Stalker (9780307823557)

by Nixon, Joan Lowery

  As it slammed against the curb and bounced into the street, one end ripped off and the package exploded.

  The door banged open and Grannie rushed out of the house. “What was that?” she yelled.

  Jennifer merely pointed.

  “You’re shakin’,” Grannie said. She touched Jennifer’s arm. “It scared you, too, huh?”

  “Yes.” Jennifer found her voice.

  “I don’t get it,” Grannie said. She squinted, peering toward the remnants of paper and cardboard and glass that littered the street and sidewalk in front of their house. A few neighbors had come from their houses, some of them looking up and down the street in bewilderment. “Did it fall off a truck or what?”

  “I—I’m not sure where it came from,” Jennifer said. She took a few wobbly steps and managed to walk toward the street. Grannie followed her.

  “Looks like part of a bottle,” Grannie said as they bent over to examine some of the pieces. “And look here—somethin’ leaked out of it.”

  Jennifer picked up a shard of glass from the dark splatter and smelled it. Rum.

  Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

  “You’re still shakin’,” Grannie said. She tugged at Jennifer’s shoulder. “You’re workin’ too hard, Jennifer Lee. Goin’ to be nothin’ but a bundle of nerves if you don’t slow down a mite.”

  Jennifer stood, taking deep breaths to keep from screaming. Finally she said, “I’ll clean it up, Grannie.”

  “Good idea,” Grannie said. “Wouldn’t want to leave that glass in the street.” She headed back toward the house as though the matter were over and settled. The neighbors, their curiosity apparently not strong enough to last, had already disappeared inside their homes.

  “Grannie,” Jennifer said, hurrying to catch up with her, “this wasn’t anything much, not even interesting enough to talk about. We ought to just forget it.”

  “Fine,” Grannie said. “But don’t forget it until after you sweep up the mess.”

  As Jennifer swept the rubble into a dustpan and emptied the dustpan contents into a paper bag, her fear turned to anger against this person who had tried to injure or kill her. She wouldn’t let him win.

  He hadn’t stopped her. He had simply succeeded in helping her make up her mind as to what she really wanted to do.

  Tell Lucas about this? No way. After what he had said to Grannie about protecting Jennifer, she’d simply find herself sitting at home while Lucas did the work.

  Uh-uh. She was going to the Trax home the minute it got dark. And she was going to hunt for something else that might incriminate the person who wrote those notes.

  She was definitely going. Tonight.

  20

  One little, two little, three little, four little … squashed bugs.

  Stella, you got greedy.

  Darryl, you thought blackmail would get you what you wanted.

  Margo, you were scared enough to run off at the mouth.

  And Jennifer, poor Jennifer, you just might have got close enough to find out. I couldn’t take the chance.

  Sorry, Jennifer Lee Wilcox, but I couldn’t let you get in my way.

  I’ll find Stella’s handbag. I’m good enough to find it, no matter where she’s hidden it.

  I’ll find it. Tonight.

  21

  The call came from Lucas while Jennifer was cutting zucchini chunks into a pan of water. She quickly dried her hands on a wad of paper towels and grabbed for the telephone before Grannie could get it.

  “Did you see Bobbie?” Lucas asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “She didn’t tell me anything. She asked questions. No one had told her about Darryl. I thought she deserved to know that, but I told her not to tell anyone.”

  “I assume you did have enough sense to keep quiet about certain other things?”

  She sighed. “Of course I did.”

  “Did Bobbie remember who was in any of those pictures?”

  Jennifer wanted to tell him about her feeling that Bobbie did remember something but had kept it to herself. Forget it. It was only a hunch. She didn’t want to disturb Lucas’s opinion of Bobbie. “No,” she said, and added, “You know there were an awful lot of those snapshots on the wall, and I couldn’t remember just which ones were missing.”

  “Why are you trying so hard to defend her?”

  She sucked in her breath as though he had hit her. He didn’t miss a thing. “Don’t do that, Lucas! I was just telling you what happened.”

  “So you didn’t find out anything.”

  She thought about the two notes in which the handwriting matched perfectly and the package label—long blown into nothing but scraps—that had been written by the same person. How could she tell him about the notes and not about the label, too? “What about you?” she countered. “Mrs. Aciddo wasn’t shopping all day long, was she?”

  “I left the tail a couple of hours ago. I wanted to follow a call I picked up on my police-band radio.” He paused. “They found a woman’s body floating in the ship channel. It turned out to be Margo Zeitlinger.”

  It took a moment for what Lucas had said to register in Jennifer’s mind. “Margo Zeitlinger? Who is Mar—Oh, no! Lucas! You mean the Margo from LaSalon!”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Now she longed to tell him everything, to pour out what had happened in a rush of words and tears, the way she would if she were a little kid needing to be comforted. But she wasn’t a kid. She was old enough to be responsible for her own actions, to make her own decisions.

  “Do the police know who killed her?” She could hear the waver in her voice. Lucas had probably picked it up, too.

  “Not yet,” he answered.

  There was a long pause during which Jennifer battled her feelings, finally blurting out, “Lucas, can we go to the Trax house tonight?”

  “I’d have to get permission,” he said. “It would be hard to do at this hour, especially since it’s Saturday. Courts are closed on the weekends, and we might have trouble hunting up a judge who could issue a search warrant.”

  “Why do we have to have a search warrant? Don’t tell me all private eyes get search warrants.”

  “Some of them don’t, but we do. I’m an officer, and I know how much better we’ll do the job if we work along with the police.”

  “You’re an ex-cop,” she mumbled.

  He ignored her. “And if we’re dealing with an emergency situation, it would be better to step aside and call in the police to take over.”

  “Why do we have to go through all that red tape?”

  “I thought I’d have got it through your head by this time. We go by the book, Jennifer, because that’s the way to do it right. Why do you want to go tonight? What have you got in mind?”

  There it was in her lap again. “I just thought we could go through the papers in Mrs. Trax’s desk.”

  “The police have done that pretty thoroughly.”

  “There could be something they missed, because they didn’t know what they were looking for.”

  “Just exactly what have you got in mind?”

  “I just want to look through the papers. When we were there before—” No, she thought. If I tell you about the paper I stuck in my jeans and took away with me, you’ll just read me out again. No way. I’ll handle it myself. “—we didn’t have time to really look through everything.”

  “This second murder puts a new light on things,” he said. “If it’s tied into the credit card scam and the murder of Stella Trax, then we’ll have to back off and stay out of the way of the police and FBI. We don’t want to cause any problems.”

  “But clearing Bobbie is more important than anything else!”

  “We’ll talk about this tomorrow. Not tonight.”

  She recognized the weariness in his voice. He wasn’t a young detective. He wasn’t the agile private eye on the movie screen. He was retired, and his arthritis hurt him, and he was awfully stubborn.

  “
Sometimes I can be right, too,” she muttered.

  “Jennifer,” he said. “You must learn that progress usually comes slowly, step by step. You have to go by the book.”

  “The book again!” She quickly added, “Sorry, Lucas. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just get—well—”

  “Impatient.” He finished her sentence. “Good night. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Jennifer slowly replaced the receiver on the telephone, shaking her head at an invisible Lucas, and said aloud, “By tomorrow, dear old by-the-book Lucas Maldonaldo, I bet I’ll have enough information for us to know the answers and get Bobbie out of jail.”

  Grannie came snuffling into the kitchen. She blew her nose and said, “I just writ a letter to Cousin Tessie, over in Lubbock. Told her about your father and that woman and how I’d have to be lookin’ for another place to lay my head afore long. Could be Tessie might be lonely, her bein’ a widow now, and will ask me to move in with her.”

  “Oh, Grannie,” Jennifer said. “You don’t even like Tessie.”

  “That’s true. She always was mealymouthed, and a downright whimper-whiny when she wanted attention, and I won’t say she’s improved any as she’s got older, but I can’t be choosy.”

  Jennifer put an arm around her grandmother’s shoulders. “You don’t have to worry about where you’ll live,” she said.

  Grannie let out a long, pitiful sigh. “You’re the lucky one who don’t have to worry. You’ll be married and away come graduation time. By the way, you goin’ out with Mark tonight?”

  Jennifer shook her head and went back to the zucchini, slapping a lid on the pot and putting it on the stove. “He has the late shift at the supermarket.”

  Grannie lifted her head and sniffed the air. “Somethin’ smells good.”

  “It’s the meat loaf in the oven. Dinner will be ready as soon as Dad and Gloria get here.”

  “I’d set the table for you, but I’ve been havin’ trouble with my feet again today,” Grannie said. “I can help best by just gettin’ out of your way.” She reached for the nearby pack of cigarettes and had one lit by the time she had left the room.

  Jennifer wished everyone would get out of her way. It was hard to wait for dinner to be over and her father and Gloria to settle down in the living room. Grannie joined them, turning on the television and grumbling loudly to herself, “Probably don’t even like the same shows as I do.”

  “Dad, could I borrow your car for a little while?” Jennifer asked.

  “Where you off to, hon?”

  “Just something about Bobbie that I need to do. Okay?”

  “Well, I guess so, hon. You’re old enough to know what you’re doing.”

  “Huh!” Grannie said, looking pointedly at Gloria. “Bein’ old enough doesn’t necessarily mean somebody knows what they’re doin’.”

  “Are your car keys on your dresser, Dad?” As he nodded, she said, “I’ll be back soon, I hope.”

  In just a few minutes she was driving her father’s old dark blue pickup truck down Carancahua toward the Trax house.

  She slowly drove around the block, studying the house, making sure there was no one around. Mrs. Aciddo was at home, and the lights in the front part of her house were on, but her window shades were down. The other neighbors on the block were either away or behind drawn shades and drapes. She was breathing fast, and her hands were so damp they slipped on the steering wheel; but Jennifer knew she could do it.

  She parked the truck on the street behind the Trax house, cutting through the neighbor’s yard as she had done before. Somewhere on the block a dog barked, and she stiffened, waiting, sweating, until she realized the dog wasn’t barking at her.

  Carefully she moved across the backyard of the Trax house, stopping under the window to catch her breath. Inch by inch she raised the window, climbed inside and waited again, listening.

  The house was alive with small night movements: the scratching of a tree branch as it moved against the roof in the breeze, the slow drip of a faucet in the kitchen, an occasional pop or creak as the house settled and slept. When Jennifer was satisfied that she was the only one inside the house, she turned and quietly lowered the window back into place. Carefully she loosened the drapes at each side of the window, pulling them together, covering the window so that no one could look in and see her.

  This time she had brought a pen-size flashlight. It had a small beam, enough to see what might be in Mrs. Trax’s desk, but not enough to attract attention outside the house.

  She snapped on the light and made her way to the desk.

  “Someone’s been here!” she whispered as she stared at the mess of papers scrambled on top of the desk.

  Like an instant flash the picture of another desk came into her mind and was gone. “Wait!” she said. “A desk … a messy desk—”

  The picture came back, and she knew. She knew where she had seen the scrawly handwriting before. On Mr. Biddle’s desk.

  Jennifer leaned against the wall, trying to think things out. There had been lots of papers on that other desk, all in the same handwriting. It had to be Mr. Biddle’s handwriting.

  And if so, then it must have been Mr. Biddle who—

  She walked to the wall where the framed photographs hung and studied them one by one. She had never paid much attention to them, sometimes noticing when Mrs. Trax had added a new one, sometimes wondering what it would be like to have a photographer in a nightclub come over to take your picture while everyone around stared to see who you were, and the man next to you put an arm around your shoulders and tried to look important. There had been a couple of photos like that. Now there was only one.

  And there was a blank space in the bottom row among the ones added during the past couple of years.

  Jennifer scrunched up her eyes trying to visualize those pictures, trying to remember if the chubby, bald Mr. Biddie had been grinning cheek-to-cheek with the beaming Stella Trax. Mr. Biddle with the giggles, with the mean sense of humor, who had sent her on a fruitless trip to the wrong investigators. Mr. Biddle who had a briefcase filled with nasty photographs to speed a divorce, who was hurrying to court.

  On Saturday.

  Jennifer’s head snapped up as though she’d been jerked on a line. Lucas had said the courts didn’t operate on the weekends. Mr. Biddle had been lying. Why?

  She snapped off the flashlight, trying to think. Alice had said something about a skinny wharf rat. For an instant Jennifer could picture the man she had bumped into coming out of Biddle’s office. Somehow he must fit in. The questions led to answers, but the answers led to other questions. She needed to talk to Lucas.

  From behind the curtains came the scratching of the window being opened.

  Jennifer took a step toward the front door, then realized that whoever was coming in the window would hear the door being opened and would go after her. Frantically she watched a hand grabbing the curtains, pushing them aside, as a man’s leg was thrown over the sill.

  It took only seconds to squeeze past the rickety end table to a spot behind the large armchair that stood askew in the corner of the room, the corner nearest the kitchen. The ceramic lamp on the table wobbled as her feet caught in the lamp cord, then settled back into place. She breathed shallowly as she heard a thump, then footsteps in the room. Someone walked close to the chair and entered the kitchen. She could hear a drawer being opened and closed. A beam of light drew a wide yellow circle on the floor. The circle came near, sweeping across the floor.

  From her hiding place Jennifer watched the track of the beam until it hit the mirror on the far wall and reflected the man who was holding Stella Trax’s flashlight.

  It was Elton Krambo.

  Jennifer weakly leaned against the wall, relieved that it was only Elton. And she’d been so frightened. She didn’t like Elton, but at least she didn’t have to be afraid of him now that she knew Mr. Biddle was the dangerous one.

  She had put her hands on the floor, ready to climb out of her hiding p
lace, when she heard a voice from the direction of the window. “Just keep those hands up nice and high, Elton. If you move I’ll shoot you.”

  Some grunting and puffing followed. Jennifer knew that Mr. Biddle was climbing into the room.

  Elton didn’t answer. Soon there was a thump as Mr. Biddle landed on the floor.

  “You knew about the window,” Elton said.

  “So did you, apparently.”

  “I used to live here. I have a right to be here.”

  “I have a right, too,” Mr. Biddle said. “Stella seems to have hidden some property of mine. Maybe you’ve seen it. I think it’s inside a very large handbag.” His voice became taut as a line holding a five-pound fighting snapper. “Or maybe that’s also what you’re here for—the handbag.”

  “Look,” Elton said, “we understand each other. I even did time without giving away your game. I’m not about to undercut you. Whatever you want the handbag for, that’s your business. I want it for the money and bankbooks that are in it. You know Stella. She kept everything of value in that handbag.”

  “You’re asking me to trust you, Elton? Well, for the moment I will.” Mr. Biddle snickered as though that were a huge joke. “Suppose we look for that handbag together.”

  “Fair enough,” Elton said.

  “Where do you suggest we look?”

  “I wish I knew. Stella used all sorts of tricks to keep us from spying on her.”

  “Not very clever, were you? Well, a woman usually keeps her handbag nearby. I’m guessing on her bedroom.”

  “I don’t think so,” Elton said. “I think we should look in the kitchen.”

  The flashlight moved toward her, and Jennifer squatted back against the wall, behind the protection of the broad chair.

  “Better yet. I have a flashlight too, so I’ll search the bedroom and you look through the kitchen.”

  Jennifer watched Elton’s legs move past her. He was in the kitchen only a few seconds when there was a thump and a curse.

  Biddle ran from Stella’s bedroom into the living room, calling in a low voice, “What was that? What happened?”