Ness was the chief of police, a longtime resident of Walnut Hills who reminisced at every opportunity about the good old days when the town had only one stop light, one bank and no one ever had to worry about locking the door. He was also a vocal supporter of Save Our Hills, a group which caused the pro-development city council considerable grief.
“Can they make him get outside help?” I asked.
“Not technically, but you know how these things go.”
Only vaguely. I wanted to hear more of Candice’s unofficial information, which was probably more complete and up to date than what anyone but Ness himself was privy to, but just then the organ began a slow, dirge-like march, and the pastor walked to the pulpit where he stood gazing solemnly at the assembly before him.
The room was warm, hot actually, and I could feel perspiration gathering under my arms and along the back of my neck. My gray wool jersey, the only thing in my closet remotely appropriate, was much too heavy for late spring. The other women, I noticed, were all stylishly dressed in lightweight silk or linen, the colors muted and subdued without being drab. I wondered whether each kept a special funeral wardrobe in continual readiness, or if some of them had run out to Nordstrom in search of the perfect outfit the moment news of Pepper’s death hit the papers.
The organ music ended, and there was a long moment when the room was absolutely still. Finally the pastor spoke, addressing first Robert, then the assemblage of friends who had come to show their respect for the remarkable woman who had been cut down in the prime of life. The man had a fleshy face, a wide mouth and long teeth that reminded me of a horse’s. Looking at him made me uncomfortable so I peered around the room instead.
A surprising number of faces were familiar, even when I didn’t know the names. Without thinking about it, I started playing a mental game, trying to catalog people I recognized. Some were from the nursery school, some from my art class, some from my association with Pepper and Daria. There was the woman who jogged at the same time each morning that I did, another who walked by my house most afternoons with a matched pair of wolfhounds. Across the aisle from me, seated next to an overweight, bald-headed man, I spotted the blonde who drove a pink Cadillac with the license plate SEXY GAL.
The minister was busily listing Pepper’s contributions to the community, when I caught another familiar face at the back of the church. Only this one I couldn’t quite place. He was young, maybe in his early twenties, with smooth skin and closely cropped blond hair. He sat at the end of the last row, hunched forward, listening intently as the minister praised Pepper for her devotion to good causes. I knew I’d seen the young man before, and he obviously knew Pepper in some way, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what the connection could be.
“Look to your left,” I whispered to Candice, “last row. Do you recognize that young man?”
If anybody knew, it would be Candice, who seemed to have a far broader knowledge of the community than her ex-husband. Certainly if the young blond had gone to school locally she would know him.
“No, he doesn’t look familiar at all. Why?”
“Just curious. I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere, but I can’t think where.”
It was time then to bow our heads in prayer so I had to stop staring, but my mind wouldn’t let go. It was like trying to recall the name of a song or an old classmate—I’d think it was there, almost on the tip of my tongue, and then suddenly there was nothing and the process would start all over again.
After the service, the mourners lingered under the giant oak in front of the church, each unwilling to be the first to leave. Out of the comer of my eye I watched as Robert shook hands, patted shoulders and nodded somberly.
I was looking around for the young man with the familiar face when Daria and Jim joined me a few minutes later. Daria, in dark green silk, looked sensational, like the hostess at a successful opening, but Jim looked terrible. His skin was pasty, and his whole body seemed to droop.
“How you doing, kiddo?” he asked, giving me an affectionate hug.
“Pretty well.” Better than you, I thought. Either half the teeth in Walnut Hills had suddenly needed serious attention, or the idea of murder was even more upsetting to Jim than to the rest of us. Then I remembered that his brother had recently lost a wife to cancer, and I guessed that Pepper’s service had somehow stirred those memories.
“Any word from Andy about when he’s coming back?” Jim has yet to acknowledge that Andy might not be coming back at all, or that he might come back to a bachelor apartment in the city.
“No. He writes Anna but not me.”
“What’s it been now, a little over a month?”
I nodded.
“He’ll be back soon, just you wait and see. Andy’s not the type to be alone for long.”
“We’re going to go pay our respects to Robert,” Daria said, adjusting the heavy strands of gold at her neck. “Want to come with us?”
I shook my head. “I talked to him the other day. There are only so many times you can say you’re sorry and sound sincere about it.”
Jim swallowed hard, and I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “I have to get back to the office, honey. Maybe you could just write him a little note.”
“It won’t take long.”
“I don’t know. He probably just wants to be left alone.”
Daria slipped her hand into Jim’s. “Nonsense, this is the way things are done.”
Looking even glummer than he had, Jim adjusted his tie and ran a hand through his hair. “Well, we’ll have to be quick.”
“Kate, you want a ride tomorrow?” Daria asked. “You know how tight parking is at the Gardens.”
With all the commotion about Pepper’s death, I’d completely forgotten about the Guild Wine Festival. “I don’t know, it seems almost disrespectful to go partying so soon after Pepper’s death.”
Daria gave me one of her don’t-be-such-a-dope looks and said Pepper, who had worked so hard on this affair, would want it to be a success. “It benefits a good cause, don’t forget. Last year we raised almost seventy thousand dollars for community services.”
She was right, of course. I relented and gratefully accepted her offer of a ride.
“Come on, honey,” she said to Jim, leading him off in Robert’s direction. “We’ll just say a few words and then leave.”
Turning to go myself, I ran, quite literally, into Lieutenant Stone, who looked as hot and uncomfortable as I felt But every bit as attractive as I’d remembered.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. My heart was doing a little hop-and-skip number so the words came out uneven and more sharply than I intended, but Stone seemed not to notice.
“It’s part of the job,” he said, with a lopsided grin. “I’m detecting.”
It took a moment to make the connection. “You think the murderer came to Pepper’s memorial service?”
“Possibly.”
Nervously, I scanned what was left of the crowd.
Stone looked amused. “He’s not going to be wearing a sign that says Killer. He probably won’t even look deranged or vicious.”
The idea that the killer might actually have been in the church, might still be lingering about, turned my stomach sour.
“Was that your husband?” Stone asked, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.
“Who?”
“The man you were just talking to, the redheaded guy.”
“No, he and his wife are friends.”
He waited, looking at me. “Your husband still out of town?”
I guess when you’re trained to be skeptical, to focus on details that appear suspicious, you find them everywhere. I could see that Lieutenant Stone was beginning to find Andy’s absence puzzling. Maybe he even thought Andy killed Pepper and then skipped town. That would make me an accomplice or a dope, and I didn’t like to think of myself as either.
“He’s in Europe,” I explained. “He’s been gone for over a month.” Pret
ty hard to kill someone when you’re six thousand miles away.
“Long trip.”
“We’re separated.” Sort of, I added silently. It was the first time I’d actually used that word, “separated,” and it seemed to hang in the air calling attention to itself. It reminded me of the first times I’d said “my husband” and “my daughter,” only on those occasions I’d let myself dwell on the significance of the words.
Stone nodded and then rocked forward slightly, cutting the distance between us in half. “That’s rough,” he said. Not sympathy exactly, but a statement etched with kindness. He threw me a quick, curious look, then straightened and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Did you get a chance to look over Pepper’s room?”
Decision time. I hadn’t yet made up my mind what to tell him. In fact, since I hadn’t expected to run into him, I’d sort of put the whole thing out of my mind for a while.
“I checked the bedroom and looked through her things,” I explained, feeling my way as I went, “but I didn’t find anything that would help you identify the killer.”
Something about my manner must have given me away because Stone grew suddenly stem.
“Look,” he said, “if you found anything that gave you pause, you’d better tell me. This is murder, not some nice parlor game.”
His tone irritated me. I was well aware that murder wasn’t a game. Pepper was my friend, after all, not just some corpse the way she was to Stone. But that was also the problem. Her affair might have nothing to do with her murder, yet if I told Stone about it, there would be a big hunt to locate her lover and a lot of people would be hurt, including Robert.
“We found her jewelry,” Stone said. “And her wallet. They were in the Dumpster at the end of the street, in front of that house that’s being remodeled.”
I knew the house. I even knew the Dumpster, it blocked my view of traffic on the cross street, but I didn’t understand what he was getting at. “Well, that’s something at least,” I offered.
“Yes, it is. It means burglary wasn’t a motive.”
“How’s that?”
He looked at me through half-closed lids. “You don’t break into a house and steal something, only to toss it in the garbage on your way out.”
“Maybe the thief was after more than costume jewelry. When he found out what he’d taken wasn’t her good stuff, he got rid of it.”
“How do you know it wasn’t?” he asked sharply.
“Robert told me.”
I couldn’t read the expression on Stone’s face. Something between irritation and displeasure. But he passed it off quickly.
“This stuff may not compare to the crown jewels,” he said, “but it’s not the sort of thing you pick up at Kmart either. All told it’s probably worth a couple thousand. Besides, the credit cards and money were still in her wallet, nearly three hundred dollars cash.”
“I see.” Slowly, I was beginning to see. And it left me weak in the knees. “You think someone was actually out to get Pepper?”
“Could be. And he went to the effort of making it look like a burglary in order to throw us off.”
“But why would anybody want to kill Pepper?”
“If I knew that, I certainly wouldn’t be standing here talking to you.” Catching my eye, he smiled then. “Pleasant as your company is.”
My heart, which seemed able at this point to take a discussion of Pepper’s death in stride, danced another little jig when the smile registered. The magnetic quality to it made rational thought almost impossible. Still, I tried to weigh my choices. I certainly didn’t want Pepper’s killer to go free.
“Are you... when you handle an investigation, following up on leads and so forth, are you guys . . . well, discreet?”
“We try to be, but murder’s a messy business. Sometimes a few of the niceties get overlooked. Why?”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement for discretion, but probably the best I could hope for. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I think she might have been having an affair.”
The notion was clearly not as shocking to Stone as it had been to me. “Any idea who the guy was?”
“No. I didn’t even know about it before yesterday.” Then I explained about discovering the diaphragm and about my conversation with Robert the night after her death.
Stone peered at me curiously. “Yesterday you told me you hardly knew the husband, and now you’re saying he went into graphic detail about his sex life?”
“It just sort of came up. Anyway, I’d say it was more biological than sexual. And hardly graphic.”
A hint of a smile played at the comers of his mouth and his soft gray eyes crinkled. “You do good work.”
It had been a long time since anyone told me I did good anything, and the words sent a pleasurable, prickly sensation across my skin. “Do you think it means something in terms of the case?”
“Hard to tell, but at this point we’ll take whatever we can get.” Stone took off his jacket and slung it casually over his shoulder. “God, it gets hot out here, doesn’t it?”
I agreed, it did.
“Do you have a key to the Livingstons’ house?” he asked suddenly.
“Me? No, why?”
“People sometimes give a neighbor a key, for emergencies.”
“No, she never gave one to me.”
“How about any of the other neighbors?”
“I don’t know. She wasn’t particularly friendly with any of them. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Anna and Kimberly, I probably wouldn’t have known her myself.” Then it hit me why he was asking. “You don’t think the killer got in with a key, do you?”
“It’s a possibility. You said yourself it was odd that the window was unlocked. We didn’t find any footprints or broken branches outside, and there was very little mud on the carpet despite the fact that the sprinklers had come on that evening. Besides, if you want to kill someone, it’s kind of an iffy proposition to hang around waiting for an unlocked window. Most likely, the window was just something to throw us off. Like the missing jewelry.”
He squinted into the sun. “Any idea who does have a key? The husband thought the housekeeper might.
“Connie?”
“You know her?”
“She works for me too.” One afternoon a week for me, three full days for Pepper.
“She has a key?”
She had a key, but there was no way Connie could have killed Pepper. A lesbian and ardent feminist, Connie’s loathing of men bordered on dementia. She refused to be in the house when workmen were present, and once even balked at opening the door for the UPS delivery man. The flip side of this was her equally zealous belief in the kinship of women, all women. Men were the oppressors, women the oppressed, it was just that some of us failed to recognize how truly exploited we were. Maybe I could have been persuaded that Connie was capable of murder, but never the murder of a sister, even one as different from herself as Pepper.
“You’re wasting your time there,” I told him. “I’m sure Connie had nothing to do with Pepper’s death.”
His eyes narrowed. “We’ll look into it all the same.”
I shrugged. I didn’t envy the cop who drew the duty of questioning Connie.
“Anyone else?”
“Possibly. There were always workman of some sort over there.”
“What about just recently? What kind of work were they having done?”
“Well, they had their windows cleaned, and their carpets. And she had a painter working upstairs. But the Livingstons have a very elaborate alarm system.”
He groaned. “The husband says he can’t remember whether or not the alarm was set that night when he got home.”
“Can’t remember?”
Another groan. “I have a feeling the guy may have stopped off for a drink or two after leaving the office.”
“It had to have been on,” I told him. “Pepper set it every evening before she went upstairs.”
Stone shifted his ja
cket to his left shoulder and loosened his tie. He frowned at the grass for a few moments, then asked, “You going to this wine thing tomorrow?”
“I don’t know, I guess so. I bought a ticket so I might as well use it.”
“Maybe I’ll see you there.”
“You’re going?”
A sheepish grin crossed his face. “Part of the job.”
I was beginning to think the city council might be right in wanting to bring in outside help. How could the police hope to catch the killer if they spent their days sitting in church and sipping wine at the Gardens? But then again, there weren’t many real leads for them to follow.
<><><>
Heather was on the phone when I got home, wrapping the cord around her finger and giggling, while Anna sat on the floor eating ice cream out of the carton with a tablespoon. Embarrassed, Heather hung up quickly, brushed the straight blond bangs from her eyes and started to explain. “It was Chris. I just needed to check on a history assignment.”
I could remember what it was like to be sixteen. When an hour on the telephone went by in a flash, when talking to your boyfriend seemed like the only thing that mattered.
I flopped down in a chair next to Anna and took a spoonful of ice cream for myself. “I don’t mind your talking on the phone,” I explained to Heather, “just as long as you remember you’re being paid to watch Anna.”
She nodded, her hazel eyes suddenly serious.
“And I think it’s probably better if you put the ice cream in a bowl first.”
“Oh, sure.” It seemed to take a moment for the words to sink in. “I’ll do it that way from now on.”
Taking the carton from Anna, I replaced the lid and stuck it back in the freezer. Given the small amount of ice cream remaining, and the fact that it was practically soupy, I guessed that Heather and Chris had found more to talk about than history.
When I sat back down, Anna crawled into my lap and gave me a big, sticky kiss. “Heather played Old Maid with me,” she announced proudly. “And I won every single time.”
Murder Among Neighbors (The Kate Austen Mystery Series) Page 7
