High Heels Are Murder (24 page)

“You’re so cynical,” Alyce said.

“I’m a realist. Trip and Fiona are experts at pretending nothing is wrong. I bet they’d kill anyone who tried to open their eyes.”

Josie skimmed through a yellow light and turned onto Highway 40. That was a mistake. There was a four-car accident just past the McKnight exit. A delivery truck and two cars blocked all the eastbound traffic lanes. One car had flipped and landed in the oncoming traffic. From
the number of lights and sirens, the crash had to be serious.

“We’re stuck,” Josie said. “The highway is a parking lot. I can’t go forward or back.”

Considering the way I’ve been driving, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, Josie decided. She needed time to calm down. Both women opened their cell phones and called their homes. Jane didn’t answer. Alyce talked to the nanny about Justin’s cough, which was definitely getting better. They were trapped in the traffic almost forty-five minutes while the ambulances and fire trucks arrived, and the tow trucks cleared the smoking wreckage. Car parts were scattered across six lanes.

“I should have taken the side streets,” Josie said.

“If you did that, the accident would have blocked Manchester Road instead of the highway.” Alyce took traffic tie-ups personally. “Who’s Betty Joan Perske?”

“Huh?” Josie said.

“The name you introduced me as in Trip’s office. Where did you get it? Is she someone you went to high school with?”

“I wish. That’s Lauren Bacall’s original name,” Josie said.

“Good thing Trip isn’t a movie buff. Who’s Harriet Hilliard Nelson?” Alyce said. “Sounds like a state representative.”

“She’s the Harriet of
Ozzie and Harriet
, that old 1950s TV show. It was my mom’s favorite sitcom. I put Harriet and Betty both on the fake letterhead. I gave you the better name. You got the bombshell. I got the boring housewife.”

“I’m due for some excitement,” Alyce said.

Traffic was moving now. “Finally, we’re off the highway,” Josie said. “I can’t believe we sat for almost an hour. I can practically see my house from here. We could have walked home faster.”

“You must be really rattled by Trip,” Alyce said. “I’m usually the one who complains about the traffic.”

“He doesn’t scare me,” Josie said. “I’m used to men like Trip. I’ve dealt with hundreds of them in my mystery-shopping job. They’re the petty department heads and
store managers who bluster and threaten Suttin Services, swearing their stores could not possibly have been as disorganized and dirty as I said in my report. You face them down and they melt like snow on a sunny day.”

Alyce seemed to be relaxing now. Josie wanted to say that Trip would never come after them. But she wasn’t sure. Had Trip killed Mel? He had a temper and a lot of hidden anger. If Mel made the man confront the ugly realities of his marriage, Trip could be dangerous indeed.

Finally, Josie reached her Maplewood street. She thought it looked like Mayberry this afternoon. An older woman was trundling a wire handcart full of groceries. Kids’ bicycles were neatly parked by the porches, waiting for their riders to come home from school. Kitchen curtains were starched, concrete steps were scrubbed, shutters seemed freshly painted.

Alyce’s elephant of an SUV was parked outside Josie’s home. Her mother still wasn’t home. Amelia was at school. Even Mrs. Mueller’s curtains weren’t twitching.

“You want to come in for coffee?” Josie said.

“Maybe just a cup,” Alyce said. “Let the accident traffic die down a bit.”

As they approached Josie’s home, they saw a box on the front porch. Damn, Josie thought. Mom’s ordering things from the Home Shopping Network again. A hot bolt of anger shot through her. Jane had promised she’d stop. Then Josie felt sad. Her mother had been doing so well since she started seeing her counselor. The pressure of dealing with Mrs. Mueller had caused this. Mom was allowed a setback.

“Hey, it’s for you,” Alyce said.

The box, wrapped in plain brown paper, was addressed
TO JOSIE MARCUS
in neat block letters.

“What do you think it is?” Alyce said.

“I don’t know,” Josie said. “I didn’t order anything. At least, I don’t think I did. It’s a surprise.”

She carried it into the kitchen, set it on the table and started the coffee.

Alyce shook the box. “Hurry up,” she said. “It sounds interesting. I want to see what’s inside.”

Josie ripped off the brown paper. Inside was a shiny pink Soft Shoe box.

Alyce squinted at the shoe size printed on the box. “Seven,” she said. “Too small for me. My feet got bigger during my pregnancy.”

“Seven is definitely my size. Maybe it’s a bonus,” Josie said. “I wonder which style it is. I’ve tried on practically every size seven in the store. I never saw a pair I didn’t like.”

Josie had that Christmas-morning feeling as she lifted the lid. She loved good shoes. Inside was a cloud of pink tissue paper. Josie lifted one side to reveal a high-heeled black suede evening sandal.

“Wow,” Josie said.

Alyce whistled. “Sexy,” she said. “You’ll look hot in those on your date with Josh.” She peered closer at the shoe. “Look. It’s fur-lined. That’s really kinky.”

“Kind of ratty-looking fur.” Josie lifted the rest of the paper for a closer inspection. The fur was ratty indeed. Curled inside the left sandal was a dead rat. It had evil red eyes and long yellow teeth.

Josie dropped the box and the rat rolled out onto her kitchen table, landing in the bowl of apples. Alyce ran for the john, retching.

“Omigod,” Josie said. “Someone’s sending me a message. Like in
The Godfather
.”

“I’d take a horse’s head in my bed over a dead rat on my table,” Alyce said in a shaky voice. She looked nearly green when she emerged from the bathroom.

Josie pulled the wastebasket over to the table and used the crumb brush to sweep the rat and the shoes into the trash. Then she threw away the brush. She found a pair of tongs in the kitchen drawer and used them to pick up the wrapping paper and the shoe box. Then she tossed in the tongs, along with the apples and the bowl.

“Ugh. Yuck. Ick,” Josie said. She had goose bumps.

“Are you saving that bag of evidence for the police?” Alyce asked.

“Evidence of what? It’s not against the law to send someone a dead rat and a new pair of shoes. Besides,
what would I tell the cops? I’ve been messing in their murder investigation. They wouldn’t appreciate it.”

“They should at least see it for themselves,” Alyce said.

“There’s nothing to show them,” Josie said. “There’s no note. My name was printed in capitals with a cheap pen. The package wasn’t sent by mail or a delivery service. I want this mess out of my house and out of my life.”

Josie carried the rat bag outside and threw it in Mrs. Mueller’s trash can. The old busybody deserved it. The curtains still weren’t moving at Mrs. M’s window. Where was she?

That woman spied on me for more than fifteen years, Josie thought. The one time I wanted her to watch my house, she wasn’t home. There’s never a snoop around when you need one.

She found Alyce huddled by the kitchen door, halfway outside. “Josie, what if that rat had fleas? It’s not a lab animal. It’s a nasty old city rat. How did it die? I didn’t see any marks on it. Do you think that rat died of natural causes?”

“It could have had some disease,” Josie said. She scrubbed her hands in hot water and soap until they were red and raw.

Alyce and Josie put on rubber gloves and washed the kitchen table with Lysol, then threw away their rags. They wiped everything with Windex next, and threw away those rags. They used bleach for the third treatment. They could perform brain surgery on that table, it was so clean.

Next they scrubbed down the chairs, cabinets and appliances with Lysol. They mopped the floor twice. Josie threw the kitchen curtains in the washer, along with all the dish towels and pot holders. Every time she thought of that rat on her table, she wanted to gag.

When Alyce and Josie finished cleaning, the kitchen gleamed like a floor wax commercial. But they couldn’t bring themselves to drink coffee at the rat table.

“Let’s go sit in the living room,” Josie said. She still saw the rat’s long yellow teeth.

Alyce looked relieved to be out of the ratless kitchen. “Who do you think sent it?”

“Cheryl,” Josie said. “She goes to sleazy motels. I bet she found a dead rat in a parking lot and did this on the spur of the moment. She has plenty of shoes and Soft Shoe boxes. She knows where I live.”

“Fiona has shoes, too,” Alyce said. “She must feel just as threatened.”

“I can’t see Fiona loading two kids into the car, hunting for a dead rat, then driving all the way here.”

“What about Paladia? She threw us out of her office,” Alyce said.

“She’s my second choice,” Josie said. “Clayton is a city. There are always rats around. Maybe she found a dead one in her office parking lot and decided to scare me.”

“How’d she get your address?” Alyce said.

“Can’t be too difficult,” Josie said. “She could call Cheryl.”

“It could be Fiona’s husband, Trip,” Alyce said. “He looked ready to strangle us. He’d have time to get here, too. We got stuck in traffic. He could have taken the side roads and beat you home.”

“It’s possible,” Josie said. “Although I’m not sure how he’d know my address.”

“He’s in the insurance business,” Alyce said. “He could get someone to run your license plate easy enough. His office window overlooked the parking lot. He could have written it down when we left.”

Josie didn’t like what Alyce said, but she knew it could be true. She wasn’t as smart as she thought. Trip could have gotten her license plate.

“There’s one good thing about this rat,” Josie said. “Somebody’s upset. That means we’re making progress. I wish I knew what it was.”

“It means the killer knows where you live,” Alyce said.

“How can you say that?” Josie said. She slammed her cup down on the end table so hard hot coffee sloshed on the wood. A dark brown pool spread across the table and dripped onto the carpet.

“How do you know the killer left that rat? It’s bad enough I found a diseased rodent in my house without my best friend acting like a—” Josie stopped suddenly.

“A rat?” Alyce raised one eyebrow.

“A fraidy cat,” Josie finished. She knew it was the wrong word. So did Alyce.

“Are you mad at me or mad at what happened?” Alyce asked.

“I—I don’t know,” Josie said.

“Let’s get you another cup of coffee,” Alyce said. “Then we’ll talk like the friends we are.”

Josie stood up. “I should wipe up the mess on the end table. It will ruin the finish.”

“No, you sit right there. You’ve had a bad shock.” Alyce came back with a fresh cup of coffee for Josie. Then she mopped up the mess. Josie found it oddly soothing to watch her. Alyce was a good housewife, in the old sense of the word, a woman who could run a household. She knew how to restore the table’s finish and get the stain out of the carpet.

“There,” she said. “I think it will be okay.” Alyce went to the kitchen for a fresh cup for herself, then sat down opposite Josie.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” she said. “I’m trying to make you see what we’ve done. We’ve intruded into the
lives of six people—three men and three women. Some of them are very well connected. We’ve discovered their deepest secrets. We’ve learned something important, but we’re too dumb to know what it is. How can we? We’re not police officers. We’re blundering around in the dark. No, it’s worse than that. We’re running across a minefield on a moonless night. Something is bound to blow up in our faces.”

“It’s nice of you to say ‘we,’” Josie said. “I’m the one who got us into this. I don’t know how it got so out of control. All I had to do was follow Cheryl for three days so Mom could get her precious flower committee.”

“It’s just a committee,” Alyce said. “I can get her on a hundred.”

“She’s wanted this one all her life. I want Mom to be happy,” Josie said.

“How happy will she be if you’re dead?”

“Nobody’s going to kill me,” Josie said.

“Someone sent you a dead rat,” Alyce said. “Don’t you get it?”

“It’s not a death threat,” Josie said. “Besides, the so-called secret isn’t that bad. So what if Cheryl and Fiona played footsies with some guys? They don’t even consider it real sex.”

“A man was murdered,” Alyce said. “He paid them lots of money. Cheryl had more cash than most people make in a year stuffed in her closet. That’s a good reason to kill. And what about Paladia? Who knows what she did for Mel. This is St. Louis, not San Francisco. People are very conservative here. They have more to lose.

“Hal is so embarrassed he’ll probably never look at me again. He’s terrified we’ll tell his wife. And don’t forget Trip, Fiona’s husband. He could have killed Mel because the man tormented his wife.”

“That’s five people,” Josie said. “Who’s the sixth?”

“The Reverend Zebediah. He paid a prostitute out of church funds.”

“He was at a church meeting the night Mel was murdered,” Josie said. “He’s cleared.”

“He could have stepped out for half an hour between
the Ladies’ Auxiliary and the board meeting,” Alyce said. “No one would miss him in the confusion. For that matter, who typed those minutes? Maybe he made them up as an alibi.”

“Look, I know we stepped on a lot of toes—” Josie said.

“Puns like that hurt,” Alyce said.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Josie said. “But if someone wants me dead, there are plenty of chances to kill me. I was at the mall. They could have run me down in a parking lot. They could have put a bomb in that shoe box instead of a rat. They didn’t. They just want me to stop investigating.”

“You will, won’t you?” Alyce said.

“Yes. No. It depends on Mrs. Mueller. I’m no coward,” Josie said.

“I never said you were. You have to think about your mother and your daughter,” Alyce said. “They could be in danger. Why don’t you three stay with me until the police make an arrest?”

“They may never make an arrest,” Josie said. “What am I supposed to do then? Move in with you? I can take care of myself. I have good locks on the doors and pepper spray by my bedside.”