I'd Kill For That

by Marcia Talley

  “Not to worry, sir,” Kris said. “I’ll say you’re busy. Up in the Arctic clubbing baby seals.”

  Parker laughed nervously. “Bad girl! You will die and go to hell.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Let me know when you locate Manny,” Parker continued. “The least the SOB can do is hear our side of it. Frankly, I’m surprised. The Post is usually a bit more balanced in its reporting. We’re not going to kill the swans, for Christ’s sake, just neutralize their eggs.”

  “Who’s his source, then?”

  “Damned if I know. It could be anybody in the Gryphon Gate community.” Parker stood, his free hand toying with the loose change in his pocket. “Legally, there’s nothing these folks can do to stop us, but they can definitely make our lives miserable.”

  “I’m sure. And sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I get you anything? Coffee? A martini?”

  “No thanks, Kris,” Parker chuckled. “You’ll just spoil a perfectly good sulk.”

  A few minutes later the telephone warbled like a strangled turkey. Nothing in the way Parker stood, hands jammed in his pockets, gazing out his Georgetown window over the Whitehurst Freeway toward Roslyn, Virginia, gave any indication he’d heard it. He was staring at the USA Today building, wondering when they’d pluck the story off the AP wire and spread it to every airport and hotel room in the nation. Eventually the phone fell silent. Thank God for Kris.

  When the intercom buzzed a few seconds later, Parker sighed and picked up the receiver, not surprised to discover it was still warm.

  “You got Manny?”

  “No, sir. But I think you better take it. It’s your wife, and she sounds upset.”

  Parker punched the blinking green button. “Lydia, I was just thinking about you,” he lied.

  “Oh, Parker! It’s just so awful!” his wife began.

  “I know. It’s all over the front page of the Post.”

  On the other end of the line Lydia snuffled then drew in a quick breath. “The Post? What are you talking about, Parker? They just found him this morning.”

  Parker stopped fiddling with his paperweight, suddenly alert. “Found him? Found who?”

  “Sigmond!” she wailed. “He was lying on the sixth hole. Oh, Parker, Sigmond’s dead!”

  In the background Parker heard one of the twins begin to tune up. In another minute the other would join in, and Parker’s chances of getting a straight story out of his wife would shrink to nil. While he waited for Lydia to pacify the children, he tried to process the information she had just given him. Sigmond Vormeister. Golf. It didn’t compute. Sigmond hung, if he was said to hang out anywhere, at the marina. Sitting on a bench facing the Truxton River, with his ever-present leather-bound notebook. What the hell was Sigmond Vormeister doing at the golf course?

  “I don’t know why I’m so upset,” Lydia sniffed. “I hardly know the man. It’s just … oh, poor Rachel!” Lydia’s voice died out.

  “I know. I know,” Parker soothed. What he knew was that as a founding member of the Gryphon Gate Garden Club, his wife had worked closely with Rachel Vormeister. They often played tennis together, at least until the twins had arrived to happily complicate her life.

  Parker waited while Lydia blew her nose. “Nobody seems to know what he was doing on the golf course,” Lydia continued, control returning to her voice at last. “But the worst of it is this: Laura got it from Peter, who got it from Bill Oberlin—the police think Sigmond’s been murdered.”

  “Shit!” Across the Potomac Parker visualized platoons of reporters pouring out of the USA Today building, cameras at the ready, piling into company cars and heading north up I-395 into Maryland. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  “Exactly.”

  “Any suspects?”

  “If they have any, they aren’t saying. Laura says the police captain, Diane Robards, has taken over the club—the Wild Goose Room—and is using it to conduct interviews. Laura’s been keeping Diane and her two acolytes Ford and Carnegie supplied with croissants and coffee.”

  “You mean Mutt and Jeff?”

  Parker was pleased to hear Lydia laugh. “Seems Mutt is quite fond of Krispy Kremes. Laura’s not happy about it.”

  Parker considered for a moment. “I wonder if we should call off tonight’s town council meeting?”

  “Parker, you can’t! I’ve spent almost a year putting it together. I’ve already squandered enough of my maternity leave working on this case. Next month I’ll be back at work, and anything I take on pro bono will have to have the blessing of Messieurs Matthews, Jacobs, and Reed.

  “If we don’t line up enough public support to demand a new environmental impact statement,” Lydia chugged on, “nothing short of Hurricane Floyd will stop Vanessa from developing that parcel any way she damn well pleases. You’ve seen the plan!”

  Parker had. Vanessa Drysdale proposed to strip the parcel clean of offending trees, backfill the wetlands, and contract a New Jersey firm to construct wall-to-wall condos that looked like they’d been designed by a student at Chesapeake Community College as a class project. It was obscene. “Okay. Okay. Do me a favor then, would you? Call Laura at the club and tell her to put out the word that the meeting will go on as scheduled.” He paused. “Who’s doing the Web page?”

  “Temple Flynt’s son, Ray.”

  “Right. Ask him to post it there, too. And Lydia?”

  “Yes?”

  “See if you can’t persuade the colonel to put off the report from the deer committee until next month. Tell him I’ll explain later.”

  “Any dragons you want slain while I’m at it?”

  Parker grinned and promised himself that after this was all over he’d buy Lydia that diamond tennis bracelet she’d admired at Alan Marcus. “I’ll love you forever,” he whispered.

  “Hah!” Lydia snorted. “That’s what all my boyfriends say.”

  * * *

  Lydia hung up the phone. It was well past lunchtime, and the twins, sitting side by side in their bouncy seats, were quietly fussing. She’d already wasted one nutritional opportunity by feeding them shortbread cookies full of empty fat and sugar calories. With a damp paper towel, Lydia wiped the evidence off their chins. Where were the whole-grain, fruit juice–sweetened muffins when you needed them? Lydia loved her children, was crazy about them actually, but sometimes she felt that if Working Mother gave an award for Uninspired Parenting, she’d definitely be on the shortlist. Lydia couldn’t imagine what she had been thinking when, today of all days, she had given Nicole, their au pair, the afternoon off.

  Lydia plugged a pacifier into Todd’s mouth and distracted Amy with a Baby Mozart video while she made the phone calls she had promised. Laura answered at once, but neither Ray Flynt nor Colonel McClintock was home, so she left detailed messages on their answering machines, secretly praying that neither man would call her back.

  After the twins were fed and down for their nap, Lydia plopped a fresh Lady Grey tea bag into a mug of water and set it on the turntable of the microwave. While waiting for the ding, she rummaged in the pantry until she found a box of Girl Scout cookies she had optimistically hidden from herself. Tea and Thin Mints in hand, she sat down at the kitchen table and considered the orderly piles of documents that were stacked there among a jumble of half-empty baby food jars and a scattering of Goldfish crackers: environmental impact statements, minutes of zoning board meetings, piles of EPA and Maryland state regulations, and a copy of HB278 dotted with strained squash. Nibbling a dainty circle around the edges of a cookie, Lydia reviewed her strategy. She planned to claim that Vanessa’s building permit had been approved on the basis of misinformation supplied by the developer that vastly underestimated the effect of the proposed development on the infrastructure of the area. Thus, they would need to reevaluate requirements for power, water, and sewage; revisit issues of traffic and public transportation, not to mention looking closely at the schools.

  Lydia sometimes worried that s
he had pressed her sources too hard. She would willingly confess to being a NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard—but hoped not to be thought of as a BANANA—Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

  Yet last night her persistence had borne fruit. Cheryl Madsen, her mole at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, had discovered that the Forest Glen marshland was home to helonias bullata, an endangered flower popularly known as the swamp pink, and to hyla sanguinea, a red-toed tree frog as cute as any character out of a Walt Disney cartoon. Now Vanessa and her developers would be up against the Federal Endangered Species Act. Lydia smiled. Bulldozers had been halted by smaller creatures than a tree frog.

  As she sat there leafing through the papers and taking notes on a yellow legal pad, she had the nagging feeling she’d forgotten something. Rachel! If Lydia had been any kind of friend, she would have been over there by now, homemade casserole in hand, and with the offer of a comforting shoulder to cry on.

  Lydia hauled a turkey tetrazini casserole out of the deep freeze in the garage and set it on the hood of her Volvo station wagon.

  Ignoring the fax machine that was noisily churning another page into the tray with several others Lydia had also ignored, she changed, freshened her makeup—such as it was—and roused the twins from their nap. With Todd squirming on one hip and Amy calmly straddling the other, Lydia stood in the garage and considered her options. The Peg Perego double stroller, imported from Italy and a gift from her in-laws, was sporty as all get out with its double yellow canopies, but, considering the inches she’d put on her thighs since the children were born, she settled for the twinner baby jogger instead. Maybe someday neighborhood heads would turn for her the way they did for the jogging Yummy Mummies.

  Lydia belted the children into the jogger, set the casserole in the mesh basket underneath, punched the automatic garage door opener with her thumb, and when the door yawned wide shot out the door and down the tree-lined drive, her raven hair flying and the children shrieking in delight.

  The Vormeisters lived ten two-acre lots away in a three-story, nouvelle Tudor set well back on an aggressively landscaped lot. So many trees dotted the lawn in so many varieties that Lydia couldn’t help but think of it as the Vormeister tree zoo.

  There were no cars in the driveway, so Lydia was surprised when her knock—on an ornate lion’s head the size of a dinner plate—was answered not by Rachel but by a pale woman of Germanic sturdiness, her graying blonde hair caught up at the crown by a pink plastic Day-Glo butterfly clip. Lydia recognized the generous nose and cupid’s bow lips and knew who this must be. Rachel’s mother.

  “Mrs. Kaplan?” With her toe Lydia set the brake on the baby jogger and extended her hand. “I’m so sorry to hear about Sigmond, Mrs. Kaplan. I’m Rachel’s friend, Lydia Upshaw. How’s she doing?”

  “She’s in shock, poor child.”

  Lydia lowered her head. “We all are. It’s terrible.”

  Suddenly remembering her mission, Lydia bent and wrestled the casserole out of the basket. “I’ve brought this. It’s not much, but I wanted to do something. Please tell Rachel that if there’s anything she needs, or if I can help in any way…” In her own ears, the words rang hollow. Would a stupid noodle casserole make her feel any better if something awful were to happen to Parker?

  “Why don’t you tell her yourself?” Holding the casserole dish in both hands, Rachel’s mother gestured toward the entrance hall. “Rachel’s in the kitchen. I was about to make some tea. I hope you’ll join us?”

  Lydia thought that if she swallowed one more ounce of tea her bright blue eyes would turn muddy brown. Besides, she had the children with her. She had just opened her mouth to refuse when Mrs. Kaplan shrieked, “Aaron!”

  Lydia shook her head to clear the ringing from her ears as a whey-faced youth with cheeks sprouting a fine crop of pimples materialized, seemingly from nowhere, a skateboard tucked under his arm.

  “Hey, Mom! You seen my lid and pads around anywhere?”

  Mrs. Kaplan frowned. “You won’t need your helmet just now, Aaron. Take the children around the jogging trail a couple of times, will you, while I give Mrs. Upshaw some tea.”

  A smile split Aaron’s face, and Lydia caught a glimpse of the handsome man he would be in another four or five years. Like his sister, Rachel, the teenager’s cap of hair was blond all the way down to the roots. “Sure thing,” he said.

  Lydia watched while Aaron laid his skateboard, as tenderly as if it were an infant, in the basket where her casserole had so recently rested. She watched without a single pang of concern as her children disappeared into the woods in the custody of someone she had never met. Shouldn’t she worry? Even a little? But what could one expect from someone whose own mother would have plopped her down in a playpen and gone off to smoke another Lucky?

  The two women found Rachel seated at an enormous white oak table, idly spinning a teaspoon around on the polished tabletop.

  “Rachel,” Lydia began. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  Rachel regarded her with red and swollen eyes. “Oh, Lydia, I don’t know what I’m going to do!” Her lower lip quivered and her shoulders began to shake.

  Lydia pulled up a chair and sat down next to her friend. Taking Rachel’s hand in hers, she soothed. “It’ll be all right. I’m here. Your mom’s here.…”

  “Bill Oberlin came and got me,” Rachel sobbed. “They needed me to identify…” She took a deep, ragged breath. “… to identify poor Sigmond before they took him away to, to…”

  The morgue. The word hung unspoken in the air. Lydia rubbed Rachel’s hand gently.

  “Oh, Lydia, he looked so peaceful lying there, as if he were asleep. I can’t believe…”

  Mrs. Kaplan set cups of hot tea on the table in front of them. When Rachel made no move to pick hers up, her mother added a heaping teaspoon of sugar to the cup, stirred briskly, and pushed it toward her daughter. “You have to drink something, darling, or you’ll get all dehydrated.”

  Rachel wrapped her hands around the cup but didn’t drink from it. “Things were finally turning around for Sigmond,” she said. “He was wrapping up his research and he had made some sort of revolutionary breakthrough.”

  “Finally!” Mrs. Kaplan huffed. “Although, what anybody can make of all those Martian runes, I’ll never know.”

  Rachel leaned toward Lydia, a slight smile creasing her face. “Sigmond wrote in shorthand. He’s got hundreds of notebooks, Lydia. One day he’s going to publish them.” Suddenly her voice cracked. “Oh, Mother, I won’t even know where to begin!”

  “Why don’t you worry about that later, Rachel?” her mother suggested.

  “We were so happy!”

  “I know.”

  “Everyone told us it wouldn’t work out.” She squeezed Lydia’s hand. “Sigmond was older than me, you know.”

  Lydia nodded.

  “And Sigmond so wanted children. We tried and we tried and we tried. Sigmond was so patient with me.” She managed a slight smile. “When he decided we needed help, we went to the best fertility doctor in the state. Doctor Jefferson said—”

  “Dr. Charles Jefferson?” Lydia interrupted.

  “Yes. Why? Do you know him?”

  “Of course I know him! He helped us conceive Todd and Amy.”

  Across the table, her eyes bright behind a pale, untidy fringe of bangs, Rachel’s mother grinned. “Tell her, Rachel.”

  Rachel pressed her hands together, as if trying to contain her excitement. Crimson patches appeared on cheeks that were otherwise pale from crying. “Sigmond wanted to keep it secret until we were sure. But I’m pregnant, Lydia. The baby’s due in December.”

  Then her face crumpled. “Sigmond hoped it’d be a girl,” she sobbed. “Next month we were going to do the ultrasound. And now he’ll never know!” Rachel leapt to her feet and rushed from the room. Flashing a nervous smile of apology, Mrs. Kaplan bustled after her.

  Lydia sat. For want of something better to do she sipped her tea—a s
prightly ginger concoction—and stared at the wallpaper. Tendrils of ivy snaked under the windows, over the doorways, twined around the copper pot rack, crept across the stone floor, wound themselves up the table leg, curled over her hand and around her neck. Lydia shook herself. She was having a Stephen King moment.

  Lydia had decided to head out to the jogging trail in search of Aaron and her children when Rachel returned carrying a large manila envelope. She leaned against the stove, the envelope clasped to her chest. “Can I share something with you, Lydia? That policewoman,” she continued without waiting for a reply, “Diane somebody. She really annoyed me.”

  Mrs. Kaplan stood in the doorway, nodding vigorously. “Not a compassionate bone in her body.”

  Lydia smiled reassuringly. “We’ve never had a murder at Gryphon Gate before. Captain Robards is probably just being careful. You wouldn’t want her to make a mistake, would you, and have Sigmond’s murderer go free on some technicality?”

  “Of course not! But, she’s in over her head, if you ask me.”

  Rachel’s mother nodded. “Not a job for a woman.”

  Although sorely tempted, Lydia kept her mouth shut.

  “That’s probably why I didn’t tell her about the baby,” Rachel mused.

  Lydia forced a smile. “No reason you needed to, Rachel.”

  Rachel shrugged then crossed to the table. She lifted the flap on the envelope and dumped its contents onto the tabletop. “These are Sigmond’s things. Except for his most recent notebook. The police are still looking for that.”

  Lydia stared as Rachel lovingly touched each item. A Seiko watch with a silver, basket-weave band. A black leather wallet. A monogrammed handkerchief. A ballpoint pen, a handful of loose coins, and a fistful of keys. “I didn’t tell Diane Robards about the baby,” she repeated almost dreamily. “And I didn’t tell her something else either.”