“C’mere, Baby,” she said. “Come do your caterpillar crawl just like you did for the other lady.”
Caterpillar crawl … like you did for the other lady. I was certain those were significant words, but it was difficult to organize my thoughts with a rope cutting off my oxygen.
But I was aware that Baby obediently came and did his caterpillar crawl, right across my face, all the while making little happy-dog sounds.
“There, stop right there,” Tammi said, her voice muffled by the barrier of dog. “Good dog. This will work. Though it would’ve been better if I’d given her something first, like I did the other lady, wouldn’t it?”
The big dog body wiggled happily. Baby was delighted his mistress was playing, no longer distressed. At that moment the truth finally slugged me. I’d been a little slow here. But now I knew.
“Brad didn’t kill Leslie. You did!”
But I was gasping my revelation into 260 pounds of dog and a faint scent of Eternity perfume.
32
Baby stood up, and I gasped for breath. But I got only a minimal gulp of air before Tammi said, “Down, Baby. Lie down again. I’m going to tie her up now.”
Baby plopped down on my face again. This is how Leslie died, I realized. This is how she suffocated! Except Tammi had given Leslie something first, so Leslie wouldn’t be aware of what was going on and wouldn’t struggle.
But I hadn’t ingested anything, and I could struggle!
I twisted and squirmed as Tammi did something with one of my hands. The rope tightened around my wrist. I twisted harder and flung myself sideways.
I caught Tammi by surprise, and she tumbled to one side. Baby was still on top of my face. I swatted him in the head. He, who had probably never felt a mean blow in his life, yelped and jumped up, sticking a foot in my open mouth as he did so. I sat up sputtering and coughing.
Only to have Tammi come down on me again. She landed on me like one of those football players throwing himself on a pile of other players on a Monday night game. I felt the air go out of me with an oof. She straddled my midsection again, spread-eagling my arms until her palms covered mine and we were face to face, both breathing hard from the exertion. Plopped across my midsection, she felt a whole lot heavier than she looked. I don’t like to be judgmental about such things, but the woman really could stand to lose a few pounds. Although this hardly seemed a prudent time to point that out. Besides, this new revelation was far more important.
“You really did kill her,” I gasped. Somewhere in the back of my mind came the dim memory of Sgt. Yates asking me if Leslie had pets. “You drugged her and then—then used Baby to suffocate her!”
And dog hairs had showed up in Leslie’s lungs in the autopsy, one of the details they hadn’t shared with the media.
“The sleeping pills should have been enough to kill her! I ground them up and fed them to her in high-energy bars I made. They put her to sleep … but she was just lying here … snoring. And I could tell that sooner or later she was going to wake up.” Tammi squirmed, looking over her shoulder for the rope. She’d lost one high heel in the scuffle, but the other one dug into my thigh like a spur.
The rope was several feet away. I remembered seeing people on TV do these amazing flops, arching the back and flinging an attacker halfway across the room.
I tightened my muscles, arched my back, and flung. I obviously had something to learn about technique, because all this did was make an insignificant little wave under Tammi. She didn’t, in fact, even seem to notice my heroic convulsion. I lifted a knee and tried to jab her in the back, but I couldn’t get the knee up high enough. She couldn’t take her palms away from mine, but she whacked me with that high-heeled spur for punishment.
“The rope, Baby!” she suddenly said urgently. “Over there! Bring the rope!”
Baby tilted his head, tail waving gently, expression curious. He surely wanted to be helpful, but, blessedly, rope was not in his vocabulary. Was gun? I wondered fearfully. At this point I had no idea what had become of the gun.
“We seem to be at something of an impasse,” I suggested. She’d have to let go of at least one of my hands and lift her weight off me in order to stretch over and reach the rope. During which time I had no intention of meekly lying here.
She yanked my arms closer to my body so she could lift her head higher and so our faces weren’t quite so close together. “Not really,” she muttered. “I’m younger and stronger. You’ll give out first. In fact, you might have a heart attack or stroke any minute now!”
She could be right. My neck hurt where she’d clobbered it with the gun. My vision seemed a little blurry. My heart felt like butterfly wings fluttering in my chest. I was, no doubt about it, in a very bad situation here.
But safety isn’t the absence of danger, I reminded myself. Safety is the presence of the Lord. Maybe some people can remember helpful Bible verses at times such as this. Not me. Only scraps came. Fear not … I am with you … never will I leave you. And God was here, right with me, just as he always was.
The reminder came with a soothing sense of calm, even a certain detachment from the jab of high heel in my leg, the weight squashing my middle, and the almost overpowering scent of Eternity. But, since we were apparently going to be in this awkward position for a while, I figured we may as well talk.
“So, how’d you get Leslie to come over here?” I asked.
Tammi frowned. Her freshly applied lipstick had widened to a clownish smear. “Brad was out of town. I called her up and told her I knew about her and Brad, but I didn’t see any need for it to be an unpleasant situation and I wouldn’t stand in the way of a divorce. I suggested she and I get together to discuss the situation in a civilized manner. She fell for it, and I had tea and my homemade high-energy bars ready when she got here.”
“The ones you’d prepared with your secret sleeping-pill ingredient.”
She twisted so she could stretch a foot toward the rope. She still couldn’t reach it. I made a lunge—at least as much of a lunge as I could make with Tammi sitting in my middle—at her arm, thinking a hard bite might change the situation. All I got was a mouthful of sleeve.
Still an impasse. We regarded each other warily. The phone rang. Tammi’s head shot up. I had the impression that she, unlike Leslie, couldn’t ignore a ringing phone any more than I could.
“Maybe you should answer it,” I suggested. “Could be important. Maybe it’s someone saying they’re coming over, and how will it look, you trying to kill a helpless little old lady when they get here?”
Her gaze narrowed, as if the prospect of someone showing up unexpectedly did concern her. Then her expression cleared. “Oh, but if I don’t answer, they’ll know I’m not home, won’t they? And not come over. No problem.”
After eight rings—we both counted—the phone stopped ringing.
“So, after Leslie was snoring peacefully, you had Baby lay across her face until she suffocated without a struggle.”
“It wasn’t quite without a struggle. I had to help hold her down when she started jerking around. But she didn’t wake up.”
“Then what?”
Tammi frowned, but she couldn’t resist telling me. “Everybody thinks I’m so soft and fat and helpless. But I drove her car into the garage, dragged her out there—all by myself—and drove out to her place. That ridiculous house, pretending to be a Southern plantation! Then I dragged her out on the dock, me, the Dumpling!” She sounded proud and pleased with herself. “And threw her in the water. Then I walked, walked, all the way home in the dark. I checked it later. It’s over seven miles out there!
“The only thing that went wrong was that I had to lock Baby all alone in the garage while I was gone, and he was very traumatized.”
I had the impression that Baby’s traumatization upset Tammi more than Leslie’s murder. I craned my neck and looked over at him. He tilted his head and looked back at me, tail swishing gently.
Death by dog, I thought. Baby, who re
ally was a gentle giant, would be horrified if he knew and understood such things. Would Tammi have to leave him alone again when she disposed of me?
I swallowed. Baby’s traumatization was the least of my worries at the moment. “So what do you plan to do with me?”
“Lost Lake. There’s an old road going around to the side opposite the inn. I drove out there to look it over, and it’s wooded and quite isolated. Except this time I’ll make sure the body doesn’t hang up on something, like Leslie’s did. Maybe I’ll use some of those concrete blocks out in the back yard to weigh it down. I’d rather it didn’t turn up for weeks. Maybe even months.”
It. It was me. The body. Were concrete blocks traceable? Would the authorities someday figure out they had come from Tammi’s backyard? Maybe. Fine lot of good this did me at the moment, however.
“Sandy will be really hurt if something happens to me.”
“I’ll help comfort her. I think she likes me.”
Tammi’s palms were sweating against mine. I felt as if my muscles and bones were beginning to stiffen up, as they often did when I was too long in one position. Tammi’s position straddling my midsection was awkward, and I could hope her legs might begin to cramp. But I doubted this was something I could count on.
Any possibility of help arriving? Not from Brad or Skye. I already knew they wouldn’t be coming home soon.
So Tammi was right. Sooner or later, stronger, heavier Tammi was going to do me in. The thought occurred to me that if she moved her weight up to my chest I might not even be able to breathe.
I hastily discarded that thought, afraid it might somehow ooze from my mind into Tammi’s. Something like the osmosis I remembered studying about in school so many years ago.
“C’mon, Baby, come play!” I urged suddenly. I tried to twist and turn, urging him to jump in as he had before. With 260 pounds of dog in the middle of us, anything could happen.
He crouched down on his forelegs and looked playful and eager, but Tammi laughed. “Baby doesn’t take orders from anyone but me. It makes Brad furious. But he’s my sweetie, aren’t you, big boy?”
Baby ambled over, tail waving, and Tammi, always affectionate with him, lifted an arm to reward him with a hug.
And I, I now had one hand free! Thank you, Lord! I frantically swept my hand across the carpet and grabbed the first thing I could reach. And then, using every ounce of strength remaining in bones, muscles, ligaments, and cells, I slammed it against the side of Tammi’s head.
33
Tammi’s eyes rolled and bounced like marbles in a hot frying pan, and she collapsed on me like a falling sack of potatoes. I squirmed out from under her dead weight. For a moment I feared it truly was a dead weight, but thankfully, when I felt for a pulse in her throat, I found one. I grabbed the clothesline rope, half afraid she’d suddenly come to and snatch it before I did.
With not a lot of expertise but with a whole lot of layers of rope, I trussed her up like a mummy in progress. Wrists bound behind her back, rope looped down to encircle her ankles, ankles pulled up behind her derrière, rope circled around to bind both her arms to her body for good measure. I tossed in some knots I’d formerly used only for tying fishing flies for Harley.
By that time I was breathing so hard that I had to rest a minute before digging in my purse to find Sgt. Yates’s home phone number. His attitude was noticeably grumpy when I first identified myself, as if he figured he didn’t deserve a toothache and Ivy Malone all in one day. I hurriedly gave him a condensed version of what I knew about Brad Ridenour and Leslie Marcone’s relationship, how Tammi had used a combination of sleeping pills and big dog to get rid of her rival, and how she’d planned to do me in as well.
Long moment of silence.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” I asked anxiously. “I know it sounds far-fetched, but—”
“Where are you now?”
“At the Ridenour house.”
“Since you’re calling me, I assume you’re okay? Not in any physical danger at the moment?”
I rotated my stiff neck and shoulders, fingered a spot on my neck that felt like a bump in the shape of Denmark, wiggled my toes, and scraped dog hair away from the corner of my mouth. “I’m fine.”
“And Mrs. Ridenour? Where’s she?”
“Well, uh, she’s lying on the floor. She seems to be, umm, unconscious.”
“A fall, perhaps?” I detected a note of sarcasm.
“Well, uh, actually, I hit her with …” I kicked the book around so I could read the title. It was that enormous book in which Tammi had been underlining sentences. “A copy of The Comprehensive Guide to Total Fitness, Diet, and Exercise.” I momentarily wondered if there was a certain irony in this. Knocked out by her own self-improvement book.
“She was trying to kill me at the time,” I added defensively.
“I suppose you have a signed confession about what she did to Leslie Marcone? Or maybe you have everything she said on tape?”
“Sgt. Yates, you are being sarcastic. Or facetious,” I chided. “Just because I read a few mystery books—”
“Okay, I suppose I am,” he muttered.
“I think the synthetic fibers you found under Leslie’s fingernails will match the carpet here at the Ridenour house,” I added. “Your lab reports have probably already noted the presence of sleeping-pill chemicals in her system. And the dog hairs found in her lungs during the autopsy will match Baby’s.”
“I’ll be right over.” He sounded resigned.
“I hope your tooth extraction isn’t bothering you.”
Grunt.
After Sgt. Yates hung up, I located the gun, which was lying on the floor near the TV. I left it there. I rubbed my throat where Tammi had tried to choke me and stayed well away from her. I doubted, when she came to, that with the way I had her trussed up she could do more than wiggle her fingers and toes, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I felt a twinge of guilt as Baby nosed her unconscious body and then snuggled up beside her, nose resting on her shoulder, expressive eyes faintly reproachful. Then a certain fact bombed me. I’d clobbered Tammi while she was hugging her dog. Which did seem a bit unsportsmanlike.
It was a small and fleeting twinge of guilt, however. Mostly, while I waited for Sgt. Yates, I contemplated the strange fact that Baby had unknowingly helped cause Leslie’s death and then, just as unknowingly, helped save my life.
I was still somewhat dazed, partly from the struggle with Tammi, partly from the shock of knowing the truth. Brad hadn’t murdered his girlfriend. Shane Wagner hadn’t murdered his ex-wife. None of the others of whom I’d been so suspicious had played any part in Leslie’s death. Tammi, Tammi the adorable butterball, Tammi the Dumpling, Tammi the chooser of gifts with charming care, had done it. And was efficiently planning to kill me to hide that fact.
Tammi was just beginning to regain consciousness when cars pulled up in front of the Ridenour house. They had arrived without benefit of sirens, but I could hear one in the distance. Her fingers twitched and her eyelids fluttered.
I went to the door. Sgt. Yates, accompanied by another officer, came in and looked down at Tammi’s rope-bound figure.
“Your handiwork, I take it?” Sgt. Yates inquired.
I had to agree that it was. He did not compliment my technique. “It’s her rope,” I said. “And that’s her gun over there.”
Sgt. Yates knelt, looked at my tangle of loops and knots, and said to his partner, “We’ll need a knife.”
“How about an ambulance?” the second officer asked. He was already bagging the gun as evidence.
“Better call for one. That looks like a rather nasty lump forming on her temple.” He leaned closer to inspect the darkening bump. “You pack a mean wallop, Mrs. Malone.”
I couldn’t tell if that was compliment or criticism, and I prudently didn’t ask. With the ropes cut free and replaced by handcuffs, they moved Tammi to the sofa. She was still a little groggy but conscious enough to turn on the charm.
“Sgt. Yates, thank goodness you’re here! This woman is demented. She came in here and attacked me!”
“I did not,” I said indignantly. “She called me up and asked me to come over here so she could kill me!” I had some exclamation points of my own, and I was willing to use them. “See what she did to me?” I lifted my chin to show the line the rope had left on my neck and my developing bruise.
“She’s crazy! You can’t believe anything she says. Leslie Marcone fired her! Maybe she didn’t just find Leslie’s body, maybe she killed Leslie!”
Sgt. Yates’s scarred eyebrow lifted meaningfully. “Were we discussing Leslie Marcone?” he asked mildly.
Tammi scowled at him, apparently realizing she may have made a blunder here. But she wasn’t about to back down.
“Do you know who my husband is?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ridenour, I do,” Sgt. Yates said.
“You can be certain he’ll let everyone know about this atrocious action toward an innocent citizen,” she stormed. Her charm was fizzling rapidly. She struggled with the handcuffs. “This is outrageous! A travesty of justice! And you can expect a lawsuit too!”
Sgt. Yates didn’t argue with her. “Tammi Ridenour,” he said as Baby pressed close to her, “you are under arrest for the murder of Leslie Marcone. You have the right to remain silent and refuse to answer questions. Do you understand?”
Tammi glared at him through smeared eyeliner. “I’m warning you!”
Sgt. Yates extracted a plastic card from his wallet and started reading aloud the required statement of Miranda rights, although I suspected he’d repeated them often enough to know them by heart.
The second officer glanced at me doubtfully as Sgt. Yates read, although whether the doubt was about my sanity, my possible guilt in Leslie’s murder, or my knot-tying ability, I couldn’t tell. I gave him my most innocent LOL smile. He did a little double take, apparently just now recognizing me. “Hey, you’re the woman with the dynamite under her Thunderbird. I was over there this morning—”
In Plain Sight Page 25
