Murder at the PTA Luncheon

by Valerie Wolzien

  “I was going to meet Paula later that afternoon …”

  “The day that she died,” Brett clarified.

  “Yes. I had picked up the coke early that morning and hidden it in the tennis shack when I came to work. She was going to meet me there around three in the afternoon. Anyway, I was busy that morning. I had lunch, and I was going to help with the kiddie class in the baby pool, but when I got to the poolside …” He hesitated, seeming to remember. “… she was lying there. Someone said she was dead and then I heard Dr. Hallard say the same thing. I …” He choked on some tears, but swallowed a few times and went on. “… I could only think about the coke that I had left in the tennis shack and how to get to it and get rid of it before the police got there. Paula and I were too connected to that shack for it to be found there. And then I heard someone say something about all the kids being around and a dead woman lying there and I got an idea. I rounded up all the kids. I’ve been working at the Club for a few years and know most of them and they’ll do most anything I tell them to do. And I led them to the far tennis court. The excuse was to get them away from the horror of it all and no one questioned that. But really, I had to get those drugs out of there.”

  “And you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “I dumped them in the line marker that we use to re-mark the white chalk lines on the clay courts.”

  Brett smiled in spite of himself. “And …”

  “And that’s all,” Kevin concluded. “I’m not using drugs anymore. I know it hasn’t been that long since Paula’s death, but I’m all through with that now. Honest.” He looked around the group of adults, his eyes coming to rest on Susan.

  “Nancy is worried about you, you know,” she said gently. “Can he let her know that he’s all right, John?” she asked the policeman, who had been taking notes during the story.

  “I think you’d better, son.”

  “Are you going to arrest me?” Kevin looked more confused than pleased.

  “Not right now, unless these people have a case against you.” John Mann indicated Kathleen and Brett with a wave of his hand.

  “No. I think that he’s given us something to think about for a while,” Brett said. “But I wouldn’t plan on any more disappearing acts.”

  “No, sir.”

  Susan thought that he almost saluted.

  “And you’d better tell your parents and have them get you a lawyer,” John Mann added. “I’m not interested in prosecuting you for drug use, but I’d sure like to get my hands on the Ameses and Vooses. Parading themselves as big deals in the community and acting rich and all that and selling drugs to kids to keep themselves in minks and Jaguars. I sure wish I had known about this sooner.” He shook his head and closed up the notebook he’d been writing in. “If these people don’t want you, I’ll drive you home,” he added.

  “No problem. But I’d like a few words with you before you leave,” Brett said. “If you’ll just wait in the police car, Kevin?”

  “Of course.”

  Susan gave the boy a sympathetic smile as he almost sprinted from the room. She felt for him. To be so young and have your life in such a mess seemed terribly sad. And, she was pretty sure, his father wasn’t going to be as understanding of his involvement with drugs as he had been in his supposed involvement with an older woman. She sat and thought over the story she had just heard, as Brett told John Mann about her recent assault and her conviction that Lars Voos had been the assailant. So Kathleen had told him about the cologne clue over breakfast! And he seemed to think that it was reasonable to assume that it was, in fact, a clue and not a coincidence. Maybe she was getting the hang of the investigative stuff.

  But now that it looked as if the Vooses were getting into trouble, she began to feel sorry for them. She said as much to Kathleen, who wasn’t quite so sympathetic. “Don’t waste your time feeling sorry for anyone who is selling drugs to kids. They don’t deserve it.”

  And after thinking it over, Susan decided that she was right. She looked up at Kathleen and Brett. “But you still don’t have your murderer,” she said. “Unless you don’t believe Kevin and think that he had something to do with the murders.”

  “No, actually I don’t think he did. He admits to being at the Ames house in the afternoon after the first murder, but there isn’t anything to connect him with that house the morning of the day Jan Ick died. And I believe him. I don’t think that he had anything to do with these deaths. But, you know …”

  “Yes?” Kathleen asked, wondering why he had paused.

  “I keep thinking that there are things being said that would make sense if only I could put them all together. You know, a comment here and a comment there. If they could just be sorted out and put together, I think we would have the answer to our dilemma and the name of the murderer.”

  “So how do we do that? Pull out the comments and put them together?” Kathleen asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Brett sighed. “I wish I knew.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “Let’s go back to the place where Paula Porter died while we’re here,” Brett suggested.

  “You think you’ll find an answer there or just inspiration?” Kathleen asked.

  “Who knows? I do know that we’ve just hit a dead end. Maybe going back to one of the places where it all started will help. So”—he held open the door for them—“if you don’t mind?”

  The Club patio was nearly deserted at this hour of the morning. Two men were cleaning last night’s leaf drop from the pool. An elderly couple was over near the kiddie pool, sharing The New York Times and occasionally watching three toddlers jump around under the fountain in the middle of the water. Two blond girls in the navy suits of official pool guards were folding towels on a table next to the pool-equipment shed.

  “She was sitting where?” Brett asked, trying to get his bearings.

  “Over by the yellow-striped umbrella table,” Susan answered, and led them there. “She always sat there.”

  “Any particular reason that you know of?” Kathleen asked.

  “Well, a few. In the first place, it’s only from this group of chairs”—she waved her arms to indicate three lounges and two tables with four chairs apiece that were in the immediate vicinity—“that a person can sit and see both the kiddie pool and the diving end of the big pool really well. Paula had a son, Eric, a friend of Chad’s, who was nine years old and a terrific diver. He was one of the starters on the diving team, in fact. And she had the twins, who were five, Brad and Heather, and little Samantha, who was two. The twins and Samantha stayed in the kiddie pool and Eric was always going off the boards. This was really the only location she could be in and check on everybody.”

  “You said ‘a few’ reasons,” Kathleen reminded her.

  “Well, Paula had a great tan and she worked on it all the time. This is also about the only place around the pool with all-day sun. The trees block the sun most of the day in other areas. The other reason I’m guessing at …”

  “What?”

  Susan looked out toward the tennis courts and into the distance. “You can see the tennis shed from here.”

  Brett and Kathleen followed her stare, but neither said anything.

  “Those little packets of sugar and sweetener aren’t on the table,” Brett said, suddenly realizing something was missing.

  “They’re not brought out until lunchtime,” Susan told him. “They used to be put out in the morning, but parents started to complain that the kids were snitching them and licking out the sugar. So now they come out at eleven or twelve and they go in each evening. I don’t know why. Maybe the nighttime dew would hurt them.”

  “So a person could put poison in one of the sweeteners on this table around noon and what would you guess would be the possibility of Paula picking it up and using it?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure, but pretty good. In the first place, Paula spent most of the morning and early afternoon
in the sun and was always ordering iced tea. We used to joke about how much of it she drank. And she put four packets of artificial sweetener in each glass. It must have tasted like sugar water.”

  “And everyone knew that?”

  Susan shrugged. “I would think so. Anyone who had their eyes open and had been around for more than a day or two.”

  “Let’s go back to the kitchen or wherever the sugar is kept overnight,” Brett suggested.

  “I don’t know where that is,” Susan said. “But we can find out. If we can’t locate it on our own, the kitchen staff will be here soon. They start serving snacks around eleven.”

  They had no trouble finding what they were looking for. The small rectangular ceramic cups were in a counter in plain view when they went to check the bar for the pool area.

  “Fourteen,” Kathleen commented, picking up on what he was going to ask. “If you look closely, you can find little numbers painted on their sides. One through fourteen, just like the tables.”

  “And the cups would be put on the tables with the identical number? Could things really be so organized here?” Kathleen asked this question, remembering that this was the place where people casually left expensive jewels around because it was “just like home.”

  “Of course,” Susan answered, taking the organization for granted. “And since people tend to sit in the same place time after time, they can get just what they want. See, some of the cups have only sugar and some only artificial sweetener …”

  “And a person who wanted to get poison to the table where Paula Porter sat only had to check the table number and replace the sweetener in some of the blue packets with cyanide,” Brett finished for her. “We could be doing that right now, in fact.”

  “Yes, I guess so,” Susan agreed. “And, of course, she would use the sweetener almost right away.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, Eric had diving practice at ten o’clock every morning, and Paula usually brought him for that, and by the time the bar opened at eleven, she was ready for her first iced tea of the day.”

  “You’re saying that if her table was equipped with four packets of sweetener the first thing in the morning, probably no one would get a chance to use them before her.”

  “I suppose so. She was here every day this summer. Of course, now we know why,” she added, thinking of the drugs.

  “So it was easy to kill Mrs. Porter,” Kathleen commented.

  “But if the same person killed Jan Ick …” Susan paused, trying to sort out what she was going to say.

  “And we do think that it was the same person,” Brett took advantage of the pause to interject.

  “Then how could they be sure of killing Jan with the sandwich? I mean, how could they be sure the poisoned sandwich would be the last eaten? And that it was going to be Jan who got it?”

  “Maybe,” Kathleen repeated the suggestion she had made once before, “maybe the first murder was a mistake. Maybe the murderer was trying to kill Paula that time and accidentally killed Jan.”

  “Well, it’s a possibility,” Brett said, taking a stick of gum from his pocket and removing the wrapper.

  “It seems like an awfully sloppy way to murder someone,” Susan said.

  “That’s exactly what’s wrong with it,” Brett agreed. “It is a sloppy way to murder someone and this person isn’t sloppy. Look around you: a person was killed here in full view of all of her friends and her children and we don’t know who did it. There were no clues left, no one seems to have picked up anything out of the ordinary around the time of the murder. I don’t think we’re dealing with a sloppy person. And I think that Jan’s and Paula’s deaths were both planned and that their connection to the PTA—the only thing that they have in common that other people don’t share—must have been the beginning of the motive.”

  “Unless Jan was involved in drugs, too,” Kathleen said excitedly. She thought that she was getting something here. “And if Jan Ick was involved with cocaine, then not only is that a connection, but it involves her with the Vooses and the Ameses.”

  “You’re right,” Brett said. “Let’s find out if that’s true before anything else. You may just have found our answer, Kathleen.

  “You know,” he continued, “I have a feeling that we can find out a lot if we join John Mann and Kevin Dobbs, wherever they are. Let’s spend some time with the car radio and see if we can dig them up.”

  Susan was impressed. It took one call to the police department to discover that Sergeant Mann was “with the suspect over at …” She recognized the address of the Ames house. “Do you want to drop me off at home on your way there?” she asked, thinking how furious the Ameses and Vooses would be that she knew that they were involved in drug dealings. She explained her concern to Brett.

  “No, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have you with us. Do you know how much time it has saved us having you along? We could have spent an hour or two figuring out where the sugar was kept in the evening and how it was distributed at the Club. For things like that, you’ve been a big help. And remember, the Ameses and the Vooses are just going to have to adjust to the fact that people know they were dealing in drugs. They’re going to have to stand trial and probably be convicted, unless they find some way to overturn Kevin’s evidence. And that’s not going to be easy.”

  “Why are they at the Ames house?” Susan asked.

  “Well, we’ll find out soon,” Brett answered, turning the police car out of the Club gates and back toward the main part of town.

  “Who is that?” Kathleen asked, as the car entered Grant Road. There was a woman standing at the bottom of the driveway, and as she saw the police car turn toward her, she started waving at it.

  “Isn’t that interesting. I’d forgotten that,” Brett muttered to himself.

  “It’s Ellen Cooper,” Susan said, leaning over the front seats of the car. “I wonder what she wants. She seems to be trying to get us to stop.”

  “Are we going to stop?” Kathleen asked Brett. He appeared to be thinking of something else.

  “Sure. I don’t see why not.” He smiled. Kathleen wondered what was behind that smile.

  “I can’t believe what is going on there” were Ellen’s first words when the car stopped alongside of her.

  “John Mann and Kevin Dobbs are here. I just can’t imagine what is happening, but I had to come here to help. Is there anything I can do?” She saw Susan in the back seat. “Oh, Susan, you’re here. I didn’t see you. Are you involved in this?”

  “Susan is helping our investigation, Mrs. Cooper,” Brett answered for her. Susan wondered if her friend thought that she was a suspect. “And you’ve been a big help too, you know.”

  “Me?” Ellen almost blushed. “Well, I just want to do anything I can.” She stopped talking, realizing that she didn’t know how she had helped. Susan and Kathleen didn’t know what Brett was talking about either, for that matter. “Well, I like to think that I can help. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “I don’t—” Brett began.

  “What about the kids?” Susan interrupted him. She didn’t like to think of children becoming involved in any talk of their parents and drugs. “Where are the kids?”

  “Well, Peer and Kristen are at the Club for Peer’s tennis lesson. Charline’s housekeeper took them. I saw them when I dropped off Bethany. That’s when I saw Carol Mann, and she told me about all of this. But I don’t know where Julia’s children are. Shall I find out? I could go around back and ask Gertrude,” she offered.

  “Gertrude?”

  “Remember the Ameses’ housekeeper?” Kathleen nudged Brett’s memory.

  “Wonderful. That would be a big help. And, if you would go back to the Club, and see if you can keep the Voos kids and their housekeeper as occupied as possible? They don’t have to be involved in this,” Brett said.

  “Of course, anything I can do. You can depend on me.”

  “I know we can,” Brett agreed, as Ellen jogged
off around the back of the house.

  “I hope she doesn’t think I’m a suspect in this murder,” Susan said, “but I’ll bet she does.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brett replied, pulling the car up in line with the police car in which John Mann and Kevin had arrived. “I know that’s what the phrase ‘helping the police with their investigation’ sounds like, but don’t worry. I think we may have this murder solved in the next hour or so. You don’t mind if one or two people think you’re a murderess for that short period of time, do you?”

  “Well …” Why complain? She figured that she didn’t have a choice anyway. “Anything you want from me particularly?” she asked as the three of them got out of the car.

  “I don’t know,” Kathleen answered, looking at Brett to see what he wanted.

  “Do you remember who brought the sandwiches that poisoned Mrs. Ick?” he asked.

  “Of course. I did.” Susan wondered if she was going to be a suspect again.

  “Okay. Now tell me who else knew that you were going to bring those particular sandwiches and what they would look like.”

  “Let me think.”

  “All the kids are at the Club.” Ellen arrived around the corner of the house. “The Ames kids are with the Vooses’. I must have missed them when I was dropping off Bethany. Should I go there and stay with them, officer?” she volunteered.

  “That would be very helpful. But, you know, you can give us some information right now, if you’ll wait a minute. I hate for you to be late connecting with the kids at the Club, however.”

  “No problem. When the tennis classes are over the kids always go for a swim. They’ll be busy for another hour at least, maybe more.”

  “Well, we won’t keep you for as long as that.” He glanced toward the large front windows of the house. “Let’s walk down to the curb to talk, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to be overheard by anyone.”

  “Of course.” Ellen was always eager.