Aurora 03 - Three Bedrooms, One Corpse (14 page)

“I’m fine. I’ll go back over there now if you’ll call.” I had the distinct feeling that she would much rather have gone back to washing her hair and forgotten that I’d knocked.

“I’ll call right now,” she promised with sudden resolution.

So I went back over to the cold black house next door. Eileen was stirring around but still out of it. I gripped the flashlight defensively as I crouched next to her on the nasty brown carpet, and stared dully at a dead beetle while I waited for the police.

At least Jack Burns didn’t show up. I would rather have been in a locked room with a pit bull than have faced Sergeant Burns at that moment. He had regarded me with baleful mistrust ever since we’d come across each other during the Real Murders investigation. He seemed to think I was the Calamity Jane of Lawrenceton, that death followed me like a bad smell. If I’d been Jonah, he’d have thrown me to the whale without a qualm.

Lynn Liggett Smith seemed to take my presence as a matter of course. That was almost as disturbing.

Eileen came out of her faint, we were allowed to tell the little we knew, and then I drove a shaken Eileen back to the office. My mother had already been called by the police, so she had waited there. Eileen went to Mother’s office in a wobbly parody of her usual brisk trot. There were lights on down the hall. I slid into the client chair in Mackie Knight’s office. With considerable astonishment, Mackie put down the paperwork he was doing.

“What’s happening, Roe?”

“Have you been here all afternoon, Mackie? Till now?” I saw by the clock on the office wall that it was already seven.

“No. I just came back after spending all afternoon at church and eating supper at home with my folks. Just as my mom put her lemon meringue pie in front of me, I remembered that I didn’t have all the papers ready for the Feiffer closing tomorrow morning.” There was lemon meringue smeared on a Styrofoam plate and a used plastic fork on a corner of his desk.

“Was anyone else at your folks‘?”

“Yeah, my minister. What’s this about?”

“Idella was just killed.”

“Oh, no.” Mackie looked sick. “Where?”

“At the empty Westley house.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” I hadn’t seen a weapon, but Idella’s coat had been covering her throat. The poor light hadn’t been reliable, but I’d thought her face had had the same funny tone as Tonia Lee’s. “Maybe strangled.”

“The poor woman. Who’s told her kids?”

“I guess the police. Or maybe whoever she left the kids with while she worked.”

“And I couldn’t have done it!” Mackie said, the penny finally dropping. “I’ve been with someone every blessed minute, except driving time from my folks’ back here.”

“Maybe this wasn’t planned as well as Tonia Lee’s murder.”

“You think Tonia Lee was killed at the time she was killed and the place she was killed because there would be a lot of available suspects.”

“Sure, don’t you?”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he said slowly, “but it makes good sense. Poor Idella.”

Mackie shook his head in disbelief. “She sure had been acting funny lately, almost apologetic, every time I talked to her.”

“She knew you didn’t kill Tonia Lee, Mackie. I think she knew who did, or suspected.”

We both sat and thought for a while, and then my mother came to the door and asked gently if she could speak to me for a moment.

“Mackie,” she said as I got up to leave his office, “you went to church after Idella left the office? Or before?”

“Before. She was still in her office when I walked out the door. I said good-bye to her.”

“Oh, thank God. You’re in the clear, then.”

“Yes, I think I am.” Mackie was having a hard time with conflicting emotions.

Lynn was waiting in Mother’s office.

“I hear you had an interesting conversation with Idella at Beef ‘N More,” she said.

I thought Lynn was bluffing, but I’d intended telling her what Idella had said anyway, vague though it was. The only person who could have told Lynn that I’d talked to Idella at lunch was Sally Allison, and Sally didn’t know what Idella had said to me. No, I wasn’t being fair to Sally

.. . there was Terry Sternholtz.

I told Lynn all about Idella’s and my little bathroom tête-à-tête. We went over and over it while my mother listened or worked quietly. I wondered why I was sitting here instead of going down to the police station. I told Lynn, frontward and backward and upside down, every little nuance of Idella’s apparent fight with Donnie Greenhouse, her flight to the women’s room, my halfhearted attempt to help her, her few comments to me, and her departure from the restaurant.

My next glimpse of her at the office, my brief conversation with her here, the exchange with an unknown person she’d had over the telephone, and her statement that she was going to go to Emily Kaye with my counteroffer. Then how I’d found her at the empty house.

By the time Lynn was satisfied she’d gotten everything out of me she could get, I was heartily sorry I’d spoken to Idella at the restaurant. Sometimes good impulses backfire.

“Go talk to Donnie Greenhouse,” I said irritably. “He was the one who upset her, not me.”

“Oh, we will,” Lynn assured me. “In fact, someone’s talking to him right now.”

But Donnie Greenhouse, who’d let Tonia Lee stomp on him for so long, would not yield an inch to the police. He called my mother while I was still in her office and told her triumphantly he hadn’t given Paul Allison the time of day.

“He told Paul that no matter what Roe Teagarden said Idella told her, he and Idella had discussed nothing more than business and Tonia Lee’s funeral.” My mother’s famous eyebrows were arched at their most skeptical.

“He might as well wear a sign that says ‘Please Kill Me. I Know Too Much,’ ” I said.

“Donnie doesn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain, but I didn’t think he was this dumb,” Mother said. “And why he’s doing it, instead of telling the police all he knows, I cannot fathom.”

“He wants to avenge Tonia Lee himself?”

“God knows why. Everyone knows she made his life hell on wheels.”

“Maybe he always loved her.” Mother and I pondered that separately.

“I personally don’t think a rational person with a sense of self-preservation could continue to love under such a stream of abuse as that,” my mother said.

I wondered if she was right. “So Donnie’s not rational and has no sense of self-preservation,”

I said. “And what about Idella? Evidently the call she got in her office was from someone she suspected might be the killer. And yet she apparently agreed to meet this person in an empty house. Doesn’t that sound like she loved whoever it was?”

“I just don’t love that way,” said Mother finally. “I loved your father until he was unfaithful.”

This was the first time she’d ever said one word to me about her marriage with my father. “I loved him, in my opinion, very deeply. But when he hurt me so much, and things weren’t going well otherwise, it just killed the love. How can you keep on loving when someone lies to you?”

She really could not understand it.

I didn’t know, with my limited experience, if my mother just had an extraordinarily strong sense of self-preservation, or if the world was full of irrational people.

“It seems from what I’ve read, and observed,” I said hesitantly, “that lots of people aren’t that way. They keep on loving, no matter what the hurt or cost.”

“No self-respect. That’s what I believe,” my mother said crisply. She stared out her window for a moment, at the bare branches of the oak tree outside, which made a bleak abstract pattern against the gray sky. “Poor Idella,” she said, and a tear oozed down her cheek. “She was worth ten Tonia Lees, and she had children. She’d done so much for herself since her husband left her.

I’d gotten pretty fond of her without ever getting really close to her.” Mother looked back at me.

Our eyes met. “She must have been so frightened.” Then she shook herself. “I’ll have Eileen call Emily Kaye to find out if Idella’d actually gotten over there with your counteroffer, honey. The police should let us have the papers in her car, soon. We can get on with the house sale, with Eileen or me taking Idella’s part. I’ll let you know.”

I hadn’t been worried about it at all. “Thanks,” I said, trying to look relieved. “I think I’ll go home now.” But I turned at her office door to say, “You know, I’ll bet money that Donnie doesn’t really know anything at all. If he does get killed, it’ll be over absolutely nothing.”

I was really glad I hadn’t agreed to meet Martin tonight. I needed a little time to get over this horror. Driving home, I felt the impulse to call him nonetheless. But I shook my head. No telling what he was doing. Still trying to inspire Pan-Am Agra executives, eating supper with a client, working in his motel room on important papers. I hated him to find out how lonely I was, so soon.

I kept thinking about Idella, her children, her death from love.

The NEXT MORNING my best friend, Amina Day—now Amina Day Price—called me. I’d just pulled on my blue jeans, and I lay across the bed on my stomach to grab the phone.

“Hi, it’s me!”

“Amina,” I said happily, feeling my mouth break into a smile, “how are you?”

“Honey, I’m pregnant!”

“Ohmigod!”

“Yes! Really, really. The ring in the tube turned the right color this morning, and I lost my breakfast, too. So I’m home lying down.”

“Amina, I can’t believe it. What does Hugh say?”

“He’s just thrilled. He’s ready to go out now and buy a car seat and a crib. I told him he better wait a while, my mother always told me it was bad luck to start getting ready too soon.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No, I have an appointment for next week with the obstetrician all the wives of Hugh’s partners go to.”

Hugh is an up-and-coming lawyer in Houston.

“I’m so glad for you,” I told her honestly.

We talked for a while. Or, rather, I listened while Amina talked to me about the baby and what she wanted and didn’t want for this exceptional infant.

“So what’s new with you?” she asked finally.

“Well... I’m seeing someone.”

“Not the minister?”

“No, not anymore. This man—Martin—he’s the new plant manager at Pan-Am Agra.”

“Wo-wo. How old is he?”

“Older.”

“Rich?”

“Well-to-do.”

“Of course, that doesn’t make any difference anymore, since you inherited all that loot.”

“No, but it’s nice anyway. He likes having money.”

“Tell me all!”

“Well, his name is Martin Bartell, he’s forty-five, he has white hair but his eyebrows are black ...”

“Sexy!”

“Yes, very ... he’s tough, strong, intelligent, and .. . ruthless. You wouldn’t want to try to bullshit him.”

“These are not Boy Scout attributes.”

“You know, you’re right,” I said thoughtfully. “He’s definitely not a Boy Scout type. More of a street fighter.”

“I hope he’s not too tough for you.”

“No matter what he is,” I confessed, “this is the worst I’ve ever had it. I’m scared to death. I couldn’t stay away from him if he were on fire.”

“Oh, wow. You do have it bad. I hope he’s worthy of this. This sounds like a ‘love at first sight’ thing.”

“Yes, the first time I’ve ever experienced it. And, I hope, the last. It’s awful.”

“I’ve never had it like that,” Amina said. “So what else is happening?” It wasn’t like Amina to change the subject. Could she be a bit envious?

But I filled her in on Tonia Lee’s murder and the resultant confusion. Then I told her about Susu Hunter’s husband and his strange secret persona as the House Hunter.

“Oh, I’m like that to a lesser extent,” Amina said instantly. “It’s not so weird.”

“You just like to look at houses?”

“Sure, don’t you? I get a tingle at the base of my spine when I walk into a house that’s not mine, that I can look at all I want. It’s like stepping into someone else’s life for a while. You can open the closets, and find out what they pay for electricity, and how many clothes they have, and how clean their furniture is ... I have had the best time since Hugh and I started looking for a house. I wish I could look at houses all the time. In fact, I thought about becoming a realtor instead of a legal secretary until I realized I’d have to get out in all kinds of weather and deal with jerks who didn’t know what they wanted . . . you know.”

“That’s interesting, Amina,” I said, and meant it.

“Of course, now we’re looking at
bigger
houses,” she added, and we were back on her favorite topic of the moment.

By the time we hung up, I’d agreed to be the baby’s godmother and Amina had urged me to hurry and marry Martin if we were going to anyway, so she could be a matron of honor before her stomach got too big.

I just laughed and said good-bye. It made me nervous to think of marriage and Martin in the same sentence, as if it were a jinx. I finished dressing, trying not to feel sorry for myself, only glad for Amina and Hugh.

I found myself wondering if Jimmy Hunter had been Idella’s lover. It would make perfect sense, given his househunting aberration, for him to pick a realtor as a lover. But how would that tie in with the things missing from houses listed with local realtors? Surely Jimmy hadn’t been lifting them while he toured the houses? He just couldn’t have, not without a realtor noticing.

And it wasn’t always Idella who’d shown him around. Hadn’t someone at the meeting at Select Realty said the Greenhouses had always made sure Tonia Lee escorted him? Had something in Tonia Lee’s sharp nature punctured the balloon of Jimmy’s fantasy life as a house hunter, something so upsetting he’d killed her for it?