Murder Among Neighbors (The Kate Austen Mystery Series)

by Jonnie Jacobs

  Wearily, Robert plopped down on the couch and ran a perfectly manicured hand across his hair. “You wouldn’t happen to have any scotch in the house, would you?”

  I found a bottle at the very back of the cupboard, still in its Christmas wrapping. “You’re in luck. Do you want water with it?”

  “Just straight, no ice.” When I returned with the glass, he was leaning back against the cushions, eyes closed, but he sat up when he heard me approach.

  “Thanks,” he said, with a lopsided, self-effacing smile, “I think I need this.”

  He took several long gulps of scotch and gazed at his feet. In the bright indoor light I could see the dark circles under his eyes and the waxy pallor of his skin. Like an elegant host at the end of a long evening, his manner was impeccable, but the sparkle was clearly gone.

  We sat in awkward silence for a moment while I racked my brain for suitable topics of conversation. Everything that came to mind was somehow connected with Pepper, and I was reluctant to mention her name.

  “What a day,” he said at last.

  I nodded and murmured agreement.

  There was another moment of heavy silence, then Robert sighed. “If only I’d been home last night, Pepper would still be alive.”

  Or you might both be dead, I thought to myself. Robert might be a formidable match at the negotiating table, but he wasn’t the sort to send an intruder scurrying for the door.

  He drained his glass and held it up, questioningly.

  “Same as before?”

  He nodded, and I went to replenish his drink.

  “Do you want to talk about what happened?” I asked as I handed him the fresh drink. I still wasn’t sure if it was better to talk about Pepper or not. But Robert had initiated the subject, and the truth was, we could hardly sit across from each other, with Pepper murdered less than twenty-four hours earlier, and talk about the Oakland A’s.

  Robert stared into his glass, then swallowed hard and looked up. His gaze drifted to the window behind me. “I didn’t find her until this morning,” he said slowly. “I got home late last night. Didn’t even bother to go upstairs, I just slept on the couch in the den. Pepper is usually up before I am, but this morning the house was strangely quiet. When I saw Kimberly sitting on the bottom step sucking her thumb, I knew something was terribly wrong.”

  He paused, and when he continued his voice had a throaty rasp to it. “Pepper was lying diagonally across the bed with a big gash on her cheek. Her head was twisted sideways at a funny angle. I could tell she was dead even before I touched her.”

  A shiver worked its way down my spine, all the way to the tips of my toes. “The police said some jewelry was taken.”

  He nodded. “But it wasn’t any of her good stuff, just the everyday jewelry she kept in her dresser. Her wallet was taken, too. The bedroom was messed up, but it doesn’t look like anything else is missing. Nothing obvious anyway. The funny thing is, Pepper doesn’t even keep her good jewelry in the safe, she just stores it in a shoe box in the closet.” This last was accompanied by a half-smile which I found oddly touching. “She was a remarkable woman,” he said, emptying his glass.

  “Can I get you another?”

  “I probably shouldn’t.” There was a short pause. “But I will, thanks.” Robert had a way of looking directly at you when he spoke, which I found both flattering and a little discomforting.

  “How about something to eat too? This isn’t exactly L’Etoile, but I could make you a sandwich or an omelet.”

  “An omelet sounds wonderful.”

  He followed me into the kitchen and sat at the table munching pretzels while I diced mushrooms and grated cheese.

  “The policeman who was here today said the killer . . .” I paused and glanced at Robert, but the word didn’t seem to upset him. “That the intruder probably got in through an open window.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

  “It doesn’t sound like Pepper, forgetting to close the window.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Robert stretched his legs out in front of him and brushed at a piece of lint on his knee. “But she’s been distracted lately, worrying about the Wine Festival and all. She was probably making a mental list of things that still needed doing and the window just escaped her mind.”

  He watched me break the eggs into a bowl. “Don’t you drink?” he asked, gesturing to my glass of Calistoga.

  “Sometimes.” Then, because it sounded rude, like maybe I was faulting him for downing scotch instead of crying over a dead wife, I explained that I was pregnant I hadn’t told anyone except Daria because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it, and my throat grew tight when I said the words.

  Robert’s eyes drifted to my middle. “Only six weeks,” I explained.

  “The beginning of a new life. You must be excited.”

  Under the circumstances, it was hardly that. In fact, I was trying hard to ignore the whole situation in the hope that it would miraculously disappear. This was the advice my mother used to give me when I complained of a stomachache.

  Robert leaned forward and adjusted the band on his gold Rolex. “Unfortunately, that was an experience we missed.”

  I must have looked perplexed.

  “Kimberly is adopted,” he explained. “You didn’t know that?”

  Not only had I not known, I would have sworn that Pepper participated as enthusiastically as the rest of us in the discussions of pregnancy and childbirth that are inevitable among mothers of young children. But now I felt like a callous jerk. Probably she had listened and nodded, and thrown in a general “God, yes” or “Me too,” while the rest of us jabbered on.

  “No,” I told him. “Pepper never said anything.”

  “It was a big disappointment to her. She didn’t give up, even after we adopted Kimberly. There was a part of her that still held out hope, although she knew it was very unlikely.” He took a pretzel and broke it into tiny pieces. “It was me,” he said with a twisted smile. “Lazy sperm. So lazy they’re almost comatose.”

  The words sounded so funny coming from reserved and refined Robert, that I almost laughed. Instead I scooped the omelet onto a plate and set it in front of him, struck by the fact that the man was not at all what I’d expected.

  While he ate, we talked about our daughters and debated the relative merits of ballet lessons and gymnastics. I offered to lend a hand with Kimberly, and he explained that his sister would be coming up from Los Angeles to help out for a few days. Although we chatted easily, there was something vaguely disquieting about the whole experience, as though we had forgotten that Pepper was not simply away on a short holiday.

  Finally Robert looked at his watch and sighed wearily. “I guess I should be going.”

  We found both girls sound asleep on the floor of Anna’s bedroom, surrounded by a herd of stuffed animals. Robert hoisted Kimberly easily over his shoulder without waking her. “The sleep of the innocent.” He chuckled. “It always amazes me.”

  At the door I turned on the porch light. “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  “You know what I keep thinking, Kate? What if she was still alive when I got home? Maybe if I’d gone up to check on her I would have been able to call the ambulance in time to save her.”

  “You can’t do that to yourself. Chances are, it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.”

  He fixed his eyes on the daddy longlegs making its way up the side of the door. “There’s always the possibility it would have, though. And the terrible thing is, I’ll never know.”

  Then he caught my eye and his lips curled into a weak smile. “Thanks for the drinks and dinner. And the company. I wasn’t sure how I would ever get through this evening.”

  He was halfway down the driveway when I thought of something else. “What about the alarm?” I called after him. “Wouldn’t an open window have triggered an alarm warning?”

  “Those two windows in the kitchen aren’t on the alarm. The previo
us owners remodeled after the system was in place. We always talked about adding them on, but we never did.” He gave a kind of half-laugh that came out more like a hiccup. “I guess we should have.”

  Watching him head off to confront whatever demons he would find lurking in the recesses of his mind that night, I was filled with sadness. Not just for Pepper and Robert and Kimberly, but for all humanity—frail and vulnerable, and yet instinctively resilient.

  In the middle of the night I woke up when I thought I heard a sound. The doors and windows were all secure, and when I peered outside everything seemed as it should be. But I couldn’t go back to sleep, so instead I lay there in the dark, staring at the vast nothingness around me, and tried to figure out how anyone would be able to track down Andy in the event I was killed.

  <><><>

  We rarely argued, but the night before Andy left we had a terrible fight I was at the sink scraping bits of roast lamb and potato into the garbage—the remnants of a special meal I’d prepared in hopes that it might somehow cause Andy to have a last-minute change of heart— while he sat at the kitchen table sorting through his plane tickets and passport

  “Do you think you’ll miss me?” he asked.

  What kind of man announces he’s leaving his wife and then asks if she will miss him? “That’s a stupid question,” I told him, in a voice that made clear just how stupid it was.

  “I take it that’s a yes.” His tone was almost playful. “I’ll miss you, Kate.”

  “Look, you’re the one who’s leaving. Nobody is forcing you to go.”

  “You still don’t understand it, do you?”

  “No, I don’t” Although on some level I probably understood better than he did.

  Andy had the misfortune of being too good looking, of having had it too easy his whole life. People liked him, adored him in fact, and he had a gift for being in the right place at the right time. While the rest of us were getting whacked about a bit, learning a lesson or two from the school of hard knocks, Andy was gathering life’s pleasures by the bushel. And he didn’t want the fun to end.

  Out of the comer of my eye I saw him get up and walk over to stand behind me. Silently, he began kissing the back of my neck and running his hands down my arms. I tried to twist away, but he pressed against me. His hands moved down to my thighs and then up to my belly, where they traced slow, warm circles through my jeans.

  “Stop it,” I said, turning away.

  But he didn’t listen. One hand began working on the buttons of my shirt while the other unzipped my pants. “I said, knock it off.”

  “Come on, Kate. You know you’ll like it. For old time’s sake if nothing else.”

  All the sadness and regret I’d felt earlier coalesced into a ball of anger that settled in the pit of my stomach. “Get away from me, Andy.”

  “You won’t have another chance for a long time, Kate.”

  My hands were wet and greasy, but I managed to turn slightly and elbow him hard in the abdomen. “You’re sick,” I said, keeping my back to him.

  “Geez, I was only trying to be affectionate.”

  “No you weren’t. You were trying to take what you wanted. You never think of anyone but yourself.”

  Andy reached across to the silverware drawer, which I had just opened, and slammed it shut. “You know what your problem is? You don’t know how to have fun. You’re so fucking serious, worrying all the time about the details of living, that you forget to actually live.”

  “Believe it or not,” I said, pulling the drawer open again, “life is not one big picnic. Most people realize that along about the time they stop wearing diapers.”

  “Most people lead boring, confined lives.”

  I dried my hands and sat down at the table. It was worth one last shot. “Do you honestly think taking off to frolic around Europe for a couple of months is any way to sort things out? Sure it will be fun, but so what? You can’t spend the rest of your life running away from responsibility and everything that doesn’t amuse you.”

  But Andy was not in the mood for such a discussion. “At the moment,” he said, pushing back his chair, “I’d say it’s certainly better than the alternatives.”

  He pounded up the stairs and slammed the bathroom door hard, so that the clay dinosaur Anna had made in nursery school rattled on the window sill above the sink. Later that night when I got into bed, Andy was already asleep, lying with his back toward me and clinging to the edge of the mattress. If he’d tried to shift any farther, he would have fallen onto the floor.

  Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up and reached my hand across the empty expanse between us. Soon I would have the whole bed to myself, every night. No warm body anywhere, no soft breathing. I slid over so that I could curl my body around his and kissed the back of his shoulders very lightly. Without rolling over, Andy took my hand in his.

  “I really do love you, Kate,” he whispered. “I’m just not sure that’s enough.”

  Maybe not, I remember thinking, but it’s a beginning. And for Anna’s sake I thought he should at least try to make it enough.

  Chapter 4

  Pepper used to go to the nine o’clock exercise class at the club. She wore those skimpy—but expensive— leotards that fit like a second skin and matching satiny tights. At the end of her workout her hair was always tastefully mussed and her face had just the right amount of shine to it. No question, she had looked terrific, like an ad for Reebok or some high fiber cereal.

  Andy and I didn’t belong to the club—some months we could barely afford the mortgage on our house—and in any case I preferred jogging to exercise class, forgoing firm thighs and a flat stomach for a healthy heart. And style for comfort. Sweat pants and an old tee shirt of Andy’s are my standard attire. And I don’t glow, I sweat. By the end of my run I look a mess.

  I was almost home, eager for a cold glass of water and a warm shower, when I saw Mrs. Stevenson standing in her driveway and motioning to me. An older woman, a widow of many years, Mrs. Stevenson lives across the street about three houses down. She’s lived in the neighborhood longer than just about anybody else and still refers to most of the houses by their previous owners’ names. We live in the old Williams place, even though the couple who had the house before us were named Bothello. They’d only lived there two years and that apparently wasn’t sufficient time to earn a place in the annals of neighborhood history.

  Mrs. Stevenson held a pair of pruning shears in her hand, and I thought she probably wanted to complain that Max had gotten out again and been trampling her flowers. I would apologize, offer to pay for the damage and promise to be more careful in the future, but I didn’t want to be drawn into a prolonged discussion of everything wrong in the world, so I kept jogging in place while I spoke.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Stevenson. Has Max been causing trouble again?” At the sound of his name, Max, who bounces along beside me most mornings, let out a polite woof and sat down.

  “Goodness, no. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him except when he’s running with you.” She leaned over to address the dog, and her voice had that high-pitched, sugar-coated quality people sometimes use with animals. “You’ve been a good boy lately, Max.”

  “But you wanted to see me?”

  “Yes. I have a problem. Well, it’s not really a problem but a situation. And I don’t know quite what to do.”

  Still breathing heavily, I nodded and kept on running in place. Listening to a recital of society’s ills was a piece of cake compared to letting yourself get sucked into solving someone’s problems.

  “It’s about that woman who lives in the old Crocker place. The one who was murdered yesterday.”

  I stopped hopping from foot to foot. “Pepper Livingston?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. There was a policeman who came by and asked me if I heard anything the night she was killed—I didn’t. I’m a very sound sleeper, which is unusual for a woman my age. Anyway, I didn’t think about the car until after he left, and no
w I don’t know whether it’s important or not.”

  “The car?”

  “The one that parks in front of my house. I first noticed it because of the way it pulls in behind the oleander. I’ve seen it there a couple of times in the last week or so, but no one ever gets out. It just pulls up and stays there, sometimes fifteen or twenty minutes, sometimes for an hour, and then drives off.”

  “And you think it might be connected with Pepper’s death?”

  “That’s what I don’t know. It’s not a place most people choose to park. You have to pull way in off the road to get to it.”

  The oleander, a large bush covered with pink flowers, was located near the comer of her property. The Livingstons’ house was diagonally across the street. It would be an ideal, unobtrusive spot for casing the place, but then cars parked along the street all the time.

  “You never saw anyone get out?”

  “Never.”

  “Could you see into the car?”

  “No. It had tinted glass, I think, or maybe the light was just wrong. I never really looked because it didn’t seem to matter.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “One of those four wheel drive things everybody has these days.” She thought about it for a moment. “An Apache I think.”

  “An Apache?”

  She nodded.

  My knowledge of cars was limited, but I was pretty sure there wasn’t any such vehicle. “You mean Isuzu? Or maybe Acura?” There were plenty of odd-sounding names out there.

  “No, it was an Apache, like the Indian.”

  “A Cherokee?”

  She smiled. “That’s it. I knew it was an Indian name.”

  “What color was it?”

  “Dark.”

  “Blue? Black? Gray?”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  So much for details. “I don’t suppose you got the license number?”

  “No, I didn’t think about that until now. Is it important?”

  “Probably not,” I said, recalling Mrs. Stevenson’s penchant for finding disaster in every nook and cranny. “But if you see the car again why don’t you try to get the license number, just in case.”