Ladies Lunch Club Murders

by David Bishop

  “Thanks for the warning. I’ll be careful. Now, here’s a little trivia maybe you don’t know. Late last night I did a little looking online. Florida is the only state that has both alligators and crocodiles. There’s even panthers here. Jesus, doesn’t Florida have any normal animals?”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know. Squirrels, rabbits, beavers, things like that, you know.”

  “We’ve got lots of squirrels and some rabbits too.”

  “No beavers?”

  “Not that I know … well, we’ve got giant beavers.”

  “Where are they?”

  “On the really fat women.”

  “What are you? A standup comedian working a side job as a Florida State homicide cop?”

  “Standup, lay down. I’m versatile.”

  “Let’s get serious for a minute. Mary Alice’s unnamed son is like the poster with the outline of a face overlaid with a question mark. Hopefully, her file cabinet gives us a name and location for the son and his father. Maybe we find her will with that letter to her son that Ms. Taylor mentioned attached to it. I’m eager to start digging through that file cabinet but, first, we’ve got an appointment with Pauline Goddard at 1:30.”

  Jack picked up the last French fry. “Why hasn’t the son come forward? When she was first killed, it was a minor back-page article. But, since then, we’ve had the killer’s memo to the media and the governor’s public statement. These last couple of days, I mean, unless he’s living under a rock, he had to hear about it, even outside Florida. For God’s sake, his momma’s dead. Where is he?”

  “He’s also due to receive a large inheritance.”

  Jack nodded. “You’re right. It appears their relationship was far from typical mother-son, but he had to know his mother was wealthy. She sent him to private boarding schools and all that. And he couldn’t know his father paid for it, because Norma Taylor said Mary Alice told her son she didn’t know who his father was.”

  Ann crumpled up the napkin that had held their fries, and stuffed it inside the little box her burger came in. “We’ll damn sure ask him just that. There’s also the safe-deposit box. I expect CC will quickly identify the bank where she had her box. After that, he’ll get a court order to drill it, if necessary. I got no idea what we’ll find, but I don’t expect anything earthshattering. Norma Taylor told us Mary Alice used beneficiaries on her investment accounts to bequeath her big assets to her son.”

  “Maybe she used the safe-deposit box to store her diamonds. Maybe even some stuff she used to blackmail the boy’s father. Maybe the DNA report Norma Taylor mentioned. That, and not a sense of responsibility, may be what made him pay for his son’s education. Maybe Poppa’s a money launderer or whatever?”

  To rid his fingers of salt from the fries, Jack brushed his hands together like discharging sand at the beach. He wiped the greasy residue on his napkin. “Right now, we don’t know the son’s first name and we don’t know if his last name is Phelps or Lennox, or possibly something else. We were told the father paid for his education. I’m anticipating something on the school may be in that file cabinet or possibly the bank box. The father probably wrote checks. We’ll find him and he’ll cooperate. If not we’ll squeeze him.”

  14

  Ann pulled into the driveway of Pauline Goddard’s home, a light tan stucco house with dark brown, decorative quoins wrapped around its corners. Ann parked to one side of the paver driveway. Unlike the nearby houses, Goddard’s house didn’t have a golf cart garage.

  As they approached on foot, a woman held open a heavy, reinforced screen door. “Hello. I’m Pauline Goddard. ” She glanced at Ann before carefully looking Jack up and down. “You must be Jack McCall, the hotshot investigator from out of town.”

  “Guilty. How did you hear?”

  “The jungle drums. We’re a tight community, no children, most of us are retired, lots of time to gossip. It figured you’re him.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about me?”

  “I’m not real fond of your shoes, but you’ve got to wear them.” She shrugged and then smiled.

  Jack glanced down at his black wingtips, then at her black flip flops. Her big toes were permanently torqued in from a career of wearing high heels. “This is Lieutenant Ann Reynolds of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”

  “You come on in here, and call me Paulé, everybody does.” Jack held the door. They followed the woman into her living room near the back of the house.

  After they were seated, Paulé brought in a tray with three mugs, a carafe of coffee, glasses, a pitcher of water, and a small bowl of cut lemon. She put it on a side table. “Sorry, no cups, I’m a mug gal, cups are a little too prissy for my style. Help yourself and ask me whatever you wish, Mr. McCall. But, first, can I ask you a question? Well, Lieutenant Reynolds, I mean, ask her.”

  Ann looked up from pouring herself a glass of water. “Sure.”

  Paulé angled toward Ann. The flowered pattern of the fabric on the chair framed her legs. “You wouldn’t be the Ann Reynolds who worked for the law firm started by my ex-husband? The firm was Walker and Greene? Did you work there back ten years or so?”

  “Yes.” Ann squeezed a lemon into her water. “In Tallahassee. I was a paralegal there for a little over a year before joining the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.”

  “Well, there you go. It sure is a small world. When you called to set up when you’d come by, your name was familiar. It didn’t click till this morning. I had to ask.”

  “How well did you know Sarah Sims?”

  “You’re British right?”

  Ann smiled. “Yes. Been here a good while.”

  “I got an ear. Love the accent. Yours is pretty soft, but it’s there.”

  “Over time the American version has pushed out a lot of the British. How well did you know Sarah Sims?”

  “Well enough to tell you she preferred to be called Red Rider. She knew the genesis of her nickname. Among those who knew, she was proud of it.”

  “How long did you know … Red, then?”

  “Oh, golly, like forever. She married my ex-husband’s law partner. Back then she was Sarah Greene. I was Pauline Walker. The man was a real shit. If I didn’t make it clear, which man I meant, no harm, they were both shits. She was ready to divorce his ass when he up and died. That was almost six years ago, the year after I divorced mine. We stayed in touch—as friends, you know. The next year we moved into this development and ended up two doors apart. Yep. Small world for damn sure.”

  “Did you both work in your husbands’ law practice?”

  “God, no. Our men got wealthy as fixer-type lawyers who were there for their high-paying clients who needed to bend or twist something or other. Or to arrange muscle when a recalcitrant somebody stood in the way of one of the firm’s core clients. At her husband’s funeral, while the pallbearers were carrying him to the gravesite, Red whispered, ‘This is the only thing my husband’s ever been on the level about.’ We got a lot of dirty looks that day when we couldn’t stop laughing.”

  Ann smiled. “Well, I guess every family’s got their skeletons.”

  “You got that right, honey. If your family ain’t got a skeleton in its closet, it only means you all buried it.”

  She punctuated her laugh with a small snort, then covered her mouth in feigned embarrassment. “But, you didn’t come here for gossip or colorful stories. I’m guessing you wanna know if there was any connection between Red’s promiscuity and her death, right?”

  Jack turned the handle of his mug of coffee and sat down. “Yes, ma’am, that’s the nub of it.”

  “Well, I can’t tell you that. I can confirm Red was promiscuous, and I can tell you she’s dead, but not if the first led to the second. Red loved menfolk; we had that in common, that’s for damn sure. Red never sold her favors, but she favored a lot of men. She was at Woodstock in ‘69 and never got out of the habit of giving. Never wanted to.”

  “Was her m
arriage happy? I mean before her husband died.”

  “Who knows? My grandma used to say, ‘Only the wearer knows if the shoes pinch.’”

  “What else can you tell us?”

  “I can tell ya there are a lot of horny, sexually repressed old broads in our lunch club that couldn’t wait for the next meeting hoping Red would regale them with another story of her sexual peccadillos. Oh, by the way, I used them big words like regale and peccadillos to dissuade the impression that us gals who like to fuck aren’t all that smart.” She laughed again, snorted again. “That’s bullshit spread around by uptight broads who want you to believe they’re too smart to spread their legs until a fella has set ‘em up with an extended mating dance. Women like to say, ‘Why can’t men just be honest? Well, I’ll give ya honest. Those broads want men to lie their way into their soft places. That wasn’t Red. She let men be just that—honest. The phony broads resented her for it. No man ever needed to woo Red with love lies.”

  Jack glanced at Ann without grinning. “How did you first meet, Sarah—Red?”

  “I told you Red never sold her favors, but I did. Back in the day, I ran a small, discreet, call girl operation. Before I married him, my ex-husband started out as my lawyer and ended up financing my setup to become a silent partner. We did it up first class. My service provided ladies for lots of his law firm clients, other attorneys, and a few judges and politicians. A little later, we married. I went for respectable and shut down my pleasure business, and he kept his law practice. His being the more legit of the two, at least on the surface. A couple years after that, my hubby took his whoring down the street to a madam who’d been my competition back when. I put up with that shit for a year or so, then we divorced. Along in there, his partner married Red and after Father Time did a do-si-do and an allemande left … here we are.

  “Red always wanted to be a concert pianist. There’s a tidbit not known by many. She was good. I wanted to be an artist, oils, you know. Shit. Life’s what happens to us all on the way to our dreams. But we had no complaints. We did well and lived well. And, hey, like I said, here we are … I guess now with Red gone, it’s here I am, and I’m still doing peachy.”

  “Did you … run around with Red? I mean go out—”

  “I know what you mean, Lieutenant Reynolds. That’ll get ya a two-part answer. I sure didn’t join any rites of celibacy when we moved here, but no, I didn’t go about finding men in a showy way. That was Red’s thing. In the end, she was like those gals who hand out samples at the supermarket. She loved passing out free samples, but never sold her product. I’m a little quieter about it than she was, and, sadly perhaps, a little less active than she was. I left it to Red to entertain the gals at lunch. But, alone, the two of us used to compare stories. I’ll miss that. A great lay can almost be relived through a stimulating retelling. Red often sang the lyrics to the song, Love’s More Comfortable the Second Time Around. I told you she played the piano. She reworked the words to the song so it included lyrics about a third time around, and a fourth. She’d sing that and laugh. Yes, sir, I’ll miss Red. Hell, I do miss Red. Telling my poodle about my dates falls way short of telling Red.”

  Ann’s smile faded. “The night Red was murdered, do you know who she was with?”

  “Not a clue. Given her normal routine, its likely Red found him in one of the area’s hot spots frequented by young studs looking for an hour or so of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”

  Paulé leaned to her left, opened a drawer in her side table, and tore the top sheet off a notepad. She handed it to Ann. “I figured you’d want this, a list of the places Red’d visit to find what she wanted. When she walked in any one of ‘em, the fellas reacted the way we did as kids when the Good Humor truck pulled onto our street.”

  Ann looked at it and passed it to Jack who asked the next question. “This interview with you is really all about one question. What can you tell us that’ll help find out who killed your friend.”

  “Nothing really. Red was a free spirit. In our day she’d be called a flower child or hippy, and she was all that. She liked sex, only men though, she never learned to switch hit. The boys didn’t need to bring flowers or candy. She did enjoy a nice dinner, but that was the only payment she ever took. Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t want you to sell Red short. The girl always had standards, but they changed with time. The last couple years, she’d trimmed her criteria down to the men with more hair and less belly. To most folks that’d make Red sound horrible, but she was a marvel.

  “Everyone liked Red. Women and men. The men lusted for her and the women envied her, all except the holier-than-thou types. Fortunately, with each generation, we get fewer sexually repressed gals.”

  “Someone didn’t like Red.”

  “Clearly, you’re right about that, Detective McCall. Find that bastard who stole my friend. I’ll cough up fifty thousand for you two to split when the guilty guy’s convicted.”

  Ann quick-glanced Jack. “That shows your affection for Sarah Sims, but, well, no thank you. Detective McCall and I will do our job and we’ll do it the same with or without your bonus offer.”

  “Don’t be foolish, Lieutenant Reynolds. In life there’s two things one should never refuse: cash and gimme putts.”

  “Red and Mary Alice Phelps were both in your lunch club. Were the two women connected in any other way?”

  Paulé Goddard smiled at Jack. “That was sure something about Mary Alice being the sister of the governor. Wow. None of us knew. Not even Norma Taylor who was Mary Alice’s best friend. I called her. She had no clue.”

  Jack nodded before rephrasing his question. “Sarah Sims and Mary Alice Phelps, any connection?”

  “Sarah was one of the four ladies who together owned the Old Tyme Cinema in town; Mary Alice was their bookkeeper. They were connected in that way, and, of course, both of ‘em were members of our lunch club.”

  “Where is this theater … we’re talking a movie theater right, not a community playhouse?”

  “Yes. It’s in town. Go out to the highway and turn west, take a left at the first light. Its two blocks down. With Red dead, the other three will be needing some gals to pull a few shifts behind the counter.”

  “How was their business doing?”

  Paulé refilled her coffee cup and held the carafe up. Ann and Jack shook her off before she answered. “Far as I know, the business was going great guns. Red told me each of ‘em were pulling out about five hundred a month, plus a regular hourly wage for working there. I think most of their profits come from the sandwiches and baked goods they sell at the concession stand. The stand has an outside window so they can sell that stuff to people on the sidewalk who aren’t coming to the movies. They keep the prices reasonable and make a lot of sales out that window. The girls seem to enjoy doing it. At least Red did. The other three made Red promise not to troll for men in the theater.” Paulé laughed. “She never gave up her hippy style. On some level, I think all of us envy people who are that free. Her death turned off a light in my life. It also left a lot of local men scurrying around to refill their dance card—if you get my drift.”

  “Any comments on Mary Alice?”

  “Not really. I mean, we were in the lunch club. She was a good golfer. She sometimes played with Red and me on Wednesdays. Didn’t really know her all that well. She was one of the up-tights in the group. I mean, she was okay, but I’d watch her eyes get big when Red would talk about going down on some fella’s—what you Brits call—beef bayonet. Mary Alice would feign a disgusted look, then lick her lips and lean closer—hypocrisy. Mary Alice and Red lived at opposite ends in the world of man meets woman.”

  15

  On the way in from the parking lot behind the sheriff’s department, Jack asked Nora and Max if they were still working on the puzzle.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Have you figured out the picture yet?”

  Nora nodded. “Yeah. It’s a lake all right. There’s a pier, well, probably a marina kind o
f thing. We got lots of pieces that shows parts of boats. It’s coming together, but we got about three hundred more pieces to fit.”

  Instead of using the conference room, the taskforce gathered in the sheriff’s office. It was big enough as long as they didn’t add a new member, and no one objected to sitting close. The sheriff shut his door.

  Ann Reynolds gave a report on her and Jack’s interviews of Norma Taylor and Pauline Goddard. She handed copies of their reports to Sergeant CC Wilmer. “These are ready for the murder books on Sims and Phelps.”

  Nora Burke went over the interviews she and Max Logan conducted. “Ours went rather quickly. The people we interviewed had all been questioned previously by Sergeant Wilmer. There was very little new and most of that was a result of the events which occurred after the sergeant interviewed them.” Nora looked at Jack. “You should run through our notes. It’s possible something we commented on may fit with something you picked up in your interviews. Max and I’ll go over your reports.” She handed her original reports to CC and copies to Jack.

  Sheriff Jackson turned to face Jack. “You suggested this gathering. What’s on your mind?”

  “As for the interviews, both teams have more people to get with. The ladies lunch club had fourteen members. Four are dead. Two were interviewed by Max and Nora. Two by Ann and me. That leaves six to go. We’ll keep working the circuit until we find a trail with some breadcrumbs we can follow. Our basic position is unchanged. We’ve got no suspects and no as-of-yet convincing motive.”

  “Is that why you wanted us to gather, to decide who and when we interview these remaining six members of the lunch club?”

  “No, the four of us doing the interviews will get together after this meeting breaks and plan that out. More immediate is the Phelps file cabinet your department moved from the home of Norma Taylor. Ann, Nora, Max and I got into that about an hour and a half ago so we’ve spent six man-hours on it. We made notes of things from it that require further attention.”