Summer Garden Murder

by Ann Ripley

  “I know. Martha told me. However, they’re not registered in the traditional places. I’ve never heard of ‘REI. ’ ”

  A new wave of fatigue engulfed Louise. She was in no condition to talk to Jean. “I’ll phone you later when I know more. Martha will give me some ideas of what they’d like best.”

  Next, she rang Martha’s Chicago apartment, first getting her daughter’s bubbly, optimistic message in the voice of a bride-to-be who was supremely happy. Just as Louise was about to pour out her story into the answering machine, Martha picked up.

  “Swell,” she said sarcastically, when she was told of the corpse in the vegetable patch and the discovery of Cunningham’s pinkie ring. “Now someone’s hiding things in houseplants. Ma, I think we’d better return home. You don’t sound good. I can tell by the tone of your voice you’re bummed out.”

  “I admit I’m bummed out, Martha,” she said, “but there’s nothing you or Janie could do if you rushed back here.”

  Even over the long-distance line, Louise could hear her older daughter’s impatient sigh. “How are you spending your time? Staying home, I hope, with your doors locked with those new locks. Did it ever occur to you or Dad that you’re in grave danger? Someone’s been in your house, doing mischief and planting evidence.”

  “He hasn’t heard about the ring yet. Hearing about it will just make it worse. He doesn’t want me to be alone, but what am I supposed to do, hire a companion?”

  “No,” said Martha, “just call in some favors from your friends Nora and Mary. Maybe Sarah Swanson, too. They could take turns coming over and keeping you company while Dad labors late at the State Department. Well, maybe not Sarah, on account of her hubby.”

  “I think it’s silly to suspect Mort Swanson.”

  “Ma, don’t rule anyone out. Gee, I wish I were there.” Her voice held a wondrous quality.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Martha. You’re just curious, especially since Sam brought up the Yiddish curse hypothesis. Do you really think the killer was playing that out when he buried Cunningham? I wonder if it wasn’t just chance.”

  “Depends,” said Martha. “How low was the head in comparison to the feet?”

  Louise flinched. The image was fresh in her mind: the stiff body, its human features barely disguised by the see-through plastic tarpaulin. She’d recognized her neighbor’s face jammed against the smooth material and could even see that his mouth and eyes were open as if in shock. She took in some quick breaths as a new thought came to her. “I just realized, Martha, the murderer’s used up two of my three large tarps. Do you suppose his work is at an end or will he try to come back and use the third on another body?”

  “Ma, that’s crazy talk. Please don’t lose it. I’m counting on you to be the serene mother of the bride in just six weeks. Calm down and stop letting your mind wander like that. Answer my question seriously. How low was the head? How high were the feet?”

  “The, uh, plastic package was arranged so that the head was down a couple of feet, and located at the base of the trench that Sam and I dug. The feet, on the other hand, were just barely covered. The feet were definitely what you would call ‘up.’ ”

  “Cool,” said Martha. “Well, I don’t mean to say I enjoy it, but someone did that on purpose. The person didn’t have to be Jewish, though. Lots of people know about those curses. I always liked the one, ‘May you catch cholera.’ But why would a Jewish killer plant Jewish clues?”

  “That’s the question,” said Louise.

  “I want you to promise you’ll phone us every day. Or would you rather that Janie or I phone you?”

  “One way or the other, Martha, we’ll stay in touch. Where did you say Janie’s gone off to?”

  “She’s out shopping for wedding clothes. We still haven’t found anything. She says she’s better off shopping without me. I’m helping Jim with the campaign, and I’m due at a rally in just a few minutes. You take care. I’m really sorry you have to go through all this. And especially sorry, of course, that you lost your onion crop.”

  “Don’t be smart, Martha.”

  “Just trying to get a laugh out of you.”

  Louise stared at the beige walls of the Mount Vernon police station and tried to put her mind somewhere else. Outside on Route One, she could hear a constant surge of traffic moving in and out of the capital and wondered what normal people were doing tonight. Eating out? Shopping for mattresses? Going to the theater? Visiting relatives? Bill was busy at work at the State Department, laboring hard under his green-shaded lamp or, more likely, sitting in last-minute meetings to plan the Vienna trip. She didn’t want to summon him here for the second police interrogation of the day and had arranged that he come in Saturday morning for questioning. He probably was still enraged over the one that occurred this morning.

  No, she’d only call Bill if they arrested her for murder.

  “So, Mrs. Eldridge,” said George Morton, “how do you think that gold ring got inside your house?”

  “I’m sure someone planted it there, Detective Morton, the same person who rearranged my antique collection, relocated my pickax and messed up my kitchen tiles.” There was little emotion in her voice, for she had little emotion left inside her.

  “Have you ever seen that gold ring before?” asked Lieutenant Trace. “I hear you immediately identified it.”

  “Mike Cunningham wore it every time I saw him. Which, I should add, wasn’t that many times. You have to understand that I barely knew the man.”

  George Morton sat forward in his chair. “Just enough to dislike him a lot, right?”

  She looked at the eager detective and pondered whether to tell him the absolute truth. She decided she would. After all, this was the age of opinionated women speaking their mind. “Right, I disliked him intensely. He wasn’t my idea of a great human being.”

  Morton nodded, as if he’d extracted the information through torture. “And are we to believe all that stuff about a house intruder without any corroboration?”

  Louise shrugged. “Believe it or not, Detective Morton, but it’s true. But they’ll never intrude again, because we’ve changed the locks.” She turned to Lieutenant Trace. “Are you going to arrest me? If so, I hope you do it quickly, because I’m exhausted and I know the county jail is in Fairfax City. That’s a trip of a dozen miles or so. I’ll have to warn Bill. Then there will be the fingerprinting, of course, and the paperwork. With all the red tape, I won’t get to sleep in a cell until probably midnight.”

  Trace looked at her oddly. “Yes, ma’am. But I don’t think we’ll arrest you tonight. In fact, you’re free to go home. The usual caveats apply, Mrs. Eldridge. Don’t leave the area, and please don’t try to intervene in any way in our investigation.”

  She exhaled a deep breath. “Lieutenant Trace, I wouldn’t think of doing those things.”

  Mike Geraghty and the other policemen stood up. “Come on, Louise,” said Geraghty, “ I’m givin’ you a ride home.”

  As she went by George Morton, he stared at her, his mouth in a tight line. She felt like giving him a smile, but there was no sense tempting fate. Instead, she nodded formally as she passed.

  The Coffee Pub wasn’t Charlie Hurd’s idea, but Hilde told him that she had to be up early, and nine o’clock was too late to start out for dinner in a restaurant in Washington.

  He looked over the wooden table at her, trying to be more objective than in the past with this girl. It wasn’t easy, since she looked so damned good to him. “Admit it, Hilde,” he grumped at her, “you had the hots for this guy Cunningham.”

  The accusation didn’t appear to bother her. Her gaze didn’t flinch, and she had a quick answer. “You think because I had a tennis game with Mike Cunningham, a foursome, and that I went over to his house to see his photography, that I was in love with him? Charlie, you’re being—what is the best word?—naive.”

  He blew out a breath. “All right, damnit, maybe you can say I’m jealous and for no good reason. Yo
u sure don’t look bent out of shape by Cunningham’s death.”

  Quietly, she said, “All deaths are sad. But Mike was no more than an older friend. A sort of counselor. Charlie, he was giving me advice on what to do next with my career—whether to stay in America or go back home and try to obtain a teaching position.”

  “What would you teach?”

  “Germanic studies. Or perhaps European cultural history.”

  Charlie scratched his head. “Okay, I’ll accept that. He was a hotshot lawyer. He had a very heavy rep in the District. But what’s so interesting about what happened to him is the curse. Have you heard about the curse?”

  “I heard about it this afternoon when I walked over to Dogwood Court. Everyone was talking about it. I have heard that curse, or perhaps I read it. There’s a book—”

  Charlie leaned forward. “The book of Yiddish curses. Of course you’d know about that. Do you think that makes our suspect a Jew? That means we’d have Phyllis Hoffman, Sam Rosen and Mort Swanson, of course.” He looked for a reaction from Hilde, but again she was totally cool.

  “Mr. Swanson? I couldn’t believe that, Charlie. He is so kind, so good.” Her gaze moved to somewhere in the middle distance. “And yet I know he’s somewhat ... suspicious. He does spend time with the widow.”

  “You mean Phyllis?”

  She nodded her head. “But I could hardly think of him and Phyllis doing this terrible thing.”

  “Hell, I could.” He mentally filed the fact that Hilde had seen Mort and Phyllis Hoffman together. And yet he was having feelings of remorse throwing Swanson’s name into the suspect pile. “I know you’re beginning to think of him as a father figure, but we can’t totally ignore him. We need to be objective and consider motive. As yet, neither Sam Rosen or Mort Swanson appears to have one, so that leaves old Phyllis. But she doesn’t look like the type of woman who cares a rat’s ass about Yiddish curses. On the other hand, if this were a team effort between Phyllis Hoffman and the more erudite Mort Swanson, then you could understand. . .” His mind wandered for a minute. “I mustn’t forget Downing,” he muttered, almost to himself. “Downing makes sense.”

  “Downing?” repeated Hilde.

  “Yes, he had a perfect motive for both murders.”

  Their meals had arrived. Charlie picked up his fork, but before he started eating, he looked over at Hilde and said, “It’s all about motive. Without motive, there’s no crime.” He reached over and took her hand. “Now, I’d consider Sam Rosen on account of he’s savvy and the kind of guy who’d catch the irony of burying someone in an onion patch. But he has no more motive than you do. But people like Lee Downing, Phyllis Hoffman and, forgive me, Mort Swanson, are the ones that I have to look into more thoroughly. Use all my resources, the Internet, local contacts, court and police buddies. In all cases, the question is, ‘Where is this person coming from, and where has he been?’ ” He laughed. “It has sort of the same cadence, doesn’t it, of that famous question about Richard Nixon from the Watergate hearings, which I doubt you know much about: ‘What did he know, and when did he know it?’ ”

  She pulled her hand away and narrowed her eyes as if she were analyzing his words. “Charlie, you are a very smart man, smarter than I am.” She stopped, and her face colored.

  “Huh,” he said, “what were you going to say? I’m smarter than you thought at first?”

  “Charlie, let me finish—”

  “Naw, that’s what you meant, and it’s not very flattering. What did you think at first, that I was a dunce?” Then he caught himself. What was he doing getting angry at a gorgeous woman like this, a woman a guy didn’t meet but once in a lifetime? Hurriedly, he said, “But since you no longer have Mike Cunningham to admire, hell, I’ll be happy to take his place.”

  She gave him one of those devastating smiles. “I do admire you, Charlie, more and more each day. You are an excellent reporter and investigator and a fine human being. Promise me you’ll tell me everything that you find out. In fact”—she looked at the slim gold watch on her wrist—“Sarah wants me to finish hundreds of those cat figures by a deadline, and that is why I was going to work tonight. But if you want me to do research with you tonight, I could postpone my work and come.”

  “Hilde,” he said, reaching over and taking her hand, “it’s like asking me, ‘Am I human?’ Of course I’d like you to come with me.”

  After an hour or so of sitting side by side in his apartment and poring over computer searches with this girl, who knew what might happen?

  31

  Friday, August 24

  It wasn’t until they’d had their second cup of morning coffee that Louise told Bill about the gold ring and her second police interrogation of the day.

  “Goddammit,” he said, “no wonder you look shot.” He went to the kitchen and grabbed for the phone to call Lieutenant Dan Trace. Leaning against the kitchen counter as the call was put through, he impatiently tapped on the granite surface, trying to frame words that would adequately express his outrage.

  Though it was only eight, the man in charge of the double murder investigation was in his office. When Bill made his case, Trace sounded abashed. “I know how you must feel, Mr. Eldridge.”

  “I don’t think you do,” replied Bill. “If you’d followed up on information we gave you about an intruder in our house, you’d know that the ring was just more fun and games on the part of that trespasser. And those include a life-threatening trick of setting a twenty-pound tool over the toolshed entrance so that it was bound to fall on the person who opened the toolshed door. It was only luck that it missed hitting Louise in the head. There’s no doubt in my mind, and there should be none in yours, Lieutenant Trace, that our trespasser is your killer.” He found himself breathing fast and tried to quiet his voice, even though he felt like yelling at the bastard on the other end of the phone line.

  Trace hurriedly added, “We told you that we were hindered in tracking down the technician who handled the toolshed. He’d already worked an overtime weekend on the case, and then he took off for a canoeing vacation with some buddies at the Boundary Waters. Even his wife doesn’t have a cell phone number for him. The guy claimed he needed to get ‘all the way away.’ ”

  Bill groaned with disgust. “Isn’t that nice for him. Meanwhile, the one who’s suffered for this is my wife. She’s mistrusted and disbelieved by your local detective, George Morton, who acts at every moment as if she’s going to be summarily arrested for murder.”

  Lieutenant Trace cleared his throat in the background. “In view of all this, Mr. Eldridge, there’s no deadline hanging over Mrs. Eldridge’s head. But don’t forget, there’s still a lot of evidence against her.”

  “Find the answer to the trespasser in our house and you’ll find your murderer,” snapped Bill. “Quit misdirecting your efforts, Lieutenant. I’m about ready to file charges against the Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Uh, I wouldn’t do that, Mr. Eldridge,” said the lieutenant. “Not until we get this sorted out.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have much time left,” warned Bill, and hung up. It was an empty kind of threat. What could he do to get the police off his wife’s back? But it made him feel a little better.

  After his angry conversation with Lieutenant Trace, Bill had a hard time leaving for work. But the pressures there were enormous.

  Normally when he left for the office, Louise was ready and eager to get into her own world and her own work. Today, she shuffled about the house in her gown and robe, her hair messy, her face unwashed. And why not? She had nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to except to peek at evidence technicians who might come around and look at the area where the second body had been buried or perhaps plead with her for a second search of the house.

  “Bill, take care.” Her voice sounded hollow.

  He turned, his brow knit with worry lines. “You’re the one who has to be careful, Louise. Remember what you promised. You won’t put yourself in danger, a
nd you’ll try to stay in the company of friends. Invite Nora over. Or Mary.”

  “I will.” When he left, the absolute quiet of the house pressed on her. Looking out the tall windows into the woods, she could see only gray. A storm was on the way. She went to the living room couch and picked up the morning paper, experiencing the final straw—the tremble had returned to her hands.

  She plopped unceremoniously onto the couch and threw the paper aside. No matter what she’d told Bill, she had to get out of this house. She would go back to the yoga studio and sign up for more classes. Then she’d drive to WTBA-TV and barge her way into the studio if necessary. There, surely, she would be among friends. Her producer just couldn’t kiss her off this way, not without Louise putting up a fight. At the very least, even if her cohost John Bachelder was there busily usurping her job, she could provide, as Marty so tactfully put it, “input” on those upcoming garden shows.

  It took a half hour to dress up and put enough makeup on her gaunt face for someone to guess she was a syndicated TV host. She grabbed the numerous gardening notes that she’d been collecting for weeks and hurried off to the studio.

  Marty Corbin tolerated her for an hour. Then her buff, dark-haired producer, the picture of good health himself, told her, “Go home, Lou. You’ve come back too soon. I told you that John would handle the next two programs. And when you do come back, I hope to see that you’ve gained a few pounds.” A big, friendly, indicting smile. “You look scrawny. We know the camera adds pounds, but not that many.”

  She’d driven home and climbed into bed for a long nap.

  The phone awoke her at four. “Honey,” said Bill, “I don’t know how I can get out of this late meeting. Damn but I’m frustrated!”

  “Bill, take it easy. What’s so new about your working late?”

  “I feel as if I’m letting you down.”

  “It’s all right, I know how busy you are. They want you to go overseas right away, don’t they?”