Murder Most Mellow (A Kate Jasper Mystery)

by Girdner, Jaqueline

  “It’s someone with a VCR,” I said after a moment. Suddenly it seemed easy. I straightened my shoulders. “So all we have to do is find out who’s involved that has a VCR.”

  “Probably everyone in this case has a VCR,” Feiffer said, sighing. So much for easy.

  “Well, I don’t have one,” I insisted loudly, unwilling to give up the comfort of an easy answer.

  “Everyone but you, then,” he growled.

  I looked him in the eye. Was he giving up already?

  “Oh, we’ll check into it,” he assured me. But he didn’t look excited about it.

  “How about tracing it?” I asked. “Can’t you find out where the call was made from?”

  “Maybe,” he said glumly. “But if it’s a local call we’re out of luck. And even if it wasn’t, I doubt that the person who called was stupid enough to do it from their own telephone.” He paused. “What time did the call come in?”

  I thought for a moment. “Sometime this afternoon,” I said slowly. “I was out for a couple of hours after you left the first time.”

  He gave me an accusing look. Did he know I was out sleuthing? Then he sighed. “We’ll do what we can,” he said apathetically.

  His lack of enthusiasm was catching. I hung my head and hoped the death threat wasn’t really serious. Fat chance! About as good as the chances of being only a little pregnant.

  “I have a question for you,” barked Sergeant Feiffer, jarring me out of my reverie. “Are you mixed up in anything else besides this Sarah Quinn business? Some other ‘case’ that someone is warning you off of?”

  “I don’t think so,” I mumbled. Then I considered the question more thoroughly. There was no one I could think of in my personal life. Except… Wayne. Wayne wanted me off the case. No, not Wayne, I told myself firmly. A business matter? I was late on some orders. But people don’t threaten gag-gift peddlers with death, do they?

  “No,” I told him firmly.

  “Well, that’s a relief!” Feiffer snapped. He lowered his head so he could glare directly into my eyes. “Now we just have to worry about one person murdering you. A person who has already killed once. Are you listening to me?”

  The hairs went up on the back of my neck. My childhood had taught me that a question like that always precedes something unpleasant. But I nodded, mesmerized.

  “I want you to stop interfering with this investigation,” he enunciated carefully, as if for a deaf person. “We will take care of it. Don’t ask any more questions. Don’t discuss it with anyone. Do you understand?”

  I nodded my head again, vigorously this time. I had understood his words. I would decide later if I was going to abide by them.

  “Now, if at any time you feel that you are in a dangerous situation, phone us immediately,” he continued. Then he changed direction. “Do you have anyone you can stay with?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I mumbled automatically. I thought of Wayne, then dismissed the thought. “I do my business from my house, so I can’t just go stay somewhere else,” I said in a stronger voice.

  “I would consider taking a little vacation from your business,” he said, enunciating carefully again.

  I blinked. He was serious.

  “Yeah, I can see by your face that you won’t,” he rumbled. “But at least stay close to a phone. And open your door to no one, I mean no one.”

  He went on in this vein for a full fifteen minutes before he left. Even Howard Hughes would have rebelled at the restrictions on human contact that he suggested. Nevertheless, I thought about Feiffer’s suggestions. I sat in my comfy chair and thought about them long and hard. But in the final analysis, one thing was quite clear to me. I was never going to feel fully safe until I found out who had killed Sarah.

  I looked at my watch. It was almost four, time to leave for my appointment with Sarah’s ex-business partner, Myra Klein of Word Inc. I paused for two final seconds to consider Sergeant Feiffer’s advice, then got in my Toyota and drove.

  All it took was one step into the corporate suite of offices that housed Word Inc. to realize that the company was thriving. A well-manicured receptionist at the desk offered me a seat on a mauve couch and buzzed an office somewhere down the luxuriously carpeted hall. Sinking into the couch, I looked up at soft-edged paintings of orchids. A tasteful sign on the receptionist’s desk assured customers of the willingness of Word Inc. to do the best job possible. There was no clickety clack of typewriter keys, only the soft hum of computers and piped music. Was this the same music that Peter had on his telephone system, or were there varieties of canned music?

  Before I could answer my own question, a petite blonde in a teal suit and high heels arrived to usher me into Myra Klein’s office.

  Myra was a tall, slender woman, dressed for success in a well-tailored navy blue suit with obligatory red scarf. But despite the stylish business suit, there was something about her that was just plain mousy. If they had been casting for the part of a schoolmarm, she would have won it. High cheekbones, a long thin nose and circles under her pale eyes defined her stiff face. She stood and offered a cold damp hand to me. I shook it gingerly.

  “I understand you were a friend of Sarah’s,” Myra said. Her voice was as pale as her eyes. “Won’t you have a seat?”

  There was an awkward silence as I tried to think of what my next line was supposed to be. I couldn’t say, “Sarah has told me so much about you,” because she hadn’t. And I didn’t want to say anything glib about a “loss,” because I wasn’t sure Sarah’s death was a loss to Myra.

  “It looks like Word Inc. is doing well,” I offered.

  I must have said the right thing because Myra’s face relaxed. She allowed herself a small smile as she resumed her own seat.

  “Yes, we are,” she agreed in a breathy rush. “We are doing quite well, even without Sarah Quinn.” I detected more than a little hostility in the way she pronounced Sarah’s name. I kept quiet. Myra tapped her fingers on her desk as she went on. “Sarah may have kept a ten per cent interest in Word Inc., but she hasn’t bothered to grace us with her presence for a very long time.”

  “Oh,” I said, leaning forward in my chair. “I suppose Sarah…” I trailed off invitingly.

  Myra just stared back at me, her face stiff again.

  “I thought maybe you could give me a little background on Sarah,” I muddled on. “I’ve only known her for a few years. And she rarely talks about her past… or talked about her past,” I corrected myself.

  Myra sighed. “Sarah and I go way back,” she murmured. She leaned back in her padded leather chair and looked up at the ceiling. “It must be twenty-five, maybe thirty years now. We shared a dorm room in college, you know, University of Pennsylvania.” She brought her eyes down from the ceiling and met my gaze.

  “It’s hard to imagine Sarah in college,” I prompted. Myra gave me a vague smile. I plodded on. “I mean she always acted like she just spontaneously appeared on this earth in full bloom. She did have parents, didn’t she? Family?”

  “Oh, yes,” Myra answered. She leaned back to look up at the ceiling again. “I met her mother quite a few times. Mrs. Quinn was a very sweet woman. She seemed totally impervious to Sarah’s shenanigans.” Myra smiled softly again, lost in some memory. “Sarah would try to shock her mother by telling her about sex, drugs, religion—whatever she was into—and her mother would just nod and say ‘Isn’t that nice’ or ‘Isn’t that interesting.’ It just drove Sarah crazy.”

  I chuckled. Myra leaned forward and flashed an unexpected grin in my direction. Her face looked alive with that grin. She went on with more enthusiasm.

  “I remember once, Mrs. Quinn was visiting and Sarah said to her, ‘Mom, I’ve got some heroin. Would you like to shoot up with me?’ and Mrs. Quinn says, ‘No thank you, dear, but you go right ahead.’ “ Myra giggled in a little-girl way that clashed with her navy blue suit. “You should have seen the look on Sarah’s face. She was incensed. And, of course, she didn’t really have any h
eroin, so she ended up looking ridiculous.”

  I laughed aloud. I could just see it. “So that’s where Sarah learned how to drive people up the wall,” I said. “From her mother.”

  Myra shrugged and leaned back again. “Mr. Quinn never visited,” she continued. “I think he and Sarah argued, and he got the worst of it, so he stayed away. She was really wild then.”

  Myra moved her head back and forth slowly, remembering. “Sarah changed her major every semester, breezed through her classes, and spent the rest of her time ‘Living’ with a capital L. I was her best friend, as much as you could be a best friend to someone like Sarah. And I was allowed to live through her vicariously.

  She did all the things that I was afraid to do and shared them with me. I lived through her drug experiments and cosmic insights and her endless string of lovers.” Myra’s tone deepened. “I even got her throwaways. My first husband came to me on the rebound from Sarah.” She frowned.

  “Was Sarah ever married?” I asked quickly.

  “Ah, yes,” Myra said, meeting my eyes once more. “In our third year of college she up and left for India to find ‘spiritual insight.’ She sent me a postcard saying she had finally found a man she could learn from, and that she had married him. He had some Indian name, but I think he was really an American. She sent one long letter to me about the joys of being married to a ‘spiritual master.’ She was calling herself Serena.” Myra snorted derisively. “As if Sarah could ever be serene! Then I didn’t hear from her for a while. A few years later I got a postcard from New Mexico. She didn’t mention the husband.” She shook her head as she smiled softly.

  “Do you think she’s still married to this guy?” I asked.

  “No,” Myra answered briskly. “Sarah was quite practical about legal details. However, I think he actually managed to… to dominate her somehow. She probably never forgave him. She certainly never mentioned him again. And she went back to calling herself Sarah.”

  Myra tapped a finger on the armrest of her chair and smiled politely at me. Was she getting ready to throw me out?

  “Have you met Nick Taos?” I asked. Keep that ball rolling.

  “Oh, you mean Herb,” she answered. She didn’t just giggle this time, she laughed heartily. “Is he still doing those sculptures?” she asked, rolling her eyes upwards.

  I nodded, politely joining with her in laughter, although I wasn’t sure exactly what we were laughing at.

  “You know, Herb wasn’t always so strange,” Myra said earnestly. “He really is, or was, a good artist. He was just overwhelmed by Sarah.”

  I nodded.

  She continued. “Herb moved into that house and let Sarah take more and more responsibility for him until…until…” Myra threw up her hands, searching for the right words. “Until he lost the knack of taking care of himself,” she finished. Bitterness had crept into her breathy voice. Was she just talking about Nick? Or was she talking about herself? “Sarah tended to overwhelm people like that. Her death is probably the best thing that could happen to him, the poor man.”

  A button on her telephone lit up. “Excuse me,” she said and picked it up. She murmured soothingly and efficiently to whoever was on the other end. She was a good businesswoman. It was hard to remember that when she talked about Sarah. After she hung up the telephone, she rose from her desk, ready to usher me out.

  I stayed glued to my chair. “Have you seen Nick lately?” I asked.

  Myra shook her head. I pretended I was a cop and gave her a long, searching look. It worked! She let out a small sigh and lowered herself into her chair again.

  “I haven’t seen Herb, Nick, for a long time,” she said. “Not since Sarah and I parted company. In fact, he had become pretty reclusive before that.” She stared at the ceiling with all of the light gone from her face. Was she thinking about Nick or about the split-up with Sarah? I couldn’t tell.

  “How’d you and Sarah end up in business together?” I asked.

  Myra brought her eyes down to mine. “I hadn’t heard from Sarah, except for a few postcards over the years,” she said, rushing through her words. “And in the meantime, I’d moved to sunny California with my second husband. Then my second husband walked out on me like the first, only he left me with two kids. So there I was, the mother of two children with a useless degree in anthropology and an equally useless minor in art history.”

  She stretched her face into an unnatural grimace. I nodded sympathetically. How many women have lived some variation of this story?

  “So I started freelancing as a typist. And one of my customers had me trained on a word processor. Word processors were a new technology then. Most people were still using typewriters. Anyway, I got a lot of word-processing work and I was doing fairly well. Then Sarah showed up.” Myra looked up again. Was this it? Was she going to throw me out?

  “How’d she find you?” I asked quickly.

  “I really don’t know,” Myra answered. She began pacing. I relaxed. She wasn’t going to throw me out. “She just had that knack, you know, of showing up and acting like she had just gone around the corner for cigarettes or something instead of having been out of your life for ten or fifteen years.”

  I nodded. I could imagine.

  Myra was pacing faster now. And talking faster. “So Sarah showed up and asked what I was doing. I told her. Then she started asking if I had more business than I could handle, and why didn’t I have any employees. Blah, blah, blah!” Her angry syllables echoed off the walls. “The next thing I knew we were Word Inc. and raking in business. And we were best friends again. I really loved her, like I did during our school years. I began relying on her emotionally again.” Her voice deepened. “That was my mistake.”

  Myra stopped pacing and turned to me. I squirmed in my chair. I could feel her anger, even smell its acrid scent. “I want to use the full potential of the computer, and of my mind!” she pronounced.

  I jerked in my chair involuntarily. She had done a perfect imitation of Sarah’s voice. I shivered. Myra was staring at me now. No, she was staring through me. And her pale eyes were full of hatred.

  - Nine -

  Myra began pacing at full speed again. Her voice paced with her. “Sarah told me she wanted to use her ‘full potential,’ and then she was gone,” Myra rapped out. “Not from Marin, but from my life. She sold me most of her company shares. Then she left me for newer and better things. I couldn’t believe I’d been taken again!” As she paced, Myra aimed a glance in my general direction, but her pale, angry eyes never connected with mine. I suppressed the urge to wave my hand in front of her face. She probably wouldn’t have seen it anyway.

  She was too busy railing. “By the time I realized how angry I was, Sarah was gone, and I couldn’t tell her,” she ranted on. “We talked a few times after that, but she deflected me any time I wanted to talk about my feelings. All she wanted was her checks in the mail! I was left with a successful business and a load of bitterness.”

  Myra came to a halt in back of her chair. She rested her hands on its leather and looked at me, seeing me this time.

  Her voice softened. “Sarah gave me a tremendous boost financially. I couldn’t have done it without her. But she ran my feelings over in the process. I haven’t seen her in over five years, and we both still live in Marin.” She circled back around her chair and flopped down into it like a spent boxer.

  “Sarah did that kind of thing, all right,” I whispered. I didn’t know what else to say. Myra had been badly hurt by Sarah’s betrayal.

  I tried to think of a tactful way to ask Myra what had happened to Sarah’s ten per cent upon her death. But she was talking again, in a soft murmur now.

  “So after years of therapy, I had finally decided I’d talk to her, have it out with her,” she sighed. She looked at the surface of her desk as if for answers. “It wasn’t just her. It was the pattern in my life.” She raised her empty hands in the air. “I never was able to tell my father what I felt because he died before I made
up my mind. And I don’t even know where my ex-husbands are. So I was going to talk to Sarah. And now she’s dead.” Myra shook her head slowly and sadly.

  I shook my head with her. I was all out of words. My stomach was churning with her turmoil. And a nasty thought kept intruding into my mind. How therapeutic might it have been for Myra to murder Sarah?

  Myra stood up abruptly. Had she realized the content of my thoughts? Guiltily, I jumped out of my own chair. She offered me her hand. It was even colder and wetter than before. I murmured my thanks for her help, all the while restraining myself from bolting from her office. I wanted out! We exchanged a few more polite words and I left with carefully measured steps.

  When I got to my Toyota, I sat in the front seat trying to shake off the interview. I felt grimy, splattered with her feelings. Her anger was frightening. And her pain and sense of betrayal had been all too palpable. Had she been the one to leave the message on my answering machine? Suddenly cold, I rubbed my hands together for warmth. I wanted a long, hot shower. I looked at my watch. I didn’t have the time.

  I had ten minutes to get to my tai chi class. And I needed that class, especially the stillness of mind it could bring. The martial arts aspect seemed pretty appealing too. And if I died any time soon, at least my spine would be straight and my thighs relatively trim.

  I drove to the class with a chattering mind. Was Myra’s the character of a murderer that I had been seeking? The requisite hatred was certainly there. I could even smell it in the acrid odor of her sweat when she spoke of Sarah. She had seemed sincere about wanting to have it out with Sarah. On the other hand, I had only her word that she hadn’t already had it out… by murdering Sarah. But if that were true, why would she have agreed to speak to me and reveal her motivation?

  I parked my car around the corner from the tai chi classroom as my mind continued to spiral outward. As owner of Word Inc., Myra must have had some understanding of computers in general. But did she have access to Sarah’s computer? To Sarah’s house and robot? I shook my head. How could she?