by Susan Dunlap
The average person wouldn’t have thought that a simple talk with a congressman would lead to his insisting on opening the cesspool. I had caught Congressman Tisson at an advantageous moment. The killer had no reason to assume Michelle would have made use of that same opportunity. The only way the killer would have suspected how much a congressman could do would be if he had heard David Sugarbaker talking about the Environmental Health Department and how the employees jump when a congressman calls.
The cemetery was deserted, too. In the evening shade the tombstones blended with the dusk. But now, in contrast to the splotches of bright sun, they seemed more sepulchral. I hurried past them, glancing at the Maria Keneally marker.
The house of the living Maria Keneally looked empty. But I knew the killer would be there. The house was the logical hideout—the only place isolated enough for use by the Bohemian Connection and still within walking, or running, distance from town. I wished it were night now, when the darkness would protect me, when a light in the house would tell me if anyone were there. As I neared it, I realized that I was the only one who had made the connections that pointed to the killer. The killer would know that too. My investigating had hardly been a secret. And the other thing that I recognized, and hoped the killer wouldn’t, was that no one knew either of us was here.
The back door was closed, the screen pulled shut. I circled around the side, staying close to the bushes, with each step placing my foot slowly, carefully, noiselessly down, avoiding the leaves and branches on the ground. The bedroom windows were closed, the broken bathroom window just as it had been yesterday. But the killer wouldn’t have had to use that way in. If there was one thing the Bohemian Connection would have, it would be a good set of skeleton keys. And I wouldn’t have to use the bathroom window either.
Keeping low under the windows, I made my way around to the garage. The door inside, from the garage to the living room, didn’t lock. Maria Keneally had complained about that. She’d complained but she hadn’t been about to spend the money to have it fixed. After all, she’d told me, the garage door locked. That would keep anyone out. And for most prospective intruders it would. But Maria Keneally’s meter was in her garage. I was her meter reader. And I knew where the key to the garage was.
I unlocked the door, and opening it inch by inch to avoid its squeak, I let myself into the garage. I walked carefully across the garage, skirting boxes and ladders, an old broken television; years of accumulated excess. It looked like Maria Keneally kept everything she owned in the garage—everything except her antique pistol. Why couldn’t that be here too?
But it was in the living room, right inside the garage door, in the end table drawer, right where Maria Keneally could grab it and face off any local ne’er-do-well who tried to break into her house.
At the door to the house I stopped, listened. There was no sound from inside. Was the killer in the bedroom, at the other side of the house? Could I slip into the living room, grab the pistol from the end table drawer…?
I turned the handle, pressing it down to keep it from squeaking. I pushed the door open half an inch at a time. Only the near slice of the room was visible—a worn armchair and a lamp. I pushed the door further. The front door came into view and beside it a coatrack with Maria Keneally’s winter coat hanging from it.
The door flew open. A hand grabbed for my hair and yanked me off balance to the floor.
“Gotcha!” Jenny shouted. She picked up a pistol from the end table behind her. It was old, heavy—Maria Keneally’s pistol.
I inched back on the floor.
“Don’t try to get away now,” Jenny said, laughing. “I’m very good with a gun. Shooting was the one thing Ross did teach me.”
The shades were up, but curtains covered the windows. Even with the bright sunshine outside, the room was dark. On the far side of the front door was the dining area. Jenny had already made herself at home there. She had pushed the table to the wall. A backpack with a roll of sketch paper sticking out sat atop it. And an end table lamp sat on the table. This would be where she planned to do her sketching.
“This is all you could bring here without your car, isn’t it?” I said.
“Ward’s car!”
“Ward’s car,” I repeated. “It wasn’t a useful car for you.” I thought of the big windows of the Pacer. They were part of the reason Jenny had dumped Michelle’s body in the sewer construction hole. The Pacer was hardly a car you could leave a body in. And the sewer hole had blocked the McElveys’ driveway. Jenny couldn’t even have put the body in the car and then the car in the garage. And with Ward’s guests, the Underwoods, already in the house expecting to be fed and entertained all weekend, Jenny couldn’t drive off long enough to safely get rid of Michelle’s body that night without arousing suspicion. So the body went into the sewer hole; on Follow-up, to be taken out Sunday night after the Underwoods had left.
“You really planned ahead, Jenny. You checked this out for the Bohemian Connection work, didn’t you? That’s how you found the pistol, isn’t it?”
She smiled.
“Ross wasn’t planning to give you the Connection job, was he?”
She smiled again, this time glancing down at the gun. “No. Ross wasn’t about to give me anything. Ross didn’t give; he only took—not even took, he grabbed. He was my father’s son. He never had to stay in the house with my mother when she was too crazy to be left alone. He raced around on his motorcycle; he went to dances. I was the one who had to watch her when she went manic. I had to make sure she didn’t get out where people might see her. I had to guard the phone. I had to drop everything. I couldn’t paint; I couldn’t read; I couldn’t even go to the bathroom. It would have looked bad if people had seen how crazy she was; it would have damaged the business. People don’t want to buy a house from a crazy woman’s husband. That’s what Daddy told me.
“I never had friends; I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay after school to do anything. I could never invite anyone over. No one would have wanted to come in there anyway. No one would have liked to see her pacing around inside. I had to watch her. But she did escape once. And you know what happened?” Jenny stared at me with a smile, an angry smile, an expression out of sync with itself.
“She drowned, didn’t she?”
“Yes, yes. I let her out and she drowned.” She stared first at the gun and then at me, still with that disparate expression.
I could imagine the mix of relief and guilt she had felt then, but I didn’t want to ask about that. I didn’t want to do anything that would drive her deeper into her emotional turmoil. Once she was submerged in that, any chance of my reasoning with her would be gone. In this secluded house, she could shoot me without anyone hearing. She could stick my body in the garage next to the broken television.
Still, I had to know about the murders. Watching her reaction, I said, “Tell me how you killed Ross.”
“I liked killing Ross.” Her smile was paper-thin. Her fingers tightened on the pistol. “Daddy loved Ross, only Ross. Ross was his son. He always forgave Ross. He left Ross the house, did you know that? My house. And the business, the business that Ward made work. Do you know what Ross planned to do?”
“When?”
“After my father died, of course. Ross watched him die. He watched him dig the hole. Then he watched him fall. He watched as the ambulance took him away. Then do you know what he said?”
“No.”
“He said, ‘Well, the old man’s dead. This shack is mine. The bourgeois business is mine. I’m going to unload them both before he’s in the ground and never see this town again.’ That’s what he planned to do, sell my house, sell the only business that would give Ward steady work. We would have had no place to live, nothing to live on. I worked for that house. I watched that crazy woman all those years while he rode around on his motorcycle. He was going to sell my house; he was going to sell the business, to make me go to work all day, five days a week.” Her fingers were white against the gun. “I w
ould never have been able to paint.”
“So you killed him?”
She flashed that smile again, like a paper floating over a fire. “It was easy. He didn’t expect it. I hit him with a pipe, just like Michelle. You don’t have to hit them as hard as you’d think. You don’t have to kill them that way. You just have to stun them and drop the body into the slime. The slime does the rest. It was so easy. So nice. So appropriate. It was so good, so right to see Ross dead. Even Daddy would have agreed.”
She continued to smile, more concretely now, as if the recitation of facts was pulling her back toward reality. “There was dirt piled right beside the cesspool hole, just waiting. I didn’t shovel much in over him. Just enough to cover him. Then I drove to the hospital. If Ross had taken me to the hospital, I wouldn’t have had to drive alone. I wouldn’t have killed him, you see. But he wasn’t going to.”
“What happened to his Bohemian Connection records? Did you just leave them in the house?”
“Yes. There was no need to do anything else with them.”
“And then you became the Bohemian Connection?”
Jenny laughed. “Ross would have been so angry. He was going to have an auction for the job. That’s why he came home. He was going to call some of his suppliers and have them come over and bid for the job. But he didn’t get the chance. I killed him first.” She laughed again. “Sometimes I wish he hadn’t died, so he could see me. He would be so furious. He thought he was keeping everything so secret, like he was this big important man with his clandestine job. But I always knew where he kept things. When I was in the house, watching that crazy woman, I’d take out his boxes and go through his records.”
“And the people he dealt with, did they think he had passed the job on to you?”
“They didn’t care. They knew me. They trusted me as much as they trusted Ross, maybe more. By that time I knew more about the area than he did. They’d seen me with him. The local people knew we didn’t get along, but the out-of-towners didn’t. They just knew I was his sister. If they called the Bohemian Connection’s number, I answered.”
The whole operation was becoming clear. She was right; it was so simple. “So the men who needed to contact you came up to you on the sidewalk and had their pictures sketched, right?” How many times had I seen an unlikely subject in Jenny’s chair? How often had I noticed a man handing her a bill, a bill for an eight-dollar sketch, and getting no change?
“It wasn’t just for the money.” Jenny stared at me, a pleading look in her eyes. “I did like taking Ross’s job. I did need the money. Ward never could keep his mind on the little matters of business that make the money to live on. With him it was always Sunset Villas, or high-rises, or pie-in-the-sky things. We could never have lived on his commission from selling houses. But that wasn’t the real reason. Those men I met, they were important. Sooner or later one of them would be an artist, or a gallery owner, or a critic, and he would see my work, and he would appreciate it like no one in this little town does, and then he would arrange for me to show it in a city, where an artist should be. You see that, don’t you?”
“You did all this for your art.”
She smiled. She looked down at the gun, then at my face again. Her finger arched on the trigger. She lowered the barrel toward my heart.
“Jenny,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, “you promised to sketch me, remember?”
“No, you just wanted to nose around.” She straightened her arm, moving the gun closer to me.
“But I wanted your drawing, too. Don’t you remember I told you I’d looked at artists doing drawings of people when I was a kid. But I was too young then. I didn’t have the money for a drawing—not a good drawing—not one by an artist with talent.”
Her eyes narrowed. I tried to tell from her expression how much touch with reality she still had. Would my reasoning make any difference? Or had the thrill of death become too strong?
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” I said.
She glanced from my face to the sketch pad.
“You’ve got your sketch pad. Your charcoal is here. Mine is the only face you’ll have to sketch as long as you stay here.”
Jenny laughed. “I can draw you day after day. I’ve never done a dead person. I’ve never drawn a corpse as it decays, as the skin droops in around the bones. You have good bones.”
I swallowed hard. “Corpses smell, Jenny.”
“I’m an artist. A real artist suffers for her art.” Her eyes looked at once blurry and piercing, as if they had honed in on some private truth, leaving reality behind. She was as crazy as her mother.
“And there are holes in the cemetery,” she said. “When they dig a hole the earth is soft. I can add another corpse. I like holes.”
The cemetery was full. But I didn’t want to keep Jenny concentrating on methods of my disposal. I needed her diverted, not thinking of me. I said, “Did you like putting Michelle in the sewer hole?
“I had to. There was no place else. It was Ward’s fault. Like everything.” With her free hand she extricated a piece of charcoal from the pack, keeping her eyes and her gun on me. “He invited those people, those Underwoods, for the weekend. He didn’t ask me if it was convenient. My busiest week, and he invites strangers, and then expects me to entertain them, to be there listening to their bourgeois talk, to cook for them. I had to make dinner. I had to sit and watch their bland faces as they talked, and listen to Ward go on and on about floor plans and unit sizes and access and variances. I thought I couldn’t stand another word. But then they went to bed. They were old. They didn’t stay up late. I left. I had to get out of the house.” She glanced from me to the backpack on the table. “Take the pack off the table. Hold it arm’s-length in front of you… Okay, now put it on the floor. Take the sketch paper out. There’s a portable easel in there. Take it out. You can set it up. That’s it, just snap the support in place. Now put it on the table. Okay. Back up, back to the wall.”
I moved against the wall, pushing the backpack to one side. “So you went outside,” I prompted.
“Michelle was at the bottom of the stairs. She’d been drinking. I could tell. You could always tell with her. Drink makes some people happy like Daddy, but not Michelle. It made her a bitch. She was real angry. Her face was pointed, like a weasel or a fox. It was all sharp edges of flesh, not bones. She said, ‘That house should have been mine, mine and Ross’s. If you, all of you, hadn’t bugged him, he wouldn’t have left here. You think you can have it your way, Jenny,’ that’s what she said, ‘you think you can have it your way; well, you can’t. That cesspool, you think you can go on letting that leak into my garage, don’t you? Well, you can’t.’ She said she was going to talk to the congressman. She told me he had a lot of power, that he would make them dig up the cesspool. She told me the man who came out to check the mosquito larvae told her that.”
Jenny moved the easel closer and glanced quickly from me to it and back to me. “I said I didn’t believe her. But she told me the man from Environmental Health came out and told her exactly what to do.”
“So you decided to kill her?”
“I had to, you see.” She drew a circular line on the pad.
“You hit her on the head, right? Then you dropped her body in the sewer hole. You couldn’t put her body in the car where it would be visible to anyone who walked by. You couldn’t drive it an hour into the woods when you had company who would wonder where you’d been.”
Jenny looked angrily at me. “I couldn’t even put the car in the garage because the damn sewer hole blocked the driveway.” She smiled. “It was fitting, don’t you think: I couldn’t use the garage because Michelle fussed about the sewer construction, so I used the sewer for her body.”
I caught my toe on the edge of the backpack. “So you planned to take Michelle’s body out of the sewer hole in the middle of the night Sunday and put it in Craig’s nursery truck when you drove to the flower market in San Francisco?”
She ad
ded another line to the sketch.
I edged the pack closer.
“I could have left the body anywhere. I planned to drop it in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. They have plenty of bodies there. Then I could have gone on to the flower market. If I left here half an hour early I wouldn’t even have been late. I still could have gotten the alstroemerias Craig wanted.” She glanced back at the sketch pad.
I inched the pack closer. It was almost within reaching distance. “What will you do now?” I asked.
“I know people, people in the hills. I have connections. Hey, hold still. Push that backpack this way, slowly.”
I leaned forward slowly. I grabbed the pack and flung it at her. The gun fired. I rolled under the table. The easel crashed down. The gun fired again. I could feel the breeze of the bullet passing my ear. I leapt forward, grabbed Jenny’s foot, and yanked her to the floor. She smashed the gun into my shoulder. My hand went numb. I grabbed her arm with my other hand. The gun fired wide. I swung my arm at her neck. It was enough to stun her.
CHAPTER 21
THE REST OF SUNDAY was consumed with the aftermath of Jenny’s arrest: the statement for the Sheriff’s Department (given to a deputy while Wescott questioned Jenny) and the avoidance of the reporters who were thronged outside. I was afraid my house might be surrounded by reporters, too, but it was clear of them. After I saw the news coverage, I understood why. I had gotten off unscathed with regard to publicity. Congressman Tisson hadn’t mentioned my role in encouraging him to push Michelle’s complaint, and the Sheriff’s Department wasn’t going out of its way to say a civilian was involved in the killer’s arrest. For me, that was just fine; the fewer people who knew, the better, particularly if one of the ignorant was Mr. Bobbs. (I didn’t want him connecting my uncharacteristic visit to the office on Saturday with the murder investigation.)
Michelle’s funeral was held Tuesday. The entire town trekked to St. Agnes’ Roman Catholic Church, filling the little church, the parking lot, and trampling the beds in which Father Calloway had never been able to grow vegetables. For the local papers the story was the high point of the year. Reporters and photographers from San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, still in town for Bohemian Week, zeroed in on the funeral. Crews from three television stations covered it. They described Michelle as a heroine, a martyr for morality, family, and decent living. They called her a crusader.
