Death in Lovers' Lane

by Carolyn G. Hart

  I closed the folders, replaced them precisely as I’d found them.

  The cold in the apartment was seeping into my bones. I almost left then. I’d looked at everything.

  But not quite.

  Trying not to shiver, I got out of the chair and stepped to the three-drawer metal filing cabinet.

  The top drawer held folders about classes in order of subjects: Economics, English, Geology, German, History, Journalism, Philosophy.

  The second drawer held hard copies of all the stories she’d written for The Clarion.

  The third drawer also held hard copies. There were six short-story manuscripts, and the beginnings of a novel. The opening paragraphs of the novel made me smile: short, swift, clever sentences, the protagonist a college senior—of course—the story line a raucous, hard-driving take on Generation X and its fumbling, funny, fractious efforts to comprehend a cyberforce world where gender is indistinct, history in flux, security elusive, and commitment—

  There is no sound quite so distinct and unmistakable as breaking glass.

  I heard it faintly.

  Oh, Christ.

  Yes, I was scared. I didn’t process logical thought. I moved fast. I didn’t even close the cabinet. Instantly, I grabbed my purse and was on my feet, darting around the end of Maggie’s bed, the bathroom my goal.

  Bathroom doors always lock on the inside. That was the fact I counted on to save my life.

  I was certain that death was only a room away.

  I plunged into the bathroom, shut the door, locked it.

  Dennis, you bastard, you sorry, self-serving, myopic bastard!

  Because I knew what had brought the murderer to Maggie’s apartment: Dennis’s interview in this morning’s Clarion.

  I leaned against the door, my heart thudding as if I’d run a long way. I looked desperately around the tiny antiseptic room. What could I use to reinforce the flimsy lock? I knew only too well how easy it is to open locked doors.

  The intruder had broken glass in the kitchen to get in. That indicated no expertise in picking locks.

  Still, I needed something. I turned, yanked the lid to the toilet, and wrenched free the metal arm holding the chain and stopper. It took only seconds to shove one end of the metal piece beneath the door, effectively jamming the door in place.

  The wooden floor creaked in the bedroom.

  The bathroom doorknob rattled.

  I was already at the window. I unlocked it, pushed it up. The screen was hard to dislodge. When it finally screeched free, I pulled myself up on the sill and wriggled out. I landed heavily on the scraggly remnants of chrysanthemums in the flower bed below. My right ankle gave a sharp twinge, but I quickly righted myself and hurried down the sidewalk.

  The weather had suddenly warmed, as it can do in November in Missouri. The result was a sudden and dense fog that turned the terrain a ghostly gray. I moved as quickly as I could, though my ankle flamed with pain.

  A dog barked.

  A gate banged.

  Maggie’s gate?

  The intruder could have left her apartment as quickly as I had, desperate to escape without being seen.

  I stood still. The parking lot was swathed in fog. I could see only a short distance. But that meant the intruder couldn’t see either.

  I had my keys in hand, which meant, of course, that I also held my Mace canister that serves as my key ring. I should be safe enough now. I hadn’t glimpsed the intruder. If I had, I would have made my own death inevitable.

  I reached the MG, checked to be certain it was empty, then slid in and locked the doors. I shoved the key in the ignition. Now, locked inside the car, armed with Mace and a mobile phone, I was willing to take a chance.

  The MG revved to life.

  But when I drove past the back of the apartment house, I knew I was too late.

  Maggie’s gate stood open. The intruder was gone.

  Stalemate.

  I didn’t know who had come. But I knew why, thanks to Dennis purveying me as Intrepid Investigative Reporter to every reader of this morning’s Clarion. Maggie’s killer had been afraid to risk the chance that I might find something—a hint, a clue, a giveaway—in Maggie’s papers.

  But I knew more.

  I knew that Rita Duffy was innocent.

  And I knew it was I who had pointed Maggie to her death.

  eight

  Y ankle hurt like hell. The drive through the billowing fog to the campus was nightmarish. I’ve never found fog romantic, simply unpleasantly damp and dangerous.

  I limped upstairs.

  The newsroom throbbed with its usual late-afternoon deadline tension. I still find the quiet unsettling, even after a number of years in computerized newsrooms. The sense of excitement and eagerness and tension remains, but now there is no staccato of typewriters, no hurrying clatter of feet with reporters rushing sheets of yellow copy paper to the news desk. Everyone is absorbed, intent upon the task, acutely aware of the swift swing of the minute hand as deadline approaches.

  Dennis looked up, saw me, and semaphored wildly.

  I ignored him and stalked—as valiantly as I could with my painful ankle—to my office.

  “Henrie O. Henrie O!” His chair scraped.

  I unlocked my door, flipped on the light, shrugged out of my coat. As I tossed it on the coat tree, Dennis was at my elbow.

  “Henrie O, somebody broke into Maggie’s apart

  115

  ment! Just picked it up on the scanner. Kitty’s checking it out.”

  I limped to my desk, wearily sat down, then glared at him. “I’ve read checkout-stand cheap sheets with more integrity than this morning’s Clarion. You are a real piece of work, Duffy.”

  His gaze was a mixture of defiance and shame, but defiance had the edge. “Henrie O—” He took a deep breath. “I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m not. The whole damn town’s buzzing. By God, they aren’t going to railroad Rita! Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  I understand loyalty. My bleak anger began to drain away. I sighed. I can’t camp on a holier-than-thou summit with any comfort. God knows my own faith in others has led me to a rash act or two in my past. “Okay, Dennis. We’ll drop it. For now.”

  His face lightened at my change in tone. His eyes glinted with their old combativeness. “You can always tell me to fuck off.”

  “I know. And I may. In fact, I probably will. But, hey, Dennis, what’s this about somebody trying to break into Maggie’s place? That sounds good for Rita.”

  He nodded, his face pathetically eager. “It’s terrific, isn’t it? I called Rita’s lawyer and told him. And listen, Henrie O, thanks. That’s great stuff you got, about the phone call. That shows somebody wanted to make Rita mad, deliberately send her after Maggie.”

  I reached down, massaged my ankle. It was beginning to swell. “I think so, Dennis, yes. Look, I’ve got some work to do, so…”

  Dennis didn’t move. He stared down at the floor, clearly uncomfortable. “Have you picked up your

  messages yet?”

  But he knew I hadn’t.

  He didn’t look up, his eyes fixed on the shiny oak floor. His voice was unaccustomedly subdued. “Susan wants to talk to you.”

  Susan Dillon, the director of the J-School, was bright, smart, and a superb administrator. She had a great talent for always arranging everything to benefit one Susan Dillon. If she’d been on the Titanic, she would have reached a lifeboat. Count on it.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. So you might want to check your voice mail.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, eyes still downcast. “Or you might not want to.”

  “I see.” I moved in my chair, trying to ease the pain in my ankle.

  “Yeah. Well.” His voice was tired. Finally, he looked at me, his eyes somber. “I told Susan that if you wrote Maggie’s series, I’d run it. But you understand, no matter what was in the story this morning, I’m not asking you to do it. Or not to do it. You can tell me to go to hell.”


  “And what did Susan say about your running the series—that I may or may not write?”

  Dennis’s mouth twisted in a sour, tight grin. “Oh, it was all very roundabout and circuitous. You know how academics are, Henrie O.”

  “The bottom line? Spare me the gymnastics, Dennis.”

  He shrugged. “What the hell, Henrie O, who needs the stress of the city desk? And I’d probably enjoy teaching Reporting 101. I’d make the little bastards work. So, we’ll see what happens. But it’s

  not negotiable, and that’s what I told Susan. I run the series—or she gets a new city editor for The Clarion.” He turned away.

  “Dennis!” He knew and I knew that tenure protects you only so far. Susan Dillon could take away the city desk, consign him to the lowest level of classes, load him up with the most boring committee work imaginable, insist he try for grant money—a full-blown industry within the academic community which requires paperwork worthy of a congressional subcommittee. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Nobody tells me what stories to run. Or not to run. To hell with it.” And he was out the door.

  I watched through the plate glass as he strode toward his desk.

  I hadn’t intended to write the series. My goal was more basic than that. I wanted to determine why Maggie died and whether it came back to my insistence on her doing more than a simple rehash of the unsolved crimes.

  Now I, too, had to make a decision.

  I rubbed my temple. I was beginning to feel like the metal duck in a shooting gallery. There was no place to run, no way to dodge. I didn’t need this. But it wasn’t going to go away.

  My phone rang.

  I almost didn’t answer. My ankle blazed with pain. My head ached. I needed a respite. But I also needed to face Susan and get it over with.

  “Hello.”

  “Mrs. Collins.”

  I recognized Lieutenant Urschel’s husky voice. I didn’t peg his tone more than a degree above frost. So much for our earlier, almost-friendly accord.

  “Been in your office all afternoon?”

  Ping, ping, ping. Again I had a mental image of the battered little yellow metal duck in the shooting gallery.

  “No.”

  Urschel waited.

  I did, too.

  “Any reason not to say where you’ve been this afternoon, Mrs. Collins?” Anger made his voice even raspier than usual.

  “No.” I opened my desk drawer, fished around for the bottle of ibuprofen. I shook out a tablet.

  “So where have you been?” He was as relentless as cresting floodwater.

  I added a second pill, poured some water into a cup from the pitcher I keep on a credenza.

  It’s always dangerous to lie. But I had no choice. “County jail. Then I timed the drive between Maggie Winslow’s apartment and the J-School.” I swallowed the tablets.

  The silence between us bristled.

  “Clever.” But it wasn’t said in admiration. “The apartment-house manager reported seeing an MG like yours. But I’ll tell you something, Mrs. Collins, we’ve got your prints on record from that secretary’s murder a few years ago. If I find your prints in Maggie Winslow’s apartment, you’re in trouble.”

  “You won’t.” Thank God for gloves. “I understand from the city editor that somebody broke into her apartment.”

  After a pause, he said without expression, “A pane in the window over the kitchen sink was smashed. Somebody climbed in. Knocked a deodorizer on the floor. The manager saw the gate swinging open about three o’clock, checked, and

  found the broken window. The back door was open.”

  The intruder had left in a hurry, just as I had. “Was anything taken? Or destroyed?”

  “What do you have in mind?” It was as close to silky as I’d heard his rough voice come.

  Tired as I was, I grinned, but Br’er Rabbit wasn’t going to get caught in that brier patch. “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see, Maggie worked on a computer, of course. Was it intact? How about her files? Had anyone been into them?”

  “We haven’t turned on the computer.”

  “Lieutenant, I hope you will check it out.” I said it very pleasantly, my voice low-key, with no hint of criticism. I wanted to regroup with this man. There’d been a break in his aloof-cop demeanor once. If it happened once, it could happen again. I didn’t blame him for being angry. If I were a cop, I’d despise smart-ass civilians who didn’t follow the rules.

  And, of course, I desperately wanted him to turn on that computer. If he did, it would reflect that a file had been called up this afternoon. That should get his attention.

  “Maggie Winslow’s computer files have nothing to do with Mrs. Duffy.”

  “But Mrs. Duffy couldn’t have broken into the apartment, Lieutenant.”

  “Right.” His tone was thoughtful. Then, abruptly, sharply, he demanded, “You swear you didn’t break in there?”

  I hadn’t broken in. So my answer was quick, easy, and truthful. “I did not, Lieutenant.”

  “Hmm.”

  I liked this man. I liked him a lot. I could feel his mood changing. He was thinking.

  “Nothing appeared to have been touched since I was there yesterday morning. Except the filing cabinets. One drawer was pulled out.”

  “Oh?”

  “And somebody’d been in the bathroom. We had to get in through the window.”

  “Somebody locked the bathroom door from the inside?”

  “It wouldn’t open,” he said dryly. He didn’t intend to describe the rod jammed beneath the door.

  And I, of course, knew nothing of that. “That seems very odd. But it certainly indicates something is going on—and, as I said before, Mrs. Duffy most certainly can’t be involved, and what you’ve described doesn’t sound like the work of a petty thief. So let’s focus on what matters. Someone broke into Maggie’s apartment. There has to be a reason.”

  “Maybe somebody is trying to divert attention from Mrs. Duffy.” He wasn’t altogether convinced of my innocence.

  “No, Lieutenant.” My answer was firm. And truthful. Then I asked briskly, “Was anything taken?” I sipped from my water. My throat and mouth were dry.

  “Nothing, so far as we know. The obvious stuff—the TV, CD player, the computer—wasn’t touched.”

  “How about Maggie’s notebook? As I recall, she took notes in a small brown leather notebook. Was that in the apartment?”

  There was a silence, a rustle of papers. “I don’t have a record of a notebook.”

  “There should be a notebook, Lieutenant. Was it in her purse? Or her car?” Maggie’s purse had lain forlornly beside her body. Her car had been found in the J-School lot.

  Another pause, another rattle of paper. “It wasn’t in either the purse or the car.”

  “Where is it? Lieutenant, that notebook’s important.”

  “It could turn up.”

  I didn’t answer that.

  Now Urschel had to be concerned about the notebook—as I truly was concerned—and now, too, he couldn’t be sure just what the break-in at Maggie’s meant.

  Yes, he might like to think I’d been nosing around there. But he couldn’t be certain.

  “If nothing valuable is missing—”

  His interruption was swift. “As far as we know.”

  “I understand, Lieutenant, but the stuff a petty thief looks for wasn’t touched. Right?”

  “What’s your point, Mrs. Collins?”

  “Okay, that knocks out the idea of somebody reading about Maggie’s murder and deciding to pull a spur-ofthe-moment burglary. What does that leave?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Maggie’s murderer.”

  “Mrs. Collins, if somebody besides Mrs. Duffy killed that girl, all that person has to do is sit still, be cool. Why break into that apartment? We’d already looked it over. Any fool would know that’s the first place we would check out. What possible reason—”

  “The interview with Dennis Duffy in this mor
ning’s paper, Lieutenant. That’s what stirred up the murderer. This killer has felt safe for a long time—

  maybe twenty years. Until Maggie found out something, and that’s why she had to die. Now the murderer’s scared there might be some hint of what she found in her apartment.”

  “No way, Mrs. Collins.” He was supremely confident. “Winslow was strangled Wednesday night. Her purse was found with her body. Her car keys and key to her apartment were in it. The perp could easily have gone to her apartment sometime after he killed her, knowing nobody was there, and searched in absolute safety.”

  I looked through the plate glass across the newsroom at Dennis, hunched close to his computer. “But on Wednesday night the murderer felt confident the only person who was looking into the unsolved crimes would never look again. Lieutenant, I’m certain Maggie’s notebook was taken by whoever killed her. And the murderer felt safe until this morning, when The Clarion ran that interview with Dennis, all about the earlier crimes and the articles that I’m going to write—using Maggie’s notes.”

  “That’s a fascinating theory, Mrs. Collins. You can share it with the defense.”

  I gently massaged my temple. God, how could I convince Urschel?

  “Lieutenant, you must find Maggie’s notebook.”

  “We’ll look for it.” A pause, then a brisk, “And I’ll check out her computer.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant.” And I meant it.

  “All right, Mrs. Collins—”

  Before he could say good-bye, I said quickly, “One more thing, Lieutenant. I’d like to ask your help.”

  “The case is closed, Mrs. Collins.” He was pleasant but firm.

  “Yes, this case is closed. For now. But there are three famous Derry Hills crimes that have never been solved. I’m asking your help with those unsolved cases.”

  He answered carefully. “Information in open files is confidential.”

  “I know that. But I simply want some facts. My questions will in no way compromise your investigations.”

  I was startled when he gave a snort of amusement. “You’re really something, lady. I bet they’ll carve ‘Never Give Up’ on your tombstone.”

  I grinned. “Not, I hope, for a few more years. But, Lieutenant, I’d really appreciate—”