Murder in Store

by DC Brod

  I gazed up at the stars and silently thanked whoever was in charge of doling out parking spaces and tickets to sold-out ball games that, for once, I had gotten a good one.

  “So,” he said, “now we know that the good guys are alive and the bad guys are dead. What were you starting to tell me about Griffin?”

  “Well, according to Griffin, who, as I see it had no good reason to lie to me—I think he figured his admission would be that last thing these mortal ears would hear—Griffin killed”—I clicked them off with my fingers—“in this order: Melinda Reichart, Ray Keller, the detective, Art Judson, and Deke what’s-his-name. Motives were rejection, blackmail, blackmail, and incompetence plus bad aim.” Finished counting, I shoved my hands into my pockets. “We didn’t get to Hauser. But if Hauser knew about Melinda, he’d definitely have made Griffin’s hit list.”

  “You didn’t get to Hauser?” I knew he wouldn’t let that line slide.

  “No. Griffin wasn’t exactly letting me lead the conversation.”

  “Yeah, but couldn’t you have brought his name up or something? It would’ve been so neat.” He crammed the gum into his mouth.

  I’d been thinking the same thing, but it irked me to hear O’Henry say it. “I’d love to hand this to you gift wrapped, but Christmas was a month ago. Do some work yourself if you’re not satisfied. As far as I’m concerned, Griffin killed Hauser. But at this point I admit I could be convinced he was responsible for every unsolved murder since 1960. I really get offended when someone tries to kin me.”

  O’Henry studied me for a minute. “You finished?”

  “Yeah,” I said, noticing that it was cold and I was without a jacket.

  “You better get your head looked at. I’ll give you a lift.”

  It felt good to get into a car through the door instead of the trunk. The heat felt good too.

  “I’m sorry,” O’Henry said, and it was a moment before I realized that he had apologized. I looked at him as he continued. “You did real good. It’s just that, well”—he shrugged—“it woulda been nice if …”

  “I know.” I didn’t let him finish the sentence and I didn’t want him to try again so I changed the subject. “I don’t need to go to the hospital. Just drop me at the apartment.”

  “The only way you’re getting to the apartment is if you walk from the hospital. Don’t be stupid. You’ve probably got a concussion.”

  He was right.

  The doctor at the emergency room was at least ten years younger than I and cocky as hell. He said I’d been sapped by a pro and offered his congratulations. Even though it was a simple concussion, he told me I might be experiencing its effects for a while and I should spend the night at the hospital under observation. I told him I didn’t have any insurance. He said that a guy in my line of work without insurance really should have his head examined. I thanked

  him for the advice. He gave me two aspirin, and we parted.

  I walked into the apartment and straight into Elaine’s arms. I kissed her on the mouth and buried my face in her hair and was starting on her neck when she pulled back slightly and said, “Ah, Quint?”

  I looked up and over her shoulder at the stranger sitting on the couch.

  “Quint, this is Paula Wainwright,” Elaine said, “Diana Hauser’s stepmother.”

  22

  The woman smiled and extended her hand to me. She was attractive in a tanned and fragile way, with simply styled, shoulder-length brown hair. When we shook hands, mine engulfed hers and I was a little surprised to find her grip as firm as it was. One other thing I noted right off the bat—there was no trace of the smile in her eyes.

  “I understand this is a bad time to be here.” She straightened a pleat in her skirt and pulled at the cuff of her tweed jacket. “Should I come back tomorrow?” From the way she delivered that line, I had the feeling she didn’t expect me to tell her I’d call her when I rolled out of bed in the morning.

  “No,” I said quickly. In spite of the strong desire I had to fall, fully clothed, into bed, there was no way this woman was going to leave before I knew why she was here in the first place. “Wait here. I’m going to change and I’ll be right with you.”

  As I walked into the bedroom, my mind was so flooded with ideas and questions that my brain overloaded and I had to sit on the bed to get my equilibrium back.

  “Are you okay?” Elaine was sitting next to me.

  “Mostly.” I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her toward me. “Where did that woman come from?”

  “She called about an hour and a half ago. Right after you phoned from the hospital. Are you going to be all right?”

  “It’s only a flesh wound.”

  “I’m serious. Give me a straight answer.”

  “I’m okay. Just got my brains scrambled a little. Back to the woman on the couch.”

  “Well, she said she wanted to meet you at your office.” Elaine giggled a little. “I told her you’d probably be coming home first.”

  “Thanks.” I kissed her hair and her cheek and pushed her back on the bed.

  “Quint,” she whispered, “we’ve got company.”

  I hauled her back up and shook my head. Thoughts were difficult to hold onto.

  “She hasn’t told me anything yet,” Elaine said, then lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know how she does it, but she makes me feel like an intruder in my own home. I invite her in, offer her a drink, which she refuses, and she sits there flipping through magazines like she’s in the waiting room at the dentist’s office.”

  “Small talk failed you?” I whispered.

  “Small talk! This woman wouldn’t respond to a cattle prod. She sees I’m drinking out of a U of I coffee mug and she asks me if I went there. I said, ‘No, I never went to college.’ She smiles sympathetically and picks up a copy of Chicago magazine and I don’t hear from her again.”

  She held my gaze for a moment before adding, “I’d appreciate it if you’d hurry up.”

  “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  I changed into jeans and a flannel shirt and splashed cold water on my face. Then I took a good look at myself in the mirror and decided that right now I didn’t look a whole lot better than Frank Griffin. I forced a smile, which turned into a wince. The blow to my head must have injured my smile muscles.

  Grim-faced, I marched into the living room, where both women looked at me expectantly. I sat down in the overstuffed chair and immediately found myself fighting the

  urge to fall asleep. I pushed forward and placed my elbows on my knees.

  “What can I do for you, Mrs. Wainwright?”

  “You may call me Paula,” she said, and I hoped she didn’t expect me to thank her for that “Tell me. What happened today? Has Preston’s murderer been identified?”

  I glanced at Elaine and she shrugged as if to say “We had to talk about something.”

  Then I said, “We think we know who he is, er, was.”

  “He confessed?” She sounded relieved. Or was it disappointed?

  “Well.” I looked at Paula, then Elaine, then at the wall. “Not exactly.” I cleared my throat. “I believe the police are proceeding on the assumption that he killed Preston. After all, he killed everyone else.”

  “Everyone else?”

  I buried my face in my hands and just wanted to sleep. Maybe this could wait until tomorrow. “Here, Quint.”

  I looked up at Elaine. She was holding a glass of ice water. I took it and resisted the impulse to splash it on my face. I drank some, and the fuzziness in my head dissipated a little. Then I explained what had happened that day. Elaine added the eyewitness commentary when I got to the part where Griffin sent his thug after her.

  Paula nodded and listened. When I finished she turned to Elaine. “I’d like that drink now. Scotch. Neat.”

  Elaine rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen.

  “So,” she said, “this Frank Griffin died before confessing to Preston’s murder.”

>   I was getting real tired of people pointing that out. “Yes, that’s true, but the police are working on it. They’re trying to find a channeler who’s tuned in to Frank Griffin. Confessions from beyond the grave hold up pretty well in court.”

  Paula studied me in a detached manner, like she was examining a lab rat. “I apologize if I seemed to accuse you of not doing your job. I suppose you were lucky to get out of that situation alive.” Paula accepted the drink from Elaine and took a couple of sips.

  She continued, “It’s been more than five years since I’ve seen or spoken to Diana. I think the distancing has made me more objective. I also believe that my schooling has made me understand her better so I can almost sympathize with her, in spite of everything.

  Before I could kick my brain into gear, Elaine jumped in. “What kind of schooling?”

  She smiled at Elaine. “I’m a dissertation away from my PhD in psychology.”

  Elaine smiled back and murmured, “That’s a long way away.”

  If looks could have killed, Elaine would have been reduced to a puddle of protoplasm on the couch cushion.

  I finally remembered how to talk. “What is it that you understand about Diana now that you didn’t before?”

  “I can understand her animosity toward me better. She was extremely jealous of me. Probably still is. She perceives me as the woman who stole her lover—her father.” Paula looked away for a moment, then said, “Not a lover in the physical sense, of course. But the crush little girls frequently have on their fathers, well, Diana never outgrew hers.” She turned back to me. “And I suppose I can understand that. Diana’s mother died when she was twelve. Robert’s all she’s had since then.”

  What she was telling me you didn’t need an almost PhD to figure out. I had the feeling that Paula hadn’t gone out of her way to make friends with her husband’s daughter. “Has she always had it in for you?” I asked.

  Paula nodded. “Oh, she was subtle about it. Diana is a very bright young woman. She did little things that made

  clear her disapproval, like showing up at our wedding wearing a black strapless dress on the arm of a man older than her father.”

  I smiled and nodded. “That sounds like Diana.”

  “It goes deeper than the father-figure complex. Diana is a dangerously disturbed young woman.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll buy the fact that Diana has a lot of unresolved feelings about her father. That’s pretty obvious. And maybe she does go to extraordinary lengths to be noticed, but don’t you think you’re pushing the limits of your schooling, not to mention the limits of slander, when you brand her a psycho?”

  Paula smiled and I knew that I’d said exactly what she wanted me to say. I was getting real good at playing straight man. I decided to continue the role and retrieved a line she had dropped earlier in the conversation.

  “You said you sympathized with her in spite of what she did. What was that?”

  “She tried to kill me.” That line was followed by a dramatic pause.

  I lopped it off after about five seconds. “And how, pray tell, did she do that?”

  Without looking away from me, Paula reached into her purse and withdrew three white envelopes that spoke louder than any completed dissertation could have.

  “These started three months after Robert and I were married,” she said.

  I felt that familiar chill I was beginning to associate with Diana Hauser, and the fuzziness in my head vanished. I picked the letters up off the table where Paula had placed them. All three were addressed to her at a Pasadena address. No return. The type wasn’t the same as the type on Preston’s letters—more even and better defined. I removed the contents from the first. It was a news clipping announcing the wedding of Paula Dixon and Robert Wainwright.

  The bride’s face had been disfigured with a red fountain pen and blotches of the same red erupted from her mouth and chest.

  Elaine peered at it over my shoulder. “Oh, God,” she said. “What did you do?”

  Paula sighed. “Nothing at first. That was probably a mistake. But, you see, I suspected it was Diana and, well, she is Robert’s daughter. I didn’t want him to have to choose between the two of us.”

  I opened the second letter. “That came about three weeks after the first,” she explained.

  It was a black-and-white candid of Paula with a bulls-eye drawn on her chest.

  “Hey,” I said, “I had one taken of me in the same pose.”

  Paula nodded like she wasn’t at all surprised.

  The third one was an altogether new approach. It was another candid of Paula, only this time she wasn’t alone. She was seated at an outdoor café with a man approximately her age. She was smiling and leaning toward the man to hear what he was saying.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Paula said. “He’s just a friend.”

  I looked at her to see if her expression would reveal a clue as to the truth of that line. Her eyes neither gave her away nor invited me to question her statement. I let it pass.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “This is when you shared these letters with Robert.”

  Paula nodded. “He was very upset that I hadn’t come to him sooner and admitted that it might be Diana, but he also didn’t want it to go any further. He’s very sensitive about keeping family problems within the family.”

  “Any more letters?”

  “No.”

  “You said she tried to kill you.”

  Paula nodded. “It happened about a week after the last

  letter.” She explained about their infrequent luncheon dates and how Diana had, for the first time, taken the initiative. “I don’t believe it was coincidence that the restaurant she chose was the one where I’d had my picture taken two weeks earlier.”

  Paula went on to describe these luncheons as stressful and how they usually produced a monstrous headache. “Not infrequently I would have to take something for those headaches with coffee and dessert.”

  “In front of Diana?”

  “Usually,” she nodded. “That most recent lunch was no different.” She drank from her glass of scotch. “As I was driving home I began to feel nauseous. By the time I got home, I knew it was more than my lunch disagreeing with me. I was violently ill and having trouble breathing. I was lucky to make it home. Fortunately, Robert was there to take me to the hospital. The doctors examined my medication and found several aspirin mixed in with my prescription pills.” She paused, then said, “I am extremely allergic to aspirin.”

  “Did Diana know that?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. She knew.”

  “The pills couldn’t have looked the same? Didn’t you notice a difference when you took them?”

  She shrugged. “They were very similar in size and shape. I’ve been taking these pills for years. I don’t examine each one before I put it in my mouth.”

  “Did Diana have the opportunity to put them in with your prescription pills?”

  Paula nodded. “I was called away to the phone at the restaurant and I left my purse at the table.”

  “Was it a legitimate phone call?”

  She shook her head. “There was no one on the line. I didn’t think much of it at the time.

  “I told Robert my suspicions and that was all he needed.

  There are some things even Robert can’t forgive his daughter for. He was outraged. But, again, he didn’t want to drag the family name through the mud. He didn’t want the exposure something like this would have caused. So he disowned Diana—wrote her out of his will, washed his hands of her. Everything.”

  “But he tells people he disowned her because she posed in the nude,” I said.

  Paula shrugged. “It’s a convenient lie. She needed cash. That was a quick way to get it.”

  “Then Preston came along,” I said, nodding to myself. “He likes them young and needy.” I considered her story. “Preston died several days ago. Why wait this long to come forward with this information? Even if you didn’t kn
ow about the letters, the means of death had to be disturbingly familiar.”

  “It was, but I didn’t know about his death until yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? Don’t you watch the news?”

  “It’s the dissertation. I don’t have time for much besides that.”

  “Did Robert know?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “Again, it’s the family name he’s intent on protecting. Having a murderess for a daughter doesn’t do much for the reputation of a law firm, even a highly reputable one.”

  “Whose clients are the rich and sensitive,” I added.

  “That can’t be ignored.”

  “Robert sounds like a schmuck,” I said before I could check myself. Then I waved my hands in front of me in denial of what I’d just said. “I’m sorry. It’s the concussion.”

  “In ways he is a schmuck,” Paula said, doing her best to imitate my pronunciation, “but in ways everyone is.” She looked from me to Elaine, then back again.

  I studied Paula and tried to read beneath the polish and

  poise. The fact was that among the three of them—Robert, Diana, and Paula—Paula was the only one who had emerged a winner, even if she had almost died in the process. I wondered just how far she’d be willing to go just to make her marriage work. Maybe she figured getting her stomach pumped wasn’t too high a price to pay to get Diana out of her life. Maybe she’d even enjoy the metaphor.

  “Were you aware that your reaction to aspirin would be so severe?” I asked Paula.

  “Oh, yes,” she responded quickly, as if anticipating the question. “When I was in college, the infirmary accidently gave me aspirin. I was in a coma for two days. The doctors told me if Robert hadn’t come home early that day after Diana and I had lunch, well, I probably would have died.” She smiled and crossed her arms. “That would have been a rather high price for me to pay just to make a statement against my stepdaughter, don’t you think?”

  I nodded, conceding the point. “Do you think that Diana really intended to kill you? I mean, I went to school with a guy who was allergic to aspirin and he just wheezed a lot and used it as an excuse to get out of PE. What I mean is, most people with aspirin allergies don’t slip into comas. Did Diana know how severe your reaction would be?”