by Mary Daheim
In the kitchen, Renie was still quivering over the suggestion that Eddie La Plante might be the second victim in the SOTS murder case. “Coz,” ventured Renie as Judith sat down again, “if La Plante isn’t Eddie’s real name, what is it? And why change it?” The gaze she gave Judith was quizzical, yet canny. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I suppose so,” said Judith in a tone of resignation. “Those initials on Eve’s bag, right?” The implications were too dreadful, but Judith had to give them voice. “It may be a longshot, but it’s certainly possible. The ‘EFK’ could stand for Eve Frizzell Kramer. And Eddie may very well be not only Eve’s father, but John’s.”
“That,” said Renie with a grim face, “is what I was afraid of.”
“Me, too,” agreed Judith. “In fact, it scares me to death.”
FOURTEEN
“WE’VE GOT TO talk to John,” said Renie, galvanized into action. “Or Eve. Let’s go.”
Judith glanced at the schoolhouse clock. “It’s after four. I shouldn’t leave. Although,” she temporized, “the California contingent said they’d have dinner on the way. I guess they’re driving up.”
Even as Judith mulled, the phone rang. Renie, already on her feet, answered in her best boardroom voice, but quickly shifted gears: “What? When? How is she?” Renie’s eyes were enormous, her face suddenly pale.
Judith stood up, balancing storklike on one foot. “What is it?” she breathed, afraid to find out.
Renie put the phone down. “Arlene says Kate Duffy tried to commit suicide.”
“What?” Judith reeled against the table. “Is she okay?”
“Satisfactory condition at All Souls Hospital. She drank nail polish remover.” Renie’s round face was etched with contempt. “Why, coz? If anybody seems innocent, it’s Kate Duffy, if only because she’s got the brains of a bug.”
“You don’t like Kate much, do you?” Judith remarked in an oddly toneless voice.
Renie considered. “I don’t dislike her. She irks me with all that sanctimonious crap. I think she wants attention.” Renie made a sharp gesture with one hand. “Like this stunt. Who’d drink nail polish remover to commit suicide? All she’d do is get sick. Or drunk. The stuff’s loaded with alcohol.”
“The question is,” puzzled Judith, “why do it at all? Now?” She gave Renie a keen look. “Where’s Mark?”
“Arlene said he and the kids are with her at the hospital.”
While Judith felt Renie was being a bit hard on Kate, the situation stymied her. “I suppose she drank the stuff of her own free will.”
“Huh?” Renie made a face. “Well, sure. How else would you get anybody—even a nincompoop like Kate—to drink enough nail polish remover to put them in the hospital?”
“I don’t get it.” Judith was at the refrigerator, taking out a package of frozen pastry puffs. “If Eve and John are half-sister and half-brother, and Eddie La Plante is really Edgar Frizzell, at least the part about the will makes sense. Eve might have felt that some of Emily’s money should have gone to Eddie, and thus, to her.”
“But even if Eddie is Edgar, he and Lucille would have been divorced years ago, before Eve was born,” protested Renie. “He and Eve wouldn’t be any blood relation to Emily.”
Judith turned on both the oven and a front burner on the stove. “Conscience money, maybe. Or some sort of divorce settlement that was never paid off. Had Lucille lived, she and Emily would have split the estate between them. If John had never shown up to hold poor old Emily’s hand, the Kramers would have gotten a big piece through Kurt’s connection with Tresvant Timber. Let’s say Kurt and Eve knew that Sandy was really George Sanderson, then they would have a motive for exposing him, and in the process maybe breaking Emily’s will. But I’m not sure either of them would go as far as killing Sandy to bring out the truth.”
“Both the Kramers have tempers,” Renie noted. “And they’re the two people who just might have had the embroidery scissors with them. Still, it would have made more sense to kill John. He’s the heir.”
“True,” agreed Judith, selecting a long-handled wooden spoon from a ceramic container on the kitchen counter. “But that would be too obvious. The Kramers aren’t stupid.” She paused, thrashing about in her kettle cupboard. “As for Wilbur and Norma’s motive, what have you picked up from your downtown grapevine about the Borings?”
Renie sighed. “With a prominent family like that, there’s practically a rumor of the week. They’re changing ad agencies, they’re selling out, they’re moving the entire aerospace division to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. But there is a bit of a buzz that at least two major law firms, one of which has heavy-hitting D.C. connections, are wooing the Borings. Plus, a couple of the Paine junior partners are big on pro bono work, all of which could upset the financial apple cart with the Tresvant family business going down the drain.”
“Or back to New York,” remarked Judith. “By the way,” she noted, eyeing Renie curiously, “you never told me your mother worked in the Paine law office.”
Renie’s eyes widened. “She did? Oh—you’re right, but it was only for a month or two, right after I got my apartment on Hawthorne Place. I forgot all about it. You must have known it at the time, too.” She caught the glint in Judith’s gaze and cocked her head. “Don’t tell me Mother possesses some vital scrap of information.”
Pointing a saucepan at her cousin, Judith nodded. “You got it. The elder Paine’s office handled Tim Mills’s adoption. Didn’t your mom ever mention that pertinent fact?”
“Jeez!” Renie stared at Judith. “If she did, it went right by me. You know Mother, she does run on. I suppose she may have said something when Tim was assigned to the parish, but it didn’t register at the time.”
“She won’t tell me who his real parents were,” said Judith, melting butter and stirring flour into the pan. “Could you worm it out of her?”
Renie looked dubious. “Mother has always taken her duties as a legal secretary very seriously. She can be a real clam if she thinks she’s morally bound to keep a secret.”
“Too many people are keeping secrets,” Judith said, adding chicken broth and milk to her mixture. “The Paines, the Kramers, Eddie, even Father Tim. I can come up with motives for Eve and Kurt and Norma and Wilbur and maybe even Eddie. But not the Duffys. This suicide attempt of Kate’s…”
The phone interrupted Judith’s conjecture, and to her surprise, it was Joe. She took a deep breath, avoided Renie’s gaze, and waited for him to mention his visit to the chancery. But, by coincidence, it was the Duffys he was calling about.
“I hear you’ve been badgering Woody and accusing us of not doing our duty,” Joe said in that pleasant voice that rarely failed to unsettle Judith. “Back off, Jude-girl. Remember when I was in vice?”
“Sure,” replied Judith, keeping her tone light. Joe Flynn had been assigned to the vice squad as a rookie when Judith had first met him.
“I called in my chips with Les Lowenstein in L.A.,” said Joe. “I worked with him before he moved to California to get some smog.”
Les Lowenstein’s name echoed from out of the past. He and his future wife had double-dated occasionally with Joe and Judith. “Good old Les,” said Judith a bit numbly.
“He’s way up in the LAPD now,” Joe went on without missing a beat. “I got him to check out our suspects, and guess whose names came leaping out of the computer?”
“Who?” Judith exchanged glances with a mystified Renie.
“George Sanderson and Mark Duffy.” Joe sounded smug.
“What?” Judith pressed the phone closer and waved at Renie to keep quiet.
“Porno flicks, back in the early sixties,” said Joe. “George—Sandy—acted in them, and Mark was the cinematographer, though that’s a fancy name for a guy grinding a camera at people grinding.”
“They couldn’t show that then,” Judith countered, but knew her quibble was beside the point. So Mark knew who Sandy really was. “Wait, how did t
hat come up in the police records?”
“They got arrested for a wild party on the set. Drug traffic, mainly. But Sandy and Mark weren’t charged. Hang on, Woody’s just handing me something…”
Judith took advantage of the interruption to relay an abbreviated version of his information to a startled Renie. A moment later, he was back on the line: “Okay, this bulletin just in, as they say on the six o’clock news…The flick they were working on was called Bottoms Up, starring Big Boy Bob Bedloe, Stormy Day, Sandy Dandy, and Kitty Cabrini. What do you bet this is our Sandy AKA George? The director was Ernest True—I’ll bet—and the…never mind, no sign of John Frizzell here, at least as far as I can tell, but then he might have been Big Boy Bob. Huh?” He had turned away from the phone, apparently talking to Woody Price. “Oh, no, Woody says this Big Boy’s real name was Robert E. Lee, but he changed it for obvious reasons. At least one that I can think of.”
“Joe,” Judith interjected, “did you hear about Kate Duffy?” He hadn’t; Judith told him. “This could be the reason Mark tried to break into John and Sandy’s house. Maybe Sandy was blackmailing Mark with some evidence, and with Sandy dead, Mark thought he could get it back. And maybe it’s why Kate drank nail polish remover. She may be ashamed that the truth about Mark will come out.”
“That’s pretty feeble,” Joe said dubiously. “The suicide part, I mean. I was going to talk to Mark about this soft-core porno stuff, but I’d better wait until tomorrow. It sounds as if he’s got enough problems.”
“But she’s okay, I gather,” protested Judith. “Joe,” she continued, on a rising note of urgency, “I don’t think you should hold off too long. Eddie’s missing, and John’s about to leave town, and I have this feeling that…”
“Yeah, right, right,” Joe broke in impatiently. “Calm down, Jude-girl, we’ve got the situation under control. Old Eddie is probably down under the public market sharing a nice jug of kerosene with some other social dropouts. Hey, I’ve got a date with a chainsaw killer. Catch you later.”
Judith’s heart wasn’t in her velouté sauce. She added and stirred and blended and simmered, but the latest news from Joe had set her off on a new tangent. “Maybe,” she told Renie, “this is where the Duffys fit in. But would Mark kill Sandy to keep his porno past a secret?”
Renie shook her head slowly. “In my opinion, Mark couldn’t kill anybody. Oh, he can get mad, but he’s not your basic homicidal type. I hope,” she breathed. “Are we still going to talk to Eve and John?”
Judith gave the sauce a final stir with the wooden spoon and chewed on her lower lip. “Well…no.” She turned off both the stove and the oven. “We can do that later. I’ve got a better idea.” Her black eyes danced at Renie. “Let’s go break and enter.”
“Huh?”
“If I race like mad when I get back and chloroform Mother, I can get everything done on time for the hors d’oeuvres hour,” said Judith, hurrying to get her sweater from its peg in the back hallway. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” queried a mystified Renie.
Judith paused at the bottom of the back stairs, en route to inform Gertrude of their imminent departure. “The Duffys are all at the hospital, right?” She didn’t wait for Renie to answer. “That means their house is empty. They’ve already been broken into once this week. Let’s see if lightning can strike twice.”
The Duffy house was seven blocks away, a Tudor brick on a tree-lined street with a panoramic view of downtown to the south and the mountains to the east. The cousins approached boldly, in full late afternoon sunlight, disguising themselves as good Christian women who had come to aid the Duffys in their time of need.
“Let’s hope they haven’t gotten a burglar alarm system installed since the last break-in,” said Judith as they marched up the front walk with its neat border of tulips and hyacinths.
“They probably haven’t had time,” replied Renie, unable to refrain from guilty glances at the adjacent houses. “Do we go through a window like any other do-gooders, or are you going to resurrect your old skills at picking locks?”
But Judith was already turning the doorknob. “I’m going to walk right in,” she told a startled Renie. “We got lucky. But I figured that in all that panic over Kate, the door might not have gotten locked.”
Inside, the house was very quiet. Except for an overturned planter at the foot of the stairs in the entry hall, there was no sign of turmoil. The furnishings were traditional, tasteful, and moderately expensive. Kate’s care for her home was evident in its tidiness, its personal touches, its comfort. Judith felt like a cheap spy.
“She probably drank the stuff upstairs,” Renie said in a whisper. “The ambulance guys or the medics may have knocked over this planter getting her out.”
“I told you in the car that’s not what we’re here for,” Judith asserted, but climbed the stairs all the same.
“So we’re fixing dinner for the Duffys in the bathroom? How do we explain that if we’re caught?” asked Renie.
“We screwed up and had to throw it down the toilet,” Judith replied impatiently. “Which way to the master bedroom? I’ve only been in this house once before, and just downstairs.”
“Over there,” said Renie, pointing to the right. “Their room faces the mountains.”
The bedroom was spacious, with its own fireplace and a small deck. A queen-sized bed was covered with a handsome, if slightly rumpled, wedding ring quilt. Judith wondered if that was where Kate had collapsed after drinking the nail polish remover. She made no comment, however, and went straight to a two-drawer oak filing cabinet in the far corner.
“You take the top, I’ll do the bottom,” Judith told Renie.
“What the hell are we looking for?” asked Renie. “Dirty movies?”
“Among other things,” said Judith. “Maybe a birth certificate, even a marriage license or divorce papers.”
Twenty minutes later, they had found none of those things. The cabinet was crammed with insurance papers, investment data, some of Mark’s business contracts, and household files. It was all quite innocent. Judith felt discouraged.
“Maybe they’ve got a safety deposit box,” suggested Renie.
“Then they’d store their investment stuff in it instead of here,” Judith pointed out. “They must have their personal records somewhere else.” She went to the walk-in closet. The Duffys kept their belongings divided, with Mark’s clothes on the left and Kate’s on the right. On a shelf sat a half-dozen shoeboxes, two folded blankets, three photo albums, and a can of mothballs. Judith also spied a covered carton on the floor at the far end of the closet, wedged in behind a set of matched luggage. With Renie’s help, she eased the box out into the bedroom and removed the lid.
“Ah,” she cried in a hushed voice, “this may be it.” On top was an invitation to the Duffys’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, celebrated the previous fall. Next was a newspaper clipping of their daughter’s wedding. The cousins kept digging.
“Dim though I may be,” said Renie, glancing at Mark’s diploma from Northwestern University, “I presume your brilliant idea is that Kate, the Do-Good Queen of SOTS, enjoyed a flaming youth, and is actually Tim’s mother?”
“It could be her, it could be Eve,” admitted Judith, sorting through souvenirs of the Duffy children’s high school years. “It could even be Norma Paine. But Kate’s the only one of the three to try to kill herself this week.”
They were almost three-quarters of the way through the box. Judith slipped open a black photograph folder, then stared in disbelief.
“What is it?” demanded Renie. “Kate’s wedding picture with the Mysterious Stranger?”
“See for yourself,” said Judith in a strained voice, handing the photo to Renie. “Kate’s got on a white veil and a long dress, but she’s not a bride—she’s posing in the chapel of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart in Tioga, North Dakota, and she’s a nun.”
A noise from downstairs paralyzed both cousins. Judith gestured at
Renie to put everything back but the photo. Tiptoeing out to the hall, Judith warily looked down the stairwell. Mark Duffy was passing through, apparently on his way to the kitchen. Judith stood motionless, calculating their chances of escaping unnoticed.
The kitchen was through the entry hall on their left. If they could get past the door without being seen, they might get out of the house undetected. Judith darted a glance into the kitchen. Mark’s broad back, still clad in his dark business suit, was turned as he did something at the sink. Judith and Renie slipped across the hall.
So intent were the cousins on stealth that Renie didn’t see the overturned planter. She tripped, suppressing a curse and almost falling into Judith. Startled, Judith grabbed Renie’s arm. They raced for the front door just as Mark wheeled into the hallway.
“Who’s there?” His voice was sharp.
Judith threw herself and Renie against the door. “Mark,” said Judith in as calm a voice as she could muster, “you are here. Renie and I came by to see if we could do anything for you.”
Bewilderment crossed Mark’s handsome face. “How’d you get in?” he asked.