(3T)Three Bedrooms, One Corpse

by Charlaine Harris

  “I’ll call her right away.”

  We hung up at the same moment.

  It had been years since I was at the Anderton house, but I still remembered how impressed I’d been that in- stead of tissues or bed lamps, Mandy’s parents had Chinese vases on their bedside tables. In her charming way, Mandy had bragged about how much those vases had cost. But she had never liked them. So when I real- ized they were gone, I didn’t for an instant think she’d had them packed up and shipped to Los Angeles. She would have left them to coax a buyer. Anyone who would have enough money to consider buying her par- ents’ house would not want to steal vases, right? I dumped an indignant Madeleine from my lap and

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  moved around the room restlessly. I was standing at the window staring out at my patio, thinking I’d have to bring in my outdoor chairs and table and store them down in the basement during the coming weekend, when the phone rang. I reached out to the kitchen wall extension.

  “It’s me again,” said my mother. “We’re having a meeting this afternoon for everyone on the staff, two o’clock. You’re going to need to come, too.” “Did the police question Mackie?”

  “They took him to the police station.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “It turns out Detective Liggett—I mean Detective Smith—was already here when I was on the phone with

  you. I’m sure this all happened as a result of what I told Jack Burns, about Mackie taking Tonia Lee the key. I was only thinking of Mackie having possibly seen who was at the house with Tonia Lee. It didn’t occur to me until too late that they might pick up Mackie as a sus- pect.”

  “Do you think it’s because he’s—?”

  “Oh, I’d hate to think that. I hope our police force is not like that. But you know, being black may work in his favor, actually. Tonia Lee would never have gone to bed with Mackie. She didn’t like blacks at all.” “They might just say he raped her.”

  There was a long pause while Mother digested this. “You know, somehow it didn’t . . . well, I can’t say why. And I only looked for a second. But it didn’t look like a rape, did it?”

  I paused in turn. Tonia completely undressed, the sheets pulled back as if two people had actually gotten

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  in the bed together . . . Mother was right, it looked like a seduction scene, not a hasty rape, even though the leather thongs might indicate force. My first thought had been consensual kinky sex. But maybe Mother and I were both factoring in Tonia Lee’s known reputation for infidelity. When I suggested this to Mother, she agreed.

  “Anyway, I’m sure Mackie is not involved,” she said staunchly. “I like him a lot, he’s a hard worker, and for the year he’s been here, he’s been totally honest and aboveboard. Besides . . . he is too smart to put the key back.”

  After we’d hung up, I wondered about that. Why had the Anderton house key been put back on the hook so mysteriously? That key had enabled us to enter and find the body.

  I thought a number of interesting questions de- pended on the answer to that riddle.

  The office meeting ought to be stimulating. I ate an apple and a leftover chicken breast while flip- ping through Jane Engle’s copy of The Murderers’ Who’s Who. I read the entries for some of my favorite

  cases and wondered if an updated edition would include our local murderous duo whose dreadful but brief career had made national headlines; or perhaps our only other claim to fame might rate an entry, the disappearance of an entire family from a house outside of Lawrenceton. That had been—what?—five or six years ago. My familiarity with old murder cases was my mother’s despair. Now, since the disbandment of the Real Murders club, I had no one to share it with. I sighed over spilt milk.

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  After putting my dishes in the dishwasher, I glumly mounted the stairs to get ready for the meeting. For one thing, I had to brush all the cat hairs off my skirt. Mother’s office building, with its soothing gray and blue carpeting and walls, peaceful prints, and comfortable chairs, exuded calm and profitable effi- ciency. That was Mother’s essence, and she and the of- fice designer had captured it when they renovated the building. Mother had insisted on a conference room, for staff meetings. Every Monday every Realtor work- ing for Mother had to attend this meeting. She’d planned to expand, and the room was still more than large enough for the whole staff.

  I saw with interest that one of John Queensland’s daughters-in-law had been brought in to answer the phones and take messages while Mother held the meet- ing. I knew my stepfather’s sons and their wives only slightly, and as I nodded to Melinda Queensland, I tried to figure out what my relationship to her was. Stepsister-in-law? It looked to me as if I was going to be a stepaunt in a few months, but Melinda had had several miscarriages and I wasn’t going to ask. Melinda was sitting at Patty Cloud’s desk, which of course was not only orderly but also decorated with a tidy plant and a picture in an expensive frame. Patty’s desk faced the front door, and her underling, Debbie Lincoln, had a desk at right angles to it, in effect form- ing the start of the corridor down to the conference room and Idella’s and Mackie’s offices. In the square created by two walls and the desks, firmly screwed to

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  the wall behind Patty, was the key board, a large peg- board striped with labeled hooks. The more popular letters of the alphabet claimed two or even three hooks. A person of even the feeblest intelligence could figure out the system in seconds, and every other agency in town had something similar.

  I snapped out of my study of the key board to find that Melinda was waiting for me to acknowledge her, and her smile was growing strained as I stared at the wall behind her. I gave her a brisk nod and started down the hall to the conference room. I was in time to sit at Mother’s left, a chair left vacant deliberately for me, I presumed. All the Realtors expected me to inherit this business from Mother, and saw my presence in the office this week as the first step in my becoming second-in-command.

  This was far from true. I had quit my job at the li- brary on a whim, and I already regretted it more than I ever would have believed possible. (Of course, even re- gretting it mildly was more than I ever would have be- lieved possible.)

  Idella Yates, a frail-looking fair woman in her mid- thirties, divorced with two children, slid into the chair at the end of the table and put a briefcase on the table in front of her as if building a barrier between herself and the room. Her short straight hair was the color of dead winter grass. Eileen Norris bustled in, carrying a large stack of papers and looking abstracted. Eileen was Mother’s second-in-command, the first Realtor Mother had hired after she’d gone out on her own. Eileen was big, brassy, loud, and cheerful on the sur- face; underneath, she was a barracuda. Patty Cloud, the

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  receptionist/secretary, groomed to a tee, had perched her bottom dead in the center of the chair next to Idella’s. Patty, who was maybe all of twenty-four, baf- fled and irritated me far more than she should have. Patty worked hard at being perfect, and she had damned near succeeded. She was always helpful on the phone, always turned out high-quality work, never for- got anything, and never, never came to work in any- thing frumpy or out of style or even wrinkled. She was already studying for her Realtor’s license. She would probably pass at the top of her group.

  Patty’s underling, Debbie Lincoln, was a rather dim and cowed girl right out of high school. She was a full- figured black with hair expensively corn-rowed and decorated with beads. Debbie was quiet, punctual, and could type very well. Other than that, I knew little about her. At the moment she was sitting quietly by Patty with her eyes on her hands, not chatting back and forth like the others.

  Eileen finally got settled, and we all looked at Mother expectantly. Just as she opened her mouth, the confer- ence room door opened and in came Ma
ckie Knight. His dark round face looked strained and upset, and he responded to our various exclamations with a wave of his hand. He collapsed into a chair by Eileen with obvious relief, automatically adjusting his tie and run- ning a hand over his very short hair.

  “Mackie, I thought I was going to have to send a lawyer down to the station to get you out!” “Thanks, Mrs. Queensland. You were going to be my one phone call,” he said. “But they seem to believe, at least for the moment, that I didn’t do it.”

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  “What did happen yesterday?” Eileen asked. We all leaned forward to listen.

  “Well,” Mackie began wearily, telling a story he’d obviously told several times already, “the phone rang here five minutes after Patty went home for the day, and I was standing out in the reception room talking to Roe, so I answered it.”

  Patty looked chagrined that she hadn’t worked late the day before.

  “It was Mrs. Greenhouse, and she said she had an appointment to meet a client to show him the Anderton house. She had forgotten to come by earlier to get the key—if anyone happened to be leaving our office soon, could they bring it by? She was worried she’d miss her client if she left to come to our office.” “She didn’t name the client?” Mother asked. “No name,” Mackie said firmly. “She did say ‘he,’ I’m almost positive.”

  Idella Yates, beside me, shuddered and clutched her arms as if she were feeling a chill. I think we all did; Tonia Lee, making arrangements to meet her own death.

  “Anyway, this is the part the police have the most trouble with,” Mackie continued. “What I did, instead of driving up and leaving the key and going on home . . . I went home first, put on my jogging clothes, and went out for my run. I stuck the key in the pocket of my shorts and stopped on my run to hand it to Mrs. Green- house. That only made maybe seven to ten minutes’ dif- ference in the time I actually got there, and it suited me better. To tell you the honest truth, I wasn’t so excited about doing her work for her. No one here would be that

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  sloppy. When I got there, she was at the house by herself. If anyone else was there, I didn’t see him. Hers was the only car. It was parked in the back, outside the kitchen, so that was the door I went to.”

  “Why does that seem funny to the police?” Mother asked. “It doesn’t seem odd to me.”

  “They seem to think that I ran instead of driving my car so no one would identify my car as being in the drive- way, later. They said a woman living across the street from the Anderton house, she was waiting for her daugh- ter to get home from spending a week out of town. So she was sitting in her front room, looking out the window, and reading a book, for the best part of two hours . . . the daughter had had a flat on the interstate, turns out. This woman might have missed a person on foot, but not a car.”

  “What about the back door?” Eileen asked. “The people who live behind the Andertons were watching TV in their den with the curtains open, since they knew no one was in the Anderton house. They told the police that they saw Tonia Lee’s car pull up when it was still daylight, but fading fast. One woman got out. They sat watching TV and eating in their den while they watched, and no other car ever pulled up. They figured someone else had come to the front door. They did see Tonia Lee’s car pull out after dark, way after dark, but of course they couldn’t see who was in it. They were pretty interested, someone being in the house for that long; they thought someone might really be thinking of buying.” We all mulled that over for a minute.

  “I wonder why the police told you so much?” Patty asked.

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  Mackie shook his head. “I guess they thought they would pressure me into confessing or something. If I’d been guilty, it might have worked.”

  “You run every night, you’ve always told us that, and I’ve often seen you. That’s not suspicious at all,” my mother said staunchly. We all murmured agree- ment, even Patty Cloud, who was none too fond of hav- ing to do work for a black man, I’d observed. Though having Debbie working for her didn’t seem to be a problem.

  “Lots of people run or ride bikes in the evening,” Idella said suddenly. “Donnie Greenhouse does . . . Franklin Farrell does.”

  Franklin Farrell was another local Realtor. “I bet it was Donnie,” Eileen said bluntly. “He just couldn’t stand Tonia Lee screwing around anymore.” “Eileen,” Mother said warningly.

  “It’s true, and we all know it,” Eileen said. “I’m sure she just made an appointment with some- one who used a false name, and the man killed her,” Idella said in so low a voice we had to strain to hear her. “It could happen to any of us.”

  We were all silent for a moment, staring at her. “Except Mackie, of course,” Eileen said briskly, and we all broke into laughter.

  “Naw, I just get framed for it,” Mackie said after the last chuckle had died away. And we were all sober again.

  Patty Cloud said suddenly, “I think it was the House Hunter.”

  “Oh,” my mother said doubtingly. “Come on, Patty.”

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  “The House Hunter,” said Eileen consideringly. “It’s possible.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked. I was apparently the only one not in the know.

  “The House Hunter,” Idella said softly, “is what all the Realtors in town call Jimmy Hunter, the owner of the hardware store. On Main, you know?” “Susu’s husband?” I asked. There were several women named Sally in Lawrenceton, so most of them went by distinguishing nicknames. “I was in their wed- ding,” I said, as if that made it impossible for Jimmy Hunter to be peculiar.

  “We all know him,” Mother said dryly. “And we christened him the House Hunter because he just loves to look at houses. Without Sally with him. He’s always going to buy her a house for her birthday, or some such thing. And he’s got the money to actually do it, that’s the only reason we put up with him.”

  “He’s not really in the market?”

  “Oh, hell no,” Eileen boomed. “They’re going to stay in that old house they inherited from Susu’s folks till hell freezes over. He’s just some mild kind of per- vert. He just likes to look at houses.” “With women,” Idella added.

  “Yes, when we sent him out with Mackie, he didn’t call us back for months,” Mother said.

  “He won’t make appointments with Franklin, ei- ther,” Idella added. “Just that Terry Sternholtz that works with him.” Eileen laughed at that, and we all looked at her curiously.

  “Maybe he called Greenhouse Realty instead,” Mackie said quietly.

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  “And since the Greenhouses are hard up, Donnie sent Tonia Lee out with him, just on the off chance he might really buy something.” This was Eileen’s contri- bution.

  “Let me get this straight. He doesn’t make passes?” I asked.

  “No.” Mother shook her head emphatically. “If he did, none of us would show him a doghouse. He just likes to look through other people’s homes, and he likes to have a woman who isn’t his wife with him. Who knows what’s going through his head?”

  “How long has Jimmy been doing this?” I was fasci- nated with this bizarre behavior on the part of my friend’s husband. “Does Susu know?”

  “I don’t have any idea. How would any of us tell her? On the other hand, it does seem strange that gos- sip hasn’t informed her that her husband is house- hunting. But as far as I know, she’s never said anything. You were close to Susu in high school, weren’t you, Roe?”

  I nodded. “But we don’t see each other much nowa- days.” I forbore from adding that that was because Susu was always ferrying her children somewhere or involved in some PTA activity. I was having trouble picturing thick-featured Jimmy Hunter, still broad- shouldered and husky as he’d been in his football days but now definitely on the heavyweight side,
wandering dreamily through houses he didn’t want to buy. “If it’s not the House Hunter,” Patty suggested, “maybe Tonia Lee’s murder has something to do with the thefts.”

  This caused an even greater reaction than Patty’s first

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  suggestion. But this reaction was different. Dead si- lence. Everyone looked upset. Beside me, Idella rubbed her hands together, and her pale blue eyes brimmed with tears.

  “Okay,” I said finally, “fill me in on this. The real estate business in this town just seems to be full of se- crets, these days.”

  Mother sighed. “It’s a serious problem, not some- thing like the House Hunter, whom we more or less treat as a joke.” She paused, considering how to pro- ceed.

  “Things have been stolen from the houses for sale for the past two years,” Eileen said bluntly. Even Debbie Lincoln was roused by this. She slid her eyes sideways at Eileen.

  “In houses just listed by a particular Realtor? In houses that have just been shown by one Realtor every time?” I asked impatiently.

  “That’s just the trouble,” Mother said. “It’s not like—say, the refrigerator vanished every time Tonia Lee showed a house. That would make it clear and easy.”

  “It’s small things,” Mackie said. “Valuable things. But not so small a client could slip them into a pocket while we were showing the home. And even though the property might be listed with one realtor, of course we let any other Realtor show it—that’s the way you have to be in a town this size. We all have to cooperate. We all leave a card when we show a house, whether the owner’s home or not . . . you know the procedure. If only we’d gotten the multiple-listing system, we could use lockboxes. None of this would have happened.”

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  What he meant was, none of the police station rou- tine would have happened to him, because he wouldn’t have had to take a key to the Anderton house. Tonia Lee would be just as dead, presumably. Mother was in favor of paying for one of the multiple-listing services most of the Atlanta area towns used, but the smaller Realtors in town—particularly the Greenhouses—had balked.