“How should I know?” Woolsey shot back. Then he abruptly threw out his arms, to their full extension this time. Officer Fox ducked again, no expression on his round face. Apparently he’d had a lot of practice avoiding Woolsey’s arms.
“Fox!” Woolsey shouted, though the man was less than a foot away from him. Poor guy, I thought, he was no fox, not with that doughy round face and recessive chin. But he was quick.
“Yes, sir,” he answered promptly, standing at attention.
“Go check out that…that thing,” Woolsey ordered.
My eyes followed Officer Fox as he checked out the trocar. I couldn’t seem to stop them. He drew out a handkerchief and pulled the trocar a little away from the door as if to look at its underbelly. He sniffed the red fluid leaking ever so slowly from the sharp point at its bottom. Then he put out his finger, touched the fluid, and gingerly put it to his tongue.
“Catsup,” he announced finally.
We all let out little sighs of relief, even Woolsey.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it, since Chief Woolsey decided the trocar on the door did have to do with Sam Skyler’s death. But we didn’t live in the city of Quiero. We lived in Tam Valley, just outside the city limits of Mill Valley, so the county had jurisdiction over whatever crime had been committed by whosoever had done our early Christmas decorating. Finally, Chief Woolsey asked if he could come inside and call the Sheriff’s department.
I took a deep breath and walked up to the door. Woolsey’s brain kicked in just as my hand touched the doorknob.
“Don’t touch anything!” he bellowed.
“Jeez,” Fox muttered under his breath.
Was that “Jeez” supposed to mean I was an idiot? Or did it refer to Woolsey’s volume? The former, I decided as Wayne and I led the officers around the side of the house to the back door that led into the kitchen, Fox never farther than a few feet from Woolsey’s side.
Once Woolsey had called the Sheriff’s, the four of us all settled down around the kitchen table for a nice chat. Chief Woolsey even accepted an offer of herbal tea after first checking the box to make sure the tea was really caffeine free. And once Woolsey had accepted, Fox followed suit.
“Vegetarian?” the chief asked as he scanned the cookbooks and jars of dried grains, beans, and spices on the kitchen shelves.
“Yeah,” I answered eagerly, noting the first hint of approval I’d heard yet in his voice.
Wayne kept his nonvegetarian, nonstupid, mouth shut.
“And you?” I asked conversationally, turning the flame on under the teakettle.
Woolsey nodded, then looked off to the side. Was he embarrassed?
“Me too,” Fox chipped in. I should have known. I’d have bet that if Woolsey walked on fire, Fox would be there tiptoeing along after him, singeing his little tootsies.
“Notebook, Fox,” Woolsey ordered, all friendliness gone from his voice.
“Yes, sir,” Fox answered, pulling a spiral notebook and a much chewed pencil from his pocket.
“What were you doing at Ray Zappa’s today?” Woolsey demanded.
So much for our nice little chat.
“We wanted to know what was going on with the Sam Skyler case,” Wayne answered succinctly.
“Why?”
“A man fell onto the rocks within yards of us,” Wayne answered, his tone even. “We’d like to know why. Did he fall? Was he pushed? Did he jump?”
I looked at him in surprise for a moment, because we both knew he was pushed. I even opened my mouth to say so, then remembered that we weren’t supposed to know Sam Skyler had been murdered, and closed it again.
Woolsey must have noticed my mouth moving.
“Something to say, Ms. Jasper?” he asked, bending forward abruptly, his eyes glinting as brightly as the diamond stud in his ear.
I sat for a moment and then opened my mouth once more.
“Yeah,” I answered. If he could accept my tea at my kitchen table and be hostile, I could be hostile too. “Did you follow us from Ray’s house?”
He sat back in his chair and looked off to the side again.
He had been following us! I was sure of it. How else had he ended up on our heels so conveniently when we found the trocar? And if he was following us—
The scream of the teakettle cut off my train of thought.
Wayne motioned me to keep my seat and got up to fill the teacups. I wished he hadn’t, because my mind was racing again and I was sure Woolsey could see it in my face. Did he think one or both of us had killed Sam Skyler? Was that why he’d followed us? Or had he just become curious when he saw us go into Ray Zappa’s house, and waited for us to come out again? Or did he think we were in on it with Zappa? Or…
“Honey?” Wayne offered as the smell of cinnamon, ginger, and chicory filled the kitchen.
Woolsey shook his head violently.
“We don’t use honey,” Fox put in virtuously. “The bees are oppressed by the honey farmers. The bees work to make their honey, and then it’s stolen from them.”
I’d heard the theory before. And I was pretty sure we’d just lost our vegetarian points with Woolsey.
It didn’t take long to verify the loss. Woolsey began the real interrogation between sips of unsweetened tea. He asked us about everything. And I mean everything. Our interest in this case. Any past associations with Sam Skyler. Our involvement in earlier cases. Even our positions on the environment.
I was trying to explain that I wasn’t really against Greenpeace, I just wished they wouldn’t ring my doorbell while I was working, when the doorbell rang.
But it wasn’t Greenpeace this time, it was Sergeant Tom Feiffer from the Marin County Sheriff’s Department. Damn.
I’d known Sergeant Feiffer as long as I’d known Wayne. Longer. And he still looked the same, tall and muscular with curly blond hair and blue eyes. Blue eyes that always brought uninvited lustful thoughts to my mind. No matter how hard I tried to keep them out. I tried picturing a sign that said, No Lust or White Elephants Allowed Here. It didn’t work.
It was something about the longing way the sergeant looked at me. (And at my pinball machines. The man was a pinball addict, too.) Even C.C. felt something libidinous for Sergeant Feiffer. She wandered in and rubbed up against his ankles, meowing low in her throat, as I escorted him into the kitchen.
“Got the evidence crew working on the trocar,” he told us, his blue eyes on mine, his tone a caress. I turned my head away, blushing from the look and its implications, and realizing at the same time that I hadn’t seen the trocar on the front door when I’d let him in. Wayne just glowered.
And then Feiffer started asking his questions, no more blush-provoking caresses in his tone now. And when he was done, Woolsey started in on us again. It was after five o’clock by the time the last representative of law and order left our house.
When the final police car was gone, I dropped onto the living room couch and reached out my arms to Wayne.
But he was muttering something under his breath. “Feiffer,” was part of it, but I couldn’t make out the rest. That was probably fortunate.
“At least he told Woolsey I didn’t do it,” I pointed out. No use pretending I couldn’t hear anything.
“Yeah,” Wayne growled. “The old ‘karma’ routine.”
“Well, it’s better than the old ‘you look like a murderer to me, Ms. Jasper’ routine,” I argued, lowering my arms and crossing them defensively.
“The way Feiffer looks at you—”
The doorbell rang again. We both jumped and turned our wary gazes toward the front hallway.
We looked back into each other’s eyes as the doorbell rang one more time. Then Wayne got up with a sigh that was about an eight on a scale of one to ten of tragic sighs. (Wayne should have been in the sigh Olympics, he was so good.) Then he trod ever so slowly toward the door, opening it an inch or so and peering out as if for armed enemies.
“Hey, how you guys doin’?” a high, resonan
t voice asked, and Emma Jett was past Wayne’s guard and into the house, without even pausing to take a breath. Wayne was clearly doing a better job of sighing than guarding at that point. “See, I thought I’d just come right over without calling, you know. More of a surprise that way. Don’t you just love surprises?”
She’d danced her way into the living room before she’d even finished her introduction and was patting one of the pinball machines. I would have told her I wasn’t all that fond of surprises. If I’d had a chance.
“Wow, this is really cool,” she rattled on, fondling Hayburners’ side rails, her reddish hair hanging in her face on the side that wasn’t cut to the scalp. “I mean this machine’s one of the totally legitimate ones. You can shake it, and feel it, and fight with it.” She trotted lightly around the side of the machine in her lace-up boots and ran her hand down the colorful backboard. “Not like all that electronic bullshit they make now. The real thing—”
“So,” Wayne put in. “You—”
“Anyway, I thought it might be a cool idea to talk about this Sam Skyler thing, you know,” she plowed on. When did she breathe? “I mean, that was some experience. Boom, gone. Just like that. And the cops and everything.”
And then she spotted the hanging chairs.
“Wow, way cool,” she caroled and pranced over in a flash of army fatigues with brass epaulets, her outfit for the day. The epaulets matched the brass studs in her ears and nostrils nicely. A bright touch of theater. Hadn’t she mentioned she was in theater or something—?
“Campbell told me you talked with him at the store,” she said, lowering herself into the chair and pushing off with her feet to put it in motion. “Campbell’s, like, a complete sweetie, you know. The gentlest man I know.” Her voice slowed for a moment. And took on weight. “He wouldn’t hurt anyone. I want you to know that. And I’m not bullshitting. You can ask anyone who knows him.”
“The police will find that out—” I began. But her mouth was still moving.
“And he’s not stupid either,” she went on. “He wouldn’t shake his fist at the guy and then push him over. The person who did it would act like they liked him first.” She screwed up her narrow face in a scowl. “If Skyler was even pushed. I don’t know why the cops are on everyone’s case—”
“What do you—” Wayne began.
I sent him a consoling look as Emma cut him off. He missed it as he sat down in the swinging chair across from her.
“If they’re gonna hassle anyone, it oughta be Yvonne O’Reilley. I’ll bet she knows—well, knew—Sam Skyler a lot better than she’s letting on. And Ona, I mean, all she can talk about is how much she hated the guy. And then there’s his space-cadet girlfriend.” I found myself nodding at the description, then stopped as I caught Wayne’s look. “You ask me, she’s more interested in Skyler Junior than she was in Skyler Senior.
“Anyway,” she summed up, popping out of the chair like a jack-in-the-box. “This whole thing is getting too intense. I mean, Campbell is put right off his music. He’s a wonderful musician you know, traditional stuff. Celtic. And I can’t even write, I’m so uptight. It’s all too weird. I mean, how can I get into Connie the Condom’s mind when all this bullshit is exploding around us?”
“Connie the Condom?”
A smile replaced the scowl on Emma’s narrow face as she walked across the living room to the newest of the bookshelves Wayne and I had built. I caught the mixed scent of cigarette smoke and coffee as she passed.
“Oh, Connie the Condom’s my children’s book series,” she explained, picking up a novel from Wayne’s futurism section.
That seemed appropriate. “See, she’s this cute little pink condom, you know, with perfect blond curls and a little rosebud mouth. See, it really points up the ambivalence we have about sexuality, and good and evil. And predestination and all of that stuff. Anyway, she’s, like, this guardian angel and helps kids who are in trouble. I write and illustrate the books. I blew up some of the pages to three feet by five and had a show at the Newmind Gallery. People thought it was really cool. But selling the books is another thing. Since they’re for kids, none of the stores will touch—”
This time she stopped herself.
“Anyway, about this Skyler thing.” She put Wayne’s book back on the shelf. Her voice gained weight again. “I don’t like it. And I think it could be really dangerous. Especially to investigate. You gotta figure it’s a lose-lose situation. If the guy wasn’t murdered, what’s the point? If he was, who’s gonna stop the murderer from murdering again? You know what I mean?”
And then she danced back across the living room to the front door.
“I’ll bring you a copy of a Connie book if you’d like,” she offered and was out the door in a flash of brass before either of us had time to accept or decline the offer. Or say goodbye for that matter.
“Was that some kind of warning?” I asked Wayne once I felt able to speak again.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Felt more like a random tornado.”
We sat in silence awhile. The silence felt good. A cocoon filled with non-questions, and non-accusations and non-threats. I closed my eyes and leaned back against the couch. Think of flowers, I advised myself. Think of sunsets—
“One thing, though,” came Wayne’s quiet voice, sidling into my cocoon. “Emma’s scared. Scared for Campbell. Or for herself. But she’s scared.”
“Do you think she really believes he did it?” I asked.
“Maybe she’s just afraid everyone else will,” Wayne suggested. “Campbell did shake his fist at the man minutes before he disappeared.”
I wasn’t through considering that one when Wayne came up with another.
“Could be it’s all a ploy to point suspicion at Campbell and away from herself.”
I sat up straight on the couch, an objection on my lips. Emma was goofy, but I didn’t want her to be a murderer. Or worse yet, to be that treacherous. Could anyone be that treacherous to someone they supposedly loved enough to marry?
“Don’t really think it fits either,” Wayne said, as if he’d heard my unspoken objections.
I leaned back against the cushions.
“Had a point about Yvonne,” Wayne added. “How well did she and Sam know each other? Neither of us has an answer to that question. And Yvonne set up the whole event. Could have been arranging the perfect murder.”
“And she brought those heavy vases,” I muttered. “But…”
“Yeah,” Wayne agreed. “Same as Emma. Just can’t imagine it.” He paused. “Ona, on the other hand…”
“Or Diana—”
His glower told me I should have kept that one to myself.
But before the glower could be translated into anything more than a facial expression, our doorbell rang again.
I motioned Wayne to be silent. He nodded in agreement and stood up quietly from his swinging chair, then crept over to the couch to sit next to me. Without a word.
“Excuse me,” a voice shouted through the door. Even the shout had an air of politeness to it I recognized the voice immediately. Park Ranger Yasuda. “Yvonne O’Reilley thought I should speak to you,” he went on.
Wayne and I huddled together on the couch holding our breaths, hearing each other’s rhythms like drumbeats.
“Excuse me, but I know you’re in there,” Yasuda said, his voice at normal volume now. We could still hear him clearly.
And we still kept quiet.
And then from behind us a small figure jumped up onto the back of the couch and yowled into my ear.
“Damn it, C.C.!” I yelped.
Wayne gave me one look from beneath rapidly descending eyebrows, stood up abruptly, and strode over to the front door.
His sigh was a nine this time. Maybe even a ten.
- Eight -
I didn’t blame Wayne. I could have joined the sigh Olympics too about then. Why couldn’t everyone just leave us alone?
I turned to glare at C.C. She yowled one mor
e time and jumped off the back of the couch, slinking off with her own feline sigh. Actually it was more like a grumble, or as close as she could get, considering her vocal cords. I had a few choice replies to that grumble, but didn’t have a chance to express them as the tip of her tail disappeared around the doorway.
“So, Ms. O’Reilley suggested I speak to you,” Park Ranger Yasuda was saying to Wayne when I finally rose from the couch to be a good host. Well, maybe not a good one, but minimally polite at least. I figured I could handle that.
Within a few minutes Park Ranger Yasuda, or David, as he asked us to call him, was sitting between us on our ratty old denim couch and telling us his problems. I was too tired to do anything but listen. And watch. Which wasn’t hard to do.
David Yasuda was a good-looking man, Japanese-American with square, even features and dark, intense eyes under thick, arching eyebrows. And long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. He looked about thirty, but I figured Yvonne’s mental age had to be at least half that in any case, so maybe he might not be too young for her fifty-plus real-time years. Assuming she actually did have the crush I was pretty sure she had on him. It was his intensity that was so attractive, I decided as he spoke. And his sincerity.
“Point Abajo doesn’t really have any grounds for legal jurisdiction,” he was saying. “My boss doesn’t think we should get involved.” He twisted his hands together, mottling the skin around his knuckles into patches of beige and white. “But I feel involved! If Ms. O’Reilley and I hadn’t arranged the wedding, Mr. Skyler wouldn’t have died.”
“Never helps to say ‘if,’“ Wayne offered, his voice sounding as stressed as I felt. But at least he was trying. “A thousand things could have gone differently and Sam Skyler might not have died. Not your fault. The only one to blame is the one who actually killed Skyler.” He paused for a second. “If someone did,” he added belatedly.
I wondered if Yasuda knew what Felix had told us, if he knew that Skyler had been pushed over that bluff.
“I know you’re right,” Yasuda murmured, still twisting his hands. “At least intellectually. But emotionally and morally…” He shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows even further. I had a feeling he knew how Sam had died.
A Cry for Self-Help (A Kate Jasper Mystery) Page 8