Murder Among Friends (The Kate Austen Mystery Series)

by Jonnie Jacobs

  I winced. Still, Conroy killing Mona didn’t make a lot of sense. The man was no Prince Charming, but he sounded like too much of a hot-head to have meticulously planned a murder like Mona’s. I told Alice that.

  “I don’t know,” she mumbled, unconvinced. “Conroy’s not dumb.”

  I remembered what Michael had said about Conroy’s rap sheet and his missing work around the time Mona died. Was it possible, after all? I was busy sorting it out when Alice started wailing again.

  “I feel so guilty,” she blubbered, “especially after the way Mona came through for me.”

  I decided we’d make more headway if we started at the beginning. “Let me get this straight. You left Seattle because you wanted to get away from Conroy, right?”

  She nodded.

  “And you came to see Mona?”

  Alice nodded again. “We hadn’t seen each other for years, but when I needed help she didn’t hesitate a minute. Got me money and the name of someone in LA.—” Alice’s eyes filled with tears. “It just rips me apart to think of all the awful things I said to her over the years.”

  Sharon sparked to life. She leaned across the table. “Mona lent you money?”

  “You have to understand, I was desperate. I had to get away from Conroy.”

  “How much money?”

  Alice looked down at her hands, embarrassed. “A lot actually.”

  “Cash?”

  “She said it would be better if I didn’t leave a paper trail for Conroy to follow.”

  “How much money?” Sharon asked again. Then, when Alice showed no signs of answering immediately, Sharon rephrased her question. “Three thousand dollars, is that how much Mona lent you?”

  Alice looked up, blinked, looked back down at her hands. “She didn’t lend it to me actually, it was more like she gave it to me.” A pause. “Mona was loaded, you know. Three thousand was nothing to her.”

  We had the answer to the missing three thousand at any rate. “This all took place on Saturday?” I asked her. Alice nodded.

  “Saturday evening?”

  She nodded again. “I went straight from the airport to her place.”

  Paul would no doubt be relieved to know that he was not the only one at Mona’s that night. “The police need to talk to you,” I said.

  She shot me a wide-eyed look. “Me? Why?”

  “Well, you’re next-of-kin for one thing. For the other, you were probably the last person to see Mona alive.”

  Alice’s expression grew squinty, then suspicious. She crushed out her cigarette and tossed her head. “That doesn’t make me a criminal.”

  “They just want to talk to you,” Sharon soothed. “You may be able to help them. Kate has a friend who’s a policeman. Maybe he’ll come over right now and you can get it over with.”

  This time it was Sharon who kicked me under the table. I took the hint and excused myself to go call Michael. I wasn’t able to reach him, but I left a detailed message with the dispatcher, who promised she’d try to contact him.

  Sharon was intently refilling everyone’s cup when I returned. Alice was once again looking tearful.

  “It was one of the nicest times the two of us ever had,” Alice gulped. “For once, Mona wasn’t bossy and full of herself. We talked like sisters are supposed to talk, about all kinds of stuff. Got a little tipsy, you know, let our hair down. I used to think she had it so easy, what with being rich and all. But Mona had her problems, too.”

  Kyle and Anna wandered in just then, demanding chocolate milk to wash down the popcorn. I didn’t consider the request unreasonable considering that, left to her own devices, Anna would have been calling for soda pop and a handful of cookies (she knows how to manipulate “grown-up time” to the max). Sharon, however, had recently fallen under the spell of some article on childhood nutrition, and was determined to save Kyle from the fat-cell battle she saw as his genetic destiny. He was the only kid in kindergarten, probably the only kid in the whole school, whose lunch box bore such treats as fat-free, salt-free chips and bite size bits of broccoli.

  I shot Anna a warning glance and then braced myself for one of Sharon’s lectures on the evils of chocolate. But maybe Sharon had decided that fat cells weren’t the worst thing that could happen to you, because she not only made each of the kids a large glass of chocolate milk, she placed a flotilla of miniature marshmallows on top.

  By the time they’d finished their snack, Michael was ringing the doorbell. Anna gave him a smile and small wave in place of her usual sloppy hug, then sidled up to Sharon and asked if they could each please have one of the cinnamon drops from the bag of leftover Christmas candy in the den.

  My daughter, the manipulator. At least I knew that whatever had caused her to feel under the weather, it wasn’t the stomach flu.

  Sharon shooed Anna away with what sounded like a go-ahead on the candy front, introduced Michael and Alice, and then filled him in on the basics of our conversation. Except for a brief introductory nod, Alice remained silent, her eyes focused on the rim of her cup, her mouth drawn tight.

  “I’d just like to ask you a few questions,” Michael said gently. “I realize this must be hard on you, since you’ve just learned of your sister’s death and all. But we could really use your help.”

  Alice lifted her eyes wordlessly.

  “You want us to leave?” I asked.

  Michael looked toward Alice, who shook her head.

  As he took her through some of what we’d covered earlier, Alice seemed to loosen up a bit, though her answers were still fairly lean. Gradually, the tearful edge to her voice gave way to wariness. “I didn’t have any reason to want her dead, you know.”

  “Nobody said you did.”

  “Nobody had to. I know how you guys think.”

  “Right now I’m just trying to put together the pieces, figure out as much as I can about what happened Saturday evening. Okay?”

  Alice’s eyes flickered from Michael’s face to the far wall. “If you say so.”

  “What time did you arrive at your sister’s place?” Michael asked, ignoring the unspoken antagonism.

  “About six-thirty, I think. It had just gotten dark.”

  “And what time did you leave?”

  “A little before nine.”

  “What did the two of you do during that period of time?”

  She shrugged. “Caught up on things mostly.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Not really.”

  “How about food. Did you have dinner? Coffee?”

  “We had a couple of drinks. Mona brought out some cheese and crackers and stuff, but no real dinner.”

  Michael gave an all-purpose nod, his face expressionless. He slouched back in his chair. “What did you have to drink?”

  I recognized the look on Alice’s face. It was the same one Anna gets when she suspects a trick question. Alice chewed on a broken fingernail for several moments, then with a sigh, she gave up trying to figure it out. “We each had a couple of drinks, but we weren’t bombed or anything. Mona had a martini. I drank scotch. She kept a bottle of pretty good stuff on hand for some guy she was seeing. That’s about it, we drank and talked.”

  “It was friendly?”

  “Very.” Her tone wasn’t.

  “What did you talk about?” he asked.

  “Stuff.”

  “Such as?”

  Alice looked Michael in the eye. “Men,” she said, spitting out the word with distaste.

  “Interesting subject.”

  “Yeah.” She lit another cigarette, the blew a plume of smoke across the table.

  Michael waited.

  “Mona was even more pissed than I was,” Alice said. “First off, turns out this jerk she’s been seeing is married. Never bothered to tell her that part. In fact, she had it out with him right before I got there, so she was pretty upset. Then she’s got that ass of an ex-husband who won’t leave her alone. They’re divorced, right? But does that stop him from p
oking his nose into her life, calling to leave nasty messages on her machine? Not by a long shot. There was also some guy on her case because his wife wants to get an education. That really takes the cake, doesn’t it? And on top of everything else, she’d had it up to here,” Alice drew a hand across her throat, “with Libby’s boyfriend. The guy’s got sticky fingers but she can never catch him at it.”

  Alice paused for a quick drag on her cigarette. “Conroy’s a first-class ass, but at least he’s the only one I’ve got to deal with.”

  Michael leaned back, arms folded across his chest. “How did Mona seem when you left that evening, besides being ready to obliterate the entire male species?”

  A glint of humor softened Alice’s expression. “We weren’t, either one of us, ready to get rid of men altogether. Just the ones we had the misfortune of knowing personally.”

  Michael acknowledged the remark with a faint smile of his own.

  “She was in a foul mood,” Alice said, “but it wasn’t just men. There was something else eating at her, too. She wouldn’t talk about it, but it must have been heavy. She said it made her realize that even God didn’t have it so easy.”

  “Hmm.” Michael chewed on his bottom lip. “Any idea what she meant by that?”

  “Nope.”

  “She expecting any other visitors that night?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “And when you left, where’d you go?”

  “Back to the airport. She offered to let me stay there awhile, but I already had my tickets and I wanted to get as far from Conroy as I could.”

  “Tell me about him,” Michael said, unfolding his arms and leaning forward.

  Alice repeated what she’d told us earlier. She was elaborating on Conroy’s temper when the peal of the doorbell interrupted. Sharon started to stand, but Alice sent her a beseeching look, so I went to answer it instead.

  Claire and Jodi stood on the porch. Claire frowned at me. “I didn’t expect to find you here. Is Sharon around? I brought over the wine she won in last night’s raffle.” She held up a boxed crate of three bottles. “I thought you might have picked it up, but Mary Nell said you left early.”

  I nodded. “Sharon’s in the kitchen.” Claire headed down the hallway with Jodi at her heels. Determined to make up for the wrongs poor Jodi suffered at the hands of her classmates, I called her back, then led her to Anna and Kyle, by way of the cinnamon drops. I gave her a whole handful, and stayed around long enough to make sure the other two didn’t exclude her. The fact that Jodi was willing to share her bounty enhanced her popularity considerably.

  When I got back downstairs, Michael had finished with Alice and was getting ready to leave. I walked with him to his car. The sky was a thick, dull gray, the air heavy with the promise of rain. It was so cold I could see my breath, like little puffs of fog. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered.

  “You cold?” Michael asked.

  “Always.”

  He raised an eyebrow and mocked me with a seductive leer straight out of the silent film era.

  “Well, not always. ”

  “Good.” The leer gave way to a grin. “You know, if you’d let me move in we could work on that more often.”

  “Or I could simply buy some woolen long-johns,” I told him, side-stepping a discussion I wasn’t yet ready to tackle. “What’s your take on Alice? You believe her?”

  Michael’s grin faded. “Hell, I don’t know. Her story makes as much sense as any.” Which, from his tone, wasn’t saying a whole lot.

  “You aren’t crossing her off your list then?”

  “At this point I’m not ready to write anyone off. There are too many loose ends to tie up first”

  “At least it lets Paul off the hook.”

  “Unless he came back after Alice left.” Michael opened the car door and tossed his jacket onto the passenger seat. “We’ve talked to Mona’s ex and that fiancée of his, too. They’re both defensive as hell. Gary's so polished you know it’s a veneer, and Bambi flat out denied ever having lunch with Mona. Now why would she do that?”

  Michael didn’t expect an answer, which was a good thing because I didn’t have one. “I wanted to tell you something else. I saw Brandon today at the—”

  “Yeah, he’s still in the running. The punk’s got a real attitude on him.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Mona’s murder. It’s about that man who was hanging out on the school yard. When Anna and I stopped for ice cream this afternoon, we saw Brandon talking to someone Anna swears is the same guy. I think I saw him at Mona’s memorial service, too.”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed. “Did you ask Brandon about it?”

  “No. They were leaving just as we arrived. Anna didn’t even tell me it was the same man until I was halfway through my recitation of ice cream selections.”

  He nodded. “I’ll try to reach Brandon this afternoon, see if we can’t get to the bottom of this.”

  I cupped my hands and blew into them for warmth.

  “I know you’re worried, but there’ve been no rent reports of anything kids. No attempted abductions, no strangers approaching children. It’s probably going to turn out to be nothing.” Michael leaned across the open door for a farewell kiss.

  I brushed him aside. “By the time you get a report,” I snapped, “it may be too late.”

  He sighed. “I’m going to check on it, Kate. And I put out the word when you first told me about this guy. I’m not a magician.”

  I knew I was probably making a mountain out of something closer to a speck of dust than a molehill, but I also knew that overreacting was one of the prerogatives of being a mother. Taking out your frustrations on someone you cared about, was not. I touched his shoulder and sought to make amends.

  “Why don’t you come by this evening,” I suggested. “I’ve got a new recipe for ginger chicken I want to try. You can tell me what you found out over dinner.”

  “Can’t,” Michael said flatly.

  “Work?”

  He hesitated a fraction too long before answering. “I’m having dinner with Barbara.”

  “Barbara?” As far as I knew, Michael and his ex-wife didn’t even trade phone calls. “Whatever for?”

  He shrugged. “She asked me.”

  A current of jealousy shot through me, though I tried to ignore it. “Oh,” I said, chirping with forced pleasantness.

  “That bother you? Even a little?”

  “No, not at all,” I lied.

  He grinned. “Yeah, I know the feeling. I’ll give you a call tomorrow. And remember, you’ve landed yourself closer to this murder investigation than is healthy, so be careful.”

  You too, I said silently. And I wasn’t talking about homicide.

  <><><>

  Not surprisingly, Anna had no appetite for dinner. I wasn’t any too hungry myself, and Libby dropped by only long enough to tell me she was going out for pizza with a friend.

  “Brandon?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” She flung open the refrigerator door and eyed the contents. “Can I have these leftover noodles?”

  “I thought you were going out for dinner.”

  “I am. But I’m hungry now.”

  I handed her a plate. “I understand Brandon came by last night while I was out.”

  “Yeah.” She scooped out a mound of noodles, sprinkled cheese on top and stuck them in the microwave. “All his talk about how there’s something special between us, then treats me like some piece of used tissue. He paid more attention to Anna than he did to me.”

  A sliver of fear lodged in my chest as I contemplated just what sort of attention he might have shown her. Suddenly it was all too close.

  “I don’t want Brandon in my house ever again, do you understand? Whether I’m here or not.” I’d intended for us to have a reasonable discussion about expectations and limits, but reason had deserted me. My voice rose with each word and by the end, I was practically yelling.

  Libby’s face r
eddened. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Maybe not, but I won’t have him here, and that’s final.”

  Her bottom lip quivered. She dropped her eyes to her hands.

  A heavy silence hung between us. I cleared my throat and backtracked. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for him to be here,” I told her, trying for the sound and sensible tone I’d missed earlier.

  She nodded wordlessly and turned back to watch the rotating dish of noodles.

  I touched her arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come on so strong.”

  “You sounded just like my mother.”

  “Mothers tend to worry a lot. It’s kind of inbred.”

  Libby was quiet for a moment. “She didn’t like him either.”

  The timer sounded and I handed her a pot-holder. “Last time I looked, you weren’t exactly president of Brandon’s fan club yourself.”

  “No, but Brandon does have a sweet side. At least I used to think he did. There were plenty of times he was there for me when no one else was.” She retrieved her plate of noodles. “He didn’t have such an easy time in the family department himself.”

  “From what Anna said, I got the impression he’d been drinking last night, or was high on something.”

  She nodded. “Half of what he said didn’t even make sense. He kept talking about some surprise, and how he held the winning ticket in the Missouri lottery.”

  “Missouri? Does Missouri have a lottery?”

  She shrugged. “Even if it does, there’s no way Brandon’s going to have the winning ticket.”

  Chapter 25

  I was cranky and irritable all evening. Even Max seemed to know enough to stay out of my way. I tried calling Michael at nine, ten, and then eleven. I told myself it was because I wanted to learn what he’d found out about this blond stranger I’d seen with Brandon, but I knew there was also a part of me brooding about Michael’s whereabouts. After all, how long can you linger over dinner?

  It was, of course, the after-dinner possibilities that worried me most. They played through my mind with an unwelcome vividness. By the time I left the house the next morning I was in such a funk I didn’t even try reaching Michael again, although I couldn’t tell if what stopped me was peevishness on my part or simply fear of knowing the truth. Barbara wouldn’t be the first woman to recognize that her ex had some awfully attractive qualities after all.