Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 02 - Dead Ringer

by Toni L. P. Kelner

  I let Richard hunt up the newspaper while I got us bottles of Coke. He brought it over to the kitchen table and spread it out, and we went through it page by page. Other than the article about Cooper, the stories were pretty tame, nothing that would have caught Dorinda’s attention like that. Now I was convinced that Dorinda had been interested in Cooper.

  “See?” I said. “That proves it.”

  “What exactly does it prove again?”

  “That Dorinda is involved. Somehow,” I said. “Look, I know it’s pretty shaky, but we don’t have anything else to go on.”

  “Okay,” Richard said. “How do we go about proving Dorinda’s guilt?”

  I thought about it. “We need to get into her house. If she’s been cutting up newspapers to put together blackmail letters, maybe she left the scraps laying around. And the letters said that she had proof that Aunt Daphine and Uncle John Ward weren’t married. I bet I can find it if I get in there.”

  “No offense, but I do draw the line at breaking and entering. Being arrested would probably keep me from getting tenure.”

  “Maybe we could go visit her,” I said, not very convincingly.

  “Some sort of pretext would be required, don’t you think?”

  “You’re probably right.” I thought about it for a few minutes. “I’ve got it. Let’s call in the cavalry.”

  “I assume you’re speaking figuratively, and not literally.”

  “Actually, it is fairly literal. Having Aunt Nellie and Uncle Ruben try to sell you something is a lot like being trampled by a herd of horses.” I reached for the telephone to call them.

  Chapter 20

  Aunt Nellie answered the phone on the first ring. “Hello?”

  “Aunt Nellie? This is Laura.”

  “Hey there, Laurie Anne. How are y’all enjoying your visit?”

  “We’re having a good time,” I said, which was partially true. We talked family for a few minutes and then I said, “Aunt Nellie, I need a favor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Have you and Uncle Ruben tried to sell Dorinda Thompson one of your water filters?”

  “Well, I asked her if we could come show her one, but she said she wasn’t interested. She was pretty ugly about it, too, when a simple ‘no’ would have sufficed. Why do you ask?”

  “I need to get into Dorinda’s house.”

  “You do?”

  “I was hoping that my going with you while you show her a water filter would do the trick, but if she’s not interested …” I saw that Richard was waving a twenty–dollar bill at me and mouthing the word, “bribe.”

  “Aunt Nellie, could you talk to Dorinda again? Tell her you’ll give her twenty dollars if she’ll let you demonstrate the filter.”

  “Laurie Anne, does this have something to do with Daphine’s troubles?”

  “Yes ma’am, it does.” Sometimes I wonder why they even bother to print a newspaper in Byerly. News spreads faster than the ink can dry.

  “Then I won’t ask any more questions, but you can count on me and Ruben. Hang up, and I’ll get Ruben to call Dorinda. I’ve got an idea that she’ll be nicer to a man than she would be to a woman.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Nellie.”

  I told Richard what was going on, and a few minutes later, Aunt Nellie called back.

  “Either Ruben’s flirting or the twenty dollars did the trick,” she said. “Dorinda said we could come over this evening. Is that all right?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Good. We’ll pick you up after dinner. Who knows? Maybe we’ll sell her one of our filters while we’re at it.”

  “Could be,” I said, and we hung up again. Of course, I didn’t give a darn about water filters, but I couldn’t wait to get inside Dorinda’s house so I could look around.

  Aunt Nellie and Uncle Ruben picked me up at six that evening, and we talked out our plans on the way over. Richard wasn’t too thrilled about being left behind, but like I told him, three of us showing up could be explained, not four. I did let him supply the bribe money so he wouldn’t feel left out.

  If Dorinda was Aunt Daphine’s blackmailer, she certainly wasn’t spending her ill–gotten gains on her house. I’d guess that it hadn’t been painted since I was in junior high school, and the grass hadn’t been mowed or the leaves raked in nearly that long. The door looked like a pack of wild dogs had been scratching to get in, and when we knocked, Dorinda took her own sweet time in answering it,

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said with a complete lack of enthusiasm.

  I wanted to remind her that we had an appointment, but we had already decided that Uncle Ruben would be our point man.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Thompson,” he said. “My, aren’t you looking lovely this evening. May we come in?”

  She opened the door, and moved out of the way for us to step inside.

  “What a nice home you have,” Uncle Ruben said, and I was awfully impressed by how sincere he sounded. Dorinda’s furniture was like her clothing, gaudy and cheap, and her housekeeping was nearly as thorough as her yard work.

  Dorinda took the one chair, a recliner that had seen better days, and waved us in the direction of the sagging, green couch.

  “You’ve met our niece Laurie Anne, haven’t you?” Uncle Ruben asked. “She’s interested in marketing our product in the Boston area, and she wanted to sit in on the demonstration. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I guess it’s all right. I heard that her husband was out of work for a good while.”

  I forced myself to smile and nod, and reminded myself again to explain to Vasti that a graduate fellowship is a job.

  “How long is this going to take?” Dorinda wanted to know. “I’ve got things to do tonight.”

  Uncle Ruben said, “Oh, it doesn’t take long to show you the benefits of What–a–Filter.”

  “When do I get the money?”

  “After the demonstration,” I said firmly. I wasn’t about to pay her until I got my chance to look around.

  Uncle Ruben opened a leather–look briefcase and pulled out a set of charts and close–up photos of water organisms. “Before we begin, are there any other family members at home? We think that clean water is something the whole family should be involved in.”

  Dorinda shook her head. “Joleen’s out. You didn’t tell me that she was supposed to be here. I still get the money, don’t I?”

  “Of course,” Uncle Ruben assured her. The real reason he had asked was to make sure that I wouldn’t run into anybody if I got a chance to search. “Now let me explain why you need a What–a–Filter.”

  I couldn’t really blame Dorinda for being bored at the lecture that followed. I didn’t find Uncle Ruben’s recitation of the dangers of fluoridated water and foreign germs very compelling either, but I did try to look interested. Not Dorinda. She spent the whole time tapping her feet, drumming her fingers, inspecting her nails, and yawning.

  Still, Uncle Ruben went steadfastly forward, with Aunt Nellie making the right noises in all the right places. They were a good team, and I decided that if they ever did latch onto a legitimate product, they would be able to make some real money.

  After at least twenty minutes of spiel, Uncle Ruben concluded with, “Now, if you’ll allow me, I’ll attach one of our travel units to your kitchen faucet so you can taste the difference What–a–Filter makes.”

  Dorinda sighed loudly, but got up from her chair. “All right, but I didn’t know that you were going to want to go in there. I didn’t straighten up.”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Uncle Ruben said, and I couldn’t imagine that it could be any worse than the living room. “Nellie, why don’t you and Laurie Anne wait in here?”

  “Well, if you think that will be better,” Aunt Nellie said doubtfully, with just a slight quaver of the lower lip. If I hadn’t heard them plan that maneuver in the car, I would have been convinced that Uncle Ruben wanted some time alone with Dorinda for a quick squeeze.

  Certainly D
orinda was fooled. She smirked, and allowed Uncle Ruben to take her elbow as they went into the kitchen. Aunt Nellie winked at me as soon as they were gone.

  Now was my chance. There wasn’t much furniture in the living room, and I looked inside the drawers of the end tables while keeping up a meaningless dialog with Aunt Nellie. Actually, Aunt Nellie did most of the talking while I added yes’s and no’s as appropriate.

  There was nothing incriminating in the living room, and only a coat rack in the front hall. I nodded at Aunt Nellie, who obligingly dropped her pocketbook to mask any noise as I opened the hall closet. There were only a few coats in there, no boxes or papers.

  Aunt Nellie continued to talk to herself as I stepped quietly toward the back of the house. I wasn’t sure which to be more grateful for: that I had thought to wear sneakers or that the house only had one story.

  The first door I came to was another closet, this one half filled with linens. Unless Dorinda had folded something into a towel or sheet, I figured the closet was clean. Not literally, of course. I ran my hands along the undersides of the shelves in case she had taped something there, and confirmed that Dorinda didn’t waste her time dusting.

  The next door was the bathroom. There was nothing of interest in the medicine chest, and the true confession magazines stacked on the back of the toilet had all of their pages intact, meaning that they hadn’t provided raw material for blackmail letters.

  I could have quit right there for all the good searching the rest of the house did. I learned that both Dorinda and Joleen had lots of clothes and very few books, the exact opposite of Richard’s and my apartment; found more eyeshadow and lipstick than I expected to need for the rest of my life; and quickly lost count of the bottles of perfume.

  I never did find any of those drawers of insurance policies and tax records that most people keep, and decided that Dorinda either kept them in the kitchen or threw them out.

  I was to the point of starting to search Dorinda’s trash can when I heard Aunt Nellie call out, “Mrs. Thompson? Somebody’s pulling into your driveway. Are you expecting company?”

  I turned out the light in Dorinda’s bedroom, decided I didn’t have time to make it back to the living room, and ducked into the bathroom instead. As the front door opened, I flushed the toilet and walked out the bathroom door.

  Joleen had just come in, looking a little worse for the wear. Her coat wasn’t buttoned at all, and her blouse only had half the buttons fastened. I think I saw her bra hanging out of her coat pocket.

  “Mama!” she yelled, and then caught sight of me. “What are you doing here?”

  I smiled sweetly. “Hi Joleen. Didn’t your mother tell you that we were going to be demonstrating a water filter tonight?”

  “Back there?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Of course not,” I said, squeezing by her to get back into the living room. “I had to use the bathroom.” She watched me the whole time as I went to sit back down by Aunt Nellie.

  Dorinda and Uncle Ruben emerged from the kitchen, with his arm firmly tucked into hers. Dorinda made a big show of disengaging, implying all kinds of things about what had been going on in the kitchen. “Hey Joleen,” Dorinda said. “I wasn’t expecting you back so early.”

  “That’s what my date said about his wife,” Joleen said, but I guess she realized that that hadn’t been the right thing to say in front of Thaddeous’s aunt, uncle, and cousin. “I mean, her husband. We were going to go shopping, but he got out of work early and she had to fix him dinner.”

  It wasn’t even a good lie. Poor Thaddeous.

  “Well Mrs. Thompson, what did you think about the What–a–Filter?” Aunt Nellie asked.

  “I just can’t decide,” Dorinda said. “Why don’t you let me think about it for a while?” She looked directly at Uncle Ruben. “I might need Ruben to come demonstrate some more.”

  “That would be fine,” Uncle Ruben said as he packed up his charts and the filter. “We do appreciate your time, and here’s the gift we promised you.” He pulled Richard’s money out of his wallet and presented it to her.

  She took it from him, making sure to stroke his hand in the process.

  “You be sure and call if there’s any other questions I can answer, Mrs. Thompson,” Uncle Ruben said.

  “I’ll just do that,” Dorinda said with a knowing look. “And why don’t you call me Dorinda?”

  “We need to be getting to our next appointment now,” Aunt Nellie said frostily. She tugged at Uncle Ruben’s elbow, and said, “Come on Ruben.”

  Uncle Ruben smiled once more at Dorinda, and then we let ourselves out.

  Aunt Nellie’s indignation was so realistic that I halfway expected her to start snarling at Uncle Ruben on the way home. Instead the two of them burst out laughing as soon as we were out of Dorinda’s driveway.

  “Did you ever in your whole life see anybody so obvious?” Aunt Nellie said.

  “ ‘Why don’t you call me Dorinda?’ ” Uncle Ruben said in a fair imitation of Dorinda. “I swear that woman must believe what happens in soap operas. As soon as we got into the kitchen, she was hanging onto me so bad I couldn’t hardly get the filter installed.”

  “She was even worse than Mrs. Shannon. At least Mrs. Shannon wasn’t making cow eyes at you with me right there in the room.”

  “You mean this kind of thing has happened before?” I asked.

  “All the time,” Aunt Nellie said.

  “Usually not this bad,” Uncle Ruben said, “but a lot of women are more likely to buy something if you flirt with them. No harm in a little flirting, is there? The woman feels good, and we sell a filter.” He shrugged.

  Aunt Nellie patted his knee and said, “My Ruben just doesn’t know his own charm. But enough of that. Did you find what you were looking for, Laurie Anne?”

  “Not really,” I had to admit. “Of course I couldn’t search the whole house, but I didn’t find what I wanted to find.” That was as specific as I could get, but they didn’t seem to mind.

  As they were dropping me back at Aunt Maggie’s, Aunt Nellie said, “Now if you need any more help, you be sure and call. You hear?”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  Richard had a book open when I found him in the bedroom, but he was clearly waiting for me. “Well?”

  I shrugged. “I’m just not sure. I didn’t find anything, but there were plenty of places I didn’t get a chance to look.” I gave a quick rundown of the evening’s visit, and concluded with, “Dorinda could still be the one.”

  Richard raised one eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re not just focusing on her because you don’t like her?”

  “Do you expect me to pick on somebody I do like?”

  “No, but you can’t let your dislike blind you to other possibilities. Face it: we didn’t really have a good reason to suspect Dorinda in the first place.”

  I thought about it, and had to admit that he was right. There was nothing to connect Dorinda with Uncle John Ward other than an ex–husband who may or may not have known him. She wasn’t showing any signs of spending inordinate amounts of money, and she had no particular reason to dislike Aunt Daphine. “There’s still the funny way she acted when she saw the newspaper today.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “All right, I concede,” I said. “Dorinda is hereby removed as a suspect, unless we learn something new. So what do you suggest as our next move?”

  He put down his book, closed the bedroom door, and grinned. After all, I told myself once again, we were still on vacation.

  Chapter 21

  I’m afraid the next couple of days were a bust as far as detective work went. Richard and I were barely through breakfast on Friday when Vasti called, even more frantic than usual. Somebody or another was sick, and somebody else had a death in the family, and Vasti recited the excuses of several other somebodies so quickly that I never did get them straight. The upshot of it was that she needed me and Richard to help her put together her garden party
.

  Since we really didn’t have any specific plans, I just couldn’t refuse her in her hour of need. I regretted it later on, of course, after hours of running around to the caterer, the florist, and several rental places to pick up stuff for the party. Vasti stayed busy, too, coming up with more stuff for us to do. Every time we got somewhere to pick something up, there was a message waiting with another chore.

  By the end of the day, we were tired of doing things for my family, so we went to a movie to hide. Unfortunately, that only saved us for the evening. By the time we got back to Aunt Maggie’s, there was a note waiting with more jobs to do the next morning. So most of Saturday was shot, too.

  Still, despite all of the work we did for Vasti, the hardest thing I had to do that weekend was to talk Richard into putting on his suit for a second time on his vacation. He finally acceded, but kept mumbling about the “cunning livery of hell.”

  He did cheer up when he saw me in my new dress, with my hair all fixed and my nails painted. For once, I didn’t mind him quoting Shakespeare to me. Though I wasn’t sure that I was likely to be mistaken for the sun or if the moon would be envious of my beauty, I was certainly willing to let him think so.

  One of the myriad tasks Vasti had asked me to perform was to check and see what Aunt Maggie was going to be wearing to the party. She was afraid that Aunt Maggie would show up in those tiger–striped sneakers, of course. Unfortunately, when I asked Aunt Maggie, she just grinned and told me to tell Vasti not to worry. For some reason, this did not reassure Vasti. I was hoping that Aunt Maggie would be ready before Richard and I left, but she was still getting dressed and yelled through the closed door that we should go ahead and she’d catch up later. So we drove ourselves to the party.

  As we drove down the curving driveway to the Walters’s house, I couldn’t help but admire the place. Though it was actually built considerably after the Civil War, to look at the columns and the veranda, you’d have thought that General Lee himself used to come calling.

  After Big Bill’s wife died, Burt and his wife Dorcas had moved in with him, and Dorcas did love being the lady of the manor. She was standing at the front door to receive her guests, dressed in a royal blue silk dress and a simple string of pearls that was obviously real. Dorcas was letting her hair go gracefully grey but kept her figure intact, either by diet or by exercise or by main force of will.