by Cathy Ace
“Did Tanya do well at university? Make any friends?”
“No friends to speak of. She did well academically—top of her class, even though she was only seventeen. When she graduated, she got a job here, right away. She’s worked her way up really fast. Cait, I know Miss Shirley liked her and trusted her. She was great with Tanya after her dad killed himself. Tanya’s never really talked about it since he died, but I got the impression that he’d finally got into a situation he just couldn’t see his way out of. They were about to take the house, the car was already gone. Tanya’s had her own little place since she turned eighteen, but now we’ll have a proper home. White picket fence, the lot. And kids. We want a real family. That’s the sort of person Tanya is. She just wants a normal life. She had no reason to kill Miss Shirley. She liked Miss Shirley.”
“Why do you think Miss Shirley took Tanya under her wing to such an extent?”
Tom gave his answer some thought. “Tanya first met Miss Shirley when she was very young. They used to have family days for the people who worked at the old Sunrise, and her dad always took her along, of course.” Tom smiled. “I’ve seen photos of Tanya back then. When her mother was around she dressed her like she was a little doll. Frilly dresses, little socks, big specs. She looked cute. I guess she just won over Miss Shirley’s heart. But I don’t think Tanya had much contact with Miss Shirley until she started working here. Well, of course, Miss Shirley presented Tanya with her scholarship money, but that was it.”
“Why would Miss Shirley present a scholarship to Tanya?”
“It was the first year of a new scholarship Miss Shirley funded at UNLV. It was for the best university entrance qualifications for a child of an employee of the Tsar! Organization. Tanya won it just before her dad got fired. Lucky, really, eh?”
I nodded. I could see a pattern emerging. Tanya’s dad had been supported by Miss Shirley through difficult times—she’d offered him employment until there’d been evidence of misdeeds she couldn’t ignore or overrule. Maybe she’d even helped him clear his debts over the years. A big lump sum had found its way to Tanya just when she’d needed it, and since her father’s death, Miss Shirley had allowed Tanya to lean on her even more. Miss Shirley had even taken an interest in Tom. Though, on that count, it seemed as though Miss Shirley had taken a very hands-on approach toward many people’s careers. It sounded to me as though Tanya’s late father might well have been Miss Shirley’s son. I wondered if he’d known that Miss Shirley was his mother. Of course, there was a chance that I was seeing a pattern where none existed.
“How does Tanya feel about Miss Shirley, Tom? Do you two ever talk about that?”
Tom sighed. “Not that this means anything, but it’s funny you should ask that. Tanya’s been . . . different since her dad killed himself. Bound to be, right? That’s a tough thing to take. But she’s been very . . . um . . . stoic about it all. She hardly cried at all during the first few weeks after it happened. Maybe it was shock, I don’t know. She just sorted everything out and made sure everything was taken care of. But a couple of weeks after we emptied all her dad’s stuff out of his house, before they repossessed it, she became . . . cold. That’s it. Cold. She started crying at night. Not when she was over at my place, but when we were at hers. When I’ve been over at her place during the past couple of weeks, she’s gotten up in the middle of the night and gone off into the kitchen to cry. I tried to console her once, but she lashed out at me. Cold. Hard. Angry. Not like her at all. She’s gone kind of flat. But I don’t know why. Other than her dad dying, you know? And when it comes to Miss Shirley, she’s been very off about her. Criticizing her to me, which is also odd for Tanya.”
“Do you think that Miss Shirley said or did something to Tanya that made her change?”
Tom shook his head. “Tanya’s never been good at talking about things, but I think she’d have told me that. Though I have no idea how she’s really coping with her father’s death. But that doesn’t mean she’d kill.” I was beginning to get a picture of Tanya that squared more with my own instinctive assessment of the girl. She was definitely hiding something, at least a part of her true self, from us all. Tom included. I asked my final questions.
“I know this is going to sound a bit odd, Tom, but why does Tanya have such an enormous handbag with her this evening?”
Tom looked puzzled. “Has she?” He clearly hadn’t noticed.
“Yes, she does. Big black thing. It doesn’t really go with her outfit.”
Tom shrugged. “Sorry, I have no idea. It’s not really my sort of thing, choosing a handbag. It’s just a thing women have. Tanya usually dumps hers on the floor out of the way whenever she has the chance, that’s all I know.”
I smiled, and Tom smiled back—good, he was back onside—then I asked, “Why did you two swap places at the bar when everyone restaged the positions they were in when the lights came on?”
“Thank you!” exclaimed Tom. “I’ll tell Tanya you said that. I told her we were the other way around, but she wouldn’t have it. I was sure I’d been the one standing closer to Miss Shirley when the lights came up. Tanya insisted she was. Does it matter? Maybe it does . . . hey, look, if you think she killed the poor woman, which I’m sure she didn’t, wouldn’t she be more likely to insist she was farther away from her, rather than closer to her?”
“You make a good point, Tom. Thanks.” I leaned in and added, “I really appreciate you being so open and honest. It’s been most helpful.”
“I knew you’d see it couldn’t possibly be her,” replied Tom, smiling.
If only he knew I am thinking the exact opposite.
As we moved back toward the dessert table, I looked around for Bud, anxious to share my theory, but I couldn’t see him. Where can he be?
When Bud’s voice rang out from behind the privacy screen near the men’s room, his tone was urgent, commanding. “I need some help in here, please. Guys—quick as you can. Clemence has passed out. I need to make him more comfortable in the main room.”
All the men rushed forward, just as Julie emerged from the ladies’ room, screaming and covered in blood.
“It’s . . . it’s . . . I only went in there to . . . she’s dead! I tried to save her . . . she’s dead!”
Confusion reigned. No one knew where to turn. I ran across the room, pushed past Julie, and threw open the door to the ladies’ room. Tanya’s body lay sprawled on the floor, her blood oozing onto the tiles. The handle of a corkscrew protruded from the back of her neck. Her face was contorted, her eyes staring. I reached to feel for a pulse. There wasn’t one. Beside her lay her giant purse, some of its contents spilling onto the floor. I knew she was beyond help, so I pulled the door open again to attend to Julie. She was still standing right outside the door, the streaks of blood on her face in stark contrast to the pallor of her skin.
“Oh my God!” she said, then she threw up.
Second Intermission
AS I LEFT THE LADIES’ room on this occasion, I already knew that Bud had his hands full with Clemence, so I took control.
“First things first, no one enters this ladies’ room again. Svetlana—” I looked over at the Diva, who was standing near the dessert table, a silver cake slicer in one hand, a plate in the other, frozen in a motion that would never be completed. “We ladies will be using the men’s room from now on.”
Svetlana nodded, dumb for once.
I continued, “Ian? Ian!” Ian’s head popped out of the men’s room. “Could you come here, please, Ian? I need you. The other guys can help Bud.”
Ian was beside me in a moment. His face paled as he saw the blood on Julie’s face and the vomit at her feet.
Julie was holding her belly and moaning. “I’m so sorry, Tom. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t save her.”
Tom was standing in the middle of the room, completely immobile. He looked utterly helpless, and his chin puckered as he croaked, “That’s Tanya’s blood on Julie? Julie said Tanya’s dead. Cait? Is Tanya dead?�
�
I had to think quickly. I tried not to bark as I said, “Ian, quick, grab a chair for Tom before he falls.”
Ian managed to get Tom onto a bar stool and propped against the bar before he hit the carpet. Tom held his forehead, and big tears started to roll down his ruddy, freckled cheeks. When he spoke again, it was as though he were in a daze. “That’s Tanya’s blood, right?” he whispered, looking at Julie’s stained suit. “She can’t be dead. Tanya can’t be dead. She’s okay really, right?” He wasn’t speaking to me, he was speaking to himself.
I turned my attention to Julie, who was swaying and still holding her tummy. I was afraid she might faint. “Ian, can you give me a hand with Julie too, please?”
Ian took a chair to Julie so she could sit down where she’d been standing. I knew that Bud should see her as she was, before she got cleaned up, because there was obviously the question of whether Julie was telling the truth about trying to save Tanya.
Art, Carl, and Jimmy emerged from the men’s room carrying Clemence between them, with Bud giving directions. They laid the unconscious body of the elderly man down on the floor, against the privacy screen, just a few feet from the two corpses in the dining room.
Once Clemence had been arranged according to Bud’s instructions, Art rushed to Julie’s side, trying to calm her.
Svetlana sat down in a chair with its back right against the glass wall. She faced the room. She looked defiant and beckoned to Jimmy to join her, which he did.
Ian and I cleaned up the mess Julie had made on the carpet. I can cope with blood. I don’t have a problem with it. But vomit? I could feel myself gag as Ian and I did our best to get it all up. The only way I managed it, without adding my own contribution, was to keep telling myself it had to be done. The room was now very warm, and the last thing we needed was for this smell to begin to mix with the aromas of the warm, spoiled caviar and the now more-than-stinky cheeses, not to mention the creeping sickliness that was beginning to crawl from beneath the tablecloth covering Miss Shirley’s body.
I tried to breathe through my mouth. We kept at it, and, finally, after running through two entire rolls of paper towels, Ian and I realized we’d made a pretty good job of it.
When we were done, I felt utterly exhausted and on the verge of tears. Both my hands were filthy—and the binding on my injured one even more so, it seemed. None of me was in good shape, but my hands definitely needed attention.
“I’m using the sink in the men’s room,” I said as I swept into the facility that mirrored the ladies’. Well, it didn’t mirror it exactly—the ladies’ room didn’t have a urinal—but they were comparable in terms of the richness of their decor. A look in the mirror as I washed up told a sorrier tale than I’d expected. Half my hair had escaped its band and bow, my lipstick and blush had disappeared, I had raccoon eyes, and there was a big smear of blood on my cheek. I didn’t bother to rebind the cut on my hand, which seemed to have closed up pretty well, so I was able to use two wet hands to plaster my hair back into a ponytail. Luckily I could feel the hairspray I’d applied the night before turn to glue as I did so. It would have to do. I’d completely lost track of my little evening clutch purse with my lipstick in it—but who would reapply lipstick at a time like this anyway? I just wiped the blood from my face and left it at that.
Emerging from the men’s room was quite a change, and it gave me a very different perspective on the dining room. I stopped for a moment to take in the scene—not so much the people, but the space itself. This part of the room felt much more open than at the other end of the bar. I reasoned that this was because there was no dessert table here. No one seemed to be paying any attention to me, so I walked a few steps to be beside Miss Shirley’s body, and I squatted down, getting almost the same view of the room that the woman herself would have had before she was killed. As I did so I realized that not only was Miss Shirley’s seat a good foot beyond the outer edge of the partition, but she also wasn’t aligned the right way to have been facing her table. Her chair was turned a little away from where the table would have been, toward the partition itself. Odd.
As I looked at the partition, and saw the empty space where the golden egg should have been, I sighed with exasperation. Even when I’d thought I’d worked out how Tanya could have killed Miss Shirley, and how the urn had been involved, I’d still been confused about the egg . . . and the pink silk handkerchief . . . and the glittering red purse.
But, there, I’d been wrong about Tanya—after all, she was lying dead in the ladies’ room, and I found it difficult to believe there were two killers in our midst—so maybe what I really needed to do was start all over again.
Could Julie Pool have wanted Miss Shirley, her own husband, and Tanya dead? Would a woman be able to calmly kill her own spouse, and her employer, but then throw up after killing someone she merely worked with?
I was confused. I wondered if I should try my wakeful dreaming technique. There were enough clues, bodies, and problems to be sorted out that allowing them to try to tell their own story while I was in a half-trance might work. In fact, I realized I was so addled, it might be the only way to tackle the whole murderous mess.
But first there was something concrete I had to sort out.
I walked around the outer edge of the room, past the huddled Svetlana and Jimmy, to the ladies’ room. As I stood outside, I grappled with my conscience about disturbing a crime scene, but decided I needed a good look at what had happened to Tanya. Glancing around the dining room I could see that everyone was still engrossed in their own interactions, so I stepped into the ladies’ room one more time.
The corkscrew in Tanya’s neck told me that someone with great strength had killed her. It would have taken great force to ram it in as it had been. Force, or fury. The excellent soundproofing of the washroom meant that no one outside would have heard a cry. Once again the killer had audaciously taken advantage of a tiny window of opportunity, and had used a weapon that was to hand. I turned my attention toward Tanya’s purse. A bottle of pills had rolled out. I also caught sight of a dark green, lumpy wallet and something metallic. I bent down to get a closer look. It was, unmistakably, the muzzle of a gun!
I nipped into the dining room, grabbed an unused napkin from the dessert table, went right back into the ladies’, and used the napkin to pull the gun from Tanya’s purse. Then I grabbed the shoulder strap of the purse itself, swung it over my arm, and dropped the gun, wrapped in the napkin, inside. It was the only way I could think of to hide the weapon—my tiny little purse, which I’d spotted on the table where I’d sat for dinner, didn’t stand a chance of accommodating it.
The discovery of the gun puzzled and panicked me. I knew for a fact that just at the entrance to the elevator in the Babushka Bar, we’d all had to go through a very ornate archway that, for all its decoration, was clearly a metal detector. How on earth had Tanya managed to smuggle a gun into the private dining room? And why would she? Besides, if she had a gun, why didn’t she shoot her attacker? And who was her attacker? Would Julie really have had enough strength to ram a corkscrew into Tanya’s neck?
Damn and blast! The girl lying dead at my feet had been my prime suspect. I’d obviously got the whole thing wrong. Everything.
Miss Shirley, Jack Bullock, Tanya Willis. Who would want them all dead? Who could have found three opportunities to kill unseen?
I needed a break. My brain needed a break. I had to start again, fresh.
I walked out into the dining room with Tanya’s purse hanging from my shoulder, my mind whirling, my heart pounding. There I saw Tom, sobbing like a child, being comforted by Bud, who clearly felt he could do no more for Clemence. The elderly gentleman’s unconscious body was still lying against the privacy screen outside the men’s room. He looked almost disturbingly peaceful.
Julie sat close to the bar staring into space, muttering to herself, clearly in shock. Art and Carl were at her side. Jimmy was trying to calm the Diva, who looked surprisingly neat and ti
dy, considering what we’d all been through. Ian was moving things around behind the bar, seemingly without purpose.
“Cait?” It was Bud. He’d left his seat beside Tom and was now right next to me. I realized I was standing in the middle of the room with what I suspected was a weird look on my face. “You alright, Cait?”
“No, I am not alright, Bud.” I didn’t shout, but I was close to it. “I could be worse, I suppose, but I am far from alright. This isn’t alright. It’s all very, very bad. I have to sit quietly and work it out. I can do it. I know I can.” I didn’t know who I was pleading with, but that was certainly what anyone listening would have heard in my voice.
“Please stop killer before everyone dead,” said Svetlana. She was still sitting in her chair, her back to the glass wall, but now she was holding her knees, looking terrified. “I very afraid. Now I sit here. Nobody come near me. Except Jimmy. Jimmy okay, I think. This is safe. I very, very afraid,” she whimpered. Jimmy patted her arm, looking deeply concerned.
“We’re all afraid,” said Art. For the first time since we’d been introduced, I was truly aware of Art’s age. He looked much more frail and disheveled than he had when we’d all been celebrating Miss Shirley’s inheritance.
“You’re not kidding,” added Carl, who seemed more angry than defeated. “Someone in this room is completely nuts. Stark. Raving. Mad. Gotta be. Who the hell would do all this otherwise? And how are they doing it? I think Svetlana’s got a point. I’m not leaving this space, where everyone can see everyone else, till the cops come out of that elevator. I don’t care if my bladder bursts—I’m staying right here.”