The Cereal Murders gbcm-3

by Diane Mott Davidson

  “Hey! Don’t think I didn’t try. I say, ‘Not a car from the neighborhood? Not Fed Ex or UPS?’ She shakes her head. I go, ‘Not the usual mail person?’ ‘No, no, no,’ she says, ‘it was something it was too late for, just one instant, there and then gone.’ That’s all that registered with her. I say, ‘Too late for what? The mail?’ And she says, ‘I just don’t know.’ “

  “So you checked with all the delivery people, limousine people, and nobody was late for anything.”

  “Correct. Nada. Same as the Lakewood guys found.” He sipped his cold tea. “Then I see Ms. Audrey Coopersmith’s pickup truck parked out front of your house, and I think, ‘an old white pickup,’ the way one of the other neighbors said. Kathy Andrews’ old boyfriend drove a pickup, I found out. Would you say Audrey Coopersmith’s truck looks old?”

  “Old? I guess it’s not new and shiny… but why would Audrey steal some woman’s credit card in Lakewood and then beat her to death?”

  “Don’t know. The most frequent kind of credit-card fraud we have is a woman – excuse me, Miss G.– anyway, getting her friends’ cards and signing their names to her purchases. Audrey works in Denver at the bookstore, and maybe she goes across the street to Neiman-Marcus on her break, sees some gal make a purchase, and the saleslady says, ‘Thank you, Miss Andrews,’ and Miss Andrews says, ‘You can call me Kathy.’ So maybe Audrey, who is having all these money problems, thinks of Keith Andrews, a convenient place to dump the card if things got hot. Then again, maybe all this investigating he was doing for the paper got him on her path.”

  “Pretty farfetched, I’d say. I mean, you can see for yourself that we’re not exactly talking a designer wardrobe.”

  He smiled grimly. “But she was at that college advisory dinner, she has some unresolved feelings about her own past and present, and maybe all that got taken out on Kathy, and then Keith, Andrews.” Again the raised eyebrows. “And she was at the cafe today when you were there with the Dawsons and Miss Ferrell. Maybe she put the spider in the drawer and it was intended for someone else, like the college counselor. Was she at the school the day Arch found the rattler in his locker?”

  With a sickening feeling I remembered Audrey standing in the hall, telling me the headmaster wanted to see me. My finger ached dully. “Yes,” I said, “she was.”

  Schulz asked to use my phone. When he had finished telling someone to check on Audrey Coopersmith’s vehicle and background, he turned back toward me.

  “Actually, I do know a cure for black widow spider bites!’

  “Now you tell me.”

  “You gotta stand up first.”

  “‘Tom – “

  “You want to get better or not?”

  I stood, and as soon as I had, he reached down and scooped me up in his arms.

  “What are you doing?” I exclaimed when he was halfway down my front hall.

  He started up the staircase. “Guess. I got the afternoon off, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  In my bedroom he set me down on the bed, then kissed my finger all the way around the bite.

  “Better yet?” His smile was mischievous.

  “Why, I do believe I’m feeling some improvement, Officer.”

  He kissed my wrist, my forearm, my elbow. A tickle of desire began at the back of my throat. It was all I could do to keep from laughing as we undressed each other, especially when my bandaged right hand made me fumble. I reached for the fleshy expanse of Schulz’s back. Only the night before, I had begun to discover hidden curves and niches there. Schulz’s warm body snuggled in next to mine. His hands lingered on my skin. Tom Schulz was the opposite of John Richard’s knobby edges and angry, thrusting force. And when it was over, I wanted him to stay in my bed and never leave.

  “This is so great,” I murmured into his shoulder. “So you are feeling better.”

  “It’s a miracle. No more spider bite pain. You see, Officer, I planted the black widow – “

  We went off into a fit of giggles. Then we fell silent. Schulz tucked the sheets and blanket around my neck and shoulders until not a square centimeter of cold, foreign air could penetrate the warm pouch within. Knowing that the boys were due home late, I allowed myself to drift off to sleep. My mother was probably right to be suspicious. It was nice, in fact it was delicious to be so successfully up to something with this man in my house in the middle of the day.

  The sun had already begun its blazing retreat behind the mountains when I woke to see Schulz standing beside my bed. My alarm clock said 5:30.

  I said quietly, “The boys here yet?”

  “No. You stay put. I’m fixing dinner.” I got up anyway and took the doctor-ordered bath. As I was putting on clean clothes, trying in vain not to use my right hand, my phone rang. I dove for it, in case it was my mother. The last thing she needed was to hear Schulz’s voice ,again.

  “Goldy, you degenerate.”

  “Now what?”

  “Oh, tell me that policeman’s car has been outside your house for three hours so he can teach you about security.”

  “Give me a break, Marla. I got bitten by a black widow.”

  “Old news. And I’m sorry. That’s why I drove by, four times. I was worried about you. Of course, I didn’t want to interrupt anything exciting… .”

  “Okay, okay. Give me a little sympathy here. You wouldn’t believe this bite I’ve got.”

  “Giving you sympathy is what I hope Tom Schulz has been doing, and a whole lot more, sweetie pie. I am going to give you help tomorrow with whatever kind of catering things you’ve got going.”

  “But you don’t even cook!”

  Marla snorted. “After tomorrow, you’ll know why.” In the kitchen Schulz was playing country music on the radio and using a wok to steam vegetables. He had made a pasta dough that was resting, wrapped, on one of my counters, and he had grated two kinds of cheese and measured out cream and white wine.

  “Fettuccine Schulz,” he informed me as he jiggled the wok’s steamer tray. “How hard is it to make pasta in this machine? That dough’s ready.”

  I put a pasta plate on my large mixer and Schulz rolled the dough into walnut-sized pieces. Just as the machine began producing golden ribbons of fettuccine, we heard the boys trudging up the porch steps.

  I felt a pang of sudden nervousness. “What’s our story?”

  “Story for what?” He laid out handfuls of pasta to dry. “You got bitten and I’m helping out. They’re not going to say, Well, did you guys make love all afternoon? If they do, I’ll say” – he put his big hands around my waist and swung me around – “yes, yes, yes, I’m trying to force this woman to marry me by making mad passionate love to her at least once a day.”

  The door opened and I squealed at him in panic. He put me down lightly, looking unrepentant. I glanced around hastily for something to do. Julian and Arch rushed into the room, then stopped, gazing in silent awe at the masses of flowers.”

  “Gosh,” murmured Julian, a news sure travels fast in this town. All this for a spider bite?”

  I didn’t answer. Arch was giving me half a hug with one arm while keeping his other hand free to hold up my bandaged area and examine it. He pulled back and regarded me from behind his tortoiseshell-framed glasses.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course.”

  He closed one eye in appraisal. “But something’s going on. Sure it wasn’t anything worse than a spider bite, Mom? I mean, all these flowers. Are you sick?”

  “Arch! For heaven’s sake, I’m fine. Go wash your hands and get ready for dinner.”

  Saved by the chore. To my surprise, they both sprinted out, calling back and forth about the work they were going to do together that night. Julian had volunteered to help Arch construct a model of the Dawn Treader. Then they were going to go over Arch’s social studies homework. After the moon set, they were going to look for the Milky Way. Amazing.

  When they came downstairs we all delved into the pasta. The velvety fettuccine was bathed in a rich
cheese sauce studded with carrots, onions, broccoli, and luscious sun-dried tomatoes. It was not until we were eating the dessert, the final batch of leftover Red ‘n’ Whites, that Arch dropped his bombshell.

  “Oh,” he said without preliminaries. “I finally thought of something that someone warned me not to tattle about.” We all stopped talking, and held cookies in mid-bite. Arch looked at each of us with a rueful smile. He was a great one for dramatic effect.

  “Well, you know Mr. Schlichtmaier is kind of short and stocky? He works out. I mean with weights. I’ve seen him over at the rec center.”

  “Yes,” I said, impatient. “So?”

  “Well, one day I asked him if he used steroids to pump himself up.”

  “Arch!” I was shocked. “Why in the world would you do something like that?”

  Schulz and Julian couldn’t help it; they dropped their cookies and started laughing.

  “Well, I was thinking about starting to work out myself!” Arch protested. “And you know they’re always having those shows on TV about guys dying because they use those hormones. And now you have to be checked before races and games – “

  “Arch,” I said. It was not the first time I longed to throw a brick through the television. “What were you saying about tattling?”

  “So Schlichtmaier goes, ‘Steroids? Ach! Swear you won’t tell?’” Arch’s mouth twisted. “He laughed, though. I thought, weird, man. Anyway, that was a couple of days ago. Then the next day he says, ‘You won’t tattle on me?’ I say, ‘No problem, Mr. Schlichtmaier, you want to die of cancer, that’s up to you.’ He says, ‘You promise?’ Boring, man. I say, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ And then the snake thing happened and I forgot all about it.”

  Great. I looked at Schulz, who shrugged. Better to let go of it for now, especially after all we’d been through that day. Arch got up to clear the table. Julian offered to do the dishwashing. I walked out in the cool October night with Schulz.

  “Sounds like a joke, Miss G.,” he said, once again reading my mind. “Way to get a twelve-year-old kid to relax, have a relationship. Make a joke about artificial hormones.”

  “But you’re willing to suspect Audrey Coopersmith of murder based on the age of her truck.”

  He said, “You know we’re already checking on Schlichtmaier because of what you told us about the other gossip. If anything turns up, I’ll let you know.”

  When we arrived at the doors of his squad car, we did not kiss or hug. We did not act as if we were anything other than police officer and solid citizen. You never knew who might be looking. I felt happiness and sadness; I felt the tug of a growing intimacy drawing me as ineluctably as the receding tide takes the unwary swimmer out to unexpected depths. I looked into his eyes and thanked him aloud for his help. He saluted me, then pulled slowly away from the curb.

  I ran back inside and picked up the phone with the thumb and little finger of my right hand, then dialed with my left. In the dining room I could hear the cheerful voices of the boys as they constructed their ship.

  “Aspen Meadow Recreation Center,” came the answer on the other end after six rings.

  “What time does the weight room open in the morning?” I whispered.

  “Six. Why, you haven’t been here before?”

  “I’ve been there, just not to the weight room.”

  “Y’have to have an instructor the first time,” said the voice, suddenly bored.

  “Okay, okay, put me down for an instructor,” I said quickly, then gave my name. A flash of inspiration struck. “Does, uh, Egon Schlichtmaier teach over there, by any chance? I know he’s a language teacher somewhere – “

  “The German guy? Nah, Egon doesn’t teach. Sometimes he’s here in the morning, brings a teenager. I asked if he knew Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he goes, ‘He’s from Austria,’ like I was so dumb.” There was a pause. I could hear papers rustling. “I’ll put you down for Chuck Blaster. Twelve bucks. Wear sweats.” A dial tone.

  Oh, God. What had I done? Chuck Blaster? That couldn’t possibly be his professional name, could it? But I replaced the receiver and crept up to bed.

  He who wants to be a tattler…

  I was not convinced it was a joke.

  12

  The throbbing in my finger woke me up Wednesday morning just as the sunrise began to brighten the horizon. I was lying there, feeling exceedingly sorry for myself when the radio alarm blasted me six inches off the mattress. Blasted, yes. Not unlike Blaster, now part of my ruse for a confrontation with Egon Schlichtmaier. But an early morning session lifting weights with one hand virtually out of commission was not my idea of fun. It seemed the mattress was begging for my return. I ignored its siren call and slipped carefully into a gray sweatsuit, stretched through the yoga salute to the sun and five more asanas, and tried not to think about lifting anything.

  In the kitchen I wrote the boys a note. Gone to rec center weight room. This would engender surprised looks, no doubt. My double espresso spurted merrily into a new Elk Park Prep carry-along mug, a heavy plastic container that the seventh-grade parents had been requested (read “strong-armed”) to purchase at the beginning of the school year as a fund-raiser for the kids’ trip to a self-esteem workshop in Denver. Afterward Arch informed me he wasn’t going to think positive unless he absolutely had to. And nobody can make me, he added. That’s what I should have said when it was mug-buying time.

  The grass underfoot was slick with frost, and my breath condensed into clouds of moisture in the cold October air. The van engine turned over with a purposeful roar. I ordered myself to think strong and muscular. Maybe I needed a positive-thinking workshop.

  The van chugged obediently over streets whitened by a thin sheet of ice. Aspen Meadow Lake appeared around a bend – a brilliant, perfectly still mirror of early light. The evergreens ringing the shore reflected inverted pines that looked like downward-pointing arrows trapped in glass. Early snows had stripped the nearby aspens and cottonwoods of their leaves. Skeletons of branches revealed the previous summer’s birds’ nests, now abandoned. Without the trees’ masking cloak of foliage, these deep, thick havens of twigs looked surprisingly vulnerable.

  Like Keith Andrews.

  And so did our household seem vulnerable now too, with accidents or pranks that were becoming increasingly serious. Julian appeared to be coming apart at the seams.

  And I had been nastily injured trying to deal with the Stanford rep’s one and only visit to Elk Park Prep. As the caffeine fired up the far reaches of my brain, I tried to reconstruct: Why was someone targeting Arch? If indeed the spider in the drawer was intended for someone, was I that someone?

  Without meaning to, I wrenched the wheel to the left l and winced when pain shot up my finger. I’d have to watch the bite area with the weights. Either that or risk passing out. The Mountain Journal’s too cute headline would read: CATERER A DUMBBELL?

  An image of the dreaded simile-speaking headmaster invaded my thoughts. Perkins certainly had not been -overeager to find the snake-hanger who plagued Arch. But in the minds of most, which was what Perkins was after all concerned with, he might be considered successful. In his decade at the school, Alfred Perkins had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for a much-publicized classroom expansion and renovation. He had masterminded a building program that included an outdoor pool and gymnasium. During parent orientation, some of the friendlier parents-of which I had to admit there were some – informed me that Perkins had superbly weathered the expected crises of administrative purges, teachers quitting or being fired, and students being expelled. Still, it seemed to me that Alfred Perkins hid behind his great wall of similes without letting too many folks know what was truly transpiring in his silvery-haired noggin. Perhaps that was how he and Elk Park Preparatory School had survived together unscarred, if not unruffled, for ten years.

  Still, Perkins must view the past month as being unusually fraught with crises. First there was the splashy story in the Denver Post about the students’ slumpi
ng SAT scores. Then, if you believed Marla’s version of town gossip, there had been the threat of local newspaper coverage -by ambitious, clever Keith Andrews – of a sex scandal. Or some kind of scandal. After the coverage the Post had given the SAT scores, what they would do with a teacher – sleeps-with-students firebomb at the same school was barely imaginable. And then the most recent crisis, a whole order of magnitude more severe: the valedictorian ,had been killed-murdered on school property. Whether Headmaster Alfred Perkins could survive this lethal threat to his precious school’s shaky stability and not-so-pristine reputation remained to be seen. How heavily he was involved in, or even worried about, these setbacks was a question mark too.

  The word from Julian was that Perkins’ tall, center-forward son, Macguire, despite his poor third-quarter standing in the senior class, had a good chance at a basketball school-North Carolina State, Indiana, UNLV. The acne-covered Perkins’ dull voice and drooping eyelids had been eerily impassive even in the face of the chaos surrounding his classmate’s brutal death. Macguire must be quite a disappointment to his status-seeking father, if not to himself. On the other hand, like many comics who acted the dunce, Macguire may have built up his own wall against caring.

  I swerved too late to avoid a muddy puddle, then began the ascent to the rec center parking lot. Built in the seventies, the Aspen Meadow Recreation Center was a long, low redbrick building on the hill behind the town’s public high school. “The rec,” as it was affectionately known in town, predated the athletic club and catered to a different local clientele-working-class folks. Anyone who had to labor for a living didn’t have a prayer of an early morning workout at the infinitely tonier Aspen Meadow Athletic Club, which didn’t even open its doors until ten.

  I pulled the van between the faded yellow lines of a space. To my astonishment, quite a few hardy souls were already parked in the rec center lot. Somehow, I had imagined I would be doing this bodybuilding work in solitude. I devoutly hoped these fitness freaks were swimming laps. The thought that someone I knew might see me in sweats was more than I could bear. My shoes gritted over gravel sprinkled with rock salt to melt the snow on the rec steps. Supported by an area-wide tax imposed by the residents themselves (since Aspen Meadow was fiercely proud of its unincorporated status), the rec was a no-nonsense sort of place with an indoor pool (shared with the public high school), a gym, a meeting room for senior citizens, and three racquetball courts. Here there were no steam rooms, no saunas, no massages, no tanning booths, no carpeted aerobics room, no outdoor pool. I didn’t even know where the rec’s weight room was until the woman at the desk, who at the age of forty had decided she needed braces, told me. She took my twelve dollars and then, through a mouth crisscrossed with vicious-looking metal, announced that they’d recently converted one of the racquetball courts.