Murder Among Neighbors (The Kate Austen Mystery Series)

by Jonnie Jacobs

  “It took a while to figure out,” I told him, “but all the pieces fit. The arguments with Pepper, the lies you told about the Cherokee, the note from McGregory which Connie found in your datebook.” Keeping my distance, I circled around to the far side of the room by the open window. If he tried anything I could scream. From that position at least, there was a chance someone might hear me.

  “Is the note what did it?” I continued, unable to hide my disgust. “Was it discovering that your beautiful, remarkable wife wasn’t quite the princess you thought she was?”

  Robert stepped closer, his breathing thick and throaty. And then another idea sprang into my mind. “Or was it her unfaithfulness? Is that what finally got to you? Your fragile male ego couldn’t take that, could it?” Once I got started, I couldn’t stop. Fear, and my shock at finally confronting the truth, were too great. “It must have been so easy. You had a key, you knew the alarm code, and you knew the back windows weren’t wired. So you took Pepper’s wallet and some of her less valuable jewelry, opened a window and made it look like a burglary.”

  I laughed nastily, forcing myself to look him straight in the eye. “No wonder the killer didn’t tear up the house or take anything of real value.”

  Robert stopped his advance and stared at me. “You actually think I killed Pepper?”

  “I know you did. The police do, too. And now that I’ve found the object you hit her with—”

  “Found?”

  “In your closet.” He shifted his eyes momentarily, and I readied myself. I was a runner after all, I just needed a break, a few seconds when his attention was diverted. “It’s a pretty stupid place to hide it, practically out in the open.”

  Robert stepped toward me again. “You’ve made a big mistake, Kate.”

  Watchful and ready, I waited for him to pounce, to grab for me, but he instead shook his head bleakly and walked past me, over to the bed. With a deep, throaty groan, he dropped down, head in his hands. And when he finally spoke, his voice was a faint monotone. “I knew it would all come out eventually. Some things you just can’t hide.”

  Still gripping the bronze rabbit, I inched over to the door. It was a trick, I felt certain. I couldn’t believe the man was going to give up so easily. “You’re right,” I said sharply. “And murder is one of them. It was pretty gutsy to think you could get away with it in the first place.”

  Robert looked up, fixing his eyes on mine. Except for the soft hum of the electric clock by the bed, the room was perfectly quiet. “Kate, I didn’t kill Pepper. You’ve got to believe me. I loved her. She and Kimberly were . . . were my salvation, my life.” He clasped his hands together, pressing thumb against thumb. “It’s probably not the kind of relationship you’d understand, but it was real, based on love and trust.”

  I was at the door now, my safe retreat assured. This sense of security, and the almost imperceptible quiver in his voice, prompted a moment of kindness.

  “Disappointment, hurt, anger—emotions like that can be overwhelming,” I told him. “Can make people do things they ordinarily wouldn’t.” I paused, imagining for a moment the fiery tides that had driven Robert to kill his wife. “It must have come as quite a shock,” I said, “to learn about Pepper’s past.”

  Robert rubbed his cheek wearily. “I knew all about her background, even before we were married. It didn’t matter in the least.”

  “You knew about her brushes with the law? And Jake?”

  He nodded.

  “What about Tony?”

  “I knew she’d had a child, but I didn’t put the pieces together until the police came by asking about him. Then I remembered some of the things she’d said. A few discreet inquiries and I had the answer.”

  Robert hadn’t moved from the bed, had hardly stirred at all, in fact; but I wasn’t taking any chances. I remained by the bedroom door, poised to run at a moment’s notice. “You think anyone is going to believe you? If your marriage was so full of love and trust, why didn’t she tell you when Tony showed up?”

  “I don’t know the answer to your second question, I can only speculate. But as to the first, no one has to take my word for it. The night she was murdered I was with friends. I didn’t get home until almost two a.m.”

  I gave him an icy glare. “You told the police you were at work, alone.”

  He nodded, pressing the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other. “I spent the evening at a sex club in San Francisco.” He looked at me and smiled wanly. “You know what that is?”

  I did. Or at least I thought I did. But it didn’t make sense. The city’s sex clubs, hangouts for prurient, no- holds-barred homosexual activity, had made the news frequently since the advent of AIDS. I’d read the articles with almost painstaking thoroughness and then tittered with my friends at the bewildering exploits alluded to.

  Robert watched me closely. “I’m gay, Kate. Bisexual actually. There’s a man I’ve been seeing quite a bit of, and I was with him all evening, although there are others who can vouch for me as well.”

  I took my free hand from the doorknob and shoved it into my pocket, but I didn’t step from my post by the door.

  “It’s something I tried for years to change,” Robert continued. “It doesn’t work like that, though, so finally I’ve come to accept myself for what I am. But I have a reputation to protect, and the rest of the world, particularly the business and financial world, isn’t exactly broadminded when it comes to things like this.” He let out a deep sigh. “I didn’t want to tell the police where I was that night unless I had to.”

  “What about the Cherokee?”

  “It belongs to Bill, the man I’ve been seeing. He’s very young—impetuous and possessive. I’ve asked him to stay away, but he won’t. He doesn’t understand my need to walk a fine line between two worlds.”

  His words pitched and rolled about inside my head, like a ship on stormy seas. It made sense, yet it didn’t. Cool, reserved, proper Robert . . . with a young, male lover?

  “You told me you loved Pepper,” I said skeptically, “that your marriage was for real.”

  “Pepper knew about my . . . proclivities from the start. Not that she was particularly happy about them, of course. She had thought once we were married I might change. And I did try. For her sake, I tried very hard, but . . .” He smiled apologetically, then blinked and looked at his hands. “In fact, we had words about it just the week before she died. Bill followed us to a party at the Patersons’ and Pepper threatened to invite him in—you know, introduce him just to embarrass me.”

  Robert paused and then sighed, an uneven, trembly sound that made me look away. “Pepper had been on edge about something all week, and I guess seeing Bill was sort of the last straw.”

  I said nothing, not so much because I disapproved, but because I could think of nothing to say. Robert must have read my silence as an expression of doubt, however, because he stood and faced me.

  “Pepper and I had an understanding—respectability and acceptance we couldn’t have had singly—but we also loved each other. Maybe not in the romantic, Hollywood way, but in the old-fashioned sense of caring deeply for another human being.”

  I don’t know what it was exactly, the tone of his voice, the pain in his eyes, or maybe just the fact that his story was outlandish enough to have come from the heart. But I believed him.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him softly. “For everything.”

  There was a moment of silence while we regarded each other uneasily; then Robert moved to the window and gazed out at the garden below. “Was she really seeing someone?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” I said, embarrassed now at my excesses. “For a while I thought she might have been, but really don’t know. You didn’t suspect anything?”

  “No, but it wouldn’t surprise me. As I said before, ours was not the sort of marriage I’d expect you to understand.”

  There was really nothing more to be said. I turned to leave, then realized I still clutched th
e bronze rabbit tightly to my side. Warily I stepped back to face him once again and held out my hand. “If you didn’t kill her, how did this end up in your closet?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said, looking genuinely perplexed. “In fact, I thought you were planting it there in order to frame me.”

  Chapter 19

  “His story checks out,” Michael said, reaching for a piece of the cucumber I was slicing. “In addition to Bill, there are three others who will vouch for the fact that Robert was at that . . . club until after one a.m. And Bill drives a blue Cherokee with tinted windows, although he maintains Robert never tried to dissuade him from visits to Walnut Hills.”

  I scowled at the cucumber and kept right on slicing. “I feel like such a jerk,” I muttered. “I can’t imagine what came over me, snooping around his house like that, accusing him of killing Pepper. How in the world will I ever be able to face him again?”

  “Tell him it was some female thing—hormonal,” Michael suggested. “He’ll understand.”

  Glaring, I picked up the wet sponge and threw it, hitting him squarely on the cheek. It was just the sort of nasty comment Andy would have made.

  “Hey, it was only a joke.”

  “Well, it wasn’t funny.”

  “Okay, you’re a natural-born, bona fide fool with no rational explanation at all for your embarrassing conduct. You like that better?”

  Drying his face with a dishtowel, Michael grinned at me, a wonderfully good-natured, I-admit-I’m-a-dope grin that was impossible to ignore. That was clearly not the way Andy would have reacted, and my irritation faded. But I wasn’t about to let him off the hook that easily, so I poked him sharply in the ribs—which is not a wise thing to do to a policeman trained in self-defense. Before I knew what had happened, he’d turned me around and pinned both arms behind my back.

  “My remark was crass,” he said with great drama. “I acted like a crude, sexist pig, and I apologize. Am I forgiven?”

  “Just don’t let it happen again.”

  He released my wrists and turned me around so that I was facing him. “It was a pretty stupid thing you did. If Robert had been the killer, you’d be dead by now.”

  “At least you’d have a fresh lead.”

  “That’s not the kind of lead I want.”

  I slipped my arms around his waist. “Besides, I did find that bronze rabbit. Was the blood Pepper’s?”

  He nodded.

  “How’d it get in Robert’s closet?”

  “I imagine the killer left it there.”

  I saw a cloud pass over his face. “But you searched the whole house right after the murder.”

  “Not well enough obviously.” His tone was flat; his mouth set in a thin-lipped scowl. He looked about as grim as I’d ever seen him. “We talked to McGregory again. Tony had nothing to do with passing on the information about Pepper. McGregory uncovered it all himself, though that wasn’t what he was after. Apparently, he started checking out Pepper and a couple of the other vocal leaders of the Save Our Hills Committee. He was sure the organization was fronting for a group that wanted the ridge lands for a private park. And he didn’t send that note to Pepper; it was his wife.”

  “Lynette?”

  “You know her?”

  “I know who she is,” I said, reaching for the salad bowl. “Why would she send the note?”

  Michael grunted. “Apparently she resented Pepper. They’d had a disagreement over something that had nothing at all to do with her husband’s construction business.”

  Vaguely, I was able to recall the incident. Something about chairmanship of the Guild fashion show. I’d heard some of the other mothers talking about it, but I hadn’t paid much attention since the social comings and goings of the Guild are about as pertinent to my life as those of the English royal family.

  “Anyway,” Michael continued, “she used the information her husband dug up out of spite, just to annoy Pepper.”

  “Maybe Lynette is the killer.”

  Michael grinned at me and tweaked my chin. “I already thought of that, but she was in New York at the time.” Then, leaning against the door frame, he watched as I pulled plastic bags from the refrigerator and dumped them unceremoniously on the counter next to the sink. “Hey, watch how you treat the lettuce. It bruises.”

  I ignored him and hacked off the end of the romaine.

  “And it’s better to do a leaf at a time.”

  I turned and glared. “You want to make the salad?”

  He smiled. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  While Michael rinsed lettuce leaves, one at a time, then drained and gently patted them dry, I checked on the pizza in the oven, which looked just as it had when I’d taken it from the freezer half an hour earlier—like a dish of plastic dog food. “The cheese hasn’t even begun to melt,” I grumbled.

  Michael, who regarded my culinary endeavors with more than a touch of disdain, had the good grace to simply smile.

  “I make an excellent enchilada casserole,” I told him defensively. “It’s just that I was at work all day today.”

  “Hey, don’t worry. Generic cardboard with shredded imitation cheese topping is a special favorite of mine.” Then, before I had a chance to bean him again, he ran a cool, damp finger across my lips and kissed my nose. “The company’s what matters, not the food.”

  I kissed him back. “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Make me want you so much.”

  “Do I do that?”

  “You most definitely do.”

  We stood with our arms entwined, smiling contentedly like a pair of matched Buddha’s.

  “Why don’t you open the champagne,” I suggested after a moment, my voice so throaty I hardly recognized it as my own. “I’ll get the glasses.”

  Michael had brought a bottle to celebrate the sale of my first painting, which I supposed was an occasion to be celebrated even if the exhilaration was tinged with regret.

  I’d stopped by Sondra’s house the previous morning to pick up a swatch of fabric I needed in order to match blue tones in a print we were matting for her. My watercolor was in the back of the car on its way to be framed.

  “Don’t tell me it’s already sold,” she shrieked. “I love it.”

  I couldn’t imagine the picture hanging in any room in Sondra’s house, and I told her so. Besides it wasn’t for sale; I’d painted it for myself.

  “But artists always sell their work,” she protested. “Name a price.”

  I thought of the check she’d written to Daria the previous week, and my fondness for the painting faltered. “One thousand dollars,” I told her, knowing full well the price was ridiculous.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Unframed.”

  She nodded. “Will you take a check?”

  That Sondra’s taste in art was less hideous than her taste in other matters did little to comfort me. And much as I welcomed the money, it was an odd sensation to think a part of me, a part born of private, impassioned sentiment, would be displayed so publicly.

  Michael opened the champagne, poured two glasses, then handed one to me. “To your continued artistic success.”

  We touched glasses lightly while I tried to think of some pithy rejoinder. Finally I gave up and smiled instead. The champagne was very good, not the six dollar a bottle stuff I bought for birthdays and anniversaries. It went down smoothly and sent a silver tingle through my veins. I felt lightheaded after one sip.

  “What’s Barbara like?” I asked, running my tongue around the rim of the glass.

  “Who?”

  “Your wife.”

  He shrugged, very noncommittal.

  “Please, I want to know.”

  Frowning, Michael set his glass on the counter and steadied it with both hands. “Bright, competent.”

  “Pretty,” I added, almost without thinking.

  He ignored me. “Extremely self-centered and demanding. As the only child of w
ealthy parents she’s been indulged her whole life.”

  I watched the play of emotions on his face, quick and ephemeral, like firelight.

  “I was husband number two. I lasted longer than number one, but that’s only because he was a cad—whereas I was merely boring.” Michael was quiet a moment; then he took a long swallow of champagne. “I can’t wait to see who number three will be, probably some stockbroker or investment banker—that’s the phase she’s going through at the moment. Barbara tends to collect people the way a child collects playthings.”

  I was unable to detect even a trace of bitterness in his voice. Weariness, yes. Even bewilderment, as though he spoke the words while still pondering their meaning.

  “She wants us to remain friends,” he continued, his mouth curving into a half-smile. “In fact, she’s already invited me to the graduation party she’s throwing for herself next month. She told me to bring a date.”

  “What?”

  “It is weird, isn’t it? I sometimes lose track of what’s truly normal and what’s normal for Barbara.”

  That was a problem I was having myself lately. Not about Barbara, of course, but about life in general. Nothing was as I thought it was, but I couldn’t tell if the problem was in me or everyone else.

  Michael opened the oven door and peered in. “Pizza’s done,” he announced.

  I got a bottle of Kraft Italian Dressing from the cupboard and began shaking it.

  “You’re not going to use that are you?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  His gaze shifted from the bottle to my face. He grabbed the olive oil, a lemon, some garlic and a few assorted spices, then began mincing and whisking and shaking. A pinch of this, a dab of that and he presented me with a fully dressed salad. Then we called Anna and settled down to serious eating.