Murder Among Friends

by Karen Ranney

  Why was I being treated like a child in my own house? And why hadn't I rebelled? Because I hadn't wanted to do so in front of Talbot. What was my excuse for all the other times?

  “The acetylene tanks exploded. I understand he welded?”

  I realized it was a question and nodded, thinking of Paul’s stained glass art.

  Frank must have been a good insurance adjuster, because he'd been right in his assessment about the explosion.

  Talbot ate the cake with barely concealed relish. Once or twice, I thought I heard him humming. Did he have a wife to cook for him? I glanced at his left hand. Nothing there, but that didn't mean anything.

  Tom didn't wear his ring, either. He said it was because he'd lost weight.

  Talbot and I had never before sat together in such peaceful silence. It was a little creepy.

  “Were you able to reach his next of kin? Who is his next of kin?” The questions popped out of my mouth before I was conscious of thinking them.

  With his fork halfway to his mouth, he stopped and studied me.

  “Why?”

  “None of his family attended Evelyn’s funeral,” I said.

  Talbot went blank. I was familiar with that look. It was his official face.

  "You can't tell me," I said.

  He put his fork down, and placed the empty plate on the tray.

  “I came by the hospital," he said. "After the accident. My cousin's an intern there."

  “Thank you,” I said, hoping he didn’t continue.

  He only nodded, his attention directed toward the floor. Maude kept them in perfect condition, so highly polished you could almost see your face in the wood.

  “I didn't like Paul,” I said. There, a bit of honesty in response to his kindness. “That's a horrible confession, is it? Especially since he's dead. Nobody deserves to die like that.”

  He glanced at me. “There's nothing about death that instills sainthood.”

  “Yes, but I should feel bad about his death. I don't feel anything at all.” And I didn't. The lack of emotion worried me, since it stripped me of some of my humanity.

  “Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “And the cake. It was delicious.”

  "I'll tell Maude. She’ll be pleased.”

  We walked to the door. He stood on the top step and I thought he was going to say something else. But he only smiled.

  "Thank you for coming to tell me," I said.

  He nodded and turned. I watched him as he descended the steps, following the sidewalk around to the driveway.

  I'm sure before nightfall everyone in the King Lion District would know a policeman had been parked in our driveway. Again.

  I glanced toward Evelyn's house, missing her. She was my friend and I felt, strangely, as if her death was somehow my responsibility.

  That’s when it occurred to me. Talbot hadn't answered my question.

  Was it murder?

  11

  Tom was working late, and Maude had already left for the day. When she was first hired, Tom had offered her a live-in position. The whole of the third floor was a mother-in-law suite with an attached study. She declined, saying she had a family.

  In all this time, I'd never asked about her family. The truth was, I hadn't cared. I hadn't cared about most things.

  Evelyn’s death had plucked me from my stasis. Now I was moving, but it was like treading water. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  I stood in the formal living room, a room rarely used except for those twice yearly firm parties, peering out at the street. Army's house was brightly lit, the lights glowing in the fog.

  The night was a chilly one with hints of a northern in the air. My leg ached as if the steel pins were giving me a weather forecast. But I wasn't going to take another pain pill, too conscious of developing my own addiction.

  I'd been invited, so Army would expect me. I hadn't declined. It would be rude not to show up.

  Did I really want to go to a gathering of a murder club?

  Death was an enemy. Death had robbed me, had taken my father, my brother, and my child.

  Suddenly, I remembered Evelyn's comment. "When it's time for me to die, I won't go gently. I'll go kicking and screaming with a bottle of moisturizer in one hand and my other fist ready to knock out Death himself."

  Death offended me. Murder offended me even more. To treat it like a game seemed wrong.

  I'd go to the murder club and if I was really uncomfortable I’d stay only for a few moments. I’d ask what Army had learned about the possibility of identity theft, that's all.

  I changed my clothes, donning a warm and comfortable green velour pants suit. I slipped on my New Balance sneakers with the Velcro straps, fastened my watch, then stopped in front of the mirror. I stared at myself, fluffing my hair with both hands. I squirted some gel the stylist had sold me, but it didn't help. I compensated for the elfin look by donning large bronze earrings in the shape of autumn leaves. Lipstick and mascara and I was done.

  I took the precaution of taking Sally out. I stood there with my shawl wrapped around my shoulders as she stood beside me sniffing the air.

  “Would you just go on and go?”

  Sometimes she needed to be verbally urged.

  She didn't like rain and she didn't like wind. The sound of falling leaves disturbed her and ever since the fire two days ago, she had sniffed at the air every time we came outside.

  Once she was done, we walked back into the house.

  “I'm going out,” I told her.

  She shook her head vehemently from side to side, rearranging her ruff.

  “Yes, I am.”

  She looked up at me, doubt flitting through her brown eyes.

  “You’re in charge of the house.”

  She studied me and then yawned.

  I left her standing by the front door. In a moment, she'd probably go to her crate in the far corner of my sitting room or curl up beneath the kitchen table.

  I closed and locked the door, setting the alarm, and reached for the iron banister.

  The motion sensors illuminated the path in front of me as I descended the steps. From time to time, a glitter of glass appeared, but that was the only remnant from the explosion. The firemen had done a great job of washing down the streets.

  A few years ago everyone on the block had gotten together and purchased twenty street lamps reminiscent of the Victorian era. Now a series of ten foot tall iron posts painted a deep green and supporting large opaque globes stretched down both sides of the street. In the fog they looked like iridescent moons.

  Two of them had been damaged in the explosion, but someone had already replaced the broken globes. Army, no doubt, had taken ownership of the problem.

  Leaves crunched under my feet as I crossed the street. It was the only sound other than the far off baying of a coonhound. I might have been in London, or the moors of Scotland. Someplace where murder was afoot and villains hid beneath many tiered capes.

  Army opened the door mid-knock. Somehow, I had expected him to be dressed for the occasion, something in the line of Sherlock Holmes. At the very least, a smoking jacket. But he was wearing a subdued blue suit with a red patterned tie.

  “Jennifer! I was just telling everyone you were coming. Come in, come in.”

  His smile was genuine and warming for this chilly night. I kept my shawl around my shoulders as I entered the house. Instead of showing me to the living room where we'd been a few days earlier, he led me through the house.

  The screened porch overlooked a heated pool, now lit with faint blue underwater lights. Fingers of mist rose off the surface of the water and merged with the fog.

  As if to duplicate the atmosphere, the room had been left mostly in shadows. I made out a semi-circular beige leather sectional and a large round cocktail table in front of it. In strategic places small lamps had been lit but the bulbs were no brighter than twenty watts.

  Evidently The Murder Club preferred its ambiance murky.

  Six people st
ared back at me. Frank I knew, of course. But the other people I'd never met before.

  Army placed his hand on my shoulder. “This is Jennifer Roberts.”

  The introduction, such as it was, had everyone nodding. A few murmurs greeted me as Army led me to a place on the couch between two men.

  The man to my left bent forward and retrieved a tray, holding it in front of me. I took a napkin and a canapé only because he'd made the gesture, not because I was hungry.

  The man on my right wore a clerical collar, but whether he was an Episcopalian or Catholic priest, I didn't know.

  The introductions began at the start of the circle.

  “Douglas Morot is in real estate,” Army said.

  Douglas reminded me of Tom twenty years earlier. But Tom had never smiled as much or been as helpful. Now he nodded and saluted me with a half full wine glass.

  Antoinette Bergamot was next. “Antoinette works in the City Planning Department.”

  She was a woman about my age, reed thin with a slicked back hairstyle and black framed glasses. She nodded crisply and I smiled in return.

  Harriet Caspar said, "Call me Harry," she said. "Everyone does.” She leaned across the table to hand me her card featuring an enormous grinning tooth. “I’m a dentist.”

  I was curious if she and Army had a professional relationship, since he was a retired dentist.

  The man who’d played host to my left was Richard Timaron. "I'm into washing machines."

  Frankly I didn't know what that meant. Did he build them, sell them, or simply use them?

  "He owns Wash & Dry," Army said. "Don't let him be modest."

  The Wash and Dry outlets were as ubiquitous as convenience stores – brightly lit and clean places where people could do their laundry in well maintained machines.

  “I’ve never seen one of your laundromats empty,” I said.

  “They don’t seem to be, for which I’m very grateful.”

  The cleric to my right turned out to be a catholic priest. "Father David. My parish is St. Anne's. Not far from here."

  We sat in silence, waiting for someone else to speak. I'd never been so conscious of my own inadequacies as a conversationalist. We might have had other things in common, but neither of us made an attempt to discover it. We were strangers linked by our presence here at the Murder Club.

  Army looked over the group. "Someone hand Jennifer the sandwiches."

  I wanted to tell him I wasn't hungry, but he'd evidently gone to the effort to feed his guests. The Wash & Dry man handed me a small plate filled with tiny cucumber and pimento cheese sandwiches, devoid of crusts and delicately cut into shapes of leaves.

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” Army asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Coffee? Tea?”

  He hovered expectantly, giving me the feeling he wasn’t going to rest until I was served something. I settled for tea and he went to a long bar on the other side of the room, beginning to pour boiling water into a large white teapot. Covering it with a cozy, he placed it on a tray along with several cups and saucers and brought it to the table.

  Only then did he join us, spreading a napkin across his knees.

  Conversation flowed around me as I nibbled on a sandwich. Who first had the idea to put cucumber on bread? I’ve never understood why people persist in the custom, but I ate it nonetheless.

  I was terminally polite.

  “It doesn't have any effect on the liver,” Douglas said.

  “Not true. They've found traces of a residual toxicity as long as six months later.” Harry shook her head and looked mutinous.

  “Even after embalming?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about benylmartilyne? I've heard it breaks down into an amino acid after death.”

  Army poured me a cup of tea and I took the cup and saucer from him as the conversation changed directions again.

  “I found that tract of land, Armand,” Richard said. “It was just exactly where you said it would be.”

  Army nodded. “When you learn your way around that labyrinth at the courthouse, it begins to make sense. One of these days they’re going to be fully computerized, maybe even on the internet, and our jobs will be a lot easier.”

  I don't know what I'd expected of The Murder Club, but it wasn't this somber, well-dressed professional group of people discussing forensics and the County Clerk's office.

  In the lull of conversation, I leaned forward and put my cup and saucer down on the table.

  “Let’s get started, shall we?” Army sat at the end of the couch, picking up a large three ring binder from the table.

  “Our group started three years ago, Jennifer, and is an outgrowth of our love of mysteries. We look at murders the San Antonio Police Department has been unable to solve. I’m proud to say we’ve been instrumental in solving two of those cases."

  He opened the binder. “At present, we’re currently working three murders simultaneously.”

  “I’m afraid you have one more,” I said. Seven faces turned in my direction. “Or at least a death.”

  “Paul,” Army said.

  I nodded. “They found his body in the studio.”

  “Well,” he said, staring off toward the pool. “A second murder in the King Lion District.”

  He didn’t look very upset.

  “Jennifer, I think a little background is in order for the other members to be filled in. Can you tell them what happened? Beginning the day Evelyn died.”

  In my position with the government I was required to give training seminars from time to time, so public speaking wasn’t difficult for me. The subject matter was not one I’d ever considered lecturing on, but the audience was attentive. I described finding Evelyn, only to be peppered with questions.

  “What color were her lips?”

  “Did she look rearranged?”

  “Was anything else disturbed in the room?”

  Army finally interrupted the questioning. “The cause of death was hypertensive aortic stenosis. Heart attack. Go on,” he said to me.

  When I came to the day of the explosion, Army took over, describing the scene with a sense of detachment I still didn't feel. I was lucky not to have been hurt. Not to mention the sickening thought that pieces of Paul might have been pelting me along with the glass.

  "Jennifer also asked me some very cogent questions about mortgage scams," he said.

  “Mortgage scams?” Harry asked.

  “I’ll let Douglas talk about that,” Army said. “He’s done some research on the subject. In the meantime, any questions?"

  “Were there any indicators of an affair?” Richard asked.

  I glanced at him, uncertain what he meant.

  He made fists of his hands and rolled his knuckles together, an affectation that captured my attention. “You mentioned your housekeeper thought he was playing around. Did you notice anything that would lead you to that conclusion?"

  I wasn't exactly sure what I was supposed to have found. Love letters? Discarded underwear?

  All I could do was shake my head. In the lull, I asked, "The tanks exploded, but couldn’t it have been an accident?”

  “Yes,” Frank interjected. “But it could have easily been deliberate. All you would need to do is rig the valve, and the flowback would be enough to explode the tank. Acetylene is flammable.”

  My companions were nodding, looking interested while I sat there feeling out of my element. Murder was such an ugly word and an even more hideous act. I couldn’t conceive of the hatred necessary to kill another human being.

  "If it was deliberate," I said, trying not to believe it, "how long do you have before it explodes?"

  "You'd rig it," Frank said. "Then just wait until Paul used the tank."

  "So anyone at the funeral could have done it."

  Everyone looked at each other and, God help me, I felt a little thrill that I had suggested something they hadn't considered.

  Maybe I wasn't as horrified by m
urder as I'd thought.

  12

  "What about this mortgage scam, Armand?” Harry asked.

  “Douglas?” Army looked to the other man.

  Douglas smiled. “Armand called and wanted to know how difficult it was to get a second mortgage or a home equity loan. We worked on the premise that Person A owned a house, but Person B wanted to steal the equity. I thought it couldn’t be done, that there were a lot more checks and balances in place than there were. But what I found surprised me.”

  Douglas looked straight at me. “You can do it, and a lot easier than I thought.”

  I leaned forward, folding my arms and listening intently.

  "We're going to assume the house is paid for," he said.

  I nodded, knowing that was true in Evelyn's case.

  "So, we can call the transaction a cash out re-fi, or a home equity loan. Essentially, it will be looked at as a first mortgage, because there isn't another lien on the property."

  I nodded again.

  “You pretend to be someone posing as Evelyn,” Douglas said to me, “and I'll be the mortgage company and we'll work it through.”

  I’ve always detested role playing when I went to one of those innumerable seminars the GSA made me attend. I felt a little foolish as I began.

  “Well, I'd come into the mortgage company and I’d say that I owned a house and I wanted to get a loan."

  "What I'd do first is gather up some information. Is the house paid for?"

  "Yes."

  "Now, there's a provision in Texas that says you can't borrow more than eighty percent of the house's value. Do you understand that?"

  I nodded, still roll-playing.

  "Let's say Evelyn's house was worth three hundred thousand. The max I could loan you would be two hundred forty thousand. We'd agree on that. My next step would be to check your credit."

  "Evelyn's credit was excellent," I said, "so that wouldn't be a problem." Something was bothering me. "Before you checked my credit, wouldn't you need proof that I owned the house?"

  “No,” he said, looking pleased. “The only real proof is your Deed of Trust but you probably wouldn't have that with you. It's on file, so I could just order a copy. The only other proof is the Title. But the Title only gives a legal description of property and your name. It doesn't identify you in any other way. It doesn't say you have brown hair and green eyes, for example."