Murder, She Did

by Gillian Roberts

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Gillian Roberts and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Murder, She Did

  One Beautiful Body

  Where’s the Harm in That?

  What’s a Woman to Do?

  After Happily Ever

  Fury Duty

  Clear Sailing

  Ellie’s Chair

  Love Is a Many Splintered Thing

  Murder, She Did

  The Old Wife’s Tale

  Goodbye, Sue Ellen

  Heart Break

  The Shrine of Miki

  Hog Heaven

  Murder, She Did

  By Gillian Roberts

  Copyright 2014 by Judith Greber

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print:

  “One Beautiful Body,” Women of Mystery II, 1994

  “Where’s the Harm in That?,” Funny Bones, 1997

  “What’s a Woman to Do?,” Sisters in Crime, Vol. 5, 1992

  “After Happily Ever,” Once Upon a Crime, 1998

  “Fury Duty,” Sisters in Crime, Vol. 3, 1990

  “Clear Sailing,” Mom, Apple Pie and Murder, 1999

  “Ellie’s Chair,” Murder Most Crafty, 2005

  “Love Is a Many Splintered Thing,” Ellery Queen Magazine

  “Murder, She Did,” Murder, They Wrote II, 1998

  “The Old Wife’s Tale,” Ellery Queen Magazine, 2007

  “Goodbye, Sue Ellen,” Speaking of Greed, 2001

  “Heart Break,” Irreconcilable Differences, 1999

  “The Shrine of Miki,” previously titled “The Shrine of Eleanor,” Cat Crimes Takes a Vacation, 1995

  “Hog Heaven,” The Best of Sisters in Crime, 1997

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Gillian Roberts and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Caught Dead in Philadelphia

  Philly Stakes

  I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia

  With Friends Like These…

  How I Spent My Summer Vacation

  In the Dead of Summer

  The Mummers' Curse

  The Bluest Blood

  Adam and Evil

  Helen Hath No Fury

  Claire and Present Danger

  Till the End of Tom

  A Hole in Juan

  All’s Well That Ends

  You Can Write a Mystery

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  Murder, She Did

  Gillian Roberts

  One Beautiful Body

  English teachers do not have power lunches.

  It took a while to get this concept across to Ivy Jean Hoffman, but then, we moved in different circles.

  I was surprised to find Ivy Jean still in Philadelphia. I had thought she’d moved on as literally as she had figuratively. I was still more surprised to find her in my neighborhood, and I was stupefied to find her in a supermarket, since she and food have been at war longer than the Arabs and the Israelis. Then I noticed that her cart contained nothing to chew or slurp or gnaw. It was piled high with non-edibles. A dozen boxes of designer facial tissues, an industrial-sized aluminum foil, bundles of soap, three colors of toilet paper, and five boxes of plastic wrap. I wondered what leftovers she wrapped in the plastic and foil.

  “Amanda Pepper!” she chirped. “I don’t believe it!” Which gives you an idea of her sincerity. She knew my center-city address and she also knew that unlike her, I ate, so why shouldn’t she believe I’d forage for food in my own neighborhood?

  We sent make-believe kisses across our carts. Ivy’s face barely moved. Way back when we were both eleven years old, she mastered the starlet’s wide-eyed amazed stare to avoid building future wrinkles.

  “I live right across the square now,” she said. I was not going to join Welcome Wagon.

  “Finished redoing our condo this morning.”

  Maybe that’s what she’d encase in plastic wrap.

  “You have to see it. Must be time for our annual lunch, anyway.” She pulled an organizer out of an alligator bag and flipped pages, looking for a window of opportunity in which to fit me. “Oh, dear,” she murmured, “no wonder I’m stressed out.”

  I explained why I, too, would have difficulty making a date. With five sections of English, one study hall, one yearbook meeting, and sporadic lunch duty, I didn’t “lunch.” Furthermore, my school’s definition of an hour was as skimpy as a psychiatrist’s, though less well paid.

  Ivy Jean Hoffman responded to the facts of my life with incredulity. “I can’t believe you stand for being treated like a slave!” Her outrage made it clear, as it was intended to, that she was treated and paid extremely well and I was a mere lackey. “But we have to get together,” she wailed. “Isn’t there any time at all?”

  We both knew weeks had more than five days, but we also knew that Saturday and Sunday were for fun, not for each other. “I have a free period after lunch Thursdays,” I said. If I didn’t prepare lesson plans or meet with disgruntled students, I could extract an hour and a half midday.

  “But Thursday’s perfect! This coming one I’m having the reunion committee to lunch. Nikki and I are co-chairs.” Nikki was another high-school acquaintance and Ivy’s business partner. “You zip over, you hear?” Sometimes Ivy played Southern Belle, although the high school she was reuniting had been just slightly west of Philadelphia.

  “I really don’t want to be on the reunion committee,” I said.

  “I hear you. Come anyway, Mandy. It’ll be fun!”

  I doubted that. Ivy Jean was a legacy. Our mothers had been close friends and so desperately wanted us to follow suit that the fact that we disliked each other from conception on didn’t matter. Year after year, Ivy and I shared celebrations: we sat next to each other at The Nutcracker each December at the Academy of Music; we watched our dads burn burgers on July Fourth; we rode the waves at Beach Haven and even shared a high-school graduation party.

  And still and all, Ivy—to me—was selfish, shallow, and stupid, and I was—to her—bookish, unstylish, and boring.

  But when we were finally, happily separated in college, Ivy’s mother died in a terrible automobile crash. Embarrassingly soon after, her father married a creature who kept forgetting there was such a person as Ivy and, somehow, Ivy’s father’s memory also failed. Ivy’s bed was donated to Goodwill and the room quickly filled with cribs for newborn twin boys. That’s about when Ivy began using me as a touchstone, proof that she did, indeed, exist.

  She was obnoxious, self-obsessed, and unreliable, but she was also truly unmoored and lost. She gave a new meaning to the word insecure. It seemed little enough to shore her up, give her a personal history fix, prove that somebody rememb
ered her. I was her past. And that is why, once a year, two women who didn’t like each other nonetheless “did” lunch. Our table talk was always the same. First, we validated the past with a round of nostalgia in which celebrations remembered were infinitely more pleasurable than they’d been when actually lived. Then we validated her present. We did Ivy—Ivy’s face, Ivy’s body, Ivy’s food, Ivy’s problems, Ivy’s business, and Ivy’s husband, all of which topics were basically interchangeable.

  Ivy had been an unpopular child. She was convinced this had been due to her having been plain and pudgy.

  I thought her obsessive concern with her appearance would subside once she snared Mitchell and married him, but I’d been wrong. Their marriage wasn’t the answer to anything. Body size was. Ivy knew the caloric count of every menu listing in North America and the details of every get-thin-quick scam. I have “lunched” with her when she ate only red meat, only bananas, only protein, only carbohydrates, only beans and rice, only fruit, only fruit juice, only water. I listened to details of spas visited, diet gurus consulted, wraps and massages attempted, and lipos suctioned. I listened and nodded. Now and then I said she would kill herself dieting. “You’ll be a beautiful corpse,” I’d say. An old joke, but she never laughed.

  In the gospel according to Ivy Jean, goodness equaled thinness. Virtue equaled trimness, success equaled freedom from cellulite. Her single measure of man—or woman—was the span of the waist, hips, and thighs. Evil was “letting yourself go.”

  Five years ago, Ivy Jean turned her private obsession into public cash. She co-created “The You Within,” or TYW to the initiated, a high-priced diet boutique that promised not only to unveil the thin woman smothered inside your flab, but to outfit her, style her hair, and set her free.

  A ripe and timely idea. Ivy and Nikki now had three clinics and a fourth due to open. There was talk of nationwide franchising.

  I bent over my grocery cart and camouflaged my half gallon of ice cream with a low-cal TV dinner. “Sounds like things are going wonderfully for you.”

  She rolled her eyes. Eyeballs never wrinkled, so she was fairly free with hers. “There’s a reason I stock up on aspirin.” And indeed, an economy-size bottle of extra-strength headache pills contained the only ingestible items in her basket. “Just between us,” she said, “I haven’t been too brilliant about picking partners. I’m talking business and marriage.”

  I knew her anxiety was sincere because she scowled, activating muscles and risking lines. “I wouldn’t tell anybody but you,” she continued, “because you’re practically family, but Nikki makes me so nervous the way she fights over every penny the business needs—and I eat when I’m nervous and I’m becoming a house—and what will that do to my business? Nothing fits and I have a TV spot for TYW to shoot next week! An ad! She’s destroying me, and if she—” She stopped herself, looking momentarily confused. Once off the topic of herself, she was on unsteady ground. “And you?” she finally said with an air of discovery. “What’s new?”

  “Nothing much. Still teaching.”

  “And men?”

  “Kind of.” I didn’t think she could understand the allure of my now and then, mostly now, thing with a homicide cop like C.K. Mackenzie. After all, it was my opinion that Ivy’s husband Mitchell could be replaced by a boa constrictor—as long as the snake was rich—and nobody, most of all Ivy, would notice.

  There was talk that Ivy Jean craved husbands—anybody’s—the way other women lusted for chocolate. She had even once computed how many calories were burned at an assignation.

  “Hmmm,” Ivy said, spotting the Rocky Road in my cart. “Ice cream. Sixty percent fat. You know my saying: a minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” She seemed much cheerier, buoyed like a missionary who’d stumbled across a native worshiping tree roots. “I have a wonderful chart of fat percentages I want to share with you on Thursday,” she said. “And don’t worry. Lunch will be simple. I’ll make something light.”

  *

  The elevator deposited me in the foyer of Ivy’s condo. The others were already there—partner Nikki and five other former classmates, all contemplating Ivy’s locked door. We rang, knocked, chitted and chatted, but by twelve-fifteen, I was hungry and edgy.

  “She does this all the time,” Nikki grumbled. “Most unreliable—”

  “I’m going downstairs,” I said. “The lobby has chairs. And a phone. I’ll call her. Maybe she fell asleep. Anybody want to join me?”

  We all packed into the small elevator and descended. The lobby was not much larger than Ivy’s foyer and it had a total of three chairs. We became excessively polite and democratic, which meant that none of us used the chairs. We all stood in a clump near a woman in a glow-in-the-dark lime outfit. She guarded a large carton filled with Styrofoam containers. “Mrs. Hoffman expected me half an hour ago,” she whispered harshly at the guard. “I’m her caterer.”

  “But ma’am, I buzzed her apartment. She isn’t home.” He wore a cranberry uniform trimmed smartly in gold braid, but he looked defeated, as if he’d been drummed out of the corps but allowed to keep the costume.

  “You don’t understand! She wanted me out before her—she’s expecting—” She finally noticed us, did a quick count, added one for the missing hostess, and her shoulders sagged. She lowered her voice, but we could all still hear her. “She didn’t want her guests to know I’m doing the—”

  So the simple and light thing Ivy made was a telephone call. It didn’t really surprise me. Ivy was afraid of touching food, as if calories could be absorbed through the fingertips.

  “Couldn’t I set up and leave?” The caterer was frantic. “Now my next order’s late, too. I’m going to lose every client I have! Please?”

  The guard considered her, her carton, and the unscary seven of us. “Well,” he said, “she did tell me about this little party of hers. I have the guest list, so if I could double-check your names, ladies, I don’t see why I couldn’t let you into Mrs. Hoffman’s.” Slowly, slowly, demanding driver’s licenses and a major credit card for I.D., he went through the list.

  While the first of our group went through the guard’s routine, Nikki seemed to lose it, but quietly. “Damn Ivy. Completely inconsiderate and self-centered. She probably forgot. Found something more exciting, like aerobics in bed. A nooner. With whoever.”

  “Whomever,” I murmured.

  “You shouldn’t say that, Nikki!” For a second, I thought I had an ally, but Barby White wasn’t talking grammar. I could see her eyes moisten.

  “Sorry!” Nikki snapped. “I didn’t say who, did I?”

  Whom, I said, but silently.

  Barby White sniffed.

  “Well, then,” Nikki said, “if the shoe fits, wear it.”

  Bad grammar and excessive use of clichés. It was obvious that Nikki was no good.

  “You’re so mean!” Barby wailed.

  “Come on,” Nikki said. “Grow up. Sometimes the truth hurts, but knowledge is power. You’ll get over it and so will he. He’ll come back. Ivy has a short attention span.”

  The guard called Nikki’s name.

  Barby stood to my right, by herself. Her skin flushed, then drained, pale to beet-borscht red to pasty bloodlessness.

  I was almost as stunned as she. Zoological images filled my brain. Nikki was a snake, a cat, a cur, a rat. The rest of the reunion committee seemed to agree. I heard a whispered chorus of reactions on my left.

  “That was way, way below the belt.”

  “But Barby must have known, don’t you think? I mean if we did, surely she must!”

  “It was obvious that she knew. Why else would she react that way? But all the same…”

  “I don’t think she did. The wife’s always last. Besides, would Barby be on Ivy’s committee if she knew?”

  The guard decided that Nikki was who she was and called Barby. Looking loose and flabby, like one who had definitely Let Herself Go, Barby turned to nobody in particular and said, “My husband wouldn�
��t sleep with that broomstick.” But she walked to the guard like someone drugged.

  “Neither will Ivy’s husband,” somebody said. “His girlfriends tend to be voluptuous.”

  One by one we were okayed by the guard and then finally admitted into the absolute splendor of Ivy Jean Hoffman’s abode. Muted, exquisite colors were on the glazed walls, oversized paintings, bleached and waxed floors, rich fabrics, fresh flowers in exquisite vases. It was, in short, your generic incredibly rich person’s living room.

  We whispered, as if in a museum, running reverent light hands over smooth woods and exquisite accessories, and then we sank into downy sofas and waited.

  And waited some more. Half my break time and all my patience were now completely gone. “I’m going to have to leave,” I said.

  “Me, too,” another woman said. “Do you think I could take a peek around before I go?”

  “Might as well while you can.” Nikki’s mood seemed permanently soured ever since the altercation with Barby. “The creditors will probably be up to repossess it before the next reunion committee meeting.”

  She greeted our shocked expressions with a shrug. “It’s no big secret. Ivy’s uncontrolled spending on this place has Mitchell near bankruptcy. He’s always saying so.”

  “He must be using hyperbole,” I suggested.

  “I don’t know who he’s using,” Nikki said. “But I know he probably couldn’t afford anybody too expensive anymore.”

  “Exaggerating,” I said. “Using a figure of speech.”

  Nikki raised an eyebrow. “I know Ivy and her spending, so I doubt that he’s hyper anything.”

  Maybe because our curiosity was the only thing we could feed, we began investigating, heading for the kitchen first, perhaps hoping for a stray grape or cracker. Instead, we found a twenty-first-century laboratory, a prototype for a space station, with not an alien microbe in sight. Except for what the harried caterer had forgotten to remove. A Styrofoam container and two salad dressing lids lay on the black granite counter. I personally thought plastic pollutants were a wonderful touch, and very much in keeping with the futuristic theme, but somebody joked about how angry Ivy would be. On behalf of the caterer’s future, I tidied up. It took a while to find the compactor and when I did, it was filled to the brim with more Styrofoam boxes floating atop a sea of plastic wrap, but I shoved my trash in, slammed the gizmo shut, and pushed the button to squeeze it all in. Ivy’s kitchen was now the way she liked things—devoid of any sign of life.