Dirty Tricks: A Kate Lawrence Mystery

by Judith Ivie

  “Of course you haven’t,” Emma agreed without hesitation. “It’s the apparent randomness of the harassment that leads me to think this is the work of teenagers. There probably isn’t a reason. They’re picking on you because you’re there, and they think you’re an easy target … older woman, lives alone, new to the area. What they don’t know is you’re part of our posse now, and we’ve got your back.”

  May grinned at Emma with something like her customary sass. “I like your style, Emma Lawrence. So what’s next, Strutter talks to her son?”

  “Nahhh, I’ll do it,” Emma volunteered. “I’ll call him or text him around lunchtime. What’s his cell number, Strutter?”

  Strutter reeled off the number, and Emma wrote it on a scrap of paper from May’s desk. “He may know something, or he may not, but either way, these people are going down tonight. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  Twelve

  By the time Margo made her belated way to Vista View, we were more hopeful and looking forward to carrying out Emma’s plan. There are few things worse than feeling helpless in the face of adversity, and thanks to Emma, we no longer were. Victim was a role that suited none of us. We were eager to turn the tables.

  At dusk, which came early at this time of year, May drove home, changed into clothes suitable for a casual dinner out with friends, drew her new, insulated drapes firmly closed across the front windows in her living room, and switched on the outside lights on her front porch and the lamppost where the sidewalk met the driveway. Carefully leaving a small night light burning in the downstairs bathroom and the back door to the house unlocked, she made an ostentatious exit through the garage.

  First, she backed her car out, then stopped at the end of the driveway to collect her mail from the box. She left her car door open and the radio blasting. Next, she shuffled through the junk mail and bills very slowly to give the entire neighborhood plenty of time to notice her imminent departure. Finally, she returned to her car, pressed the remote on its visor to lower the garage door and drove off.

  At Prospect Street, the nearest main road, she turned right and drove two miles or so to The Birches, where Margo, Strutter, Emma and I waited for her at my place. We all piled into Emma’s little Saturn for the trip back to Folly Brook Boulevard, which ran perpendicular to Wheeler Road. Giggling like schoolgirls, we slipped through back yards in the darkness to reach May’s house unseen. Our route had been chosen with an eye to avoiding neighborhood dogs, who would feel honor bound to alert their humans to our presence. The only living creature we encountered was a startled tomcat, embarking on his evening prowl. Embarrassed, he immediately sat down and groomed his whiskers with elaborate nonchalance.

  One by one we slipped through May’s unlocked back door into her kitchen. Emma brought up the rear, lugging our take-out Chinese dinner. After assuring us that the glow could not be seen through the drawn drapes, May switched on the gas fireplace, and we fell upon our food like wolves.

  “Nothing like a secret mission and a little stroll before dinner to sharpen up the appetite,” Strutter noted as she crunched on an egg roll.

  “There had better not be any MSG in this food.” Margo poked suspiciously through the carton in her hand, then speared a plump shrimp and took a sniff.

  Emma and I both laughed at her. “I don’t believe you can smell it, sweetie,” May told her niece.

  “You won’t have a clue until two o’clock in the morning when your tongue feels like an old gym sock, and you’re dying of a thirst no amount of water will quench,” I reminded her. We’d been down this road with Margo before.

  “Wonderful. We’re eatin’ this unhealthy, potentially dangerous stuff why?” Margo pouted.

  “Because John is playing cards with J.D. and some other buddies at our house, where they’re feeding the kids pizza and making a big old mess, which I’ll have to deal with when I get home, so we decided I got to pick what we ate on surveillance here, remember?” She peered at the cartons arrayed on the coffee table. “Where’s the General Tso’s chicken?”

  “Besides, it’s yummy,” Emma said with difficulty around the spare rib she was gnawing. “It’s weird to eat only healthy food all the time.” She wiped her greasy fingers on a napkin and grinned.

  “Huh, look who’s talkin’,” Margo retorted. “If you ask me, weird is deliberately choosin’ to start a relationship with a man who lives about as far from Connecticut as a person can get and still be in the lower forty-eight. Have hormones completely trumped your reason?”

  There ensued a lively, albeit hushed, discussion of the pros and cons of long-distance romances. As usually happened when Emma joined the group, the conversation was spirited and frank, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Every mother of a daughter revels in the moment when she realizes her baby has become a friend. These were the most important women in my life, and I took enormous satisfaction in knowing how much they valued each other. Although she was decades younger than the rest of us, Emma was accepted as a peer, not just my daughter, probably as a result of our having worked together as real estate professionals for the past several years.

  Before any conclusions could be reached about Emma’s plans, not that they ever would be, we were startled by the sound of May’s house phone ringing.

  “You still have a land line?” Emma asked, incredulous. The ringing stopped, and the call presumably went to voice mail.

  “I do,” said May tartly. “I don’t care to give myself a brain tumor and arthritic thumb joints by spendin’ all day on my cell. That’s for emergencies and photos to e-mail to my friends. Besides, the sound quality on my house phone is ten times better.”

  She got up to check the possible message, and I smiled triumphantly at Emma, who knew that I clung fiercely to my land line at The Birches for precisely the same reasons May had just laid out—well, plus the fact that I was forever forgetting to put my cell phone in the charger.

  May listened for a moment and returned the phone to its base. “That’s odd,” she mused, returning to her seat. “Carla Peterson wants to speak with me as soon as possible, says it’s important, and she’ll try to reach me again in a little while.”

  “Do you think she finally found out who put Duke in your dining room?” I asked.

  “It must have something to do with that,” Strutter agreed. “I hope you’re right, Emma, about this being just teenagers’ pranks. Remind me again why we don’t think this might be the work of a disgruntled author?”

  “We had that conversation earlier today, remember? It simply doesn’t make sense. There are far easier ways to exact vengeance,” May laughed.

  “By the way, Emma, what did my Charlie have to say?” Strutter picked up our earlier thread. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him today.”

  “I texted him, and he replied a little while later. He said he didn’t know anything specific, but he’d ask around.”

  “Good Lord, I hope he’s being discreet about it,” Strutter fretted. “I don’t want ours to be the next house to have its doors sealed shut with us inside it.”

  “Oh, I think we can trust Charlie not to create any unnecessary drama—but Duane, maybe not so much,” Emma chuckled, and we all joined in. Duane was Charlie’s best friend, gay, proud of it and prone to what Charlie called reckless mouth syndrome.

  A loud thump at the rear of the house ended our mirth. Emma held up a hand and shushed us, instantly alert. She got up from where she’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor and crept to a back window. Margo, in her stocking feet, was close behind her.

  “There’s a ladder propped against the second floor gutter,” Emma hissed, “and a pair of very big sneakers climbing the rungs. He’s got a sack of something dangling from one hand.”

  Margo shoved her way in front of Emma to get a look. “Let’s turn on the back lights and go and get the little stinker,” she proposed gleefully, clearly itching to even the score on May’s behalf.

  “Not yet. I’ve got a better idea. Mom, you an
d May and Strutter go upstairs and tell us what you can see. I want to find out what this guy is up to,” Emma directed, and we scrambled to comply.

  “This would be a lot easier if we had some light,” Strutter groused.

  “Try not to break any expensive bones. I’m not sure my homeowners liability insurance has kicked in yet,” May advised, feeling her way along the stair wall.

  “Right or left?” I asked as we reached the top.

  May hesitated, then turned left and led us down a short hallway to her office, which overlooked the back yard. “Careful,” she warned us, “the legs on my desk chair are lethal.”

  “Ouch!” Strutter yelped.

  “Oops, too late, sorry.” May leaned across her computer desk and peered out the window. “I can’t see anything except the rungs of a ladder that looks as if it’s propped against the dormer. Wait! Hear that?”

  Sneakered footsteps thudded across the roof, which was now only a few feet over our heads.

  “No attic?” I asked May softly.

  “Just a crawl space,” she whispered back. “He must be right over us.”

  “Damn it, T.J.,” expostulated a youthful baritone voice, so close that we all jumped and shrank back from the window. “The old broad has a cap on the chimney. Didn’t you check that out, you idiot?”

  Garbled protestations rose from the lawn in response. It would seem that our visitor had a companion still on the ground somewhere.

  “Great,” snarled the roof-walker. “What am I supposed to do with this sack of garbage now?”

  Before Strutter or I could divine her intentions and stop her, May yanked open the window and yelled at the top of her voice.

  “You can get it the hell off my roof, for starters, and yourself with it,” she bellowed. She turned around and shoved past Strutter and me back to the stairs. “Margo, Emma, call the police! There are a couple of punks on my roof and in my yard, and I’ve had just about enough of this.”

  She clicked on the light switch at the top of the staircase, and the three of us half ran, half stumbled, back down the stairs to find Margo already on her cell phone with the Wethersfield Police Department.

  The house phone rang again, but May ignored it. “Where’s Emma?”

  “Out here!” I followed my daughter’s voice and dashed into the kitchen, snapping on lights along the way. The back door stood wide open, and I rushed out and down the porch stairs with Strutter right behind me.

  Emma stood at the base of a large extension ladder, yanking in vain at the pulley ropes for the higher section. Then she got between the ladder and the house and started pushing. “Help me drop this thing, and he’ll be trapped up there until the police can get here.”

  Strutter and I ran to help her, and together we successfully pushed the ladder away from the house until it fell flat in the yard. “Got you, you little creep!” Strutter exulted, shaking her fist at the roof. We were so busy fist-bumping that we failed to notice two big feet and long legs sliding backward over the dormer above us.

  A shadowy figure unfolded itself from the shrubbery where T.J., presumably, had been aiding and abetting. All we could make out were jeans, some kind of zip-front jacket and a knitted cap. T.J. took one look at the three of us and the fallen ladder before deciding that discretion might be the better part of valor.

  “Sorry, man, I’m outta here,” he yelled to the feet dangling over his head. “My dad will kill me if the cops catch me here.” He beat a hasty retreat, tearing around the corner of the house with Emma in hot pursuit.

  Margo and May appeared on the back porch. “A cruiser should be here any second,” Margo reported. “A neighbor had already called in a disturbance by the time I got through.” She followed the direction of our eyes upward. “What’s goin’ on?” she asked a split second before roof-walker lost his grip and plummeted fifteen feet or so, still holding onto a section of May’s gutter. Luckily for him, but not so much for Strutter, he landed half on top of her, and they fell to the grass in a tangle of arms, legs and irate epithets.

  “Oh, no!” Margo covered her face with her hands for half a second before joining me where I stood over the thrashing pair, trying to figure out how to help Strutter.

  May remained on the porch, clearly aghast. A siren wailed nearby. “Hang on, help is on the way,” she encouraged and scurried back through the house to let the arriving officers know where the action was.

  At first we couldn’t distinguish the muffled moans and curses emanating from the bodies writhing at our feet. Then a torrent of Jamaican expletives let us know that the moans and groans were coming from the intruder, not Strutter.

  “She’s okay,” I noted with relief. “Those are some of her best cusses.”

  A few seconds later our friend succeeded in disentangling herself and promptly sat down on top of her accidental attacker, who still thrashed feebly. “Don’t just stand there with your mouths hanging open. Help me out,” she ordered, and Margo and I piled on.

  Which is how two of Wethersfield’s finest, a pair of young officers, who mercifully seemed unaware of our history of misadventures, found us a moment later. That probably would have worked out all right, were it not for the appearance of Lieutenant John Harkness and his good friend, J.D. Putnam, who brought up the rear of the little group. The officers, who’d been filled in on the events of the last half hour by May, offered each of the rest of us help getting up before checking out the culprit on the ground. One of them disappeared to call for an ambulance.

  “Nice work, ladies,” said the remaining cop, clearly impressed by what I’m sure he thought of as our geriatric spunk. “Any idea who this is?”

  Strutter and Margo carefully avoided looking at their husbands. Then Strutter spoke up. “No. He’s about my son’s age, which would make him seventeen or so, but he has a skinnier build. I’m pretty sure one of his legs is broken. I heard a big snap when he fell off the roof.”

  John and J.D. looked at each other and shook their heads.

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” replied the young officer. “Evening, Lieutenant. Do you know these ladies?”

  “Two of them are our wives,” John said darkly without further clarification. J.D. kept silent but glowered in Strutter’s direction. The officer wisely decided to redirect his attention to the injured boy on the ground.

  John held out one arm in an “after you” gesture as another siren wailed in our vicinity. We got the message and trooped through the back door in time to see Emma, along with what seemed to be the entire neighborhood, outside the dining room window. Emma and the second officer were leading a team of paramedics around the house to the back. Apparently, she’d been unsuccessful in her attempt to catch up with T.J.

  “The gang’s all here, I see,” J.D. commented in a neutral tone, which didn’t fool any of us, especially Strutter.

  “Thank goodness Armando is off bonding with his colleagues in Southbury, or I’d never hear the end of this,” I quipped in an effort to lighten the mood.

  “A fate Margo and I aren’t likely to escape,” Strutter muttered. She plucked a dry leaf from my hair, then brushed at her skirt in annoyance. “What gets out grass stains?”

  Margo, who had been uncharacteristically quiet until now, plopped down on May’s sofa. A hank of blonde hair dangled into one eye, and she fussed over a huge run in her stocking, acquired when she’d run into the back yard without her shoes. She licked the tip of one finger and dabbed at it ineffectually. Her eyes met mine, and she snorted. Strutter tried without success to smother a giggle, and it was all over for me. I cracked up as I fell onto the sofa beside Margo. Strutter collapsed on the other side of her, and the three of us howled with laughter.

  “If you could have seen yourself flappin’ around under that boy, yellin’ Jamaican cuss words,” Margo sputtered.

  “Oh, yeah?” I defended Strutter. “You didn’t look so cool and collected sitting on that kid’s back in your stocking feet. I’m starting to feel a little sorry for him.�
� I wiped my eyes on my sleeve.

  “Whoever he turns out to be, I’ll bet his account of tonight’s events won’t include being tackled by Charlie Putnam’s mama,” Strutter choked. She fumbled in her pocket for a tissue and blew her nose. Then, “Charlie! Where’s Charlie, J.D.?”

  “Home minding his little sister, where we abandoned him after hearing about Emma’s contact with him earlier today, and boy, is he mad about being left behind.”

  “Oops, busted,” I apologized to my partners, and we all got another fit of the giggles.

  Emma, who had seen variations of our group giggles before, just grinned to herself, but May regarded us warily from where she stood by the stairs. “Do they do this often?” she asked John and J.D.

  “More often than you’d think,” J.D. answered with resignation.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Perfect,” May sighed, “because what we really need at this moment is more visitors. John, would you be a dear and see who that is? I believe I’m going to put on a pot of coffee.” She headed for the kitchen.

  “I don’t know about you, Harkness, but I can wait to hear the rest of this story until another time,” said J.D. “It looks like your officers have this situation well in hand. What do you say?” He frowned at Strutter.

  John sent a similar scowl in Margo’s direction, but I noticed the corners of his mouth twitching. “I’m right behind you,” was his only comment as he went to answer the door and let himself and J.D. out.

  Thirteen

  Emma’s intuitive assessment of May’s predicament had been right-on. After the paramedics had carted off the wounded intruder, and most of the neighbors had dispersed to their homes, the two young officers joined us in May’s badly overcrowded living room to get our preliminary reports. Complete statements would need to be given at the police department in the morning, but my partners and I were getting to be old hands at that process. I almost looked forward to introducing May to the PD’s administrative staff, with whom I was on a first-name basis.