A shower and dressing room is not often provided at the scene of a murder. How convenient this one was. And it was standard operating procedure to arrive with a change of clothes as well. He must have been in the exercise room, on the mat, the leotards had said, then gone into the massage room for murder, then into here until everyone was in a group elsewhere—until the police came in, passing the ladies’ locker room—until it was safe to strip, wash, change, and leave. Which brought us up to just about now.
I knew I could rush in to the police and tell them about my find—and face a forever of questioning and then a jail cell for two.
I was too easy a suspect—in collusion, I was positive they’d say, with Sasha. I could be, with a stretch of the imagination and a shrink of my torso and hair, the still-missing shorter partner. Case closed.
I took deep breaths to quell a flurry of panic—and knew I wasn’t going to offer myself to the police like an unsanctified sacrifice.
Besides, the unfeminine, sweat-suit-shucking, freshly washed Ray Palford was very possibly still in this building, but not for as long as it would take the police to question me.
I opted to run now, talk later, to hit his trail before he disappeared. Catch the culprit before the police caught me.
I opened the locker room door and looked right and left. The security guard was off telling the cops of my guilt by association. Very soon the law would be aimed my way, in search of half of a murderous duo. It was a theory they’d love. High-concept. All the makings of a movie of the week or an Oprah special. Girlfriends who kill. Could yours?
I was getting out of here not a second too soon.
Twenty
I REALLY MISSED SASHA. I pushed the lobby button, breathing hard. I needed her nearby, saying, “Are you out of your mind? Get back in there and tell the police about the sweatpants. It’s their job to find the person who wore them.”
Sasha and I are a good balance because our forms of insanity differ. She’s berserk when it comes to men, but is otherwise fairly rational. I tend to veer off track in matters civil, and at such times I need a monitor.
Speaking of which, I missed Mackenzie, too, even though when he monitored me, I found it oppressive and annoying. In any case, I had neither of my brakes on hand, and about when I realized that, I arrived at the lobby and there was too much to do to waste time wondering if I should do it.
The one thing I was sure the leotard women would have noticed—even on an otherwise completely forgettable person—was an ensemble that didn’t fit properly. So despite the little man’s description of the tall woman who’d killed Jesse Reese, if she’d actually been as tall as Sasha, those sweats would have looked like knickers and note would have been made. Unless, of course, we had a tall but anorexically thin murderer, on whose frame fabric drooped, but that, too, the leotards would have noticed.
I didn’t realize how much I wanted to discover Ray Palford trying to blend into the crowd, wending his no-fuss, non-noticeable way to the exit with the kind of cool deliberation it had taken to murder, shower, and change—until I absolutely couldn’t find him. Every time I saw a brown-haired man his size, I speeded up as much as my still-aching back allowed and scanned, but Palford must have been a common variety of man, because there were dozens of almosts, but no Ray.
I peered into the casino, where the light was dark and bright at the same time. Tricky. A great place to disappear, and I certainly couldn’t find Ray Palford. Instead, I gaped at what appeared to be a seven-foot man with a tiny head hobbling above a row of slot machines.
“Don’t stare,” my mother had taught me. “It’s rude.” I tried not to—besides, I didn’t have time for staring—but the man was so very odd. And then, he really appeared—all of him this time, and I realized the figure, or at least its topping, was Lucky, my tough-talking, self-sufficient five-year-old former companion. At the moment, he’d dropped precocity and reverted to his rightful childhood. His face was puckered and fuchsia, and he was sobbing, “Mommy!” My former homeroom student, Eric, had the boy riding on his shoulders. I could see a rip in Lucky’s jeans and what looked like a bad bruise.
How had they gotten in there? The casino was absolutely off-limits, and Eric was already skirting the law with his job permit.
“Lucky!” I called. “Eric!” But Eric was playing hero at the moment, carrying the wounded to safety, his step sure and forward-moving and not about to be deterred.
He moved with such confident stride that nobody stopped him. There was a message there for all of us.
Another message, just for me, was that I had lost my killer.
“Precious! Stop!”
I half turned and saw Lala and Belle, both waving broadly. “More news!” they cried out.
“No time!” I called. There was, alas, all the time in the world now, but it wasn’t socially acceptable to say, “No patience!”
“It’s important!” Lala had changed into a new ensemble, turquoise this time. Old Tommy had better have deep pockets, because Lala was diving into that pot of gold headfirst.
Belle, still in this morning’s outfit, had relacquered against the humidity. Her hair sat on her head like a fibrous hat. “You wouldn’t believe,” she said.
“The wig!” I suddenly remembered. “What happened to the wig?”
Belle raised her hand to the top layer of her hair. “This is not a—I never wore a—Lala’s the one who wears wigs.”
Lala colored deeply. “You could have had the decency to say it looked funny.” She blinked hard and for a moment dropped all the effort and muscular skill that kept her face in place, and turned into a seriously old woman.
“I didn’t mean either of you,” I said. “Your hair always looks beautiful. I meant…the killer’s wig.”
“Killer? Weren’t we talking about a lawsuit?” Belle asked. “The missing money?”
If Ray Palford had been the one in the black workout suit, then surely he’d worn a wig—and where was it? Would he dump the suit and bag and carry incriminating evidence along with him in his briefcase? And what about the earring? Poppy wasn’t the sort for pearl earrings—they didn’t go with brass—but Palford was even less likely to have been wearing a pearl stud in the ear while killing. What was wrong with my brain?
“We have five more names,” Belle said, “and one of them has a nephew who’s a lawyer, and he’s absolutely going to start a class action suit, to get the money from the estate.”
“Great going,” I said. “There’s a woman named Georgette. She lives under the boardwalk. Add her name to the list.”
“Under the boardwalk?” Lala’s mouth hung slightly open. “Georgette?” All her worst nightmares were reflected on her face. All mine, too. Except for the ones about a killer in pearl earrings.
Pearl earrings. There was only one pearl-earring type out of all the characters I’d met lately. Her. Norma Evans, the barely visible woman. Perfect in pearls. Perfect all around, except for any apparent motive.
I’d worry about that later. Right now, I was thinking of Norma Evans in partnership with Poppy Reese. Tiny, wig-and slacks-wearing, cane-toting Poppy. Capable—when she took off her luxuriant brown wig and put it on Norma’s head, and when she was seen by a passing elderly gentleman—of being mistaken for a small man herself. As was Norma capable of being mistaken for Sasha.
It was all perfect, except that by now Norma would have dissolved into the wallpaper and the floorboards, never to be found if she didn’t want to be.
I couldn’t imagine her running out of the hotel, so I tried to imagine, instead, where and how she would have proceeded once she left the spa.
Where would I go if I could go anywhere, because nobody ever noticed me?
I’d go anywhere I damned well pleased, I thought. And I also thought that if I’d just killed my second victim, my former partner in crime, and I’d done it with the cool aplomb that had me showering and changing at the scene of the crime—I’d want a drink. I’d maybe need a drink. And I’d have i
t. Why not? I certainly wouldn’t rush outside, where, as far as she knew, the police might already be, waiting for someone who might fit the black and bloody workouts.
Belle was still talking. I heard her voice as if coming from a passing car, distant and unrelated to me. I walked toward the bar and looked in.
She was sitting almost where Jesse Reese had been two nights earlier. I wouldn’t have recognized her, and I was sure Frankie didn’t.
Norma Evans had cut her gray-brown hair and she was wearing dark red lipstick and tortoiseshell eyeglass frames. It was enough to give her an entirely new, albeit equally forgettable, persona.
She saw me and stood up, pushing so hard that her drink fell on the floor.
“You!” I said. I moved toward her. “It’s you!”
“Hey!” Frankie shouted. “Mandy, isn’t it? Have you heard any—”
And during the split-second automatic head turn at his hey! Norma Evans shot around and past me with amazing speed. I turned and ran after her through the lobby, limping and lurching with the hot spears of pain in my back.
“Baby doll!” Lala called out. “What are you—”
“Stop her!” I shouted. I looked for a guard, even as I realized how futile my request was, how much time and explanation it would require. Grab that incredibly respectable-looking woman? She was everyone’s third grade teacher, favorite lingerie clerk. The aunt the family felt sorry for.
But she had done it, I was positive. Finally, all the jarring details quieted down and fit. She was the one who’d driven Poppy down here. The two of them had known Reese’s escape plans and were following him—probably with murder in mind. And then they saw Sasha and heard, via Frankie’s joke, what room she was in, and the coincidence of hair and place altered the details of their plans. It didn’t take much.
And it didn’t matter much because Norma Evans was gone. Sucked into the casino, a gray invisibility in the chronic glare.
I searched for her inconspicuous, well-tailored shoulders, her demure skirt, her low-heeled pumps.
“Have you gone crazy?” Lala screeched from behind me. “You’ll give us heart attacks.”
That angry voice on the answering machine in Jesse Reese’s outer office—the voice that sounded like metal grating. Poppy had every right to call her husband’s office—but so angrily? And Norma, who’d ignored an earlier caller, had leaped to silence that one.
One thing didn’t yet make sense. Poppy’s motives were easy enough—she’d be financially better off with a dead husband than one who fled the country with his fund, but I didn’t understand what drove Norma Evans.
“Miss Pepper! Tell him I’m okay.” Eric, with Lucky still on his shoulders, was being propelled toward the exit by a security guard, his hand on the young man’s elbow. “This guy’s like accusing me of kidnapping!”
“I never said kidnap,” the guard insisted. “I said—”
“Abducted,” Eric said. “Geez!”
“The little boy’s mother’s in here.” I kept moving, searching for a sign of Norma. “Eric’s trying to help.” Norma Evans was gone, lost in the maze of money machines. Soon she’d be out the door and gone for real and forever.
And then I spotted her. I thought. “See that woman?” I said to the guard. “Get her. She murdered somebody.”
“Miss Pepper!” Eric nearly dropped his grip on Lucky’s legs.
The guard, on the other hand, didn’t even pretend to look. “That’s a cheap way of getting these kids off the hook,” he said. “I’m a little too savvy for the old look-over-there game, anyway.”
“What’s going on?” Lala and Belle arrived together, puffing between words. “Honey,” Lala panted, “if it’s about the phone bill—if you’re afraid we’re dunning you, don’t worry. We only—”
“Either of you these kids’ mother?” the guard asked the two women. His eyes weren’t all that functional, unless he was flirting.
Lala shrieked with laughter. “My grandchildren are twice his age!”
“Poor tyke has a boo-boo.” Belle’s voice had gone high and singsongy. “Do you have an itsy boo-boo, little boy?”
Lucky stopped snuffling. “Who you calling a little boy?” he demanded.
Once again I thought I saw gray dim the neon-brights of a slot machine. I took a step away. “Help him find the little boy’s mother, please,” I said to Belle. “She’s gambling in here somewhere. I can’t. I have to—” Their voices faded as I moved toward where I thought I’d seen Norma, past the center row of poker and craps tables. The robotic voices of machines encouraged the players on. The background music softly pulsed out of the walls, and always, from everywhere, was the sound of silver going in and coming out of machines. Above the bank of tall slots an electronic machine tabulated total winnings, a number that escalated even as I glanced up at it.
But I wasn’t a winner. I had lost Norma and the game was over. Doom was setting in with cement hardness. The very worst scenario—Sasha permanently accused—was becoming inevitable. I needed Norma Evans right now. I needed to be able to show her to the leotard girls and the masseuse and Holly while whatever memory they had was fresh. If she left, she would blend into her surroundings somewhere else. She could imitate her former boss’s aborted plans and take the money and run. Take it right now.
In fact, she probably was doing just that.
I had to find her and keep her right now.
And even then I’d have no real proof. A pocketbook that kept reappearing, an overheard voice on an answering machine, and maybe a pearl earring. If I was unbelievably lucky, and she was much dumber than I thought, she’d have kept the earring’s mate, hoping to find the lost one. Great.
If I was even luckier than that, her pocketbook would be full of incriminating money in one form or another.
I rounded one corner, scanned the row, saw only three ancient stone-faced women offering up coins to their machines, and a young girl with orange hair sipping a drink and giggling while her boyfriend—his hair butter-yellow and frizzy and even bigger than hers—popped coins.
I turned and scanned another row, then moved on toward the craps tables, chasing shadows. There were too many corners and possibilities. She could appear where she had not been the second after I left and this could go on forever, until she reached the exit.
I moved toward the door that led to the boardwalk, then backtracked—what if she exited via the casino lobby, instead?
I looked longingly up toward the ceiling where, I knew, everybody—or at least everybody’s money—was being observed nonstop. I wondered what level of commotion it would create if I tried to get up there, to enlist their assistance, to signal from below.
I didn’t have to wonder long, because at that moment I spotted Norma nearing the exit.
“Hey!” I shouted, running in her direction. “Stop! Somebody stop her!”
She stopped herself, looking completely innocuous. When I reached her, therefore, she was ready. Her right arm grabbed my shoulder in what must have looked the friendliest of poses, but which hurt. “Shut up, now. Don’t move. There’s a sharp cutting object between your third and fourth ribs,” she said.
I was wearing a green linen blazer, white T-shirt, and tan slacks, none of which offered the protection of, say, a bulletproof vest, so I was immediately able to verify that she was telling the truth. Something pointed was about to do painful acupuncture on internal organs about which I’m sentimental and possessive.
“You’re in big trouble,” Miss Evans whispered.
I’m mortified to admit that my first response was more suitable for Scarlett O’Hara. My knees buckled, my head grew light. But Philadelphia never was a part of the Old South, so I shook myself back to consciousness. It was too late for a swoon.
It was, I feared, too late for everything.
Twenty-One
“SURPRISED?” NORMA EVANS SAID, PROPELLING me along. “Blinded by preconceptions about women of a certain age? By your own stereotypes? Call yourself a fem
inist, I bet. Sisterhood is all—but you still underrate middle-aged sisters. My hair turns a little gray and I become invisible, a non-person, ready to be victimized, right? I’m certainly not an actor, a doer, a person to notice. Who’da thought the old dame packed a knife? Can you pack a knife or only a gun?” She interrupted herself to giggle, which didn’t seem much improvement or much endorsement of her mental health.
“Help!” I squawked.
“Stop sniveling! Act like a woman!” She managed to simultaneously clutch my arm tighter and press the knife in closer. I gasped—shallowly. A normal inhale would result in a puncture wound. I tried to contract all my muscles—but the one in my back that was already in a slipknot made any movement tricky.
“’S killing me!” I croaked, conserving my air and rib cage.
A man at a computerized poker game looked my way. “This one’s killing me, too.” He returned to his game.
“No joke!” I pushed out words with the exhale, feeling my sides shrink in. “This woman’s—” I was out of air.
Norma pushed the knife along my newly tightened sides. My skin gave way with the sharp hot rip of shredding nerve ends. My eyes teared.
“People in here don’t care about us,” Norma said. “They’re too busy with their own good times. You know that a man once had a heart attack and died, right on the floor—literally, down on the floor, dead. And people walked over him to get to the machines? That I once saw the doctor administering CPR under the craps table—but the game went right on above them? The way those sick people felt is exactly how it feels to be me, all the time now. To be no longer valuable, over-the-hill.”
Was this really the time for polemics? Still, I wondered whether I’d live long enough to experience mid-life devaluation firsthand.
And while I mused and winced and worried, she steered me toward the outer wall of the casino. Her grip on my upper arm was amazingly tight. I tried to shake loose but couldn’t. I used my free hand to claw at hers—but she immediately scraped me with the knife in response. My side was on fire. Surface wound, I reminded myself. Surface.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation Page 21
