Finally I realized what the answering machine had been saying. “Lulu’s Clown Service.” I clapped when she dipped her knees to bow low. “You do kids birthday parties! That’s the kind of parties you do.”
She pulled off the oversized nose to reveal a real nose, slightly freckled and nicely shaped, and yanked off the wig to expose sandy-blonde hair scrunched into a tangled mass held atop her head with clips. “It’s better with the floppy feet and gloves, but I have to take them off to drive. And you?” She motioned toward the limo, the massive eyebrows uplifted.
I would have liked to do a little dance too, but all I could do was pull out my usual business card. “Andi’s Limouzeen Service. Hey, I get called for kids’ birthday parties now and then. I can recommend you!”
She reached back into the SUV and then handed me a card. Lulu’s Clown Service, with an address in Tumwater, over near Olympia. “You didn’t know I’m a clown?” she asked. “But it was my clown service number you called.”
“I got it from Mary Beth’s landlord back in Tennessee.”
“Oh, yeah, I did give it to him. The fish and quilts guy.”
“I, uh, couldn’t understand the message on your answering machine very well.”
“I just changed it a few days ago. Isn’t it clear?”
“I thought it said—” I hesitated, uncertain how she’d take my misinterpretation. “Lulu’s Call Girl Service.”
Judee looked horrified, then whooped in laughter, stretching the clown mouth from ear to ear and making me laugh too. “Maybe that explains why I’ve had some quick hang-up clicks on the machine. And a guy who made a very risqué suggestion about the kind of party he wanted. I’ll have to re-do the message and make it more clear.”
“I get a few risqué calls too,” I had to admit. Some people had a steamy imagination about the uses to which a limo could be put.
She eyed the limo, then laughed again without asking questions. She shook the floppy wig, then tossed it in the SUV. Her tone sobered. “I guess we shouldn’t be laughing, should we? We’re here because Mary Beth is dead.”
I sobered too. “Murdered.”
“You have the key?”
I brought it out of my pocket and dangled it between thumb and forefinger.
“Okay, let’s go inside. I’ll get this stuff off my face and change clothes, and we’ll take a look around.”
She got a duffel bag from the SUV. I tried the key on the front door but it didn’t fit, so we went around back. I suddenly felt very skittish about this as I pushed the door open. As if Detective Molino himself might jump out and demand to know what I was doing here. Sometimes it felt as if Detective Molino had become my conscience on matters murderous.
The door opened onto a laundry room, with a washer and dryer on one side, a small bathroom and big laundry tubs on the opposite side. The house already had a stale odor, but with an under-scent of laundry detergent in this room.
“This’ll just take a minute,” Judee said as she went into the bathroom. She didn’t close the door while she got a big jar of cleansing cream from the duffel bag and started removing the clown mouth and eyebrows.
I peered into a clothes hamper by the washer. It was still half full of towels and sheets and clothes, including a man’s shirt. Newspapers were stacked in one corner, empty spaces showing where items had been clipped out. Potential house-staging clients? Obituaries or other information about potential “investment” clients? Although one, where she’d missed part of a headline, was apparently about some political rally. I wished I hadn’t just set out my newspapers for recycling or I could have looked back to see what had been in some of those empty spaces. News that Mary Beth considered important enough to cut and save might be revealing.
“What did you want to talk to me about?” Judee asked as she worked on her face.
“As I said, the guy they’re accusing in Mary Beth’s death, Tom Bolton, is a friend—” I broke off, wanting to qualify that, but deciding it would take too much explanation. “I don’t think he killed Mary Beth. I’d like to find out anything you know that might point to someone else’s involvement.”
“Like Slick Sloan?”
“He sounds like a possibility, so I’d like more information about him. But also anyone else in her past. Or present. Sloan said he and Mary Beth were considering getting back together.”
“Her present I can’t tell you much about. But a long time ago, when we were kids, Mary Beth and I were best friends. Our mothers were cousins, which made us – what? Something. Anyway, we were close all though high school. Then I went off to college—” She gave me a glance in the bathroom mirror, saw something in my expression, and laughed. “No, not clown college. In my other life, with a different phone number, I’m Judee’s Bookkeeping and Tax Service. No, Mrs. Jones,” she intoned in a severe voice, “you may not take your pet iguana as a dependent on your income tax return, even if his upkeep does cost as much as a small child.”
One eyebrow was gone now, and she attacked the other one.
“Anyway, my dad had a stroke, and I dropped out of college to help my mother take care of him. By that time Mary Beth was married, then Dad died and I got married, and the four of us, Mary Beth and her husband Mike, and I and my husband, were pretty close. But then in our late thirties, both our marriages broke up, and Mary Beth and I were churning around in the singles scene. We shared an apartment for a while.”
I watched, intrigued, as a delicately pretty woman about Mary Beth’s age emerged from under the gaudy makeup. She removed the clips holding up her hair, and it fell neatly into chin-length waves. Under the same circumstances, mine would have looked like something Phreddie had found under a bush in the yard.
“We were both kind of lost and searching, I guess.” Judee scrunched her mouth around to scrub a persistent blotch of red. “We dabbled in astrology and numerology and a couple of other ‘ologies.’ Tarot cards. Crystals. Bumps on the head. We even tried a witch’s coven once, but Mary Beth always got awful sneezing attacks at coven meetings. She blamed some perfume the head witch used, but sneezes are apparently a no-no in the witch world and she was encouraged to drop out. So I dropped out too.”
“A very loyal friend.”
Judee smiled. “Well, giving up the witch stuff wasn’t all that big a sacrifice. The whole witch scene creeped me out. And I look like death warmed over in black.”
“Was Mary Beth interested in politics back then?”
“Not that I knew of. Why do you ask?”
“Tom Bolton mentioned that she was always listening to talk shows about politics and seemed really interested. He said she’d been to some local political gatherings too.”
“Doesn’t sound like her. But, like I said, it’s been a long time since we were close. Ever heard of alectryomancy?”
“No.”
“Neither had I, until Mary Beth dragged me to this little old lady who claimed it was the way to find the answer to any question on any subject, love, future, money, whatever. For a fee, of course.”
“Spell it.”
“a-l-e-c-t I don’t know. Alectryomancy. This woman had latched onto the word somewhere, and I think she figured a scientific sounding word gave authenticity to her goofy fortune-telling system.”
“Which was?”
“This woman had a chicken named Astrid. She had a big circle painted on a piece of plywood. It was marked off in sections, with each section representing a letter of the alphabet or a number. She’d close her eyes and scatter grain on the plywood, then turn Astrid loose on it. And whatever letters Astrid pecked out, that was the answer to your question. Of course, given chicken spelling, the answers took a little interpretation.” She grimaced, then laughed, and now there was a hint of affectionate nostalgia in the laughter. “Astrid said Mary Beth’s next husband would be named Ergh, which the woman ‘interpreted’ to mean the name would have those letters in it. Mary Beth said that for the money we paid for that ridiculous answer, we should get a chicken d
inner. And she thought Astrid would do just fine, roasted, fried or fricasseed.”
“It sounds as if you had fun together.”
“We did. And then we got involved in the channeling thing.”
Quite unself-consciously Judee dropped the clown clothes and slipped into dark slacks and a tailored white shirt from the duffel bag. Now I could see someone closer to the person her bookkeeping clients probably saw.
“For a while we had fun with that too. We’d go to a channeling session and then go home making fun of the gullible people sitting around all wide-eyed while this guy pretended an all-wise being from another dimension was speaking through him. Mary Beth could nail an imitation of almost anyone with just a few words or gestures, and she was hilarious doing him. So then she heard about this new group where we could learn to be channelers ourselves.”
“And?”
“And, again, there were all these gullible people soaking up this nonsense. They’d sit in a circle on the floor and make all these strange, croaking noises. The teacher kept encouraging them, saying that was a being from another dimension trying to get through.”
“Did you try it?”
“Oh, sure. Nothing happened, of course, not so much as a croak.” She hesitated, brow furrowing. “Well, maybe that isn’t quite right. I certainly didn’t start speaking in a strange voice, but once I felt . . . something.”
“Something?”
“Like something was . . . fingering my brain. And it felt . . . unpleasant. Anyway, I just jumped up and got a cup of coffee. Afterward, I felt foolish, but I knew it wasn’t anything I wanted to get involved in, and I never tried it again.”
“But Mary Beth did?”
“She tried several times at the teaching sessions, and nothing happened with her, either. Until one night, something did happen, and this great male sounding voice boomed out of her.”
“Trafalgar?”
“That’s what he said his name was. And it creeped me out, you know? Worse than the witch stuff. I was afraid she’d tapped into something real in the middle of all this phony garbage, and I wasn’t sure what it was.”
“But it wasn’t good?”
Judee nodded. “Mary Beth seemed to be in a kind of trance, and when she came out of it, she looked around and said, ‘What happened?’ Everyone was all excited. She was the real star of the evening.”
Goosebumps unexpectedly prickled my arms. “So Trafalgar really was real?” I asked, doubtful but uneasy.
“No way. She’d faked the whole thing. And they’d fallen for it, like kids at a magic show. She even did it there at our apartment, with ‘Trafalgar’ saying all kinds of snarky things about the people who’d been present and what idiots they were.”
“What did you think then?”
“To tell the truth, I was relieved that it wasn’t something real,” Judee admitted. “I figured we’d go back and she’d tell what she’d done, so everyone could see how phony it all was. But instead, Mary Beth really got into it. Within a few weeks people were coming to our apartment to talk to her all-knowing Trafalgar. She also latched onto the ‘love gifts’ thing real fast. Did you go to her sessions here?”
“I brought Tom out in the limo one time, and, according to him, Trafalgar was present and asking for me. So I came into the house to see what it was all about.”
“What did you think?”
“She was good at it, and it was kind of . . . spooky. But I was, I don’t know . . . impertinent, I guess, in my disbelief, so the entity got mad and went away. But Tom is certainly a believer. He thinks Trafalgar killed her.”
“Oh, he can go for an insanity defense with that. But she was good at her act, wasn’t she? Very convincing. People can be so incredibly gullible. She claimed she didn’t know what was happening when Trafalgar was present, and people told ‘him’ all kinds of personal stuff. It was almost as if they were going to a priest for confession. And Trafalgar, of course, was good at probing for juicy details.”
Trafalgar, and Mary Beth, knew exactly how much money Tom had to invest.
“One guy confessed how as a kid he’d started a fire in a schoolroom because he wasn’t ready for a test that day. The whole school burned down, and he’d kept it a secret all these years. Some woman admitted she’d embezzled thousands of dollars from her employer. One woman said she’d just found out her husband had another wife and kids in a different state. And affairs! Affairs were all over the place.”
“So what did Trafalgar tell these people to do?”
“He told the embezzling woman to confess to her employer, which I thought was excellent advice. But he told a woman with cancer to stay away from radiation and chemotherapy, and try alternate healing methods instead, and she died. Trafalgar told men who were having affairs to end them right now. And to buy their wives expensive gifts and be extra nice to them to make up for their wrongdoings. Women were usually just told to be careful not to get caught.”
“A double standard from another dimension.”
“I’ve wondered how she was doing here.”
“She had a house-staging business along with the channeling sessions. I don’t know which may have been her main source of income, but I think she added in, or was about to add in, some kind of investment scam.” I didn’t feel any hesitation telling Judee about this. She obviously knew what kind of person Mary Beth was. “She, through Trafalgar, of course, had told Tom and several other people about a great investment opportunity they could get in on. Making each one think only he or she was getting this exclusive information.”
As we talked, we moved through the house. The bedroom was frilly and feminine, with ruffled lavender curtains, another ruffle around the boudoir mirror, and a frothy negligee at the foot of the bed. We opened drawers and poked in closets. There was a lot of makeup and jewelry, although most of it looked like costume stuff to me. Had Slick Sloan already appropriated the good jewelry? The necklace Tom had given her wasn’t there, of course. It had been used to kill her.
“When did Sloan come into the picture?” I asked.
“I’m not sure how Mary Beth met him. By then she and I had gone our separate ways. I disapproved of how she was making a real cottage industry out of deceiving all these people with her Trafalgar sessions, and she didn’t like my disapproval. She married Slick about the time I married again. I lost touch with her when my husband and I moved up here, but a grand-aunt back in Arkansas, the queen bee who tries to hold the family together, told me Mary Beth’s marriage to Sloan flopped. As did mine, unfortunately. After Mary Beth moved up here, Aunt Margie wanted me to contact her, so I did. We met a couple of times for lunch, but she was still into channeling, and I still disapproved. I don’t know why she moved up here. I’ve wondered if something in the channeling business down there backfired on her.”
“And now you’re elected to take care of the contents of the house after Mary Beth’s death because—?”
“I don’t know who notified the family back in Arkansas of Mary Beth’s death. The police probably found family names here in the house. A will hasn’t turned up yet, but the lawyer got an okay for me to take care of her stuff temporarily, since I’m the only relative in the area.”
We moved on through the house. The plants Mary Beth had used in her house-staging were wilting, and we carried pitchers of water to them. “Can you take the plants home?” I wondered. “They’ll die in storage.”
“I say we split ‘em! Want some?”
“Sure.” I brought up another subject. “According to Tom, Mary Beth had said she had some big money coming in soon.”
“Really? The investment scam was about to pay off? Or something else?”
“Something else, I think, because she’d mentioned the big money to Tom, and she never said anything to him about the investment scheme. That was supposed to be confidential between Trafalgar and Tom. Now I’m wondering if Sloan knows about this big windfall she was expecting, and that’s why he was snooping around in here. Trying to find some
way he could latch on to the money himself. Although what he said when a friend and I ran into him here was that he was looking for evidence to help catch her killer.”
“Sloan isn’t that noble. Whatever he was looking for was to benefit numero uno, the Slickster himself.”
I couldn’t tell if the house had been searched by either the police or Sloan. There wasn’t a mess, like the police had left after searching my house one time, but drawers and closets were open. I hoped to find those clippings Mary Beth had cut from the newspapers. No luck with that, but, down below some house-staging papers in a drawer, I came across a snapshot.
Slick Sloan, several years younger than now. Tan and muscular in swim trunks, lounging beside a palm tree. He sported a flirty smile, dark hair falling carelessly toward one eye. Underneath the snapshot, I also found a formal photo in a frame, just his head, again without a mustache, not smiling but with a good-times gleam in his dark eyes. I showed the photos to Judee.
“Would there be a problem if I borrowed these?”
“Like with the plants, I can’t imagine anyone would care. Help yourself.”
I removed the photo from the frame and stuck both photos in the pocket of my chauffeur’s uniform. “Was Mary Beth ever into drugs? Could Sloan have been searching for something like that?”
“She never used anything back when I knew her. But since then?” She shook her head. “Who knows? But I doubt it. She was more the health-food, take-every-vitamin-in-existence type.” She hesitated. “Although that wouldn’t necessarily keep her from having a little side business dealing in drugs, would it?”
True. “I’m also thinking that if Sloan killed her, he may have been in here looking to get rid of something that might incriminate him. But you said you didn’t think he was a killer type.”
“I could be wrong. If a payoff was big enough, I guess I wouldn’t put it past him to kill for it.” She paused, and there was an unexpected catch in her throat when she said, “Poor Mary Beth.”
For Whom the Limo Rolls Page 16