Framed

by Karen Leabo

  Kyle scribbled a note to himself to check out all the U-Haul-type companies to see if Rodin really had reserved a truck.

  “What was your take on Gilpatrick?” Kyle asked.

  Blayney scratched his chin, which sported a scraggly beard. “Earnest, worried. Almost a little too cooperative, just inches short of bowing and scraping. Know what I mean?”

  Kyle knew well the type of character Blayney was referring to—polite and helpful around authority figures, always saying “yes sir, no sir,” in a way that was slightly nauseating. Such behavior always made Kyle wonder what the person was really thinking.

  “Did he call you ‘sir’?” Kyle asked Blayney, smiling at the thought.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Hey, what’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. Just don’t get used to it.” Blayney was about as authoritative as Little Orphan Annie.

  “So do we have enough to get a search warrant for the babe’s house?” Blayney asked, clearly relishing the idea of discovering some type of foul play.

  Kyle opened his desk drawer, pulled out a much-abused Yellow Pages, and thrust it at Blayney. “Find out if Rodin rented a truck,” he ordered. “I’m going to talk to Ms. Robinson’s neighbors. And I wish you wouldn’t call her ‘the babe.”’

  Blayney shrugged, looking a little puzzled. “It’s just between us. I wouldn’t call her that to her face, or write it in a report or anything.”

  Kyle nodded. He was being an idiot. All cops were at least a little cynical. Suspects were automatically “scumbags,” and that was when the cops were feeling charitable. But it didn’t seem right, referring to Jess Robinson as a “babe.” She had more dignity than that.

  “She good-looking?” Blayney asked.

  “Average,” Kyle said. He turned and stalked out of the squad room before he could think too hard about why he’d just lied to his partner.

  “Hey, Jess, come look at this.” Lynn was staring out the bedroom window, a half-folded pair of Terry’s jeans hanging across her arm, forgotten.

  “What now?” Jess asked, growing more irritated with Lynn every passing minute. The girl had spent far more time gazing out the window than performing any useful task. “Honestly, you’re worse than nosy Mrs. Tanglemeyer two houses down. Is that stray dog relieving himself on our lawn again?”

  “Much more interesting than that,” Lynn said smugly, her gaze never wavering. “The macho cop is back.”

  Jess was at the window in an instant, peering down at the empty driveway. “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  “Across the street. Talking to Mrs. Stubbs.”

  “I wonder what he wants with her?”

  “Jeez, Jess, don’t you ever watch TV? He’s checking out your story! Whatever you told him about Terry, he’s seeing if Mrs. Stubbs can corroborate it.”

  “Is he talking to all the neighbors, or just her?” Jess wondered aloud.

  “I’ll bet he talks to everyone, to see if he can get a consensus of opinion. You know, like, ‘Were they a happy couple? Did you ever see them fight? Did she have violent tendencies?”’

  “Lynn! That’s not the slightest bit funny.” Apparently Kyle Branson had finished questioning Mrs. Stubbs. He was putting his notebook in his pocket, although the middle-aged woman was still talking ninety to nothing. He waved goodbye to her and headed down the walkway, but he didn’t return to his car. Instead he walked to the next house over.

  “What in the world is he finding out?” Jess asked, guiltily remembering the incident between her and Terry a couple of months ago. Terry had locked her out of the house in her bathrobe when she’d run outside to get the paper, and she’d yelled and knocked loud enough to wake the whole neighborhood, to no avail. Later he’d claimed it was an accident, and that he hadn’t heard her knocking and ringing the bell, that he’d been taking a shower.

  But she knew better.

  She’d had to wake up her landlord next door at 6:00 a.m. to borrow the extra key. At the time, she’d been sure that the whole block knew that Terry had locked her out of the house and that she’d been madder than a she-wolf who’d missed dinner.

  “Does this Branson guy doubt my word?” she wondered.

  “A good cop doubts everyone’s word,” Lynn said in her newly acquired “expert” voice. “In my psychology class, we learned how fallible human memory can be. Even if he believes you’re telling the truth as you know it, he has to allow for the fact that you might not accurately remember the sequence of events.”

  “It happened exactly like I told him.” Then Jess thought back. During her conversation with Branson, she’d corrected herself several times, she recalled, and had often admitted that she wasn’t sure about things.

  Wouldn’t that indicate innocence to him, to anyone? After all, if she’d been covering up something, wouldn’t she have thought about her story and gotten it straight before talking to a cop?

  Maybe not. The newspapers were full of stories of criminals too stupid to be believed, like the guy who robbed a bank and wrote the demand note on his own deposit slip.

  “Lynn...you don’t suppose he really thinks I had something to do with Terry’s disappearance, do you?” Jess asked in a small voice.

  “You?” Lynn laughed with abandon.

  “It’s not that ridiculous,” Jess said. “After all, I did once...hurt someone.”

  Lynn sobered. “Relax. That Branson guy is just checking things out, that’s all. Playing it safe.”

  For once, Lynn was making sense, more sense than Jess. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Do you think Mr. Dickinson will tell him about the time he saw you sunbathing nude in the backyard?”

  Jess groaned. “I was not nude. I had on a beige swimsuit, and Mr. Dickinson needs glasses.” If Detective Branson talked with a bunch of her chatty and highly imaginative neighbors, he might deduce all kinds of unsavory, incorrect things about her life. There was the time one of Terry’s parties had gotten out of control and the police had shown up. She’d been out of town.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” Jess concluded. “I’m going to face this guy head-on. If he wants to know everything about my private life, he can ask me. I won’t hide anything.”

  “Not even the—”

  “That I’ll hide,” Jess said quickly. “And don’t you mention it, either. No one needs to know about the trial in Massachusetts.”

  Jess abandoned the box she’d been packing, rolled up her sleeves and headed downstairs. She paused in the hallway to stare at the brown stain on the carpet. She felt a strong impulse to clean the spot despite Kyle Branson’s warning.

  She would have to wait, though, until the police had run their tests, or whatever it was they did to supposed bloodstains. Anyway, she was on another mission right now. She opened the front door and strode brazenly out into the early-October chill.

  Jess caught up with Branson just as he was exiting Mr. Dickinson’s house. “Detective?”

  He stared at her, first in disbelief, then looking a bit sheepish, like a kid caught looking up a lady’s dress. “Ms. Robinson. What a...surprise.”

  “I could say the same. Just out for a little social stroll, are we?”

  “It’s called canvassing the neighborhood.” He resumed walking toward his next target, the house across the street, which was next door to Jess’s duplex. “I’m trying to find out if anyone has seen anything suspicious—you know, strange characters hanging around the neighborhood, any peculiar behavior—”

  “Peculiar on whose part?” Jess asked. “Mine? Terry’s?”

  “Either. Both.” He stopped on the neighbor’s front porch, where Jess had followed him. When she didn’t budge, he took a threatening step toward her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to conduct these interviews in private.”

  “Oh.” Jess shrank back from his intimidating six-plus feet towering over her. She realized that by being confrontational, she was shedding an unflattering light on herself. “Fair enough. I’ll just, um, go ho
me and put some coffee on, then. Maybe you could stop by when you’re done. I’d like to find out what kind of progress you’re making.”

  “I’ll keep you informed,” Branson said in a way that made Jess suspicious, as if he was making fun of her. “As a matter of fact, I’d already planned to pay you another visit this afternoon. I might have a few more questions for you.”

  Jess nodded. He wanted to ask her more about her relationship with Terry. Fine. She had nothing to hide. Well, nothing about Terry, anyway.

  Lynn was bouncing down the stairs as Jess came through the front door. “All of Terry’s junk is in the basement except for the stuff in his bathroom. I’ll start moving my stuff in now, okay?”

  “Whoa, whoa, wait. I’m moving into the master bedroom. You can have the smaller room.”

  Lynn wrinkled her nose. “How come Terry could always get his way with you, but I can’t?”

  “Terry was a man,” Jess said simply, without thinking.

  “So?”

  “Men can be pretty frightening, even weak men like Terry.” Her thoughts strayed to Detective Branson. He scared her, but he also intrigued her. How annoying.

  Lynn appeared thoughtful. “Yeah, I guess.” Then she was back to business. “Okay, let’s move your stuff over to the master bedroom, then.”

  “You can start anytime you like,” Jess said mildly as she headed for the kitchen, Lynn dogging her heels. “I’m making coffee. Detective Branson is coming over to ask more questions.”

  “Really? Maybe he’ll try and trip you up, get you to contradict yourself.”

  “What a pleasant thought.” As she put a new filter in the basket, Jess dithered over whether to make decaf or regular, then shook her head at her own foolishness. Had she actually been concerned about what Branson would prefer? This wasn’t exactly a social call. She grabbed the canister of decaf, figuring it would be kinder on her nerves. She put two scoops into the filter, then filled the reservoir with tap water.

  “You could box up the last few things in the bathroom,” Jess suggested hopefully to Lynn.

  “I told you, I’m not touching anything intimate like toothpaste or that flippin’ gold razor you told me he uses. Oh, and, by the way, you’ll need a new shower curtain.”

  “What? What’s wrong with the old one?”

  “There is no old one. It’s not there.”

  “Not... You mean it’s missing? How could that be?”

  Lynn shrugged. “Beats me.”

  Now Jess was really baffled. First her Oriental rug, then her shower curtain. The only logical conclusion she could reach was that Terry had taken them. But why? The rug she could understand. He could sell it for at least a couple of thousand dollars. But why steal a shower curtain?

  Maybe he’d torn it and thrown it away, then forgotten to ask her to buy a replacement. Yes, that made sense. Anything could be explained away if you just worked at it, she reasoned.

  With a guilty smile, she reached under the sink and plucked out a pair of rubber gloves. “Here,” she said, handing them to Lynn. “Now you can box up his toiletries, and his cooties won’t get on you.”

  Lynn rolled her eyes, but she took the gloves. “All right, but you’ll owe me.”

  “You might even find some pine cleaner under the sink. I’ll bet the place needs a good disinfecting.”

  “No doubt. Don’t push your luck, sister dearest. I promised I would keep my bedroom and bathroom neat, and I would clean up after myself around the rest of the house, but that does not include scrubbing up after Terrible Terry.”

  “All right, all right.” As soon as the coffee was ready, Jess poured herself a cup, doctored it with cream and sugar, then went into the living room to sit down and await her interrogator.

  “Now that’s a strange way to think about it,” she murmured to herself. She and Branson were on the same side, weren’t they? He wanted her cooperation, and she was giving it. He hadn’t said a cross word to her, or given any reason to believe he wanted to nail her for something—just that cocked eyebrow that indicated a skeptical nature.

  She vowed not to take his skepticism so personally.

  Olivia Tanglemeyer was the eighth and final neighbor Kyle intended to question. So far, he’d learned some interesting, if not startling, facts about Jess Robinson and Terry Rodin. Nude sunbathing, huh? Hardly the trait of a murderer, but fascinating nonetheless.

  Not one neighbor had seen a taxi pull into Jess’s driveway three nights ago, although Maxine Findley claimed she remembered a horn honking.

  Maybe Rodin was the vindictive type, Kyle thought as he waited for someone to answer the door. Maybe he’d disappeared on purpose just to scare Jess, as she’d laughingly suggested. Stranger things had been known to happen.

  The front door opened a crack, and a white-haired woman peered at him with one rheumy eye above a security chain. “What do you want?”

  Kyle immediately displayed his shield and introduced himself, then explained why he wanted to talk to her.

  “What do you want with me? How could I possibly help you?”

  “You might have seen or heard something that could shed some light on the situation,” Kyle said, part of his standard spiel. “It could be something that seems very insignificant to you. May I come in?”

  The chain came off. “I’ll be of help if I can,” the lady said, her manner changing abruptly from suspicion to cooperation. “I’m Olivia Tanglemeyer, by the way, and you can call me Livvy. And your name is Kyle? How nice, I have a grandson with the same name. Come in and sit down. I just took a coffee cake out of the oven. Although I still don’t know how I can help. I mind my own business. Most folks around here know me, but mostly I keep to myself....”

  Mrs. Tanglemeyer continued with her monologue while Kyle loosened his tie. This was going to be a long interview. Contrary to what the lady had just said, she didn’t mind her own business or keep to herself—at least, not according to her neighbors. When she wasn’t peering out the windows at everyone else, she was on the phone, trying to glean information and passing along her own juicy morsels.

  “And he was a very nice young man, yes indeed,” Livvy said as she set a generous slice of coffee cake in front of Kyle. They had settled in the kitchen, which bore that odor of stale grease and natural gas so common to old houses belonging to old people. “He took my garbage out for me a couple of times, although I think that was Jess’s idea.”

  “Mpff,” Kyle said. Olivia Tanglemeyer’s coffee cake was dry as a brick, and she offered Kyle nothing to drink, and she talked nonstop, but he stuck around. She was proving to be a wealth of information. “He drove too fast,” she said of Teny, “always screeching in and out of the driveway, sometimes at odd hours. Then again, I guess a lot of young men act that way. And the parties. Oh, my.”

  It seunded as if the old lady spent most of her life peering out windows, looking to find fault. But as for Jess herself, Olivia had only kind words to say.

  “She really is a good neighbor. She keeps her grass mowed and is generally quiet, except for those few exceptions I mentioned. Maybe she just has bad luck with men. Her younger sister, the one who’s over there now, once told me that a man Jess dated in college stalked her after she gave him the boot. What an awful thing.”

  Kyle made a note of this, though he wasn’t sure what significance, if any, it had.

  “Oh, there is one other thing...no, never mind. It’s probably nothing.” Livvy began nervously wiping down the pink-flecked Formica countertop.

  “What? If it’s nothing, then it won’t hurt to tell me.”

  Reluctantly, she did. “Well, last weekend—before Terry left, you understand—Jess dropped by to see if I had anything that would get out bloodstains.” The way Livvy dithered, it was clear she wished she’d never brought up the subject. “I lent her some spot remover.”

  “Did she say why she needed it?”

  “No, I don’t believe so, But it’s so easy to cut yourself—by dropping a glass in the k
itchen, or cutting up vegetables...” Her rheumy eyes seemed to be asking something of him.

  “You’re right, it’s probably nothing,” Kyle said, hoping to put the lady at ease. And maybe it wasn’t significant, especially if it happened well before Terry’s disappearance.

  Maybe it hadn’t happened at all, he thought hopefully. Could be that Mrs. Tanglemeyer imagined things. She seemed sane enough, but she could be dotty as a Dalmatian. She was, after all, eighty-two years old, which she’d reminded Kyle of no less than six times.

  Surely, if Jess had killed her lover, she’d done so in the heat of passion. He refused to believe she could ruthlessly plan ahead, to the point of anticipating troublesome bloodstains.

  It was almost an hour later when he left Livvy’s house with a promise to return soon and sample her poppyseed pound cake. He headed back to Jess’s house, looking forward to his interview with her. He already had her on the defensive, and with a few pointed questions he hoped to get her thoroughly flustered. Then perhaps he could ascertain whether she was telling him the whole truth.

  When she answered the door, her long dark hair was piled carelessly on top of her head, secured with a single clip. Several loose, wavy tendrils framed her face. She looked expectantly at him, and he was the one who felt suddenly flustered.

  “Um, as I said earlier, I have a few more questions, if this is a convenient time.”

  “No more or less convenient than any other time,” she said, her face and voice carefully neutral, he noticed. She allowed him inside. This time, however, she sat in the recliner, relegating him to the sofa alone. Did she do it because his nearness bothered her, or because she wanted to be sitting higher than he was? Perhaps she thought she would gain a psychological advantage by doing so.

  Hah. He was a master at interrogation. He declined to sit down. “Is that coffee I smell?”

  “It was,” she said smoothly. “I drank it all. I was working at the computer, and I drink nonstop when I’m working.”

  “May I have some water, then? I just ate two pieces of Mrs. Tanglemeyer’s coffee cake. Have you had the pleasure?”