A Sensitive Kind of Murder (A Kate Jasper Mystery)

by Girdner, Jaqueline

  “Sorry,” Wayne muttered. “All the lies in the group are getting to me.”

  “A lack of disclosure is not a lie,” Janet proclaimed and slammed the glass door in our faces.

  “If Steve’s death wasn’t enough, the lies, the evasions, will destroy Heartlink,” Wayne explained to the closed door. Then he turned from the door and whispered, “I give up.”

  I led him back outside by the hand.

  “Maybe we should have called first,” I said as gently as I could once we were inside the Toyota again. Wayne had not insisted on driving.

  Dorothy giggled.

  It was infectious. When we thought of their sexual antics, all the tensions the Kimmochis had inspired seemed to disappear. I laughed, and even Wayne grinned unexpectedly.

  “We should have waited till she tied him up,” I added, and Wayne’s grin turned into a much-needed belly laugh.

  A few miles down the road, Wayne said, “Tell me if I’m ever being a complete jerk again.”

  “A complete jerk or just a jerk?” I asked innocently. We all laughed. The Three Musketeers were back in form for sleuthing.

  “Who was your group facilitator, again?” Dorothy asked Wayne after a few minutes.

  “Oh, that’s right, Ray,” Wayne answered, his face brightening. “We can still talk to Ray. He helped Steve and me start the group. He met all the members. He even facilitated the original group, then turned it over to Steve and me. Let’s go see him.”

  “Call first,” Dorothy and I ordered together.

  I found a pay phone outside a convenience store, and Wayne made the call. It would have been nice for Wayne to have used his cell phone, but it was locked inside his impounded Jaguar.

  Ray was at home. The ramp to his front door should have given me a clue to his condition, but I was surprised that the man who opened the door, dogs barking all around him, was in a wheelchair. I didn’t ask why.

  “Sit, all of you!” Ray roared, and amazingly, the four black Labrador retrievers sat. Ray rolled forward.

  “It’s been a while,” Wayne said. “Too long.”

  “Good to see you, too, man,” Ray replied. Wayne bent down and gave him a one-shouldered squeeze.

  “My wife, Kate, and her aunt Dorothy,” Wayne introduced us briefly. “This is Ray, the man I told you about.”

  Ray smiled, his weathered brown skin wrinkling. He was actually a very attractive man, I realized. And then I stopped myself. I shouldn’t be noticing if he was attractive or not. One of the labs whined and wriggled forward, tongue ready to lick. Ray ignored him.

  “Glad to meet you all,” he pronounced politely. He pulled his wheelchair back, and his dogs moved with him. “Grab your seats.”

  Wayne, Dorothy, and I all squeezed onto an old plaid couch, the dogs eyeing us as if we were chew toys.

  “Damn, I was sorry to hear about Steve Summers. His death is a real tragedy. Hard to believe.”

  I wondered if Ray was one of the few people to really grasp the fact that Steve had been murdered. And maybe one of the few who really liked him.

  “Steve was a good man,” Wayne said, and this time he was met with no argument or hesitation.

  “Yeah, Steve seemed like an ideal co-facilitator,” Ray agreed. “Honest, committed, willing to keep confidences. The whole purpose of these groups is to build community and friendship.” Ray shook his head and reached down, burying his hand in the fur of one of the dogs near his wheelchair. “When I heard he’d been killed coming from the group, with your car, no less, I gotta admit I freaked a little.”

  “That’s the problem, Ray,” Wayne explained. “We’re pretty sure the murderer is one of the group members or one of the members’—”

  “Sigos,” my aunt finished for him. She just loved her new word.

  “Why?” Ray demanded, leaning forward in his chair.

  “Um…” I began. Had we told Dorothy this part yet?

  “The spare key to my car was lifted from Kate’s purse at a potluck,” Wayne explained. Obviously, he trusted this man. But of course, Ray wasn’t a suspect. “Haven’t told anyone else,” Wayne added. “Confidential.”

  “Understood,” Ray said, leaning back in his chair.

  I turned and glanced at Aunt Dorothy. She was just nodding as if she’d known already.

  “Damn,” Ray muttered. “I remember all the guys in your group. We tried to screen out anyone who seemed too unstable.”

  “Ray, give us your feedback,” Wayne suggested. “Tell us what you thought of the members.”

  “At this point, you probably know them better than I do,” Ray told him. “But I’ll give it a shot. Steve, well, Steve was quiet but observant, a good listener. Though he could have opened up more.”

  “Did you know Steve outside of the group?” Dorothy asked.

  Ray shook his head, and then offered a brief synopsis of each of the other group members. I wondered as he spoke whether I would have done the same synopses myself. According to Ray, Ted needed a chance to turn his attention outward, to make real connections with others. Garrett needed to care more for himself. Van was self-destructive, but needed the support to change. Carl knew how to give support, but needed the approval of others. And then he came to Isaac.

  “Isaac has a problem with alcohol. But he’s sharp, a lot sharper that he lets on. Isaac notices everyone and everything that’s happening. If I were you, I’d talk to Isaac again.”

  So the three of us all piled into my Toyota once more and headed toward Cortadura.

  No one answered when Dorothy knocked on the door of Isaac’s condo, but the door opened an inch or so with every knock. Whether he was inside or out, Isaac hadn’t bothered to close his door, much less to lock it.

  Aunt Dorothy frowned. “Oh, dear. We should go in and check on Isaac,” she said after her final knock. “He might be in some kind of trouble.”

  Alcohol trouble, I thought, but kept my mouth shut. Then Wayne and I looked at each other. His face had a look I knew well, a look that said “no” as loudly as C. C. could yowl when going to the vet’s office.

  “We might learn something,” I muttered.

  “It’s still not right,” Wayne declared.

  “Look, he left the door open—”

  “How would you like it if Isaac came into our house if we left the door open?”

  “This is different—”

  That’s when we realized that Dorothy wasn’t with us any longer. She was inside Isaac’s condo.

  And she was screaming.

  - Fourteen -

  I saw my own expression reflected on Wayne’s face: panic. And then we both rushed through Isaac Herrick’s open door. We looked around the living room but saw only the same collection of furniture, bottles, books, and miscellany that had been there on our previous visit. I ran a few steps down the hall and entered the first doorway on the right. It was dark in the room, but I could see my Aunt Dorothy there. She’d stopped screaming and was just staring now, staring down, her shoulders rolled forward and her hands clasped in front of her protectively. I followed her eyes and saw a bed—Isaac’s bed? It had to be. I looked back up. My mind seemed exquisitely clear as I walked toward Dorothy. I felt as if I could have seen a pin in the dark, as if I could have heard a bird chirping in the next county. But all I was really hearing was the beating of my own heart.

  Then, once I was close enough to my aunt, close enough to the bed, I turned my head, and I saw. And what I saw was Isaac Herrick, but it wasn’t Isaac Herrick. It was a corpse. Even in the darkened room, I could tell that the purple and blue skin shades didn’t belong on a live person; nor did the pale lips and nails. Only the Hawaiian shirt and khaki pants lent a gruesome normalcy to the body. Isaac Herrick was dead. I didn’t need to touch him to be sure.

  I closed my eyes and felt the room turn over, or maybe it was my stomach. I couldn’t tell anymore. My heart was pounding too loud.

  Then I heard a new sound.

  “Katie?” someone whimpered. “K
atie?”

  I forced my eyes open. Aunt Dorothy. She looked at me now, away from the bed and its grizzly contents.

  “It’ll be okay,” someone said.

  For a moment, I thought I’d said it would be okay, but then I realized that it was Wayne who’d actually mouthed those words from behind me.

  I opened my arms, and my aunt’s tiny body was pressed against me instantly. I closed my arms around her. I didn’t know what to say.

  I felt Wayne’s warm hands on my shoulders, and strength seemed to pour into me. Isaac was dead, and my elderly aunt was in shock. I had to act.

  “Katie, it’s Isaac!” Dorothy shouted, pushing out of my arms suddenly. “How can he be dead? He was alive this morning.”

  “Let me take you out of here,” I finally whispered.

  “Yes, dear,” Dorothy agreed mildly. “Isaac wouldn’t want to be seen like this.”

  Outside, on the sidewalk, the air was bright and incredibly sweet. The noise of traffic, insects, and voices hummed around us. My body ached, inside and out.

  Wayne stood in silence with Dorothy and me for a moment, then made a dialing gesture with his hand and reentered Isaac’s condo. I guessed that he was going to call the police.

  “They’ll say it was a heart attack,” Dorothy burst out. “Just because Isaac was old. But you know it wasn’t a heart attack just as well as I do, Katie.”

  “Why?” I said. I didn’t know what I knew yet.

  “Isaac said he had an idea who’d killed Steve Summers, and he was going to check it out, remember?” my aunt said. I had a feeling she wasn’t in shock anymore. I wasn’t sure if I was.

  “So, you think that someone killed him when he tried to check it out?”

  “That must be it, dear,” Aunt Dorothy proclaimed, straightening her spine. She was almost five feet tall now.

  “But who?”

  “We’ll find out,” my aunt assured me. Then the new confidence in her face faded. She looked stricken. “Helen,” she whispered.

  “Oh, no,” I whispered back, closing my eyes. Helen. Not another widow. Divorcing him or not, Helen seemed to have sincerely loved Isaac.

  “I know you might not have seen it, Katie, but Isaac was a charming man in his own way. He just mentioned that the emperor had no clothes a few times too many for most. And he drank. He drank even when Claude and I knew him. But he had kindness, and he had a good wit.”

  I believed her; I’d seen his kindness when she’d told him Uncle Claude had passed way. And yes, he’d had wit.

  “I’ll find out who killed him,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  “We will,” I expanded, putting my arm around her shoulder.

  “Thank you, Katie,” she chirped.

  And then we heard sirens.

  Wayne came out of the house to join us.

  “The police are on their way,” he explained. “Captain Wooster has been notified.”

  The police car screamed its way to the curb, and then the same two officers who’d arrived after Steve’s death jumped out of their marked vehicle. Before they’d even had a chance to speak, the paramedics pulled in behind them. After a few words with Wayne, the paramedics went scrambling into Isaac Herrick’s condo, along with the police. Finally, the last car pulled up, unmarked. The back driver’s side door opened and Captain Wooster pushed himself out of the seat. Sergeant Marge hopped out of the right side, and we all stared at each other.

  Captain Wooster hadn’t gotten any better looking since the last time we’d seen him. You could still have hung a hat off of his jutting jaw, his nostrils still looked like he’d smelled something bad, and his eyes hadn’t gotten any friendlier. At least Sergeant Marge smiled our way.

  “Hell’s bells!” Wooster exploded. “You two again? Who’d you run over this time?”

  “No one was run over,” Wayne said, his voice filled with a deliberate calm that didn’t match the tension of his body. “I called in the…the death.”

  “Isaac Herrick was murdered!” my Aunt Dorothy exclaimed.

  Captain Wooster’s mean eyes narrowed to two thin lines under his eyebrows as he turned toward my aunt.

  “Who in all creation are you?” he demanded.

  Dorothy narrowed her mascaraed eyes back at him. “My name is Dorothy Koffenburger. I’m Kate Jasper’s aunt. And I was Isaac Herrick’s friend.”

  “You’re not one of those goofy group people—”

  “No, I am not. I am neither a group member nor a sigo. I knew Isaac when I was younger—”

  “What century?” Wooster asked, then leaned back his head and neighed through his equine nostrils.

  “That’s enough, young man,” my aunt admonished him. She stepped forward and looked up into his face. “I’m sure you weren’t raised to make fun of the elderly. Or to harass innocent citizens.”

  “But—”

  “Answer me,” Dorothy ordered. “Do you believe you’re behaving in a dignified manner?”

  “I’m just doing—”

  “Is it doing your job to try to embarrass an old woman and to make fun of a serious situation? Shouldn’t you be trying to find out why Isaac Herrick was murdered?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Wooster finally conceded, looking at the ground.

  I could hear the sound of choked laughter coming my way from Sergeant Marge. I just hoped the captain couldn’t hear it.

  “If you three will stay here with Sergeant Abbott, I’ll just go check the situation in the house,” Wooster announced quietly. He turned and strode into the darkness of Isaac’s doorway.

  “Heh-heh-heh,” I heard, and looked up to see Sergeant Marge Abbott, red-faced, laughing into her hand.

  Dorothy looked at her, too, and smiled unexpectedly.

  “Petty tyrants are the worst,” Aunt Dorothy offered.

  “I’d work a week of overtime to have gotten that on tape,” Sergeant Marge responded. “‘Yes, ma’am,’” she mimicked in a deep voice. “Har-har-har.”

  Luckily, she’d stopped laughing by the time Captain Wooster rejoined us on the sidewalk.

  “How in purgatory did you know that Herrick was murdered?” he asked my aunt.

  “Because he told us he had an idea who the murderer was,” she replied calmly. “How do you know?”

  “The eyes,” he told us. “You can tell by the eyes when someone’s been smothered. People think it’ll look like a heart attack, but—”

  Dorothy blanched at the word “smothered.” For all of her guessing, I don’t think she’d really known she was right till Captain Wooster said so.

  “Ma’am?” the captain said. “You all right, ma’am?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, adding a wan smile. “And thank you so much for asking.”

  Our interrogation was polite—or as polite as it could be, as we were standing on a sidewalk buzzing with gawkers and police personnel. But it was long.

  The events leading to our discovery of Isaac’s body were dealt with exhaustively, and then we discussed our morning conversation with the dead man.

  “Did Mr. Herrick give any indication who he suspected?” Captain Wooster asked.

  Then he asked the same question at least twenty more times in twenty different ways, with all due courtesy and respect. Dorothy seemed to be faring the best through these questions. I could feel Wayne stiffening into stone beside me, and my own body was dissolving into a state that felt like sandpapered pudding.

  Finally, the captain seemed to run out of questions.

  “You’ve been with your niece and her husband since the last time you saw Mr. Herrick alive?” he asked once more.

  “I certainly was, Captain,” Dorothy answered.

  Wooster narrowed his eyes at us and then sighed. “I guess you might as well go,” he said.

  And we did. Quickly.

  “It’s lucky Captain Wooster doesn’t have the imagination to believe a woman over eighty might conspire in murder,” Dorothy commented on the way home in the car.

  We all trie
d to laugh, but we were laughed out. For all that had happened, Isaac Herrick was well and truly dead.

  “Will the captain tell Helen?” my aunt asked a few miles later.

  Wayne grunted something that sounded like an affirmative.

  “Two widows,” I muttered. “Is there a pattern here? Is someone killing off the husbands of the Heartlink group?”

  Wayne gave me a startled look. “You’re my wife,” he said slowly.

  “Yeah,” I answered. I’d already figured that part out. I pulled into our driveway, popping gravel.

  We tramped up the stairs, each in our own world of misery. Dorothy was grieving for Isaac. And I would have guessed that Wayne was, too, as well as for this latest blow to the Heartlink group. I felt so sorry for Helen and Laura. And I was frightened: Could someone be planning Wayne’s murder right now?

  “Hey, guys!” someone yelled, not far from us.

  I looked up. Felix Byrne stood at our front door.

  “No,” I said. It was too soon for him to know about Isaac’s death. “How did you find—”

  “Kate, ya gotta help me,” he interrupted. “Is Brother Ingenio a fraud?”

  I blinked.

  “Janis said he wasn’t a fraud, but, hey, the man’s a friggin’ wacko—”

  “Janis?” I asked.

  “Janis Joplin,” he answered. “Brother Ingenio channels Janis Joplin and all these other cool rockers.”

  “Janis Joplin is dead,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah, but Brother Ingenio can channel her and Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, all of them.”

  “You mean,” I said slowly, working it out as I went along, “that Brother Ingenio’s mouth is channeling these dead rockers, and it’s his mouth that’s telling you he’s not a fraud?”

  “Yeah. Cool, huh?”

  “Cool,” I said wearily. I was just glad he didn’t know about Isaac.

  “But Kate, I still don’t understand. See, Brother Ingenio is so far friggin’ out, I can’t tell if he’s really a looney, ya know. But I dreamt about you, Kate. You had the answer.”

  “What answer?”