Murder Among Friends (The Kate Austen Mystery Series)

by Jonnie Jacobs

  Sharon squeaked through a light that was more red than yellow. “I left space at the top,” she continued, “so we can list possible suspects. I haven’t put down any names though.”

  “Well,” I said, getting into the spirit of things, “there’s always the spouse. Or ex-spouse. That’s usually the first person the cops think of.”

  “Gary?” She looked at me as though I’d suggested Mona had been killed by aliens. “I’m not fond of the man, but he is one of George’s oldest and dearest friends. I can’t believe he’s a killer. And I can’t imagine Mona inviting him in, either. She was adamant about not letting the guy set foot in the house.”

  “Maybe he disguised his voice, kind of like The Big, Bad Wolf.”

  Sharon didn’t laugh. She didn’t even acknowledge she’d heard me.

  “He’s got a motive, too,” I continued. “With Mona dead he no longer has to make those hefty support payments you told me he always groused about.” I held my breath as she rounded the comer straddling the yellow line. “Why did he agree to the plan anyway, if he found it so unfair?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Andy says Mona had something on him, something she used to put the squeeze on him in the divorce.”

  Sharon shrugged. “Like I said, I’m not fond of the man. But I’d put Bambi on the list before Gary. I’ve suspected all along that she’s more interested in his pocket-book than his soul—or his body. What’s more, I don’t trust anyone who signs her name with a heart.”

  “Bambi does that?”

  “It’s how she dots the ‘i’ at the end of her name. Sometimes even in a different color ink.”

  “Overly cute, but hardly criminal.”

  “I was thinking,” Sharon continued, “that maybe we should put that man who lives down the street from Mona on the list. You know, the one who wanted to remodel his one-story ranch style into a four-story villa with twin spiral towers. Mona wrote a protest letter to the planning commission.”

  “So did everyone else on the block.” In fact, so had a sizable percentage of the town’s residents. Walnut Hills takes the planning approval process seriously.

  “For some reason though, he decided it was Mona’s fault his plans were turned down.”

  “So four months later he walks down the street and knocks on Mona’s door. She not only invites him in, she sits there cooperatively while he pours a bottle of pills down her throat?”

  Sharon gave an exasperated sigh. “If I had all the answers, Kate, we wouldn’t be here.”

  I refolded Sharon’s grid. When you stopped and really thought about it, the list of possible killers was almost endless. It could have been some guy Mona cut off in traffic, or a disgruntled student. Or maybe she’d unknowingly witnessed some crime and had to be silenced. It could be about money, love, anger, even some perverted sense of justice. And I knew, from my association with Michael, that without some solid evidentiary clue, cases sometimes remained open indefinitely.

  “Mona told me she had something she wanted to talk about,” I said. “She’d asked if we couldn’t get together over the weekend but I put her off till Monday. Do you think what she wanted to tell me might be significant?”

  Sharon swung into the driveway causing me to grab the door handle for support. “You know Mona, she always had something she wanted to say. Besides, no offense here, but why you?”

  “I thought it was strange, too.” Mona and I were friends but hardly bosom buddies.

  Sharon parked, missing the potted daffodils on the left side by a narrow margin. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the task ahead, then dug into her purse for Mona’s keys. “You remember which key fits the top lock?”

  “The rounded one I think.”

  We headed up the walk, Sharon jangling the keys loosely in her palm. As it turned out, they weren’t necessary. The front door was already ajar.

  “Good Lord, look at this,” Sharon wailed, pushing the door fully open. “Someone’s been here.”

  The house wasn’t a shambles, but it was clear that someone had indeed been there. And it wasn’t the cleaning lady.

  “I think we’d better call the police,” Sharon said.

  I nodded agreement.

  “I’ll stay here by the door while you call. That way if there’s still someone in the house, I’ll be able to go for help.”

  I turned. “Thanks a bundle.”

  “One of us should stay here, and you’ve had more experience at. . . She paused. “At these things.”

  Encounters with killers is what she meant, and to my mind experience didn’t buy you much in that regard. But arguing hardly seemed worth the effort. I stomped noisily down the hall, giving fair warning to whatever intruder might be lurking about. And for the second time in less than a week I used Mona’s phone to call the police.

  “Call your friend, too,” Sharon yelled after me. “Maybe this will convince him that Mona’s death wasn’t suicide.”

  It wasn’t, strictly speaking, Michael’s kind of case. But in light of Mona’s recent death, I thought he might be interested. More to the point, I wanted him to be interested.

  Michael was, as usual, away from his desk. I left my name and Mona’s number, then called the dispatcher, reported the burglary and joined Sharon by the front door.

  The police pulled up in less than ten minutes. Our local tax dollars at work. While the big city folk in San Francisco and Oakland have to contend with 911 lines that ring busy and a police force so overworked it sometimes takes days to write up a burglary, those of us in elite enclaves like Walnut Hills get real service for our money.

  Or fast service anyway. The two officers who’d arrived so swiftly didn’t exactly set any records for zealous investigation once they were there. The older and heavier of the two meandered from room to room, kicking at the clutter on the floor and mumbling variations of, “Yep, looks like they got to this spot, too.” The younger man trotted along behind, notebook in hand.

  “What’s missing?” the older man asked.

  “We don’t know,” Sharon said, and then explained why we were there in the first place. “All the big stuff— television, VCR, stereo, it all seems to be here.”

  “What about jewelry?”

  “She didn’t have any.”

  The cop raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, she had some but she kept it in the safe deposit box.”

  “She was divorced,” I explained, because the eyebrow was still raised. “Most of the jewelry had come from her husband and she didn’t want it around.”

  The man humphed. “Loss undetermined,” he muttered and the younger man again scratched in his notebook.

  The phone rang and I went to answer it, leaving Sharon to sort out the details of police forms and procedures.

  As usual, Michael’s voice sent a lovely tingle down my spine.

  “It’s always such a pleasant surprise to find your name in my stack of message slips,” he murmured. “To know you’ve been thinking about me.”

  “Someone broke into Mona Sterling’s house,” I replied, before he could steer the conversation into the I-thou arena.

  Michael was silent.

  “Doesn’t that seem suspicious?”

  He cleared his throat. “You and Sharon didn’t cook this up yourselves, did you, just so I’d be more inclined to investigate Mona’s death?”

  “What?” I pulled myself up straight. “You don’t honestly think I’d do that, do you?”

  “No, I honestly don’t. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask.”

  “So, will you come take a look? See if there’s anything here which could lead you to Mona’s killer?”

  There was another moment of silence followed by a long sigh. “It’s not unusual for houses to be broken into after someone has died, you know. Burglars read papers just like everyone else. An uninhabited house, a distracted family, it makes for a pretty good target. It takes weeks before anyone can figure out what’s actually missing. Someti
mes there’s never a complete list.”

  “But Mona didn’t just die. She may have been murdered.”

  “We’ve been over this, Kate. There’s nothing to suggest foul play.”

  “The thief didn’t take anything though. Nothing obvious anyway. It’s more like he was looking for something.”

  “Could be the guy got scared off before making his haul.”

  Logic can sometimes be a most exasperating quality. “Does that mean you’re going to let it drop?” I asked.

  “It means we’ll treat it like a burglary. For now, anyway. There’s nothing I could do there that the cops on the scene can’t do better, and I’m up to my eyeballs in this arson case. Now that the district’s offered a reward, half the kids in town seem to recall seeing or hearing something.” He sighed wearily. “Why don’t you let me talk to whomever’s in charge there.”

  I went and got the older officer, who grunted into the phone for a couple of minutes before handing it back to me. “The lieutenant needs another word with you,” he said, and ambled off.

  “They’re going to take extra prints,” Michael explained. “And photographs. And I’ll review the report personally, though I have to tell you, the chances of finding anything meaningful are pretty slim.”

  “You want me to look around, too? I might see somehing the cops wouldn’t. Because I knew her, I mean.”

  Michael grunted.

  “You and Sharon are going to do that anyway. Whether I ask you to or not.” His voice dropped then, turned soft. “How about I come by this evening? You can fill me in on the details of the crime while I nibble on your neck.”

  “That’s probably not such a good idea. The dropping by part I mean.” I told him about Libby.

  “Nice going.” He didn’t sound any too happy about the arrangement.

  “How about Friday night instead? I’ll get a baby sitter and we’ll go out to a movie or something.” The “or something” usually won out. We had a long list of movies we’d never gotten around to seeing.

  “Friday’s the day I leave for Santa Barbara. The criminology conference, remember?”

  I hadn’t.

  “Will you miss me?” he asked.

  “You know I will.”

  “So much that you’ll throw yourself at me the minute I’m back?”

  I laughed. “The very minute. You want to try for the airport lounge or shall we wait for something more comortable?”

  “Ah, Kate.” That was all he got out before the line clicked and he turned serious. “I’ve got another call. I have to run.”

  I hung up with an odd little hollow spot in my heart. Truth was, I would miss him. More than he realized. More than I cared to admit to myself.

  Chapter 11

  For the next forty minutes, we followed the two officers from room to room, peering through doorways as they dusted for prints and snapped pictures. A couple of times Sharon ventured closer to offer a word of unsolicited advice, which was never received with more than a grunt.

  “They didn’t seem particularly interested in any of it,” she huffed once they’d gone.

  “That’s probably because they know there’s not much chance of finding the perp. Very few residential burglaries are ever solved.”

  Sharon raised her brow and regarded me with amusement “My, my. You’ve become intimate with the law in more ways than one.”

  I shrugged. “You pick up stuff without thinking about it.”

  “This wasn’t a simple burglary, though. I’m sure it’s related in some way to Mona’s death.”

  Michael’s indifference aside, I was inclined to agree with her. “The trouble is, we’re too late. The thief has probably already made off with the give-away clue we were hoping to find.”

  “We’ll never know unless we look. Come on,” Sharon said, gesturing impatiently. “We’ve wasted enough time already, twiddling our thumbs while those buffoons in blue sleepwalked their way through department procedure.”

  We started in the den, on the theory that since Mona had died there the room might offer evidence about her death. It was a pretty dumb theory since the paramedics, the police, the coroner’s office and the killer, as well probably as the burglar, had all been there before us. But we had to start somewhere.

  We went through closets, cupboards, and drawers, then moved onto the kitchen and the bedroom, repeating the procedure. Though I’m an incurable snoop, and have been known to peer into the medicine chests of people I barely know, there is something about going through a dead friend’s things which is more than a little unsettling. It left me feeling nervous, depressed and guilty all at once. I kept waiting for Sharon to decide that we’d done enough, but when Sharon sets her mind to a task she doesn’t easily give it up.

  “Have you found anything?” she asked finally, plunking herself down on Mona’s bed.

  What I’d found was that Mona’s monthly Mastercard bill was higher than my mortgage and that her phone bill was nothing to sneeze at either. I’d learned that Mona wore white cotton panties and no nonsense bras, but that she had a scarlet silk teddy from Frederick’s of Hollywood that had little holes in all the places I’d want to be sure were covered. I knew that she washed her hair and face with products from France, that she wore a night guard to protect her teeth from grinding, that despite her minimalist tendencies in decor, she was a pack rat at heart.

  “Nothing that points to murder,” I told her. “How about you?”

  She shook her head. “Zip.”

  The doorbell rang just then and we both jumped. Jumped, exchanged nervous glances, and immediately started speaking in hushed tones. You’d have thought we were a couple of school girls in the midst of telling late night ghost stories.

  “Go see who it is,” Sharon whispered. “I’ll stay by the phone, just in case.”

  “Why me?”

  “What’s the problem?” she mouthed. “The killer is hardly going to ring Mona’s bell in broad daylight.”

  I leaned closer and mouthed back, “Then what makes you think you need to stay by the phone?”

  In the end we both went, peering out through the side window before unlatching the door. But we’d raised our blood pressure and taken minutes off our lives for nothing. It was only a UPS delivery man.

  “You gotta sign for it,” he said. “It’s insured.”

  Sharon signed and took the package, a small, lightweight thing from Union Square Jewelers in San Francisco. “You think we should open it?”

  “I don’t see the harm. You’re going to have to inventory her entire estate anyway.”

  She peeled away the shipping wrap and opened the box. “Cufflinks,” she said, bewildered. “And a tie tack.” She examined the receipt. “It must be something Mona ordered.”

  Sharon handed me the box. The cufflinks were burnished gold ovals, each set with a diamond and engraved with an ornate cursive monogram. The tie tack was a larger diamond rimmed in gold. Even before I looked at the receipt I could tell they must have cost a bundle.

  “Why would she buy cufflinks?” I asked.

  “As a present, most likely.”

  “Men wear cufflinks these days?”

  Sharon took the box and looked at me with mock disdain. “Maybe not in your circle, Kate. But among the upper crust, they are still very much in vogue.” She pulled out one of the ovals and examined it. “The lettering is so fancy it’s hard to tell, but it looks like an ‘S’.” Stanley? Steven? Sebastian? I tried to think of men I knew whose names began with S. “Sterling! Do you think she bought them for Gary?”

  “She couldn’t stand the guy.”

  “Or so she said. Maybe they were working toward a reconciliation and she was too embarrassed to admit it.”

  Sharon shook her head. “No way.”

  “Her father-in-law?”

  “You don’t give something like this to a father-in-law, especially an ex-father-in-law. Besides, Harry wouldn’t know what to do with a long sleeve shirt, much less one with French c
uffs.” She put the cufflink back in the box and snapped the lid. “I hate to admit it, Kate, but you may have been right about Mona seeing someone. The weekend away, this present, it all fits. I just can’t figure out why she never mentioned him.”

  “Maybe he’s balding, four-foot-four and weighs two hundred pounds.”

  She laughed.

  “Or he could be famous. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Springsteen, Steven Seagal, Telly Savalas—”

  “Telly Savalas is dead.”

  “Okay, we’ll forget about him. How about Steven Spielberg, Sidney Sheldon—”

  “Enough. We obviously aren’t going to find the guy based on his initials. Maybe Libby knows.”

  “Speaking of Libby.” I checked my watch. “I want to run out to Macy’s and see if I can’t get some pillows or something to brighten up her room. You think we’ve done enough here for today?”

  “I guess. I don’t know where else to look anyway.”

  We were on our way out the door when the phone rang. “Let the machine pick it up,” Sharon said.

  But it’s almost impossible to walk away from a ringing phone without finding out who’s calling. We waited until the machine clicked on.

  “This is Laurie McNevitt again.” The voice was thin and tentative, as it had been earlier. “Please, even if you don’t know for sure, I’d like to talk... to maybe, uh ...” She paused, started, then stopped again. She exhaled deeply, abruptly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t keep bothering you.”

  I rushed for the phone but she’d already hung up. “Oh dear,” said Sharon. “The poor woman sounds so... so disheartened.”

  “If she’d only leave her number. Did you check the tape to see if she called during the last few days?”

  Sharon nodded. “There were only a couple messages. Nothing important.”

  She dropped me off at my house where I picked up my own car and headed for the mall. With luck I’d be able to find something that was cheery and bright, but not frilly or overly cute. Or expensive. In some ways it didn’t much matter what I found. Anything would be an improvement.