Murder Most Mellow (A Kate Jasper Mystery)

by Girdner, Jaqueline

  “It sounds like you’ve done some thinking about Sarah,” I said quickly.

  “Oh, a lot.” She let out a long sigh. “And a lot of difficult emotional work too.” I could just imagine. Getting a room big enough for all of her warring parts would be difficult to begin with. “I really think that if the funeral were today, I could find something meaningful to say about Sarah,” she declared.

  “I’m sure you could,” I agreed heartily. “Listen, Myra, I had thought about using your services. I have a modem on my computer. Could I link up to your computers and send my correspondence over for word processing?”

  “A modem?” she asked. She sounded genuinely ignorant.

  “You know,” I prodded. “A phone line to your computers.”

  “Oh, I think I know what you mean,” she said slowly. “But we don’t use them here.”

  I tried another tactic. “I thought I remembered Sarah saying she communicated to Word Inc. from her house by modem.”

  “Maybe she did,” Myra said, her voice cooling again. “But we just do glorified typing here, no complicated computer functions.”

  “I mainly called to say hello anyway,” I said as soothingly as I could. Just a tad more deceit, I promised myself. “I tried to get you Monday morning, but you were out.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Myra objected. I thought I detected new suspicion in her tone. “Did the receptionist tell you that?”

  “Well,” I temporized. I didn’t want to get the receptionist in trouble. “Maybe it was Sunday,” I said finally.

  “We’re not open Sunday,” Myra said, pronouncing her words very carefully.

  I hung up the phone a few moments later, feeling very foolish. Did Myra really believe I couldn’t tell the difference between Sunday and Monday?

  More important, was she telling the truth when she said she didn’t use a modem, when she said she hadn’t been out Monday morning?

  I stared at the phone and sighed. There was no way I could know for sure. I rose from my comfy chair unhappily. It was time to tackle the next in line on my list, my friend Tony Olberti.

  The Wednesday morning crowd was dense at The Elegant Vegetable when I arrived. As I pushed my way up to the front where the woman was taking names, I was struck by how successful Tony’s restaurant was. In an era of billion-dollar drug and defense industries, it was gratifying to see Tony making money cooking health food good enough to line up for.

  Tony came up behind me and whispered, “I’ve fixed up a private table for us in back.”

  He took my arm and steered me through the dining area and down the short hallway to his private office. When he opened the door I saw a small table that had been placed in front of his desk. It was covered with a linen tablecloth and topped with a setting for two and a vase of flowers.

  Tony ushered me in and shut the door behind us. So much for witnesses. I took a quick surreptitious look over my shoulder and saw anxiety in the new sharp lines of his face. I couldn’t tell what other emotions remained hidden. Tony pulled out my chair and sat me down at the table without his usual hug, then stood staring at me.

  “Aren’t you going to sit down?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, hastily slipping into his own chair. “I thought we could eat in here away from the crowd. Is that okay with you?” He peered into my eyes.

  “Sure,” I answered, after a moment’s hesitation that I hoped went unnoticed.

  “I wanted to talk in private,” he explained solemnly. “I have some confessions to make.” He turned his eyes away from me. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for us.”

  A knock on the office door startled Tony. He jumped slightly, then called out, “Come in.”

  A waitress brought in a teapot and a cloth-covered tray. Her maroon hair stuck straight out around her white face. She reminded me of a Raggedy Ann doll. After she left, Tony poured tea and uncovered the tray to reveal assorted home-baked breads. I exhaled gratefully. My imagination had produced guns, knives, any number of lethal objects under that tasteful cover.

  “Remember the last study group, the one where Sarah said, ‘I know your secret’?” Tony began hesitantly.

  I nodded eagerly.

  “I think she could smell my breath,” he continued, talking faster now. “Or maybe it was her intuition but…” His words trailed off as he stared at his lap.

  “But what?” I urged.

  “It all boils down to…” He faltered again and turned moist eyes on me. “Kate, this is really hard.”

  I reached over and squeezed his hand. “Tony, does this have to do with meat?” I asked gently.

  “You do know!” he yelped. “I thought that’s what you and your friend were talking about. I’m almost glad,” he said. “Living with this in secrecy has been very hard to handle.”

  “What exactly have you been doing?” I pressed. I picked up a slice of bread and began nibbling nervously.

  “Eating junk food, and worse, meat!” he cried. “I’ve eaten hamburgers and doughnuts and pepperoni pizza and fried chicken.” He paused and looked at me anxiously.

  “So?” I challenged him.

  He looked at me for a moment without comprehension. “But I’ve eaten meat, Kate,” he insisted. Then he put his head in his hands and moaned. “Oh God, every time I do it I tell myself it will never happen again, but it does. I’m so ashamed. I don’t even like the food! I don’t know why I do it.”

  “Maybe just so no one mistakes you for a saint,” I said in a sudden leap of intuition.

  “But nobody could ever mistake me for a saint,” he objected, pulling his head out of his hands to look at me again.

  “Tony, I’ve never heard you say a nasty word to anyone,” I shot back. “You spend an hour a day meditating. You donate time to Hospice every week. You share your space with ants. You’re even nice to Peter. That alone should qualify you for sainthood!” I realized I was shouting, and lowered my voice. “I think somewhere inside you, someone just wants to rebel a little.”

  “Maybe,” he murmured, considering. He looked through me for a moment, his eyes unfocused. “But hamburgers,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Who are you hurting with hamburgers?” I asked. “You’re probably not even hurting yourself, at least not permanently.” All that cholesterol, I thought to myself. I hurried on. “As rebellion goes, hamburgers are pretty mild. You don’t get drunk. You don’t do drugs. You don’t make a public disgrace of yourself.”

  “But they kill animals to make hamburgers,” Tony whispered. There were actual tears in his eyes. Damn.

  “Have you eaten enough hamburgers in the last year to make up a whole steer?” I demanded brusquely.

  He stopped to consider. “I’ve probably had six or seven.”

  “Maybe a leg,” I said. “All right, so you’ve crippled one steer.”

  I looked him in the eye. “Do you think you can burn off that much karma in this lifetime?”

  “Well—” He was cut off by the arrival of our fruit-smoothies. The tension level in the room must have been uncomfortably high. Raggedy Ann took one look at us, dropped the glasses unceremoniously on the table, and left.

  “Drink your smoothie,” I ordered. I resisted the urge to hug him. He needed some tough talk. “You ought to just go for it, without guilt,” I advised. “Then it wouldn’t work as a rebellion anymore.”

  He didn’t look convinced as he sipped his drink.

  “Maybe you need to find some other way to rebel,” I suggested. I tasted my own smoothie. It was thick and sweet with bananas, coconut and berries.

  “Well, I have been thinking about a rainbow Mohawk,” Tony confided diffidently.

  “But you’d look ghastly!” I protested.

  “I know,” he murmured wistfully.

  “Isn’t it enough to be a gay man in a straight society?” I asked, suddenly anxious about what I might have unleashed with my talk of alternate rebellions.

  “Oh, I got over feeling defiant about tha
t years ago,” he answered with a dismissive shrug.

  Raggedy Ann came back in, carrying more food. The dish she set before me contained a mini-smorgasbord of fruit crepe, scrambled tofu and soy sausage. As I smelled the mixture of aromas, I decided to heed my own advice to Tony and go for it without guilt.

  “In any case, Tony, you’re a helluva cook,” I told him. “If you want to feel guilty, feel guilty about the inches you’ve added to my measurements.”

  Tony smiled his first big smile of the morning. Then we dug into the food. After I had sopped up the last of my scrambled tofu with a slice of banana-apricot bread, I told him about Linda.

  “Oh, so that’s what she was doing in the group,” he commented mildly. “I always wondered.”

  The idea of being in her next book didn’t seem to upset him. Probably because he was the only member of the group who had comported himself with dignity at our meetings.

  Tony didn’t hold back when he hugged me goodbye. I left The Elegant Vegetable with a lighter heart and a heavier stomach.

  The lighter heart didn’t last long. Driving home, the wheels in my mind began to turn again. First I began to wonder if the act of murder might be the ultimate rebellion for a person who needed to rebel. No, that didn’t really fit, I decided. But was meat-eating really “the” secret? What if Tony had told me about his carnivorous leanings in order to lead me away from a more heinous guilty secret, one worth murder to hide?

  My legs felt like they weighed a hundred pounds apiece as I climbed my front stairs. I was dead tired. As I opened the door the telephone rang. I spurred my leaden body on and caught the phone on the second ring, before the answering machine kicked in.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “That’s our last warning,” a gangster’s voice snarled in my ear. I slammed the phone down and flopped into my comfy chair, blood rushing too fast through my veins.

  Oh God, I thought, recycled death threats. I was sure that the words were the same as the last one. What was I going to do? The police couldn’t do anything about this threat. They hadn’t done anything about the last two. I was at a dead end. Even if I wanted to investigate, I couldn’t see any further avenues to pursue. I didn’t know who the murderer was.

  But the murderer knew who I was. I wanted to scream, but I settled for deep breathing. After five minutes my body had almost stopped shaking.

  Then a clear, reasonable thought rose out of the ashes of my panic. When Jerry Gold had left a message on my answering machine, he had been talking to someone else at the same time. And he might have been talking about whatever it was that had precipitated his murder.

  But who had he been talking to? The murderer? Not likely, I decided. If Jerry had been talking to the murderer, he probably would have been killed right there as soon as he hung up the phone. Who then? Sergeant Feiffer had mentioned a wife. Jerry talking to his wife made more sense. The wheels in my mind were turning again.

  I dug through the piles on my desk and found Jerry’s business card. I dialed his number.

  “Hello,” answered a lifeless voice. I realized that I would be intruding on a recent widow and hesitated.

  “Hello,” the voice said again, tinged with fear this time.

  “Is this Mrs. Gold?” I asked, keeping my voice soft and unthreatening.

  “Yes, who’s this?” she demanded, the fear still in her voice.

  “This is Kate Jasper, one of Jerry’s customers,” I said.

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line.

  “My husband’s dead,” Mrs. Gold said finally, her voice flat again. I asked myself whether I could really go through with this.

  “I know, Mrs. Gold,” I offered gently. “And I’m so sorry.”

  There was no response. I took a breath and continued.

  “I wanted to ask you some questions about Jerry’s last day,” I said quickly. “It’s possible that the answers might help find the person who killed him. Do you feel up to talking to me?”

  “Who are you, again?” she asked.

  “Kate Jasper.”

  “Yes, I think Jerry’d mentioned you,” she said slowly. “He liked you. Said you always paid your bills on time.” She paused. “He called you that day. Said he wanted to talk to you.”

  Mrs. Gold’s voice became more lifelike as she went on. I listened to her speak about Jerry’s last day without interruption. After she had finished, I offered my condolences. She thanked me for listening and hung up.

  Then I just sat, rooted in my chair by a mass of conflicting emotions. Pity for Mrs. Gold weighed me down. And I was afraid that I might be wrong about the murderer, but even more afraid that I might be right. Should I tell someone my new theory? It would only be an unverifiable opinion to the police. And telling anyone else might be slander.

  I dialed Barbara’s telephone number. When I heard her answering machine I slammed the receiver down with a force that shocked me. I told myself to relax. Then I reached for my good stationery. A sealed letter no longer seemed silly. I outlined my ideas on an embossed sheet of paper and stuck it in a matching envelope addressed to Barbara. With what felt like an enormous effort, I walked the few blocks to the corner mailbox and dropped the letter in.

  Walking back, I decided I needed more information. I needed to talk to Vivian, a.k.a. Information Central.

  - Twenty-Four -

  I glanced at my watch anxiously and accelerated my pace toward home. It was twelve thirty. That meant Vivian would be cleaning for the unhappy parents of the bride-to-be that she had mentioned yesterday. I could probably catch her there. But what was their name? I stopped for a minute to remember, but my brain refused to cooperate. My brain could tell me the name of the woman who played Beaver Cleaver’s mother in another decade, but it had forgotten a name uttered less than twenty-four hours ago. I cursed to myself and stomped the rest of the way home in disgust.

  I was climbing the front stairs when the name surfaced. Kornberg, that was it! I hurried into the house and grabbed my phone book. There was only one listing for Kornberg in Marin. Barring the chance of unlisted Kornbergs, these had to be the ones. I briefly wondered whether I should intrude on Vivian while she was working, but only briefly. My need to know had overwhelmed my sense of courtesy. I put on my glasses, got in the car, and drove in search of the Kornberg residence.

  The address from the phone book was in the upscale end of Marin. I drove through miles of sparsely populated rolling hills until I reached the black wrought-iron gates that guarded the Kornberg residence. My heart did an anticipatory leap when I saw Vivian’s Datsun in the driveway. Information Central was in. The iron gates were open a few feet. I climbed out of my car, pushed them open further, and drove up the long driveway to park behind Vivian’s car.

  As I rang the doorbell of the impressive three-story glass-and-redwood structure, I realized I was going to feel pretty foolish if anyone but Vivian answered. I figured I could always pretend I was collecting for charity. But it was indeed Vivian who greeted me at the door, holding a bottle of Windex in one hand and the working end of a vacuum cleaner in the other. I breathed a sigh of relief. My relief was short-lived.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Vivian snarled.

  I decided to skip the pleasantries and get straight to the point. I pushed my way past her into the house. She turned to glare at me.

  “Vivian, I talked to Jerry’s wife,” I said carefully, watching her face. “She told me what he called about.”

  Vivian’s tan skin paled to a sickly yellow. Her pupils contracted. I was still watching her face, fascinated, when she jerked the Windex bottle up to my eye level and squeezed the trigger.

  I saw the blur of spray and smelled the ammonia in the same instant. A millisecond later the cold spray hit my face. But it didn’t reach my eyes. I had my new glasses on.

  I could taste ammonia, though. I spit it out and wiped my face with the back of my hand frantically. Then I yanked my wet glasses off, clearing my vision just
in time to see Vivian drop the Windex bottle and grasp the long neck of the vacuum cleaner with both hands.

  I turned and stepped to the side without thinking. The beater brush crashed down in front of me.

  “Vivian, I’ve written it all down—” I began.

  She wasn’t listening. She lunged at me, muscled arms outstretched. I backstepped quickly. She tripped over the vacuum cleaner cord and hurtled to the ground. A sound of startled pain and rage erupted from her lips.

  “—in a letter,” I finished. “They’ll know what happened. They know I was coming here. It’s no good,” I told her.

  “You and your goddamn tai chi!” she screamed. Her eyes looked strange again as she looked up at me, wide and unfocused like they’d been at Nick’s house. But now I recognized the expression. It was pure hatred.

  “Vivian…” I said gently, then faltered. What words could help her now?

  “Why didn’t you just keep your nose out of it!” she screeched. “I left you three messages.”

  “It’ll be all right,” I lied softly.

  “SHIT!” she roared.

  “Oh, Vivian, I still can’t believe it was you,” I burst out. “I really do like you, for God’s sake!”

  It might have been the sincerity of my last words, or maybe just the knowledge that her mistakes were irrevocable. Vivian bent her head and exploded into loud and wrenching sobs. I sat down next to her on the carpeted floor. My own eyes were watering profusely. I told myself it was just the ammonia fumes. The skin on my face was beginning to burn too. I pulled an old wadded-up Kleenex out of my pocket to wipe my face. Vivian wordlessly handed me a damp cloth to better do the job.

  We sat on the floor, side by side, for some time. I wiped my face and she massaged her hurt knees. I could smell her acrid sweat over the tang of ammonia.

  “Why?” I asked finally.

  “That bitch couldn’t even keep her fuckin’ house clean!” Vivian bawled. Her face tightened as she turned toward me.