“Olivia was certainly ... tireless in pursuit of her objectives, which may have included the mayor’s office. It never hurts to have the student vote in this town, and she’s been pursuing that voting bloc with quite a will.”
Just ask Ralph.
“That doesn’t sound like someone who would be especially popular among her fellow Council members,” Mac observed.
“Not especially, no.”
A word about Erin politics: City Council and mayoral elections are officially non-partisan. The political parties do endorse candidates, but they don’t give them a lot of money. As a result, it’s basically every man or woman for him/herself. That applies to the floor of City Council as well as to mayoral elections, so the City Hall is not the friendliest place in town.
“What do you know about her personally?” I asked.
“From what I have heard, she was as aggressive in going after real estate sales as she was in going after votes.” So, not a lot of friends there, either. Saylor-Mackie looked out the window, mentally taking her leave from us for a moment. She was trying to make up her mind about something, and I was pulling for her to do it right. She did. “I’ve also heard that her marriage was on the rocks.”
“Heard from whom?” Mac asked.
“I don’t remember. That’s why I hesitate to bring it up, Mac. It might not be true.”
This was good stuff. Husbands and boyfriends are always excellent suspects. Maybe Olivia Wanamaker had both.
Mac raised an eyebrow. “I hate to be indelicate, but did what you hear include a third party?”
Saylor-Mackie squirmed. “This gossip is making me uncomfortable. I think you’d be better off talking to somebody who would really know - perhaps her husband. I usually only saw her at City Hall and at press conferences to announce some new development in the city, at which she had a knack for standing in front of me.”
“What about at City Hall, then?” Mac said. “Based on your own first-hand observation, was there anyone with whom she had a particularly tempestuous relationship?”
Saylor-Mackie gave Mac a Mona Lisa smile. “Well, she did have a shouting match at the last City Council meeting.”
“Ah! With which Council member?”
“None of them. It was with a member of the gallery - Ralph Pendergast.”
VII
“What do you make of that?” I said as we headed back across campus.
“I think our mayor’s political talent might well take her to higher office, should she choose. Her timing in the way she delivered the swipe at Ralph, letting us draw it out of her, was flawless.”
I knew where he was coming from. It was becoming increasingly clear that Lesley Saylor-Mackie would like to add provost and academic vice president to her collection of titles, which made Ralph’s existence kind of inconvenient. The provost essentially runs St. Benignus, kind of like an executive vice president. Saylor-Mackie probably thought she’d be good at that, based on her experience as mayor. And I didn’t doubt that she was right.
“Still,” I said, “I’m sure she didn’t make up that shouting match. It would have been nice if Ralph had mentioned it to us.”
“Since when is Ralph nice?”
“Good point.”
We stopped by my office in Carey Hall. Popcorn was sitting at her desk reading Love’s Forbidden Embrace, another Rosamund DeLacey romance.
“Slow day?” I asked.
“I’m taking an early lunch break.”
“What’s going on?” I knew there wasn’t much because my smartphone hadn’t rung and I’d been monitoring my office e-mail.
“Father Pirelli stopped by.” Our octogenarian president, always more of an inspirational figure than a detail man, had taken to sticking his head in offices more than ever since Ralph arrived to take up a lot of the administrative chores. “He said he really liked the commencement address you drafted for him. He only made a couple of changes.”
Cha-ching! I’m in the zone!
She handed me the printed manuscript of the speech. Flipping through, I saw three or four changes written in red ink in the great man’s neat handwriting. Father Pirelli had never fully gotten into the computer age.
“Also,” Popcorn continued as I glanced at the changes, “I e-mailed out that press release about the remodeling of the chapel and sent out a couple of tweets. Other than that, all’s quiet on the Western Front, Boss.”
Thank heavens Ralph didn’t hear that. I keep telling him we’re busy, busy, busy. Can’t possibly make this a one-person office! Actually, this was probably just the calm before some storm. That’s the way it works in my world.
“Good.” I handed her back the manuscript. “Mac and I are going to see Chief Hummel.”
“Tell Oscar I said hi.” Her voice sounded like melted chocolate when she mentioned his name.
“Coffee?”
Mac and I answered simultaneously. “Yes, please.” “No, thanks.” Oscar poured high-test java into Mac’s regular mug, the one emblazoned with the words I SEE NO REASON TO ACT MY AGE.
“It all looks pretty simple to me,” Oscar said. A Dayton Dragons baseball cap covered the chief’s bald noggin as his chapeau-du-jour. “Unlike you, Mac, I like simple.”
“I suppose we should call that Oscar’s Razor,” Mac quipped.
“What about my razor?” The chief unconsciously stroked his smooth-shaven skin.
That sidetracked Mac into a longer-than-necessary explanation of Occam’s razor, the fourteenth-century friar William of Ockham’s principle that simpler is better. Part of it was in Latin. By the time he’d finished, he’d drunk half his coffee.
“Oh,” Oscar said at the end. “Well, like I said, I’m for that. So the simplest thing is if the murderer was the person in whose house the body was found, namely Dr. Ralph Pendergast. Why else would the killer be there?”
“Four reasons come to mind offhand,” Mac rumbled. Showoff. “Suppose the killer went there with Olivia Wanamaker posing as a potential homebuyer and she caught him looting drugs out of the bathroom cabinet. I am told that such behavior occurs frequently at open houses. Or suppose the killer met Mrs. Wanamaker there for a romantic rendezvous that ended tragically. Or suppose the killer and the victim met there because it was a neutral location, one that both could agree upon. Or suppose Mrs. Wanamaker thought that is why they were meeting there, but the killer’s plan was to frame the owner of the house. So you see, while Occam’s razor is a perfectly sound starting place, it is sometimes insufficient.”
Oscar squinted at Mac. I think he needs glasses. “You’ve been thinking about this, haven’t you?”
“Guilty.”
“Who had keys to the house?” I asked, trying desperately to get beyond the “supposes” into practical territory.
“The owner, for one,” Oscar said.
“Surely that is irrelevant.” Mac set down his coffee cup on Oscar’s metal desk. “Olivia Wanamaker had access to a key in her capacity as an agent for Happy Homes Realty. The killer didn’t need a key if he - or she - had Mrs. Wanamaker open the house.”
Oh.
But Oscar barely paused. “Still, the fact remains, it was Pendergast’s house and he had a big brouhaha with the victim during the City Council meeting less than a week ago. That’s why I’m focusing on him, not his wife.”
Mac raised an eyebrow. “So you found out about the blow-up? You are to be congratulated, Oscar.”
“Gibbons turned it up.” His voice betrayed a certain paternal pride in his assistant chief, the unflappable Lt. Col. L. Jack Gibbons. “Routine solves cases. You never get that right in your books.”
Not to take anything away from Gibbons, but I bet Mayor Saylor-Mackie just happened to stop by and let that piece of information be coaxed out of her. Oscar’s office and the small city jail are in
the bottom of City Hall, several floors down from the mayor’s office.
“Did you bring Ralph in for questioning?” I asked. “Third degree, hot lights, and all that?”
“He’s coming in this afternoon. There’s no hurry. He’s a respectable member of the community, not a crazed serial killer. Here’s what I think happened: They get together to cool things down, reach some kind of accommodation, but it goes sour. He gets carried away and hits her too hard with the frozen fish, totally unpremeditated. He hides her in the freezer, expecting to come back for her later, never dreaming that some snoop is going to look inside.”
Oscar poured himself another cup of coffee from the pot behind his desk, then topped off Mac’s mug without asking. “That’s a simple, no-frills scenario and it makes sense. Do you see any holes?”
Mac sighed. “It is hard to know where to begin. Your unpremeditated rage hypothesis, although it looks good at first glance, falls doubly short upon closer inspection. First of all, it strains credibility that someone looking for a weapon would think to open a freezer and haul out a frozen salmon.”
“The house was empty,” Oscar said. “There wasn’t a lot to work with.”
“Granted. It is barely possible that an agitated person standing near the freezer chest and desperate for something to strike out with might look inside the chest, but not very likely. Already your scenario becomes not so simple. Moreover, Ralph and his wife, questioned separately, both assured me that they left nothing behind in the freezer. The murderer must have supplied it.”
Oscar sat back. “Oh, well, by all means, let’s take their word for that.”
You know, amateurs should leave the sarcasm to people who are really good at it, like me.
Mac wasn’t finished. “Another weak point is this: Surely the mutual, highly public animus that Ralph and Mrs. Wanamaker had for each other would preclude them from meeting alone in an empty house? That simply does not pass the common sense test.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one. Maybe they had a secret thing going and Wanamaker using Pendergast for campaign fodder was a just a façade to cover it up. In that case, the killing happened during a lover’s quarrel. Or maybe it wasn’t spur of the moment, an accident. Maybe she was threatening to expose him, a respectable, married man.”
I snorted, and I don’t have a cute snort like Lynda does. It wasn’t just that the picture of Ralph as a hot-blooded swain was frying my brain circuits. I was also dazzled by how quickly Oscar had turned his theory around - from impromptu act of anger to coldly plotted murder of a troublesome (ex-?) lover.
“Well, which is it - unpremeditated or planned?” I said. “Pick a scenario.”
Oscar shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. It fits Pendergast like a glove either way. Why would anybody else leave the body there just waiting to be found? And why bring a frozen salmon, of all things, for a murder weapon?”
“I should think that is obvious,” Mac said.
But he would say no more.
VIII
“How’d it go?” Popcorn said, putting down Love’s Forbidden Embrace. “I want all the details.”
“Okay. Oscar was wearing a Dayton Dragons cap. I think it’s new.”
“No, I’ve seen it before. You’re not very observant.”
I just don’t have the same kind of interest in Oscar that you do, Popcorn. No forbidden embraces with him for me!
Feeling like a rat for not having the nerve to tell her that her job was in jeopardy, I told her everything else. About halfway through, her mouth fell open and stayed that way.
“This is like some surreal dream,” she said. “I can’t believe that Dr. Pendergast would do such a horrible thing.”
“Of course he wouldn’t.” He does other horrible things.
After a brief fill-in on what I’d missed while I was gone (a visit from a history professor named James Gregory Talton who wanted help publicizing his new book), I headed off to lunch with Lynda.
Daniel’s Apothecary seems like a throwback to the late 1950s in every aspect from the malt shop menu to the jukebox (new but with classic rock ’n rock music) to the fact that it’s a drug store that serves food. In reality, the Daniel family has been dishing out burgers and filling prescriptions there on Main Street since 1904. I’ve never asked whether the Daniels froze the look before 1960 or went retro at some later period.
I was studying the menu, sitting under a poster of James Dean looking rebellious and causeless, when Lynda sat down across from me with a deep sigh. Her dark oval face looked weary and her honey-blonde curls hung a bit limp.
“Going for the burger and fries this time?” she said, showing that her sense of humor was intact.
I chuckled. “If I decide to commit suicide by cholesterol, you’ll be the first to know. Why the sigh?”
“Budgets. The parent company wants us to put out a good news product but they want the publishers and news directors to keep cutting back on the expense side.”
In Lynda’s job as editorial director of Grier Ohio NewsGroup, she’s a kind of writing and reporting coach to all of the Grier newspapers and TV stations in Ohio. Operating from her base at The Erin Observer & News-Ledger, she travels a lot, but not very far.
“Somebody must have cloned Ralph to get your CEO,” I said.
And so forth.
By the time our food arrived (the Marilyn Monroe sandwich for Lynda, the slightly less toxic Route 66 for me), we were on to the subject of our own personal budget.
“I still think the price Ralph and his wife are asking for the house isn’t bad,” I said. “But given the current circumstances, we may be able to get it even cheaper if we play it cool.”
“But do we want it? I’m not sure we really talked about that.”
Oh, yeah. The body kind of took our attention off of that. We hadn’t talked about the murder, and I hadn’t warned her that the other purpose of our meeting with Cecily was to ask her about Olivia Wanamaker. What was this lately with me hiding things from the women in my life?
“You know I like it,” I said. “It’s my kind of house. But what do you think? What’s your honest opinion?” You probably think I was adding silently, as long as it agrees with mine. But that wasn’t the case. I was hoping to make one move and stay put, so it had to be a house where both of us could be happy for a long time.
“I like it better than all of the other houses we looked at, and we looked at an exhausting number. If I had to pick one, that would be the one. But I think I’d like to look at it one more time just to be sure.” She reached her hand across the table and took mine. “I want to picture our children in it, tesoro mio.”
We finished lunch with time to spare and walked over to Happy Homes Realty, not far away on Market Street. The office is mostly divided up into cubicles, with an agent in each one. Cecily Almond, on the phone when we arrived, waved and smiled from hers. After a few minutes she signed off and gave us her full attention.
“Hi, guys. Good to see you. Nice day, isn’t it? So, are you ready to make a bid?”
“Not quite,” Lynda said. We’d agreed that she would do most of the talking. “We’d like to see the house again.”
“Oh, sure. No problem. Um. Well, actually, there might be a problem. I’m not sure the police have cleared away the crime scene tape yet. But after that, no problem!”
Could I ever have a better opening for negotiating a lower price? But before I had a chance to open my mouth, I heard, “Lynda! Jefferson!”
Mac was trying to look surprised as he walked our way, but he isn’t as good an actor as he thinks he is - at least, not off stage.
“What are you doing here?” Was that a note suspicion I detected in my beloved’s voice?
Mac held up a Multiple Listing Service catalog with photographs of homes for sale in Sussex and nearby counties. �
��I stopped by to pick up a house-hunting aid for a prospective new professor in the English department.”
That may have even been true, though not the complete truth. Mac seldom lies, but often misleads.
“This is our real estate agent, Cecily Almond,” I said, as if he didn’t know. “Cecily - ”
“You’re Sebastian McCabe. I’ve read all of your books.”
“Not yet,” he assured her. “I have many more to write.”
“Then I’ll read many more. I just love them.”
I know you’re in the sales business, networking and all that, but do you have to actually gush?
“Thank you, Cecily. That is very kind of you to say so. Lately I feel almost guilty about engaging in murder for fun and profit in my fiction. I have learned that real-life homicide can be sad, tragic, horrifying, and many other things, but never fun.”
Cecily shivered slightly - the real thing, nothing theatric. “No, it’s certainly not. I hope I never find another body as long as I live.”
I keep hoping that myself!
Mac was all sympathy. “That must have been a horrible experience, especially given that Mrs. Wanamaker was your friend and colleague.”
“Friend would be pushing it. In fact, colleague would be an exaggeration.”
Mac raised an eyebrow.
Cecily looked around Cubeville and lowered her voice. “Olivia was very hard-charging and not a team player. That didn’t win her many friends in this office. In fact, she wanted to start her own team and she asked me to join her. Month after month I’m usually the second ranked sales agent, right behind Olivia. I said no thanks.”
“You mean she was planning a new company?” Lynda asked.
Cecily nodded. “She even showed me the logo - Olivia Wanamaker Realty. I thought this was a risky time to be going out on her own, but self-doubt was not one of her handicaps. She thought her name on the door would bring in clients.” Cecily shrugged her slim shoulders. “She sold a lot of houses, so maybe she was right. We’ll never know.”
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