Rogues Gallery

by Dan Andriacco

  Mac put the house book under his arm and unwrapped a cigar, not that he could smoke inside Happy Homes. I think he just likes the prop. “As a mystery writer of some experience who has had several unfortunate encounters with untimely death in real life, I cannot help but wonder who might want Mrs. Wanamaker dead.”

  Cecily chuckled mirthlessly. “If this was one of your Damon Devlin novels, there’d be no lack of suspects. I’ve already hinted that she wasn’t Miss Congeniality here at the office. Besides that, a lot of folks in the local real estate industry weren’t happy with her crusade against student landlords. We sell a lot of properties that are rented to students. And I don’t imagine that Margaret and Gordon were very happy about her plans to leave Happy Homes, if they heard about it.”

  Margaret and Gordon Cole, a couple in their sixties, had founded Happy Homes back in the ’80s, riding high in boom times and hanging on through several slumps. The last few years might have been the worst they’d seen. I could imagine that losing their highest-producing agent would be a hard blow.

  “Surely not everyone hated her,” Mac said, waving his cigar. “She leaves behind a husband. Unless her marriage was...” He delicately left the thought uncompleted.

  “I don’t like to repeat gossip.” So listen carefully the first time. Cecily didn’t say that, but that was the idea. “From what I hear, Sam Wanamaker wasn’t the dumb blonde she took him for. Apparently things had been strained at their house lately after he smelled pipe smoke in the bedroom. He doesn’t smoke.”

  “Is that what you talk about at lunch around here?”

  Lynda asked. “That’s pretty personal. I’m surprised you’d know a thing like that if she wasn’t that friendly with her co-workers.”

  I couldn’t tell from her tone whether Lynda was offended at the gossip or wanted Ben Silverstein to hire Cecily as a reporter. It could have been either. My wife is an old-fashioned girl in a lot of ways, but she’s also a newshound through and through.

  Cecily lowered her voice. “Piper Lawrence heard it from Sam. They went to grade school together. A man won’t tell a thing like that to another man because he doesn’t want to look like a fool, but sometimes he’ll tell a woman that he’s friends with.”

  Welcome to small town America, where everybody knows everybody - and sometimes too well.

  “I haven’t seen Piper since she got laid off at WIJC-FM,” I said. She’d been assistant producer at the campus radio station until Ralph had decided in an earlier wave of cutbacks last year that Tony Lampwicke and the other on-air personalities could pour their own coffee. That’s not all Piper did, of course, any more than that’s all Popcorn does. But when Ralph Pendergast gets a notion in his head it can’t be dislodged with a jackhammer.

  “Piper works here. There she is over there.” Cecily pointed. I could barely see the top of her head above a cubicle on the other side of the room.

  “She must have gotten her real estate license after St. Benignus gave her the old heave-ho,” I said. “I’m glad she landed on her feet.”

  “Oh, Piper isn’t an agent. She’s a stager.”

  I made a mental note to say hi to her on my way out. She might see me, and I wouldn’t want her to think I was avoiding her because of survivor’s guilt.

  “If you were writing a detective story,” Mac said to Cecily, “who would be your favorite suspect?”

  She gave that a good ten seconds’ consideration. “Me.”

  Mac almost lost his grip on the unlit cigar in his mouth. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. “Why you?”

  Cecily smiled. “Because I’m the least likely person. Olivia was a pain in the butt, but I don’t have a reason in the world to be glad that she’d dead.”

  “But with her gone, you’d be the top ranked agent here,” I pointed out. “Wouldn’t you like that?”

  “She was planning to leave Happy Homes and start her own outfit anyway, remember? She tried hiring me.”

  “Oh, right.” I wondered whether Olivia Wanamaker had acquired a real estate broker’s license - a step up from an agent’s license - which she would need to start her own company. That would indicate how serious she was.

  After a few more attempts, Mac finally gave up trying to get Cecily to speculate on who might have done in her personally unpopular but politically successful colleague. I’m sure that Mac found her reticence frustrating, but I thought it was admirable.

  He held up the catalogue of homes for sales. “Well, I must get back to the groves of academe and put this into the hands of our prospective new professor.”

  “Ciao,” Lynda said.

  “Alla prossima.”

  I hate it when they yack at each other in Italian; it makes me feel like a fifth wheel.

  “We’re leaving, too,” I asserted.

  So we all three left together, by way of Piper’s cubicle. I called out her name as we got close.

  She turned around, saw us, and opened her generous mouth in a broad smile. “Oh, hey Jeff, Professor McCabe. Been a while. And you’re Lynda, right?”

  At St. Benignus, I was used to seeing her in slacks. Today she was wearing a burgundy dress of some soft fabric with a wide, white belt. Her chestnut hair, previously cut rather short, hung down to her shoulders. When her head moved I saw that she wore silver earrings, the same material she had around her wrists and neck. I wondered whether she took her fashion cues from the Duchess of Cambridge, who is Lynda’s age and a little younger than Piper.

  “Cecily tells me you’ve become a home stager,” I said.

  “Isn’t that wild? I’m even certified. Half a year ago I didn’t even know what a stager was.”

  Apparently she could tell from the look on Mac’s face that he didn’t know either, because she hurried on to explain.

  “Staging means that I prepare a home for sale to make it appeal to the largest number of potential buyers, which facilitates the quickest sale at the best price. Research has shown that homes can sell up to twice as fast and for ten to fifteen percent more money if they’re properly staged.”

  She had the pitch down cold.

  “No offense,” Lynda said, “but the Pendergast house didn’t exactly look staged. It looked empty.”

  Piper exercised her smile muscles again. “I didn’t work on that one. I guess the owner didn’t want to spend the extra money.”

  That sounds like Ralph.

  “How’s business?” I ask that all the time. As an investor in index mutual funds - which had done quite well lately, thank you - I’m always hoping for indications of a strengthening economy. And this time I got it.

  “Better,” Piper said. “People can see that houses are starting to sell again, and that’s encouraged people who’ve been waiting to sell. So listings are up. But it’s still taking longer for homes to sell than it does in a strong economy, so a lot of sellers are seeing the value in getting help from a professional stager.”

  It seemed that Piper had indeed landed fairly softly after being bounced out of St. Benignus. I was sure that Popcorn would do as well if she got the axe. The question was how I would do without her.

  “I suppose a dead body in a freezer is about the worst staging possible,” Mac said.

  Piper seemed to take that personally.

  “Like I said, I wasn’t involved in that particular sale.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I’m still shocked by what happened to Liv. She was very nice to me and helped me out a lot when I first joined Happy Homes.”

  Finally! Someone with a kind word to say for the dead woman! But then, why shouldn’t Olivia Wanamaker be nice to Piper? The two women weren’t in competition for sales or votes.

  “It sounds like you were rather close to Mrs. Wanamaker, perhaps closer than most of her colleagues here,” Mac observed.

  She shrugged. “I g
uess so.” She lowered her voice. “I think a lot of the other agents were jealous of her.”

  “If you know anything that might help the police find her killer, you must tell Chief Hummel.”

  Piper’s green eyes widened. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know what you know.” The way Mac said that, his tone of voice, it sounded like the most reasonable thing in the world. “What seems innocuous to you might be significant to the police. And what you may think too personal to share may be critical to the hunt for the killer. For example, if Mrs. Wanamaker had a boyfriend and you knew his - ”

  “I don’t!”

  “ - name, I am certain the Chief would like to talk to him.”

  “But I don’t!”

  “Well, then, that is final.” Mac smiled. He’s at his most dangerous when he smiles. “You do not know his name. What do you know about him?”

  Well played, Mac.

  Piper hesitated. Should she tell or not? Oh, go on! “I know that he was quite a bit older than Liv. That created, uh, physical challenges that she described in some detail.” Piper colored. “I’d rather not be more explicit.”

  Uh-oh. An unidentified much older boyfriend would play right into Oscar’s lamebrain back-up theory that Olivia Wanamaker and Ralph weren’t the enemies that they appeared to be in public.

  Piper rushed on, as if afraid that Mac would press her for details. “I also know that she had an appointment with him on the morning of the day her body was found.”

  “What kind of appointment?” Lynda asked. Her journalism genes were kicking in now.

  “I don’t know exactly what was going on, but they’d reached some kind of crisis and the purpose of the meeting was to settle it. I thought maybe she wanted to break it off.”

  “Do you remember her exact words?”

  Piper paused. “It was something like, ‘I’m going to end this even if it’s the end of me.’”

  “That sounds definite,” I said.

  But Mac shook his head. “The ‘this’ could be the relationship, but it could be something else - it could be a misunderstanding, or a behavior pattern, or a deception, or any number of other things.”

  “Maybe so,” Lynda conceded, “but the ‘end of me’ part sounds ominous no matter what she meant by the other part.”

  “Should I tell Chief Hummel?” Piper asked.

  Let’s see: Do we want Oscar to know that the victim was stepping out with an older man and seemed determined to cut it off at a meeting the day her body was found, fitting in perfectly with his conviction that Ralph was the most likely suspect?

  “Only if he asks,” Mac advised.

  “He probably won’t,” Lynda added, “unless he gets onto the boyfriend angle and works it, or has Gibbons work it, with everybody associated with Olivia. But Johanna Rawls will want to ask you about it.”

  “Isn’t she the reporter at the Observer who wrote about the murder?” Piper shook her head vigorously. “I’m not talking to a reporter. I don’t want my name in the paper.”

  Good girl!

  Storm clouds gathered over Lynda’s pretty visage. Understandably, she wasn’t a bit happy about Piper’s professed media shyness. It put Lynda in a pickle. She still had newspaper ink running in her veins instead of blood, but she was a journalist without being a reporter. Anything somebody says to a reporter, unless they’ve first reached agreement that it’s off the record, is fair game for quoting. But etiquette says that rule doesn’t apply to talking with people higher up the pay scale.

  As an employee of The Erin Observer & News-Ledger’s parent company, Lynda was more like the publisher who comes back from the Rotary Club meeting with a heck of a story, but tells the troops they have to confirm it on their own and leave him out of it. That happens all the time, by the way, and not just in small town America. It’s even more awkward when the publisher is on the board of trustees of say, a museum, which has done something controversial and nobody at said institution will talk to the publisher’s paper.

  “Well, gosh, how time flies!” I observed. “I guess I’d better be getting back to ... whatever I’m getting back to. Nice seeing you again, Piper! Good luck.”

  Mac and Lynda murmured polite goodbyes and we were soon out of there.

  “Cheer up,” I told Lynda as we hit the sidewalk. “Johanna is pretty sharp. Maybe she’ll get a line on the boyfriend on her own, something even more solid, like a name.”

  Lynda raked both of us with a withering glance. “It’s not Johanna I’m worried about. It’s you two.”

  Mac’s “Moi?” expression wouldn’t have fooled a three-year-old.

  “You didn’t just happen into Happy Homes today, Mac. You guys have been poking into the murder, probably asking questions all over town, haven’t you?”

  J’accuse!

  “All over town would be a considerable exaggeration,” Mac said.

  “Don’t get all legalistic, Mac!” My beloved whirled on me. “And you! Why didn’t you tell me what you were up to?” Lynda Teal (Cody) is the most even-tempered of women, even though she is half-Italian, so I was ill-prepared by experience for this tsunami of emotion. What I saw in her gold-flecked brown eyes wasn’t anger, it was hurt. And that hurt me. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

  I want a lawyer! At least I had Mac. He broke my awkward silence with our defense.

  “I believe that what Jefferson is trying not to say is that we were rather boxed in by a request from the person who asked us to make inquiries. This person, our non-paying client as it were, is most eager that our involvement on behalf of a third party not be known.”

  “That’s true,” I confirmed. Although it’s almost impossible to follow what he just said. “Plus, it only happened this morning that this person contacted us. I didn’t have time to break down and tell you what I wasn’t supposed to tell, which I’m sure I would have sooner or later - probably during dinner or pillow talk. You know I’m terrible at keeping secrets.”

  Apparently being a good husband is more than just remembering to put the toilet seat lid back down and squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom.

  Lynda shook her head. “I should have known you boys couldn’t stay out of this.”

  IX

  By the time I got to my office the next morning, which happened to be Shakespeare’s birthday, Lynda and I had reached an understanding that she wasn’t going to be surprised like that again. Lynda isn’t one to stew over things, so that was that. But I decided I’d better make reservations soon at Ricoletti’s Ristorante, or at least The Roundhouse, just to seal the deal.

  It was the day before Olivia Wanamaker’s funeral.

  “Oscar knows who did it,” Popcorn said with an unmistakable note of pride in her voice as she handed me a cup of decaffeinated coffee. That can’t be good. “He said he talked to him yesterday.”

  “Who is it?” As if I didn’t know.

  “He just chuckled and said to ask you.”

  “How very cagey of him.” How much should I tell her? With Popcorn keeping company with Oscar, although she remained coy about that, maybe I shouldn’t let her have anything we didn’t want the chief to know. But I didn’t want to get into the same kind of trouble with her that I was in with Lynda.

  “Can you keep a secret? Even from Oscar?”

  She sat forward eagerly. “I barely know the man, Boss.”

  Right. But I told her everything, including the older boyfriend stuff from Piper Lawrence. At the end of my summary of the case against Ralph, Popcorn was gaping.

  “I can’t believe he’d do a thing like that.”

  “Mac doesn’t seem to think he did. Anyway, I know that Oscar had an interview scheduled with Ralph, but I didn’t get debriefed on the outcome. I was tending to the home fires last night, s
o I haven’t talked to Mac. Maybe he knows more.”

  “Call him.”

  I did so.

  “I was just about to call you, old boy,” my brother-in-law boomed. “Yes, I spoke with Oscar. Apparently our beloved provost’s stuffed shirt got a little stiffer under Oscar’s rather aggressive questioning.” Popcorn, who could hear Mac halfway across the room, smirked. “In short, I gather that Ralph’s injured dignity did not serve him well and he overplayed his hand.”

  “And that, naturally, only made Oscar all the more suspicious.” I groaned. Obviously, Ralph needed a communications advisor.

  “I have a class this morning.” How unusual for a tenured professor. “However, I am available starting at eleven-thirty. I suggest we both take an early lunch and visit Mr. Sam Wanamaker, the widower.”

  “The funeral is tomorrow. Isn’t that a little tacky?”

  “Sadly, there will never be a better time, Jefferson.”

  I wasn’t happy about this little plan, but I agreed to it. Mac was going to do it anyway, and he’s even more dangerous if he doesn’t have adult supervision.

  The Wanamaker house was in a new development just inside the city limits. When I had first come to Erin, it had been farmland. Now it was all McMansions for Altiora Corp. executives and others in their income range. Apparently the Wanamakers did quite well for themselves. Although they had no children, they lived in one of the larger houses on the street, two stories in a mock Tudor style, all brick. The landscaping was flawless, of course. That was Sam Wanamaker’s business. He had met Olivia on the job five years ago at the annual Sussex County Parade of Homes home show.

  We rang the doorbell, waited, rang it again. Finally a big man answered, not fat but tall and bear-like. He had short, golden hair that glittered in the sunlight, as did the equally golden frames of his glasses. He was wearing a Wanamaker Landscaping golf shirt.

  The door was only open about halfway. Mac took the lead.

  “Mr. Wanamaker? My name is Sebastian McCabe and this is my friend and brother-in-law, Thomas Jefferson Cody. We are sorry - ”