by Karen Ranney
The back of my neck felt clammy, partly because I wasn’t used to breaking the law and partly because the house felt uncomfortable. Not haunted but empty. As if it knew, somehow, that the one person who’d lavished so much attention on it would never do so again.
Did places hold the memory of what had happened within them? If so, then the houses of the King Lion District would have at least a hundred fifty years of recollections.
Slowly, I walked to the door of the Civil War Room and pushed it open, half expecting it to be empty.
Evelyn had inherited her parent's Civil War memorabilia. Rather than sell it, or even offer it to a museum, she'd turned one of the upstairs rooms into a vault.
The walls were papered in a crimson silk-like pattern, and the lone window covered with a light diffusing film. Several mahogany vitrines held the museum quality photographs, letters, and diaries. Built into the side of one wall were two mahogany cabinets topped with shelves holding the less valuable books of her collection. The other volumes were stored in a hermetically sealed, climate controlled bookshelf on the other side of the room.
Evelyn had been so proud of this Civil War room, so much so she’d had a party to celebrate its completion.
I hadn’t been in here since.
To my surprise everything was intact. Paul hadn’t sold what he could to avid collectors. I should have felt ashamed of my suspicions, but I wasn’t.
Maybe he wasn’t as venal as I thought.
But I don’t think he was an angel, either, but somewhere in the middle like the rest of us.
Which made the mystery of his death even deeper. Who had killed Paul?
18
“Out taking the dog for a walk?” a voice asked.
I turned and sent an accusing look at Sally. "You could have barked."
She only stared adoringly at Talbot, her ears flattening. Sally’s tail never wagged but if it did it would be brushing back and forth like a furry flag right about now.
“How did you know I was here?”
“Even the walls have eyes,” he said obliquely, leaving me to wonder if Mrs. Maldonado had turned me in.
I doubt it was Army because his curiosity was as deeply rooted as mine. I hadn't talked to him since the hospital, but I'd be willing to bet that if he'd known I was here, he'd have joined me in my explorations.
Talbot removed his sunglasses, his cool gray eyes taking in the room. But he said nothing, his look impenetrable in a way I envied. I wish I could hide my thoughts as well as he did.
“It's Evelyn's Civil War Room," I said, hoping he wouldn't ask any further questions, such as why I was here. “I was just checking to ensure everything was all right.”
He raised one eyebrow and surveyed me. For long moment, he didn't say anything and it was the most uncomfortable survey I’ve endured in quite a while.
"It wasn't breaking and entering," I said, holding up my key.
He still didn't say anything.
"Oh, for God's sake, you can't arrest me." I could just imagine Tom's comments.
"I can't?"
I sighed. "Please don't."
"Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Jennifer? Anything at all?"
I blew out a breath. "All right," I said. "I thought Paul had sold everything.”
His gaze didn't drop.
“Okay, so I was also going to check her computers. She had a laptop and a desktop," I said. "If there's evidence she checked her credit often, wouldn't that mean she knew what was happening? She might have been killed because she figured it out. My life is on my computer," I added. "Evelyn was the same way."
"So, you came to find her computer?"
I nodded.
"Were you and Norton close?"
Where the hell had that come from?
I frowned at him. "No, I barely knew him.”
He didn't pursue the subject.
"What is all this?" he asked, glancing around.
“A lifetime of collecting. Evelyn's parents were Civil War buffs and they were forever going to auctions and sales.”
I pointed to the two uniforms mounted on mannequins in the corner. They were behind special glass cases to protect them from dust. “There’s a stain on the Confederate uniform that’s said to be the owner’s blood. And the union outfit has a saber cut on the leg. The uniforms alone are worthy of a Smithsonian exhibition.”
“What do you think all of this is worth?”
I hadn't stopped to consider it before. “I think some collectors would probably consider a few of the letters priceless." I pointed to one mounted in the smaller vitrine. “That’s a letter from Lincoln to the mother of a Union soldier. What would somebody pay for that? I don’t know.”
"If she had financial problems, she could have sold the collection."
"Yes, but I doubt if she would. She adored her parents." I'd heard countless stories of them, and Evelyn's love was evident from the warmth in her voice.
"Give me the key, Jennifer," he said.
I stretched out my hand where it lay on my palm, a shiny gold Schlage. He reached over and plucked it from my hand.
“If I find you here again, I'll have to arrest you.”
Fair warning.
"What about her computers?" He wasn't going to distract me.
He shook his head. "They aren't here."
"What do you mean, they're not here?"
The look he gave me was impatient and annoyed. Too bad.
"They aren't here," he said. "Not the desktop. Or the laptop."
"Did you check with the bank, just in case she left her laptop at work?"
I received another one of those looks.
"I've been doing this for awhile," he said. "I don't need pointers."
I frowned at him. "But doesn't the absence of her computers prove murder?"
"No," he said. "It proves her computers aren't here. That's all. Stop jumping to conclusions."
It was my turn to send him a look.
"Why isn’t there any crime scene tape across the door?"
He looked startled by the question.
"Would that have kept you out?" he asked, a slow smile curving his lips.
I changed the subject. "Paul was murdered, wasn’t he?”
"We’re still looking at what's left of the tank."
He didn't look at me when he spoke, but bent to scratch Sally's ear. Her eyes liquefied in adoration.
Men, on a whole, don’t lie well. They aren’t nearly as creative as women. But they do obfuscate, deny, or evade extraordinarily well. Being married to one of them makes me certain of that.
"It's murder, isn't it?" He wasn't going to evade me this time.
He didn't answer, only straightened, took another look around, and walked toward the door.
The man was certainly stubborn.
Talbot closed the door behind me as I preceded him down the hall and down the steps.
"Are you absolutely sure her computer isn't here?" I asked, hesitating at the bottom.
Talbot was an expert at hiding his thoughts, but I was beginning to know him. His eyes turned flat and flinty. His mouth firmed. I'd succeeded in annoying him. To my detriment, I wasn't all that upset about it.
"Would you like to look?" he asked.
I nodded, leading the way to Evelyn's study, stopping when I came to the open door.
I hadn't been here since the day we found her. I placed my hand on the door frame, looking inside.
"Have you talked to the bank about her laptop?" I asked again, glancing over my shoulder at Talbot.
He didn't answer but, truthfully, I hadn't expected one.
"I imagine it's a security issue with them," I said, filling the silence with sound.
Still no answer.
The desktop wasn't on top of the desk. I stood in the doorway, trying to remember that day. Had it been there? I'd been concentrating on Evelyn, not the location of her computer.
"Seen enough?"
I nodded.
We were
a silent triumvirate until I reached the kitchen. My Tupperware container wasn't among the dishes scattered everywhere. It sat, alone and looking forlorn, on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. I grabbed it.
"This is mine," I said, all too aware I sounded like a possessive two year old.
Talbot didn't say a word, and I'd half expected him to protest it was part of the crime scene.
We retraced my steps, walking slowly back to my house via the alley. At the entrance to my yard, I hesitated. Today was garbage day, so the container was in the front of the house. I walked to the other side of the alley, pulled off the top of the container, dumping Maude's shepherd's pie in the grass of the beginning of The Woods.
"I don't want to hurt Maude's feelings," I said, turning and facing Talbot.
He smiled at me, not the first time he'd done so, but the first time the smile crinkled his eyes.
"Can I buy you lunch?" I asked, feeling as if I owed him some sort of thanks for not being more official with me. "Plus, Maude still has chocolate cake."
Not that I had any of it, yet.
He nodded, and I led the way to our back porch.
At my entrance, Maude peeked her head out of the Great Room, saw it was me and smiled. A second later the rest of her appeared, a dust rag in one hand and a bottle of furniture polish in the other.
“We have company,” I told her. “Officer Talbot.”
Just like before, her eyes rolled over him like he was an all day sucker and she was a child forbidden candy.
I almost felt sorry for the man.
“We have roast beef or tuna salad."
“Whatever is easier," he said.
I handed Maude the empty Tupperware container, and hinted. "And chocolate cake."
She didn’t say a word as I gave Sally a low calorie dog treat in the shape of a bone. I lied to my dog and told her it was filet mignon.
The furniture on the Winter Porch is upholstered in bright yellow flowers with an accent color of soft baby blue. It was a pleasant room, one where we gathered in the cooler months, and sometimes ate dinner. In the summer it was a bit too bright, and too warm, despite the air conditioning unit that had been added just to cool this space.
I sat at the circular table, the scene of my Last Supper with Tom. Talbot sat opposite me in a matching chair with an upswept back. Was he going to be as pitiless in his recitation of my faults?
Why did men think women needed to be told our problems? We knew them. Believe me, we all knew our faults and shortcomings. We even make up some. Would that men were as self-aware.
"What would you do if Norton was murdered?” he asked after Maude left the room.
I reached for my cane, holding onto it like a prop.
“Do? What do you mean?"
"Would you move?"
I'd never noticed, before, how much space Talbot took up. Especially when he was silent, like now. The man seemed almost a granite monolith, a Ranger sized man in a rattan chair.
"Why? Because two murders happened next door? Bad things happen anywhere."
"We don't have all that many murders in the District," he said.
"How many?"
"None in the last two years. Five years ago, a man killed his wife, then himself."
We might not have many murders in the King Lion District, but we had everything else: drug use, prostitution, tagging, and even some peripheral gang activity.
"Lots of activity on your street, though."
Too damn much activity. A thought I didn't voice.
"I never got to tell you how sorry I was."
My hand clenched on top of the cane. Don't. Please. Don't. I didn't say it, though. What I did say surprised both of us.
"Thank you. Thank you for everything you tried to do. I wished I'd listened. Earlier."
"Nobody does," he said.
"Well, that's depressing."
"People don't want me to be right. If I'm right, it means they have a real problem."
"I knew you were right all along," I said, surprising myself again. "I just didn't know what the hell to do."
"But you finally got help," he said, his look compassionate.
I didn't have a response to that.
Maude entered the room, laden with another tray. She served Talbot first, of course, tuna layered on her famous rolls. In addition to a pot of coffee, there were two pieces of cake.
I'd evidently done something right, or were they both for him?
He waited until she left to speak again. "Your only problem was that you tried to do it on your own."
I studied him. He didn't turn away from my inspection.
"Your husband should have been with you. He should have been driving, and you should have been in the backseat with Barbara." He met my eyes. "Addicts are uncontrollable."
"I thought I knew what I was doing."
"You can't reason with an addict. You can't appeal to their better nature. I know she was your daughter, but she was an addict, first. You always saw her as Barbara. She saw you as a barricade to getting high."
I couldn't argue with him. He was right.
"Do you have anyone in your life like that?"
"An addict?" He shook his head. "My brother-in-law likes to beer it up on Sundays. Calls it his Football Buzz. But I've seen enough families just like yours destroyed by drugs to hate them."
"Do they all do the if only game?"
His smile was only a wisp of expression. "Every single one of them."
"I hate death," I said, staring out the window at my overgrown garden. "I feel like it's everywhere, trying to defeat me."
"It is."
Startled, my eyes flew to his.
"Isn't that what life's all about? Surviving from day to day, beating death?"
I'd never thought about it that way.
"A policeman who's a philosopher."
"I have to look at the bigger picture," he said. "Otherwise, it would only depress me."
I sat back, my gaze on his hands as he lifted his sandwich to his mouth. He ate the way he did a great many things, with focus, intent, and deliberation.
"You know something, don't you? What is it you aren't telling me?"
I’ve never seen a face change so fast. One moment, he was too charming. The next, he was impenetrable and inscrutable again. I reached over, grabbed the cake and waved it in front of him.
“Cake for your thoughts.”
“I can’t be bought with a piece of chocolate cake,” he said, looking amused.
“Bet you can," I said.
When he didn't answer, I put the plate down. "Then tell me anyway, because I've been honest with you.”
“How important was Evelyn Addison to you?”
“She was my friend,” I said. "My best friend. I loved her."
“She was poisoned.”
19
My hand went to my throat to keep my heart from leaping into my mouth.
“You did the revised tox screen,” I said.
He didn't say anything for a very long moment. When he did speak, he prefaced it with a sigh.
"I might not get a new car next year, but we did the tox screen."
"Was it that expensive?"
"According to the chief, it was."
“And you found poison?” I asked.
"Taxine," he said.
I'd never heard of that before. "What is it?"
“It’s normally used to treat breast cancer but it’s toxic in high doses. It's not something you'd pick up on an ordinary tox screen, but it isn't difficult to find on a comprehensive test."
"Which nobody expected you to do."
He nodded.
"Paul killed her, I knew it." I said, feeling a strange mix of sadness and excitement.
"We don't know that."
I stared at him. "What do you mean, we don't know that? Isn't it always the next of kin or the boyfriend or the husband?"
His eyes crinkled again. "How much television do you actually watch?"
The
month after Barbara died, I'd been glued to the TV almost nonstop. I'd watch anything, and everything, in an attempt to simply pass the hours. Maybe that's why Tom hired Maude. To take care of me more than the house. Of course, the house had suffered, too. Everything had.
"Is that wrong?"
"Statistically, it's right," he said. "But we don't know Paul killed her. Anyone who had access to taxine could have fed it to her in her food."
I stared at him. "Well, how do we find out?"
"It's called police work," he said.
If I was supposed to be rebuffed, I wasn't.
"Someone with motive," I said. "Why do people kill?"
"It depends on who you ask," Talbot said. "James Patterson would tell you it's love, money, or to cover up a crime."
I looked at him in surprise. "You read mysteries?"
"I don't, actually," he said. "They annoy me for the most part. They hardly ever get it right."
"I can think of a lot more reasons to kill someone than that," I said, ticking them off my fingers. "Insanity, revenge, self-protection, greed, envy, and the list goes on."
"Pick one, then," he said. "One's as good as another."
"Without a motive, do you ever find a murderer?"
He smiled. "Sometimes, we never find a motive," he said. "Sometimes, we find the murderer and ask him why he did it. The answers can be surprising."
"So you don't need to know why Evelyn was killed?"
"It would help in this case. This isn't a drive-by, or a gang killing."
"All we have is how it was done," I said.
"We?"
I couldn't help but smile again.
"Okay, so we know how. Now all we need to know is who had the opportunity."
"Entirely too much TV."
I waved my hand in the air. "So, who was close enough to Evelyn to kill her?"
"You."
I leaned back against the chair, feeling as if one of those triangles of Paul's glass had embedded itself in my chest.
"Me?"
"Close friends, didn't you say?" he asked, his voice soft, calm, and low pitched. A strange counterpart to the menace of his suggestion.
"Yes, but I didn't kill her."
"Didn't you often drink together?"
"You make it sound like we were alcoholics," I said, annoyed. "We had margaritas maybe one or twice a week. Big whup."