Requiem for a Realtor (22 page)

“You remember me, Mrs. Collins? Bridget, Dr. Jameson's nurse.”

She perked up. “Did he come with you?”

Edna said, “Let's get this place cleaned up, shall we?”

Phyllis looked around as if her surroundings were unfamiliar. Edna found an uncapped bottle of gin on the sideboard in the kitchen. Phyllis had followed her there.

“I don't usually drink. It doesn't help at all.”

“Have you had any sleep?”

Bridget said, “I think she's been sleeping on the couch in the living room.”

Edna took the fingerprinted glass that Phyllis was carrying and poured an ounce or two of gin in it. She added orange juice and handed it to Phyllis. The woman who didn't drink drank it as if it were merely orange juice. Edna took her arm.

“Now you are going to bed.”

Bridget stayed on the first floor, thinking that this was where David had come on Wednesdays, and now he had sent her here to be with the woman he had visited then. She could not understand the meaning of it. If Phyllis had been any other patient, it would have been different. But now that David had finally taken notice of her, this renewed concern for Phyllis Collins seemed to threaten what had hardly begun. Would this second tragedy draw him back into the web from which he had escaped?

“How do you know she's alone?” she had asked him.

“I know she is.”

“Have you been there?”

His eyes would not meet hers. How weak he was. All men are weak, Edna had told her that. Only another woman can see a woman's wiles, men cannot.

“No. I talked to her on the phone. She doesn't make much sense.”

Bridget was still standing in the living room when Edna came down.

“Did she go to bed?”

“She's out like a light.”

“The poor thing.”

“Bridget, this is what I am going to do. At the senior center I have dozens of old women who would be happy to take turns staying with Phyllis. You have your job and…”

David? Bridget wondered if that were so. She had an ally in Edna, that was certain, but their alliance had been formed when Bridget was the nurse David ignored.

Suddenly it struck her how awful it was to be thinking only of herself. She meant it when she called Phyllis a poor thing. As David had said, first her husband, now her brother. They had the place cleaned up when Officer Agnes Lamb came to the door. She told Bridget and Edna all the police knew.

Bob Oliver had been struck by a vehicle and left for dead in the alley behind the Frosinone Hotel.

“What was he doing at a place like that?” Edna asked.

“Apparently, he sometimes had lunch there. And there's a bar.”

It was the fact that Bob Oliver had been killed in the same way as Stanley Collins that was so strange.

“Of course, it could be just a coincidence.” But Agnes said it without conviction. “It wasn't the same car, anyway. The one that killed Stanley Collins is still in the police garage.”

“Have you found the car that struck him?”

“We think it was a pickup belonging to the crew installing new elevators in the hotel.”

It had been parked behind the hotel; the keys had been left in the ignition. It had been found a block away, parked at the curb.

“But why?”

“We're talking to anyone who can help us answer that. I was sent to talk with his sister.”

“That's going to have to wait.”

“I've talked with her before, you know. About her husband.”

“And now her brother.”

“Why?”

“That's the big question,” Agnes said.

*   *   *

Bridget explained to David the arrangements for taking care of Phyllis Collins that Edna Hospers had made.

“Won't they be strangers to her?”

“David, I am a stranger to her. Who are her friends?”

He looked blank. “I don't know.” He looked at her. “Thank you for going to her.”

“She'll be all right.”

He turned away, but she put her hand on his arm.

“David, you mustn't feel responsible for her. It is all over, isn't it?”

He swung to her. “There wasn't anything to be over.”

“Good.”

“I was trying to advise her.”

“She's in good hands now.”

She moved closer to him, and he put his hands on her shoulders. She pressed against him, and his arms encircled her. He would be just fool enough to be drawn back to Phyllis Collins out of sympathy, and she didn't intend for that to happen, not if she could help it. She and Edna had talked.

“Men are just little boys who have grown up, Bridget. More or less.”

How true that seemed. But what are women but grown-up girls?

“It's not the same thing,” Edna had assured her.

And then Lieutenant Horvath came, and Bridget stayed in the office, taking a seat.

“I have to ask you some questions,” Lieutenant Horvath said. He looked at Bridget.

“It's all right.” David's voice was husky.

“Okay.”

It was clear that the police had suspected David of being involved in the death of Stanley Collins. Horvath didn't put it so baldly, but that was the implication. Why else would he want to know where David had been on Wednesday when Bob Oliver had been run down behind the Frosinone Hotel?

“He was with me,” Bridget said. “The clinic is closed on Wednesdays.”

Horvath looked at her, and she could not read his expression. “With you?”

“I volunteer at St. Hilary's. I help out there on Wednesdays. David came with me.”

“Volunteer in what way?”

“I work with Edna Hospers.”

“I had offered my services before,” David said. “I think I may become a regular now.”

“Dental services?”

He tried to laugh. “It would be mainly dentures with the old people there. No, I want to do pastoral counseling.”

“Did you know Bob Oliver?”

“He wrote a story about my work here.”

“That's right.”

“The photographs you see around here were taken on that occasion. They took far more than they could use, and we bought them all and had them framed. I can tell you the story was a tremendous boost to my practice. I owed Bob Oliver a lot.”

2

Shirley Escalante found the offices of Sawyer and Collins a gloomy place after the death of Stanley. George Sawyer was a busy Realtor, you had to give him that, and he was more often out than in. That left Shirley underemployed, half hoping the phone would ring, counting the hours until five in the afternoon when she could escape. So Bob Oliver's surprising visit had come as a welcome relief.

For one thing he was a man, and he responded to Shirley's enhanced smile. He began by telling her the kind of stories he wrote.

“Maybe you saw the one about David Jameson the dentist.”

“You wrote that?” She had seen the pictures on the wall at Jameson's clinic and had read the reprint available in the waiting room.

“That's right. I think I doubled his business for him.”

Well, she wasn't going to tell Bob Oliver that she herself was one of the beneficiaries of Jameson's skills.

“So what can we do for you?”

“‘We'? Is Sawyer here?”

“That's the editorial we.”

“Hey, that's my line.”

She liked him.

“I guess you know Stanley Collins was my brother-in-law.”

“He was a wonderful man.”

He dipped his chin and looked at her through his bushy brows. “He had quite a reputation.”

“He was always a gentleman!”

Bob Oliver held up his palm. “Believe me, I wasn't suggesting anything.”

“Don't. Because there wasn't anything.”

“Stanley must have been a man of steel.”

“He was one of the nicest men I've ever known.” However exaggerated, the remark seemed demanded by her loyalty.

“May he rest in peace.”

“I went to his funeral.”

“Sad, sad. This has been terrible for my sister. It's with her in mind that I have been thinking of doing a feature on Realtors. A kind of tribute to Stanley.”

“Oh, that would be wonderful.”

“Phyllis suggested it long ago but nothing came of it.”

“I'll bet you could make even real estate interesting.”

“But agents? Does Mrs. Sawyer still work here?”

“Not since I've been here.”

“Post hoc ergo propter hoc?”

“What does that mean?”

“Ask Dr. Jameson. I heard it from him.”

“You really are thinking of a story?”

“I would need your help, of course.”

Shirley was more than willing to help him. It seemed a posthumous blow struck for Stanley Collins. When Bob asked her to lunch, she said yes. It seemed almost a duty. And he was a pleasant fellow, a little old, perhaps, but then she wasn't getting any younger.

*   *   *

The next day was Tuesday, and he was back with a photographer who shot several rolls of film while Bob Oliver interviewed Shirley. Sylvia Woods wore jeans, a baggy T-shirt, and a Cubs baseball cap. Bob Oliver wanted shots of the offices of the partners.

“Is Stanley's office locked?”

“You can see it.”

“Has Phyllis been here since Stanley's death?”

“No, she hasn't.”

“You mean no one has been in there since he died?”

“I have, of course.”

“Of course. Did Mrs. Sawyer even come by?”

“I can count the times I've seen her here.”

“No kidding.” But he disappeared into Stanley's office with Sylvia, and Shirley followed. “Sylvia, I want one of the desk. The empty desk. You know.”

A nod of the baseball cap. No wonder there had been so many more photographs on the walls of Jameson's clinic than had appeared in the newspaper article. Sylvia seemed to use the automatic-rifle principle in taking pictures.

“Anything else?” she asked.

“You get everything?”

“How about another of you two together?”

She said it in a taunting way, but Bob liked the idea, putting his arm around Shirley's shoulders and tugging her close. “How's this?”

“Actionable.”

She packed up her equipment then and loaded bags onto her shoulders.
“Arrivederci.”

“Auf Wiedersehen.”

“She's the best,” Bob said when Sylvia was gone. “Okay, let me ask you some questions.”

He wanted to know about the insurance policy that George and Stanley had on one another.

“My sister told me about it,” he said, when Shirley hesitated.

“What didn't she tell you?”

“Just tell me what you know of it. Phyllis doesn't have much business sense. She's come into a lot of money from Stanley, but he must have some equity in the firm.”

Shirley told him what she knew, not altogether willingly. His interest in his sister's affairs seemed somehow greedy. But someone had to act for Phyllis, and who better than her brother? Shirley began to think that the idea of writing a story about the agency was just a pretext.

*   *   *

In a way, it was even more of a surprise when Susan Sawyer came by the agency a day or so after Bob Oliver's visit. A key turned in the outer door, and there she was.

“Oh, you're here,” she said when Shirley rose from her desk.

Mrs. Sawyer was a well-groomed woman carrying a few extra pounds who acted as if she were Shirley's older sister. Her hair was short, graying attractively, and she wore a capacious jacket that fell almost to her knees, neutralizing the weight she carried. Her shoes were sensible flats, laced, crepe-soled.

“It has been ages since I've been here, isn't that awful?”

“There isn't much going on here at the moment.”

“You are not suggesting that business has fallen off since Stanley died?” She looked at Shirley as if they shared a secret.

Shirley managed not to answer that. Of course, Mrs. Sawyer would have taken her husband's side in the continuing quarrel between the partners. Shirley's loyalty to the late Stanley Collins had been strained by what came out after he was killed, not that she was surprised at all the talk about what a womanizer he had been.

“Has Phyllis been here?”

“In the office?”

“I meant since…”

“No.” Shirley remembered the stormy visit when Phyllis had shouted and screamed at Stanley behind the closed door of his office. Perhaps George Sawyer had brought that story home to his wife. “The most exciting thing recently was a journalist's visit.”

Mrs. Sawyer had been walking away from Shirley's desk, but now she swung toward her.

“A journalist!”

“He brought his photographer, too. He may do a feature on the agency for the
Tribune.
”

She sat across from Shirley and asked to hear all about it. After a while, Shirley felt that she was being grilled. Mrs. Sawyer wanted every detail of Bob Oliver's two visits.

“You just gave him the run of the place?”

“I'm sure it was all right. Of course, they wanted photographs of everything.”

Mrs. Sawyer seemed to want to say more, but after a moment she stood.

“Was that Stanley's office?”

Susan tried the door, opened it, and looked inside. Shirley had risen to go with her but the door of the office closed. Shirley half resented the wife of Stanley's partner checking out his office, but what could she say? Twenty minutes went by, and the door remained closed. What was she doing in there? A few minutes later the door opened, but more time passed before Susan Sawyer emerged.

“Did you know I worked with George before he and Stanley became partners?”

“So I understand.”

“A long time ago, at least you would think it was. I'm afraid I wasn't much more of a Realtor than Stanley.”

“You were an agent?”