A Sensitive Kind of Murder (A Kate Jasper Mystery)

by Girdner, Jaqueline

  “Ms. High and Mighty McKinnon, we called her in school,” came a voice from one of the barber chairs.

  “You went to school with her?” I asked, astounded by my luck.

  “You betcha. That girl could drive you crazy, even in the fifth grade. No real harm in her, though. Just not real sensitive.”

  “She’s good with money,” another voice came from under one of the dryers. “At least I hope so.”

  “Never gets her hair done here,” Michelle stage-whispered. “We’re not snooty enough for her.”

  And then the room was quiet. Too bad Janet wasn’t as well known as Laura Summers.

  “Helen Herrick?” I threw out.

  “Is Helen involved with this?” a sharp voice demanded.

  “Possibly,” I answered cautiously. I thought fast. “Maybe as a witness or something.”

  “Oh, dear. Helen has enough to put up with—”

  “Her husband ought to be shot—”

  “Always gets the same hairdo. You ask me, it’s too severe—”

  “Sweet woman—”

  “No nonsense—”

  “But funny—”

  As I listened, I realized that the women in the Golden Rose might not have ruled the world, but they were certainly its intelligence agency. And I recognized the score. Helen Herrick lead in popularity, closely followed by Laura Summers. Janet McKinnon-Kimmochi came in a late third.

  But these were women. I didn’t think I was going to get as lucky with the male suspects.

  The names Garrett Peterson, Jerry Urban, Carl Russo, and Ted Kimmochi didn’t raise even a ripple of interest, except for a bit of sympathy for anyone married to Janet McKinnon-Kimmochi. And Isaac Herrick was only vilified for Helen’s sake. But the mention of Van Eisner’s name seemed to push a button in every second woman’s mouth in the place.

  The ones who hadn’t dated Van had girlfriends who had, or sisters, or daughters. As everyone talked, I thought of Van: slight, short, and balding, with pointy little features. What did he have that other women saw in him? I certainly didn’t see it.

  “But Van was fun,” someone finished up.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe Van was fun.

  When the voices finally wound down, there was only one thing left to do.

  “Thank you,” I addressed the hairdressers, manicurists, and customers of the Golden Rose sincerely. I gave a little bow. “You are truly amazing women.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Wayne’s deep voice rumbled.

  Someone tittered, and I led Wayne out of the lioness’s den.

  He was pale when we got in the car, but alive.

  “Kate?” he whispered as I started the Toyota. “You don’t talk about me down there, do you?”

  I took a deep breath and thought of an appropriate answer. “No more than you talk about me to the other Heartlink members.”

  Wayne’s complexion was pink again. Bingo!

  And then, all of a sudden, I wanted to know what he’d said about me to the Heartlink members. But the good angel of all foot-in-mouthers stopped me just in time. If I asked him, he’d ask me, and then…No, the results were too horrendous to even consider. And the angel must have been doing double-time because Wayne changed the subject abruptly.

  “I think we need to know more about Steve,” he said as I backed out of my parking space.

  “Should we go back to the Golden Rose?” I asked, stopping the car. We hadn’t really pumped the women on the subject of Steve Summers.

  “No!” he cried out, gripping my shoulder. Damn. It was good we weren’t on the highway. I would have been in the next lane. “Oh, sorry,” he said, looking at his hand as if it wasn’t his. “Didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “I’m fine.” I didn’t add that he, Mike Russo, and C. C. were now all contestants in the startling-Kate-out-of-her-wits competition. I reparked the car. There was still plenty of afternoon left. I had a feeling we were going to visit someone, and I wasn’t moving the car until I knew where I was going.

  “How about Steve’s friends?” I asked.

  Wayne frowned.

  “Steve had friends, didn’t he?” I asked.

  “Well, there was the group…”

  “I mean outside of the group,” I prodded, none-too-gently.

  “Steve didn’t make friends easily,” Wayne murmured uncomfortably. Then he shrugged. “I can’t think of any he talked about. He hardly even talked about his son. I’d forgotten he had one till Laura mentioned him.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “We can ask Laura about Steve’s friends.”

  “Or maybe we’ll meet some at Steve’s funeral,” Wayne added.

  I restarted the car. It looked like we weren’t going visiting after all. I was backing up again when Wayne spoke.

  “I do know one person,” he announced.

  “One person, what?” I stopped the car, braking hard this time.

  “Someone who might have known Steve, at least peripherally,” he explained. “A guy I went to law school with—Joe Calderon. He was a legislative assistant for a while. He knows the state assembly. Now he teaches law at Beaumont University. I’ll bet we can catch him between classes. He’s usually in his office between one and three.”

  I didn’t even ask Wayne how he knew that. I just backed up, shifted gears, and took off for Beaumont University. For a quiet man, Wayne had a lot of friends.

  Joe Calderon was a large, honey-colored man with a bushy Castro beard so thick he could have hidden a city underneath it.

  “Wayne, my man,” he roared when we peeked into his open office door. “How goes it?”

  “It goes,” Wayne answered, and Joe laughed, causing a small earthquake in his small office.

  Then the two men did manly things like hand-shaking and shoulder-slapping for a while. Finally, Wayne turned Joe’s attention to me.

  “Um, this is my wife, Kate Jasper,” he said diffidently.

  “Whoa, Wayne,” Joe admonished him, shaking a big finger in his face. “This woman is way too beautiful to be your wife.”

  Now it was my turn to blush. Wayne had braved the pink portals of the Golden Rose, and now I was facing masculine academia in the flesh.

  Joe kissed my hand and then flashed me a dangerously flirtatious look out of his dark eyes.

  “What do you know about Steve Summers?” I asked in response. All right, I admit it was rude. But hand-kissing just isn’t my thing.

  Joe laughed again. The glass in his window vibrated. Then he asked us to sit down. The wooden chairs were hard, but Joe was easy. Once Wayne had explained our mission, Joe leaned back and talked.

  “I knew Laura Summers,” he told us. “Everyone at the state assembly did. She’s one of those people who actually remembers your name without having to read it.” Joe laughed again, not quite so loudly this time, and I smiled with him. Maybe the hand-kissing wasn’t so bad. “Summers has a good record: education, environment, Social Security, Medicare—”

  “You mean Laura Summers, don’t you?” Wayne interrupted. I had a feeling Wayne knew his friend well. Uninterrupted, Joe Calderon could probably talk forever.

  “And you want to know about Steve Summers.” Joe grinned. “I was getting there. It just takes a while these days.” He reached for a bowl of cellophane-wrapped, sugar-free candies on his desk and offered them silently in our direction. When neither of us accepted, he took one himself, unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth. I could smell butterscotch drifting my way. Suddenly, my stomach wanted lunch.

  “Now, Steve Summers is a little harder to remember,” he spoke around the candy. “I met him, more than once, but he never said much. Of course, I’ve read him. His book about politics and investing was truly brilliant. But he was a cold fish, if you wanna know the truth.”

  He was even colder now, I thought, but said nothing. I resisted looking Wayne’s way. That had to have hurt.

  Joe must have noticed because his mouth shifted gears.


  “Steve was a great helpmeet, though. He couldn’t avoid it. It was beyond his sense of ethics to be anything less. A right-minded man of the first degree. He and Laura were a matched set.”

  Finally, I looked at Wayne. He was nodding politely, but I could tell he was disappointed. There was nothing new here.

  “Could someone have attacked Steve to get at Laura Summers, to influence her voting or something?” I asked, desperate for anything that might help.

  Joe sucked his candy meditatively. When he finally spoke, his voice wasn’t so jolly anymore.

  “I would have said no ten years ago. The stakes just weren’t high enough in state congress. But these days?” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  We left after that, eating a late lunch at a student hangout near the campus. We filled up on beans and rice on freshly made tortillas smothered in two kinds of salsa and guacamole. We didn’t make small talk, and not just because our mouths were too full. What had we accomplished? Had we learned anything that could answer the question of why do-gooder Steve Summers was killed? I thought about Van Eisner. I thought about the Russos and the Kimmochis. And then I thought about my Aunt Dorothy.

  “Oh, my God!” I squawked, looking at my watch. “The plane!”

  - Nine -

  What had my mother said, exactly? I searched the files in my brain anxiously until I found the one with the time. Four o’clock. Aunt Dorothy’s plane was coming in at the San Francisco airport at four o’clock. I checked my watch. It could have been worse. It looked like we had forty-five minutes to get there—forty-five minutes for a drive that usually took me more than an hour.

  I must have said “four o’clock” aloud. Or maybe I screamed it because Wayne grabbed me by the shoulder and announced, “I’ll drive. It’ll be faster that way. You can meet her in the concourse.”

  It took me two garbled seconds of objections before I agreed to the plan. Wayne did drive faster than me. And of the two of us, I was the only one who was going to recognize Aunt Dorothy when she came down the long tunnel leading from the plane.

  We left uneaten food on our plates and cash on the table, then rushed out the door to the Toyota. Wayne climbed in the driver’s side and moved the seat back. I winced. Would my elderly car survive the drive?

  In minutes, we were squealing down the highway toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, my Toyota and I were squealing. Wayne was just driving—driving a lot faster than I thought the car could go.

  By the time we hit the bridge traffic, I was ready to talk about anything that would take my mind off the drive and the minutes ticking away on my watch. But there was only one other thing on my mind.

  “What was it about Steve?” I asked as Wayne handed the toll collector the bridge ticket. “There had to be something that he did, or said, or was, that killed him.”

  Wayne grunted, either at me or at the toll collector, and wove his way through the apres-bridge traffic toward Nineteenth Avenue. I wasn’t sure he’d even heard me.

  “Maybe it was what he said,” I went on. “What did he say his worst secret was, again?”

  Apparently Wayne had heard me because this time he answered.

  “Steve’s worst secret was a story he thought he should’ve written and didn’t.” Wayne’s mouth paused as he stomped the gas and darted in front of a tour bus. “A story that might have helped others, he said.”

  “Was the story about a Heartlink member?” I prodded.

  Wayne grunted again, gaining two car lengths as he did.

  “All right, maybe the story wasn’t about anyone who had anything to do with Heartlink,” I said. “Maybe someone we don’t even know found out about his story and—”

  “The key, Kate,” Wayne reminded me quietly. “Had to be one of us. They got the key at the potluck.”

  I put my head into my hands. How could I have forgotten? Probably the same way I’d forgotten about Aunt Dorothy. Denial is a powerful and effective strategy.

  I dropped my hands from my head as we whizzed onto Nineteenth Avenue.

  “So did Steve want to write a story about someone at the potluck?” I persisted.

  Wayne sighed. “Maybe,” he conceded. “Or maybe this has nothing to do with Steve’s worst secret, maybe it has to do with someone else’s worst secret, maybe a secret we don’t even know about.”

  “But who?” I muttered in frustration.

  Wayne just shrugged and ran a yellow light.

  I reviewed my list of murder suspects in silence as the cars blurred around me. And then I thought about Steve again. For all the nice things people had said about him, I’d sensed a nasty undercurrent, too. Isaac had called Steve a prig, and Janet had called him repressed. I’d never felt much of anything personal emanating from Steve Summers myself, except a strong sense of righteousness. Self-righteousness? I knew how annoying that could be. But being annoying was not punishable by death. Or was it?

  I played out a dozen scenarios in my head. Self-righteousness could lead a person to tell the police about someone’s drug use or someone’s son’s joy-riding, or to tell another person’s wife about an affair. But wouldn’t Steve’s respect for the rules of group confidentiality have inhibited any of those impulses? Wayne was probably right. If there was a secret involved, it was probably one we didn’t know about. And now there was another secret—murder.

  The road was opening up, even though my brains were snarled.

  We were almost to the airport. In rapid succession, Wayne moved from Highway 280 to 380 to 101, and then we were on our way over the overpass and around to the concourse. We sighted the airline logo and I yelled at Wayne to stop. He pulled into an illegal space a bus had just left.

  I jumped out of the car. It was three minutes to four.

  “I’ll park, and then I’ll find you,” Wayne yelled out at me. I could barely hear him over the roar of shuttles, busses, and cars, and the honking that had just begun behind us.

  I gave him a thumbs-up sign and ran into the terminal. I found Dorothy’s flight on the incoming airline monitor. It was on time. I jogged though the maze, stopping only for the metal detector. I bumped a young man as I ran and apologized. He had brown skin and deep, dark eyes that seemed to look back into mine as if…

  I started jogging again. I was a married woman. I shouldn’t have even noticed that man’s eyes, much less looked into them. This seemed to be happening way too often lately.

  Finally, I was at the gate. It was after four, but the plane had just begun to empty itself of passengers.

  I panted, wiped the sweat off my face, and belatedly wondered if I looked like the woman my Aunt Dorothy would have wanted me to grow into.

  And then my Aunt Dorothy came waltzing down the ramp, looking no different than she had the last time I’d seen her. A well-preserved sprite, Dorothy Koffenburger was not quite five feet or a hundred pounds. But her lack of earthly substance was made up for by the energy she radiated. The lines in her face all pointed to her smiling, mascaraed eyes. Her white hair was bound up into two twists that ended in curlicues atop her head. That day, she wore a sensible navy blue pantsuit that matched the two small navy canvas bags she carried. When she saw me, she dropped her bags and stretched out her arms.

  “Katie!” she greeted me, in a voice that seemed to shimmer with delight.

  I didn’t correct her, I just galloped the last few steps to meet her and wrapped her tiny frame in my arms. Aunt Dorothy was irresistible. I hadn’t forgotten this important fact, but I’d forgotten how it felt to be under her spell. Aunt Dorothy was the magic fairy godmother everyone wanted, and she was mine.

  After a good hug, I grabbed her luggage. It couldn’t have weighed more than a few pounds.

  “Way to go, Aunt Dorothy,” I congratulated her. “You know how to pack light.”

  “Oh, Katie, you’re so sweet, just like always,” she told me, reaching out her hand to pat my arm. “Of course, there’s a lot more where those came from. I checked most of my luggage.”

  “O
h,” I muttered. I kept my groan internal. Everyone’s favorite fairy godmother…with baggage.

  “This is just wonderful, Katie,” she chirped as we took the escalator down to the luggage carousel. “I was so thrilled when your mother called to tell me you’d asked for my advice as a wedding planner.”

  “Um…” I began, but decided that this wasn’t the time to tell her that it wasn’t my idea.

  “My favorite niece. What could be more perfect?” No, definitely not the right time.

  “Now, I know you and Wayne have some reservations about a formal wedding,” she assured me. My spirits lifted. Maybe she’d incurred psychic powers when her plane had landed in the Bay Area. “But it’s only the fear of the unknown.”

  I nixed the notion of psychic powers. I wasn’t afraid of the unknown. I was afraid of the known. I’d been married formally once, and look how that had turned out.

  “Actually, Wayne and I are happy as we are,” I began, but I didn’t know how to finish.

  “Of course, you are, my dear,” she trilled. “That’s what will make the ceremony so special!”

  We walked to the luggage carousel on that note, and Aunt Dorothy began to point.

  “Oooh, that one’s mine!”

  I snagged a navy blue suitcase that was heavy enough to have held Jimmy Hoffa’s remains.

  I had grabbed the third piece of luggage when someone put their hand on my shoulder. I spun around, ready to kick if necessary. But it was only Wayne, sweating. He must have run from the parking lot.

  “You found us,” I said, stating the obvious.

  He looked at the luggage that surrounded me and his eyebrows lowered.

  “Aunt Dorothy,” I said quickly. “This is my husband, Wayne Caruso.”

  Aunt Dorothy didn’t seem to notice Wayne’s lowered eyebrows, or his pitted skin or cauliflower nose, for that matter. She just smiled a smile that lit up her face and then attacked Wayne with a hug.

  “Oh, goodness,” she murmured when she let him go. “You are a big man, aren’t you? Katie must be so happy with you.”

  I wasn’t sure if I followed her logic, but I loved her for loving Wayne on sight.