Summer Garden Murder

by Ann Ripley

  They heard a knock, and Lieutenant Trace came in. “Folks, I think you’d better come out and have a look.”

  Louise felt like a sleepwalker. She walked slowly out the front door with Bill and Sam trailing behind her. She turned around and exchanged a despairing glance at her husband when she saw the press people milling in Dogwood Court. They followed Lieutenant Trace the thirty feet to the yard’s boundary. Even now, at eight-thirty, the sun shone down on half a dozen police technicians and a deep excavation that once was a growing onion patch. The carefully stacked timbers that supported both ends of the little garden had been dismantled and set in a neat pile. Black dirt was scattered in a wide circle. Because the soil was tilled for planting, it had been a quick job to dig it out. No one had bothered to save the onion sets as they dug, and they were strewn aimlessly about, like bent green pencils. “Oh,” she moaned, an involuntary sound that came out when she saw all her and Sam’s gardening work destroyed.

  “Steady, honey,” said Bill.

  “Step closer so you can see,” said Lieutenant Trace. Visible at the bottom of what once was their garden was a long, plastic-wrapped package. She could see clearly that there was a body inside.

  “Oh, my God, no,” she cried as she saw the face far down at the end of the hole, a big, handsome face. The body was garbed in white shirt and tan slacks, the feet much closer to the surface, in stylish sneakers. Cunningham. Faintness overcame her, and she would have fallen had Bill not stood in back of her and supported her weight.

  “Easy does it,” said her husband. Then she realized this was as hard on him as it was on her, and she willed her feet to hold her own weight.

  “Is it Mike Cunningham?” Bill asked.

  “We don’t know for sure,” said the lieutenant.

  She stood teetering, looking steadfastly away from the body. “It’s him, you know it is.”

  Trace’s voice was stern. “You’re really convinced of that, are you?”

  Bill snapped at the policeman. “Of course, and so am I.”

  Trace raised both hands, as if quieting a crowd. “Okay, okay, don’t get upset. We just wanted you to see the ... situation as it now exists. Uh, Mrs. Eldridge, can you pull yourself together long enough to tell us if you see anything strange, anything foreign-looking, in the hole?”

  Louise looked back down and tried not to shudder. Dully, she said, “The body’s wrapped just like Hoffman’s body was wrapped. This one is inclined, with the head lower than the feet. Now can I go somewhere and sit down?”

  But Sam caught her arm and said in an excited voice, “Just so, Louise, just so! The head is down, and the feet are up. ‘Zolstu voksn vi a di tsibele, mitn kap in elrerd un di fis aroyf!’ ”

  Lieutenant Trace gave him a polite look, the kind one gave to a person who was acting crazy. Perhaps he feared that their wide-eyed neighbor was having a breakdown. Louise knew he was wrong about that, for Sam was as well-adjusted a person as she’d ever met, composed and logical. He’d just come across something of extraordinary interest.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Rosen?” said the lieutenant. “What is it you’re trying to tell us?”

  Sam said, “The person who did this was fulfilling an ancient Yiddish curse. ‘Zolstu voksn vi a di tsibele, mitn kap in elrerd un di fis aroyf.’ ”

  “Which means?” asked Trace.

  “ ‘May you grow like an onion, with your head in the ground and your feet in the air!’ Actually, that’s the mild translation. Literally, it’s ‘May you grow like an onion, with your head in hell and your feet in the air.’ ”

  “Holy shit!” muttered Morton.

  Mike Geraghty asked Sam, “So we think that’s why this guy ended up in your onion patch, to fulfill a curse? You wouldn’t know anyone who’s familiar with that curse, would you?”

  “Besides me, you mean?” Sam grinned widely. “Maybe you ought to add me to your list of suspects.”

  Still staring down at this extraordinary scene, Sam turned his attention to Louise. “Do you realize this is the literal carrying out of a curse that is centuries old? Now why the devil would someone do that?”

  Morton’s remark was barely audible, for he’d directed it at his colleague, Mike Geraghty. Unfortunately, the rest of them heard it too. “Maybe it’s to throw us off the scent. Maybe it was someone who didn’t like a guy who sued them for minor neighborhood offenses.”

  Lieutenant Trace came over to Morton and quietly said, “George, that remark wasn’t called for.” He turned back to Louise and Bill and Sam. “We want to search your house and also question your family, Mr. Eldridge. You, too, Mr. Rosen. Is it convenient for you all to come to the station?”

  Bill retorted, “Not convenient at all, Lieutenant. I’m needed downtown. I’ll have to make it fast if at all.”

  The lieutenant blinked his eyes, as if Bill had slapped him. Louise supposed he was rethinking the kind and compassionate manner he’d taken so much trouble to exhibit since he’d arrived at their house at the crack of dawn. The officer cleared his throat, then said, “I know your work is important, Mr. Eldridge. But so is mine. A murder has been committed here and, whether you like it or not, there’s lots of in situ evidence tying your wife, or maybe even you, to the crime. Now we aren’t going to be able to come up with better solutions if we don’t have cooperation with people such as yourself. Get me?”

  Bill looked over at him. Louise could tell her husband was completely frustrated, wanting to cooperate, on the one hand, because he wanted her off the suspect list, but being torn by the unusual demands from the State Department on the other. His response was silence. He didn’t use words to answer the lieutenant, just curtly nodded his head in agreement.

  29

  In view of another body turning up, Dan Trace looked forward to a long afternoon and evening sitting in this small conference room and reinterviewing the principals related to the Peter Hoffman murder. What he had he wasn’t sure of, but undoubtedly a murder related to the Peter Hoffman killing. A curl of pain went through his gut.

  Was a serial killer of some kind at work in the Sylvan Valley neighborhood?

  He hadn’t liked Bill Eldridge’s attitude at the house this morning. Mrs. Eldridge appeared stunned and out of it. According to the husband, there was no way his wife could have killed Mike Cunningham and buried him unless she did it after he fell asleep. It probably took more than an hour, maybe two, for one person to kill a man, wrap him in plastic and bury him in a garden filled with soft, deep soil. It took three men only fifteen minutes to unearth him.

  Trace knew the murder had likely occurred somewhere after eleven. From nine to eleven, it wouldn’t have been safe to commit the crime, for kids sometimes tramped through the woods near the Eldridge house. Bill Eldridge was asleep by then, and so were the rest of the neighbors. Everyone except the tipster.

  He looked over the table at Mike Geraghty. Now there was a man who thought it incredible that the Eldridge woman could kill. Yet Mike, unfortunately, was blinded by his friendship with the Eldridges. Trace, too, thought Louise Eldridge was an unlikely candidate, but it was amazing how people could fool one.

  Now that the Eldridge interviews were concluded, he was meeting with Mike and George Morton, comparing notes. “Let’s talk about this Yiddish curse. Anybody believe that’s what the murderer had in mind?”

  Geraghty shrugged his big shoulders. “It could be significant, or it could be a fluke. The soil was real soft. Maybe the head got lower than the feet by accident, or because of the killer’s general sloppiness.”

  “First of all, lots of people might know that curse,”said Trace. “There’s Phyllis Hoffman, for instance. A small woman, but a small woman with a motive. It looks as if she’s been left with only a small portion of her husband’s wealth. And the person who engineered that unfortunate dispersal of Hoffman’s wealth is now dead.”

  “She’s also buff,” said Geraghty. “We’ve found she spends a lot of time in a health club. She’s stronger than we think.�
�� He leaned back heavily in his chair, forgetting it was stationary, and it groaned in protest. “On the other hand, Mrs. Hoffman is Jewish, and it’s a pretty stupid murderer who broadcasts his or her ethnic background by fulfilling an ethnic curse. It’s too darned obvious. Another one of our outlying targets of interest, Mort Swanson, is also Jewish. But I sure don’t think a man that smart would do something that implicated himself.”

  Morton pulled himself up closer to the table, and Geraghty could see he was about to make a pronouncement. “Why go through all this mickey mouse when we have the murderess tagged already?”

  “We do?” replied the lieutenant in a flat voice.

  “Darn right, Lieutenant. Did you look at Louise Eldridge this morning? She’s a mess. She’s lost weight, and she’s got the shakes. The woman looks guilty as hell. And she doesn’t go to work anymore, I’ve heard. They may even have fired her. So how did all this develop? First, it’s Peter Hoffman bugging her, so she kills him. We have firsthand testimony from at least four people that she set the guy up by inviting him to her home.”

  Trace nodded. “That’s right, we have to take that into account. You mean she was going to kill him that night, August fourth, I believe, but it didn’t come off, so she lured him back a week later to finish the deed?”

  “Exactly,” said Morton, his face happy and flushed as his superior helped him make his case. “There’s evidence galore—we all know that. Now we find Cunningham buried in her yard. Here’s a man she obviously hated.”

  Trace said, “How do you know she hated him?”

  “Well, she deliberately smashed his garden statue, didn’t she? And she went to all the trouble to go to downtown Washington to his office to rant and rave at him.”

  Geraghty sliced his hand across the air. “Cut it for a minute, George. That was Cunningham’s take on those events. He could have had it in for Mrs. Eldridge. Let’s not ignore another good candidate, Lee Downing. He was swindled by Hoffman and Cunningham when he bought Hoffman’s arms business. We need to trace the movements of both Mrs. Hoffman and Mr. Downing. And maybe Mort Swanson as well.”

  Lieutenant Trace nodded agreement. “Especially since I’ve just learned something that bolsters the theory that Downing could be our man. Peter Hoffman was the one who phoned the ethics hotline and dished the dirt on Downing’s industrial spying.”

  Geraghty said, spreading his hands wide. “There you are, George. Just more reason to pin both murders on him. A helluva lot more reason than to pin them on Mrs. Eldridge.”

  Dan Trace raised an admonishing finger. “Hold on, Mike. That’s motive. But we have physical evidence pointing another way.”

  “And when we test the plastic on Cunningham’s body, we’ll have even more,” said Morton. “We’ll find Mrs. Eldridge’s fingerprints again.” He smiled triumphantly at Geraghty. “Evidence is evidence, Mike. She’s the only one caught in the evidence net.”

  Trace stretched back in his chair. “Now why in the hell would someone like Louise Eldridge, who seems like a smart lady, kill two men and bury their bodies in her own yard? Doesn’t make sense.”

  Geraghty said, “I agree. Especially after she’s told us about those strange happenings at her house, the misplaced items in a cabinet, the pickax that nearly fell on her and the muddied tiles in the kitchen.”

  “Huh,” scoffed Morton, “you gonna believe that? Those kinds of incidents are so easy to fake that it isn’t worth talking about. She is a smart lady, I’ll give you that. She figured no one would believe she’d do it again. I tell you, folks, she’s our killer. She murdered Hoffman because he threatened her. She hated him. She polished off Cunningham because she thought he was on to her. He as much as told us that he had information that tied her to Hoffman’s death. The guy got killed before he had a chance to tell us about it.”

  Geraghty shook his head. “Come on, George, the guy could just be blowin’ smoke. He probably would have told any lie to get Louise Eldridge in trouble.”

  Morton scowled at his partner. “How do you know that? We ought to bring her in.”

  Dan Trace gave Morton a thoughtful look. “What you say makes some sense, George, but I still have to get over my disbelief.”

  At the phone’s insistent ring, he said, “Excuse me. That will be the evidence technicians at the Eldridge house.” Trace talked for a minute, then hung up. He looked at George Morton, then slowly turned his gaze to Mike Geraghty. “Speaking of evidence, they’ve found more.”

  After the police interrogations at the station, Bill and Louise arrived home to find the TV trucks and reporters circling Dogwood Court again. They reminded Louise of foraging jackals coming in after a kill, scrounging for the leavings from a crime scene now encircled with yellow tape. Ignoring reporter’s shouted questions, she and her husband walked up the flagstone path. Louise carefully avoided looking at her onion patch, where police technicians still poked about. More technicians were in the house.

  Bill hurried off to his office in the State Department, urging her to call the locksmith and also to contact Martha and Janie in Chicago, plus both sets of parents. He didn’t want them to hear about a second body in the Eldridge garden through a news program.

  Louise was sitting at the dining table and had just dialed up her mother. Elizabeth Payne said supportive things. “I feel positive, darling, that they’ll soon find who did this. Your father and I believe you must just go about your business on the theory that this will all soon go away.”

  The remark made Louise’s stomach pitch. Easy for her mother to say “go about your business.” People don’t get it, thought Louise. I have only days, perhaps hours, before they come and throw me in jail!

  In the background, she could hear the sounds of the two police technicians searching the house. They were almost finished and had opened the door to the back bedroom that Martha used when she was home. After the girls left Wednesday morning, Louise had vacuumed and cleaned it to make way for the next guest, neatly closing the door behind her.

  While she’d been able to hear the men’s constant talking back and forth, now there was only silence. Had they left by the recreation room door?

  Suddenly, one policeman appeared in the dining room, and she could see the man’s eyes were bright with excitement. He said, “Ma’am, could you please come with us?”

  She told her mother, “Mom, I’d better phone you back. I’m needed here right now.” She followed the technician into the bedroom and immediately noticed the dirt on the carpeting at the base of an étagère, a three-shelved unit that held her most prized houseplants. He pointed to the hoya plant on the middle shelf, with its handsome fronds of shiny dark green leaves. It was filled with waxy pink blossoms, which occurred only seldom and were a cause of great pleasure. Any police technician looking for clues would have been led right to the plant, not because of those dramatic flowers, but because the plant’s soil surface had been roughed up and the dirt spilled.

  “Look what we’ve found in this plant,” said the technician. Not far below the surface, she saw a small gleaming object. The technician took his pen and prodded the object until it was loosened further from the soil. It was a gold ring set with a big diamond.

  Louise took in a deep breath and realized she’d been shafted again. She looked straight into the eyes of the policeman and said, “I’ve no doubt that this ring belonged to Mike Cunningham. Why else would someone have put it here?”

  30

  Louise’s body felt heavy, too heavy for her bones to support in an upright position. For the moment, she had no further strength to know or care about what would happen to her next. She took the phone and went to the bedroom, collapsed on the bed and promptly fell asleep.

  She didn’t wake up until someone insistently rang the front doorbell. When she went to the door, she found only the locksmith. Why weren’t the police here to lead her off in shackles? Surely the gold ring belonged to Mike Cunningham. With the help of a bloody sweatshirt and a “stolen” ring, Louise was ne
atly tied to the two murders. Why didn’t they just come and get her?

  She yawned heavily and decided to resume her normal activities until her time was up. First, she put a spare set of new keys the locksmith had given her into her favorite outside hiding place in case the family was stuck outside without them. Then there were Bill’s parents to be concerned about. She went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea before she rang up Jean Eldridge. Her mother-in-law would need some warning that Louise might be headed for jail. While her father-in-law, Dick Eldridge, was solidly in Louise’s corner, Jean had not always felt the same way. When she told Jean of the second body, it appeared to renew her old doubts about Louise. Louise parroted her own mother’s optimistic sentiments that the cops eventually would quit buzzing around the Eldridge house and the press would quit talking about it on the evening news.

  “Oh dear,” said Jean in a condescending tone, “I can just imagine the headlines that are coming!” Louise could imagine them, too, something such as ANOTHER LETHAL “PLANT” IN TV TALK SHOW HOST’S GARDEN. Things would get even worse if the press learned about the way the body was buried and the possibility that it fulfilled a Yiddish curse.

  “Oh, well,” said Jean, “I’ve unfortunately come to expect things like this from you. Dick says it won’t hurt Bill’s career, but you know how I worry about that.”

  “Jean, you know I didn’t murder anyone.”

  “I expect you didn’t, dear. But you’re involved somehow.”

  Changing the subject, Louise said, “I’m sure Martha’s phoned you about the date for her and Jim’s wedding.”

  “Yes,” said Jean, “and we’re looking forward to it.” Louise waited for the “however” to follow. “However, it’s too bad she didn’t plan it further ahead. It took us by surprise. As it is, we’re racking our brains trying to decide on a gift.”

  “They’re registered, you know,” said Louise.