Deadly Housewives (v5) (epub)

by Marcia Muller

  They stopped at the Spadona Institute first. Like Karin’s house, and other homes along Woodlawn, it was an outsize brick mansion, with some twenty rooms, standing on a double city lot. Set well back from the street, with a couple of old maples and an ash on the front lawn, it had done nothing to attract attention to its activities, at least until it blew up.

  When the three engineers got close to the house, they could see that a number of windows had shattered; behind the glass they could make out charring from the fire. The main destruction was on the roof and third floor of the building, but they could see black scarring underneath the second-floor windows, as if the house had been tied up in a giant black ribbon.

  “Odd kind of destruction pattern,” Alvin said.

  The two women nodded, and moved cautiously around the building to the back, which looked much like the front. Although all three were engineers, none of them had training in explosives; Lettice, a chemical engineer, came the closest, but she had never looked at a bomb site. Temple was a mechanical engineer, which meant she knew a lot about furnaces and heating/cooling systems; at the Probit forensic lab, she’d mostly been working with pipes and valves.

  “Have they said where the bomb was planted?” Lettice asked. “Because it looks as though it was under the roof, which would be really weird if you were trying to kill someone. Maybe whoever set it off just wanted to disrupt the institute—maybe one of your mom’s nuns didn’t know enough to realize she’d got hold of something powerful.”

  Temple shook her head. “It can’t have been set under the roof, not with that burn pattern around the second story. Fire goes up.”

  “Duh,” Alvin said. “I missed class the day they talked about fire.”

  Temple swatted him with her briefcase. “It wouldn’t burn downward, at least, not along that very precise route—you’d see fingers of charring. This looks like it followed the pipes.”

  “So maybe it started on the second floor and traveled upward,” Alvin said.

  “Along what route?” Lettice asked. “Temple’s right—the burn pattern doesn’t make sense.”

  A police car pulled over; the man at the wheel didn’t bother to get out, just broadcast over his loudspeaker that the area was off-limits. He waited at the curb until the three engineers went around the block to Karin’s house.

  The front door stood open: so many different people used the common rooms of the house for meetings that Karin never locked up during the day. When Temple and her friends walked in, they heard a woman shouting.

  “You and your stupid protests. You look stupid with all this adolescent behavior, your marches, your prayer vigils, wearing your hair as if you were still twentysomething instead of fiftysomething. You hated Clarence so much you’d let anyone into this house who was ready to hurt him. You never thought to ask any questions, but believe me, he did, and I did.”

  The young engineers couldn’t make out the murmured response, but the first speaker shouted, “You made his last days on earth miserable! Don’t tell me to calm down.”

  “Ruth Meecham,” Temple said. “She lives next door; she and Karin and Clarence Epstein all grew up together. Karin hates people shouting, but when she says ‘calm down,’ it sometimes makes you want to hit her.”

  Temple led the way into a large common room, where her mother stood, a toddler in her arms, facing her neighbor. Temple suddenly saw her mother through strange eyes: she did dress like an old sixties hippie, in her Indian pajama trousers. Her graying hair hung unbraided to her waist. She was barefoot this afternoon, too.

  Almost as if she were deliberately accentuating their differences, Ruth Meecham had dyed her hair black, and wore it severely bobbed around her ears. She was wearing makeup, and the open-toed espadrilles showed she had polish on her toenails.

  “Hi, Karin; hi, Ms. Meecham. Hi, Titus,” Temple added as the little boy squirmed out of Karin’s arms and toddled over to her. “Where’s everyone else?”

  She bent to pick up Titus, but he wriggled away and made a beeline for a chest in the corner where Karin kept toys—not just for him, but for all the children whose parents brought them to the many meetings held in the house.

  “Jessica Martin left as soon as I came.” Ruth Meecham bit off the words as if they were cigar ends. “She knew I’d let her have what for, the way she treated Professor Epstein.”

  “Clarence had so many resources,” Karin said. “The president, the Congress, all those billionaire Spadona donors. Was Jessica really more than he could handle?”

  “Not even letting him touch the baby!”

  “And how do you know that?” Karin asked.

  Ruth Meecham hesitated, then muttered that it was all over the neighborhood. Karin didn’t reply to that; after an awkward silence, Ruth started to leave. She paused in the doorway long enough to say, “Do you ever investigate the people you give house room to?”

  Karin laughed. “I hope you’re not suggesting Jessica is a fugitive from justice. She’s a little aggressive, it’s true, but she’s still very young.”

  “Oh, grow up, Karin!” Ruth Meecham stomped down the hall to the door.

  “Did Jessica and Mr. Epstein have a fight?” Temple asked.

  “Oh—Karin—you remember Alvin and Lettice, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” Karin gave them a warm smile. “Jessica is too hot-tempered; she wouldn’t let Clarence hold the baby. But Ruth was lying, wasn’t she, on how she knew.”

  “I bet she was listening under the window,” Temple said.

  “She does, you know. At least, when I was a kid, I sometimes saw her with binoculars, studying the inside of our house.”

  “That’s a little different from listening under the window, Temple!”

  “She might have a remote mike,” Alvin suggested. “Something with two-point-four gigahertz could pick you up from next door without her leaving the comfort of her home.”

  “If she wants to listen in on our pregnant-teens book group, she’s welcome,” Karin said. “Maybe it’ll make her want to volunteer. I suppose, though, Clarence told her. She always had a crush on him and he knew she’d see his side of things, no matter how crooked that side might seem to me.”

  Lettice and Alvin started asking her questions about the explosion. Temple wandered over to a battered coffee table whose surface was covered with flyers and books, old mail and unread newspapers; she started sorting them.

  “Leave those alone, Temple,” Karin called out. “Whenever you tidy up, it takes me forever to find my notes.”

  Temple bit back a reply. She wasn’t going to argue with Karin in front of her friends, but really, how could anyone stand to live in this kind of chaos? Karin had never been a typical mother, and she certainly had never been a typical house wife. Temple controlled the urge to pick up the papers that had drifted to the floor and looked at Titus, who was trying to fit a rubber ball into a plastic jug. The jug’s lips and handles were misshapen—from being put on the stove, Temple imagined—in her mother’s haphazard home, the kitchen always was the site of small catastrophes.

  “That’s quite an engineering problem you’ve set yourself, little guy.” She squatted next to him to watch, then said sharply, “Where did you get that?”

  When she pried the jug from his grasp, Titus began to howl—at which moment his mother appeared in the doorway.

  “What are you doing to my child?” Jessica demanded.

  She was a tall woman; Temple, who was barely five-two, always felt invisible next to Jessica. She craned her head back and said firmly, “I was taking this from him. It’s had something nasty in it, and I think it’s pretty irresponsible to let a baby play with it.”

  Karin interrupted her own description of Clarence Epstein as a high-school student to say guiltily, “Oh, dear: I found that in the trash and meant to put it out with the recyclables. Titus must have picked it up from the kitchen table before I got around to it.”

  “Oh, everyone around here is so fucking pure! Couldn’t yo
u just leave it in the garbage for once? I picked it up in the backyard and threw it out!” Jessica grabbed Titus, who howled even more loudly.

  “Sorry, sweetie.” Karin smiled at Jessica. “Sometimes we’re myopic, putting recycling ahead of the baby’s curiosity. And the recycling—oh, dear—I promised I’d look after that along with the seedlings, and I completely forgot to take them out last week. Sandra and Mark will be so upset when they get back.”

  “I’ll take it out to the recycle bins.” Temple picked up the container, giving her mother a level glance that stated her unspoken opinion of the sloth that let the container stay in the house.

  Karin pursed her lips and turned away. Temple knew what she was doing—a minimeditation, a mini–letting go of anger with Temple herself, not with Jessica, who couldn’t look after her baby and then got pissed off with someone who was paying attention to his welfare.

  She walked through the house to the kitchen, which as usual had pots and papers and bags of organic granola on every surface. A blender was on the floor, where Titus could conveniently slice off his fingers; Temple put it next to a precarious mountain of bowls in the sink. Karin had never appreciated her tidiness, even when she was eight, and making the chaotic house livable. Maybe Jessica was the daughter Karin had always wanted—an activist, the daughter who could tolerate mess—unlike Temple, in whose stark white apartment every pen and paper clip was in a tidy accessible drawer.

  She blinked back self-pitying tears and went out to the recycle bins, where she removed newspapers from the bin for glass. Who knew what the papers had been used for—they were streaked with white powder. Surely no one was using cocaine in Karin’s house. Temple rubbed a little of the powder in her fingers, which began to burn. She quickly wiped them on the grass.

  A few minutes later, Alvin and Lettice joined her. Alvin wanted to see the green house where Karin grew herbs, in case she had any medicinal marijuana. The green house sat in the back of the garden, next to a compost heap where wasps were hovering.

  “Knock it off, Alvin; if my mom was breaking the law she wouldn’t be doing it where people like you could barge in on her. Anyway, the green house is the responsibility of one of the other house members who’s big on organic gardening—she starts all her seedlings out here.”

  Temple was annoyed with all of them, with Jessica for being such a dimwit, with her mother for running such an idiotic house hold, and with her friends for treating Karin like a sideshow in the circus. Her annoyance made Alvin clown around more, pretending that the oregano he plucked in the green house was reefer. He staggered up the sidewalk past Ruth Meacham’s house, and Temple’s anger increased to see that the neighbor was watching them all with a kind of voluptuous malevolence.

  It was six hours later that the police came for Karin.

  III

  “What’s she doing in handcuffs?” Temple demanded.

  She had found Karin in a side room, where prisoners were held after their bond hearings until court ended, when they would be put on buses to Cook County Jail.

  The sheriff’s deputy bristled. “It’s the law, and if you want to talk to her, you won’t carry on in here.”

  Temple sized up the deputy, the gun, the attitude, and squatted next to her mother, who gave her a wobbly smile. Temple was overcome with shame: she had heard her mother’s message when she got home at one, and decided if there was a crisis, it had something to do with Temple’s visit earlier in the evening. She didn’t feel like hearing a lecture on why she needed to treat Jessica with more consideration, so she’d erased the message and gone to bed.

  It was only when she was dressing for work with the radio on that she’d heard the news: her mother arrested for murder. Traces of the explosive used at the Spadona Institute, a common house hold cleaner, mixed with fertilizer, had been found in the green house at the back of the garden.

  “I don’t believe it, any of it,” Temple announced to her kitchen. “This is insane.”

  She had called the house to try to find out where her mother was. The phone rang a dozen times before Jessica answered it. She was surly, as if annoyed that Temple wanted to talk about Karin: the police raid had totally freaked out Titus, she said; he’d cried until three in the morning. “I don’t know where Karin is and she’s not my responsibility. If she blew up the Spadona Institute, then I am out of here—I am not getting involved in her crimes.”

  “Sheesh, Jessica, after all my mother’s done for you, all the babysitting, letting you run off when you need your own space, or what ever sob story you lay on her. What happened? What grounds did they have for arresting her?”

  Jessica bristled at Temple’s criticism, but she did confirm the news reports, that the cops had found what they were looking for in the green house.

  Temple frowned. “I was in that green house yesterday afternoon, and didn’t see any buckets or bottles of cleaner. And you know Karin doesn’t use that kind of product, or let anyone in the house use it—didn’t you tell the police that?”

  “It was the middle of the night, the baby was howling, what was I supposed to do, give them a lecture on nonviolence and green gardening?”

  Temple snapped her phone shut. In her head she could see a spreadsheet with a to-do list, the items filling in as if written with invisible ink. Number one, evict Jessica, had to be moved to number four, she decided: number one had to be to find a criminal lawyer for Karin. Number two was to find out what evidence the state had and number three was to see if Karin was guilty.

  Since Probit Engineering was a forensic lab, her boss, who’d testified in a gazillion or so criminal cases, surely knew a good criminal lawyer. She caught him on his way to a meeting. He thought for a minute, said that Luther Musgrave was the best, if he was available, and that Musgrave could also find out exactly where Karin was. Musgrave wasn’t in when Temple called, but his paralegal traced Karin and told Temple that Musgrave or one of his associates would meet her in bond court as soon as possible.

  Temple was still squatting in front of her mother, rubbing her cuffed hands and sniffing out an apology for not responding to Karin’s SOS last night, when Luther Musgrave arrived. He was such a model of the corporate attorney, from the bleached hair cut close to his head to the navy suit tailored to his tall body, that Temple was sure her mother would reject him. She was astounded when Karin got to her feet, awkwardly because of the cuffs around her ankles, and held out her chained hands to Musgrave.

  “Luther, of course! If I hadn’t been so rattled last night, I’d have thought of you myself. Bless you—that is, I assume you’ve come for me?”

  “Of course, I should have known it was you.” Musgrave turned to Temple. “Our parents had adjoining cottages in Lakeside when we were growing up. I knew your mother before she went to India and changed her name to Shravasti. Let’s get you out of here.”

  “They set bail at a million dollars,” Karin said. “Even if I take out a higher line of credit on the house, I can’t come up with that much money.”

  “That’s why you’ve hired me. Or why your daughter has. Million-dollar bonds for felons are just part of our complete service.”

  IV

  “I won’t pretend that I’m going to wear black and sob at their funerals, but I didn’t kill Epstein and Antony,” Karin said.

  “I don’t want any hairsplitting here,” Luther Musgrave said sternly. “If you placed an explosive device in the house, intending to blow it up before the guys got there, you’re still liable for their deaths.”

  “Luther! I don’t know word one about explosives, and I am utterly and completely committed to nonviolence.”

  “That’s really true,” Temple said. “And besides, she’s totally green, you know. They’re saying she mixed ammonia with fertilizer from the compost heap, but Karin wouldn’t buy a cleaning product with ammonia in it.”

  “But they found her gardening gloves in the green house and they’re saying they had traces of the ammonia and some fertilizer on them,” Jessic
a put in.

  They were sitting in Karin’s private parlor. When she turned her house into a co-op, she’d kept a suite of four rooms for herself at the back of the second floor. Normally at a meeting like this, all the house mates would have taken part, but Jessica—and Titus, happily banging away on a drum improvised out of old milk cartons—were the only ones at home. Three were trekking in Uzbekistan and the fourth, an elderly civil-rights lawyer, was visiting his daughter in northern Michigan.

  “But I don’t garden,” Karin said. “Maybe I have some old work gloves, I guess I do, but Sandra—one of our housemates—looks after the green house, and she’s one of the ones away trekking right now. In fact, it’s been on my conscience that I haven’t looked at her seedlings to see if they’ve been watered.”

  “It’s impossible to prove, Karin.” Luther held up a hand as Karin and Temple both began to protest. “I’m not saying I doubt you, but I can’t prove it in court, which is where it matters. If you’re innocent, someone planted your work gloves in there, coated with ammonium nitrate. Who could have done that?”

  “Anyone,” Temple said. “Karin keeps an open house. Doors are locked at night, but I bet you never lock the gate leading to the alley, do you?”

  “Of course not, darling, why would I? It just makes twice as much work. It’s bad enough that people are always losing house keys, without worrying about the garden, too.”

  “Are you sure it was an ammonium bomb?” Temple said. “I’m surprised it behaved like this one did.”

  “What do you mean? How does an ammonium bomb behave?” Jessica gave the word a sarcastic inflection.

  Temple saw Karin mouthing Let it go and took a deep breath before she answered. “Ammonium-nitrate bombs leave a big hole. The house would have fallen in on itself if the bomb had been set inside, and if it was outside, the front or the back would be missing. The Spadona building just has roof damage and a pattern of burn marks around the second floor.”