Paper, Scissors, Death (5 page)

“There’s an interview missing.” Over a smoked turkey sandwich on focaccia and a cup of broccoli cheddar soup, Detweiler was all business now. He insisted on paying so I ordered a tall glass of green tea and a sourdough bread bowl of low-fat vegetarian black bean soup.

He continued, “Another detective was supposed to talk to the housekeeper who found your husband’s body. And we’re missing information because of the shift change. The hotel records show the assistant manager was on duty when Mr. Lowenstein died. But—and here’s where it gets interesting—the responding officer only talked with the manager.”

“So what happens next?”

“I follow up. I talk to the housekeeper and the assistant manager. Now, what did you want to see me about? Anything I need to know?”

The nearness of his body, the smell of his cologne, the sound of his voice were all getting to me. I wanted to reach over and touch him.

Which was silly. Really silly of me. This was business. And he felt sorry for me. That was all.

I cradled a heavy coffee mug in my hands. I’d shivered after the iced green tea. Without a word, he’d gotten up, ordered two coffees, and placed one in front of me. I took a sip and decided to trust the man. “I heard George had lunch with two people, two young and well-dressed women, the day he died. They left the restaurant and got in a car together. My source tried to follow up and no one would talk.”

There. I’d made a contribution to the investigation.

“You heard this? From who?”

“I need to protect my sources.” After all, I’d been a journalism major in college. Time to use what little education I had.

“Your … sources? That’s rich.” Detweiler tapped my hand softly with his index finger. “Did your sources have any idea who your husband might have been with?”

My stomach flipped. “No.” I glanced up at him. “No,” I repeated more firmly.

Detweiler moved on. “Something else that’s bothering me, I don’t remember seeing a report on the key cards.”

“Key cards?”

“They’re coded. I couldn’t find where anyone checked whether Mr. Lowenstein was issued one card or two. Or if anyone entered the room just before the housekeeper did.”

“You could learn that from those silly plastic cards?” I was impressed.

“Maybe there’s a reason all this isn’t in the report.”

“Such as?”

“Could be sloppy police work. With ninety-one different municipalities in the greater St. Louis area, stuff falls through the cracks.”

“Or?”

“Or maybe someone is covering up.” He sighed. “I hate to think that. But I’m not naïve. This
is
St. Louis. People here have—”

“Connections,” I supplied.

“What high school did you go to?” We chanted in chorus. That question was the standard opening gambit for anyone in the area. By learning what high school you attended, a native of St. Louis could tell what religion you were, your ethnic background, how much money you had, and what your social status was.

Detweiler nodded and continued, “People in St. Louis go to school together, worship together, marry each other, and spend the rest of their lives hanging out together.”

“Exactly.” Which went a long way toward explaining why I never fit in.

I took a deep breath. “There is one other thing …” I told Detweiler about the regular checks George had written to “orb.” Then I swallowed hard and added, “And I have no idea who or what ‘orb’ might be.”

My imagination must have kicked into high gear. I could have sworn he stared at me with sad eyes as he said, “I’ll check into that.”

___

A few days later Mert and I pulled up in front of a small apartment building not far from the Busch Brewery. A set of rickety wooden stairs once painted white climbed past the first floor to a bent aluminum storm door on the second. The glass was missing, if indeed it had ever been there. All that stood between the apartment and the cold winter wind was an insubstantial wooden door that didn’t even meet the floor. Splinters of wood along the perimeter told me the door was hollow. Mert rapped sharply and the sound of her knuckles echoed.

A dark-haired woman with drooping, worried brown eyes answered. Under an oversized man’s sweater, a faded housedress clung to her, draped like a thin painter’s cloth. As I glanced down to step over the threshold, I could see angry purple veins running up her legs like a trellis.

“Irma, this here’s my friend Kiki.”

I took the woman’s rough hand and shook it. “Thank you for agreeing to talk to us.” A wonderful smell of bacon and onions filled the air as we followed Irma into her kitchen. Through an archway to our left, four children under the age of ten sat on a sagging sofa and watched a flickering television.

We pulled up chairs. I watched Irma cook and realized the dish she was making was very similar to one I’d seen in a magazine. I made mental notes because it smelled so good. Mert shocked me by speaking Spanish to her colleague.

Why on earth had I taken French in high school? “Jacques has the red crayon” hadn’t gotten me anywhere in life. Somehow I doubted it ever would come in handy. At least not at the rate my life was going.

I caught “señora” and “señor” and my last name as they rattled along.

Mert translated. “Irma didn’t find George, but she knows the woman who did. The other gal’s afraid to talk with us. The police have already been to see her. She ain’t talking with them neither. She’s worried she’ll be deported.”

“I don’t want to cause any trouble, Mert. Please, reassure her. I just need to know if Irma’s friend saw anything suspicious.”

Mert and Irma exchanged accented volleys. Both waved their hands in the air. I was beginning to think they’d forgotten me, when Mert said, “There’s one thing. She doesn’t want to get her friend in trouble—”

The Latina raised her eyes to mine. Her mouth was set tightly, and her fist clenched the wooden spoon.

How could I convince her to talk?

I crossed my heart in a childish gesture. I raised a hand as if taking the pledge. I broke down and begged, “Please.
Por favor
.” That used up every bit of my Spanish vocabulary.

Finally I offered my little finger. “I pinky swear.”

Irma’s face relaxed and we met halfway, linking small digits. She tapped the wooden spoon against the side of an iron skillet. “Ho-kay. It was woman’s scarf. Silk. My friend, she say, she find scarf in el hombre’s mouth. The color was, how do you say?”

Mert translated, “Aqua and black. Striped. Like a zebra.”

Back in my BMW, Mert hesitated. “I’ll be jiggered. And the manager took the scarf, and musta hid it afore the police got there. Sounds pretty suspicious-like to me. Whatcha reckon happened?”

“Sheila,” I said tiredly. “The assistant manager was on duty. He called the manager when it happened, and I’d bet anything the manager called Sheila. Probably knew her from some charity board. She used her money and connections with the police chief to protect George’s reputation.”

“Unless he was into flying solo, your hubby wasn’t in that hotel room alone,” said Mert. “That sound like him? Was he a wild man?”

“Huh, George thought patterned boxers were obscene.” I stared out my windshield at the line of cars clogging Highway 40. “I’ll have to tell Detweiler what we learned. And I have to figure out how to tell him without getting an illegal alien in trouble. That’ll be tough. I’m not sure I can pull the ‘protect my sources’ gambit twice. I’ve got information, but I can’t share it. And without what we’ve just learned, he can’t turn this into a murder investigation.”

I thought for a minute.

Mert heaved a tired sigh. “Okay. I’ll go to a pay phone and call in an anonymous tip. You s’pose that’ll work?”

“Absolutely.” I sent up a prayer of thanks for such a terrific friend. “Of course there’s nothing stopping me from snooping around too. I always did like Nancy Drew.”

“Not me,” Mert cleared her throat. “She ain’t my type. I always had a hankering for them Hardy Boys.”

Pamela brought me an offer for the house and counseled me to accept. She didn’t have to ask twice. I was on it like needles on a pine tree. In what I’m sure was an act of charity, she also helped me find a small place to rent. I would be able to pay back Bill as soon as the paperwork cleared. But I still needed money for Anya and me to live on.

I was willing and eager to work. But where? And at what?

Dodie became the most unlikely of saviors. I’d been going on an endless and humiliating round of job interviews when she stopped by.

“I need help at the store.” She watched me tape a packing box shut.

The couple buying my house fell in love with my furniture. With Pamela’s help, we came to an accommodation and I sold most of it. That extra money would tide me over until I got a job. Roger was helping me transfer my things into Mert’s garage until I could move into my new home, a smallish brick box set on a crumbling street in a diverse neighborhood. The new place needed a major cleaning and paint job. I was up at dawn and busy every moment of the day and getting more panicky by the minute because I hadn’t found employment.

Dodie continued, “I don’t know your situation, or if this appeals to you, but I talked this over with my hubby Horace, and I’d like to make you a business proposition.”

I’d never seen Dodie outside of Time in a Bottle. She moved about like a wild animal in an unfamiliar environment. As she talked, she paced my living room floor, while turning her key chain over and over in her meaty hands. Having a six-foot-tall linebacker wearing a lopsided floral dress and following a path round and round in circles made me nervous. My kingdom for a tranquilizer dart. As she walked, she scratched various body parts intermittently. This seemed to be a nervous habit, but given her hirsute physique it could have been fleas. Later I would learn that Dodie had grown up dirt poor, like I had, and her method of overcoming her fear of poverty was to attack financial matters head on.

Mine was to run and hide. Head down in the sand, bottoms up. Not a very secure or smart position. And not one that seemed to be working.

But she wouldn’t let me take cover.

She asked what I thought I needed to survive.

I told her I didn’t know.

“Let me guess. You went straight from under Mom and Dad’s roof to under George’s, with a brief layover in a college dorm.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Unemployed and clueless. Pitiful combination, sunshine.” She rattled off a Yiddish proverb and translated it for me: “Ask advice from everyone, but make up your own mind.” With a grunt, she added, “When you decide what to do, call me.”

___

True to his word, Detweiler phoned a couple of weeks after our meeting at Bread Co. His frustration leaked from every word. “The housekeeper working that day at the Ritz-Carlton has moved back to Mexico, a place called Toluca. I’ve heard rumors she found an article of clothing in the room, but I’m not at liberty to say what. But no one saw another guest with your husband, and no one saw anyone leaving the room.”

“Which leaves us … where?” I prayed the housekeeper moved to Mexico of her own free will and hadn’t been deported.

“That leaves us bupkis. Nowhere.”

What little I knew about Yiddish was right down there with Jacques and his red crayon, so I refrained from explaining that
bupkis
literally means “goat droppings.”

“How about fingerprints?” I tried to be helpful.

“We’ve got fingerprints.”

“So can’t you track someone down with those? They do it all the time on television.”

“Yeah,” he said, extending the word to two syllables. “We call that the CSI effect. An unreal expectation based on a television program. See, unless a suspect committed a crime before, or unless the individual has had prints taken for a job or what-have-you, the prints aren’t in our system. So, okay, we’ve got prints from the room—lots of prints—but when we ran them they didn’t match anyone.”

“Any luck on finding out who or what ‘orb’ is?”

“No.”

I stood in the middle of my empty living room. The house had been sold, my culled-down belongings were in Mert’s garage, and for the past two weeks I’d been fixing up my new domicile. The landlord had “graciously” allowed me to both pay rent and make improvements. I didn’t want my daughter to see the place before I spruced it up. She’d go into shock. Bad enough her whole life had turned upside down and her dad was dead. Adding a move to the slums was going to be a crushing blow—unless I could provide enough eyewash to distract her.

Temporarily, Anya was staying at Sheila’s. Valentine’s Day had come and gone, delivering a pang as I remembered how George always sent me a dozen red roses. The Easter holidays were nearly upon us. Sheila was taking my child to Florida for spring break. I’d called my mother and sister just to check in. and succeeded only in re-opening old wounds of family strife and sibling rivalry.

I had never felt so alone in my life.

And now, now I’d let George down all over again. I was failing at helping Detweiler catch his killer.

I could hear the detective breathing softly into the phone and waiting.

“Is there anything more that can be done?” I whispered. My throat tightened and ached.

“You could exhume the body and pay to have more tests run.”

I ended the conversation with my thanks and sank down to my knees on the carpet of the empty room in the empty house. No way would Sheila sit still for an exhumation, especially one that was little more than a witch hunt. All that was left of our life as a family was this vacant building and my beloved scrapbooks. A tear rolled down my cheek and splashed onto my hand.

It was left to me to find out who or what ‘orb’ was.

And I needed to find out who was with George in that hotel room. I could no longer avoid the truth; my husband was involved with another woman.

What I needed was a name.

Suddenly it dawned on me. Time in a Bottle would be the perfect cover for investigating George’s death. Everybody who was anybody patronized the store. The wealthy elite of St. Louis moved in a circle as tight as a pair of control-top panty hose. Surely one of them knew who my husband was seeing, who the aqua-and- black-striped scarf belonged to. And it would be easy enough to discover what they did know. People record their personal and social lives on their scrapbook pages. Someone, somewhere, had to have seen my husband with his girlfriend.

Okay, Detweiler was stymied. But I could snoop around on my own. Who would suspect me? I was just a mom.

Shoot, I was as good as invisible.

I called Dodie and named a figure.

She laughed, a deep rumble like thunder. “I couldn’t pay Martha Stewart that much, sunshine. Welcome to the real world. Who do you think I am, your fairy godmother? I can’t promise you that in salary, but …” She limned out a plan that had me working as a freelance scrapbook consultant, as well as full-time help in the store. Dodie figured I could also teach classes, especially to newbies who wanted to start scrapping. The benefits were slim, but mindful I had a child, Dodie compensated with flexible hours.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a plan