter rains. Such thoughts were soothing; they implied that I would be free to garden, that the planet would continue without blowing up, that global warming would not impact the climates, and that Gaia would prevail over the dark forces lined up against her. I pictured the world goddess overthrowing industrialism as I worked though the rose hips. The greenhouse smelled of leaf mold and potting soil. It was cold, with occasional scurries of wind blowing through the broken pane in the roof, riffling the old paper seed packets that littered the workbench. Faintly from the tall trees at the back of Claudia’s property came the tapping of branches against each other, or a woodpecker decimating the bug population.

  The sun went behind a cloud. It was getting late; soon Drake would show up with his pizza. Stretching, I walked out of the greenhouse, shutting the door so the wind wouldn’t turn over my plastic cups and mix all the seeds up.

  The tapping was louder, oddly rhythmical for a bird. Something about it caught my attention, and I realized that it wasn’t a woodpecker. It was a typewriter, being used by someone unaccustomed to it. The sound could have come from another writer on the block behind Claudia’s, but it was too immediate for that, and too recognizable, somehow, but skewed, as your own face is in a photograph. After all, I’m probably the last writer in the Silicon Valley to use a typewriter. And that was mine I heard, clacking away, the sound familiar but the rhythm ragged. Coming from my bus, parked behind Claudia’s garage.

  I thought about going for help, but if I did, the intruder might get away before I could return. The anger that had alternated with fright for the past few days rushed to the surface, a geyser ready to erupt. It was so unfair that I, who had little more than my vehicle and typewriter, should have those things be as threatened as was my freedom to use them.

  And more than anything, I had to know who was doing this. I had to know if it was Tony. Somehow it was like him to invade my space, try to take over the means of livelihood I’d found.

  The fence behind the garage that marked the boundary of Claudia’s yard was missing a board here and there; it would have been no big task to get into the bus without coming up the driveway. If this was the same person who’d hid those mysterious seeds in my little fridge, he must have known how noisy it was to crunch along that gravel, right past the house windows.

  I knew how noisy it was, too. I crept around the other side of the garage, dodging as best I could the blackberry brambles that shrouded it. They made good cover, though. I crouched behind them, snagging my old sweater badly, and looked around the corner.

  I was too low to see through the windows. The side door was closed, but the cardboard that had blocked off the broken window now hung down from it, dangling remnants of duct tape. The clacking of typewriter keys sounded louder. It was definitely coming from inside the bus.

  Straightening a little, I tried to see inside, but the slowly gathering darkness made the interior so shadowy and vague that I couldn’t tell if what I saw was a seat back or a person. Then the typing stopped, followed by the ratcheting sound of paper being pulled out of the platen, accompanied by a muffled curse.

  So my phantom writer was having trouble. I would have been sympathetic under other circumstances.

  The platen rolled again, and the typing started up again. It’s always harder to see into a car than to see out of it; inside the bus it was probably still pretty light, and black print on a white page has its own luminescence. I would have to get right up to the window to see who it was in there, sweating over composition. Other people’s cars were broken into so their radios could be stolen; mine was broken into by someone who really needed to write. I tried to tell myself it was highly entertaining, but the hair had already lifted on the back of my neck.

  I looked around for a handy weapon, but assault rifles don’t grow on blackberry bushes, although reading the newspaper sometimes you might think differently. All I had was the pocket knife I had just been using to split rose hips with.

  Holding it opened to the biggest blade, I crept closer to the bus, debating whether to go around to the fence side, where the person couldn’t easily get at me if I were discovered, but where I would be trapped if guns were the order of the day, or just to peer in through the windshield and hope to be able to see enough.

  In the end, that was the simplest thing to do, so I did it. The interior of the bus looked so much darker than the overcast dusk that spread around me. At the center of that darkness, hovering over my typewriter on the pull-up table, was something even blacker, a huge shape that I couldn’t relate to anyone I knew, not even Tony. Then the typing stopped again, and a hand, a pale glimmer, came out of the blackness to rip the paper from the platen. It’s not the best thing for a typewriter, but I didn’t even wince.

  “Damn it.” The words came out strangely muffled. Then the pale hands moved up and I thought, Whatever it is, it’s going to tear its hair in frustration. There was upheaval, and suddenly a face emerged from the darkness as an oval whiteness. The eyes were looking straight at me.

  I ducked, and spent a moment dithering about my escape route—around to the side and through the space in the fence where two boards were gone? That was the way the intruder had come, I was sure. I didn’t know if I wanted to risk that, and it left Claudia unprotected until I could race around the block and get to the phone.

  On the other hand, I sure wasn’t going past the door of the bus. I could hear it opening, so I started back the way I’d come, through the blackberries to the garage, still clutching my open knife in my hand.

  “Wait!”

  The voice stopped me cold. It wasn’t Tony’s. It was a woman’s.

  I turned, astounded, and nearly screamed. Pursuing me was a grotesque black creature with a human head. At least, that’s how it looked for the two seconds it took me to recognize what it was. Certainly it was the last person I would have expected to see dressed up in a gorilla suit.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I stood there, gaping at her, while she closed the distance between us with a couple of long strides. The running shoes she wore didn’t really go with the gorilla outfit.

  “What are you doing with that knife?” She sounded accusing, as though I was the one acting weird. I glanced stupidly down at my hand, and she reached out and plucked the knife away from me, smiling sweetly. Then she gestured with it toward the door of the bus. “Come on.”

  “Why? Where?” I backed away a little, and her smile vanished.

  “Stop it,” Delores Mitchell said. “I don’t want to have to hit you on the head again.” She pointed with the knife once more, and I debated just running away, escaping this lunatic. “Don’t try to run,” she said, when I backed farther away. “I have a gun, too, and I don’t mind using it to kill you and that ugly old woman.”

  The threat to Claudia stopped me, and Delores put her head to one side, the smile returning. “So you don’t want to be shot? I don’t blame you.” She shuddered. “It needn’t come to that. Get into that wretched vehicle, and we’ll talk.”

  I wasn’t really frightened of her—after all, though she was taller than me and probably as aerobically toned as possible, I was pretty sc
rappy myself. She tossed the knife into the air and caught it as it flashed down in the feeble light—by the blade. “I know how to throw knives,” she said in her light, somewhat prissy voice. “If you run, I’ll spit you like a chicken.”

  I got into the bus. It seemed like the thing to do. And I was extremely curious, especially when I saw the head of the gorilla costume on the bench seat.

  Delores stood at the side of the bus, blocking the open doorway. She should have looked ridiculous, her body smothered in the gorilla suit, her head and hands free. Her hands, I noticed, were encased in surgical gloves. She didn’t look that funny to me.

  Chapter 32

  I sat on the bench seat of the bus, feeling totally confused. The surgical gloves, the gorilla costume—“Just what’s going on, Delores?”

  “I don’t understand why they haven’t arrested you yet.” She sounded angry. “You’re the obvious suspect in every case.”

  “Just lucky, I guess.” I stared at her curiously. Even without the prim suits and the fancy shoes, Delores still looked incredibly clean-cut. “Are you going to a costume party somewhere, is that it? And you needed to dash off a sonnet or something on the way so you just broke into my bus to use the typewriter—”

  “You don’t have a clue,” she said impatiently. “I should have stuck to my original plan, but—” She gazed into space for a moment. Her usually sleek hair was disheveled by the gorilla head; still wearing those surgical gloves, she began to pat and smooth it. “This is better,” she decided at last. “Since you’re here, you can type the note.”

  “What note?” I used the soothing voice recommended when speaking to those who have lost touch with reality. The incongruity of her costume didn’t diminish Delores’ perkiness a jot. The effect should have been amusing, but it was exceedingly creepy instead. She closed my knife with a decisive click, but she didn’t give it back. Instead she pulled a gun from somewhere in her hairy gorilla flank and pointed it at me. An immediate adrenaline jolt reverberated though all my nerve endings.

  “I’m a very good shot.” Her hand was certainly steady on the gun. “Daddy always believed it was important for a woman to be able to defend herself. He taught me to throw knives and hunt and target-shoot. I’ve never shot a person yet, but it might be kind of exciting—different from the paper target, you know.”

  “I don’t imagine your dad had this sort of thing in mind,” I said, casting around for something that might improve the situation. My mind didn’t want to believe that this was happening, but my body was buying it; the words that came out of my mouth were shaky. “What will he think when you get arrested?”

  “He died last year.” Delores’s lower lip quivered. “I really miss him, but it would be selfish to want him alive when he was in such bad shape.” She sniffed. “It was for his sake, really. That’s when I found out how easy it was.”

  It took a moment before her words sank in. “You mean you—you killed your dad?”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she protested. “He was very sick. He was dying anyway.” Her face changed, looked younger. “It was just him and me for so long, after Mummy died,” she murmured, almost crooning. “He used to call me DoDo—he used to like me to wear her dresses. A man has needs, you know.” She blinked, but the febrile glitter in her eyes didn’t dissipate. “After he got sick he didn’t want DoDo anymore. He was just a sick old man. He wanted to die. They all wanted to die.” Her grip on the gun tightened. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. But it’s safe, because you’re going to die, too.”

  “I don’t—” I had difficulty getting the words past the dryness in my throat. “I don’t want to die, Delores.”

  “You have to,” she said matter-of-factly. “When you’re dead, everything will be settled.”

  “No, it won’t.” I didn’t know if trying to be logical with someone whose sanity was slipping away would work. “Another death will just raise more questions. Your dad would have known that. He wouldn’t want you to keep killing people.”

  She wasn’t really listening. “I saved all his things. This was his gun.” Her voice hardened. “And he wouldn’t have cared at all about someone like you. He wanted me to be happy.”

  “You don’t need to shoot me. If you need something typed to be happy, I’ll do it for you.” Delores, in her bulky costume, filled the side door space; I couldn’t get past her. It would be difficult to race around the table and through the passenger door before she potted me, if she meant to. I was effectively trapped. “Just tell me what you want.” I pulled the typewriter toward me. The light had grown too dim; I couldn’t see the words on the paper in the machine.

  “Your confession, of course.” Delores’s gloved fingers rubbed the gun in an absent caress. I couldn’t take my eyes off the gun; it looked similar to the one I had shot Tony with. At the time, I’d thought I’d rather die than shoot someone again. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “Put it in your own words,” Delores ordered. “On a fresh sheet of paper—how sorry you are for all the murders.”

  I gripped the smooth metal sides of the typewriter to keep my hands from shaking. “I didn’t do the murders, Delores.”

  “You had opportunity, and you’re obviously not …” She hesitated, and I thought wildly that she didn’t want to hurt my feelings—“you’re not a responsible person. You don’t have a house or anything but this junk heap.” She flicked a disparaging glance at the interior of the bus, and I saw it for a moment through her eyes—the duct tape that mended the bench seat’s upholstery, the broken window, the faded curtains.

  “Maybe,” I said, keeping a firm grip on both temper and sanity. “But I still didn’t kill anyone.”

  “How can they let you go free after all the evidence against you? Those yew seeds should have convinced them.”

  “Yew seeds?” I must have looked too interested. She waved the gun in my face. I jerked back on the bench, and then tried to look relaxed when every muscle in my body ached with fear. “You put them in my cooler?”

  “I should have taken you out then,” she said, scowling at me as if we were discussing nothing more important than me stealing her lane at the swimming pool. “Actually, I thought you might be dead, and that wouldn’t have suited me too well, because it might have gotten you off the hook. But this plan,” she concluded with satisfaction, “is bound to work. Write the note.”

  “Now?” I needed time. Somewhere back in my mind was the knowledge that Drake was coming, if I could only buy enough time. Her face was just a pale circle above the blackness of her costume. The evening was still in the deep blue stage, before absolute night.

  “You can turn on the light. That way I can be sure what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t need the light.” I felt in the cupboard below the table where I keep copy paper. I put it in the machine, moving by touch, and then stopped helplessly.

  “Just write that you murdered all of them, you’re sorry, and you’re taking this way out.” Delores rattled it off with the self-possession of the truly poised. “I tried to do it but I kept making mistakes, and everybody knows about your boring perfect typing. Typewriters are so primitive.” I could hear the disdain in her voice. “But the police could tell if the note wasn’t written on this typewriter, so I had to do it this way.”

  I hit the return lever a couple of times, stalling. “Why the gorilla outfit, anyway?”

  “It’s Halloween,” Delores said reasonably. “With the head on, nobody can tell if I’m a man or a woman—and no one I know would ever believe it’s me in this outfit.” She laughed her girlish laugh. It gave me the horrors. “When I’m through here I’ll just go back to my car and take it off. I have my real costume underneath—a very nice Tahitian sarong. I am going to a party later, as a matter of fact. With Ted,” she added.

  “That’s nice.” My fingers were icy. They didn’t feel strong enough to pound the keys.

  “Glad you think so.” Her voice roughened. “He’s said a couple of times late
ly that he couldn’t believe you would have anything to do with the deaths. That just made me so mad.”

  “It’s the truth.” I forced my hands to unclench, and tried to steady them.

  “Not after tonight.” Delores was openly gloating. “Ted’ll have to admit he was wrong. Maybe then he’ll be a little more forthcoming. Maybe when I give him the development rights to my new properties, he’ll see what a good partnership we could have.”

  “You’re going into partnership with him?” I moved my fingers onto the home row and felt the comforting cold smoothness of the keys. There was a little chip on the f key—my left index fingertip found it automatically.

  “He should have offered it months ago; I told him I was interested.” She laughed scornfully. “He thought I was just interested in him, and of course I am, but I wanted to work with him. There’s real money in development if you do it right. Especially if the land costs next to nothing.” She waved the gun again, and its shiny metal caught what little light there was. Again it commanded my gaze. It was an effort to look away. “Type,” Delores ordered.

  I typed: “Paul. Delores Mitchell is holding me at gunpoint.” As a sentence, it lacked credibility. If he ever saw it, he wouldn’t believe it. I kept trying to find an escape somewhere, but my brain wouldn’t work at it. All it would do was embrace the cold breath of the breeze and the sharp scent of Claudia’s compost pile, along with the sophisticated perfume smell that was coming from Delores and the way the crows flew around the black treetops like upward-blowing leaves, cawing out their evening roost song. These would be my last sights, sounds, smells. Like Pigpen, like Vivien, I would be dead, and the world would continue on without me.

  “Why?” I turned to look at the dark shape of her. “Why did I kill them?”