For Whom the Limo Rolls

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Well, for one thing, the fact that you told them she and I’d been seeing each other and had a big fight.”

  “All I said was that there’d been a misunderstanding!”

  He shrugged as if this, too, were an inconsequential inconvenience. “Someone working over in that new subdivision also saw me leave the house and gave them a description of my car and me. And then, my fingerprints were in the house. Although I didn’t think about that when I let ‘em take my fingerprints that first time they came to the house here.”

  “You were there, in the house where she was killed?” I asked, rather dumbfounded by the fingerprint information.

  “I went to Mary Beth’s house to get my necklace back. She was just leaving, and I followed her to that place on Hildebrand.”

  “But she said that she’d tried to talk to you, that she wanted to explain to you about . . . that night. But you wouldn’t talk to her.”

  “I wasn’t going to talk to her about that jerk in the shower or listen to any of her lame excuses. I have eyes. I saw what I saw. I just wanted the necklace back. But she got really nasty about it and threatened to call the cops if I didn’t leave. So I left. I figured I’d sic my lawyer onto her about it.”

  “She was wearing the necklace then?”

  “Oh yeah, it and all that other stuff she always wore.”

  “And you didn’t kill her?”

  “Of course I didn’t kill her. She was taking some pictures down off the walls when I left. I was mad, but I didn’t want her dead.”

  He was so vehement about not wanting her dead that I was surprised. “You thought maybe you could back together?”

  “After what she did? No way.” He sounded impatient with my denseness. “I needed her so I could talk to Trafalgar.”

  I felt as if I were following Tom into a swamp here. And my feet were sinking ever deeper into quicksand. I wanted to argue the simple fact of Trafalgar’s non-existence, but I saw another problem here that seemed to have escaped Tom’s notice. “But if you and Mary Beth weren’t on speaking terms, how could you talk to Trafalgar?”

  “Yeah, that would be a problem, wouldn’t it?” he asked as if he hadn’t thought around that point. “But she’d probably have done it anyway, even if she was mad at me, if I offered her a big enough love gift.”

  Ah, so we were getting down to the nitty-gritty here. Mary Beth and money. The financial benefits of having your own private entity on call.

  “She charged big money for private sessions with Trafalgar?”

  “She didn’t charge. They were love gifts. Trafalgar wouldn’t like her doing it for money. He has very high standards.” Tom scowled. “Higher than Mary Beth’s. Although she really didn’t need money. She had some kind of big payment coming in soon.”

  My ears perked. “What kind of payment?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  More quicksand. I decided to backstep into different territory. “Do you think the man in the shower may have killed her?”

  Tom looked blank. “Why would he kill her?”

  “Would you know him if you saw him again?”

  “I don’t know. I might.”

  Of course, there’s that old saying, Clothes make the man. And Tom hadn’t exactly gotten a good look at the guy’s wardrobe.

  “Okay, if he didn’t kill her . . . and you didn’t . . . who did?”

  Tom looked around uneasily, as if spies might be lurking behind the TV or under the sofa. Then he spoke in a whisper, as if unseen ears might be listening.

  “Trafalgar,” he said.

  Make that other-dimensional ears listening in.

  He nodded in a sage, knowing way, and his voice got stronger. “I think Trafalgar killed her.”

  The idea was so preposterous that I didn’t know how to respond. Finally I said, “Did you tell the police that?”

  “I tried to, but my lawyer kept telling me to shut up. Which was probably a good idea.” Which made me think Tom still had a shred of common sense, until he added, “Trafalgar might not like a lot of people knowing what he did.”

  Cautiously I tried to make sense out of Tom’s peculiar claim and how he’d arrived at it so I could get him to see how foolish it was. I tried logic first. “But if Trafalgar is over in another dimension, how could he do something here?”

  “I don’t know. But he did.”

  “Why?”

  Tom gave me a sideways glance. “Because Trafalgar likes me. And he didn’t like what Mary Beth did to me. Taking my necklace and then cheating on me like that. He has very high standards. But like I told you when he got mad at you, he can retaliate if he wants to. And he retaliated.”

  An entity with a short fuse. I felt out of my zone here. Maybe out of my dimension too. I eyed Tom uneasily. Was he a little off mentally? A lot off mentally? Maybe the lawyer should have let him talk and gone for an insanity plea. The idea of other-dimensional fingers tightening that chain around Mary Beth’s neck struck me as too ridiculous even to be creepy, more like a cartoon villain than a real one. But I could see Tom was all-too serious about this.

  “What makes you think Trafalgar likes you so much that he’d commit murder for you?”

  Tom leaned forward, hands gripping his plaid-clad knees. “He’d already been a big help to me. He’d found out that stuff about my great-grandfather, and now he was just about to give me some really important information about a big investment. Very exclusive information. Not the kind of thing he’d tell just anyone. So I know he liked me because he was going to tell me.”

  Ah-ha, the money angle! I’d figured Mary Beth had some kind of scam going with her other-dimensional entity. This must be it! She let Trafalgar “advise” people on how to invest their money, which somehow made its way back into her greedy little hands.

  Had one of the investors gotten scammed and retaliated?

  “What kind of investment?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I need to find out from Trafalgar.”

  Of course this jumped back to something that puzzled me. I’d never known Tom to have any money. At our annual street yard sale, he was notorious for his dime offers on quarter items. He got most of his clothes, except the McWeird plaid items, at Goodwill. Yet he’d had enough money to buy that necklace for Mary Beth, and enough to put up big bucks for bail too. So, even if I hadn’t known Tom had money available, perhaps Mary Beth had known?

  “You have money to invest?”

  He tapped his fingers on his thighs as if deciding whether to tell me. His tone was definitely reluctant when he said, “I inherited some money from an uncle last year. Weird old guy who lived in a shack out in Harstine Island.”

  Weird old guy. What was that old line about the pot calling the kettle black?

  “It wasn’t any big fortune,” he added, obviously not about to give me a dollar figure on the inheritance. “But with what Trafalgar was going to tell me, it could turn into a fortune.”

  My head circled this like Phreddie creeping up on a dustball, questions ricocheting around in my mind. I grabbed one. “Did Mary Beth know about this money you inherited?”

  “I never told her.”

  Which didn’t mean she didn’t know, of course. If he mentioned it to Trafalgar, Mary Beth knew. Because that stuff about her not knowing what went on during the channeling sessions was as phony as Trafalgar himself. But, on reflection, I suspected she’d known about the money even earlier. She wouldn’t have cozied up to Tom the way she did if she hadn’t known he had money.

  Which brought up another thought. Mary Beth had tried to draw me into the Trafalgar thing by having him personally invite me into the house that night. Had she figured, since I’d inherited the limo from a rich uncle, that I’d probably also inherited a bundle of money? And would make a fine addition to her sucker list?

  “But how could Trafalgar predict what might be a good investment in this dimension?”

  “It wouldn’t be a prediction.” Tom waved his hand in an impatient ges
ture. “Predictions aren’t worth anything. But, like I told you, Trafalgar could open these doors on any time period and see what was happening. It wasn’t guesswork. He was going to look into the future and tell me how I could make big money. He could see it.”

  What I saw was SCAM, in big capital letters.

  “So wasn’t it a little thoughtless of him to kill Mary Beth without telling you about this big investment first?” I suggested.

  Tom missed the facetiousness of the question. He frowned as if he hadn’t thought of that. He got up and paced the floor. “I guess she just drove him to it. She was strangled, you know. Probably with that necklace I gave her. Though the police haven’t found it yet to match it up with the marks on her neck.”

  “They told you that?”

  “My lawyer knew. I don’t know how. Maybe they have to supply the defense lawyer with information. Anyway, I see Trafalgar as thinking the necklace would be an appropriate weapon. You know, the ironsides thing.”

  “Ironsides?” I repeated blankly. Then I realized what he must mean. “Oh, an ironic thing.” A murder charge hadn’t improved Tom’s sometimes skewed vocabulary. “Ironic because you’d given her the necklace, and Trafalgar used that very necklace to . . . retaliate for you.”

  “Yeah. He’d suggested I get it for her, so I know he was really mad about what she did.”

  So that was how she’d done it. She’d let Trafalgar make the suggestion about the necklace rather than saying it herself. Clever Mary Beth.

  Or maybe not so clever. She was dead.

  “Are you thinking Trafalgar could have influenced someone in this dimension to kill her?”

  A surprised blink of eyes. “Why would he do that? He could do it himself.”

  So here’s our defense, judge. My client here didn’t do it. The murder was committed by this entity from another dimension. What’s that, judge? Well, no, I don’t think we can subpoena him to testify or give you fingerprints. We don’t know if has fingerprints. Or fingers. But he did it, because he really likes our client here.

  Tom was looking at me while I waltzed off on my speculative detour. A thought jerked me back. Could Trafalgar somehow have manipulated Tom himself into committing the murder, and Tom didn’t even know it?

  I gave myself a mental whack. That kind of thinking rested on Trafalgar having an actual existence. Which he didn’t have.

  “Did Mary Beth have enemies, I mean enemies here in this dimension? Someone who might have been angry enough to kill her?”

  “She never mentioned anyone. People mostly seemed to like her.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of the sofa, uninterested in exploring suspect possibilities. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Trafalgar killed her.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I thought Mary Beth and I had something good going, but we didn’t, so. . .” I thought he was giving Mary Beth’s death a careless, so-what? dismissal, but then he swallowed. A big throat-moving swallow that ended in a kind of gurgle, and I knew the death was affecting him more than he wanted to let on. He dropped heavily back to the sofa. “I wish she hadn’t done what she did.”

  “I think you’re going to have a hard time convincing the authorities Trafalgar killed her.”

  “I need your help.”

  Me, convince Detective Molino that Trafalgar was real and reached his other-dimensional fingers or whatever bodily parts other-dimensional entities possessed over here to strangle Mary Beth? What I wanted to do was throw something in frustration, preferably at Tom, but I managed to keep it down to a low-key suggestion. “Tom, perhaps you should talk to a counselor.”

  “I don’t need a counselor. They’re all a bunch of shysters and quacks. What I need is to get in touch with Trafalgar. That’s where you come in.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Me!”

  “I want you to contact him,” Tom said. “The same as Mary Beth did. Then I could talk to him.”

  “About who killed Mary Beth?”

  “About the investment.” He sounded impatient. “It’s something that has to be done right now, or it’s going to be too late. He told me that much. I want in on it.”

  “Tom, you’re accused of murder! You may even be convicted of it! Isn’t that more important than some investment?”

  He hesitated, frowning. “I don’t think Trafalgar will let that happen. He likes me.”

  We were back to that irrational claim. “Then why don’t you contact him?”

  “I tried,” Tom admitted. “But I think maybe the inter-dimensional vibrations only mesh with a woman’s mind. Or something. Anyway, I can’t get through to him. But I think you can.”

  The quicksand was getting deeper. Or maybe it was more like the deepening of what collects on a barnyard floor. I tried to attack the problem from Tom’s mindset.

  “But you said Trafalgar is mad at me. So he’s surely not going to talk to me. Or through me, or whatever.”

  “You could try,” he insisted. “You could apologize, and then I could talk to him about the investment. And ask him about Mary Beth’s murder too,” he added, as if that incentive might make me more cooperative. “He could give me advice on how to handle it.”

  “Tom, we need to get something straight. I don’t believe Trafalgar exists. I think it’s all something Mary Beth cooked up. Maybe to dupe people into investing in some quack scheme.”

  He looked up at me, his jaw dropped as if he were astounded by my disbelief. “Mary Beth didn’t know anything about the investment. That was between Trafalgar and me.”

  “Did he mention this investment thing to anyone else?”

  “He told me about it in a private session. And said not to mention it to anyone else, or they’d all want in on it, and that could ruin it.”

  By now I felt like whacking Tom to try to knock some sense into him. He was no intellectual giant, but it baffled me that he was so stubbornly gullible about all this. Yet time and again you hear about people falling for some get-rich-quick scheme and losing their life savings. Tom certainly wasn’t the first guy to get taken in by some outrageous scam. You gotta get in on it right now was even one of the hallmarks of such schemes. Mary Beth knew all the angles, like warning him not to let anyone else know about it.

  This was where an investigation should concentrate, on the scam. “Did you tell Detective Molino about this investment thing?”

  Tom’s head reared back in indignation. “Of course not. That’s confidential between Trafalgar and me.”

  “Did Detective Molino ask for names of people who came to the group channeling sessions?”

  “No. They just kept asking about the necklace. In fact, they came back with a search warrant and went through everything from my socks to the tank on the bathroom toilet. They practically took my car apart.”

  “I guess I wasn’t home when they did that.”

  “They didn’t find anything. Because there wasn’t anything to find. I didn’t kill her, and I didn’t take her jewelry.”

  I brought up another thought I hoped would turn him away from his confidence in Trafalgar. “Her jewelry was missing from her body. You think Trafalgar made off with it? Took it back to his other dimension with him?”

  Tom’s jaw moved as if he were chewing on that, and I thought for a minute I had him, that this would make even him see how preposterous his claim about Trafalgar was.

  But then he said, “He probably just hid it somewhere in this dimension.”

  I shook my head in frustration, then switched tactics. “Tom, I’d like to talk to some of these people who came to the group channeling sessions. Can you give me names?”

  “It wasn’t always the same people. Different people came. Mostly they just used first names. I didn’t even go to a lot of the group sessions. I liked talking to Trafalgar in private better.”

  “Then just give me first names. Any you can remember.”

  With obvious impatience, because he considered all this irrelevant, he named a Mary and a Bobbi, a
Lisa and an Ellen, a George and a Hammer.

  “Hammer?”

  “Strange people, some of ‘em,” he muttered. “That one had an angel tattooed on one arm and a devil on the other. And a ring in his nose.”

  I’d try to avoid that one, I decided. He didn’t sound like a potential big-time investor anyway.

  There were a few full names, those of people Tom had taken the trouble to check up on himself. He gave me all the information impatiently, almost grudgingly, as if he resented the waste of time. I scribbled the names on the back of an envelope.

  “Do you know where any of them live? Any addresses?”

  “No, I wasn’t buddy-buddy with them. The woman next door came over a couple times. But I think it was just because she’s nosy, not because she had any real interest in raising her plane of consciousness.”

  The weird uncle from whom Tom inherited money. The strange people at the channeling sessions. Now the nosy neighbor. Couldn’t Tom see his own peculiarities in his scornful descriptions of these people?

  “Do you know who’s taking care of Mary Beth’s burial arrangements and her estate?”

  “She had a cousin or something over in Seattle or Puyallup or somewhere. Maybe her. I never met her.” More disinterest. “Or maybe some relative from back in Arkansas will come out.”

  “Do you know the local woman’s name?”

  “No. It’s probably in Mary Beth’s phone book or address book or somewhere. What difference does it make? Contacting Trafalgar, that’s what’s important.”

  “Tom, I’m sorry, but this is all just too. . .” I could spout a dozen disparaging words, but I knew they wouldn’t penetrate Tom’s stubborn barrier of belief in Trafalgar. “You—” I hesitated and then decided to include myself. “We’ve got to concentrate on the real-life person or persons who could have killed her, not some imaginary entity. Or you’re going to wind up in prison.”

  The warning apparently didn’t penetrate any deeper than Tom’s comb-over hairstyle. “Even after you talked to him yourself, you still don’t believe Trafalgar is real?” Tom actually sounded dumbfounded, as if I’d denied the existence of my left foot.