Nobody Lives Forever

by Edna Buchanan

  He rang the doorbell and felt his trousers swell with his erection.

  She opened the door immediately, the dim light behind her glowing in her blond hair. She wore something long and black and lacy that took his breath away. His throat ached when he looked at her. “Hi, blue eyes.”

  She moved right into his arms like she belonged there.

  “I’m so glad to see you,” she whispered.

  He was taking off his jacket. She took the bottle. “Asti Spumante, you remembered.”

  “I remember everything.” He was loosening his tie. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’ll get the glasses.” She turned in the doorway. “Did you just call?”

  “No, why?”

  “Had a hang-up.”

  “Humph. I bet it was Jim, unless you have somebody else checking up on you.” He raised an eyebrow.

  “Jim?”

  “Yeah, I think he’s already onto us. You can’t slip anything past that guy. He’s too sharp.”

  He turned down the volume on the walkie so that they could just make out the calls, stood it on the coffee table and sat in a rose-color armchair. “What are you doing?” she laughed, a glass in each hand.

  He was taking off his shoes.

  “Mister Romance, huh?”

  He looked embarrassed. “We might not have much time. I’m still on call if anything happens.”

  She stood in front of him, smiling softly, her face sweet. “It’s all right,” she said. “Whatever time we have. It’s enough.”

  He popped the push-up cork on the bottle. It flew somewhere behind the sofa. Her laugh had a giddy ring to it.

  “Why don’t we drink this in the other room?”

  “The kitchen?” she said brightly.

  “No, you gorgeous idiot. The room with the bed.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Careful,” he cautioned in the bedroom doorway. “Don’t get any makeup on my shirt.”

  “Sure,” she said wistfully, and unbuttoned it for him.

  It felt good, really good to lie naked on her bed, a glass of wine in one hand, the other under his head, and watch the long black lace gown slip off her creamy shoulders and drop like spilled ink around her feet.

  “Something this good can’t be bad,” he whispered in her ear.

  “I thought we’d never be this way again. I’m so happy you’re here.”

  Her mouth and her breath tasted sweet. He raised his head from them suddenly. “What was that?”

  Her voice was thick with passion. “Must be stray cats out there at the garbage pail.”

  “Don’t move,” he said, kissing her throat. “I’ll be right back.” He stood naked in the moonlight for a moment, looking out. The only view was the alley behind her townhouse and a small shed for the garbage cans. He saw nothing else. Turning back, he looked at her, the moonlight on her body, then drew the drapes and hurried back to her open arms. With any luck, they would have until dawn.

  Twenty-Six

  The news burst out of ballistics with the force of a shotgun blast the following afternoon. The bullets dug out of a fire-singed Eldorado parked behind the Bal Harbour Shopping Center and the elevator used by the courier had been shot from the same gun that had killed Rob Thorne and the Pakistani convenience-store clerk.

  The day was full of revelations. As the team assembled early, more news developed. The headless woman had a tentative name, Jonina Vandermay. The well-to-do widow had been reported missing by her accountant. He had telephoned her swank Sunset Island home when she failed to appear for a scheduled appointment. The Jamaican housekeeper informed him that Mrs. Vandermay had not come home for two nights. Though the unexplained absence was entirely out of character, the housekeeper had not notified authorities for several reasons. Her employer was a troublesome woman and the respite from her sharp tongue had been a relief. The housekeeper also happened to be an illegal alien.

  On the last day she was seen, Jonina Vandermay spent the morning being difficult, as usual, according to the housekeeper and maid. She had driven off at eleven A.M., as usual, in her champagne-color Jaguar, to visit her rental properties and oversee their management. Those visits were usually spent tormenting her tenants and employees. This time was different. She never came back.

  The detectives were batting a thousand. Luck had smiled their way at last. The stunning news from ballistics excited them. This time, they hoped, the killer had made mistakes.

  Jim knew he was right about them when he saw Rick and Dusty trying not to look at each other. “We finally got a break,” he commented.

  “Sure, but no thanks to me. I could kick myself,” Dusty grumbled. “You know how every cop dreams of walking in on a big one in progress and doing the right thing? If you’re lucky it might happen once in a lifetime. Well,” she looked sheepish, “that was my chance, and I blew it by giving in to some self-indulgent, moody crap.”

  “Well, you seem to feel much better today,” Jim said, smiling wryly. “Don’t sweat if. If you’d been there you might’ve wished you weren’t. Sometimes things happen for the best.”

  “Yeah.” Rick rubbed his hands together and cut his eyes at Dusty. “When you get lucky, you get lucky.” Her response was a look that could melt metal.

  Jim pretended not to notice. Hot looks and heavy breathing in the office, it seemed like old times, before Laurel.

  He and Rick hit the shopping center while Dusty pursued the Vandermay case.

  To confirm the identification, Dr. Lansing planned to compare chest X rays of the corpse with the widow’s medical records. A mere formality. The clothing and physical descriptions matched. So did the timing of her disappearance. Less than an hour after Dusty issued a countywide BOLO on the Jaguar, an alert motorcycle patrolman spotted it parked outside a Miami Beach apartment house owned by the victim.

  As Dusty traced Jonina Vandermay’s footsteps, Rick and Jim drove to the shopping center. Their stake in that investigation was now far greater than that of the local police in whose jurisdiction it had occurred.

  Rick, Jim and two Miami robbery detectives canvassed the stores, listing the names and addresses, via sales receipts, of shoppers who had been there the night before, people who might have been witnesses. They had already debriefed the shaken security guard and the armored car crew. The results were disappointing. All three swore they had not seen the robber well enough to work with a police artist on a composite drawing. The detectives toyed with trying hypnosis to fish forgotten details from their subconscious minds. But it seemed fairly obvious that no such details existed. The lighting was poor and the events had been lightning-fast.

  “Somebody else had to have seen him,” Rick said as they parked. “He can’t be that lucky. Good Christ, it’s a goddamn shopping center. He had to have a car, he had to be somewhere before all the shit went down. He arrived, he left. Somebody saw that son of a bitch. Probably somebody who doesn’t even realize who or what they saw. We’re gonna find that witness.”

  The new developments energized them both. Frustrated by the Thorne case, they had, at last, a trail to follow. Jim even seemed to wheeze and sneeze less.

  They canvassed the hotel fronts across the street and the help at the shopping center’s outdoor cafés, with little luck.

  “This guy is not invisible,” Rick said angrily. “Somebody else saw him.”

  “This heat is gonna kill me,” Jim said, mopping his face with a handkerchief. “You could fry your brains on the sidewalk. We got to come up with something soon.”

  Rick was determined. “What we’ve gotta do is come back at nine—with reinforcements. We need to see who is here at that precise time. We’ll stop traffic going by, people on the sidewalk, employees who leave the center and the hotels, guys who pick up their wives from work the same time every night.” The unyielding glint in his eyes was a sign of the persistence that made him more than a good detective. “If that doesn’t work, we co
me back a week later, and do it all again on the same night, at the same time it went down. We’re all creatures of habit. Maybe our witness eats here, or drops by once a week to window-shop.”

  “If there is a witness.” Jim felt a trickle of perspiration worm its way down his back to puddle inside the line of his belt.

  “There is,” Rick said. “There has to be.”

  “I’m with you, bro.”

  Jonina Vandermay’s frightened housekeeper and maid were not suspects, Dusty decided. They were losers. Their employer’s death had cost them their jobs. From talking briefly to the women and the accountant, Dusty formed a thumbnail sketch of the widow, a self-indulgent woman who spent lavishly on herself but was tightfisted with others. Dusty decided she would check the building where the Jaguar had been discovered, talk to the woman’s lawyer to determine who would benefit most by her death and the compile a list at the courthouse of all the property the woman owned.

  Her apartment buildings had live-in managers. The widow Vandermay gave them small discounts on the rent and a multitude of headaches. The job had a high turnover. Wearing three-hundred-fifty-dollar high heels and expensive designer fashions, perfectly coiffed and bejeweled, she visited her buildings almost daily to point a well-manicured finger at a leaky faucet or a burning light bulb that might cost her pennies, hedges that needed trimming or weeds that needed pulling—though she would prefer not to pay anyone to do it. When she had to pay, she preferred it to be below minimum wage, to an illegal alien pitifully eager to work and too afraid to complain when shortchanged.

  The motorcycle cop who had spotted the Jaguar was standing by with the car, waiting for the crime lab. There was nothing obvious, no blood, no damage, to link the sleek machine to the crime. It was locked and legally parked. Some small change, mostly quarters, for tolls and parking meters was stacked on the console. A folded Wall Street Journal lay on the passenger seat along with a letter folder and what appeared to be an appointment book. Dusty would examine those after the lab techs got through. There seemed to be no sign of a struggle.

  The twin two-story buildings were garden apartments constructed toward the end of the Art Deco era. They faced each other across a lawn mowed too short and singed yellow-brown by the sun. At one time, the grassy expanse had been graced by two stately coconut palms, one on each side. One still stood, tall and beautiful, its fronds chattering gently in the breeze. The dead stump of the other, probably a casualty of the blight, had never been removed. Nor had it been replaced. Its absence threw the symmetry of the twin buff-color buildings off balance.

  Neatly trimmed Florida cherry hedges lined the brickred sidewalk. Outside staircases with pink railings were located at each end of both buildings. The frames around the glass jalousie doors were painted the same salmon pink. Room air conditioners hummed beneath the front windows of each unit. A large square of twelve metal mailboxes was mounted on the wall next to the first apartment. Dusty knocked at apartment one. Moments later, the jalousies cracked open and an elderly woman peered out through the screen.

  Dusty could hear TV news blaring in the background. She displayed her badge case and identified herself. “I know why you’re here,” the woman said. “I just saw it on TV. Is it really her?”

  “Identification isn’t positive yet, but it appears as though the victim is your landlady. Can I ask how long you’ve lived here?”

  “It will be eighteen years on November first.” The voice was flat, expressionless.

  “Was she the owner when you moved in?”

  “The place was sold to her about nine or ten years ago.”

  “Do you mind if we talk for a few minutes? We don’t know much about her yet. I’m sure you could help us.”

  A safety chain rattled free, then the sounds of double dead bolts being released. Little good they would do with these jalousie windows, Dusty thought.

  “It’s hot our there, you can come in,” the woman said. She was faded, with light, colorless eyes, a flowered cotton housecoat and a hair net around pink curlers. There were liver spots and a wedding band on her left hand, but no sign of a man in the immaculate apartment.

  “I don’t think there is anything I can tell you,” she said, offering Dusty a seat on her yellow sofa. Curiosity colored the pale eyes. “Did they really cut off her head? Who would do a thing like that?”

  “It’s pretty much what you heard on the TV,” Dusty said, nodding. “We’re trying to find out. When did you last see Mrs. Vandermay?”

  “A week ago tomorrow. She came and said I had to bring my spider plants in off the porch. Did you ever hear anything like that?” She shook her head slowly. “This is Florida. The word means full of flowers, and yet that woman doesn’t want plants on the porch.”

  “Why was that?” Dusty looked up from her notebook.

  “Just miserable, I guess. She said it’s because she wants all the apartments to look alike.” The woman leaned forward and spoke very slowly to emphasize her words. “This is Florida,” she repeated. “Yet no plants—no plants, no pets. When something wore out, the former owner replaced it with a new one. With her, everything is used.”

  She leaned forward even further, her voice sharpening. “Every year she raises the rent, increases the deposit and won’t pay interest on the money she holds. She’s got it in an interest-bearing account, you can be sure, but she won’t pay you interest. And I’ll tell you something else: She will never give that deposit back. When people leave, she always finds a reason to keep their money. Mrs. Braverman, in the other building, died last year, a month after she signed a new lease. Mrs. Vandermay not only kept the deposit, guess what else she did?”

  “What?” said Dusty, wondering who was doing the questioning in this interview.

  “She sued the estate! To hold them to the lease and force them to pay for the whole year, even though she found a new tenant right away. You can ask anyone who knows me,” she said, her hands fluttering around a plastic button at the neckline of her housecoat. “I don’t talk about people, I don’t say bad things about anybody, but that was not a nice woman. We never kept a good manager because of her. She drove them crazy.”

  “You didn’t see her park her car outside on Tuesday?”

  The woman thought, freckled fingers folded under her chin. “I’m not sure if it was Tuesday or last Thursday. I thought I heard her voice, those high heels, but it could have been anybody, I didn’t look out. I try to avoid her, and with the air conditioner and Geraldo on the TV, you don’t hear much from outside.”

  “Did she have any special friends here in the building?”

  “She didn’t have any friends that I know of.”

  “What about enemies? Did she have an argument with anybody here lately?”

  The woman paused. “I don’t know anybody she didn’t argue with. She even snooped in apartments when the tenants weren’t home. She said she had the right, that it was her property.”

  “Why do you think she came here that day?”

  “No telling. She came by a lot, just to see what was going on or to meddle. Money—money was always on her mind, if there was a way she could save it or cheat somebody out of it. Maybe to see if my spider plants were moved.

  “She wasn’t so bad before my husband died, but since then she’s rude. You don’t dare move because you know you won’t get your deposit and security back unless you take her to court—and who can afford a lawyer?”

  Dusty slid the cap back onto her pen and handed the woman her business card. “If you think of anything else that might help, anything you hear or forgot to tell me, please call.”

  The woman stopped her at the door. “If she really is dead, who’s in charge of our building now?”

  “I don’t know if she had a will, or what it said if she did,” Dusty said. “It’ll probably be tied up in probate for a while.”

  “You think they’ll raise the rents?” she asked, getting down to basics. “My lease is up in November
.”

  Outside, Dusty stood in the sun, squinting at the building across the way. In some murder cases there are no immediate possibilities. In others, like this one, there are sometimes too many.

  She felt buoyant, though she had had little sleep. Rick had to know now that Laurel was not right for him. Last night was proof that relationship was a mistake. It will end if it hasn’t already, she thought, and I’ll be there.

  The woman had followed her out into the sun. She carried a wicker basket containing a large spider plant with long gracefully drooping leaves and several pups. She was humming.

  Dusty smiled and turned to the mailbox to copy the names and apartment numbers of the eleven other tenants in the west building. She would come back in the evening to see the ones who were not at home. One name leaped off a mailbox marked apartment six: Terrance McGee. Could it be the same man? Of course, that’s why the address had been faintly familiar.