A Little Night Murder

by Nancy Martin

  “Sweetie,” she said, sounding tense, “something’s brewing at the Tuttle house. The police have been crawling all over the place like ants at a picnic! And there’s yellow crime scene tape everywhere.”

  I told her about my misadventure with Emma and our discovery of Boom Boom’s dead nurse.

  “Dear, sweet heaven!” Lexie cried when I had described the events of my brief detecting excursion. “The nurse is dead? How did she die?”

  “It looked like a heart attack,” I said. “But of course the police think she was murdered.”

  Lexie gasped. “Do you think she suffered?”

  “I’m pretty sure it was quick,” I said.

  At once, Lexie turned sympathetic. “What a shock for you. Sweetie, I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

  “To tell the truth, seeing the dead body wasn’t the worst. You wouldn’t believe the wall of pictures Jenny had put up in her music room.” I told Lexie about the collage of defaced photographs of Boom Boom.

  “What do you think it means?” Lexie asked.

  “I think Boom Boom is lucky Jenny died first.”

  Shocked all over again, Lexie said, “You think Jenny wanted to kill her mother? Calling Dr. Freud!”

  “It was very clear she hated Boom Boom.”

  “I’ve been known to make a wisecrack or two about my mother, but I never really— Oh Lord, there’s someone ringing my doorbell. And yes, it’s probably a police officer. I can see him through the window. No doubt he wants to know if I saw a villain fleeing across my lawn last night. I’ve got to go. Listen, have your groom call me later, will you, please? I need more information from him.”

  “Lexie, wait!” I had a sudden vision of Hostetler, Gus’s snoopy reporter, finding his way to Lexie’s front porch.

  But she had hung up already. I redialed the number, but she didn’t answer. While her phone rang, the bell on our security gate went off. I went to the window and peeked out. I didn’t recognize the car idling at our gate, so I went to the console and pressed the intercom button. “Yes?”

  “Miss Blackbird? It’s me. Poppy.”

  Poppy Fontanna? Here?

  When I didn’t respond, she said, “Poppy Fontanna. From Bluebird of Happiness? Boom Boom sent me.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, uh, come in.”

  I pushed the gate button, and it opened to allow a nondescript compact car to pass through. Behind it pulled a state police cruiser. The first car wavered to a stop on the lane, and a spritely figure popped out. She practically danced like a woodland nymph across the lawn to the front porch, swinging a tote bag as if it were a leprechaun’s pot of gold. Warily, I opened the door to her. The police cruiser proceeded to the back of the house. I figured I’d let Michael cope with that problem.

  Bouncing up the steps, Poppy smiled brightly and waved at me with all the enthusiasm of a newfound best friend.

  “Nora! That’s your name, right? I thought I’d stop by this morning and give you this banana bread! Fred baked it. He bakes all the time. It’s a stress reliever. I got this one out of the freezer.” She pushed past me into the house, handing over what felt like a brick wrapped in aluminum foil. “I heard you had a terrible shock last night while we were at rehearsal.”

  “Uh—”

  “We wanted to make sure you’re okay. You’re okay, right? You look okay. Wow, what a lovely robe. You look like Christine in Phantom. That is, if she had a bun in the oven. Or a dozen buns. You’re really pregnant, aren’t you? Do I smell coffee?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “This is some house.” She spun around, looking up. “It’s like the set of Jekyll and Hyde. Very atmospheric. Unless that chandelier is going to fall down on us; then it’s totally Phantom. Ha-ha! Kidding. How about some coffee? We could be just a couple of normal girlfriends having a chat.”

  Poppy seemed to have forgotten that the last time I’d seen her, she’d threatened to call the police to get rid of Lexie and me. This morning she was as cheery as . . . as an actress hoping to win some free publicity.

  “Poppy, if you’ve come looking to score a mention in my newspaper column—”

  “You have a column?” Her eyebrows disappeared up into her wig, and she popped her eyes wide enough to be seen from the cheap seats. “How fascinating! Oh, look, a piano! Do you play? I brought some music, if you’d like to hear me sing. I could use a good accompanist. Would you like to see me dance, too? I brought my shoes. I bet you could take some great pictures for your newspaper!”

  The next thing I knew, I was pouring coffee and Poppy Fontanna was pulling on her tap shoes and thundering around my kitchen table like a madcap chorus girl. I peeked out the window in time to see Ricci climb out of his police cruiser and walk over to Michael in the garden, where Noah was still throwing things.

  With a shine of perspiration starting on her face, Poppy stopped dancing long enough to open her large tote bag and pull out sheets of paper. “I can give you my whole résumé—here. See? All the Tuttle shows I’ve ever done, plus some regional theater and a couple of off-off-Broadway things, but you can skip those. They were stinkers. Not my fault, though. And here’s my head shot. What do you think?”

  “Very nice.” I looked at her photo. She looked like a Muppet.

  While she continued to sell herself to me, I opened Poppy’s offering of banana bread and discovered a frozen lump that didn’t look very appetizing. If Fred was baking to relieve tension, he was still very tense.

  “I started out in a road show of Annie.” Poppy continued reciting her accomplishments. “I played one of the orphan girls, and it was a magical beginning to my show-business career. Next I was in Peter Pan and then— Should you be taking notes?” she asked with a frown.

  “How about I ask you about the new show?”

  She perked up again. “Sure! What would you like to know?”

  I pushed a cup of coffee into her hands. “Tell me about Boom Boom.”

  Her face fell. “Oh, she’s had enough publicity to last a lifetime. Me, though—”

  “First, tell me when she turned blue.”

  “You noticed that, huh?”

  “It’s hard to miss. What happened?”

  “A while back, Jenny got excited about food supplements instead of eating actual, you know, food. She gave some to her mother.”

  “Why did Boom Boom turn blue, but Jenny didn’t?”

  “What do I look like? Dr. Oz?”

  I assumed Jenny had deliberately used the supplements to sabotage her mother’s career. “Tell me about Boom Boom’s relationship with Jenny.”

  Suddenly cautious, Poppy sank into one of the kitchen chairs. She mustered an angelic smile. “They loved each other, of course.”

  I sat opposite her. “We both know that’s not true. Jenny’s gone, and there’s a good chance Boom Boom won’t ever set foot onstage again—making way for you to star in the next Toodles Tuttle musical. You have no reason to hold back information. So how about telling me the truth? What was really going on between those two?”

  Poppy’s smile broadened at my mention of her stepping into the lead role, but she tried to gain time to think by sipping coffee. I could see her debating a way to improvise the scene. At last, she gave up and said, “They hated each other. To the rest of us, it was pretty clear it was only a matter of time before one of them murdered the other.”

  “You think Boom Boom killed her daughter?”

  Poppy shook her curls. “That’s not what I mean. For years, Jenny and Boom Boom argued about dieting. Boom Boom always yelled at Jenny for being fat. Started her on pills, sent her to the doctors who helped her get skinny. That’s how Boom Boom stayed thin, too—pills. Plus they were both on heart and blood pressure medications—different prescriptions. And the supplements! The two of them popped pills like crazy. Sooner or later one of them was going to screw u
p and die.” When she saw my puzzlement, she added, “That’s why Higgie came to live at the house. After Boom Boom turned blue, it was obvious she needed help. Higgie’s job was keeping all their pills straight.”

  “Boom Boom and Jenny got their pills mixed up?”

  “Often,” Poppy said.

  “But the nurse ended up being the one who died.”

  “I know! Crazy, right?”

  “Was Miss Higginbotham taking pills, too?”

  “How should I know? Higgie needed to drop some weight. Maybe she figured she could help herself to Jenny’s diet pills now that Jenny was gone. But she died instead.”

  “By accident?”

  “Sure! Happens all the time. That’s why I don’t take any unnatural substances. My body is a temple.” She regained her butter-won’t-melt smile. “No sugar, no meat, no drugs. I do like a double martini once in a while, though. And if anybody tries to talk me out of it, I can show ’em a thing or two.” She held up a fist.

  I decided not to argue with her. “Okay, tell me about the boy in the photograph.”

  “The boy in the newspaper?” Her face closed like a trap door. “I’m not—I don’t know anything about that.”

  “You’ve known Jenny for a long time, though, right? Your whole career? Did you know her when she was pregnant?”

  “Pregnant? Jenny? Are you kidding me?” Poppy laughed unattractively. “That’s not possible.”

  “Not possible?”

  “Jenny never had a boyfriend. Not ever. With all the rest of us girls around, why would anybody look twice at her?” Unfazed by her own nastiness, Poppy added, “It’s not like she was pretty or even very nice. She was a total grump most of the time—and completely obsessed with the shows. She worked, that’s it. No boyfriends, no kids.”

  “I thought—well, it seemed to me that at least Fred was fond of Jenny.”

  Poppy’s eyes turned to ice. “If he was, I’d have kicked his ass all the way to Chicago. Fred was my partner. He’s still mine, and nobody else’s. Maybe they were friends, just a tiny bit, but nothing else.”

  “Okay, my mistake,” I said, backpedaling hastily. “But why do you think Jenny was carrying around a photograph of a little boy?”

  “All I know is it wasn’t her kid. We’re a company, a theater company. Do you know how close a company works together? And we’ve been together for years. Oh, we had a revolving door of actors and musicians that rotated in and out, depending on the show, but the core group—that is, Fred and me and Boom Boom and Jenny and Toodles—we were really tight. There was this one time I went on the road to do the revival of The Sound of Music—believe it or not, I was a really good nun—but while I was gone, everybody else was working on a Toodles show, and they would have noticed something as obvious as Jenny being pregnant. Here, I’ve got pictures of me in my nun suit. Want to see?”

  I thought of all the photographs of children in the desk in Jenny’s private studio. “Poppy, are you absolutely sure Jenny never had a child? Or more?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I mean, Toodles was an old hound dog, and Boom Boom wasn’t an angel in her day, but Jenny? No fooling around for her. And look at you. It’s really hard to hide being pregnant. Trust me, we would have known.”

  Poppy opened her portfolio and spread out a series of photographs on the table. “Now, see? Here I am playing Miss Betty Brown in The Flatfoot and the Floozy. It got lousy reviews, but I think that’s because Toodles wasn’t nice to the press. See this one? I had to use a trapeze in that show.”

  I stared at the pictures without seeing anything. If Jenny wasn’t David Kaminsky’s mother, what was their relationship?

  And who were all the other children in the photographs Jenny kept?

  “Well?” Poppy finally asked. “How about it?”

  I blinked. “How about what?”

  “Featuring me in the newspaper, of course.”

  “That’s not really up to me. My editor makes all the decisions.”

  Steamed, Poppy began stacking up her pictures again. “Well, you could have told me that ten minutes ago! It would have saved us both a lot of time!”

  “Poppy—”

  “And why all these questions? The police are bad enough, but why should I have to put up with you grilling me, too?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “What?” she demanded. “Do you think I killed Jenny? I’ll have you know, when I was in Little Shop of Horrors in high school, the cast nominated me for Miss Congeniality! In a cast that small, that’s a real accomplishment. Besides, none of this matters.” She shoved the photos into her bag. “The cops told us there’s a murderer living right next door.”

  “A—?”

  “Yeah, in the house beside Boom Boom’s. Some rich lady got out of prison, and she moved into the neighborhood. So of course she killed Jenny. It’s going to be all over the front page tomorrow.”

  My heart gave a horrible thunk. I grabbed my cell phone. “Gus,” I muttered as I savagely punched in Lexie’s number, “you better not do what I think you’re doing.”

  Poppy finished stuffing all of her items back into her bag. “This whole trip has clearly been a waste of my valuable time.” She grabbed the slab of frozen banana bread off my counter and swept out of the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she said, “I can see I misjudged your reporting skills, Miss Blackbird. It’s obvious you don’t really want to write about good theater. If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

  Poppy went out through the living room, and the front door banged shut so hard the chandelier over my head swayed.

  Samir answered Lexie’s phone.

  “Samir,” I said, almost hyperventilating. “Did Lexie let a man into the house? Is he a reporter? You have to stop her before she says anything.”

  “The police are here now,” her houseman said, voice low. “A reporter came first, then the police.”

  “Samir, you have to find a way to get rid of the reporter—”

  “They’re questioning Miss Lexie about a murder,” Samir interrupted. “I think I should call her lawyer.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, trying to keep my wits. “She shouldn’t say anything without her lawyer. She had nothing to do with Jenny Tuttle’s death, but they’re going to make things awful for her.” The police interview would be unpleasant, but the havoc Gus could wreak with headlines made me shudder.

  “I’ve got to go,” Samir said.

  I dialed Gus next. “Don’t you dare,” I said while his phone rang in my ear. “Don’t smear my friend, you bastard, or I’ll strangle you with my bare hands.”

  “Tut-tut,” said a voice behind me.

  I spun around to see Bridget standing in my kitchen, dressed to kill and wearing enough makeup to audition for a drag revue. I hung up before my call to Gus went through. I could cope with only one egomaniac at a time. I said, “I’m not really in the mood, Bridget.”

  “Me neither,” she said, dropping her handbag on my kitchen table. “Man, this place of yours is a dump. There’s no air-conditioning! I once had a boyfriend who spent half his time in the sauna. A Swedish guy, used to own a big international furniture company. He’d be right at home, sweating here.”

  “A police officer is waiting outside,” I said. “Probably looking for you.”

  “I saw him from upstairs.” She stalked over to the window and peered out. “Where’s my car?”

  “Michael hid it in the barn.”

  “Smart guy, my boy, isn’t he?”

  “I’m not so sure aiding and abetting anyone is a good idea for him right now. He’s still on probation, you know.”

  She laughed. “He’s protecting his mommy. Can I get to the barn without being seen?”

  “If you don’t mind crawling through the pig pen. But even if you can reach your car, you can’t drive out any other way except p
ast the police.”

  “Then I have time for breakfast.” She turned around and grinned at me. “I once had a boyfriend who was a famous French chef. The breakfasts he made could give a girl an orgasm.”

  Hardly in the mood to provide her with a food-induced sexual experience, I simply pointed at the coffee maker. She found a cup on the shelf and poured for herself. Sipping it, she went back to watching out the window. “What did the Poppet have to say?”

  “You mean Poppy? We talked about Jenny Tuttle giving up a baby, as a matter of fact. But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Judgmental, much?” she asked. “You sure have a lot of opinions for a girl with a leaky roof.”

  “I have a hard time imagining how you could have given up your son, that’s all. Especially to the Abruzzo family.”

  “He turned out pretty good with them.”

  “You call nine years in prison ‘pretty good,’ but I call it a waste of his—”

  “Oh, come off it. Maybe those nine years helped him calm down, grow up, figure out how to be a man.”

  “You couldn’t have helped him do that?”

  She laughed again, a harsh sound. Strolling around the kitchen, she made note of various items—the antique silver serving dish on display on a shelf, Michael’s wine rack on the counter, the set of German kitchen knives that had come to me as a wedding present from a wealthy cousin. She picked up an etched glass jam jar with its matching delicate silver spoon inside, but set it down with a snort.

  “Babycakes, maybe I didn’t raise him, but you can thank me for teaching Mick a few things. Opening doors, please and thank you? I bet he still carries a clean handkerchief, right? I picked up stuff like that from my boyfriends and taught him all of it. I sent him books in jail, too. Lots of books. He finally had time to read, so I spent a fortune on books. So he’s smart. And he knows how to treat a lady like a lady, am I right?”

  “But—”

  “Otherwise, Mick is the self-taught type. Most kids are. Your kids turn out to be who they are even if you’re not a paragon of motherhood.” Bridget’s gaze had a cold glitter. “And you, a morally superior know-it-all girl with money and family and friends—you’d better walk a few miles in my Payless platforms before you shoot your mouth off.”