Knot in My Backyard

by Mary Marks

  “What did she say?” asked Lucy.

  “Diane jumped to his defense, just like you’d expect someone to do who was in the thrall of a control freak. She denied he could be a killer. Then she said she intended to get him a lawyer, asked where he was being held, and left.”

  Birdie absently massaged her knees with wrinkled hands and fingers enlarged at the joints. “The poor child.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know why, but when I suggested she call her parents, she completely rejected the idea. Almost as if she didn’t want their support.”

  “Or couldn’t count on it,” said Lucy. “You can never tell what really goes on inside families, can you? Remember Claire Terry.”

  Lucy referred to the young woman we found murdered four months ago and the family secrets she kept. “You’re right. You can never tell, for sure.”

  Birdie stopped rubbing her knees. “If Arlo has just arrested Jefferson Davis as the killer, does this mean your friend Ed can now come home?”

  “I certainly hope so.” I took a deep breath. “Arlo came over last night and apologized for being such a jerk. He said he loves me and wants me to move in with him.”

  Lucy’s jaw dropped about three feet toward the ground. “Just like that? What changed his mind?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe it had something to do with my telling him the other day I’d fallen in love with him. Maybe it was the fact he saw another man moving in on his territory. He called himself an ‘idiot’ for thinking I’d ever sleep with Yossi.”

  Lucy choked on a drink of water. “Oh, Lord, girlfriend. You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  Birdie spoke up. “Tell him what? Has something been going on I don’t know about yet?”

  I told Birdie about Yossi and me. “He’s very special.”

  She smiled. “I don’t doubt it, dear, but it’s such a shame. I really like Arlo. He’s very special too.”

  And there in a nutshell is my dilemma.

  Lucy held up her hand. “Okay, okay. So, last night?”

  “I told him about Yossi. I’m not ashamed of what happened, and I’m not sorry. Besides, telling him was the fair thing to do.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “These things never turn out well.”

  “You’re right. Last night was no exception. Arlo gave me a kind of ultimatum. He still wants me, but only if he can have all of me. We’re both taking a step back to consider our options.”

  Lucy asked, “Did you speak to him this morning at the memorial service?”

  “Briefly. He said both Hardistys have solid alibis for the night of the murder.”

  We chatted a few more minutes and Lucy stood. “Well, girlfriend, time to go. Looks like you didn’t need our help today, after all. Good luck with the other thing.”

  She hugged me; and as they walked to Lucy’s Caddy, Birdie said, “It’s a shame about Arlo, isn’t it?”

  I waited a couple of hours to give Beavers time to interrogate and process Jefferson Davis. Then I called him to ask about Ed.

  “Beavers.”

  “Hi, Arlo. It’s me. I called to find out when Ed is being released.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Have you charged Davis with the murder? I mean, he fits the witnesses’ description to a tee.”

  “You know I can’t discuss this with you. There are still a lot of question marks and loose ends even you, with all your people, don’t know about.”

  “Did Diane Davis make it to the station? I told her where she could find her husband.”

  “And thanks for that. She ran into Kaplan. Turns out they know each other.”

  Of course! When Kaplan had questioned me right after I discovered Martin’s body, he bragged about being an alumnus of Beaumont. Now that I thought about it, he and Diane were about the same age.

  “Between their personal connection and the fact Kaplan also knew Jefferson Davis, he’s been taken off the case and I’m back as lead.”

  “So . . . wait a minute. If Kaplan and Diane went to school together, he must have known Dax Martin also. Were they all classmates?”

  Beavers didn’t answer.

  “Come on, Arlo. Why didn’t Kaplan say anything about knowing the victim? When you went to arrest Davis, did you know Kaplan was his former student?”

  The possible conspiracies in this case just kept growing.

  “As I said, ‘Sherlock,’ Kaplan is no longer on this case. So unless you have any more information, I’ve no further comment.” The phone went dead.

  He hung up on me! But he did call me “Sherlock.” Joking around is a good sign, right?

  I immediately called Simon Aiken and repeated what Beavers just revealed about Detective Kaplan’s connection to the case. “I know Arlo better than to think he’d be careless with information. I think he meant for me to tell you in order to help with Ed’s release.”

  “I’m on my way to the DA’s office as we speak. In view of the arrests yesterday and today, I’ll try to get the charges against Ed dropped.”

  “Tell her about Detective Kaplan’s connection to the prime suspect, his wife, and the victim. He could be construed as having a personal interest in the outcome of the case, which would look very bad for the police department. That could give her further incentive to drop the charges against Ed.”

  “On it. Talk to you later.”

  Hunger pangs gnawed at my stomach, and the clock read an hour past lunchtime. I scooped some cottage cheese into an ice-cream bowl and sliced a fresh, juicy peach on top. I chewed my last mouthful of “faux peach ice cream” when the phone rang.

  “Hi, Mom!” Quincy and I finally connected. “Get my bedroom ready. I’m coming home.”

  “Oh, Quincy. Did you get the West Coast job with NPR? Are you moving back to Los Angeles?”

  “Not exactly. NPR wants to do a story on the wildlife reserve in the Sepulveda Basin. A YouTube video of the destruction went viral. The Audubon Society, homeless advocates, and environmentalists from all over the country are up in arms against the Army Corps of Engineers. Since I’m from the area, they thought I’d be the perfect person to do the story. Plus, this’ll be a kind of tryout for a permanent assignment there.”

  “Oh, honey, that’s just great. Uncle Isaac will be thrilled when I tell him. When are you coming?”

  “Sunday evening. Don’t bother to meet me at the airport. I’m renting a car.”

  I hummed as I changed the sheets in the spare bedroom and cleaned up the bathroom. I didn’t have much to do, as Hilda had already done a good job after her overnight almost a week ago. As I vacuumed the dust curls under the bed, it occurred to me Quincy’s visit provided me with a perfect excuse to avoid any encounters with Beavers or Crusher. Having her in the house would give me plenty of space to think things through.

  As long as she was around, my daughter would be my priority. I’d introduce her to Hilda and Pastor Sandoval so she’d get a real inside track on the plight of the homeless. Her story would be so good, NPR would beg her to take the West Coast assignment.

  At about four o’clock, the phone rang again.

  “Babe, just got a call from Aiken. Ed’s being released.”

  “That’s great news, Yossi.”

  “Listen. I can’t stop thinking about you. I miss you. Let me come over and show you how much.”

  I was wrong. He didn’t have to touch my body to get it to sing. Just thinking about making love to him made me want to join the “Hallelujah Chorus.”

  “I’m sorry, Yossi. I still need time.”

  “What about tomorrow night? We can have Shabbat dinner again with your uncle Isaac. I’ll pick him up and take him home. Then afterward, you and I can fulfill a mitzvah.”

  The Sabbath is considered a time of joy and pleasure and is often alluded to as a bride. Crusher’s comment referred to the rabbinical directive for a husband to make love to his wife on Friday night as a way to celebrate with joy the coming of the Sabbath bride.

  “Yossi, first of all, that par
ticular mitzvah only applies to married couples.”

  “We can fix that.”

  “What? No. What? No. Are you saying you want to get married?”

  “I’m saying I want you to be my woman.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Yossi. We’ve known each other for less than two weeks.”

  “So? Jacob loved Rachel as soon as he set eyes on her.”

  As Uncle Isaac would say, Oy va voy!

  CHAPTER 41

  Darkness had fallen on this late August night. Ed Pappas dropped by earlier to pick up his computer, house key, and gun; then he invited me to the Cantina, where everyone was going to celebrate his release. If I was around Crusher tonight, I might not be able to resist his charms, and I still had a lot more thinking to do about my love life. So I opted to stay home and enjoy a quiet evening.

  Bumper meowed to be let out the back door. I might have worried about coyotes coming down from the hills looking for water in the river and easy meals from ground squirrels and wandering house pets, but Bumper never left my fenced-in backyard. So far, the coyotes respected the six-foot-high wooden boundary between my territory and theirs.

  The weather had eased from ninety-five degrees in the daytime to a much more comfortable sixty-five degrees at night. I opened the door and we both stepped outside to enjoy the cool night air. A froggie chorus rose up from the river, mixed in with the high-pitched chittering of crickets in the field and the muted sound of a television audience clapping through somebody’s open window. The neighborhood felt almost normal again. The murderer—Jefferson Davis—was in custody, and my daughter was due back home in another three days.

  The rustling of the branches was so subtle that I didn’t notice it at first. My heart began to race as a tall, slender silhouette stood up from where it had been crouching near a mock orange bush in the thick darkness. Surely, my mind played tricks on me. Surely, I was just overstimulated by my myopic determination to find the killer. As the figure slowly approached, my knees melted. This wasn’t a trick of the mind. Someone was really there!

  I backed up a couple of steps until I reached the door and pushed it open. The shape advanced rapidly toward me, forcing its way into the kitchen light. Illuminated before me stood the unhappy figure of Diane Davis.

  She had changed out of her elegant black suit and diamonds into baggy gray sweatpants and a loose T-shirt. Her luxurious blond hair cascaded past her shoulders instead of being pulled back under that ridiculous little veiled number she had worn to the memorial service.

  Strapped to her back was a small canvas backpack, and on her feet was a pair of white athletic shoes stained with spots of dark brown. Did she take my soiled shoes from the side of the road, where I had abandoned them on Sunday? No, she couldn’t be wearing them; her feet were much larger than mine.

  Her eyes were red from crying and her black mascara was smudged and smeared. She glared daggers at me and spoke through clenched teeth. “Thanks for saving me the trouble of breaking into your house.”

  Oh, my God! She came here to force her way into my house?

  It couldn’t be to take anything. After all, what could I possibly have she couldn’t afford to buy ten times better? There was only one reason for Diane to break in. She meant to hurt me. I backed up a step and leaned on the counter to keep my knees from buckling.

  “What do you want?”

  Diane’s voice was hard. “Jeff’s in jail and it’s all your fault.”

  So she was angry at me that her husband was in jail? She wasn’t relieved to be free of that control freak? Did I get their relationship all wrong?

  “Why is it my fault?”

  “Noah told me how you kept poking around Dax’s murder.”

  “Who’s Noah?”

  “Noah Kaplan.”

  “You mean Detective Kaplan? Is Noah his first name? I always wondered.” My mind reeled in confusion. What was going on here?

  Diane narrowed her eyes and growled, “I want Jeff back. If he’s in jail, I’ll be all alone, and who’ll take care of me then, huh?”

  Well, all right, then. That settles it. Let’s just suspend every law of decency so someone can take care of Diane. Clearly, she needs a caretaker, or meds, or something!

  “Aren’t you afraid of your husband? After all, he killed Dax Martin in a jealous rage.”

  Her eyebrows pushed together in surprise. “What?”

  “I know about your affair with your old boyfriend, Dax Martin, Diane. Don’t deny it. Apparently, your husband also found out and killed him. If Jefferson’s capable of murder, he could harm you too. Think about that.”

  She threw her head back and laughed a little too harsh and a little too crazy. In that moment, I knew the truth. How could I not have seen it sooner?

  The woman standing before me resembled the description of Dax Martin’s killer. She was tall, slender, and had light hair. If she wore loose clothing and pinned her hair up under a baseball cap, she could look like a man in the dark. What would account for the funny voice Graciela heard?

  Then I realized my mistake. Jefferson Davis’s British accent wouldn’t be a flag for a non-English speaker like Graciela; all English speakers would sound the same to her. But a softer, high-pitched feminine voice would sound incongruous, or “funny,” if she thought she was looking at a man.

  What was Diane’s motive? I swallowed.

  “You killed Dax Martin, didn’t you?”

  Diane just glared at me. “Nobody leaves me.”

  And there it was. Motive. Martin and his wife were recently overheard arguing about his affair with Diane. Maybe he tried to end the affair. Diane obviously didn’t take kindly to anyone leaving her. She must have arranged to meet Dax that night. If she caught him off guard, she certainly could have incapacitated him with the first blow and then beaten him to death. Dax Martin was killed in a jealous rage, all right. Diane’s jealous rage, not her husband’s.

  I looked at the brown stains on her shoes. Blood? Back splatter from when she beat a man to death?

  “You killed Dax because he wanted to end the affair and go back to his wife?”

  “Noah was right about you.”

  “What did Noah Kaplan say about me?”

  “He said you have cop envy. You only sleep with a cop because you want to be one. He pities the stupid bastard who sleeps with you.”

  I’d file that away for future disclosure: Hey, Arlo, your partner tells other people you’re a “stupid bastard.” I just hoped I had a future. I had to figure out a way to get out of the house and get help. I no longer had Ed’s gun.

  “How did you end up throwing the murder weapon into Ed Pappas’s backyard?”

  “I called Jeff. He came right over to the field. Jeff always knows what to do. He knew which house belonged to that Pappas guy, so he threw the bat over the fence. He said everyone would believe your friend killed Dax because they had a fight. Then he called the police the next morning to place an anonymous tip.”

  That was it—the thing she had said earlier in the day that bothered me. She had known where Ed’s house was and that the bloody baseball bat had been found in his backyard. However, the police had never publicly disclosed the exact nature of the murder weapon. Of course the killer would know.

  Diane extracted a pair of gardening gloves from her backpack and put them on. “Your friend wasn’t home tonight. He has a nice set of tools in his garage.” Then she removed a hammer. “I’ll bet his prints are all over this. When they find your body, they’ll think he killed you. Then they’ll release my Jeff.”

  Oh, my God. She means to kill me with Ed’s hammer.

  I needed to draw her outside. If we were outside, maybe someone could help me. Maybe there’d be a witness. Maybe she’d be afraid to be seen and leave. I turned and ran from the kitchen. I threw open the front door and ran outside, yelling as loud as I could, “Help! Help! She’s going to kill me!”

  I moved forward and managed to duck as Diane took the first sideways swing with the ham
mer. Instead of splitting open my skull, it clipped a gardenia plant growing in a pot on the porch. Diane’s rage was now in high dudgeon for all to see. She obviously didn’t care anymore about her plan to blame my murder on Ed. She just wanted to kill me.

  She swore and raised the hammer over her head, preparing to create an opening in the top of my cranium.

  “Help!” I yelled as I ran, praying her long arms couldn’t reach me. I knew I could never outrun her, so I headed toward my car parked in the driveway, hoping to put it between the two of us.

  I reached the far side of my Corolla just as the hammer came down on the windshield. It shattered with a resounding crack! The glass dissolved into thousands of shiny little pebbles.

  “Bitch!” she screamed. “Get back here!”

  Thwack! The hammer came down on the car, again and again, as she chased me.

  “I hate you!”

  In the frantic circuit around my vehicle, I desperately looked for something to defend myself with. Then I heard a loud “meow.” Bumper had followed us out of the house and into the front yard.

  Diane stopped and looked at me with wild eyes. By now, she was completely off the rails. Bumper meowed again. She turned away from me and looked down at my orange fluff ball. Her lip twisted into an ugly snarl. “I hate your cat. I’m going to kill your cat.”

  “No!” I shouted. I ran over and jumped on her back, wrapping my legs around her and putting my hands over her face so she couldn’t see.

  Diane tried to shake me off, but I was way too heavy. We both fell to the ground. I landed on my back and she landed on top of me. I tried to get up, but she turned over and sat on my chest. Her knees pinned my arms to the driveway. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move.

  A nasty smile curled her lips. She raised the hammer. “You’re dead.”

  I closed my eyes and waited for the end. I pictured the people who would be sad if I died. Quincy. Uncle Isaac. Lucy. Birdie. Beavers. Crusher.