The Dark and Deadly Pool

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  “Like everything,” Fran said.

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  “Why don’t you just forget all about the problem and let your detective friend take care of it?”

  I thought a moment. “Maybe it’s because of my job. I’m supposed to be responsible for the well-being of the guests of the health club. Maybe I feel guilty because I didn’t investigate that noise I heard last night. Maybe it’s because I’m scared, and I want the police to catch the murderer as soon as they can.” I rubbed my nose with the back of one hand. The sugar felt scratchy.

  “I have a good idea,” Fran said. “Let’s go to the zoo, and eat hot dogs, and ride on the Hermann Park train, and forget all about the Ridley Hotel until it’s time to go to work.”

  My immediate reaction was to say no. But getting away from the problem for a little while made sense. I pushed my chair back from the table. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Wash your face first,” Fran said. “If you go out like that, you’ll attract bees.”

  I did, and pulled a clean health-club T-shirt and shorts from the drier, stuffing them into a paper bag.

  “We can take my car and go from the zoo to the hotel, and I’ll take you home when our shifts are over,” Fran said. So I got my plastic purse from where I had left it on the hall table. I took the small box from it and laid it on the table, following Fran out the front door and to his car.

  Fran’s car made Old Junk Bucket look good. As he put his key in the ignition, he patted what was left of the dashboard and said, “Come on, Yellow Belly. Don’t let me down.”

  With a wheeze and rattle the car started. Nervously, we headed for the Hermann Park Zoo.

  Fran had been right. Going to the zoo was a good idea. We had a wonderful time and made it back to the Ridley not only on time, but a little early. My watch said two-forty P.M.

  As I entered the club from the hotel, Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee sat bolt upright. They were seated where they could watch the door and catch me when I came in. They both waved and motioned to me, but I pretended that I didn’t understand what they wanted. I just smiled and waved back and hurried into the office.

  Deeley Johnson was behind the desk. Deeley was trim, compact, and perky, with a big smile for everyone who came into the club. Her hair was no longer than an inch anywhere on her head, and on her it looked great. “Hey, girl!” she said. “Did you think I was never coming back?”

  “I’m sorry you were sick,” I said.

  “No big deal. I’m just sorry I missed all the excitement.”

  Mr. Kamara’s staring black eyes suddenly popped into my mind, and I shuddered. “It wasn’t exciting, Deeley. It was horrible.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess it was.”

  “I’m glad you’re back,” I told her.

  “So’s Art Mart. He told me he was going to sleep till noon today. Too bad he didn’t get the chance.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  Her eyes widened. “That’s right. You didn’t hear about the break-in.”

  “Where? What break-in?”

  “Let me tell you. Two of them, in fact. When the police went up to Mr. Kamara’s suite, after you went home last night, they found it had been gone over. Stuff was all over the floor and thrown out of the closet. I mean, it was a real mess.”

  “Somebody must have been looking for something.”

  “Down here too. Whoever it was did a job on the health club. All the drawers in the desk were open—they broke the lock on the bottom drawer—and nothing was left on the closet shelves.”

  “What did they take?”

  “Nobody knows,” she said. “Art Mart couldn’t find anything missing.”

  I gasped as it occurred to me. “If they came back after I had locked up, how did they get in?”

  “Good question,” she said. “The door between the hotel and the club was locked up tight.”

  “Deeley!” I said. “The wall!”

  She looked puzzled, and I realized that she wouldn’t know, so I told her about the gap in the wall.

  “Did Lamar or Art tell Detective Jarvis about the wall?” I asked.

  “Probably,” she said.

  “Where is Art?”

  “Gone home for a while. He’s in a real grouchy mood.”

  “I suppose he didn’t like having to put back everything in the closet.”

  Deeley stood and stretched. Then she laughed. “Are you kidding? Do you really think that Art Mart would do all that work with me here?”

  We grinned at each other.

  “This has been a bad morning,” she said. “The pool company came and drained the pool, and scrubbed it down, and now they’re practically through filling it up again. Nobody’s supposed to go in today, because it’s going to take till tomorrow to get the water heated properly.”

  “But I saw a number of people here in the club.”

  “Some of them only want to sunbathe or use the exercise equipment. Oh. And it’s okay if they want to use the Jacuzzi.” She glanced out the window at Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee and lowered her voice. “Some of them just want to talk. Watch out for those two.”

  The card file was near her elbow. Now was a good time to bring it up. I told her about some of the cards missing, then returning to the file. “Have you ever noticed that?” I asked.

  She thought a moment, then shrugged. “I never paid that much attention. An awful lot of people come and go through the hotel. Anyhow, why would some of the cards be missing? What would it mean?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  “Probably every now and then a card gets accidentally misplaced.”

  “Maybe.”

  Deeley pointedly glanced at the clock. “I’ll keep the desk till you get changed,” she said.

  Two minutes to three. I hurried into the women’s dressing room. I locked my purse inside my locker, since the desk lock was broken, and soon returned to the office dressed in the health-club uniform.

  “Hope your day’s better than yesterday,” Deeley said. “See you tomorrow.” She quickly left the club.

  Plopping into the desk chair, I suddenly remembered Mr. Smith’s card. I opened the bottom drawer and picked up the few papers that were lying scrambled on the bottom, thumbing through them. The card was gone.

  I methodically went through every drawer in the desk. There weren’t that many papers in it. A few notes about things that probably should have been thrown away a long time ago, out-of-date fliers about health runs, and things like that, but no sign of Mr. Smith’s card. Obviously someone had taken it.

  Maybe Art or Deeley or whoever had cleaned the desk had tossed it. I went through the wastepaper basket. Obviously it hadn’t been emptied since the nightly cleanup crew had been here, because it was full of Deeley’s candy and gum wrappers and Art Mart’s diet drink cans. The card wasn’t in the basket either.

  Why would someone want that card? Is that what the ransacker had been looking for? Surely not. It could have been taken out of the file at any time. Then where was the card?

  I glanced through the window to the pool to see Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee pointedly staring at me, so I strolled over to join them.

  “Sit down, sit down,” Mrs. Bandini said as she patted a chair that had been deliberately arranged between the two women.

  I did.

  “Tell us what happened last night,” Mrs. Larabee said.

  First, I repeated what Detective Jarvis had said about their description of the two men in business suits. They were so pleased with themselves that their cheeks turned pink.

  “Next time your son-in-law tells you you’re nosy, you can tell him it’s a talent that can come in handy,” Mrs. Larabee said to Mrs. Bandini.

  “His word was curious, not nosy,” Mrs. Bandini said.

  “A matter of semantics,” Mrs. Larabee said. She turned to me. “Tell us everything that happened, Mary Elizabeth. We heard you were once more a heroine.”

  “Heroine? No.” Un
shed tears swelled painfully behind my eyes. I didn’t want to cry again, so as quickly as I could I told the women everything I could remember about what had happened the night before.

  As I ended the story, my appreciative audience burst into a duet of clucks and sighs and hum-humming.

  “Was it murder or not?” Mrs. Bandini asked.

  “I guess no one will know until the medical examiner gives his report.”

  Mrs. Larabee laid a plump hand on my arm. “When you find out, tell us.”

  I shifted in the chair. My legs were getting cramped. This was a good time to end the conversation, so I stood and stretched. “I will,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon. Can you help me?”

  The voice was behind us. The three of us turned in one motion, as though we were on a string. A blond woman, who was probably in her early forties, looked at me inquisitively.

  “I saw your T-shirt,” she said. “No one else was in the office. Could you help me?”

  “Of course,” I said, and tripped over the chair leg in my rush to assist her.

  She held out a hand to steady me. She wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she was attractive. Her hair was tightly pulled back into a knot at her neck. She had on a little too much makeup, but I recognized her cream silk jacket and skirt from one of the fashion magazines. Expensive. So was her gold jewelry. Her pale leather handbag hung on her arm, the clasp ajar, her sunglasses hooked over the side.

  Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee were initially impressed. I could tell from the quality of their silence as they waited to hear what she would say.

  “My name is Mrs. Kasha Vendra,” she said. “I’m Mr. Asmir Kamara’s sister.”

  “Oh!” I said. “I’m terribly sorry about what happened to Mr. Kamara.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her eyelids slowly lowered like smudged blue window shades before she once again raised her glance to meet mine. “A terrible accident.”

  Mrs. Bandini struggled out of her chair. “I’m Sylvia Bandini,” she said, “and this is my friend, Olga Larabee. You have our condolences.”

  Mrs. Vendra barely nodded in Mrs. Bandini’s direction. She didn’t even look at her. “Will you please allow me to take the contents of my brother’s locker?” she asked me.

  “I’ll have to get permission,” I said.

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  I tried to ease the situation and smiled. “It won’t take long. I’ll call the security chief right away.”

  “No!” She took a deep breath. By the time she had exhaled it, she was once more under control. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This whole situation is very upsetting.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Bandini said. She moved nearer. “You and your brother were probably very close friends, as a brother and sister should be, even though he must have been much older than you.”

  Mrs. Vendra ignored Mrs. Bandini. “I am his only relative,” she told me. “Naturally, I will inherit everything. The money—well, there’s a lot of it, but it doesn’t matter. What matters are Asmir’s personal things, the items of sentimental value. Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “So if I could just see what was in his locker?”

  “Come with me,” Mrs. Bandini said to her. “We’ll find a nice place to sit and chat while Mary Elizabeth calls security.” Without giving Mrs. Vendra a chance to answer, Mrs. Bandini practically barged into her, grabbing her arm and causing her handbag to fall. Since it was already open the contents spilled across the tiles.

  “Oh, my! How clumsy of me!” Mrs. Bandini dropped to her knees and began scooping sunglasses and lipstick and wallet and keys back into Mrs. Vendra’s handbag, while Mrs. Vendra fumed.

  I had to help Mrs. Bandini to her feet by tugging on the arm she waved in my direction. She gave Mrs. Vendra her handbag, still babbling apologies.

  “Later,” Mrs. Vendra said to me as she snatched her bag from Mrs. Bandini and tucked it under her arm. “I am totally unnerved. This is all too much for me.”

  She turned and swept from the club.

  “Call security,” Mrs. Bandini said to me.

  “But she’s left.”

  “Call them anyway Right away. Tell them a blond hussy type woman was here posing as Mr. Kamara’s sister.”

  “I can’t do that. How do you know she isn’t his sister?”

  “Intuition, for one thing,” she said, “and for another the name in her wallet. It wasn’t Mrs. Kasha Vendra.”

  I ran to the telephone in the health-club office, Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee scurrying after me. I called the security office, and told the guard who answered what Mrs. Bandini had said.

  Lamar came into the club a short time later and told me they had found no sign of the woman in the hotel.

  “Nate was monitoring the cameras in the office, but he wasn’t concerned about what was going on in the health club, so he didn’t pay attention to the woman. Can you describe her?” he asked as he pulled out a notebook and pen.

  “Sure,” I said. “Expensive.”

  Lamar sighed. “Meaning?”

  “Great clothes. Silk jacket and skirt, and chunked up with lots of gold jewelry. Her face was kind of middle aged, but her hair was younger.”

  I paused, and he said, “Hair was younger?”

  “Light blond. I can’t think of anything else.”

  Mrs. Bandini subtly slid in front of me. “The woman was wearing a Liz Claiborne outfit, cream-colored silk. Costly, but not too costly. I have a Liz Claiborne blouse myself. She was about five feet six, but she was wearing three-inch heels. Beige lizard shoes and matching handbag. I didn’t catch the label on the handbag. She was in her forties, but I recognize a good face-lift when I see it. She wasn’t a natural blonde by any means. I know the shade. It’s called ‘golden ash,’ and her hair was pulled back into a French knot. Not many women wear a French knot any longer, so I think she did her hair that way just for this occasion.”

  Mrs. Bandini ran out of breath, so Mrs. Larabee picked up the string of words and ran with it. “Her jewelry wasn’t all real gold. The bracelet was. It had inscriptions on it—sort of like Egyptian hieroglyphics—and the chain could have been.”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Mrs. Bandini said. “Although I prefer no.”

  “I’m telling this now,” Mrs. Larabee said to her friend.

  Mrs. Bandini shrugged and let Mrs. Larabee continue.

  “The earrings were definitely not,” Mrs. Larabee said. “They were costume jewelry and a little too large for her face.”

  “Decidedly,” Mrs. Bandini said.

  Lamar’s pen had been wildly dashing across his notepad. Now he looked up at the three of us.

  “Anything else?”

  “Blue eyes,” Mrs. Bandini said. “There is no way she could have been Mr. Kamara’s sister. And there was no way she was Mrs. Kasha Vendra, as she said she was, when the name on her driver’s license was Lily Payne.”

  Lamar made a final notation, then tucked his pad and pen back into his inside coat pocket. I got a quick glimpse of his shoulder holster and gun. “Thank you for an excellent job of description,” he said.

  Mrs. Larabee playfully poked Mrs. Bandini in the ribs with her elbow. They giggled. “The detective also thinks we’re pretty good at describing people,” she said. “Maybe we should go to work for the Houston police.”

  “If this woman comes back—” Lamar said to me.

  I finished his sentence. “I’ll call you immediately.”

  As he turned to leave the office I said, “Mr. Boudry, have you been in touch with Detective Jarvis? Has he told you yet what the medical examiner said about Mr. Kamara?”

  Lamar’s shoulders squared professionally. “I was right,” he said. “Death was caused by a strong blow to the head. Mr. Kamara didn’t drown. He was dead before he hit the water.”

  “Could he …” I didn’t want to face it. “Could he have slipped and fallen?”

  “Mr. Kamara was murdered,” La
mar said. He strode out of the office.

  Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to listen. Somehow I managed to herd them back to their chairs by the pool, and returned to the office. I had assumed that, with the pool closed for the day, everything at the club would be pretty quiet, but people kept wandering in to ask questions and stare at the pool as though an outline of the body would be marking the surface of the water. Fortunately for me, Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee were delighted to answer everyone’s questions. They had lunch by the pool and held court even through their chicken almond salad on egg twist rolls.

  Eventually they had to go home and make dinner. I made a sign and taped it to the door to the club, so the usual evening crowd would know in advance that the pool was closed, and that helped. Only an occasional guest wandered in to use the exercise equipment or Jacuzzi. The photo-ID cards were brought and filed, and Art Mart showed up briefly around seven-thirty.

  “Your sign looks tacky,” he said.

  “I didn’t have time to go to a printer’s. Besides, it’s doing the job.”

  “Anything new around here?”

  “Like what?”

  “How do I know like what? That’s what I asked you.”

  “Well, Mr. Boudry said it was definite that Mr. Kamara was murdered. He was hit on the head. He didn’t drown.”

  “Maybe he fell and hit his head.”

  “That’s what I suggested, but Mr. Boudry said no.”

  “They don’t know everything.”

  I told Art about the woman who said she was Mr. Kamara’s sister. He frowned the entire time I told him and muttered something under his breath. “Nobody tells me anything!” he grumbled. “And I’m in charge of this club!” He moved closer to me and scowled right into my face. I could smell the sweet-sour pungency of his exotic and cheap shaving lotion. It was all I could do to keep from holding my nose.

  I said, “If you were here more, you’d see what was going on.”

  “I don’t get paid for overtime!” he snapped. He walked toward the office door.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him.

  “Home,” he said. “This place is dead.”

  “Don’t you want to stick around for a while?”