Murder Unrenovated

by P. M. Carlson

  Brugioni looked pained. He stared out at the sluicing rain and sighed. “Go haul her in, Steve. Let’s see if she can throw any light on the comings and goings here.”

  It took some convincing and considerable gesticulating, but the officer succeeded at last in coaxing the old woman to the shelter of the office. She halted just inside the doorway, clutching a bundle wrapped in torn plastic and blinking blearily at them. A tattered sweater and soaked sneakers clothed her stocky body, and a black plastic trash bag hooded her head and shoulders.

  “You must be glad to get out of that rain,” said Maggie warmly. “Here, I’ll take your cape.” Before the woman could react, Maggie had whisked off the plastic and draped it over the puddling umbrellas.

  “My cape,” murmured the old woman uneasily. Her mouth made little smacking movements that reminded Len of a guppy.

  “It’ll be fine,” Brugioni reassured her. “Look, dear, what’s your name?”

  “Sukie.”

  “Have you been out there long?” Brugioni spoke slowly, as if to a child.

  “Dunno. All night.”

  “And did you see people coming into this office?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Who?”

  Almost as if reciting, she chanted, “Young guy first. Then tall blond lady. Then little blond lady. Then brunette.”

  Len tried to remember if he had seen her in her doorway shelter when he arrived. No, but then he was busy balancing the bagel and coffee, and trying to unlock a door that Joyce had already unlocked. He could have missed her. Face it, he could have missed King Kong.

  “Then”—the ruined old face puckered and the lips smacked—”there was a fight. Then lots of cops. See?” She bestowed a gappy grin on the officers. The one called Steve grinned back.

  Maggie took advantage of her distraction to yank the bundle from her arms. “Here, put this down. Nick will guard it for you.”

  “No! No!” Panicked, the old woman lunged forward, but Maggie evaded her grimy hands and flipped the parcel behind her back to Nick, who fielded it neatly.

  “Miss Ryan, this isn’t necessary!” exclaimed Brugioni.

  “Look, Lieutenant,” said Maggie, pointing to the old woman’s legs. “Support hose.” Brugioni opened his mouth to protest. “And look at her sweater. Len, whose sweater is this?”

  Len inspected the ragged garment, pilling and unraveling, sloppily darned with darker yarn, and recognition dawned. “My God!”

  “That’s the one Mrs. Northrup wears!” exclaimed Joyce, again sitting upright, at attention.

  “Good to see you two agreeing,” said Maggie. “This sweater was still under Mrs. Northrup’s vanity table as late as Monday night. Saw it myself.”

  Brugioni studied the old woman carefully. “Sukie, can you tell us where you got your sweater?”

  She looked at him vacantly. “Trash can.”

  “Where?”

  “Dunno. Over on Garfield.”

  “Good answer,” Maggie admitted. “Now let’s get down to business, Mrs. McGuire. Curt, read off the record for the Hepburn sisters.”

  The old woman’s face decomposed into a look of disbelief and then panic. She tucked her chin into Mrs. Northrup’s unspeakable sweater and whirled to charge at the door like a football lineman. Cleary, the nearest, grabbed the handle, but it was all he could do to hold it closed against her furious attack.

  Curt said, “Hepburn sisters. Sisters means—Andrews Sisters, right? No, wait, you said McGuire. McGuire Sisters!”

  “Go on,” Maggie nodded.

  “It says, born 1943.”

  “She’s older than that,” said Nick, frowning dubiously at the old woman, now slumped against the doorjamb.

  “It’s her daughter Audrey’s record,” explained Maggie.

  “Born 1943,” repeated Curt. “In 1958, gonorrhea... 1959, diaphragm ... 1959, trichomoniasis... 1960, gonorrhea. God, that’s a lot of VD, isn’t it?”

  “Especially for the fifties,” said Maggie. “Especially for someone in high school at the time. Especially for someone who’s now married to a religious fundamentalist.”

  “McGuire,” said Brugioni thoughtfully, looking down at the crumpled old woman. “When I met you, you were wearing glasses and a sweatshirt. Cleary, wasn’t Mrs. Northrup just telling us about her friend Pauline McGuire?”

  Cleary thumbed back through his notebook. “Yes. Went on and on. She said, let’s see, her friend Pauline McGuire was in Utah visiting her daughter, Audrey.”

  The bag lady had gone ashen. She was still slumped against the door blocked by Cleary, but her face had turned slowly toward Brugioni. She licked her lips. “Northrup?” she asked hoarsely. “You—talked to her?”

  “Teach has been renovated. Good as new, and chattering away to the detectives and me,” Maggie informed her.

  “Go on, Sergeant,” said Brugioni.

  “She mentioned Audrey’s husband was paying Mrs. McGuire’s rent. Said Audrey’s husband thought Audrey was pure as the driven snow. And, let’s see, the only other thing was that she was supposed to water Mrs. McGuire’s plants because they dried out daily, and they hadn’t been watered since Sunday.”

  “And were they dried out, Sergeant?” asked Maggie.

  Cleary said, “I didn’t look. Thought she was just rambling on.”

  “I looked,” Brugioni admitted. “The soil was moist. You’re suggesting that Mrs. McGuire has been in Mrs. Northrup’s apartment?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Motive. Sweater. Begonias. False alibi.”

  Len was looking back and forth between Joyce and the old woman. “I don’t know what to believe!” he said.

  “Len, think a minute,” said Maggie impatiently. “Dennis Burns was killed before ten or so Wednesday morning, right, Lieutenant?”

  “That’s what the medical examiner says.”

  “And he was seen alive by Curt at eight-thirty and by Mrs. Northrup at nine. Well, Len, where was Joyce between nine and ten Wednesday morning?”

  Len tried not to look stupid. “Here,” he said sheepishly. “At our regular Wednesday meeting. Joyce, we alibi each other.”

  But Joyce was rising slowly from her chair, eyes locked on Maggie in unbelieving anguish. “You knew! You knew all along that I didn’t kill him! And you made him read that—that—Why did you do it?”

  Maggie’s bony fingers smoothed the front of her slashed skirt. “I’m not real good at turning the other cheek,” she explained, and Joyce’s eyes fell.

  Brugioni cleared his throat. “Mrs. McGuire, do you want to tell us about it?”

  The old woman huddled in the doorway, shaking her head, clutching the frayed edges of the sweater. She was silent.

  “You’ll need a lawyer,” said Maggie. “But it’s easy enough to see what happened. Your daughter had a wild, promiscuous adolescence. You did your best, found a doctor who would treat VD and prescribe birth control for unmarried girls. Not easy to find such doctors in the fifties, and you ended up where Joyce did. At last Audrey found Jesus and also found a priggish young fellow with a good head for business. He’s an ideal son-in-law—when you were evicted he came up with the extra rent that you needed to stay in this neighborhood. The only problem was that Dr. Burns threatened to send him the record of Audrey’s wild oats. You had to pay him to keep quiet. To keep her renovated reputation clean. Right so far?”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “Right. Then young Dennis inherited the records. And asked you to quadruple the payments.”

  “He was a pig, a drunken young hippie! He didn’t care about breaking up families, about people getting thrown out of their homes! He had no understanding! I had to protect my family!”

  “Hey, hang on a minute, that’s pretty heavy!” exclaimed Curt. Nick murmured something to him, and he subsided.

  “Did you try to explain to him?” Maggie asked the old woman.

  “Yes, he laughed at me. Said I’d find a way. I shouldn’t say any more.” Her dark eyes squinted fe
arfully at Brugioni.

  “That’s okay, we know. You visited Mrs. Northrup last Tuesday and when you went up to tell the plumbers to quiet down so that your meeting could continue, you got the idea of meeting Dennis privately. You rigged the kitchen door to stay unlocked, then called Dennis that night and told him to come disguised early the next morning. Mrs. Northrup saw him arrive by the front door. You must have come out of the back of your building, across the broken fence, and in the kitchen door. Then you unlocked the front door for Dennis. You met him upstairs so you wouldn’t be overheard if Teach came back early from her errands. But he wouldn’t listen to reason. You got the bottle somehow—”

  “I finally told him I’d get the money for him, and he laughed and handed me that bottle, said we should drink on it. I took it, and then, when he looked out the window—” She stopped and studied her sodden sneakers. “It had just been a fantasy, but—”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “He fell down. And I was frightened but then—he looked dead, and I thought, I’m free! Just like my fantasy. Free!”

  “That’s what I thought when I heard he was dead,” Joyce murmured.

  “But then he moaned a little,” Pauline McGuire continued. “So I couldn’t let him live. Audrey was trying so hard, everything was finally going right—And then I was really afraid. I took his I.D. and the folders, and his wig, and the hose, and ran away out the kitchen door. But on my way out I dropped the pantyhose somehow. And I couldn’t get back in to look for them. It was an awful night.”

  “Next day was Thursday,” Maggie said. “We found the body. You came around as soon as the police arrived.”

  “I had to know what was happening. And I wanted to look for the hose, but I didn’t see them and couldn’t hunt very thoroughly.”

  “But you had good luck,” said Nick. “Because when the lieutenant gave back Len’s keys, he just dropped them on the bookcase by the door. You managed to palm them because Len was as distracted as the rest of us.”

  “God, that was stupid of me!” Len exclaimed.

  “Should have handed them to you directly.” Brugioni looked discomfited too.

  “So, as soon as you could, you came back to hunt for the lost weapon,” Maggie continued. “But just when you were beginning to hope that they’d been permanently lost, because the police weren’t asking about them specifically, you decided to attack Mrs. Northrup. Did you know she’d found them?”

  “She said she knew something about the weapon.”

  “But she thought Mr. Lund had left the hose to frame her. How was she a danger to you?”

  “She’s smart,” said Mrs. McGuire simply. “She would have figured it out.”

  “She did figure it out,” said Brugioni. “Why else would she tell us so much about you?”

  “Yes, see? And when I found her searching the building on her own, I knew I had to do something.” She gave a sudden sob.

  Brugioni looked longingly at the tattered plastic-wrapped bundle that Nick had placed on Len’s desk. “We’ll need to question you, Mrs. McGuire. May we look in your package?”

  “No! I want a lawyer.”

  There was a crash. “Whoops,” said Nick blandly, “clumsy of me.”

  The contents of the bundle had spilled onto Len’s desk. Glasses, a sweatshirt, half a dozen manila folders with the now-familiar medical records stapled to them, a set of keys with an amber tag, a wet black wig.

  Joyce stared at the medical records. “Those are the originals!” she exclaimed. “That means—you’re the blackmailer, not Len! You called me last weekend! You took my money this morning!”

  “And you were still here when Len arrived.” Nancy stepped forward so indignantly that Len touched her arm lightly to calm her. “You panicked, and hit him! Just like you hit Dennis!”

  “I want a lawyer,” repeated Pauline McGuire, hiding her face.

  “Mrs. McGuire, I would like to warn you...” Brugioni began to recite the Miranda warning in a flat voice.

  They took her away in the squad car. Curt and Joyce were asked to make statements immediately. The rain was abating as they watched them go. Maggie looked at her watch and sank into Renata’s chair. “God! Not even eight-thirty! What a morning!”

  Len reached shyly for Nancy’s hand. “You feel like going to work?”

  “Sure. But, Len, what does this do to you? To your job?”

  “Well, it may be a little hard to go on working with Joyce.” He was surprised at his own equanimity. Last week this problem would have set him floundering. Now he was no longer envisioning his life as Joyce’s salesman, but as his own boss. He said, “It’s a complication, sure. But I’ve got a damn good proposal. If it doesn’t work out with her, I’ll show it to Fred and his doctors.”

  At the door Nick gave a last fatherly wave to the departing Curt and turned back into the office. “Maggie! What’s wrong?”

  Len looked at her too. Slouched in the chair, the scissors slash still red on her cheek, she looked vacant, gazing luminously into the distance as though stunned. Nick reached her in two strides. “What’s wrong?” he repeated.

  “Nothing’s wrong.” She focused in on him, smiled a little. “Everything’s right.” She took his hand and placed it carefully on the blue fabric across her belly. In a second his face became rapt too, and the two remained entranced, oblivious, in intense communion with the first flutters of the quickening life within her.

  Nancy’s hand tightened in Len’s. “I don’t know about now,” she said softly, “but we ought to have kids someday.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know about now either. But it’s time we started talking about it. Come on, I’ll walk you to work.”

  18

  Nick pulled out his keys as he turned into Garfield Place. The cool November air had an edge that promised colder things to come. Never-resting time leads summer on to hideous winter. As he approached the steps he saw a well-bundled Julia Northrup emerging from her door under the stoop.

  “Hi, Teach!”

  “You bastard!” She eyed him severely. “Saw you go up in flames on TV last night. And good riddance!”

  “Hey, you hated me! Good!”

  “I just hope Vic Jr. didn’t watch. He’d try to rescue me out from under your roof again.”

  “Any dutiful son would. What’s that you’re carrying?”

  “Just arrived. I’m taking it over to show Ellie.” With a bashfulness that Nick found winning, Julia held out the little book. Leafy trees, an impish Victorian boy. Fred-Law Grows Up.

  “Congratulations!” Nick bent to enclose her in an exuberant hug. “I’ll send champagne!”

  “You still think I’m a wino at heart,” she grumbled, pleased.

  “Who are you going to write about next?”

  “I’m tired of men. Thought I’d do Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “You blasted Irishmen always take things so personally,” Julia sniffed, and marched off. Smiling, Nick went up the steps to unlock his own door.

  Inside was disaster. Through the arch to the living room, two-by-fours and old paneling lay splintered and jumbled across the floor. Peelings of stripped wallpaper curled down like stalactites from the ceiling above Maggie’s hastily abandoned stepladder. It had looked like this for weeks. The Vietnam approach to decorating, Maggie had said, bemused. Destroy the place in order to save it.

  But he’d gotten the kitchen installed, though not painted; and two of the bedrooms on the second floor were clean and freshly white. Nick scooped up the glad little black dog that was scrambling down the stairs on short legs to meet him, informed her that she was not much of a housekeeper, and carried her upstairs. A neat stack of papers labeled “Grant Proposal: Check with Dan” sat next to Maggie’s briefcase on the hall table. Nick put down the dog and leaned against the doorframe of the smaller bedroom.

  Maggie was sitting on the rug, wearing blue jeans and nothing else, and crooning softly, something Irish. When she saw him her e
yes smiled at him, but she didn’t stop singing. Nestled against her breast, a drowsy infant suckled sporadically as it drifted into the last stages of euphoric slumber.

  She finished the song and removed the sleepy little mouth from her nipple experimentally. Opaque dark eyes twitched open. Maggie stood up, smoothly, and held the limp happy baby upright against her shoulder. It belched with total commitment. She smiled proudly.

  “Sarah stinks,” she announced to Nick. “I’d better change her before I take my stuff to the office.”

  “I’ll do it,” he said, holding out his arms.

  There was the familiar hesitation, just an instant. She was always reluctant to give her up. She’d even made a scene in the delivery room, when, exhausted and bloody, she’d punched and bitten the nurse who had tried unsuccessfully to take Sarah away from her to be dried and examined. But, more reasonable now with Nick, Maggie handed him the baby. “Try not to wake her too much.”

  “Right.” He gazed down at the scrap of satisfied humanity drowsing in the crook of his arm. Maggie smiled and went into the other bedroom to dress.

  Nick removed the diaper, cleaned the fat little bottom, and slipped on the fresh clothing. Fleetingly, his daughter awoke and looked at him stupidly, her fists momentarily churning before the enormous eyes closed again. He was in awe of her. Tiny tough little creature, full of fierce instincts for feeding and digesting, learning and sleeping, growing and loving. Right now sleep was in the ascendant. He laid her in the crib on her stomach. Her head turned sideways, the tender mouth opened, the breathing became regular and contented. His hairy hand could cover her whole back. He tucked a cotton blanket around her gently.

  Maggie was watching him from the door, grinning at his foolish primal pride in the small greedy animal he had helped create. “Do you feel like a dad, love?”

  “Maybe.” His finger brushed a wispy curl. “I feel connected. To her, to you. To the future. To the past, my own parents. To the renovation of the whole damn human race.”

  “Yes.” His words had made her sad. “It’s too bad when that connection is betrayed. Too bad it can’t always be like this.”